A strange passage follows, in which Levinas turns to Heidegger’s notion of “thrownness” to elicit the notion of an existentless existence: “It is as if the existent appeared only in an existence that precedes it, as though existence were independent of the existent, and the existent that finds itself thrown there could never become master of existence” (p. 45). Thrown existent takes place, then, against a spectral, disrupting backdrop, which Levinas terms the “il y a.”

¶ 8:23 PM 0 comments

[W]hat if "natural language," which in the eyes of information theory is no more than a troublesome residue, were drawing its nature, that is, the persistent nature of the being of langiage, from Saying? What if Saying, instead of merely impeding the destructiveness of information-language, had already overtaken it in virtue of the fact that Appropriation cannot be commandeered? What if Appropriation---no one when or how--were to become an insight whose illuminating lightening flash enters into what is and what is taken to be? What if Appropriation, by its entry, were to remove everything that is in present being from its subjection to a commandeering order and bring it back into its own?

P. 133

¶ 6:28 AM 0 comments

Heidegger's meditations on the place of Germany in history are carried out largely in the form of commentaries on Hölderlin. In the 1930s Heidegger saw Hölderlin as the prophet of a new dawn; when the Reich collapsed he saw him as the consoling poet for dark times when the gods withdraw. While in rough outline this account squares with the Nazi version, it does an injustice to the seriousness with which Heidegger reflects on each line of Hölderlin. To Heidegger in "the completely destitute time" of the pres-ent (he was writing in 1946), when the relevance of poetry is everywhere in doubt, Hölderlin is the one who articulates most clearly the essential calling of the poet, namely to speak the words that bring a new world into being. We read Hölderlin's dark poetry, says Heidegger, not so much to understand him as to keep in contact with him until that future arrives when he will at last be understandable.

¶ 7:17 PM 0 comments

[I] myself preferred to keep the German word "Hütte" which would, I believe, link the poem more directly to Heidegger for one, and bring over a load of meaning that the Eglish word "hut" does not carry in this specific context.

¶ 7:10 PM 0 comments

[Heidegger] was clear and emphatic right to the end of his life that the single, defining concern of his path of thinking was about the originary, fundamental, unifying meaning of Being, named by him over the many years Beyng (das Seyn), Being itself (das Sein selbst), Being as such (das Sein als solches), and Being as Being (das Sein als Sein). Certainly, there is no denying the importance of the notion of Ereignis in his thought, but its significance has been overworked and overstated by several Heidegger scholars in recent years. In other words, I think that if we examine Heidegger’s words carefully, we find that he understood Ereignis to be (only) another name for Being itself.

¶ 5:35 PM 0 comments

[I]n viewing The Simpsons, many are able to observe and discuss their findings as to the sort of truth they think it has revealed because of what is still concealed. Conversely, as I have stated before, truth is subjective because it does not have an exact definition and anyone is able to attain their own ideas of what truth is in art. Nonetheless, taking the idea from Heidegger, The Simpsons has certain ways in showing viewers many diverse ideas the truths in how it conceals and reveals material.

¶ 2:03 PM 0 comments

I am ready, the lord beyng my helper.

¶ 12:42 PM 0 comments

We understand what art is or that a particular object is a painting due to its relation with other things such as paint, blank canvas, an artist and such. Heidegger shows us that we see the object ‘as’ a painting or ‘as’ a piece of art. The ‘as’ is what it is. The ‘as’ constructs the explicitness of the object as something that is understood.Heidegger also shows us that understanding is not a brain state; understanding comes from the whole of being-in-the-world.

¶ 6:58 AM 0 comments

[Boredom] can take of us in an instant like a flash of lightning, and yet precisely in this instant the whole expanse of the entire time of Dasein is there and not at all specifically articulated or delimited according to past and future.

P. 148

¶ 5:41 PM 0 comments

[H]ere's where another support for the Andy Kaufman style joke enters, Badiou also says this:

Truth is first of all something new. What transmits, what repeats, we shall call knowledge. Distinguishing truth from knowledge is essential. It is a distinction already made in the work of Kant, between reason and understanding, and it is as you know a capital distinction for Heidegger, who distinguishes truth as aletheia, and understanding as cognition, science, techne.

Now Badiou, who cites and references Heidegger, who is here explicitly using Heidegger to support his distinction between novelty and repetition as the basis for a distinction between truth and knowledge, and who we collectively agree is a smart fellow, is clearly wrong. Heidegger puts techne on both sides of the ledger, as both a process of poiesis (for the Greeks) and the means of enframing (for modernity). The difference is the historical and metaphysical overdetermination of techne, which hides the term's more original meaning and gives techne to us as something that we believe we master or control, but that actually controls us through this belief (a process called, appropriately enough, subjectification). Heidegger is saying (and he says it repeatedly, in Origin of the Work of Art, Age of the World Picture, the Question Concerning Technology, and so on) that different technological modalities produce different possibilities for techne, and with it different relations to Being. His diatribes against the typewriter in his seminar on Parmenides make this abundantly clear. Surely Badiou knows this. So either his disagreement must be more nuanced than I currently perceive, or this is one of those hints, a wink to his audience, a test to see if we figure out he's having us on, piling up layers of set theory in an authoritative tone, making odd declarations about the future of philosophy and the failures of philosophers, and then laughing as eager grad students trip over themselves writing articles extolling his virtues. Incidentally, if this is a joke, I suspect Zizek is in on it. I would have significantly more respect for him if it turns out he set the whole thing up.

¶ 6:11 AM 0 comments

The turning of the danger comes to pass suddenly. In this turning, the clearing belonging to the essence of Being suddenly clears itself and lights up. This sudden self-lighting is the lightning-flash. It brings itself into its own brightness, which in itself both brings along and brings in. When, in the turning of the danger, the truth of Being flashes, the essence of Being clears and lights itself up. Then the truth of the essence, the coming to presence, of Being turns and enters in.

P. 44

¶ 8:54 AM 0 comments

It remains open to question whether the glance - and this means lightning [Heraclitus, Fragment 64] - strikes into our relation to the truth of being; or whether only the weak glimmer of a storm long past casts the pallid light of its brightness into our knowledge of what has been.

P. 255

Once, however, in the beginning of Western thinking, the essence of language flashed in the light of Being--once, when Heraclitus thought the LogoV as his guiding word, so as to think in this word the Being of beings. But the lightning abruptly vanished. No one held onto its streak of light and the nearness of what it illuminated.

We see this lightning only when we station ourselves in the storm of Being. Yet everything today betrays the fact that we bestir ourselves only to drive storms away. We organize all available means for cloud-seeding and storm dispersal in order to have calm in the face of the storm.

P. 78

¶ 9:35 PM 0 comments

Until recent years, I read only "fundamental" books, that is, key books on key subjects, such as War and Peace, the novel of novels; A Study of History, the solution of the problem of time; Schroedinger's What is Life?, Einstein's The Universe as I See It, and such. During those years I stood outside the universe and sought to understand it. I lived in my room as an Anyone living Anywhere and read fundamental books and only for diversion took walks around the neighborhood and saw an occasional movie. Certainly it did not matter to me where I was when I read such a book as The Expanding Universe. The greatest success of this enterprise, which I call my vertical search, came one night when I sat in a hotel room in Birmingham and read a book called The Chemistry of Life. When I finished it, it seemed to me that the main goals of my search were reached or were in principle reachable, where upon I went out and saw a movie called It Happened One Night which was itself very good. A memorable night. The only difficulty was that though the universe had been disposed of, I myself was left over. There I lay in my hotel room with my search over yet still obliged to draw one breath and then the next. But now I have undertaken a different kind of search, a horizontal search. As a consequence, what takes place in my room is less important. What is important is what I shall find when I leave my room and wander in the neighborhood. Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.

P. 69-70

¶ 1:49 PM 1 comments

Pure process is a powerful drug; it swallows up experience. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger anticipated this problem 57 years ago in a bleak essay titled "The Question Concerning Technology." I'm far from certain that I understand him correctly -- reading the cryptic old Nazi is like taking a Germanic, footnoted acid trip -- but Heidegger seems to argue that technology is not merely a neutral tool, but is a kind of coercion over and shrinking of the world, a process he called "enframing." By framing the world through technology, man is losing touch with it.

We can illustrate Heidegger's point with a humble example: the iPod. As Farhad Manjoo pointed out in these pages, the blessing of the iPod, the fact that it allows you to draw on a vast musical library, is also its curse. The more choices you have to create the perfect soundtrack for your life, the jumpier and more uncertain you can become that you've made the right choice. As Manjoo writes, "Am I the only one who worries that for all its wonders, the iPod has also tremendously complicated our relationship to music -- has made us more mindlessly consumptive of songs, less attentive to the context and the quality of music, and concerned, constantly, with just always getting more, more, more?" Heidegger would have scoffed at the idea of writing a sentence this succinct, but it's the same idea.

¶ 9:01 AM 0 comments

Mona had great ambitions for her son. She wanted him to be an actuary or a dentist, but unfortunately Lionel was a prodigy of a different sort. From an early age he exhibited a gift for metaphysical thinking and an aptitude for moral philosophy.

"Can you butter metaphysics?" asked Mona with mother's tears in her mother's eyes.

At six he grappled with the great Scottish thinker David Hume's problem of induction, by eight he had read and mastered Kant, and by 16 he had penned a treatise attacking the intellectual promiscuity of Heidegger's Being and Time.

Unfortunately this treatise was lost to the world for Mona destroyed it, fearing that these "useless distractions" could prove disastrous to a solid career of fixing teeth or calculating life expectancies. "Fine," said Lionel, "you want me to have security," and so he joined the post office.

"Good," said Mona. "Ethics -- can you make soup from it?"

¶ 5:49 PM 0 comments

A cover story in China Newsweek on “The Abnormal Corruption of Higher Education” estimates that 530,000 published papers in “key journals” will be required of graduate students in the coming year. Of those, the magazine reports, perhaps 20,000 will genuinely merit publication in China’s 1,500 recognized academic journals, while the authors of the rest will resort to either bribery or “black market” counterfeit journals. And, as described in China Daily, in a recent Ministry of Science and Technology survey of 180 Chinese Ph.D.s, a whopping 60 percent admitted to paying to have their work published, and another 60 percent copped to plagiarizing the work of others.

¶ 6:35 AM 0 comments

The movement underwent a "deepening" in the Germanidealism of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Scheiermacher's discovery of "primal Christianity" "influenced decisively Hegel's youthful writings on the history of religion and indirectly the whole of Hegel's specifically philosophical systematic, in which the decisive ideas of the German movement in general condensed as their high point." Heidegger was thinking here of Hegel's "(phenomenology) of spirit and of the historical dialectic of reason." With reference to his lectures from the previous semester, he added that "Hegel's so-called pan-logic has its origin out of historical consciousness and is not merely the consequence of a radical theorizing of the theoretical!" Indeed, in KNS 1919, he had told his students that, once "the idea of the system" is seen to be "illusory," "we stand facing Hegel, i.e., before one of the most difficult confrontations." He was thereby renewing his earlier call in 1915-16 for a "confrontation with [Hegel's] system of historical worldview."

Heidegger explained further that Dilthey then "tackled the problem of a critique of historical reason...in continuity with the German movement (with Scheiermacher above all) and the development of historical consciousness." "Dilthey already (1883) saw clearly the significance of the singular and the unique in historical actuality...In [the natural sciences] this is only a 'means,' a passageway to be transcended in analytical generalizations; in history it is the 'aim' and goal." And, near the end of his life, he "saw the significance of Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen" for a descriptive psychology of historical consciousness. Finally, the problem of history was taken up in a Neo-Kantian "value-philosophy," where we find, for example, Rickert's notion of the "unsurveyable multiplicity" and "heterogeneity" of "actuality in its individuality and uniqueness." Here we also find Heidegger describing Windelband's notion of the historical human sciences as "Ereignis-sciences," which are "oriented to the happening of a unique, temporally demarcated actuality and its exhaustive presentation. Shapes of human life--heroes and peoples, languages, religions, legal systems, lieteratures, art, sciences--are supposed to be presented in their 'unique actuality.'" Whereas the natural sciences are "nomothetic," i.e., oriented to universal laws, the historical sciences are "idiographic," i.e., oriented to to idion, das Eigene, what is own, the peculiar, the idiosyncratic in the Ereignisse of history.

P. 278-279

¶ 8:15 PM 0 comments

"Here is Herr Heidegger, sure enough!" cried Holmes, exultantly. "My reasoning seems to have been pretty sound, Watson."

"I congratulate you."

"But we have a long way still to go. Kindly walk clear of the path. Now let us follow the trail. I fear that it will not lead very far."

¶ 10:07 AM 0 comments

In rare abruptness, Being's flash of light.
We peer, protect--turn towards the sight.

P. 62

¶ 7:19 PM 0 comments

As with German philosopher Heidegger's cats, if they don't hear about it or see it, then is it happening?

¶ 8:11 PM 0 comments

A change of interest, and a change of heart, led [Doug McGaughey] to the Chicago Theological Seminary, a school steeped in social activism; it had been founded by leaders of the Underground Railroad. “I thought I was going to be a pastor,” McGaughey says.

That was before he got waylaid by a German philosopher named Martin Heidegger, whose Being and Time was starting to take North America by storm. “That was the fall of 1969, and I haven’t been the same since,” McGaughey says.

¶ 9:04 PM 0 comments

German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), meanwhile, is said to have remarked after reading Suzuki that, "If I understand this man correctly, this is what I have been trying to say in all my writings."

¶ 10:11 AM 0 comments

Procol Harum — and yep, the cod Latin name is a giveaway — made a career from purloining classical music riffs and appending to them words which sounded meaningful but were, rather, pretentious drivel of the most risible kind. Harum was one of the first bands to be allowed to indulge their craving for high seriousness by performing in concert with a classical orchestra, which they did for A Salty Dog, their concept album about boats and stuff. They had a couple of minor hits with the similarly Bach-inspired ‘Homburg’, ‘Pandora’s Box’ and the rather likeable and catchy ‘Conquistador’, the latter a piece of cute rhythm and blues reminiscent of the Zombies which showed how good Harum might have been had they stuck to the basics. A later single, ‘Souvenir of London’, had no Bach influences at all and took as its subject matter venereal disease; after that there was pretty much nothing, just blissful decades of utter silence. Think of them as their John Cage years.

¶ 9:16 AM 2 comments

That boredom's the undisnegation of motion
The empty lunchbox of hunger
Neither over nor under
A close cousin of time we should cease avoiding
Passing
Killing

¶ 10:59 AM 0 comments

A confrontation with No-thing that allows being to realize it exists. Anxiety reveals No-thing, which in turn discloses a world. Being and No-thing are integral to each other one of the most salient qualities about being is it's hidden concealed and overcoming concealment is fundamental to overcoming nihilism.

¶ 6:09 PM 0 comments

In phronesis, human life uncovers that to which it ultimately relates when it is practically involved with itself (in its own being, that is). In this way phronesis gives direction to every practical acting. Phronesis gives human beings who are acting access to their own situation by elucidating the purpose of the action, its appropriate moment and its appropriate way. That which the action must achieve (and which phronesis thus explains) on the one hand does not yet exist, but on the other hand already exists as revealed possibility.

P. 19

¶ 10:22 PM 0 comments

We therefore arrive, finally, at one of the fundamental, philosophical questions of modern Europe, one which the German philosopher Martin Heidegger formulated thus: does technology have man in its hand, or does man have technology in his hand? Can we reform unbridled capitalism at all?

Martin Heidegger is pessimistic about whether man, under his own aegis so to speak, can change the course of things: “No human calculation or action can of its own accord or by its own means bring about a turnaround in the current state of the world – even if only because the machinations of human power are themselves shaped by this world situation and have succumbed to it. So how can they become its master?” (Martin Heidegger, Correspondence with Kästner)

I am convinced: herein lies the actual intellectual appeal of Europe’s encounter with Islam and its Revelation. Every age has its message, and in our age the core of any message that hopes to be relevant must be of an economic nature. The Qur’an in fact contains a key ayat on our human situation but also on the economic situation: “Allah has permitted trade but forbidden usury.” (Surat al-Baqara, 275) On reflection the opposite reality is true of today’s Europe: Europe has monopolised trade and professionalised the taking of interest.

¶ 8:33 AM 0 comments

[Prajapati] looked around in perplexity. All creatures were sure they existed except him, who had given them their existence. Without him, "this" would never have been, but now he felt superfluous in respect to the world, like milk spilled while being carried from one fire to another, milk that one then tosses away on an ants' next.

P. 29

Prajapati was mind as power to transform. And to transform itself. Nothing else can so precisely be described as overflowing, boundless, inexpressible. Everything that exists has been in Prajapati first. Everything remained attached to him. But it was an attachment that might well go unnoticed. Where was it? In the mind, buried in our being like a splinter no one can dislodge.

P. 32

¶ 3:19 PM 0 comments

Good Points

It will put you in touch with your self

Bad Points

It seems to be about nothing at all

¶ 9:54 AM 0 comments

In about 54 C.E., the book of Revelation was written (contrary to popular scholarly dating), and its original title was Guide to the Forms and Traditions of the Synoptic Gospels, In Secret Existentialist Code (please see the Bohairic and Sahidic versions). It was a smash hit, but nobody understood its intent since there were fewer existentialists in Asia Minor than there were in Parthia. In fact, we estimate that there were no existentialists in Asia Minor, and that everyone in Parthia was a rabid existentialist. The fact that Revelation was really a secret decoder ring was lost to the budding church. Though this may cut against the grain of accepted scholarship, the research still stands on its own (primary sources to follow).

Bultmann struggled with the true meaning of the synoptics as much as anyone, until his critical Turmerlebenis (Tower Experience). It was on this night that Heidegger and Bultmann were having a cigar party with the Knights Templars, and the works of Plato spontaneously combusted behind the bust of William Wrede.

¶ 11:15 PM 0 comments

But this view thereby "dissolved all historical happening into conceptual connections, causes and purposes, and conceptually clear goals, treating the individual (the unit of historical happening) not as individuality, but as a particular case of genus, as a historical atom, if you will." Here Heidegger made a comments that relates to his use of "the sunrise" in Sophocles's Antigone as an example of the notion of Ereignis, as well as to his interest in Hölderlin and the Romantic poets: "Thus the poets are not valued as creative shapers within a genuine world of lived experience, but rather as perfecters of language, which in its refinement and polish brought special and public life to an elevated stage." In his courses of 1919, Heidegger mentioned repeatedly that the distinctive and irreducible types of lifeworld in which one finds the worlding-out of the primal something include the artistic, the religious, the political, and the scientific. The artistic and the religious spheres are not inferior or antiquated such that in the march of progress they need yield to the positivist's theorized world of "things" and "facts."

If, according to Heidegger, France and England were the primary exponents of the Enlightenment, "technology," "naturalism," and "materialism," the "German movement" in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought about a "reversal" vis-à-vis the Enlightenment project. Starting with Herder, the focus now becomes historicity, "historical consciousness," "historical Dasein." This received "a decisive clarification" especially through the category Eigenheit, owness or peculiarity, in which we should hear resonances of the terms Ereignis and haecceity:

Under the influence of Hamann, [Herder] saw historical actuality in its manifold and irrational fullness and above all acknowledged the independent ownmost value [Eigenwert] of each nation, each age, and each historical appearance in any sense. Historical actuality was no longer seen exclusively within a schematically rule-oriented and rationalistically linear direction of progress...There awakens an understanding for individual, qualitatively original effective centers and effective contexts; the category of "owness" becomes meaningful and related to all shapes of life, i.e., this category becomes visible for the very first time.

In the works of Herder, Schlegel, and others, the historical lifeworlds of people were explored through their expressions in literature, myths, sagas, folksongs, political and legal history, and so on. "Schleiermacher saw for the first time the ownmost being [Eigensein] and ownmost value [Eigenwert] of the community and of life in the community, as well as the peculiarities [das Eigentümliche] of the Christian community." Heidegger expressed his high regard for the Romantics in the statement to Blochmann in 1918 that "these romantic figures were indeed eminent philosophical figures."

P. 277-278

¶ 7:37 PM 0 comments

Martin Heidegger writes that “Being” arrived at understanding in man. For him, “Being” comports itself understandingly only in the Dasein. This means that the cosmic landscape was endowed and became electrified with meaning, and significance, when evolution reached what Teilhard de Chardin called its omega point, with the arrival of man on the scene. This is to say that the whole of creation would have been a timeless expanse of meaninglessness without the human being. This may well account for Protagoras’s assertion in 450 BC, that Man is the measure of all things-Homo omnia mensura.

¶ 11:15 PM 0 comments

The experimental 14-minute Denazification, which pays a visit to Martin Heidegger's Black Forest cabin, explores the philosopher's late-in-life struggle to come to terms with his wartime allegiance to the Nazi party.

¶ 11:08 PM 0 comments

Were human beings to come to see the danger as danger, this would not entail the elimination of technology, but simply seeing Gestell as what it is, in its specific relation to finitude. Such a seeing would be a thoughtful attentiveness to what is refused in Gestell as such. It would also be a transformation in the "destiny" or claim of being as presencing. Such transformation would occur as a knowing relation to concealment, that is, as a thoughtful relating to the appropriative event (Ereignis) of presencing itself as finite in each case. But this thoughtful responsiveness would itself be a response to a turning of presence, to a turning whereby presencing itself is destined to us in a different and yet related way. Such turnings in the destiny of presencing itself, however, do not follow any laws of causality. They precisely resist any scientific or calculative predictability, and this because they occur in an event of originary finitude that engages human responsiveness and responsibility. In the case of our present dominant world-destiny, that of modern technology, the turning in question indeed transpires as a kind of "recovery" of the as yet concealed truth of technology. "But the recovery in a destiny of being, here and now, the recovery in Gestell, in each case occurs in the event of the arrival of another destiny, one that can neither be calculated in advance in a logical or historiographical manner, nor constructed metaphysically as the result of a process of history."

Such a turning occurs without mediation (in a dialectical-historical or causal sense). At the beginning of the essay Heidegger remarks that "What is destined in each case proceeds intrinsically toward a distinctive Augenblick that sends it into another destiny, whereby, however, it does not simply become submerged and lost." The appearance of the Augenblick in this context is not fortuitous: it locates the historical turnings of presencing in a site of human responsivenes that occurs in such a way as to be held open for the possibility of hearing and response, for an event (Ereignis) of language. With respect to the history of being, the Augenblick is nothing less that the site of the epochal turnings of presencing: it is that site in which the emergence of a new world, or of a new openness of world, first occurs and comes to presence, a site in which historical human beings are called upon to respond to the presencing of a world in a new and unforeseeable way.

P. 214

¶ 7:37 PM 0 comments

[M]y paper is on a Philosopher and Existentialist named Martin Heidegger. Now, the problem with writing a paper on Heidegger is that he never actually tells you what his theories are, he just gives vague allusions to round-about ways of thinking which might, might, get you into his state of mind. But he never actually says a damned thing. I sat in Barnes & Noble the other night reading through the introduction to Being And Time (his first book) over and over again, waiting for him to slip up and actually reveal what he was talking about.

¶ 6:11 AM 0 comments

It cannot be expressed in any language made from numbers or letters except as part of an existentiell analytic.

I glance back over my list. I have to smile when I see the reference to Heidegger. What's Apollo Smintheus doing thinking about Heidegger? But some instinct tells me that Apollo Smintheus knows how to explain things to people in their own personal language, and my language does include terms like existentiell and ontical, as well as their grander counterparts: existential and ontological. I've never forgotten what I read of Being and Time, although not finishing it is one of the big regrets of my life. I remember those terms because they're the ones I wrote so many notes about, all in the margins of the book.

When I read Being and Time I always though of it as Being and Lunchtime: It was my private joke with myself for the month it took me to read the first one hundred pages. It took that long because I read it only at lunchtime, over soup and a roll in a cheap café not far from where I was living at the time in Oxford. That house had no heating at all, and it was damp. I spent the winetrs with chest infections and the summers with a house full of insects. I tried to spend as little time there as possible. So every day I'd go to the café and sit there for an hour or two reading Being and Time. I think I managed about three or four pages a day. As I remember this, I can't help wondering: Does Apollo Smintheus know this, too? Does he know about the day the café closed for renovations and I stopped going there? Does he know that I started having an affair with a guy who wanted to meet me at lunchtimes, and that I left Heidegger for him?

I wish I'd finished the book. I wish I'd brought it with me. But who takes Being and Time with them as an essential object when running away from men with guns? I get out of bed. There's a freestanding antique bookcase by the wall. It has a glass front and a little silver key. I look through the glass and see lost of texts written by Pope John Paull II, including a book of his poetry. There are think brown Bibles and thin white Bible commentaries; all dusty. No thick blue book. No Being and Time. As if I thought there would be.

P. 237

¶ 8:08 AM 0 comments

I've been experiencing many such difficult choices recently, seemingly in the thrall of equally strong but contrary instincts - in what books I read, what films and programmes I watch, what newspaper I take. And the difficult choices are not only to be had in what I consume - when I'm chatting with my new contemporaries, I am unsure whether I should be discussing Heidegger, just war theory or making fart jokes.

¶ 6:45 PM 0 comments

[5] The distinction does not happen to us arbitrarily or from time to time, but fundamentally and constantly.

[6] For if this distinction did not occur, then--forgetting the distinction--we could not stick merely to beings at first and for the most part. For precisely in order to experience what and how beings in each case are in themselves as the beings that they are, we must--although not conceptually--already understand something like the what-being and that-being of beings.

[7] Not only does the distinction occur continually, but this distinction must already have occurred if we wish to experience beings in their being such and such. We never ever experience anything about being subsequently or after the event from beings; rather beings--wherever and however we approach them--already stand in the light of being. In the metaphysical sense, therefore, the distinction stands at the commencement of Dasein itself.

[8] This distinction between being and beings always already occurs in such a way that "being," although undifferentiated, is indeed understood at all times in an inexplicit articulation, at least with respect to what-being and that-being. Man therefore, always has the possibility of asking: What is that? and: Is it at all or is it not? Why precisely this doubling of what-being and that-being belongs to the originary essence of being is one of the deepest problems that these terms contain, a problem that indeed has hitherto never yet been a problem at all, but something self-evident. This can be seen, for example, in traditional metaphysics and ontology, where one distinguishes between essentia and existentia, the what-being and that-being of beings. This distinction is employed as self-evidently as that between night and day.

[9} From all the eight moments listed above, we may infer the uniqueness of this distinction, as well as its universality.

P. 357-8

¶ 10:34 AM 0 comments

Gordon subscribes to Heidegger's tenet that there is no such thing as the present, only the past and the future. An example of this is Feature Film, in which on two opposing screens we watch a conductor directing the soundtrack for Hitchcock's Vertigo. But that is all we see. No orchestra and certainly no film. Gradually, as the music increases in intensity, anyone who has seen the film will start to conjure images. So is this any less real than actually watching the film?

The being is known to us--but Being? Are we not seized with vertigo when we try to determine such a thing, even if we should comprehend it properly?

P. 158

¶ 7:16 PM 0 comments

Another Lebanese choreographer who presented quality work at this year's Platform was Alia Hamdan, who combined a lovely mix of intellectual engagement and dance performance in her powerful solo "When the Holiday Inn Became Again."

A video screen projected an image of the bombed-out Holiday Inn, followed by a series of quotations by German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Then Hamdan walked onstage, traced a chalk circle on the ground, stepped inside, and performed a nicely choreographed solo.

¶ 7:11 PM 0 comments

[1] We constantly fail to hear this distinction between being and beings, precisely where we continually make use of it: specifically whenever we say 'is', but before this in all our comportment toward beings (what-being, being such and such, and that-being).

[2] We continually make use of this distinction, without knowing or being able to ascertain that in so doing we are applying any knowledge, rule, proposition or the like.

[3] The distinction--disregarding its content, namely whatever is distinguished as such in it--is obscure with respect to the very dimension in which the distinction is possible. We cannot put being on a level comparable to that of beings. This implies that this distincion is not at all represented or taken note of in the sense of something knowable.

[4] If, therefore, we do not place this distinction before us in the sense of making an objective distinction, then we are always already moving within the distinction as it occurs. It is not we who make it, rather it happens to us as the fundamental occurence of our Dasein.

P. 357

Being and Time was, to some extent, caught up in the metaphysical search for beingness. The "ontological difference" between beings and being, as presented there, could easily be misunderstood as nothing but the relation between beings and beingness. Presumably Heidegger has this danger in mind when he writes that Division III of Being and Time ran the risk of objectifying be-ing and thus was held back. When be-ing is taken exclusively as beingness, it is degraded to the level of beings.

P. 47

¶ 9:12 AM 0 comments

"See," she said triumphantly, "even adults need to name things! So, Dad, what would be a good name?"

"Hmm...I need to think a little...How about something like Martin, or Soren, or maybe Jean...how about Fyodor?"

"Be serious." She scrunched up her face and shook her head sharply. "What kind of names are those? I don't want a weird name."

P. 86

¶ 8:45 AM 0 comments

In order to get at this aspect of differentiation, Heidegger's courses of 1919 again mentioned his earlier Neo-Kantian and Diltheyan notions of "heterothesis," "heterogeneity," "otherness," and "unsurveyable multiplicity" within historical reality. Here we see more clearly the an-archic character of the Ereignis of the primal something, an anarchic arche, which means that no one differntiation and effect of it, that is, a particular lifeworld, can be raised to the level of a universal arche, principle/kingdom, and privileged over other effects, except at the cost of becoming an ideological myth and principle of ontological violence. In Heidegger's SS 1919 lecture course, we read, "Every reality exhibits its own, peculiar, individual mark. There is nothing absolutely homogeneous; everything is other, everything actual is an hetergeneity." Reminiscent of his earlier Scotist notion of haecceity, such-here-now-ness, Heidegger's essay on Karl Jaspers spoke of the "hic et nunc" of the historical "situation" and again took up the old adage that "individuum est ineffabile," the individual is inexpressible, that is, cannot be reduced to essential or universal moments. But now all these earlier and still residually "theoretical" concepts were stripped of any reference to "objects" or "objectifications." In and after 1919, Heidegger was thinking rather of a heterothesis of the Ereignis and worlding-out of non-objectified historical lifeworlds, whose "contexts" or "situations" are characterized by "the unique, particular, and individual." The closing comments of his treatment of the primal something in KNS 1919 referred to both heterothesis and haecceity: "Problem of heterothesis, negation...Life is historical; no dismemberment into essential elements, but rather context."

In the background of the notion of Ereignis, we also find Heidegger's old interest in the "historical consciousness" and worldview-orientation of the German Romantics (Novalis, Schlegel), Hegel, and Dilthey. In SS 1919, Heidegger contrasted these figures with the project of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The later was guided by "a universal idea of history," namely, the progress of "civilization," over against particular peoples and "nations," especially so-called "primitive peoples" and "barbarism." This idea of univeral history was "grounded in the absolute dominion of mathematical natural science and of rational thinking in geneal at the time, " in the "triumph of pure thinking." It was expressed in, for example, Kant's notion of history as the "development and fulfillment of rational determinations, rules, and the ends of humanity." And it was articulated in a cruder form by Turgot and then later by Comte in "the law of the three stages [of human development]: the theological-mythical, the metaphysical, and the positive stages."

P. 276-277

¶ 6:23 PM 4 comments