•For Heidegger, there is nothing beyond Dasein, not a transcendent God, not to the universe as "the sum total of all beings", and not to some Cartesian subject from which a world of things can be established. Beyond Dasein, nothing lies. The answer to the metaphysical question that haunted philsosophers from Plato to the present is: "nothing." As Robinson says, "the answer to the metaphysical question is at the same time the end of metaphysics."

Nothing was delivered
And I tell this truth to you,
Not out of spite or anger
But simply because it's true.

Beyond here lies nothin'
Nothin' done and nothin' said.

¶ 9:31 AM 0 comments

People simply don’t know what death is and this is scares them. Anxiety becomes the key mood for authentic self-awareness because it brings about Fear. Anxiety becomes a “gift” which defines our individuality…in essence, it makes us “human” because it makes us focus on the things that matter most.

¶ 11:58 AM 0 comments

Why is there not the ‘animal’ in Malick’s world? So much earth and water, so much nature and yet the only access to each occurs by way of the human. In certain ways Malick subverts Heidegger by problematizing the latter’s entire earth/world dichotomy. The first of this couple is itself an earth/water dichotomy. It is fair to suggest that the ‘liquid’ is quite far from Heidegger’s basic grammar at every stage of his thought though one might find ‘air’ in the latter writings much as there is assuredly ‘fire’ earlier on. If one thinks of this elemental fourfold Heidegger misses water. Malick seems to have it all. And yet he is still faithfully Heideggerian in terms of not granting enough to the animal, not even as much as Heidegger does. The ‘animal’ is just not represented in such an important oeuvre.

¶ 7:53 AM 0 comments

Possibly the most famous philosophical text on gossip is Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, published in 1927. The role of gossip in Being and Time, while not his central concern, is of some significance in its relation to the major concepts of the book. It is brought under the term “idle talk” [Gerede], which is one of the modes of falling.

In the investigation of the meaning of Being, it is necessary to determine the existential structure of Dasein, which is the being who is concerned about his or her being (that is, you and me). Heidegger describes this as a “possibility” which Dasein originally possesses: “That entity which in its Being has this very Being as an issue, comports itself towards its Being as its ownmost possibility. In each case Dasein is its possibility…”. From out of this possibility emerge two “modes of Being, authenticity and inauthenticity”. The latter mode is actualized in fleeing, forgetting, and neglecting Dasein’s ownmost potentiality-for-Being by becoming lost in the amnesiac slumber of the “they.”

¶ 10:34 AM 0 comments

Phusis must be understood in OOP terms as the ‘real object’ or as Harman suggests, ‘unnatural object’ – the core ‘character’ of objects remains unknown and always unnaturalized. Real objects are the “serving bearer of being” (the concealed Heideggerian earth). logos is the sensual object that performs semantic (or apophantic) articulations of phusis: as Harman notes in Tool-Being, all objects are Dasein. Dasein ’speak out’ the prevailing “growing growth” (that which has been born and has the propensity to grow) of phusis. It is the nature of phusis to come forth through logos as something at all or in particular. Objects form the world through the universal structure of semantic logos which articulates phusis as something-at-all.

¶ 5:42 PM 0 comments

What if Heidegger was correct when he said inherent in human Dasein is an incessant violence – that we find humans the uncanniest of the uncanny because of this reciprocal tension between dike and techne (Intro to Metaphysics)? Did he mean that humanity is the violent one, the one who oversteps his bounds in everything it does? Or did he mean that humanity, in its need to separate itself from the all encompassing, gathering-together of being, this real that is real for everything, is always battling for a place of its own, a unique clearing?

¶ 9:25 AM 0 comments