Do Heideggereans make good neighbors? Savage Chickens has the answer.

  ¶ 11:24 AM 0 comments

  The standard for superficiality in soccer magazines.

It sometimes strayed into Scottish football where it was as superficial as a Big Brother contestant on the principles of Heidegger.

What are the principles of Heidegger? The ontological difference? Beyng gifts dasein, dasein thanks Beyng?  ¶ 3:00 PM 1 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Countermemory on Heidegger's Auseinandersetzung with Hegel.

The otherness that a fundamental confrontation with Hegel gives to our thinking has its ground in what seized Hegel early on as a demand within a distinction that he always--for himself and his system--again and again took up: that the standpoint of his philosophy was composed in reality and that the principle of his philosophy through all fields (nature, art, right, state, religion) was thoroughly followed and represented.

  ¶ 6:43 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Cosmology, Mathematics and Philosophy explains why something and not nothing.

By placing itself as the foundation of itself, the Being placed itself in existence, as a difference from which all things come.

I'd replace "the Being" with Beyng, but in an ontological sense, there you are.  ¶ 6:27 AM 2 comments

  3:AM interviews Simon Critchley about his new book.

3:AM: The Book of Dead Philosophers has lofty ambitions. You set out to write “a history of philosophers” as opposed to “a history of philosophy” in the teleological mould. In effect, you are defending a specific conception of philosophy against another…

SC: Yes, I am against the idea of the history of philosophy as a history of systems that can be arranged in a certain logical and historical order, such as one finds in Hegel or Heidegger. It is one of the many aspects of being deluded by the idea of progress (Hegel) or even the idea of regress (Heidegger). I am opposing it with an idea of the history of philosophy as a history of philosophers, that is, a history of mortal, fragile and limited creatures like you and I. I am against the idea of clean, clearly distinct epochs in the history of philosophy or indeed in anything else. I think that history is always messy, contingent, plural and material. I am against the constant revenge of idealism in how we think about history.

I haven't seen Heidegger's history of philosophy described as a regress before, but I can see the narrative, that man was in the Garden of Beyng, then Plato drank from the tree of metaphysical kool-aid and we've been dealing with that original sin since.  ¶ 8:29 PM 0 comments

  Presence through the looking glass.

In short, that which up to now we have called 'presence' was regarded by Heidegger as 'absence', and that which up to now was called 'absence' he considered to be 'presence'. Heidegger's thought was to some extent directed against the 'the world-enslavement' of an acosmically composed subjectivity. It is in this sense that we read in the paper Beiträge zur Philosophie (vom Ereignis) (Contributions to Philosophy (From the Event)) - published for the first time on his 100th birthday: If, namely, being-present is experienced as the creative foundation of human existence and it thereby becomes known that being-present is only moment and history, usual human existence must be determined from this as being-absent. It is absent out of the composition of being and complete only in the being as the existing (oblivion of being). The human being is the absent. Being absent is the more original title for the unreality of being-present.

  ¶ 5:42 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

The Church and Postmodern Culture down by the schoolyard.

It seems these days that all the cool kids are against metaphysics and onto-otheology, and all that boring stuff. Today it is hip to talk about the betrayal of faith, heretical orthodoxy, and the me-ontology of the Cross.

Why is this?

Well, perhaps we could look to Heidegger or Freud and all those other folks who prepared the way for the p_stmodern. But I suggest that it began earlier than our first reading of Being and Time (or what is Being and Nothingness, or Being and Event).

  ¶ 4:46 AM 0 comments

  Getting out of the mind and into the world.

In Freud's psychoanalytic theory, we see the threads of the Cartesian mind, the 'thinking thing' which observes an external world from which it is inherently estranged. We see this notion reflected in drive theory, in which psychical conflicts necessarily arise in the psyche's attempt to satisfy and manage its inherent requirements. Thus for Freud, defense mechanisms such as repression and projection are seen as an attempt to stop this 'container' being flooded with an excess of instinctual energy. Important in challenging this theory was Heidegger's account of being-in-the world, which spoke of Dasein (literally 'being there') rather than a self-determining 'I'. Thus, what was previously spoken of as the 'self' was recontextualized as always already embedded in the world, and in relationship with others. The term 'being-in-the-world' therefore describes the way in which we are necessarily engaged in a meaningful world, rather than as an isolated entity which comes to know the external world after first being aware of 'itself.' This view suggests a new perspective upon human emotions.

  ¶ 6:49 AM 0 comments

  How to stave off senility.

[G]ive your brain a workout with Martin Heidegger. "The Doctrine of Categories and Signification in Duns Scotus" is sure to get blood flowing to the brain.

  ¶ 9:37 AM 0 comments

  There's a new edition of John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson's translation of Being and Time, with an introduction by Taylor Carman.  ¶ 10:18 PM 0 comments

  YouTube has Bryan Magee's conversation with Hubert Dreyfus (Hat tip: another heidegger blog). The transcripts from the series have been published under various titles, but it's great to be able to watch it again.

In an earlier television program on philosophy broadcast while I was in high school--transcripts also in print--Bryan Magee interviewed William Barrett on Existentialism. That was when I first came across Heidegger as more than just another name in the list of Sartre's influences. I had expected the episode on Existentialism to be an hour on Camus and Sartre, but Barrett and Magee concentrated on Heidegger, and only mentioned Sartre at the end, as in interesting novelist and playwright, but by then (1978) largely irrelevant to philosophy.  ¶ 8:51 AM 0 comments

  A simply amazing contribution to human culture. Every song by The Fall documented. Can any bricks-and-mortar library match that, eh? Chew on that critical Cassandras of cyberspace.  ¶ 8:34 AM 0 comments

  Beyng is Ereignis.

29. Being is En-owning
...
30. Be-ing and Freedom
Be-ing is en-owning and is thus the ab-ground and as ab-ground the "ground" of ground and therefore Freedom.

Pp. 83-84

  ¶ 11:23 PM 2 comments

  The turning at the end of philosophy.

We are not seeking individual "truths" but the essence of truth. In the unfolding of this question we have now reached the point of having to raise the question of the truth of the essence. The question of truth--asked as a basic question--turns itself in itself against itself. This turning, which we have now run up against, is an intimation of the fact that we are entering the compass of a genuine philosophical question. We cannot now say what the turning means, where it is founded, since we have hardly entered the portico of the region of philosophical reflection. Only one thing is clear: if all philosophical thought must more unavoidably move in this turning the more it thinks originally, i.e., the more it approaches what in philosophy is primordially and always thought and reflected upon, then the turning must belong essentially to the single focus of philosophical reflection (Being as the appropriating event).

P. 44

So the appropriating event is a simile for being. Ereignis at beyng.  ¶ 11:11 PM 0 comments

  In one of his lectures on the Later Heidegger (2001, first lecture on Basic Questions of Philosophy) Dreyfus says that Ereignis is how the open opens up.  ¶ 10:47 PM 0 comments

  How not to talk rubbish. (1) Do not conflate existential with existentialist.

Recently when President George W. Bush told Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that Iran was an “existential threat to peace” and the world, right away I became very intrigued. Not because I believe Iran is a threat to world peace, but because President Bush used the word “existential.”

(2) Know the relevant timelines. Existentialism, as such, has its origins with Sartre and his circle in the early forties--e.g., see Sartre's Existentialism is a Humanism (1946).

Martin Heidegger, who was born in Germany and remained a staunch member of the Nazi Party until the end of World War II, introduced the concept of “authenticity” to existentialism. Heidegger believed humans could “freely” choose to act responsibly and whole heartedly by committing themselves to life and the development of their true being.

It's hard to introduce authenticity (let's date it circa B&T, 1927) to existentialism, before it existed as such. Many texts try pass off historical figures like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Pascal, even the author of the Book of Job, as existentialists. They, of course, can't defend themselves, but thinkers like Heidegger, who were able to respond to such accusations, denied being existentialists. Even Sartre denied being one, after he'd tired of promoting it.

(3) Be careful with those big words that sound like other big words, but mean something else.

To be “authentic” means to be conscience of one’s humanness and take responsibility, something inanimate objects cannot do.

(4) Get your text edited before publishing it.

I wanted to also contrast historical existentialism with President Bush’s concept of existentialism. By using “existential” alongside “threat,” it is disturbing that he appears to be confusing “existentialism” with “power!”

I used to be disturbed that journalist could get any old rubbish published, but I learned to stop worrying about their existential threat to literacy.  ¶ 2:49 PM 0 comments

  How to move beyond nationalism.

We wanted to be black and proud, as the song went, but we wanted none of the nationalist narrative of the generation that came before us. What, then, were we to do?

Into this mix came Beatty, and his novel "The White Boy Shuffle," which in London very quickly became a kind of guide for how to approach this new blackness: a blackness that allowed us to read Heidegger, to argue that we liked Wallace Stevens better than Langston Hughes, to love action films in spite of their often-racist subtexts.

  ¶ 11:06 AM 0 comments

  Tales from the annals of backward hermeneutics.

William James – father of American pragmatism who in turn was influenced by Italian pragmatism (Mussolini).

William James (1842 – 1910); Benito Mussolini (1883 – 1945).  ¶ 10:49 AM 0 comments

  Different tech for different folks.

Richard Polt, a philosophy professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, collects old typewriters but is sufficiently computer literate to run an attractive website devoted to them.

"There are so many distractions with the internet, it is also so easy to change and delete what you have written. It is too easy to dither."

So he turned to one of his 175 old typewriters.

"I didn't compose most of the book on a typewriter, but every once in a while I would put out a few pages on a typewriter, a first draft, and it was kind of refreshing."

  ¶ 12:09 AM 0 comments

  Michel Haar on dismissing the question of Being.

...Heidegger completely abandons the Hegelian model when he says that the history of Being has ended and that it is necessary to "to leave metaphysics to itself." Metaphysics is well and truly dismissed. It is necessary to leave even the thought of Being, to cross out Being (to write it under erasure), because "the history of Being is the history of metaphysics, and nothing else." Ereignis is not a new name for Being. With the awakening to Ereignis, Heidegger says, the oblivion of Being "overcomes itself": "die Seinsvergessenheit 'hebt' sich 'auf.'" This placing of "Aufhebung" between quotation marks is at the very least surprising! All the more as Heidegger adds: "Now the veiling does not veil itself anymore; on the contrary, it is to this veiling that the attention of thought applies itself"! Since veiling makes up an integral part of the essence of truth, or oblivion an integral part of the manifestation of Being, it is necessary to conclude (the abandonment or "crossing out" of Being would confirm it) that the question of Being is itself what would turn out to be dismissed.

P. 55

  ¶ 7:23 PM 0 comments

  In case you missed the comment on the previous post, here are the MP3s of Hubert Dreyfus lectures on Being and Time, Division II, Spring 2008.

By my count, there are currently four of his Heidegger classes available online:

Later Heidegger 2001
B&T Div 1 2002
B&T Div 1 2007
B&T Div 2 2008

B&T Div 1 2004 circulated, but I can't find it on online today.  ¶ 10:08 PM 6 comments

  I looked online from MP3s of this summer's Dreyfus classes on the Later Heidegger. I didn't find any, but most of the links returned were for a torrent with the audio of the 2001 version of the same class. The content of the lectures doesn't keep up with the ambitious syllabus, but they still cover an impressive amount of material. And, as with the Being and Time courses, a coherent path is travelled through the challenging texts.  ¶ 10:02 PM 1 comments

  Johnny Golding's colorful time ideas think furiously.

black gold. All goes well for Heidegger, until he tries to disengage completely from Metaphysics (particularly from the metaphysics of the teleological and dialectical variety) in order to make a stronger case for logics of sense and imagination. Now, not to get too caught up in the entire sordid tale of how he attempts (and fails) to get beyond this epistemological brick wall, suffice it to say, that because his analysis still requires a kind of ground (ontic) to knowledge; that is, a kind of a “groundless ground”, he is brought right smack-dab face-to-face with the quasi- mystical onto-theo-logical Godhead haze Itself. That is to say, and to put it slightly differently: with the Heideggerian move, we get the nuance, the fluidity, the multiplicity – of Time or Being or Identity or Difference – we just also get our Father, who, at it turns out, is not just, in heaven, but is, indeed, everywhere (and nowhere) at the same time, all the time, before Time, during Time and even after Time.

  ¶ 9:27 AM 0 comments

  The play Hannah and Martin begins a run in London.

Kate Fodor’s neatly structured play is the perfect marriage of philosophical argument and dramatic tension. The ideals of philosophy and didactic argument that might normally pad out a drama here take centre stage and add a rippling tension when held up against the brutality of the Third Reich and the irrationality of love.

  ¶ 9:17 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

:flushing on Roger Scruton's understanding of Heidegger.

He complains that Heidgger’s language is “metaphorical and contorted to the point almost of incomprehensibility” so that no one can “understand [it] completely”. Furthermore, Heidegger “does not give any arguments for the truth of what he says,” relying instead exclusively upon “compound assertions, with hardly a ‘thus,’ ‘therefore,’ ‘possibly,’ or ‘it might follow that,’ to indicate the relations which are supposed to hold between them.” “Even if the whole of Heidegger’s philosophy is both meaningful and true, therefore, we have yet to be given a reason to accept it. Looked at critically, Heidegger’s ideas seem like spectral visions in the realm of thought; vast, intangible shadows cast by language”.

  ¶ 12:21 AM 0 comments

  Gail Stenstad on what enowning is.

The connection of owning and showing carried by Ereignis is made more evident when Heidegger draws on an etymological trace to say, "Ereignis ist eignende Eräugnis" (GA 12:253). We could read this as "enowning is the owning bringing-before-the-eye." Eräugnis (from Auge, eye) is a bringing-before-the-eye, bringing forth into disclosive appearance. Something shows up, just as it is, in its own way. This is not necessarily just to be taken literally, visually. Enowning as the heart of saying-showing may come into thinking as the arising of an insight, a decisive gathering up of the thinking experience around some matter, especially an insight into enowning itself, by whatever word is invoked. It can also involve sound, silence, and dwelling with things (another preview, this time pointing forward to chapter 4).

The showing of enowning always remains in dynamic tension with what is not shown, in relation to both the showing of things and of language. Neither language nor things are "boundlessly unconcealed"; there is always more than meets the eye or something held back. The arising as such of language and things always withdraws from thought and perception. It shows itself only in the intimations of this withdrawing. We can take that a little deeper, at least in a preliminary way. "Ereignis withdraws what is fully its own from boundless unconcealment. Thought in terms of Ereignis, this means: in that sense it expropriates [enteignet] itself of itself. Expropriation [Enteignis] belongs to Ereignis as such. By this expropriation, Ereignis does not abandon itself--rather, it preserves what is its own" [Pp. 22-23]. Enteignis is fairly nearly untranslatable. "Expropriation" for it is no better than "appropriation" for Ereignis, but it does tell us one thing: Enteignis pulls in the other direction from Ereignis. To enowning, dynamically bringing everything into what is its own, belongs movement that goes the other way, too. How? In a different context the translators of Contributions translate Enteignis as dis-enowning [P. 164]. What does this mean? Heidegger says that what is ownmost to language, language's own arising and holding-sway, refuses to come to conceptual, propositional language and that this refusal or withholding belongs to its very arising as such, which denies its ownmost holding-sway, its emerging as such, to our usual notions [P. 164]. What are our usual notions? Being. Presence. Essence. Subject. Object. Instead of "being" coming to word in a concept, we are here trying to think be-ing, which "is" enowning, which moves as saying-showing. "Being" is only an idea. "Be-ing" and "enowning" and "saying" are words that try to say something that is neither a being nor an idea. Any attempt to grasp and fix enowning is not something that can be lifted out by itself but is always the enowning of things, it is, in a sense, dis-enowned of "itself." There is nothing here that can be fixed and reified. Enowning is ongoing dynamic relationality, which necessarily brings continuous change.

Pp. 78-79

  ¶ 8:41 PM 0 comments

  Final excerpt on translating Ereignis.

With this word Heidegger attempts to think/say being as emergence in a nondual way. It is hard for any English word to accomplish this. (Note, once again, that the word in German is shocking to the native speakers of German as well, such that they also have to make a shift in their thinking to understand what is going on here.) Things emerge into their own, into what is own to them: humans come into their own as they respond to the owning dynamic in being as emergence; being as emergence enowns Dasein -- all of these dynamics belong to the matter said in 'enowning.' In thinking the dynamic here beyond subject-object and within the circularity -- rather than linearity or hierarchy -- the serious reader is invited to ponder how the word enowning says all of this.

Someone has offered the suggestion that Heidegger means for the word Ereignis to say 'the opening of the open' -- mirrored in such word-images as lichten-clearing/concealing. And then to translate Ereignis as 'opening up and appearing.' Ereignis is not foreign to this phenomenon, but how would we then deal with zu-eigen, über-eigen -- or how would we translate Die ihm eigene, d.h., zu-geeignete, er-eignete Würde: Eignung und Ereignis?

Interestingly, this interpreter/translator concludes his remarks on translating Ereignis with the idea that one might translate the word as 'appropriation,' if one understood the proprium of appropriation as 'opening up of openness.' Why this same 'endorsement' of a possible translation does not apply to 'enowning' is not explained.

Thus is added to the chorus of voices singing the possible ways of saying Ereignis in English: from (i) not translating the word; to (ii) translating it as 'appropriation,' 'event of appropriation,' 'event' or 'Event,' 'eventuation'; to (iii) translating it as 'enowning.' Is it a cacophony? And where is the harmonics?

Once the current clamour settles down, thinkers can begin to think Ereignis in English -- with 'enowning' as one, serious option. This open-mindedness and detachment from reactive and agenda philosophy may take awhile.

P. 174

This chapter on translating key terms, from Kenn Maly's Heidegger's Possibility, doesn't discuss the translation of Seyn as be-ing, instead of beyng--which I consider a more harmonic domain name.  ¶ 2:58 PM 0 comments