Week 11 Blog 1 –
Truman Combs
I have known for some time now that I am someone who gets caught
up on the fine details of things. I recommend this type of perspective to no
one, for I attribute to it a great deal of unnecessary stress in my life. And
yet, it is this same attention-to-detail that I believe defines who I am as a
person—a person who, in possessing this selective acuity, I have come to
appreciate for that very reason. Having said this, I wish to call upon some
hastily overlooked remarks made by Seth during Monday’s discussion on understanding
the notion of being. Should you
recall, I am the individual who requested that Seth reiterate his comprehension
of being in relation to one’s peers. According
to him, in order for one to realize the meaning of being, one must understand his/her relation to each other
individual around him. In other words, I would need to understand every facet
of every other individual’s life in relation to my own, in addition to
understanding the entirety of my own existence, in order to conceptualize being, or as Heidegger calls it,
Da-sein. I do not agree with this logic. Rather, I think the importance of
knowing humanity beyond oneself to Da-sein lies in the relation of oneself to
the community of selves, and not in the relation of oneself to all other selves
individually. To better explicate the difference, here’s an interdisciplinary
analogy: In the natural world, how a thing functions is very much dependent on
the scale at which it is being observed. For example, understanding the
physical properties of a single water molecule says nothing about the
hydrodynamics of a stream. To this end, I would argue that an individual’s
relation to his peers are microscopic and macroscopic phenomena, respectively.
However, Seth’s proposition is very much a microscopic-to-microscopic
perspective. Simply “totaling” all of a person’s individual relationships does
not equate to how said person relates to the community as an entity in and of
itself. It is this definition of relation to one’s “environment” that I believe
Heidegger frequents in his work.
Yours Tru.ly
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