We are thus plunged into a skeptical mood about reality and the external world, for there is nothing we can say about them apart from Da-sein as being-in-the-world. This seems a bit unsettling. Without absolute grounds that can be identified and expressed, we seem to be aimlessly positioned in a universe without meaning. Tension arises. Moreover, rekindling the fire of dogmatism in a desperate attempt at demanding more will avail us little. In fact, Heidegger says, it is a "scandal of philosophy" when we demand proofs of the external world and refutations of skepticism to alleviate the anxious condition in which we find ourselves when, in the existential analytic of Da-sein as being-in-the-world, realism and idealism collapse.

¶ 7:00 AM 0 comments

"You are a mighty desirable length of calico, how come you're not married already?" was how Deuce got around to popping the question."

"Thought I'd take my time, I guess."

"Time is something you're given," he philosophized, "you don't take it."

P. 263

¶ 9:26 PM 0 comments

Columbia and Barnard faculty now make all hiring decisions together, and former junior professors such as Professor Neuhouser have successfully worked their way up the ranks. Neuhouser points out, "the proof of unity is that the first person to come up for tenure under this system was [Heidegger specialist] Taylor Carman," a Barnard professor and the current acting departmental chair for Neuhouser, who is on leave.

¶ 9:12 AM 0 comments

You sometimes give the impression of biting the hand that feeds, for example when you describe Heidegger as a "weak-minded pre-Alpine thinker" and...

He didn't feed me. Why should he have fed me? But he's an impossible character, he has neither rhythm nor anything else. He lived off a few writers, he cannibalised them, to the last, what would he have been without them?

I was thinking of the word "Lichtung" (clearing).

That word existed before Heidegger, 300 and 500 years before. He was nothing, a philistine, gross, nothing new. He's a perfect example of someone who unscrupulously eats all the fruit other people have jarred and who gorges himself, thank God, which makes him sick and he bursts. Gets stomach ache.

¶ 8:52 PM 0 comments

What kind of concept is the Augenblick? We know how to deal with it because it occupies a definite position within the lucid architectonic of Being and Time, as the name for authentic temporality and historicity. But when we approach it, it nevertheless tends to slip away--not for dialectical reasons, as the Aristotelian now, but precisely because it pretends to escape this inherited logic of temporality altogether. It claims to name a present that is not the present of the now-point, not the extended Husserlian present of retention and protention, but a constitutive present out of which the temporal scheme can emerge as such. Such a present is not and can never be present. As a locus of decision and authentic resolve, it nevertheless withdraws from conceptual reach.

This logic of withdrawal and restraint is not made explicit by Heidegger in connection with the Augenblick, even though it is implied by the way it operates in his thinking. It is only in the thought of Ereignis that this curious mode of being and of signifying is made into a theme in itself. Ereignis is also Enteignis, it is withdrawal and disappropriation. It is a basic concept that disavows the idea of conceptual hierarchy; it is a name for the origin, yet does not designate anything. What kind of a word is it? What kind of understanding, indeed, what kind of thinking and reasoning does it encourage us to perform? It seems to hold out a promise for those who are prepared to seek out the limit of discursive thought, as it pretends to name the very element of thinking, of understanding, and of truth.

P. 246-247

¶ 8:11 PM 0 comments

Ereignis is a key-word in Heidegger's later thinking, in which the question of the meaning of being is transformed into a question of the essencing and truth of being. It seeks to capture the "happening" or "event" of being in manifestation, while repeatedly insisting that it is not some kind of process-philosophy. Its way of signifying has its roots in what I have spoken of here as a "kairological" mode of thinking and writing, for which the experience of truth is bound and conditioned by a confrontation with the unique situation of which we ourselves are a part; or rather, a situation to which we belong while we are also constantly being deprived of it and to which we can therefore relate only as to an unexpected encounter.

The thought of Ereignis thus elaborates the conception in the eraly writings and lectures of that existential factical situation out of which every general description and designation of beings emerges, including the spatio-temporal structure itself. In Being and Time the name of this qualified situation is the Augenblick. Though seemingly restricted to a temporal singularity, we should not fail to keep in mind that it is modeled on the situation of historical existence and praxis. Factical Dasein is always already thrown into a historical situation, forced to act and to think from out of its given conditions. The Augenblick is what we could perhaps speak of as the metonomy for this incessant, demanding situatedness of human existence. It designates that to which we can access only by means of a certain abandonment. Or to put it differently, it designates that which we have only in losing it, as we devote ourselves to what the situation requires.

P. 245-246

¶ 8:05 PM 0 comments

[O]ur judges were on the lookout for something a bit more profound than a propellor on the roof: something that spoke of the sacred bond between the Englishman and his garden - a deep understanding of what Martin Heidegger (not an Englishman, admittedly, but a shed-owner none the less) would have called the "shedliness" of the shed.

¶ 9:11 AM 0 comments

Philosopher Martin Heidegger stated that human beings live existentially (Das Wesen des Daseins liegt in seiner Existenz). Reading is one way to experience our own existence and better understand the lives of others. Reading is also a habit of successful people.

¶ 9:08 AM 0 comments

If you want to answer the question 'what is art', you first have to answer a socalled prequestion of all questions andf this pre-question is the question of truth. Only if this question has been answered one can understand what Nietzsche meant with the 'conflict between art and truth'.

Heidegger thinks Nietzsche somehow didn't really think of this meaning of truth and then he starts to unfold his exploration regarding the word truth: We have to look at the word truth independant from it is normal usage in daily life.

¶ 8:37 AM 1 comments

As far as he knew, heidegger's whole dream life consisted of a single dream happening. To be sure, since his student days, he dreamed these events repeatedly at longer or shorter intervals. This too disapeared, but only after he had deepened and broadened the traditional interpretation of Antiquity of "Sein" ("Being") as "Anwesen" ("presence") to the discernment of the "Ereignis" which allows "Sein" ("Being") and "Menschenwesen" ("human being as presence") to be seen as belonging together in an indivisible identity, as "vereignet" ("ordered") "zugeeignet" ("assigned"), "übereignet" ("appropriated") to one another.

Previously, he had dreamed repeatedly he was in the situation of his matriculation examination at the Constance high school. All the professors who had examined him at that time sat once more physically present before him and harassed him with relentless questions.

To understand such dreaming in the context of a life history and in a way appropriate to human nature, it is first necessary to dispose of all the current "depth psychology" theories of dreaming as undemonstrable, and as abitrary instructions leading solely to distorting interpretations of the dream phenomena. In their place, we have to practice a phenomenological approach as was taught by Heidegger himself. Then, what is characteristic of our dreaming as a whole, as well as this single specific dreaming of Heidegger, appears effortlessly of itself. It is specific of our dreaming state that the meaningfulness that appears to us addresses us mostly only from sensorily perceptible beings, which, moreover, do not belong to our own existing. For example, in Heidegger's dreaming, he is addressed primarily by his matriculation examiners. In the following, more clearsighted waking state, we may be addressed by the same "fulfilled meanings," but from more characteristic, much more central facts, or better, "givens," of our existing. So Heidegger's waking perception, too, expanded and focused to an ever clearer awareness of the meaningfulness of being examined, but in an incomparably more comprehensive way than previously in high school. He came to see how he had long been examined out of the center of his being, which consisted primarily of a fundamental ability to think. It brought him suffering enough, that in his waking state he was exposed to the never slackening demand emanating from this center of his being that he endure and pass the maturity examination of his philosophizing. However, his dreaming vision was so highly constricted that of all possible examinations of maturity only that of his high school matriculation examination could occur to him. His own proper and fundamental self-realization was evidently reached with his waking discernment of that state of affairs which revealed itself to him as "das Ereignis." It was this that allowed him to make the audacious leap from the ground of Parmenides' ancient saying, which he then knew how to say in German as: "Perceiving (thinking) and being: the same." If this lightning like revelation of the "Ereignis" had not corresponded to the true completion of his selfhood, how could it be at all comprehensible that Heidegger forthwith not only never again dreamt of having to stand the scrutiny of his examing high school professors, but, now waking, found his way out of the earlier constant pressure to think, and into a wise, serene composure in the depths of his heart.

P. 13, 20

¶ 2:21 AM 0 comments

But the thought of Ereignis is not just the adequate response to the dramatical and dramatized historical moment of thinking. In a deeper sense, I read it as a philosophical refiguration of this moment itself. On a few occasions Heidegger suggests such a connection himself. In the context of a discussion of space and time in Contributions to Philosophy, section 239, he insists that space-time must be reflected from out of the "Augenblicks-stätte" of Da-sein, its "momentary-places." The remark is partly in line with the analysis in Being and Time, even though it points to the later thinking in that it accords an irreducible role to spatiality. What is important here, however, is that in the same section he states that this existential origin of time-space corresponds to the unicity of being as Ereignis. As we learned from Being and Time, the Augenblick is the temporal mode that does not fit into the linear structure of chronological time, which it both shatters and gathers. Likewise, Ereignis belongs outside or beyond the generality of time and space, as well as every organized ontological conceptuality.

Another indication of the proximity between these two key concepts is the curious correlation of Ereignis and Er-äugnis that is mentioned in several later texts, such as "Der satz der Indentität." There he speaks of the Er-eignen as in fact an Er-äugnen, that is an er-blicken. These somewhat elusive indications should make us attentive to the underlying philosophical motivation that brings these two themes together. For they do indeed emerge from what we could perhaps describe--borrowing a term from Heidegger himself--as a common philosophical basic Stimmung.

P. 244-245

¶ 6:39 AM 0 comments

The site for the moment [Augenblicksstätte], uniqueness and onset of the brightest removal-unto the domain of the hint, out of the gentle charming-moving-unto the self-refusing-hesitating, nearness and remoteness in decision, the "where" and the "when" of being-history, lights up and shelters itself from within enownment of the grounding-attunement of reservedness--this and the basic experience of the t/here [Da] and thus of time-space.

Now, of course, referring representations of space and time back to attunement seems to be not only a metaphysical aligning of these empty forms, but also at the same time a new "subjectivizing."

But in this regard the following needs to be said:

Because Da-sein is essentially selfhood (ownhood) and because for its part selfhood is the ground of the I and the we and of all lower and higher "subjectivity," therefore the unfolding of time-space out of the site for the moment is not a subjectivizing, but rather its overcoming, if not already a fundamental discarding in advance.

This origin of time-space corresponds to the uniqueness of be-ing as enowning.

P. 261-262

¶ 6:48 AM 0 comments

Meaningless now becomes the meaning of beings as a whole. The meaninglessness in which the metaphysical articulation of modernity is consummated becomes something we can know as the essential fulfillment of this age only when we conceive of man as pure objectivity. Correspondingly, representation is the mis-calculating securing off of the horizons that demarcate everything we can perceive along with its explicability and its use.

¶ 10:04 AM 0 comments

Das Ereignis vereignet Mensch und Sein in ihr wesenhaftes Zusammen. Ein erstes, begrängendes Aufblitzen des Ereignisses erblicken wir im Ge-Stell.

Der Satz der Identität, not the Gesamtausgabe edition.

The appropriation appropriates man and Being to their essential togetherness. In the frame, we glimpse a first, oppressing flash of the appropriation.

P. 38

In concern Man and Being are alienated in their essential togetherness. A first uneasy flashing of concern is glimpsed in the frame-work.

P. 29

The event is suitable humans and its into its natureful together. We see a first, begrängendes flashing of the event in the rack.

Enpropriation gives over possession of human being and being into their essential (belonging-)together.

¶ 9:35 AM 0 comments

In one of the introductory sections to Contributions to Philosophy Heidegger speaks precisely of the need to actualize the historical moment (Augenblick) that is marked by the consumption of all previous metaphysical efforts. Their common failure is defined as the inability to draw man into the basic relation with beings. Throughout the book this theme is echoed: that the next step in the thinking of being is to disclose the belonging of man and of his thinking to that which he seeks to think. The task is not to add new determinations to being, but to reveal the dependence on being of thinking and language in general, or rather, to enable an experience of this dependency. To perform this task is to step into the Ereignis, a name for being to the extent that it gives itself precisely as that to which the thinker belongs.

This step is not something that can simply be performed according to a specific method. It is something that is granted to the thinker, or poet, who have experienced the need and cultivated the question. In section 255 these qualified situations are also presented as the Augenblick, in which "being flashes forth" and in which truth unfolds. The image of lightning as well as that of need and preparation, belong to what we could call a kairological rhetoric, a rhetoric of urgency and crisis. It dramatizes the situation of knowledge and truth as a situation about to undergo a radical transformation, reversal, or decision.

P. 244-245

Blaze like a
Fire
Flare
Burn like fire
Burn like
Fire in Cairo

¶ 4:32 PM 0 comments

[B]eyond his extensive writings in Descartes and in phenomenology, Marion has also published a number of influential studies in theology. The most notable of these is Dieu sans l’être (1982; Eng. trans.: God Without Being, 1991), which created an uproar among Thomists and Heideggerians alike for its commendation of Christian love (agape, or charity) as the preeminent phenomenological category, superior at once to the being of traditional scholastic metaphysics and to its supposed overcoming in Heidegger’s phenomenology of Being.

¶ 9:16 AM 0 comments

[K]airos is basically the idea that eternity isn't a continuity of nows, it's the presence of eternity in every moment, for Paul the eternal rebirth of Christ in the soul. In Paul's notion of time, the self is oriented toward the future and the inevitable return of the Lord, who 'shall return like a thief in the night'. His arrival will not be announced, the revolution will not be televised. This is where Heidegger comes in. The Augenblick, or 'moment of vision' is allied to the concept of world-historical heroism and the renouncing of egoism. I think. In my understanding, world-historical heroism occurs when an individual overcomes their egoism and becomes authentically oriented toward time.

¶ 4:47 AM 0 comments

[I]n a late writing, Identity and Difference, Heidegger suggests that in the grimmest extreme of the Ge-Stell flashes an opening to being’s retrieval, the event of a post-metaphysical dispensation. While Heidegger concludes, argues Vattimo, that no simple leap out of the Ge-Stell is possible, Heidegger hints that the weakening of being in the Ge-Stell may eventually and paradoxically allow for the lifting of being’s current near oblivion.

Taking this hint, Vattimo pursues what he calls “weak thought.” Resigned to imprisonment in metaphysics, this thinking hopes gradually to bend metaphysics toward dissolution. Weak thought questions “strong” claims, truth assertions brandishing as their ultimate warrants anachronistic, termite-ridden metaphysical cudgels. The trick to weak thought is to work strategically with the erosion of foundations rather than to react futilely against this nihilistic trend. Religious fundamentalists, rightist politicians, and nostalgic graspers after fading metaphysical reality generally: these forces stand in emancipation’s way. Vattimo argues that to counter reactionary philosophical arguments, governmental policies, and social movements with claims that emancipation better corresponds to some foundational truth only buttresses the roadblocks to liberation. Rather, in any given situation, Vattimo, practicing weak thought, searches out the nihilistic crowbar useful to help further dismantle cracking foundations and to bring forward emancipation-friendly political alternatives. In mood and attitude, these alternatives embody a mellow nihilism.

¶ 7:47 PM 0 comments

According to Heidegger's own statements (which of course do not have to be taken as the final source of evidence), from 1937 on, at the time of writing the Contributions to Philosophy - From Enowning, the word 'propriation' or 'enowning' assumes a position as principal word in his thinking. The essence of technology is also thought through in the forties under the aura of propriation. In an unusual text from the fifties, Identity and Difference, whose unusual status among Heidegger's writings has been noticed by Gianni Vattimo, Heidegger talks of a twisting of the set-up into propriation, of the "sudden flash of propriation" within the set-up. In this text there is a sort of toggle relationship between the most extreme consummation of metaphysics and the twisting of metaphysics into propriation, in which humans would "lose" the determination of essence which metaphysics has "lent" them. Twisting (Verwindung), as Vattimo's pensiero débole elaborates, must not be confused with overcoming (Überwindung). In the small difference of a prefix there lies a subtle but decisive difference between Heideggerian thinking of being and metaphysical thinking. Twisting as well as overcoming relate to Western history. Whereas overcoming lies close to the Hegelian and a fortiori the Marxian conception of history, twisting or getting-over is supposed to initially indicate another type of thinking of history, namely, history as the history of being. "In the destiny of being there is never a mere sequence: now set-up, then world and thing, but in each case a passing-by and simultaneity of the early and the late."

¶ 9:38 AM 0 comments

Wherever truth of be-ing is not willed--not shifted into the will of knowing awareness and experience, i.e., into questioning--all time-space is withdrawn from the moment, as from the en-lightning of be-ing out of steadfastness of the simple and never calculable enowning.

P. 288

Only the few constantly stand in the brightness of this lightning.

P. 21

¶ 11:50 PM 0 comments

[It is] the richness of being in its multiple meanings which points in Aristotle's thinking toward the marvel: Dass Seindes ist, that a being is.

In such a Dass there resounds in anticipation that for which we ouselves are still allzu unangefangen, all too 'un-begun' or inexperienced, as Heidegger said one day, in order to be able to think it as,..., the inconceivable 'Dass' of Ereignis, which as physis is nevertheless already proposed to us as a task. Even the pollachos legesthai of being in Aristotle's sense is only an 'immobilization' of it. It is according to the guiding thread of Aristotle's thought, however, in a meditation pursued over fifteen years, that Heidegger came to clear with Sein und Zeit the question of the meaning of being before exploring more profoundly this question itself in the course of a 'second navigation' that suspended the publication of a pure and simple continuation of Sein und Zeit itself.

P. 135

¶ 8:11 AM 0 comments

It is worth recalling Heidegger's dislike of linguistic 'slogans', his so-called "Sprachkritik", to highlight the political implications of his apology for an ontological relationship to language. We cannot pretend that Heidegger was a socialist but the evolution from a 'purely' Marxist viewpoint is clear. Indeed, Marx and Engels' "Communist Manifesto", a manifesto by intellectuals for the proletariat, was with Heidegger's ontology replaced by a less altruistic "Intellectual Manifesto", a manifesto by intellectuals for intellectuals.

¶ 8:20 PM 0 comments

The question posed was: is philosophical responsibility possible?And the answer was that Heidegger treated perceptions like a clear window through which he thought to see the world. With this approach, Heidegger couldn’t answer questions of responsibility at the level of the description of perceptual actuality. And the further conclusions were left to us.

¶ 9:04 AM 0 comments

"So with this Michelson-Morley result. We've all had a lot of faith invested. Now it looks like the Aether, whether it's moving or standing still, just doesn't exist. What do we do now?"

"Taking a contrary view," said O. D. Chandrasekhar, who was here in Cleveland all the way from Bombay, India, and didn't say much, but when he did, nobody could figure out what he meant, "this null result may as easily be read as proving the existence of the Aether. Nothing is there, yet light travels. The absence of a light-bearing medium is the emptiness of what religion calls akasa, which is the ground or basis of all that we imagine 'exists.'"

Everybody took a moment of silence, as if considering this. "What I worry about," said Roswell at last, "is that the Aether will turn out to be something like God. If we can explain everything we want to explain without it, then why keep it?"

P. 63

¶ 3:45 AM 1 comments