"O friend, you here I'd not expect to find
On streets past midnight littered with such folk
As myself, drunk, a disgrace to the Volk,"
Words like these passed to lips from mind

¶ 5:07 PM 1 comments

Just imagine, as Descartes did, that we can be liberated from the constraint of the body and exist only as pure thought. What greater freedom could one possibly enjoy? No longer bound by space or time, such a being would be free to traverse the universe at will. Except that such an undifferentiated and locationless being, no longer tensed in time, would be unable to separate past, present and future or to separate here from there. With no fixed abode in time or space there would be no means by which experience could be determinate and no features to discriminate the specific from the general. It is precisely the constraint of a body, existing in the here and now, which enables a specific viewpoint to flourish and an independent existence to announce itself.

¶ 4:46 AM 2 comments

Unconcealment, as an openness to being considered without reference to beings, comes about to reveal Being because of Being, but without residing in Being. Thus something must give Being through unconcealment. This “something,” which, because it gives Being, cannot be either Being or a being, is Ereignis. The thinking of Ereignis is the thinking of how Being can be unconcealed by unconcealment when unconcealment cannot be in or even by Being and Being itself cannot be.

¶ 11:53 PM 3 comments

Man 1: You are looking for something?
Man 2: Yes...
Man 1: Are you looking to go in?
Man 2: Yes.
Man 1: An opening?
Man 2: I look for an opening? Do you understand?
Man 1: Yes. I understand.
Man 2: Do you understand I look for an opening?
Man 1: Yes, I understand completely.
Man 2: Good. Good that you understand. That's good you understand.

¶ 9:04 PM 0 comments

Most likely, the mobile telephone will evolve into a kind of internet appliance; you always will be connected, and the internet automatically will find you as you walk around. And it won’t be a slow connection, like today’s Treo, rather, it’ll be at broad-band speeds. This evolution will take place in much the same way that broad-band replaced dial- up.

Even someone as profound about these issues as Martin Heidegger was unable to account for the ontological status of performances – music, theater, dance, etc. They certainly aren’t “things,” in the sense of being either ready-to-hand or present-at-hand. In Being and Time, at least, these are the only two categories of being he acknowledges, apart (of course) from Dasein. Although they would have floundered on shoals of mutual incomprehensibility, Heidegger’s view of “things” in Being and Time is a lot like Bertrand Russell’s (early) view of language: its purpose is to refer, and refer to objects, which are “things.”

Later, in What Is a Thing, Heidegger expanded his ontology to include “plans, decisions, reflections, loyalties, actions, historical things,” even, “anything else that is a something and not nothing,”. Unquestionably this is over-broad, for the simple reason that processes and performances aren’t tangible, corporeal “things.” Rather, they’re “events” or “occurrences” – something ephemeral, or evanescent. Continuing with our analogy, it would take later philosophers such as J. L. Austin to recognize (re-recognize, of course) that language does far more than simply “refer.”

¶ 10:58 AM 0 comments

Their first experiment was published in 1989. To test the hypothesis that recognition of mortality evokes "worldview defense"--their term for the range of emotions, from intolerance to religi- osity to a preference for law and order, that they believe thoughts of death can trigger--they assembled 22 Tucson municipal court judges. They told the judges they wanted to test the relationship between personality traits and bail decisions, but, for one group, they inserted in the middle of the personality questionnaire two exercises meant to evoke awareness of their mortality. One asked the judges to "briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you"; the other required them to "jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you physically as you die and once you are physically dead." They then asked the judges to set bail in the hypothetical case of a prostitute whom the prosecutor claimed was a flight risk. The judges who did the mortality exercises set an average bail of $455. The control group that did not do the exercises set it at an average of $50. The psychologists knew they were onto something.

¶ 8:38 AM 0 comments

According to Heidegger, humankind has fallen into a crisis by taking a narrow, technological approach to the world and by ignoring the larger question of existence. People, if they wish to live authentically, must broaden their perspectives. Instead of taking their existence for granted, people should view themselves as part of Being.

¶ 1:58 PM 0 comments

While at this point there seems to be very little in common with Heidegger's ontology, the similarity will be made obvious when we consider Vico's discussion of the lightning flash.

¶ 9:06 AM 0 comments

What if we take the third view, that the FQP is rational and scientifically unanswerable, but interesting nonetheless? The modern and highly influential German metaphysician Martin Heidegger maintained that the FQP is the only genuine philosophical question. Oddly enough, he called himself an atheist -- but also claimed that atheists do not deny the existence of God. Rather, they deny that "God has an existence". This obscure wording serves to emphasise the ambiguity in the concept of existence. Heidegger's basic point was that simply stating that God does or does not exist, without further clarifying the sense of the word "exist", is ambiguous.

¶ 9:02 AM 0 comments

So in a way Heidegger is moving from a reinterpretation of the idea of Being, since this is the primary way the Greeks understood things, to a reinterpretation of the idea of Becoming-as-Being, which is what negation as analyzed by the later traditions leads to--i.e. not-Being as a way of Being--and then from there to an idea of Being that is beyond both the Greek and the Christian/German Idealist tradition. This means that as he moves further and further away from Being-towards-death and towards the issue of temporality in the later chapters of Being and Time he is looking more and more at how negation can be redefined explicitly--i.e. not implicitly, as it is in the sections on Being-towards-death--by bringing in time. Thus he will have to contend with the two greatest philosophers of each tradition, Aristotle and Hegel, concerning time.

¶ 9:30 PM 0 comments

[N]o one has ever seen Mind, just like no one has ever seen the Cosmic Order or God. If this magic mirror, the mediator-guarantor of ultimate, absolute reality proves to be a mere metaphysical illusion, then philosophy has no more to say about knowledge and truth than common sense does. In this case, reliable, objective knowledge is just a matter of embracing the ways in which we, members of a community, go about justifying our actions to each other; it is just a matter of acknowledging our epistemological quirks and mannerisms.

All this may not be entirely new. Well before Rorty there were others, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein for example, who had done much to loosen the metaphysical coils constricting our lower case minds.

¶ 2:40 PM 0 comments

Should I have a will?

You may feel full of life, but now is the time to address mortal thoughts. Death, as the German philosopher Martin Heidegger said, “is in the widest sense a phenomenon of life”. You are not yet ready to embrace it, but it lurks, and must be addressed. A calm, business-like approach is recommended. Affairs should be in order. And eat lots of blueberries.

¶ 9:40 AM 0 comments

Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.

There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.

The math and the logic are inexorable once you assume that lots of simulations are being run.

¶ 8:11 AM 0 comments

You know Heidegger, for a long time, for years and years kept saying that thinking started with questioning, that questioning (fragen) is the dignity of thinking. And then one day, without contradicting this statement, he said "yes, but there is something even more originary than questioning, than this piety of thinking," and it is what he called zusage which means to acquiesce, to accept, to say "yes", to affirm. So this zusage is not only prior to questioning, but it is supposed by any questioning. To ask a question, you must first tell the Other that I am speaking to you. Even to oppose or challenge the Other, you must say "at least I speak to you", "I say yes to our being in common together".

¶ 4:51 PM 0 comments

Heidegger highlights the myth of autochthony through Hölderlin’s poetry. He binds landscape and rootedness with the primordial affinity to the Greeks. For the völkisch ideologists the kinship with the Greeks functioned as an aesthetic religion, for an authentic German homecoming; a path that was meant to rescue the Germans from enlightenment and modernity.

¶ 9:00 AM 0 comments

And, of course, kids can be a handy vehicle for combating status anxiety: even if your net worth is failing to keep up with the Einsteins’ next door, you can still take solace in the fact that while the Einsteins’ son is barely speaking in complete sentences, your son is already reading Heidegger.

¶ 9:20 AM 0 comments

Hannah Arendt carried Benjamin’s manuscript “On the Concept of History”
through Port Bou several months after Benjamin died
she gave it to Adorno
what the hell was she doing fooling around
with Heidegger all those years?
Hannah the first woman to occupy full professorship at Princeton
testified on Heidegger’s behalf after the War
denazification hearing
Martin said breakfast was the most important meal.

¶ 7:00 AM 0 comments

Heidegger frequently uses the term "thrown." We are thrown into Being. And, I'd add, we are thrown into the hotel, thrown into its impersonal, public muddle.

We turn away from work as a means of "taking care," says Heidegger. To check into a hotel: this, too, may be a mode of taking care, of refusal.

Hotel is a method of "not-staying." Curious, we stray: we enter the euphoric state of "never dwelling anywhere."

P. 7

¶ 7:48 PM 0 comments

Derrida did not quarrel with Heidegger's position that history, as perceived in the philosophic tradition was over; only that Heidegger himself had not escaped it. Derrida raised the question of what there was to say after philosophy was over (but ironically still in place, because reason is absolute and can only be questioned in its own terms). The strategy he chose was duplicity, the playing of a double game. He would operate in the language of reason, since there was no other, but try to lay traps for it by posing it problems it could not answer, exposing the inherent contradictions in apparently reasonable positions. He called this strategy deconstruction, after Heidegger's term destruktion.

¶ 8:02 AM 1 comments