Few...have read and fewer understand German philosopher Martin Heidegger when he writes about truth and untruth, and their relation to human freedom (me included). But everyone can appreciate Sabina, the embodiment of his ideas in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Sabina is one of the four central characters of Kundera's best-known and most successfully realised fiction. She escapes from communist Czechoslovakia to the West, only to be ground down by what Janet Malcolm, in her review of the novel, called a perpetual struggle against theunbearable banality of her situation as an emigre artist:

Sabina had once had an exhibit that was organised by a political organisation in Germany. When she picked up the catalogue, the first thing she saw was a picture of herself with a drawing of barbed wire superimposed on it. Inside she found a biography that read like the life of a saint or a martyr: she had suffered, struggled against injustice, been forced toabandon her bleeding homeland, yet was carrying on the struggle. "Her paintings are a struggle for happiness" was the final sentence.

Sabina's anger at this falsification leads her to make her own. Kundera regards this decision, to alter aspects of her background, then hide her nationality altogether after moving to the US, as an "attempt to escape the kitsch that people wanted to make of her life".

¶ 3:29 PM 0 comments

How anything can emerge from nothingness is a question which the ancient Greeks answered by saying that it can’t. There must, they reasoned, have always been something. But that seems to raise a further question, which was given its most concise formulation by Leibniz at the end of the 17th century: why is there something rather than nothing? Another German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, who died in 1976, argued that this puzzle was the most important question of all, though he never quite got round to answering it. Heidegger was infamous for his bizarre neologisms and contorted language, which were especially evident when he wrestled with nothingness. He even invented a verb to describe what nothingness does: in the English translation, it “noths”. Well, maybe it doth, but this does not get us very far.

¶ 6:54 PM 0 comments

He blows a dragon snort of smoke into the air. "You know what Heidegger says about time?"

And I think, Heidi who?

"Heidegger said time is the basic category of existence. He said we live in its ever-shrinking shadow, and if we are to achieve anything in our brief being that lets us die without feeling we've wasted our time, we will have to go into heady conflict with the forces of scarcity that deny our desires."

Pp. 156-157

¶ 1:23 AM 0 comments

There is a very interesting discussion of moods in Being and Time. Interesting specially because it is quite different from what we generally think of when we think about moods. In so far as I understood what I read, Heidegger says that mood is not just a cognitive or psychological concept but something much more fundamental ("ontological"). He further says that there is nothing like not being in any mood. If we are in the world we are "always already in the mood."

¶ 3:46 PM 0 comments

In it a young boy tells his mother Juliette (Marina Vlady) about a dream he’s had. "I was walking all alone along the edge of a cliff. The path was only wide enough for one person. I saw two twins coming towards me. I wondered how they would get past. Suddenly, one of the twins went towards the other and they became one person. And then I realized that these two people were North and South Vietnam being united." In the counter shot, the camera returns to Juliette lying on the couch, smiling blankly. Her son then asks, "What is language?" She replies, "Language is the house that man dwells in."

¶ 10:41 AM 0 comments

Overall we need to remember that knowledge management is, to use the Greek, a matter of phronesis or practical wisdom; its the exercise of judgement and that can only be developed in action through the acquisition of habits. To quote Heidegger here (sorry about that but one should always acknowledge ones sources): "an authentic existence can only be gained on the foundation of our quasi-habitual, skilful, inauthentic involvement with the world" Habits in humans determine action, not mission statements, organisational values and outcome focused targets.

¶ 2:12 PM 0 comments

In the end, music stands as the most powerful reminder that time is not so much about the so-called moments of time, about the ossification of the confrontation with the course of time into past/present/future, as it is about dissonance. Heidegger, of course, is the one who dedicated himself to thinking precisely such dissonance.

Real participation in music draws us into the dissonant body and into the full instance at once, and it does so (so says Nietzsche at least) more fully and profoundly than words can ever communicate. Music places us, body and soul, at the site of dissonance, the very site of the pain and contradiction of life that get plastered over by the so-called truths of religion and philosophy. Religion and philosophy, having effaced the body and denied time, are incapable of thinking and affirming the profound pain, equally the deep joy, that issues out of the contradiction of being at all. The "musical sense" that Heidegger finds requisite today carries with it a receptivity to precisely what has been effaced by a thinking guided by the images of onto-theology, a thinking modeled after an infinite and omnipresent mind that has no body and suffers neither pain nor death.

P. 98

¶ 9:59 AM 0 comments

Heidegger explicates the concepts of "ontic" and "ontological" through a consideration of science in section 3 of Being and Time. A field of study such as mathematics, for example, operates under normal conditions with a conception of the nature of its subject matter -- numbers or quantities -- that is taken as self-evident and beyond question by its practitioners. Mathematicians start from paradigm cases of numbers, presumably cardinal numbers. In the course of their work, however, they might encounter anomalous cases, such as zero, infinity, irrational numbers, negative numbers, three divided by zero, and so forth. When such anomalies arise, it becomes necessary to ask questions such as, "What are we talking about when we talk about numbers?" and "What exactly is a number?" For Heidegger, the ordinary busy-work of puzzle-solving in mathematics is called "ontic" inquiry, whereas deeper questions about the very nature of the subject matter of this domain are called "ontological."

¶ 9:25 AM 0 comments

We have already referred more than once to this phenomenon: in the actualization of caring, life occurs, encounters itself, even if for the most part in a worldly way, yet such that, in this worldliness, life appears in its genuineness (in its Being and as a certain sort of object: that it is and what it is). According to everything explicated hitherto, this occurrence should not be thought of as an Objective, factual event, a mere coming onto the scene, but is, instead, a mode of the very actualization of caring. (We are speaking here by way of a formal indication.) Now, every mode of occurrence has, as such, its determinate (factical) chairological character (Χαιρός [chairos] — time), its determinate relation to time, i.e., to its time, and this relation lies in the sense of the nexus of actualization of facticity. The chairological therefore includes categorial determinations that concern (formal) temporal relations in and for the factical. In the present context, we introduce the chairological (which, according to our considerations, is incorporated into a genuine sphere of problems relating, in principle, to facticity) only to show in it the specific ruinance of caring. i.e., of factical life. The question is how, from a chairological point of view, life as such can and does announce itself (how it occurs) in apprehension.


P. 102

¶ 10:55 AM 2 comments

German philosophers, from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, were the Michael Jordan-era Chicago Bulls of philosophy: dominant, confident, and effortlessly superior to the competition. I imagine a sense of this proud tradition informed Heidegger's infamous fulminations about how Frenchmen could only think seriously if they switched languages, true philosophy only being possible in Ancient Greek and in German. It's an odd, and kind of bigoted way of explaining the very real phenomenon of the comparative German excellence in philosophy. It's kind of like explaining the dominance of the Jordan-era Bulls as product of Chicago's superior hot dogs and deep dish pizza.

¶ 7:26 AM 0 comments

‘The SI,’ Debord writes towards the end of this volume, ‘possesses nothing – except its demand for totality.’ Philosophically as well as politically, Debord made his greatest contribution here, but in a way that has attracted the criticism of others on the left (Althusserians, Foucauldians, feminists, neo-Gramscians) ever since. I mean his theory of ‘spectacle’, which recovers Lukács on ‘the riddle of the commodity-structure’ in History and Class Consciousness (1923), first translated into French in full in 1960. ‘The problem of commodities,’ Lukács writes early in his essay, is ‘the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects. Only in this case can the structure of commodity-relations be made to yield a model of all the objective forms of bourgeois society together with all the subjective forms corresponding to them.’ Debord agreed, but he also understood that in consumer capitalism ‘the phantom objectivity’ of the commodity had grown exponentially, and that it had effectively merged with media-forms in such a way as to produce a world of spectacle, which he defines in his 1967 text as ‘capital accumulated to the point where it becomes an image’. This commodity-image had also proliferated like mad, colonising once protected areas of social life, and it was in these fields that the SI took up the fight – in ‘the battle for leisure’, above all – using strategies first sketched in these letters. The Situationists, Debord writes in June 1958, must indicate ‘the transition between the artistic commodity-object of today and the free experimental activity in a new dimension of culture’. But how to do so? Here as elsewhere Debord tended to swing between calls for immediate action – ‘a direct construction of a liberated, affective and practical existence’, as he puts it in On the Passage of a Few People . . . – and hopes for dialectical magic: ‘the alienating satisfactions of the spectacle can at the same time be outlines, in negative, for a planned development of affective life.’

¶ 9:27 AM 0 comments

After one month of frenetic reading I come to the conclusion, with immense relief, that phenomenology is a fraud. In the same way that cathedrals have always aroused in me the sensation of extreme light-headedness one often feels in the presence of man-made tributes to the glory of something that does not exist, phenomenology has tested to the extreme my ability to believe that so much intelligence could have gone to serve so futile an undertaking. As this is already the month of November, there are no cherry plums available. At times like this therefore—eleven months a year in actual fact—I have to make do with dark chocolate (70%). But I know in advance the outcome of the test. Had I but the leisure to bite into the standard meter, I would slap myself noisily on the thighs while reading, and such delightful chapters as "Uncovering the final sense of science by becoming immersed in science qua noematic phenomenon" or "The problems constituting the transcendental ego" might even cause me to die of laughter, a blow straight to the heart as I sit slumped in my plush armchair, with plum juice or thin driblets of chocolate oozing from the corners of my mouth...

When you set out to deal with phenomenology, you have to be aware of the fact that it boils down to two questions: What is the nature of human consciousness? What do we know of the world?

Let's start with the first question.

For millennia now, by way of "know thyself" to "I think therefore I am," mankind has been rambling on about the ridiculous human prerogative that is our consciousness of our own existence and above all the ability of this consciousness to make itself its own object. When something itches, a man scratches and is aware that he is scratching. If you ask him, What are you doing? he'll reply: I'm scratching myself. If you push your questioning a bit further (are you aware that you are conscious of the fact that you are scratching yourself?) he will again reply, Yes; thus, ad infinitum to as man are-you-aware-and-conscious questions as you wish. Does this, however, leave man with any less of an itch to know that he is scratching and is aware of it? Can reflective consciousness have a beneficial influence on the order of the itching? Nay, not in the slightest. Knowing that it itches and being conscious of the fact that one is conscious of knowing it has absolutely no effect on the fact of the itching. As an added handicap one must endure the lucidity that results from this wretched condition, and I would wager ten pounds of cherry plums that such lucidity merely serves to exacerbate an unpleasant condition which my cat, for example, can eliminate with a quick flick or two of his rear paw. But it seems so extraordinary to us—no other animal is capable of this and in this way we escape our own animal nature—that as human beings we are able to know that we are in the process of scratching ourselves; this preeminence of human consciousness seems to many to be the manifestation of something divine that is able to escape the cold determinism in us to which all physical things are subject.

All of phenomenology is founded on this certainty: our reflective consciousness, the sign of our ontological dignity, is the only entity we have that is worth studying, for it saves us from biological determinism.

No one seems aware of the fact that, since we are animals subject to the cold determinism of physical things, all of the foregoing is null and void.

Pp. 58-9

¶ 11:53 PM 0 comments

The withdrawal of Being and man's uprooted alienation were prepared by the Western conception or self-conscious Reason which was based on a doctrine of "Being as presence." Armed with this notion, Western thinking turned its back on the ground of presence, the real "object" to be thought. The early Heidegger tries to prepare a conception or Being not qua presence, but as the a priori precondition of presence. But Heidegger came to believe that to use the traditional term Being for this new notion was misleading. He also came to see that his early work could be accused or a kind or Nietzschean voluntarism and of transcendental subjectivism.

Being, if it can still be called that, is that absence that stands before presence; "It" gives (es gibt) or grants presence but withdraws and remains concealed. It is the ground of unconcealment or appearance which remains self-concealed, unlike Hegel's self-revealing, self-manifesting Spirit. Being must be linked with the primordial meaning or aletheia. Heidegger argues, Being is the ‘uncovering. which is simultaneously a “veiling.” Heidegger experimented with a variety or locutions that could express this Nothing in non-metaphysical terms free from the language or subjectivity. He finally arrived at the locution: Being "under erasure," (Being) signifying the absence which mysteriously remains the reason for presence.

P. 113

¶ 8:48 PM 0 comments

What did Dragomir study at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Freiburg? In the first place, the lectures and seminars of the “master”, as Heidegger’s doctoral students called him. In the two years (four semesters) that Dragomir spent in Freiburg, Heidegger delivered a lecture of one hour and held a seminar of two hours every week. Dragomir’s student record book records his attendance at the following courses, in order: Hölderlin’s Hymnen (two semesters), Parmenides und Heraklit (one semester) and Heraklit (one semester). What were Heidegger’s seminars? Winter semester 1941-42, Einübung in das philosophische Denken; summer semester 1942, Hegel, “Phänomenologie des Geistes” I; winter semester 1942-43, Aristoteles, “Metaphysik” IX; summer semester 1943, Hegel, “Phänomenologie des Geistes” II. The seminars were particularly useful to Dragomir, as the thesis that he was going to write under Heidegger’s supervision was precisely about Hegel’s concept of mind.

What did the Heideggerian seminar look like? How many people took part? Were they all trained in philosophy? Did they come from all corners of the world? Was there any other Romanian in the seminar?

¶ 7:42 PM 0 comments

Incidentally, and as Václav Havel, following Heidegger, once pointed out in an address to a joint session of Congress, this makes a strong case for “consciousness” having a say in the determination of “social being.”

¶ 1:26 PM 0 comments

As I read the history of philosophy, Heidegger is in the intellectual sphere one of those people who tears down philosophical kingdoms. (Nietzsche and Marx did their share as well, let the record show.) What Descartes and Kant and Hegel constructed they did with the idea that the human mind, whether that mind be a detached eye or a manifold that categorizes phenomena or the world’s apparatus for thinking about world’s self, was ultimately intelligible through a lens of radical, secularizing doubt. While Nietzsche and Heidegger are no Christians, nonetheless they call radically into question the metanarratives (that word, of course, comes later in the game) that would elevate universal–sometimes mathematical, sometimes not–reasoning and purportedly eliminate the need for particular experiences, particular articulations, and especially particular moments of revelation. At the end of division one of Being and Time Heidegger does say that true philosophy needs to eliminate the last vestiges of Christian theology (and I’ll get to that on Thursday, I promise), but along the way he’s broken down the assumptions that Descartes and Kant used to reduce the rich theology of the Church to a flat theism.

¶ 10:17 PM 0 comments

In his later thinking, Heidegger will explore the concept of nature through the Greek "physis," exhibiting "physis" as standing in intimate relation to "aletheia" — nature, in this primordial sense, itself appears as a mode of the concealing/revealing of being. Thus Heidegger says in Basic Questions of Philosophy (from 1937—1938) that “The fundamental character of φύσις [physis] is ἀλήθεια [aletheia], and φύσις, if it is to be understood in the Greek sense and not misinterpreted by later modes of thought, must be determined on the basis of ἀλήθεια."

The way in which the various issues that come to light here connect to the question of world, transcendence, and the conceallng-unconcealing of truth is somewhat tangled, and, in the period of the late 1920s, and even into the early 1930s, is not yet clearly worked out in Heldegger’s thinking. Yet it should already be appurent that what emerges is a set of issues centered around the attempt, not only to think the happening of disclosedness, and so of world, in a way that would rule out any grounding of that happening in the human, but also to understand it in a way that encompasses the "mystery" of that happening, and so does not treat it merely as the happening of disclosedness, but also of that which is not disclosed, that which remains concealed or else appears as concealment.

Pp. 192-193

¶ 9:53 AM 0 comments

A radical liberal would point out that philosophers in politics stand for a calamitous misfortune: starting with Plato, they either fail miserably or succeed… in supporting tyrants. The reason, so the story goes, is that philosophers try to impose their Notion on reality, violating it — no wonder that, from Plato to Heidegger, they are resolutely anti-democratic (with the exception of some empiricists and pragmatists), dismissing the crowd of “people” as the victim of sophists, and at the mercy of contingent plurality… So when the common wisdom hears of Marxists who defend Marx, claiming that his ideas were not faithfully realized in Stalinism, the reply: “Thank God! It would have been even worse to fully realize them!” Heidegger at least was willing to draw consequences of his catastrophic experience and conceded that those who think ontologically have to err ontologically, that the gap is irreducible, that there is no “philosophical politics” proper.

¶ 9:28 PM 2 comments

There are a few things to set straight right off. His simple, literal defintion of aletheia as “uncoveredness” is an incredible simplification of the meanings and origins of the word, something he quickly has reduced, in largely Sophoclean fashion, to a trope of cloaking and residual depth. The power and sweep of this simplification should not be underestimated, for it directs the whole of the theoretical that follows. When something is “covered” our immediate questions inevitably turn to the nature of the thing that lies between it and us, how did it get there, what is it made of, can we remove it, what purpose does it serve.

¶ 9:26 PM 5 comments

Let me be clear: I am in no way endorsing the misguided notion that clinical depression is somehow "good for the soul", or that it is represents a state of heightened spiritual or artistic awareness. This myth has been thoroughly debunked by my colleague, Dr. Peter Kramer, in his book Against Depression. But I am saying that when we find ourselves dealing with everyday problems, we can find a measure of consolation in the fact that we are troubled only because we are alive -- and life is something we must never take for granted. Just as the philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that the awareness of death allows us to live a more intense and "authentic" life, I believe that the embrace of our problems leads us to a deeper appreciation of our pleasures.

¶ 3:13 PM 0 comments

Heidegger places his primary focus on the persona of the preservers and positions them in relationship to both truth and history: “[I]n the work [of art], truth is thrown towards the coming preservers, that is, toward an historical group of men.” This terminology of projection engages art with a historically implicated audience. The shoemakers and other tradespeople of Chartres may not have understood images of themselves as “truth” (although the new realism of such a depiction does avail itself to discussions of truth), but the images of saints and the divine figures of Mary and Christ which were displayed gloriously in the windows above the donor panels certainly projected truth.

It is within this intersection of truth, history, and preservers that Heidegger hints at an idea that I find gripping: that the work of art is also that of subjectivity formation. “Preserving the work means: standing within the openness of being that happens in the work.” “Openness of being” is a phrase that Heidegger uses often in conjunction with truth, and therefore associates the subject position of preservers as “standing within” the truth that happens in a work of art. I take “standing within” to be a powerful assimilation of the viewer (preserver) with the truth of a work of art – it is a stronger claim of interaction than merely “standing before” a work of art. These distinctions become important when we consider the effect of seeing stained glass window panels depicting shoemakers and tradespeople on the historical shoemakers and tradespeople of thirteenth century Chartres.

¶ 9:25 AM 0 comments

On that occasion I wondered if she would have been an even more marvellous writer if she'd made apricot jam. Apricot jam being a metaphor for any cooking task which involves transformation, which is in its own way magic at the same time as it is absolutely ordinary. She would have despised such an activity, would not have been able to comprehend how to begin; moreover she would not have seen that as her problem. But I think it was. Murdoch being a philosopher by trade spent a lot of time thinking about Heidegger and not being able to make the sense of him she wanted. This is what he said when he was out on a walk and stopped to look at oak trees: "Everything real and true only prospers if mankind fulfils at the same time the two conditions of being ready for the demands of highest heaven and of being safe in the shelter of the fruitful earth: the oak constantly repeats this to the country lane, whose track runs past it."

I think my apricot jam does much the same thing. I am not even that fond of it, much preferring Seville orange marmalade, and pretending anyway never to eat jam, but I know a good metaphor when I have ladled it into sterilised jars. It's a marvellous concoction, firm, sticky, richly fruited, deeply and darkly flavoured, dense amber gold in colour. Objectively regarded, it's gorgeous. And it brought comforting messages with it, of thrifty housekeeping, of provisioning against times of want, of turning what would be wasted — the apricots came from a friend's tree — into a treasure. Thus it offers the demands of the highest heaven as well as safety in the shelter of the fruitful earth. What's more, it's ephemeral, it's designed to be consumed, its success is that finally it does not exist any more, which is fairly metaphysical. If only Murdoch had made some jam, or done any of the cooking (any kind, really) that is alchemical in nature, transforming simple and disparate ingredients into a quite different other, she might have made more of the sense she wanted of Heidegger.

¶ 9:27 AM 0 comments