enowning
Monday, November 06, 2006
 
The other five of nine points on the ontological difference.

[5] The distinction does not happen to us arbitrarily or from time to time, but fundamentally and constantly.

[6] For if this distinction did not occur, then--forgetting the distinction--we could not stick merely to beings at first and for the most part. For precisely in order to experience what and how beings in each case are in themselves as the beings that they are, we must--although not conceptually--already understand something like the what-being and that-being of beings.

[7] Not only does the distinction occur continually, but this distinction must already have occurred if we wish to experience beings in their being such and such. We never ever experience anything about being subsequently or after the event from beings; rather beings--wherever and however we approach them--already stand in the light of being. In the metaphysical sense, therefore, the distinction stands at the commencement of Dasein itself.

[8] This distinction between being and beings always already occurs in such a way that "being," although undifferentiated, is indeed understood at all times in an inexplicit articulation, at least with respect to what-being and that-being. Man therefore, always has the possibility of asking: What is that? and: Is it at all or is it not? Why precisely this doubling of what-being and that-being belongs to the originary essence of being is one of the deepest problems that these terms contain, a problem that indeed has hitherto never yet been a problem at all, but something self-evident. This can be seen, for example, in traditional metaphysics and ontology, where one distinguishes between essentia and existentia, the what-being and that-being of beings. This distinction is employed as self-evidently as that between night and day.

[9} From all the eight moments listed above, we may infer the uniqueness of this distinction, as well as its universality.

P. 357-8
 
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