Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event)
Abstract
Martin Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy reflects his famous philosophical "turning." In this work, Heidegger returns to the question of being from its inception in Being and Time to a new questioning of being as event. Heidegger opens up the essential dimensions of his thinking on the historicality of being that underlies all of his later writings. Contributions was composed as a series of private ponderings that were not originally intended for publication. They are nonlinear and radically at odds with the traditional understanding of thinking. This translation presents Heidegger in plain and straightforward terms, allowing surer access to this new turn in Heidegger's conception of being.
... For something to be present to itself, to repeat itself identically, to persist as itself, as logical forms are traditionally assumed to do when we compare their elements, is to transform and displace itself, to continue to be itself differently , even as it is presumed to persist unchanged across comparisons. In a comment anticipating Derrida's notion of iterability, Heidegger(1999) ...
... "Thinking becomes I-think; the I-think becomes: I unite originarily, I think unity (in advance). By virtue of the guiding-thread that already dominates, knowing as self-knowing is the utmost identity, i.e., what is an actual being; and as such a being it is at the same time in the possibility for conditioning every other objectness in its manner as knowing…" ( Heidegger 1999). ...
... Instead, transformation functions already prior to self-presence, deconstructing propositional logic from within its own resources before it has a chance to repeat itself as a static identity. As Heidegger(1999) explains: ...
Philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze and Gendlin pronounce that difference must be understood as ontologically prior to identity. They teach that identity is a surface effect of difference, that to understand the basis of logico-mathematical idealities we must uncover their genesis in the fecundity of differentiation. In this paper, I contrast Heidegger’s analyses of the present- to-hand logico-mathematical object, which he discuses over the course of his career in terms of the ‘as’ structure, temporalization and enframing , with the approaches of Gendlin and Deleuze, supplementing this discussion with Husserl’s investigations of mathematical idealities. Gendlin distinguishes between the representational power a logical pattern has in itself, apart from its virtual generative source, to exactly repeat itself, and the way this self-same pattern is generated and changed by the larger situational texture within which it is embedded. In so doing, he misconstrues the empty, meaningless temporalization of logical calculation as the explicitly preserving carrying-through of already instituted implicit sense. For Heidegger, by contrast, logical inference is less a supplement to or development of implicit experience than a narrowing of its scope , a deficient mode of handiness. Experiencing something as present to hand extension modifies the relevant usefulness of ‘as’ structured comportment by stripping away what is meaningful in our relation with beings, and in the process stripping away its intelligibility. Thus, contrary to the assertion Gendlin, extensive repetition does not carry through intelligible, relevant meaning, it dissolves understanding into the nihilism of empty calculation.
While Nietzsche and Deleuze agree with Heidegger on the nihilism of countable units of extension, they retain the idea of instantaneous intrinsic presence. They put into question most aspects of traditional notions of subjectivity, objectivity and causation, except instantaneous presence. Deleuze's notion of intrinsicality as a differential “produced in a time smaller than the minimum continuous time thinkable'.” remains a notion of temporality as ‘in-timeness', as the occupying of a moment of time by a present-at-hand being.
... Heidegger assumes that the modern mode of being is structured by computability (Berechenbarkeit), which means a universal quantification of things into energy to create more energy. It is a representative structure that is focused by a gigantic ''anticipating, planning, organizing grasp of everything, before everything is already grasped in particulars and individuals, this representation finds no limits in what is given and seeks to find none'' (Heidegger, 1989(Heidegger, /2012. Just as the scholastic mode of being operated on the basis of a fundamental division (createdness and noncreatedness), computability also operates on the basis of a logical operation. ...
... Heidegger assumes that the modern mode of being is structured by computability (Berechenbarkeit), which means a universal quantification of things into energy to create more energy. It is a representative structure that is focused by a gigantic ''anticipating, planning, organizing grasp of everything, before everything is already grasped in particulars and individuals, this representation finds no limits in what is given and seeks to find none'' (Heidegger, 1989(Heidegger, /2012. Just as the scholastic mode of being operated on the basis of a fundamental division (createdness and noncreatedness), computability also operates on the basis of a logical operation. ...
... Just as the scholastic mode of being operated on the basis of a fundamental division (createdness and noncreatedness), computability also operates on the basis of a logical operation. However, this operation is ''its divisibility into parts which remain the same as it in kind'' (Heidegger, 1989(Heidegger, /2012. This means that computability, as Heidegger conceives it, introduces a totalization of explicit and explicable data. ...
The following paper focuses on discerning a specific epistemic effect that modern computers and especially the technology of artificial intelligence (AI) have. To discern this effect, it is necessary to reflect on the use of mathematics, that is its practice, and its ontological underpinnings. To do this, we combine Heideggerian and Lacanian concepts to approach the theoretical problem that AI and computers pose to the practice of calculation. The paper discusses that the computer as a material calculator has limiting factors that make it unable to utilize important uses of formalization. Central to this is the forced absence of virtual voids, which compels computers to act as if the symbolic would behold to the same structural axioms as the imaginary. Far from being a simple inability of computers, this proximate failure allows us instead to understand AI and modern computation in terms of their use and misuse as an epistemic tool.
... This is a philosophical worldview informed by science and mathematics, though not afraid to speculate about the Absolute or Univocal Being while remaining, in the main, roughly compatible with the ethical-but not theological-imperatives of religion. Examples of past thinkers who worked with science, logic, and philosophy, on one side, and theology, on the other, include Aristotle [59], Cicero [60], Seneca [61,62], Plotinus [63], Proclus [64,65], Avicenna [66,67], Averroes [68,69], Bruno [70], Duns Scotus [71], Leibniz [72], Schelling [73], Whitehead [2], Heidegger [30], and Zubiri [34]. In our view, each one of these thinkers, and others not mentioned above, had contributed in his own manner to the problem of the event ontology of nature, though obviously without always using the technical term 'event' itself. ...
... However, probably the first complete event ontology of nature is due to one of Schelling's various formulations of his ever changing philosophical systems of nature, the text where he introduced the concept of Aktions, roughly synonymous with events as we understand them here [85]. In recent times, the subject appears to have attracted the attention of several philosophers, for example Russell [86], Whitehead [57], Deleuze [87], and Heidegger [30], but again while each thinker is found to be engaged in developing, expanding, and advancing the subject in his own distinctive and unique mode of inquiry. ...
... Our position will be that conventional theological concepts need to be either rejected or drastically revised in order to integrate them with the truly postmodernist and naturalistic position of event ontology. 2 A possible explanation of why the Heideggerian project of ontotheology had been negative and critical might probably be located in the fact that the prevailing modern Galilean-Cartesian science complex [28], together with the parallel and closely related social system of merchant/industrial capitalism [29], had formulated a worldview of nature through which the human dimension has been reduced to a minimal position of little importance, while the totalizing mechanization of nature and society through the machination of science and capital was allowed to reach exaggerated measures [30]. Reintroducing a form of the human that avoids falling back into Cartesianism and Idealism then required a fully-fledged destruction of the entire history of that particular brand of western metaphysics that originally lead to Descartes and Galileo. ...
We propose a new event ontology of the world, which is part of a general approach to philosophy based on combining ideas from science, ontology, and the philosophy of nature. While the position advocated here is grounded in science and philosophy, it attempts to move beyond each of them by devising and exploring a series of technical (naturalized or naturalistic) ontological concepts such as Interconnectedness, the Whole, the Global, Chaos, the event assemblage, and Nonspace. A central theme in our event ontology is the mapping out of a fundamental critique of the theory of the organism and organization, especially when the latter two are viewed as processes in spacetime. In particular, and following earlier leads, we criticize the spacetime doctrine by arguing that it is not ontologically fundamental, where we suggest its replacement by more primordial naturalized ontological concepts of space such as ontospace and Nonspace. The event ontology of nature can be considered a radical alternative attitude toward the relation between the human and nature, an attitude, in fact, that has been repeatedly explored, though under very different headings, by numerous scattered thinkers throughout the history of ideas. We examine some of the past thinkers who contributed to this general but still incoherent body of thought, including Leibniz, Heidegger, Simondon, Ruyer, Deleuze, Whitehead, and Guattari. The goal of this article is to provide a condensed high-level view on this very complex and still evolving subject intended for a large audience, not necessarily only philosophers, but also scientists, mathematicians, technologists, theologians, sociologists, artists, and psychologists.
... In Idealism, Being is the determinate, the actual [120,121]. On the other hand, abstract materialism finds in primary matter the ontological Open horizon of actualization (Bakhtin [122], Heidegger [123,124], Uexküll [125], Russell [126]), where Being can never be exhausted by mere enumeration or listing of all that exist or have been. Consequently, instead of thinking the set S as a "bag of stuff" s 1 and s 2 , the situation captured by the formal statement s 1 , s 2 ∈ S, we reverse the construction and interpret the generic process entailed by S s 1 , s 2 as an indication of some happening, that in which the Undetermined or Open horizon named S has given rise to (or condensed into) concrete elemental beings s 1 and s 2 , while more still could come out from S, that is, additional concretizations still affiliated with the very same mother set S. Sets, therefore, may be viewed neither as collections nor aggregates, but rather like abstract generative principles existing outside logic and grammar, truly immanent to Nature and incorporating within their territories the seeds of that great crystallization of space and time underlying ontologies of becoming and metamorphoses. ...
... Idealism, especially in its most vulgar reincarnations found in Badiou's "System of the world" [83,85], is the refusal to admit deep and profound meditative reflection on being and worldhood. On the other hand, the philosophy of nature continues to resist giving the upper hand to perception and introspection, favoring instead the more penetrating anti-personalistic thinking style of abstract art, non-axiomatic mathematical exploration, and poetic reflection (Taoism [139], Heidegger [124], and the Stoics [140]). However, mathematics itself remains the proper ontological stage on which the drama of the field of the non-personal experience of Nature unfolds, a space of creative production as fundamental as poetry and abstract painting. ...
... Heidegger, at least Early Heidegger, tried to revisit the same term through the concept of the 'hermeneutical circle' [69,219]. (We believe the Later Heidegger had moved beyond this [124]. See also Lautman's essay on essence in modern mathematics [41] and Deleuze's commentary [63]). ...
This article concentrates on exploring the relevance of the postmodernist concept of the event to mathematical philosophy and the foundations of mathematics. In both the scientific and philosophical study of nature, and particularly event ontology, we find that space and dynamism are fundamental. However, whether based on set theory or category theory, modern mathematics faces conceptual and philosophical difficulties when the temporal is intentionally invoked as a key aspect of that intrinsic dynamism so characteristic of mathematical being, physical becoming, process, and thought. We present a multidisciplinary investigation targeting a diverse audience including mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers who are interested in exploring alternative modes of doing mathematics or using mathematics to approach nature. Our aim is to understand both the formal character and the philosophy of time as realized through a radical mode of thinking that goes beyond the spatial in mathematics. In particular, we suggest the need to transcend the purely geometrical view altogether in future foundational research in both mathematics and mathematical philosophy. We reexamine these issues at a fundamental and comprehensive level, where a detailed exposition and critique of both modern set theories and theories of space is outlined, with emphasis on how the philosophy of Idealism has been permeating much of old and new mathematics. Furthermore, toward the end of the article, we explore some possible constructive directions in mathematical ontology by providing new proposals on how to develop a fragment of mathematics for the description of dynamic events.
... 18). Drawing on the Heideggerian point of view, he strives to indicate that the ground is embodied within the abyss and abyss attached to the ground, i.e., "a ground without ground, a bottomless ground" (Marchart, 2007;Heidegger, 2012). As a result, grounding continues to take place. ...
... Therefore, from a Heideggerian approach, "the abyss remains active and present in the ground as the process of 'essencing' or holding sway" (Marchart, 2007;p. 18-19;Heidegger, 2012). ...
Modern social sciences arose during a period of classical modernity in which discovering universal rules between distinct phenomena was the most prominent criterion of scientific knowledge. Social phenomena were considered in the form of isolated, determined, standardized, and regulated objects whose knowledge, like that of the natural sciences, depended on the understanding of universal laws. The accidental and the contingent were eliminated in favor of universal laws. With the intensifying of modernity and the transition to late and liquid modernity, and by suspending many dominant cognitive categories, this kind of essentialist foundationalism was attacked by a variety of anti/non-foundationalist criticism that subscribed to either plural grounds or groundlessness, a bottomless ground in which scientific knowledge at a high level lost its significance. This predicament has given rise to several biases and antinomies in modern social theory. By addressing some of these predicaments and antinomies, including foundationalism/non(anti-)foundationalism, agency/structure, the individual/society, essentialism/relativism, and universalism/singularism, the present article strives to propose the idea of social configurations as a solution to overcome them, and through this endeavor, it is indicated that considering these configurations can effectively explain emerging and interrelated global phenomena. By prioritizing the conditions of possibility for social phenomena, and taking into account their contingency, as well as the incompleteness and partiality of their foundations, social configurations are considered as units at the level of the particular whose relationality, indeterminacy, interdependence, and fluidity constitute their central features.
... First, autohermeneutic phenomenology allows us to trace an experience back to its very beginning and where and how it was triggered to understand how it was formed. In other words, we need to analyze the "where" and "how" experience incepts, which are also referred to as the "inceptuality" of experience (Heidegger, 2012b;Van Manen, 2016a). This notion was initiated by Heidegger (2012b), who referred to "inceptual thinking." ...
... In other words, we need to analyze the "where" and "how" experience incepts, which are also referred to as the "inceptuality" of experience (Heidegger, 2012b;Van Manen, 2016a). This notion was initiated by Heidegger (2012b), who referred to "inceptual thinking." We borrow this notion because it may be helpful in regard to gaining sudden insights that reveal the truth about a certain phenomenon. ...
... Конституисано и конституисање, конституишуће представљају двострукост у појму сада када се њим покушава у његовој завршеној и присутној форми дефинисати садашњост. Ако следимо Аристотела (Heidegger 2012), који га дефинише као жиг или тачку, увидећемо да свака тачка у самој себи има крај који је истовремено и почетак кретања, те не представља завршавање, већ напротив отвара питање завршавања. Сада у временским обрасцима, кретање и догађај у књижевним и филозофским итд. ...
... Nietzsche had earlier highlighted the dialectic in the terms of Apollonian and Dionysian (Nietzsche, 1872/1967, p. 34 andp. 37); crudely representative of the rational and th`e mysterious or, to use Heidegger's jargon, intelligibility versus its collapse in terms of the strife of "world" and "earth" (Heidegger, 1950(Heidegger, /2011bHeidegger, 2012). So, one could say that through the prism of Enlightenmentthought Greek philosophy would bequeath the monotheistic belief system its mature intellectual form. ...
This article presents an ontological reading of Sufism in the style of Heidegger’s ontological examination of ancient philosophy. In this regard, it is a novel approach to the study of Sufism as a metaphysical conundrum within the Islamic context. The article explores what we mean by the nature of Sufism and the question of “being Sufi.” It does this for two reasons: to show the frontiers of metaphysical reasoning in Islamic intellectual history and to demonstrate that Sufism is the “setting-into-work” of the mystical within the Islamic.
... Heidegger refers to this novelty as an "other beginning." [16]. However, this other beginning can only occur if the essence metaphysics as meta-physics is first understood. ...
This paper explores the philosophical perspectives of Nietzsche and Heidegger, tracing their analyses of the death of God and its aftermath. My aim is to clarify the diagnosis of this nihilism and its underlying causes, as well as evaluate the proposed remedies put forth by Nietzsche and Heidegger. Ultimately, I argue that the seemingly ambiguous consequences of the death of God are not only hopeful, but necessary, if human beings are to rise above and transmute a meaningless, resentment-laced existence, however, not by jettisoning Judeo-Christianity and its values, but rather by reinterpreting them.
... It keeps swirling and bifurcating because ontologically all the assemblages that constitute it draw and exploit a continuous incompleteness of the world (de Vaujany, 2022). Ontologically, novelty is continuously called beyond what could be continuously new (a primordial originarity, see Heidegger, 1938). Managerial apocalypses are part of this new world as the continuous revelation of a new world already in the process of becoming in our present, imminent in our experience, already at stake now. ...
... Also in his earlier ethics lectures, Husserl considers God an abstract ideal of ethical and rational perfection (Husserl 1988). Neither does Heidegger relate God to a specific religion when he evokes, in the Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), the sign of the last God that opens other possibilities of being (Heidegger 2012). Levinas, moreover, avoids relating (at least in his phenomenological, not Talmudic writings) God to a specific religion when he describes the trace of God that reveals itself through the face and as face of the Other (Levinas 1969). ...
This article assesses the possible role and scope of phenomenology for the emerging field of interreligious studies while at the same time bringing forth a critical reflection on the practice of phenomenology itself, and more particularly of phenomenology of religion. It contends that phenomenology can be used as a descriptive method in order to understand the structures of experience which are at stake in interreligious dialogue, thus complementing the current approaches in interreligious studies towards this question which are mainly normative. Moreover, it can offer a comprehension of the paradoxical dimension of interreligious dialogue which is marked by a tension between openness and closedness, by drawing on Husserl’s phenomenology of the world, and its dynamic opposition between homeworld and foreign world. This analysis is structured around four argumentative moments: (1) an overview of the main features of the history of the phenomenology of religion and its problematic relationship towards the interreligious space; (2) an assessment of the main advantages of the phenomenological method for the study of religious and especially interreligious studies; (3) a sketch of a possible phenomenology of dialogue, grounding mainly on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology; (4) a sketch of a possible phenomenology of interreligious dialogue, drawing on Husserl’s phenomenology.
... Though many philosophers have reflected on the significance of boredom, Martin Heidegger's 1929Heidegger's -1930 lecture course on The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (Heidegger, 1995) stands as one of most influential and systematic philosophical accounts of the phenomenology of boredom; complemented (and to some extent complicated) by his discussion of indifference in his 1936-1938 notes The Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) (Heidegger, 2012). Two prominent interpretations that have critiqued and extended Heidegger's philosophy of boredom include Lars Svendsen's A Philosophy of Boredom (Svendsen, 2005) and a series of articles and books by Andreas Elpidorou including some co-authored with Lauren Freeman (Elpidorou, 2014(Elpidorou, , 2018a(Elpidorou, , b, 2020(Elpidorou, , 2021aElpidorou & Freeman, 2015, 2019. ...
Boredom is an affective experience that can involve pervasive feelings of meaninglessness, emptiness, restlessness, frustration, weariness and indifference, as well as the slowing down of time. An increasing focus of research in many disciplines, interest in boredom has been intensified by the recent Covid-19 pandemic, where social distancing measures have induced both a widespread loss of meaning and a significant disturbance of temporal experience. This article explores the philosophical significance of this aversive experience of ‘pandemic boredom.’ Using Heidegger’s work as a unique vantage point, this article draws on survey data collected by researchers in an ongoing project titled ‘Experiences of Social Distancing During the Covid-19 Pandemic’ to give an original phenomenological interpretation of the meaninglessness and monotony of pandemic boredom. On a Heideggerian interpretation, pandemic boredom involves either a situative confrontation with relative meaninglessness that upholds our absorption in the everyday world, or an existential confrontation with absolute meaninglessness that forces us to take up the question of our existence. Arguing that boredom during the pandemic makes this distinction difficult to sustain, I consider some of the ways in which pandemic boredom might be seen to expose and then exceed the distinctive methodological limitations of Heidegger’s philosophical interpretation of boredom.
... It is interesting to ask what is it that prompts Heidegger to examine the erection of the bridge as some sort of an event generating the place of the bridge in a way that is radically ungrounded, i.e. in no way predicted or anticipated, allowing us only to attune ourselves to it. Things may be thought of as events (Ereignis that reveal their fourfold constitution between earth, sky, mortals Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) (Heidegger, 2012) (Bahoh, 2021) (Grollo, 2021, pp. 89-104) (Nelson, 2007, pp. ...
Both Christian Norberg-Schulz and Kenneth Frampton have written on Martin Heidegger’s views on building and dwelling from which they seem to have been influenced. However, upon close scrutiny, their views seem to differ from Heidegger’s when it comes to place and the way place comes to be. For as Heidegger indicates through his famous example of the bridge in “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” the location, the place “comes into existence only by virtue of the bridge” (So kommt den die Brückenichterst an einen Ort hinzustehen, sondern von der Brückeselbst her entstehterstein Ort, Martin Heidegger, Κτίζειν, κατοικείν, σκέπτεσθαι, μτφ. Γιώργος Ξηροπαϊδης, bilingual edition, Αθηνα, Πλέθρον, 2008, p. 50). It seems that human made things emerge as events n Heidegger’s view and influence the world on their own rightand in a constructivist way. Human made things, works, seem to stand outside all relations (Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” in Poetry, Language, Thought, transl. Albert Hofstadter, New York, Harper& Row, 1975, p. 41) as claimed in “The Origin of the Work of Art” setting up a world, setting forth the earth and letting the truth take place as a happening and becoming, a founding that ultimately comes from Nothing, in the sense that it never comes from the ordinary and the traditional (Ibid., p. 76). Schulz, on the contrary, seems to claim that it is not the building that brings the place into existence. The place is already there when the building starts to be erected and “its detail explains the environment and makes its character manifest.”(Christian Norberg-Schulz, “The Phenomenon of Place” in Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture. An Anthology of Architectural Theory,ed. Kate Nesbitt, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1996, p. 413) By place Schulz means “a totality made up of concrete things having material substance, shape, texture and color” (ibid. p. 414). A place is given as a character and an atmosphere. Things like buildings make this character and atmosphere manifest to the extent they express it. Likewise, Kenneth Frampton, introduces the distinctions between architecture and building, industrialized construction and demanding craftsmanship, autonomous architectural practice and place-making and loss of rapport with nature and an architecture that is life fulfilling (Kenneth Frampton, “On Reading Heidegger” in Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture. An Anthology of Architectural Theory, ed. Kate Nesbitt, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1996, p. 442-446). The purpose of these distinctions is to qualify Heidegger’s constructivism and unquestioned espousal of building as place generator. Although not stated clearly, Schulz’s and Frampton’s views on place are more intricate but less challenging than Heidegger’s radical constructivist visions.
Nosso objetivo consiste em mostrar que a interpretação heideggeriana sobre a constituição da técnica moderna ainda é válida para nos esclarecer como se estrutura, fenomenologicamente, a tecnologia contemporânea. Nosso desafio será evidenciar como o conceito de Gestell, isto é, de composição entre o asseguramento no ente e a experiência do ser, que determina a verdade e a realidade dos entes na técnica moderna, edifica também a verdade e a realidade virtual produzidas pelos subcampos da Inteligência Artificial (IA) na tecnologia contemporânea.
Deleuze’s philosophy, celebrated for its affirmation of life, also offers a profound and nuanced exploration of death, challenging conventional understandings of individuality and existence. Through key concepts such as the “death drive,” the “virtual,” and “assemblage,” Deleuze frames death not as a terminus, but as an integral process within life itself. This article critically examines Deleuze’s conception of death in three main stages. First, I explore how Deleuze characterizes the ego as a metastable entity – inherently fragile and prone to disintegration. This implies that we are always already embedded in processes that draw us into larger becomings, dissolving fixed identities. Next, I differentiate this perspective from spiritual traditions that emphasize ego dissolution. I argue that Deleuze’s framework, while grounded in a secular, intellectual engagement with worldly involvement, offers insights that could enrich spiritual discourse. Finally, I also identify limitations in his approach. Deleuze’s intense focus on the creation of the new often overlooks what he terms the “first death,” which aligns with traditional conceptions of mortality as an absolute end. He appears to neglect the possibility of a final cessation of all processes, such as the heat death of the cosmos. After presenting the practical implications of these considerations for religious life, I conclude by addressing various points of contact between these reflections and other intellectual currents. While Deleuze’s philosophy may not serve as a definitive framework for understanding death, engaging with his ideas provides insightful and novel perspectives on existence. It encourages a reexamination of the boundaries between life and death from an immanent standpoint, enriching traditional perspectives.
The essay offers an interpretation of psychedelic peak experiences. It criticizes the quasi-scientific naturalistic attempts to explain such experiences and offers an alternative ontology underlying a more complex sense of naturalism, thus defending an entheogenic view irreducible to mere psychological effects. First, the mainstream ontology in the paradigm of natural sciences is exposed as being a version of the ontology of presence. This fact is shown as the reason for the phenomenological gap and the impotence of the natural sciences to address human experience. Next, existential anxiety is interpreted in terms of Heidegger’s ontology and is suggested as the core dimension of possible spiritual transformation. Finally, the phenomenology of mystical psychedelic experiences (MPE) is interpreted in terms of overcoming existential anxiety– a well-documented effect of MPE – and explicated in ontological terms. The psychedelic experience is shown to be mystical in a sense of transcending the everyday mode of existential denial of the enigmatic nature of the universe by facing the nothingness in a way that transforms one’s stand within it into a stand of original belongingness to the field of emptiness (Nishitani). Different aspects of psychedelic experience are explained and co-related in terms of such a transformation.
In this paper I juxtapose Heidegger’s account of care with Fink’s account of play. The aim of this juxtaposition is to show how Fink’s account of human play sheds light on a modality of being that disrupts the futurism that characterizes the caring temporality of Dasein. In sections II and III, I argue that future projection plays a pivotal role in Heidegger’s analysis of human existence. In section IV, I discuss Fink’s critical reflections on the futurism of human existence. I examine how our care for our own being can have a limiting effect on how we relate to the world. In section V, I discuss some key features of human play that allow us to think of it as an eventful activity that opens up a more flexible relation to the world. In the final section, I discuss how Fink’s account of play overcomes some of the issues raised in relation to Heidegger’s prioritization of the future.
This article offers a fresh exegesis of Heidegger’s philosophy of art, focusing on his conceptualization of artwork as the reproduction of the thing’s general essence. Grounding the analysis in Heidegger’s revisit of Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic, this study explores Heidegger’s interpretation of a thing as a “composed homogeneity” that reveals inherent determinations of temporality and spatiality in the self-presence of beings as a phenomenon grasped within finite human cognition. This is inextricably linked to the ecstatic temporality of Dasein, elucidating a cyclical human–thing dynamic integral to Heidegger’s ontology. Going deeper, I draw parallels between Kant’s “supersensible” realm and Heidegger’s “earth”, revealing a teleological (ethical) design manifested in art that captures the dual essence of Nature—using Kantian terminology, its purposiveness and contrapurposiveness—intersecting with Heidegger’s notion of the counter-essence of ἀλήθεια in relation to freedom. Finally, I show how the manifold aesthetic metamorphoses of this existential scheme within the existentiell ordinariness through nonradiant φαίνεσθαι, such as equipmentality, emerge as the everyday incarnation of this design.
This chapter transitions from the reading of Kant in Chap. 2 into the main thesis of my book by using the reading and critique of Kant to interpret the initial decisions Heidegger makes in Being and Time. It first argues that the critique of Kant goes beyond a mere correction and instead demands a complete rejection of the idea of cause and effect as the starting point for any consideration of freedom. This is due to the conception of being and time underpinning Kant’s conception of causation being in error. It leads to viewing being as something constantly present, something eternal and unchanging, with events being alterations in an underlying substance. Heidegger argues that the relationship between being and time itself needs to be investigated. It further argues that the arguments from The Essence of Human Freedom clarify the original project of Being and Time by clarifying the core arguments of Division 1 of Being and Time as a describing Dasein having a lack of freedom. It also interprets the more metaphysical parts of Division 1, concerning Dasein’s awareness of itself and ability to feel and understand, as inflected as a state of unfreedom.
Hannah Arendt’s aesthetic reflections have not been largely considered in Law and Literature (1), contrary to her contributions to political theory and philosophy. This article seeks to give an approach to the phenomenology of art developed by Arendt to apply it to Law and Literature. For this (2) I describe what this theory consists of, focusing the analysis on the notion of a work of art whose characteristics (permanence and uselessness) and functions (visibility and anticipation) are intertwined with two types of narrative: first, the narrative for redemption (3), based on which Arendt redeems the defeated in history and, second, narration for understanding (4), which seeks to morallyengage the reader in social phenomena. To highlight the use of both forms of narration, I pay attention to the use of Proust In Search of Lost Time in Arendt’s work, regarding the redemption of the Jewish outcast, and to the analysis of a story by Günter Anders entitled Die beweinte Zukunft (1961), based on which I present the concept of understanding developed by Arendt, but led to concern for the current climate crisis.I conclude (5) with some projections and criticisms that show that Arendt’s phenomenology and her use of the narrative can be used in Law and Literature to reflect on the great problems of contemporary times.
This contribution delves into the concept of ‘corporate sovereignty’, where companies, akin to states, function not only as economic entities but also as political actors exercising a novel form of sovereignty. Although business ethics typically approaches corporate power from ethical, legal, and economic perspectives, these viewpoints prove inadequate in conceptually grasping the specific form of power, namely sovereignty. In an era of escalating corporate influence and contested state authority, political theology becomes indispensable. The political theology of Carl Schmitt, though not prominently featured in business ethics, provides valuable insights into how corporate power manifests in contemporary reality, particularly as ‘corporate sovereignty’. Schmitt contends that sovereignty reveals itself in exceptional circumstances, a concept paralleled by companies exercising sovereignty. Political theology unveils the political concepts and power dynamics behind corporate sovereignty, necessitating a broader approach in business ethics where political philosophy and theology play a crucial role.
This paper attempts to contextualize a philosophy of curation that is object‐oriented or toward a “return to the object.” In the museum, three interrelated philosophical problems pervade curation practices that prevent access to the object as it is. Here, the subject‐object relations or idealism‐realism issues are reconsidered as a specific niche of the philosophy of curation. To address these issues, this paper claims that Jean‐Paul Martinon and Graham Harman's philosophical return to the Heideggerian fourfold ( das Geviert ) can introduce creative pathways for the curated object that is riddled with excess and tensions. Later, with some caveats, the paper addresses the issues and suggests a possible avenue for further research.
The idea of a cosmopolitics is considered in terms of the many stories that are simultaneously told by this cosmos. Those stories interact in several political ways and often require a taste for cunning to be heard. This stereoscopic feature of cosmopolitics is considered in terms of some of its salient dimensions: it relies on the ecology of practices, on the anthropology of nature, on the history of beyng, on spectrology and on general economy. As a consequence of this analysis of the cosmopolitical action (or event), this cosmos is persistently open to the otherwise.
Martin Heidegger is one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th Century, and a key philosophical resource for literary critics. Not only has he written about poetry, generations of poets have engaged his writings. And yet, for Heidegger poetry and literature are separate. An essential part of the project of this book therefore is to show how both the distinction and connection between literature and poetry is staged within Heidegger's thought. It offers Heidegger's perspective on a range of key themes, topics, poets, and writers, including Poetry and Poetics, Ancient Greek theatre and tragedies and then specifically Friedrich Hölderlin, Thomas Mann, Paul Celan, Euripides and Sophocles. As the Chapters comprising this book make clear, Heidegger's work remains indispensable for any serious engagement with either literature or poetry today.
This study investigates how Martin Heidegger’s notion of “the thing” (Das Ding) can help rescue modern disenchantment with regard to its root in the World, a concept developed from “being-in-the-world” presented in Being and Time, and later taken as a participant in the bilateral polemos illustrated in die Gestalt (signifying Being’s strife to disclose itself against the Earth: self-concealing concealment). In Section 1, I analyze the occurrence of disenchantment by critically reviewing several thinkers’ discussions of it, pointing out that “faciality”—which has structured the modern Western understanding of reality—is the cornerstone of ontotheology, as well as the collapse of it: disenchantment. In Section 2, to demonstrate how Heidegger’s rediscovery of usefulness in a de-subjectified discourse of signification has challenged the positivistic view attached to “faciality”, I examine Heidegger’s idea of “readiness-to-hand,” revealing the basic temporal–spatial units composing the “handiness” of categorical beings and its relation to Dasein, progressing thereon to the analysis of a thing-centered worldview of Heidegger’s phenomenology. In Section 3, I demonstrate how this thing-centered worldview has the potential to form a preparative stage for re-enchantment of the World by uncovering the concealed existentiality within things, aligning with Heidegger’s polemos in his philosophy of art.
The aim of the present paper is to advance a polyphonic reading of Heidegger"s ways of thinking, notably concerning his notion of body and corporeality. Despite the talk of Heidegger"s neglection of the body, I show that there are at least two distinct voices in Heidegger"s discourse about corporeality: the phenomenological voice and the retractive voice. The first one is marked by the so-called neglect of the body, while the later aims to recoup it. I support the lack of a definite take on human embodiment in Heidegger"s works by pointing at some hermeneutical ambiguities regarding corporeality. Finally, I conclude with some remarks about the necessity of a polyphonic reading of Heidegger"s works.
Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein are two of the most important philosophers of twentieth-century philosophy, and their ideas became the founders of two major philosophical traditions (Continental Philosophy and Anglo-Saxon Philosophy). Their ideas were formed on the basis of a common problematic consciousness, i.e. a critique of the philosophy of subjectivity. So on this basis, it is possible to seek the intrinsic relationship between the two views, from which we can get a glimpse of the two philosophers’ different answers to the common problem and seek the possibility of mutual dialog.
This paper elaborates various ways in which atmospheric negations operate by weaponising bodily vulnerability to air. It shows, firstly, how bodies remain exposed to colonial proximities of respiratory, olfactory, and sonic violence with ways that are constituted through negating site- and body-spheres. It highlights these spheric materialities by discussing the use of tear gas and skunk water, bombing of chemical warehouses, and the sonic settler aggression in Palestine, further arguing that we need to pay more attention to the irreducibility of the body to such violent orchestrations of atmospheric. Here the irreducibility of the body and the incapacity of the spheric become key matters related to what is called, secondly, the reciprocal sphereological vulnerability between the corporeal and the spheric. By paying particular attention to difference between breathing and attunement, the paper shows how a negative limit condition resides at the heart of what constitutes sphere-dwelling. Here an ontological shift in thinking atmospheric is suggested, one that starts, not from current framings aligned around the notions of vitality, affirmation, and relationality, but from the weaponisation of the fundamental incapacity of the body to overcome its own vulnerability to the air it breathes.
Plato’s dialogue Parmenides remains one of—if not, the—most perplexing text in the Platonic corpus. Specifically, it examines the difficulties surrounding the concepts of unity, multiplicity, and Being that are required for participation in the Ideas. One of the problems forced upon the young Socrates by Parmenides and Zeno in the second half of the dialogue concerns the relationship between Being (ὄν) and the One (ἕν), namely, how defensible is the oneness, or the unity, of the Idea if it also partakes of Being? The text culminates in an aporia as to how to articulate the difference between the One (ἕν) and the many (πολλά), since if the one is, it becomes many. How do many beings share in the one mode of Being? Crucially, how are we to articulate the difference between the One and the many, or Being and beings? Where Plato’s answer invoking the enigmatic concept ‘exaiphnēs’ (ἐξαίφνης), the temporal becoming of the unity and plurality of the One, seems to contradict the privileging of presence that Heidegger charges him with, he nonetheless fails to offer an understanding of difference that has neither Being nor unity. I argue that Heidegger’s engagement with the problem of the ontological difference, and its development into the identification of Being with difference itself, offers solutions to this aporia in Plato’s Parmenides by addressing a difference that is irreducible to the one or the many, the relational or the derivative. This has significant consequences for understanding Heidegger’s critique of Plato as not just consisting of the privileging of presence but also the failure to respond to the problem of difference.
The tendency of individuals to protect their own worldview by rejecting information and phenomena that cannot be reconciled with it is a significant issue in today’s polarised society. This paper aims to gain a deeper insight into this tendency towards exclusion and the impact it has on worldview by examining a particular interpretation of worldview developed in the late 1930s by Martin Heidegger. It is a radical account that portrays a highly restrictive and extremely closed-off model of worldview, within which exclusion plays a key role. The impact of this exclusion on the nature and shape of worldview is explored by analysing worldview from three distinct perspectives focusing on (1) its appearance, marked by freedom and safety, (2) its inner dynamic, marked by absolute control, and (3) its affective background, marked by frantic struggle and dread. The analysis reveals a dread-fuelled, highly reactionary, and thus extremely fragile structure that is fundamentally shaped by the endless effort to conceal the exclusion on which it is built, resulting in a complete inability to engage with that which is excluded without severely endangering the very existence of that worldview.
Maybe the most divisive topic of the Heideggerian reception is whether the question of God is part of the disclosure of being in Heidegger’s thinking, or if Heidegger rather obscures the phenomenological inquiry on God by way of his questions on being and his reinterpretation of the meaning of being as historical beyng. It is not accidental that Hedwig Conrad-Martius, the contemporary of Heidegger, writes in her critique on Being and Time that it is “like when, with tremendous force of wise prudence and unflagging tenacity, a door that has been closed for a long time and is almost impossible to open is blown open and then immediately slammed shut again, locked, and barricaded so tightly that it seems impossible to open it again.” (Cf. Heideggers ‘Sein und Zeit’). Unfortunately, the different stages of Heidegger’s thinking do not help further clarify the question of whether it is a conscious program of Heideggerian thinking to involve theological questions into the fundamental ontological analysis of being, if it follows from his theological background and from the relation to theology (as a positivistic science in Heidegger’s sense), or if that he includes theological knowledges into his thinking and shows a critical turn against the theological statements. Heidegger’s reflections on his own thinking in relation to theological questions and his influence on the Munich–Göttingen Phenomenology raises the present argumentation for the common phenomenological interpretation of God-Experiences.
The first book of Agamben's Homo Sacer series contains very few references to Heidegger. Even so, the pages that Agamben devotes to Heidegger in the third part of the book are far from a digression. They touch on a number of crucial topics that are vital to both Heidegger and Agamben, such as the relationship between philosophy and politics, the specific philosophical motivations behind Heidegger's political commitment, and life as a central philosophical theme. This article evaluates Agamben's interpretation of Heidegger in those pages by concentrating on two interrelated questions: (1) whether and to what extent Agamben's biopolitical reading of Heidegger is plausible and persuasive, and (2) how to judge the relationship between their respective accounts of life, which center around the two seminal concepts of “bare life” and “facticity.”
The essay develops a parallax between Lispector and Heidegger with regard to the question of being: being not as an idea or a concept, or as anything substantive, but being in the spatio-temporal sense of being in being, of the event which lets each instant of “in being” take place. Instantiating this proximity, the essay focuses on dis-humanization and the role that openness to nothingness plays in this context. Lispector’s writings, especially Passion, illustrate how what hinders the true humanity of human beings is not barbarity or animality but what she calls “false humanization,” which sets humans apart from all other beings as if separate from life and nature. Heidegger’s critique of humanisms and their machinational approach to things and the world opens a similar perspective on being. Although presented in markedly different tonalities of writing, Lispector’s and Heidegger’s texts concern the “same” of the passion/pathos of being.
The subject of this paper is Heidegger's understanding of world and world-formation [Weltbildung] in his lecture The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (GA 29/30) and his references to the idealistic philosophy of Schelling, such as the ancient thought of Aristotle and Heraclitus. I will put forward the following thesis: World is prevailing and, as this prevailing, it is the being of beings as such as whole in the projection of world that lets it prevail. In this paper, I will clarify how the world prevails, how Dasein forms the world, and the significance of physis, logos and as-structure in this context. I will also show that Heidegger's concept of world-formation, which is less discussed in research, can be thought together with his concepts of being-in-the-world and worldhood. Finally, I will discuss some of the difficulties of Heidegger's understanding of the world and propose some solutions.
The paper analyzes the intellectual situation that developed in the 1920s, which led to what later became known as a philosophical split into two directions – continental and analytical philosophy. The author poses a problem: was this a split associated with the division of philosophy into scientifically oriented philosophy, on the one hand, and metaphysics, on the other? Or is this division quite controversial? Using the example of a famous episode, a philosophical discussion between Е. Cassirer and M. Heidegger in Davos in 1929, the author discusses another split in philosophy: into the so-called classical way of philosophizing based on spiritual tradition (represented by E. Cassirer) and the so-called non-classical, represented by M. Heidegger. In this regard, the topic of the development and overcoming of the neo-Kantian tradition, the topic of understanding the basic ideas of the philosophy of I. Kant, but in a new cultural situation is discussed. In his analysis, the author proceeds from the version proposed in the book by M. Friedman: “Philosophy at a Crossroads: Carnap, Cassirer and Heidegger”.
The article addresses the Heideggerian notion of being-towards-death and the specific role anxiety plays in Dasein’s transformation from inauthenticity to authenticity vis-à-vis Lacan’s conception of anxiety. Heidegger’s presentation of everyday Dasein’s attitude towards death is mainly focused on Dasein’s inauthentic denial of its possibility of dying, and the tranquility it takes in Das Man’s idle talk which shifts the attention from one’s own possibility of death to the death of the other. Heidegger locates a shift in Dasein’s attitude toward death when Dasein is struck by anxiety which facilitates Dasein’s shift from inauthenticity to authenticity. Yet Heidegger’s account of anxiety raises a lot of difficulties. Is everyday Dasein truly exposed to the radical circumstances which Heidegger outlines in the context of death-anxiety, such as the discovery of one’s own existential singularity in the case of the impossibility of sacrifice? What are the conditions under which such anxiety takes place? In this article I propose a further development of the relation between Dasein and death, based on the psychoanalytic theory of Freud and Lacan. Following Lacan, I argue that death-anxiety could be understood with respect to a prior loss, the loss of the subject or its own signifying disappearance, and hence being-towards-death is first and foremost a relation to the subject’s own division, to what “has already taken place” so to speak, rather than to what is “not yet.” Hence I argue that a subjective relation to death is a relation to one’s lack of being (manque-à-être) rather than to what is yet to come. The article proposes the following claims: (1) being-towards-death is a relation to what has already happened, rather than to a future event; (2) anxiety in the face of death assumes a “familiarity” with a moment of prior loss, which the subject interprets as death, i.e., a signifying disappearance; (3) “what happened” is not an event in the empirical sense, but a void or a lack constitutive of being.
Chapter 13 argues for the central importance of translation to philosophy, which is ‘born translated’ and constantly renews itself through translation. It considers leading philosophical accounts of translation, focusing on the question of untranslatability, before addressing complementary ways in which translation studies as a discipline has been exercised by philosophical questions, especially concerning translation equivalence and the ethical duty of the translator. The chapter examines some of the purposes met by translations of philosophical texts, and some of the practical issues involved in translating philosophical texts by canonical German philosophers into English.
The majority of the contemporary literature on Schelling and Heidegger focuses on the direct connection between the two philosophers – Heidegger’s engagement with Schelling’s Freedom essay. This paper, however, explores an implicit link between them on the topic of creation by reading Schelling’s Ages of the World alongside Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’. It brings God’s creation in Schelling together with artistic creation in Heidegger and argues that the two have similarities in their structures, sources, and aims: both creations are dependent on a two-fold struggle, the sources are either the absolute (in Schelling) or being (in Heidegger), and the aims are to reveal the divine principle (in Schelling) or the truth of being (in Heidegger) in the world. In making these comparisons, I argue that, in spite of Heidegger’s esoteric neologisms, his account of artistic creation is not as radically new as he himself claims. It can be read and better comprehended in the light of a Schellingian metaphysics of creation and, more broadly, in the light of the history of philosophy in general. Eventually, Heidegger’s philosophy remains committed to the tradition of philosophical theology, despite his own attempt to move beyond this tradition.
The paper studies, within the framework of Martin Heidegger's narrative of the history of metaphysics, two perspectives on the unity of being: the "protometaphysical" perspective of Parmenides, the thinker of the "first beginning" of Western philosophy, and the postmetaphysical perspective of Heidegger, situated in the ongoing transition from the Hegelian and Nietzschean end of metaphysics to a forthcoming "other beginning" of Western thought. Both perspectives involve a certain "crisis", in the literal sense of the Greek krisis, "distinction," "decision." Parmenides' goddess exhorts the thinker to decide for being in the sense of pure intelligible accessibility or presence and to exclude all references to non-accessibility and non-presence. This is the foundation of the Parmenidean thesis of the unity of being. In the Heideggerian perspective, by contrast, meaningful presence is seen as constituted precisely by references to a withdrawing meaning-context, to background dimensions that in themselves are not immediately present. Since presence is constituted only in terms of non-presence, the "decision" or "crisis" between presence and non-presence is an unresolvable and irreducible feature of postmetaphysical thinking.
In comparative philosophy, there arises the problem of ground for comparison. Qualitative comparison is based on a certain qualitative ground for comparison, e.g., weight. Quantitative comparison brings more clarity into the qualitative comparison, introducing discrete and homogeneous units: how much does it weigh? How much does it cost? Both qualitative and quantitative comparison start from a ground that is already given and clear; they simply apply it to the case at hand (Is this one heavier than the other? If so, by how much?). In other—and more interesting—cases, the common ground is obscure: we have the feeling that A and B can be compared, but how exactly? The inability to immediately proceed to application creates a tension, and this opens the intensive dimension of comparison. The intensity has two sides: obscure and clear. The obscure side has its articulations, but they interpenetrate each other. Our task is to unfold, unravel, unpack. Then we will bring something to clarity where the elements do not interpenetrate so much but are juxtaposed (in different qualities and quantities). This will give rise to new tensions and new unfolding. The obscure articulations do not resemble the clear ones, and their unfolding is a creative process.
Scholarly and public debates generally envision the far right as a populist, irrational and anti- intellectual movement. Driven by economically left-behind voters it is seen as diametrically opposed to rational and educated, bourgeois liberal democracies. In Germany, this is echoed in the vision of a liberal-democratic cultural nationhood or Kulturnation¸ a country of poets and thinkers, that is imagined as a bulwark against the far right. Yet, envisioning themselves as Querdenker – original thinkers – a growing number of German intellectuals, once celebrated as representatives of Kulturnation, have recently embraced the populist far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and the PEGIDA movement. Why and how do well-off educated bourgeois intellectuals and institutions formerly seen as exemplifying Kulturnation embrace far-right populism? Why and how is the populist far right appealing to academics, artists, writers and their educated bourgeois audiences? To explore these questions this thesis analyses ethnographic data gathered among Dresden’s intellectual and educated bourgeois milieu between 2016 and 2018. Employing Jacques Rancière’s concept of the “politics of aesthetics” and symbolic boundary theory it argues that Dresden’s intellectuals use the aesthetics of Kulturnation not to counter, but to reproduce, substantiate and legitimize far-right populism and racism. As producers and interpreters of shared cultural symbols, local writers, artists and academics draw on the racist heritage implicit in Kulturnation’s politics of aesthetics to ideationally articulate and spatially prefigure an explicit white identity that resonates with educated bourgeois and far-right populist audiences. As a concept of nationhood that is perceived as post-racist, Kulturnation helps to design a shared white identity while veiling its biological underpinnings. The findings demonstrate that the far right is not a “populist other” that is essentially distinct from rational post-racist visions of national identity. Rather, Dresden’s intellectuals make visible unmarked racial and irrational dimensions in liberal-democratic discourses on national identity.
This essay pursues Gilbert Durand’s plea for a new anthropological spirit that would overcome the bureaucracy-or-madness dichotomy which has since Nietzsche left its imprint upon contemporary thought, forcing it to choose between an “Apollonian” ontology established upon some kind of first principle and a “Dionysian” ontology consisting in the erasure of any founding norm. It does so by reclaiming Dionysus and Apollo’s original twin-ness and dual affirmation in dialogue with contemporary anthropological theory, especially Roy Wagner’s thesis on the interplay of “elicitation” and “containment” in sociocultural life. What would happen then, I ask, if we were to reimagine today’s philosophical game – which after Heidegger Deleuze, and Derrida turns variously and increasingly around subtraction – otherwise: as a chiastic board on which Apollo would cut Dionysus’s continuum, which Dionysus would in turn restore despite Apollo’s cuts, and on which the obliteration of any of the two gods would entail the inevitable dismemberment of the other? Accordingly, I offer a full reassessment of Dionysus’s and Apollo’s complementary roles in ancient-Greek culture in discussion not only with Nietzsche’s Dionysian philosophy but also with Ihab Hassan’s postmodern critique of Orpheus. All of it less with the purpose of putting forward a new metaphysics than with the intent of restating the translucent-ness that keeps together reality and thought against any claim that they are either transparent or opaque to one another.
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