Trevor,
Well well well. I suspected that you may have a lot of sympathy with all that Australian materialism stuff. There we have a fundamental dividing line. I turned to Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger to dig my out of that particular materialist flybottle that was so hegemonic in academic philosophy at that end of last century. You are quite right. The kind of modern scientific metaphysics (technological mode of being), with its distorted lens of representational thinking, that you find attractive is what Heidegger sets out to destruct.

Just a quick note in a free moment late at night about philosophy and death. Death is an integral part of political life. Political death is experienced most acutely at the moment. To give it a Heideggerian twist political life, does and must, take the fundamental orientation towards death as part of its practice.

Death is a key part concern of Heidegger's.

I have argued that the previous posts on everydayness outlined a social ontology or metaphysics of being. Outlining that was the task of Division 1 in Being and Time, where our comportment is one of care, which manifests itself as concern and as solicitude. The horizon of the future shapes the way things show up for us in that the projects that define us extend into the indefinite future. Thus they run ultimately up against death. Death is a non-place, a no-where which is non-being and unrepresentable.

So Being is fundamentally linked to its own negativity, its own non-Being. ( A reworking of Hegel's Logic?) When pus within the ontology of everydayness it means that we recognize that our lives are limited—and therefore shaped—by death.

In our everydayness we move toward and the rebound back from the possibility of death. Death gives rise to an "uncanny" feeling of not being at home in the things with which we are most familiar.

Heidegger then makes a distinction between inauthentic and authentic being. The implication is that the structure of the human world, so far as it has been described to us, and everydayness, belongs only to the inauthentic being of Dasein. What authentic being might be is still something that we do not know.

Hence we have authenticity and inauthenticity as possible ways of existing. The above modes of care (concern and solicitude) are disclosed authentically by resoluteness. Resoluteness anticipates and is constantly certain of death--- it is always face to face with the certainty of death. The argument is that self-awareness leads to the authenticity of a life in the face of dread.

Authentic being is linked to death.