I’m trying to get an angle on Heidegger, not in any scholarly way, but only to make progress in my general thinking.
He seems to be dead right in trying to come to terms with our grasp of time as always and inevitably involving an integrated awareness of the present, past and future.
This seems to be part of the dynamic of being thrown into the world.
In turn this formulation of our awareness of time seems to be the very foundation of the possibility of meaning, of one thing referring to or signifying another, as part of our temporal, integrated life world.
Things reveal themselves to us in the course of our projects and within moods.
We inevitably search for the meanings of things in the first instance, that their relationship to other things.
Grasp of meanings become automatic, increasingly so, or perhaps more effectively so, as we become more integrated into the world into which we have been thrown.
Things are revealed to us as we grasp them in our projects.
The significance of things becomes transparent to us.
Only when things don’t naturally and unselfish-consciously seem to serve our projects do we become aware of them in a more objective fashion.
This provokes the mood of interest, a feeling of the dynamic to re-establish meaning relationships, that is relationships integrated with our wider life world.
A purely objective, scientific or theoretic perspective is one in which meaning (its relationship to our life world) has been or is stripped away.
Things are here related to each other but not to our projects. They are related purely formally, solely by measurements whose relationships are expressed mathematically.
Or rather, this is the project of science, which itself is related to a number of other life projects, as relationships discovered or invented theoretically are integrated into a whole range of life projects.
This range of tools is is technology.
Science is integrated with technology which in turn is integrated into a lifeworld.
Our projects and moods rise in us in a mysterious manner, related to the dynamics our thrownness in, and encouragements with, our life world
We may conceive of ourselves as a scientist thrown into a technocratic world, but this is in some sense inauthentic, thinking of the technological world as a given rather than a project.
Science, scientists and technology are important, often dominant parts of lifeworlds, but they do not determine or exhaust them.
The project of philosophy relates to the logical relationship of meanings, the mood of interest in logical coherence, the dynamic to achieve a logically coherent account of some situation revealed to us.
It seems to be theoretical enterprise a fortiori. Even the attempt to formulate the revealed situation clearly involves a dynamic towards objectivity, towards a language which can be shared across lifeworlds.
This will not be the language of mathematical relations.
It may be related to the language of pragmatism. If this is the language ordinary life projects, this might now be too rooted in scientific (and so inauthentic) discourse, as is apparent in much of the so-called “analytic” analytic approach.
Alternatively, its pragmatism may relate to more authentic engagement with more limited philosophic situations.
An authentic, pragmatic (theoretical) approach to the projects revealed to us in our moods of logical interest and wonder.
