The Horizon of Being and Time
When we are considering the meta-levels of Being we are going beyond the thought of Heidegger in Being and Time. But Being and Time sets the stage for the discovery of the meta-levels of Being because Heidegger shows that there are at least two fundamental modalities by which we encounter things in our world which he calls Present-at-Hand and Ready-to-hand. He takes these from Aristotle who distinguishes Episteme and Techne as two kinds of knowledge about things. Heidegger also grounds Da-Sein (Being There, i.e. being-in-the-world) by connecting it to Phronesis another kind of Being that Aristotle distinguishes that relates to the human being’s own praxis and not to other things. This places our inquiry within the core of the Western Worldview which is what Plato calls the Divided Line that is isomorphic with the kinds of knowledge that Aristotle identifies in his Ethics. Heidegger does not consider either Nous or Sophia, but only Episteme (present-at-hand), Techne (ready-to-hand), Phronesis (Dasein), and Metis (They, One, Das Mann, our mixture with others human beings from our inception). We prefer to consider the whole core of the Worldview not just the slice that Heidegger prefers to deal with. Heidegger does not consider Nous and Sophia because they are that which cannot be different from what they are and they never vary. This is a fundamental reversal of the tradition by Heidegger. The tradition has always been obsessed with the a prioris, i.e. that which does not change. Heidegger’s whole philosophy is to change our direction of view toward the facticity of life as appropriated (ereignis) by Dasein. This reversal is much deeper than any previous reversal within the dialectical unfolding of the tradition, and we are still trying to come to terms with it. What does not change is obviously not living, and to understand what is living and the facticity of life we must concentrate on what changes and what may vary and be different from what it is. But the word IS can take many different meanings depending on which meta-level we are talking about, and the aspects of Being (truth, reality, identity, presence) transforms at each of these meta-levels and thus it discloses ontic phenomena differently at each of the meta-levels. All of the meta-levels of Being are about how we see things other than ourselves (as dasein) and other human beings considered as mitsein (with-being). Disclosure occurs as constrained by the first and second meta-dimensions as levels of transcendence within our tradition. All the things (ontic stuff) appears as schematized within the zeroth meta-dimension. So we can see clearly how the higher meta-dimensions constrain the disclosure of things within meta-dimension zero and how these function as the fundamental infrastructure for schematization of things in the world. Transcendence works in a completely unexpected way. Instead of beings being subservient to transcendences instead transcendences devolve from each entity, and especially from the schemas by which we understand and organize those entities in spacetime. The transcendent layers are not continuous but discontinuous devolving from separate entities that are schematized within the worldview in an a priori fashion as syntheses. And this is why we are still in keeping with the reversal of Heidegger that looks at the facticity of life via a formal indication. The transcendences are the means for the formal indication of each phenomena that is disclosed within the world. The formal indication structure is dependent on the entity to be indicated. These are not abstractions or generalizations as Heidegger says but instead ways of indicating a specific phenomenon without disturbing its content. But it also sets the limits for the disclosure of the phenomena by distinguishing the greatest possible differences within the worldview as a basis for comprehending all differences within the worldview.
Being and Time establishes a horizon by distinguishing human Dasein in its Existenz from ontic phenomena discovered by Ontology. Continental Philosophy has explored this horizon and discovered other kinds of Being beyond Pure and Process Being. We call those other meta-levels of Being: Hyper, Wild, and Ultra Being. They do not fit completely into the framework of Being and Time. But they unfold naturally from the framework that Heidegger has wrought. They are further possible and deeper levels of potential disclosure of phenomena. When you understand that Meta-levels of Being entail types and that those types are in each case the aspects then we see that the meta-levels of Being are fundamentally transformative with respect to the ontic phenomena that they disclose.
Just this extension of Fundamental Ontology is enough to help us understand more deeply the structure of our worldview. The worldview is not a super-structure that overarches all phenomena within it with continuities like the Paradise of Cantor. Rather it is an infrastructure based on the finitude of each ontic phenomena within it, such that in the process of disclosure each separate phenomena unfolds through specific stages of the articulation of its meta-levels and the transformation of its aspect types. The transcendences are an infrastructure of disclosure common to everything within the worldview but not legislated as an overriding structure above everything to which it must conform by external imposition. Rather it is what is disclosed about disclosure in the processs of disclosing of each individual and unique pheomena within the worldview. The structure of the worldview is in fact the internal coherence of disclosure of everything within the worldview that they hold in common and thus make them part of the same set of schemas. Dasein more appropriately is being-in-the-schema and the worldview is our projection of all the schemas together as an a priori super-synthesis. All phenomena within the worldiview have as part of its internal coherence this infrastructure of disclosure.
Heidegger brings disclosure to our attention, but does not yet understand that this disclosure process has its own infrastructural basis within the phenomena. It is the meta-levels of Being with the aspects that shows us what this infrastructural basis might be. Meta-levels of Being and their aspects, i.e. the meta-dimensions beyond zero are inside the phenomena as a different kind of absolute reason inherent in every phenomena within the worldview. By identifying this infrastructure we are fulfilling the hope expressed by Heidegger of understanding disclosure itself deeply. This gives unity to the work of Continental Philosophy to explore the horizons opened up by Heidegger in Being and Time. Analytic Philosophy remains trapped in the Present-at-hand or with Wittgenstein at most discovers the ready-to-hand though meaning as use and family resemblances within forms of life playing various language games. Only Derrida goes beyond this to explore Hyper Being as Differance, and very few manage to discover Wild Being uncovered by Merleau-Ponty and explored by Deleuze.
If we have a framework like this for understanding what Continental Philosophy is doing then it is possible to use it to get a deeper view of our own worldview through their work uncovering deeper and deeper levels of the internal coherence of disclosure within the worldview. We suddenly get a vision in broad outlines of what we have been missing all along in our attempts to understand the worldview. Everything within the worldview is engaged in self-disclosure. Self-disclosure has a structure of its unfolding that gives an infrastructure to our experience of things in the world encompassed by all the schemas within the worldview. This gives us insight into the fact that there are meta-dimensions that are there as transcendentals underlying phenomenal self-disclosure. The internal coherence of self-disclosure is what gives the all the schematized phenomena within our experience its coherence.
