Heidegger also points to care as that which is characteristic of being human (he used a German word for this, Dasein). As you may know, Heidegger’s topic in Being and Time is the question of being, which he claims has long since been forgotten in philosophy–the ancient Greeks had it but we’ve since lost sight of this question. Heidegger claims that being in the world is care (L. cura), that is, not some detached “philosophical” looking at the world–we are entrenched in it already. We are attuned to the world into which we are thrown (our past so to speak) and we’re always busy projecting into future possibilities. These parts in particular sounds very Dickian if you remember his long concern with understanding his own past after 1974 and the so-called exegesis.

¶ 2:33 PM 0 comments

Even in the improved formula "A is A," abstract identity alone appears. Does it get that far? Does the principle of identity really say anything about the nature of identity? No, at least not directly. Rather, the principle already presupposes what identity means and where it belongs. How do we get any information about this presupposition? The principle of identity itself gives it to us, if we listen carefully to its key note, if we think about that key note instead of just thoughtlessly mouthing the formula "A is A." For the proposition really says: "A is A.” What do we hear? With this “is,” the principle tells us how every being is, namely: it itself is the same with itself. The principle of identity speaks of the Being of beings. As a law of thought, the principle is valid only insofar as it is a principle of Being that reads: To every being as such there belongs identity, the unity with itself.

What the principle of identity, heard in its fundamental key, states is exactly what the whole of Western European thinking has in mind—and that is: the unity of identity forms a basic characteristic in the Being of beings. Everywhere, wherever and however we are related to beings of every kind, we find identity making its claim on us. If this claim were not made, beings could never appear in their Being. Accordingly, there would then also not be any science. For if science could not be sure in advance of the identity of its object in each case, it could not be what it is. By this assurance, research makes certain that its work is possible. Still, the leading idea of the identity of the object is never of any palpable use to the sciences. Thus, what is successful and fruitful about scientific knowledge is everywhere based on something useless. The claim of the identity of the object speaks, whether the sciences hear it or not, whether they throw to the winds what they have heard or let themselves be strongly affected by it.

The claim of identity speaks from the Being of beings. However, where the Being of beings appears, most early and most authentically in western thought — with Parmenides — there speaks τὸ aὐτὸ, that which is identical, in a way that is almost too powerful. One of Parmenides’ fragments reads: τὸ γἀρ aὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι.

“For the same perceiving (thinking) as well as being.”

Different things, thinking and Being, are here thought of as the Same. What does this say? It says something wholly different from what we know otherwise as the doctrine of metaphysics, which states that identity belongs to Being. Parmenides says: Being belongs to an identity. What does identity mean here? What does the word τὸ aὐτὸ, the Same, say in Parmenides' fragment? Parmenides gives us no answer. He places us before an enigma which we may not sidestep. We must acknowledge the fact that in the earliest period of thinking, long before thinking had arrived at a principle of identity, identity itself speaks out in a pronouncement which rules as follows: thinking and Being belong together in the Same and by virtue of this Same.

Pp. 25-27

¶ 12:20 PM 0 comments

The first half of Given Time is a study of Heidegger’s late essay ‘On Time and Being’ (1962). Its movement was to distance Derrida further from the master, by showing again what was obvious, but which he felt needed to be said over and over again in various voices: that Heidegger was part of the 'great transcendentalist tradition’. Heidegger had revolutionized the German term and activity ‘thinking’ which he had inherited, into an activity combining thinking and thanking, thanking Being for having given itself as philosophy, and thanking it by thinking upon it. Such a stance, a comportment, was the earthy and revolutionary destruction of idealistic thinking into something other, something which was seen by him as a truer and more attuned thought. But this thought is not abandoned to the totality of things without an anchor. Its anchor is in what Heidegger termed the 'Origin,' the factual conditions of Ancient Greece; the 'Other Origin' is in the factual historical situation of Germany or Europe, it is Germany. The Being in question is the collection of beings which constitute Europe and the Greek-German axis, the places to which Being gives with most care, and the thought of whose people should be filled with the most thanks and meditation of the gift they have received from Being.

But if Being gives/gibt, then it gives, Heidegger says, on the condition that the Greeks alone really receive, and that they reciprocate. They receive because they alone are able to think/thank. From this nation-centred giving by Being which determines the shape of thinking, and which is naturally limitless and self-originating, and which Heidegger interprets as a conditioned gift, Derrida takes away the certainty, since he is concerned that determining the unknown like this is dangerous and illegitimate, as it forces transcendental limits to It, signing a pact with the unknown to safeguard it and to control its power within known limits. The circle of control, of history, of Greece giving to Germany, and of spiritual Being giving to both, in an event of Ereignis which thought can control and master by its labour, is a circle which, Derrida says, cannot contain Being itself, since Being as the giving power sets the circle in motion, and yet must also contain it, neither as interiority nor exteriority. Paul de Man had made the same point in an essay on Hölderlin's 'Andenken' In his Blindness and Insight (1983).

Pp. 135-6

¶ 1:51 PM 0 comments

Western society inherited from Plato the most popular concept of copying, that "everything is a copy" (also known as mimesis). Heidegger would later say that mimesis equals copying a presentation — “all copies are made and produced” quoted Boon — and the parodying of something in a manner. How’s a bag then the imitation of an idea?

Perhaps it has something to do with our concept of luxury. Boon showed an original 1927 Louis Vuitton ad with this delicious sales pitch: “The trunks that last a lifetime… is French but LOOKS French… not only IS the finest but APPEARS the finest.” The idea of an "essential" LV outward appearance is complicated, a sameness not easily differentiated between a real Canal Street stall with fake product and the faux Louis Vuitton stall (with real product) installed outside the Brooklyn Museum for their Takashi Murakami retrospective (the Japanese artist famously re-made the LV monogram in "super-flat" technicolour). Outsourced manufacturing muddies it further — is the Louis Vuitton bag really French? LV artistic director Marc Jacobs is American, after all.

¶ 9:55 PM 1 comments

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

¶ 1:30 PM 0 comments

If difference can lead as far as contrariety [Metaphysics, Ι, 4], it cannot lead as far as contradiction. To the extent that difference is thought on the basis of a prior identity, contrariety constitutes its absolute limit. The principle of contradiction is quite naturally the corollary of the principle of identity, so long as difference is thought on the basis of the latter. And it comes as no surprise, then, that this principle should have had such a destiny, perhaps expressed nowhere more strongly than by Leibniz. The principle of identity (A=A) claims that a concept or a thing, in order for it to be the concept or the thing that it is, must remain identical to itself. By contrast, the principle of contradiction claims that whatever includes a contradiction can be neither true nor real. Indeed, since the principle of identity presupposes a definition of truth and reality through self-identity or self-coincidence, whatever includes a contradiction does not coincide with itself, and is thus, at the level of cognitions, false, and at the level of realities, unreal. Only that which has the form of self-identity is "real" or "true."

P. 50

¶ 10:48 AM 0 comments

As for the definition of a thing, this means that it has a unity which, however, closes around dis-unity. Two impressions which are met with separately are united in a proposition that identifies them. What is the essence of this all-important proposition? That the meaning of two phenomenon are identical. In Heidegger's lexicon, "A is A." The principle of identity, which presupposes but covers up an anterior difference, depends on the verb to-be. The identity of beings presupposes their difference; the difference between one being and another presupposes the fact that beings are. It turns out to be one and the same thing to say that the identity of any two beings presupposes their difference, and to say that any and all beings presuppose difference. For this later Heidegger, difference is another name for the sheer existence, the beingness, of all beings. Presupposed in the most elemental function of experience, this beingness is the ultimate horizon for all meaning. As a concept, it is also the placeholder for the claim that difference is anterior to identity. It would not be difficult to show how this thought, in all its radicality, is essentially alien to the modern epistemology of someone like Kant, where he installs unity above plurality among the categories of quantity. Nor would it be difficult to show that most thinkers presently called or calling themselves "postmodern" build on one or another variation of this idea.

There is more. Heidegger has said that the identity of "A with A" presupposes the proposition that it is so. In other words, acts of identification, of giving meaning, of saying "A is A," depend first on the fact that we who commit those acts have a relation to what it means to-be; because of that relation we can affirm that something is, for instance, a chair and not a table. This means that it is possible to affirm that A belongs together with A only through and because of the fact that being and thinking belong together. The belonging-together (Zusammengehören) of being and thought is the central theme of Heidegger's later work. It is a remarkable feature of his essay on "The Principle of Identity" that he dares to call this relation one of identity, and then submit it to the same conditions he has just discerned for the identity of a thing with itself. The identity of being and thinking entails, on one hand, that thinking gathers differences into identities around the word "is," and on the other hand that the word "is" never occurs in pure form but only in and through thinking. In this belonging-together of being and thinking, Heidegger discerns the ungrounded wellspring, or essence (Wesen) of all meaning. These are one and the same event (Ereignis): Being appears as beings (or: difference is manifest as identity) in and through thinking, and thinking is the act or process of being manifesting itself as beings.

¶ 12:29 PM 0 comments

Still one must forget something and not nothing. Derrida draws on Heidegger again in describing how this forgetting is the "condition of Being and the truth of Being". This notion of forgetting makes it so Being and time are brought together in relation, and are conditioned together with each other by the "there is" (es gibt) and the "it gives". It is in the very concept of "giving" that "there is Being" and "there is time". The gift itself is the "there is". Heidegger asks about the nature of the "gift or the 'there is' that relates time to Being," conditioning them one to the other. The "there is" brings Being and time together in relation as a result of a gift. To try to think about Being and time properly it is necessary to "see" this relation of giving. Derrida points to a circular thinking in trying to find the "proper" in the gift, Being, and time. When one seeks to think about the gift, Being, and time in their "own element" that is, properly, one is already desiring the proper, it is a "desire to accede to the property of the proper".

¶ 8:18 AM 0 comments

Indeed, it is from this generation of “natural” numbers, all woven from the void in accordance with the axioms of being, that Badiou will establish his concept of “Nature.” Or more precisely, that Badiou understands Nature in this way is the result of the way in which set-theory ontology provides a resolution of the tension, highlighted since the work of Heidegger, between Nature understood poetically as appearance or the poetic coming-to-presence of being (the pre-Platonic poem), and Nature interpreted as Idea, subtracted from all appearance (in the manner of Plato). In other words, within the perspective of a set-theoretical ontology, Badiou will be able to find another arrangement of these two opposed orientations. In short, following Heidegger, he will maintain that Nature is “the stability of maintaining-itself-there” within the opening forth of its immanent coming-to-presence. On the other hand, he will mathematize the Platonic subtraction of being from appearance. Or again, he will develop a concept of Nature as a network of multiples which are interlocking and exhaustive without remainder, but which are also woven entirely from what is subtracted from all presence: the void. The point is, of course, that without reference to the opposing conceptions of Nature belonging to Heidegger and Plato, the assertion that natural or ordinal numbers formalize the being of natural things would appear somewhat arbitrary or as a play on words. Certainly, nothing within set theory itself authorizes such an ontological appropriation of the generation of ordinals.

¶ 1:28 PM 0 comments

Pragmatism's proposal that old metaphysical categories be abandoned led to a fork in the road of twentieth-century philosophy. Exemplary of this split is Vienna emigré Rudolph Carnap's well-known analysis of certain statements from Martin Heidegger's 1929 lecture "What is Metaphysics?" as meaningless. According to Carnap, if metaphysics is capable of generating the kinds of statements found in Heidegger's lecture, then metaphysics is a language of total non-sense. But both Carnap (in his logical empiricist way) and Heidegger (in his ontological existentialist way) wanted to do the pragmatic thing of getting rid of the bad categories and questions of metaphysics. Pragmatism's injunction to abandon metaphysics might then be thought of as setting the stage for the radically different idioms of Heidegger's ontology and Carnap's logicism, or what is sometimes called the Continental/analytic divide.

We should see "Against Theory" as a literary-critical avatar of this agon of intellectual temperament, but one in which the different sides of the divide are conflated through a complex (and in some ways unconscious) inheriting of pragmatism's role in setting twentieth-century philosophy down these peculiarly incompatible paths. If the "theory" they attack is the offspring of a certain strain of French Heideggerianism—a Derridean inheritance, referenced in "Against Theory" in an Americanized, New Critically-inflected Paul de Man—then the language they adopt to attack it might be traced back to the analytic philosophy exemplified in Carnap (or perhaps the early Wittgenstein). Considering this set of inheritances, the essay's target should not be seen as the tendency in literary criticism toward theoretic generalization, for as we have already pointed out the very premise of "Against Theory" is itself a colossal generalization about the identity of meaning and intention. Rather, the essay should be read as a (complexly equivocal) attack on a whole ideology of theory as "non-sense," in which the bitingly direct sentence is designed to replace Continental wooliness.

¶ 8:14 AM 2 comments

What is there in the room there at home is the table (not a table among many other tables in other rooms and houses) at which one sits in order to write, have a meal, sew, play. Everyone sees this right away, e.g., during a visit: it is a writing table, a dining tab1e, a sewing table - such is the primary way in which it is being encountered in itself. This characteristic of "in order to do something" is not merely imposed on the table by relating and assimilating it to something else which it is not.

Its standing-there in the room means: Playing this role in such and such characteristic use. This and that about it is "impractical," unsuitable. That part is damaged. It now stands in a better spot In the room than before — there's better lighting, for example. Where it stood before was not at all good (for...). Here and there it shows lines — the boys like to busy themselves at the table. These lines are not just interruptions in the paint, but rather: it was the boys and it still is. This side is not the east side, and this narrow side so many cm. shorter than the other, but rather the one at which my wife sits in the evening when she wants to stay up and read, there at the table we had such and such a discussion that time, there that decision was made with a friend that time, there that work written that time, there that holiday celebrated that time.

That is the table - as such is it there in the temporality of everydayness, and as such will it perhaps happen to be encountered again after many years when, having been taken apart and now unusable, it is found lying on the floor somewhere, just like other "things," e.g., a plaything, worn out and almost unrecognizable - it is my youth. In a corner of the basement stands an old pair of skis, the one is broken in half — what stands there are not material things of different lengths, but rather the skis from that time, from that daredevil trip with so and so. That book over there was a gift from X, that one there was bound by such and such a bookbinder, this other one needs to be taken to him soon, with that one I have been wrestling for a long time, that one there was an unnecessary buy, a flop, I still need to read this one for the first time. My library is not as good as A's but far better than B’s, this matter is not something one would be able to derive pleasure from, what will the other say about this way of doing it, and the like. These are characteristics of the world’s being-encountered. What now needs to be inquired into is how they constitute the being-there of the world.

Of the two descriptions, the first was characterized as an inaccurate description, i.e., with respect to the basic task posed: ontologically and categorially grasping the immediate givens closest to us in the beings-which-are-there. This does not mean it is "false," as if it had no basis in the subject matter. It is possible for the essential content of its results to prove itself vis-à-vis a speci& domain of heing-there to be objectively there for a theoretical observing which has a definite direction and focus.

Pp. 69-70

¶ 7:30 PM 0 comments

The purest everydayness can be called on: tarrying for a while at home, being-in-a-room, where eventually "a table" is encountered! As what is it being encountered? A thing In space—as a spatial thing, it is also a material thing. It has such and such a weight, such and such a color, such and such a shape, with a rectangular or round top—so high, so wide, with a smooth or rough surface. The thing can be dismantled, burned, or dissolved in some other way. This material thing in space which offers itself to possible sensation from different directions always shows itself as being-there only from a certain side and indeed in such a way that the aspect seen from one side flows over in a continuous manner into other aspects sketched out in advance in the spatial gestalt of the thing, and the same holds for these ones. Aspects show themselves and open up in ever new ways as we walk around the thing-and still others when we look down on it from above or perceive it from below. The aspects themselves change according to lighting, distance, and similar factors bound up with the position of the perceiver.

The being-there-in-such-a-manner of this thing which is given in the flesh provides the possibility of determining something about the meaning of the being of such objects and their being-real In the proper sense, such objects are stones and other slmilar things in nature. However, when seen more closely, the table is also something more - it is not only a material thing in space, but in addition is furnished with definite valuative predicates: beautifully made, useful - it is a piece of equipment, furniture, a part of the room's decor. The total domain of what is real can accordingly be divided into two realms: things in nature and things of value - and the latter always contaln the being of a natural thing as the basic stratum of their being. The authentic being of the table is: material
thing in space.

P. 68

¶ 10:02 PM 0 comments

The history of metaphysics, which coincides with the history of technology and the history of Western civilization, is the repeated effort to repress Ereignis. Technology has its roots in Greek philosophy with the fatal turn in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle away from physis to a metaphysics privileging presence over absence, eternity over time, and substance over nothingness. The divine being is configured by Plato as the good, by Aristotle as pure act, in both instances an absolute self-presence capable of protecting the totality of beings from the danger of Ereignis. Greek philosophical monotheism consolidates the move from physis to metaphysics, merging with the revelation of the one God in the Jewish Bible into a monolithic tradition Heidegger calls "onto-theology." Used as a synonym for metaphysics, onto-theology conceals the question of the meaning of being by constructing a narrative that traces all beings back to a highest being, the good, the first mover, the Creator, the first cause or the causa sui. In Heidegger’s view, it is no accident that most metaphysical treatises in the history of Western philosophy are founded on a philosophy of God. Metaphysics, Heidegger says, is essentially onto-theological: it allows us to elide the question of the meaning of being by presenting the origin of beings as a foregone conclusion: we always already know where beings come from (God); hence we can, with seemingly good conscience, limit our thinking to the ontic.

The eventfulness of Ereignis is experienced in the vicissitudes of history, no moment of which gives us an absolute vantage point from which preceding epochs may be judged; every age brings with it unprecedented disclosures and concomitant concealments of what has been disclosed. We are "sent" (geschickt) into an epoch of history in which being opens up the there of a historical moment of Dasein and makes possible a set of possibilities for understanding while closing down others — the later Heidegger's version of "the hermeneutical situation." The early Heidegger tells us that we neither can nor should want to extricate ourselves from that into which we have been thrown: to understand is to think our way into the strengths and limits of the way of seeing constitutive of our time. For the later Heidegger an original sending of being is progressively distorted and forgotten until, at the end of the epoch oblivion descends upon Dasein and the old traditions no longer speak to it. Heidegger's philosophy of history is a story not of continual progress but of inevitaible decline. The task for thinking (the successor to philosophy) is to decipher the meaning of the Western epoch as it winds itself down. “The latecomers" await in darkness the new sending, which will open the new era of thinking. When the sun rises in the Black Forest, that which was not seen clearly emerges into the light: the valley, the farmhouses, and the animals come into dear illumination. At the same time, something disappears that prior to this unconcealment was unconcealed, namely, the stars in the night sky.

P. 73-4

¶ 8:42 AM 0 comments

When Scout Tufankjian’s photo-agency sent her to New Hampshire in the dead of December, 2006, to cover a post–mid-term election Democratic “victory rally,” this hard-bitten photo-journalist fresh from covering the horrors in the Gaza Strip was prepared for a lame photo-op.

After all, Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh was there, drawing a small crowd of … mildly enthusiastic party regulars.

And then Barack Obama showed up — and 600 rabid fans went crazy.

“Bayh got three people,” she said. “So I knew something was up with this Obama guy. People lost their minds when he came on stage and spoke.”

The excitement continued at the next stop, a smaller gathering at a bookstore-coffeeshop.

“One person asked him to sign her copy of ‘Lady Chatterly’s Lover,’ and they got into a long talk about the book. Then the next person asked him about philosophy and suddenly they were talking about Kant and Heidegger. I thought, ‘Wow, this guy is smart.”

¶ 6:59 PM 0 comments

What do you mean by "place"?

"We tried to locate in Heidegger's texts an indecision between, on the one hand, the 'place' fixed by national and even nationalist content, a distinctly German content, which falls under a clear political, historical and national definition; and, on the other hand, that 'place' Heidegger leaves undefined, a place free of fixations and distinct from any content, which makes it possible to question the definitions that are overly fixed in a political, historical and national sense. Appropriate thought is conditional on that kind of indecision."

¶ 11:31 AM 0 comments

What is the aesthetic significance National Celebration, a triptych depicting a gigantic rust-colored locomotive? Nothing about the painting explicitly suggests that a judgment is being meted out — were the outline a little sharper, the colors a little brighter, it could be called Socialist Realism. Yet, of course, we cannot but read the title as ironic. Heidegger wrote that though the objects in a museum remain for us to look at, they are no longer what they were: their world is gone. It is in this sense that Guotai's cars and trains are the evidence of a lost era: by appearing to us in all their drabness and lostness, they show us what we can no longer think.

¶ 5:50 PM 0 comments

The abyss between man and God.
    -- Kierkegaard

The abyss between animal and superman.
    -- Nietzsche

The abyss between past and future.
    -- Nietzsche

Beware, beware
Of warning the reckless!
Thy warning will drive them
To leap into every abyss!
    -- Ecce Homo, Nietzsche

The abyss between being and beings.
    -- Heidegger, Mark I

The spring leaps away, away from the habitual idea of man as the rational animal who in modern times has become a subject for his objects. Simultaneously, the spring also leaps away from Being. But Being, since the beginning of Western thought, has been interpreted as the ground in which every being as such is grounded.

Where does the spring go that springs away from the ground? Into an abyss? Yes, as long as we only represent the spring in the horizon of metaphysical thinking. No, insofar as we spring and let go. Where to? To where we already have access: the belonging to Being.

P. 32

The law appears at first in the form of a fundamental principle which presupposes identity as a characteristic of Being, that is, of the ground of beings. This principle in the sense of a statement has in the meantime become a principle bearing the characteristics of a spring that departs from Being as the ground of beings, and thus springs into the abyss. But this abyss is neither empty nothingness nor murky confusion, but rather: the event of appropriation. In the event of appropriation vibrates the active nature of what speaks as language, which at one time was called the house of Being. "Principle of Identity" means now: a spring demanded by the essence of identity because it needs that spring if the belonging together of man and Being is to attain the essential light of the appropriation.

P. 39

We stand at an abyss: either into nothingness, that is, absolute reification, pure thingness, or we somehow leap into another world, more precisely, we manage for the first time to make the leap in the world as such.

P. 53

¶ 4:52 PM 0 comments

While in Heidegger, embodiment may be non-contingent, but the body is bounded only by possibility. David Cerbone writes that Heidegger leaves open the possibility for Dasein to be embodied in radically different ways so that in vast diversity and possibility each Dasein exists as though a species unto itself. This is related to the second consequence of Dasein being delivered over to its own Being in that Dasein can not be spoken ontologically as an instance of a genus. This is the primordial existentiale of Jemeinigkeit, where Dasein has in each case only ‘mineness’. This means that Dasein is spoken of as ‘I’ and ‘you’ but not however as ‘we’.

¶ 6:19 PM 0 comments

The later Heidegger's ontology revolves around another untranslatable German word: Ereignis. Approximated as "the event," "enowning," or "appropriating," Ereignis is an overdetermined word. It connotes the happening — the rupture or opening — that holds within itself the secret of its happening and makes possible both Dasein and the appearance of beings dependent upon its "disclosedness" or openness (Erschlocsenheit). It also connotes the appropriation of facticity or owning of one's time, a task that belongs uniquely to Dasein. The difficulty with the term Ereignis is that it references two seemingly incompatible ideas: the notion of an event and the notion of appropriation. The former appears to be an objective happening, the latter a subjective act, something one does. The ambiguity is of course deliberate. Dasein's owning of itself, which is the task for thinking and the only experience of truth available to us, is the event of history. The later Heidegger clarifies that the thinking that begins with Being and Time is neither directed to being in a metaphysical sense (the whatness or thatness of things) nor directed to the human being in an existential-phenomenological sense. Its theme is the coincidence of Dasein with the appearance of beings, whose self-showing is only for Dasein. The human being is the shepherd of being called by being itself into the preservation of being's truth" [P. 260]. This leads Heidegger to ask what makes possible both the showing of beings and the being for whom beings are shown? The question strikes us as extraordinarily abstract because it is no longer working within any of the received philosophical narratives: being is no longer out there (realism), nor in here (idealism); the human being is no longer one among many things subject to physical or metaphysical conditions, nor is the human being the ground of the world. The later Heidegger expends all his energies on breaking the presuppositions operating in these narratives. Physis is not the prehuman appearance of things, even for the early Greeks. Rather physis is the spontaneous emergence of things for Dasein: being and appearance of being to Dasein coincide.

The mystery of this convergence raises two further questions: What kind of being is Dasein that it can be the site for the appearance of beings? (This is the question of Being and Time.) Secondly, what is the condition of the possibility of the interdependence of beings and human being? what opens up Dasein as the site of the appearance of beings? The answer to the last question is Ereignis: the "event" simultaneously opens the clearing (the not) that is Dasein and makes possible the appearance or beings. We can now see more clearly where Heidegger is heading with his notion of ontological guilt in Being and Time: only insofar as the human being is defined by a lack of being, insofar as it is not coincident with its being (in that its being is always an issue for it), is the temporal space secured for the appearance of beings. Without presuming to have found the formula of the later Heidegger (there is no formula), we can make a few thematic observations. Inasmuch as aletheia is the unveiling or beings that is preceded and succeeded by a return into darkness and physis remains horizoned by the nothing that shows itself as the spontaneous and contingent emergence of things from out of themselves. Ereignis is Dasein's irruption into being in its sheer unmasterable eventfulness, the incalculable happening of Dasein's disclosedness. The experience of Ereignis pulsates with the vital threefold relationship of Dasein, being, and temporality, a relationship that Heidegger so laboriously tries to retrieve in Being and Time. Ereignis names that which is never unveiled to calculation, that which is repeatedly suppressed by the metaphysics of presence, namely, the unthinkable upsurge in the nothing that renders Dasein free and available for the showing of being.

P. 71-3

¶ 9:14 PM 1 comments

Sarah Palin is now the heroine of the Republican base. Scary. During the campaign it became obvious that she is completely ignorant on the principal issues. It never became widely known that she is a religious nut: she believes in the imminent End of Days and the “Rapture,” in which the saved will be suddenly wooshed up to heaven—a notion that has no basis in scripture or anything else. She believes she was elected governor because of a laying-on-of-hands by an African clergyman who had run a witch out of town for causing automobile accidents.

This stuff makes William Jennings Bryan look like Martin Heidegger.

¶ 9:11 PM 2 comments

Well, what the hell is Ereignis? Understanding the concept requires situating it within Heidegger’s later conception of the “history of being”; I’ve talked smack about that view of the history of philosophy before, but for the moment we’ll give him his due. For later Heidegger, “being” is not a brute fact or timeless dimension of human experience but something that irrupted into human consciousness with the Greeks and can undergo decisive changes (such as he hoped the Nazi-Zeit would bring). Ereignis is a word for that irruptive dimension, the historical point at which thought can latch onto Being: it is equally implicated in thought, being, and history.

What could this possibly have to do with the expressive facilities for talking about individual possible worlds? Well, consider this: each use of a “nominal” to refer to a point is a miniature instance of Ereignis (though Heidegger called it a singulare tantum, Latinspeak for mass noun, we won’t reopen that issue at this point). Using the nominal, we can talk about how something is in a way distinct from its “essence” as parceled out over different possible configurations. Furthermore, I think there is a natural-language phenomenon which illustrates this very nicely: plays on words like the title of this post, which “hybridize” sayings and phrases in a way that subverts figural expectations: that sort of hybrid language creates a path of access to a truly singular description, one which breaks the bonds of the “eternal return” of metaphor in cliche and offers access to a form of words which says one thing, be it true or not. (I’m attracted to this as a theory of prose, but perhaps it has the consequence that one is not speaking prose without even knowing it after all.)

¶ 11:55 AM 0 comments

What I Learned from Heidegger by Rudolf Carnap

¶ 8:47 AM 1 comments

But, of course, despite its cast of academic types, My Sex Life... isn’t about the academic columbarium; while he does spout off at length, mostly about pussy, we never see or hear any of the work Paul does; the closest is his late rant that culminates: “It’s not Heidegger climbing some fucking mountain. No, it’s the girl’s face, it’s your fear, as you pull back the elastic, her belly … you see?”

¶ 8:42 AM 0 comments

Instead of becoming an assistant priest in a new parish, Hausen chose to study philosophy at the University of Notre Dame in 1992 and 1993. This is where Hausen says he "was really exposed to top-shelf theology": the postmodernism of Martin Heidegger, the comparative religion of Joseph Campbell; and the writings of Leo Tolstoy.

And this is where Hausen began drinking heavily.

¶ 9:54 PM 0 comments

Dick was deeply tolerant and amazingly generous both in action and in spirit. When I was appointed at Princeton, he had, I think, some hopes of acquiring a colleague with whom he could discuss the more metaphysical parts of the German philosophical tradition that were near the center of his attention at that time. It must have been at least a mild disappointment to him that I had little interest in any kind of metaphysics and spent my time studying philosophers like Adorno who were of no interest to him and thinking about “social theory”—at that time a purported academic discipline that has now disappeared as completely as Davidson's. Characteristically, Dick used to say to people that my first book, The Idea of a Critical Theory, showed the uselessness of the concept of “ideology,” whereas I thought it showed the reverse. We could also find no common ground in aesthetics because of my own obsession with the philosophy of music. Dick seemed not only, as I have mentioned, to be deeply unmusical, like Freud, but he sometimes seemed even slightly irritated by the very existence of music and certainly by the thought that someone could take it sufficiently seriously to try to think about it in a sustained and systematic way. Finally, I think it puzzled him that I cleverly avoided ever giving any instruction in the university on Heidegger.

¶ 4:33 PM 0 comments

I’m just not comfortable with being-in-this-relationship.

Let’s face it: Daseins are on the wall.

I know it’s really hard, but you have to at least make an effort to understand me.

I’ve always felt thrown into this relationship.

It’s about time that someone asked about the question of the meaning of this relationship.

We can’t dwell together anymore, so get out of my fourfold!

¶ 11:43 AM 0 comments

Heidegger argues that the basic concepts undergirding any science whatsoever have to be taken as clues from which these sciences can be founded. He argues that the “real ‘movement’” of the sciences is determined by “how far it is capable of a crisis in its basic concepts”. It is in this strict sense that Heidegger envisions the destruction of the ontological tradition to be productive and positive, not simply negative. For as a science, ontology must be able to treat its own fundamental concepts—res cogitans, cogito ergo sum, etc.—as material to be reworked in order to make the real problem of Being transparent. It is also in this vein that Heidegger asserts that “ontological science is primary to ontical science”. This is why he claims that ontology is fundamental, whereas physics or biology deal with regional, ontical questions, i.e. questions concerning particular entities. However, since the Being of these entities has not become transparent until the advent of universal phenomenological ontology, science has to be subordinated to philosophy (in Heidegger’s view of things). My question is: does this not perpetuate the perennial struggle between science and philosophy? How is it that philosophy can have the pretentiousness to claim to ground real science, when, from the scientists’ point of view, philosophy is the mere recycling of concepts that do not have any factual basis in scientific inquiry? In other words, Heidegger continues the war between science and philosophy, even if he claims the latter is the most universal of sciences. How can we introduce democracy into thought and put science and philosophy on the same footing without claiming to give one or the other any sort of precedence? How can we break down the hierarchy that establishes itself in thought, i.e. how do we establish a peace treaty between philosophy and science, especially from the former to the latter?

¶ 6:54 AM 0 comments

Freud thought the same: "Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of the enjoyment." Gold is precious because it is in short supply. Our life on earth is precious because it is limited.

German philosopher Martin Heidegger says there are two fundamental ways we can exist in this world. He calls them the state of forgetfulness of being and the state of mindfulness of being.

Living in a sense of forgetfulness of being means we forget or overlook the richer, deeper part of what is actually taking place for us.

It's like viewing the Olympics as just a neighborhood game; it's like being married and overlooking the depth of passion, love and relationship that we can experience and share with the one loved.

Forgetfulness of being means we miss the mystery and meaning of life. We even miss much of ourselves. We skim along the surface of life rather than sink into it. We're just part of the veneer that coats real existence.

¶ 8:49 AM 0 comments

It has always surprised me how little Heidegger's conception of mood or attunement (Stimmung) is used by theorists of affect. It's a very rich concept, and in fact it is one of Heidegger's most significant contributions to philosophy that he rigorously thought it out: he rescued it (with Husserl, and, in a different quarter, Bergson) from the oblivion to which epistemology-centered work had consigned it, arguing it had more significance than as an external accident of psychology.

Perhaps this is the case because the body doesn't make too many significant appearances in Heidegger (unlike Husserl and Bergson): the circuit between body and mood might have to be a bit more elaborated for them to pick it up. But Heidegger does indeed make inroads into this connection (especially in his seminars), so the problem seems deeper than this.

¶ 11:08 PM 0 comments

Heidegger thought about pickles deeply and developed his philosophy from them. Before the pickle existed, the cucumber existed, as did the brine and spices needed to turn the cucumber into a pickle. So the essence of the pickle preceded the existence of the pickle. This was Heidegger’s Sauregurkenprinzip, or “pickle principle,” which was expounded in Being and Time (1927). So now you know where “essence precedes existence” comes from (which we all used to say in the 60’s, even if we didn’t understand it).

¶ 7:54 PM 0 comments

13. We want to advance the concept of originary inauthenticity, which we freely adapt from Heidegger. The thought is that human existence is formed in relation to a brute material facticity that cannot be mastered. Any attempt at authenticity slips back into an inauthenticity from which it cannot escape, but which it would like to evade. It is in this movement of evasion, of the self’s turning away from itself, that our fatal embeddedness in materiality is revealed. Inauthentic existence is experienced as a burden, a weight, something to which I am riveted without being able to know why or know further, like Racine’s Phaedra rooted to the fact of her erotic longing for her stepson from which she longs to escape. Or like Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, languishing within an unsatisfied desire, an unbearable physical weariness whose only escape is her father’s pistol. Inauthentic existence has the character of an irreducible thatness, what Heidegger calls ‘das Daß seines Da’. I feel myself bound to the ‘that of my there’, to the sheer fact of my facticity, in a way that demands a response.

14. However, from this point onwards we part company with Heidegger. For us, the nature of this response cannot be the authentic decision of existence that comes into the simplicity of its fate (Schicksal) by ‘shattering itself against death’ as Heidegger melodramatically puts it. The response will not be the heroic mastery of our inauthentic state in the authentic present of what he calls the Augenblick or ‘moment of vision’, which produces an experience of ecstasy and rapture. On the contrary, for us, the response to the materiality of our inauthentic state is a more passive and less heroic decision. This calls for comic acknowledgement rather than tragic affirmation.

¶ 11:34 PM 0 comments

She’s tired of crying and headaches, dragging herself from one day to the next, feeling “a vague desire to take hold of myself again and find myself in the metaphysical solitude of my youth.” She’s up to her neck in incessant, insistent images. We lose her for more than a month, and then, starting in January 1941 -- a breakthrough.

“…The metaphysical tragedy of a fascism -- it is not just a matter of stifling an expression but of absolutely denying a certain being, a matter, really, of confusing the human with its animal, biological aspect. And according to the other idea of Heidegger that the human species and I are the same thing, it’s really I that am at stake. After reading a ridiculous and despicable issue of the NRF (New French Review), I experienced this to the extent of feeling anguished. I am far from the Hegelian point of view that was so helpful to me in August. I have become conscious again of my individuality and of the metaphysical being that is opposed to this historical infinity where Hegel optimistically dilutes all things…. I have vertigo… I understand what was wanting in our antihumanism.”

She can’t decide between Hegel and Heidegger. (“Why would my individual destiny be so precious if consciousness can transcend itself?... At times it seems to me that the Hegelian-Marxist universal point of view deprives life of all meaning. Then again I think that perhaps individuality as such has no meaning and that wanting to give it one is a delusion. The idea of personal salvation -- but why that idea?”) The not-yet-finished She Came to Stay “rests on a philosophical attitude that is already no longer mine.” It’s kind of puerile. Her next novel will be about “the individual situation, its moral significance and its relation to the social.” In her brutal, sudden solitude, she has broken out of her solipsistic loop forever. She’ll be writing about the “rationalization of the world by happiness,” about historicity, about the search for conciliation and “temptation to merge with the universal (for example, when returning to Paris in June, when Germany has won) -- then conquering individual existence again,” about relationships between people, about the mutual recognition of consciousness.

¶ 1:48 PM 0 comments

But how can "history" be designated the theme of Heidegger's thinking? Is not his theme rather being? Here one must keep in mind the context in which "being" is relevant for Heidegger. It is the history of Western thought. Its great theme and at the same time its great fate is "being." Hence, to understand the nature of its history, Heidegger has to inquire as to the meaning of "being". But Heidegger's reflection ultimately goes beyond this theme. In his dialogue with a Japanese professor about the possibility of the West and the Far East understanding each other, the topic is no longer being but rather language and hermeneutic. Similarly in the address, "Der Weg zur Sprache," and in other recent statements Heidegger no longer speaks of being but rather of "e-vent" ("Ereignis"). The theme of history as history's room, the theme of thinking as historic hermeneutic, is broader than the theme of being. The latter is limited to the inquiry as to the nature of history of Western thought. Hence on occasion Heidegger could even say that the concept "being" should not even occur in theology.

P. 208

¶ 8:14 AM 0 comments

Surprisingly, McGrath seems ready to excuse this specific failing, but not Heidegger's general, antidemocratic view of humanity.

Apparently, for the postmodern age, elitism is a graver offense than Nazism.

Likewise, McGrath deeply resents Heidegger's rejection of Christianity, and his later, neo-pagan romanticizing about new divinities. He takes Heidegger's talk of "the gods" literally, and levels his most passionate criticism at it.

A more fruitful reading might have seen Heidegger as a type of Nietzschean poet who wanted to restore a sense of the divine without relying on traditional Christian categories. Metaphor, not analysis, became the philosopher's new tool.

In any case, McGrath helps us appreciate Heidegger's rich, conflicted legacy; his originality and daring; his genuine insight into the question of Being.

Love him or hate him, we can agree on this much: Without Heidegger, 20th-century philosophy and theology would have been much the poorer.

And Being might have stayed forgotten.

¶ 9:24 AM 0 comments