gary e. davis
I’ll start indirectly, please, but brief precursory attention serves interest in conceptuality beyond “Dasein,” beyond “ontology.”
If I say “It’s raining,” I could be teased with a literal-minded retort “What’s raining?”
(Kids!) Obviously, (1) the sky’s raining; and (2) “There’s rain,” to which one could retort “Where?”
From the sky, of course. The sky rains, or more exactly: Clouds are raining. One could say, oddly, “It gives rain.”
Actually, we translate the German “Es gibt” (It gives) as “There is” because that’s the German sense of the phrase. But Heidegger, late in life, wanted to emphasize the words: It gives:
It gives time. It gives being.
“Dasein”
‘Dasein’ is commonly (proximally) regarded as we regard “human existence.” But Heidegger wanted Germans to understand ‘Dasein’ as “there being.”
Commonly in English scholarship, ‘Dasein’ is translated as “being there.” But that’s not what Heidegger had in mind. He wanted to focus on the character of the original term, which arose from the German sense of persons as minds aware as persons can be (distinct from other animals). We’re minds in the way we regard not only what’s there, but how it’s there as per-
sons can let there be someone or something.
So, Heidegger begins with the proximal meaning of ‘Dasein’ (persons as persons) for pros-
pecting a primordial engagement with conceptuality. There being ‘Dasein’ (the term) with its history of usage in the historicity of lives is analyzed relative to the prevailing historicality (academic conceptuality) of its time for the sake of introducing new conceptuality which better serves his interest in actualizing “authentic potential for being.” There being such historicality in one’s historicity is brought into a conception of belonging together which Being and Time prospects. The conceptuality isn’t a new ontology. It’s the conceptuality which it is. That conceptuality is the fundamental purpose of Being and Time: being as how it is.
beyond “fundamental ontology”
But Heidegger’s calling that conceptual prospecting “fundamental ontology” was confounded
by his intent to deconstruct being “ontological” in historical time. So, he gives up the rubric. He wasn’t after a new ontology; rather, he sought a new conceptuality which is post-“onto-
logical,” i.e., which evinces from an immanent beginning for thinking of conceptuality which was beyond the “First Beginning” by the Greeks.
Going back to the Greeks was not about reviving a lost sense of being which the history of philosophy concealed. Rather, a better conceptuality of being, available to us now (in prin-
ciple), can be realized to have been intuited by the Greeks, but lost. Yet, what can be originary now in unprecedented ways is not as the classical Greeks thought, but as inception of our times, appropriate for our times.
Being and Time is not ontological. Its conceptuality is phenomenological in especially con-
ceptual terms (inceptual withness or with-inceptuality) which is the conceptuality of Being and Time. That is, Being and Time was not an instance of some other kind of discourse. It’s
a conceptual analysis of there being phenomenality with us in terms of being and time itself.
Lectures and courses afterward are about the conceptuality of their topics, which are often about “ontological” presumptions of historicity and historical claims. But the thinking itself is the conceptuality of each course.
The oddity that Heidegger avows at the opening of Being and Time that the analysis will pro-
ceed “concretely,” but then proceeds very conceptually, expresses Heidegger’s intent that
we are supposed to work through it relative to our own life. We are not supposed to adopt the conceptuality of Being and Time as the basis of one’s own understanding; rather, to think through Being and Time about one’s (and our) lives in our “ownmost” way.
In fact, our relation with Being and Time is textual. There being that text is the initial and final reality of Being and Time. In fact, there’s “textuality” to speech (so analyzed by Derrida’s Grammatlogy of writing-in-speech). Textual presence is integral to there being any relation to “Heidegger.” Your disposition (“state-of-mind”) in understanding Heidegger is discourse you enact by way of the text.
There being textuality is integral to Heidegger’s conception of there being discourse medi-
ating different understandings in being with each other. There being textuality is integral to there being articulate life.
“Daseinanalysis”
Dasein analysis is Being and Time: conceptual analysis of the articulate phenomenality of there being our questioning of who we are, as that conceptual venture, that experiment in conceptual prospecting.
Analysis of articulate phenomenality can be very useful for overtly psychologcial analysis relative to the language of standard psychology. Heidegger of Being and Time would (or did) understand phenomenological psychology in terms of Being and Time. Applied to psycho-
analytic interests, conceptual analysis of there being phenomenality between “us” becomes phenomenological psychoanalysis.
Professional versions of that express conceptual analysis of Being and Time applied to psy-
choanalytic interests in the manner of those who avow “Daseinanalysis” as a specific kind of approach to psychotherapy. The “manner” is relative to the applied interest. There can be disagreement about the degree to which “Daseinanalysis” closely appreciates Being and Time.
There’s difference between (1) conceptual analysis of there being phenomenality in various approaches to psychoanalysis; and (2) the particular kind of thinking which is profession-
alized as “Daseinanalysis.” ‘Dasein’ is the ordinary name for there being phenomenality to-and-by persons; and analysis of phenomenality (phenomenological analysis) can be applied to any kind of approach to understanding, be it a life, a text, or the “worlding of the world” in the “mirrorplay” of our receptiveness (“granting”) and responsiveness (“bearing”) reflected in our “belonging together in the Same” time of being given to care about whomever or whatever is reigning for the time being.
“Mitdasein” in proximally shared terms may be a way into shared engagement with inceptions of-and-with being (“Mitsein”) figuratively, tropically.