Ereignis
@ beyng.com
Ereignis
@ beyng.com
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.
Information at this site
The rest of this page has all the links ordered chronologically, with the most recent
additions at the top.
The withdrawal of things from all access is not some quirky existential/psychological feature of humans, but infects even the most rudimentary forms of inanimate causation. Veiling and unveiling are ubiquitous: even between billiard balls, even between fire and cotton, and even when humans are not observing, do not yet exist, or exist no longer.
[T]hrown-open or appropriated ex-sistence, as the clearing, is responsible for all forms of the meaningful presence (the being) of things. Es gibt Sein because Ereignis gibt Sein, that is: The reason why there is “being” (the meaningful presence of something) at all is that the appropriation of ex-sistence to its proprium as the clearing makes that possible.
Time-space takes on a particularly privileged role in the Beiträge, as "originally the site for the moment of propriation [Augenblicks-Staätte des Ereignisses]". Although this is perhaps more important for Heidegger scholarship than for geography, we should note that this is the way to understand the notion of Da-sein, as "the site for the moment of the grounding of the truth of beyng".
James Bahoh Larry Berger Robert Bernasconi Peg Birmingham Scott Campbell Richard Capobianco Daniel Dahlstrom Sean Driscoll Jessica S. Elkayam Jesús Adrián Escudero Gregory Fried Wayne Froman Jennifer Gammage Matthew Girson Rico Gutschmidt Peter Hanly Rebecca Longtin Hansen Lawrence Hatab Julia Ireland Khafiz Kerimov Theodore Kisiel Adam Knowles María del Rosario Acosta López Brendan Mahoney Eduardo Mendieta Andrew J. Mitchell Ian Moore David Nowell-Smith David Pettigrew Richard Polt Jeffrey Powell François Raffoul Joel Reynolds Karen Robertson Elizabeth Rottenberg John Sallis Thomas Sheehan Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback Dennis Skocz Peter Trawny Daniela Vallega-Neu Kate Withy David Wood
Arab philosophers read Heidegger as a critic of metaphysics in and through language and they, in addition, go beyond this by applying it in the frame of their own philosophical projects.
[W]e can say that Enframing does not primarily concern the content [Gehalt] of phenomena called human-technology relations, but concerns a relation [Bezug] that we already enact [Vollzug] in encountering these phenomena. Understood on this ontological level, Enframing means a reciprocal setting-upon [stellen] of being and thinking with regard to function, which is technical inasmuch as utility marks the main trait of the horizon toward which all experiential correlations are oriented.
In the entire scope of what is classified fundamentally, everything exists without conscious linguistic naming or self-conscious, reflective consideration; instead every thing is known in terms of its use, its purpose, its teleology – everything appears in terms of how it will matter for us.
from Marx & Philosophy Review of Books
and
from International Journal of Philosophical Studies (24.2)
Trawny’s essay ventures into those obscure passages in Heidegger’s works where most Heideggerians have feared to tread, because, he argues, it is on these sinister, darksome pathways of errancy where “the controversy surrounding the name of Heidegger [is] gathered” in its blackest light.
Die Herkunft der Kunst und die Bestimmung des Denkens (Vortrag in der Akademie der Wissenschaften und Künste in Athen 4. April 1967), GA 80
Translated by
[W]hat is the reason for this discussion of cybernetics, futurology and industrial society? Have we not, in so doing, strayed too far away from the question of the provenance of art? Indeed, it would appear so — and is, yet, not the case.
Das Wohnen des Menschen, GA 13
A new translation by
That region’s overall inclination ought to be termed a clearing: a clearing in which the heavenly ones incline towards Earth’s mortals in a manner both foreign and generous, and where those on earth incline to the heavenly by way of gratitude and cultivation.
From Architecture Philosophy Volume 2 Number 1.
Interview by
In order to understand Heidegger correctly, we need to share the basic anti-modern position that explains the main direction of his thought. He cannot be understood by liberals or communists (new leftists). They will criticize him or pervert his thought.
From
Essays from Alain Badiou, Lee Braver, Daniel Dahlstrom, Charles Guignon, Graham Harman, Karsten Harries, Ted Kisiel, Denis McManus, Eric S. Nelson, Richard Polt, François Raffoul, Thomas Sheehan, Iain Thomson, Kate Withy, Julian Young
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[T]o think this beginning in a way that captures its originary, inceptive dimension is to come to understand being in a way different from yet underlying the Greek beginning and its understanding of being (Sein) as φύσις. It is, in other words, to understand be-ing (Seyn) as the historical grounding of the meaning of being and its difference from beings, i.e., as the ground that constitutes and thus appropriates to itself the essential correlation of that meaning and human understanding of it.
Dasein’s dealing with beings, its comportment with the world, from out of an understanding of the structure of sterēsis sees Dasein demonstrating a particular vision. This vision is the vision of the Kairos.
Heidegger's concept of work in Being and Time prevents access to being, while the concept of work in the thirties provides exactly access to being.
Snow White is still struggling with the fallenness of following a role assigned to her by society or the “they-self” and has not reached the point of making an authentic choice of her own future.
Am Ende stiller Hüttentage 12 September 1931, GA 16, translated by Timothy Lavenz.
Of course Faye may be subjectively convinced that the claims he makes are both exact and true. But philosophy demands more than mere assertion of strongly held convictions without evidence to support them. And above all, philosophy demands intellectual honesty in advancing one’s claims—and in retracting them after one has been shown in considerable detail why those claims are unsupported and unsupportable.
[I]t seems that it is being that is “between” man and things. It founds their ontological kinship. Being is not therefore limited only to a man, but being embraces also other beings making them “appropriate for themselves.”
Heidegger and Shiva agree, then, that modern science and technology together constitute a reductive and violent assault that limits knowledge. Where they part ways, further analysis does not uncover disagreement, but shows that each has something to contribute to the thinking of the other.
[Updated]
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.
When we, through transhumanism, (attempt to) turn the organic into more mechanical technology, we lose that orientation – not just the world, but the self, our very identity, is given over to enframing. When our own bodies become enframed through a technology that defies even death, we are not freed for genuine individuality.
The publication of unpublished texts changes published texts but above all invites us to a reflection upon the working history or reception of those same texts. This Heidegger is at pains to indicate in his reading of Nietzsche but in the Schwarze Hefte he points to Hölderlin and Hegel too. The notebooks themselves illustrate Heidegger’s thesis on the backward working effects of the Nachlaß.
The task therefore becomes not one of specifying a primordial level of temporal existential projection, but of developing a reflection that may somehow do justice to the enigmatic giving—the Es gibt—in which both time and being are given to man. This attempt eventually culminates in the account of Ereignis as an event of truth, as αλήθΕΐα. However, it is also an attempt for which a whole range of "historical" concepts are activated: being is here designated as "history," as "sending," and as "happening" (Geschichte, Geschick, Geschehen).
From
Translated by Richard Rojcewicz
Lecture course summer semester 1932 (GA 35).
Heidegger‟s retrospective commentary on his reconceptualization of the work of art underscores clearly the need to understand the setting-into-the-work of truth as Ereignis, specifically because the truth of being transpires solely as event. While the double, true and false, etymology of Ereignis that links it to manifestation and propriation is well known, the publication of the so-called private manuscripts, including the most recent volumes 73 through 76, makes clear the significant degree to which Heidegger inflects the valence of the term Ereignis through the prism of singularity (Einzigkeit).
The action of the no-thing is no ordinary event. It pushes us back and directs us toward the things that are slipping out of meaning, and in so doing it discloses these things in their full and heretofore hidden strangeness as the radically other, i.e., as other than the no-thing. In the clear night of the no-thing experienced in dread, there occurs the original revelation of the meaningfulness of things: the fact that things are meaningful and are not the no-thing.
Shared, meaningful contexts consistently invite the presence of others without demonstrating that this very openness functions by perpetuating an attitude towards others that is characterized by a blindness to particularity and contingency. An appropriate response to others would involve a sensitivity to their implicit participation in our projects by way of our shared contexts.
This is surely one of the vanities of philosophy – that philosophy can guide politics, that it can provide the ground for political decision. If, however, we take the recognition of the failing character of thinking as lying at the heart of philosophy, as perhaps it ought, then perhaps the proper and only role for philosophy in relation to politics can be one, not of decision, but precisely of constant questioning
The oddest part of Heidegger's account of Dasein is the body. He admits its kinship with animals yet denies that it is an animal body. He thinks the meaning of the body comes from openness to being; handicraft, gesturing, dancing, etc. are what they are due to openness to being.
has published
by
How the uncanny reveals the limitations on our ability to make sense of ourselves, and why this finitude is constitutive for being human.
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[A]t the most basic level of lived experience, absorbed coping is about meaning and meaningful activity, which finds structure in the fore-the-sake-of-which we do things, and "its constituents are 'in-order-to' realize some possible way of being". To reinforce this notion, Heidegger describes walking across a room as a field experience: "My encounter with the room is not such that I first take in one thing after another and put together a manifold of things in order to then see a room. Rather, I primarily see a referential whole".
Heidegger insists that the phenomenological question of method is not a question of the appropriate methodological system, but of access, how to find the way to a “factical” life experience. A phenomenology of religious life, he writes, should not be a theory about the religious, conceived of as an object of study in the standard mode of a science of religion, but rather as a way of entering in understanding the religious as a form of meaning-fulfilment or enactment.
Heidegger also came to grasp autochthony as the name for an understanding of history as a destiny [Geschichte als ein Geschick] to which we primordially belong and through which we are appropriated by the gift-giving power of being (what he would term Ereignis).
Heidegger proceeds to assign an ontological status to the relation between people and state: that is, what it means for a particular people to be must be established through its state. While he leaves open the question of what a people in general is, he claims that the state is not just ‘grounded in the Being of the people’ but is the Being of the people
Dying understood as that essential proneness to collapse just is the preciousness of life.
From
Translated by William McNeill and Julia Ireland
Lecture course winter semester 1934-35 (GA 39).
In improvising from latent possibilities, those that are dormant in Greek mythology may be as relevant for Heidegger's thinking of Ereignis as is the violence he does to Greek etymologies. Heidegger doesn't posit some “golden age” in which aletheia, for example, was actually experienced as unconcealment, but that interpretation can be exchanged for our usual understanding of truth in such a way that adequatio gives way to an improvised having-been where a latent possibility becomes an actualizable potential.
This can be couched in the following terms: philosophy is all right, but in this intellectual marriage demanded by Wheeler, it is science the one with preeminence when it comes to the postulation of existing objects. Escaping the Cartesian mindset does not impose on us an obligation of forsaking the grounds of a scientifically informed philosophy. We are, after all, Muggles, and must abide by nonmagical methods and by the constraints they impose.
Influenced heavily by Dreyfus’s pragmatization of Heidegger, Agre too understands Sein und Zeit as providing a phenomenology of ordinary routine activities, and believes Heidegger’s Analytik des Daseins can provide useful guidance for the development of computational theories of interaction.
has published
Six essays on the primacy of Being in Heidegger's thinking, continuing the case for the overarching importance of Being for Heidegger begun in Engaging Heidegger.
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I claim that the notion of Anwesen only came to express Heidegger’s own positive conception of being around the mid-forties and after a complex and relatively long process correlative, on the one hand, to the evolution of his use of the term ‘Wesen,’ and to his reappropriation of the Presocratics, on the other
Heidegger’s reflection on the essence of technology cannot claim to be already an alternative way of bringing forth, but is primarily concerned about the right way to come into the hermeneutic circle, to move in the circular course of the challenging of man and nature in the technological age and at the same time to hold back in order to experience the essence of technology.
[I]nsofar as all language is historical, the objectification of language itself at any particular time imposes a stasis in an historically fluid phenomenon. The "loss of Being" incurred when it becomes the object of representing means restriction of a genuinely historical manifold to what has been spoken or imagined to have been spoken in a particular language.
From Yale University Press
A new edition of
Translated by
Taylor Carman on Image and Shadow: Heidegger on the Limits of Scientific Representation.
Against the current English favorite of “enframing,” I therefore propose an etymological translation of Ge-Stell from its Greek and Latin roots as “syn-thetic com- posit[ion]ing,” where the Greek-rooted adjective ‘synthetic’ adds the note of artifactuality and even artifi ciality to the system of positions and posits.
Heidegger’s account of his fundamental concept, the Ereignis, the opening of the Open (Sheehan, 2001: p. 5; Wheeler, 2011: § 3.1, 3.2.) provides a far better model of Wittgenstein’s point in Z608 [p. 608 of Wittgenstein’s Zettel]. The paper argues, first, that Z608 is not making a sudden inexplicable venture into verboten neural theorizing, but is describing something akin to Heidegger’s Ereignis, and, second, that comparing Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s respective views illuminates them both.
Speakers: Peter Trawny (Bergische Universität Gesamthochschule Wuppertal), Bettina Bergo (Université de Montréal), Robert Bernasconi (Pennsylvania State University), Martin Gessmann (Hochschule für Gestaltung, Offenbach am Main), Sander Gilman (Emory University), Peter E. Gordon (Harvard University), Michael Marder (University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz), Eduardo Mendieta (Stony Brook University), Richard Polt (Xavier University), Tom Rockmore (Peking University)
Heidegger remained silent about sex but this silence reveals itself as a moment of interruption: an interruption which, if we will have the patience and the acumen to hear Heidegger’s silence, will work to announce a certain “non-said” that takes on many forms and determinable contours – a non-said that has been omitted, repressed, denied, foreclosed and even unthought.
[B]ecause of the central role that Heidegger grants to mood (disclosive affectivity) as a primordial way of disclosing Being-in-the-world, and because it is impossible to think mood without also thinking the lived body, Heidegger has actually placed the latter at the very center of Dasein’s disclosedness. Heidegger’s account of mood thus entails and highlights, rather than neglects, the ontological significance of the body
Heidegger is unequivocal in indicating that human activity cannot address Ge-stell’s danger. Yet, he says that the piety of thinking which is questioning and the reflection on art may save us from it. In this regard, Heidegger does not anymore advocate a restraint in the human use of technology
[T]he turn consists in grounding our understanding of Being in a realist manner. For this purpose Heidegger introduces the concept of destiny (Geschick), which simply means that we each find ourselves in what is ultimately a completely groundless and thus arbitrary understanding of Being, which is simply there. The event (Ereignis) has no source, no agent – this is Heidegger’s interpretation of the death of God.
Ereignis is much more than an event: it is a fact, that which is always already done (factum). Appropriation is that which “is already operative in our case, even before we were.” What is more, it is the fact, the “Urfaktum” or “thing itself,” without which there are no other facts, events, or happenings in the human realm.
From Bloomsbury Academic
A new book of essays
Edited by
With contributions from François Raffoul, Eric S. Nelson, Ted Kisiel, Dermot Moran, Thomas Sheehan, Richard Polt, Robert Bernasconi, Françoise Dastur, Alfred Denker, Sean Kirkland, Holger Zaborowski, Emilia Angelova, Frank Schalow, Peter Trawny, Ullrich Haase, Leslie MacAvoy, Peter Gordon, Peg Birmingham, Andrew Feenberg, Scott Campbell, P. Christopher Smith, Dennis Schmidt, Gregory Schufreider, Gregory Fried, William McNeill, Andrew Mitchell, Lee Braver, Andrew Bowie, Anne O'Byrne, Kevin Aho, Daniela Vallega-Neu, John McCumber, Gregory Schufreider, Iain Thomson, Ben Vedder, Patricia Glazebrook, John Russon, Kirsten Jacobson, Hans Ruin, Daniel Dahlstrom, Wayne Froman, Iain Macdonald, Jill Stauffer, Leonard Lawlor, Janae Sholtz, Leslie MacAvoy, Tina Chanter, Robert D. Stolorow, Bret Davis, and Alejandro Vallega.
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In general, Heidegger’s concept of Gelassenheit is interpreted as ‘indifference’ to ethical duties, as a quietism that withdraws from the world. What these authors fail to see, is that Heidegger does not embrace quietism, but puts into question this whole distinction between active and passive.
The Event, in contrast to the Framework, is thus in noway a ‘violent’ mode of revealing, but allows things to come forth in theirdifference and unity, in their distance and their nearness. Unlike the Framework,the Event allows the fourfold to appear in terms of the mirroring interplay, the‘round-dance’, of the elements that are brought to appearance within it.
Hölderlin's poetry holds the potential to determine the possibility and manner in which Dasein appropriates its historical "essence," and enacts its destiny, which first manifests as authentic possibility in the Ereignis, as Dasein's historical relation to Being is first "spoken" and inaugurated through the language of poetry.
[P]osthumanist theory is both inspired by Heidegger and pushes off from him. In other words, what links the various posthumanisms is a common, Heideggerian-inspired attempt to overcome the logic of binary oppositions of humanistic anthropocentrism that departs from Heidegger’s insistence that doing so requires and must emanate from a primordial inquiry into the question of the meaning of being.
Ereignis would be Being as the revelation of Being to itself qua the thinking of Being by human beings (i.e. the region of itself which is clear to itself). Heidegger’s rendering of Being as Ereignis is antihumanistic inasmuch as it configures human beings as the place of Being qua event, but not as the conceptual/ethical centre of the universe and/or history. Simply put, Being in itself transcends human beings.
Of this event, in which both being and the human are appropriated each to the other, Heidegger writes that it “is that realm, vibrating within itself, through which man and being reach each other in their nature”—making clear that this event is indeed a realm, a bounded domain, a topos, rather than purely and ex-clusively temporal.
In: Environmental & Architectural Phenomenology
According to Heidegger, memory, in its original sense, is not just a thinking or recalling of past events as we are used to taking it. Moreover, it is a thinking and at the same time a thanking of past, future and now, a meditative state of heeding that which is gathered and compressed in the living present.
For both, philosophical investigation is a way of bringing what we already prereflectively understand into the light of thematic explicitness. And what both philosophers bring into thematic explicitness are aspects of our context-embeddedness and of our finitude.
Call for papers
8-11 May, 2014
St. Petersburg, Florida
And it’s that strange combination of esoteric, almost mystical texts (like “Die Kehre”) with scathingly direct political texts (like “Das Gestell”) that makes Einblick in das, was ist (along with, say, “Überwindung der Metaphysik” and “Zur Seinsfrage”) among the most important (and most neglected) of Martin Heidegger’s post- Kehre texts. And also among the most difficult to translate.
From Philosophy Today, Fall 2013
The word Ereignis, which becomes the keyword of Heidegger‘s thinking from the mid-1930s on, is here appropriated from Hölderlin‘s hymn "Mnemosyne," which speaks of the sich ereignen, the "coming to pass," of the true
Call for papers
22-25 May, 2014
Meßkirch
Heidegger argues that we must attempt to determine the concept of poverty in world insofar as it relates to the "phenomenon of world," but not in a manner that would hierarchise this relation.
[W]e must Be-with—that is, attune to—the other’s existentialanxiety and other painful affect states disclosive of his or her finitude, thereby providing thesefeelings with a relational home in which they can be held, so that he or she can seize upon his or her ownmost possibilities in the face of them.
To relinquish a traditional Christian account of being and assert a kind of visionary naturalism in its place, which is what I think Heidegger achieved, he needed a philosophy that could speak for the beauty and truth of an immediate experience of being not mediated by intellect.
A philosophical investigation of the shamanic drum.
by
An adventure in thought.
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The very aim of exercise is, according to Heidegger, to cancel deliberation as to the realization of the desired result. Since it is the result that is decisive in τέχνη, the delivery of the result demands the smoothest procedure of the process of production, which is implied to be without deliberation, mechanically following rules or principles.
The difficulty for Heidegger, in attempting to assimilate Aristotle’s philosophical terms into his historical worldview, is that Aristotle’s ontology is not just unhistorical, but anti-historical. History was not deemed philosophically significant by the Greeks, as they did not believe that being resided there.
A new book of essays
Edited by
With contributions from Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Walter Brogan, William McNeill, Richard Polt, John Sallis, Krzysztof Ziarek, Daniela Vallega-Neu, Robert Bernasconi, Dennis J. Schmidt, Jeffrey L. Powell, David Farrell Krell, Françoise Dastur, Peter Hanly and Christopher Fynsk.
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But there is a Heideggerian supplement to the abground not found in Bohr: the event of lighting-up or dis-closure, an appearance of the everyday world. Heidegger problematizes “world,” rather than taking it for granted.
What Heidegger seems to want to teach us is not either how to become philosophers or how to be with one another in a concrete manner but, rather, how to remain in dialogue with ourselves while being with others or how to become philosophers in the company of others.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein on metaphysics and ontotheology.
Richard Capobianco on Heidegger on Hölderlin on 'Nature's Gleaming'.
Heidegger and 'The Greek Experience' of Nature-Physis-Being.
From
Translated by Richard Rojcewicz
Das Ereignis, Heidegger's notebook from 1941-2 (GA 71).
In situating where and how works of art, carry, disclose, or open up truth, we come to recognise that the work of art posits the question of man. As Heidegger submits: "Being needs man and is not without man."
Though Heidegger never escapes the Kantian correlation between thought and world, both composing half of any situation we can talk about, he would not treat the orange as simply an enduring core within the visible realm. For Heidegger there is always withdrawal (Entzug) behind all presence, and the name of what withdraws is Being.
A video presentation.
When Heidegger speaking to the heart of the charge of nihilism argues that “Only from the truth of being can the essence of the holy be thought” he suggests that one must hear language beyond logic in a mode that hearkens to melody, interval, the spirit of the word.
From University Press of America
"Overcoming Metaphysics" provides the jumping off point for a wide-ranging critique and deconstruction of Western Metaphysics.
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Journal review.
Given the inherently subjective nature of modern politics, the most appropriate response would seem to be withdrawal from the political realm altogether. Sure enough, much of Heidegger‘s work counsels the abdication of the political realm.
This crossing from technical knowing to erotic understanding is the experience of enowning itself, which recoils, at least in fantasy, into erotic enslavement of another. Ownership of another Self was seen as the primally erotic by Plato in the Phaedrus and Symposium at the beginning of metaphysics but lost in the swapping of the erotic horizon for the thanatic, particularly in Christianity, which from the beginning betrayed the erotic experience of life as love in its focus on death.
Hermeneutics is not to be construed as a form of theoretical comprehension or as a theory about interpretation. It is itself an interpreting, an announcing, a making known, and, as such, it is an interpreting that is also self-interpreting – hermeneutics is “the announcement and making known of the being of a being in its being in relation to…(me).”
Sinn is a socially and historically constituted conceptual scheme, which functions as the background of all understanding.
[B]y comparing the sublime to an ontological mood of disclosure, rather than understanding it as an aesthetic experience, one is able to give an account which overcomes some—if not all—of the concept's metaphysical baggage bequeathed by Kant.
New from
Clarifying phenomenology by looking at the phenomenon of life.
Heidegger derives his main point about the temporality, the “subjectivity” of the pure subject in Kant: it is not some fixed (innate) a priori transcendental unity, contained in a consciousness. Rather, it is the open temporality of relating to being that “affects our concepts and representations”.
Similar to all of Heidegger’s terms, Ereignis gestures to the possibility that the name has come, has become flesh in an experimental sense and one that cannot be reduced to the Pentecost of Christianity or the Shavuot of Judaism. That a spiritual-linguistic epiphany accompanies the creation of the word is suggested by the poetic context to which Heidegger’s key word for authentic experience—Ereignis—belongs.
Let us also acknowledge that one cannot read Heidegger without a kind of drunkenness, that particular drunkenness which German philosophical wines of the best vintage give.
New from
Exploring the factical life through Heidegger's early courses.
For Heidegger in looking-toward being requires a looking-away-from coming-into-being and passing-away. As Heraclitus would say the harmonious structure of the world depends upon opposite tension like the bow and lyre. For Heidegger, "this is possible only if something is set above being, something that being never is yet but always ought to be." Being is the power that emerges and discloses.
[S]ocial man has no criterion by which to judge his behaviour other than that of society. This may seem like a good thing – in general - but its cash value is that the individual has given himself up to anonymous instrumentality, allowing it to govern his existence as an investment, or a managerial project.
[B]eing, time and space need human being for their eventuation. Hence, modern science's postulation of and insistence on the 'objective reality' of space and time is an illusion insofar as there is (i.e. It gives) objectivity only for subjectivity, and human being cast as subjectivity is only one particular historical casting of human being that still holds sway in our own epoch.
What we want to explore is never the fate of questioning in the wake of technology, that is: we do not ask how it fares with questioning in today’s technological world nor and indeed how to put technology as such in question (as if it could be) but and much rather we are concerned with the how, the practical know-how, of remedying or fixing whatever may be the untoward consequences of technology and just so that we can continue along as we are and have been.
It is only ‘properly speaking’ (eigentlich) that dao can be said to refer to Weg. This means that only when interpreted in the particular manner, or thought in its proper nature as Heidegger may ascribe to it, can dao come into relation with Weg. Weg is the standard against which dao is measured. The same consideration applies to the relation between Ereignis and dao.
From
New directions in hermeneutics and new possibilities for “the life of understanding” and “the understanding of life.”
The Collegium Phaenomenologicum will convene for its thirty-eighth annual session in the Umbrian town of Città di Castello from July 8–26, 2013.
Bret Davis, Dennis Schmidt, Daniela Vallega-Neu
[I]f the current state of history is characterised by Seinsvergessenheit, it is impossible to ask directly after the Sinn of being, since our current conceptual scheme does not allow that question. And this explains Heidegger’s general philosophical strategy of creating a new conceptual repertoire, or, by reemploying an old conceptual repertoire, in order to give a more accurate description of Dasein and the world.
It was Heidegger in the twentieth century who argued that the metaphysical quest for presence was in fact irrational and based on a distorted understanding both of the Greek concept of being and of the way we engage with the world, which in its emphasis on reflection tends to sideline the pre-reflexive and physically embodied aspects of man’s—or Dasein’s—opening onto the world.
From
Translated by Andrew Mitchell
The transition from B&T and Heidegger's later thinking in plain language.
The risk run by dialectical thinking, whether utopic or negative, can be avoided only if one relates Heidegger's radical recovery of the question of Being to the critique of metaphysics as an ideology committed to insecurity and the domination that stems from it.
The Blind Brain Theory actually possesses the resources to reinterpret a number of the early Heidegger’s central insights, thrownness and ecstatic temporality among them. The focus here, however, is the Ontological Difference, and the kind of hermeneutic logic Heidegger developed in an attempt to mind the distinction between being and beings, and so avoid the theoretical sin of reification.
Was cybernetics the height of metaphysical humanism, as Heidegger maintained, or was it the height of its deconstruction, as certain of Heidegger’s followers believe?
From
The new translation
Translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu
The transition from B&T and Heidegger's later thinking in plain language.
Heidegger’s tool‐analysis holds good for even the most stupefied forms of inanimate causation. But this means that the linguistic turn and all other forms of the philosophy of human access are shattered by Heidegger in a single blow. The relation between humans and the world is now merely a subset of the general relations between one withdrawn object and another.
It is of course highly significant that Being is now displaced as the transcendens schlechthin—"the absolutely transcendent"—in favour of the Es gibt. The giving and sending of both Being and Time and their mutual relations are now referred to by Heidegger as Das Ereignis which now becomes the focal concern of the essay.
This understanding-interpretation relationship having the notion of being-in-the-world in background is circular in the sense that all interpretations require the fore-structure of understanding and again all understanding is developed or projected through interpretation. This is what Heidegger calls the ‘circle of understanding’ denying any possibility of its being vicious.
Granted that Heidegger allows for the possibility in Being and Time of an authentic human community, the ontological analysis of this authentic community is nonetheless enunciated in its distinction from a public world that would be capable of serving as an authentic ontological foundation for the political realm.
In Heidegger’s view, the danger of technology, including biotechnology, is not that something might go terribly wrong, but, quite the contrary, that everything will actually function smoothly.
Recently published
An investigation into the theme of homelessness in Heidegger’s discourses.
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Heidegger suggests that for modern eyes, the “political” is the way in which history is accomplished, and as such is itself unquestioned. The failure to question the “political” belongs with its totality. The totality of the political is not simply based on the arbitrary wilfulness of dictators, but in the metaphysical essence of modern actuality in general.
From
The common threads in both thinkers and how to understand them together.
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[T]here is an incipient distinction between ‘place’ and ‘location’ in Heidegger's late work. Heidegger articulates a relationship between the opening that allows an event of appropriation (Ereignis), which defines an epoch in the history of Being, and the dwelling of mortals in place (Ort), or among places, in which language plays a mediating role as the way in which Being speaks mortals.
Huebner’s critique of learning in social efficiency ideology is linked directly to Heidegger’s interpretation of the Cartesian world of objects, for if we are perceiving the classroom in such impoverished terms, focusing only on the objective features of the things we deal with, their present-at-hand attributes, their abiding presence, educators are missing the fact that things and people always reveal themselves in a larger context, within a context of meaningful relations, which cannot be reduced to the knowledge of things available to us by way of thematizing the world.
Heidegger shows that pathos is not an incidental concept or a mere “byproduct” of other concepts, such as substance (ousia) or being (to einai). Instead, Heidegger pulls pathos out of the (traditional) shadows and shows its intricate connection with the groundbreaking concepts of being, movement, disposition, embodiment, and logos.
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The place of topology in Heidegger's thinking.
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[A]rt opens and readies Dasein for its authentic communal and historical Being . . . in the “work-being” of the great work of art as the Ereignis, the lighting and clearing event of truth’s happening (aletheia), the temporal event of appropriation of the historical destining of Being, which is facilitated by Dasein’s participation in and preservation of the great work of art.
Droysen defined history as the constant increase of the ethical world, an assumption Heidegger did not share and which, in his view, lacked any proof.
In order to avoid the epistemological preconceptions built into the traditional terminology of thinghood and to overcome the temptation to discuss entities as pieces of inert matter, Heidegger introduces a set of new concepts, the most important of which are the concepts of dealing (Umgang), concern (Besorgen), and equipment (Zeug) .
What Heidegger misses in his description of the Hegelian "experience" as the path of despair (Verzweiflung) is the proper abyss of this process: it is not only the natural consciousness that is shattered, but also the transcendental standard, measure, or framing ground against which natural consciousness experiences its inadequacy and failure - as Hegel put it, if what we thought to be true fails the measure of truth, this measure itself has to be abandoned.
As time passes, so do our possibilities. The passing of time and indeed such restrictions are thus meaningful only for a being that lives with an understanding of a limit.
The more important thing to consider today is that in this age of modern mobility, worlds are more frequently reshaped and transformed than ever before. This should make us recognize that we are indeed standing on groundless grounds, for our worlds, we now realize, are not only mobile and malleable but temporary, because in fact they are entirely temporal. This, in the end, is what Malick’s Heideggerian cinema—as both a product and an investigation of cultural mobility—puts on display.
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Created 1995/04/18
Last updated 2016/09/13
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