Ep. 296: Heidegger Questions Being (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: Hey, this is the Partially Examined Life, episode 296, part 2. Continue doing a close reading of particular sections of Heidegger's Being and Time. We are still in the introduction. So Wes is not on for part two. He's in another country. We're doing this on a fresh day, which means that we're all using the same translation. We all have the same page numbers, right? Yes, sir. You not.

0:30 Seth: I have the online version and my old black cover version as well. So I'm ready to roll with whatever.

0:37 Mark: I think those are the same as far, but I have not, actually.

0:40 Seth: They're not.

0:41 Mark: Oh, they're not. Okay. Well, it's the same translation.

0:44 Seth: Yes, but the pagination is different.

0:46 Mark: All right. Well, I had put in sort of a. Just a little bit from. I had said that let's talk about the ontological function of time. I don't know, should we skip that and go right on to what are phenomena?

0:56 Wes: Or.

0:57 Mark: So this was from Intro 2, Section 5, Page 39. Really 38 we could start on if we wanted.

1:03 Dylan: Well, it seems like we ought to touch on time, since the book is called Being and Time.

1:09 Mark: That is why I picked it out.

1:11 Dylan: We've done the introduction to Being right

1:13 Mark: at the very top of 38. The first words on it are talking about how we're going to talk about Dasein in its average everydayness.

1:22 Dylan: Yes.

1:22 Mark: Which I thought, like, let's get that term out there as well. Do you guys have a sense of what that is going to mean?

1:29 Dylan: I think it's important to talk about. If we look at the bottom of 37 just before that. Again, this whole thing, we haven't been talking about being in the right way. We haven't been talking about Dasein. And so he's frames this as basically, we need to talk about Dasein. We've been talking about Dasein without the proper ontological consideration, we must rather choose such a way of access and such a kind of interpretation that this entity can show itself in itself and from itself. And this means that it is to be shown as it is proximally and for the most part, in its average everydayness.

I mean, I guess the preamble to me is that he is. Something we sort of touched on earlier is that he wants to focus on or thinks the thing that we've, we've left off historically about being is its utter conventionality, the way it's most with us all the time. And that if being is anything, it's going to be about its everydayness. It's not going to be something special in that respect.

2:32 Mark: And this is going to set up pretty well what phenomenology is as we're going to talk about in the next part. Because phenomenology for Husserl, Heidegger's teacher in this respect was a special standpoint. It was not about us in our everyday walking around. Let's sort of think retrospectively about what that was like. It is a matter of stopping. In fact, that natural attitude, you know, in which we deal with things is exactly the thing that maybe phenomenology is supposed to undermine. Treating objects as if they're things like the natural science would describe them, there might be something wrong with that.

So we know we need to stop, we need to reflect, sort of do the Cartesian thing. Even though obviously Heidegger, in writing this book is stopping and reflecting, but he's trying to do something that's a little trickier. You know, a lot of the point of this is as soon as you stop and you create this artificial situation where it's like me as a stable point, contemplating the shifting images around me. And that's exactly what the world is not like when we're not being philosophers.

3:37 Dylan: That's a super great point. And I like, even though it's only sort of floating in the background to me in this part of the book, the Scientific Method of Inquiry, though he's specifically replying to Descartes. So maybe it's not quite sort of in the background. But one thing about the scientific method of inquiry and the beginning of early modern science, it's not standpoint theory, but it's basically saying you need to sort out the question that you have to ask in the right way so as you can get purchase on it, that kind of thing. So it's really important in science that you ask a question in the right way such that it's answerable.

And that is an example of something that's super, super useful in science, but I think is exactly the kind of thing Heidegger is talking about. He doesn't want to be doing because that is reifying the entities being looked at too much. In fact, it's over determining that it's extracting away from the very thing that he thinks is most interesting and most worthwhile understanding. Being is it's making too many assumptions about what those beings are. It's just that act of creating a class of questions that are answerable in a particular way, makes presumptions on those entities in a particular way.

And if he wants to understand what being is, he needs to remove it from that context.

4:50 Seth: Yeah, I think there's a good corollary here. It reminded me, this particular part of the book and where I think the thrust is to just go back to the phenomenology of spirit. He's taking it in a different direction. But it's a similar kind of thing where, you know how Hegel moves through perception, sense, experience, those different categories to get through consciousness. And he's trying to undermine the concept from within, so to speak. Heidegger is in the same way that he's trying to make an end run around Descartes. He agrees with the Hegelian assessment, but he's going to propose a different approach.

That's what being in time is. It's a different way because he does think that there's a way of experience that's not categorical, that is, I don't want to say experienced directly, but it's experienced in a way that hasn't yet been conceptualized in the conceptual scheme that we have. And that's this concept of everydayness that we. It's what's so close to us and what's so near to us that we just overlook it. It's like he thinks he found something that Hegel overlooked.

6:03 Dylan: Do you think that he has a similar thing in sights, which I thought Hegel did as well, which is really seeing that the distinction between being and becoming is sort of philosophically problematic, that you can really only talk about beings that are becoming constantly. And so to talk about what beings are, particularly, Dasein is going to have to embody the constant transformation that is going on, while also being able to talk about a being and also talk about it having different forms and features and different experiences phenomenologically with the world at different times, but still talk about it being an entity.

That's the thing that he has in his sights, which I think is similar to the kind of phenomenology that, you know in the phenomenology of spirit, the kind of thing that, you know with the dialectic that Hegel embraces it by this iterative. Not iterative. This iterative, cyclical dialectic.

7:08 Wes: Right.

7:09 Dylan: But that dialectic in his case is also constantly approaching something. I haven't read enough of the book yet, but in Heidegger's case, I think I see him looking at preserving a notion of authenticity, which would, you would think points you to like, the acorn grows into the oak tree. But I don't think that that's where he's going to end up with.

7:28 Mark: Right, well, let's just look at the next sentence. So the top of page 38. In this everydayness, there are certain structures which we shall exhibit, not just any accidental structures, but essential ones, which in every kind of being that factical Dasein may possess, persist as determinative for the character of its being. Thus, by having regard for the basic state of Dasein's everydayness, we shall bring out the being of this entity in a preparatory fashion. So this sounds like Husserl, right? Where what phenomenology is, is about grasping essences.

But we're saying that even though it's not going to be this, freeze, apply the epoche, you know, which is a special standpoint of Husserlian phenomenology, where we specifically try to set aside the scientific viewpoint here. This is going to be. There is no such possible standpoint. So we're going to just retrospectively, we're going to just think about what it is like we're around. You know, our everydayness is, as Heidegger says, ontically, the closest thing to us. Right? It is literally what we're doing pretty much the whole day. But ontologically, that's the thing we have to uncover.

So it's figuring out the actual being of that, the structures. Because normally I would point out this distinction he's making between accidental and essential structures, that most of the things that we just noticed as we're walking around, those are accidental structures. Like the things that are actually catch our attention, right? If they were just like that all the time, they wouldn't catch our attention. That's sort of the nature of essential structures. So he's going to say, then on this page we shall point to temporality as the meaning of that entity which we call Dasein.

In other words, that's going to be the main structural thing. It's hard to just focus on the passage of time. No, you focus on, like the stuff that's happening in time, but that's all sort of accidental. You could be perceiving something else but time itself, its flow. That's an essential structure.

9:17 Seth: I don't want to try to jump ahead or anything, but there's a place later in what we read for this time. I don't have it exactly in front of me, but the first thing we have to get past to attend to the everydayness is that all of the investigations, Hegel, Husserl, Descartes, they privileged Dasein's being as knowing, a knower. And he says later on, as knowing is one way of Dasein's being, but it's just one way. And because ontology has been founded on the structure of knowledge, really, because they talk about what is an object, knowing an object, properties, attributes, substance, all this kind of thing that we've completely ignored all the other ways that Dasein is every single day in its everydayness.

And so when we look at the everydayness, what we're going to come up with is understanding that Dasein has. It can be towards a thing, it can care for a thing, it can be disinterested in a thing. And so there's many, many different ways. And knowing as a way of being is just one mode of being. So he's going to elucidate these other modes of being, these other ways of being, from this perspective of the everydayness. And he's going to point out you lose that by thinking that knowing is somehow the way to get to being. If you think knowing is the being of Dasein, you're ignoring all the rest of this stuff.

And in fact, when you attend all the rest of the stuff, that's where you really see the structure of Dasein's being, of which knowing or knowledge is just a subset. So that's one part of the movement, the point towards temporality. I think we should hold on, that we can elucidate it a bit later. But it really is around the fact that because Dasein has all these ways of being and it has possibilities, because it has possibilities, as Dylan said, right? The acorn becomes the oak. The acorn doesn't have the same possibilities as Dasein. Dasein can choose this, choose that can be authentic, inauthentic.

An acorn can't choose not to try to become an oak tree, right? If there's water and there's sunlight, that's what it does. But Dasein can say, oh, I'm supposed to become an oak tree, but fuck that, I'm gonna.

11:36 Dylan: I'm gonna join the circus.

11:37 Seth: I'm gonna join the circus. And it's the temper, the notion of temporality and the reason why Dasein's being is framed in this horizon of temporality has everything to do with possibility and choice. And that will come out later.

11:52 Dylan: And that's going to be where this discussion of authenticity is going to get really interesting. Right, because it could be that the choice of Dasein to join the circus is authentic and it could be inauthentic.

12:05 Seth: But the fact that Dasein projects and sees these possibilities in the future and can direct itself towards an authentic or an inauthentic possibility here. Remember, you need time for possibility because at least future possibility. And that's why time is so critical and is constitutive of Dasein's being in a way that it isn't for other beings.

12:26 Dylan: This part of the conversation is part of why Dasein is interesting, I think. Seth, you're hitting on this specific character, the possibilities of Dasein as being a being for whom the choice about their being is a live option. And that's one of the ways in which Dasein is the right entity to be considering when considering what being is. I think that all sounds correct, but this is also part of the uniqueness hypothesis for human beings. And I'm not averse to it exactly, but I'm just wondering about are we sure that other entities don't make choices, let's say, about their own flourishing?

Right. If I were to say it that way, summarize that point that you were making is that Dasein has the ability to make choices about the form of their flourishing. That's what's unique about Dasein. And it made me wonder, is it really the case that every other entity, every other living entity doesn't make any choice about that? There isn't such a thing as a kind of an ambition or a conflict? And maybe that's just right. And it just made me think about what are the signs of that.

13:39 Seth: It's a good point. And there's a certain Heidegger speak that you have to get into so that you don't make these category mistakes by using terms like choice and things like that. So if I was going to try to answer what you said, Dylan, in a different way, what I would say is in his words, top of page 39, we've already intimated that Dasein has a pre ontological being as its ontically constitutive state. Dasein is in such a way as to be something which understands something like being. So it's not that other beings don't make choices about how they flourish. It's that other beings don't have some kind of pre ontological understanding of being that's constitutive of them.

14:26 Dylan: Got it?

14:28 Mark: I'm not sure how we can know that. I mean, sort of. Following on Dylan's skepticism with this, let me just say first, my initial reaction to Dylan, to your question is just that despite what I was just saying about Heidegger trying to get rid of Husserl's special standpoint. Well, it's still a special standpoint, this retrospective activity. And this sort of follows with just the way that Heidegger sets up that Dasein is the being for which being is an issue. So anybody else that's engaging in this kind of retrospective analysis, observation with us is someone for whom being is an issue, right?

15:04 Dylan: So they, they participate in the being of dase, right?

15:07 Mark: So it doesn't matter if it's an alien or whatever. Like, that's why, just like Kant has, like a rational being doesn't want to rule out anything. So it's potentially, if you want to say that chimps have real intelligence or that artificial being has real intelligence, whatever anything could be. But that is, you know, a matter of like, who can engage in philosophy, which is who can actually have an ontology. Who can. But you're saying, Seth, that in order to have an ontology, you have to have this pre ontological general sense of being right. For us, yes, that is something that we need to leverage, as we discussed in part one, that like, unless you sort of know the shape of the answer, you don't even know what to look for, right?

You can't engage in the inquiry at all unless you have some sort of sense of the answer. So that's to say having the pre ontological stuff is a necessary condition for getting to ontology. Now, does that mean the fact that it's necessary for us, that it's exclusive to us because there could be beings that they're never going to engage in this inquiry with us, they're never going to actually have an ontology, but maybe they also have a pre ontological, a general sense of the being of things, and maybe that's even required to have consciousness of any sort at all, or, you know, to have the.

Maybe not going so far as this theory of mind that we keep talking about, but the fact that an animal will treat another member of its species or another like that they'll treat them differently than they will treat a gust of wind or something, you know, some moving thing that is not an animal. I don't want to just have the same discussion we already had with Langer about this, but it could very well be, you know, if you want to say that this pre ontological stuff, that that's just tantamount to being conscious, then it just moves the discussion over how do we so that Dylan, your question is just how do we know other beings are conscious?

17:03 Dylan: And I was wondering about that. But the sentence that Seth read, Dasein is in such a way as to be something that. Which understands something like being. That's a different statement than Dasein is in such a way as to be something which wonders about its being or is uncertain about its being or thinks about what it is. Those are two different things. And I was just thinking exactly what Mark was wondering is that it's not at all clear to me that other. The fact that there are lots of other living entities that clearly have recognition of different. Other sorts of entities on different sorts. They're making distinctions that I would believe that they make distinctions of kind.

17:45 Mark: So are those ontic distinctions? Is that what that means?

17:48 Seth: No, no, no, no, no, no, it's not. Okay. I'm talking as if I know this better than you and that I have some perspective.

17:55 Dylan: I probably do.

17:57 Seth: I don't. So think of it this way. Remember Nagel. What is it like to be a bat? There is something it's like to be a being other than Dasein. No doubt about it. Yes, it's absolutely true or absolutely okay, that other beings comport themselves and have dispositions towards beings and have an understanding of beings.

18:22 Dylan: It still doesn't make them Dasein, because

18:25 Seth: Dasein has an understanding of being. What he's basically saying is we have an understanding of being that's somehow not the being of any particular beings, but a being itself. But a being itself. And other things don't.

18:42 Dylan: Yeah, and that's why I wanted to refine that statement as to Dasein, for which being itself is a question. In fact, I feel like he had that earlier that Dasein is the being for which being is a question. Some version of that.

18:56 Seth: Yeah, this is a good call out for listeners because this is a problem with reading Heidegger. What happens is you instinctively try to translate what he's talking about. It's. You're like, oh, is he just creating a new vocabulary? This is his version of consciousness. This is his version of subjectivity. This is his version of object versus subject. And that may very well be exactly what's happening. But he thinks that he's doing something different or trying to do something different.

19:28 Dylan: Yeah, it's very important to understand what he's trying to do there. And there's lots of examples of this in intellectual history where you think something is just glossed over. Ratios versus fractions is a good example.

19:42 Mark: Let's say a little more about time here. In the next two pages, without trying to read all the paragraphs. But you might think that if we're going to sort of give a typology, if we're going to again do Aristotle's categories or something, but talk about it in terms of temporality, then it would be, well, there's like numbers. Numbers don't exist in time. They're like Platonic ideas. They're ideas of a sort. Whereas this event that just happened that seems obviously temporal. And he wants to claim the first paragraph on 40. If being is to be conceived in terms of time, and if indeed its various modes and derivatives are to become intelligible in their respective modifications and derivation, by taking time into consideration, then being itself, and not merely entities, let us say as entities in time, is thus made visible in its temporal character.

But in that case, temporal can no longer mean simply being in time. Even the non temporal and supra temporal are temporal with regard to their being, and not just privatively by contrast with something temporal as an entity in time, but in a positive sense, though it is one which we must explain. So we can't even say that the number three or whatever is not temporal because we're thinking about it. It is an entity for us. And insofar as it has any being at all, somehow this is going to be temporal. Let's keep reading. In both pre philosophical and philosophical usage, the expression temporal has been preempted by the signification we have cited in the following investigations.

However, we shall employ it for another signification. Thus, the way in which being and its modes and characteristics have their meaning determined primordially in terms of time is what we should call its temporal determinedness. Thus, the fundamental ontology of the task of interpreting being as such includes working out the temporality of being. In the exposition of the problematic of temporality, the question of the meaning of being will first be concretely answered. I don't know if any of that actually helps.

21:35 Seth: There's a place on the previous page mark, that you skipped that might help clarify this a little bit. So he's talking here about Time has long functioned as an ontological, or rather an ontical criterion for naively discriminating various realms of entities. What does that mean? You have things that are in time, you have things that are not in time, right? So you have natural processes. Historical happenings are temporal. Spatial and numerical relationships are not. I mean, do we agree?

22:08 Mark: Yes. That is what I was trying to summarize in my one sentence before I read the part I read but keep going.

22:13 Seth: So his point is, isn't it strange that time has this function of being able to cleave beings into different groups? It's just something we naively. And time has temporality, really, not time. But temporality has come to give us this ability to distinguish the beings that are in time and the beings that are not in time, and that it's essentially created these two different realms of being. So time has this weird function. Just. It's kind of like a category, right? I mean, it's. And so he's. He's saying it does this, and yet we don't even think about it.

And nobody's ever said why. Why would we separate beings this way? How does time operate on being in such a way that it allows us to separate beings this way or to create different realms of being? And what he wants to say is, that's why. That's how he says. In contrast, all this, our treatment of the question of the meaning of being must enable us to show that the central problematic of all ontology is rooted in the phenomenon of time, if rightly seen and rightly explained. And we must show how this is the case. So time and being are somehow related.

23:26 Dylan: Yeah, this makes a whole ton of sense, right? Because I feel like you could say, well, historically, the way we've answered this question and is the things that are unchanging are the things that are true things, and those are the beings. And insofar as they change, I mean, this is Aristotle, right? The thing that is not changing is the thing in itself, and the thing that is changing are the accidental features of it. Right? And you can get into this more complicated realm of like living things that it's the acorn, it grows into the tree. Its being is to become the tree.

And its activity is such that it goes towards that. But its beingness is stretched out over time. And that becomes like the hardest, most interesting kind of question for Aristotle. But when he says temporality is the fundamental thing to be unearthed, to me it goes right to the heart of is everything one or many? Is it all change or is it not? I mean, the Heraclitus question. And his focus is on that central problem, resolving it. The fact is, we've cleaved beings into these two buckets. And in fact, I think that the typical thing is to be the things that don't change, that are not temporal, have priority of being.

And he's going to say, oh, no, that's not true. In fact, Dasein is the priority one. And that's the one that's always changing.

24:49 Mark: All right, I want to segue here. I'm hoping in the remaining half hour that we have of this part, we can get through the next two points. So we want to say what phenomena are, what appearance is, and then what phenomenology is, and then we can be done with part two. And in our next complete episode, we can start by talking about equipment and all the stuff going on from there. So still in Intro to Section 7A, the concept of phenomenon, skipping some of the etymology at the top there. The kicker is about eight lines down or something. We must keep in mind that the expression phenomena signifies that which shows itself in itself, the manifest.

So that's going to be. And then the following parts is just how the word appearance can be used, right? How seeming can be used, because this is going to be the whole thing. If we're describing phenomena in phenomenology, then, like, what are these things that we're describing? How do we know they are not just the skin on events, you know, that they're just the seemings, the appearances? Maybe we need science to actually delve into, like, what things are in themselves. But somehow phenomenology is committed to an ontology that there is. There's some way of grasping things just by them appearing and showing their essence right there.

So you might think about, like, looking at red, like, yeah, okay, there's things to learn about red in terms of, like, the physics behind it, why, how light produces this thing in our eyes. But in terms of us understanding what red is, you might think that, well, giving a causal account, that's kind of a distraction to get to the thing itself, the things themselves, right? What is. Redness is just. Redness is something that reveals its whole essence just by its appearance, right? That is the nature of color. In particular, that even if there's something separate that causes that in our eyes, and lots of stuff we could say about our eyes or ways that we could be colorblind or all these things that.

But to understand, right, the thing that Mary, the color scientist, who has read all the books about red but has never seen red before, the thing that she learns when she beholds that thing, you know, that is sort of a world, a phenomenon unto itself. It is the thing that exposes its own essence.

27:00 Dylan: So everything you said, right, sounds right to me. I find myself pausing about your example of red and redness only because I wonder if red is a being.

27:13 Seth: Red has being, red has being.

27:16 Dylan: Is there anything that doesn't have being?

27:18 Seth: No.

27:19 Wes: Okay.

27:20 Mark: Just checking if we thought that there was a veil of illusion over things and that the only real being was hidden behind it, and then we have the veil of Maya or something, you would say, oh, that doesn't have being. It's just the stuff.

27:31 Seth: No, no, no.

27:32 Dylan: Is red an entity as well? Or if I say red has being, that's a different thing to say about it. Then red is an entity.

27:43 Seth: That is true.

27:44 Dylan: Okay.

27:45 Seth: Yes, I agree with that.

27:46 Dylan: Because ideas can have being, but they're not entities.

27:50 Seth: Correct.

27:51 Wes: Okay.

27:51 Mark: I mean, we could get into the fact that you could say something is red. Right. Therefore it has the being of red. You know, but what if there's something that, you know is just made up or something that is, you know, the essence of ultraviolet or something like that? Like, because we can't see ultraviolet, so maybe it doesn't have being in that same way.

28:10 Seth: Before we go there, I think we should focus on this concept of phenomenon because it's. It's really important. So, Mark, I think what I heard you say. You talked about the thing showing itself as itself, being manifest, and then potentially appearing as something that it's not.

28:27 Mark: Yeah. The fearing part is the. We should read more of this. But go ahead, Seth.

28:30 Seth: That whole first paragraph on 51, which is 9,000 words long, it's confusing to give the listeners a flavor when phenomenon signifies semblance, the primordial signification, the phenomenon as manifest, is already included as that upon which the second signification is founded. We shall allot the term phenomenon to this positive and primordial signification of phenomenon and distinguish phenomenon from semblance, which is the privative modification of phenomenon as thus defined. But what both these terms express has approximately nothing at all to do with what is called an appearance, still less mere appearance.

That's very confusing. But what he's trying to say here, and this is going to go to ultimately, his notion of truth in the later writings is when you talk about appearing, if something can be a semblance of something else, or if something can appear as something that it's not, then already inside of that, you have this concept of it potentially being able to present itself as itself. Like, you can't say that it's not what it is without having a sense of what it is.

29:39 Dylan: So on page 52, he says, Thus appearance as the appearance of something does not mean showing itself. It means rather the announcing itself by something which does not show itself, but which announces itself through something which does show itself. Appearing is a not showing itself. So in there, he says Both those things. The first is that in being an appearance, it is not a phenomenon. It's not revealing itself in itself. But the fact that it is doing that implies that there is an in itself.

30:16 Seth: So I think that's right. Yeah.

30:18 Mark: I thought he was trying to just say, look, the word appearance is ambiguous. There are three things that it could mean. So red, as I was describing originally, is something that I'm saying is just a phenomenon and it presents its essence right up front. However, you could also think about red as being. It is the indication that there is light bouncing off something. So it's sort of. This is the way that light bouncing off announces itself. So it is appearing through the color red in our minds. But what we're really the real thing that's happening there.

The thing that is most important is the light bouncing around. Or you could say, and maybe there's in fact another way, maybe a better example of that is smoke and fire. Right? Because you could. The smoke indicates the fire, but you could also just go closer and look and say, oh, I'm now I'm actually seeing the fire, not just the smoke. But then there's a third way in which the appearance positively occludes the thing that is behind it, that is causing it, and that is, you know, the Kantian version. And I'm not sure, maybe the color example is more like the smoke and fire one, in that there are other ways.

You could pull out your prism. There are other ways of detecting light. So you could say, okay, now we've really detected the thing. You could also say, because I think we said in part one, whenever something appears some way, it necessarily doesn't appear in another way. Right. That appearance is blocking, is hiding some other possible appearance of it. And that is an everyday phenomenon that I look at the front of a physical object. Well, that means I'm not seeing the back of it. I'm not seeing the inside of it. There's all sorts of things that are being blocked by this appearance.

And we could think of the same thing, that maybe if I'm seeing the color red, well, then I am by definition not seeing the bouncing light. Right? Because I'm experiencing the effects of bouncing light, but I'm not seeing the bouncing light. I'm not sure what to do with that. But there's definitely. In the Kantian world, or if you said God is everywhere, God is the only real thing and everything is just emanations of God. Well, those emanations that would not be necessarily. Unless you're Spinoza, like That we're actually seeing God. Notice we're seeing these appearances that have been put sort of in front of God.

32:26 Dylan: The thing that. With Kant, right, and you guys should correct me if I'm wrong, is that we only get appearances. We don't have any access to the thing in itself because it's always just appearances. And in this sense, he's adamantly opposed to that, that the appearances are not the thing announcing itself, it's just the not showing of itself. But it also is the indication that there is an in itself to show and there is a phenomena to have access to that would get to get it in itself, which is, to me, adamantly non Kantian.

33:03 Seth: But I think we'll just go to the second paragraph on page 53, because I think it'll bring it all together. So again, the expression appearance itself can have a double signification. First appearing in the sense of announcing itself as not showing itself. There's an appearance. It's not the true thing, but it signals to us that there is that true thing behind it. As Dylan was saying right, Next, there's that which does the announcing, that which in its showing itself indicates something which does not show itself. So there's the actual appearance as opposed to the actual thing or experience or whatever.

Then finally, one can use appearing as a term for the genuine sense of phenomenon as showing itself. If one designates these three different things as appearance, bewilderment is unavoidable. And in my marginal notes in the book I wrote this is true. Anyway, 40 years later, I agree. So really, terminologically, what he's doing in these three pages is. If you think when I say phenomenon, I mean appearance, you're wrong, because appearance is an incredibly ambiguous term and just common usage. And in fact, do you see in the part, it's about three lines down from that little 30 in the margin where he says.

And in the words and in parentheses it says rede R E D E. That term is a term that he's going to use. He means it's like regular common speech, like talk. So he's talking about. He's implying that the common usage of appearance is confused because it's used for all these different things. And he's trying to disambiguate so that he can indicate what he means by phenomenon.

34:52 Mark: And so does he. Then this definition, the real definition, phenomenon, does that defeat Kantianism?

35:01 Dylan: Does it?

35:01 Mark: Just by definition, in the same way that I think in our Hegel episode, Hegel's Phenomenology, we are saying that by definition what we are doing is we are in touch with beings. And that just rules out metaphysically, in advance, any idea that there is a hidden world and that has all the real being in it. And the stuff that appears is mere appearance. That he's just going to, like Hegel, just rule that out by fiat. There's no reason to believe that, right? There's no reason in our primordial being. You'd have to be screwed up by some terrible philosophical or religious theory that casts all being out of anything we could actually be in touch with.

35:45 Dylan: To think that he utterly rejects Kant's

35:48 Seth: he kills it in one sentence. If one then says that with the word appearance we allude to something wherein something appears without being itself an appearance, one has not thereby defined the concept of phenomenon, one has rather presupposed it.

36:03 Dylan: To me, he gave a gives a kind of neat summary of the conclusion of phenomena appearance. This is the second full paragraph, just under 31. In the German pagination phenomenon, the showing itself in itself signifies a distinctive way in which something can be encountered. Appearance, on the other hand, means a reference relationship which is in an entity itself, and which is such that what does the referring can fulfill its possible function only if it shows itself in itself and is thus phenomenon.

36:36 Seth: And then he says, if in taking the concept of phenomenon this way, we leave indefinite which entities we consider as phenomena and leave it open whether what shows itself as an entity or rather some characteristic which an entity may have in its being, then we have merely arrived at the formal conception of phenomenon,

36:54 Mark: which I guess is a way of saying that he's not cheating. If you were to say, yeah, the stuff that we encounter in our everyday life, those really are phenomena, then that would be making the case for philosophical realism, right? But if you say no, we only have the idea of phenomena sort of in the abstract, whatever is actually showing itself in itself. It could still be the case that most of the everyday things we encounter are not phenomena. But we'll figure that out. We actually, actually do phenomenology. In order to figure that out. I want to skip then to Intro to Section 7, right?

He goes through in between the concept of logos, but we're going to study stuff, so let's intro section 7C, page 58 to 62, the preliminary concept of phenomenology. When we envisage concretely what we have set forth in our interpretation of phenomenon and logos, which we are struck by, an inner relationship between things meant by these terms, this is not the greatest place to start. Do you feel strong enough in your Greek, Dylan, to be able to just read this section instead of what I just did?

37:58 Dylan: Yeah, I could probably do it.

37:59 Mark: I mean, is it necessary, or can we just not read those words?

38:02 Dylan: Well, I think that you can read it because, I mean, at some level, it gives you a sense of, you know, Heidegger just uses this all the time. So it's probably worth. So I can just read the first paragraph. So what you want me to do?

38:12 Mark: Go ahead.

38:13 Seth: Yeah, please.

38:14 Dylan: So this is the first paragraph of 7c. Preliminary conception of Phenomenology. When we envisage correctly what we have set forth in our interpretation of phenomenon and logos, we are struck by an inner relationship between the things meant by these terms. The expression phenomenology may be formulated in Greek as legein ta phainomena, where legein means apophainesthai. Thus, phenomenology means apophainesthai ta phainomena. So after my butchered Greek, to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself. That's Heidegger's translation of what the Greek means.

39:01 Mark: Is it merely a mistake of our typesetting that it looks like that which shows itself be seen from itself? There's no spaces between those words.

39:10 Seth: It's just the typesetting.

39:11 Dylan: Okay, yes, the typesetting, they squished it together. There's other cases where it gets spread out. There's very, very tiny amounts of more white space between the words than there is between the letters there.

39:23 Mark: Okay?

39:24 Dylan: And I would comment. And I'm not in a position to genuinely judge this, but I will say that this kind of etymology of Greek by Heidegger is controversial. So Heidegger, when you read him, he makes it sound like, well, this is obvious. It's like the Greek is revealing itself in itself to me. And I'm presenting. So I'm uncovering this. And in fact, that's not true. He's presenting an interpretation of it, which some things. Well, of course he's presenting an interpretation of it, but Heidegger doesn't present it as presenting an interpretation. And people who know Greek well and who know these sections of these ancient texts well, I'll just say that it's an interpretation that people would take issue with.

Not that he's wrong. I'm just saying that it's not quite as strong as a thus. Thus. The etymology is clearly the case that this is the case. We should read this as. This is what I mean by phenomenology. This is what I Heidegger mean by phenomenology, it means to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself. If we read it that way, we're good.

40:38 Seth: Yeah. Honestly, I don't think Heidegger would even ever assert that this was an interpretation of the. This is wordplay. This is what he does. And he's unabashed about it. And in the later works, most of the later Heidegger, there's just tons of this stuff. And what he's trying to do is he's doing in this way, ironically. Right. It's much more. I was going to say, religious way to treat a text, which is how much meaning can you tease out of it by playing around with the root? You know, because he breaks things down into roots all the time. That, of course, means this, and so it has the signification of that.

And, you know, it's just his playfulness with language. But to get to your point and to return to Mark, what he's saying is he thinks of phenomenology, and he goes and says this on the next page, right? Phenomenology is not a discipline like ontology or theology, because it's not defining a sphere of inquiry. It's simply a method. This is how you will get to the things themselves. And when Husserl read that sentence, after reading these first few pages of Being and Time, he probably spit his coffee out.

41:49 Mark: So what this method is going to be to the things themselves, Right? That's Husserl's version. And supposedly saying, letting that which shows itself be seen from itself in the way that it shows itself from itself somehow. That's supposed to be more illustrative. But he says descriptive phenomenology, that's tautological, right? Because it's describing is of course, built into the whole idea of phenomenon. So if you're talking about it at all, you're describing the way in which it shows itself as itself. He says here description does not signify such a procedure as we should find, say, in botanical morphology.

The term has rather the sense of a prohibition, the avoidance of characterizing anything without such demonstration. The character of this description itself, the specific meaning of the logos can be established first of all in terms of the thinghood of that which is to be described, that is to say, of what is to be giving scientific definiteness as we encounter it phenomenally. The signification of phenomenon is conceived both formally and in the ordinary manner, is such that any exhibiting of an entity as it shows itself in itself may Be called phenomenology with formal justification.

Is that helpful? Just describing stuff in a systematic way? That's what we're going to do. Right? That's what the word scientific means. There it's demonstrated, as opposed to what would the bad way that a botanical morphologist would do it. I guess it's applying.

43:12 Dylan: Well, it was applying categories of being without exploring what being is. Right. And at the Top of page 60, Phenomenology is our way of access to what is to be the theme of ontology. And it is our way of giving it demonstrative precision. Only as phenomenology is ontology possible. The mistake that has been made in, like that botanical example is a presumption of what being is. And if we're going to actually understand our ontology and we're going to do metaphysics, we have to do phenomenology.

43:45 Mark: And I guess this kind of gets back to what we're talking about. Are animals conscious or whatever is. I guess reading this makes me a little more convinced of the idea that you could have something that performs a selection procedure. In other words, it distinguishes kinds of things, but in no way has an idea of what being is. Right. That you could say, in fact, analogically. You know, a flower, if water drips on it, it will react by opening up and letting the water in. I don't know if this is the way flowers act, but let's say there are plenty of things that react in such a way. A Venus fly trap can detect when there is a fly or whatever, a bug crawling on it so that it can open itself up and gobble that bug up. Or it detects when the thing is already in its mouth so it can close mouth. It detects something, so it is distinguishing.

44:30 Dylan: It changes its current form in reaction

44:33 Mark: to something, in reacting to something, but that doesn't mean it has any idea of the being of the thing whatsoever. Even if. Now I think that you could actually fool a Venus flytrap type, you know, putting a stick in it and it'll still close on it. I'm not like it. So it might be more mechanical. But imagine the Venus fly trap. There are plenty of other examples that are a little smarter than that and will distinguish between stick, thing to eat, and thing not to eat. So there are lots of ways that you could then apply categories. And we could say those are ontic categories. I don't know, they're ways of putting stuff in buckets. But you don't have to have any sense of ontology to do that.

45:08 Dylan: That sounds right. That notion that ontic. Other forms of being would have access to ontic categories, but not ontology. That sounds certainly Heideggerian.

45:18 Mark: So, I mean, I had put. For this thing to go through page 62.

45:23 Dylan: Yeah. Because just that section ends.

45:25 Mark: Right. What else is in here that we should for sure talk about?

45:29 Dylan: The very end. I felt like in the last couple paragraphs, maybe not the last paragraph itself, but I felt like he was getting into what his book is about and ontology and being in phenomenology.

45:42 Seth: Before you go there, can I. A few sentences down from the last thing you read, Dylan? Only as phenomenology is ontology possible. He says, in the phenomenological conception of phenomenon, what one has in mind as that which shows itself is the being of entities, its meaning, its modifications and derivatives. And this showing itself is not just any showing itself, nor is it some such thing as appearing. Least of all, can the being of entities ever be anything such that behind it stands something else which does not appear. Behind the phenomena of phenomenology, there is essentially nothing else.

On the other hand, what is to become a phenomenon can be hidden. Right. So that whole notion that we were talking about all this stuff that we were talking about phenomena and appearance and the idea of a thing in itself, what he's saying is, if what we're after is being, the being of entities, there can't be a thing in itself behind being. Being can't appear.

46:39 Dylan: Being an appearance, yes. Being isn't an appearance. Being is not a phenomena. Being is a phenomenon.

46:45 Seth: But it can't be in the Kantian sense. It can't be.

46:48 Dylan: It's not an appearance. Yes.

46:50 Seth: So it's important just that we get that out. And then he goes on to talk about hidden and undiscovered. And we're going to have to rest. He says we must wrest the way in which being is from these. From these objects of phenomenology. It's a fight because it's hidden and you have to dig through it.

47:08 Mark: So I had made a criticism of this in our old episode based on my teacher Frithjof Bergmann, saying that, you know, oh, Hegel and those folks, they got the idea that there's no mere appearances. We're actually getting in touch with the things themselves in a direct manner. And so all the skepticism of the ages was just misguided. And he said that Heidegger betrayed that by focusing on all this hiddenness and stuff. So this is the thing that I'm trying to grapple with. I'm very willing to just say Bergmann was wrong. No, we've just been reading how Heidegger is in line with Hegel in dismissing the idea of a Kantian mere appearance.

But he's leaving open, like, it doesn't sound to me very controversial or very fundamentally troubling to say, as I was saying before, when something appears in one way, it necessarily does not appear in another way. And so if we're going to say that, we have to rest the meaning of the phenomenon from what appears to us like that sort of.

48:07 Seth: No, no, no, no. We're making that same mistake again between ontic and ontological. So what we're wresting from the objects of our inquiry is the being of those entities, not the beings. So what Frithjof was probably pointing to was, you know, Hegel and those guys had already said, look, when you encounter a being, that's it. We don't need that radical skepticism. But again, to just go back to that notion of everydayness and the many manifold ways that Dasein is in the world. Heidegger thinks there's a whole ontology that we have never uncovered that's hidden behind this everydayness and hidden by our ontic encounters with things and the way in which we, when we try to conceptualize and turn them into objects of knowledge, we miss out on all this other stuff.

So we have to go back to these objects because we have to figure out what are these, for lack of a better word, what are these divisions of being that make beings possible and what is it? Because there's more to it than just subject and object.

49:12 Mark: I'll push back a little bit on the idea that I was merely considering an ontic, because there's the whole.

49:18 Seth: I said Frithjof.

49:19 Mark: Right, I know, but the whole ontico ontological thing that we were discussing is that individual objects are sort of our way back to exploring being. So that. And this is getting us toward the bottom of 61, where he introduces the idea of interpretation, on top of 62, where he uses that word hermeneutic for it, which I think is really important for us to hit before we get out of here. You know, I just said, if you're looking at the front of a physical object, right, that's an ontic thing, a physical object in front of me, then I'm necessarily not seeing the back of it.

I'm necessarily not seeing the inside of it. So that particular appearance of it, even though it is an appearance really of the thing, is necessarily occluding other appearances that it has. Well, this is the way phenomenon work, too. It's just when we're talking retrospectively, then it doesn't matter what is in front of me right now. Right? I'm considering my entire range of experiences with the book. In other words, I know what a book is. I can open it, I can think about where, who printed it. I can think about all these things. And so the selection process is not, like, moving my standpoint around.

So I'm seeing a different part of the book than I've seen before. But it's a matter of what aspects of the book am I going to focus on? That is what interpretation is, what aspects of life, of our average everydayness. How are we going to. You know, so we're sort of performing a literary act in. I could just think about what did I do this morning. Got up, walked out of bed, into bathroom. You know, I could sort of have a very unliterary way of conceiving this, but somehow there are going to be more perceptive ways in terms of getting at the structures of being of something.

So this wresting is a matter of coming up with a good interpretation.

51:00 Seth: What if I said it's wresting because we're going to have to overcome a bunch of prejudices and ways of seeing and thinking, because phenomenology is a method that's hard to do. What if I just said it that way?

51:12 Mark: Like, if I asked you, tell me about your day yesterday, doing that in a literary way, in a way that, like, would also be something that is hard to do, a way that is getting, you know, tell me about your yesterday in a way that has philosophical import.

51:24 Seth: Okay, let me read another passage and see if maybe I can clarify this. Because phenomena, as understood phenomenologically, are never anything but what goes to make up being, capital B. While being capital B is in every case the being of some entity, we must first bring forward the entities themselves. If it is our aim that being should be laid bare and we must do this in the right way, these entities must likewise show themselves with the kind of access which genuinely belongs to them. So the wresting, what you're going to wrest. We're going to wrest an understanding of being from beings.

And it is not immediately manifest. Because what happens when you encounter a being is you encounter that being or that entity in its own being. You don't encounter capital B being itself. So, you know, he's getting at. Okay, Our object of inquiry is this great nebulous, abstract, misunderstood, never questioned being that makes entities possible. It makes it Possible for beings to be right or for entities to be. We're after that big B, but we can't access it directly. But that is the thematic. That's the horizon. That's the hermeneutical structure.

We're going after capital B being. To get there, we have to go through beings. And beings do not show capital B being. You can't get to capital B being directly anyway through a flower or an acorn or a dog or an elephant or piece of sand.

52:59 Mark: Because we have to consider instead our relationship toward them as their ontico ontological, whatever the way in.

53:06 Seth: No, no, it's this goes back to. Because the pre ontological understanding of being that makes it even possible to ask this question and set the horizon for phenomenology belongs only to Dasein in Dasein's understanding of itself. I don't look at a dog and have a pre ontological understanding of being. I have it through my own existence or existence. And so basically what we've gotten to at this point is it's like, okay, if that's the question, and if that question requires that we go through some being to get there, the best candidate made, the only candidate getting access to capital B being is Dasein. So we have to do this analytic of Dasein. I mean, the trick is here, right? When we uncover the being of Dasein, it will tell us the meaning of capital B being.

54:00 Mark: All right, do we want to say what the transcendence is, or can we just skip that?

54:05 Seth: I think we can skip that.

54:06 Mark: Dylan, it seems like you had some other point toward the end of the section you want to make.

54:10 Dylan: Well, it's just in fact, that paragraph and the paragraph following it seemed to me to be.

54:15 Mark: Go ahead with it.

54:15 Dylan: Okay, so being as the basic theme of philosophy is no class or genus of entities, yet it pertains to every entity. Its universality is to be sought higher up. Being and the structure of being lie beyond every entity and every possible character which an entity may possess. Being is the transcendence, pure and simple. And the transcendence of Dasein's being is distinctive in that it implies the possibility and the necessity of the most radical individuation. And then he says, ontology and phenomenology are not two distinct philosophical disciplines among others.

These terms characterize philosophy itself with regard to its object and its way of treating that object, philosophy, and is universal phenomenological ontology. And it takes its departure from the hermeneutic of Dasein, which as an analytic of existence has made fast the guiding line for all philosophical inquiry at the point where it arises and to which it returns.

55:21 Mark: So transcendence or the transcendental, you know, that these are put together. He mentions both here. I mean, that language is of course, all over, like, you know, Kant's whole anyway, time. He's trying to describe the structure of the appearance versus reality, right? Phenomenon versus noumenon. That is itself a transcendental fact. Maybe there was a transcendental ego, something that. And then Husserl had taken that term as well. And even just talking about a physical object is a transcendent in that it is. It will always have more appearances than we can grasp of it.

So it presents itself as an infinity. Right? That is another way of saying transcendent, which is kind of where this comes from in terms of, oh, like God must be the transcendent thing. Like that we have these individual things in front of us. But then there's something, something higher, something bigger, something that's getting more at the fundamental structure of things. And so he's saying being is the transcendence, pure and simple. That is, that's at least of some limited value in seeing how he's using that term, that that will play a role in his phenomenology, just as it did for Husserl and for Kant.

I forget whether Hegel used that. I bet he did. But I don't even want to guess at this point that one sentence and the transcendence of Dasein's being is distinctive, enables the possibility, necessity of the most radical individuation. And I think that's going to be a key thing going forward in the book, because it is that we're not, in doing phenomenology as I think Husserl saw it, engaging in this purely scientific, shared enterprise. Like, if I'm discussing the being of the book, then you're discussing the being of the book. Like we're all discussing the same thing that there is when we're Dasein, thinking about my own being, my own possibilities, reflecting on things temporally.

Because the Husserlian take their time doesn't seem to be part of it. It's just like we're all looking at the same thing, as if that phenomenon could be frozen in place. Even if it is a shifting, moving thing. We can all kind of focus on the same thing. Whereas the truth is, you know, we all have individual different perspectives. Even if we're trying to all contemplate the same thing, we're not doing it in the same way. Even if we're all trying to contemplate the number three, it seems like that is itself. Right. That's a non temporal entity.

It's not going anywhere. So when I think of three and you think of three, we're thinking of it in, you know, in the same way. It is a transcendent thing that we can all sort of take a bite out of, that we can grasp a hold of. But it seems that there is something specific, something that that overlooks in here, which is this view toward time. And that is related to this ultimate individuation, which is then it just opens Heidegger up to talking about whole other aspects of, you know, Dasein's being, of our beings as individuals that we can start talking about our moods, our emotions.

My projecting toward my future, even my projecting toward death. Right. We're all projected toward death. But my death is individual. It is my death. Right. We're not really all. When we all think about death together, we're not really thinking about the same thing.

58:29 Seth: I think that's true. Correct.

58:32 Dylan: That's a great way to end. When we're all thinking about death, we're not thinking about the same thing.

58:37 Seth: When you said that, do you remember the Wittgenstein thing? Yes. But can you feel this pain? Right.

58:42 Dylan: Or whatever.

58:43 Seth: I was like, I thought, how would you do that with death? Yes, but can you feel this death?

58:50 Mark: That would not be a good way to end the episode. Don't do that. That's not what happened to Wes. Wes will be back. He's just overseas.

58:58 Seth: And by the way, you're not wrong to mention death because that's gonna come into play later. I don't know that we ever will get to it in our episode.

59:06 Mark: Yeah, not on the next episode. We're not gonna have, despite our thoughts, a supporter only part three. Because we want to include everybody in in this next full episode that we're going to have hopefully with Wes back. But we'll see. He still may be on his trip considering further into Being and Time. Thank you so much for listening to this. We also would love to hear, you know, we have our the next episode and we're going to do a play after that. We're going to have Peter Adamson back on. We're going to have our big live episode. But after that we're going to be open to new topics and we'd love to hear what you would like us to cover. Email us at fel.

59:42 Dylan: We'll care about you later.

59:43 Mark: Yes, after all the celebrating is done.

59:47 Seth: It's not about the person we care about your opinion later.

59:52 Mark: Good night, everybody.

59:53 Seth: Good night.