From a special issue of Forum Philosophicum on Heidegger.
Interestingly, Heidegger diagnosed this transgression a few decades ago, claiming that the “process of annihilation encompasses the Earth” (Heidegger 2010, 11). By this token, the Anthropocene can be referred to as the age of annihilation.
(October 30, 1930 — December 25, 2021)
A renowned authority on German philosopher Martin Heidegger, Theodore Kisiel is best known for his book The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, which remains the authoritative study of how Heidegger’s magnum opus came to be written.
1951. Response to "Letter on Humanism".
For Heidegger’s actual history would arise when the experience of this homelessness of man is phenomenologically grasped, clarified through the phenomenological view of essence, illuminated in its intentional objectivity, and then thought through ontologically in terms of the being on which it is based. Heidegger’s illusion consists in: that he thinks that in this way he can find a more real historicity than those who struggle with the real, objective historical process.
| Text | Page |
|---|---|
| Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (GA 29/30) | 7 |
| Einführung in die Metaphysik (GA 40) | 3 |
| Sein und Zeit (Niemeyer) | 14 |
| Grundfragen der Philosophie (GA 45) | 154 |
| Der Satz vom Grund (GA 10) | 34 |
| Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (GA 13) | 198 |
| Vorträge und Aufsätze (GA 7) | 19 |
| Logik: Die frage nach der Wahrheit (GA 21) | 150 |
| Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (GA 65) | 13 |
| Holzwege (GA 5) | 277 |
* excluding pages in last year's top ten.
Original PDF.
Against the current English favorite of “enframing,” I therefore propose an etymological translation of Ge-Stell from its Greek and Latin roots as “syn-thetic com-posit[ion]ing,” where the Greek-rooted adjective ‘synthetic’ adds the note of artifactuality and even artificiality to the system of positions and posits.
Is Trakl looking forward to a new birth, as Heidegger claims, or is he lamenting a painful miscarriage, a tragedy of spirit that will soon drive him, not to the poetic sounding of silence, but to the irrevocable silence of suicide?
| Text | Page |
|---|---|
| Lectures and Essays "What Does Thinking Mean?" | 129 |
| Logic | 178 |
| Being and Time | 34 |
| Early Greek Thinking "Logos (Heraclitus, Fragment B 50)" | 59 |
| Pathmarks "On the Essence of Ground" | 134 |
| The Question Concerning Technology | 15 |
| Zollikon Seminars | 158 |
| Basic Questions of Philosophy | 167 |
| Parmenides | 120 |
| Discourse on Thinking "Conversation on a Country Path" | 64 |
* excluding pages in last year's top ten.
Original PDF.
Heidegger’s concern in the “Letter” with thinking is ultimately a concern with language. Thinking, the metaphysical privilege of the human, is an exposing of oneself to the dispensation, claim, and arriving of being such that this advent be brought to language.
He seems to think that, when we write by hand, we are in closer, if not immediate contact with the event of meaning, for that which is written in this way preserves—maintains—the bodily felt dimensions of meaning carried by the gesture.
Translated by Ian Alexander Moore
Original PDF.
[T]he fundamental question of ontology, namely, that concerning the meaning of Being in general, receives its answer.
The movie combines the theme of summons to appropriation, Zuruf des Ereignisses, with the theme of desert power in a single symbol—the crysknife.
Eyeglasses are thereby revealed as being—this we recall out of the depths of our collective, cinematic imaginary—the original and all-purpose cybernetic signifier.
[Ereignis] is the self-generating event of history itself, what makes history as the immanent event and enactment of a being—and thus historiographical narrative and explanation—possible.
[T]he truth of existence is the finitude of existence. The truth of existence is grasped – the ontological insight comes – in Angst or in some other ‘original experience,’ in einer ursprünglichen Erfahrung; some “decisive experience where we might learn with that abysmal depth the richness of being sheltering itself in the essential nothingness.”
Original PDF.
Far from being something to be overcome, such not being at home is something that has to be taken on, assumed as the very essence, the abode or dwelling place of the human being, an abode that prevails amid change and becoming, journeying and flowing.
A discussion of new book
with the author
Original PDF.
Φύσις does not make sense, Dasein does.
Original PDF in Gatherings volume 4.
Heidegger arrives at a more originary conception of difference that operates at the heart of the essence of truth and, in turn, beyng as event.
Original PDF.
Artemis and Apollo are for Heraclitus not merely manifestations of φύσις in signs but in fact are φύσις itself.
Dupin recurrently meditates on the right way of keeping a secret and mocks the police for confusing λήθη with ψεῦδος.
Original PDF.
It seems, then, that we should not take the “leap” as an act of voluntary self-creation in which Dasein pulls itself up by its own bootstraps; instead, the emergence of Dasein is a happening that subjects humanity to a global transformation, or exposes it to a new dimension.
Doctor Manhattan is no longer human, but he remains a case of Dasein.
Original PDF in Filozofia volume 75 No. 5.
[I]n the structural relation of Being to the human being, Being precedes and exceeds the human being and is in no way reducible to what is posited or constituted in “meaning” by the human being.
Freedom is here not thought as a property of the human will or in terms of the causality of the will; it is conceived, rather, as an event—as the granting and revealing of possibility, yet also, therefore, as the withholding and concealment of possibility—and as such is nothing human.
Original PDF in Gatherings volume 9.
Aristotle’s investigation shows that αἰτία (cause), like being, is said in many ways and that any substantive investigation into causes will, therefore, have to account for τύχη and αὐτόματον.
Heidegger is drawing out different aspects of Being and the Holy that belong to all epochs, even if they cannot always be seen as such, and even if different gods show up in them.
The 56th annual Heidegger Circle Conference, to be held at the University of Memphis on May 26-29, 2022.
All submissions must be received by February 1, 2022.
More than the philosopher and the scientist, therefore, the poet knows that language is disclosive of nothing, which denotes not the negation of something positive but the advent of the retreat of the appropriating event, the nullity or negativity that precedes the fissure into being and nonbeing.
Original PDF.
Today, beyond any of this, we live on the terms of the virtual, our machination is that of social media, the digital, our connected, constantly agitated life lived here and elsewhere at all times. We need a new language for today’s time‑space.
[W]e intend to “deterritorialise” Heidegger, i.e. to re-position Heidegger’s thought in a theoretical context open to, but not limited by, Heidegger’s own concerns.
Ereignis is not an event at all, not even “the event of appropriation.”
Heidegger asserts that lógos pseudēs, a distorting lógos, is possible “only if nonbeings can be (237a2)” (GA 19, 410/284). So, the question of falsehood, on his reading, concerns both the ontological status of ψεῦδος, i.e. the being of non-beings, and the structure of lógos itself.
The act of drinking the wine Heidegger describes as conditional, making the jug a thing that is located in the place where it functions not as just another jug but a jug of that place.
Traditional hero that Wendy is, ἄτη is at hand to snare her into tragedy.
[B]oth Schürmann and Heidegger would agree that technology inaugurates the “annihilation” and “extinction” of metaphysical principles and positions and opens onto the anarchic origin of being as simple presencing—nothing more, nothing less.
This is the HTML version of a paper in Gatherings 2017. The original PDF file is on the Heidegger Circle web site.
[T]he singer can seem to echo Heidegger’s insight into the ancient goddess of truth herself, Aletheia, tacked between the marvels of perspective, and we remember, as Lacan tells us, as Nietzsche has told us, that truth rises naked from the depths, as the ancients depict her, with a mirror in her hand.
To be in love is said here to be in the love, to be in Eros and understood as the same as being urged to experience the most proper meaning of existence.
With contributions from: Scott M. Campbell, Lee Braver, Morganna Lambeth, Richard Polt, Harri Mäcklin, Jussi Backman, John J. Preston, David Liakos, Iain Thomson, Katherine Ward, William Blattner, Megan Altman, Carolyn Culbertson, and Timothy Quinn
Asking the question of Being (and, drawing our attention to this question is his significant contribution) is an important addition to, but can never replace, asking moral questions in the spirit of rationality and freedom.
In Heidegger's path from transcendental philosophy through "thinking," Žižek would argue that Heidegger should have stuck with transcendentalism.
Maybe Heidegger, relegating Nietzsche to the Roman, gains for himself the chance to claim the Greek other beginning. If so, the Alemannic and the local betray some of his ambitions, the fox, as Hannah Arendt spoke of him, pointing to physiognomic traits evident in the younger man, still present as Heidegger aged.
By standing outside her Being in the truth of Being, the human preserves the essence of her Being.
What, viewed from a Heideggerian and early-Greek standpoint, [Gestell] suppresses, is, in the case of all non-human-made things, what we are willing to call their “translucent phenomenality,” i.e. their translucent-ness to “being” – their auto-poietic shining forth into the region of the unconcealed.
Original PDF.
We have always already “suffered” the burden of thrown-openness as the clearing. No prior agent has acted upon ex-sistence, forced facticity upon us, thrown us into being-needed for the sake of intelligibility at all.
Allen Scult ticks away the moments on his This Old Man podcast.
[W]hat is sought is an understanding of freedom not as a foundation for being, in the sense of its ultimate explicability, but rather as the neutral event through which Dasein is situated before and amongst beings.
[B]oth social and cultural revolutions have driven the larger ‘human revolution’, or the general process of hominization along its trajectory towards ‘we moderns’. Such revolutions are necessary to fore-ground the Upper Palaeolithic record where local styles and time-space cultures are identifiable.
Thinking that is the not yet, that happens as the not yet of itself, has always anticipated the present.
Entschlossenheit is not altogether for keeps: "Dasein is already in [Unentschlossenheit], and soon, perhaps, will be in it again." Yet in the phrase Gaddis puts to various uses semper aliquid haeret, a bit always sticks (flesh to soul, tell to fake, shit to heel); authentic Entschlossenheit "resolves to keep repeating itself;" a glimpse of 'radical opened-upness' sticks in the Sein.
The fundamental concept of teshuva makes room for thought, delineating a horizon in which it ultimately would be possible to illuminate the very event of “thinking”, as it unfolds in Heidegger’s efforts.
Heidegger’s “originary ethics” must derive its directive, its normativity, its point of reference, hence its measure, from the questioning of being—from our thoughtful exposure to the ontological dimensionality into which that questioning throws us.
Heidegger kept unaltered his differentiated assessment of the Christian experience and its philosophical-theological interpretation. Religion as such constitutes a fundamental possibility of human existence, in the form of myth, as opposed to philosophy.
Wherever we locate the power, the claim is that the play first opens the Greek – and so Western – understanding of being (as uncanny, and so as φύσις) and of the human being as open to being and able to stand authentically towards it.
The Heideggerian “questioning” is already a way of responding, and the politico-magical efficacy of the invocation of being makes up for the “fundamentally” unsteady character of the intellectual construction: being is a nonhuman and anthropomorphic figure.
The 'outside' world is not for us what we see, just because it is out there. It's made from what we take care about, what's of interest to us. The things that are of no interest in us and are out there, are for us a residue, a waste product, compared to things that we have an interest in.
Here Schürmann undertakes the reflective question, underway to be sure towards the event, the inception of Ereignis: “What, then, is it that already holds us? Nothing other than the post-principial economy made possible by technology as the completion of metaphysics.”
[W]hen Heidegger insists that the essence of Technik is not itself technisch, it may well be that the essence of techne is to be thought through an invocation of a movement of nihilism, in this double sense of a covering up of exactly that to which Heidegger is trying to draw attention.
So from (Wer & Was) – beings – we get (Sein & (Wer & Was)) – being and beings, the ‘narrow’ ontological difference. Thence (Lichtung & (Sein & (Wer & Was))) – the ‘broad’ ontological difference between the clearing and being-and-beings.
The philosophers must return to the cave not only in order to save the polis, but also in order to understand the political realm in its particularity after spending time in the light of the intelligible forms.
The projection and configuring of possibility belongs, rather to Being itself as such, as a happening to which Dasein (or the Being of the human being) is exposed in advance – an antecedent happening or “event” (Ereignis) that “destines” Being in this or that historical manner.
The combined texts of GA 45, 65, 66, 69, 70, 71, and 73 are a total of 5242 pages. Seven volumes written in German by Heidegger (and a few pages of editors and translator notes). Five volumes of English translations. The combined total of indexed words adds up to 60,309 words.
[T]he Gestell of technology can only enable global capital because, using Heidegger’s account of mathematics, economics is already embedded in the origin of the history of metaphysics
The πόλις is thus not political, but is that from which all that is human takes place (which is what history is), including and especially that which we call political. Thus our understanding of politics presupposes the πόλις and not the other way around.
In 1935 Heidegger very clearly credited the entire philosophical tradition – not just as far back as Plato, but including the Presocratics – with asking about entities as such and as a whole, which is to say, entities in their being. This is why in 1935 he was able to slide so easily back and forth between saying on one page that φύσις means “being itself” and on the very next page that it means “entities as such and as a whole”.
Heidegger sees in Aristotle here the last echo of the pre-Socratic insight that being is φύσις, since φύσις is not simply the imposition of form onto matter, but rather their primary and appropriate belonging together. Matter is formed in φύσις with an appropriateness that is not merely an ordering of what is on hand the way an artist organizes material into the work.
“Also, movement—just as time—is holding itself together in itself according to its ontological sense. Accordingly, time is either the same as movement or a how in the manner of Being of movement.”
In the techno-industrial era, deluded moderns think they are in charge of world affairs, but in fact they are another means for maximizing power for its own sake.
| Text | Page |
|---|---|
| The Principle of Reason | 38 |
| Pathmarks "Letter on 'Humanism'" | 269 |
| Poetry Language Thought "...Poetically Man Dwells..." | 211 |
| Nietzsche II "Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra?" | 211 |
| Being and Time | 262 |
| Basic Writings "The Question Concerning Technology" | 311 |
| Heraclitus Seminar | 161 |
| Basic Questions of Philosophy | 134 |
| Four Seminars "Le Thor 1969" | 61 |
| Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) | 278 |
Heidegger is a process philosopher. Heidegger and Whitehead share a deep suspicion of the notion of “substance,” in regard to which Whitehead develops Hume’s Buddhist critique while Heidegger develops Nietzsche’s.
| Author | Document |
|---|---|
| Thomas Sheehan | Heidegger: The Three Meanings of ἀλήθεια |
| Eric D. Meyer | Review: Freedom to Fail by Peter Trawny |
| Franco Volpi | Dasein as Praxis |
| Thomas Sheehan | What does Heidegger mean by “time”? |
| Jeffrey Rubard | The Torso of Humanity |
| Eric D. Meyer | Apostrophe of Difference |
| Doug Wise | Dolores hears a Who |
| Patricia Glazebrook | Heidegger and Vandana Shiva |
| James M. Magrini | Die Auseinandersetzung with Heidegger’s Phenomenological Ontology |
| Eric D. Meyer | The Task of the Translator, or, How To Speak To Martin Heidegger’s Texts |
| Andrew Mitchell | What Is Called Drinking? |
| Doug Wise | Heidegger, Freud, and the other clearing |
| Doug Wise | Heidegger and Darwin |
| Richard Capobianco | Heidegger on Hebel |
| Thomas Sheehan | Emmanuel Faye: The Introduction of Fraud Into Philosophy? |
| Thomas Sheehan | L’affaire Faye: Faut-il brûler Heidegger? |
| William J. Richardson | Heidegger and the Problem of World |
| Doug Wise | Some natural history of sense-making |
| Doug Wise | Daseintropy |
| Doug Wise | On the essence of μύσται |
| Text | Page |
|---|---|
| Vorträge und Aufsätze "Das Ding" | 182 |
| Platon: Sophistes | 17 |
| Zur Sache des Denkens "Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens" | 85 |
| Seminare | 262 |
| Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges "Was ist das Sein selbst?" | 424 |
| Sein und Zeit | 220 |
| Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt, Endlichkeit, Einsamkeit | 527 |
| Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz | 234 |
| Vorträge und Aufsätze "Bauen Wohnen Denken" | 152 |
| Zum Ereignis-Denken | 758 |
Deconstraint is also the key notion in Heidegger’s analysis of the concepts ‘poor in world’ and ‘world-forming.’ Deconstraint is particular and local in the former and general and global in the latter. Radical deconstraint in the dimension of ‘taking-as’ distinguishes human being from the rest of the biota.
Mortals are oriented toward the entities that show up, not toward their showing up (Being) as such, and certainly not toward the clearing that allows for such showing up.
I did another annual sweep for dead links on Ereignis. The most common problem were hyperlinks that don't respond at all; the machine at the other end is gone. I remove those items from Ereignis. In some cases the institution (.edu or .org) or publisher (.com) still exists, but they've adopted a new scheme, and the link to the person or book returns not-found. In those cases, I just remove the hyperlink and leave the announcement.
Article in the International Encyclopedia of Ethics
For Aristotle, φρόνησις was different from τέχνη, because the goal of the latter is something external to action, while the former involves the active life of the soul itself. Heidegger saw this element of Aristotle’s thought as important for advancing non-scientific forms of truth and preparing a model for the being of Dasein, in non-subjective, world-disclosive terms. The fact that Aristotle focused this discussion of truth on the virtues of the soul allows an avenue for exploring a robust sense of ethical virtue by way of Heidegger’s thought.
Heidegger claims that such an experience would not occur within the domain of beings, Seiendes (physics); it accordingly would not be of something particular, whether physiological or psychological. Nor, moreover, would it occur within the domain of the being, Sein, of beings(metaphysics); it accordingly would not be of something common to all entities, both physiological and psychological. Rather a proper experience of pain would be an experience on the order of being itself (Seyn), an experience that would “unsettle metaphysics at its core” and “transform the human being’s relation to truth”
Heidegger’s crucial paraphrase of Aristotle refers not to Dasein’s past in any sense but to its existential aheadness, its Zukünftigkeit or futurity. Dasein’s essence is to be always becoming itself, coming-to (zu-kommen) what it always already is: its mortal thrown-a-headness unto death.
I've added the paraphrastic translation at the end of this paper to §74 of the Being and Time App.
Contributors:
In “Entwicklung” Schumpeter specifies das Neue as discontinuity, a break with ‘before’: “The change transmuting one imprinted form [eine geprägte Form] into another one must represent a crack [Riß], a jerk [Ruck], or a leap [Sprung].”
GA links in progress.
New book
With contributions from: Jeff Malpas, Markus Wild, Tristan Moyle, Thomas Buchheim, Claudia Baracchi, Damir Barbarić, Jussi Backman, Nikola Mirkovic, Andrew J. Mitchell, Hans Ruin, and Sylvaine Gourdain.
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Book now available as a single page.
Translated by Pete Ferreira
The decade preceding the publication of Being and Time (1927), from the last years of the first period at Freiburg and the entire period in Marburg, is characterized in its speculative terrain by the strength with which, in engaging Aristotle, Heidegger puts into action this foundational intent. From a general point of view, it comes together as an urge for a truly radical philosophical knowledge, in the need to locate and determine the primary source from which it springs before it unfolds, and to which it later returns, the live wire of philosophizing.
[O]ur discussion does not set itself the task of winding up a fixed program. But it would like to prepare all who are participating for a gathering in which what we call the Being of being appeals to us. By naming this we are considering what Aristotle already says.
Τὸ ὄν λεγέται πολλαχῶς.
Cerisy-la-Salle, Normandy, August 1955.
New book
Beginning with Heidegger is an in-depth examination of the influence that Martin Heidegger’s inceptual thought exerted on Leo Strauss, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida and Alexander Dugin. How did these vastly different thinkers employ Heideggerian concepts to define their own philosophies and often antagonistic politics?
At its best, qualitative research works like a great poem, causing the reader to experience ‘evocation’ and to see the world through different eyes. Then a new horizon opens, and this process Heidegger describes as the ‘happening’ (Ereignis) of the truth.
[I]nsight is the essence of technology and down in the engine‐room is the impulse drive, the dopaminergic reward circuit.
We are an international network of 43 public philosophy groups with a combined membership of over 50,000 people. Our groups have held thousands of public philosophy events in total.
I am currently in two virtual Heidegger exegetical reading groups in my time zone; Basic Writings on the Discord D&GQC server (instructions for joining Friday's discussion) and Nietzsche 3-4 with the Phoenix Philosophy Meetup Group. Go live!
Profound boredom is in fact, for Heidegger, the mood connected to originary time; it can be said that through the setting forth of the earth in the dead time of L'eclisse we may become attuned into profound boredom.
An Index to Martin Heidegger’s (1889-1976) two printed volumes Zum Ereignis-Denken; Gesamtausgabe Volumes GA 73.1 and GA 73.2 (published in October 2013).
How to participate in an online reading group on Discord servers to read your favorite philosophical books with others from around the World.
slows down and unclutters the time-space of our existence
No experience, no matter how ursprünglich, can disclose an embedding dimension of the distinction horizon/Open because all experience takes place only within and by virtue of the horizon/Open, sense-making, affective/cognitive ‘taking-as.’
It is one thing to say that a better account of life is found in Aristotle's Ethics than in post-Cartesian subjectivistic theories; it is quite another to say that philosophy itself is essentially phronesis. That is simply the obverse error of the theoretism it is supposed to replace.
Hence Heidegger’s famously eponymous recommendation to us that we use technology but without letting it "entangle" us. We are, that is to say, to employ technological devices and practices while detached from them, able to "let go of them any time", able in other words (and it is this that seemingly defies us today) to "let them alone".
Prior to 1934, Heidegger consistently interprets τέχνη as the know-how that pertains to handicraft; after 1934, Heidegger turns to τέχνη itself, and to his original blurring of τέχνη with φρόνησις, to find the possibility of a higher knowing that unifies them in a reconceived τέχνη.
In characterizing the world as will to power [Nietzsche] had, unfortunately, fallen back into an attempted answer. He had lost sight of the question of Being which [Hölderlin] faced more squarely and poetry could, in this way, claim preeminence over philosophical thought.
By forming her response to Heidegger from the passages of his own text—but from a perspective distinct from his own—Irigaray puts into question the unarticulated ethical implications of his positive ontology. She ‘clears the ground’, to employ a Heideggerian motif, so that the “previously neglected powers” of his philosophy may be released.
In 1930 Heidegger gives untruth a special name, die Irre, ‘errancy.’ ... Because we ek-sist and in-sist by these systems we “already stand within errancy,” for the dynamics of these systems inherently produces error and illusion; Irre is constitutive of existence as a modality of sense-making.
The event of φύσις is as much the event of rising into unconcealment as that of suppressing into concealment; for all that comes forth into shining much remains left behind in oblivion.
Taking Heidegger’s proposals into consideration, we can ask: Do we need an alternative to presence as an understanding of being?
[H]ow Dasein responds to interruption is the key to its individuation: Whether the break itself is recognized as such and its questionability intensified or whether it is excluded as nonsense – as the “nothing” is habitually disclosed in average existence – or – like death – integrated into the identity of everydayness.
The polemos, rather than the idea, captures what Heidegger believes is most important about human existence: that it is finite, connected to a specific tradition rather than the universal; that it is temporal rather than linked to the eternal, be it the forms, God, or secularized versions of these, such as human rights; and that it is historical rather than an abstraction based on generalized characteristics of human nature.
The crucial point, as Heidegger emphasizes, is not to trace Verstehen down to the innermost constitution of transcendence, but to note its “essential unity” with “finding oneself …” (my translation of Befindlichkeit) and with “thrownness.”
To see the gleam or hear the ‘pure noise’ of meaning requires the occurrence of some mode of ma, a darkness or a stillness, a rift in the continuum of Bedeutsamkeit.
Translate one with circumspection during the corona circumscription.
Heidegger did not think that fundamental ontology was a strict departure from, or replacement for, the Western philosophical tradition. The meaning of being as he saw it was simply concealed within, and even implicit in, that tradition.
The difference between authentic and inauthentic choice appears to rest in the extent of freedom for repurposing, redirecting, and so on. Whereas inauthentic choice takes the inherited possibilities as simply given ‘in themselves’ for reactualizing or not, authentic choice takes them as ‘empty,’ for reinterpreting and refabricating to cope with one’s thrown circumstances.
In Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), Heidegger also acknowledges that his speaking of ‘human Dasein’ in Being and Time and elsewhere had been misleading – since it suggested there might be another kind of Dasein, e.g., animal or plant Dasein. In fact, only human beings can be Dasein.
Heidegger Schwarze Hefte (1931-1948)
Martin Heidegger Esoteric Writings
Anmerkungen I-V (Schwarze Hefte 1942-1948)
Martin Heidegger on the Greeks
Being and Time, Sein und Zeit (1927)
In proper thinking as non-willing, one is released from the will to determine the being of beings on one’s own, by transcending or “stepping over” beings to form a horizon of meaning in which they are then allowed, or compelled, to show themselves as objects. And one is released into a relation of waiting upon, listening and responding to, that in which one belongs.
Heidegger takes his bearings from Aristotle precisely because Aristotle still retains the plurality of the uncovering attitudes of human life and, in the 6th book of the Nichomachean Ethics, offers the first systematic analysis differentiating the three fundamental uncovering attitudes of the soul, to wit, θεωρία, ποίησις and πρᾶξις, together with the specific forms of knowledge which go along with them, namely, σοφία, τέχνη and φρόνησις.
So Heidegger claims that human existence – the sense-making life of ever generating what-fors and whys – is itself ohne Warum, without why.41 Which, again, appears to be another way of saying that being-in-the-world is devoid of intrinsic nature: no svabhāva; only dependent origination, thrownness; pratītyasamutpāda, Geworfenheit.
New book
Conceptual resonances of hermeneutics, temporality, language, nothingness and being in the Kabbalah.
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Let me know if you find something in this bibliography that's not already on this web site.
Fundamental ontology has to unfold itself under a theological epoché and only on the basis of what is so unfolded, one can turn to the god-question as one of the regional ontologies, which would provide the ontological basis for a specific theology as a positive science like Christian theology.
[U]niquely because of the nothing, that is, when the human being is held out into the nothing, hovers over it, and holds the site of nothingness in Dasein, is there questioning, thought, philosophy, culture, technology, etc.
But, and of course, it transpires that there is no ‘secret’ to the secret notebooks (understood as a covert or concealed texts) and saying so seems to be a cover term for expressing difficulties in commandeering open ‘access’ to archives that are not archives at all but family papers held by aphilosopher’s sons.
In 1927 Heidegger published Being and Time; in 1928 Sturges published his mortgage article; in 1929 Wittgenstein returned to philosophy. All three and others were non-colluding instigators of this inversion: the Umschlag from svabhāva to pratītyasamutpāda – the turnover from the metaphysics of inherent being to the phenomenology of Geworfenheit, thrownness, mutually conditioned origination – ‘relationality’ in Andrew Mitchell’s term.
Is what we have said above really what Heidegger meant? Finding out whether the preceding five points do in fact represent what he was driving at throughout his career would require revisiting and rethinking most (if not all) of the 96 (and soon to be 102) volumes of the Gesamtausgabe.But who is up for such a lifetime of research?
For Heidegger, time is the fundamental existential category: an authentic grasp of time allows Dasein both to project itself or ‘run ahead’ (vorlaufen) to the very edge of its existence and to lay hold of the way in which its past lives on as a ‘having-been’ (Gewesenheit) within a present which is consequently ‘stretched’. Time therefore unifies Dasein within a threefold model of ecstatic temporality.
New printing
The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness is a translation of Edmund Husserl’s Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins. The first part of the book was originally presented as a lecture course at the University of Göttingen in the winter semester of 1904–1905, while the second part is based on additional supplementary lectures that he gave between 1905 and 1910.
The viewer, as preserver and participant, is there with the images and what is depicted in and through an attuned mode of dwelling in the midst of the image, Being-in the midst of the world the images open and establish.
[H]orizon functions as that openness toward closure that moves Dasein by opening and bounding the limited expanse that is Dasein’s very Being.
Glancing forward to Heidegger’s take for a clue, we read that “Da-‐sein expends itself primarily for itself as a being that is concerned about its being, whether explicitly or not. Initially and for the most part, care is circumspect taking care of things. Expending itself for the sake of itself, Da-‐sein ‘uses itself up’.” That account emphasizes the experience of ongoing dissipation.
Heidegger, in his work of the 1920s and beyond, will in effect inaugurate a new thinking of possibility that will exceed the parameters set by the first, Greek beginning of philosophy, which became established in Aristotle’s ontology.
The analytic moment (μαθών) aims at showing
how ex-sistence is the Open (cf. SZ I.1-2)
what ex-sistence as the Open does (cf. SZ I.3).