enowning

2012-05-27T02:10:00.002-07:00

[Start][Previously on]

The Shadow of Heidegger

There’s a rising colonel going around shaking many hands and smiling excessively. The oligarchy and the communists call him fascist, Nazi. They haven’t read Alfred Rosenberg , Martin. A country, he’d let them know, is built from its racial purity; by the elimination of inferior races. Here, neither the oligarchy nor the communists or the idle classes propose exterminating the blacks. But neither do they approach them. And those that should do so, the communists, find themselves suffocating in their alliedphile pathos. This pathos keeps them from differentiating themselves from the oligarchy. Their hatred for the blacks keeps them from approaching them. Who then does so? The smiling Nazi. He approaches them in order to use them, for whatever, to build up his power. I don’t know. This I know: in this country, today, towards the ends of 1944, the only politician that makes an effort to expressing and protecting the scorned, neglected races is a colonel with many faces, but without one, that all his adversaries have: he’s not a racist. They all call him Nazi. Everyone who calls him a Nazi disdains or ignores the damned, dark races. He, the Nazi, doesn’t. He expresses them. His goes amongst them, touches them, and allows himself to be touched. Not even Alfred Rosenberg could understand this; especially him.

On the other hand (I warned you, Martin: don’t try to understand this country), the colonel has a National Socialist Weltanschauung. He speaks, for some time now, of something he calls the third position. Do you know what it’s about? Of Heidegger’s pincers, son! According to the colonel, his country, this diabolical crossword: Argentina, must reject communism as much as capitalism. It must seek a third position. Which is, of course, his; which he calls justicialismo. And here I stop. You’ll have to continue. Just one thing, Martin, one of the notable things of these people is their self-regard. A partner of the colonel, a nationalist historian, a man who was a minister of the golpe del ’30, with admirable conviction told me that we, the National Socialists, had barely scoped out this thirdist horizon, so to speak. That only now, with this vertiginous colonel, the time for the authentic struggle against Bolshevik massification and North American business was opening up. “Many say that Perón is a Nazi”, he intoned the name of the colonel, “but it’s not like that. Perón is the architect and he will be the great warrior to win our third position.” “Outstanding”, I commented, “Please, continue”. He continued: “Professor Müller”, he said solemnly and definitively, “Hitler only prefigured our Leader. He only prefigured the brilliant strategy of the third position. From here where so sadly the oligarchs and communists of this country err when they call ‘Nazi’ to our colonel of the people. Perón is not a Nazi, Professor Müller. Hitler was a Perónista”.

You won’t be bored in this country, Martin.

2012-05-26T15:58:00.008-07:00

[Start][Previously on]

Frédéric de Towarnicki's Visite à Martin Heidegger

He never stopped telling his students that they should not consider science lightly nor with disdain. Science is going very well for their consideration and did not need to be justified. While learning to work in proximity, they had just as long as possible to maintain an attitude of vigilance with respect to representations of it and rationalization (technical-scientific) that governed the time. For it was only then that the distance necessary to perform the “leap” could be safeguarded, for a thinking more thoughtful in the place of being. Reasoning, in these parts, about everything, no matter what, leads only to sophistication, to an appearance of philosophy.

Heidegger referred to his seminars and lectures. Between science and thought the connection could not be authentic, but might be fertile, if the abyss between them became visible. Over this abyss, one could not span it with a bridge, only a leap is possible. This was the unusual and confusing part from the thought of being and from “looking into that which is”, as understood by phenomenology.

To be continued. . . .

2012-05-25T04:21:00.000-07:00

Anna Pia Ruoppo on integrating Aristotle.

In opposition to Aristotle, Heidegger assumes phronesis as the model of philosophical knowledge. Pointing out an ambivalence in Aristotle’s thinking, he contrasts the ontology of production (for which the texts of the Physics and Metaphysics are the relevant reference) to his own ontology of life (the foundations of which he sees in De Anima, the Rhetoric and the Nicomachean Ethics).

According to his own testimony, Heidegger gains essential insight into the understanding of existence from his analysis of De Anima, “a doctrine of living Being” offering “an ontology of Being characterized as life”. Then, employing a method to which he will come back later in Being and Time, he turns to the Rhetoric, seen by him as an interpretation of Dasein in its “everydayness” (Alltäglichkeit). In this context, Heidegger’s attention focuses on the Aristotelian interpretation of pathe where he finds a thematic basis for the understanding of the “attunement” (Befindlichkeit). Furthermore, by an integration of conceptual elements from the Nicomachean Ethics, the concept of pathe is interpreted in terms of a disposition or propensity (exis) to act, thereby opening a wide horizon with respect to the problem of an ethical dimension of existential analytics.

Even though these moments of the Aristotelian thinking – the doctrine of pathe from the Rhetoric, the analyses of life from De Anima, and of the cairological instant from book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics – offer the basis for an understanding of the fundamental categories of life, it is Heidegger’s view that Aristotle did not integrate these important intuitions into a doctrine of the entire human life. To achieve this integration is the task Heidegger sets himself in the existential analytics. In doing so, he does not acquire the fundamental categories of the Aristotelian comprehension of life in their original context of Being as production, but in the horizon of Being as “Being-toward-death”.

2012-05-24T04:42:00.000-07:00

Edward S. Casey and J. Melvin Woody on the basis for Lacan's subject who is "supposed to know".

But what is this subject, after all, this being who is defined by language and who becomes Other to himself by being in language? "What constitutes
me as subject is my question," remarks Lacan, echoing Heidegger's description of Dasein as a questioning being in the introduction to Being and Time. Questioning—whether of oneself, of other beings, or of Being itself—is itself a fundamental form of splitting within the subject, since it inexorably introduces a division between the questioner and the questioned, the known and the unknown. Lacan therefore speaks of the subject as "ex-centric," as alienated from himself. The philosophical origins of this conception of the subject again derive from Heidegger's analysis of subjectivity in Being and Time. In this work of 1927, Heidegger designates human existence as "Dasein": literally, being-there. To be-there is to ex-ist, to standout in one's being-in-the-world. Such ex-isting is a way in which to-be:
The 'essence' of this entity [Dasein] lies in its 'to be' [Zu-sein: about to be, implying possibility] The essence of Dasein lies in its existence. . . . In each case Dasein is its possibility. [P. 67-8]
Dasein exists, then, by standing out—out from the world regarded as a collection of indifferent, present-at-hand particulars and out from itself as a centered substrate. As thus ex-centric and ex-static, Dasein stands out as being something other than its mundaneity or egocentricity would prescribe or predict; and it does so in two basic ways: (1) Dasein ex-ists by the projection of existentially significant possibilities through its understanding of the world and itself: an understanding that is essentially projective by virtue of its fore-structure, through which it is ineluctably drawn into the hermeneutical circle of knowing projectively what it comes to know in detail in cognitive (and other forms) of inquiry; and (2) Dasein also stands out from itself by its involvement with others in the "with-world" of human sociality, especially in the crucial activity of "leaping ahead" in relation to others rather than "leaping in" for them by directly disburdening them of their anxiety or cares—where "leaping ahead" has remarkable affinities with psychoanalytic techniques of abstinence, silence, and empathic understanding. Such leaping ahead contrasts with the deadened and deadening passivity of das Man understood as the "they-self" which dictates conformity and submission.

Pp. 203-4, Volume II

2012-05-23T04:13:00.019-07:00

Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala on subjects interpreting their finitude.

[A]lready in Kant the human subject was not considered a tabula rasa but rather said to encounter the world perceiving things within a priori frames: categories of space, time, and the intellect. According to Kant, man only knows phenomena, that is, what appears within those a priori schemes that constitute his own reason. In knowledge there is not only the object but also, and most of all, the subject. But Kant never called knowledge “interpretation,” because he still thought that those a priori schemes with which the human being is equipped are fixed and identical at all times and for all men. Against Kant, we must observe that this character of stability belongs to phenomenal objects but cannot be attributed to the structure of the human subject. Between Kant and Heidegger there is also Kierkegaard and cultural anthropology, that is, the awareness of the inevitable finitude of human existence (which is not pure reason but involved interest, passion, and history) and the knowledge of different cultures. In sum, “thrown project” means for Heidegger that human existence is in the world not as pure reason but as an individual with interests, expectations, and cognitive instruments that he inherits from a world, culture, and language. He is an interpreter: someone who looks at things with interest. Only in this way will he avoid the appearance of things as an indistinct stack and instead frame them in a comprehensible order, that is, in a world and without falling into subjectivism. But just as his world is not distinct from the subject, neither is he, as a subject, distinct from the world that would be his “object.” This transobjective dimension, which can still seem imperfect and dubious in Being and Time, is developed further in Heidegger’s later writings, starting from his Letter on Humanism, Contributions to Philosophy, and other texts.

Pp. 92-3

2012-05-22T18:05:00.001-07:00

Antigone/Antigonick

Sophocles

Ἀντιγόνη: ὦ κοινὸν αὐτάδελφον Ἰσμήνης κάρα, ἆρ᾽ οἶσθ᾽ ὅ τι Ζεὺς τῶν ἀπ᾽ Οἰδίπου κακῶν ὁποῖον οὐχὶ νῷν ἔτι ζώσαιν τελεῖ;

Anne Carson

Antigone: We begin in the dark and birth is the death of us.
Ismene: Who said that?
Antigone: Hegel.
Ismene: Sounds more like Beckett.
Antigone: He was paraphrasing Hegel.
Ismene: I don't think so.
Antigone: Whoever it was, whoever we are, dear sister, ever since we were born from the evils of Oidipous, what bitterness, pain, disgust, disgrace or moral shock have we been spared?

2012-05-22T08:56:00.000-07:00

The National Post explains hermeneutics.

In the 19th century it was mainly a system of interpreting Christian teaching. Martin Heidegger, the modern philosopher who most deeply influenced Gadamer, helped to broaden it and insert it in the curriculum of modern philosophy. Heidegger once wrote: “Language speaks.” Certain words and phrases can be infinitely expandable, opening fresh possibilities by their very existence. In Gadamer work, hermeneutics became one such word. It bulged with meanings, implications, speculations. . . . In one of the interviews, Grondin quoted a remark that Heidegger made in a letter: “Hermeneutical philosophy? Oh, that is a Gadamer thing.” Gadamer never decided whether that was a compliment or not but in any case he continued to place this subject — enormously complicated, endlessly promising — at the core of his life as a philosopher.

2012-05-22T05:04:00.000-07:00

François Raffoul on the earth and history, from "Heidegger and the Aporia of History".

The earth, Heidegger explains, can neither enter into history, nor step out of it, because the earth “has nothing to do with history.”. And yet, “the southern Balkan peninsula entered into history more than two thousand years ago. A mountain chain, a river can become [a] site for world-historical decisive battles. We speak of ‘historical soil,’ [we] say that an entire region is, as it were, laden with history”. The earth is the soil [Der Erdboden] of history, a soil which then “also enters into history”. No substantial separation between earth and history (the world is earthy, the earth is worldly), but a singular intertwining, indeed a strife (Streit). As Heidegger explains in “On the Essence of Truth,” “Beings as a whole reveal themselves as φύσις, ‘nature,’” and history “begins only when beings themselves are expressly drawn up into their unconcealement and conserved in it”. In that sense, the earth cannot constitute a separate, substantial nonhistorical ground. This is what Heidegger shows in “The Origin of the Work of Art”. The earth represents a self-secluding element and world the open region, and yet they are essentially intertwined: the earth cannot subsist on its own without the openness of the world and the world cannot float away from earth; the world is grounded on the earth, the earth juts into the open region. Heidegger explains that “World and earth are essentially different from one another and yet are never separated. The world grounds itself on the earth, and earth juts through world”.

Earth and world belong together as the co-belonging – and original strife, Urstreit – of clearing and concealing. That relation is one of tension and resistance. The world, resting on the earth, attempts to overcome it; the earth, as sheltering and concealment, draws the world toward it. In the creation of the world, the strife “must be set back into the earth,” and the earth itself “must be set firth and put to use as self-secluding”. Such strife is not destructive but constitutive of both earth and world, for in “essential strife, rather, the opponents raise each other into their self-assertion of their essential natures”. The world “lets the earth be earth”. In the end, history itself is rethought as the strife between earth and world, as the between of earth and world, as Heidegger makes clear in The Contributions to Philosophy when he describes history [Geschichte] as “the strifing of the strife [Bestreitung des Streites] of earth and world.” History happens in, and as, this original strife of earth and world.

2012-05-21T04:36:00.014-07:00

Graham Harman on Levinas's response to objects' enslavement in the global tool-system.

Surely Heidegger must have realized that we deal with individual cigarettes and loaves of bread, and that such objects are not entirely used up in a totality of meaning. But this “surely” is irrelevant in judging any philosopher—Parmenides must surely have realized that our perceptions are filled with entities in motion, yet this did not prevent him from treating them dismissively. The question is not what philosophers “must have known,” but only what they openly honored and welcomed into their thinking. And it is Levinas, not Heidegger, who makes sufficient room in philosophy for individual beings such as wood, silk, or apples. In his own words, “the handling and utilization of tools, the recourse to all the instrumental gear of a life, whether to fabricate tools or to render things accessible, concludes in enjoyment . . . the lighter to the cigarette one smokes, the fork to the food, the cup to the lips.” Our world is not a unified totality of objects plugged into other objects, and so forth without end. Instead, we live amidst a carnival of independent zones, districts, and termini, and explore a world without fissures or gaps, where the meaningless hum of insects and the feel of cotton garments on our skin is not dissolved into some global empire of references. We live in a milieu or medium, not in a tool system. In this sense, the things are partly separated from totality, but also partly immersed in it. Levinas has no wish to return to an old fashioned theory of natural lumps of substance whose relations would only be accidental. He does not deny the system of tools; he merely insists that the tool-system is riddled with gaps and tropical islands where individual things take shape for our enjoyment.

2012-05-20T02:05:00.001-07:00

[Start][Previously on]

The Shadow of Heidegger

As you might imagine, this oligarchy that speaks French and sells its produce to Great Britain, is alliedphile. Also, coherently enough, like any owner class conscious of its interests, it is rabidly anticommunist. They are, however, united. Here, the oligarchy and the communists, fight in the name of liberty against the “Axis powers”. That’s how they like to call us. Both groups pronounce things without shame, incurring the ridicule of absolute repetitiveness, mishandling them, emptying them of all meaning, the concepts of liberty and democracy. The middle classes come and go, especially from office.

I must speak to you of the army. They’re from the golpe del 43. They’re as pathetic as the oligarchy. They are so National Socialist that to march, they use the goosestep. It doesn’t suit them as well as it does SS formations, but they try. Their helmets are ours. They have copied them with indubitable merit. Not only are they not alliedphiles, they don’t act like they are, nor do they even pretend. They haven’t declared war on us yet. When they do they will be declaring it on a defeated country, event that will grant that decision all sorts of explanations minus that of courage. They like to talk of the steel industry, of the tall furnaces, of heavy industry. I think they are irredeemably stupid.

I must speak of the lower classes. They are many. And for some time they have been slipping out of the country to the city. The crisis of the English (who provided the oligarchy with every product, to which they only had to add a screw) led by the lazy landowners to face the unusual adventure of industry. They substituted the imports that the empire of Mr. Churchill could no longer provide them with. This (only, solely, this, Martin) fired off a powerful industrial and urban development. There arrived, to work in the new factories, men from the interior of the country. A region the oligarchy has forgotten, has erased from itself with astonishing effectiveness. Now it’s falling on them. And they, who, instead of a country, built a beautiful city, have to suddenly house, in between their Parisian palacettes, the armies of backwardness, the hungry, the scruffy. Can anyone receive them, shelter them, listen and understand what they say, what they want? Does anyone in this ostentatious city know the dialect of hunger?

Allow me my enthusiasm, Martin! Allow the secret paths that are un-hidden by my writing to dazzle me. (They are, you know, my last enthusiasms, my final bedazzlements.) What a demented country! Observe this panorama: the alliedphiles are democrats, feverish adherents to liberty. They are the antithesis of Nazism. But they are racists, Martin. They don’t hate the Jews. (No sane mind would say they held them in any esteem.) They hate that which they call the blacks. These blacks are not the Negroes from Africa. They’ve come from the distant union between Indians and Spaniards. They are, perhaps, mestizos. They’ve been named black heads. A pejorative yet appropriate name, given they have hard, greasy hair, of an inveterate negritude. Who will take care of them?

The oligarchy? Never! They are blacks, peons of the poor ranches in the country’s unappreciated interior. Or from the powerful ranches whose bosses they flee? The middle classes? Neither! They fear them. They are so many. Something they must take, without a doubt. The communists? Even less! Those aren’t proletarians! Does some lost page or footnote from Capital consider them? They are pre-capitalism. They have no experience with unions. The National Socialist military that dreams of steel works and marches with the goosestep? No! They want industries, military development, the triumph of the Reich, and even, some will dream, of Aryan workers, with Viking technicians.

I don’t know what solution this will have.

2012-05-19T04:56:00.008-07:00

[Start][Previously on]

Frédéric de Towarnicki's Visite à Martin Heidegger

When he had written it in 1927, Being and Time was born “a test, that of the fundamental experience of forgetting being”. More than ever this oversight marked our civilization. Characterized by the language of science and technology, it had extended to the humanities and the field of art. Man forgets the dimension of being, he forgets that it is in being, in its clearing, that its existence becomes possible. It is in this clearing that man stands and it is in this Lichtung that speech comes to him.
The question of the sense of being, asked by continuing to ask the ancient question of being, refers to a thought other than that of metaphysics, more original than that. Sein und Zeit was not a new thesis on being, but the unspoken of philosophy, or of metaphysics - the two terms being identical. Being and Time was presented as “the preparation for the task of thinking. Still reserved in the history of philosophy and to which neither philosophy nor metaphysics, and science even less, can have access to”. The issue did not lead to a simple “movement of boundaries” within a domain already cleared but led thinking to a “leap” in a place where, he had to admit, science could not enter . Heidegger wrote in Introduction to Metaphysics: “Being and Time refers not to a book, but to what is proposed as a task. Understand by this, that we do not know, and if we authentically know it, we will never know it except as a way of questioning.” Science, in its way, follows a different path.

During our interview Heidegger came back for a moment to the phrase that had caused a scandal: “that science does not think. " As he had said again and again, we should not hear it in a derogatory way, as a reproach or condemnation of a deficiency: science simply cannot turn to think like the thinkers, it could not just because of its methods; it is precisely these that allow it to move forward and that ensure its path. Assuming that philosophy is a science could only be a source of errors. Philosophy considers a being in its context, while the sciences (moving within a specific horizon) continue their research in specific domains of the being, making measurements in a world. The question of the essence of human freedom, for example, could not be “scientific”. Given such a fundamental issue, we were in a place that no science, not today, not tomorrow, not ever, was able, as a science, to occupy or control.

To be continued. . . .

2012-05-18T04:53:00.000-07:00

Reiner Schürmann on two breaks in the later Heidegger.

[Heidegger] describes the first of these breaks as the transition from time as the “sense of direction of being” to time as the “history of the truth of being.” This break constitutes the “turning” (die Kehre) in his thinking. Briefly, it results from the discovery that being-in-the-world is diversified according to Menschentum, the epochal type of man, for example, the Greek, Roman, Medieval, modern, and contemporary types. Thus ecstatic temporality turns into epochal temporality. The continuity with the Existential Analytic is nonetheless striking. An epoch is the sudden establishment of a constellation of presence and absence that unites the three dimensions of time in the non-linear upsurge of a phenomenal arrangement that henceforth will mark the age. And since it is the advent of such a new arrangement of things, the epoché remains future-oriented. Lastly, as the phenomenal origin of past, present, and future, the epoch unifies these dimensions co-originarily. In the movement of Heideggerʼs thought from ecstatic temporalization to epochal temporality, the basic features in his understanding of time become historicized and yet also preserved, as will be seen.

The other break is described by Heidegger as the transition from “the truth of being” to “the topology of being.” At this last stage, his reflection on time touches on what might be called the “primordial” condition—the universal and necessary condition of all previous notions—were it not for the impossibility, directly resulting from it, of a “first order.” Time here is the “direction” of being inasmuch as being assigns phenomena their site in a given economy. Such assigning is not the deed of any agency. It is nothing other than the entrance of beings into an arrangement which makes up an epoch. This entrance, for which Heidegger still has recourse to verbs such as phuein, ‘emerging,ʼ and phainesthai, ‘appearing,ʼ is the phenomenon which the term Ereignis is supposed to capture. As we have seen, this may be translated as ‘event,ʼ so long as we understand by this both appropriation and expropriation. The “proper” (eigen) points to the way singulars belong to one another in a world, a mutual belonging which is always made fragile from within by the ex- of expropriation (by the Ent- of Entzug, etc.). The proper thus designates the movement by which things render themselves mutually and provisionally proximate—which does not mean unfailingly close by, or fully present. Here, just as in ecstatic and epochal temporalities, it is Sinn as directionality, and not as “significance,” that is at stake here. But if time thus gives a “sense of direction” it is no longer to human existing, or to historial epéchein. For of what is Ereignis the sense of direction? It can only be in relation to presence and absence. Time as the event of appropriation-expropriation gives a sense of direction to coming to presence, a sense of direction which turns the latter against itself by coupling universalization—the law of salvation (Heil)—and singularization—the counter-law of havoc (Unheil).

It should be clear in what way Heidegger, up until his last writings, remains indebted to the transcendental tradition. Time as event makes possible ecstatic as well as epochal temporality. However, Heideggerian transcendentalism abandons the ancestry of self-consciousness—thereby destituting modern hegemony. The event is originary time, operative always and already in lived time (through existence or in history), and it makes possible all the concepts of time the tradition has transmitted to us, be they physical or spiritual.

P. 152-3

2012-05-17T04:19:00.036-07:00

Jeff Malpas on differences between Aristotelian and Cartesian spaces.

Whereas Aristotle treats topos as tied to the bounding inner surface of a container, Descartes takes “l’éspace” to be identical with the area or volume enclosed within the container and “le lieu” [location] to be just a matter of the container’s position, with both notions tied to the concept of an extended body. From the idea of space as tied to a particular body, it is easy to arrive at a more generalized notion of space as the extended realm within which all bodies can be contained. Albert Einstein talks in just this way of the development of the modern idea of space: the idea of an “independent (absolute) space, unlimited in extent, in which all material objects are contained” is arrived at by “natural extension” from the concept of the particular space that exists within any particular enclosing body.

This Cartesian view of space is continuous with the Aristotelian in that
it derives from a concept of space (and of place) that is tied to containment. But the Cartesian view is much more dependent on ideas deriving
from the Greek atomists and Stoics than from Aristotle. Indeed, the Cartesian view of space is clearly descended from the idea of kenon or void that was especially important in providing the basis for a notion of space as undifferentiated and unlimited extension in writers from Philoponous to
Giordano Bruno. The Cartesian view is also indebted to Platonic ideas of
space. Plato’s view of space—the view presented in the famous discussion
of chora in the Timaeus — is explicitly criticized by Aristotle in the Physics. Aristotle takes it to be a view that reduces space or place to matter understood as pure extension. The Platonic account of the Chora is notoriously obscure, but it involves a concept of the Chora—or Receptacle—as opening up a space into which qualities can be received so that particular things can come into being. The Receptacle is thus the “Nurse of Becoming.” The concept of space or place that is involved in this account—of space as the receptive and nurturing opening or “womb” in which things come to be—is one that is amenable to a more geometrical or mathematical account than the Aristotelian. And this is not surprising since Aristotle’s concern, at least in the Physics, is with place as it plays a role in change, especially motion, which he defines “in its most general and primary sense” as change of place, while Plato is interested in the role of chora in generation, viewing the process of generation as itself governed by geometrical principles and forms. The space or place that is the chora is indeed a space of pure, featureless extension. For this reason, the Platonic account of space or place in the Timaeus can be seen as an ancestor to modern conceptions of space in a way that the Aristotelian notion cannot. Thus, although, in Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger claims (perhaps somewhat ambiguously, given the difficulty in establishing exactly how either place or “topos” should be understood) that “The Greeks have no word for ‘space’ . . . for they do not experience the spatial according to extensio but instead according to place (topos), [p. 69]” still he writes elsewhere that “Platonic philosophy — that is, the interpretation of Being as idea — prepared the transfiguration of place (topos) and of chora, the essence of which we have barely grasped, into ‘space’ as defined by extension. [P. 70]”

Pp. 70-1

2012-05-16T04:10:00.000-07:00

Taylor Carman on truth, correspondence, and correctness.

Does Heidegger accept or reject the correspondence theory—or, if it’s not exactly a “theory,” then the correspondence conception—of truth? Casual readers often simply assume he rejects it, but this is not obvious. Indeed, Hubert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall have recently, though in different ways, argued that Heidegger embraces the correspondence theory. Dreyfus does so by equating the problem of truth with the problem of realism, so that the case for correspondence is simply the case for realism, at least with respect to entities posited by the natural sciences. Wrathall does so by identifying correspondence (Übereinstimmung) with correctness (Richtigkeit), as Heidegger himself frequently does, and then maintaining that Heidegger has no objection to the notion of truth as correctness. I agree that Heidegger accepts the notion of truth as correctness. I want to argue, however, that correspondence is not the same as correctness, that the distinction between them is philosophically significant, and that Heidegger recognizes both the distinction and its significance—sometimes explicitly, but more often implicitly in the way he conceives and criticizes the metaphysical tradition from Plato to Nietzsche.

First, a point of clarification. The notion of truth as correspondence is often conflated with a related but distinct issue, namely realism. Some philosophers reject realism because they think it presupposes a correspondence conception of truth, which they find either empty or incoherent. Others reject the correspondence conception of truth because they think it requires realism about the entities on the object side of the correspondence relation. But these are two separate, if connected, issues. The crude intuition that propositions (or beliefs or sentences or whatever) are true in virtue of the way the world is seems compelling precisely—but only—where we already have a notion of the world itself being a certain way, independent of the way we understand it, a notion of the world, as Bernard Williams says, “as it is anyway.” The idea of a kind of external anchor in reality, it seems to me, is what breathes life into the metaphor of correspondence, so that the order of intelligibility is the reverse of what it might seem: it’s not that realism presupposes the correspondence theory of truth, but that the image of correspondence thrives on an assumption of realism, that is, some notion of the way the world really is, independent of our way of understandig it. Without realism, the notion of correspondence may have nothing going for it, but neither is it clear that the notion of correspondence adds anything to the realism on which it thrives. If we are to retain the correspondence conception of truth, our reason for doing so cannot simply be that we are realists about the entities to which we suppose our truths correspond.

2012-05-15T20:46:00.000-07:00

In-der-Blog-sein

Seynsgeschichte on Nothing.

If the Nothing is to be thought of in terms of a consummate withdrawal of Being, then a fortiori Being must be thought of in terms of a withdrawal, namely, its own (eigen). Being is that which is not, nor could ever be, a being, it is that which differentiates itself from all beings, it is that which withdraws from beings --indeed, withdraws from them so that they can be beings for a while (jeweilen). This means that neither Being nor Nothing is to be thought save in this withdrawal. Nothing must be thought in the withdrawal of Being; Being must be thought in the withdrawal of It Itself, i.e. Ereignis.

2012-05-15T05:00:00.000-07:00

From the section on Sartre in Clive James's Cultural Amnesia.

[Jean François] Revel, heartening in his impatience with Sartre’s ponderous folderol, usefully records Kierkegaard’s threat to Hegel: that he would send to him a young man who was in search of advice. Kierkegaard’s menacing insinuation was that Hegel would have to either get down to brass tacks or he responsible for the young man’s bewilderment. Revel also, and even more usefully, suggests that we should make the same threat to Heidegger. One says “even more usefully” because although there is something to be said against the belief that Hegel’s obscurity is never meaningful, there is nothing to be said against the belief that Heideggers’s obscurity is always meaningless. Hegel was trying to get something awkward out into the open. Heidegger was straining every nerve of the German language to do exactly the opposite. More than half a century later, the paradox has still not finished unravelling: it was Heidegger’s high-flown philosophical flapdoodle that lent credibility to Sartre’s. It was a paradox because Heidegger was an even more blatant case than Sartre of a speculative mind that could not grant itself freedom to speculate in the one area where it was fully qualified to deal with the concrete facts—its own compromises with reality. But merely to call Heidegger a “more blatant case” shows what we are up against. The case is still not clear, and in the years when Sartre and Heidegger were in a supposedly fruitful intellectual symbiosis, it was still not even a case: Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazis was thought of as a flirtation. The means scarcely existed for anyone—philosopher, philologist, literary critic, journalist or clinical psychologist—to point out the truth which has since become steadily more obvious, even if it does not appear axiomatic yet: that these two men, Heidegger and Sartre, were only pretending to deal with existence, because each of them was in outright denial of his own experience, and therefore had a vested interest in separating existence from the facts. Will it ever be realized that they were a vaudeville act? Probably not. Even George Steiner, who can scarcely be accused of insensitivity to the historical background, persists in talking about the pair of them as if they were Goethe and Schiller. Those of us who think they were Abbott and Costello had better reconcile ourselves to making no converts.
Pp. 276-7

2012-05-14T18:58:00.000-07:00

In-der-Blog-sein

Tom Pokinko draws Heidegger, with spiel.

2012-05-14T18:54:00.000-07:00

In-der-Blog-sein

Maddalo reads Towards Speculative Realism.

Harman argues that philosophy must shift away from the human subject and towards the object. He does this by radicalising Heidegger's thesis on das Zeug (equipment) and Zuhandenheit (readiness-to-hand). The usual way of reading these sections of Being and Time, as Harman himself admits, is to express the priority of pragmatic lived experience over theoretical, abstracted descriptions. When we encounter a doorway, we do not encounter a wooden construction of certain dimensions, but something we may walk through and which articulates a threshold between two spaces we may cross and inhabit (e.g. the outside and the warmth of the house, or the cold, unforgiving corridor and the intimidating office of the lecturer...)

For Harman, this reading is superficial even if it was probably Heidegger's own. In Speculative Realist terms, equipment or 'tool-being' does not relate specifically to human praxis but to any interaction between objects whatsoever. The encounter between a human student and the doorway of a lecturer's office is not philosophically more unique or special than the encounter between a dust mote and the door. Indeed, throughout his work, Harman insists we cannot 'continue to lump together monkeys, tornadoes, diamonds, and oil under the single heading of that which lies outside' . The event of 'relation' which occurs between human being and tree, say, is no more important or structurally unique than the relation between tree and earth, or tree and carbon monoxide, or tree and house (or whatever).

2012-05-14T04:21:00.000-07:00

Ilan Gur-Ze’ev on the question of truth.

For Heidegger, the human subject can exist only by self overcoming, which as an authentic existence reveals itself in the moment of conceiving herself - and her surroundings - as some-thing, and will open herself to the call, to her or his mission of revealing the openness of Being in beings - and in herself. She manifests herself as a creator in realizing the call of Being and manifests her uniqueness in disclosing the thingness of the world. Dasein is “the location of the truth of Being”. For Heidegger “the essence of man consists in his being more than merely human, if this is represented as being a rational creature”. This is revealed when he responds to the call of Being: “Man is the shepherd of Being. Man loses nothing in this ‘less’; rather, he gains in that he attains the truth of Being. He gains the essential poverty of the shepherd, whose dignity consists in being called by Being itself into the preservation of Being’s truth”. Man in his authentic existence, as the shepherd of Being, is in an ecstatic “homelessness”. This is the Heideggerian understanding of realizing human responsibility as “ecstatic dwelling in the nearness of Being” which enables the Dasein to face meaninglessness, to confront the question of Being, and to exit authentically in face of the Daseinfrage (question of Being).

The possibility of authentic life is inseparable from the question of truth. But here the question of truth is not revealed as an epistemological question within a correspondence theory but as an erotic posing of the question of the truth of Being. As the shepherd of Being the human subject is not a mere thing, one of the beings which do not concern for the question of Being and the truth of his mission. He has a responsibility, an aim to fulfil – to face the absence of the call by which he is to be awakened. The response to the absent call fertilizes a creative self-positioning which is anti-instrumental or anti-goal oriented.

The Heideggerian concept of truth as a-letheia as Ent-bergung (dis-covery, uncovering, un-veiling) confronts Verbergung (concealment), closure and thingness. Transcendence in the authentic ex-istence realizes concern as un-covering, as opposed to the possibility of oblivion of human responsibility and being swallowed in an opposite, unauthentic concern in the given appearances as an alternative mode of existence.

There's a certain frisson in unveiling the truth with an erotic posing.

2012-05-13T04:46:00.001-07:00

[Start][Previously on]

I settled in a residential neighborhood, in an elegant, European house. I discovered – it was impossible not to and not to do so quickly – that this country had been made to be European. And it even managed. (With these digressions of little import I only put off telling you what I should have already told you. Here, in Argentina, only one thing, a single intolerable event happened to me and only that should I tell you. I won’t be long.)

Suppose I pause for some paradoxes. Let’s suppose that having suggested (does a father suggest?) not deciphering this country I’m obliged to decipher it for you. I’ll do the (im)possible.

A European country, I said. Unreservedly they named themselves the Silver Athens, also the Paris of Latin America. It was correct: the sectors in charge (those called oligarchy) built Parisian palacetes, exquisite public buildings and even an immoderate opera theater, of an offensive opulence. These people, the oligarchy, speak in French and sell meat and wheat to England. Then, the military; last year they had a coup d'état; something that, almost with a simplistic quality, they call golpe. Last year’s was “el del ‘43”. It seems that earlier, there was another: “el del ‘30”. It seems they expect more. Like the sun rises or it rains. Like cattle fatten, like wheat grows, so they expect them. They are a natural part of the country; a disgrace, a benediction. Or neither of those things: How can one morally qualify a natural event?

El del ’30 was pro-Germanic. I’ve been told, proudly, that the general that presided over it even managed to talk over the telephone with Marshall Hindenburg, informing him, through that medium, the good news and his admiration for the German nation. At times it is difficult to believe the events that manage to fill men with pride. I learned that the pro-German general from ’30 read a proclamation the day of the golpe, written by a bard that was said to be the national poet; his name, Leopoldo Lugones. This man, already in 1924, had eulogized, as symbol of the military soul, the sword. His hour, once again and for the good of the world, he said, had arrived. The day of the golpe, the pro-Germanic general, another poet, or, shall we say, feverish orator, specialist, I was told, in a peculiar lyrical genre (by chance native to these latitudes) that was called, by him, patriotic harangue, had gathered a group of cadets and, I was told, with a booming voice, he harangued them patriotically in the following way: “I will direct you my words, quick like a rifle shot”; a sentence worthy of the Duce.

[Next]

2012-05-12T04:48:00.008-07:00

[Start][Previously on]

Frédéric de Towarnicki's Visite à Martin Heidegger

Heidegger was clear in his lectures about presence and thinking that when he noted his distance from science by questioning the way we represent the phenomena of the world, “it was not from an impertinence of a better knowing, but due to the prudence of a not knowing“. This emphasis on the limits of his work he said were “on the side” of the greatness of the philosophers who had the lead way by opening up the grounds of Western European thinking.

We had arrived with a list of questions on the difficulties of the thought of being, on Sien und Zeit (Being and Time),his first book which had made him famous. With scattered pauses, we talked about this and that until early afternoon. Our global civilization is still in its beginning, he said. Thinking ought now to prepare to one day overcome the scientific and industrial settings in which it was defined. It was therefore necessary to re-understand and make be understood, something that had already been said as a prelude to the night of the ages, but that philosophy had never really thought: the free “clearing of being”. There was probably hiding the original point of entry into presence that set the dimensions of the World Game.

Heidegger answered our questions with patience: yes, many theses have been written on his work, but they’ve continued to speak of the “philosophy of being” as if it were a recipe or an opinion, and not about a work to find in the otherness of philosophy the permanence of a first question . Those who hoped to use being as a launching pad to propel a Weltanschauung,a new world view, could only be disappointed. The question he posed, on the truth of being, offered no support to such programs. He said the important thing in a true philosophy course was not what was said directly, but that which was reserved for the silence. Therefore, he said in a lecture on Hölderlin, it was easy to blacken pages with notes without even knowing what it was about.
Pp. 21-2

[Next]

2012-05-11T04:40:00.000-07:00

Ḥayim and Rivca Gordon on the open in Οἰδίπους Τύραννος.

Additional understanding of the open, as Heidegger presents it, can be attained by looking again at the myth of Oedipus in Sophocles’ poetic drama. King Oedipi&1 We have mentioned Heidegger’s staunch belief that great poetry resides in the neighborhood of thinking. In previous chapters, we have shown some elements of the wisdom that is found in Sophocles’ beautiful poetry. Giving a full account of titis wisdom would require writing a different book. Hence, we discussed only a few elements of this wisdom. Here we also look only at the personal development of Oedipus throughout the play.

One major point that Sophocles’ King Oedipus portrays is Oedipus’ stubborn unwillingness to face the terrible truth of his own past, a truth that is central to the myth. Throughout most of the drama. Oedipus refuses to acknowledge the horrible possibility that he may have murdered his father and married his mother. Despite his atempts to block the unconcealment of this abdominal truth, it slowly becomes unconcealed as the drama unfolds.

We have already reminded the reader that, when Oedipus finally sees clearly that he murdered his father and married his mother, it arouses such horror of himseLf in him, that he blinds himself. Here we add a Heideggerian point. By such an appalling punishing of himself, Oedipus also leaped "into the groundless from the habitual ground.". . . It is not difficult to perceive that the myth of Oedipus and the drama, King Oedipus, open a realm in which poignant truths concerning human existence become unconcealed. . . . Works of great literature and our own experiences have taught us that, like King Oedipus, persons often will do their utmost to evade facing painful truths. Furthermore, the drama, King Oedipus shows that Oedipus, and even the chorus, have great difficulties perceiving and relating to some of the truths that emerge, at times forcefully, from concealment. Frequently. they seek ways to evade facing these painful truths.

Persistent attempts to evade seeing the truth are not confined to King Oedipus, as he was portrayed by Sophocles. Nor are purposeful evasions of truth confined to the people whom Ibsen’s heroes, Nora and Dr. Stockmann, confront. A glance at human history reveals countless examples of people who devised both clever and inane ways of life that allowed them to evade seeing truths that may bring pain.

Pp. 94-5

I watched Fassbinder's Nora Helmer (AKA A Doll's House) a few months ago. Recommended, unless you've already decided you can't stand Fassbinder's mirror play.

2012-05-10T04:39:00.000-07:00

Marcus Boon on our appropriation by music.

Without the endowments of metaphysics that appear to ground beings in essences, the universe appears as a flux of mutually co-constituting and interdependent appropriations, not dissimilar to that described by Tutuola. “Properness” is given in the moment or event of the coming together of these vibrations. But what does Heidegger refer to when he writes of this “self-vibrating realm”? Of course, it’s not clear. The realms of light or sound? The realm of pattern, tantra, interdependence, sunyatta of Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism? Following the rumor that Heidegger took LSD with Ernst Junger in the early 1950s, the realm of psychedelic experience? Although Heidegger in fact pursued this thought in the direction of language, the vocabulary he uses is more specific to sound. Thus in Identity and Difference, he writes that “in the event of appropriation vibrates the active nature of what speaks as language” (39, my italics). Avital Ronell has already investigated the importance of the “call” to Heidegger, and one might also examine “attunement” in Being and Time as a specifically sonic mode of apprehending being. For now, let us observe that the sound world is indeed a “self-vibrating realm” and one in which appropriation is already quite familiar to most of us.

Music moves us, in doing so, it appropriates us. It does this affectively – through “affection”. What is called in our world today “appropriation” – the taking of something and making it ours, making it belong to us – operates in a fluid way in the realm of sound where the interaction of different sounds, which is called “harmony” or “rhythm” is manifestly a mutual appropriation. The sound world requires us to think through the possibility of “appropriation” precisely in the Heideggerian sense of a “belonging together” which is not a unity. The sound world “takes us out of ourselves” (ecstasis) and yet we experience that which takes us out of ourselves as part of ourselves, because we are emotionally affected, and we identify ourselves with our ability to “have” emotions. David Byrne struggles with this in his essay accompanying the reissue of Bush of Ghosts when he writes about an emotionally affective music that is composed through montage, that “tricks the emotions” because it is not a representation of an authentic performance. But in the realm of sound, the affective power of sound is not the product of authentic expressions of particular subjectivities, despite the tradition of writing about music in the west that takes this point of view. This tradition would be the Platonic tradition that Heidegger is criticizing, in which identity is an essence that is revealed by an expression or representation. A variety of non-western musical traditions around the world have developed rituals, practices and cultures built around this appropriative potential of sound. Possession by deities and spirits is initiated through drums and percussion throughout the African-Atlantic diaspora, and the Islamic world from Morocco to Indonesia. In Hindustani classical music, singers and musicians evoke the spirit of a raga by performing it, and a successful performance is measured by the appearance of the spirit, which is simultaneously a sound form, a picture, a color, a mood and a deity. In all of these situations, no claim is made by the performers that the power of the music is the result of a particular personal subjectivity revealing itself.

2012-05-09T05:09:00.000-07:00

Marcel Detienne on translating "truth", from Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece.

The philosophicoreligious circles of the late sixth century were thus deeply involved with the subject of Truth, the very Truth which, rightly or wrongly, Martin Heidegger regarded as the essential element of Greek philosophy and which was at the heart of philosophical discussion during the “overthrow of metaphysics” between the time of the Greeks and “our own time.” Few scholars of Antiquity or educated readers are aware of how carefully Heideggerians and “deconstructionists” have built a veritable wall to separate themselves from the explorations of Greek scholars. The Hellenists are perhaps at fault in not realizing that the only real innovator in Greek thought is Heidegger: still, these scholars continue to publish and publicize documents, texts if not whole works, from the diverse world of archaic Greece. The barrier seems insuperable. Even lucid critics of successive interpretations of Heidegger’s views on truth seem to accept at face value his notion of the “unconcealed” or the “deconcealed,” making no attempt to deconstruct it or set it alongside those archaic representations of Aletheia. André Doz, one of the boldest of those critics, as uninformed as the most obdurate of them about the discoveries at Olbia and Derveni, has written. “We ought to take a closer look at the word alethes.” On the other hand, many Greek scholars probably do not know that, for Heidegger and his disciples, the history of philosophy and hence the establishment of the meaning of Aletheia are part of the very history of being. Clearly, this does not make it any easier to initiate a debate on the modalities of concealment, oblivion, and memory in Greek thought and culture.

From the perspective I have adopted from the start, no etymology can be singled out as infallible (thank God). At least from Parmenides on, Greek philosophers recognized that to think it was necessary to debate and argue. When an etymology seems bad or fantastic no appeal to higher grounds can confer authority on it. In the context of the same inquiry, it is important to remember that it is partly because of the etymology of the word polis that the held of Politics is left out of the analyses offered by Heidegger and his followers, intent as the are on the “overthrow of metaphysics.” During a seminar, Heidegger once said (and later wrote) that the word polis comes from polein, an ancient form of the verb meaning “to be.” Such an etymology is entirely arbitrary; there is simply no convincing, verifiable “true meaning” for polis. Even so, there was no reason for such an elementary piece of information to inhibit thought on the polis from developing: if the city, or polis, is based on the verb “to be,” that in itself demonstrates that the polis must be the site of a total unveiling of Being. Thus, the city cannot have anything in common with “politics” in the trivial sense of to politikon. So, goodbye politics. The “philosophicoreligious” aspect was not even mentioned in connection with either the mundane world or the world of the Beyond.

Pp. 26-8

2012-05-08T07:24:00.000-07:00

Bermuda's Royal Gazette on naturalism.

Naturalism is the philosophy of the naturalist perspective, and it stands behind the human science of psychology. K A Aho, in the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, asserted that human beings are unlike other animals in that they are a “lived-body”, a dialogical way of being that is already engaged and embedded in a web of sociohistorical meanings. That is, we are born embodied into a culture, thrown into it as the philosopher Martin Heidegger has said. Aho claimed that the job of the human sciences is not to explain existence but to understand how we interpret ourselves, how we make meaning out of our experience of being in this world. A background of meanings is always already in place informing the development and direction of a world view.