1.51
Heidegger can open us to what we take to be limits or margins of thought: the question of Being; Dasein (i.e., the being of humans as being-there); the clearing; being-in-the-world; being-towards-death; world and things; hermeneutic phenomenology — these are important insights in Heidegger’s texts. But they’re insights from within a particular tradition and understanding. This should be obvious. Being is not transcendental.[1] A culture isn’t better because it has thought that “the being of being ‘is’ itself not a being”[2] — profound as that is, for us.
One could try devices to remind ourselves of this—putting being under erasure—but all signs will necessarily become calcified in time. There’s no way to guarantee meaning or communication. Which is part of the insight of Derrida’s différance.
Heidegger revolutionized how we think of world, things, and humans. But he lagged in how we think of non-human animals, plants, and in other areas. And this isn’t just a problem at the edges of his—or our—thought.
[1] Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1967, 1997), p. 23: “the sense of being is not a transcendental or trans-epochal signified […] but [is] already […] a determined signifying trace […].”
[2] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York, 1927, 1996), 6/5. For citations of Being and Time, I will, first, cite the German page, followed by the English, translated page.