Heidegger And The Place Of Ethics
Being-with In The Crossing Of Heidegger's Thought
byMichael Lewis
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The New Heidegger
byMiguel De Beistegui
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The concept of “the worldhood of world” provides a possibility for us to think how we can transcend the world of significations toward the world of meaning, or better: transcend the world of inauthentic meaning toward the world of authentic meaning.
Through this refusal of struggle, man does not renounce violence, but rather commits the most terrible violence against Being and against himself. By avoiding struggle, Dasein shuts itself off from the unconcealment of Being, refusing to open itself up as the site for Being’s disclosure. Dasein thereby prevents itself from asserting its creative power, its possibilities, in the world, affirming itself as the negation of Dasein, not-Dasein.
Heidegger did not give an exhaustive account of Being, nor would he claim to have done so, (accordingly, the last lines of the book are questions). The question of Being is one which shatters all attempts at solution, along with the claim that this is all there is to say about the matter. In the first lines of the book, we find the declaration of a newfound bewilderment in the face of Being.
What is one trying to know when one poses the question of Being? Heidegger answers: the meaning of Being. A mysterious formula, but it will receive a rather prosaic sense: the point is not, we are assured, to bring to light the meaning of existence, but solely to elucidate what is comprised in the notion of Being by bringing it to conceptual clarity.
One of Heidegger’s main discoveries with regard to the question of Being was that for metaphysics the sense of Being is presence. Being presence – together with past and future – a dimension of time it follows that time is the hidden horizon of the metaphysical interpretation of Being. According to Heidegger metaphysics “forgets” temporality in its full three dimensionality by holding only to the one-dimensional sense of “standing presence-at-hand.”
My projecting forward into a future is not something I will as such, but rather is how I could even know myself at all, how I could have the view that driving forward is the driving of my will. I am driven into the future because the present, through ruinance, decays into the past and leaves me with an absence, a nothing, which demands to be filled.
If Dasein created itself, Dasein would be something that is added to the furniture of the world. Precisely because Dasein cannot be reified, it does not create itself, but is tied to a world in which it is realized. Consequently, the possibilities for Dasein’s existence are tied to a physical world. Their content – that is, what possibilities they are – derives from a physical world, and they are carried out in a physical world.
Heidegger's conceptualization of the open is arrived at through an original rendition of the pre-Socratic notion of aletheia (which might be translated as "truth," "uncovering" but also, although more metaphorically, as the "fight against oblivion"). Heidegger thinks of aletheia as unconcealment, as the freedom "to-be-there." Humans' freedom, their breaking from the concealed closure in which all creatures are housed is, according to Heidegger, achieved through language.
For, Heidegger believed it possible, in a "moment of vision," to step back from the heroes we have "always-already" chosen, adopt a second-order perspective on those choices, and choose again, in full awareness that we are choosing a hero, and that doing so lucidly can help us own our own lives in a way that will restore our sense of the meaning, weight, and integrity of our actions.
At stake is the cave itself, and whether transcendence from it is imaginable, possible or desirable. For Heidegger, Platonic idealism, the vision of philosophy that sees everything completely in the full light of day, is a form of nihilism. Such philosophy wants to transcend the world as a finite, bounded whole; it wants to deny the earth its due and bring a total enlightenment back to every shadowed corner of the cave. But if the cave is our world, our only world, such a longing for transcendence and ideals will destroy the only dwelling we will ever have: the finite, historically circumscribed existence of earth-bound human beings.
The ultimate ground is now being, which is itself groundless. Because the sendings of being are themselves groundless, they are, according to Heidegger, a "game". The leap from the ground of the principle of reason is therefore a leap into the groundlessness of a game "into which we mortals are brought by dwelling near to death".
Both Heidegger and Derrida enact the thing's release from the confines of conscious representation, but whereas the former wishes to reclaim the independence and the self-identity of the thing, the latter conjoins, hinges and unhinges, the plentitude of the thing on the abyss.
For Heidegger, one must be sure to recognize that this conflict or struggle does not consist of a mere replenishment of the old with new, but rather the upbringing of the unheard and unsought into the open space. Moreover, this struggle not only bring beings out of concealment, but "it also preserves the essent in its permanence"
Lefebvre's use of habiter is a direct translation of Heidegger's wohnen. Indeed, in a number of places, Lefebvre cites Hölderlin's poem "poetically man dwells", and mentions Heidegger's discussion positively. Lefebvre's suggestion that inhabiting [habiter] has been reduced to the notion of habitat [habitat] parallels Heidegger's notion of a crisis in dwelling. As Lefebvre notes, explicitly following Heidegger, this crisis "springs from a strange kind of excess: a rage for measurement and calculation".
The primary theme of hermeneutics was less the immediate facticity of our Being in this world, than the fact that the presuppositions of the understanding of Being remain hidden in a tradition that needs to be reopened (or « destroyed », as Heidegger puts it). Such a hermeneutics still aims at a self-awakening of existence, but it does so by promising to sort out the fundamental structures of our understanding of being.
Heidegger's appeal to the fleeting and tragic character of technical knowledge suggests that we need not be beholden to any of the static traditions or institutions of contemporary science. Instead, he wants us to move away from an emphasis on the permanent imposition of form onto matter associated with technology toward the fleeting and tragic character of this techne.
[Heidegger's] idea is that we can only remain within the realm of authentic temporality in distinguished moments of our Dasein. In the normal run of things we proceed into a future whose content we determine through our concrete needs and plans, and from which we exclude the final horizon of death.
By this decentered thinking, Heidegger wants to show firstly that the self of Dasein is never primarily regarded as an isolated self-point subject but is constituted in the co-existence with others in the world. Then secondly, decentered thinking means that Dasein can never appropriate its own Being, insofar as it is always ahead of itself grounded in the possibility.
Peirce, like Heidegger, was interested in speaking about aspects of existence which could not be represented by language, i.e. those aspects of immediate existence that get lost in translation when they are mediated, or re-presented back to us linguistically as thoughts. However the advantage for us that Peirce's epistemology has over Heidegger's, is that he does not abandon the normal subject/object distinctions of logic in order to articulate this point of view. I think Peirce's philosophy can therefore act as a bridge to help us understand Heidegger.
Heidegger's contributions to the interpretation of the Greek word for Truth (Alethéia) as unconcealment and to his translation in Latin as Veritas
Heidegger's contributions to the interpretation of the history of metaphysics as ontotheology
[Heidegger] teaches us to see the danger as standing in the place of the promise. Heidegger's hope for the future, I shall show, turns crucially on helping us learn to make a gestalt switch whereby we come to see the promise instead of the danger-there, in the same place. When we examine the precise meaning Heidegger gives these philosophical terms of art, it will become clear that seeing the promise instead of the danger does not mean adopting some Pollyannish optimism. Rather, learning to see the promise instead of the danger means developing a phenomenological comportment attuned to what we can anticipate but never expect, that is, the future[.]
How do become what we are? Understanding Heidegger's strange but powerful answer to this original pedagogical question, I suggest, allows us to make sense of some of the most difficult and important issues at the heart of Being and Time, including what Heidegger really means by possibility, death, and authenticity.Visit Iain's web page for more to read, and listen too.
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This volume contains his first lectures given at Marburg in the winter semester of 1923-1924. In a way that will become familiar through out his career, Heidegger introduces the notion of phenomenology by tracing it back to Aristotle's treatments of phainomenon and logos, and providing his own unique interpretation of the Greek words. One senses that Heidegger is bringing phenomenology fresh from Freiburg, where he had been studying under its developer Husserl. At the same time, the distance from his mentor allows him to criticize Husserl's themes and expand on his own evolving approach. He does this by analyzing Husserl's scientific viewpoint and his relationship with Descartes. He notes Husserl's neglect of the ontological questions posed by phenomenology and the openings available with hermeneutics.
In addition to the translator's foreword and afterword, and the text of the lecture, comments from students' lecture notes provided by Helene Weiss and Herbert Marcuse are also included.
The two things to note here, of course, are that Heidegger rejects both 1) the view that the reality of the external world needs to be proved, and 2) the view that the reality of this world can be proved. The problem with a view (such as realism) that supports these two claims is that it begins on ontologically inadequate grounds.
To free ourselves of the alienating influence of technology and recover our rootedness in the world, Heidegger maintains that we must cultivate a mode of being he calls a "releasement toward things." To be "released" toward a thing is to attend to it as the particular thing that it is, rather than as a placeholder for some other thing that would serve the same function.
At first blush, the grouping of Coleridge, Derrida, and Heidegger seems counter-intuitive, and by no means theological.
At second glance, however, there seems to be a common motion observed by the three, despite the initial confusion occasioned by the way in which the artist seems to be discussing religion and the philosophers discussing art: that motion is described by Coleridge's "corresponding Opposites" by which "all Power manifests itself"; by Derrida's separation of "one" from "oneself" at the "blind origin of the work"; and by Heidegger's "origin of the work of art" which "is art," "a distinctive way in which truth comes into being".
Seeing beings as beings in their present-at-handedness only belongs to humans who can be said genuinely to have a world. The animal never does and never can see things as they are but always, i.e. constitutionally, operates within the domain of instinctual drives.
Malick's understanding of cinema seems to be influenced by Heidegger's contention that it is a cardinal symptom of modernity (which he claims has its deepest roots in Greek thinking) to apprehend reality as something to be differentiated from how it appears to a subjective consciousness, and that the reality is understood at the most fundamental level as something to be mastered.
On the basis of the fundamental openness to being that comes to stand in understanding and to resonate in attunements, human being is also active. We act, we are involved in practices, mostly the practices of everyday life. These acts are in large part interactions.
[B]eginning with Heidegger, the end of metaphysics names a kind of exhaustion, as if the path of inquiry opened by the question "what is the nature of X" had reached a limit, one that metaphysics undoubtedly engages but cannot render transparent.
Any philosophical reading of film has to be a reading *of* film, of what Heidegger would call *der Sache selbst*, the thing itself. A philosophical reading of film should not be concerned with ideas about the thing, but with the thing itself, the cinematic *Sache*.
Now, according to Heidegger, although Husserl had used phenomenological reflection to get at the domain of pure consciousness in a manner far in advance of any other philosopher, nevertheless, he had passed up an opportunity to examine the ontological nature of the intentional acts and objects themselves. The anti-psychologistic thrust in Husserl, which laid so much emphasis on the discovery of ideal objectivities, had the drawback that the being of acts themselves has been neglected, leaving open the possibility that they would be treated merely as psychological facts.
Foreword by Hubert L. Dreyfus
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enowning's In-der-Blog-sein has heidegger blog posts covered.
Filming may also be regarded as philosophy's expressionist turn, which Heidegger articulates in his esoteric texts of the 30s and 40s. His turn to *Enowning* (*Ereignis*) marks a thinking away from ourselves (a transcendental *Seinsdenken*) to a new consideration of *being-historical*.
Despite the claims of his interpreters and his own wishes, almost the whole of Heidegger's conceptual array-Ereignis, temporality, Angst, etc.-reduces to a monotonous replay of this basic insight: that each thing is at once present-at-hand and ready-to-hand.
The value of Heidegger's theory of technology consists in its ability to offer us an alternative way to conceptualize a rupture between a technological past and present.
At the end of Heidegger's lectures it will become apparent that the guiding theses for making the difference between human and animal being are not there so much for the purpose of making philosophical discoveries regarding animal being, but rather in order to put the peculiar character of Dasein and its accessibility to beings as such into relief. For, this as is the deepest of metaphysical mysteries, which however does not mean that, now that we are 'beyond' metaphysics, we can today brush aside with disdain the puzzles that originally founded metaphysics - in the first beginning. Instead, it is a matter of appropriating metaphysics in the step back from it.
[D]eath is also that which is irreducibly our own. Death is never generic. Heidegger repeatedly argues that we can never understand death through another's death and uses this fact to reveal that death remains the one thing that individuates. By "running forward to death" we can see our past as our own and have the ability for the first time to appropriate it as our own.
Heidegger states that this Being-towards-death is an "impassioned freedom". It is the void of death which brings to us the potential of realizing the possibility of a full and authentic existence.
Since Being is not a scientific fact but rather a means of expressing a quality, facts are not sufficient or appropriate to explain or describe it. That is the task of myth, and for myth you need a poet.
From my experience, Heidegger is correct in his belief that where contemporary Western culture and its dedication to technology and science prevail, poetry has been marginalized, depreciated, and, in many cases, discarded. It is sad but true that today poetry plays a minor role in the lives of almost all people where the Western corporate-capitalist, scientific, and technological culture prevails.
The situation is indeed sad.
All genuine thinking arises from and returns back to thoughtful existence; "thinking" that is not so anchored is homeless "thinking", e.g., calculating, computing, or even reasoning. Thoughtful dwelling is the existential ground of thinking; in such a mode we can hear what calls for thought.
What is surely required, then, is a decisive evolutionary shift in Being such that we, as a species, can transcend the limiting straight-jacket of Cartesianism and materialism and all that accompanies the world-view of modernity.
Heidegger's Greeks do not actually write, and if they do write, the less they write the better. The best Greeks, for Heidegger, seem to be ones who merely speak, and who speak single, heavily charged substantives with which they tacitly connect highly sophisticated and profoundly meditated but unspoken associations.
In his Parmenides, section 3, commenting on the German word Befehl (command), he notes that originally the word meant the same as befelh, to cover, to commit the dead to the earth or to the fire, to entrust them to a cover: it is the misplacement of that h, from after to before the l, that has obscured the meaning of "command" and thereby has contributed to the most significant event in the history of Western thought, the forgetting of the essence of falseness and truth.
[Paul Edwards] claims to have found numerous instances of meaningless or false statements in Heidegger's position, whereas in fact most of these are attributable either to Edward's own misunderstanding of Heidegger's position or to his confusion of that position with those of so-called Heideggereans.
Sloterdijk inflects Heidegger's assertion of ontological difference in the `Letter on Humanism' with a specifically technological bias. Identifying the condition for empathetic relationships - which structure relations of power through texts - he gestures towards the human genome as a kind of alphabet, a codex, from which human needs can be read and which can structure how they are met. His proposal is for a thorough technologization of humanity through genetic manipulation, generalized as a principle with which to govern the progress of society.
When arguing for a philosophy of technology, which 'thinks' technology but thinks it technically, refusing the 'abyss of essence' between logos and techne, Stiegler is both working within a Heideggerian problematic and overturning it. The issues are the same (calculability, the incalculable, indifferentiation, temporal ecstasis); the way of situating and confronting these issues is, in the end, almost totally different.
In his peculiar reappropriation of Aristotle's notion of logos, Heidegger contends that discourse is essentially apophantic, which means that it reveals something, it discloses what it talks about; the topic of discourse is a theme made visible to the speaker and to his listeners thanks to words which bestow a determination, a form to what is talked about.
Heidegger said that Being-in-the-world is a being-with, and that the understanding of the presentness of others is to exist. However, being-with presents the possibility of comprehending our own Dasein as an everyday Being-with-one-another where we may come to exist not on our own terms, but only in reference to others.
Within the general concept of life-world Heidegger began his critique of historical consciousness, especially as this entailed the fore-structure of understanding. His analysis was not carried out as a property of consciousness modeled on the old subject/object distinction, but rather rests in the context of world which already contains both subject and object.
The perverse harpsichordist Momus explores his connections with Viktor Shklovsky, Heidegger, and J-Lo.
Bjoern at The B-Zone struggles with Being & Time
Not only does Arendt describe her subjectivity in Heideggerian terms, she also reads Heidegger's philosophy romantically. The structure of her romantic experience follows the amorous structure in the formula of romance that contains a dangerous hero, yet, alas, without the happy ending.
This site is dedicated to the fulfilment of Martin Heidegger's hope that his thinking would '...escape the confines of the philosopher's study and become of benefit to wider circles, in particular to a large number of suffering human beings. Books and articles on Heidegger, health and human genomics, offering a new field-phenomenological approach to medicine and somatic psychotherapy.
Ecophenomenology's guiding idea, put simply, is that uprooting and replacing some of our deeply-entrenched but environmentally-destructive ethical and metaphysical presuppositions can help us heal the earth, combating environmental devastation at its conceptual roots, as it were.
[A]s Heidegger points out in Being and Time, language is not normally used for the exchange of information. Rather language calls attention to some aspect of a world the language users already share.
Just as one can question whether the 'authenticity' or indeed 'inauthenticity' (in Heideggerian terms) of an artefact will endure once memory of its creation is lost, so technology can never be seen to be the enduring site of alienation. Technology is always open to poetic appropriation.
Heidegger claims that his question and answer about the nothing, because they lead us into contradictions, constitute a challenge to ``the sovereignty of `logic' within philosophy.'' Here Carnap is usually read as attacking Heidegger for being against logic, whereas he himself was in favor of it. In fact, however, as we have seen, what both Heidegger and Carnap oppose is the sovereignty of logic within philosophy, i.e. the thought of philosophy, strictly speaking, as a theoretical discipline which makes assertions about its own special region of beings.
philosophical conversations delves into Heidegger & Technology.
Many comments on samizdata when it revisits a Weekly Standard article that fingered Heidegger as the godfather of fascists, leftists, the Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot, Khomeini, and Al Qaeda.
And True Boy finds a total Heideggerian moment in Spiderman 2.
In academic and political arenas throughout the West, the formerly well-recognised dialectic between the interests of big business and workers that, for many years, defined the role of government, has been silenced by a babble of Heideggerian Dasein — existentialism by any other name.
Our organs are therefore not just of the same kind as they are embedded within another kind of capability that Heidegger calls 'behaviour' ("Verhalten") in contrast to animal 'dazed state' ("Benommenheit"). At the same time there is not a fundamental division between being human and other non-human organic life as far as we are also inserted in the 'ring-like' structure of "living nature" "which holds us as captive in a very specific way."The quote is from The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics.
Cole's predicament of being trapped in time graphically depicts Heidegger's key concept that our Beings are grounded in time. Plato's ethereal, timeless souls don't fit in this scheme of things; it is meaningless to speak of our Beings outside of time.
Heidegger's Big Point about language, at least as it affected me, is that it is not a medium of communication. It first and foremost the "as"-ness of our experience. When we speak together, we are not shipping meanings from one mind to another. We are instead turning towards the world together, letting the world reveal itself in its as-ness.
Beings only come to show themselves to human beings within the openness of the truth of being, and this self-showing is always impaired by the contentious opposition of hiddenness which leads to things showing themselves not the way they are in truth, that is, distortedly, or that things remain altogether hidden to human beings.
For Heidegger, truth understood ontologically is the opening up of a world, the making manifest of beings for Dasein's understanding of Being. But this opening up, this making manifest, is always a struggle to bring forth from concealedness, from lethe. Indeed, for anything to be at issue is dependent on truth as polemos.
It is now much clearer than when Rahner studied with him that Heidegger's issue, die Sache selbst, is not the question of traditional metaphysics. This could almost be taken for granted—except that the scandal for Heideggerian inspired philosophy, as Sheehan himself points out, is that both Heidegger and his commentators have had such difficulty articulating the all important 'difference' from metaphysics in language accessible 'to those who stand outside the circle of Heideggerians of the strict observance.'
The task of philosophy is to help bring back humans and beings in general to the place which they originally belong, i.e., to their most fulfilled way of being which is their proper or own [das Eigene, eigen]. The term "En-own-ment" or "Ap-propri-ation" [Er-eign-is] - the key word in Heidegger's thinking since the 1930's - marks his attempt to think more originally than metaphysics the relation between Being and humans in terms of the being "enowned" of humans through Being and in terms of the belonging of humans to Being.
Ambiguity of philosophical asking, in opinion of Heidegger, is not a disadvantage of philosophy, but its essential property. The correct thinking kills any thinking.
Crucially, physis does not rely on the materiality of the planet, but rather on its dynamic of obscurity and emergence into the light of truth, aletheia. Physis is, at once, aspects of the earth coming forth and at the same time, necessarily, retaining a hidden element.
Enowning is Heidegger's name for the rapprochement between human beings and Being by which intelligibility take places. That is, Ereignis designates the process whereby human beings actively participate in the becoming-intelligible of their worldly environments, the disclosure of their worlds.
'Heidegger reinterprets the question concerning the ground of beings and transcendental philosophy as the quest for these grounds. This was shown to be a questioning of the back-ground, horizon and context which surrounds and grounds beings and is necessarily implied in their presence. Now, for Heidegger, this necessary, implicit background is nothing else than what he calls Being (Sein or Seyn). The question of the grounds of beings is, fundamentally, the question of the Being of beings. As transcendental philosophy, philosophy asks the question of Being. What philosophy ultimately seeks is the transcendental and implicit background which allows the immediate presence of beings to take place in the explicit foreground.'
'In Sein und Zeit Heidegger describes only three essential characters of moods: 1) the disclosure of thrownness, 2) the disclosure of Being-in-the-world as a whole, and 3) the disclosure of the ways of "mattering." However, in the works written shortly after Sein und Zeit Heidegger emphasizes a fourth essential character of moods, a character which in many respects is analogous to the character of disclosing Being-in-the-world as a whole. This character is the disclosure of being as a whole...'
'To design is to cut a trace, like cutting a furrow in the soil to open it to seed and growth. This metaphor of opening, a clearing in the forest, so that something can be presented or shown, recurs in Heidegger's writings. A Way is made across a snow-covered field, that is, transitively, way-making, being the way (Ereignis: appropriating).'
'[A]uthenticity is to be interpreted ontologically in terms of disclosive truth, of freedom understood as Gelassenheit. Gelassenheit is a "letting-be [which] exposes itself to beings as such and transposes all comportment into the open region. The essence of truth reveals itself as freedom, [a] disclosive letting beings be."'
The quote is from The Essence of Truth.This site is NOT about
There is a good anecdote about the man:
Such was Heidegger's remarkable ugliness that he once bet Lord Chesterfield that he would be unable to produce anyone uglier. Thus encouraged, the earl eventually produced an old woman who was said to be marginally more hideous. The quick-witted Heidegger, however, snatched his rival's bonnet, set it upon his head, and was promptly awarded the desired victory.
The reason traditional philosophers were unable to see that the disclosure of beings is the basis of truth lies, according to Heidegger, in the Platonic origin of traditional philosophy. Heidegger argues that Plato's allegory of the cave in the Republic is where the understanding of truth as aletheia gave way to the misunderstanding of truth as correspondence.
For more on similar themes see also the author's Beyond Subjectivism. Recommended.
While non-human animal being is subjective and not "worldless" like the being of the stone, the non-human animal is capable of only a limited range and depth of experiential relationships-unlike human Dasein, who is the only being constitutionally able to relate to anything "as such."
Heidegger's project in 'Language' seems to be not merely to debunk traditional notions of language, but to try and discover - re-cover, perhaps - what language really is. The latter involves a Phenomenological angle in Heidegger's train of thought, which I will elaborate on further in the course of this essay.
Starting with Being and Time, and continuing through his whole intellectual career, Heidegger tried to resurrect the idea that philosophy should be about uncovering. Where Plato turned truth into "the correctness of apprehending and asserting," Heidegger would call it "disclosure of beings through which an openness essentially unfolds." As Heidegger advanced in his thinking, he found the language of philosophy to be essentially inadequate for the delicate task of uncovering the world.
If Heidegger's earlier work, Sein und Zeit, can be regarded as preparations for the leap into the casting of the open 'there' of enpropriation, then we can see in more detail how human being comes to a stand vis-à-vis standing presence. Human being does not answer to the question: What? Rather, human being is always a who. The mode of being which we could call whoness is essentially a casting of one's own existence on the basis of an understanding of who one is. Human being responds to being as the gathering of standing presence in understanding the world.
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This book contains the lectures from two courses at Freiburg, Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion from winter semester 1920 and Augustine and Neoplatonism from summer semester 1921. In addition there are twenty pages of notes for a course on The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism that was not held because Heidegger decided to lecture on another subject in winter semester 1919.
"Because 'technology is not equivalent to the essence of technology,' that is, because the essence of technology is nothing technological, the free or open relationship of human existence to technology is not a matter of the technical facility or experience with technology so often invoked by commentators arguing against or on behalf of Heidegger's analysis of the technological essence of modernity. Nor it is a mater of detachment, Gelassenheit alone. This in turn means that any neutral perspective on technology is a convicted relationship to technology, just as being for or against technology is an entrapment within the technological setup."
'The alternative notions, that hermeneutics either founds or is founded upon social analysis, are reconciled by interpreting Marx's social methodology as being in accord with hermeneutic principles and by transforming Heidegger's ontology to take account of social mediations.'
"En-own-ment" or "Ap-propri-ation" [Er-eign-is] is the key-word in Heidegger's thinking since the 30s, in which he attempts to think more originally than metaphysics the relation between Being and humans in terms of the being enowned of humans through Being and in terms of the belonging of humans to Being. In the following, I will rethink the question of this relation in reference both to Heidegger's well known Letter on Humanism and to the more difficult book Beiträge zur Philosophie (Contributions to Philosophy). I will thereby focus on the difficulty, as well as on Heidegger's struggle for a proper language which would be able to say that which essentially remains concealed for metaphysical language: the truth (or ground) of Being as Ereignis.
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If philosophy ends with Heidegger, what to think next? David Wood reaches back to the Greeks, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Husserl, and then forward with Adorno and Derrida, amongst many others, to find his answer.
Divided into three parts, the first begins with What is Metaphysics? and examines the predicament for philosophy. The second part examines Heidegger in relation to Hegel's dialectic and Nietzsche's eternal recurrence of the same, and Derrida's extensions of Heidegger's thinking. The third part continues with Derrida's thoughts on humanism and animals, and concludes with reflections on the Beitrage. And not only that, many more themes and connections are made. Wide ranging and with a certain playfulness, this well written book invites us to think alongside.
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This book collects the three seminars (1966, 1968, 1969) Heidegger participated in in Le Thor, France, and the Zähringen seminar (1973), along with a couple ancillary papers. These are especially interesting because they are the last of Heidegger's "works" and Heidegger is involved in thoughtful dialogue with others.
The seminars touch on familiar themes of presence and Ereignis, Heidegger's interpretations of Parmenides and Heraclitus, his reflections on Hegel ideas and Husserl's Categorical Intuition, and he reaches out to the seminar participants by commenting on French artists and thinkers. He also criticizes aspects of his earlier works, including Being and Time.
The text of the seminars comes from the notes of the participants. First published in book form in France, the work was later translated to German and added to the Gesamtausgabe. As usual Indiana University Press and the translators have done a excellent job and created a first class English edition.
How does Heidegger think the political? He thinks it in the only way possible for what he has been called upon to think, namely, from the truth of being. The truth of being is Heidegger's discovery, it is what he unearths as the unthought dimension within which Greek thinking thought in the first beginning.
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Six essays on anthropology, history, politics, science and aesthetics.
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'Today, the old relationship between speaking about the world and living well, between leaving disciples and leaving a scar, is again as urgent as it is confused. If Romanticism sprang from the age of reason, Postmodernism might be the age of values. Conservatives demand them; most people, perhaps especially art lovers, take them for granted while puffing them up; smart critics see them behind the pretended objectivity of every institution, society, and theory.
Appropriately, Heidegger's Nazism has become a test case, just as the Holocaust has challenged the validity of art. No serious postwar thinker grew more philosophically influential or more publicly reserved, and none was so close to this century's greatest evil. Through his great influence on hermeneutics and deconstruction, his rejection of "values" is supposed to have tainted all postmodern attacks on modernist traditions, authentic truths, and artistic conventions.'
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Greenwood Publishing Group has recently published
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This important new volume brings together Jürgen Habermas's key writings on religion and religious belief. In these essays, Habermas explores the relations between Christian and Jewish thought, on one hand, and the Western philosophical tradition on the other. He often approaches these issues through critical encounters with the work of others, including Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Johann Baptist Metz, and Gershom Scholem.
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Continuum has recently published the following books
edited by Alfred Denker and Marion Heinz
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This volume gathers together nine of Professor's Kisiel's papers on Being and Time,
it's origins, l'affaire Heidegger, and the introduction to History of the Concept of Time.
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Visit Iain Thomson's Home Page for more Heidegger resources, including the Heidegger Song.
A Site of Philosophy with several essays including:
The Quivering of Propriation: A Parallel Way to Music
Heidegger's Hölderlin and John Cage
A Critical Note on D.F. Krell's 'Daimon Life'
ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA
Now available
Robert Petkovsek
Theological Faculty of the University of Ljubljana
This book is an exception to this site's English only rule. Apart from a preface in Slovenian, the book is essentially in German and Greek, indexing words to the GA. Invaluable to serious scholars.
A Heideggerian Meditation on the Studio Paintings of Jean Koeller
From Conference of the Academy of Sciences at Heidelberg, July 26, 1958.
From Literature of the Holocaust
Metaphysics has come to an end. It has ended because its essential possibilities have been exhausted. Given this occurrence Heidegger asks what it would mean to overcome metaphysics.
This web page aims to provide easy access to those net resources pertaining to the life and work of the 20th century philosopher, Edmund Husserl.