beginning . . .

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Thoughtful questioning is more important than construction of systems (Moran summarizing Heidegger 246)… can thoughtful questioning itself be structuring in a systemic way? Seeds are sown – production, address, negation, accessibility – a trajectory will unfold, its velocity overdetermined by dissent, assertion, resistance, negotiation. A group forms within the limits of language, guided by what ideology/ies? A Marxist view juxtaposes persons with historical movement; Marcuse claims Heidegger accounts for the bourgeois deconstruction of social life from within (Moran, 245). Are we transcendentally homeless?

“We are caught up in a structure of care…it is not a matter of indifference to us” (Moran, 241).


Heidegger’s project is not problem-solving, but descriptive of “falling” in (to?) the world. When, where, how can we catch our thrownness? At what moments does it matter, and when is the flow of existing trajectories generative in their own right?

Dasein, existentially, is care, and “names human being in so far as it is individualized as myself or someone else and in so far as questioning is its essential mode of relating to Being” (emphasis added, Moran 238, ref Being & Time, § 41).

Not only do the questions we ask cast certain patterns and presuppose certain boundaries on the discoverable, these questions will be shaped to some extent by our mood when inquiring, and are imbricated with the performative. We will co-enact and co-construct a kind of knowing; could it be a knowing-together?

“Heidegger,” according to Moran,and me, according to me (!), “is coming to see that the essential disclosure of things takes place through Dasein’s concernful dealing with things in the environment, that it takes place essentially in expression. Relating to things, disclosing them, always relates to our concerns in advance, our relation is primarily interpretative, or hermeneutical” (emphasis removed, 234).

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