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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.
Alexander Payne’s 2002 film, About Schmidt, the story of Warren Schmidt, 66 year-old retiree, coming face to face with the meaninglessness of life. I proffer an interpretation of this film that draws on the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger
In worlding things reflect, not merely what is ‘opposite’ it, but themselves as such. In the referential and auto-referential play of references or ‘mirrors’ the thinging of the thing maintains and shows itself as that which it is. Also, in every worlding of the thing (mirroring) the wholeness of the worlding of the world is already and immediately revealed as such—‘the fourfold as One’.
We will show that the transformation of logos into logic depended on mathematics taking the place of the phusis: within the self-givingness of mathematics the logos can continue to act as a gathering, but because of the completely different context, the nature of this gathering changes.
[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.
[T]he fact that as ereignis, as the event of appropriation, Being simultaneously presents itself--by making manifest what entities are--while at the same time withdrawing itself, by refusing to disclose what it is. It is an open space, a clearing, where beings show up.
The “truth of Being” is the unfathomable depth of history, unfolding that history in its epochal structure. It remains not only “more,” but also wholly “different” than history. It is that unique dimension that does not exhaust itself in historicity.
...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?
The rule of quantum is showed in the three main characteristics of modernity, namely calculation, acceleration and massiveness, and more concretely expressed in the quantification of sciences, the corruption of universities into enterprises which compel human sciences into “newspaper science” [Zeitungswissenschaft] and natural sciences into “machine science” [Maschinenwissenschaft], the emergence of the gigantic such as the unlimited multiplying of production, the pervasion of nihilism and its political expression as “total mobilization”.
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.
As Heidegger reads it, Aristotle argues that phronēsis is a practical form of vision that allows us to recognize the relevant features and contents of a situation in an instant (Augenblick). Just as the geometer is able to recognize that the triangle is the simplest component of the hexagon without analyzing the hexagon and without giving any further reasons why this is the case, phronēsis allows one to orient one’s activities in the light of one’s for-the-sake-of-which’s without analyzing the situation or providing further reasons for that orientation.
Heidegger advocates an (active) non-action— articulated in his much-debated call to ‘let be’ — as the appropriate response to the relentless demands of modern technology. Such an orientation is of course problematic in a studio context where it is completely mismatched to preframed expectations about design and architecture and their heroic role in inventing new worlds.
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.
What does Ereignis signify? It is the self-generating event of history itself, what makes history as the immanent event and enactment of a being—and thus historiographical narrative and explanation—possible. It furthermore names the other of history entering into and potentially interrupting and transforming existing historical life.
So what is the immediate and untranslated thought of the thing? What shows itself self-evidently insofar as we keep all preconceptions at a distance, simply describe without any philosophical theory? What lets the thing be as it is without doing violence to it?
For Heidegger, it is that which is continuous in the thing—not the form, but that which allows the interpretation or translation of the thing qua form and matter, or ens creatum and increatum, to remain constantly together, to stand together; it is the constancy or continuity of the thing, the standing and remaining, das Ständige, die Konsistenz.
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.
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The unhiddenness of beings in their Being which for us is an aspect of the dao is given in each and every form of transfinite experience and cognition. Every center of activity perceives, interprets, and appropriates itself to the dao in its own way and within the experiential givenness of its own perspective.
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?
“Waiting” is the key experience, for in waiting we are in the position of crossing from thinking as representing to thinking as meditative thinking. In waiting we move from that thinking which, as Heidegger states, has lost its “element” (be-ing) and dried up, to the thinking that is “appropriated” by its “element” (be-ing itself) and which, therefore, has turned towards be-ing itself.
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.
As Heidegger points out, there is both the light of the fire in the cave and the light of the Sun above, thus these two sources of illumination must have two different meanings attached to them. Consequently, though what emanates from these two sources is referred to as “light” in both cases, “light” here must itself be capable of having two different meanings. Hence just as “truth” can be understood as either adequatio and correspondence or as aletheia and unhiddenness, so too can “light” bear within itself a conceptual distinction.
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Heidegger continually criticizes Descartes for limiting the scope of the human being to the cogito sum, an object of thought that shows up as a necessary condition for representation. For Heidegger, the danger of this equation is that the human being is understood along the lines of an object, like any other object, and not as the privileged being who has its being as an issue for it. In the language of Being and Time, Descartes' understanding of the self is of an object present-at-hand, or so Heidegger claims.
I agree that Heidegger accepts the notion of truth as correctness. I want to argue, however, that correspondence is not the same as correctness, that the distinction between them is philosophically significant, and that Heidegger recognizes both the distinction and its significance—sometimes explicitly, but more often implicitly in the way he conceives and criticizes the metaphysical tradition from Plato to Nietzsche.
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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Not to return to the phenomenon of everyday human activity but consider beings only as something present-to-hand would be to forget the primordiality of the relation between beings and being, a forgetfulness with nihilistic consequences. In the event of nihilism, the world will not be invigorated by the resources either of the fermentation of philosophy or of a new political theory or of a new ethics, thereby maintaining the status quo and leaving the world untransformed. The ontological significance of these areas of human existence can be retained only by way of Denken (thought), that is, by seriously reflecting on the disaster of the forgetfulness of being.
The point of seeing the danger is not that we then retreat from the enterprise of technology. Quite to the contrary, the danger haunting the technological era is that there is no retreat. However, it is precisely this realization that can turn our heads around and bring us to go forward in a manner Heidegger refers to as releasement. Releasement represents a form of letting go, but not in the sense of surrendering to the inevitable, or dismantling it; or merely leaving things alone.
This view of language allows Heidegger to criticize the mentalism characteristic of modern philosophy and to articulate his new, hermeneutic approach. It lends plausibility to his contention that our primary access to the world is not due to an allegedly neutral perception of entities but to our prior understanding of everything that can show up within the world as something or other.
One of the fundamental features of his mature position of the 1960s—the account familiar to most readers of Heidegger—is that die Lichtung, thought as the clearing, is emphatically not to be defined in terms of lux, that is, “light” in the sense of “luminosity” or “brightness.” Yet, what has been largely overlooked is that this is not how Heidegger thought about the matter early on in Being and Time.
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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).
Hegel’s account of the relationship between time and spirit—that spirit ‘falls into’ historical time and yet can be sublated or aufgehoben by speculative thought—is presented as evidence of how the metaphysical tradition has obliterated the question of temporality in favour of an ontologically inappropriate interpretation of da-sein as objective presence.
While Malpas demonstrates that the topological aspects of Heidegger’s thinking can be traced in all phases of his writing, they are most explicit in the later works in which Heidegger became increasingly concerned with ideas of event, dwelling, and gathering. Malpas suggests that, for Heidegger, “event” and “place” often mean the same; they are both the starting point for thinking and both offer possibilities for disclosure, appropriation, appearing, and gathering.and
When something is present at hand, says Heidegger, its being is a matter of indifference. To apply the term “presence at hand” to a human being is thus inappropriate. It suggests that the person belongs to the same class as a thing. But one’s humanity, one’s very being, cannot be a matter of indifference.
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.”178
Because what Heidegger means by metaphysics is identical towhat he means by philosophy, Heidegger's Nietzsche proves to be acentral 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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Created 1995/04/18
Last updated 2008/08/25
Pete