...the back of a capricious and childish beast that would have swallowed Heidegger in a single gulp if Heidegger had had the bad luck to be born on the Mexivan-U.S. border.

P. 114

¶ 10:07 PM 2 comments

Once while on a trip to Asia, Martin Heidegger was approached by a Zen master. The Zen master stepped up to Heidegger and slapped him very hard on the forehead. Heidegger punched the Zen master in the throat. Commotion ensued. But he gave what he got and the Zen master got what he deserved. You don't go around slapping people on the forehead. I don't care who you are. Heidegger awoke the Zen master. This is so Martin Heidegger.

¶ 8:35 AM 1 comments

Let us begin with the image of the quarry — an image that has much to do with beginning. Heidegger introduces the themes of “Be-ing” (part 8, originally part 2) with the words, “Here lie the boulders of a quarry in which bedrock is broken” (421). In the other inception. philosophy is "no edifice of thoughts anymore, but boulders apparently fallen at random in a quarry where bedrock is broken and the rock-breaking tools remain invisible. Are the blocks closed forms, or the unwieldy supports of an invisible bridge—who knows?" (436). As a quarry, the Contributions try to reach primordial bedrock, Urgestein(187,421,436). The bedrock is appropriation as the giving of being. But this giving is not simply handed to us; it is given as a task and a challenge, given only to and in questioning. This ground-as we will see in chapter 3—is an Abgrund, an abyss. So we cannot begin with a self-evident first principle that serves as a foundation for an edifice. We must begin at the beginning and stay there, continually digging into the bedrock. Each moment needs to he a new beginning, in which we reinterpret and rediscover whar is primary. The thoughts have to be “mined” from the basic mood on each occasion (21). The text is repetitive because Heidegger is trying, again and again, to stay with the same (82), to start from the beginning in confronting the problems at stake. This is repetition as renewed retrieval, not as reproduction. Heidegger's aim is to inceive—-to perform and re-form his concepts and words on each occasion. He envies poets, who manage to capture the essential in a single, surveyable form (59-6o). He tries to do the same himself, struggling to sum up everything in a nutshell-—while fully realizing that this cannot be done, that no single sentence can convey the whole.

P. 133

¶ 3:26 PM 2 comments

Heidegger performs what he says: withdrawal also, at the level of his discourse, his text, withdraws (from contamination). But things don't stop with just this. For what this allows us to ask is the following: What could it mean to think withdrawal otherwise than as protection? This is what Derrida is getting at, this is what he thinks Heidegger falls a little short of doing. And it's understandable, for to think withdrawal otherwise than as protection against technology would be to think withdrawal as a function of technology, as permeated by the technical. This would in turn make the phenomenon itself--which is self-veiling or withdrawing--technical. A technical phenomenon: this is what it is impossible for Heidegger, and incumbent upon Derrida, to think.

¶ 5:38 PM 3 comments

Heidegger never mentions any specific theory of art, nevertheless he is implicitly critical of any theoretical account that privileges one or the other of art’s four components as the essential one. So, for Heidegger the work of art, itself an ambiguous term which refers both the art object and to its effects, can be understood with reference to its role in that complex phenomenon. Once this holism of Heidegger is grasped, it becomes easier to analyze his more specific claims. The most important of those claims is the assertion that art reveals the truth of Being. From time immemorial philosophers have linked art and truth, but Heidegger’s unique conception of truth as the disclosure of Being is essential for understanding his view of art.

¶ 11:30 AM 1 comments

A pre-established order cannot contain, perhaps cannot even make manifest, the life of the mind and its fruits. That observation led Plato and Aristotle to say philosophy was the highest, but to not dismiss the political entirely, as it was something different to a degree. Heidegger, on the other hand, might be willing to devote far too much to institutions, for the ironic reason that he is utterly dismissive of them in their most fundamental sense.

¶ 9:24 AM 0 comments

Global Viewpoint: How would you characterise the effect of this rhetorical stand-off?

ElBaradei: It has had the effect of stereotyping Iran. Iran is one of the most advanced countries in the region. For example, Farsi is the number-one language into which German philosophy is translated. In Iran, you see a discussion about Kierkegaard, about Heidegger.

¶ 1:18 PM 0 comments

It is not always easy to be Heideggerian. It would be easier to understand a great painter or musician falling into shame in this way (but, precisely, they did not). It had to be a philosopher, as if shame had to enter into philsophy itself. He wanted to rejoin the Greeks through the Germans, at the worst moment in their history: is there anything worse, said Nietzsche, than to find onself facing a German when one was expecting a Greek?

Pp. 108-9

¶ 11:44 AM 0 comments

Man’s time is always the future. He is never there where he is. He is always transcendent. Time for Heidegger is complicated. He gets confused. The essentials of this philosophy have been explained.
Death does not exist. When death comes, one does not know that one is dying.
Man is for death.
The problem of death preoccupies human thought, without arriving at a result.
How to explain what I am?
And what I no longer am? not?
We know nothing.
When I die, the world no longer exists.

P. 83-4

¶ 9:52 PM 0 comments

We must now consider the meaning of "Appropriation." Heidegger suggested that he hardly intended the essay as an argument of logical coherence. He says at the beginning: “Let me give a little hint on how to listen. The point is not to listen to a series or propositions, but rather to follow the movement of the showing.” The truth, however? is that the essay, written long after Heidegger had declared language inadequate to the thinking of Being, proceeds conceptually. Insofar as we are to understand, we must understand “Appropriation.” In the earlier essay, “The Way to Language” (1959), Heidegger explains “Appropriation” in this way: “The moving force in the Showing of Saying is Owning... This owning which brings them there, and which moves Saying as Showing, we call Appropriation.” Appropriation is “the moving force” that moves language and thus accounts for the Being of beings. But because to think Being without beings is the purpose of “Time and Being,” there is little concern with the role of language in the bringing about of beings. Furthermore, we are now told that we must not think of Appropriation as "an indeterminate power which is supposed to bring about all giving of Being and of time.” Heidegger’s treatment of Appropriation consists basically in demonstrating that what it is cannot be revealed in logical discourse. The question “What is Appropriation?” becomes a question about the Being of Appropriation, while the logic in which the question is approached requires that Appropriation be antecedent to Being. Eventually it is possible, not to define Appropriation, but only to identify its peculiar properties. The first of these is that "Appropriation withdraws what is most fully its own from boundless unconcealment." This would seem to rest upon Heidegger’s earliest explanation of truth, or aletheia, as being always both unconcealment and concealment. Another peculiar quality of Appropriation is that it brings “man into his own as the being who perceives Being by standing within true time.” In Heidegger’s earliest terminology “standing within true time" is achieved by the resolve which establishes authenticity, and man always has at least an ontic perception of Being. Standing within true time, man is “thus Appropriated” and “belongs to Appropriation.” But in belonging to Appropriation man is also "assimilated" by Appropriation. This means that man is “admitted to the Appropriation” and “this is why we can never place Appropriation in front of us, neither as something opposite us nor as something all-encompassing.” This parallels Heidegger’s argument that because we live within language we can never know language. If we might now argue that in belonging to Appropriation man, in language and in knowing, Appropriates beings, then again a Plotinian configuration of Heidegger’s thought would emerge. That, however, would mean that “Being” is language, of which Heidegger never admits, and the text of “Time and Being” does not legitimate such an argument. We have only the argument that because man is "admitted to appropriation” neither discursive argument nor simple statement can “correspond” to Appropriation. Eventually all we can say is: "Appropriation appropriates." In the sentence which immediately follows, Heidegger returns to the point at which his thinking of Being began: “Saying this, we say the Same in terms of the Same about the Same.” The Same, says Heidegger, is “the oldest of the old in Western thought: that ancient something which conceals itself in aletheia.” In the end, logical discourse can identify Being only as “that ancient something.”

P. 54-6

¶ 11:35 AM 0 comments

Articulating my position as an expansion of Heidegger’s discussion of the being of Dasein through Levinas’ alterity as well as Ricoeur’s dual-axis self, I contest both the biological conclusions of patriarchical though that women are inferior to men because of biology or intellect as well as feminist assertions that separate women from men as objectifications which seek to eradicate the unity of difference natural to human sexual ethics. As Heidegger voices, the human condition into which we are born, male or female sex, is not a result of conscious choice of the will, but we find ourselves thrown into bodies, thus automatic identities and forms of relating between the genders. To separate one gender as superior to the other on the basis of sexual function is to objectify not one, but both genders,

¶ 10:53 AM 0 comments

According to Martin Heidegger, technology is what defines all of modern life. In other words, we moderns assume that what is real is what can be comprehended by reason; the real is what can be calculated or predicted or manipulated. Anything that cannot be objectively known—known as an object—by reason is not real. For Heidegger, this technological way of thinking is above all nihilistic; everything noble and beautiful that gives human life its seriousness or dignity is regarded, literally, as nothing. The modern view, on the other hand, is that technological thinking frees us from the irrational illusion of indebtedness. Technology can be put at the service of what we now call “free choice” because we have no knowledge of any purposes or ends or limits that are simply given. Unconstrained human choice or willfulness depends on a debt-negating or nihilistic foundation.

A contemporary critic of technology, Wendell Berry, explains that our dogma or “conventional prejudice” today is the uncritical acceptance of the goodness of technological liberation. Our intellectuals and educators mean to prejudice us “against old people, history, parental authority, religious faith, sexual discipline, manual work, rural people and rural life, anything that is local or small or inexpensive.” We are prejudiced against all that is required to acquire moral virtue, to what we must have to subordinate technical means to human ends. We are prejudiced against “settled communities,” against anything that has not been uprooted by the impersonal universalism of technological thinking. But it is only in the routinized and moralized context of such communities that any technology might be viewed as good, as not merely displacing or disorienting human beings for no particular purpose.

Berry agrees with Heidegger that in a technological age those who are best at manipulating others as objects will rule without restraint. Technological democracy tends to bring into existence a new sort of tyrannical ruling class composed of clever and liberated or communally irresponsible merito-crats who employ technology to impose a humanly destructive uniformity on those they rule. These meritocrats—believing maybe more than any prior ruling class that they deserve to rule—are full of contempt for those they control. And they themselves don’t realize the extent to which they are controlled by technological thinking, by a way of thinking that has devalued all standards except wealth and power.

Heidegger and Berry, not without evidence, tend to view America as a sort of technological tyranny in which the unlimited pursuit of money and power that is the result of technological thinking has led the few to lay waste to the communal and moral world inhabited by the many. Technological progress tends to make true or communal democracy almost impossible, as even Tocqueville showed. Berry explains that we Americans characteristically “behave violently” toward the land and particular places because from the beginning we “belonged to no place.” We have regarded the land or nature as an alien or hostile force to be conquered, not as our home. For Berry, what we modern Americans regard as the natural human propensities for wandering and violence are not really so natural at all. Our anxious dissatisfaction can at least be checked by our natural tendency to be bound by habit and familiarity. As even Heidegger says, the existential view that the truth is that we human beings alone have no natural place in particular is not shared by people who have the experience of belonging “deeply and intricately” to some place.

¶ 2:44 PM 0 comments

A space is something that has been made room for, something that is cleared and free, namely, within a boundary, Greek peras. A boundary is not that at which something stops, but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its essential unfolding. That is why the concept is that of horismos, that is the horizon, the boundary. Space is in essence that for which room has been made, that which is let into its bounds. That for which room is made is always granted and hence is joined, that is, gathered by virtue of a location . . . Accordingly, spaces receive their being from locations and not from ‘space’.

P. 332

¶ 9:08 AM 0 comments

Q: About Martin Heidegger.

WERNER HERZOG: What was the question?

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Can you say something about Martin Heidegger?

WERNER HERZOG: I have never read anything of Martin Heidegger. I am not good in reading philosophy. We are sitting here with a trained philosopher, a learned philosopher, and Paul has always been appalled that I have not read this and not that and not the other so I have hardly ever read Heidegger.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It always reminds me of a comment of a teacher of mine when he was asked if he had read something: He said, “Read it? I haven’t even taught it.”

¶ 11:12 PM 0 comments

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

¶ 9:28 AM 0 comments

[Rhodes Scholar Stephen Aylward] is specializing in early twentieth century German philosophy, particularly that of Martin Heidegger, which Aylward studied last year while on exchange at the University of Freiburg in Germany. Though he found his courses there, conducted entirely in German, to be challenging at first, the 21-year-old native of Mount Pearl, Newfoundland, said that the experience gave him a new perspective upon returning to McGill.

"No longer having to do all my readings and write all my papers in German is like boxers training with weights on-you take them off and it's the same sort of idea," Aylward said. "Reading seemed far less daunting, even readings that would have struck me as difficult before."

¶ 5:06 PM 0 comments

Within Enframing, we are for Heidegger faced with two choices; one to push forward nothing but what is revealed in ordering, and the other to realize that we too are on our way to arrival, and that, as a result, we need to re-orient ourselves to the world and our existence, thereby re-introducing chance. Under the first option we too become standing reserve (‘human resources’) and partake in a narcissism at the species level, becoming blind to the ways in which the world reveals itself; in this case, humans no longer experience their essence, which goes beyond the human: Being. In the second option, humans are needed for the surmounting of Enframing, and yet they correspond to that surmounting, in that a surmounting of Enframing is a surmounting of (liberal individual) self. Human essence must open to the essence of technology, which is also Being. Instead of `turning’ into oblivion, Being may thereby turn `homeward’ into whatever is; challenging-forth may be transformed into a more harmonious bringing-forth. This is, of course, a graciously selective reading of Heidegger, and one should hold reservations over his implicit Earthy anti-technological bias and his privileging of the German language, and the way these arguably converge in his Nazism. What I want to draw out here is that this surmounting, and this corresponding to this surmounting, is, when viewed through the present discussion, testimony itself. One surmounts the liberal self at the same time as one testifies; one surmounts in this testimony.

To find a way to `mourn the impossibility of mourning’, to exappropriate, one should begin an accounting of previous imaginings of the human-technological relation, centering around the figure of the cyborg.

¶ 2:55 PM 0 comments

Though both The Constant Gardener and Being and Time critique the ideological relationship to time that conceives time as an infinite series of nows, the alternatives that they propose differ radically. For Heidegger, authentic temporality involves accepting one’s constitutive finitude and being-towards-death. In this position, one constantly experiences the limit that time represents and comes to grasp the productivity of that limit. Existence itself becomes identical—and reduced to—the limits of finitude. In contrast, The Constant Gardener sees the embrace of finitude as yet another version of the ideological relationship to time (or a failed attempt to escape it). By fully acceding to the limit of its finitude, the subject fails to see the possibility of transcending limits. The embrace of finitude misses, in other words, the infinite nature of subjectivity itself, which is the origin of the subject’s political drive.

¶ 3:08 PM 0 comments

And in his recent writings, as the actual--or, in his Heideggerian terminology, the "ontic"--possibility of revolution recedes, its "ontological" importance has increased. No, the Revolution will not bring the millennium. As a historical science, Marxism is false. Divine violence "strikes from out of nowhere, a means without an end." And yet "one should nevertheless insist that there is no 'bad courage.'" The courage displayed in the Revolution is its own justification, it is the image of the utopia it cannot achieve. "The urge of the moment is the true utopia."

Zizek is hardly the only leftist thinker who has believed in the renovating power of violence, but it is hard to think of another one for whom the revolution itself was the acte gratuite. For the revolutionary, Zizek instructs in In Defense of Violence, violence involves "the heroic assumption of the solitude of a sovereign decision." He becomes the "master" (Zizek's Hegelian term) because "he is not afraid to die, [he] is ready to risk everything." True, "democratic materialism furiously rejects" the "infinite universal Truth" that such a figure brings, but that is because "democracy as a rule cannot reach beyond pragmatic utilitarian inertia ... a leader is necessary to trigger the enthusiasm for a Cause." In sum, "without the Hero, there is no Event"--a formula from a video game that Zizek quotes with approval. He grants that "there is definitely something terrifying about this attitude--however, this terror is nothing less than the condition of freedom."

¶ 8:25 AM 0 comments