/lit/ - Literature

Read Derrida first

He’s the Midwife of existentialism, his interpretation of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard being the children of his research birthing Postmodernism through expositions about language. This is the simplest that it can be put because those are all really complicated topics but that is as simple as it gets, hopefully my post can give you perspective and understand the simpleness of his complexity and the needful complexity of simplicity in his philosophy.

>>19083994
:( I'm sure you understand why this is annoying, but ok. Any (sorter) text in particular which would help me?

>>19084011
ok, that might be a good starting point. Haven't read Kierkegaard, so can't relate to that, but starting with Nietzsche, how exactly does he *interpret* him, and is there anything in particular from Nietzsche I can use to understand where Heidegger adds something? To me at least it doesn't seem like he's talking about the same things as Nietzsche at all.

>>19084025
The devil is in the detail, when Heidegger talks about the primordiality of language he is talking specifically about Nietzsche’s critique of Plato in the birth of tragedy and his misuse of by Scholastics. Heidegger uses Nietzsche’s interpretation of the presocratics to his own advantage in an attempt to overturn what he sees as the rot of his contemporaries interpretations of Kant, that of Husserl and specifically Cartesian expectations of Kant’s thought. Heidegger expects a return to an organic understanding of the presocratics.

>>19083982
>>19083994
>>19084011
>>19084016
>>19084025
>>19084071
>Heidegger is a good example of how nothing is left but a number of ridiculous photographs and a number of even more ridiculous writings. Heidegger was a philosophical market crier who only brought stolen goods to the market, everything of Heidegger's is second-hand, he was and is the prototype of the re-thinker, who lacked everything, but truly everything, for independent thinking. Heidegger's method consisted in the most unscrupulous turning of other people's great ideas into small ideas of his own, that is a fact. Heidegger has so reduced everything great that it has become German-compatible, you understand: German-compatible, Reger said. Heidegger is the petit bourgeois of German philosophy, the man who has placed on German philosophy his kitschy night-cap, that kitschy black night-cap which Heidegger always wore, on all occasions. Heidegger is the carpet-slipper and night-cap philosopher of the Germans, nothing else. I don't know why, Reger said yesterday, whenever I think of Stifter I also think of Heidegger and the other way about. Surely it is no accident, Reger said, that Heidegger just as Stifter has always been popular, and is still popular, mainly with those tense women, and just as those fussy do-gooding nuns and those fussy do-gooding nurses devour Stifter as their fovourite dish, in a manner of speaking, so they also devour Heidegger. Heidegger to this day is the favourite philosopher of German womanhood. Heidegger is the women's philosopher the specially suitable luncheon philosopher straight from the scholars' frying pan. When you come to a petit-bourgeois or even an aristocratic-petit-bourgeois party, you are very often served Heidegger even before the hors-d'oeuvre, you have not even taken off your overcoat and already you are being offered a piece of Heidegger, you have not even sat down and already the lady of the house has brought Heidegger in with the sherry on a silver salver. Heidegger is invariably a well-cooked German philosophy which may be served anywhere and at any time, Reger said, in any household. I do not know of any philosopher today who has been more degraded, Reger said. Anyway, Heidegger is finished as far as philosophy is concerned, whereas ten years ago he was still the great thinker, he now, as it were, only haunts pseudo-intellectual households and pseudo-intellectual parties, adding an artificial mendaciousness to their entirely natural one. Like Stifter, Heidegger is a tasteless and readily digestible reader's pudding for the mediocre German mind.

>>19084071
this might be very good, thank you. I guess I'll have to re-read the relevant parts from the birth of tragedy with this in mind before I can tell in how far this will help. I got about 20 pages into "time and being", and heidegger mentions the greeks (but not a pre-socratics iirc), though I can't tell what he's saying about them exactly, other than that fundamental terms need to be re-examined. I did a quick search of the book, and I've only seen him mention heraclitus once, and only pretty far into the thing. I read the paragraph and it's the usual hair-splitting which I can't comprehend, about the "logos". Heidegger doesn't like that "reality" implies "being discovering" (poorly paraphrasing from german, sry), that much is clear, and that this also happens with heraclitus, and that it's not ok to translate "logos" as "truth". Which is fine, I guess, but I don't think anybody was making the case that modern german maps well onto ancient greek.

>>19084083
doesn't really explain much other than "don't bother, heidegger man bad".
> favourite philosopher of German womanhood
I have never heard a single IRL woman be particularly taken with heidegger. In as far as I've met women who were into philosophy it was Foucault and Rawls. More to the point, however:
> the prototype of the re-thinker
ok, so what does his re-thinking constitute (e.g. given the above example about the pre-socratics, or better yet about kant or nietzsche, since I don't know the pre-socratics first-hand)?

>>19083982
>I read the full text of "What is metaphysics", which is short and I was told is an easy entry,
You probably confused this with 'Introduction Into Metaphysics'. That's the book your supposed to read before tackling the rest of his works. It's what Heidi himself recommended people start with.

>>19084083
holy shit, the amount of impotent rage here; kek.

>>19084173
>>19084071

Also, not asking anybody to do a supervised reading of "being and time" or "what is metaphysics" with me (though if you can illustratively explain parts of them that's also cool), just trying to understand what I can get from heidegger.

Just a few disparate examples:
1). From aristotle, I really liked the explanation of the "golden mean", which is an idea I've seen popping its head up my entire life, just never had a name and explanation for it before I read him.
2). In kant, I saw the categorical imperative, which seems like a somewhat elegant way to bootstrap morality, and again a moral impulse I've seen people intuitively latch on to.
3). In nietzsche I got the apollonian and dionysian and the master/slave morality dichotomies, which don't seem to be widely accepted conceptual staples, but which make sense, and you can use to look at the world through.
?). What, if anything, similar can I find in heidegger?

>>19084173
>>19084205
Heidegger was a filthy thief Goblin.

>According to Tomonobu Imamichi, Heidegger's concept of Dasein in Sein und Zeit was inspired – although Heidegger remained silent on this – by Okakura Kakuzō's concept of das-in-der-Welt-sein (being-in-the-worldness) expressed in The Book of Tea to describe Zhuangzi's philosophy, which Imamichi's professor Ito Kichinosuke had offered to Heidegger in 1919, after having followed private lessons with him the year before:[2]

>‘Ito Kichinosuke, one of my teachers at university, studied in Germany in 1918 immediately after the First World War and hired Heidegger as a private tutor. Before moving back to Japan at the end of his studies, Professor Ito handed Heidegger a copy of Das Buch vom Tee, the German translation of Okakura Kakuzo’s The Book of Tea, as a token of his appreciation. That was in 1919. Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) was published in 1927 and made Heidegger famous. Mr. Ito was surprised and indignant that Heidegger used Zhuangzi’s concept without giving him credit. Years later in 1945, Professor Ito reminisced with me and, speaking in his Shonai dialect, said, ‘Heidegger did a lot for me, but I should’ve laid into him for stealing’. There are other indications that Heidegger was inspired by Eastern writings, but let’s leave this topic here. I have heard many stories of this kind from Professor Ito and checked their veracity. I recounted this story at a reception held after a series of lectures I gave in 1968 at the University of Heidelberg at the invitation of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Japanese exchange students attended these lectures, and I explained that there were many other elements of classical Eastern thought in Heidegger’s philosophy and gave some examples. I must have said too much and may even have said that Heidegger was a plagiarist (Plagiator). Gadamer was Heidegger’s favorite student, and we ended up not speaking to each other for 4 or 5 years because he was so angry with me’ (Imamichi 2004, pp. 123–124).[3][4]

>>19084195
well fug. Ok, I'll start with this one, first paragraph is crystal clear, but then he continues repeating how important it is to know why there are beings at all, and I fear it's just going to be the same circus. In any case I'll read more carefully when I'm off 4chan. Could it be that if I don't agree that I should care why there are beings at all heidegger has nothing to offer me?

>>19084195
>>19084256
Is the entire point of metaphysics that you need to be able to unabmiguously explain every word with other words so that philosophy can be something of an exact form of knowledge? Is that the heidegger insight?

>>19084290
bro, just be.

>>19084227
>>19084083
sounds like COPE

>>19084318
But I'm always doing that anyway,

>>19083982
I will do my best here. The best way to understand Heidegger is first to understand what he was trying to do and why. He thought that over the years we had uncritically inherited a certain anthropology, a particular idea of what we as human beings are and how we relate to the world. In various forms, from Platonism through Scholasticism and finally Cartesianism, this idea has been some sort of ahistorical subject who stands in relation to an outside historical world, usually awkwardly and imperfectly. This history of philosophy, history, and anthropology since Plato is broadly subsumed under the category of "metaphysics". Heidegger wanted to shake us up enough where we can start asking the right questions again, namely, and perhaps most importantly, what do we mean when we say that something "is"? What is it for something to be? If we cannot get this basic question straight, we have no business pressing any further into philosophy. Our mistake since Plato was looking at the way objects exist and extrapolating the nature of being in general from objects. For example, by asking what makes a tree exist for us rather than an imaginary tree, we might decide that physical presence is a qualifier of being. This totally misses the more primary question of how it is that being itself comes to presence, prior to the being of any particular "thing". By the time we're looking at "things", we've already assumed too much. Phenomenology attempts to attend to "the things themselves" as we most directly experience them, in order to get a passing glance at the ontological structures which ground us before we ever attempt anything like philosophy. With this in mind, we might be able to better orient ourselves.

>>19084331
Thank you. Yes, I understood that Heidegger was about defining words more precisely. What I don't understand is how this would help with anything. For instance
> what do we mean when we say that something "is"?
what would a definition of "is" beyond the intuitive change in the rest of the philosophical edifice? Is it his claim that there might be some "noble lie" hidden behind the "is", analogous to Nietzsche's commentary on Plato's notion of the "ideal"? If so, does Heidegger lift the veil on this noble lie and show us what "is" actually is, or what else it could be? After "what is metaphysics", "nothing" still means the same to me as before (though, again, might be just a lack of my understanding than of heidegger not making a case).

>>19084366
Heidegger isn't so much concerned with re-defining or overly defining words as he is with pointing out the structures that need to be in place for anything like words to function. Here is an example from Being and Time when he talks about signs and symbols outside the typical sense/reference paradigm. It isn't directly referring to language, but I think it might shed some light on his approach generally. Imagine a car's turn signal. This is a sign, but what is it signifying? It isn't a one to one correspondence, nor is it generated in isolation. The blinking light calls us to a certain response (caution, or movement, lets say) based on a huge matrix of other objects and obligations. A turn signal only makes sense in a world pre-packaged with cars, roads, certain social expectations, bodies which can be harmed by vehicles, reasons for going places, etc. What the turn signal actually refers to is the entire structure that we already inhabit. This doesn't change the fact that most proximately, the signal just means "I'm going this way", but by attending closely to the way the signal functions, we can see that before we reach a definition, the world already "makes sense" in a certain way, or rather, the world already grants certain possibilities for making sense.

By the time we get to the word "is" or "to be ", Heidegger wants to know, what is the structure that allows this term to make sense? Just like we have a pre-reflective awareness of traffic and cars that allow a turn signal to make sense, how can we get a glimpse of our pre-reflective understanding which grants the possibility of sense to "to be".

His approach to this question changes slightly over the years, from a human-being focused interrogation in Being and Time to a more historically oriented ontology of "happening" in his later work, but I think his motivations and even his preliminary results were the same. The biggest hurdle for Heidegger was presenting his work in such a way that people wouldn't confuse it with just another book of systemic metaphysics, which they of course did do with Being and Time, much to his frustration.

>>19084218
>What, if anything, similar can I find in heidegger?
You can get all of those philosophical concepts and ideas put into a Heideggerian ”metalanguage” - that is, an explication of their relationship to the question of Being and how they relate to fundamental existentials like sorgenheit, angst, umsicht, zuhandenheit, vorhandenheit

Also, you’ll stop treating philosophy as pure ”concepts” that can be seamlessly extracted from history of philosophy, instead you’ll take up a ”phenomenologically destructive” relationship to history/the past where you ”mobilise/free” the phenomenological aspect of those ideas, making them actual living pointers in your own life - not just armchair musings

>>19084421
>By the time we get to the word "is" or "to be ", Heidegger wants to know, what is the structure that allows this term to make sense?
Ok, this is actually quite interesting, and I think you've done a better job explaining this than anybody so far (including Heidegger himself, lol).

Is it then correct to conclude that this point is that there's no fundamental reductionist building blocks for thought, because they all presuppose some given context to exist at all? On one hand this can seem like a banal application of "systems" theory (it's a thing that's plaguing the natural sciences recently and supplanting reductionist research with meaningless correlative studies) to philosophy; but on the other hand it could be very interesting in as far as he can make this insight do any sort of heavy lifting. In this sense, is there anything which is changed by looking at the world in such a fashion? Having understood both the problem and the novel approach which heidegger proposes (meaning now in your case, not mine), has this changed any decision you would make given some state of affairs (or at least how you would evaluate some state of affairs)?

Being is the transcendental conditions for the intelligibility of any possible being. The clearing is the transcendental conditions for the intelligibility of any possible being. Alethia and Disclosing is the opening up of something for possible intelligibility by the transcendental conditions for the intelligibility of any possible being. Dasein is the being which has as part of its being, a stand on its own being and thus a pre-ontological understanding of what it means to be. What Heidegger aims to do in Being and Time is to elucidate and analyze this already existing understanding of Being via what amounts to a phenomenological, hermeneutic version of the Trancendental deduction. Basically, he's Kant but less rationalist. Don't let the pragmatist fags or Heideggerian snowflakes tell you any different.

>>19084464
> free the phenomenological aspect of those ideas, making them actual living pointers
Can we try this out? Here's a short excerpt from Seneca which I like (not my life motto in any case, just very well put and prescriptive in any case):
> not control anger, but destroy it entirely, for what control is there for something which is fundamentally wicked?
how would I put this into a heideggerian "metalanguage"?

>>19084491
>he's Kant but less rationalist
>rationalist
Unfortunate word, ”more ontological” works better

>>19084501
I know he says in Being and Time that he's not anti-rationalist and makes a point to give Science its place and all, but lets be real, he discards logic as basically just a residue of the present-at-hand, favors phenomenological descriptive characterizations of experiences rather than casual reconstructions and then after he 'finished' Being and Time he basically obsessed over Holdernlin Poetry and 6 sentences of Heraclitus for several years. None of that was very Rationalist.

>>19084498
>how would I put this into a heideggerian "metalanguage"?
A sort of care/Sorge for Dasein, which is set upon destroying negative emotions because it resolutely can’t be indifferent to anger. Anger becomes an issue, and we can accept it, destroy it, use it and so on. There’s also the tendency to turn the specific care into a metalphysical evil, which is sort of a reifying movement compared to the phenomenological content.

Heidegger also has a ”theory” of the emotions - but that is more oriented on how ”moods” always permeate Dasein - doesn’t seem fully relevant here.

>>19084557
> A sort of care/Sorge for Dasein, which is set upon destroying negative emotions because it resolutely can’t be indifferent to anger.
Hm, ok, but if anything it's the same thing but less clear, no? Would the point of the metaphysical language be to highlight the constraints in which the statement operates, or to extrapolate a generalization (not saying the above did either)? Also, not trying to troll or channelge you, just wondering what the metaphysical reinterpretation of all insights I might otherwise find in philosophy would add.

> Heidegger also has a ”theory” of the emotions - but that is more oriented on how ”moods” always permeate Dasein - doesn’t seem fully relevant here.
Yeah, might sidetrack us if anything, but just for reference, where can I find that?

>>19083982
>I read the full text of "What is metaphysics"

Don't start with primary literature. My advice is to get familiar with the phenomenological tradition, especially Husserl. Since reading Husserl on primary sources might take at least a year, my advice is to start with some history of philosophy testbooks. Just check the syllabi of a few good phil departments, see ehich texts they're using, download them from libgen, and read the sections dedicated to Husserl and to post-Husserlian-pre-Heideggerian philosophers. Do it with at least 4 or 5 textbooks (it wont take you that long, those sections are usually 20-30 pages long).
If you'll do that you'll know the context in which Heidegger operated. For example you'll get why Angst and Nothing were the focus of "What is Metaphysics?", since Angst seem to really break the notion of intentionality accepted by Brentano and Husserlian phenomenologists (since it is a disposition that refers to nothing in particular).

>>19084083
>Anyway, Heidegger is finished as far as philosophy is concerned, whereas ten years ago he was still the great thinker, he now, as it were, only haunts pseudo-intellectual households and pseudo-intellectual parties
Boy if he was wrong.

>>19083982
https://youtu.be/2YFLoLrwFls?t=53

>>19083982
For early Heidegger: just read Being and Time. Contrary to popular belief, it is actually a quite straightforward and self-contained work. He states what he is about to do, why he is doing it, what "method" he is using, and then he tries to do it (ultimately unsuccessfully). Later Heidegger is harder to read.

>>19084686
>Later Heidegger is harder to read.
I've been told by German speakers that late Heidegger is only hard to read in translation, mostly because he uses many turns of phrases and word-plays that translate clumsily into other languages.

>>19084470
Glad to hear it.

>Is it then correct to conclude that this point is that there's no fundamental reductionist building blocks for thought, because they all presuppose some given context to exist at all?

Absolutely correct, thinking for Heidegger is more like a quiet listening than an active system-building. Even trying for some "abstracted" thinking like looking at objects as just weights and measures of physical mass and space is itself a stance among others, and one that privileges the detached gaze of a scientifically-minded subject who has chosen to relate themselves to objects in a particular manner. When we decide that time is a countable abstract aligned to a neutral grid, or that space/distance is most accurately measured in units like feet or meters which work everywhere and nowhere, this is itself a privation of the meaning-rich time and space which we experience prior to our desire to abstract. Whether we're dealing with thought itself, language, or our sense of spatiality and temporality, Heidegger is antireductionist. There is a tension between our use and the possibilities lurking just around the corner, and this tension is to be maintained as strongly as possible rather than glossed over for the sake of neat and orderly metaphysics.

In this sense, is there anything which is changed by looking at the world in such a fashion?

Yes, although bear in mind the idea of a Heideggerian "ethics" or something of the sort is so far downstream from what Heidegger was doing in his own work that its not even fair to speculate what it might look like. In the same way that you can't see the skyline of a city while you're in one of the buildings that make it up, we need some distance from our own philosophical tradition before we can even properly appreciate where we've been and what its meant. A new ontology will allow us to see things like ethics, the human being, and the nature of our world for the first time and as something radically new and strange. His later critique of technology allows for a peek into what this might do. For example, if we stop looking at the world as resources waiting to be managed, and raw material waiting to be put to this purpose or that, we might pause before treating the human being as just another resource to be optimized. Think of San Fransisco tech workers planning out their day to the minute and cruising on some cocktail of nootropics and vitamins to boost productivity. The human being in this case is a machine to be fueled and biologically optimized for peak economic and social productivity. This is the human being "enframed" by the technological mindset, and the deeper we stray into this territory, the harder it is to realize that we've created a problem. In essence, realizing that there is nothing privileged or inevitable about the technological mindset will re-awaken us to a rich multiplicity of meaning that actively repels attempts to reduce it to this or that.

My single biggest issue with Heidegger is the emphasis on authenticity and breaking from das man, while he spent his whole life as a careerist academic using highly technical jargon and denigrating other thinkers for absolutely no reason. It sure seems as though he never practiced what he preached. He was right about Spengler, but Spengler was also right about him.

You have to read it as transcendental idealism. Right away, bracket out of your mind the possibility that he's being overtly metaphysical in a conventional sense. You will rarely if ever see Heidegger talk about the external world, material or metaphysical or otherwise. Also, the architectonic aspects of Being and Time are uncharacteristic of most of his work and thought. He is anti-system and anti-architectonic for the simple reason that systems and architectonics have a tendency to reify technical (and thus initially provisional and heuristic) language and become taken for granted, occluding and causing forgetfulness of the elemental thoughts or phenomena they were originally brought in to describe.

If you already understand Nietzsche it's not that hard to get a grasp on Heidegger. He is basically Nietzsche's destructive, genealogical, and poeticising aspects combined with Husserl's transcendental phenomenology (and turned against what he sees as Husserl's lingering quasi-metaphysical reification of a "transcendental subject"), combined with the hermeneutics of Dilthey and the Baden neo-Kantian school around Rickert, Windelband. Take the radical historicism and "situatedness" of hermeneutics, the genealogical perspective of Nietzsche ("what is the real PROCESS of coming-to-be hiding behind this seemingly self-evident, taken for granted idea?"), and the phenomenological "attitude" of Husserl (bracketing out all metaphysics, whether materialist or idealist or whatever, in order to "attend to the phenomena, just as they appear as phenomena"), and you have Heidegger.

What is distinctive about him, what drew most people to him, was the way he weaponised this combination in his method of "destruktion" (really more like de-construction than destruction), a form of hermeneutics in which "beings" (intended meanings, phenomena) are analysed NOT in terms of some imagined abstract content, i.e. NOT by "purifying" them of their supposed "contingency" (as if concepts have an atemporal, always-valid, internal core of pure meaning, and are simply cloaked with external contingency as an afterthought or by accident), but by attending to their actual "being for us," their givenness just as they give (present, appear as) themselves, and then inquiring into their historical-genealogical constitution AND the consequences of their having become reflexive.

All the jargon dissolves and even becomes pleasant and intuitive once you have these basic parameters in mind. The opening of Being and Time is simply talking about how enthralled we are, historically, to the tendency to describe the process of ideal meaning-constitution as ITSELF a constituted meaning in the very same way, i.e. to "treat Being as if it were a being." He's trying to re-reveal the strangeness of the fact that the world "is" in certain ways (ways which evidently flow, historically, and sometimes harden up and become hidden from us even as we continue to make use of them reflexively).

>>19084950
>continuing
Everything flows from that: Husserl's phenomenological approach of bracketing genetic-causal relationships ("mind is just a computer on a meat machine") and reductive assertoric judgments ("x is REALLY just an x of z") when describing the most primordial nature of thought, because it is precisely the ability of thought to CONSTITUTE and combine such meanings ("mind," "computer," "meat," "machine") in thought and judgment that is in question in the first place. Nietzsche's "hermeneutics of suspicion," seeing behind every "truth" and every reflexive attitude or unthinking commonplace thought a complex historical process of falsehood becoming so self-evident that it's simply felt as a commonsense part of reality itself. Historicist hermeneutics' radical reduction of thought contents to continuous processes of becoming, accessible only through induction and sympathetic dialectical engagement, i.e. accessible not through "pure" apprehension of "really underlying" rationalist/logical/transcendental contents but through precisely the acquisition of the contingent and historical "what-it-isness" of the various beings of another culture, worldview, or way of thinking.

It's far less mystical and far more critical than it appears at first. He's trying to turn this "ontological" or phenomenological way of seeing into a fundamental philosophical modality, a first philosophy. It's a way of approaching all inquiries by first inquiring into the ontological (meaning-constitutive, hermeneutic-genetic) background of their ontical (taken for granted schema of "what things are, what their relations are," etc.) layout. It can be applied fruitfully in many domains, but it also lends to large scale critiques of things like the techno-materialistic-scientific worldview. Basically it specialises in loosening up and showing the arbitrariness in anything that occludes, buries, submerges, or otherwise causes forgetfulness of some possibility of "other" thoughts, e.g. by going to the origin point of a certain collective "decision" to bury an originary scientific quandary in technical jargon that subsequently became so reflexive that people think the jargon simply IS the scientific reality itself, they can't even think outside of those ontical parameters anymore.

>>19084955
>continuing
Basically it lends itself to a tremendously powerful first philosophy for doing other shit. Gadamer is a good systematiser of it and clearer than his master. Don't go into either expecting a grand metaphysical unified field theory. They are fundamentally transcendental philosophers at the end of the day. They don't have all the answers or claim to. It's an incomplete project. It's also dubious whether it "overcomes" Husserl. Better read as a development of one aspect of phenomenology than a completion of it.

>>19084640
I would agree with this if you're a based autist and want to have lots of fun (read: agonising pain) trying to understand Husserl for ten thousand years, but honestly, Heidegger is a better intro to Husserl than Husserl is to Heidegger. You can understand Heidegger a lot easier and quicker than Husserl. Heidegger has so much secondary lit and so many enthusiasts that you can kind of just flounder around in him until you eventually get it. Husserl, I don't even know if Husserl scholars get him sometimes. But reading some of the popular works couldn't hurt if you're willing, like Crisis.

>>19084775
That's really only characteristic of Being and Time, and frankly Adorno's "jargon of authenticity" complaint doesn't land home on Heidegger. But Heidegger definitely does have a deep structure to his thought of tragic gnosticism, or something like that anyway, with all his talk of "forgetfulness of being" and fallenness and lapsing into "mere" going-with-the-flow instead of mastering one's destiny and making "decisions" and so on. Heidegger was definitely a dick on a human level. Look into how he treated Jaspers. But his Nazism was sincere, and perfectly consonant with his philosophy. In the same way that individual humans have to stay abreast of the "thrownness" of their condition and master it and make "decisions" within it (as one is confronted with objective exigencies), a collective of individuals (a people) does too.

What the fuck is going on in this thread

>>19085273
First time in a Heidegger thread?

>>19084775
Adorno’s critique of Heidegger’s ”jargon” is laughable

>>19084962
Heidegger is not consonant with biological racism

>>19084950
So he's right?
>>19084491

>>19083994
For a retarded gay retard you sure are fucking retarded and gay

>>19084962
>how he treated Jaspers

>>19085273
Verbal masturbation is happening

>>19085823
>There is no doubt in fact that Heidegger's hostility to the grand masters of Kantianism, especially Cassirer, was rooted in a profound incompatibility with their alien habitus: 'On the one hand, you had this dark, athletic little man, an accomplished skier, with energetic but impassive features, a hard, difficult man, totally committed to setting and solving problems with the deepest moral seriousness; and, on the other hand, a white-haired man, Olympian not only in appearance but also in spirit, with his open mind and his wide-ranging discussions, his relaxed features and his indulgent amiability, his vitality and adaptability, and, finally, his aristocratic distinction'.
>We can quote the words of Cassirer's wife herself: 'We had been explicitly warned about Heidegger's odd appearance; we knew about his rejection of all social conventions and also his hostility towards neo-Kantians, especially Cohen. His penchant for anti-semitism was not unfamiliar to us, either... All the guests had arrived, the women in evening gowns, the men in dinner suits. At a point when the dinner had been interrupted for some time with seemingly endless speeches, the door opened, and an inconspiciuous little man came into the room, looking as awkward as a peasant who had stumbled into a royal court. He had black hair and dark piercing eyes, rather like some workman from southern Italy or Bavaria; an impression which was soon confirmed by his regional accent. He was wearing an old-fashioned black suit. For me, what seemed the most worrying thing, was his deadly seriousness and his total lack of a sense of humour'.
SIGMA GANG

>>19084775
>>19085440
I’ve not even read Adorno and wasn’t trying to refer to him with use of the word “jargon”. That’s my own word because that’s basically how I see it. I mentioned Spengler and in Spenglerian terms he would be “a mere academician” and I think that’s pretty obviously true. For all his talk of authenticity and das man, he was precisely a petty academician. Does that mean anything is wrong? Not necessarily. But it doesn’t help the cause.

>>19084083
Bernhard burned him HARD

Whenever i see the ideas of a philospher laid out and explained i ask myself "so what?" and realize that most philosophy is a jerk-off with barelly any implications to anything else (expect for pedantic humanities writers who want to "spice up" their text by referencing a philosopher). Philosophy might be one of the least cost-effective uses of ink ever invented.

Or maybe i'm just another working class quarterwit blinded by objectivism who can't understand how any all these ramblings about terms such as "phenomenology", only used in philosophical texts, can be of any relevance to anything or anyone besides as a sample of someone's supposed inteligence. I wish someone would enlighten me, because whenever i see a philosopher being discussed or referenced in a text from other humanities, i see nothing of real value beig added regarding the subject matter.

>>19085979
Most philosophy is an antiquated stepping stone that brought us to where we are. Without it, we wouldn't have refined our methods of art, science, and law. It's not useful to study it anymore unless you're in a position to move civilization forward on a reasonably grand scale, and even then, what's useful to study isn't so much the content as is the historical development of said content.

>>19085979
>Whenever i see the ideas of a philospher laid out and explained i ask myself "so what?" and realize that most philosophy is a jerk-off
Sounds like Heidegger’s relationship to theoretical philosophy, maybe you should give him a chance

>>19085979
I'm tickled that you went through the effort of adding a picture of Tony Soprano to this post, so that we read it with a tone of earthy working-class wisdom and not as someone who is scared by words they don't recognize. Do you also find cookbooks scary and useless? I've never read the term "julienne" or "blanch" outside of culinary text, do I get to mistrust these hotshot chefs with their fancy jargon? Or should I consider that maybe these words have a useful meaning within the topic at hand.

>>19086007
You forgot your image, so your post comes across as pretentious.

>>19085917
>For all his talk of authenticity and das man, he was precisely a petty academician
Umm maybe you should look at this post>>19085865

>>19084083
The reality is everyone knows Heidegger was based, but people pretend to hate him because he joined the Nazi party.

Even Sartre pretended his work was not influenced by Heidegger when he plainly was.

They just want to create distance.

>>19084962
>I would agree with this if you're a based autist and want to have lots of fun (read: agonising pain) trying to understand Husserl for ten thousand years, but honestly, Heidegger is a better intro to Husserl than Husserl is to Heidegger. You can understand Heidegger a lot easier and quicker than Husserl. Heidegger has so much secondary lit and so many enthusiasts that you can kind of just flounder around in him until you eventually get it. Husserl, I don't even know if Husserl scholars get him sometimes. But reading some of the popular works couldn't hurt if you're willing, like Crisis
I havent said that OP should start with reading Husserl, only that he should check some history of philosophy textbooks first. Had he done even the minimum amount of research (by discovering the meaning of one of the most basic concepts in phenomenology, namely the one of "intentionality") he would have understood right away what Heidegger was doing in that essay, and if he had the slightest familiarity with Husserlian phenomenology he would have understood why the move towards Angst and Nothing was such a big deal. He didn't need to read both volumes of Husserl's Ideas to understand it, much much less was required to understand that Heidegger's text.

>>19086046
The Heidi's problem isn't nazism, his problems are plagiarism, graphomania and blunt careerism.

Basically he’s most well known for his meta-reinterpretation of the western philosophical tradition, turned everything on its head. Heidegger was mostly concerned with ONTOLOGY, a field of philosophy concerned with the most essential aspects of human perception/consciousness for instance our tendency to create ABSTRACTIONS which are basically mental categorizations and divisions HUMANS engage in in order to make reality comprehensible (at least according to most philosophers on the subject it varies between thinkers)

According to Heidegger there are two types of thinking that humans engage in: calculative thinking and meditative thinking. Calculative thinking is the type of thinking we engage in when we want to imbue our conscious energy into the things around us, it’s entirely concerned with DOING as opposed to CONTEMPLATING. Like thinking of building a barn is CALCULATIVE thinking. Meditative thinking, according to Heidegger, is a core part of BEING that is entirely unique to humans. It’s when we simply let our mind reflect, contemplate, ponder about how and who we are, what we are feeling, etc., Heidegger saw meditative thinking as the most natural or fundamentally human-oriented way of thinking as opposed to calculative thinking

meditative thinking forms an aspect of what Heidegger called dasein or “being-in-the-world”, however there are other aspects that constitute dasein for instance the concept of THROWNNESS, which is another quality unique to humans that differentiate us from animals; humans are THROWN into this world and as we grow older we make the phenomena surrounding us comprehensible through abstraction and meditative thinking. Again, dasein/being-in-the-world are the ontological phenomena that constitutes the unique human experience

>>19083982
heidegger is when you nazi

>>19086097
Heidegger, like I said, completely reinterpreted the western philosophical condition. According to Heidegger the oldest of the Gayreek philosophers like HERACLITUS were meditative, “primordial” thinkers - men who were, like I said, concerned primarily with meditative thought which is what humans innately prefer when not exposed to society, which invariably favors CALCULATIVE thought. Gayreek philosophers that came after Heraclitus especially PLATO were responsible for orienting human thought closer to CALCULATIVE thinking. This, Heidegger believed, was a horrible mistake and one of the worst things to ever befall humanity. From Plato onwards virtually all philosophers save a few were primarily focused on CALCULATIVE thinking which is more or less alien to DASEIN. For instance Nietzsche is almost an entirely calculative thinker, ideas like “will to power” are 100% calculative in its constitution

Heidegger believes that calculative thinking has left a deep rot in all of western society. As time progresses humans are moving closer and closer to exclusively having calculative thinking patterns. A good example of this is what has happened to the state of education in the US: art appreciation classes, literature classes, etc. are drastically underfunded and underappreciated for subjects more suited to calculative thinking, and furthermore these classes explicitly focus on how these subjects will be applied in the future, I.e. at a future job

Technology and its relationship to humans is also calculative in its nature. Technology is entirely focused on DOING, ACCOMPLISHING a task.

Heidegger believes that we are rapidly approaching a dark, dark moment in history, a world where every one will shrug offmeditative thinking, and forget how important it is to the type of being that is unique to humans living in the world. Humans will no longer really be humans at that point, life will have lost all of its authenticity

Any way the way Heidegger saw it (and I agree), the least authentic society that was by far the most concerned with purely calculative thinking, at least when he was alive (I’m sure he wouldn’t have changed his mind) is the USA, the most soulless shithole imaginable

>>19086003
What is the bare minimal pre-requisite readings before getting into Heidegger's writings about theoretical philosophy?

>>19085997
>Most philosophy is an antiquated stepping stone that brought us to where we are.
Then what is the use of people writing PhD's about "reading *philosopher A* through the lens of *philosopher B*" and "a *philosophical term X* approach to *subect Y from philosophy or other humanities*"?

>>19086097
>it’s entirely concerned with DOING as opposed to CONTEMPLATING. Like thinking of building a barn is CALCULATIVE thinking. Meditative thinking, according to Heidegger, is a core part of BEING that is entirely unique to humans. It’s when we simply let our mind reflect, contemplate, ponder about how and who we are, what we are feeling, etc., Heidegger saw meditative thinking as the most natural or fundamentally human-oriented way of thinking as opposed to calculative thinking
You’re mixing up calculative thinking (ratio) and poetic dwelling with the modii ready-to-hand and present-at-hand here I think

Practical doing, like hammering a barn, is ”meditative” ready-to-hand - you’re absorbed in the task

Philosophizing in a lecture room is overwhelmingly present-at-hand - and taking this form of being-in-the-world for granted is what has lead to a ”metaphysics of presence”, where things only are ”real” in the degree that they can be conceptualized and reflected upon

>>19086119
>Then what is the use of people writing PhD's
They need to justify getting paid somehow.

>>19086103
It reminds me of playing videogames in general how this toxic thinking has spread. Instead of playing the games for fun or exploration, everything every build or varaible is calculated and collated on the internet so that people will only play cookie cutter builds and only play the S tier or A tier characters.

It makes everything so soulless when everyone is completely focused on winning that it ceases to be a game and is more like work and its stressful.

Then you have people speedrunning video games and instead of actually playing the fucking game they just look for autistic exploits to jump through the maps and fuck with the game physics to teleport and people think its something amazing.

Its basically come to a point where our society is immersed in a sort of psychopathic-autism where people no longer care about whats fun when "cheating" or playing by numbers is more efficient.

You look at WWII Germany had the best armed forces, the best technology, the best generals, the best scientists. They lost because they lacked numbers and the satanic jewish masons managed to brainwash half the world to destroy germany.

Germany actually secretly won the war because they took their best and brightest and went to Antartica and are now chilling with ayys.

>>19086097
>>19086103
ngl this is the best and most understandable interpretation of Heidegger's thought I've ever seen. you diminished my strong and staunch dislike for his philosophy a bit.