The central premises that determine Heidegger’s conception of language follow from the crucial change that Heidegger introduces in Being and Time in his confrontation with transcendental philosophy. In order to bring about a hermeneutic transformation of philosophy, Heidegger substitutes the ontological difference for the empirical/transcendental distinction. The ontological difference (the distinction between being and beings) is established by Heidegger in such a way that it follows that there can be no access to entities without a prior understanding of their being. It is for this reason that entities appear to us as always already understood in one way or another, or, as Heidegger puts it, this is why ‘we always already move about in an understanding of being’. This is the fact from which Being and Time starts, and which lies at the basis of Heidegger’s philosophy as a whole.

However, remaining under the influence of the empirical/transcendental distinction, Heidegger invests this fact with a normative significance: given that our understanding of the being of entities is constitutive for what these entities are for us, it determines how we understand, perceive, and experience the world. It provides the ontological framework for everything that ‘can appear within the world’. Such an understanding of being or world-disclosure has, therefore, a quasi-transcendental status. On the one hand, it is valid a priori, although only in the sense that it cannot be called into question from within, i.e. by those who share it. There is no way to step outside of our understanding of being in order to check its validity, to test whether our understanding of being coincides with the being of the things themselves. For there is no being without an understanding of being. But on the other hand, it is not the (eternal) endowment of a transcendental ego (which would guarantee the objectivity of experience, and thereby the possibility of valid knowledge for all human beings), but it is merely contingent, changes historically and cannot be put under control at will. It is a fate into which human beings are thrown. The crucial challenge to transcendental philosophy in Being and Time, therefore, is to be found in Heidegger’s thesis that ‘disclosedness is essentially factical’.

¶ 12:50 PM 1 comments

the difference between our subjective experience of the sun (sunrise and sunset) and the objective knowledge of the sun as the central body of our solar system.

¶ 9:59 AM 0 comments

The German word for emergence is das Anwesen. The more usual English translation of Anwesen is "presencing" or "presence." I deliberately use the word emergence, to avoid the danger of implying a "presence" in "presencing"--thus letting thinking think in terms of presence rather than "presencing." The Sache in Heidegger is clearly not presence, but Anwesen in its work of emergence, i.e., in its work as being. The published English translation fell and slipped on this very danger. It reads: "To crewn is thus the handing over of presence [Anwesen], which presencing delivers to what is present..." (P. 52). This translation suggests that there are two realms named here: the realm of what comes to presence (beings) and the realm of presence, with Anwesen (presencing) as the movement between these two realms. Much of Heidegger scholarship has stumbled on this rock by not staying long enough or working closely enough with this realm of Anwesen itself, thus getting lost by taking the Sache of Anwesen to be one of presence. Frankly, presence as such--separated out from emerging ("presencing," if you will) is only an issue for metaphysics (named by Heidegger as Anwesenheit) and is never the Sache of being.

P. 231-2

¶ 6:02 PM 7 comments

Heidegger seems pretty dense and hardcore, probably for academic philosophers. But since Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are in here, I'll give Heidegger a chance!

¶ 7:45 AM 0 comments

Try to think of Nothing. When you do, you find that you are thrown back into the thought of particular things. But are those things the same, or have they been transformed by the attempt to think away their existence, by the encounter with Nothingness? The classic account of the role of Nothing in consciousness was given by Martin Heidegger in “What is Metaphysics.” He held that when we lose all our focus on things around us, Nothing looms just over the horizon of our consciousness. When we try to approach it we are thrown back into our thought of things.

¶ 9:50 AM 0 comments

To Hannah Arendt [Karl Jaspers] commented on Heidegger's letter disdainfully: "He is entirely in his Being speculation, he writes 'Seyn.' Two and a half decades ago he backed 'existence' and basically distorted matters. Now he backs more essentially...I hope he doesn't distort again. But I doubt it. Can one, as an impure soul...can one see greatest purity in insincerity?" But he immediately takes back his harsh judgement and observes: "The strange thing is that he knows about something that hardly anyone notices today, and that his surmise is so impressive."

Arendt similarly fluctuates in her judgement. She is pleased that Jaspers has made contact again with Heidegger, and at the same time she endorses his negative opinions. "This living in Todtnauberg, ranting against civilization, and writing Sein with a 'y' is surely in reality just the bolt-hole into which he has withdrawn, because he rightly assumes that there he needs to see only those people who make a pilgrimage to him full of admiration; surely hardly anyone will climb 1200 meters just to make a scene."

P. 374

¶ 7:21 PM 0 comments

[Heidegger] pointed out that the primal something is precisely the futural "not-yet" and "preworldly something" of the situation. As such, it makes up the toward-which or upon which of tendency, of "living toward something". Insofar as this primal something has always already been fulfilled and differentiated in the "worldish something" of "lifeworlds" and "specific spheres of lived experience" (e.g., "aesthetic," "religious," "political" experience), the tendency toward the primal something is always "motivated" by this dimension of having-been. Of the primal something, Heidegger wrote, "Its sense rests in the fullness of life itself and means precisely that this has not yet marked-out a genuinely worldish characterizing, but that such no doubt motivationally lives in life. It is the 'not-yet,' i.e., that which has not yet broken-forth into a genuine life, it is essentially preworldly".

As such a preworldly future, the Ur-etwas is an "index" or pointing into its breaking-forth and fulfillment in the different lifeworlds and experiences of the "worldish something." "It is the index for the potentiality of life....there lies in the sense of the something as the experienceable of the moment of the 'out towards', of the 'direction out towards,' of the 'into a (specific) world'--and indeed in its undiminished 'centrifugal force of life'. The out-toward of the primal something into specific worlds is what Heidegger meant by Ereignis. The "worldish something" of the ancient Greek sunrise or of the twentieth-century lectern "e-vents/en-owns itself according to its essential presencing." The student transcripts of this course describe the Ereignis of the primal preworldly something as a "to world-out [auszuwelten] into specific lifeworlds". This Ereignis of being is also described as a temporal there is/it gives worlds. In the phrase "it e-vents/en-owns itself," the nonpersonal "it" that encompasses the personal I is precisely the Ereignis of the primal something, of being, of worlds. Heidegger's primal science is focused precisely on this Ur-etwas as an Ursprung, a primal source from which worlds spring forth. "Everything flows," having its "primal source from the in-itself of the streaming experience of life," from "the flowing stream" of the Ereignis of life. The world is not made up of frozen and static "things," but is the rhythm of swinging (Schwingung) and swaying (Entschwebung). "The environing world does not stand there with a fixed index of existence, but rather sways in lived experiencing, carries in itself the rhythm of lived experiences and can be experienced only as this rhythmic." Like a primal breathing or tidal movement, Ereignis is the circular in-and-out of rhythm from the futural primal something into the "centrifugal force of life" toward particular lifeworlds and back again.

P. 274-275

¶ 1:43 PM 1 comments

It might seem that what we are thinking here is a refined and more subtle shape of the ontological difference. But it is utterly different. Although the words used and the grammer may seem to be about the ontological difference, what is being said is in a dimension that is fundamentally not that. This can be seen in two ways: first, the being that is spoken of here (speaks itself) is not the being of beings--it is not the difference between beings and the being of those beings. (We will see later that the very word being is unsuited for saying this region/domain.) Second, what is opened up in this unresolvable matter/Sache is not a difference at all. There is no difference here, even though language and grammer differenciate. Thus I would suggest not using such words as discord, dispersal, dichotomy--or even difference--to name this place of opening. This Sache in its unresolvability cannot be named difference, however one spells or pronounces the word.

P. 223

¶ 7:30 AM 5 comments

[W]e stand between two equally unavoidable limits. On the one side, we immediately make being into a being when we think it and say of it "being 'is,'" thus disavowing the proper work of being: we cast being away from us. On the other side, however, we can never disavow "being" and the "is" wherever we experience a being. For how should a being be in each case a being for us without our experiencing it as a being, without our experiencing it in respect to its being?

Being has already cast itself over us and toward us. Being: casting itself toward us and cast away from us. This looks like a "contradiction." However, we do not wish to capture what opens up here in a formal schema of formal thinking. Everything would merely become weakened in its essence, and essence-less, under the appearance of a "paradoxical" formula. On the other hand, we must attempt to experience that, located between both limits, we are placed into a peculiar abode from which there is not way out. But in finding ourselves placed into this impasse, we also become aware that such an extreme impasse could perhaps stem from being itself. Indeed, without exception the guidewords indicate a peculiar ambivalence of being.

If, in the manner just presented, thinking encounters insurmountable difficulties, and sees itself placed into a situation where there is no way out, then it can yet deliver itself from peril in the way previous thinking has done. We have already refrained from the nearest available technique of discerning a contradiction and playing, so to speak, with a "paradox." For relinquishing thought is the most deplorable way for thought to accomplish its task. Nevertheless, according to the way of thinking practiced until now in the otherwise usual questions of philosophy, one could undertake still other and subsequent reflections in respect to the impasse now arrived at. In view of this situation where there is no way out, where, on the one hand, being cannot be avoided, and on the other hand, investigating being immediately makes it into a "being" and thus destroys its essence, one gives up the question of being altogether and declares it to be a psuedoquestion. Or else one decides to acknowledge the now exposed impasse ("aporia"). One must then come to terms with it in some way. In such cases, the popular technique of making a virtue of necessity offers itself as a salvation. Accordingly, we could say in respect to our impasse that being itself forces us into this situation with no way out and even brings it about. Therefore, being would show itself to be what is represented as at once both unavoidable and yet ungraspable. What it shows itself to be in this way, this impasse, is precisely its essence. The impasse that being brings with it is being's own mark of distinction. Therefore, let us take the impasse as the predicate with whose help the decisive assertion about being can be won. It states: Being is every time, with every attempt to think it, converted into a being and thus destroyed in its essence; and yet being, as distinguished from all beings, cannot be denied. Being itself has just this kind of essence: it brings human thinking into an impasse. When we know that, we already know something essential about being.

P. 68-69

¶ 5:47 PM 12 comments

[T]he nature of Dasein is the always already physical dweller within the world because, unlike other entities, its nature is that of physically dwelling within the world. Heidegger would probably say that this is not a rational conclusion, but rather a tautological one.

¶ 3:01 PM 0 comments

[a]s with string theory, devising experiments to test for the new theory will also be difficult.

If the notion of space ceases to have meaning at the smallest scale, Markopoulou says, some of the consequences of that could have been magnified by the expansion that followed the big bang. "My guess is that the non-existence of space has effects that are measurable, if you can only see it right." Because it's pretty hard to wrap your mind around what it means for there to be no space, she adds.

[As a difference in points] space does not get grasped in its Being. Only in thinking is it possible for this to be done--in thinking as the synthesis which has gone through thesis and antithesis and transmuted them. Only if the negations do not simply remain subsisting in their indifference but get transmuted--that is, only if they themselves get negated--does space get thought and thus grasped in its Being.

P. 482

¶ 9:27 AM 1 comments

I can understand the journalistic misread. Many surely think that Benedict, as a German intellectual, must be as hard to understand as Heidegger, Hegel, or Kant. Maybe they skipped the reading and took the easy road of juicy sound bites. But Benedict is no typical German intellectual. He's so smart, and his thought is so refined, that he can be simple, profound, and precise at the same time. What he says, in its full context, is what he means, and much to the consternation of those who would like to offer their altogether unique interpretation, there is no need for fancy hermeneutics.

¶ 8:36 AM 0 comments

Gadamer later speaks of how Heidegger took up Schleiermacher's concern that a person understand a text without projecting one's self into the text. "All correct interpretation must be on guard against arbitrary fancies and the limitations imposed by imperceptible habits of thought and direct its gaze 'on the things themselves'". The way to discover that there is a difference between our own customary usage and that of the text, is to be "pulled up short by the text". We must remain open to the meaning of the other person or of the text.

But this kind of sensitivity involves neither 'neutrality' in the matter of the object nor the extinction of one's self, but the conscious assimilation of one's own fore-meanings and prejudices. The important things is to be aware of one's own bias, so that the text may present itself in all its newness and thus be able to assert its own truth against one's own fore- meanings.

"Prejudice" did not have its negative tinge until the Enlightenment, he continues. In German legal terminology, "prejudice (Vorurteil)" means a provisional legal verdict before the final verdict is reached. In English, lawyers speak of a finding to be given "without prejudice". In a similar way, an interpreter can use one's prejudice as part of the hermeneutic circle, whereby one takes in the message and utilizes a fore-understanding until such time as one is "pulled up short" and revises one's interpretation to fit the newly revealed, apparent sense of the text. This continues throughout an interpretation. To understand primarily means for two people to understand one another. People dialogue until they reach agreement. "Understanding becomes a special task only when this natural life in which each means and understand the same thing, is disturbed".

¶ 8:19 AM 0 comments

The meaning of guidewords: Instructions for reflection upon the difference between being and beings

We are attempting, through a series of guidewords, to raise into knowledge something about the being of beings. And this, for the present, only in order to procure for ourselves, entirely from afar and in a modest way, a preparation for the resolve to follow the ancient saying meleta to pan [Heidegger: "Take into care beings as a whole"], and in following what is incipient in Western thinking to come nearer and thus to know something of what, after all, is said in the inception. In case we are struck by a word from this inceptive saying, we are at least in clearer readiness for the direction toward which we must listen.

It must be observed with respect to misunderstandings already circulating that the guidewords about being do not appear as propositions that promulgate a special doctrine or system, or that merely develop a particular "theory" about being. The guidewords are not propositions that can be passed around as assertions "about" a "philosophical standpoint." Taken as such, they would be misunderstood in everything essential.

The guidewords are instructions for reflection upon what comes to light when we have a proper eye for what we can do without. And indeed this reflection can be carried out at all times, from all situations, and according to various forms. It also does not have to cling to the phrasing of what is said here.

The main point is this: to take notice of something neglected, to learn to take notice of it without the hasty urge to immediately seek out utility and purpose. In the realm of this reflection, it is a matter of having the courage not to be as "daring" as the usual and exclusive calculation of what is actual in each case. It is a matter of having the courage to look around the domain of the difference between beings and being and simply to recognize what holds sway here. It is a matter of resisting the nearly ineradicable thought that every such attempt is only a going astray in abstractions, and indeed to resist on grounds of the growing knowledge of being, which might appear to us like the incarnation of all abstraction pure and simple.

At the end we say: Being is the most said. For it is said in every word of language, and nevertheless discourse and writing talk for the most part only about beings. This comes to articulation. Even where we actually say the "is" and thus name being, we say the "is" only to assert a being about a being. Beings are said. Being is kept silent about. But not by us and on purpose. For we are unable to discover any trace of an intention not to say being. Hence, the keeping silent must indeed come from being itself. Hence, being is a keeping silent about itself, and this is certainly the ground of the possibility of keeping silent and the origin of silence. In this realm of silence, the word first arises each time.

P. 64-65

¶ 5:30 PM 0 comments

The discussion continues with Heidegger further clarifying the meaning of das Ereignis, and the same considerations we have addressed come into play. To think das Ereignis is to “step-back” from thinking about “the various epochs of the history of being (Geschichte des Seins).” Here, again, he means more precisely that the “history of being” is the history of the epochal renderings of the being-ness (Seiendheit) of beings because he explicitly adds that these “are the epochs of the various ways in which presence (Anwesenheit) dispenses itself to Western human beings” (61:367) from the Greek period to the contemporary period (and continuing forward). As he sees it, then, thinking must “go beyond” this history in order to think “Being as Being,” which even the Greeks could not quite achieve. Thinking that goes beyond metaphysics thinks das Ereignis as the temporal unfolding—which also withdraws itself from view—of beings (including human beings) in their being-ness as this comes to pass in all the different epochs. Thus, thinking das Ereignis is thinking Being as Being. And by virtue of this thinking, we become aware that “the history of being[ness] has not so much reached its end, as that it now appears as the history of being[ness].” One important lesson of this seminar discussion is that we realize that Sheehan, Maly, and some other commentators have claimed too much for the notion of das Ereignis. Thinking das Ereignis is not more fundamental than thinking Being as Being (Being itself); rather, fundamental thinking thinks Being as Being (Being itself) as das Ereignis.

¶ 3:05 PM 0 comments

In "Science and Reflection", Heidegger tells us that "science is the theory of the real." But he is quick to assure us that it is not the task of philosophy to tell us that. In fact, it tells us very little. It is, at bottom, a question; and it is the task of philosophy to interrogate such definitions, not make them.

I think that is basically right. More generally, I think it is the task of philosophers to describe specific knowledge claims (scientific moments, if you will) in terms of "the theory of the real".

¶ 11:04 AM 0 comments

Greetings to the participants of the 10th Colloquium
May 14-16, 1976 in Chicago


    Thoughtful people greet one another by posing to each other questions.

    The question, with which I greet you, is the only question, that even up to the present hour, I seek to inquire into ever more inquiringly. One knows this question under the title “the question of Being.”

    For us, this question can be asked, first of all, only by way of a discussion of Western-European metaphysics, and in particular with respect to the forgottenness of Being that has held sway in metaphysics from the beginning.

    In the metaphysical question about the being of beings (Sein des Seienden), Being itself (das Sein selbst) conceals itself regarding its own proper essence and place.

    This self-concealing of Being is different in the individual epochs (cf. Holzwege, “Der Spruch des Anaximander,” p. 296ff).

    The forgottenness of Being in the age of a world civilization imprinted by technology is especially pressing for posing the question of Being.

    From the variety of questions that are necessary here, the following one may be stated:

    Is modern natural science—as it is maintained—the foundation of modern technology or is it itself already the basic form of technological thinking, the determining fore-conception of technological re-presenting and of its constant intrusiveness in the implementing and manipulating machination of modern technology?

    Whose increasingly accelerating “efficiency” drives the forgottenness of Being in the extreme, and thus lets the question of Being appear as insignificant and redundant.

    In the few days of the Colloquium, you will not be able to answer, nor probably even be able to pose adequately, this question regarding the relation of modern natural science to modern technology.

    But it would be already sufficient and beneficial if each of the participants gave attention, each in his own way, to this question and took it up as a suggestion for his area of research.

    So, in this way, the question of Being may become more pressing and experienceable as what it is in truth:

    To think in its own proper essence—aletheia as such—which in the legacy from the beginning of the history of being has remained necessarily unthought in and for this beginning; and thereby [by bringing aletheia into such thoughtfulness] to prepare the possibility of a transformed way of being in the world for human beings.

Martin Heidegger        

Freiburg i. Br.
am 11. April 1976

¶ 7:33 AM 0 comments

This modern concept of reason is based, to put it briefly, on a synthesis between Platonism (Cartesianism) and empiricism, a synthesis confirmed by the success of technology. On the one hand it presupposes the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality, which makes it possible to understand how matter works and use it efficiently: this basic premise is, so to speak, the Platonic element in the modern understanding of nature. On the other hand, there is nature’s capacity to be exploited for our purposes, and here only the possibility of verification or falsification through experimentation can yield ultimate certainty. The weight between the two poles can, depending on the circumstances, shift from one side to the other. As strongly positivistic a thinker as J. Monod has declared himself a convinced Platonist/Cartesian.

This gives rise to two principles which are crucial for the issue we have raised. First, only the kind of certainty resulting from the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements can be considered scientific. Anything that would claim to be science must be measured against this criterion. Hence the human sciences, such as history, psychology, sociology and philosophy, attempt to conform themselves to this canon of scientificity. A second point, which is important for our reflections, is that by its very nature this method excludes the question of God, making it appear an unscientific or pre-scientific question. Consequently, we are faced with a reduction of the radius of science and reason, one which needs to be questioned.

[I]t is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by "science" and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective. The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective "conscience" becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it.

Here I am reminded of something Socrates said to Phaedo. In their earlier conversations, many false philosophical opinions had been raised, and so Socrates says: "It would be easily understandable if someone became so annoyed at all these false notions that for the rest of his life he despised and mocked all talk about being - but in this way he would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer a great loss". The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby.

¶ 7:47 AM 0 comments

If anyone on here is in my Heidegger class here's a sneak preview at tomorrow's seminar presentation. Six pages of explication on three sections of Being and Time. Good times?

¶ 7:42 AM 3 comments

Existentialism is a school of philosophic thought. The name is not like Platonism, Epicureanism, and Thomism. Existentialism is a nameless movement like pragmatism and positivism. Yet this is deceptive. Existentialism owes its overriding significance to a single man: Heidegger. Heidegger alone brought about such a radical change in philosophic thought as is revolutionizing all thought in Germany and continental Europe and is beginning to affect even Anglo-Saxony. I am not surprised by this effect. I remember the impression he made on me when I heard him first as a young Ph.D., in 1922. Up to that time I had been particularly impressed, as many of my contemporaries in Germany were, by Max Weber: by his intransigent devotion to intellectual honesty, by his passionate devotion to the idea of science--a devotion that was combined with a profound uneasiness regarding the meaning of science. On my way north from Freiburg, where Heidegger then taught, I saw, in Frankfurt-am-Main, Franz Rosenzweig, whose name will always be remembered when informed people speak about existentialism, and I told him of Heidegger. I said to him that, in comparison to Heidegger, Weber appeared to me as an "orphan child" in regard to precision and probing and competence. I had never seen before such seriousness, profundity, and concentration in the interpretation of philosophic texts. I had heard Heidegger's interpretation of certain sections of Aristotle, and some time later I heard Werner Jaeger in Berlin interpret the same texts. Charity compels me to limit my comparison to the remark that there was no comparison. Gradually the breadth of the revolution of thought which Heidegger was preparing dawned upon me and my generation. We saw with our eyes that there had been no such phenomenon in the world since Hegel. He succeeded in a very short time in dethroning the established schools of philosophy in Germany. There was a famous discussion between Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer in Davos which revealed the lostness and emptiness of this remarkable representative of established academic philosophy to everyone who had eyes. Cassirer had been a pupil of Hermann Cohen, the founder of the neo-Kantian school. Cohen had elaborated a system of philosophy whose center was ethics. Cassirer had transformed Cohen's system into a new system of philosophy in which ethics had completely disapeered. It had been silently dropped: he had not faced the problem. Heidegger did face the problem. He declared that ethiccs is impossible, and his whole being was permeated by the awareness that this fact opens up an abyss.

P. 27-28

¶ 6:51 AM 0 comments

What is the sense of this es geschieht etwas, something/it happens? Later we are told that "the sense of the something means precisely: 'what is experienceable in any sense.'" Heidegger was here critically deepening the historical heterology of being that he had developed in his qualifying dissertation and in his 1915-16 essay on history. It was then that he first equated the "primal category" and "primal element" of being (ens) with "the something in any sense," "what is experienceable in any sense," and "givenness." The upshot of our analysis of Heidegger's heterology was the following: The indifference of something (being) is marked by a transcendental inclination into heterothesis (alterity, difference) and haecceity (historical such-here-now-ness, individual-being). The givenness or "there is/it is given" (es gibt) of real being means that it is given as an Other that is historically such-here-now, at this particular time (jeweilig). In relation to its enactment by historical consciousness, the something of a futural telos of noematic sense and value that intentionally points into its fulfillment and analogical differentiation within the alterity and haecceity of historical being (the Umwelt, individual persons, groups, institutions, cultural worldviews, epochs, historical Ereignisse such as the birth of Christ, famines, wars). The something is a dynamic analogical identity-in-difference similar to "a bundle of rays flowing together in a single point." But we must also be aware that, by sharply distinguishing the pretheoretical something from the theoretical logical something, Heidegger's KNS 1919 course criticized the metaphysical elements in his earlier treatment of the something, namely, its identification with "object in any sense" and ultimately with atemporal "validity" and "value," as well as the characterization of its enactments in history as "objectifications." All this still involved the theorization that leads to deworlding, deliving, and dehistoricizing. Regarding the notion of validity, Heidegger asked: "Is this a founded, even extremely founded phenomenon?...Validity is ultimately a phenomenon constituted by its subject matter, presupposing not only intersubjectivity but further historical consciousness as such!"

P. 273-274

¶ 9:44 AM 0 comments

I looked for another container, this one not a tin but a small carton, definately from a later period, one which I had opened on countless occasions before we sat down to our meals. Its illustration would have been slightly different: still the same gentlemen, who still were drinking the amazing water from champagne glasses, except that clearly visible on the table before them was a carton identical to the actual carton, and on that second one were depicted the same gentlemen, drinking in front of a table on which appeared yet another carton of powder, that one also with gentlemen who...and so on forever. You new that all you needed was a magnifying glass, en abime, like Chinese boxes or Matrioshka dolls. Infinity, as seen through the eyes of a boy who has yet to study Zeno's paradox. The race towards an unreachable goal; neither the tortoise nor Achilles would ever reach the last carton, the last gentleman, the last waitress. We learn as children the metaphysics of the infinite and infinitesimal calculus, though we are unaware of what we are learning, and it might be the image of an Endless Regress or its opposite, the dreadful promise of the Eternal Return and of the turning of the ages that bite their own tails, because upon reaching the final carton, were there such a thing, we might have discovered, at the bottom of that vortex, ourselves, holding the first carton in our hands. Why had I decided to become an antiquarian book dealer if not in order to have a fixed point, the day that Gutenberg printed the first Bible in Mainz, to go back to? At least you know that nothing existed before that, or rather, other things existed, but you know that you can stop there[.]

P. 121-122

¶ 9:58 AM 0 comments

My blog for this reason will be dedicated to addressing these problems by attempting to translate and elaborate his obscure prose into a more accessible and philosophically useful language. In this way, I hope to better understand or should I say Disclose Heidegger.

¶ 10:32 AM 0 comments

a breaking in of presence to puzzle Heidegger,
who searched for exiled gods and found
a thing or two but thought the earth abandoned

yet everything is here, everything
comes to us in this good time.

¶ 10:20 AM 0 comments

[T]o teach poetry in accordance with Heidegger's insights means developing a different relation to language, whereby language is not just a means of asserting and communicating. Pupils and students can be shown that through reading and listening to great poems you can relate to language 'as that wherein the openness and conversance of world first of all bursts forth and is.' Heidegger would probably advise the teacher to point out to students how great poetry can assist each person to consider language as a source of perceiving beings and relating to Being from new perspectives. The teacher should indicate that listening to the Saying of great poetry is a manner of dwelling upon earth. Such has nothing to do with the accepted approach which views poetry as a manner of appealing to the reader's or the listener's aesthetic feelings.

¶ 1:20 PM 0 comments

It's not every day that dance artists make the leap of faith to create a dance based on philosophical writings. But unlike many men and women in the field, Cristina Campisi and Louis Turcotte take the plunge and invoke the German philosopher's metaphysical musings on being there - or not - in their new dance work, Gestell.

¶ 8:48 AM 0 comments

I felt horrible again after discovering that the thief had also taken my favourite backpack, which contained nothing but the Routledge Guide to Heidegger's Being and Time (2nd edition) that I had purchased two weeks ago.

¶ 9:21 PM 0 comments

Uncanonical subjects, such as Lusophone language and culture, the writings of Ivan Illich, traditional breads of Europe and the Middle East, and auto mechanics, are offered alongside Shakespeare, Proust, Lévi-Strauss, and Marx. Philosophy is perennially in fashion. A student nicknamed Dasein, after a term in Heidegger, told me, "'False dichotomy' and 'discourse' are our favorite words."

¶ 3:49 PM 0 comments

[I]n the first presentation of Sein und Zeit, the actual "systematic" section on "Time and Being" proved to be inadequate, while external circumstances (such as the enlargement of the volume of [Husserl's] Yearbook) fortunately hindered the publication of this section in which, considering its inadequacy, I had placed little confidence. This section was destroyed but it was immediately approached anew in a more historical manner in the lecture-course of the summer semester 1927.

Nevertheless, viewed from the standpoint of these retrospective observations, "Time and Being", that totally inadequate section would have been in the end quite important if it were to be printed. This publication would not have let the misinterpretation of Sein und Zeit as a mere "ontology" of man and the misconstrual of "fundamental ontology" go as far as these misinterpretations have gone and are going.

Precisely because vis-à-vis the entire metaphysics hitherto the inquiry of Sein und Zeit into the meaning of being (into a projecting-opening of the truth of being -- not of being -- ) is something entirely different, the inquiry in the withheld section on "Time and Being" could have shown nevertheless what Sein und Zeit accomplishes, although what this work strives for is often enough said in what is communicated. For the inadequacy of the withheld section in "Time and Being" was not because of an uncertainty concerning the direction of the inquiry and its domain, but because of an uncertainty that only concerned the appropriate elaboration.

And yet, who is now able to assess precisely what was, or what would have been "better"?
P. 366-7

¶ 11:05 AM 2 comments

Terrence Malick in The New World comes close to revealing the spiritual presence beyond the material reality—the reality of nature—that we can see: he makes being—the luminescent fact of existence—vivid.

¶ 12:50 PM 0 comments