Being and Time for Beginners | Lecture 1: Heidegger's Introduction

This lecture marks the beginning of a six-part series on Heidegger's "Being and Time". This is meant to accompany the schedule and syllabus for our 2024 Being and Time Reading Group (the link to which you can find below):

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Music is Richard Wagner's Siegfried Act I: "Hoho! Hoho! Hohei" by Georg Solti and the Wiener Philharmoniker

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[belacqua]

It is interesting that the English translation uses "beings" as "das Seiende". "Das Seiende" is the nominalization of "Sein", which ("das Seiende") indicates a mode of a process/becoming/happening (i.e. "der kreischende Lehrer" - the screaming teacher; "die färbende Substanz" - the colouring substance etc.).

The word "being" already includes the gerund in itself (be-ing), otherwise if it was translated literally it would lool like this - being-ing. The choice of plural - was this a makeshift solution for "das Seiende" because there wasn't an adequate expression in the English language?

I am interested how other languages translated "das Seiende" into their own rules of expression.

[RolfGoebel]

What a wonderfully nuanced, thorough, and illuminating introduction! The "attunement " that you mentioned between Dasein and beings through their immersion in the world is of particularly importance, because it refers to Heidegger's central notion of "Stimmung" (atmosphere/attunement) as the bodily-affective preconditions of any experience. Since "Stimmung" has auditive connotations (Stimmung" is also the tuning of a musical instrument) Heidegger is not only interested, as you rightly argue, in the experience of letting something be "seen" through logos (the primarily visual self-presentation of phenomena in language); he is also exploring Dasein's "listening" to the sonic self-revelations of the world. Especially for this auditive experiencing, Heidegger, as you stress, thinks that conventional discourse is lacking appropriate words and grammar. That's why the later Heidegger discovers the poetic language of Hölderlin, Rilke, Trakl, and others as a radically different discourse that opens up the world to Dasein and allows the truth of things to reveal/conceal itself. I am greatly looking forward to your next lectures!

[horsymandias-ur]

Do you know if Heidegger addresses whether abstract objects (e.g. numbers) are counted among the phenomena?—or are they all simply kinds of beings that become present only for the “detached” or contrived mode of being a philosopher? (and is this either/or question fair?)