/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14664312]

Why do some people continue to view Heidegger as “primitivist” or a “luddite”?
I think it is pretty clear that, when he talks about “technology” and “Gestell”, he is not talking about technological machinery and equipment, i. e. about beings. Rather, he is talking about a certain way beings are disclosed.

[Anonymous No.14664364]

>>14664312
what he wrote + the way he lived

sure, he wasn't 100% opposed to tech...he would sneak off to a neighbour's house to watch german football on tv but he still lived like a romantic luddite in nearly all aspects of life and advocated against stuff like air travel and space exploration

[Anonymous No.14664536]

>>14664364
>advocated against stuff like air travel and space exploration
Seriously? lmao can you post sources because that's kind of ridiculous if true

[Anonymous No.14664605]

>>14664536
read his famous last interview with der spiegel

[Anonymous No.14664860]

>>14664312
Heidegger was a luddite, and genuinely that's a good thing.

>>14664536
This man will burn.

>inb4 Ted
Ted is retarded.

[Anonymous No.14665004]

>>14664860
>This man will burn.
What?

[Anonymous No.14665016]

>>14665004
He considers me the "enemy" of his luddite agenda because I mock its stupidity.

[Anonymous No.14665101]

>>14664312
He was born in bumfuck southern Germany where horse carts were rolling and ended up witnesing the atomic bomb. His generation necessarily had to have a complicated relation with modern technology, they either were amazed by it and worshipped it as a new god like the Futurists or saw the dangers it posed and questioned it like Heidegger.

Anyways his critique of modern technology is mostly a critique of Descartes' subjectivism and not an attack on space travel. He feared the rise of science and technology above all other aspects of life, but also the understanding of Art through aesthetics, of culture through sociology and "cultural sciences" and the "flight of the gods" or Entgotterung of the world.

I concede that picturing Heidegger as a luddite or as an anti-scientific thinker may be partially true but it's a very shallow understanding of his work and ignores the questions that he was trying to raise.

[Anonymous No.14665113]

>>14665101
>but also the understanding of Art through aesthetics, of culture through sociology and "cultural sciences" and the "flight of the gods" or Entgotterung of the world.
Can you elaborate on this?

[Anonymous No.14665242]

not that poster but we create tools to understand and manipulate the world. even a mechanical, physical tool in the general sense of the word still emerges from thought, in the sense that it is still embedded in thought for it to "be" (be seen as, be taken as, be used as) a tool at all. we build, and then see and make reflexive use of, a hammer "as" a tool, but this does not make it inherently a tool. there is no free-floating hammer-essence any more than there is a free-floating atlatl essence. whatever it may or may not be inherently (wood, stone, atoms, quarks, superstrings, whatever you want), a hammer "is" what it is for us when it is a tool, a hammer. and it emerges out of nested contexts in which it makes sense (e.g. among other tools, hammering as opposed to screwing), in which those contexts make sense (tool use in general), which we can't define rigidly either, because these contexts are equally involved in their being "used," simply taken for granted and taken up reflexively, not to mention the fact that they are interwoven and have borders too fuzzy for us to indicate except in a general way. (what i mean is, it's not like we could fully enumerate the hierarchy of contexts within which hammers emerge, as if they are some kind of ideal structure. even the ways of speaking, thinking, and seeing that we might employ in order to construct such an ideal hierarchy would themselves be tools, with their own nested contexts and so on.)

these complexes of context are mostly unconscious and reflexive like i said. tools, whether they are tools in the usual colloquial sense like a hammer, or computational/quantification methods in the social sciences or a graphing application on a computer or a "scientific method" that guides researchers in separating data points from irrelevant noise in whatever it is they're researching, or even just whole disciplines like "sociology," they are tools, and as tools they are emergent from thought and exist in thought (again, aside from any material reality they might have).

what happens when you use a hammer? it's unconscious, you just use it. it is what it is. this is the natural attitude. but "what" it "is," like i said, is presumably a historically contingent concrescence of various overlapping structures of thought and so forth. you don't reflect on these factors, you don't reflect on "how we got to having the concept 'hammer' with these conceptual linkages and implications (many of which are fuzzy and probably indefinable/intangible)" when we use a hammer, we just do what it does. when we do what a hammer does, hammering, we become what hammering makes us, a hammerer, which is itself a kind of concrescence of ways of being in the world. and we don't think about that being either, we just do it, we just become it.

[Anonymous No.14665248]

>>14665242
>>14665113
normally this is fine, because we can always in theory re-trace the paths that led us to where we are now, reclaim the history that is inextricably woven in the being of any tool (really, any being at all) as its essence. put simply, we can look at a hammer and think "this no longer suits my purposes, i now just see this as a lump of wood and stone, i understand where this came from and what it was for, but it is no longer 'for' anything, so i can remake it or discard it."

but what happens when the tool-being of a tool becomes so unconsciously reflexive, so deeply assumed, that we think it "just is what it is," in a way that is beyond our merely human capacity to break down, reclaim, understand, and ultimately remake as needed or as desired? the tool, already a concrescence of certain ways of viewing reality ("reality has nails in it that can be hammered"), becomes hardened up to the point that it no longer seems like it has a history, it just IS. and likewise, because our being is reciprocally determined by the tool's being ("hammers hammer nails; the hammer's wielder is the hammerer"). so it's not just a matter of the hammer (again, a concrescence of certain assumptions about the world which have normally or historically been harmless/necessary to assume sometimes) being hardened up, our own being qua hammerers is being hardened up too, we are losing our own capacity to reclaim our genetic-historical essence, we are becoming "forgetful" of being.

the hammer example is easy because it's neatly circumscribed, but remember i said this applies for any tool, and really, any being we use/encounter whatsoever. imagine the wide-ranging implications if a materialistic and mathematical conception of reality, bound up in natural-scientific institutions that necessarily draw upon the financial, cultural, and intellectual resources of entire countries, becomes hardened up in this way. back when those institutions were young, perhaps the materialism inherent in them was reflexive - lots of late 19th century physicists quite frankly admitted that they simply had nothing to say about what life or mind was, because what they studied was simply a very useful tool for talking about the mechanics of dead matter (about whose "deadness" they even admitted uncertainty as well).

[Anonymous No.14665249]

>>14665242

[Anonymous No.14665250]

>>14665113
>>14665242
>>14665248
but is such reflexivity still usual after more than a century of near deification of the physical sciences? extend the same analogy to freudian psychoanalysis (we are mere bundles of drives), to most evolutionary biology (life is a subset of chemistry which is a subset of physical mechanics), to philosophical logic (logic is a free-floating computer program that only requires a human operator as a technicality), to economics and various forms of social science (humans are "rationally selfish" animals). all of these are likewise bound up in overlapping and criss-crossing contexts, reified in institutions, reified in the socio-dynamics necessary to carry them out (billion-dollar grant applications, projects spanning decades, rivalries, industrial and military applications, popularization and "public outreach", and so on).

now what if all or most of these disciplines and institutions, if you keep going deeper and deeper down the chain of the contexts within which they operate, really fundamentally share a certain perspective of the world all alike? what if that perception of "what the world really is, actually, once you strip away all conventional elements" is something like "dead, measurable, pointless matter," and the concomitant perception of a human being is "a pointless, hedonistic animal who manipulates dead, pointless matter by being ever more efficient at measuring it"? and what if the latter conception extends to other human beings as well? if, like in the hammer/hammerer scenario, this way of viewing the world became reified not only because of the "forgetfulness" of the life-history of a simple being (i.e. the hammer) but of the forgetfulness of all these institutions with their complex and interwoven life-histories, all the industries and assumptions necessary just to survive and come across as a plausible participant in today's world, all the things one has to assume simply to be able to go to work every day and get by, what would happen? we would need (and need more and more with each passing day of further reification, further forgetfulness) an ever more cataclysmic break with this forgetfulness, we would ever more urgently need an ever increasingly shocking "remembrance" of being, or opportunity to effect such a remembrance. otherwise, the tool-instituions will keep reifying themselves in the tool-worldview deeper and deeper until it's simply impossible to reverse or until we create a totalitarian regime of techno-measurement that kills or enslaves every human being on earth as an afterthought to further maximizing efficiency.

>>14665249
sorry

[Anonymous No.14665254]

>>14665250
That's okay, they're still good posts. I realize some anons don't have the means to purchase capital letters.

[Anonymous No.14665267]

>>14665113
Heidegger thinks that all these phenomenoms are the direct consequence of cartesian subjectivism, the idea that we as knowing subjects live separate from a world comprised of objects that we are able to get to know. Heidegger obviously proposed a different model in which subjects are already-always-there in the world.

The cartesian model leads however to a certain "disclosing of being" like OP said that culminates in modern technology and all the aforementioned ways of relating to, experiencing and understanding the world. In few words, all these modes of relating to the world are only one: the human pretension of completely mastery over all that is. So, for instance, when we look at the Rhine in this way, we see it as a resource to be exploited for our own gain, wether as a hydroelectric dam or as a place for a tourist resort.

This apparently innocuous process is actually concealing the disclosure of being of said entity. To look at an artwork as a piece to be exposed in a museum really undermines what the artwork already is and how we phenomenologcally experience it. Even more, this relation is contrived and in some way secondary, derived from the primordial relation in which we already are within the world. We do not stand apart from the entities that populate our world, observing them dispassionately. Why, then, should we privilege the detached, subject/object framework that results from the breakdown of our engaged experience? This is the true crime of modern technology that Heidegger is trying to get at.

[Anonymous No.14665307]

>>14665267
>phenomenoms

[Anonymous No.14665313]

>>14665242
>>14665248
>>14665250
Thanks, will add to my growing collection of Heidegger screencaps

[Anonymous No.14665329]

>>14665307
I'm German which means I can't shitpost as effectively as native English speakers. I can read Heidegger in the original tho, so there's that.

[Anonymous No.14665342]

>>14665329
I wasn't shitting on you, I just thought "phenomenoms" sounded cute. The cat looks pissed off though so I can see why it seemed like I was being a dick. Apologies. Here's a different cat that more accurately reflects my reaction to your post.

[Anonymous No.14665364]

>>14665342
That's a cute cat, I thank you for it.

[Anonymous No.14665877]

>>14664312
That’s the problem with being an obscurantist bull shit artist, anyone can project what they want onto your work.

If you happen to be really obscure and pretentious, and weasel your way into an academic department, and if your timing is right, then a whole generation of wannabe intellectual psueds will praise you.

[Anonymous No.14665908]

>>14664860
Wow. You’re an idiot if you think Ted is retarded. Ted is supremely lucid, insightful and rational. His two books are da

[Anonymous No.14665917]

>>14665908
>His two books are da
did candlejack get you before you could finish your po

[Anonymous No.14666083]

>>14665242
is this what reading heidegger is like? i have no clue what you're trying to say in this post

[Anonymous No.14666099]

>>14666083
that post is a lot clearer than an equivalent Heidegger passage would be

[Anonymous No.14666119]

>>14665267
>So, for instance, when we look at the Rhine in this way, we see it as a resource to be exploited for our own gain, wether as a hydroelectric dam or as a place for a tourist resort.
this makes heidegger sound like some sentimental hippy crap. NOOOOOOO MY HECKIN RHINERINOOOOO, MY FLIPPIN RIVERERO AAAH

seriously what the fuck is this heidegger guy about. ive tried watching videos on him, ive gone through the archives. i cant fuckin figure it out. it seems like he was just trying to hard to be "original" and just came up with the weirdest shit that he could. like he just really wanted to say "heh, but you never thought about it like that, huh??".

[Anonymous No.14666136]

>>14665877
I honestly don’t think that “The Question Concerning Technology” is a particularly dense or obscure text. It’s pretty clear for the most part.

[Anonymous No.14666149]

>>14666136
>The Question Concerning Technology
why do i hear this being narrated in the voice of some guided meditation hippy. like imagine some middle aged white male yoga instructor with one of those long feather earrings sitting cross legged as he calmly tries to guide you into a state of mindfulness. that's what this reads like

[Anonymous No.14666166]

>>14666119
Nigger, if you think that Heidegger was some kind of sentimental environmentalist who romanticized the rural way of life, than you clearly haven’t understood in the slightest what he was trying to say about technology. Such an interpretation of him is retarded and simplistic beyond belief.

[Anonymous No.14666170]

>>14666166
maybe you're retarded, because i made it really clear in my post THAT I DON'T UNDERSTAND HEIDEGGER. pls help me understand

[Anonymous No.14666176]

>>14666083
>seriously what the fuck is this heidegger guy about. ive tried watching videos on him, ive gone through the archives. i cant fuckin figure it out. it seems like he was just trying to hard to be "original" and just came up with the weirdest shit that he could. like he just really wanted to say "heh, but you never thought about it like that, huh??".
I'm sure you can learn everything you need to know about a complex thinker's work from 10 minute youtube videos. God forbid you actually read anything he wrote.

[Anonymous No.14666242]

>>14666176
his works are impenetrable to me, that's why ive tried secondary sources and they aren't helping

[Anonymous No.14666251]

>>14666176
and they weren't ten minutes long. they were millerman's videos on heidegger

[Anonymous No.14666258]

Did Heidegger eat beans? I think that's the fundamental question. How many did he eat? And did he just put the can on the fire? Or bring a pot with him?

[Anonymous No.14666260]

>>14665917
lol.

[Anonymous No.14666269]

>>14666258
What do we mean by beans? We must question the beans-in-pot in order to uncover the Beans-within, the Beans as it stands apart from pot-of-beans. It is through the eating-of-the-beans that we fall into a forgetfulness of Beans-in-or-out-of-pot.

[Anonymous No.14666290]

>>14666269
The setting-forth of the beans can be said to be enframed by the beanness of the beans being. Where heat is ready-at-hand the beans achieve the dasein of total heat heatness relative to the received-receiving of the potential choosing of the beans.

[Anonymous No.14666305]

>>14666149
>why do i hear this
because you’re stupid

[Anonymous No.14666307]

>>14666242
To understand Heidegger's project, you have to set it within the contextual framework that he's working in and expects his audience to already understand. He's trying to elucidate a fundamental issue, the neglect of the question of the meaning of Being, which has been concealed in manifold ways over the course of western thought. If you really want to understand his thought, stop bitching and get a rudimentary understanding of Plato and Aristotle, then move on to Descartes and Kant. You could probably do this from secondary sources and videos if you want to take short cuts. The first book of philosophy I read was "From Socrates to Sarte: The Philosophic Quest" by T.Z. Lavine, which isn't great but it provides a general outline of the western tradition. Once you have the background, then I'd give "Being and Time" a shot.

[Anonymous No.14666345]

>>14666242
Heidegger is genuinely not that difficult. I think that the only thing that can help you is reading Hegel so that Heidegger will become relatively accessible for you in comparison. I'm not memeing, reading Hegel genuinely boosts your ability to deal with dense philosophical texts.

[Anonymous No.14666371]

>>14666345
The problem with Hegel is that nobody agrees with what his overall meaning was. I know some fucking contrarian 18yo will rush to say "heh I understand Hegel, it's really not that difficult ;)" but for real, the best books by the best scholars are completely disagreed on what Hegel's most basic positions are. The most recent scholarship on his natural philosophy simply takes up a "strong" absolute idealist reading of it, for the sake of having some kind of reading to run with in its analysis at all, because fundamentally nobody agrees on how strongly Hegel's absolute idealism overdetermines his account of nature. It's irreducibly vague by every standard. People often don't even agree on whether he was an metaphysical idealist in general, so a lot of Hegel scholarship will say things like "there's no way he was naive enough to be a metaphysician after Kant" (especially Pippin is guilty of this). This one is stupider and the non-metaphysical Hegelians are simply wrong, he was a metaphysical idealist, but it just goes to show you how much room there is for such a wrong reading to be extremely well-represented in the literature. In fact it's the currently dominant one, at least in terms of how trendy it is.

I agree Hegel will teach you to read carefully but he sure as shit won't be fun unless you know how to read him. It's like being blue-balled for 200 hours straight. There is no point at which you will experience simple certainty, at least about anything non-trivial, with regard to Hegel's ontological commitments. Even his most basic ones. The best you can hope for is to wade through this haze for hundreds of hours and then come up with your own idiosyncratic interpretation (which necessarily many people will not agree with), or simply pilfer Hegel for interesting ideas without caring much how they actually fit into his actual system, which very well may have been understood only by him if it was ever understood fully at all.

[Anonymous No.14666387]

>>14666149
>that's what this reads like
If you were familiar with hermeneutic phenomenology you'd realize you were bringing your own presuppositions into the reading. If however, you were actually read in the phenomenological tradition, you'd realize much of what he says in your pic is fairly standard perceptive-spatial talk that phenomenologists tend to adopt ("ways", "attention", "isolated", "perceptibly lead through", "bounds").

[Anonymous No.14666394]

>>14666307
>simply pilfer Hegel for interesting ideas without caring much how they actually fit into his actual system

[Anonymous No.14666434]

>>14666371
Hegel was just a bullshitter. I don't mean to suggest that he consciously meant to deceive. It's just that his "philosophy" amounts to bullshit.


As Schopenhauer correctly described him, "a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense. This nonsense has been noisily proclaimed as immortal wisdom by mercenary followers and readily accepted as such by all fools, who thus joined into as perfect a chorus of admiration as had ever been heard before."
-Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, 4th ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 2, p. 33.

But hegel got lucky. He had good timing. people were looking for some highly-intelligent ((seeming)) highly-advanced ((seeming)) super abstract (scholar) to give their yearnings for a coherent historical meta-narrative for the materialist age with which to displace the teleology of christianity. these people found their champion in that obscurantist moron charlatan hegel.

[Anonymous No.14666454]

>>14666307
this is bs. cope with the fact that all that philosophy has nothing to offer and you've wasted all those dreadful hours studying it.

t. cope

nope, i'm almost certainly smarter than you.

cope fag

[Anonymous No.14666455]

>>14666371
>he was a metaphysical idealist

He wasn't though. A genuinely Hegelian stance would probably be to say that the very distinction between "idealism" and "materialism" misses, by abstractly opposing them, how the ideal can preserve the material within itself and vice versa. The fact Schelling didn't take this distinction seriously and treated it with irony should be taken here into account, I think. Not to mention that Hegel had his own critique of metaphysics which follows Kant in some respects.

[Anonymous No.14666461]

>>14666434
Popper is unironically more metaphysical than Hegel

[Anonymous No.14666473]

>>14666461
??? I'm quoting Schopenhauer. It just so happened I found that quote in a Popper book. i could have just as well found it anywhere.

[Anonymous No.14666502]

>>14666371
What you guys need to understand is that "philosophy" is just a historical aberration; a literary pretense and surrogate activity of a few unique societies. The greeks were uniquely perverse. Then, fast forward a few thousand years, and you have a very particular bourgeois status-culture in continental europe that tried to out-do each other in literary pretense in emulation of the greeks. It's just culture and individual life experience regurgitated back onto itself. Nothing of any worth but aesthetics or historical interest.


give. it. up.

[Anonymous No.14666506]

>>14665250
Good posts, thanks. I think this clears up some of his views on truth that I haven’t been able to wrap my head around, too

[Anonymous No.14666512]

>>14665877
Heidegger is very sincere in his work, arrogant as he was

[Anonymous No.14666534]

>>14666502
Not all philosophy is like that. One can divide philosophy into two categories. On one side the Real Niggaz who actually deeply cared and desired to understand the world. On the other side the Fake Ass Bitch Niggaz who were just trying to sound smart, fit into academic culture, or come up with an idea that sounded cool and original. This division of philosophy is comparable to Michaelstaedter's Persuasion and Rheteroic distinction, respectively. An example of Real NiggaZ Whomst'd've Actually Cared To Apprehend The Truth are Schopenhauer, Plato, Nietzsche. An example of Fake ASs Bitch NIggaz is Aquinas, Hegel, Heidegger. There are also in-between cases, where they showed traits of both like Kant, Descartes, Plotinus, Aristotle etc

[Anonymous No.14666546]

>>14666119
... the essence of the idea could be applied to a fucking dead spacerock with a mining colony on it you fucking moron. Learn to read. The biological environment is not the concern. God imagine being this surface level.

[Anonymous No.14666550]

>>14666546
NOOOO MY HECKIN SPACERINO ROCKAROO

[Anonymous No.14666557]

>>14666534
I agree with this actually. This confirms my reading as well. Thanks.

[Anonymous No.14666583]

"Traditionally, within the sphere of philosophy, it is perhaps the persistently opposed this rigidity of the classifying gaze. Hegel's assumption abstracted from experience and taken to be fundamental critique of the 'philosophy of reflection' is based on the view that any assumption that subjectivity itself is something self-contained, isolated must necessarily enter into contradiction with itself, including the from and standing over against the object of knowledge. In Hegel's conception experience consists in the shifting reciprocal determinations of subject and object, and culminates in an awareness that the very distinction between the two is valid only from a restricted standpoint." - Mapping Ideology, Zizek, p 50.

"It was already mentioned that there is a break with Schelling in the preface to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). This break concerns the concept of the Absolute as the identity and indifference of all opposites which Schelling had made the fundamental principle of philosophy. With regard to this, Hegel says to consider any existence as it is in the Absolute consists in nothing else than saying about it that while it is now doubtless spoken of as something specific, yet in the Absolute, in the abstract identity of A=A, there is no such thing at all, for everything is all one there." - Schelling's Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom - Heidegger, p 12.

Ugh. I guess I have to read Hegel now.

[Anonymous No.14666588]

>>14666083
it's actually well written but I've read Heidegger so I already know what he's talking about

[Anonymous No.14667204]

>>14666170
Dreyfus' lectures on Heidegger are all in youtube
There's also Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, they have a couple of articles on him. The one about his Aesthetics by Ian Thompson is specially good and deals extensively with the question concerning technology.

[Anonymous No.14667584]

>>14665101
>and not an attack on space travel.

he literally attacked space travel though

[Anonymous No.14668165]

>>14667584
>literally
I'm imagining Heidegger knocking a spacecraft out of orbit by flying at it at top speed fist-first like some DBZ shit

[Anonymous No.14668737]

>>14668165
too bad he was a 4ft manlet

[Anonymous No.14668792]

>>14668737
so was krillin

[Anonymous No.14668794]

>>14667584
Sauce?

[Anonymous No.14670194]

>>14668792
You've given me a lot to think about

[Anonymous No.14671623]

>>14670194
he was not a big guy

[Anonymous No.14671678]

>>14667204
>"Dreyfus' lectures on Heidegger are all in youtube"
>part one is 9 hours long
holy shit, why is this guy's philosophy so fucking complicated. is it even possible to "understand" heidegger or do people just make up whatever interpretation they want like with tarot cards

[Anonymous No.14671681]

>>14671678
>. is it even possible to "understand" heidegger
Yes
.> do people just make up whatever interpretation they want like with tarot cards
Also true.