Friday, March 28, 2014
I, Me, They, We
The development of an I into a We does not presuppose that the former is given as such. Rather, an I emerges from a Me, which is the object of a They. Thus, the I-We relation reconstitutes a preceding They-Me one. Accordingly, Descartes can be interpreted as deriving an I from a Me, having already abstracted the latter from a They background, i. e. from some group from which he withdraws en route to his chair in front of the fire, thereby leaving unattended any subsequent I-We analysis. In contrast, Heidegger does recognize the They background of the emergence of an ontological I, and does proceed to conjoin the latter with a We, i. e. his 'being-with-others'. However, by abstracting the transitions from a Me, which is systematically related to both the They and the I, his newly-found 'others' remains detached from that They, a distinction that he later codifies as 'Ontological Difference', and that, arguably, serves he and his political allies as a rationale for the Ontic hostilities of the era.
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