Being & Time Introduction I

hi this is phenomenology and I'm mark doors B welcome back I'll be doing well in this video we're going to be taking a look at the introduction to Martin Heidegger seminal text being in time or in the German Zion insight so welcome back Ramona I hope you're doing well so uh what we're going to be taking a look at here is in so far in the in this course we've looked at and in whose rules texts of ideas one or a pure an analysis of what pure phenomenology looks like and we see and we've chosen that we chose that jax-ur I chose that text because I wanted you to get a nice and a solid understanding of what phenomenology is in its most basic and original conception we're going to see here that really starting with this video is we're going to be looking at phenomenology after whose role now there's a lot of phenomenologist who follow who's role and but probably the most important and certainly the most impactful of these philosophers was Martin Heidegger Martin Heidegger not only studied directly with higher with who's role but he even his magnum opus text which he rose being in time he actually dedicates Todd to Edmund who Cyril but we're going to see that um Heidegger I think really goes beyond who's role and succeeds his master as it were we're going to see that whereas whose roles attitude in his philosophy we looked at was really about the articulation of phenomenology and laying bare the the science of phenomenology as he saw it in terms of where what phenomenology does how it operates etcetera etc and what some of the principal themes and discoveries the phenomenology can offer us we're going to see here that for Heidegger who's a phenomenologist phenomenology becomes a method for addressing the most important question for him or the most forgotten question which is the question of being and so we're going to see that he really radicalizes phenomenology in a way that is so pivotal and so that really impacted philosophy in many ways I think one could argue indeed people have argued the Heidegger is really one of the most important if not the most important philosopher of the twentieth century not about the most important but certainly I think he's up there at the top to in my view him and Vic and Stein I think are the most important philosophers of the 20th century and so I'm really really looking forward to Heidegger these series of lectures and I hope that you'll be reading along with this with us as we go through these now I'm going to be honest with you as we're reading being in time you're going to find that Heidegger's language is very difficult I think it's difficult in a different way than who Cyril who Cyril I think part of his difficulty or at least the part of the difficulty I have what I reduce role just simply consists in terms of his term illogical distinctions and the many many interrogative statements he seems to put in there I think Heidegger is a much cleaner writer it's much more beautiful but we're going to find this the difficulty with heidegger's tags concerns the very concepts he's trying to lay bare because Heidegger will see especially in the introduction here believes that our understanding of phenomenology and ultimately our philosophical understanding of being is itself hampered by all of the philosophical vocabulary and all of the philosophical language that we become accustomed to that is sort of sedimented and accumulated over the last couple centuries and over really a couple millennia so Heidegger has a more radical task I think but I think you're going to sees it is that Haider in one sense once you're able to understand what Heidegger is doing and being in time it opens up and it actually becomes very clear and I think quite beautiful so there's something really really powerful in this philosophy I think you're going to enjoy it but you're gonna have to struggle through it I'm not going to lie to you there so let's start off with a sort of quick introduction to Martin Heidegger and in terms of his life you see I sort of put together a sort of brief timeline of some of the elements of how to life just to give you a sense of who he is he lived from 1889 well let me show you a picture of him here here is it's not that the best quality picture not least the highest quality but here is Heidegger you can see he's maybe not the most beautiful man as it were but he certainly looks like a serious thinker now his life he lived from 1889 to 1976 so really he spans the the 20th century most of the 20th century his life and he actually lived of course he never met but he lives in the same time he's born at the same time in which need she's alive and we'll see that although later on in the course here we talk about the history of philosophy will see that Heidegger is strongly influenced or at least he recognizes the importance of Nietzsche's philosophy Nietzsche died in 1901 now in 1909 Heidegger received his bachelor's degree and initially Heidegger had prepared he was Catholic and he was preparing to enter the priesthood and he attended Theological Seminary it wasn't long after he began attending that he really became convinced of that he was didn't really want to do theology is really interested in doing philosophy rather and by 1913 he pursues a doctorate in philosophy and in 1913 he his doctoral exam is completed his doctoral exam was on the doctrine of judgment in psychologism so so it's pretty interesting because we read who stroll if you'll recall who stroll made a sound critique of psychologism and he really wanted to demarcate phenomenology from psychology and he in whose role of course was attacked for creating a sort of psychologism especially regarding the publication of the latter volumes of the logical investigations and there's a there's a debate here especially you can think you're a frege's critique of whose role as really providing sort of psychologism of mathematics so it's interesting here because Heidegger is sort of primed and ready in this sort of discussion by studying psychology is 'm and thinking about what it means to make judgments in 1915 who sir Heidegger rather completes his doctoral dissertation on the doctrine of categories and a signification in Duns Scotus now many of you may not be aware of who Duns Scotus was but Duns Scotus was a medieval philosopher who in many ways begins to articulate an early conception of intentionality and he starts to lay bare some early conceptions that bear a strong resemblance to phenomenology so there's something very very interesting there in in higher his dissertation though I'm by no means can talk about it in this in this course in 1916 Heidegger meets wu cyril and eventually begins to study with him and under him eventually later you'll see he succeeds whose role in 1918 Heidegger became a private in the military for a year and but by 1919 Heidegger became an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Freiburg in 1920 he begins teaching courses on phenomenology in particular and we'll see that like many of the Greek philosophers from his time Heidegger is heavily influenced by a classical reading of Greek philosophy you're going to see as you read being in time the higher is consistently referring back to the Greek air this course is not in Greek philosophy so we're not going to spend too much time on that but I do encourage you to brush up a little bit on ancient Greek philosophy take a look at for instance some of the lectures in metaphysics that I've posted of Aristotle's metaphysics in the YouTube channel in 1923 Heidegger moves to the University of Marburg where he accepted a position at the University which is where Hosur was was located in 1926 so in those three years Heidegger is teaching vigorously and Heidegger it becomes very very popular professor one of the things that was required though it still is required you've probably heard of publish or perish in the universities is that Heidegger wasn't really published in lots of books despite his enormous popularity and you'll see his not only does he follow in in the footsteps of who stroll as a phenomenologist but he really begins to radicalize some of the problems the phenomenology can address in fact one of the important lecture courses he gave and eventually it gets published and you can read it it's called history of the concept of time which really is if you will sort of first dropped at being in time but Heidegger was was in the meantime Heidegger was working on a draft of his this sort of major work called science I it's being in time and he was forced eventually by the university to publish it ahead of time and so one of the things interesting is that being in time was actually never fully finished and which raises some interesting questions for us now in 1926 who sir Heidegger presents being in time to whose role at a 67th birthday party and in fact the book itself is dedicated to Edmund Husserl so so the two are very very close friends in 1926 in nineteen now over the between 1926 and 1933 there's a nut there's a lot of amazing work that been Heidegger Bertoni entire continuum really I think amazing philosophical work throughout most of his life but in 1933 he was elected director at the University of Freiburg but in the same year how did her join the National Socialist Party in Germany that is he became a Nazi um they joined the Nazi Party and what's more than that Heidegger actually gave a series of speeches and a series of talks arguing in favor of the Nazi Party especially regarding of his degree especially denounces the Jewish conspiracy in Germany and he supported the new laws that the Germans had been pat that had passed under the Nazis that it dismissed intellectuals of jus Jewish intellectuals from serving within academia at the University and it's at this time whose role is forced to retire for racial reasons whose role was actually a Protestant in terms of his religious affiliation but he was Jewish in terms of he was he was Jewish and so he was forced to retire really quite tragic and unfortunately there's a sort of there's a lot there's a big question here about heidecker's relationship to who Cyril in 1933 which you see really see a sort of breakdown unfortunately and of course I mean I'm not this isn't a course on German history and so I won't go into all what happens between 1933 of course 44 but everything basically goes wrong in German culture one of the play one of the philosophers who actually studied under and who's also a phenomenologist who studied under Martin Heidegger is khana errant and on an arrant actually it was also Heidegger's lover - she was Jewish and she was also forced to flee Germany despite being German herself um but she writes a book that I encourage you to take a look at called the origins of totalitarian and so what she looks at in put out she gives a phenomenological reading to certain degree she has more phenomenal other texts which are more phenomenological in nature but she looks at the question of what it means for the Germans to have moved into this sort of racial programming essentially so take a look at that text it's quite interesting now in 1934 though Heidegger actually resigned his rector show and he actually stopped taking part in the Nazi Party meeting so after 34 Heidegger is not a he doesn't he's not officially he's still an official Nazi member of the party official member of the Nazi Party but Heidegger his role in terms of the Nazis really diminished and of course this is many many years before of the genocide of the Jewish people in the genocide of others so so we can't we're not going to associate Heidegger at least I don't associate Heidegger with genocide though it raises important ethical questions regarding his affiliation especially because Heidegger refused to recant his Nazi involvement in fact his entire life you never regretted being Nazi and it's hard not to to be critical of Heidegger and I think we really should be critical in this regard now next in 38 in the midst of world war two or the beginnings of world war two who Searle dies and it's really quite tragic because Cousteau was prolific writer a prolific and important philosopher and he really created a whole realm of philosophy at the center of which is Heidegger um but when Harold dies only two professors attend his funeral he was really shun because of his Jewish heritage which is evil I think in tragic in 1945 Heidegger's Heidegger at survived the war people weren't sure if he had survived the war but he did survive the war in a series of denazification hearings begin in which the Nazi Party gate is disbanded in Germany Karl Jasper's was an important phenomenologist actually and a contemporary of heidecker's at one point Heidegger Karl Jasper's had had a series of correspondences but higher grit dropped them off well Jasper's right to report on hydras involvement detailing how you might say Heidegger's his anti-jewish work and the sort of the negative things that Heidegger had done Freiburg the University of Freiburg faculty debate Heidegger his involvement in 45 and by 1946 Heidegger actually services sir suffers a nervous breakdown that year but the university of faculty of the university of freiburg ultimately decide to grant Heidegger faculty emeritus status which means that he's still a member of the faculty retired as it were but he's bar from teaching so he's banned from teaching any more lectures and really it's because of his involved in the Nazi Party by 1951 the ban on teaching is lifted and higher than begins to give a series of lectures throughout his career and throughout the rest of his life you continue to give a number of really important lectures that are worth reading tragically as I mentioned for Heidegger at least my views tragic Heidegger refuses to work in his Nazi involvement in 1976 Heidegger dies and just a couple days after Heidegger dies dare speak 'el which is a very important publication in germany publishes an interview that they conducted with Heidegger and one of the things in that interview was they asked Heidegger point-blank whether or not he regretted his involvement as a Nazi and with the nons National Socialists and Heidegger says no and it's shocking the question for us is how could a philosopher who really provides us fabulous insight philosophically into the question of being and into and really pushes phenomenology into in the whole new domain becomes really so critical to the rest of the 20th century and 21st century philosophy how could such a philosopher become so blind so as not to even regret his involvement with really one of the darkest stains in human history politically and especially within German history so it's quite shocking there I do think and this it I don't really want to spend a lot of time talking about Nazis or National Socialists in this video but it raises for us some fundamental questions regarding is there a relationship between Heidegger's philosophy and his Nazism Heidegger actually claimed that there was a certain relationship regarding his conception of historicity we're not going to go into that right now but on the other hand or is his philosophy really separate from this I think it's important to recognize that Hagar is not giving us Nazi philosophy I think that is a misreading of Heidegger's work but that does raise for us ethical questions and in that early 80s French phenomenologist raise this question explicitly regarding whether or not Heidegger Heidegger's involvement with the Nazis and especially Heidegger's involvement regarding whose roles forced retirement whether or not that's something we can forgive and and how we should understand that so there's something we're talking about here and maybe at some point in the these series videos we'll talk about it but you're going to see really what I want to do in these video lectures is really just take a look at Heidegger's understanding of phenomenology and in his introduction to being in time so let's sort of take a look at that we're going to focus really quite heavily just giving a a really detailed reading in this video of the introduction to being in time I imagine this video is going to run long so feel free to pause the video take a break as you go through okay let me take a drink up here now being in time the German of course is Zion and Zeitz was first published in 1927 in the yata book fear of phenomenology in phenomenologist for sure which is a journal there was actually added by edmund husserl so so this is so being in time here is first published its first published by who cyril actually if you will who so of course the book is dedicated to who stroll in a key i mentioned this previously a keep repertory text if you there's no doubt that being in time is a difficult text to read if you would like I encourage you to take a look at Heidegger's lecture a history of the concept of time which is now published which really is if you will sort of first draft at being in time because one of the things you're gonna sting of being in time is that Heidegger jettisons are ordinary philosophical vocabulary and really jettisons the language that we saw who Cyril using completely and in order to articulate a new and refresh and I think a more original conception of phenomenology and the question of being in particular there's a lot of other great texts that can help you in great texting commentaries that can help you understand the history of the concept of time my own I was my there's a great philosopher contemporary philosopher Simon Critchley he's actually the editor of the New York Times philosophy blog and column called the Philosopher's Stone but Simon Critchley has a great text on who throw that was published just a couple years back on being in time which really lays out I think a really really fantastic explanation commentary of Heidegger and of course I was previously friends with Simon with Professor Critchley and and that's my reading of who Cyril is very much influenced by by professor crucially so take a look at that some great stuff in there now what's the structure of being in time well the basic structure is there's an introduction that's we're going to be looking at in this text part one is called the interpretation of das eine in terms of temporality and the explication of time is the transcendental horizon for the question of being by the end of today's video you'll have an understanding of what this is talking about if you've never read or read Heidegger before and then the being in time is actually structured into two different divisions the preparatory fundamental analysis of das eine I'm sorry part one is divided into two divisions the preparatory fundamental analysis of das I'm and then division two is about design and temporality in particular part two of being a time was actually never complete in fact the majority of this book was never completed partially because Heidegger was forced to rush this into publication in order for his for his career publish or perish you're going to see that Heidegger really structures being in time and very similar and are definitely a very germanic way similar to who strove without a series of sections how did you organize the Texas series of paragraphs and then sections within those and this is how giant insights is organized so let's sort of jump in here and you'll see that before the book even starts there's a brief title page in which there's this quotation and we're going to see that although this is a course in phenomenology Heidegger is not writing a book on phenomenology he is interested in the most important question for him which is the question of being and of course we know that the philosophy is concerned with lots of things but at the core philosophy is concerned with what is what it means to exist and what it means for us to understand things in existence all of this ruminates around this concept of being and we're going to see that this is the most important question for Heidegger so let me take I want to read this passage from you just because this directly from the title page here or right after the title page before he begins the introduction and it's quite beautiful but it sort of gets to the heart at it and so let me read this to you Heidegger rights for manifestly you have been aware of what you mean when you use the expression being we however who used to think we understood it have now become perplexed do we in our time have an answer to the question of what we really mean by the word being not at all so is it fitting that we should raise and do the question of the meaning of being but we but are we nowadays even perplexed at our inability to understand the expression being not at all so you can see here he says that on the one hand we don't even understand the question of being what we mean by this term being but on the other hand we don't even care right now our aim in the following treatise and Zygons ayats is to work out the question of the meaning of being and to do so concretely our provisional aim is the interpretation of time as the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of being but the reasons for making this our aim the investigations which such a purpose requires and the path to its achievement call for some introductory remarks and so you can see this is the beginning of the introduction and you're going to see that cut really Heydrich was interested in the question of what being is and he doesn't even think we even understand what being means or we even know how to ask the question of Dean and so really being in time is less about being and it's about what it means to ask the question of the meaning of being itself so and you're going to see him articulate all of this in the introduction I'm going to follow the introduction as closely as I can section by section I should emphasize that there's a lot to the introduction and there's a lot of arguments that Heidegger makes that I'm not going to be talking about simply because I will run out of time we're already twenty four minutes into the video and we're only now getting to part one so I'm not going to cover everything and so I encourage you to read this carefully and probably to get a commentary text to help you along as well now the introduction begins with paragraph 1 which is the necessity for explicitly restating the question of being now the the question of being here in the German is called the zenith Fraga and that just means question of being read being questioned and what he wants to say is he's number one is that the question of being is a forgotten question it's not even something that philosophers are talking about notice particularly that Edmund Husserl never really talks about this he who Stroh talks about ontological structures and this sort of stuff and who Stroh talks about existence and he talks about actuality consider for instance on who Cyril in our in our previous lectures here they talked about the suspension of our general positing of actuality well what is actuality right that's not a question that who Cyril asked and he doesn't think that any of the Philosopher's are asking this this is a forgotten question so what exactly is the science Fraga what is the question of the meaning of being alright and who starts out how do i I'm sorry Heidegger starts off by saying that the question of being is what is stimulating this ancient Greek research of Plato and Aristotle and the energy here of first there's in our introduction to philosophy video series week I give a very sort of cursory analysis of Plato's theory of the forms and in my history of philosophy course we talked a little bit more about Aristotle's metaphysics in more detail but we're going to see here that at the core of both Plato aerosol is the question of what it means to be right what it means to be and Heidegger actually we're going to give very specific concrete lectures about Plato and Aristotle with regards to the question of the meaning of being we're not going to really review those but we will you if you do you will find that Heidegger has a very I think unique analysis of Plato in particular who he doesn't think that we understand Plato correctly anyway I'm not gonna go into that but the meaning of being is the question of what it means to be is that the source it's the it's at the core of ancient Greek philosophy right but things are either worse than we realize because the original contribution of Greek philosophy keaur Heidegger argues has actually sanctioned the neglect of the question of being that is the Greek philosophy is generated out of this question of what it means to be but because we have all of these contributions from these Greek philosophers all the way from the original pre-socratics like Parmenides all the way up to up through Hegel right well what we see is that we've neglected the question of being now being on the one hand has been set as the most universal concept and here you can you I encourage you to take a look at the work of Thomas Aquinas who actually focuses quite heavily on the question of being and Thomas Aquinas argues those two is that being is on the one hand the most universal concept but it's also the most empty concept right because on the one hand everything that we experience and everything we see is a form of being right which means that everything has been but since everything has gained we don't really know what we're talking about it's the sort of old idea that if something is everything then in a certain way it's nothing and that's the other that's to say that existence clear is something it's so Universal but because of its universality it's an empty concept in fact it looks like being just simply resist every attempt at definition but everyone seems to use this term and they seem to understand what being means or as Heidegger would say there so it would seem we don't really know what we're talking about though we have some sort of general intuition right we have some sort of provisional obscure average understanding but it's insufficient philosophically right in Section two and by the way in all the video here whenever I have a pagination I'm using the original high D carrying pagination with excuse me until it's edge to year Heidegger says in this way that which the ancient philosophers found continually disturbing as something obscure and hidden has taken on a sort of clarity and self evidence such that if anyone continues to ask about it he's charged with an error of method right so we sort of think that we know we have a handle on what existence in being means to the pointed for instance if you ask a philosopher they can rattle off a series of arguments right for instance though Heidegger doesn't mention this at all think about the ontological argument for God's existence right and think about the use of existence and the use of being in that in that discussion in which it's taken as self-evident what it means for things to exist so philosophers are not really thinking about this question especially when Heidegger is writing now of course we're going to see that phenomenology as prepared by Edmund Husserl provides us a way in which to begin to access this question but consider the fact that all the philosophical work that's going on really around the world at this time no one is asking this question not in the way that Heidegger will ask it right in hydras argument here is that there's so many philosophical prejudices that we have that they're really too numerous there's too many of them that we can adequately deal with the beginning of pinyon time so we can't really start off and really understand what the meaning of being is or even with the question the zines Fraga of being is the question of being because we just have so many philosophical prejudices recall when we looked at Edmund who's Earl's work who Searle talked about the idea that we had to bracket off all these theoretical concepts we become a constant two we're going to see that how do her not only agrees with was true but it doesn't think we go far enough because we can't really uncouple ourselves from them so all we really have is a clue to the question of being now in the introduction of being in time Heidegger begins by sort of signifying we have this clue about what the question of being is but let's lay out what our prejudices regarding being are the first prejudice here is the universal nature of being right and that's when we say that woman win Owen for instance Thomas Aquinas says that being is the most universal concept fool what kind of what does that mean here and Heidegger sees this as a prejudice which makes it difficult or really rather impossible for us to begin to think about what we're even talking about the first thing here is that Heidegger emphasizes that being is not a universal genus right you'll recall that when we when we laid out the distinction between genus and species right the genius is always a higher category that subsumes particular individual categories right but the idea here is that we say that being is universal we don't mean that being as a universal genus we're not talking about a category at all right and this is the difficulty here for instance Heidegger mentions that the medievals refer to being and they use the term transcendence right or at least in the Latin formulation I'm not giving you the Latin hair but two trends it transcends right and of course to transcend is to go beyond and it's important here to recognize that we the being goes beyond categorization itself right so being is not a categorical intuition as such right now he also mentions that for instance Aristotle understood the universe of being really as a form of analogy right so when we say that being is universal we're not we're saying something analogically right because being is here and we have genus and species and universality is a type of genetic category but the idea here is that for at least from Aristotle's perspective is that this this is not saying it's not a genus this is an analogical relation here right and then in this section as Heidegger discusses the universal nature of being he talks about Plato and Aristotle and he really goes all the way up through Hegel it talks about how in Hegel being becomes an indeterminant is something that's indeterminate in an immediate sense right and you can and of course I'm not going to go through Hegel's logic here which is actually quite complex here and also remember that Hegel has a work in phenomenology too not the phenomenology that whose role describes but the phenomenology of spirit and so being is an important category within the phenomenology of spirit but here it's indeterminate in the medium right what exactly does that mean basically hire a gross contention is that we don't know because the keys the the history of philosophy is actually resulted in making being the darkest of all the concepts right it's not just one genetic category among others it's something completely other than that but the history of philosophy is essentially shrouded our conception of being by making it a sort of genetic Universal category section number two the second major prejudice here the Heidegger identifies is the indefinable 'ti of being right think here about what you just mentioned about Hegel right here it's important to recognize that being is not an entity right and this will become an important thing for us when we talk about the existence of something the being of something right being in and of itself is not a something at all because every something is as something only in virtue of its having being or participating in being or are in some way being infused as a being right so but being itself is not an entity so we're not talking about a thing at all right being is on the one hand it's not derived from some higher concept because if you will it's the most universal right but analogically but then on the second way being is not presented through these lower concepts either which means that we can't uncover our concept of being by looking at some conceptual relations so a taxonomy of concepts or for instance a logical analysis of conceptual relations in terms will never give us insight into this problem of being right there is no definition of being in the optical sense this is a mistake here I apologize let's just say on to Cole and we'll talk about what that means in a moment here Heidegger will actually lay out specific definitions for these things the idea here is that when we talk about the indefinable 'ti of being right in defined ability demands actually a thorough examination of being because what is a philosopher to do when a philosopher doesn't understand something it means that they should examine it even closer right and we'll see that this is going to be heidegger's insistent approach right the third prejudice that Heidegger lays out regarding our inability to think about being regards the self-evident nature of being right when we talk about in our experience about things having actuality well it just seems that it's self-evident right and and what's important here is that the way in which we can port ourselves to being or let's put it this way itself evidence when I look at something in sync oh it's just it exists self-evident right this actually takes us back to a way in which I'm organizing and comporting myself in consciousness towards being right I mean of course comportment here way in which we can talk about this is think about language we're constantly in our language referring to being in here think about the copula a copula is a logical category which is the cat or for being right so for the example the sky is blue is is the copula and what is the copula well the copula is a demarcation of being right so I say that I am holding a coffee cup M refers to being right I'm saying that there's a that I'm saying that the coffee cup has being in my hand well what does it mean to demarcate being exactly what exactly are we talking about right obviously I'm talking about a compartment in consciousness but we're going to see significantly every compartment is itself a form of being right so the compartment towards entities always uses the concept of being and this presents us with what Heidegger calls an a priori enigma that is enigma that comes before our experience itself right a mystery the needs to be addressed so self evidence here is a dubious procedure to say that something self-evident is really a way at avoiding the question in the mystery of the deep demarcation in the significance of being and it's a way to dubiously ignore this opry or iook nigma right not only is there no answer to the question of being here Heidegger says well not that there's not an answer but not only do we not have an answer to the question of being we don't even know what the question is right and so for instance is if as I'm talking through this video lecture your teen what is he talking about what does it mean to ask the question of what existence of being means you don't know because we don't even have a grasp on the question of being here itself and you're going to see this is this is in the introduction of being time because being in time is meant to give us really a path towards eventually being able to just understand what the question of being is just to get us to the point where we can understand what the science Praga is all about now paragraph 2 of the introduction concerns the formal structure the formal structure of the question of being right so all the way yeah we don't know the content of the question being we don't really know we're asking but we can read that to ask a question every question has a structure right because every question is something that always asks for an answer right so what is the four can we formulate this question and then we can ask what belongs to the form of any question well Heidegger says right is that every inquiry because a question is to inquire right every inquiry is a seeking a Sukkah right every inquiry is a seeking and every seeking is always guided by what is sought right so imagine if I'm looking for my keys right I'm seeking my keys throughout the room looking and what is guiding my seeking is what I'm looking for right so that means that the question of being whatever it is right it's a seeking after being and it has to be guided by being itself right so seeking for what being is and that means we have to seek in regard to the manner of being so we can start to as over so hydras argument here isn't the designs frog is an impossible question it's rather that we have to work our way out of our categories and we can start by formally understanding then the the answer and the question of being itself ultimate has to be guided by being right so the form of a question um always includes a that which is interrogated this is what Heidegger does not use this term and I think you would object am i using this term we might say is that the fourth question always right moves towards is looking for a specific object right it's guided here it includes that which is interrogated but it also includes that which is found out and here I want to talk about the essence here the reason I'm included the object in essence here is because I want you to see that there is a linkage between the who's early in categories of phenomenology and ideas one and what who's real Heidegger is doing here Heidegger for reasons we'll get to in a moment specifically does not want to use this sort of language but it isn't it is I think helpful for us to enact for at least in this course I want you to see the lineage of what Heidegger is doing traces back to loose rope right now inquiry to inquire itself is a particular manner of being for a being that inquires right so remember here is that since so to just ask any question to inquire itself only beings which can inquire um can ask questions right and that means that when I as of being that can inquire when I make an inquiry I'm actually taking on a particular manner of being right I'm existing in a certain sort of way right here you can think about maybe who strolls categories of noesis it's a type of no EEMA for instance inquiry right now whose role is not Heidegger is not going to follow who stroll along those lines right but in in a certain way you can see here there's a sort of tragedy regarding who strolls view of what phenomenology was to become because in a certain way it gets dismantled to some degree by Heidegger right but back to the point inquiry itself is a particular manner of being for a being that inquires loops let's go back there right now since we have some access to the concept of being because we do have the copula we do use these concepts that means that there must be a way to inquire about it you can see this is what how you recall our average everyday of vail groups right here this is what we call a vague average understanding or an average everyday understanding of being so what is being well Heidegger says what we need to do is we need to know what the horizon for that very question is right and by horizon here think about the language that who Cyril used here to talk about the conditions for the possibility of the question right what we do know for instance about being is that being determines the entities as entities so anything can be an entity everything from the coffee-shop to the mirror behind me to me right all of this is being and we know that being is what determines an entity as an entity so you can't be an entity if you don't have being right but being like we said earlier is not an entity in itself right so what does this mean well it means that the science frog is not a question is it design to dress the science progress it's not a question of trying to tell a story or trace an origin why because only entities have origins right so this is so we're not going to be trying to link it back to some sort of start with an entity and work our way backwards to the question of being in a certain way this is a way in which you might for instance understand the defunct nature of the problems regarding first movers and all this sort of stuff that you've may have heard of or you can take a look at regarding for instance Thomas Aquinas is Thomas Aquinas or Aristotle here right in which there's a sort of tracing towards origin and Heidegger is explicit says we can't do that here right on six he says hence being as that which is asked about must be exhibited in a way of its own and this is essentially different from the way in which entities themselves are discovered right so that means we need to find a way to understand being that is there remains faithful or has a fidelity towards being itself right so that's why we can't tell a story because you can only tell stories of entities and we have to be faithful to being as itself now what are the different ways in which we recognize being well everything we talk about right everything we have in view all of the things we comport ourselves towards right we're being how we are is being right the the thing inquiry itself is a manner of being when we talk about something having reality we're talking about being right and think here about I can talk about the reality of that which is outside of me but I can also talk about the reality of the presentations I have in consciousness for instance all of those are real all those have being right that something is and what are you talking about realize the what is present at hand right before me of what what subsistence means even validity is a way in which we recognize being and think care of you if you want take a look at my series on introduction of formal logic and we talked about the validity of argumentative propositions right or for instance quantificational validity to say that something as valid is to demarcate a form of being right is to say that something is right so when we talk about there being something is or talk about something given we're always recognizing being so whatever a point of departure we're going to make towards being we have to recognize that of these different manners right so from went from which of the entities is the disclosure of being taken what has the priority well Heidegger says to understand being we have to understand how we look at being in other words we need to uncover the nature of the being the we ourselves are right because since being is something that's recognized by us and that recognition is a form of being we can't answer the we can't understand what being is in itself we have to first begin and uncover what being means for the being for whom being is a question right we're going to see this is an explicit reference to an important concept of Heidegger's okay now this is and this is the concept da sign right Heidegger writes on 7 this entity which each of us is is himself and which includes inquiring as one of the possibilities being we're going to denote by the term sign now in German design you can see our sign is the term for being and da means to point right so here it means something like to point to being and what he means to say is that we're going to call ourselves da sign now later on in just a minute Heydrich is going to really say and this is the what I want you to memorize here is that whenever you say what is being what is da sign Dawson is the being for whom being is an issue now that means that all human beings who can ask the question of being and who can recognize me our da sign so he's talking about us da sign is his term for the human now he doesn't use the term human here because by using the term da sign he's signifying the the being of the person who inquires after being right so he's giving this new term this new language in many ways you're going to see that being in time operates almost Lexington graphically and operates as a lexicon of concepts for thinking about how what being is and what it means for us now how do you recognize there might be a problem here that is is there circularity because are we really just saying we're going to understand being by understanding being right and in Heidegger is responsible that fact eclis there is no sir Claude all right that says when we look at the actuality of ourselves the facticity of ourselves and we'll see later in the book how to gurbles explicitly define facticity though I'm not going to do it now is when we look to how we actually exist we recognize that we can determine the nature of an entity's being without first formula in the meaning of being itself right that is it's not circularity but it's a relatedness between the backwards and the forward Ness our inquiring nature of being as beings this stuff is difficult I know so I hope this is helping and I hope this this is at least link clear some of these concepts now paragraph three is known as the ontological priority of the question of being now what he's going to argue here and you'll see that ontology is going to play an important role here and we'll get to this in a minute now when we talk about this question of being we can ask is the science frog or the question being a matter of speculation or is it a matter of the most basic and concrete of all possible questions of course he doesn't think it's just speculation he actually thinks it is a concrete question the problem is it's a concrete question but it's so concrete and so basic and then coupled on top of it with the history of our theoretical concepts and philosophy we just don't know what that concretizing thing is right so the task here is to understand the constitution of entities because every entity has being and so the constitution of any entity ultimately must try back to be where as it were right so the task is interesting the constitution of entities in their most basic sense and this is what a science is doing ultimately right and Heidegger here actually discusses the role of the sciences he talks about the crisis of science in his day or and I think would still be today any mentions for instance the crisis in mathematics when talking about formalism and intuition ISM but he goes on to talk about mathematics physics biology the historical human sciences theology and so forth but then all of these have a crisis and what's the crisis the crisis refers to the idea that none of these Sciences are able to articulate what it means to evaluate the things themselves right so for instance mathematics is looking at mathematical concepts that have validity right that's a type of being but what exactly is that mathematics can't tell us the same things with physics etc right he has a quotation here on ten quote basic concepts determine the way in which we get an understanding before and of the area of subject matter underline all the objects the science takes as its themes and all the positive investigation is guided by this understanding only after this area itself has been explored beforehand in a corresponding marriage these concepts become genuinely demonstrated as grounded so you can see here is that what he's going to say is that the sciences today are in crisis because they have no grounding in their understanding of the copula right of being I'm continuing on but since every such area every science is itself obtained from the domain of entities themselves this preliminary research from which the basic concepts are drawn signifies nothing else than an interpretation of those entities with regard to their basic state of being such research must run ahead of the positive sciences as Andy can hear the work of Plato narrow stalls evidence enough right you can see that Plato and Aristotle without any science any conception of modern science or any of the the work that was laid out by the later scientists right they're able to begin to address this so we can in fact begin to try to understand the grounding of the sciences by looking at being other philosophers have done so and we too can do it right and this would hold for theology as well now the crisis of their Sciences require an examination of what it means for something to be as they're given now this is the discussion of ontology right and in a really general sense what you can say is that ontology is the is refers to the logic of being right on toast beam and Greek they're right and so what you might say is that ontology refers to the relations that beings have with each other and with themselves now Heidegger is doing a fundamental ontology at the or he wants to get to a fundamental ontology with designs Fraga now Heidegger makes a distinction here between ontology versus the way cause the optical or the antic right and this is sometimes referred to as the ontological distinction right the ontology refers concerns being itself whereas the article concerns entity the being of entities themselves right so if we're talking about ontology in its most radical sense we're talking about being in and of itself we're talking about on ticks we're talking about the beam of specific sorts of entities so for instance you can say that if we go back to Edmund who strolls discussion of consciousness all of that was on tickle it was an ontology proper right and the same thing would go for any number of philosophers we could name but basically all ontology no matter how rich and firmly compacted a system of categories it has at its disposal remains blind and is perverted from its own most aim if it has not first adequately clarified the mean of being and conceived this clarification as its fundamental task right so all the things that non ontology as we've seen previously we're actually on to coal because they're the ontology itself being itself the meaning of being is ever answered or clarified okay so now we're going to move to the second paragraph for where Heidegger discusses the optical priority of the question of being right now science in general refers to the totality of established interconnections of true propositions within a specific domain right that's what science is and you're going to see that who through the Heidegger is giving a science here but he's giving an original conception of what a science move means a science in general is this totality of established interconnections of true propositions the question of establishment here ultimately goes back to the type of science we're looking at right so how a chemist establishes true propositions and their interconnections differs from how a mathematician does right but they're both doing the same thing in a general level as it were right but the science of beings but but what about the Sun but science has the has the being of its entities and that is every science ultimately also includes the the manner of being of which is the of which is the occurrence of the Enquirer the scientists themselves in other words that the the science has an article theme which is determined by the scientists because the scientist is the person who's doing the inquiring so remember we talked about inquiring as a manner of being well that filters into science which means that the science has the being of atenas that has its being of us or da sign so what distinguishes da sign onto clay is that that is that being is an issue for it right or being in such a way that one has an understanding of being right now the kind of being that docile can comport itself towards is designated by the term existence so when I comport myself towards the coffee cup here right that comportment is designated by existence right that's what I mean by existence right and think here about when if I no something exists I don't know it exists because I can't comport myself towards it at least in in a sort of kind of concrete fashion Heidegger writes da sign always understands itself in terms of its existence in terms of a possibility of itself to be itself or not itself here of course I think of Shakespeare to be or not to be da sign has either chosen these possibilities itself or got itself into them or grown up in them already right so so how exactly do sign gets in is we're not sure but there's these different ways only the particular design decides its existence whether it does so by taking hold or by neglecting the question of existence never gets straightened out except through existing itself and here is quite fascinating right this is the idea here is that one cannot recognize existence except through a manner of existing right you can see here it's a similar sort of question to this problem with being now higher is now going to start to give us a range of categories and lay out what these categories are the understanding of oneself via existence is called what he calls the existential existential right let's see let's move here and here's a list of categories right so existence here refers to that which Dawson comports itself towards right the existential is the understanding of itself by design existential 'ti refers to the structures of existence and existential refers to the analytic of existential 'ti right that refers to the analytic of the structures of existence and the understanding of of itself by design is existential right so he's sort of laying out these terms which can be confusing but I hope you'll see there's a rigorous formulation to what he's doing here at the end of the day what we can say is that being in the world is something that belongs to Dawson existentially right that is a the analytic of the structure of existence for da sign is that da sign is a being in the world all of us are all always already thrown into the world as it were right we're living in a world and we can't separate ourselves from that and so if we want to understand da signs existential right then we have to recognize that da sign is a being in the world and we're going to see later on in subsequent videos that this will this this inside of our being in the world as a preliminary structural category for da sign is going to allow Heidegger to lay out structurally his formal analysis of da sign from him so on 13 he says therefore fundamental ontology right uh remember the ontological distinction for which alone all other ontologies can take their rise must be sought in the existential analytic of da site right that has to be it has to be sought out in the way in which we are beings in the world the way in which we have we're a manner of being towards things that exist right now that means that da sign takes priority here in terms of articulating the meaning of the question of being right and so hiding our leis I says when we talk about this priority there's three things that go alone on the one hand there's the optical priority where da sight is an entity whose being has the determinate character of existence right sodaw sine is something that existing but there's the ontological priority in which da sign is in itself aunt illogical because existence is thus determinative for it remember Dawson is the being for whom being is an issue and then there's the on T Co ontological priority in which Dawson also possesses as constitutive for its understanding of existence an understanding of the being of all entities of a character other than its own right so there's these sorts of three categories that Heidegger is going to use within the text now let me give you here there's a great quote from Heidegger here which this quote if to interpret the meaning of being becomes our task dosing is not only the primary entity to be interrogated it is also the entity which already comports itself in its being towards what we're asking about when we ask this question so let's get moving here okay now now this is section 2 of the introduction and I've already gone an hour so here's what I'm going to do is I'm going to stop right now and in the next video I will complete our understanding our I will complete the video on the second part of the introduction of being in time thanks again for watching I look forward to seeing you guys on lunch

Channel: Mark Thorsby

Views: 31,983

Rating: 4.8557115 out of 5

Keywords: Heidegger, Being and TIme, Sein und Zeit, Introduction to Being and Time, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Existentialism, Dasein

Id: _MPUls6VSzk

Length: 62min 50sec (3770 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 12 2016