Modern intellectual discourse is still under the spell of the Heideggerian project. Once it had broken away from its German moorings, Heideggerian thought proliferated and was received into non-German cultures. Their intellectual elites appropriated it according to their own reading of Heideggerian texts. While they came to divergent and often contradictory conclusions about the philosophical and political significance of his work, they still regard Heidegger’s symbolic evocation as a most fascinating intellectual response to the multifaceted crisis of modernity.

¶ 5:13 PM 6 comments

In the 1920s, Descartes made the statement "Cogito Irgo Sum" (I think, therefore I am). If a person is thinking, they must exist. He believed consciousness was in 2 parts (Dualism): me, and the world. This was accepted by all until 1927, when Heidegger claimed this was not true, all you can say is that there are ideas. This poses the question: What are ideas? Heidegger says that they are intentions, moods, ambiguity and the act of choosing.

¶ 10:29 AM 2 comments

The to-be-poetized figure of Zarathustra [is] metaphysically the single possibility of replying to the still-concealed fact that being needs the human essence.

In the completion this emerges in the most extreme indefiniteness. Appropriating in this way, the appropriative event lasts as expropriation.

Behind the will to power stands the fear of the nothing, which stands before the will as that which is not really knowable by it, but solely what is willed.

The eternal return of the same and the same.

P. 59

¶ 8:55 AM 0 comments

The paradigms from different epochs are fundamentally incommensurate. They literally have no common measure on the basis of which they can be compared. What makes sense as a life worth aspiring to in one age might well be reviled in another. There could not have been saints in Homeric Greece for example. Ar best there could have been weak people who let others walk all over them. Likewise, there could nor have been Greek-style heroes in the Middle Ages. Such people would have been regarded as impulsive and irresponsible sinners. To be a saint or a hero is not just to behave a certain way; it is to be held up as worthy for doing so. The paradigmatic works of art for an age let certain ways of life shine forth. But in doing so they cover up what is worthy in other—radically different—ways of life.

Temples, cathedrals, epics, plays, and other works of art focus and hold up to a culture what counts as a life worth aspiring to. Works of art in this sense do nor represent something else—the way a photograph of one’s children represents them. Indeed, Heidegger says explicitly that the temple “portrays nothing.” Rather, works of art work; they gather practices together to focus and manifest a way of life. When works of art shine, they illuminate and glamorize a way of life, and all other things shine in their light. A work of art embodies the truth of its world.

P. 101-2

¶ 8:03 AM 4 comments

[T]he authors would seem to be pointing to both Heidegger and Melville as providing a potentially transfiguring vision of a new relationship to Being as the one to replace the Enlightenment rationalist relationship to Being. And they very well could be right, but their visions would have to catch on culture-wide to fully qualify, and I don't know if the authors' commitment to pluralism even allows for that possibility. Maybe it does. And while they don't say so, they msut see their own book as playing an articulating role for the Heideggerian/Melvillean vision. But they're not trying to convert anybody; they're just trying to make a case that looking at the world from their point of view allows for rich possibilities that offer a non-monotheistic alternative to nihilism.

They are phenomenologists, so their goal is to describe the phenomena, which means all the stuff that happens in human experience. And the phenomenon that most interests them is 'mood', which they want to argue is a non-subjective experience--it's something given by Being that we attune to if we are receptive to it. They refer to Heidegger's description of the gods as the "attuning ones". When the gods favor you, they attune you to aspects of Being that effect feeling states and shifts in consciousness. And the difference between the heroes, or a figure like Helen, is that when the gods 'shine' upon them they are overtaken by a mood that raises them above the normal grade of human to be themselves god-like. When the gods abandon them, as Athena does Odysseus, they are quite ordinary and usually screw things up.

¶ 6:36 AM 2 comments

In his fundamental ontology, Heidegger rightfully raises the question how it is possible to make the sense of being in general a subject of consideration without clarifying the sense of being of the only being able to raise the question of being, i.e. the being of a concrete human. Existentialism is against representing the connection between the human and the world as a relation between subject and object, because a concrete human being, existence, is not out of the world, but it is thrown into the world by its very constitution. Intentionality, one of the most important categories of existentialism, adopted by the latter from Husserl’s phenomenology, means directivity of human mind toward…, so as to say there cannot by human being without the word, the human must necessarily have his world, where he is being oriented by ‘placing’ the things in space, having time as horizon. Space and time have a subjective and not objective meaning for the human. The being of a concrete human is finite in space as well as in time, it is spatial and temporal.

The human being, Heidegger says, understands the being of the surrounding world ascending from himself, and therefore any ontology must be fundamental, i.e. the being of a concrete human, its mode and sense must be studied first of all, and then the surrounding world, if only, of course, that is possible.

As fundamental ontology must differ from the traditional Philosophy, its method, too, must differ from the methods of the traditional Philosophy. Heidegger sees hermeneutics as such a method.

This-being or the presence or, in Heidegger’s term, Dasein, from which the true, according to Heidegger, ontology starts and with which it ends, understands itself as being as well as the being of the surrounding world and things. That understanding is not a scientific cognition and anticipates it.

¶ 6:29 AM 1 comments

Marburg days (days I choose to call those "before Being and Time", the book that changed my life, and that possibly, will lead me to destroy it) had the intensity of a premonitory time. We all spoke of Heidegger. We went to his classes. We discussed his ideas. We were young and so was he, our Master. My bosom buddy was Rainer Minder. I'll tell you about him. He had gone further than us in his closeness to National Socialism. He had contacts in Röhm's SA and talked with fervor (despite his fervor not devouring his reflective temperament) of the figure that agitated Germany in those days. I don't need to tell you his name. It is enough to signal that that small bodied yet titanic man, that pure force of nature dragged Germany towards its encounter with its lost greatness. He dared to say what we all knew: the warriors of 1914 had been betrayed by the social democrats, by the cowardly merchants of 1918 that surrendered without a fight to the end, without deciding to summit a triumph that should have been ours. Germany, son, didn't lose that war. It was lost by the politicians, the bankers, the traitors. Hitler was the return of the pride of the nation. With him, Germany returned to occupy the center of the West, its philosophical destiny. If some place might relive the glory of Athens it was amongst us. That flag was the one we should now have courage of raising, unfurling. However, I'm getting ahead of myself.

In Marburg it was Rainer Minder who thought these things. I, fearful, listened to him and delayed my decision. Secretly (I believe) I was already turned, but I still had doubts about making it known publicly; not even, son, to myself. One fears throwing oneself in the abysses or climbing the peaks. Here, it was the case of the peaks. To climb to the highest peaks of German spirituality and his unrenounceable mission: defend the permanence of the Western spirit, its centrality. Its space open for the battle; its uncontainable willingness, in permanent warrior expansion.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 7:02 AM 2 comments

76. Propositions about Science

5. "Specialization" is not somehow a manifestation of decline and degeneration of "the" science, and not somehow an unavoidable evil as a result of progress and vastness and division of labor, but rather a necessary and inherent consequence of its character as an individual scientific discipline and inalienable condition for its existence and that always means: its progress. Where is the actual ground for the division [of sciences]? In beingness as representedness.

P. 101

¶ 8:23 AM 0 comments

“The Transcendental Ego can never die.”

Thus claimed a professor under whom I once studied Husserl at Duquesne University.

She meant to be correcting what she thought was a fundamental error of Husserl’s student and treacherous colleague, Heidegger.

A convinced mortalist, I believed then as I believe now that she was mistaken and he was not.

¶ 6:47 AM 0 comments

Then he goes down the linguistic rabbit hole. "To lay means to bring to lie. Thus, to lay is at the same time to place one thing beside another, to lay them together. To lay is to gather."

He goes on to say that gathering is inherent to laying. "Every gathering is already a laying."

So, this question, "How does the proper sense of this word, to lay, come to mean saying and talking?" isn’t really relevant. When we ask that question, we’re assuming that the meaning has ADVANCED from one form to another. Heidegger says that there was no advancement: these meanings are still there, contained within the act of talking and telling.

¶ 4:33 PM 1 comments

Quirin's team found that thoughts of death, but not of dental pain, triggered heightened activity in brain regions such as the right amygdala, which is associated with fear and anxiety. More surprisingly, the team also saw increased activity in the caudate nucleus when the men thought of death - an area of the brain associated with performing habitual behaviours.

Quirin thinks the work of German philosopher Martin Heidegger could explain the unexpected result. Heidegger said that doing what everyone else does is a defence against anxiety. According to Quirin, performing culturally learned habitual behaviours to fit in with the crowd could be a strategy to reduce the anxiety associated with death.

¶ 1:27 PM 0 comments

Silence reaches back to presence and original community, before the symbolic compromised both silence and presence. It predates what Levinas called "the unity of representation," that always works to silence the silence and replace it with the homelessness of symbolic structures. The Latin root for silence, silere, to say nothing, is related to sinere, to allow to be in a place. We are drawn to those places where language falls most often, and most crucially, silent. The later Heidegger appreciated the realm of silence, as did Holderlin, one of Heidegger's important reference points, especially in his Late Hymns. The insatiable longing that Holderlin expressed so powerfully related not only to an original, silent wholeness, but also to his growing comprehension that language must always admit its origin in loss.

A century and a half later, Samuel Beckett made use of silence as an alternative to language. In Krapp's Last Tape and elsewhere, the idea that all language is an excess of language is strongly on offer. Beckett complains that "in the forest of symbols" there is never quiet, and longs to break through the veil of language to silence. Northrup Frye found the purpose of Beckett's work "to lie in nothing other than the restoration of silence."

¶ 9:45 AM 4 comments

In the 1970s, Ouija board users were also described as "cult members" by sociologists, though this was severely scrutinized in the field. The Ouija board was criticized by Heidegger who noted that: "it seems as though man everywhere and always encounters himself" and was said to have described users of the board as 'arrogant' in their assumption that they could overcome death to talk to spirits.

¶ 5:12 PM 2 comments

76. Propositions about Science

4. Thus there is never and nowhere anything like the science, as perhaps there is "art" and "philosophy," which are always in themselves essentially and fully what they are, if they are historical. "Science" is only a formal title whose essential understanding requires that the breakdown into disciplines, into individual and separate sciences, be thought along. Thus, to the extent that every science is a "positive" science, it must also be an individual scientific discipline.

P. 101

¶ 8:22 AM 0 comments

On a philosophical level Martin Heidegger links architecture, or building to be more precise, to food in his etymological analysis of the word building (bauen) in his text ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ (’Bauen Wohnen Denken’). The origin of the word ‘bauen’ (building) is in ‘bin’ (being) but is also related to ‘bauer’ (farmer). So farming the land, the production of food, has an etymological link to building. Some of the first buildings were built because people started to grow crops and stayed in a fixed location. Heidegger also says that in order to build, you have to master living (”Nur wenn wir das Wohnen vermögen, können wir bauen.”). I would even go as far as to say that the preparation and consummation of food is a huge part of living and should be mastered in order to be able to build, to practice architecture.

¶ 3:57 AM 2 comments

One does not need to consult the original German to see that Mario Wenning's translation is inadequate in places. Sloterdijk's pithy prose comes through at times, but it is a clunky imitation in many others. Indeed there are some real howlers. For example, when Sloterdijk means to play on Heidegger's dictum that thinking is thanking, to turn our attention to rage and to imply that Heidegger was a bit of a flâneur in the ways that he called our attention back to the Greeks, Wenning renders this very interesting sentence: "Heidegger, who we imagine to be a thoughtful tourist on the planes [sic] of Troy, would probably say: fighting is also thanking." (p. 11-12) I know that I have never been able to get a good flight into Troy! One wonders what the airport code might be. .

¶ 9:35 PM 1 comments

Einstein modifies Newton, arguing that space and time are actually aspects of the same thing (‘spacetime’) artificially divided by our perceptions. Heidegger disagreed, and held that time was different to space because—for instance—it is possible to go backward and forward in space, but not in time (I can go back to Canterbury; but I cannot go back to 1977. As if I would ever want to). Einsteinians might say: this happens to be true of me, and something similar happened to be true of Heidegger, but that these are particular not universal circumstances: that given the right equipment, which I happen not to possess, I could go back to 1977 – as if a man in 1700, considering that he personally could not travel at 100 mph, decided thereupon that ‘100mph’ was a radically different sort of thing to 5mph or 15 mph. Such a man would be an idiot.)

¶ 11:34 AM 1 comments

When I say Heidegger is humorless, I also mean that his notion that Da-sein has moods is limited to very dark and depressing and anxious moods, because, after all, the foundation of Da-sein is a great abyss. There is no laughter, and hence no pleasure in knowledge in his work, in his existential moods. In great part, the angst arises out of the realization that man is in the condition of “falleneness” and man has been existing already from primordial times to be in “thrownness,” although I like to think of it that as Heideggerian Being has excreted Da-sein.

About this bad mood, Leo Strauss writes: “Existentialism appeals to a certain experience, anguish or angst, as the basic experience in the light of which everything must be understood. Having this experience is one thing; regarding it as the basic experience is another thing. That is, its basic character is not guaranteed by the experience itself. It is only guaranteed by argument.” I assume that Strauss intimates that if the experience itself were enough, there is no real need to write the argument of Being and Time.

¶ 8:34 AM 6 comments

Arendt was certainly right to note that Scholem was a man who did not enjoy being contradicted, but he also worked hard to maintain their friendship. Most of this time, they kept their ideological tensions under control through occasional familiar Yiddishisms like "tachles," witty barbs against common targets such as Scholem's "Love thy Buber as thyself," or careful silence (the name Martin Heidegger does not appear in any of the letters). Most often, however, it was their mutual commitment to the memory of Walter Benjamin that held their friendship together. Whenever disagreements arose, they reverted to Benjamin, and the ways in which they could advance his publications and good name, which was then virtually unknown. They both regarded Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the leading figures of the "Frankfurt School" of neo-Marxist critical theory, who had been Benjamin's erstwhile colleagues and patrons, as the enemies, determined to monopolize, misconstrue, or even hide Benjamin's work.

¶ 7:57 AM 0 comments

Just this morning, I read Heidegger's analysis of how we come to understand being-with: "This understanding [of co-existence], like all understanding, is not a knowledge derived from cognition, but a primordially existential kind of being which first makes knowledge and cognition possible. Knowing oneself is grounded in primarially understanding being-with." I understand why he wants "being-with" almost a priori, but Heidegger is perhaps only partly right here; knowing oneself isn't primordial unless parents and other caregivers are. I was born in 1950, so knowing myself probably began with my mother. More heartbreakingly, Heidegger talks about those moments when Da-sein loses itself, something my mother regularly did. I know I'm reading Heidegger through the lenses of grief, but it's oddly as if grief allows me to see things I might not have noticed before.

¶ 6:32 AM 0 comments

Heidegger's tale is not as catastrophist [as Nietzsche's], and so emphasizes less Christianity's novelty than its continuity with a nihilism implicit in all Western thought, from at least the time of Plato (which Nietzsche, in his way, also acknowledged). Nihilism, says Heidegger, is born in a forgetfulness of the mystery of being, and in the attempt to capture and master being in artifacts of reason (the chief example--and indeed the prototype of every subsequent apostasy from true "ontology"--being Plato's ideas). Scandalously to oversimplify his argument, it is, says Heidegger, the history of this nihilistic impulse to reduce being to an object of the intellect, subject to the will, that has brought us at last to the age of technology, for which reality is just so many quanta of power, the world a representation of consciousness, and the earth a mere reserve awaiting exploitation; technological mastery has become our highest ideal, and our only real model of truth. Christianity, for its part, is not so much a new thing as a prolonged episode within the greater history of nihilism, notable chiefly for having brought part of this history's logic to its consummation by having invented the metaphysical God, the form of all forms, who grounds all of being in himself as absolute efficient cause, and who personifies that cause as total power and will. From this God, in the fullness of time, would be born the modern subject who has usurped God's place.

I hope I will be excused both for so cursory a précis and for the mild perversity that causes me to see some merit in both of these stories. Heidegger seems to me obviously correct in regarding modernity's nihilism as the fruition of seeds sown in pagan soil; and Nietzsche also correct to call attention to Christianity's shocking--and, for the antique order of noble values, irreparably catastrophic--novelty; but neither grasped why he was correct.

¶ 4:29 AM 2 comments

76. Propositions about Science

3. What is "scientifically" knowable is in each case given in advance by a "truth" which is never graspable by science, a truth about the recognized region of beings. Beings as a region lie in advance for science, they constitute a positum, and every science is in itself a "positive" science (including mathematics).

P. 101

¶ 10:08 AM 2 comments

Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos

Cassirer's concentrated on a critique of philosophical anthropology and specifically of Max Scheler's version of this new trend. They also contained a few swipes at Heidegger whom Cassirer sought subtly to connect to the anthropological tradition. Heidegger, in turn, criticized the neo-Kantian interpretation of Kant which, he said, had reduced the first Critique to a theory of knowledge for the natural sciences when it should in fact be read as laying the groundwork of a metaphysics -- a somewhat contentious claim that Heidegger would elaborate in his book Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, published in late 1929.

Heidegger's provocative thesis was also to form the basis of the debate between him and Cassirer, which was the recognized high point of the entire 1929 seminar sessions at Davos. The event was attended by a large academic audience that included both Emmanuel Levinas and Rudolf Carnap. Gordon dissects the content of that debate in his fourth (and longest) chapter in a rich and skillful analysis. He reproduces the entire transcript of the event composed at the time by two younger German philosophers, interspersed with his own perceptive comments. Cassirer had begun the debate with the question: "What does Heidegger understand by neo-Kantianism?" And Heidegger responded by forcefully restating his view that the neo-Kantian philosophers "were united in the conviction that, given the apparent supremacy of the natural sciences, the sole task left for philosophy was to furnish a theoretical ground-work for natural scientific knowledge."

¶ 4:01 AM 0 comments

standing still (because of awe or wonder) is still a mode of comportment.

¶ 8:18 PM 1 comments

A brief philosophical and methodological comment: without premeditation, our team once again subscribes to a particularly Franco-German approach as our anticipation work not only draws on the concept of "listening" and the unveiling of reality so dear to Heidegger, but also the approach advocated by Descartes, namely the definition of a rational method. Here, moreover, is a synthesis that should inspire those who are currently working to define the future characteristics of Euroland governance.

¶ 4:38 PM 2 comments

A second “theatre of thought” play of mine, “The Fir Tree and the Ivy”, is about “trahison des clercs” played out against the background of the rise of National Socialism and the complex relationship between the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, and his one-time student and later famous political thinker, Hannah Arendt. It was completed in 2005 and won the prestigious Eamon Keane Full Length Play Competition in 2006, part of the annual Listowel Writers’ Week, in Ireland.

¶ 12:04 PM 0 comments

According to one of Heidgger’s famous analyses in Being and Time, the emotion, mood, or attunement (Befindlichkeit) of what he calls anxiety (Angst) temporalizes itself into and as the adventing of advent, the coming-to of the to-come (the authentic “future,” German Zukunft), that retrieves or repeats what has been (das Gewesene, the authentic past) in the bare blink of an eye (the authentic moment, now, or present: Augenblick, which the old, standard English translation of Being and Time by John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson renders as “moment of vision”). So too, according to Heidegger, does every “state-of-mind” (MacQuarrie and Robinson’s translation of Heidegger’s German term Befindlichkeit) temporalize itself in one way or another—and, crucially, always as a version either of authentic time, or of inauthentic time, but either way “simultaneously” in all three of time’s dimensions.

Just so does the state of mind called rage, too, temporalize itself. Indeed, read as the very spirit of what Nietzsche calls revenge, rage, like what Heidegger calls anxiety, is not just one way among others in which temporality temporalizes itself, but is, instead, a form of fundamental temporalization. Rage, conceived along Nietzschean lines, is like Heideggerian anxiety in being what Heidegger will soon enough after Being and Time come to call a “fundamental mood” or “fundamental attunement”–a Grundstimmung.

¶ 11:22 AM 0 comments

Let us think back to Homer, who likewise already, almost reflexively, brings the presencing of a what-is-present into relation with light. We may recall a scene during the homecoming of Odysseus. With the departure of Eumaeus, Athena appears in the form of a beautiful young woman. The goddess appears to Odysseus. But his son Telemachus does not see her, and the poet says: οὐ γἀρ πως πάντεσσι θεοὶ φαίνονται ἐναργείς (Odyssey XVI, 161). “For the gods do not appear to everyone ἐναργείς”—this word is translated as “visible.” Yet ἀργὀς means gleaming. What gleams, shines forth from itself. What shines forth thus, presences forth from itself. Odysseus and Telemachus see the same woman. But Odysseus perceives the presencing of the goddess. Later, the Romans translated ἐνάργεια, the shining-forth-from-itself, with evidentia; evideri means to become visible. Evidence is thought in terms of the human being as the one who sees. In contrast, ἐνάργεια is a feature of presencing things themselves.

According to Plato, things owe their shining to a light. This relation of the ideas to light is understood as a metaphor. Nevertheless, the question remains to be asked: What is it about the proper nature of presencing that its determination requires and allows a transference to light? For long enough, thinkers have troubled over in what way determinations such as identity, otherness, sameness, movement, which belong to the presencing of what-is-present, can still be thought of as ideas. Is here concealed a completely different issue that becomes entirely inaccessible because of the modern reinterpretation of ἰδέα, namely, from the outward appearance of what-is-present to perceptio, to a constituted representation by the human I? The presence of what-is-present has as such no relation to light in the sense of brightness. But presence is referred to light in the sense of the clearing.

¶ 8:48 AM 11 comments

As I said, I admire what Kotsko has done in this short book, and most of all in his last chapter. At the same time, I would question two presumptions here. First, I wonder what it means to claim that the fulfilling of divine purpose depends on humanity, especially considering the broader ecological framework of Kotsko’s thought. In a Heideggerian context, Dasein can ask the question of being, as opposed to animals which cannot, and rocks which simply lack any sort of world. In an evolutionary context, however, it seems a little arrogant and naïve to claim that the proliferation of relationships depends solely on us, even if we arrogate to ourselves the ability to name, value and ultimately to impact the nature and status of many of these relationships in the world.

¶ 4:08 PM 1 comments

76. Propositions about Science

2. Accordingly, "science" itself is not a knowing in the sense of grounding and preserving an essential truth. Science is a derived mechanism of a knowing, i.e., it is the machinational opening of a sphere of accuracies within an otherwise hidden—and for science in no way question-worthy—zone of a truth (truth about "nature," "history," "right," for example).

P. 101

¶ 10:04 AM 0 comments

In Freiburg, in 1928, I knew Heidegger. I knew his name, his fame, his writings, and his voice. I had earlier attended his courses in Marburg. I didn't know him - so to speak - in person. I can't say I ever did, despite the closeness of our lives. I could see him, hear him and even exchange phrases with him. However, can anyone know the absolute?

Nothing could transmit the bewitchment, the reflexive ecstasy (I know the risks of this phrase: is there an ecstasy of thinking), the feast of intelligence provoked, in me, by his appearance. We didn't believe much in philosophy in those years. Reaching us were the final waves of a turgid, old neo-Kantianism, or the icy winds of the mathematical currents, so dear to the inheritors of English empiricism. Or the power of Husserl, the greatest and latest of our philosophers, that, in fact, was insufficient to shake our spirits with the necessary violence to tear us from decadence, from the opaque humors of defeat. Heidegger was the new. And what's new always has the fury of hurricanes, and the pain of devastation. No one spoke like him. No one spoke like him at the closing of his Rektorat address. Nobody, as when he said: "The whole world is in the middle of the storm." And we raised our arms in joy and we acclaimed - glorifying him - the Master from Germany.

I want, now, for you to know something, I want to establish this from the start: your father, Dieter Müller, was National Socialist and was professor at Freiburg for many years. I also want to confess (even though this should not diminish in the least my responsibility before the facts) that I became a National Socialist for Heidegger, that I had not been one until hearing, in 1933, his Rektorat address, and had that not been the case, I never would have been one if that speech had never been made. Spoken by he who said it, the way in which he said it, with the authority with which he said it; said by Martin Heidegger, from the vast height of his philosophical genius. You were born in 1934 and it was for him that your name is Martin.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 8:09 AM 2 comments

German had for more than a century been an important medium for those who wanted to become involved in the work of the philosophers, namely, in reading important texts and discussing their content. It was Christian Thomasius who, at the University of Halle in 1694, changed from Latin, the language common at the time for academic lectures, to German. But it was only with Immanuel Kant that German became recognized in countries near and far as a language which corresponded, as it were, to the dignity of philosophy. I need not comment on the next stages: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, but also Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Max Weber, and finally, the above-mentioned Heidegger. Their major texts contributed towards the German language becoming familiar to philosophers all over the world, but also towards the delusion that one should philosophize in German.

¶ 9:50 AM 3 comments

76. Propositions about Science

1. "Science" must always be understood in the modern sense. The medieval "doctrine" and Greek "knowledge" are fundamentally different from it, although in a mediate and transformed way they co-determine what we now know as "science" and what we now can exclusively pursue, in accordance with our historical situation.

P. 100-1

¶ 8:43 AM 2 comments

Much later, Heidegger erected a personal psycho-philosophical mythology of woodland paths and forest huts which the kitsch image-makers of the Third Reich would make their own. German forests are black in more than one sense, and they produce worse things than gateaux.

¶ 10:02 PM 1 comments

What appears after the self experiences its self as disappearing? Heidegger poses the question in relation to anxiety: “Anxiety reveals the nothing.” And the revelation of the nothing is only possible because the “I” has slipped away from itself, leaving the “pure Da-sein” of the “one” in a mode of unhomely persistence (I am compressing the details for the sake of brevity…) Unfortunately, Heidegger does not tell us what becomes of the (still) living body as the “I” slips, instead: “Beings as a whole become superfluous.” But the gaps in his sketch can be augmented with an appeal to Sartre’s concept of nausea.

¶ 11:38 AM 2 comments

Another aspect of the same problem is the passage from ready-at-hand to present-at-hand in Being and Time Heidegger takes as the starting point the active immersion in its surroundings of a finite engaged agent who relates to objects around it as to something ready-at-hand; the impassive perception of objects as present-at-hand arises gradually from this engage ment when things ‘malfunction’ in different ways, and is therefore a derivative mode of presence. Heidegger’s point, of course, is that the proper ontological description of the way Dasein is in the world has to abandon the modern Cartesian duality of values and facts: the notion that the subject encounters present-at-hand objects on to which he then projects his aims, and explots them accordingly, falsifies the proper state of things: the fact that engaged immersion in the world is primordial, and that all other modes of the presence of objects are derived from it.

On closer examination, however, the picture becomes somewhat blurred and more complex. The problem with Being and Time is how to co-ordinate the series of pairs of oppositions: authentic existence versus das Man anxiety versus immersion in worldly activity; true philosophical thought versus traditional ontology; dispersed modern society versus the People assuming iLs historic Destiny. ... The pairs in this series do not simply overlap: when a premodern artisan or farmer, following his traditional way of Life, is immersed in his daily involvement with ready-at-hand objects that are included in his world, this immersion is definitely not the same as the das Man of the modern city-dweller. (This is why, in his notorious ‘Why should we remain in the province?’, Heidegger himself reports that when he was uncertain whether to accept the invitation to go to teach in Berlin, he asked his friend, a hard-working local farmer, who just silently shook his head — Heidegger immediately accepted this as the authentic answer to his predicament.) Is it not therefore, that, in contrast to these two opposed modes of immersion — the authentic involvement with the ready-at-hand and the modern letting oneself go with the flow of das Man — there are also two opposed modes of acquiring a distance: the shattering existential experience of anxiety, which extraneates us from the traditional immersion in our way of life, and the theoretical distance of the neutral observer who, as if from outside, perceives the world in ‘representations’? It seems as if this ‘authentic’ tension between the immersion of ‘being-in-the-world’ and its suspension in anxiety is redoubled by the ‘inauthentic’ pair of das Man and traditional metaphysical ontology. So we have four positions: the tension in everyday life be tween authentic ‘being-in-the-world’ and das Man, as well as the tension between the two modes of extracting ourselves from the everyday run of things, authentic existential resoluteness and the traditional metaphysical ontology — does not this give us a kind of Heideggerian semiotic square?

Pp. 11-2

¶ 8:11 AM 7 comments

As mobile social technology diffuses – Heideggerian philosophy provides an overarching understanding of the ‘Internet of things‘ - as the networked realisation of people ‘being in the world’ with ‘social objects’ in lots of different times, places and moods.

¶ 7:34 AM 2 comments

As Heidegger himself put it, those who came closest to the ontological Truth are condemned to err at the ontic level. . . err about what? Precisely about the line of separation between ontic and ontological. The paradox not to be underestimated is that the very philosopher who focused his interest on the enigma of ontological difference — who warned again and again against the metaphysical mistake of conferring ontological dignity on some ontic content (God as the highest Entity, for example) — fell into the trap of conferring on Nazism the ontological dignity of suiting the essence of modern man. The standard defence of Heidegger against the reproach of his Nazi past consists of two points: not only was his Nazi engagement a simple persona) error (a ‘stupidity [Dummheit]’, as Heidegger himself put it) in no way inherently related to his philosophical project; the main counter-argument is that it is Heidegger’s own philosophy that enables us to discern the true epochal roots of modem totalitarianism. However, what remains unthought here is the hidden complicity between the ontological indifference towards concrete social systems (capitalism, Fascism, Communism), in so far as they all belong to the same horizon of modern technology, and the secret privileging of a concrete sociopolitical model (Nazism with Heidegger, Communism with some ‘Heideggerian Marxists’) as closer to the ontological truth of our epoch.

Here one should avoid the trap that caught Heidegger’s defenders, who dismissed Heidegger’s Nazi engagement as a simple anomaly, a fall into the ontic level, in blatant contradiction to his thought, which teaches us not to confuse ontological horizon with ontic choices (as we have already seen, Heidegger is at his strongest when he demonstrates how, on a deeper structural level, ecological, conservative, and so on, oppositions to the modern universe of technology arc already embedded in the horizon of what they purport to reject: the ecological critique of the technological exploitation of nature ultimately leads to a more ‘environmentally sound’ technology, etc.). Heidegger did not engage in the Nazi political project ‘in spite of’ his ontological philosophical approach, but because of it; this engagement was not ‘beneath’ his philosophical level — on the contrary, if one is to understand Heidegger, the key point is to grasp the complicity (in Hegelese: ‘speculative identity’) between the elevation above ontic concerns and the passionate ‘ontic’ Nazi political engagement.

One can now see the ideological trap that caught Heidegger. when he criticizes Nazi racism on behalf of the true ‘inner greatness’ of the Nazi movement, he repeats the elementary ideological gesture of maintaining an inner distance towards the ideological text — of claiming that there is something more beneath it, a non-ideological kernel: ideology exerts its hold over us by means of this very insistence that the Cause we adhere to is not ‘merely’ ideological. So where is the trap? When the disappointed Heidegger turns away from active engagement in the Nazi movement, he does so because the Nazi movement did not maintain the level of its ‘inner greatness’, but legitimized itself with inadequate (racial) ideology. In other words, what he expected from it was that it should legitimize itself through direct awareness of its ‘inner greatness’. And the problem lies in this very expectation that a political movement that will directly refer to its historico-ontological foundation is possible. This expectation, however, is in itself profoundly metaphysical, in so far as it fails to recognize that the gap separating the direct ideological legitimization of a movement from its ‘inner greatness’ (its historico-ontological essence) is constitutive a positive condition of its ‘functioning’. To use the terms of the later Heidegger, ontological insight necessarily entails ontic blindness and error, and vice versa — that is to say, in order to be ‘effective’ at the ontic level, one must disregard the ontological horizon of one’s activity. (In this sense, Heidegger emphasizes that ‘science doesn’t think’ and that, far from being its limitation, this inability is the very motor of scientific progress.) In other words, what Heidegger seems unable to endorse is a concrete political engagement that would accept its necessary, constitutive blindness — as if the moment we acknowledge the gap separating the awareness of the ontological horizon from ontic engagement, any ontic engagement is depreciated, loses its authentic dignity.

Pp. 9-11

¶ 9:04 AM 10 comments

Kirby was ultimately interested not in the future of the relationship between religion and technology, but the prospect of technology as religion. Citing Martin Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning Technology” throughout, Kirby posits the existence of a religion of technology.

“It seems to me arguable that a certain kind of commitment to technology, an unquestioning commitment that technological advancement is progressive and beneficial to humanity, is a kind of religious commitment itself,” Kirby stated.

Most people view technology as means to an end: tools that we control in order to better serve our lives on Earth. However, what if technology actually controlled us? What if the way in which we used technology determined our actions, and the technological progress we made was pre-determined by the technology we already possess?

Kirby explained that society tends to assume that technology is ethically neutral. It is merely an instrument of progress that we as human beings control. He told The Daily that Heidegger calls this common assumption into question. “Technology is a way that we as human beings have a relation to truth,” quoted Kirby.

¶ 8:11 AM 0 comments

At the beginning of the previous century, philosophers like Heidegger and Leo Strauss sort of picked up where Hegel left off: I recall Jacob Klein's talk one day on Heidegger. Prior to his encounter with Heidegger, Klein had, by his own account, been "locked up inside of self," unable to "know anything." Then, he went to Heidegger's seminar on Aristotle, perhaps the Physics, I forget which one. Anyhow, for Klein, with this encounter with Aristotle himself, as it were, the door of perception was opened, and Klein was off and running, so to speak, towards truth in philosophy and reason as...LOGOS.

Strauss, too, as I recall, learned from Heidegger that Plato and Aristotle could be read in the light of dia-logos!

I'd be willing to bet that the young Joseph Ratzinger, too, read his philosophy right along with the Church Fathers, Augustine and Bonaventure, etc. The emphasis upon reason as Logos, in Ratzinger's approach to interpretation, is quite pronounced.

¶ 6:57 PM 3 comments

In physics, the theory of relativity introduced the position of the observer as a theme of science. Yet physics, as such, is unable to say what this “position of the observer” means. It obviously refers to what we touched on by saying: I am here at any time. In this being-here, the bodiliness of the human being always comes into play. In the area of microphysics, the act or measuring and the instrument themselves interfere with comprehending the objects during experimentation. That means that the bodiliness or the human being comes into play within the “objectivity” of natural science. Does this only hold true for scientific research, or is it true here precisely because in general the bodying forth of the human being's body co-determines the human being's being-in-the-world.[sic] If this is the case, the phenomenon of the body can be brought into view if and only when being-in-the-world is explicitly experienced, appropriated, and sustained as the basic characteristic of human existence. This can only be done by critically overcoming the hitherto dominant subject-object relation [in human knowledge]. One must see that science as such (i.e., all theoretical-scientific knowledge) is founded as a way of being-in-the-world—founded in the bodily having of a world.

Pp. 93-4

¶ 7:26 AM 3 comments

Finally, it is necessary to disrupt a web of assumptions that I have left undisturbed hitherto, most pointedly, the assumption that in asking about the meaning of presence one is asking simply for one or several positive senses. It is necessary to disrupt this assumption of straightforwardness because meaning "has never been conceivable, within the history of metaphysics, otherwise than on the basis of presence and as presence" (Marges de la philosophie 58; Tr.: 51)-as, to take the exceptionally revealing Husserlian case, presence to eidetic intuition. To ask straightforwardly about the meaning of presence is already to assume what presence means, to assume it in the very question of meaning.

But then, is not the Heideggerian question itself caught in this web of assumptions and as a result held firmly within the closure of metaphysics? If the question of Being is determined as a question of meaning, as the question of the meaning of Being, then is it not in its very formulation a question of presence, a question directed toward a recovery of presence? Indeed this would be so, were it not the case that the Heideggerian text, from Being and Time on, engages ceaselessly in a deconstructive reduction, a delimitation, of meaning, its reduction to the woraufhin des Entwurfs (Sein und Zeit, 151), its referral to world, i.e., signification, and eventually to ἀληθεια. Meaning as presence becomes, is reduced to, the meaning of presence, the latter taken not straightforwardly, but as that which delimits presence. The Heideggerian text, thus releasing the torsion in the question of the meaning of presence, twists it free of metaphysical closure.

¶ 8:54 AM 1 comments

Heidegger saw technology as a vicious circle: technology breeds more technology, it “challenges” nature, and people live in a Gestell, or “frame,” of technology. In doing so, we lose elements of freedom. With technology so rampant and so ever-present, the original experience of Being. says Heidegger, is lost. We cannot let nature "be," we are less able to submit, to surrender to that experience of being; the “releasement towards things” is simply unavailable in a technological society: the poetic experience of the world is sidelined and overwhelmed by technology. This was reinforced by Heidegger’s views on America. The United States had often been the object of German thought. For Heine, America was the symbol of all that Romanticism detested. After a visit across the Atlantic, Nikolaus Lenau, sometimes called the German Byron, described the country as disfigured by its politics, with its culture imposed from outside. Nietzsche expected America to spread a spiritual emptiness (Geistlosigkeit) over Europe and neither Moeller van den Bruck nor Spengler cared much for it, though Ernst Jünger admired America’s ability to involve all the country in World War I. As we have seen, Freud thought America “a mistake” (whatever that might mean). For Heidegger, America was the symbol of the crisis of our age. “which is also the deepest crisis of all time.” It represents the greatest alienation of man, his profoundest loss of “authenticity,” and it was the supreme impediment to spiritual reawakening. America reduced everything to its lowest common denominator, all experience to routine—all was trivialized and rendered bland. Americans, said Heidegger, were “totally oblivious” to man's encounter with Being.” After the first space probes, Heidegger wrote that “there is no longer either ‘earth’ or ‘heaven,’ in the sense of poetic dwelling of man on this earth.” The age of technology is our fate and America the home of this “catastrophe.”

P. 771

¶ 7:01 AM 1 comments

For Heidegger, Dasein finds its ultimate existencial Truth and condition at the moment when it looks itself in the mirror in the morning and is thrown into the finitude of the realization of a bad hair day (Tag-Schlechtes-Haar).

¶ 9:30 PM 0 comments

The default of God and the divinities is absence. But absence is not nothing; rather it is precisely the presence) which must first be appropriated, of the hidden fullness and wealth of what has been and what, thus gathered, is presencing, of the divine in the world of the Greeks, in prophetic Judaism, in the preaching of Jesus. This no-longer is in itself a not-yet of the veiled arrival of its inexhaustible nature. Since Being is never the merely precisely actual, to guard Being can never be equated with the task of a guard who protects from burglars a treasure stored in a building. Guardianship of Being is not fixated upon something existent. The exiting thing, taken for itself, never contains an appeal of Being. Guardianship is vigilance, watchfulness for the has-been and coming destiny of Being, a vigilance that issues from a long and ever-renewed thoughtful deliberateness, which heeds the directive that lies in the manner in which Being makes its appeal. In the destiny of Being there is never a mere sequence of things one after another: now frame, then world and thing; rather, there is always a passing by and simultaneity of the early and late.

P. 182-3

¶ 6:26 AM 1 comments

Particularly congenial with Heidegger’s perspective, in my view, is Lacan’s conception of psychotherapy and of the rootedness of illness in a “lack of being.” Several passages in the Zoliikon Seminars link human pathology with an ontological lack or “privation.” “If we negate something not by simply excluding it but rather by retaining it as a lack or want,” Heidegger says at one point, “then we call such negation a privation.” The endeavors of the medical profession, he continues addressing his psychiatric audience, occur “in the domain of negation understood as a privation” — because they revolve around human illness or pathology. In the case of illness, well-being or being in-the-world is not simply absent or eliminated but disturbed. In this sense, illness is not a “mere” negation of Dasein’s situatedness. but a phenomenon of privation; every privation, however, implies a relatedness to being or to the condition which is wanting or of which one is in want. Thus, “to the extent that you deal with illness you actually deal with well-being in the sense of a lack of well-being which is to be restored.”

Heidegger’s affinities with a non-orthodox Freudianism are underscored in the Zollikon Seminars by frequent protestations against idealism and mentalism (which, it is true, do not fully cancel certain cuhuralist overtones). In my own estimate, the path to a viable connection of existential ontology and psychoanalysis was traced some time ago by Merleau-Ponty in his essay “Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis.” In this essay, Merleau-Ponty sided with those who, separating psychoanalysis from a “scientistic or objectivist ideology.” treat the Freudian unconscious rather as “an archaic or primordial consciousness” and the repressed as “a zone of experience that we have not integrated.” This construal, in his view, did not vindicate a mentalist approach nor the integration of psychoanalysis into the “philosophy of consciousness” (along Husserlian lines). As he observed, drawing his inspiration more from Heidegger than Husserl: “All consciousness is consciousness of something or of the world, but this something, this world, s no longer . . . an object that is what it is, exactly adjusted to acts of consciousness. Consciousness is now the ‘soul of Heraclitus’ and being, which is around it rather than in front of it, is a being of dreams, by definition hidden.”

Pp. 560-1

¶ 7:17 AM 1 comments

[T]he primary explicit thesis of the book is based on the view of Rudolf Allers that "Being is a univocal term" for Heidegger. The author holds that "This remark when taken with Deleuze's pronouncement that Heidegger 'follows Scotus,' motivates my project". The Appendix is concerned with "The Univocity of Being: Deleuze". It is the key to the thesis of the book. Deleuze is made normative for a reading of Scotus, all of the history of philosophy, and all of Heidegger's works.

¶ 8:51 PM 3 comments

But the mind is a puzzling thing. If you force it to think about something, it may not be ready to do so, at least, not in a way that will be clear to you. It will reject the ideas and follow other distractions, or it will work so hard that it just produces a raging headache. When you want to sleep, it will decide to keep you up because NOW it has something to tell you. Or ask you. Or demand of you.

All you can do is go with it, go about your days, fitting in the reading and the thinking and the dissecting. Cry a little. Get mad. Refuse to continue. Use every expletive you have ever learned, and make some up while you’re at it.

Until you reach a clearing. I can’t believe this term came to me, because it is one that I learned during my PhD coursework a few years ago. At the time, it was profound but ever-so complex, at least to me. It is a pleasant surprise to realize that I retained this idea and am able to apply it to my research experience. Learning is a wonderful thing.

Martin Heidegger developed a philosophy of being that introduced the term “clearing” as an opening through which entities other than ourselves can emerge out of hiddenness, or are made visible by a bringing into the light.

¶ 10:33 AM 6 comments

It was interesting to observe that Heidegger was very much present in both Sloterdijk and Latour’s talk during their recent joint appearance at Harvard. For Sloterdijk, it was a matter of building on Heidegger positively, by “explicitating” Heidegger’s notion of being-in. As Latour quipped, for Sloterdijk “Dasein is design,” and explicitation means rendering the material aspects of being human visible.

¶ 8:18 AM 1 comments

What is the fundamental structure of this thought? It is brought-to-pass by the nature of man conceived as ek-sistence, i.e., as endowed with the prerogative, unique among beings, of an ecstatic open-ness Unto the lighting-process of Being. Ek-sistence thus understood may be called the There (Da) of Being, because it is that domain among beings where the lighting-process takes place. Since the There comes-to-pass in a being, this privileged being is the There-being (Dasein), and, conversely, There-being must he understood always as the There of Being among beings, nothing more.

To understand thought, then, we must first see more precisely the relation
ship between Being and its There. It is, in fact, a cor-relation. For on the one hand Being maintains a primacy over its There, throwing it forth and dominating it at all times, revealing itself and concealing itself according to its own nature. Yet on the other hand, Being needs its There in order to be itself (the coming-to-pass of non-concealment), for unless non-concealment comes-to-pass in a There that is found among beings, it does not come-to-pass at all. We understand in what sense, then, the There is “for the sake of” Being, the “shepherd,” the “watchman” of Being: Being is its unique concern (Sorge). To think Being will be to think the truth of Being in which There-being is ek-sistent.

Being discloses itself to and in its There, but since it is Being that holds the primacy, Being is conceived as sending itself (sich schickt) unto its There. We may speak of this self-sending of Being as proceeding from Being and call it a “self-emitting” or, if we may be permitted a neologism to designate a new concept, a “mittence” (Geschick) of Being. We may speak of it, too, as terminating in There and therefore call it a “com-mitting” or “com-mitment” (Schicksal) of There to its privileged destiny as the shepherd of Being. In any case, one thing is certain: intrinsic to the mittence of Being is a certain negativity, by reason of which Being withdraws even as it bestows itself, conceals itself even in its revealment. The reason is that even though Being reveals itself in revealing beings, it can never be seized for itself and by itself (since it is not a being), hence conceals itself in the very beings to which it gives rise. To think Being, then, will be to think it as a mittence, not only in its positivity but in its negativity.

Pp. 82-83

¶ 6:53 AM 1 comments

Heidegger understood that the emergence of scientific hypotheses concerning pure extension and temporal duration, and so our commonsense conceptions of space and time, represented abstractions, transformations and perversions of a more primal and overwhelming experience of Being — perhaps what the Pacific Islanders referred to as “mana.” For the Islanders, there was apparently no such thing as empty space or simple, objective material extension, as was the documented case among many other pre-urban tribes and hunter-gatherer societies; their world was filled with living, animate, sentient and powerful subjectivities lurking everywhere and residing almost anywhere – in the wind, the water, the stone, or the bush.

¶ 6:32 PM 6 comments

This morning, as I was watching coverage of the celebrations in the streets of Cairo, I began thinking about the connection between literature and revolution, poetry and civic engagement. At times of social crisis and political milestones, historians and commentators often turn to writers (especially poets) to help encapsulate the emotional tenor of the event. Great moments need great language.

In was Martin Heidegger who said "In the time of the world's night, the poet utters the holy." Indeed. But, who are those writers we tend to gravitate toward? Who embodies "greatness?"

To be a poet in destitute times means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy. This is why, in Hölderlin's language, the world's night is holy night.

P. 92

¶ 4:53 PM 1 comments

It is possible to place the incipient revolution in Egypt in a wider historical and philosophical framework — one that is very illuminating regarding its potential for liberation as well as renewed oppression. The conceptual framework I am thinking of here is that of “modernity as crisis” — a notion encountered in different guises and in many thinkers’ work, from Nietzsche and Heidegger to Derrida, Deleuze, Kristeva, Virilio, Megill and others.

In Prophets of Extremity (1985), Allan Megill reminds us that the word, “crisis”, in medical discourse, denotes that turning-point in the development of an illness where it could go in the direction of either a rapid deterioration (followed by death), or an improvement, on the road to recovery. Transferred to the domain of history, it means very much the same thing, except that the “recovery” and “death” in question mean something different than in the case of a living organism.

¶ 9:42 AM 0 comments

[Heidegger] does not derive the object in general by means of the logical analysis of judgements. Indeed, he does not endorse the idea that logic is prior to ontology, and construes ontological categories as independent of logical categories. The sole connection between the two realms is that the transcendental one, as the absence of multiplicity, is true of every entity, and hence, true of judgments, and judgments are logical objects.

Moreover. Heidegger endorses the centrality of the link between numbers and the object in general, a link that is particularly striking in the definition of number. His characterization of numbers as ordered also reflects an affinity with a fundamental aspect of Dedekind’s conception.

Heidegger, like Hilbert, rejects the reduction of arithmetic to logic. Indeed, while Heidegger’s critique of the reduction of number to set is apparently based on Natorp, Natorp himself based his arguments on Hilbert’s 1904 article '0n the Foundations of Logic and Arithmetic'. In this article, Hilbert uses the general concept of the thing as the starting point from which he goes on to construct arithmetic.

The various influences that have been outlined above come together to paint a complex picture of where Heidegger’s very early thought should be situated relative to the revolutionary developments that had transformed logic and the foundations of mathematics in the preceding years. The young Heidegger was by no means hostile to these developments, and in fact, his own approach places him squarely in one of the two main camps, in the framework of which he seeks a treatment of the thing in general that transcends the mathematical context and can serve as a foundation for all the sciences.

P. 35

¶ 9:04 AM 0 comments

If an existential analytic of fear reveals a Dasein in which fear can be rationally grounded, then it must also reveal a Dasein which not only recognizes futural possibilities, but past having been possibilities. Fear as a mood only is possible if there is past experiences in which the present experience is grounded and made possible. If there was no having been or grounding in the past, the mood of fear would be impossible. Moreover, if there was no past experience of fear, there would be no reason to fear in the present. There would be no reason to fear if fear had never first been experienced in a having been. The very mood of fear, as Heidegger rightly concludes, reveals an orientation toward future possibilities, but just as importantly also reveals a primordial foundation of those possibilities that is grounded in a having been.

¶ 6:26 AM 0 comments

Finding that Heidegger’s critique of Cartesian thinking falls short, even when supported by Hubert Dreyfus’s influential critique of orthodox artificial intelligence, Wheeler suggests a new Heideggerian approach. He points to recent research in “embodied-embedded” cognitive science and proposes a Heideggerian framework to identify, amplify, and clarify the underlying philosophical foundations of this new work.

He focuses much of his investigation on recent work in artificial intelligence-oriented robotics, discussing, among other topics, the nature and status of representational explanation, and whether (and to what extent) cognition is computation rather than a noncomputational phenomenon best described in the language of dynamical systems theory.

Wheeler’s argument draws on analytic philosophy, continental philosophy, and empirical work to “reconstruct” the philosophical foundations of cognitive science in a time of a fundamental shift away from a generically Cartesian approach. His analysis demonstrates that Heideggerian continental philosophy and naturalistic cognitive science need not be mutually exclusive and shows further that a Heideggerian framework can act as the “conceptual glue” for new work in cognitive science.

¶ 3:33 AM 0 comments

Ron Broglio, an assistant professor of English, [...] put a lot of thought into selecting just the right present. Not to mention writing a fairly hefty check for the postage.

Broglio has never met Santino, but he thinks the gift – a copy of philosopher Martin Heidegger’s book “Being and Time,” wrapped in brown paper and placed in a hand-made wooden box – will catch Santino’s fancy.

If nothing else, Santino can throw the book at someone. Santino is, after all, a chimpanzee

¶ 5:26 PM 0 comments

If we are to understand "the real" that happens completely on its own without reference to anything, then this will first need to be understood at the expense of temporal dying which finds its spiritualization through Heidegger. If the idea of Diachronicity is a "time" that happens completely independent of human subjectivity, then the idea of "time" itself will be something different than the explanation of "time" given by Heidegger where "time" is the "who" of subjectivity, and ultimately the "who" of Dasein, meaning "time" is absolutely the structure of Dasein, and nothing else. This circumscription of time by Heidegger that has certainly held a strong sway over philosophy in the 20th century into the 21st century has kept philosophy from looking past its veiled mystical proclivities.

¶ 3:39 PM 12 comments

[T]here is broad base of knowledge that almost all well-rounded, highly educated share in common. There is also specific area knowledge that is known almost exclusively by people with a PhD in the relevant field of study. In the middle is the grey area, the knowledge that even if you don’t know, you know that it is something that you should probably expect to know if you hang around scholars, intellectuals, and intellectually curious generalists (let’s call them SIICGs, for short).

Take, for example, David Bentley Hart’s recent article in First Things on Heidegger’s philosophy as a meditation on the mystery of being. Even if you do not know much about the German philosopher, you recognize that as an SIICG you should be familiar with Heidegger and, duly chastised, you tell yourself that you’ll finally get around to reading Philosophy of Right (even though, let’s be honest, you probably won’t).

This is a prime example of knowing that you should really know about someone that other people already know. I know enough to know that I should know about Heidegger—even if I don’t. But there are times when the issue is not so opaque.

And that brings me to my Žižek problem.

¶ 12:57 PM 2 comments

Heidegger’s answer to “what is technology” is a perfect explanation of this conundrum. We cannot define technology because we cannot experience the essence of technology – or technology that can be encountered among all technology – because we are “unfree and chained to technology whether we passionately affirm or deny it” (1). While Heidegger claims that technology is a human activity, Sims explores the idea that the use of technology is not exclusively human. Both authors agree that is it a means to an end. So, if technology can be defined as a means of control, then it necessarily CAN BE CONTROLLED. Clearly, this is not true when dealing with androids.

¶ 10:31 AM 0 comments

The paradigm of movement qua absence-dispensing-presence also sheds light on Heidegger's key term Ereignis. In ordinary German Ereignis means "event," but in Heidegger's retrieval of the unsaid in Aristotle, it becomes a name for the structure of the ontological movement that enables all being-significant. Playing on the adjective eigen ("one's own"), Heidegger comes up with the neologism Er-eignung: ontological movement as the process of being drawn into what is "one's own" by the apposite οὑ ἔνεκα. Formally this structure applies to any "natural" entity: the being of any φύσει ὄν that is moved καθ'αὐτό consists in its being-pulled by, and thereby its anticipation of, its τέλος. However, for Heidegger it functions preeminently as the kinetic structure of differential openness. The ultimate possibility of such openness is the possibility that ends all possibilities, such that openness is "claimed" by the unsurpassable τέλος that is ever-enacted in its being and "pulled forth" by it into finite, mortal becoming. This being-drawn by and into its intrinsic absence, in such a way that a differentially structured semantic field is engendered and sustained, is appropriation-by-absence (κίνησίς). It is what Heidegger means by Ereignis.

¶ 8:01 AM 1 comments

cherry blossoms falling...
Heidegger's Being and Time
emerges in my mind

¶ 7:31 AM 0 comments

Ireland discovered that an abbreviation thought to refer to “Natural Science” actually refers to “National Socialism.”

¶ 6:30 PM 13 comments

Heidegger gives us a lovely example of truthful simplicity. At the beginning of his 1939 lectures on Nietzsche, he writes that thinkers only think one thought, and it comes with great decision. What is lovely about this statement is its invitation for reflection, making this turn of phrase more than just a simplified proposition. There is something within it that activates it. Heidegger’s phrase has to earn its simplicity, and does so by struggling with a poetic truth, provoking us to wonder at its possibilities. Its simplicity is truthful insofar as it invites us to engage with what Heidegger calls its thought-path: that which has in advance provided us with a way to think the thought.

¶ 1:59 PM 0 comments

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¶ 10:51 AM 1 comments

The forgotten is, in the experience of the Greeks, what has sunk away into concealedness, specifically in such a fashion that the sinking away, i.e., the concealing, remains concealed to the very one who has forgotten More precisely and more in the Greek vein, the forgetter is concealed to himself in his relation to what is happening here to that which we then call, on account of this happening, the forgotten. The forgetter not only forgets the forgotten, but along with that he forgets himself as the one for whom the forgotten has disappeared. A concealment takes place here that at once befalls the forgotten and the forgetter, without, however, obliterating them.

This concealment displays a special radiation. For the event of such concealment we have only the word "oblivion"-which actually names that into which the forgotten sinks-as the occurrence excluding man from the forgotten. In general we conceive forgetting in terms of the behavior of a "subject," as a not-retaining, and we then speak of "forgetfulness" as that by which something "escapes" us, when, because of one thing, we forget another. Here forgetfulness is poor attention. In addition, there is the forgetting explained as a consequence of "memory-disturbances." Psychopathology calls this "amnesia." But the word "forgetfulness" is too weak to name the forgetting that can befall man; for forgetfulness is only the inclination toward distraction. If it happens that we forget what is essential and do not pay heed to it, lose it and strike it from our minds, then we may no longer speak of "forgetfulness" but of "oblivion." The latter is a realm something may arrive at and come to and fall into, but oblivion also befalls us and we ourselves permit it in a certain way. A more appropriate name for the event of oblivion is the obsolete word "obliviation" [Vergessung]: something falls into oblivion. We are always in such a hurry that we can scarcely pause a moment to inquire into "oblivion." Is oblivion, into which "something" falls and sinks, only a consequence of the fact that a number of people no longer think of this "something"? Or is the latter, that people no longer think of something, already for its part only a consequence of the fact that people themselves are thrust into an oblivion and can therefore no longer know either what they possess or what they have lost? What then is oblivion? It is not just a human product and it is not simply human negligence.

Pp. 71-2

¶ 7:57 AM 3 comments

GA 50 also contains Heidegger's undelivered lecture from 1940, Nietzsche's Metaphysics, which has already been published in English and is not translated here.

"Nietzsche's Metaphysics"...is not (as was once believed) a lecture course from winter semester of 1941-42 but a sixty-four page typescript dated August 1940.

¶ 9:22 PM 2 comments

For Sheehan, Heidegger holds to the doctrine of analogy, in that the being of X will be similar to the being of Y inasmuch as they are all beings. Tonner is not arguing that that is no way in which Heidegger does not view being in terms of analogy, one need only look at Heidegger's notion of 'worlding' in his later works where he views animals and humans in degrees of being. It is not misguided to invoke analogy when talking about Heidegger, it is simply wrong to end with analogy, it leaves our understanding of Heidegger incomplete, for as Tonner argues analogy presupposes univocity. Univocity has to be ontologically prior to analogy, if it were not, how could all these instances of being show up for us all, the being of a dog is very different from the being of a human. There has to be something univocal, some aspect which is always the same for the understanding of being, and thus of those that 'have' being. As Tonner points out, for Heidegger this is time. Time, that Dasein has a temporal character is for Heidegger the horizon or condition for any understanding of being, and therefore it is because of temporality that being, for Tonner, is univocal.

¶ 7:31 PM 1 comments

But what, to repeat, is a "thing"? Heidegger’s paradigm is the simple peasant jug that is used to pour out wine for the gathering of friends around the Stammtisch (table reserved for regulars) in the village pub, somewhere in Southwest Germany. In the wine — the wine of the region, of course — are “gathered” the local earth and sky — the terroir, as French wine makers call it. And in the gathering of “mortals,” deeply rooted in the richness of their tradition or “heritage,” are gathered, too, the gods. Hence, “in the gift (Schenk, from schenken, which means both to give and to pour) of the outpouring dwells the simple singlefold of the four” (PLT 173).

Let me try to translate this into something closer to Anglo-Saxon experience: the Christmas dinner, focused around the turkey. Outside, the already dimming light of the Yorkshire afternoon is reflected off the snow through the low-set, mullioned windows and onto the faces and the walls. The family is gathered round the table. In the small silence that descends before the carving of the turkey begins, suddenly, in a way that is “inexplicable and unfathomable” (PLT 180), one experiences an epiphany, is visited by a profound sense of being in place, being in the right place, of belonging to a unique and indissoluble unity of earth, sky, divinities and mortals. One’s world “worlds” which is the same as saying that the “thing things” (PLT pp. 180—1).

In Heidegger's Philosophy of Art, since the account of “the artwork” offered in “The Origin of the Work of Art” is heavily focused on Greece, I call that account “the Greek paradigm.” Things which “thing” in the above manner one might call “mini-Greek-paradigm artworks.” Though they do not gather an entire culture in the manner of the Greek temple or medieval cathedral (the manner the Bayreuth Festival and the Nuremberg rally attempted to revive) the context in which world rises out of background inconspicuousness into radiant salience is one of communal gathering.

At the end of “The Thing,” however, Heidegger makes it clear that anything at all, no matter how “unpretentious” (PLT 182), can come to “thing” that any occasion, whether communal or solitary, can be an occasion of “thinging”: “the jug and the bench, the footbridge and the plough. . . tree and pond, brook and hill. . heron and roe, deer, horse and bull, ... clasp, hook and picture, crown and cross,” “each in its own way. . . thinging from time to time,” are all “things” (PLT 182). In Greece and the Middle Ages, “things” gathered the fourfold to presence for an entire culture. In the modern ages they can still gather for an us, though for a smaller, more private “us” than in the past. But things can also gather just for me.


Pp. 385-6

¶ 6:16 PM 0 comments

According to Heidegger, this running ahead in resoluteness of being-toward-death is what makes my being possible, for death is the most extreme possibility of my existence, my “ownmost potentiality of being [das eigenste Seinkönnen]”. At stake for Heidegger, then, is to conceptualize death not as pure nothingness, but rather as pure possibility.

Key in understanding Heidegger is a conception of death not as a function of mortal finitude, but as a making-possible. Death is not the negation of possibilities, but is the most profound, originary possibility.

¶ 6:34 PM 4 comments

§29. Gorgias.

Περὶ τοῡ μὴ ὄντος ἢ Περὶ φύσεως ["On nonbeing, or, On nature"]. Opinions diverge regarding the content and aim of this text. Some believe that presented here is merely an example of the most overdone dialectics and sophistry; others find positive and serious deliberations, to be sure not without a strong influence from the art of formal argumentation. Aristotle wrote Πρὸς τὰ Γοργίου ["Against the views of Gorgias"], and we can assume Aristotle would not do battle against a mere babbler.

The content of the text in three theses: 1. There is nothing. 2. But if there were something, it would be unknowable. 3. If there were something and it were knowable, then the knowledge of this being would be incommunicable and could not be expressed or interpreted.

The Being of beings, the knowability of Being, and the communicability of what is known are denied.

Regarding 1: Being. εὶ γἀρ ἔστι-"if Is." There is nothing. a) What is not is not. b) Beings are not either: aa) eternal, or bb) produced by becoming, or cc) both at once. c) Beings must either be one or many; but they can be neither. d) Likewise, both the one and the many cannot be at the same time.

Regarding 2: What is thought of would have to be; nonbeings could not be thought of.

Regarding 3: Every sign is different from what is signified. Words are something other than colors. The ear doe snot hear colors. How is the same intended thing supposed to be in two different "subjects"?
Pp. 71-2

¶ 7:43 AM 9 comments