"Philosophize This" Podcast

Check out this outstanding and enjoyable philosophy podcast. It starts with the Presocratics and the latest podcasts deal with Marx and Kierkegaard. philosophize this

Check This Out

Twelve lectures titled "The Heidegger Sessions with Taylor Carmen." Check out the link under "Heidegger Resources."

This is a test, it is only a test... It's been over a year since anyone actually posted. But hopefully the amazing resource list here is still helping wandering minds eager to learn... Best wishes for 2013!

Bye Bye Berkeley

All good things must come to an end. The Do It Yourself Scholar has posted that many of the courses that Berkeley has maintained on its podcast site over the years have been removed. As far as I can tell, all the Dreyfus podcasts are gone. It was interest generated by those podcasts that originally brought us here so it is very depressing to see them just disappear.

UPDATE: The Dreyfus courses can still be found on Berkeley's iTunesU page.

FURTHER UPDATE: The Do It Yourself Scholar is now reporting that "due to an overwhelming outcry from viewers across the globe" Berkeley is going to make more of its retired courses available once again.

A Gathering Place

Over the last few months our list of podcasts has been greatly expanded. This post is intended to solicit recommendations that we can add to the growing list. Following the lead of Dreyfus and his Philosophy 6 & 7 courses the concentration of podcasts listed deal with philosophy, literature, art, and film. Please use the "comments" for this post to recommend any podcasts that you think would make good additions. This would also be a good place to review any of the podcasts we have listed or start a dialogue concerning them.

Dreyfus and Kelly start a blog

Professors Dreyfus and Kelly have started a blog associated with a book they are currently writing titled "All Things Shining." Here is an excerpt from blog's first entry:

How did we go from the intense and meaningful lives of Homer’s world to the sadness and indecision, perhaps even the nihilism, of the current age? And how can we find the shining things once more?

Bert Dreyfus and I are just completing a book on this topic. It is called All Things Shining: Reading the Western Canon To Find Meaning in a Secular Age. As we put the finishing touches on the manuscript this summer, and as we prepare for courses on the topic at Berkeley and Harvard this fall, we hope to use this blog to lay out some of the themes of the project and to generate discussion among a wider group of folks.

You can find it at: http://allthingsshiningbook.wordpress.com/

Being & Time Revisited

For some reason I was clicking on bookmarks from yesteryear, and came across Sean Kellys Fall 2009 podcasts on Being & Time out of Harvard. Hooray! I enjoyed his lectures on "Later Heidegger" which were brought into the clearing on this blog last year....In my opinion, his presentation is every bit as good, maybe even clearer (in some parts) than what we got out of Dreyfus at Berkeley.

...Yet the distinction between Dreyfus & Kelly is justified only on the condition that this is kept constantly in mind: only by way of what Dreyfus has taught does one gain access to what is to-be-taught by Kelly. And the teachings of Dreyfus seemingly become more accessible when it is explained by Kelly...

Or so I hope. Just downloaded the first 3 lectures, and am ready to go!

http://my.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k65010

Poetry Corner

Every once in a while I just feel like posting some of my old poetry here on Whooshup, just for the fun of it. Last time I did, we got some return poetry, which was nice. I wrote this maybe two or three years ago.

When we trump the night.

That we should trump our given hands,
or strut and shunt our bones around,
when every tree and shrub remands
our justice to the frozen ground,

or grab the gladness we denied,
or false remake the words we lied.
Begone the mist! Away the veil,
that masks the many ways we failed!

Beyond the dormant, raised by straps,
that bind us to the stage above -
this escalator, ripped and gapped,
we solemnize, then quickly shove

to get beyond, to raise to heaven,
to greet and 'brace the law of seven.
The law of seven guarantees
a fitful state that we may sieze
(A fitful state, all crumped with light,
that lullabies the cruel night).


For when we get the eyeless gaze
and mystify our greasy bounds,
wrapped up in dusk's uneasy haze,
we faintly hear organic sounds

of stove-pipe dreams and treble sighs,
that grip our bones and tear our guise,
until that smoky, lurid night
enfolds our soul, our heart, our might.

What daemon halts us, calls our bluff,
and wheedles out an apish trust,
which all our inspirations hush,
and camouflages faith with lust?

To get beyond, to haul and push,
we back out sense, and clip the bush.
The bush that rises from the ashes,
frozen by our pearl white sashes
(Sashes earned in turning ground
to make the woodwork come around).

Letter to a friend on Christmas Day

Believe it or not, I have been mulling over a response since that last email you sent. Then a week ago, at a funeral, I determined that I should at least try (try again - I already threw away a couple tries). The problem has been that I feel totally inadequate to convince you of a truth I feel "to my bones" as it were, about christianity and how one properly enters into it.

And now, after months of hesitation and self-agonizing indecision, here is the result, just in time for the high holy days of Christmas.

"After a while they played at forfeits; for it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself. Stop. There was first a game at blind-man's buff. Of course there was." says Dickens in A Chrstmas Carol.

Dickens possessed a profound christian sensibility without ever bothering to mention Jesus directly in his fiction, a tradition that 20th century englishmen like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis emulated, and we who spout the holy name left and right as if it is in danger of being forgotten entirely should take note of them. Maybe the best way to allow others to be drawn to christian thinking is to give it a rest.

So Jesus was born about 2000 years ago and did so spectacularly well with his gig on earth that his purported stable-based birthday eventually preempted that most pagan and ancient holiday - winter solstice. The rebirth of the sun in the northern hemisphere - a fitting cultural deep meme for the one who told an elder emissary from the jewish religious establishment of his day "you must be reborn". It sounds so simple, but of course, if you bother to think about it (reborn?) it's incredibly complicated prima facie.

Even though many christians talk as if the "plan of salvation" is just a simple recipe you can cook up, with a little coaxing, the paradox (and there are paradoxes galore) is that for each individual, its working out is often not so simple. Maybe it takes a special time and place of execution, but I doubt it. Maybe it takes some special mental energy, but I doubt that too. The mental act, if we care to speak that way, is more a surrender than an achievement. We don't really have to worry about when and how we "become" a christian, as much as we ought to worry about whether we have "given up" being no more (and no less) than a human animal.

Nevertheless, I do not think the answers you may be pursuing are to be found in an intellectual exercise, and the above is as far into actual thinking as I think the merry season warrants. The real answers are experiential - you have to "live into" them, not think them, much less mentally appropriate them from someone else's recipe. Thinking is as likely to mess up the thing as to help it along. My best spiritual exemplars have had, as far as I can tell, an average to below average IQ. They are not particularly skilled or superior at doing anything, except being spiritual. They certainly would not understand modern philosophy, nor care much about it.

Just as our oh-so-postmodern strengths may include understanding complex shades of subtle discrimination between finely hewn arguments within shadows cast by deep philosophical questions, their strengths include humbly addressing themselves (often on our behalf) to a totally different world, one that is adjacent to our every-day world, but utterly set apart. This other world disintegrates whenever the analytic spotlight shines on it. It is necessarily mysterious - not because it cannot be understood, but because as soon as it is understood it no longer has power to help us find our way.

It's as if these untutored seers are sitting at a strange computer you and I have never used, entering something into it that we cannot fathom. The computer's internal operating system consist of the exact opposite of what normal computers do. Instead of manipulating logic, it manipulates an irrational connectedness between all things. But these operators I speak of, they would never use that particular word picture, because to them what they are doing is as old and traditional as the hills. What they are doing, they will tell you, is "praising God", "being in prayer", "communing with the Spirit", "talking to Jesus", "stilling their soul", "worshipping the Father", "intercessory prayer", and so on. These are activities many philosophers simply cannot stomach, and would likely hold in utter contempt as a dreary descent into a pedestrian skein of compulsive religious fallacy.

Ergo, I'll use the story of the three crosses of the crucifixion. The one in the middle held the dying Jesus, and the two on either side held two common criminals also sentenced to death, almost certainly because they committed murder and mayhem. Here's their conversation, roughly:

Left-hand Criminal: Aren't you Jesus, the G*d-damned f*cking Christ? Here we are nailed to three g*d-damned wooden crosses and you can't get us the f*ck outta here? What a pile of sh*t you turned out to be!

Right-hand Criminal: Hey, shut up, you g*d-damn loser. We got ourselves to blame for this - but he didn't do a damn thing wrong. Yo, Jesus, would you talk to the Big Man when you get to heaven, put in a word for me?

Jesus Christ: Sure man, sure. See you on the other side.

--Luke 23:39-43 my version -note that all the cursing going on here is quite attested, if not transliterated.

I don't know what this has to do with anything - I've just been wanting to share it. But it's my kind of salvation plan. All this guy asked for was to be remembered. Tell me if you noticed any other significant step in this crucial (pun intended) interchange. How hard is that? Of course, we don't all get the chance to be crucified right next to Jesus Christ, so it gets more complicated the farther away we get from that signal honor. And we are such a long way from believing that this crucifixion and resurrection story I just alluded to is true. We postmoderns believe Jesus died, the criminals died, their bones turned to dust, their gory execution got mythologized by a cult, and the rest is history. Here we are.

Until we go to a funeral. Now, I've been wondering what a postmodern funeral should be - one in which we philosophically skewer the mock seriousness with which even the oh-so-scientific moderns (still!) pretend to solemnize the onset of human tissue death and decomposition. Would there be dancing, laughter? Would we celebrate the banishment of all religious nonsense from the simple fact of organic death? What would we say about the 85-year-old departed - that she lived too long? But wait - perhaps a true postmodern would not even bother to gather the family, except perhaps to divide the belongings. Dice anyone?

It would be inexact to say that the very traditional funeral I attended the other day was for the living. The funeral was for the souls, the souls of us living organic beings, and the souls of dead and decomposing organic beings set loose at last. Religious people do funerals because it is an observance of a religious truth, one that is inaccessible to the modern and postmodern mind: that in this "other world" which religion and other practices, unlike science and logic, are capable of linking up to, souls survive. Do you have a soul? Not sure? Just ask it.

Imagine yourself sitting calmly in an armchair. Across from you lies a haphazard pile of bones and muscle and organs and skin, oozing blood and other fluids. The pile is fresh, but you know it cannot stay that way - it is going to start turning smellishly into compost soon. Then comes self-recognition - the mass of flesh is you, it is your "bone bag" of a body, opened up and spilled on the floor. Is that pile you? Ask your soul. If you have one, it will whisper "I am still here."

For me, the major redeeming grace of the postmodern perspective, and the christian existentialism it enables, is that it lets me retain such a simplistic belief, and hold it in my being without forcing my hand on any other matter, such as quantum mechanics, for instance, or genetic drift, social construction of truth, power relationships expressed in language, artificial intelligence, fractals, alien life, or interplanetary emigration. Jesus doesn't care, he's mainly about asking and receiving.

So here's the best witness I can give. Be really, really open. Pay attention to the people in your life who will never understand what Heidegger was getting at. Pay attention to people who remain stubbornly stupid about the profound, troubling, and utterly complex challenges facing the postmodern intellect, preferring that worn out dodge about us not fully comprehending "God's ways". For one thing, they are probably praying for you. Put another way, they are accessing the other world in which your soul does not die and go away, a world no scientist or philosopher can ever quite nail down precisely. They are putting in a word for you.

Their intercession may well lift you to an amazing level of spiritual strength, resilience and confidence, as I believe the nightly prayers of this now-dead, frail old woman of average intelligence, whose funeral I attended, in fact, did for me, and for my family members, spawning miracle after miracle in life's hidden linch-pin moments over the past twelve years. In this humble, broken way, the simple archaic practices, which we moderns and postmoderns alike disdain - we cast about for substitutionary rituals - are somehow shouting "remember me!" back in time 2000 years, trying to wedge their humble petition right in alongside the dying criminal who bothered to ask it, and who got the answer, "sure", when no logical processor could ever enable such a strange reconciliation between sin and salvation, between rejection and acceptance, between condemnation and forgiveness.

So my existential christian attitude is simply this: don't worry so much about it. Give it a rest. Accept the humility of the prayer. Accept the incredible freedom apportioned to each new christian, to reinterpret the asking and the receiving, like I have done, until it feels right for you. The recipe is, there is no recipe. And perhaps that can give aid and comfort to us postmodern watchers out in the border hills of our lumbering culture with its many parts.

SACREBLEU! Another Heidegger Book

Heidegger is splashing some ink on the pages of the New York Times once again. A "new" book by Emmanuel Faye has hit the English speaking shelves this month, translated by Michael B. Smith from the French, which came out in 2005. So far, I've looked at the forward by Tom Rockmore, and the preface and introduction by the author. The book evidently caused a bit of heat (une reaction au chaud) when it came out in France, and is expected to do the same in the English reading world. With a subtitle like "the introduction of nazism into philosophy", its not hard to understand why.

Faye worries that some intellectuals have been blithe apologists of Heidegger's nazi past. He claims that Heidegger's philosophical message was and continues to be the basis of national socialism. He would like to see his works removed from the philosophy section of the library and placed in the basement under "history, nazism, hate speech", marked with a government warning label He claims:

..."the diffusion of Heidegger's works after the war slowly descends like ashes after an explosion - a gray cloud slowly suffocating and extinguishing minds"

In other words, a Heideggerian "suicide bomber" has allegedly corrupted our youth, and continues to do so even from the grave. I am reminded of Mel Brooks' "Blazing Saddles", where a black sheriff is seen riding into town, as a crier shouts "the sheriff is a N****R !", only to be drowned out by the clapping of a bell. Mr. Faye feels that he is the crier in this case, shouting "Heidegger is a N**I !", having been drowned out too long by philosophical apologists grounded in their Heideggerian pixie dust.

After listening to the Berkeley podcasts for a couple of years, and reading and continuing to read things by or about Heidegger, I am not really convinced by the claims made in the first 32 pages by the Frenchman. So far, I have not found myself goose stepping around town, or sporting a toothbrush moustache, or knowingly(?) contemplating the inner truth and beauty of national socialism. Is there a danger that my not so young mind has been irrevocably corrupted by contemplating the existential analytic of the dasein? OK, OK, so I bought the damn book - I did have a coupon -and I may even get to page 33, before moving on with my idle curiosity.

Interestingly, the authors father was also a philosopher who had it in for Heidegger. And the son of Heidegger has done a pretty remarkable job getting a bunch of old lecture notes of his father on the shelves of bookstores across the world. The past, present and future all look very promising indeed for Heidegger enterprises, both pro and con.

A poem I wrote at this season, long ago...

November snow, a quilted white aphasia,
Scuttles past out-scoured features
and scattered faces in a man-made maze of
frozen glass and gritty concrete seizures.

Injected anasthesia grips the unreal city,
Smothers in a welcome chloroform of cold
My unanchored premonitions from a litany
Of autumn evils awkwardly foretold.

Wrapped in numb amnesia, snow, November's gift,
Soothes embattled senses, lures out illusion
To replace fragments of reality adrift,
As the intimacy of cold negates confusion

Gazing at the falling snow I am steeled
To weather now the world's insanity, congealed.

"Later Heidegger" podcast by Sean Kelly

Harvard Professor Sean Kelly has his 2008 course titled "Later Heidegger" available on audio. Kelly was a student of Dreyfus and gave a guest lecture for Dreyfus' "Merleau-Ponty" class.

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~sdkelly/SDK-4-PHI139.html

An interesting side-note is that Kelly is teaching the "Man, God,and Society" and "Existentialism in Literature and Film" courses at Harvard. Those are not currently available as podcasts.

Campbell, Dreyfus & Searle to mix it up in PodiCast Triple "Header"

Theory of Meaning[Campbell] http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details_new.php?seriesid=2009-D-67289&semesterid=2009-D

Existentialism in Lit & Film [Dreyfus] http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details_new.php?seriesid=2009-D-67124&semesterid=2009-D

Philosophy of Society [Searle] http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details_new.php?seriesid=2009-D-67309&semesterid=2009-D

A letter to Dave

Dave wrote:

Karl, I am looking forward to reading the Heidegger essay. I have very mixed feelings about Hegel, only because of the ways that contrary philosophers such as Neitzche and Engels turned it upside down, and, borrowing from Kant, created the idea of the "Hegelian Dialectic," which has been used for nefarious purposes. Yet I value his position of the subjectivity of history, and the idea that out of thesis and antithesis comes synthesis. I shall try to be open minded as I read the work.

Hi Dave,

Well, so philosophy is sort of my refuge. I admit I don't know a lot about Hegel. I need to read some of his accessible work. What mainly interests me is the 19th century rupture in philosophy between two camps. The first camp consists of the mainstream of european philosophy devoted to understanding what is "real" while the second camp consists of those, like me, who cannot get far beyond the "is" of reality - who, what, how does the reality we experience get assigned this "is-ness" by philosophers.

Most prominent figureheads of the first camp are the rational dualists (like Descartes who founded the subject-object duality and then placed us as the observer-subject and reality as any object properly observed), the rational empiricists (like Hume, who didn't believe in anything he couldn't touch or measure) and the rational idealists (like Kant, who synthesized Descartes and Hume by turning every "thing" into a formalized idea-thing). These three strands of thought, among other varieties of rational philosophy, then influenced the rest of history down to today, decisively.

The second camp arose in the following generations and consisted of the earliest existentialists, the thinkers who questioned the primacy of rationality, and who have served to subtly bend our current reality, where absolute confidence in science and technology is coupled with the most bizarre forms of irrational entertainment as evidenced by TV shows and commercials, music, the internet, etc.

So the critical difference is one's faith in the rational faculty. The earlier thinkers (and the majority of ordinary people today, including most of the scientists who dominate our view of reality) believe that rationality is somehow the basis of truth. Ultimately, that boils down to the statement that all truth can be mathematically expressed. Stephen Wolfram says that the universe is "calculable". It's his faith statement.

Existentialists do not deny rationality as one of the many human faculties that become apparent to any observer. However, they would claim that there is something deeper and more fundamental than a sort of mathematical truth, or logical order, in the universe. They would say that us living in the world is the basis for everything else. That is, lived experience presupposes everything else. This seems trivial, but it becomes a powerful antidote for an unbalanced way of thinking, in which rationality becomes the ultimate end instead of an occasional means. So what exactly is this alternative state, "lived experience"? Think of everything you do without thinking (note the paradox - by thinking about it you destroy the unthinking thing you are trying to evaluate). Things like breathing, walking, eating, sleeping, dreaming, humming, doodling, glancing to and fro, and most work, once you get into a routine. What is foremost in all such activities is not discrete thoughts, but rather vague feelings, intuitions, instinct.

Let's assume for a moment that moods, emotions, hunches, and vague feelings are the opposite from what we mean by rational. Reductionists would simply dismiss this premise, saying that moods are chemical alignments in the body and brain, and therefore perfectly predictable and rational if we could only measure them well enough. But nevertheless, in the ordinary way we talk about them, moods are rarely rational. Now, do moods come before thinking rationally, or after? Which is a more fundamental aspect of human-ness? It seems a person has to "overcome" their moods and feelings in order to get into a rational frame of mind. But once there, that rational person likely says that rationality must be the fundamental aspect of reality, the raw truth about things. Feelings are merely the fog that obscures reason. We come from this tendency to say the universe is built on orderly laws - it is a rational universe. The laws of the universe must have been in place before humans ever existed. Many religious folks then deduce that God must be rational, despite His many seemingly irrational acts.

The existentialist turns it around and says that moods are the fundamental basis for everything else. They would say, more or less, that rationality is a certain kind of mood, or better yet, it is a mood wherein the natural flow of human action has broken down. This breakdown picture, to me, is the key observation of the existentialists, and the one thing most non-existentialist, rationalist outsiders simply cannot see, or cannot accept. In this picture, most "thinking" - including their own philosophical thinking on either side - must be labelled as abnormal, as suspect, as a sort of tool of last resort when all else fails. This is the opposite of everything we are taught by our culture and education system. We are taught that thinking is good, that it leads to truth, that it is a precondition of success. But existentialists think (note the paradox of thinking about thinking again) that thinking is often bad. This is Dostoevsky's key insight, and why he is considered one of the founders of existentialism. In his novels, every one of his characters who thinks more than he/she feels, ends up with far worse consequences than those who feel more than they think! He writes about evil, and he recognizes two kinds - brute evil, which is what animals do as well as humans, and intellectual evil, which is uniquely human, but often drives humans to behave worse than animals.

I am thoroughly Dostoevskian, at this point in my life. Love is not rational. Beauty cannot be adequately defined and calculated. Hope and faith utterly defy reason. The best in us, as humans, emerges when we have not broken down and fallen into a process of logical thought. Rationality is an emergency measure. We must accept it, carry it around with us like some societal life preserver, and deploy it when lived experience and the natural flow it adheres to have met some difficulty too great to live through alive. And given the violence and uncertainty we see in studying history, that is often enough. For the rest, we should concentrate on existing well.

Heidegger and Pilate

I could not sleep, so I read an essay by Martin Heidegger called "Hegel and the Greeks" which would be impossible to summarize and is near impossible to read. But I would urge you to try it anyway, like cliff diving, but with less adrenaline.

Heidegger has taken a lot of flak, from all sides, for smashing our comfortable notions of truth. Many mainstream philosophers discount him for ruining their party. Many thinkers find it impossible to forgive his German Nazi identity in the 1930's. Most Christians, especially those who need the idea of truth to stay put, find his existentialism much too relativistic for their taste.

This is perhaps the most comprehensible paragraph in the essay:

But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history. Prior to a decision as to the historical correctness of the representation it is therefore necessary to consider if and how history is experienced, from whence does it determine its fundamental traits.

The above paragraph occurs 3/4 of the way through the essay, after he explains in painful detail what Hegel's philosophy of history consists of. At this point, he is getting ready to strongly, massively, disagree with Hegel. He does so in the following paragraph, which I apologize for in advance:

With regards to Hegel and the Greeks this means: all correct or incorrect historical statements presuppose that Hegel has experienced the essence of history out of the essence of being in the sense of absolute subjectivity. There is at this hour no experience of history that can, philosophically speaking, historically correspond to it. However, the speculative-dialectical determination of history brings with as consequence that it prohibits Hegel from regarding 'Aletheia' and its prevalence as the proper matter of thought, and this, precisely, in that philosophy that determines the "reign of truth" as the "purpose" of philosophy. Because Hegel experiences being, when he conceives it as the indeterminate immediate, as the determining and comprehending subject's posited. Consequently, he cannot disassociate being in the Greek sense, the 'einai', from its relation to the subject, and release it to its proper essence. This latter however is pre-sence [An-wesen], that which out of concealedness abides [vor-Wahren] in disclosedness. In pre-sence the unconcealed plays. It plays within 'en' and within 'logos', within the properly gathered bestowment [Vorliegen] - that which lets truth be [An-wahren-lassen]. 'Aletheia' plays within the 'idea' and within the 'choinomia' of the ideas, insofar as these mutually bring to appearance and so compose the existent being, the 'ontos on'. 'Aletheia' plays within 'Energeia' which has nothing in common with actuality, but only with the Greek experience of 'ergon' and its manner of being produced before us within pre-sence.

The passage above captures Heidegger's departure from the rest of philosophy. But it is essentially non-understandable without a whole lot of explanation. I can say that I just barely understand what he's doing. So here's the rundown on this bizarre paragraph:

1. One of the main ways Heidegger "does philosophy" is by picking apart the meaning of words (usually Greek, Latin and German words that ground the language used by philosophers). He does this with hundreds of words in hundreds of contexts all through his writings. In this paragraph he chooses the following words to pick apart:

1a. Aletheia is Greek and usually translated as "truth" - a pretty important word. But it is formed from the root parts "a-" meaning not or opposite from, and "letheia" meaning hidden. So the root meaning is "not hidden" or "unconcealed" and Heidegger makes much of this meaning. Our ordinary sense of truth is that truth is truth whether it is hidden or not - it stays the same before and after we discover it. Heidegger disagrees. He says truth is properly that which is disclosed, not that from which it emerges (hiddenness). This alone is a huge philosophical leap. It suggests that the only things we can say anything meaningful (or truthful) about are the things we have "brought out" of concealment - mainly by seeing them, and thinking about them.

1b. einai is Greek for being, that is, just being there - "is-ness" if you will. Heidegger extends this with the Latin word "presence" and characteristically splits it up for emphasis. The derivation of presence implies it is before (pre) perceptions come into us (sence). Something similar is behind German An-wesen but I can't figure out what. The basic idea is that there is something that comes before our awareness of something. Hegel thinks that thing is truth. Heidegger thinks that thing is more or less "hidden" until it hits us - then it becomes "disclosed" and is true. The rest of the word analysis seems somewhat less important, and the "choinomia" Greek word is a total mystery - even Google can't find it anywhere other than in this essay. Maybe it's a typo.

2. Heidegger saw himself as going against the entire train of philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Hegel. In attempting to overturn this locomotive, he had earlier help from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who also called a lot of the standard philosophical assumptions into question. The way Heidegger proceeds is to point out ways in which the basic assumptions everyone took for granted were subtly flawed. In this paragraph, he is attempting to shift the focus from logic, which is the ultimate outcome and triumph of Greek philosophy, made much more powerful by modern science, to that which is non-logical. That which is hidden cannot be made logical. In a sense, it is pre-rational. The logical and rational is what most certainly is not hidden. It may be difficult, but it's clear when you study it how logic works. Heidegger does not question that. He questions whether it is the foundational tool needed for understanding the truth. He suggests that we cannot understand the (disclosed) truth without looking at the (hidden) un-truth that lies behind it. This essentially boils down to mysticism.

Heidegger is following in the footsteps of Pontius Pilate, who when questioning Jesus at trial asked him if he was guilty of the obvious crime of proclaiming himself a king in rebellion to Rome's rule. Jesus answered that Pilate was correct, that he was a king. But then he extended this comment with a comment about truth, saying that he had come to demonstrate the truth, and that those who know or want truth should pay attention. So, his life is on the line, and he starts a philosophical discussion with the judge! We can imagine Pilate's snort, as he answers that bizarre statement with the rhetorical question "what is truth?"

I feel more like Pilate than Jesus. Pilate knew that truth was up for grabs. Jesus had an immense certainty that truth was in him, in his words and deeds. Pilate knew that given power, the governor of a Roman province could, in effect, fabricate the truth and make it stick. He could have, he tried to, let Jesus off alive. There is a real question whether if Jesus had responded "of course I'm not a king - anyone can see that!" he would never have been crucified under Roman edict. Pilate was fishing for something he could work with.

I also am fishing for something I can work with. The truth that Jesus represents feels much more like a Heideggerian un-truth, a truth that is not yet discernible, than the truth we associate so readily with scientific logic. Pilate, like so many spin-meisters of our own time, knew that logical truth was subject to manipulation. Pilate wanted an appearance of truth (for instance, Jesus did not appear to be a rebel king to him). Jesus testified to an as yet undisclosed truth (that his lived-out ethics of kindness, caring and self-abnegation would come to dominate the lived experience of the next two millenia in western history).

A new B&T Heidegger Blog at The Guardian.co.uk

Being and Time, part 1: Why Heidegger matters
a blog that showed up this week at the Guardian
Hosted by Simon Critchley

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/jun/05/heidegger-philosophy

Seeing Seeing

Daniel Coffeen has a podcast lecture series that looks at perception. Most of the lectures focus on the work of Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Bergson. The lecture series can be found at the following:

http://danielcoffeen.podomatic.com/profile?p=1

The blog for the lectures is here:

http://seeingseeing.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2008-10-07T17%3A36%3A00-07%3A00&max-results=7

Gimme some Truth

What is truth? We have so many in our culture who seem to know it in its totality and will hand it to us (if not jam it down our throats) if we will only grasp for it. It seems only fair that they are usually well compensated for doing so. With so much “truth” being peddled out there, it must be some lack in ourselves if we do not feel we have it in our possession. A moral failing perhaps?

What is often confusing is that these claims are often at odds (to put it politely.) We are expected to choose the “right” one and there we will find repose. Of course, that repose is disturbed if our neighbor chooses the “wrong” one. If he is Guelph instead of Ghibelline; Red instead of Blue. Then that neighbor is a very deluded and dangerous person; he is probably unpatriotic to boot.

How different could things be if we just admitted that none of us finite and mortal creatures could ever have possession of the totality of truth which so many now claim in word and deed? What if we gave up the project of totality? What if we could “think” in a different way? Would this lead us out of our cultural impasse?

I don’t claim to be any more than a novice in the study of Heidegger and I have struggled with him for the last year. I am currently on my third copy of “Being and Time” as the first two were thrown in the fire. Thankfully, the summer months approach. But through the study encouraged by our group I do believe that Heidegger was offering a solution; an exit from the age. At least an exit in thought.

Heidegger claimed that truth is not a correspondence (proposition to object guaranteed by the mind of God or some such transcendent source) by rather an “event.” This event occurs in the movement between my solicitation of an entity and what the entity reveals. The space between my solicitation and the entity is the “open region.” It is in this “open region” that truth might be glimpsed.

Heidegger says that we must make an insistence (solicitation) for the entity to reveal itself. We do not impose meaning on the entity; we draw it out through the solicitation. Bucking virtually the whole Western Tradition, Heidegger is asserting that the entity has an agency. It is an active participant in “the event of truth.” Truth needs both the solicitation of Dasein and the revealing of the entity. In “The Letter on Humanism” Heidegger will make us the “lieutenants of Being”; receivers of what Being discloses to us. In “The Essence of Truth” Heidegger goes back to the Pre-Socratics, he insists that every revealing is also a concealing. We can never get the entity in its totality. Something always withdrawals. This is the notion of “aletheia.” This is not to deny that we get some truth; the entity does reveal itself in some way. I don’t think Heidegger can be counted as one who denies truth. What he does deny is our ability to get the totality of the truth. So aletheia gives us both truth and error. It gives it truth in so far as the entity reveals itself and error in what withdrew in the face of our insistence. Truth and error make up “the event of truth.” This is unavoidable; no insistence can get the totality of the entity. Error is as constitutive as truth is in “the event of truth.”

The problem is that we embrace what is revealed in our insistences and forget aletheia. We forget that error is an essential component of our “truth.” Instead of “letting beings be” so they can reveal themselves in manifold ways, we crush them through the weight of dogmatic insistence. The problem is the forgetting: the forgetting that has run through the course of the Western Philosophical tradition since Plato. We fall in love with our insistences and forget that something withdraws. We forget aletheia. According to the “Essence of Truth” we must insist. But we do not have to forget that something withdraws from that insistence. We need to remember that we have the freedom to make other solicitations that will lead to a different revealing (and concealing.) This road leads to Heidegger's engagement with the poets.

What if we learn to “think” differently? To think and remember aletheia? We would not have to deny truth or make it relative. We would have to accept the humility of realizing that we cannot ever expect to come in full possession of truth and maybe we could learn to thrive in the freedom that new solicitations could offer. We would understand that all of our insistences are only partial and that unavoidably there will be error. How would this change cultural and political discourse?

It is fair to ask exactly what is this “open region” where the insistence and entity meet in the event of truth? To learn to think differently Heidegger tells us not to think of it as "what" or an "entity" at all. Heidegger calls it “the mystery.” Could we learn to treat this “mystery” with reverence and gratitude as perhaps the antidote to a dispirited and fractured age? Heidegger gives us these intriguing alternatives.

The Broken Circle

I have had an interesting experience the last couple of months. I abandoned my own discussion group. I suppose any attempt to compare such an action to real life begs bemused contempt. A boy running away from home; a husband from his wife; a captain jumping his sinking ship. Leaving a virtual reality is extraordinarily easy by comparison - virtual feelings and virtual loyalties run shallow, a truism Dreyfus, as usual, sniffed out early and loudly outed (see his book On the Internet).

So now I'll do the obvious Tysonian thing and discuss, in public, on my discussion's blog, what it feels like to reject my discussion's "on the basis of which" and like so many others, just break the wrist, and walk away.

First, the technical points to review. The Whooshup discussion was meant to draw in a crowd of Dreyfus' podcast lecture devotees as a sort of adjunct classroom. In Fall 2007, I sent polite email invitations to hundreds of contactees and got polite responses from many dozens, some enthusiastic. We held an inaugural meeting in Second Life, which drew a dozen or more curious participants, who got to converse, after a fashion, with Bert Dreyfus in the budding metaverse, the "basis of which" he has so presciently criticized most of his life. Our group, following a stumbling statistical tail curve, soon diminished to five, then four, then three. The three of us got to know each other too well, until we could describe each other's philosophical undergarments, and then I dropped out myself. I'm not sure if the other two virtual souls I left behind still virtually meet at the Garden Spot at EdTech to talk about Martin Heidegger (arguably the greatest philosopher of the last century), Bert Dreyfus (arguably Heidegger's strongest living proponent), and the constellation of worthies that surrounds them. Well, do you?

So that's the scenario. But why did I leave? Well, the easy answer is that I just got too busy. Things came up. Absorbing things, that turned out to be more compelling than virtual discussion groups. But that is only one aspect of the answer. Another aspect of the explanation, brighter but even more contrived, is that I left in order to find out why everybody else left. What did it feel like to the other critical members, who could have kept something afloat if they had really tried to, after they just stopped showing up every weekend? Because now I could feel that way. A little remorse, a twinge of regret at not getting in to a good philosophy discussion every week, perhaps even guilt (virtual guilt?). Now I can feel it too.

But there's a darker aspect too, and I'll dive right into it. Religion and politics, they say, are two things strangers cannot discuss safely. Philosophy is a sinewy matrix that encompasses and entwines religion and politics. One thinks to escape them in pure speculation but gets tripped up nevertheless, and I believe our discussion group mirrors, in our palpably bumbling and amateur way, the wider picture in contemporary philosophy, even in its academic stratosphere. Dreyfus, like Heidegger, is tangibly conservative. Rorty, like Derrida, is bona fide liberal. These labels are almost meaningless in terms of pure thought, but can we ever really escape them?

So if you want to follow my justification for leaving farther than it may justifiably go, and franker than it ever needed to get, here it is: Those Dreyfus fans who got as far as the "real" but "virtual" discussion group ended up peeling away by ideological idiosyncrasies. The buddhist Deleuzian left first. Then the Rortian liberal secularist. The existential christian Heideggerian (me) left (experimentally?) the ground occupied by the neo-pagan Heideggerian. The best of us, just a good man looking for a good world view, stayed to the end.

But is this the end? If we all faced our own deep religious and political insecurities, picked them up and laid them on the table along with all the "safe" but equally bizarre and ultimately ridiculous concepts such as Heideggerian authenticity, Neitszchean free will, Kierkegaardian commitment, could we still come together for continued discussions? Could we put humpty dumpty together again? I'm open to it.

I am grasping for a meta-narrative of this entire whooshup episode, acting inside and outside of it, myself as object and subject simultaneously. Some may find it embarrassing or distasteful, but it is clearly the only thing to be done beyond brushing our hands and walking away. It is a form of group analysis. A learning experience inside a failed learning experience: What is the "basis upon which" a freely organized high-level philosophy discussion group remains susceptible to such an apparently weak contingency as cultural alignment, and is it possible for the group disbanded by such contingencies to seek its explanation? Or better: Can the patient who has died on the operating table evaluate the cause of the mishap? Or better still: Can the society, the civilization, that tears itself apart in violent strife over political (who gets what) and religious (who believes right) issues, successfully analyze the "basis upon which" that urge to fight, or any other social tendency can be caught, diverted, subsumed, survived?

A Question Concerning Humanities

The New York Times reports that at colleges and universities across the country, the humanities are under scrutiny to justify their salt. "Technology executives, researchers and business leaders argue that producing enough trained engineers and scientists is essential to America’s economic vitality, national defense and health care." Evidently, what it means to be a human being is less important at the college level than cranking out workers to run our technological life-machine. Higher ed bean counters everywhere are engaged in a process of enframing a curriculum to respond to these perceived vocational ends. But what of the spirit of man? Where are these questions to be asked (and perhaps answered) if colleges and universities either cannot afford or choose not to keep the doors open to an examined life?

Heidegger in his essay on technology hears from Holderlin:

"But where danger is, grows
The saving power also"

Which he rephrases:

"...poetically dwells man upon this earth."

Is there a gate through which thought must pass for man to take a stand on his own being? Is it a question of thinking through a homeric gate of horn or ivory?

Heidegger concludes his essay "For questioning is the piety of thought". I would hope all this means that so long as creative thought is not entirely extinguished in society in general, or vacated by higher education in particular, that the relation between man and technics will continue to evoke something more than a simple ordering of a grocers ledger. And perhaps this questioning will occur less in a physical classroom, and more in the virtual environment.