Fido the Yak

"Genuine questioning always involves a laying open and holding open of possibilities that suspend the presumed finality of both the text's and the reader's current opinions" (David E. Linge, "Editors Introduction," Hans Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, Berekely: University of California Press 1976, p. xxi, cited by Andrew Cashin, A Hermeneutic Phenomenological Study of the Lived Experience of Parenting a Child with Autism, p. 1.) And, "We speak, therefore of having gotten into a discussion, or of being caught in a discussion, and these expressions serve to indicate the element of buoyancy in understanding that leads the conversational partners beyond the original horizons into a process of inquiry that has a life of its own and is often filled with developments that are unanticipated and unintended" (Linge, xxii, in Cashin, p. 13). I'll check this book out tomorrow.

From David Krell's "General Introduction: 'The Question of Being,'" Martin Heiddegger, Basic Writings (Harper & Row, 1977, p. 31):

Yet this linear image of a way into the neighborhood of Being–as though that were somewhere over the rainbow–is annoying. Isn't such dogged persistence a mark of stubbornness or eccentricity; doesn't it ultimately betray a plodding imagination? And isn't the question of Being from first to last an academic one, bloodless and without force, like one of the shades Odysseus awaits in the underworld? Another student bends the linear image by emphasizing the essential restlessness of Heidegger's passage and the many turns of the path. "Although it always circles about the same thing," he notes,

Heidegger's thinking does not come to rest. Each time believe we have finally arrived at the goal and prepare to latch onto it we are thrown into a new interrogation. Every resting point is shaken. What seemed to be the end and goal becomes a departure for renewed questioning. If Descartes sought an unshakable foundation for philosophizing, Heidegger tries to put precisely this foundation in question.

Labels: Biemel, Cashin, Gadamer, Heidegger, Krell, Linge, questions

posted by Fido the Yak at 11:12 PM.