In-der-Blog-sein

The Pangrammaticon on Ereignis:

[I]n most cases the individual words in Heidegger's German should be translated into colloquial English (and certainly an ordinary German word like Ereignis should not be rendered as an English neologism). The profundity of Heidegger's work does not lie in the meaning of the individual words he uses but in his arrangement of them (as with all writing, the depth of philosophy is an illusion arranged on the surface of the page). In any case, Ereignis is also sometimes translated as 'event' and sometimes as 'the event of appropriation', to wit: en-own-ing, i.e., making something your own, appropriating it (er-eig-nis, I think, is how it goes).

I'm with Martin on this one, Ereignis should be a singulare tantum, and not translated. Especially given the multitudes of words and phrases translators have come up with so far.

It's also worth noting that, like translators, Heidegger also struggled with words. That's why he has so many synonyms for Ereignis, even going so far as using being crossed out: being; a typographical gesture Derrida later adapted for his purposes. Heidegger even adopts different etymologies for Ereignis in different texts, depending on what aspect he wanted to emphasize.  ¶ 10:29 PM 7 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

This line from Rent has been showing up everywhere, like at Academia as an Extreme Sport:

Chatting not about Heidegger, but wine
Let's open up a restaurant in Santa Fe

Pat pablum or meaningful meme?  ¶ 5:55 AM 1 comments

  In-der-Blog-Sein

is dit alles? on why nothing's not naught:

What is Nothing, anyway?

It's not anything, and it's not something, yet it isn't the negation of something, either. Traditional logic is no help, since it merely regards all negation as derivative from something positive. So, Heidegger proposed, we must abandon logic in order to explore the character of Nothing as the background out of which everything emerges.

  ¶ 9:47 PM 0 comments

  Ork! Ork!:

What is the Martini prior to its encounter? What is the act of appropriating a Martini? What is the teleological end of Martini appropriation? Thus, we are left with the greatest questions of meaning and Martinihood. Division II shall therefore begin its bold inquiry with these general concerns. Perhaps the words of the eminent hermeneutic philosopher Paul Ricoeur will shed some light: "Rival hermeneutic philosophies of Martininess [l'essence du matin] conflict not over the structure of double martininess [i.e., martini shaken or stirred, olive or two olives, vodka or gin] but over the mode of opening, over the finality of showing."

Reminds me of Derrida's anecdote in The Post Card

[W]hile typing this page for the present publication, the telephone rings. The U.S. The American operator asks me if I accept a "collect call" from Martin (she says Martine or martini) Heidegger. I heard, as one often does in these situations which are very familiar to me, often having to call "collect" myself, voices that I thought I recognized on the other end of the intercontinental line, listening to me and watching my reaction. What will he do with the ghost or Geist of Martin? I cannot summarize here all the chemistry of the calculation that very quickly made me refuse ("It's a joke, I do not accept") after having had the name of Martini Heidegger repeated several times, hoping that the author of farce would finally name himself.

Calculation? That'll never uncover the truth.  ¶ 7:00 AM 0 comments

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A quote about anxiety, "Anxiety is there. It is only sleeping. Its breath quivers perpetually through man’s being.", leads thinkBuddha to meditate:

For Heidegger, anxiety is interesting because it shows us something fundamental about what it is to be human. This anxiety is not a fear of anything in particular, but more a general sense of being unsettled; it is a mood that makes us aware of our essential aloneness, of the fact that we are in the world without choosing to be and the only certainty that awaits us is death, a certainty that is nevertheless the most uncertain thing: which breath will be our last, our final breath?

Read the whole thing, but if you don't, his prescription is, read older news.  ¶ 7:34 AM 0 comments

  Ereignis commonly means "event" in German, but Heidegger used it as the singulare tantum for his key insight. He also added his own particular usage to many other everyday words, and used many other words, common (e.g. Da and Lichtung) and archaic (e.g. Seyn), for his insight, but it was Ereignis he chose to use in his final major work, Time and Being; a private lecture delivered with a seminar in 1962, and published in 1969. It's curious that he held this critically important term back until the end. Although he didn't publish anything between his doctoral thesis and Being & Time, after the war he published essays and lecture courses and lectured extensively. He discoursed on the matters covered in Being & Time, on art, poetry and technology, on his predecessors from the Pre-Socratics through Plato and Kant to Nietzsche, but he rarely addressed the key to his way of thinking directly.

He described Ereignis in an essay on language (Identity and Difference), but its importance to his way of thinking was not explicitly called out. Only after his death, with the ongoing publication of his extensive private papers and previously unavailable lecture courses, have readers discovered the key role of Ereignis. It shows up in his earliest published lecture course from 1918, plays a key role in what many scholars consider his second most important work, Contributions to Philosophy (1936-8), and is further elaborated in works that remain to be published (Das Ereignis, GA 71) or translated (History of Being, GA 69). Although his reputation was established by Being & Time, considered by many to be the major philosophical work of the last century, it's becoming clearer all the time that this text isn't everything original Heidegger had to say, nor does it contain his most important thinking on the subject of ontology. Instead, we may today consider it for it really was in practical terms, something the previously unpublished Heidegger had to produce in order to get the chair of philosophy at Freiburg. And we now know that what he has to contribute to our understanding of ontology goes well beyond the hermeneutics of phenomenology in his famous book.

What precisely he meant by Ereignis also appears to change over his life time. In his essay Ereignis, published in this year's A Companion To Heidegger, Richard Polt explains the term as used at three different points in Heidegger's career: the 1918 lecture course, in the Contributions, and in Time and Being. The three different meanings are roughly as a phenomenological appropriation of phenomena, an ontologically determinative event, and the universal condition that gives time and being to humans.

Why would Heidegger use the same term for such different things? Perhaps further study and interpretation is called for. In his essay, after a close study of the textual differences, Polt questions whether there isn't a consistency there after all:

Despite the apparent differences in the three texts, they may all be attempts to respond to the same experience: the same encounter with an enduring theme or "thing" (Sache). Some central questions patently endure: How are things given to us? How is their being given to us?

In a similar vein, Thomas Sheehan writes that Heidegger is always referring to the same thing.

“Das Ereignis” and “die Kehre im Ereignis” were only two in a long line of titles for what must always already be the case if givenness and its dative are to come together at all. But the various titles aside, the question remained the same.

And so did the answer. In both the earlier and the later Heidegger, the “giving” of being as presence requires the “taking” of Dasein by absence, that is, the opening of human being by finitude. Before the 1930s Heidegger described this movement of give-and-take as the interface of Geworfenheit and Entwurf: being thrown-open as grounding the possibility of taking-as. During the 1930s Heidegger began describing the same issue as the interplay of Ereignet-sein and Es-gibt-Sein: being-opened-up as the ground for understanding the being of entities, Ereignis as making possible Seinsgeschick. But at no stage in his thinking did Heidegger conceive of the opening up of the open as an achievement of subjectivity. Rather, he always saw the open as grounded in Dasein’s being opened up by its own finitude.

Given all that, if the question and answer remained the same, why did Heidegger only present Ereignis towards the end?  ¶ 10:23 PM 0 comments

  I see Heidegger's relationship with Catholicism as an arc. He was born to a church sexton and received a Catholic education until university, where he abandoned Catholicism prior to his marriage. Despite reading Luther and St. Augustine, his thinking progressively abandoned any theological aspects. The tendency peaked in the 1930s, when he argued that a belief in God precluded one from authentic philosophy.

Yet, during that period, he also began to anticipate a coming of beyng, a historical event, that he began to decribe in religous terms. In an interview intended for release after his death he famously said that only a god could save man from the path he was on. He was buried in the Catholic churchyard at Messkirch. How far did his thinking follow his body back to Catholicism?

In a recent essay Jean Grodin hints about the end of the arc.

We have recently learned that Heidegger decided that the last writings to appear in the collected edition would be the "black notebooks" (schwarze Hefte) to which he consigned his most personal, and no doubt most revealing, reflections. We may have to wait a few decades for the completion of this edition before we can know the source of the unease that tormented Heidegger as he stirred up the question of Being. One can suspect, with Gadamer, that the unease was in large part religious. The title of the hundreth projected volume of the GA already gives us a little glimpse of its contents: Vigilae. This Latin title also reveals that, for Heidegger at his most secret, the space of thinking was perhaps not exclusively occupied by the Greeks and the Germans.

Striking evidence for this point can be found in a short autobiographical text from 1937-1938 titled "My Path Up to Now," which slipped into GA 66.

And who would want to deny that this entire path up to now was accompanied silently [verschwiegen] by a confrontation with Christianity--a confrontation that was not and is not a "problem" taken up at random, but the preservation of the ownmost origin--of the family house, of the homeland and of my youth--and at the same time a painful detachment from it. Only someone who was so deeply rooted in an actually lived Catholic world can suspect something of the the necessities that affected the path of my questioning up to now like subterranean seismic tremors.

Vigilae means awakening.  ¶ 3:15 PM 0 comments

  An essay calling for a new humanism.

Jean Beaufret asked his mentor Martin Heidegger the question: How can we restore meaning to the word ‘humanism’? Heidegger responded with the idea that all types of humanism – Greek, Roman, Christian or Marxist – put man at the center of life, with man determining his own fate. He said that this belief has led to the destruction of civilization and moved philosophy away from the study of Being. Heidegger called this a disastrous step.

  ¶ 8:17 PM 0 comments

  Being-in-the-world of media:

An alternative starting point for thinking about communication, then, which I prefer, is not the individual, nor 'language', nor self and other, but the world. I have always been struck, ever since I started work on it, by the essential worldliness of broadcasting. That is why I was so bowled over by Heidegger's stunning analysis of the Umwelt, the round-about-me everyday world in which 'I', in each case, dwell. We encounter the world and all its everyday things as zuhanden, as 'ready-to-hand' or, simply, handy - a pragmatics, not an erotics, of touch. From reading Being and Time I at last came to understand the world as interactively communicative in all its parts and as a whole; the world 'as a relational totality of involvements'. Everyday things are indeed pragmata but we should pause to consider exactly how it is that they are so and not otherwise, and it is part of Heidegger's extraordinary genius to remind us of this.

  ¶ 8:15 PM 0 comments

  Derrida on Heidegger on thinking:

You know Heidegger, for a long time, for years and years kept saying that thinking started with questioning, that questioning (fragen) is the dignity of thinking. And then one day, without contradicting this statement, he said 'yes, but there is something even more originary than questioning, than this piety of thinking,' and it is what he called zusage which means to acquiesce, to accept, to say 'yes', to affirm. So this zusage is not only prior to questioning, but it is supposed by any questioning. To ask a question, you must first tell the Other that I am speaking to you. Even to oppose or challenge the Other, you must say 'at least I speak to you', 'I say yes to our being in common together'. So this is what I meant by love, this reaffirmation of the affirmation.

On the Suicide Girls site. Tattoos, theory, this ain't your grandpa's burlesque.  ¶ 6:36 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Positive Liberty has a thoughtful post on Strauss and his critics, with reference to Celine via Bloom, and notes about them, nihilism, and the masses:

More importantly the Straussians genuinely believed that keeping nihilism confined to the wise few was better for society, in a sort of utilitarian sense (though they weren’t utilitarians). It was, I sincerely believe, out of genuine concern for society. This is important: While they believe that Nietzsche and Heidegger were correct as to the ultimate nihilistic nature of reality, such a “Truth” could not be used to found political orders. And indeed, such a Truth gaining wider public acceptance made Weimar German more receptive to Nazism.

I wonder if that last sentence was actually the case, or the public was simply confused, and tired, and just wanted a patriarch to provide them with jobs and security. Did the masses accept the Nazis' vision of a renewed German nation as an antidote to nihilism, or was that just the case with certain intellectuals?  ¶ 9:10 AM 2 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Non Servium posts on being-towards-death. To me the key take away is the finiteness that's given by Dasein's death.

Death is the ends of our possibility, this shows us our finiteness, and it brings to question our being itself. Anticipation of death shows Dasein what it is, since it is Dasein contemplating itself, free of the “they”. From this we can see that an authentic being-towards-death opens the way to an authentic Dasein itself, since it clears the they-self from its relation to itself, it can, to be simplistic, simply be.

And beyond the individual's relationship with others, the finiteness given by death also indicates the finiteness of every thing, so there are no absolutes; including metaphysics, understood as the unchangeable system that underlies reality. There can't be _a_ metaphysics, if everything is finite.  ¶ 5:24 PM 3 comments

  The negation is inherent in the system, at least in France.

'They are integrating themselves by the very act of setting cars alight, even by the fact that they are setting people alight,' [philosopher Andre Glucksmann] told the German newspaper, the Franfurter Rundschau.

According to Glucksmann, negation is a typical form of French integration.

'All parties in France, business, the workers and so on, believe that something can be achieved by violence,' he told the leftist daily.

By this view, young people are integrating through their behaviour. Glucksmann believes that a 'nihilistic atmosphere' predominates currently in France and extends well beyond the banlieus.

  ¶ 9:57 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

The Mars Hill Symposium has a short biography and intro to Heidegger, with an emphasis on angst.

Heidegger, trapped in the negativity of the aura of angst as his authenticating reality, needed desperately to break out of this suffocating shackle, into some form of positive focus that could give this life a new legitimacy. Thus, he blindly leaps by faith in asserting language, the logos, as sameness with Being.

Others, of course, disagree with that interpretation, and understand Heidegger's way of thinking without blind leaps.  ¶ 12:54 PM 0 comments

  Some people are using blogs merely as websites to publish their documents, and why not. Blogspot is present-at-hand. On the other hand, blog software is intended for a spcific purpose, and constrains users. It makes it user to update a blog, but you don't have the control of using plain HTML. An example is The Theory of Epistemological Transmutation of English Language as the Global Reversal of Flow of Knowledge which could be a PDF or HTML file. Because its not plain HTML, the links are managed through the Blogger software instead of directly by browser, and footnotes links are broken, at least in my browser.

Still, if Blogspot was the only route to get this document a world-wide audience, I'm glad Blogspot's there. The document is an interesting read, recapping problems in language that start with Saussure's analysis of it, through Quine, and on to Heidegger ontological analysis.

In Being and Time, Heidegger makes clear that in interpretation, signification is not projected on ‘some naked thing’, but ‘when something within-the-world is encountered as such, the thing in question already has an involvement which is disclosed in our understanding of the world’. He adds that interpretation cannot occur without presuppositions, and it is based on ‘fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception’. Hence, it is clear that interpretation works within the domain of what is already understood; hence it may mistakenly be considered as a ‘circulus vitiosus’. Then Heidegger asks: ‘how is it to bring any scientific results to maturity without moving in a circle, especially if, moreover, the understanding which is presupposed still operates within our common information about man and the world?’ He explains that if we take this circle as a vicious one and try to avoid it then the act of understanding itself is not correctly understood. Instead, as he points out, ‘what is decisive is not to get out of the circle but to come into it in the right way. This circle of understanding is not an orbit in which any random kind of knowledge may move’.

Then onto to Gadamer and more Heidegger.  ¶ 12:51 PM 0 comments

  Ork! Ork!

Mensonge went further -- challenging what he called "the coital cogito," that implicit structure underlying "the non-existent ego of the scholar him/her non-self." For is it not commonplace to refer to intellectual "excitement," to speak of the need to "lay bare the thing as it is" -- so that thought might "penetrate" reality? (As Mensonge sums it up with admirable lucidity: "Alas, the 'thing' as it is in actuality is not, for there is no thing, and actually no actuality for it actually not to be not in.") Nor is it sufficient to deconstruct what Mensonge called Lacan's "great phallusy."

  ¶ 11:03 PM 0 comments

  Robert Tracinski gets an inkling of a thought:

I got my first inklings of this some years ago, as a philosophy student, when I became aware of an academic controversy over revelations that two influential 20th-century philosophers — Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man — were Nazi sympathizers. Most of the controversy centered around whether this involvement with Nazism (Heidegger joined the Nazi Party, while de Man expressed sympathy for the Nazi cause) detracted from the value to be found in their philosophical work. But few comments addressed the philosophical similarity between Nazi ideology and the ideas of these two philosophers.

This is a crucial question, because Heidegger and de Man were two founders of the most influential contemporary school of philosophy, called "Deconstruction," which has provided the theoretical foundation for Multiculturalism.

In its essence, Deconstruction is an assault on reason in favor of the same dogmatic subjectivism held by the Nazis.

Nazis, agents of Multiculturalism? Would've thunk?  ¶ 3:47 PM 0 comments

  Mormon Metaphysics is kindly hosting nearly an entire semester of Being & Time lectures by Hubert Dreyfus.  ¶ 7:12 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Metablog notes:

Heidegger tells us that Ereignis is untranslatable as the Tao, we will use it in the original, as we have with Dasein.

I've always thought so, but then that moniker was already taken when I named this blog. Which is why we shouldn't be taken too seriously. And neither should the singulare tantum, that is really an acronym. Yes, E.R.E.I.G.N.I.S. stands for ereignis recurs eternally in gnostic nihilism inceptualising seyn. There you have it, and the men from E.R.E.I.G.N.I.S., charged with concealing the ontological difference from just any man, are Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin.  ¶ 9:17 PM 0 comments

  The USA, damned if too modern, damned if not modern enough.

The greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger, characterized "Americanism," by this time an abstract concept, as "the still unfolding and not yet full or completed essence of the emerging monstrousness of modern times." According to Heidegger, Europe (chiefly Germany) was caught in a "great pincer," squeezed by the modernist ideologies of Americanism and Bolshevism, which, despite their differences, represented from "a metaphysical point of view, the same dreary technological frenzy and the same unrestricted organization of the average man."

In the contemporary European intellectual critique of America, by contrast, the force threatening Europe derives from religion, with the pincer squeezing Europe coming from the two fundamentalisms. Although many European thinkers still take America to task for being too modern in certain realms, the main charge today is that America is not modern enough--that it adheres to an anachronistic concept of the nation, that it still expresses a belief in a principle of natural rights, and that it is not embarrassed to rely on religion. Meanwhile, European culture and politics have moved on to embrace a post-religious ethos, in which even the slightest mention of the Almighty in an official public address is seen as fatally compromising the practice of true democratic politics.

There's no pleasing some people.  ¶ 2:48 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

The Free West has an entertaining introduction to Alfonso Krause, the link between Leo Strauss and Heraclitus:

Krause met Marcuse, Hannah Arendt as well as Strauss in Heidegger's famous seminar. Heidegger, as we know, was fascinated by the sage from Ephesus. Like Marcuse, Arendt and Strauss Krause refused to learn to drive a car and used only taxis on his way home from the seminar He was a firm believer in the need-to-know principle; when asked by the taxi drivers where he wanted to go--he invariably told them that this was none of their business.

Most of it comes off as too entertaining and I couldn't find any other references to the gentleman, but Krausismo, albeit grandpa's, appears to be a genuine enough to rate a conference.  ¶ 7:17 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

The Weblog, on animals, the open, boredom (essentially Agamben on GA 29/30):

In short, Agamben says, we are both, animal and man, 'open to a closedness.' (In an amusing sidenote here, Agamben speculates that this 'being delivered over to something that refuses itself...[perhaps] defines the specific emotional tonality' or 'characteristic Stimmung...of Heidegger's thought' -- a rather general statement that probably applies to everyone who ever wrote after Heidegger if ever there was one.)

Heh.  ¶ 7:03 AM 0 comments

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Johnny America on why you can't fear nothing:

Fear, Heidegger tells us, is always of something--of something that is in the world. It is grounded or founded in threat, or in being threatened by something, and the founding or grounding movement of that experience--the experience of being threatened by something--is in the swift approach, experienced as a nearness that could almost be described as an on-handedness--in other words, "it is on hand"--of something that has not yet arrived.

  ¶ 8:00 PM 0 comments

  Wozu Dichter?

From Phenomenology in blue:

V.

Thunder, and what it is to be alive
balancing on the sinews of circumstance.
The sirens lull us to sleep in pelting song.
Awakening, we feel our way through the dark.
We see light again under the door, stumble out
among appearances. Their luminous movements
are a world on fire, sparked by our own seeing.

Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei in After the Palace Burns  ¶ 7:12 PM 0 comments