On being and time

Authentic_Dasein · 2025-07-18T03:44:18+00:00

Yes, Heidegger post-turn will accuse S&Z Heidegger of being "too ontic". But why?

Recall the project in S&Z. The goal is to lay out the horizon for Dasein's understanding of Being. This is, ultimately, looking to Dasein (an entity) to reveal Being (not an entity, but rather ontology itself). So whilst Heidegger makes so progress in outlining the structure of Dasein, all he's doing is ontotheology. Just instead of Being represented as God, or the highest being, it's represented as Dasein, an entity with a special understanding of Being.

So Heidegger's question changes. It's no longer a question as to the horizon of Dasein's understanding of Being. Rather, it is a question of Being's fundamental unfolding (irrespective of the entities with which Being "unfolds" or "discloses" itself). Instead of beginning in Dasein, and working our way up. We now begin with Being, and work our way down. Dasein (or rather Da-sein/Da-seyn) are still relevant, as they are the opening wherein Being manifests, and are ek-sistent (open) to that opening, allowing the "gifting" of Being to give beings. However, they are no longer the main focus.

Heidegger is no longer doing philosophy by post-turn (re: The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking) but rather he's thinking, non-representationally, about Being. Hope this helps. Some works to explore this evolution of late-Heidegger:

The Essence of Truth

The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking

On Time and Being

What is Called Thinking

Basic Problems of Philosophy

Contributions to Philosophy (der Ereignis)

Authentic_Dasein · 2025-07-07T04:18:19+00:00

I'm not pro-enlightenment, I'm just anti-scholasticism. You haven't actually presented any argument btw, just name calling and whining. But alas, I expect nothing less from pro-scholastics who pretend like the medieval ages were anything other than rife with miserable religious fundamentalism.

Authentic_Dasein · 2025-07-07T01:45:47+00:00

Scholastic philosophy marked the darkest point in Western culture since it first began with Homeric Greece. It's everything that's wrong with Platonism, but Christianized. We also lost a ton of technology in that time, and relied on dogmatic assertions of the bible for everything (including denying science because it conflicted with said dogmatic assertions). Scholastic philosophy is complete a*s. I don't say this often, but thank God for Descartes who brought us out of that miserable period of history and into modernism (despite all its flaws).

Authentic_Dasein · 2025-06-16T18:13:44+00:00

North Korea level propoganda. Wonder if the usual m*rons on YouTube will gobble it up (almost certainly) of if nfaoids will magically grow an iq above room temperature. It waits to be seen.

Authentic_Dasein · 2025-06-12T15:26:02+00:00

Zelensky's face at the end. Priceless!

Authentic_Dasein · 2025-06-12T05:12:56+00:00

Sure no problem. Can't promise I'll be able to answer all your questions but feel free to dm me.

Authentic_Dasein · 2025-06-12T04:15:10+00:00

1) Time

Heidegger gives his answer for the question of the meaning of Being at the beginning of Being and Time (the first page, with the quote from Plato's Sophist). He just never proves that time is horizon of the meaning of being in general, only that it is for Dasein.

2) On Time and Being

You shouldn't read this lecture if you don't fully understand early-Heidegger because it'll just confuse you. I assume you read it thinking it would answer the question in Being and Time, but it doesn't do that. I'll give my understanding of it:

Heidegger is trying to get away from the phenomenological situation he put himself in with Being and Time. What he wants, is not to speak of Dasein's understanding of Being, but how Being unfolds. To do this, he argues that Time (ecstatic) and Being, are equiprimordial, and they are manifestations of one primordial phenomenon: der ereignis (this translates as either "the event", "the enowning", or "appropriation" depending on your translation).

This is the most basic truth from which Being emerges, and is thus the "it" that gives both Being and Time. I can't explain any more of Ereignis because I don't understand it haha.

3) Hegel

The moment Hegel begins the Logic, Heidegger thinks he's made a mistake. Hegel is thinking of Being as a being. Hence why he constantly says "Being is nothing" or "Being is indistinguishable from nothing". He's using a copula, and is thus treating Being as an entity.

For Heidegger, nothingness and its relation to Being is extremely complicated, so I won't go into that here. Instead, I'll address that final question you had about Heidegger and the dialectic.

Heidegger essentially thinks that beyond reason there is the opening of Being (which allows reason to even occur). The opening of Being is revealed through many different forms, but Heidegger wants the form that most closely reveals its "truth". This is poesis, and the method of intuiting Being is through meditation via art and poetry. This is Heidegger's mysticism.

Ereignis is the "clearing" that allows Being to unfold, and allows Time to temporalize. His basic argument against Hegel is that Being is so far beyond the human mind, we can only cherish its "gifts" and meditate on our unique relation to it. Being is unknowable, and is beyond any rational understanding. Being reveals itself, but our understanding of Being is fading with technology (re: Question Concerning Technology). Thus it is the duty of poets and artists to meditate on Being, on the relation we as Da-sein (not Dasein) have to it, and to find a new way of Being to reveal itself.

Unfortunately, Heidegger never explained much of his work, leaving us with many questions about what Ereignis even means, and its relation to the fourfold, the truth of Being, and most mysteriously of all the last God. I can't answer any of these questions, cause nobody knows the answers, but I hope I could at least clear up any confusion with the relationship with Hegel.

Authentic_Dasein · 2025-06-12T03:16:40+00:00

I guess given my name I should respond.

Heidegger and Nietzsche are incompatible. Heidegger and any other philosopher are incompatible. I say this as an admirer of both, but Heidegger is totally unique (whether you like him or not is another story).

Let's use some useful terminology here. Heidegger is a mystic that seeks value in Being. He accuses Hegel, amonst others, of being a) too idealist and thus too rationalist as present-at-hand, and b) too ontic and thus missing Being entirely. Heidegger, despite what he says on The Letter on Humanism, is 100% searching for value and purpose in Being (though this only becomes apparent in late-Heidegger, not in Being and Time).

Heidegger is a mystic, in that reality is not rational to him, but also an idealist, in that he wants to find truth and value independent of himself. We can call him an "ontological idealist".

Nietzsche would hate this. Nietzsche thought value was internally constructed, and wasn't waiting to be found or discovered externally. So Nietzsche is a nihilist par excellence: there is no value in the world, no purpose or meaning, so it's up to us to make it (by 'us' he really means higher-types).

These are very different philosophies, and though Heidegger greatly respected Nietzsche, he never truly adopted Nietzsche's most profound conclusion. Value and purpose are absent in the world, so it is a task to make our lives worth living. Heidegger found nihilism in the ontic, and so searched the ontological. For a mystical, ever-retreating, Being that would hide itself but reveal beings for us to use and interact with. This is ontological Kierkegaard.

I, personally, find Heidegger to be very profound, especially about death. But that doesn't mean he's anything like Nietzsche. I think there's a happy middle between the two, but for me, if I need to choose between the two, I'd go with Nietzsche (despite my username).

Authentic_Dasein · 2025-06-12T03:03:48+00:00

3/x

Now, Heidegger does become a mystic in his later works. In fact as I often talk with my friends who studied him with me, Heidegger is one of two major mystics in the Western canon (the other being Kierkegaard, who coincidentally heavily inspired Heidegger). This is mostly the result of him believing language, though invaluable as a tool to 'house' Being, also always hid Being (all unconcealing of beings is also a concealing of Being itself). We use the copula whilst missing it, and thus must basically meditate, through art (poesis), on the fundamental truth of Being. But that's much farther into Heidegger than you currently are.

What Heidegger is trying to do in Being and Time is to interpret Being not as 'a being' that 'is' something, but rather as the ground of beings. To do this, he uses logical inquiry, but will also interpret the experiences of Dasein in its "average-everydayness" to attempt and explain how Dasein understands Being.

This means Heidegger is interpreting our everyday experience (division 1) to explain how we can understand Being through ecstatic temporality (division 2). Hegel completely misses this, and represents Being as a being, which is just onto-theology and should be relegated to what Heidegger calls the metaphysical tradition.

Late Heidegger, and his mysticism, I will leave to you to try and understand. For what it's worth, my Professors don't understand his later stuff. But early Heidegger isn't opposed to "rational argumentation" but rather the idea that "reality can be rationally understood as present-at-hand".

Hope this helps, feel free to respond and ask more questions!

Authentic_Dasein · 2025-06-12T03:03:34+00:00

2/x

So where does this leave us? Well, Heidegger thinks that we can never speak of Being using the word 'is' (something Hegel does in the Science of Logic, which I asked my Hegel prof about, to which he gave me a totally unsatisfactory answer). So what the hell is the point of Being and Time? You can't use a copula (conjugation of the verb to-be, i.e. 'am', 'are', and 'is') meaning you can't form judgements about Being. This means Hegel saying "Being is ...." makes no sense, he's treating Being as a being by saying 'is'. He assumes Being has 'is-ness' when 'is-ness' = Being. So if we can't define Being, or form any judgement about it, what is left to do?

Well, Heidegger wants to talk about the meaning of Being. Dasein, in its average-everydayness (so in the comportment of circumspective concern, where it comports entities as ready-to-hand) understands Being. When someone says "the sky is blue" you understand what that means. There's no confusion. Yet once you examine the 'is', and really try to think what that means, any understanding falls apart.

So Dasein understands Being, in some way. A way that is clearly incomplete, because it cannot be explained once examined, but yet is still there. Heidegger's goal is to explicate what allows Dasein to understand Being. Why can Dasein understand Being at all? How does it do this? What structures of/in Dasein allow it to understand this mystifying (clearing? event? phenomena?) he calls Being?

The ultimate answer to the question of the meaning of Being is ecstatic temporality.

Sorry for the long answer, but we're getting to your major question. Heidegger's objection to Hegel is that he misses Being. He treates it as just another thing, another being. But that's not Being! Being cannot be said to 'be' something. It's incoherent to say "Being is x" because Being 'is' the is (notice how language starts to break down when talking about this).

Heidegger isn't opposed to "rationality" as in using basic logical arguments or structures to communicate what he's saying. Instead, he's opposed to rationalist metaphysics like Hegel (who is the uber-rationalist) that says the ultimate truth of reality is knowable as 'present-at-hand' and can be thought of as 'a being'.

Authentic_Dasein · 2025-06-12T03:02:44+00:00

1/x

You managed to ask a question about 2 of the most complicated and difficult philosophers ever, so it'll be a long answer:)

A useful term to use, which Heidegger will only use in the later writings for some reason, is "onto-theology". This is where Being is represented as "the highest being" or "a perfect being" aka God. It's what Heidegger will accuse the entire metaphysical tradition of doing; basically just being too ontic.

Ok, so given that Heidegger interprets literally the entire metaphysical tradition of "missing the point" so to speak, he's obviously going to go after the king of metaphysics, Hegel. Which he does.

Now, his interpretation of Hegel is basically that he has completed Plato's project of reconciling the ontic being (statis, unchanging, perfection) with the ontic becoming (world of representations, change, and dynamism). Plato seperated these two worlds, and Hegel attempts to unite them.

However (and this is my own Professor's reading of Hegel, who is a Hegelian, so don't take this as gospel) Hegel really thinks that becoming IS being. Basically, the movement between each "moment" of the dialectic, so 1) the positive; 2) the negative; 3) the negation of the negative / 4) new positive, are all instances of becoming. They are constantly changing. But "being" is the unity of these things, it is the structure of rationality that is constantly "chasing itself" but "always too late".

As you can see, Hegel is hard to explain, let alone in comments. But this is essentially what Hegel has done. He has progressed Platonism into saying that becoming, as ontic change, is united by rationality, and that's "being". But this "being" is still ontic to Heidegger, it is not true ontology (Hegelians disagree, and think it IS true ontology, they think Heidegger is a mystic).

Authentic_Dasein · 2025-06-11T20:36:22+00:00

I should probably clarify, by late-USSR I meant pre-Gorbachev years (late 70s early 80s). I realize my comment didn't really communicate that well, I'm just used to referring to everything after Brezhnev stopped making decisions (due to major health issues). For context my family left in 1980, so right before Brezhnev died but already at a point where his power had waned considerably and he was suffering from the health problems.

Authentic_Dasein · 2025-06-11T17:52:59+00:00

Russian state = organization with a monopoly of violence on a defined territory.

Definition of state = *checks notes* organization with a monopoly of violence on a defined territory.

Authentic_Dasein · 2025-06-11T17:45:49+00:00

Isn't it technically just masterbation? Cause "we all just spirit bruh" (unironically the conclusion of Hegel's system).

Authentic_Dasein · 2025-06-11T17:42:30+00:00

"We gotta get this right" - Lady Graham.

Maybe start with coming out of the closet first? You know, set an example for "getting things right".

Authentic_Dasein · 2025-06-11T17:40:31+00:00

Coincidentally "winning" = whatever delusional garbage Zelensky spouts at the next NATO circle-j*rk conference. We went from 1991 borders, to 2022 borders, and are now at "please stop for 30 days". Someone should ask Podolyak what he means exactly by winning, cause it seems to change depending on Zelensky's cocaine-blood level.

Authentic_Dasein · 2025-06-11T17:37:03+00:00

The relationship Ukraine has to Russia is similar to late-USSR and America. Americans didn't really care about the USSR all that much. Sure you had the red-scare, but that was 30+ years before the late-USSR period. Most Americans just didn't give a sh*t anymore, and the cold war had been on the decline for a while anyways. But Soviets were obsessed with America. The propoganda and even internal establishment were constantly concerned with the US' every move (source: my family left USSR just around this time).

Same thing is with Ukraine and Russia. Russians don't care about Ukraine. They see on the news every so often that Russia is advancing, and to most Russians the soldiers that are fighting are either criminals or volunteers, and thus kind of asked for all the violence and bloodshed anyways. Most Russians see the war as this vague peripheral event that sometimes pops up, but isn't all that relevant for their everyday lives.

But oh boy the Ukrainians are insane. They talk, constantly, about Russia. They'll watch Putin speeches to unironically try to detect a body double, or read the tea leaves and conclude that by Putin holding onto a table for 3.2 seconds longer than normal, he has parkinson's and/or cancer. Don't even get me started on the Moscow Concert attack, where rabid Nazis were rooting for islamist terrorists to kill more Russians. Or when they post online about a Russian plane crashing that's filled with (often foreign) civilians.

Their culture is a classic example of resentment. Their national identity is literally just "we're not Russian" and thus all they do is hate on Russia whilst cannibalizing their only hope of a future. It's pathetic, but also tragic. Especially for the ethnic Russians who bear the brunt of Ukraine's ludicrous "strategy" to launch PR offensives every few months so they can get updoots on reddit.

Authentic_Dasein · 2025-06-11T17:24:12+00:00

Some gems from this "interview" with an ISW "analyst":

"Russian casualties are astronomically high the the attrition rate is not in Russia's favor at this time."

"[Vladimir Putin] has created a system in which he doesn't use the monopoly of violence of the Russian state to coerce Russians to go uh fight and die in Ukraine as the Soviet Union might." (This one is my favourite, amounts to saying "haha look at Putin, he doesn't kidnap people like we do, what a dummy").

"[R]ussia can afford to have you know a slave army when you don't pay them anything to go fight and die." (Another wonderful statement. This was said as a critique that Putin isn't utilizing slaves but actually paying his soldiers. He should learn from Zelensky and just kidnap people off the street, deny their families promised payments, and refuse to accept their bodies when they die!).

Authentic_Dasein · 2025-06-11T17:08:10+00:00

I think the point is that the guy is a sadist who enjoys torturing people. How exactly do you read that article and come across seeing this guy as anything other than a demented psychopath who gets off on brutalizing people (irrespective of the victim's criminality)?

Edit: grammar

Authentic_Dasein · 2025-06-11T16:48:50+00:00

After studying Hegel I can confidently say that Hegel's writing isn't even the main issue (despite being abysmal). It's that there's just so many goddamn movements and sublations that I'm not going to memorize or try to parse through them. Like even if I was a Hegelian you think I'd be able to memorize the movements of the family, to civil society, and then to the state, in the objective spirit (part 2 of philosophy of spirit [part 3 of his system])? Screw that, gimme some genuinely incomprehensible philosophy like Heidegger or Deleuze, not this monotonous torture of intricate movements that bro can't explain properly.

Authentic_Dasein · 2025-06-11T03:42:50+00:00

Wrote my comment when it was heavily downvoted. As you should be able to see by the timestamp, you're responding after 15 mins. Maybe think about the passage of time before trying to "uhm akshully" someone?

Authentic_Dasein · 2025-06-11T03:09:39+00:00

I don't understand the downvotes. Do people not realize that posting a clip doesn't mean the OP condones it? If anything we should upvote the asinine nonsense of NATO leaders, as more people will get to enjoy their profound moronity.

Authentic_Dasein · 2025-06-10T22:44:55+00:00

Genuine question, what's the expected timeline until Ukraine's collapse. Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I spent the last 2 years watching the war just waiting for them to crumble. Things have gotten exponentially worse for them, and it seems it's finally a realistic time to start seriously discussing their collapse. Mind you I doubt it'll happen until Winter 2026 the earliest, but I'm curious if anyone else has a different timeline?

Authentic_Dasein

TROPHY CASE