Ethical Theory: Heidegger (Lexicon) [add if you can] Flashcards
Thing (being)
a thing is not merely an aggregate of traits or an accumulation of properties
Work (aletheia)
“the unconcealedness of beings” (164)
disclosure of a particular being, disclosing what and how it is
ex) Van Gogh’s painting discloses what the equipment (peasant shoes) are in truth
Being/being
??
1) Being is not a genus
2) Being is indefinable
3) Being is self-evident
Dasein is a Being who understand that it exists
Ground/earth/world
Before Heidegger, the world had been conceived of in 2 philosophical arguments:
1) the world as the sum of the things contained in the world
2) the world exists beyond the realm of matter
In Heidegger’s opinion, both these views are mistaken because they are grounded in the flawed paradigm of traditional ontology, which privileges an objective view of the world.
“to be a work means to set up a world” (170)
“World is never an object that stands before us and can be seen. World is the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death” (170)
the work-being of the work: the setting up of a world and the setting forth of earth
Hermeneutic circle
understanding the whole by the parts and the parts by the whole
neither can be understood without referencing the other
Three modes of “thingness”
1) bearer of its characteristic traits
2) the unity of manifold of what is given to the senses
3) formed matter
pg. 160
The artist
“the artist remains inconsequential as compared with the work, almost like a passageway that destroys itself in the creative process for the work to emerge” (167)
Heidegger discusses how people make a fuss about art and asks the question “do we encounter the work itself?” (167)
Ancient works taken out of their world lose power and meaning.
Even if we visit them in their native environment, they no longer have the meaning they once had.
“World-withdrawal and world-decay can never be undone”
concealing unconcealment
“this denial, in the form of a double concealment, belongs to the essence of truth as unconcealness. Truth, in its essence, is un-truth” (176)
pg. 175-6
- proper locus of truth is the being itself in its manifestness
- we take part in the being’s unconcealment, its (the being’s) truth
(175) lighting unconceals beings
poetry and/as language
language is not just communication
“language alone brings beings as beings into the open for the first time” (185)
projective saying
“Poetry is the saying of the unconcealedness of beings”
brings the unsayable into the world
pg. 184-5
Dasein
the shepherd and guardian of being
*our only access to being is through it
meaning is properly understood as a response to being by Daesin, not as a performance or achievement of transcendental subjectivity
*only in so far as there is being is there meaning
What inspired Heidegger?
He was inspired and guided by how things are manifest to us in an eventful way and address us and speak to us
