Heidegger: Being and Time

[Music]

martin heidegger

is one of the most influential and

enigmatic of 20th century philosophers

and this is in part because of the fact

that he writes in a particularly obscure

style

and is a philosopher that engages in

many

verbal tricks and maneuvers which are

unique to heidegger

and to his project and which somehow to

some extent determine

the outcome and form that his

philosophical project takes

and it's worth encountering and thinking

about heidegger because he was the

source of so many

movements in 20th century uh

intellectual life

existentialism in some respects is a

sort of god child of heidegger

heidegger perhaps borrows some of the

main ideas from kierkegaard but he's the

one who reformulates many of these

concerns

in a 20th century idiom which turns out

to inform things like sartre

or camus or murlou ponti and a whole

variety of french and german thinkers in

particular

who will be relatively inaccessible

unless you look at heidegger first

now heidegger himself has a very

interesting background which

tells us a great deal about the sort of

intellectual activity that he undertakes

in the first case he starts out in his

intellectual career as a jesuit

seminarian

which tells you a great deal about the

cast of his mind

which tells you a great deal about his

early intellectual habits and much of

this will have i mean

influence later on we will see it come

out in a sort of transformation

um i may be the only person that

believes this but i may not be uh

that growing up as a jesuit seminarian

definitely has

telling effects later on in life if you

ever met any i believe you will find

this to be true well martin heidegger

is that in spades and when he makes a

philosophical move

it is absolute and it is an attempt to

go as far as a particular line of

thought can take it

perhaps characteristic of that whole

tradition

in addition to starting out as a

seminarian which is interesting in its

own way

he wrote his doctrinal dissertation on

dun scotus

now any of you at home who've read some

scholastic philosophy who know who duns

scotus is

know how difficult and recondite and

intimidating forbidding

a doctoral dissertation like that is and

it indicates not only something of the

cast of his mind but also

the intellectual ambition of someone who

feels like he can cut the gordian knot

i myself would never consider even

reading much less writing a dissertation

on done scotus

so if someone is going to take a project

like that this is a person

for whom very little is intellectually

intimidating

now his first and perhaps greatest work

or

the work that got him the most noticed

was published in 1927

it's called sign on site which means a

being in time and he was a student of

husserls

and it was published in husserl's

phenomenological

yearbook and it was dedicated to edmund

husserl so there's a definite

you know student pupil relation a pupil

teacher relationship

and a sort of conceptual relationship

between the phenomenology of husserl

and the phenomenal phenomenological

existentialism that heidegger develops

now heidegger himself claims not to be

an existentialist but he is

in a historical rather than a conceptual

sense rather than in a philosophical

sense it's clear that he does

influence people like sartre or camus

and despite his protestations his

influence has been greatest in the

philosophy of existence

as opposed to his unique and somewhat

idiomatic philosophical project of

developing an ontology

now ontology goes back to the greek term

maybe you've seen some of the lectures

on plato

and you know that ontology the science

of being or the logos of being

statements about being well one of the

early philosophical attempts one of the

kind of foundational philosophical

enterprises of the greek tradition

and heidegger wants to revive that

enterprise which is a particularly

intimidating and i don't know impressive

intel

uh intellectual ambition regardless of

whether he achieves it or not

to go back to the science of being to go

back to being itself with a capital b

well i i don't know if that's a

persuasive or even a possible thing in

the 20th century

the fact that heidegger thinks that he

can do that that he wants to take that

project seriously

is a tribute to his great intellectual

ambition regardless of how it ends up

turning out

so he thinks of himself primarily as an

ontologist now this leads us to all

kinds of difficulties

first of all talking about being is like

trying to bite your teeth

in other words what can you say about

being how can we come to know being

what sort of procedure do you engage in

to find out about being

well this maybe or discloses his

connection to husserl

you're not going to find out about being

by investigating tables

into individually in chairs individually

and christmas trees individually or even

inspecting the outside world

for its regular law like behavior the

way you're going to find it about being

is some process of introspection

this is one of the things that holds the

the continental tradition together

they tend to be more concerned with that

which is inside than they are about that

which is outside

there is a decidedly anti-scientistic

tendency to this and i will come back to

that problem

but what heidegger wants to do is find

out about being

and he's very familiar with greek

philosophy as a matter of fact he thinks

that

pretty much it's all been downhill since

aristotle

right that christianity the romans the

enlightenment didn't make much of a

contribution to the history of thought

um after aristotle it's all downhill and

the real high point was even before

plato was

in the pre-socratics and what he wants

to do

is to force us back to the original

sophisticated naivete of pre-socratic

thought

which is a very funny way of thinking

about it but he does think that we have

actually

decreased our understanding of ourselves

and the world around us by bracketing or

eliminating this problem of ontology

the problem of being and instead

investigating beings

particular elements in the world so he

wants to move away

from that practical concrete tangible

sort of inquiry

into something a great deal more

abstract and also more nebulous

now another thing to think about when we

deal with heidegger and his ontological

hopes

is what plato said about uh being

and it's an interesting thought plato

says in the myth of the cave when he

talks about the divided line that a

being is not like the other beings in

the world when we get up into the realm

of the forms

being is like light that discloses the

things in the world to us but it is not

one of those things that gets disclosed

so being allows us to know about the the

being that the small be being of

tables and chairs and podiums and

carpets and things like that

and we all have a kind of intuitive

everyday knowledge of what it means to

say that the grass

is green or the podium is made of wood

or the cup

is blue all those uses of the word is we

kind of feel like we have an idea of

what's going on there

but there's a problem even though we

know these local and particular uses of

the word is

we don't know what being is on the whole

we don't know what being capital b

is what it is that holds all these

little beings together the small be

beings

and that's because being itself is not

like any of the beings that being

discloses are you following this so far

in other words light is not like the

objects that we see in the room

it's a unique kind of a thing and here i

just mean it metaphorically because i

don't know how to literally talk about

this in any kind of sensible way

but the metaphor discloses the idea

roughly speaking that somehow being is

different from all the other stuff

of our experience heidegger says before

we

bother with trivialities like this

particular entity or that particular

entity

we have to do is leave all that stuff

out in a way bracket it for now

and let's talk about what it is to be

how we know being what being tells us

about itself

now the question is how are we going to

do this and what is being

well in the first case heidegger does

not want to

have a conception of being which is

abstract

formal he wants to connect it to the

experience of everyday life

and this is the kind of the husserlian

turn or perhaps the whole continental

turn

he says think of it from the perspective

of a human being from your perspective

now

rather than constructing a set of

abstractions which later on you you will

use to tailor your experience of the

world start now with your experience

and remove from your experience the

things that are irrelevant the dross

so that you get the pure gold of

ontological knowledge later on

now uh the way in which he does this is

to

create a theory of what human existence

is and he calls this uh

this human existence design which

doesn't translate out of german

one of the things that heidegger does

all the time human being what is it like

to be a human being design

is human being in the world it is finite

it is contingent it is uncertain

it is a collection of psychic states

like worry

guilt anxiety and

this constellation

of human qualities or human entities

is not like anything else in the world

it is the way in which or the vehicle in

which

the matrix in which being is disclosed

to us in other words you can only find

out what being is

from the perspective or in the way that

a human being finds out about what being

is and that's by

being a human being i know how now can

you see how this is going to get awfully

circular and strange and that

we're going to have whole chapters and

perhaps whole volumes of

being talks to itself and projects

itself into the future of being you're

going to get a lot of what appears to be

circular reasoning

on account of the fact that we're stuck

within

the internality the what i call the

intracosm and it's very hard to break

out

from the intracosm into the exorcism

it's one of the characteristic flaws

it's perhaps the achilles heel of

continental philosophy

so what we're going to do is investigate

design investigate what it is to be a

human being

and we're going to do that by being a

human being and we're going to do that

in an authentic way

and what that means that we have to

remove our illusions

and remove our

distraction by the events the little

trivial events in the world

focus yourself and turn inward

and what you will find is your true self

and your true being

you will move from a pre-reflective

state of inauthenticity of concern with

beings small b

beings to an authentic state of

concern with being itself and apparently

the only imperative or

what i can discern and hide again the

only imperative that human beings have

the only thing left that we ought to do

that we somehow have a responsibility to

do

is to authentically be capital b to

confront the reality of human life

despite the fact that we may find it

unpleasant or difficult or trying

and it may well be that once we do that

we have moved to another level of

experience and conceptualization of the

world

and if that turns out to be the case

then he will have contributed something

to our self-knowledge

and if you remember that i said that

heidegger wants us to drive us back to

the pre-socratic

primordial kind of a state and the

delphic oracle told socrates told

socrates and the rest of the greeks that

they must know themselves

well the continental prog project

involves

knowing yourself turning inward and

finding out what it is like to be a

human being

now when we look at design at human

existence in its contingency and its

finitude

we find that it has a three-fold

structure one

and that structure is understanding mood

and discourse

now understanding means that we have to

accept

dozen as offering us as creating a

context in other words to be a human

being

is to contextualize the world around you

and to attribute meanings to it to

to organize the experiences that you

have into a sort of a gestalt a whole

and in order to be a human being you

have to contextualize the world

a second thing that's necessary for

design is mood

and here it means something kind of not

unambiguous and fairly straightforward

happiness

sadness things like that i mean the

psychic states of our moods

and think about this for a second can

you imagine an anglo-american empiricist

telling us that one of the really

important things you have to think about

in the course of philosophical

development is the idea of mood very

foreign to that scientific

approach to reality whereas for

heidegger it's a fact of life it is

perhaps one of the facts of life which

we

only ignore at our peril at the peril of

abstracting and making inauthentic your

conception of yourself and the world

and the third element in design is the

idea of discourse

language is constitutive of design

things can be

can be formulated in speech and can be

understood or things can only be

understood when they are formulated in

speech and then

made subject to our moods so everyday

depoeticized language

doesn't uncover a design it numbs us it

makes us anesthetized to the true facts

of being

and causes us to be caught up with

trivialities

do any of you know ts eliot's for

quartets where he says

that the it's not the hollow man but

some example of inauthenticity

or inauthentic men are distracted from

distraction by distraction

isn't that a beautiful and lovely poetic

line well to a great extent

that's what heidegger is driving us

towards he's saying i'm calling you back

to yourselves

i'm asking you not to be distracted from

distraction by distraction

do not let the little beings of the

world deprive you of the big being

and may i suggest that the big being has

an uncomfortably

strong homology to god remember he

starts out as a german

theologian all right give that some

thought or a jesuit theologian

well this search after being which is

enigmatic and discloses itself in some

very peculiar ways

may well be the depersonalized form of

god in the 20th century

now heidegger's stance towards being

i mean to take this idea a little bit

further reminds me of the gospel story

of the rich young man

a rich young man who's very virtuous

comes to jesus and says

how do i really become good how do i

really become virtuous

and jesus says go sell all you have and

follow me

is saying something remarkably like that

he is saying go

forsake all of beings with a small b all

the trivialities of your experience

and sell all you have and follow me not

follow heidegger but follow being itself

follow authenticity it is the only

obligation left

for the conscious human being in the

20th century this is a

very closely sanded down version of

theology i suspect

now his great work being in time

is uh a very difficult piece of work

because it wasn't all published

in one whole chunk he published it for

various kind of academic contingencies

in 27

and the idea behind it is that freedom

has to be earned

it's not something you get given it's

something you work towards as a response

to design

and you earn your freedom you become a

human being you

make yourself by your confrontation with

the real facts of human existence

of design and here are some of the parts

the first volume

is the sort of hermeneutics of being the

first are the two volumes in

being in time and the first volume is an

analysis of what we might call the

unreflective

state of being of a man or a woman

that's caught up with

this being small b and that being small

b that is still distracted from

distraction by distraction

and the problem that he's going to raise

is that we are lying to ourselves we

delude ourselves we get ourselves all

caught up with little things that really

don't matter to us

and then we ignore what we really are

and

god knows we are offered little enough

in this dozen in this world of

contingent finitude and minimally we

have an obligation

to ourselves to become what we can now

uh in this first volume he analyzes this

pre-reflective state before we actually

connect or con confront dazan and it

turns out that uh

that human being has three related

aspects or the design is

a three-fold structure the first is

facticity

in german govorfan height to be thrown

into the world

we didn't ask for this right no one

consulted us

you know before we were born or before

we became conscious asking us if we

would like a kind of spatio-temporal

world

full of people and things and objects

and questions and

issues like that we're stuck with it you

know this is not a disease it's not a

problem it's just it is what it is

you don't like it that's tough deal with

it so facticity

the fact that we are cast into a world

not of our own making and that we busy

ourselves with little irrelevant things

right that's a given the second element

in existence is existentiality

and this idea entails appropriating the

world for our own purposes

we take knowledge we take objects we

take food

we take things of utility to us and we

manipulate them in practical ways

right practical utilities very pragmatic

sense of how human beings

interact with the world around them and

the final

quality of human being particularly this

pre-reflective quality

is the quality of uh in german it's fair

fallen

but the best translation index is

probably something like

there's something wrong with us there's

something there's a sort of radical

deprivation of the human condition

as it starts this is what gives

heidegger something to do

he wants to start with his

pre-reflective kind of unconscious human

state

and drive us towards consciousness of

ourselves he doesn't guarantee this is

going to be pretty

he doesn't guarantee this is going to be

easy and it doesn't guarantee this is

going to be readily intelligible

but on the other hand whatever it is you

are engaged in that isn't that

relatively unimportant what profiteth

the man

that he should gain the whole world and

lose his soul i think that this has

at least one foot in christian theology

and i think that many of the

ideas of heidegger's honest or authentic

confrontation of being

are philosophical highly abstract jesuit

theology

de-theologized or de-divinized you hold

on to the structure you leave the

content

things are going to get very weird all

right

so we have facticity extension

existentiality and forfeiture

this condition of being fair fallen of

being caught up in a web of maya

a web of illusions the world of beings

this booming buzzing confusion out there

is essentially not real our reality

is in being capital b not in any of

these trivialities these distractions

that we're forced to confront

just from being a human being if you

always live your life

in this condition of being fair fallen

in this condition of forfeiture

you have forfeited your claim to being

really human

to be human is to confront the world the

way it is not it's it's to be

a grown-up adult that is willing to

deal with human life as it is rather

than yet

then getting distracted or sidetracked

by any of the various

cul-de-sacs that life might offer us

and if you think about what this leads

to uh these

men or the vast majority of human beings

apparently are

caught up in this inauthentic mode of

existence and that is the source

in the 20th century of the thing called

the mass man

heidegger calls it dasman but what it

means is uh it's the opposite

of being an individual it's being a herd

creature not reflective

not thinking not encountering the world

on your own

and the best he can do you know perhaps

the great tradition of german

romanticism

is to force us to become individuals if

you remember the great philosopher

kierkegaard

who is certainly one of the formative

influences on on hegel

um or on uh on heidegger sorry thank you

um one of the formative influences um uh

kierkegaard wanted his tombstone to say

soren kierkegaard and his date of birth

and date of death and then below that he

wanted to say

that individual which is a beautiful and

profound epitaph well what heidegger

calls upon us to do

is to follow kierkegaard but to follow

him

in that respect in an individual way you

confront being on your own become what

you might possibly be

you might also deserve to be called an

individual if you work really hard at it

if you cultivate your inner life and you

find

some authentic confrontation with things

that you'd rather not think about

and in volume two of heidegger's work

we find that he does try and sketch out

what an authentic being would be like

how we really confront dazine and

what what it will entail and what it

will do for us

and in addition to that he goes through

the history of philosophy and with

considerable detail and

in a very kind of idiomatic way and the

point of his going through the history

of philosophy

is to construct a philosophical history

of ontology

and to do a phenomenological destruction

of prior conceptions

of ontology so that he can clear the

ground to erect his own new building

essentially he says i'm going to only

hold on to the pre-socratic legacy

most of platonism and some of aristotle

but after aristotle's all downhill i

don't want to talk about their

conception of being or ontology it's a

waste of time

we have gone down an inauthentic

cul-de-sac human beings

almost without exception have not been

authentic since we began to separate

ourselves

from being in particular he's concerned

with nietzsche's charge that it's not

even possible to talk about being

anymore

so we'll talk about that in a little

later but the idea is that heidegger

wants to force us back

to an earlier pristine state this

sounds remarkably like going back to the

garden of eden i could be mistaken

this condition of being fair fallen

sounds to me an awful lot like sin

and since it's so universal it strikes

me as an awful lot like original sin

but i may be mistaken professor

heidegger tells us that it's not

original sin he explicitly says so but

i have my doubts well we

construct this phenomenological

destruction of the history of of

ontology

and in its place instead of looking at

the world

sub species eternitatus we're going to

look at the world

subspecies temporalis in other words

we're going to look at human being the

way it really is rather than some

than from the god's eye view we're going

to look at it from the human being's eye

view

and we're going to find that the world

discloses itself and being discloses

itself

that's a very peculiar matrix of things

most of which are not very pleasant

in the first case if you want to really

confront dazine that's what we get from

volume 2 you're going to have to get

used to the idea of amorphati

or acceptance of fate particularly

acceptance of your own death

death anxiety worry care

fear are the main themes of heidegger's

second work and this is the good side

remember this is the upside

you're better off with this rather than

dwelling on all the other things that

might distract you from these businesses

and in addition conscience is going to

be an important element in this second

volume in other words in order to come

to our authentic being in order to be

truly human which apparently so few

people do

we must confront death we must recognize

that we have a conscience and it is an

ineliminable

and we must do what we can to sacrifice

all else to sell all we have to follow

being

now death is an interesting and

important problem and

unlike most philosophers heidegger seems

to be under the impression that he has

some intelligent things to say about

death

my personal feeling is that although

death is a fear fearsome reality

and it is the kind of thing that a

conscious person will inevitably at some

point or

perhaps at all points uh come into

contact with and think about

um having thought about it myself i'm

not able to think of

or say anything intelligent about this

topic perhaps you are

i apologize but i'm not able to do that

there's not a lot you can say about

death

on the other hand heidegger wants to

talk about that as the horizon of human

existence

if any of you've read ernest becker's

book the denial of death that's a sort

of

popularization of one heideggerian

problem

we all try and persuade ourselves in all

the everyday activities of life

of life is that uh that i'm gonna last

forever i'm gonna last forever i'm gonna

last forever

time goes on into an infinite horizon

nay that is being small b

you are lying to yourself nay in fact we

all have to realize that time is not an

infinite horizon

to view time as time sub 1 times sub 2

times sub t

3 time sub n going on forever that's to

view time from the perspective of god

that's also to pursue to

view time from the perspective of our

scientific friends

the only difficulty is is that no human

life experiences time like that

we experience it in a radically

different way we experience it as the

horizon of our possibilities

so time is here to stay now can you see

why he titles his book

being and time he wants to study being

and then he wants to study some

essential foundational groundwork for

the human experience of being

and that turns out to be the fact that

we are temporal

right if you think of t.s elite in the

rose garden time present and time passed

right um it's surprising how the eliot

is so overtly christian and this denies

its christianity or it seems to be

indifferent to it but i think there are

powerful christian themes

underlying this so temporality the fact

that we must confront our own death

surely one of the great themes of

christianity as well

comes out as being the one imperative i

would almost be tempted to say

that this demand made upon us by

conscience because

one of the important elements in volume

2 is that heidegger talks about the

human conscience and says look you want

to be a human being

listen to your conscience because there

is a real thing conscience is

one of the ore facts of human life and

you know what your conscience tells you

to do

sell all you have and follow me don't

get caught up with little trivialities

do not become distracted by beings

search out the final the real the

ultimate being

so conscience forces us into

authenticity conscious

kind of conscience accuses us of being

inauthentic and being concerned with

beings

and what he is or what uh heidegger

thinks he is here is

the voice of conscience to no small

extent he

moves from being a philosopher to being

a prophet with surprising agility

and when he calls you to be yourself

when he calls you to hear

heed the voice of your own conscience he

sounds

more like jeremiah than he does sar but

i could be wrong here

now authenticity this confrontation of

our own finitude

is the the one state that would actually

reduce or would we

take us out of this pre-philosophical

not quite human state

and what this discloses is a number of

important issues but one of the most

important of them is the idea of guilt

and care and worry and

i would be inclined to say that like

elliott um heidegger thinks that the

human condition is one of radical

deprivation we are not what we should be

we are not what we could be

and once we confront our own finitude we

confront the fact that we have

obligations to ourselves which we can

never meet

think about let's think this through in

the first case

when we confront dozyn and we

find ourselves in being capital b not

just small b

the response on the part of the

conscious agent is

what is in german called zorga and in

english that would be called

care or worry or concern and there are

at least three things about which we are

concerned and here comes the temporal

element

first case we are concerned about the

future and that means that design

conscious human being projects itself

into the future

right in other words the way we

experience the world we experience

ourselves not just here and now but we

project ourselves into the future

and we also project ourselves into our

own past

projecting ourselves into our future

causes angst

worry almost

almost a terminal frightfulness because

we must confront the fact that

we come to an end and we don't know how

to avoid that we can't avoid that

we project ourselves into the earlier

parts of our life and an interesting

fact is that we cannot avoid the

experience of guilt

and i would be tempted to say that guilt

is the uncomfortable certainty

that we are not what we could have been

it's true and heidegger is right about

that

and not only is he right about that but

that is an ineliminable part of being a

human being

and any scientific theory which either

fails to talk about this or tells us we

can't talk about it

is just unacceptable that's right

so we project ourselves into the future

we project ourselves into the past

and we confront darzan in the present

and what we find out about ourselves

when we confront our design in the

present

is that we have a potential for freedom

from being small b

which we have not completely realized

what this means is the following

we look into our past we realize we have

not

been what we could have been we look at

the present and we realize

we are not as free and as knowledgeable

about being as authentic as we could be

and we look into the future and we

realize that there is a definite

temporal horizon

think about this now we see our own

death coming in the future

and this death and we don't know when it

will happen

it extinguishes all our possibilities

right but it does not exhaust all our

possibilities

in other words between now and the time

we die there is a great variety of

choices we could make of context we

could

construct of projects we could undertake

and the problem is that we will not

undertake all of them we will not do all

these things

so that means between now and then

you've got to make some choices about

what you're going to do with your life

and the problem is that you will not be

able to do all the things you might wish

to do or that you

could do if you were an eternal being

all right and that means that you will

not realize some of your possibilities

and that means you owe yourself a debt

that you can never repay

and that is a sort of cosmic guilt may i

suggest this is the

echo of original sin when it gets

de-theologized

it is the human condition and we cannot

escape it if we try and escape

it by truncating off reality by adopting

some sort of human or positivistic

position

so don't worry about guilt don't worry

about your inter the internal facts of

your psyche

the result is is that you concern

yourself with beings you lapse back into

that pre-authentic

pre-philosophical state that heidegger

says you ignore at your parent oh that

you engage in extra peril

if you want to be human then get a soul

and you want to get a soul

then face the fact that there are

certain inelimitable parts of your

experience

which you have to confront in order to

be human

and there are certain questions that you

have to ask in order to be human

the difficulty is and the tension of

being human is that you are forced to

ask some questions

for which there are no answers you can't

get around it you must ask the question

of being

even though it's not at all clear

exactly what that means and also it's

not at all clear

what the answer is and if the answer

would have come up and shake you by the

hand it's not at all clear that you

would recognize it

so for a great many reasons this is

obscurity piled upon obscurity piled

upon obscurity

combined with a certain obvious and

honest confrontation of the realities of

human life

i think this is a that sort of funny

combination of obscurity and obvious

kind of literary or psychic truthfulness

is one of the characteristic

amalgams of 20th century continental

philosophy

now let's look back at the question of

conscience

design demands that we face either we

that we live our life

facing death rather than denying it and

that means that

ethics kind of not implodes

so that the only real obligation that we

have left is that we should be authentic

and that ends up meaning that it's not

so important what you do in life is how

you do it

right in other words between now and the

time you die it's not so important what

projects you undertake as it is that you

should be conscious of the fact that

you're not going to take all of them

and that you have to decide which are

better the difficulty here

is that this very easily shades off into

straightaway nihilism

heidegger after all became a nazi

heidegger

was advanced due to his political

connections to national socialism

heidegger who um his greatest workers

first great published work being in time

was in husserl's yard book and husserl

was his teacher and it was dedicated to

husserah

but alas for sure was a jew and so when

huster was

moved out of academic life starting in

1933 uh

heidegger publicly disassociated himself

from husserl

and heidegger ended up taking husserl's

chair at the university of freiburg

this sounds to me like the phenomenology

of careerism but i could be wrong

all right it is a particular a

particularly unhappy circumstance

or when philosophers at least those

philosophers who claim to have a

particularly deep

or profound or important insight into

life should let us down in such an

egregious way

there is something not only

disconcerting about it but something

which

makes me want to put the rest of his

statements in italics

and be very careful about how i read

them in some ways we are

if if being in this pre-philosophical

state of denying design

gets us to behave well i would be

inclined to say well i'd rather be

stupid

that perhaps that's just me now in

addition to

confronting design through the

vehicle of conscience and through the

vehicle of existence

the historicity of human beings is of

course of great concern to heidegger

we are in some particular context at

some particular time

and we must always be oriented towards

the future

in particular when we are oriented

towards the future and our own demise

and our own

end we have to do what heidegger calls

thinking about

nothing now in the english translations

of heidegger

nothing gets a capital n but alas in the

german language all nouns are

capitalized so

we don't have quite that that way out

and thinking about nothing is one of the

most trying things you can try and do i

mean there are long sections i know it

sounds like

almost a joke but there are long

sections which we discuss are

encountered with nothing

and it means that nothing is not quite

negation but the source of negation

i have no clear conception of what that

means and what

what's involved in thinking about

nothing i have tried working through it

and

it runs us into all kinds of logical

problems and heidegger will say well

so much the worst for you and for your

logic confront being as it really is

i can see why positivistic guys like

carnap and the vienna circle find this

so trying

lush ambiguity and elaborate

self-indulgence

it's one of the things that i think we

would justifiably want to avoid in any

philosophical construct

now after uh during the nazi years he

produced some of his most

important work and that nazism should be

hospitable to philosophy is well

apparently the case

is quite influential and well it's

perhaps not

fair to judge a man's philosophical

output by his life it depends on how you

look at philosophy

but i might be inclined to say that he

is influenced by the cultural chauvinism

of the time

he has some very peculiar ideas about

language apparently and i'm not joking

here

he holds the view that philosophy can

only be done in german

that is not a joke i know that may sound

funny it may sound and i can imagine

wittgenstein in his grave turning over

and over and over

saying nine right no no in any language

no all right philosophy can be done in

any language that's not correct but

heidegger has

what i would end up being describing as

a sort of mystical or magical view of

language which i think

becomes more apparent in his late work

and which makes it that much more

difficult

which makes an obscure and difficult

philosophy doubly difficult later on

um german is perhaps the only

language philosophy could be conducted

and maybe greek when he's in a good kind

of

a feel-good or a kind of generous mood

he willing to love that perhaps

philosophy could be done in greek in

greece but that's about it you have to

do it in greek

and what he's trying to do

in this later work is to meet

nietzsche's

objections about ontology if you

remember that nietzsche at the end of

the 19th century

said that look our ideas about being

have faded away into vapor and mist

well heidegger in his introduction to

metaphysics says no

actually nietzsche is a sort of

seismograph who sees the intrinsic

depravity and mistakes in the western

tradition

and he sees that it leads up to this

idea that we can't talk about being at

all

what he does is show us the

inauthenticity of all the history of

philosophy

since the greeks all right so what he's

going to do is drive us back

beyond the niche and impasse back to the

pre-socratics

an admiration that he shares with

nietzsche of course because nietzsche

loved the priest of critics as well

in the post-war years heidegger's work

continued to be difficult

and almost impenetrable and he spent

most of his time analyzing the

pre-socratics

um there's a very interesting set of

essays called uh

uh what's what's the german uh name

pulse vega which means wood trails

and what is interesting about wood

trails the reason why i chose that kind

of odd title is that

in german wood trails have the idea of

cul-de-sacs in other words

you take a walk into the woods and there

are various trails but they don't lead

anywhere

they lead towards nothing they lead

towards an impasse you've written a set

of essays

that are the logical or psychic

analogues of cul-de-sacs blind alleys

would be a way of

translating holtz vega in a sensible way

and

this is where we find most of his

treatment of the pre-socratics there's

an

amazing and long detailed essay on

anaximander

and i mean he's one of the the ionian

physicists

and it's amazing how much mileage you

can get from one line

since after all we only have one

surviving line of anaximander

and he's easily able to kick out both 50

70 pages on that

and this the most elaborate and

implausible and

uh self-referential kind of treatment so

his later work is even more difficult

than the earlier work but in many

respects it's an extrapolation from the

earlier work and it's concerned with

being

and these sources of being back in that

pre-socratic tradition

in some ways by the end of his life the

great example of a philosophical

enterprise

is no longer plato's dialogues it has

become parmenide's

poem about being i don't imagine many of

you at home or many of you here

have gotten around to reading

parmenide's poem about being let me see

if i can help you with that

um what parmenides says is that we must

think and say that being is

from the other way i debar you what he

means is

that ontology is the first and primary

and fundamental concern of human beings

all else follows from that heidegger is

trying to drive us back to that

pre-socratic state of innocence

and the great exemplar of that will be

parmenides the forbidding

difficult um completely abstract

founder of ontology now

there are lots and lots of problems with

this it's all it's hard to know exactly

where to start but

let's take a couple of cracks at this

in the first case heidegger is so

impenetrable

that he often comes close to being

self-parody

when he talks about nothing and thinking

about nothing and

nothing knots rather than nothing

negates

i have no clear idea of what this

nothing is i found out that it's not

negation

and i find out a lot about what

heidegger's ideas are not

i often have a difficulty in finding out

how to attach some sensible predicate to

an idea about

like nothing what can you think about

nothing what can you say about nothing

heidegger appears to suggest you can say

quite a bit but beats me what it amounts

to

many of heidegger's ideas or

many many parts of his writings are

elaborate puns

and plays on words let me give you an

example from the german

um he says that our feeling uh with

regard to

our encounter with design is uncanny and

in german that's unheimlich

and he says that this uncanny feeling of

not knowing our way around in the world

amounts to not feeling at home in the

world now in german the word for home is

haim

and so when we have this uncanny feeling

we feel on heimlich which means unhomely

which means we don't feel at home in the

world

so he kind of makes the idea of

uncanniness and uncertainty

and kind of anxiety and the kind of

being and the feeling of being sort of

homesick

of longing for a connection with being

well he kind of merges them all together

in a kind of

messy mushy kind of linguistic

overlap and it we might be tempted to

think that that's a big

problem with heidegger but i might be

tempted to say that that's also

the source of his richness in other

words the fact that that he's more

concerned

in many respects with connotations than

denotations the fact that he likes this

messy overlap this linguistic

um word play this play these plays on

words these puns

and also he's famous for his elaborate

and very implausible etymologies

when he doesn't know the actual

historical source of a word i think he

usually makes it up

and then provides some quote

philosophical argument

to account for why only he understands

the real source of this word the rest of

the lexicographers in the world

do not this happens all the time with

the treatment of greek it also happens

to time all the time with this treatment

of german

another problem that comes up is the

problem of

morality mysticism and nihilism and

here's where i would like to take a

a sort of crack at the continental

tradition i'd like to offer kind of

foundational criticism

when you start talking about interiority

when you move from the realm of public

discourse about stuff out there

beings with a small bee to whatever it

is you've got going on inside you

all right the difficulty is first of all

that it's very hard to put words on this

to talk about this in any kind of

intelligible way

the danger here is that you end up

talking to yourself

right which is the opposite of the

philosophical enterprise

a second problem is that nihilism

is always a possibility because we might

want to say almost a definition of

nihilism

is a speech that's indistinguishable

from silence

and i've often thought that this

discussion of nothing and what it does

and how we encounter nothing

is a very sophisticated way of not

saying anything

right but that may be just me uh my

sense is though

that this is uh that he's trying to do

the impossible linguistically

too much of the time and my final

difficulty with heidegger and i think

this is the most interesting and

important difficulty with at least from

my perspective it is

is that this nebulous collection of

insights and tautologies

and unintelligibilities and neologisms

right

are a kind of transformation

of theology in other words it seems to

me

that what heidegger's being is what this

ontological search is

is theology with the god left out right

and we worship ourselves and we have

obligations to ourselves

instead of obligations to the deity and

our one obligation to ourselves is to be

ourselves

okay i mean this comes very close not

just to solipsism

but to self-worship i mean what else is

that worship there's only me

solipsism is the great danger that

recurs in all of these systems why

because they're beginning from the

inside and working out and most of never

get out

that's the big difficulty generally

speaking and this is i mean i think

tells us something about this kind of

philosophy it's had rather little

influence

certainly in the anglo-american

philosophical world a karnap wrote a

scathing treatment of some of heidegger

in which he said this is a particularly

unpleasant example of what happens

to metaphysics or what happens to your

brain when you do metaphysics

this is the high point of unintelligible

gibberish and karnap was

published a very unkind treatment of

this and you can kind of see why you

would

scientific guys are not going to want to

hear about dread and death and stuff

tables and chairs atoms and physics and

that kind of stuff well

where has it been influential this is

worth noting in theology

paul tillich the great systematic

theologian

heidegger right turned into theology

think about it i mean he makes his debt

to heidegger quite explicit

those of you that know the work of

rudolph bolton demythologized

christianity this is

all heidegger heidegger redux he's back

to haunt us again

they just transformed the old

theological problem into heideggerianism

and then heideggerianism

into what is alleged to be a new

theological problem

may i suggest then that this enigmatic

being

so central to heidegger's thought is in

fact

easily interpreted as the silence of god