[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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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.]
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'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'.
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.
[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.
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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.
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”.
For Heidegger, what is endangered is the aletheic, poetic essence of truth, the veiled essence of truth, an insight he has from Nietzsche, where he can say almost as Nietzsche would: "Truth is un-truth" and mean, with reference to poiesis, to poetry, and the poet already named, "Truth as the clearing and concealing of what is, happens in being composed, as a poet composes a poem."
Heidegger's way of portraying the whole history of the West as a single "propriative event," or Ereignis, has seemed to some critics to be unncessarily confining. If we are to grasp the basis of Heidegger's quest for a new openness, and what such openness might entail, we must take care to understand the finitude he associated with human belongingness to a particular history.
Grounding the confrontation in the film between the languages of Greek and German is the encounter between the interrogator and the interrogated, between a member of the de-Nazification committee and Heidegger, between worldly politics and originary politics. This mock interchange is brilliantly conceived and enacted by Hong to reveal the abysmal disconnection between the worldly politics of Western Europe and Heidegger’s ontology.
For heidegger “the child at play is the Seinsgeschick”, the fateful sending of being”. This notion, related to the Ereignis that is the propriating event of being, is what gives space and time. Paralleling angelus silesius’s line about the rose, heidegger suggests that the child of the ‘play of the world’ “plays, because it plays”. heidegger’s claim is that “the ‘because’ is subsumed [versinkt] in the game. the game is without ‘why’”. For heidegger, the “play of the world” is thus the “sending [Geschick] of being”.
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[O]ne can experience the other in a theological transcendence and realise the Difference of that other so as to be able to articulate a different idea of the other’s identity using language and ideas of the same. Thus, one can describe someone differently based on the ideas grasped about them at the event of appropriation, while realising that the other’s entirety is beyond words.
...the fact of not being able to ind a hammer or pair of shoes does not usually—or perhaps ever—result in a new, authentic awareness that we live in a world full of things that exist as part of a meaningful web of relations. That awareness, Heidegger thinks, involves an awareness not just that any object may break or be lost but that the whole world as world depends on the human being who lives and works, for whom the things have meaning.
We've linked to Hubert Dreyfus's Berkeley podcasts on Being and Time Division I, Division II, and Later Heidegger in the past, and then removed the links when they stopped working.
Someone has kindly forwarded a link to the Fall 2007 Division I lectures.
If you torrent, you might also check Pirate Bay.
Being and Time is not an easy read, and doubtless, many of the author's accusers, in mob fashion, without having read the book, would have formed their opinions on the backs of others. How should one characterize Heidegger's silence if he had already decided not to dignify his accusers with a response?
[S]ince the thing itself “is” its (own) other and the other thing, its withdrawal modulates the eventhood of Ereignis and projects outward, into the realm of self-referential signification, the spacing of différance encrypted in it.
Because Heidegger believes the entrenchment of a world-view precludes original possibilities of thought, he says it is necessary to "destroy" the tradition of ontology before any new metaphors can take hold.
The trace then, leaves one to ponder on Heidegger’s question of the distinction between Be-ing and beings (Da-sein und das-seindes), and in this pondering between these distinction, one will imagine Derrida positing the question itself of différance on Heidegger’s question: why is it that we need to make a distinction between Be-ing and beings in the first place?
The self-consumption of be-ing by the fire of its glow is now known never to have been capable of having happened—out of its own necessity, its unredeemedness.
For Heidegger, the law underlying the nihilistic sequence of the mittences of being is the Ereignis which is their principle; thought of the Ereignis ends the history of being by recalling it to its source. "The Ereignis is the law, in so far as it gathers mortals in the appropriation to their essence and keeps them therein". It is the true Grund.
[I]n a similar movement to Heidegger who sought to struggle against language and metaphysics, Artaud rejected language as traditionally conceived—meaning in separation from the thing represented.
The major difference between Hegel's and Heidegger's thinking on history is that Hegel conceives world history as a continuous unfolding of the Weltgeist in which what has been prepared, or can be seen retrospectively, in abstract philosophical thinking shapes an historical world, whereas Heidegger underscores the leaps and ruptures in the sendings from being.
...Heidegger himself does not return to this facticity of the life experiences in Dasein. That I exist, that you exist, that you die, that I die are not the concern of Heidegger’s phenomenology either, but my understanding of myself in anticipation as a being-for-death (Vorlaufen zum Tode) is.
It is the openness that is first disclosed in Dasein’s shattering against its finitude that allows Dasein to be free, i.e., to be different from how it was before and therefore to take on its facticity in a creative, recontextualized way. The question that emerges from this is: How does Dasein’s relation to its most extreme possibility affect its self-understanding?
A fundamental understanding of time therefore situates human knowledge within the most intelligible horizon of its possibility, namely, human knowledge is always the result of our negotiation with reality, a reality that keeps changing with the time, which rather proves the contingency or the finitude upon which our understanding of Being is, for the most part, dependent.
It is suggestive that Heidegger, one of Malick’s formative influences, claims reality in any sense should be thought of in terms of emergence and withdrawal, after the Presocratics, rather than static presence. As a certain aspect appears, certain other aspects retreat into the background (or more exactly, in order for a certain aspect to appear, certain other aspects must retreat into the background, as with the Necker cube or duck-rabbit picture.
Nine years after buying Webcom, Verio has finally decided to shutdown webcom.com and move stragglers like Ereignis to its own servers. I've been meaning to move for a long time, because Verio kept the webcom contracts frozen. Ereignis has been limited to the 5 megabytes of space it started with back in April of 1995. On the new Verio website, Ereignis occupies only 1% of the available disk space. And Ereignis now has its own domain name: beyng.com.
Everything appears to be working, apart from search on the books page. If you find something broken, let me know.
Heidegger cannot abide by evolutionary theory that makes man a mutation of animal because, for him, language is not something merely added onto the body or onto animality. Rather, language is a way of being in the world and a way of having access to it, what he calls “world-formation.” Heidegger is not so much denying evolution on an ontic level, the level of biologists, as on a conceptual level, the level of philosophers.
Man’s only task is to keep in mind the fragile things of nature and to their finitude, the deathliness which technology attempts to close out in favour of constant presence, its realisation of the Western understanding of being in practical form. Once man has done this, it is then in nature’s power, or perhaps god’s, to reveal something new to us (not man but ‘only a god can save us now’). We just have to remain open to the possibility of this revelation, while constantly preparing sites for it The question is perhaps whether there is any politics that could do this, or whether such an action would not rather be ethical?
Heidegger reflects upon his own talk of thinking and understanding in terms of seeing and hearing, Erhören und Erblicken, and mentions also Plato’s and Heraclitus’ parallel ways of speaking of idea and logos as if these were something visible or audible; this has sometimes been misunderstood to mean that Heidegger considered these terms of philosophical discourse as ‘metaphysical metaphors’, but this is not at all what Heidegger claims. To the contrary: the concept of metaphor is not any better suited for understanding philosophical concepts than it is for reading poetry.
It should hopefully be clear why a number of theologians and philosophers have appropriated Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics, which is described by a number of them as a form of ‘idolatry’. Philosophers seem to have been all too comfortable to venerate their own metaphysical explanations and speculative constructs, rather than the mystery of Being in which they should stand in awe.
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Heidegger constantly insists that being is not an abstract universal. Being is our opening onto beings; by virtue of being, what is becomes accessible, available, understandable for us in contrast to what is not. Heidegger’s enduring question is how this opening opens: what makes the difference between something and nothing? Thinking with Heidegger, then, requires us to distinguish three themes: beings or entities (das Seiende: that which is, rather than is not); being ( das Sein : the open region or horizon within which we can recognize beings as such); and the ground of being itself (the horizon, event, or destiny by virtue of which being itself is given—thought by Heidegger under labels such as Temporalität, Ereignis, and Seynsgeschichte).
Heidegger expresses the poverty of the animal by explaining how the animal is essentially captive to its environment. Animals behave (sich benehmen) by responding to certain instinctual drives of flight and pursuit which allow them to move within their environment. However, they can never come to comprehend or understand their environment as an environment.
The appropriation (Ereignis) of Being gives space and time, while technè, phusis, and poièsis assure that the disclosure is possible. Appropriation as such is a contraction, a gathering of time and space which makes possible a birth ground (Heimat). In one of his last letters to Bernard Welte, Heidegger seems to doubt whether technè still allows for such contraction of time and space: “It requires contemplation to say whether and how there can still be a birth ground (Heimat) in an era of technicalized uniform world civilization.”
Because what Heidegger means by metaphysics is identical to what he means by philosophy, Heidegger's Nietzsche proves to be a central locus for his discussion of philosophy in general. Therefore, even if Heidegger's attempt to disclose a Being as such that eludes the philosophers falls short, and philosophy's horizon proves to be the basic one, his Nietzsche remains fundamental, for it discusses philosophy with evident force.
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I should like to treat the matter genealogically and resort (like Heidegger) to the pre-Socratics as the default position for contextualizing the global economy. Let's appeal to Anaximander's notion of the apeiron, the unlimited, "the first principle of things that are, a 'that' from which the coming-to-be of things and qualities takes place and to which they return making reparation according to the order of time."
[T]here are moments—only moments, for Heidegger—of authentic being-in-the-world, of relating with the awareness of one's own being toward death, of finitude, that awakens us to true discourse, of recognition of the "event of Being," the "event of appropriation" as the happening of the truth of Being.
A consensus is gradually emerging in Heidegger studies that there are not two, but, rather, three distinct phases of his thought: the early phase of the analytic of Dasein (Sein und Zeit); the middle phase of the assertion of heroic historicity (from the conference “What is Metaphysics?” to the manuscript Vom Ereignis – the key published text Introduction to Metaphysics); and the last phase of the withdrawal from technological nihilism into poetry and thought, under the sign of Gelassenheit. In his first phase, Heidegger ignores the phenomenon of the Will; in the second phase, it is forcefully asserted, and well beyond Heidegger’s Nazi engagement (in Vom Ereignis manuscript, which is usually read as the beginning of late Heidegger, he still speaks of the “will to Ereignis”); in the last phase, as the result of Heidegger’s confrontation with Nietzsche, Will is, on the contrary, posited as the very core of modern subjectivity, and thus as that which has to be overcome if mankind is to leave behind the nihilism that threatens its very essence.
‘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.
Under Heidegger’s beliefs, characters such as Jof and his wife Mia who avoid facing death would never experience “authentic existence.” Heidegger views this in a negative light as Jof and his family would not enjoy the freedoms from social conventions that come from acknowledging death. However, Bergman’s presentation of these sequences seems to indicate that he does not share the same view. By closing The Seventh Seal with Mia’s casual denial of Jof’s haunting vision, Bergman adds an uplifting mood to the movie.
Where Hegel speaks of the Idea, the being of beings, as the divine Absolute, Heidegger prefers reticence, but this may amount to the same thing, for Hegel himself underscores many times that the Absolute, a placeholder for God, is itself merely an empty name whose meaning is given only through what is predicated of it by speculative-dialectical thinking, and these predicates are precisely the ontological concepts for the worldliness of the world.
Reflection on aletheia, on the emergence of forms of understanding into the lighting of Being is alone the appropriate subject for philosophical reflection. Consequently the specific events of everyday moral experience are not a relevant subject for philosophical reflection. Nor is there any philosophical significance to moral principles or to standard logical inference.
The phenomenological continuity of Heidegger’s analysis of the equipmentality of the shoes qua equipment turns upon and into the same evidential quality of the obvious – what is made manifest via Heidegger’s earlier phenomenological analysis of things in use in Being and Time. Equipment recedes, disappears, withdraws or vanishes from conscious intrusion in use: this is the intentional utility of equipment as such.
The recognition of the ineffectuality of a political or social response to technology leads [Heidegger] both to move away from the call for a violent recapturing of a primordial techne, and to suggest instead that within the enframing essence of technology lies an opportunity to once again experience the disclosure of a sense of limitation. As he explains in the passage quoted above, in the dominance of technology “something is being announced . . . namely a relationship of Being to man—and . . . this relationship, which is concealed in the essence of technology, may come to light someday in its undisguised form. I do not know whether it is going to happen!”
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What 'eventuates' in ereignis is the enactment of decision, the 'decisive' moment is one in which something is decided. Such a moment 'makes a difference’ something is changed radically in a determined resolution, it is brought to fullness in a satistactory conclusion. This is the meaning of kairos, the appropriate moment for action duly considered and using the knowledge of one's experience and technical expertise, the moment of decision. Resolute action brings to Presence or discloses what this moment holds.
Heidegger's attempt to gather things together in the Ereignis may be incompatible with the intrinsic pluralism of language, and the Ereignis may reflect a Greco-Germanic sense of being which is but one historical possibility among others, even within Western culture. His effort to step back from Western philosophical tradition to uncover its fundamental bearings, by a phenomenological bringing into view of matters that this tradition occludes, may suffer from a narrow purism in its focus on the being-question.
For all the care to avoid invoking a philosophical meta-text, or departing from our immersion in the cinematic Sache, we find ourselves talking of the way things presence, their luminous appearance, their revealing of a world that we do not master or control, that reveals the mystery of finitude and the calm releasement towards time, death, and the mystery of Being/Nature. Hermeneutic banana skin or not, it seems difficult to avoid talk about Malick's cinematic 'letting be' without invoking, at least implicitly, the Heideggerian thought of Gelassenheit,
The issue for Heidegger is obviously not the individuality of truth and how it is identical in essence with the individuality of freedom. In fact, it seems that wherever Heidegger comes across individual freedom, he diagnoses a hopeless case of subjectivist metaphysics.
But to know oneself as possibly insignificant to oneself is at the same time to know oneself as ultimately responsible for one’s own significance. Knowing ourselves as finite, as beings among beings, we also know ourselves as having a finite interest, in pursuit of which we have already spoken carelessly (have taken no responsibility for our word). But we can know this only because we find ourselves to be commanded (or “called”), and therefore to be (possibly) free.
In retrospect, we can say that Heidegger did first glimpse the way being itself exceeds the current understanding of the being of entities in his existential analysis of death in Being and Time, but to say (as Heidegger himself and White like to) that Heidegger already understood this back in Being and Time is to succumb to an illusion of hermeneutic hindsight and so to read him anachronistically, that is, timelessly, without sufficient sensitivity to the very real breaks, ruptures, and discontinuities through which his work passed as it underwent its fascinating evolution.
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The work of art is held to be the origin of things in such a way that the "thingliness" both of the work and of the thing is held to be, in effect, an abstraction from the self-secluding of the "earth" within the "world" opened up by the work-–this is, one can say, the moment of severance or distantiation that appears as such only under the condition of de-severance or de-distantiation. Here again Heidegger is concerned to trace the logic of this into the work itself, so the work appears as, in its inmost structure, a "rift"–say, an establishing of distance as the very means of the work's intimacy with itself (what one might call its autonomy).
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Whether or not onto-theology is the truth about metaphysics, it is not the truth about the divine, and if it has reached its conclusion, its end is not the fate of the gods. In our witnessing the return of the gods we begin to see, against Heidegger, that for much of our history metaphysics as onto-theology did not contain or subdue the divine.
In Heidegger's strategy, the Pre-Socratics were deployed largely in order to deconstruct Plato and, as a side-effect, to plot the emergence of the system of metaphysics. Does Lacan conduct a similar operation? The answer is complex.
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The project or design that is set to work in this or that particular work is always an openness or unconcealment of beings that “casts itself toward us,” an unfolding that “is cast ahead into the rift of the figure.” This clearing of the unconcealment of beings, “happens only when the openness arriving within thrownness is in turn projected.” Yet this arrival is not accomplished by human thought, nor by human agency or subjectivity: it is the antecedent claim of a destining or designing that first calls upon us to think, or to respond to the historical claim of a world along the lines of a certain path, of a gathering of possibility.
A specialist on Descartes and Renaissance humanism, and himself a staunch rationalist, Faye sees Heidegger’s philosophical critique of Cartesianism and modern rationalism merely as an ideological mask for a perverted politics. Those who adopt elements of Heidegger’s critique are dubbed politically naïve or, worse, suspect--a judgment Faye passes on Derrida and even Habermas without further ado.
Other philosophies have become anthropologies: that is part of the illness of our time. But his work is something else. Anthropological, psychological, ethical, epistemological analyses: all these are what he calls ontic, existentiell. His method and his matter are not of this kind. But let us ask once again, what can really be meant by the contrary of ‘ontic’ and ‘existentiell’.
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The notion of "formal indication" means that the terms used to describe existence require a specific and unprescribable process of appropriation on the part of the reader, or listener. This process is not contained in the concept itself, it can only be awakened, encouraged, admonished by it.
[Heidegger] argues that the practices in the background of understanding can function only if they remain in the background. The background itself opens up the very possibility of a foreground, for it is only against something that another something can be focused, or call for attention. Thus, that which is most vital in functioning must be that which is closest to us; so close, as not to be seen because it belongs to the background, not the foreground.
That speaking to others in the attempt to win them over and persuade them is ontologically an uncertain enterprise means in particular that this phenomenon and technique falls outside the ambit of those arts that for Heidegger will develop through Western history into modern technology with its total, planning precalculability. This indicates that the other human being as a free other and individual site of truth eludes the foreknowing, calculating reach of technological machination. The importance of this cannot be over-estimated, for it is the Achilles’ heel in Heidegger’s thinking on technology.
In the background, we engage in ‘silent thought’. What is most significant in our lives is not easily accessible to reflection - it is not visible to intentionality. Being is self-interpreting and is necessarily involved in and dependent upon the world. We exist amid a world of shared meanings and understandings in the social context as a mode of being human which exists factically.
