enowning
Sunday, October 30, 2005
 
In-der-Blog-sein

Pangrammaticon collates two quotes from Ezra Pound and Heidegger that hint about metaphysics and man.

However, I couldn't find that quote in B&T, but I did find this one:
Dasein is an entity which is in each case I myself; its Being is in each case mine.
Heidegger calls this just a (formal?) indication, and then tries to seperate this Being, the "I", that is Dasein, from the Cartesian subject, gazing out into a world of objects, as is the case with metaphysics. To wit:
It could be that the "who" of everyday Dasein just is not the "I myself".
P. 150
As Jean Grodin indicates:
[W]ithout this opening, this fulguration of Being would not take place. However, man does not control this fulguration. He is there (hence the term Da-sein), he belongs to it, for he himself is a sudden emergence, a rest-less unfolding in the opening of the present. This is Heidegger's fundamental experience.
P. 26
That fulguration of being, of course, being enowning.
 
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
 
In-der-Blog-sein

In a post on Politics and Ontology Critical Reports, the blog, Chris provides us with notes from his intro to B&T class:
Heidegger’s next task is to determine the ontic-ontological priority of the question of Being. What this means essentially is that Heidegger’s ontology sets the clarification of the meaning of Being as its “fundamental task,” but also that it is necessarily a priority even in ways of “dealing with beings” that don’t “raise the ontological question,”
Which makes sense once you understand it. But I did spend years wandering about in the dark before getting to an “average comprehensibility”, which leads one to wonder from what set of what that average is calculated. Later you comprehend the average is not calculated.
 
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
 
I'm simply delighted to hear the news coming from the ID trial in Harrisburg: Sociologist urges that theory be aired. Apparently all high school students will be required to learn Intelligent Dasein.
 
Monday, October 24, 2005
 
Heather Mallick in the Canadian 'zine Rabble let's us know that food it the new drug:
I have written about this before, as it seems to explain an increasing number of things in our lives. American literary theorist Avital Ronell was the first to use it, although she bows to Heidegger, and who doesn't, I ask.
Quite. This weekend I was reading about obscene language in Attic comedy and it turns that that to bow to someone is to...Well, in the interest of promoting the family status of this blog, you'll have to intuit that, or read the book.
 
Sunday, October 23, 2005
 
Martin answers question on cars, life, and chicks, in H2SO4's Dear Heidegger feature. More here.
 
 
In-der-Blog-sein

42, the blog, on the vector of the projecting-open:
So, what if we really are projecting ourselves out in this fashion into this Nothingness that will become our future? Well, initially, the prospect had me rather concerned, and I thought that projection was, in fact, a very poor choice of words on Heidegger’s part, especially for one so clearly conscious of the impact of linguistic connotation. After all, if we live by projecting, we live as mere shadows of ourselves, it would seem. This hardly seems an authentic and fully expressive mode of Being.

What I realize in writing this, however, is that there is also a certain brutal truth in the very nature of projecting that I didn’t consider. While our future selves, our projections, are completely dissimilar from the past/present selves we project from, this doesn’t make them any lesser in existence. In fact, to accept this continuous process is to realize that life is a one-way, irreversible journey.
It's not a thrown-project without a reason.
 
Saturday, October 22, 2005
 
In-der-Blog-sein

ThinkBlog on the meanings of "World" for Heidegger:
Dasein relates to the world through apprehending its Things which are ready-at-hand, as Heidegger says. The importance of the world in all its senses is, for Heidegger, not so much the Kantian things-in-themselves or the actual (ontical) entities; rather, it is the significance of these Things insofar as they are beneficial to the Dasein's Being-in-the-world.
 
Friday, October 21, 2005
 
In-der-Blog-Sein

Goats and other things.... on the pensive look:
Philosophy professor Karsten Harries teaches Chris in a class entitled Being and Time and Being-on-Time: The Poetics of Punctuality in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit and is more than impressed with Chris's classroom demeanor. "I can't tell you how refreshing it is to look up from one's lecture notes and find a student out there in that sea of faces who is so completely engaged," professor Harries stated.
Ork! Ork!
 
 
In-der-Blog-sein

Full-Tilt Boogie has an interview with Hubert Dreyfus about his life's work. I found this bit, which appeals to Descartes to reinforce a point, a tad ironic.
I don’t understand anything about computers. They were always criticizing me that “He doesn’t even know how to program a computer,” which I don’t. But, I knew what the essence of computers was and that’s what was important – the way they had bits of data and followed rules to organize those data into representations. Descartes said you don’t have to know computers to know that.
 
 
In-der-Blog-sein

Transcendental Philosophy and Naturalism has a review of a paper by
Mark Wrathall, "Transcendental Philosophy Must Die": Heidegger's Task of Thinking and His Critique of Transcendental Philosophy. Unfortunately access to the paper itself is restricted from hoi polloi digitalloi, but the post does a god job of summarizing its main points.
According to Wrathall, Heidegger's critique of transcendental philosophy (so conceived) takes the following form: (i) Transcendental philosophy has an inadequate conception of man as consciousness, ego, etc. (ii) Transcendental philosophy has too narrow a conception of experience and of the understanding.
 
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
 
There's an article in a German periodical on Giorgio Agamben, the latest "follower" of Heidegger to engage in a bit of the old épater les bourgeois--putting the boot into the establishment.
Agamben's fidelity to Heidegger is absolute. Until now it was difficult in Germany to use Heidegger for subversive purposes. What stood in the way was not only Heidegger's compromised Nazi past, but also his provincial cultural conservatism. The Frankfurt School was unconditional in its rejection of the Freiburg prophet of being. But now all this is history: a Heideggerian has become anarchy's new darling.
I wonder, do anarchists agree on something, besides no government, and agreeing to disagree?

I haven't got around to reading Agamben yet. And reading this article, that's just as well. But then anyone who annoys the establishment can't be all bad.
When the extremely nimble and widely read philologist goes about his proper business, he is always brilliant. Agamben's exaggerated pose and his "history of being" pathos have something dandyish about them. But it would be better not to try too hard to strip him of the role of the apocalyptic preacher. It is entirely possible that he himself does not take the hordes who hang on his every prophesy entirely seriously. Ultimately, every epoch gets the fashion philosophy it deserves. Our own seems once more to be running on empty.
It's best not to get one's politics from a philologist, or philosopher.
 
Saturday, October 15, 2005
 
In-der-Blog-sein

Eric Haller hips us onto a Bert Dreyfus podcast on Nihilism and the Internet.
 
Friday, October 14, 2005
 
Scholar finds Heidegger humorless:
[Jerry Weinberger] had spent five years working on a book about German philosopher Martin Heidegger when he was asked if he would like to submit a proposal for a book about [Benjamin] Franklin. It would be part of a continuing series on American political thought published by the University Press of Kansas.

He dropped Heidegger and started reading 36 volumes of Franklin's collected works, then focusing on about 1,500 pages of Franklin's most important political and philosophical writings.
...
He has turned his attention back to Heidegger but admits the German who died in 1976 is humorless compared to Franklin.

"I've spent 10 years with both of them," he said. "If I had to spend 10 more years with one or the other of them, it would be Franklin, hands down."
Reminds of the seminar on Marx. Boy, was I disappointed they dwelled on the dull one. Or to paraphrase Groucho, "That's my philosophy. If you don't like them I have others."
 
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
 
In-der-Blog-sein

Peregrind posts a Fredric Jameson critique:
Heidegger’s "field path" is, after all, irredeemably and irrevocably destroyed by late capital, by the green revolution, by neocolonialism and the megalopolis, which runs its superhighways over the older fields and vacant lots and turns Heidegger’s "house of being" into condominiums, if not the most miserable unheated, rat-infested tenement buildings.
Bad, bad capitalism. Yesterday's field path is today's bike path. Not like those collective farms. Now they knew how manage paths, comrades. All the way to the gulags, they went.
 
 
Heidegger, spirit-ualist:
The age of globalisation has now become, and created, its nemesis, the age of global terrorism. It is carrying with it the global fear of a rapid deterioration of, borrowing Heidegger, the 'spirit' of this world; 'spirit' that ought to be evolving towards global peace.
 
 
Just came across Gadamer saying something similar to the gist behind yesterday's post.
...[T]he central issue of the place of conceptual thinking as such. I think that without some agreement, some basic agreement, no disagreement is possible. In my opinion, the primacy of disagreement is a prejudice. This is what Heidegger called die Sorge fur die erkannte Erkenntnis; that is, the preoccupation with "cognized cognition," the commitment to certitude, the primacy of epistemology, the monologue of the scientists. My own perspective is always the hermeneutics of the whole world. We have to become aware of the limitations of the methodology of the sciences or the epistemology of the monologue. Beneath the structures of the opinion-making technology on which our society is based one finds a more basic experience of communication involving some agreement.
It's from an interview on his agreements with Strauss.
 
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
 
In-der-Blog-sein

Mormon Metaphysics on Heidegger and Truth:
When I make an assertion there must first be a world disclosed to us that makes the act of asserting possible. I can't make an assertion about the computer before me without there first being a whole slew of understandings about what a computer is, the room in which I find myself, and so forth. It is the whole set of understandings that make assertion possible. To consider truth a mere property of propositions or sentences is to fundamentally mistake what truth is and where the question of truth is located.
And that's the case, much like it is wrong to consider being a mere property--a boolean, either something is or isn't--of things. An existential property and propositions aren't necessarily incorrect, but it is a mistake to consider them to be all there is. Read the whole thing.
 
Saturday, October 08, 2005
 
In-der-Blog-sein

Ramlings of a wannabe sage, the blog, gets moody:
The philosopher Heidegger theorized that the primary way that we experience the world isn't through our vision, or our hearing, or any other sense perception. We experience the world around us first and foremost through our mood. That makes sense to me; think about. When you're bored, what is it that bores you? The things you do are boring. The people you're around you are boring. Everything in your life at that point is boring.
I put it in a slightly different order. We experience the world by giving things meaning, their being, whether things reach us ocularly or aurally, and our moods tint, or taint, that meaning.
 
 
Financial Times in existentialist gaze back in error:
Food in [in Judith Moore's book] Fat Girl has, in Heidegger's terms, become an object, not a thing with the rich multi-dimensionality of the cultural artefact that gathers the fourfold unity of earth and sky, human and divine. But what is even more striking, and harrowing, is the way Moore's own body has also become an object - that is, the way she has turned what Heidegger called the objectifying gaze upon herself.
Sweet, except that "objectifying gaze" is one of Sartre's terms.
 
Friday, October 07, 2005
 
In-der-Blog-sein

Yes, Virginia, things reveal themselves, at knightlylights.
 
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
 
In-der-Blog-sein

GRE Plus Good Writing, discussing Heidegger's influence on Sartre, remarks:
Unlike Heidegger, however, Sartre does not try to combat metaphysics as a deleterious undertaking. He simply notes in a Kantian manner that it raises questions we cannot answer. On the other hand, he subtitles Being and Nothingness a "Phenomenological Ontology."
 
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
 
Lodestone Salvage, a site about salvaging furniture and such in Toronto, and Heidegger.
 
Monday, October 03, 2005
 
In-der-Blog-sein

The Pangrammaticon argues that the world in its worlding refers to "things":
My argument for this is that what the world does when it is being itself is "to world", but the phenomenological evidence for the world's worlding is constituted by what this doing "brings forth", and this can be nothing other than things. Thus, we catch the world "in its worlding" (in the act of worlding, i.e., in the act of being itself) whenever we encounter a thing.
To the world in its worlding themselves!
 
For when Ereignis is not sufficient.

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