GE Morton
Well, that response illustrates the problem. Phrases such as "being in the foundational sense," "being as such," and "eternal essences of all things" are meaningless phrases. The word "being" has two uses in English --- it is a noun denoting an existent, especially a living creature, and as a verb, the present participle of to be (to exist). There is no sense to "being as such" --- the term is only meaningful with reference to some particular existent. It does not denote some inchoate, mystical substance, some "essence," that permeates all tangible, perceptible things. Nor can any such mystical substances supply a foundation for any useful ontology. Speaking of "being" in that way does not constitute some revolutionary insight; it is merely a linguistic corruption contrived in an attempt to describe an incoherent idea.
Read this to clarify (intended for TS)
Well, that response illustrates the problem. Phrases such as "being in the foundational sense," "being as such," and "eternal essences of all things" are meaningless phrases. The word "being" has two uses in English --- it is a noun denoting an existent, especially a living creature, and as a verb, the present participle of to be (to exist). There is no sense to "being as such" --- the term is only meaningful with reference to some particular existent. It does not denote some inchoate, mystical substance, some "essence," that permeates all tangible, perceptible things. Nor can any such mystical substances supply a foundation for any useful ontology. Speaking of "being" in that way does not constitute some revolutionary insight; it is merely a linguistic corruption contrived in an attempt to describe an incoherent idea.
That's what Heidegger said (as well as Husserl. A thing is an "predicatively formed affair of actuality"). He takes Being as such as a badly misunderstood concept. These mysterious intuitions, he said, one might have of Being are what he is trying to give some articulation to. He thinks we have to to understand Being as a foundational concept in an analytic of Time: I approach a thing, it IS there. What is it that constitutes this awareness of the thing before me? It is not some pure intimation of Being, for, as you say above, no sense can be made of this. He sees that before I even approach the thing, I am equipped with the ability to acknowledge it AS something, some reference to language, a foreknowledge of what couches and chairs ARE before we can analyze what it means that things ARE. The areness, if you will, is bound, in every case, always, already, bound to the pre understanding, so the question of what it means for something to be is analyzable to the temporal conditions that are in place in order for a "there is" or a "I am" to occur at all. this is why Heidegger's ontology is as foundational as it can get: wher a scientific account is about planets and chromosomes, the phenomenological ontology is about what it is for a thing to be at all, so that when you approach the microscope, there is a constitution, if you like, a paradigmatically informed apperceptive constitution that makes encounters at all maningful, and thus,the scientist's work meaningful.
Heidegger says at root, it is all interpretation. Now, his analysis of what an interpretative act IS requires looking into his thinkiing.
"Essences" only exist as rigid requirements in an individual's concepts. No essence as such would be "eternal." "Why is there something" is a rather silly question. There's no reason there should be nothing instead, so that it would be a mystery that there is something, and the question usually has a connotation almost of there being an intelligent reason behind the brute fact that things exist, which is also nonsense.
Right. Now I do recall saying to someone that phenomenologists are all different. There are those who take phenomenology another direction. When attention is placed on the interpretative act that engages the world, it brings philosophical attention to what is there, in the phenomenal act of recognition. This is why science plays no part in phenomenological analyses: Attention is on the act of perception, or apperception, itself. Studying the structure of time, the present and the literal "making" of our existence (hence Sartre's existence precedes essence: we make what we are in the fleeting "nothingness" of the present moment moving into the future) by freely choosing among the possibilities our history provides. We are, therefore, determined insofar as our past is made of the stuff of culture and language, a body of possibilities, but free in that the future is nothing, unmade.
One thing I like about this, is that it allows a good liberal like myself to look to social conditions as the cause of poverty and ignorance, after all, it is our history that determines our possibilities, but at the same time, does not undo the dignity of freedom (Skinner's term), for there is in this a clear recognition of what it is to stand at the precipice of the future and choose one direction or another.
It does get interesting, believe it or not. Perhaps you can see why phenomenologists take special note of that moment what one stops simply acting as a kind of automaton, just doing this and that, getting a job, buying a house, and on and on, and wakes up to ask the question regarding Being: what does it mean to be here" Why am I here at all? Why are we born to suffer and die? And so on. Questions get quite poignant if you are among those born into nothing but suffering. Why IS it that things are like this? Heidegger thinks when you get to this juncture, you begin to realize your own freedom, as you stand apart from history that would otherwise simply move you along unconsciously. Only now are you free. Freedom requires one to step away from unconscious behavior. When you do this, you witness possibilities, as when I stop typing, look up and consider all things and why they are.
Then you find Jaspers' The Encompassing, Henry's Affectivity, Kierkegaard's existential Anxiety, Levinas' Infinity, and so forth. All terms alien to analytic philosophy's lexicon. Of course, derision is easy with kind of thing. It all does sound very weird. But this subsides with reading.
Scientists and analytic philosophers are "know-nothings"? Yikes.
Yikes is right. By no nothing, Rorty was referring to critics who never read Derrida and others yet were terrified of his conclusions. Not, heh, heh, critics of science.
But then, analytic philosophers really are barking up the wrong tree. This philosophy goes nowhere at all.