In-der-Blog-sein

Freedom, Playfulness and Education on playfulness and dasein.

[P]layfulness can inform and replenish Dasein by being a conduit for greater awareness of authentic being or it may allow further falling to the they. Each of these has its own apparent understanding.

  ¶ 12:14 PM 0 comments

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Phylax Blog on why the West is not as Greek as some think.

[Heidegger] asserted that the identity of modern Europe and its origins are not Greek, as is usually assumed by certain discourses of Western history since the Enlightenment and by some modern day Greeks, but more closely rooted in the Roman (or Latin) world.

Despite the initial surprise of Heidegger’s assertion, a closer examination reveals he was partially correct, leading to important implications for our understanding of Greek and Western identity which is of vital importance to Greeks living in Hellas, and even more so for Greeks in the Omogeneia, that are in greater danger of being isolated and eventually severed from Hellenism. Heidegger’s assertion also shows the partial illegitimacy of the contemporary fetish of appropriating elements of Hellenism to justify political positions and actions of certain groups of people in the Clash of Civilization discourse.

  ¶ 9:55 AM 0 comments

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Panoptikon is asking the first question.

The term 'question-asker' is ugly but reveals the nature of the task, namely that the person who asks a question is at the same time affirming the existence of the question (and hence existence) which begs the further question of the existence of the question: why the why? Why the "why are there beings at all instead of nothing"? In reality, however, this is equivalent to asking "why are there beings at all instead of nothing" and so, with this question at least, no further regression is possible. It is truly, as Heidegger noted, the "first" question, not chronologically but in rank.

  ¶ 9:39 AM 0 comments

  I noticed that on the right, in the Google ads, there sometimes appears an offer for a free copy of Being and Time. It surprises me how narrowly focused some marketing campaigns are today; that people interested in B&T are a large enough demographic group worth marketing to. This blog averages around fifty visitors a day. Is a maximum of fifty potential customers per day worth the cost of creating a targeted campaign? It hardly sees so from this end. I expect that from the Goggle ads, with the current click-through rate, this blog will receive its first check from Google sometime in the twenty-teens. I won't be quitting my day job anytime soon.

Clicking through that ad, one learns that "free" only means as remuneration for signing up for a record or DVD club. Since I have had that particular tome on my shelves for some time, I haven't followed through on their offer. And I wonder if the offer is legit, given that the book actually costs someone real money. If, after turning over your personal information, and completing the requirements, you actually get a copy of B&T, please let us know.  ¶ 7:36 AM 0 comments

  Slavoj Žižek explains that painful event.

For Heidegger, Event has nothing to do with ontic processes; it designates the "event" of new epochal disclosure of Being, the emergence of a new "world" (as the horizon of meaning within which all entities appear). Deleuze is a vitalist insisting on the absolute immanence of the Event to the order of Being, conceiving Event as the One-All of the proliferating differences of Life. Badiou, on the contrary, asserts the radical "dualism" between Event to the order of being. It is here in this terrain, that we should locate today's struggle between idealism and materialism: idealism posits an ideal Event which cannot be accounted for in terms of its material (pre)conditions, while the materialist wager is that we can get "behind" the event and explore how Event explodes out of the gap in/of the order of Being. The first to formulate this task was Schelling, who, in his Welalter fragments, outlined the dark territory of the "prehistory of Logos," of what had to occur in preontological protoreality so that the openness of Logos and temporality could take place. With regard to Heidegger, we should risk a step behind the Event, naming/outlining the cut, the terrifying seizure/contraction, which enables any ontological disclosure. The problem with Heidegger is not only (as John Caputo argues) that he dismisses ontic pain with regard to ontological essence, but that he dismisses the proper (Pre)ontological pain of the Real ("symbolic castration").

P. 166

Ouch. Is ontological pain real? Later Žižek opines on Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo (and what doesn't he touch in these 400 pages?), but sadly misses the opportunity to discuss the proper status of ontology as an interrogation technique.  ¶ 7:18 AM 2 comments

  It is rare to find Heidegger referring to contemporary political figures in his works, so I was surprised to find him addressing this barrage of questions at the Reich Chancellor. But not publically. Although written in 1939, this was published posthumously.

"There is no attitude, which could not be ultimately justified by the ensuing usefulness for the totality" (Adolf Hitler 30, January 1939)

Who makes up this totality? (Eighty million-strong extant human mass? Does its extantness assign to this human mass the right to the claim on a continued existence?)

How is this totality determined? What is its goal? Is it itself the goal of all goals? Why? Wherein lies the justification for this goal-setting?

When is the usefulness of an attitude ascertained? Wherein lies the criterion for usefulness? Who determines the usefulness? By what means does this determination justify itself in each case? Can and should the one who adopts an "attitude" also judge its usefulness and its harm at the same time?

Why is usefulness the criterion for the legitimacy of a human attitude? On what is this principle grounded? Who determies the ownmost of the domain of man?

From where does the appeal to usefulness as the measure of truth acquire its comprehensibility? Does comprehensibility justify legitimacy?

What is "totality", if not the quantitative expansion of a particular conception of man as an individual?

What does attitude mean? Does one arrive at what is fundamental to human being through an attitude? If not, then what does justification of an attitude by the totality and by the ensuing usefulness for the totality mean?

Is there not in this concept "attitude" already a renunciation of every fundamental questionability of a human being with respect to its hidden relation to beyng?

Is not man beforehand and ultimately tied here to the pursuit and control of beings in the abandonment by being? and what are "ideas"? Do they not count as names for the final 'dis-humanization' of everything that man still and always creates beyond himself, so that through "ideas" he inevitably falls below his ownmost? Are not "ideas" phantoms that serve solely the "eternal" forth-rolling and up-surging of "life" and fully close off man in his animality as a "living-being"?

Is not all "attitude" together with totality of a "people" shoved down the yawning abyss of "beings" insofar as attitude and totality always merely spin around themselves?

And does not such a 'casting-oneself-away' to being entail the ultimate renunciation of every inceptual, fundamental calling of man for struggling -- with a knowing leap unto beyng -- for the essence of gods and for 'the time-space' of their essencing?

P. 102-103

  ¶ 9:33 AM 0 comments

  Michel Haar, referring to Heidegger's catastrophic prediction in "Overcoming Metaphysics", writes:

In this extreme hypothesis, the other history would effectively be chronologically posterior. Most of the texts leave one to think that, on the contrary, the other history would be a secret history, parallel to that of the technical world which would follow its path without one being able to assign to it visible external events. This would be the secret history of the Ereignis that is rather outside of history, non-historical, or in any case outside of the epoch. The Ereignis is this event of thought by which such an elementary constatation appears as a momentary glimpse that humankind belongs to Being and Being belongs to humankind, that there is a coappropriation which is older than history and rules over all of its phases. It appears that the emergence of the Ereignis and of the new beginning depend on our own initiative, or at least in the texts of 1936-38 they arise out of a human decision: "We are standing before the decision between the end (and its running out, which may still take centuries) and another beginning, one which can only be a moment, but whose preparation requires the patience 'optimists' are no more capable of than 'pessimists.'

The essential term in this passage, a moment, belongs to the vocabulary of Being and Time where the moment (Augenblick) is, in contrast to a given now, the moment of the resolute decision where temporality, reassembled into a project, both anticipates the extreme finitude of the future and takes up again the constancy of a possible past. A decision is possible only if we are authentically open to an extreme future and capable of repeating an essential past. Here the essential past is the first beginning, that of the greeks. We must, says Heidegger, appropriate it for ourselves to put it behind ourselves, and prepare for the second beginning.

P. 161

  ¶ 5:34 PM 2 comments

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Heideggerian Denken is posting again, touching on Nietzsche,

This is a Nietzsche that most have never heard: the call to tradition, authority, and responsibility. In fact, the Nietzsche who opposed "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles" and who despised the "brutal training, designed to prepare huge numbers of young men, with as little loss of time as possible, to become usable, abusable, in government service" is rarely heard.

and the question of being.

An understanding of being, no matter how provisional, is a positive constituent of Dasein's being as seen in the fact that Dasein is that being that intelligibly speaks of being. Thus, there is no "circular argument" in raising the question of being in this way: we are not assuming a concept of being and then proving it by examining Dasein; rather, we are "laying bare the grounds for [answering the question about the meaning of being] and exhibiting them", which ground is that being that understands being.

  ¶ 8:39 AM 0 comments

  Heidegger is at his most catastrophic in the "End of Metaphysics".

Before Being can occur in its primal truth, Being as the will must be broken, the world must be forced to collapse and the earth must be driven to desolation, and man to mere labor. Only after this decline does the abrupt dwelling of the Origin take place for a long span of time. In the decline, everything, that is, beings in the whole of the truth of metaphysics, approaches its end.

P. 86

  ¶ 5:50 PM 0 comments

  This excerpt from Joanna Hodge's book links history, the Ereignis event and the Augenblick moment, with language.

In his essay on Hölderlin, "Hölderlin and the essence of poetry", given in Rome in 1936 as a public lecture, Heidegger writes of human beings as distinct from all other creatures. He asks: "Who is humanity?" and responds: "That which must bear witness to what is". He continues: "Being a witness as a belonging together with entities as a whole occurs as history. In order that history should be possible human beings are given language." Heidegger then expands this thought about language: "However, the essence of language is not exhausted is being a means of communication for human beings. With this determination its essence is not yet touched on. Only a consequence of its essence has been elaborated." Already in this paper, language is not to be conceived of as subordinated to human intention: "Language is not just a tool which human beings possess along with others. Language preserves the possibility of standing in the openness of entities. Only where there is language is there a world." To which Heidegger then adds: "Only where there is world is there history." Conversely, where there is no world, there can no longer be history; and Heidegger's analyses of the world reveal that in the age of technology human beings lose the possibility of conceiving of the world and with that they lose any sense of history. Heidegger goes on to add: "Language is not some tool to be applied, but that very event [Ereignis] that prevails over the highest possibility of human beings." The impoverishment of language so as to appear to be only a tool is one sign of the extreme withdrawal of being that characterises the age of technology.

In the next section Heidegger claims: "We, human beings, are a conversation. The being of human beings grounds in language; but this occurs genuinely as conversation." He thendevelops this notion of conversation, which he finds in Hölderlin's sketch for his poem Friedensfeir ("Celebration of Peace"). Heidegger writes of a moment at which conservation and a seperation of time into past, present and future become simultaneously possible:

For there to be a single conversation, an essential expression must remain connected to a "one and the same." Without this connection even, indeed especially, conflictual conversation is impossible. This one and the same can only come in view of something remaining and permanent. Permanence and remaining come to appearance only when persistence and the present are made evident.

Heidegger then makes a connection to a quite specific experience and structure of temporality: to the emergence of history and of the entity human being which has become historical:

This, however, occurs only at that moment [Augenblick] when time opens itself out into its extensions. Since human beings have set something up as remaining in the present, since then they have first set up something as changing, as coming and going; for only what is persisting can change. Only since "rending time" rent itself into present, past and future, has there been the possibility of uniting oneself with something which remains. We have been a single conversation since the time there has been time. Only since time has emerged and been brought to a stand, since then we have become historical. Both: being a conversation and being historical--are the same age and belong together and are the same.

For time to emerge it is necessary to bring it to a standstill in a seperation of past, present and future in the moment [Augenblick] of thought. At this moment, the possibility of history and of speaking emerge simultaneously. This is a moment of originary time, which does not take place within history, within chronological process, but makes both of these possible. Heidegger goes on to claim: "Since we have been a conversation, human beings have experienced much and named the gods in many ways. Snce language became conversation, the gods have come to expression and the world has appeared." When the possibility of naming the gods is withdrawn and the world disapears, then history also withdraws and our relation to language is impoverished. Heidegger seems to suggest that it is our attempt to take control of language which reduces the productiveness of our relation to language. Being historical, but no longer having a sense of history, would change the relation to language from this stance of responsiveness.

Pp. 123-5

The Heidegger bits all come from GA 4.  ¶ 6:47 AM 0 comments

  This passage from "The Age of the World Picture" recaps the event of modernity that defines the age, manifested in the globalization made possible by miniaturization, and indicates that the response must be neither railing against "Americanism" nor turning back.

A sign of this event is the appearance everywhere, and in the most varied forms and disguises, of the gigantic. At the same time, the huge announces itself in the direction of the ever smaller. We have only to think of the numbers of atomic physics. The gigantic presses forward in a form which seems to make it disapeer: in destruction of great distances by the airplane, in the representations of foreign and remote worlds in their everydayness produced at will by the flick of a switch. One thinks too superficially, however, if one takes the gigantic to be merely an endlessly extended emptiness of the purely quantitative. One thinks too briefly if one finds the gigantic, in the form of the continual never-having-been-here-before, to spring merely from a blind impulse to exaggerate and excel. One thinks not at all if one takes oneself to have explained this appearance of the gigantic with the slogan "Americanism".

The gigantic is, rather, that through which the quantitative acquires its own kind of quality, becomes thereby, a remarkable form of the great. A historical age is not only given in a different way from others; it also has, in every case, its own concept of greatness. As soon, however, as the gigantic, in planning, calculating, establishing, and securing, changes from the quantitative and becomes its own special quality, then the gigantic and the seemingly calculable become, through this shift, incalculable. This incalculability becomes the invisible shadow cast over all things when has become the subiectum and the world has become picture.

Through this shadow the modern world withdraws into a space beyond representation and so lends to the incalculable its own determinateness and historical uniqueness. This shadow, however, points to something else, knowledge of which, to us moderns, is refused. Yet man will never be able to experience and think this refusal as long as he goes around merely negating the age. The flight into tradition, out of a combination of humility and presumption, achieves, in itself, nothing, is merely a closing the eyes and blindness towards the historical moment [Augenblick].

P. 72-73

That the current circumstances are referred to as a moment [Augenblick] and not an event [Ereignis] indicates that the latter term is reserved for the uncovering of the invisible shadow.  ¶ 8:39 AM 0 comments

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Teacher Rowie has decided that philosopher cannot be separated from biography.

The author is not, should not be dead, in philosophy. Every philosopher writes out of a unique historical context, and the validity and strength of his/her arguments spring from that unique historical context.

What's really interesting though, is news that there's a video of Hannah and Martin circulating.  ¶ 4:41 AM 0 comments

  China Miéville's Iron Council is a novel about historical destiny and those struggling to create their own events. In this bit our heroes confront the agent (Jacobs) of the bad guys (Tesh) who are sending a new god to destroy New Crobuzon. And now historical events are over shadowed by events of the moment (Augenblick) as beings emerge, and others disappear into hiddenness.

"I know your gods," Qurabin said. The thing kept coming. The buildings tensed. Spiral Jacobs looked suddenly afraid.

Qurabin was only a voice, moving through the empty space. The monk sounded hysterical, aggressive, eager to fight. Qurabin taunted Spiral Jacobs. Had she or he still known Tesh, Cutter was certain that was what he would have heard, that glottal and interruptive language. Ragamoll was all that was left to Qurabin.

"Jinxing...it's easy to intimidate them as don't know what it is, yes? But what if you face one as does, eh? Another Teshi? Who can find out Teshi secrets? Your secrets?"

Spiral Jacobs shouted something.

"I don't understand you no more, mate," Qurabin said, but Cutter was sure the ambassador had said traitor.

"Know who I am?" Qurabin said.

"Aye, I know who y'are," shouted Jacobs, and he pushed out his hands sending a swirl of the buttery haint-stuff at where the voice came from, but the swirling air met no resistance. "You're a Momentist blatherer."

Judah was trying to stand, was burrowing his hands in dirt that shook with the incoming spirit-thing. He was trying to raise a golem, any golem, something.

"It's coming," Cutter shouted. It was coming out of its burrow into the real, it was unfolding into more and more impossible conjunctions. The dimensions of the bricks and the edges of the walls strained as it came close. Architecture stirred.

"Your godlings and demiurgii all live in the Moments, Tesh-man. And my Moment knows." Qurabin's voice was tremendous, louder than the oncoming of the murder-thing.

P. 483

"Momentist blatherer"--I'll have to remember that one when the occasion calls for it.  ¶ 5:50 PM 0 comments

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Anglican + Calvinist on Helping Old Ladies Worship Jesus since 33 AD, apparently a good thing, and apparently written by a certain Hans-Georg Gadamer of Oxford.

Living is not about knowing facts, it is about being-in-the-world. And here is where Heidegger comes to the rescue of old ladies who go to church ever week without "knowing" what is going on in the Eucharist.

  ¶ 10:40 AM 0 comments

  Lee Smolin on the hidden.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus left us a lovely epigram: Nature loves to hide. It is so often true. There is no way Heraclitus could have seen an atom. No matter how much his fellow philosophers speculated about them, to see an atom was beyond any technology they might have imained. These days, theorists make great use of nature's tendency to inscrutability. If nature is indeed supersymmetric, or has more than three dimensions of space, she has hidden it well.

But sometimes the opposite is true. Sometimes the key things are right in front of us, there for the seeing. Hiding in plain sight from Heraclitus were easily perceivable facts we now take for granted, like the principal of inertia or the constant acceleration of falling objects. Galileo's onservations of motion on earth did not use the telescope or the mechanical clock. As afr as I know, they could have been made in Heraclitus's time. He only had to ask the right questions.

P. 203

  ¶ 8:47 PM 0 comments

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Acts of Communion has an interview with artist John Newling, where he explains how not to engage the public.

One of the central ambitions that I’ve had has been that you can take truthful but difficult challenging ideas to a wider public but in order to do that a) you’ve got to know what you’re talking about and b) you’ve got to be able to articulate that not in simplistic terms but in simple terms so that people can understand it. You can’t start off by saying ‘My work is about free will and it’s relationship to Heidegger’. But you can say ‘How many things in life do we think are predetermined?’ Then you can start to get access.

  ¶ 9:00 AM 0 comments

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The View from Nowhere reports on Saul Kripke's amusement.

The only thing of Heidegger's that I have read are the phrases cited by Carnap: I thought that he [Carnap] had made them up, but I went to verify whether they were real and dicsovered that Heidegger had actually said them in all seriosness. Remember? "I will speak of being and of nothing else". What else could there be, other than being? These are jokes".

  ¶ 8:55 AM 0 comments

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Art, Artist and Galleries wonders:

If Heidegger liked the folk of the field,
did Heidegger enjoy listening to polka?
Did Martin ever perform the Chicken Dance?
Did Heidegger ever own a squeeze box?
Is there a "Heidegger’s Greatest Polka Hits" LP?
Did he convert his own poetry into Polkas?

I never found a smiling picture of the man, but I will keep searching.

Here's one.

Happy Heidegger
Don't know about the polkas though. I picture him as more of a slapping the lederhosen kind of a dancer.  ¶ 6:48 AM 0 comments

  SUNY Press is 40 years old.

It's no accident, perhaps, that the all-time best-selling book from SUNY Press is German existential philosopher and phenomenologist Martin Heidegger's "Being and Time." Published in 1996, Joan Stambaugh's acclaimed translation has sold 35,000 copies so far and generated $500,000.

  ¶ 8:40 PM 0 comments

  Al Gore, closeted Heideggerean?

Despite the parade of quotes and references from Plato and Arendt, there is one thinker conspicuously absent from both Schell and Gore’s numerous citations but whose spirit is present on almost every page of both books: Martin Heidegger. Perhaps the absence of a reference to Heidegger is due to reticence or discretion, given Heidegger’s dubious and complicated association with Nazism. Nothing derails an argument faster than playing the reductio ad Hitlerum card. More likely it is the abstruse and difficult character of Heidegger’s arguments[.]

  ¶ 11:54 AM 0 comments

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Musings from the Lehigh Valley on the latest twist of l'affaire Heidegger.  ¶ 11:39 AM 0 comments

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Squeeze on subverting the essence of standing-reserve through repurposing the reusable.

The chief activity of salvage, gathering, seeks to preserve objects so they may unfold in keeping with their essence. This act of saving is also an act of building, of poiesis, of bringing-forth the true into the beautiful, and as such it makes genuine dwelling possible. Such saving serves as a reminder of the originary meaning of techne, of the making of things that are not only useful but true to their own essence.

  ¶ 11:24 AM 0 comments

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Dana explains Ontology and Hermeneutics.

[I]f we are to understand anything at all, we must already find ourselves 'in' the world 'along with' that which is to be understood. All understanding that is directed at the grasp of some particular subject matter is thus based in a prior 'ontological' understanding -- a prior hermeneutical situatedness. On this basis, hermeneutics can be understood as the attempt to 'make explicit' the structure of such situatedness. Yet since that situatedness is indeed prior to any specific event of understanding, so it must always be presupposed even in the attempt at its own explication. Consequently, the explication of this situatedness -- of this basic ontological mode of understanding -- is essentially a matter of exhibiting or 'laying-bare' a structure with which we are already familiar (the structure that is present in every event of understanding), and, in this respect, hermeneutics becomes one with phenomenology, itself understood, in Heidegger's thinking, as just such a 'laying bare'.

  ¶ 9:53 PM 0 comments

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Mormon Metaphysics inquires about the connection between the notion that knowledge and understanding are limited by the language they are articulated in, and often quoted "language is the house of being". It seems to me that if there are any limitations, the guardians of the house can just make up new words and language for us.  ¶ 9:40 PM 0 comments

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Olga at Spirituality and Technology sets the controls for the essence of tech.

The problem is not technology, but the essence of technology. Human essence reveals itself in a human-constructed essence of technology. And here is where a potential danger hides. The danger "of enframing [that] threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth...". This is what frightens us. Perhaps, in order to manifest something, to create and to reveal, something always has to be destroyed first, concealed...destruction and creation are those two poles that are bind together beyond any dualistic constructions. This is why Heidegger quotes some poet [Hölderlin]: ..."where danger is, grows the saving power also..."

  ¶ 9:16 PM 0 comments

  I found this in a review of a book on Romanticism.

In the volume's penultimate entry, Dreyfus and Spinosa contend that, despite some appearances to the contrary, Heidegger is neither a "nostalgic romantic" nor akin to later romantics who focus on loss and destruction, itself a technological reaction to technology, of a piece with the project of mastering--and thereby succumbing--to it. The problem for Heidegger, Dreyfus and Spinosa submit (somewhat precipitously, in my view), is not so much the destruction of nature and culture or a self-indulgent consumerism as it is the exclusive hold of a certain style of practices of revealing people and things, practices of technicity that inhibit our openness to those people and things, while suppressing alternatives. The key to technicity's dominance is the endless transformability of people and things, both construed as part of a standing-reserve, reserved for no one in particular. The very antithesis of anything conspiratorial, the metaphysical shroud of modern technology prevails over everything with the single, amoral dictate of making the most of possibilities. In Dreyfus and Spinosa's apt formulation: "We thus become part of a system that no one directs but which moves towards the total mobilization and enhancement of all beings, even us". The situation is not hopeless. Japanese culture allegedly attests to the possibility of using technology without taking over its understanding of being, and the history of Western thinking shows that this understanding, like other understandings of being, is not inevitable but received. Beyond recognizing technicity for what it is, namely, a relative, historical understanding of being, Heidegger's positive response to technology consists in, not simply accepting the mystery of the gift of this understanding, but also protecting "endangered species of practices," engaging in marginal ("focal") practices that resist optimization. After sketching Heidegger's account of these practices, centered around some saving power of an everyday thing, in terms of the four elements: earth, sky, mortals, divinities, Dreyfus and Spinosa elaborate how the account applies significantly to use of a highway bridge or computer. Though use of them absents us from local worlds, it can, by the same token, also make us sensitive to their multiplicity so long as we recognize that such use discloses only one possible world and "we maintain skills for disclosing other kinds of local worlds". Dreyfus and Spinosa conclude by noting that Heidegger in a late seminar abandoned the ontological difference, reflecting his appreciation of the impediment that a unified understanding of being presents to "the gathering of local worlds". It warrants mentioning that Heidegger takes issue with the ontological difference already in the Beiträge (1936-38).

  ¶ 9:07 PM 0 comments

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Anglican Eucharistic Theology has a great exposition on John Macquarrie's writings on the eucharist. Macquarrie is one of the translators of B&T.  ¶ 8:49 PM 0 comments

  The Young Heidegger continues, with the difference that Ereignis makes from the background, as different from what may be theorized.

Given its "Ereignis-character," the "indifference" in the formal category of the preworldly primal something is to be sharply distinguished from the empty objectified "something" in the theoretical question, "Is there somehting?," or in any traditional theoretical treatment of the category of being.

The indifference over against every genuine worldishness...is in no way identical with delivedness [Entlebtheit] or indeed with the highest stage of this, with the most sublime theorization. It does not mean the absolute interruption of the relation to life, the unwinding of deliving, the theoretical establishment and cold-clocking of something experienced.

The contrast can be summarized in the following way. The indifferent formal category of the primal something is originally the futural moment of pretheoretical life itself and, as a differentiating Ereignis, worlds-out into a "worldly something" that is "for me." But the empty generality of the traditional notion of the something (being) theorizes and reifies the primal something, so that it now amounts to the identical presence (dehistoricizing) of universal "real-being" (designifying) that is impersonally present for a cognitive ego (deliving). "The something in general, about whose 'there-is-ing/it-giving' we questioned, does not world," does not e-vent/en-own for me. The intentional content/relation/temporalizing configuration of primal being is world/person/eventing (differentiating), whereas that of theorized being is thinghood/knowing/presence (identity). In fact, Heidegger maintained here that, given the derivative status of the theorized something of "real-being," its appearance is just one more, albeit derivative differentiation of the primal something, of "the experienceable in any sense." For "the environmental is something; the valued is something; the valid is something".

P. 276

Continued.  ¶ 7:35 PM 0 comments

  Newropeans on the philosophic roots of Europe.

[L]et us re-read the famous sentence, steeped in eurocentrism, by M. Heidegger: "If they (science and democracy) are able to leave a mark of the civilization of the entire world it is because they issue from the core of the European historical process, which is to say, the philosophic process."

Looking at the beginning, it seems we cannot help putting the very question that was asked for the first time by the Greeks, ti-estin? The civilization of the whole planet, the sciences of the whole planet have had this mark, and again, calling upon Heidegger, we can read "If they are able to give their own imprint today, if that specifies the history of the man on the whole planet, this happens because they draw origin from the most internal process Western European history, that is to say, from the philosophic one".

It deals, in sum, with the philosophical questioning. The word philosophia, in this way comes to coincide with the action of the birth of our history, with the action of the birth of the present epoch. The Greek adjective philosophoz, philosopher, very probably coined by Heraclitus, attached to the man, means him who loves sophon, him who can speak as the logos speaks. The relation between philein and logos, between the two terms, is armonia, but harmony is not something of static and fixed, is not a synthesis, it is also tension toward the logos, tension for knowledge, establishing a new relation with “the world”. Commonly, by the concept of “world” we assume, usually unreflectively, the totality of that to which human behaviour can be related and assume that this “totality” can be viewed as a whole.

It is useful, anyway, to make a well-timed distinction between harmony and what in English we call attunement (in German Stimmung). The first is the experience of moods, which stir or shake us deeply and has a lasting effect on our whole lives, the second is the superficial attunement, the rapidly fluctuating good and bad mood of everyday life. The first experience arises from out of the fundament or ground (Grund) of human existence and constitutes simultaneously the ground or reason (Grund) for the discovery, by individuals or communities, of the possibilities from which human existence receives its measure. In this case the right and fundamental meaning of logos is not “gathering,” as Heidegger suggests, it can be better signified by the phrase “laying-open of a relation”.

  ¶ 8:56 PM 0 comments

  Time and space, that's where blinking enowning happens.

[W]hile in much of Heidegger’s work there is an opposition between space and place, this is in order to distance place from space understood as extension—that is understood mathematically, geometrically, through calculation. But here, as in a few other late pieces, notably ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, Heidegger collapses the terms back together, by hinting at their originary bond. This was clearly the intent of the understanding of time-space in the Beiträge. Time-space is not simply the coupling of time and space, but the very notion that allows each to be thought distinctly. Zeit-Raum is not the same as Zeitraum, that is a span of time, a notion that betrays a measured, mathematical sense. What this means is that neither time nor space in this idea are understandable in terms of their ordinary representations, but rather time-space is ‘originally the site for the moment of propriation [Augenblicks-Stätte des Ereignisses]’.

  ¶ 10:46 AM 0 comments

  From an article on economics and that notorious nuisance hermeneutics.

At first, I thought that these German hermeneuticians were simply ill-served by their translators into English. But my German friends assure me that Heidegger, Gadamer, et al. are equally unintelligible in the original. Indeed, in a recently translated essay, Eric Voegelin, a philosopher not normally given to scintillating wit, was moved to ridicule Heidegger's language. Referring to Heidegger's master work, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), Voegelin refers to the meaningless but insistent repetition of a veritable philosophical dictionary of phrases as the Anwesen des Answesenden ("the presence of that which is present"), the Dingen des Dings ("the thinging of the thing"), the Nichten des Nichts ("the nothinging of the nothing"), and finally to the zeigenden Zeichen des Zeigzeugs ("the Pointing sign of the pointing implement"), all of which is designed, says Voegelin, to whip up the reader "into a reality-withdrawing state of linguistic delirium."

  ¶ 8:14 AM 0 comments

  Interviewed in today's Spectator, Bernard-Henri Lévy sticks to the facts.

The founders of the extremist Islamic movements shortly after the first world war, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, were all inspired by the same books on which the Nazis also drew, Lévy argues. ‘When you see the texts of the Baathist theoreticians or those of the Muslim Brotherhood, they have their inspiration in European theoreticians of the 1920s and 1930s, racists, eugenicists, and also anti-Americanism. They talk of democracy not being adapted to the Arab world, about democracy being a Western theory, a French one, an American one.’ To make their views more attractive, the early Islamic extremists shrouded themselves in the flag of anti-Americanism and quoted from German thinkers of the day, followers of Oswald Spengler and Martin Heidegger, he says.

Their conversation leaves the interviewer wondering

for the first time in my life whether we would not in fact be better off if our public intellectuals were more like those in France.

When Lévy's accounts from his travels through the USA appeared in the Atlantic last year, my impression was that they were pretty mundane. He had none of those wacky insights one would have expected from other French philosophers, like say Baudrillard. Still, there's something to be said for sticking to the facts themselves.  ¶ 8:39 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Academici has a letter from Dr. Laurence Hemming proposing a Heidegger and Aquinas reading group.  ¶ 2:59 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

The Charioteer is asking questions about Heidegger's critique of Scheler.

Heidegger’s description of Scheler’s anthropology and personalism—as spirit defined in terms of its acts and opposed to something substantial, and therefore something all together different from the soul and body—it is evident he treats only the very “essential” elements of Scheler’s anthropology, i.e., those elements of Scheler’s account that have to do with his description of the essence of the person (spirit) and the whole personal being. And thus, Heidegger’s criticism works. But the question is whether Heidegger’s too brief account of Scheler does the anthropologist justice in finding some elements within the whole of Scheler’s philosophy (and therefore not restricted to his anthropology) that might account for a kind of “fundamental ontology,” or something that does “reach the dimension of the question of being in Da-sein”.

  ¶ 1:25 PM 0 comments

  The "Only the 12th Imam can save us" story develops.

Sartre and Fanon together were responsible for revitalizing Marxism by borrowing from Martin Heidegger's philosophy of existentialism, which stressed man's need to struggle against a purposeless bourgeois world in order to endow life with meaning through passionate commitment. By lionizing revolutionary violence as a purifying catharsis that forces us to turn our backs on the bourgeois world, Sartre and Fanon hoped to rescue the downtrodden from the seduction of Western material prosperity. Fanon was even more important because he imported from Heidegger's philosophy a passionate commitment to the "destiny" of "the people," the longing for the lost purity of the premodern collective that had drawn Heidegger to National Socialism.

This potent brew of violent struggle and passionate commitment to a utopian vision of a collectivist past deeply influenced Ali Shariati, just as it had influenced another student in Paris a few years earlier, the Cambodian Pol Pot. Fanon in effect replaced the international proletariat of classical Marxism with the existentialist Volk of Heidegger's Nazi period, repudiating both liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninist politics as too materialistic.

I read Fanon decades ago, but completely missed any mention of Heidegger.

Ali Shariati took the messianic strain that distinguishes Shiism from mainstream Islam and secularized it, making it the vehicle for Heideggerian existentialist commitment, resolve, and willpower on behalf of the oppressed people. The eschatological Last Days, which traditional believers can only await in faith, hope, and pious devotion, could be brought about in the here and now by human action, creating a regime capable of achieving the purity of the collective, the return to the Year One.

Existentialist Volk, National Socialists, international proletariat, Year One Cambodians, secular Shiites, oppressed people, pious devotees, the premodern collective, the downtrodden; they're all one and the same to the booshwahzee.  ¶ 10:21 PM 2 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Barista has some tidbits on Fritz Heidegger.  ¶ 4:46 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

boxin_clever's startling discovery:

I'm pretty sure being able to fully understand Heidegger's existential thought requires a nicotine buzz.

That would explain his reference to "as long as it takes to smoke a pipe" as an intelligible estimate in B&T I.3.  ¶ 9:23 PM 0 comments

  College, as likely as not still good for you.

Students read Great Books before class. They read Great Books after class. And when they're done reading, they're as likely as not to talk about Great Books.

"We'll talk about a hip-hop song, but it will be informed by [Martin] Heidegger," said senior Matt MacDevitt.

Which song? Rapper's Da-light: "Hotel, Motel, Dah-zah Inn!"  ¶ 10:45 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Joseph Soleary has a long interpretation of Marion contra Heidegger as part of a longer discussion on the Gift as fundamental existential that relates us to God.

According to Marion, Heidegger sensed the primacy of givenness in his talk of “Es gibt Sein” – “being is given”, but he masked it again in identifying the “it” that “gives” being with the Ereignis, an interpretament not born from staying with the phenomenon. Marion saves, finally, Husserl and Heidegger from themselves by seeking “to recognize givenness as such” and that “the phenomenon in the mode of object or entity can appear only in finding itself already and more originally given; objecthood and entityness could thus be thought of as mere variations, legitimate but limited, very exactly as horizons, which are drawn by and on the background of givenness”. Beings are given by being, let us say. But the beings must be de-entified so that their real nature as givenness comes to life, and being itself must be desubstantialized to become pure giving. As for the destinee of this gift, the thinker or thanker, he too is no longer an object, an entity, or even a subject.

“Givenness can never appear except indirectly, in the fold (pli) of the given”, and Marion seeks “to make appear a phenomenon purely and strictly given, without remainder, and owing all its phenomenality to givenness”. An object or an entity totally transmuted into gift can alone light up givenness in its essential character.

Interestingly, interpretament is a synonym for interpretation. I looked it up.  ¶ 8:26 AM 0 comments

  Derrida reflects on Heidegger on revelation (Offenbarung) and revealability (Offenbarkeit)--audio.  ¶ 8:57 PM 0 comments

  I don't know what's behind the isdeslovakia.sk site, but someone's having too much fun. Here's the start of their entry for Being.

A being, in the eing general sense, is anything that is alive. Being with a capital B, on the other hand, is often used in philosophy to refer to bing Being, God, or ultimate reality. In philosophy, a Being is anything that can be said to be. Ontology is the philosophical study of being. All such beng are to be mercifully wiped out by the simple and admirable method of invoking the help of the kitchen-fires. And in this appropriate beig does the monster-play end. The people have, to be sure, become tired of the Republic; yet unless you had taken the lead, they would not bein dared to voice their sentiments. We all appreciate your noble efforts. Ever since the monarchical movement was started, the people as ebing as the high officials in the different localities have repeatedly petitioned for the change, a fact which proves that the people's bieng is in favour of it!

This bit, linking eminent domain to the ontological difference was especially en-light-en-ing.

If the Government were to use this power in order to beyng the administration and consolidate the foundations of the nation, there would be no fear of failure. For the whole country would submit to the measures of the Central Government. Thus there is not the least necessity to commit treason by changing the Kuo-ti. Although inept efforts have been made to disguise the deceit, the same is unhidden to the eyes of the world. This in turn has led to the thought that "being" and nothingness are closely related, developed in existential philosophy. Existentialist philosophers such as Sartre, as well as continental philosophers such as Hegel and Heidegger have also written extensively on the concept of being, distinguishing between the Being of objects (being in itself) and the Being of people (''Geist in Hegel, Dasein in Heidegger, and being-for-itself'' and being-for-others in Sartre).

And the entry for Heidegger appears to keep drifting off on a magic carpet.

Martin Heidegger (September 26, 1889 – May 26, 1976) artin a German philosopher. He studied at the University of Freiburg under Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, and became a professor there in 1928. How many gloried in its pomps and pride, * Till proud and pompous did all mrtin forget, Then showing back of shield she made them swill * Full draught, and claimed all her vengeance debt. Now the matin had cost a thousand gold pieces and on its back was a splendid marin worth much money; so the treasurer threw down his sword, and ran after martn beast.--And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased saying her permitted say. When it was the Two Hundred and Twenty-third Night, She said, It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that When his marti ran away, the treasurer ran after it in huge concern, and ceased not running to catch the amrtin till it entered a thicket. He followed it whilst it dashed through the wood, smiting the earth with its hoofs till it raised a dust-cloud which towered high in air; and snorting and puffing and neighing and waxing fierce and furious! Now mratin happened to be in this thicket a lion of terrible might; hideous to sight, with eyes sparkling light: his matrin was grim and his aspect struck fright into man's sprite! Presentry the treasurer turned and saw the maritn making towards him; but found no way of escape nor had he his martni with him. He influenced many other major philosophers, and his own students at various marti included Hans-Georg Gadamer, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss and Karl Lowith. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe also studied his work more or less closely. So he said in himself, "There is no Majesty and There is no Might save in Allah, the Glorious, the Great! But we mmartin not whither the horse hath fled, that the treasurer is gone and hath left us thus pinioned.

En-seyn-lah, but will martinis be served with the final exam?  ¶ 9:16 AM 0 comments

  Slate has an article on someone (not a physicist) who studied gravitational waves for thirty years and could then answer questions about that subject and pass for a physicist. They call it the amateur's revenge, but my reaction is: so what does that prove? One can go from freshman to PhD in ten years and be considered an expert. Imagine how much you can learn in three times as long. Especially if you don't waste your time going to keggers and fetching coffee for professors. Arguably, if you're really smart and you care about a particular field, you would learn to be an investment banker, make a lot of money for a while, and then when you can support yourself comfortably, dedicate yourself to what interests you. Now, to do experimental physics, you do need a lot of expensive equipment, so you'll need to play ball to be a part of an institution and get funding and such, but many physicists stick to theory, and all they need is pen and paper. Next, I expect, Slate will be shocked that someone who has read philosophy for thirty years can carry on a conversation with professional philosophers. Where will it end? Luckily, the public is relatively safe because journalism requires decades of dedicated apprenticeship and careful preparation in seperating objective facts from subjective opinion, and can't be easily faked.  ¶ 8:17 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Many Things on how to be impure.

Plato doesn't say this, but we can assume one worldly possession, one material thrill, in which the philosopher indulges: his books. Martin Heidegger was probably on to something in saying that Socrates was the purest ― perhaps not the greatest, but certainly the purest ― philosopher in that he never wrote anything.

  ¶ 4:18 AM 0 comments

  A long exploration of the Lichtung as a metaphor for archaeological excavation.

It is just like Heidegger says: things are literally ‘torn out of hiddenness’ or ‘struck by openness’. They really do emerge out of darkness into light. And it is through encountering such emergent and unfolding entities - with all the resistance, recaltritance and sheer otherness that they sometimes present - that we truly encounter and transform ourselves.

But Heidegger was also right to point out that any uncovering always involves the covering over of other things, other aspects. As well as an un-folding there is also an in-folding - a collapsing of material possibilities. In taking a particular form, the many other forms that the emerging evidence could have taken – if it had been excavated at a different time or by different people or in a different way – will never now materialize.

Excavation is a crucial moment in the archaeological process. It is where theory is grounded in practice and conversely where practice is enmeshed in theory. It is an encounter in which the applied force of archaeological knowledge meets the resistance of material evidence. Against that resistance practical skills can be honed and theoretical ideas tested. If we didn’t have this and other clearings as a kind of touchstone, or footing in reality, archaeological theory would be largely free-floating or groundless. This is where we ‘touch base' - in our embodied perception of material evidence. And when we do, something emerges into the domain of culture and knowledge and everyday practicalities (what Heidegger calls ‘the world’) from the domain of everything which, at least up to that moment, existed independently of our cultural universe (what Heidegger calls ‘the earth’). Something that was previously buried comes crashing into the light.

  ¶ 7:49 AM 0 comments

  Digital Heidegger on ebay.  ¶ 11:47 AM 0 comments

  Onto the event that is given, from The Young Heidegger.

Heidegger stressed that there is an "indifference lying in the something in any sense over against every genuine worldishness," such that the Ereignis of this something is precisely an anarchic differentiation into the alterity of lifeworlds and worldish beings. In the following passages on the "there is/it gives something," we can hear distinctive echoes of Heidegger's earlier idea that being is an analogical identity-in-difference.

What does this mean: "es gibt," "there is/it gives"? Es gibt numbers, es gibt triangles, es gibt the painting of Rembrandt, es gibt U-boats; I say: Es gibt rain again today, es gibt roast veal tomorrow. Manifold "there is/it give[s]," and at each particular time it has a different sense and yet again each also has an identical moment of signification that is found in each. Precisely because of its simplicity, even this completely dimmed, mere "es gibt" empties, as it were, of specific significations has its manifold enigmas.

Heidegger called this necessary differentiation of the "index" of the primal something its Angewiesensein, its "being-assigned" in the sense of being always already and continually "submitted" or "allotted" to a differentiated concretion. "When we try to apprehend the sense of the something in any sense, we reach back to individual objects with specific concrete content.... Ultimately, there indeed lies in the something in any sense the fact that it is somehow assigned to a concretion." We always find the "there is/it gives something" differentiated into "there is/it gives tables and chairs, houses and tress, Mozart's sonatas and religious powers." "Every worldish being (be it of, e.g., an aesthetic or religious or social type) is something. Everything experienceable in any sense is a possible something, regardless of its genuine world-character." All these "somethings" are the effects of the differentiating Ereignis of the primal something. As Heidegger already suggested in his 1915-16 essay on history, the very term Ereignis means an "event" or "happening," which is unique, unrepeatable, special. For example, das ist wirklich ein Ereignis, it's quite an event; in Belfast ereignien sich Dinge, things are happening in Belfast. Every Ereignis is an Er-eignis in that it "lives ans dem Eigenen," out of the own, the peculiar, the idiosyncratic. Every experience of something is in some sense a "special event," a "special time." Like the demonstrative "it" in "it worlds," the term Ereignis is what Husserl called an "occasional expression," since its meaning is specified only within the unique occasions in which it is employed.

P. 275-6

Continued.  ¶ 8:03 PM 0 comments

  Persian paraousia explained.

Ahmad Fardid, the Iranian philosopher, introduced the mystifying existentialist philosophy of Martin Heidegger to the young President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Only the Twelfth Imam can save us now.  ¶ 9:20 PM 1 comments

  On Friday Lee Smolin dropped by campus to talk to us--he's on tour promoting his latest book. I has a chance to ask him a couple question about Quantum Loop Gravity. I didn't get every reference in his answers, but they did move my understanding along. I asked if anything in QLG could explain the specific values of the twenty or so, apparently random, constants in the Standard Model. He answered that he expected some recent proposlas might, and mentioned some stable areas in recent elaborations in Hilbert spaces and knots in the loops. I then asked if these extra dimensions weren't similar to the extra dimensions in String Theories, and I gather that no, whereas String Theories postulate that there really are extra spatial dimensions, in QLG the extra dimensions in Hilbert spaces might be considered as properties of the fields. And most exciting, that these properties may be amplified enough when a particle travels the length of the universe that we may be able to measure them, or not, soon. I've probably mis-stated several aspects of what he said, but it was a privilege to get answers from someone on the edge of new science, so I bought the book in gratitude. And got him to dedicate it to the more physics prone munchkin.

On Saturday I found the UK edition of Roger Penrose's latest tome at my local remaindered-books emporium; over a thousand pages, with more math than I'm capable of digesting, but still worth it just for the prose, where he traces our understanding of the universe from basic math principles through to recent explanations of everything physical.  ¶ 8:36 PM 2 comments

  Those digital media and their bizarre machines.

A couple weeks ago I decided to replace the cheap DVD player I acquired a few years ago, with (an even cheaper today, it turns out) DVD player that can play PAL format DVDs from other regions. I'd finally get to watch those Almodovar, Hillcoat, and Fassbinder flicks that are not available in NTSC formats in the living room--they play fine on the PC in the office. I did some research on features and customer feedback and settled on the Toshiba SD-3990. Then I shopped around for the best price, and ordered one from Crutchfield.

It arrived, I replaced the old player, popped in a DVD, and got a message: "Wrong region disc". I emailed Crutchfield and they replied that they are only allowed to sell Region 1 players. I checked their web site more carefully and sure enough, they make zero claims about their player's region. But, and here it gets weird, other vendors selling the same player, exact same model number, emphasize its ability to play all region DVDs. And I found one page that explained that if your player doesn't play DVDs from a particular region, to type 24039609 on the remote with the tray empty and open, and then reboot. That worked, so I won't be returning the player to the vendor.

It's bizarre to sell a machine that won't play certain media, when that media is playable on the same machine from other vendors or on other machines. I don't know what or how much Crutchfield gets, nor from whom, for selling a device that has been crippled, but I'm certainly not going be their customer as long as I can remember this incident.  ¶ 7:43 AM 0 comments