Heidegger: An Introduction by Richard Polt

Author:Richard Polt [Polt, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781134574308
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2013-10-16T00:00:00+00:00

This is one of the most relativistic-sounding passages in Heidegger’s writings. It may seem that he is saying that any interpretation is as good as any other – but that reading goes against the grain of his thought. It makes more sense to read him as saying that ancient and modern physics are both illuminating: they unconceal different sides of experience.21 But such claims presume that we moderns can somehow take part in the ancient understanding of the world, and decide whether it is illuminating. How is this possible? How can we transcend our own epoch or place to understand and assess some other culture’s ways of unconcealing? Heidegger clearly thinks that this can be done, since he devotes a great deal of energy to interpreting the Greeks and deciding what is true and untrue in their thought. But this cannot involve rising above history. Instead, it involves a confrontation and dialogue with the other.22 Through this confrontation, we can learn from other ways of understanding the world. As Heidegger’s student Gadamer puts it, our interpretations always have a historical boundary, or “horizon”, but it is possible to carry out a “fusion of horizons” with others’ interpretations. We are finite, but flexible. And once we have been initiated into a new interpretation, we can decide to what extent it helps us uncover the phenomena.23

Entities, then, are unconcealed in various ways to Dasein at various times. And Being is the difference that entities make to Dasein. We might ask, then: isn’t Being itself historical? Does it make any sense to look for a single meaning of Being? These are questions that must have given Heidegger pause as he attempted to compose Part One, Division III of Being and Time. His later work no longer gives the impression, as Being and Time does, that we can find some ahistorical meaning of Being. As we will see in our next chapter, rather than establishing a single concept of Being, he tries to understand how Being “essentially unfolds” in history.

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