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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.
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.
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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.
[I]n Sein und Zeit Heidegger offers no further analysis of his concept of “being-towards- beginning” (Sein zum Anfang), but instead quickly returns to asserting the priority of being-towards-death for the self-understanding of human existence. This priority of death, is precisely what Arendt contested already in her 1929 dissertation on Augustine’s theory of love.
Gods and men are not only lighted by a light--even if a supersensible one--so that they can never hide themselves from it in darkness; they are luminous in their essence. They are alight; they are appropriated into the event of lighting, and therefore never concealed.
Within the framework of the ontological difference, Be-ing is not yet fully thought in its truth apart from beings, for it still retains the ontic-ontological structure belonging to the analytic of Da-sein, and still conceives Being in terms of its relationship with beings as a whole. Heidegger’s fragmentary “confrontation” with Hegel on the origin of negativity—for Heidegger, the essential-presencing of Be-ing as abyssal ground—marks an important transitional stage on the way to the thinking of Ereignis.
I want to focus particularly on the concepts of, ‘The-they,’ ‘authenticity/inauthenticity,’ and ‘fallenness.’ I have chosen these specific terms because they express important themes in existentialist philosophy. I feel that an effective way of illustrating the meaning of these terms is to make reference to the film Holiday.
Including Heidegger translations online, Helene Weiss and Ernst Tugendhat archives, and more.
Oppen does not have to confront or explain experience, or for that matter philosophy, specifically the philosophy of Dasein or Being; instead, he practices poetry in the Heideggerian sense of that act, not unlike the way in which Heidegger practices philosophy, so that what Heidegger calls gelassenheit or releasement takes place
[Heidegger] declared that ethics is impossible and his whole being was permeated by the awareness that this fact opens up an abyss. Prior to Heidegger's émergence the most outstanding German philosopher — I would say the only German philosopher — was Edmund Husserl. It was Heidegger's critique of Husserl's phenomenology which became decisive: precisely because that criticism consisted in a radicalization of Husserl's own question and questioning.
The relentlessly conjoined objectification of entities and subjectification of our accountability to them inevitably transformed that accountability itself into a further object (a “value”) for a subject. Values then need clarification and objective assessment in turn, but their objectification as values to be chosen undermines their authority over the choice.
Despite Heidegger's efforts to avoid any commitment to an ultimate metaphysical reality, Derrida thinks that Heidegger's talk about the presencing of Being and its appropriation involves such a metaphysical metaphor. In fact, it is Heidegger's theory of language that reveals his entrapment. Of Grammatology intends to show that any theory of the sign as consisting of an irreducible dualism between signifier and signified is based on the metaphysical illusion that a sign must be a sign of something and that language needs this referentiality to be capable of expressing truths.
In overturning the other-worldliness of Platonic idealism and by proclaiming the death of God, Nietzsche called on humankind to ―remain faithful to the earth,‖ that is, to adhere to a this-worldly understanding of humankind in the midst of the whole of beings. Nietzsche‘s this-worldly orientation has led some to read him as a proto-environmental thinker. Quite to the contrary, however, Heidegger claims that Nietzsche‘s metaphysics justifies the technological domination of the earth! Blind to the truth (self-concealing clearing) of Being, Nietzsche was unable to discern the difference between otherworldly, eternity-seeking transcendence, on the one hand, and the transcendence involved in the truth of Being, on the other. Throwing out the transcendental baby with the metaphysical bath, Nietzsche was unable to develop a post-metaphysical conception of humankind.
Heidegger does not attempt to do philosophy or nonphilosophy, butphilosophywhich does not deal with being, but withbeing.
[I]nsofar as [Heidegger] rejects the claim of humanism to have adequately defined the humanity of man, and opposes to it his own onto-anthropology, he nonetheless indirectly retains the most important function of classical humanism - namely, the befriending of man through the word of the other - indeed, he radicalizes this drive to befriend, and transfers it from mere pedagogy to the center of ontological consciousness.
Yet Heidegger makes it patently clear that a phenomenological interpretation of these phenomena comes at the price of cutting off the bond that ties these themes to morality. The liberation of these themes from their moral and ethical interpretations turns out to be a necessary condition for their phenomenological appropriation.
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A thorough and comprehensive study of the later Heidegger's works through the motifs of homelessness and homecoming.
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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.
I argue that humans are always appropriated, and that since individuals throughout history have experienced what could be described as being owned by being, the possibility of such an experience is not dependent on some unknown future event.
That which Heidegger can offer to Wittgenstein is the possibility of seeing under the aspect of the Nothing, as the question of the historicity of existence, and that such seeing will have its use, and perhaps, will help to clarify certain unresolved questions in Wittgenstein’s work, such as the relation between rule and custom.
The U. S. Department of Energy’s Hanford nuclear reservation serves as an illustrative text, exemplifying Heidegger’s reading of nuclear energy as a culmination of both Western metaphysics and the instrumental stance that he calls “enframing.”
Perhaps contrary to his intentions, as a critic of the technological epoch Heidegger emerges as the quintessential Platonic philosopher ‘of the twentieth century’ — castigating the democratising errors of technological disclosure in the name of a more profound philosophical wisdom: a philosophic-poetic wisdom that would allow us to stand in a freer relation to a technological world that currently dominates us.
Since Plato, [Heidegger] believes, Western philosophy has interposed logical essences between Being and man and has thus forced Being to disclose itself through man-made forms. We must recover the original experience of immediacy which preceded sophisticated thought.
Heidegger suggests the following: Traditional philosophy embraces truth as life’s ultimate guiding principle, for as the logic runs, humans require truth in order to have a meaningful life. Is it not right to demand that life, in the first instance, be grounded and guided by truth in all of its aspects? Nietzsche vehemently opposes such logic.
In Heidegger's view conscience does not primarily accuse me of being guilty of this or that action but it makes me aware of what it means for me to be guilty at all. Conscience is original responsibility - it is a matter of my very existence. Conscience is, in Heidegger's terms, the call of being and it call us to authenticity.
The first articulation, let us say on the whole and for simplicity’s sake, is that of Being and of the entity, one which finds expression in terms of the meta and that tends to be ‘ecstatico-horizonal’ and ontico-ontological, to take up two Heideggerian expressions in a simplified, descriptive sense. It constitutes a historico-systematic structural a priori proper to the philosophies of communication which are develloping globally in the realm of the meta and of the universal project, albeit obviously not without brushing up against the event both in its lower aspect of generality or representation, that of the media for instance, and in its higher aspect, that which Heidegger, for example, upholds as Ereignis.
Heidegger’s elegant description of the bridge reflects my belief in the preeminence of “place” and the role that dialogue should play in the creation of architecture—or, as he says, “this speaking that listens and accepts is responding”. So too must architectural response arise from attitudes and practices that are first trained to speak by listening.
Heidegger’s and Habermas’s position seem to be in accord with the design rationales built into Ada. The problem is that hermeneutic practices in FLOSS projects like Python transcend this horizon. Their visions don’t seem to have trans-historical validity: they are only relevant in the case of “Ada-thinking”, but “Ada-thinking” has many alternatives.
Already in the 1930s, Heidegger emphasized the fundamental "derangement" [Ver-Rueckheit] that the emergence of Man introduces into the order of entities: the event of Clearing is in itself an Ent-Eignen, a radical and thorough distortion, with no possibility of "return to the undistorted Order" - Ereignis is cosubstantial with the distortion/derangement, it is NOTHING BUT its own distortion.
The much discussed Summer Semester 1924 Marburg lectures. Attending are Günther Anders, Hannah Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hans Jonas, Karl Löwith, Jakob Klein, Leo Strauss, and Helene Weiss, the greatest gathering of German intellectual acumen since Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling roomed together at Tübingen.
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The conception of language as a mere instrument leads to an inability to understand ourselves, or, indeed, even the world around us. It leads us, as Heidegger says, to become forgetful of Being. Language, on this view, when it is construed as mere instrument, inhibits the very thinking it makes possible when it is understood in its fullness—as disclosive of what is, as that which lets things appear to us as they are.
If one comes to the authors Hölderlin and Rilke from the background of German culture and scholarship, then they tend to appear quite differently from their guise in contexts where Heidegger discusses them. The window onto Hölderlin’s work opened by Heidegger’s texts is a very narrow one.
Language cannot flourish without mythology just as pathogens cannot thrive without a host, or as plants cannot grow without soil. Here again language is an outgrowth of something else. For Heidegger, language grows out of koto and for Tolkien it grows out of mythology, but the basic concept about the nature of language is the same.
Time is accordingly the three-dimensional "reaching" (Reichen) of the three ecstasies of time, past, present and future. This reaching, which Heidegger also characterizes as a "giving" (Geben) is, in turn, given by propriation. Hence, time proper is a giving given by the giving of propriation, that is, the giving of a giving (Geben eines Gebens). Likewise, being itself is given by propriation as the giving of presence that in turn enables the presence of what is given, namely, beings, in their epochal castings.[Now with MP3 audio file.]
In general, our everyday activities find us motor intentionally absorbed in an everyday world full of affordances whose solicitations constantly change as we cope. As Heidegger puts it:[W]hat is first of all “given” …is the “for writing,” the “for going in and out,” … “for sitting.” That is, writing, going-in-and-out, sitting, and the like are what we are a priori involved with. What we know when we “know our way around”.
We must pose Heidegger the questions: What has happened to power in his casting of the fourfold (Geviert)? What is the relationship between power and letting-be (Gelassenheit)? Reposing the question concerning power necessarily brings the questions concerning the ontology of movement and time into (re)play.
a review of Charles Bambach's Heidegger's Roots
It would seem that, in this appropriation of the past, Bambach's sincere attempt to disclose the historical/political context of 1933-45 has perhaps overly determined his own reading of Heidegger . If an interpretation of the past takes place by the present, then the present must remain open-in Heidegger's understanding of that term-to freeing the philosopheme from its historiographical articulation.
poetically man dwalls
leavin no juist mairks buit meanins
Heidegger eventually articulates the “it” of the es gibt as Ereignis. This event of appropriation does not designate a kind of horizon akin to the ontological horizon of the early Heidegger. Nor does it refer to the manifestation of being through Dasein’s disclosure of its own possibilities. Rather, Ereignis designates a groundon the other side of the appearance and its horizon, a ground that cannot be properly attributed to Dasein because it itself remains concealed in the process of manifestation.
Heidegger's warning that a technical approach to thinking about the world obscures its true essence is directly applicable to the effects of current (as well as former) information technologies that provide access to law. While technology enhances accessibility and utility of law, technology also obscures law's fundamental grounding in experience and language, thereby eviscerating its transformative power.
The uncertainty emerges because that which is offering us an opportunity remains hidden. Despite its immediate nearness, it is not the present; what has become the present is no longer opportunity. Therefore Heidegger can quite literally say of the 'nearer-bringing nearness' that it 'keeps open the arriving from the future by withholding the present in the coming'.
The ecstatic structure of stimmung is the "reciprocal relation" between mortals and divinities. Seeing the divinities as the mood of encounter allows a clearer understanding of the nature of this reciprocation, in that the divinities announce themselves as a pervasive atmosphere that lights up one’s engagement with a specific situation
To Heidegger, “Eternal Recurrence of the same’ is the name of the Being of beings” (or “willing”). ‘Superman’ is the name of the human being who corresponds to this Being.”
I am questioning anti-technological humanism as well as digital metaphysics. I believe that we live in an age in which the sense of Being is widely interpreted from a digital perspective as the ‘Zeitgeist’ of post-industrial societies. From this perspective I also question what one could call a digital humanism that would look for the limits of the digital within the realm of the human.
Friday, April 17th and Saturday, April 18th, 2009
The University of Dallas, Irving, Texas
Heidegger's model of dialogue is a monologue of Being's own saying with itself, the appropriating or enowning event (Ereignis) to itself, or of the Greek origin with itself. This saying only occurs in Western languages and particularly in Greek and German. The linguistic ethnocentrism of the mid- and later Heidegger cannot be bracketed and his approach to Being and language retained.
[M]uch has been made of Ereignis as the “appropriative event” that opens up a world horizon, but without Austrag—the carrying out of this opening up by the things that bear it—there is no Ereignis.
Heidegger’s specifi c emphasis on the concreteness of the selfrelation is a reason to be cautious about applying a functional perspective to his concept of self-awareness. Such an application would without doubt for him represent a suspicious attempt to objectify the living self that only is and only can be conceived in concrete situations.
now in paperback
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The hellish moonscape haunting the ideal tone of the sons of the earth in Hölderlin’s poetry has clearly suffered a psychical subtraction. The disruptive dissonance in Heidegger’s text arises from the desire to repress the absence of a new demigod and force an untroubled ideal. But how are we to understand this oppressive omission? What is the source of Heidegger’s semi-divine wind romance?
[T]he idea of a topology can be understood as a mode of analysis that looks to the articulation of complex structure composed of multiple elements that are simultaneously present as part of a single 'surface', whose unity is not to be understood in terms of anything that underlies it, but in terms of the mutual inter-relation of those elements in their dynamic interaction. It is thus that the Ereignis of Heidegger’s later thinking must be understood as both temporal and spatial – it is the unfolding of place in place – and within the structure of the Ereignis there is no derivation of elements, but rather a gathering of those elements in their originary belonging together.
It is within this intersection of truth, history, and preservers that Heidegger hints at an idea that I find gripping: that the work of art is also that of subjectivity formation. “Preserving the work means: standing within the openness of being that happens in the work.” “Openness of being” is a phrase that Heidegger uses often in conjunction with truth, and therefore associates the subject position of preservers as “standing within” the truth that happens in a work of art. I take “standing within” to be a powerful assimilation of the viewer (preserver) with the truth of a work of art – it is a stronger claim of interaction than merely “standing before” a work of art.
From
Now in paperback
[T]his gives the known classes that Martin Heidegger took from these different teachers. Some of their publications and web sites where you can find more details.
It is not simply that Heidegger might claim that only our experience is our experience, and that the answer to these can only ever be assertions about our experience and not the experience itself. More profoundly, the background must always be that which stays in the background, as it is the condition of possibility for allowing experience to show up in the foreground of our awareness.
Heidegger's recognition that the 'nihilating' of the nothing is the action of being as such, an activity which exceeds and so cannot be explained in terms of the ontological difference between being and entities, is the defining experience at the heart of his so-called 'turn' and the sine qua non of his 'later' thought.
In Heidegger’s view, Aristotle failed to recognize the ontological difference and — partly as a consequence of this — he failed to recognize the unique nature of Dasein, the being who has an understanding of being. The result of the Aristotelian ontology was an ontology of things that are simply there, or present-to-hand. Aristotelian substance ontology ushered in the “metaphysics of presence” that Heidegger sought to move beyond.
Revised, reworked, extended, deepened and retitled on artefact
Behind the interface there is merely a numerical representation of the beings shown along with the network which is physically spread over the entire globe without the geographical scattering being sensuously experienceable as such, and without the user having to understand anything at all about digital code. Nevertheless, Dasein knows that it is approximating beings from all over the world and thus appropriating them.
Ereignis is the happening of being, the unfolding of being, the temporalizing of being, the turning of thought. As such Ereignis is prior to and transcends both being and time. Ereignis captures the “and” of “being and time”.
Proceeding to more Heidegger links:
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Created 1995/04/18
Last updated 2010/02/06
Pete