well, the following is a big mess with lot's deleted, but here it is:
> And Bunkerphil does it too. "Man ... must be somehow gathered up
>and gerryrigged into some sort of 'counter-apparatus' that will
>extricate itself from this ever tightening iron cage of
>technological domination. ... The only thing we can do for
>Heidegger now is to relieve him of his delusion that Being would
>return." But for Heidegger, Being is returned to, not what
>returns. Being could not be what is to return if it is what is
>forgotten. Indeed, Being is what is always the trace that is
>present in absence in beings (as Derrida would say, and
>Bernasconi lays out in his excellent book, mention by Chris).
Ooooh. I hate to be accused of being metaphysical. That stings. But I
think you are right about my usage of terms. What I meant was what I think
of in heidegger functions as a 'new dispensation coming from afar."
Heidegger says "whether and how in the upsurgence of the holy an epiphany of
God and the gods can begin anew." (1977, p218). What could this refer to but
a world historical event that may or may not happen?
There's a confusion I see in Heideggers writing that I am only beginning to
articulate to myself. It seems that his text veers toward a what shall we
say,, representation of Being in which it is a sort of an actor. it may
simply be because Heideggers mind has so incorporated a notion of Being which
is 'beyond Metaphysics', that he fails to notice the points at which his text
seems to suggest a metaphysical noiton. Not simply on there own as
propositions at the level of the sentence, but at shifts in the way Being is
uytilized propositionally in different particular sentences. It seeems that
just when you are riding out of the subject along with Heidegger, he'll drop
a sentence that seems to shift the sense of the sort of "thing' Being is.
How does one deal with this? The only vague suggestion I have in deal ing
with it is to think of some sort of way that Being gets worked over through
the momentum of the text,, that when we get to something like a conclusion
(to thextent Heidegger can be said to come to any) we are assumed to be
ready to recieve what has accrued to the ntion of Being in the interim. In
other words, how much we must deny to ourselves on one hand,, is that
Heidegger has a sort of narrative structure, moments in the tezt which
funciton, or seem to have the same sort of rythym, of a narrattive. The
"conclusion" or "climax" to the narrative include thte well known slogans
"language speaks man", "language is the house of Being." all phrases that
when taken in their grammatical structure, impute a keenly felt sense of
subject/ object, but the words that you would normally see occuppying these
positions are reversed. The problem I see in this sort of sloganism, these
propositonal structures which are meant to perturb some quite definite
structure, are that the moment when the slogan is deployed (on a big colorful
placard) becomes completely arbitrary, it is only the result of whatever
correct calculatoin h. had made that indeed, the text has reached the point
where such a slogan will have the effect it ought to have. Heideggers text
have this rythm, he sayts a few shocking things to get oyour attention,
grabbing hold of the conclusions his text will work toward, or somehow
demonstrate then he criticyzes current events for a while, he locates a
starting point in the history of phil (which is always clearly implied to be
"the way it really happened' and don't tell me heidegger didn't expoijt this
clear implicattoin in his texts), then he works up with mounting excitement
to the shattering conclusion, which blows minds left and right. All this is
done for this affective discharge. The text leads to it and executes the
coup de grace at the exact moment and the audience roars. Now, I'm all for
affective discharges, but do we really have to be subjected to this baroque
machinery, not to mention this postulation of structure which it needs in
order to deliver? This sort of rythym, in my mind, is clearly the rythm of
fascism, a very constricted, manipulative, way of, well, being. One
carefully sets oneself on a path the path must be correct. All along one's
walk, one is carefully fed a very homogeneous style of statements, and kept
from others. It is all very diligently and painstakingly organized by
Heidegger. In this sense it is hardly distinguishable from the technical
master H is trying to combat.???
Rather, as transcendence pure and
>simple, it is transcendence in form, without stating what the
>content of that transcendence is.
but form is a huge wildcard.
But Dasein is a special one (that can question), and ask
>about the meaning of Being (which is different from what Being
>means). If Being manifests itself through
>beings, as the trace of Being in beings,
I don't know if this is a correct interp of heid. I think it is stuck in
B&T. It's one of the elements of B&T that I believe was abandoned (or let's
say, moved beyond) in his later years. heideggers semiotic work was done in
being and time. he never concerned himself with it in his later years
because it had only been one of the rungs on the ladder. derrida looking
through very intricately desinged filters, transfers it into h's later work.
returns a signifier to h's later work becuase he's at the arrested stage of
development of Being and Time (from a Heideggerian perspective). derrida has
no right to interpret heidegger this way, he ought to go do his own thing,
and quit trying to mold heidegger intoo his image.
this critciism doesn't apply for the most part to heideggers misreadings,
becuase he's not primarily concerned with this 'reading' bullshit. he's out
to follow his own path. derrida is constantly marking up the texts, trying
to mutate them, which is fine, but by god if that's not the only thing he
does.... its an unhealthy obsession. let's hear something new beyond this
exquisite clash of texts, man.
> One cannot articulate Being, and not turn it into a being in
>that articulation. One must let Being be. This is what is implied
>in Heidegger's centering the ontological difference; the
>ontological difference approaches the inarticulability of Being,
>by specifying that beings are, that a consideration of beings and
>a consideration of Being are different, and stopping there. For
>Heidegger, this is enough to follow the path of aletheia, of
>having unforgotten the question of Being, but then not having
>forgotten again that Being cannot be specified, that it is not a
>being. One must not forget not to fall into the trap of
>forgetting this. This is another reason that Heidegger returns to
>Being in BT only through the means of discussing Dasein, and its
>existentials. Its as close as one can get in an articulation.
hmmm, so that's how you interpret the analytical of dasein. well it sounds
king of right, except i don't think that the analytic of dasein is returns to
Being. It simply serves to prove if you will, that 'man' is so deeply
intwined in Being inthe world, that 'he' has reached a vanishing point. B&T
is a science tract, it is pervaded by notions of phenomenolgy as grounding.
Heideggfer may have looked for being there, i don't know, but he didn't find
it or at any time think he was upon it or let's say "in its region".
>
> This notion shows up again in the Augenblick that Chris
>makes reference to. Chris says: "that the whole suddenly lights
>up. This sudden lighting is the Augenblick, or the moment, which
>should be taken to mean (in another of his [Heidegger's]
>metaphors), being flashes like lightning in the dark and
>illuminates everything, but only briefly, and then darkness again
>falls." The lightning flash in which Being is revealed is only
>the blink of an eye because it must necessarily remain
>unarticulated. It is the flash of what Husserl would call
>intuition (also using the term augenblick); the flash of
>realization of Being in and through all beings, including
>ourselves as Dasein -- that is, never out there.
>
> And this is why Heidegger turns to poets, and poetry. Chris
>puts his finger on this nicely. This is "the problem that
>Heidegger approaches in his later writings on language. The poet
>cannot name the highest, because there the word fails and there
>is only silence. All poetry is ... a talking around the
>unsayable," not vainly unsayable, as Chris puts it, but
>necessarily approaching the unsayable (for Heidegger). This is
>why, as Chris puts it, "Heidegger says that the poet must come
>down from the holy places in the mountain peaks and back to human
>society." It is to be one of the means of approaching the
>inarticulable, as an approach to the meaning of Being.
these are all undeniably pretty sentiments. but i fear you fail to recognize
their context. heid is waiting for being to grant the new dispensation. all
of this poetry is waiting for this historical moment. people read heidegger
as if he is simply offering this as a 'way of thinking'. as opposed to the
way of thinking that we must approach if a new way of being is to be granted
unto man. it, in itself is not this new way, it is on the way. but that
doesn't mean that one should read heidegger as simply being "on the way".
tthis is only the prelude, the readying for something new. if the new
doesnt come then it looks pretty damn pointless, doesn't it? the deafening
alarm bells of imminent crisis are erased in these readings.
>
And I don't think that anyone will deny that there is
>precious little philosophical discourse in slogans.
> that hardly befits a philosopher of Heidegger's
>stature.
I mean, if I'm going to do a critique of a book, should
>I restrict myself to what the author has written on the dust
>cover as part of an attempt to sell the book? But that is what
>Heidegger did.
but Heidegger is a philosopher, not a book critic.
Furthermore, Sartre notes that he bases
>the entire notion of human reality on negativity, while Heidegger
>bases Dasein on positivity. In effect, Sartre does not translate
>Dasein as "human reality" at all, and thus did not appropriate
>Dasein in a metaphysical or anthropologized guise. Rather, he
>critiqued it, and in his own ontology replaced it by something
>else because he found Heidegger's idea to be sorely lacking for
>him. Well, Derrida's charge of misapprpriation is simply a way of
>not dealing with the difference between the two, a serious
>difference that seems like it might pertain to this list's
>discussion of Heidegger's politics, insofar as Sartre did not
>make the same mistake in perspective in 1933, or in 1939, that
>Heidegger did, and that other French philosophers did.
i find this to be a silly concern. the notion that we by some comparison of
different usage of terms in different philosophers come to a conclusion about
how this usage maps to some sort of political position, a binary space by
tthe way, cuase your either a fascist or your not i guess. we can isolate a
couple of variables that we have extracted from each text and then conclude
that those particualr varibles penetrate to the core of the difference that
matters: "fascism". this is exacltly the kind of analysis that heidegger
would have spotted immmediately as completely within the regime of
technological domination, carving out pieces of nature to subject them to
tests. we all know that heidegger had an impoverished world view. you
realize that already from a simple reading of his texts. texts that make no
effort to reach out into the world in which we actually live. one doesn't
need some painstaking comparison to sartre to tell you that. i mean you
gotta think that here is a man who never looked out the window except when he
was out in his fores abode. he tells you absolutely nothing about living in
any real world whatsoever. of course he was unfair to sartre's situation, he
is a blatant misreader who utilizes pronouncements of others to launch his
own thoughts. its really not that complicated. it would be an absurdly
redundant exercise to argue that he 'misreads' ANY philosopher and Heideger
would surely laugh with derision at any such attempt (if you can imagine him
laughing at all). so much for hermeneutics. your attribution of specific
politics to heidegger entirely rests on a reading of history, not heidegger.
also you totally left out sartre's political scandals.
what i also sense when i much heidegger commentary, is that he is being used
to support a certain sort of aesthetic ideal of contemplation, that it is
simply "something good" to think heideggerian thoughts. that's perfectly
fine, but its not cool to allow this to obscure heideggers trajectory, which
was a desperate attempt to avert an apocalypse which was almost inevitable
anyway. he simply kept the fire lamely burning long after it had happened.
do we really want to contiue kindling this dying flicker simply because its
pretty?
>
> In effect, I think that the question of Sartre is central to
>understanding what Heidegger is doing in LH, and to its
>historicity as a text.
no, sartre is simply a stand-in for broader world historical forces
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
------------------
> And Bunkerphil does it too. "Man ... must be somehow gathered up
>and gerryrigged into some sort of 'counter-apparatus' that will
>extricate itself from this ever tightening iron cage of
>technological domination. ... The only thing we can do for
>Heidegger now is to relieve him of his delusion that Being would
>return." But for Heidegger, Being is returned to, not what
>returns. Being could not be what is to return if it is what is
>forgotten. Indeed, Being is what is always the trace that is
>present in absence in beings (as Derrida would say, and
>Bernasconi lays out in his excellent book, mention by Chris).
Ooooh. I hate to be accused of being metaphysical. That stings. But I
think you are right about my usage of terms. What I meant was what I think
of in heidegger functions as a 'new dispensation coming from afar."
Heidegger says "whether and how in the upsurgence of the holy an epiphany of
God and the gods can begin anew." (1977, p218). What could this refer to but
a world historical event that may or may not happen?
There's a confusion I see in Heideggers writing that I am only beginning to
articulate to myself. It seems that his text veers toward a what shall we
say,, representation of Being in which it is a sort of an actor. it may
simply be because Heideggers mind has so incorporated a notion of Being which
is 'beyond Metaphysics', that he fails to notice the points at which his text
seems to suggest a metaphysical noiton. Not simply on there own as
propositions at the level of the sentence, but at shifts in the way Being is
uytilized propositionally in different particular sentences. It seeems that
just when you are riding out of the subject along with Heidegger, he'll drop
a sentence that seems to shift the sense of the sort of "thing' Being is.
How does one deal with this? The only vague suggestion I have in deal ing
with it is to think of some sort of way that Being gets worked over through
the momentum of the text,, that when we get to something like a conclusion
(to thextent Heidegger can be said to come to any) we are assumed to be
ready to recieve what has accrued to the ntion of Being in the interim. In
other words, how much we must deny to ourselves on one hand,, is that
Heidegger has a sort of narrative structure, moments in the tezt which
funciton, or seem to have the same sort of rythym, of a narrattive. The
"conclusion" or "climax" to the narrative include thte well known slogans
"language speaks man", "language is the house of Being." all phrases that
when taken in their grammatical structure, impute a keenly felt sense of
subject/ object, but the words that you would normally see occuppying these
positions are reversed. The problem I see in this sort of sloganism, these
propositonal structures which are meant to perturb some quite definite
structure, are that the moment when the slogan is deployed (on a big colorful
placard) becomes completely arbitrary, it is only the result of whatever
correct calculatoin h. had made that indeed, the text has reached the point
where such a slogan will have the effect it ought to have. Heideggers text
have this rythm, he sayts a few shocking things to get oyour attention,
grabbing hold of the conclusions his text will work toward, or somehow
demonstrate then he criticyzes current events for a while, he locates a
starting point in the history of phil (which is always clearly implied to be
"the way it really happened' and don't tell me heidegger didn't expoijt this
clear implicattoin in his texts), then he works up with mounting excitement
to the shattering conclusion, which blows minds left and right. All this is
done for this affective discharge. The text leads to it and executes the
coup de grace at the exact moment and the audience roars. Now, I'm all for
affective discharges, but do we really have to be subjected to this baroque
machinery, not to mention this postulation of structure which it needs in
order to deliver? This sort of rythym, in my mind, is clearly the rythm of
fascism, a very constricted, manipulative, way of, well, being. One
carefully sets oneself on a path the path must be correct. All along one's
walk, one is carefully fed a very homogeneous style of statements, and kept
from others. It is all very diligently and painstakingly organized by
Heidegger. In this sense it is hardly distinguishable from the technical
master H is trying to combat.???
Rather, as transcendence pure and
>simple, it is transcendence in form, without stating what the
>content of that transcendence is.
but form is a huge wildcard.
But Dasein is a special one (that can question), and ask
>about the meaning of Being (which is different from what Being
>means). If Being manifests itself through
>beings, as the trace of Being in beings,
I don't know if this is a correct interp of heid. I think it is stuck in
B&T. It's one of the elements of B&T that I believe was abandoned (or let's
say, moved beyond) in his later years. heideggers semiotic work was done in
being and time. he never concerned himself with it in his later years
because it had only been one of the rungs on the ladder. derrida looking
through very intricately desinged filters, transfers it into h's later work.
returns a signifier to h's later work becuase he's at the arrested stage of
development of Being and Time (from a Heideggerian perspective). derrida has
no right to interpret heidegger this way, he ought to go do his own thing,
and quit trying to mold heidegger intoo his image.
this critciism doesn't apply for the most part to heideggers misreadings,
becuase he's not primarily concerned with this 'reading' bullshit. he's out
to follow his own path. derrida is constantly marking up the texts, trying
to mutate them, which is fine, but by god if that's not the only thing he
does.... its an unhealthy obsession. let's hear something new beyond this
exquisite clash of texts, man.
> One cannot articulate Being, and not turn it into a being in
>that articulation. One must let Being be. This is what is implied
>in Heidegger's centering the ontological difference; the
>ontological difference approaches the inarticulability of Being,
>by specifying that beings are, that a consideration of beings and
>a consideration of Being are different, and stopping there. For
>Heidegger, this is enough to follow the path of aletheia, of
>having unforgotten the question of Being, but then not having
>forgotten again that Being cannot be specified, that it is not a
>being. One must not forget not to fall into the trap of
>forgetting this. This is another reason that Heidegger returns to
>Being in BT only through the means of discussing Dasein, and its
>existentials. Its as close as one can get in an articulation.
hmmm, so that's how you interpret the analytical of dasein. well it sounds
king of right, except i don't think that the analytic of dasein is returns to
Being. It simply serves to prove if you will, that 'man' is so deeply
intwined in Being inthe world, that 'he' has reached a vanishing point. B&T
is a science tract, it is pervaded by notions of phenomenolgy as grounding.
Heideggfer may have looked for being there, i don't know, but he didn't find
it or at any time think he was upon it or let's say "in its region".
>
> This notion shows up again in the Augenblick that Chris
>makes reference to. Chris says: "that the whole suddenly lights
>up. This sudden lighting is the Augenblick, or the moment, which
>should be taken to mean (in another of his [Heidegger's]
>metaphors), being flashes like lightning in the dark and
>illuminates everything, but only briefly, and then darkness again
>falls." The lightning flash in which Being is revealed is only
>the blink of an eye because it must necessarily remain
>unarticulated. It is the flash of what Husserl would call
>intuition (also using the term augenblick); the flash of
>realization of Being in and through all beings, including
>ourselves as Dasein -- that is, never out there.
>
> And this is why Heidegger turns to poets, and poetry. Chris
>puts his finger on this nicely. This is "the problem that
>Heidegger approaches in his later writings on language. The poet
>cannot name the highest, because there the word fails and there
>is only silence. All poetry is ... a talking around the
>unsayable," not vainly unsayable, as Chris puts it, but
>necessarily approaching the unsayable (for Heidegger). This is
>why, as Chris puts it, "Heidegger says that the poet must come
>down from the holy places in the mountain peaks and back to human
>society." It is to be one of the means of approaching the
>inarticulable, as an approach to the meaning of Being.
these are all undeniably pretty sentiments. but i fear you fail to recognize
their context. heid is waiting for being to grant the new dispensation. all
of this poetry is waiting for this historical moment. people read heidegger
as if he is simply offering this as a 'way of thinking'. as opposed to the
way of thinking that we must approach if a new way of being is to be granted
unto man. it, in itself is not this new way, it is on the way. but that
doesn't mean that one should read heidegger as simply being "on the way".
tthis is only the prelude, the readying for something new. if the new
doesnt come then it looks pretty damn pointless, doesn't it? the deafening
alarm bells of imminent crisis are erased in these readings.
>
And I don't think that anyone will deny that there is
>precious little philosophical discourse in slogans.
> that hardly befits a philosopher of Heidegger's
>stature.
I mean, if I'm going to do a critique of a book, should
>I restrict myself to what the author has written on the dust
>cover as part of an attempt to sell the book? But that is what
>Heidegger did.
but Heidegger is a philosopher, not a book critic.
Furthermore, Sartre notes that he bases
>the entire notion of human reality on negativity, while Heidegger
>bases Dasein on positivity. In effect, Sartre does not translate
>Dasein as "human reality" at all, and thus did not appropriate
>Dasein in a metaphysical or anthropologized guise. Rather, he
>critiqued it, and in his own ontology replaced it by something
>else because he found Heidegger's idea to be sorely lacking for
>him. Well, Derrida's charge of misapprpriation is simply a way of
>not dealing with the difference between the two, a serious
>difference that seems like it might pertain to this list's
>discussion of Heidegger's politics, insofar as Sartre did not
>make the same mistake in perspective in 1933, or in 1939, that
>Heidegger did, and that other French philosophers did.
i find this to be a silly concern. the notion that we by some comparison of
different usage of terms in different philosophers come to a conclusion about
how this usage maps to some sort of political position, a binary space by
tthe way, cuase your either a fascist or your not i guess. we can isolate a
couple of variables that we have extracted from each text and then conclude
that those particualr varibles penetrate to the core of the difference that
matters: "fascism". this is exacltly the kind of analysis that heidegger
would have spotted immmediately as completely within the regime of
technological domination, carving out pieces of nature to subject them to
tests. we all know that heidegger had an impoverished world view. you
realize that already from a simple reading of his texts. texts that make no
effort to reach out into the world in which we actually live. one doesn't
need some painstaking comparison to sartre to tell you that. i mean you
gotta think that here is a man who never looked out the window except when he
was out in his fores abode. he tells you absolutely nothing about living in
any real world whatsoever. of course he was unfair to sartre's situation, he
is a blatant misreader who utilizes pronouncements of others to launch his
own thoughts. its really not that complicated. it would be an absurdly
redundant exercise to argue that he 'misreads' ANY philosopher and Heideger
would surely laugh with derision at any such attempt (if you can imagine him
laughing at all). so much for hermeneutics. your attribution of specific
politics to heidegger entirely rests on a reading of history, not heidegger.
also you totally left out sartre's political scandals.
what i also sense when i much heidegger commentary, is that he is being used
to support a certain sort of aesthetic ideal of contemplation, that it is
simply "something good" to think heideggerian thoughts. that's perfectly
fine, but its not cool to allow this to obscure heideggers trajectory, which
was a desperate attempt to avert an apocalypse which was almost inevitable
anyway. he simply kept the fire lamely burning long after it had happened.
do we really want to contiue kindling this dying flicker simply because its
pretty?
>
> In effect, I think that the question of Sartre is central to
>understanding what Heidegger is doing in LH, and to its
>historicity as a text.
no, sartre is simply a stand-in for broader world historical forces
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
------------------