Lia’s Reviews > Heidegger's Being and Time > Status Update

LOL, a list of projected exam questions. Imagine reading a book in order to pass an exam ... which is ... probably how this book is marketed.

I vaguely remember the author moaning about inauthentic way of reading, as in reading not to understand the subject, but to pass exams. There’s something incredibly sad about the way this book ends. (I know the format is forced by the publisher, but still...)

Yikes: What is lacking in Being and Time is any ethics. Not ethics as an ethos, or a calculative morality (which seem to be the only two ways Heidegger can think ethics), but one in which my existence, and the right to my existence is called into question by the other, who is not merely a means by which I can be authentic.

I gave the exact “ethos ≠ ethics” response when T questioned H’s ethics.

Being-towards-death is a permanent possibility of my life, not an actuality which ends it. It is upon this indefinite future that all my definite futures are projected, and it shows them all as inherently fragile and insubstantial. This is the real truth of human finitude. Not that we are not God, or even that God is dead, but our existence is without solid ground.

Why should death be the ultimate future through which all my other futures must be weighed?

[Death] reveals my life as a whole, rather than just parts of it... I am not asking about this or that activity or occupation, but the significance of my life as a whole... it shows me I am nothing and not identifiable with any of these. It is only because I am not so that I can choose authentically ...

the structure of care is temporal. Existence is the future, facticity is the past, and fallenness is the present... time can be temporalised in two ways: authentically and inauthentically. In the first, the present is primary, and in the second, the future.

If in everyday concern, I lose myself in the flow of time, then in this ‘moment of vision’ (which comes to me through anxiety), I am thrown back upon myself. This is why authenticity is not an empty projection into the future, but always determined by our past. We come to our past authentically as a possibility of our future and we take up what we already were.

The projection has to be real and earned.

Krell: Did Heidegger simply fail to see the arm of the everyday body rising in order to hammer the shingles onto the roof, did he overlook the quotidian gaze directed toward the ticking watch that overtakes both sun and moon, did he miss the body poised daily in its brazen car, a car equipped with a turn signal fabricated by and for the hand and eye of man, did he neglect the human being capable day-in and day-out...

Jean-Paul Sartre amplified this line of criticism when he emphasized the importance of the body as the first point of contact that a human being has with its world, a contact that is prior to detached theorizing about objects.

Alphonse de Waelhens: Heidegger’s phenomenology completely overlooks the fundamental role played by perception in particular and the body in general in our everyday understanding of things.

“[In] Being and Time, one does not find thirty lines concerning the problem of perception; one does not find ten concerning that of the body.”

↑ on neglecting the ontic:

“ Dasein’s spatialization in its “bodily nature” is likewise marked out in accordance with these directions. [This “bodily nature” hides a whole problematic of its own, though we shall not treat it here.] (BT, 143) ”