Heidegger and Wittgenstein were not only exact contemporaries who respected each other’s work from a safe distance, but they both built these cocoons for thinking deep thoughts right around the same time, and for comparable reasons that reveal an underlying reactionary, anti-modern instinct. Wittgenstein, the tormented scion of a wealthy Austro-Hungarian industrialist family who could not bear the niceties of social life in Vienna and Cambridge, fled to a remote rural nook of Norway’s fjords in search of a simpler life. Heidegger was the modest, diminutive son of a middle-class church official in the Swabian provinces of Germany whose retreat to a peasant cabin in the countryside has something exquisitely staged and therefore inauthentic about it. And that’s where the seeds for Being and Time were sown, much like Wittgenstein’s Tractatus was shaped in no small measure by the experience of living at the edge of the world. Very cinematic, is it not?

¶ 5:15 PM 0 comments

[T]he nude does not elude or suppress chaos. First matter continues to come from it or reenter it. In a certain way, the nutter of the nude conserves in itself traces of the deflagration from which the partition of sense has issued. From one opening to another, matter continues to flow out, from the original opening to a wide-open mouth. ("Chaos, χάος, χαίνω means 'to yawn'; it signifies something that opens wide or gapes," Heidegger writes.¹⁵ ) The nude: not a "beautiful form," but chaos in the order of the body, an opening in the closing of the figure, anarchic matter in the middle of the laws of composition.

¶ 1:04 PM 0 comments

In his books Being and Time and What Is Metaphysics?, he maintains that human beings must return to the fundamental question (the question of existence), which he believes has been distorted by the desire to look beyond the very nature of the person posing the question. In other words, the question of existence posed by human beings must not be distanced from the nature of the existence of human realities. For Heidegger, the world itself is the essential starting point for addressing the question of existence. He argues that our engagement with this question must rid itself of the belief that the answers lie beyond that which is presented within the phenomenon of human experiences.

¶ 12:04 PM 0 comments

By virtue of the temporal character of our ex-istence (temporality is the meaning of Dasein), and the ec-static character of time (time is the ekstatikon par excellence), I am never simply who I am. When finitude, as understood by Heidegger, is taken into account, the result is a sense of non-actualizable possibility belonging to our existential or ontological structure.

¶ 8:01 AM 0 comments

[Heidegger] emphasizes the wisdom of Heraclitus's teaching in fragment 30 that "none of the gods, as well as no one of the human beings" has brought forth being as kosmos. He adds: "It [being] is nothing made and has therefore also no determinate beginning at a point in time and no corresponding ending of its existence." And in the second lecture course, he states that being (written in this instance as Seyn, "beyng") is "imperishable, but also on the way to its own truth."

¶ 5:30 PM 0 comments

Heidegger is deeply reactionary in the proper, not necessarily condemning sense of the word. His thinking aligns him with those who ‘see modernity instead as a movement of ethnic and class domination, European imperialism, anthropocentrism, the destruction of nature, the dissolution of community and tradition, the rise of alienation, the death of individuality in bureaucracy’ (ibid). Although the term post-dates him, Heidegger is also a major thinker of ‘globalization’. Heidegger was a philosopher who gave supreme importance to some poetic texts. He retained, however, a philosopher’s contempt for the field of literary criticism, with its mix of moralism and amateur philosophizing. If the literary takes on a new importance for Heidegger, it is because his thinking also disputes what ‘philosophy’ has always meant since classical Greece.

¶ 7:27 PM 0 comments

Nietzsche was the first to declare that the true grandeur of ancient philosophy predated Socrates, and Heidegger offers his own ambitious version of that revisionist thesis of Nietzsche’s. The fact that Aristotle’s philosophy can be divided into “logic” and “ethics” and “physics” already shows that authentically ontological thinking has been reduced to a lower level, a merely “ontic” level (investigation of X or Y or Z, whatever X, Y, or Z happen to be). That “lowering” or corruption from the ontological level to the ontic level is ultimately the doing of Plato, the thinker who committed the “original sin” of Western thought. Put otherwise, thinking in its heroic phase becomes merely prosaic and commonplace. Heidegger is following Nietzsche’s lead in adopting this kind of rhetoric. Thinkers come in two basic varieties: the heroic thinkers who “think Being”; and the banal thinkers who merely think beings (X or Y or Z). Our whole civilization is banal because it has taken its bearings from thinkers of the second variety rather than those of the first. But thanks to Heidegger, it is not too late to reverse course. We can resume where Heraclitus and Parmenides left off and bypass the long detour from Plato to the nineteenth century. Nietzsche, unknowingly (on Heidegger’s account), was part of or an expression of the long, failed metaphysical detour taken by Western thinking, but Heidegger can restore it to the true path.

¶ 7:44 PM 0 comments

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¶ 9:42 PM 0 comments