Martin Heidegger - Entitled Opinions

only Heidegger could be with us today what would he say I wonder would he be speechless or would he simply declare I saw it all coming I told you what the Oblivion of being leads to the unearthing of the earth the unworldly the bonds between people the setting in place of an absolutely technical state or better a bio technical state which orders and in frames all things all available energies and resources putting them on standing reserve for general distribution and human consumption I told you that when beings are abandoned by being they lose their density their power of resistance they're very famous and fall prey to objectification exploitation and manipulation when being withdraws from the world the world becomes a nun world no longer hospitable to human habitation yes Heidegger may way may well say something like that if he ever returns from the grave but I have a feeling that even he would be shocked and incredulous at just how monstrous the phenomenon of planetary Tecna City has become the machine is everywhere with no way left to rage against it what's with the doom and gloom Harrison you ask things are better now than they've ever been looked at objectively what's all the fuss about you ask the fuss my friends is about our relationship to the earth about our being at home on the earth in an interview he gave in 1969 to the German magazine Der Spiegel Heidegger declared that we presumed to control direct and regulate our technologies but in fact human beings do not control the inner drive that compels us to amass more and more technical capability and twin frame all beings in an ever-expanding network of circulation and consumption techni city in its essence he told his interviewers is something that man does not master by his own power his interviewers playing dumb asked Heidegger but what must be mastered in this case everything is functioning more and more electric power companies are being built production is up in highly technologized places of the earth people are well cared for we are living in a state of prosperity what really is lacking to us to which Heidegger answered my quote everything is functioning that is precisely what is terrifying that everything functions that the functioning propels everything more and more toward further functioning and that techni City increasingly dislodges man and uproots him from the earth well this uprooting is more or less complete in some places still underway in others but there's not a place on earth that escapes it in my humble yet nevertheless entitled opinion Martin Heidegger is the most important philosopher of the modern era and it is my distinct pleasure if that's the right word to devote the next hour to discussing various aspects of his thought with a young and brilliant scholar who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Heidegger and who has translated one of hydras books from German into English before I introduce him to you let me say and I'm fully aware that my opinion about Heidegger's importance is controversial and that Heidegger himself remains controversial I have nothing against putting him on trial I have both prosecuted and defended him in the past and one day I'll invite someone to this program who was hostile to Heidegger and see where the debate might lead but our objective today is to introduce us to Heidegger to review the path that his Cinque thinking took and to give us a sense of the kinds of problems his philosophy addressed I like to squabble as much as the next man but despite the prevailing dogma among educators today squabbling is not the best method for coming to terms with the thinker's thought in fact it's one of the worst so we'll save the squabbling for another time all right as I mentioned I have with me in the studio a young scholar of Heidegger his name is Andrew Mitchell and he teaches here at Stanford in the ihum program Andrew thanks for joining us today we're going to talk about heidegger's career maybe starting from being in time his first kind of Magnus opus and then move on to the later stuff but Andrew can you tell our listeners how you got interested in Heidegger in the first place what what drew you to him when you were a student and what drove you also to write a dissertation on him well sure it started in high school I would say it arose out of my interest in philosophy and my interest in philosophy itself arose through my preoccupation with literature I was constantly reading Dostoevsky Kafka Becket absurdists theater especially everything that Grove Press published I would read and this led me to Nietzsche Rilke as well these were two my first loves in philosophy and poetry Nietzsche in Rilke and through further reading I've encountered the name Heidegger Heidegger Heidegger and so it seemed to me that I should read Heidegger I started reading him in English yes sir yeah and I was quite enamored taken with it I still remember when I first read the essay what is metaphysics in a library and Heidegger asks this question about science he says that science proceeds in a certain manner and nothing more thinks in a certain way and nothing else and then he asks but what is this nothing and when he asked that the scales fell from my eyes and I knew I was going to read Heidegger for a long time to come in reading them however I found he was quite hostile to meetcha quite hostile to Rilke and so coming to terms with that in a sense was coming to terms with my own past and so routing Heidegger was a if it's not too cliche to say a voyage of self-discovery in some acharya i'm not sure i would use the word hostile when it comes to his reading of Rilke and Nietzsche clearly he wants to he presumes to stand outside of their their thinking or their poeta sizing and to retrieve things that might be unspoken or unthought in them but and I presume that we'll discuss this maybe in the second half of the hour of the way so much of Heidegger career is really a rereading of the history of philosophy from his own sort of high daguerreian way so he impressed you enough that you went on to learn German and did you learn German in order to read Heidegger is that the main reason that you well I wouldn't say that Nietzsche probably I was quite taken with Nietzsche as a stylist and German philosophy as a whole Hegel Schopenhauer it seemed that if you want to study philosophy you needed to know German and so that's what led me to study German okay Andrew then let's try to give our listeners a sense of you don't have to agree with me that he is the most important thinker of the modern era but I think it's relatively uncontroversial that he is an important thinker okay Time magazine said victims time yeah well it could be it could be big concern it could be yeah when they had to go yeah for us how let's try to give our listeners a sense of what is momentous about his is thinking starting with being in time which is a book that erupted on the scene of philosophy in Germany in 1926-27 and was really like a bombshell what was it about that book that had such an impact at the time well I think in being in time had removed from what could be considered a more arid phenomenology of oral to a conception of life and existence so being time has been taken as a cornerstone of existentialism though had ger himself tries to distance himself from the term what being in time added to the philosophical landscape I think is a certain persistence in questioning a devotion to thinking that haven't been seen before hand except perhaps what kant hegel it he returned philosophy to its roots I would say in this thinking of the question of being that he approached in a entirely new way ok let's let's lay it out so he in his introduction to being in time he says that he wants to raise a question that has not been asked since the time of Aristotle and Plato which is what is the meaning of being that this word that we use all the time in all of our copulas and sentences with the word is that although philosophers have always asked what is the being of beings or what is the essence of everything that is Heidegger claims that the meaning of being what we mean when we use the word being or even think of it as the essence of things is a question that has laid dormant and not raised in the entire tradition of Western philosophy and he wants to raise it again and therefore being in time is supposed to be like the first step towards reawakening this question of the meaning of being but then it takes the form at least in the first parts of this massive analysis of one specific being among others which is what he calls design german word hard to translate into english but basically means us it's human existence design is literally being there but it's it's the human being why does Heidegger approach the question that the general meaning of being through this intensive analysis of who we are as human beings yes one thing I want to say preparatory to answering that question as that being in time itself is an incomplete work the text as we have it is only a third of what had occurred projected for the entirety so to discuss the book is a fragment in some sense it's a artifact of a particular point in his career and he abandons it for philosophical reasons the issue of being as articulated in being in time is formulated around design as you said and this is because being for him is nothing abstract nothing general but always something concrete we could say it takes place here it's for design it has if there's a meaning to being that meaning is in relation to design in relation to our existence and the reason presumably being that design if I remember correctly he says is the one being whose own being is an issue for it exactly within a way that's not the case presumably with other sorts of hearthstone for example if being is completely indifferent to it right so when he so as he undertakes this sort of analysis of the what he calls the existential structures namely the kind of universal basic found fundamental structures of design what what does he what does he find who are we in this existential at this existential level of universality well one thing he finds is that we're not always ourselves or not even most often ourselves and this is what he refers to as dustman the vait in the sense that they say this is a good movie they say you should see that this impersonal existence he finds to be determinative of our existence we flee from ourselves he says which isn't a complete loss of ourselves but most of the time we are not ourselves yeah but in order to understand why he says that we have to know what our selves means to know what we're running away from what is it that we're running away from what is design when it's in its what Heydrich recalls it's in authentic modes of being as you say the dust man the vase elf what does inauthentic design flee from right and before answering that I just want to add that it's it shouldn't be taken as a moral evaluation now I understand inauthentic doesn't mean inferior in any way I know high Darien's are very fond of our the first thing every time you talk about authenticity or inauthenticity Heidegger is just have to always come down on your head saying this is these are not moral categories these are ontological categories but frankly being in time is pervaded with a bunch of terms that come out of a kind of moral lexicon and there's no way that you'll ever convince me that in authenticity doesn't have some kind of moral overtone but nevertheless let's let's just say it's an ontological capable you'll agree though yes but in any case right so in authenticity would be simply put understanding yourself on the basis of objects thinking of yourself as a thing in the sense you could say if you believe your life to be completely determined you're treating yourself as a thing if you lose yourself in the world this is almost an Augustinian theme in Heidegger you're treating yourself as a an object and so this objectification of existence is inauthentic it's a misunderstanding a recognition of who we are and how we exist again but the question is who are we what is this self misunderstanding a misunderstanding of in other words I'm trying to get us to talk about well what would design in its authenticity consistent sure that causes us to flee from from it in we thank would I recalls anxiety or angst oh it's a we exist in the completely destabilized D substantial eyes manner we we don't have an essence right this is one of the key theses of being in time that the essence of design lies in its existence which is to say that our being is always nothing that we have nothing we possess it's not a predicate but rather we always have it to be its featural in this regard we always have our being to be and that absence of an essence that lack of a pre-established or pre-programmed direction or path can be troubling to people and cause them to flee yeah here I think you're approaching timidly the whole question of designs temporal and let me praise it the way I would put it that design is not a thing and it doesn't have a being which can be possessed or even conceptualized as such and to say that designs essence is in its existence I see I understand existence to mean that design is temporally dynamic yes that it's thrown into a world which is not of its own choosing and once it's thrown into the world it finds itself projected beyond itself into possibilities of almost all of designs every everyday activities are projects of some sort or another even if as banal is driving to work and you know that you're driving to work in order to get there and you're doing that work in order to make a salary you make your salary so that your kids can get an education and in the final analysis design is always finding itself beyond projected beyond itself temporarily in its existence so there is this whole realm of possibilities that that were projected into and this is a key point to that Heidegger's notion of the self in being in time shatters the traditional metaphysical notion of a encapsulated subject this self is already temporally ecstatic temporarily outside of itself and this outside of itself is its entry into the world that design exists essentially if we can use that term in the world right right this is let's talk about that because Heidegger says one of the basic existential structures of design is being in the world design is always a being in the world and what does he mean by that exactly well if you compare this with Descartes in the meditations on First Philosophy there Descartes says that if we want to really understand ourselves if we want to understand what the subject is what the eye is then we need to extract it from its environment we need to remove it from its surroundings so that we can better see it for what it really is and the subject that he envisions is an extractable encapsulated subject he goes so far as to even eliminate the imagination as being part of the self because this is too closely allied to the sense organs and the impressions that they receive so heidegger's notion to subject contra this is that it's always within this world of projects of concerns that it's being is always at issue for it that it's always confronted with other beings it's always exposed to others to things it's always runs the risk of mistaking itself for one of these things it's embedded in other words it's embedded it's in its body and it's projects in its environment and ultimately and right on the earth and this is why mood is so important in being in time because mood is something that philosophy as a whole has overlooked and in being in time haider gives great pride of place to mood and if we think about this it's a mood is not something that we have at our disposal you can't make yourself happy on a moment's notice you can't make yourself sad it's something that comes over you from outside of you and for Heidegger this seeming passivity though this would be perhaps or the wrong term this passivity of the self is just as important as every other aspect of it what's the German word for mood stim stimuli and what does that mean yeah well it early I mean is it a musical metaphor yeah tuning attunement attunement yeah that's why I think a tune one would probably be a better translation of streaming than mood although that what he really does mean is mood but to understand our moods as a form of a tune Minh I agree with you that's one of the great insights of being in time that design is never without its mood and it's never without an atonement to its world and to others and I agree with you as well that this is one of the most under thematized if not if not non thema ties existence reality of in philosophy so it's true that it that that mood comes and then mood is linked to the body as well in many ways on it there it has also a bio rhythmical foundation yeah I think so and Heidegger has an understanding of the body which obviously can't view it as simply an object at our disposal or a tool that we use okay so we have design that's all always a being in the world the world the world is it's da or it's their design meaning literally being there and therefore we start from this presupposition that design is always situated right it's never it doesn't have this Cartesian capacity to be an abstract entity it's not extractable that's not extractable fear it's not never disembodied in other words so it's in the world we also said that it's temporarily ecstatic I mean we're projected into the future and the possibilities of the future but we're also thrown into a world and we're thrown in the world that was there before we got into it that comes with a whole baggage and past and we find ourselves already in in the world in the sense of having inherited we're tryin eyes did another work yeah so yeah we have a a being that is as you were saying earlier always outside of itself in one form or another and I and this so this temporal structure that design has is finite that's the that's the very important word that you just use there then it's a you could say to speak high degrees language design is transcendent it's always self-transcending but it's finitely Trent self-transcending now yeah what is the importance of finitude in the temporal equation well this stuff is on a theme I know to be dear to your heart death design doesn't have its death once again no one has their death our death is always ahead of us and so in being in time Heidegger speaks about our being towards death yeah what's that mean being toward death mommy we're bringing unto death I think was the old older translation time from Thoth we don't have death as a possession when deaths there we're not there this is a thesis you could find in epicures for example but what what had occurred does with this is say that as long as we're alive something is outstanding and what is outstanding is death but death is precisely what is most our own no one can die in my place people could teach my classes for me people can drink my alcohol for me but no one can die for me so this is inextricably my own and yet paradoxically perhaps I never have it I don't possess it what's most my own is this outstanding possibility death and that itself is a shattering or an opening of the subject of the self into this world yeah Heidegger calls death my own most possibility of being which is founded upon an impossibility of being because once you die you are you are no more designs who comes when with its biological with its biological death which I I don't agree with by the way I mean I I hired a gariand enough in many respects but I also don't agree with what he says that you repeated that no one can die for me someone can die for you i well put it this way in anthropologically speaking if you were to ask a I don't mean just someone heroic lead Iong so that I can live on no but it's you if you ask a believing Christian whether Christ's death on the cross was not an instance of someone dying you know for me then then or so that I could live right that board a part of my rejoining Christ would entail my own death so that I could rise again well exactly to heaven so even though Christ dies in my name perhaps I still have my own life to live my own death to die yes well it depends on how you read someone like st. Paul where we you know he says it Christ died so that we can live I get anyway we don't want to get into that it's not the only that's not the basis of my sinful died didn't he my skepticism about the fact that no one can die for me is it is that or no one can die in my stead someone can't die in my stead I suppose that it makes my death a completely individual event that separates me from others isolates me in fact Heidegger says that death is that which individuals design radically know right and there's different ways of interpreting these passages in being in time however one could say that through this relationship to death what I lose relationships with with others but I lose my inauthentic relations with others I no longer see others as replaceable beings or myself as one just like them in realizing my own uniqueness let's say my own singularity there's a transformation of the world as well and so in recognizing myself as an open self and opened the subject I'm actually able to entertain relations with others I'm already relationally disposed towards them as opposed to an understanding of the self that would be encapsulated and would have nothing could have no way of escaping itself in order to communicate with another so I think death is the possibility of being with others well I like it when you say it that way and I'll go along with that as long as we can account for the fact that in traditionally in almost all human cultures the event of death is one of the most communal collective social ritualized events that bring entire communities together around the mourning rituals and and so forth so 29 that yeah and this is where one would need to give Heidegger's ontology a little bit of an anthropological supplement but but that lets keep you know the focus on the on the point which is that this is astonishing that a philosopher of Heidegger's caliber because he was already well known by 1927 you know he comes out with this book being in time in which things like my being unto death my authenticity he also speaks about the call of conscience that if design is going to embrace its own authenticity it's going to have to hear this call of conscience which he says it's coming to me out of the very nullity or nothingness of my being and he speaks about anxiety and all these things that had such a resonance for these peoples which wasn't that long after World War one and very very unusual for you know high brow academic philosophy to be talking about these highly existentially charged exact offices this is what distinguished it from this world's phenomenology and in a certain regard it's it's concrete it's it's real it's about life and how we live it yeah before we move on from being in time by just scratching the surface is I mean the text is such a complex one and like I think that yeah in the question of the meaning of being the design analysis serves I think to emphasize the fact that it's really designs finite transcendence is temporality it's being projected beyond itself into possibilities that all this let's say these recessive absentia mentions that surround the moment of presence past future and so forth possibility instead of reality that this creates a distance it gives design a distance from from the immediate involvement with things and is able to disclose the world or the horizon of intelligibility give it access to what Heidegger will then call you know the being of beings so it's really through an analysis of design that he that he puts himself on the track to asking that you know that fundamental question now right and one thing I would add is that perhaps we speak a little too strongly if we say that design is embedded in the world because one of the things that had to go on to maintain is that there's also the world itself is composed of differences and distances his criticism of Nietzsche of Rilke and also of ants younger is that they're ideal figures they're ideal subjects are completely a piece of the world they blend seamlessly into that world and in so doing annihilate the world yeah Andrew after being in time heidegger's career takes a so-called turn or not everyone agrees that there's a Heidegger one and Heidegger two but clearly something happens in the 30s he has that moment where he's he embraces the National Socialist Movement becomes the rector of Freiburg University and that ends up in a kind of disaster and do you agree with the kind of orthodoxy that there is a turn in thinking somewhere in the late 30s early 40s well yes and no it depends what's that what's at stake in this notion of a turn on the one hand I would say no insofar as Heidegger's thinking has always been from the outset to the very end thinking of the kobra longing of let's say design or the mortal and being a thinking of this difference or spacing on the other hand there is a definite shift in his thinking in the thirties and we could even speak more specifically and say around the time of his contributions to philosophy the byte Ricketts our philosophy here I think what becomes more prominent more emphatic than before is the role of history in the text that I translated for seminars Heidegger says that being in time lacked a sense of a proper sense of of history in these works of the 30s Heidegger develops a what he calls it being historical thinking and here the history of philosophy of metaphysics is no longer thought so much as the history of an error or the history of a lie or a force of sedimentation that covers over a truth that has to be exposed again or brought to light instead he sees this covering if you will of metaphysics as essential to question of being itself in other words being is no longer thought of without concealment this wasn't this isn't the opposite of what he says and being in time in anyway but the emphasis changes the emphasis changes also away from design as the very center of the focus to you know being as such no because it gets away from the existentialist at least the lexicon being in time right yeah where has nothing necessarily the issue as you were saying there's a certain subjectivism you could say of that he wants to avoid the whole apparatus of being in time the structure of the book itself is thoroughly metaphysical we could say a girl wrote very few books what he published were often essay collections lectures slightly revised lecture courses but apart from being in time maybe caught in a problem of metaphysics there's not much that's very interesting about Heidegger is that even being in time he was forced really to come out with it in order to get tenure or demand what we would also and you get to get a post and philosophy and a lot of it were based on his lecture notes and yeah he very rarely did he actually write a book as such and in that sense I think he's a very pure philosopher in the Socratic tradition he's not a thinker of the book no no philosopher there is some place where he says if socrata it's a it's a mystery why all thinkers after Socrates were fugitives into the art of writing and that Socrates was like the only pure philosopher who philosophized strictly by word of mouth or in the lecture or in the room or the marketplace I go or not and I think Heidegger had he had his druthers he wouldn't never have published a book as such but nevertheless was possible fortunately we have all those lectures as you know one other thing that I think needs to be mentioned in regards to this turn in his thinking is that he changes his conception of being being for him comes to be a matter of withdrawal and okay let's specify before we go on yep the way I understand it from being in time being comes to mean designs ecstatic projection ality that enables design to come back from the visa the kind of apps these regions of abscess of absentia lism and and render present things as they are and it's not being is not something that's out there you know on its own it's something that as you were saying it in the in the opening it's in radical relation to and it's designs relationality the things that discloses realm of being so how does it differ later well it is since it becomes more radicalized more finite even because designs opening onto the world has the risk of sounding like a willful endeavor as though design were completely in control and that design determined being in some way and what had the transition or the change in heidecker's thinking is to see that there's also a movement on the part of being that's beyond designs control so you have these two interrelated implicated movements simultaneously this idea of withdrawal just briefly put if if you think of being as a as a whole or as a single sphere or in almost per minute Ian's manner then there would be no differences no space no room in that withdrawal in the first moment makes the world of differences and distances possible by evacuating that area but this the shift that we have to understand is that withdrawal is actually a way that the things exist they exist in this withdrawn manner which is to say they exist partially they are not whole or discrete or encapsulated things but everything itself is opened into this space of the world and that's sort of what Heidegger thinks under the addition of withdrawal which is incredibly technical moment or intense moment of this contributions to philosophy yeah and but I think Heidegger Ian's often have a tendency to mystify you know the retreat of being the withdrawal of being right I like the way you put it that the the withdrawal of being is something that is constitutive of things themselves in the world in other words there's something about a tree or another person or another where I cannot fully appropriate right there is a distance there there is a certain resistance right and that atom and an opacity no right and that same distance is what allows us to relate to the tree really exactly to concern us it's like jean-paul Satre said I think it was in Being and Nothingness he says it if the chessboard were completely full you could never have a game it's only when you take a thing that you have a hole now all these things become possible because there's a void there and likewise you know in our relation to things if there's not a distance we could never know them as what they are and being is nothing but knowing things as what they are on the point I'm making about withdrawal is that it's not that we take away a few of the pieces and that whole pieces remain it's that all of the pieces can't be thought of as complete or encapsulated pieces withdrawal is permeates them exactly and this is where I think his origin of the work of art which is a fundamental essay on aesthetics I think he points out I mean that's very difficult for people to read and the language is very technical but I don't know if I would be over trivializing to just say that for Heidegger artworks remind us that things are not radically available totally at our disposal but that the artwork shows that no matter how much I try to grasp the whatever's is being painted or you know the statue that there's something that draws away from me and it's the power or the beauty of it is precisely the fact that I cannot hold it in my hands in a tangible way and and there you know it it with it gives itself on the one hand but gives itself as you say partially and any artwork that doesn't throw into relief the extent to which things are available to me only in this shrouded what shrouded might be the wrong metaphor but most utilitarian manner possible that everything would be either a tool or a stone that idea is shattered yeah and you know since these discussions go really quickly Andrew and we don't have that much time left we might why don't we just take this into the question of technology with which we began at the beginning at least with my opening remarks that if the if the artwork is something that shows how things have as you say this lets with drawing distance technology as Heidegger understands it in his famous essay the question concerning technology wants to insist that everything is radically available and disposable to us right now and how to grab use this as the culmination of metaphysics metaphysics as the history of philosophy has constantly misunderstood being if you could say it's it's overlooked this partial character of existence that we've just mentioned and seen complete presence that becomes a pasta sized into now you have to explain to our listeners what that word means called we're not in the classic high pasta sighs well Oh theological Irma let's say that things become reified into that means objectify every objectified into well objects yeah that are held to be discrete entities and that technology is the culmination of this transformation in things into sheer presences right we're in technology everything becomes completely available at our disposal Heidegger talks about it in terms of ordering and availability and the internet is the perfect example of this everything is available everything is at our disposal and everything is replaceable if you lose a watch you can buy the exact same watch so I you know that I share your unease at that my technology modern technology is technically especially contemporary biotech nnessee but I don't think a lot of people share are the kind of anxiety and so if I were to play the devil's advocate again say well what's wrong with using our ingenuity as human beings to create a technology that gives us complete mastery in possession of the earth that puts all of its resources makes them all available for our own ends which we always want to believe our good ends and what's wrong with substitutability and the endless availability of things for our own consumption well this is an age-old response that has to do with the disenchantment of the world we could say that what we find so agreeable about existence is the singularity of it the uniqueness of it the specificity of it and it's precisely that's a sufficiently in singularity that paradoxically enough we're able to share with others right through this communication with others and technology the chata car also thinks is part a way of thinking or approaching the world that thinks in terms of values when one something has a value or a price it becomes replaceable by something else of equal value or equal price drains the world of the varying distinctions that we would like to which we attribute to it so if we say that God for example is the the greatest being then we've degraded God by making him or it comparable with other things the same idea holds for technology where technology does to the world it makes our existence into a homogenized prepackaged existence and takes the surprise of the world away from us we should make it clear that you know how Heidegger was not a Luddite and murder he wasn't you know the Unabomber his critique of technology was also part of his reading of the history of philosophy as you said of history of metaphysics and he believed that every major epoch in Western history had a certain mode in which things reveal themselves to design and that somehow in with modern metaphysics Descartes and so forth that the technology was a that the essence of technology which he called tech Nyssa T was an epochal way in which things revealed themselves to reveal themselves to us as always at our disposal and our there to be brought into a system of a network of circular endless circulation and availability and so forth so this he said the the way that things reveal themselves are not dependent upon us they're dependent on what he called the history of being whatever that means and that there's no way to fight against the evil the evils of Technology or excesses of it and we're gonna have to wait for the era to change and somehow things will show a different side of themselves to us than they do it as they do at present one other thing I'd point out in regards to the technology issue is that the technological approach shortchanges ourselves as well we place ourselves in the position of mastery and we have to be that master everything is at our disposal everything is according to our will the history metaphysics is the history the will for Heidegger and in so doing that we eliminate from our own reality all the wonderful passions path the OI and passivity zuv of life that are so pleasurable yeah I think something much more sinister and diabolical has been going on in the last decade that Heidegger obviously when he died in 76 I believe probably couldn't have suspected but it's the way that the this in framing of all things is not just the world of objects or ourselves as consumers but now with biotechnology the way in which we're pen at going right into the very fabric of life and presuming again to be the total masters and play God in fact that's what out Heidegger understands technology it's just rendering concrete the power of God in in terms of this the means of production and to do this with life itself with the biotic and to without anyone really and the moral issues surrounding the you know biotechnology are so primitive compared to the complexity of the phenomena I mean I was reading this morning that some scientists have found ways to extract some cells without compromising embryos and so this is supposed then this is supposed to solve the moral problem that it's all about you know embryos about aborting embryos or not aborting this is not the issue my friends the issue is who the hell are we to go into the you know the very constituency of the biotic and start playing around and recreating the world as if you know we are the masters of of that destiny we know that we're not and yet there is a dr i what's so profound for me of Heidegger think about technology is that there's a drive there of which we are not in control and for the most part we're not even aware and it might be I think one would have to conjugate it with Freud's notion of the death Drive to maybe do full justice to the demonic element of contemporary technology yeah a hundred thinks that's out of Nietzsche this is one of his strongest criticisms of niche and I agree that his reading of Nietzsche isn't he's not necessarily hostile to nature because nature cannot be the complete decimation of philosophy or of of being his his views can can't reflect that because that would be the end of being and being is never holy present or wholly absent in this manner but to return to this this point regarding technology it's as if we were trying to secure ourselves so much from anything different from us that we end up erecting so many mirrors around us only to reflect back ourselves it's if we were going to add something from Freud I would also add a theorization of narcissism because it seems that we want to be all that there is and there will be nothing outside of us no others it will be a program of complete to modernization and this is in the sense what people fear in globalization as well I think Heidegger is a precursor to the thinking of that I agree with it I would with you there what do you think he meant that I began with the sentence that I came across in the preface to the second edition of Canton the problem of metaphysics right where he's giving all the all the kind of bibliographical information in the years and then there's just that one sentence which I read at the beginning that just pops out of nowhere the growing and unacknowledged anxiety in the face of thinking no longer allows insight into the Oblivion of being which determines the age yeah that's a that's a heady sentence isn't it and I was the preface to the third edition of Scott in the problem metaphysics also says that the reading of philosophers has to be a violent reading if it's to do any justice to them so when I said that he had a hostile rewrite of nature that's what I meant but to return to this this question of what Heidegger means by thinking here for him a thinking is a matter of letting yourself be exposed to something beyond you in some way it's not a matter of conceptualizing or comprehending in a sense of completely grasping something within a hand literally the word comprehending would would entail but instead of letting yourself be exposed to the matter of thought letting yourself be attuned to that matter and not dominating it letting it be we could say to use another category in term what what I think he's getting at in that sense the pithy sentence you read is that comprehension cannot comprehend what was already is the abyss of being or the the Oblivion of being we also speaks about the anxiety in the face of thinking do you think that there's this anxiety in the face of thinking today oh certainly especially anyone who's in philosophy is faces this because philosophy is precisely not a matter of calculation or or reckoning it can't provide certain answers it can't provide results anytime it does it's it's not thinking any longer thinking's not it's just we could look at being in time the it's a book of thought and it all it wants to do is figure out how to ask the question what is the meaning of being and it can't even get a third of the way there right that's that's thinking thinking is a failure it can't be useful and this anxiety in the face of thinking of I have to ask you because I read this brilliant essay you wrote that's just come out in the research and phenomenology on Heidegger and terrorism where you have this where you talk about terrorism not just abstractly but also the you know the real phenomenon that we know as terrorism and and relate the age of terror to this anxiety that we might have that being as abandoned beings and that there's something ultimately terrifying and and what convinced me in your essay is that we we have we don't acknowledge the extent to which we are terrified by the era to which we belong and I would say that is because we are terrified that terrorists can can actually successfully spawn terror in our in our psyches yeah yeah definitely and one the thing I would add to that is that the effect of terrorism isn't in the actual bombings or the destructions that take place but in the the threat what terrorism can be understood as an ontological issue in a matter of being in the sense that everything is a potential target everything and everyone could be the victim of the next terrorist attack and that's very hard to wrap your head around and to do so requires no longer thinking of ourselves as separate beings that would then be destroyed by some outside force that would fall upon them or not fall upon them but instead it changes the very nature of being itself insofar as things now exists as terrorized which is to say that the threat of their destruction is constitutive of how they are and they're no longer stable objective presences things exist as terrorize that's a that's a really beautiful way to understand what Heidegger would call you know the abandonment of being but of the world no yeah I think the terrorism gives us an opportunity to think to think being is no longer discrete encapsulated entities but as threatened and as threatened somehow unstable destabilized open so since we only have just a couple of minutes left do you think it's through awakening a sense of terror or this or heightened awareness of the threat that hangs over the whole story the whole world that it's only through exasperated the terror that there can be a you know the possibility of stepping outside of the frame of techni city and maybe finding a way to allow beings to reveal themselves in other modes than just as available for our own consumption well yes I do and that's hard to hard to say because on the one hand it seems that I'm worse yeah that's obviously we don't mean that we need terrorist bombs or anything we're not it clearly we're talking about a tuning ourselves to this other sort of right Hydra calls this anxiety in the face of thinking right things get worse and worse and things seem bleaker and bleaker and I think for Heidegger they can always get worse and they can continue to get worse and that's what's so disturbing but because they can continue to get worse there's always also this possibility that they're not yet completely annihilated they're not yet completely destroyed there's still a call to responsibility and to find that to be sensitive to our responsibilities in this age is an uplifting thought I think and so within terrorism within the destruction around us there's still cause for I don't say hope that's wrong word celebration and celebration yeah the famous line of holding that Heidegger is so fond of there were that there where the danger is the saving power also DeRose yeah that we have to hope that that's true because we certainly have plenty of danger around us to to deal with that's the nature of danger yes

Channel: Philosophy Overdose

Views: 35,973

Rating: 4.7789292 out of 5

Keywords: Philosophy, Martin Heidegger, Continental Philosophy, Existentialism, Phenomenology, Heidegger, Dasein, Metaphysics, Being, History of Philosophy, German Philosophy, Existential, Authenticity, Existence, Death, Being and Time, Being-in-the-World, Das Man, Aesthetics, Heideggerian, Hermeneutics, Sartre, Sein und Zeit, Existential Phenomenology, Lifeworld, Husserl, Subject-Object, Non-Being, Nothingness

Id: BJB4nD4NqxE

Length: 56min 26sec (3386 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 31 2016