PHIL4205 - Heidegger - Method and Form

During today's lecture on Heidegger The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics I often found myself returning to how his curiosity returned to the place of the universal. I had mentioned the paralell between enlightenment positivism and Heideggers use of the term "positive research" to professor Jowette who only dismissed my comment as misunderstanding what Heidegger intended to say about the possibility of find true knowledge. Although I respect this oppinion and have no doubt about questioning Heidegger good intent, I am somewhat less able to conceed that his reasearch did not at all share something with his enlightenment predecessors. One might argue that my inclination to this interpretation is a gross misunderstanding of Heideggerian thought, after all this is the scholar who had devoted a great deal of work to challenging conventional understanding - particularly the ideas of modernity. Nonetheless, could we not equate Heidegger rejection of modernity as also a projection into a different ideal set of circumstances? A point when the academic bantering over an identification of "subject" from an exclusively ontic perspective. Though I am unable to point directly to Heideggers intended meaning, it does not seem fitting that I also release my suspicion on account of his eloquent criticism of the positions he puts forward. A number of critics have raised similar arguements, that it is sensless to ask the question of Being because it is so inaccessible. But I would not subscribe to this view either - Heidegger is too pursuasive on this front as he makes clear some of the real ways in which the concern for Being can be observed, even if only in small and subtle ways. Heidegger's preoccupation with the question of Being, the same that had once fascinated the early greeks, therefore represents a significant direction in his work but what does it mean to pose the question of Being?. To draw from Heidegger himself, to ask the methodology of what one considers is to be possessed by a preoccupation of what that thing is. By defining the Being as something common to all beings, and yet at the same time overlooked by them, shows a particular disdain for the structures in which we can now find our present subject. The study is, as Heidegger regards it, an investigation of "essences" from which the subject is fundementally contained within. His use of the term "positive research" is not to be overlooked too easily, for it is when we affirm the true essence of the thing we are actually considering the thing in itself. This however is not to be confused with the enlightenment pursuit of the perfectability of man, but it is not fundementally not seperate from it either. In both cases, it is reasearch that yeilds the very truths from which we obtain a sense of the thing irrelivent of whether certain truths are more true than others. Though I have a great regard for Heidegger's work whose influence continues to humble my thinking, I am not yet will to conceed that he is wholely opposed to his own orientation to a future conclusion that follows the collaps of conventional knowledge, as is suggested by his use of the term Dasein to collaps all worldlyness of being(s).