In-der-Blog-sein

Excerpter does Derrida on typing:

Heidegger deplores the fact that even personal letters are now typewritten and that the singular trace of the signatory are no longer recognizable through the shapes of the letters and the movements of the hand. But when we write 'by hand' we are not in the time before technology; there is already instrumentality, regular reproduction, mechanical iterability. So it is not legitimate to contrast writing by hand and 'mechanical' writing, like a pretechnological craft as opposed to technology. And then on the other side what we call 'typed' writing is also 'manual'.

I don't deplore type over handwriting, but I do think it adds a barrier in personal communications. I can tell something about how my great-aunt's arthritis might be afflicting her, how important brokers consider their recommendations, or how distressed a friend is by examining their handwriting.

Heidegger points out that the work of thinking is a handiwork, a Handlung, an 'action', prior to any opposition between practice and theory. Thought, in this sense, would be a Handlung, a 'maneuver', a 'manner', if not a manipulation. But is that a reason for protesting against the machine?

The machine is a good thing if you have bad handwriting and a bad thing if you intend to persue a career as a graphologist.  ¶ 10:40 AM 1 comments

  Blogcast:

Andrew Keen talks with Hubert Dreyfus about Heidegger and AI.  ¶ 11:06 AM 0 comments

  Get your ownmost enowning t-shirt!  ¶ 8:40 AM 0 comments

  Clark's been entertaining himself with last week's Heidegger test.  ¶ 6:39 PM 0 comments

  Continuing on to the second paragraph on the subject of being from Miguel De Beistegui's paper. The question under consideration is "What, then, is the proposition of being?".

To address this question, we need to take a further look at the word under investigation here: being. Or rather, perhaps, Sein. For the word being, as a present participle turned substantive, already takes us further in the direction which the German Sein only suggests, resisting it a bit more, tarrying a while longer this side of metaphysics, before allowing it to slip into representation. Before being a noun, before having been reified by the inevitable and long since legitimized impulse of representational thought, Sein is a verb. And an infinitive. And verbs, particularly in the infinitive, refer to events, first and foremost. They refer to those events that are subject-less, those events to which belongs a certain anonymity or, rather, a certain preindividuality, events, in other words, that refer to a certain happening, to something of which we can say that it is taking place, without its taking place being the effect or the doing of any thing or agent—an event, in other words, which is not an accident of a substance. Thus, being as event must be distinguished not only from ousia and quidditas, from essence in its classical determination, but also from the sense of accidens complicit with such a determination, in which an accident is seen as something that happens to a pregiven substance, a substance given entirely independently of the movement of accident to which it is subjected. The thinking of being as event will require a reversal of this order, so that substances themselves will come to be seen as happenings, as accidents, as it were, of a primordial and forever recurring event, which itself cannot be assimilated with another more primordial and superior form of substantiality. Examples of pure events, with which the event of being would have some affinity, would be revealed in propositions such as: "it is raining," "it is snowing," "es regnet," "llueve," "piove," Crh ("it is necessary"), etc. In each case, the verb is pointing purely to that which is taking place or rather to the taking place or the happening itself, which is entirely indissociable from that which is actually taking place. There is no subject withdrawn from or in excess of the taking place: the taking place is itself the subject: in "es regnet," or "it rains," the "es" or the "it" is not so much the subject of the verb as the doubling or the underlying of the verb-event (Spanish and Italian, Latin and Ancient Greek do not even have recourse to such semblances of subject). Here, the subject is the verb, and the verb is pure event. Such, then, is the way in which being itself must be heard and experienced: as an event, as something that is happening or taking place, yet not on the basis of something other than itself—a pure event, a subject-event. As Heidegger himself puts it, after the series of transformations to which the Seinsfrage is submitted in the course of nearly fifty years: "es gibt Sein," "das Sein west," "das Ereignis ereignet," etc. In this regard, it is no different from the event "rain." And yet, in another sense, it is quite different from the event "rain," insofar as it designates not so much a particular event, an event alongside other events, but the event of all events, or better said perhaps, the eventness or eventuality of all events. To address the question regarding the type of discourse that is adequate to being, we need to go one step further and raise the question regarding the kind of question that is suited to events and to the event of being in particular. For this question can evidently not be that question that so decisively shaped the fate of philosophy, the question with which, in the face of a thing or an object, philosophical inquiry says we must begin: quid est?, what is it? Indeed, this question, the question that will have guided metaphysics throughout its history, is such as to point inevitably and from the outset in the direction of essences. It is a question that is adapted to a certain interpretation of being as ousia, and of ousia as upokeimenon, in other words, as essence-substance. And, as Heidegger will have shown, this type of inquiry inevitably and lamentably points to what is most general and most common amongst beings, and so to something ultimately seen as vague and empty, "general" in the most vacuous sense of the term. Events escape the grasp of metaphysics, for they are without essence: their very essence is to not obey the law of essence understood as quiddity. Now if Heidegger does indeed deploy the classical determination of essence (Wesen) anew, rescuing it from its metaphysical appropriation, it is only at the cost of a formidable and daring transformation that equates the operation of essence with movement as such, verbalizing it, de-reifying it, allowing it to coincide with the very movement of unfolding, with being as such; it is only, and ironically, to overturn the notion of essence so that, from being the first and highest substance, it becomes a pure event, being as becoming or happening. Thus, the essence of a flower is not its eidoV, but its flowering, much in the same sense in which, in Perrault’s tale, the grass is grasped in its essence as "greening" (verdoyer) and the summer sun as "dusting" (poudroyer). The essence of being itself is to be; it is the movement of essence as such: wesen. It is, in other words, the unfolding that is proper to the thing in its thinging, the event or the eventing of the thing. It is, if you prefer, the event of all events or, more specifically still, the eventfulness of every event or Wesen. Essences, on the other hand, at least in their classical formulation as quiddity, are equated with the being of a thing precisely as the negation of the becoming or the eventuality that is implicated in the thing, which is then relegated to the status of contingency, accidentality.

Continued.  ¶ 2:31 PM 12 comments

  Mucking about in the Ozarks.

I think I quoted da Vinci in the book about being able to look at mud or clouds or stains and find marvelous ideas. So, out of the muck of my own condition — that’s what I’m trying to do.

You’re just trying to look closer to where you are. Heidegger said, “We don’t want to get anywhere, we just want to get to where we already are.” I always liked that. That quote is really important, because we often take so much for granted.

That's a new Heidegger quote, in so far as I can tell. Sounds like a variation of Buckaroo Banzai's "no matter where you go, there you are".  ¶ 8:03 AM 1 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

On one of their Village Walks, Tine and Rubob observe a couple of trees whose seeds were thrown together.

"Thrown or fallen?" Tine wondered to herself. She thought of Martin Heidegger's use of the word "thrown" -- "geworfen." We find ourselves thrown into the "thereness" of the world, Heidegger wrote.

Rubob was thinking the same thing: "It's like what your friend Heidegger says, Tine -- how we're thrown into things," he said.

Tine thought how some acorns are scattered about by chance, and how some are brought together.

"Maybe Rubob and I were thrown into the world together -- or at least thrown together in the world," Tine thought. "We put down roots, and that was it."

"Human beings are 'more daring than plant or beast,' according to Heidegger," Tine thought, looking at Rubob standing before the trees. Heidegger quotes the poet Rainer Maria Rilke saying that we "go with this venture," we "will it."

"We made the choice to venture together in this world we've been thrown into," Tine thought, looking at the trees rooted in the ground and reaching for the sky together.

  ¶ 6:55 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

An Undivided Unity posts a Celan poem and finds reading Heidegger is too physical:

There is a specific type of headache associated with reading too much Heidegger. It involves a dull and distracting throb right behind my forehead and a stabbing pain behind my eyes, and is indicative that I ought to sleep instead of trying to write. Especially when even Heidegger's paragraph subtitles stop making sense. "Being open in captivation as a not-having of world in having that which disinhibits", indeed.

Yeah, well, like the song says, there's more than 50 ways to read Heidegger.  ¶ 8:37 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

The Freedom Sanction has been reading about postmodernism and God, and has a question.

Raschke says that the philosopher, Martin Heidegger, tried to overcome metaphysics through "thinking of the Being" while attemtping to avoid nihilism. Raschke summarizes Heidegger's thought by saying that "Being is only revealed by its concealment." To put this as simply as possible, God (the Being) is a person (or more accurately, a personality) not a metaphysical principle. Postmoderns take this a step further by attempting to go beyond the "identification of God as a 'Being'" at all.

My question is this: Is Heidegger's idea an earth-shattering philosophical development?

  ¶ 9:02 AM 0 comments

  An article in CounterPunch a year ago asked what Heidegger's break from Husserl's phenomenology means for notions of identity and authenticity.

Belief in a truly authentic identity is crucial for the realisation of the self as a genuine autonomous agent, but is authenticity possible? A phenomenological thinker may say yes. Husserl argues that we can refer to 'Evidez', which is 'awareness' of matter itself as disclosed in the most clear, distinct and adequate way for something of its kind. Accordingly, one can experience a pure awareness of oneself. This notion was articulated by Descartes' cogito: 'I think therefore I am.' In phenomenological terms, it is the pure and lucid 'awareness' of me thinking which removes any doubt concerning me 'being in the world', at least as a thinking entity. Phenomenology attempts to describe how the world is constituted and experienced through conscious acts and what is given to us in immediate experience without being mediated by preconceptions and theoretical notions. According to phenomenology, one's self-awareness can depict an unmediated authentic form of knowledge.

It didn't take long for Husserl's student Martin Heidegger to expose major cracks in his teacher's philosophical endeavour. Heidegger revealed that 'being in the world' might be slightly more complicated than Husserl had suggested. It was the former's notion of hermeneutics that exposed the shortcomings of Husserl's phenomenology. Hermeneutics deals with the complex interaction between the interpreting subject and the interpreted object. Within his critical reading of Husserl, Heidegger exposed the embarrassing fact that unmediated awareness is actually hard to conceive. Human beings, it appears, do 'belong to language'. Language is out there before one comes to the world. Once one enters the realm of language, a separating wall made of symbolic lingual bricks and cultural mortar blocks one's access to any possible unmediated awareness. Can we think without applying language? Can we experience at all without the mediation of language? Admittedly, we are capable of feeling desire while dreaming or being overwhelmed by beauty but then, as soon as we think it through, we find ourselves entangled in a process of naming. As soon as we name, the awareness ceases to be unmediated. Once within the realm of language, our perception of the world is shaped by meanings that are not ours. It would seem that a comprehensive authentic awareness is impossible.

Hat tip peacepalestine.  ¶ 8:49 AM 0 comments

  Miguel De Beistegui, in three long paragraphs at the beginning of his essay "The Transformation of the Sense of Dasein in Heidegger's Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis)" (Research in Phenomenology 35), does a good job of summarizing what Heidegger's questions on ontology are all about.

At the heart of being lies the following contradiction, which representational thought—metaphysics—has continuously and consistently overlooked: being “is” not; it is, literally, nothing. For “is” or “are” only those things—those beings—that can be represented, only those beings with a minimal structure of identity and permanence such that they can be identified and recognized by way of nouns, or substantives. In one way or another, beings are substances, or derived from substances, or attached and attributed to substances. Yet because “being” is not a thing, because it is no-thing, it is the one and most singular exception to the rule and law, as well as to the logic of substance, a rule and a logic that has come to permeate our use of language and of grammar to such an extent that being itself has fallen prey to it: being has been and continues to be mistaken for a substance and for the essence of what is. And yet, being is not simply foreign to this law and this logic; it is not simply foreign to those things from which it differs essentially. If it “is” indeed nothing, it is at the same time everything: it is the very operation whereby the things themselves come to be, the very operation whereby “there is” (something rather than nothing). Being is only in and through its difference from beings. And this, in such a way that one can wonder as to whether it is at all possible to ever speak of being “itself ” or “as such,” that is, independently of those beings which come to be in its wake, independently of those things that can be identified by way of nouns. Can there ever be being as such, if being is indeed such that it does not refer to an essence or a substance—a self-present and self-identical structure—and, at the same time, such that the very operation for which this word stands always opens the field of beings as such and as a whole? Can we ever speak of being itself, if being is such as to escape the structure of selfhood altogether? Since it is neither an individuated thing nor an essence, neither a substance nor an idea, it cannot be treated as a noun or made the subject of a proposition. It cannot take the form of the classical “S is P”; it cannot be made the object of a judgment of predication, whether analytic or synthetic. For any such proposition would presuppose and have decided in advance about that which is precisely at issue in the proposition regarding being: that being can have the status of subject in a proposition; that this proposition allows for a doubling of being as copula; that being can be predicated; that the matter for which the word “being” stands can be inscribed within an implicit understanding of language as propositional—all of this when the very operation of being is such as to resist any such subjectivization and copulation, and when the essence of language itself is addressed for the first time in and through this operation. This operation escapes the classical form of the proposition altogether, which understands being from a twofold perspective: first, and as its ontological presupposition, as the substrate, substance, or subject characterized by its permanence and identity beyond and despite the various transformations and changes it can be subjected to (recall the first analogy of experience in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason), and thus, ultimately, as the idea, the eidoV, the essence or the origin and cause of such transformations; second, as the copula or the purely functional link uniting subject and predicate. As a result, when, attempting to develop a discourse about being, we say: “Being is . . .,” we already give the impression that it is a matter of predicating Being, about which a fundamental decision has already been made, the decision according to which it designates something, first of all, like presence, or actuality (ousia), and second, something like an essence (eidoV), or the being of a thing. We give the impression, then, that being refers to this twofold sense of substance-subject and essence first thematised by Aristotle. We have already inscribed the operation of being within the metaphysics of the ousia-upokeimenon, we have already answered the question regarding the status of being before having had a chance to raise it. Yet, despite all these difficulties, if the word “being” is not the emptiest and most general of words, if something is really at issue in it, it will need to be made the object of a certain discourse and take the appearance of a proposition, albeit at the cost of a radical transformation of the very nature of the proposition. Yet this discourse will need to unfold from the very matter for which the word stands, the proposition will be of being, that is, belonging to being, in the strictest and most literal sense. What, then, is the proposition of being? What form must this ontologic take? What must now be the sense of logoV, if it is no longer compatible with its classical conception as logical proposition?

Continued.  ¶ 9:33 PM 0 comments

  Ork! Ork!:

Its sort of funny I've been running this little test on people. Open Heidegger to any page read any sentence and make sense out of it. It hasn't failed me yet. At the lecture the other night, my girlfriend told one of the profs about that test. The prof said "that's an unfair test you can understand the context of the sentence in any book." My reply was "but at least I can understand that sentence as a comprehensible English sentence. That is not the case with this book" She conceded that point to me.

  ¶ 6:39 AM 2 comments

  Christopher Hitchens on The Strange Case of David Irving five years ago:

On the old principle famously adumbrated by Bertrand Russell -- of "evidence against interest" -- it seemed that Irving was capable of publishing information that undermined his own position. He also, in his editorial notes, gave direct testimony about the mass killing of Jews in the East (by shooting) and of the use of an "experimental" gas chamber in the Polish town of Chelmno. The "deniers" don't like this book; on the strength of it you could prove that the Nazis tried to do away with the Jews. There was some odd stuff about Hitler's lack of responsibility for Kristallnacht but, as I say, I allowed for Irving's obsessions. I wrote a column criticizing St. Martin's for its cowardice and described Irving himself as not just a fascist historian but a great historian of fascism. One should be allowed to read "Mein Kampf" as well as Heidegger. Allowed? One should be able to do so without permission from anybody.

  ¶ 6:33 AM 0 comments

  In an article in yesterday's NY Times, After Neoconservatism, Francis Fukuyama writes:

By the 1990's, neoconservatism had been fed by several other intellectual streams. One came from the students of the German Jewish political theorist Leo Strauss, who, contrary to much of the nonsense written about him by people like Anne Norton and Shadia Drury, was a serious reader of philosophical texts who did not express opinions on contemporary politics or policy issues. Rather, he was concerned with the 'crisis of modernity' brought on by the relativism of Nietzsche and Heidegger, as well as the fact that neither the claims of religion nor deeply-held opinions about the nature of the good life could be banished from politics, as the thinkers of the European Enlightenment had hoped.

I think this notion that Heidegger introduced relativism is an indicator that the speaker believes they know Heidegger's philosophy, but hasn't actually read him. Heidegger was not a relativist. He questioned some of the fundamental ideas of Western philosophy, and he believed they changed historically, but he did not indicate that meant other beliefs were equally valid. In fact, he was convinced that Greek and German thought were the pinnacles of thinking. His motive for questioning their base assumptions was to rise further, and not to bring everything them down to the same level as other cultures. That others have picked over Heidegger's works to support their own notions of relativism is no reason to ascribe that concept to him. If one were to say that Heidegger was a relativist because he believed that standards changed historically, then Strauss and Fukuyama could also be considered relativists.

In his introduction to Heidegger, Timothy clark puts it like this:

Heidegger's thinking is clearly committed to some interpretations being more valid than others. Heidegger is a 'realist' in the technical philosophical sense of assuming a reality that precedes all human formulations (for Heidegger, it is one of the egotistical absurdities of philosophical reason to imagine that the existence of an 'external world' somehow requires a proof). However, his relentless attack on the fantasy of our achieving a truth which would be ahistorical and self-grounding means that no interpretation, including his own, can or should be called final.

  ¶ 2:33 PM 3 comments

  Blood not blue enough? Aspiring above your station in life? Want to be a
ruling class hero? Then, reading this blog may help.

It came as a shock, therefore, to come to Britain and learn that Homer, Aquinas and Heidegger might be viewed as part of a snobbish syllabus that was the exclusive property of private and selective schools. Those well-versed in the travels of Odysseus or the poetry of Racine were 'toffs', not well-educated.

  ¶ 7:04 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Amor Fati posts a lecture on death in Being and Time:

End is not something negative. End (and totality) means wholeness. It is the “ontological determination” of being-there, which is the window to his Being. Can we say that totality belongs to Da-sein although it is yet to come (which means outstanding)? Does it mean there is something in Da-sein, which is lacking?

  ¶ 6:50 AM 0 comments

  Heidegger's Letter on Humanism was written in response to a letter from Jean Beaufret, November 10, 1946, asking "How can we restore meaning to the word 'humanism'?". Beaufret has been in touch with Heidegger for almost a year.

In October 29, 1945, Jean-Paul Sartre has delivered his Existentialism is a Humanism lecture and shortly thereafter published it as a book. Philosophical talk revolved around that essay as Europeans tried in make sense of what had just happened in the war. In the essay Sartre claimed man was thrown into an athiestic universe and must commit himself to actions for the "human community". And, he also claims, that existentialism is shared by Heidegger.

Immediately after the war, Heidegger has been quite keen on an alliance with Sartre. An attempted meeting between the two in Baden-Baden failed because transporation could not be arranged. Camus was also invited, but declined because of Heidegger involvement with the Nazis. In a surviving letter from Heidegger to Sartre, October 29, 1945, Heidegger praises Sartre's writings and invites him to Todtnauberg for skiing and philosophizing about being. So it is not surprising that Sartre thought Heidegger agreed with him.

A year later, Heidegger had regained his confidence and was ready to reclaim his own destiny without the umbrella of post-war existentialism, under which Merleau-Ponty, Marcel, and Jasper were also grouped.

I'm fairly sure this is cover letter for the Letter on Humanism because the dates match up. The notes in the book in which I found it are less than definitive. I don't think it has been translated before.

Freiburg, November 23, 1946

Dear Mister Beaufret,

Your kind letter, that was brought to me, some days ago, by Mr. Palmer, gave me great satisfaction. I have known your name for only a few weeks, through the excellent articles, on "Existentialism", pbulished in Confluences. Unfortunately, up until now, I have not obtained # 2 and 5 of the review, but since the first article it has become evident to me the high understanding you have of philosophy. There still remain here some obscure parts that only the future will clear up. But that will not happen unless rigorous thinking, vigilant attention to speaking and the economy of words are rewarded more than they are today. You yourself see that an abyss here separates my thinking from Jasper's philosophy, without even talking about the other question that animates my thinking and that, in a curious manner, has been up to now completely unknown. I truly esteem Jaspers as a person and as a writer, his influence on university youth is considerable. But the approximation, now almost classic, "Jaspers and Heidegger, is the misunderstanding par excellence that circulates in our philosophy. This mistake peaks when one pretends to see in my philosophy a "nihilism", in my philosophy that not only questions, like all previous philosophy, about the being of beings, but about the truth of being. On the contrary, the essence of nihilsm is characterized by being incapable of thinking the nihil. I sense, as much as I could realize after a few weeks, in the thinking of young French philosophers, an extraordinary élan which clearly shows that a revolution is being prepared in this domain.

What you say about the translation of Da-sein with "human reality" is quite justified. Also excellent the annotation: "But if German has its recourses, French has its limits"; here hides an essential indication of the possibilities of one instructed by the other, in the bosom of a productive thinking, inside a mutual exchange.

"Da-sein" is a key word of my thinking, and because of that it is a source of grave errors of interpretation. "Da-sein" does not mean for me exactly "here I am", if I might express myself in an undoubtly impossible French: ser-o-ai e o-lá [translator: being-towards-having and towards-there] mean exactly AlhJeia, uncovering-opening.

But the preceeding is but some brief information. Fecund thinking requires, more than writing and reading the sunousia [translator: togetherness] of preserving,and this work that is, already teaching received, already teaching given.

Martin Heidegger

All translations are imperfect and interpretations. I have refrained from using the formal forms of addressing that are archaic in English. Suggested alternatives appreciated.  ¶ 2:06 PM 0 comments

  On German cops and transgressors, and the metaphysics of the bored.

If German policemen were forced to read German philosophy, they would -- provided they didn't die of boredom themselves -- also learn that ennui is no simple thing. One of the greatest and most contested philosophers of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger, who could by no account be described as a philosopher of fun, saw in boredom, or in what he called the "drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence" -- humanity's terminal sinking into general indifference.

Are all Germans that bored? Doesn't the world, in which party girl Paris Hilton is considered for the role of Mother Theresa in a forthcoming Indian movie or in which pop icon Madonna consistently refuses to stay with her own age, offer enough hilarity to cheer everybody up?

One shouldn't be too critical of the Germans. After all, they carry the burden of an overwhelming philosophical tradition on their shoulders every day. Thanks to Heidegger & co., there are Germans who wake up in the morning to ponder the history of metaphysics as they tiptoe their way to the bathroom. There are Germans who look into the mirror while brushing their teeth, and, while observing the dark circles under their eyes, inevitably ask the big question: Why is there something, rather than nothing?

  ¶ 9:27 AM 1 comments

  Mark Halpern on comparative intelligence reversal:

Raj Reddy, another winner of the Turing Award and former president of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, takes a much rosier view of the matter. In a 1996 paper, Reddy begins with the usual bow to Turing, then says, “Since its inception, AI has made steady progress.” As an illustration, he mentions a wide variety of accomplishments, such as playing high-level chess, guiding an automobile down a road, and making possible the “electronic book.” But he nowhere mentions attempts to pass the Test or do anything remotely like it. Instead, he attacks those who minimize AI’s achievements, like Hubert Dreyfus, author of What Computers Can’t Do:

The trouble with those people who think that computer intelligence is in the future is that they have never done serious research on human intelligence. Shall we write a book on ‘What Humans Can’t Do’? It will be at least as long as Dreyfus’s book.

This dismissive remark is an example of another tendency exhibited by AI defenders: when they find “computer intelligence” being compared unfavorably with human intelligence, they sometimes try to promote computer intelligence by denigrating that of humans. In other words, if they can’t make the computer smarter, they can try to improve the ratio by making people seem dumber. As Jaron Lanier told the New York Times: “Turing assumed that the computer in this case [i.e., having passed the Test] has become smarter or more humanlike, but the equally likely conclusion is that the person has become dumber and more computerlike.”

  ¶ 11:04 PM 0 comments

  Robert Sokolowski interviewed on Deus Caritas Est.

Q: Does Benedict XVI adhere to a particular philosophical tradition in the way the Pope John Paul II was known as a Thomist and personalist?

Monsignor Sokolowski: I think that the work of Benedict XVI could be said to resemble the Christian Platonism one finds in the Fathers of the Church.

Also, his extensive and thoughtful survey of the various uses of words, in both current and historical texts and discourse, makes one think of Aristotle's and Heidegger's way of looking for philosophical phenomena in the way people speak about things.

  ¶ 5:46 PM 0 comments

  Heidegger in a rub-a-dub way.

Was ist Sein? Was ist Sein? Was ist der Sinn vom Sein?

With riddim (Hat tip just ma.y). Dread anticipate Laswell version.  ¶ 8:42 PM 0 comments

  Blogcast:

A conversation with Andrew Mitchell about the philosophy of Martin Heidegger.

I printed out his "Heidegger and Terrorism" (Research in Phenomenology 35) this morning. Lots of Clausewitz, so far.  ¶ 6:56 PM 0 comments

  Heidegger's Humanism, from John Gray's Straw Dogs, continues.

Heidegger praised 'the crooked path of thought', but he did so because he believed it led back to 'home'. In Heidegger's never-renounced engagement with Nazism, the quest for 'home' became a hatred of hybrid thinking and the worship of a deadly unity of will. There can be little doubt that Heidegger's flirtation with Nazism was in part an exercise in opportunism. In May 1933, with the help of Nazi officials, he was appointed Rector of the University of Freiburg.

Heidegger was elected rector by the faculty on April 21. He joined the National Socialist Party on May 3.

He used the post to give speeches in support of Hitler's policies, including one in November 1933 in which he pronounced, 'The Fuhrer himself and alone in the present and future German reality and its law.' At the same time he broke off relations with students and colleagues (such as his old friend and former teacher Edmund Husserl) who were Jewish. In acting in this way, Heidegger was not much different from many other German academics at one time.

Husserl converted to the Evangelical Lutheran faith in 1886.

But Heidegger's involvement with Nazism went deeper than cowardice and power worship. It expressed an impulse integral to his thinking. By contrast with Nietzsche, a nomad who wrote for travellers like himself and who was able to put so much in question because he belonged nowhere, Heidegger always yearned desperately to belong. For him, thinking was not an adventure whose charm comes from the fact that one cannot know where it leads. It was a long detour, at the end of which lay the peace that comes from no longer having to think. In his rectorial address at Freiburg, Heidegger comes close to saying as much, leading the observer Karl Lowith to comment that it was not quite clear whether one should now study the pre-Socratic philosophers or join the Brownshirts.

Gray is here following a common pattern: Heidegger is considered an important philosopher by those who have read him; I don't understand him; Heidegger was a Nazi; Nazism is universally condemned; I'll simply dismiss Heidegger's way of thinking by ascribing his politics to it. It is, of course, Heidegger's own fault that his critics can avail themselves of this excuse, but it doesn't say much for the critics either.

Heidegger claimed that in his later thought he turned away from humanism. Yet, except perhaps in his last years, he showed no interest in traditions in which the human subject is not central. He held resolutely to the European tradition because he believed that in it alone 'the question of Being' had been rightly posed. It was this belief that led him to assert that Greek and German are the only truly 'philosophical' languages -- as if the subtle reasonings of Nagarjuna, Chuang-Tzu and Dogen, Jey Tsong Khapa, Averroës and Maimonides could not be philosophy because Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Tibetan, Arab and Jewish thinkers did not write in these European tongues. Purged of alien voices and returned to its primordial purity, philosphy could once again become the voice of Being. Philosophers could read the runes of history, and know what mankind was called upon to do -- as Heidegger claimed he did in Germany in the thirties. Seldom has a philosopher claimed so much for himself, or been so deluded.

Putting delusions to one side, Heidegger's claims about the privileged status of Greek and German were really a dig at the Western philosophers that wrote in Latin from Augustine to Kant. Although not as much of an orientalist as Schopenhauer, Heidegger was quite keen on seeking out affinities for his thinking in other philosophical traditions. Gray's sarcasm is self-defeated in his next paragraph.

In Heidegger's last writings he speaks of Gelassenheit, or releasement -- a way of thinking and living that has turned away from willing. Perhaps that reflects the influence on him of East Asian thought, particularly Taoism. More likely Heidegger's Gelassenheit is only the release from willing that Schopenhauer had long before seen as the source of art. In art, and above all in music, we forget the practical interests and strivings that together make up 'the will'. By doing so we forget ourselves, Schopenhauer claimed: we see the world from a standpoint of selfless contemplation. In the last phase of his thought, the only one in which he really turned away from humanism, Heidegger did little more than return to Schopenhauer by a roundabout route.

If Heidegger's critique of humanism is reduced to a matter of selfless contemplation, then Heidegger might be considered a minor follower of Schopenhauer, but instead, the issues Heidegger grappled with extend far beyond the boundaries of the metaphysical box John Gray is in.

The argument that Heidegger unjustifiably privileges humans above animals is one worth persuing, but to do so, one first has to unpack Heidegger's reasons for privileging Dasein.  ¶ 1:06 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Cloudrider has been reading the Letter on Humanism and musing on that subject:

I think [Heidegger] accurately deduces that the whole problem of understanding, what existence is for instance, is corrupted with alot of mixed notions and historical fallacies, his need to avoid these is admirable but a wee bit confusing to the armchair philospher (me).

In my opinion his long-winded reply in Letter on Humanism, is less about what is wrong about Humanism and much more an appeal to the French philospohy movement at the time. It seems more of an attempt to move them away from Sartre, in short he was trying to make young philosophers know how smart he was.

The historical circumstances are that immediately after the war, Heidegger was traumatized and feared that his works would be forgotten. He was initially gratified that Sartre was alluding to Being and Time, but as he read more of Sartre writings he realized that he needed to voice his objections. As his confidence returned, he decided to use his reply to Beaufret's questions to spell the the differences between his work and Sartre's existentialism-as-a-humanism. One of these days I'll post a translation of his cover letter to Beaufret that accompanied the Letter on Humanism. I don't think it has appeared in English before.  ¶ 12:08 PM 2 comments

  John Gray's Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, was published four years ago to wide acclaim. "[A] devasting critique of liberal humanism, and all of it set out in easy-to-digest (although hard-to-swallow) aperçus," said Will Self; i.e. readable yet no quite right. Here's an excerpt.

Heidegger's Humanism

Heidegger tells us that, by comparison with man, animals are 'world-poor'. Animals merely exist, reacting to the things they encounter around them; whereas humans are makers of the worlds they inhabit. Why does Heidegger believe this? Because he cannot rid himself of the prejudice that humans are necessary in the scheme of things, whereas animals are not.

The scheme of things (or beings), or the first question one needs to ask, for an ontologist like Heidegger is "Why is their something rather than nothing?". In that scheme of things, beings that ask the question are privileged, and all other beings fall in the other category, be they pandas, photons, or the Pedra da Gávea.

In his Letter on Humanism, Heidegger claims to reject the man-centered thinking that has prevailed -- ever since the pre-Socratics, he tells us -- in Western philosophy. In the past, philosophers were concerned only with the human, now they should put the human on one side and concern themselves with 'Being'. But Heidegger turns to 'Being' for the same reason that Christians turn to God -- to affirm the unique place of humans in the world.

This is Gray's main thesis: humans aren't special. Sure, we're just another variation in the Higgs field, but it's one that's meaningful to me.

Like Nietzsche, Heidegger was a postmonotheist -- an unbeliever who could not give up Christian hopes. In his great first book Being and Time, he sets out a view of the human existence that is supposed to depend at no point on religion. Yet every one of the categories of thought he deploys -- 'throwness' (Dasein), 'uncanniness' (unheimlichkeit), 'guilt' (Schuld) -- is a secular version of a Christian idea. We are 'thrown' into the world, which remains always foreign or 'uncanny' to us, and in which we can never be truly at home. Again, whatever we do, we cannot escape guilt; we are condemned to chose without having any ground for our choices, which will always be somehow mysteriously at fault. Obviously, these are the Christian ideas of the Fall of Man and Original Sin, recycled by Heidegger with an existential-sounding twist.

It's surprising that Sartre is never referred to in this book, because this is a Sartrian reading of Heidegger, through Christian lenses. I has a teacher that could reasonably demonstrate that ultimately everything was about sex. And after two millenium of Christianity dominating the West, one can pretty much trace anything back to some Christian idea. But postmonotheists have more fun.

In his later writings, Heidegger declared that he had abandoned humanism in order to concern himself with 'Being'. In fact, since he sought in Being what Christians believe they find in God, he no more gave up humanism than Nietzsche did. Admittedly he is never clear what Being signifies. Often he writes as if it is altogether indefinable. But whatever Being may be, there can be doubt that for Heidegger it gives humans a unique standing in the world.

Heidegger is quite clear (certain) of what Being is in his own original sense. The problem lies in his originality, so that one cannot facilely say: Being means blah, where blah is some word we are all familiar with. There are critics that have taken the time and effort to understand Heidegger, and they are worth reading. And then there are the others, who--no matter how easy they are to digest--can't say anything meaningful.

For Heidegger, humans are the site in which Being is disclosed. Without humans, Being would be silent. Meister Eckardt and Angelus Silesius, German mystics whose writings Heidegger seems to have studied closely, said much of the same: God needs man as much as man needs God. For these mystics, humans stand at the centre of the world, everything else is marginal. Other animals are deaf-mutes; only through humans can God speak and be heard.

We need to turn this premise around. For Heidegger, Being is the site where beings are disclosed to humans. Or better: Being discloses beings to humans. That's the crux. Being is not a thing. And neither is God to mystics like Eckardt.

Heidegger sees everything that lives solely from the standpoint of its relations with humans. The differences between living creatures count for nothing in comparison with their difference from humans. Molluscs and mice are the same as bats and gorillas, badgers and wolves are no different from crabs and gnats. All are 'world-poor', none has the power to 'disclose Being'. This only the old anthropocentric conceit, rendered anew in the idiom of a secular Gnostic.

In the auxiliary notes in the back of the book, Gray refers the reader to Hans Jonas's The Gnostic Religion for more on the comparison between Gnosticism and Heidegger. Jonas may have been a student of Heidegger's, but his book only refers to his teacher once, noting an affinity in the notion of 'throwness' into this world.

Continued.  ¶ 5:21 AM 0 comments

  Enowning has it's first guest blogger! Orenda writes about Terrence Malick's The New World:

The title -- "The New World" -- is not inconsequential. This fragment of a poem by Friedrich Hoelderlin ("The Ister," "Germania," and a great influence on Heidegger) may well have been in the back of Malick's mind. (Malick translated an early work from Heidegger while a graduate student at MIT.)

Friedrich Hoelderlin
from "The Death of Empedocles" (1800-1801)

"New world


    and a brazen vault

Heaven hangs over us, a curse
freezes the limbs of mortals, and the strengthening,
joy-giving presents of Earth are like chaff, the
Mother mocks us with her gifts
and all is mere semblance --
O when, when

    will it break at last,
    the flood over the parched land."


The new world is the world of enframing nature, setting her off over and against men, who in their drive toward exploration come no longer to see earth as Hoelderlinian Mother but as chaff for exploitation, consumption, and profit. Captain Newport's (Christopher Plummer) address to the citizens of Jamestown on the beach midway through the film -- "we will be the new gods" -- tells of the self-possession behind this impulse. What gives life -- sky, sun, earth -- becomes mere semblance to the West, while metaphysical apparitions and abstractions now take priority as the "real."

The new world, then, mandates the death of the old -- or at least, its shackling, re-education, and conversion -- and the replacement of old gods with more tellurian ones -- namely, us. And we do "not intend to leave," as chief Powhatan concludes.

Malick's understanding of cinema seems to be influenced by Heidegger's contention that it is a cardinal symptom of modernity (which he claims has its deepest roots in Greek thinking) to apprehend reality as something to be differentiated from how it appears to a subjective consciousness, and that the reality is understood at the most fundamental level as something to be mastered.*

In their first attempt at communication, Pocahontas asks Smith to translate "sky," "sun," "water," "lips," "eyes," and "ears" from Algonquian into English. Yet it is her physical gesturing, along with her words, which suggests the musicality and harmony of these elements (in the case of sky, sun, and water) with human beings, who are gifted to speak, see, and hear of them. This is no mere labelling of natural things with words -- an inconsequential pasting of sounds onto objects we come across -- but instead, a gesturing toward a more primordial rhythm of these forces with the human spirit.



Language, the human voice, and the body are not originally at odds with nature, but instead, reveal it to us, as Pocahontas's prayerful gesturing -- the opening of her hands from her face and body -- throughout the film indicates. A true openness to being brings the world to life -- not as a place from which we escape through death, but which is, in fact, our only home. "There is only this," Captain Smith (Colin Farrell) says in a moment of clarity while his sight ranges over the waters: "All else is unreal." The technological distance introduced by the West between humans and nature -- by this new dominion and mastery -- severs us from our only true dwelling. We are the creators of our own imprisoning and brazen vault, what Wallace Stevens in "Sunday Morning" called "...this dividing and indifferent blue."

The enclosed forts of Jamestown intimate that at the heart of the mortal West is a sealing off against our originary poetic dwelling with the earth, sky, and gods. Our spirits are headed in another direction, toward other creations. The wooden towers constructed within the fort climb futilely toward a heaven from which we were not always divided.

Heidegger's saying in der Spiegel in 1966 that "...only a god can save us" takes on a new meaning when considered in this vein; such a waiting awaits, perhaps, a "coming word in the heart," and a flood over this new, parched land.  ¶ 4:23 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Philosophical Conversations gets up Richard Wolin for the same book review that made me spit the dummy.  ¶ 1:15 PM 0 comments

 

"There is only this. All else is unreal."

  ¶ 7:11 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Trinitology posts on the subject/object distinction, science, and theology:

In Being and Time 69b, Heidegger offers an interpretation of the “theoretical attitude” of modern science in terms of his existential analytic. Over the course of this project he presents a critique of “objective truth” of which theologians would do well to take note. It will never cease to be important to stress the “let God be true” foundation of our belief, and yet the results of 20th century existentialism lead back to the inescapable frailty of our epistemic finitude. In any case, Heidegger shoots at the same target of modern arrogance in scientific neutrality, deconstructing its supposedly unassailable methodological foundation. While modern rationalism attempted to ground epistemic certainty in a subject-centered rational discourse, empiricism sought to overcome the uncertainty of sense perception through the methodological objectivity of instrumental quantification. But both approaches assumed the subject-object distinction, an absolute, unbridgeable demarcation between the knower’s being and the world. Heidegger offers an existential interpretation of man’s being that both undercuts this distinction and allows for its legitimate perspectives.

  ¶ 8:06 PM 3 comments

  Ork! Ork!

Putting aside it's two-dimensional characters, the pathetically weak love story, the depressing scenery, and the unbearable (lack) of dialogue, Brokeback Mountain at least helped me understand Heidegger's onto-ethical relationship & the idea of the shepherd of Being. I mean, such fabulous lines as I wish y'd let me be Jack, and it cud' be like this sound like excerpts from The Gay Red Neck's Guide to Heidegger.

  ¶ 4:59 PM 0 comments

  Spengler on globalization, Islam, and the right lager.

It is not a good thing to come late to the table of globalization. China and its neighbors have emerged from the maelstrom of revolution and the violent loss of tens of millions of lives to become actors on the world economic stage. Of China's 1.3 billion people, 400 million are integrated into the world division of labor, and millions more are becoming urbanized, literate and productive by the year. India remains behind China but has good prospects for success. Against these formidable competitors, few countries in Western Asia, Africa or Latin America can hope to prevail. In a world that has little need of subsistence farmers and even less need of university graduates with degrees in Islamic philosophy, most of the Muslim world can expect small mercy from the market.

The theological problem I have discussed in other locations, most recently in reporting the pope's seminar at Castelgandolfo. Christianity and Judaism have adapted to doubt, the bacillus of modern thought, by inviting doubt to serve as the handmaiden of faith. No better formulation of this can be found than in Benedict XVI's classic Introduction to Christianity. The object of revelation, the believer, becomes a participant in revelation, in dialogue with the Revealer. This great innovation has not prevented the death of traditional, autonomic Christian belief, but it has left an enduring core of Christian faith in the West well inoculated against skepticism. As the pope explained, the eternal, unchanging character of the Koran that the Archangel Gabriel dictated verbatim to Mohammed admits of no doubt. Muslim belief is not dialogue, but submission. It is as defenseless before the bacillus of skepticism as the American aboriginals were before the smallpox virus.

That is why Muslims cannot respond to Western jibes at the person of their Prophet except as they did to the Jyllens-Posten cartoons. I do not sympathize with scoffers but, like Benedict, I see doubt as an adversary to be won over, rather than as an enemy to be extirpated. I would not have drawn nor published these cartoons, but when the lines are drawn, I stand with Western freedom against traditional authority. I write these lines over a Carlsberg and shall drink no other lager until the boycott of Danish product ends.

I would only disagree with the assessment of Latin America in the globalizing world. Africa has collapsed and Western Asia is only kept afloat by oil revenues, but Latin America has a good chance of prospering. Argentina and Chile might as well be European societies. Brazil has a vibrant culture and a lot of potential, if the rule of law prevails. So if Europe can get over its current problems, I expect Latin America might too.  ¶ 9:51 AM 0 comments

  The Cartoon War rages on, and thank the deity for the web, because I wouldn't know about it from reading the wife's Newspaper of Record (All the news we see fit to print!). Judging by their story placement, the most important thing that happened yesterday was the funeral of the wife of the famous civil rights leader. Buried somewhere inside there's a short story about some embassies being torched, over some cartoons. What cartoons? Their readers won't find out reading this paper. Just like their readers didn't read about the controversy about the last Democratic presidential candidate's war record nor the one about CBS's fabricated military service documents. They suppress the news they want until after anyone that's been near a water cooler knows the story.

All told, what it tells me is that the freedom to publish on the internet is a real and vital right worth fighting for, but most newspapers are not worth defending because of their pathetic cowardice. Do we need them when they won't exercise their responsibility to inform us about what's going on?

The cartoons aren't particularly good and they were intended to be provocative. But they had a serious point. Before coming to that, we should note that in the Western world "artists" "provoke" with the same numbing regularity as young Muslim men light up other countries' flags. When Tony-winning author Terence McNally writes a Broadway play in which Jesus has gay sex with Judas, the New York Times and Co. rush to garland him with praise for how "brave" and "challenging" he is. The rule for "brave" "transgressive" "artists" is a simple one: If you're going to be provocative, it's best to do it with people who can't be provoked.

Thus, NBC is celebrating Easter this year with a special edition of the gay sitcom "Will & Grace," in which a Christian conservative cooking-show host, played by the popular singing slattern Britney Spears, offers seasonal recipes -- "Cruci-fixin's." On the other hand, the same network, in its coverage of the global riots over the Danish cartoons, has declined to show any of the offending artwork out of "respect" for the Muslim faith.

Which means out of respect for their ability to locate the executive vice president's home in the suburbs and firebomb his garage.

I'm ready to defend our rights to publish any cartoons. I'm ready to take it up a notch. Cartoons of Muhammed offensive? Well, how about cartoons of Allah then? Except that, beyond my limited capabilities as a caricaturist, how does one draw what Meister Eckhart described in this way:

God is Nothing. He is Utterly Other; He is the VOID

?  ¶ 9:17 AM 3 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Clark has a post on Heidegger and Plato, with a promise of more to come.

To understand Heidegger's "Platonism" one should turn first to his discussion of Plato's allegory of the cave. I'll not repeat the allegory since most of us are at least vaguely familiar with it. It is important to note, however, that for Heidegger, the four stages of the cave must be seen together. Truth, as Heidegger sees it, doesn't consist in forever dwelling in a world of light. Rather it is dwelling in darkness (the cave) while knowing of the world of light. Now where Heidegger parts company with Plato is over the ideas. For Plato this is the light and the ideas become more real than the beings in the cave (the shadows). To Heidegger one must note the function of the light which lets the beings become accessible. Yet it is the beings, not the light, which is real. Plato makes the mistake not only of reifying the light (treating it as a being) but then denying all other beings.

Quite important those shadows, as everything cannot be lit all the time. Read the whole thing.

For more on Heidegger and the allegory, besides reading Heidegger's lectures on the subject, you can also read a couple of documents on Gregory Fried's page.  ¶ 8:38 AM 4 comments

  A couple days ago I remarked on Richard Wolin's review in the current Nation. In a review of Wolin's own book The Seduction of Unreason last year, Stanley Rosen made a few of observations that are worth repeating in the current context.

Though I am hardly an admirer of Heidegger's character, I have to say that in many decades of reading his books, I have never found an argument against freedom of thought. It is true that Heidegger's conception of authentic Denken is quite different from Wolin's understanding of thinking. But neither Wolin nor Holmes succeeds in confining the defense of human freedom to a narrow loyalty to Enlightenment rationalism. Let us, however, suppose that Heidegger was an enemy, not of thinking but of freedom of speech. How does this enmity show itself in Leo Strauss, who, if anything, spent his career in the U.S. revealing with much freedom, and to his own professional detriment, the "secret teaching" of the great thinkers of the philosophical tradition? And in what way was Strauss more unreasonable than Wolin or Holmes? I have to say that I was offended by this evasive, even cowardly footnote.

The footnote the sets off Rosen's gander detector to is a quote from Stephen Holmes.

The other passage from Rosen's review indicates that to advance a discussion of Western politics, philosophy, or both, in a meaningful way, it is necessary to undertand both the Greek origins and to understand those one disagrees with.

To be sure, there are some defects in his erudition, particularly with respect to the ancient Greeks. Wolin incorrectly states that the Weimar Republic is a version of what Glaucon in Plato's Republic calls the city of pigs; the city of pigs, actually, is a primitive society lacking in luxuries of every kind, especially including philosophy. Similarly, Wolin characterizes Plato's Seventh Letter, the philosopher's account of his failed intervention into practical politics, as an invocation to give up philosophy for politics! He refers to "first philosophy" (an Aristotelian term) as "an a priori and speculative approach to history and politics," a strange way to characterize the thought of the man who first separated "first philosophy" from ethics and politics. Wolin's almost complete silence concerning Leo Strauss is, probably, a reflection of his apparent inacquaintance with Greek thought. Most if not all of the "anti-rationalists" discussed in the book were either Greek scholars (Nietzsche, Gadamer) or well trained in the classics. The ostensibly reactionary return to the Greeks that Wolin discerns is, in fact, a clue to the development of a richer, more reasonable conception of reason.

This leads me to a final criticism. In order to get back to the Greeks in a fruitful way, one must first come to terms with Heidegger. I mean by this that Heidegger both brings the Greeks to life and distorts them. To study Heidegger is thus like walking a tight-rope. What needs to be said is that Wolin is not good at taking seriously the people he dislikes. He seems to lack the ability, or in any event the will, to think through the ways in which the representatives of anti-Enlightenment were correct. For example, there can be no doubt that humanism, liberalism, and a rational democracy are endangered by the uncontrollable aspects of technology. That Heidegger links his critique of technology to a peculiarly romantic form of religion and a denunciation of the Enlightenment does not invalidate the force of the critique itself.

Coming soon: Heidegger and the critique of the Enlightnment in John Gray's Straw Dogs.  ¶ 8:07 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Borderland... Homeland... Wasteland says in a post In Defence of Non-Falsifiability that:

If any action is broken down to its bare components, by man, it is best described in terms of Heidegger’s argument in relation to Dasein (human existence, ‘being there’) and the ‘towards-which’. This is the basic statement that all actions of human choice, in relation to Dasein, revolve around moving towards a goal. Hence even an argument that ‘turning a doorknob to enter a room involves neither pleasure nor pain, nor does it result in satisfaction of doing the Right’ is easily refuted, due to the fact that we can broaden the outlook in relation to the ‘towards-which’. We open the door. Why? To enter the room. Why? To take part in some action, such as sitting down to read a book. Why? To gain pleasure from reading the book. Why? Because doing such a thing is Right, not contrary to moral boundaries, and therefore acceptable and authentic to one’s self.

That sounds more Husserlian than what Heidegger intended. By 'being there' Heidegger meant that Dasein was where things are merely apprehended, and not necessarily involved in attaining goals.  ¶ 5:09 PM 0 comments

  The Nation has a review by Richard Wolin of a book on Levinas and another on Heidegger's influence on French intellectual circles before the sixties.

In Heidegger Levinas encountered a richness and philosophical daring that were otherwise wanting in contemporary thought. With Heidegger, philosophy transcended the self-referential confines of "consciousness" and acceded to the planes of "life" and "world." Levinas felt that Husserl's phenomenology remained wedded to the arid rationalism of the reigning neo-Kantianism. As such, it was narrowly focused on perception and cognition. With Heidegger's philosophy, conversely, there was talk of "everydayness," "authenticity," "historicity" and "Being-towards-death." Levinas found these topics highly stimulating--as did an entire generation of German youth who, upon hearing "the rumor of the hidden King," flocked to attend Heidegger's lectures. In order to keep the throngs of eager students at bay, Heidegger often had to hold his classes at 7 AM.

The title of the review, Heidegger Made Kosher, strikes me a fairly silly (Did Spinoza make Descartes kosher?), if not insulting to some in its frivolity. The review seems to spend more time lionizing Sartre more than anything else. It takes the position that Sartre's embrace of Marxism was something positive.

Unlike Heidegger, he sincerely believed that the problem of freedom still mattered. His oeuvre constituted a lifelong meditation on the significance and parameters of this fundamental moral and existential imperative. The turning point came during the 1950s, when Sartre realized the inadequacies of the Stoic-Cartesian conception of freedom presented in Being and Nothingness. Thereafter, in order to rethink the problem of freedom in light of the omnipresence of social injustice, he turned to history--and to Marx.

So Sartre embraced Stalin and Mao because of their contributions to human freedom? More than anything else, notions like that indicate where on the political spectrum The Nation shakes its fist from. Heidegger grasped the Cartesian problems at the core of Sartre's existentialism immediately, without going off the deep end and embracing dictatorships. Heidegger had already made his political mistakes, and wasn't about to return to Syracuse. Heidegger also had things to say about freedom, but he was not a political philosopher. The review castigates Heidegger for being an ontologist, and not a moral philosopher or an ethicist, and there lies its central flaw. It presupposes that everyone must take an absolute position for or against this or the other. Heidegger's popularity as a philosopher comes not from a position his readers must occupy, but rather from the insights his take on ontology can give those who study him. This should be obvious when one sees his influence across a broad spectrum of disciplines and the diversity in political opinions of those he has influenced.  ¶ 3:42 PM 2 comments

  Taylor Carman has a letter printed in this week's New Yorker.

Total lack of emotional involvement in the game may give chess programs a strategic advantage over human players, but it is also precisely what robs them of anything like genuine intelligence. Can we even say that such programs are "playing" the game when they neither know nor care what it means to win or lose, or even just to do something or be thwarted? Real animal intelligence involves the organism responding affectively to its environment. Computer programs literally could not care less, which is why they are mere simulations of intelligence.

Quite.  ¶ 8:58 PM 6 comments