HEIDEGGER PART 2 BY GEORGE PATTISON

who's here and for Heidegger the way in which our being in the world is revealed to us is in a slightly complex way through three fundamental aspects of you of human being and these are what often gets translated as mood understanding and discourse I'll go through these one by one the mood the German word is the Findley kite which has a word like the English find in the middle of it that we always find ourselves being a certain way but you know you I meet you on the street and you say hi George how are you I say I'm alright I find myself being alright I don't have to think about whether I'm alright or not I just say yeah it's alright I find myself being a certain way mood but that is also a certain understanding I have an understanding of myself I'm the sort of being who could feel alright or not alright to be able to say I'm alright involves a certain understanding of what it is to be human but then the third thing discourse Lagos is that I say it I have something to say I don't have an understanding of myself as alright and then find a word for it to fit the word onto it but it's in saying the word that my understanding of how I find myself being comes to expression Heidegger's project he says is phenomenology under the inspiration of the phenomenology of who so but what is what are phenomena phenomena are what come to appearance but for Heidegger logos is the primary mode in which being in the world comes to appearance not visual perception or tactile perception apart from logos but it's in logos that the world becomes a world for us and we become existing human beings in of world in our logos with one another indeed he says if we understand logos in the Greek sense the original meaning of leg iron is de Lune it is uncovering so when I say look there's a sparrow I saying it's a sparrow shows you and reveals it to you as a sparrow well perhaps you already know that but if you're a three-year-old you don't am I telling you shows you what that thing is that you're seeing so language uncovers the world language presents us with the phenomenon of the world and of our own being in the world that's great but that there's a problem because as speakers of language of course we don't make language up we receive language we are inducted into an already existing language and that's not just a matter of learning of vocabulary and a grammar but learning phrases figures of speech ways of talking and so on now that means that in a sense as language users we're always using language secondhand Derrida would say I have only one language and it is not my own that language is something we receive the language we have wasn't designed to express or to articulate our unique and singular experiences and understandings it's part of a complex common life the great risk here of course then is that we can say things that we've heard without really understanding them in the light of our own experience when that happens language is no longer uncovering the world it's covering it up in high daguerreian terms discourse when she uses the German word Raider becomes good Raider translated as idle talk or chatter we're just repeating what others have said without underst now important here for Heidegger I think people sometimes miss read him at this point it says it's just a can manifestation of decadent life in the early 20th century if you go back to his lectures on Aristotle and to the sort of life of the Greek Agora reflected in Aristotle's writings this is a problem right from the beginning of philosophy because it's built into the structures of language and that we have and can't have language is anything but second hand and so here I am you know talking about being in time and the student might write down you know being in time contains important new ideas such as the idea of design and being in the world now of course that's not wrong that is correct to say that but just because the students writing it down because I've said it doesn't mean that the student really understands and a student could regurgitate an exam ants or an essay scholar could even regurgitate a book perhaps or whole series of books without necessarily having an original kind of primordial understanding of what is being said in in language so in practice we live in our average everyday way of being the world is not uncovered but the world is covered over by this way of talking this grader this idle talk so what are we to do how are we to get out of that situation now here Heidegger introduces the distr another of these key terms that's become associated with him I can't lick it-- authenticity we have to find out what is truly our own and not just what is handed down to us or reflected back to us from our surrounding society and we have to do this because it's only in this way that we can realize our lives as a whole and make of ourselves a whole authentic human being but then there's a problem can we be a whole how can we live as a whole now an object that didn't have time could be a whole an object that was simply what and as it is you know the Greek VARs that keeps writes about simply a perfect object that doesn't become anything else but here we are in the middle of a course of becoming we're always changing we're living from day to day we're developing becoming something new ceasing to be what we are we haven't yet lived all our possibilities these still lie ahead of us how can we live as a whole and then there's something else and that is of course all of us are going to die and for Heidegger this means that in a sense it seems impossible for us to live as our lives as a whole because our end is always going to escape us and that means we can never really be sure about any of our possibilities in life any of the things that we are committed to could be cut short at any time and indeed this is one of the motivations as to why we find it so easy to slip into idle talk secondhand talk assuring ourselves that everything is in order everything is in place the world is well managed and as as it should be a way of avoiding confronting this terrifying ineluctably fact that each of us individually must die so for Heidegger the only way to as it well lift ourselves out of this second-hand life of average everydayness is to look the prospect of our own death in the eye his german word translated in English as antis anticipation for laughs and means literally like running towards so we run towards our death we don't run away from it and of course he has some wonderful passages and drawing partly on Tolstoy his short story the death of Yvonne Ilitch about how even when someone is dying of course we go to visit them we say everything's alright hope you know hope you're fine don't worry too much things will be ok you know say saying just about anything except what directly and truthfully states what's going on but no we need to confront the truth about ourselves and that is that we are each of us singly going to die and none of our this as it were reflects back on to the finer tune of all of our possibilities all of our human relationships all of our work projects all of our political programs our technical projects all of these are limited we may try to absolute ties them in our minds but none of them can really bear the weight of absoluteness maybe it's a little bit like what kqr said in concluding unscientific PostScript about being relative with the relative well Kathy also said we must be absolute with the absolute and relative with the relative but for Heidegger it seems there's no absolute human beings are just thrown into the world thrown towards their death that's their condition they have to accept that I think at this point there's two very different ways of hearing what Heidegger is saying one way is to hear it as a sort of heroic confrontation with death you know looking death in the eye running towards it authentically resolute a little bit like a civilian version of the soldier you know and Heidegger is the first world war generation going over the top running towards the enemy lines but at the same time he's also saying you know when you do this actually nothing much changes in your life you know if you're a bank clerk and you become authentic you don't give up being a bank clerk and go and live this kind of way out life on South Sea Island or anything like that like go go you carry on being a bank clerk but you are more aware of the limitations of your life you're you're fine it ood your your restrictions your a little bit humbler perhaps less self-assertive a bit quieter the person who knows this doesn't make too big a song and dance about anything so that there's two very very different ways I think of hearing what's going on here and both there's some evidence in in the text if all this is to happen of course how can it happen that it has to happen but for Heidegger week we can't get out of time we're always in time time is the horizon of any possible human meaning of being but we're not just carried along as it were on the currents of time time isn't just rolling us along any old how well well maybe a lot of the time it is but we have the alternative of as it were taking our time in hand in what hide a goat using a term he borrows from from kicking or calls the moment of vision the algum bleak the moment in which translates literally as the gaze of the glance of the eye the moment in which we look around we see ourselves we see our lives for what it is and in the light of that illumination we then accept who we are in our finite you in our solitude visa vie our death and move forward and this moment of vision again borrowing a term from kick your is something that has to be repeated again and again it's not a once and for all heroic thing in which are today I found the meaning of life which is death and now I can live authentically for the rest of my life no you have to do it every day you have to you know you can never as it were develop a habit of this it's something you have to confront again and again and again now being in time promised to be only the first part of a much bigger work and that much bigger work was never written being in time itself I mean was would have been enough to establish hydrators reputation and certainly it gave a kickstart as it were to what became known as the philosophy of existence and that then of course also had influence in France on the rise of French existentialism in theology it was taken up by Rudolf Bultmann as we know close colleague of heidegger's important to say actually in in connection with Bookman Burt 1933 the the advent of the Nazis marked the division between Heidegger and Bookman because Bookman was from very beginning a committed anti-nazi at the beginning of summer semester 1933 he sent out a letter to all students saying you know of course is exciting times but you know not everything's good and particularly not good is the vilifying of colleagues and friends on the grounds of their Jewish origins you know this was published in the sub student newspaper so from the very beginning Bookman put his head above the parapet and said you know there are things here that shouldn't be accepted you could do that Heidegger didn't do it and from that time Bookman tried to make some protective gestures towards Heidegger in various of his lectures to say you know we mustn't understand this infamous speech Heidegger gave on the occasion of being installed as rector in a racialist sense in anyway but that was they they went very different directions at that point but Bookman nevertheless and one can see for example in his commentary on the doctorate Gospel of John how he uses many Heidegger's ideas about word as revelation to interpret John's teaching about the Word made flesh and the light that illuminates every man coming into the world well I say Bookman use Heidegger you can see in both of them their common conversations coming out in their important published work now being in time is written in this kind of extraordinary dense technical language that's very challenging to many readers although it's a technical language as Heidegger in a way as making up as he goes along with many many points one more footnote to give about being in time is that Heydrich himself of course claimed that by the time he'd written being in time he was no longer theologian he was no longer a Christian that it was written under the auspices of atheism how important to say I think that for Heidegger atheism didn't mean I don't believe in God out there simply a - theism in other words that one didn't take God into account and neither did one take atheism in the conventional sense into account it's neither affirming nor denying the existence of God but it's abstract encountered so Bookman could nevertheless find in it scope for a a Christian interpretation others are more radically atheist interpretation now in the 1930s we see Heidegger and totally leaving on one side or the question of his Nazism turning to a number of new topics and a new way of writing that being time as I say it was was written in this heavy jargon much which would be ridiculed by Adorno in his book on the jargon of authenticity but Heidegger himself moves away from this in the 1930s he starts lecturing on art and as lectures the origin of the work of art and especially on the poetry of hölderlin and a poet extraordinarily important for Heidegger and his whole generation of Germans one of the major Romantic poets of the German Romantic movement but a very idiosyncratic poet very different from any of the poets of English Romanticism writing in a style that I think is quite difficult for English language readers to to connect to which is perhaps why a lot of this aspect of hydrators work is relatively less known in the english-speaking world simply because we don't have hölderlin as it were at our fingertips in the way we might have Wordsworth or corage but for Heidegger and when he's writing about hölderlin he's not writing about some obscure poet that only a few literati know he's writing about sort of poet that German soldiers going to the front in the First World War would buy and have in their backpacks and reading in the trenches a poet who was nationally revered and loved and of course there are nationalist themes in Holdens poetry but it is well I think what chiefly interest Heidegger is the notion of poetry itself we've already seen that of course the importance of language for Heidegger of logos as de Lune as uncovering and for him the poet is the supreme practitioner of this uncovering of the phenomenon of human being in the world in language so it may look as if when he starts talking about Holden's poems about the Danube and the Rhine and and and the rest of them as if he's totally left being in time behind and he's doing it in vocabulary borrowed from Holland's own writings but this focus on the poet I think we can understand in continuity with what he's saying in being in time because the poet is the practitioner of language par excellence aligned from hölderlin himself the conversation that we are human beings have their lives in language it is through how we speak that we constitute our humanity and so when Holden when Heidegger describes how in one of Holden's poems the poet summons the people to the festival for Heidegger this means that it is in a sense the poet whose word that grounds the religious festival also in a sense grounds our experience of time of what what of how time is measured out of how the year takes shape so in important continuities there as well at the same time as Heidegger is developing these meditations on on hölderlin he's also starting to write more and more about the question of technology that chiefly concerns him now indeed one of the interpretations of his Nazism is precisely that he saw Nazism as pointing the way back to a simpler more traditional more agrarian way of life and a rejection of the modern world with the big city and all its tech nology and so on I don't know if that's what he he did think and certainly there was all that rhetoric about the return you know to more traditional ways in in in Nazism but certainly it became clear by the middle of the 1930s that the Nazis were more than committed to buying into the military industrial machine and using every possible technological means to advance their their cause it is interesting and in a letter from Heidegger to Buckman at the beginning of the war he he said describes what's happening in terms of the hegemony of Technology and says there's actually now no way we can stop this technological machine from bringing its ruin and destruction upon us all the things been set in motion and can't be be stopped so that he sees the war itself as manifesting a power of technology that has simply run away from human control that no one can bring it back under control anymore however I think it's wrong if we think of Heidegger simply as a Luddite in relation to technology you know that all modern technology is bad the old world with windmills and water mills and homely peasants living in nice thatched roof houses is good I don't think that's what it what it's about at all and he himself says in subsequent lecture on the subject that you know the atom bomb that's not the danger of technology the danger of technology is simply that we allow ourselves to be fascinated by it to be mesmerised by it to be dragged along by it without really thinking about it and he says what he's arguing for is that we should have a thinking a thoughtful relation to technology because only if we do that can we have a free relation to technology if we just as it were hand ourselves over to technology then it will take us to places we don't want to go and we will lose our humanity we will be dragged into a condition that he describes as planetary homelessness we'll be uprooted not knowing who we are here's the connection then between that and the poetry of hölderlin what the poet does what hölderlin the German poet does for german-speaking people is to call them back to what is most their own what is most proper to them again how he uses sometimes this word eigen one's own that we find in a gondola kite authenticity to what is most proper to oneself to one's own language one's own words the words that in the most original way reveal the world to us spontaneously as we speak now there's something very beautiful in that idea and we could say for Heidegger its whole in the German poet who does that for us it might be whoever our favorite English poet is but for Greeks for French each would have their own poet who would speak these original words but of course in the context of a 20th century ravaged by nationalisms are various kind it's also perhaps slightly problematic as well and undoubtedly there are passages in Heidegger that suggests that only people who speak Greek in German can really do philosophy that these two languages have some sort of extra privilege that they somehow penetrate deeper they get closer to the things that they reveal in in their words that they have a kind of intrinsic connectedness with things in a way that Latin and other Romance languages French and English don't have there is that there is that there but perhaps we can kind of keep that off on one side and think about the positive aspect of this thought of the poet and you know we can think here about our own favorite poet whoever that might be the poet calls us back to what is most our own speaks the word that gives us our world gives us our sense of self and does so not so as to cancel out our to technology but in such a way as to help us to go on being human in the middle of an age of technology that's dragging us out into this situation of planetary homelessness and one can think you know of the situation of a person any person from any culture perhaps living far from home in economic exile politically enforced exile or simply traveling and you know sitting there with a volume whatever their their favorite poet is and through through those words as it were wherever they are and however they're living connecting back with their original sense of self and so that the poet for for Heidegger there's almost a sort of religious quality about it indeed he said what what is it that the poet speaks to us the poet speaks to us of the holy the poet speaks and enables us to experience holiness in the middle of this technologists world how does one respond to that as a theologian it's a two-edged sword of course and one can as in many ways of talking about literature and religion see it has a secularizing move that actually we don't need religion anymore because we have poets we have our our national poets but I think it can also show us something about our own religion about our own theology that the word of the Bible itself it's in Heidegger sense perhaps a poetic word a word that calls us to our own most proper being and does so in such a way as to make our life and our experience holy and of course it's the difference in that most of us don't speak the languages of the Bible most of us have the Bible only as a translated document secondhand as it were already at the beginning of the 19th century Hegel asked rhetorically is Judah Judea then the Teutons fatherland that you know that the language of the Bible is an alien language or perhaps if the language of the Bible is poetic and can function poetically for us in the way that whole Dylan's poetry functioned worked for Heidegger then we would have to say that perhaps this issue of the native language is we would have to part company with Heidegger and say that the power of the word is not simply as it were in this fact of it being our mother language but in some other aspect of it well this is taking us into into different territory and quite complex territory but I think it's fruitful to dwell on a friend of mine recently wrote a little meditation on David and why is it that David is the figure of the Messiah because when you look at him in the Bible he's not obviously a very attractive figure he's an adulterer a killer as of a ruthless mafia boss in many ways but he says well perhaps we shouldn't think of the Davidic Messiah chip has modeled on these aspects on David but David the harpist the poet long believed of course to be author of the Psalms David the singer who sings the songs of God and in seeing the songs of God awakens us through his word to the presence of the holy one and I think that's to read the Psalms in a very high to Gary and perhaps very productive way as well you

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Length: 28min 41sec (1721 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 10 2013