The portion I read today is, in my view, not especially important; Heidegger lays out the framework of “the book” (including the unfinished second part).
To me, this framework is open to question. What I admire most is the first half of *Being and Time*; but once “temporality” is unveiled and the whole thing is repeated on the basis of temporality, I can no longer keep up with Heidegger’s train of thought.
Still, broadly speaking, my line of thought remains corresponding to Heidegger’s—only, starting from “time,” perhaps more revisions are needed.
Last week I said that what Heidegger calls “that which is asked about” (问之所及), “that which is questioned” (问之所问), and “that about which the inquiry inquires” (问之何所问) correspond respectively to beings, Being, and the meaning of Being; and in my ontology of media, these three correspond to content, medium, and environment. Finally, Heidegger reveals “time,” or rather “historicity,” as the “meaning of Being” of Dasein as this being. Correspondingly, we can also easily understand that what is called “environment,” or human “predicament,” human “condition,” is in fact what is called “historicity.” The “time” in “time,” “timing,” refers precisely to a kind of “environment.” I use “content,” “medium,” and “environment” to translate Heidegger’s “Dasein,” “existence,” and “time”; although the content can still correspond, the subtle shift in terms can suddenly yank Heidegger down to earth. And although Heidegger himself keeps saying that he will begin from Dasein’s “average everydayness,” after only a few twists and turns he soars up into the clouds.
Heidegger points out that human beings are, in essence, historical, are “happening”; thus the very questioning of the problem of Being already contains a demand for history, and therefore the second part of *Being and Time* is bound to be a historical investigation. But for Heidegger, this “history” is only the “history of ontology,” merely tracing the language of earlier questioners in the conceptual realm.
I entirely agree with the necessity of this “historical turn,” but my objection is that I think such history should not be confined to a history “about ontology”; it should become a history on the “ontological level.” That is to say, since this history is not merely a task of listing and textual criticism, but unfolds as an ontological questioning, it ought to set forth its own thread in an ontological way, rather than narrating “ontology” as its object.
Heidegger plainly says that although Dasein, the questioner of the problem of Being, is closest at the level of beings, at the ontological level it is in fact the farthest away; and what is closest at the ontological level is “world,” Dasein’s existence and the surrounding world in which and with which it deals, or in other words, “environment.” This is what is closest at the ontological level: people first and always grasp their own existence—what they “are”—through the environment in which they find themselves, through what they “do” and “with whom they deal.” That is why Heidegger repeatedly stresses that one must reveal Dasein’s being by starting from Dasein’s average everydayness, from what it “is initially and usually.” And such a “foundation” is not some traditional foundationalist foundation; that is to say, it is not as if I first get this layer of foundation in place and then, without looking back, can go on building an abstract theoretical edifice into the air. Heidegger’s “foundation” should not be something in this foundationalist sense; rather, it should be something from which one must always start, and to which one must always return. It should not be the case that in the first part you build a theoretical platform on the basis of Dasein’s average everydayness, establish some abstract concepts, and then in the work that follows you can devote yourself single-mindedly to circling within abstract theory. In my view, even after the “historical” turn, the work of the second part must still begin from “average everydayness,” from the surrounding world, from the “environment.” And what is regrettable is that Heidegger here instead tries to start from those “Daseins” that are ontologically most distant (Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, …). Here, he seems to treat “ontology” as an object, as a kind of being, and to enumerate its history; and this kind of history with ontology as its object is precisely not a history on the ontological level.
In this sense, my “program for the history of media” can be understood as another way of continuing Heidegger’s *Being and Time*; it still insists on beginning from the “environment,” which is closest at the ontological level. My architectural strategy is similar to Heidegger’s: first, a “preparatory existential analytic of Dasein”: starting from human reality, revealing human mediality, medium as environment, environment as historicity; and then, in reverse, doing it all over again: through an examination of the historicity of the “environment,” revealing human reality. Only such a cycle—going from thought into history, and from history back into thought—can count as the fulfillment of the Heideggerian grand ambition.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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