What is Philosophy?

Paragraph 22

The Greek word φιλόσοφία goes back to the word φιλόσοφος. This word is originally an adjective like φιλάργυρος, loving silver, like φιλότιμος, loving honor. The word φιλόσοφος was presumably coined by Heraklitus. This indicates that for Heraklitus φιλόσοφία did not yet exist. An ἀνὴρ φιλόσοφος is not a "philosophical" man. The Greek adjective φιλόσοφος expresses something completely different from the adjective philosophical. An ἀνὴρ φιλόσοφος is ὅς φιλεῖ τὸ σοφόν, he who loves the σοφόν; φιλεῖν, to love, signifies here, in the heraclitean sense, ὀμολογεῖν, to speak in the way in which λόγος speaks, in correspondence with the λόγος. This correspondence is in accord with the σοφόν. Accordance is ἁρμονία. That one being reciprocally unites itself with another, that both are originally united to each other because they are at each other's disposal--this ἁρμονία is the distinctive feature of φιλεῖν, of "loving" in the Heraclitean sense.

[Next]  ¶ 4:15 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

The Philologist ruminates:

Maybe that's just in the eyes of the philologist, you can't really ask me how I gathered those conclusions, it's just some kind of banal intuition, beyond the scope of my science, or of the science I'm attempting to discover, temporarily called simply historical ontology or historical phenomenology, it basically comes down to the same axe; being Husserl and Hegel the very first phenomenologists and other such as Heidegger, having completed and extended their work, in almost existentialist preclusive fashion, into the science that would be called 'ontology'.

But can there be a science that is not about entities? A science of being? Or would such a thing be simply ontology?

The Seinsfrage aims therefore at ascertaining the a priori conditions not only for the possibility of the sciences which examine entities as entities of such and such a type, and in so doing, already operate with an understanding of Being, but also the possibility of those ontologies themselves which are prior to the ontical sciences and which provide their foundations. Basically, all ontology, no matter how rich and firmly compacted a system of categories it has as its disposal, remains blind and perverted from its ownmost aim, if it has not first adequately clarified the meaning of Being, and conceived this clarification as its fundamental task.
P. 31

We said that ontology is the science of being. But being is always the being of a being. Being is essentially different from a being, from beings. How is the distinction between being and beings to be grasped? How can its possibility be explained? If being is not itself a being, how then does it nevertheless belong to beings, since, after all, beings and only beings are? What does it mean to say that being belongs to beings? The correct answer to this question is the basic presupposition needed to set about the problems of ontology regarded as the science of being.
P. 17

  ¶ 3:38 PM 0 comments

  Received Paul Edward's book Heidegger's Confusions from Prometheus Press.

As can be gathered from the title, this is an anti-Heideger book, but unlike many other books out there with similar intentions, that invent a strawman to punch, this one is quite well informed about Heidegger's works and reasonable in many places. For starters, it quickly disposes with Heidegger the Nazi and concentrates on Heidegger the thinker. It proceeds by identifying some of the inconsistencies in Heidegger's works. These inconsistencies are familiar to writers sympathetic to Heidegger's thinking, and are the subject of different interpretations and much debate. The author is perhaps most critical of those that have sympathetically translated and commented on Heidegger's way of thinking.

In part the book is about comparing what is said about being in different translated passages and it's all jolly good fun. The ancient problem of being as the attribute of every entity that that cannot be isolated is revisited. Similar criticisms could, of course, also be raised about anything else that is important to humans but impossible to measure scientifically, like poetry.

If a philosopher is a lover of wisdom, as per the Greek, then how does Mr. Edwards understand the word love? Might not all his criticisms of being also be leveled at love? Is he merely reiterating that science cannot say anything outside the box it has defined for itself?

Although the book quotes extensively from Heidegger translations, it feels driven more by the history of Being & Time's penetration of the anglophone world, than by Heidegger's way of thinking.

I have given a few samples of Heidegger word-torrents, but for the most part I have extracted the more or less discussable conclusions. No matter what the starting point of a discussion is in the later works, whether it is a passage from Parmenides, a poem from Hölderlin, or a quotation from Nietzsche, the end is always the same: Being west, the Presence presences, Being conceals itself but reveals itself in its very concealment or the other way around, the Appropriation appropriates (I skipped this one out of mercy for my readers),

But wait, that's the best bit! And how to quantify that mercy? Precisely.

Well, withstanding criticisms is a key factor, a requirement, for any reasonable thought. If Heidegger's way of thinking has a future in philosophy, it will be in part because it weathers the criticisms in this book. I think it already has, but if you are an anti-Heidegger frame of mind, feel that it's all wrong at a gut level, and want to explain why, this book a good starting point.

And you'll have to read a lot more Heidegger for your arguments to improve beyond this book. A double-edged sword that.  ¶ 1:57 PM 0 comments

  What is Philosophy?

Paragraph 21

Here a statement of principle is required. If we listen now and later to the words of the Greek language, then we move into a distinct and distinguished domain. Slowly it will dawn upon our thinking that the Greek language is no mere language like the European languages known to us. The Greek language, and it alone, is λόγος. We shall have to deal with this in greater detail in our discussions. For the time being let it be sufficient to suggest that in the Greek language what is said in it is at the same time in an excellent way what it is called. If we hear a Greek word with a Greek ear we follow its λέγειν, its direct presentation. What it presents is what lies immediately before us. Through the audible Greek word we are directly in the presence of the thing itself, not first in the presence of a mere word sign.

[Next]  ¶ 4:05 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

The Pinocchio Theory reviews Paolo Virno's A Grammar of the Multitude:

Virno also analyzes categories such as the 'idle talk' and 'curiosity' so excoriated by Heidegger (who views them with horror and disgust as inauthentic ways of being of the ignorant masses), and shows how they might better be regarded as civic virtues, and sources of invention and renovation.

This as an exaggeration of Heidegger's views of 'idle talk'. It is ungrounded and inauthentic (non-disclosive):

[Idle talk] does not communicate in such a way as to let this entity be appropriated in a primordial manner.
P. 212

And it is related to curiosity

Idle talk controls even the way in which one may be curious. It says what one "must" have read and seen.

But everyone does it some of the time.

Everyone is acquainted with what is up for discussion and what occurs, and everyone discusses it;
P. 217

That is just the ways things are.

Such discourse, which is cultivated in the uprooting engendered by repetitive talk, is idle talk. I am referring to a well-defined phenomenon with this term, which as such carries no disparaging connotation whatsoever.
P. 269

No horror or disgust there.  ¶ 3:08 PM 0 comments

  What is Philosophy?

Paragraph 20

The question of our discussion concerns the nature of philosophy. If this question arises from a need and is not to remain only a hypothetical question for the purpose of making conversation, then philosophy as philosophy must have become worthy of question. Obviously we can indicate this only if we have already taken a look into philosophy. In order to do this we must know beforehand what philosophy is. Thus, in a strange manner, we are being chased around in a circle. Assuming that we might not be able to escape immediately out of the ring of this circle, we still are permitted to look at the circle. In which direction should our glance turn? The Greek word φιλόσοφία indicates the direction.

[Next]  ¶ 11:34 AM 0 comments

  There's a new search service for philosophy papers: Philosophy Papers Online

It could be a useful service, if it worked; if it indexed all philosophy papers. Unfortunately, it depends on the authors of papers proactively going there and submitting their papers for indexing. If you search for Heidegger, you get zero hits.

I've spent close to ten years trying to link to all Heidegger related papers online, hence trying to find all such papers, and I've noticed similar ideas come and go. Some of them are still ongoing, like Ephilosopher and Online Papers in Philosophy, but even after a few years in service they have indexed only a small fraction of the papers available online, and don't even keep up with what's becoming available daily.

Part of the problem with such services is depending on the writers of papers coming forth and informing the sites. The successful philosophy sites depend on their webmasters doing most of the work, like the regularly updated Ekotopos.

Another problem is that many authors are not interested in the wide dissemination of their papers. They come from a tradition of exchanging ideas within a tight circle of specialists and striving to be published in certain prestigious journals. To them, being widely read, being popular, is not a concern, or even antithetical.

In a recent interview on Slashdot Neal Stephenson, a novelist who is wildly popular with engineers, was asked whether he thought science-fiction was treated condescension by the mainstream literati. He replies at length by relating his meetings with "literary" types, and dividing writers in Dantes (who write for their patrons) and Beowulfs (who write for the audience around the campfire). Go read the whole thing; second Q&A. Arguably, something similar is at work in philosophy. There are people who are genuinely interested in philosophical subjects and eager to discuss it with other enthusiasts, and then there are those that have made an institutional career out of philosophy, and need to please their patrons to get grants, tenure, and get published. And there are the clever few that manage both, getting both the respect of their peers, their books sold in bookstores, and their ideas spread. I don't think there's anything wrong with being published in specialized journals, but in the long run, what's the point of doing philosophy, or anything else for that matter, only to have your work gather dust in a few libraries?

The web was invented by physicists who were tired of tracking down references through slow library systems. By combining the internet's File Transfer Protocol with hyper-text, all references in a document were immediately available with the click of a mouse. Today, science publishing is in crisis because scientists and their libraries are canceling their subscriptions to specialized journals. Even peer review has been revolutionized. Having your peers link to your papers and counting the links is a much more efficient method of ranking papers than the traditional method of waiting years for a handful of specialists to read the draft and approve it for publication.

Some philosophers have got the idea and now publish their papers on the web, and benefit from the wider readership and the contacts they make that way. They are the brave few because internet publishing is still a new thing, where the rules and culture is being worked out, and because the prestigious journals try to forbid the papers being available through alternate sources. Now, scholars have been photocopying and faxing each other papers for years, so the journals haven't had complete control of those papers, but the internet has changed the dynamics. I believe the technical term for the new dynamic is a new use of the word disintermediation--it used to be a financial designation. In internet parlance it means routing around the bottlenecks.

It's encouraging that some philosophers are posting their papers on the web. It's a first step. The papers are still in the old style appropriate for paper journals. They are generally PDF files designed for looking good on paper, which is not a bad thing, but as such they are internet dead-ends. Ideally they should be HTML documents so that their references can be hyperlinked to the documents referred to.

So, I encourage writers to publish on the internet, and make use of the services trying to index philosophy papers. It's an evolving medium, dynamic, growing, and on the path to the future.  ¶ 9:49 AM 2 comments

  No more Peel Sessions

John Peel, a man of impeccable musical tastes, has died. Loved by
many, the future of music is impoverished without his shepherding.

A nice piece from NPR.

Mark E. Smith, Britain's preeminent scribbler, was on the BBC. Asked if he felt gratified that Peel considered Mark's band, The Fall, his favorite band, replied:

Well, I guess he was objective, wasn’t he?

Exactly.  ¶ 7:02 AM 0 comments

  What is Philosophy?

Paragraph 19

If we enter into the total and original meaning of the question, "What is Philosophy?" then our questioning has, through its historical origin, found a direction into an historical future. We have found a path. It leads from the actuality of the Greek world down to us, if not, indeed, beyond us. We are--if we persist in this question--traveling on a clearly indicated path. Nevertheless, we still have no guarantee thereby that we are immediately enabled to pursue this path in the right way. We cannot even determine at once at which point on this path we are standing today. For a long time we have been accustomed to characterize the question of what something is as a question about its nature. The question about the nature of something awakens at those times when that, whose nature is being questioned, has become obscure and confused, when at the same time the relationship of men to what is being questioned has become uncertain or has even been shattered.

[Next]  ¶ 5:58 AM 0 comments

  The Skeptical Inquirer has an article, Can the Sciences Help Us to Make Wise Ethical Judgments?, which includes this:

Most recently, postmodernists, following the German philosopher Heidegger and his French followers, have gone further in their skepticism, denying that there is any special validity to humanistic ethics or indeed to science itself. They say that science is merely one mythological construct among others.

Now, many that travel under the rubric of postmodernism have made all kinds of silly statements about science, just as many scientists have been known to spout nonsense. But is Heidegger responsible for anyone that denies the validity of science?

Heidegger has a lot to say about science through out his works, sometimes even calling ontology the most basic science. In Science and Reflection he says that:

Science is one way, and indeed one decisive way, in which all that is presents itself to us.

And goes on to say, in his investigation of theoretical science, that:

modern science, as a theory of the real, is not anything self-evident. It is neither a mere construct of man nor something extorted from the real.

Heidegger also privileged the natural sciences over the human sciences for their exactness, and their empirical basis. In the Beitrage, section 76, he says

But a science must be exact (in order to remain rigorous, i.e., science) if the field of its subject-matter is launched in advance as the realm that is accessible only to quantitative measuring and calculation, only thus guaranteeing results.

Clearly he does believe science has a special validity. Now, on the other hand, a humanistic ethics is entirely a different matter, and Heidegger doesn't conflate the two.  ¶ 8:54 PM 0 comments

  What is Philosophy?

Paragraph 18

Let us bear well in mind that both the theme of our question--"philosophy"--as well as the way in which we ask "what is that...?" are Greek in origin. We ourselves belong to this origin even when we do not mention the word "philosophy." We are peculiarly summoned back into this source and are re-claimed for and by it as soon as we not only utter the words of the question, "What is Philosophy?" but reflect upon its meaning. [The question "What is Philosophy?" is not a question which directs a kind of knowledge towards itself (philosophy of philosophy). Nor is it an historical question which is interested in determining how that which is called "philosophy" began and developed. The question is an historical, that means, a fate-full question. Even more--it is not a it is the historical question of our Western-European actuality.]

[Next]  ¶ 9:36 AM 0 comments

  NPR has three interviews with authors of books on Leo Strauss about his Lasting Influence on U.S. Policy. The consensus appears to be: no discernable influence (his students, and students of his students, have widely divergent views on policy), but a serious thinker worth studying. Strauss was influenced by Heidegger's lectures in the 1920s, although one of the guests on the show thinks Husserl was a bigger influence.

I found this bit in a short biography of Strauss:

“One of the unknown young men in Husserl’s entourage was [Martin] Heidegger. [Strauss] attended his lecture course from time to time without understanding a word, but sensed that he dealt with something of the utmost importance to man as man.” Strauss was very impressed by Heidegger’s thoroughness and intensiveness of his interpretations of philosophic texts, (in particular, on one occasion, when he understood something of what Heidegger meant, his interpretation of the beginning of Aristotle’s Metaphysics). “Up to that time [Strauss] had been particularly impressed, as many of [his] contemporaries in Germany were, by Max Weber: by his intransigent devotion to intellectual honesty, by his passionate devotion to the idea of science - a devotion that was combined with a profound uneasiness regarding the meaning of science. On [his] way north from Freiburg... [Strauss] saw, in Frankfurt-am-Main, Franz Rosenzweig... and [Strauss] told him of Heidegger. [Strauss] said to him that in comparison with Heidegger, Weber appeared to [him] as an ‘orphan child’ in regard to precision and probing and competence.” “Sometime later [Strauss] heard Werner Jaeger in Berlin interpret the same texts [namely, Aristotle’s Metaphysics],” and according to Strauss, “there was no comparison”; Heidegger was infinitely better.

  ¶ 7:18 AM 0 comments

  I received On the Essence of Language (GA85) yesterday, a seminar on Herder's On the Origin of Language from summer semester 1939. Unlike the typical books from his lectures which read as narratives, this is more a collection of notes, phrases, and lines pointing between words. Here's a taste:

Hearkening--obedience
Hearkening, listening to--submitting-oneself to the order. Order-ing of the order, of the strife.
Be still! hearken!

Apparently students were particularly fidgety that summer.

I'm not sure why they decided to release this as a hardback with lower quality paper than the typical trade paperback, and with pages cut incorrectly (Show some care, SUNY Press!). As usual there's no index, but, in a groundbreaking--hopefully trendsetting--advance, the lexicon in the back references every page each term appears on. One can look up every occurrence of Event-of-appropriation (Er-eignis), which should not to be confused with Appropriating-event (Er-eignung).  ¶ 6:23 AM 0 comments

  What is Philosophy?

Paragraph 17

Now we must, however, be careful that in the question just mentioned not only a more exact delimitation is sought of what Nature, movement, or beauty is, but also that, at the same time, an interpretation is given of what the "what" means, in what sense the τί is to be understood. That which "what" means is called the quid est, τὸ quid, the quiddity, the whatness. However, the quiddity is determined differently in the various periods of philosophy. Thus, for example, the philosophy of Plato is a specific interpretation of what the τί signifies, namely the ἰδέα. That we mean the "idea" when we ask about the τί and the the quid is by no means to be taken as a matter of course. Aristotle gives an interpretation of the τί different from that of Plato. Kant gives another interpretation of the τί, Hegel still another. That which is asked each time by means of the clues of the τί, the quid, the "what," is to be newly determined each time. In every case when, in regard to philosophy, we ask, "what is that?" then we are asking an originally Greek question.

[Next]  ¶ 5:51 PM 0 comments

  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:

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 1 comments

  What is Philosophy?

Paragraphs 14, 15 & 16

But not only what is in question--philosophy--is Greek in origin, but how we question, the manner in which we question even today, is Greek.

We ask, "what is that?" In Greek this sounds τί ἐστιν. The question of what something is, however, has more than one meaning. We can ask, "what is that over there in the distance?" We receive the answer, "a tree." The answer consists in the fact that we name a thing which we do not clearly recognise.

We can, however, ask further, "what is that which we call a 'tree'?" With the question now posited we are already approaching the Greek τί ἐστιν. It is this form of questioning which Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle developed. They ask, for example, "What is the beautiful? What is knowledge? What is Nature? What is movement?"

[Next]  ¶ 5:45 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

destri.us remembers running into the unexpected:

Things happen. I remember back in summer, when I was taking my course in existentialism, we discussed the topic of death. In particular we went over Heidegger, and his concept of dread, anxiety, and other stuff.

For most people, most of the time, death is a faraway topic, perhaps only cropping up in relation to distant people, or in terms of things like video games and movies. We don't think about it, don't expect it.

We are thrown into the world and find ourselves in uncanny places. Stephen Mulhall writes that it reveals dasein calls to us, and that we care.

[T]he one who calls through the voice of conscience is definable by nothing more concrete that the fact of its calling: it is the voice of Dasein as 'not-at-home', as the bare there-Being in the nothingness which remains when it is wrenched from its familiar absorption in the world, and that world stands forth as the arena for Dasein's projective understanding.
...
And since the voice of conscience is the voice of Dasein as thrown projection, the voice which summons it from its lostness to confront its inescapably personal abandonment to the task of existing, it can be thought of as the call of care. In other words, the call of conscience is ontologically possible only because the very basis of Dasein's Being is care.

  ¶ 8:09 PM 0 comments

  What is Philosophy?

Paragraph 13

Let us consider for a moment what it means that an era in the history of mankind is characterized as the "atomic age." The atomic energy discovered and liberated by the sciences is represented as that force which is to determine the course of history. Indeed, there would never have been any sciences if philosophy had not preceded them and proceeded. But philosophy is not ἡ φιλόσοφία. This Greek binds our discussion to an historical tradition. Because this tradition is of a unique kind, it is also unique in meaning. This tradition which bears the Greek name φιλόσοφία, and which is labeled for us with the historical word φιλόσοφία, reveals the direction of a path on which we ask, "What is Philosophy?" Tradition does not surrender us to a constraint by what is past and irrevocable. Surrendering is a delivering into the freedom of discussion with what has been. If we truly hear the word and reflect upon what we have heard, the name "philosophy" summons us into the history of the Greek origin of philosophy. The word φιλόσοφία appears, as it were, on the birth certificate of our own history; we may even say on the birth certificate of the contemporary epoch of world history which is called the atomic age. That is why we can ask the question, "What is Philosophy?" only if we enter into a discussion with the thinking of the Greek world.

[Next]  ¶ 4:29 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Noetic Muse explains how To Love the Truth:

Heidegger liked to define man as the being that asks the question of being. We are the only ones in all of nature that poses questions to reality, as if it had some meaning that was hinted at everywhere.

Indeed. Heidegger also calls out other distinctions from animals that make humans unique. In the Letter on Humanism he notes that language is peculiar to humans.

Because plants and animals are lodged in their respective environments but are not placed freely in the clearing of Being which alone is "world," they lack language. But in being denied language they are thereby suspended worldlessly in their environment. Still, in this word "environment" converges all that is puzzling about living creatures. In its essence, language is not the utterance of an organism; nor is it the expression of a living thing. Nor can it ever be thought in an essentially correct way in terms of its symbolic character, perhaps not even in terms of the character of signification. Language is the clearing-concealing advent of Being itself.

And in What Is Called Thinking? Heidegger notes that only humans have hands

The hand is a peculiar thing. In the common view, the hand is part of our bodily organism. But the hand's essence can never be determined, or explained, by its being an organ that can grasp. Apes, too, have organs that can grasp, but they do not have hands. The hand is infinitely different from all grasping organs--paws, claws, or fangs--different by an abyss of essence. Only a being who can speak, that is, think, can have hands and can be handy in achieving works of handicraft.

  ¶ 3:17 PM 0 comments

  What is Philosophy?

Paragraph 12

However, the originally Greek nature of philosophy, in the era of its modern European sway, has been guided and ruled by Christian conceptions. The dominance of these conceptions was mediated by the Middle Ages. At the same time, one cannot say that philosophy thereby became Chrisitian, that is, became a matter of belief in revelation and the authority of the Church. The statement that philosophy is in its nature Greek says nothing more than that the West and Europe, and only these, are, in the innermost course of their history, originally "philosophical." This is attested by the rise and dominance of the sciences. Because they stem from the innermost Western-European course of history, that is, the philosophical, consequently they are able, today, to put a specific imprint on the history of mankind upon the whole earth.

[Next]  ¶ 10:21 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Follow the Baldie reflects on the strange and humorous relationship between Heidegger and Beckenbauer.  ¶ 9:24 AM 0 comments

  What is Philosophy?

Paragraph 11

The word φιλόσοφία tells us that philosophy is something which, first of all, determines the existence of the Greek world. Not only that--φιλόσοφία also determines the innermost basic feature of our Western-European history. The often heard expression "Western-European philosophy" is, in truth, a tautology. Why? Because philosophy is Greek in its nature; Greek, in this instance, means that in origin the nature of philosophy is of such a kind that it first appropriated the Greek world, and only it, in order to unfold.

[Next]  ¶ 7:49 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

The Hedge is asking some questions on the way to working on some questions:

[W]hen a philosophy student says he's 'working on a question', he means just that. Getting the questions right is about 90% of the battle. Answering them is the easy part...usually. Also, I'll gladly translate out of Heidegger speak should the need arise.

I. What constitutes Worldhood?
A. Practical Engagement (PE) and Contemplation (Cp)
B. . If A, there is no "world" without contemplation, only a concatenation of things ready to hand.

II. What is contemplation?

And more. Help Hedge.
  ¶ 1:48 PM 0 comments

  What is Philosophy?

Paragraphs 9 & 10

The first thing for us to do is to lead the question to a clearly directed path so that we do not flounder around in either convenient or haphazard conceptions of philosophy. But how are we to find a path by which we can determine our question reliably

This path which I should now like to point out lies directly before us. And only because it is the nearest at hand is it difficult to find. However, when we have found it, we still move along it awkwardly. We ask, "What is Philosophy?" We have uttered the word "philosophy" often enough. If, however, we use the word "philosophy" no longer like a wornout title, if, instead, we hear the word "philosophy" coming from its source, then it sounds thus: φιλόσοφία. Now the word "philosophy" is speaking Greek. The word, as a Greek word, is a path. This path, on the one hand, lies before us,, for the word has long since been spoken, i.e. set forth. On the other hand, it lies behind us, for we have always heard and spoken this word. Accordingly, the Greek word φιλόσοφία is a path along which we are traveling. Yet we have only a vague knowledge of this path although we possess and can spread much historical information about Greek philosophy.

[Next]  ¶ 10:23 AM 2 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Odious and Peculiar wonders about thinking and computation:

I wonder, though, if 'computation' is all that goes on. Heidegger divides calculation from contemplation quite sharply, and I'm not sure he's not on to something. It seems that there's something quite different going on when I, say, play chess or ping-pong, compared to when I'm reading philosophy. I've yet to be convinced that my more abstract maunderings can be reduced to ones and zeros.

I think there's an ontological difference between computation and thinking. Beyond the specific case that contemplation is not calculation. All human thinking is enowned, machine computation isn't. Even when a human calculates a sum, she is doing something different from the machine, and arriving at the same answer.
  ¶ 9:55 AM 0 comments

  What is Philosophy?

Paragraphs 7 & 8

If, on the other hand, we point out the possibility that that upon which philosophy bears concerns us humans in our essential nature and moves us, then it might be that this being-moved has nothing whatsoever to do with that which is usually called feelings and emotions, in short, the irrational.

From what has been said, we deduce at first only this one thing: greater care is required if we hazard a discussion under the title "What is Philosophy?"

[Next]  ¶ 8:50 AM 0 comments

  What Is Philosophy?

Intermezzo

At the start of the lectures from winter semester 1935-36, collected in What Is A Thing? (GA41), Heidegger argues that philosophical questions are so broad and non-specific that one begins answering them with nothing to go on, unlike scientific questions which are about specific things. He then reads a passage from Plato's Theaetetus about a joke:

[T]he jest which the clever witty Thracian handmaid is said to have made about Thales, when he fell into a well as he was looking up at the stars. She said, that he was so eager to know what was going on in heaven, that he could not see what was before his feet. This is a jest which is equally applicable to all philosophers.

With this he suggests another answer to the question of what philosophy is:

Philosophy, then, is that thinking with which one can start nothing and about which housemaids necessarily laugh.

  ¶ 8:52 PM 0 comments

  What is Philosophy?

Paragraph 6

"With fine sentiments bad literature is made." These words of André Gide apply not only to literature but even more to philosophy. Sentiments, even the finest, have no place in philosophy. Sentiments, it is said, are something irrational. Philosophy, on the other hand, is not only something rational but is the actual guardian of reason. In making this assertion we have come unawares to a kind of decision as to what philosophy is. We have already anticipated our question with an answer. Everyone considers the assertion correct that philosophy is a matter of reason. However, this assertion is perhaps a premature and hasty answer to the question, "What is philosophy?" for we can immediately oppose new questions to this answer. What is reason? Where and through whom was it decided what reason is? Has reason constituted itself to be the ruler of philosophy? If so, by what right? If not, whence does it obtain its mission and its role? If what is considered to be reason was first established only by philosophy and within the course of its history, then it is not good judgment to proclaim philosophy in advance as a matter of reason. However, as soon as we cast doubt on the characterization of philosophy as rational behavior, then in the same way it also becomes questionable whether philosophy belongs in the domain of the irrational. For whoever wishes to designate philosophy as irrational thereby takes the rational as a measure of limitation and, what is more, does it in such a way as again to take for granted what reason is.

The André Gide quote is from his book Dostoievsky, 1923.

[Next]  ¶ 7:37 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Chris Boese's is another blog commenting on Derrida's passing:

Almost as devastating for deconstruction and Mr. Derrida was the revelation, also in 1987, that Heidegger, one of his intellectual muses, was a dues-paying member of the Nazi Party from 1933 to 1945. Once again, Mr. Derrida was accused by critics of being irresolute, this time for failing to condemn Heidegger's fascist ideas.

This whole episode is one of the most misunderstood events in modern political philosophy. Heidegger was not a fascist. And his motives for joining the Nazis were not merely to promote himself in the academy, as some have suggested. Others have suggested that he hoped to become the leading philosopher of the Nazis and change them from within. This is partially correct, but the ideology driving him has been misunderstood. Commentators on both the left and the right have ignored his true political intentions. This is clearly obvious if one examines his unjustly ignored speech in 1933, during the commencement of the academic year at the Freiburg Kindergarten und Preskool, where he spoke of Adam Smith and the spirit of libertarianism, ending with the salute:

Ein volk, Ayn Rand, Ein Fuhrer! Heil Hayek!

Next week: the recently discovered correspondence between Martin Heidegger and Ludwig von Mises.
{The idea for this was resolutely appropriated from a post on the Classical Values blog.}
  ¶ 9:03 AM 0 comments

  What is Philosophy?

Paragraphs 4 & 5

The path of our discussion must, therefore, be of such a kind and direction that that of which philosophy treats concerns us personally, affects us and, indeed, touches us in our very nature.

But does not philosophy thereby become a matter of affection, emotions, and sentiments?

[Next]  ¶ 8:22 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Mixing Memory discusses bucketing Philosophers:

I doubt many people are surprised when Jerry Fodor, Donald Davidson, or W. V. Quine are referred to as "analytic philosophers," any more than they are surprised when Martin Heidegger, Jean Paul Sartre, or Jean-Francois Lyotard are referred to as "continental philosophers."

I was reading a book review in the Madrid ABC's lit. supplement and there continentals go into the bucket labeled filosofia centroeuropea, and analytics into positivismo anglosajón (How does Frege feel about that?). The continental bucket are also referred to as idealismo humanista. I guess the postal service hasn't delivered the Letter on Humanism yet.
  ¶ 7:10 AM 0 comments

  What is Philosophy?

Paragraph 3

If we now assume that we might find a way of determining the question more exactly, then there immediately arises a grave objection to the theme of our discussion. When we ask, "What is Philosophy?" then we are speaking about philosophy. By asking in this way we are obviously taking a stand above and, therefore, outside of philosophy. But the aim of our question is to enter into philosophy, to tarry in it, to "philosophize." The path of our discussion must, therefore, not only have a clear direction, but this direction must at the same time give us the guarantee that we are moving within philosophy and not outside of it and around it.

[Next]  ¶ 8:21 PM 0 comments

  Iain Thomson's new paper is on ecophenomenology. I don't have a deep understanding of the various threads he teases out of the matter but I found footnote 36 of particular interest:

[O]nce Heidegger abandoned his earlier quest for a ‘fundamental ontology’ (that is, a transhistorically-binding understanding of ‘the meaning of being in general’), he could no longer appeal to such a notion in order to explain what makes possible Western history’s succession of epoch-grounding understandings of ‘the being of entities’ (a succession that, in the early work, is thought to be a retrogressive falling-away from an originally complete ‘fundamental ontology’). I believe Sheehan is misled by passages in which Heidegger seems to equate ‘being as such’ with ‘enowning’ (Ereignis), for this is not Heidegger’s considered view, and passages can be found alongside these that more carefully distinguish these two key terms of his later thought (put simply, Ereignis is how ‘being as such’ takes place),

Sheehan's writings about Heidegger's works over the last couple of decade have been particularly clarifying, correcting misconceptions from earlier translations and straightening obtuse corners. But has he simplified too far? Heidegger seems to use terms like kehre and ereignis in ways that aren't always compatible. This is an area of Anglophone Heideggeriana that needs additional work.  ¶ 7:09 PM 0 comments

  What is Philosophy?

Paragraph 2

Therefore, we must try to define the question more exactly. In this manner we direct the discussion into a definite direction. The discussion is thereby brought into a path. I say--into a path. Thereby we admit that this path is certainly not the only one. It must, in fact, remain open whether the path which I should like to indicate in what follows is, in truth, a path which allows us to pose and answer the question.

[Next]  ¶ 7:14 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Seasick Sailors notes the forking path of decisions:

Choosing one woman, or one career, or one school, means relinquishing the possibility of others. The more we face our limits, the more we have to relinquish our myth of personal specialness, unlimited potential, imperishability, and immunity to the laws of biological destiny. It is for these reasons that Heidegger referred to death as the impossibility of further possibility. The path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness - domains soaked in anxiety. Everything fades and alternatives exclude.

  ¶ 6:27 AM 0 comments

  An article in the Boston Globe on books and their indexes notes that:

Martin Heidegger banned indexes from his work, presumably so that no one could skip ahead to the good parts.

I think the intent was to make readers read the whole thing and not just pick bits out of context. It's annoying as heck if you're trying to find something after you've dillegently read the whole thing. Perhaps the publisher could send you the index after you mail them the answers to a quiz (Compare and contrast sein, seyn, sein and da-sein)? Some translators have helped a bit by adding long descriptive tables of contents to the lectures books. Martin himself was not above quoting a paragraph from earlier works here and there. And beyond being merely an idiosyncracy of Martin's, it's now a trend. Derrida's books are also indexless. At least it's only a temporary annoyance. Some day the the works will slip into the public domain and scholars will google through the texts. The texts are destined to be stockpiled in standing reserve. Yikes! The texts' tech apocalypse.
  ¶ 5:59 AM 1 comments

  What is Philosophy?

Paragraph 1

With this question we are touching on a theme which is very broad, that is, widespread. Because the theme is broad, it is indefinite. Because it is indefinite, we can treat the theme from the most varied points of view. Thereby, we shall always hit upon something that is valid. But because, in the treatment of this extensive theme, all possible opinions intermingle, we are in danger of having our discussion lack proper cohesion.

[Next]  ¶ 8:59 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Arbitrary examines Derrida's death, and notes the contradiction in death via Division II of Being & Time:

This is a paradox of sorts: the event that makes individual existence most clear is the event of the end of that existence. All of your experiences are never properly yours--there are always other who have a hand in them--until that one experience that is actually the end of all experience. This is the contradictory ontology of death.

Magda King wrote in her guide to the book:

Nevertheless, the outcome of the preceding analysis is not negative. It shows positively that the wholeness constituted by "ending" in death is an existential phenomenon. It can be explained only from the existential structure of an existence, which is essentially my existence.

Read the whole thing, which ties in nicely with Aporias.  ¶ 9:12 PM 5 comments

  Bad Subjects discusses what leftists can learn from Derrida:

[T]he early Derrida had no time, no place for metaphysics or its trappings. In these early works, he convincingly shows how ideas that are supposedly couched in reason, logic, and sense were in fact mystical incantations of a sort. Though he loved Heidegger, he also completely obliterated the mystical foundations of Heidegger's conservative philosophy.

That was some tough love.  ¶ 8:14 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Brown Like Me revisits an interview with Jurgen Habermas that was published earlier this year in the journal Logos. Habermas is answering a question on why him and Derrida are suddenly getting along (they have diametrically opposite views on Heidegger):

But even as a philosopher, he is suspect to me because, in the 1930s, he received Nietzsche precisely as a neo-pagan, as it was then the fashion to do. Unlike Derrida, whose reading of "Andenken" accords with the spirit of monotheistic tradition, I take Heidegger's botch-job "Seinsdenken" as a leveling of that epochal threshold in the history of consciousness that Jaspers had called the "axial age." According to my understanding, Heidegger committed treason against that caesura which is marked, in various ways, by the prophetic-awakening Word from Mount Sinai, and by the Enlightenment of a Socrates.

When I read the above in Logos, I was befuddled. The whole poly/mono-theism sounds like a red herring. After all, Heidegger was the atheologist who said:

God -- that is the most worthy object of thought.

Andenken, typically "rememberance", is a poem by Hölderlin that Heidegger addressed in a lecture course of that name in 1941, and examined again in a book on Hölderlin's poems. Gadamer helpfully interprets what it means to Heidegger in his essay on the poem. And yes, Heidegger does use Hölderlin as a vehicle to a pre-Platonic and pre-Chrisitian thinking; contemporaneous to his studies of Hölderlin were his lectures on the pre-Socratics. But he was not doing so for an either, nor an or, but in an enveloping beyng.

Seinsdenken, being-thinking, is what Heidegger is remembered for. Call it a botch job if you must, but what ever else he did is footnotes.

A caesura is a break in a line, and serves as the break into what Habermas is thinking. There was no break on Mount Sinai, that story is pure mythology, ask a historian, and today let me stick to the facts, but the "Enlightenment of Socrates" is the clue. The there was no illumination of Socrates, like the awakening on Sinai. Socrates, asked questions, rather than having truth revealed to him. The projecting back of the enlightenment, is an illusion of Habermas's modernism. Heidegger does not go for breaks, or do any breaking (he is, however, sensitive to turning events!). Thinking beyng puts modernism in a box. What we hear from Habermas is the rage of the prisoner who does not recognize the box he confines himself in.  ¶ 8:19 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Masood Mortazavi's Weblog:

Martin Heidegger has effectively said that 'being' is 'being-in-the-world,' and that we're the only being (among the rocks, animals and other inanimate and animate objects that surround us) whose being is a concern for itself. In other words, the lion in the forest may not be so concerned about why it, i.e. the lion, is, but we are. That's what distinguishes us as a being-in-the-world.

Heidegger compares us to a lizard while sunbathing-on-a-rock:

The lizard basks in the sun. At least this is how we describe what it is doing, although it is doubtful whether it really comports itself in the same way we do when we lie out in the sun, i.e., whether the sun is accessible to it as sun, whether the lizard is capable of experiencing the rock as rock.

  ¶ 1:34 AM 1 comments

  I thought of this last weekend and never got around to looking it up, but after a week of journalists and french-a-phobics moaning on and on that Derrida's

prose was famously impenetrable; Derrida didn't shrink from writing sentences that rambled on for two or three pages and his books were abstruse and convoluted in the extreme.

I'd like to know what they make of the other "philosophy" of the 20th century, the Anglo analytical one. The big text there is Russell and Whitehead's Principia Matematica, the book which Wittgenstein showed up in time to help them finish. Other philosophers were baffled by their text, and assumed it was a form of mathematics. Later, after thinking about the matter some more, Wittgenstein denied

that there were any mathematical facts to be discovered and that mathematical statements were "true" in any real sense: they simply expressed the conventional established meanings of certain symbols.

And they certainly expressed themselves with symbols. Here's a taste of their Principia

(((P v Q) -> (P v R)) -> (P v (Q -> R))); ! *2.85 (GB 41->37)
(((P -> Q) -> (R -> S)) -> (R -> (Q -> S))); ! Result of proof

Nothing abstruse there, eh? No doubt today's journalists also find the conclusion of Russell and Whitehead's proof that 1 + 1 = 2, after several hundred pages, penetrable and uncovoluted.  ¶ 9:01 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

philosophical conversations continues posting on university reform, today reading an essay by Iain Thomson, who also addresses the subject in his contribution to this book.

Ian Thompson says that Heidegger came to this historicist understanding of being in the later 1030s. Heidegger becomes aware of this when he actually engages in the destruction of the history of ontology called for in Being and Time. It characteristicizes the turning (Kehre).

I suspect that Kehre is misused here, if it is intended to refer to a change in Heidegger's thinking (die Wendung im Denken), and not to the turn in Ereignis.

The Beiträge thus clarifies another crucial matter: the Kehre is not the change that Heidegger's thinking underwent in the 1930's. There is no doubt that Heidegger's approach shifted during that decade, and Richardson's book is the unsurpassed text-of-record on that. But we now know that the proper name for that shift is not die Kehre but what Heidegger called die Wendung im Denken or "change in thinking". The Kehre did not take place between 1930 and 1938 but is the very structure of die Sache selbst. As Heidegger put it in 1962:

First and foremost the Kehre is not a process that took place in my thinking and questioning. It belongs, rather, to the very issue that is named by the titles “Being and Time”/“Time and Being.” [. . .] The Kehre is at work within the issue itself. It is not something that I did, nor does it pertain to my thinking only.

Read the whole thing.  ¶ 9:27 PM 0 comments

  Margins of Derrida

Pieces on Derrida continue to appear in the media, mainly uninformed.

To their credit, the Wall Street Journal and New Republic managed to publish critical items without mentioning deconstructionism. Although the New Republic's editors managed to assert their ignorance of the subject when constructing the subtitle to the article.

Marco Roth wrote a nice memoir in n+1.

I found a surprisingly cogent interview with Derrida in the LA Weekly, from a couple of years ago:

In an interview he gave shortly after World War II but ordered withheld from publication until after his death in 1976, Heidegger said, "Philosophy after Nietzsche could offer neither help nor hope for mankind's future. All we can do is wait for a god to reappear. Only a god can save us now." Do you agree?

I wouldn't use the term "a god," but what interests me in this statement is that Heidegger was anti-religious. He was raised Catholic, but he vehemently rejected Christianity, so the god he refers to is not the god we know. He refers to a god who not only hasn't come yet, but perhaps doesn't exist. He gives the name of god to the one who is hoped for, and implies that the one who'd come and save us will have the name of god. I don't agree with this if it encourages hope for salvation, but if the statement means that we're waiting for the arrival of an unpredictable one, and that we must be hospitable to the coming of this one, then I've got no objection. This is a form of what I'd describe as messianicity without messianism, and we are by nature messianic. We cannot not be, because we exist in a state of expecting something to happen. Even if we're in a state of hopelessness, a sense of expectation is an integral part of our relationship to time. Hopelessness is possible only because we do hope that some good, loving someone could come. If that's what Heidegger meant, then I agree with him.

At this site we aspire to blogicity without blogism.
  ¶ 10:58 AM 1 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

philosophical conversations examines Heidegger's attempts at university reform, at the core of which was the difference between the accumulation of knowledge and thinking:

The totality of knowledge is viewed in a critical manner: as a questioning of the fundamental asumptions of the total field of knowledge rather than the transmission of that totality. The humanist understanding of formation of character is transformed to enable individuals to be capable of undertaking that metaphysical questioning. Those who undertake this ontological questioning are doing philosophy.

Heidegger's thinking on knowledge is tied to how he related science to philosophy. Which is one area where his thinking changes over the years. In B&T science is the mathematical projection of nature, but at about the same time in his lectures (Basic Problems of Phenomenology) metaphysics is the science of being. He reads Kant's Critique of Pure Science and decides that science is an a priori transcendentalism that makes scientific knowledge possible. Then in the lectures collected in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics he privileges experimental science and says that dialectics is an "embarassment". All is the space of three years. By the time of the Rektoratsrede he has decided that science and philosophy are the same thing, if we return to the ancient Greeks.

The key here is that science and philosophy must be properly bound together. He says in What is Metaphysics?:

Only if science exists on the basis of metaphysics can it advance further in its essential task, which is not to amass and classify bits of knowledge but to disclose in ever-renewed fashion the entire region of truth in nature and history.

The university must not merely produce scientific knowledge, ready for use by technology, but must instead open the world by scientific questioning.  ¶ 8:55 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Magic Kingdom Dispatch encounters destiny:

I am convinced that we gift ourselves with whatever meaning that we find, that we are the artists of our own destinies and create ourselves, and to some extent at least, that we make our own luck. I offer this fragment by Martin Heidegger:

'For not everyone has a destiny: destiny is a pattern achieved only by the rare individual who in dread and silence has come face to face with his own nothingness and has shaped his life in the light, or the darkness, of that encounter.'

I remember breakfasts at youth hostels where I too was gifted and encountered some destiny.  ¶ 6:45 AM 0 comments

  The Chronicle of Higher Education has perhaps the most informative story on Derrida this week. Note the absence of the term deconstructionism. Deconstructionism is a term invented by conservatives for everything they hate. Frontpage, a site by ex-rabid-Trots, has an exemplary rabid anti-deconstructionism piece.

Why do conservatives go bananas over a philosophy professor? The Chronicle provides a clue.

Ms. Kamuf, a professor of French and comparative literature at the University of Southern California, recalled on Saturday what it was like to read Derrida's work as a graduate student at Cornell University in 1970.

"There was a sense of urgency when we encountered it," she said, "urgency in the context of the American political circumstances at the time. It was a few months after Kent State. But we were intellectuals who were not willing just to condemn the university, to renounce rigor of thought, in order to get out into the streets."

...

As an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin in the late 1970s, Mr. Pyle studied with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who had translated Derrida's book Of Grammatology (originally published in 1967). The practice of deconstructive analysis "engaged our interpretive skills, and pushed our reading beyond any prescribed boundaries."

"It was intellectually exciting and politically hopeful," he said.

It's the politically hopefulness that must have set FrontPage off. In their piece they create an effigy of everything they dislike and name it deconstructionism. Their invention has nothing to do with what Derrida thought, any more than an astrology column has to do with what astronomers think. Why is FrontPage wading into specialized waters about which they know naught? After all, we wouldn't expect them to write an informative piece on the Strong Force, which is also newsworthy, meriting last week's Nobel physics prize. They probably feel justified in venting their rage because philosophers have a history of trying to meddle in politics, from Syracuse to Freiburg, much to their disadvantage. Fortunately, interest in Derrida is not limited to literature departments.

As their students fanned out across the country, they met resistance -- and not just from those who rejected deconstruction itself. Other currents influenced by Derrida stressed his roots in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger

Roots which are not going help Derrida any with the Frontpage crowd, but they are what makes Derrida dear around here.

The best intro into Derrida, the man, is Derrida the Movie.

Favorite bits 1:

Throughout, Derrida and the filmmakers return to Heidegger, the German thinker who believed that the anecdotes and details of a philosopher's life are irrelevant to his work. Derrida wrestles with that: He believes that it's untrue and yet finds it difficult to reveal personal matters.

Reading about the private lives of others is far preferable. "If you were to watch a documentary about a philosopher -- Heidegger, Kant or Hegel -- what would you like to see in it?" Kofman asks.

"Their sex lives," Derrida replies.

"Why?" Kofman wants to know.

"Because it's something they don't talk about."

Favorite bits 2:

Derrida's most spontaneous moments occur as a public figure. He seems genuinely nonplussed, if not downright testy, when an overeager British interviewer attempts to lure him into a discussion of Seinfeld. "Deconstruction as I understand it does not produce any sitcoms," Derrida haughtily tells her. "Do your homework and read."

Favorite bits 3: Avital Ronell recalls being with Derrida when a new edition of a French dictionary is released, and it includes the word differance with an a. Avital wants to organize a celebration of this historic occasion. Derrida's mom, who's been sitting at the dinner table listening to this conversation, turns to Derrida aghast and asks, "Jacky, you spelt differance with an a?"  ¶ 11:43 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

From the Tao of Steve via The Tao Of Robert:

Dex : Look at me. Look at me, okay? Technically, I shouldn't be getting laid, but I do. And do you know why, Dave? Because when I'm hanging out with a woman, that's all I'm doing is hanging out, talking, listening. I'm not sitting there thinking about how to get in bed with her. And this completely confuses them because they're saying 'Wait a minute. I'm so much better looking than this guy. Isn't he attracted to me?' The basic principle: We pursue that which retreats from us.
Rick : It's from Heidegger.

The retreat belongs to enowning:

[T]o give as sending there belongs keeping back--such that the denial of the present and the withholding of the present, play within the giving of what has been and what will be. What we have mentioned just now--keeping back, denial, withholding--shows something like a self-withdrawing, something we might call for short: withdrawal. But inasmuch as the modes of giving that are determined by withdrawal--sending and extending--lie in Appropriation, withdrawal must belong to what is peculiar to the Appropriation.

P. 22

The retreating/withdrawing/self-sheltering-concealing is enopened by dasein:

Da-sein is the very own self-grounding ground of alhJeia of fusiV, is the essential swaying of that openness which first enopens the self-sheltering-concealing (the essential sway of be-ing) and which is thus the truth of be-ing itself.

S. 173

  ¶ 9:25 AM 0 comments

  Modern Man Action Figures

Martin Heidegger looks like a Cuthbert Calculus Mech-Warrior.  ¶ 10:10 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Kehre is a Japanese band:

The name "kehre." derives form a philosophical concept of Heidegger, Martin. a German philosopher who joined Nazi. Our view toward this fact is as follows, although holocaust is crucial guilt, to deny his thought in the name of Humanity is mere interectual corruption which might reflain such tragedy.

Kehre is in this blog, die Kehre im Ereignis, the opening up of Dasein:

En-ownment of Da-sein by be-ing and grounding the truth of being in Da-sein--the turning in enowning--is contained neither solely in the call (staying-away) not solely in belongingness (abandonment of being), or in both together. For this "together" and both of them deeply resonate first in enowning. In enowning, enowning itself resonates in counter-resonance.

The enquivering of this deep resonance in the turning [Kehre] of enowning is the most sheltered and concealed essential sway of be-ing.

GA 65, S 141

Does their music resonate in counter-resonance? They have mp3s at their site. Enjoy.
  ¶ 9:33 PM 0 comments

  The last of the 20th century philosphers

Jacques Derrida RIP.

Même si un jour au Paradis
Je deviens comme j`en serais surpris

Jacques Brel - La Chanson de Jacky


Je veux qu'on rie
Je veux qu'on danse
Quand c'est qu'on me mettra dans le trou

Jacques Brel - Le Moribond

MemeFirst
Pedablogue
Hallucinations & Antics
Samizdata.net
SomethingSomething
ProvenByScience
The Hegemo's Creative Class Warfare
Maiden Over
South Puget Sound Libertarian
The Will To Blog
Jason Craft
The Daniel Hurie Project
Chris Murray's Tex File
Balkinization
Spurious
wood s lot
pas au-delà
Daily Pundit
Water Cooler Games
soak the edge
jewishyirishy
ombion
mikarrhea
eripsa
The Blogging of the President
Speaking of Nonsense
chris murray's E-Po
Cronaca
Never Neutral
William Bragg
For Common Things
NarcissusWorks
The Truth
infinite thought
muninn
Limited, Inc.
Paper-trap
The Pinocchio Theory
nightspore
The Fishbowl
Michelle Malkin what a silly bunt!
Mormon Metaphysics  ¶ 1:14 PM 12 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Pomegranate Seeds says about Rodin, poetry, and philosophy:

The work of Rodin resonates with the great aspirations of the 19th century, the century of Darwin, Marx and Wagner. But in his equation, The Thinker = the Poet = the Creator, Rodin was way ahead of his time. The greatest German Philosopher of the 20th century, Martin Heidegger, only began to formulate this equation in the 1930's in such works as 'The Thinker as Poet', 'What are Poets For?' and '...Man Dwells Poetically'. Now it is a commonplace of humanities departments, repeated endlessly by such luminaries as Derrida, Lyotard, Richard Rorty and their followers.'

It's true that Socrates didn't want poets in his polis, but is the thinker = poet equation a 20th century invention?

In the Will To Power, in the 19th century:

It is through lyric poetry that Nietzsche feels he can convey a philosophy intended to make the individual think for themselves and thus to build and inform their perspectives. This poetry reveals a truth that emanates from our own intuition, the obstacle of morality is removed, and we find this poetry has the ability to reflect ourselves back at us, it is a confession of ourselves to ourselves.

Whereas Heidegger while discussing Nietzsche (II p. 208) thinks that:

[T]he thinker, in a way peculiar to him, rises to the rank of a poet, yet he remains eternally distinct from the poet, just as the poet in turn remains eternally distinct from the thinker.

  ¶ 8:46 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Time to call in the B-52s? Saccharin Metric is unsatisfied with the violence so far:

The horror of Heidegger's terminal philosophy is often said to be the disrespect and coldness he feels when describing the arraying of human experience. The summit of Adorno's critique was, for me, the moment where he managed to utter what was clearly under his breath all the time; 'inhumane'. Even with that final effort, however, I am unsatisfied with leaving Heidegger bloodied and broken in the gutter.

"The horror! The horror..."

Willard finds Kurtz's manuscript where he has written : "Drop the bomb. Exterminate them all."

"Street Gang, this is Almighty, over..."
  ¶ 5:20 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

m759's Xanga Site semainei.
  ¶ 10:55 PM 0 comments

  Born with a silver fork in her mouth

The new Marianne Faithfull Before the Poison has an introduction from Will Self.

...politicians, prelates and pedagogues trade in the facile dualities of good and evil, but for Faithfull the transcendent forces that barter for human destiny are love and hatred, while the currency they employ is only ever either the truth or lies.

Whew!

...that smoky voice...it disappears for days to disport with the existentialist inhabitants...

I heard zinc is good for that.

For decades now Marianne Faithfull has dragged this sisyphean stylus up a groovey hill, and all you can do is lie there getting your liver gnawed for free.

You can get it on vinyl?!

This time around the music includes a tracks with Rob Ellis, the guy for Portishead, and the songwriter from Blur, the rest of the tracks are from PJ Harvey and Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. The songs will stand on their merits and flaws, but I enjoyed the first listen; Warren Ellis has never played a bum note. Marianne wrote most of the lyrics, including the title track.

Couldn't see the Fall
coming on, coming from nowhere

I hate when that happens.

You can get the digipak for a reasonable price from amazon.uk. In Europe they include sales tax in the listed price, so don't forget to subtract it when shipping outside the EU. Air mail is reasonable for a single CD.
  ¶ 9:49 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

mediated.comm makes this comment about Heidegger and technology:

The most interesting feature of it all to me is what comes out as the "inherently social" nature of technology that altered earlier view of technology as a mere tool, independent of the user. The transition made in line with Heidegger (1977) and Ong (1982) school of thought that affirms technological evolution as an outcome of social processes.

I've always understood that the key take away from Heidegger's thinking on technology was that

the essence of technology is by no means anything technological

and everything that leads up to and from that. I'm not sure where the transition from an earlier technology to the "inherently social" is, nor what Heidegger's involvement was in affirming social processes. Technology is inherently human and social in the way that it transmits itself between generations. It has always been so. Whereas animals transmit themselves through their genes to their offspring, humans can also carry over to their descendents through technology, ever since the first arrowhead and pot were bequeathed. Heidegger calls out the difference between the ancient technê, where an artisan formed a unique thing with a purpose from materials (e.g. a metal cup), and the modern notion of technology, using resources to produce goods for consumption (e.g. a dam generating electricity).
  ¶ 8:35 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Sampo is reading Understanding Computers and Cognition:

Both Gadamer and Heidegger reject rationalism, seeing the individual as a fundamentally social being that exists in continuous state of being immersed in any situation that they may be attempting to engage or analyze, with Heidegger going so far as to defy the distinction between subject and object.

It's a bit strong to state that Heidegger rejected rationalism or defied the subject-object distinction. He says that rationalism is fine, within its own system of logical rules, and Descartes says sensible things within his system. What Heidegger is saying is that both of these systems are in boxes of their own devising, and that it is possible to think outside those boxes and still think reasonable thoughts.

In The Age of the World Picture Heidegger says about Descartes and modernism:

With Descartes, there begins the completion of Western Metaphysics. Since, however, such a completion is only possible as metaphysics, modern thinking has its own kind of greatness.

  ¶ 9:33 AM 0 comments

  Ontology in a rub-a-dub style

Gelassenheit:

[E]ven if the old rootedness is being lost in this age, may not a new ground and foundation be granted again to man, a foundation and ground out of which man's nature and all his works can flourish in a new way even in the atomic age?

Sir Robert Marley:

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery
None but ourselves can free our minds
Have no fear for atomic energy
Cause none of them can stop the time

I once worked in the control room of an atomic reactor. The engineering firm I worked for had been contracted to write an expert system to filter control room alarms. The moment the accident occurred at Three Mile Island their control panels lit up, and it took them days to trace back to the original failure through the cascades of alarms. The expert system was intended to filter and prioritize the alarms so that in the event of an accident the personnel in the control room would be directed to the central failure immediately.

The control room at Diablo Canyon was run by a, by that date, obsolete mini computer; it was too expensive to go through the regulatory process to update the control room hardware. All entire RAM in the computer was in a shared memory pool and all the alarms were at a specific memory address. I convinced a colleague at the firm who knew assembler to write a routine that would get interrupted when an alarm changed state, and send the data out a UDP port. Most computers had TCP/IP because that was a requirement from the Pentagon, the biggest buyer of computers in those days.

Listening at the other end I had a 386 running Xenix. It would get the alarm data through a socket, store it in a file, and go back to listening. Another daemon would monitor the file system. When the daemon detected a new file, it would open a socket on a second ethernet card, and send the alarm data to an expert system in a TI Explorer II Lisp machine. The first Explorer had been a workstation, but the II was now a board inside a Macintosh II.

The 386 was there to act as a buffer. Alarms might be generated faster than the expert system could process them. Garbage collection in the Lisp machine might have prevented the expert system from getting an alarm if it had been connected directly to the control room computer.

The 386 existed because we couldn't stop the time.

That's what I remember of that time. The rest is a blur of nearby hotels and restaurants, and driving back to the City up Highway 1, in the fog though Big Sur, past a dying Henry Miller's home, listening to a tape of Gil Scott-Heron's greatest hits.  ¶ 10:40 PM 0 comments

  Dylan at Side Effects responds to my earlier post on the question of: Heidegger the future ecologist or ontologist? Go read it.

I agree that Heidegger is very much a country boy. Born in a Bavarian village, he never lived far from the countryside, retreated there to think and write, and hated the big city; even going so far as to refuse the call to the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin because he hated the big city. He probably had more nostalgie du bois than any other 20th century philosopher, and like many of his German contemporaries the mythos of blood and soil was rooted in him.

{I myself am a city boy stuck in the 'burbs and dearly miss the cosmopolis and its ways. "But the schools are so good for the kids!"}

Heidegger was obviously comfortable with the countryside, its farms, and that life, before the arrival of mechanized agriculture. That said, it is necessary to separate Heidegger's philosaphy from his preferences and the choices he made in his life (especially his political choices...). I feel his critique of technology is misunderstood as a derogatory criticism contra technology. If one reads it closely, his thinking is not anti technology, but rather directed towards better understanding of technology and its importance to man. Technology is not as an extension of modern science, but is something rooted ontologically ever since man began to shape objects for his purposes. Although The Question Concerning Technology is usually the text used for explaining Heidegger's thinking about technology, and it is excellent in situating Heidegger as the critical ontologist after Aristotle, Gelassenheit serves to extend the path Heidegger was thinking. He was not anti-technology.

Thus we ask now: even if the old rootedness is being lost in this age, may not a new ground and foundation be granted again to man, a foundation and ground out of which man's nature and all his works can flourish in a new way even in the atomic age?
...
We depend on technical devices; they even challenge us to ever greater advances. But suddenly and unaware we find ourselves so firmly shackled to these technical devices that we fall into bondage to them.

Still we can act otherwise. We can use technical devices, and yet with proper use also keep ourselves so free of them, that we may let go of them any time. We can use technical devices as they ought to be used, and also let them alone as something which does not affect our inner and real core. We can affirm the unavoidable use of technical devices, and also deny them the right to dominate us, and so to warp, confuse, and lay waste our nature.

But will not saying both yes and no this way to technical devices make our relation to technology ambivalent and insecure? On the contrary! Our relation to technology will become wonderfully simple and relaxed. We let technical devices enter our daily life, and at the same time leave them outside, that is, let them alone, as things which are nothing absolute but remain dependent upon something higher. I would call
this comportment toward technology which expresses "yes" and at the same time "no," by an old word, releasement toward things.

That final phrase, the old word, is Gelassenheit. And so, given the above, and more elsewhere in his works, I don't see technology as something pernicious for Heidegger.  ¶ 8:47 PM 0 comments

  Tried to get tix for Tom Waits last night but the line was too long by the time I got around to attending to the task. Maybe next time:

And it's Time Time Time
And it's Time Time Time
And it's Time Time Time
That you love

In time the four-fold meet:

Pigeons fall around her feet [Earth]
So put a candle in the window [Divinity]
And a kiss upon his lips [Mortal]
Till the dish outside the window fills with rain [Sky]

  ¶ 1:20 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Side Effects proposes the future history of Heidegger:

At best, the application of dead philosophers onto a living world is only justified by the deforming the original content of that philosophy, or at least by making it relevant. The future of Heidegger will not consist in his philosophy of Being but in his philosophy of ecology. Da-sein is indicative of a particular age and with the passing of that age the term is reduced to a historic entity and certainly not something lived.

I'm not sympathetic with justifying philosophers by deforming them. It sounds too negative to my ear. I do think philosophers need re-forming, in the sense that they must be thought anew to be relevant. I recall the history of philosophy being something musty, and merely to be memorized (e.g. Russell's history), until I came across Heidegger and his re-thinking of, or thinking alongside, the classic philosophers. I realize he's not alone in doing so, but he was the first for me.

I'm also suspicious of Heidegger's philosophy of ecology being his legacy. Of course the future remains to unfold itself down unpredictable paths, but ecology is not a word Heidegger uses. I've read some of the ecological directions that Heidegger's thinking has been extended into, and find them speculative. It's great that philosophers think in new directions, but in this case I find it difficult to ascribe the new thoughts back to Heidegger. To my mind what Heidegger said about technology and our environs, and the earth as a part of his four-fold, are facets of his thinking about ontology, Being. He could not have made his comments about the environment without thinking beyng first, so I don't see those comments surviving as a stand alone philosophy.

I'm sympathetic to the notion that Da-sein may be a historic entity, and thus ripe for deconstruction. And when I'm in the mood, I enjoy reading Derrida's attempts to do so. But I am not convinced Da-sein, who thinks the appropriative event (to use Stambaugh's term), is merely historical, and not, instead, always already lived.  ¶ 9:15 AM 5 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

philosophical conversations is reading Derrida's Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, and notes:

Of Spirit is dense in its deconstruction of Geist --which I generally interpret as culture.

Geist is usually translated as "spirit", and is normally associated with Hegel in in German philosophy; in winter semester 1930-31 Heidegger lectured on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Geist appears in Being and Time but always inside quotation marks. Derrida's lectures are centered on Heidegger's rectorship address in 1933, where Geist appears without being quoted, or, as Derrida puts it: the curtain is lifted on Geist. Heideggers says there:

Spirit is originally attuned, cognizant openedness to the essence of being.

This phase of Heidegger's has always been out of character to me. The Rektoratsrede has its bits about serving the university, which I would expect from a new university administrator, but the philosphical parts seem out of tune with the rest of Heidegger's works. On the other hand, there is a gap in the translations. We have Aristotle's Metaphysics Q 1-3 from 1931, and then nothing until An Introduction to Metaphysics in 1935, except for the Rektoratsrede. I wonder if there is whole Hegelian and nationalistic period of Heidegger that has been kept from English audiences.

David Wood wrote that what drove Heidegger during this period was the feeling of historical crisis.

Heidegger understands the language of spirit in terms of the temporalizing of temporality, as originary temporality. It is being deployed in the service of the actualization of philosophy as a reinauguration of a lost origin.

This whole episode just reinforces the notion that philosophers should avoid politics and stick to the difficult enough task of trying to articulate the ineffable.  ¶ 4:38 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Innumeracy-sein

The Washington Times reveals:

New research by Burke's Peerage reveals that Mr. Kerry is the only presidential candidate in U.S. history who has genealogical descent from Muslims, Jews and Christians.

If you go back far enough, everyone is related to everyone else. For example, all Europeans are descendants of Charlemagne:

Let's say, Charlemagne who lived 742-814 AD was from me about 50-60 generations ago. Only 10 generations back and you are already talking about 2048 individual parents on that particular level. If you now go back even further, then of course I all likelihood it is very possible, if not even a sure fact, that at one time or another any European has a bloodlink to Charlemagne.

There were Muslims in Europe before Charlemagne was born. There was a Jewish community in ancient Rome. So every European descends from Muslims, Jews and Christians. Saying otherwise of anyone of European descent would be false. All Europeans are even descended from Muhammad. Do the math.  ¶ 8:04 AM 0 comments

  Victor Davis Hanson, a classics professor from California, sometimes makes interesting analogies between today's world and the classics. Today, he has an opinionated piece on the folks who dislike President Bush wherein he attacks Foucault for being a moral relativist:

Remember the preexisting landscape of postmodern thinking of the last two decades that has dominated the intelligentsia, specifically the Foucauldian notion that there is no real absolute standard of good or bad, right or wrong, but simply interpretations and views, whose 'correctness' is predicated on the nature of power.

The curiosity I find here is his picking on Foucault. I'm no expert on the French theorist, but I know he didn't invent moral relativism. Nietzsche thinks along those lines in The Genealogy of Morals, as described in Damon Linker's review of Safranski's bio:

In the beginning, there was chaos. All of Nietzsche’s books begin from this assumption. The Genealogy departs from those works in asserting that this primordial anarchy consisted of an unfocused, undifferentiated, and purposeless “will to power” that permeated all things. (Whether the will to power merely animates living creatures or acts as a metaphysical force that pervades all of nature remains unclarified.) The pointless, anarchistic violence that characterized the prehistoric world came to an end when certain individuals began to focus their will to power on the goal of decisively triumphing over others. When they finally succeeded, these victorious individuals, whom Nietzsche dubs “the strong,” foisted the first “moral valuation” onto mankind.

In the strong (or “noble”) valuation, the good is nothing other than an expression of what the members of the victorious class do and what they affirm. And what they do is triumph ruthlessly over the weak by violence. Likewise, the opposite of the good—the bad—is defined by the strong as weakness, or the inability to conquer the strong. Nietzsche illustrates the dynamics of the strong valuation with an infamous image of birds of prey devouring defenseless lambs. The birds of prey do not choose to eat the lambs; there is thus no free will involved and nothing blameworthy about their viciousness. It’s simply what they do; what they do is the essence of who they are; and who they are serves as the measure of good and bad.

Reaching back to the classics, the notion of moral relativism is discussed as a belief of the sophist Protagoras in Plato's Theaetetus. And back then, conservatives were already alarmed:

The test case normally used is temperature. If Ms. X. says "it is hot," then the statement (unless she is lying) is true for her. Another person, Ms. Y, may simultaneously claim "it is cold." This statement could also be true for her. If Ms. X normally lives in Alaska and Ms. Y in Florida, the same temperature (e. g. 25 Celsius) may seem hot to one and cool to the other. The measure of hotness or coldness is fairly obviously the individual person. One cannot legitimately tell Ms. X she does not feel hot -- she is the only person who can accurately report her own perceptions or sensations. In this case, it is indeed impossible to contradict as Protagoras is held to have said. But what if Ms. Y, in claiming it feels cold, suggests that unless the heat is turned on the pipes will freeze? One might suspect that she has a fever and her judgment is unreliable; the measure may still be the individual person, but it is an unreliable one, like a broken ruler or unbalanced scale. In a modern scientific culture, with a predilection for scientific solutions, we would think of consulting a thermometer to determine the objective truth. The Greek response was to look at the more profound philosophical implications.

Even if the case of whether the pipes will freeze can be solved trivially, the problem of it being simultaneously hot and cold to two women remains interesting. If this cannot be resolved by determining that one has a fever, we are presented with evidence that judgments about qualities are subjective. If this is the case though, it has alarming consequences. Abstractions like truth, beauty, justice, and virtue are also qualities and it would seem that Protagoras' dictum would lead us to conclude that they too are relative to the individual observer, a conclusion which many conservative Athenians found alarming because of its potential social consequences. If good and bad are merely what seem good and bad to the individual observer, then how can one claim that stealing or adultery or impiety or murder are somehow wrong?

So why pick on Foucault, who is also not around to defend himself? Because he was French? Because he was gay? Because of his dramatic solution to the coiffeur's challenge of incipient balding? Perhaps picking on Foucault is just a peculiarity of the senior common rooms of Californian academia.  ¶ 3:10 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Culture_Raven in a review of Buruma and Margolit's Occidentalism has this non sequitur:

Academics should begin by considering the Occidentalist ideas that have been handed down to them, in gnomically convoluted prose, by the biggest philosopher of the 20th century: Martin Heidegger. Philosophers, literary critics, and the ecologically minded have all cited Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology." I wonder if intellectuals would be so eager to cite Heidegger once they realized that here, as in so many other of his allegedly profound and insightful essays, he is merely recycling hackneyed intellectual commonplaces shared by other members of the German intellectual mandarinate.

Baffled that the biggest philosopher merely recycled commonplaces? What were the less bigger philosophers doing in the 20th century? Were all the German mandarins also reinterpreting Aristotle? Note the Borges quote at the top of the page. It's not reasonable, merely satirical.  ¶ 1:59 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

At Vomit the Lukewarm, a limitation of Heidegger's is noted:

'Being at hand' (there probably were hyphens) the idea behind the term is that we best understand the being of something when we don't have it anymore. No one is more aware of their car than in the times when it doesn't work, no one has a more profound awareness of a screwdriver than in the times when they can't find one. The Method here is a sound one, my only question has to do with what is left out. Nowhere does Heidegger mention things like eyes, hands, a harvest, good weather, etc- in other words, there are no natural things.

Only problem here is that not only does Heidegger go on about natural things, he goes on about those specific things. In fact hands are very popular and show up in many places: the hand holding this piece of chalk, the hands holding the lectern. The limitation with Heidegger's works, compared with other scholars, is that Heidegger forbade having indexes in his works, and translators have largely followed suit. Consequently it's hard to find out where Heidegger discusses the weather, and so on. Heidegger wants you to read entire works and not just pick out passages out of context.  ¶ 7:05 AM 1 comments