In-der-Blog-sein

The Fluid Imagination asks about the is:

I think it is fair to say that Dasein is that being that recognizes the Being-there. By restricting this concept to humanity, Heidegger gives privilege to that being which is aware, not only of its own Being, but also of the Being-there.

Or put more simply, humanity is the being that questions why things are meaningful.  ¶ 9:02 PM 0 comments

  This article on Kang Yeong-ahn’s book on Levinas, seems to miss something:

"Levinas explains that our identity is not blank like Heidegger says, but becomes richer by helping neighbors, others, and people in pain. So justice is before truth. Don't you think that this is the real spirit of Christmas?"

It's not often one sees Heidegger saddled with proposing humans as a tabula rasa. And although I can see where he's coming from with Levinas prioritizing justice, there's also something dissonant about Levinas being more in tune with the xtian holiday. In the spirit of which, around this household my fave xmas tale is Burrough's The Junky's Christmas, which has the most effective use of Mendelssohn in a short story. We like to hear the old man read it--it was also a clamation short. And about which The Fall said:

The x in x-mas is a substitute crucifix for Christ

'Nuff said.  ¶ 6:26 AM 1 comments

  The Harvard Crimson had a short bio of their '65 alumni Terrence Malick, the occasional film director:

The unique style Malick developed in those three films draws heavily on the philosophic training he received at Harvard. Like Heidegger's archetype of the human as a being who simply "exists," with no direction or motivation, Malick's American everymen and everywomen drift from scene to scene, through non-linear plots and rich landscapes.

His new flick The New World is out, but hasn't made it to the provinces yet.  ¶ 6:06 AM 2 comments

  Been out and about abroad vacationing. Enjoyed Malcolm Bradbury's Doctor Criminale and Michel Houellebecq new one, about both which more later.  ¶ 5:56 AM 0 comments

  Opus Dei blacklists philosophers.

[Opus Deists] can't buy or read any book without asking the center's director for permission. When the Catholic Church abolished the Index Librorium Prohibitorum, which was imposed in the Middle Ages, Opus Dei instituted its own Index, blacklisting authors like Jose Saramago, James Joyce, Umberto Eco, Machado de Assis and 99 percent of philosophers since Rene Descartes, such as Kant, Heidegger, Hegel, etc.

The classification of these books can vary from level one -- unrestricted, to level six -- morally forbidden.

Do they rate blogs? I'm hoping for a six. Have there been 100 philosophers worth reading since Descartes? Which one do they approve of? And are they aware of the messages from the priory of the ontological difference, secretly encoded by Van Gogh in his paintings of peasant's shoes?  ¶ 8:50 AM 2 comments

  An English prof's explanation for why Literary Theory petered out:

"I think that the 60s theorists would have considered much of this application unserious," he continues, "but times have changed, and people are bored by a reading of a paragraph in Being and Time."

If they'd only make the effort to destrukt their ennui, and discover the finitude of their world, then they'd know, but no.  ¶ 8:04 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Luminaries, in an appreciation of Gravity's Rainbow, explains why the active participation of the reader is a good thing:

[W]hat I would like to emphasize is that destruktion is a practice that is, at its root, an activity designed to impart meaning to ones life. This is done through action, through active investigation, and through attention to the production of meaning in ones life and language.

File under books that make you think.  ¶ 6:43 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Body Parts advises shorting phenomenology.

The concept of humanity initiated by Heidegger, which bases phenomenology on primordial anxiety, will be abandoned as fundamentally mistaken. Heidegger was the founding source of post-modernism; although some European thinkers have rejected post-modern phenomenology, Heidegger is still regarded as the basic reference. He will finally be abandoned.

Scientific understanding of brain function, physiological sources of consciousnesses, and scientific psychology will drive rejection of "anxiety" as the original human condition. The general intellectual issue will be to translate this scientific understanding into philosophical terms.

Not anxious? Buy more precious mentals for your portfolio then.  ¶ 7:22 PM 0 comments

  Blog exclusive.

Read the Ereignis interview with Richard Polt before their vast staff of proof readers and copy editors are done reviewing it.  ¶ 9:00 AM 0 comments

  David Weinberger said last century that multi-tasking's bad for you because Heidegger said so.

[T]his is because attention isn't a dry and abstract or cognitive relation to the world. It's a relationship of caring. (Gosh, did Heidegger think of this before me? Damn! Wait, maybe I if I give it a made-up name I'll be able to trademark and claim it as my own thought. I've got it! Let's call it "e-care"?!)

If this is true -- and you can take it from my sincere look and deep tone of voice that it is -- then it proves that humans can't multitask, at least not always. If attention were nothing but cognition, if it were like a flashlight sweeping over a dark world, then maybe we could multitask by wagging our attention back and forth. But if paying attention to two objects also means switching our emotions, feelings, preferences, mood and valuations, then, well, our souls just aren't enough[.]

Hat tip snowdeal.org.  ¶ 8:52 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

things that got thunk on the eternal recurrence of das Seyn:

From Being and Time (1927) where the question of the meaning of being is first developed, but still expressed in the language of metaphysics, to 'Time and Being' (1962) where an attempt to think being without regard to metaphysics is made, Heidegger goes full circle.

  ¶ 6:55 PM 0 comments

  Mixed message mars musical movie's mettle.

Thus the down-and-out philosopher of the group complains that his students would rather watch television than read Heidegger, while others invoke Lenny Bruce, Michelangelo Antonioni and The Sex Pistols as their inspiration.

It would probably come as a surprise to many American teens that their identification with the characters in "Rent" somehow or other aligns them with Heidegger, and with good reason. In its music, plot and cinematic qualities, "Rent" proceeds as if none of its alleged patron saints ever existed. Of course it's usually a good idea for musicals not to stray too far from mindlessness.

Mmmm, many musicals misstate metaphysical meaningfulness.  ¶ 2:38 AM 0 comments

  How to tell if you're not too pagan.

But Maija Kule believes that Latvian is able to adequately translate foreign philosophical texts and render them in a suitable form. Her husband has translated the likes of Heidegger and Husserl, among others, from German into Latvian.

"It's very important that Latvian can capture word play, such as Heidegger's extreme word play in German. And it can. It's not so pagan that it can't express complex philosophical ideas," she says.

  ¶ 11:00 PM 1 comments

  In-der-Blog-Sein
ThinkBlog on Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of the Primacy of Perception.

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology implicitly incorporates the Heideggerian notion that the Dasein must understand the meaning of the world around him, and each Dasein constructs a world for himself. Contrary to Kantian transcendentalism, I do not dwell in a numerically distinct world from my friend, the gap between which can only be bridged by precise and explicit language; but rather, we really do inhabit the same world, and the objects in it are not true (as though syllogistically) for all thinking minds, but “real” for all subjects that are in the same place as I am as I see what I see.

Indeed.  ¶ 4:15 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

The Pangrammaticon on why Ereignis happens, or rather shouldn't.  ¶ 8:58 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

The Rhine River translates a tidbit by Daniel Cohn-Bendit on Arendt and Heidegger.  ¶ 11:44 AM 0 comments

  Fanciful fact about the Xbox.

360 is a hermeneutic circle in the sense Heidegger intended.

  ¶ 8:12 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Those who tell stories also rule society- Plato Lam, the blog, goes one on one with philosophers over insurance:

Me: Hey Jean! Long time no see man, so how's Heidegger?

Sartre: Being is nothingness, the ego is the self.

Me: yes ok, you're trying to avoid Heidegger aren't you?

Sarte: an insurance is the ego, an asset is nothingness the being is nothingness."

Ork! Ork!  ¶ 3:49 PM 0 comments

  Clark summarizes his reasons for distinguishing between Heidegger the political man and his way of thinking over on the Mormon Metaphysics blog.  ¶ 3:43 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

The Esoteric Order of Herodotus on why Heidegger is not a member, of the order. Ork! Ork!  ¶ 11:02 AM 0 comments

  Meaning, Relevance, and the Limits of Technology, a coversation with Hubert L. Dreyfus by Harry Kreisler

"Skillful coping," the phrase I always am using: when you're skillfully coping in flow, without thinking, without rules, your body and its skills are drawing you to get this optimal grip on the situation. And the situation is always completely concrete. It's something that you've never been in before and the other people haven't been in before and you'll never be in it again because having been in it this time it's change you.

Aristotle already saw that. It was lost, sort of, until Heidegger found it in Aristotle. Aristotle says if you keep acting and getting experiences and making mistakes and learning, you will finally become aphronemous, a person of practical wisdom, and that means you'll do the appropriate thing at the appropriate time in the appropriate way, to talk like Aristotle. And that's mastery. That's the highest thing you can get.

  ¶ 12:06 PM 4 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

I only discovered this today searching for "enowning of enowning" on msn, but there's been a long discussion of the Heidegger's-philosophy-is-nazism-incarnate meme at The Rhine River.  ¶ 7:55 AM 0 comments