#reason unbound

[randomglory]

Authenticity, as the process of taking over (owning) one’s roles critically, implies that one is not in the grip of this or that “public” or idiosyncratic ideal. Rather the authentic individual adjusts himself to the demands of the particular situation: he acts appropriately (does the right thing). As a result, the authenticity of Dasein makes possible a genuine encounter with things themselves and not as things that appear through the mold of available public or idiosyncratic ideals. In Being and Time, Heidegger writes: “To have a science ‘of’ phenomena means to grasp its objects in such a way that everything about them which is up for discussion must be treated by exhibiting it directly and demonstrating it directly”. In a phenomenological encounter that reaches to things themselves, things appear in their relevant contexts, and the inquirer is free of interpretive constraints that distort those contexts.

Mohammad Azadpur, Reason Unbound

[randomglory]

As tarrying alongside, Dasein is free from the prejudices that frame the entities it observes. Liberating the self from these prejudices through the achievement of authenticity, Dasein is capable of “dwelling autonomously [eigenständigen] alongside entities within-the-world. In this kind of ‘dwelling’ [Aufenthalt] as a holding-one’s-self-back from any manipulation or utilization, the perception of the present-at-hand is consummated”. This knowledge (i.e., “the consummation of the perception of the present-at-hand”) is not achieved through the apophantic approach of positive sciences, and the present-at-hand entities here are not necessarily the entities broached by such sciences. The present-at-hand here are things themselves as they show themselves, and the inquiry that allows us to dwell by them autonomously, to tarry alongside them, is phenomenology. Moreover, the hermeneutic method of this phenomenology involves a self-understanding that is a self-constitution, a self-cultivation that removes Dasein’s opaqueness and allows it to see, to let “entities which are accessible to it be encountered unconcealedly in themselves.”

Mohammad Azadpur, Reason Unbound

[randomglory]

According to [Edward] Said, “the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it.” In other words, Orientalist discourse is the systematic academic discipline of dominating, controlling, and managing the so-called Orient for the sake of the Western imperial political agenda. The Orient, in this account, is not the Far East, but rather primarily refers to what we call the Middle East, and for Said principally the Islamic Orient. His conclusion is that, as a result of the Orientalist discourse, Islam “has been fundamentally misrepresented in the West.

Mohammad Azadpur, Reason Unbound