4. Welt/Lichtung/Da occurs only with and as Da-sein, our apriori opened-ness.

a. Heidegger, both early, and late, holds that the human essence consists in necessarily (= apriori) being-the-Da. Da-sein = "being-in-the-open" in the double sense of "always already having been opened" and "having to be that already opened-ness.".

b. Being-the-open = being die Sache selbst.

¶ 6:09 PM 0 comments

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

[T]hinking in the crossing dare not eschew the dearth of preparatory differentiations and elucidations, as long as they only drift in the wind of a decision that comes from afar. Only the chill of the boldness of thinking and the night of errancy of questioning lend glow and light to the fire of be-ing.
P. 303

¶ 7:49 AM 0 comments

5. Thus, in one formulation die Sache selbst is the apriori (= always already) opened-ness of the open-that-we-are, which makes possible all takings-as and attributions of "is."

a. In Heidegger's earlier terminology the apriori status of our opened-ness is called the Geworfenheit or thrown-open-ness of the Da-that-we-necessarily-are (GA 2, 74.25). Thrown-open-ness makes possible all taking-as (entwerfen). Our openness is called "thrown" because it arises from and is grounded in our groundless ("hidden", "withdrawn," relatively absential) finitude. (See no. 7, below.)

b. In Heidegger's later terminology the apriori status of our opened-ness is called the Ereignetsein or drawn-open-ness of the Lichtung-that-we-necessarily-are (Lichtung-sein: GA 69, 101.12). Our Da-sein/Lichtung-sein makes possible die Geschick des Seins, i.e., the groundless -- because grounded in our finitude -- giveness (=Geschick...) of the abiliy to understand and affirm that anything is (==...des Seins).

Truth will never be gathered from what is present[-at-hand] and ordinary. The disclosure [opening up] of the open and the clearing of beings happens, rather, only insofar as the approaching openness is projected within thrownness.
P. 44

[The leap] is the enactment of projecting-open the truth of be-ing in the sense of shifting into the open, such that the thrower of the projecting-open experiences itself as thrown--i.e., as en-owned by be-ing.
P. 169

¶ 7:07 PM 0 comments

During the Florida debate, Lux played a series of SUV commercials on his laptop, commenting on the cultural implications of each and explaining just how hypocritical the "rugged lifestyle" of the SUV driver really is in the context of Heideggerian conceptions of morality.

¶ 6:12 PM 0 comments

Audubon colors dive in through your retina
like a searchlight
roving shadowlessly up and down the brain

until you turn away.
And you do turn away.
There is nothing to see.

You can look at these true shapes all day and not see the bird.
Audubon understands light as an absence of darkness,
truth as an absence of unknowing.

¶ 6:15 PM 0 comments

Derrida was an accomplished footnote to Heidegger, but not an earth-shaking one.

¶ 8:06 PM 0 comments

6. Heidegger sholarship should abandon the word "Sein" as a marker for die Sache selbst.

a. Heidegger's focal topic is not "being" in any form ("das Sein [ist] nicht mehr das eigens zu Denkende," SD 44.6-7). Rather, his topic is that which makes possible all Seinsverständnis and thus any appearance of Sein/ist.

b. Even when die Grundfrage is designated as "the question of being-itself," the crucial distinction between das Ermöglichte (= das Sein selbst) and das Ermöglichende (= the open as das Woher und Wodurch das Seins selbst) is all too frequently overlooked.

c. Heidegger scholarship tends to hypostasize das Sein into a non-phenomenological, quasi-metaphysical Something ("Big Being") that we can allegedly pursue and relate to, an "X" that performs such mystical tasks as revealing and concealing itself, dispensing epochs of itself, and so on.

¶ 5:14 PM 0 comments

"Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy"

Those in the crossing must in the end know what is mistaken by all urging for intelligibility: that every thinking of being, all philosophy, can never be confirmed by "facts," i.e. by beings. Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy. Those who idolize "facts" never notice that their idols only shine in a borrowed shine. They are also meant not to notice this; for thereupon they would have to be at a loss and therefore useless. But idolizers and idols are used wherever gods are in flight and so announce their nearness.
P. 307

¶ 8:20 AM 2 comments

The philosophy of existentialism affected and changed the attitude of the Western community to suicide greatly. Philosophers wrote about the absurdity and emptiness of human existence in the extraneous Universe. The work by Martin Heidegger, 'Existence and Being,' the most important philosophical book written in the 20th century, has the largest significance at this point. According to Heidegger, death brings all human wishes and actions to nothing. One may turn a blind eye on this or that fact, but such position creates artificial life. Death is the only real matter, which deserves human attention. According to Heidegger, a tendency to suicide is the ontological essence of human ego.

¶ 6:53 AM 0 comments

7. What brings about Welt/Lichtung/Da is human finitude - the hidden, withdrawn lack that generates the open.

a. What generates (zeitigt) and sustains the open is the finitude or lack-in-full-self-presence that defines the human essence as Zeitlichkeit. This lack is responsible for the fact that human being is "im-perfect" (not pure presence but pres-absence), a finite openness within which things are known not with the immediacy of intellectual intuition but only via the indirection of Seinsverständnis (cf. GA 3, 280.30-3). One's finitude/lack clears a "place of dif-ference" wherein synthesis becomes possible. This "place" is Welt/Lichtung/Da as the realm of possible relation ("as"), thanks to which entities can be taken as being this or that and thus can be understood as what and how they currently are. Our groundless finitude grounds the "e-mergence" (a-letheia, Wahrheit) of all forms of being.

b. Insofar as human finitude/lack is a non-presence, Heidegger describes it as "hidden," i.e., as the usually overlooked lethe or mystery that constitutes the essence of Da-sein (das vergessene Geheimnis des Daseins GA 9, 195.23).

c. Insofar as human finitude/lack is a relative absence, Heidegger likewise describes it as a withdrawing from presence (der Entzug or das Sichentziehende: GA 8, 10.30, 11.12, 13, 16, 17).

d. The hiddenness/withdrawal that is our finitude "appropriates" or "draws" us into opened-ness and thus into the possibility of understanding the current being of whatever we encounter. Our finitude is our appropriation into opened-ness. (Der Entzug ist des Daseins: GA 65, 293.9; Entzug ist Ereignis: GA 8, 10.30 with 11.6-11.7.)

e. Thus the Vor-frage nach der Wahrheit selbst -- the question about the whence and whereby of emergence itself -- finds its answer in human finitude.

¶ 9:42 PM 0 comments

We said: man still does not think, and this because what must be thought about turns away from him; by no means only because man does not sufficiently reach out and turn to what is to be thought.

What must be thought about, turns away from man. It withdraws from him. But how can we have the least knowledge of something that withdraws from the beginning, how can we even give it a name? Whatever withdraws, refuses arrival. But--withdrawing is not nothing. Withdrawal is an event.

In fact, what withdraws may even concern and claim man more essentially than anything present that strikes and touches him. Being stuck by actuality is what we like to regard as constituitive of the actuality of the actual. However, in being struck by what is actual, man may be debarred precisely from what concerns and touches him--touches him in the surely mysterious way of escaping him by its withdrawal. The event of withdrawal could be what is most present in all our present, and so infintely exceed the actuality of everything actual.

What withdraws from us, draws us along by its very withdrawal, whether or not we become aware of it immediately, or at all. Once we are drawn into the withdrawal, we are drawing towards what draws us, our essential nature already bears the stamp of "drawing toward." As we are drawing toward what withdraws, we ourselves are pointers pointing toward it. We are who we are by pointing in that direction--not like an incidental adjunct but as follows: this "drawing toward" is in itself an essential and therefore constant pointing toward what withdraws. To say "drawing toward" is to say "pointing toward what withdraws."

To the extent that man is drawing that way, he points toward what withdraws. As he is pointing that way, man is the pointer. Man here is not first of all man, and then also occasioanlly someone who points. No: drawn into what withdraws, drawing toward it and thus pointing into the withdrawal, man first is man. His essential nature lies in being such a pointer.
P. 9

...to giving as sending there belongs keeping back--such that the denial of the present and the withholding of the present, play within the giving of what has been and what will be. What we have mentioned just now--keeping back, denial, withholding--shows something like a self-withdrawing, something we might call for short: withdrawal. But inasmuch as the modes of giving that are determined by withdrawal--sending and extending--lie in Appropriation, withdrawal must belong to what is peculiar to the Appropriation.
...
Insofar as the destiny of being lies in the extending of time, and time, together with being, lies in Appropriation, Appropriation makes manifest its peculiar property, that Appropriation withdraws what is most fully its own from boundless unconcealment. Thought in terms of Appropriating, this means: in that sense it expropriates itself of itself. Expropriation belongs to Appropriation as such. By this expropriation, Appropriation does not abandon itself, rather, it preserves what is its own.
P. 22

¶ 10:00 PM 0 comments

Geek A: 'This summer I've been reading Martin Heidegger & Ludwig Wittgenstein.'

Geek B: 'Really? Me too.'

Geek A: 'Great minds think alike.'

¶ 5:38 AM 0 comments

8. What Heidegger calls Seinsvergessenheit is the forgottenness not of Sein but what makes possible Sein and Seinsverständnis.

a. It is impossible for human beings to forget "being" without ceasing to be human. Indeed, metaphysics has never forgotten "being" or the ontological difference. Even the failure to thematize one's unthematic awareness of "is" does not count as what Heidegger means by Seinsvergessenheit (cf. GA 9, 263.28-30).

b. Seinsvergessenheit is shorthand for "the forgottenness of what allow for taking-as and thus 'being'" (cf. SD 40.6, 18-24). Seinsvergessenheit means overlooking our hidden-withdrawn finitude and the Welt/Lichtung/Da that it holds open.

c. This lack is already intrinsically hidden and withdrawn (= the lethe), but its hiddenness is "Redoubled" (doubly and improperly hidden) when it is overlooked or forgotten in Seinsvergessenheit (SD 44.14-19, 26-30).

d. However, one can also understand and embrace that intrinsically hidden finitude--as one's own essence, as what generates the open clearing, and as the source of all taking-as and occurence of "is." In the early Heidegger the act of understanding and embracing own's finitude is called "resolve" (Entschlossenheit: GA 2, 393.36). In the later work it is described as returning to and settling into one's opened-ness (die Einkehr in das Ereignis: SD 44.16-17, 26).

In Being and Time (1927) [the relation between Da-sein and Be-ing] first grasped as “understanding of being,” whereby understanding is grasped as projecting-open –- and the opening-throwing as thrown, and that means: belonging to en-ownment by be-ing itself.

But if we fail to recognize in advance the strangeness and uniqueness (incomparability) of be-in -- and together with it what is ownmost to Da-sein -- then we succumb all too easily to the opinion that this 'relation" corresponds to or is even commensurate with the relation between subject and object. But Da-sein has overcome all subjectivity; and be-ing is never an object, re-presentable. It is in every case only a being that is capable of becoming an object -- and even here not every being.
P. 178

Heidegger writes "Entschlossenheit" ("resoluteness" or "decisivesness") as "Ent-schlossenheit" ("un-closedness") in order to emphasize that the existential "resoluteness" whereby Dasein finds a way to authentically choose the commitments which define it (after having been radically individualized in being-toward-death) does not entail deciding on a particular course of action ahead of time and obstinately sticking to one's guns come what may, but rather requires an "openness" whereby we continue to be responsive to the emerging solicitations of our particular existential "situation." The existential situation in general is thus not unlike a living puzzle we must continually "re-solve."
P. 146

¶ 5:27 PM 1 comments

But, as is the way of ontology, that most fundamental of questions went unarticulated, and so assumed what Heidegger would call its "grounding significance." How's that for an angle? The Monica State of the Union as a Heideggerian moment of decision. It works for me.

¶ 1:23 PM 0 comments

9. The intrinsically hidden lack/finitude that is reponsible for the apriori opened-ness of the open guarnatess both the groundlessness and the in-principle unlimitedness of our ability to take-things-as -- for example, in theoretical-scientific knowing.

a. The in-principle unlimitedness of such theoretical-cognitive takings-as and occurences-of-being as the positive gift of our finitude and of the Welt/Lichtung/Da that it holds open. The universe is endlessly knowable and should be known as such.

b. Such unlimited knowing need not stand in inverse proportion to the understanding and embrace of one's essential finitude, nor need it entail the overlooking or forgetting of die Sache selbst.

-- these three that are actually one -- constitute die Sache selbst, the open that "gives" all forms, and all historical epochs, of being.

The conference's Saturday panel discussion began with a controversial and, perhaps according to traditional readings of Heidegger and technology, paradoxical thesis from T. Sheehan ("Eleven Theses on Heidegger and Technology," Stanford University, USA). Sheehan offered the claim that Heideggerians should move away from the word 'being' as a maker for die Sache selbst, since Heidegger quite clearly contends that things have no sense apart from human beings: it is not the "is" of being, but instead the as of being, Sheehan argues, that guides Heidegger's thought. That is, rather than 'constituting' beings in conformity with our concepts, Dasein's finitude, its lack of full presence to itself, requires an openness to beings and, as it were, entails a taking-as/understanding of entities through their being. From his discussion of this being-the-open that derives from our lack of full self-presence and marks our essence, Sheehan rereads Heidegger's notion of Ereignis as our openness to the open that results from the self-concealment in which our being hides. Being-the-open makes entities not just available to us, but, Sheehan claims, language [that might sound heretical to traditional Heideggerians], "endlessly available to human engagement and manipulation". Having grounded the theoretical portion of his project with an etymological exegesis equalled in its density and originality by its lucidity and rigor, Sheehan concludes by risking the potentially morally irresponsible claim that "far from having a philosophically negative valence, the global spread of technology is the positive force of Ereignis". That we in the twenty-first century have witnessed the mendaciousness of modern, cybernetic technicity (that until now almost undeniably appeared as the fulfilment of Heidegger's prophecy concerning technology), however, should cause us to pause before championing Sheehan's scholarship - as may conference attendees seemed quick to do. It is possible that we have misunderstood Heidegger's thought on technology. Perhaps Heidegger's own philosophical framework does indeed preclude his critical portrayal of technicity. Sheehan's bold claims, however, not only seemingly sacrifice the moral to the intellectual, but they fly in the face of decades of scholarship concerning Heidegger on technology.

In an important, and in this listener's opinion unduly neglected presentation, M. Zimmerman ("Heidegger's Phenomenology and Contemporary Environmentalism," University of Tulane, USA) attempted to work through the tensions in Heidegger's view of nature and humankind with those of environmentalists, and on the way objected to Sheehan's rereading of Ereignis, remarking that Sheehan ultimately claims "that from their own side beings 'want' to be disclosed and utilised by humankind," and such utilisation denotes progress ("technological domination," to use Sheehan's words. No one will argue the benefits of technological advances, and perhaps our being is such that entities appear as 'endlessly available' to us. Yet, Zimmerman asks: does Ereignis, the gift of openness from finitude, exculpate humankind from the crimes it has perpetrated against animals, ecosystems, and peoples of the third world, as Sheehan's reading implies? What gets lost amidst the force of Sheehan's erudite exegesis, Zimmerman notes, is that "[e]ndowed with great disclosive capacities, Dasein is also burdened with unparalleled responsibilities to 'care' for beings".

¶ 9:52 AM 0 comments

I think it was Heidegger who said that 'technology is the art of arranging the world so that we don't have to experience it'.

¶ 8:39 PM 0 comments

In the coming to presence of the danger there conceals itself, therefore, the possibility of a turning in which the oblivion belonging to the coming to presence of Being will so turn itself that, with this turning, the truth of the coming to presence of Being will expressly turn in-turn homeward--into whatever is.
P. 41

"Will turn in--turn homeward--" translates einkehr. The verb einkehren means to turn in, to enter, to put up at an inn, to alight, to stay. The related noun Einkehr, translated in this essay as "in-turning," means putting up at an inn; an inn or lodging. Einkehren and Einjehr speak of a thorough being at home that yet partakes of the transiency belonging to the ongoing. Both words suggest the Heimkehr (homecoming) important in Heidegger's earlier Hölderlin essays. The allusion to a transient abiding made here in these words leads toward Heidegger's culminating portrayal of the turning within Being as a self-clearing, i.e., a self-opening-up, as which, and into which Being's own self-lighting that is a self-manifesting entering brings itself to pass.

The in-turning that is the lightening-flash of the truth of Being in the entering, flashing glance--insight.
...
When oblivion turns about, when world as the safekeeping of the coming to presence of Being turns in, then there comes to pass the in-flashing of world into the injurious neglect of the thing.
...
In-flashing is the disclosing coming-to-pass within Being itself. Disclosing coming-to-pass [Ereignis] is bringing to sight that brings into its own.
P. 45

Enowning has its innermost occurence and its widest reach in the turning.
P. 286

¶ 1:17 PM 0 comments

10. The in-principle unlimitedness of takings-as and occurrences-of-being likewise makes possible unlimited technology.

a. One form of unlimited taking-as is unlimited using-for -- for example, the adapting and reshaping of entities into commodities, into means for achieving human ends, etc., ad infinitim.

b. As with scientific knowing, such in-principle unlimited using-for need not entail Seinsvergessenheit or stand in an inverse relation to Entschlossenheit, Eigentlichkeit, die Einkehr in das Ereignis, or die Überwindung/Verwindung der Metaphysik.

c. Overlooking human finitude and the Welt/Lichtung/Da that hold open is not the cause, or even a contributing cause, of the globalization of technology.

d. Heidegger's published thought provides no good arguments for limiting (much less opposing) the endless spread of technology. While such arguments might well be made, Heidegger's philosophy fails to do so.

e. There is no necessary connection between the self-assertion of the technologically efficient self (sc., Jünger's "worker-dominating-the-world") and Seinsvergessenheit. Aquinas could just as easily have overlooked and forgotten the Welt/Lichtung/Da during his mystical vision at Fossanova, as Stalin could have understood and embraced his essential finitude while industrializing the Soviet Union.

The Worker belongs in the phase of "active nihilism" (Nietzsche). The action of the work consisted--and in a changed function still consists--in the fact that it makes the "total work character" of all reality visible from the figure of the worker. Thus nihilism, which at first is only European, appears in its planetary tendency. However, there is no description in itself which would be able to reality in itself. Every description, the more sharply it advances, moves that much more positively in its own way within a definite horizon. The manner of vision and the horizon--you say "optics"--appear for human conceptions from the basic experiences of being in the whole. But they are already preceeded by a vista [Lichtung] never to be made first by man, of how being "is."
P. 41-43

¶ 11:49 AM 0 comments

[The grounding question] is not the continuation of the version of the guiding question in Aristotle. For it arises immediately from the necessity of the distress of the abandonment by being, that occurrence which is essentially also conditioned by the history of the guiding question and its misconstrual.
P. 165

The lack of distress is the greatest where self-certainty has become unsurpassable, where everything is held to be calculable and, above all, where it is decided, without a preceding question, who we are and what we are to do -- where knowing awareness has been lost without its ever actually having been established that the actual self-being happens by way of a grounding-beyond-oneself, which requires the grounding of the grounding-space and its time. This, in turn, requires knowing what is ownmost to truth as what knowing cannot avoid.

But wherever "truth" is long since no longer a question and even the attempt at such a question is already rejected as a disturbance and an irrelevant brooding, there the distress of abandonment of/by being has no time-space at all.
P. 87

¶ 10:37 PM 0 comments

Ten Theses on Heidegger
1. Das Sein = das "ist"

2. For Heidegger die Sache selbst is not Sein but that which makes possible the phenomenological occurrence of Sein.

3. die Sache selbst = die Welt, die Lichtung, das Da, etc.

4. Welt/Lichtung/Da occurs only with and as Da-sein, our apriori opened-ness.

5. Thus, in one formulation die Sache selbst is the apriori (= always already) opened-ness of the open-that-we-are, which makes possible all takings-as and attributions of "is."

6. Heidegger sholarship should abandon the word "Sein" as a marker for die Sache selbst.

7. What brings about Welt/Lichtung/Da is human finitude - the hidden, withdrawn lack that generates the open.

8. What Heidegger calls Seinsvergessenheit is the forgottenness not of Sein but what makes possible Sein and Seinsverständnis.

9. The intrinsically hidden lack/finitude that is responsible for the apriori opened-ness of the open guarantees both the groundlessness and the in-principle unlimitedness of our ability to take-things-as -- for example, in theoretical-scientific knowing.

10. The in-principle unlimitedness of takings-as and occurrences-of-being likewise makes possible unlimited technology.

¶ 6:23 AM 3 comments

When I was young I read tons of Heidegger, literally everything available in English translation, and thereby, indirectly learning something about the Hegelian differentials of Becoming & Being. But man, what a "world-historic" caper, that Heidegger! Once I woke up from the authoritarian spectacle of denken and all its Main Street wannabes--the neurasthenic pulling up and pulling down of shades (which is the pre-requisite for contemporary neo-metaphysic vomitron poetics) I got down to what's still the core of my poetics: the study and dramatization of the dynamics of the ideologeme as itself.

¶ 7:43 AM 0 comments

We learn from Heidegger that the Being of Man centers around its grounding in this real world. Dasein is an existent. This is, to my mind, almost the merger of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
I've always pondered the ways in which Kierkegaard's "leap" could be applied outside the religious realm. It can be; Neitzsche did it, really. In the face of the Abyss, we go on living daily. That is certainly faith, although not to a religious end.
In a sense, existentialism is concerned with the birth of new gods -- ones that look as we do, and die as we will.

¶ 7:31 AM 0 comments

1. For Protagoras, man in his selfhood is defined by his belonging in the radius of the unconcealed. For Descartes, man as self is defined by referring the world back to man's representing.
2. For Protagoras, the beingness of beings--in the sense of Greek metaphysics--is a coming to presence in the unconcealed. For Descartes, beingness means representedness through and for the subject.
3. For Protagoras, truth means the unconcealment of what is present. For Descartes, the certitude of self-representing and securing representation.
4. For Protagoras, man is the measure of all things in the senseof a measured restriction to the radius of the unconcealed and to the boundaries of the concealed. For Descartes, man is the measure of all things in the sense of the presumption of the de-limitation of representation for self-securing certitude. The standard of measure places everything that can pass as a being under the reckoning of representation.

If we correctly ponder the difference that has come to light in these fundamental metaphysical positions, then doubt might arise as to whether the same--something equally essential--holds true for both, which would justify our speaking about fundamental positions of metaphysics in both cases. But the intent of the contrast is precisely to make clear what is the same--although not identical--in the apparently dissimilar, and thus to make visible the covert unitary essence of metaphysics as opposed to the Nietzschean interpretation of metaphysics, which is merely moral, that is, determined by valuative thought.
P. 122

That there is insight, that I can have cognizance, is to be conceeded. The skeptic is the genuine absolutist; he takes formal lawfulness in a radically serious way; i.e. he does not play with it and make out of it a beautiful and convenient world.
P. 147

calls it "a scandal of philosophy and human reason in general" that there is still no cogent proof for "the existence of things outside us" which will do away with any skepticism.
P. 247

The 'scandal of philosophy' is not that this proof has yet to be given, but that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again.
P. 249

¶ 11:15 PM 1 comments

I am stuck with having to make what I can of Heidegger, and that is that his Nietzsche lectures--which set the standard for Nietzsche interpretation, the work of Nietzsche interpretation to which every European philosopher who is interested in Nietzsche, and there are very few who are not, has had to respond--are lectures in which Heidegger recommends especially the young Nietzsche to our attention, and that young Nietzsche is the Nietzsche most nakedly indebted to the writings of Emerson.

    So in 1936, Heidegger is giving endlessly influential interpretations of words, some of which, though he didn't know it, were Emerson's. That is something I'm struck with, that I want to know about, as I want to know that Thoreau's Walden is interpreted by next to no philosophical work more intimateky than by certain texts of Heidegger. I cite the essay "Building, Dwelling, Thinking," but the other essays equally. Because it's also a perfectionist work, more generally by Being and Time. But this connection with Thoreau, whom I regard as a philosophical genius and as an American genius and one whom I have been inspired by and intend to become inspired again by--if I'm lucky--I can't avoid wanting to know how this happened.

¶ 7:24 PM 0 comments

Man is in each case the measure of presence and unconcealment through his measuredness and restriction to that most intimate open region, without denying the remotest closure and without presuming to make a decision about presence and absence. There is no trace here of the thought that the being as such has to be oriented toward the self-posited ego as subject, that the subject is the judge of all beings and their Being, and that by virtue of this judheship the subject may with absolute certitude decide about the objectivity of objects. Here, finally, there is no hint of Descartes' procedure, which attempts to prove the very essence and existence of God as absolutely certain. If we think of the four "moments" that determine the essence of metaphysics, we can now say the following about the saying of Protagoras:

1. The "I" is for Protagoras detremined by the always limited belonging to beings in the unconcealed. The being-oneself of man is grounded in the reliability of the unconcealed being and its radius.
2. Being has the essential character of presence.
3. Truth is expereinced as unconcealment.
4. "Measure" has the sense of the measuredness of unconcealment.

For Descartes and his fundamental metaphysical position, all those moments have a different meaning. His metaphysical position is not independent of Greek metaphysics, but it is essentially removed from it. Because the dependence and distance have as yet never been clearly distinguished, the illusion could easily creep in the Protagoras is, as it were, the Descartes of Greek metaphysics; in the same vein, one was able to assert that plato is the Kant of Greek philosophy and Aristotle its Thomas Aquinas.

¶ 10:08 PM 0 comments

Kubota's God, Zen and Heidegger, a three-sectioned wooden box stuffed with three wads of rice paper on which have been repeatedly printed the words 'I AM' (for God), 'IT IS' (for Zen), and 'being Being' (for Heidegger) is insufferably cute and pretentious, and more or less encapsulates what goes wrong when language-workers forswear the high road and settle, as too often happens, into cerebral kitsch.

¶ 7:06 AM 0 comments

For Protagoras, to be sure, beings remain related to man as egw. Of what kind is this relation to the I? The egw stays, in the sphere of that which is apportioned to it as this particular unconcealment. Accordingly, it apprehends everything that presences within this sphere as in being. The apprehending of what presences is grounded in this staying within the sphere of unconcealment. The belonging to the I to what presences is through this staying alongside what presences. This belonging to what presences in the open draws the boundary between what is present and what absent. From out of this boundary man receives and preserves the measure of that which presences and that which absences. In his restriction to that which is unconcealed at a particular time, man gives himself the measure which confines a self in each case to this and that. Man does not set the measure to which all beings in their being here have to accommodate themselves, out of a detailed I-ness. One who stands in the Greeks' fundamental relationship to beings and their unconcealment is metron (measure) insofar as he accepts restriction to the sphere of unconcealment limited after the manner of the I; and, as a consequence, acknowledges the concealment of beings and that their presence or absence, together with the visible appearance of what is present, lies beyond his power of decision. This is why Protagoras says (Fragment 4 in Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker) peri men qewn ouk ecw eidenai, ouq wV eisin, ouq wV ouk eisin, ouq opoioi tineV idean. "Concerning the gods, I am, admittedly, not in the position to know (i.e., for the Greeks, to have something in "sight") either that they are, or that they are not, nor how they are in their visible aspect (idean)."

polla gar ta kwluonta eidenai, h t'adhlothV kai bracuV wn o bioV tou anqrwpou. "Many, that is, are the things that prevent the apprehending of the being as what it is: both the un-openness (concealment) of beings and the brevity of man's course in history.

In view of this thoughtful circumspection on Protagoras' part, it is no wonder that Socrates says of him (Plato, Theaetetus 152 b) eikoV mentoi sofon andra mh lhgein. "We may suppose that he (Protagoras), as a sensible person, was not (in his statement about man as the metron) simply babbling."

The fundamental metaphysical position of Protagoras is merely a narrowing down--which means, nonetheless, a preserving--of the fundamental position of Heraclitus and Parmenides. Sophism is only possible on the basis of sofia, i.e., on the basis of the Greek interpretation of being as presence and truth as unconcealment--an unconcealment which remains itself and essential determination of being, which is why that which presences is determined out of unconcealment, and presencing out of the unconcealed as such. But how removed is Descartes from this beginning of Greek thought, how different is the interpretation of man which represents him as subject? In the concept of the subjectum, there still lingers on the sound of the Greek essence of being (the upokeisqai of the upokeimenon) in the form of a presencing that has become unrecognizable and unquestioned (namely, that which lies permanently at hand). Precisely because of this, we can recognize in this concept of presencing the transformation of the fundamental metaphysical position.

It is one thing to preserve the always limited sphere of unconcealment through the apprehension of what presences (man as metron). It is something different to proceed into the unlimited region of possible objectification through the calculating of the representable of which everyone is capable and which is binding on all.

Every subjectivism is impossible within Greek Sophism since man can never, here, become subjectum. This cannot happen because, in Sophism, being is presencing and truth is unconcealment.

In unconcealment, fantasia happens: the coming to appearance, as a particular something, of that which presences--for man, who himself presences to what appears. Man as the representing subject fantasies, however, he moves in imaginatio in that his representation imagines the being as object into the world as picture.

¶ 8:24 AM 0 comments

I wrote a good deal on Husserl's view of mathematics, as well as what I think Heidegger would say about mathematics if he had anything to say about it (actually, he did have something to say about it in his lectures on Kant published under the title, _What is a Thing?_, but that is quite brief).

¶ 4:50 PM 0 comments

When Heidegger wishes to point out that man is not just a thing among other things but a subject, a person, he calls man the "being for whom in his being this being itself is at issue." A thing is not concerned with its being: it lies, as it were, "crushed upon itself." Man, however, is not ill just as a cauliflower is rotten, he is not a hunchback just as a willowtree is gnarled, for man is concerned with the malfunctioning of his organism, his misshapeness. He has a relationship with what he is, and he has this by saying that Dasein (existence) has a essentially is, what makes man's being differ from that of a thing. For this reason Heidegger says that for man in his being this being itself is at issue, thereby excluding that there would be merely question here of something accidental.

¶ 10:06 AM 0 comments

Heidegger's great pupil, Gadamer, teaches us in Truth and Method: The hermeneutic challenge of accounting for your own horizon and the pre-judgement before making a judgement of what you read. Something to remember before reading Heidegger - or "interpreting" his life (his moral and political practice).

Without acknowledging this hermeneutic circle, the discussion may be spicy, but will be irrelevant, because anyone passing this judgement (the phrasing of the question to it being in itself problematic) at best simply conflates their political horizon as an Anglophone in the 21st century with that of Heidegger's.

¶ 9:50 AM 0 comments

When do we let difference into our lives? In the case of everyday living, most people will only let it in if it is forced upon them. Even when we think of the future, we are not thinking of a different future, but as a future, which is the same as the life that we are living. Or the static image of the life that lives us - life seen as a being, rather than as difference, as becoming, as more-than-being. Heidegger claimed that we fall from a conception of the future, back into the understanding from the past, our history, and into the present. How beautiful this picture may be, it means that we would constantly be rethinking our understanding of the past in an image of the future, and both the past and the future are dynamic, rather than static, difference rather than being.

¶ 6:57 AM 0 comments

This is why I find the epistemology of the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce helpful, especially his notion of the fundamantal categories of firstness, secondness and thirdness. For me Peirce really nailed the problem of epistemology, but the power of his analysis is really yet to be fully appreciated. For example, if you read Heidegger's Being and Time, bearing in mind Peirce's categories there are less problems in picturing what Heidegger has in mind. Heidegger to my mind never completely successfully addresses the difficulty of communicating pre-representational systems through the language of philosophy. Peirce I think can be particularly helpful in this respect because he developed an approach which can describe the kind of mental paradigm shifts Heidegger is calling for his readers to attempt in order for them to understand Dasein.

¶ 7:38 PM 0 comments

But did not a Sophist at about the time of Socrates venture to say that "Man is the measure of all things, of what are, that they are, of what are not, that they are not?" Does not this statement of Protagoras sound as though it were Descartes speaking? Is it not through Plato that the being of beings if fully grasped as the visible, the idea? Is not the relation to beings as such, for Aristotle, pure looking? And yet it is no more the case the Protagoras' Sophistic statement is subjectivism than it is the case that Descartes had the capacity to bring about the overturning of Greek thought. Through Plato's thinking and Aristotle's questioning there occurred, to be sure, a decisive transformation of the interpretation of beings and of man. But this transformation always remained within the Greeks' fundamental experience of beings. Precisely as a struggle against the Sophistic, and so as dependent on it, this transformed interpretation proves so decisive as to become the ending of the Greek world, and ending which indirectly helps to prepare the possibility of the modern age. This is the reason that, later on, not just in the Middle Ages but right through the modern age and up to the present, Platonic and Aristotelian thought was able to be taken as Greek thought per se, and why all pre-Platonic thought could be considered to be merely a preparation for Plato. Because we have long been accustomed to understand Greece in terms of a modern humanistic interpretation, it remains denied to us to think being as it opened itself to Greek antiquity, to think it in a way that allows it its ownness and strangeness.

Protagoras' statement reads

pantwn crhmatwn metron estin anqrwpoV, twn men ontwn wV esti, twn de mh ontwn wV ouk estin.
(cf. Plato's Theaetetus 153a)

Of all things (those, namely, that man has around him in use and usage, crhmata crhsqai) man is (in each case) the measure, of what presences, that it so presences, of that, however, to which presencing is denied, that it does not presence.

The being whose being is up for decision is understood, here, as that which is present in the sphere of man, arriving in this region, of itself. Who, however, is "man"? Plato tells us in the same passage by having Socrates say:

Does he (Protagoras) not understand this somewhat as follows? Whatever, at a given time, something shows itself to me as, of such an aspect is it (also) for me; but whatever it shows itself to you as, is it not such a turn for you? But you are a man just as much as I.

Man is here, accordingly, the man in each particular case (I and you, he and she). And should not this egw coincide with Descartes' ego cogito? Never. For in every essential respect, what determines the two fundamental metaphysical positions with equal necessity is different. What is essential to a fundamental metaphysical position embraces:

(1) The manner and way in which man is man, that is, himself: the essential nature of selfhood which by no means coincides with I-ness, but is rather determined by the relationship to being as such.
(2) The essential interpretation of the being of beings.
(3) The essential projection of truth.
(4) The sense in which, in any given instance, "man is the measure."

None of the essential moments of the fundamental metaphysical position can be understood apart from the others. Each, by itself, indicates the totality of a fundamental metaphysical position. For what reason, and to what extent, just these four moments bear and structure a fundamental metaphysical position in advance is a question which can no longer be asked or answered out of or through metaphysics. To ask it is already to speak out of the overcoming of metaphysics.

¶ 8:38 AM 0 comments

Googling it (yea tres savvage) you will perceive (that is if you subscribe to any commonly accepted standards of argument and reasoning) that Herr Carnap knocked out Heidegger rather quickly.

¶ 10:07 AM 1 comments

    For any man, "Dasein," in the world, Heidegger felt there are three possible modes of existence: undifferentiated, inauthentic, and authentic. A man in the undifferentiated mode never questions the meaning of his own life or faces up to the fact that his existence is defined by the culture fate threw him into. He never recognizes his own "thrown-ness," but blindly accepts the existence he has inherited. If anything, I had questioned the meaning of my life way too f*cking much, so the undifferentiated mode clearly did not describe me.
    A man in the inauthentic mode recognizes that his existence is a result of coincidence-recognizes his own thrown-ness, but simply substitutes some other role for the life he inherited, not recognizing that both roles were created by the culture he was thrown into. I had left the Marine Corps for civilian life, and I had left the congestion of Denver for mountain life in Nederland, but I recognized that both roles existed within the American culture I'd been been born into. I knew that if I'd been born in China, I'd have turned out to be a thick-limbed Chinese private eye, so I definitely recognized my own thrown-ness, and the inauthentic mode didn't describe me either.
    A man's recognition of his own thrown-ness sometimes leads to what Heidegger called "anxiety." He begins to think about death. When a man is unable to face up to the possibility of his own nonbeing or nothingness, Heidegger referred to this as "fallen-ness." Instead of dealing with his anxiety, the man who experiences fallen-ness returns to the inauthentic mode.
    But some who experience anxiety do face up to their own thrown-ness and their own death, and in so doing they accept responsibility for their own lives. Heidegger called this "care." In caring for the world, each man makes the most of his own possibilities-even if those possibilities were originally dictated by the culture he was thrown into. A man who adopts this attitude lives in what Heidegger called an "authentic mode of existence."
    I closed the book and put it down. Then I remembered the dream I'd had in Walla Walla. And I think I understood it. Joy hadn't been shouting, "Dozen"; she'd been shouting, "Dasein." The image of me falling to earth indicated a state of fallen-ness. I had changed my outer life, and I was happier, but I still hadn't found a way to deal with with death or the fear that there is no God and life is meaningless. And Joy had been carrying a CARE package. Had she been trying to tell me how to pull myself out of my state of fallen-ness?
    "You're awful quiet," Jeff said. "Whatcha thinking about?"
    "Falling," I said.

¶ 7:19 AM 0 comments