SCIENTISTS AT CALTECH and Stanford recently published the results of a peculiar wine tasting. They provided people with cabernet sauvignons at various price points, with bottles ranging from $5 to $90. Although the tasters were told that all the wines were different, the scientists were in fact presenting the same wines at different prices.

The subjects consistently reported that the more expensive wines tasted better, even when they were actually identical to cheaper wines.
...

The human brain, research suggests, isn't built for objectivity. The brain doesn't passively take in perceptions. Rather, brain regions involved in developing expectations can systematically alter the activity of areas involved in sensation. The cortex is "cooking the books," adjusting its own inputs depending on what it expects.

Although much of this research has been done by scientists interested in marketing and consumer decisions, the work has broad implications. People assume that they perceive reality as it is, that our senses accurately record the outside world. Yet the science suggests that, in important ways, people experience reality not as it is, but as they expect it to be.

¶ 6:08 AM 0 comments

...insistent that philosophies which emphasize our situatedness, the fragility of our thinking, and our unsurpassable being-towards-death, cannot help but conjure up meaning in a nostalgic manner, since human finitude, so understood, necessarily stands in relation to a crypto-divine infinite. Feuerbach's thought, with its evocation of a natural world on which human beings are dependent, and which surrounds them too intimately ever to be objectified, offers an early example of the genre. But, of course, similar structures can be found in the pre-eminent philosophical oeuvre of the twentieth century, that of Heidegger. Indeed, the two paradigms against which Badiou measures himself are -- on the one hand -- Heidegger's thinking of finitude, and -- on the other -- the scientific naturalism of mainstream analytical philosophy, with its unavowed subjective correlate, an unbridled instrumental attitude to the world. Badiou agrees with Heidegger that the proper concern of philosophy is the ontological question. Yet his founding -- deeply anti-Heideggerian -- claim is that mathematics gives us our only access to being as such, indeed that mathematics is ontology. We live, irrevocably, in the world of the modern sciences, where nature is number: there will be no re-enchantment.

¶ 7:16 AM 0 comments

A difference of views came to light surrounding the meaning of an "historical event" for the ontological understanding of Dasein; or, in terms of Heidegger's later thought, there was a difference of opinion concerning the meaning of an "historical destining disclosure of Being," such as "the forgetfulness of Being" of metaphysics and the "turn about" in the "thinking of the truth of Being." I therefore asked Heidegger how the historicity of the historical destining disclosure of Being relates to the factual (and historically knowable) history of humans. He answered that the historical destining disclosure of Being, i.e., the "manifestness" or "unconcealment" of a meaning of "being" at a particular time, always precedes, "as if it were on dove's feet" (Nietzsche), the factual history. This he elucidated by discussing the fate of translations of the Greek work theoria. The transformation of meaning which was attached to the various translations was not the "cause" of the basic changes in philosophical thinking but rather was already a symptom of the ontological-historical transformation in the understanding of Being. And this owes its origin not to human ideas but to the "clearing" of Being itself which defines Da-sein. It is this which also always opens up the space of human freedom in which failure, neglect, and going astray take place.

Pp. 67-68

¶ 9:31 PM 0 comments

In our everyday lives, bees are important to us primarily for their utility value: honey, food, beauty products, and recreation. In this poem, bees have been ordered to wait in their bee-box until humans are ready for them. Bees are made to follow the patterns of modern technology where nature can always be further divided and ordered: “Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for further ordering” (pp. 53-56). Our encounter with these poetic bees draws us towards an ethical issue about the ways humans have been unable in Heidegger’s terminology to “let things be.” Instead, we have challenged and demanded that objects and other people stand by (bestehen) and wait for further ordering and restructuring. Plath suggests that being passive and letting things be requires an active willingness to engage with phenomena. This poem shows that releasement and freedom are events that happen to gendered and raced individuals. (Heidegger’s writings on releasement miss this crucial point). We witness this most poignantly in the final stanzas where the speaker’s sex manifests itself: There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades,/ And the petticoats of the cherry.

These stanzas also situate the speaker as white. This completes the framing of the poem as far as race is concerned. We begin the poem with the presence of these imported African bees, shipped by dark African hands and end with the speaker’s blond presence.

¶ 2:38 PM 0 comments

We now come to my favorite passage:

In his infamous rectorial address, [Martin] Heidegger looked forward to the time — hastened by Hitler's efforts — "when the spiritual strength of the West fails and its joints crack, when the moribund semblance of culture caves in and drags all forces into confusion and lets them suffocate in madness." (pp. 174–75)

How can I possibly accuse Goldberg of distortion? Has he done anything more than quote a passage from the rectorial address? Well, let's have a look. In "The Self-Assertion of the German University," the address in question, Heidegger calls for teachers and students to will the essence of the German university: this essence is "the will to science as will to the historical spiritual mission of the German people as a people that knows itself in its state." (I cite from the same translation that Goldberg uses, which appears in Günther Neske and Emil Kettering, eds., Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers [New York: Paragon House, 1990], p. 6.)

This will to science is to be achieved in large part by rethinking the beginnings of Greek philosophy. It is up to us: "Do we, or do we not, will the essence of the German university?" (Neske, p. 13). Heidegger then says, "But no one will even ask us whether we do or do not will, when…" following which is the passage that Goldberg quotes (Neske, p. 13). Goldberg has completely reversed what Heidegger is saying. Heidegger does not look forward to the spiritual collapse of the West. Rather, he warns that we may delay too long in our mission to will the essence of the university. If our culture "caves in," what we will is irrelevant. Further, although Heidegger criticized the philosophical notion of "values," he did not contend that "good and evil were childish notions" (p. 174).

¶ 3:23 PM 0 comments

Martin Heidegger: Some of the faculty at Freiburg called him ’Edmund II’, a monicker that Heidegger found demeaning.
Reverted: 05:30
In the edit summary, the user removing the fib called it “undue weight to trivial assertion.”

¶ 9:37 AM 0 comments

[W]hile Einstein shows how time and space shift as we approach the speed of light, for Heisenberg: 'an objective description for events in space and time is possible only when we have to deal with objects or processes on a comparitively large scale, where Planck's constant can be regarded as infinitely small. When our experiments approach the region where the quantum of action becomes essential we get into all these difficulties.' But when are we not 'approaching' the 'universal' constant of the speed of light? And when can Planck's constant be regarded as 'infinitely' small? When are we not 'approaching' the region where the quantum of action becomes essential? In fact, although we would like to ignore the effects of relativity and quantum theory as 'practically infinite', they react upon everything we do, everywhere, all the time. Practical infinity is no infinity at all. And uncertainty is everywhere. The quantum world constantly interferes with phenomena, with thing as they show themselves, and as they are thought, with technology itself and with our attempy to raise the question of its essence. And overlooking events on the quantum level is a 'dangerous oversimplification', like splitting the world up into subject and object, us and nature, like forgetting the technology of the question.

P. 152-153

¶ 7:31 AM 2 comments

It is not clear whether Heidegger provided the deeper answer to the question of criticism (“unyielding antagonism and stinging rebuke”) such as he describes it in this striking moment of “What is Metaphysics?” What he does provide is a name and a structure for these and related “possibilities of nihilative comportment.” For in all of them, Heidegger says, in all criticism, that is, there is a “surpassing of beings as a whole.” This surpassing Heidegger calls “die Transzendenz.” To be sure, Heidegger insists that the kind of transcendence he is thinking about itself surpasses Christianity (as well as science, in fact, which “becomes laughable when it does not take the nothing seriously”). Transcendence – unyielding antagonism and stinging rebuke directed at beings as a whole – may seem like a hyperbolic word for “critique” but it reveals, I think, a deep truth about critique as a structure, a transcendental structure.

¶ 7:33 AM 0 comments

Greek ontology is an ontology of the world. Being is interpreted as presence and constancy. Being is conceptualized on the basis of the present, naively on the basis of the phenomenon of time, in which, however, the present is only one mode. Question: how is it that the present has this privilege? Do not the past and future have the same rights? Must Being not be apprehended on the basis of the whole of temporality? Fundamental problems taken up in the question of Being. We will understand the Greeks only when we have appropriated this question; i.e., when we have confronted the Greeks by vigourously countering their quetioning with our own.

Pp. 230-231

¶ 1:58 PM 0 comments

Husserl said, "If we are cut off from reality, never mind Kant's abstractions. Let us sit all day staring at superficial particular material things which are available to our senses." Then Heidegger said, "Away with Kant's abstractions and Husserl's mindless gazing at material objects. Let us deal with the exterior world with the "intentionality" of our wills. Heidegger brought us Existentialism which is indifferent to universals and rationality and is nihilistic in its implications.

¶ 1:15 PM 0 comments

The most totalizing suture of recent philosophical times, Badiou writes polemically, is not the political or the scientific-mathematical, or even privatized "love," but the poetic, the literary suture. As he insists, today "it so happens that the main stake, the supreme difficulty, is to de-suture philosophy from its poetic condition" (67). Badiou rather cannily chooses Heidegger as his main foil in this argument. Even Heidegger's staunchest proponents would agree that the literary is in fact the ground of his thinking; he has relatively little compelling to say about politics, mathematics, or love for that matter--or, more precisely, anything compelling that he might have to say about those topics would have to run through the poetic, as this suture is the ontological ground of the space of possibility in Heidegger's thinking. Anything that emerges does so in Heidegger through the structure of the literary opening, that privileged path to the meaning of Being.

¶ 9:17 AM 0 comments

The sharing of mooded presence in the world is what one could call a union or merging of souls, a common notion in the context of thinking and poetry about love, affection, friendship and suchlike. The human soul has to be thought as the openness of human being to the world, and this openness is, in the first place, moodedness. The indefiniteness of mood, its transient, fleeting character, supports a notion of merging with respect to the phenomenon of co-attunement, i.e. the sharing of the mooded exposure to world. The bodily rooted nature of all moodedness, i.e. of all affectedness by the world, implies also that the union of souls in love or friendship can be described suggestively in a poetic language as 'one soul in two bodies' or 'two hearts beating as one'.

¶ 9:29 AM 0 comments

Baird-Smith says that Dr Williams remains a man who is more comfortable with highbrow conversation. 'I went to see him at Lambeth Palace last year and he doesn't have a lot of small talk, but as soon as I mentioned Heidegger, he relaxed into conversation.'

¶ 8:51 AM 0 comments

Heidegger accuses Hegel of thinking of the being of things in terms of the speculatively historical. Thus does history become a dialectical process. Heidegger insists, however, that Dasein always remains free in his essential possibilities. As he notes in his Einführung, philosophers are creators who bring about historical change. However, this cannot be predicted in advance.

Heidegger, then, far from having previous stages of thought superseded by more profound and adequate ideas, sees the process of history as exactly the reverse. There is not some sort of progressive, fuller understanding of being, but rather a progressive, or better a regressive, understanding of being. One might say that Hegel's view is filled with the optimism of the nineteenth century; Heidegger's with the pessimism of the twentieth. Hegel's is an all-comprehensive system in which all systems are contained and mediated in a dialectical process. And for Hegel the final stage of absolute knowledge (which is embodied in his own thought) is the greatest. For Heidegger, on the other hand, mankind has not gained but lost. Greatness is not here and now at the end, as the end product of a long process, the dialectical evolution of progress. Greatness was in the beginning, and is still contained there for us to search it out; that is; if we will but abandon the metaphysics which has degenerated into a destructive nihilism, and re-turn to the greatness of an authentic re-beginning, a re-building which can then be projected forward in an authentic manner for the future possibilities of Dasein.

¶ 12:28 PM 0 comments

As an obvious reference to Hegel, it might be interesting to compare briefly the respective views of Heidegger and Hegel on the history of philosophy. As for Heidegger's appreciation of the work of Hegel there can be no question. He refers to him as the only thinker in the West who really thoughtfully experienced the history of thought. Similarly he speaks of him as the first truly philosophical historian of philosophy. Unfortunately, however, in Heidegger's view Hegel understood all the fundamental word of Greek philosophy abstractedly. Hegel was also guilty of reading the pre-Socratics through the eyes of Plato.

In the end their respective views on the history of philosophy are fundamentally different. Hegel's Phänomenologie represents a restaged account of how man came to Spirit. History got Hegel, then, is the knowing, self-mediating (sich vermittelnde) becoming of Spirit as emptied into time. It is the presentation of the slow, staged, process, Galerie von Bildern, showing how men came to Spirit, with the Absolute already present at each and every stage of the process. In fact, history's task in the view of Hegel is to show this process (Bewegung) toward Spirit from the upper standpoint of absolute knowledge. Hegel's view of the history of thought thereby becomes a progressively higher mediation of lower positions in the movement toward the Absolute.

¶ 11:02 PM 0 comments

One is inclined to ask whether it was all so inevitable. Does the whole history of metaphysics as inaugurated by Aristotle and Plato end by necessity (and Heidegger did use the word "notwendig" in this connection) in Hegel and Nietzsche? Does this not rule out freedom in history? The question as to the extent to which thinkers or philosophers in the history of the philosophical past decide the course of the history of philosophy and the extent to which it is rather decided for them by the way in which (through thinking on being) being sends itself out (Geschick des Seins) is a question which has already been discussed in the preliminary section on history.

Heidegger broaches the problem again in his brief but valuable work Was ist das--die Philosophie?, where he discusses the Aristotelian definition of philosophy. He insists that Aristotle's definition of philosophy must not be transferred back to Parmenides and Heraclitus. And yet he admits that the Aristotelian definition is a "free consequence" (freie Folge) of the early thinking of the pre-Socratics, and even its conclusion (Abschluss). Nonetheless, Heidegger does insist that there is not involved here the necessity of a dialectical process.

¶ 6:32 PM 0 comments

Hence the sort of metaphysical question which Heidegger had carried on in "Was ist Metaphysik?" indicated to him that he had already overcome nihilism. It also indicated that he had overcome metaphysics as well, for the essence of metaphysics of nothing else but nihilism. To draw nothing into the very questioning of the essence of being is to overcome nihilism, as Heidegger says. The realization of this essence of nihilism was, however, already the first step in overcoming it. And the essence of nihilism, which rests upon and has characterized the whole history of the western tradition of metaphysics as a forgetting of being, fulfills itself in the end as a will to will. It finds its perfect expression in modern science, where domination for the sake of domination is the order of the day.

However, simply because with Nietzsche's philosophy metaphysics is "all washed up" (vollendet), this does not mean that thinking itself is at an end. Thinking is in transition (Übergang) to a new beginning. This is the essence of metaphysics as the fate of transcendence. For if, as Heidegger says in his work Zur Seinsfrage, "nothing" (das Nichts) predominates in nihilism; and if the essence of nothing belongs to being (Sein), in the sense seen above; then being itself is the fate of transcendence (Überstiege), and the essence of metaphysics shows itself as the basic location (Wesensort) of nihilism. This is what Heidegger means when he says that "turning the tales" (Überwindung) on nihilism is based upon a "turning out" (Verwindung, getting rid) of metaphysics. For the whole of the metaphysical tradition has been falsified from the very beginning, and the only way to overcome it is to come to an understanding of what it is, as thought back into its very essence, and in this way to get it out of one's system. This is what Heidegger meant by the "destruction of the history of ontology" which was to be carried on in the second part of Sein und Zeit. That which had its beginning among the Greeks came to its logical conclusion in the nihilism of our own day. And to overcome this blight upon the tradition of western thinking on being, in the view of Heidegger, we must go back, dig back into our tradition in order to understand how it came to be--thus, again, the importance which the pre-Socratics have for Heidegger.

¶ 9:06 PM 0 comments

A basic problem is that he scarcely does justice to issues of translation that, even if they cannot be resolved within the compass of a work such as this, can at least be flagged. For example, I do not find anywhere a discussion of the crucial term found in Heidegger's subtitle: 'Vom Ereignis'. Powell takes the English translators' rendering 'Enownment' without further comment, but given the role of this term not only in this work but throughout Heidegger's later philosophy, this seems to miss a trick. The power of Heidegger's ruminations on language is not in his facility in conjuring of neologisms, but in the way in which he gives new meanings to old words (or, as he would have it, enables us to hear what is originally being said in a word that has become debased and overlooked in the everyday chatter of Dasein). In this case, Ereignis is not a forced piece of terminology (like 'enownment'), but a word you are likely to encounter every day in the newspaper. Moreover 'enownment' entirely obscures the normal sense of event or happening, a meaning that, semantically, points to other key Heideggerian terms and concepts, such as historicity. This link to historicity is explained on p. 66. However, it is hard to say that what is said there will be clear to a reader who does not already have a good sense for what Heidegger is about: 'Ereignis is the thinking-act of entering non-self-hood and pure life, entering the unity of things which is within, which the "personality" that writes the poetry of Hölderlin seems to do in each poem . . .' (p. 66).

¶ 8:00 AM 0 comments

Nietzsche's Übermensch, says Heidegger, attempted to leap over the being of things (Sein des Seienden). Unfortunately he never quite made the leap, failing as he did to ask the authentic question of being (Seinsfrage). Nietzsche, as has the whole of the metaphysical tradition, attempted to use the categories of the old metaphysics, culled as they were from things (Seinendes) and not from being (Sein). And then metaphysics attempted to apply these categores to being itself (Sein selbst). This was, Heidegger insists, the actual theme and the real meaning of the lecture which he gave in 1929, namely, "Was ist Metaphysik?" All the various sciences ask about things of different kinds (Seiende), and falsely imagine that philosophy simply takes all these things into account and nothing else. But as Heidegger says in Zur Seinsfrage, it is exactly this nothing, the "nothing" that is totally other than things, that he lecture "Was ist Metaphysik?" asked after. It is the "nothing" that is totally other than things, and to which the Dasein of man is attached, which is inquired after.

Thus Heidegger point out, primarily in response to the charge of nihilism which was leveled against him as a result of his "Was ist Metaphysik?" lecture, that only by having already overcome nihilism was it possible for him to discuss "nothing" in the 1929 lecture in the way in which he did. Only if he had already overcome nihilism could he have considered that "nothing" which was in the beginning identical with being. As Heidegger insists, clearly this "nothing" is hardly something negative (nicht Nichtiges). It is the most positive. It is after all the same as being, the being that is other than things.

¶ 7:08 AM 0 comments

At the very same time that Karl Marx (Moses Mordecai Levi) was writing the ‘Communist Manifesto’ (Thesis) under the close direction of one group of revolutionary Luciferian Illuminists, Dr Karl Ritter of Frankfurt University, was developing the Antithesis to Marx’s Thesis under instructions from another cadre of the Illuminati. Ritter’s work was continued further by the nihilist German Magus and philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietsche (1844-1900) and by Heidegger and Schmitt, and was then elaborated into Fascism en route to National Socialism – thus providing the controlling Luciferian Illuminati nutcase elite with the desired dual manipulation ‘Black regime’ tools for the fomentation of the two world wars and the Soviet Revolution et seq.

Foreigners and Experts go in
And through my place
Turn my home into a museum
Like the murder squad
They scan the room
For the well of inspiration
They don't tolerate ordinary folk
and folk look at me strange
But I'll give them this at least:
They pay for what they eat
Visitors and peripherers never give
I just want room to live

    -- Mark E. Smith

¶ 6:29 AM 0 comments

While deploring the fetishistic physicalism of some eucharistic theologies, I also deplore the haimophobia that would wipe away all the sacral overtones of blood-sacrifice from the death of Christ and his martyrs and from the Eucharist. To talk of metaphors is all right if one remembers that a metaphor, as Heidegger suggests in Der Satz vom Grund, can be a way of naming being. The reality and power of Christ’s sacrificial language is equally missed by those who obsess about transubstantiation, ripping the Real Presence from its total network of relations, including the temporal play between anamnesis and eschatological expectation, and those who dephysicalize it to the point of making Christian assembly a mere meeting of minds and hearts rather than incorporation into the Body of Christ.

¶ 12:05 PM 0 comments