The new issue of Axess has an article by Richard Wolin that is basically a diatribe about "postmodernists" and "postructuralists"; adjectives that appear to cover anyone Wolin disagrees with, whether on the left or right, authoritarian or anarchistic, conservative or progressive. As with his books that I have read, I don't dispute the most of the facts--what year someone published something--he cites, but his interpretations verge on the incoherent and just plain silly.

For example, consider this particular morsel:

During the 1960s the poststructuralists sought to supplement Marx with more radical critiques of “civilization” set forth by Nietzsche and Heidegger.

I'll leave Nietzsche for others, but as far as Heidegger is concerned, his critique of civilization, is under explored territory. He did, in two decades, work his way up the hierarchy of a centuries old German university, from graduate student, through chair of the philosophy, to getting elected rector by the faculty. Only when offered a position at the University of Berlin did he finally decide that too much civilization did not agree with him. Examining the works set forth by Heidegger, I find that, after searching the text of his most popular work, in Being and Time the word civilization, with or without the quotes, appears exactly zero times. That leaves one wondering of what those poststructuralists were supplementing. Searching his other works available to me, his most popular works, and those also available to the poststucturalist supplementers, I do occasionally come across instances of terms such as Greek civilization and Roman civilization, and yes, occasionally the word itself in quotes. But nothing substantial enough to be pass for a critique of "civilization". Perhaps to a historian like Wolin, every text is about "civilization", and facts, such as what a philosopher actually wrote about, shouldn't stand in the way of a good polemic.  ¶ 10:48 PM 0 comments

  Wozu Dichter?

An excerpt from Maxine Chernoff's Scenes from Ordinary Life from New American Writing 25.

(Supertitles: The Love Suicides at Sonezaki (circa 1725) describe a realistic fashion a young merchant of soy sauce who commits suicide with the prostitute he loves. Chikamatsu sought in his domestic plays to depict on the stage the tragedies which occur in ordinary life rather than the mystical struggles of the gods.)


Time: 1925

Martin Heidegger:Why is love rich beyond all possible human experiences and a sweet burden to those seize in its grasp? Because we become what we love and yet remain ourselves.

Hannah Arendt: Do not forget me, and do not forget how much and how deeply I know that our love has become the blessing of my life.

(Dejection would be more vivedly suggested if each in turn stood by a drooping willow when they spoke.)

  ¶ 3:20 PM 0 comments

  Frank Schalow on freedom and the ontological difference.

In resolute decision making, Dasein experiences freedom through the facticity of its taking action (i.e., as a form of praxis). As Heidegger states in his 1930 lectures on Kant: "The factuality corresponding to the idea of freedom is that of praxis." In its facticity, freedom pertains directly to the authentic self. But what about the possibility of Dasein's understanding of being? Is there not corresponding to this development a specific instance of freedom? But how is it possible to understand being except through its differentiation from beings? As Heidegger states in his 1928 lectures on logic, "We thus term this distinction that first enables something like an understanding-of-being the ontological difference." In On the Essence of Ground, Heidegger suggests that Dasein first experiences the ontological difference by projecting the world as the horizon of possibilities. He reserves the term transcendence to describe this act of "world-making." Through transcendence, the ontological difference becomes factical. The enactment of transcendence, the projecting of "that for the sake of which," he calls "freedom."

In this context, freedom implies Dasein's ability to distinguish between being and beings and to abide within that difference. The differentiation between being and beings defines the dynamic character of that openness by making explicit, in a way only presupposed in the phenomenon of resoluteness, the difference between the openness as such and what emerges (to become manifest and be encountered) within the space of opening forth. In the Kant book, which Heidegger discusses at length Dasein's transcendence, he calls this area of openness a "free-space" or "play-space" (Spiel-Raum). Not only must various beings emerge in this free-space so Dasein can encounter them, but, because it is a being, the self must also depend on this openness in order to benefit from its own capability of "awareness." Thus self-reflexivity is not a given, but, as Raffoul illustrates, it must depend upon a prior openness. Accordingly, Heidegger emphasizes that the self, because it must be surpassed along with beings-as-a-whole, comes to be constituted in the act of transcendence itself. On the one hand, the self projects "that for the sake" over beings-as-a-whole, and hence a primordial sense of willing remains intact. On the other hand, the freedom of the initiating act (of will) only becomes determinate and factical through the accomplishment of transcendence, in which the self benefits from the abundance of possibilites emerging at the periphery of the world toward which the self transcends.

Pp. 122-123

  ¶ 4:57 PM 0 comments

  Walk, don't run.

Some intellectuals find aspects of [Sarkozy's] man-of-the-people style a bit déclassé. Even his preferred athletic activity, jogging, has been criticized as somehow anti-intellectual.

In an after-midnight round table on French television this month, Finkielkraut, the philosopher and a Sarkozy supporter, called on him to abandon what he called an “undignified” pursuit.

“Western civilization, in its best sense, was born with the promenade,” Finkielkraut said, noting that thinkers such as Aristotle, Heidegger and Rimbaud all were walkers. “Walking is a sensitive, spiritual act. Jogging — it is management of the body.”

  ¶ 7:42 PM 0 comments

  The horizonal, still pertinent in later Heidegger.

If the body as body is always my body, then this is my own way of being. Thus, bodying forth is co-determined by my being human in the sense of the ecstatic sojourn amidst the beings in the clearing. The limit of bodying forth (the body is only as it is bodying forth: "body") is the horizon of being within which I sojourn.

P. 87

  ¶ 8:48 PM 0 comments

  Continuing with Parvis Emad on translating Ereignis.

I first considered leaving Er-eignis untranslated. But doing so requires an explanation that cannot begiven without interpreting Ereignis, and such an interpretation ipso facto requires translating the word. Leaving Ereignis untranslated also leads to other problems concerning the family of words closely relatd to Ereignis such as Ereignung, Eignung, Zueignung, Übereignung, Eigentum, ereignen, zueignen, übereignen, eignen. Accordingly, I translated Ereignis as "enowning"--a word "that approximates the richness of the German word without pretending to replace it" [P. xx].

The English prefix en- in enowning adequately assumes the same function as the German prefix Er- in Ereignis. The English prefix en-, with its varied meanings of "enabling something," "bringing it into a certain condition," and "Carrying thoroughly through," captures the dynamic character of Er- in Ereignis. When enjoined with owning, en- conveys a different meaning of owning, an unpossessive owning with no appropriatable content, as differentiated from an "owning of something."

The rendering of Ereignis as "enowning" has several advantages: unlike terms such as event, appropriation, event of appropriation, the word enowning lends itself readily to hyphenation and thus functions as an approximate rendering of the Er- and eignis of Er-eignis; unlike terms such as event, appropriation, event of appropriation, and befitting, enowning is not tied to a content whose appropriation or fitting would be an "event"; unlike the aforementioned terms, enowning speaks of an "owning" that has nothing in common with hegemonic seizing; and unlike the aforementioned terms, which are hard put to reflect the hermeneutic-phenomenological kinship of Ereignis to words such as Ereignung, Eignung, Zueignung, Übereignung, enowning reflects this kinship and allows for an approximate rendering of the following words: Ereignung with enownment, Eignung with owning, Eigentum with ownhood, Eigenheit with ownness, Zueignung with owning-to, Übereignung with owning-over-to, Eigentümliche with what is of ownhood.

Pp. 32-33

  ¶ 7:38 PM 0 comments

  Salvador Pániker on humanism's need for linguistic reform.

Still, while a "linguistic turn" may have taken place, our syntactic habits have changed very little. And I'm only referring to that which can be understood. The previously-cited Heidegger, in his second period, claimed poetry—of whose supreme example would be Hölderlin—as a model for non-objectifying language, irreducible to a simple instrument of information. Unfortunately, Heidegger managed to so inebriate himself in the "poetic darkness" that he became hard to follow.

It's interesting that this article, published in the February 18 edition of Madrid's El Pais, refers to "the recently disappeared Richard Rorty", who officially died June 8. And this isn't the earliest anticipatory announcement of Rorty's finitude.  ¶ 3:06 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Die fröhliche Wissenschaft explains Zuhandenheit and more.

Now, Heidegger does not believe that the Greek time was any better than modern times, though many still characterize him in this way. Heidegger is not another Winkelmann nostalgic for the age in which "real men" lived; he does not wish he was Greek. Heidegger conducted an intense study of the Greek and early Greek writings in the years before and during the composition of Being and Time in seminars and privately because he realized that the Greeks had a closer understanding of the real ground of ontology than many throughout history. It is not that this understanding allowed them to grasp it better and define it concretely. Indeed, it is often their misunderstandings of Being that Heidegger finds most informative as to what Being is. What is crucial for Heidegger about the Greeks is that they brought Being, the ground of ontology and metaphysics, to words more explicitly than the rest of Western history.

  ¶ 9:50 AM 0 comments

  Continuing along with Parvis Emad's on translating and translating Ereignis.

What is this openness? "It is that...wherein being allots itself to man such that man preserves the allotted in its ownmost and such that for his part man first finds his ownmost from out of such preserving and retains it" (GA 54:115). The "word" does not have the function of relating the human to human being. Rather, the word appears as that wherein being allots itself to the human. Put more precisely, the "word" is not the link between the human and being. The issue here is not linkage or relatedness but allotment. In view of this allotment, Heidegger considers the "word" to be "the essential mark of distinction of man" (GA 54:118). And the "word" sustains such an allotment because it is openness through and through. Precisely as this openness the word "allows for the intralingual translation of the "word" Ereignis in to Er- and eignis.

Turning now to the problems that pertain to the translation of Ereignis, the most crucial being-historical word, I should note that my translation of this word is oriented by Heidegger's own stance toward this "guiding word." (He articulates this stance when he points out that Ereignis is as untranslatable as the Greek logoV or the Chinese Tao.) The first thing to be kept in mind is that the prefix Er- and construct eignis have an independent status calling for distinct translations of both if the translation is to be hermeneutically responsible to what Heidegger says with Er-eignis. In Er-eignis the prefix Er- has an active character, which places an unmistakable emphasis on the dynamism and the movement inherent in the verb eignen. Moreover, the construct eignis opens the way to the being-historical word Eigentum, "ownhood."

P. 32

Continued.  ¶ 9:15 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Idea Festival asks and Steven Horst responds:

I find Heidegger hard to figure out, personally. But my understanding of what he says that is relevant to philosophy of mind is basically that discursive thought is only a small portion of what goes on in our (broadly) mental lives, and is itself parasitic upon more basic modes of thinking and being like skillful bodily engagement with the world. So trying to understand the mind in its totality in terms of, or on the model of, discursive reasoning is sort of like trying to understand the physical world in terms of rocks and lakes and sofas. There are things that are more or less explainable in those terms, but the explanation is not fundamental. It leaves a lot of things out, and doesn't allow you to understand why the macro-level regularities so often break down.

This has a particular application to the view that the mind is, in its totality, a computer running a symbolic program. Computer programs are themselves modeled upon discursive reasoning. Upon a very regimented form of reasoning, to be sure, but discursive nonetheless. The classic AI/CogSci strategy is to hypothesize that all of our reasoning, including unconscious and intraconscious processes, are underwritten by something program-like, and that means ultimately something modeled on our understanding of conscious discursive reasoning, involving rules and representations, only transposed to another level that the conscious mind cannot access. If Heidegger is right, and the underlying architecture of thought is not well described in such terms, that's a serious problem, as it means that AI and traditional CogSci are importing an interpretive metaphor (rules and representations) that mis-represents its subject matter.

  ¶ 6:46 PM 0 comments

  Get thee to a cottage.

A little privacy, some movement of air and a gentle conversation between architecture and nature - this is all I want for my cottage. Possibly, a place to retreat into the mind. Henry David Thoreau's house on Walden Pond, a tiny affair, suggests a thinking solitude, not the despair that can come from living among millions in the city. Le Corbusier's "Cabanon" in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin overlooks the Mediterranean in the south of France. A rough pine-board cabin lined with plywood, now restored, was rudely attached to a snack bar; this is where Corb designed new cities, social condensers and modern mansions for the clients who would indulge him. Martin Heidegger's hut in the Black Forest mountains of southern Germany is where, in the early 1920s, without electricity or running water, he wrote his groundbreaking phenomenological work titled Being and Time, a work that resisted the high priests of modernism and articulated, instead, a crisis of dwelling.

  ¶ 3:13 PM 0 comments

  Parvis Emad on considerations when one goes about translating Ereignis.

The primary outcome of the coalescing of interpretation and intralingual translation in this work [Contributions] is the terminological meaning that the word Ereignis receives. In light of this terminological meaning, being-historical-thinking unfolds and proliferates from Contributions to Philosophy onward. It is essential to keep in mind that on the way to this terminological meaning, the coalescing of interpretation and intralingual translation endows an independent status to the prefix Er- and the construct eignis in the word Ereignis. Henceforth, each functions as a single word requiring s distinct translation. To do justice to the terminological meaning of the word Er-eignis, one must take into account this independent status by translating both the prefix Er- and the construct eignis. Only by being mindful of their independent status can one account for Er-eignis as "[the] self-supplying and self-mediating midpoint into which all essential swaying of the truth of be-ing must be thought back in advance...And [from which] all concepts of be-ing must be said" [P. 51].

To grasp the intralingual translation of the word Ereignis as Heidegger translates this word into the prefix Er- and the construct eignis, we must bear in mind that this translation does not take its orientation from a dictionary. This Heidegger's use of Ereignis is not bound by its dictionary-based definition.

The autonomy of the intralingual translation of Ereignis vis-à-vis its dictionary-based definition prompts Heidegger to reject the authority of the dictionary. By doing so, he also rejects the idea that the dictionary functions as the undisputed arbiter in matters of translation. He says "A dictionary can provide an indication for understanding a word...but it is never an absolute authority that would be binding a priori. The appeal to a dictionary is always an appeal to an interpretation of language, which is often not grasped at all in its style and limits" (GA 53:75). He does not accept the undisputed authority of the dictionary not because with its definitions a dictionary displaces each word into the subsets of other words but because the openness inherent in each word eludes these definitions. This openness makes possible the intralingual translation of the word Ereignis.

Pp. 31-32

Continued.  ¶ 7:58 PM 0 comments

  The Stranger salaciously reviews a recent Arendt book.

[S]he didn't want to be registered as [a philosopher]. That was her final position. But what her work on Plato, Kant, Hegel, and Marx (the main subject of the first half of her book) offers is a philosophy that has what she in her teens brought to Heidegger's stale world: fresh air. The essays in The Promise of Politics are not musty or suffocating from dread—but very much alive, affirmative, and, at times, as easy on the mind as a breeze on the skin. Nietzsche once spoke of philosophizing with a hammer; Arendt philosophized with an open window.

And who pointed out the importance of the open, that musty dusty hermeneutical transcendental horizonal clearing, to said "teenager", then?  ¶ 9:05 AM 0 comments

  Chinese not confrontational enough these days crisis.

In the 1980s, a Chinese translation of Martin Heidegger could sell hundreds of thousands of copies.

Though it was unclear how many of the readers can really understand Heidegger, the truly important thing is that the philosopher was looked up to because people were trying to understand the problems confronted in their real life.

Today few care to read such books.

  ¶ 12:30 PM 0 comments

  Parvis Emad on what's discordant between the ontological difference and beyng--be-ing in this instance.

The ontological difference is a discording distinction because it introduces discord into the thinking of being by intimating that to think being in its own right it is enough to determine the beingness of beings, which is precisely what happens in the 'first beginning.' Specifically, this distinction does not heed the manner in which a being's shining forth, its manifesting, is inseparable and yet different from the manner in which be-ing as such appears. Had this distinction accounted for the manner in which a being's appearing proves to be inseparable and yet different from be-ing's way of appearing, this distinction would have recognized that when viewed in the light of be-ing, a being is not--beings are not. However, if we carefully ponder the question whether we can attribute to beings the same "is" that distinguishes be-ing as the same "is-ness" peculiar to beings, that is, to what is extant, "exists," and has an essence, then we realize that "be-ing can no longer be thought of in the perspective of beings; it must be enthought from within be-ing itself" [P. 5].

Ontological difference is a discording distinction because it fails to take into account the distinction between the "is" peculiar to be-ing and the "is-ness" peculiar to beings. Ontological difference is a discording distinction because it suggests that be-ing can be thought in its own right within the perspective of beings. Insofar as this difference does not lead to awareness of the distinction between the "is-ness" peculiar to beings and the "is" that belongs to be-ing, it introduces a discord into the onefold of be-ing and a being. This onefold, in spite of the discordant ontological difference, must be thought at all costs.

P. 138

  ¶ 7:23 PM 0 comments

  Patrick Crogan on ordering things.

According to Heidegger in his famous essay, "The Origin of the Work of Art", one of the most common understandings of a thing is, precisely, matter (hyle) that has form (morphe). "In this analysis of the thing as matter", says Heidegger, "form is already coposited". Heidegger argues in this essay first given as a lecture in the 1930s that this notion of what a thing is arises first and foremost from the notion of "equipment" as intentionally formed matter. Moreover, he claims that the "matter-form" structure of the thing seen as a piece of equipment has become in modern times the dominant way of understanding all things, and indeed all beings, both man-made and natural, but also human beings and their work:

the matter-form structure, however, by which the Being of a piece of equipment is first determined, readily presents itself as the immediately intelligible constitution of every being, because here man himself as maker participates in the way in which the piece of equipment comes into being. Because equipment takes an intermediate place between mere thing and work, the suggestion is that nonequipmental beings--things and works and ultimately all beings--are to be comprehended with the help of the Being of equipment (the matter-form structure).

Heidegger's account of this generalisation of the being of equipment so that it comes to determine the nature of all kinds of things anticipates the critique of modernity and modern technology that he was later to develop as a central theme of his writings in essays such as "Overcoming Metaphysics" and the "The Question Concerning Technology". In a similar vein to this argument about the extension of the thingness of equipment to all things, this critique stresses the way in which in the modern age there is an increasing tendency to view everything, both natural, man-made things and even humanity itself, as part of the potential resource pool for the systematic maximisation of an ever-expanding technological exploitation of materials. Samuel Weber has translated Heidegger's term for this tendency, "Bestellbarkeit", as "the susceptibility of being-placed-on-order".

  ¶ 10:14 AM 0 comments

  Otto Pöggeler, in the introduction to his The Paths of Heidegger's Life and Thought, describes three periods in Heidegger's thinking.

If we were to mark the most prominent phases of the thinker's career, we would have to distinguish:

1) the question of the meaning of being in Being and Time,
2) the question of truth as history in the following decades, and
3) the question of place as a way of addressing our place, in his late work.

In between lie manifold documents in which the unified course of Heidegger's path of thought can be seen.

Why, then, isn't the continuity of Heidegger's thought obvious, rather than held to be sharply divided in two by a reversal? The continuities which inform it throughout are not far to seek. In a general way, the notion that nature makes no leaps favors continuity. Leaps that break the continuity of history, like a failure and a new beginning, or a return to an earlier condition, are unknown. Heidegger personally testified that the term Ereignis, or emergence, became a fundamental word for his thought beginning in 1936. Finding that this word had many earlier uses prior to its coming to be emphasized by Heidegger, and that it carried other meanings after 1936, would go far towards establishing continuity in Heidegger's thought.

P. 6

The translator of the book explains how he dealt with Ereignis.

In German Ereignis conventionally conveys either "event," in the sense of something coming into its own, or "appropriation," in the sense of making something one's own. Whie he sometimes uses it in the sense of "event," Heidegger usually intends Ereignis to name his ultimate insight into the relationship between being and time. Many English translators early chose "appropriation" or "appropriative event" to render this special sense. Unfortunately both of these suggest that being--which is what is characterized by Ereignis--might be some sort of agent or entity. But the conception of being as some sort of agent or entity is exactly what Heidegger found to be wrong with traditional Western philosophy since Plato. Pöggeler correctly insists in this book, as he first did more than thirty years ago, that the energizing force for Heidegger's thought is the revision of this traditional Western conception of being. I have adopted "emergence" to render Ereignis. It suggests the independent sense of being as what comes forth in the course of events, while not confining such unfolding to the singular "event." "Emergence" conveys in English the historical and temporal qualities Heidegger evidently intended to articulate, especially because it makes available the sense of temporal unfolding in the verb "to emerge."

  ¶ 12:18 AM 0 comments

  Hold onto the handrail to avoid falling into the abyss.

The photographs record moments of actual physical danger for the artist, who has taken falls and created physically hazardous sets to position his body just so. A magician never reveals his secrets, but he safeguards particularly demanding stunts with a trapeze-like wire (that are later digitally erased) to capture just the right moment of peril. To better inform this series, Skarbakka invokes the words of existentialist Martin Heidegger, who described existence as struggling to catch oneself after being thrown into an already existing world and thus into its mortal possibilities. The Struggle to Right Oneself hits the nail on this philosophic head, reminding us to hold onto the handrail and brace for the ever-present uncertainty.

  ¶ 7:51 AM 0 comments

  Francis Fukuyama is still trying to reason us back from the abyss.

[Interviewer] The clash with Islam underlines this moral paralysis because we live, as the late Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz used to say, in "non-parallel historical times."

As a result we witness this paradox: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, citing Spinoza, has fled from faith to reason in the name of freedom, defecting from the womb of Islam and becoming an "Enlightenment fundamentalist" and atheist. Yet, Europe's most famous secular liberal philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, now argues that since postmodern society is unable to generate its own values, it can only "nourish" itself from religious sources. For him, Western values—liberty, conscience, human rights—are grounded in our Judeo-Christian heritage.

According to Habermas, "unbridled subjectivity"—the relativism which reigns today—clashes with "what is really absolute—the right of every creature to be respected as an ‘image of God.'"

What do you make of this double movement in history?

Fukuyama This problem of how our post-religious societies come up with values was the critical issue for two celebrated thinkers from the University of Chicago—Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, and Leo Strauss.

Strauss called this "the crisis of modernity." The question is whether there is a way of establishing values through reason and philosophical discourse without reverting to religion. His central argument was that classical political philosophy—the Greeks with their emphasis on "natural right," or nature deciphered by reason as a source of values—had been prematurely rejected by modern philosophy.

The way to think about this is that we have both a deep philosophical problem and a practical political problem. The two may be related, but not necessarily.

The deep philosophical problem is whether you can walk Western philosophy back from Heidegger and Nietzche and say that reason does permit the establishment of positive values—in other words that you can demonstrate the truth of certain ideas.

  ¶ 7:24 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Michael's [zaadz] Blog on occasions of art.

While Heidegger's project of the history of being is worthwhile, his insights into the modes of nature's coming forth valuable, the radicalness of his vocabulary at times entails philosophical loss; in our case the marginalizing of the sensuous-perceptual character of art, now re-framed as poeticizing earth, contributing to the leveling of distinctions in media (music is heard, a painting is seen, where these respective perceptual fields are incommensurable).

  ¶ 6:53 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Still Water Springs deconstructs authenticity.

Let us consider the fact that in order for Dasein to exist intelligibly it requires a degree of inauthenticity. Dasein exists within what Heidegger calls ‘world’, i.e. a pre-conscious and even pre-conceptual network of meanings and significations. As Being-in-the-world Dasein finds all he comes into contact with as ready-to-hand, viz. as already occupying an understood place, role and function within Dasein’s world in such a manner that we must think of it not as an ‘understanding’, but a pre-understanding of sorts, an intuition.

  ¶ 10:58 AM 0 comments

  Alfred Denker's dictionary on Ereignis.

APPROPRIATION (Ereignis). Appropriation is the central formal indication of Heidegger's entire path of thinking. It identifies the very source and primal leap (Ur-sprung) of the dynamic relationship between Being and being-there. In the dictonary sense Ereignis is the event, the happening or occurence. Heidegger makes use of the 'own' meaning of 'eigne' to read the sense of the verb 'ereignen' as to make one's own appearance, to appropriate. However, entities do not appropriate being for themselves; Being appropriates entities in their being. The verb 'ereignen' is derived from the German 'eräugnen', that means to place before the eyes, to show. Appropriation is also 'Eräugnung', the placing before the eyes, that is, the unconcealment of Being. The Appropriation of Being is the clearing in which everything becomes visible.

Heidegger introduced appropriation in his 1919 course, The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldviews, as the most intense lived experience of the meaning-bestowing dynamics of the It which worlds. The I is fully there in the "It worlds" of the primal something such that I myself properize (ereigne) It to myself and It properizes (ereignet) itself according to its essence. The intimate involvement with the primal "It gives" of Being thus prompts the distinction between events which matter to myself personally and move me by situating me, and processes which pass before me objectively and do not concern me personally. In Being and Time appropriation returned to its mundane sense of historical events past and gone. After a decade of dormancy Heidegger returned to its originally intimate sense in 1928.

Appropriation became the central topic of Heidegger's later thought. Here it means a unique process of appropriating (aneignen) and assigning (zueignen). Being calls for the authenticity of commemorative thinking. With his conception of appropriation Heidegger's thought no longer transcends being-there to Being; he tries to let Being speak out of itself and make being-there heed its claim. This turning away from being-there to Being implies a change in the essence of truth. Heidegger leaves the identity of Being and thinking and fundamental ontology behind. His thought is now enacted in a region appropriation addresses as 'aletheia', that is, the clearing of self-revealing concealment from which the relationship between Being and being-there is thought in a more original way.

Heidegger's second main work, Contributions to Philosophy, written between 1936 and 1938, is a careful meditation on Being as appropriation in which he attempts the turning away from metaphysics towards the commemorative thinking of Being. The turning of appropriation is the turning point and appropriation is the ruling middle in which that which is can be itself and thus can return to its property as its proper place. The propriation (Ereignung) of appropriation is the assigning (Zueignung) of Being to being-there and the surrender (Übereignung) of being-there to Being.

Heidegger's new conception of appropriation leads to three fundamental changes in his thought. 1. He determines language no longer as apophantic assertion, but as the appropriation that brings being-there to its essence and makes it the 'there' of Being. Appropriation grants to mortals their abode within their essence, so that they may be capable of being those who speak. Language is the saying of Being from the region of its essence: the dynamic process of self-revealing concealment. Appropriation by way of saying and language thus always speaks according to the mode in which appropriation as such reveals itself or withdraws itself into concealment. 2. The temporal determination of appropriation can neither be ontological nor existential. Appropriation temporalizes itself suddenly and unexpectedly. In this respect it is like lightning; we never know when and where it will strike. The history of Being is the sequence of such flashes of lightning. Every appropriation is a clearing. 3. Heidegger determines appropriation in its being as the fourfold and its nearness to things. The unity of the fourfold comes to presence as the worlding of the world, that is, the region and time where sky and earth and the divinities and the mortals meet. Of groundless appropriation holds: It - appropriation - propriates.

  ¶ 4:02 PM 0 comments

  The forgetfulness of being, scaled up.

It may be possible to glimpse before the supposed beginning of time into the universe prior to the Big Bang, researchers now say.

Unfortunately, any such picture will always be fuzzy at best due to a kind of "cosmic forgetfulness."

  ¶ 10:04 AM 0 comments

  I phone, your ring tones, all remain alone.

[T]echnolust has nothing to do with rationality. It's all about instant gratification and the absurd belief that devices can make us happy. We are all, as Keynes famously said, the slaves of some defunct philosopher. In the case of the iPhone, the sage is Heidegger, who said that 'technology is the art of arranging the world so that we don't have to experience it'.

  ¶ 10:07 AM 0 comments