Language is a stencil for thinking.

How do we know that it is language itself that creates these differences in thought and not some other aspect of their respective cultures?

One way to answer this question is to teach people new ways of talking and see if that changes the way they think. In our lab, we've taught English speakers different ways of talking about time. In one such study, English speakers were taught to use size metaphors (as in Greek) to describe duration (e.g., a movie is larger than a sneeze), or vertical metaphors (as in Mandarin) to describe event order. Once the English speakers had learned to talk about time in these new ways, their cognitive performance began to resemble that of Greek or Mandarin speakers. This suggests that patterns in a language can indeed play a causal role in constructing how we think.

  ¶ 6:32 AM 0 comments

  Critchley, B&T, week 4.

Furthermore, I am always found in a mood, a Stimmung. This is mood is the strong Aristotelian sense of pathos, a passion of the soul or an affect, something befalls us and in which we find ourselves. The passions are not, for Heidegger, psychological colouring for an essentially rational agent. They are rather the fundamental ways in which we are attuned to the world. Indeed, musicologically, Stimmung is linked to tuning and pitch: one is attuned to the world firstly and mostly through moods. One of the compelling aspects of Heidegger's work is his attempt to provide a phenomenology of moods, of the affects that make up our everyday life in the world.

This is another way of approaching his central insight: that we cannot exist independently of our relation to the world; and this relationship is a matter of mood and appetite, not rational contemplation.

Such moods disclose the human being as thrown into the 'there' of my being-in-the-world. As Jim Morrisson [singer for The Doorrs] intoned many decades ago, 'Into this world we're thrown'.

As a corollary, music is the language of moods.  ¶ 11:13 PM 0 comments

  It's not where you publish, but who reads and cites you. How to rank published papers.

In his 2005 article, Hirsch introduced the h-index (named after himself, of course). The key was focusing not on where you published but on how many times other researchers cited your work. In practice, you take all the papers you've published and rank them by how many times each has been cited. Say paper number one has been cited 10,000 times. Paper number two, 8,000 cites. Paper number 32 has 33 citations, but number 33 has received just 28. You've published 32 papers with more than 32 citations—your h-index is 32.

Basically a PageRank algorithm that includes paper journals, from the olde pre-web days. Today, if your paers are not online, you're nobody - only Polyphemus cares about your work.  ¶ 4:47 PM 0 comments

  National Review on Rémi Brague's The Legend of the Middle Ages.

One place where Brague highlights the sophistication and relevance of medieval thought is in a fascinating chapter about the era’s reflections on the flesh. He finds here a model of subjectivity that can inform and improve our contemporary understanding of the self. Drawing from Hegel and Heidegger, Brague describes for the reader the link between modernity and subjectivity, and he summarizes Heidegger’s account of modern subjectivity thus: “The subject itself is above all an object, the object of certitude. The I must assure itself of its own being before it can become the ‘subject.’ The subject is the I, but only once it has been determined by certitude.” This modern formulation of subjectivity implies “something like a pre-subjective modality of the I,” which, in turn, betrays a certain mind/body dualism — for it is only after an intangible, invisible “certitude” assures the I of its own existence that the I can then become a subject and view the world as an object. In the end, modern thought tends to minimize the role the body plays in forming the self, insisting instead on a subjectivity based on consciousness.

Brague prefers the medieval account, rejecting this modern tendency to ignore the body as an integral part of the self, and he thinks that “the rediscovery of the flesh is perhaps a philosophical task decisive for our own age” — not least because modernity has become “the age without angels.” For medieval thinkers, angels held an important position in the hierarchy of being because they are rational, non-corporeal beings — intermediaries between rational, corporeal human beings and God, who is pure being. Modernity, however, has lost its angels, and this poses an anthropological problem: If humans can be properly defined only when their carnal nature is distinguished from the non-carnal nature of angels, what happens when angels disappear? In effect, man himself becomes an angel. And this is precisely what one finds in the modern approach to subjectivity. Man is defined, not by his rationality and carnality, but by his rationality alone.

Much is lost, however, when our carnal nature is overlooked. For one, carnality gives us our sense of touch — a sense that in medieval thought seemed central to knowledge of self and world. In the Middle Ages, “all knowledge is necessarily based in sense knowledge” and the fundamental sense is touch. Brague notes: “We cannot help but possess [touch]: To lose it would be to lose life.” Moreover, touch is the fundamental sense because “we touch our flesh at the very moment we touch an object.” “We do not see our eye when it sees,” nor do we “hear our eardrums when they hear.” In touch, however, “the I knows itself,” and not “in the same manner as does the modern subject — or at least not if we follow Heidegger’s analysis. The subject does not make sure of itself before knowing things.” Instead, “we awaken to conscious life and we discover ourselves already inhabiting a body we have not created.”

  ¶ 8:37 PM 0 comments

  On the reputations of academostars.

One would assume that commenting in some controversial way about politics would precipitate a rapid fall from power, but that is apparently not the case. Both the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the literary critic Paul de Man have been accused of being anti-Semitic, yet their reputations have remained relatively untarnished.

Heidegger was a member of the Nazi Party who was appointed director of the University of Freiburg in 1932. His writings at the time indicate strong support of the Nazi cause, and a contemporary photograph shows him in full Nazi regalia. He later denied that he had been a fervent Nazi and said he had joined the party only to save his university. Subsequent documentation proves otherwise, and, as many have noted, he never apologized for his involvement in Nazism. Yet his ideas are still widely studied and taught.

Paul de Man, a Yale professor and inaugurator of deconstruction in the United States, was found after his death to have written over a hundred articles for the Belgian collaborationist newspaper Le Soir. Both de Man and Heidegger have been the focus of vigorous arguments for and against ignoring politically reprehensible actions in favor of a body of work. De Man's reputation has perhaps suffered a bit, but he has had many heavy-hitting apologists, including Jacques Derrida and J. Hillis Miller. In some sense, there has been both scandal and spin, and the reputations of both de Man and Heidegger depend on the effectiveness of the latter over the former. Still, it has been hard to strip fame from those two scholars and drape them with notoriety, or even infamy, because their ideas endure.

So ideas count for something in the academy?  ¶ 9:48 PM 0 comments

  Good news, the second coming. Thomas Sheehan's Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker is being republished. Used copies go for bowkuh bux.  ¶ 7:46 AM 0 comments

  Touch, underappreciated.

In striving for verification, do we reach out to touch something to feel its truth, or do we believe our eyes? And in the notoriously visual culture in which we live, what is the place of touch?

Like much of philosophy, what is closest or most obvious to us is revealed to be most distant. Or, as Heidegger once asked in The Essence of Truth: “How is it that the apparently self-evident turns out, upon closer examination, to be understood least? Answer: because it is too close to us and because we proceed in this way with everything close.” Not only the banal, everyday nature of touch but also its transience and deeply subjective nature, are all potential factors that make it unattractive for philosophers to consider seriously.

  ¶ 7:30 AM 0 comments

  The narrator, in Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Camera, on thinking.

The conditions were now perfect, it seemed to me, for thinking. A few minutes earlier, on the maritime platform, I had stopped to watch the rain fall in a bright projected beam, in the exact space delineated by the light, enclosed and yet as devoid of material borders as a quavering Rothko outline, and, imagining the rain falling at this place in the world, which, carried by gusts of wind, passed through my mind, moving from the shining cone of light to the neighboring darkness without it being possible to determine the tangible limits between the light and shadows, rain seemed to me to represent the course of thought, transfixed for a second in the light and disappearing the very next second to give way to itself. For what is the act of thinking—if it's not the act of thinking about something? It's the flow of thought that is so beautiful, yes, the flow, and its murmur that travels beyond the world’s clamor. Let yourself attempt to stop thought, to bring its contents to light, and you'd end up with (how could I say, how could I not say rather) trying to preserve the quavering, ungraspable outlines, you'd end up with nothing, water slipping through your fingers, a few graceless drops drying out in the light. It was night now in my mind, I was alone in the semi-darkness of the booth and I was thinking, protected from outer torments. The most favorable conditions for thinking, the moments when thought can let itself naturally follow its course, are precisely moments when, having temporarily given up fighting a seemingly inexhaustible reality, the tension begins to loosen little by little, all the tension accumulated in protecting yourself against the threat of injury—and I had my share of minor injuries—and that, alone in an enclosed space, alone and following the course of your thoughts in a state of growing relief, you move progressively from the struggle of living to the despair of being.

Pp. 82-3

  ¶ 4:03 AM 0 comments

  Ork! Ork!

Humor from Paul Johnson.

Martin Heidegger, whom many believe to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century (he is impenetrable, I find, though I once understood his main point for about half an hour, until my mind crumbled), laughed only once. That was when, on a picnic in the Hartz mountains, Ernst Jünger bent over to pick up a sauerkraut roll, and split his lederhosen with a tremendous crack. But after ‘a fierce shout of mirth’, Heidegger checked himself, and ‘his expression reverted to its habitual ferocity’.

Having lived in England, I can tell he's trying to be funny because he used the word sauerkraut while talking about Germans.  ¶ 9:12 PM 0 comments

  Death is so last century, now we're bored.

We feel strongly about [boredom], but rarely discuss it. Occasionally it's a subject of nostalgia, as in, "Remember how wonderful it was, two years ago, when business news was boring?"

It occupies some philosophers, most of them following Martin Heidegger. He considered profound boredom the modern era's basic mood. Not always original, he pointed out that waiting for a train can be boring. He disliked the industrial world and argued that the unrelenting desire for novelty reflects our fear of being bored.

...

My own mind fills up with what Heidegger called the "muffling fog" of boredom during all announcements given on aircraft, particularly those filled with plonkingly ordinary data, such as the news that we are to travel from Calgary to Toronto, via northern Ontario, at 35,000 feet. (If we were going via New Orleans, at 350 feet, it might be notable.)

An article in the summer issue of The American Scholar by Mark Edmundson of the University of Virginia puts the blame for tedium, apathy and the rest on other people, in particular his academic colleagues.

  ¶ 5:43 PM 0 comments

  God occluded by all the hullabaloo.

I think part of the problem is that a technological society such as ours not only lessens our sense of dependence but also is so filled with sound that it doesn’t create spaces for the silences wherein we might hear the still, small voice of God calling to us. Death as well as life is swallowed up in noise (a point Heidegger makes when he discusses how our Sein zum Tod is occluded for us in the chatter of the world). We don’t know, or what’s worse seek to know, the measure of our days, and thus miss out on the fundamental wisdom of our existence: that we are passing through. Without a realization of this mystery of being, we cannot begin to cultivate the virtues of gratitude and service.

  ¶ 2:34 PM 0 comments

  Not enough Zizek media in your life? Mariborchan's got you covered.  ¶ 9:25 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Shunya's Notes on the dearth of A.I..

In many ways, Heidegger stood opposed to the entire edifice of Western philosophy. A hammer, he pointed out, cannot be represented by just its physical features and function, detached from its relationship to nails and the anvil, the physical experience and skill of hammering, its role in building fine furniture and comfortable houses, etc. Merely associating facts, values or function with objects cannot capture the human idea of a hammer, with its role in the meaningful organization of the world as we experience it.

Simon Critchley makes a similar point in this week's installment on B&T.

Heidegger insists that this lived experience of the world is missed or overlooked by scientific inquiry or indeed through a standard philosophy of mind, which presupposes a dualistic distinction between mind and reality. What is required is a phenomenology of our lived experience of the world that tries to be true to what shows itself first and foremost in our experience. To translate this into another idiom, we might say that Heidegger is inverting the usual distinction between theory and practice. My primary encounter with the world is not theoretical; it is not the experience of some spectator gazing out at a world stripped of value. Rather, I first apprehend the world practically as a world of things which are useful and handy and which are imbued with human significance and value. The theoretical or scientific vision of things that find in a thinker like Descartes is founded on a practical insight that is fascinated and concerned with things.

  ¶ 6:49 PM 0 comments

  Ulysses "seen", the graphic adaptation.


I was disappointed to discover that the snotgreen sea is actually a shade of azure, more evoking of a sheltering sky than anything remotely scrotumtightening. I'd always assumed Joyce was describing the Atlantic I was born next to, but I guess the Manx Sea is nothing like that.  ¶ 8:48 AM 0 comments

  Gamelan, apparently it's not just about randomly gonging gongs.

Halfway through a heady conversation that has already touched on terrorism, music theory, and the divergent philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Giorgio Agamben, Andreas Kahre stops midstream and utters a low, self-deprecating chuckle.

“I’m sorry,” he says, on the line from his Gabriola Island home. “This thing sounds desperately highfalutin. But it’s really goofy.”

The thing in question is Ear/Nose/Throat, Kahre’s new multimedia composition for gamelan orchestra, voice, and electronics. And while this “opinion piece” does indeed have a serious dimension—among other things, it considers Agamben’s response to the line that Heidegger draws between humanity and the natural world—it’s also rich in surreal vignettes and surging rhythms.

  ¶ 3:21 PM 0 comments

  After the genderquake, femininity after feminism.

I want to suggest that what we are seeing is not just a harking back to a safe, bygone or mythical age when 'men were men and women were women', but rather the construction of a new femininity (or, better, new femininities) organized around sexual confidence and autonomy. Indeed, what is novel and striking about contemporary sexualised representations of women in popular culture is that they do not (as in the past) depict women as passive objects but as knowing, active and desiring sexual subjects. We are witnessing, I want to argue, a shift from sexual objectification to sexual subjectification in constructions of femininity in the media and popular culture.

I'm sure that'll sounds reasonable to Cartesian dualists. I sense a new meme is present at hand.  ¶ 10:10 AM 0 comments

  From this week's TLS, how the phenomenon of money lead to man to start ordering his world.

This new and revolutionary phenomenon of money itself underpinned and stimulated two great inventions in the Greek polis of the sixth century, “philosophy” and tragedy. “Philosophy” (or rather idea of the cosmos as an impersonal system) was first produced in the very first monetized society, early sixth-century Ionia, and – even more specifically – in its commercial centre Miletos. The tendency of pre-modern society to project social power onto cosmology (for example, “king Zeus rules the world”) applies to the new social power of money. And the following description applies equally to money and to much of the cosmology of the early philosophers: universal power resides not in a person but in an impersonal, all-underlying, semi-abstract substance.

  ¶ 9:56 PM 0 comments

  Simon Critchley on the breathtakingly obvious.

Note the radical nature of this initial move: philosophy is not some otherworldly speculation as to whether the external world exists or whether the other human-looking creatures around me are really human and not robots or some such. Rather, philosophy begins with the description – what Heidegger calls "phenomenology" – of human beings in their average everyday existence. It seeks to derive certain common structures from that everydayness.

  ¶ 2:36 PM 0 comments

  Dana S. Belu reviews Sharin N. Elkholy's Heidegger and a Metaphysics of Feeling.

If, as Elkholy argues, authenticity is the prerogative of Da-sein's attunement to "the ground of its possibilities" and if this ground turns out to be discrete heritages, histories and traditions, then Da-sein, whether individuated or not (she never retrieves an individuated Da-sein), can hear only the call of its own kind, unable to bridge deep cultural differences. Moreover, the political and ethical vector that concludes Heidegger and a Metaphysics of Feeling raises the provocative question of how collective responsibility toward an inherited past can be ethically and politically justified. Since the book does not set out to answer this question it is certainly not the book's fault for not addressing this problem. In fact, the book succeeds in accomplishing the difficult feat of tracing this problem back to its ontological roots.

  ¶ 7:54 PM 0 comments

  Theodore Kisiel on Joseph Kockelmans (In Memoriam), from last month's Heidegger Circle.
  ¶ 1:47 PM 0 comments

  Carl Schmitt and over lawyering Ereignis.

Unlike de Sá, Mika Ojakangas subscribes to what Louis Althusser would have called "an epistemological break" in Schmitt's corpus, expressed in the turn from the decisionism of his early thought to the institutionalism of his "mature" writings. But Ojakangas, too, is interested in the notion of the event as it relates to the law and its "sacred origins," traceable back to the telluric relation to the earth. Whereas the first legal order arises directly from land appropriation, which evokes the Heideggerian take on the "event of appropriation," the reinstitution of the law hinges on the forgetting of its sacred origins, as it does in Derrida's "Force of Law." Removed from its roots in sacred space, or the appropriated segment of the earth, law is not only deterritorialized, but it is uprooted from the concreteness of life and transformed into a set of normative rules. For Ojakangas, the event denotes the creation of sacred space and, thus, of the existentially concrete figure of law. Yet the question is whether the history of its subsequent reinstitution, unfolding under the sign of the forgetting of origins, is itself an integral part of the event, since the process of appropriation is unable definitively to set itself apart from expropriation and desacralization.

  ¶ 11:50 PM 0 comments

  How to spot the anarcho-situationists.

They arrived at the Barnes & Noble at Union Square in small groups on Sunday afternoon, proceeding two and three at a time to the fourth floor, where they browsed among shelves holding books by authors like Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger.

  ¶ 9:39 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Al Filreis reviews a book on Wallace Steven's poems and Europe.

Here we get the delightful piece of Krzysztof Ziarek once again considering, indeed, Stevens and Heidegger. Yes, Heidegger was definitively German, but the essay’s large concept, the “foreignness of poetry,” turns out to have only tangential connection to Stevens’s sense of Europe, a limitation that fortunately does not thwart Ziarek’s revisionist reading of an important late poem, “Of Mere Being.” Again, though, “mere being” is an existential condition more fundamental, more culturally unspecific, than can be obtained by the category “European.”

  ¶ 1:37 PM 0 comments

  On being bored in the not saving the world mood.

For more than a century, thinkers have been writing about how modern life, with its endless stimulations, actually makes boredom worse - and less easily tolerated. When the boom of the 1920s was busting, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote about this, focusing on the blah of waiting hours for a train.

If only he knew how bad things would become a lifetime later. Train commuters now have to endure the tedium of watching a blue monitor as they wait as the estimated time of arrival flicks down to three minutes, then back up to four, then back down to three. All that the commuter can do to ease this torture is check emails on a mobile, skim newspaper stories about the spat between Gordon Ramsay and Tracy Grimshaw, return missed phone calls and slurp coffee from a paper cup.

I listen to Theme Time Radio Hour, with our host Bob Dylan, when I commute.  ¶ 11:45 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Snurp Reads Philosophy; World Scratches its Head, the blog, comments on obscurity and figuring out what philosophers are actually saying.

Why does Heidegger make understanding his work so difficult? Because only by forcing us to wretch our minds, by making us step away from what are given uncritically as already finished and see it in its essential being-ness, its emergence. We cannot just say that Being is emergence; Being must emerge.

Emergency is under appreciated. Read the whole thing. Too long we've ignored Steel Pulse's pronouncement, "State of emergency, never seen such urgency, forever we will strive, I never seen a thing like this before."  ¶ 8:01 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Matt Langer updates "hammering with a hammer" for today's workers.

Plato mysteriously included a cobbler in the originary population of the ideal city he outlines in the Republic—likely to symbolize a working class—while Heidegger derived a phenomenology from a hammer. Could Plato ever have imagined a software engineer instead of his cobbler, Heidegger a compiler in lieu of a hand tool?

  ¶ 11:44 AM 0 comments

  Dominique Janicaud on where things comes from.

Heidegger is perfectly aware of the difficulties in invoking what the current usage of Ereignis conceals, namely the element of a possibility even more originary than an optical event, more originary even than any optical event, more originary even than any ontological manifestation: the breakthrough towards the prior source, from which being itself in its epoch is to be thought. The difficulty is repeated because holding Being in a view as “Ereignis” is not derived from the discovery of a transcendental structure or correlation, but from announces itself as a sign heralding a new epoch. Such an irruption does not proceed from a decree made by thought, it emerges from what, up to the present, Being has reserved, and now offers. Thus it is the spirit of the times that is imposing this novel—indeed unsettling—way meditation on the juncture of Being and the present moment of epochality, within which the unprecedented word burst out. In it thought is no longer assigned—as in absolute idealism—to wanting to enclose emery decisive event, every effectiveness within its survey. The new meditation does not ratify history with a signature a absolute knowledge attempted to do. “Ereignis does contain possibilities of unconcealment which thinking cannot determine” (TB, 50, mod.). The open future preludes thought from closing upon itself, but not from tumbling into a blind race forward, which would happen if it forgot the originary is concealed within such a future. Das Ereignis ereignet, what happens appropriated. At the end of the book Nietzsche, Heidegger was able to delineate the unsought of the history of Being; from now on in “Time and Being” in particular, Being in its (metaphorical) history is no longer the ultimate recourse, the presence of the present is referred to destiny’s sending.

Why does this acknowledgement take place outside of the traditional chattering ways of philosophy? Why this mutation in language? But then we may just as well ask: Why are Giacometti’s statues suddenly elongated and so seriously gripping? The seriousness of creation in every domain has requirements. They are more difficult when they seem to question the meaningful character of discourse, to confront understanding. A careful reading of the text does not allow us to be entrenched within such an impression. Overcoming metaphysics never meant for Heidegger thinking without the requirements of adequation; it never meant not reasoning, denying the realm of presence. He did not aspire to the madness that fascinated Artaud and Bataille. His enterprise is subtle not aiming at “impossible,” but rather concerning possibilities yet reserved (thinking what adequation presupposes, what presence covers up, naming what up until then had received no name, unfolding the appropriation of the originary). Metaphysics thus finds itself invested in situ. It is indeed on its essences that one must meditate in order to understand its extent, and the transgression of the simplicity of the “there is” for the benefit of beings. But it is within the nearest proximity that what is to be thought is sheltered—a thought whose vocation is to liberate the tradition, and to connect it to its “essential still reserved anteriority” (sein noch aufgespartes Gewesenes) (ID, 44). It is, however, necessary to concede that even in “Time and Being” Heidegger exposes himself to misunderstandings similar to the ones that affect first the understanding of the “destruction” and then the “overcoming” of metaphysics. “To think Being without beings means: to think Being without regard to metaphysics. Yet a regard for metaphysics still prevails even in the intention to overcome metaphysics. Therefore our task is to cease all overcoming, and leave metaphysics to itself” (ZS, 25; BT, 24). Such a clarification attempts to be definite. Thought must move forward, the question of its relationship to metaphysics is secondary. The obstacles however are undeniable: Is it literally impossible to think Being without beings? Is not Heidegger once more falling prey—as he did in Sein und Zeit—to a sort of radicalism that takes him beyond what he attempted to articulate? Likewise, are we at liberty “to leave metaphysics to itself” (ibid), since it continues to determine our world and our existence under the form of planetary technology (follow what Heidegger himself has shown), and since the thought of Ereignis admits that it turns back to metaphysics while stressing the necessity not to do so any longer?

Pp. 118-9

  ¶ 4:32 AM 0 comments

  The Ontological Boy on the not so bad kind of phenomenology.

Philosophy is phenomenology –well yes and no. Phenomenology, as academic philosophy, has the feel of being a science. The –logy part has taken over – though not the Logos. Take Heidegger, who does phenomenology for the sake of ontology. He worries about the strange German he will have to put it in. He knows that philosophical writing has always been barely approachable because it is so far from simple narration. And he tries to make up for it by speak-writing as casually as he can - he is a professor, after all. He has to hang on to his students; they will be his grounding element. That's what science is. It is the everyday, the commonsense part of life. Heidegger, a sometime philosopher, mixes together the heavy compactness of philosophical terms with casual lecture-narration. It doesn't work well. One or the other, please. The Hindu philosophers knew enough to separate the compact Sanskrit from easy articulate explanation. And so I wonder about myself.

I mix together casual talk with the erotic. That isn't so bad. The most passionate, the most disturbed by desire, always hide it in the most casual. There, easy outward movement is a sign of inward agitation – everyone recognizes it. And so maybe Heidegger was forced into the same pretense. Still, it's hard to put up with. Just as living with a lover is nerve-wracking.

Philosophy is a lover's ever-failing attempt at phenomenology.

  ¶ 10:08 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Coriana Six explains Descartes and Heidegger.

According to Heidegger then, the notion of substances can be completely removed from Descartes’ thought and the rest of his ideas will still stand up. Speaking of the physical and the psychical as two distinct substances is to talk about it within a certain ‘language’, that of the scholastic tradition which preceded Descartes. Had there been a different tradition with which he had to contend, Descartes may well have used a different language to convey his ideas, and certainly would have been unlikely to include the notion of substance. It is important to note that this is not simply a case for Heidegger of hidden presuppositions deriving from the context in which Descartes’ thought was formulated, but in fact more of a conscious decision on the part of Descartes who, whilst aware of the unsatisfactory nature of scholastic terminology, was heavily restricted by the need to remain relevant and, as Heidegger states, “intelligible” to this tradition.

  ¶ 8:28 PM 0 comments

  Simon Critchley has a new column in the Guardian, Being and Time, part 1: Why Heidegger matters.

[B]ecause of his political commitment to National Socialism in 1933, when he assumed the position of Rector of Freiburg University in south-western Germany, Heidegger continues to arouse controversy, polemic and much heated misunderstanding.

When you consider that physicists don't have polemics about Heisenberg's politics, the controversy mainly says more about "philosophers" than about Being and Time.

In any case, we live in interesting times when an Anglo newspaper has a eight part series on Being and Time.  ¶ 5:04 PM 2 comments

  Kodwo Eshun on the proper use of P-Funk.

I was really pleased to find an old essay by Sylvere Lothringer which explained how they wanted people to use Semiotexte books for speculative acceleration. Instead, people started using these text to prove their moral superiority, saying "You are wrong, you have misunderstood Foucault." They used theory for prestige, to block speculation. That is why so many artists used to resent theory. You would get these lame pieces, somebody trying to apply Heidegger to Parliament-Funkadelic because they had seen the word "ontology" on a cover, instead of taking Parliament to read Heidegger. They always did it the other way round. Theory wasn't being used to pluralize, to see that there was theory everywhere you looked, and everywhere you listened.

Give up the theory - tear the roof off the sucker.  ¶ 2:13 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Minds and Brains provides Dasein for Dummies.

It was the entrenchment of this indirect representationalism against which Heidegger was fighting in Being and Time. Only by understanding the deficiencies Heidegger saw in these representationalist accounts of perception can we get a grasp on what an “analytic of Dasein” entails. We can see this in how Heidegger sets up the whole definition of “phenomena” and “phenomenology” - central to the entire project of phenomenological-ontology as we will see. He starts by defining what a phenomenon is. A phenomenon is that which shows itself to us. “Phenomena are the totality of what lies in the light of day or can be brought to light – what the Greeks sometimes identified simply with [entities].” This much is clear and I imagine most people would agree to a similar definition. But then he continues: “Now an entity can show itself from itself in many ways, depending in each case on the kind of access we have to it. Indeed it is even possible for an entity to show itself as something which in itself it is not” (BT 51). Here, he makes a crucial distinction between a “phenomenon” and a “semblance.” This is a simple but profound conceptual framework and understanding the force of Heidegger’s argument here is central to understanding his entire shift away from Kantian transcendentalism.

  ¶ 8:35 AM 0 comments

  Another review of Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft notes that:

He distinguishes his own work completely from that of the craftsman who is mystically connected to his materials and obsessively devoted to honing his skill. Crawford is good at fixing stuff. Though he is quite comfortable quoting Heidegger, he is the antithesis of a Heideggerian - uninterested in medieval agrarianism and utterly unpossessed of any religious affectation about the nature of work. He has respect for practicality and usefulness above all. It's like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance without the Zen. Motorcycle maintenance is quite enough for Crawford.

  ¶ 3:38 PM 1 comments

  Rick Roderick lectures on Heidegger and the Rejection of Humanism.
  ¶ 10:32 AM 0 comments

  D. Ladkin says in "When Deontology and Utilitarianism Aren’t Enough: How Heidegger’s Notion of ‘‘Dwelling’’ Might Help Organisational Leaders Resolve Ethical Issues" that you need to use your imagination.

Colloquially, ‘‘dwelling’’ is associated with a particular quality of engagement. It connotes lingering, paying attention in an unhurried way. As a quality of thought dwelling suggests openness, it is not quite so directed or forceful as ‘‘pondering’’ while being more focused than ‘‘day-dreaming’’. As an activity, dwelling implies affecting a place, creating a home space perhaps, which reflects the self while sympathetically representing the particularities of the space itself.

In Heidegger’s terms, dwelling has corresponding connotations. Similar to the common sense use of the term, dwelling is strongly associated with a ‘‘poetic’’ way of being in Heidegger’s writing. As such, it can never be wholly apprehended through hermeneutics or completely rational ways of knowing; the imaginal plays a key role in both our understanding, and enactment of dwelling.

  ¶ 8:41 AM 0 comments

  Obama's speech in Cairo has been praised and panned by the usual suspects on the web, yet there's an aspect that I haven't seen others comment on, but which stood out for me. That's the five places where Islam's tolerance is praised, for example:

Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the inquisition.

Now, a Manichean dualist would say tolerance is a good thing - it's better than intolerance - but is tolerance what the world needs from Islam? Do women want to be tolerated by men? Do blacks want to be tolerated by whites? Do gays want to be tolerated by straights? I think tolerance is insufficent. If Islam wants to be part of the global village, it'll have to get along with everyone else, and not merely tolerate others.

Then there's the matter of what that tolerance actually entailed. In Cordoba, Jews were required to wear a yellow star, and Christians a yellow star. Is that level of tolerance acceptable?

And finally, there's a problem of basic correspondence with the facts. Cordoba was liberated (1236) centuries before the Inquisition (1478-1834) got started. If this was a self-proclaimed important speech, yet it was written without caring if it corresponds with the facts, what truthfulness can be attributed to it?

[Update: Google now has hundreds links to Spanish blogs for Obama, Cordoba and tolerancia. I didn't know about the pogroms of 1011 and 1391.]  ¶ 4:52 PM 0 comments

  Robert Vallier reviews Brett Buchanan's Onto-Ethologies, and notes the missing body in Being and Time's description of embodiment.

It becomes quite clear that Heidegger's interest in animality is less to determine its essential being, which he always seems to leave in suspense, but rather in the notion of "world," so that he might clarify the fundamental existential structure of Dasein as "being-in-the-world" through a comparative study. The very close reading of the relevant sections of the 29/30 course is clear and sober, and instead of propagating "heideggerese," clarifies it, cautiously examining and explaining every substantive claim in light of both Heidegger's overall project during these years and Uexküll's contribution (especially his notion of the Umwelt) to that project. I believe that these two chapters will (or should) become a standard secondary source for all those who want to question and understand Heidegger's analytic of animality and its relation to Dasein. That said, Buchanan at one point contends that those (like Lowith, Sartre, Jonas, and Merleau-Ponty, to name just a few) who have rued that Heidegger pays scant heed to the body in Being and Time would gain much from close attention to what he says of animal being. I am not yet quite convinced by that claim. Certainly they would gain something, but the human body and embodiment, is qualitatively different from animality, and this difference is not simply a function of the degree and kind of world that Dasein has and is in, and in which animals are poor. Heidegger is always a bit cagey, I think, about the exact nature of that difference, and while Being and Time may be, as some claim, a wholly new and ontological description of embodiment, Heidegger does leave the originary structure of the body itself -- animal and human -- in suspense.

  ¶ 3:49 PM 0 comments

  Chattering mice question ontological assumptions.

There will also be fundamental philosophical implications — Heidegger’s notion that animals can’t truly experience death because they lack language will have to be completely reassessed, for example.

Mice act as though they were the shapers and masters of language,
while in fact language remains the master of mice.  ¶ 7:41 AM 0 comments

  The TLS has some interesting quotes on embodiment from Feuerbach and Nietzsche.

They should listen to Feuerbach, writing in 1843: 'whereas the old philosophy started by saying, 'I am an abstract and merely a thinking being, to whose essence the body does not belong', the new philosophy, on the other hand, begins by saying, 'I am a real sensuous being and, indeed, the body in its totality is my self (Ich), my essence itself''; or to Nietzsche, in the 1880s:

'I am body entirely, and nothing else; and 'soul' is only a word for something about the body. The body is a great intelligence . . . . Your little intelligence, my brother, which you call 'spirit', is . . . an instrument of your body . . . . You say 'I' and you are proud of this word. But greater than this – although you will not believe in it – is your body and its great intelligence, which does not say 'I' but performs 'I' . . . . Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, stands a mighty commander, an unknown sage – he is called Self. He lives in your body, he is your body'.

  ¶ 4:27 PM 0 comments

  Who's the right person to lead a truth commission?

[T]he personal orientation of this scribe often led him to be skeptical about the idea of establishing one grand truth as absolute, and that there is truth per se that is true to one and all. At around the same time when I was thinking on this line, I got a chance to come across the chairperson of Peru’s Truth Commission (Salomon Lerner), whose specialization was the German philosopher Martin Heidegger.

Heidegger being a primary influence on existentialism (which viewed human existence as something thrust upon the individual who has no specific purpose to be on earth) and on deconstruction (which exposes truth as merely a linguistic construct and nothing serious as we usually tend to believe), it was quite interesting to discover that a Heideggerian professor had chaired the commission whose sole responsibility was to establish one finite truth.

“So, professor, how is it working out? Why did Peru choose you for the job and why did you accept it? How could you – a Heideggerian or a deconstructionist by extension – who has critiqued the very nature of truth as a variable and not as a constant, take this job?” A zero hour during our session in Lima allowed this scribe to put these questions to the Peruvian scholar. His response: “Perhaps that is why I was qualified.” Apparently, the Peruvians had realized the need of a person with a capacity to look at truth critically.

  ¶ 8:03 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Happy Days, Simon Critchley's blog for The New York Times, explains Rousseau's sense of time.

To say, as Rousseau does, that the state of bliss is one “where time is nothing to it,” is not to say that there is no time here. It is a question of different experience of the present, what Heidegger calls the rapture of ecstatic time that breaks through the ordinary series of past, present and future that habitually marks the rhythm of our lives. If eternity means anything, it is this lived intensity of the present.

  ¶ 2:25 AM 0 comments

  Thinking is Craftwork, at Harvard.

It was a startling reminder that thesis-writing was an act of material as well metaphorical distillation. I had built a thesis out of books and notes and drafts, no differently than I had built a desk out of boards and pegs and paint over the previous summer. Martin Heidegger once wrote “Denken ist Handwerk”—thinking is craftwork. This observation, simple and revolutionary, contains within it the assertion that thinkers and intellectuals are bound into the same matrices of morality and creativity that control all humans who build things—that is, everyone.

  ¶ 9:22 PM 0 comments

  Andrew Mitchell was back on Entitled Opinions last week; this time talking about preachy Nietzsche.  ¶ 11:30 AM 0 comments

  Ruminating on men promoting women, and how not to be just any fashion editor.

Why did I, on hearing the (false) news, automatically assume the women were unqualified? I didn’t know much about them, and neither did most of the others who condemned the situation. Why did none of us give the idea of Berlusconi’s babes the benefit of the doubt? Especially me, considering the years it took me to shrug the “I-may-be-a-fashion-editor-but-I-can-still-quote-Heidegger” chip off my shoulder?

  ¶ 9:13 AM 0 comments