Dojo of Love!  ¶ 3:55 PM 0 comments

  The origin of the problem of negation in Plato's dialogues.

Every "not," in every saying of "not," whether explicitly expressed or implicit, has, as a speaking about something, the character of exhibition. Even the empty "not," the mere exclusion of something over and against something arbitrary, shows, but it simply shows that on which the negation is founded, thus what, in saying, "not," is delimited against the nothing. This empty negation places discernment, legein and noein, prior to the nothing; it lets the nothing be seen as founded by the negated. That is the meaning of negation in Parmenides. This negation, placed prior to the nothing and purely exclusionary, has thus been uncovered for the first time in the history of the development of our logic, in our grasp of logoV. That should not seduce us into thinking that this negation, empty exclusion, is the most immediate one and the primary one carried out in legein. One the contrary, the original negation is precisely the one Plato exposes as antiqesiV and Aristotle then, in a remarkable reversal of terms, calls enantiwsiV. The empty negation, as it dominated the understanding of legein up to Plato, did not spring from a primordial study of logoV but from the ground of a particular and over-hasty (this is not meant as a reproach) theory of Being, namely the Parmenidean theory of Being. The universal character of presence, of einai, which Parmenides was the first to see, became for him the substantive realm of beings in general. He thus identified the ontological meaning of Being with the ontical totality of beings. To that extent, for every saying "no," there remained left over only the nothing, since indeed it is nothing else then the en as on. This makes it clear that the clarification of logoV and logic leads back to the respective level of clarity concerning the meaning of Being. We may suppose that Plato acquired, on the basis of the new insight into the on of mh on, a new basis for the interpretation of logoV and that therefore Plato's advance in the determination and clarification of beings corresponds to a new possibility of a radical conception of logoV, as in fact occurred for the first time in the Sophist.

P. 395-396

antiqesiV: opposite
einai: Being
en: one
enantiwsiV: contradiction
legein: to speak
logoV: speech, discourse
on: being
mh on: non-being
noein: to discern, perceive  ¶ 1:29 PM 0 comments

  At Le Thor, September 9, 1969, the horizon of the difference is beyond simplistic negation.

From what place can Heidegger say:

Being : Nothing : The Same?

From a question concerning the essence of metaphysics, that itself is nothing metaphysical. Heidegger's word belongs neither on the side of beings, not simply on that of being, it speaks from where the horizon of the difference itself becomes visible. If one will allow, the ontological difference is the condition of possibility for metaphysics, the place upon which it is grounded.

But what is the theme of the Heideggerian proposition? It is difference itself. Heidegger speaks of the difference, without holding onto it; thereby he has abandoned metaphysics. One can now ask, what is chracteristic of the nothing just spoken of ? If it is nothing negative, then by what it is distinguished? Heidegger says: it is a nihilating nothing [nichtendes Nichts]. The essence of the nothing consists in the turning away from beings, in the distance from them. Only in this distance can being as such become apparent. The nothing is not the simple negation of the being. On the contrary, the nothing in its nihilation refers to the being in its manifestation. The nihilation of the nothing "is" being.

P. 57

  ¶ 10:39 AM 0 comments

  On the nattering nabobs of negation.

How few understand--and how rarely those who understand grasp--"negation." One immediately sees in it only rejection, putting aside, degrading, and even destroying. Not only are those forms of negation often pretentious, they also most immediately encourage the common ideaa of "no." Thus the thought of the possibility that negation could perhaps have a still deeper being than "yes" is left out--especially since one quickly also takes "yes," in the sense of any kind of approval, as superficially as the "no."

But is approving and rejecting in the domain of representing and of representing "evaluation" the only form of yes and no? Is that domain after all the only and essential domain, or is it rather, like all correctness, derived from a more originary truth? And in the end is not the "yes and no" an essential possession of being itself--and the "no" even more originarily than the "yes"?

But how? Must not the "no" (and the "yes") have its essential form in the Da-sein that is used by be-ing? The "no" is the great leap-off, by which the t/here [Da] in Da-sein is leaped into: the leap-off that both "affirms" that from which it leaps off and has itself as leap no nothing [nichts Nichtiges]. The leap-off itself first undertakes to leap-open the leap, and in this way the "no" surpasses the "yes."

P. 125

Leaping lizards of lethe!  ¶ 8:38 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Philosophy As Such investigates Dasein Oedipus.

The cardinal mysteries of this tragedy will be explored along with their philosophical implications, including: a) the prophecy about Oedipus’ destiny and the concept of Fate both under the Heideggerian optics and, closer to the Sophoclean use of it, as a kind of regulatory idea in the Kantian sense, one which can be placed in a symmetrical relation to the concept of teleology; b) Oedipus’ visit to the Oracle at Delphi, his concentration on the prophecy, and the curious disregard for the lemma ‘know thyself’, inscribed in the temple of Apollo; c) the solution to the riddle of the Sphinx and a possible hermetic interpretation of it; and, d) Oedipus’ self-inflicted punishment, a key element in the interpretation of the tragedy. It will be noticed that there is in Heidegger’s thought a common subjection of humans and gods to the “essential swaying of being”.

  ¶ 8:08 AM 0 comments

  A recapitulation, at the seminar in Le Thor, September 4, 1969.

In metaphysics, and first of all in Aristotle, there is thus a genuine short-circuiting of the meditation upon time from which there developed what Being and Time called the covering over of the meaning of being. Thinking must consequently attempt to further a new--non-metaphysical--way of thinking time, a way that is not surreptitiously governed by the ontological presupposition of the beinghood of time. The effect of this upon the metaphysical concept of time results in its being entirely concentrated upong what presences (actually only what presences is; and along with what presences, having-been and futurity are conditioned by a lack of being, they are consequences of mh onta).

How is a non-metaphysical thinking of time possible? It is possible by way of an analysis of the temporality of Dasein. The essential character of this temporality rests in ek-stasis, which means in the fundamental resolution [Enschlossenheit] of Dasein for alhJeia. In fact, ek-stasis is nothing other than the relation of Dasein to alhJeia, in which all temporality arises.

Viewed in this manner, time is not longer a series of now-moments, but instead itself the horizon for the understanding of being.

P. 43

mh onta: non beings  ¶ 5:10 PM 0 comments

  The horizon of beyng is always out there for Heidegger. Even in his final works. In the Summary of a Seminar following the On Time and Being lecture in 1962.

If this is how it is with time—-time being addressed as the transcendental horizon of Being—-then how can the fundamental experience guiding the position of Being and Time be characterized? Is it possible to find the character of withdrawal already in that position? The experience which attempts to find expression for the first time in Being and Time and which in its transcendental manner of question­ing must still in a way speak the language of metaphysics has indeed thought the Being of beings and brought it to a conceptual formula­tion, thus also bringing the truth of beings to view, but in all these manifestations of Being, the truth of Being, its truth as such, has never attained to language, but has remained in oblivion.

P. 29

Beyng withdraws when approached, like the horizon. The truth of beings, another manifestation of beyng, can be viewed, but not attained.

When it is a matter of the question about the meaning of Being, whereas meaning is projected meaning which occurs in and as the under­standing of Being which constitutes the fundamental characteristic of Dasein, then the development of Dasein's horizon of understand­ing is the condition for any development of an ontology which, so it seems, can only be built upon the fundamental ontology of Dasein.

P. 31

Dasein's horizon of understand­ing = meaningfulness of beings = beyng.  ¶ 9:52 AM 0 comments

  The horizon analogy should not be interpreted purely optically or ontically.

What do we mean by the horizontal character of the ecstases? We understand "horizon" to be the circumference of the field of vision. But horizon, from orizein, is not at all primarily related to looking and intuiting, but by itself means simply that what delimits, enclose, the enclosure. And the ecstases are, of course, not an awareness of, not a consciousness, and even less a looking.

...

Of itself the ecstasis does not produce a definite possible, but it does produce the horizon of possibility in general, within which a definite possible can be expected. We must keep in mind, however, that the ecstasis surpasses every being and the horizon is not located, say, in the sphere of the subject.

This second part alludes to the Cartesian subject-object limitation, whose horizon is limited by enclosing the subject and the objects it sees.

On the other hand, Dasein is in a world given by the ontological horizon:

This ecstematic unity of the horizon of temporality is nothing other than the temporal condition for the possibility of world and of the world's essential belonging to transcendence.

P. 208

The move from the purely optical horizon to the ontological horizon is given by time.

[I]t is time, as given a prior, which in advance bestows upon the horizon of transcendence the character of the perceivable offer. But not only that. As the unique, pure, universal image, it gives a preliminary enclosedness to the horizon of transcendence. This single and pure ontological horizon is the condition for the possibility that the being given within it can have this or that particular, revealed, indeed ontic horizon.

P. 76

That the horizon we can see is made possible by the ontological horizon was understood by Aristotle. Heidegger's insight is that time, which makes everything finite for humans, circumscribes Dasein's world.

[I]f Dasein's Being is completely grounded in temporality, then temporality must make possible Being-in-the-world and therewith Dasein's transcendence; this transcendence in turn provides the support for concernful Being alongside entities within-the-world, whether this Being is theoretical or practical.

P. 415

  ¶ 4:53 PM 0 comments

  Heidegger's explanation of what a horizon is, in general.

In Greek, what limits is called to horidzon. A horizon belongs to the essence of living beings in their vitality, to the securing of stability in the form if the need for a schema. Accordingly, the schema is not a limit imposed on the living being from without, not a limit with which life-activity collides so as to stunt its growth.

Forming horizons belongs to the inner essence of living beings themselves. Initially, horizon simply means setting limits to the unfolding occurrence of life with a view to stabilizing the onrushing and oppressing torrent. The vitality of a living being does not cease with this limiting scope, but constantly takes it start from it. The schemata takes over the elaboration of the horizon.

P. 86

Furthermore,

The horizon, the scope of the constant that surrounds man, is not a wall that cuts man off; rather, the horizon is translucent. It points as such to that what has not been fixed, what becomes and can become, the possible. The horizon pertaining to the essence of living beings is not only translucent, it is somehow always measured and "seen through," in a broad sense of "seeing and looking." As an occurrence of life, praxis moves in such seeing-through, in "perspectives." The horizon always stands within a perspective, a seeing-through to something possible that can arise out of what becomes, and only out of it, hence out of chaos. The perspective is a way of looking through, cleared in advance, in which a horizon is formed. The character of looking through and looking ahead, together with the formation of a horizon, belongs to the essence of life.

P. 87

The horizon is not the boundary or limit of what can be seen, but from where new things arise.  ¶ 8:01 AM 0 comments

  How significant is the temporal horizon?

It's a change from the ontology the went before.

Uncovering the temporal meaning of ousia allows Heidegger to understand time as the horizon with which being is understood. This answer entails that the question concerning the meaning of being, which Heidegger has taken up from Brentano's interpretation of Aristotle, itself aquires a different meaning. What Heidegger in Being and Time intends by the meaning of being (Sinn von Sein) no longer pertains only to the meaning of being in the sense of, for instance, being-produced or presence, but also--and even primarily--to the horizon within which being as such receives meaning in the first place, that is to say, becomes understandable at all.

P. 34

And the horizontal schema, in the previous post, is the end of metaphysics.

In exposing this proto-understanding, Heidegger's analysis has arrived at an end which is also the beginning from which arises the understanding of Being; it has reached that point which, as with the Platonic idea tou agaqou, is both end and beginning. To the extent that the analysis genuinely and fully reaches this point, it brings Being and Time and philosophy itself to their common end, their completion.

P. 136-137

To that extent, where one could reach a point on the horizon, an end and a beginning.  ¶ 6:59 PM 0 comments

  Finding time as beyng, through the horizontal schema. In Division II, after a couple hundred pages of discussion of authenticity and death, and the application of temporality to those, Heidegger says:

We have shown that temporality constitutes the disclosedness of the "there", and we have shown how it does so. In the disclosedness of the "there" the world is disclosed along with it. The unity of significance--that is, the ontological constitution of the world--must then likewise be grounded in temporality. The existential-temporal condition for the possibility of the world lies in the fact that temporality, as an ecstatical unity, has something like a horizon.

P. 416

Again the ontological difference. Temporality is not a being.

Temporality "is" not an entity at all.

P. 377

Jumping ahead to The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, the temporal horizon is necessary for understanding beyng.

Everything that is encountered in the enpresenting is understood as a presencing entity--that is, it is understood upon presence--on the basis of the horizon, praesens, already removed in the ecstasis. If handiness and unavailability signify something like presence and absence--praesens modified and modifiable thus and so--the being of the beings encountered within the world is projected praesensially, which means, fundamentally, Temporally. Accordingly, we understand being from the original horizontal schema of the ecstaces of temporality.

p. 307

Back to Division II.

The way the Present is rooted in the future and in having been, is the existential-temporal condition for the possibility that what has been projected in circumspective understanding can be brought closer in a making-present, and in such a way that the Present can thus conform itself to what is encountered with the horizon of awaiting and retaining; this means that it must interpret itself in the schema of the as-structure. We have thus answered the question we formulated earlier--the question of whether the as-structure has some existential-ontological connection with the phenomenon of projection. Like understanding and interpretation in general, the 'as' is grounded in the ecstatico-horizontal unity of temporality.

P. 411

As such, temporality is necessary for understanding, for the meaningfulness of the world.

Each ecstasis, as removal to..., has at the same time within itself and belonging to it a predelineation of the formal structure of the whereto of the removal. We call this whither of the ecstatis the horizon or, more precisely, the horizontal schema of the ecstasis.
...
The transcendence of being-in-the-world is founded in its specific wholeness on the original ecstatic-horizontal unity of temporality. If transcendence makes possible the understanding of being and if transcendence is founded on the ecstatic-horizontal constitution of temporality, then temporality is the condition of the possibility of the understanding of being.

p. 302

  ¶ 2:32 PM 11 comments

  The horizon of being is also the horizon of intelligibility or meaning. Heidegger says at the beginning of Division II of Being and Time.

What we are seeking is the answer to the question about the meaning of Being in general, and, prior to that, the possibility of working out in a radical manner this basic question of all ontology. But to lay bare the horizon within which something like Being in general becomes intelligible, is tantamount to clarifying the possibility of having any understanding of Being at all--an understanding which itself belongs to the constitution of the entity called Dasein. The understanding of Being, however, cannot be radically clarified as an essential element in Dasein's Being, unless the entity to whose Being it belongs, has been Interpreted primordially in itself with regard to its Being.

P. 231

He will interpret temporality in Division II to show that time is critical to understanding the horizon of beyng.  ¶ 6:44 AM 0 comments

  Heidegger understood that horizontal analogies had their nautical elements.

The situation in question does not correspond to a safe harbour but to a leap into a drifting boat, and it all depends on getting the mainsheet in hand and looking to the wind. It is precisely the difficulties that we must see; clarification in that regard first discloses the proper horizon toward factical life. Only in appropriating this correspondingly structured possession of the decision, only in realizing that our vision depends precisely on this possession, does there reside the basic motivation for the maturation of philosophizing.

P. 29

  ¶ 8:42 PM 0 comments

  The metaphor of horizon is one that shows up throughout the Heidegger corpus, including as a means of understanding beyng. Here is the last paragraph of Being and Time. The bold in the last question is mine.

Something like 'Being' has been disclosed in the understanding-of-Being that belongs to existent Dasein as a way in which it understands. Being has been disclosed in a preliminary way, though non-conceptually; and this makes it possible for Dasein as existent Being-in-the-world to comport itself toward entities--toward those which it encounters within-the-world as well as towards itself as existent. How is the disclosive understanding of Being at all possible for Dasein? Can this question be answered by going back to the primordial constitution-of-Being of that Dasein by which Being is understood? The existential-ontological constitution of Dasein's totality is grounded in temporality. Hence the ecstatical projection of Being must be made possible by some primordial way in which ecstatical temporality temporalizes. How is this mode of the temporalizing of temporality to be Interpreted? Is there a way which leads from primordial time to the meaning of Being? Does time itself manifest itself as the horizon of Being?

P. 488

Several aspects of this notion of the horizon as an ontological metaphor work well. The familiar notion of a horizon is that of a ship is at sea, surrounded by a horizon.

When an island is spotted, the ship approaches it, and as it gets closer, the island may be discerned with greater detail. Yet, approach one island close enough, and another island will move away, its details lost until it is merely just another island. So it is with anything. We can examine something more closely and understand that phenomena in more detail, or instead examine some other thing, losing our focus of the first thing.

The ship can also approach the horizon, but unlike approaching a thing like an island, the horizon never gets any closer. As such, the horizon is like beyng. All beings are enclosed by it, but beyng cannot be studied like a thing, it always eludes us when we approach it. Such is the ontological difference between beings and beyng.

Phenomenology can be used to study phenomena, but it cannot directly study beyng, although that limitation does give us some insights about beyng.

Dasein is the ship bobbing along on the ocean, being-in-the-world. It can only appropriate and understand what is within its horizon, the clearing where it encounters phenomena.

Time as temporality is a horizon. We always approach the future and the past recedes from us, like moving toward and away from the horizon at the same time.

The horizon can be nearer or farther away, so that the world encompassed shrinks or grows. From the crow's nest you can see more islands than from the deck; the higher you look from the further you can see. You can observe more phenomena, but not get any closer to the horizon. Instead, the more you know, the further away the horizon is. And there is an absolute limit, the most you can ever see of a sphere is half, and horizon continues to elude you whatever your position.  ¶ 6:41 AM 2 comments

  Can't improve on Pitchfork's comment:

Mel Gibson's other movie about a Jew with a fanatical cult following.

  ¶ 11:30 AM 0 comments

  Heidegger on faith and knowledge

Faith means holding-for-true. In this sense it means appropriating what is "true," no matter how it is given and can be takenover. In this broad sense it means agreement.

Holding-for-true changes according to what is true (and finally and foremost according to truth and what is its ownmost).

But faith--especially in its open or tacit opposition to knowing--means holding-for-true that which withdraws from knowing in the sense of an explaining intuiting [erklärende Einsichtnahme] (even "believing" a report whose "truth" cannot be demonstrated but is vouched for by reporters and witnesses). Even here it becomes clear that in its essentiality this faith depends on the specific manner of knowing that is set against it.

Faith: holding-for-true what is completely withdrawn from any knowing. But what does knowing mean here? What is actual knowing? It is the knowing that knows what is ownmost to truth and accordingly determines it primarily in the turning [die Kehre] from within this ownmost.

If what is ownmost to truth is the clearing for the self-sheltering-concealing of be-ing, then knowing-awareness is holding oneself in this clearing of sheltering-concealing and thus is the basic relation to the self-sheltering-concealing of be-ing and to be-ing itself.

Then this knowing-awareness is not a mere holding-for-true something that is true or something that is outstandingly true but rather is originarily holding oneself within the essential sway of truth.

This knowing-awareness, essential knowing, is then more originary than any faith, which always refers to something that is true and therefore, if it ever wants to get out of total blindnesss, must necessarily know what true and something true means to it!

Essential knowing is a holding oneself within the ownmost [Wesen]. This is to say that essential knowing is not a mere representation of an encounter but rather is persevering within the break-through of a projecting-opening which, through enopening, comes to know the very abground that sustains it.

Thus, if one takes "knowning" in the heretofore sense of representation and possession of representation , then of course essential knowning is not a "knowing" but a "faith." However, this word then has an entirely different meaning, no longer that of holding-for-true, whereby truth is already known--even if confusedly--but rather that of holding-oneself-to-truth. And this holding oneself, having the character of a projecting-open, is always a questioning, nay the originary questioning as such by which man exposes himself to truth and puts what is ownmost up for decision.

P. 257-258

One question that springs up is, this essential knowing from originary questioning, this holding oneself within the ownmost, is this something any man can do? Anyone that's not unquestioningly holding-for-true what is given? Or is this something only possible by Heidegger? Or a new god?  ¶ 9:25 PM 0 comments

  While following a trail through Heidegger's thinking on religion, I came across this:

Be-ing-historical thinking is outside any theology and also knows no atheism, in the sense of a worldview or a doctrine structured in some other way.

S. 259

What is be-ing-historical thinking? Here's how Daniela Vallega-Neu explains it:

Be-ing is no longer articulated, as in Being and Time, by means of an ontological structure which underlies history (in Being and Time Heidegger thinks history as being grounded in Dasein's temporality). Instead, be-ing itself opens as a historical occurrence, and thinking finds itself partaking in this occurrence, in this abysmal grounding in which a world open historically. Heidegger calls this way of thinking "be-ing-historical thinking" (seynsgeshichtliches Denken).

The more original insertion into the history of be-ing which marks be-ing-historical thinking is twofold: First, it refers to a rethinking of the history of be-ing in its different epochs in our Western tradition out of and within the motion of the essential occurence of the truth of be-ing. Second, it refers also to a transformation of thinking which no longer places itself, as it were, against the history of be-ing in the way in which it questions history, but rather which finds itself caught up and determined by be-ing's historicality. By remaining in that grounding attunement that unsettles thinking form day-to-day life and representational thinking, be-ing-historical thinking finds itself historically enowned out of be-ing's occurrence, i.e., out of the truth of being. The truth of be-ing is thus thought as what Heidegger calls "enowning event" (Ereignis).

P. 30-31

Alejandro Vallega translates seynsgeshichtliches as beyng-historical, which I prefer.

Susan M. Schoenbohm has this to say about beyng-historical thinking:

As the meaning of be-ing transists, so also does the meaning of "human being." More specifically, Heidegger says, the transition to be-ing-historical thinking involves a change from taking the basic meaning of human being to be something metaphysical, something along the lines of "rational animal," to orienting our thinking according to da-sein in its temporal disclosive character.

At least since Aristotle, we humans have thought of ourselves metaphysically, as beings among other beings that are distinguished from them by a lasting essence, that is, our ability to reason and speak. The consequences of this interpretation include virtually all of the ways that we have thought and behaved with respect to others in the world. The transition from metaphysical thinking to be-ing-historical thinking enfolds a change in this thinking of humans--that is, in our being--from thinking and experiencing ourselves in terms of some permanent essence toward a thinking of "self" as having whatever character or meaning it has only in virtue of be-ing-t/here in the world.

P. 19

  ¶ 4:44 PM 0 comments

  Here's the table of contents for Mindfulness, the translation of Besinnung (1938-39; GA 66), due in a couple of months. From this perspective it looks similar to the Contributions, finished two years earlier, and with whom it shares a translator.  ¶ 3:09 PM 0 comments

  On a shrinking world and damming rivers:

The traditionalist adventurer may like to preserve the world in all its mystery and then set sail for the unknown. One may like to characterise Thesiger as a freak, an anachronism, as one not belonging to his time. But what about modern thinkers like Martin Heidegger, who is staunchly against the science's aim to dominate nature? To him using nature to serve man is something intrinsically repulsive.

  ¶ 1:49 PM 0 comments

  Postmodernism in the news.

Postmodernism is simply a theory that suggests there is more than one way of looking at the world, Professor Sankey said.

"There are lots of different ways of thinking and some are more valid than others; but you can't just say that one way of thinking is the only way that you should be thinking."

The word "postmodern" comes from a French academic, Jean-Franois Lyotard, who wrote a 1979 book called La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge).

The suggestion that there are multiple viewpoints prevades Plato's dialogues, which are canonically dated somewhat before the modern era. By 1979, the term Postmodernism was almost a century old, although its popularity rose after it was adopted by late-XX Century architects reacting against the impersonal glass and steel boxes of modernist buildings (e.g. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe). In Lyotard's text, postmodern describes a broad reaction against the enlightenment's faith in rationalism, and he doesn't claim to have evented the term. I can't quite fault Professor Sankey, because to do so I would have to assume that the newspaper is correctly quoting her, and fact checking is evidently non-existent there.  ¶ 11:06 AM 3 comments

  I've received a second DVD of The Ister (see: theister.com). One's enough for my purposes, so it could be yours!

It's Dual Layer Format and regions 2, 3, and 4 PAL. That means it won't work on a cheapo walmart deck, but it plays fine on my dell laptop.

I'll trade it for something of equivalent value, ~$50.

If you're interested, email me, and we can haggle.

I've also got extra, new, copies of The Young Heidegger (HB), Phenomenological Interpretation of Aristotle (HB), Plato's Sophist (PB), and Companion to Heidegger's Contributions (PB). Also available for trade or half the RRP+P&P.

[I have been offered an attractive exchange for the DVD. If it doesn't go through, I'll re-announce the DVD.]  ¶ 8:16 AM 2 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Knife-Life-Crisis hosts Heidegger for Dummies.

In order: I II III IV  ¶ 10:44 PM 0 comments

  Art beyond things themselves.

In terms of content, both Osmose and Ephémère are based on nature and landscape as metaphor. As such, their realms are populated with trees, roots, rocks, streams, etc., all iconic elements which have reoccurred in my work for 25 years. It is outside the scope of this essay to discuss the reasons for and implications of re-presenting the natural world in virtual environments. However I do want to emphasize that my intention has been to use the medium’s unique qualities to present nature beyond the veil of surface appearances, while grounding such perception in the subjectively lived body. In this context, my work could be interpreted as an ongoing attempt to articulate a vision of nature perhaps closer to how Heidegger (in Heraklit) described the Greek’s "physis" - as "outside of all specific connotations of mountains, sea or animals, the pure blooming in the power of which all that appears and thus "is’".

  ¶ 10:43 PM 0 comments

  The Telephone Book designer, R.I.P.

In 1989, however, Mr. Eckersley made a radical departure from his signature restraint, shaking up the field with his design for Avital Ronell's "Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech," an unorthodox study of Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger and the philosophy of deconstruction. This was the first book Mr. Eckersley designed on the computer, using new page-making software programs to interpret the author's complex postmodern ideas typographically.

Although the stark black-and-white cover of this long vertical book was rather quiet, he radically dislodged the interior text from conventional settings, and the book's layout sometimes upstages the text by deliberately impeding the act of reading, which is just what Ms. Ronell wanted. Throughout the book there are unexplained gaps and dislocations between sentences and paragraphs, forcing the reader to work at reading. On one page is a mirror image of the page that faces it. On another, snakelike trails of space that come from careless word spacing (called rivers) are intentionally employed. Some words are blurred to the point of being indecipherable; one line runs into another because of the exaggerated use of negative line-spacing.

Though some adventurous graphic designers were experimenting at the time with idiosyncratic computer type design, this was first attempt to apply a "deconstructivist style" to a serious book.

  ¶ 8:26 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Culture Industry on The Ister.

I have some problems with listening to philosophers improvising – Bernard Stiegler, for instance, recaps much of Technics and Time I: The Fault of Epimetheus in talk that is far less snappy than his prose – but on the other hand, it's worth it to hear the occasional squawks of his little girl in the background & see the opening and shutting of kitchen cabinets behind his work table.

Lacoue-Labarthe is quite rivetting, even beyond the painful game of wondering when exactly he's going to light the cigarette he keeps gesticulating with.

I've noticed that video humanizes philosophers. Instead of merely reading a text, one gets a representation of the person that one can feel sympathetic or antipathic towards. That impression remains, later affecting me when I return to a text. Heidegger appears to have been of two opinions on this. On the one hand he felt that a philosopher's biography was insignificant and should have no part in philosophy. On the other, he said that philosophy must be a living questioning.  ¶ 7:50 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Martin posts his paper on Authenticity: A Heideggerian Account.  ¶ 12:05 PM 0 comments

  Badiou lectures on truth.

Modern philosophy is a criticism of truth as adequation. Truth is not limited to the form of judgment. Heidegger suggests that it is a historic destiny. I will start from the following idea: Truth is first of all something new. What transmits, what repeats, we shall call knowledge. Distinguishing truth from knowledge is essential. It is a distinction already made in the work of Kant, between reason and understanding, and it is as you know a capital distinction for Heidegger, who distinguishes truth as aletheia, and understanding as cognition, science, techne. Aletheia is always properly a beginning. Techne is always a continuation, an application, a repetition. It is the reason why Heidegger says that the poet of truth is always the poet of a sort of morning of the world. I quote Heidegger: 'The poet always speaks as if the being was expressed for the first time.' If all truth is something new, what is the essential philosophic problem pertaining to truth?

With followup questions from Agamben through Zizek.  ¶ 8:50 AM 2 comments

  Iain Thomson weaves together an account relating philosophy to science from several Heidegger texts:

Being and Time contends that the “real movement of the sciences” occurs when such crises lead the sciences to subject their guiding ontological understandings to “a revision which is more or less radical and lucid with regard to itself.” During such a crisis, a science often puts its ontological understanding of the being of the class of entities it studies into question, usually settling the crisis only by revising its previous ontological understanding. Those who explicitly recognize and take part in such ontological questioning and revision are doing philosophy, Heidegger says, whether or not they happen to be employed by a philosophy department. It is in this sense, I submit, that we need to take Heidegger’s widely misunderstood and so highly controversial claim that science as such “does not think.”

For Heidegger, philosophy is essentially an activity of ontological questioning. One is “philosophizing” whenever one explicitly examines and seeks to clarify the ontological understanding that normally guides a science implicitly. To say that the positive sciences, as such, do not “think” simply means that they do not, as positive sciences, question their guiding ontological presuppositions: “The researcher always operates on the foundation of what has already been decided: the fact that there are such things as nature, history, art, and that these things can be made the subject of consideration.” Of course, scientists do occasionally engage in such potentially revolutionary ontological questioning, but when they do, they are (by Heidegger’s definition) doing philosophy, not research. Thus biologists as well as philosophers of biology were philosophizing when they explicitly questioned the ontological understanding of what life is during the recent debates over “artificial life.” Conversely, philosophy is “only alive and actual” when engaged in the ontological questioning at the center of such scientific crises. Philosophers (and others) philosophize only by doing the potentially revolutionary work of questioning the ontological presuppositions that guide the natural, social, and human sciences. Hence the Husserlian concept of a “scientific philosophy,” Heidegger proclaims in 1928, is like the concept of a “circular sphere”: Not simply redundant, for as a sphere is more circular than any circle, so “philosophizing” is “more scientific than any possible science.” Indeed, strictly speaking, “philosophy is not science, . . . but rather the origin [Ursprung] of science.” Science “springs from” philosophy in a way that resembles the emergence of normal science from revolutionary science, namely, through an eventual routinization and procedural exploration of the ontological insights gained philosophically during a period of revolutionary science.

To practice philosophy so conceived, Being and Time explains, is “to interpret entities in terms of the basic constitution of their being.” By focusing on a positive science’s guiding ontological presuppositions, philosophy can clarify the ontological posits of the positive sciences and so transform and guide the course of their future development. Thus Heidegger writes:

Laying the foundations for the sciences in this way is different in principle from the kind of [Kantian] “logic” which limps along behind, investigating the status of some science as it chances to find it, in order to discover its “method.” Laying the foundations . . . is rather a productive logic—in the sense that it leaps ahead, as it were, into a particular region of being, discloses it for the first time in its constitutive being, and makes the structures acquired thereby available to the positive sciences as lucid directives for their inquiry. [P. 30-31]

By clarifying the positive sciences’ guiding ontological posits, philosophy plays a foundational role with respect to the other sciences, proactively guiding their development, even issuing “lucid directives for their inquiry.” In this way, Heidegger believes philosophy can reclaim its historic role as “torch-bearer” of the sciences.

This material has been is expanded upon in Iain's recent book on Ontothelogy.  ¶ 8:18 AM 0 comments

  An excellent discussion of Leo Strauss from La Trobe University's (Melbourne) student radio. Unlike so many others who have taken a facile attitude that Straussian is a synonym from Machiavellian, the hosts on this show have actually spent some time reading his texts, can situate his ideas in their proper context, and have some thoughtful comments.

Which reminds me that I should post the central esoteric passage from The Closing of the American Mind one of these days.  ¶ 8:03 AM 4 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Intercapillary Space in poetical review interview:

E: If there is a "doomed transcendentalism", it appears in the emblem of wholeness, another refrain, a whole encountered from the very edge. All this being sung, it would be no stretch to mention Heidegger here.

M: Must you? And run the risk of joining the "Heideggerian stable lads going mop, mop, in the Augean horse-boxes of Being"? (Drew Milne) Unless you could be a radically un-stable Heraklean palynologist of the flora rhetoricae?

E: Well, putting that enticing idea to one side; In the essay 'What Are Poets For?' Heidegger writes: "To sing, truly to say worldly existence, to say out of the haleness of the whole pure draft and to say only this, means: to belong to the precinct of beings themselves." But in this singing, the poet finds the draft entirely impure, but the singing continues.

  ¶ 7:34 AM 0 comments

  Continuing the story of where things came from.

From the coitus hidden in the knot of their interwoven bodies, Ether, Chaos, and Night were born. A shadowy vapor lay over the two winged snakes. Time-Without-Age hardened this gloomy fog into a shell that gradually took on an oblong shape. And, as it did so, a light spread from the shell, fluttering in the void like a white tunic or a shred of mist. Then, breaking away from Ananke, the snake wrapped himself around this luminous egg. Did he mean to crush it?

Finally the shape split open. Out poured a radiant light. Appearance itself appeared. You couldn't help but be invaded by light, but you couldn't make out the figure it came from. Only Night saw him: four eyes and four horns, golden wings, and heads of a ram, a bull, and a lion, and a snake spread across a young and human body, a phallus and a vagina, hooves. Having broken the shell, the father snake wound himself around his son's body. Above, the father's head looked down on his son; beneath, a boy's fine face looked into the light emanating from his own body. It was Phanes, the Protogonos, firstborn of the world of appearance, the "key to the mind."

Phanes' life was like no other life since. Alone in the light, "he grazed in his breast." He didn't need to look at anything but the light, because everything was in him. Copulating with himself, he impregnated his own sacred belly. He gave birth to another snake, Echidna, with splendid woman's face framed by a vast head of hair. From her sweet-smelling cheeks, from the incessant flashing of her eyes, she emanated violence. Speckled scales, like the waves of a swollen sea, stretched right up to her soft, white breasts. Then Phanes begot Night, who had already existed before him. But Phanes had to beget her just the same, because he was everything. He made night his concubine. He was a guest in her cave. Other children were born: Uranus and Ge. Little by little, with the light constantly pouring from the top of his head, Phanes made the places where the gods and men would live. Things were ushered into the world of appearance.

P. 200-201

  ¶ 8:42 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Philosophy As Such, in midst of discussing discourse in Athens, notes:

Heidegger interprets Plato’s notion of the Good “as the idea of ideas… what enables everything else”. This ‘enabling’ of things, if Heidegger’s view is accepted, is for Plato a divine function that grounds human reality. The key difference between both views resides in the fact that Plato’s philosophy was entirely metaphysical in the sense that it did not postulate the existence of exclusively other-worldly entities –Plato creates “a transcendence within… immanence”, Deleuze observes- whereas Heidegger’s distinction between fundamental ontology and reality becomes blurred in the phrase just quoted. Plato spoke of the Good as the “sovereign of the intelligible world and the parent of intelligence and truth”; it is the cardinal Form, but it is a Form nevertheless. On the other hand, a notion such as “the idea of ideas” seems to extrapolate Heidegger’s vision of the “Being of beings”.

  ¶ 9:12 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Apperception explains intentionality.

It’s not a coincidence that intentionality is all about the relationship between consciousness and its object and that Husserlian intentionality is primarily focused upon resolving epistemological problems. In other words, it’s not an accident that knowledge is the most basic relation to the world, and that out of which the world is primarily composed are objects. The way Heidegger sees it, when a Husserlian looks out into the world, all he sees are objects. And the subjective correlate of objects is consciousness. So the basic relationship to the world is understood as a knowing relationship between subject and object. But, according to Heidegger, if you see the world as being made up of objects, and if you see the subject as being a conscious being, and if you see the most basic relationship between the subject and the world as a knowing relationship, then you’re missing something really important and profound about the self and the world.

  ¶ 9:07 PM 0 comments

  The origin of things, in Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.

Zeus had been born into a world already old, dangerous and full fo divine beings. In his life he had performed only one exploit truly worthy of the name of Living Being for every living being. He was still hidden in night's cave. Night was the wet nurse of the gods; her very substance was ambrosia. She advised Zeus to swallow up Phanes, the Protogonos, firstborn of the sovereigns of the world, and then to swallow the other gods and goddesses born from him, and the universe too. Thus gods, goddesses, earth and starry splendor, Ocean, rivers, and the deep cavern of the underworld all wound up in Zeus's sacred belly, which now contained everything that had been and would ever be.

Everything grew together inside him, clutching his innards as a bat clutches to a tree or a bloodsucker to flesh. Then Zeus, who had been just another of the Titan's children, became, alone, the beginning, the middle, and the end. Then, in his overflowing solitude, he saw the life that had come before his birth as a child of Kronos, the father who had immediately threatened him and wanted to swallow him up. And he understood why his father has been so fierce. In the end, Kronos had only tried to do what Zeus alone how now succeeded in doing. But everything seemed luminous and clear to him now, because everything was in him. With amazement he realized he had become the only one. He lived in a state of perfect wakefulness. He went back to the times preceeding his father, Kronos, further and further back until he reached a point that was furthest, because it had been the first.

Space no longer existed. In its place was a convex surface clad with thousands upon thousands of scales. It extended beyond anything the eye could see. Looking downward along the scales, he realized that they were attached to other scales, the same color, interwoven with them in knot after knot, each one tighter than the one before. The eye became confused, could no longer tell which of the two coiling bodies the scales belonged to. As he looked up again, toward the heads of the two knotted snakes, the body of the first snake rose, and its scales merged into something that no longer partook of the nature of a snake: it was the face of a god, the first face to reveal what a god's face was, and on either side of it were two other huge heads, one a lion and one a bull, while from the shoulders opened immense, airy wings. The white arm of a woman was twined to the arm of the god, just as below the tails of the two snakes were knotted together. The woman's face gazed steadily at the god's, while with her other arm, behind which trembled an immense wing, she stretched out toward the farthest extremity of everything: and where the tips of her fingernails reached, there Everything ended. They were a royal and motionless couple: They were Time-Without-Age and Ananke.

P. 198-200

I believe this story is from the Orphic hymns. Here's Phanes emerging from the Cosmic Egg, surrounded by the four winds and the twelve signs of the zodiac.Continued.  ¶ 7:40 PM 0 comments

  Wozu Künstler?

Kim Dylla's The Question Concerning Technology Exhibit 2006

As far back as 1953, the question of technology and the nature of the machine was paramount. German philosopher Martin Heidegger in his essay, “The Question Concerning Technology” states, “Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where alétheia, truth happens.” In my work, I seek to investigate this realm, a space between science and art. I seek to reconcile these two disciplines, often juxtaposed, so that scientific innovation comes full circle to create a new type of “haunting” or artistic presence.

  ¶ 5:41 PM 0 comments

  Wisconsin bishop says openness precludes truth:

"The second weapon in the arsenal of those who would dictate relativism to the rest of us consists in a series of linguistic redefinitions, euphemisms, and other anomalies," Bishop Morlino pointed out. "Language, as the philosopher Heidegger said, 'is the house of being.' If our language is contorted and deconstructed through euphemisms, redefinitions and other anomalies, then the being housed by language becomes indeterminate. There are no fixed meanings, that is relativism pushed to its pinnacle, nihilism itself.... Our society speaks of openness and tolerance as almost supreme virtues, but to be open means precisely to be closed to the objective truth."

And here I'd thought that openness was a condition for truth, and deconstruction revealed being.  ¶ 5:09 PM 3 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Trish explains that dreaded nothing.

Next we have to find a way to understand the totality of what-is. For Heidegger, it is a certain mood that helps us to reveal nothing, that is the mood of dread or angst. Dread reveals Nothing, and it reveals a fresh illumination of reality. Through feelings of dread we contemplate nothingness, which in turn lets us better understand Being. Because of dread, what-is-in-totality slips away and forces Nothing to the fore. It is a turning point that marks the end of a history of self-deception and of metaphysics that confuses what is with what is not.

  ¶ 9:02 AM 3 comments

  The Face of a Naked Lady by Michael Rips is a memoir about discovering and reflecting on the life of the author's late father, who ran a lens grinding firm in Omaha. He realizes that his father, and the meaning of his own life, are defined by how they interact with other people.

Following in the path of Husserl and Heidegger, Levinas was committed to uncovering the constituents of consciousness. Believing, as did Husserl and Heidegger, that consciousness was thoroughly embedded in the world, he stripped aside all presumptions, including those concerning the real as well as metaphysical worlds, including the presumption that there was a division between the subjective mind of man and the objective world beyond that mind, to discover--the discovery set forth in Totality and Infinity--that the essence of man's mind was his awareness of the Other.

The Other, according to Levinas, cannot be known by man--a transcendence that provides no guidance or salvation. Levinas users the term "Other" interchangeably with "Infinity" or "God" or "Mystery of God," understanding that no term is adequate given the incomprehensibility of the subject.

Critical to Levinas's philosophy is the idea that man's awareness that he is radically apart from the Other (man is not an extension of the Other, nor is the Other an extension of man) confers existence on man by way of contrast and hence places man in the debt of the Other.

In the face of other people, man becomes aware of the Other and, consequently, the debt owed to the Other. The term "face," as used by Levinas, means both the material face of other people but also the unapproachable Infinity or Mystery that is reflected in the face.

"The face," Levinas observes, "expresses itself in the sensible,...[but] the face tears apart the sensible." Here Levinas repeats a story told by Vassily Grossman on how in Moscow, before a gate where people were allowed to drop off letters for friends and relatives arrested for political crimes, "people formed a line, each reading on the nape of the person in front of him the feelings and hopes of his misery."

Engagement with the Other that is never completely revealed, that is always the subject of contemplation, changes us, Levinas believed--it allows us to develop, freeing us from the illusion of a "true self." To reflect on it was to "explode" consciousness, not save it. In this, Levinas distinguished himself from Heidegger, who held that the forces exterior to man's mind were entrapping and that man could only find freedom by pushing aside those forces, and in doing so, allow an authentic self to emerge.

P. 56-58

There's much to recommend this book. The story of how Michael "translated" Ionesco's Rhinocéros into French for a high school class, and the play was then entered in a Nebraska academic competition is priceless.  ¶ 8:25 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Mormon Philosophy & Theology posts on Heidegger and Thomas Kuhn's different understandings of science. They are typically, and superficially, considered to have had similar ideas. Which is understandable from view points sufficiently distant from both. Here's the key paragraph, but read the whole thing.

Heidegger argues that the traditional argument of the essence of science as experiments is flawed. Experimentalism can't distinguish modern science from Aristotilean or medieval science. Rather what characterizes modern science is the mathematical. He finds the rise of mathematics (meaning a kind of projective metaphysics) in Descartes. Experiment is always an appeal to facts. Yet as Kant's Critique demonstrates the experimental method is itself a projection of a priori conceptions onto nature. Thus in the 1930's, Heidegger's view of science is as a kind of methodological idealism. Yet an idealism essentially tied to Externalism rather than Internalism.

  ¶ 6:22 PM 0 comments

  On maths as another religion, or the problems with Set Theory: Should You Believe?:

Most of the problems with the foundational aspects arise from mathematicians' erroneous belief that they properly understand the content of public school and high school mathematics, and that further clarification and codification is largely unnecessary. Most (but not all) of the difficulties of Set Theory arise from the insistence that there exist 'infinite sets', and that it is the job of mathematics to study them and use them.

In perpetuating these notions, modern mathematics takes on many of the aspects of a religion. It has its essential creed---namely Set Theory, and its unquestioned assumptions, namely that mathematics is based on `Axioms', in particular the Zermelo-Fraenkel 'Axioms of Set Theory'. It has its anointed priesthood, the logicians, who specialize in studying the foundations of mathematics, a supposedly deep and difficult subject that requires years of devotion to master. Other mathematicians learn to invoke the official mantras when questioned by outsiders, but have only a hazy view about how the elementary aspects of the subject hang together logically.

...

Occasionally logicians inquire as to whether the current `Axioms' need to be changed further, or augmented. The more fundamental question---whether mathematics requires any Axioms---is not up for discussion. That would be like trying to get the high priests on the island of Okineyab to consider not whether the Divine Ompah's Holy Phoenix has twelve or thirteen colours in her tail (a fascinating question on which entire tomes have been written), but rather whether the Divine Ompah exists at all. Ask that question, and icy stares are what you have to expect, then it's off to the dungeons, mate, for a bit of retraining.

  ¶ 7:38 PM 4 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Ian Hays posts on Joyce, Heidegger, and technology.

Bruns’ study of Heidegger’s final text on language, The Way to Language, comes under the sub-title Signs in which Finnegans Wake frequently features as a kind of paradigm. Indeed, Bruns discusses Heidegger’s writing on language, art and technology: “the worlding of the world, is the event of language”, in ways that seem to teem with allusions to Joyce’s language-use, structure and motif in Finnegans Wake, not merely because it cannot be called a reasoning of any sort (from the standpoint of progressive, systematic, calculative and ‘philosophical thinking’ it is “repetitious, opaque, pointless and unproductive”);) but the work of the work of art, in Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art, that is to say what happens with it, is in any case: “[…] explicated in terms of the doubleness of truth as disclosure and refusal or dissembling (Versagen and Verstellen).

  ¶ 1:20 PM 0 comments

  Alan Badiou asks his questions in Briefings on Existence.

The theme of quidditas, whatness, as a determination of the Being of beings according to the unity of its quid, is what seals Being's entry into a normative power that is strictly metaphysical. It destines Being to the preeminence of beings.

Heidegger summarized this movement in the notes included at the end of volumne II of his Nietzsche, which he titled "Projects for the History of Being as Metaphysics":

The preeminence of quidditas continually brings about the preeminence of beings themselves in what they are. The preeminence of beings secures Being as koinon (common) from the perspective of the en (One). The distinctive character of metaphysics has been decided. The One as unifying unity becomes normative for the subsequent determination of Being

Therefore, it is because the One normatively decides on Being that the latter is reduced to what is common, reduced to empty generality. That is why it must also endure the metaphysical preeminence of beings.

Metaphysics can be defined as follows: the enframing of Being by the One. Its most appropriate synthetic maxim comes from Liebniz. The maxim ascertained the reciprocity of Being and the One as a norm: "What is not truly one being is not truly a being either."

The question from which I began speculating can now be formulated as follows: Can the One be unsealed from Being? Can the metaphysical enframing of Being by the One be severed without in turn becoming involved in the Heideggerean idea of destiny, or without entrusting thought to the unfounded promise of a redemptory returning? For, with Heidegger himself, the thinking of metaphysics as a history of Being is bound to an announcement whose ultimate expression is that "only a god can save us."

Plato, Parmenides, Lucretius, Lacan, Cantor, and Hilbert are also mentioned.  ¶ 12:24 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Driftwork is reading Being and Event.

What is usually stated is that the important point of Badiou's philosophical construction is the now famous equation ontology = mathematics. The tendency is to present this as a strictly original philosophical proposition, which continues the materialist line of thought beginning with the Platonic break and continuing through Galileo and restated by Badiou. This, it appears, rather misses what I suspect is the central trajectory of the text � that Being & Event is centrally written against Heidgger�s Being and Time. To avoid this issue is to avoid the central monumentalist intention of the book. Perhaps it seems a little naive to say, to suggest that Being & Event is in the now substantial line of attempts to write responses that are to supplant Heidegger's Being & Time, a list that includes Sartre's Being and Nothingness and Adorno's Negative Dialectics amongst others, but this central reactiveness of the text has not been discussed, probably because the idea of comparing B&E and B&T is simply to horrible a thought.

  ¶ 6:11 AM 6 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Maverick Philosopher analyzes Adorno's problem with being.

Being is not a being, but a transcendental condition of the manifestation of beings; it is also not a concept or category, but the vehicle of all concepts. As such it is a Third that mediates between subject and object, but is not itself mediated by anything. And of course this is why the neo-Hegelian Adorno objects to it.

  ¶ 8:04 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Journal has been reading the Letter on Humanism to learn about discourse:

Heidegger also makes the claim that "language still denies us its essence: that it is the house of the truth of Being". The meaning of Being takes places in words (and time) and is therefore tied to a particular historical and cultural setting.

  ¶ 8:43 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Humanities Policy on the Epistemological Power of Art:

Martin Heidegger makes this point by arguing the root instance of 'truthing' is not captured by our accepted idea that truth consists of the correspondence between a proposition and an external state of affairs. Heidegger turns to the Greek term alethia, which translates roughly as a bringing forth, a revealing, or a bringing forth out of concealment. Alethia is closely related to poiesis (creation). Literature and other forms of art do not copy the world in some objective sense, but if they do their proper work they reveal or bring forth truth as no other form of knowledge or episteme can.

  ¶ 7:26 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Saintbryan describes being bewildered.

“Uncanniness”, as Heidegger describes it, is a state-of-mind, or mood of “not-being-at-home”. One’s average, everyday state of “being-in” (as in being-in-the-world) is defined by Heidegger not as a sort of ‘insideness’, but as more of a “residing alongside…”, or “being familiar with…” It is an “in” in much the same way as when one is “in” a relationship (in this case, a relationship with the world). The particular relationship with which one is familiar- the everyday- brings a mood of tranquilized self-assurance. Of being-at-home. This particular relationship is a relationship with entities within-the-world: the items and “things” which occupy our everyday lives, and the other people with whom we interact. The relationship formed between you and all these entities is the totality of the world as you know it. In immersing one’s self in this world of things and people, one fails, as Heidegger puts it, to stand by one’s self. This is the mode of inauthenticity. That which is unfamiliar, and uncanny, is an encountering of the world outside of the frames of reference which have been built up for you. Bewilderment is to see the world through your eyes alone. When this happens, we flee. We run back home as fast as possible, immersing ourselves in the world of things and people. The ‘they’. We turn on the TV, go see a movie, go get drunk with friends.

  ¶ 5:18 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Mauberly asks:

So when a Heideggerian says that 'the eventing events,' possibly there is something said there. But in contrast to what? Might an eventing event something other than an event, as raining might rain something other than rain, e.g. mud?

One answer is nothing, in the Parmenides sense of "nothing changes". For example, Michael Roth wrote:

Nothing happens, Ereignis ereignet. We can no longer naively write this as the happening of happening. Happening itself is the movement of Ereignis, it is event. Being does not happen, rather Being is and nothing happens...That nothing results from Ereignis no doubt follows from the fact that nothing happens there....The question of giving in/as/through Ereignis is the question of the relation of metaphysics and its other, the relation of the principle of identity and the Same. 'Perdurance' is austragen or 'carrying out,' which indicates indicates the migration of what is into the Open from out of a concealed abyss (groundless origin). This migration is a becoming other, the becoming other of the origin. A pure and simple unitary origin could never accomplish the perdurance of sending, since the one perfect and unmoving source could never be said to become other. Any movement toward otherness separates the agent (the one who acts) from the distinction (the other place where one is not now) and the point of departure would be the groundless (it would be impossible to get there from here). There would have to be an additional component to interact with the first one so that it may change from its stasis into its other through movement (or as a movement). The third thing, however, is already the otherness of the first and so would, in turn, require an additional reagent to enable it to connect with the first one. And so on and so on. The third man is always deferred, his necessary presence makes presence in movement impossible.

Hat tip to the wonderful Being & Alien.  ¶ 10:02 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

thebewilderness imagines Frege and Heidegger chatting.

F: For each word you utter there are a thousand uncertainties! 'Dasein' is a self important tautology, disclosedness no more than thinking. As for 'Being', if it is not a predicate or an object or a class of objects, then it simply makes no sense!

H: You dull the wondrous light of Being with your machinations!

  ¶ 9:55 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Nanotations on an art scroll and the right font:

The horizontal thrust of the piece evokes the chronologic notion implicit in Heidegger's quote, which runs as a single line along the distance of the scroll (life/existance), the quote is set in Bouer Bodoni type , in contrast with the rest of the piece's compositional elements (words), which are set in a variety of styles from the original Grothesque family (lead and wood type).

  ¶ 9:50 AM 0 comments