In-der-Blog-sein

Whales blogs a Prolegomenon to a discussion of art and time. Dr. Willie Anku, Agamben, Walter Benjamin, Klee, Dürer, Gustave Guillaume, Leibniz, St. Paul, Van Gogh, Bacon, Nietzsche, and Deleuze are mentioned.  ¶ 2:24 PM 0 comments

  I found this in an article by Robert D. Walsh on philosophical counseling in the new Janus Head.

For early Greek thinkers like Heraclitus, for example, according to Martin Heidegger, the loving, desiring, and seeking of wisdom (philosophia) by this or that particular person is primarily a way or a path and only secondarily and derivatively a what or a subject matter, as it will become for later Greek academic thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, and the entire so-called onto-theological tradition up to the present day. But originally, as Heidegger says in What is Philosophy?, “…the Greek word philosophia [φιλοσφία] is a path along which we are traveling.” And the philosopher is not traveling along this path alone because the path of the lover of wisdom already implicates a necessary connection and an openness to others in conversation:

The Greek adjective philosophos [φιλόσοφος] expresses something completely different from the adjective philosophical. An aner philosophos is hos philei to sophon, he who loves the sophon; philein, to love, signifies here, in the Heraclitean sense, homolegein, to speak in the way in which the Logos speaks, in correspondence with the Logos…. That one being reciprocally unites itself with another, that both are originally united to each other because they are at each other’s disposal—this harmonia is the distinctive feature of philein, of “loving” in the Heraclitean sense.

That philosophy is fundamentally a praxis (i.e., a living practice from within an originary ethical response-ability) of loving, caring interacting between persons who seek the truth, i.e., who seek to see and to speak in harmony and co-respondence with the Logos of what is happening, as it is happening, and insofar as it is what is happening for me, for us, here and now… is crucial to understanding philosophical counseling practice and will allow it to be effectively distinguished from all other forms of psychological and psychotherapeutic counseling practices operating out of an abstract theoretical framework.
...
Philosophical inquiry, ultimately, in the Socratic tradition, is a habitual, daily practice of reflecting upon, clarifying, coming to see, and making sense of your values, beliefs, ideas, judgments, desires, emotions, intuitions, feeelings, goals, commitments, relationships, and, in general, all of the actions and experiences that constitute your life. To try to put a price on access to this process would create a problem for the philosopher, according to Socrates.

By desiring to make money from therapeutic interacting, it will be more difficult, perhaps impossible, for the philosopher to see clearly and truly what is happening—and seeing clearly and truly what is happening, as it is happening, is the practice. People often rush from the what and the how to the why. “Why did my marriage fail?” someone might ask. But I would redirect such a question to: What do you mean by “my marriage,” “failure,” etc.? How do these ideas manifest themselves in your situation? What are the values, beliefs, attitudes, etc. underlying this perception and these ideas? How have these emerged in your actual living? And so forth. This type of inquiry into the what and the how, pursued deeply and sensitively enough, will often obviate the need for any intellectualizing obfuscation born of unproductive “why-questioning.” Again, Heidegger puts it this way: “Philosophy is a kind of aptness which makes it possible to see being in respect to what it is in so far as it is being.”

A question a day keeps the therapist away.

All the quotes are from What is Philosophy?, previously hosted here.  ¶ 8:03 PM 0 comments

  A critique of Hannah Arendt's oeuvre.

Arendt delineates the crucial Augustinian distinction between cupiditas—the love of worldly goods for their ministration to one's immediate desires—and caritas—the love of eternal goods and especially of God, a love which then enables us to love earthly things rightly. For those possessed by cupiditas, earthly life is a tragedy of accumulation, for the things and people they acquire or control cannot satisfy the desire for eternal happiness that animates their errant love. Even worse for the prisoners of cupiditas, life's intractable brevity implies no horizon beyond the grave, and so the avoidance of death, "transformed into the worst evil," compels the most desperate and even horrific conduct. While she must have remembered the sting of cupiditas in her futile love for Heidegger, Arendt seems to have recognized the outlines of caritas in their philosophical communion.

From Heidegger's notes for his winter semester 1920-21 course (GA 60) on Augustine.

The temptation of uti [use], of the dealing-with, in the cupiditas oblectando (in carne) [lust of entertainment (in the flesh)], taking-delight-in, comfort, calculation of significance, pretending-to-oneself, more precisely: pretending one significance before the other one and, in this, wriggling oneself out of the noose. (Direction: letting the significance force itself upon oneself.) Saving oneself in the uncovering and ascertaining of one possibility of delight, even if that were one's own neediness and uncertainty.

P. 193

One of the translators of the GA 60, Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei wrote at the end of Eurydice in the Underworld:

Just an instant ago! You were here among curtains,
wooden tables, mouth glowing, wet soil,
the wine-stained cups, torches lit with sputter
and smoke, shaken just to make them burn.

You discerned me in thie crevice; you came
blinding and able, hazy but firm,
my knotted dress no hinderance up the steep path.

I endured that glance--triumphant, singular--
it, too, now submerging, now disapeered
to where I might slip through now, and live on.

  ¶ 4:21 PM 1 comments

  Ammer & Console's (the laptop artists) cut Heimat und Technik, mentioned here a couple years ago, is now available online.  ¶ 8:20 AM 0 comments

  The cuts that don't lead anywhere, from Lomov.

'Holzwege' (meaning wood-ways) is a topic of mine since I've studied philosophy. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger used this scene to describe the way man are used to percept reality. Imagine you awake within a dark forest. You can't percept the whole forest, only the environment around you. To learn more about the forest, you cut down some trees and create some space. Now the light (symbol of thinking/logos) can illuminate the scene and you will see a little bit more. While cutting more trees in order to understand more you build a dead-end street into the forest, but the nature grows again behind you and closes the gap. Later you may use the things and thoughts you have acquired, but finally you will do not know exactly the being of a forest as a whole.

Bring on the Feldwege.

There's a video too--caveat: 29 Megabytes to download.  ¶ 8:23 PM 0 comments

  The answer would be enowning.

As instantiations of the fourth dimension of time, presencing and pastting are holistically different ways of structuring the Time of Being. However, the primordial Time which determines Being as presencing – the Time that is the meaning of Being – is not the mysterious “it” of one of Heidegger’s favorite expressions, “it gives Being.” Heidegger says: “What determines both, time and Being, in their own, that is, in their belonging together, we call: Ereignis” (P. 19).

Now that we have concrete ideas of what Heidegger means by presencing and the Time of Being, his notion of the Appropriation will not seem quite so obscure. Indeed, if he had gone on to discuss Temporality as the meaning of Being in the framework projected in Being and Time, the plausible next question could have been, what is the meaning of this primordial Time, that is, what makes it possible? The answer would be the Appropriation.

The quote from Time and Being was modified to match the text.  ¶ 5:56 PM 0 comments

  That historical Dasein.

The thesis of Dasein's historicality does not say that the worldless subject is historical, but that what is historical is the entity that exists as Being-in-the-world. The historizing of history is the historizing of Being-in-the-world. Dasein's historicality is essentially the historicality of the world, which, on the basis of ecstatico-horizontal temporality, belongs to the temporalizing of that temporality. In so far as Dasein exists factically, it already encounters that which has been discovered within-the-world. With the existence of historical Being-in-the-world, what is ready-to-hand and what is present-at-hand have already, in every case, been incorporated into the history of the world.

P. 440

Emphasis in the original. You may find Blattner's Terminology page helpful.  ¶ 12:14 PM 0 comments

  At the end of the course following the publication of Being and Time, in which Heidegger covers the discussion of time and temporality from Division II to end up on the otological difference, he recaps by stressing that what he has done is used phenomenology as a method to investigate ontology. That done, students should now go over it again and reflect on the material covered. Then he adds,

There is no such thing as the one phenomenology, and if there could be such a thing it would never become anything like a philosophical technique. For implicit in the essential nature of all genuine method as a path toward the disclosure of objects is the tendency to order itself toward that which itself discloses. When a method is genuine and provides access to the objects, it is precisely then that the progress made by following it and the growing origiality of the disclosure will cause the very method that was used to become necessarily obsolete. The only thing that is truly new in science and in philosophy is the genuine questioning and struggle with things which is at the service of this questioning.

P. 328

I was reminded of the above when I read Lee Smolin's paper calling for less calculation and more thinking in physics (Hat tip MM).  ¶ 8:26 AM 4 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Iampennyd wrote about being there.

Dasein does not spring into existence upon philosophical exploration of itself. Heidegger intended Dasein as a concept, in order to provide a stepping stone in the questioning of what it means to be.

Dasein (Being-there), indicates a “special kind of being, because it has a possibility of understanding being”. Heidegger thus opens up questions of the essential interpretative and temporal nature of human being.

  ¶ 9:46 AM 0 comments

  Rod Munday continues to explicate Being and Time.

Our primordial Being-in is therefore continually being shaped by the world, as the world is being shaped by our primordial Being-in. This reciprocity means that the world and Being has changed when certain things are forgotten, the world is in error when certain things are erred upon. Hence forgetfulness and error and knowing itself are all seen as modifications of our primordial Being-in.

  ¶ 7:20 AM 2 comments

  Ork! Ork!

Zenicurean vs. Martin Heidegger's restless spirit.  ¶ 7:19 AM 3 comments

  Derrida on Being. One of the deleted scenes from the movie.

It's often said that when philosophers start a course of philosophy, they start by stating that the question: "what is?"--the question of being--is the inaugural question of philosophy. They say that it all began in Greece, when the philosophers asked themselves, "Ti esti?"--"What is the sense of this or that?" "What do we mean by the word Being?" This tradition has continued, naturally, but fundamentally the first question on the question that has preoccupied me--I did not invent it, it came from my readings--the first question on the question has two parts. First: Is--as it's often said, in the way that Heidegger thought--is questioning the totally privileged form of philosophy? Is thinking really questioning, as it's often said? Couldn't there be, before the question, a more ancient, profound, and radical movement of thinking that is not questioning, but is rather an affirmation. That's the first question on the question. Then, even presupposing that the first question of philosophy concerns Being--what is 'to be', what is the sense of this or that, what do we mean by the word Being?--is there no something presupposed in the way we come to understand Being? That's not something I invented, but something I more or less inherited from Heidegger, and reinterpreted, in a certain way. Heidegger was suspicious of Greek philosophers and their tradition of privileging the present participle of Being meaning a presence of Being. Haven't we in out interpretation of Being privileged a modality of time that is the present? The presence of the present. And as soon as one is suspicious of this privilege of the presentness of the present, this privilege of interpreting Being as a presence of the present, of the now, are there not serious consequences that follow this desire for the present, the desire to interpret Being as presence? This is the question Heidegger formulated in his own way, and I tried to reinscribe, to displace, to reinscribe in a different terrain or corpus, in texts Heidegger didn't interrogate. Everything that I wrote about the trace in writing--which is itself the very condition of non-presence of the present--says that in order to access the present, as such, there must be an experience of the trace; a rapport to something else, to the Other. Sometimes to something other than Being, to the Other past, the Other future, or to the Other in general, but to an Other that does not appear as the present or presence. The trace, in the way that I elaborate it, involves putting into question both the questioning form of thought as well as the authority of the present or presence. That's my explanation of this philosophical debate, in the history of philosophy, concerning the authority of the question, of the questioning gesture. I have a lot of respect for the question, I'm not against questioning, since it's the condition of critique and deconstruction. But I try to understand what comes before the question. What is the very condition of the question itself. To ask a question, I must address someone. It doesn't have to be a violent question. Even innocent questions, presuppose a primary affirmation. I address myself to someone else and I am saying it's better we speak than we don't, it's better that I relate to the Other than not. And so I affirm a sort of yes, a sort of 'anterior' aquiescence. I say it in quotes [one finger] because it's not a question of time, but rather what precedes the question with regard to the order of thought. And so, once the question itself is interrogated in this way, then comes the question of the present, that I've just mentioned, followed by the work on what I want to call trace, writing. Not just writing in the sense of what one writes on paper or a computer, but in everything there is the trace, there is the experience of a return to something else, a return to the other, of being returned to another present, past, future. A different type of temporality that's even older than the past, or a to-come beyond the future. The past and the future are like another present; a past-present and a future-present. I want to try to think of a past or a coming to be that is not just a modified present, not future presents of past pressents, but a different experience with regard to the past or the future, and this takes place via a rapport with the Other, in general, or Others.

I started from the subtitles, but expanded and made minor corrections. So all mistakes in translation from the French are my own.  ¶ 6:59 AM 0 comments

  Big shout out to Mountain Seven. Lots of fine music and links there. Lucky stiffs are going to see Neko Case. I first heard her when she opened for a Nick Cave solo show (Nick at the piano, with Warren Ellis, Jim White, and Susan Stenger) at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco some five years ago. The significant other's picked up every album since. The new one's great, but I agree with a review that said she's better when she sings with musicians that challenge more than cater to her. Also found a BBC show with Ursula Rucker DJing through this site. Attended a poetry reading of hers last year. She was worried some words might offend the critters, but they're used to, and bored with hip hop. These days they're into Magnetic Fields (Stephin Merritt's Lemony Snicket album due this year!), Ingram Marshall, and (annoyingly) Abba.

And, just discovered this, The Fall are coming. Life is good.  ¶ 10:32 AM 0 comments

  Ontology, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and all that.

With regard to its subject-matter, phenomenology is the science of the Being of entities--ontology. In explaining the tasks of ontology we found it necessary that there should be a fundamental ontology taking as its theme that entity which is ontologico-ontically distinctive, Dasein, in order to confront the cardinal problem--the question of the meaning of Being in general. Our investigation itself will show that the meaning of phenomenological description as a method lies in interpretation. The logoV of the phenomenology of Dasein has the character of a ermhneuein, through which the authentic meaning of Being, and also those basic structures of Being which Dasein itself possesses, are make known to Dasein's understanding of Being. The phenomenology of Dasein is a hermeneutic in the primordial signification of this word, where it designates this business of interpreting. But to the extent that by uncovering the meaning of Being and the basic structures of Dasein in general we may exhibit the horizon for any further ontological study of those entities which do not have the charcater of Dasein, this hermeneutic also becomes a 'hermenenutic' in the sense of working out the conditions on which the possibility of any ontological investigation depends. And finally, to the extent that Dasein, as an entity with the possibility of existence, has ontological priority over every other entity, "hermeneutic", as an interpretation of Dasein's Being, has the third and specific sense of an analytic of the existentiality of existence; and this is the sense which is philosophically primary. Then so far as this hermeneutic works out Dasein's historicality ontologically as the ontical condition for the possibility of historiology, it contains the roots of what can called 'hermeneutic' only in a derivative sense: the methodology of those humane sciences which are historiological in character.

P. 61-62

Important that, to distinguish between hermeneutic, 'hermeneutic', and "hermeneutic". I wonder if Heidegger would gesture the quotes while lecturing using one or two fingers, as appropriate.  ¶ 9:05 AM 3 comments

 
So much time to choose from.

In the second half of Being and Time [Heidegger] explicitly turns to the analysis of time and temporality in a discussion that is significantly more complex than the earlier account of spatiality. Heidegger makes the following five distinctions between types of time and temporality: 1. the ordinary or "vulgar" conception of time; this is time conceived as Vorhandenheit. 2. world-time; this is time as Zuhandenheit. Dasein's temporality is divided into three types: 3. Dasein's inauthentic (uneigentlich) temporality, 4. Dasein's authentic (eigentlich) temporality, and 5. originary temporality or “temporality as such.” The analyses of the vorhanden and zuhanden modes of time are interesting, but it is Dasein's temporality that is relevant to our discussion, since it is this form of time that is said to be founding for space. Unfortunately, Heidegger is not clear about which temporality plays this founding role.

  ¶ 4:40 PM 4 comments

  A review of a new biography of Levinas.

Epstein's book traces Levinas' philosophical ideas from his earliest links to Husserl, Heidegger and ontology, to the consolidation of Levinasian ethics. He tries to show how Levinas takes phenomenology beyond the strict theoretical bounds demarcated by Husserl, in order to "discover the meaning of human life, first beyond consciousness and then beyond being itself."

"Beyond being" is a subtle subject. Michael Eldred says:

Heidegger refers to two crucial litmus tests for the understanding of the issues of ontology. The first is to break with the deeply ingrained modes of thinking that proceed from conceiving a subject encapsulated in its consciousness and separated from the world. The second is to defuse the idea that Dasein, because it exists “for the sake of itself” (Umwillen seiner selbst) is egoistic. Lévinas is a victim especially of this second misunderstanding because, apart from refusing to shift from the metaphysics of subjectivity to a consideration of human being as Dasein, he adamantly insists on a fundamental casting of human being as egoistic, i.e. as an egoistic subject, into which he then introduces the imperative, absolute ethics of the other. On the other hand, it still has to be shown that fundamental ontology à la Heidegger leaves room for, or can be twisted into, the problematic of the other’s freedom. The freedom of the other, i.e. freedomsharing in the world, is the issue and not, as Lévinas claims, ethical responsibility for the other.

Heidegger and Lévinas agree that the issue is what lies beyond being, but whereas the latter interprets the beyond of being ethically and theologically with an intervention of the Infinite, the Absolute, the former is at pains to show that the transcendental dimension beyond beings in their being is freedom, if not freedomsharing. The freedom of the other is the missing link that separates Heidegger’s thinking from Lévinas’ thinking. The issue is the following: if there lies beyond being the Idea of the Good, and this is translated as the Umwillen des Daseins, i.e. the for-the-sake-of Dasein’s self, how is this for-the-sake-of-self to be reconciled with the freedom of the other, who likewise exists for the sake of self? This is a far more subtle and perplexing question for thinking than Lévinas’ demand — via the injunction of the Infinite that breaks with the (ontic-causal) Totality — that ethical responsibility be assumed for the other and that a certain conception of justice prevail, for it requires that the question of being itself be folded and unfolded richly enough for the other as other to appear — albeit scarcely and non-substantially — in the folds in adequate concepts that do not misrecognize it as a being in the third person, which has been its fate hitherto within the long tradition of the metaphysics of whatness.

  ¶ 9:28 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

YvonneConstance reports on Nancy's Being, from community to the subject-less-ness of death.

For Nancy, Being, following Heidegger, is never individual but always being-with. Compearance, then, is the exposure of the space opened by our “co-originary and coextensive” being-in-common and being-self. While Nancy uses several terms to describe this rupture in Being – alternately calling it ecstasy, the exposure of sovereignty, communication or sharing – the most central figure for this splitting, the one which becomes most central to his critique of immanence and work, is death. As opposed to the will to immanence of communism, for Nancy death is absolutely unworkable, unsublatable, into anything other than nothing. It is “senseless meaning.” And as such, it is “indissociable from community”. Following Heidegger, Nancy argues that being-toward-death places the I outside itself, where “I is not – am not – a subject”. This exposure to finitude produces being beside itself, a relation “it cannot relate to itself, but with which it entertains an essential and incommensurable relation. This relation prescribes the place of singular being”.

  ¶ 8:03 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

PYHÄ on Heraclitus, his stove, and the sacred.

As Heidegger has stated, we should open ourselves again to beingness itself, and the dimension of sacredness and divine would also open. It is very sad if we cannot do this in our own everydayness, where we almost constantly are.

  ¶ 10:17 PM 2 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

A Tedious Existence on being experienced.

I am convinced that Hendrix demonstrated the kind of thinking Heidegger talked about.

  ¶ 10:04 PM 0 comments

  In the Contributions, section 125, Heidegger writes about what he intended for Division 3 of Being and Time.

"Time" was to become experienceable as the "ecstatic" free-play of the truth of be-ing. The re-moval-unto what is lit up was to ground the clearing itself as the open in which be-ing is gathered into its essential sway. Such essential sway cannot be demonstrated as something extant;...

In the question of being we are dealing solely with the enactment of the preparation for our history. All specific "contents" and "opinions" and "pathways" of the first attempt in Being and Time are incidental and can disapeer.

...

Being and Time is therefore not an "ideal" or a "program" but rather the self-preparing beginning of the essential swaying of be-ing itself--not what we think up but--granted that we are ripe for it--what compels us into a thinking that neither offers a doctrine nor brings about a "moral" action nor secures "existence"; instead "only" grounds truth as the free-play of time-space, in which a being can again become "a being," i.e., come to preserve be-ing.

P. 171

As in other places in this book, he knows he's not going to explain man's relation to beyng satisfactorily. It's now up to the future god, or history shaping ontological event to come. Heidegger can only announce it; i.e. he's being a hedgehog.  ¶ 2:06 PM 5 comments

  Heidegger provides one explantion of why he didn't publish Division 3 of Being and Time (provisionally entitled Time and Being--not to be confused with the lecture of the same name in 1962) in GA 49, a lecture course on Schelling that has not been translated. However, here's a passage from a book that describes that bit from GA 49.

The course on Schelling from 1941 gives the most biographical information with regard to Heidegger's decision not to publish the partially elaborated text. This decision, he writes, was taken on the ground of the "lively and friendly discussions" with Karl Jaspers, whom he visited for a few days at the end of December 1926 to talk about the printer's proofs of Being and Time. During this visit, Heidegger realized that "the hitherto reached elaboration of this most important division (I,3) would remain incomprehensible" (GA 49:39-40). Presumably Jaspers could not follow Heidegger's efforts to move away from the concrete existence of human beings. This must have been a serious blow to Heidegger, the more so because he had placed all his hopes in Jaspers, as he wrote to him in June 1926. Jaspers' lack of understanding will have considerably strengthened Heidegger's own doubts about the elaboration of Time and Being. However, this does not mean that he initially abandoned the project as such:

At that time I took the view that in about a year's time, I would be able to say everything in a clearer way. That was a mistake...It is essential however that the fragment itself gives enough hold to at least come upon the decisive question. And that in fact was all that mattered. (GA 49:40)

In a year's time: that is a reference to the course GA 24 from the summer of 1927. Here Heidegger does indeed start out with questions that no longer pertain to human beings, but he again fails to achieve his aim.

P. 130-131

Henceforth, all published papers had to pass the Jaspers standard of incomprehensibility. Sadly, Jaspers passed away in 1969. Finally, Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe project could get underway.  ¶ 7:01 AM 5 comments

  Here's a good appreciation of R. Crumb, as a review of The R. Crumb Handbook. This book is definately worth it you're into his comics, and partially compensates for his sparse output these last few decades. The CD of his greatest hits included in the book makes it a real deal.  ¶ 4:44 PM 0 comments

  Heidegger's most popular text, Being and Time (1927), was first published in English in 1962, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. At that time only a few of Heidegger's essays and one lecture course had been translated, and there was little precedent and scholarship on which to base all the decisions the authors had to make. Heidegger exploited the German language in subtle and idiosyncratic ways to describe his original way of thinking about philosophical themes that had gone unexamined for millenia. The translation was studied by generations of scholars and over time, as it was better understood, better ways of expressing Heidegger in English were proposed.

In 1996 a new translation, by Joan Stambaugh, was published. It was hailed as a major step forward for understanding Heidegger, immediately became the new standard, and the earlier translation stopped being printed. However, after some time, sales of the original translation began to pick up, a paperback version was released, and then withdrawn when the hardback was reprinted, and it returned to its former spot as the required text for university classes. Today, ten years later, the Macquarrie and Robinson translation (M&R) outsells Stambaugh's.

What happened? Two things. First, the earlier translation was and remains the standard. In the vast secondary literature on Heidegger, references are usually to its page numbers. If you are going to study Heidegger, you will need a copy of M&R to look things up in. And second, the Stambaugh translation is simply not that much better. At least not sufficiently better to replace the existing standard.

Theodore Kisiel, probably the top authority on how B&T was written, had this to say in The new translation of Sein und Zeit: A grammatological lexicographer’s commentary,

The full translation of the book was completed in the late seventies and is thereby dated, having circulated in manuscript form for well over a decade. It therefore cannot claim to have taken the full measure of “the insights of the past thirty years of Heidegger scholarship in English,” despite the valiant latter-day efforts of the SUNY editors to update it. The “new” translation of key notions, which in some cases are left unexplained and unjustified, leaving one with the impression of unilateral willfulness, should by and large not be made to “serve as the standard for Heidegger studies to come.”...The translator’s hope to “remedy some of the infelicities and errors of the previous translation” is only occasionally and imperfectly met, in some cases in fact repeating its errors verbatim, indicating the degree to which the translator herself is obligated to the “first cut” made by M&R to decipher Heidegger’s idiosyncratic syntax and style in rendering this ground-breaking book into English. Not that the new translation followed the old in any diligent and thoroughgoing fashion. Would that this were so. Repeated comparison of the two together, against the original Niemeyer edition, is in fact one good way of uncovering the plethora of minor errors and omissions that have somehow been “left” in or “crept” into the new translation and, along the way, of acquiring a profound appreciation for the scholarly accuracy of M&R’s rendition.
...
In the many decisions involved in retranslating a great work, Heidegger’s Swabian maxim of advice drawn from the idiom of habitual everyday concerns, “lassen es bewenden,” suggests a pragmatic English equivalent: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Thomas Sheehan in his essay “Let a hundred translations bloom!” A modest proposal about Being and Time notes:

Many of us first met this translation some twenty years ago in its then typed format--690 double-space pages replete with hundreds of handwritten corrections. Now two decades later, a glance at that earlier manuscript reveals that little has changed in the intervening years: The published book is virtually identical to the earliest typed manuscript. So too, the Introduction here (JS 1-35) is the same one that appeared in Basic Writings (1977, 41-89), with only minor orthographical changes.

Read both essays for detailed critiques of the translation, but here's one of my pet peeves.

The Greek gets badly mangled. To begin with, the Greek is printed in hodgepodge fashion. The epigram from the Sophist is set in Greek characters, but in the body of the text all Greek words are transliterated. What is worse, the transliterated Greek is riddled with orthographical errors, misspellings, and inconsistencies. This may seem trivial; but it is just another example of how the editorial quality of JS lags far behind MR. The simple solution would have been to set all the Greek (not just the epigram) in Greek characters. Surely if readers do not understand a text printed in Greek, there is little chance they will understand it any better when transliterated.

If M&R could do the Greek correctly four decades ago, there's no excuse for botching at a time when the most popular word processor could handle Greek characters.

So, here's hoping that we'll some day be thankful for a decent translation of the definitive Gesamtausgabe edition of Sein und Zeit.  ¶ 9:01 AM 6 comments

  Here's an article on the penetration of the humanities departments of American universities by French post-structuralism . The article is over ten years old, but still worth reading.

Aron was especially baffled by Derrida's success for the simple reason that he could not see how any student who did not have Plato, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger at his fingertips ("an essential prelude") could appreciate Derrida's enormously erudite output. He doubted whether anyone not trained in ontology could question Derrida's "enigmatic work." He added, "Some powerful ideas, swiftly vulgarized, had to satisfy their [the students'] appetite."

This might appear to be an elitist point of view suggesting that French students were better educated than their American counterparts. What it really took into account is the simple fact that in France, as in some other European countries (not Great Britain), philosophy is a subject taught at high-school level, so that nearly any educated French person can play with ideas and deal with abstractions in a way that is foreign to the American (and British) student and can use the vocabulary of abstract discussion. The reader of French newspapers is often surprised—and impressed—by the way journalists can handle these matters. Their education has given them the appropriate critical apparatus.

I remember decades ago being in Europe with a group of teenagers who were discussing the local newspaper's review of the last Joy Division album. The review had an allusion to Plato's Allegory of the Cave, and while not everyone in the group was familiar with the music, they all understood the allusion. They has done two years of philosophy because there is an elitism in the education system. While in the USA, all students that stay through to the end will receive a diploma, whether they can read and write, or not, in Europe, students who are not going on to university tend to transfer to trade schools in their mid-teens. If eighteen year olds don't pass the final exams, the bac, or A-levels in the UK, they won't get into a university. That is also why a university degree in Europe typically takes three years, instead of four in the USA.  ¶ 8:13 AM 5 comments

  I went looking for places where Heidegger refers to love of another Dasein. I found many references to love of God (especially when he's lecturing on St. Augustine), the "physis loves to hide" Heraclitus fragment, and love of wisdom, natch, but only two on love of the other Dasein, both from around 1929, and in both amid discussions of boredom.

In Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics he's asking about boredom, what is it we are bored with?

To put it in general terms: determining our attunement is here to be grasped as something attuning us in such and such a way, and this being attuned is to be grasped as the fundamental nature of our Dasein. To ask this concretely once again: Whenever we love something, a thing or indeed a human being, is what or who we love merely the acuse arising somewhere of a state arising in us, a state we transfer onto what we call our beloved? Of course not, it will be said, for the beloved is simply the object of our loving. Yet what does 'object' mean here? Something our love stumbles across and clings to? Or is all this not merely stated in a superficial way, but fundamentally wrong? Is it not the case that in love we do not stumble upon an object at all, yet nonetheless love something? This may stand merely as an indication that if we leave aside the cause-effect relation, we have not taken any positive step forward. Indeed the problem has become more acute.

P. 89

The other appearance of Dasein as the desiderata is in What is Metaphysics? Again, boredom is being discussed.

Another possibility of such manifestation is concealed in our joy in the presence of the Dasein--and not simply of the person--of a human being whom we love.

Such being attuned, in which we "are" one way or another and which determines us through and through, lets us find ourselves among beings as a whole. Finding ourselves attuned not only unveils beings as a whole in various ways, but this unveiling--far from being merely incidental--is also the fundamental occurence of our Da-sein.

What we call a "feeling" is neither a transitory epiphenomenon of our thinking and willing comportment, not simply an impulse that provokes such comportment, nor merely a present condition we have to find some way of coping with.

But just when moods of this sort bring us face to face with beings as a wole they conceal from us the nothing we are seeking. We will now come to share even less in the opinion that the negation of beings as a whole that are manifest to us in attunement places us before the nothing. Such a thing could happen only in a correspondingly originary attunement that in the most proper sense of unveiling makes manifest the nothing.

P. 87-88

I can see the scene now. Candlelight, sipping a Setubal muscatel, look into the enamorata's eyes and intone: "You are not merely something I cope with, but manifestly nothing!"  ¶ 8:25 PM 2 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Over the Horizon watches The Ister in San Rafael.

As with any credible philosophy there is a long series of seemingly deep, thought provoking observations, in which some pattern is alleged, often as part of a larger one, and the viewer (or reader, of text on a black screen) can acknowledge, "yes, that looks deep." Yet, after all these years (I ask), how much (positive) influence has it really had? Techne, the power of technology and economics, which the ancient Greeks dismissed as unrelated to truth or science, is in the saddle now and drives everything else, the Internet being only the most dramatic example so far.

The philosophers in the flick also serve up some ambiguity. Is technology helping us to remember, or is it now going by to fast? Is it better to remember (Scenes of excavating a Greek town, Trajan's bridge, and Stiegler) or forget, and forgive (Scenes from Bosnia, and Nancy)?

It's a real pity the DVD isn't affordable domestically. You have to jump through all sorts of hoops to get it from Oz. The DVD is in PAL format and dual-layered, which will work on some PCs, but not on a typical NTSC setup--the USA domestic TV default. An NTSC version has shown up on Ebay, so maybe availability will improve.  ¶ 8:38 AM 2 comments

  Agamben on the horizon that doesn't contain--the open.

Heidegger described the disquiet and movement specific to being-in-the-world by way of the term Dasein, being-there, being in one’s here-place. It is a question, so to speak, of a transcendence without an elsewhere, of a being outside itself and on its way toward its very own taking-place (Heidegger once expressed this condition as ‘being inside an outside’).

  ¶ 7:54 AM 0 comments

  Here is a excerpt from On the Essence of Truth that refers to how things come into into presence through statements. I have made a minor modification in the choice of words that I discuss at the end.

What is stated by the presentative statement is said of the presented thing in just such a manner as that thing, as presented, is. The "such-as" has to do with the presenting and what it presents. Disregarding as "psychological" preconceptions as well as those of any "theory of consciousness," to present here means to let the thing stand opposed as object. As thus placed, what stands opposed must traverse and open field of opposedness [Entgegen] and nevertheless must maintain its stand as a thing and show itself as something withstanding [ein Ständiges]. This appearing of the thing in traversing a field of opposedness takes place within an open region, the openness of which is not first created by the presenting but rather is only entered into and taken over as a domain or relatedness. The relation of the presentative statement to the thing is the accomplishment of that bearing [Verhältnis] that originarily and always comes to prevail as a inclination [Verhalten]. But all inclination is distinguished by the fact that, standing in the open region, it in each case adheres to something opened up as such. What is thus opened up, solely in this strict sense, was experienced early in Western thinking as "What is present" and for a long time has been named "being."

One's inclination stands open to beings. Every open relatedness is an inclination. Man's open stance varies depending on the kind of beings and by way of inclination. All working and achieving, all action and calculation, keep within an open region within which beings, with regard to what they are and how they are, can properly take their stand and become capable of being said. This can occur only if beings present themselves along with the presentative statement so that the latter subordinates itself to the directive that it speaks of beings such-as they are. In folowing such a directive the statement conforms to beings. Speech that directs itself is correct (true). What is thus said is the correct (the true).

P. 141-142

Verhalten is canonically translated as comportment in Heidegger's texts--the common translation is behavior, for which comportment is a synonym. Comportment strikes me as too active for what Heidegger is describing here. In a note to the third edition of this text he added:

Verhalten: abiding [sich aufhalten] in the clearing (standing in [inständig in] the clearing) of the presence of that which is present.

In English, abiding has a sense of permanence, that is not intended here. I first considered using disposition, which has a sense of the person's mood, but then liked one of its synonyms--inclination--even more because it has a sense of "towards something". So, in the transaltion above I have used inclination for Verhalten. Other variants that come to mind are predispostion (too static; loses dependency on mood?) or proclivity (again, too perdurably natural; not mindful enough?).

This entire essay is available here.  ¶ 7:26 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Per Caritatem on how Heidegger missed the love connection.

Heidegger as we recall speaks of a human being as Dasein—emphasizing that a human being is not an object. Here, Marion seems to suggest that even Heidegger’s critique doesn’t overcome modern problems because he fails to emphasize two crucial themes: personal relationships and love. As Rosemann points out, Being and Time is all about the self—about leaving inauthentic forms of existence behind and embracing our own existence. In passing over personal relationships and love, Heidegger fails to recognize that love is the acknowledgment of one’s need for the Other.

  ¶ 12:50 PM 8 comments

  Thomas Sheehan on why Heidegger stopped referring to Dasein's horizon.

During the 1930s, as Heidegger pursued his abiding topic (apriori openedness as the ability to make-sense-of), he saw that the quasi-Kantian language of transcendence and horizon was inadequate to express the reciprocity (Kehre) of thrownness and taking-as. The crowning section of SZ was left unpublished, he later said, because "thinking failed to adequately express this Kehre". So Heidegger adjusted his presentation of the issue, (1) expressing Geworfenheit as Ereignetsein and (2) re-emphasizing that the open must be always already opened up if there is to be any taking-as.

  ¶ 12:35 PM 3 comments

  From an interview, Derrida on the hedgehog (Igel):

The silhouette of an Igel passes by still more quickly near the end of Identity and Difference in "Die ontotheologische Verfassung del Metaphysik." Heidegger there mimes the objection of someone who might reproach him for claiming to contribute something with the difference between Being and being, when in fact Being and being in their difference are already there, there where one thinks one has arrived, a "there" which is already a "here", here where one pretends finally to reach them...The Grimms' tale in fact tells of a hedgehog who, to be sure of victory and of winning the race, sends his female hedgehog ahead to the finish line. One or the other of them will always be able to cry out "I am there," already there, whenever some hare will have naively thought he beat them to the finish. The concept, the figure, the sense of the hedgehog, in this case, whatever its language may be whatever its name may be, mean the "always-already-there," the structure or the logic of the "always already" (and who would dare to claim this "objection" to Heidegger is as naive as it appears when it is the setting-to-work of truth that is in question?), of the "I have always already arrived," here or there, here as there, "Ick bünn all hier," "Ick bünn all da." The Da or the Fort-Da of the Dasein would belong to this logic of destination that permits one to say, everywhere and always, "I have always already arrived at the destination."

P. 303-304

Nietzsche had already arrived at the destination when, in Ecce Homo, he asked:

In such circumstances should I not be compelled to become a hedgehog?

P. 47

  ¶ 8:16 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein


Saintbryan has an unheimlichkeit time in class.

The detective attempts to arrest Carm, who then goes limp. He is handcuffed and dragged away.

Only in an existentialism class would the students be taking notes throughout all of this. I certainly was- well, in my head at least. It was very alarming. Highly disorienting, exhilerating, frightening in a way, enlightening. Heavy. I felt very present. Here now. And sharply aware of how disorienting it was. Uncanny, or "unhomelike" as Heidegger puts it.

  ¶ 12:20 PM 1 comments

  AfterTV interviews Albert Borgmann on Heidegger, AI, and the dangers in technology.  ¶ 8:45 AM 0 comments

  Heidegger and the difference between hedgehogs.

[W]e think of Being rigorously only when we think of it in its difference with beings, and of beings in their difference with Being. The difference thus comes specifically into view. If we try to form a representational idea of it, we will at once be mislead into conceiving of difference as a relation which our representing has added to Being and to beings. Thus the difference is reduced to a distinction, something made up by our understanding.

But if we assume the difference is a contribution made by our representational thinking, the question arises: a contribution to what? One answers: to bengs. Good. But what does that mean: "beings"? What else could it mean than: something that is? Thus we give to the supposed contribution, the representational idea of difference, a place within Being. But "Being" itself says: Being which is beings. Whenever we come to the place to which we were supposedly first bringing difference along as an alleged contribution, we always find the Being and beings in their difference are already there. It is as in Grimm's fairytale The Hedgehog and the Hare: "I'm here already." Now it would be possible to deal with this strange state of affairs--that Being and beings are always found to be already there by virtue of and within the difference--in a crude manner and explain it as follows: our representational thinking just happens to be so structured and constituted that it will always, so to speak over its own head and out of its own head, insert the difference ahead of time between beings and Being. Much might be said, and much more might be asked, about this seemingly convincing but also rashly given explanation--and first of all, we might ask: where does the "between" come from, into which the difference is, so to speak, to be inserted?

P. 62-63

  ¶ 7:20 AM 10 comments

  Axel Honneth on credibility and a moral antidote to American culture.

I think it is rather simplistic to say that the main ambition of postwar German philosophy was to regain credibility; there were so many other motives, moral motives. There was also the motive of finding one's place in a culture increasingly influenced by the United States. One should not forget the continuation of the Heideggerian tradition to an incredible degree in the postwar period.

  ¶ 9:51 PM 0 comments

  Clark continues his examination of Derrida's différance and Heidegger's ontological difference with an extended excerpt from Ousia and Gramme. Here's a couple answers from an interview of the same period, where Derrida lays out the four facets of différance, the fourth being the one from his essay, anticipating a difference to come.

Ronse: ...Much has been said above about the a of différance. What does it signify?

Derrida: I do not know if it signifies at all--perhaps something like the production of what metaphysics calls the sign (signified/signifier). You have noticed that this a is written or read, but cannot be heard. And first off I insist upon the fact that any discourse--for example ours, at this moment--on this alteration, this graphic and grammatical aggression, implies an irreducible reference to the mute intervention of a written sign. The present participle of the verb différer, on which this noun is modeled, ties together a configuration of concepts I hold to be systematic and irreducible, each one of which intervenes, or rather is accentuated, at a decisive moment of the work. First, différance refers to the (active and passive) movement that consists in deferring by means of delay, delegation, reprieve, referral, detour, postponement, reserving. In this sense, différance is not preceded by the originary and indivisible unity of a present possibility that I could reserve, like an expenditure that I would put off calculatedly or for reasons of economy. What defers presence on the contrary, is the very basis on which presence is announced or desired in what represents it, its sign, its trace...

Ronse: From this point of view différance is an economical question?

Derrida: I would even say that it is the economical concept, and since there is no economy without différance, it is the most general structure of economy, given that one understands by economy something other than the classical economy of metaphysics, or the classical metaphysics of economy. Second, the movement of différance, as that which produces different things, that which differenciates, is the common root of all the the oppositional concepts that mark our language, such as, to take only a few example, sensible/intelligible, intuition/signification, nature/culture, etc. As a common root, différance is also the element of the same (to be distinguished form the identical) in which these oppositions are announced. Third, différance is also the production, if it can still be put this way, of these differences, of the diacriticity that the linguistics generated by Saussure, and all the structural sciences modeled upon it, have recalled is the condition for any signification and any structure. These differences--and, for example, the taxonomical science which they may occasion--are the effects of différance; they are neither inscribed in the heavens, nor in the brain, which does not mean that they are produced by the activity of some speaking subject. From this point of view, the concept of différance is neither simply structuralist, not simply geneticist, such an alternative itself being an "effect" of différance. I would even say, but perhaps we will come to this later, that it is not simply a concept...

Ronse: I also have been struck that already in your essay on "Force and Signification" différance (but you did not yet call it that) led you back to Nietzsche (who linked the concept of force to the irreducibility of differences), and later to Freud, all of whose opposed concepts you showed to be governed by the economy of différance, and finally, always, above all, to Heidegger.

Derrida: Yes, above all. What I have attempted to do would not have been possible without the opening of Heidegger's questions. And first, since we must proceed rapidly here, would not have been possible without the attention to what Heidegger calls the difference between Being and beings, the ontico-ontological difference such as, in a way, it remains unthought by philosophy. But despite this debt to Heidegger's thought, or rather because of it, I attempt to locate in Heidegger's text--which, no more than any other, is not homogeneous, continuous, everywhere equal to the greatest force and to all the consequences of its questions--the signs of a belonging to metaphysics, or to what he calls ontotheology. Moreover, Heidegger recognizes that economically and strategically he had to borrow the syntaxic and lexical resources of the language of metaphysics, as one always must do at the very moment that one deconstructs this language. Therefore we must work to locate these metaphysical holds, and to reorganize unceasingly the form and sites of our questioning. Now, among these holds, the ultimate determination of difference as the ontico-ontological difference--however necessary and decisive this phase may be--still seems to me, in a strange way, to be in the grasp of metaphysics. Perhaps then, moving along lines that would be more Nietzschean than Heideggerean, by going to the end of this thought of the truth of Being, we would have to become open to a différance that is no longer determined, in the language of the West, as the difference between Being and beings. Such a departure is doubtless not possible today, but one could show how it is in preparation. In Heidegger, first of all. Différance--fourth--therefore would name provisionally this unfolding of difference, in particular, but not only, or first of all, of the ontico-ontological difference.

P. 8-10

I think Derrida's doing a hedgehog here. "Not possible today", but when someone actually gets around to demonstrating this more primordial difference, Derrida will have been there already.  ¶ 8:30 PM 0 comments

  The Brothers Grimm's The Hare and the Hedgehog. It's another of those fabled races.

As they walked toward the field together, the hedgehog said to his wife, "Now pay attention to what I tell you. You see, we are going to run the race down the long field. The hare will run in one furrow and I in another one. We'll begin running from up there. All you have to do is to stand here in the furrow, and when the hare approaches from the other side, just call out to him, 'I'm already here.'"
...
The hare counted "One, two, three," and he tore down the field like a windstorm. But the hedgehog ran only about three steps and then ducked down in the furrow and remained there sitting quietly.

When the hare, in full run, arrived at the bottom of the field, the hedgehog's wife called out to him, "I'm already here!"

The hare, startled and bewildered, thought it was the hedgehog himself, for as everyone knows, a hedgehog's wife looks just like her husband.

Always already.  ¶ 7:58 PM 0 comments

  Postmodern Dora in an Amazon remove.

"Dora the Explorer" may be a far remove from Derrida, Foucault, and Heidegger, but I find watching the little imp on her adventures with her simian companion, Boots, and her animated inanimate objects, backpack and map, a great relief from the demands of intellectual rigor, especially with two fingers of my favorite single-malt and a smooth Cohiba.

Hat tip Dapla999.  ¶ 7:48 PM 0 comments

  Here's a video of master comic scripter Alan Moore talking about his works.  ¶ 11:58 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Pink Elephant reports it's still winter in Todtnauberg.  ¶ 8:17 AM 0 comments

  Francis Buckley on the romantic enemies of neoliberalism.

Here is how one person, that improbable hippie Heidegger, resisted the call to material advancement:

I recently received a second invitation from the University of Berlin. I left my town and retreated to my cabin. I listened to the voice of the mountain, the forests and the fields. On my path I met my old friend, a 75 year old peasant. He learned of the invitation from a newspaper. What would he say? He faced me, calmly, he clear and unclouded eyes before me. He put his faithful and prudent hand on my shoulder, and in an almost imperceptible way shook his head. Which meant: “Absolutely not.”

The Black Forest for Heidegger, the Lorraine for Barrès, the rooted past, Mounier’s “authentic spiritual élan” of the fascists all ranged against the ravages of a joyless bourgeois modernity.

But did he have that whiff of patchouli about him?  ¶ 7:40 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Mauberly, on where Heidegger went wrong.

My claim that Heidegger departs from phenomenology, distilled to elixir, is that he departs from a description of Dasein and its modes and from any analysis that rests on that description. To do that is to leave the descriptive method which gets him through the first two divisions of Being and Time. The point of the descriptive method is to prevent abstract philosophizing, by grounding any analysis in what can be described and no more.

I've tried to point him down the right path. Now it's your turn to explains things. Here's hoping that, as the Ephesian was quoted,

All things are a flowing

  ¶ 8:42 PM 2 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Marx and Heidegger: eine Schlägerei discusses the ad hominem fallacy and Heidegger.  ¶ 1:17 PM 0 comments

  Clark has a long excerpt from a book on Derrida on Heidgger.

If différance means anything, it is precisely the putting into question of this logic of the origin, a logic that is always also a logic of destination and sometimes of destiny.

Différance must conversely refer to the trace at the origin of the sending, the trace of beyng.  ¶ 8:56 PM 0 comments

  Alain Badiou talked with Simon Critchley.

Mr. Badiou's aims in Being and Event divide neatly according to the title of his book. First, he dissects "being" with the aid of set theory, the mathematical study of abstract groups of objects (sets) and their relations to one another. Then, he explains how change occurs in the world, a process that he calls an "event."

As Mr. Badiou himself told the audience, he finds the second question more interesting. "The great question for me is not really what 'being' is," he said. "My fundamental question is a very simple one -- and small. What, exactly, is something new? What is creation?"

To reach that analysis of creation, however, requires the reader to navigate contemporary mathematics. Much of the alleged inaccessibility of Mr. Badiou's work is rooted in his reliance on set theory to discuss ontology, the branch of philosophy that deals with existence.

Indeed, Being and Event makes the striking claim that "mathematics is ontology." And chunks of the book are studded with equations and theorems that may frighten off the scholar who fled to the humanities to escape mathematics.

Bring'em on, I say. Sets and relations should fit nicely in a RDBMS. Your DBA was always already your ontologist.  ¶ 7:16 PM 6 comments

  Malcolm Bradbury, in his book on Henri Mensonge's underappreciated role in the development of structuralism and deconstruction, recaps the story of those movements as they overcame the Cartesian subject.

[I]t soon became clear that if it was possible to deconstruct the author as a person the same argument ought to work with anyone, or indeed everyone. The decisive implications of this were developed by Michel Foucault, who was shortly able to prove that we all of us lived in the age of the total disappearance of the subject. As he put it, 'The researches of psycho-analysis, of linguistics, of anthropology have "decentered" the subject in relation to the laws of its desire, the forms of language, the rules of its actions, or the play of its mythical and imaginative discourse.' The disappearance of the subjecct was another enormous step, of considerable relevance to the fate of Mensonge. But these were still the early days of the argument, which was further refined by the Deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, who was able to demonstrate with a totally convincing philosophical obscurity that all concepts of 'presence', 'identity', 'self' and the like were fabrications, desperate attempts to retain the attached signifier when it had departed long ago.

In a series of bold transverse moves, Derrida had soon demolished the entire heresy of the proper noun, showing that the names we signed on cheques were not our own or anyone else's either, and eliminating the metaphysics of all forms of presence under any pretext whatsoever. All that was left was a persistent deferral of identity, a kind of foreplay to existence without the satisfaction of an outcome, apparently increasingly popular in France. It had been made clear that everything had been deconstructed, and that the proper noun, the author, the self, the book, the object, the reader, the referent, the real, were all floating items of signification without a base. This bold sequence of philosophical developments made for clarity and brought us to where we are today, wherever that may be.

  ¶ 8:40 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

ckctomcat appropriates a poem.

It is inappropriate but common for the Burglar and the Cheat to be on the prowl, trying to appropriate inappropriately for their own property. But one who recognizes the nature of the appropriation of Being is never really at a loss, because one releases the concept of property into one of appropriation. One still possesses meaning and significance without being possessed by the symbolic interface and social pretensions of personal property.

  ¶ 8:18 PM 0 comments

  Some Greco-Germanic profundity.

Discerning minds understand that Heraclitus speaks in one way to Plato, in another to Aristotle, in another to a Church Father, and in others to Hegel and to Nietzsche. If one remains embroiled in a historical grasp of these various interpretations, then one has to view each of them as only relatively correct. Such a multiplicity necessarily threatens us with the specter of relativism. Why? Because the historical ledger of interpretations has already expunged any questioning dialogue with the thinkers--it probably never entered such dialogue in the first place.

The respective difference of each dialogical interpretation of thought is a sign of an unspoken fullness to which even Heraclitus himself could only speak by following the path of the insights afforded him. Wishing to persue the "objectively correct" teaching of Heraclitus means refusing to run the salutary risk of being confounded by the truth of thinking.

The following remarks lead to no conclusion. They point toward das Ereignis.

P. 106

Enowning, the alternative to common epistemological relativism.  ¶ 6:05 AM 1 comments

  The logoV cometh, in Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.

The power of the abstract begins as a rejection of that epic encyclopedism where every element, whether it be a comment on the power of the gods or instructions on how to fix the axles to a cart, has the same importance, the same impact on the mosaic surface of the narrative. Anaximander and Heraclitus aimed for the opposite: sentences that subsumed whole cycles of reality and almost eclipsed them, dazzling the reader with their own light. The lόgos, when it appears, annihilates the particular, the accumulation of detritus typical of every experience, that obligation to repeat every detail. Like the cipher, like the arrow of Abaris, the lόgos transfixes in the merest atom of time what the rhapsodies had strung together and repeated over and over for night after smoky night.

The resulting thrill was without precedent. People had heard stories from the East, stories more occult than their own. But it was to longer a question of stories. In comparison with what had gone before, these were bare propositions that stamped things with "the seal of 'that which is.'" And the seal would live on, closed away inside itself, proud, immobile, like the epsilon engraved on the temple at Delphi. There, for the first time, the priests realized that the knowledge that is power derives not only from the secret stories of the gods but from the hypothetical syllogism.

P. 153

Engraved epsilon indeed. It's the arrival of the power of written language, overcoming the oral culture.  ¶ 7:00 PM 0 comments

  It's not just a straight white male thing anymore.

Would anyone like to discuss the finer points of Heidegger with me over a cup of weak herbal tea?

So goes phallologocentrism in the XXIst century.  ¶ 5:27 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

travelling with your pet through black america, the blog, on "is" to the "be".

What "is" the thing that you have discovered?

To me this is the obvious "step" that Heidegger took at each turn. It represents one unit of Heideggerism.

So, it's one step per turn per Heidegger, and two olives per Martini. I can exist on that.  ¶ 11:11 PM 0 comments

  A couple comments of relativism from Heidegger's The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. The first on why history itself is responsible for relativism.

It is not the case that at all times and for everyone all beings and all specific domains of beings are accessible in the same way; and, even if beings are accessible inside the range of experience, the question still remains whether, within naive and common experience, they are already suitably understood in their specific mode of being. Because the Dasein is historical in its own existence, possibilities of access and modes of interpretation are themselves diverse, varying in different historical circumstances.

P. 22

This one on why a belief in relativism is justified if one does not already know all the answers.

Has any factually existing Dasein, has anyone of us as such, decided freely of himself and will any existing Dasein ever be able to decide of itself whether it will or will not enter into existence? Never. The establishment of eternal truths remains a fanciful assertion, just as it remains a naive misunderstanding to believe that truth, if it exists only and as long as Dasein exists, is delivered over to relativism and skepticism. On the contrary, the theories of relativism and skepticism spring from a partially justified opposition to an absurd absolutism and dogmatism of the concept of truth, a dogmatism that has its ground in the circumstances that the phenomenon of truth is taken externally as a determination of the subject or of the object or, if neither of these notions works, as some third realm of meaning. If we do not impose on ourselves or surreptitiously permit hidden convictions of one sort or another to play a role in our investigation, then this insight emerges: unveiling and unveiledness--which is just to say, truth--are grounded in the Dasein's transcendence; they exist only so far as Dasein itself exists.

P. 221-222

So, while there are no absolutes, that doesn't mean everything must then be relative and anything permitted, because Dasein circumscribes truth.  ¶ 7:05 PM 1 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

John Winsor on why obey:

The OBEY sticker campaign can be explained as an experiment in Phenomenology. Heidegger describes Phenomenology as 'the process of letting things manifest themselves.' Phenomenology attempts to enable people to see clearly something that is right before their eyes but obscured; things that are so taken for granted that they are muted by abstract observation.

I have the OBEY CD somewhere, but don't remember what's on it. I should dig it out, put it on, and let it manifest itself.  ¶ 2:09 PM 0 comments

  Clark has a post up on the difference between the ontic and ontological, and while not delving directly into their difference, I find this excerpt highlights the problem so many have with Heidegger's ontology. It's from Richard Polt's excellent introduction to our subject.

Often enough, Western philosophers have tried to escape from "subjective" emotion and mood, and have sought "objective" clarity and certainty through the intellect alone. If Heidegger is right, this is really an inauthentic attempt to evade one's throwness and facticity -- it is a desire to have no past. Descartes, for instance, at a moment when he has "no worries or passions", retreats by himself to "a small stove-heated room", where he reflects on how much better it is to produce everything according to one's own plan, rather than relying on tradition. He concludes that "it is almost impossible for our judgements to be as pure or solid as they would have been had we the full use of our reason from the moment of our birth and had we never been led by anything but our reason". When he emerges from his artificial womb, he is determined to build his own system of truths through reason alone. Heidegger would point out, however, that every system has to rely on the past -- both on one's won pre-rational familiarity with the world and on the millenia of cultural and philosophical tradition. There is no way to build truth from scratch. The very idea of being born with the full use of reason is absurd, because reasoning presupposes a prior revelation of the world, a revelation that is largely achieved through attunement.

There is a price to be paid for accepting Heidegger's analyses. Although he rehabilitates moods, restoring their meaning and disclosive force, he cuts us off from the possibility of absolute or total knowledge: since Dasein is thrown and factical, we always experience the world from a particular perspective, and we can never guarantee that we have found a final and best perspective. We will have to ask whether this leaves us in a state of radical skepticism and relativism -- the fate that Descartes feared above all.

P. 67-68

Interestingly enough, this appears to be René's fear alone, and does not afflict Martin.

We touch here a delicate point. Does not thought of this kind become a complete relativism? Heidegger recognizes the difficulty himself, and his answer is that relativism makes sense only in terms of the subject-object polarity, where the truth of the object is considered as "relative" to the knowing subject. Once we pass beyond the subject-object relationship, "relativism" has no meaning.

P. 546-547

All's well, that, well, ends the subject-object dichotomy.  ¶ 8:42 PM 27 comments

  Congratulation to Agnes Heller for winning this year's Sonning Prize.

Here's a couple questions to Ms. Heller on modernism:

CP: I'd like to ask you about the quote you just mentioned, "The essence is good but all the appearances are evil." Isn't that really an age-old issue, very traditionalist in the sense, that prior to the modern age, "essence" was taken as true reality, whereas "appearance" was illusion, a phantasm? Or that the material world was fleeting whereas the spirit or soul was eternal - in the medieval conception, and prior to that as well. And a part of the whole modernization process involved making "appearance" the real and "essence" an illusion, or an ideological reflection of forms of social practice by various groups. Do you think that, in terms of the failure of Marxism, or extending that to the failure of modernism as a whole, is wound up in that conflict or problem?

AH: At that time, when I was involved in that problem, I was unaware of the deconstruction of metaphysics. I was unaware of the fact that Marxism, and even already Karl Marx, was a new metaphysics and you can really compare it to what Heidegger and Nietzsche described as the reversal of metaphysics. The essence then becomes what is underneath, it is deep-down and no longer that which is high-up. You have to go deep-down and unearth the essence from the world of appearance, the world of commodity fetishism. What appears in your every-day life, daily communication, intercourse and so on, and the reversal of the appearance of something that is really deep-down and essential: that is the reversal of metaphysics. But at that time I had not experienced this in these terms. I'm speaking about the field of Marxism, not about Karl Marx. Marx was a cogito who elaborated the great theory of modernity. I think there are three great over-arching theorists of modernity: Hegel, Marx and Max Weber. All the other theorists approached modernity from one angle or another but didn't give us an over-arching general theory of modernity. But I would not speak of the failure of modernity. The idea of the failure of modernity is a very romantic thing. It assumes that modernity should have been something better, that because it did not provide something better, by definition it failed.

CP: Could you elaborate on why you believe that modernity did not fail?

AH: Yes, it has not failed because I think we have to look at what our expectations have been. If we think that modernity has failed we have to compare modernity with our expectations and the question which we may then ask is whether or not we have had the wrong expectations. We expected development, we expected progression, we expected that the modern world would solve all the problems that the pre-modern world could not solve. We expected the modern world to become far superior to all kinds of pre-modern world arrangements. It didn't happen that way and instead of speaking about the failure of modernity we have to ask the question whether our expectations were right. Rather, we need to look at modernity as being different than all pre-modern social arrangements. The fact that it is different doesn't mean that it is necessarily better, it is simply different. And if we describe it as different we have to ask how it performs its function as a new social arrangement in counter distinction to all previous social arrangements. And for the time being we cannot speak of modernity's failure but of its enormous success. Because it first became elaborated two or three centuries ago in Europe and since then it has spread throughout the whole world. The whole world has essentially become modern as far as the social arrangement is concerned. It's an amazing success and not a failure. Of course if you are dissatisfied with the modern world, if you don't like it, if you feel that meaning is lost and if you are afraid and speak with Heidegger then, yes, I believe it is so. But it is not the failure of modernity, dissatisfaction with modernity also belongs to modernity. It is part of its functioning, it belongs to its survival. Of course, I do not know if modernity will be able to survive. That is something to which you cannot yet give an answer. It is still a very new social arrangement and it is difficult for us to imagine how a social arrangement with so little spirituality can survive. Whether it will be possible for modernity to survive is an open question. It is still too early to tell, but at this point we cannot describe it as a failure.

  ¶ 7:42 PM 0 comments

  This paraphrasing of a section of Heidegger's lecture What is Metaphysics? demonstrates how a mood, in this case dread, can be investigated with hermeneutical phenomenology to uncover the underlying ontology. Go read the whole thing to find out how nothingness is the source of dread. Towards the end we have a good example of an analysis of mood leading to ontology. You cannot get more ontological than existing or not.

The functioning of the nothing is no ordinary occurrence. Rather, while it is pushing you back and directing you towards the things that are slipping out of meaning, it reveals those things, for the first time, as being meaningful: it shows them in their complete strangeness (a heretofore hidden strangeness) and shows them as being radically other -- other than nothingness.

In the clear night of the nothing, which is experienced in dread, there emerges the original meaningfulness of things as such: we see that they are in being -- instead of nothing. But this phrase -- “instead of nothing” -- is not an afterthought. Rather, it is the prior issue that makes it possible for anything to show up and have meaning at all. The original essence of the functioning of the nothing lies in bringing you face-to-face, for the first time, with things as meaningful.

Only if we experience the nothing can we take approach things and understand them. Our essence, as human openness, is to relate meaningfully to beings (both to the being that each of us is and to the beings that we are not). But in so doing, we are always already returning from an experience of the nothing.

Human openness means: being held out into the nothing.

Held out into the nothing, we are always already beyond things and in touch with their meaning. The name I give this “being-beyond-things” is “transcendence.” If human openness were not essentially transcendence -- that is: if we were not already held out into the nothing -- then we could never relate meaningfully to things, not even to ourselves.

Without the original revelation of the nothing, no selfhood and no freedom.

With this we have the answer to our question about the nothing. The nothing is not an object, and it is no thing at all. The nothing does not show up for itself, nor does it show up “next to” things as if it were attached to them. Rather, the nothing is what makes it possible for anything to be meaningfully present within our human openness. The nothing is not merely the opposite idea to things; instead and in the most original way, it is why things can be meaningful at all. The operation of the nothing is inseparable from the meaning of things, i.e., the very being of things.

Humans relate to their world, already in a mood. Humans understand things, ascribe meaning to them, in a mood. In interpreting that mood, a phenomenologist is dealing with the reality of how a person exists. The interpretation of the mood describes how the person makes sense of the things in the world and ascribes meaning to those things. This is a different approach from explaining things by starting from some abstract principles and then applying them systematically to explain a particular situation, as, for example, science or Husserlian phenomenology does. Science is one of many useful procedures, but what makes such procedures useful is our basic understanding of the things we encounter.  ¶ 9:00 PM 9 comments

  Terrence Malick on worlds and understanding, from the introduction to his translation of The Essence of Reasons.

Vom Wesen des Grundes, despite its title, is largely concerned with the concept of "world," and in particular with establishing the concept's lineage--a legitimate concern, since the ordinary meanings of the term and Heidegger's are only oddly akin. The "world," on his definition, is not the "totality of things" but that in terms of which we understand them, that which gives them measue and purpose and validity in our schemes. What leads Heidegger to offer the defintion is not obvious, but it may well be related to explaining why we must, and no less how we can, share certain notions about the measure and purpose and validity of things. And presumably it is important to have that explanation because sometimes we do not, or do not seem to, share such notions.

Where Heidegger talks about "world," he will often appear to be talking about a pervasive interpretation or point of view which we bring to the things of the world. This, in any case, has been the view of many commentators. But there is little sense in speaking of "a point of view" here since precisely what Heidegger wnats to indicate with the concept is that none other is possible. And there is no more sense in speaking of an interpretation when, instead of an interpretation, the "world" is meant to be that which can keep us from seeing, of force us to see, that what we have is one. Heidegger's concept is quite like Kierkegaard's "sphere of existence" and Wittgenstein's "form of life," and, as with them, it enters his inquiry only as its limits, when a problem moves out of his depth, or jurisdiction.

There is a way in which one cannot agree with Heidegger "on certain points" any more than one can, even in a manner of speaking, be insane or revolutionary on ceratin points. None of his concept, the concept of world included, can be understood until one knows how to turn all of them to account. Until then, it is confusing how one goes about understanding him or, rather, how one decide when one has understood him and whether one has understood him as others must. Our confusion is not anarchic; it has its own discipline. We are not, for example, concerned to ask whether his remarks are true; each will be an untried example of its own truth, a truth which one does not know how to fix. Nor are we concerned to examine certain new facts of his and their implications. For, though he is telling us something that we can failed to know, he is claiming to give us different information; the right preface for his remarks would not be "furthermore" or "on the other hand." We have a different interest, at the outset. We want to know the kind of advantage that Heidegger has over us in deciding what to say about Dasein or "world," e.g., the kind of precautions we might be expected to take before challenging Heidegger's on statement on the matter and whether a challenge is possible in the first place. It might appear that the only terms on which we could raise a challenge, or even voice our confusion, are either outlawed or do not begin to threaten his own; we cannot speak against Heidegger's terms, while, on them, we set no limit to his advantage; our challenge, then, would serve to discredit, not Heidegger, but our understanding of him. This may or may not be true. It put forward as an example of what would settle the question of our relationship to Heidegger. And only if we know how we stand related to him will we also know what to make of our confusion.

But it is not as if Heidegger did not realize all this this, or did and were satisfied with himself nonetheless. He is constantly aware of how far he is from making a case; he takes pains to assess his distance and its consequences for him. Indeed, the analysis and treatment of his failure to make a case are as internal to his work, and often as thematic, as his most obscure exercises with the notion of Dasein. Perhaps the reasons which he gives for his failure are wrong, but there is nothing wrong, no necessary finality, in his failure as such; or, if there is, then it is at least unclear who is in the wrong.

P. xiv-xvii

  ¶ 9:14 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Freedom, Playfulness and Education, the blog, on playfulness, one of the modes left out of Being and Time.  ¶ 6:32 PM 0 comments

  Bringing up this extract from a paper by Daniela Vallega-Neu, just because.

[D]oes Heidegger really succeed to speak "from" Ereignis in the Beiträge? According to his own words, the Beiträge are just an attempt at such a thinking and language. Further, whether or not his language succeeds to speak originally from Ereignis depends also on us, who read his words. In section 41 of the Beiträge Heidegger says:

"All saying of beyng holds itself in words and namings which are understandable in the direction of the everyday opinions on beings and which, if they are exclusively thought in that direction, can be misinterpreted as expressions of beyng. [...] the word itself already discovers something (known) and thus covers that which should be brought into the open in the saying of thinking." (GA 65:83)

It is always possible to read Heidegger's words metaphysically, i.e. to read his words in terms of subject and object, to place what is written before one's sight and represent it as the object of a thinking subject. This possibility can not be escaped. Certainly there are ways of speaking which more than others encourage representational thinking (like speaking in terms of presence, of transcendence, and of horizon of thought); but, on the other hand, there are no written or spoken words which in themselves are non-metaphysical. Heidegger thinks the "essence" [Wesen] of language not in departure from words as signs, but as an articulating and disclosing occurrence. And in order to occur as such, original language needs original listening, a listening which attempts to let itself be attuned by what is said (by the silence which is echoed in what is said), a listening which also resists our natural tendency to think in terms of representation, and which gathers towards the silent source of Being.

  ¶ 5:36 PM 0 comments

  Too lazy to use toaster, or breading and time.  ¶ 9:36 AM 0 comments

  I found this paragraph in China Miéville's King Rat:

The acceptance of the unacceptable was a kind of reactionary stoicism, a dynamic that dulled his feelings for these others. He could feel it within him, a growing cunning, a hyper-real focus on the here and now. It frightened him. He could not battle it head on, he could not decide what to feel and what not to feel, but he could challenge it with his actions. He could change it by refusing to behave as if it were how he felt. He abhorred his own reaction, his own feeling.

That's the rectorate, right there.

It was an animal trait.

P. 244

When humanism was called for.  ¶ 9:05 AM 0 comments

  On awakening too early.  ¶ 6:25 AM 0 comments

  Meanwhile, back at the Ground Zero, Mr. Existential introduces the team:

"That's Kierkegaard, named after the Danish philosopher, Soren Aabye Kierkegaard. That one there is Sarte. I named him after John-Paul Sarte. I know... he was a Frenchie, but he was brilliant. Maybe the only brilliant Frenchmen!" Existential let out a rather creepy laugh. "Lastly," referring to the Special Ops soldier, "Heidegger. Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher who served during the last year of WWI you know."

Here's hoping they liberate the girdle of Aphrodite.  ¶ 7:51 PM 0 comments

  Philosophy is a serious matter in Iran. The local culture war pales in comparison.

Initially, the Popperites had rallied around Murtadha Mutahhari, a mid-ranking mullah who had worked for Empress Farah’s High Council of Philosophy before the revolution. When Mutahhari was assassinated, presumably by hard-line Heideggerites, the Popperites promoted a non-cleric amateur philosopher named Abdul-Karim Sorush as chief spokesman.

Popperites? Sounds like something you'd get from too much amyl.

At home, there's a picture on the wall of dad with the Farah Diba in the sixties. I'll have to ask him if he ran into any Farsi Heideggerites.  ¶ 7:46 PM 0 comments

  Wozu Dichter?

Heidegger gets laid in France

Sometimes it was just the neighbors
flapping. Billy with his bob on.
Kierky Guarding the red fishies.
Hei Digging for gold ones.

  ¶ 4:56 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Heidegger's Beitraege (sic) is a forum (for a class) on the Contributions.

To be put into question is both to be turned towards one’s own truth, and the truth of one’s own being-turned. (Ereignis ist Er-eignung) This is a key element to the theme of Ereignis, and what justifies its translation as “enownment”: in the question of being the being of the questioner is sent into its “own”. Ownness is not what “belongs to my essence”, but what belongs to this encounter with myself, with this being sent to the space of my own truth: the space in which my essence is encountered. Yet at the same time this being-turned to this space is the essence of my truth, or the “manner” in which this truth ‘is’.

Like being-turned into a newt, but getting essentially better, reciprocally.  ¶ 7:51 PM 21 comments

  Congrats to Martin for making it twice into the National Review's top ten reasons:

Postmodernist philosophers should be burned alive in public squares atop piles of their books.

We gush, but sadly reading Heidegger was beyond the National Review's ken. They were reduced to selectively quoting from someone that could actually read philosophers. In the book John Derbyshire skimmed, one finds:

The twentieth-century philosopher Martin Heidegger offers the most telling critique of this emphasis on the human being a thinking subject, arguing that Descartes and Kant directed all modern philosophy down an illegitimate and destructive path.

Quite incisive that.

I expect that next week the National Review's staff will quote ten maths formulas they don't understand, or something from the top ten courses they flunked, and reduced their choices of major to journalism and nothing else.

What does the fact that these diagnoses of culture find an audience among us--albeit in quite different ways--tell us about what is happening here? What is happening in the fact that this higher form of journalism fills or even delimits our 'spiritual' space? Is all this merely a fashion? Is anything overcome if we seek to characterize is as 'fashionable philosophy' and thus to belittle it?

P. 77

  ¶ 5:20 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Clark posts some passages on the humanism in Heidegger. That subject was a consideration in the long comment thread after the 2nd paragraph from Miguel De Beistegui's paper on Da-sein posted last week.

Also check out his post on Dreyfus and blogging.  ¶ 8:42 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

freedom, playfulness and education, the blog, publishes favorite quotes from Being and Time.  ¶ 8:33 PM 0 comments

  Continuing on to the last paragraph we'll feature from Miguel De Beistegui's paper, where the question under consideration is: what is the being of beings?.

What is the question best adapted to the event, then, if not that of its what? How does one qualify verbs, as opposed to substantives? What, if any, is, if not the definition—for definitions apply to essences only—at least the formulation or the proposition of being? It is when philosophy can no longer say that being is this or that, only when being has been radically distinguished from any thing or being or any attribute that would immediately assume the presence of a previously given substance, that formulations such as "das Sein ereignet," "das Sein west," "es gibt Sein" become not only possible, but indeed necessary. For such formulations suspend and neutralize the metaphysical operation of definition, attribution, qualification that belongs most intimately to the quidditative interpretation of philosophical discourse. Yet these formulations do not simply give up on qualifying the matter at stake. They indeed qualify Sein, only verbally, emphasizing from the very start that, at issue in the issue of Sein, is precisely something like an Ereignis, or rather an Ereignen, a wesen or a Wesung (and not a Wesen), a Geben (and not some thing given). Sein, the noun Sein, is first and foremost a verb, a noun that is always qualified by way of a doubling of its verbal origin. With Heidegger, being can no longer be mistaken for a being, so long as we envisage being as the originary, always presupposed, and always operative event within which every thing, every event, including the event of language itself and its metaphysical grammar, takes place. And so, if one wishes to extend these formulations, if one wishes to go deeper and further into that which is being designated in such formulations, one needs to shift the questioning from the what of metaphysics to the how of premetaphysical thought. For this is how verbs are qualified: not nominally, but adverbially. Adverbs address verbs in the how of their unfolding, in terms of unfolding. And so, the proper mode of questioning with respect to being will have always begun, for Heidegger, with the quomodo. How is being? Wie west das Sein? This, Heidegger tells us time and again, especially in Contributions to Philosophy, is the question with which the other, nonmetaphysical, nonrepresentational thinking begins. And yet, holding to this question, remaining faithful to the demand contained in the simplicity of the question, is a task that proves to be infinitely complex, a task that Heidegger himself will have found most difficult to achieve (and in a sense, all I shall be attempting here is to show the way in which this difficulty persists in Heidegger’s work, and the form it takes). For thinking verbally (and adverbially), thinking from out of the originary event of presence, is an enterprise that runs against our entire tradition, our perhaps naturally representational tendency, our very grammar. "Wie west das Seyn?", even before Heidegger formulated the question in precisely those terms, is the question with which he was concerned. And to this question, Heidegger will have provided one answer and one answer only. To the question regarding the "how" or the being of being, Heidegger will have retained a single word, the meaning of which evolved, in ways that are not easily identifiable, but that I shall try to clarify: Da-sein. Moving away from addressing beings in their whatness, Heidegger addresses them in terms of their being-there, that is, in terms of the "there is" that exceeds the mere physical contours of the individuated thing and that this thing is, retaining it, displaying it, as the dimension of its own virtuality, in the moment in which, as a thing, it also erases it. Dasein is the word—primarily an adverb—that will have served to capture the "how" of being, or being as the very "how," the style, or the garment in which things wrap and present themselves. Da-sein will have designated this intangible, invisible, impalpable dimension at the heart of the tangible and the visible. It will have pointed in the direction of the "there is" that sustains and traverses every phenomenon, in the direction of the phenomenality of all phenomena, but with this remarkable characteristic that this phenomenality is itself non-phenomenal, beyond phenomenality. Heidegger’s phenomenology is a phenomenology of the inapparent. The being of what is, and which never can be confused with its beingness, its presence, is the "there is" prior to all present beings. Being unfolds as "there" (da), or as the "there is" of everything that is: not as the "here" and "now" of a concrete being individuated in the world, but as the dimension, nowhere visible, never actual, yet always in place, virtually, whence beings emerge and tower up. Not a concrete hic et nunc, then, but the very opening up of space and time, the unfolding of the Open as such, or the happening of the clearing in which things take place and a world is born. For every thing, in its hic et nunc, is the crystallization of a prespatial locality and a pretemporal moment, of a single dimension made of two co-originary sheaves (time and space). It is as this primary dimension that Da-sein is the adverb of being. The adverb, and not the noun. Even if, and at the cost of some confusion, the consequences of which remain to be analyzed fully, in Being and Time in particular, but in the Beiträge too and in the texts surrounding the Beiträge as well as in later texts, Heidegger will have never been in a position, or indeed even willing to dissociate entirely the adverbial, preindividual aspect of the Seinsfrage from the question of what, with the necessary caution, I would like to call the "subject" of being, thus pointing to the "who" of being. In other words, Heidegger will have never been in a position to separate completely the question of the how of being, which does not immediately call for an individual qualification of this how, with the question of man as the "proper" name of being. As if, as Heidegger explicitly suggests, being "needed" man, as if the being or the "how" of being were inevitably and necessarily drawn to selfhood, as if being came into its own and were properly only in being preserved in man. As if being destined itself to man. That being needs and opens up the domain of the proper is something that Heidegger will have assumed throughout. Could it have been otherwise? Does the thinking of being as event necessarily lead to thinking the event as propriation? Does the thinking of being as Ereignis necessarily open onto this other humanism Heidegger speaks of in his letter to Jean Beaufret from 1946? And is this other, more primordial form of humanism not still a form of anthropocentrism? Can philosophy escape anthropocentrism altogether? Or can the question of being be deployed anew so as to not even presuppose the human as one pole of its unfolding?

  ¶ 4:05 PM 2 comments