Reviews for Basic Writings

The average rating for Basic Writings based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-06-10 00:00:00 Fredrick Norman I created a podcast version of this review, which you can find here: _______________________________ Every valuing, even where it values positively, is a subjectivizing. It does not let things: be. A Gentle Warning In matters philosophical, it is wise to be skeptical of interpretations. An interpretation can be reasonable or unreasonable, interesting or uninteresting, compelling or uncompelling; but an interpretation, by its very nature, can never be false or true. Thus, we must be very careful when relying on secondary literature; for what is secondary literature but a collection of interpretations? Personally, I don't like anybody to come between me and a philosopher. When a philosopher's views are being explained to me, I feel as if I'm on the wrong end of a long game of telephone. Even if an interpreter is excellent'quoting extensively and making qualified assertions'his interpretation is, like all interpretations, an argument from authority; to interpret a text is to assert that one is an authority on the text, and thus should be believed. Over generations, these interpretations can harden into dogmas; we are taught the "received interpretation" of a philosopher, and not the philosopher himself. This is dangerous; for, what makes a classic book classic, is that it can be read repeatedly'not just in one lifetime, but down the centuries'while continuing to yield new and interesting interpretations. In other words, a philosophical classic is a book that can be validly and compelling interpreted a huge number of ways. So if you subscribe to another person's interpretation you are depriving the world of something invaluable: your own take on the matter. In matters philosophical, I say that it is better to be stupid with one's own stupidity, than smart with another's smarts. To put the matter another way, to read a great book of philosophy is not, I think, like reading a science textbook; the goal is not simply to assimilate a certain body of knowledge, but to have a genuine encounter with the thinker. In this way, reading a great work of philosophy is much more like travelling someplace new: what matters is the experience of having been there, and not the snapshots you bring back from the trip. Even if you go someplace where you can't speak the language, where you are continually baffled the whole time by strange customs and incomprehensible speech, it is more valuable than just sitting at home and reading guide books. So go and be baffled, I say! This is all just a way of warning you not to take what I will say too seriously, for what I will offer is my own interpretation, my own guide-book, so to speak. I will make some assertions, but I'd like you to be very skeptical. After all, I'm just some dude on the internet. An Attempt at a Way In The best advice I've ever gotten in regard to Heidegger was in my previous job. My boss was a professor from Europe, a very well educated man, who naturally liked to talk about books with me. At around this time, I was reading Being and Time, and floundering. When I complained of the book's difficulty, this is what he said: "In the Anglophone tradition, they think of language as a tool for communication. But in the European tradition, they think of language as a tool to explore the world." He said this last statement as he reached out his arm in front of him, as if grabbing at something far away, to make it clear what he meant. Open one of Heidegger's books, and you will be confronted with something strange. First is the language. He invents new words; and, more frustratingly, he uses old words in unfamiliar ways, often relying on obscure etymological connections and German puns. Even more frustrating is the way Heidegger does philosophy: he doesn't make logical arguments, and he doesn't give straightforward definitions for his terms. Why does he write like this? And how can a philosopher do philosophy without attempting to persuade the reader with arguments? You're right to be skeptical; but, in this review, I will try to provide you with a way into Heidegger's philosophy, so at least his compositional and intellectual decisions make sense, even if you disagree with them. Since Heidegger's frustrating and exasperating language is extremely conspicuous, let us start there. Imagine a continuum of attitudes towards language. On the far end, towards the left, is the scientific attitude. There, we find linguists talking of phonemes, morphemes, syntax; we find analytic philosophers talking about theories of meaning and reference. We see sentences being diagrammed; we hear researchers making logical arguments. Now, follow me to the middle of this continuum. Here is where most speech takes place. Here, language is totally transparent. We don't think about it, we simply use it in our day to day lives. We argue, we order pizzas, we make excuses to our bosses, we tell jokes; and sometimes we write book reviews. Then, we get to the other end of the spectrum. This is the place where lyric poetry resides. Language is not here being used to catalogue knowledge, nor is it transparent; here, in fact, language is somehow mysterious, foreign, strange: we hear familiar words used in unfamiliar ways; rules of syntax and semantics are broken here; nothing is as it seems. Now, what if I ask you, what attitude gets to the real essence, the real fundamentals of language? If you're like me, you'd say the first attitude: the scientific attitude. It seems commonsensical to think that you understand language more deeply the more you rigorously study it; and one studies language by setting up abstract categories, such as 'syntax' and 'phoneme'. But this is where Heidegger is in fundamental disagreement; for Heidegger believes that poetry reveals the essence of language. In his words: "Language itself is poetry in the essential sense." But isn't this odd? Isn't poetry a second or third level phenomenon? Doesn't poetry presuppose the usual use of language, which itself presupposes the factual underpinning of language investigated by science? In trying to understand why Heidegger might think this, we are led to his conception of truth. If you are like me, you have a commonsense understanding of what makes a statement true or false. A statement is "true" if it corresponds to something in reality; if I say "the glass is on the table," it is only true if the glass really is on the table. Heidegger thinks this is entirely wrong; and in place of this conception of truth, Heidegger proposes the Greek word "aletheia," which he defines as "unconcealment," or "letting things reveal themselves as themselves." It's hard to describe what this means abstractly, so let me give you an example. Let's say you are a peasant, and a rich nobleman just invited you to his house. You get lost, and wander into a room. It is filled with strange objects that you've never seen before. You pick something up from a table. You hold it in your hands, entranced by the strange shape, the odd colors, the weird noises it omits. You are totally lost in contemplation of the object, when suddenly the nobleman waltzes into the room and says "Oh, I see you've found my watch." According to Heidegger, what the nobleman just did was to cover up the watch in a kind of veneer of obviousness. It is simply a watch, he says, just one among many of its kind, and therefore obvious. The peasant, meanwhile, was experiencing the object as an object, and letting it reveal itself to him. This kind of patina of familiarity is, for Heidegger, what prevents us from engaging in serious thinking. This is why Heidegger spends so much time talking about the dangers of conformity, and also why he is ambivalent about the scientific project: for what is science but the attempt to make what is not obvious, obvious? To bring the unfamiliar into the realm of familiarity? Heidegger thinks that this feeling of unfamiliarity is, on the contrary, the really valuable thing; and this is why Heidegger talks about moods'such as anxiety, which, he says, discloses the "Nothing." Now, it is a favorite criticism of some philosophers to dismiss Heidegger as foolish by treating "Nothing" as something; but this misses his point. When Heidegger is talking of anxiety as the mood that discloses the "Nothing" to us, he means that our mood of anxiety is the subrational realization of the bizarreness of existence. That is, our anxiety is the way that the question faces us: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" This leads us quite naturally to Heidegger's most emblematic question, the question of Being: what does it mean to be? Heidegger contends that this question has been lost to history. But has it? Philosophers have been discussing metaphysics for millennia. We have idealism, materialism, monism, monadism'aren't these answers to the question of Being? No, Heidegger says, and for the following reason. When one asserts, for example, that everything is matter, one is asserting that everything is, at base, one type of thing. But the question of Being cannot be answered by pointing to a specific type of being; so we can't answer the question, "what does it mean to be?" by saying "everything is mind," or "everything is matter," since that misses the point. What does it mean to be at all? So now we have to circle back to Heidegger's conception of truth. If you are operating with the commonsense idea of truth as correspondence, you will quite naturally say: "The question of 'Being' is meaningless; 'Being' is the most empty of categories; you can't give any further analysis to what it 'means' to exist." In terms of correspondence, this is quite true; for how can any statement correspond with the answer to that question? A statement can only correspond to a state of affairs; it cannot correspond to the "stateness" of affairs: that's meaningless. However, if you are thinking of truth along Heidegger's lines, the question becomes more sensible; for what Heidegger is really asking is "How can we have an original encounter with Being? How can I experience what it means to exist? How can I let the truth of existence open itself up to me?" To do this, Heidegger attempts to peel back the layers of familiarity that, he feels, prevents this genuine encounter from happening. He tries to strip away our most basic commonsense notions: true vs. false, subject vs. object, opinion vs. fact, and virtually any other you can name. In so doing, Heidegger tries to come up with ways of speaking that do not presuppose these categories. So in struggling through his works, you are undergoing a kind of therapy to rid yourself of your preconceptions, in order to look at the world anew. In his words: "What is strange in the thinking of Being is its simplicity. Precisely this keeps us from it. For we look for thinking'which has its world-historical prestige under the name "philosophy"'in the form of the unusual, which is accessible only to initiates." What on earth are we to make of all this? Is this philosophy or mystical poetry? Is it nonsense? That's a tough question. If by "philosophy" we mean the examination of certain traditional questions, such as those of metaphysics and epistemology, then it might be fair to say that Heidegger wasn't a philosopher'at least, not exactly. But if by "philosophy" we mean thinking for the sake of thinking, then Heidegger is a consummate philosopher; for, in a sense, this is the point of his whole project: to get us to question everything we take for granted, and to rethink the world with fresh minds. So should we accept Heidegger's philosophy? Should we believe him? And what does it even mean to "believe" somebody who purposely doesn't make assertions or construct arguments? Is this acceptable in a thinker? Well, I can't speak for you, but I don't accept his picture of the world. To sum up my disagreement with Heidegger as pithily as possible, I disagree with him when he says: "Ontology is only possible as phenomenology." On the contrary, I do not think that ontology necessarily has anything to do with phenomenology; in other words, I don't think that our experiences of the world necessarily disclose the world in a fundamental way. For example, Heidegger thinks that everyday sounds are more basic than abstract acoustical signals, and he argues this position like so: We never really first perceive a throng of sensations, e.g., tones and noises, in the appearance of things'as this thing-concept alleges; rather we hear the storm whistling in the chimney, we hear the three-motored plane, we hear the Mercedes in immediate distinction from the Volkswagen. Much closer to us than all sensations are the things themselves. We hear the door shut in the house and never hear acoustical sensations or even mere sounds. In order to hear a bare sound we have to listen away from things, divert our ear from them, i.e., listen abstractly. To Heidegger, the very fact that we perceive sounds this way implies that this is more fundamental. But I cannot accept this. Hearing "first" the door shut is only a fact of our perception; it does not tell us anything about how our brains process auditory signals, nor what sound is, for that matter. This is why I am a firm believer in science, because it seems that the universe doesn't give up its secrets lightly, but must be probed and prodded! When we leave nature to reveal itself to us, we aren't left with much. And it was clear that I'm not a Heideggerian from my introduction. As the opening quote shows, he was partly remonstrating against our dichotomy of subjective opinion vs. objective fact; whereas this notion is the very one I began my review with. You've been hoodwinked from the start, dear reader; for by acknowledging that this is just one opinion among many, you have, willingly or unwillingly, disagreed with Heidegger. So was reading Heidegger a waste of time for me? If I disagree with him on almost everything, what did I gain from reading him? Well, for one thing, as a phenomenologist pure and simple, Heidegger is excellent; he gets to the bottom of our experience of the world in a way way few thinkers can. What's more, even if we reject his ontology, many of Heidegger's points are interesting as pure cultural criticism; by digging down deep into many of our preconceptions, Heidegger manages to reveal some major biases and assumptions we make in our daily lives. But the most valuable part of Heidegger is that he makes you think: agree or disagree, if you decide he is a loony or a genius, he will make you think, and that is invaluable. So, to bring this review around to this volume, I warmly push it into your hands. Here is an excellent introduction to the work and thought of an original mind'much less imposing than Being and Time. I must confess that I was pummeled by Heidegger's first book'I was beaten senseless. This book was, by contrast, often pleasant reading. It seems that Heidegger jettisoned a lot of his jargon later in life; he even occasionally comes close to being lucid and graceful. I especially admire "The Origin of the Work of Art." I think it's easily one of the greatest reflections on art that I've had the good fortune to read. I think it's only fair to give Heidegger the last word: … if man is to find his way once again into the nearness of Being he must first learn to exist in the nameless. In the same way he must recognize the seductions of the public realm as well as the impotence of the private. Before he speaks man must first let himself be claimed again by Being, taking the risk that under this claim he will seldom have much to say.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-08-24 00:00:00 Bill Day 020220: more The Philosophy of Heidegger Heidegger: Thinking of Being The Heidegger Reader The New Heidegger Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil 220918 this is a much much much later addition (four years): in choosing the most interesting and influential philosopher of the 20th century, i nominate hd over say analytic favourite wittgenstein. i am also told w is interested in the 'therapeutic' use of philosophy, showing the insect's 'way out of the bottle' or breaking down questions 'dissolving' them by showing they are incoherent questions, rather than engaging and clarifying the questions... this attitude to me seems only appropriate if you think thinking is somehow a disability, an illness, rather than exploration, understanding, an opening of the world and of others through the medium of words, words you might have to recast or invent, words you might struggle with much as any artist to express ideas or senses or Being and this is no disease or disability or mistake... this is a later addition: it is said that every writer begins as an obsessive reader, always looking for that perfect book for herself- inevitably failing, she must write it herself. i believe to some degree this applies also to philosophy, as read, as searched, as frustrated, so eventually writing out your own. this is construction, more than creation, by using thoughts previously read here or there, so this new philosophy is born of however much precedes it. this is definitely the case with hd, who is so conscious of the history, the thoughts, the worlds, the words he uses. for myself, there is desire to see how hd and all other European continental philosophy might engage with Indian philosophy, classical or current, but this is hampered for me in that i have not read much Indian philosophy, so at the moment trying to, knowing it is more than just the Buddhism read, more than the intros read... so very hopeful i can find this philosophical style... 080914 first review: a review? great. more review? great but helps to have already read so many works on the man's thought. tried to read one long or short chapter each time, tried to glean significant thoughts, almost enthuses me enough to try his being and time. almost... had read some previously, decided to try this after latest heidegger: Heidegger: Thinking of Being... questions arise, as usual- do i like his thought or the way it is shared?- but this is the man himself, and not near as complicated to read if you are afraid of trying, if you have heard he is difficult. no more or less than kant. whom i do not read. and this selection has useful abstracts before each reading, chronologically follows him, shows how his original conception of 'being' and 'time' over the years becomes 'clearing' and 'presencing'- but he never abandons his primary concern: the 'question of being' even as his language matures, he forms neologisms, he offers provoking thoughts, engaging thoughts, and some of his concepts easily misinterpreted become decidedly clearer... i do not know if this would work independently as introductory. i have had the good fortune of so many texts already read on him on his thought on how he is misunderstood. in some ways, i am sympathetic to those readers, those philosophers, who are annoyed by his 'ways' rather than rigorous logic or positivistic assertions they can take apart. he wants us to think, not just expect his answers, not just resolve questions. yes he is eventually more poet than philosopher, but this is intrinsic, this is there from the beginning. if husserl wanted to create philosophy as a first 'science', heidegger goes with phenomenology as a starting point, to express, to understand, philosophy as an 'art'. this is fine with me... there are eleven chapters, a forward, a preface, a general introduction: 'on the question of being'. read this introduction. this covers his work leading up to 'being and time' (hereafter bt), and clarifies the culture he came through, his religious background, his locale, his heritage in thought as well as beliefs. hd did not erupt with bt out of nowhere. he did arrive on campus, arrive as a lecturer, with great drama, and this introduction gives some idea of how well he must have engaged students. perhaps it is good to read the 'abstracts' before each chapter before deciding which to read when or why. this book could serve as research source and need not be read all in one go. i have read other books at the same time. not philosophy texts. but some selected texts are already familiar and possibly the reader is only interested in this essay or that essay... the first chapter is 'introduction to bt' and covers the development, the ideas, the investigating concept hiedegger will use- 'dasein'- but this chapter also frustrates because he never did fulfill his plans, and later when he does go on, it is not the same structure. it is unfair to ask a thinker to stop thinking, to go back and elaborate previous work. but even had he never written anything else, his place as thinker in his time and ours would be assured. the next chapter is one that becomes a book, is 'what is metaphysics', after that 'on the essence of truth', next 'the origin of the work of art', next 'letter on humanism', next 'modern science, metaphysics, and mathematics', next 'the question concerning technology', next 'building dwelling thinking', then 'what calls for thinking?', then 'the way to language', finally 'the end of philosophy and the task of thinking'... what a lineup. having just finished it, reading four chapters in a row, i am remembering thoughts sparking from these more than his earlier work. but i know those chapters were equally fascinating. i know they each gave me pleasure i do not know how else to find: everything from 'dasein' to 'clearing'- or is that 'lightning'?- from how there is a difference from 'speaking' and 'saying', there is language in which we 'dwell' and language we 'find ways to', that there is the unacknowledged metaphysics that underlies all 'regions' of science, that there is the conceptual mistake of believing science precedes technology, that technology is mastered rather than mastering, there is the argument that we diminish humanity or diminish 'Dasein' if we think of man only in body in mathematical, scientific, technological, terms... yes there is to much here to explain, to quote, and how much do i fully retain anyway... and why do i read philosophy? am i doing so the right way? if i enjoy it am i mistaken? well, there is only the answer i gave previously in The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science and there is nothing here to add. just to say, yes really this is immensely fun. almost enthuses me enough to try his being and time. almost... and why am i so engaged by this selection, why do i find it easier to read than big books? yes partly it is all 19 other books read on or involving him, plus 4 works by the man himself, this makes it easier to understand his discourse. without heidegger this past century would lack so much insight to our being, to Being as it is explored, theorized, in all social sciences. i have heard that his translations of aristotle, for example, are not necessarily agreed-upon. there is suspicion over his refusal to propose any ethics grown out of his thought, even when he uses ethically loaded terms like 'anxiety', 'fallenness', 'resolute', 'authentic', to characterize his conceptions. and is he avoiding actual failures of his own support of the nazis? this is the end of his thought, an irreconcilable, mistaken, appraisal of hitler say... this is hindsight. 20/20. but cautionary as his real-life acts trying to link philosophical aspirations of some sort, yes i can see how many philosophers refuse to take anything from him. apologists use his dense, difficult prose, to avoid certain interpretations not the least favourable to h. in his later career, going back, going poetic, invents his fourfold- gods, mortals, earth, sky- to deal with what he sees as limits to causal theories of aristotle- material, formal, efficient, final- is this just a way to not talk about current horrors? so i still feel conflicted about where leads his thought. enough, now. i cannot offer an answer. i cannot say i refuse to read him... this is not the solution. read, read, read yourself free...