Spirit or ghost understood in this way has its being in the possibility of both gentleness and destructiveness. Gentleness in no way dampens the ecstacy of the inflammatory, but holds it gathered in the peace of friendship. Destructiveness come from unbridled license, which consumes itself in its own revolt and thus is active evil. Evil is always the evil of a ghostly spirit. Evil and its malice is not of a sensuous, material nature. Nor is it purely "of the spirit." Evil is ghostly in that it is the revolt of a terror blazing away in blind delusion, which casts all things into unholy fragmentation and threatens to turn the calm, collected blossoming of gentleness to ashes.

P. 179

¶ 5:43 PM 0 comments

The drama of Jandek's music is given in a freeing up of fate, a kind of mercy - not as it lifts itself from despair altogether, but as it momentarily allows despair to sing of itself. Mercy lies at the root of the surprise of the address, of being able to address. This carries the music; it bears it - there has been a retreat of suffering in suffering sufficient to sing of it - but suffering is there nonetheless. This does not imply a detachedness or an objectification of pain; there is still a bearing of suffering, a way in which suffering is enacted. I am tempted to put it emphatically, without knowing what this formulation might mean: at issue is not simply a performance of suffering, but of suffering as performance.

We are thrown into existence, says Heidegger; the fact of human existence is aways pre-given such that we are obliged to find ourselves in a particular situation, understanding (in Heidegger's sense) and taking a stand upon what exists in our vicinity. We do not throw ourselves into existence, we are thrown; and we cannot get back behind or thrownness. This is why the adolescent's wail, 'I didn't ask to be born' is not ridiculous. Not only that, but we are obligated to do something about our condition; we exist in time, and the future opens before us. Our existence is a project [Entwurf]; we remain in the throw of thrownness [Geworfenheit]. The project is what means we are thrown into the future; we have to do something about our condition, even if it is only to accept it. To chose to do nothing is itself a choice (a refusal to choose to choose). But are we always capable of making such a choice? Can a merciful surplus of strength lift us from that despair in which incapacity voids our ability to choose, to live, to act, from the start?

Writing in a prisoner of war camp, the young Levinas suggests thrownness should be understood as a kind of abandonment or dereliction; that it has the sense of a desertion such that our relationship to the fact of our thrownness returns to overwhelm us, disrupting the opening of the project, of that projection that throws us into the future.

Hovering uncertainly between speaking and singing, the voice remains unmelodic, with wayward, part-improvised lyrics which are usually clearly audible despite slurred, irregular phrasing. The singing, so difficult to bear for many listeners, never settles into a particular pitch, remaining agonisedly in motion; Jandek presents us with a voice in extremity, and an endless quarrying of pain and related states, in which infinite gradations of suffering are allowed to differentiate themselves. The music of the albums with which I am concerned here remain in the singer-songwriter tradition, even as song prolong themselves into half-hour soundscapes.

¶ 9:10 AM 1 comments

Poetry as Celan understands it is…the interruption of the ‘poetic.’…The task of poetry seems to be tirelessly undoing the ‘poetic’; not by ‘putting an end’ to figures and tropes, but by pushing them ad absurdum…In the highly rigorous sense the term has in Heidegger, poetry would thus be the ‘deconstruction’ of the poetic, that is to say, both of what is recognized as such (here there is a closely fought confrontation with the poetic tradition) and of the spontaneous ‘poeticity’ of language.

¶ 4:59 PM 0 comments

Authenticity in Heidegger’s early sense only comes with en-ownment of the Master by the en-slaved. The early sense hence not primordial. The ‘Lord’ is master by virtue of en-ownment by the en-slaved bondsman, therefore reducible. The en-slaved as not reducible. ‘Lord’ is Master only in a relative sense, in relation to the specifically en-slaved. En-slavement by en-framing (technology as techne) as ultimate reductio ad absurdum of Lordship to the en-grasping of the con-cept (Be-griff … “griff” grip or handle, old German). Origin of Heidegger’s transgression - the crucial philosophical mistake of favouring the Lord over the bondsman. C.f. the re-estimation of Being as Ereignis in terms of the mastery of the last god in “vom Ereignis.” Dasein is only encounterable as “mineness” by the Lord after a dialectical sublation, “not-mineness” is primordial.

¶ 12:18 PM 0 comments

That Heidegger sees western metaphysics to end with Nietzsche is basically just saying that after Nietzsche, to turn back to metaphysics, while obviously possible, is too uninteresting to bear the name of philosophy anymore. This 'end of philosophy' is not the 'death of values' or the unwritten rules regulating behaviour and belief more than ever (Zizek). It is precisely being caught in this mutual end between affirming that something and denying it in order to submitt it under another conceptual edifice- which begins the entire metaphysical constellation of dialectics in a new way. But this is philosophy, Heidegger tells us, philosophy cannot offer anything more. In this sense he wishes to stand outside philosophy and metaphysics as did Derrida.

¶ 8:40 AM 0 comments

For Heidegger technology is an ontological problem in that the technological disclosure is itself determinative of the ontological possibilities of an entire epoch. The conclusion of both remains the same: If entities manifest themselves through the prism of ratio-technological thinking then they manifest themselves through our reductive thinking as resources, reserve, production and ultimately consumption. It has nothing to do with phenomena as Hayward suggests since phenomena is a metaphysical term and Heidegger has long ceased to employ such terms. Here Hayward’s analysis is misleading: instead of phenomena he should state beings or things, he should also be aware that the technological age does not mean our way of being is defective but that being has simply receded.

¶ 10:30 AM 0 comments

While there are a lot of shallow arguments made by Dawkins, Hitchens, [Sam] Harris and the others, behind them there is the formidable atheism of philosophers like Bertrand Russell and Friedrich Nietzsche. My book takes the new atheists to task on specific fallacies and whoppers that they routinely make. But I’m not content to defeat them on their weakest ground. So at times I strengthen their arguments, remove contradictions, and give them the benefit of every doubt. I attack their argument not at its vulnerable point but at its strong point. If I succeed there, then I have defeated atheism in its strongest and most coherent form. Ultimately, it is Russell and Heidegger and Nietzsche who pose the greatest challenge to believers, not intellectual snipers like Hitchens and Dawkins.

¶ 11:05 PM 0 comments

Martin Heidegger first raised these issues in powerful form earlier this century. He took note of what we would call in Foucault's terms an epistemic shift between the medieval and the modern periods. It was with the dawn of the modern age that European society arrived at the notion that the world in its entirety could be pictured or represented. For Parmenides, but also for our medieval forebears, 'man is the one who is looked upon by beings' [P. 68], whereas in the modern age, 'The being is that which rises up and opens itself; that which, as what is present, comes upon man, i.e., upon him who opens himself to what is present in that he apprehends it. The being does not acquire being in that man first looks upon it in the sense of a representation that has the character of subjective perception' [ibidem]. Hence, Heidegger remarks that 'the world picture does not change from an earlier medieval one to a modern one; rather, that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of modernity [ibidem]. Guy Debord, characterizing the 'society of the spectacle', notes in similar terms that:

The spectacle cannot be understood as an abuse of the world of vision, as a product of the techniques of mass dissemination of images. It is, rather, a Weltanschaung which has become actual, materially translated. It is a world vision which has become objectified. [s. 5]

Heidegger accurately identified this shift to totalizing picturing as underwriting the emergence of subjectivity itself: 'Representation [Vor-stellen] here means: to bring the present-at-hand before one as something standing over-and-against, to relate it to oneself, the representer, and, in this relation, to force it back to oneself as the norm-giving domain' [P. 69].

P. 135-136

¶ 8:27 PM 0 comments

Nietzsche and Heidegger are [Rorty's] heroes as ironists, historicists, and slayers of metaphysical chimeras, though Rorty takes them to task for exempting themselves from their own exuberant irony. Some historical or ontological apocalypse is always about to unfold for these German Dionysians, but Rorty insists incessantly on his own contingency. He wants us to believe that his words have no more truth than anyone else’s. He is merely changing the subject from two thousand years of dried-up metaphysics; he is talking about more useful and interesting things.

Rorty locates the original sin of western philosophy in Plato’s concept of mimesis, the idea that our experience of the world is a more or less opaque manifestation of the real world—which can conveniently only be accessed by philosophers. Rorty lauds the German Idealists and the Romantic poets for their rejection of external reality, but, in their fetishization and spiritualization of the Self, he sees mere Platonic claptrap. In Rorty’s view, humans and the world have no fixed essence or meaning. Instead, they are in perpetual flux, constantly dissolved and recreated by the language we use to make sense of our experience.

Although Rorty extols the great ironist philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries, he finds them deeply troubling and precarious, precisely because philosophy will always hear the siren song of Truth, the irrepressible desire to be universal. Thus we get Hegel’s “absolute,” Nietzsche’s “will to power,” and Heidegger’s “being.” For this reason, Rorty believes that philosophy is done best in the context of the novel, because the novel seeks to express solely the contingent.

¶ 3:22 PM 0 comments

Adorno criticizes Heidegger for developing a philosophy whose definitions block the memory of the miseries of humankind. This is accomplished by Heidegger, according to Adorno, in his insistence of 'Being" as having the property of resistance to definition. This resistance to definition acts as a blinding mechanism by which the subject is unable to reach a clarity. Heidegger's construction points to a mythical superiority beyond the real human miseries that constitute an element of this so-called superiority, and thus beyond these miseries and their memory, finally away from suffering.

In our third example of Adorno's criticism of Heidegger, Adorno takes aim at what he calls Heidegger's 'Ontologization of the Ontical'. According to Adorno the move to ontologize the Ontical is a blatant move to eliminate otherness within Heidegger's existential scheme. By showing the Ontical as an element of the ontological, Heidegger strikes the pose of a philosophy by identity in the manner of the authoritarian. It's focus is on dynamic characteristics of the Ontical that are translated into a function of the ontological, and thereafter has no opposing element to balance the purified assertion. The philosophy thus becomes the most horrible of affirmations, the affirmation of sheer power.

The example we shall present lastly, is Adorno's criticism of
Heidegger in the section on the copula. Adorno criticizes Heidegger for taking the sense of 'is' in each particular synthetic judgment, and then raising it to a principle of synthesis generally. Adorno points out that the synthesis cannot occur but in particular judgments and in particular circumstances. Thus Heidegger's move to raise the element of synthesis to a principle without a context is an ignorance of the value of particulars in a particular judgment. For Adorno there is no real synthesis without the elements of subject-synthesis-predicate. Heidegger thus, for Adorno, is caught in a move of reified thinking by raising 'is' to a general principle of synthesis by decree. This false elevation of the synthetic element binds us from these particular moments by pointing to the mythical brighter light of synthesis without context of the real. It is thus totalitarian.

¶ 2:57 PM 0 comments

Heidegger came to represent, in Strauss’s view, the logical end of radical historicism and nihilism, his philosophy of history having "the same structure as Marx’s and Nietzsche’s." Heidegger’s association with the Nazis was by no means an accident on this view (Strauss’s "reductio ad Hitlerum"). The philosophical basis for such an interpretation lies in Strauss’s much maligned distinction between the exoteric (for the people) and esoteric (for the wise) levels of meaning in a philosophical work—which is what is meant by "the hermeneutics of reticence"—and Paraboschi spends the remainder of the section summarizing Strauss’s case for the distinction in Persecution and the Art of Writing.

¶ 2:39 PM 0 comments

[W]e see here that Heidegger treats his concept of world as even more primary than the spatial world paradigm. We can treat this world in its physical coordinates and in analytic geometry only if we are fundamentally involved with it on the level of Dasein. Thus the intentional relationship so constitutive of Husserlian phenomenology is relegated to a derivative rank. We are always basically more in the world than intentionality can capture.

¶ 4:49 PM 0 comments

A city-dweller thinks he has gone "out among the people" as soon as he condescends to have a long conversation with a peasant. But in the evening during a work-break, when I sit with the peasants by the fire or at the table in the "Lord's Corner," we mostly say nothing at all. We smoke our pipes in silence. Now and again someone might say that the woodcutting in the forest is finishing up, that a marten broke into the hen-house last night, that one of the cows will probably calf in the morning, that someone's uncle suffered a stroke, that the weather will soon "turn." The inner relationship of my own work to the Black Forest and its people comes from a centuries long and irreplaceable rootedness in the Alemanian-Swabian soil.

P. 17

¶ 11:09 PM 0 comments

FP: What are your own personal thoughts on global warming? And what do you think of Al Gore in general and what his main motives are when it comes to this issue?

Hayward: The world is warming, and human civilization probably plays a role in this (though that role may have more to do with land use changes than greenhouse gas emissions, which would mean the warming is about over), but it is a much more modest and manageable problem than Gore and his fellow alarmists argue. I think Gore is a deeply problematic person and thinker. I wrote a long paper last fall (which you can find here) in which I make out Gore as an epigone of Heidegger. Gore believes man is separated from nature by technology, and his calls for "changing human consciousness" are really quite amazing, and potentially totalitarian in its implications, though I do not think he has any understanding of the implications of his own attempt at "deep" thinking on these matters.

FP: If Gore doesn’t deserve a Peace Prize, what does he deserve?

Hayward: Monty Python's Upper Class Twit of the Year Award.

¶ 9:14 AM 0 comments

Modern science, like any cultural-historical world (the structure that determines the mode of being in which beings appear), sets up conditions that allows beings to appear within those conditions (i.e. beings then show up according to that structure). Specifically, in modern science, mathematics is equivalent to a metaphysical projection: beings are projected as mathematical projection to calculate the calculable. Modern science is thus not only the a posteriori knowledge that science gets, but is first and foremost the a priori ontological projection of a certain mode of being in which beings appear.

¶ 11:33 AM 1 comments

▶ Some experts say that Korean is bad for expressing concepts. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger said Greek and German were the best languages for philosophical study. But they were not born at such an advanced level: they are simply regarded as suitable languages for philosophical study because countries using the languages have produced numerous distinguished philosophers. Hence the value of some Korean academics’ efforts to publish a Korean dictionary of philosophical terms and find Korean equivalents to foreign jargon.

▶ Philosophy professor Lee Ki-sang at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies is taking up the challenge to find Korean replacements for difficult Heidegger coinages like “Geworfenheit” and “Zuhandenheit.” However, Prof. Cho Dong-il at the Department of Korean Language and Literature at Seoul National University says a deeper understanding of Chinese characters is necessary for the development of Hangul, stressing the common cultural tradition of countries using Chinese characters in East Asia.

¶ 9:54 PM 0 comments

To be thrown into the world is not especially grounded in anxiety. On the contrary, it is even reassuring for the dasein!
Falling is not the same. Falling, explains Heidegger, is a turning-away or fleeing of Dasein into its "they-self." This turning-away is grounded in anxiety. Anxiety is what makes fear possible.

¶ 7:38 AM 0 comments

[W]e are left with the result that Heidegger's gloss on a supposedly arcane Japanese word is far more arcane, or, less charitably, far less coherent and meaningful, than the word itself. When it comes to Japanese words that few of his readers are likely to know, and still fewer likely to know the history of, Heidegger is apparently quite happy with any old 'playful thinking'.

¶ 1:19 PM 0 comments