In-der-Blog-sein

The Marketplace of Ideas links to the Zizek article on "Which is worser? National Socialism or International Communism?", curious about Heidegger.

After reading a bit more, it seems that Heidegger was a true believer, at least for a time. While he fell out of favor, he was definitely on board with the Nazis for a while. Not good.

Define good. Useful as a lesson in hubris. Another warning not to trust philosophers with your future. Don't depend on figures of authority to make decisions for you, make up your own mind, now. The future is unwritten.

On a related note, on the Heidegger Dialognet mailing list, Dennis Sepper, who's written on philosophy and science reflects on what he's learned about Heidegger, and the list itself.

I do not consider myself to be a Heideggerian in my philosophizing about technology, and would never give him the last word (not least because, despite his treatment of traffic signals and broken hammers, he leaves so obscure our manifold engagements with technologies). Still, I think that Heidegger, like no other before him, has shown an aspect (and that itself is a laughably inapt term) of our world, an aspect we take for granted and have learned ever more easily to inhabit without thinking.

My hope is that on this Heidegger list it should be possible to ask questions, to float ideas, to get recommendations and motivation for future reading, to hear reactions to lines of argument, to remind one another of where there are passages relevant to our expressed concerns in Heidegger's works and in the secondary literature, to have our attention called to other and larger considerations.

Yeah, well, you have to take mailing lists for what they are. No public forum is ever going to be what a single participant might ideally want. At least today mailing lists appear to have gotten over the spam problem, that in the late 90s was swamping out the mail messages actually intended for the specific lists. Malanderers and flame wars will likely always haunt public forums, but you may still find some lists rewarding. Just treat yourself by using the delete button generously.  ¶ 9:11 AM 0 comments

  In Pakistan's Daily Times Timothy Mitchell opines on the spectacles of colonialism:

Exhibitions, museums and other spectacles were not just reflections of this certainty, however, but the means of its production, by their technique of rendering history, progress, culture and empire in 'objective' form. They were occasions for making sure of such objective truths, in a world where truth had become a question of what Heidegger calls `the certainty of representation'.

He wrote that in The Age of the World Picture, referring to science.

This objectifying of whatever is, is accomplished in a setting-before, a representing, that aims at bringing each particular being before it in such a way that man who calculates can be sure, and that means to be certain, of that being. We first arrive at science as reasearch when and only when truth has been transformed into the certainty of representation.
P. 127

  ¶ 8:00 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

philosophical conversations has been on a roll lately, posting on Heidegger and Technology, Nietzsche, and Nihilism, and today steps back to reflect on philosophy.

One of the contradictions about philosophy that has stuck me is how analytic philosophy says that it is universal, but then talks in terms of Anglo-American philosophy as good and continental (French philosophy) is bad, then denies that it is part of the discourse of the nation. There is a cordoning of Australia off from the philosophy of France and Germany. Australians view deconstruction as French philosophy and hermeneutics as German philosophy.

And pragmatism as American philosophy? Practically speaking analytical philosophy is universal in the sense that mathematics is also universal, and just as useful to us in our day-to-day deportment.   ¶ 2:27 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Keith Wilson begins a study of being:

I'm slowly coming around to the idea put forward by Martin Heidegger that philosophy is in fact the study of being, or more specifically: the study of what is.

More specifically, the study of being is ontology. Philosphy also has room for the study of knowledge, what's right and wrong, how we should behave, what's it all about, and all other things wisdomy.  ¶ 6:57 PM 0 comments

  Over to Existence to learn that:

Dasein, sadly, has disbanded.

No more ligging in the lichtung for the band then.

Hat tip to Pragmatic Systems of Terror Discourse, the blog, which remarks

I guess it would matter where THEY were in time.

Yes, that's why Dasein were enframed by their drum machine.  ¶ 6:50 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

jdrabinski helps a colleague out with the later Heidegger and adds a personal interpretation:

My take is this: the emphasis on temporality in Being and Time borrows from the New Testament notion of kairos, the fullness of the moment, wherein Dasein glimpses Being. The later Heidegger purifies itself of the onto-theological tradition, however, which allows him to not glimpse Being as such, but rather catch the trace of Being in its withdrawal.

And much more. Read the whole thing.  ¶ 11:18 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

ho_skoteinos finds that his library is his Greek temple:

In this way of thinking, the library can be a "Greek temple" in the sense that it too sets-up a world and sets forth the earth. But to be of real honesty, as was said in The Origin of the Work of Art, things that have grown ordinary lose this sense of truth in them. The library too may be subject to such "falling-into-the-ordinary", by way of borrowing Heidegger's way of speech, as artworks too if they are merely seen as things, as objects, with no regard to what they are in themselves.

Next, my ordinary Converse All-Stars are my originary peasant shoes.  ¶ 7:16 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Dreyfish reminds us to avoid the philologist on the omnibus when on the way back from Syracuse:

Phillips notes that in 1934 '[a]ccosting Heidegger on a tram after his early resignation of the rectorship of Freiburg University, Wolfgang Schadewaldt asked his colleague, 'Back from Syracuse?''
Schadewaldt's teasing reference, of course, was to Plato's similar dalliance with a tyrant (Dionysius II of Syracuse in his case). On his way back from from Sicily, Plato for a time found himself enslaved, the story goes. So did Heidegger after his return from Freiburg: by Frau Heidegger, who apparently wore the lederhosen. Plato, at least, was ransomed by his friends.

Plato had friends because he did not stab his mates in the back on his way to Syracuse. And that's the moral of the fable.

And Martin did too wear the lederhosen. At least when company dropped in for tea and schnapps. Not that the missus didn't have the legs to be wearing leather short-pants, mind you.

Was Dreyfus, only 23, nervous about seeing the man many consider the 20th-century's greatest philosopher? "I suppose I was," Dreyfus replies. "But I had been distracted by the legs of Mrs. Heidegger. She was on a ladder in an apple tree in the front yard when I came to the house, and all I could see was her legs. So I was already bemused when Heidegger came to the door in his lederhosen and green suspenders and funny hat."

Green suspenders? That was one swanky Swabian.  ¶ 9:13 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

'I do not know its name but its nature I call Reason', the blog, randomly muses on the subject, Dasein, and the whole menagerie.

So Dogs and Cats, daseins perhaps? Dolphins, Monkeys, hmmm. We may never know if these are beings capable of authenticity, but it seems to rescue the Heideggerian approach something has to give here.

Can't get more authentic than a cow being milked, but that's besides the point. Heidegger's pretty certain only "we" are privileged ontologically. It's all about positioning your species so that it gets to define ontology--authentically or not.  ¶ 9:32 AM 2 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Alphonse van Worden, towards the end of a post on recent political positioning by Zizek as an example of political positions as a post-modern commodity for intellectuals [that's you, gentle reader random browser], states that:

Even a devotee of Heidegger will see some value in the work of a scholar dedicated to showing that Heidegger's whole philosophy is nothing but debunkable airy fairy excuses for Nazism. Product into which Heidegger's defender, if sincere, will read, engage, happily sink teeth into. The idea of refusing such debate - if you don't like Heidegger or Schmidt or whomever, why don't you just change the channel and read Benjamin instead? - would be an eccentric response.

I don't know about that. While speculations about the relationship between Heidegger's thinking and his political involvement may prove fruitful, particularly to those concerned with the implications of Heidegger's ontology for ethics, politics, or moral philosophy. There have already been many studies published from many different perspectives documenting the intersection of Heidegger and the Nazis. So it's hard to imagine a scholar thinking that Heidegger's basic philosophical insights, already in place at least a decade before the the appearance of the Nazis, are some kind of pre-cog exculpatory exercise.

It's not about refusing debate, its about being skeptical.  ¶ 9:19 AM 0 comments

  The wrong Elvis

From a roundtable on Derrida's Love of Philosophy: From Deconstruction to Aporia, the six degrees of separation from Martin to Elvis:

It is true the early Derrida follows Heidegger in seeing the history of philosophy as the history of texts whose surface allegiance is to "presence." This is what they called "metaphysics." That is, traditional philosophy tries to ground difference -- the world -- in a single, self-identical point outside the world: the Good beyond Being for Plato, the Prime Mover of Aristotle, the God of the medievals, and so on. Of course Derrida is a far more sophisticated reader than this caricature lays out, but in this context, let's let it go at that. That reading is called "deconstruction." Its job is to show that the supposedly self-present point outside the world is only a projection, a desire to escape difference. Derrida calls a structure of difference a "text," so "there's nothing outside the text" [= il n'y a pas de hors-texte = there is no outside-the-text] simply means "there's nothing outside the world." In other words, we can't make appeals to some transcendent source of meaning: we have to figure it out ourselves down here on earth. This is atheism, to be sure, but after this past election it's time to insist as often and as publicly as possible that it's also what many people have said was Jesus' message in Mark 1:15: the kingdom of heaven is at hand, not up in the sky, but here in the solidarity of those struggling for peace, love, and justice. And as Elvis Costello sang, "what's so funny about peace, love and understanding"?

My money's on the spiritual vacuum. Or as Advantage Elvis might puts it:

Elvis' biggest advantage over Costello is spiritual. Elvis Presley had a spiritual openess and aspiration which Costello could never touch.

For starters, think of their broadest respective statements of humanism. Costello gave a highly articulated expression of lower level human despair: "What's so funny about peace, love and understanding." Contrast this to the finale of Elvis' famous 1968 television special, "If I Can Dream." Elvis is reaching out toward something holy and transcendent that Costello could never touch.

Critics, gotta love 'em.  ¶ 8:26 AM 1 comments

  Facilitating an understanding of I Heart Huckabees by example, is The Difference Site. Voila the "it's all about the cracks" brand of existential detective work. There is Pro Bono advice.

[S]uggestions for the generation to come in terms of how to approach and study difference.

suggestion 1

Consider approaching difference through comparative studies i.e. studies that contrast and compare the notions of difference developed by two thinkers, in particular: The Understanding of Difference in Heidegger and Derrida, Derrida, Kristeva, and the Dividing Line: an Articulation of Two Theories of Difference, and Ecart and Différance: Merleau-Ponty and Derrida on Seeing and Writing.

So then, Julia Kristeva is Caterine Vauban, and so on.  ¶ 7:19 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Blogtrotter muses on poetry contra science:

[Heidegger] makes the point that philosophy is actually closer to poetry than science. Good point - as 'science' in the sense of objective science demands that we be zombies, whilst poetry is exclusive to subjects. The famous example of a sunset - objective scientific description is trivial, whilst a poet gives a lyrical account of subjective qualia. - this point struck me again in reading also last night interview of Spiegel editor with Brian Greene of 'Elegant Universe' - in his new book he again shows how one sided he is - apparently utterly ignorant of philosophy

Well, we tend to judge folks by what they know and not what they don't know--always a lot, in our era of ever increasing specialization. Unless, that is, folks are pretending to know what they don't. Then the gloves can come off.  ¶ 6:38 PM 0 comments

  Chuck Palahniuk on Heidegger and bestand:

The philosopher Martin Heidegger pointed out how human beings tend to look at the world as a standing stock of material, ready for us to use. As inventory to be processed into something more valuable. Trees into wood. Animals into meat. He called this world of raw natural resources: bestand. It seems inevitable that people without access to natural bestand such as oil wells or diamond mines, that they'd turn to the only inventory they do have--their lives.

More and more, the bestand of our era is our own intellectual property. Our ideas. Our life stories. Our experience.

What people used to endure or enjoy--all those plot-point events of potty training and honeymoons and lung cancer--now they can be shaped to best effect and sold.

The trick is to pay attention. Take notes.

The problem with seeing the world as bestand, Heidegger said, was it leads you to use things, enslave and exploit things and people, for your own benefit.

With this in mind, is it possible to enslave yourself?

Martin Heidegger also points out that an event is shaped by the presence of the observer. A tree falling in the forest is somehow different if someone is there, noting and accenting the details in order to turn it into a Julia Roberts vehicle.

If only by distorting events, tweaking them for more dramatic impact, exaggerating them to the point you forget your actual history--you forget who you are--is it possible to exploit your own life for the sake of a marketable story?

But then, sorry, but your seven minutes is up.

  ¶ 9:35 AM 0 comments

  Interesting footnote on fraternal Fritz from Der Spiegel:

Martin Heidegger is well known the world over; not so his oddball brother Fritz. A new study by the Berlin literary specialist Hans Dieter Zimmermann, 64, reveals the courageous brother as having been a remarkable man. Zimmermann has investigated the home life and family ties of the Heideggers in great detail. The resulting twin portrait, tinged with a lot of local colour, demonstrates that Fritz, who was nicknamed 'Scheinwerfer' on account of his money-counting skills, could equally well have become an intellectual, had the financial means of the sexton family not been limited and had his severe stammer not got in the way. Whereas Martin Heidegger joined the new ruling powers in 1933, even hailing the decision of 'our people' in favour of Hitler as the 'fundamental demand of all being to preserve and save its own essence'; just three months later Fritz gave a carnival speech warning that the hot summer had 'turned everything brown'. 'Beware of these people who try to do things one hundred percent!', he called out.

  ¶ 7:22 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Comment Me No Comments blogs on post-structuralist fundamentalism and the nattering nabobs of nihilism:

Nietzsche also grasped, though, that the modernist for whom "God is dead" is nihilistic; the same pragmatic evasion of reality that "kills" God also "kills" all distinctively human sources of meaning, all measures of value beyond personal preference (as pragmatically modified by social conformity). Heidegger discusses the "default of God" as becoming most desperate when the "default" is no longer sensed as such; when there is no longer any destitution-of to remark that of which we are destitute, our destitution has become so absolute as to erase itself entirely from our consciousness.

Nietzsche's response is to expect and announce the emergence of great souls who can 'transvalue values,' who can go beyond the negation of old systems of valuation to create their own-ultimate self-asserting selves. Heidegger's response is to attempt the destruction of the Western metaphysical tradition and the consideration of the basic questions whose 'answers' formed the now-dead systems; his intellectual descendant, Derrida, though, is the one who concerns us.

Derrida's strategy is different, though it contains elements of both Nietzsche and Heidegger. Derrida takes seriously the destruction of all Western metaphysics in Nietzsche and Heidegger, and examines the nihil (the abyss).

Nothing nihilates like destitution, so give generously to bridge the nihil.  ¶ 7:22 AM 2 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Charlotte Street on the call that calls:

Crucially, we understand that the Call signifies without understanding what; we grasp the fact of being addressed but not the content of that address (your country needs you! do the right thing! Stop, thief!).

The content-less incontinent call?  ¶ 7:07 AM 0 comments

  The Holy Cross Crusader reports on a talk by Rev. William J. Richardson on the later Heidegger. I am entertained by the reporter's phonetic transcriptions of various words. Ok, so I'm easily amused.

Richardson was to address Heidegger's "Turn," its tone and mechanics, from its early to later years, but he realized that the "Turn" was too "ranging," "sinuey," and "overwhelming" for this audience.

Instead, he addressed the period after Heidegger's "Turn" in hopes that it would be accessible to discussion.

Heidegger, Richardson explained, became friends with Menard Boss, a leading philosopher of the era.

That's Medard Boss, the Swiss psychologist.

Heidegger's lectures addressed the idea of 'Being' and idea he become intrigued with through learning about Aristotle and Grattano's idea of being.

That's Franz Brentano, author of On the manifold sense of Being in Aristotle.

Richardson explained that Heidegger's idea of being could be explained by three approaches: First, he used ontonology. Then, aletheia, or the Greek word for truth, which is believed to be a depth for non-concealment by Heideggar.

Also, one must look at the time and dimension in which a being is referred. Richardson stated with arms out-stretched, that questioning ultimately starts "here" as to the meaning of being.

Fishing for being, I caught an ontonology that was this big!

Heidegger's concept of "da-scin" is the clearing of being that may reappear and reveal what the truth is.

He was there-sinning in the Lichtung, with Jennifer apparently.

[A] patient, "Jennifer," whose insulin dependant diabetes plagued her since youth and made her defiant of medication and attention to her disease.

Psychoanalysis offered access to her unconscious through free association. Psychoanalysis is therapeutic as the gratitude a patient feels toward non-entrapment shows care, instead of "unbearable oppression" from doctors.

Richardson cited how "Jennifer" repressed rage toward her disease and mystery diabetic origin as the core of her mental frustration, forcing Richardson to find her aletheia, her truth, in order to cure her.

I myself search for the inner-truth of my allergies.

In order for "Jennifer" to attain freedom from her oppression, Richardson believed she needed to let herself be through lagos, or the discernment of aletheia.

Or the capital of Nigeria.

Pure luck and providence took a boy from Brooklyn to be educated at Holy Cross, study at the University of Louvain in Belgium, and finally, become the worlds leading philosopher on Heidegger.

And Enowning, modestly, hopes to luck into being the blogosphere's leading charlatan on Martin, but finds heavy competition from this article, which goes on to repeat itself with new spellings.

Heideggerss concept of dazine is the clearing of being that may reappear and reveal what the truth is.

Truly, in the internet age, the truth is no longer revealed in dazine, but in the dablog.  ¶ 6:21 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Masood Mortazavi's Weblog discusses the referential totality of tools. The mobile, Einrichtung device?  ¶ 9:56 PM 0 comments

  Class and style in the XX1th century, Global Politician explains:

What is postmodern intellectual style like? It is very sophisticated, theoretical, and usually written with genuinely good literary taste. It is self-consciously the climax of an old, refined intellectual heritage. One normally reflects ideas of the great thinkers of the western cultural tradition. One can start from Montaigne or Erasmus, but it is more typical to start from Germany and move from Kant and Hegel to Nietzsche and Heidegger. From Germany the intellectual narrative is relocated to France by discussing Foucault and Lyotard, and finally the story is ended in the United States with Bell, Rorty, and Shapiro. In postmodern discussions it is not the custom to use forenames, titles, or biographical details, which implies that these things are presumed to be known to all concerned, i.e. the audience is supposed to be as sophisticated as the writers. Within such a learned environment the surname of an intellectual ancestor suffices.

Sophisticated? Surnames? Not around here, mate!

People get the wrong impression with Martin
I know he doesn't mix much but he's no snob

--Tom Robinson  ¶ 9:06 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

20th Century Phil. Blog explains the Fourfold at the Heidelberg bridge.  ¶ 1:53 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Novelita Blog hosts an editorial by Slavoj Zizek:

If Heidegger cannot be pardoned for his flirtation with Nazism, why can Lukács and Brecht and others be pardoned for their much longer engagement with Stalinism?

This has always struck me as an issue of quality over quantity. The shocking thing wasn't only the sheer numbers involved, but also the dispassionate use of technology to address the problems in the disposal of corpses, as if it was merely another project for engineers.  ¶ 7:46 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Fluid Imagination is dissatisfied with Heidegger's vocabulary.

The result of this innate feature of Heidegger's question is that it results primarily in a long list of new vocabulary words which do little to remove the "susceptibility" of being. Logisms such as "being-there," "being-in-time," "being as theme," "being extant," "sein," "Dasein," and all the numerous other terms used to prod at this question of being, while they carve out in more ornateness and detail the ways in which being can be discussed, do little to advance the problem of being, as it is laid out by Heidegger, forward to a solution.

It is primarily a new vocabulary, and so are many fields for the neophyte, and eventually one gets past that and on to the real subject matter, or one doesn't.  ¶ 7:39 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

The Philosophical Apprentice hosts an article on Paul Ricoeur's Phenomenology of the Will that describes a connection between Heidegger and Ricoeur.

The project that Heidegger talks about in Being and Time is concretized in Ricoeur as the project of human action. There is a link therefore in Heidegger's explication of the meaning of Dasein to Ricoeur's own elucidation of the meaning of the subject.

  ¶ 8:46 PM 0 comments

  Horton Deconstructs the Doctor:

She thought she saw all
But it seems one small catch is
Like bad O'Keeffe scholars
. . . She only saw snatches!

Her decoder ring failed
But h'rumph-h'rumphers all noted
That HERS was the meaning
Old Seuss had encoded!

  ¶ 7:48 AM 0 comments

  Calling brings closer what it calls

Went to see Dylan for the first time last night. I had always hesitated before. Not sure I'd enjoy it. Most recently in the late-nineties a friend of mine was invited to a Dylan concert by someone in his entourage. He described to me the uncanniness of watching from the wings huge crowds singing in unison while Dylan strummed "Blowing in the Wind" and "I Shall Be Released." But his last two albums have been great and it might be my last chance to see him.

Merle Haggard went on before Dylan with a fine band of country musicians. They played to a full raucaus hall. Hollering and booing through Okie From Muskogee, and cheering other standards.

Dylan played with with bass, drums, two guitarists, violin, and an other strings musician. Dylan pounded on a keyboard on the left. Their sound was like the early tours with the Band, with the violin from Desire. They played half the tracks of the last album, a song from each of the sixties electric albums. A great riff fest of a Highway 61 Revisited. They did one acoustic number, Ballad of Hollis Brown:

Way out in the wilderness
A cold coyote calls
Way out in the wilderness
A cold coyote calls

They came out for one encore and closed with a storming All Along the Watchtower. Dylan's voice drenched in echo, overdriven violin, and the guitar licks from Hendrix's version. Ears ringing, outside I wrote my address on a mailing list for ordering the bootleg from the gig.  ¶ 5:30 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Rokkitz has a nice entry on holzwege that reminds us that:

The way of thinking does not invite the thinker to arrive, only to think.

Read the whole thing.  ¶ 3:29 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

::::w i l l i n g t o n w o r l d:::: has the Starbucks interview with Jonah Goldberg, an editor at the National Review:

Many conservatives like to blame all of our modern ills on those horrible ideas that escaped German laboratories at the beginning of the 20th century and then mutated in French cafés. And while I think nihilism, moral relativism, existentialism, etc. have had serious consequences for society, it's impossible to deny that the automobile, birth control pill and the telephone have done more to unsettle traditional arrangements than anything Heidegger ever wrote or said. The problem is that it's easy to argue with Heidegger (or his writing); it's really hard to argue with a Buick.

That depends on how one's physical fortitude stacks up against one's mental acumen, but I wouldn't argue against a Chantico!  ¶ 3:25 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

State Street proposes a Metaphysics of Blogging:

Let's face it, a metaphysics of blogging has yet to be written. I would say a metaphysics of blogging has yet to be hazarded as a project. We must cull the philosophical literature of the past to find anything meaningful to say about blogging. We return to Heidegger's essays, "The Origin of a Work of Art", "The Question Concerning Technology", "What Calls for Thinking", and "The Way to Language", to ground our nascent metaphysical pronouncements and judgments about blogging. Would Heidegger have something to say about blogging if he was still alive? Sure he would.

I don't know about that. He didn't have much to say about TV, even though he enjoyed watching football on it.  ¶ 2:52 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

SpookyOptics replays an interview with Foucault:

Paradoxically enough, Heidegger is not very difficult for a Frenchman to understand. When every word is an enigma, you are in a not-too-bad position to understand Heidegger.

Or perhaps too easy to misunderstand--par example, Sartre.  ¶ 9:41 PM 0 comments

  Kewl stuff on eBay: HEIDEGGER Martin 10 pins/buttons/existential philosophy  ¶ 2:01 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Stray Reflections explains post-Fordist migration patterns:

This vision of what Hobsbawm describes as "the collapse of citizenship" has roots in post modernist philosophies - such as those of Foucault and Heidegger. Post modernism however preaches resignation not resistance (Post modernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism) - resignation to the ghastly reality of the violent, inhuman, corrupt society that is contemporary America.

Thus explaining the many denizens, and women, of late capitalism desperate to immigrate to peaceful, incorruptible, and humane Islamistan. The conflation of the religion of in-humanism with (logic of lame minds) marxism shows that all losers roll, resigned and frictionless, to the lowest point of contemporary blather where they commingle.  ¶ 7:25 AM 0 comments

  The Necronautical Society interviews Simon Critchley:

Heidegger's work is all about time: for him, time is the horizon of being, and time is facilitated by death - decay and death is what makes time possible. And there's an emphasis on travel - which is something that interests this organisation, the INS, as well. Heidegger has this expression Holzwege - and didn't he actually compose his work as he strode in manly fashion through these black German forests?
SC: So he would like us to believe.
TMcC: Is it not true, then?
SC: Oh, he walked a lot. He was a great walker.

Time for another walk, then. Forests are black here too. Leastways now, at night.  ¶ 9:41 PM 0 comments

  In this morning's Asia Times, Spengler points out what President Bush got wrong and Martin right:

US President George W Bush fell wide of the mark when he declared in his second Inaugural Address, 'We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul.' Human beings do not first of all wish to be free, but to be remembered, that is, to have lives that are significant. US democracy depends upon a religious foundation; the individual first must assume the yoke of responsibility (to God, country, family and so forth) in order to exercise freedom. In the vast majority of other instances human beings prefer a collective identity as a source of meaning; that was the message of the most prestigious of 20th-century philosophers, the abominable Martin Heidegger.

Yeti, the abominable seinman! And yet, that's too simplistic an interpretation. He did go through that Germano-romantic phase. All Geist and what have you. But later, even nationalism became just another notion that techno-modernism usurped to have more resources in reserve for future consumption.  ¶ 8:52 PM 0 comments

  An entry on toasted thinkers at Everything2 imagines that a hophead heidegger

tells everyone that they should stop thinking, and just enjoy and be in the moment and appreciate what is going on around them. Then he bogarts all the weed and later on rats everyone out to the cops.

Too I Heart Hashabees for me.

Culturally Heidegger is all Bavarian brew and no bhang, but there is an affinity between pharmaceuticals and his philosophy. For your consideration here's Tim Leary, the psychedelic poet,

To breathe in
You must first breathe out
Let go

To hold
You must first open your hand
Let go

To be warm
You must first be naked
Let go

That's just so

Ereignis
Enteignis
Gelassenheit

to me.  ¶ 9:24 PM 0 comments

  Ronald Aronson weighs in on the Camus quoting Bush I mentioned on Monday. Being an actual intellectual he recognizes the Camus quote is from The Fall, but then proceeds to lose the point in a display of over-knowing-ness:

Camus' character, while sounding resolute and tireless about pursuing freedom, making it seem daunting and thankless but the mark of a true human being, is really prattling on about freedom. He is intimidating people with it, using it for purposes of self-interest and does not at all believe in it. The grand-sounding phrase about freedom being a "long-distance race" is just another piece of flimflam.

But Bush is not a Euro-tellectual trying to shine in the shadow of Sartre's amour for Stalinism. He instead is the cowboy leading the free world in the fight against the barbarians on the frontier. He's a cowboy poet, who has the artist's license to pick and chose from the past as suits his message for today. Much like Dylan can pick a phrase from Baudelaire, a mood from Chekov, and a strophe from Anon. to make a something new for us.  ¶ 7:50 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Maverick Philosopher explains wisdom love:

Philosophy is not ideology. Philosophy aims at truth, not at ideas useful for the end of gaining and acquiring power.

Quiet in back, Nicolo!

We do not study Kant and Nietzsche and Heidegger to refute them or to agree with them, or to satisfy a need to have something to believe in, or a need to belong to a movement.

Certainly don't want to join a club that allows those characters in.

Philosophy is inquiry: an attempt at arriving at the sober impersonal truth to the extent that this is possible for such limited beings as we are.

Or a way the scratch that itch in your mind.  ¶ 5:53 AM 0 comments