'Another sort of intelligibility': Heidegger's project of be-ing and the phenomenology of feeling

Abstract

In this thesis, I develop a critical dialogue with Martin Heidegger's projection of the meaning of be-ing (Sein), from the hermeneutically developing standpoint of a phenomenology of feeling (taking my cue from Quentin Smith's early work in phenomenology). I wish to open up a path toward a new and more balanced interpretation of be-ing-here (Dasein), particularly at the disclosive level of felt meaning and at the ontological level of temporality. With this, the possibility of a metaphysics and ontology of be-ing itself becomes possible. In Part One, I give an interpretive reading of Heidegger's project in Being and Time. After an introductory chapter, I shift to the question of primordiality of interpretation, as Heidegger himself poses it, at the beginning of the second Division of Being and Time. I point out that, beyond the well-known 'holistic' and 'authenticity' requirements (for which I provide intensive readings), there is the less well-known 'phenomenological' requirement, viz., that an interpretation be drawn from a "basic experience". In analyzing Heidegger's version of this basic experience, i.e., anticipatory resoluteness, we come up against the possibilities of deeper primordialities, both of interpretation and experience. I point out that we could take up a deeper-reaching phenomenology of felt disclosure as a possible path to resolve Heidegger's impasse in his turn to be-ing itself. In Part Two, I give a detailed exposition of the new phenomenology of feeling, of Quentin Smith's The Felt Meanings of the World. This under-appreciated work develops a phenomenological methodology that is free of Heidegger's existential and projective bias. It opens out the inner structure of felt meaning in a way that allows for more accurate description and conceptualization of the phenomena of feeling than has hitherto been achieved. This, further, opens up the possibility of a metaphysics of feeling, which can be interpreted within the context of Heidegger's original intention toward the meaning of be-ing and in explicit contradistinction to his 'project' of be-ing. In Part Three, I elaborate Heidegger's own phenomenology of dis-position (an ignored aspect of his work), and develop it, particularly as regards the temporal analysis. Here I make several observations and criticisms of Heidegger's temporal analysis (another quite ignored though crucial aspect of his thinking), which have far-reaching effect as to the validity of his overall existential projection of be-ing. The 'prejudice' of the imperatives of existence becomes particularly visible in the consequent distortions of the factical be-ing of be-ing-here and of its temporal structure. The thesis concludes with the phenomenologico-temporal analyses of some key moods, using both Smith and Heidegger's concepts, with the intention of opening up a concrete direction for a phenomenological interpretation of be-ing itself.