enowning

2009-07-10T10:35:00.000-07:00

In-der-Blog-sein

Kaizenology on Alan Moore's The Birth Caul.

A trip back through and beyond birth, overcoming the barrier of the everyday language in search of the DNA helix, the primordial verb, the being of the there would have said Heidegger, nothing.

My translation.

2009-07-10T05:43:00.000-07:00

Artemy Magun on hiding from the open.

Yaghoubi: You suggest that a reorientation of politics toward justice, and particularly the known unknown of the Other, might alleviate some of the present antinomies described above. I was especially interested in your placement of Carl Schmitt into this intellectual tradition. You trace the genealogy of justice as relating to the Other from Plato onward to Heidegger and Derrida, but you make a good case for including Schmitt. How does Schmitt's work, and his friend-enemy distinction, contribute to our understanding of the Other?

Magun: Well, this is kind of an unexpected thesis, particularly because we know Schmitt was a Nazi. But (see above) you cannot just dismiss the conceptual content of a theory because it went practically wrong—the task is to reorient it. Already Derrida drew attention to this interest of Schmitt in the figure of the Other. But Derrida clearly thought that he was reading Schmitt against the grain, showing how his writing and thinking subvert his explicit agenda, and so on. And I argue that these things in Schmitt have been present quite explicitly: like Plessner and Heidegger, he was a theorist of the open, but from the right. What is interesting is that this is not exactly the liberal openness, since it has to do with the divisive political action, with antagonism. However, in Schmitt this is not, of course, a left-wing revolutionary openness either. First, it is an openness that dialectically turns into aggressiveness, because one is too open and therefore needs to be violent against the intruder. We have seen this logic, unfortunately, in the left-wing revolutions too, in the moments of terror. Second, this openness is still too close to the liberal one, since it led Schmitt to accept just any interesting political development. His conservatism is here (and elsewhere) strongly marked by liberalism. Again, our task is to be aware of this dialectics and to remember for what you need this openness, what are you actually doing.

An interesting topic to develop—I did it a little bit in an article on terror, coming out this year in a Routledge volume on "Law and evil"—is the connection of this receptive openness with the active openness of manifestation, with the drive to reveal, which Heidegger affirms in An Introduction to Metaphysics and then criticizes in "The Question Concerning Technology." I think that his criticism of Gestell would also apply to liberal or conservative openness, which should be balanced, in my view, with a capacity to keep things hidden or latent, if needed (not to discover more atomic bombs, etc.). Openness should not be an absolute, of course.

2009-07-09T20:50:00.000-07:00

Peter Osborne on ordinary time.

The ordinary conception of time is taken by Heidegger to 'cover up' the character of temporality as a mode of Dasein's existence, by reducing it to 'a sequence of "nows" which are constantly "present-at-hand", simultaneously passing away and coming along' in an uninterrupted flow, as if they existed externally to one another and independently of Dasein. As such, the ordinary conception of time is described by Heidegger as now-time' (Jetztzeit). For Heidegger, it is essentially an everyday version of Aristotle’s conception of rime as an endless and irreversible succession of instants. In presenting time as continuous (as opposed to ecstatic), and independent of Dasein, the ordinary conception marks itself off as the product of a 'fallen' Dasein, an 'inauthentic' mode of time-consciousness. What it covers up, in particular, is Dasein's finitude, and hence everything that flows existentially and temporally from the recognition of that finitude. The ordinary conception of time involves a 'fleeing in the face of death'. It is a 'self-forgetful "representation"' through which time appears as infinite, since it is defined by the standpoint of 'the they'. For '"the they" never dies.' Indeed, 'the they' cannot die since, as we have seen, on Heidegger's analysis, 'death is in each case mine.'

P. 64

Hat tip to adswithoutproducts.

2009-07-09T11:21:00.000-07:00

In-der-Blog-sein

Prometheus Unbound on whether scientists can speak about anything but empirical science.

Another example: If Collins was a Heidegger enthusiast, absorbing Heidegger’s works and language in his leisure time, and in an interview Collins declared that his reflections on Heidegger’s concept of “Dasein” (Being) had brought him to experiment with meditation and vegetarianism, and gave him a deeply ecological view of the world, with a suspicion of human technology, would we feel that an otherwise good scientist had flipped his wig? What if he punctuated his conversational speech with Heideggerian coinages like “bestand,” “gestell,” and “dwelling”? Is it tolerable for a scientist, outside the lab or science journal, to adopt ways of being in the world and languages that are, well, quirky and non-evidential based, or not?

What if, for instance, Collins flatly declared in public:

“I oppose zoos because by caging animals we lose contact with our relationship to Dasein—the Ground of Being. I agree with Heidegger that ‘mystery pervades the whole of man’s Dasein.’”

Is this kind of “reasoning”—from a non-empirically derived concept to an opposition to caging animals—an outrageous abuse of reasoning by a scientist who ought to be committed to empiricism alone? Would Collins be a man guilty of believing and acting on something absent evidence—and therefore someone worthy to be made fun of by atheists?

2009-07-08T14:41:00.000-07:00

In-der-Blog-sein

Bread and Circuits liked a passage from “Building Dwelling Thinking.”

2009-07-08T11:10:00.000-07:00

Cuban artist Juan Carlos Rodríguez explains his art.

These large structures or paintings with natural elements are influenced by the readings of German philosopher, Martin Heidegger. He said that every human being is a project of being. Afterwards in an epitaph of Rayuela, - the novel by Argentinean writer Julio Cortázar -, I found: “a human being isn’t except that s/he tries to be, plans to be.”

This explains what art means to me: a path that I have to travel while going through life and not an end that I must reach. If tomorrow I consider that I must not do what people call art, I won’t do any more. Art is another of the roads of my life and because of this I have never hurried the works.

2009-07-07T14:50:00.000-07:00

Horrors. McNamara not as authentic as Kurtz.

Unlike McNamara, Kurtz understands himself as what Heidegger would have called a "thrown" man, thrown into the middle of the Horror, where he realizes that Reason cannot help him. Thrown back on himself, in the midst of unreason, Kurtz does the only thing left to do. He pushes through. He pushes BEYOND, into madness, and into authenticity. Kurtz’s madness cannot be understood as a mere "backlash" against Reason. To the contrary. In a war that could never be WON but from which it was impossible to WALK AWAY, perhaps Kurtz’s decision was quite rational. Perhaps he is as much an Enlightenment man as McNamara. Perhaps his response, his DECISION, was, in those circumstances, COMPLETELY rational.

2009-07-07T09:18:00.000-07:00

From Theodore Kisiel's review of James Luchte's Heidegger's Early Philosophy: The Phenomenology of Ecstatic Temporality.

In confronting the tradition of philosophy with his central insight of the radically finite temporality inherent in the Da-Sein experience, Heidegger discovers that the entire tradition of Occidental philosophy constituted a basic drift away from this chiaroscuro experience of be-ing and developed over the centuries into a metaphysics of permanent presence now coming to its perfection in the Ge-Stell (syn-thetic com-posit[ion]ing) of modern technology in the form of global matrixes. These include air traffic control grids, Global Positioning Systems, the World Wide Web of the internet, the starkly binary digital logic that rules informational electronics, etc. To move beyond this final upshot of the Occidental tradition of philosophy, the later Heidegger calls for a radically other beginning of thinking in accord with the history of be-ing 'based' on the abyssal temporality inherent in the Da-Sein experience of his early philosophy.

2009-07-06T18:45:00.000-07:00

Critchley, B&T, week 5. Ineffable anxiety.

In order to understand what Heidegger means by anxiety, we have to distinguish it from another mood he examines: fear. Heidegger gives a phenomenology of fear earlier in Being and Time. His claim is that fear is always fear of something threatening, some particular thing in the world. Let's say that I am fearful of spiders. Fear has an object and when that object is removed, I am no longer fearful. I see a spider in the bath and I am suddenly frightened. My non-spider fearing friend removes the offending arachnid, I am no longer fearful.

Matters are very different with anxiety. If fear is fearful of something particular and determinate, then anxiety is anxious about nothing in particular and is indeterminate. If fear is directed towards some distinct thing in the world, spiders or whatever, then anxiety is anxious about being-in-the-world as such. Anxiety is experienced in the face of something completely indefinite. It is, Heidegger insists, "nothing and nowhere".

2009-07-06T08:06:00.000-07:00

In-der-Blog-sein

anotherheideggerblog has words of advice for young Heideggerians.

2009-07-06T08:03:00.000-07:00

In-der-Blog-sein

The Cold Hut on real truth.

Heidegger contrasts the epistemological notion of truth as correspondence with his ontological notion of truth as disclosure. Another friend of mine, rather different in attitude from the friend mentioned above, once told me that the truths of fiction are “more true because they are fiction.” I think that’s a somewhat over-the-top way of making the point but I believe I understand what he is trying to say. In a similar manner to Heidegger, he has rejected the correspondence theory of truth, according to which we divide literature into fact and fiction, in favour of a notion of truth that can better be described as revealing or disclosing the intrinsic nature of the world. Rather than a relationship between propositions and facts about reality, alétheia is the disclosure of reality itself.

2009-07-05T19:28:00.000-07:00

Jan Zwicky on being down in the valley.

Zwicky's second essay is a humorously written monologue from the perspective of a cowboy in an Old Western saloon. This piece is an interesting complement to others in the book in that, unlike Bringhurst's discussion, for example, which traces some of the historical rejections of poetry by philosophers, here Zwicky is questioning the fervent celebration of poetry by an influential philosopher, "Marty Heidegger." The cowboy narrator is suspicious of what it means to think of poets the way Heidegger does. To think of language as the constitution of Being and to think of poets as the masters of language potentially eliminates humility from poetic acts of attention. Does the world exist outside of language? The cowboy cautions: "If you think it's obvious the world is out there, turns out you have to give up on bein able to provide a proof fer how you know that." Ultimately, we all have to decide what to believe in; whether it is to follow Heidegger's mythic ethos or acknowledge that there is a world outside of logic, outside of language. This choice, Zwicky reminds us, is fundamentally ethical.

2009-07-02T16:11:00.000-07:00

In-der-Blog-sein

The Book Oven on The Question Concerning Digital Technology.

Of late, I’ve been feeling cold about the web. So much of what is going on is the ordering of nature, which, if you believe Heidegger, is the inevitable drive of technology. And “dangerous” for our humanity.

2009-07-02T08:10:00.000-07:00

In-der-Blog-sein

Samuel Chase on Being discrimination.

What Heidegger is saying here that perhaps being cannot be defined, however, Being, which one should not confuse with being, could be defined.

I'm feeling the ontological guilt of being prejudiced against capital B Being.

2009-06-30T06:32:00.000-07:00

Language is a stencil for thinking.

How do we know that it is language itself that creates these differences in thought and not some other aspect of their respective cultures?

One way to answer this question is to teach people new ways of talking and see if that changes the way they think. In our lab, we've taught English speakers different ways of talking about time. In one such study, English speakers were taught to use size metaphors (as in Greek) to describe duration (e.g., a movie is larger than a sneeze), or vertical metaphors (as in Mandarin) to describe event order. Once the English speakers had learned to talk about time in these new ways, their cognitive performance began to resemble that of Greek or Mandarin speakers. This suggests that patterns in a language can indeed play a causal role in constructing how we think.

2009-06-29T23:13:00.000-07:00

Critchley, B&T, week 4.

Furthermore, I am always found in a mood, a Stimmung. This is mood is the strong Aristotelian sense of pathos, a passion of the soul or an affect, something befalls us and in which we find ourselves. The passions are not, for Heidegger, psychological colouring for an essentially rational agent. They are rather the fundamental ways in which we are attuned to the world. Indeed, musicologically, Stimmung is linked to tuning and pitch: one is attuned to the world firstly and mostly through moods. One of the compelling aspects of Heidegger's work is his attempt to provide a phenomenology of moods, of the affects that make up our everyday life in the world.

This is another way of approaching his central insight: that we cannot exist independently of our relation to the world; and this relationship is a matter of mood and appetite, not rational contemplation.

Such moods disclose the human being as thrown into the 'there' of my being-in-the-world. As Jim Morrisson [singer for The Doorrs] intoned many decades ago, 'Into this world we're thrown'.

As a corollary, music is the language of moods.

2009-06-29T16:47:00.000-07:00

It's not where you publish, but who reads and cites you. How to rank published papers.

In his 2005 article, Hirsch introduced the h-index (named after himself, of course). The key was focusing not on where you published but on how many times other researchers cited your work. In practice, you take all the papers you've published and rank them by how many times each has been cited. Say paper number one has been cited 10,000 times. Paper number two, 8,000 cites. Paper number 32 has 33 citations, but number 33 has received just 28. You've published 32 papers with more than 32 citations—your h-index is 32.

Basically a PageRank algorithm that includes paper journals, from the olde pre-web days. Today, if your paers are not online, you're nobody - only Polyphemus cares about your work.

2009-06-27T20:37:00.000-07:00

National Review on Rémi Brague's The Legend of the Middle Ages.

One place where Brague highlights the sophistication and relevance of medieval thought is in a fascinating chapter about the era’s reflections on the flesh. He finds here a model of subjectivity that can inform and improve our contemporary understanding of the self. Drawing from Hegel and Heidegger, Brague describes for the reader the link between modernity and subjectivity, and he summarizes Heidegger’s account of modern subjectivity thus: “The subject itself is above all an object, the object of certitude. The I must assure itself of its own being before it can become the ‘subject.’ The subject is the I, but only once it has been determined by certitude.” This modern formulation of subjectivity implies “something like a pre-subjective modality of the I,” which, in turn, betrays a certain mind/body dualism — for it is only after an intangible, invisible “certitude” assures the I of its own existence that the I can then become a subject and view the world as an object. In the end, modern thought tends to minimize the role the body plays in forming the self, insisting instead on a subjectivity based on consciousness.

Brague prefers the medieval account, rejecting this modern tendency to ignore the body as an integral part of the self, and he thinks that “the rediscovery of the flesh is perhaps a philosophical task decisive for our own age” — not least because modernity has become “the age without angels.” For medieval thinkers, angels held an important position in the hierarchy of being because they are rational, non-corporeal beings — intermediaries between rational, corporeal human beings and God, who is pure being. Modernity, however, has lost its angels, and this poses an anthropological problem: If humans can be properly defined only when their carnal nature is distinguished from the non-carnal nature of angels, what happens when angels disappear? In effect, man himself becomes an angel. And this is precisely what one finds in the modern approach to subjectivity. Man is defined, not by his rationality and carnality, but by his rationality alone.

Much is lost, however, when our carnal nature is overlooked. For one, carnality gives us our sense of touch — a sense that in medieval thought seemed central to knowledge of self and world. In the Middle Ages, “all knowledge is necessarily based in sense knowledge” and the fundamental sense is touch. Brague notes: “We cannot help but possess [touch]: To lose it would be to lose life.” Moreover, touch is the fundamental sense because “we touch our flesh at the very moment we touch an object.” “We do not see our eye when it sees,” nor do we “hear our eardrums when they hear.” In touch, however, “the I knows itself,” and not “in the same manner as does the modern subject — or at least not if we follow Heidegger’s analysis. The subject does not make sure of itself before knowing things.” Instead, “we awaken to conscious life and we discover ourselves already inhabiting a body we have not created.”

2009-06-25T21:48:00.000-07:00

On the reputations of academostars.

One would assume that commenting in some controversial way about politics would precipitate a rapid fall from power, but that is apparently not the case. Both the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the literary critic Paul de Man have been accused of being anti-Semitic, yet their reputations have remained relatively untarnished.

Heidegger was a member of the Nazi Party who was appointed director of the University of Freiburg in 1932. His writings at the time indicate strong support of the Nazi cause, and a contemporary photograph shows him in full Nazi regalia. He later denied that he had been a fervent Nazi and said he had joined the party only to save his university. Subsequent documentation proves otherwise, and, as many have noted, he never apologized for his involvement in Nazism. Yet his ideas are still widely studied and taught.

Paul de Man, a Yale professor and inaugurator of deconstruction in the United States, was found after his death to have written over a hundred articles for the Belgian collaborationist newspaper Le Soir. Both de Man and Heidegger have been the focus of vigorous arguments for and against ignoring politically reprehensible actions in favor of a body of work. De Man's reputation has perhaps suffered a bit, but he has had many heavy-hitting apologists, including Jacques Derrida and J. Hillis Miller. In some sense, there has been both scandal and spin, and the reputations of both de Man and Heidegger depend on the effectiveness of the latter over the former. Still, it has been hard to strip fame from those two scholars and drape them with notoriety, or even infamy, because their ideas endure.

So ideas count for something in the academy?

2009-06-25T07:46:00.000-07:00

Good news, the second coming. Thomas Sheehan's Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker is being republished. Used copies go for bowkuh bux.

2009-06-24T07:30:00.000-07:00

Touch, underappreciated.

In striving for verification, do we reach out to touch something to feel its truth, or do we believe our eyes? And in the notoriously visual culture in which we live, what is the place of touch?

Like much of philosophy, what is closest or most obvious to us is revealed to be most distant. Or, as Heidegger once asked in The Essence of Truth: “How is it that the apparently self-evident turns out, upon closer examination, to be understood least? Answer: because it is too close to us and because we proceed in this way with everything close.” Not only the banal, everyday nature of touch but also its transience and deeply subjective nature, are all potential factors that make it unattractive for philosophers to consider seriously.

2009-06-24T04:03:00.000-07:00

The narrator, in Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Camera, on thinking.

The conditions were now perfect, it seemed to me, for thinking. A few minutes earlier, on the maritime platform, I had stopped to watch the rain fall in a bright projected beam, in the exact space delineated by the light, enclosed and yet as devoid of material borders as a quavering Rothko outline, and, imagining the rain falling at this place in the world, which, carried by gusts of wind, passed through my mind, moving from the shining cone of light to the neighboring darkness without it being possible to determine the tangible limits between the light and shadows, rain seemed to me to represent the course of thought, transfixed for a second in the light and disappearing the very next second to give way to itself. For what is the act of thinking—if it's not the act of thinking about something? It's the flow of thought that is so beautiful, yes, the flow, and its murmur that travels beyond the world’s clamor. Let yourself attempt to stop thought, to bring its contents to light, and you'd end up with (how could I say, how could I not say rather) trying to preserve the quavering, ungraspable outlines, you'd end up with nothing, water slipping through your fingers, a few graceless drops drying out in the light. It was night now in my mind, I was alone in the semi-darkness of the booth and I was thinking, protected from outer torments. The most favorable conditions for thinking, the moments when thought can let itself naturally follow its course, are precisely moments when, having temporarily given up fighting a seemingly inexhaustible reality, the tension begins to loosen little by little, all the tension accumulated in protecting yourself against the threat of injury—and I had my share of minor injuries—and that, alone in an enclosed space, alone and following the course of your thoughts in a state of growing relief, you move progressively from the struggle of living to the despair of being.

Pp. 82-3

2009-06-23T21:12:00.000-07:00

Ork! Ork!

Humor from Paul Johnson.

Martin Heidegger, whom many believe to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century (he is impenetrable, I find, though I once understood his main point for about half an hour, until my mind crumbled), laughed only once. That was when, on a picnic in the Hartz mountains, Ernst Jünger bent over to pick up a sauerkraut roll, and split his lederhosen with a tremendous crack. But after ‘a fierce shout of mirth’, Heidegger checked himself, and ‘his expression reverted to its habitual ferocity’.

Having lived in England, I can tell he's trying to be funny because he used the word sauerkraut while talking about Germans.

2009-06-23T17:43:00.000-07:00

Death is so last century, now we're bored.

We feel strongly about [boredom], but rarely discuss it. Occasionally it's a subject of nostalgia, as in, "Remember how wonderful it was, two years ago, when business news was boring?"

It occupies some philosophers, most of them following Martin Heidegger. He considered profound boredom the modern era's basic mood. Not always original, he pointed out that waiting for a train can be boring. He disliked the industrial world and argued that the unrelenting desire for novelty reflects our fear of being bored.

...

My own mind fills up with what Heidegger called the "muffling fog" of boredom during all announcements given on aircraft, particularly those filled with plonkingly ordinary data, such as the news that we are to travel from Calgary to Toronto, via northern Ontario, at 35,000 feet. (If we were going via New Orleans, at 350 feet, it might be notable.)

An article in the summer issue of The American Scholar by Mark Edmundson of the University of Virginia puts the blame for tedium, apathy and the rest on other people, in particular his academic colleagues.

2009-06-23T14:34:00.000-07:00

God occluded by all the hullabaloo.

I think part of the problem is that a technological society such as ours not only lessens our sense of dependence but also is so filled with sound that it doesn’t create spaces for the silences wherein we might hear the still, small voice of God calling to us. Death as well as life is swallowed up in noise (a point Heidegger makes when he discusses how our Sein zum Tod is occluded for us in the chatter of the world). We don’t know, or what’s worse seek to know, the measure of our days, and thus miss out on the fundamental wisdom of our existence: that we are passing through. Without a realization of this mystery of being, we cannot begin to cultivate the virtues of gratitude and service.