In-der-Blog-sein

Business Affairs explains Heidegger and tech-ontological analogical pro-gnostic-ation.

Most likely, the mobile telephone will evolve into a kind of internet appliance; you always will be connected, and the internet automatically will find you as you walk around. And it won’t be a slow connection, like today’s Treo, rather, it’ll be at broad-band speeds. This evolution will take place in much the same way that broad-band replaced dial- up.

Even someone as profound about these issues as Martin Heidegger was unable to account for the ontological status of performances – music, theater, dance, etc. They certainly aren’t “things,” in the sense of being either ready-to-hand or present-at-hand. In Being and Time, at least, these are the only two categories of being he acknowledges, apart (of course) from Dasein. Although they would have floundered on shoals of mutual incomprehensibility, Heidegger’s view of “things” in Being and Time is a lot like Bertrand Russell’s (early) view of language: its purpose is to refer, and refer to objects, which are “things.”

Later, in What Is a Thing, Heidegger expanded his ontology to include “plans, decisions, reflections, loyalties, actions, historical things,” even, “anything else that is a something and not nothing,”. Unquestionably this is over-broad, for the simple reason that processes and performances aren’t tangible, corporeal “things.” Rather, they’re “events” or “occurrences” – something ephemeral, or evanescent. Continuing with our analogy, it would take later philosophers such as J. L. Austin to recognize (re-recognize, of course) that language does far more than simply “refer.”

  ¶ 10:58 AM