'SEIN' AND 'DASEIN': AN ESSAY IN THE CONTINUITY OF THE THOUGHT OF MARTIN HEIDEGGER

JOHN ANTHONY MURRAY, Purdue University

Abstract

Heidegger scholarship is uniformly based on the assumption that "Dasein" denotes the human subject. As a result of this assumption, there appears to be a discontinuity in the path of Heidegger's thought: it appears that Being and Time is an analysis of the human subject, and that the essays published in the 1950's are accounts of a supra-human Being (Sein) which bestows itself upon the human subject from without. The relation between Dasein and Sein appears to be external and to some degree accidental, and there is no apparent exigency in the analysis of Dasein which calls for the later accounts of Sein. Heidegger scholarship concludes either that Heidegger arbitrarily shifted his interest or the focus of his attention from the human subject to Being, or else that he acknowledged and corrected an early voluntarism and subjectivism in his thinking by means of a turning (Kehre) toward a more intellectualist and transpersonal mode of thinking. This work inquires whether the continuity which Heidegger claims for his own thinking can be brought to light by viewing both the 1927 analysis of Dasein and the 1962 articulation of the Ereignis (Event) as stages in the same ongoing project of laying bare the ontological basis of consciousness. What this inquiry finds is that "Dasein" was not used by Heidegger to denote the human subject. Rather, as being-in-the-world, it denotes that out of which intentional performance and self-reflexive subjectivity emerge, and so provides the basis of consciousness. However the primordial basis of reflexivity is articulated in 1927 as if it were itself an intentional performance. It is argued that this presupposes a more primordial form of reflexivity, here called transparency, which is prior to all intentional performances. The achievement of the "turning" (Kehre) was to articulate this transparency or primordial self-presence as Sein or Anwesen (presence) within the structure of Ereignis (Event), and thus to complete the analysis of the ontological basis of consciousness begun in 1927. The genesis of Heidegger's insight into this primordial transparency is traced through essays and books of the Kehre period, especially "On the Essence of Ground," "On the Essence of Truth," Introduction to Metaphysics, The Principle of Ground and "Time and Being."

Degree

Ph.D.

Subject Area

Philosophy

COinS