Criterion has released Orson Welles's F for Fake on DVD with a bunch of bonus material on a second disk. This is one of the greatest documentaries of all time. The story of Elmyr de Hory, one of the greatest art forgers in history. Apparently "his" paintings are hanging in museum the world over. He was the subject of Clifford Irving first book. Irving then went on to fake Howard Hughes's autobiography. I watched this on VHS some years ago. It works as a straight documentary, but if you watch carefully, you realize Wells is also pulling some fakes on the viewer. Is de Hory really answering the questions put to him by the off-screen interviewer, or are we watching some clever splicing from Welles. And who's faking who? What is real art anyway? The canvas or the painter? The writer or the putative author? Where does the faking end and the film begin? If things were in this confused in 1975, what chance have we in telling what is true today, what with CGI, digital sampling, and photoshop?  ¶ 6:08 PM 1 comments

  RedNova News has an interesting article on Ten (Possible) Reasons for the Sadness of Thought, which ranges over many areas, including the rational versus the emotional, the contributions of diverse thinkers, and the different ways to thinking supported by different languages:

The 'prime numbers' which thought addresses are constants, circumscribing our humanity. They are or ought to be supremely obvious. What is it 'to be' and is it not, as Heidegger urges, the essential task of thought 'to think (about) being'? To discriminate between multiple phenomenal existentiality and the facticity of things on the one hand and the concealed core of the essence of being (Seyn) itself. Why is there not nothing-Leibniz's resounding challenge-should be the concern of thought-acts as primordial, as original, i.e. arising out of our origins, as is human life itself. Can we, contra Parmenides, think, conceptualize nothingness? It may be that every attempt to 'think death'-a lamentably awkward phrasing in English-to think consequently about death, is a variant on this enigma of nullity.

Overall I'm not convinced that thinking is inevitably sad, but melancholy does lie along the path of existential thinking.  ¶ 1:49 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

GedankenTravelExperiment, sadly, in a post on how much brighter the English are than those foreign French people, gets things backwards:

In contrast take analytic Anglo-American philosophy. The hero for us is Frege. Frege started philosophy of language, modern logic, philosophy of mathematics, then philosophy of mind. Frege was also a proto-Nazi. He was a virulent anti-Semite, and anti-Catholic. That is all clear. We know this because he left over a diary where he wrote some real bizarre things (only recently translated to English by someone I know). Is what he said defensible? I am sure with the right twists of logic (which would be real ironic) you can construe him as not evil. But for analytic philosophers, that is hardly the point. Maybe he was a bad guy, maybe he wasn't. Who cares? A philosopher is supposed to really be above that.

That sounds very noble of those Anglo-Americans: it's the philosophy, not the man. Sadly though, most criticism of Heidegger's way of thinking from the analytical rank-and-file is: he's a Nazi, nothing to think, move along please.  ¶ 6:40 AM 0 comments

  The story Violet Hair A Heideggerean Tragedy in William F. Vollmann's The Rainbow Stories, end with a glossary.

A HEIDEGGERIAN GLOSSARY
Authenticity - Living rightly and appropriately. The Holy Ghost sees authenticity as fulfillment, whereas Catherine sees it as responsibility.
Being-towards-death - The orientation of Dasein towards its own finitude in time.
Dasein - Literally, "Being-there." The human subject (you and me), defined in terms of its finitude, temporality, and thrownness into the World.
Das Man - The "They." As a fish must swim through water, so Dasein must swim through the "They," the ontic neighbors who tranquilize Dasein with idle talk on the porch on long summer evenings while Dasein drinks too much and forgets that it is primordially guilty and must die.
Deficient - A shabby mock-up of what you should be doing.
Factic - A fancy way for saying "factual"; or (factically) "in fact."
Hiddenness - The natural state of an entity. Dasein must wrest (Heidegger's word) things from their hiddenness in order to make them disclose themselves to Dasein's understanding.
Horizon - The limiting compass of knowledge and vision.
Leaping-in-ahead - The authentic way of caring for someone. Showing a possibility, example or method which the other person can act upon. An example would be encouraging the other to become a martyr.
Leaping-in-for - The deficient version, in which the Dasein who cares appropriates the other person's way of Being. An example would be torturing the other to death to force her to be a martyr.
Ontic - Particular, specific, random. In Being and Time this adjective seems on occasion to be contemptuous.
Ontological - Universally inherent, which I sometimes interpret (as Heidegger would not) to mean divine.
Potentiality-for-Being - The various exits on the Dasein Freeway. You can put the cruise control on and just continue on, faktisch and praktisch, or else you can turn off at the Existential Hotel, the Existentiell Motel, or any of a variety of seedy ontic resorts, or end up on Deficient Drive, or you can despair becoming authentic and project your potentiality-for-Being into space when you drive over a cliff' and see the cold grey ocean coming up at you in your last towards-which...
Present-at-hand - The ontological state of an entity which merely is, without being for anything. An example would be the dead body that was once a Dasein.
Ready-to-hand - The ontological state of an entity which exists in relation to Dasein. An example would be a Mexican stiletto which Beelzebub is about to use.
Relatedness - One of Dasein's most integral characteristics. Dasein does not exist as an isolated quantity, but as an entity in relation to the constellation of ontic flotsam and jetsam in the World.
Thrownness - The condition of finding oneself in a pre-existing ontic situation, the random elements of which (culture, topography, etc.) one has no control over.
Towards-Which - The goal or direction for which something is ready-to-hand.
The World - The external Being and possibilities that Dasein encounters in its relatedness. I once read that the earth is so rich in roundworms that if everything else were taken away they could still form a ghostly outline of every mountain and steeple and skull. It is something like this roundworm- portrait which Heidegger attempts to draw, subtracting every particularity to see what is left.

Well, since authenticity left me,
I found factic place to dwell.
It’s down at the end of ontic street
Existential hotel.

You make me leap-in-for baby
I'm leaping-in-for
So leaping-in-for I could die.  ¶ 9:46 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

The Taste Land has an appreciation of B&T that starts with:

Reading Heidegger is like trying to learn to ride a bike in the thickest of San Francisco fogs during an earthquake measuring 8.2 on the Richter scale.

SF fog's not that bad, nothing like driving through pea-soup on Piedmont's winding mountain roads, barely able to see the tail light of the truck a meter ahead of you. SF fog's annoying though. I got sick of coming home, drawing the curtains and seeing naught but fog, so I moved to the Mission district. 8.2? Bah! Easy if your county enforces its building codes and you're quick enough to sip enough of your martini so it won't slosh over the edge. Sipping is the trick with Martin too.  ¶ 8:20 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

mAggotty sTew from the bottom of a vOid, the blog, has been reading Gunter Grass's Dog Years:

I've nearly finished Dog Years after just two or three days. It's fantastic. But I am a bit perplexed about his treatment of Heidegger. I find the re-renditions of Heidegger's language quite amusing (rat-being, rattiness, dog-transcendence, &c. There are hundreds of little Heideggerian neologisms here), but they hardly constitute serious criticisms of Heidegger - plenty of literate illiterates, to borrow a phrase out of Grass, will go on reading books that are beyond them without ever realizing how completely they have missed the point. However, when Matern goes about with a list of names and revenge in his heart (the scene with the confessor is my favorite of these, so far), one of the people he seeks out is the same philosopher, whom he had taken to misquoting (and misunderstanding) during the dog years. He and his friends eventually use the language that they have thus invented to disguise to themselves the nature of the pile of bones on the other side of a barbed-wire fence.

Naturally, the philosopher is at his famously favorite hobby - skiing. Matern, grinding his teeth, seeks him everywhere, and finally settles for simply taking "Stockingcap's" iron gate off of its hinges and throwing it into the garden. Amidst a string of provocations aimed at the windows of Heidegger's cute little house is an accusation in the form of a question: with what rope did you strangle Husserl. Husserl is mentioned elsewhere, too, in the context of having been betrayed. He himself, apparently, felt that his student, then a rising star, had taken his thought in the wrong direction, misused it.

So, I’ll be reading more Husserl, more Heidegger. I’ll probably never understand this stuff at all, but it’s good exercise.

That's what I tell the critters about some of the stuff their teachers makes them learn.

You may gather from these comments that I suspect Grass of having taken sides in the Heidegger-Husserl argument for political-historical reasons. Well, I’m a pessimist. And all I have here is a book of fiction and a foggy memory of having once thought that I was reading philosophy as if it were a huge chess game, with intricate, scintillating pieces: meaning checks time, time to E5 takes language, Phenomenology to D76, taking genealogy, mate, next game.

I've read interviews with Grass over many years and he comes across as pretty vituperative towards those he disagrees with, while being irreproachable himself.  ¶ 5:59 AM 0 comments

  William F. Vollmann's first collection of short stories, The Rainbow Stories, has a piece titled: Violet Hair A Heideggerean Tragedy. It's filled with Heideggerean jargon, and divided into short titled paragraphs.

How to Study Heidegger
Catherine lay on her bed, ankles crossed, white arms behind her head, and her long hair hanging down. She seemed imprisoned in some summer reverie about whether sunlight is essentially present-at-hand because it is there in itself or whether it is ready-to-hand* because Catherine discovered it and felt it on her through the window and related it to her on her bedspread; and meanwhile the morning and the afternoon passed in such pleasure that the sunlight itself, the proximal cause of Catherine's pleasure, became subordinated to that pleasure, because Catherine had been existentially thrown into the sunlight and could take it for granted, so that for her it became present-at-hand simply by creating the climate for her to have this idle argument with herself; so the poor sunlight lost out. And Catherine's summer mornings rushed into those summer afternoons, rushing, rushing into the violet as the earth turned away from the sun. "The organization is there," said Catherine to herself, "but it's not something you want to schematize."

* "Anyone may dream in the sunlight which is so ready-to-hand," says Heidegger (H.71).

What Heidegger Said
"There's this quote from Heidegger: 'You are what you do,'" said Catherine the next morning, "although I don't think he wants to talk about explicit intentions."

What the Great Soviet Encyclopedia Said
"As a whole, Heidegger's irrational philosophy is one of the acute manifestations of the crises of modern bourgeois social consciousness."

Wholly and acutely, Soviet consciousness manifests no longer. Unlike the modern bourgeois, which still hang around. Like the narrator, who is hoping to rekindle something with Catherine. Something like they once had together up in Berkeley, but now she just sits around watching TV and reading Heidegger, and ignoring him, the narrator. Probably because he doesn't make his intentions explicit.  ¶ 8:02 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

MelbournePhilosopher graces us with an entertaining anti-Martin rant from which I nick this bit:

Let me first cast aspersion at his 'nounification'. Nounification is the very which describes 'taking a verb and using it as a noun'. The fact that the word nounification is the result of verbification only adds to ironic(al) beauty. Now, because I'm such a clever marketer, I will not deign to give an example. Giving an example would be sinking to his level, and if I try that he'll beat me with experience.

Because it took me a while to track this down, I'll mention it here for the web indexers. Nounification, or a nounified verb, is more formally known as a gerund. The opposite of a gerund is a denominative (AKA verbification). Are you taking this down search engines?  ¶ 6:50 AM 0 comments

  Victor Farias is back in the news with a new book on Salvador Allende. Farias was student of Heidegger for a while, and later wrote the most well known anti-Heidegger tome.

[T]he philosopher -- who's been teaching at the Latin America Institute at Berlin's Free University since 1974 -- has caused quite a stir. It isn't the first time he's done so: Farias has a track record of raising controversial issues. In his book "Heidegger und Nationalisozialismus" (Heidegger and National Socialism), Farias uncovered embarrassing and previously unknown information on the most German of the German philosophers, Martin Heidegger.

It is a matter of debate whether Farias uncovered unknown information (ob.cit. Ott), but the information in his book was a revelation to many scholars.

Allende was the socalist president of Chile, killed during Pinochet's coup in 1973. Today he's a hero of leftists everywhere. Farias has uncovered evidence that Allende supported fascism in his younger days, shielded Nazi war criminals, and was an anti-semite--the proof is in Allende's doctoral dissertation.  ¶ 8:51 PM 0 comments

  Tempest in a demitasse

This French website, Paroles des Jours, is up in arms over an interview with Emmanuel Faye in a French literary magazine. In the interview Ms. Faye says nasty things about Mr. Heidegger. The site has also been sending an email around the philo-webo-sphere with the follwing terse message:

French philosophers fight back!
Determined to oppose the slanderous campaign which followed the publication of the outrageous essay by Emmanuel Faye (insinuating Martin Heidegger to have inspired Hitler and Heydrich), some of the most eminent french philosophers, translators and experts of Heidegger's works and thought, answer online in a special project put out on the website dedicated to litterature and philosophy entitled "Paroles des Jours".

With my limited French, as far as I can tell, beyond the spurious claim that Heidegger inspired Hitler, Ms. Faye's accusations and supporting evidence are a rehash of the same documents, etc., already familiar to students of L'affaire Heidegger. They sure have a lot on content on that site: editorials, letters to the editor, interviews, video. It is the most passionate web gathering of philosophers since the New York Times' nasty obituary for Derrida.  ¶ 7:49 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

In Medias Res on Ricoeur and the personal beyng:

Heidegger (in whose footsteps all these thinkers tread, more or less) insisted that the fullest expression of that which is manifest through attendance to the conditions of our own existence as subjects is simply that "being speaks." For Ricoeur (in whose writings one could always discern the glimmer of old Marxist hopes), that wasn't enough: it had to be a matter that "being can still speak to me." That is, we can be modern believers and meaningful actors simultaneously; the modern, critical self can still engage the foundations of the world without eschewing that very modernity which allows us to think about the symbols of that foundation as symbols themselves.

  ¶ 6:58 AM 1 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Philosophy, et cetera, the blog, passes along word that someone is commisioning essays on Metallica and Philosophy; e.g.:

Heidegger's Being-toward-death--"Fade to Black" and "The Four Horsemen"

I can imagine a limited market for titles like The Simpsons and Philosophy (I read some of the essays in that one and feel that the connections are too tenuous and gimmicky to satisfy fans of either), and perhaps the genre can be stretched to something music related like The Jouissance in Joy Division, but a metal band?  ¶ 11:06 PM 0 comments

  The Modern Word interviews professor John D. Caputo (hat tip wood s lot). The whole interview is worth reading and a chunk of it is on Caputo's opinion of Heidegger. Here's a taste:

At a certain point, after many years of studying Heidegger quite faithfully -- I even wrote to him, once -- I just could not stand this stuff any longer and I decided to lay out my case. So I am kind of Heideggerian apostate and that is how the acolytes treat me. But do not misunderstand me. I do not want to lynch Heidegger, or dismiss him. I was myself in the beginning -- this was my first "research program" as they call it in academicese -- deeply interested in the convergence between what he called "thinking" (and the thinking that "called" him, as he said in a well known book called in English What is Called Thinking?) and the late medieval mystical tradition whose peak I myself would locate in Meister Eckhart, in whom the young Heidegger had a serious interest. Heidegger made many important breakthroughs about poetry, metaphysics and technology, and he opens the space within which continental philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century takes place. Those who want to simply jettison him go too far. But he has a dark side; he is a spell binder, with an unhealthy oracular voice, telling a too simple and highly elitist and Romanticized story, and he has a tendency to produce not thought but epigones who simply incant what he says, who divide the world up into those who are inside and those who are outside their little esoteric world, and who translate his books into no known language, certainly not English.

Enowning knowing: heh.

A quick sampling of the texts that reference Heidegger indicates there's much evidence to support Caputo's contention. Heidegger's way of writing has opened his thinking to interpretation by many who get him just plain wrong--Caveat romantic. And I'm certainly of the opinion that that he gets much wrong when he himself moves from ontology and applies his insights to art, society, and much else--yet he still has valuable insights. But if you sweep the spellbinding unhealthiness aside, put on the protective gloves, pick his key thinking on ontology up with antiseptic forceps and hold them under bright lights to shoo away the dark side, then there much original thinking that turns the last 25 centuries of Western Philosophy inside out and reveals matters that have been hidden from the familiar dead-ends philosophy has gone down, and also suggests rewarding new ways of thinking.  ¶ 9:05 AM 7 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Another nice explanation from Chris Kearns, with Eastern resonance:

The groundlessness of our existence is an insight the West has been having at least since Nietzsche -- and perhaps since Heraclitus. Heidegger (who drew on Heraclitus and all the early Greek thinkers), for example, insisted that the human way of life is endlessly interpretive, there is no ground other than our ability to posit a ground for ourselves. Standing up for oneself in a concrete way meant and means something like saying to oneself: "I understand myself as the one who can take my stand just here -- here instead of somewhere else."

The lesson Heidegger finds in early Greek thinking involves the intimate relationship of presence and absence (Freud's fort/da). When reading the Anaximander Fragment, bits of text preserved from the teaching of this pre-Socratic Greek thinker, Heidegger notes: "What is for the time being present, what presently is, comes to presence out of absence. This must be said precisely of whatever is truly present, although our usual way of representing things would like to exclude from what is present all absence" (Early Greek Thinking, 37).

Trying to think through the braid or weave of presence and absence can leave Heidegger�s text sounding like a loose string of Zen koans. Writing of the Anaximander Fragment, Heidegger says: 'The auta refers to what is named in the previous clause. The antecedent can only be ta onta, the totality of what is present, whatever is present in unconcealment, whether or not at the present time. . . . The auta refers to everything present, everything that presences by lingering a while: gods and men, temples and cities, sea and land, eagle and snake, tree and shrub, wind and light, stone and sand, day and night' (Early Greek Thinking, p.40).

The point seems to be that when we behold beings, to onta, we do not find things rooted in persistence over and through time (Bergson makes a similar point when he says we should think of identity in terms of time – meaning change – rather than in terms of being). Rather than defining itself by means of persistence through being, the totality of what is present also includes both what is absent and the inevitable passing away of what is present. In Heidegger's rendering of the fragment, presencing is always presencing awhile. If we contrast this with Plato's hunger for the eternal and unchanging, we can begin to see the scope of Heidegger's challenge to Western thought and the groundless ground (in Western terms, the tragic insight – that life always includes death, that we are inescapably mortal and that all things are already passing away, slipping beyond our grasp) on which his way of thinking is compatible with Zen.

  ¶ 7:11 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Tabula Rasa I, who according to his blurb has been a Catholic, an athiest, an evangelical Presbyterian, and again an athiest (around the theological block, as it were), expands on further religious analogies:

Heideggerian existentialism is essentially a monism. The contingency of being is set before us for consideration since we alone can reflect on this situation as Dasein--being reflecting on itself. There is no Creator God, or he is merely conspicuously absent (Deus absconditus). This is the same thesis proposed by the Gnostics and by the non-dual cosmology inherent in eastern tantric practice, such as Dzogchen.

I don't know about the connection with the Gnostics, but the presence of things in the Lichtung resonates with aspects of Dzogchen, a practice (path/weg) of Tibetan Buddhism.  ¶ 11:30 AM 0 comments

  Memory, history, keeping up appearances: Ricoeur kicks the bouquet.  ¶ 9:30 PM 1 comments

  House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, is a book about a book. The book by Zampanò is about a documentary called The Navidson Record about a haunted house. After Zampanò's death the manuscript fell into the hands of Johnny Truant, a happy-go-lucky party guy and employee at a Hollywood tattoo parlour, who's been getting spooked and adding footnotes to the manuscript.

Near the beginning of chapter IV Zampanò wrote

    What took place amounts to a strange spatial violation which has already been described in a number of ways--namely surprising, unsettling, disturbing but most of all uncanny. In German the word for 'uncanny' is 'unheimlich' which Heidegger in his book Sein und Zeit thought worthy of some consideration.

[paragraph from pages 250-251 of Klostermann Sein und Zeit]

    Nevertheless regardless of how extensive his analysis is here, Heidegger still fails to point out that unheimlich when used as an adverb means "dreadfully," "awfully," "heaps of," and "an awful lot of." Largeness has always been a condition of the weird and unsafe; it is overwhelming, too much or too big. Thus that which is uncanny or unheimlich is neither homey nor protective, nor comforting nor familiar. It is alien, exposed, and unsettling, or in other words, the perfect desciption of the house on Ash Tree Lane.

In a footnote to the passage from Sein und Zeit Johnny writes:

And here's the English, thanks to JohnMacquarrie and Edward Robinsons' translation of Heidegger's Being and Time, Harper & Row 1962, page. A real bitch to find:

[paragraph from pages 233 of Being and Time]

Which only goes to prove the existence of crack back in the early twentieth century. Certainly this geezer must of gotten hung up on a pretty wicked rock habit to start spouting such nonsense. Crazier still, I've just now been wondering if something about this passage may have acutally affected me, which I know doesn't exactly follow, especially since that would imply something in it really does make sense, and I just got finished calling it non-sense.
    I don't know.
    The point is, when I copied down the German a week ago, I was fine. Then last night I found the translation and this morning, when I went into work, I didn't feel at all myself. It's probably just a coincidence--I mean that there's some kind of connection between my state of mind and The Navidson Record or even a few arcane sentences on existence penned by a former Nazi tweaking on who knows what. More than likely, it's something entirely else, the real root lying in my already strange mood fluctuations, though I guess those are pretty recent too, rocking back and forth between wishful thinking and some private agony until the bar breaks. I've no f*cking clue.
    das Nicht-zuhause-sein
    [not-being-at-home.]
    That part's definately true.

Yeah. Ever since I typed that bit into the blog, the angles on the display seem wrong, like the resolution's changing disproportionately, more room inside the display than the frame should allow, and there's a dull thumping, like distant drums, and between the lightning and the progressively shorter intervals to the following thunder, sounds like cries, strange words, like they're calling for Yog-Sothoth.

Starting from the mockumentary and with the book's footnotes to Bachelard and Lacan, plus invented studies of the movie, crossings-out, and fake insights from Derrida, Camille Paglia and Harold Bloom, the novel is like a pomo Blair Witch. And very good it is too. I interrupted Stephenson's Quicksilver to devour this one.

Here's a page with lots of links to studies of the uncanny.  ¶ 2:24 PM 0 comments

  Ork! Ork!

One possible reason Mary Kay LeTourneau loves Vili Fualaau:

Was instantly attracted to his original insights regarding Heidegger's "Being and Time"

  ¶ 8:19 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Bauen quotes from What is Called Thinking? on The Eternal Return of the Same and concludes that:

Modern technology, modern economics, and modern politics sure seem cyclical. There seem to be technological possibilities of newness, but economics and politics seem to be going nowhere and seem to shut down technological possibilities.

Technology can measure its progress on its own terms, as can the hard sciences. Economics and politics as social sciences have a harder time claiming to progress, and perhaps, like philosophy, can only claim progress with ontological change.  ¶ 9:04 PM 0 comments

  Wozu Dichter?

A Conversation with Martin Heidegger

Later, retired to the mountains in peasant garb,
in the hut Hölderlin said defines man, the maker
of huts, could you find no words in the woods
for the dirt in the blood of your days?

Too late for you or them, too soon for us.

Van K. Brock  ¶ 7:41 PM 0 comments

  Norman Mailer bloviates on Sartre and God in yesterday's The Nation:

I would say that Sartre, despite his incontestable strengths of mind, talent and character, is still the man who derailed existentialism, sent it right off the track. In part, this may have been because he gave too wide a berth to Heidegger's thought. Heidegger spent his working life laboring mightily in the crack of philosophy's buttocks, right there in the cleft between Being and Becoming. I would go so far as to suggest Heidegger was searching for a viable connection between the human and the divine that would not inflame too irreparably the reigning post-Hitler German mandarins who were in no rush to forgive his past and would hardly encourage his tropism toward the nonrational.

Let's face it, too many have contested Sartre's character for it to be a given. He certainly derailed existentialism because he also, err, set it on its rail tracks through his novels, plays, and generally being the archetypical intellectual about the left-bank cafe. As a cultural phenomenon existentialism incontestably owes more to him than anyone else. He started existentialism, and he abandoned it, but it barely had anything to do with Heidegger, apart from some superficial borrowings of Sartre's.

Today, with this stuff, it's hard to imagine that Mailer was once a voice-of-his-generation. Still, the image of Heidegger as a Crumbian Snoid is probably the most entertaining thing in the morally-superior-to-thou Nation in ages.  ¶ 6:28 AM 0 comments

  FrontPage reviews Deconstructing Post-Modernism by Gary Jason:

He discusses Heidegger in some detail, appropriately, given that Derrida and Foucault describe themselves as followers of Heidegger. Heidegger grounded his philosophy in phenomenology, the close examination of the given field of immediate experience. He came to the view that logic and reason are impotent in answering ultimate metaphysical questions, leaving dark emotions such as boredom, guilt, and dread as the only tools, and reaching a metaphysical nihilism in which pure Being and pure Nothing are one and the same. Heidegger thus provides the postmodernists with some of their core beliefs: that reason and logic are subjective and metaphysically sterile; that words and concepts are obstacles to be destroyed or unmasked; that feelings are a more reliable tool than logic and scientific method; and that the Western philosophic tradition (based upon the law of non-contradiction and the subject-object distinction) is something that needs to be overcome.

There is so much misunderstood in the above it's hard to know where to begin. One of the key continuities in Heidegger's thinking is the overcoming of metaphysical thinking, but the way the term metaphysics is tossed about in the review, that's no help. He was trying to overcome the Cartesian subject-object distinction, which most philsophers had already found troublesome. He wasn't against the law of non-contradiction, or other logical tools, but he did point out their limited usefulness in resolving philosophical questions, a conclusion on which there is broad consensus today. At no point does he say that feelings are more reliable tools than logic or the scientific method, instead he said that moods give us insight into philsophical dilemmas, about which logical and scientific tools are silent. The notion that post-modernists have core "beliefs" is an interesting proposition, and probably reveals more about the writer's beliefs than about postmodernism--about which there's much to criticize, mind you, mainly because the field is so broad, there probably a postmodernist that has made whatever statement or taken a position a critic wants to attack. It's easier to define postmodernism by what it's not, than by what it specifically is. Sure Heidegger is popular with many postmodernists, but then everyone would like the big tamales of philsopaphy on their side. Wittegenstein and Nietzsche get a similar treatments, with many claiming to be their descendents.

The question arises, then, how can a philosophic trend so rooted (or mired) in the Continental tradition of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger come to be so attractive to the American academy — indeed, apparently now more the stronghold of postmodernism than Europe, its birthplace — given the Anglo-American tradition of Enlightenment empiricism? Hicks rightly puts the focus on the collapse of the logical empiricist project.

It's all their fault then. That's a relief.  ¶ 11:20 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Gathering the Fourfold is a new blog that will explore the world of sports and Heidegger, based on an idea from Julian Young.

Heidegger claimed that in a technological society, these fourfold roots become lost, and human beings lose their conception of what it is to dwell in a place. Young, following Heidegger, evaluates sports as to how well they can reunite the fourfold, drawing much on the fact that contemporary sports events take place outside in large stadiums--earth and sky. Mortals are the audience, the gods are things like the elements and the power of chance (dionysius), and the players are mediators between the mortals and the gods. Something like a home run, for example, unifies the fourfold, because you have the audience watching the player hit the ball, making it leave the earth and go into the sky.

Sounds like an excuse to me, "Can't do the dishes, dear. I'm working on a new paper." Just like today I'll be at the cinema, working on "Sith und Zeit" (forthcoming); all about about the swaying of ready-to-hand light sabres as a tool towards the presence-at-hand of the force.

Speaking of tenuous connections to entertainment: did you know Sein und Zeit was an episode of the X-Files?  ¶ 6:42 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Updates on the life of our heroic Mr. Fish thinks that whether by nuclear apocalypse or passive adoption of technology we're, ontologically, doomed:

Heidegger apparently thought along these lines: it is possible that after a nuclear war, life might once again emerge, but it is far less likely that there will ever again occur an ontological clearing though which such life could manifest itself. Further, since modernity's one-dimensional disclosure of entities virtually denies them any "being" at all, the loss of humanity's openness for being is already occurring.

  ¶ 7:37 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Catholic Blogic on too much Heidegger in Rahner's thesis.

In 1936 Karl Rahner's doctoral thesis was failed. There is much disagreement as to why. The accusation in the past was that Martin Honecker his doktorvater was a neo-scholastic who didn't like Rahner's interpretation of St Thomas and thought it was too influenced by Heidegger, whose seminar Rahner attended whilst a student of Honecker.

Today you can buy that thesis.  ¶ 8:50 PM 0 comments

  From Iris Murdoch last novel Jackson's Dilemma.

He left the drawing room and went to his study. There on
the desk was his book about Heidegger, open at the page where he had left it such a little while ago. Benet perused the page which he had written.

Heidegger's central concept of truth or unconcealment should be understood by tracing it back to the Pre-Socratics, and to Homer, as he explains in an essay, originally a 1943 lecture, 'Wonder first begins with the question, "What does all this mean and how could it happen?" How can we arrive at such a beginning?' Heidegger quotes Heraclitus Fr. 16, 'How can one hide from that which never sets?' What is this hiding and from what? He then quotes Clement of Alexandria who adapts Heraclitus as meaning that one (the sinner) may hide from the light perceived by the senses, but cannot hide from the spiritual light of God. Well, though we may readily understand him in that sense, the Greek was not thinking about anything like a christian deity. Heraclitus, according to Heidegger, is not thinking of anything 'spiritual' or 'moral', but of something far more fundamental in the dawn of human consciousness. Heidegger here, as elsewhere in his writings, suggests a significant connection between aletheia (truth) and lanthano (I am concealed, or escape notice, doing or being something) and lethe forgetfulness or oblivion. He then engagingly quotes Homer, The Odyssey VII 83 ff. (It is always a relief to get away into Homer.) Odysseus, after his meeting with Nausicaa, now incognito in her father's palace, hears the minstrel singing about the Trojan War, from which Odysseus is now making his laborious way home. Verse 93. 'Then unnoticed by all the others he shed tears.' Literally, he escaped notice shedding tears. Heidegger points out that elanthané does not mean the transitive 'he concealed', but means 'he remained concealed' shedding tears. 'Odysseus has pulled his cloak over his head because he is ashamed to let the Phaeacians.' But doesn't this quite clearly mean the same as: he hid himself before the Phaeacians out of a sense of shame? Or we must also think 'shying away', aidos, from remaining concealed, granted that we are striving to get closer to its essence as the Greeks experienced it? Then 'to shy away' would mean to withdraw and remain concealed in reluctance or restraint 'keeping to oneself'. Of course this is an example of the persuasive movement of Heidegger's laborious argument when he wishes to read one of his concepts (in this case aletheia, 'though as' unconcealment) into the minds of the early Greeks!

Benet paused, well what does it all mean, he thought, and why on earth do I go on with it? Am I losing my German? Could one forgive Heidegger or be interested in him just because he loved the Greeks? Benet loved the Greeks. But did he understand them, was he a Greek scholar? No, he was just a curious reader romantic psuedo-historian. He would really spend his time reading Hölderlin than Heidegger.

The lecture on the Heraclitus fragment is published as Aletheia.

This novel strikes me as an anti-"Remains of the Day", the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. There, a simple butler, Stevens, reminisces about his life serving the gentry, and the reader slowly grows aware of how disconnected in many ways Stevens is from the world around him. Unaware of the emotional bonds others have to him, and of his employer's involvement in the gathering storm of WWII. On the other hand, in Murdoch's novel, the butler, Jackson, appears to be the only grounded character. The rest of the characters, whom Jackson attends to, come across as frivolous. Especially Benet who has spent years worrying through his book. They are idly rich, none of them have jobs or the preocupations of ordinary people, and disconnected from the world.  ¶ 7:49 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Stew-Meat for Cerberus materializes Dasein's essence:

Since being-in-the-world is therefore always already a condition of Dasein when she attempts self-scrutiny, it does not require a huge leap in logic to claim that Dasein's essence, insofar as it's discoverable, is materially determined. As an inevitable consequence, moreover, any condition of existence that is independent of, or that precedes, dialectical materialism will always remain precognitive. In other words, the gate to the kingdom of noumena is forever shut to Dasein because to gain entry would involve extracting herself from being-in-the-world (to which she is inescapably bound) and, if she were able to do so, she would cease being Dasein, qualitatively speaking.

And there's many more logical leaps.  ¶ 8:49 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

A beautiful thought, the blog, makes the connection between the Letter on Humanism and Jean Genet.  ¶ 8:40 PM 0 comments

  Which Existentialist Philosopher Are You?

Dang. I wanted to be Christopher Walken or Harvey Keitel in an Abel Ferrara flick. Instead I ended up in university administration.  ¶ 6:04 PM 0 comments

  Ork! Ork!

Heidegger in the Bedroom  ¶ 6:50 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Just home from Sunday nihilisitic service with the local community college staff at the Temple of Dasein in the Four-Fold, to discover that Bog Blog is onto us.

Academic freedom in our universities was turned into a weapon to stifle academic freedom, just as Martin Heidegger — Hitler's first appointee as University President, and still an object of academic worship in America

That really annoyed the Freiberg faculty; after they elected Heidegger rector, Hitler, in a pique of one-up-mensh-ship, dropped everything, and promoted him to President.  ¶ 8:49 AM 0 comments

  A review of a new translation of Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption yearns for the author's notoriety:

And even if Rosenzweig still does not gain a space on every Jewish bookshelf, maybe he'll get his due in the academy as — earlier and more reliably than Heidegger — the true progenitor of postmodern ethics and metaphysics.

Good grief. Give him his due. Then Heidegger might be reduced to being interesting merely for his contributions to ontology.

Meanwhile Hannah and Martin has opened on both coasts.  ¶ 4:26 PM 0 comments

  Caught Diplo/M.I.A./LCD Soundsystems at the Showbox last night. Diplo played a selection of Dancehall hits ("Yeah, I got that record at home too!"), and then pushed the button on the DAT player for M.I.A. She sang with a partner for half and hour or so, and then she'd done all then songs on her album, and that was that. Diplo managed to throw in a sample of the meninos da favela off that hit from Rio, somewhere. At least there was no lip syncing. The girl's got charisma, great smile, got the crowd bouncing and waving their arms, a little risque ("Lolita suckin onna lollipop"), and easily fits into the Clash's urban-guerillas-you-can-bring-home-for-tea music consuming demographic (the opening DJ played the Rachid Taha Rock the Casbah cover). There's been plenty of new-face-of-world-beat-via-Ceylon hype about her, but she's as British as the next bloke, and so are her beats. I expect someone'll dig up a snap of her in public school uniform soon. But she is fresh. LCD had a great sound and energy, but came off a bit contrived (they are from NY) and art by the numbers--as in not-fresh, coming on after M.I.A. I didn't catch their whole set because I parked in the out-by-midnight lot. Midnight worked for my last Showbox gig, PJ Harvey, but she's a West Country girl and LCD are
from NY.  ¶ 7:15 AM 0 comments

  From Iris Murdoch last novel Jackson's Dilemma.

He shuffled into his study, he looked at Uncle Tom's bronze dancing Shiva Wildly waving his four arms inside a circle of fire. He looked down at the words he had written the day before yesterday. He sat down.

In attempting to make some sense of Heidegger's involvement with the Pre-Socratics one must keep in mind the metaphysical patterns which illustrate connections and identities and show the (apparently) Many as the One. The One (or the Same) is what it is about. The One has various faces or facets, the approach to it being a grouping (or as one might say bodyguard) of concepts with other names. Chrisitianity emphasises the One, but mediates it through the Three, others through the Two. Too much insistence on the One could, by seeming intolerable, generate a mass of sub-concepts and sub-entities. These of course can exist as saints, minor gods, unrelated virtues, and so on. The force that makes the One is (as often or not rightly) resisted. Heidegger wishes to show us the internal relations between the great Greek concepts, and in doing so to sustain and explain his doctrine of Being, which is supported by a similar inner concept ring.

What on earth does he mean, thought Benet, or what do I mean? I thought it would be an escape -- instead I am just involving myself in a dark spider's web, the web of his mind. And did dear good Célan, they say, visit him in his mountain hut -- and Hannah Arendt forgive him -- and he dare to take over great Hölderlin, as well as the Greeks? Alas, that awful darkness is there, but for me it is my darkness, it is my neighbour and my heavy chain. I am small and I do not understand. How I wish I had stayed in the light and devoted my life to poetry, not philosophy. I used to write poems when I was young, before I became bemused by that philosophy! And now it is all impossible. Only Tim could hold up a light for me in the dark. And the Greeks, the Greeks, even they are fading away.

What's it all about, eh? I often wonder when I come across an old post on this blog. What did I think I was trying to say, eh? Is it all about the grand unifying same Parmenidic One? Or the ever-changing Heraclitean cracks between things? About the different berries in the compote, or the clotted cream that gathers them together? In China Miéville's Perdido Street Station there's a multi-dimensional spider that goes around mending the tears in the fabric of reality. Has the world one reality? And is the dark web of Heidegger's mind it?  ¶ 7:30 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Dark Matter, has today's hot rumor, Hanna Arendt Story to Hit Cinemas in 2007:

Revolution Pictures has announced a "prestige" biography of philosopher Hanna Arendt (1906-1975). The story will focus on the 'turgid' love affair betweeen Arendt and fellow philosopher Martin Heidegger, the author of "Being in Time," in the era leading up to World War II.

The book was not "Being in Time", of course, but few know the true story of it's original title. Intended as a collection of tips to help his mentor arrive at his lectures punctually, the title of "Being on Time" was changed at the printers in one of those typesetting errors that changes the course of history. Confused by its turgid prose, no career savvy philosopher would fess up to "not getting it", but would in turn recommend it to her hapless students. Which is why we are here today, in the lecture hall, wondering why the professor's not on time.  ¶ 6:44 AM 0 comments

  Ork! Ork!

I've begun to think that Elmo would have great difficulty with Heidegger. Personal pronouns just aren't his thing. And don't get me started on the corrupting influences of sponsors such as the letter H

  ¶ 6:20 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Spirit in Action is journaling his thoughts of the FourFold:

I believe the bridge and the FourFold is a metaphoric representation of how to use our 'bridge' to do away with separatism. Perhaps the sky represents one's mind and the Earth, the physical entity(body). Next is mortals reminding us of our finite structure,and the divinity concept represents that creative insight in us all that produces such things like art. So now we have a FourFold bridge that connects the possible ideals one can travel to within the depths of consciousness.

I suspect that ontological concepts may go deeper than consciousness.  ¶ 8:47 AM 0 comments

  Pitchfork interviews LCD Soundsystems' James Murphy who makes a point about dealing with the canon:

I remember taking a good class in English, with a good professor, and he said, 'I can't imagine being you.' What do you mean? He said, 'Well, I went to college in the 50s. You could count all the books you needed to read on two hands.' You read your Shakespeare, your Chaucer, read the moderns, maybe you read a couple Russians, couple French, couple translated Germans, you know. And by the time you were 20 you had a good sense of literature. And by the time you're 21 you can read contemporary, 22, contemporary, 23, contemporary, and you're riding the wave. Now, I'm 35, I'm an avid reader, I'm still reading backwards, still getting my groundwork to get on top of the wave. Still too many books come out every week to pay attention to. If the fat TV lady doesn't recommend it who knows if it's even gonna get sent to the book store.

The same thing goes for music. There's so much more work [involved] to pay attention to what's new. It becomes really hard for a band to have a good sense of its history. Doesn't mean that's bad. Just means, I don't know. I think there's a reason why good bands were 19 and 20 in the 70s, and in 1966, they were 17. And that's very hard right now. New bands that are very young, they're not as good, they're not as new. Because they inevitably sound like the Who or, you know, AC/DC. They sound like something else. And it's very hard for them to crawl out from that and do something unusual. Or they're forced to be like, quirky individuals. It's very hard to find your own thing right now. I mean actually it took me till I was 29, 30 years old, to have any sense that I was doing anything my own. Any sense at all. Maybe that's just me. Maybe I'm just a hack, but it just took a long, long time to swim my way out of history, swim my way out of indie rock. Swim my way out of everything. I don't really know what could possibly be the solution to it. There are just so many tripping points into ego, so many tripping points into compromise. I don't know how people do it. I don't know how bands do it. Everything feels very very compromised.

Partly this is a variation in the perennial rockist problem with authenticity. Can you be authentic if you're repeating something someone else already said? My feeling is that new generations discard and forget what isn't relevant any more. The LCD Soundsystem refernces sounds from The Fall, Brian Eno, New Order and many more. It's soaked in the rock canon, and I can see where James is coming from. But I don't think new artists are too concerned with first having to absorb everything that came before because they create from within their personal world. Listening to M.I.A. and the new Grime artists, I hear a lot of sampling from video games that were the sounds the new generation grew up with. I don't think they care whether their beats come from James Brown or P-Funk, or the bass sampled from Liquid Liquid or Chic, or similar issues that concern people like James. You have to let go of the past to be free to move forward.

It's fun for Fall fans like me to listen to LCD Soundsytem and be teased by the references. That was the charm of their first single"Losing My Edge" ("I was there in 1968, at the first Can show in Cologne"; "I heard you have a white label of every seminal Detroit Techo hit") but clearly kids today aren't listening to LCD Soundsystem, don't know who Can were, nor can they tell Detroit Techno from New York Garage. Nor should they be required to, to make authentic music. The teenage band up the street plays Led Zep and Who covers, badly. I think they're a bunch of fake posers and wish they'd create their own music from the sounds they've grown up with. Perhaps they have, and having hippie parents is their problem.  ¶ 4:53 PM 0 comments

  This article on Rosenzweig by the newly tenured Peter E. Gordon makes an important point regarding Levinas:

Levinas claims for ethics an infinitely expansive—indeed, foundational—position in philosophy. Levinas developed this position partly while wrenching himself free of Heidegger (whose writing upon explicitly “ethical” themes was sparse, thus prompting the scholarly opinion that Heidegger’s Nazism grew like a weed from this neglected terrain). For some readers, Levinas’s panethicist response to Heidegger grants Levinas the presumptive moral high ground. To argue against Levinas concerning the “primacy of ethics” places one in the unfortunate position of looking like an opponent of ethics. This is all the more the case if, like Derrida, one happens to have developed important aspects of one’s own philosophy upon the ruins of Heidegger’s “destruction of metaphysics.” Whatever Derrida’s intellectual and political integrity, the moral odds in this symbolic struggle are against him. Unlike Heidegger, Derrida does not claim that the existential horizon which allows for objects to be—ontology—is without qualification “prior” to ethics. But there is a reason for this. Unlike both Levinas and Heidegger, Derrida prefers to stir up the linguistic waters that permit us to make clear priority assertions of any kind. Derrida’s goal in troubling these waters is a serious one, arising from his belief that all priority-talk must appeal to a spuriously metaphysical trust in pres-ence—that is, our access to timeless and nonlinguistic Ideas.

I've always felt that reading much moral philosophy. There's that attempt to be the holier-than-thou king of the hill. That's also a problem with the demand that philosophers write an "ethics" after they've made some changes in the foundations. Perhaps the best thinkers about the foundations are not the best suited for formulating ethics, or passing moral judgement. Simarly, you wouldn't ask the best cement chemist to design your living room.  ¶ 4:22 PM 2 comments

  Scientist are boycotting the Creationist circus in Kansas:

Scientists said they don't see the need to cram their arguments into a few days of testimony, like out-of-state witnesses who were called by advocates of the 'intelligent design' theory.
But the boycott has frustrated board members who viewed their hearings as an educational forum.
"I am profoundly disappointed that they've chosen to present their case in the shadows," board member Connie Morris said. "I would have enjoyed hearing what they have to say in a professional, ethical manner."

Science isn't there for entertaining politicians and its ethics is about the correspondence evidence to theories, not about pandering to politicians (apparently no scientific funding is involved here).

Still I wonder if scientists are taking the wrong approach here. Perhaps they should go along, and make Kansans live with the consequences of the politicians they elect. I mean, clearly, if there is a creator, then only Satan would create politicians, and they should teach children that. They could call it Stupid Design Theory. Only Satan would create stupid people, why would God do so? Survival of the fittest, my hinny! If that were the case, then how would the theory of evolution explain the Kansas Board of Education, eh?  ¶ 6:56 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

We are in Science Fiction Now, the blog, asks after Five or Six Ways of seeing L'Affaire du Heidegger, via Gadamer, and Celan, and Baudrillard, amongest others.  ¶ 6:43 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Theory Reading Group finds Plato in the Preface to Being and Time:

I've been reading Heidegger's Preface to Being and Time, and it seems like he's just repeating Plato's Meno Paradox. Now, I'm trying to find the exact text of Meno, but it is eluding me. I know it's in Meno 80d-e, but I don't have that book here... But essentially it's that you can't ask questions of something without knowing something of what you're inquiring about before hand. However, since you already know the answer to your queston, (which you must in order to answer it) it's not really a question...

The Meno Paradox refers to Plato's notion that humans don't learn things, but instead remember what was forgotten at birth. We recognise horses because we remember the essential properties of horsiness.  ¶ 3:32 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Purse Lip Square Jaw calls Heidegger an essentialist:

I recall being told once: 'My work shares a lot of common questions with yours, Anne, but my use of Heidegger and phenomenology is more old skool than your use of Deleuze' and wondering if that is really true. I take for granted that being is related to time; that context and embodiment are crucial. But I oppose Heidegger's essentialism, partly because I believe that essentialism shares too much in common with fascism and unforgivably limits who we can be.

I read that claim before, but it's hard to square with the record. For example, Sartre believed that Heidegger's key contribution was to privilege existence over essence, and in his essay, Plato’s Doctrine of Truth, Heidegger is against the essentialism in Plato's theory of ideas.  ¶ 1:09 PM 7 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Withered Fields feels that Heidegger is all about relativism:

My problem with Heidegger is not that he is wrong, but that he can't be wrong. ... or right. In fact, my problem with Heidegger is not even with Heidegger, but with metaphysics in general. The terms 'right' and 'wrong' simply do not apply to metaphysical frameworks, they are terms that apply only within the accepted belief system.

My problem with Heidegger is not even with his statements. They are fine statements as far as poetry goes, and i like poetry. But poetry is neither right nor wrong, it is aesthetic. Heidegger is aesthetic at times, usually, though, he is just wordy.

Unlike many relativists today, Heidegger wrote that mathematical propositions could proven or disproven, and the scientific theories could be tested empirically. The issue is that Heidegger believed that humans have to make decisions about matters that cannot be reduced to fit within formal systems. Are all such matters poetic? Certainly not, they are mundane and common. Let's reserve poetry to describe those wordy texts that resonate for us.  ¶ 12:58 PM 0 comments

  A column in an Indiana paper explains the background of Ratzinger's criticizism of relativism:

Heidegger is the hinge on which modernism swings on its way into postmodernism. Postmodernism and its heterotopian sects are the current dogma (though we call it "critical theory") in Hegel's church. It is nothing if not morally relativistic. It is moral relativism at the speed of light. As a young student, I, as well as every single colleague my age, in the field of philosophy and in most of the humanities, was thoroughly schooled in it.

It's ironic that Hegel, a proponent of absolutes, is considered the founder of relativism. Certainly Heidegger, as a hermeneuticist, saw the need to interpret texts in the context in which they were written, but he certainly had his notions of what was correct and not. He certainly didn't believe that correctness is merely about your point of view or that all beliefs are equally valid.  ¶ 12:46 PM 0 comments

  I tried reading Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon, about a future world where people can die and be brought back to life:

[I]n Morgan's world the challenge of re-forming our being is clearer than in our own world. This is one of the values of fiction. Heidegger once spoke of death as the "end of possibility." Until death occurs for us, which in Morgan's world, given one's financial resources, is less of a possibility, our being is always open to a re-making.

But I just couldn't take more than a few pages of the prose. Here's an example from the second page, Mr. Hardboiled hands the missus a gun:

    "A little something with your phallic substitute, ma'am?"
    Sarah looked up from beneath the hanging sickle of black hair over her forehead. She was in the midst of pulling a pair of long woolen socks up over the sheen of her thighs.
    "Yours is the one with the long barrel, Tek."

I was in the midst of embarassing juvenalia and had to put it aside.

Then I picked up Perdido Street Station, and I am quite enjoying the alternate universe horror-steam-punk yarn.  ¶ 8:31 PM 0 comments

  Wozu Dichter?

Serge Gavronsky's Sprach ist Namen Scholem:

You're wrong
lady from Germany
Heidegger's Jew
you've wronged
a displacement
my language
via trains
Lisbon on a
German balcony
fires above graves
so recently dug
music and shovels

  ¶ 8:57 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

PRO2K'S BLOG's fantasizes about Logical Positivism:

Rudolf Carnap showed in his famous essay "Elimination of Metaphysics through a Logical Analysis of Language" that many metaphysical statements are the result of the abuse of language, and he showed Heidegger's "the Nothing itself nothings" [Das Nichts selbst nichtet] as an example of that.

Eliminating metaphysics? Why? It's been overcome. Number of Google hits for "Elimination of Metaphysics through a Logical Analysis of Language"? Zero. Could anything be anymore un-famous today?  ¶ 8:05 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Different Day on being Britpop:

[M]usicians have responded to Britpop's argument about national identity to posit a 'Britishness' which is less about reasserting a disappearing tradition than about looking to the future (in Heideggerian terms, more about Becoming British than about Being British - Heidegger, 1978). I am thinking here of Cornershop's Punjabi version of Norwegian Wood, The Verve's Bittersweet Symphony (with its loop of a fragment of a version of a Rolling Stones song), The Rootsman's dub version of the shipping forecast and the Big Beat genre of dance music.

I'm partial to sampling, mash-ups, and the bass riff from Chic's Good Times from here till the end of time, but how are these British songs indications that their British performers are becoming even more so? Especially as most of the music sampled is American (Big Beat), or reaching to be so (Stones).  ¶ 7:30 PM 0 comments

  The Beyng done it.

Bai Bai Enjeru launched the career of [Kiyoshi] Kasai's detective protagonist Kakeru Yabuki, who employs phenomenological speculation to solve his murder cases. His most ambitious Kakeru narrative so far is the 2,000-page novel The Philosopher's Locked Room, which concerns the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and the recent revelations of Heidegger's involvement in Nazism. When the interviewers visited his house in the summer of 1992, he had published the first 1,000 pages of this in serial form for EQ, the Japanese version of Ellery Queen's Magazine. But after finishing the serial, there was more to go and he wrote another 1,000 pages.

With bated breath, and whispring humblenesse: When's the translation?  ¶ 10:22 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Blog, the blog, in Vesper Bell Revised (referring to Heidegger on Trakl) is chaining signifiers from the bridge of the fourfold:

If we utilize the construction of space in the manner of Heidegger's bridge, then the existence of the property will bring meaning to its surroundings, eventually leading to a successive chain of signifiers unfolding toward the fourfold.
...
It is indicative that the surveyor translates the quantified abstraction of the property into a physical manifestation through precise mathematical measurements and calculations. Once the minimum number of points have been plotted and physically marked, only then can dwelling take place.

Man, used to live in a cave, now dwells on his tract [reading Trakl?]. I was thinking about this the other day, as the dearly beloved's teacher told the class that landscapers aren't surveyors. Yet they do impose order. Must investigate further.  ¶ 6:30 AM 0 comments

  Ork! Ork!

a priori blues

'What's the matter?', she said.
'Mysticism', I muttered.
'What's mysticism?', eyes wide.
'Matter...' I replied,
'...but mystified.', added I, misty-eyed.
Mystified, she sighed, 'What's matter?'
'Mysticism', said I, 'objectified.'
I'll have a dirty Martini, Heidegger, extra dry.

  ¶ 8:56 PM 2 comments

  In-der-Blog-Sein

Twentieth Century Philosophy is reading about the oneness of the fourfold:

The bridge provides a physical place to dwell, to hang out, it is an authentic place, it's setting is idyllic and blends with nature in Heidegger's eyes. I believe the bridge is also symbolic of bringing two worlds that are separated together, just like in the painting of the peasant's shoes.

Here, where I live, we just get hokey floating bridges and freeway overpasses. Bringing together there and nowhere, with a vaguely Ballardian sense.  ¶ 7:44 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Philosophy Journal on das ding thing:

[H]e concludes with "Only what conjoins itself out of world becomes a thing." Perhaps meaning something along the lines of; that which resides in the simple oneness of the fourfold. At this point, it seems clear that Heidegger questions can only precede Heidegger answers. Answering otherwise is like answering an English question in Spanish.

I'll give that a shot: "Solo que cojones del mundo hace cosa". Hey, this is fun. Next I'll do Molly Bloom: "Si! Si! Que si! Mas que si!". Whew! Better cool down a little bit now.  ¶ 7:35 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Nostradamus, host of Death/Media Incarnate Made Real in Text Form, is irked by an predictably inevitable phenomenon:

Heidegger was a Nazi. Nostradamus, in no way denying this truth, was still somewhat interested in discussing, or at least hearing discussed, Heidegger's philosophy in a complex and organic way with/by this famous professor... Alas, it was not to be...

As Heidegger's influence continues to grow, necessitating teaching something about him, thinking along with him is beyond most pedestrian pedagogues (no surprises there--those that can't--and all that), so they fall back on moralistic finger wagging. If nothing else, in one respect they are superior to him. And so is a pet rock.  ¶ 7:24 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

James Crystal rhapsodizes being inside the beltway:

Maybe I've lurched into the best way to FLOW with what's going down on the American populace in DC---politicians are paint drying! So, it could be that 'Life is waiting to die' is equivalent to 'Life is waiting to dry'. Therefore, the art of politics could be said to be the art of living to fight and dry, another day. In this sense, then, harking back to Heidegger may bear sweet fruit for this current screed.

Two of his major determinants of Dasein, or 'being human', are CARE and living in the NOW, by always using the Zukunft, the FUTURE, to guide one. A good boy scout is ALWAYS prepared, which essentially means that each NOW is, in action and thought, all about consciously controlling the FUTURE---why do this? Why not let it BE?

I don't get it, yet derive uncanny enjoyment.  ¶ 7:09 PM 0 comments

  Arts and Letters Daily today links to an article on David Horowitz:

He wants open universities for people like himself.

He used to be a totalitarian on the left, now he's a totalitarian for the right. I have friends on the left and right, but generally avoid totalitarians.

As I see it, the problem with the argument that there should be a fair number of Republicans amongest university professors, is that it then may be applied in other areas. Imagine if companies' boards had to have a certain quota of Democracts. Then where would we be, eh?  ¶ 3:29 AM 0 comments

  Twelve years ago Bruce Katz wrote an article entitled Hyper-subjectivism in Art : The Will to Self-Annihilation. It's been translated, and was published yesterday. Mr. Katz, who supports an end to impunity (For whom? Certainly my critters favor impunity for their misdeeds...), criticizes those who favor particular artistic expressions to the detriment of universal principles. I like that he traces relativism back to Plato's Protagoras (When you read it, please note that Plato's own position is never clear in his dialogues), something one appreciates in these times when conservatives prattle on as if relativism was invented by post-modernists. Katz appears to favor "classic" values in his art, and he equates bourgeois art (art people will pay for, I gather) with fascist art.

If hyper-subjectivism is seen as a force against civilisation, one must face the knowledge that in spite of its many apologists, the ideology of liberalism (as distinct from the concrete realisations of the liberal democratic state), based as it is on the individual's will-to-power, is essentially an expression of the anti-civilisation. If that is so, then anti-humanism and classical liberalism move in a symbiotic relationship, not diametrically opposed as some might have us believe, but both working toward the demise of civil society. They constitute a dialectic. This means that any critique of liberalism is self-contradictory if it promotes particularism as an alternative. The clearest example of this may very well be Heidegger who, in response to the materialism of bourgeois society, slips back into cultural determinism or particularism and the idea of a "pure" German ethnicity and so becomes, as Luc Ferry has written, "the philosopher who says 'yes' to Hitler." The art of Nazi Germany is no less void of cultural content than the degenerate art of bourgeois society. In both world views art is reduced to being a vehicle of material production.

Leni Riefenstahl is devoid of cultural content? Seems to me that fascist art is full of fascist cultural content, bourgeois art is full of bourgeois cultural content, and Mr. Katz's art is full of his cultural content, even if he does label his aesthetic values "universal" or "classic".

It is somewhat bizarre, or crude, the call Heidegger, the critic of subjectivism par excellence, the clearest exponent of hyper-subjectivist particularism. Heidegger in his essays on art demonstrates an affinity for art as a "most profound expression of human existence", as Mr. Katz puts it earlier in his piece.

I think what we have here is a case of relativism being bad because relativism means others' standards. The author's tastes are the correct ones--those naturally embody the universal forms. Everyone's an aesthetic solipsist, bar me, so to speak.  ¶ 8:32 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Memory Hole quotes extensively from David Horowitz's The Politics of Bad Faith:

Of all the influences on contemporary academic radicals, Martin Heidegger's may be the most revealing. Heidegger's influence derives partly from his importance to academic theory generally, but also from the fact that he has directly influenced seminal leftists like Derrida, Foucault and Sartre. As a Nazi, Heidegger's socialist utopia was national in character, but his response to its implementation in the Third Reich is strikingly reminiscent of Marxist responses to the revealed horrors of the Soviet state. In Heidegger’s postwar refusal to recant his Nazi commitments, he anticipated the denials later employed by American leftists refusing to discard their parallel faith.

Interesting this notion of "academic theory". What is it? Nothing by that name shows up in Heidegger. Perhaps it refers to the Western canon that Heidegger taught and was immersed in? Is that Mr. Horowitz wants to expel from the academy. I presume he'd like to censor anything he doesn't understand.

Comparing the responses of ex-Nazis and communists to the atrocities of the XXth century dictatorships and seeing the similarities makes me question if Mr. Horowitz can see at all. When a Nazi, Heidegger was very much a nationalist, and against its socialist tendencies. Clearly Mr. Horowitz is unaware of Heidegger's time before the de-nazification tribunal in the late 1940's when he did everything he could to recant and evade his earlier political engagement. Heidegger with his silence, the rocket scientists that taught me fluid and thermodynamics, and so many others just wanted to forget and put behind them the dreadful errors of the 1930s. Communists, the other hand, continue to wear Che pins and wave their red flags proudly. How much more different could their reactions to the past be?

The second mode of denial favored by western Marxists and Nazis like Heidegger is the doctrine of moral equivalence, which is simply a form of nihilism. This is an attitude that refuses to distinguish between actually existing totalitarian socialisms and the liberal realities of capitalist states.

Really what we have is the victors writing history. Totalitarians are evil, whether in the guise of socialism or capitalism, liberal or conservative. Liberal capitalist reality includes the extermination of hundreds of native peoples, slavery, and so on. It's all very tragic. One acknowledges such, hopefully learns from the past, and carries on coping. Examining the past indicates to me that the greatest danger comes from those that are blind to their own failings, and must demonize others to hide the vacuity of their thinking, or lack there of. Nihilism in deed.  ¶ 4:42 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Afilmaday has an entry on Deleuze and film that goes on about mood, or attunement:

[M]ood is the primary attestation to Da-sein's not being its own origin. Prior to and beyond all cognition, mood is an evasive turning away that both discloses and closes off the pure *Da*. Prior to all experience, *Stimmung* makes possible all that is within the world to matter in some way and hence to be experience-able.

I that is linked to how a poem resonates with one, or how a scientific idea strikes one as right, before setting about trying to verify it.  ¶ 3:42 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

The Alcohol Journals plays up and down, there and back:

The poetic word--the word beyond words for Heidegger--motions to this stepping into the open world that is intimately connected with Seyn. If Seyn is beyond words (and the word), then how do the words Heidegger deploy come into play? The words of the Beiträge are strange, and yet close to us. They ring out in the fugue-like repetition that--although causing a dizzying effect--echo a incomprehensible secret that calls for articulation. But where is language when we need it? To think language as music may be the response Heidegger poses in the Beiträge.

  ¶ 9:05 PM 0 comments