The artist’s engagement with philosophers and writers began in 1956 when Gaston Bachelard wrote an essay, Le Cosmos du Fer about Chillida’s early works in wrought iron presented at the Galerie Maeght in Paris. Later, in 1968 Chillida met the German philosopher Martin Heidegger and, the following year, collaborated with him on an illustrated version of his text, Die Kunst Und Der Raum. Both conceived of space as a material medium of relational contact and understood sculpture as a means of revealing how we belong in the world.

¶ 6:28 PM 0 comments

Barshasketh is a band that hails from New Zealand originally, but is currently located in Scotland. Its founder Krigeist is quite the traveler and makes old school black metal with this project (he has various other bands going). Outre is a Polish company, that has released one full length this far. The two team up for a split, inspired by none other than the German philosopher Heidegger. [...] The result Sein / Zeit is an interesting listen.

¶ 7:50 AM 0 comments

The White Ribbon provides an exemplary instance of Heidegger's conception of the artwork. The historical meaning of The White Ribbon is quite clear. But one can also observe that the historical significance is of a piece with this film's inherent character of hiddenness, secrecy, and mystery. What the film does reveal, in the voice of the narrator, and the images his memory conveys to us, is delicate, fragile, and not firmly grounded in established fact. Indeed, the unanswered aspects of the film's narrative (told in the way that it is) reflect the oblivion of memory and memory's inability to re-enact events with precision. Thus, not only does the art-character of The White Ribbon render an alethec depiction of the mystery embedded in an historic moment of a people: it also reveals the truth of the fragility of memory, and the fragility of memory as re-presented in images. For the film itself is in fact presented as a memory, a memory that calls out its own inability to discern what is real from what is not. The film for its part similarly conveys the fundamental unreality or unknowability of what its images purport to depict. For, as viewers, we walk away from this film with an explicit lack of understanding of the events conveyed to us, despite what the film actually "showed." Film's finite manner of showing is presented as a problem rather than as a solution. This serves as a reminder of the interpretative character Heidegger highlights in Dasein's existential of understanding. Regarding film images as truth-bearing involves seeing them in an interpretive light, because all understanding is interpretive. All seeing is "seeing-as."

¶ 5:08 AM 0 comments

Heidegger’s account of the uncanny and its role in angst suggests a compelling reason for why we are drawn to certain horror films that neither horrify nor frighten us. Uncanny horror films act as aids to self-understanding. They slowly turn us toward different ways of looking at the world; they confront us with characters in situations progressively shown to be far different from our own. The characters are always faced with mystery; frequently, with the supernatural and genuine evil; sometimes, only with their own imaginations.

Their struggles are artistic expressions in dramatic form of a more ordinary activity, which, according to Heidegger, we are engaged in all the time. Da-sein, he says, is always ontological. Although the uncanny thoughts might be ones that we ultimately reject (for good or bad reasons), it is the entertaining of them that is of greatest importance for the Heideggerian account of the uncanny. By engaging in a rudimentary form of ontological reflection, we prepare ourselves for reflection of a more sustained sort. As we watch uncanny films, we must revise or abandon the ontology that we initially used to understand what we see on the screen, and by doing so we become more explicitly aware of our own ontological commitments. We might, of course, also be horrified and frightened, but the feeling of uncanniness is paramount. If some horror films are capable of arousing feelings associated with Heidegger’s concept of the uncanny, then we have at least one good reason to take the genre seriously, just as Aristotle gave us reason to esteem tragedy.

¶ 3:02 AM 0 comments

Which, then, is the dimension of Heidegger’s thought that is worth fighting for and preserving? Perhaps the best way to discern this dimension is to render problematic the notion of the “univocity of being” whose main proponent in our times was Deleuze. The assertion of the univocity of being can play a positive role in enabling us to dismiss all notions of ontological hierarchy, from the theological vision of the universe as a hierarchical Whole, with God as the only full Being at the top, up to the vulgar Marxist hierarchy of social spheres (economic infrastructure as the only full reality, ideology as somehow “less real,” part of an illusory superstructure). Along the same lines, one could interpret Dziga Vertov’s (Eisenstein’s great opponent) Man with a Movie Camera as an exemplary case of cinematic communism: the affirmation of life in its multiplicity enacted through a kind of cinematic parataxis, a setting side by side of a series of daily activities—washing one’s hair, wrapping packages, playing piano, connecting phone wires, dancing ballet—that reverberate in each other at a purely formal level, through the echoing of visual and other patterns. What makes this cinematic practice communist is the underlying assertion of the radical “univocity of being”: all the displayed phenomena are equalized, all the usual hierarchies and oppositions among them, inclusive of the official communist opposition between the Old and the New, are magically suspended (recall that the alternate title of Eisenstein’s The General Line, shot at the same time, was precisely The Old and the New). Communism is here presented not so much as the hard struggle for a goal (the new society to come), with all the pragmatic paradoxes this involves (the struggle for the new society of universal freedom should obey the harshest discipline, etc.), but as a fact, a present collective experience.

¶ 4:30 AM 0 comments

Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg-Gadamer, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, three unquestionable distinguished Heidegger’s interpreters, came together that February of 1988 for over two days to discuss the philosophical and political implications of Martin Heidegger’s thought and legacy, under a Gadamer’s sign of hospitality: the encounter took place in the common linguistic territory of the French language.

Two paths seem to be shaped in the face of the intellectual inheritance of the German thinker. On the one hand, “orthodoxy”, which either denies or trivializes the status of Heidegger’s political statements, reacts with loyal impotence, marginalizing texts, problems, even people. On the other hand, a spectacular parade of pamphleteer whistleblowers sets out to hunt down the “Heideggerians”, suspected subscribers of any action or omission of Heidegger. Of course, these are false options that take us to just a single alternative: refusing to think.

¶ 4:14 AM 0 comments

[T]he fact that the viewer is spatiotemporally removed form the situation depicted onscreen, while also experiencing an emotional affect, or being mooded, seems to be the strongest evidence indicating that attunement in Heidegger's sense informs the disclosure fostered in the film experience. The empirical fact that film scenes never before witnessed can nonetheless occasion distinct moods for their viewer is a strong piece of evidence. Consider a couple of opening scenes of films that convey a definite and palpable mood just by virtue of the world into which they bring the viewer. he opening scene of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West fosters a mood of boredom. This scene is an unusual opening scene for a conventional major studio picture in that it contains several minutes of shots, all of the same scene, without dialog or action. The scene depicts three men sitting at a train stop in the old American West. They do nothing else aside from appearing to wait. Because they are at a train stop we assume they are waiting for someone to arrive. The only notable sensory stimuli are the sounds of dripping water, a creaky windmill, and the buzzing of a pesky fly. Yet how would we say the scene occasions the mood of boredom? The viewer can be bored precisely because she is "there," existentially present to this scene in which nothing is happening. The viewer's being-in-the-world occurs in a fashion that this world refuses to be engaging or interesting. The world presences itself as moving painfully slow, in a way that one cannot make time move any faster. The Dasein of one present at this scene is left in the lurch. All one can do is wait.

¶ 10:56 PM 0 comments

The project has its roots in 2013, when Artut was writing his Ph.D. dissertation on the philosophies of Martin Heidegger, and found himself struggling to get through the philosopher’s difficult 1927 magnum opus, Being and Time. But it wasn’t until this past summer when Artut, who often uses coding as a tool for his artistic practice, took online courses on machine learning and machine intelligence from Stanford University and became inspired to apply the technology to his work. He would, he decided, “teach the machine to think like Heidegger.” To do so, Artut trained a computer with the text from Being and Time. The resulting algorithm formulates Heidegger’s words and ontological paradigms into three-sentence-long statements that sound all too similar to art world gibberish.

¶ 1:28 AM 0 comments

Labels: podcast

¶ 9:21 PM 0 comments

On the doctrine of gods. -- Jehovah is the god who presumed to make himself the chosen god, and not to tolerate any other gods beside himself. Only the fewest people can guess that this god, even so, and necessarily so, must count himself among the gods; how else could he set himself apart? That is how he could become the one, only god, apart from whom (praeter quem) there was no other. What is a god who raises himself up against the others to become the chosen one? In any case, he is never "the" God pure and simple, if what this means could ever be divine. What if the divinity of a god lay in the great calm from which he recognizes the other gods? "God is"--speaking this way is thoughtlessness, and a veiling of thoughtlessness to boot, not to mention the presumption that such idle talk reveals, if it is supposed to be the talk of a thinking person at all. Anxiety in the face of the divine flees to "God," who neither is a god, nor can be "the" god; or else one flees to mere theology.

¶ 1:36 AM 0 comments

We do not mind misogyny in politics—heck, we practice it in philosophy, we denounce it and talk about it, and go on practicing it. Ditto racism. Ditto anti-Semitism. But for me it matters that we are prepared to tolerate Heidegger’s misogyny (he gets a free pass: think of Arendt, not that we actually do) but not his anti-Semitism.

¶ 11:28 AM 0 comments

1. What Eignung is to artifacts and acorns, Ereignis is to ex-sistence – but with an important twist.

Ereignis does have to do with κίνησις, and κίνησις does have to do with incompleteness
However, Ereignis applies exclusively to existential κίνησις.

2. Ex-sistence is unique in being already “complete” in its incompleteness, already “whole” as never being whole.

Ex-sistence is perfectly “perfect” in its imperfection, its inability to achieve complete self-coincidence.
In SZ, what accounted for ex-sistence’s finitude (its open-ended-ness vs. full selfpresence) was called “thrownness.” But in 1936 Heidegger began calling thrownness “Er-eignis” (“ap-propri-ation”), a term modeled on Eignung.

3. Appropriation names the fact that ex-sistence has been brought a priori into its proper ownness (er-eignet) as the finite, mortal Open (GA 73,1: 226.26; GA 12: 128.29-30.; 248.16; 249.5–6).

The word “Ereignis” simply reinscribes the basic structure of ex-sistence that SZ had called thrownness. (GA 65:34.8–9; 239.5; 252.23–25; 322.7–8 with SZ 325.37; GA 9: 377, note d; GA 73, 1: 642.28-29; etc.)
Appropriated ex-sistence is Zu-sein: as possibility, ex-sistence is in the condition of ever-becoming.
To name this asymptotic condition of ex-sistence, Heidegger adopted Heraclitus’ hapax legomenon ̓Αγχιβασίη, “ever approaching” (fragment 122).

4. Appropriation is not an “event” in any sense of that term (GA 14: 25.33; GA 11: 45.19-20; GA 70.1719). It is an existential fact, the very facticity of ex-sistence.

¶ 5:51 AM 0 comments

The historian may protest that to be interested in Aristotle, al-Kindi, or Kant, is unlike voting for a politician: it need involve no approval of the author’s worldview. I’ve met many experts in Aristotelian cosmology, and not one of them has thought that the Sun orbits the Earth, as Aristotle did. So we might treat the bigotry of the past the way we treat the scientific mistakes of the past. That is, rather than detaching hateful remarks from the rest of the theory, we detach ourselves, offering an objective analysis of these thinkers’ ideas without ever adopting those ideas as our own. This will often involve situating the thinkers in their historical context. We might for example note – as a historical observation, not as a matter of praise or blame – that when Plato argued in the Republic that women can do everything men can do, but not so well, he was being unusually ‘feminist’ for his time – while simultaneously being sexist by modern standards. This seems a reasonable solution, but it will not be enough for those philosophers who do not see themselves as ‘mere’ historians, but seek truth in historical works. Most notorious in this regard is the case of Heidegger. There is an ongoing debate as to whether his Nazism effectively poisons his thought as a whole, making it off limits as a source of philosophical inspiration.

¶ 2:58 PM 0 comments

1. Heidegger interprets δύναμις as a moving thing’s Eignung (GA 9: 215.25; GA 19: 265.14; etc.), its condition of

• coming-into-its-own/eigen, coming-ad-proprium, that is:
• being ap-propri-ated by and unto its τέλος.

2. Two examples, one from nature (ϕύσις), the other from human know-how (τέχνη): 2.1 Nature (ϕύσις): An acorn has the δύναμις/Eignung of being an oak tree.

It is “drawn” into its proper wholeness by its τέλος (“oak tree”). This τέλος lies within the acorn; it is the origin and ordering (ἀρχή) of its movement.
Put otherwise, the acorn already has itself in its τέλος (ἐν τέλει ἔχει), but not fully.
The realness (actuality) of the acorn has the form of ἐν-τελ-έχεια ἀ- τελής.

2.2 Know-how (τέχνη): Guiding the construction of a cabinet is the carpenter’s know-how (τέχνη).

The process begins with the carpenter’s prior projection of an idea of the outcome, the εἶδος προαιρετόν that will function as the τέλος of the activity.
The wood that has been selected as appropriate (geeignet) for the task then undergoes a process of appropriation (Eignung) to being a cabinet.
In this case the process is guided not by an internal τέλος, as with the acorn, but by the external τέλος residing in the mind of the carpenter who first projected the outcome (GA 9: 191-93).

4. In short, Eignung names the reality of a something that is in the process of being brought-ad-proprium, still coming into its proper status as complete and whole.

¶ 1:41 AM 0 comments

In fact, this computer-generated statement is itself an artwork called Variable by the Instanbul-based artist Selcuk Artut. At the press of a button, Variable generates a new artist’s statement for one of eight different screens. Each screen chooses a title for the art piece, like “movement,” “presence,” or “weakness,” and then each statement is concocted with a machine learning algorithm that was trained on the book Being and Time by the philosopher Martin Heidegger. Artut writes that he was inspired by the book’s complexity; his algorithm remixes Heidegger’s text and transforms it into new meditations on the nature of being, an appropriate topic for contemporary art, which so often ponders the same questions. All the statements sound appropriately vague and baffling–just like actual artist statements.

¶ 5:46 PM 0 comments

In 1971, I wrote my PhD dissertation on a comparative study of Mawlana (Rumi) and Meister Eckhart. Karl Löwith was my supervisor. I found out there is actually similarities between western philosophers and Muslim mystics (Sufis)—that the comparisons are not without merit. I published it under the title of Historical Sociology. In this book, I showed that Mawlana, Eckhart and Heidegger’s ideas are not philosophical but mystical. Gadamer read my works and told me that I was right, he told me that “for the last thirty years, I’ve been saying that my dear teacher, Heidegger, is a mystic, but no one believes me. You are the first one that has written this down.” It is surprising that Mr. Ayatollahi, Davari Ardakani and Dinani also believed this and they told me once that Heidegger’s being a mystic is the reason that they agree with his ideas. I told them that because I believe that Heidegger is a mystic, I am rejecting and criticizing him; because Heidegger is deviating from the rational German philosophy. 

¶ 7:49 AM 0 comments

The philosopher Heidegger believed that impending death is an essential feature of human existence. “Heidegger saw death as a pervasive feature of your being in the world and not just an unfortunate event that happens at the very end,” says [Taylor] Carman. “He thought we can’t really understand ourselves unless we see ourselves as finite.” After all, “If my time is finite, what’s important and how do we live?”

Heidegger and Bentham had different notions of honesty around death. While Heidegger believed that anxiety about death was inevitable in life, Bentham’s point was to “demystify our mortality and finitude and render it tractable,” says Carman. Both, though, were considerably more honest about death than most. And this honesty makes life all the more meaningful.

¶ 1:34 PM 0 comments

[P]hilosophers from Socrates onwards have been in the business of questioning accepted communal pieties, often at their own peril. One lineage beginning with Plato has thus seen philosophers repeatedly attracted to forms of tyrannical government. For in these regimes, their controversial wisdom can directly shape policy, by-passing any need to court popular consent. The most influential 20th century figure in this lineage of ‘Platonic political philosophy’ is Alexander Dugin’s philosophical hero, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger.

“A different, special, exclusive place in the history of philosophy that can be set aside for Heidegger should be recognized,” Dugin has proclaimed: "in the case that we fully trust Heidegger, immerse ourselves in his thinking, and make him our highest authority, … even in the event that his deeds went beyond the accepted norms of common morals. Geniuses are forgiven by everyone."

Heidegger’s Germanism might then seem to pose a sizeable problem for a Russian ethno-nationalist like Dugin. But the latter’s fidelity to Heidegger sees him proposing to carry the German thinker’s anti-modernist project forwards, by relocating it on different “Indo-European”, Slavic or Russian soil. For Dugin, the “putrefaction” of the West diagnosed by Heidegger meant that Nazism could not break out from modernity. One needed to look further East: to the untapped telluric riches of the Russian narodi (very roughly, “people”) and its language.

¶ 9:11 AM 0 comments

Labels: podcast

¶ 7:20 AM 0 comments

With the phrase "Je est un autre" Rimbaud anticipated the unconcious as being an essential part of the subject. Moreover, Rimbaud's "I', in the transitional poetry between Romanticism and Modernism, to which Rimbaud's statement should be seen as belonging, is not only a questioning of a stable, indivisible subject, that is, the unity of the subject with itself, the subject's, but also a breaking up of the lyrical subject and the Cartesian self-identity of the "I" of poetry. Indeed, what Rimbaud can be said to precursor is the free play of Modernism and even more so of Postmodernism.

P. 123-4

Heidegger first asks about how rhythmos relates to the incompatible terms nearness and the unapproachable, which, according to the Greek poet Archilochos, is supposed to keep the human being in line. Second, he asks if poetry still has the force to save language from the Gestell of modern science as represented by the sciences of language, linguistics, and informatics. Third, Heidegger answers these questions by answering that Rimbaud remains vital to poetry if poets keep asking these questions in their poetry, which means becoming a seer that can hear the call of the unknown. For poets to be able to do this they must find a way to make the unknown still, the rhythm of poetry must still the unknown.

P. 138

¶ 9:23 AM 0 comments

The statements of Derrida and Heidegger might have the appearance of complimenting non-Western philosophy for avoiding the entanglements of Western metaphysics. In actuality, their comments are as condescending as talk of ‘noble savages’, who are untainted by the corrupting influences of the West, but are for that very reason barred from participation in higher culture.

¶ 9:14 AM 0 comments

In the end, Jim neither flees nor fights, refusing the "anxious" retreat and escape from his destiny, and refuses to fight as if recognizing the uselessness of mere human machinations in acts of doing violence through the power of techne. Rather, he understands what is required is a "self-opening or a stance of receptivity that relates to beings by looking beyond them," to their "source and ground in concealment and mystery". In direct relation to the understanding of Heidegger's poetizing of the ταμηχανα, against which no one can avail themselves, Jim releases himself over to an approaching destiny, realizing there is "no escape" and "nothing to fight for," and so he solemnly with the "hearty' knowledge of Being (as φρην), declares, "Time to finish this". It is not Jim's death per se that is of supreme interest but, rather, der Augenblick, the 'right time." or time of Being's historical presencing and appropriation (Ereignis), when Jim takes up the δεινον prior to ever standing before Doramin and uttering his final words, "I am come ready and unarmed". In this moment (der Augenblick) Jim becomes because he already is, what is poetized, the story, the telling, the saying (muthos), namely, the supreme unhomely One (to deinotaton), which for Heidegger indicates that he is "nothing other than becoming homely in being unhomely," and in the poetic telling, it must be understood, and this is what sets the telling of from a saying associated with works of "free inventing [Erfinden] in the sense of will imagining by authors and poets, that the telling "always remains only as a potential for being that pertains to risk--as something to be poetized and poetically decidable".

P. 174

¶ 6:35 AM 0 comments

For Heidegger, authenticity could only be achieved within a community. Authentic existence, he argued, unfolds as a “co-happening” with others – not strangers, but people with whom we are connected. He situated authenticity as an emergent aspect of individuality that was amplified by a community’s shared past. In other words, authentic being (Dasein) outside of a grounded community – the underlying premise of which tourism scholars have claimed is the existential basis of travel – is, according to Heidegger, impossible. The world of Dasein is a world shared not with humans in general but those who share the same norms, assumptions, and, in short, culture.

¶ 7:18 PM 0 comments

In the first part of the book, which draws extensively on Heideggerian philosophy, Baracco and Wright argue that Boyd’s work deviates from mainstream international modernism and displays an “affinity with cultures and sensibilities that are in touch with the history, geography and culture of their places.” This point is well taken and, like Baracco and Wright’s suggestion that Boyd’s buildings were spatially ingenious and established a relevant dialogue with their context, it is widely accepted. Thus, when reading the first part of the book, a question emerges: Do we need Heideggerian theory to validate these observations? And, more broadly, does Boyd’s work need to be theorized in this way? What does drawing out parallels between Heidegger’s “critique of the objectifying nature of Western thought” and his philosophy to mitigate the modern overemphasis for rational representation through “meditative thinking” as a coexisting and parallel sensibility of “calculative thinking” on the one hand, and the “spatial continuity” recognized in Boyd’s work on the other, add to our knowledge of the architect’s thought and design approach? Particularly given that – to the authors’ admission – Boyd was “hardly involved with the field of philosophy, and there is no evidence that he read or discussed any work by the German philosopher.”

¶ 7:16 AM 0 comments

Rumi goes beyond identity to geographies of “placement” and settled habitation in any sense. Hence: “do not belong to any land, or to any known or unknown sea. Nature cannot own or claim me, nor can Heaven.” The question arises, particularly in our current context of diasporic and reverse diasporic migration, refugee migration and more: Can one ever claim to be “placeless”? Surely, we are “thrown” as Heidegger would have it (a brutally expressive metaphor), not “merely’ into “the world”, but also into a specific life world by virtue of birth and conditioning? Yet, our own unsettled diasporic consciousness points to a portal beyond the entrapment in any given life world. Our “thrownness” is challenged gently or forcefully disrupted by exposure to multiple lifestyles and value systems.

¶ 8:58 AM 0 comments

For Jim, in Conrad's novel, the moment of decision is the moment when all hope is gone, when complete uncertainty governs, it is an instant in which life and death come together as one, when there is no difference between them, when time is suspended for an in an instant. At that moment there is the leap, the jump that changes everything. The decision to jump cannot even be said to be a choice, it is pure de-cision, in which existence is put on hold. From thereon causality and consequences rule, whatever they might be, and existence and meaning are put into play again. But exactly in the moment of decision there is an instant of clearing or aletheia, which takes place as an Ereignis, as what we propose to name the cision of enowning [Ereignis].

P. 153

An essential de-cision is thus a suspension of decision, but comes to happen, ereignet, in the turning that opens up for the truth of Being and the Being of truth. Moreover, and to translate this in terms of Conrad's novel, it is the de-cision that is staged in Lord Jim through Jim's jump from the Patna. The jump, in the way Heidegger conceives the leap, is necessary for us to be able to think essentially about the de-cision and about doubt viewed as the Abgrund of Conrad's novel as a work that leads us to the limit of metaphysics. This means conceiving the jump not only as part of the plot of the novel but also, at the same time, as the leap (der Sprung) into the other beginning, which makes it possible to think the de-cision and doubt essentially. This is, furthermore, the movement (Satz) that leads us to the leap, which lets us make the jump to essential thinking as the other beginning. The other beginning is a beginning that provides a path to think the unthought as other than a form of representational thinking and hermeneutical thematization.

P. 155

¶ 7:58 PM 0 comments

because the word says, and is, beyng, it intrinsically bears the structure of beyng itself, a structure previously covered over by language (and by the opinions that think concomitantly with it) and expressed in "categories", in accord with the predominance of metaphysics.

P. 241, Ponderings X.

¶ 1:34 AM 0 comments

Asked if there was any way philosophy — or ordinary people, for that matter — might get us out of this world-historical mess, Heidegger gave an infamous reply: “Only a god can save us.” This cryptic phrase has kept the commentators busy for the last 40 years, but Zabala is not necessarily interested in joining the fray. Too many thinkers have taken Heidegger’s invocation of divinity “too literally,” he says, on the very first page of his book, and quickly moves on. As if to reinforce the idea, his book’s dust jacket reproduces an image of Cattelan’s controversial sculpture The Ninth Hour (1999), which depicts Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteorite. There’s no dithering over the divine here. Zabala wants to answer in the affirmative the question that Heidegger evaded with talk of an absent god: Surely there is something we can do.

¶ 8:23 AM 0 comments

Livingston stresses a reading of Heidegger's conception of being (presencing) as intentional. For as with Frege's theory of sense, whereby sense consists of being an intentional entity that is neither the object signified nor the utterance or psychological processes associated with the utterance, so too for Heidegger, on Livingston's reading, the presencing of being is neither to be confused with beings, nor is it reducible to the psychological processes of a subject -- yet another being. Although seeking to avoid psychologism, Heidegger was nonetheless committed to understanding the manner in which the theoretical (our use of categories) is already 'given in pretheoretical experience and in the kind of availability of objects that is displayed in ordinary, nontheoretical life'.

¶ 6:31 AM 0 comments

Truth is not a relation that is “just there” between two beings that themselves are “just there”—one mental, the other physical. Nor is it a coordination, as philosophers like to say these days. If it is a relation at all, it is one that has no analogies with any other relation between beings. If I may put it this way, it is the relation of existence as such to its very world. It is the world-openness of existence that is itself uncovered— existence whose very being unto the world gets disclosed/uncovered in and with its being unto the world.

Aristotle certainly did not really see this phenomenon, in any case not in the ontological structure that is proper to it. But even less did he invent anything like a copy-theory of truth. Rather, he stuck to the phenomena and understood them as broadly as possible. That is, he avoided a fundamental error in seeing, and thus kept the road open— only, of course, to have it thoroughly blocked again.

P. 137

¶ 5:28 AM 0 comments

The swelling feeling of threat, mixed with love of military and, to a lesser extent the police, seem to have amalgamated, of late, into emotions tightly wound into the US flag and national anthem. They represent symbols of who we are: good, decent people misdirected into believing that a nation which starts more wars than any others is ‘exceptional’ and the military that does so is religion. Bring any American out of there shell of work, family, hobbies and friends and into the Heidegger ‘Open’ of the world and they will see that – yes, America is still great for its ability to incorporate people worldwide into an experimental venture where freedom and opportunity, at least in theory, are allowed. But it is also a storm cloud raining upon the world.

¶ 8:19 PM 0 comments

To equate man exclusively with his ontological structure is inadequate. The inadequacy of this position lies in the fact that man, ontologically revealed and defined, can be conscious of this state of being only insofar as it realizes itself as being something other than the practical states of being such as the political, social, and economic. These forms are for the ontological, the "other." These "other" forms of being are historical and describe man's doings, creations, and achievements. These are descriptive items or adjectives. They describe man as he does things. These adjectival qualifications belong to man and describe him, not ontologically but historically.

The ontological dimension of man transcends all adjectival qualifications. The adjective can only describe one aspect of the ontological dimension but cannot exhaust it or identify itself with it. The dimension of Being transcends all other dimensions and each adjective can bring forth only one aspect of Being, It is this fact which limits each adjectival qualification and points to the inexhaustible nature of Being.

P. 13

¶ 5:20 AM 0 comments