Following along the Young Heidegger, to presencing

The second way in which theory dehistoricizes the Ereignis of the it-worlds-for-me is by obliterating it as a personal Ereignis "for me." When, as a theoretically disinterested astronomer, I observe and objectify the sunrise, it now appears as a pro-cess (Vor-gang) that impersonally runs its course in front of me. "It simply goes-by-before, before my knowing I, has only the relation of being-known to this I, this paled I-relatedness reduced to a minimum of living experience....I am directed to something, but I do not live (as historical I)." Thus, Heidegger concluded, "the historical I is de-historicized to the remnant of a specific I-hood as the correlate of thinghood." Not only is the Ereignis of the sunrise no longer uniquely for the personal I, but this I has also been broken out of the Ereignis, reified and depersonalized into a present-at-hand ego, and thus deprived of its historical Ereignis-character. "The character of the situation disapeers. The unity of the situation is exploded....Thereby, the situation-I, the 'historical' I, is simultaneously driven away. The 'dehistoricizing of the I' steps in. Suppression of the living relation of the I to a situation." The full sense of the dehistoricized temporalizing-sense effected by metaphysics is thus the static and impersonal presence of an objective something (being) over against a present-at-hand I. Here the something, being, does not event/enown for me. As another counterexample to the theoretical esperience of the sunrise as process, Heidegger also dealt with the Ereignis of his "seeing the lectern":

But something indeed happens [in seeing the lectern]....The living experiencing does not merely go by before me like a thing that I posit as object, but rather I myself e-vent/en-own it to myself, and it e-vents/en-owns itself according to its essential presencing.

There is much to digest in this passage. Let us begin by noting that the Er-eignis of lived experience has a doubled aspect of content-relation, depth/surface, nonpersonal/personal in accord with the doubled aspect of the intentional configuration of I-comport-myself-to-something. Let us first focus more on the deep, nonpersonal temporalizing-sense of the Ereignis of the primal something (being) that "e-vents/en-owns itself according to its essential presencing."

P. 272-273

Continued.  ¶ 6:17 PM 2 comments

  Taylor Carman is up to nothing much.

I'm writing a book about Heidegger, which means I'm writing about nothing.

  ¶ 3:55 PM 2 comments

  Getting to the sole of the matter, or putting the boot in?

[Meyer] Schapiro asks Heidegger what seems like an innocent art-historical question: Which Van Gogh painting of boots are you talking about? It turns out he wrote Heidegger about this in 1965, and Heidegger's reply was vague. Schapiro thinks he knows which painting it must have been (it is reproduced), but he also thinks Heidegger could have developed his peasant rhapsody without looking at the painting at all. But if he had tried to look, he would have had to see that Van Gogh represented boots in two sharply different ways: when they belonged to peasants, he painted them clear, smooth and unworn, as an unproblematic element in still-lifes; when he painted them old, wrinkled and worn-out, in the way Heidegger describes, they were his own.

  ¶ 5:54 PM 0 comments

  Contemplatio, a new journal from Loyola, interviews Thomas Sheehan.

I think we would do well to follow [Heidegger's]
example and simply drop the ontological word “being” (Sein) and
instead use the phenomenological term Anwesen, “meaningful
presence.” The next step is to work out the phenomenological
structure of meaningful presence as such, and then trace it to its
source in human finitude. By and large Heideggerians don’t get
that point. Most of them still think Heidegger’s focal topic was
“being,” even though he clearly denied that it was.

  ¶ 5:35 PM 3 comments

  Ork! Ork!

Twas the night before school starts

So curious and ready, in classrooms they sit
Awaiting the profs with their knowledge and wit:
“Now Foucault! Now Freud! Jean-Francois Lyotard!
On Heidegger, Nietzsche! Don’t act like it’s hard!"

  ¶ 2:16 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Levantine on martyrdom. A post that is pertinent to current events.

While martyrdom may imply in its voluntary self-sacrificial forms the potential of reigning over death, or of the semblance of bringing it to a specific controllable determinacy, it still cannot command the uncanny character of dying or its projected cum anticipated outcomes (while alive or as imagined ‘posthumously’), which all remain obscured within the possibilities of a concealed Otherness that is external to our worldly perspectives on life-death.

Our first link to an AOL blog. I'm guessing the italics button is very prominent in their editor.  ¶ 2:10 PM 0 comments

  Silliness from The Postmodern Pooh:

Paunchy Panza, catching the rays without reflection. He seeks nothing, perceives nothing, propounds nothing, but merely sings the noncomittally conditional, innocently egoistic "I could spend a happy morning / Being Pooh."

Being--Dasein! What is Pooh in this tableau if not the personification (ursification?) of Man stripped of all striving, truly attuned, for once, to that discursive impossibility, a Nature without cultural excess or archive?

P. 6

It's all very ursologocentric.  ¶ 7:39 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Heideggerian Denken on the basic presence of things:

A being's pre-essential essence is the practically unlimited ways that it could be disclosed, both by beings with Dasein's mode of comportment or otherwise (some alien race, perhaps, or animals). It is not understood as some essential 'nature' that we can 'see' in its 'properties,' as this is a de-worlded and, for that reason, diminished grasp of beings. The pre-essential essence of beings lies in its transcendence, its excess that cannot be captured in any given disclosure of that being, the object's ability to be disclosed in an indeterminate number of ways and, by such, its ability to surprise us.

  ¶ 5:45 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein


Intercapillary Space on Stretchers. We welcome any blog post that both mentions Iain Sinclair and quotes Heidegger.

The specific movement in which Dasein is stretched along and stretches itself along, we call its historicizing.

I finished Sinclair's Lights Out For the Territory last week. The title's from the last line of Huck Finn--"...I been there before." I need regular doses of Sinclair to remind me there's more to things that I'd otherwise realize. Radon Daughters is already waiting in the pile. I'm currently a third of the way into Wu Ming's 54; Cary Grant's training his double, the KGB's onto the plot, and Pierre's been smuggled to the Illyrian coast, to find out what Tito's done with dad. Brilliant. It's by the same anarcho-situationist collective that wrote Q, the best novel of intrigue amongst heretics during the Peasants' Revolt you'll ever read, by Luther Blissett.  ¶ 10:05 PM 0 comments

  Continuing with the Young Heidegger, Ereignis in one of the early lectures.

In order to illustrate Ereignis as the temporal sense of comportment to-the-primal-something (it-worlds-for-me) and as the temporalizing of situations, Heidegger's lecture course of KNS 1919 set up still another contrast in his phenomenological kindergarten. He first described the theoretical experience of a sunrise in astronomy. Next to this he held up the experience of sunrise from a mountain top (for example, in an outing in "the 'free-Greman youth movement'") and after a battle in Friedrich Hölderlin's translation of Sophocles's Antigone:

Let us transplant ourselves into the comportment of astronomers who in astrophysics investigate the phenomenon of the sunrise as a mere process in nature and, indifferently comporting themselves to it, merely let it run its course before them. And let us hold up before this the lived experience of the chorus of Theban elders in Sophocles's Antigone who, on the first friendly morning after the victorious counteroffensive, look toward the rising sun...O glance of the sun, you most beautiful one, who / upon seven throned Thebes / ever shine...

In the theoretical experience of the sunrise, whether in astronomy or traditional philosophy, the pretheoretical Ereignis of the it-worlds/breaks-forth-for-me is objectified into a Vor-gang, a pro-cess. Theory thereby dedistoricizes it in two basic ways. Frist, not only are the worlding of the world and the personal I designified and delived into naked and discrete "things," but simultaneously their flowing circular Ereignis put of an unavailable future is "reified" into a "thing-time," into the static presence of an available pro-cess that runs its course before one's all-seeing gaze. "[The situation] contains no static moments, but rather 'Ereignisse,' [events/enownments]. The happening of the situation is no 'process'--as this is observed, for instance, in the physicist's laboratory in a theoretical attitude, e.g., an electrical discharge."

P. 272

I made some minor corrections to quote marks and punctuation in the original. Also, Thebes is usually seven-gated.

Continued.  ¶ 9:29 PM 2 comments

  The Summer issue (117) of October, the journal, Critique of Heidegger (1934-7) by Georges Bataille, translated and with a twenty-two page introduction by Stefanos Geroulanos. The critique was an unpublished manuscript, and will be more interesting to folks into Bataille. At that time, only a few of Heidegger's lectures had been translated to French, and most accounts of his philosophy came from those who had attended some lectures in Freiburg. Bataille is mainly interested in psychological issues pertaining to the ego and its intentionality, rather than ontology.  ¶ 3:55 PM 0 comments

  Recently the German novelist, and Nobel Prize winner, Günter Grass admitted having been a member of the Waffen SS during WWII. If you missed the news, here's a blog post, with links, which also provides some context in the American culture wars.

Kudos to Mr. Grass for fessing up, and I don't know how I would have behaved had I been a German teenager during the war, but still. Grass assumed the role of his nation's moral scold, urging them to acknowledge the past, and so on. So this whole episode drips irony. To me it reinforces the dictum that artists should stick to their art, and leave morality to those who have actually achieved something significant, like created jobs, cured the sick or helped the needy.

In one of his novels, Dog Years, Grass parodied Heidegger: "Heidegger hid, Heidegger hod!". And here's a bit from his semi-autobiographical book My Century, commenting on the meeting between Heidegger and Paul Celan at Todtnauberg.

I had imagined the conversation in the cottage, because between the rootless poet and the Meister aus Deutschland, between the Jew with the invisible yellow star and the former rector of Freiburg University with his perfectly round yet likewise invisible Party emblem, between the namer and the concealer, between the survivor constantly pronouncing himself dead and the harbinger of being and the coming God, the Unutterable Words should have been found and were not, not a one.

And this silence kept its silence.

P. 177-178

Heh. As he wrote in Cat and Mouse: "With and without irony: maybe you wouldn't have become a clown", by sticking to writing fiction.  ¶ 3:37 PM 0 comments

  Report on Dubya at the Heidegger seminar.  ¶ 5:44 PM 3 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

The Tossing Bark share their thesis.

Mood is a primary mode of our experience – as such, we must understand our moods so that we may understand our experience and our dealings in the world.

  ¶ 8:34 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Heidegger's Beitraege was the blog for a class by James Dodd last Spring at the New School for Social Research. It is possibly the best web resource on the Contributions to Philosophy, and I don't know how much longer it will be available online. Save it now, or cry later.  ¶ 8:15 AM 0 comments

  More from The Young Heidegger, moving on to the revolutionary KNS lectures.

Beginning with his courses in 1919, Heidegger thus took up the third requirement for rethinking the question about being that he had put forward in his qualifying dissertation, namely, "history...must become a meaning-determining element for the problem of the categories" of being in the sense of the "something in any sense." He aslo continued the analysis of historical time initiated in his 1915-16 essay on history, which defined time as the "effective context" of a unique historical Ereignis that involves a circular movement of past, future, and the present. Similarly, his KNS 1919 lecture course explored the ""Ereignis-character" of the primal something (being) that worlds and e-vents/en-owns (er-eignet) for me, and in which I e-vent/en-own it to myself. Life, he explained, is always a "situation in the context of life" and "the I is itself a situation-I; the I is histor'ical,'" a "historical I." Intentionality is not only horizontally directed to the worlding of the world, but also vertically extended through the historicity of situations that build on and "permeate each other." Heidegger provided an example by recalling his own wartime experience in the previous year: "Their durations do not exclude each other (e.g., a year in a field, a semester: no objective time-concept)....The intentionality of all lived experiences of a situation has a definite character that springs from the whole situation. Example of a situation: 'Going through the course.'" The intentionality of the situation involves a protentional "tendency" toward something futural that is guided by a retentional "motivation" from past situations. Life is "forward-reaching and backward-reaching, i.e.,...motivated tendency or, alternatively, tendential motivation." Thus, more formally, the "sight" and the concept of a situation involves both a preconception or precept and a recept.

P. 271-272

Continued.  ¶ 8:08 AM 0 comments

  What does the term being-historical refer to? Here's an explanation from the Contributions.

This historically essential characterization of philosophy grasps philosophy as the thinking of be-ing. This thinking should never seek refuge in the shape of a being and in that shape experience all the light of what is simple out of the gathered richness of its enjoined darkness. This thinking should also never follow the dissolution into what is shapeless. In the abground of the shaping ground--this side of shape and shapelessness (which is, of course, only in a being)--this thinking must seize the resonating throw of its throwness and carry it into the open of the project-open. The thinking of be-ing, completely other than any conformity to the objective, must belong to what is to be thought itself, because be-ing does not tolerate its own truth as an addendum and something proposed but rather "is" itself the essential sway of truth. Truth itself, that clearing of self-sheltering-concealing, in whose open gods and man are enowned for their countering, enopens be-ing as history [Geschichte]. We must perhaps think this history if we are to prepare the arena which in its time must preserve the resonance of Hölderlin's word--a word which again names gods and man--so that this resonance attunes those grounding-attunements which appoint future man to the guardianship of gods' needfulness.

P. 298

That being as clear as mud, I went looking for being-historical in my two Heidegger dictionaries, but they didn't have an entry. So, that's as en-lightening as it gets. Mindfulness helpfully provides this:

The be-ing-historical word is ambiguous and at the same time does not "mean" different "objects", but says be-ing non-objectively, because be-ing, the sustaining en-owning that sways specifically and ceaselessly in manifold ways, nevertheless demands simpleness from its word.

P. 86

  ¶ 9:44 PM 0 comments

  Ork! Ork!

According to Slate's John Dickerson, President Bush read Camus's novel The Stranger while on vacation this summer. According to Tony Snow, Bush "found it an interesting book and a quick read": "I don't want to go too deep into it, but we discussed the origins of existentialism." Which suggests that the president delved into Heidegger, or perhaps Nietzsche. I suspect he didn't, but I'm with John on this: "We want a book report!"

What does Bush think of Camus? What did he take away from this rather odd (for him) read (summer or not)? Did he find it challenging? Did it compel him to reconsider his Manichaean worldview? What does he think of existentialism? "Does his experience in Iraq push him to read works replete with themes of angst, anxiety, and dread? Was the president trying to gain insight into the thinking of Europeans who are skeptical of his plan for democracy in the Middle East, founded as it is on the idea of a universal rational essence that existentialists reject?" Will he now turn to The Fall. Or to The Myth of Sisyphus?

All good questions. At least, as far as we know, he isn't wasting his time with, say, Ayn Rand.

  ¶ 6:19 AM 0 comments

  Mindfulness (GA 66) is the latest work by Heidegger to be translated and published in English. Here, the translators explain their translation of Besinnung as mindfulness. Note that "be-ing" is these translators' rendition of Seyn, or beyng.

Right from its onset, be-ing historical thinking unfolds itself as Besinnung and not as reflection since the latter belongs to the domain of a thinking that is not being-historical. Accordingly, it is of paramount importance in translating the word Besinnung to hone in on the foundational difference between reflection and Besinnung. In this context it would server well to note the intimate hermeneutic-phenomeological connection between Sinn and Besinnung to which Heidegger pays especial attention both in Being and Time and Contributions to Philosophy. To obtain a rendition of the word Besinnung that approximates in English to what Heidegger regards as the very unfolding of being-historical thinking, we have to bear in mind that Besinnung is nothing but an inquiry into the self-disclosure of being -- self-disclosure that in Being and Time Heidegger calls the meaning of 'der Sinn' of being and that in Contributions to Philosophy he calls the truth of being. What is of utmost significance here is that philosophy as Besinnung unfolds this inquiry. This inquiry is not merely a human enterprise of reflecting on the data of consciousness, on the peculiarities of perception or on the states of mind. It differs from reflection in that, as Besinnung, this inquiry is not entirely and exhaustively in human discretion. What distinguishes this inquiry as Besinnung is that it is basically determined and shaped by the truth of being. Thus there is an intimate interconnection between this inquiry, as Besinnung, and being. As Besinnung, this inquiry is already enowned by being. As enowned, it stands at the service of being by projecting-opening being's enowning sway or conferments -- its 'enowning throw'. This 'being mindful of being's enowning throw' cannot even be classified as a particular kind of reflection, or even as a mode of conscious awareness. Two factors are important here: on the one hand there is "the inexhaustibility of being's enowning throw" and on the other hand "the inconclusiveness of its projecting-opening". As a result, 'being mindful of being's enowning throw' is not an addendum to this inquiry but "originates from within the inexhaustibility of being's enowning throw..."

One way of grasping the distinction that Heidegger draws between Besinnung and reflection is to consider their bearings upong the issue called 'self.' Reflection of the 'self', which sustains all psychology and psychiatry, attends to the empirical states of the 'self' in order to render those states accessible to objectification. By contrast, in Besinnung on the 'self' these states are bracketed out and what is at stake is the grounding of the 'self' via 'temporality', 'linguisticality', 'historicality', ' mortality', and so forth. Heidegger alludes to the distinction between Besinnung on the 'self', as its grounding, and reflection on the 'self' by first questioning whether the 'self' is accessible to reflection at all and then by alluding to the necessity of grounding the 'self'. He says:

[Besinnung] is ... so originary that it above all asks how the self is to be grounded ... Thus it is questionable whether through reflection on 'ourselves' we ever find our self ... [xxxii]

Here we see that while Heidegger endorses a grounding of the 'self' via mindfulness of the 'self' he questions the very possibility of accessibility of the 'self' to reflection.

In order to obtain in English an approximate rendition of the word Besinnung, we took our bearing from the distinction that Heidegger draws between reflection on the 'self', and being mindful of the 'self', and rendered the word Besinnung with mindfulness. The unique advantage of this rendition consists in the fact that the word mindefulness has a pliability that is denied to reflection -- a pliability that does not let mindfulness become rigid and unyielding and end up in doctrines, systems, and so forth. In section 11 of Mindfulness, which comes right after the "Introduction", Heidegger brings to mind this pliability of minfulness when he says:

Coming from the overcoming of "metaphysics", mindfulness must nevertheless touch upon the hitherto and cannot become inflexible as the finished product of a usable presentation either in a "doctrine" or ina "system", or as "exhortation" or "edification".[17]

P. xxiii-xxv

  ¶ 4:30 PM 2 comments

  John Banville impersonates Martin impersonating Death:

In a radio play I wrote a while ago, on the meeting between Martin Heidegger and Paul Celan at Todtnauberg in the 1960s, Heidegger at one point declares: “Death is the salient fact of human existence. Death stands beside the midwife and takes the infant from her hands, saying, ‘Come with me, for I am the giver of life.’ Everything we are and do takes its savour from the knowledge of death. That’s our tragedy, and our glory. Existence … is a process, and that process is Time, and Time for each one of us has an end. Death leads us into the wilderness of the future, our only guide.”

  ¶ 8:56 PM 0 comments

  I dug Force of Circumstances, the third volume of Simone de Beauvoir's autobiography, out of the vault to get this bit on Sartre's visit in 1952. I probably came across Heidegger's name for the first time reading it. It's hard to believe I read over a two thousand pages of her life in high school, more than I ever read of her fiction, philosophy, and The Second Sex combined.

[Sartre] was rather coldly received at Freiburg, where he went to give a lecture. He spoke for three hours. "I got quite caught up in it; you catch me at another!" said the wife of the director of the French Institute as she came out. Out of the twelve hundred students who had heard him, barely fifty understood French well enough to follow. "We understood the ideas, but not the examples," one of them said. Sartre struck them as too close to Marxism. He paid a visit to Heidegger, perched on his eyrie, and told him how sorry he was about the play Gabriel Marcel had just written about him [La Dimension Florestan]. That was all they talked about, and Sartre left after half an hour. Heidegger was going in for mystiism, Sartre told me; then he added, his eyes wide: "Four thousand students and professors toiling over Heidegger day after day, just think of it!"

Tragically, Marcel's comedy The Florestan Dimension is not available in English.  ¶ 2:32 PM 5 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

English Literature, the blog, provides the Heidegger encyclopedia entries. Britannica's is shorter.  ¶ 8:56 PM 0 comments

  Theodore Kisiel on that that is given, but is not a thing.

[I]n any experience, intentionally understood, there is a 'pull' toward something, such as the noematic pole, in its derivative sense, motivates the experience. In this experience, something is asked about something in general. What is being questioned, the matter of the question, is 'something in general.' What is asked about, what stands in question, the form that the question takes, the actual content of the question, is the 'es geben.' In both form and matter, the question contains the emptiest, the most general, the most theoretical of the reflexive categories. From [Emil] Lask, we have learned that 'giveness' is the very minimum that can be said about the most minimum. It is devoid of substantive meaning that we have a tendency to fill in the phrase with examples. This very 'pull' reflects a certain dependence of the phrase on something more concrete which itself will have to be explored.
...
All these things (bboks, pens, cars, campus, trees, shade, etc.) give themselves directly out of the immediate context of meaning encompassing us which we tend to call 'the world.' Much like Lask's objects known only through the constituitive categories in which we live, such things receive their significance from that meaning-giving context encompassing us, whose activity can then be described as 'worlding.' If we then take our campaign against reification one step further, then the true locus of our experience is not in objects or things which 'in addition are then interpreted as signifying this or that,' but rather the signifying element itself not dynamized and set in motion, the 'It' that 'worlds[.]'

P. 129-130

I couldn't find any page to hyperlink to for Emil Lask. The web, what is it good for? Nothing on "noematic (or noetic) pole" either. It's Husserl's term for the intending attention of consciousness.  ¶ 8:55 PM 3 comments

  Heidegger first used the term Ereignis, with his special nuances (the dictionary translation is event), in one of his earliest lectures, along with hints of many other themes he would develop through the rest of his career. Ereignis would not appear again until the mid-1930s.

In his book on the young Heidegger, Van Buren describes the first appearance of some of his themes. This extract comments on temporality's early role.

In WS 1921-22, Heidegger defined the sense of the enactment of the person/world relation as follows: "Comporting oneself is also definable as a how of formal happening, proceeding--in view of how it acts, i.e., is enacted, as enactment, accroding to it enactment-sense." Vollzug, enactment , means the Way that the intentional relation literally pulls or draws (zieht) from the source of possibility into full (voll) actuality, and can therefore also be translated as fullfillment, carrying out, or performance. "'Life' and 'world' are not two objects subsisting in themselves like a table to which the chair standing before it is spatially related. The relationality is that of a relation, i.e. is enacted, lived." Enactment is the transitive sense of the verb "to live," where the object here is life itself in relation to the world: "To live in the transitive sense: 'to live life,' 'to live one's work'; here mostly in compounds: 'to live through this and that'; 'to live out one's years.'" Enactment is, however, dependent upon its deeper historical sense as temporalizing. Heidegger's notes read, "But, furthermore, this [comportment] particularly as to how the enactment as enactment becomes in and for a situation, how it 'temporalizes' itself. Temporalizing is to be interpreted on the basis of temporalizing-sense." "The how of being-related-to-world and the world itself are in factical temporalizing." By showing that "temporality" is "the basic phenomenon of facticity," Heidegger endeavored to revive ontology from "the old metaphysics" that was fixated naively on being as unchanging presence (Präsenz): "It hsall be shown 'in tim' precisely that fundamental tasks also lie in ontology!"

P. 270-271

Continued.  ¶ 3:11 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Whales posted his interpretation of Heidegger's "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking". And look around for other interesting stuff.  ¶ 12:35 PM 0 comments

  Philosophy, it's not essentially about curiosity.

[I]t has long been known that the Greeks recognized thaumazein as the “beginning” of philosophy. But it is just as certain that we have taken this thaumazein to be obvious and ordinary, something that can be accomplished without difficulty and can even be clarified without further reflection. For the most part, the usual presentations of the origin of philosophy out of thaumazein result in the opinion that philosophy arises from curiosity. This is a weak and pitiful determination of origin, possible only where there has never been any reflection on what is supposed to be determined here in its origin. Indeed, we consider ourselves relieved of such reflection, precisely because we think that the derivation of philosophy out of curiosity also determines its essence.

P. 135-136

Brad Elliott Stone explores this in detail in a recently posted paper on his web site: Curiosity as the Thief of Wonder.  ¶ 10:35 PM 0 comments

  Here's an explanation of how the word enowning got started, from the Kisiel paper I referred to recently.

It was Albert Hofstadter who, in an article first published in 1976 in boundary 2, spliced together the makeshift English word “en-own-ment” as “the most literal possible translation” of Er-eig-nis. Ereignis as “event” optimally refers to the defining events of a unique and proper lifetime, like birth, marriage, and death, or to unique epoch-defining events of a people or culture, like the founding of Rome, the coming of Christ, and Muhammad’s hijrah. As the enowning Event that enables and enacts all uniquely defining historical events, “Er-eignis is originary history itself” (32/23). Most basically for Heidegger, enownment is the realm of intimate belonging-together of be-ing and human being (Da-sein) in core relationships like call-response and mutual need and usage that in historical enactment allow them mutually to come into their own; in the case of human Da-sein, to become its proper historical self.

  ¶ 5:55 PM 0 comments

  It ain't easy.

In finding itself hard to bear, life is difficult in accord with the basic sense of its being, not in the sense of a contingent feature.If it is the cas that factical life authentically is what it is in this being-hard and being-difficult, then the genuinely fitting way of gaining access to it and truly safekeeping it can only consist in making itself hard for itself. This is the only duty philosophical research can be required to fulfill, unless of course it wants to miss its object completely. All making it easy, all the seductive compromising of needs, all the metaphysical tranquilizers prescribed for problems having been for the most part derived from mere book learning--the basic intention of all of this is from the start to give up with regard to the task that must in each case be carried out, namely, bringing the object of philosophy into view, grasping it, and indeed preserving it.

P. 113

  ¶ 10:05 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Mormon Philosophy & Theology on Heidegger's Realism:

Now the way most read Heidegger is in seeing Being as a mysterious 'entity' or quasi-entity that mystically sends entities to us. An other way of looking at Heidegger though is talking about the essences of human understanding that allow entities to be presented to us as the kind of entities they are. That is, a hammer as an entity is an entity. However we can only understand the hammer hermeneutically which means in terms of the pre-existing linguistic and practical frameworks we already find ourselves in. That is, to be, is really to ask the question of how things can be thought. That says nothing about entities independent of thought.

  ¶ 10:03 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Guy's (Apollonian) Inquiries Made Public posts his paper on Martin Heidegger's notion of Mitda-sein from part 1, section 26 of Being and Time.  ¶ 9:59 PM 0 comments

  I'm back from the wilderness. I wanted to see a glacier melting, before the ones within driving distance all melt away.  ¶ 9:53 PM 0 comments