Heidegger’s Mistress: An exploration in 32 paragraphs.

My father met Heidegger’s mistress in Caracas, Venezuela. My father’s good friend at the time, Ernst Tugendhat, introduced them.
Ernst, like my father, was a Jewish refugee: the Tugendhats had left Brno, Czechoslovakia, where they had lived in a famous house designed for them by Mies van der Rohe.
My father’s parents were uneducated, poor.
The Tugendhats listened seriously and solemnly to Beethoven quartets on their record player in Caracas.
Heidegger’s mistress gave Ernst Tugendhat, my father’s friend, a box of Heidegger’s lecture notes, which Ernst eventually translated.
Ernst and my father left Caracas in 1945 to go to Stanford. My father was seventeen. World War II had just ended.
After a period at Stanford, Tugendhat returned to Germany to study with Heidegger and became an important analytical philosopher.

Tugendhat went on to write a paper challenging Heidegger's notion of truth.  ¶ 9:18 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Heideggerian Denken posts on the privilege of presence.

I'd like to begin with the question of presencing, or making present. As a being-within-the-world, I am at or exist as a 'here' (Da-sein, "being-here"). It is by virtue of my being a 'here' that there can be a 'yonder' or a 'there.' Within so-called 'objective' space, as constituted by absolute coordinates, there cannot be a 'there' as there are no privileged points in space; there are only objective distances between points in homogenous space. But with Dasein, as the being that is concerned with being, including its own being, there is a privileged place that is Dasein's 'there.'

The 'there' is not merely privileged over somewhere else. I think that the 'there', as the lichtung, or the 'open', it is the basis of Dasein's understanding of the world.  ¶ 9:59 AM 1 comments

  The University of Essex is hosting a Phenomenology Workshop and their blog is reporting on the papers presented. Hat tip to Clark, who has a bunch other interesting stuff on his blog.  ¶ 9:42 AM 2 comments

  Ork! Ork!

Marty's got MySpace, and he's single again. Look out Hannah, Simone got her eye on him, and she swings. (Hat tip: BobFromBrockley)  ¶ 11:00 AM 0 comments

  Being-in-the-World-Cup

...Heidegger's thought, a thought that is incomparably strict and translucently clear, provided, of course, that the grave difficulties of penetrating to it are overcome, and even more, that the clarity proper to an inquiry into being is not expected to be of the same kind as the clarity proper to a mathematical theorem or to a report of a football match.

P. 90

  ¶ 8:17 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

The Philologist reminisces.

Becoming a philologist or maximum a humanist; at the time the idea of being become, of been become rarely crossed my mind. At least until that summer afternoon when our lecture with the greatest of teachers devoted four hours amidst coffee and tobacco to that all-destroying creature by the name of Martin Heidegger. It was murmured that he had re-invented the German language anew since Goethe and Schopenhauer, that he had proclaimed the end of philosophy and de-structured (dialectically opposed to destructed) the whole of the Western tradition. Our entanglement was rather limited, the "Parmenides fragment" and little more, perhaps also some sections from "What is meant by thinking?". Those lectures on Martin Heidegger brought to an end my career as a classical philologist and the happiness of a rarely touched-off childhood. That day without even knowing I had bethroted myself to Heidegger, for a love affair that have lasted until this very day.

  ¶ 10:23 PM 0 comments

  Action Philosophers #5 features Descartes, Sartre, and Derrida.

A large part of explaining the significance of Sartre amounts to explaining Heidegger, one of those daring Xtreme daredevils.

Those onlookers are Descartes and Husserl.

The comics get several things wrong, but they're still fun. When I first started reading Sartre decades ago, Heidegger was just briefly mentioned as someone who had influenced Sartre, but was too obscure to go into. But now, this comic gets into the ready-to-hand, and appears (can't cram too much into a few comic panels) to ascribe Heidegger's positions contra-Sartre to Sartre himself. The book is neatly balanced by starting with Descartes cogitating the sum out of nothing, and ending with the authors disapearing in a puff of deconstruction.  ¶ 7:59 AM 0 comments

  Here's my translation (original in French) of Heidegger's letter to Sartre, delivered when Towarnicki returned to Paris after tracking Heidegger down.

Freiburg on October 28 1945

Good dear Mister Sartre

It is only in the past few weeks that I have heard speak of you and of your book. Mister Towarnicki has kindly left me here your book Being and Nothingness, and I have at once begun to work on it. For the first time, I have met an independent thinker, who has reached deep into the field of experience starting from that which I think of. Your book shows an immediate understanding of my philosophy, such as I have never found before. I hope sincerely that we might enter into a fruitful debate, that would allow us to clarify essential questions. Ever since writing Being and Time twenty years ago, I have always faced the same problem; I see how to present many things more clearly and more simply; many misunderstandings could have been avoided.

With your critique of "being-with", and your insistence on being-for-others, partly too with your critique of my explanation of death, I am in agreement. Being and Time and above all what has been published, is but a path; the decisive question, which I merely touched upon in On the Essence of Ground, has not yet been fully deployed. The introduction and conclusion of your book are very stimulating to me. Always, these questions, I think them in an original relation to history, and especially with the beginning of Western thought, which finds itself until today entirely covered over by the domination of Platonism. I hope to have in a short while the chance of publishing my more fuller works. I would very much love to have my own copy of your book, thus I would be able to work through it differently. Because I intend to express myself on the matter of some essential questions, to arrive with you on a way of putting thought in a tested state of being itself as a basic event of history - that will place the man of today in an original relation with being.

It would be good if you could come here this coming winter. In our little chalet we could philosophize together, and undertake some sking tours of the Black Forest. I am already delighted with the idea of a meeting in Baden-Baden; but after all the so comprehensive and enthusiastic efforts of Mister Towarnicki, I am well permitted to expect that our meeting will roll along in a very fruitful manner. It is indeed a question of seizing in its greatest seriousness the present moment of the world, of holding it to its word without taking into account the spirit of party, the currents of style, and the debates in schools - so will finally awaken the decisive experience where we might learn with that abysmal depth the richness of being sheltering itself in the essential nothingness.

I salute you as a true companion of the path forward
yours
m.h.
Your capital book must imperatively be translated to German

There is no record of Sartre responding.

I have tried to stay close to the original French as much as possible, even when it sounds awkward, rather than substituting English idioms. If you'd like a go at translating it yourself, send me an email, and I'll see if I can scan it and mail you the bitmap.  ¶ 4:57 PM 1 comments

  The translation of What is a Thing? (GA 41; winter semester, 1935-36) is out of print. This is unfortunate for those interested in Heidegger and philosophy of science, because this lecture course was his lengthiest survey of science.

In this excerpt, he uses Newton's First Law and Galileo's experiment dropping balls from the tower of Pisa to question what science and maths can tell us about things themselves.

The Essence of the Mathematical Project
(Galileo's Experiment with Free Fall
For us, for the moment, the question concerns the application of the First Law, more precisely, the question in what sense the mathematical becomes decisive in it.

How about this law? It speaks of a body, corpusquod a viribus impressis non cogitur, a body which is left to itself. Where do we find it? There is no such body. There is also no experiment which could ever bring such a body to direct perception. But modern science, in contrast to the mere dialectical poetic conception of medieval Scholasticism and science, is supposed to be based upon experience. Instead, it has such a law at its apex. This law speaks of a thing that does not exist. It demands a fundamental representation of things which contradict the ordinary.

The mathematical is based on such a claim, i.e., the application of a determination of the thing, which is not experientally created out of the thing and yet lies at the base of every deteremination of the things, making them possible and making for room for them. Such a fundamental conception of things is neither arbitrary nor self-evident. Therefore, it required a long controversy to bring it into power. It required a change in the mode of approach to things along with the achievement of a new manner of thought. We can acuurately follow the history of this battle. Let us cite one example from it. In the Aristotelian view, bodies move according to their nature, the heavy ones downward, the light ones upward. When both fall, heavy ones fall faster than light ones, since the latter have the urge to move upward. It becomes a decisive insight of Galileo that all bodies fall equally fast, and that the difference in the time of fall only derive form the resistance of the air, not from the different inner natures of the bodies or from their own corresponding relation to their particular place. Galileo did his experiment at the leaning tower in the town of Pisa, where he was professor of mathematics, in order to prove his statement. In it bodies of different weights did not arrive at precisely the same time after having fallen from the tower, but the difference in time was slight. In spite of these differences and therefore really against the evidence of experience, Galileo upheld his proposition. The witnesses to this experiment, however, became really perplexed by the experiment and Galileo's upholding his view. They persisted the more obstinately in their former view. By reason of this experiment the opposition toward Galileo increased to such an extent that he had to give up his professorship and leave Pisa.

P. 88-90

Continued.  ¶ 7:58 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Clark comments on a recent book on the Jewish background to Heidegger's thought.

It is interesting though that Heidegger's mentor was Husserl, a Jew. Many of the prominent Heideggerians were Jews. (Notably Derrida and Levinas) Certainly in Derrida one finds a kind of Heideggarianism that is extremely Jewish. (One need only read Caputo's The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida to see the role Jewish thought plays in Derrida's philosophy.

The lack of engagement still is quite interesting. Jewish neo-Platonism offers many obvious parallels to Heidegger's thought. One can also argue that the way Jewish thought approached 'intellectualization' tended to avoid the issue of presence that characterized Greek thought. Further in the history of philosophy one can't help but think of famous Jewish philosophers like Maimonades, Spinoza or others.

How little Heidegger says about Spinoza has been most surprising to me (there's a bit in the Schelling book), because of both the obvious overlap in their areas of interest, and how much Heidegger wrote about everyone else in the canon who fell into that category. At the same time, I'm somewhat chary of labeling people because of accidents of their birth. Husserl joined the Luthern Church decades before mentoring Heidegger, and Derrida noted: "I quite rightly pass for an atheist". While on this subject, I should also mention Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger, a study of the rhetorical affinities between Heidegger and Jewish texts, which I enjoyed very much.  ¶ 7:12 AM 1 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Philosophy As Such has another extensive post on Dasein Oedipus.

Heidegger’s own interpretation of Oedipus’ self-inflicted punishment cannot be accepted as valid, since a syncretism is applied to the subject-matter in the Introduction to Metaphysics when Oedipus is understood as having blinded himself moved by an experience of ontological tension between “seeming (concealment and distortion)… and unconcealment (Being)”. By exposing himself to the “unveiling of Being”, Oedipus, according to Heidegger’s interpretation, cannot withstand the light and the brilliance of Being in its truth, aletheia, the nakedness of Being, and must resort to hiding within “the veil of night”, in blindness. This does not address the specific circumstances that drive the Oedipean narrative logic, a point to which we will return. On the other hand, and of much deeper significance, Heidegger adds that Oedipus must be seen as an example of “Greek Dasein”, insistently pursuing “knowledge and science”, and, we may surmise, aletheia itself, and Oedipus is reinterpreted as a prototypical Greek and representative of Greek philosophical “passion”.

  ¶ 8:07 AM 0 comments

  Walter Brogan on Aristotle, phenomenology and all that:

Both Heidegger and Aristotle were engaged in the project of winning back a discovery of beings that were already hidden and distorted in the way they showed themselves. Both thinkers recognized that only by giving an account of this privative character of beings, as an intrinsoc way in which they can be, could a genuine access to the phenomenon itself be recovered. "What already shows itself in appearance prior to and always accompanying what we commonly understand as phenomena, though unthematically, can be brought thematically to self showing." [SZ 31] Phenomenology places the self-showing of these beings on a more radical footing. Phenomenology is the way, the method, in which the being of these beings can be approached and brought to light. The self-showing of beings is the starting point of all phenomenological investigation. But because being reveals itself in beings that are always already interpreted in some way, there must be a movement from our ordinary experience of beings to the phenomenological. This in turn grounds and makes accessible in its being the being that shows itself. Aristotle takes the ordinary experience of natural beings that shows itself. Aristotle takes the ordinary experience of natural beings as moved beings and asks what their being must be if they show themselves in their way.

By returning to the Greek roots of the word "phenomenology," Heidegger shows that there is an inner connection between what is meant by the Greek notion of phainomenon and the meaning of logos. Phainomenon means the self-showing, what is manifest. Logos lets something be seen from itself. Hence, Phenomenology means: "To let what shows itself be seen from itself, just as it shows itself from itself." [SZ 34] Heidegger's analysis of the greek roots of the term and his understanding of phenomenology in terms of the Greek understanding of being places phenomenology on a new path. Husserl's call to return "to the things themselves" urged an analysis of the transcendental ground that makes possible the disclosure of beings. For Husserl, this was the transcendental consciousness, and the task was to unfold the intentional structure of consciousness that constitutes the what and how of what it experiences. For Heidegger, the task of phenomenology is rather to make explicit, to bring to language and to formulate, what already shows itself, not in the human subject, but in itself. As Aristotle says: "the cause of the present difficulty (the seeing of aletheia) is not in the matter but in ourselves. For, as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the nous in our soul to that which through physis is most manifest of all" (Met 993 b8ff).

P. 28-29

  ¶ 7:03 AM 4 comments

  On the line:
Heidegger postcard; one clothespin.
Take car,
for a spin,
to the open.
Sounds Baroque.  ¶ 8:01 AM 0 comments

  How to live advice from Florence, Kentucky:

German philosopher Martin Heidegger believed that there are two basic ways in which we can exist in this world. One, he called forgetfulness of being. The other, mindfulness of being.

Forgetfulness of being is the surface-type life. We may be very busy, immersed in work, diversions, and much idle chatter, but we are disconnected with the mystery of life. We are chiefly concerned with the way things are. He calls this kind of surface-life an inauthentic one, a tranquilized one. It has minimal depth and meaning. We're living horizontally like a stone skipping across the water.

Mindfulness of being, on the other hand, he calls the authentic way of life. We marvel not just at the way things are, but that they are. We are aware of much more of value than the surface of life. We appreciate nature, people and ourselves -- and our ability to grow to greater depths in our thinking, feeling and loving. We are not living the mystery of life mindlessly. Instead of living horizontally like the skipping stone, we live vertically, often going into the depths like a snorkeler to discover the colors and expansiveness of a greater world.

Snorkling is fun.  ¶ 3:46 PM 0 comments

  Pre-Columbian tourism.

The Muslims in West Africa were so intrigued by what was on the other side of the Great Sea, that they began their expeditions into the great unknown. Early reports of these travels are sketchy, but we can be sure that they crossed the Atlantic by 889 C.E.

A Muslim historian and geographer ABUL-HASSAN ALI IBN AL-HUSSAIN AL-MASUDI (871-957 CE) wrote in his book Muruj adh-dhahab wa maadin aljawhar (The meadows of gold and quarries of jewells) that during the rule of the Muslim caliph of Spain Abdullah Ibn Mohammad(888-912 CE), a Muslim navigator, Khashkhash Ibn Saeed Ibn Aswad, from Cortoba, Spain sailed from Delba (Palos) in 889 CE, crossed the Atlantic, reached an unknown territory(ard majhoola) and returned with fabulous treasures. In Al-Masudi's map of the world there is a large area in the ocean of darkness and fog which he referred to as the unknown territory (Americas).

Columbus merely confirmed what he'd learned from globetrotting Andalusians.  ¶ 8:18 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Over on the Heidegger mailing list Rene, feeling he's talking to himself, lists three entries, the first of which is about Seynsvergessenheit.

[S]o, with a memory, one has, as to the beginnings of SuZ, not so much the book, but the relation of being and time itself, several intro’s, which are being neglected.

1. Heidegger’s discussion of BT in the Contributions, that its background is the forgetting of Being, Seinsvergessenheit, which, first of all, has to announce itself, as Anklang/echo, and without which all talk becomes useless (as we have experienced and do always more)

What strikes me about this business about the forgottenness of beyng is that it is Heidegger at his most Platonic. Forgotten? When? And who knew? Do are immortal souls know beyng, forget it at birth, and then struggle to recall it? Is the source for the echo of beyngforgetenness the call from beyng? Did mankind know beyng back during some mythical beginning, and then unlearn it, distracted by metaphysics and its machinations? Like Karl Kraus said: "The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back."  ¶ 7:00 AM 0 comments

  Bongos help the abstruse go down.

Heidegger (whom Monty Python slandered as "a boozy beggar who could think you under the table") wrote almost unreadably abstruse tomes such as his masterpiece "Being and Time"(1927). Even an encyclopedia summary of that book had me nodding off. Though short on answers, Heidegger was a dab hand at posers, his best being: "Why is there anything at all and not rather nothing?" Considered a father of Existentialism, Heidegger denied the paternity. Yet Sartre and his frères popularized some of these ideas to the point where by the 1950s they could be discussed in espresso bars by beatniks listening to bongos.

  ¶ 10:31 PM 0 comments

  From the back story to the Snakebite.

Stacy had quadruple-majored in economics, biology, comparative literature, and Portuguese at Harvard, graduating summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with high honors, all while heading up the prestigious Unicorn Society. She earned a J.D. at Yale, then jetted to Britain on a Rhodes Scholarship, where she completed a thesis at Oxford-a Marxist critique of Heidegger, I understand. Then she scuttled to Cambridge to scribble off a Heideggerean critique of Marx. She used her MacArthur Genius grant to write Quirky Truths, a quirky coming-of-age tale about a young girl with lots of degrees.

Make mine with Tennessee's finest.  ¶ 3:00 PM 0 comments

  Entitled Opinions, Robert Harrison's show for Stanford U Radio, has another interview with Heidegger scholar Thomas Sheehan. This time on the subject of Easter--what it meant then, versus what it means now.  ¶ 11:35 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Fractured Compass questions its ownmost authenticity:

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

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

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

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

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

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

I suspect, from the data, that Heidegger's way of thinking is still on an upsurge, principally because it gets written about in ways that are consistent with what he wrote. That is fed by the plethora of new translations, so Being and Time is no longer a monolith that must be conquered (read), but instead a piece in a larger puzzle. The puzzle's never done, and continues to entertain. I discovered last week that the Contributions hasn't been translated in French yet, and look at how much Heidegger continues to be discussed in France, despite left-bank existentialism having passed on as a XXth century curiosity. And the next piece, Mindfulness, is about to arrive.  ¶ 7:07 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

A Kantian's Journey There And Back Again continues with Act VI: To Be or Not to Be - Is That a Question?

In the beginning of this clause Heidegger reminds us that Dasein exists. This appears to be harmless enough a statement, but it is far more indepth than it would seem. We must remind ourselves of the fundamental difference between being and existing as Heidegger would have them. It is not just that Dasein exists, but that only Dasein exists.

  ¶ 12:36 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

How To Use Your Philosophy Degree on kindred spirits.

I am becoming more and more conviced that Heidegger and Wittgenstein were philosophically kindred spirits. They both saw the history of philosophy as something that is fundamentally flawed, although for different reasons. For Heidegger, the tragedy was that philosophers had lost or forgotten the language of the Ancient Greeks; for Wittgenstein, the problem was that they were still using that language.

  ¶ 12:36 PM 0 comments

  Too funny. Lawrence Welk Orchestra play Sister Ray video mashup.  ¶ 6:46 PM 0 comments

  From a speech by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht:

The other correspondence between this oscillation between becoming and unbecoming, making a form and undoing a form is actually Heidegger's concept of Being, with capital B. His idea of sign is the world without a human view projected onto the world. It is the world as such, the world without human distinctions, without the grid of the categories that we project onto the world - I think this is what Heidegger means by sign.

Once you understand this idea, you will understand that we all have a desire - you know romantics called that 'the world untouched' - to see what the world would be without our view. What the world would be not philosophically objectively, but what it would be like to touch the world without this being our touch, what it would be to be touched by the world in an objective way. This is the Heideggerian dilemma because yes we do think that there is this Being, there is this sign, the world without the grid of human distinctions. But as soon as we, the humans, want to get it, we only have the world with our distinctions. Get my point?

We have this desire to get the world as a Nirvana, but without distinctions - even without soft lines-, but at the same time it is impossible for us because we cannot live without orientations, without our conceptions to have the world this way.

  ¶ 11:54 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Peircepublishing on the Zygmunt Adamczewski Letter

In Box 16 of the Morris papers is found a folder of correspondence for the year 1969. Among the documents in this folder was a letter dating from March 8, 1969 which discusses Heidegger’s knowledge, circa 1927, of Oriental, and especially Japanese thought, as well as an account of the first contacts between Martin Heidegger and Jean Paul Sartre, including the influence which Heidegger had on Sartre’s thinking.

  ¶ 5:03 PM 0 comments

  I've played around with several internet music gizmos over the years, and right now I'm impressed by Pandora. First off the price is right, it's free. Second, the selection of music is pretty good. Basically they let you create your own radio stations. You start off by selecting an artist or song you like, they play that and then add other tracks they think are similar. You can then tell them a track doesn't fit, or that it's an expecially good fit, or add more artists or songs to that station. I've been playing around with it for a week and set up reasonable post-bop, sad female alt-country, Laswellian outernational, and hard post-punk stations. They keep introducing straight house tracks into my glitchy dance station, and lame emo strummers to my sixties poets (Dylan, Scott Walker) station, but even those keep improving as I vote on their selections. Instead of using an another-people-that-like-what-you-liked system like Amazon, they've hired musicologist to classify tracks by their musical qualities. My impression is that works fine when you want a particular sound, but won't pick up on artists' poetical sensibility. They made the old dear's day when they selected Amy Rigby's Are We Ever Gonna Have Sex Again? for the alt-country station. The album's in the mail.  ¶ 7:33 PM 0 comments

  The evening is coming, things are wrapping up underneath the chestnut tree.

The major difference between poetry and thought is perhaps that poetry already exists, whereas thought does not yet think. Or, rather, thought arose only to decline at once into philosophy, that is, into metaphysics. The dialogue with poetry could begin only by appealing to thought that was bearly possible, to thought at least unencombered by metaphysics and its conceptual retinue. Only with such thought was poetry ready to converse. Always conceived by Heidegger as a dialogue with poetry, thought, if it has yet to come, is nevertheless in its advent, less the novice, for having dared to listen to poets. But when, for its part, poetry embraces thought, this does not, as some have erroneously believed, imply any metaphysical vocation or inflation of its language. Rather, poetry in its own way demolishes metaphysical representation. At a single bound it leaps ahead of thought without needing first to overtake it. “The fate of the world,” Heidegger has written, “is heralded in the work of the poets without already being manifest as history of being.” And Char: “To each collapse of proof, the poet responds with a salvo of future.” If a salvo salutes, it also saves. Heraclitus is a savior in this sense. If thought must resort to lengthy meditation to join him in his pre-Socratic remoteness, the poet has already acknowledged him as a kindred spirit. Thus, the contrast between the meditative slowness that “thinks uphill” and the speedy poem that “races directly to the summit” conceals a secret closeness. That closeness occurs in a common site: speech, and the language that is spoken. Only within the illuminated enclosure of language does man find a home by losing himself. Without such an enclosure nothing opens up. “In the swallow’s loop a storm takes shape, a garden is made.” From the first, thought responded to the finiteness of poetry by transcribing its message. The initiators of thought, from the dawn of Greek civilization, thought that the Greek tongue, thereby opening up a space for themselves, a territory in which everyone thinks as much as his neighbor, but each in his own way.

“The poem,” Char said underneath the chestnut tree, “has no memory. I am urged to move ahead.” And as we know, he also said, “of all clear waters, poetry is what lingers least under the reflections of its bridges.” Heidegger admired this speed, whose law is to burn its bridges. If the poet never exists but in passing, if he leaves only traces of his presence, he nevertheless sets out for the future from the most distant past. Only the arrow’s vital if elusive trajectory bestows depth on the drawing back from which it emanates. “Behind modern poetry lies a vast territory that is dark only at its edges. Over this frozen expanse no banner flies for long: it gives itself to us when it wishes and reclaims itself at will. Yet it makes us see the Lightning, and its untapped resources.” When thought has become more thinking than philosophy, it, too, will have to contend with this frozen expanse, and to this task it will have to bring a patience quite different from that of history, which can at best construct landmarks in the tundra. But little by little, as the thawing wind begins to blow, the immobile has begun to move. What existed no more has begun to stir once again. The language of being has begun to speak, responding in its way to the declaration of the poet, who went ahead in search of his own echo.

And so on a summer night it came to pass that two individuals, different from each other yet of the same race and both distinguished by the sparkle of solitude, came together, for they differed only within their shared concern to shun words so that speech might exist.

P. 162-163

  ¶ 7:56 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

The Fortunes of the Dialectic on Heidegger's realism:

[W]hat Heidegger does with Dasein in Contributions to Philosophy is very instructive. He redefines Dasein, the 'between', as an achievement rather than a basal state: and I think this shows that Heidegger is clearly thinking realistically.

  ¶ 7:33 AM 0 comments

  I found this bit on Towarnicki's critical role in disseminating Heidegger's way of thinking.

While Towarnicki was in Paris, Heidegger read Being and Nothingness. He was impressed with Sartre's use of phenomenological description, and in reading Sartre's philosophical opus Heidegger came to understand the association between his philosophical work and French existentialism. To Heidegger, Sartre's emphasis on the human actor and the conservation of the Cartesian ego cogito was a misreading of his work. As a result, he was impatient to meet Sartre and discuss the discrepancies between their philosophical programs. When Towarnicki returned from Paris, Heidegger set out to instruct him about the fundamental differences between his philosophical project and Sartre's existentialism. Heidegger explained to Towarnicki that, unlike Sartre in Being and Nothingness, he in Being and Time had been interested solely in the question of being. "And that question was not an anthropological interrogation of human experience or the foundations for an ethics, but the question into the truth of Being in itself."

During this visit, Heidegger also tried to explain what he saw as the problems with the French presentation of Dasein:

Heidegger smiled with a perplexed air, then he started to laugh: "You philosophize on the ground like the Greeks." No. Dasein is not the cogito, the world is not inside of consciousness. Dasein does not mean "There I am"; it is more like "there." Heidegger pointed to a grove of magnolias at the edge of the park. He explained to me that Dasein is (Being) in the world.

Heidegger's presentation of his philosophy was nothing like the first reading of his work in France; Heidegger's concerns were seperate from those of Sartre's existentialism. Towarnicki returned to Paris ready to spread this information.

P. 165-166

  ¶ 7:59 AM 0 comments

  Who was Frédéric de Towarnicki? He was the French officer who sought out Heidegger in French occupied Bavaria.

[I]t was precisely during that year 1945, that he met the man who changed his life : cultural coordinator of the Army division of the Rhine et Danube, and in order to prepare a meeting between philosophers Sartre and Heidegger, he went to the Black Forrest to talk to the German philosopher whose Sein und Zeit had dazzled him.

He gave Heidegger a copy of L'être et le néant. In the Fall he returned to Paris with Heidegger's letter to Sartre, expressing his agreement with a meeting in Baden-Baden and inviting Sartre to Todtnauberg.  ¶ 2:35 PM 2 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Neurotic Crocodile is also writing a paper with Heraclitus fragment 64 ("The thunderbolt steers all things.").

As lightning appears in the sky, it quickly illuminates all of the different objects in its sphere. I thought maybe concealment could simply mean to make apparent or visible. I also thought some of Heraclitus' unity-through-simplicity was at work here as well: lightning makes every tree, brush, frog, etc. apparent in a distinct way as it lights up the sky but at the same time is a unified in the fact that they are all illuminated by lightning at once.

However, reading this passage, I notice that Heidegger attaches a much deeper meaning to concealment, and what it means to be unconcealed. If concealment is not simply being hidden but appearing as something that it is not, nonconcealment or coming out of concealment would be seeing a thing as it truly is. So, lightning would steer the universe by illuminating but not our everyday illumination. If lightning lets us see a tree, it's not just that we see the tree but that we see it as it really is.

Emphasis in the original.

I think this matter is more subtle and complicated. For example, here's Heideggerian Denken on concealment.

Every unconcealing of a being as something in particular conceals other ways that that being can be unconcealed. By doing so it conceals “beings as a whole,” or the open comportment that lets beings appear, forgetting the manner of its showing as presencing through unconcealment in preference to what is shown. By doing so man forgets the basis of every appearing and takes as self-evident a given mode of comportment and a particular way of appearing. As every unconcealing is a concealing, every aletheia is a lethe, untruth must be part of our analysis and cannot simply be ignored We must, then, understand untruth positively as concealment/concealing.

See his blog for the references. Clearly Heidegger is on about more that than just seeing phenomena or not. And he gets more nuanced the more he thinks about it.  ¶ 5:25 AM 0 comments

  Reason to be cheerful:

And, of course, kids can be a handy vehicle for combating status anxiety: even if your net worth is failing to keep up with the Einsteins' next door, you can still take solace in the fact that while the Einsteins' son is barely speaking in complete sentences, your son is already reading Heidegger.

I'd never considered Einstein's net worth before, but all those licensing fees must amount to a tidy sum.  ¶ 3:29 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Heideggerian Denken has been posting aspects of the essence of truth. Today's he's up to the fifth, The Essence of Truth itself.  ¶ 8:05 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

philosophical stuffed animals is writing a paper

In my paper, I focus on two fragments: fragments 64 and 62. In frament 62(Diels), Heraclitus says, Immortals are mortal, mortals are immortal, living the others' death and dead in the others' life. Heidegger interprets this as allowing each to relate to their own being through an awareness of others--mortals understand their mortality through an awareness of the gods' immortality while immortals are aware of their own unceasing being through mortals' finitude.

At least that was the case with the pagan gods.  ¶ 8:00 PM 0 comments

  Time to blow the dust off the dictionnaire Larousse.



The French monthly Magazine littéraire recently published a special issue on Heidegger. Around 30 articles by French savants (nothing by Emmanuel Faye, heh) spread across 100 pages (some ads), and lots of photographs. It's amazing to me that there are cities on this planet where you can find a magazine like this at the local news kiosk.

I'd heard about this issue earlier this year, but the magazine's web site hasn't updated their back-issue order form to include it. Shipping from the French equivalent of eBay was prohibitive. Then last week I found that the European Book Company, on Larkin in San Francisco, carrys it.  ¶ 8:54 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Mr. Aston finds more usefulness.

Karl Raschke (The Next Reformation) points out that Heidegger correctly identified one of the fundamental flaws in western philosophy and in particular western theology. The confusion of map for territory became institutionalized in the correspondence theory of truth. According to Heidegger, the syntax of language does not duplicate the structure of reality any more than a map reflects the territory. Being cannot be demonstrated by argument and inference; it can only be thought. We confuse presence with representation.

  ¶ 8:45 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

The Unconvention finds the useful.

What struck me (and still strikes me) as useful insight was the idea of truth as a “clearing” process rather than an abstract. When I was converted, my search for a working model of truth was at the core of the changes which were taking place in me. It began with seeing Augustine’s analogy: “we are vessels for truth”, and understanding that as vessels we can never hold pure truth; it is always adulterated or mixed with some falsehood, and that the desire to purify ourselves by seeking truth is a noble purpose. So reading Heidegger gave me other metaphors with which to explore the notion of truth.

  ¶ 8:36 AM 0 comments

  Meanwhile, under the chestnut tree, Martin and René extend their thoughts on the history of the poetic.

Nowadays the language of thought is a sad affair, only occasionally revived by polemic. When poetry tries to engage with though, it finds nothing in present-day philosophy, which gravitates, theologically or otherwise, toward science in general and ever-greater confusion with the “human sciences” in particular. Surrealism committed a memorable error in believing that the possibility of progress lay in this direction. The wedding of poetic talent with scientific hubris yielded a few impressive monsters, nothing more. As Heidegger says, there is no bridge from science to thought: One has to jump. And philosophy is no more thought than science is. Hegel taught that philosophy is “thought in a particular guise, whereby thought becomes knowledge, and, more specifically, knowledge through concepts.” This is what thought is for philosophy, and for Hegel philosophy is obviously the highest form of thought. But is it really? Might there not be a form of deep thought that is not philosophy, in the sense that Heraclitus was not yet philosophic, or, as Heidegger says in this Letter on Humanism, in the sense that “the tragedies of Sophocles and their language contain ethos in a form prior to that of Aristotle’s teachings on ethics.”? If so, then thought might become thinking not by philosophizing more but, rather, by freeing itself from philosophy. It might becoming thinking through what Heidegger dares to call the “destruction of philosophy,” where the word destruction is to be understood in Char’s sense: “If in the end you destroy, let it be with nuptial implements.”

“Nupital destruction” might also describe what could happen to the poet’s craft if it renounced its stale game and instead sought to join the elements of language together in a new way. Rimbaud was gone in a flash, like a meteor, yet he had time to say that “peotry will no longer set action to rhythm” but will precede. All of Char’s poetry is in that final word. But will poetry’s forward march drive far enough to mow down the barricades that currently divide poetry devoid of thought from thought specialized as philosophy, therefore making way for language unified at a higher level? “This would be soul for soul’s sake…thought hooking thought and pulling.” But the poet heeds Rimbaud’s words, he is perhaps bound to come upon those matinaux, or early risers in the world of thought, the first Greek thinkers, who were present at the inception of thought, before the schism in the heart of language occurred. They precede us only in appearance. In the maelstrom of changing times, their past is also a future. With the thought of Heraclitus, Char says, “at the tip and in the wake of the arrow, poetry races directly to the summit.” Perhaps poetry and thought both have to risk a new morning. This, of course, does not mean imitating the Greek morning, in which poetic and noetic language were not yet enemies. The morning to come assumes endless centuries of braving the trials of day, evening, and night, ordeals of which we are the survivors. Char’s extraordinary statement is addressed to the survivors of a lengthy history. It says that no history can stanch the true wellspring. It says this frequently, in the rigorous language of aphorism. To speak in aphorisms is to refrain from saying too much; avoiding philosophy, ir provides that much more food for thought. In a stroke, it creates space to breathe. It restores breath. No one who has not had his breath taken away can learn of it. Aphorism is not always in season. Only at the height of crisis does it deliver its boon. Wihtout permission or optimism, without owing anything to man, without avoiding anxiety in any way, “it wishes us well, exhorts us.” The ancients knew the aphorisms of Hippocrates and passed them on to us. If, in Char’s work, the modern piecing-together of poetry and thought is aphoristic, it is because “we have reached the time, the indescribable time, of supreme despair and hope for nothingness.”

P. 160-162

Continued.  ¶ 10:22 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

A Tedious Existence muses about the importance of myth:

The point I would like to make, however, is that Heidegger is absolutely right. Thinking must not consider myth, poetry, music, plays, movies, dreams, etc. as non-reality. They are just as real as this keyboard I am using. Prior to Plato and his teacher, Socrates, and perhaps a few others, they were included; there was no distinction in thinking between mythos and logos.

  ¶ 8:41 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Lucid explains one interpretation of the Anaximander fragment.

Another possible tack on this is Heidegger's. He translates the fragment thus: "along the lines of usage; for they let order and thereby reck belong to one another (in the surmounting) of disorder". Needless to say, this rendering of the fragment looks quite different from the standard ones. Heidegger leaves off the first part of the fragment due to an obscure habit of Greek scholarly citation pointed out by John Burnet, whereby an author's text is often `blended' in with the beginning of a citation from another author's text. There are several questionable links that Heidegger makes in the philology of his translation (not the least of which is the insertion of the `in the surmounting of' prior to adike). What interests me, however, is the way in which Heidegger translates one particular word: tisis. Tisis is normally translated as a penalty or recompense in punishment for some unjust deed. Likewise, in the widely accepted translations of the fragment, it is translated `penalty' -- the individual beings must `pay penalty' for their injustice. Heidegger, however, against the juridical reading claims that the original meaning of tisis is `esteem' and in the eventual translation, he uses the word `reck'. [Keep in mind that time, one's publicly recognized worth has the same root as tisis, so this is not too far fetched]. The latter word is the forgotten German root of ruchlos -- `reckless' -- and is related to the middle high German ruoche and the modern verb geruhen. All of these words circle around the notion of respect, solicitude, and above all, order. Heidegger chooses `reck' as the proper translation because, in the fragment, the word tisis stands in direct relationship to dike (dike kai tisis), which Heidegger translates as order (fug in the German -- a word that Heidegger employs often in his readings of Pre-Socratic thinkers). In light of this, we find that the `order' of `esteem' is required as recompense for injustice. The individual beings must `esteem', or give `reck' to the other individual beings to restore the order disrupted by their stepping beyond their proper sphere, which, according to Heidegger, is here represented as the will to outlast one's `while'. Individual beings stand against the passing of the proper time allotted to them and hence must `pay esteem' to those things coming into being with their passing away.

  ¶ 9:40 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Per Caritatem outlines philosophy since the Greek beginnings, concluding with:

As Heidegger tells the story, philosophy comes to its end because it tries swallow up mystery—an extremely insightful observation. Today we have fallen into the illusion of thinking that we grasp things because things today are so specialized. We have forgotten about the whole because there is no longer any mystery. This is what Heidegger means by philosophy “coming to its end.”

  ¶ 3:06 PM 0 comments

  The Prague Writers' Festival director Michael March interviews playwright Howard Brenton in today's Guardian, asking:

MM: Martin Heidegger, not an ideal theatre critic, believed that "the light of the public obscures everything".

HB: Some of the great liberating ideas of the 20th century - the whole existentialist tradition - have a very dark side. Heidegger did get very near describing what existence actually is and, at the same time, threw in his lot with an evil regime. You think, "what does this mean and why?".

That's a good quote, about the public's light. It's so good that Marsh used it on Irvine Welsh at last year's Vienna Writer's Festival. It's so good that it's an official festival quote.

Where does the quote come from? From Hannah Arendt's Men in Dark Times. It's her translation of Das Licht der Offentlichkeit verdunkelt alles. I believe it's what a decade later would appear as:

By publicness everything gets obscured, and what has thus been covered up gets passed off as something familiar and accessible to everyone.

P. 165

and

...the publicness of the "they" supresses everything familiar.

P. 237

But Arendt didn't reference her sources. I'm not familar with "the light" or "brightness" of the Offentlichkeit. It might arguably (says my ready-over-the-shoulder expert) be translated as "openness", but Heidegger uses Offentlichkeit when referring to the public, and "publicness" is used by most translator.

This bit of the Contributions has a similar focus.

In what is the nearest and the ordinary and the continual, beings will always outdo and chase away beyng. And this occurs, not when a being itself gathers unto itself and unfolds, but when a being has turned into the object and state of dissembling machinations and is dissolved into non-being. Here, in the most ordinary publicness of beings that have become all the same, the utmost squandering of beyng occurs.

P. 168

  ¶ 7:58 PM 0 comments

  Last month we mentioned Fukuyama's latest. This month Roger Scruton has at it.

Kojéve influenced a whole generation of French post-war intellectuals with his lectures on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, in which he injected into the bloated Hegelian body some strong shots of Nietzsche and Heidegger, making the moribund organism writhe in interesting torment.

  ¶ 3:49 PM 0 comments

  There's a new Being and Time reading group blog for this summer.  ¶ 1:30 PM 0 comments