Heidegger and Don Quixote: on the phenomenology of 'verstehen'
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References
1 Presented on 3 June 1995 at a City University Postgraduate Seminar in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy.
2 I am referring to his notorious involvement with the Nazi movement in 1933/34 (not to his romantic encounter with a female student of his at Marburg).
3SZ142,336/BT182,385. (SZ: M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 8th ed., Tubingen, 1957; BT: Being and Time (transl. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson), Oxford, 1962)
4SZ 132-3/BT 171.
5SZ 133,142-3/BT 171-2,182.
6SZ 137/BT 176.
7SZ 144/BT 184.
8SZ 167/BT211
9SZ 145/BT 185.
10Compare SZ 143-5,151-2/BT 182-5,192-4.
11M. Heidegger, Die Grundprobleme der Phanomenologie, Gesamtausgabe vol. 24, Frankfurt a.M., 1975, p.395. (Abbreviation: GP)
12SZ 145,147/BT 185, 187.
13SZ 147/BT 187.
14SZ 223/BT 265.
15SZ144-5/BT 183-6.
16It is dealt with in Section Two of Being and Time.
17As should be obvious, this is a very rough account of Heidegger's ways of speaking about understanding. A more detailed analysis would have to scrutinise a variety of Heideggerian phrases such as: der Entwurfcharakter des Verstehens' ('the projective character of understanding'), Verstehen als Entwurf ('understanding as projection'), 'das Verstehen entwirfft' ('under standing projects'), Verstehen as 'entwerfend-sein zu einem Seinkonnen' ('being projective towards a potentiality of being'); 'the understanding of being' (which goes together with 'the projection of being' and also with 'disclosedness of being', but hardly with 'Dasein's potentiality for being' - 'Dasein's potentiality for being' - would make little sense). Let it be added that the incoherence I referred to is still present in GP (see e.g. pp.394-6).
18M. de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote, Book I, Chapter 1.
19Ibid., chapter 2.
20Ibid., chapter 2.
21Ibid., chapter 8.
22R.G. Collingwood, An Autobiography, Oxford, 1970 (first published 1939), p. 100. Collingwood's statement must, of course, not be taken in too literal a sense. The past cannot be part of the present, strictly speaking, otherwise it would not be the past; however, its effects may be present, and also remnants and perhaps memories of it. Among these remnants and memories fragments of the significance structure of past worlds may be found.
23 See SZ paragr. 2 and 6.
24That Heidegger was aware of this phenomenon is evident from several passages of Being and Time. See e.g. SZ 144/BT 184, SZ 146/BT 187, SZ 174/218. However, Heidegger is mainly concerned with the misprojection that characterises fallenness. In this case possibilities that do belong to Dasein's potential (indeed to its ownmost potential) are not projected, while in the case studied above possibilities that do to belong to Dasein's potential are in fact projected.
25 I am not sure whether Heidegger would have agreed with this analysis of 'the projection of possibilities'. For reasons inherent in his fundamental-ontological approach he refrains from such an analysis and clarification of the notion of understanding.
26According to Heidegger there is an exception: "the certain possibility of death". However, it may be doubted whether death (as opposed to Dasein's being-towards death) is an existential possibility at all.
