enowning

2012-01-27T07:23:00.000-08:00

The New York Times on blogging in the academy.

Cathy N. Davidson, an English professor at Duke, wants to eradicate the term paper and replace it with the blog.

Her provocative positions have lent kindling to an intensifying debate about how best to teach writing in the digital era.

So, five years of blogging is a PhD then?

2012-01-27T06:22:00.000-08:00

Levi R. Bryant reviews David Couzens Hoy's The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality, in NDPR.

Hoy draws a distinction between time and temporality. Whereas time, according to Hoy, refers to the universal time or objective time of physics and the natural world, temporality refers to the time of human existence. However, as Hoy's analysis of temporality proceeds, this distinction is itself called into question. In the final chapter, Hoy seems to side with the thesis of later Heidegger, holding that temporality does not issue from the subject or mind, but rather that the self or mind issues from temporality:
The contrast between the early and later Heidegger is brought out nicely in the later Heidegger's discussion of the sentence from Being and Time, "Es gibt Sein" (literally, "it gives Being," although it is better translated as "There is being"). The early Heidegger was often read as meaning by the "Es" that the giver of Being was Dasein. In 1947, however, the later Heidegger maintains in the "Letter on Humanism" that when Being and Time says "Es gibt Sein," the "Es" is Sein. In the early text, the sentence in question reads, "Only so long as Dasein is, is there [gibt es] Being." The later Heidegger claims that because Being is both the clearing and what sends the clearing, Dasein was not meant to be the clearing.
Later Hoy remarks that "it is not the subject that temporalizes, but temporality itself that temporalizes". In short, temporality is not to be conceived (as in the case of Kant or Husserl) as a product of the subject, but rather temporality is a more "primordial root" out of which the subject itself emerges.

It is here, in relation to the thesis of temporality as the primordial root of being, that questions about Hoy's project emerge. If (following the later Heidegger) temporality, not the subject, is the primordial root of being, why draw a distinction between the universal time of physics and the temporality of human existence? If, indeed, the "Es" of the "Es gibt Sein" is temporality rather than Dasein, then it would seem that the distinction between universal time and human temporality collapses and that there is no special reason to privilege human existence where inquiries into being are concerned. Both universal time and human temporality would be dimensions of this primordial root. One potential problem with Hoy's analysis of temporality is that while it is at pains to distinguish itself from the anti-realist thesis that the being of beings is unthinkable apart from a relation to the subject or mind in taking care not to equate temporality with mind or consciousness, in treating temporality as pertaining to human existence it nonetheless remains within the anti-realist orbit. Yet strangely, over the course of his investigation, Hoy develops a number of resources for delivering a realist account of temporality.

A realist account of temporality would not consist in taking the physicist at his word so that we would be called to reduce temporality to what Hoy calls "universal time". Instead, a realist account of temporality would call for a more profound metaphysics, a temporal metaphysics, that responds to the critiques of ontotheology advanced by Derrida and Heidegger, but which is nonetheless a metaphysics in the sense that it shows how the being of beings issues from temporality.

Thanks to January for finding this.

2012-01-27T04:32:00.000-08:00

Antonio Calcagno on Edith Stein's critique of Being and Time.

Is the analysis of being provided by Heidegger sufficient to serve as a ground for approaching the question of the sense of being? Essentially, Edith Stein's answer is negative. Echoing the sentiments of the philosopher Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Edith Stein believes that Heidegger's project attempts to open the doors to and reinvestigate the question of being. She concedes that Heidegger may have well been on his way to re-opening the question of being and giving it a cosmological significance, however, he fails in his Entwurf (project) because he ultimately confines the question of being to Dasein. Being, understood in a multiplicity of forms ranging from the simple onta to higher more complex beings, is never fully interrogated. Heidegger excludes them from speaking forth. Furthermore, no room is given to the possible questioning of the First Being, God. Heidegger questions, but does he always listen to the response? Moreover, because Heidegger may not hear a response when he questions certain types of beings, this does not necessarily imply that these beings are incapable of responding. Perhaps Heidegger is incapable of understanding their response because they respond in ways different from Dasein, for they do not speak like Dasein. Their being may have meaning in the fact that their appearance (Erscheinungen) speak forth-an articulation without articulation.

Stein concludes her work by asking whether it would not have been wiser on the part of Heidegger to be more closely in dialogue with the tradition of metaphysics. She wonders if a treatment of the analogia entis would have proven more fruitful. She also believes that a more thorough examination of thinkers like Thomas, Aristotle and other Greek thinkers may have proven challenging. Heidegger's dismissal of the tradition of Western metaphysics as analyzing being only in terms of Vorhandensein has not done justice to the subtleties and depth of the tradition. Ultimately, Heidegger has given a sense to the question of being which is much too auto-referential. Dasein becomes the ultimate and absolute framework wherein being comes to play itself out. It is interesting to note that Stein wishes to compare future works of Heidegger to his earlier works. She undoubtedly recognized that Sein und Zeit was not completed as it was supposed to have been. Unfortunately, Stein perished before she ever had the chance to become familiar with the later Heidegger's work.

2012-01-26T05:47:00.000-08:00

Iain McGilchrist on excessive reflection in The Master and His Emissary.

Excessive self-consciousness, like the mental world of schizophrenia, is a prison: its inbuilt reflexivity – the hall of mirrors – sends the mind ever back into itself. Breaking out of the prison presents a problem, since self-consciousness cannot be curbed by a conscious act of will, any more than we can succeed in trying not to think of little green apples. The apple of knowledge, once eaten, cannot become once more ‘unbitten in the palm’. Nonetheless conscious reflection, the root of the problem, may itself provide the antidote to its own effects. Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Merleau-Ponty, all of them critics of reflection, embodied in their writing a reflective attempt to surmount reflection. Hölderlin's lines once again come to mind: ‘Where there is danger, that which will save us also grows’.

This is because philosophy does not answer our questions but shakes our belief that there are answers to be had; and in doing so it forces us to look beyond its own system to another way of understanding. One of the reasons reading Heidegger is at the same time so riveting and such a painful experience is that he never ceases to struggle to transcend the Cartesian divisions which analytic language entails, in order to demonstrate that there is a path, a way through the forest, the travelling of which is in itself the goal of human thinking. Though we can emerge into a ‘clearing’, we cannot hope to reach the clear light of the Empyrean, which as Hölderlin's devastating poem Hyperions Schicksalslied makes plain, is reserved only for the gods. Perhaps inevitably Heidegger's last writings are in the form of poems. Wittgenstein also saw the true process of philosophy as a way of transcending or healing the effects of philosophy in the philosophical mind: philosophy is itself a disease, as Karl Kraus said of psychoanalysis, for which it purports to be the cure.

450-1

2012-01-25T18:59:00.000-08:00

In-der-Blog-sein

Philosopher's Kitchen on Chipotle's dis-framing.

2012-01-25T16:59:00.000-08:00

In-der-Blog-sein

Salew-o Chachei on meaning from God.

I would say the first realization of God in Heidegger is that when we realise that we are contingent being- in Heidegger’s expression, “why is there any being at all and not rather nothing?” This contingency is evident with regard to our own being, when we realize that our own finiteness, that we are going to die. This leads him to have faith in beyond being or reality. In other words, Dasein or Being is always becoming. As man, being-in-the-world realizes that, he is going to die; he becomes aware that he is not the master of his destiny. When we realise that we are not a master or a giver, etc. we naturally begin to search for the master, the real source, the giver; thus the question of the meaning of our human existence necessarily involves a search for the giver of this gift i.e. for the source of our being.

2012-01-25T04:57:00.000-08:00

In-der-Blog-sein

Specular Image speaks of the open.

Heidegger understood openness as a space in which is shared, in other words in order to experience what the other experiences there must be a space open. Heidegger understands that awareness would be impossible without a space in order for us to experience a freedom. Freedom in Heidegger is tied up with the unconcealment of being. Unconcealment or aletheia means we bring something to our conscious awareness what was hidden. Humans exist “outside themselves” but Heidegger believed we are alone in this endeavor. I do not believe we are completely alone in this, and Agamben takes it from here to introduce a linguistic understanding. Agamben wants to know, what it means to say we speak. Agamben writes in an early essay, “Philosophy concerns itself with what is at issue not in this or that meaningful statement but in the very fact that human beings speak, that there is language and opening to sense, beyond, before, or, rather, in every determinate event of signification. (emphasis is mine)”

2012-01-25T02:04:00.000-08:00

Yu Xuanmeng on reponding to technology.

People usually think it not bad for man to be the lord of the earth. Man is supposed to be the center of the world; if he be subjected to nature he is alienated or reified. Although people have seen from man’s controlling nature some unexpected results, such as pollution of the environment, loss of ecological balance, and so on, usually they think that these unexpected problems resulting from technology can also be resolved by means of technology. But, will rectified nature be the same one in which human beings and other living things primordially came to be? If not, why in practice could man not prevent those results beforehand; perhaps man is driven by some unknown force.

If a disadvantage is caused by man’s fault, such as alienation, it could be corrected or remedied by man’s own effort. But when a danger comes from destiny it could not be avoided merely by man. What man could do is not to give up technology, but to "keep watch over the unconcealment -- and with it, from the first, the concealment -- of all coming to presence in the earth." That is to say, man should take technology not only as an instrument at hand, but as a way of revealing. It is a way for human beings to recover their own dignity: man is the shepherd of the destiny of Being.

2012-01-24T01:57:00.000-08:00

James Magrini on art setting up a “world,” and bringing forth the Earth.

In 1936, the concept of art as a cultural founding force, which facilitates Dasein’s authentic communal relations in the form of a people’s (new) historical “beginning,” is considered by Heidegger in terms of the historical manifestation of Being, in the Ereignis, the "clearing and lighting" in the very midst of beings, "which grants and guarantees to us humans the passage to those beings that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves Being of all other entities as a whole, giving all things their look, delimitation, and meaning. Truth happens in the "work-Being" of the work of art, as the counter-striving forces of world and Earth clash, which is the site of aletheia, the vortex of the battle (polemos) for the unconcealement of beings. In Being and Time, "world" represents the overarching system of meaning(s) that organizes Dasein's activities and identity, the structure within which its life makes sense. However, in "The Origin of the Work of Art," the world does not simply represent the world as it is, because art does not simply reveal a world of which it is a part as just another thing; more importantly, art stands within the unique limits that it first establishes and sets forth. When "world worlds" in and through the work-being of the art work, a space is opened and the work erects a world, i.e., it establishes boundaries as it transfigures the world, casting the truth of an authentic historical existence toward the preservers, revealing the potential for the enactment of their destiny. This "worlding of world" occurs as an event, within the work-Being, within the Ereignis. McNeill expresses Heidegger's concept of the "world worlding," or world as an event, in the following terms: "World is not to be understood then, as an already existing openness within which the art work, as one particular being would then become accessible. World is rather an event, a happening, and occurrence, whose divine processes unfold in the work of art."

In addition to setting up a “world,” the art work also brings forth the Earth, and these counter-striving forces are the two essential features in the work-being of the work of art. Undoubtedly, the notion of Earth is of supreme importance in Heidegger's work during the turn, derived from, and equated with, Hölderlin's notion of divine "Nature" (Earth). Being and Time intimates the divine possibilities of Nature as the force that "assails us" and "stirs and strives," but in "The Origin of the Work of Art," Heidegger develops the concept of Nature more fully, and from his readings of Hölderlin, brings forth the Earth, arguing that "world" cannot be thought outside of its connection with Earth, world cannot exist or arise without it. Dasein cannot dwell authentically without acknowledging its debt to Earth, for Dasein's Being belongs to the Earth, which represents the divine-spiritual aspects of the holy, a force which Dasein must return to in order to transform its life. Earth is for Heidegger the radicalization of phusis as the coming-to-presence-of-beings in his thinking the Ereignis and the historical revelation and appropriation of Being. The Earth represents the primal ground upon which Dasein works to establish its dwelling, as the native soil upon which it builds its home. Earth is also the supreme spiritual presence, a sublime, inexplicable holy force that is beyond even the gods.

2012-01-23T05:01:00.000-08:00

Andrew Feenberg on Marcuse and finding meaning beyond technology.

Under the influence of Hegel, Marcuse explained the concept of essence in terms of the role of potentiality or “real possibility.” Essences are the highest realization of what appears imperfectly in the world. Thus essences are in some sense ideals, but not for that matter merely subjective. Essences are objects of striving of the things themselves, in modern terms, of human beings and societies in the course of history. In this reinterpretation of Greek ontology, the concept of truth applies not just to propositions but to things, which can be more or less true to their essential nature.

Marcuse followed Heidegger in arguing that meanings are neither things nor thoughts but a third ontological order. But unlike Heidegger, he understood this order as dynamis, force or tendency in the things themselves. Marcuse argued that the Greeks misread such tendencies in terms of the culturally relative assumptions of their time. We cannot return to such a naïve relation to culture. The modern discovery of the constructive power of the subject stands in the way. This constructive power is now exercised not only in the spiritual domain of culture but materially, through technology, which transforms the environment according to human plans and purposes. Modern society dismisses the essences of antiquity as obstacles to the free exercise of human powers. Technical means are normatively neutralized and stripped of any relation to an objective truth of the object they create. The norms under which technology now stands are not intrinsic to its operations as cultural imperatives once were, but extrinsic demands of the powerful and, ultimately, of capital as a dynamic force.

This formulation recapitulates the basic point of Heidegger’s critique of technology, i.e. the radical deworlding accomplished by modernity which shows up in the reification of society to which the individuals are called to submit. The new conformism consists not in obedience to a leader or to customs but more fundamentally in submission to the “facts of life” interpreted as the one and only possible organization of a modern society. In so adapting the individuals fall into the objectivistic worship of the given which authentic decision must resist.

2012-01-22T16:46:00.000-08:00

In-der-Blog-sein

Northendom on the anxiety of the internet.

This is where the issue of technology steps in. This article explains how technology, as a man-made instrument of coordinating information, puts a premium on the immediate “ready at hand” state of information, but not necessarily knowledge. This information, as we can probably all relate to, is most often “inessential or trivial.” The internet doesn’t care, it just serves to put us in “massive proximity” to information, making “a new type of informing.”

2012-01-22T11:49:00.000-08:00

[Start][Previously on]

The Shadow of Heidegger

It was 1935, it was now. We were in the cloister where Heidegger addresses us with his word. That word is it directed only at us or does he have ambitions for something more. Now it is late, now, neither you nor I can ask ourselves this. I wish so much I'd had you there. I wish so much you had seen him. I took notes during that course and obtained others from trusted, brilliant students. Heidegger took us to the limits. "Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?" He challenged us. "Whoever talks about Nothing does not know what he is doing. In speaking about Nothing, he makes it into a something." He was molding us. "To know means to be able to learn". It was, and it couldn't have been otherwise, the class he invited me to the most indelible of all, the one that would establish in me the true greatness of National Socialism; the only one.

That day, in that class, he spoke to us of Russia, he spoke to us of America, identifying them. He said: "which are metaphysically the same". The same what? Heidegger turned to, to show us, to his theme of world as the worlding of the ready to hand. From Being and Time we knew that theme. When I spoke to you of the Luger resting on this desk, now, as I write, I unveiled it for you. That Luger is a utensil. That utensil is there, at hand. (In this case, given that I am the only one here, it is, in this sense: it is at my hand.) Heidegger was not referring to this Luger; he was not referring to any other utensil, but to a specific one; to one solitary, unique utensil. He was referring to the pincers. Russia and America was a great pincers, and drowned by it, subjected to that double power, lay Europe, "in", to top it off, "its unholy blindness always on the point of cutting its own throat". Why did he choose pincers? I'll risk a couple conjectures. Pincers crush, kill. Pincers are a thing privileged by technology, for its power for organizing the earth instrumentally. America was technology in its business expression; it was the cipher of techno-capitalism. Russian was technology in the service of the massification of man, of collective enslavement. Both uses of technology cut off the possibility of man's historical-spiritual launch. This Heidegger (the Heidegger obsessed by the Dasein that has forgotten Being and has given himself over to conquering the planet technologically) was already in Being and Time. But only now was it fully expressed. Because, son, Martin dear, it was the fullness of spirit, the spirit of the West, in one of its most elevated, purest, moments, that surged, then, in his words. I have jottings, various notes. I have trouble re-assembling that text. Sometime the Master will polish it, his send it to the publisher and the world can know it. That was the day we knew. Prophetic, or better: menacing. Or better: in the way of the prophet that warns about what is to come Or in the way of the great philosopher that doesn't prophesize but warns. That severely warns about what has already happened and what might happen. So, Heidegger said: "When the farthest corner of the globe has been conquered technologically and can be exploited economically; when any incident you like, in any place you like, at any time you like, becomes accessible as fast as you like; when you can simultaneously 'experience' an assassination attempt against a king in France and a symphony concert in Tokyo; when" I pause, son. What follows this "when" was one of the most powerful ideas that, in my long years given to philosophy, ever penetrated my spirit. "When", said Heidegger, "time is nothing but speed". Where did he get this? From his long slow walks through the Black Forest? From his long silences shared with the peasants in his neighborhood? In those shared silences while they smoked (with austere, simple slowness; which other way is there?) their rustic pipes, made, almost always, with their own hands. Heidegger was rural, not urban, philosopher. You already know: he declined being named Rektor of the University of Berlin in order to remain in Freiburg, the provinces, the earth, rootedness. Beingness. The nation, and no deviating. I was, I have told you, in Berlin. There time was speed. Only speed. Speed, velocity, the immediacy of business ate up time. Doing so eliminates "time", said the Master, "time as history". Not as fleetingness, not as bewilderment. He heard him continue: "When a boxer", he said, "counts as the great man of a people". "When the tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph". When all this happens, what? Heidegger's voice got graver still, not threatening. Not prophetic. A warning, if you'll allow me. The prophet announces to us a truth that will inevitably be fulfilled in the future. Not the philosopher. Not, for sure, Heidegger. Heidegger warned, and warning is to announce the presence (not necessarily realizable) of a danger. (How difficult this was to explain to you. It is so important. Marx is a prophet. He announces to the masses a future of plenitude, a classless society. Not Heidegger. Heidegger, desperately even, warns. If "it" remains like so, if "it" is not avoided, the worse will happen. But "it" can be avoided. That was the possibility he saw in National Socialism. That possibility, he, in the dawning of his hopes, in the midday of his faith, in his shining rejection of nihilism, he found it in Adolf Hitler.) "Then", he continued, "yes then, there still looms like a specter over all this uproar the question: what for? - where to? - and what then?"

Allow me to rest. I don't know what you were thinking while reading those lines, but I, on writing them to you, lost my breath. Why not allow ourselves the fertile slowness of time? Why not loathe speed, with its empty lightness.

2012-01-21T19:37:00.000-08:00

Guest post.

Michael Eldred restructured in a free verse format by January.

Open, three-dimensional time-space is the same as the mind
for which humans, to be human beings are used
and into which each individual human being is cast,
to which each is exposed
and in which each is immersed,
where beings qua beings present and absent themselves for the mind.
Each individual exposed to this play of presencing and absencing in temporo-spatial mind
has its own individual perspective on the play.
The individuality of the viewing angles,
e.g. my very own (jemeinig) and your very own (jedeinig) perspective,
for the play of presencing and absencing
is the originary splintering of truth conceived as disclosure,
so to speak, the atomic fission of truth into individual atoms.
Minding is “for the sake of” beings’ temporal presencing and absencing
in time-space, which is being’s medium.
Being ‘is’ ecstatic time.
Without this open time-space of presentation for beings,
there would be no minding (νοειν),
nothing minded/thought (νόημα),
no mind (νους) whatever.

-- Michael Eldred, "Out of your mind? Parmenides’ message," Pp 23-24

2012-01-21T04:42:00.000-08:00

Thomas Brockelman on Žižek's revolutionary Heidegger.

What, according to Žižek, was Heidegger’s error in 1933? Precisely the one which typifies our response to the possibility of revolutionary change, change disruptive of reality itself – namely, anxiety and retreat. Or, to be more precise, Heidegger gives us the kind of retreat in the face of anxiety which seems like no retreat at all, a kind of “acting out” pretending to be a decisive “act.” In its embrace of both an extra-individual “people” and a basic disruption of modern reality, Nazism seems to follow through on the promise of “will” and “violence,” the promise of a “non-metaphysical core of modern subjectivity,” but this appearance is false. Nazi “will” is, of course, merely the self-assertion of a larger, corporate but all the more metaphysical subject. Nazi violence is directed against people (Jews, Gypsies, etc.) who represent what cannot be integrated into a totalized reality and precisely not against totality itself. As Žižek puts it, perversely, in his essay on Heidegger in 1933, “the problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough, that his violence was not ‘essential’ enough”.

Nazism, like all Fascism, remained a kind of show, a “pseudo-Event” filled with the appearance of change, but designed in the end to ensure that “nothing will really change”. On, the other hand, while the Soviet experiment may have failed dismally to transform the fabric of society, with horrific human consequences, that was not a problem with its intention. Quite the contrary, the Soviets really tried to overturn the existing social order, and it was their initial success in doing precisely that which produced the vehemence of the Stalinist backlash. Above all, the Soviet experiment tried to transform the very relationship between individual and society in the terms of the collective. Thus, for Žižek, we can express Heidegger’s breakdown before his own conception of fi nitude as his failure to see that he really should have embraced the Soviet opportunity rather than the Nazi pseudo-alternative. For Žižek, “it was only Soviet Communism which, despite the catastrophe it stands for, did possess true inner greatness”. Had he remained “in the truth” of his own insight, Heidegger would have had to become a Communist!

Pp. 21-2

2012-01-20T08:31:00.000-08:00

George Pattison on Heidegger

An episode of The Video Timeline Project.

2012-01-20T05:36:00.000-08:00

David Nichols on coping with storms, from "Antigone's Autochthonous Voice".

This interpretation of "The Ister" allows Heidegger to form a bridge to Sophocles' Antigone and to revisit its second choral ode. He reworks some of his previous points from the Introduction to Metaphysics lectures pertaining to the "Ode to Man" chorus, especially those having to do with the homelessness of human existence. He reiterates the importance of two different word couplets within the choral song for understanding what it means for humans to be most uncanny (to deinotaton) among beings. Heidegger translates Sophocles' hupsipolis-apolis to mean "towering high above the site, losing the site." In a process of ontological hubris, the community loses sight of its being at the same time that it springs forth from its native origin. Heidegger translates pantoporos-aporos to mean, "venturing forth in every direction, without experience." He claims that a "counterturning" (Gegenwendigkeit) takes place within the essence of the human being whereby one dwells, ecstatically, in a perpetual state of being beyond oneself. Heidegger understands the double axis of the rising polis and the polis wanderer to constitute "the site of the abode of human history," the primordial ground of being human. The two descriptions nearly form the image of a carousel for Heidegger, or at least that of a twister: the polis requires a pole, an axis mundi, around which all the activities of the community swirl (Wirbeln). He suggests that the driving force behind the whirlwind could be the activity of questioning itself, even to the extent that the polis becomes its own question—one that the Greeks were willing to ask, without ever arriving at a definitive answer.

In the Ister lectures, Heidegger adopts an approach to Greek tragedy that waits upon the mystery of Being instead of forcing a polemical confrontation. The poet must remain vigilant in order to catch the first signs of the "holy enigma" (heiliges Rätsel) of the opening of new possibilities for thinking. Long gone are the heroic overtones of the Introduction to Metaphysics lectures where the poets and other creators of the polis violently crash against the prevailing fugue of appearances. Heidegger's treatment of tragedy in the Ister lectures already embodies what he later calls Gelassenheit, the releasement that lets the being of beings be. This explains why Heidegger develops the terminology of the whirlwind for the polis instead of retrieving his earlier image of a polemos between oppositional forces. "What truly stands steadfast must be able to sway within the counter-turning pressure (gegenwendigen Andrang) of the open paths (der offenen Bahnen) of the storms. What is merely rigid shatters on account of its own rigidity." At first glance, these statements resemble the quote from the Republic at the close of Heidegger's 1933 Rectoral Address, "All that is great stands in the storm." The critical difference, however, has to do with the way that Heidegger abandons the heroism that stands firm against the storm. He now advocates following the paths of storms and allowing the rigidness of prevailing thought structures to shatter on their own accord.

The intellectual revitalization of a community depends upon its ability to first recognize what is foreign within what is proper. For this reason, Heidegger identifies "the fatherland" of the German people as their own unique ground, simultaneously haunted by a primordial Greek past. In order to arrive at the home of being German, the community must experience an appropriative event (Ereignis), a festival, whereby their other origin, namely that of the Greeks, provides the conceptual resources necessary for a fresh beginning.

2012-01-19T17:18:00.000-08:00

In-der-Blog-sein

Clare McAllister on an art work by Steven Claydon.

The Thingliness of Things I (Potatoes In The Cellar) takes its inspiration from Heidegger’s writings on art. One of Heidegger’s philosophical problems was what exactly is it that gives art its special value? At what point does art become art and not just an ordinary object? Heidegger explored this question via a comparison between a stored work of art and potatoes kept in a cellar.

2012-01-19T16:13:00.000-08:00

Existentialism Final with Martin Heidegger

There are at least three other new videos on youtube that appear to come from high school class projects. A general confusion is that authenticity for Heidegger meant either Sartre's notion that you-are-the-choices-you-make or that it means not being fake. It's a sign of the influence of his way of thinking that he's showing up in high school classes, but students would be better served by an intro to Aristotle, than they are with misunderstanding Heidegger.

2012-01-19T11:06:00.000-08:00

How to play the clarinet authentically.

2012-01-19T08:07:00.000-08:00

In-der-Blog-sein

Videre Spectare on Peter Paul Verbeek and Heidegger.

Heidegger’s late work also reflects the “no cyborgs” approach, when he argues that we have to keep technology at a distance from us. But Heidegger’s work is harder to dismiss and Verbeek does not simply dismiss Heidegger.

For Heidegger, we are not in control of technology; instead, technology/Gestell (Enframing) is a destining. Technology for Heidegger constitutes one way of revealing being which he contrasts with “poesis.” Rather than trying to “save” the late Heidegger’s point with reinterpretation, Verbeek points out Heidegger’s inconsistencies and double-standards.

2012-01-19T06:05:00.000-08:00

Heidegger and Art by Kyle Clifford.

2012-01-19T05:50:00.000-08:00

Raymond Aaron Younis on our estrangement.

[A]ccording to Heidegger, to inquire into the ‘nature’ of something, while presupposing that that is the key to a true understanding of it, is a manifestation not of sound methodology but of confusion; what is confused, fundamentally, is the question of origin or ground on the one hand, and the question of the nature of something, on the other hand. What becomes obscured or confused is the question of the primordial relation of the thing to its ground; the search for the nature of something is a kind of manifestation of confusion and obscurity. In a sense, one is estranged from the question of the primordial relation, or of the ground, which is why the question of the nature of something ‘awakens’ again.

More broadly, Heidegger argued that this kind of problem emerges when at the same time our relationship to things (whose nature is sought in questioning) has become uncertain or severed. In other words, Heidegger was pointing to a kind of estrangement on two levels: first, from what things really are (and questions about the nature of such things become the very manifestation of a state of confusion or obscurity); and second, from a relationship, perhaps primordial, between us and the things that ‘we’ ask such questions about, especially if, Heidegger added, the nature of a thing “might then define for ‘us’ the whole of the thing… or… might lead us to presuppose that its ‘essence’ lies in its nature”. Such a view amounts to a catastrophic error, according to Heidegger.

2012-01-19T02:00:00.000-08:00

Existentiopolis, a Heidegger rap.

2012-01-19T01:55:00.000-08:00

In-der-Blog-sein

The Partially Examined Life on Foucault and Heidegger.

[F]or Foucault, Power orders the world and for Heidegger, Being discloses it. In both cases, the order/disclosure creates the horizon (boundaries, structure) in which Knowledge/Truth (with a capital “K” and “T”) is possible. This possibility then shapes the methodologies and areas of knowledge (with a little “k”). In both cases, the thesis is that knowledge is historically determined.

2012-01-18T23:25:00.000-08:00

In-der-Blog-sein

Blogging About Blogging on revealing and concealing.

The ability to publish on the WWW is what is revealed to me through a blog. The identity of the readers of my blog is concealed. I have no idea if anyone is reading my blog. Or if someone is reading it, I have no idea who they are. By publishing the readers of my blog (if they exist) are concealed.

I think publishers in other media have the same issues; e.g.: Is anyone listening to my radio show? And so on.

2012-01-18T05:45:00.000-08:00

Today is black out the internet to protest SOPA day, to mobilize against politicians' attempts to sell out culture to their paymasters. Since I'm on the road, it is too difficult for me to update and black out my sites. So here's a link, and consider my sites blacked out.

2012-01-18T05:32:00.000-08:00

In NDPR, Jeffrey L. Powell reviews the Laurence Paul Hemming, Bogdan Costea, and Kostas Amiridis edited collection The Movement of Nihilism: Heidegger's Thinking After Nietzsche.

The expression "the movement of nihilism" is attributed to Heidegger's problematization of nihilism in his essay on Ernst Jünger. Heidegger's confrontation with nihilism is certainly not limited to this essay, a point affirmed in the various essays that make up this volume. The problem, although not necessarily the name, is in Heidegger's mind as early as the 1929 "What is Metaphysics?" One can certainly argue for an earlier date insofar as the "problem" of nihilism is inseparable from the nothing, but 1929 seems to me a date in which the full force of the question first arises in a form consistent with all the subsequent formulations offered by Heidegger. That being said, "nihilism as a normal state of affairs" would mean that all Heidegger's preceding texts, lecture-courses, etc. were equally under that force. This is not to say that those writings necessarily failed to be determined by the essence of nihilism, rather than simply running counter to its essence, for if Being and Time makes advances within the history of metaphysics, and I believe that it does, then it does so only insofar as it is determined from out of that essence. More generally, if "the movement of nihilism" is to advance beyond a simple repetition of the same, then it will do so only insofar as it is engaged in a confrontation with the essence of nihilism. Stated differently, the attempt to surpass nihilism is the classic move of nihilism.

2012-01-18T03:27:00.000-08:00

To understand Metaphysics you must first read Physics.

Aristotelian "physics" is different from what we mean today by this word, not only to the extent that it belongs to antiquity whereas the modern physical sciences belong to modernity, rather above all it is different by virtue of the fact that Aristotle's "physics" is philosophy, whereas modern physics is a positive science that presupposes a philosophy. Aristotle's remains the fundamental book of what later is called metaphysics. This book determines the warp and woof of the whole of Western thinking, even at that place where it, as modern thinking, appears to think at odds with ancient thinking. But opposition is invariably comprised of a decisive, and often even perilous, dependence. Without Aristotle's Physics there would have been no Galileo.

P. 63

2012-01-17T05:02:00.000-08:00

Michael Eldred on Parmenides' out of your mind message.

Heidegger draws attention in his 'Moira' essay to the goddess Ἀλήθεια in Parmenides' poem which he, Heidegger, interprets as the hitherto unthought openness of disclosure that bears the presencing of presents and their "taking-in" by "thinking". Ἀλήθεια as the unfolding of the folded-in, i.e. implicit, twofold of presence and presents, is said by Heidegger to "grant ... all presencing the light in which presents can appear". This "light", however, is then immediately associated with the "clearing of presencing", even to the extent of hazarding formulations such as "Licht der Lichtung" (light of the clearing) and "sich lichtendes Scheinen" (self-clearing shining), suggesting that the clearing were simply shining and light-filled. This ambiguity is resolved only much later, in 1969, when Heidegger says clearly that, "Light, namely, can fall into the clearing, into its openness, and in it allow brightness to play with darkness". This implies that the clearing as ecstatic time-space is the clearing for both light and dark, disclosure and concealment. Concealment, however, must be understood in two different senses.

The first sense concerns the self-concealment of the clearing of presencing-and-absencing itself in granting the presencing of presents, which is an historical event (Ereignis) of self-concealment in favour of the presents that present themselves in the temporal clearing. Heidegger interprets the goddess, Moira (one's portion in life, lot, fate, destiny; Liddell/Scott), who appears in Frag. VIII at line 37, as the dispensing, sending event of enpropriation (Ereignis) that enpropriates to each other human being and the play of presencing and absencing. Moira is the event of enpropriation that "bound" (ἐπέδησεν; Frag. VIII 37) minding and presencing into their simple self-sameness. Due to the self-concealment of the temporal clearing of presencing in favour of its presents, it is overlooked — or rather, taken for granted — and left unthought throughout the two-and-a-half millennia history of Western metaphysics. Instead, time itself is thought as a linear sequence of 'nows' that are ('exist'), without the (circularly temporal) meaning of being itself ever being clarified.

The second sense of concealment, however, concerns the play of disclosure and concealment of presents themselves within the granted clearing, which, according to the above new interpretation of Frag. III, is three-dimensional time-space and mind in their sameness. Presents (beings) can present themselves clearly in the mind's light, or can remain hidden to the mind, or they can present themselves only distortedly and obscurely in an ambiguity of light and shade. This play of disclosing and hiding of presents is overlaid and thus crossed with the play of presencing and twofold temporal absencing of beings in a matrix of various combinations so that, for instance, the arriving of that which is still absent in the future may be seen by mind clearly or only obscurely. With its absolute will to foresee and control all change, modern science is hell-bent on fore-seeing the future as clearly, unambiguously and predictively as possible through its calculative theoretical models for fore-seeing. Similarly, what has been and is thus absent in this specific temporal mode, can be retrieved to presence by the mind's calling to presence — without, however, overcoming its absence, but attaining only a presence as an absent — either clearly or only faintly; or it can remain in the complete darkness of oblivion, so to speak, out of mind. The mind can also be mindful that it has forgotten something that remains in concealment, or it can be totally oblivious even to its own forgetting, in which case, what has been forgotten is doubly concealed to the point of oblivion.

2012-01-16T04:57:00.000-08:00

Tom Sheehan on getting from thrownness to Ereignis.

One’s own grounding in this ultimate praesuppositum is what the early Heidegger called “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) and what the later Heidegger called “being-opened-up” (Ereignetsein). So too the act of resolutely embracing that groundless ground is what the early Heidegger called “taking over one’s thrownness” (Übernahme der Geworfenheit), and what the later Heidegger called “taking over the fact of being-opened-up” (Über-nahme der Er-eignung). Thrownness and openedness are the same.

In the Beiträge:

182. Projecting Be-ing Open: Projecting-Open as Thrown Der Seynsentwurf. Der Entwurf als geworfener

What is meant is always merely the projecting-open of the truth of be-ing. The thrower itself, Da-sein, is thrown, en-owned by be-ing.[ist geworfen, er-eignet durch das Seyn.]

In that the thrower projects-open and enopens openness, the enopening reveals that the thrower itself is the thrown and does not accomplish anything other than getting hold of the counter-resonance in be-ing, i.e., shifting into this counter-resonance and thus into enowning and thus first becoming itself, namely the preserver of the thrown projecting-open.

P. 214

See also theses 7 and 8.

2012-01-15T19:21:00.000-08:00

In-der-Blog-sein

SOH-Dan considers: Was Heidegger an Analytic Philosopher?

2012-01-15T02:21:00.000-08:00

[Start][Previously on]

The Shadow of Heidegger

I never again has a direct conversation with him. I never again heard him speak to me. Dialogue, we always engaged in dialogue, from the Marburg years until the end, until this letter, where I still dialogue with him. But this dialogue was internal, it happened in me. Heidegger dwelled in my life. Who, if not him, with his happening in me, with his dwelling in me, could have awoken and sustained me day to day, for years, decades.

Eric Biemel's replacement was named Kruger and was an obese and clumsy man, a mean bureaucrat that, not even in the worst winter days, could avoid sweating. Everything was simple for him. He told me directly: "Our task is simple. We will teach whatever the Rosenberg office tells us to. We'll be patriots, true National Socialists". I tell you this so that you can understand my enthusiasm and my vacillations before the Master's course on metaphysics. When I heard his rectorial address it was he that directed Freiburg. It was him, Heidegger, our Rektor. Not now. Now it was no longer his word that we should necessarily be required to follow. What was his power then? He continued to be Heidegger, but he was no longer the Führer of Freiburg; a difficult situation for me. His word was, who could doubt it, unveiled truth. But that truth was no longer power. And this eroded him. For me, Martin, this event was obscure, difficult or impossible to understand. If truth doesn't express power, if power is not the expression of truth, if the truth is not power in its most profound becoming, if the truth doesn't unite with the maintenance and growth of power, is that, then, the truth?

Given that his truth was not the truth of the Rosenberg office, for whom it was that of power, was it then, true? Did Heidegger believe in a truth parallel to that of power? Did Heidegger believe in a new power? Only that way (only if Heidegger's parallel truth created a new power) could it stand up. Such a thing was, for me, improbable. The clingy bureaucrat Kruger had, now, more power than Heidegger. Power resided in the will of the Führer (Heidegger himself had said so) and the Führer had delegated the transmission of the truth to the Rosenberg office. Truth was no longer unveiling. It was obedience. It was to comply with the decisions of power, given that in those decisions truth was expressed, and whose compliance with, furthermore, power demanded and controlled. Kruger was right: our task was simple. There is nothing simpler than the simple act of obeying.

I confess: instead of "act" I was about to write "art". Only thinking in Brückner's seventh symphony blocked me. If anything is art, that symphony is. However, no one could conduct it, ever, like Furtwängler, obedient, a genial baton of power. It was he (when I heard him direct that symphony) who handed me the truth of music. Remember her that phrase of Heidegger's I have cited for you, that he said one somber afternoon, persecuted: music reaches heights that even philosophy can't manage. How was it possible that Furtwängler, obedient, tedious as a servant to power, could take up there? Or was that servilism, that docile compliance with power and its truth, that allowed him that reach? So to this event, Martin, was unclear to me, hard or impossible to understand. I hope you live in simpler times. Allow me my doubts: the ones your father lived through were so dark that they will never stop hounding you, they will grant no quarter.

[Next]

2012-01-14T04:56:00.000-08:00

Tziovanis Georgakis on the laughing event of Being.

I would propose at this point that what Heidegger calls ‘das Ereignis’—usually translated as ‘appropriating event’ or ‘appropriation’ in English—could be just another name for the echoing laughter of Hermes. Heidegger notes in Contributions to Philosophy (from Ereignis):
The echo [Anklang] of Beyng as refusal in the abandonment of beings by Being—this already says that here something present-at-hand is not to be described or explained—or to be arranged. The burden of thinking in the other beginning of philosophy is different: it is en-thinking that which is appropriated as the appropriating event itself [das Er-denken dessen, was sich ereignet als das Ereignis selbst]. [P. 108]
The echo of Being refuses to abandon beings, so it revoices and recollects them as they are in their Being. The burden of this echoing restoration is uniquely different: a difference that is deceptively different insofar as it refuses to either differentiate beings or get differentiated by beings. Indeed, Heidegger has already claimed in another work that ‘Being is no being, no thing and no thingly property, nothing present-at-hand [Das Sein ist kein Seiendes, kein Ding und keine dingliche Eigenschaft, nichts Vorhandenes].’ Ereignis, then, as the laughing event of Being, does not get recognized and differentiated among beings. It is a resounding echo, a ‘ha ha ha’ sound that makes thinking possible as proper thinking, albeit through a bouncing sound that itself returns a sound which is so ridiculously different that doesn’t make a difference. The event of the echo of Being is a proper event of laughter, a resounding that is so spasmodic and inarticulate that resists regulation and articulation in the trickiest and silliest way.

2012-01-13T04:42:00.000-08:00

Temenuga Trifonova on Heidegger's and Howard Hawk's The Things.

Heidegger’s essay began, you will recall, with a reference to cinema as that which produces the abolition of all distance. And indeed, Heidegger is careful to let the cameraman appear in the very image that is said to de-distance. In one sense, this conception of thingness might bode well for cinema. After all, what is the film strip if not light imprinted on celluloid, gathered by way of the techne of cinematography? Along such lines, it is worth noting that in Beinq and Time Heidegger understands the world as that which comes to presence by way of techne; being, by way of care. Is filming a form of gathering? Techne and care also become the means by which one discovers a totality; not the totality, but a totality. And this is precisely what is so agonizing, and so difficult, to answer in Heidegger. For, what is the nature—what is the measure—of this totality? Is it to be understood in onto-theological terms? Is it the implied totality of Cavell’s description, where the film frames make the world legible because fìlmable? Or is it closer to the social totality and reification that his contemporary, Georg Lukàcs, was beginning to grasp around the same time?

At the very moment in which we are inclined to sing with Heidegger the song of the sky—the film strip as a four-fold thing—we have to remind ourselves of the menacing, cinematic claim announced in the title itself: "The Thing." I find it difficult to believe that Heidegger would have been unaware of the Howard Hawks film that goes by the same title, was released in the same year that he wrote his essay, and that is about a group of
scientists who discover a spaceship frozen beneath the surface of the snow, only to become terrorized by an alien who appears human. As such, we are left to consider whether the abolition of all distance announced by cinema is a product of technology, and thus a form of alienation; or, whether technology simply moves in step with nature, which can no longer be understood as the ground of objects and a rounded conception of space. Could it be that the horror of the cinema as thing is owed to the possibility that nature is only ever technological?

Pp. 115-6

The full title of Howard Hawks's film was The Thing from Another World (1952). John Carpenter's 1982 remake was titled simply The Thing. Das Ding was published in 1951, and originally delivered as the first of the Bremen lectures (Insight into What Is; GA 79) in 1949.

2012-01-12T04:40:00.000-08:00

Joan Stambaugh on Heidegger's turn in emphasis.

The development of Heidegger's thinking after Being and Time has led many people to speak of a "turn" in his philosophy and to distinguish between the "early," more phenomenologically oriented Heidegger before the turn and the "late" Heidegger after it. There are ample grounds for speaking of a turn, but it is misleading to see any radical break in Heidegger's development. The turn represents a shift of emphasis, but it is a shift which Heidegger himself foresaw and prepared for in Being and Time: the shift from the perspective of man to that of Being. The books written from the perspective of Being are concerned with the history of Being which takes the form of a thorough and intensive analysis of the history of philosophy. But these writings are no mere historical commentary. They bring to light in a unique manner the way in which Being has given itself to us since the beginning of philosophy with the early Greek thinkers. Thus, the earliest Greek thinkers experienced Being as nature or physis--that is, as what arises out of itself and becomes unconcealed-- and as truth or aletheia which Heidegger characterizes not as the correspondence theory of truth, as the adequatio or correspondence of idea and object, but as unconcealment. It is, so to speak, wrested out of concealment which is equiprimordial with it if not more primordial. The root word of concealment in truth or aletheia is familiar to us in the myths of the river of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. The two, unconcealment and concealment, are always together, one can never be without the other. One might say by way of interpretation that if there were only concealment and oblivion, all would remain in undifferentiated darkness. If there were only unconcealment, all might be exhausted and cut off from the generative source.

With Plato, philosophy begins to go in a certain direction--that of metaphysics--in a direction which it has followed up to and including the thought of Nietzsche. By metaphysics Heidegger means the separation of essence and existence--of the eternal realm of idea and the transient realm of becoming--implicit in Plato's thought, and the consequent preoccupation with beings accompanied by an oblivion of Being. Heidegger analyzes the transformation of the fundamental concepts of philosophy, showing how, for instance, Aristotle's entelechy becomes the medieval concept of actuality and how Descartes' emphasis on the clarity and certainty of the ego cogito leads to the development of subjectivity which finally culminates in the concept of the Will in the nineteenth century. With Nietzsche's statement that by abolishing the true world (Plato's Ideas), we have also abolished the apparent world, in other words that there is no longer any criterion to distinguish between them, metaphysics has come to its end. This does not mean that metaphysics stops dead in its tracks stunned by Nietzsche's lethal proclamation. Nietzsche's statement is itself still metaphysical since it merely turns Plato upside down. (This is most evident in another formulation where Nietzsche states that the apparent world is more real than the true world.) The end of metaphysics could last for centuries. The phrase "the end of metaphysics" simply means that metaphysics has run through the gamut of its possibilities. Its last stage in which we are now is that of the age of technology. Technology is now what is decisive in our experience of what is, of the world and even of ourselves.

2012-01-11T17:13:00.000-08:00

Tem minutes of ambience.

I think the music's by Gas (the 'lectronica "band").

2012-01-11T04:03:00.000-08:00

Concluding the questions for Levinas, from Ethics and Infinity.

Ph.N.: In what does the second part of the Heideggerian work disappoint you?

E.L.: Perhaps in the disappearance in it of phenomenology properly speaking; in the first place that the exigesis of Hölderlin’s poetry and etymologies began to occupy his analysis. Of course, I know that in his thought the etymologies are not a contingency; for him language bears a wisdom which must be clarified. But this way of thinking seems to me much less verifiable than that of Sein und Zeit—a book in which, it is true, there are already etymologies, but adjacent and which only complete what is eminently strong with analysis proper in the phenomenology of existence.

Ph.N.: Language does not have this originary importance for you?

E.L.: In fact, for me, the said [le dit] does count as much as the saying [le dire] itself. The latter is important to me less through its informational contents than by the fact that it is addressed to an interlocutor. But we will speak about this again. I think, despite these reservations, that a man who undertakes to philosophize in the twentieth century cannot have gone through Heidegger’s philosophy, even to escape it. This thought is a great event of our century. Philosophizing without including would including Heidegger would involve a share of “naivité” in the Husserlian sense of the term. For Husserl there is very respectable and certain knowledge, scientific knowledge, which however is “naive” to the extent that, absorbed by the object, it ignores the problem of status of its objectivity.

Ph.N.: you would say of Heidegger, all things being equal otherwise what Sartre said of Marxism: that it is the unsurpassable horizon of time?

E.L.: there are many things for which I cannot pardon Marx . . . in what concerns Heidegger, one cannot, in fact, ignore fundamental ontology and it is problematic.

Ph.N.: Nevertheless there is a Heideggerian scholasticism today . . .

E.L.: . . . which takes vicissitudes of course for ultimate reference of the thought.

I must underline still another essential contribution of Heidegger’s thought: a new way of reading the history of philosophy. The philosophers of the past had already been saved from their anarchism by Hegel. But they entered into “absolute thought” as moments, or as stages to go through; they were aufgehoben, that is, well and truly annihilated, at the same time conserved. In Heidegger there is a new way, direct, of conversing with philosophers and asking for absolutely current teachings from the great classics. Of course, the philosopher of the past does not directly involve himself in the dialogue; there is an entire work of interpretation to accomplish in order to render him current. But in this hermeneutic one does not manipulate outworn things, one brings back the unthought to thought and saying.

Pp. 41-4

2012-01-10T04:34:00.000-08:00

Continuing to question Levinas, from Ethics and Infinity.

Ph.N.: Sein und Zeit appeared in 1927. Was this way of presenting the task of philosophy an absolute novelty at the time?

E.L.: That is in any case the impression that I have maintained of it. To be sure, in the history of philosophy it happens that after the fact one rediscovers the tendencies which retrospectively seem to announce great innovations today; but these consist at least in thematizing something which was not beforehand. A thematization which requires genius and offers a new language.

The work that I did then on “the theory of intuition” in Husserl was thus influenced by Sein und Zeit, to the extent that I sought to present Husserl as having perceived the ontological problem of being, the question of the status rather than the quiddity of beings. Phenomenological analysis, I said, in searching for the constitution of real consciousness, does not undertake so much to search for transcendental conditions in the idealist sense of the term that it does not wonder about the signification of “beings” in the diverse regions of knowledge.

In Sein und Zeit’s analyses of anxiety, care and being-toward-death, we witness a sovereign exercise of phenomenology. This exercise is extremely brilliant and convincing. It aims at describing a man’s being or existing --- not his nature. What has been called existentialism has certainly been determined by Sein und Zeit. Heidegger did not like anyone to give his book existentialist signification; human existence only interested him as the “place” of fundamental ontology; but the analysis of existence done in this book has marked and determined the analysis later determined “existentialist”.

Ph.N.: What struck you especially in Heidegger’s phenomenological method?

E.L.: The intentionality animating existing itself and the whole series of “states of soul” which, before Heideggerian phenomenology, passed for “blind”, for simple contents; the pages on affectivity, on befindlichkeit and, for example, on anxiety; anxiety appeared to banal study as an affective movement without cause or, more exactly, as “without object”; now it is precisely the fact of being without object which, in Heideggerian analysis, shows itself to be truly significant. Anxiety would the authentic and adequate access to nothingness, which could have seemed a derived notion to philosophers, the result of a negotiation, and perhaps, as in Bergson, illusionary. For Heidegger one does not “reach” nothingness through a series of theoretical steps, but, in anxiety, from direct and irreducible access. Existence itself, as through the effect of intentionality, is animated by meaning, by the primordial ontological meaning of nothingness. It does not derive from what one can know about the destiny of man, or about his causes, or about his ends; existence in its very event of existence signifies, in anxiety, nothingness, as if the verb to exist had a direct complement.

Sein und Zeit has remained the very model of ontology. The Heideggerian notions of finitude, being there, being-toward-the-death, etc., remain fundamental. Even if one frees oneself from systematic rigors of this thought, one remains marked by the very style Sein und Zeit’s analyses, by the “cardinal points” to which the “existentialism analytic” refers. I know the homage I render to Sein und Zeit’s seems pale to the enthusiastic disciples of the great philosopher. But I do think the later work of Heidegger, which does not produce in me a comparable impression, remains valuable through Sein und Zeit. Not, you well, know, that is insignificant; but it is much less convincing. I do not say this owing to Heidegger’s political engagements, taken several years after Sein und Zeit, even though I have never forgotten those engagements, and though Heidegger has never been exculpated in my eyes from his participation in National-Socialism.

Pp. 39-41

Continued.

2012-01-09T04:26:00.000-08:00

Levinas questioned, from Ethics and Infinity.

Ph.N.: When you came to Fribourg [sic] to follow Husserl’s teaching, you discovered there a philosopher you did not know beforehand, but who would have capital importance in the elaboration of your thought: Martin Heidegger.

E.L.: I discovered in fact Sein und Zeit, which people around me read. Very early I had a great admiration for this book. It is one of the finest books in the history of philosophy --- I say this after years of reflection. One of the finest among four or five others...

Ph.N.: Which ones?

E.L.: For example, Plato’s Phaedrus, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Hegel’s Phenomenology of mind; also Bergson’s Time and Free Will. My admiration for Heidegger is above all admiration for Sein und Zeit. I always try to relive the ambiance of those readings when 1933 was still unthinkable.

One speaks habitually of the word of being as if it were a substantive, even though it is a verb par excellence. In French, one says the being or a being. With Heidegger, “verbality” was awakened in the word of being, what is event in it, the “happening” of being. It is as if things and all that is “set a style of being,” “made a profession of being”. Heidegger accustomed us to verbal sonority. This reeducation of our ear is unforgettable, even if banal today. Philosophy would thus have been --- even when it is not aware of it --- an attempt to answer the question of the signification of being, as a verb. While Husserl still proposed --- or seemed to propose --- a transcendental program for philosophy, Heidegger clearly defined philosophy in relation to other forms of knowledge as “fundamental ontology”.

Ph.N.: What is ontology in this context?

E.L.: It is precisely the comprehension of the verb “to be”. Ontology would be distinguished from all disciplines that explore that which is, beings, that is, the “beings”, their nature, their relations --- while forgetting that in speaking of these beings they have already understood the meaning of the word being, without, however, having it made explicit. These disciplines do not worry about such explication.

Pp. 37-9

Continued.

2012-01-08T08:05:00.000-08:00

I'll be travelling the rest of January. There are daily posts scheduled and I'll approve comments whenever I have internet access.

2012-01-08T06:39:00.000-08:00

In-der-Blog-sein

The Chasm on elemental and mystical words.

In a alluring passage, Heidegger illuminates what he thinks the "ultimate business of philosophy is," or at least one of its many features.
Nevertheless, the ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself, and to keep common understanding from leveling them off to that unintelligibility which functions in turn as a source of pseudo-problems (section 44 in BT).
I love that phrase preserving "the force of the most elemental words" through which undergo life. We live through life in its depth and mystery. In this way, Heidegger has always had a poetic bent to a phenomenological orientation to human life. Moreover, this is also suggestive as to why Heidegger finds all art poetic, and why I find his works preserving this elemental force and restoring wonder to philosophy from my brief excursion into analytic philosophy. Some insights escape us if we do not hold fast to how we undergo and experience them firsthand, and some structures of experience cannot be encapsulated by previous philosophical frameworks. Therefore, a new vocabulary that attends to the phenomenological mystery must be brought to the fore while at the same time not creating an "uninhibited word mysticism" in Heidegger's own words.

2012-01-08T04:51:00.000-08:00

[Start][Previously on]

The Shadow of Heidegger

We met again. It must have been, for me, a foreseeable event. Heidegger wanted to talk to me. He had said so and had set a precondition. You'll remember it: As soon as I'm freed from some commitments. On saying this phrase from the peak of his rectorate it was clear he was referring to engagements that swirled from that maelstrom. Now, they were over. Heidegger was still Heidegger. He wasn't someone else. But he was no longer the Führer of Freiburg. It was to be expected that I'd run across him eventually. I entered the senior common room and there, on that morning of 1935, on that morning like any other, even while a pair of servants, anonymous, evanescent to the extreme of insignificance, did their job, there dwelled Being. A white light entered through the large window. It was so white, so real it hurt the eyes. It fell on Being, illuminating him. Heidegger was a man of the shadows, an expressionist, a romantic. But nature loved him: light, transparency, total unveiling all loved him. He was reading a think and worn book. He smoked a rustic pipe that he might have made. He was at the end of the large cedar table, not at the center. Off to one side. Seeing him I lost my breath. I don't know if you'll understand: Heidegger was Being. So much had he spoken of that sublime absence, of that absence that our forgetting created. So much had he spoken of that withdrawal, of that "withdrawal of Being", that he, for me and many other, was its only possible and desirable incarnation. Heidegger could exist amidst the forgetting and withdrawal of Being because he was the Master that asked about that forgetting, about that withdrawal. That mission gave him an abundance that we didn't have. We had it through him. He was the prophet of Being. He was the possible or impossible but only nearness, relation between Being and us. I walked, as if levitated, towards him; I stopped at his side and waited, for a while, for the remotest chance of his glance. There was no such glance. It was without looking at me that he said: "Sit down, professor Müller". Rarely had he honored me by calling me "professor". Always "Müller", like to the young student in Marburg. "If you were about to ask me what I am reading, don't. I read Nietzsche. It is the time to read, deeper than ever, Nietzsche." I told him that I also read Nietzsche, that I even taught him in my classes. "You neither read Nietzsche nor teaching him in your classes", he said. "You read a crude Nietzsche. A Nietzsche contrived by what today is National Socialism." Then he looked at me. His eyes always clear, his moustache, now thicker. I also looked at him, I also saw him. I'll tell you what I saw: there wasn't peace nor even any joy left in the face of Being. Only the opacity of the times we lived in. neither he nor I ignored it. Without him as the Führer of the university, the university would only drift off looking for the mediocre, for party dogma. "You read a coarse Nietzsche, built by Alfred Baeumler, watched over by Alfred Rosenberg, in the service of a biologism, of a mediocre racism that injures not just the sublime madman of Turin, but also National Socialism itself. These are bad times, Professor Müller. It was strange that he would be telling me this. I lived in the space of fear. I accepted fear as an essential part of National Socialism. Adolf Hitler has so many enemies that - of the two possibilities Machiavelli offers the Prince for governing: make himself loved or make himself feared - he could only chose the second. He made himself, then, frightening and everyone feared him. That is why he was the Führer. Because his will was the law of the fatherland. And I, who wasn't brave, was scared. I knew that fear (and its factical expression: obedience) was the most genuine recourse for surviving in Germany. Heidegger seemed to ignore that. Or he was ignoring it now, on telling me these words, lateral to those of the regime. He was Heidegger. Perhaps he could say them. But I wasn't him. Perhaps I should not hear them. I asked (I heard myself ask, the question came from somewhere, or it came out because I could not contain it): "Why are you telling me all this?" "I have to talk with someone, Müller." (Once again, only "Müller"! My question had diminished me. My question, that is to say: my fear.) "You are a good man. You were my student and you are honest. Your spirit has the transparency of the peasant spirit, or the originary. I trust you". I asked, again I asked: "Why did you resign the rectorship?" "Professor Müller", he said. (Professor Müller! My new question had returned his respect. It was a brave question. Not many question Being about the motives for its unveilings.) He continued: "Since 1934, only at the start of that year with thunder but without greatness, I knew my demotion was imminent. Following, subsequently, the killings of June 30 (I refer to this, Professor Müller, when I speak of thunder and not of greatness), I had no doubts about my actions. I could not take part in that. After that date the university would fill with odious presences, detestable to me. And so it was. I don't regret it." "But you are still here. You continue to give classes." "Don't worry: I'll continue. Are you attending my class in metaphysics?" I said yes. He said: "Don't miss the next one. You will assist not merely a class. You will assist, Professor Müller, to the ontological exposition of National Socialism, to the historical mission of our people as soul of the West. Listen, there is still truth and there is greatness in National Socialism. But it won't be Baeumler or Rosenberg who can express it". I swore to him I wouldn't miss it. "You can go", he said. I turned, took some steps and again his voice, ordering: "Müller!" I approached him. He grabbed me by the arm. Heidegger was strong. His hand was a claw, and a claw hurts. "There is still time", he said and his brow shined. "Don't lose hope. National Socialism is the only movement capable of reconciling man with technology. If that is achieved, we'll have saved ourselves." He relaxed his hand and returned to his reading.

I left.

[Next]

2012-01-07T12:24:00.000-08:00

Charles Brickdale reviews David Lewin's Technology and the Philosophy of Religion
.

One of the ways in which Lewin links the ontologies of Tillich and Heidegger is through the concept of poiesis. Art (and craft, by implication?) is one of the paradigm human activities here. Poiesis, according to Heidegger, is the process whereby contemplation leads the artist to an understanding of what is being disclosed to him or her and thereby, to acts of creation as much receptive as projective, as much passive as active.

Contemplation and attentiveness to what is being shown create a ‘clearing’ in which being can come into itself. As much as anything, this is key to ‘the origin of the work of art’ (the title of another of Heidegger’s essays). It is also a signpost to ways in which our engagement with technology might be more open to the inspiration that comes from transcendence and less at the mercy of capricious subjective will and the narrow ‘pragmatism’ of contemporary culture.

I understand that poiesis can lead anyone, not just artists.

2012-01-07T08:38:00.000-08:00

In-der-Blog-sein

Dan Conley on Emerson's “divine dream”.

We are accustomed to waking from various human dreams, finding enlightenment, ovecoming misconceptions. But here Emerson completely turns the metaphor on its head. It’s in our day-to-day understanding of the world, our relation to Dasein to use the language of Heidegger, that we exist in God’s grace, the Holy conception of the world. If it had ended there, the line would be profound. But it keeps finding greater depth, because we have the ability to awaken from this graceful dream and discover reality, the glories and certainties of the day.

2012-01-07T07:24:00.000-08:00

Existentialism in music.

Nick Cave on the secret life of the lovesong.

All in all it would appear that sadness is too fragile to survive the compulsive modernity of the music industry. In the hysterical technocracy of modern music sorrow is sent to the back of the class where it sits, pissing its pants in mortal terror.

2012-01-07T05:00:00.000-08:00

Ingrid Leman-Stefanovic on sustainability.

Heidegger will no more feel that a building is a physical structure that also refers to supplementary symbolic structures of meaning than he feels that language is mere symbolic representation. “Language speaks,” we are told. Language does not simply mediate between mental thoughts and physical texts; rather, it serves as the occasion for the granting of a world. Similarly, buildings are not mere physical symbols, but the sites of dwelling wherein, Heidegger tells us, the ontological event of the fourfold—earth, sky, divinities, and mortals—is spared and preserved.

What sense can we make of such outrageous language? Is Heidegger merely lapsing into mysticism or poetic musings, thereby abandoning all practical sense? Let me reassure even the most vehement practitioners of programs for sustainable development that Heidegger’s reflections here promise to return us to the most concrete, lived experience of building and dwelling. We must recall architect Christian Norberg-Schulz’s reminder that “to dwell in the qualitative sense is a basic condition of humanity When we identify with a place, we dedicate ourselves to a way of being in the world.”

Heidegger tells us that, inasmuch as we exist, we exist as mortals, for a certain finite “stay” on the earth. “On the earth,” however, also means that we dwell “under the sky” and, if we are fortunate, before the increasingly elusive divinities. The earth is seen by Heidegger to be “the serving bearer, blossoming and fruiting, spreading out in rock and water, rising up into plant and animal.” When one experiences the expanse and grandeur of the open sea or the spring awakens what Bachelard calls the “immediate immensity” of the forest, infusing the senses with the advent of new life, perhaps then one might begin to sense how “earth,” for Heidegger, captures the wonder of the originary grace of creation as it emerges from within the immeasurable and impenetrable source of the natural world?

P. 109

2012-01-06T17:12:00.000-08:00

Philosophy as a sitcom.

2012-01-06T05:12:00.000-08:00

Hubert Dreyfus on issues with Heideggerian AI.

If we can’t make our brain model responsive to the significance in the environment as it shows up specifically for human beings, the project of developing an embedded and embodied Heideggerian AI can’t get off the ground.

Thus, to program Heideggerian AI, we would not only need a model of the brain functioning underlying coupled coping such as Freeman’s but we would also need—and here’s the rub—a model of our particular way of being embedded and embodied such that what we experience is significant for us in the particular way that it is. That is, we would have to include in our program a model of a body very much like ours with our needs, desires, pleasures, pains, ways of moving, cultural background, etc.

So, according to the view I have been presenting, even if the Heideggerian/Merleau-Pontian approach to AI suggested by Freeman is ontologically sound in a way that GOFAI and the subsequent supposedly Heideggerian models proposed by Brooks, Agre, and Wheeler are not, a neurodynamic computer model would still have to be given a body and motivations like ours if things were to count as significant for it so that it could learn to act intelligently in our world. The idea of super-computers containing detailed models of human bodies and brains may seem to make sense in the wild imaginations of a Ray Kurzweil or Bill Joy, but they haven’t a chance of being realized in the real world.

2012-01-05T14:10:00.000-08:00

Holy nothing, Batman!

Caped Crusader quotes from Was ist Metaphysik? in Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises shock.

Slate has reaction from Richard Polt, Mark Wrathall, and Iain Thomson.

2012-01-05T10:09:00.000-08:00

In-der-Blog-sein

Downcast Lids on Havel.

In dissecting Late Socialism, Havel was always aware that Western liberal democracy was far from meeting the ideals of authentic community and ‘living in truth’ on behalf of which he and other dissidents opposed Communism. He was faced, then, with the problem of combining a rejection of ‘totalitarianism’ with the need to offer critical insight into Western democracy. His solution was to follow Heidegger and to see in the technological hubris of capitalism, its mad dance of self-enhancing productivity, the expression of a more fundamental transcendental-ontological principle – ‘will to power’, ‘instrumental reason’ – equally evident in the Communist attempt to overcome capitalism. This was the argument of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which first engineered the fateful shift from concrete socio-political analysis to philosophico-anthropological generalisation, by means of which ‘instrumental reason’ is no longer grounded in concrete capitalist social relations, but is instead posited as their quasi-transcendental ‘foundation’. The moment that Havel endorsed Heidegger’s recourse to quasi-anthropological or philosophical principle, Stalinism lost its specificity, its specific political dynamic, and turned into just another example of this principle (as exemplified by Heidegger’s remark, in his Introduction to Metaphysics, that, in the long run, Russian Communism and Americanism were ‘metaphysically one and the same’).

Keane tries to save Havel from this predicament by emphasising the ambiguous nature of his intellectual debt to Heidegger. Like Heidegger, Havel conceived of Communism as a thoroughly modern regime, an inflated caricature of modern life, with many tendencies shared by Western society – technological hubris and the crushing of human individuality attendant on it. However, in contrast to Heidegger, who excluded any active resistance to the social-technological framework (‘only God can save us,’ as he put it in an interview, published after his death), Havel put faith in a challenge ‘from below’ – in the independent life of ‘civil society’ outside the frame of state power. The ‘power of the powerless’, he argued, resides in the self-organisation of civil society that defies the ‘instrumental reason’ embodied in the state and the technological apparatuses of control and domination.

2012-01-05T06:51:00.000-08:00

In-der-Blog-sein

Alastair's Adversaria on the event of forgetting.

Heidegger argues that the forgetting of ‘ontological difference’ (the difference between being and entities, something that should become clearer in the course of this post) should be understood ‘not as a failing but as an event.’ Metaphysics involves a form of revelation of being, yet a revelation of which it is ignorant. This metaphysical stage reaches its climax in technology, which establishes the dominance of man’s subjectivity (‘bringing nature to reason’), reducing being to a ‘reservoir of energy’ at humankind’s disposal, yet at the price of our oblivion to being. The history of metaphysics as an ‘Event’ ‘reveals the very essence of a human behavior that demands accounts, gives ultimatums, compels the real to adjust itself to human needs “from the perspective of what can be calculated”’. This ‘Event’ is not the ‘result of human contrivance’, but is the destiny of being itself.

2012-01-05T04:49:00.000-08:00

Inter-stellen Overdrive.

Existential Non—Being loomed even larger in the writings of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Where Sartre's nothingness often concerned individuals, Heidegger’s was more cosmic. He took European history itself, the "history of metaphysics" as he called it, to be based upon a "forgetting of Being." being was replaced by concern merely for the individual "beings" that make up what we call "the world." Being, of course, never really goes away. But, as Heidegger puts it, it "withdraws" in the face of a world of things. leaving us, especially after the domination of the modern world by science and technology, without any firm bearings, fundamental values, or "ground of our human being." Modern human beings live in a world where Being itself is an "ever-present absence," a potential basis for life’s meaning that somehow always eludes us in its concealment behind the everyday world of material things, gadgets, and gizmos produced by modern technology. The result is the familiar and pervasive modern experience of anxiety, guilt, and loss.

Were Heidegger to direct a film about modern life, Pink Floyd would obviously write the score. For their music registers this sense of modern Angst, of living in a cold and expansive universe from which any clear meaning is absent though still sensing (hat it could or even ought to have some meaning. Obscured by Clouds, Wish You Were Here, and other titles plainly point to this kind of "cosmic absence," The Dark Side of the Moon is literally cosmic, the song "Eclipse" taking in "All that is now, All that is gone / All that’s to come / and everything under the sun." All of this "is in tune / but the sun is eclipsed by the moon."

Pp. 195-6

2012-01-04T16:42:00.000-08:00

In-der-Blog-sein

Integral Postmetaphysical Enaction recaps observations on OOO, Heidegger and the withdrawn.

2012-01-04T10:19:00.000-08:00

In-der-Blog-sein

The Key to Happiness on our time.

According to Martin Heidegger we do not exist inside time, "we are time". Hence, the relationship to the past is a present awareness of "having been", which allows the past to exist in the present. The relationship to the future is the state of anticipating a potential possibility, task, or engagement. It is related to the human propensity for caring and being concerned, which causes "being ahead of oneself" when thinking of a pending occurrence. Therefore, this concern for a potential occurrence also allows the future to exist in the present. The present becomes an experience, which is qualitative instead of quantitative. Heidegger seems to think this is the way that a linear relationship with time, or temporal existence, is broken or transcended. We are not stuck in sequential time. We are able to remember the past and project into the future - we have a kind of random access to our representation of temporal existence --- we can, in our thoughts, step out of (ecstasis) sequential time.

2012-01-04T04:20:00.000-08:00

In Philosophy Now 87 (Nov/Dec), Namit Arora on getting from brains to minds.

According to [Heidegger], the Western philosophical tradition, “has been focused on self-consciousness and moral accountability, in which we experience ourselves as distinct from the world and others.” Such ‘subject-object dualism’ dominates modern science, but fails to describe how humans relate to the world in their experience of it, which is quite holistic. Heidegger claimed that the subject-object model of experience, in which we see ourselves as distinct from the world and others, “does not do justice to our experience, that it forces us to describe our experience in awkward ways, and places the emphasis in our philosophical inquiries on abstract concerns and considerations remote from our everyday lives.” (p.48.) As Heidegger contends, “we are disclosed to ourselves more fundamentally than in cognitive self-awareness or moral accountability… Our being is an issue for us, an issue we are constantly addressing by living forward into a life that matters to us.” For Heidegger, our being in the world is “more basic than thinking and solving problems; it is not representational at all.” For instance, when we are absorbed in work, using familiar pieces of equipment, “the distinction between us and our equipment – between inner and outer – vanishes.” Or as Prof Blattner says, Heidegger “argues that our fundamental experience of the world is one of familiarity. We do not normally experience ourselves as subjects standing over against an object, but rather as at home in a world we already understand. We act in a world in which we are immersed. We are not just absorbed in the world, but our sense of identity, of who we are, cannot be disentangled from the world around us. We are what matters to us in our living; we are implicated in the world.”

In other words, it makes no sense to believe that our minds are built on basic, atomic, context-free sets of facts and rules, with objects and predicates, and discrete storage and processing units. This is why the methods of natural science, which look for structural primitives such as particles and forces, fail to describe our experience. Therefore, contrary to the implicit beliefs of much Western philosophy and AI research, a ‘computational’ theory of the mind may be impossible. Isn’t our common sense “a combination of skills, practices, discriminations, etc, which are not intentional states, and so, a fortiori, do not have any representational content to be explicated in terms of elements and rules?” as Hubert L. Dreyfus and Stuart E. Dreyfus asked in Making a Mind vs. Modeling the Brain: AI Back at a Branchpoint. The older Wittgenstein agreed, adding in 1948 in his Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology: “Nothing seems more possible to me than that people some day will come to the definite opinion that there is no copy in the… nervous system which corresponds to a particular thought, or a particular idea, or [a particular] memory.”

2012-01-03T03:43:00.000-08:00

Continuing with Robert Sinnerbrink on ontopoetic thinking.

In technological modernity, human beings are also appropriated within this challenging-forth. The modern configuration of the mutual appropriation of humans and Being is what Heidegger calls the Ge-stell, . . . as the essence of technology: “The name for the gathering of this challenge which places man and Being face to face in such a way that they challenge each other by turns is [das Ge-stell]”. The modern constellation of human being and Being takes the form of technology. The neologism Ge-stell . . . denotes the mutual confrontation of the human with Being, a challenging forth of the human in its ordering of beings in general, a confrontation that determines the constellation of modernity. Heidegger means to convey here the mutuality of production and disclosure between Man and Being: the process by which all beings are posited and ordered, including human beings themselves, within the modern horizon of Being which discloses itself as technology. In this sense, Heidegger rejects any uni-directional production on the part of human beings in regard to Being, since Being itself calls forth the process of mutual production and disclosure of man and beings that Heidegger is calling here the frame-work . . . Indeed, Heidegger outlines a transition here from metaphysical-representational thinking—which conceives technology as the man-made, that which is produced through the power of human planning and decision—to technology as [Ge-stell], within which “there prevails a strange ownership [Vereignen] and strange appropriation [Zueignen]” between humans and Being. The modern constellation or identity of human being and Being within the en-framing is a mutual challenging forth in which humans and Being are “delivered over” to each other” [einander ge-eignet sind] within an intimate relationship of simultaneous production and disclosure.

From Heidegger’s viewpoint of ontopoetic thinking that has leapt out of representational metaphysics, this peculiar relationship of identity or belonging-together can be experienced as the event of appropriation or Er-eignis. The latter, which remains as untranslatable as the Greek logos or the Chinese Tao, now becomes the key term of onto-poetic thinking since it no longer names a highest being as grounding principle or attempts to ground technology in an underlying substratum or subjectivity. The appropriative event no longer means a happening or occurrence but is now used as a singulare tantum. The term “Ereignis” (event) is taken from ordinary language, but is now used to name the more originary appropriation of man and Being than which we currently experience in modernity. Indeed, Heidegger suggests that the appropriative event is an anticipatory possibility that we glimpse in the “negative” or inverted form of the modern world of technology. Nonetheless, we still remain “on the way” towards this kind of non-metaphysical thinking, since the leap required would mean somehow no longer experiencing modernity, as the epoch of technology, in a metaphysical way.

2012-01-02T09:25:00.000-08:00

More on time from Espen Hammer in the NYTimes The Stone Opinionator.

Modern philosophy, especially in the European tradition, contains plenty of attempts both to diagnose and remedy this situation. Some thinkers — Schopenhauer among them — have hoped that philosophy could identify ways in which we may escape the modern time frame altogether. Others, like Heidegger, have tried to show that clock time is not as fundamental as we often think it is. In addition to the objective time of the clock, they argue, there are temporalities of human experience and engagement that, while often ignored, deserve to be explored and analyzed. Perhaps clock time is one mode of temporality among others. If so, then it is not obvious that clock time should always be our preferred mode of temporal self-interpretation. Perhaps we have to recognize a tension in human life between the demands of clock time and those other temporalities, between the clock or the calendar and life as it is truly experienced.

2012-01-02T08:44:00.000-08:00

In the Manilla Standard, Fr. Ranhilio Callangan Aquino explains time.

[Kant] wondered why everything we perceive is perceived in time: the basketball player moves his hand, THEN, the ball dribbles, THEN we hear it bounce, with “then” indicating invariable succession. Nothing perceived is timeless. And he arrived at the momentous conclusion, not that time was everywhere or that time was in everything, but rather that time was part of the apparatus by which we perceived—as was space.

But the German philosopher, Heidegger, thought that this was not fundamental enough. He did not deny that time is the measure of motion. He thought, though, that there was something more basic to time. At the moment, I am finishing this article, bringing the project of completing this column to pass. I will, thereafter, stand up and take a drink and then proceed to the other tasks I had set out to do today. Fundamentally, therefore, Heidegger wrote, it is human existence that is temporal. It is because “to be” essentially consists in realizing projects that there is such a thing as time. The time therefore measured by chronometers and watches, even the time marked out by the revolution of the celestial bodies is secondary to the time that existence fundamentally is.

2012-01-02T05:04:00.000-08:00

Robert Sinnerbrink on the struggle to think ontopoetically.

Heidegger’s attempt to enter the domain of the ontopoetically apprehended Sameness of human beings and Being requires a leap or spring away from representational thinking altogether. A twofold leap is needed: away from representational thinking and its conception of the human as animale rationale, who in modernity becomes the self-certain and self-knowing subject that represents objects and itself to itself; and away from the metaphysical conception of Being as logos, ratio, or Vernunft, that is to say from that systematic attempt to ground beings as a whole. From the metaphysical perspective, such a leap away from a conception of Being as ground appears to be a leap in the ungrounded, into the abyss or Ab-grund; but in fact the leap into non-foundational or ungrounded thinking—or what I am calling here ontopoetic rather than ontological thinking—is rather a leap back into the mutual appropriation of human being and Being. This leap into the event of appropriation that first creates the historically disclosed constellation of human being and Being is precisely what determines and defines what Heidegger understands by the “experience of thinking”.

This raises the question: what is the constellation of human being and Being within the epoch of modernity? Heidegger makes a transition at this point from non-metaphysically understood “identity,” as the mutual appropriation of human being and Being, to the contemporary constellation of this appropriation in modernity: the presencing of Being as the modern world of technology. Here the term “technology” is not used to denote the ensemble of technical apparatuses, equipment, knowledges or systems, projected by human beings in order to master nature. That is to understand technology, Heidegger maintains, solely as a projection of human will and action, an interpretation that fails to grasp the way human beings and all other beings in nature and history are themselves called forth or claimed by the essence of the technological world. Rather, for Heidegger, “technology” names the way Being presences in modernity; it names the contemporary constellation of the mutual appropriation of human being and Being, a constellation in which “our whole human existence everywhere sees itself challenged [herausgefordert]—now playfully and now urgently, now breathlessly and now ponderously—to devote itself to the planning and calculating of everything”. Technology, for Heidegger, is to be thought as the way in which Being itself appropriates human beings by challenging us into setting-up the project of securing, ordering, calculating, and stockpiling beings in general as manipulable resources or standing-reserve [Bestand], a process of endless ordering and calculation which carries manipulation “on past all bounds”.

Continued.

2012-01-01T09:56:00.000-08:00

Under the proposed SOPA and PIA laws many corporations could order this blog shutdown. Tell your congress person you don't want that to happen: americancensorship.org. It only takes a minute. Thank you.

2012-01-01T03:20:00.000-08:00

[Start][Previously on]

The Shadow of Heidegger

What was Maria Elisabeth Wessenberg in my life? What was I in hers? Does transcendence need time? Does it need to extend itself into that linear and bureaucratic temporality of the almanacs? No. The great achievements of a life are outside of time. They happen, wound and then flee, they abscond. I believe, sadly, that your mother and I had none of that. Not even the factical and lineal expansion of so called ordinary days. Nor the unavoidable event that cleaves the spirit and keeps it from being what it was. What did I do for Maria Elisabeth? I plucked her out of the Berlin squalls. It was the case; I assume at times, that there was more historic authenticity than in the years she later spent at my side. I plucked her from her home, I took from that gray, frightened, father, that could only show her the mediocrity of the "interpreted" German, he who said what everyone said and did what everyone did. The German of they say, not of his own words. I took her to Freiburg and I made her listen, beside me, the speech of Rektor Heidegger. Never, as in that moment, was there more historic authenticity in her life. But did she let herself be pierced by it, or did she merely observe the greatness and the storm as a distant spectacle? I never asked her. Not even next to her death bed. Did she stop being Bolshevik? Did she truly embrace National Socialism? We didn't speak about that either.

What was I to her, the man that caressed her sweaty brow in the exact instant of her last breath? There is a final breath, Martin. It's not a metaphor, it's not literature. Humans, on dying, exhale. If you read Homer you'll tire of finding that happening. What we exhale in that last breath is the soul. I never knew whether to believe in this. The soul is not a prestigious philosophical category. But then, why do we die exhaling? What are we expelling in that last exhalation? What is leaving us? It is being that leaves us, Martin. When we die we don't die, we cease to be. Dasein, on dying, is not dead. Death isn't. Death is a ceasing to be. Your mother, then, when she expelled that sigh, when that tenuous exhalation left her parted lips, expelled her being. The last thing we exhale is being. On exhaling we deprive ourselves of it. On exhaling, we cease to be. That is death. That event made your mother while I caressed her face. Nothing, I believe, united us as much. We were never as together as the instant we separated forever.

And then on to you. And what if you were the event of the erratic union, almost indecipherable, between Maria Elisabeth Wessenberg and Dieter Müller? It's your own existence that will respond to this question. It is your own existence that will strengthen the lightness of ours, or will ratify their insignificance. We're depending on you, Martin. Only one thing will alleviate this grievous load. We won't be there to judge you. Or yes: we will be there in your spirit, demanding of you. You will then have, one only path to happiness: to tear us out of you, exhale us. You'll have to kill us, Martin.

The day I buried her there was a hostile sun. That brightness was injuring my hurt, which was deaf and turbid. I hate nature. What indifference, so little does it accompany us. How could I feel myself one with it? Did it do anything for me? Had it allowed me a fresh dawn, with dark clouds, with dark birds? Everything shone. Everything was unbearably visible. You mother's coffin sank into the earth and the sun warmed its somber texture, drawing reflections from it, festive, idiotic luminosities. Not even paleness was allowed for our brows. The sun reddened us and we looked at each other and we watched ourselves burn, flowering out of season like stupid roses in the spring. I hated nature, Martin. I thought (against everything the Master had taught me) that maybe it deserved our devastation, the razing of no return we submitted it to.

Maria Elisabeth was buried without shadows, between the splendors of a glorious morning. I couldn't describe to me the revulsion that a simple butterfly can awaken in a wasted widower. Even the earth we put her in burned. And she, poor thing, endured soaring temperatures. She wasn't even conceded the charity of a humid earth, of a cool tomb that would allow her to free herself of the hell of the fever.

[Next]

2011-12-31T08:51:00.000-08:00

In-der-Blog-sein

Alastair's Adversaria in athiests closer to God shock.

The god of traditional onto-theology, the First Cause and Supreme Entity, is quite different from the sacred and divine as it functions in Heidegger’s thought. In rejecting the God of the philosophers (adopted by much traditional Christian thought), atheists may in fact be ‘closer to the divine God’. . . . The poet is the one who maintains the posture of openness to being, not seeking to close the doors against its arrival and retreat, circumscribing a pure presence. For Heidegger the gratuitous character of being is to be preserved, involving a forgoing of our attempts at mastery, whether through explanation or calculation, one of the means of which is the god of onto-theology. In abandoning the god of onto-theology we come to experience the ‘present absence of the gods’. However, ‘this absence is not nothing; it is the presence of the hidden plenitude of what … is.’ Heidegger sees this understanding of the divine within the Greeks, Hebrew prophets, and in Jesus.

2011-12-31T05:02:00.000-08:00

Slavoj Žižek on philosophy.

What did you understand to be the purpose of philosophy and
your role as a philosopher?

Oh my God, I don't think there was a clear vision of philosophy! I'm almost tempted here to quote the jargonistic Lacanian statement, ' It was something in me more than myself which decided' , because it wasn't even a clear idea. But if I were to locate a specific insight I would say that - and this is something that stays with me even now - retroactively, at least, I only understood what philosophy was at a certain elementary level when I arrived at the Kantian transcendental dimension. That is to say, when I understood the central point that philosophy is not simply a kind of megalomaniac enterprise - you know, 'let's understand the. basic structure of the world' - that philosophy is not that. Or, to put it in more Heideggerian terms : while there is a basic question of understanding the structure of the world, the notion of the world is not simply the universe or everything that exists. Rather, the 'world' is a certain historical category, and understanding what the world is means, in transcendental terms, understanding some pre-existing, at least historically, a priori structure which determines how we understand how the world is disclosed to us. This for me is the crucial turn.

P. 25

2011-12-30T18:17:00.000-08:00

In Co.Exist, Umair Haque on the coming global companies.

Poiesis--the root word of poetry--means to create, to generate. In the words of the great philosopher, Martin Heidegger, it is a transformative “bringing forth.” Companies in betterness generate new wealth, and a generative advantage means being able to multiply the Common Wealth to a greater degree than rivals. Creating wealth means adding to our metaphorical buckets, instead of emptying them--whether social, intellectual, human, emotional capital, or beyond.

2011-12-30T16:54:00.000-08:00

CTheory interviews William Leiss.

I must explain my special degree of attention to the issue of Heidegger's Nazism. In terms of ethnic background I am of 100% German ancestry; although both of my parents were born in Brooklyn, each was a member of a German family that had recently immigrated to the United States. I myself was born four months after the beginning of World War II, marked by the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. The world-historical crimes committed by the Nazis in that era -- from the late 1920s until 1945 -- are the responsibility of the German people as a whole, and they are a perpetual torment for me.

I think the key insight here is that Heidegger's Nazism has a special resonance for Germans, and anyone with a special affinity for Germany. Pretty much all German philosophers get around to commenting on the meaning of Germany at some point; comments that are generally skipped over, or a curiosity, to the disinterested. Philosophy should be, by its nature, the most universal and abstract of all the fields of inquiry. That Germany is an issue to German philosophers, I think this is due to the late emergence of Germany as nation in terms of European history. Similarly, Italy is a big issue for Machiavelli. For students of philosophy disinterested in Germany, Heidegger's insights into Aristotle stand on their own, irrespective of his moral failures.

2011-12-30T10:21:00.000-08:00

In The New York Times, Pico Iyer on Gelassenheit.

The urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

2011-12-30T06:17:00.000-08:00

Alistair Welchman on AI, from "Heidegger Among the Robots".

[A]lthough there are suggestive convergences between Heidegger’s phenomenology of the to-hand and contemporary practice in artificial intelligence, the phenomenology is making little or no substantive contribution to that practice. First, there is at least one significant counter-example to the claim that phenomenological structure matches causal structure: almost all varieties of contemporary linguistics exhibit a smooth-coping phenomenology; but the underlying causal structure is, as far as the best science shows, computational. Second, the kind of causal mechanisms implied by a naturalization of Heidegger's conception of equipmentality are both implausible and constrictive. Third, there are independent non-phenomenological reasons for the contemporary critique of traditional artificial intelligence, based in information theory, evolutionarily biology and neuroanatomy that are motivating both scientific practice and philosophical reflection (even of an explicitly Heideggerian kind). As a result, I conclude, the Heideggerian phenomenology is doing no contentful work in artificial intelligence.

2011-12-30T04:07:00.000-08:00

Hubert Dreyfus on the uncanniness of interpretation all the way down.

Dasein not only covers up its unsettling way of being; it uses the commonsense ontology to "close off" access to its structure. As Heidegger says in Division II:
Not only in exhibiting the most elemental structures of being-in-the-world,. . . but also, above all, in analyzing care, death, conscience, and guilt ... we have shown how in Dasein itself concernful common sense has taken control of Dasein’s ability to be and the disclosure of that ability—that is to say, the closing of it off. [P. 359]
Heidegger draws the following moral:
Dasein’s kind of being thus demands that any ontological Interpretation which sets itself the goal of exhibiting the phenomena in their primordiality, should capture the being of this entity, in spite of this entity’s own tendency to cover things up. Existential analysis, therefore, constantly has the character of doing violence whether to the claims of the everyday interpretation, or to its complacency and its tranquilized obviousness. [Ibid]
Transcendental-hermeneutic phenomenology, then, does not simply seek to lay out the general structure of self-interpreting being; it claims to force into view a substantive truth about human beings. Not only is human being interpretation all the way down, so that our practices can never he grounded in human nature, God’s will, or the structure of rationality, but this condition is one of such radical rootlessness that everyone feels fundamentally unsettled (unheimlich), that is, senses that human beings can never be at home in the world. This, according to Heidegger, is why we plunge into trying to make ourselves at home and secure. Thus the conformist, everyday activities in which human beings seek to give their lives some stable meaning reveal to Heidegger a flight motivated by the preontological understanding each human being has of his or her ultimate ungroundedness.

Pp. 36-7

2011-12-29T21:46:00.000-08:00

I'm back from my travels. In Paris I discovered an all-philosophy bookstore. They had a dozen issues of Heidegger Studies, the major works in German, and even a dozen of the secondary literature English books. I bought Frédéric de Towarnicki's Souvenirs et chroniques. At FNAC, the French Barnes and Noble, they had a book of photographs of contemporary philosophers. I may be compelled to move to Paris when I quit my day job.

I found a new square by the Sorbonne:

2011-12-29T13:47:00.000-08:00

Tablet Magazine on the least-requested Hanukkah Specials ever.

The Banality of Hanukkah (1962)
Taped during The New Yorker’s annual Christmas party from their midtown offices, this NBC special featured Hannah Arendt, at her desk, calmly explaining that Hanukkah is an ordinary holiday and the Maccabees were just ordinary people who happened, together, to commit an extraordinary deed (she also noted that not all the Syrians were evil, much as certain Nazi philosophers, for example Martin Heidegger, were good people). Arendt was frequently interrupted by the partiers outside her office: A clearly inebriated Joseph Mitchell noiselessly walked in, vomited on Arendt’s desk, and walked out; Lillian Ross brought in an unidentified man and proceeded to “neck” with him for several minutes before noticing the camera and embarrassingly fleeing. Some historians have suggested Arendt’s experience producing this special led her to be Tom Wolfe’s source for his articles about the magazine a few years later. Arguments over whether this special ought to be deliberately blocked from historical consciousness, so that nobody is ever subjected to it again, or specifically replayed every year, as a reminder of how awful television can be, have been known to ignite an Upper West Side salon to this very day.

2011-12-29T11:56:00.000-08:00

At sightandsound.com, Gertrud Leutenegger on Kleist and the forgetfulness of beyng.

On my journey home to the north-western tip of the island my thoughts circled, as if seeking purchase, around the Marquis von O... again whom, so unexpectedly, I believed I had recognised in one of the portraits of the people born blind. And I thought, too, about the protective obliviousness which is no longer accessible to us today and to that blessing which Kleist bestows with such striking frequency, of fainting in situations where something incomprehensible is taking place. He dispensed this talent for being able to fall unreservedly unconscious all the more generously among his characters the less it was granted to him. Although in September 1800 he wrote, still facetiously, from Würzburg to his fiance Wilhelmine von Zenge about the ceremony of Latin Mass. "I am convinced that all these compounds do not inspire a single sensible thought"; in May 1801, with his Kant crisis already well behind him, he reported back to her, full of yearning, about a person praying ardently at the altar in Dresden: "Oh, just one drop of forgetfulness and with lust I would become Catholic."

2011-12-29T10:49:00.000-08:00

In-der-Blog-sein

Be Late on moving on from Aristotle.

In contrast to Aristotle’s ontology, in which dunamis or possibility can have no final claim on being, Heidegger argues that “[h]igher than actuality stands possibility”. Heidegger reverses Aristotle’s ontological prioritization of being-in-energeia over being-in-dunamis. As mentioned above, if the “not yet” for Aristotle is only a partial, incomplete being awaiting its full actuality in the being-in-energeia, Heidegger argues that the being of Da-sein is such that a “not yet” constantly remains as something which is constitutively outstanding. “As long as Da-sein is,” Heidegger writes, “a not-yet belongs to it”. This means that Da-sein “exists” in such a way that there is always something that is still outstanding—a “not-yet,” which precisely must remain as an existential potentiality for Da-sein. To put it another way, Da-sein exists as a being-there insofar as it is a being that “is” and a “not yet”: I am actual and real, but my factically existing means that there is a “not yet,” a possibility, in me that must always remain to be actualized. If this “not yet” were not there, if there were nothing more outstanding, Da-sein, according to Heidegger, would cease to exist: I would become a no-longer-being-there, for there would be no possibility left of me to be realized. Because a “not yet” must always belong to it as its essence, Heidegger suggests that Da-sein exhibits “a constant unfinished quality”. This means that Da-sein is never fully totalized, can never achieve total wholeness, for its being must always be related to a possibility, a “not yet” whose elimination would be “equivalent to annihilating its being”. Although this “not yet” is by definition not something objectively present, it should not be interpreted in terms of actuality. The “not yet” is not unreal or non-being. It is for Heidegger a constitutive element of possibilization and, to that extent, positive phenomena. For without the “not yet,” Da-sein would come to an end as a being-possible.

2011-12-29T09:16:00.000-08:00

At The Guardian, a thirteen minute podcast by Benjamin Walker appreciating Friedrich Kittler, with Avital Ronell, Tom McCarthy, and the V2.

2011-12-29T05:29:00.000-08:00

Michael Lewis on the essence of Ereignis.

If Ereignis is the essence of Seyn then let us begin by asking what in turn is the essence of Ereignis? Heidegger name this essence explicitly and on many occasions throughout Contributions to Philosophy: it is the refusal which hesitates (die zögernde Veragung). This refusal which hesitates is precisely the gesture that will explain how it is that a withdrawal can give. Heidegger goes on ever more simply to specify the relation between withdrawl and giving, replacing these words--withdrawl/giving, refusal/hesitation--with others that bring us gradually closer to an understanding of the way in which this process 'actually' occurs, the process of abyssal grounding.

So far we have seen this process to comprise: being/beings, abyss/ground, withdrawal/giving, refusal/hesitation.

'Hesitant refusal' is the essence of Ereignis as the name for the slash or the process of rifting that seperates and joins the contrasting processes named above and that is ultimately the differenciation of the ontological difference called Seyn. It is necessary to follow this process to the point at which being can be seen fully to 'join up' with beings, in such a way that we may explain, as Being and Time did not, how being's withdrawal from beings as a whole allows them to form an organized totality or world. In other words, it is necessary to follow this process until we reach the thing.

P. 118

2011-12-28T02:07:00.000-08:00

The anthropocentric privilege, from Ron Broglio's Technologies of the Picturesque.

It is valuable to keep in mind two separate moments in Heidegger's work — the critique of technology and his response which weds techne to poesis. Heidegger's criticism of technological enframing proves useful as a means of asking what authorizes the current worldview. Much of ecocriticism employs this strain of Heidegger's work, and it is evident even in this current study. In working through a response to technological enframing, ecocritics seek a solution in the second element of Heidegger's work in which he joins the techne of technology to poesis. This second move, in which poesis brings together the fourfold in nature, bears examination and is worth redirecting. It is in this final chapter that I can now turn to the problems of the fourfold that begin this book.

For Heidegger, only humans are capable of poesis since only we possess language. The symbol system of language is the tool and visible evidence of our self-reflexive nature. Since Heidegger believes other animals lack language, they are relegated to live simply on the surface of things, interacting with other objects but not creating an interiority through self-reflection. Our privileged interiority of refletive consciousness provides a unique relationship to the exterior world. Language enables humans to create a clearing by which the world reveals itself as "the world worlds." Heidegger expresses this unique relationship in his term "the fourfold": as mortals, humans provide the space by which earth, sky. and deities come together. Such is the nature of human dwelling and building. In fact, only humans—not rocks or vegetation or animals—can have a world: "A stone is worldless. Plant and animal likewise have no world; but they belong to the covert throng of a surrounding into which they are linked. The peasant woman, on the other hand, has a world because she dwells in the overtness of being". By its life on the surface of things, the animal is linked to other entities; however, only humans are able to consciously make the link, connecting ourselves and other things together in the space of the world as world and thus the human "dwells in the overtness of being."

In terms of ecocriticism the problem lies ¡n Heidegger’s claim that only humans can have world. As much as Heidegger tries to avoid an anthropocentric relationship to being, humans have a privileged role: “[1.] The stone (material object) is worldless; [2.] the animal is poor in world; [3.] man is world-forming.” Without humans, the world continues to he the world. The stone is a stone, although worldless, and animals live and interact through the surface of contact and sight and sound but not inner reflection. The world worlds hut without any clearing in which the relationship among things is made overt. For Heidegger, human building and dwelling, or world forming. is the means by which the world is known not only for us but to the world itself. The world comes to know itself through human techne and poesis.

Pp. 193-4

2011-12-27T04:45:00.000-08:00

Andrew Cutrofello explores "The Ontological Status of Lacan’s Mathematical Paradigms".

The gap between modern science and Aristotelian science might not seem
so great, for it is easy to imagine that an “educated” aisthesis might come to perceive the new truths revealed by the new science, as when we learn to “see” not the sun rising but the earth turning. But as Koyré points out, for Galileo we do not see that the law of gravity is true, nor do we confirm the law of gravity through physical experiments, since all genuine justification takes place at the level of the thought experiment: “Good physics is made a priori.” For Lacan, the gap is completely radical, since it is not a question of substituting one “picture” of the world for another but of substituting mathematical equations for pictures. It is thus the truth of beings—not necessarily the being of beings revealed in aisthesis—that modern science reveals. This means that there is a radical disjunction between the order of the mathematical and the order of perception—or, to invoke Lacan’s dispute with phenomenology, that the order of the signifier is radically other than the order of “lived experience.”

Of all modern philosophers, no one has been more aware of the fact of this
disjunction than Heidegger,whose sole philosophical enterprise was to summon
thinking back to what he takes to be its proper (essentially Aristotelian) task, namely, to think the being of beings as this is revealed in aisthesis. Lacan’s strategy is the exact opposite. His aim is to show that the split between aisthesis and noesis has not been sufficiently appreciated. If Heidegger can be said to attempt to reclaim the being of beings by thinking the history of the truth of beings in terms of the way in which that truth itself unfolds within aisthesis, Lacan attempts to accentuate the encounter with the real that thrusts subjectivity within the domain of the truth of beings (i.e., the symbolic order), thereby definitively exiling the subject from the being of beings. It is the difference between an attempt to reestablish reality and an attempt to confront that loss of reality, which is the true consequence of modern science. Or, put otherwise, it is the difference between a discourse that sees in anxiety the mark of the subject’s being-in-the-world and a discourse that sees in anxiety the mark of the subject’s not-being-in-the-world. From a Lacanian perspective, the Heideggerian enterprise would be a way of attempting to reclaim the possibility of a sexual relationship, despite the rise of modern science. As such, it has the character of a refusal.

Pp. 156-7

2011-12-26T05:20:00.000-08:00

James Martin on Gianni Vatimmo path past metaphysics.

For Heidegger, Being is understood as an ‘event’, an opening to the world
and its possibilities into which beings are ‘thrown’. Human existence is not reducible to any specific kind of entity – such as nature – knowledge of which might serve as a stable ‘ground’ for establishing its ‘proper’ features. Rather, human existence is, fundamentally, a projection that is always ahead of itself, always acting and thinking in light of a future that is never fully attained. Being, as possibility, emerges out of nothing. What things ‘are’ is revealed in a process of ‘unconcealment’ whereby form, value and function are attributed to things, casting light on them in distinctive ways, but also holding back other possibilities in the dark. Human existence is fundamentally temporal, or finite, always facing the prospect of death. Never static and complete but – because death is the purest form of future possibility, one we never actually experience but constantly look towards – existence is essentially open and incomplete.

For Heidegger, further, western metaphysics has caused us to ‘forget’ our relationship to Being. Metaphysics treats Being as though it were a fully present entity of which we can have direct knowledge, rather than as an opening towards the future. Having surrendered our capacity to reflect on Being we have, instead, objectified it and, in the modern age, subordinated ourselves to domination by technology. This, he claims, is our ‘fallen’ condition, our sense of ‘homelessness’ and marks the ‘oblivion of being’. But instead of the truths of science and technology, Heidegger argues we need to revive a deeper, ontological sense of truth, one that serves not as a ‘ground’ to scientific knowledge but as the spur to greater existential awareness. If there is a ground to human existence at all, it is, he says, an ‘abyssal ground’, one whose very absence presents a permanent ‘potentiality for being’.

For Vattimo, Heidegger’s conception of Being as an event refuses all metaphysical certainties. This is a ‘weakening’ rather than a ‘refutation’ (which would be in the name of another truth based on a new ground), a ‘declension’ (declinazione) from the quest for absolute certainty rather than its substitution by another principle. Vattimo uses Heidegger’s term Verwindung to denote the way a non-metaphysical approach to Being invites a ‘working through’ of our philosophical inheritance. Heidegger deliberately employs this term instead of Überwindung (‘overcoming’) in order to stress the withdrawal from, rather than utter rejection of, metaphysics, and to rethink the truth of our Being as an historical and cultural legacy, an opening to certain possibilities handed down to us, not an objective fact or principle to be ‘discovered’ once and for all.

2011-12-25T05:40:00.000-08:00

[Start][Previously on]

The Shadow of Heidegger

Two things happened in 1935. Your mother died; my wife, Maria Elizabeth Wessenberg. And Heidegger, in Freiburg, no longer as Rektor, but as the unreachable philosopher and teacher that he was, read a course on the Introduction to Metaphysics. I devoured those classes. Those ideas gave me life. They made me feel, once again, that human intelligence has no limits. That in some, like in Heidegger, it is shot towards the absolute and it doesn't stop until possessing it. National Socialism was whatever he said it was. Werner Rolfe was wrong. No one understood Nazism like Heidegger. If Nazism did not reach his heights, didn't know how or couldn't manage it, that's a different matter. If Nazism blinded itself in the biologist racist texts of Rosenberg, of Bauemler or of Goebbels, if it gave a mediocre and mistaken version of the great Nietzsche, it is not Heidegger's fault at all. He, in his course on metaphysics, spoke of the greatness and truth of National Socialism, and he knew how to enunciate it. He was the one that thought our movement from ontology, from the history of the forgetting of being and not from prattle about the races. We weren't, the National Socialists, superior for being pure Aryans, for not sharing our blood with Jews and Gypsies, but for being a metaphysical people, for being in the center of the West, for carrying the burden of saving that spirit that was drowned between the tongs of North American mercantilism and Bolshevik massification. One again, I get ahead of myself.

It is, now, your mother that dies. Without knowing why, without understanding, overshadowed, suspecting, with pain or sadness or simple resignation, that death, hers, meaning nothing, which is, in the tragedy the world lives, within the massacre it is giving itself over to, a trivial matter that matters to no one, save to you and me, minor beings like her, suffocated in a universal disaster.

I expect that the master's classes had the power to rescue me from that abyss. From that anonymous vegetating in the lack of transcendence, I stopped being a somber widower and returned to my place in the West's center. In the center of Being.

[Next]

2011-12-24T04:13:00.000-08:00

Thomas Brockelman on the Heidegger in Slavoj Žižek.

The first step here must be to recall the way that the Heidegger of Being and Time underscores the finitist theme – which is, namely, through the existential thematic of “thrownness” (“Geworfenheit”) and related concepts. We find our finitude in experiences where we are overwhelmed by our situatedness, where we find it impossible to scrabble up beyond the way that our situation shapes us. As Žižek puts it, “A human being is always on the way toward itself, in becoming, thwarted, thrown-into a situation, primordially “passive,” receptive, attuned, exposed to an overwhelming Thing”. But, of course, this seems to be an experience of limitation or determination. Thus, it’s essential from the outset to understand that Žižek refuses to limit his Heidegger to such a “negative” dimension of experience. As Žižek puts it, “Heidegger’s greatest single achievement is the full elaboration of finitude as a positive constituent of being-human”. In what sense, “positive”?

In The Parallax View, Žižek suggests this “positive” side through a contrast between Heidegger’s Being and Time and The Discourse on Method of Descartes. In Chapter 3 of that latter text, Descartes proposes a kind of “provisory morality” to help him live while he entertains radical doubts about the foundations of his thought. He will simply follow the modes and customs of his country and will act according to those rules in a consistent and persistent manner, “imitating in this the example of travelers who, when they have lost their way in a forest, ought not to wander from side to side, far less remain in one place, but proceed constantly towards the same side in as straight a line as possible”.

While, as we will see, Heidegger, will himself fail to live up to this insight, Žižek’s interpretation of the implicit ethics of finitude opposes it to Descartes’ view. Heidegger’s most direct answer to thrownness, “anticipatory resoluteness,” (in Section 62) shares an apparently “provisory” status with Descartes’ morality for the doubter, but it also differs essentially. Recall that Heidegger proposes in Being and Time that we should make an ungrounded, abyssal decision to live resolutely. For Heidegger, to “decide” without guarantees (based on resolute thrownness) is not simply to “make do” with what we’re given (the impossibility of knowing the way things “really are”), as it still is for Descartes. Rather, as Heidegger writes, resoluteness creates the “situation” in which Dasein is (“The situation is only through resoluteness and in it.”). Furthermore, such resoluteness also produces a primordial self-understanding: “Dasein is brought face to face with its own uncanniness,” its irreducibility to any substantive identity that might later be disclosed for it.

Pp. 4-5

2011-12-23T05:43:00.000-08:00

David E. Tabachnick on the tragedy of decay, from "Techne, Technology, and Tragedy".

In "The Self-Assertion of the German University," Heidegger calls this relationship between man, technical knowledge and nature "the original Greek essence of science". While modern science is understood normally as a means to transform nature to serve human ends, Heidegger argues that the original Greek essence of science reminds us of our tragic impotence in the face of nature. While the technai discussed in Antigone, and likewise those discussed by Thucydides, may allow a freedom from of mastery of nature's dynamic influence, there is no suggestion it is enduring. Far from it, it is a freedom that is fated to be unmade.

According to Heidegger, where ancient techne was a scene of disclosure for overpowering nature, contemporary technology invites no such disclosure. Put differently, the distinction between techne and technology is found in the difference between temporary and permanent imposition. This is why Heidegger celebrates pre-Platonic technical knowledge and laments the instrumental rationality of technology.

This division is discussed in somewhat clearer terms in The Question Concerning Technology. There, the ancient craftsman's art is described as a "bringing-forth", a working in partnership or co-operation with the nature of materials to construct an artifact, such as a chair or a house, while the contemporary technologist is described as "challenging-forth" or changing the nature of materials to make them stronger, more flexible, longer lasting, etc. For example, a doctor may "bring forth" the already available health of an individual through medicine whereas cloning or genetic engineering "challenge" the natural bounds of the body creating a wholly new "artifact" with different characteristics. As Heidegger details, earlier human inventions did not permanently impose a new form onto nature. Under normal conditions, because the material of an artifact was still bound by natural characteristics, nature would always "shine through" the imposition of the artist, craftsman or technician. A carpenter imposes the form of a chair onto wood but once the chair is finished that wood still maintains its natural characteristics to rot and decompose in the same way a fallen tree rots and decomposes on the forest floor. In other words, the craftsman's chair is a site of openness for the revealing of nature. And, because this revealing comes through an artifact, it is all the more stark and tangible. The rotting of our chair or our house is more significant to us than the decomposition of a dead tree.

Pp. 100-1

2011-12-22T04:50:00.000-08:00

Hendricus Johannes Prosman explains Vattimo, in The Postmodern Condition and the Meaning of Secularity: A Study on the Religious Dynamics of Postmodernity.

In Vattimo’s reading of Heidegger, there is one more element that is significant for Vattimo’s understanding of secularity. In the wake of Heidegger, there is also a philosophical reflection on the idea of Lebenswelt. Vattimo describes this as a philosophy centering around the idea of a world that ‘stands prior to any possible fixing of categories.’ A turn to the world would, for Vattimo, imply staying within the scheme of subjectivity and objectivity. His rejection of Gadamer’s interpretation of the notion of Erde in the work of Heidegger is instructive here. For Gadamer, the idea of Erde functions as a critique of the centrality of subjective consciousness. For Vattimo, however, Heidegger is after a perspective that leaves the duality of subject and object behind. As Vattimo sees it, the ‘recovery’ of the irdisch or earthly character of Dasein, cannot be understood in terms of a reappropriation. Being, for Vattimo, is an immanent experience of Ereignis, but this immanent experience may not be understood in a material sense. The immanentism Vattimo has in mind is characterized by a differential logic, according to which Being shows itself in the experience of the continuously changing.

Vattimo’s position in contemporary philosophy can thus be located more precisely. As a postmodern thinker, he confronts the reappropriative intention. Instead of saving from nihilism a core of human subjectivity and humanism, Vattimo’s effort is to get beyond subjectivity and humanism. Nihilism should be regarded as an entrance gate to a new post-human experience, which is now dawning upon us. This new post-human condition cannot be exhaustively explained in terms of social history; rather Vattimo sees it as a new event of Being. In this sense we can speak of a postmodern metaphysics in the work of Gianni Vattimo.

Within postmodernism, Vattimo rejects the most common interpretations of Nietzsche and Heidegger. For Vattimo, a theological reading of Heidegger fails to benefit from the possibilities of a truly postmetaphysical philosophy. Such a postmetaphysical philosophy entails a positive nihilism, which enables a general aesthetization of culture, understood as the pluralization of lifestyles typical for our postmodern culture. In postmodern, mediatized culture, the difference between art and reality progressively breaks down. The resulting pluralism is on the one hand a very open culture, which is ready to accept every possible experience of being as an Ereignis, as an advent of Being. On the other hand it is less so. Vattimo vehemently rejects everything that does not measure with this pluralism. Every attempt to articulate a sense of a sphere ‘beyond’, or a realm of authenticity, is seen by Vattimo as a denial of the weakening of Being. In terms of secularity, this would mean that the secular for Vattimo is no longer accepted as a multiplicity of spheres, rather as the possibility of endless difference within the only possible sphere, the immanent sphere of pluralism. For Vattimo this nihilistic culture is a continuation of Europe’s religious past, in the sense that there is a ‘return of religion’ in Vattimo’s philosophy. But this returned religion has to follow the protocols of the weakening of Being. Vattimo works out the consequences of the weakening of being by means of the concept of secularization.

Pp. 186-7

2011-12-21T04:56:00.000-08:00

Ted Sadler asks about the manifold ways of being.

But what of Being (Sein)? Is this different from worldhood, or is it just a different way of indicating the same un-thing? Consider the various ways Heidegger speaks of Being. For instance, Being 'is' not, but rather 'it gives Being' (es gibt Sein). Being is a 'clearing' or 'open space' (Lichtung) in which beings can be. Being is an 'event' (Ereignis) which allows beings to 'be present'. Being is not 'the present thing' but an original 'letting presence' (Anwesenlassen). Being 'essences' (west) in the mode of a 'going over' (Ubergang) to beings. Being is the 'sending' (Geschick) of beings. Being has the character of 'withdrawl' (Entzug) in relation to beings. Being is the 'abyss' (Abgrund) of beings. Being is the 'most empty but also the fullest', the 'most common but also the most singular', the 'most obvious but also the most hidden', the 'most uttered but also the most un-uttered', the 'most forgotten but also the most remembered'.

Pp. 91-2

2011-12-20T03:16:00.000-08:00

On understanding Attic tragedy. From Hesiod's Theogony:

But the (goddess) Strife. the dark one. gave birth to Trouble, the one who brings sorrow,
As well as Oblivion and Absence and Suffering, the tearful.
Λήθη, “Lethe” is the daughter of “Eris.” She is mentioned together with Λιμος, mistakenly translated as “Hunger.” Of course forgetting is “painful” just as “hunger” Is painful and agonizing. But the effects of forgetting and of hunger on the state of the body and soul, i.e., in modem terms, the physiological and psychological, or, in short, the “biological.” aspects of forgetting and hunger do not “Interest” the Greeks. Therefore something else is meant when λήθη and λιμος are mentioned together It is not their effects on man but their own essence that sustains their identity. Λήθη, oblivion, is a concealment that with draws what Is essential and alienates man from himself, i.e., from the possibility of dwelling within his own essence. Λιμος does not mean "hunger" in the sense of the desire for food; the word is connected to λείπω, to leave, to let disappear, and means absence of nourishment. Λιμος does not mean the non-satisfaction of human desires and needs, but it refers to the occurrence of the absence of a donation and distribution. Such absence is essentially characterized by falling-away, as is concealment. Let us reflect on this: something falls and thereby falls away. This falling away is a kind of being-away and being-absent. What falls away no longer returns to what is present, and yet this “away” turns, in its turning away, against what is present, and specifically in the uncanny fashion that it takes no notice of it. Here we catch sight of the hidden essence of the oppositional and the confllctual, which explains why λήθη and λιμος are said to be descended from “Eris,” the goddess “Strife.” 1f hardship and suffering are mentioned here as descendants of Strife, then precisely this origin In suife should teach us to avoid the modern misinterpretation and not attempt to understand pain and suffering “psychologically” as kinds of “lived experiences.” Our usual interpretation of them in terms of lived experience is the main reason Greek tragedy is still entirely sealed off to us. Aeschylus-Sophocles on the one side, and Shakespeare on the other, are incomparable worlds. German humanism has mixed them up and has made the Greek world completely inaccessible.

Pp. 72-3

2011-12-19T02:49:00.000-08:00

Alexandra T. Earle-Lambert Ms. on Heidegger and grieving.

Perhaps one of the most compelling insights that Heidegger can provide to death and grief literature is that the problems that we engage with when considering modes and aspects of grief is that there may be no clear answer to this perplexing aspect of our existence. It may in fact be the case that we have to it is impossible to fully comprehend what it means to be human because as long as we are existing we are incomplete and at the moment we might be said to become completed we are simultaneously destroyed.

Perhaps rather than glossing over this real problem as many have, we ought instead, as Heidegger argues, engage with this phenomenon and consider what insight this perplexing element of our existence itself might offers us in our investigation. We might also then examine the perplexities of grief through the same lens, and, rather than attempting to explain how the process itself ought happen, we can examine the myriad of ways in which it does happen and ask what kind of insight this might provide into the human experience of death and grief. Perhaps the question ought not to be how should we grieve? But rather, what does the fact that we grieve, in the way that we do, show us about what it means to be human? And perhaps the questions and not the answers offer us the most information.

2011-12-18T03:10:00.000-08:00

[Start][Previously on]

The Shadow of Heidegger

Professor Müller, if you weren't killed it was because of me.

He said my clumsiness bordered on insanity. How, he asked, did it occur to you to aid a fanatic like Rainer Minder? I told him it was a risky theme, that of Rainer's fanaticism. The elevation of sensitive folk had been common currency in Germany for some time. That exaltation led one to embrace many causes with immoderation. We live, as you know, in that mode. Any tepidness is a dishonor or a loss, or even cowardly. Every new day demands decisions and courage from Germans. With politics diminished, they occur now in those crude expressions that perpetuate it, as master Clausewitz might put it, "by other means": the war. Or isn't what is going on now a war?

What is going on now is a massacre, a cleaning, a tallying of accounts, and a definitive ordering of the politico-military National Socialist apparatus.

I know, I said, that as you said, I owe you my life.

My men are not subtle, as you know. They erase the problem, and everything around it. I had to seriously warn them that your life was to be respected. I know that Goering managed to save Papen, by a miracle, or by being Goering.

Which is the same.

The same.

You too made a little miracle this evening.

Your life, yes. You are an effective professor and a good national socialist. You will lead the faculty.

And Biemel?

That Marxist shot himself this morning.

Marxist? Biemel, Marxist? He said he hated Marx.

Those are the worst.

I looked at him fixedly. I looked for his eyes. I wanted to see if what I would say might awaken a shine in them.

Lieutenant Rolfe, I know what I speak of. Biemel was not a Marxist. He was a national socialist, he hated Bolsheviks and Jews. He was, in all, a good German. Or - and forgive my search for precision - he was what today should be every good German.

Only today?

As long as the Third Reich lasts.

It will last a thousand years.

For a thousand years, then, a good German must be that.

Will you be?

I won't live a thousand years.

Will you be while you live?

Absolutely. Every day that goes by affirms in me the two passions that plot my life: fear and obedience.

They are the same passion. I can take one away. Fear. Nothing will happen to you, Professor Müller. Keep your obedience and teach in your classes the materials you will be given. We know you will do it well and that's all we want from you. Heroism has a thousand faces.

Why did Biemel kill himself?

I told you: he was a Marxist.

No.

Was he or wasn't he with Röhm?

That doesn't make him a Marxist.

He leaned his arms on his desk and laughed whole heartedly, with the outrageous disdain of victorious soldiers. Professor Müller, Biemel was with Röhm. That made him our enemy. And our enemies are whatever we say they are. If we win, they are so definitively. And for being so we kill them. That is why it is war.

What will happen to Professor Heidegger?

Nothing. He resigned in time. He doesn't enjoy our sympathies. He exceeded with his ambitions. But he has our immense respect. He will continue teaching. National Socialism is not what he believes it is. But that doesn't matter to anyone nor does it prejudice anyone. The Master, dear Müller, is as much a genius in philosophy as he is limited in politics. He believed that Hitler would be the Führer of war and he, at his side, that of philosophy. Aligning with Röhm lost him. But without Röhm he wouldn't have been imposed on Freiburg. In any case his enterprise was implausible. Adolf Hitler is the Führer of war, of philosophy, of the West and, very soon, of the whole world. It's an old story; great intellectuals approach great political leaders to control them through ideas. But great political leaders are great because no one controls them. On the contrary, they hate those that try to. And so the bitter luck of so many intellectuals - an odious word, as you know - and philosophers. Herr Heidegger, at least, has saved his life. You too, Müller. Now retire.

I returned in the same black Mercedes Benz. I didn't know (it was impossible that I could know) that I would travel once more, in the car, in another time, in another place. I didn't know (it was impossible that I could know) that I would see Lieutenant Werner Rolfe once again. Even less did I know, on seeing him, also in another time and place, he, with sadism and with a demented pride, would open the doors of the abyss for me.

[Next]

2011-12-17T05:45:00.000-08:00

Martin Woessner on the corruption of American students.

Derrida and de Man’s most prominent counterpart on the other side of the debate was Allan Bloom, who decried deconstruction as but another form of the relativism that had taken hold of American culture at large, and American education in particular. Bloom, a political philosopher who had studied with Leo Strauss, thought that Heidegger was part of an attack on the mission of university education itself, and he did not refrain from saying so. His polemical book, The Closing of the American Mind, which shot to the top of the bestseller lists after its publication, represented the antithesis of everything Derrida seemed to stand for. If Derrida, following Heidegger, thought that the humanities needed to be radicalized, Bloom fretted that they had already been radicalized, and the effects, in his opinion, were simply disastrous. To be sure, Bloom was not necessarily an objective analyst. At times, it was hard to tell if he was even being entirely serious. He lumped Heidegger’s pernicious infl uence on American students with other such lamentable and offensive phenomena as, in no particular order: rock music, European relativism (or nihilism), Woody Allen, and everything and anything to do with the 1960s, such as radicalism, the counterculture, and free love. His diatribe sounded at times as though it had been concocted by some counterrevolutionary government official in a Thomas Pynchon novel.
[. . .]
Unlike their European counterparts, who had been beaten to death with the canon of the great thinkers for too long, Americans saw the great texts always in a pure and direct light. Sometime in the 1950s, however, Americans began to read the Great Books, as the Europeans did. They no longer came to the Great Books without preconceived notions about their larger historical and cultural meanings. The switch, Bloom argued, had something to do with the “popularization of German philosophy in the United States.” The “antirational and antiliberal” thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger penetrated the America academy via émigrés such as Herbert Marcuse and others, producing what Bloom memorably called “a Disneyland version of the Weimar Republic.” Shorn of the pathos that defi ned its original European debut, the American version was a faint copy – it was, as Bloom called it, “nihilism without the abyss” or “nihilism with a happy ending” – but it still had the power to ruin American students. Innocently introducing Heidegger to American students was equivalent to “playing with fi re.” 60 Echoing his teacher Leo Strauss, Bloom warned that Heidegger led straight to nihilism. As a form of relativism, Heideggerian historicist nihilism undermined the authority of the humanities. It put all values up for grabs. It undid the greatness of the Great Books. In this sense, Heideggerian thinking had corrupted American students, plain and simple.

Pp. 276-7

From Heidegger in America

2011-12-16T17:21:00.000-08:00

I'll be travelling abroad for the rest of this month. My access to the internet will be sporadic, so approving comments may be slow. Allowing unapproved comments means oddles of undesirable spam. Don't panic, there are daily posts queued up. Happy holidays.

2011-12-16T17:03:00.000-08:00

Counterpunch has words of advice for understanding economists.

Another smokescreen offered by Western economists is that their economics is evidence based. What they mean is that they choose the methods that support their economic claims. How many victims of their intellectual largesse have they ever interviewed? In fact, the statistical methods that they use are ideologically embedded at the core of Western hegemony. I refer readers to the ontological issues discussed in Edmund Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences and Martin Heidegger’s response in History of the Concept of Time and less straightforwardly in Being and Time.

The point here is that the statistical methods used by Western economists to support their claims are hegemonic in the same way that their economics are. Alternatively, if the statistical methods are non-ideological and the economics they are used to support are non-ideological, both being “methods,” then who sets the goals of these methods and how do they escape the taint of ideology?

2011-12-16T08:54:00.000-08:00

In-der-Blog-sein

Larval Subjects links to Levi R. Bryant's recent book The Democracy of Objects. I applaud Levi for providing us with the full text of his book.

I've been reading Reiner Schürmann's lectures on Being and Time, and quite like his approach of interpreting B&T in light of the later works. Unfortunately, the book's content is not available on Amazon or Google Books, and I haven't had the time to OCR the bits I want to share. I can't imagine anyone benefits from keeping the book closed off.

2011-12-16T05:25:00.000-08:00

Vladislav Suvák on getting to truth via Aristotle.

If we analyze and ‘deconstruct’ the modern concept of truth as certainty, we see that it can be traced back to the definition of truth as correspondence first formalized by Aristotle which locates truth in judgment (Aussage, Urteil). At the same time, though, we find a deep mistake. Heidegger contends that this supposed Aristotelian heritage is rooted in a misunderstanding of Aristotle. It rests not on Aristotle’s account of truth but rather on Aquinas’ (or Isaac Israel’s) interpretation of Aristotle’s account of truth as ‘correspondence’ (Adequatio intellectus et rei). Even Kant, Heidegger maintains, accepted the view that truth is a characteristic of judgment in which there is a correspondence between the knower and the known. Thus, already in St. Thomas’ appropriation of Aristotle we can find the beginning of modern ‘epistemological theory’ (of truth) which misrepresents the thinking of the classical Greeks.

The Greeks did not believe that knowledge consists in a judgment of what is really true. Heidegger explains that this notion is alien to the Greek spiritual world. Thus, we must attempt to understand what Aristotle means when he claims that ‘judgment is true’ in a way that is faithful to his thinking. Truth for Aristotle above all means the disclosure of Being to us by itself. Only after Being has disclosed itself can it then possibly be presented in true judgment which refers to what is disclosed.

Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle follows the critical post-Cartesian tradition ushered in by Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl. According to Brentano, the sense of the truth has its source not in judgment but rather in Being. For Husserl as well the primary meaning of truth lies in the truth of the entity (Seiendes). Although Husserl’s notion of epistemological certainty resembles that of Kant, Husserl is also critical of the Kantian epistemological position (cf. Aristotelian background in Husserlian concept of ‘intentionality’). Truth must be understood as a type of selfmanifestation or givenness. Still, truth does not mean givenness as such but rather the possibility of a superior mode of givenness. So self-givenness does not imply for Husserl any relation to transcendental being-in-itself (as Heidegger charged against Husserl). For Husserl, self-givenness or ‘evidence’ is something that is immanent within experience. Of course, Heidegger does not want to follow Husserl’s desire to formulate any kind of ‘transcendental subjectivity’ in an effort to find a ‘last island of certainty’ (to use Patocka’s phrase) of human knowledge. Heidegger’s questioning of the traditional concept of truth , set in motion by Husserl’s phenomenology, thus proceeds by way of a strongly ontologizing interpretation of key texts of Aristotle (such as De Interpretatione I, Metaphysics Theta, and Nicomachean Ethics Zeta).

2011-12-15T05:04:00.000-08:00

Noëlle Vahanian interviews Catherine Malabou.

CM: Reading neurological or neurobiological books helped me to become aware of a certain change in the philosophical thought of death. A transformation of the Heideggerian notion of “being-toward-death” in particular. Heidegger says that death is at every moment possible. Neurobiologists make us conscious of the fact that my own metamorphosis after brain damage is at every moment possible; there is something like a break of the subject which is not death, which is another kind of possibility. To be destroyed as a subject when you suffer from a concussion, for example, means that you become someone else. The possibility of becoming someone else at every moment and for everybody equally--for even if we know that certain people are more likely to be the victims of such damage, we also know that everybody may undergo this kind of destruction at any moment--this possibility alters how we conceive of the subject. The fact of being mortal is one thing, and the fact of being plastic means being able to be totally transformed and become somebody else. For example, Damasio will say of one of his patients: “Elliot was no longer Elliot.” So, subjectivity must be confronted to the risk of the loss of itself at every moment, and this loss is not death; it is something different.

NV: Frightening.

CM: It is very frightening, yes. But at the same time, because we don’t want to get prepared for it, we’re always disarmed when someone we know suffers from Alzheimer’s or any kind of disease. We don’t know what to do, yet this is a constant existential possibility: Kafka’s Metamorphosis, it’s something like that when you become, when you wake up as somebody different. This, then, is according to me the great metaphysical teaching of neurobiology today: not to consider brain damage as an isolated possibility, rare things that happen in hospitals, but to consider them as a constant possibility.

2011-12-14T11:49:00.000-08:00

iMedia Connection on the future of Facebook.

Facebook will eventually become part of what philosopher Martin Heidegger would call the background of everydayness -- something that simply "is." And some people will really like it, and it will provide them with the kind of social interaction they are incapable of getting from the three-dimensional world around them. And some people will turn it off, never to bask in its glow again.

Isn't that future already here?

2011-12-14T04:41:00.000-08:00

Giuseppe Riva on the bleeding edge of cognitive neuroscience.

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger, underlined in his writings the following structural (ontological) features of the being:
- Spatiality: the space is not around us but within us;
- Being with: we exist not on our own terms, but only in reference to others. As we have discussed in the chapter, the recent outcomes of cognitive science support this vision. In particular we showed how different theories from social and cognitive sciences – Situated Cognition, Embodied Cognition, Enactive Approach, Situated Simulation, Covert Imitation - and discoveries from neuroscience – Mirror and Canonical Neurons - have many contact points with this view.

The overall picture we depicted is different from the traditional view of cognition. Cognition is no more the simple performance of formal operations on abstract symbols, but has instead deep roots in sensorimotor processing.

2011-12-13T20:20:00.000-08:00

The Arts Fuse reviews Savyon Liebrecht's Martin and Hannah play, The Banality of Love, staged in Massachusetts.

All of these are fascinating themes, but the play never focuses on the central question posed by the relationship between Arendt and Heidegger: why when so many of Heidegger’s most brilliant and influential students were Jewish, was Arendt the only one to espouse Heidegger’s political rehabilitation?

He wasn't romantically involved with the others? It's a play, after all, not a treatise.

More than an uncomfortable case of loyalty is at stake here: because David Farrell Krell decided to exclude Heidegger’s 1933 rectorial address (“The Self-Assertion of the German University”) from his anthology Basic Writings, Arendt’s apologia greatly influenced how Heidegger’s politics were perceived by a generation of American philosophy students.

I don't think the rectorial address comes close to the importance of the other pieces. If I were putting together a revised addition, there are many other texts I would include first. The reason Heidegger is read today is for his contributions to philosophy, and not his support for political nationalism. My issue with Basic Writings and the rectorship, is that Krell isn't being honest enough, or misleading, about Heidegger's involvement in his commentary. On the other hand, it's an anthology, Krell needed permission to use the pieces, so he sticks to Heidegger's explanation.

2011-12-13T05:10:00.000-08:00

Michael Worton on Char and Heidegger, and poetry and being.

The work of both thinkers is highly imagistic, if rarely traditionally mimetic: both reject the dominant (post-)Aristotelian concept of mimesis as the imitation of reality, preferring to re-present - and thereby to reconstitute - the phenomenal world through language, to show that mimesis is about movement, change, interrogation. From his solitary childhood onwards, Char found his inspiration in the close observation of the natural world, which he saw and heard as an echo of a lost, 'ideal' past. However, he also constantly and resolutely refused the Platonic concept of the work of art as an imitation (at two removes) of an eidos or Idea, preferring to conceive of art as a possibilization of the world, and ultimately of the absent and/or lost eidos. Furthermore, he refused the Hegelian distinction between poetry and painting on one side and philosophy on the other because Hegel's conception of philosophy as non-figural struck him as a betrayal of what 'authentic' philosophy should be. in his war notebooks, Feuillets d'Hypnos, Char wrote: 'J'écris brièvement. Je ne puis guère m'absenter longtemps',. This testifies to his commitment to active participation in the world, yet he also repeatedly insists that poetry is a solitary activity. In this, he is following Plato's concern with the unsayable, with the unutterable in the 'soundiess dialogue with myself, a concern which also preoccupied such 'substantial ailies' of Char as Braque and Heidegger, as well as Hegel, who in this respect at least is a major precursor for Char." Yet while both Char and Heidegger concur tangentially with Plato's thought, they ultimately find his metaphysical project just as antipathetic as Aristotle's investigations into 'first principles' which laid the foundations for the modem science and technology that both found so worrying.

As Char once wrote: 'La poésie est la solitude sans distance parmi l'affairement de tous, c'est-à-dire une solitude qui a le moyen de se confier', as Heidegger asserted in Gelassenheit (1959), thinking is 'Coming-into-the-nearness of distance'. These two statements indicate that both situate separation (from the present, but, more importantly, from the past) at the heart of their creative enterprises. In other words, emotion, especially the sense of loss, must be inscribed functionally within any act of thinking. Throughout their works, both lament the decline (Heidegger's Verfall) from an originary logos, and so have been described as writers of nostalgia, though they might be better defined as poets of the Time Between, as Heidegger described Hölderlin - poets of the time between the departure (and/or the failure) of the gods and their return. Heidegger has famously spoken of language as 'the house of being', in which all meaning and meaningfulness reside. This metaphor is drawn from an important concept in Empedocles' thinking, and it is significant that Char chose as one of the epigraphs to the 1945 edition of Le Marteau sans maître (The Hammer without a Master) the following fragment from Empedocles: 'J'ai pleuré, j'ai sangloté à la vue de cette demeure inaccoutumée for he too holds that language is our primal home to which we must constantly strive to return. In a 1965 interview, he stated: 'What is clear is that words must allow us, must spur us to enter the land [of first Being]: if this does not happen, the written word cannot become a poem.'

Hat tip to Aphelis.

2011-12-12T07:13:00.000-08:00

The Chronicle Review argues academic philosophy is caught in a trap of its own making.

We are saddled with early-20th-century modes of philosophy. In the 20th century, philosophy abandoned its Socratic heritage in favor of a disciplinary model of practice. Rather than engaging citizens in all walks of life on the issues they faced, philosophers spoke mainly to one another about problems of their own invention. In this we are the heirs of Kant. In the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Kant argued that we must separate the role of the technical philosopher from that of the general philosopher. Philosophy would demonstrate its bona fides by developing a mode of inquiry that only other philosophers could understand. To attempt both philosophic rigor and public engagement would result in "nothing but bungling."

And who is to blame?

We are. Philosophers. We did this to ourselves.

The profession of philosophy has had ages to make itself more relevant to what people—even within the academy—care about, and we have largely ignored the issue. Now that the financial crisis has hit, the chickens are coming home to roost. The philosophers at UNLV are good folks; I do not wish anything that I say to distress them. And let me stipulate that the benighted administrators who proposed eliminating the philosophy department within a university with a liberal-arts college need some serious remedial education in what a university means. But the crisis is not about one institution, it is about the profession. It is about the way philosophy is handled within academe today: the way it is taught; the way we hire new faculty; the way we evaluate them for tenure.

2011-12-12T04:15:00.000-08:00

Pauli Pylkkö has words of advice for neuroscientists.

In order to take Heidegger seriously in the context of neuroscience, we must have access to something which is genuinely aconceprual, something that is even in principle inaccessible within a single consistent conceptual system. We should try to question the metaphysics of subjectivity, undermine the dichotomy of subject and object, and plunge deeply into their holistic entanglement; we must deal with something that is unpredictable, not only due to accidental technical limitations, but also due to philosophical reasons; we must not equal meaning and reference, for example. meaning as arising from the reference of allegedly universal natural kind words; we must challenge the entity-based and class-based notion of scientific knowledge and the related idea of scientific realism; and, we must get rid of the Leibnizian identity.

P. 99

2011-12-11T03:55:00.000-08:00

[Start][Previously on]

The Shadow of Heidegger

Between the night of Friday, June 30, 1934, and midday of Sunday, July 2, the men of the Gestapo and the SS assassinated more than a thousand persons. The SA were annihilated, but so too were murdered all those who at that moment were in the way of the Führer's plans, or Himmler's, Goering, or Goebbels. What was left of the SA was integrated into the Wehrmacht. They lost, of course, all their power in the universities.

A week went by before we learned that apocalypse had not touched Martin Heidegger. I will die without knowing why.

Röhm was arrested by Hitler himself. He put him in prison and had a pistol delivered to him so he could end his life. The extravagant and unhinged Führer of the Marxist wing of National Socialism turned down such a kind offering. Hours later, dark like his end, two SS entered his cell. Röhm began shouting them orders; absurd, belated, even pathetic. Without fuss, they riddled him with their bullets.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to know the exact number of dead that Saint Bartholomew night. Some venture 1,048 persons. Never, in a period less than 48 hours, had there been a killing like this. It was said: Hitler has gone too long without resolving the problem of the SA. It was said: he owed an acknowledgement to Röhm, a loyal man, a fierce warrior of the highest caliber. It was said: he feared that Röhm might reveal things that only he knew. Finally, it was said: Hitler's decision wasn't a decision, it was an explosion. And from that came the cruelty of the proceedings.

The Führer directed everything. Also the decision about the scope of the killings was his. He, he insisted, leading an invincible army, had arrested Röhm, at the end of a gun barrel, almost drilling him in the face. He held the gun in his right hand, as beautiful as the other hand. "You should just see his wonderful hands!" What didn't we see then, that very night of Saint Bartholomew? What did we deny seeing?

You could ask me. I, now, recently, have asked myself. Not then. Also, now I ask myself if Heidegger asked himself. Could it assassinate hundreds of people in less than 48 hours, a movement destined to incarnate the soul, the core values of the West and to revive the greatest of the first beginning, the greatest of classical Greece? I never learned Heidegger's answer to that question. But only one year later, in Freiburg, on again as the awe inspiring teacher he was, he spoke to us. He dictated the course of Introduction to Metaphysics and he spoke, less than a year after the massacre, of the truth and greatness of National Socialism.

Once again, I get ahead of myself, Martin. When I do, I simplify. The whole is more complex. Perchance, confronted by all this, we end up sheltering in the Master's original philosophical attitude, the only one: to question.

It doesn't matter, says Werner Rolfe. I swear that now you will never forget me.

Here we are, still. They have just taken Rainer's cadaver. I went up to the room where Maria Elizabeth, controlling her terror so that you might not suffer, waited, and I told her I had to accompany lieutenant Rolfe who, luckily, had been my companion in Marburg and swears he will return me alive. Maria Elizabeth doesn't say anything. She looks at me and, miraculously, I understand she has believed me. I leave with Werner Rolfe. A black Mercedes Benz waits for us. He get in the back seat and Rolfe says, simply, to headquarters. Less than half an hour later we are there. During the trip we didn't say anything. But Rolfe has much to tell me.

Close or distant, the gun shots and screams reach us.

[Next]

2011-12-10T02:07:00.000-08:00

Thomas Sheehan on appropiration as δυνάμις.

All kinesis is metabole, the change-over of something into something, such that the very act of change itself comes to appearance as what it is, namely, as genesis. Let us take the example of the construction of a table. Lying around the carpenter shop is plenty of “material” with the eidos “wood.” But simply lying there, the wood is not yet considered hyle for, say, a table. In order for the wood to be read as hyle, the carpenter must have in mind (cf. eidos prohaireton) a new function for it, namely, as wood for a table. Precisely in its being ordered to a new eidos, the wood that just lies there becomes wood for . . . ,or appropriated wood. Thus, in a similar example Aristotle distinguishes in Physics G, 1, 201 a 30ff between bronze simply as bronze (he tou chalkou entelecheia hei chalkos) and bronze seen as appropriate for making a statue (ho chalkos dynamei andrias). The latter state of the bronze is controlled by the prevision and prescription (cf. kata ton logon; ibid., 33f) of a new eidos for the bronze.

With that in mind we may now ask: How does one see the table’s genesis as genesis? In the shop we certainly see various movements (the carpenter hammers, saws, carves), but our question concerns the movement of the wood itself into the eidos “table.” We cannot actually see the table yet (although we might envision it), and if we are looking for generation, we do not see merely wood as wood. What we see is the appropriation of the wood unto a table: we see the wood as appropriated unto, as underway to, a table. The generation of the table as generation is the on-going appropriation-unto-a new-telos wherein the wood changes from mere wood to wood that is appropriated for. . . . The kind of kinesis that we call genesis is he tou dynatou hei dynaton enteletheia (Physics, G, 1, 201 b 4f). In generation, the wood is read from the telos “table” (entelecheia) but as not yet fully there (hei dynaton). Its being is seen as the process of being-appropriated (on hei dynaton=on dynamei). When one has said that much, the mention of entelecheia becomes superfluous because it is tautological. Dynamis by itself is enough to express energeia ateles. “Appropriation”—Heidegger’s word Eignung, which he uses to translate dynamis—suffices to define the being of an entity that is in the process of generation and hence in the state of pres-ab-sence.

If we move from the generation of an artifact to that of a natural entity, we find the same structure, but with an important addition. The eidos that controls the being-status of the table-under-construction (as on dynamei) is from outside that which is being produced: it is the carpenter’s eidos prohairelon. Because it is external, this eidos of itself does not provide from out of itself the “appropriate material” for the table. Rather it sends the carpenter to the lumberyard in search of it.

However, in the generation of a natural entity (cf. “man generates man,” Physics 193 b 8f), the controlling eidos is within the very generation itself, and hence the process of generation entails the self-provision of that which is "appropriate for . . . ." The “from which” (say: Smith, Sr.) and the “to which” (Smith, Jr.) have the same eidos (“Man”). The process of generation as a being-underway from Senior to Junior (genesis as physeos hados eis physin — see 193 b 12f) never has logo outside of itself, but rather consists simply in deriving from one instantiation of the eidos (Smith, Sr.) the second instantiation of the same eidos (Smith, Jr.). Yet, as a being-underway of physis to more physis, natural generation is never a simply circling back upon itself (Smith, Sr. does not generate Smith, Sr.) but is always the production of a new and unique instantiation that never exhausts the power for yet more generation. The inexhaustibility of physis as power of generation (genesis) can be expressed as “a going bark into itself i.e., towards itself as a going forth”. Physis remains physis, an ever repeatable-retrievable pres-ab-sent source of possibility for the appearance of a physei on. Again we find Wiederholung. But as such it is “self”-appropriation of that inexhaustible hidden source into the limited appearance of its instance. Hence we have Eignung. We may draw the conclusion: Physis = dynamis = Wiederholung = Eignung.

From "On the Way to Ereignis".

2011-12-09T20:14:00.000-08:00

In e-flux, Sotirios Bahtsetzis on Rancière's active spectator.

One can set Rancière’s emancipated spectator within a broader concept of art as the state of “bringing forth.” In this phrase Heidegger conceives making art as something, “extended to every ability to bring forth and to everything that is essentially brought forth.” More narrowly, Heidegger describes the Nieztschean aesthetic capacity as “a relation to art of a creative or receptive sort,” which effectively reasserts the essential, aesthetic and even political position of the viewer. Putting a name to this capacity, Heidegger elaborates on the ancient Greek word techné, which is often translated as craftsmanship, craft or art, and he brings us toward a unique definition of art, that makes a clear distinction between art of the artist and the public: “Techné is often the word for human knowledge without qualification.” In difference to techné the word episteme stands for the knowledge or science of quantifiable experts. For the ancient Greeks, polis politics is not linked to expertise and qualification, but is a capacity that can be actualized by doing; it is a civic way of life and an ethos for every citizen. That is why Plato speaks about politike techné and not episteme. What Rancière proposes is not a manual for how to do art, as has been often misunderstood; instead, he offers an answer to the question of what the artistic state should look like. In a truly democratic way—meaning looking at things from the standpoint of people or of civic society—Rancière demands an aisthetike techné, not an episteme, one addressed to all as political beings, that would advance art to an essential position within a political constitution.