All of which leaves us with the classic Heideggerian question: the Grundmerismus discloses a fundamental difference—in what dimension is that difference embedded? What subtends the distinction between ontotheology and finitude, that from which the two emerge in their difference?
The whole allegory is about the process by which we become capable of bringing things into unhiddenness, and yet unhiddenness as an event itself is not fully thematized.
Heidegger’s last letter.
Conference
The conference will explore and discuss Martin Heidegger’s reading and reception of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas.
New book
The “first inception” among the ancient Greeks glimpsed Being as pure giving and granting, and the “other inception,” which is breaking in upon human beings in the present time, retrieves the first inception and brings into fresh language the giving, letting, appropriating character of Beyng itself, namely, as Ereignis.
Original PDF.
If art involves an ontological determination, then this is to insist that a time-space of unconcealment is not only opened up in the conflict between world and Earth but that what Heidegger designates as “the truth of being” happens historically in ontical creations that are stationed in the midst of beings to set a standard for their appearance as phenomena.
Where Heidegger speaks of the inquiry into the meaning of being as the most basic and concrete of questions, Hussed agrees, but he comments in the margin that this is a "transcendental-phenomenological question" about the constitutive meaning of being.
As Heidegger puts it, the fact that something is not this or that is what constitutes that thing’s being.
§ 7 of the paraphrastic translation in the Being and Time app updated.
The point is that Heidegger approaches ontology in terms of movement rather than things,that the main movement he is concerned with is that of life, and that early on, life is conceived not merely as the temporal movement of human Dasein, but in a wider sense to include both humans and other living things.
6 Aug 1943 — 11 May 2022
Translated by
Being-in-itself is dependent on the human being insofar as being always already shelters within itself the clearing of essencing that is safeguarded by the human essence, but in such a way that this human essence itself belongs to the essence ofbeing, from which that being-in-itself comes forth.
and
New book
The religious and spiritual resonance of Heidegger’s language is unmistakable. His language of “the holy” as “the source” and “the gladsome” that pours forth “light” and abiding “joy” for humans and for all beings is a religious and spiritual language—which certainly has metaphysical and theological implications.
'House in general' is ontologically prior to houses; a history of houses might be attempted but 'house in general' has no history, it always already was, it pre-exists houses.
[O]ne repays a teacher badly if one remains a student or a follower much less an acolyte, reflecting that the teacher has, just in order to be a teacher, to withdraw as such[.]
What shows up within the clearing and thus is understandable becomes actually understood when it is taken as having such-and-such a meaning (Bedeutung), whether that meaning is correct or not—the way, for example, an Athenian juror in 399 BCE might take Socrates to be a threat to the city-state.
Translated by
For the truth of our Dasein is no simple thing.
In both texts space is understood as opened: in Contributions as an empty between-space, and in Agchibasié as an opened landscape (Gegend).
Beyng as event serves as a ground for many things, including Dasein and the worlds in which we encounter other beings. But the nature of this grounding can be rather unclear.
I would like to take seriously the possibility that Heidegger was attempting to understand the Nothing on its own terms. This was, to be sure, a path Heidegger did not follow for long. But one of its forks leads to a destination that Heidegger would arrive at only in the mid-1930s, albeit by way of a different route.
Turner’s Überschreitung aims at understanding biological being as a structure of existence in Heidegger’s sense; it seeks to establish and determine the structures of being-in-the-world in non-human biota.
Reimagining Heidegger’s relational conciliation [Austrag] or hidden harmony [ἁρμονία ἀφανής] between thinking and things, the nothing of beings and the nothingness of beyng as a non-relational diaphora, dif-ference [unter-Schied], différance, indeed in terms of disinterest and indifference will be essential to my analyses of habituating oneself to nothing, and ultimately to the key Heraclitean fragment for any eco-deconstruction: φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ – nature loves to hide.
But what if the “I” is not simply extra-temporal? What if it is understood, not as the subject in the sense of a substance, but as a horizon within which beings unfold themselves in events of truth (un-concealment)?
The work of art, and in fact world in tension with earth, are seen as an event of aletheia, Heidegger’s term for truth as unconcealment (Unverborgenheit) (GA5: 21).
The most complete document of this kind yet.
This is the question of the historical truth of being, or of how being itself gives or grants itself in or as its event of Ereignis, by grounding – in various and historically variable ways -- the possibility of conceiving of and experiencing beings in their totality.
I suggest the term “shapeability” for the dimension of disclosure of being (that is, the peculiar character of each being) through changes caused by a broad variety of interactions grounded in the dichotomous, passive-active capacity of beings for shaping and being shaped.
We host philosophy reading groups. Join us if you are interested in discussing philosophy with others in a reading group format.
Such an approach is bound to seem strange to modern sensibilities, but we have to look at what is at stake.
In many ways, Heidegger’s masterwork Being and Time is a 20th Century reflection on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.
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The objective of Gebsattel’s therapy was to reconstitute the conditions of the patient’s future. His method of treatment was to kick-start a cold Aussein auf etwas – ‘to be out for something’ – and thence to stoke the warming categorical desires of the care-structure.
[I]nterpretation becomes complementary to phenomenological description in the triadic structure of Dasein being ontologico-ontically prior in phenomenological research and hermeneutically explicit in understanding.
The book. A project from Indiana University Press.
The “stamps” or principles belong to the epochs and wither away with them. Heidegger calls the other shape of presencing or of being the Ereignis, the event of appropriation. But, and this is crucial, “the Ereignis is not a new stamp of being belonging to the history of being.” That is my starting point.
[T]he Unknown grants the authority to poetry and philosophy, without which all will be reduced to science
[B]y exposing the manifold meaning of being according to Aristotle Brentano paves the way for putting an entire tradition into question.
Since we all as human beings stand out into this openness of three-dimensionally stretched time, Dasein is always already shared, prior to any possible individuation.
The main difference between Heidegger and Foucault, then, is that Foucault sees Nietzsche as affirming a continual instability in the practices defining both the self and the culture, while Heidegger points to the importance of a non-metaphysical but nonetheless essential tendency towards gathering in the practices which he calls appropriation (Ereignis).
Translated by Frank H. W. Edler
I don't believe we'll find ourselves again so long as we keep dogging the "current situation" instead of turning our backs on it in the knowledge that the origin of the history of our essential being in antiquity has to articulate itself in what we ourselves can be as existing beings.
If indeed ontological possibility, a realm of openness (ein Offenheitsbereich), “ontological wiggle-room,” did evolve, how did it evolve?
Original PDF.
As essentially related to being, attention is the abyssal ground for all modes of human engagement, be they walking, talking, reflecting, etc. Its movement is the very movement of our being, which is how we participate in the being of all that is.
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.
[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.