Assorted Essays

Martin Heidegger was a German Professor of Philosophy known for his contributions to the meaning of being. It is a birthright to say that Existential Philosophy grew out of his philosophical underpinnings. Here I would like to explicate critically some of the terms that he has used. His magnum opus is Being and Time.

The first of the terms that he has used has come from Greek and refers to Aletheia. By Aletheia Heidegger meant how things of the world appear to human beings. He uses two corollary terms: un-closedness and un-concealment. To simplify the matter, I would like to put Aletheia as perception, cognition, and affection. For perception and cognition, epistemology is the effect. Affection can mean ecstasy or celebration or nausea of angst.

The second of the terms used by Heidegger is Apophantic. Apophantic refers to a statement that covers meaning. For example it is a euphemism to say that the Cow was put to sleep instead of the cow being slaughtered. It would be a pungent humor to say that the American President Donald Trump is vacationing in North Korea. Apophantic statements maintain a protean character by their elusiveness, irony and humor.

The next of the terms used by Heidegger is Being in the World or Dasein in German. With being in the world Heidegger wanted to eliminate distinctions between subject and object and the world. Being in the world is understood as a consciousness of something. It also opens the being to the futuristic world of possibilities.

Being towards death is the next of Heidegger’s term. Death here refers not to clinical death. Death is the dread or anguish. He dissects time as the notion of the present and eternal to modes of temporality. It is not clear as to what he means by eternal time. Again time is not in a linear progression as the past, present and future. Time for him is only a realm of possibilities. Death for Heidegger has the potentiality to be authentic and specific. Heidegger is being vague here as he connects death to the presence of being in the world. Heidegger is right when he says that the conception of death and the presence of being opens the subject of being to angst or dread.

The next of the terms used by Heidegger is being with. It refers to the spatial proximity of being with other beings. Behavior here performs an ideological function. As an ideology behavior can be social, anti social, psychotic or pathological. How to authenticate being as a behavioral ideology is a philosophical question and a problem.

The next of the terms used by Heidegger is care. Care is a kind of concern for the self when the being is in a participatory mode with other beings. The modality of care would include conciliation, opposition, assimilation and accumulation. Care could be identified with a Freudian Ego. Care is also related to the Sartre’s facticity of the body.

The next term of Heidegger is Destruction. Here he calls for the destruction of traditional ontological concepts like history, time, death, time etc. I would like to disagree with Heidegger there. When I look at history, I am from a decolonized nation, a brown Asian who feels prejudiced that his English is inferior. Sometimes I wish to embrace Americaness as a culture and a philosophy and not be an immigrant. It’s ironic to say that America imports French avant garde philosophers and exports missiles. I would also like to comment on time; the past, present has to be deconstructed radically with futuristic possibilities. Death is clinical; for religion it is another phase; for philosophy death is a problem.

The next of the terms used by Heidegger is discourse. He has mapped discourse into the ontological structure of being. Discourse is always being in a mode of participation. Discourse in postmodernism is dialogic and democratic.

The next of Heidegger’s concept is present at hand. It refers to the disinterested gaze at facts. A

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Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 04.11.2017
ISBN: 978-3-7438-3943-4

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