Aris Tsoullos

Aris Tsoullos examines the philosophical question of the human being, understood - in methodological continuity with Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology - as a phenomenon of "Dasein". Unlike "present things", "available equipment", "existing numerical relations" or "living" animals, Dasein "exists" insofar as it "projects" itself onto possibilities to be fulfilled while preconceptually understanding being - both its own and the manifold being of other entities. Nevertheless, it tends to interpret itself in the light of the being of things ("presence"). his tendency toward ontological reification, which arises already in pre-theoretical existence, is described by the author as the "problem of discrepancy" between the being of Dasein and the being of things that determines its natural self-interpretation. The philosophical tradition, in this regard, asks indiscriminately for the essence rather than the being of any entity, which is why it objectifies and determines the human being as a "present-at-hand thing" - for example as "animal rationale" or "res cogitans". First, the author explains, in the context of a "preliminary task" of the problem of discrepancy, the concept of Dasein within the horizon of the question of being and the totality of "modes of being" ("Seinsidee"). Building on this, he turns to the "genetic interpretive task" of this discrepancy, taking into account the parallel modifications of the enactment of existence and the understanding of being in Dasein, as well as his formulated "ontological question of unity". The modifications of the understanding of being reveal the ontological tendency of "isolation," which corresponds to the gradual loss of the original unity of being as existence and readiness-to-hand, and the formation of simplicity and abstraction as characteristic features of the various modes of presence. This becomes particularly evident in Descartes' leveling of being in general as "substance" and "substantiality," from which the interpretation of Dasein as an isolated "ego" emerges.

In this paper we undertake a systematic examination of the multifaceted phenomenon of nature in Being and Time. Primarily, nature refers to a being that can present itself to Dasein in various ways. First, we trace the modifications of its self-showing and being in accordance with the modifications of Dasein’s existential comportment and understanding of Being. In accordance with Being and Time we begin with an analysis of the immediate concern with the “world”, where nature is discovered in the light of readiness-to-hand as something either useful or harmful, up to the adoption of the theoretical stance, in which it is thematized merely as a homogeneous research object in the sense of mere presence-at-hand. Subsequently, taking into account some of Heidegger’s insights, we develop a possible experience of nature in terms of passive and calm contemplation, which neither instrumentalizes nor objectifies it but allows it to be encountered in its original Being or in its “naturalness”. We then further determine this naturalness of nature through a hermeneutic-phenomenological approach to Kant’s analysis of the beautiful and the sublime in the Critique of Judgment.