From Dasein to Being in Heidegger’s totality

Abstract

For Heidegger, Being is prior to the subject-object split and prior to man. Being is the past plenitude which offers its services in various epochs of history in revealing and concealing ways. Basically Being functions as the otherness for man, making claims upon him and issuing its constraints and revelations. Man is the place of Being’s disclosures. When man is a part of such a totality of Being man quickly moves from his claims and transcending functions to Beings’s claims and transcendence over him. Being thus makes its presence known as otherness to man. While Being is more pronounced in the writings of the later Heidegger it is assumed in the early writings, too, only there it is poorly presented. Because infinite transcendence resides in Dasein’s constitution and within temporality it is just a matter of time before Being appears in its otherness to Dasein. It is the same nonhuman form of infinite transcendence that dwells both in Dasein and Being, as well as in their togetherness. Infinite transcendence is’the far side’ of finite transcendence that resides in totalities making extraordinary claims on us and provides all those excesses we are familiar with in transcendence. Infinite transcendence is thus an outside transcendence, and also an alien anti-human force within finitude.