In-der-Blog-sein

Philosophical Book Reviews reviews Letters 1925-1975 – Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, using Echo and Narcissus as allegories:

Arendt's and Heidegger's love was a mirror. Their own intellectual genius reflected back at them. They could each have been Narcissus and the lake water respectively. But what is striking is that love transcended political unrest and religious and ethnic differences. They loved each other as they would love themselves.

  ¶ 1:09 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Long Sunday gazes over the World Picture:

For the Greeks, says Heidegger, the world is an extended or continuous question addressed to man. Man is defined by this answerability to this address; he is beholden to that which beholds him. The presence of the non-human works to distribute across humanity a kind of ontological humility.

All this (irrespective of whether it accurately 'depicts' the Greeks) is significant as the exact reverse of modern man. We look at, direct and interrogate the world -- an interrogation always for human ends. We do not apprehend the world we represent or enframe it. We render it as a picture.

Plus Lacan, and comments on the Dasein behind the picture.  ¶ 3:14 PM 0 comments

  In his book on Heidegger's poetics, Marc Froment-Meurice writes about the ocular Ereignis:

Good grammer, the "Grammer of Being," therefore fails to say its meaning. The word is not sufficiently visionary, including the word "Being" itself, which says (and does) nothing remarkable--that is the word or mark for it. We would have to invent another glance, another trait inscribed in the very body of language and that would be different from this blind and indifferent vision that is the letter. We would have to surpass the letter and finally touch the spirit spirit (of language). But is that itself not already a blind word? "King Oedipus has one eye too many, perhaps"...the eye for what is not to be seen.

    But if it is only in light that what appears can allow itself to be see, "light itself remains in a dimension of opening and of liberty" that Heidegger will name die Lichtung or das Ereignis: the flash that makes come (but also the coming-as-event). In Ereignis, in the "eye" of this word, there would be (though as a distant trace, already becoming tain) the Aug, the eye. The word gives us the eye at the very moment in which it no longer gives anything to be seen, nothing but the -invisible that is in the visible without residing there, in the letter, just as silence always returns to (re)sound in every word when it is left to go on its way, returns to haunt it in its body: the dead bosy of a live language, ready to be reanimated every time a fresh breath is lent it, as though we (those "endowed with speech") were but the poppets as a theater of shadows. This is the moment in which language speaks. At this moment, everything is reversed. But has philosophy not always carried out this reversal of the glance? From beings to Being--and now, from Being to what?

Pp. 58-59

  ¶ 3:38 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

The Pragmatic Christian on mapping Heidegger to Chrisitianity offers these tidbits:

Existentialism is essentially the continental version of American pragmatism.
...
So Being and Time is basically a reworking of Kierkegaard using the concepts of a desacralized theology.
...
authenticity = being in Christ
...
The one real problem, however, -- in my opinion ---is that his "existentialism" like all the others, speaks in terms of operations of the ego, the left mind metaphor, or "outer I" whereas as I see it true spirituality (the operations of faith) comes out of the "inner I", or right mind metaphor.

Tune in next week for "Relational theory remapped for Christian use", or Codd's left inner metaphor of sin.  ¶ 9:05 AM 0 comments

  In a note on thesis 8 of his "Eleven Theses on Heidegger and on Technology", Thomas Sheehan disputes the translation of Ereignis as enowning.

Beiträge [Contributions] and later works make it clear that Ereignis is not an "event" in any usual sense of the term (i.e., Vorkommnis und Geschehnis: SD 21.27) and that what Heidegger meant by Ereignis is not primarily "appropriation" or "enowning." In the forthcoming GA 71 (Das Ereignis, 1941-42) Heidegger shows that the original etymon of Ereignis is not eigen ("own," parallel to the Latin proprium, from which derive "appropriation" and "enowning") but rather eräugen/ereugen, "bringing something out into view." Heidegger got much of this from Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. More importantly, however, in GA 71 (section "Das Ereignis," sub-section "Er-eigen -- Er-eignen,"), Heidegger annotated the Grimm etymologies, thereby providing his own understanding of Ereignis.

That and what follows (Grimm brothers' text, plus Heidegger's annotations) is essentially the same as section 6 of Sheehan's A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research, so I won't repeat it here.

Heidegger also made the connection between Ereignis and seeing in The Principle of Identity, although it was dropped from the second translation to not distract from its translation as "appropriation." Enowning, event, appropriation, and more (Αγχιβασιη?), all have their place in explaining what Heidegger is trying to convey. As Sheehan says:

Nonetheless, this is not to entirely exclude "appropriation" as a possible translation of Ereignis. That word might work -- but only if we understand the proprium of appropriation as the opening up of openness.

The key take away is that Ereignis is not a thing.

When Dasein properly takes up its thrown projection, the "there", or "here") opens up. Ereignis is "the appropriating event of the grounding of the there."

P. 87

das Ereignis der Dagrundung (GA 65, P. 247)

Ereignis connects things to Dasein, not in a relational way, but by gathering them together.  ¶ 6:53 PM 0 comments

  Hans Ruin's essay Contributions to Philosophy, revolves around the term Ereignis [but of course!]. Heidegger's book is about a philosophy that goes beyond representing concepts, or this or that thing. A philosophy that doesn't fall back to discussing a "thing". Tricky that.

[H]ow should it avoid this trap? Is it not the inevitable fate of a language to posit and objectify the entities which it designates? Heidegger's response here evokes the key concept of the whole work, namely Ereignis, which in the English translation of Contributions has been rendered as enowning. The story of its various translations is a theme in its own right. Among the earlier alternatives are "appropriation" as well as "event." "Enowning" is an awkward, but etymologically well founded possibility, since the German term is composed by the prefix "er" and "eigen," which means "own." Yet the expression "being owned over into enowning" is so strange and unnatural from an English perspective that it risks prohibiting the access to what Heidegger is after from the start. The German expression here is "dem Ereignis übereignet zu werden" (GA 65: 3). Unlike the English translation, this passage has an immediate and more straightforward meaning in German, where it signifies something like "to abandon oneself to the event." To be sure, Ereignis is a concept which in Heidegger's use obtains a depth and philosophical gravity which the undifferentiated notion of "event" can hardly carry. Yet it is a common word in German, which "enowning" in English is not. In forging a philsopheme from out of the neutral term of Er-eignis Heidegger seeks to reach beyond the subject-object dichotomy, to designate the event of meaning, that which takes place, that which manifests itself and shines forth, as something to which the subject of knowledge also belongs. As a descriptive term it therefore short-circuits itself at the root, since the very premise for its use is that it is not an ordinary descriptive term, whereby something is depicted and designated by someone.

P. 365

If it is desirable to be able to translate Heidegger's German directly so that phrases "abandon oneself to the event" may be rendered, then Ereignis should be translated simply as "event". Otherwise, translators are being to clever, by noting that Heidegger's Ereignis is not simply the "event" of common German and using "enowning", they at the say time eliminate the simple phrases, that Heidegger himself used.

To be sure, using a phrase such as "Ereignis is a concept" above is a problem, and it already comes across as a term for something transcendental. Tricky, like I said. Perhaps the best study of Ereignis as the term that is not a thing is Polt's The Event of Enthinking the Event. I'll perhaps post something about that essay after absorbing it some more.

Although the etymology of Ereignis above (as enowning) is the one justified by the translators of the Contributions, it is controversial, and I'll post something about that tomorrow.  ¶ 5:09 PM 0 comments

  Via On Line Opinion comes Phillip Elias's award winning essay A legitimate role for government?

What I believe all this points to is another key aspect of the human person forgotten by the Enlightenment. Martin Heidegger claimed that "we are creatures of the unreal". Unlike animals, we are not defined by our biological need to feed and reproduce. The things that we are most concerned with are those "ought" statements. We are moral beings. We seek a normative dimension to our actions and our lives. Values are an important part of who we are, and any pretensions to "values-neutrality" should be seen merely as the expression of another value.

Where to start? For starters Heidegger never wrote "we are creatures of the unreal", nor anything remotely resembling that, and it is obviously intended to be understood as a literal quote. Nor does Heidegger ever discuss "'ought' statements", nor "normative dimension", nor, in fact, anything in this paragraph.

Congratulations to Mr. Elias for winning the prize. He should look into a career in journalism, especially the main stream media, where with his talents he will fit right in.  ¶ 8:28 AM 1 comments

  How difficult is the Contributions? It depends on your expectations. Daniela Vallega-Neu in her essay Poetic Saying puts it like this:

When Contributions to Philosophy first appeared in 1989 after gaving been announced by Otto Pöggeler and Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann as Heidegger's second major wotk after Being and Time, the critical response seemed rather more disappointed than excited. What presented itself to critics was an apparently random collection of repetitive notes, aphorisms, fragments of texts, collections of questions, or lists of words and unfinished sentences that were utterly different from the systematic exposition of Dasein given in Being and Time. And event those sections with longer passages and "complete" sentences are marked by a strange abruptness. The reader finds himself deprived of linking elements providing continuity of thought in a smotth development from one question to the next. No "concepts" are systematically introduced and developed; no didactic considerations are provided. The reader is left alone, without support and eventually exposed to the power of naked words uttering the event of beyng.

    The language of Contributions demands that the reader expose herself to a thinking that does not provide any support for familiar ways of thinking. For those that are not ready to engage in a journey along an unknown path with an uncertain destiny, Contributions must remain a random collection of fragments, a "private language" at most, cryptic in its content and unworthy of being taken seriously.
P. 66

That final phrase could also be read as: "unworthy of being, taken seriously." Is Heidegger not up to the task he earlier assigned to himself? To clear up the problem in B&T's epigraph and raise anew the question of the meaning of being? Many of Heidegger's critics don't even believe there is such a thing as being nor that it is a fit subject for philosophy--that philosophers' discussion of it is brought about by grammatical confusion. Not being taken seriously, being taken lightly, as comedy, also appears in Simon Blackburn's review of the Contributions:

What seems to be random hyphenation further dislocates, or dis-locates, any sense of being at home, or being-at-home, with the words on the page. Sometimes this results in unintended comedy: Heidegger is fond of saying that things we cannot do anything about are thrown at us, and for some pages this leads to talk of a "free-throw," giving the surprising impression that the subject of this metaphysics is basketball.

All joking aside, perhaps what is missing from so many studies of Heidegger and existentialism is comedy. Death and tragedy are well attended to, but no one appears to have examined the lighter aspects being. Plenty has been written about death, anxiety, anguish, and so on, so why has no one done a phenomenology of comedy. Presumably ontology should be behind every aspect of the world, both the tragic and the comedic. There is as much humor in breakdowns of the ready-to-hand as tragedy, if not more. What is slap-stick if not such breakdowns? And reading Ms. Vallega-Neu above, and the Contributions I am inspired to apply the cut-up method to this text, and prepared to be delighted by the unintended juxtapositions of the resulting textual mashup. It is a weakness of contemporary philsophy that it needs to take itself so seriously. The need for gravitas is probably a consequence of the imperiled status of university humanities departments in today's technological world, rather than anything intrinsic to philosophy or to the question of the meaning of being.  ¶ 6:44 AM 0 comments

  In his essay Ereignis, Richard Polt examines Heidegger's use of that term at three different times: the 1919 Kriegsnotsemester, the Contributions, and in the Time and Being lecture. He then summarizes the differences in Heidegger's use of the term.

    In everyday German, any change or motion, any happening, can be called an Ereignis (although, like our "event," the word can hint at a special and unique quality). Heidegger's usages of Ereignis grow increasingly distant from this normal usage.

    In 1919, Ereignis refers to experiences that belong to my own, meaningful life. Such happenings are the norm, whereas objectified, meaningless processes are products of a theoretical attitude that is neither normal nor philosophically necessary. Even the Ereignis of the pre-worldly "something" is an accessible part of human life -- "a basic phenomenon that can be experienced in understanding" (P. 97). Both everyday, worldly events and extraordinary, pre-worldly events illustrate the workings of appropriation in human existence.

    In 1936-38, Ereignis has become far more rare, perhaps even becoming a unique future possibility that has never yet taken place. Now it is life as we know it, at least in its everyday modern state, that is drained of meaning and consigned to the "confusion of unbeings" (GA 65). Only through a supreme effort might we begin to take part in the event of appropriation. Only an extreme emergency can illustrate Ereignis.

    In 1962, Ereignis does not seem to be happening at all. It is a constant aspect of the human condition, even though philosophy up to now has failed to recognize it. Ereignis is already "appropriating" in ancient Greece -- and indeed, wherever and whenever human beings have existed. Far from being an extraordinary emergency, it seems to be a universal.

P. 388

The quote from GA 65 above, appears in the standard translation, in section 2, Saying from Enowning as the First Response to the Question of Being, like this:

We call it enowning. The riches of the turning relation of be-ing to -Da-sein, which is en-owned by be-ing, are immeasurable. The fullness of the enowning is incalculable. And here this inceptual thinking can only say little "from enowning." What is said is inquired after and thought in the "playing-forth" unto each other of the first and other beginning, according to the "echo" of be-ing in the distress of being's abandonment, for the "leap" into be-ing, in order to "ground" its truth, as a preparation for "the ones to come" and for "the last god."

    This thinking-saying is a directive. It indicates the free sheltering of the truth of be-ing in beings as a necessity, without being a command. Such a thinking never lets itself become a doctrine and withdraws totally from the fortuitousness of common opinion. But such thinking-saying directs the few and their knowing awareness when the task is to retrieve man from the chaos of not-beings into the pliancy of a reserved creating of sites that are set up for the passing of the last god.

P. 6

In the first paragraph of his essay Mr. Polt, reasonably, describes the Contributions as "cryptic".  ¶ 6:49 AM 2 comments

  The 2005 Heidegger Studies lists the current state of the Gesamtausgabe and the English translations that are in preparation. They are:

18. Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy (1924)

27. Introduction to Philosophy (1928)

28. German Idealism (1929)

39. Hölderlin's Hymns "Germanien" and "Der Rhein" (1934)

52. Hölderlin's Hymn "Andenken" (1941)

59. Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression (1920)

66. Mindfulness (1938/39)

69. History of Being (1938-40)

77. Feldweg-Gespräche (1944-45)

  ¶ 9:35 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

New on the block: Dasein Ereignis  ¶ 4:35 PM 0 comments

  Second part of extract from Conversation on a Country Path About Thinking, near the end:

Scholar: 'Αγχιβασιη

Scientist: What does it mean?

Scholar: The Greek word translates as "going toward."

Scientist: I regard this word as an excellent name for designating the nature of knowledge; for the charcater of advancing and moving toward objects is strikingly expressed in it.

Scholar: It appeared so to me too. That is also probably why it occurred to me in our first conversation, when we spoke of the action, the achievement, the work inherent in modern scientific knowledge, and, above all, in research.

Scientist: Actually, one could use this Greek word to make clear the fact that scientific research is a kind of attack on nature, but one which nevertheless allows nature to be heard. 'Αγχιβασιη; "going toward": I could think of Heraclitus' word as keyword in an essay on the nature of modern science.

Scholar: For that reason, too, I have hesitated to utter the word at this point; for it does not hit that nature of thinking which we have come to assume along our way.

Scientist: Indeed, waiting is really almost a counter-movement to going toward.

Scholar: Not to say a counter-rest.

Teacher: Or simply rest. Yet has it been definately decided that 'Αγχιβασιη means going toward?

Scholar: Translated literally it says "going near."

Teacher: Perhaps we could think of it also as: "moving-into-nearness."

Scientist: You mean that quite literally in the sense of "letting-oneself-into-nearness"?

Teacher: About that.

Scholar: Then this word might be the name, and perhaps the best name, for what we have found.

Teacher: Which, in its nature, nevertheless, we are still seeking.

Scholar: 'Αγχιβασιη: "moving-into-nearness." The word could rather, so it seems to me now, be the name for our walk today along this country path.

Pp. 88-89

  ¶ 6:54 AM 0 comments

  I looked up Αγχιβασιη in my Liddell and Scott (1940--acquired after much haggling from a used bookstore. They had just returned with boxes from the local libraries' catalog deletion sales. "It's got the library's stamp on the inside cover and it's out of date; almost worthless", I told'em). They have its only occurence as Heraclitus Fragment 122 and the definition as

= amfisbhthsiV

and their definition of that word is

dispute, controversy

Which is a Heraclitean sort of a definition (life is strife, and so on). Now, I don't doubt their definition of amfisbhthsiV because they have a bunch of sources for that, but how do they know it's a synonym for Αγχιβασιη? It's not suggested by the etymology. The prefix Agci- usually means near.  ¶ 9:42 PM 0 comments

  A few weeks ago I posted about Ten Theses on Heidegger by Thomas Sheehan, originally published by Revista de Filosofia in 2003, and nicely summarized on Mormon Metaphysics. There was an earlier version of this paper, Eleven Theses on Heidegger and on Technology, presented at the Thirty-Fifth Heidegger Conference in 2001. And I've heard that another updated version is in preparation.

I thought it might be interesting to compare the 2001 and 2003 versions of the theses to see what changed between versions. The original eleven theses were:

1. Heidegger's focal topic is not das Sein des Seienden.

2. Heidegger's focal topic is what makes possible such "is" or being.

3. Heideggerians should abandon the word "being" as a marker for die Sache selbst.

4. Being/"is" occurs only as the sense of entities.

5. Being/"is"/sense occurs only in and with Da-sein, the open-that-we-are.

6. In one formulation die Sache selbst is human finitude, the lack that generates and is the open.

7. In another formulation die Sache selbst is the apriori openedness (Geworfenheit, Ereignetsein) of the open-that-we-are, which makes possible all takings-as and occurrences of "is."

8. In yet another formulation die Sache selbst is Ereignis, the opening of the open.

9. What Heidegger calls Seinsvergessenheit is the forgottenness not of being but of what makes being possible.

10. The intrinsically hidden lack that is responsible for the apriori openedness of the open also guarantees an in-principle infinity of takings-as and givings-of-being (Geschicke des Seins).

11. The in-principle infinity of takings-as and givings-of-being also makes possible unlimited global technology.

Glossary:
Geschicke des Seins: fate of beings.
die Sache selbst: the things themselves.
Seinsvergessenheit: forgottenness of being.
Geworfenheit: throwness.
Ereignetsein: being enowned.
Sein des Seienden: being or beings.

Although both sets of theses emphasize that what Heidegger is on about is not being per se, but rather what makes being possible, by 2003 Sheehan has focused in on that what, and is explicitly calling it openness, or Welt/Lichtung/Da. I'm finding that other writers today also agree that, in principle, Heidegger was on about the grounds or foundation of being and not about being itself. That was not the case earlier; witness all those Heidegger guides that twist themselves into knots trying to explain what is "being" and why it is so important.

Perhaps the most controversial thesis, in both, is the final one about unlimited technology. It's part of the general correction that must be made to the perception that Heidegger is anti-technology. Although he was certainly not a technophile, he was not against technology in itself. His general warning about technology was to not allow technological thinking to become the only form of thinking for man, and to instead always attend to the other, non-technological, ways of thinking.  ¶ 8:13 PM 0 comments

  First part of extract from Conversation on a Country Path About Thinking, near the end:

Scholar: [...] I know a word which up to now seemed to me appropriate to name the nature of thinking and so of knowing.

Scientist: I would like to hear this word.

Scholar: It is a word which had occurred to me as early as out first conversation. I had this in mind when I remarked at the beginning of today's conversation that I owed a valuable suggestion to our first conversation on a country path. Several times in the course of today's conversation, I was about to propose this word; but each time it seemed to fit less what neared us as the nature of thinking.

Scientist: You talk mysteriously about this thought of yours. It is as if you didn't want to reveal your discovery too soon.

Scholar: The word I have in mind was not my discovery; it is merely a scholarly thought.

Scientist: And thus, if I may say so, an historical reminder?

Scholar: If you want to put it that way. Also it would have suited well the style of today's conversation, for in the course of it we often threw in words and sentences from Greek thought. But now this word no longer suits what we are attempting to name by a single word.

Teacher: You mean the nature of thinking (that in-dwelling releasement to that-which-regions) which is the essentially human relation to that-which regions, something we presage as the nearness of distance.

Scientist: Even if the word is no longer suitable, you might divulge it to us at the end of our conversation; for we again near human habitation, and in any case, must break off our discussion.

Teacher: And even if this word, earlier esteemed by you as a valuable suggestion, is no longer suitable, it could make clear to us that meanwhile we have come to confront something ineffable.

Scholar: This word is Heraclitus' word.

Scientist: From which fragment did you take it?

Scholar: This word struck me because it stands alone. It is that word, which, all by itself, constitutes Fragment 122.

Scientist: I don't know this shortest of Heraclitus' Fragments.

Scholar: It is scarcely noticed by others either, because one can hardly do anything with a single word.

Scientist: How does the fragment read?

Scholar: 'Αγχιβασιη

PP. 87-88

Continued.  ¶ 6:57 PM 0 comments

  One of the earliest translations of Heidegger's works appeared in Walter Kaufmann's collection Existentialism From Dostoevsky to Sartre in 1956, the introduction added to the 5th printing (1949) of What is Metaphysics?, entitled The Way Back Into The Ground of Metaphysics. In it, Heidegger describes what he means by ontotheology.

Metaphysics states what beings are as beings. It offers a λόγος (statement) about the (ὄντα) (beings). The later title "ontology" chracterizes its nature, provided, of course, that we understand it in accordance with its true significance and not through its narrow scholastic meaning. Metaphysics moves in the sphere of the ὄν ῃ ὄν: it deals with beings as beings. In this manner, metaphysics always represents beings as such in their totality; it deals with the beingness of beings (the οὐσία of the ὄν). But metaphysics represents the beingness of beings [die Seiendheit des Seienden] in a twofold manner: in the first place, the totality of beings as such with an eye to their most universal traits (ὄν καθόλου κοινόν;) but at the same time also the totality of beings as such in the sense of the highest and therefore divine being (ὄν καθόλου, ἀκρότατον, θεῖον). In the metaphysics of Aristotle, the unconcealedness of beings as such has specifically developed in this twofold manner. (Cf. Met. Γ, Ε, Κ.)

Because metaphysics represents beings as beings, it is two-in-one, the truth of beings in their universality and in the highest being. According to its nature, it is at the same time ontology in the narrower sense and theology. This onto-theological nature of philosophy proper (πρώτη φιλοσοφια) is, no doubt, due to the way in which the ὄν opens up in it, namely as ὄν.

Pp. 217-218

So, if ontology is the study of beings, ontotheology is concerned with what makes beings possible, the ground or fundament of ontology--the open in which beings appear.  ¶ 6:37 AM 0 comments

  The only appearance of "almosting it" in James Joyce's Ulysses, Episode 3, Proteus:

After he woke me last night same dream or was it? Wait. Open hallway. Street of harlots. Remember. Haroun al Raschid. I am almosting it. That man led me, spoke. I was not afraid. The melon he had he held against my face. Smiled: creamfruit smell. That was the rule, said. In. Come. Red carpet spread. You will see who.

Haroun al Raschid was the Caliph that Shahrazad entertained for 1001 nights.  ¶ 9:31 PM 0 comments

  Heraclitus Fragment 122, in its entirety:

Agcibasih

This word occurs nowhere else in the extant ancient Greek texts.  ¶ 8:01 AM 0 comments

  From an interview with the artist Anselm Kiefer earlier this month in Le Monde:

You speak of your chaos. While your work gives one the opposite feeling of extreme coherence.

I am full of contradictions and every work is the result of a struggle between the different parts of me, a war in my head. When you say my work is coherent, this may be true. But, that which my work feeds on, life, that goes differently. If it didn't go differently, there would be no need to create. Do you believe there is a great coherence between the work of Heidegger--that of a great philosopher--and his life, that of a man with an execrable character? When Celan, who admired his books, visited him, he was devasted by the man he discovered. Contradiction is everywhere. This is why man indefinitely seeks to rebuild a place where he can feel in peace, in order to escape his own chaos.

Any translation errors are entirely my fault. Please send me corrections.  ¶ 6:09 PM 0 comments

  Lee Smolin has an interesting article on Einstein's legacy where he cites the moral quality of Einstein's thinking. I found this especially thought provoking:

In the transition from Aristotle to Newton to special relativity, that structure changed, but in each case the structure remained fixed. We and everything that we observe live in a space-time, with fixed and unchanging properties. That is the stage on which we play, but nothing we do or could do affects the structure of space and time themselves.

General relativity is not about adding to those structures. It is not even about substituting those structures for a list of possible new structures. It rejects the whole idea that space and time are fixed at all. Instead, in general relativity the properties of space and time evolve dynamically in interaction with everything they contain. Furthermore, the essence of space and time now are just a set of relationships between events that take place in the history of the world. It is sufficient, it turns out, to speak only of two kinds of relationships: how events are related to each other causally (the order in which they unfold) and how many events are contained within a given interval of time, measured by a standard clock (how quickly they unfold relative to each other).

Thus, in general relativity there is no fixed framework, no stage on which the world plays itself out. There is only an evolving network of relationships, making up the history of space, time, and matter. All the previous theories described space and time as fixed backgrounds on which things happen. The point of general relativity is that there is no background.

This point is subtle and elusive.

It's a point that helped me to better understand the mechanics behind the Inflation Theory of the early universe.  ¶ 7:59 AM 1 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Scott Dodge for nobody on Catholics and evolution:

[W]hile Catholics can accept variations in life on earth as random in the sense of being unpredictable, no variations can be considered by Catholics as unguided and unplanned. Biologists and other scientists work hard to explain how life on earth originated and evolved. However, it is beyond the competency of science to tell us why, to paraphrase Heidegger, there are things rather than no things.

This is brought on by Cardinal Schonborn's recent comments on evolution. It seems to me that there's more subtlety here than most scientists and proponents of so-called Intelligent Design grasp, and it's certainly outside journalism's scope to explain. Newspapers are limited to reporting many opinions, but this blog post helps separate the science from the theology. To me that indicates that while blogs won't replace news services, they can provide a forum for thoughts beyond journalism's purview.  ¶ 10:47 PM 4 comments

  Dipping into Michael Inwood's Dictionary I came across this description of Dasein from GA 49:

Man is not transferred as Da-sein into an open realm as a pair of shoes is placed before the door of a room; as Da-sein man is the wandering abandonment into the open, whose openness and lighting is the world.

GA 49 contains the untranslated lectures from 1941 on Schelling and German Idealism.  ¶ 9:03 PM 0 comments

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Sub Specie Aeternitatis on the excluded middle BS:

How would one defend philosophers like Hegel or Heidegger from the charge that their writings are bullshit? Not, Cohen says, by showing that they cared about the truth (which would be enough to get them off the hook if they were charged with being bullshitters under Frankfurt's definition). Rather, one would try to show that their writings actually made some sense. And how could one prove the opposite: that a given statement is hopelessly unclear, and hence bullshit? One proposed test is to add a "not" to the statement and see if that makes any difference to its plausibility. If it doesn't, that statement is bullshit. As it happens, Heidegger once came very close to doing this himself. In the fourth edition of his treatise "What Is Metaphysics?" (1943), he asserted, "Being can indeed be without beings." In the fifth edition (1949), this sentence became "Being never is without beings."

Either it depends on differenciating between "can be" and "is", or, well, BS happens.  ¶ 7:43 PM 0 comments

  Brian Leiter is a chair at a university in Texas and a critic of book reviews. I last heard of him in a book review in The Economist:

A while ago [Mr. Leiter] hit on a solution to the question of how to rank philosophy departments. Defining and measuring philosophical output is a challenge, to put it mildly. Mr Leiter's answer was to ask philosophers themselves which departments were best. Out of their answers, after a statistical working-over, he built a league table, which he regularly updates. It is called the Philosophical Gourmet and you can see it on the web.

Although plenty of philosophers consult the Gourmet, it makes others of them cringe. Two years ago close on 300, including some from top-ranked New York University and Rutgers, wrote an open letter complaining that Mr Leiter's table measured reputation, not excellence, and that it was driving good students away from middle-rank colleges in a race for the top.

This resulted in Mr. Leiter's petulant letter to the Economist, which they sadly no longer carry, but there is a Leiter Reports websites for those that can't get enough of Mr. Leiter's bruised ego and self-apotheosis. I had a look at the Philosophical Gourmet and as far as I can tell, the intersection between what it and I consider philosophy is almost an empty set. Well, to each his own. Our differing understandings of what is philosophy being like the difference between the term metaphysics as understood by bookstores and by someone who knows what they are on about:

“Where is your philosophy section?” you ask.

“It’s all philosophy. Anything specific?” says the shaggy haired weirdo at the counter.

“Anything on metaphysics?”

“All these are metaphysical books. This is a metaphysical bookstore. Any authors come to mind?”

“Edmund Husserel or Martin Heidegger?

“Who are they?”

But we digress.

Yesterday, Mr. Leiter had a go at William Vollmann's review of the Curtis Cate's biography of Nietzsche:

Although Curtis Cate's biography of Nietzsche appeared nearly two years ago, just today the Times has run a lengthy review of the book by the writer and novelist William Vollman, who, best I can tell, has no expertise in the subject, and who certainly displays none in the review.

Hmmm, the biography was published in 2005. What the heck, appearances deceive. Perhaps two years is how long Mr. Leiter has been trying to get someone to publish his review.

Now, I pointed out once, on the occasion of Mr. Leiter's disparaging remarks following the death of Derrida, that there was some hint of jealously because Derrida was a successful writer--you can walk into a bookstore and find his books--and Mr. Leiter is not. I suspect much the same is behind Mr. Leiter's remarks about Vollmann. And Vollmann can also write well enough to live from the proceeds. Now he's not the easiest weriter to read, and his themes can be harsh--I don't think I'd let my daughter date Mr. Vollmann--, but a dozen his books sit on my shelves. Onwards to Mr. Leiter's critique of the review.

Our first hint that Mr. Vollmann is well out of his depth comes early on, when he praises Cate's summary of "the relevant aspects of Schopenhauer, Aristotle and others by whom Nietzsche was influenced and against whom he reacted."

Aristotle?

Many figures from antiquity--Thales, Thucydides, Socrates, Plato, Phyrro--loom large for Nietzsche (as both targets and inspirations), but as every serious student of Nietzsche knows, Aristotle is notable for his almost total absence from the corpus. There are a mere handful of explicit references to Aristotle in Nietzsche's writings (even in the unpublished notebooks), and no extended discussion of the kind afforded Plato or Thales. And apart from some generally superficial speculations in the secondary literature about similarities between Aristotle's "great-souled man" and Nietzsche's idea of the "higher" or "noble" man--similarities nowhere remarked upon by Nietzsche himself--there is no scholarship supporting the idea that Aristotle is a significant philosopher for Nietzsche in any respect.

Phyrro? Is he serious? The other difference between Mr. Vollmann and Mr. Leiter, is that apparently Mr. Vollmann--who, to be honest, is a know-it-all poly-math type--knows more about philosophy than Mr. Leiter. If we look up Nietzsche in the encyclopedia we find in the second paragraph:

In addition to the influence of Greek culture, particularly the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle,...

No mention of Phyrro there, mind you. And when I fetch Nietzsche's lectures on Rhetoric from my library, I find that the lecture course consists of Nietzsche comparing what Aristotle had to say on the subject to other classical writer's remarks. Really, how can one begin to understand Nietzsche's contributions to metaphysics and his Will To Power without Aristotle's Metaphysics? "No scholarship", eh? Trying reading Nietzsche! Or not. A wise man once said:

From all that has been suggested, it should be clear that one cannot read Nietzsche in a haphazard way; that each one of his writings has its own character and limits; and that the most important works and labors of his thought, which are contained in his posthumous writings, make demands to which we are not equal. It is advisable, therefore, that you postpone reading Nietzsche for the time being, and first study Aristotle for ten to fifteen years.

--Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, Lecture VI

To cap off this inanity, one finds that Mr. Leiter is the author of several books on Nietzsche. Books which, I expect, his students probably had to buy (Amazon.com Sales Rank: #589,078). And no one asked him for his learned opinion on this biography (sniff, snivel)!

He concludes:

The public culture in the United States is debased enough that one might be forgiven for entertaining the modest hope that a high-profile review of a book on a philosopher might be written by someone who knows something about the philosopher and his philosophy.

But perhaps Sartre is right, and we must live without hope.

Looking at Mr. Leiter's picture on the faculty web page, one appreciates where that hopelessness originates, and reading his misinformed remarks, one understands that, as they say in the great state of Texas, he is all chair and no philosophy.  ¶ 10:28 PM 8 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Etika in an interview with Norris Clarke asks:

Dr. Rosario: You are best known for your work on St. Thomas Aquinas. Could you tell us what you find attractive in the thought of this medieval thinker who appears mainly to have been ignored by Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger?

I can't vouch for the others, but Heidegger did lecture about Aquinas, and the place of essentia and existentia in the history of ontology.  ¶ 12:08 PM 1 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Open Texture explains Why AI Won't Work:

So here's where I do my best to explain another pestilent European philosopher. Martin Heidegger wrote in dense, obscure prose about things that have become the cliche image of philosophers, like "what is the meaning of being?" To make this terribly simple, Heidegger was arguing against some of the most basic and fundemental assumptions of the last 2000 years of philosophy.

And the explanation that follows about that pest is challenged by chronology and more, but for certain audiences it pays to be simplistic. Think TV.  ¶ 11:58 AM 3 comments

  A Heidegger community on LiveJournal.  ¶ 10:49 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Exploded View has some good stuff on the clearing and Plato's cave.

Heidegger's entdecken, comes from the Germanic word dick, which means thicket and also thick. "Ent-" serves the word like our English "un". Entdecken is the un-thicket-ing, or un-thicken-ing. Entdecken is to allow passage through the thicket, entdecken is the moment of aporia, the moment of penetration and thinking the clearing.

  ¶ 10:33 PM 2 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Solipsism For The Masses speculates on Heidegger's take on Nietzsche. Some of the details are new to me, and I should follow up.

The metaphysical claim being made by Heidegger-Nietzsche is that reality consists in Process and Becoming, not in the static absolute Being that exists only because our minds need something to hold on to in mid stream. Things continually emerge into being. The activity of our senses (itself a practice of art) continually discloses things.

The piece emphasizes where they agreed more than their differences, but is perhaps more informative that way. Read the whole thing.  ¶ 10:18 PM 0 comments

  A letter to Red Nova on the limits of the scientific approach, and how experiments disrupt theories, points out that:

In Heideggerian terms, violent assaults by the world of empirical practice on our culturally conditioned notions of abstract theorizing as a comfortable mode of human existence will decenter the scientific subject at his or her core. These jolts must generate ontic anxiety that cannot be anticipated in advance by the authoritative pronouncements of agenda-setting peer conferences or assuaged after the fact by the nostrum of consensual fiat.

This ontic anxiety is itself a byproduct or side effect of the ontological limitations the scientific theorizing, and the typical lack of awareness of those limitations, evident by the Platonism espoused by so many scientists. That said, those who study Heidegger are not immune themselves to the effects of agenda-setting peer conferences or consensual fiat. Dasein's only human, after all.  ¶ 8:25 AM 0 comments

  There's a new Heidegger blog in German, Phainomena.

No surprises there, seems appropriate and all. Even a little surprising that I haven't come across more. What does surprise me from Technorati searches is the number of blog posts in Portuguese and Spanish that mention Heidegger.  ¶ 7:10 AM 0 comments

  Ork! Ork!

At right is a group of philosophers engaged in a typical quest for truth. In this instance, the question is Heidegger's: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" It is obvious that questions of this form cannot be answered by sitting at home in a chair before the fireplace.

Indeed, one must seek the answer out in the open.  ¶ 10:39 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Printfreak has a piece by Misa Nikolic on Heidegger and printmaking as a craft.  ¶ 10:36 PM 0 comments

  Google has been scanning library books, OCRing and indexing their content, and making them searchable on the web. This very useful service is at print.google.com. Sadly, they've suspended it for now.

[A] trade group representing publishers said Friday the action falls far short in stopping what it sees as massive copyright violations on the part of the search-engine giant.
...
[Google] says it has the legal right to go into a public library and copy books, as long as it doesn't make copyrighted material available online. With copyrighted works, the company only makes bibliographic information and a few short sentences of text around each search term available, unless it has permission to show more.

I was wondering when publishers would complain.

Publishers have been complaining about their mounting woes for years. University presses have been cutting back their catalogues as their parent institutions push them to become profitable, or at least loose less money. Flipping through the university press catalogs it's not difficult to see why they lose money, as it's hard to imagine the audiences for many of the books published. Most books are either too specialized or too expensive to sell more than a few copies. Especially when one hears that libraries are spending more on providing internet access than on purchasing books for their collections. With publishers having to guess the potential markets for each book, over-estimating, and ending up with warehouses full of unsellable books it all seems like an archaic way to go about things. I expect academic publishing may return to subscription publishing (only doing a print run when enough buyers have asked for a specific book) or embrace printing on demand.

The Google service is wonderful, allowing one to search libraries full of books just like one can search the internet. Despite the publishers' fears I suspect that potential buyers will discover more books pertinent to their interests through online indexes than they ever could by searching card catalogs or shelves, and then only if they had physical access to a library.

But beyond publishers' fears of lost sales, I wonder what Google's service will mean for authors that want specific retrictions placed on their texts. For example, Heidegger did not want his books published with indexes. He wanted his readers to read entire texts, and not simply look-up and read the bits containing specific indexed words. Yet today many of his works are indexed by Google. I like it because even if I've read a text, many times I want to find a passage, and a full-text search is usually much faster than thumbing through the book. And it's not like Heidegger texts don't include excerpts from earlier philosophers themselves. Still I wonder if the Heidegger estate has a case to make. Beyond the fair-use argument between Google and the publishers, should authors' wishes or stipulations regarding the indexing of their works be respected?  ¶ 9:51 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Sub Specie Æternitatis today provides us with William Vollmann's review of Curtis Cate's biography of Nietzsche, appearing in the NYTimes on Sunday.

Heidegger is onto something when he advises us that philosophy can be possessed "most purely in the form of a persistent question," and that "Nietzsche's procedure, his manner of thinking in the execution of the new valuation, is perpetual reversal," perhaps like life itself, not to mention Heidegger's own devoted explications of Nietzsche.

Heidegger certainly had his own persistent question.  ¶ 9:35 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Philosophia, the blog, on A Phenomenological Interpretation of Dr. John Dewey's Views on Education.

Although the methodology of Heidegger who used phenomenological method of investigation differs from the method of scientific inquiry employed by Dr John Dewey, the synthesis of their efforts can be achieved. The aim is to study and organize Dr John Dewey's knowledge in the categories formulated by Heidegger.

  ¶ 7:40 AM 0 comments

  Ten Theses on Heidegger

From Thomas Sheehan's paper Being, Opened-ness, and Unlimited Technology.

1. Das Sein = das "ist"

a. The guiding question (Leitfrage) of Western metaphysics is the question about the being of entities, das Sein des Seienden. But the being of entities is the "is" of entities -- in Heidegger's words, "das ist, d.h. das Sein" or as William J. Richardson puts it, "the Is of what-is." "Being" shows up only as what, that, and how an entity is (das Was-sein, Wie-sein, Daß-sein des Seienden). It is also called the "is-ness" of what-is, die Seiendheit des Seienden (GA 9, 260.6-7).

b. For Heidegger, however, unlike the classical tradition of metaphysics, Sein or ist is not an ontic characteristic of entities in themselves and does not occur on its own-apart from human beings. To be sure, Sein/ist is always the "being/is" of an entity. But in Heidegger's phenomenological view, such "being" appears only within a human enactment of legein (= hermeneuein, Seinsverständnis), a synthetic-differential act of taking-an-entity-as (ti kata tinos legein = etwas auf etwas entwerfen). The orginal manifestation of Sein or ist occurs as the "as" of anact of taking-something-as. In theorectical objectivity we take an entity as this-or-that; in practical engagement we take the tool as-suitable-for a task. Thereby, whether thematically or unthematically, we understand that the entity is this-or-that, and that the tool is for a certain purpose. Only in this way do we know an entity's "being".

c. Heidegger, both early and late, holds that "being" is phenomenological. It occurs only in a synthetic-differential act of taking-as; only as the what-ness, how-ness, and that-ness of the entities we encounter; and only as the sense or meaningfulness of those entities. To say "This entity is ..." is to say that this entity "makes-sense-as." Das Sein = das Anwesen-als = die Bedeutsamkeit [sc., des Seienden].

Glossary:
legein: to say, or to gather.
hermeneuein: to interpret.
Seinsverständnis: understanding of being.
Anwesen-als: being present as.
Bedeutsamkeit: meaningfulness.

[Thesis 2]  ¶ 1:39 PM 1 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Shane Wilkins while beefing about Barth:

The line between theology and philosophy is quite a bit more porous than I used to think. Heidegger said that his theology would never use the word Being, but it is not clear to me that one can have a discourse about anything, God included, without reference to the concept of Being. Nor does it seem to me that all theology which reference being is 'ontotheological' in the sense that Heidegger rightly criticizes.

I need to track down criticisms of ontotheology before reviewing Iain Thomson's new book, but I'd have suspected that any theology which references being in a significant way to be ontotheological by definition. I recall somewhere Heidegger directing criticisms towards philosophers, who were accused of engaging in ontotheology.  ¶ 7:51 AM 0 comments

  Sergio Troncoso's The Nature of Truth is a campus crime novel whose characters uncover past transgressions, engage in discrimination and harassment, and rationalize brutality to themselves. After a professor of German literature is murdered, his former lover recalls their first meeting:

"Our paths truly crossed at the Heidegger symposium. These lectures are so exciting. You hear people from all around the world. I asked a question, I've read some Heidegger. but I don't know that much. This claptrap about being-in-the-world makes me dizzy. But I thought the speaker was being too hard on Heidegger. The fellow struck me as an arrogant dolt. He was French. Need I say more? I asked him why he was connecting Heidegger's connection with Nazism to his political philosophy. I'd just been to Amadeus--wasn't that F. Murray Abraham fantastic?--and in my mind, the point of it was that despicable people often create wonderful things. Why should we attack the great music or literature or theory of a worm because he was a worm? I didn't put it quite like that. But the French professor answered with a flourish I didn't understand. Werner Hopfgartner asked the next question and, like a bulldog, wouldn't let the French bastard waltz free! Werner was terrific! Much more sophisticated and precise than I was. It was a wonder to watch him press Mr. Europa with points about 'the nature of philosophical truth' and its flying free of its originator to stand on its own. It was truly exciting. They went at it for a while, quoting arguments and philosophers as if they were flinging arrows at each other."

  ¶ 9:44 PM 0 comments

  Ten Theses on Heidegger

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

a. Heidegger designates the basic question about his focal topic (= die Grundfrage that pursues die Sache selbst) as die Frage nach dem Sein selbst or nach dem Sein als solches. This question moves beyond the Leitfrage (which asks what/how/that entities are and what the highest entity is) as well as beyond all takings-as in which such "being" occurs. The Grundfrage asks what it is that makes possible all such takings-as and thus all instances of "being."

b. If "being" shows up only in a Seinsverständnis, Heidegger's central topic is "die Bedingung der Möglichkeit des Seinsverständnisses" (GA 24, 405.12-13).

{the condition of the possibility of its understanding}

c. If "being" is the is-ness, we ascribe to entities, Heidegger is after what allows for such ascribed is-ness: "Grund und Zulassung der Seiendheit" (GA 68, 51.5).

{Reason and permission of the beingness}
d. If "being" is the presence/accessibility of entities, Heidegger asks how such presence/accessibility comes about" "Die Frage, inwiefern es Anwesenheit als solche geben kann" (SD 77.17-18).

{Reason and permission of the beingness}

e. If "being" is the manifestness/availability of entities, Heidegger's focal topic is the prior possibilizing of that manifestness/availability: "die vorgängige Ermöglichung der Offenbarkeit von Seiendem" (GA 9, 114.26-27).

{the previous making possible the obviousness of what there is}
or
{The a priori enabling of the open disclosure of beings}

I'm not terribly confident with my {translations} above. Please add comments with better renderings and I'll update them.

Glossary:
die Sache selbst: the things themselves.
Grundfrage: basic question.
Seinsverständnis: understanding of being.

[Thesis 3]  ¶ 8:46 PM 2 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Pantagruel on the difference in physis between Heidegger and Strauss.

[T]hinking based on ideas does not lead to the disjunction of being and thinking as Heidegger thinks. On the contrary, only through ideas, the unity of the perfect knower and the perfect known becomes possible, since ideas, the high, are beyond the difference between knower and known. I shall mention here, like Heidegger, Strauss also disagrees the function of language, but his new way for the knower to realize the known is a kind of speechless thinking, a genuine thinking, not Heidegger’s waiting for and apprehending the revelation of Being.

Interesting idea, speechless thinking, but how to communicate it?  ¶ 3:11 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Enlightenment / Aufklärung / Les Lumières quotes from a Nietzsche lecture to show that:

Martin Heidegger clearly raised the specter of unenlightened commitment to commerce, trade, consumerism at the neglect of human value and integrity.

Quite so. That's why we only commit ourselves only to enlightened consumerism. There is no specter haunting this clearing. Sheltering and concealing, OK, but there's no ghost in the machination.  ¶ 8:01 AM 0 comments

  The Da is the opening in the Zollikon Seminars:

In the philosophical tradition, the term "Dasein" means presence-at-hand, existence. In this sense, one speaks, for instance, of proofs of God's existence. However, Da-sein is understood differently in Being and Time. To begin with, French existentialists alos failed to pay attention to it. That is why they translated Da-sein in Being and Time as être-lá, which mean being here [spatial adverb] and not there [pronoun; e.g. there is]. The Da in Being and Time does not mean a statement of place for a being, but rather it should designate the openness where beings can be present for the human being, and the human being also for himself. The Da of [Dasein's] being distinguishes the humanness of the human being.
P. 120

And thus also the clearing.

How is the "there" [da] then determined as "the open"? This openness has the character of space as well. Spatiality [Räumlichkeit] belongs to the clearing [Lichtung]--to the open in which we, as existing beings, [naturally] sojourn in such a way that we are not expressly related to space as space in any way.

The being-in-space of a untensil cannot be reduced to the spatiality of "being-there" (Da-sein). Yet, the reverse is impossible as well. Both spatiality and temporality belong to the clearing. Space and time belong together, but one does not know how. Now how about consciousness? To stand in the clearing does not mean that the human being stands in the light like a pole does. Rather, human Da-sein (being-there) is sojourning [sich aufhalten] in the clearing and "concerns itself with" [beschäftigt mit] things.
P. 144

And where is it when it's not sojourning in the clearing?  ¶ 10:35 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

NRDC Action Fund Blog on the uncertainty of watching frogs:

I watched him for a long time, to see if the rhythm would slow when he was less alarmed, but watching a wild animal is like the Heidegger's principle - by watching them you change them, so I've never found out whether or not the pulse would slow.

Easy mistake to make that. They both start with H, both German, same party affiliation.  ¶ 10:14 PM 1 comments

  The Da is the clearing in the Contributions:

Correctness as interpretation of what is open becomes the basis for the subject-object-relation.

But insofar as the one who re-presents re-presents itself to itself, this standing out is merely repeated and taken back unto this self--and that remains dissembled which distinguishes Da-sein, namely to be the t/here [Da], the clearing for the sheltering-concealing, in the inabiding of selfhood as grounding the truth into beings.
P. 222

  ¶ 9:16 PM 2 comments

  The open Da in the Contributions:

Projecting-open is the between [Zwischen] in whose openness a being and being-ness become differentiatable, so much so that at first only a being itself is experienceable (i.e., a being as sheltered-concealed as such and thus with respect to its beingness). Merely going over to essence as idea mistakes the projecting-open, as well as the appeal to the necessary pre-givenness of a "being".
P. 228

205. The Open
From the perspective of correctness, [the open] is indicated only as condition and is thus not ensprung in itself.
    The open:
as the free of the keenness of creating,
as what is unprotected in the execution of throwness; both in themselves belonging together as the clearing of self-sheltering-concealing.
    The t/here [Da] as en-owned in enowning.
    This free [reigns] over against beings. [It is] what is unprotected by beings. [It is] the free-play of time-space of chaos and of hints. What belongs to be-ing.
P. 230

  ¶ 9:05 PM 0 comments

  Ten Theses on Heidegger

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

a. The "as" of taking-an-entity-as underlies all instances of the "is" that we wscribe to the entity. In turn, what underlies the "as" of such taking-as are the human concerns that make an entity interesting, relevant, and significant, whether those concerns be practical, theoretical, aesthetic, or whatever.

b. Heidegger calls the realm of such concerns and interests "the world" or "the clearing" or "the open" (Welt = Lichtung = das Da). None of these titles refers to the "being of entities" or to "being itself." They refer, rather, to what makes possible all taking-as and hence all instances of "being."

[Thesis 4]  ¶ 7:43 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Ghost in the Wire on Mediation qua temporality and the problem of representation:

Heidegger's purpose in Being and Time is not just to think the essence of Being through the facticity of time, it is also to force a rethinking of time that is not beholden to its vulgar/technical reduction to quanta. That such a project is thinkable at all implies that technics cannot control entirely the experience of time. But criticism wedded to representation can never approach the temporal affects of media time, because such critical acts always already map the atemporal logic of representation (in this case, a symbolic logic) upon the more complicated temporalities of the act of presencing.

Yeah.  ¶ 6:34 AM 0 comments