November 26, 2003
returning home
This is courtesy of Rick over at Artrift
Boryana Dragovea
It's been a while since I visited the Artrift. I'm too tired to struggle with the 3rd part of the Stephen David Ross interview. I had intended to pick up where I'd left off here. The aesthetic as shock.
Heidegger is attractive because he argued that people do not exist apart from the world but, rather, are intimately caught up in and immersed. There is, in other words, an "undissolvable unity" between people and world This situation‑-always given, never escapable‑-is what Heidegger called Dasein, or being-in-the-world.
What is also attractive is the way being-in-the-world is conected to place. Place is a central ontological structure of being-in-the world partly because of our existence as embodied beings. We are "bound by body to be in place"; thus, for example, the very physical form of the human body immediately regularizes our world in terms of here-there, near-far, up-down, above-below, and right-left.
What I don't accept in Heidegger is his animal human divide which presupposes that mammals and birds, everything nonhuman, are language to exclude language. Animals do have a language. They do communicate.
Heidegger's failure to acknowledge this means that he remains a prisoner of the very Cartesianism he had overturned with his category of being-in-the world.
That's enough philosophy for tonight.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at November 26, 2003 10:12 PM | TrackBack