You look at Heidegger, as Sartre does. You find an absence of phenomenology. So you do it for the guy, and it turns out his theory goes poof. It’s got no legs; it’s like a dot.com before the 2000 meltdown. You have to short it; its books don’t balance. Its whole rally is suspect.
==================================================================

Where is the unitary phenomenon called Dasein? What is unitary in Pierre's being unexpected across town when he is due at the café to meet Sartre? If German intelligence agents are watching the two of them and have information about the appointment, maybe they do not find to be unexpected what I found unexpected. No unity there.

Maybe they imagined that Pierre might decline to appear so that there is no suspicion of a meeting of a possible resistance cell. But maybe they also imagine their source for the meeting is unreliable. Maybe they need to do some checking. No unity there.

So Sartre, on reflection, may surmise that he needs to get lost. Pierre will somehow get hold of him later. Maurice may be the go-between. Possible unity there, unless the Germans get warm to Maurice.

Sartre needs another smoke.
================================================================

Where is the unity in this little slice of Parisian Dasein? There are all these negatives in it. Nothingness haunts being everywhere.

“Let’s just gloss this over and call it ‘being with others’.”

“Call it what you like, just don’t fail to see its lack of unity.”

“Well, it’s just all these people doing all these things.”

“Yes, and not doing other things which you’d prefer to have double as doing things.”

“Well, see here. I’ll pull out the Greek hermeneutics of ‘being.’ I’ll call that phenomenology, and we can dispute for forty years. I’ll show you that your theory of being is wrong. I’ll show you that the nihilation of the nothing ‘is’ being.”

“I don’t have a theory. I have an ontology, if you want to call it that, which is derived from descriptions of everyday affairs. The affairs make sense as they stand, otherwise you could not write about them. Plays, novels, vignettes would not make sense, if I should take negation out of them. My ontology has no more force than the affairs I have described. But it has that. I stand with my descriptions. No hermeneutic will make them false. ”

If language is the house of being, read Holmes.

Look again at the café, with Sartre there to keep his appointment. The appointment is not an item in the café, If you say it is like an item in the café, then Sartre did not have it going in. If you put it outside the café, then there is no reason for Sartre to enter.

But let’s somehow make the appointment part of the landscape. Suppose you say the appointment is something that Sartre can keep or cancel. So you put it in the horizon in some way. The horizon now becomes something other than merely what is possible to perceive (present at hand) or use (ready to hand).

The appointment is certainly not something to which the multitude is privy. It’s not as though the Stones have billing. It’s just Pierre. If it is part of the horizon, it is personal, although others may know about it.

So maybe it is something ready to hand in a complex sense. After all, it can be used to impeach Pierre’s character if he does not show. A lawyer could use it if he had testimony or knew of it from a post-it note or an e-mail.

However, whatever you throw into the horizon at this level: expectations, needs, foolish notions, etc., they are somebody’s expectations, needs, or folly.

“I figured he’d show with some money.”
“So what happened?”
“He hit me up for every last nickel.”
“What?”
“He gave me the old “sick-wife-and-kids” story.”
“Lame. Both of you.”

If they are nobody’s, the above dialogue makes no sense.

If I see Pierre across town, do I know he is breaking his appointment with Sartre? Only if I know of Sartre’s arrangement. Then he becomes the unexpected Pierre. Sartre’s introduction of negation back at the café provides a ground for another negation where I am.

How could you write a mystery without Sartre’s “negatite”?

Note that there is a phenomenology behind Sartre's ontology, in contradistinction to Heidegger's.

Returning to the example of Pierre and the café, recall that there are the things in the café and the people. The people are others and pose a bit of a confusion at this stage of Sartre’s analysis. He raises the case of others later on with what he calls “the look”.

To make the analysis simple, let’s take the others out of the café and make it empty of patrons. Sartre is still looking for Pierre; he has the appointment with him, etc. The cafe and its contents are there. There is no basis to say anything is missing by simply looking over the café. It is Sartre’s appointment that introduces the possibility of Pierre’s absence.

For the purpose of his ontology, Sartre calls the things in the café and the café “being in itself.” Nothingness is not a part of them unless it is introduced independently of them.

So they are beings to which nothingness is introduced.

“There is something wrong with the cabinet.”
“What?”
“It won’t fit in the corner.”
“Yeah, and it won’t hold all our wine glasses.”
“ Well, then, we’ll forget it.”

There are also beings that introduce nothingness.

A shopper is a being “for itself.”

Sporting delight:

A: “Think you can do it?”
B: “Got to.”
A: “It’ll be a real stretch.”
C: “What are you talking about?”
A: “There is this pipe. It’s Coach’s. He uses it to see if guys can reach end to end. If you can’t, you’re off the team. He figures if you can’t, there will be shots you won’t take or block.”
C: “Son of a bitch.”
B: “You got that right.”
C: “What about the jump?”
A: “He’s a “reach guy”; that comes later.”
C: “How long is the pipe?”
B: “Long.”


If B can stretch the length of the pipe, he has the length Coach wants. The ends of the pipe only matter insofar as he can reach them. The ends are separated by the length he has to reach. On the other hand, to measure the length, the ends are the key. The length he has to reach becomes secondary.

In each case there is a negation. In the first case, the ends are not paramount. As ends of a shorter pipe, they would have the same function. It would just be easier to reach them. Here it is the length of the pipe that counts. You have to reach it. That comes first.

In the second case, the question of reaching the full length drops out. It is the ends that take on primacy in the measurement. Here the ends function as limits to a segment beyond which it does not extend. Here there is the negation of what you have to reach. One says how long the pipe is, not how it is to reach the full length of it.

Negation is in this very simple situation. There is a figure and ground here. You have two ways to look at the segment. You can shift from one to the other. In the first case, you have a distance to cover. In the second you have a segment to measure. (B&N 24, 25)

The ready to hand of Heidegger, Sartre shows, has negation shot through it.

So does average everydayness. I can look at a kid and tell him his hair has a being-towards-combing. But what does this mean? It means it’s not combed, and it needs to be.

To hell with Holderlin:

Whatever its significance in the Poundian corpus, the poem below(4/25), “The Rest”, is a brilliant collection of negatites, each layered on the other, to be denied at the end, by the denied, to wit, the exile who has negated his exile.

Heidegger says “The Nothing nothings”. Or “Das Nichts nichtet.” But Sartre asks what are we to do with these “little pools” of negativity such as Pierre’s absence if nothingness is simply a withdrawal from being?

If nothingness is simply a withdrawal, as in Heideggerian dread, “if I emerge in nothingness beyond the world, how can this extra-mundane nothingness furnish a foundation for those little pools of non-being which we encounter each instant in the depth of being?” (B&N, 23)

"So take me to the station,
And put me on a train,
I’ve got no expectations
To pass through here again."

O helpless few in my country.
O remnant enslaved!

Artists broken against her,
A-stray, lost in the villages,
Mistrusted, spoken against.

Lovers of beauty, starved,
Thwarted with systems,
Helpless against the control;

You who cannot wear yourselves out
By persisting to successes,
You who can only speak,
Who cannot steel yourselves into reiteration;

You of the finer sense,
Broken against false knowledge,
You who know at first hand,
Hated, shut in, mistrusted:

Take thought:
I have weathered the storm,
I have beaten out my exile.

E. Pound, Personae(92)

“You're good, kid, but as long as I'm around, you're only second best.”

Sartre has the chance from this analysis to say that being and nothingness are irreducible opposites. They are just that in the phenomenology that leads to the minimal position.

They could be said to be just that in the phenomenology of perception that we have just gone through. Seeing that negation is part of absence, even part of perceiving anything at all, might have led Sartre to reject wholly the figure/ground account of perception.

That which Husserl lifted from the Gestalt theorists and inflated into a structure of consciousness Sartre could have thrown aside. But he holds the Gestalt view of the horizon and continues to play with it on the ontological level.

For this purpose, Sartre lets Hegel frame the origin of the discourse. Sartre sees nothingness as posterior to being, for non-phenomenological reasons. He does not see being and non-being as empty abstractions, as Hegel did. Sartre thinks he can improve on Hegel’s position in ontology. It seems not to have occurred to him that he may have needed no ontology at all.

In fact, the minimal position (stated on 4/8/06) does not lead to ontology (as stated on 4/10/06). But Sartre writes his ontology anyway.

In an ontology, being has to have a place vis-a-vis nothingness. So Sartre gives being priority and says “it is from being that nothingness derives its efficacy.” (B&N, 19) He could have said “nothingness haunts being” without this priority. But instead he says “this is what we mean when we say that nothingness haunts being.” (B&N, 19)

What “efficacy”? An ontological efficacy, whatever that is, because the phenomenology does quite well without it.

While the minimal position sweeps Heidegger away, the ontology has its use, because it goes toe to toe with Heidegger, showing the mischaracterization of humanity in Being and Time.

Why, however, think “background-foreground” at all? If I am walking over to the bar at the café to get another beer, is the men’s room in the background? Suppose I don’t even know where it is?

“Well, it is there for you if you need it”, someone might note. “Yes, but so is that piece of paper under the far table, and I’m not the clean-up guy.”

I’m writing this text. My ancient copy of Being and Nothingness is over to my right under a small pile of articles by Badiou. It is in the background. What about Frazer’s Golden Bough? I have not looked at or thought of it in years. Is it?

“Well, it is there for you if you need it”, someone might note.

Notice a pattern here? I just suggested a random book somewhere on my shelf. Don’t even know where it is. Come to think of it, it might have got thrown out. Not sure. Somebody has now stuffed it into the background.

What about the Library of Congress and its multitudinous textual seas?

“Well, it is there for you if you need it”, someone might note.

This is beginning to sound like a villanelle.

What if I don’t need it? What if it’s never an issue? Why say it is in the background at all? Because the model says it must be. If it’s not in the foreground, well, then it must be in the background.

What about Lancey Howard's hole card when he folds to the Kid? If I'm the Kid, is it in the background, ever?

================================================================


Sartre shows that in the case of Pierre and the café, there is something that is neither background nor foreground. He shows that, in essence, if there is a clearing, what accounts for presence and absence (i.e., the appointment to meet Pierre) is not in it.

Is there a clearing? This is where the first nihilation comes into play. If I cannot see that “this is not that”, there cannot be a clearing. Negation is at the base of any clearing at all. Nothingness is in the mix at the ground floor.

But if I can see that this is not that, I can look back at this and see what it was a moment ago. There is no lag, no confusion, no profundity to explain for forty years.

This is another reason why Sartre thinks that nothingness really does haunt being.

Like it or not, it haunts Heidegger, too.

"He came with the name Cincinnati.."
(Tough world to play cards in.)

Imagine the clearing, if you will, as a kind of living M.C. Escher painting, or as a changing Rorschach blot. You look at it one way, with this foreground and this background.

Oops, you can’t see both. I’m wrong. Well, let me go back to the foreground. But is it the same as it was last time? Well, let me look at the background. Silly me. This isn’t easy. What am I talking about?

Imagine now that from this that you have concluded that you really can’t say much about the painting or the blot, because you have a moving target. In fact you’re not sure if ‘target’ is the right word, so if you were to write it, you’d need to write a line through it, because you don’t really want to say it’s a target, although it is(in one sense, maybe not even a sense) because you’re shooting at it, but it’s not(in another sense, maybe not even a sense), because you can’t really hit it.

It’s rather like what happens with an exponential moving average and its application to a financial time series. It’s high-powered, you can change the exponents, but you just can’t yank the lag out of it. But I do not mean ‘really like it’, but ‘rather like it’, with a line through ‘rather’.

That sounds profound. Maybe we can invent a word to name this lag (but put a line through ‘lag’) in talking about being. Why not call it a ‘trace’? We can then spend forty years talking about its dynamic in philosophy and literature. We can also talk about ‘eventing’, a term for what is really going on in the clearing. We can make it the ground of a hermeneutics of being. Then we can compare what the trace is to eventing; we can have a kind of cross fertilization, and grow a robust hybrid.

(Don't know what I'm holdin', so I don't know when to fold 'em.)

"This world is half the devil's and my own,
Daft with the drug that's smoking in a girl,
And curling round the bud that forks her eye..."

Sartre’s account shows that Heidegger’s notion of the clearing does not account either for presence or absence. If it accounts for the being of something, it does not account for it being present, as in present and accounted for in a roll call, or as in absent for the same. Expectation is independent of whatever clearing Heidegger posits. A roll, an appointment book, a promise to be some place, even a suggestive ‘maybe’ with a Carly Simon smile may set contexts that lie beyond the clearing.

To fold them back into the clearing is impossible phenomenologically, because without a context, Pierre’s absence is impossible. I have to come to the clearing with the appointment.

If there is an ebb and flow of being in the clearing, which consists of the tables, chairs, denizens, etc., of the café, the appointment has nothing to do with it. Someone else sitting there may see precisely what I see. Without an expectation of someone, he cannot see that anyone is absent, unless he knows about my deal to meet Pierre.

One can see why Sartre thought that nothingness haunted being.

“That seat taken?”

“Uh…”

One could not have the Friday night hustle without it.

From this phenomenology, Sartre argues that the expectation of Pierre has caused the double nihilation. Certainly I would not have relegated any of these people back into the ground as “not Pierre” if I were not looking for him, and I would not have been looking for him, if I did not expect him to be there.

So I am the key to Pierre’s absence. The café must be there, but I am the one from whom the double nihilation arises. Pierre’s absence, which is a fact, comes from me as well as the café. I have to have the café for the ground. It is independent of me. But the double nihilation comes from me. In the first nihilation I simply distinguish objects and people. I can see that this person is not that one, implying a negation at the ground floor. In the second nihilation, I see that Pierre is not (among) any of them.

The first nihilation could possibly be chalked up to being. An ontologist of Heideggerian persuasion could say that “of course you have to distinguish something either ready to or present at hand.” The Heideggerian will pack the first nihilation into Dasein. So the first nihilation will not count. It will be said to be the condition of the possibility of any particular thing being perceived or used.

But the second does. Absence requires me to reject possible candidates as not Pierre. That is where negation creeps in to an analysis of being in the world, if it has not already crept in with the first nihilation.

The concepts of foreground and background, or figure and ground, are insufficient to account for absence. Pierre is absent from whole café. (B&N12) Foreground and background, figure and ground, do not account for this. There is a third thing that is fundamental, my expectation of Pierre, which has been missed by intentionality, understood in terms of figure and ground.

Remember this: whatever complaint you have with Sartre on this score is not a complaint per se against the minimal position. The minimal position assumes no figure and ground.

There is a good reason from this case that it does not. Sartre rejects it here. Sartre is telling the reader that intentionality, as figure and ground, is insufficient to account for the case in which I cannot find Pierre. If it cannot account for the case in which I do not find him, it cannot account for the case in which I do.

So if the clearing of Heidegger is supposed to be a movement from background to foreground (and the reverse) in the analysis of the meaning of being, it is missing a third term that negates it away.

This has destructive implications for Heidegger’s theory of deconstruction, but also for Derrida, who has his own theory of deconstruction. Heidegger's theory is gone; Derrida's needs to be examined for analogous flaws.

“Ear, ear for the sea surge; rattle of old men’s voices.”
(Canto 7)

Toward a clearing

Sartre approaches the case of Pierre and the café from the point of view of a phenomenology of perception. Sartre gives a description of perception, which rests on a kind of Husserlian account of intentionality. Sartre’s phenomenology of perception assumes that one can reduce looking for Pierre to seeing a figure and ground, which is the basis of intentionality.

In the description, what I am attending to becomes the figure above the ground of the café. From my point of view, if I see a table, the rest of the café settles in behind it, becoming an object of purely marginal attention. (B&N,11)

As I bring a table into view, Sartre says that I negate the ground of the rest of the café. ‘I negate’ just means ‘I distinguish’ the table from the rest of people and medium-sized pieces of dry goods sitting around.

But when I am looking for Pierre, I examine all the people among the goods. I bring them into view as figures (the original nihilation), in which I see that some particular figure is not the ground.

Then I negate them again, relegating them back to the ground since each is not Pierre. This is what Sartre calls the ‘double nihilation.’ (B&N,12) In this, figures are raised from the ground(the first nihilation) and cast back into the ground (the second nihilation), since they are not Pierre.

Thus, we have a description of the perception involved in Pierre’s absence.

Dead by debit.

Earlier remarks have shown that Heidegger does not do much, if any, phenomenology, in the sense of offering descriptions of something for its subsequent analysis. So he has no phenomenology of what it is for something to be missing.

But he has an ontological account of being missing in the sense of “being still outstanding.” “The remainder yet to be received when a debt is to be balanced off, is still outstanding” When the remainder comes successively along, the money comes in to liquidate the debt.(B&T, H 242).

Let me think of this in a small business. If I have $10,000 of a $40,000 debt, $30,000 is still outstanding. That is the sense in which the $30,000 is missing. It is an outstanding part of a totality, i.e., the original $40,000 debt. So my not having the $30,000, is still having it as part of the $40,000 totality.

However, a problem arises when the debtor fails to pay the debt. Suppose he writes it off in bankruptcy. Do we now have a new totality of $10,000 only, the difference between the old totality and the new totality being $30,000?

In accounting, I have to write the debt off. I have to say the money is gone. I have to take a loss. Are we going to subsume the write off, the being gone of the money, the loss, etc., to the difference of the new totality versus the old one?

How do I distinguish the case above from the one in which the $30,000 was never there to pay me back? That would occur in the case where the borrower had no intent to repay the balance. That he intended to pay the $10,000 back as a show of good faith and then leave town. Here my $30,000 is stolen with a false promise.

In the one case, I have a loss to a debtor who just cannot pay, in the other to a crook, who will not pay and told me things that were not true to get my money. Am I indifferent to his lies when I book the loss? One case is in bankruptcy court; the other I might refer to the District Attorney. If I have a board of directors, there might be some furious questions about the latter case, because I, as officer of the company, was taken. There are internal control problems to consider such as how did this man get sold the goods on credit in the first place?

The totality of 'being-still-outstanding' does not account for the difference in the two transactions. In each case, there is a different negative to explain them. In the first case, a business has gone bankrupt and cannot pay me. In the second case, the debtor never meant to pay me. There are two more negatives that need to be turned into positives just to get these cases straight.

In either case, I have to put the loss somewhere. It is a loss, in which my assets are reduced by $30,000 and my equity in my business is reduced by $30,000.

If I do enough of these bad loans, my business is not a going concern. When it is not a going concern is it still a totality? Just a totality of zero? What about the dead phones and my customers who are calling me, missing me as Sartre is missing Pierre? Are the goods that I owe them “still outstanding” for them?

There is a problem for Heidegger in that ‘being still outstanding’ cannot gloss over the negative. A ‘minus’ sign between totalities and the resulting difference does not at all get the drift of what happened.

Nor does it get the drift if I lose $30 outright in a card game. Or if my pocket gets picked. Here again there is no totality at all, and there is no being still outstanding. You have to redefine nothing( i.e., zero, zip, nada) as something, by calling it a totality of nothing, in order to avoid refutation by a simple description of losses.

Philosophy is not won with redefinition. Debates may be; you can sometimes persuade debate judges(even the body politic) with that device. But you cannot do philosophy with it. Once again Heidegger’s position is shown either to be false or tautological(true by definition only).

Sartre makes a similar move with regard to his wallet in which he expects to find 1500 francs and there are only 1300. He bases his argument on a phenomenology of perception and not simple accounting, as in the analysis above. But he has the point, nonetheless. (B&N, 13)

He did not get it from me; I from him.

In sum, on 4/8, there is the argument that the question of the meaning of being lacks context; that it is fair to say that it is not in point as other questions, such as “Where is Pierre?” These questions arise out of a context that is understandable. The question of the meaning of being does not so arise. One has to create a false context for it.

On 4/10 there is the argument that the being of the questioner does not need disclosure for the question to be clear. Thus, no particular ontology is necessary to an analysis of questioning.

On 4/13 there is the argument that the question of the meaning of being makes no sense because it is not in point with respect to Sartre’s particular question in the café, ‘Where is Pierre?’ Thus the ontic does not imply the ontological if you purchase the argument from the minimal position.

Included in the argument on April 13 is the syllogism that concludes that idle talk needs no disclosure. Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety depends on idle talk requiring disclosure. Anxiety is supposed to reveal the unified phenomonon of being in the world. It does not, for reasons already cited on April 4.

Heidegger is getting a genuine drubbing, but he can rally in the 15th round with a knockout, if he can somehow subsume the negatives that Sartre believes are primary to describing the situation of Pierre’s absence in the café. If he cannot, he will have lost every round to the challenger.

Let me state an argument from the minimal position this way, citing the contextual use of transparency on April 8, i.e.,

“To say that questioning is transparent simply means that one can understand it without referring to something other than it and the context in which it arises.”

This means merely that one can say all that he needs to say about a question based upon it and its context. One can do this because there are real negatives in the example of the absent Pierre, which allow one to make any distinctions he needs to make, within the context of the question. One can say whether the question is clear or unclear, answered or unanswered, etc. There is no disclosure beyond this.

These negatives cause a problem for the question of the meaning of being. They enable one to be clear at a level that puts the garden variety ontologist out of business. The ontologist wants to subsume the negatives into something else. Sartre says no.

Here is the argument:

Part of idle talk is questioning
Questioning is transparent (April 8).
Therefore, part of idle talk is transparent.

Whatever is transparent needs no disclosure.
Questioning is transparent (April 8).
Therefore, questioning needs no disclosure.

Part of idle talk is questioning
Questioning needs no disclosure.
Therefore, part of idle talk needs no disclosure.

Sartre’s question, ‘Where is Pierre?’ is a questioning.
Questioning needs no disclosure.
Therefore, Sartre’s question needs no disclosure.

If Heidegger’s question of the meaning of being makes sense, there must be something about the being of Sartre’s question that needs to be disclosed.

But Sartre’s question needs no disclosure.

Therefore, Heidegger’s question of the meaning of being makes no sense.

In the beginning was the word, the word
That from the solid bases of the light
Abstracted all the letters of the void;
And from the cloudy bases of the breath
The word flowed up, translating to the heart
First characters of birth and death.

(D. Thomas, Collected Poems, p 27.)

What about the being of the questioner? Does it not need disclosure? Perhaps so. Perhaps no. Sartre offers an account of the being of the questioner in his ontology, so he must think that one is necessary.

However, I don’t need to make Sartre’s disclosure (or any disclosure) to make the argument that questioning is transparent. Irrespective of the nature of the questioner, questioning can be made clear from the context in which it arises.

Well, you say, then you do presume there is the context of the question. Of course I do, in this case alone. If there were not something to ask about, there would not be a question. Then there would be no context of a question to presume. Remember the parallel status of being and nothingness. I can also say there is no occasion for a question.

Well, what about the situation in which there is either a context or there is not? Cannot the two be sublimed into one? No. That is the point of the example of Pierre and the café. There is no dialectical bailout of the opposites. The opposites are real. They are concrete.

So they do not presume anything. There is not a being (as a poet might have it) that is begging to be disclosed, whispering dactylically “here I am”, then trochaically exhaling “in the clearing”. Contradictories presume nothing.

The way this argument has gone, it would appear that there is no cause for an ontology that somehow lies beneath the case of the absent Pierre. A minimal position, based simply on central features of the case, merely leads to a position that does not presume that disclosure of being is necessary. Following Ockham, who exhorts one not to multiply presumptions (or beings) beyond necessity, one can say that the minimal position should do quite well.

Phenomenology here does not lead to ontology, for either Heidegger or Sartre.

To Bishop Butler, who said "everything is what it is and not another thing."

At this point, I am going to take a minimal position based on Sartre’s phenomenology. I don’t need to adopt his ontology to state it. I can hold it without the baggage of the cogito, which people love to produce as a Sartrean straw man, because they think it is established that it is easy to refute.

I am going to argue that questioning is transparent, without making any claims about what Sartre calls consciousness. To say that questioning is transparent simply means that one can understand it without referring to something other than it and the context in which it arises.

The questioning of Sartre, the questioner, is perfectly understandable in the case of Pierre and the café. Sartre can tell you why he asks the question, ‘where is Pierre?’ He can tell you how he came to ask it. He can tell you what will answer it. He can tell you why it does not make sense to ask the question of Paul Valery, namely, that Mr. Valery is not supposed to be there.

Generally, a questioner can explain his question, and why he asked it. But there are cases in which he cannot. Suppose he asked it mistakenly, e.g, out of a confusion in his appointment book. That can be cleared up by showing he has the wrong date, or place, or person. When that is clear, it is clear that (and why) he asked the wrong question.

Much goes wrong with questions. But that which goes wrong, can be made right, just as Pierre can clear up his absence by walking in the front door of the café.

We know this to be the case, for Sartre has just shown phenomenologically that there are two real sides to the distinction of ‘is’ and ‘is not’. The sides are equally primary, as the phenomenology reveals.

For this reason, questioning is, in principle, transparent. A question that is asked can be explained. One can explain from the context in which it arises why it is a right question or a wrong question. One can say why it is good or bad, reasonable or unreasonable, pertinent or impertinent, etc. One can say what is absent from a question which would make it clearer. One can say if a question is answered or unanswered.

What relevance does this have to Heidegger’s question of the meaning of being? There is no context out of which one would ask it in the way Heidegger does. The public remembers Clinton’s waffling on the meaning of ‘is’. That was a context. It did not lead to anything like a theory of Ereignis.

One has to invent a context to ask the question. But it is a false context, because parallel to ‘being’ is ‘not being’ or 'nothingness', as Sartre’s phenomenology shows.

Furthermore, there is no problem of what to disclose. There is no such matter to be discussed as the “clearing”. The clearing of what? If there is a clearing of being, it must be of nothing also.

Never mind the point made in early posts: that to answer the question of the meaning of being, you have to be able to ask it from a position beyond the ‘is’, so that your answer is not circular. Once again, the question of the temporal horizon is begged. You have to go beyond the horizon to give an answer of this sort. That need only mean you have to give the answer in no tense. Try it some time without the copula.

In fact, for the time being, I recommend this approach:

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.

(Ode on a Grecian Urn, Stanza 2)

The question of what is missing in idle talk leads one to ask “what is it for something to be missing?” Sartre provides an answer. His account of waiting for Pierre in the café describes a café, which to any observer is a café in the full sense of the word. The café lacks nothing. It has tables, chairs, denizens, coffee, etc. But Pierre is absent. He is said to be absent, however, only because he is expected. Sartre has a date to meet him. The absence of Pierre makes no sense if no one expects him. (B&N, p 10-11)

The question of where Pierre is, is a question Sartre raises based on Pierre’s being expected to be where he is not. This distinction is drawn by Sartre the questioner. Sartre knows Pierre is not where he is supposed to be. So he asks where Pierre is. Pierre is missing from where he is supposed to be.

Questions come out of a context. This one comes out of the situation described above. It is a real situation demanding a real answer. Sartre can explain why he asked the question. His reasons can be derived from the situation. Pierre is missing. Others are not. No reason to ask the question of them. For example, it is true to say Paul Valery is not in the café. But it does not make sense to miss Paul Valery.

Sartre thinks that one implication of the above case is that “nothingness” is as fundamental to the elements of the case as “being.” You need both, for Pierre to be absent. You need the setting of the café (being). You need to be able to say that Pierre is not there (nothingness). Then absence is possible against the backdrop of a question that makes sense to ask, in this case, ‘Where is Pierre?’, which makes sense because Sartre expects him.

So if there is a question of the meaning of being it has to take account of many elements of many situations that have negation bound up in them, among them, absence.

Clearly, Heidegger does not know what these are because his entire thesis about the need to disclose the being of Dasein is based on a misconstruction of something being missing. He thinks there is something missing from idle talk, even though he has not even done a phenomenology of absence. As prior posts indicate, it is questionable whether he has done any phenomenology at all.

This is a genuine burr in Heidegger’s saddle. It is not a simple matter to deal with the question of the meaning of being, the ‘is’ of the copula, when parallel and equally fundamental to it there is the ‘is not’.

To the dogdayed night.

The last four days have revealed:

1) That there is no basis in B&T for saying that being in the world is a unitary phenomenon. (4/1)

2) That there is no basis for saying that being in the world is a phenomenon. (4/3, 4/4)

If being in the world is not a unitary phenomenon, there is not primordial time. If there is not primordial time, there is not primordial being. So Enowning may have been right when he said that Heidegger never changed his position from the first Division of Being and Time onward into his later work.

You could argue that Heidegger was doing phenomenology somewhere in his work and then he quit later on. But there is little reason to say that he was ever doing it. His descriptions tend to be laced with ontological terms that assume a conclusion. They do not function as descriptions, but as props for an assumed ontology.

The description of idle talk is where you can clearly see the buried assumption that Dasein is somehow hiding from itself in everyday talk. It is somehow carried along in a kind of gossip or of passing the word along so that it misses its primordial relation to itself (B&T, p 168).

Where does this missing take place? Where am I looking around for something I’ve missed? Where is the absence in all of this of something that needs disclosure? Heidegger tells me I’m missing something, but my philosophical wallet is full. All of my cards are in it. My money is there, etc. Everything I put there is there. What is missing?

The trouble is that you have to give a phenomenology that shows what is missing. You may not merely say it and have the point made for you. You may not say the point and give a description of selective features to make the point. Rather the point must be made, by a description alone, that something is missing.

Sartre figured this out. It is the reason for Being and Nothingness.

Another day in the life of dear Mr. Spitzer:

Being in the world is not a phenomenon; rather it is at best an analysis of phenomena, anxiety among others. As an analysis, it has a unity, an analytical unity. It could not have anything else; otherwise Heidegger would not have offered it. He would have offered more than one analysis or none at all. If he had offered more than one or none, he would have had no reason to say that being in the world is a unitary phenomenon.

Heidegger appears to have inflated the analytical unity of “being in the world” into that of a unitary phenomenon. So even though he may see a unity in a number of states like anxiety, he has no basis, other than an unproven assumption, upon which to extend the unity to all such states, or any given state.

What is the unity that he sees in anxiety? Heidegger believes that “in anxiety Dasein gets brought before itself through its own Being, so that we can define phenomenologically the character of the entity disclosed in anxiety, and define it as such in its Being, or make adequate preparations for doing so.” (B&T, p184)

However, the description of anxiety depends on what Heidegger calls his concrete analysis of ‘falling’. (B&T, p 184) Dasein is supposed to have fallen away from itself. But ‘falling’ itself is not an average everyday word. Thus, we have another analysis (here of ‘fallen’) and no phenomenology to deal with. One may understand what it is to have fallen into crime, or into bad company. But ‘to fall away from oneself’? What does that mean?

We never do know because we are never given the phenomenological content of the term. We are told things such as it means absorption in “Being with one another” insofar as the latter is guided by “idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity.”( B&T, p 175) Though these last three terms are used in everyday talk, they turn out to be more terms with little if any, ordinary, descriptive meaning.

For example, idle talk. “Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without previously making the thing one’s own.” (B&T, p 169) Somehow everyday discourse misses the point. If it is talking about something, it has lost its primary relationship-of-being towards the entity it is talking about. (B&T, p 169).

Does he mean that somehow when I get a pop-up that prevents my cursor from working and I can’t write my Derridean “text”, I can’t say ‘son of a bitch’ and get my relation to my laptop just right? That if I say “I will never buy a Motorola blue razr,” whatever the damn thing is in the pop-up ad, I miss my relationship to the being of my laptop?

What can he add to it? Here idle talk tells the whole tale. I don’t have any other relation to my laptop other than it is hell to type on it with these pop-ups. Heidegger has to define an abstract set of terms to make me think there is more. For me to think my talk is idle, I have to think there is something else to say.

As a former fraud investigator, let me tell you. Usually when there seems to be more, there is less.

Now I have the option of flipping a quarter and winning. I hope Eliot Spitzer cleans some clocks. Metaclocks. Clocks of Being.

To the sobriety of this day:

Heidegger says quite early (B&T, p7) that the entity which each one of us is, is denoted by the term Dasein and that Dasein is grounded upon being in the world (B&T, p 53).

Is being in the world a phenomenon at all? Heidegger never shows it as a phenomenon except through other phenomena. For example, Heidegger uses the state of mind of anxiety to show a way in which Dasein is disclosed.

This is quite different from saying, as Augustine might say, that my sin is grounded on my freedom. I can point to my freedom every day. Every time I do something I regret (sin or not), I may look to see if I might have done otherwise, and that when the blame falls squarely on me, I may see that I was free to do otherwise. In certain cases I may relish my freedom to pick this woman or that. The power of the potential hat trick, if there are three, can be quite a rush.

So freedom is a phenomenon; it is not inferred from what I do. It is part and parcel of talking about what I do. Arguably, when it is not, i.e., when I do something under duress, my lacking freedom is (to use one of Austin’s expressions), one of my pleas for an excuse.

‘Being in the world’ is a term. It does not have currency in the language of Heidegger’s average everydayness. It is derived from it. Heidegger says we see being in the world in the anxiety that we experience in average everydayness. (B&T, p184). We don’t simply see being in the world just walking down Main Street. We have to derive it.

So if we derive it from describing anxiety, anxiety is the phenomenon. Being in the world is the derivation. Why call it a phenomenon at all?

To the folly of this great day:


What I have said through the posts so far has assumed Heideggerian terminology. By that I mean I use it. I have not fleshed out why anyone should use it. Why should anyone go about saying something in the form ‘the raining rains’?

One could say ‘it is raining down rain'. It sounds a bit redundant, but one could imagine a situation in which it would be appropriate to say, during a dust storm punctuated by fits of showers that ‘it is raining down mud,’ or even ‘raining mud’.

Hence then one sees the point of the metaphor, ‘raining ticker tape’, and can go on to see the force of Johnson’s ‘blues falling down like hail’.

So when a Heideggerian says that ‘the eventing events,’ possibly there is something said there. But in contrast to what? Might an eventing event something other than an event, as raining might rain something other than rain, e.g. mud?

Prior to the introduction of ‘eventing events’, there is much other terminology that Heidegger uses. There is ‘being in the world’.

What does ‘being in the world’ mean? That is supposed to be a key to the question of the meaning of being. Being and Time is supposed to answer this question. Being in the world is said to be a unitary phenomenon(p 78 of B&T, Macquarrie and Robinson, p 53, Heidegger text) .

The term ‘being in the world’ is supposed to denote this unitary phenomenon. The problem is that it is never shown to be unitary. It is assumed to be so. Heidegger next says "this primary datum must be seen as a whole". He never shows how or why. He then offers an account of its constitutive elements, an account which assumes the unitary character of the phenomenon.

From this point on Heidegger never looks back. In his own terms, his analysis has a “thrownness” about it. It “falls” into an unclear unity that obscures its "authenticity.”

The reader can assert at this point, and at every subsequent point until the unitary nature of the phenomenon is shown( it never is), that the truth of Heidegger’s ontology is assumed. The reader can assert that because all of Heidegger's conclusions about time assume this unity, there is no primordial time and the question of the meaning of being cannot be answered Heidegger’s way.