Heidegger: we cannot talk about objective things, because we are always immersed in the objectivity we talk about. — Angelo Cannata
1) Heidegger: we cannot talk about objective things, because we are always immersed in the objectivity we talk about. — Angelo Cannata
Subjectivity needs to be conceived as something subject to change, becoming, so, we cannot give any stable definition of it. — Angelo Cannata
In other words, something similar to the Buddhist idea that we, or our destiny, are just an element of the whole universe, so that separated subjectivities are just our mental creation. This way, there is not me, you, they, but just the whole, with some kind of apparent distinctions not very important. — Angelo Cannata
You seem to be suggesting that this is not "true" or absolute objectivity, because the examining and analysis is always from a subjective point of view. — Janus
Yes, this is what I mean. — Angelo Cannata
I felt stuck, in my reflection, about the subjectivity being condemned to be impossible to prove, impossible to find evidence, impossible to share. — Angelo Cannata
SPIEGEL: Obviously, you see a world movement -- this is the way you, too, have expressed it -- that either is bringing about an absolutely technical state or has done so already.
Heidegger: That's right.
SPIEGEL: Fine. Now the question naturally arises: Can the individual man in any way still influence this web of fateful circumstance? Or, indeed, can philosophy influence it? Or can both together influence it, insofar as philosophy guides the individual, or several individuals, to a determined action?
Heidegger: If I may answer briefly, and perhaps clumsily, but after long reflection: philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinknig and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or for the absence of a god in [our] decline, insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline. — Heidegger, The Spiegel Interview
SPIEGEL: Fine, that is understandable. But we seem to perceive a new tone in your rectoral discourse, when, four months after Hitler's designation as Chancellor, you there talk about the "greatness and glory of this new era (Aufbruch)."
Heidegger: Yes, I was also convinced of it.
SPIEGEL: Could you explain that a little further?
Heidegger: Gladly. At that time I saw no other alternative. Amid the general confusion of opinion and political tendencies of 22 parties, it was necessary to find a national and, above all, social attitude, somewhat in the sense of Friederich Naumann's endeavor.
Only a god can save us. But we have a choice in how we are not saved - the principle he expressed there of return to a poetic and spiritual sensibility (@Wayfarer), or the one he embodied in practice, or, not to put too fine a point on it, a forceful politics of nostalgia and mythical reclamation. The poetic violence of fascism. — fdrake
Do you see any hints of mythical nostalgia or fascism in his distinction between inauthentic present to hand and authentic Dasein in that book? — Joshs
In all honesty, I've no interest in going down the rabbit hole, especially if you feel it needs to start in B&T. — fdrake
You can start it where you want, but I think you’re making the wrong case. Fascism is a simplistic explanation, which mostly ignores or misreads rather than properly addresses his work. The best philosophical arguments connecting his ideas and his political actions I’ve read come from Derrida and Levinas , both of whom avoid oversimplified notions of fascism. — Joshs
The revealing that rules throughout modern technology has
the character of a setting-upon, in the sense of a challenging forth. That challenging happens in that the energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is
transformed is stored up, what is stored up is, in turn, distributed,
and what is distributed is switched about ever anew. Unlocking,
transforming, storing, distributing, and switching about are ways
of revealing. But the revealing never simply comes to an end.
Neither does it run off into the indeterminate. The revealing
reveals to itself its own manifoldly interlocking paths, through
regulating their course. This regulating itself is, for its part,
everywhere secured. Regulating and securing even become the
chief characteristics of the challenging revealing
The dominion of Enframing as the essence of modern technology and the concomitant presence of the standing-reserve are
most clearly seen in the realm of machine technology, where no
object has significance in itself and where the "orderability" of
everything, from energy and statistics to machines and persons,
is all-important. It can be found also, Heidegger says, in the
sphere of science, namely, in modern physics. There again, the
object, otherwise the hallmark of the sciences, has disappeared.
In its stead the relation between subject and object comes to the
fore and "becomes a standing-reserve" to be controlled
In metaphysics too the rule of the essence of technology appears. Perhaps rather surprisingly, Heidegger finds in Nietzsche
the culmination of the movement of modern metaphysics begun
in Descartes and carried forward by subsequent thinkers. Standing within the modern metaphysical outlook, Nietzsche, in asking
concerning the reality of the real, found the will to be fundamentally determinative. The self-consciousness of the subject,
which Descartes established as normative, is raised in Nietzsche
to full metaphysical expression. Self-consciousness is here the
self-consciousness of the will Willing itself. The will to power,
fundamental for Nietzsche, is no mere human willing. It is the
mode of Being now ruling in everything that is, which must find
accomplishment through man
(Heidegger again)The essence of freedom is originally not connected with the
will or even with the causality of human willing.
Freedom governs the open in the sense of the cleared and
lighted up, i.e., of the revealed.23 It is to the happening of revealing, i.e., of truth, that freedom stands in the closest and most
intimate kinship. All revealing belongs within a harboring and a
concealing. But that which frees-the mystery-is concealed and
always concealing itself. All revealing comes out of the open,
goes into the open, and brings into the open. The freedom of
the open consists neither in unfettered arbitrariness nor in the
constraint of mere laws. Freedom is that which conceals in a way
that opens to light, in whose clearing there shimmers that veil
that covers what comes to presence of all truth and lets the veil
appear as what veils. Freedom is the realm of the destining that
at any given time starts a revealing upon its way.
What, then, was art-perhaps only for that brief but magnificent time? Why did art bear the modest name techne? Because it was a revealing that brought forth and hither, and
therefore belonged within poiesis. It was finally that revealing
which holds complete sway in all the fine arts, in poetry, and in
everything poetical that obtained poiesis as its proper name.
The same poet from whom we heard the words
says to us:
But where danger is, grows
The saving power also.
... poetically dwells man upon this earth.
The poetical brings the true into the splendor of what Plato
in the Phaedrus calls to ekphanestaton, that which shines forth
most purely. The poetical thoroughly pervades every art, every
revealing of coming to presence into the beautiful.
Only when insight brings itself disclosingly to pass, only when
the coming to presence of technology lights up as Enframing, do
we discern how, in the ordering of the standing-reserve, the truth
of Being remains denied as world. Only then do we notice that
all mere willing and doing in the mode of ordering steadfastly
persists in injurious neglect. In this same way all mere organizing of the world conceived and represented historiographically
in terms of universality remains truthless and without foundation. All mere chasing after the future so as to work out a picture of it through calculation in order to extend what is present
and half-thought into what, now veiled, is yet to come, itself
still moves within the prevailing attitude belonging to technological, calculating representation. All attempts to reckon existing
reality morphologically, psychologically, in terms of decline and
loss, in terms of fate, catastrophe, and destruction, are merely
technological behavior. That behavior operates through the device of the enumerating of symptoms whose standing-reserve
can be increased to infinity and always varied anew. Such
analyses of the "situation" do not notice that they are working
only according 1;0 the meaning and manner of technological
dissecting, and that they thus furnish to the technological consciousness the historiographical-technological presentation of
happening commensurate with that consciousness. But no historiographical representation of history as happening ever brings
us into the proper relation to destining, let alone into the essential
origin of destining in the disclosing coming-to-pass of the truth
of Being that brings everything into its own.
--All that is merely technological never arrives at the essence
of technology. It cannot even once recognize its outer precincts.
Therefore, as we seek to give utterance to insight into that
which is, we do not describe the situation of our time. It is the
constellation of Being that is uttering itself to us.
But we do not yet hear, we whose hearing and seeing are perishing through radio and film under the rule of technology. The constellation of Being is the denial of world, in the form of injurious neglect of the thing. Denial is not nothing; it is the highest mystery of Being within the rule of Enframing.
Whether the god lives or remains dead is not decided by the
religiosity of men and even less by the theological aspirations
of philosophy and natural science. Whether or not God is God
comes disclosingly to pass from out of and within the constellation of Being.
after Heidegger, certain metaphysical philosophers like Parmenides and Aristotle cannot be agreed anymore as if nothing happened after them. — Angelo Cannata
You know the 'Heidegger makes ethics subservient to ontology' line then, do you feel like it's that much of a stretch from there to fascism? I don't, I think the technology stuff is a fairly big enabler for his Naziism. — fdrake
This is a similar point, to my understanding, as Levinas' ethical charge against Heidegger - too much focus on ontology makes you forget the world. By highlighting that Levinas perhaps had an inadequate understanding of the ontological aspects of Heidegger's ontology in response to someone highlighting a political implication of his ontology, it looks to me like you're making a similar move to the one criticised. — fdrake
What's the problem with the rational common in a cultural relativist's view? — Enrique
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