Heidegger: Being and Time

[Music] martin heidegger is one of the most influential and enigmatic of 20th century philosophers and this is in part because of the fact that he writes in a particularly obscure style and is a philosopher that engages in many verbal tricks and maneuvers which are unique to heidegger and to his project and which somehow to some extent determine the outcome and form that his philosophical project takes and it's worth encountering and thinking about heidegger because he was the source of so many movements in 20th century uh intellectual life existentialism in some respects is a sort of god child of heidegger heidegger perhaps borrows some of the main ideas from kierkegaard but he's the one who reformulates many of these concerns in a 20th century idiom which turns out to inform things like sartre or camus or murlou ponti and a whole variety of french and german thinkers in particular who will be relatively inaccessible unless you look at heidegger first now heidegger himself has a very interesting background which tells us a great deal about the sort of intellectual activity that he undertakes in the first case he starts out in his intellectual career as a jesuit seminarian which tells you a great deal about the cast of his mind which tells you a great deal about his early intellectual habits and much of this will have i mean influence later on we will see it come out in a sort of transformation um i may be the only person that believes this but i may not be uh that growing up as a jesuit seminarian definitely has telling effects later on in life if you ever met any i believe you will find this to be true well martin heidegger is that in spades and when he makes a philosophical move it is absolute and it is an attempt to go as far as a particular line of thought can take it perhaps characteristic of that whole tradition in addition to starting out as a seminarian which is interesting in its own way he wrote his doctrinal dissertation on dun scotus now any of you at home who've read some scholastic philosophy who know who duns scotus is know how difficult and recondite and intimidating forbidding a doctoral dissertation like that is and it indicates not only something of the cast of his mind but also the intellectual ambition of someone who feels like he can cut the gordian knot i myself would never consider even reading much less writing a dissertation on done scotus so if someone is going to take a project like that this is a person for whom very little is intellectually intimidating now his first and perhaps greatest work or the work that got him the most noticed was published in 1927 it's called sign on site which means a being in time and he was a student of husserls and it was published in husserl's phenomenological yearbook and it was dedicated to edmund husserl so there's a definite you know student pupil relation a pupil teacher relationship and a sort of conceptual relationship between the phenomenology of husserl and the phenomenal phenomenological existentialism that heidegger develops now heidegger himself claims not to be an existentialist but he is in a historical rather than a conceptual sense rather than in a philosophical sense it's clear that he does influence people like sartre or camus and despite his protestations his influence has been greatest in the philosophy of existence as opposed to his unique and somewhat idiomatic philosophical project of developing an ontology now ontology goes back to the greek term maybe you've seen some of the lectures on plato and you know that ontology the science of being or the logos of being statements about being well one of the early philosophical attempts one of the kind of foundational philosophical enterprises of the greek tradition and heidegger wants to revive that enterprise which is a particularly intimidating and i don't know impressive intel uh intellectual ambition regardless of whether he achieves it or not to go back to the science of being to go back to being itself with a capital b well i i don't know if that's a persuasive or even a possible thing in the 20th century the fact that heidegger thinks that he can do that that he wants to take that project seriously is a tribute to his great intellectual ambition regardless of how it ends up turning out so he thinks of himself primarily as an ontologist now this leads us to all kinds of difficulties first of all talking about being is like trying to bite your teeth in other words what can you say about being how can we come to know being what sort of procedure do you engage in to find out about being well this maybe or discloses his connection to husserl you're not going to find out about being by investigating tables into individually in chairs individually and christmas trees individually or even inspecting the outside world for its regular law like behavior the way you're going to find it about being is some process of introspection this is one of the things that holds the the continental tradition together they tend to be more concerned with that which is inside than they are about that which is outside there is a decidedly anti-scientistic tendency to this and i will come back to that problem but what heidegger wants to do is find out about being and he's very familiar with greek philosophy as a matter of fact he thinks that pretty much it's all been downhill since aristotle right that christianity the romans the enlightenment didn't make much of a contribution to the history of thought um after aristotle it's all downhill and the real high point was even before plato was in the pre-socratics and what he wants to do is to force us back to the original sophisticated naivete of pre-socratic thought which is a very funny way of thinking about it but he does think that we have actually decreased our understanding of ourselves and the world around us by bracketing or eliminating this problem of ontology the problem of being and instead investigating beings particular elements in the world so he wants to move away from that practical concrete tangible sort of inquiry into something a great deal more abstract and also more nebulous now another thing to think about when we deal with heidegger and his ontological hopes is what plato said about uh being and it's an interesting thought plato says in the myth of the cave when he talks about the divided line that a being is not like the other beings in the world when we get up into the realm of the forms being is like light that discloses the things in the world to us but it is not one of those things that gets disclosed so being allows us to know about the the being that the small be being of tables and chairs and podiums and carpets and things like that and we all have a kind of intuitive everyday knowledge of what it means to say that the grass is green or the podium is made of wood or the cup is blue all those uses of the word is we kind of feel like we have an idea of what's going on there but there's a problem even though we know these local and particular uses of the word is we don't know what being is on the whole we don't know what being capital b is what it is that holds all these little beings together the small be beings and that's because being itself is not like any of the beings that being discloses are you following this so far in other words light is not like the objects that we see in the room it's a unique kind of a thing and here i just mean it metaphorically because i don't know how to literally talk about this in any kind of sensible way but the metaphor discloses the idea roughly speaking that somehow being is different from all the other stuff of our experience heidegger says before we bother with trivialities like this particular entity or that particular entity we have to do is leave all that stuff out in a way bracket it for now and let's talk about what it is to be how we know being what being tells us about itself now the question is how are we going to do this and what is being well in the first case heidegger does not want to have a conception of being which is abstract formal he wants to connect it to the experience of everyday life and this is the kind of the husserlian turn or perhaps the whole continental turn he says think of it from the perspective of a human being from your perspective now rather than constructing a set of abstractions which later on you you will use to tailor your experience of the world start now with your experience and remove from your experience the things that are irrelevant the dross so that you get the pure gold of ontological knowledge later on now uh the way in which he does this is to create a theory of what human existence is and he calls this uh this human existence design which doesn't translate out of german one of the things that heidegger does all the time human being what is it like to be a human being design is human being in the world it is finite it is contingent it is uncertain it is a collection of psychic states like worry guilt anxiety and this constellation of human qualities or human entities is not like anything else in the world it is the way in which or the vehicle in which the matrix in which being is disclosed to us in other words you can only find out what being is from the perspective or in the way that a human being finds out about what being is and that's by being a human being i know how now can you see how this is going to get awfully circular and strange and that we're going to have whole chapters and perhaps whole volumes of being talks to itself and projects itself into the future of being you're going to get a lot of what appears to be circular reasoning on account of the fact that we're stuck within the internality the what i call the intracosm and it's very hard to break out from the intracosm into the exorcism it's one of the characteristic flaws it's perhaps the achilles heel of continental philosophy so what we're going to do is investigate design investigate what it is to be a human being and we're going to do that by being a human being and we're going to do that in an authentic way and what that means that we have to remove our illusions and remove our distraction by the events the little trivial events in the world focus yourself and turn inward and what you will find is your true self and your true being you will move from a pre-reflective state of inauthenticity of concern with beings small b beings to an authentic state of concern with being itself and apparently the only imperative or what i can discern and hide again the only imperative that human beings have the only thing left that we ought to do that we somehow have a responsibility to do is to authentically be capital b to confront the reality of human life despite the fact that we may find it unpleasant or difficult or trying and it may well be that once we do that we have moved to another level of experience and conceptualization of the world and if that turns out to be the case then he will have contributed something to our self-knowledge and if you remember that i said that heidegger wants us to drive us back to the pre-socratic primordial kind of a state and the delphic oracle told socrates told socrates and the rest of the greeks that they must know themselves well the continental prog project involves knowing yourself turning inward and finding out what it is like to be a human being now when we look at design at human existence in its contingency and its finitude we find that it has a three-fold structure one and that structure is understanding mood and discourse now understanding means that we have to accept dozen as offering us as creating a context in other words to be a human being is to contextualize the world around you and to attribute meanings to it to to organize the experiences that you have into a sort of a gestalt a whole and in order to be a human being you have to contextualize the world a second thing that's necessary for design is mood and here it means something kind of not unambiguous and fairly straightforward happiness sadness things like that i mean the psychic states of our moods and think about this for a second can you imagine an anglo-american empiricist telling us that one of the really important things you have to think about in the course of philosophical development is the idea of mood very foreign to that scientific approach to reality whereas for heidegger it's a fact of life it is perhaps one of the facts of life which we only ignore at our peril at the peril of abstracting and making inauthentic your conception of yourself and the world and the third element in design is the idea of discourse language is constitutive of design things can be can be formulated in speech and can be understood or things can only be understood when they are formulated in speech and then made subject to our moods so everyday depoeticized language doesn't uncover a design it numbs us it makes us anesthetized to the true facts of being and causes us to be caught up with trivialities do any of you know ts eliot's for quartets where he says that the it's not the hollow man but some example of inauthenticity or inauthentic men are distracted from distraction by distraction isn't that a beautiful and lovely poetic line well to a great extent that's what heidegger is driving us towards he's saying i'm calling you back to yourselves i'm asking you not to be distracted from distraction by distraction do not let the little beings of the world deprive you of the big being and may i suggest that the big being has an uncomfortably strong homology to god remember he starts out as a german theologian all right give that some thought or a jesuit theologian well this search after being which is enigmatic and discloses itself in some very peculiar ways may well be the depersonalized form of god in the 20th century now heidegger's stance towards being i mean to take this idea a little bit further reminds me of the gospel story of the rich young man a rich young man who's very virtuous comes to jesus and says how do i really become good how do i really become virtuous and jesus says go sell all you have and follow me is saying something remarkably like that he is saying go forsake all of beings with a small b all the trivialities of your experience and sell all you have and follow me not follow heidegger but follow being itself follow authenticity it is the only obligation left for the conscious human being in the 20th century this is a very closely sanded down version of theology i suspect now his great work being in time is uh a very difficult piece of work because it wasn't all published in one whole chunk he published it for various kind of academic contingencies in 27 and the idea behind it is that freedom has to be earned it's not something you get given it's something you work towards as a response to design and you earn your freedom you become a human being you make yourself by your confrontation with the real facts of human existence of design and here are some of the parts the first volume is the sort of hermeneutics of being the first are the two volumes in being in time and the first volume is an analysis of what we might call the unreflective state of being of a man or a woman that's caught up with this being small b and that being small b that is still distracted from distraction by distraction and the problem that he's going to raise is that we are lying to ourselves we delude ourselves we get ourselves all caught up with little things that really don't matter to us and then we ignore what we really are and god knows we are offered little enough in this dozen in this world of contingent finitude and minimally we have an obligation to ourselves to become what we can now uh in this first volume he analyzes this pre-reflective state before we actually connect or con confront dazan and it turns out that uh that human being has three related aspects or the design is a three-fold structure the first is facticity in german govorfan height to be thrown into the world we didn't ask for this right no one consulted us you know before we were born or before we became conscious asking us if we would like a kind of spatio-temporal world full of people and things and objects and questions and issues like that we're stuck with it you know this is not a disease it's not a problem it's just it is what it is you don't like it that's tough deal with it so facticity the fact that we are cast into a world not of our own making and that we busy ourselves with little irrelevant things right that's a given the second element in existence is existentiality and this idea entails appropriating the world for our own purposes we take knowledge we take objects we take food we take things of utility to us and we manipulate them in practical ways right practical utilities very pragmatic sense of how human beings interact with the world around them and the final quality of human being particularly this pre-reflective quality is the quality of uh in german it's fair fallen but the best translation index is probably something like there's something wrong with us there's something there's a sort of radical deprivation of the human condition as it starts this is what gives heidegger something to do he wants to start with his pre-reflective kind of unconscious human state and drive us towards consciousness of ourselves he doesn't guarantee this is going to be pretty he doesn't guarantee this is going to be easy and it doesn't guarantee this is going to be readily intelligible but on the other hand whatever it is you are engaged in that isn't that relatively unimportant what profiteth the man that he should gain the whole world and lose his soul i think that this has at least one foot in christian theology and i think that many of the ideas of heidegger's honest or authentic confrontation of being are philosophical highly abstract jesuit theology de-theologized or de-divinized you hold on to the structure you leave the content things are going to get very weird all right so we have facticity extension existentiality and forfeiture this condition of being fair fallen of being caught up in a web of maya a web of illusions the world of beings this booming buzzing confusion out there is essentially not real our reality is in being capital b not in any of these trivialities these distractions that we're forced to confront just from being a human being if you always live your life in this condition of being fair fallen in this condition of forfeiture you have forfeited your claim to being really human to be human is to confront the world the way it is not it's it's to be a grown-up adult that is willing to deal with human life as it is rather than yet then getting distracted or sidetracked by any of the various cul-de-sacs that life might offer us and if you think about what this leads to uh these men or the vast majority of human beings apparently are caught up in this inauthentic mode of existence and that is the source in the 20th century of the thing called the mass man heidegger calls it dasman but what it means is uh it's the opposite of being an individual it's being a herd creature not reflective not thinking not encountering the world on your own and the best he can do you know perhaps the great tradition of german romanticism is to force us to become individuals if you remember the great philosopher kierkegaard who is certainly one of the formative influences on on hegel um or on uh on heidegger sorry thank you um one of the formative influences um uh kierkegaard wanted his tombstone to say soren kierkegaard and his date of birth and date of death and then below that he wanted to say that individual which is a beautiful and profound epitaph well what heidegger calls upon us to do is to follow kierkegaard but to follow him in that respect in an individual way you confront being on your own become what you might possibly be you might also deserve to be called an individual if you work really hard at it if you cultivate your inner life and you find some authentic confrontation with things that you'd rather not think about and in volume two of heidegger's work we find that he does try and sketch out what an authentic being would be like how we really confront dazine and what what it will entail and what it will do for us and in addition to that he goes through the history of philosophy and with considerable detail and in a very kind of idiomatic way and the point of his going through the history of philosophy is to construct a philosophical history of ontology and to do a phenomenological destruction of prior conceptions of ontology so that he can clear the ground to erect his own new building essentially he says i'm going to only hold on to the pre-socratic legacy most of platonism and some of aristotle but after aristotle's all downhill i don't want to talk about their conception of being or ontology it's a waste of time we have gone down an inauthentic cul-de-sac human beings almost without exception have not been authentic since we began to separate ourselves from being in particular he's concerned with nietzsche's charge that it's not even possible to talk about being anymore so we'll talk about that in a little later but the idea is that heidegger wants to force us back to an earlier pristine state this sounds remarkably like going back to the garden of eden i could be mistaken this condition of being fair fallen sounds to me an awful lot like sin and since it's so universal it strikes me as an awful lot like original sin but i may be mistaken professor heidegger tells us that it's not original sin he explicitly says so but i have my doubts well we construct this phenomenological destruction of the history of of ontology and in its place instead of looking at the world sub species eternitatus we're going to look at the world subspecies temporalis in other words we're going to look at human being the way it really is rather than some than from the god's eye view we're going to look at it from the human being's eye view and we're going to find that the world discloses itself and being discloses itself that's a very peculiar matrix of things most of which are not very pleasant in the first case if you want to really confront dazine that's what we get from volume 2 you're going to have to get used to the idea of amorphati or acceptance of fate particularly acceptance of your own death death anxiety worry care fear are the main themes of heidegger's second work and this is the good side remember this is the upside you're better off with this rather than dwelling on all the other things that might distract you from these businesses and in addition conscience is going to be an important element in this second volume in other words in order to come to our authentic being in order to be truly human which apparently so few people do we must confront death we must recognize that we have a conscience and it is an ineliminable and we must do what we can to sacrifice all else to sell all we have to follow being now death is an interesting and important problem and unlike most philosophers heidegger seems to be under the impression that he has some intelligent things to say about death my personal feeling is that although death is a fear fearsome reality and it is the kind of thing that a conscious person will inevitably at some point or perhaps at all points uh come into contact with and think about um having thought about it myself i'm not able to think of or say anything intelligent about this topic perhaps you are i apologize but i'm not able to do that there's not a lot you can say about death on the other hand heidegger wants to talk about that as the horizon of human existence if any of you've read ernest becker's book the denial of death that's a sort of popularization of one heideggerian problem we all try and persuade ourselves in all the everyday activities of life of life is that uh that i'm gonna last forever i'm gonna last forever i'm gonna last forever time goes on into an infinite horizon nay that is being small b you are lying to yourself nay in fact we all have to realize that time is not an infinite horizon to view time as time sub 1 times sub 2 times sub t 3 time sub n going on forever that's to view time from the perspective of god that's also to pursue to view time from the perspective of our scientific friends the only difficulty is is that no human life experiences time like that we experience it in a radically different way we experience it as the horizon of our possibilities so time is here to stay now can you see why he titles his book being and time he wants to study being and then he wants to study some essential foundational groundwork for the human experience of being and that turns out to be the fact that we are temporal right if you think of t.s elite in the rose garden time present and time passed right um it's surprising how the eliot is so overtly christian and this denies its christianity or it seems to be indifferent to it but i think there are powerful christian themes underlying this so temporality the fact that we must confront our own death surely one of the great themes of christianity as well comes out as being the one imperative i would almost be tempted to say that this demand made upon us by conscience because one of the important elements in volume 2 is that heidegger talks about the human conscience and says look you want to be a human being listen to your conscience because there is a real thing conscience is one of the ore facts of human life and you know what your conscience tells you to do sell all you have and follow me don't get caught up with little trivialities do not become distracted by beings search out the final the real the ultimate being so conscience forces us into authenticity conscious kind of conscience accuses us of being inauthentic and being concerned with beings and what he is or what uh heidegger thinks he is here is the voice of conscience to no small extent he moves from being a philosopher to being a prophet with surprising agility and when he calls you to be yourself when he calls you to hear heed the voice of your own conscience he sounds more like jeremiah than he does sar but i could be wrong here now authenticity this confrontation of our own finitude is the the one state that would actually reduce or would we take us out of this pre-philosophical not quite human state and what this discloses is a number of important issues but one of the most important of them is the idea of guilt and care and worry and i would be inclined to say that like elliott um heidegger thinks that the human condition is one of radical deprivation we are not what we should be we are not what we could be and once we confront our own finitude we confront the fact that we have obligations to ourselves which we can never meet think about let's think this through in the first case when we confront dozyn and we find ourselves in being capital b not just small b the response on the part of the conscious agent is what is in german called zorga and in english that would be called care or worry or concern and there are at least three things about which we are concerned and here comes the temporal element first case we are concerned about the future and that means that design conscious human being projects itself into the future right in other words the way we experience the world we experience ourselves not just here and now but we project ourselves into the future and we also project ourselves into our own past projecting ourselves into our future causes angst worry almost almost a terminal frightfulness because we must confront the fact that we come to an end and we don't know how to avoid that we can't avoid that we project ourselves into the earlier parts of our life and an interesting fact is that we cannot avoid the experience of guilt and i would be tempted to say that guilt is the uncomfortable certainty that we are not what we could have been it's true and heidegger is right about that and not only is he right about that but that is an ineliminable part of being a human being and any scientific theory which either fails to talk about this or tells us we can't talk about it is just unacceptable that's right so we project ourselves into the future we project ourselves into the past and we confront darzan in the present and what we find out about ourselves when we confront our design in the present is that we have a potential for freedom from being small b which we have not completely realized what this means is the following we look into our past we realize we have not been what we could have been we look at the present and we realize we are not as free and as knowledgeable about being as authentic as we could be and we look into the future and we realize that there is a definite temporal horizon think about this now we see our own death coming in the future and this death and we don't know when it will happen it extinguishes all our possibilities right but it does not exhaust all our possibilities in other words between now and the time we die there is a great variety of choices we could make of context we could construct of projects we could undertake and the problem is that we will not undertake all of them we will not do all these things so that means between now and then you've got to make some choices about what you're going to do with your life and the problem is that you will not be able to do all the things you might wish to do or that you could do if you were an eternal being all right and that means that you will not realize some of your possibilities and that means you owe yourself a debt that you can never repay and that is a sort of cosmic guilt may i suggest this is the echo of original sin when it gets de-theologized it is the human condition and we cannot escape it if we try and escape it by truncating off reality by adopting some sort of human or positivistic position so don't worry about guilt don't worry about your inter the internal facts of your psyche the result is is that you concern yourself with beings you lapse back into that pre-authentic pre-philosophical state that heidegger says you ignore at your parent oh that you engage in extra peril if you want to be human then get a soul and you want to get a soul then face the fact that there are certain inelimitable parts of your experience which you have to confront in order to be human and there are certain questions that you have to ask in order to be human the difficulty is and the tension of being human is that you are forced to ask some questions for which there are no answers you can't get around it you must ask the question of being even though it's not at all clear exactly what that means and also it's not at all clear what the answer is and if the answer would have come up and shake you by the hand it's not at all clear that you would recognize it so for a great many reasons this is obscurity piled upon obscurity piled upon obscurity combined with a certain obvious and honest confrontation of the realities of human life i think this is a that sort of funny combination of obscurity and obvious kind of literary or psychic truthfulness is one of the characteristic amalgams of 20th century continental philosophy now let's look back at the question of conscience design demands that we face either we that we live our life facing death rather than denying it and that means that ethics kind of not implodes so that the only real obligation that we have left is that we should be authentic and that ends up meaning that it's not so important what you do in life is how you do it right in other words between now and the time you die it's not so important what projects you undertake as it is that you should be conscious of the fact that you're not going to take all of them and that you have to decide which are better the difficulty here is that this very easily shades off into straightaway nihilism heidegger after all became a nazi heidegger was advanced due to his political connections to national socialism heidegger who um his greatest workers first great published work being in time was in husserl's yard book and husserl was his teacher and it was dedicated to husserah but alas for sure was a jew and so when huster was moved out of academic life starting in 1933 uh heidegger publicly disassociated himself from husserl and heidegger ended up taking husserl's chair at the university of freiburg this sounds to me like the phenomenology of careerism but i could be wrong all right it is a particular a particularly unhappy circumstance or when philosophers at least those philosophers who claim to have a particularly deep or profound or important insight into life should let us down in such an egregious way there is something not only disconcerting about it but something which makes me want to put the rest of his statements in italics and be very careful about how i read them in some ways we are if if being in this pre-philosophical state of denying design gets us to behave well i would be inclined to say well i'd rather be stupid that perhaps that's just me now in addition to confronting design through the vehicle of conscience and through the vehicle of existence the historicity of human beings is of course of great concern to heidegger we are in some particular context at some particular time and we must always be oriented towards the future in particular when we are oriented towards the future and our own demise and our own end we have to do what heidegger calls thinking about nothing now in the english translations of heidegger nothing gets a capital n but alas in the german language all nouns are capitalized so we don't have quite that that way out and thinking about nothing is one of the most trying things you can try and do i mean there are long sections i know it sounds like almost a joke but there are long sections which we discuss are encountered with nothing and it means that nothing is not quite negation but the source of negation i have no clear conception of what that means and what what's involved in thinking about nothing i have tried working through it and it runs us into all kinds of logical problems and heidegger will say well so much the worst for you and for your logic confront being as it really is i can see why positivistic guys like carnap and the vienna circle find this so trying lush ambiguity and elaborate self-indulgence it's one of the things that i think we would justifiably want to avoid in any philosophical construct now after uh during the nazi years he produced some of his most important work and that nazism should be hospitable to philosophy is well apparently the case is quite influential and well it's perhaps not fair to judge a man's philosophical output by his life it depends on how you look at philosophy but i might be inclined to say that he is influenced by the cultural chauvinism of the time he has some very peculiar ideas about language apparently and i'm not joking here he holds the view that philosophy can only be done in german that is not a joke i know that may sound funny it may sound and i can imagine wittgenstein in his grave turning over and over and over saying nine right no no in any language no all right philosophy can be done in any language that's not correct but heidegger has what i would end up being describing as a sort of mystical or magical view of language which i think becomes more apparent in his late work and which makes it that much more difficult which makes an obscure and difficult philosophy doubly difficult later on um german is perhaps the only language philosophy could be conducted and maybe greek when he's in a good kind of a feel-good or a kind of generous mood he willing to love that perhaps philosophy could be done in greek in greece but that's about it you have to do it in greek and what he's trying to do in this later work is to meet nietzsche's objections about ontology if you remember that nietzsche at the end of the 19th century said that look our ideas about being have faded away into vapor and mist well heidegger in his introduction to metaphysics says no actually nietzsche is a sort of seismograph who sees the intrinsic depravity and mistakes in the western tradition and he sees that it leads up to this idea that we can't talk about being at all what he does is show us the inauthenticity of all the history of philosophy since the greeks all right so what he's going to do is drive us back beyond the niche and impasse back to the pre-socratics an admiration that he shares with nietzsche of course because nietzsche loved the priest of critics as well in the post-war years heidegger's work continued to be difficult and almost impenetrable and he spent most of his time analyzing the pre-socratics um there's a very interesting set of essays called uh uh what's what's the german uh name pulse vega which means wood trails and what is interesting about wood trails the reason why i chose that kind of odd title is that in german wood trails have the idea of cul-de-sacs in other words you take a walk into the woods and there are various trails but they don't lead anywhere they lead towards nothing they lead towards an impasse you've written a set of essays that are the logical or psychic analogues of cul-de-sacs blind alleys would be a way of translating holtz vega in a sensible way and this is where we find most of his treatment of the pre-socratics there's an amazing and long detailed essay on anaximander and i mean he's one of the the ionian physicists and it's amazing how much mileage you can get from one line since after all we only have one surviving line of anaximander and he's easily able to kick out both 50 70 pages on that and this the most elaborate and implausible and uh self-referential kind of treatment so his later work is even more difficult than the earlier work but in many respects it's an extrapolation from the earlier work and it's concerned with being and these sources of being back in that pre-socratic tradition in some ways by the end of his life the great example of a philosophical enterprise is no longer plato's dialogues it has become parmenide's poem about being i don't imagine many of you at home or many of you here have gotten around to reading parmenide's poem about being let me see if i can help you with that um what parmenides says is that we must think and say that being is from the other way i debar you what he means is that ontology is the first and primary and fundamental concern of human beings all else follows from that heidegger is trying to drive us back to that pre-socratic state of innocence and the great exemplar of that will be parmenides the forbidding difficult um completely abstract founder of ontology now there are lots and lots of problems with this it's all it's hard to know exactly where to start but let's take a couple of cracks at this in the first case heidegger is so impenetrable that he often comes close to being self-parody when he talks about nothing and thinking about nothing and nothing knots rather than nothing negates i have no clear idea of what this nothing is i found out that it's not negation and i find out a lot about what heidegger's ideas are not i often have a difficulty in finding out how to attach some sensible predicate to an idea about like nothing what can you think about nothing what can you say about nothing heidegger appears to suggest you can say quite a bit but beats me what it amounts to many of heidegger's ideas or many many parts of his writings are elaborate puns and plays on words let me give you an example from the german um he says that our feeling uh with regard to our encounter with design is uncanny and in german that's unheimlich and he says that this uncanny feeling of not knowing our way around in the world amounts to not feeling at home in the world now in german the word for home is haim and so when we have this uncanny feeling we feel on heimlich which means unhomely which means we don't feel at home in the world so he kind of makes the idea of uncanniness and uncertainty and kind of anxiety and the kind of being and the feeling of being sort of homesick of longing for a connection with being well he kind of merges them all together in a kind of messy mushy kind of linguistic overlap and it we might be tempted to think that that's a big problem with heidegger but i might be tempted to say that that's also the source of his richness in other words the fact that that he's more concerned in many respects with connotations than denotations the fact that he likes this messy overlap this linguistic um word play this play these plays on words these puns and also he's famous for his elaborate and very implausible etymologies when he doesn't know the actual historical source of a word i think he usually makes it up and then provides some quote philosophical argument to account for why only he understands the real source of this word the rest of the lexicographers in the world do not this happens all the time with the treatment of greek it also happens to time all the time with this treatment of german another problem that comes up is the problem of morality mysticism and nihilism and here's where i would like to take a a sort of crack at the continental tradition i'd like to offer kind of foundational criticism when you start talking about interiority when you move from the realm of public discourse about stuff out there beings with a small bee to whatever it is you've got going on inside you all right the difficulty is first of all that it's very hard to put words on this to talk about this in any kind of intelligible way the danger here is that you end up talking to yourself right which is the opposite of the philosophical enterprise a second problem is that nihilism is always a possibility because we might want to say almost a definition of nihilism is a speech that's indistinguishable from silence and i've often thought that this discussion of nothing and what it does and how we encounter nothing is a very sophisticated way of not saying anything right but that may be just me uh my sense is though that this is uh that he's trying to do the impossible linguistically too much of the time and my final difficulty with heidegger and i think this is the most interesting and important difficulty with at least from my perspective it is is that this nebulous collection of insights and tautologies and unintelligibilities and neologisms right are a kind of transformation of theology in other words it seems to me that what heidegger's being is what this ontological search is is theology with the god left out right and we worship ourselves and we have obligations to ourselves instead of obligations to the deity and our one obligation to ourselves is to be ourselves okay i mean this comes very close not just to solipsism but to self-worship i mean what else is that worship there's only me solipsism is the great danger that recurs in all of these systems why because they're beginning from the inside and working out and most of never get out that's the big difficulty generally speaking and this is i mean i think tells us something about this kind of philosophy it's had rather little influence certainly in the anglo-american philosophical world a karnap wrote a scathing treatment of some of heidegger in which he said this is a particularly unpleasant example of what happens to metaphysics or what happens to your brain when you do metaphysics this is the high point of unintelligible gibberish and karnap was published a very unkind treatment of this and you can kind of see why you would scientific guys are not going to want to hear about dread and death and stuff tables and chairs atoms and physics and that kind of stuff well where has it been influential this is worth noting in theology paul tillich the great systematic theologian heidegger right turned into theology think about it i mean he makes his debt to heidegger quite explicit those of you that know the work of rudolph bolton demythologized christianity this is all heidegger heidegger redux he's back to haunt us again they just transformed the old theological problem into heideggerianism and then heideggerianism into what is alleged to be a new theological problem may i suggest then that this enigmatic being so central to heidegger's thought is in fact easily interpreted as the silence of god

Channel: Michael Sugrue

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Keywords: Michael Sugrue, Dr. Michael Sugrue, Lecture, History, Philosophy, Western Culture, Western Intellectual Tradition, Western Literary Tradition, Author, Literature, Great Minds, Heidegger: Being and Time

Id: MaobMHescwg

Length: 44min 52sec (2692 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 24 2021