Last year, when our reading group read *Being and Time*, I had already thought of writing reading notes as we went along. But at the time I talked quite a lot while reading, so I more or less used up my urge to express myself on the spot; when I got home, I was too lazy to write it all out again, and in the end I never managed to do it. This semester, as we read *Being and Time* again in the Wumen discussion seminar, maybe I can take the opportunity to make up those notes.
The introductory part of *Being and Time* is very important, but also not so important, because the rest of the book unfolds from the introduction, and without reading what follows it is hard to understand the introduction thoroughly. So as for the introduction, there really is not much that especially needs interpretation; here I will first casually talk about two points.
The basic aim of *Being and Time* is to inquire into “being,” and “being/to be” is an elusive, vaporous big concept: it seems to include everything, and yet also seems to be nothing at all. Heidegger emphasizes the difference between being and beings: inquiring into beings is not the same thing as inquiring into being, but neither are they completely unrelated, because being is always the being of beings.
Being is the appearing of beings, or rather the “light” that enables beings to be illuminated. But how can this ubiquitous yet elusive thing called “light” itself be scrutinized? Heidegger wants to solve precisely this problem: light makes things appear, thereby making it possible for us to “understand” things; but how can one make “light” itself clear? This requires a special mode of inquiry: no longer, as when scrutinizing a being, placing it in the open and calmly observing and judging it, but rather “seeing” the existence of light precisely through careful reflection on shadows and obscurities.
Yet in Heidegger, especially in his early Heidegger, this “light” still lacks concreteness. He turns his gaze to “equipment,” but the “equipment” in *Being and Time* always remains too empty and abstract. My media ontology tries to further trivialize Heidegger, bringing him down to the ground.
So I translate awkward phrases like “being and beings” into more straightforward and more plain concepts: “media and content.”
Heidegger points out that the structure of the question of being has three moments: that which is asked about, that which is interrogated, and that with respect to which it is asked. These are, respectively, being, beings, and the meaning of being. Teacher Wu explains these three moments as formal cause, material cause, and final cause; I think there is some relation, but it is not quite accurate. I understand them instead as media, content, and environment.
For example, I step up to the podium, pick up the microphone, and ask: “Is the sound loud enough?” — in this question, the thing being asked about is the sound I produce; but that which is interrogated is the microphone: what I care about here is not the content of the sound but the microphone’s transmission; and that with respect to which it is asked is a background environment, namely that I am about to begin speaking. This is a typical question, in which the three moments of media, content, and environment are clearly distinguished. Other questions also contain similar moments, though they are often more entangled and harder to disentangle. For example, if I ask, “Are you full yet?” then what is being asked about is your stomach, what is interrogated is your eating status, and that with respect to which it is asked is whether I am going to add another bowl of rice for you. Here, “eating” is the medium through which “having a full stomach” is reached, and whether or not to add rice is the environment of eating.
Thus Heidegger’s being, beings, and the meaning of being are translated into media, content, and environment (context).
Heidegger takes Dasein (the human being as questioner) as the breakthrough point for inquiring into the question of being. This is because, to put it in rough and ready plain language, Dasein has self-consciousness; that is to say, Dasein gains an understanding of itself through the questioning of being, and questioning is the mode of existence of Dasein. In other words, within Dasein’s activity of questioning, media and content attain unity: Dasein is presented through Dasein’s activity of questioning; here Dasein is both content and medium, and therefore Dasein not only has a place at the level of beings, but also has a place at the ontological level.
However, to be precise, “Dasein” is not yet entirely the “medium” here; rather, it is “Dasein’s activity of questioning,” as part of Dasein’s existence, that is the medium of this self-disclosure. And Dasein’s existence is worldly: it dwells in the beings that are nearest to it and with which it deals. Therefore, the questioning of the question of being starts from Dasein, but its foothold is Dasein’s surrounding world, the network of equipmental references centered on Dasein.
I’ve just finished reading the first chapter of the introduction, so I’ll stop here for now.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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