Heidegger's goal in Being and Time is a "destruction of the history of ontology" in order to open a new of thinking about Being. The principle contribution of Scholasticism is their interpretation of essence in relation to existence. For Heidegger, this thinking presents essence as a mode of production in that all existence is actualized from the possibilities inherent in a thing. In other words, since all things are created by God, beings were conceived as modes of production. Heidegger explains that thinking about things as modes of production is what leads to the modern industrial age of science and technology. The seeds of beings as something produced goes back to Plato's ideas where the copy is produced from the ideal model. Heidegger's approach to linking Antiquity and the Middle Ages to the present is through a reinterpretation of the philosophy of Descartes and Kant. With Descartes begins the modern revolution of dualism that completely separates mind, the res cogitans, from body, the res corpora. This becomes the basis for the separation between subject and object which is the epistemological grounding for all later sciences. Descartes' dualism is further advanced with the transcendental philosophy of Kant and his formulation of Subjectivity. Heidegger's project in Being and Time can be read as an attempt to overturn the modern subject/object distinction which began with Descartes' cogito sum, "I think, I am."

Pp. 21-2

¶ 8:54 PM 0 comments

[T]he Sorge Bears live in the Erschlossen-Heights next to the Black Forest of Stimmungen. Using the powers of Seinsfrage, they are frequently forced to contend with their enemies: Professor Descartesheart, his assistant Fregebite, and Auntie Kantie.

¶ 7:59 PM 0 comments

This 'them' and 'they' have a long history. In fact, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger believed that these ideas were basic to the human condition.

In Being and Time, Heidegger wrote of 'das Man' referring to the anonymous 'they' we bow to. 'They' say refugees are terrorists. 'They' say the Duchess of Cambridge is having twins. Another translation is 'one': 'one' does not question press releases.

¶ 7:38 PM 0 comments

Consider Heidegger. Had it not been for his French translators and commentators, German philosophy of his time would have remained an obscure metaphysical thicket. And it was not until Derrida’s own take on Heidegger found an English readership in the United States and Britain that the whole Heidegger-Derridian undermining of metaphysics began to shake the foundations of the Greek philosophical heritage. One can in fact argue that much of contemporary Continental philosophy originates in German with significant French and Italian glosses before it is globalized in the dominant American English and assumes a whole new global readership and reality.

¶ 4:37 AM 3 comments

This is not the first time Cristina has changed her views; several years ago, she told a gathering of local philosophers that, after much soul-searching, she had switched her allegiance from Martin Heidegger to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

¶ 6:26 PM 0 comments

[Heidegger] doesn’t say that truth is not (nor that it is) correspondence, for example, only that it must already be unconcealment in order for anything like the idea of correspondence even to make sense. Similarly, he doesn’t say that objective reality is dependent upon Dasein, only that things being intelligible as objectively real depends on a world already having been disclosed in a different, nonobjective way. Finally, he doesn’t say there is no such thing as linear sequential (or “clock”) time (9:47 am), only that the idea of linear sequential time is an abstraction from everyday world time (“bedtime”).

¶ 9:58 AM 0 comments

Of course, footwear as a visual fulcrum is nothing new. Genre painters from Jan Steen on (and probably earlier) have routinely put preposterous-looking Dutch shoes in the foreground of their messy households. Van Gogh has painted several pairs of peasants’ shoes that have seen better days, saturated with the weariness of hard labor, but still functional and not to be discarded. In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger speaks of these shoes as reflexive “equipment,” instrumentalized forms that mirror the starkly enduring lives of those who wear them.

The arguments of Arendt’s opponents here only get a cursory treatment. This is consistent with the style of citation that seems to be the major liability in von Trotta’s approach to history, as well as to feminism. The secondary actors in von Trotta’s biopics often feel like signposts. At the New York press screening of Hannah Arendt, representatives from the distributor, Zeitgeist, handed out a xeroxed packet identifying the various figures on screen; certain scenes, like a few (gratuitous) flashbacks showing Arendt with her graduate school professor Martin Heidegger, would be unintelligible if you did not already know who he was and that the two had a love affair. The arguments from her critics feel like actor Klaus Pohl’s stage mustache: grown on a bit too quickly and dyed too starkly to convince.

¶ 9:42 AM 0 comments

In March, an old Derrida nemesis, Jean-Pierre Faye, published a libelle, or a polemical pamphlet, titled Lettre sur Derrida: Combat au-dessus du vide, or Letter on Derrida: Combat Above the Void. It is a title that deliberately evokes Martin Heidegger’s famous “Letter on Humanism,” a text that has long been at the center of heated debates in France. The short book alleges that Derrida used back-door politicking to impose his own vision on the Collège international de philosophie (CIPh), a nontraditional philosophy school formed under President François Mitterrand's administration in 1983. Faye claims that Derrida wanted to force deconstruction on the collège, and in so doing make “the Nazi Heidegger” its “master thinker.”

¶ 8:35 PM 0 comments

He begins with a discussion of Malabou's first book, The Future of Hegel (1996). In this text, Malabou extracts the concept of plasticity from a passing comment in the "Preface" of the Phenomenology on the difference between speculative and logical propositions (§64) and slowly transforms it until it becomes something like the basic motor of the dialectic itself. As James puts it, Malabou tries to show that plasticity is "the key principle of the entire Hegelian system insofar as it governs both the temporal movement and the by turns dissolving and synthesizing force of dialectics itself". The concept reappears, two books later, in Le Change Heidegger: Du fantastique en philosophie (2004). Again, James lucidly describes the way in which Malabou, by tracing Heidegger's different uses of Wandeln, Wandlungen and Verwandlungen, rediscovers the logic of plasticity, but now on the territory of what Heidegger, in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, called the productive imagination. As James glosses the argument, what we discover by following Heidegger's changes is: "Being presents itself to thought not in the clarity and exactitude of concepts or conceptual determination, but rather in the plasticity of images and phantasms".

¶ 9:19 AM 3 comments

In 1931 Heidegger again considers the philosophical significance of ‘dunamis’; this time in the context of the first three chapters of book 9 of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Here Aristotle presents ‘dunamis’, or potency, in two ways: as a force applied in acting, and as a force received by ‘being acted upon’. In acting it is the potency of something else that is affected, whereas, in ‘being acted upon’ it is one’s own. These are not powers additional to being, but constitute what something is in itself; they are “indissociable from the essence of being”, as Heidegger puts it. However, for Heidegger, the fundamental meaning of potency so far as Dasein is concerned relates to the external expression of ‘dunamis’, i.e., to what it produces through acting. Since, for Heidegger, “all the phenomena found under the title ‘dunamis’” – capability, talent, skill, proficiency, being accomplished etc., are all gathered together in “ability”. As Dasein is the “being on the way towards an accomplishment.” However, all these productive actions relate to ‘kinēsis’, which is not the activity of being. For Aristotle the primary significance of ‘dunamis’ relates to ‘being acting upon’, because what results from ‘being acted upon’ in the way Aristotle describes is a change in the one ‘being acted upon’ to an active condition and into that thing’s nature. It is this notion of ‘dunamis’, i.e., concerned with ‘being acted upon’ by an operative reality that is the more important one for book Θ because this meaning of ‘dunamis’ is concerned with the deep structural features of being. Heidegger sees in ‘producing a work’ a decisive determination of the existential being of Dasein, “a fundamental posture toward the world,” and, by contrast, sees a lack of producing as a ‘failing’ of ‘dunamis’ - a sinking into ‘unforce’. Heidegger regards the other form of potency, i.e., ‘being acted upon’, as synonymous with “impotence” and “deprivation”. Because, for him, the potency that relates to the ‘being-at-work’ of a being relates to what it can bring forth and not to what it can actually be.

¶ 7:40 PM 0 comments

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¶ 7:58 PM 0 comments

If you don't mind having your ear bent for a bit, ask the captain about Martin Heidegger's essay on motor boating versus sailing.

¶ 8:51 PM 0 comments