And it may be partially accurate , although I suspect O’Brien has an axe to grind. You’ll find an inverse correlation between enthusiasm for Heidegger’s philosophy and hostility and disdain toward him as a person. If you think his philosophy is revolutionary, you are less inclined to accuse him of a Messianic Complex, and you will view his disappointment with more sympathy. ‘Petty’ and ‘spiteful’ likely say as much about O’Brien as they do Heidegger.

Thank you for your astute reply.

My presence on this thread is indicative of how unsettling I find Heidegger. I don't know what to do with him. There are those such as yourself who find his writing enlightening. To me it vacillates between being pretentious and being wrong.

I can't understand what you see in his writing.

I've presented, in a disjointed fashion, a methodological critique of phenomenology stemming from its reliance on first person accounts. One can't help but draw a connection between this self-obsessive methodology and the self-obsessive personality of it's greatest advocate.

In the end I'll just have to walk away, repeating the mantra "There's nowt so queer as folk".

I see. You're impressed that some his best friends were Jewish. I know he, when 36 and married, was pleased to seduce his young Jewish student, Hannah Arendt. Perhaps you think that's to his credit as well. I know how he treated his mentor, Husserl, turning his back on him and even removing the dedication to him appearing in Being and Time in 1941 (putting it back in after the war). Didn't attend his funeral/cremation either. I wonder how his Jewish best friends would feel about him if they had the opportunity to read his Black Notebooks.

But I haven't referred to Heidi's anti-Semitism. You brought that up. Why defend him to me for his bigotry?

What is there to gain from a historical-biographical analysis? The basic facts of his history can be obtained easily enough. I don't think he was a villain in any case. He was simply someone who greatly admired Hitler, urged German students while he was rector to follow Hitler, was a member of Nazi Party continuously through the war, never condemned the Nazis, never condemned or even mentioned the Holocaust (except very briefly in a single instance and tangentially, comparing it to the industrialization of agriculture), never expressed regret for being a Nazi--that sort of fellow. For me, that makes for a pretty damn disagreeable person. You may not find any of that concerning, of course.

All that aside, tell me--what is the German being and its "secret mission"? Perhaps if I knew that I'd think him to be a hero.

As far as I am concerned there is no "cult of Heidegger". Perhaps Heidegger was, politically speaking, an idiot. Perhaps he was, on a personal level, what we now refer to as a psychopath or sociopath. I don't care about Heidegger the man, or Heidegger the Nazi, my interest is only in the philosophical brilliance of the early (not sure about the late) Heidegger.

There is a reverse cult of Heidegger, those who as I said earlier "make a weird fetish out of detesting him", and you may well just be its grand master. Have you Heidegger haters organized yourselves into a coven or lodge yet?

Just between you and me, authenticity and death are two foci of analysis in Being and Time that lead to confusion and, as far I’m concerned, can be removed without losing much from the heart of the work. — Joshs

I don't agree with this. I think those ideas are central to Being and Time. They may lead to confusion in some readers, but they certainly don't inevitably.

Tables and rivers are beings. In that respect, they do indeed share a commonality: being. — Xtrix

Are they? I had thought that primarily humans, and some of the other higher animals, are referred to as 'beings', and that tables are 'artifacts', rivers, 'natural phenomena'. Surely there's a distinction to be made there, isn't there?

For that matter, why is the term 'being' used for beings such as us? When scientists search deep space for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, they're searching for 'other beings', are they not? A search which has so far proved barren.

My presence on this thread is indicative of how unsettling I find Heidegger. I don't know what to do with him. There are those such as yourself who find his writing enlightening. To me it vacillates between being pretentious and being wrong. — Banno

This sounds a little whiny tbh. Like: I'm here because I thought there might be something to this and maybe Heidegger found that one doesn't have to push the ladder away at the end but you haven't shown me anything, but instead have failed me like everyone and everything else in my life.

Whyyy???

But I haven't referred to Heidi's anti-Semitism. You brought that up. Why defend him to me for his bigotry? — Ciceronianus

What is there to gain from a historical-biographical analysis? The basic facts of his history can be obtained easily enough. I don't think he was a villain in any case. — Ciceronianus

Like hell you don’t. At least be honest about it. You may be right , so why the bullshit posturing?

He could be everything you say he is . In fact, he has to be everything you say he is because you haven’t given us anything beyond the reader’s digest version of the nazi villain Heidegger , and you’ve admitted it.

Maybe a lawyer has nothing to gain from a historical-biographical analysis of a defendant. After all, their job is to create a simple overwhelmingly negative caricature of the person on trial, leaving out all ambiguities and redeeming features. You have done exactly that. Contributing to your cartoonish presentation is your choice to portray me as ‘defending’ Heidegger. Let me make something clear. I am not invested in protecting Heidegger from character assasination. I am perfectly open to the possibility that he had no redeeming personal qualities.
My beef with you really isnt about Heidegger. It’s about your laziness This isnt a trial, it’s a philosophy forum. Don’t give us the cartoonishly one-sided argument of a prosecutor. Play devils advocate . Do a little research. Banno quoted a biographer of Heidegger who displays the even handedness that’s lacking from your comments.
He doesn’t portray Heidegger in a positive light , but as a philosopher he understands his work and the historical context well enough to go beyond your superficial condemnation.

I wonder how his Jewish best friends would feel about him if they had the opportunity to read his Black Notebooks. — Ciceronianus

What about his Jewish enemies? Eugene Gendlin was a Viennese Jew who , at age 13 , just barely made it out of Austria alive in 1939. As a philosopher and psychologist at the University of Chicago, he avoided reading Heidegger for years because of his political activities.
After finally reading and embracing aspects of his philosophy, Gendlin wrote a remarkable analysis of the historical context of Heidegger’s actions. He didn’t excuse Heidegger or explain away what he did , but , like another famous Jewish philosopher who suffered at the hands of the Nazis, Emmanuel Levinas, he showed Heidegger’s faults to be symptomatic of a weakness endemic to European thinking. Rather than conveniently indulging in a pose of moral superiority, patting himself on the back for his righteousness, he looked beyond the individual to a climate of thinking common not just to the Nazis but to those who opposed them.

Here’s the first part of Gendlin’s article , plus the last paragraph:

“Jung offers deep and indispensable insights. I did not like knowing that Jung had said: "Hitler is the embodiment of the German spirit." The Nazis knew his views. Records show that they considered sending for Jung to help Rudolph Hess with his mental trouble.

Similarly, I had not wanted to know that Dostoevsky hated Jews, Germans, and Poles. He gave influential speeches in favor of the Panslavic movement. That movement was a direct cause of the Russian-French alliance and the World War.

What I heard of Heidegger's Nazi views made me decide not to read him at all. I read him when I was almost 40 years old. Then I realized that Heidegger's thought was already in mine, from my reading of so many others who had learned from him.

With these three we are forced to wonder: Must we not mistrust their seemingly deep insights? How could we want these insights for ourselves, if they came out of experience so insensitive to moral ugliness? Perhaps it might not matter if the insights were less deep. But they open into what is most precious in human nature and life. The depth is beyond question. The insights are genuine.

So one attempts to break out of the dilemma on the other side: Is there a way Nazism or hatred of other peoples might be not so bad? Could it have seemed different at the time? No chance of that, either. I am a Jewish refugee from Vienna, a lucky one to whom nothing very bad happened. I remember what 1938 looked like, not only to a Jew, but to others. I remember the conflicts it made in people. They could not help knowing which instincts were which. Many writers and ordinary people had no difficulty seeing the events for what they were, at the time.

So we return to question the insights again. But by now they are among our own deepest insights. We go back and forth: Nothing gives way on either side.

Did these men simply make mistakes? We can forgive mistakes. A human individual can develop far beyond others, but surely only on one or two dimensions. No one can be great in more than a few ways. And Heidegger did write of his "mistakes" in his application to be allowed to teach again at Freiburg (1946). He also distanced himself from the Nazi party already in 1934, long before most Germans. I have no difficulty understanding any person's mistake, and less difficulty if someone is highly developed in other ways. No human can have every kind of strength and judgement. On a personal level there is really no problem.

Why he was so silent about the mistake is also more than personal. It is the silence of a whole generation. I will return to this silence.

The problem is not about him, personally, at all. I pose a problem for us. The problem is, why his kind of philosophy---our kind of philosophy---fails to protect against this "mistake." That is the philosophical question.

His philosophy allowed for this mistake. It is therefore not just the personal accident. There is an inherent, systematic connection. These deep insights permit inhuman, racist views. To find the systematic connection, we must look exactly where these views---our views---are deepest, most precious, and not false but true. What was lacking at that most true point?

Something very important was lacking at the deepest point. We don't notice the lack, because when we read these writings today, we assume and add what is lacking.

I became an American when I was 13. As a child I had not belonged in, or identified with, Austria. I had been alienated in some confused and inarticulate way. I found I could really be an American, and I am one.

But, some European peculiarities remain from before. At the Heidegger Circle I laugh silently to myself, when other Americans discuss and share Heidegger's view that to be human is to dwell historically as a people on a soil. How do my fellow Americans manage to dwell with Heidegger on German soil?

My colleagues read this in a universalized way. For us, in the Heidegger Circle, the human is the same everywhere in this respect, and equally valuable. Humans are culturally particularized, certainly, but this particularization is itself universal. Humans are one species. They are all culturally particular. This universal assertion holds across us all, and we see no problem.

Indeed, after 1945 Heidegger writes of the dangers of technological reason on a "planetary" level. But it is reason, which is thus planetary---the same universal reason he says he had always attacked. (Spiegel Interview.) Heidegger's planetary view differs from our more recent understanding of human universality. The difference has not been much written about, so there are no familiar phrases for it. For Heidegger there is no common human nature which is then also particularized and altered in history. There is no human nature that lasts through change by history. There is only the historical particular, no human nature.

Humans eat and sleep differently in different cultures. They arrange different sexual rituals, build different "nests," and raise their young differently. In an animal species the members do all this in the same way. Humans are not even a species. So, at least, it seemed to those thinkers who entered into what is most deeply human.

To them, the deepest and most prized aspect of humans was the cultural and historical particular.

In our generation we easily and conveniently universalize the particularization. Not Heidegger. For him, what is most valuable is the necessarily particular indwelling in one people's history and language, on its land, and not another's. We change it without noticing, to read: any indwelling in any people's history is this most highly valued aspect.

**************************
Last paragraph:

It is partly the influence of his work in us, which now makes us unable to grasp how he could have failed to sense the nonrational universality of humans. Today, in Chicago, when we look at Louis Sullivan's buildings, the ones that created modern architecture, we wonder why he used so much granite. Why didn't he use just steel and windows?

To understand may be to forgive, but it is certainly not to excuse. Without pretending to lighten the horror, we need to understand why that tradition of thought also brought
horror. Only so can we think through what we draw from our immediate past. Only then can we recover the other past, right behind that one. We need both, to articulate our own, non-rational universalization of human depth.“

Complete paper:

http://previous.focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2018.html

Heidegger distinguishes between the being of things in the world and the being of dasein. We enjoy an additional dimension of being beyond that of a present at hand or ready to hand being. All existents are, by common definition or usage, beings. Remember that being is really a verb. So an existent is an existing in a similar sense that all entities are be-ings. We and the animals are sentient beings. Things like mountains, rocks and (probably) trees are insentient beings.

That is close to the distinction that I am getting at. I think there has to be a distinction between the verbs 'to exist' and 'to be'. So 'existent' or 'phenomenon' don't have precisely the same meaning as 'being'. Furthermore, living beings embody the dynamic nature of being more so than minerals and inorganic substances, because their being is something that is dynamically enacted moment by moment. That is why I question whether it's meaningful to refer to any kind of thing as a being.

Just between you and me, authenticity and death are two foci of analysis in Being and Time that lead to confusion and, as far I’m concerned, can be removed without losing much from the heart of the work.
— Joshs

I don't agree with this. I think those ideas are central to Being and Time. They may lead to confusion in some readers, but they certainly don't inevitably. — Janus

If we remove Heidegger’s analysis of authenticity, for me what’s left are the most remarkable features of his model, including his analysis of mood , interpretation and pragmatic ready to hand dealings with the world , being-with-others, the origin of empirical objectivity and formal logic. What the shift to the mode of authenticity does is take this pragmatic engagement and make it thoroughly self-reflexive. We become concerned with Being as whole
rather than beings. But as Heidegger says, only on rare occasions do we think authentically.

Interesting. I never knew what you though of Heidegger. He has useful things to say, I think that is not too controversial if you just read B&T with just a little sympathy.

But I agree with you, there is something in his use of being that can be potentially misleading.

Furthermore, living beings embody the dynamic nature of being - the fact that it's a verb - more so than minerals and inorganic substances. — Wayfarer

I can see the distinction you want to make, but nonetheless even apparently 'static' entities are be-ings. They are also, despite their apparent stasis, becomings. We also have dynamic non-sentient entities such as tornadoes and lightning.

To return to the subject of this thread, Heidegger distinguished between beings and being in his use of the terms 'existential' and 'existentiell':

Existentiell and existential are key terms in Martin Heidegger's early philosophy. Existentiell refers to the aspects of the world which are identifiable as particular delimited questions or issues, whereas existential refers to Being as such, which permeates all things, so to speak, and can not be delimited in such a way as to be susceptible to factual knowledge. In general it can be said that "existentiell" refers to a "what", a materially describable reality, whereas "existential" refers to structures inherent in any possible world. In other words, the term "existentiell" refers to an ontic determination, whereas "existential" refers to an ontological determination.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentiell

Heidegger distinguishes between the being of things in the world and the being of dasein. We enjoy an additional dimension of being beyond that of a present at hand or ready to hand being. All existents are, by common definition or usage, beings. — Janus

I don’t know that the being of things has any status for Heidegger except as a distorted and flattened modification of the ‘as’ structure’ of disclosure. Objective presence is deconstructed over and over in Being and Time. The being of things as presence implies extension, duration and self-identity. Heidegger shows such thinking to be in need of clarification.

I never knew what you though of Heidegger. He has useful things to say, I think that is not too controversial if you just read B&T with just a little sympathy. — Manuel

I've resisted reading Heidegger although quite a bit has filtered through in these debates and from various readings I've done.

Thanks although I think that differntiation obfuscates as much as clarifies. I prefer E F Schumacher's ontology in his Guide for the Perplexed - that there are levels of being.

It's not a thing, it's a quality — Manuel

A quality is nothing? Sounds like something to me.

I think there has to be a distinction between the verbs 'to exist' and 'to be'. So 'existent' or 'phenomenon' doesn't have precisely the same meaning as 'being'. Furthermore, living beings embody the dynamic nature of being - the fact that it's a verb - more so than minerals and inorganic substances. — Wayfarer

There isn’t such a distinction for Heidegger. To exist is movement and becoming, not static presence to self.

What the shift to the mode of authenticity does is take this pragmatic engagement and make it thoroughly self-reflexive. We become concerned with Being as whole
rather than beings. But as Heidegger says, only on rare occasions do we think authentically. — Joshs

It's seems to be true that it is only in self-reflective moments or with those who are highly concerned with living an "examined life" that authentic thinking commonly occurs. The concern with authenticity and being-towards-death are more aligned with the existentialist dimensions of Heidegger's thought, I'd say.
Some Buddhists are also interested in this aspect of Heidegger as can be seen here.

I don’t know that the being of things has any status for Heidegger except as a distorted and flattened modification of the ‘as’ structure’ of disclosure. Objective presence is deconstructed over and over in Being and Time. The being of things as presence implies extension, duration and self-identity. Heidegger shows such thinking to be in need of clarification. — Joshs

I know of one interpreter of Heidegger, Blattner (Heidegger's Temporal Idealism) who seems to be interpreting all being for Heidegger as "being-for-us" only, which could be seen as a form of idealism. Dreyfus, if I remember right, sees Heidegger as a realist in the sense that he acknowledges the mind-independent existence of things. It is quite a while since I read Being and Time, Blattner, Dreyfus and others so it's hard for me to judge now without going back to the text (which I don't have time to do); do you see the Heidegger of B & T as an idealist?

That a colour is not a "thing" does not mean a colour is nothing. A colour is a quality.

Again, do people say "I saw a red" or "I'm seeing a yellow"? No, because they colours aren't recognized as things.

I've resisted reading Heidegger although quite a bit has filtered through in these debates and from various readings I've done — Wayfarer

Why resist?

Thanks although I think that differntiation obfuscates as much as clarifies. I prefer E F Schumacher's ontology in his Guide for the Perplexed - that there are levels of being. — Wayfarer

I remember reading that book thirty years ago when I was interested in Gurdjieff's ideas. If memory serves, Schumacher was heavily influenced by Gurdjieff and references him in that work, but I could be confusing it with another book. Gurdjieff certainly thought there were different levels of being in terms of ever more subtle "energies".

The concern with authenticity and being-towards-death are more aligned with the existentialist dimensions of Heidegger's thought, I'd say. — Janus

Being-towards-death certainly reminds many of Kierkegaard, but the feature of Heidegger’s analysis of death that I find valuable doesn’t rest on death as the end of life but death as the end of every moment of time. That is, the finite nature of temporality , the fact that each néw moment of time is the death of a previous sense of meaning. So I link death directly to the nothing , angst and the uncanny.

Dreyfus, if I remember right, sees Heidegger as a realist in the sense that he acknowledges the mind-independent existence of things. It is quite a while since I read Being and Time, Blattner, Dreyfus and others so it's hard for me to judge now without going back to the text (which I don't have time to do); do you see the Heidegger of B & T as an idealist? — Janus

You’re right about Dreyfus’s interpretation, but Dreyfus has gone out of fashion as a reader of Husserl and Heidegger. I suppose I’d could call Heidegger an idealist in the sense that I don’t believe that things have an indeed et existence for him. But neither do contents of the world conform to faculties of mind ala Kant. Instead , world and self mutually form each other , which makes for an odd kind of idealism.

Being-towards-death certainly reminds many of Kierkegaard, but the feature of Heidegger’s analysis of death that I find valuable doesn’t rest on death as the end of life but death as the end of every moment of time. That is, the finite nature of temporality , the fact that each néw moment of time is the death of a previous sense of meaning. So I link death directly to the nothing , angst and the uncanny. — Joshs

Exactly! Death for Heidegger doe not represent (merely) the end of life, but the closing of of possibilities; hence angst and the desirability of living authentically in full acknowledgement of that closing off.

You’re right about Dreyfus’s interpretation, but Dreyfus has gone out of fashion as a reader of Husserl and Heidegger. I suppose I’d could call Heidegger an idealist in the sense that I don’t believe that things have an indeed et existence for him. But neither do contents of the world conform to faculties of mind ala Kant. Instead , world and self mutually form each other , which makes for an odd kind of idealism. — Joshs

If I understand correctly Heidegger rejects the notion of the transcendental ego as constitutor of the self and world. The mutuality of self and world as an interactive process then would seem to lead to the possibility of enactivism. Whitehead also seems to have run with this kind of idea in a very different way, and his philosophy also seems to be either an odd form of idealism or not really idealism at all. Not realism as usually understood, either. Maybe relational realism.

There isn’t such a distinction for Heidegger. To exist is movement and becoming, not static presence to self. — Joshs

I wouldn't say that to exist means becoming and not stasis. In that case we're in the being/becoming distinction again, only taking the side of the latter. But Heidegger rejects that as a false choice, as you know. Not sure what you're saying here.

Are they? I had thought that primarily humans, and some of the other higher animals, are referred to as 'beings', and that tables are 'artifacts', rivers, 'natural phenomena'. Surely there's a distinction to be made there, isn't there? — Wayfarer

In ontology, being is not restricted to human beings or sentient beings. It's a matter of terminology. We can make all kinds of distinctions, and we do. But within this context, we're talking about what's usually thought of as the most "universal" of concepts.

That a colour is not a "thing" does not mean a colour is nothing. — Manuel

If it is, it is a being. If it's not nothing, it's something. True, it's not a "thing" like a rock or tree, but neither is justice and sound and numbers.

Again, do people say "I saw a red" or "I'm seeing a yellow"? No, because they colours aren't recognized as things. — Manuel

Come on. Do we really have to continue this? "I'm seeing red," "I see green" gets used all the time. "The sky is blue," "I like the color yellow," etc. If it's not nothing, it has being. Qualities have being, numbers have being, sound has being, light has being, love has being, a unicorn has being. This is a matter of nomenclature. If you define "thing" or "being" as something physical, then none of this is true. But as I've stated many times, this is not what I mean when I'm discussing beings. Think of it as "phenomena," if you like. There's all kinds of phenomena -- mental phenomena, physical phenomena, for example -- a common distinction in our culture.

All have being.

I'd like to redirect the conversation to something I pointed out earlier. I'm surprised no one took issue with it. It's crucial to the OP and (my reading of) Heidegger:

The pretence is that somehow being - treated apparently as a thing - is structured by time.

Explain that. — Banno

Being is not treated as a thing. I would also take issue with "structured" by time. Being is interpreted by human beings, and human beings, in Heidegger, are "embodied time" -- what he calls temporality. The claim is that in the West, since the Greeks, being was taken as phusis and, later, ousia -- that which is constantly present.

The "present" in this case is simply an interpretation based on one mode of the human being: what he calls the "present-at-hand." This is the mode we're in, for example, when things break down, the case he uses being a piece of equipment, like a hammer. When the hammer breaks down, or a doorknob sticks, or something goes wrong with our car, we look at these entities differently -- more theoretically, one could say -- than we do when using this equipment (what he calls the "ready-to-hand"); in this latter case, the hammer "withdraws"...or the door, or the car. They go unnoticed, they're absent. I like the example of breathing. It's constantly going on, but how often are we aware of it until something negative happens? Most of the time, breathing is absent -- we're unconscious of it, take it for granted; it withdraws. So in this ready-to-hand mode, these examples are not present-at-hand objects -- they're transparent to us.

We notice the hammer as an object with properties (weighing one pound, being of x length, having this color and shape, etc) usually when it breaks down or we're in a more theoretical (or "scientific") mood. This is the present-at-hand mode of being. It's this mode, Heidegger argues, that is the basis for the West's interpretation of being as "constantly present," as idea, ousia, substance.

This may all be uninteresting or unconvincing, but I hope it at least clears away some misconceptions. Again, being is not an entity/thing, as odd as that sounds -- and Heidegger is not offering an interpretation himself, for example that being = time.
-----------

I think this sums it up well enough. Plenty to dive into there.

I'm not convinced of that, though I do agree that this has to do a lot with nomenclature, but I'll drop it. I guess we're not connecting here. Just like you get intense in political stuff, I get involved in these type of arguments. :cool:

I wouldn't say that to exist means becoming and not stasis. In that case we're in the being/becoming distinction again, only taking the side of the latter. But Heidegger rejects that as a false choice, as you know. Not sure what you're saying here. — Xtrix

In the quote below, Heidegger equates occurrence with existing , and existing with transition( elsewhere he uses the word ‘becoming’), and transition with the structure of temporality. Where does stasis fit in here? If stasis is equivalent to objectively present , enduring , subsisting , self-identical, inhering, then he is determining stasis as an inadequate way to think about existing. Becoming isnt at one pole and stasis at the other, and neither is becoming the sequential movement of things becoming present ( stasis) in time and then passing away. Rather , the becoming of time is a single unified occurrence that is future, present and having been in the same moment. There is no room for stasis or objective presence here.

“Thus thrown in this throw, man is a transition, transition as the fundamental essence of occurrence...Man is enraptured in this transition and therefore essentially 'absent'. Absent in a fundamental sense-never simply at hand, but absent in his essence, in his essentially being away, removed into essential having been and future-essentially absencing and never at hand, yet existent in his essential absence. Transposed into the possible, he must constantly be mistaken concerning what is actual. And only because he is thus mistaken and transposed can he become seized by terror. And only where there is the perilousness of being seized by terror do we find the bliss of astonishment-being torn away in that wakeful manner that is the breath of all philosophizing.”(Heidegger 1995)

Heidegger is not offering an interpretation himself, for example that being = time. — Xtrix

He certainly is, if you are referring to the ontological understanding of the being of Dasein.

“We defined the being of Da-sein as care. Its ontological meaning is temporality.”
“ The task of the foregoing considerations was to interpret the primor­dial totality of factical Da-sein with regard to its possibilities of authentic and inauthentic existing and to do so existentially and ontologically in terms of its very basis. Temporality revealed itself as this basis and thus as the meaning of being of care. Thus what the preparatory existential ana­lytic of Da-sein contributed prior to setting forth temporality has now been taken back into temporality as the primordial structure of the total­ity of being of Da-sein.”