But for Heidegger Poetry is not the abandonment of reality: poetry is not a transitory spiritual exaltation, enthusiasm nor leisure. Even less a simple cultural manifestation, nor the expression of the soul of a given culture. Poetry is foundation, the pillar of History.

¶ 8:58 PM 1 comments

Forty years ago, in "The Duality of Human Existence," David Bakan proffered a distinction between an alleged masculine orientation to action and exerting power, and a feminine communing orientation. Women, he wrote, were socialized to orient their lives around relationships. I cannot recall whether Bakan cited Heidegger's provocative notion that we don't have relationships as much as we are relationships. In fact, in enunciating three modes of being, Heidegger suggested that at all times we deal with the biological world into which we are thrown, the world of consciousness and identity in which we are thrown against ourselves, and, most significantly for the present discussion, the world of relationships.

¶ 5:48 PM 0 comments

Heidegger tried to give his own answers when he claimed that the Greeks did not have to eliminate millenia of philosophy and bad philosophical habits before thinking thoughts of being and existence that had claims to authenticity which we have lost long since.

¶ 9:36 AM 2 comments

Heidegger is quite explicit in connecting the shock or terror of death with the awe felt in the face of the nothing as the veil of being: "the shock (Schrecken) of disclosing being's abandonment and at the same time the awe (Scheu) before the pealing Ereignis (anklingenden Ereignis)" [GA 65, p. 396--author's emphasis] Restraint is elided here because it is the midpoint of the two moods in the sense that it responds to the formar while preparing for the latter. Restraint is the between of terror and awe [GA 65, p. 15], both of which are said to be "guiding moods" of the second plane of Contributions to Philosophy, "Appeal" [ibid.] One cannot intimate the appeal of Ereignis from out of being's abandonment without these two moods being in place. "Shock and awe together first let the appeal be enacted in thinking (denkerish vollziehen)" [GA 65, p. 396]. Death breaks through the encrusted sediment which has obliviated all trace of being's withdrawal. Awe lets us understand this withdrawal as the gift of beings as a whole. Only with terror as withdrawal and awe at the gift can the full balance of Ereignis be reached.

It is restraint that joins the second and third planes of Contributions to Philosophy, Appeal and Zu-spiel, the later being the place at which Heidegger describes the relation of play (Spiel) that exists between withdrawal and giving, and is therefore attuned by awe. Restraint should be our attitude to the unintellibility of Contributions to Philosophy itself, which merely brings out and holds before us the hints of being as "boulders of the quarry" [GA 65, p. 421].

P. 96-97

¶ 8:08 AM 0 comments

Think about how so many millions of people have become absorbed in this, and how the theological world has wholly ignored this obsession or only attacked it. Then consider how Heidegger himself makes a comparable even if far less dramatic point, and how these words of Heidegger have been ignored by both our philosophical and our theological establishments. Of course, I am referring to his remark in Parmenides (#3) when he says that "Latinization" is the passage of Greek alethia into Roman imperium, wherein the domination of command passes into the very essence of ecclesiastical dogma.

¶ 8:14 PM 0 comments

Perhaps the best insight as to what Heidegger means by "project" is Kant's use of the word in the Critique of Pure Reason.

When Galileo experimented with balls whose weight he himself had already predetermined, when Toicelli caused the air to carry a weight which he had calculated beforehand to be equal to that of a definite column of water, or, at a later time, when Stahl converted metal into lime and this again into metal by withdrawing something and then adding it, a light broke in on all investigators of nature. They learned that reason only gains insight into what it produces itself according to its own projects; that it must go before with principles of judgement according to constant laws, and constrain nature to reply to its questions, not content to merely follow her leading-strings. [B XIII]

Literally Entwurf means "a throwing forth"; from werfen (to throw) and ent- (indicating seperation or severing in the sense of "out," "away," "from," "forth"). In present day use it is a sketch,... Originally a textile term referring to the building of a frame, in the seventeenth century if (entwerfen) took the sense of a preliminary or preparatory sketch. As Heidegger uses it in SZ, 145, it is a sketching which is a throwing forth of Dasein in which it "throws before itself the possibility as possibility and as such allows it to be." It is through understanding as project that the structure of the being of entities, including Dasein, becomes accessible. Project is constructive in that it allows the possibilities of entities to be; in the case of Dasein to achieve its openness to its own being.

P. 88-89

¶ 10:11 AM 1 comments

Did you not read Heidegger?

Marks are meaningless

no just not important

stuff

get stuffed

¶ 2:48 PM 0 comments

If poetry and thought are two proximate modes of speech, the poet nevertheless remains for the thinker the other in a perilous dialogue, a dialogue that therefore demands extraordinary forbearance on the part of thought. "If," Heidegger once said, "the dialogue with poetry begins with thought,...[it] is in constant danger of disturbing the language of the poem rather than allowing it the miracle of its voice." Less uncertain is the dialogue of poet with poet. Thus Hölderlin, in his translations of Oedipus and Antigone and in the remarks that follow these translations, was in dialogue with Sophocles. So, too did Ronsard enter into dialogue with the Greek poets, and Racine with Euripides, and Victor Hugo with Vergil. And dialogue is equally what Char attempts, for example, in his Recherche de la base et du sommet and elsewhere, when, in texts that are no sense essays in aesthetics, criticism, or exegesis, he sets before us Hugo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and "the infallible foil of the most benevolent Mallarmé," without intending to exhaust with these quick sketches a deeper relationship that his poetry itself. Such brilliant fragments nevertheless attest to an uninterrupted dialogue, and if, as Hölderlin said, the poem is a gift that requires no explanation, it is nevertheless "best grasped in profound study."

Heidegger thus mentions two possibilities for dialogue--that of poet with poet and that of thought with poetry. But is there not a third possibility, the dialogue of poetry with thought? Heidegger does not discuss this. Char, however, without explaining himself, takes the risk of such a dialogue. At times in its history poetry has, seemingly of its own accord, allied itself with the métier of thought. Without ceasing to be poetry, it has found a way to become thinking. Despite what Proclus would say centuries later, Parmenides' poem is not "more correctly versified than truly poetic." This was, of course, a very different kind of poetry than that of Homer or Sappho. Yet the noetic content did not stanch the flow of rhythm, did not, in other words, cut the poem off from the source that feeds it just as surely as the spring feeds the river. In a very different sense, and in a manner all its own, Pindar's poetry searched for and found thought. And what of Heraclitus? Heraclitean language, like Zeus' thunderbolt in Aeschylus, "neither falls short of its target nor sails off beyond the stars," but strikes the heart dead center, causing the noema to blossom in the exact image of the poem it carries within. The crucial separation of the poetic from the noetic would not occur until later, with the debasement of the noematic to the didactic, with the founding of the schools and the subsequent scholatic exploitation of that to which thought, in an earlier stage, had been able to relate, long before language became expression and speech became proposition--in an era, in other words, when speech was still speech, that is, a call, and the poetic was not yet the enemy of the noetic but its friend and neighbor, even if neighborly relations are not exactly the best. Later, however, after language, now understood as expression and emaning, had formulated itself canonically as proposition, the philosopher could hardly fail to see the poet as anything but a parasite on language. What chance was there then for dialogue between poetry and thought?

P. 159-160

¶ 7:34 AM 0 comments

The overwhelming majority of theologians today sift through Heidegger and his philosophical children and grandchildren to try to find useable material. This impulse is understandable but misguided. Heidegger and his progeny have developed into a tradition unsuited to the traditional role of philosophy has played in Christian intellectual life.

¶ 7:03 PM 2 comments

But is this rupture a matter of temperal succession? Does the other beginning need to come 'after' the first beginning? It would seem that, in Heidegger's notion of a 'turning' within Ereignis, it is not so much a change of direction or heading within history, that same and very history from which it would depart, which is in question. Rather, it would seem that an altogether different move is announced: an unfolding of time and space that is entirely heterogeneous to history understood as the history of the abandonment by and of being (Seinsverlassenheit), and event that is incommensurable with any occurrence taking place in space and time, an event the repetition of which would not be reducible to the succession of its chronological inscriptions. It would mark something like the beginning of history as such, given the fact that, for that time, history would unfold, a site would open up, on the basis of the essemce of history itself--that is, truth--having explicitly come to the fore. In that respect, the other beginning would consist in taking up again and anew what was left behind and abandoned in the first beginning. It would amount to a repetition of history from the point of view of its forgotten origin. Nothing 'more' would take place in that repetition; history would not become the site of a 'new' event. Rather, what would take place and, in thus taking place, would constitute an event of an unequalled and incompatible nature, is the taking place of place itself (as Augenblicksstätte), the event of the event (of beyng). Would that be history, then, at least understood from this 'turning' in which everything is transformed? The temporality of repetition is intriguing and complex; if, in the other beginning, that beginning that is to open onto, not yet another epoch or moment in history, but an altogether different history, one does not turn away from the 'old', but turns to it as if for the first time, that is, turns to what is forgotten and abandoned in the first beginning, then, to a certain extent, that history of the first beginning can be said to linger on; to a certain extent, it remains intact, untouched. And yet, on another level, it is profoundly subverted--for it now relates to the world in such a way that the world speaks from its unspoken and hidden ground, from the abyss onto which it opens and which sustains it. In a way, then, I would like to suggest that the other beginning does not succeed the first beginning, and that the temporality that is at stake in the other beginning escapes chronology altogether. The 'first' and the 'other' beginning can coincide, for the simple reason that they respond to two entirely different temporalities: their reaction is one of chronological coincidence and historical disjunction. The time of the other beginning is the time that turns back onto the time-space of being as the presupposed and forgotten ground of the first beginning. It is time that at once makes possible and exceeds chronological time, and this means the time of things and of the world--it is the time that is otherwise than worldly, or the time of the earth.

P. 86

¶ 7:18 AM 0 comments

Not only have the works of Marx and Lukács been discussed afresh, but also Heidegger's Being and Time, which concludes with the following remarks and questions: 'That the ancient ontology works with "thing‑concepts" and that there is a danger "of reifying consciousness" has been well known for a long time. But what does reification mean? Where does it originate from? . . . Why does this reification come again and again to domination? How is the Being of consciousness positively structured so that reification remains inadequate to it?' Goldmann maintained that these questions are directed against Lukács (whose name is not mentioned) and that the influence of Lukács can be seen in some of Heidegger's positive ideas.

¶ 7:55 AM 0 comments

After the so-called 'turn' of Heidegger's thought, Da-sein no longer refers to the human and existence alone, but to the concrete, historical place or site opened up and held open by a configuration of truth, the scene of the eternal strife between two tendencies or forces that oppose one another and yet reciprocally implicate one another. This is the 'the site of the moment' (die Augenblicksstätte). Not the occurence of something in a measurable instant and identifiable place, not even the vision of the essence of time and space, but the occurrence or the event of time-space. The essence of time and space, in a way. Except that, here, essence can only be understood as the happening ot the unfolding not of some essence that would itself not be entirely implicated in the happening, but as the unfolding or the taking place of a configuration of time-space, a specific and singular time-space assemblage, jointure or articulation. The unity of time and space as the 'site of the moment' designates this taking place of place or this temporalizing of time as history. History does not so much take place in time as it is the happening of time-space, every time absolutely singular and unique. The event of time-space is the emergence of history as such, which is also always the emergence of a historical configuration, from out of a turning in Ereignis. Every turn of the screw or the pole of Ereignis marks a new epoch, and by that we should understand a decisive reorganization or a new deal between world and earth in their eternal strife, and gods and men in their en-counter:

History is not the privilege of the human but rather the essence of beyng itself. History is at stake in the between of the en-counter between gods and the human as the ground for the strife of world and earth; history is nothing other than the happening [Ereignung] of this between. [P. 337]

What Heidegger is telling us here is that history is of truth and being. There isn't a history of truth, and a history of being, which would be a subset of a broader, more universal history. Rather, history is itself born of the essence of truth, and of its inner conflict. History is the very way in which truth unfolds and comes about. What is so striking about our own history is its remarkable unity. It is a unity marked by the systematic and increasing erasure of one aspect of truth in favour of the other, an erasure and a forgettenness recorded in the metaphysical tradition, and carried out most forcefully in the birth of modern science, and subsequently the domination of planetary technology and techno-science. Our history is dominated by the withdrawal and the forgetting of untruth (or concealment) as the essence of truth, and so by the domination of what is left in the wake of this forgetting, namely, presence, the objective world and the human as its master and possessor. From the start, and until the bitter end, Heidegger's struggle will have been to reawaken Western philosophy, Western culture and the Western consciousness in general to its forgotten and repressed origin. This is what, in Contributions, and in other texts of that period, he calls 'the other beginning'--a new beginning towards which his own thought is only a 'crossing'. Heidegger viewed his own effort as an attempt to prepare thought for this other beginning, and to open it onto this other, hidden history, or, better said perhaps, this other side of truth that is pregnant with a different future. Given the remarkable unity of our Western history, Heidegger contrasts this 'other beginning' with what he calls the 'first beginning', which stretches from the Greek origins of Western culture to the twenty-first century. Despite his talk of various epochs within that first beginning, and his attempt to distinguish between moments 'within' a history that sinks deeper and deeper into the forgetting of its own origin, we must bear in mind that this is a unified and unidirectional history. The other beginning alone would be a genuine alternative, and mark a real turning within history. It alone would herald something like a historical break, and a decisive rupture.

P. 84-86

¶ 8:12 PM 0 comments

Blanchot read Being and Time alongside Levinas, when both were students at Strasbourg. They immediately knew its importance. There could be no going back to a pre-Heideggerian philosophy. But the difference between being and beings (a difference Heidegger would have been reluctant to call a relation, that fallen, Latinate word) was to be rethought, along with Dasein.

To be rethought: this is what occupied Blanchot and Levinas from the later 1930s onwards. And wasn't this task, this rethinking, at the heart of their friendship?

¶ 5:27 AM 0 comments

Now that we have an existential conception of the kind of Being that belongs to truth, the meaning of "presupposing the truth" also becomes intelligble. Why must we presuppose that there is truth? What is 'presupposing'? What do we have in mind with the 'must' and the 'we'? What does it mean to say 'there is truth'? 'We' presuppose truth because 'we', being in the kind of Being which Dasein possesses, are 'in the truth'. We do not presuppose it as something 'outside' us and 'above' us, towards which, along with other 'values', we comport ourselves. It is not we who 'presuppose' truth; but it is 'truth' that makes it all possible ontologically for us to be able to be such that we 'presuppose' anything at all. Truth is what first makes possible anything like presupposing.

P. 270

¶ 5:01 AM 0 comments

In an effort to clarify the meaning of time and space, let me now return to the passage I began by quoting. When understood not just on the basis of world and nature, but on the basis of the full operation of truth as involving a twofold movement of clearing and concealing, time and space emerge as the 'where' and 'when', the 'site' and 'moment' of beyng in its historical unfolding. Needless to say, then time-space is not something of which we can say what it is independently of the way in which it is, and this means of its specific historical configuration. There is simply no 'essence' or 'identity' of time-space outside its concrete spatial-temporal inscription. Time-space, as an event, always refers to a site--the site of a specific and concrete strife (Streif) between world and earth and en-counter (Entgegnung) between men and gods, the site of a singular historical configuration. These are the limits within which history unfolds. Time-space is as it were framed, its field of action delineated by this fourfold horizon, in the unfolding of which comes to be decided what is possible and what is not, what is valued and what is not, what is necessary and what is superficial, etc.

At this point, leaving aside the question of the god, I simply wish to note the fact that 'the human' is mentioned alongside world, earth and gods as one pole or strip (Bahn) constituting the fourfold historical configuration of truth, which Heidegger will later designate as the 'fourfold' (Geviert). This raises the question of the meaning of such a gesture, and of the placed attributed to the human in this reconfiguring of truth. For if, as was already the case in Heidegger's early work, truth is indeed no longer either objective or subjective, or indeed a combination of both subject (mens) and object (res), it is also no longer simply equated with the disclosedness (Erchlossenheit) of finite existence, as in Being and Time. We recall how, in section 44 in particular, Heidegger derived the concept of truth from the existing--and this meant, ultimately, from the temporalizing--of existence, essentially envisaged as the most originary mode of aletheuein. Yet the human is not simply absent from the operation of truth as reformulated in the 1930s, even if truth is now of being. Truth is no longer of the human, or even of Dasein, yet the human remains implicated in the operation of truth. In fact, he is the only being (Seiende) implicated in this operation (for neither earth nor world nor even gods are actual beings). Thus, in a way, the human continues to be privileged in the assembling of truth, in the very moment in which truth moves away from the human, and in the direction of the pre-individual and the pre-human. For truth, as the truth of beyng, is essentially for the human. Such is the reason why, doubling the fourfold articulation of truth as it were, the very movement of Ereignis, as the turning or the oscillation born of the strifely essence of truth, is envisaged as the reciprocal appropriation and the co-respondence of beyng and the human. In its turning, Ereignis turns itself towards the human, in such a way that such a turning cannot take place without the human. The human and being 'need' one another, and call for one another. The human is called forth by being, and being is gathered, grounded, and sheltered in the human's actions, in art and thought especially. The human is by virtue of its exposedness to the clearing of being; being unfolds truly and genuinely to the extent that it is sheltered and preserved in the human. Ereignis designates this co-belonging of the human and being.

P. 83-84

¶ 6:44 PM 0 comments

In 1582, the Gregorian calendar we still use today was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII to replace the outdated Julian calendar which had been implemented in 45 BC. The Gregorian calendar was designed to correct for a ten-day discrepancy caused by the fact that the Julian year was 10.8 minutes too long. But by Heribert Illig's math, the 1,627 years which had passed since the Julian calendar started should have accrued a thirteen-day discrepancy… a ten-day error would have only taken 1,257 years.

There are a number of eclipse reports tracing to the period of the Middle Ages (700 to 900) which Illig and his defenders claim never existed.

¶ 11:11 AM 0 comments

When the German philosopher Martin Heidegger saw the painting in an exhibition in Amsterdam in 1930 and was deeply moved, he used it as a demonstration of the meaning of a work of art in his essay "The Origin of the Work of Art," delivered as a lecture in 1935 at Freiburg. Heidegger wrote:

From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far- spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliniess of the field path as evening calls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth.

His essay goes on to say that the painting forces us to look at shoes devoid of their utility. Because we cannot put on these shoes in a painting, we are confronted by them in a new way. The work of art shows us a way of seeing apart from self-centered utility. But the art critic Meyer Shapiro attacked Heidegger's essay, concerned that Heidegger was searching for support for some Aryan "peasant-earth-and-blood" myth. As Shapiro notes, a peasant working in the wet fields would have worn wooden sabots; high leather shoes would have belonged to a city laborer. Derrida then joined the argument.

As long we only imagine a pair of shoes in general, or simply look at them empty, unused as they merely stand there in the picture, we shall never discover what the equipmental being of the equipment in truth is. From Van Gogh's painting we cannot even tell where these shoes stand. There is nothing sorrounding this pair of peasant shoes in or to which they might belong - only an undefined space... A pair of peasant shoes and nothing more. And yet---

....In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. From out of this protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting-within-itself.

Heidegger is here thinking deeply into the nature of what is presented in Van Gogh's painting, thinking to experience the deep inner quiddity, the "existential inscape" of a simple pair of shoes. But this more active element in interpretation only follows on the initiative taken by the painting itself. As Heidegger expresses it, "the painting speaks." "If there occurs in the work of art a disclosure of a particular being, disclosing what and how it is, then there is here an occurring, a happening of truth at work." What Heidegger seems to suggest, comments Macquarrie, is that the discovery of truth is not just the result of human striving, does not involve ridding the psyche of all distorting influences so as to hear the truth plainly, but is an event "above and beyond our willing and doing" in which Being gives itself to be known. This is especially so in such a heightened mode of existence as art. "The essence of art," writes Heidegger, "is this: the truth of beings setting itself to work."

¶ 6:32 AM 0 comments

Heidegger gathers the various determinations of the Augenblicksstätte [the site of the moment], which we shall have to clarify one by one, in the following, arguably complex terms:

The site of the moment: uniqueness and assault of the greatest rapture [Entrückung] in the domain of the hint, out of the gentle captivation [Berückung] of that which refuses itself and hesitates, proximity and distance in the domain of decision, the 'where' and 'when' of the history of beyng, clearing and concealing itself from within the occurring of the fundamental attunement of reservedness--such is the fundamental experience of the there and thus of time-space. [P. 261]

'Rapture' and 'captivation', 'refusal' and 'hesitation', 'proximity' and 'distance', 'decision', and 'reservedness' are all terms, or concepts, which need to be clarified. They all point to a certain transformation of Heidegger's thought. This, of course, is making things more difficult for us: in connection with his early thought, and the project of fundamental ontology in particular, we witnessed a remarkable production of new ideas and concepts. We now need to familiarize ourselves with a new set of concepts, and with a decisive reworking of the assumptions governing the early work. Only later will we be able to ascertain the necessity of this new direction.

Let me begin by noting the fact that, in the passage I've just quoted, time and space are thought from out of what emerges as their originary unity, from the 'and' itself. This unity is the very movement of Ereignis. If I choose to leave this word untranslated at this point, it is for the same reasons that forced us to leave the word Dasein untranslated. In fact, it's a word--a decisive and pivotal philosophical term--that's even harder to translate than the term 'Dasein'. On one level, Heidegger retains the ordinary meaning of the word, that of event. Since the beginning of our enterprise, we've seen how insistent Heidegger is that we think of being, Sein, and of Dasein itself, not as a thing, or a substance, but as a movement, and a verb. The same, you recall, went for truth, which, as a result of his early texts on Aristotle, Heidegger understood as an activity, an aletheuein. So, it is perhaps not surprising that he is now explicitly interpreting being (or, as he now calls it, beyng) as an event. Naturally, the event in question is no ordinary event. It is not just an event, that is, the irruption of something new in time, the happening of something in historical time. It is not one event along this chain of events we ordinarily refer to as 'history'. Rather, it is the irruption, or the coming about of time and space as such, the advent of history as the open realm in which world-events take place. It points not to historical events and facts, but to the origin of history itself, to what we could call historicity, or the eventfulness of events. It is, if you will, the founding event--except that,as we shall see, it is itself without foundation. As the founding event, it musn't be mistaken for something like a creative act--whether that creation be the work of an omnipotent God or the result of physical forces that produced the laws of nature as we know them. The event in question is neither theological nor cosmological. It is not an event that took place once, and from which everything else unfolds, but the event that does not cease to take place, and in the taking place of which a world is opened up, and beings find their own place. It is the advent of presence, or the opening up of being. As such, Heidegger uses the term 'Ereignis' to designate the nature of the relation between being and beings, between being and the human and between being and time (as well as space). In each instance, what's at stake is what he began by calling the ontological difference, and to which philosophical thought was to turn as towards its primary subject-matter. In the thinking of Ereignis, there is a great continuity with respect to the early work. We should think of Ereignis--Heidegger's most significant philosophical term from the 1930s onwards--as a deepening and a reworking of the problematic of the ontological difference and the quest for the unifying sense of being with which he began.

P. 82-83

¶ 8:55 PM 0 comments

I am not aware of the chalk that I use to write with until the moment that it breaks, so Heidegger says. This is also true with respect to reality itself: only its problematic character makes reality 'visible'. This problematic character of reality becomes concrete in suffering. Only because reality makes us suffering, we can get aware of it. Our pain is our only sensitivity to reality as it is.

¶ 3:40 PM 0 comments

Conversation Under the Chesnut Tree

Under the branches of a chestnut tree in Ménilmontant, a philosopher and a poet discuss what they know and what they are. As they speak, Martin Heidegger and René Char are learning the language of their dialogue. Paris is on vacation. The year is 1955. “During my time in France,” Heidegger had written, “I would be pleased to make the acquaintance of George Braque and René Char.”

Impromptu meetings are always chancy. But here, at the beginning of a summer’s night,

The bread and the wine gleam
On the table in pure light.

Despite the differences of experience and language that separate the two men, a meeting of the minds has taken place. The result is a dialogue between poetry and philosophy.

Thought, in its innermost depth, is dialogue. Thought seeks, through dialogue, to situate itself: from the very beginning, thinkers have sought a space for themselves. All of Aristotle is a dialogue with Plato. Hegelian dialogue is an attempt to open itself up to the totality of language. But language is not just the language of thought. Before the noetic thought of the thinker reverberated the poetic thought of the poet. Homer’s language touched the essence of things before Heraclitus. It created a place, situated a world, the Greek world, in which philosophy would be born. Long before philosophy would be born. Long before philosophy, it opened up the space within which, as Hesiod put it, “the gods confronted man.” But why does language serve for thought as well as for poetry? From what does this intrinsic duality derive? “What blossoms forth delights in pulling back.” With these words Heraclitus tells us that the question most remain unanswered. At best we can try to relate to the duality in language.

To relate to the duality in language is to enter the dimension of dialogue. Dialogue never seeks to reduce the other, as haughty philosophy does in its claim to complete its other reductions by elaborating an aesthetic that would ultimately reduce poetry to a theme of philosophical explanation. Dialogue, by contrast, seeks to let the other be. “This is truly the first time,” Char said of Heidegger, “that a man of this sort did not try to explain to me what I am and what I do.” Heidegger listens more than he explains. From this listening to the point of silence comes the possibility of relating without responding, without offering a response that that as already transformed what is to be thought about into a problem, that is, in offering a response that that as already transformed what is to be thought about into a problem, that is, in Leibniz’s terms, into a proposition, part of which “is left blank . . . as when we are asked to find a mirror that will focus all that sun’s rays on a single point.” The poet is such a mirror, of course, but he is never to be “found.” Because the poet can not be grasped, he represents a danger for thought, but perhaps a salutary danger.

Three dangers threaten thought.

The miraculous and therefore salutary danger is the proximity of the poet, the closeness of his song.

The pernicious danger, which confesses everything, is philosophizing.

In such terms did Heidegger speak to himself “when the wind suddenly shifted, causing the beams of the cabin to groan, and the weather began to turn sour.”*

P. 158-159

¶ 12:42 PM 0 comments

It is here that Heidegger finds the thing, and to be sure all things, to encompass in their very existence the culmination, or gathering as he puts it, of the four main things, those being earth, sky, divinities, and mortals. It is here, in the thing (Das Ding), and namely in the example of the jar as he gives in "The Thing," that one is to find the meeting place of the dream and the reality; it is the common ground of the divine and the mortal. This, of course, is a seemingly mystical spin on what seems to be merely the application of philosophy; here Heidegger finds truth in the aesthetic existence and applicability of the thing rather than the philosophical. In this one can see that the jar, used as a sacred tool and as a mere watering vessel, finds itself in the common ground of that which is divine and that which is mundane.

¶ 9:45 AM 0 comments

It seems that the crème de la crème of verbal construction, what the philosopher Martin Heidegger, in a rare lapse from impenetrability, called the essential form of speech, has taken to cyberspace the way dandelion seeds take to a gust of wind.

¶ 9:18 AM 0 comments

There didn't seem to be a higher form of society that would transcend one based on the twin principles of liberty and equality. Alexandre Kojève, the great Russian-French Hegelian, put this rather mischievously when he said that history ended in 1806, the year that Napoleon defeated the Prussian monarchy at the battle of Jena-Auerstadt, thus bringing the principles of the French Revolution to Hegel's corner of Germany. Everything that happened thereafter was just backfilling, as those principles were universalised across the world.

It is the question of whether the values and institutions developed during the western Enlightenment are potentially universal (as Hegel and Marx thought), or bounded within a cultural horizon (consistent with the views of later philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger).

But very few of [Hegel's] readers have understood that in the final analysis dialectic meant atheism. Since Hegel, atheism has never again risen to the metaphysical and ontological levels. In our times Heidegger is the first to undertake a complete atheistic philosophy. But he does not seem to have pushed it beyond the phenomenological anthropology developed in the first volume of Sein und Zeit (the only volume that has appeared). This anthropology (which is without a doubt remarkable and authentically philosophical) adds, fundamentally, nothing new to the anthropology of the Phenomenology (which, by the way, would probably never have been understood if Heidegger had not published his book): but atheism or ontological finitism are implicitly asserted in his book in a perfectly consequent fashion. This has not prevent certain readers, who are otherwise competent, from speaking of a Heideggerian theology and from finding a notion of an afterlife in his anthropology.

P. 259

¶ 5:29 PM 0 comments

"CAMPsites" embodies notions of dwelling that go beyond simply inhabiting some form of informal habitat. Instead, we find an articulation of Heidegger's "dasein," whereby the act of dwelling expands the notion of "being-there" in a constructed space. One moves philosophically through the terrain of "building, dwelling, thinking." Think of it as a healthy case of bivouac subsuming monster house.

¶ 8:28 PM 0 comments

Eason concludes in his evaluation of user behaviour, based on the use of OpenURL technology via Zetoc, within the array of services that are the users' 'ready to hand' working practices, that "most users will only try new services as minor variations on normal practice that are easy to explore". This is consistent with Heidegger's concept that people undertake their everyday tasks by using tools and techniques so familiar to them that they do not have to think, and Zipf's law regarding the 'principle of least effort'.

¶ 4:36 PM 0 comments

I had a dream last night that I had an opportunity to discuss with Heidegger on “what is the being he meant”. It seemed that we were in some kind of outing trip (Henry was there), and we were stopped by a river (from heavy rains). We stayed in a building, European style, rotunda in the evening, by something (fire). I was asking what is his “being” and explained to him what my understanding of it. But he keep telling me, somewhat mysteriously, that that’s not what he meant.

¶ 6:44 PM 0 comments

The sublime author of The Sublime traced literature back to megalophyia, a "greatness of nature," which sometimes manages to light up a similar nature in the mind of the reader. But how can nature, which "loves to hide," accept the cumbersome conspicuousness of the rhetorical machine? How escape the ostentatiousness of the téchne? The chassé-croisé between Nature and Art, which was to generate comment for two millennia and would be condensed in seventeenth-century capitals, was executed in a single way back at the height of classical decadence: "Only then is art perfect, when it looks like nature, while nature strikes home when it conceals art within itself."

Perfection, any kind of perfection, always demands some kind of concealment. Without something hiding itself, or remaining hidden, there is no perfection. But how can the writer conceal the obviousness of the word and its figures of speech? With the light. The anonymous author writes: "And how did the rhetorician conceal the trope he was using? It's clear that he hid it with light itself." To conceal with light, the Greek speciality. Zeus never stopped using light to conceal. Which is why the light that comes after the Greek light is of an another kind, and much less intense. That other light aims to winkle out what has been hidden. While the Greek light protects it. Allows it to show itself as hidden even in the light of day. And even manages to hide what is evident, made black by the light, the way the rhetorical trope becomes unrecognizable when inundated by splendor and submerged by a "greatness that pours forth from every side."

P. 282

¶ 6:14 AM 0 comments

Heidegger means to harry and confuse. That is his method. This is because there are two "Heideggers" really. One tells you what you want to hear, the other its opposite. But if you are sick in your soul, stout in character, and you are irresistibly drawn to a pathology, then you should attempt to travel through Heidegger country, at least once, at least for the decal on your steamer trunk, that veteran of a thousand battles. My consulate issues this travel advisory: it is a country where the signs are wrong, where rivers flow backwards, where the poets, unbanished, are maddened lawgivers, and the natives are primitive, hostile and suspicious. You were warned.

¶ 7:16 PM 0 comments

At that point, a childhood friend who was writing his PhD on Heidegger at Northwestern University, invited me to Chicago to stay with him and audit classes. Northwestern was a very exciting place at that time because a few years earlier the entire Continental philosophy department from Harvard, which had shifted over to linguistic philosophy, migrated to Northwestern. A lot of work was being done there on translating Merleau-Ponty. But it didn’t take me very long to realize that I didn’t have the monastic temperament to spend all my time in the library reading philosophy and writing papers. So I started skipping classes and going to the Art Institute of Chicago to look at paintings. The desire to make things, to get back inside the process, became too powerful to ignore.

¶ 3:07 PM 0 comments

One might say that politics just happens, but that it is not happening now, ours are not favourable times. One might say, like some post-Heideggerian leftists, that it is necessary to wait and await the advent of the saving power of the revolution, the Ereignis will one day come to pass.

¶ 3:00 PM 0 comments

What must be kept hidden is kept hidden, while much blows in the wind.

¶ 9:48 PM 0 comments

I see white paper. But this is a twofold seeing; there are two visions: sensous vision and categorical vision. The difficult lies in the double signification of seeing--a double signification that already governs Plato's philosophy. The difficulty consists in that if I see white paper, I do not see the substance in the same way "as" I see the white paper. Antisthenes already expressed this diffuiculty for Plato: "O Plato, I surely see the horse, but I do not see horsehood."

P. 66-67

¶ 5:08 PM 2 comments

Anxiety, as the fundamental attunement of Dasein, presupposes being-in-the-world, and, as discussed above, only that which is Dasein can be-in a world. “Anxiety,” Heidegger writes, “individualizes Dasein for its ownmost Being-in-the-world, which as something that understands, projects itself upon possibilities”

We must above all see that here it is not a matter for psychology, not even for a psychology undergirded by physiology or biology. It is a matter of the basic modes that constitute Dasein, a matter of the ways man confronts the Da, the openness and concealment of beings, in which he stands.

P. 45

¶ 11:58 PM 0 comments

Of course, the most astonishing aspect of Heidegger's great effect was that in the 1920s and the early 1930s, before he fell into political disfavor, he was able to generate such an unheard-of enthusiasm among his auditors and readers and that, after the war, he was able to regain that effect. This took place after a period of relative seclusion. He was unable to publish during the war because, after he had fallen into political disfavor, no one would give him any paper.

P. 11

¶ 7:14 PM 1 comments

We—humankind—are a conversation. Because language is the medium in which reality is constituted, language is at once the house of being and home of human beings. Discourse is the literal translation of the Greek word logos which means to make manifest or to let something be seen. Discourse is the articulation of intelligibility. It therefore underlies both interpretation and assertion. Discourse refers to the way we express ourselves as a being towards entities. . . .[B&T]

As Heidegger’s words capture the essence of what is meant by discourse in a concise and understandable manner, I adopt his words as my working definition—discourse means to make something manifest or let it be seen. My next step then is to break with the traditional definition of software as a program of directions to a computer system and to posit software as a form of discourse, something that allows things to be seen or appreciated.

¶ 10:07 AM 0 comments

Frank thus follows a path much like one laid out by Martin Heidegger (though she rarely mentions him). A Democracy of Distinction ends with a recognizably Heideggerian reflection on the political constitution as 'the work of the present from out of the past with a view to the future.' And the argument of the book as a whole parallels the argument of the first section of Being and Time. For Heidegger, the question of being (Sein) cannot be asked without asking about the nature of the being who raises this question--Dasein--which, in turn, cannot be understood apart from the world that necessarily unfolds for it. This world around us (die Umwelt) first comes to sight in terms of the objects of which we make use--what is ready-to-hand. These objects are not only for me, but are part of a world of use for those like me. Dasein is always in a world of related things that involves being together with others (Mitdasein). Or, in Frank's terms, individual identity only makes sense in terms of the work we do with property, and such work, in turn, already implies social life.

Like Heidegger, Frank does not wish simply to do away with the tensions that generate the 'middle.' Dasein may always be in a world, but it is in this world as sensing itself apart from it. In Heidegger, meaning (Meinung) cannot be separated from making something mine (mein), which, in turn, involves an understanding that there are things other than mine. In Frank, individuals may show themselves only insofar as they are at work with something proper to them--their property--but property must still somehow remain other; we do not simply disappear into it.

Now, harkeneth, how I bare me properly.

¶ 8:42 AM 0 comments

[F]or all his ontologizing, Heidegger deliberately obfuscates ethical, economic, and political discussion, treating so directed complaint as misunderstanding him. Schmitt, as a philosopher entrenched in political thinking, thus seems rather distinct, if not somehow opposed to Heidegger.

¶ 9:11 PM 1 comments

Every student admitted that philosophy had made them better at arguing. "When you're arguing with your ma you tend to win more because you've got the skills," laughs Smylie. "They get quite annoyed because I can beat them in arguments now," admits Hobbs from Oban.

¶ 11:03 AM 0 comments

One needed to go beyond and behind the gods, to arrive at the pure divine, or rather the ”immediate,” as Hölderlin was to write one day in a dazzling comment on Pindar. It is the immediate that escapes not only men but gods too: “The immediate, strictly speaking, is as impossible for the gods as it is for men.” Hölderlin is referring here to the lines where Pindar speaks of the nomos basileus, the “law that reigns over all, mortals and immortals alike.” What ever else it might be, the divine is certainly the thing that imposes with maximum intensity the sensation of being alive. This is the immediate: but pure intensity, a continuous experience, is “impossible,” overwhelming. To preserve its sovereignty, the immediate must come across to us through law. If life itself is the supreme unlivable, the law, which allows both mortals and immortals to “distinguish between different worlds is what transmits life’s nature to us. At least if-–staying with Hölderlin—-what we mean by “nature” is that which “is above the gods of the West and the East,” and which, as he says, is “generated out of sacred chaos.” At this point Heidegger would later ask: “How can chaos and nomos be brought together?” It is here perhaps that we come to the bold provocative core of Hölderlin’s poetry: never before nor after him would chaos and law be brought so close together, obliged to acknowledge, as in Vedic India—-where Daksa, the supreme minister of law, is son of Aditi, the Unlimited One, and Aditi is a daughter of Daksa-—a relationship of reciprocal generation. Chaos generates the law but only the law will allow us to gain access to chaos. The unapproachable immediate is chaos-—and “chaos is the sacred itself,” adds Heidegger, and at once he goes on to develop a modulation that would have seemed obvious to the theorists of nirukta, yet sounds incongruous to Western linguists, from the verb ent-setzen, “to shift,” to the neuter das Entsetzliche, “the awesome,” which is used to define the sacred: “The sacred is the awesome [das Entsetzliche] itself.” Then comes a sentence which is rather mysterious: “But its awesomeness remains hidden in the mildness of this light embrace.” Words which clearly—-and it was a charity Heidegger was certainly after—-set out to echo Rilke:

Since the beautiful is only
The beginning of the awesome, as we are barely able to endure it.

P. 38-40

¶ 6:25 AM 0 comments

Secret defénse (1998), with its girl scientist Sylvie (Sandrine Bonnaire) trekking across France on the hunt for her father's murderer, might sound like something out of Hitchcock, but it comes across like something out of Heidegger.

¶ 7:01 PM 0 comments

Finally, about 4 months after the end of the class, I began to understand what he was saying.

¶ 5:36 PM 1 comments

The purpose of this brief essay is to evaluate Martin Heidegger's Aristotelian scholarship. I focus on a few specific texts in which Heidegger examines in detail Aristotle's ethical and metaphysical theories. These texts are, I think, representative of his treatment of Aristotle, and they are, I believe, sufficient to show the quality of his work.

I conclude that his scholarship is poor. The inferiority is due, I suggest, not simply to his eccentric etymologies and his questionable translations, but above all to the purpose that produced them: to express what Aristotle "meant" to say.

¶ 7:24 PM 0 comments

18 Antipático, antisocial, sarcástico y grosero con el mundo, menos conmigo
19 Haber leído a Heidegger

¶ 6:44 PM 0 comments

After I left the consulting business, in a reversal of the usual order of things, I decided to check out the management literature. Partly, I wanted to “process” my own experience and find out what I had missed in skipping business school. Partly, I had a lot of time on my hands. As I plowed through tomes on competitive strategy, business process re-engineering, and the like, not once did I catch myself thinking, Damn! If only I had known this sooner! Instead, I found myself thinking things I never thought I’d think, like, I’d rather be reading Heidegger! It was a disturbing experience. It thickened the mystery around the question that had nagged me from the start of my business career: Why does management education exist?

Remember the three Cs: Communication, Communication, Communication!

Philosophers (other than those who have succumbed to the Heideggerian virus) start with a substantial competitive advantage over the PowerPoint crowd. But that’s no reason to slack off. Remember Plato: it’s all about dialogue!

¶ 12:05 PM 2 comments

Brentano's conception of the relation between consciousness and intentionality can be brought out partly by noting he held that every conscious mental phenomenon is both directed towards an object, and always (if only ‘secondarily’) directed towards itself. (That is, it includes a ‘presentation’ -- and ‘inner perception’ -- of itself).

¶ 10:05 AM 0 comments