We must simply experience this owning in which man and being are owned to each other, that is, we must take the turn into what we call Ereignis.
Insofar as “the historicality of the domain of man is grounded in the enowning-character of be-ing (Ereignis-Charakter des Seyns),” a person can be historical or unhistorical, but if one is entirely “without history,” then the human becomes an animal.
“affectivity.” The benefit of this translation is that it captures the notion that existing in the world, we are always already affected by and feel things, as well as the sense in which in Befindlichkeit things matter to us.
Text | Page |
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Country Path Conversations | 11 |
Parmenides | 120 |
Basic Writings "Building Dwelling Thinking" | 352 |
Plato's Sophist | 323 |
Being and Time | 262 |
Early Greek Thinking "Moira (Parmenides VIII, 34-41)" | 79 |
Heraclitus | 115 |
The Question Concerning Technology | 28 |
Bremen Lectures "Positionality" | 23 |
Hölderlin's Hymns "Germania" and "The Rhine" | 50 |
* excluding pages in previous years' top ten.
Yet Heidegger’s subsequent writings, in my opinion, show that the early phenomenology really was simply preliminary to a larger philosophical aim: getting to some fundamental essence that can ground thinking and that might be taken as something unto itself (being as such or Ereignis, understood as independent of beings).
Text | Page |
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Holzwege (GA 5) Wozu Dichter? | 269 |
Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie. 1919 (GA 58) | 261 |
Sein und Zeit (Niemeyer) | 2 |
Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (GA 65) | 331 |
Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (GA 3) | 13 |
Wegmarken (GA 9) Vom Wesen des Grundes | 174 |
Vorträge und Aufsätze (GA 7) Was heißt Denken? | 129 |
Die Geschichte des Seyns (GA 69) | 95 |
Grundfragen der Philosophie. Ausgewählte »Probleme« der »Logik« (GA 45) | 193 |
Frühe Schriften (GA 1) Vorwort zur ersten Ausgabe der „Frühen Schriften" | 55 |
* excluding pages in previous years' top ten.
Heidegger interpreted human beings, insofar as they already know the beingness-dimension of entities, as transcendence, i.e., as being already beyond entities and disclosive of the possibilities in terms of which entities can be understood. This kinetic exceeding of entities he called the human being's Immer-schon-vorweg-sein, his condition of being "always already ahead" of entities.
A discussion with
Despite its dark context, Being and Time remains essential reading for engaging with the vexing challenges presented by modernity.
The perspective on temporality that is coded into the deep structure of affective comportment helps to relate even putatively fleeting affective states to more encompassing situational and worldly conditions, and moreover in a dynamical fashion that always points ahead of the concrete “now” into essentially open yet always already pre-fashioned dimensions of possibility.
The threat is not mainly that AI may take over certain activities from human beings, but that we already regard these activities as functions akin to the supply of power.
Heidegger's concept of Ereignis is a difficult one to define, as he himself offered no clear explanation of its meaning. Broadly speaking, Ereignis is a German word that translates to "event" or "appropriation," and Heidegger used it to refer to the process of coming into being, in which the essence of something is revealed. Heidegger argued that Ereignis was the ultimate source of all being, and the relationship between humans and the world. This relationship is one in which a particular being is revealed as having its own particular essence, and in which all beings come into a meaningful relationship of mutual disclosure.
Translated by
The language machine is — and above all, is still becoming — one manner in which modern technology controls the mode and the world of language as such.
Sexuality and gender, as elements of essentializing anthropology in Heidegger’s critique, close off more than they can unlock possibilities of tangible existence.
Original PDF version.
It is not that the typewriter, on its own, has clouded the world; this signless cloud, if properly read, points to an “event” of oblivion that has affected the relations among being, human beings, and beings as a whole.
Krüger argues that Plato's dialogues conceive of truth as a dynamic process of self-revealing which is by no means reducible to the propositional understanding of truth
The future that provides the sense of my being-here is not something on hand, it is not the presence of any object, and yet only with a view to it am I able to make sense of existing.
In Heidegger’s reading, the dialogue culminates in the notion of the “ instant” (to exaiphnēs, Augenblick) in which the temporal plurality of presence and un-presence converges into a unified disclosure.
How are we to fathom, let alone think of, a pretheoretical realm which precedes and underlies the distinction between subject and object while at once describing their dynamic intentional unity?
Heidegger’s claim is always a crucially, critically local claim, a claim of place, of the world-historical playing together of time and space (Zeit-Spiel-Raumes).
Original PDF version.
It is here, then, that we can see at work something like a natality: this thinking of being is a thinking of natality to the extent that it is a thinking of incipience, of a dynamic of emergence and withdrawal.
Only on the ground of Possibility and Nothingness, only against the background of death, can reality in the usual sense be known.
In its “thinging”, the thing refers to what is elsewhere. It is in this referring to what lies beyond itself, in an elsewhere, that the thing becomes itself and announces its existence.
Test yourself with the
7. What does Heidegger refer to as the event of appropriation and what would be the result?
- Understanding our natural place in the world which results in peace of mind and with the world.
- Understanding time and presencing which results in understanding our place in the world.
- Coming to accept ourselves and others as a Being which results in socially beneficial actions.
- The event where one comes to self-actualizing which results in them becoming masters of the world.
Um, none of the above?
The next step might be an openness to the Ereignis, the transformative event that grants a founding experience of being. Such an event would be the true Singularity.
time is the field within which being is intelligible at all
In light of Withy's account self-concealing being can be taken in this very way—as a zero symbolic value in the ontology-system: opposed to — other than — all things in its lack of thinghood; and yet opposed to — rather than — the absence of all things, to nothing.
When we say that ‘being is’, we use a sense of ‘being’ that ‘posits nothing in reality’ and hence our sentence is consistent with our flat-footed denial that Being and its modes are genuine entities. And finally, we can see how Heidegger could think that being depends on Dasein even though there are many entities that do not depend on Dasein.
Sophocles’ Antigone is the only individual whom Heidegger names as authentic.
Original PDF version.
Dasein, by focusing on the “how” of historical construction rather than the “what is” of static juxtapositions, offers insights for thinking about nonbinary, trans, and genderqueer identities.
A discussion with
Truth happens because we participate in it, and this is not a one-time event but a path we travel over and over again.
To name or speak the meaning of being anew means to rely simultaneously on the self-givenness of being and on one’s own ability to speak when that givenness clearly arises. This moment of being’s emergence in speech is what Heidegger calls Ereignis.
The mis-taking of ψευδὴς δόξα is therefore a failure of the intended predicate, i.e. what is said about the object before us. This leads Plato to grasp the essence of ψεῦδος, un-truth, as the un-correctness of the proposition. Accordingly truth must also have its seat in the λόγος, rather than unhiddenness, it is thereby understood in terms of the correctness of the proposition.
Original PDF version.
Perduring in deep time and remembering the language of nature is an interpretative ongoing process that takes seriously other-than-human entities that occupy and share our world.
A dialogue with
With contributions from: Scott M. Campbell, Ian Alexander Moore, Richard Polt, David Kleinberg-Levin, Yuval Adler, Erik Kuravsky, Kevin Aho, Jill Drouillard, Jesús Adrián Escudero, Tricia Glazebrook, Róisín Lally, Iain Thomson, Yuchen Liang, and James Emery.
With the growing separation of thinking and poetry, computational thinking is rampant everywhere, and an era of technological dictatorship and poverty of thought and poetry has arrived.
[E]vidence suggests that Heidegger, under the influence of the Third Reich’s Arbeitsideologie, viewed “Arbeit” as an autonomous mode of ontological “unconcealment” (Unverborgenheit) whereby the “Being of beings” is revealed.
Matriculation Ceremony Speech November 25th, 1933
Two addresses delivered at summer courses for foreign students at the University of Freiburg, August 15-16, 1934
Ereignis concerns a gift of language in which the essence of language is disclosed to us. Heidegger writes that Ereignis can be experienced as that which gives or grants. What it gives and what it grants is that which is most proper to us, namely the realm of the open to which we belong.
[O]nce he understood the breakthrough Husserl had achieved with the categorial intuition, Heidegger applied that insight to a rereading of κίνησις in Aristotle that started him on his lifelong pursuit of the question of being.
Whether Kraftsmaschine is taken as ‘dynamo’ or as ‘power tool’ its kinetic essence is ‘rotor.’
Original PDF version.
Heidegger presents the currency of need and desperation, that is: he lists a litany of death, as indeed of pain that is to say suffering, and also of poverty, all and each as what confronts us and at the same time manages not to touch us, leaving us unmoved, unchanged, in a terrifying sense.
An Interview with
School of Philosophy, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne
With participation via Videolink
Original PDF version.
[F]undamental attunements let our relation to particular things and events retreat and reveal the sheer “that” of being and nonbeing and thus the possibility of being and nonbeing as such.
We cannot, in the strict sense of these terms, know and understand the clearing, but we can and should acknowledge it, precisely because this field of meaningfulness is not only the most basic fact of our existence but in fact is our existence.
St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures
The ‘hidden secret of our essence' is the ‘having-been' that is still within us and is us, fabricated as we are piece by piece from alien forms, and fabricating as we do piece by piece new forms.
Three planks tabulated.
Original PDF version.
Heidegger acknowledged that to think that evil dwells in the essence of being represented a challenge.
8 October 1934 – 2 August 2022
Inasmuch as Dasein through its transcendence implicitly projects or lets be the open realm in which beings may be encountered, Dasein implicitly philosophizes.
Original PDF version.
What is at issue is not the difference between modern and classical science, but that between Western thinking and its forgotten origin.
The space of possibilities of meaningful presence — die Lichtung — is one such bubble within the larger bubble that is life — the space of possibilities of organisms — within the rather larger bubble that is our particular universe, a bubble within eternal inflation.
The Monist, Vol. 66, No. 3, Categories (JULY, 1983), pp. 387-409
Not only is the distinction between the ontological categories of the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand intelligible only in terms of the sort of Being that Dasein has, but the difference between Dasein's sort of being and readiness-to- and presentness-at-hand must itself be understood in terms of Dasein.
Heidegger’s philosophy, in many ways, can be read as an allegory of antiblackness and black suffering — the metaphysical violence of the transatlantic slave trade.
That being conceals itself, that world effaces itself, and that the clearing surreptitiously holds back other possibilities are all modes of concealing that obtain simultaneously with the unconcealing in question. They are all also modes of self-concealing in one way or another, whether what is concealed is the unconcealment, the unconcealing or the concealment itself.
Original PDF version.
[T]o think this beginning in a way that captures its originary, inceptive dimension is to come to understand being in a way different from yet underlying the Greek beginning and its understanding of being (Sein) as φύσις. It is, in other words, to understand be-ing (Seyn) as the historical grounding of the meaning of being and its difference from beings, i.e., as the ground that constitutes and thus appropriates to itself the essential correlation of that meaning and human understanding of it.
New book
There is much to be said about being’s shining out and its various modes, as well as about disclosing and how it is correlated with being as a dimension of third-plank unconcealing (i.e., das Ereignis). Indeed, there is much to be said about worlding, which is a way of thinking third-plank unconcealing that receives comparatively little attention in Heidegger’s corpus. There is presumably also more to be said about being’s self-concealing—not only about the fact that being conceals itself but also about how we experience and express that self-concealing.
MOREAll 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.
MOREOriginal 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.
MORE'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.
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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.