Introducing Heidegger E-Book

Jeff Collins

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Graphic Guides
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 116

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Martin Heidegger - philosophy's 'hidden king', or leading exponent of a dangerously misguided secular mysticism. Heidegger has been acclaimed as the most powerfully original philosopher of the twentieth century. Profoundly influential on deconstruction, existentialism and phenomenology, he stands behind all major strands of post-structuralist and postmodern thought. Heidegger announced the end of philosophy and of humanism, and was a committed Nazi and vocal supporter of Hitler's National Socialism. Was Heidegger offering a deeply conservative mythology or a crucial deconstruction of philosophy as we have known it? "Introducing Heidegger" provides an accessible introduction to his notoriously abstruse thinking, mapping out its historical contexts and exploring its resonances in ecology, theology, art, architecture, literature and other fields. The book opens up an encounter with a kind of thinking whose outlines might still not yet be clear, and whose forms might still surprise us.

Leseprobe

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP Email: [email protected]

ISBN: 978-184831-174-9

Text copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

Illustrations copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

The author and illustrator has asserted their moral rights

Originating editor: Richard Appignanesi

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Beginning with a Question ...

What is Being ?

Which Heidegger?

Against Heidegger

For Heidegger

A Social Heidegger

A Future Heidegger

Heidegger and Nazism

Existence in a World of Things

Strange Moments

Natural Attitudes

Beings and Being

Obedient Piety: Beginnings in Theology

Pious Disobedience

Meanings of “Being”

The Rule of Substance

Scholasticism

Modern Philosophy

The Legacy of Descartes

Phenomenology

The First World War

Towards Pure Consciousness

Objects in Consciousness

Solipsism

The Transcendental Ego

Heidegger and Phenomenology

Limits of Phenomenology

The Practical World

Aristotle’s Phronesis

Heidegger’s “Destruction”

Factical Life

The Hermeneutics of Facticity

Dasein

Being and Time

The Analysis of Dasein

1. Being-in-the-World

Presence-at-Hand

Understanding

States of Mind

Descartes’ Amnesia

IN-the-World ...

... and IN-ness

The World’s Places

2. Being-with-Others

Them

The Dictatorship of the Others

Mass Society

Industrial Misery, Commercial Happiness

Pop Culture and They

Averageness

Fallenness

Thrownness and Projective Possibility

Care

Philosophies of Time

Linear Time

Bergson’s Time

Husserl’s Time-Consciousness

Time All At Once

Time and Care

Mortality

Death Within Life

Time and History

Heidegger’s Museum of Household Utensils

Authenticity

Philosophers of Existence

Adventures in Humanism

Critique of Subjectivity

Ethics and Values

Heidegger’s Theology

The Mistress and the Handmaid

Theology Demythologized

Decision and Action

Politics and Philosophy

The Nazi Agenda

The Politics of Renewal

Crisis and Nation

Germanness and Ruralism

Rural Myths

Philosophy in the Inglenook

Primordial Language

Nation, Crisis and Being

Political Controversies

Conservative Revolution

Questioning the Silence

The Truth of Being

Two Roads to Truth

The Truth of Truths

Disclosures: from Husserl to Heidegger

The Clearing

Opening, Lighting and Presencing

Concealment in Unconcealment

Limits of Disclosure

The Hiding Light

The Ruins of Logic

Towards “Thinking”

Heidegger on Art

The Nazi Attack on “Degenerate Art”

Realms of Being

Essential Strife

Pre-Socratic Thinking

Heraclitus

The Work of Art

What Do Shoes Disclose

The Temple

Art at Work

The Names of Poetry

Legacies of Hölderlin

Remembrance of the Poet

The Journey

The Homecoming

The Four-Fold

Attunement and Gathering

Departing From the West ?

The Jewel Net of the God Indra

The Principle of Reason

Reason and Being

The Play of Being

Words and Writing

Technology and Modernity

The Lost Meanings of Techne

Technological Disclosure

The Danger of Technology

Saving Power

Ecology and Essential Thinking

The History of Being

The Essential Question

Heidegger’s Influence

Some Post-Structuralists

Heidegger’s Deconstruction

Demythologizing Heidegger

Heidegger’s Question

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

BEGINNING WITH A QUESTION ...

“Is” is one of the most commonplace words in the English language. It slips into sentences almost unnoticed. It is difficult to speak, write or think without it.

But few people ask –

To the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), that neglect was astonishing.

It is not just the neglect of a word, but of every resonance that such a word might have.

What is Being ?

“Is” is part of the verb “to be”, the verb of being. To ask “What is ‘is’?” is to ask a question of BEING. That was Heidegger’s central preoccupation.

A strange concern? Heidegger proposed something extraordinary.

Western thought has ‘FORGOTTEN to question being, not just recently, but in a process of neglect spanning 2,500 years.

Heidegger’s task: to return to the question. How could “being” be understood?

Was it possible to forge a new disposition towards “being”, redirecting the trajectories of the last two millennia?

To Heidegger, what was at stake was nothing less than Western thought as it has been known – not only its philosophy, but its natural sciences, its human sciences, its everyday discourses.

To turn towards “being” meant: to turn away from their traditional concerns, to place their methods, their concepts and their underlying assumptions in question.

It means to propose a “thinking” that proceeds otherwise ...

Few philosophers have proposed such a radical disturbance of philosophy.

It took Heidegger into some strange and contentious territories, both conservative and revolutionary, secular and theological, anti-traditional but deeply rooted, backward-looking while proposing a future thinking whose contours are still not settled.

Which Heidegger?

Unsurprisingly, the author “Heidegger” has been read in many different ways. It has often been said, there are many Heideggers.

A Heidegger of German idealist philosophy, preoccupied with abstruse but fundamental questions of time, death, and the underlying anxiety or Angst of human living ...

A scholarly Heidegger, “central to European philosophy”, intersecting major currents of 20th century thought, interrogating philosophy’s “great traditions” ...

A theological Heidegger, taken to have offered a philosophical foundation for modern Christian thought ...

... and some Heideggers who disclaim this: one thoroughly secular, and another of post-theology, responding to the “death of God” while searching out what remains of religious thought in mystic traditions, Eastern religions, etc.

Against Heidegger

Not far away is a Heidegger of abstruseness, opacity, impenetrability and obscurity: the bête-noir of Anglophone “analytical” philosophy; a Heidegger of “dangerously unaccountable speculations”; of mysticisms and obfuscations; sham tautologies and self-important immersion in self-generated problems ...

The question of being? A senseless querying of what must be an absolute presupposition. If treated as a question there is no way of answering it ... Heidegger has displays of surprising ignorance, unscrupulous distortion and what can fairly be described as charlatanism.

British analytic philosopher A.J. Ayer in 1982

Heidegger’s writings contain the last despairing glimmer of German romantic philosophy. His major work Being and Time is formidably difficult – unless it is utter nonsense, in which case it is laughably easy. I am not sure how to judge it, and have read no commentator who even begins to make sense of it.

British conservative philosopher Roger Scruton in 1992

For Heidegger

Heidegger has been interpreted more positively.

... the rescuer of PHENOMENOLOGY (a philosophy of consciousness) from its own self-constructed limits.

... contributor to modern HERMENEUTICS (the philosophical inquiry into how we make interpretations), crucial to the key hermeneutic theorist, Hans-Georg Gadamer.

... the most profound influence on 20th century EXISTENTIALISM and major figures like Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre.

... a POST-STRUCTURALIST Heidegger, coming before the name, anticipating the most innovative developments in philosophy and theory in recent decades – and a powerful formative influence even on thinkers who took other paths.

Jürgen Habermas ...

Herbert Marcuse ...

Michel Foucault ...

and many others.

... And a Heidegger of DECONSTRUCTION, providing the most important resource for its leading proponent, Jacques Derrida.

A Social Heidegger

There are Heideggers of social and cultural critique ...

The Heidegger opposed to the conditions of MODERN INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY, its “mass” culture and technological modes of thought ...

... correspondingly, a Heidegger of conservative RURALISM, rooted in a vision of the “agrarian past”; its traditional modes of life and its assured lore and customs ...

A proto-ECOLOGICAL Heidegger, offering a platform for “deep ecology”: ways of thinking other than those of “exhaustive extraction and relentless appropriation” ...

A Future Heidegger

There are figures of the as-yet-unknown Heidegger ...

A substantial amount of Heidegger’s large output remains unpublished. He lent a hand in setting up a Collected Edition, the Gesamtausgabe, in 1974. But the task of editing and publishing is far from complete. This is a “not-as-yet Heidegger”, still awaited.

Heidegger’s personal papers are held in the German Literary Archive in Marbach, but access has been strictly limited ...

– A private Heidegger, mostly sealed from view.

Heidegger and Nazism

“Heidegger” is therefore a noun with many possibilities, and its arrival has often sparked controversies. The most fiercely argued issue has been Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism.

Curiously, this has become a powerful reason for reading him. At issue are the politics of philosophy – the political forces at work on it and in it, its attachments and responsibilities.

For many readers, this is not a purely historical concern. It is bound up with our responses to resurgent nazisms now, emerging with new names and without a swastika in sight.

There are many figures of the “political” Heidegger ...

Heidegger was an energetic supporter of German National Socialism in the 1930s and never fully retracted or renounced his publicly-stated views.

Was this a temporary career compromise – a Heidegger pressured by circumstances, perhaps politically misled?

Or was it something deeper and more pervasive, something intimately bound up with his philosophy? That is another Heidegger: a thinker of conservative revolution, forging a discourse of “romanticism and steel”, bound into a vision of regenerated primordial Germanness.

Whether philosophical or theological, socio-economic or political; none of these figures is totally unambiguous. Many are incompatible, and all are contentious.

But the most persistent figure is Heidegger as the “philosopher of being”. What can this mean? Is there any question about being? How could any such question be cast, let alone answered?

Existence in a World of Things

“Being” might seem an innocuous site of inquiry, scarcely likely to upset the usual orders of the world. And it seems strictly philosophical, something rarefied and abstract; a soaring generality, perhaps invented uniquely by and for philosophers.

Indeed the word “being” might be so abstract, that meaning drops away from it ...

It’s an empty word, fated to a hollow resonance ... Doesn’t it refer to existence in general, therefore to everything? After all, everything exists ... Nothing in particular has been identified ... That is the wrong kind of approach. My task is to find a way of thinking “being” and a language in which to speak it.

Heidegger’s sources, modes, methods and procedures – and his concepts and his vocabulary – were not going to be commonplace.

But why is “being” so troublesome? We deal every day with things that “exist”; whether mirrors or clouds, CDs or sonatas, or rain and cities.

We grasp their particularities in all our practical dealings with them ... ...And we could go on to think them theoretically – in scientific or philosophical terms. But in amongst all these practical dealings or theorizings, is the. ineluctable fact that something exists ... We usually overlook this.

Heidegger wanted to create a new awareness of that. And the awareness that might arise of this elusive “is-ness” will not be of the ordinary orders.

What could such an awareness be like?

As a first resort, literature might help: for instance, the writings of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), German poet and prose writer, and one of Heidegger’s preferred authors.

Strange Moments

Rilke tried often to write of the strange moments in which the very fact of existence – that there is something – seemed to make itself felt.

In “Concerning the Poet” (1912), Rilke’s poet-narrator takes a ferry from the Greek island of Philæ towards the open sea. Almost nothing happens. But Rilke is not interested in events of the usual narrative kind. His happenings are of a different order.

I had the rowers facing me, sixteen of them. Mostly their eyes saw nothing, their open gaze going out into the air ... ...But sometimes I could catch one of them deep in thought, meditating on the strange disguised phenomenon facing him and on possible situations which might disclose its nature ...

... when noticed, he immediately lost his strenuously thoughtful expression, for a moment all his feelings were in confusion, then, as quickly as he could, he reverted to the watchful gaze of an animal ... ...until the beautiful serious expression became again the usual silly baksheesh* face, with its foolish readiness to assume any required humiliating distortion of thanks.

*a gratuity, tip or alms

Rilke’s concerns are styled like Heidegger’s.

First, no worthwhile question of being can expect quick answers. The existence of things is “strange” and “disguised” – not simply given to an observer, nor given all at once. What is might be disclosed, but also perhaps not. That there might be some kind of “mystery” of being has alarmed many philosophers.

In Rilke’s words, ...the strange disguised phenomenon ... possible situations which might disclose its nature.

Second, the meditative state with its possible disclosures can be lost, covered over by the call of the “everyday world”; of labouring to deal with the demands or largesses of the tourist-poet and of others.

...the immediate loss of the thoughtful expression, the momentary confusion, the reversion to the ... usual silly baksheesh face ...

Questions of being can be evaded. We can simply accept that things “exist”, and turn away from questioning, towards practical everyday matters...

And thirdly, who is concerned with all this? Certainly the poet.

For Rilke, being is a proper concern of poets. It is poets who should speak it, and speak our awarenesses of it.

A questioning of being might need “poetic” language... That too has alarmed philosophers. Is this the end of all logic, all reason, all truth and all proofs, all systematized argument?

And this again suggests a possible evasion.

We could throw any question of being over to logical reasoning, or to scientific method: e.g. to the accumulation of “facts” about the world; absorbing ourselves in descriptions of what things are like – not that they are ...

Natural Attitudes

So is Rilke, and Heidegger too, pursuing some beguiling question conjured in the artifice of philosophy? Isn’t “being” so dramatically easy to grasp that it needs no lavish care from poets and philosophers ?

For instance: how do we know that things exist? We can see them, or hear them, or feel them, etc. Sensory perception offers the route and the answer. Rilke and his rower are out after some purely phantasmal realm, inherently untestable, unprovable and perhaps nonsensical.

This attitude has its counterpart in philosophy. For instance, in Empiricism.

Empiricists hold that knowledge must be derived from experience of the world and that the “direct” experience of sensory perceptions is vital. Observation and experiment will rule.Positivismpushes the case further. Philosophy should proceed like the sciences ...

From such perspectives, there can scarcely be a question of being. It is a basic pre-supposition, what one assumes before anything else.

Beings and Being