Abstract
Dasein; the aletheic space as the space of human attunement to Being; freedom as relatedness to Being, as letting beings be, without mastery or appropriation, as congenial engagement with beings; dual (active/passive) conception of the gaze; the gaze, the divine, and Being, are names for the aletheic space; gazing, encountering, engaging with the Other; gazing and seeing; the intentionality of sight; human vision as responsiveness to Being’s gaze; knowledge is constituted by responsiveness to Being’s solicitation; modernity’s conception of the gaze as the reflexive act of a sovereign subject, an act that doubles beings by representing them; Heidegger’s critique of the modern conception of gaze; two kinds of gaze corresponding to two human types, Greek man and metaphysical man; the relation between metaphysics and modernity, between encountering and conquering; egoism, subjectivity, and selfhood; man as zoon logon echon and as animal rationale; Heidegger’s reading of the cogito; representation as imposing the subject’s calculative, numeric, measures on the represented thing; modernity’s assumption that nature is configured in measures accessible to human understanding (mathesis universalis); the violence of representation: appropriation of the represented thing for the sake of affirming the representing thing (the subject); modern consciousness as reifying, as self-consciousness; representation and the I; modernity identifies Being with representedness; Heidegger’s reading of Protagoras’ ‘man is the measure’ dictum; Protagoras’ “measure” does not originate in man, but in belongingness to the aletheic space, which entails self-delimiting in line with Being; mindfulness and be-ing; two kinds of thinking; two kinds of consciousness; two kinds of man.
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- 1.
At the beginning of Being and Time, Heidegger chooses Dasein as an example (Beispiel) of a being through which the meaning of Being can be investigated. He explains this choice by noting that Dasein is the only being for which the question of Being is of concern, and for which the question is the ground of its existence . Yet it is Dasein’s nature not only to seek out the meaning of Being, but also to seek to understand herself as the only being that seeks out the meaning of Being. What is unique about Dasein is that Being discloses itself to her through her understanding of her own being. Heidegger plays with the ambiguity of the word “Beispiel” (example), which is a composite of the preposition ‘bei,’ meaning ‘at,’ and the noun ‘Spiel,’ meaning ‘a play.’ It can thus also be rendered ‘playing at,’ or ‘playing in.’ Hence Dasein is not just an example, but also a play. The fact that it serves as the site of the play, the performance, of Being, is what justifies the choice of Dasein as an example through which the investigation of Being can be suitably carried out. Dasein , with its ek-static moods, is the example (Beispiel) within which Being’s play is performed (bei-spielt). Being plays out in Dasein’s world as the dance of the concealment and unconcealment of beings in their Being.
- 2.
It is important to attend to the difference between Heidegger’s and Sartre’s respective notions of engagement. According to Heidegger, Sartre understands engagement in the “ontic” sense, as engagement in the world, mainly in the political and social sense, whereas he himself understands it in the “ontological ” sense of engagement with Being. Thus the notion of engagement, which served as the leading slogan (Engage!) of Sartre’s existential philosophy during the 1940s and 1950s, undergoes an ontological shift, and is taken by Heidegger to be another name for the authentic relation to Being; see Heidegger (1993b, 218–19).
- 3.
The word “vorstellen” is ambiguous: it can mean ‘appearing before’ or ‘presenting to,’ as, e.g., when a guest is introduced, but can also mean representation in the sense of a mental representation of something.
- 4.
The Latin term ratio originates in the Greek term logos . But in Heidegger’s view, it doesn’t follow that the term logos has anything to do with rationality. Heidegger contends that its primordial meaning is derived from the Greek word legein, which means to lay bare. Accordingly, he takes logos to connote the disclosure of beings in the space of aletheia, where they shine forth and appear. Articulation of the logos discloses beings in their Being, in the sense that its utterance in speech gathers them, bare and unconcealed, within the aletheic space . The word logos is thus also related to Heidegger’s notion of Versammlung, discussed in detail in Chapters 2 and 8; see Heidegger (1984, 59–78).
- 5.
In this book “theaon” is rendered as “gaze” rather than as “looking,” “look,” and the like.
- 6.
See Footnote 4 above.
- 7.
The term Gelassenheit (from the verb lassen, to permit, to give way, to let go), usually translated as “releasement,” signifies a proper relation to Being, where, without control or manipulation, beings are released, are free to be in their Being.
- 8.
On “theory ” in the ancient and modern senses, see Heidegger (1992, 147–48).
- 9.
See Chapter 8, at Footnote 11.
- 10.
Note the lexical connection between the intellectual capture of something, and physical capture. The German word for ‘concept,’ Begriff, comes from the verb greifen, to grab, take hold of, grasp.
- 11.
The term used for “berechnenden Verfügung” in this book is “reckoning ordering” or “Reckoning Order of Representation .”
- 12.
Since the representing I, being the very ground of the act of representation —which, as we saw, is also an act of reification —is present in that act, we can go a step further, and excise the “sum” (I am) as well, expressing the principle by the word “cogito” alone. But an objection to this erasure can be raised: the move from cogito to sum reflects a fundamental shift in the ontological mode of the representing I. In the word “cogito,” the ontological role of the representing I is that of an essence (essentia), in which capacity it grounds the represented object. In the word “sum,” however, its role is that of an actual existent (existentia). On this approach, the act of representational thinking (cogito) should be considered an act of creating the representing I, in the sense of deriving its actual existence from its essence, which is necessarily actualized in the said act. On this view, the two words, the two parts of the statement, do not say the same thing, and if the statement is to express the act of creating, i.e., the shift in the representational act from the ontological mode of essence to that of actual existence , the “sum” must be retained.
- 13.
The way Protagoras defines the relationship of man to the being is merely an emphatic restriction of the unconcealment of beings to the respective radius of man’s experience of the world (Heidegger 1982, 94).
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Pimentel, D. (2019). Representation and Its Limits. In: Heidegger with Derrida . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05692-6_3
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