Facticity avoids Circularity

So I think in these paragraphs Heidegger is showing his whole strategy for coming to terms with the question of the meaning of Being in terms of Dasein’s role in the projection of Being. He is saying that somehow Dasein already knows about Being even though it is not formulated discretely as such, and is living in this fore-knowledge of Being. And because dasein has this fore-knowledge without presumptive conceptual understanding of Being, we can avoid the circularity. My own opinion is that his is a ruse. He is taking this position so his work will not be dismissed out of hand on logical grounds. However, it is clear that because Being is in our language and we use it all the time we have some kind of understanding of what it is, even though we cannot say clearly what it is. Heidegger will call this pre-ontological understanding.

One way to understand this situation is through the trinity. Dasein is like, Christ God the Son, who is in the world created by God the Father. But there is also the Holy Spirit which is God as He pervades the Christian community, and as the messenger of God to Mary for instance. Pre-ontological understanding is like God the Spirit that pervades everything prior to its understanding about God the Father or God the Son. What we need to understand is that the central absurdity of the Western tradition is being modeled here on a mundane and secular level. Heidegger was going into theology before he considered Philosophy, in fact Physics was his second choice. And it is not as if he ever left the problems of Theology or Physics behind. He is simultaneously trying to solve theological, physical and philosophical problems, and that is one of the reasons that his work is so profound. It actually has all these levels answered in it at the same time.

Dasein is an entity within the world

Dasein is projecting the world as synthetic a priori which it is in

Dasein knows pre-ontologically about the Being that is being projected and exemplified in its own being non-discursively

In a sense this turns Hegel upside down. Hegels struggles to get to Spirit from Sense Certainty, then self-Consciousness, then Reason, then Spirit. At one point in B&T Heidegger identifies DaSein with Sprit (Geist) which can mean also mind and ghost. The ghost is what pervades the world. As such it is what is pre-ontologically understood. But later it becomes clear that Dasein is both the projector and the projected, by itself. As projected it is thrown in the world and thus like sense certainty. But it achieves distance from that by differentiating itself from Mitsein just as self-consciousness of the slave gets distance from the oblivious self-satisfaction of the Master. These two positions are reconciled via Reason which provides criteria for judging that goes beyond the opposites of too much immersion in experience and too much separation from experience. But reason by itself leads to violence as in the French Revolution and ultimately terror, as Blake shows us with Urizen in the four Zoas. Spirit provides a criterion for limiting reason and avoiding its excesses.

Heidegger instead turns Hegel upside down and starts with Spirit in the form of the dasein immersed in mitsein and thus pervaded by the pre-ontological understanding of Being from the common language. Dasein separates itself out from the Mitsein but not as Subject/Object but as something prior to their differentiation. But this something is like the Transcendental Subject of apperception in as much as it projects Being in terms of a priori syntheses. But of course we can after the fact analyze this synthesis into the part which projects the world (God the Father) and the part that is immersed in the projected world (God the Son). But Heidegger’s point is that this analysis that appears circular is an artificial separation of that which is prior to the separation of subject and object, or projector and projected. So this is where we see the sophistication of the argument. By not allowing Subject/Object split and only dealing with something that is simultaneously projector, projected and the pervasion of the projecting we can avoid the logical vicious circle. But on the other hand if we don’t have the vicious circle then we don’t know why we need this sophisticated solution to that problem. So there is non-avoidance and avoidance together as complementary positions that are simultaneously effective. And of course this spills over into the analysis of Dasein in terms of time because time is also trinitarian.