Heidegger His Life and Philosophy

all right so this evening we're going to do Martin Heidegger who one of the most famous and most controversial philosophers of the 20th century if victim Stein isn't the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century then it's almost certainly Heidegger they're sort of tied or close to being tied for most important person you'll understand why he is controversial as a lecturer precedes a warning how about Heidegger professional philosophers find Heidegger's writing opaque so he's sort of very difficult my philosophy professor when I was an undergraduate one of them called his box turtle Heidegger took it forever to do anything and so he named it Heidegger and it seemed appropriate to him so if you read if you've had a chance to peruse the selections in here these are not particularly hard to follow sections and items I tried to find some that might have made sense as I wrote very long books just like this and it is probably easier to read Heidegger in translation because the translators are working to make him clear then he was in the original just true that he was in the original German in Germany he's doing all kinds of word games and tricks that make him even more confusing so he's one of the few people you might be better off reading in translation so Heidegger is born 1889 and mess Kirke Germany important two things that to note about this one very rural two very Catholic important to think that Heidegger was born in you know sort of 1704 it is says 1889 but for where he was how he was raised and his life was very isolated sheltered and extremely Catholic and in the sense of it was just taken for granted there's no controversy about religion really there was a little schism inside the Catholic Church when he was growing up but Sir there's this inner Catholic feud that was the big question what flavour of Catholic were you going to be the notion that you might not be Catholic the motion that you're Protestants existed these things were sort of they must have been known but not so much in mess Kirk Germany right I didn't really penetrate very far he grew up actually in the church literally in the church his father worked for the church and so they had what we would call called man's sort of a house attached with associated with the church itself um and so you know he it was in dis all Yubel from this environment and his entire life he really never leaves it it's one of the important things to know and very idyllic childhood he always refers to his childhood being wonderful he enjoyed it very much enjoyed the church very much the beauty of it he was a bell ringer and a choir boy and the entire experience so he sort of lived this model idyllic rural German childhood steeped in the traditions of the Catholic Church well as he grows up he is obviously a bright young lad and so but not wealthy they don't have money per se and so the church gives him a scholarship first to sort of a private high school the near equivalent of a private high school and then to a Jesuit university well Jesuit universe or of a Jesuit part of the university what's important here is boast of they're both of them were monastic in or organization and actually in history his high school was at an old monastery run by priests as if it were still a monastery his university the section was in was in an old monastery run by Jesuit priests as if it were a monastery and so here's a person who goes from rural Germany very rural very isolated culturally steeped in the church through two layers of Education that were essentially monastic so in one hand his mind is very free wrong I needed deep research and he studied medieval monastic monks which is a fitting for someone from this background and his original idea was that he wanted to bring the philosophical insights of the medieval Catholic thinkers into the modern world which is the same bridge that he was trying to make and he thought if I can save the core of the thinking that was going on and bringing into the modern age then I can bring the stability in the organization and the virtues of the church into a world where those are sort of fading this is a regional goal of this research one thing to notice it's often one of our biases is we think all Middle Ages right those people we're going to dump those guys front you know very smart they're in those churches our minds are all warped and what not really it turns out that people have been about equally smart for ever and and the Catholic monks we're doing some very fine research that a few problems of course on that we're going to limit their the direction their thought could take and certainly the thoughts that they could write down whether they were thinking them or not um but they were doing some very fine research and this is what Hydra was working on so we had this rich tradition of first-rate philosophical reflection within the context of the church that he was trying to reorganize and sort of modernize without destroying the core of it at some point this doesn't work very well and he realizes that the real problem is is he doesn't believe in God or the church right so this is a tension that exists for Heidegger that that here you are you're in it monastery essentially you're being paid for it he took this very seriously but they're actually paying him to be there the church is and he's supposed to be the like standard bearer that's going to bring this philosophical tradition into the modern age um and he sort of starts to waver and you can see this immediately his career they sense this one of the scholarships doesn't get renewed he's like oh why really well how you doing Heidegger like oh no I'm good like yeah we don't think so you think you're getting a little crazy here right and so they're getting suspicious of family he's getting suspicious of them but at this time in Germany the stakes are pretty high for him because publications were put out by the church so if these days working the way has been being agreeable to them doing first-rate scholarship within the context of the medieval Catholic tradition he's guaranteed that what he writes because it is first-rate will be published redkin taken seriously his career is essentially guaranteed could take a couple of different tracks but he's good to go if he abandons the church well he loses his scholarship he loses his education and he loses the outlet for his publication but then where do you go when you everybody says oh well you're not a philosopher you're a catholic scholar so non Catholic philosophical tradition has very limited interest in somebody with this background but you know Catholic Jesuit tradition really doesn't like to give scholarships to people who don't believe in the church anymore um and so he's torn and what he ends up doing is sort of sticking it out he convinces himself for a while that this is good he gets his degree um and yeah he's torn he really doesn't know what to do and into this sort of gap appears the phenomenological movement for him intellectually there's other things of course going on and the big champion there is who's roll there's another philosopher we could have done in this series and what has happened is if you can think about what Heidegger has done is he's been in an idealist mode and there's two big schools of philosophy it's sort of roughly you can have the idealists who say the world there's these things out there things like God which is an ideal we can't see it we can't feel it we can't touch it or the truth or the a priori truth if you want to talk about Conte or the TV ology of history right you can't kick the teleology of history it's not there it's an ideal that we projected to do into the world and then you have the materialist school and the tearless school said no if you can't kick it why are we talking about it right if you can't somehow interact with it physically viscerally if you can't feel it touch it taste it smell it then it is not important for a hundred years the idealists had been triumphant Conte and Hegel being the two great flag bearers of the idealist movement of all time Marx is the one counterpoint to that with we will call him materialism historical materialism Hegel historical idealism Marx historical materialism he's like takes the same idea but he's an idealist groundings material grounding so you have Marx doing this and you have who Searle doing this with a movement called phenomenology what phenomenology was an attempt to do as philosophize the groundings of science you may remember this from Russell it's the same project look we don't believe in religion anymore we don't believe in God we don't believe in governments we don't believe in kings or monarchies or the aristocracy we've gone rid of all that or theoretically we've gotten real off um what do we believe in it turns out what they believed in was science remember how hard Russell is working to salvage all of the of his youth through mathematics if we could just get to the truth if we can found it and prove it to be pure we'll be there this is one of the reasons that science at the turn of the 20th century is so enticing it's absolutely enticing because it stands in for all the beliefs that have been destroyed that this is what things that infuriated Nietzsche he's like we didn't tear down all the old idols to build a new one and then everybody else is like no yeah we did that's right that's exactly what we're doing right Russell's like don't be confused that's what I'm doing and the phenomenological movement very much invested in this and what phenomenology did and whose role in particular pointed out and I'll give you a long example this in a second is that you want to do is pay very close attention to your experience of the world of phenomena hence the title just phenomenal experience you receive phenomenon you receive sensory input that is the world that's what we should talk about that's what philosophy should deal with um right about this time World War one happens and if people in Germany were a little discontented and dismayed prior to World War One World War one sort of put a little cap on that right they totally destroyed the old social structure of Germany and the ideals of German rhymey ideal is shifted from religion to the German nation Bismarck as it's called Bismarck and culture count the notion that the superiority of German culture would would set the day it set the tone and rescue us and that's all destroyed in World War one Heidegger served exactly the way started in World War two he was a weatherman kind of a curious parallel there which means he didn't really see a lot of action but he did get to see his country pretty much totally destroyed um and so he thought well what does that mean what did we do and this brain sort of gave him rather than making him bear he found it liberating he's like okay we've done with that half of tradition we've done with that idealist crap materialism let's go to the materialist route and so it becomes a very ardent follower briefly of who Cyril the founder phenomenology and who Cyril sort of anoints him as his successor the guy that's going to carry on the tradition of the phenomenological philosophical project and this allows Heidegger to make the transition from Catholic scholar to respected philosopher which is a big jump um so here's what whose role is arguing and then I'll say what I'll give you example of what Hydra good almost immediately after that he broke with visual very quickly and you'll see why and this is from an actual example that Heidegger gives in a lecture and it was the lecturer whose will realized that Heidegger probably wasn't the guy who thought he was so the lectern we see the lectern but what is it we actually see how do we experience it whose role said to figure that out what we have to do is put ourselves in a special place where we watch ourselves experiencing things it is normally we just experienced crap stuff just happens you know we take it and it's warm it's hot it's light it's cold that jab does it taste good who knows right just things happen to us we take it in but we don't watch things happening to us so who strolls big method was to say no we've got to try and stand outside of ourselves a little bit and focus on what actually happens when we see something like a lector so everybody close your eyes close your eyes close your heads and then try and just clear your mind and then when you open your eyes try and see yourself seeing the lectern so oh thank you so open your eyes right and that's that's what who's troll want to study what do we actually see um the impressionist by the way we're working a similar mode here they said you don't see figures often when you see yours maybe color right maybe the first thing you notice is it sort of got a form that's got some color and so crucial explores this state of being the state of being that is observing what you're doing um and and he calls us basically thinking he says what we normally call thinking is not thinking what thinking is is thinking about the thinking that you do you get that that's like two removes like you do something you think about that there's no it's watching yourself think about what it is that you do the experiences that you have whatever you can derive from that that's what we should be talking about because you can never experienced something like god for the transcendence of history or the teleology of man's cultural development we shouldn't talk about that it's not real and notice this is what science does science tries to isolate a phenomenon take some kind of device that measures records triggers does something with it and then says what that is you watch the device making a record of a phenomenon so whose role is trying to import scientific models of knowledge and construction from the hard sciences into the much softer science of philosophy uh very very soft science extraordinarily soft ah and build not transcended truth notice that you give up on the notion of transcendent truth very quickly because he said look it's going to be different people are going to perceive different things and that's okay but by and large we can agree that we have this lectern here and and and we're in business and so you build your philosophy from the phenomenal itself not from ideas down into the world but from the phenomena of the world and then base it from there up and to the land of ideas and culture and big reforms so in Heidegger's lecture he says ah that's all very nice very interesting and in many ways true however when I calm being the lecture in this again this is straight from hydras lecture when I come to lecture I expect there to be a lectern here what I need are my expectations if the lectern were not here I would be surprised and in fact this is a different lecture just coincidentally it's not I don't know where this handle came from that's never been there before Oh perfect because it's not a lecture and that's supposed to be here right and he said this notion there when you all come expecting there to be a lectern urine if there's not a lectern here you'll be like oh I wonder where maybe you're not or maybe you didn't even remember that right but if I'm not here you'll notice that eventually right 605 610 615 you're really noticing it so this notion that we carry part of the world with us we've pre-constructed it I was waiting for a friend to join me at lunch earlier this week and I thought see this is what happens my experience of my lunch or the appetizer at this point is completely different because I expect someone to be there right we all know this you can sit there by yourself oh well you focus on the food it's wonderful great sunny day but if you're expecting somebody else well it's not the same now is that a phenomena it this is back to the question of there's not a right honor rhinoceros in the room that victims don't want to talk about what the hell does that mean there's not an imaginary object that you would not expect to be here anywhere in the room what kind of statement is that it can't make a positive statement like that can you and Heidegger said well it's tricky this is very it turns out that this very tricky getting in this position of figuring out yes we take in phenomena but we don't just take in from and what he wants to do on one hand and this is why it gets so confusing is he says one of our problems is we have the subject object dichotomy that still exists in phenomenology and in sciences and all over the place most particularly it exists in our language I see the lectern notice I can't hardly say that any other way now how do you're saying no but that's not what happens we just ran the experiment we open our eyes we see a form we see color we see we see a collection of our expectations met or fulfilled memories projections towards the future maybe I'm hungry I don't know where this guy's talking about the stupid lectern still right and then all of that happened simultaneously it's not really possible to pull all those threads apart oh it's not all phenomenon but it's certainly not I over here see my eyes are doing this work the lectern which is this thing that is right there Oh because really strictly speaking what the hell is a left turn I mean you could say I see a wood box that at least makes some sense because we have a definable material of indefinable shape I see a wood box that's used to lecture behind sort of makes more sense but our language pre constructs the world it puts me in a position that allows me to pretend like I see the world in a very tight phenomenological way when in fact we don't it's not like that at all really and so the first thing Heidegger wants to do is change the way we use language okay that's tricky right because we didn't create the language and a lot of people speak it besides us and so unless you can get a consensus of everybody else to change the fundamental grammar of the language you're stuck and so if you read through these quotes and high degrees on those who use a lot of words a lot of strange sentence structure is because he's trying to work against the illusion of the world that is created by language and one of the primary four forms of that illusion is this subject object division we have people throwing grammar right what you guys you got the subject of the sentence you have the object so Heidegger is like no that's not that's not it at all and when language goes subject object is producing this lie that's a lie that we enjoy very much and we're happy go away but if we start thinking about it is not quite right so they this is one problem that he was coming in Oh the second problem is the problem of being right you have language problem and what he really wants to talk about is the question of being that observing of yourself you love this part of phenomenology he thought this is who she rules real breakthroughs not this whole phenomenon crap but this notion of observing yourself this being questioned and it goes back because this is a question that Socrates raises by the way Socrates raises all philosophical questions in case you're wondering it's always sake this is everybody everything you want to know it's operty talk about and one one I think it's in the Phaedo he walks into a dinner party and says oh what are you guys talking about they said oh we're discussing essentially being we've got that all wrapped up he's like oh that's great because I never understand what being means and of course by the time he leaves nobody else understands which is what Socrates does he reduces the level of understanding around when around and confuse everybody right and this is sort of what Heidegger does I don't know if he ever aji he just sort of he reduces what we understand which can be positive in a way I think the best if you think of Heidegger's philosophy it is like a crab and you know if you poke a crab like put their claws up and they snap and they walk backwards this is how Heidegger does philosophy you sort of fight you off and backs away you're like I just want to know something guys you just know no he's not so this is what he is doing he wants to take these ideas that we think we know that we think we understand very intuitively and concretely in show us that no we don't understand them at all um but still stick with this materialist foundation because he's really broken with the idealist movement for the time we'll see has a bit of a slip coming up so this brings out his big work being and time so if you want to write a philosophical work that covers the big stuff right being right because that that pretty much sums it up um and in this he points out I can't even begin to cover everything he points out in here some what his work for the rest of his life was was an elaboration of being in time that is it's very clear if you're going to read anything by Heidegger read being in time because that it's all there and what he does is unpack explore complicate if you could believe that elaborate the ideas that he presents originally in that book it's really the central book for him um any points out a couple of things one that when we ask what being is you have to be a particular kind of being to ask the question of being see you have to put yourself in a particular intellectual linguistic mindset to say what is the question of being and so the question of being presumes the question of being it's already been answered just the asking of it answers the question of being because that's where you have to be to ask the question and he says this is no good because most of the time we don't ask the question of being and so it's a very peculiar place to be to be the kind of being that asked questions about being does that make any sense right thank you just go it does it really good so right I can't yeah most of the time right we don't worry about being most of times were basically cows right we're happy ruminating our grass eating clover Sun shines on us we're happy it's cold we're sad life is good rarely do we position ourselves in the very odd in fact awkward intellectually awkward place of trying to actually question the very nature of our own existence it's not easy notice that the sentence I see the lectern presumes me but this is the that's the question that Heidegger wants to ask okay let's stop at the I what the hell does that mean well it means me okay well that's helpful thank you but if you look at the grammar of our language and pretty much every language except Sanskrit language of every language pretty much you all you end up is this series of I me us myself you which is just you know taking the same concept and pushing it around the table you know duty work with it and what he says is to say I you have to be the kind of being that can feel I and say it without feeling any problems with your being it's a very uncomplicated simple form of existence by the way how you girls are like like 800 pages descends after sentence just like that um and so he says what we have to do is back to the phenomenological methodology here is put ourselves in a space where we can see ourselves being the kind of being that asks our question of beam like see how he just keeps backing away and so he said there's two parts of this one is cosine and he takes us for a guide Hugo wolf so this was not actually some of these problems he did but Hugo wolf says look there's two kinds of being in the world and gets you global I think that's right ah boss sign which is sort of what is and dot sign that it is and these are two completely different modes of existence right the notion that something doesn't exist that's one issue what is it it is it is and then that is what it is I exist I see the lectern I exist great what is this thing that is this odd that is and what it is um higher shortens this that it is to gasai is one word you'll see that a lot I took a bunch of sections just on this one concept and put it oh and shortens it and he says this question that is is the questions that will exist itself and this is what he focuses on a lot what does it mean for something to exist to be the kind of thing that exists more importantly what is it to be the kind of thing that is aware of its own existence notice most things don't have this problem as far as we know rocks are perfect perfectly good with their concept of bead right it's this bizarre capacity of the human mind to reflect on itself which creates all this trouble but Heidegger says not only does it create all this trouble it is the nature of being being is the capacity to look at your own existence and be confused by it seriously I know that's they called it the capacity for anxiety other places he calls it the capacity for annihilation you have to be able to look at yourself and realize that there's this big blank void there where we want to find B and the more you look at it the less you're going to find where the more confusing things you're going to find as if that were complicated how he further complicates this by pointing out a few other obvious but troubling aspects of this is that when I asked about being I'm asking about a particular type of being like myself you people the universe so being the kind of being that's capable asking shapes this whole field in one way what you question shapes it in another way so just the way and the direction in which you ask the question sort of transforms the field of being that you're in fact looking at you can't you have to ask about the being of something even if you're at me about the being of nothing which he does do for him I talk about difficult to follow passages up he does ask that what about the being of nothing but if you asked about the being of nothing you've shaped the whole notion of your relationship to existence or the washing watching of your relationship to existence as being quite different from if you had asked about the nature of the being of the tree your mindset would be different your expectations are different and so it's a part of this it's just pointing out that we're already always already being and so we can't get out of it we can't get behind there is no out underneath behind escape from being you have to be and therefore when you question being you're questioning aspect of something that always already precedes you and therefore is not you can't get basically a scientific grip on it it's always inside of you or inside of your system you're always being in the world or being with the world two distinctions that he makes but probably not going to all right so it's confusing but it's really the core of this is the notion if you think about it and you try and monitor your own experiences of the world you'll see very quickly that how we exist in the world is really not as cut and dried as you would think particularly if you don't think about it the more you reflect on it the more confusing it becomes for instance again what I if I'm at a table at a restaurant everything is exactly the same the idea that someone may be coming to join me completely transforms the experience right nothing physical is changed know that this white wearing parts very much no phenomenological encounter another that is just exactly the same um but what I'm doing is I'm looking into the future predicting a state of my existence a type of being of what it is in this case of boss line and saying I do not correlate with that type of being yet and therefore I'm either a little uneasy or dissatisfied or just expectant and my mode of being therefore vacillates a lot not just on external stimuli but on my thinking about how I should be constantly reshaped our sense of being and in the complicated feedback loops but again nothing phenomenologically has actually changed Mattox Ariane's so he's wants to look at this very closely notice that also introduces a second aspect being and time our being always takes place in time Heidegger argues what we're mostly doing not always but often is this sort of future projection back on ourselves we can't freeze ourselves and say okay I'm freezing myself now it's impossible because we move we're always moving in time so he says the other aspect you need to complicate the already plenty complicated notion of being is the fact that it's always changing it's the Heraclitus you can't put your foot in the same river twice because the river is always flowing transforming being remoulded by currents and Eddie's and so what you're observing is not just being changed by the observation of it by the expectation of your observations of it but by the fact that time is passing as you observe it being and time so this is a big book everybody's been waiting for this book and it comes out and it's almost immediately recognized pretty much immediately recognized by all the people who matter which is you know 20 different philosophers in Germany but this is a significant work that this really is a major piece of philosophical thinking that is pushing the insights of phenomenology very far and raising a question that has been asked forever about being about ontology as the whole field of philosophy called ontology and really Heidegger said well you have the question of being but I want to ask the question that's beneath the question of being and this kind of blows philosophers away and it makes his name pretty much instantly he becomes a professor at the University of Freiburg for while he's put up to be the professor of the University Berlin which is something like we have no climate right it's like it's the best possible thing you could do as a philosopher to be opposed for the University of Berlin is that that's the height I mean you would be having dinner with the Kaiser with the nobility with wealthiest people I mean you would be sort of an intellectual star we don't have any I guess I can't think of any equivalent that we would have today culturally speaking and but he gets the one at Freiburg which is an excellent school excellent choice and it's about this time that so the whole time this has been going on bime our republic in germany which is the democratic republic that follows the collapse of world war one has been itself collapsing it's a rat it's a mess it's that you know every kind of problem the economy of course the world economy is going down so fast cause the Great Depression they have the war reparations issue they have internal dissension you have the Communist you have socialists you have the rising National Socialists movement and all anybody can agree on is that we don't like these liberal Republicans we were trying to ratify more democracy everybody hated them or almost everybody and so that's falling apart um and just as Heidegger is really making his name for himself he decides you know what this national socialism looks really really good oh yeah it's just uh yeah it's not a good call it turns out um but um he is said almost it's amazing cuz at this the same moment that he's hooking himself up completely with the Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler in particular and specific um he's also dating Hannah dating he's having an affair with Hannah Arendt was the Jewish anti totalitarian intellectual one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century who has both the love of his life his main student and her main intellectual sort of father and also lover so that's a kind of interesting set of dichotomies there um so Heidegger nationalist socialist or um you it's this is hard to believe but this is more or less the sketch of it so the Nazis take power through various sort of devious and not so devious routes and once they're in power they want to consolidate their grip on everything and Heidegger thinks this is spectacularly good and so he gets mein Provost of the University of Freiburg and what he immediately tries to do is a basically make the rest of the faculty lick his boots right they must worship the National Socialist Party do exactly what I say and keep his to keep their mouths shut to the point where he has been lining up in brown shirts saluting the flag doing military markings around the parade ground the whole bit right he also is instrumental in getting started and lobbies hard to be the head of a new school in Germany that we found in Berlin and you will have to attend that school for I think it's two years my behavior but I think it's two years to get the National Socialist stamp of approval before you can go to a college or a university in the country which would mean in ten years the only people who would be coming out of the universities at all would all have been had this you know intellectual and doctrine ation of the National Socialist system prior to being able to go to school so it was a conscious he wrote this all out perfectly clearly attempt to produce an absolute I guess brainwashed or ideologically fine and focused collection of university professors and teachers and hence transform the higher education of Germany forever that was his plan with him as the head humbly um so yeah now not to defend Heidegger per se but here's what he's responding to um when World War one had this one a lot of people went for National Socialism early in Germany by the way um the democracy has failed there's no question about that it could not figure out how to deal with the manifold problems facing Germany at that time is not there anybody could have by the way I don't know I just what system they could have put in place that might have dealt with it no one knows but certainly that the by Maher republic couldn't hold it together and so look at the kind of very small economic mess we're in now multiply that by a thousand times add that your country is surrounded by very hostile neighbors hostile by the way because you just hit them with a bat right and you don't know what the future holds and your government keeps collapsing over and over and over again right we voted the bush administration out of office and the Republicans basically because they screwed everything up all right now imagine that the Obama administration screws it up worse which is hard to imagine and then I'll pick it up a lot earlier than they are dispute at work but imagine they pull that off and then you voted another administration and things get worse at what point do you say you know what this is not working voting people and things get worse okay we have another election things get even worse yeah but I like some things get really bad so there's that aspect of it of the country really was collapsing the other aspect of it is the desire even though he tried to go the abandons the Catholic Church that whole world Germany seemed to desire for order and for belonging all right the problem with liberalism and liberal systems is everybody gets to do with they want which means that everybody gets to do what they want which means that nobody can say you're doing the right thing I'm doing the wrong thing I'm doing the wrong thing or the right thing you're bad hey it's all open so where do you find meaning where do you find truth where do you find real values and having her said look you find real values in the community it was the socialist part of the National Socialism he really loved the communalism of it if you could build a strong intellectually vibrant community of shared values and principles then we'd have a new future then we could launch the new world um and he thought Hitler was definitely the the voice of that I'm not particularly anti-semitic which is you know in his defense he was not part of the anti-semitic right he didn't do a lot to prevent it from happening by the way it's not like he's going out of his way to do much on that front but he was not he just didn't feel that way I never wrote that way and he did some things when he was rector to protect some of the Jewish professors um but 19 32 33 34 rolls along Heidegger resigns as rector of the University of Freiburg this is what saves him after the war by the way he resigns because the Nazis are going too far militarizing too much censorship for pressing people no he resigns because the Nazis are not doing enough to revolutionize the country or the universities they keep interfering with his attempt to enforce strict National Socialist ideology at the University of Freiburg and it finally says look you high nazi officials if you're going to keep moderating my policies and handing me in I don't want to be rector anymore which is hard to believe it's true ha he really went he went hard National Socialist so hard that the natla Nazis like around Hitler's if they knew he was he was a famous philosopher we're like hmm Heidegger a little nuts on the National Socialism you knows D Kyle on all but you know he's a little crazy and so they were they were literally like pinning him in we don't let's promote him to keep him down as we got to moderate his policies it get a little crazy out there in fiber a little further on our program than we want him to and so he says well find that I was on and so it turns out he resigns and so that's about 35 just before things get really bleep ah and that saves him because after the war he gets to say look I resigned the post National Socialists 1935 I wasn't a real not to which is not true at all he was more real than the real mountains that you were so real that he came out the other side somehow magically I don't know just it's just amazing um anyway he did a lot of unpleasant things to a lot of people while he was there I mean not relatively scale of fat not fashion dodging is about that implies eating chili buddy or anything but people lost their post because they're either Jewish where they were speaking out against the liberal policies of the early national socialist museum where they attacked aspects of Hitler's plans all this so he was in no way a good guy at this time huh so the war comes of course and everything is destroyed he's living in rural Germany in a way very undisturbed by the war there was a little bombing very late on but they were conquered by they're taken by the French which makes a big difference by the way at the end of World War two if your Congress by the French the Americans or the Russians more Flemish were taken by the French with Americans and so but the whole time he's still a famous worldwide philosopher within that realm and so Germany would send him on philosophical conferences very until very late like 1939 1940 he's going to conferences in England and in Italy on another like neutral like Spain where philosophers still want to gather but you know politics is making it difficult but they let him leave the country repeatedly and he carried the flag National Socialism to all these conferences and it really upset a lot of the other philosophers they said why are you being such an ideologue he's like because Hitler's right that's what he would say Hitler is right - the war on wines and the French basically want to imprison him there's some negotiations he's just for about four or five years he can't teach anymore yes sir we go to rural Germany and just leave well enough and the denazification process and then one of the amazing turns and history happens so he's sort of persona non grata in Germany because all the intellectual class knows that this guy was a hardcore in a lie fascist and they want nothing to do with them but if you remember the Sartre lecture just before the war Sartre was in Germany studying Heidegger immediately after the war Heidegger a higher start publishes Being and Nothingness notice the title which makes him just hugely famous as we discussed more importantly all the sudden everybody's interested in Heidegger so while he cannot teach in Germany because he's a fascist he becomes famous and friends and attends lectures gives interviews his books are translated he's more famous than he's ever been while being Dean ossified in rural Germany history is a funny thing oh that's all I can say um he does a lot of lying at this time to try and protect himself it's really not until the 1980s that the entire history of his involvement with the Nazi Party has worked out that's how easy he died in 76 76 and and so a lot of these details were not known but it is clear that Hannah Arendt after the war they become great friends again they reconcile and she goes right back to him she loved him whole life he said she was the love of his life but certainly her intellectual mentor how that works again when she was this huge I guess that's how you know totalitarianism right you sleep with it but what happens is in sorts sort of reimagining of Heidegger's questions of being you get the opposite of what Heidegger had done Sartre imagines it as a Liberatore understanding of being that puts the individual in the center Heidegger had imagined it as a being that wants to be tied to the group to find identity Sarge version of Heidegger is much more popular for obvious reasons and this really allows Heidegger to rejuvenate himself four or five years after the war with you're a famous philosopher all over Europe except in your own country what do they do they give you your professorship back you know every blood bygones be bygones right he's our most famous living philosopher and he can't even teach in our country and so everything sort of washes in he's back undo his chair Freiburg restate for the rest of his life teaching post for his work changes some but not a lot two things to know one is he again because of sorry he becomes hugely influential in all kinds of fields again if not victims die and then probably he hires the single most influential philosopher in the 20th century and if you look at that list you can see why because he's influencing people in existentialism in psychology in linguistics all these fields because he asked these very fundamental questions about existence about being about how we are in the world the other thing that happens is and he was always a big lover of nature by the by part of growing up in rural Germany his later writings or even mid to later writings become increasingly interested in the question of man's relation to nature but if you're going to ask a question of being he increasingly asked a question of being not about man in human society but turned out he didn't answer that well and as we stopped asking that but how is man with nature and he wrote some pretty profound works that read today from our environmental concerns look incredibly prescient about how we should relate and can relate to nature on but again they tie right into as a whole the processes been going the whole time with being so I just give you an idea of one of them it's called to build this to dwell and he says what does it mean you two live someplace to live in the sense of dwell Germany has a couple of different words for this to vote voting in in Germany means to be comfortable with to be at peace in to to occupy in a communal cozy happy way and even a vote though none even means like glad or happy occurrence so when you're if someone says where do you live and you say it won't our loan here that means that's where I really am if you just happen to be staying in a hotel you would never use the word though right so so what he's asking is this question was it being to dwell someplace to really build to be someplace and he says well for a human being it always involves a lot of different ways of being not surprisingly immediately returns to that he says for instance he says if you're a truck driver you can probably dwell in your truck because you feel at peace there you feel comfortable and he says we usually think of dwelling as being in buildings but notice we build bridges but we definitely don't think of dwelling there we build houses but sometimes they aren't very good for living and so he says when we talk about living in the sense of dwelling in the sense of occupying in a meaningful way he says we're always invoking four aspects simultaneously to mention any one of them is to mention all four of them and this is again back to that being notion there is no place where you can only get one aspect of being because they're always all of them already there and so he says to live someplace is to be on the earth that seems obvious but to be on the earth in the sense of to care for the earth he says you can't dwell without caring you can't dwell without sort of in the sense of like animal husbandry all right the notion of you are responsible you care you must cultivate but not in the cultivate sense of dominate but cultivate in the sense of to care for and to care for in time with with an eye on the future says it also means to be under the Sun beneath the sky this is that this it's always has this notion of an awareness of space and of openness and of possibilities he actually calls it divinities although it's never clear what he means by I've never found that Heidegger scholar who has any idea what he means by Definity there but I mean but it's this sort of this freedom of possibilities and the examples of user or variable I mean obvious but in some ways telling you know if you work on your garden you're cultivating the earth you're dwelling there but you look up this is this uniquely human to look up because we are beneath the sky so we're on the earth we're beneath the sky and we're with our buildings this is a human beings or beings that build the notion of a human being that doesn't build things he says it's impossible we are those things that build and so the doing of the building is part of the dwelling if we aren't messing around with stuff rearranging things fixing it up taking it down reordering it restructuring or redesigning it then we're not existing and so it says you have these ideas actually you're on the earth in the sense of cultivating it you're with it you must care for it you're under the sky that's where we are you're in your building or your with your buildings you actually says we exist with them and then you're with people we are not alone we're social beings this is anytime you talk about a human living you're already always talking about building cultivating under the sky and with other people you can't invoke the human without mentioning all those things Vulcania Slee those are all aspects necessary for a human being to exist to be to dwell on the earth and the argues that what happens the reason we can't find loan in peace of contentment is because we mess all those things up our buildings are stupid we don't cultivate we destroy our communities don't function right our skies are the clouded and and smog he's writing this in your early late 40s early 50s but what he's really doing is he's reinventing his past from mess Kirk Germany he's saying there was a place where people had dwelled for a thousand years without license they've cultivated but not destroyed they had built buildings you could live with and believed in and have a happy childhood with and live with your neighbors and it communally in a happy way you could you could Bonin there you could really live you could be your being there and so he does this full circle he goes from this rural isolate doesn't go that far physically intellectually he goes from this isolated monastic sort of rural ideal existence into the world where he goes very wrong indeed and takes being in the wrong way then after the war at some level he recognizes this and then returns in any argues no the kind of being I really want it turns out is a kind of being that I had back there in in mess crook Germany and in this way he attacks a lot of people pointing this out he attacks the real problem of Germany and has done this over and over again you know incredible culture totally destructive um wonderful arts you know horrible as Oracle patterns beautiful rural landscapes blighted industrial factories how do you reconcile these Heidegger never does what he does do for all of these problems is he raises the question of being to a central place from which it has never left since he asked the question we are still asking the question every modern philosopher who's doing any kind of serious work at some level has to address it because it's so problematic and so we really do we sort of dwell in the massive heidegger's being in philosophy today Martin Heidegger

Channel: Wes Cecil

Views: 103,422

Rating: 4.7088122 out of 5

Keywords: Heidegger, Humane Arts, Philosophy, Wes Cecil, Lecture

Id: UF8f3Y2KRfc

Length: 58min 30sec (3510 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 31 2012