And the most monstrous danger in philosophy consists in cheating, because all efforts do not have the massive character of a natural scientific experiment or that of an historical source. But where the greatest danger of cheating is, there is also the ultimate possibility for the genuineness of thinking and questioning. The meaning of doing philosophy consists in awakening the need for this genuineness and in keeping it awake.

p. 293

¶ 5:14 PM 0 comments

[T]he landscape of language also determines the strain of ideas and in this regard, the landscape of language pugnaciously contemplates the relevance of the philosophy. In contrast, the expression of language is principal to delineate philosophical essentials such as Ontology, episteme-logy, theo-logy, metaphysics and meta-logy. Consequently, it was the nature of language of the Heideggerian philosophy that paved the way for new great awakening in the field of natural philosophy and political philosophy.

¶ 7:42 AM 0 comments

As for an ultimate purpose or transcending moral order, all the great thinkers since ancient Greece have failed to find one. The best philosophical minds have dug into this for 25 centuries, without success. There have been endless theories, but no clear answer. Martin Heidegger concluded that we are doomed to live our whole lives and die without knowing why we’re here. That’s existentialism: All we can really know is that we and the material world exist.

¶ 4:38 PM 1 comments

Nicholson argues that Heidegger revises his understandings of freedom, unconcealedness and Dasein. Here Dasein functions differently than in Being and Time, Nicholson tells us, insofar as it the “hidden essential grounding of the human being”. Heidegger writes, “In Da-sein, the essential ground, long ungrounded, on the basis of which human beings are able to ek-sist, is preserved for them”. The notion of the “clearing” (Lichtung) which does not appear in WW but elsewhere in later Heidegger serves for Nicholson to better understand the idea of openness expressed in the Da- of Dasein.

¶ 8:31 AM 0 comments

Everyday life, for revolutionary conservatives like German philosopher Martin Heidegger, was a notorious concept which connoted inauthenticity and fallenness. It was thus marked by a failure to keep one’s promise – a promise to become who one already is. Yet, a virus proved that without such a failure there isn’t any “origin”, any home, to which one would yearn to return. The “idle talk” that permeated everyday life turns out to be not so pointless after all. Take that away: there remains no refuge.

¶ 4:00 AM 0 comments

The primacy of the individual is still resisted by many cultures, particularly in much of Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. For if you enshrine the self above all, there’s the danger of dead-ending in solipsism, disavowing the responsibilities of public life in pursuit of a perfected solitude, as if being in the world and being true to oneself are at odds. The early 20th-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger thought otherwise: that to be human is to be in the world. We come alive in the presence of others. The self is not a fixed goal but a flux, ever in progress, generated and modified by each encounter, in the space and sometimes the tension between what is expected of us — by family, society, cosmology — and what we might actually want. Even before we thought of ourselves as individuals, we had private desires, arising in response to the dictates of our context; as the American-Canadian historian Natalie Zemon Davis has written of the premodern era, being embedded in a circumscribed social sphere “did not preclude self-discovery, but rather prompted it.”

¶ 3:48 AM 0 comments

Most of us, most of the time, are encouraged by what passes as normality to live in a counterfeit eternity. We imagine that life will go on and death is something that happens to others. Death is reduced to what Heidegger calls a social inconvenience or downright tactlessness. The consolation of philosophy in this instance consists in pulling away from the death-denying habits of normal life and facing the anxiety of the situation with a cleareyed courage and sober realism. It is a question of passionately enacting that fact as a basis for a shared response, because finitude is relational: It is not just a question of my death, but the deaths of others, those we care about, near and far, friends and strangers.

¶ 6:44 AM 0 comments

With the imposed isolation of so many communities, a part of us is lost – a part of our humanity becomes missing. Martin Heidegger talks of our relationship to the Being of other entities as our facticity. Our facticity involves our concern for things that we do, things that we buy, and people that we care about. But the needed isolation for survival devoids us of these relationships; the Enhanced Community Quarantine rids us of an aspect of our facticity. Suddenly, we can no longer do things that are of concern to us and we cannot visit those whom we care about. Even the food that we care to eat is suddenly lost; we are now at the mercy of which supplies are left on supermarket stands. Suddenly, just so we could survive as a species, we deprive ourselves of a modality of our Being as humans.

¶ 6:38 AM 0 comments

Tell me your “philosopher of the future” and I will tell you who you are. More likely than not, your future philosopher is a phantasmatic image of the place where you already stand—as when hopeful fathers imagine their infant sons following in their professional footsteps someday, but with more success. Heidegger had some sense of this problem, as we find in one of his passages on ambiguity in Being and Time:

Everyone is acquainted with what is up for discussion and what occurs, and everyone discusses it; but everyone also knows already how to talk about what has to happen first–about what is not yet up for discussion but “really” must be done. Already everyone has surmised and scented out in advance what Others have also surmised and scented out. This Being-on-the scent is of course based upon hearsay, for if anyone is genuinely “on the scent” of anything, he does not speak about it… [B&T 217-218]

Any philosophical future that merely involves some new permutation on the onto-taxonomy of thought and world–however radically it claims to have ended “Cartesian dualism”– is not much of a future, but merely an extension of the present. We need to stop looking toward the horizon, and reflect instead on the major prejudice in our midst.

¶ 8:56 AM 1 comments

It’s no surprise that so many people are feeling bad through the isolation -- not just worried for themselves or their loved ones, but more deeply, feeling a kind of meaninglessness. Heidegger talked about two sorts of things that are distinctive of our being human, and that give our lives the only kind of meaning we can hope for: One is our projects — the things we care about, work toward, are engaged in — and the other is our being with others. The pandemic, and the isolation it has brought, has cut most of us off from our projects — whether it’s baking cakes for weddings, teaching first-graders or cheering on the Rays. And it’s cut us off from much of our normal ways of being with other people.

¶ 7:20 AM 0 comments

The German lectern, a neat stand-in for the enterprise of knowledge production, is possibly meaningful, is a possible object of phenomenological description, only because its value is culturally determined according to pre-existing conditions into which ‘we’ have been ‘thrown’. But something else is at work here. When Heidegger performs this self-imposed delimitation of phenomenology’s remit, blackness gets figured as the horizon-line of philosophical inquiry, marking out a constitutive edge where the study of ‘things in themselves’ falls short, fails to answer a question, or ceases to formulate one. Such epistemic failures flag up the relation between phenomenology and ontology, the region of inquiry towards which Heidegger’s would turn in later work, largely in attempt to address precisely the fundamental underlayers of experience that are resistant, or unavailable, to phenomenological description. In the past years, Fred Moten has been concerned with parsing the interrelation between blackness and ontology, tacitly interrogating the legacy of Frantz Fanon’s famous claim that “ontology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black man” (Fanon 1986).

¶ 5:13 PM 0 comments

The understanding that we are Dasein or ‘there-being’ is offered as an alternative to the traditional notion that we are a ‘rational animal’. Thus for Heidegger, to be aware of death is a rupture with living and the purposes of living. It is really something like a realisation of the ultimate pointlessness of living and of reasoning – all of which, for him, including nearly all philosophy hitherto, is really ‘idle chatter’. This is a horrible foreshortening of our existential situation. As Heidegger’s pupil Hannah Arendt said, we live as much in relation to birth and constant new beginnings as to constant endings. We also live ecstatically in space besides time: in terms of our habitual attachments to and relationships with other people, animals, things and places. In short, Heidegger lagged well behind Bergson in his understanding of human existence: in being alive we are as we are also equally orientated towards birth, towards creativity human and creaturely others as we are towards death.

¶ 4:27 PM 0 comments

German philosopher Martin Heidegger is famous for his theory of Dasein, or “There-Being.” For Heidegger, the temporary nature of things renders them meaningful. Thus, meaning in a person’s life comes from the acknowledgement that one cannot do everything before they die. One action or decision precludes others. Anyone who has walked into a bookshop and realized that they cannot read every book will understand this concept. Thus, we exist as Beings limited “There” to a particular stretch of space and time.

¶ 9:00 PM 0 comments

My mind jumps to the opening of Avital Ronell’s Telephone Book, to Martin Heidegger alone in his office at Freiburg University late at night in 1933, to the phone that rings, to the commander of the local Gestapo who tells him that he must fire all of his Jewish and Communist colleagues and expel the students. Ronnel speculates on Heidegger’s capture via the phone line, picking up the phone in the absence of his secretary; on the immediate confrontation with these demands by the state; on his inability to do anything but comply both to the ringing and the orders, the one seemingly exerting the same sense of compulsion as the other. While different, they are both anchored by the technology that reaches and addresses, that commands and captures.

¶ 2:58 PM 0 comments