The little book that [Elżbieta] Ettinger published was structured around the correspondence between Heidegger and Arendt, which she had originally intended to use as a portion of a larger biography. That’s how she explained the project to the Hannah Arendt Literary Trust when she obtained permission to quote from Arendt’s letters. . . .

Ettinger wanted to present the story of this complicated relationship because she felt it “provided a key to understanding their lives.” . . . But the letters also called to mind her own love affair with Manfred Lachs, the man who was, as she put it, “the father of my daughter.” Ettinger had met Lachs after the war when she was a university student and he was a married professor.

¶ 6:02 AM 0 comments

Here my model is Martin Heidegger, a philosopher who located both epistemology and ontology in the hands. In his account, the know-how of a hand handling its equipment, the 'ready-to-hand' knowledge of a hand, is the most immediate way that man (what Heidegger calls 'Dasein,' literally 'Being There') has of understanding objects. The more that a hand uses a hammer, the more that it unveils the true 'hammer-being' of the hammer. And granting that epistemology of the hand doubles as an ontology of the hand--that is, an account of how hands go about being in the world or otherwise constituting the Being of that world--such ready-to-hand knowledge is naturally fraught with existential significance. Whenever Dasein uses the hammer, he relates not just to the hammer but to everything: the nails in his desk drawer, the desk, the chair at the desk, the room itself, with its walls and windows and doors, the hallway outside and the house, continually spiraling outward, ad infinitum, until the hammer has formed a total world. Being-in-the-world means being caught up in just such a network of equipmental relations, which Dasein is enmeshed in anytime he grabs a tool. For Heidegger, to hold something is both to know and to be. In the case of our undead, the ramifications of this chiral ontology are clear. If an infected breaks into its old bedroom, and its hand roots under the bed for the hammer that it 'knows' is there, then doesn't the infected also 'know' the equipmental totality of the mattress, bed, room, and house, that is, the entire Being-in-the-World of its quondam Dasein, which is to say, couldn't the infected be, in some qualified way, precisely the same Dasein?

P. 111-2

¶ 2:34 AM 1 comments

"I'm very into reading philosophy. In particular I'm very into this guy Martin Heidegger, who promotes a view of the human being as absorbed into the world. Most of the time you're not actually conscious of yourself as being separate from your environment, it's only when you stop and think that you become separate from your environment. So for me that kind of belief that Heidegger promoted really rang true for me, growing up in Rotherham where my dad was a steelworker and observing him doing certain things. So I guess the way I work with sound on one hand is trying to create this weirdness, but on the other hand I'm trying to question this received wisdom that the academic community has about electro acoustic sound."

¶ 4:50 PM 0 comments

What is the public to make of such a book?

¶ 4:41 PM 0 comments

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger analyzes the question concerning technology with both more wisdom and more prescience. The task is not to understand the function of this or that tool, he argues, but rather to examine the way technology comes to dominate every aspect of existence. This enframing, as Heidegger calls it, which places everything within the ambit of possible use and disposal, is the real meaning of technology.

You could not hope to find a clearer example of this than the current debate about the future of reading. The first task, then, is to recognize how we ourselves are enframed. As long as we continue to think about reading in the context of technology, we will fail to see any deeper meanings, including the possible effects of our own self-imprisonment.

¶ 7:44 PM 0 comments

When Heidegger became rector of the University of Fribourg he set about to Nazify it. He resigned his rectorship in 1934 immediately after Hitler and Himmler liquidated Rohm and his SA in what is called the Night of the Long Knives.

¶ 9:18 PM 0 comments

Labels: podcast

¶ 9:51 PM 0 comments

In the difference and out of it, being never "comes to" beings as a "predicate," nor is being in relation to beings something to which they are "entitled" and their state of affairs. On the contrary, in the difference beings rather "come to" being, i.e., they "approach" being in that they come forth--toward--being in the clearing. Beings arise from beyng.

Being, however, ises as the appropriating event. Being is not always. It itself brings time-space in the clearing and thus first grants the possibility of determination, explicitly on the basis of beings, according to the now and then.

P. 106

¶ 10:00 AM 0 comments

We must also remember what Heidegger formulated brilliantly in Being and Time: that the essence of man is not to be found in some “other world”, but in his very existence. It is here and now, in these last moments, that our destiny in is play.

¶ 7:22 AM 0 comments

Everything that gets circulated in idle talk, all the pat formulas and conventional wisdoms, are just part of the “thrownness” (one of his most vivid neologisms) that defines the human condition: the fact that we always find ourselves thrown into an already-interpreted world. “All genuine understanding, interpreting and communication and new discovery come about in [idle talk] and out of it and against it.” In no case are we untouched by the way things have been previously and publicly understood. In no case are we set before “an open country of a ‘world-in-itself’” to be encountered with virgin eyes. And yet for all this, the true form of talk for Heidegger can never be idle.

¶ 11:22 PM 0 comments

The existential analytic of Being and Time is the project from which all subsequent thinking follows, whether this is Heidegger's own latter thinking or our various ways of thinking against or beyond Heidegger himself. This affirmation is in no way an admission of "Heideggerianism"; it completely escapes the impoverished proclamations of "schools." It does not signify that this analytic is definitive, only that it is responsible for registering the seismic tremor of a more decisive rupture in the constitution or consideration of meaning (analogous, for example, to those of the "cogito" or "Critique"). This is why the existential analytic is not complete, and why we continue to feel its shock waves.

P. 93

¶ 1:58 PM 0 comments

Today, how to break out of that Cartesian rut, and learn to love Heidegger for fun and a little more profit.

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¶ 11:30 AM 0 comments

Taxpayers are also forking out $594,489 for a study titled Who Am 'I'?, exploring the concept of "self" using the work of philosophers Hegel and Heidegger.

¶ 9:23 AM 0 comments

A similar point is argued for by Daniel Palmer. He writes that Heidegger called the traditional kind of truth ‘derivative’. What must come before the traditional conception of truth is the disclosedness of beings as they are. That is, before one may make a judgement of the truth of a proposition, the entity which this proposition is regarding must first become unconcealed. This shows that the traditional concept of truth is contained within the one Heidegger proposes.

¶ 2:41 PM 0 comments

[I]f we are to have any genuine insight into the relationship between Heidegger and National Socialism, then we must do so on the terms by which such events took place. It is imperative that the phenomena of National Socialism be understood within the proper context, and not merely treated as “objective” or “present-to-hand” data by which yet another narrative may be construed –subject to the privileges and prejudices of our contemporary post-WW2 perspective. The point is not to re-construct yet another or alternative narrative; but to de-construct existing narratives, and to delineate the limitations of our historical understanding.

¶ 12:03 PM 0 comments

House Music makes sense only on drugs (it Worlds, in its Heideggerian sense); the crowd and space feel familiar and friendly (they presence, again, in the Heideggerian sense), etc.

¶ 7:54 AM 0 comments

An all-conference football player at St. Stephen’s Episcopal School in Austin, Malick went on to study philosophy under Stanley Cavell at Harvard University, where he graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1965 before crossing the Atlantic as a Rhodes scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford. Prior to completing his PhD, he left the school over a dispute with his thesis advisor. The details of this argument are largely unknown, though The Harvard Crimson claims it had to do with “the contrasting worldviews of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein.” Upon arriving back in the United States, Malick taught philosophy at MIT and published a translation of Martin Heidegger’s Essence of Reasons. (While at Harvard, he also translated Heidegger’s Holzwege and met the philosopher during a year abroad in Germany.)

¶ 8:04 PM 0 comments

Heidegger asks the unanswerable questions because if the essence of something is not present how can we possibly know what it is? Heidegger is not interested in finding out the answer because then as we have always done before we will find the answer process it and fixes it to a name and category. Heidegger is interested in trying to change our way of thinking from an optic to an ontological, from a closed to open way of thinking.

¶ 10:32 AM 0 comments

According to Heidegger’s reading, “the various kinds” of generation are for Aristotle only two, that of technical objects and that of living beings (φύσις), of which only the latter “place themselves forth” and are thus “intrinsically twofold” insofar as they constitute “the presencing of an absencing.” However, according to Aristotle there in fact exist “multiple branches of Being,” of which φύσις is only “a particular (and in itself limited) region of beings.”

¶ 5:47 PM 1 comments

She marched across the room, arms slightly akimbo, and repeated herself: “Thus we ask now: even if the old rootedness is being lost in this age, may not a new ground and foundation be granted again, a foundation and ground out of which human’s nature and all their works can form in a new way even in the technological age?”

¶ 8:14 AM 0 comments

[A]s Martin Heidegger argued in his landmark 1950 essay, we don’t build technology as much as we uncover it and put it to use in a particular context (a process he refers to as “enframing”).

He gives the example of a hydroelectric dam:

“The hydroelectric plant is set into the current of the Rhine. It sets the Rhine to supplying its hydraulic pressure, which then sets the turbines turning. This turning sets those machines in motion whose thrust sets going the electric current for which the long-distance power station and its network of cables are set up to dispatch electricity. In the context of the interlocking processes pertaining to the orderly disposition of electrical energy, even the Rhine itself appears to be something at our command.

So the dam itself isn’t technology, but its agent, much like Facebook and Twitter aren’t social networks, but tools for uncovering particular truths about human relationships that have always existed. It is through unlocking those forces that we advance.

¶ 8:02 AM 0 comments

“Building Dwelling Thinking” – Martin Heidegger chose this list of activities as the title for a lecture held at the Darmstadt Symposium in 1951, and it would seem that the lack of punctuation was quite deliberate. It simultaneously conveys both a consecutive sequence and reciprocal concurrency. The three activities are more closely linked than merely in terms of the implicit chronology, in which one must necessarily happen before the other. Instead, the concepts seem to depend upon one another. The core of Heidegger’s presentation was the separation of dwelling from the pure sense of having accommodation. He emphasised the existential dimension of dwelling as a basic facet of human existence. As a consequence, building itself is more than just architectural construction: we create things and places that structure and accommodate our actions and behaviour. Concomitantly, they develop relationships, both among themselves and to the environment, opening up spaces for living and being in the world.

¶ 3:43 AM 0 comments

The writer sees humans as boomerangs that return to the same places, the same jobs, the same people day after day. Quoting the Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky, Sims accesses the idea of automatized perception and habituated memory—the notion that we can perform the same task so often that we forget the purpose behind it. The task becomes rote, loses all significance.

“The object fades away… We know it’s there but we do not see it,” Sims writes. He references Heidegger to explore the idea of muscle memory in the undead: Motion without purpose can never really matter.

¶ 1:06 PM 0 comments

The philosopher Martin Heidegger quite rightly pointed out that technology is a process of uncovering. Nobody owns it. Once it is released it is here to stay and we will need to make our peace with it.

How we build is how we dwell.

¶ 10:54 AM 0 comments

As well as vehicles there are generators, tents, and all the baggage accrued by a force more than ten years in the field. Lieutenant-Colonel Todd Burnley, the battalion's commander, says the strangest item to turn up so far has been a tuba.

Magritte - The Scale of the Fire

¶ 12:15 PM 0 comments