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Punktmannigfaltigkeit
Welcome to my Heidegger site.
It contains information on the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)
and links to related web pages in English.
| heidegger.de(utsch) | Heidegger en Castellano | Heidegger Association of Tokyo |
| heidegger.ru(ssian) | Heidegger in Korean | Heidegger Célèbre |
The rest of this page has all the links ordered chronologically with the most recent additions at the top.
New translation
Three dialogues from the mid-forties.
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The overall objective of Heidegger’s preliminary discussion of herme neutics is to show that originary philosophy today requires a return to Ar istotle. That is, by turning to Aristotle we can free philosophical inquiry for the possibility of genuine questioning that constitutes it as philosophy.
In Heidegger’s ontology there is no will. Instead, one finds a dissimulated subject in the form of a system of relationships finally structured by time. What determines the movements or actions of Dasein is the system of inclinations in which it stands, structured by the disclosure of meanings within its existential horizon.
Heidegger would argue that the difference between normal and crisis-provoking difficulties is due not to features of the problem, but to the disposition (BefindlichKeit) or mood of the practitioners.
The coup de grace to this evolution occurs in an article by F.-W. von Herrmann published in December 1982, which proclaims that what Heidegger in fact really wanted — a wish reported over six years after his voice had been stilled — was an “edition without interpretation”. One would have to imagine that the pan-hermeneutical Heidegger had in his dotage lapsed into senility even to utter the words, let alone to express the wish for an “edition without interpretation”.
[W]hen Heidegger says that the way of life always appears to a person as "its other," as its world, then we can maybe see how tyche speaks precisely of a being's tendency to be, always in relation to, and emergent from, everything else.
has published
Thinking the relationship between bodies and space through sculpture.
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Heidegger pauses to remind us that his account of Aristotle does not reach the true origin of metaphysics. For, we must see that we have still not clarified the difference between Being as such and beings, between presencing itself and those that are present. This difference precedes and underlies the distinction between beings understood as what they are and that they are.
[T]hough many were masterful readers of the philosophic and religious traditions, none of the thinkers in the community of thought around Heidegger to which Strauss and Arendt belonged devoted their efforts to a critical reading of the tradition of political thought for the sake of rethinking, and if possible, reviving political philosophy.
The fear of death is the fear of the event, of the instant that is impossible to experience. In this sense death is always sudden, always a disruption and interruption. This death is truly deadly. Anxiety, on the other hand, as a consequence of the indefiniteness of death’s “when”, presents dying as being (Being-towards-death) where death is no longer compacted into the terminal instant but lived as “care”.
Sometimes all these seachanges converge in a single philosophical work, particularly in the case of Martin Heidegger. The very starting point of Heidegger’s philosophy—his formulation of human existence as being-in-the-world—places him at odds with Cartesian metaphysics by inserting the “thinking ego” immediately into a world context composed of societies, fellow beings, and nature. He explicitly described the method he adopted in Being and Time as a “hermeneutical phenomenology,” that is, as an interpretive study of human world-experience.
[T]emporality is implicitly conceived in similar ways in computational ontology as it is in digital ontology. Both digital ontology and computational ontology hold time to be an entity within the domain of temporality. In the case of digital ontologists, if they remain in line with Heidegger, time is the everyday ordinary understanding of time that is in some sense a present-at-hand entity.
[T]echnology, as a type of revealing, cannot simply be understood as instrumental. The tool connects up with nature and humans only to the extent that nature and humans are already within this realm of the technological: nature and humans already have machine like aspects— the extent to which we recognize this is due to the type of organizing which technology calls forth.
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Every age needs an introduction to Heidegger appropriate for its epoch.
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Such knowing has little to do with seeking or finding answers. Rather it is most purely expressed in the act of creative questioning itself. Heidegger frequently says that knowing is an ability to learn, and this ability to learn means an ability to inquire. Heidegger also says that knowing is willing to know, and willing to know is questioning. Indeed, the kind of knowledge Heidegger seeks is only possible through “creative questioning and shaping out of the power of genuine reflection.”
The essential self-masking feature of word processing fits into the logic of Enframing unveiled by Heidegger. Language turned to information within this concealment brings about the danger in the way Enframing is the danger. But where danger lies so does salvation. The forgetting of being, slipped away from this surface of continuous textuality, can be undone by the essential questioning of this technology.
[W]hen Heidegger describes resonance as (foregoing enowning) an “enstrifing of the strife into the strife itself,” he is discussing the ceaseless struggle of wills to power that have as their consequences the signs we cannot help but use; he is discussing the face of a language and not one of its masks.
According to Heidegger, light can therefore be seen as illumination, as “brightness,” but it can also be understood with regard to its relationship to truth, to unhiddenness, to liberation, and to freedom. Light is more than just brightness, than illumination; it is what (if we may be allowed to create our own Heideggerian turn of phrase) “lets-things-be-seen-in-their-unhiddenness.”
The clearing, as I imagine and describe it, connects with a larger‐scale clearing in which a literature of settler indigenisation appears, literature that is concerned with theorising memory, concealment and place in local, national and transnational contexts.
The aim of this one-day workshop is to introduce key Heideggerian ideas to those working in philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences, and to link them to contemporary empirical research and philosophical debate.
Nihilism, in Heidegger’s eyes, represents the consequence and the accomplishment of a slow trend toward the oblivion of Being, which begins with Socrates and Plato, continues in Christianity and Western metaphysics, and triumphs in modern times. The essence of nihilism “rests in the oblivion of Being”. Nihilism is the oblivion of Being in realized form. It is the reign of nothingness.
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A guide to Heidegger's Basic Writings
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So—to make this long story short—Heidegger proceeds over the years, guided especially by Aristotle’s insight into the kinetic character of things, to unfold his understanding of Being itself—that is, the fundamental, unifying, and originary meaning of Being—as the Being-way wherein and whereby beings emerge, linger in their full ‘look’ or ‘presence’ (eidos), wane, and pass away.
The relation between all these factors radiates a uniqueness of presence, which engages different dimensions of human interest. This engagement is not that of the appropriation of resources, but rather a care for the work in its own character as sculpted being. Through this character an horizon of reverence and insight constellates around the sculpture. The sculptural work is, accordingly, an elemental place-instituting entity, which occupies a distinctive location amongst other things, by creating a relational space of display and interpretative contexts around itself.
It is this general distinction between Reality (the world-structure opened up by instrumental sense-making) and the Real (the totality of extant, Earthly entities) which allows for a hybrid theory of realism and idealism in BT. Realist, because ontic, natural entities exist as extant independently of human disclosure; idealist, because how entities show up for us depends on how we take them to be.
What does it mean to suggest that the answer to the question of ‘who is Dasein?’ is the ‘they’ signify, however? From the perspective of everydayness, human existence is heteronomously constituted and manifested not as the ‘I’ assumed by accounts of modern subjectivity, but as ‘anyone’.
[B]eings or entities are to be distinguished from what Heidegger called "the clearing of Being"-the opening up of a shared horizon of intelligibility through which we first can encounter or relate ourselves to such entities, whether through language, thought, or action. Indeed, we can only 'get over' metaphysics, Heidegger suggests, through non-metaphysical thinking; a meditative attempt to reflect upon Being, the event or happening of world, the familiar yet mysterious way that it shows up for us.
Throughout ‘Heidegger’ the sole objective is therefore a Wiederholung or Ereignis, a “retrievingrepeating” of the propriativity that is (human) being. It is a process of re-petition (reseeking) by which one becomes what one is, an appropriation of the movement of appropriation that gathers together Entschlossenheit and Gelassenheit, resolving to release oneself to the projecting that we must do in order for beings to be.
In Schelling's Philosophy of Mythology there is no special meaning attached to the word Ereignis. When he comes to the Philosophy of Revelation, however, the word does take on a special meaning. In Heidegger's Beiträge the word is often hyphenated (Er-eignis), to indicate that he wishes it taken in its deeper etymological sense. Thus, the event is an eye-opener (er-äugen, open up one's eyes to). The word is also made to relate to an-eignen and zu-eignen, which mean make one's own, take to oneself, ap-propriate. In this connection he uses the neologism Er-eignung to indicate that Seyn determines that human beings should become the property (Eigentum) of Seyn as a result of their encounter with (Ent-gegnung), and decision for (Ent-scheidung), Da-sein, the "being" that is very much "there."
Heidegger identifies our purposes as themselves structured within a significance whole that begins at its most basic with what he calls a ‘for-the-sake-of-which’. We do things for the sake of something, some purpose, the ultimate purpose being for-thesake- of our own well-being.
New translation
Winter semester 1925 lecture course on the meaning of truth in pschologism, Aristotle, and Kant.
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The development of Heidegger’s thought can thus be understood in terms of the way he switches the reference of the term ‘Being’ from the unifying structure of entities qua entities to the structure of the givenness of entities as a whole. This is a move from the Being of entities to Being as such, from Sein to Seyn, or from Sein to Ereignis.
Now, we must reject Heidegger’s position both early and late, insofar as in both cases it collapses back into some form of correlationism.
[T]he later Heidegger will use the term Ereignis for the man-meaning bond. That technical term refers to the fact of meaning-giving insofar as it “requires” human being (brauchen) to belong to (zugehören) and sustain that fundamental fact. However, Ereignis is said to “appropriate and own” (ereignen) man as Sein’s own “property” (Eigentum), while in turn making possible man’s proper authenticity (Eigentlichkeit). Do all these metaphors mean that Ereignis is a Super- Something with power to act on human beings? If such a monstrosity is to be avoided at all costs, what then about the later Heidegger’s own quasi-hypostasization of Sein? William J. Richardson answers that question with exquisite délicatesse, “Only truly great philosophers should be indulged for their obscurity.”
Following Kant, Heidegger concludes that the pure intuitions are space and time, and as pure intuitions space and time are not intuitions in the sense of ontic beings that can be taken-in-stride by the human, but they appear, rather as the horizon on and in which beings-as-such can be encountered. What is intuited in space and time as pure intuitions is not therefore a being-at-hand, but Being itself.
Heidegger holds that, because we speak of binary oppositions, they exist in some sense and are, therefore, merely a particular form of being. Because being is that which is common to the two terms of the binary opposition and that which makes it possible to speak of a binary opposition in the first place, being cannot be reduced to one of the terms of a binary opposition; being grounds and so escapes the constraints of binary logic.
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Eight essays across the whole of Heidegger's project.
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If we distinguish the conceptions of nothing into three basic types, namely, privative, negative, and original nothing, then Heidegger‘s and Daoism‘s conception of nothing can be characterized as ―original nothing‖.
What can we infer from this for the being of digital beings? A digital being is, in the first place, a finite sequence of binary code, consisting perhaps of billions and billions of bits, that is interpreted and calculated by the appropriate hardware in sequences of nested algorithms to bring about a foreseen effect. As binary code, i.e. a string of zeroes and ones, a digital being is nothing other than a finite rational number. And yet, this binary code, interpreted as commands to be processed by a digital processor, brings forth change and movement in the real world of real, physical beings.
It is fitting that Heraclitus, in his day, was referred to as the "dark" one. In many ways he remains dark, but his darkness opens a thinking possibility for us.
DATE: 10th-11th September 2010
VENUE: UCD Humanities Institute of Ireland, University College Dublin
To speak of the last God is not disparaging, nor is it blasphemous, nor does it mean the cessation of God. Such interpretations arise only when we think ‘calculatively’. Far from being blasphemous, in speaking of the last God we are addressing the question of the essencing or mode of be-ing (Wesung/Wesen) of the God, indeed we are raising it, Heidegger tells us, to its highest form.
Martin Heidegger famously contends, "Our ordinary perceptual awareness of things is itself interpretive." This contradicts the usual view of modern science—namely, that all knowledge is acquired by objective observation. However, empirical, scientific data has a long history of necessary, and sometimes unfortunate, subjective interpretation. One such case is the hapless tale of the Martian canals.
Now in paperback
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.
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As a sudden insight, as it was described in conversa- tion with Boss, Ereignis has the character itself of revelation. Since the revelation of Ereignis appears to be a requisite for understand- ing the discourse of the later Heidegger. the Beitrage would be the revealing of revelation itself.
My own growing rigid, in this context, has to do with the determination of the origin and the dawn. The Greek morning which Heidegger arranged for us is monomaniacal and kleptomaniacal. It robs an entire array of texts and possibilities so that they may fit under the aegis of Parmenides’ poem.
Dasein, in being exposed to the future, remains essentially un-finished and has to start perpetually anew, Sisyphus-like, in resolving the strife of togetherness. This is a matter of gaining clear insight into the predicament of shared-but-individualized human being situated in the open timespace of being's truth, rather than of ethical appeals or prescriptions. It is timely that we think about this aspect of our propriation by beyng.
Heidegger’s critique of the (robust) correspondence theory of truth places him in a certain proximity to defenders of minimal CT. Heidegger’s primordial truth (aletheia)–not correspondence but revelation, is the removal of a veil (lethe)–defers falsifiability to a penultimate level of discourse.
My thesis about the primary philosophical sense of Being and Time is that Heidegger attempts to free himself there from the Husserlian thought of time by introducing the already-there of historiality—which is very close to Simondonian preindividuality. However, he does not truly succeed in breaking with Husserl precisely because, like Husserl, he still wants to exclude tertiary retentions—which constitute for him the realm of Weltgeschichtlichkeit—from the originary realm of Eigentlichkeit.
My claim that phenomenology, and especially the phenomenology of Heidegger, could be used to develop ethical arguments will come as a surprise to some scholars, since Heidegger himself denied ever having such a goal in view. One should not, however, let oneself be misled by Heidegger’s self-characterizations.
Together these experiments show that a smoothly coping participant-tool system can be temporarily disrupted and that this disruption causes a change in the participant's awareness. Since these two events follow as predictions from Heidegger's work, our study offers evidence for the hypothesized transition from readiness-to-hand to unreadiness-to-hand.
According to Heidegger's own statements (which of course do not have to be taken as the final source of evidence), from 1937 on, at the time of writing the Contributions to Philosophy - From Enowning, the word 'propriation' or 'enowning' assumes a position as principal word in his thinking. The essence of technology is also thought through in the 1940s under the aura of propriation. In an unusual text from the fifties, Identity and Difference, [...] Heidegger talks of a twisting of the set-up into propriation, of the "sudden flash of propriation" within the set-up. In this text there is a sort of toggle relationship between the most extreme consummation of metaphysics and the twisting of metaphysics into propriation, a 'getting-over-metaphysics', in which humans would "lose" their determination of essence which metaphysics has "lent" them.
Sculpture would be the embodiment of places. Places, in preserving and opening a region, hold something free gathered around them which grants the tarrying of things under consideration and a dwelling for man in the midst of things.
A new book on crossing to the other beginning with the Beiträge
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"An authentic deep concern and reverence for the natural world can only come from a transformed conception of how we see our place and role within the earthly relationship...rooted in an ontological soil in which the experience of existence, of 'being as such', can grow."
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The Invental as the ground of the event. Threads of the past are gathered from within that temporal horizon and projected in a unified manner upon what one is practically involved with towards the futural temporal horizon. This projection towards the futural horizon together with the gatheredness of the past creates the unified temporal moment of presencing.
I wanted to spur him to an unguarded opinion about the situation in Germany. I turned the conversation to the controversy in the Neue Ziiricher Zeitung and explained that I agreed neither with Barth's political attack [on Heidegger] nor with Staiger's defense, insofax as I was of the opinion that his partisanship for National Socialism lay in the essence of his philosophy. Heidegger agreed with me without reservation, and added that his concept of "historicity" was the basis of his political "engagement." He also left no doubt about his belief in Hitler.
Imagine this: a home without cheddar cheese, Marmite, baked beans and tea bags. Not homely enough? Well try and imagine the following: ‘what if man’s homelessness consisted in this’, that ‘he’ was not able to think of homelessness itself as a kind of home, that ‘he’ was not able to dwell within ‘his’ homelessness?
The four quadrants that result are the same edscribed by Heidegger’s infamous fourfold, as I have discussed at length in print. But since Heidegger’s Geviert of earth, sky, gods, and mortals can feel so painfully pseudo-poetic, let’s offer a more respectable quartet of names: space, time, essence, and eidos. All four of these dimensions belong together, since all arise from the tension between unified objects and their tangible qualities.
Ideology by contrast tends to discourage questioning of the facts so as to promote belief or faith in its system of ideas, and is correspondingly reluctant to engage in dialogue that might put into question the origin of those ideas. The neo-Marxist scholarship on the politics of the Kyoto School thinkers and their relation to Heidegger is a perfect example of this latter syndrome.
To understand Heidegger's critique of aesthetics, it will help first to sketch his positive view of art's true historical role. Heidegger's own understanding of the work of art is resolutely populist but with revolutionary aspirations. He believes that, at its greatest, art “grounds history” by “allowing truth to spring forth”.
Heidegger is suggesting that what is ultimately omitted in Parmenides’ “omission” to problematize this belonging together of givenness and receptivity is the taking-place (Ereignis) of meaningful presence, in other words the reciprocally differential event-structure of givenness and receptivity.129 This is an “essential” omission, however, in that Ereignis could not come into view within the Parmenidean scope of thought.
A large portion of Heidegger’s philosophy boils down to this simple opposition between Zu- and Vorhandenheit. His break with Husserl hinges entirely on his rejection of Husserlian phenomena as a form of presence-at-hand. And this harsh treatment goes far beyond Husserl, since Heidegger holds that the entire history of philosophy is guilty of reducing reality to some form of presence.
[F]or Heidegger constituting the self is only possible through the passage from inauthenticity to authenticity. Dasein cannot however install itself in authenticity once and for all. As selftranscendence, Daseins being is given to him as a task, as each time having to be etc., all these do not allow objectification and a supposed continuity of authenticity: Daseins being is born each moment from its confrontation with its modalities and possibilities of being.
Philosophy has still to learn that it is made by human beings and depends to an alarming degree on their psychic constitution. In the critical philosophy of the future there will be a chapter on "The Psychopathology of Philosophy." Hegel is fit to burst with presumption and vanity, Nietsche drips with outraged sexuality, and so on.
Indeed we might contend that Heidegger’s invocation of the ontological difference, the difference between Being and beings, opens up the possibility for Irigaray to think sexual difference otherwise than as always already subsumed within metaphysical identity. In other words, the ontological difference provides the clearing within which sexual difference can be articulated on a register other than ontic.
However, this relatively abstract world of sameness and difference is, in fact, coterminous with the concrete world of Being and time as presented in, e.g., Heidegger's late work Zeit und Sein. We find this passage on the second to last page of that austere and highly condensed essay: "What renmains to be said? Only this: Appropriation appropriates. By this, we say the same of the same toward the same"
Even though Heidegger’s Kehre indeed shifts from Dasein to Ereignis, what does this mean for the transcendental imagination? It might be conceivable that Heidegger was confronted with an immediate problem, namely that of the distinction between the inner and outer. In Kant we notice that time is an inner sense, and insofar as fundamental ontology – beginning with the transcendence of Dasein as a being outside-itself – remains stuck in this opposition, i.e., the opposition of space and time, the problem of transcendence perhaps remains unresolved.
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A selection from Heidegger's first to his last works.
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Heidegger's use of Stimmung is not to be understood subjectively where the world meaningfully affects me in terms of my own psychological “states of mind,” being depressed, afraid, bored, or excited. Rather, Stimmung is the condition for the possibility of any individual disposition or mood. The mood is not in me, in the body; I am already in a mood by virtue of my public involvements, by being thrown into a shared social context that determines the way things affect me. In short, mood is “like an atmosphere,” already “there” prior to the emergence of the body, and it is by means of this atmosphere that my embodied engagements are tuned or disposed in one way or another toward things.
If eventuality is undecidable empiricity — the passage through the ‘ordeal’ of the undecidable, the condition of the decision, the poetic — then culture does not derive in any strict sense. What could it derive from? Rather it revolves; it constitutes a revolution. It revolves, or — less perfectly, perhaps — wobbles, unpredictably around the axis of (ap)propriation. It is in this important sense only that Ereignis is a revolutionary concept.
When one binds oneself to the being that is illuminated, one is free to better understand beings, where understanding ‘first of all lets beings as beings be.’ Therefore, it is one’s freedom that determines how beings will be shown—whether ‘more beingful or less beingful,’ in Heidegger’s words. And freedom is determined by whether the self-binding entails ‘the individual grasping himself as being-there [Da-sein], set back into the isolation and thrownness of his historical past and future. The more primordial the binding, the greater the proximity to beings.’ In other words, freedom is freedom to commit oneself to seeing beings as they actually appear when illuminated, apart from the everyday awareness with which we are ordinarily inclined to see them. It is only with this sort of freedom, which must be accompanied by a keen awareness of our deeply historical situation and thrownness, that we are able to allow beings to be seen as they are.
But as for the manner of leaping and what to leap means, that would perhaps be a question precisely of leaping beyond the Heideggerian sense of leaping. It would thus be a question of transindividuating the potential of philosophical individuation in which the preindividual reserve [fonds] of the Heideggerian text consists, insofar as it expands and supersaturates the question of leaping by pushing the “question of being” or the “question of the history of being” to the extreme.
has published
A key text on Heidegger's way of thinking and ecology.
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One of the books in the New Studies in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics series edited by Kenneth Maly, Parvis Emad, and Gail Stenstad.
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Created 1995/04/18
Last updated 2010/09/01
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