From: spurrett@superbowl.und.ac.za (David Spurrett)
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: Re: Being and Time (longish)
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1992 15:50:25 GMT
Organization: University Of Natal (Durban)
NNTP-Posting-Host: pc13.superbowl.und.ac.za

In article <1992Nov10.125715.3048@ulrik.uio.no> solan@smauguio.no
(Svein Olav G. Nyberg) asks:
>
>        What is the connection between Being and Time?
>
and adds:
>
>Whoever manages an answer that satisfies, has won my respect.
>

Wow!  The ultimate intellectual prize!  Who can resist?

Here goes:

(1) The problem is an ancient  one.  Zeno's paradoxes of motion  were attempts
    to make the doctrine of his boss, Parmenides, that all is one and  nothing
    ever  changes,  look  less  stupid,  by  showing  the converse impossible.
    Aristitle credited  Zeno with  being the  inventor of  dialectic.  In this
    version  the  problem  is  sometimes  referred  to  as  that  of Being and
    _Becoming_, but the issues are in many essential ways the same.  There are
    also links  between this  and the  `discretum' vs  `continuum' debates  in
    metaphysics and some physics.  [It may be fun for someone to start a threa
    on Zeno' paradoxes, they are great stuff.]

(2) The problem gets to be a  big problem in modern philosophy because of  the
    naughty power of empiricism.  Since time is not an _object_ of  experience
    empiricists get major headaches trying to explain how we can tell that  we
    are seeing, for example, a `constant conjunction' (Hume) between cause and
    effect.  Put another way,  we have a succession of  experiences (according
    to an empiricist) but  no way of identifying  them as a succession,  since
    that is not a thing which we experience over and above the things `in' the
    succession.  Starting out as an empiricist can thus, by making it look  as
    though  statements  about  knowledge  and  those  about being are the same
    thing, make it look as though Being and Time are two different things.

    Part of the way  to dealing with the problem is, therefore, to stop 
    being an empiricist.(Or a positivist, or any of those naughty people)

(3) Kant  got closer  to dealing  with the  problem by  arguing that  _we_ are
    temporal in the way we percieve.  That any experiences we have are  struc-
    tured by the intuitions of space and  time, which is how they _get_ to  be
    experiences at all.  ie: Our being, at least, _is_ temporal.

(4) That's all well and good, but  Kant said we could never approach the  real
    nature of  the world,  and that  we had  no reason  to suppose  that _our_
    temporality (or anything) was the same  as that of the world.   The philo-
    sophical style called `Phenomenology'  was heavily ifluenced by  Kant, and
    it is from and out of this school that Heidegger came.  I mention  Heideg-
    ger only because  his great work  is call `Sein  und Zeit', or  `Being and
    Time.'  For the  purposes of your question  there is not that  much in B&T
    not added by  Kant - it  is a study  of the temporality  of _human_ Being,
    which  Heidegger  calls  `dasein',  which  means  `being-there' or `there-
    being', to emphasise his claim that human being (self conscious being)  is
    never just being, but that it is `there' and also `then.'

    That helps with human being, and some of it can be  generalised/abstracted
    for use on the problem of being in general.

(5) With a little General Relativity along  for the ride we can begin to  say
    that the being of  anything does not  exist independently of  its context
    (spa-tially or temporally) _and_ that the context  does not exist  indep-
    endently of the being of the things in it.

THUS: (provisional conclusion)

    What it is to `be' is to have a distribution over a region of space and  a
    period of time.  Being is Temporal, and Spatial.

                                    and

     What it  is for there  to be time,  or space, is  for there to  be things
    `being' _in_ that time or space.

    This has the (intelligible) consequence that a universe with nothing  `in'
it  would  be  a  non-universe,  there  would  be no space or time without the
things.  I hope that this is a start, and sorry it is so long.  (Can I have my
respect now?)

o------------------------------------------o------------------------------o
| David Spurrett, Department of Philosophy |  `I have seen the truth, and |
| University of Natal, Durban              |   it makes no sense.'        |
| email: spurrett@superbowl.und.ac.za      |              - OFFICIAL!     |
o------------------------------------------o------------------------------o
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc