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

0:08 Mark: This is the partially Examined Life, episode 297, part 2. We've been discussing Heidegger's Being and Time. We're now up to chapter two, page 81 in the online version.

We're skipping being in the world in

0:23 Dylan: general as the basic state of design.

0:26 Seth: Which section?

0:28 Mark: Section 12, page 81 through 86. I put somebody want to start reading here?

0:35 Seth: Let's just start at the beginning of section 12 and we can skip through. In our preparatory discussions, we have brought out some characteristics of beings which will provide us with a steady light for our further investigation, but which will at the same time become structurally concrete as that investigation continues.

0:50 Mark: This is all just going to be repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat.

0:54 Seth: Dasein's Being takes on a definite character as grounded upon that state of being which we have called being in the world. An interpretation of this constitutive state is needed if we are to set up our analytic of Dasein correctly. The compound expression being in the world indicates, in the very way we have coined it, that it stands for a unitary phenomenon. This primary datum must be seen as a whole. But while being in the world cannot be broken up into contents which may be pieced together, this does not prevent it from having several constitutive items in its structure.

Indeed, it may be looked at in three ways. First, the quote in the world. With regard to this, there arises the task of inquiring into the ontological structure of world and defining the idea of worldhood as such. Second, that entity which in every case has its being in the world as the way in which it is. Here we are seeking that which one inquires into when one asks the question who. Third, being in. As such, we must set forth the ontological constitution of inhood itself. Emphasis upon any one of these signifies that the others are emphasized along with it.

Of course, being in the world is a state of design which is necessary a priori, but it is far from sufficient for completely determining Dasein's being.

2:12 Mark: So I remember now why I had said skip over these pages, because we already talked, like, as a major thing in that previous episode 32, about the whole idea of being in the world and how it is a unitary phenomenon and why there are dashes between the three elements there. But it is good to get more of a sense of the flavor of the text by oh, yes, it's all one thing. But we can still talk about the individual components, including in-hood, Inheit, in-hood itself. And that he's going to have a whole chapter on what inhood means. We're not going to get to a lot of that, what constitutes worldhood.

But we've sort of sketched out that world is not a container. It's not like putting a shoe in a shoebox. That's not the way in which we are in the world. It is the environment. I don't even know if that word helps, but it is this background texture, the canvas upon which our actions and perceptions and experience takes place. So it is like this assumed big thing that is there. So this, again, the way of putting this cuts against any possible, like, fundamental skepticism, like, how do we know the world is really there? Like, well, whatever it is, it is the thing that is providing the background for our actual knowledge and experience.

And blah, blah, blah. So you can't doubt it. It is already presupposed.

3:34 Dylan: I like Wes's instinct to want to draw on analogies that we're familiar with, even if you have to qualify them. So to me, it's almost like form and material. Everything that has a shape is made of something, and being made of something, it has a shape. Those things are indistinguishable from one another. And we're in a world, but that's inseparable. It's like you want to say we're immersed, but that also has a distinction between what we are and the thing we're immersed in. And I think that he means it much more immersive than that.

4:10 Mark: In the next two paragraphs, he kind of spells out this analogy and the contrast between them. Right. So if we were speaking categorically about something present at hand, about an objective presence, it's this spatial container, and in means being in that container. And that's what he wants to warn us away from. He wants to warn us away from thinking about it in that way. Our being in the world, it's not us being in a container, it's part of our structure as the Dasein. The in the world is part of us in a strange way. And that's what makes it. It's not a category, it's an existential.

4:47 Dylan: It also implies that whole business we talked about in the last part about. It's not a question of knowing either, right?

4:55 Mark: Yeah. It's ingrained at a deeper level in our being.

4:58 Dylan: Yes, it's a being question, not a knowing question.

5:01 Mark: All right, so I think we can then, with that said, skip down to the. It's the middle of page 81. So as an existential, being alongside the world never means anything like the being present at hand together of things that occur. There's no such thing as this side by sideness of an entity called Dasein with another entity called world. Of course, when two things are present at hand together alongside one another, we are accustomed to express this occasionally by something like the table stands by the door, the chair touches the wall. Taken strictly, touching is never what we are talking about in such cases.

Not because accurate re examination will always eventually establish that there is a space between the chair and the wall, but because in principle, the chair can never touch the wall, even if the space between them should be equal to zero. If the chair could touch the wall, this would presuppose that the wall is the sort of thing for which a chair could be encounterable. An Entity present at hand within the world can be touched by another entity only if by its very nature the latter entity has being in as its own kind of being, only if with its being there, something like the world is already revealed to it.

So that from out of this world another entity can manifest itself in touching and thus become accessible in its being present at hand. So there's what it is for us to encounter something in the world. Objects can never encounter each other. They're just for us.

6:27 Seth: What he says is that entities that are present at hand are world less.

6:32 Dylan: The only entity that touches anything, it touches the world is Dasein, touches anything in the world.

6:39 Mark: So this interesting. He's making a lot here of a word that has two different meanings.

6:46 Seth: Heidegger.

6:47 Mark: No, and he's suggesting to us that it's the, the quote unquote, objective meaning is derivative in a way of the subjective one. Right? It's, it's just an analog. So when we think of two objects touching each other, we are piggybacking upon our own subjective experience of actually making contact with objects in the world. And our conception of objectively present objects, quote unquote, touching each other, is imbued with that. In that sense, it's inaccurate in a way. It sounds like a simple point if we translate it again into naturalistic language. Being with, in his terms is about being conscious beings and encountering the world in that sense, not in the sense of two things being next to each other.

7:32 Dylan: Again, it's an activity. Right, so the touching, you know, the reason the chair isn't touching the wall is because the chair isn't actively doing anything from his perspective, isn't actively encountering the wall. And he would poo, poo, you know, some physicists saying, well, the chair's got electric fields all around it and the electric field that is encountering the electric field in the wall around those atoms and they're actively encountering that kind of, that kind of panpsychism kind of thing.

8:03 Mark: Well, it's just because the chair is not conscious. Right?

8:05 Seth: The chair doesn't. Well, it's not that the chair's not conscious, it's that the chair doesn't care. Literally, it has no concerns. The chair has no concerns.

8:15 Dylan: Yes, and I think that's a really good point because the way I was trying to weasel in the physics point of saying, like, well, there's activity there and that he would be discounting that. I think you're right to bring up that even if you said that the chair in itself is an activity with all those atoms and forces and stuff like that, that is an activity.

It doesn't care.

And so that not caring. That form of action is uniquely Dasein.

8:46 Mark: The non Heideggerian simple way of putting all these points is just again, chairs are not conscious. The being with that he's talking about is not the being with of objectively present objects in the world being spatially alongside each. It's about something that I would associate with consciousness. Again, Heidegger is trying to make an ontology of ontological. Ontologify.

9:09 Dylan: Ontologify.

That's good.

Ontologify.

9:13 Mark: That's way better.

9:14 Dylan: Ontologify.

9:15 Seth: Yeah. Well Wes, on the last recording I said it's very common to take the approach that you're doing, which is like,

9:22 Mark: I know we're going to get a lot of shit for it and well,

9:25 Seth: no, no, it's just if you give him credit, he was smart enough that if that's what he was trying to say, he would have said it using that language.

9:32 Mark: So. Well, I'm not saying that's what he's trying to say, that's what he's pivoting off of. And again, it's how I have to understand it initially. And then we can say how it's different and then if we can. It's hard for me to say how it's different.

But I'm even wondering now if all this talk of activity might be somehow violating the spirit that you're saying, Seth. Because process philosophy has been the thing that we have talked about in other episodes as the main contender against this object based ontology, which seems to be this present at hand scientific thing. No, no, Everything is a process. But process might itself also be two third person physics objective. You know, I'm not sure whether that is just something that we're trying to use to break out of the Aristotelian object based thing. But it is not any more in Heidegger than the object stuff is.

10:24 Seth: No, no, that' good point, Mark. To defend Dylan's use of the term activity, think of it in terms of what is it to be is to do. Think of it more as action. And maybe I hesitate to use the word intentional, but there's something about Dasein can't have possibility. Possibility implies activity, it implies action, it implies progression from present to future. There's some active motive element in it, even if you don't want to classify it as activity or action or if we want to add additional qualifications. But yes, we should not confuse Heidegger with a process ontologist.

11:01 Mark: There's gotta be an English word that says action or activity, but necessitates that it is like making a choice. And it necessitates that it's something by a conscious being. We used activity. I think that works pretty well for that. But you still could maybe say, as Dylan was saying, that when, you know, the magnets come together, then there's activity between them. When we don't want to say that, that would be at best analogical, like saying that these things touch. And Heidegger's trying to say I'm reclaiming the word touch. Touch is only for design. And so activity we could do the same thing with and say, yes, we can talk about action and activity, but those are special design ways of talking about them, not physics ways of talking about them.

11:40 Seth: Well, I have some good news for you. I have a pocket full of hyphens. So we can just throw together as many words as you want.

11:48 Dylan: Pocket full of hyphens.

11:53 Mark: Moving here, page 82.

The next bit I have here is this factuality versus facticity. So it's on the next page for me.

We get done with the contrast between being with in the object sense versus the Dasein sense, together with and in two different senses. And now we talk about factuality versus facticity, where it's objective presence is that factuality a stone. There's a factual occurrence of it, and we can't think about Dasein as having that kind of factual objective presence. So maybe it's worth reading a little bit from my translate.

12:28 Seth: Yeah, I'd like to hear your version of it, because this is another one that's very confusing to me.

12:33 Mark: Those beings which are not worldless, for example, Dasein itself, are objectively present in the world too. So I take that to mean, as we have bodies, we're things in the world. Correct me if I'm wrong later, but more precisely, they can be understood within certain limits and with a certain justification as something merely objectively present, right? So we can think of human beings as physical objects. To do this, one must completely disregard or just not see the existential constitution of being in. But with this possible understanding of Dasein as something objectively present and only objectively present, we may not attribute to Dasein its own kind of objective presence.

This objective presence does not become accessible by disregarding the specific structures of Dasein, but only in a previous understanding of them. Dasein understands its own most being in the sense of a certain factual, objective presence. And yet the factuality of the fact of One's own Dasein is ontologically totally different from the factual occurrence of a kind of stone. The fact Dasein as the way in which every Dasein actually is. We call facticity. So this again, this is the existential, as opposed to the category of factuality. We have the existential facticity, the way of being of Dasein.

The complicated structure of this determination of being is itself comprehensible as a problem only in the light of the existential fundamental constitutions of Dasein which we have already worked out. The concept of facticity implies that an inner worldly being has being in the world in such a way that it can understand itself as bound up in its destiny with the being of those beings which it encounters within its own world. Bound up in its destiny with the being of those beings which it encounters within its own world. So we can move back to the beginning of this, but I just want to say that that's an interesting elaboration on the idea of possibility, right?

Because possibility is tied to our encounter with other beings in the world, things and other human beings as well. But I think prior to this, we were talking about possibility in a more abstract sense and different futures and choice and all that stuff. I'm assuming the destiny in my translation here is related to possibility.

14:45 Dylan: Of course.

14:46 Mark: But we can't talk about that sort of concept and time in the future unless we are talking about the interrelationship between Dasein and other beings which it is with in the world.

14:57 Seth: So this is hard for me, this passage. I get that he's saying Dasein has a kind of presence at hand. There is a kind of presence at hand that Dasein has, but it's not the same as the presence at hand of a worldless thing like a rock, right? Yes, there's certain limitations. There's a way in which we can be seen as present at hand, just like objects in the world. But even in that perspective, Dasein's different than other beings present at hand. What I get lost in is whenever Dasein is, it is as a fact. And the factuality of such a fact is what we shall call Dasein's facticity. I don't even know what to do with that. I don't understand.

15:39 Dylan: I'm getting way more confused now, too. So, Seth, you just said something that sounded to me like that a rock doesn't have a world. And I'm wondering if that's true in Heidegger, if we're just sort of progressively sectioning off all the Things about environment and contextuality and stuff like that, to just make them all only really true of Dasein, which to me sounds wrong. And maybe Heidegger is doing that, and that just maybe is a problem, or maybe he's not doing that. I kind of thought that he was like the present-at-hand aspect of Dasein was something it had in common with everything else that Dasein can have present at hand, but that there are other features of Dasein that were the ones he wanted to focus on.

So it wasn't that a Dasein couldn't be present at hand. It was that that's not the factor of its being. So I guess I'm. Right now I'm confused about how we're understanding entities in the world in general. And they obviously, even in the way he's talked about so far, they have interactions with other things, even if they don't have encounters. And even if you want to qualify what a chair touching a wall means, it seems like he can't possibly mean that things that are present at hand for Dasein don't have interactions with one another. I mean, that just seems absurd, right?

17:06 Seth: No, I don't think he would say they don't have interactions. But I'll just read from the bottom of the previous page. When two entities are present at hand within the world and furthermore are worldless in themselves, they can never touch each other, nor can either be alongside each

17:22 Mark: other in the sense that Dasein can be along side something, which is to say another thing can be for it. Again, I'm just equating this with consciousness, right?

17:33 Dylan: So yeah, but then what I thought couldn't be true is actually true, which is we've also privileged the word world in addition to the world encounter in addition to the word touch. Because in that way only Dasein has a world. Everything else doesn't have a world because it can't encounter it. Because nothing else encounters anything. Because Dasein only encounters stuff because it's only conscious. I mean, now I'm getting like down like this like horseshit road for me. So

18:10 Seth: what he's saying is that that is a characteristic of Dasein's existence. In other words, of course there's a world. Of course things interact in the world, but the existence, they do not exist. The way that Dasein exists, that's fine.

18:26 Dylan: And that makes sense. And that's where I thought he was going with it.

18:28 Seth: That is where he's going with it. But all the things you say that you're concerned about are also going to end up being true in some sense, because Dasein is ungendered. Dasein doesn't have a body. You know, there's a lot of things about Dasein that people are gonna end up taking issue with. By the way, how do two individuated Dasein encounter each other? And how does that work? What's the relationship between individual Dasein A and individual Dasein B? Because we can't treat each other as present to hand. Ergo Levinas. Right. I mean, there's a million things that come out of this. It feels very solipsistic the way he describes it.

19:03 Mark: That's why he's saying being with is something that we're going to actually restrict. Two instances of Dasein, two minuses. You know, you could actually be with another person. You can't be with a glass of water.

19:16 Seth: Yeah, it's a pretty thin conception. But the other part of this is I just wanted to finish up saying, I think this section here, he's also trying to create the new category that only applies to Dasein. So somehow capital F, fact or facticity is us and factical is the world. Just like there's existence and essence and what was the other one? Existentialia.

19:39 Dylan: And oh, so facticity is like the active form of fact.

19:43 Seth: Yeah.

19:44 Dylan: And therefore it applies to Dasein.

19:46 Mark: Facticity is for Dasein what factuality is for the stone. So the factuality of the stone is its objective presence, its presence at hand. And the facticity of Dasein is, quote, unquote, ontologically totally different than that. So Dasein understands its own most being in the sense of a certain kind of factual, objective presence. So that's a really interesting statement because it feels as if we have the same type of factual, objective presence as the stone. But in fact, it's something a bit different. Then the question is, well, why does it feel that way to us?

Maybe it is to some extent that way. And. And this does all come down to the fact that it's not solipsistic. Right. We are located in a world. And again, I'm going to just switch to the language of consciousness. But we may be conscious beings, but it's not like the world is simply completely inside us or we are disembodied presences hovering around at various locations from a distance, but we are located within. And I think this is just very speculative on my part, but I think that's part of what makes us think of our own consciousness as a factual, objective presence.

And then of course, there are borderline cases like, I think it was Schopenhauer who concentrates on the hand. Right. Things that have both outsides and insides. Right. Or that we can understand as having both outsides and insides. That our hand is sensory for us, but it's also an object. But anyway, I don't know. Do we feel like we understand facticity versus factuality?

21:17 Seth: We understand that he's claiming that there's something there.

21:20 Mark: I mean, he'll say facticity is associated with the inner worldly being.

There was something about the first sentence that you know most. I don't see the need to compare translations point by point on this. But in the first sentence that you read in that, Wes, mine reads Dasein itself. It can be present at hand in the world or more exactly, can within certain right and within certain limits be taken as merely present at hand. To do this, one must completely disregard it or just not. See, the existential state of being in. And taken is in italics in my version. So yours was like, it can be understood, but I wasn't sure if taken there meant understood by the theorist or was saying something more.

Actually, we're looking at two different sentences.

No, no, this is.

22:06 Seth: No, I don't think so.

22:07 Mark: Nope, this is exactly where you started. It's just.

It's quite different translation, but there are two different formulations of this in this paragraph. So are you talking about the one where I'm talking? I say Dasein understands its own most being in the sense of a certain factual, objective presence.

No, this is earlier. It's where you started. Just the idea that I was reading into here is that potentially this has moral consequences. In other words, you could treat somebody merely as a present at hand object. And there are lots of things you can do with them in that way, but of course with monstrous moral consequences. When you start thinking about people as resources to be managed and how many can we fit on the bus?

And things like that are merely a means to an end, as opposed to ends in themselves.

Yes. So of course, if you are somebody who's designing school buses, you do actually care about how many human beings can fit on the bus. You know, yes, you have some background of like, why do human beings want to use school buses? And like, there's a whole thing there. So there are certain legitimate and narrow ways in which it is legitimate to treat people merely as objects, but that is throwing away 95% of what's important about them.

We need Dasein centered school bus design. Dasein centered design design for Dasein.

What's the Next part that we want to read here, I had put 81 through 86 for this section, and we are right now still at the bottom or in the middle of 82.

23:39 Seth: Well, the next thing he just says, it's not spatiality. I think that we can kind of gloss.

23:45 Mark: Yep.

23:46 Seth: So next thing. This, I think, is good. Dasein's facticity is such that its being in the world has always dispersed itself or even split itself up into definite ways of being in. The multiplicity of these is indicated by the following. Having to do with something, producing something, attending to something and looking after it. Making use of something, giving something up and letting it go. Undertaking, accomplishing, evincing, interrogating, considering, discussing, determining. All these ways of being in. Have concern as their kind of being. A kind of being which we have yet to characterize in detail. Leaving undone, neglecting, renouncing, taking a rest. These two are ways of concerning. But these are all deficient modes in which the possibilities of concern are kept to a bare minimum.

24:33 Mark: Taking care is my translation of concern.

Actually, I like taking care better because that's activity that we were just looking for. Is there a human way to say action or activity? Taking care might well be it, yeah.

24:48 Dylan: One question I would have is, is it the same just in terms of translation? Later on he, you know, he talks about the ontological meaning of care and care and selfhood. Is there a reason why the translation from Macquarrie and Robinson have used the word concern here rather than care? Because if it's like the same word, it seems like a little bit of a miss.

25:12 Seth: I think here it's Besorgen and there it's sorgen. So it is two different words, right?

25:18 Mark: Well, it's the difference between care and taking care.

25:21 Dylan: Oh yeah, it is Besorgen.

25:22 Mark: So care would be sorgen and taking care or concern would be Besorgen. They're obviously related.

25:29 Dylan: Have concern or to take care. Okay, I got it. Yep.

25:33 Mark: The term taking care has initially its pre scientific meaning and can imply carrying something out, settling something to straighten out,

25:40 Dylan: which also means provide oneself with something.

25:44 Mark: We do not choose this term because Dasein is initially economical and practical to a large extent. But because the being of Dasein itself is to be made visible as care,

25:56 Seth: this actually is one of the parts I really like. This was very influential on me before. But when you talk about a knowing relation to the world and the impartial observer, what Heidegger's saying is that as Dasein, you can't get away from a comportment. I'll just use that word towards the world where you're not either concerned or indifferent, so to speak, or somewhere in between that everything you do, all the possibilities you undertake, you have a certain disposition towards them.

26:32 Dylan: Degrees of concern.

26:33 Seth: It's not just like subject, object, intention, knowledge. Who gives a shit? You always give a shit or you don't.

26:40 Dylan: Well, it's always degrees of giving a shit.

26:42 Seth: It's always degrees of giving a shit. Exactly. And he wants to outline and say, look, we can't gloss this and we can't discount it as being constitutive of what it is that Dasein is human beings are. And again, when you think in terms of categories, if you're talking about doing your analogical comparison, that whole flavor is missing in some sense from the categorical approach to classifying things according to properties and so forth. This is why I think he thinks he's doing something quite different, is that knowledge structure just ignores attitude or disposition or goal orientedness.

27:25 Mark: But that might be wrong, because I thought I understood this paragraph until I got to the point where Heidegger told me I didn't understand the paragraph

27:35 Dylan: because

I was thinking, you don't understand shit.

27:40 Mark: Because I was thinking, okay, I get this. This is some kind of cognitive relationship to the world, but it's more pragmatic, it's more practical, it's more immersed in doing things and accomplishing goals. It's more procedural type of knowledge or unconscious or subconscious, however you want to put it. And then he gets to the point where he tells me we do not choose this term because Dasein is initially economical and practical to a large extent. So why did he warn us away from what I thought was going to be the natural interpretation of this?

I think it's just because when you talk about things in an economic way, economics is like social physics, that it's like you're assuming an object having properties, sort of ontology. And he wants to. In the next page here, he's saying that it's not like Dasein is an object that has being in or being in the world as its property. That is not the way to think of it. Again, we have to reinterpret the word is or reinterpret being, to talk about the specifically existential structures. And we could say they're essential structures of being of Dasein that were for sure going to be in a world.

But this is just this problem that we keep running into that if we, if we try to translate it to anything else, even by this analytic way that he suggests, he Says we can look at through the aspect of being or in this or worldhood. But that doesn't mean. What the analytic philosopher would mean by this is like pulling the three apart and doing an analysis of each of them and saying, how do these things fit together? No, it is an essential unity. And, you know, we are just exploring it through different ways. In.

29:20 Dylan: I think that in him saying that he doesn't mean it as economical doesn't mean that it doesn't have a characteristic of being practical. It's not insofar as it's practical and economical that we talk about it this way. Right. As Mark was just saying, it's because it's ontological. So it's not to deny the efficiency of it.

29:43 Mark: It's not practicality, nor is it angstiness. We're not going to put on our black berets and grow our goatees and say that that's what care is. These are all states which are, you know, I think maybe because they are still described subjective states of consciousness, they're not ontological enough for him. So he'll say even something like carefreeness and gaiety is ontically possible, which is to say, possible as a property of a particular human being. Only because Dasein, ontologically understood, is care. So I kind of get that part, you know, he wants to warn us away from understanding care as just a. In the everyday sense, some subjective state of a human being or a property of a human being, rather. It grounds all that stuff ontologically.

I feel like Spanish should be a better base language for this because at least they have ser and estar. That those are both two words for being. And estar is for temporary things. Estas triste. Are you sad? But no soy triste. That means I am sadness. I am sadness is part of my essence. But even that is not enough because that would make sadness as part of, you know, essential property of me. We want to have whatever ser is to estar. We want B and capital B to be to ser, you know, ontological, that ser is still ontic. We want an ontological version of that. But at least we have some notion that there could be differences in degrees of being.

If we talk about Spanish, next time someone asks you if you care, say, not only do I care, I am care.

Care is my middle name. I think that's what that means.

31:22 Seth: Yeah, well, in German, it's just, you don't say, I am cold.

31:27 Dylan: You say, I have Brenda, when she was in Germany, when she was in college, made that mistake instead of saying she has hotness. She is hotness. They laughed at her.

31:40 Mark: Nowadays, the middle of the page here 84 on ours 58 in the original translation. Nowadays there's much talk about man's having an environment, but this says nothing ontologically. As long as this having is left indefinite, in its very possibility. This having is founded upon the existential state of being in. Because Dasein is essentially an entity with being in. It can explicitly discover those entities which it encounters environmentally, it can know them, it can avail itself of them, it can have the world to talk about. Having an environment is ontically trivial, but ontologically it presents a problem to solve it requires nothing else than defining the being of design and doing so in a way which is ontologically adequate.

Just to show one place where he's spitting at. I used the term environment earlier in this conversation. Don't do that. That itself at least is ambiguous, if not, you know, scientifically prejudicial.

You know, I take them to be saying here. If you start out with this naturalistic ontology and framework, there's a bunch of things, and then human beings are spatially in that world, in that environment, and then you have to figure out how they connect to that world. You obviously create these enormous ontological and epistemological problems. You know, ontologically you have to talk about two different types of substances, right, in the case of Descartes, and then how they interact and all that stuff. If you, from the ground up, set up your ontology appropriately, then you sidestep those problems. I think that's what he's saying.

33:09 Seth: Can we move forward in the text a little bit?

33:11 Dylan: So we're going to basically get to the end of things being encounterable today, and then save forged, I think.

33:17 Seth: So a little further along, following paragraph. When being in the world is exhibited phenomenologically, disguises and concealments are rejected, because this phenomenon always gets seen in a certain way in every Dasein. And it thus gets seen because it makes up a basic state of Dasein, and in every case is already disclosed for Dasein's understanding of being, and disclosed along with that being itself. So do you remember from a couple days ago, we were talking about the method of phenomenology and the showing and the hiding and the showing itself as appearance and shine and all this stuff.

So he's essentially saying being in the world is, remember we said the phenomenon. When we set our horizon and we go after the phenomenon, which is not appearance and which is not a sign of the thing we will encounter the phenomenon and that we set the horizon for the investigation as being with a capital B. We identified the entry path to that investigation as Dasein, because it's the being that has being that cares about him. Then being in the world is the first phenomenological phenomenon in this interpretation that we can say is disclosed as it is in itself.

Remember all that crazy terminological language, or as it is in itself.

34:46 Mark: In itself. As itself.

34:48 Seth: So this is like. He's like Peter, and this is the rock upon which he's going to build his church.

34:58 Mark: Next paragraph. Knowledge in German.

35:00 Seth: Right.

35:00 Mark: There are two different words for that. Wissen, knowing that and kennen, which is like acquaintance. And so this actually seems important that the Cartesian was all about. Wissen was all about what knowledge can I obtain, not what am I immediately familiar with. And so, yes, both in design and for it, the state of being is always in some way familiar from Kennan. Now it is also to become known erkannt, the knowing of which such a task explicitly takes itself as a knowing of the world, as the chief exemplification of the soul's relationship to the world. Knowing the world, or rather addressing oneself to the world and discussing it, thus functions as the primary mode of being in the world, even though being in the world does not as such get conceived.

35:51 Seth: Right.

35:51 Mark: So if it actually was propositional knowledge, Wissen, you know, that would be conceived as opposed to this direct acquaintance.

36:00 Dylan: Do any of you know if either Descartes or in French, existentialism, if they make a similarly big deal about the difference between savoir and connaissance?

36:11 Mark: Yeah, I think Pascal does make a big deal of that.

36:13 Dylan: Right. I don't remember. I'm just working on my French and I've been.

36:18 Mark: Yeah. The heart has its reasons, which reason cannot know.

36:22 Dylan: This sounds like exactly the same kind of thing. It makes me want to go look at Descartes. But then I remember a lot of Descartes stuff in this respect was written in Latin. And so, like the cogito, it's just not written in French.

Right.

36:36 Mark: So, I mean, Descartes wrote a ton of stuff that we haven't looked at. He wrote about the passions, he wrote about things, and in ways that kind of defy how he's often stereotyped. So, I don't know.

36:48 Seth: You want to net out the last three paragraphs or two paragraphs.

36:52 Dylan: Bring us home.

36:53 Mark: Oh, it's your favorite subject option.

36:55 Seth: Exactly. So basically, we have the structure of being in. It's ontologically inaccessible, but is experienced as a relationship between one entity, the world, and another, the soul. And because we kind of understand being is taking entities as entities within the world. In other words, if you're trying to do ontology through beings instead of through being, then you're going to end up with looking at the relationship between the beings that are present at hand, right? And the thing that recognizes that they're present at hand. So he says, and even though being in the world is something of which one has pre phenomenological experience and acquaintance, it becomes invisible if one interprets it in a way which is ontologically inappropriate.

This state of Dasein's being is now one with which one is just barely acquainted, and indeed is something obvious with the stamp of an inappropriate interpretation. So in this way it becomes the evident point of departure for problems of epistemology or the metaphysics of knowledge. For what could be more obvious than that a subject is related to an object and vice versa, the subject object relationship must be presupposed. But while this presupposition is unimpeachable in its facticity, this makes it indeed a baleful one if its ontological necessity and especially its ontological meaning are to be left in the dark.

The phenomenon of being in has for the most part been represented exclusively by a single exemplar, knowing the world. This has not only been the case in epistemology, for even practical behavior has been understood as behavior which is non theoretical or atheoretical. Because knowing has been given this priority, our understanding of its own most kind of being gets led astray. And accordingly, being in the world must be exhibited even more precisely with regard to knowing the world itself, being invisible as an existential modality of being in.

So if you go back to the section we read where how can you be in having to do, producing, attending, making use of something, giving up something, letting it go, undertaking, evincing, interrogating, considering. Guess what? You didn't say it then, but you say it here. Knowing. Knowing is just one of those modalities, so to speak, or one of those possibilities of being in. But because of the way that we have done ontology for 2000 years plus years, by going through beings and categories and properties, we have made knowing not just the exemplar, but we've essentially made knowing philosophy, right?

And all the rest of that stuff has been relegated to psychology or social science or natural sciences or whatever. And he's trying to say you got to go back to basics, because if you really want to understand Being, you have to encompass an understanding of being in that takes all of that into account and doesn't just simply focus on knowing.

39:48 Mark: There are a lot of things that are reminiscent of Hegel, but one famous one is where he says the true must be understood not only as substance, but equally as subject. Right. And so the idealists were all about criticizing the quote unquote dogmatists or naturalists as making matter their starting point and then trying to conjure up another type of substance out of that, you know, the spirit, the Cartesian subject, or however you want to put it. And that's the thing, right, that'll be invisible if you interpret the world in a way that's ontologically inadequate, which I take to be starting from what Heidegger is going to call objective presence or the present at hand.

Yeah, subjectivity is invisible. You get, again, a bunch of ontological problems about minds and bodies and their relationships and all that stuff. To get an ontologically adequate picture, you have to start in a different way. And that kind of thing is right there in idealism. And then the question is, how do you begin? Are we starting from the subject? Are we starting from some kind of monistic thing underlying the subject and object? I mean, he says at the end of the paragraph here, the subject object relation must be presupposed. Sounds very much like Schelling in a way.

It's a little unclear to me what our starting point is here and how it's differing from the idealists, which I'm not saying Heidegger is being unclear, I'm just saying I haven't figured that out yet.

Well, I'm going to use this to segue to announce the next topic, which is, you might wonder, I mean, we talked about Descartes and things, but why would you think that sort of knowledge is the primary way of being? But if you look at it through Plato's eyes, I think you can make a case for that. Right. Because the form of a good wisdom, it's very much getting exposed to what ultimate reality is, is a matter of knowing it. Right. So being, I'm thinking about Spinoza's concept of immortality is insofar as we are reason, then reason is an eternal thing.

Reason has to do with knowledge. So it seems like even Hegel, when we get to the absolute ideal, it's about the world knowing itself as it is in itself, which is the same as becoming itself. So knowledge and being really get synthesized. Heidegger is reacting to a lot of stuff. And one of the chief ways that we got this view of Plato is through the Neoplatonists. And in the Renaissance, we're going to be reading Marsilio Ficino, his commentary on Plato's Symposium. Right. Love. Trying to merge with. Trying to transcend. That ends up being knowledge.

42:29 Dylan: Right.

42:30 Mark: Getting out of the cave. So we're going to revisit that with that idea, with Peter Adamson through this Renaissance Christian lens, which even though we didn't do Plotinus, we haven't done Neoplatonism. We'll see after this whether we even need to.

I hope Mark has convinced the audience that this isn't just a random.

42:48 Seth: Yeah, really? That was like the longest leading.

42:50 Mark: We got to a point in Heidegger where we. We realized we could not understand it

42:54 Seth: without reading Ficino, without going back to Ficino.

43:00 Mark: Okay. So there might be a little bit of random synchronicity that I'm trying to knit.

This way was excellent. I thought.

Yeah, yeah, come back for that. This is not the end of the road. For supporters. We're going to have a part three to this episode where we will actually finally get to equipment. The ready to hand, as opposed to merely the present at hand. If you want to hear that. Part three for supporters. It's actually not going to be up until next week, so you'll get to have a little treat next week. Thanks everybody, and good night.

43:30 Seth: Good night.

43:31 Dylan: Good night.