Harman, Heidegger, and Time

Since I am gearing up for the 21st Heidegger conference I’ve been leafing through Sein und Zeit and noticed Graham’s post on encountering SZ for the first time. I can’t really remember how that felt since our undergraduate program has plenty of Heidegger and it is likely I just leafed through the introduction in our ‘Introduction to Existentialism’ course. Heidegger didn’t strike me until my final year when I came across his monumental Nietzsche lectures.

Graham raises an important question about the status of ‘time’ in Heidegger:

‘*”Time” in Heidegger isn’t actually time at all. This took me several years to figure out, and in my opinion too many people have never figured it out. Time in Heidegger is simply his usual threefold ambiguity: we are thrown into a situation, we interpret it in a certain way according to our own potentiality for being, and these two moments combined give us a present that is not simply present, but torn in two directions. But this has absolutely no connection with time in the sense wonderfully dealt with by Bergson: time as irreducible to a series of cinematic frames. In Heidegger, the “temporal” analysis would work perfectly well for a cinematic frame. There is no flux or becoming in Heidegger, there is simply a trembling ambiguity in each individual instant.’

This is a really significant albeit probably quite shocking thing for non-Heideggerians to hear. ‘Time’ is a strangely underdeveloped notion in Heidegger scholarship. Despite the blunt fact that Heidegger dangles time before us as the horizon (or solution) to the fundamental question his readers rarely accept this. One finds any number of counter-intuitive explanations that go ‘What Heidegger really meant to emphasize was…[insert theme here].’ This also holds for the anti-technological motif that Graham rose in an earlier thread. Not only is Heidegger’s position on technology transparent it is almost mundane. I say this as someone who is consistently astounded by the depth of his analysis of technics (hence the subtitle of this blog), but I am impressed with it in its immediacy. I find nothing subtle about it. That is its singular force.

When you have this wonderful epochal explanation of the entire history of philosophy at hand why the desire to out-do it? There is no point trying to bring it back down to earth. It belongs precisely in its beautifully ambiguous state – a poem on ‘Being’ as Heidegger himself would put it. Our job, as Zabala in the Remains of Being is arguing, is to deal with the remnants of ‘Being’ and not to re-imagine a profounder Heidegger than the one that actually existed. When it comes to exegesis on Heidegger surely the job is help make him more accessible? If ever someone didn’t need any help to think great thoughts…

Turning back to Harman’s explanation of time in Heidegger it really is something ‘not quite figured out’ because it is, in its very bones as I like to say, obscure. The ecstases of temporality are mind-blowingly hard to follow in Division II corresponding to this strange dialectic of Dasein’s ‘fissuring’ and being ‘displaced’ and held in a Moment (Augenblick) - the blink of an eye. I like the idea of the non-present present torn in two directions and here one should take Graham’s advice to read The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic as a key to SZ. I suspect, though I cannot be sure, that Graham’s views here are drawn from that text rather than SZ and it is the right choice since time/temporality is not SZ’s strong point. Rather one ought to look at MFL or Basic Problems.

Heidegger’s, admittedly somewhat convoluted, way to express how Dasein evolves out of itself from out of that initial thrownness is the locus of ‘time’ for him. If you follow the thread in Division II you get a real sense of Heidegger’s theological impulses: a desire to set alight in your mind a state of rapture [ἔκστασις]. But this is all well and good for Dasein but what role does ‘time’ play except a subordinate or ‘grounding’ role in providing a crack into ‘Being’ (the horizon in the sense of a passage/bridge as Heidegger puts it at times). Certainly we get those difficult passages on temporality temporalizing or temporality temporalizes but this is not Time per se but a distinctly temporality in that transcendental sense *time as transcendentally ideal a la Kant.* It is odd, but this all feeds nicely into the correlationist critique. Consider, for example, Blattner’s intervention into the realism/antirealism debate apropos Heidegger:

“To the question whether entities will continue to be, even if we (Dasein) cease to exist, we may develop two different answers, depending upon whether we are asking the question ‘now’ or ‘then’. If we ask the question ‘now’, while we do exist, the answer is that entities will continue to exist. But if we ask the question ‘then’, when we no longer exist, the question has no answer.”

In Blattner, William(2004) 'Heidegger's Kantian idealism revisited', Inquiry, 47: 4, 322.
Food for thought, but for now I really must head out. Blog posting on Heidegger on a Saturday evening is frowned upon.

Heidegger on the prior existence of the Cosmos

Worth quoting apropos correlationism and the ancestral argument. From GA 26, 216/
169 [The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic]:

“...the cosmos can be without humans inhabiting the earth, and the cosmos was long before humans ever existed.”

Nice Glazebrook quote

I like this as an opener to Glazebrook's article on Heidegger and scientific realism:

It is in general not at all clear how Heidegger is to be positioned in relation to the analytic tradition of philosophy. This is not because he fails to address its questions...In brief, I argue that Heidegger is a realist who nonetheless holds antirealist assumptions, and that this position is neither garbled nor self-contradictory. Rather, it exchanges the either/or of realism/antirealism for a both/and. His realist commitment to the transcendent actuality of nature goes hand in hand with the thesis that human understanding is projective, and its corollary that the idea of a reality independent of understanding is unintelligible.

The article is, like everything by Glazebrook, wonderful.

from 'Heidegger and Scientific Realism' Continental Philosophy Review 34: 361–401, 2001, 362.

Heidegger Among the Sculptors

Just recieved a tip from Stanford University Press about this interesting little gem. Of course anyone who has mused on Heidegger's cryptic little essay Art and Space will find it worth a look.

"Stanford University Press is pleased to announce the publication of Heidegger Among the Sculptors: Body, Space, and the Art of Dwelling, by Andrew J. Mitchell. Andrew J. Mitchell is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Emory University.

In the 1950s and 60s, Martin Heidegger turned to sculpture to rethink the relationship between bodies and space and the role of art in our lives. In his texts on the subject—a catalog contribution for an Ernst Barlach exhibition, a speech at a gallery opening for Bernhard Heiliger, a lecture on bas-relief depictions of Athena, and a collaboration with Eduardo Chillida—he formulates his later aesthetic theory, a thinking of relationality. Against a traditional view of space as an empty container for discrete bodies, these writings understand the body as already beyond itself in a world of relations and conceive of space as a material medium of relational contact. Sculpture shows us how we belong to the world, a world in the midst of a technological process of uprooting and homelessness. Heidegger suggests how we can still find room to dwell therein. Filled with illustrations of works that Heidegger encountered or considered, Heidegger Among the Sculptors makes a singular contribution to the philosophy of sculpture.

More information about this book may be found at http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=18317."

The Argument from Disinterest

'Philosophy has a global mission. When Heidegger talks about Being only in its correlation with Dasein, it is merely special pleading to say that Heidegger “knows” that there are things happening apart from Dasein and simply “isn’t interested.” The point is that he roots his entire philosophy in the Sein/Dasein correlate. This is a blind spot in his philosophy, not just a “lack of interest,” as if that were an excuse anyway.'

The more I think about it the more the argument from disinterest seems such a weak response. Even if Heidegger expresses everywhere his disinterest in what lies outside the Sein-Dasein correlate we should cease to celebrate this is as a some wonderful quirk of his thinking and start to consider it a reminder of the the sheer parochialism of his thinking.

Sunday Thoughts...

Tonite I'm feeling tired. The thesis is starting to fold together almost as if it had taken on a life of its own with me acting like a young child filling in the colours of a preset outline. This is nice because it has freed me up to contemplate what comes next. The one thing about academic philosophy that nobody tells you is that if you pursue a PhD your life ceases to your own - you become dependant on grants, scholarships, and the pursuit of jobs in what I suspect is a more random sense than is normal (or at least feels different from when I sought out 'normal' jobs). Where these might send you is extraordinarily random. Fine in one sense but in terms of organizing one's life in advance...forget about it! This makes life not so much hard on you but those around you. I feel I have put tremendous pressure on the people who matter to me the most in this regard.

I cannot decide (perhaps it is too early) what it is that would be my guiding concern, my theme or the question that I am dedicated to. I am sure it is something to do with realism, perhaps contingency or the rather startling way in which nature has patterns at all - that we are granted, even if it is limited, some intuition that what we know latches on to the real somehow. How that is...well that is metaphysics as I see it - the pursuit of explanation.

I think in the next few years I need to acquire a certain nimbleness to address the contemporary situation. I do not want to think philosophy as the history of philosophy. This is important (especially in terms of teaching) but I cannot think of anything worse than waking up daily and simply finding out more about the canon as if this is enough. It is a welcome distraction to think what a future project might look like but my skills (as I most likely misconstrue them) are perhaps to be found not in exegesis but pulling together different strands of thinking-in-motion This is what excites me and my god how long it has taken to find this out...

21st Century Heidegger Reminder

Just a reminder that the deadline for submitting a paper for the Twenty First Century Heidegger conference is coming up soon.

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION DEADLINE:
Friday, July 23rd, 2010

Keynote speakers:
Professor Miguel de Beistegui (The University of Warwick)
Prof. Dr. Martin Gessmann (The Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg)

Confirmed speakers:
Professor Dermot Moran (University College Dublin)
Dr François Raffoul (Louisiana State University)
Dr Joseph Cohen ((University College Dublin)
Dr Raphael Zagury-Orly (University of Tel-Aviv and Bezalel School of Fine Arts)
Dr Andrew Haas (University College Dublin)

Heidegger and the sciences

I know a bunch of people interested in Heidegger who happen also to be scientists so I am interested in what people think of his characterization of the sciences in the opening of SZ.

In §4 Heidegger sets out to establish the ‘ontic’ priority of the question of being (and not the question of the meaning of being). This section opens with an ‘incomplete’ definition of science ‘as the totality of fundamentally coherent true propositions.’ The claim that science operates with such a totality can, at best, be stated in a formal sense. There are unlikely, I presume, to be many scientists in our post-Gödel, post-Cantor times that are willing to accept that such a totality exists even in the sense of a collection of ‘true’ propositions. That each proposition is open to revision and that each (restricted) totality is, at best, an aid in reaching a solution seems, from my limited (very limited) understanding to be problematic these days. Disregarding the problem of totalization for the moment one can accept that the sciences insist, perhaps no more so than ever, in the thesis that physical reality is governed by a strictly defined number of fundamental principles and it is to the ‘making coherent’ of these fundamental principles that our propositions should aim (TOE).

Heidegger leaves these problems open because he fails, and does so often, to fill us in on the details. His definition is a ‘rough’ definition carrying under its remit an entire set of radically different disciplines. The other implicit thesis that Heidegger holds here is that in so much as his definition fails to capture the meaning of science it is not because he has not captured the meaning of science according to the sciences, but that, in a transcendentalist fashion, the meaning of science is broader than its collection of true propositions. Science is more than its collection of true propositions and includes its referential context and embeddedness in human affairs. This, alongside the transcendental background operative here, belies Heidegger’s commitment to a historically informed hermeneutical understanding of truth(s).