Heidegger and Hegel on Being: A Comparative Analysis (original) (raw)

Hegels revisions of the Doctrine of Being

to be published in Rivista di Storia della Filosofia , 2020

This essay aims to demonstrate a clear and significant difference, not merely expository revisions or additions, in the logical progression of Being between Hegel's two main versions of the Doctrine of Being (1812-1817 and 1827-1830, 1832). This controversial issue is analysed by retracing and examining changes that international scholarship still widely neglects. Focussing on Hegel's introduction of the doubled transition of Quality and Quantity in the genesis of Measure, the essay argues that the main point of the revisions is that Hegel views the whole determinateness of Being as self-sublating its own externality, because in one determination of Being passing into another one, the first does not vanish; instead, both remain within their relational unity. Hegel's new version of the genesis of Measure indicates an essentially qualitative appreciation of the quantitative methods of the empirical sciences. This accords with Hegel's growing acknowledgment in Berlin of the independent cognitive status of the natural sciences in regard to philosophy, and with his reassessment of the relation among intuition, representation and conceptual cognition of the objects of consciousness, to do justice to their real differences and their being for themselves within their own existence.

Heidegger on the Question of Being

Martin Heidegger on Technology, Ecology, and the Arts, 2014

The central issue is the question of Being. Heidegger’s principal intention is to reawaken the Western world to what he feels has been lost in the history of Western metaphysics. In Heidegger’s interpretation, Being, a process of dynamic emergence, equated with the life force in all primitive societies, was converted by western philosophers into a transcendent Form, a substance, or a God. As a consequence, philosophy as thinking disappears behind the engineering of increasingly elaborate metaphysical systems that lead us to forget the mystery of Being. Heidegger proposes that we go back to a point in the history of ideas where the thinking of Being involved a relation to a dynamic process, rather than the erection of metaphysical scaffolding.

Heidegger and Aristotle: The Twofoldness of Being

2007

A fi rst generation of Heidegger's students were quick to identify the importance for him of Aristotle's philosophy. Th ey had sat in his lectures and seminars from the early twenties, fi rst in Freiburg im-Breisgau, in Marburg, and again in Freiburg: they heard Heidegger's protracted discussions of Aristotle's texts. Th e title of one set of lectures, from 1921 give a sense of the direction of the reading: Phenomenological Interpretation of Aristotle: Introduction to Phenomenological Research (GA 61, 1984). Aristotle's writings were to be read as a source for following through and radicalising the phenomenological innovations of Edmund Husserl (1856-1938). Heidegger himself, in the late essay 'On Time and Being' (1962), testifi es to the importance for his earliest development of the gift, in 1907, of a study by Franz Brentano: On the manifold senses of being for Aristotle (1862). Th is preoccupation with the manifold senses of being, which must all the same be thought as a unity, can be linked to the diff erences between the unity of logos, as Rede, and its various modes of being said, as Gerede, which is structural to the development of the argument of Being and Time (1927). Th is distinction between Gerede and Rede informs the analysis of the diff erences between the tendency to fallenness into the world, and an authentic self-attestation of Dasein, in its ontical and ontological distinctiveness, as having a relation to its own being. In this fi rst generation of students, the work of Helena Weiss, Hans Georg Gadamer, Otto Poeggeler, and Hannah Arendt all attest to the challenge posed by Heidegger's writings. Th e task is to return to Aristotle, under the guidance of a retrieval of the question of the meaning of being, both to work through to an understanding of the unity of Aristotle's thinking, and to develop alternatives in the twentieth century to the dead ends of Cartesian dualism. By contrast, a second and a third generation of students have access to the famous early lectures and seminars only by second hand, by means of rumour, and in the outline of a critique of Aristotle, indicated, but not carried out in Being and Time. Th e proposal to destroy the history of ontology sits uneasily alongside this claim, from section 29, about Aristotle's Rhetoric: 'Contrary to the traditional orientation, according to which rhetoric is conceived as the kind of thing we "learn in school", this work of Aristotle must be taken as the fi rst systematic hermeneutic of the everydayness of Being with one another.' (SZ 138, MR 178).Th e destruction of Aristotelian ontology is to reveal an Aristotle who contributes to reposing the question of the meaning of being, and to an analysis of the everydayness of Dasein. Th is opens up a duplicity in Aristotle's texts, they are to be read against the grain, to release a hermeneutical component, in addition to the question concerning the unity, or meaning, articulating the multiplicity in being.

Article Haecceitas and the Question of Being

2014

ver the thirty years since his death Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) has emerged as one of the key philosophers of the 20th Century. Yet he claimed to be moved throughout the entirety of his work by a single question: the question of the meaning of being. According to Heidegger the ancient Greek thinkers experienced being with a sense of wonder that has been lost in modernity. There has never been a satisfactory answer to this question and philosophers are no longer even perplexed by their inability to answer it. It was the question of being (Seinsfrage) that Heidegger set out to confront in his unfinished master work Being and Time (1927). The young Heidegger years before the publication of that work had been afforded an insight to an aspect of what would become his central concern from what at first might seem an unlikely source: the medieval philosopher and theologian John Duns Scotus. Scotus inspired Heidegger in so far as his thought was in proximity to “real life, ” and while he ...

Comparing and Contrasting Being, Non-Being, and Nothingness: A Review Article

Being is a broad concept that covers subjective and objective features of reality and existence. The history of its philosophy goes back to the pre-Socratics when they attempted to evolve a classification of beings. Since then the notion of being has had various meanings in the Middle Ages, Age of Reason or the transcendental philosophy. However, the present paper mainly focuses on existentialists views on being, non-being and nothingness. It discusses for the existentialists man as a being is entirely free, and being and nonbeing are the same while nothingness is the opposite of being in it-self. Keywords: being, existentialists views, non-being, nothingness

HEIDEGGER AND THE MEANING OF BEING

This paper is about different ways of understanding the notion of ontology, and about correspondingly different senses of 'being'. Heidegger is renowned for probing the question of the meaning of being, but also for writing in a fashion that is immensely obscure and confusing, largely on account of the fact that the word 'being' is used so often and in so many different ways. My hope in this paper is to clarify some of his central uses of the notion, and to offer a reading of his work that displays the way his expression of his philosophical views was forced to change in order to approach the conception of ontology he was trying to communicate.

Understanding the Concept of Being in general: From Being and Time back to Young Heidegger

Conatus, 2024

This paper exhibits a way of understanding Heidegger's concept of being in general [Sein überhaupt] -the central aim of Being and Time's questioning- by getting insight into his early years. I argue that the term "being" [Sein] as Heidegger understands it in the early 1920s describes the meaningful relation between humans and the things of their surrounding world which is given to us as a fact. I maintain that Sein überhaupt refers to this fact, i.e., the fact that every particular being is always with a certain meaning for us. I come to this conclusion by exploring (1) Heidegger's early analysis of Umwelterlebnis, (2) his early description of medieval transcendentia, (3) his critique of formalization and the introduction of formal indication. Lastly, (4) I observe the way Heidegger introduces the concepts of Sein and Sein überhaupt pointing to the simple fact of beings' being in meaningful relation to us.