enowning
Friday, May 28, 2010
 
Fred Dallmayr on the difference ontology makes.
For Heidegger, interpretive or hermeneutical understanding was not the province of specialized human disciplines (nor of a transcendentally construed phenomenology) but rather a constitutive feature of every human being inserted both in the world and in the movement of temporality. With his thesis that ‘being itself is time,’ Gadamer comments, Heidegger called into question the ‘basic subjectivism of modern philosophy’, as well as the entire ‘frame of reference of modern metaphysics which tended to define being as what is present.’ At the same time, by focusing on the ‘understanding character’ of human Dasein, Heideggerian ontology departed from and overcame the ‘historicist’ dilemmas of the Historical School. In comparison with Dilthey, understanding is no longer a mere ‘methodological concept’; rather, it pinpoints the ‘original mode of being of human life itself.’ Through his ‘analytic of Dasein,’ in particular, Heidegger revealed ‘the projective (not merely present-ist) character of all understanding and conceived the act of understanding itself as a movement of transcendence, of moving beyond the existent (state of affairs).
 
Comments:
At the same time, by focusing on the ‘understanding character’ of human Dasein, Heideggerian ontology departed from and overcame the ‘historicist’ dilemmas of the Historical School...

The obverse of this view might be said the loss of a certain historical perspective, even of Hegelian world-spirit. Heidegger (as I may have said previously) seems closer to Kierkegaardian thought --and theology--than many realize in his comments against Hegel's "secularism" (one of Eldred's essays brings this point out quite effectively).

Existenz-oriented thinkers tended to affirm the subjective element that Hegel (and...Marx) had broken with--not that Hegelianism is perfect by any means, but Hegel's "concretization", as they say, affirmed a certain degree of realism, perhaps of an odd manichean or monistic sort, but...an external world with oil spills and financial oligarchies, unfolding in historical--and economic struggles--nonetheless.
 
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