BCS I Popa Roxana 19th of November 2019

History Of Ideas

Historicity of Being
- Being is usually regarded as the thinnest of abstracions, the most general feature of
everything that is. A distinction may be drawn between That-being and What-being.
Being might be the being of something in particular , and then it might be its essence (
That-Being) or its essence ( What-Being or Fundamental Nature)
- History or rather historicity is Heidegger’s main theme in this chapter. So, this second
task projected in the Introduction was to provide the rudiments of a destruction of the
history of ontology in terms of the problem-area of temporality. Also, this 2nd part was
intended to have 3 divisions dealing with: Kant’s doctrine of schematism and time;
Descartes’ ‘ cogito sum’ and his debt to medieval ontology; Aristotle’s account of time.
- German has 2 words for history, GESCHICHTE & HISTORIE. Heiddeger assigns
Geschichte to events, history & Historie to the study of the events( historiology, the
historian)
- Heidegger believes that history is too important to be left to historians: to consider history
( GESCHICHTE) only as the ‘ object of a science’ is on a par with viewing the world
around us only through the eyes of the natural & social sciences. He raises the Kantian
question: How is Historie possible? The answer lies in the historicity of all DASEIN even
of those who do not study it. Dasein is historical, that is, ‘ open in its having-beenness on
the basis of temporality’ and this clears the way for Historie to thematize the PAST.
- Historie is authentic if the historian approaches the theme in accordance with ‘ authentic
historicity and the corresponding disclosure of what has been there, repetition’ .
REPETITION ‘ understands Dasein that has been there in its authentic possibility
which has been’ . The ‘ history that has been there’ is then disclosed in such a way that
the force of the possible intrudes into the factical existence of the historian. It thus
concerns primarily the historian’s future, not the present: the historian’s disclosure grows
out of the future.
- H’ s own history of philosophy exemplifies this idea of Historie. He asks about Being.
The question is not historical, nor has he yet answered it, he hopes to answer it in the
future. To answer it, he needs to see how past philosophers aked&answered this question.
He needs to consider what they said not as a sheer fact but as a possibility, in several
senses: a possibility that is not available in the philosophical discourse of the present; one
possibility selected from a range of possible alternatives open to them; a possibility that
they were striving towards but did not succeed in achieving or expressing in their actual
words; or a possibility that we may endorse in the present.
- H himself is a thinker of histoy, rather than a historian or a philosopher of history . He
does not explain history historiologically or reckon it up into a definite picture for
purposes of edification: he restores history itself to the uniqueness of its inexplicability

Destruktion or Destructing the history of ontology

- A philosopher needs to undertake a DESTRUCTION, a critical inspection, of this

tradition.Nonphilosophical Dasein performs a REPETITION of the possibilities
tradition provides, it is authenthically historical, while if it is not, it remains
dispersed in present affairs, its interest in history confined to historical remains
and records. Dasein’s historicality gives it access to the historical past and thus
provides the basis for historiology, The historian’s work is initiated and guided
not primarily by remains and documents, but by a prior conception of history, as
well as by the nature of the historian’s own historicality.
- First, Dasein’s everyday life has a history, culminating in the current dominance
of technology. This history depends in large measure on the history of
metaphysics.
- Second, H shows more interest in the ‘ first beginning’ , the orginal founding of
‘western’ history and philosophy by the Greeks. The end of western history may
be followed by ‘ another beginning’ of history, for which we need to prepare by a
‘ critical engagement’ with the first beginning.
- Finally, history is the history of being itself rather than of man: ‘ History is no
prerogative of man; it is in the essence of being itself. History plays alone in the
Between of the interchange of gods and man, the Between that is the ground of
the conflict of the world and earth; history is nothing but the event of this
Between. Hence history eludes historiology. Thus man is seen as the instument of
impersonal forces: being, art and philosophy.
- Ontology, like its near equivalent, metaphysics, usually indicates a general study
of beings. Being and Time’s enterprise is not merely Ontolgie, but
Fundamentalontologie. Fundamental ontology analyses the being of Dasein as a
preparation for the fundamental question about being. Since both Dasein and
being are prior or fundamental to other ontologies, Fundamentalontologie
sometimes denotes the ontology or analytic of Dasein, sometimes the
investigation of being to which the analytic of Dasein is merely preparatory.
Fundamental ontology studies the being of beings, not being as such.