/lit/ - Literature

>The mathematical is a fundamental position towards things, one in which our apprehension pro-poses things with regard to the way in which they are already given to us and must be so given. The mathematical constitutes therefore the fundamental presupposition of the knowledge of things. Epimêtheia would also mean then tradition-originating in a fault that is always already there and that is nothing but technicity. This understanding of the term is faithful to traditional historiality, which forms an existential trait of Dasein: Dasein, as "being-thrown," inherits the already-there that is its past, always having preceded it and from out of which it "is" this particular "who," child and grandchild of so and so, and so on—its past, which is not properly speaking its past since it did not "live" it. The temporal mode of being of Dasein is historiality, which "designates the constitution of the historizing-being of Dasein as such," and the meaning of this historizing is itself facticity. "In its factical being, any Dasein is as it already was, and it is 'what' it already was. It is its past, whether explicitly or not." One can understand the (awesome) sense of the adverb "already" here. If the mode of being (of Dasein's past) historicizes "from the future," Dasein has grown up both into and in a traditional way of interpreting itself: in terms of this it understands itself proximally and, within a certain range, constantly. By this understanding, the possibilities of its being are disclosed and regulated. Its own past—and this always means the past of its "generation"—is not something which follows along after Dasein, but something which already goes ahead of it.

>Hence Hubert Dreyfus is more correct than he believes to see in the philosophy of Being and Time a "technical phenomenology," even if Heidegger remains fundamentally ambiguous on this point and fails to carry this reflection to a conclusion:

>Opposing the Cartesian subject/object distinction in terms of an account of Dasein as a user of equipment becomes an ambiguous form of opposition, for it is no longer clear whether such an analysis offers a critique of technology in the form of a transcendental account of the pre-technological everyday understanding of equipment, or whether, under the guise of a transcendental account of everyday activity, such an analysis reflects a transition in the history of the way equipment is which prepares the way for technology. In other words, it is not clear whether Being and Time opposes technology or promotes it. (Dreyfus 1992, 175).