2.72
‘But is the rock not there, outside all interpretation, outside all disclosures?’
What could that mean, outside all disclosures?
‘So, the rock wouldn’t exist without humans?’
No. Disclosures aren’t restricted to humans, or even living beings. They aren’t restricted to the sensory. The rock itself discloses a world.
‘But world, for Heidegger—whom you seem to, in very broad strokes, be following—is grounded in being-in-the-world: an essential-existential openness and relatedness to Being, with all the incumbent existential structures traced out in Being and Time. – Surely a stone isn’t being-in-the-world!’
The way of being of a stone isn’t the same as the way of being of, for instance, humans. A stone doesn’t seem to have life, consciousness, awareness. But a stone expresses itself and that doesn’t ultimately depend on our existence: the way that it shows up for us depends on our world, but so too our world depends on the way it shows up. That is, we’re open to the being of the stone only because the stone is open to being for us.
There are many ways to understand and interpret this.
I’ve shown some difficulties with the concept of ‘interpretation.’ The same kind of problem presents itself in thinking of ‘perspectives’; that is, the problem of the subject/object division. ‘There are all these interpretations, all these perspectives, and so we need to find what’s common, what we can all agree upon, to determine what constitutes the reality of the thing.’ – So, we need to reduce the thing and ourselves to a play of commonality, which becomes identity. We don’t see how this reduction is itself a particular way of approaching beings that we’ve taken up.
And so, while we can reach for these terms as ways to suggest a revaluation (interpretations over ‘truth’; perspectives over ‘the view from nowhere’), there’s always a risk: that we’ll be misunderstood as upholding the old binary. Rather, the goal is similar to deconstruction (§2.68): the revaluation is an attempt to implode the binary.[1] It’s not just that we take ‘perspective’ up over and against ‘reality’ (understood as what has no perspective; i.e., the view from nowhere); rather, we see that the idea of the real is precisely a perspectival view and always has been. Perspective is the originary source of the perspective/real binary. What’s real is found through perspective.
[1] Which needs to be indicated, e.g., arche-X, and then, presumably, moved away from, else we’re stuck with the binary.