As like all of my postscripts, the explication given serves only as a very primitive attempt to understand philosophical texts, on my own. Therefore, it is highly likely to be subjected to syllogisms, insufficiently critical deductive reasonings and the like. It is not supposed to be taken as a thesis or a conclusive understanding of Heidegger but only as the title says, a preliminary understanding. I have not yet read the original text of Heidegger’s Being and Time but have been perusing through works of Heideggerian scholars who have already interpreted and digested Heidegger’s works so as to understand the directions of his studies better. Here I have synthesized some of my understandings in perhaps the most untidy fashion, the various important points that Charles B Guigon, Dorothea Frede, Taylor Carman, Robert J Dostal, William Blattner, David Couzens Hoy, Charles Taylor, Piotr Hoffman and Mark A Warthall’s were trying to make of Heidegger’s works. Their works can be found from The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger edited by Charles B Guignon 2nd ed. (2006). I will leave a more precise deduction of Piotr Hoffman’s “Death, time, history: Division II of Being and Time” for another postscript writing for I think it adds to my basic understanding of Heidegger’s concepts of Daesin and temporality better.
Analysis of Daesin
The ontology of Daesin i.e. Being must be understood in temporality Zeitlichkeit. Temporality or time is the transcendental context for Heidegger’s Daesin. Key to this is how the “unitary [my emphasis added] temporal flow of experience is” a necessary condition for conceptual formation and all intuitive experience [pp. 166]. To understand Heidegger, better a contrastdistinction must be drawn with Kant. For Kant, the transcendental apperception is the highest principle of the faculty of understanding but as established in his transcendental Aesthetic, temporality (a priori time) is belongs not [my emphasis added] to the faculty of understanding but intuition. Unity of the two faculties in the original apperception (with the synthetic a priori transcendental categories) thus gives rise to objective knowledge. But Heidegger is trying to establish the ontology of the Daesin based upon Zeitlichkeit itself – the temporal structure thereby conflating the Kantian a priori categories whereby we can derive objective valid knowledge and the form of intuition (time). Zeitlichkeit itself, a conflation of the Kantian form of intuition (time) and understanding is thus where we can derive objective knowledge of the Daesin. Both Heidegger and Kant thus takes formal temporality to be the basis for experience. But the directions both thinkers take is drastically different. For Kant, intelligibility is conferred upon the manifold representations by the transcendental categories and the subject’s sensibility can receive manifold intuitions. This presumes like Descartes, Mr Locke, Hume etc. a separable zone of “subject” [or in Heidegger’s terms, Daesin] and “representational objects [impressions; intuitions etc].” The “Daesin” in modern philosophy’s terms is thus “disengaged” [CCH Taylor, pp. 213] from the nature or world of objects and in its act of understanding, seeks to ‘bridge this gap.’ The subject no longer stands estranged, outside.
What constitutes Heidegger’s ‘hermeunetic turn’ herein lies in how the Daesin is synonymous to an engaged form of agency whose entirety of the world is shaped by its mode of being and itself must be understood in time. The subject is inside [my emphasis added] this time which itself is the horizon of understanding and understanding of the Daesin. Daesin, the subject, is constituted in Heidegger’s Zeitlichkeit which itself is a ‘dynamic totality’ of endless possibilities […] The Daesin is not that free floating spirit that transcends [my emphasis added] its materiality like a projection Entwurf into the world. The factuality of the Daesin must be seen in factically in its concreteness. Everything is within this Heideggerian context of temporality which hence give rise to the dynamic hermeunetic circle, “where all understanding is circular where any interpretation which is to contribute understanding must already have been understood what it is to be interpreted” [H BT 194].
The Daesin is unlike Husserl’s phenomenology whereby the subject is the condition or a priori ground for all objects of experience and thought and one can make a naturalistic description or study of these content of our intentional acts of consciousness. For Heidegger, the ontic – factual is open to the ontological uncovering of the deep structures which is always subjected to the confirmation of the ontic. The Daesin must thus not be treated ‘purely as an abstraction’ and also not detachedly and naturalistically. The Daesin = being is = being-in-the-world as an organic whole. We project ourselves, our whole existence, into the world and understand ourselves as well as everything in the world in terms of the possibilities of our own projection Entwurf [CCH, Frede pp. 63] and underlying our projections, is the ‘Heideggerian temporality’ which at once, impressionistically resembles a circle […] As Frede puts it, we exist in three temporal dimensions at once or in other words, temporality is the simultaneity of: a) being “ahead of ourselves” in the future b) drawing on our past c) while being with the present “being already in” that constitutes our Daesin. Our Daesin thus embodies an “already extended outward temporal dimension.” Our Daesin is thus, an entity whose very understanding constitutes the temporal dimensions of its existence. This has affinity to the Kantian notion of a transcendental a priori horizon or frame that precedes all experience. For Heidegger, this temporality is not at all like the Kantian notion of time in his ‘Analytic of Principles,’ his famous Analogies of Experience whereby as Kant claims: “our apprehension of the manifold of appearance is always successive [CPR pp.213] [and] where there exists a synthetic faculty of our imagination that connects the two states of time A and time B so that either the one or the other precedes in time… [CPR pp. 219]” Hence, for Kant, the extent to which we are conscious of an objective relation of appearances is the extent to which we subject it to the “[law of causality] concept of the relation of cause and effect, the former of which determines the latter in time, as its consequences [CPR pp. 219]” and allow this apprehension in successive relation to be subjected to the synthesis of our imagination – the synthetic faculty that bestows the temporal connection of the manifold. The Heideggerian temporality manifests an outwardly extended and dynamic circle. It does not go in the Kantian unidirectional way. It is a circle or ‘hermeunetic circle’ because we are always tied to our present moment say at present Tb, but at Tb, we carry with us our ancestral history of Ta-antecedents and based on our position at Tb carrying along Ta-antecedents we project intentionality into the future or understand various future possibilities. Every Tb is thus the act of Daesin transcending temporality i.e. an act of transcendence i.e. our Daesin is always transcending temporality or in transcendence [emphasis added]. Thus the conclusion that “intentionality of the consciousness is grounded in ecstatic temporality of the Daesin” [SZ 363n] i.e. the ekstases of temporality i.e. that we are never at every punctual here and now or are never a Kantian synthesis of static points but we are always at once temporally outwardly extended [emphasis added] [CCH pp. 64]. In a way of putting this, the Daesin’s projection is always from the inside and this inside is the ubiquity or totality of temporality. There is always only an inside. There is always only immanence and repeatedly transcendence of this immanence.
Again, this is drastically different from Husserl’s phenomenological bracketing that dictates a consciousness of the subject, very much like Descartes’s conception of the mind as a ‘container’ of all representations from outside. Husserl’s transcendental reduction thus reflects an attempt to turn away from everything worldly or external to consciousness and focusing on the contents in the container [CCH, pp. 106]. For Heidegger however, the existence of the Daesin lies in its very existence [SZ, 42]. Being is or is based on what it takes itself to be. Its intentionality and projections into the future is based upon its present being that carries the baggage of its past. The whole existence of the Daesin lies in its to be in the world [SZ, 42]. For Heidegger then, Husserl’s phenomenology which is purely descriptive only describes relations of one thing to another in the immanent consciousness but fails in comprehension of their mode of being and the realness reellitat of this mode of being (being-in-one-another). What Heidegger wants to do then is to efface the notion of “substance” as an indubitable absolute being in its collateral contact with the external world of things and that we can perceive the thing-in-itself (das sich or ein Selbst) when presented to us gegenwartigt. Heidegger wants to establish that there is never this illusional gap between the subject with de facto consciousness of itself and the ein Selbst. In fact, Daesin and the world are coterminous in understanding [CCH, pp. 178]. Thus, the “i”nterpretation i.e. Auslegung understanding of the world or Daesin itself is to be situated within the world or Daesin itself i.e. its very own context. This applies to the Interpretierung of Daesin as well i.e. that philosophical interpretations for instance must be reflective of the real world or phenomenal world activity. The whole of Understanding thus in grasping the world also grasps Daesin’s way of being in the world and Daesin’s understanding of its world is thus not very much distinct from the understanding of itself [CCH, pp. 184]. In fact, it is an interpretation of itself. Both Entdecktheit (discoveredness of things; particular features of our world) and Erschlossenheit (disclosedness) of the total context opened up through understanding is intimately linked. The former lead to a greater disclosedness of the later and through the latter disclosedness of possibilities, we gain greater understanding of the Entdecktheit. Most cardinally, both processes are key to human activity. If we only focus on the former, we might end up like Hume making quite crazy claims of a totality of disconnected aggregate of representations or things outlawing causality.
Daesin and Circularity of understanding
The Daesin itself exists at Tb as in [emphasis added] real relations, contexts, significance and situations. Daesin is what it is factically and at point Tb, it projects itself onto the concrete current world. But the Daesin also finds itself already in concrete possibilities at point Tb and projects itself based on Tb into the future thereby deriving at possibilities of the future based on Tb. Possibilities of the future is thus, based upon his constitution of the totality in Tb. The Daesin then can become [my emphasis added] what it is, by becoming what it is already possible for it to be [my emphasis added] [CCH, pp. 187]. At Tb, Daesin interprets who he is and how he wants to continue to be and hence, the Daesin can be said to project its interpretation or meaning, based upon this ‘fore-having’ a) Vorhabe i.e. background of understanding (at point Tb). Say the Daesin wants to make explicit a particular feature of the world or derive an Auslegung of a thing. In this case, Daesin needs not only need Vorhabe but also b) Vorsicht i.e. fore-sight a projection, expectation in advance of the appropriate way things can appear based on the Vorhabe. A Vorhabe will thus always precede Vorsicht of something but to attain the most clear and distinct interpretation, a c) Vorgriff fore-conception (concept) is needed. All the three processes of Vorhabe, Vorsicht and Vorgriff are for Heidegger, never complete interpretations and understandings and any interpretation which is to contribute [to] understanding must already have understood what is to be interpreted [CCH pp. 192]. Heidegger assumes no linearity to a) b) and c) but argues that a) b) and c) occurs simultaneously. Circularity does not mean that we will necessarily be stuck within our own assumptions. Yet it does not mean we can extricate outselves out of it. This process of understanding is holistic in the sense that we will always discover obvious -selbstverstandliche but taken-for-granted and undiscussed assumptions - Vormeinung made by the Daesin or subject. In other words, everything is pre-given within the circle of understanding through fore-having fore-sight and fore-conception, i.e. a) b) and c) but we do not take notice of them. They lie at the subsidiary or undetected focus of the Daesin. Hence, it is wrong to say they are “prior” or “a posterior” or “nouveau” discoveries. Everything lies within the Daesin and Understanding is not Understanding something out there in itself as assumed by empiricists or materialists or rationalists philosophers and the like but Understanding for Heidegger is simply, interpretation of what there-is and what there-is, is the Daesin. This is why Heidegger says something like “in interpretation, understanding does not become something different, but instead becomes itself.” The Daesin understands a “new facticity” out of interpretation of its Daesin 1[a) b) c)] and then, based on this “new facticity,” interprets out of its Daesin 2[a) b) c)]… 100[a) b) c)] and so the Daesin or understanding always transcends itself and always becomes itself – not something lying in the exteriority out there and somewhere. Or as David Cozen Hoy puts it, “understanding as projection suggests that explicit interpretations always arise from implicit needs and the appearance of a new interpretation is likely to generate new needs furthering the appearance of a new interpretation…” [pp. 197] But all interpretation = understanding arises from every present the Daesin is in.
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