Monday, October 25, 2004
In-der-Blog-sein
I came across an old posting on The Ivory Tunnel about Heidegger and death. Go read the whole thing. Besides reminding me that I should read Julian Young's book on the Later Heidegger, it also has recommendations:
I have always found Heidegger to be most insightful regarding ontology, but really not altogether coherent in the ethical and moral department. He certainly didn't lead an exemplary life. So, while I am interested in the moral and ethical inferences others may derive from Heidegger's works, at the same time I remain leery of them. ¶ 1:01 PM
I came across an old posting on The Ivory Tunnel about Heidegger and death. Go read the whole thing. Besides reminding me that I should read Julian Young's book on the Later Heidegger, it also has recommendations:
And so, we might transcend death in a variety of ways. We might acknowledge, for example, that the world and everything in it does not die with us. We might relocate the cosmos outside our own consciousness. We might dwell in it as mortals, care for it, preserve it to unfold in its own essence.Therein lays the cosmological dilemma brought about by science. Knowing that the universe was created circa 14 billion years ago, that we live around a star that will eventually exhaust its fuel, knowing what we evolved from, knowing all that, how does that change the "world" we find ourselves in? Sure it gives us a cosmic perspective that people in other epochs did not have, and that our lives are blinks in the eye of the cosmos. But I still get up and live in the world I am thrown into, with all its immediate concerns. So, all things considered, I don't know how the two views, the rational-scientific and the ontological-phenomenological, might come together into a coherent explanation on how to live one's life.
I have always found Heidegger to be most insightful regarding ontology, but really not altogether coherent in the ethical and moral department. He certainly didn't lead an exemplary life. So, while I am interested in the moral and ethical inferences others may derive from Heidegger's works, at the same time I remain leery of them. ¶ 1:01 PM
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Indeed Heidegger stumbles on moral questions. I think, increasingly, that he did (as often charged) work himself into a recursive knot in Being and Time, and that his later works were in large part efforts to make something coherent of his ontological phenomenology. The task for scholars now is not to perpetuate exegetical works on Heidegger as master, but to actively move forward with the substantive ideas. Hence Werner Marx's excellent work (on the possibility of a post-metaphysical Heideggerian ethic), Towards a Phenomenological Ethics: Ethos and the Life-World (1992: SUNY Press) and Johanna Hodge, Frederick Olafson, and Lawrence Hatab's work, also on Heideggerian ethics. Julian Young is one of my favourites, not so much because I have seen him move Heideggerian thought forward, but because he does such a good job of pointing out gaps and slippages and possibilities for further work. My own thoughts have moved from being centred on mortality /Being-toward-death as depicted in BT to broader questions about the possibility of wholeness. I think Heidegger's thoughts in The Question Concerning Technology, Building, Dwelling, Thinking, and his work on Nietzche are all, ultimately, about the possibility of a phenomenology of wholeness, despite (or perhaps because of) the rupture of the self as finite. It creates an opening, one I have decided to peek through.
I have viewed Ereignis (a place I haven't been for a very long time), and will browse happily -- what an excellent compendium.
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I have viewed Ereignis (a place I haven't been for a very long time), and will browse happily -- what an excellent compendium.
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