Ep. 297: Heidegger on the Human Condition (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Foreign. To the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 297, it's still something like, what is our relationship to the world? We're continuing on Heidegger's book Being and Time now, discussing passages from chapters 1 through 3, 1926. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, raring to hand in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:34 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, not ready to hand in Austin, Texas.

0:38 Wes: This is Wes Owen, always defining myself in terms of possibility. Near Cork, Ireland.

0:46 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, realizing existentially and every day I am what I am, and that's all that I am.

0:53 Wes: In Madison, Wisconsin, that's like a hybrid of Popeye. And every day, in every way, things are getting better. Every day, in every way, I am more what I am.

1:08 Mark: I am calling in from Ireland. How's later in the day?

1:13 Wes: It's three. I've been sick. I missed the last one, actually, just because I was sick and it was 10pm my time and I was too sick. So I don't have Covid again. That would be weird. Within weeks. But two of my family members do have Covid, and I guess I have something else.

1:31 Mark: Well, I think you should have no problem jumping back in. We are now starting on chapter one, which is Section nine, exposition of the task of a preparatory analysis of Dasein. Who wants to read?

1:48 Wes: Wait, Chapter one, Section nine?

1:51 Dylan: Well, it's called Section nine, so it's. It's part one, Division one.

1:56 Mark: Section nine is the first section of chapter one. Yeah, because it's section nine of the whole book.

2:01 Wes: Okay. The being whose analysis our task is is always we ourselves. The being of this being is always mine. In the being of this being, it is related to its being. As the being of this being, it is entrusted to its own being. It is being about which this thing is concerned. From this characteristic of Dasein, two things follow. So, number one, the essence of this being lies in its to be. The whatness essentia of this being must be understood in terms of its being, existentia, insofar as one can speak of it at all.

2:37 Mark: The whatness is essentia is the Latin he gives. So the essence and existence we've got here, and the essence of design, the essence of us is just. Existence must be conceived in terms of its being is existentia. It is not merely that conceived in terms of. Or what was the phrase that your translation had?

3:01 Wes: So it's using whatness as essentia.

3:04 Mark: Yeah.

3:05 Wes: And being as existentia. So existence as being in this translation, at least at this point in the translation. And then whatness is.

3:14 Mark: But what's the verb there?

That.

In that second sentence after one, in my translation, it's being what it is. Essentially, I must, as far as we can speak of it at all, be conceived in terms of its being. So what's the be conceived in yours?

3:28 Wes: Be understood.

3:29 Mark: Okay, all right. So that's not to say essence is existence, but insofar as we can understand, it, must be understood in terms of existence. I don't know if that's a substantially weaker claim.

3:41 Wes: I'm pretty sure there are other points in this where he. I think in a previous part of the reading, he just said, its essence is its existence. I can't find that from memory, but that was my impression because I noted that because it's a different formulation than Sartre's, which is existence is prior to or precedes essence. Is that how Sartre puts it? Sartre puts it, yep. So, I mean, in Sartre, we talked about this many times, of course, the idea is just that. Our essence, in the sense of our being, determined by our nature as beings, our essential qualities, by our, you know, in Sartre, our roles, our character, all the determining influences that bear down on us.

You know, we should associate this with the concept of necessity and determinism, you know, are just being beings that are determined by our natures, our essences, and then as existences, beings who are determined to some extent by freedom and by the openness of our possibilities in some sense. This kind of assertion, at least in Sartre, I mean, we'll have to discuss how and whether it's different in Heidegger. In Sartre, it's like an assertion of our freedom. This idea of existence preceding essence is the idea that we have some kind of existential freedom that overrides or at least is prior to all the other deterministic stuff.

5:04 Mark: So that's a good review. The next sentence is the reason that I picked this passage at all for us. Seth, do you want to keep going here?

5:13 Seth: Sure. But here our ontological task is to show that when we choose to designate the being of this entity as existence, this term does not and cannot have the ontological signification of the traditional term existentia. Ontologically, existentia is tantamount to being present at hand, a kind of being which is essentially inappropriate to entities of Dasein's character. To avoid getting bewildered, we shall always use the Interpretive expression, presence at hand for the term existentia, while the term existence as a designation of being will be allotted solely to Dasein.

5:49 Wes: I just want to jump in here because my translation is different in a revealing way. It translates present. So all this interesting Heideggerian lingo gets recast and presence at hand becomes objective presence. And the German word and Seth can give me the pronunciation is Vorhandenheit. The idea is just that it's being insofar as it's observed from the outside and supposedly from, I guess, an objective point of view or a view from nowhere, say, as opposed to the kind of being where we're inside it, right? With Dasein, the way he begins this with it's being that's always mine, there's always a personal pronoun that goes with it.

These are two very different conceptions of being. So to the extent that we designate Dasein as an existence, we're never just designating it as an objective presence or present at hand. If we weren't speaking Heideggerian, we would just want to say it's subjectivity, right? It's the kind of existence that is subjectivity rather than merely an object. But this is his way of reformulating it in a more ontological frame of mind, I guess.

6:58 Mark: I would be surprised if objective existence, being present at hand, actually implies the view from nowhere thing that the term objectivity maybe means to us. Because using the term being present at hand, this builds in the perceiver, that it is not a view from nowhere by no perceiver, it is a view specifically from the outside. I like that formulation, objectifying the thing. So is this the same that Hegel used in itself, but an object in itself is as objectified, us considering it in itself in its essence.

7:36 Dylan: To me, the Hegel part is confusing, you know, and whether or not, because that's like the interpretation of Hegel and I don't know, the present at hand, to me, I agree. Mark includes the perceiver and the objectifying act that the perceiver always makes of the things around them. And this is where the categories fall in. Like all the things that the traditional Aristotelian categories apply to apply to those things.

8:02 Wes: There's going to be a contrast between the world treated, I guess, quote unquote, objectively versus the world treated as equipment, right? As ready to hand, as something with which we have a more. I've used this phrase procedural knowledge over and over again, or tacit knowledge, as opposed to knowing that knowing how, which is a much more immersed way of being in the world. That's the contrast and that's what ready to hand involves. So just something as simple as tennis. It's the difference between being engaged in a task and knowing how to do it and having that know how ingrained in your bones.

8:41 Seth: I was thinking about praxis versus theory, theory, theoria, however you say it in Greek. But it's important because that distinction, what he's going to claim, right, this pre ontological understanding of being that we have is about our being. But there's a kind of existence is think of it as a pre ontological engagement with the world. And the whole ready to hand and not ready to hand thing is how the ontological character ends up sort of breaking through and revealing itself. So it's primary for Heidegger, this existence. This is what I think comes out in the next paragraph. So I really do want to take a look. The essence of Dasein lies in its existence.

9:28 Mark: Let me interrupt you to that, because I think the existence there. We should, as a house rule, use the German term existenz, because that is the whole point of this is that existentia, existence, as Aristotle thought about in the Categories, is different than what Dasein has, which is. If you just say existence, well, that just sounds like the same ambiguous word. But if we say existence. Oh no, that's the pretentious German word that means.

9:54 Seth: What I'll do is I'll substitute the name David Cronenberg, who made a film called Existence. Every time I want to say existence, and that way it'll be clearly differentiated. All right.

10:04 Wes: In my translation, it's the Aristotelian, Existence is existentia and then existence is Existenz. So it's just existence.

10:13 Seth: Yeah, the essence of Dasein lies in its existence. Accordingly, those characteristics which can be exhibited in this entity are not properties. That's in scare quotes. Present at hand of some entity which looks so and so and is itself present at hand. They are in each case possible ways for it to be, and no more than that. All the being as it is which this entity possesses is primarily being. So when we designate this entity with the term Dasein, we are expressing not its what as if it were a table, house or tree, but its being. So this ties together a bunch of different threads here, which is we've talked about possibility, we've talked about time, right?

We've talked about comportment towards the world, this care or this directedness. And what he's saying here is, if you talk about a tree, you can talk about a tree in terms of its height and the thickness of its trunk and the effectiveness of its photosynthesis and the shape of its leaves. Right. Like as if it has properties. But when you talk about Dasein, you can talk about an individual Dasein and say she's so and so tall and has this color hair and so forth,

11:30 Wes: or has such and such a personality, and therefore is predisposed to do certain things. We could talk about people, as we often do, as essences, who are deterministic

11:40 Dylan: functions of properties, but those aren't things insofar as they are Dasein.

11:45 Seth: No, exactly. That's my point is you can talk about individual Dasein this way, but when you talk about Dasein, when he uses the term Dasein, you can't read it like me. You can't think that it's the being that I have, the being which is in every case mine, and in your case is also yours. But that being is constituted by possible ways to be, by possibilities. That's fundamentally. So when you talk about Dasein, if you say it has this type of property and this type of thing, you can talk about it that way and you can talk about human nature or humans having an essence. But what he says is that ultimately is going to come out of Dasein's possibilities in its being.

12:33 Wes: Yeah.

12:33 Seth: So he's trying to find a different starting point here.

12:36 Wes: Yeah. Again, it's a way of talking about the priority of human freedom and subjectivity. But the way I think of it is it's recast in terms of ontology. And I think that's really interesting because one of the things I had gotten about our many consciousness, or a few, I don't know if it's many, but, you know, our episodes on consciousness was that, you know, if there ever were to be a solution to the problem of consciousness, it would involve the concept of possibility. And it deeply involves the concepts of possibility and time. And that's why it's so intransigent.

So this is a way of emphasizing that point. Right. So instead of simply saying, hey, the difference is it's not just a thing, it's a subjectivity, you say the difference is that its existence is intimately tied to. To the modality of possibility as opposed to the logical modality of mere presentness. Now, present at time T1, we are not just present at time T1. We have the past with us. We are projected out into the future in terms of our goal orientedness, all that stuff.

13:38 Dylan: And Wes, when you say this is recasting the question of human freedom in terms of ontology, I would also then contrast it with, instead of casting it in terms of epistemology, human freedom isn't a question of how we know and what we know, but of what we are. In some ways, he's effectively saying that's the mistake of the past was categorizing our freedom in terms of what we know or don't know. And the question of obtaining our freedom is gathering more on better understanding of what we know and how we know, and maybe making that knowing a God's knowing. And here it has to do with our being and the kinds of beings we are and the possibilities of our being, which I think you're right, is a significantly different way to understand human freedom.

14:27 Mark: So does possibility, which is clearly in this text, does that necessarily imply freedom, which is Sartre's thing? Or does Heidegger even talk about freedom in this text?

14:38 Dylan: I think it implies that so far, I haven't seen the word freedom yet. But I think when you get to the next section about authenticity, I think that's where freedom comes in.

14:48 Seth: I agree with that assessment. So I'll say this. He doesn't talk about it in those terms, Mark. He doesn't use the term freedom. But authenticity implies freedom. And every single person who read him after this read that into it. I mean, that's why Sartre wrote Being and Nothingness, and all these existential texts were heavily influenced by this. It's fair to say it. Although he won't use that term, I

15:12 Mark: would like to leave open the possibility that Heidegger might have been onto something by not using that term, that maybe what constitutes authenticity, you know, because from the Essence of Truth essay, he starts to talk about authenticity in terms of, like, is something true gold or is it fake gold? Is it authentic gold? Is it. You know, and so that's something showing itself as itself. The phenomena that has been so far, what has been authenticity. And so relating that to human authenticity,

15:41 Dylan: there's probably a connection, especially in the notion of showing, as opposed to freedom. And the baggage with freedom is always this question that you get along with free will, of what are you removing right? And for Heidegger, Dasein is all about action, activity, and it's a realization of possibility. It's not about a unfettering or a unconstraining the way we would often associate with freedom. So I agree with you, Mark. The fact that he's not using that word has a lot of potency. Even if I do associate his talk of authenticity and possibility as being his freedom talk, the Fact that he's talking about freedom in those terms is revealing.

16:25 Wes: Take any of my attempts to translate this back into the language of Descartes and subjectivity. All that stuff. Right. He's. I'm just trying to translate it back into the stuff that he's trying to escape, in a sense. Right.

16:36 Dylan: Yes, it is.

16:37 Wes: So always take it with a grain of salt, but it's the way for me to understand it. So I translate it and then I think, yeah, this is tweaked. It's ontological, or however you want to understand what he's trying to do to this to make it different.

16:49 Seth: I think that's a really interesting conversation and we should keep it in mind as we go forward.

16:53 Mark: All right, number two, we're still the bottom of the first page here. Then that being, which is an issue for this entity, in its very being, is in each case mine. Thus, design is never to be taken ontologically as an instance or special case of some genus of entities as things that are present at hand. In other words. Oh, there's a bunch of Daseins here. Let me address the crowd. I'm so glad the four of us Daseins could be on the call today.

17:18 Dylan: No, and also then categorizing our designs, right? We're going to put these kinds of designs over here and these kinds of Dasein over there and the ones that look like this over there.

17:29 Mark: Right? Yeah, they're da. And those ones are da, because da means there, which we didn't say that essence is Sosein. So there's a little fun wordplay there. Sosein, the Sosein of Dasein. Continuing to entities such as these there being as a matter of a difference. Seth, you pointed out scare quotes in one place. There's scare quotes in every goddamn sentence. In something. In something. And listening to the audiobook person just try to like. He just stopped trying to. Trying to emphasize, like. Just read the book. If you want to know what the scare quotes are, just take everything with a grain of scare quotes.

Right. So it's regular entities, entities that are not us. Their being is a matter of indifference. Or more precisely, they are such that their being can be neither a matter of indifference to them nor the opposite. Because Dasein has in each case minus, one must always use a personal pronoun when one addresses it. I am comma, you are.

18:24 Wes: So a rock is indifferent to its own existence.

18:28 Dylan: Yes.

18:29 Wes: We are not rocks. You know, the animal cases get us into tricky.

18:33 Dylan: Yeah, we started talking about this time. It is tricky.

18:36 Mark: I thought rocks Are always like, I want a rock.

18:41 Dylan: The scare quote thing for a second. Are you guys sure that they're scare quotes or are they meaning to be taking them almost like things or nouns or things to be talked about. Like in the way you spoke, Mark, you emphasized it says when you say they are such that their being can be so their being is a matter of indifference. I don't know that he means scare quotes, like in the sense of like sort of like that or ironic or anything like that. I think that putting it in quotes means that it's like a characteristic of it.

19:14 Mark: It's a technical term. In other words, putting the word R in quotes means you're not just using

19:20 Dylan: it as a verb, you're using it as well.

19:23 Wes: You're referring to the term as opposed to using the term. Right?

19:26 Dylan: Exactly. Yes.

19:27 Mark: You can't say the rocks and stuff are such that their being can be neither a matter of like you're using it. You're not just saying. They're saying the word are.

19:37 Wes: It could be both in a sense, but it could be pointing to a different use or pointing us to the fact that we should be thinking about the term. Its. So it's like use and mention at the same time or something like that.

19:48 Seth: The intent of using the emphasis here, for all I know, in German it's italicized as opposed to.

19:53 Dylan: Which would be incredibly confusing because of all the italizations.

19:57 Seth: What he's saying is indifference is not a property that they have. He doesn't want you to think of it as rock is indifferent, as if it is capable of being indifferent. He's trying to say just by virtue of what they are, they can neither be indifferent or, you know, different, whatever the opposite concerned. Right? Yeah. Whereas we are. That's why you don't personalize interactions with. Of course that's not true.

20:24 Mark: But if we're going to bring up animals, of course we personalize connections with our pets, but maybe we're imposing mindness on them and they don't have that. Let's not go down the rabbit hole again.

20:38 Wes: I assume that you guys did as much animal stuff as you wanted to.

20:41 Mark: Yeah, let's. Let's. That's not animal dancing.

20:44 Seth: In fact, we had Coco on and she signed her own interpretation of the first 30 or so pages.

20:53 Wes: I had a class recently on Heidegger. A substantial portion of one of the classes was spent discussing whether animals knew that they were going to die. And I did not enjoy that part of the class.

21:08 Mark: Let's keep going. Wants to Read Dylan, you haven't read much the second paragraph. 168.

21:14 Dylan: Furthermore, in each case Dasein is mined to be in one way or another. Dasein has always made some sort of decision as to the way in which it is in each case mine. That entity which in its being has this very being as issue, comports itself towards its being as its own most possibility. In each case, Dasein is its possibility, and it has this possibility, but not just as a property, as something present at hand would. And because Dasein is in each case essentially its own possibility, it can in its very being choose itself and win itself. It can also lose itself and never win itself, or only seem to do so.

But only insofar as it is essentially something which can be authentic, that is something of its own, can it have lost itself and not yet won itself as modes of being. Authenticity and inauthenticities, these expressions have been chosen terminologically in a strict sense are both grounded in the fact that any Dasein whatsoever is characterized by mindness, right,

22:27 Mark: that is M I N E N E S S, not minds, ness. But yeah, being mine. We're trying to figure out, yes, it is related to choice, whether that means it's related to freedom.

22:38 Dylan: How can choice not be related to freedom, at least in some kind of family oriented way?

22:44 Mark: Kenneth is being quotes choose itself and win itself. In other words, choose is in the scare quotes there. So I don't know if he's using choice in a way that phenomenologically it seems to us that we have choice. So it is totally irrelevant whether we really don't have free will or whatever. Like once you move into the realm

23:05 Wes: of phenomenology, all I'm saying is as

23:07 Dylan: long as we don't go down the rabbit hole of, well, we don't actually have free will because we don't actually have freedom. Where we presenting an interpretation of what freedom is. Well, all I'm saying is that if you bring up the word choice, you also bring up the family of words associated with freedom. It's a related conversation of those things. And then you're going to have all those controversies associated with choice and well, do you actually have choice? Well then if you don't have choice, do you have freedom? I mean, that's going to happen. But if you bring up choosing, you also are talking about freedom, or at

23:37 Wes: least on a provisional basis until we have a better way of understanding it. At least that's the only way I can grasp this. And the same thing goes for Dasign is always its possibility. Right? To say that an entity is its possibility as opposed to its actuality. Right. For a rock to go back to that example, it just, it is what it is at any given time. It has a future, but it doesn't have different possible futures in any pregnant sense. I mean, you know, you could argue it does in some sense, but it doesn't from the inside, so to speak. There aren't different projected possibilities. Do I go down this path? Do I go down this path?

24:14 Dylan: It's not self moving in that way in its internal being.

24:18 Seth: Right? And it's also not self reflective. Even if it's true that dogs and trees can make choices about which possibilities to pursue. Part of this mindness, part of this notion is that my being is a concern for me. I like literally can be self reflective and concerned about what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. And that activity of having concern for my own being is something that he thinks is unique to human beings. Dogs are not self reflective in that way, even if they have, or at least this is his claim. Let's stay off the animal thing. But that's the important point.

24:53 Mark: So footnote number three tells me that there is a German pun here that is actually important, that the word eigentlich means authentic or real, and the word eigen means own. So in other words, he's saying that something of its own is something that is authentic. So we're already saying Dasein is essentially characteristic by mindness, by ownness, by individuality, and that is directly related, you know, so it's like if mindness is the noun, mine is the adjective, and authentic means mine. So is there a way of being to give a preliminary sketch of what it is to be an authentic being?

Here is just being authentically you as an individual, which doesn't necessarily sound like it has to refer to. There's an inner essence that I have and I may have to discover it, I have to find myself or, and it doesn't necessarily mean like for Sartre, that we literally start as nothing and we are developing and we have to achieve this crafted artistic self, that maybe this is the direction that is pushing, but it seems like it is trying to be more basic and that this is just like something that by definition as individuals, you could somehow lose your individuality if you just follow the herd, if you just do, if you act as if you are a programmed being.

And whatever society tells me to do, they define me as this kind of thing. I'm just going to do that no, be yourself.

26:23 Wes: It's suspiciously similar to Aristotelian lingo. Right. Or it seems to in this idea of winning oneself or losing oneself and belonging to oneself. You know, it's suspiciously reminiscent of actualization. So for Aristotle, potentiality, right, is an important part of being as well. And then actualization according to some end, according to some teleology, where for some entities, their being consists of that being at work, being themselves, of sort of fulfilling that end, but that end is its essence. It's what's prescribed for it. It's not a matter of freedom, it's not a matter of choice. So we can't speak of Dasein in the same way, but this seems to be an analogous way. So when we're talking about authenticity, it seems to be the analog for Dasein of what we might talk about for other beings as. Or in an Aristotelian way, as actuality.

27:15 Dylan: And that's going to require some explication on Heidegger's part. Right? How you can talk about authenticity and have it not be actualization, that you can both be authentic or inauthentic towards something with which you choose that requires some more explanation.

27:34 Mark: Yeah, I think this is just a puzzle here, because it can't be correspondence to an inner core essence. Like Aristotle would say that the genetic code of the acorn is to become tree. If it becomes oak tree, then it's authentic. If it gets all smashed up and becomes a bunch of logs, then it's inauthentic. Then it is not tree, you know,

27:52 Dylan: or it's not a fully flourished tree.

27:54 Wes: Sure, right, yeah. So the tree actualized is just the tree being at work, being itself according to its plan, according to its design. Right. Fulfilling its end to be the oak tree that is the tree actualized. And then, yeah, the puzzle is how there's some analog for dase sign which does not involve it just running according to an essential plan.

28:14 Seth: Yeah, I don't know that we'll ever get there because I don't know if we're going to read more of this and get to the death part angst. But yes, we're not talking about being authentic to some kind of essential nature that you can choose or not choose. And if this is like you're programmed, you're born and you're programmed to be X. And if you don't do X, then you're inauthentic. And it's not like that. There's not a teleology there the authenticity comes from. Mark alluded to it on his first response. There is authenticity's authenticity with respect to possibilities.

It's the recognition that Dasein is its possibilities. It's the recognition that those possibilities will end one day. One day there will be no more possibility. That's called death. And then its comportment that takes that into account. It's action that takes it into account. If you, as Dasein, never reflect that you have possibilities and never reflect on the end of your possibilities, and you just are doing what you're told, or you're doing what society expects of you, or you're not making choices that are acknowledged with respect to your possibilities, then that's the closer definition or characterization of inauthenticity.

So it's not about doing anything in particular. It's about acting from the perspective of having this understanding of your being and your possibilities.

29:44 Wes: I think it's helpful to compare it to the virtue ethics tradition as well, because we got into some of this with the contrast, right, between Aristotle and Nietzsche. We can think of human actualization in terms of fulfilling our essential natures as rational beings and having certain virtues, temperance, magnanimity. Right. We might think of the Aristotelian virtues as having something to do with authenticity. And then keeping in mind Nietzsche's rejection of that or his emendation of that, however you want to put it, where it's not about becoming virtue according to some human essential nature with predefined virtues, it's about becoming oneself, becoming me in particular, where my.

I have my own particular ends. And I don't know ultimately how much this will end up resembling other existentialists. Sartre, Nietzsche, to the extent that he's an existentialist, but it's a good point of comparison.

30:36 Mark: I think my workaround has been to instead of talking about human nature, which implies some sort of determinism and some sort of teleology that's built in, it's just talk about the human condition. So that. Seth, you were saying if you live in a way that denies that you're ever going to die, there's obviously something inauthentic about that, because that's the kind of creatures we are, that is our human condition. There are conditions surrounding our possibilities. And so not acknowledging that we even have possibilities, like I just do what I'm told, then that does not acknowledge that you have choice possibilities, then that would clearly be inauthentic. And that doesn't require that there be any very specific thing that is at the core of you that you have to be true to. It is neutral with regard to that.

31:20 Wes: But won't we be able to upload our consciousness soon to the. To the cloud and live forever? Talk about possibility.

31:27 Mark: I don't think I'm going to survive. I just want my personality to be there annoying people for. For generations to come. I don't.

31:33 Wes: Well, I think you've ensured that with this podcast,

31:38 Mark: all the podcast will be thrown in the fires. Where did we stop? But the inauthenticity of Dasein does not signify any less being or any lower degree of being. Rather, it is the case that even in its fullest concretion, design can be characterized by inauthenticity when busy, when excited, when interested, when ready for enjoyment.

31:59 Wes: This is a confusing one.

32:00 Seth: I don't like this at all.

32:02 Dylan: Well, what I liked about it is him making the point that design isn't a vector or a magnitude of being. Maybe it's really the authenticity is not. So you aren't more or less in your beingness, in your Dasein ness, by being more authentic or inauthentic.

32:26 Seth: Ah, okay, so it's not like the

32:28 Mark: spirit of God that could be, you know, filling you or not filling you. Like, if we want to say that, that's a good example. Dasein is having the seed of the divine in us that animals and rocks and whatever do have, then we always are that kind of creature that has that seed, even when we are turning away from it.

32:44 Wes: This seems to be meant to directly contrast to Aristotle and the whole tradition that follows Aristotle, where he explicitly says that if something is more actualized, is more real.

32:56 Dylan: And the whole virtue ethics, things, the way you become virtuous is to act virtuously and you can become more so that way. And the idea of flourishing the oak tree that is in a box or jammed up against a cliff where it's not as fully realized, you know, just that language itself in its right conditions, or is it a drought or whatever, all those things external constraints will affect it being able to flourish and become the most of what it can be.

33:26 Wes: In my translation it says inauthenticity can determine Dasein even in its fullest concretion when it is busy, excited, interested and capable of pleasure. So this seems to be a warning that some of these things that we might associate with flourishing are being at work, being ourselves or whoever you are. To put it, do not guarantee Dasa. I mean, they don't guarantee authenticity. They can be authentic. So that's not a good guide to

33:50 Seth: authenticity that actually I like that much better, Wes.

33:54 Mark: So I think we can actually Skip the next paragraph. That is merely summarial. The next thing that I find of note is in the middle of page 69. So down at the end of the next paragraph where he talks about everyday under differentiated character of Dasein averageness. So we talked about the average everydayness in the previous episode. Is this adding anything?

34:16 Dylan: He's continued to explicate it, right? Especially at the bottom of 69, and saying, because average everydayness makes up what is ontically proximal to this entity, it has again and again been passed over. So he's emphasizing, look, this average everydayness is a big deal, and in fact we've constantly ignored it. And then at the bottom. Dasein's average everydayness, however, is not to be taken as a mere aspect here too. And even in the mode of inauthenticity, the structure of existentiality lies a priori here too. Dasein's being is an issue for it in a definite way.

And Dasein comports itself toward it in the mode of average everydayness, even if this is only the mode of fleeing in the face of it and forgetfulness thereof. To me, this is why he wants to point to Dasein's average everydayness. Because even in forgetting about its average everydayness, it's revealing what its being is as Dasein.

35:17 Seth: Yeah, it's actually the part you skipped over, Mark, I think, gives some context that's helpful here, which is, he says, the kind of being that Dasein is is different from the kind of being that other things have. Dasein is not present to hand, and it can't possibly be present to hand. It's just different. He says, but it would be a mistake if we then proceeded with the investigation by saying, okay, how's Dasein different? What's the difference between Dasein and Zuhandensein, or whatever the ready to hand, present at hand thing is? He says, no, no, no, no.

We still have to come at it phenomenologically from Dasein. And one of the things is this average everydayness. This is characteristic of Dasein's being. And we always immediately leave and say, okay, what are the properties that Dasein has that other things don't have? And he's like, nope, that's not the right way to go at this. We have to start from the experience, the existence. Existence of Dasein. And that existence is not knowledge based, right? It's average everydayness.

36:21 Mark: You can't. Theaetetus.

It's so top of page 70 then. But the explication of Dasein in its average Everydayness does not give us just average structures in the sense of a hazy indefinite. Anything which, taken ontically is in an average way, can be well, very well grasped ontologically in pregnant structures which may be structurally indistinguishable from certain ontological characteristics of an authentic being of Dasein. I'm not sure what that means.

36:48 Seth: I think we should move forward, because that's super confusing and if we try to parse it out, we're trying to

36:54 Mark: get through basically to the middle of the next page, the middle of page 71. All explicata to which the analytic of Dasein gives rise are obtained by considering design's existence structure. Because design's characters of being are determined in terms of existentiality, we call them existentialia. Is that right? Existentialia or these are to be sharply

37:16 Wes: distinguished existentials in my translations, which again I like, correspond to. Right, the categories, the sign version of the categories.

37:23 Mark: Right. These are to be sharply distinguished from what we call categories, characteristics of being for entities whose character is not that of design. But yes, it's analogical to that. Here we are taking the expression category and its primary ontological signification and abiding by it. He's just saying, in other words, how Aristotle meant it. In the ontology of the ancients, the entities we encounter within the world are taken as the basic examples from the interpretation of being. Knowledge is how we would know them. Entities are encountered therein.

But the being of these entities must be something which can be grasped in a distinctive kind of. What is the Greek word there? Legein, letting something be seen so that this being becomes intelligible in advance as that which it is and as that which it is already in every entity. In any discussion of entities, we have previously addressed ourselves to being.

38:12 Dylan: So I think if you go all the way to the top of 71, the first sentence there. Existentials and categories are the two basic possibilities for characters of being. The entities which correspond to them require different kinds of primary interrogation, respectively. Any entity is either a who existence or a what presence at hand in the broadest sense. The connection between these two modes of the characters of being cannot be handled until the horizon for the question of being has been clarified.

38:42 Mark: And then the last paragraph, he clarifies. The existential analytic of design becomes before any psychology or anthropology, certainly before any biology. This is the whole point of this, is that method of phenomenologically grappling with being is a standpoint that is prior to objective science. There you go. I think we've said that about 40 times in the past.

39:06 Wes: So we're going to get at the ontological structure of things, but we're not doing it the old way by making thingness our paradigm, right? This outer objects and talking about causality and unity and quality and those types of things. But we are going to think about it from the inside, so to speak. And that will give us a different set of categories, the existentials and something specifically Dasein related and something that is prior to all that other stuff. Even though our. Right. Our bias is to think of that as secondary.

39:39 Dylan: Right.

39:39 Wes: What comes first as dogmatists. Right. It's matter and it's the naturalistic framework that comes first and thingness and. And then we try to make consciousness out of that. We try to say how consciousness arises from that. And in this case we reverse the priority and do the ontology from the inside out.

39:56 Dylan: And your description there, which sounds exactly right, Wes, to me, makes it resonant. Not the same thing as Hegel's project, but a similar concern.

40:06 Mark: Right.

The reason that you would want to do the science thing first is because you feel like we have a very partial perspective. We're seeing through our own senses. The whole point of science is to get beyond the individual human foibles and to get reliable knowledge, to get essentially this view from nowhere, because we need to get out of standpoints. I'm making connection to standpoint epistemology here, but let's talk more about that in part two of this discussion when we move on to chapter two and talk about ready to hand what ontology actually looks like from this first person perspective, as opposed to the scientific perspective that gave us Aristotle's categories and things like that. So folks can get that. If you're already a supporter, that should be the next thing in your feed.

40:51 Wes: Thanks, thanks, Thanks.