We had another great session of the Being and Time/Derrida discussion group today, especially thanks to our great discussion organizer.  What stood out to me: We asked what Heidegger is doing with the question of Being, since this isn’t immediately obvious.  If Hegel is right and Being is just the most general concept, then it isn’t clear what we can say about it as there would be no more general predicate that could describe Being.  For the Greeks and presencing, by contrast, Being is the most tangible.  Homer identifies Athena appears in manifest presence to Odysseus while Telemachus only sees here as a normal woman (Odyssey, Book 16 (lines 155–163 in A. T. Murray’s translation).  I’m reminded of the Platonic notion of Beauty appearing incarnate in the beautiful person (Phaedo, parousia), or houseness appearing incarnate in the beautiful mansion.  In the seminar we also noted the scholastic interpretation of Being as essentia/existentia, the chair being brown and hard in terms of “what” it is, and badly placed in the center of the gym during a basketball game in terms of “how” it is.  Heidegger seems to have seen the culmination of this essentia/existentia meta-physics with Nietzsche’s inversion of Platonism in Heidegger’s big Nietzsche book with essentia as Will to Power (e.g., Niagara Falls may appear as a wonder of the world to the tourist but as noise pollution to the local resident) and existentia as Eternal Return (e.g., Ecclesiates’ notion of repetition and nothing new under the sun – Ecclesiastes 1:9).  We began to think about the distinction of present-at-hand and ready to hand, not just directly, but as Heidegger says in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysic if we are in doubt that the table is broken, we resolve the dispute by appealing to the table at hand right now.  Really interesting session today and that’s the material that spoke to my ear, and I’ll report back after the next session in 2 weeks!

ps

I thought a bit about Geometry and Reason. That makes me think of when Heidegger says “in Leibniz’s sense, a ratio sufficiens, a sufficient reason, isn’t at all a ground capable of supporting a being so that it doesn’t straightaway fall into nothing. A sufficient reason is one that reaches and offers to beings that which puts them in the position of fulfilling their full essence, that is, perfectio.” I interpret Heidegger here to mean an increase in reason lets the entity appear more and more perfectly/completely. For example, a right angle triangle is going to appear very differently to (1) a young child learning her shapes, and conversely to (2) a teenager learning the Pythagorean theorem, and finally (3) a university geometry professor teaching a unit on the history of the geometric and algebraic proofs of the Pythagorean theorem. It’s difficult to see reason allowing beings to fulfill their essence directly, but in the above example with the “difference” between neophyte (child learner), apprentice (teenage learner), and master (expert professor) we can phenomenalize it or coax it out of hiddeness.