But for Heidegger the presence of the other is not strange
“standing around” is not objective, but circumspection foiled in vain,
for every da-sein is mit-dasein, meeting others is its name!
Communion befits us more!

¶ 4:43 PM 0 comments

This is how the Upanishadic transcendentalism will proceed. It is for one conscious of the post-Hegelian philosophy of transcendental phenomenology of Husseri in its development towards the existential phenomenological traits of Heidegger and Sartre; to see where exactly the advanced model of the Upanishads can be located or reflected upon.

¶ 8:11 AM 1 comments

For my part, I must confess, Faye's dark vision of "any attempt to further the acceptance or legitimation" of Heidegger's works as posing "dangers to humanity and to thought" strikes me as too silly to merit serious discussion. And even without the hysterical rhetoric, his argument is so profoundly ill-conceived - the reasoning so feeble, the evidence so thin, the conclusion such a glaring non sequitor - that it's hard to know where to begin.

¶ 9:28 PM 1 comments

But what then is the Being of truth? What is truth in its unfolding? It is the truthing of Being; it is that process whereby beings manifest themselves in their Being. Hence, the Being of truth, its essence understood as the happening of its unfolding, is precisely the truthing of Being, the unfolding of Being into an articulated world. This is how we should understand Heidegger’s claim that the essence of truth is the truth of essence. Both ‘truth’ and ‘essence’ are ultimately words for the way in which Being ‘happens’, the way in which Being temporally articulates itself in a world.

¶ 2:18 PM 0 comments

Despite Heidegger's early pronouncement that philosophy is properly agnostic, in his later works, gods play an important role: the gods who need beying (§§191, 267) and the passing of the "Last God" (VII) in the Beiträge as well as the divinities of the fourfold (most notably in the Bremen lecture cycle of 1949 (GA79)), not to mention Heidegger's oracular pronouncement that only a god can save us (of Der Spiegel interview). The real Auseinandersetzungen between St. Thomas and Heidegger partially revolves around which of their approaches to divinity gets to a being centric understanding of the other, not whether one is atheistic or not.

¶ 6:48 AM 0 comments

MH: My intention is to work this essential content of the positive basis of the Critique of Pure Reason into ontology. By reason of my interpretation of the Dialectic as ontology, I believe that the problem of Being [Sein] in the Transcendental Logic, seemingly only negative in Kant, is really a positive problem.

¶ 8:39 PM 0 comments

For Heidegger, the central mystery is not the knowledge, but the Being, the existence. So that, he emphasizes the importance of understanding what is “to be” in the world and not “to know” it. Heidegger was mainly interested in the question that has escaped the consideration of philosophers throughout history, to know: what is Being? Or in other words, what does Being mean? Heidegger wanted to define our place in the world, since Being is the most fundamental aspect of life. In truth, the question of being was formulated by Aristotle and had been a preoccupation to the medieval Scholastics. So, what is the novelty of Heidegger’s approach? Heidegger notes explicitly that his way of questioning being is more original than the metaphysic way.

¶ 7:32 AM 7 comments

When I sniff the backside of a passing schnauzer I shall no longer have to speculate about whether it might inspire some flight of authorial fancy; it will be just what it is: a schnauzer's backside. I can once again dwell in the thingliness of things, as Heidegger said.

¶ 2:19 PM 0 comments

But while we’re being all meta (in that Ancient vein), let’s appreciate a certain elegance to the boringness of the article, which is essentially about the boringness of who Zuckerberg appears to be. Appears to be because that’s all we have to go on: who knows what he’s really like? And for that matter, who knows what anyone is really like?

But wait: isn’t the virtue of Facebook – like the rest of the Internet, like all of our technologies: to provide tools for revealing to us the truth of the world and the people in it? In his essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger summons the Ancient Greek origin of techne to describe technology as methods and skills, but a means for getting at true forms and ideas, the “bringing-forth,” from the Greek poiesis. Put this on your Wall:

“Bringing-forth brings out of concealment into unconcealment. Bringing-forth propriates only insofar as something concealed comes into unconcealment. This coming rests and moves freely within what we call revealing [das Entbergen]. The Greeks have the word aletheia for revealing. The Romans translate this with veritas. We say "truth" and usually understand it as correctness of representation.”

¶ 11:33 AM 0 comments

Labels: podcast

¶ 5:31 PM 0 comments

LR: You've said in the past that all art is repetition.

TMcC: Yeah: Joyce's "commodius vicus of recirculation" . . . Or Mark E Smith's three Rs: repetition, repetition and repetition . . .

LR: I'll drink to that. It's like a never-ending transmission that can't be switched off.

TMcC: The transmission thing is important. There's that Kraftwerk song, "I am the receiver and you are the transmitter", or however it goes. One way of thinking about art, or the novel, is that the writer is the transmitter, the originator: I have something to say about the world and I'm going to transmit it. But this isn't how I see it, I see it as exactly the inverse: the writer is a receiver and the content is already out there. The task of the writer is to filter it, to sample it and remix it – not in some random way, but conscientiously and attentively. This is what Heidegger says about poets: to be a poet is to listen before speaking; it's first and foremost a listening and not a speaking. Kafka said it as well: "I write in order to affirm and reaffirm that I have absolutely nothing to say." Writing, or art, is not about having something to say; it's about aspiring to a heightened state of hearing.

¶ 5:58 PM 6 comments

Norton savored the opportunity to help Nelson make classic thought witty, sexy and thrilling, even in a lecture hall. But the star got his biggest kicks from moments when the black-sheep brother, Brady, one-ups his sibling. "I think Brady, as the movie intimates, is smarter than he sometimes lets on. I really enjoy the moments when Brady is very conscientiously winding his brother up a little bit, saying things like 'Heidegegger' when he knows full well who Heidegger was. One thing that really makes me smile is when Brady pretends he's hunting for a word like epistemology when he probably knows the Oxford English Dictionary definition of it. He gets Billy's goat."

Bill and Brady were going to look even more alike until Norton was flipping through a book and saw a picture of a relaxed, hand-cut Tom Petty circa 1997.

"I just started staring at it. I said I think Brady might have to go a little farther astray in his look than we were imagining. Yet the thing about twins is that, despite superficial differences, they are so much the same. The truth is, Brady is very much like Bill. Brady, too, is a classicist. He says, 'I don't go in for digital' — he has his own classical aesthetic. And with his pot-growing he's a purist. He has a Platonic ideal of pot."

¶ 3:33 PM 0 comments

[I]n Being and Time Heidegger managed to package Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean thoughts in a jargon that made them sound like respectable philosophical doctrines, rather than mere literary conceits. By imposing a quasi-Kantian, professional-sounding form on Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean content, Heidegger helped make it possible for philosophers to be much more interesting to literary intellectuals than either Carnap or Husserl thought they had any business to be. He thereby founded the tradition that analytic philosophers refer to as “Continental philosophy”-a tradition which, in the US, is studied in many humanities departments, but not usually in the philosophy department.

¶ 2:06 PM 1 comments

Heidegger uses the term "contingency" in the sense of "dependent on or conditioned by something else" or "subject to causality," meaning that the notion of the transcendence-that-is-the-opposite-of-contingency stems from our intuition about the necessity of the first cause, or an intuition that allows a theoretical possibility of a discontinuity in any chain of causation.

In other words, insofar as we picture the world is an aggregate of adjacent or nested boxes, we need to have a model of how communication between these boxes is possible in some causal form of signal-sending. This line of questioning leads us towards a theory of knowledge. This is why Heidegger terms this conception of transcendence--the transcendence that is the opposite of immanence--epistemological.

¶ 11:48 AM 0 comments

Heidegger's essential questions--about embodiment and truth and individuality and society in a postmodern, post-industrial world--reverberate through my thoughts on religion and Marx and language and gardening and Canada and more. I don't really have the smarts or the patience to ask and follow through with serious questions of ontology and epistemology any more, assuming I ever did...but if I do find myself caught up in such questions, it is almost invariably the language of Heidegger and being and meaning and care which comes most naturally, if clumsily, to my mind.

¶ 9:44 AM 0 comments

Heidegger often says that Ereignis gives Man unto his essence. This follows from the fact that Ereignis is essentially the structural relation between Dasein and reality. To understand this, one has to appreciate two things: a) that the relation does not involve any particular Dasein or group of Dasein, but rather the very structure of Dasein as that being which opens up a horizon (or clearing) within which entities can appear to it, and b) that insofar as it is the structure of beings as a whole, Heidegger thinks that Ereignis is the very structure of reality itself. What this enigmatic statement means is that reality, in and of itself, necessarily involves the possibility of something like Dasein. What Dasein is (or the essence of Man) is not something that has contingently emerged within the world, even if the fact that there are any particular Dasein is contingent. This is the crux of Heidegger’s renowned anthropocentrism: there can be a world without Man, but not without the possibility of something like him. This is correlationism writ large, insofar as the very structure of the correlation (the relation of Man and reality) is not only taken to be a facet of the real structure of the world (or reality), but to be the only such facet that we can know.

¶ 7:34 AM 3 comments

Eidetic Phenomenology is descriptive of the phenomena, and is Husserlian in its philosophical roots. Hermeneutic Phenomenology is interpretive and owes its philosophical roots to Heidegger, a student of Husserl. Where the importance of choosing the philosophical school for a study resides is in how its findings are generated and used. Both schools deal with this differently. Hence the importance of not being generic in the design of the methodology, but philosophically specific.

In Eidetic (Husserlian) research it is important for the researcher to absolutely 'bracket out' prior personal knowledge and biases, to achieve "transcendental subjectivity". This results in the researcher holding in "abeyance ideas, preconceptions, and personal knowledge when listening to and reflecting on the lived experiences of participants". From these lived experiences features or essences that are common under Phenomenological scrutiny emerge that represent the phenomena's true identity. This is so so that a generalised description can be made, through a foundationalist approach, with a belief (reflecting scientific values) that these essences "can be extracted from lived experiences without a consideration for context".

In the Hermeneutic philosophical school (or even movement) its application has predominantly been in Theology, and its purpose is to go beyond mere descriptions of core concepts, or essences, "to look for meanings embedded in common life practices" to bring out what is normally hidden in human experience. Its focus therefore is on what humans experience rather than know within what Heidegger terms being-in-the-world.

¶ 1:03 PM 0 comments

Q. How did you come up with the name I’ve Lost?

JONES: About the artist name: I have been racking my brain trying to remember where “I’ve Lost” came from. I think it came from a bunch of reading of existentialist writers and philosophy, and was dealing with issues of loss of freedom, youth, added responsibility, etc. I was also thinking about the crisis of facing the void, or nothingness. Heidegger called it the condition of being forlorn.

¶ 6:29 AM 0 comments

By considering woman as Dasein, however, we are able to look into the depth of the life of Fefu and her friends and then have a better appreciation of Fornes' work. The play, set in New England in the 1930s, presents women living a highly "inauthentic" life, as they are being on the point of being submerged in the society. They struggle to show their authentic selves that are different from the anonymous crowd, experiencing anxiety and going towards death. In a nut, the characters lead an existence that is quite the same as Dasein does. What should be born in the mind is that Heidegger's Dasein refers to human being regardless of sex, but woman as Dasein needs to be considered in a more specific context.

¶ 4:14 PM 0 comments

According to the conception of Ereignis in Heidegger's middle period, human being or Da-sein is not simply "carried along" by the "flow" of Being, but must take part in the punctuated eventfulness of the conflictual strife of Being itself. Being is not simply "phainesthai, the temporal shining-forth of beings," if that were mistaken to mean that Being is merely a flow of surface appearances; for the strife of Being essentially involves the "negativity" of concealment and withdrawal -- which also indicates its depth dimension. To be sure, in Contributions Heidegger is in the process of turning away from the language of forcefully bringing to a stand the violent onslaught of Being (a language one finds most pronounced in the 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics), and turning toward his later conception of the proper comportment of human being as that of Gelassenheit to the Seinlassen of Being itself. But it is crucial to bear in mind that, to the end, Heidegger stresses that human beings must participate or engage in (Sicheinlassen) the appropriating event of Being, and not simply "go with the flow" in the sense of a sheer passivity.

¶ 8:08 AM 0 comments

Entities are independently of disclosure insofar as they exist as natural entities but their being “is” only insofar as there is an understand of being, that is, only insofar as entities are taken to be meaningful in relation to prior teleological interests. The ontology of being, of meaning, is thus equivalent to the affordance ontology of ecological psychology. The ground will afford support whether any animal is around to walk on it, but the perception of the affordance is relative to the perceiver. In this way, we can say that the perception of affordances (the disclosure of meaning, of being) is both subjective and objective, but neither taken in isolation. Objective, because what the environment affords is related to what it actually is. Subjective, because an organisms history of structural coupling determines the perception of what the environment affords.

¶ 3:44 PM 1 comments

Steve Finbow: You write that desire is similar to boredom; do you think that like fetishes (a concentration of desire) there are particular types or differing degrees of boredom?

Lee Rourke: Yes, I do. I would point anyone towards Heidegger’s three-fold explanation of boredom in his lectures from The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, which are possibly the only real exploration of boredom as an everyday thing in modern philosophy. The narrator of The Canal is continually experiencing each of Heidegger’s proposed degrees of boredom: the first form of boredom is a state of ‘becoming bored by something’, the second is ‘being bored with something and the passing of time belonging to it’ and the third is a form of ‘profound boredom’ where ‘it is boring for one’. It is in the state of ‘profound boredom’ where the feeling of emptiness begins, it is the most challenging form of boredom for Heidegger, and it is where things begin to fall apart for the narrator of The Canal.

¶ 8:24 PM 0 comments

Heidegger ends the final lecture of the course [The Principle of Reason] with a passage that seems more clearly to articulate his positive proposal. He derives it from Heraclitus’ account of the aion as a child at play. Aion in Greek is standardly translated as “epoch” or “age”, but Heidegger assimilates it directly to the “Geschick of being”. The suggestion is something like that history plays instead of develops.

¶ 11:21 AM 1 comments

You have multiple degrees in philosophy. Of the thinkers you studied or continue to study, who would have made the best trombone player?

This wins the award for most original interview question so far! Unfortunately I do not have a snappy answer. Wittgenstein was apparently an excellent amateur clarinetist and a world-class whistler, but his musical tastes seem to have been pretty narrow. Heidegger would probably have had some kind of woolly issues about technology and music. In general it is hard to imagine most philosophers loosening up enough to be good trombonists, so maybe it would have to be some sort of postmodernist. Or, actually, I can imagine Socrates being good at it — he was a good improviser and a champion drinker.

¶ 3:45 PM 3 comments

Somehow I feel that Heidegger's quip that "the essence of technology is by no means anything technological" is not particularly popular (or even well-known) in Washington (still, here is a guide to the perplexed; I can only hope that David Weinberger who once was a Heidegger scholar would take the time to spread some Heidegger love around town). This is too bad, because Heidegger was actually right for a change: given all the myths and misunderstandings surrounding modern technology, anyone dealing with it often misses its highly political nature.

¶ 3:41 PM 5 comments

Then again, the allusions to Western philosophy in which the novel is steeped (Heidegger’s notion of “clearing” as a positive space for being is lampooned, for instance, in Roithamer’s choice of a forest clearing to hang himself) are only another trap. The last notes Roithamer scribbles on some slips of paper are: “in the end nothing matters all that much” and “it’s all the same.” When the narrator catches himself searching for significance in a yellow paper rose, he cuts himself off: “If we keep attaching meanings and mysteries to everything we perceive... we are bound to go crazy sooner or later.” Bernhard avoids description; he uses hardly any adjectives. Yet an undercurrent of “meanings and mysteries” persists despite the absence of anything in the text to suggest it.

¶ 10:54 AM 0 comments

At one point in the book, you write, “It seems that boredom is not really that removed from desire. It seems that they are, in fact, the same urge more or less: the urge to do something.” The two main characters both talk about this urge leading them to violence. How are boredom and violence related?

Bertrand Russell said that "all human activity is prompted by desire." As I see it, we possess a simple desire to acquire things and repel things. I think that violence is the product of our inability to repel boredom. When I think about violence, then boredom for me is a good place to start. When people are bored, not just the palpable sense, or the feeling of having nothing to do, but truly bored to the extent that it has become their entire being, then the roots of violence make perfect sense to me. Heidegger, in his lecture "What is Metaphysics?" (1929) argues that this state of boredom is like a "muffling fog" that swathes us, and boredom itself, in "indifference" causing us to slide further into the abyss of our existence. Heidegger argues that such indifference is a platform for us to rebuild, or revalue our being-in-the-world -- so, for Heidegger this slide into the abyss is a good thing, it gives us space to observe things in finer detail. Ultimately, it affords us more time. Something we naturally crave. But he also warns us that such a slide can also suspend us in a state of dread (the same sense of dread I mentioned in an earlier answer), because this slide into the abyss is often perceived by us to be a slide into nothingness, something which basically scares the shit out of us. It is here that our frustrations begin, and it is also here, in our inability to survey existence from a plateau of nothingness that our frictions and frustrations arise -- which, as I see it can only lead to one thing: violence in all its multiplicitous guises. I suppose the danger here is for me as a writer to avoid the trappings of Heideggerian, or even Nietzschean Heroics, I mean who am I to say there is something to be found in meaninglessness and nothingness when there is so much bad stuff happening to people in this world?

¶ 6:49 AM 0 comments

In free fall, objects have an uncanny ability to escape, then evade a search. According to Don Pettit, who lived on the International Space Station in 2003, part of the problem is the terrestrial habit of looking for lost items down at your feet. “In weightlessness, this is not an effective search strategy,” he says. “Even after months of living in space, the one thing I never lost was that reflex.”

¶ 3:29 PM 0 comments

Universities, as such, were first created in the Middle Ages to train the clergy, and they began assuming their modern form in 18th-century Germany. For two centuries Germany was home to the best universities in the world, leading the field in philosophy, theology, philology and most of the sciences. But this was the same Germany that under Otto von Bismarck became a militaristic state and under Adolf Hitler a totalitarian one. Germany led the world into the two most destructive wars in history. Hitler always received higher ratings from students than from any other group in society, his views being strongly supported by a majority of German academics, with the world-famous philosopher Martin Heidegger setting the pattern.

¶ 9:30 AM 7 comments

Heidegger put special emphasis on the role of Dasein in enabling the being of entities to come to presence and manifest itself, by providing the 'clearing' in which entities can show up as entities. In case this all sounds a little too anthropocentric however, Zimmerman reminds us that Dasein did not own or produce this clearing, but rather is appropriated as this clearing. Dasein is in this fashion summoned by being and finds itself always already thrown into the world of entities and the ontological play of concealing and unconcealing. Authentic Dasein denotes a kind of embodied being-in-the-world whose essence is 'care', where 'to care' refers not only to ontic intervention but principally to the simple 'letting be' of entities; of not submitting them all the time to the calculating reason of human subjectivity. Authentic Dasein can be seen in this way as the 'shepherd of being'.

¶ 1:36 PM 0 comments

Heidegger saw science as a derivative activity with respect to other activities of the life-world; the making-present involves the transformation of something ready-to-hand to something present-at-hand and thereby the detachment of scientific entities and observations from the life-world, from human culture and history. In contrast to Dewey, Heidegger holds that the beings studied by the scientist are desiccated. "The botanist's plants are not the flowers of the hedgerow; the 'source' which the geographer establishes for a river is not the 'springhead in the dale'" [P. 100]. Far from being world-building, science serves to encourage eradication of experience in the world. Heidegger thus accepts uncritically certain assumptions of the mythic account, including the priority of theory, the detachment of the scientist from scientific entities and observations, and the independence of scientific entities from the cultural and historical context.

¶ 8:59 AM 1 comments

“And of course now no one can tell us that there is no God. We’ve passed through all forms. You remember Jack when I first came to New York and I wanted Hal Chase to teach me about Nietzsche. You see how long ago? Everything is fine, God exists, we know time. Everything since the Greeks has been predicated wrong. You can’t make it with geometry and geometrical systems of thinking. It’s all THIS” He wrapped his finger in his fist; the car hugged the line straight and true.

P. 221

¶ 10:40 PM 2 comments

Though quantum theory suggests that a vacuum should be fizzing with particle activity, it turns out that this paradoxical picture of nothingness may not be needed.
[...]
Quantum field theory tells us that short-lived pairs of particles and their antiparticles are constantly being created and destroyed in apparently empty space. A branch of the theory, called quantum chromodynamics (QCD) - which explains how gluons and quarks, the particles that make up protons and neutrons, behave - predicts that a vacuum should be awash with an interacting sea or "condensate" of quarks and gluons.
[...]
Now Stanley Brodsky of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, and colleagues have found a way to get rid of the discrepancy. "People have just been taking it on faith that this quark condensate is present throughout the vacuum," says Brodsky.

¶ 5:39 PM 0 comments

Heidegger’s idea of authenticity is that we can live in mode that moves away from, transcends, or in some way reflectively challenges the inauthentic mode. It is not about pursuing some kind of inner, true self that is separable from one’s historicity and imbedded connections. It is a different kind of world relatedness; it is a different kind of involvement in living. Yet it goes beyond our non-reflective absorption into the world of things. It goes beyond the sort of fleeing from our anxieties that we experience in our everyday routines and habits. We avoid the responsibility of having to make something of our lives within the context of finitude–that we are going to die. Thinking beyond roles and habits brings us face to face with our own finitude, with nothingness, with the terror of the possibility of non-existence.

¶ 11:53 AM 0 comments

Writes Dorfman of that time: “Instead, I instinctively chose, the first time I was truly alone with myself and took control of the one thing that was entirely my own in the world, my language, I instinctively chose to refuse the multiple, complex, in-between person I would someday become, this man who is shared by two equal languages and who has come to believe that to tolerate differences and indeed embody them personally and collectively might be our only salvation as a species.”

What Dorfman was echoing in those words, even if he didn’t explicitly acknowledge the reference, was the conviction of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger that “we do not speak language, language speaks us”. Of course Heidegger, while he may have made the notion famous, did not come to it out of nowhere either – the idea that the language we inhabit influences our experience of the world, that different languages colour our minds in subtly yet palpably different ways, has been a preoccupation of poets and thinkers since time immemorial.

¶ 9:15 AM 0 comments