In-der-Blog-sein

Fractured Compass questions its ownmost authenticity:

In the heyday of Heidegger’s influence, authenticity became a key word - and living authentically became a catchphrase of existentialism, the art-nouveau bastard child of Husserlian and Heideggerian thinking. Even now that Heidegger and Nazism seems almost a blase topic, there are still Heideggerians among our midst and perhaps wired within our own neurons.

There was a heyday? And I missed the hayride? Its hard to say if Heidegger's popularity has peaked. There's more about him every week on the internet, but then there's more about most things, so it's hard to chart where the peak is, unless his popularity actually goes down. Of course, with people like him it is not "popularity" in the sense of "I heart Heidegger", but he's talked about more and more. Then again, the indexing of MySpaces, disrupted all trends.

That this cannot be helped is explained by the thinking human’s fascination with Being and beings. There was a time when I read, word for word, every sentence of Being and Time, after reading commentators on Heidegger, hoping to catch a revelation or even a glimpse of Authentic Being.

I've always admired that kind of dedication. I just dip in to follow some path with a similitude to what I'm thinking then. Being and Time is more a symbol of something, than read. Witness its popularity in the "What I'm reading now" slot in all those MySpaces. Frankly, what someone reads has always been a dubious signifier for significant dating. Much better to go with the "What I'm listening to now". Music is easier to share, while reading is inherently private. Music sets the temporal space, while every reads at their own pace.

Then came a period of eclipse, and a year ago, I decided to read again Being and Time, after reading Safranski’s biography of Heidegger. But what Time and a little age can do to Being! What stood out was the almost comic preoccupation with being and Being compounded with prepositions. Philosophy becomes the obvious, perhaps too obvious. Because how else can you conceive of being or Being or Who-ness or What-ness, in consciousness or thinking, except with Where-ness or With-ness or For-ness, or any preposition for that matter. Being or being, necessarily compounds itself, in our mind, with prepositions the moment you think about it or place it in the world.

There they go again, treating being as a thing. That's no beyng.

I suspect, from the data, that Heidegger's way of thinking is still on an upsurge, principally because it gets written about in ways that are consistent with what he wrote. That is fed by the plethora of new translations, so Being and Time is no longer a monolith that must be conquered (read), but instead a piece in a larger puzzle. The puzzle's never done, and continues to entertain. I discovered last week that the Contributions hasn't been translated in French yet, and look at how much Heidegger continues to be discussed in France, despite left-bank existentialism having passed on as a XXth century curiosity. And the next piece, Mindfulness, is about to arrive.  ¶ 7:07 AM