enowning

Google is changing Blogger again this month. It has happened before in the 16 years Enowning has been updated. Each change has led to loss of original features. Older posts can no longer be updated to correct typos and link rot. The latest changes restrict blog posts even more down a particular channel, make the blog more difficult to manage, so it is time to take a break from Enowning.

2020-06-09T13:21:00.000-07:00

In LARB Anders Dunker interviews Yuk Hui.

Dugin is influenced by a reading of Heidegger that tends to see technology as a tool for the spread of the moral hollowness he sees in liberal Western societies. To reject what is foreign and romanticize tradition seems an altogether obvious and dangerous mode of resistance.

Dugin misinterprets what Heidegger says. Heidegger doesn’t say that we should resist technology. He says that we mustn’t forget that there is also something else. This something else is the unconcealment of Being, which is forgotten in modern technology. Or, more precisely, the unconcealment in modern technology can only be carried out through a mode of challenging, of violence. With this statement, Heidegger abruptly ends his argument, but the way I understand him, he doesn’t call for a resistance to modern technology but rather a transformation of it. This transformation is at the same time a stepping back and a leap ahead.

If we want to deepen our understanding of the local, we should perhaps give a fresh look at the pre-romantic German thinker Herder, as Peter Sloterdijk told me he aims to do in a forthcoming book. Herder was the origin of German nationalism with all it entails, because of what he writes about the spirit of the people — der Volksgeist. In one way, he was the inventor of “the people.” Herder’s ideas are dangerous, but if you don’t dare confront danger, as Heidegger says, you end up with catastrophe.

2020-06-07T11:44:00.002-07:00

Classical Philosophy Academy on Heidegger on the Gigantic Battle for Being.

2020-06-02T19:58:00.000-07:00

In Big Think, Warren Ward on a meaningful death.

Heidegger believed that Aristotle's notion of Being – which had run as a thread through Western thinking for more than 2,000 years, and been instrumental in the development of scientific thinking – was flawed at a most fundamental level. Whereas Aristotle saw all of existence, including human beings, as things we could classify and analyse to increase our understanding of the world, in Being and Time (1927) Heidegger argued that, before we start classifying Being, we should first ask the question: 'Who or what is doing all this questioning?'

2020-06-01T21:53:00.003-07:00

In the Dhaka New Age Rezaul Karim Rony seeks a response.

Today, in this crisis time when state, science and everything has failed, I recall Derrida’s famous quote ‘even if we’re in a state of hopelessness, a sense of expectation is an integral part of our relationship to time’ and it is a sense of hope that I feel. I recall Heidegger when I feel most challenged, but the most important act is still thinking. Unfortunately, we have forgotten that task in this troubled time.

2020-05-31T06:43:00.002-07:00

From IIT Madras course "Aspects of Western Philosophy" with Dr. Sreekumar Nellickappilly, module on "Heidegger : phenomenological hermeneutics; concept of Being"

2020-05-29T06:51:00.001-07:00

Apply-Degger: A Podcast with Simon Critchley

2020-05-28T21:18:00.002-07:00

New B&T reading group online, at Continental Philosophy on Discord.

Read the announcement.

2020-05-28T18:48:00.000-07:00

Rappler on a pandemic of nothing.

Due to the extreme circumstances brought about by the pandemic – one that has essentially dissolved any semblance of our daily practices – I believe we are gradually experiencing an exacerbated version of what German philosopher Martin Heidegger called encounters with “dasnichts” or “the nothing.” For those familiar with Heidegger’s work, you’ll know that he was keenly insightful but was immensely confusing as well. To put it in simpler terms, what Heidegger referred to are instances where we are confronted with the strangeness or even absurdity of everything. We begin to ask questions like: why are things in this manner? Or why are we here rather than there?

2020-05-27T06:26:00.003-07:00

Charles Guignon RIP

2020-05-26T16:38:00.000-07:00

Inside Hook on curing conspirators.

Solomon nods to philosopher Martin Heidegger, who saw these issues as something that couldn’t be solved. Rather, you need to come to tolerate and accept opposing views, not overcome them. That’s where you get to a point where you’re truly concerned and compassionate for your fellow humans. As Solomon notes, “that gives you a sense of what Heidegger called ‘unshakeable joy.’”

2020-05-25T07:05:00.000-07:00

Existential Comics on the origin of Anglo Philosophy.

2020-05-25T06:40:00.000-07:00

In the NY Times, artist Doris Salcedo on presencing death.

[A]n insignificance trivialized and inscribed into our everyday life. Death has become what the philosopher Martin Heidegger called the “manufacture of corpses.” That is why the testimonies of victims are not only at the center of my work, but are actually a requirement for the very existence of each and every one of my pieces.