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On Heidegger

13/05/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"During the final years of his life, Heidegger's main concern was the preparation of his collected works. Originally he wanted to call them Paths, but they ended up as his Collected Works.

Near the end of his life, Arthur Schopenhauer once said: 'Mankind has learned a few things from me that it will never forget.' No such statement is known from Heidegger. He did not create any constructive philosophy in the sense of a world picture or a moral doctrine. There are no 'results' of Heidgger's thinking, in the sense that there are 'results' of the philosophy of Leibniz, Kant, or Schopenhauer. Heidegger's passion was for questioning, not answering. Questioning appeared to him as 'piety of thinking,' because it opened up new horizons—just as religion, while it was still alive, had extended horizons and sanctified what appeared in them. For Heidegger it was one question in particular that had this opening-up power, the question he had asked all through his life, the question about Being. The meaning of this question was none other than this keeping open, this moving forward into a clearing where the matter of course suddenly finds the miracle of its 'Here' returned to it, where man experiences himself as a location where something gapes open, where nature opens its eyes and notices that it is there, where, therefore, amid the 'essent' (das Seiende) there is an open spot, a clearing, and where, for all that exists, gratitude is possible. Hidden in the question about Being is readiness for jubilation. The question about Being, in Heidegger's sense, means to lighten things, the way one weighs anchor to sail out into the open sea. It is a sad irony of history that the question about Being has, in the reception of Heidegger's work, mostly lost this opening, lightening feature and that it has rather tended to intimidate, knot, and cramp all thought" (Safranski 1998:428-429).

Safranski, Rüdiger
1998[1994] Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil. Ewald Osers, trans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Being and Concealment

05/02/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“Through Being there passes a veiled destiny that is ordained between the godly and the countergodly. There is much in being that man cannot master. There is but little that comes to be known. What is known remains inexact, what is mastered insecure. That is, is never of our making or even merely the product of our minds, as it might all to easily seem. When we contemplate this whole as one, then we apprehend, so it appears, all that is-though we grasp it crudely enough.

And yet-beyond what is, not far away from it but before it, there is still something else that happens. In the midst of beings as a whole an open place occurs. There is a clearing, a lighting. Thought of in reference to what is, to beings, this clearing is in a greater degree than are beings. This open center is therefore not surrounded by what is; rather, the lighting center itself encircles all that is, like the Nothing which we scarcely know.

That which is can only be, as a being, if it stands within and stands out within what is lighted in this clearing. Only this clearing grants and guarantees to us humans a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves are. Thanks to this clearing, beings are concealed in certain changing degrees. And yet a being can be concealed, too, only within the sphere of what is lighted. Each being we encounter and which encounters us keeps to this curious opposition of presence in that it always withholds itself at the same time in a concealedness. The clearing in which beings stand is in itself at the same time concealment. Concealment, however, prevails in the midst of beings in a twofold way.

Beings refuse themselves to us down to that one and seemingly least feature which we touch upon most readily when we can say no more of beings than that they are. Concealment as refusal is not simply and only the limit of knowledge in any given circumstance, but the beginning of the clearing of what is lighted. But concealment, though of another sort, to be sure, at the same time also occurs within what is lighted. One being places itself in front of another being, the one helps to hide the other, the former obscures the latter, a few obstruct many, one denies all. Here concealment is not simple refusal. Rather, a being appears, but it presents itself other than it is.

This concealment is dissembling. If one being did not simulate another, we could not make mistakes or act mistakenly in regard to beings; we could not go astray and transgress, and especially could never overreach ourselves. That a being should be able to deceive as semblance is the condition for our being able to be deceived, not conversely.

Concealment can be a refusal or merely a dissembling. We are never fully certain whether it is the one or the other. Concealment conceals and dissembles itself. This means: the open place in the midst of beings, the clearing, is never a rigid stage with a permanently raised curtain on which the play of beings runs its course. Rather, the clearing happens only as this double concealment. The unconcealdeness of beings-this is never a merely existent state, but a happening. Unconcealdeness (truth) is neither an attribute of factual things in the sense of beings, nor one of propositions” (Heidegger 1975:53-54).

Heidegger, Martin
1975[1971] Poetry, Language, Thought. Albert Hofstandter, trans. New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers.

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Lived Before Conceptualized

29/01/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“The term ‘understanding’ is not confined by Heidegger to analytic or reflective consciousness. It refers primarily to those pre-reflexive ‘moods’ (Stimmungen) of our lived experience – e.g. anguish, guilt, fear, concern, wonder and so on-which Heidegger identifies not simply as psychological emotions but as ontological acts of pre-understanding (Vor-Verständnis). For instance, Heidegger argues that our common experience of anguish, which frequently goes by the name of ‘depression’, is irreducible to the sum of ostensible causes which might be adduced at the level of an empirical psychology. We are not simply depressed because we failed exams, had influenza or crashed a car. These are no more than occasions which disrupt our normal patterns of behavior, leaving us exposed to a fundamental void or nothingness at the heart of our existence. At its deepest level, Heidegger argues that anguish is an ontological ‘mood’ which expresses being-in-the-world as an experience of non-being. Unlike fear, for instance, anguish lacks any identifiable object; it occurs precisely where ‘nothing’ is the matter.

Heidegger sees his phenomenological analysis as a way of bringing the moods of our lived pre-understanding to the level of a reflective self-awareness. For Heidegger we exist before we are objectively aware that we exist. Our existence is pre-understanding-in the sense of a pre-reflective interpretation of the world as a project of possibilities for our existence-before we come to reflectively understand it as such. In short, Daisen’s understanding is existential before it is philosophical; it is lived before it is conceptualized. Moreover, human existence constitutes what Heidegger terms ‘a hermeneutic circle’ to the extent that it implicitly interprets (Greek, hermeneuein) Being in terms of its everyday moods and projects before it raises this interpretation to the level of an explicit philosophical questioning. We already know-however vaguely-what we are looking for when we ask the question of Being. If we did not, the question would be meaningless and we would be unable to recognise what we find” (Kearney 1986:34-35).

Kearney, Richard
1986 Modern movements in European philosophy. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

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The Connection of Reality and Dasein

14/01/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“The question of the meaning of Being becomes possible at all only if there is something like an understanding of Being. Understanding of Being belongs to the kind of Being which the entity called ‘Dasein’ possesses. The more appropriately and primordially we have succeeded in explicating this entity, the surer we are to attain our goal in the future course of working out the problem of fundamental ontology.

In pursuit of the tasks of a preparatory existential analytic of Dasein, there emerged an Interpretation of understanding, meaning, and interpretation. Our analysis of Dasein’s disclosedness showed further that, with the disclosedness, Dasein, in its basic state of Being-in-the-world, has been revealed equiprimordially with regard to the world, Being-in, and the Self. Furthermore, in the factical disclosedness of the world, entities within-the-world are discovered too. This implies that the Being of these entities is always understood in a certain manner, even if it is not conceived in a way which is appropriately ontological. To be sure, the pre-ontological understanding of Being embraces all entities which are essentially disclosed in Dasein; but the understanding of Being has not yet Articulated itself in a way which corresponds to the various modes of Being.

At the same time our interpretation of understanding has shown that in accordance with its falling kind of Being, it has, proximally and for the most part diverted itself… into an understanding of the ‘world’. Even where the issue is not only of ontical experience but also one of ontological understanding, the interpretation of Being takes its orientation in the first instance from the Being of entities within-the-world. Thereby the Being of what is proximally ready-to-hand gets passed over, and entities are first conceived as a context of Things (res) which are present-at-hand. ‘Being’ acquires the meaning of ‘Reality’. Substantiality becomes the basic characteristic of Being. Corresponding to this way in which the understanding of Being has been diverted, even the ontological understanding of Dasein moves into the horizon of this conception of Being. Like any other entity, Dasein too is present-at-hand as Real. In this way ‘Being in general‘ acquires the meaning of ‘Reality‘. Accordingly, the concept of Reality has a peculiar priority in the ontological problematic. By this priority the route to a genuine existential analytic of Dasein gets diverted and so too does our very view of the Being of what is proximally ready-to-hand within-the-world. It finally forces the general problematic of Being into a direction that lies off the course. The other modes of Being become defined negatively and privatively with regard to Reality.

Thus not only the analytic of Dasein but the working-out of the question of the meaning of Being in general must be turned away from a one-sided orientation with regard to Being in the sense of Reality. We must demonstrate that Reality is not only one kind of Being among others, but that ontologically it has a definite connection in its foundations with Dasein, the world, and readiness-to-hand” (Heidegger 1962:233-234).

Heidegger, Martin
1962 Being and Time. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, trans. San Francisco, CA: Harper San Francisco.

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“We Stand at the End of Our Reflections” (Gadamer 1993:18).

12/01/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“What a transformation of meaning of the world theory is manifest here! What lies at the root of this change? The word theory, theoria, is Greek. It exhibits the distinctive characteristic of the human being-this fragile and subordinate phenomenon in the universe-that in spite of his slight and finite measure he is capable of pure contemplation of the universe. But from the Greek standpoint, it would be impossible to construct theories. That sounds as if we made them. The word does not mean, as it does from the vantage of a theoretic construct based upon self-consciousness, the distance from beings that allows what is to be known in an unbiased fashion and thereby subjects it to anonymous domination. Instead the distance proper to theoria is that of proximity and affinity. The primitive meaning of theoria is participation in the delegation sent to a festival for the sake of honoring the gods. The viewing of the divine proceedings is no participationless establishing of some neutral state of affairs or observation of some splendid demonstration or show. Rather it is a genuine sharing in an event, a real being present. Correspondingly, the rationality of being, this grand hypothesis of Greek philosophy, is not first and foremost a property of human self-consciousness but of being itself, which is the whole in such a way and appears as the whole in such a way that human reason is far more appropriately thought of as part of this rationality instead of as the self-consciousness that knows itself over against an external totality. There is, then, another way in which a human heightening of awareness penetrates and discovers itself-not the way inward to which Augustine appealed but the way of complete self-donation to what is outside in which the seeker nevertheless finds himself. Hegel’s greatness lies in the fact that he did not suppose this way of the Greeks to be a false way left behind in contrast to that modern mode of reflection, but he acknowledge that way as a facet of being itself. It was the magnificent achievement of his Logic to have acknowledged precisely within the dimension of the logical this ground that gathers in and underpins what points in the opposite direction” (Gadamer 1993:17-18).

Gadamer Hans-Georg
1993[1976] Reason in the Age of Science. Frederick G. Lawrence, trans. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

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