Now being is only being-for, being as exploitable.
In the twenties Heidegger believed that there could be a positive outcome of metaphysics, but after the 30s he has a clearly pejorative view of it, as the history of forgetfullness of being, the thinking that is structurally incapable of thinking beings.
”Metaphysics does indeed represent beings in their being, and so it also thinks the being of beings. But it does not think being a ssuch, does not think the difference between being and being. Metaphysics does not ask about the truth of being itself. Metaphysics has not only failed up to now to ask this question, the question is inaccessible to metaphysics as such.”
Being is not an entity, it is what allows entities to entitise.
We can only understand Being through the beings. Being-as-revelation when something is revealed. And one has to see a thing that is revealed, without reflecting on that thing itself, but rather the act of revelation itself.
Being is identical to what is revealed insofar as it is the revelation of that which is revealed. This is where the idenity of being is found, in difference.
The difference is only accessible to us as we stand in the identity.
[Derrida critiques Heidegger for hanging onto the transcendental signifier, and the difference in Derrida is more Saussurian].
For reflection to be operative, we need to have an access in a non-objectified way to a think, which is then objectified as a certain object, rather than another. As such, it is difficult to say to what extent something is ”made up” in that sense.
For Heidegger, we have to suspend the objectivisation when focusing on Being, because we are not really making Being a thing, but rather explicitly speaking of it as not a thing.
Being outside of metaphysics: Disclosedness (Erschlossenheit), openness (offenheit) and clearing (Lichtung).
Being as disclosedness is that what opens to the metaphysical conceptions of Being and makes them possible.
Being is truth, it is what shows, presents and gives to the person. This is inspired by Husserl’s 6:th logical investigation. Husserl equates being with truth: this means that truth is the standing in the presence of a givenness. We are in the face of something given, and it is undeniable, it is impossible to doubt about it.
eg. in Descartes, you cannot doubt that you are thinking, and this kinda givenness is something undeniable which cannot be negated. The pure givenness is an experience and as such is something for you, which cannot be denied. However, the conceptual interpretation of that thing can later be doubted.
[More or less every experience is of ”as”, professor believes in limit experiences that lack that though].
After WWII, Being is thought of as the absence, as that what retrieves, and what leaves the thinker. Being as being-present is the greek way. The Greeks are standing in the midst of fusis and the cosmos which shows itself and which is present, something they can rely upon. Now we are instead experiencing the retreat of being.
What Heidegger calls the fundamental ontology: the ontology of the kind of Being that Dasein are, that is able to ask the ontological question. The kind of being that can ask the question of being; this is what Being and Time is about.
”Truth is not a feature of correct propositions that are asserted of an ’object’ by a human ’subject’ and then ’are valid’ somewhere, in what sphere we know not; rather, truth is disclosure of beings through which an openness essentially unfolds.”
Aristotle has a kind of correspondence theory of truth, and insofar as a proposition reflects a present state of affair, a pragma(ta). This has a huge history, going through the whole history of philosophy. The correspondence between judgements and states of affairs. Heidegger already in his early writings propose a different understanding of this.
It is a disclosure of things, through which a dynamic upheaval of openness comes to us, in a way that things show themselves in a certain light.
Gewesen: terminated activity from the ge-. So a kind of terminated essence, happened essencing. It is the disclosure of essences which Heidegger speaks of I guess.
The process of essencing is the outcome and result of a perception.
The essence in scholastics is the essential part of a dog that makes it a dog. But in Heidegger it is through the essence which the dog unfolds what it is and its capabilities.
He critiques the modern age in the age of the world picture. For Heidegger, modernity is negative.
It is here that cartesian representationalism, subjectivism, mathematisation of sciences and humanism.
If one does studies about modernity, then you see how all these points connect in European history. So many things are invented, and they are closely related to each other, in terms of ontologies. Heidegger is not very amazed about that.
Heidegger blames WWII for Descartes. ”unlimited porcess of calculation, planning and breeding.”
In the modern age, the concept of the world-picture is invented. The understanding of the world as a representation. The notion of the world-view (Weltanschauung). This is the outcome of a certain understanding of what the subjects represents in the world, and this view is subjective, in that it is relative to the viewpoint as the individual that I am. This becomes important during globalisation, as we see that there is much diversity going on, and so philosophers began to think of philosophy as world-view, see eg. Karl Jaspers on this matter.
Every world-view has its own world-picture. The centrality of the notion of representation is a heritage of modern philosophy; especially from Descartes and Locke.
You diminish the things into a picture: beings are subjected under the free disposal of men.
(John Locke is amazed by the concept of paricide. You take the killing, add the father, and then you have the mixed mode of killing the father, and you create a new idea. This is how humanity creates culture. You cannot create new things, but only new ideas through which you engage the world)
And all of this is done through representation.
In the modern age then, men step to the foreground as subject.
Before Descartes, the notion of subjectum was related to substance. Or in Greek Hupokeimenon: the individual thing in question, that what underlies all predication. It has nothing to do with a kind of concsciousness or subjectivity, this is rather what Aristotle would call Nous.
To consider the subject as something that has presence of itself is completely foreign to Descartes.
And in Christianity, there is only one subject, which is God, and everything else is an object of God’s creation.
Vor-stellung. Putting in front of oneself. Positing a thing on an arbitrarily chosen place, that is only meaningful to the subject, in order to dominate and process it. If we conceive the world as being our vor-stelling, then we conceive of it as that which we put in front of ourselves, something specifically we choose. If the world is reduced to representation, this is an expression of violence of the subject onto the object.
We present things twice, once in the original, and then in the copy. Representation in English is only possible in time, as it comes back in time.
For Parmenides; thinking and being are the same. What did Parmenidaddy mean here? This does not mean that all being is reduced to representation, but rather it means that the thinking is the standing in the midst of being, and being fully receptive to the presence of being, to what is given and revealed around me. Thinking passively receives being, and it is open for its presentation of the beings. There is no representation.
The direction of this activity is fully different. Instead of from the subject to the outside, for Parmenides we are giving ourselves away to the world. There is no mastery of the thinking subject.
Being is here the dominant, and the thinker is the passive receiver.
”The Being does not require that man first looks upon it in the sense of representation that thas the character of sujective perception. Rather, man is the one who is looked upon by beings, the one who is gathered by self opening beings into presencing with them. To be looked at by beings, to be included and maintained and so supported by their openness, to be driven about by their conflict and marked by their dividedness, that is the essence of humanity in the great age of Greece.”
It means not only the logos of the anthropos, but the logos of the cosmos as nature. Man is only catching up with the rationality of the world itself, man aligns himself with the logos of the cosomos. The logos is not as it is in the roman age, something that is a subjective intellectual activity.
Technology dominates us. Nature is here understood as quantifiable and measurable matter.
Once you have reduced nature as something that you put in front of yourself, as physics does in the 18:th century, this goes along with representation and with the discovery of our priviledged acess to mathematics. For Heidegger then, we can project all these a priori laws onto nature and thereby comprehend it. So the chaotic profileration of processes become numbers and lawful relationships between numbers. The world is reduced to a representation of myself. The age of technology then is the result of the age of modernity.
Technology emerges in the enframing Das Gestell. A kind of artificial structure that is only directed towards efficiency and exploitation. Everything has to be measured on this matter. Enframing is the putting up of a certain system and structure, so as to become like a machine that runs on its own, which we subject ourselves in order to exist.
This is a kind of blind machine that human beings build around themselves.
We mathematise nature and then build up a kind of techtonic system that ultimately swallows even the human being.
The Human being is itself nothing else than exploitable matter.
It is just a bunch of numbers whose soul essence is the maximisation of gains, which foreshadows the nazi regime.
The age of technology is the highest form of the ”oblivion of Being” through extreme objectification. Everyhing seems to stand at is place as an object, and everything needs a precise locus based on pure efficiency, and in this tightly conceived system, no event can happen. Nothing new can happen, and being cannot reveal itself in a new way. We become so dominated by the enframing that no new inspiration can take place. Technology is the endpoint of metaphysics.
In a way, we have to subject ourselves to technology, but this is unbearable, and so we have to hope that something new comes. Heidegger becomes very pessimistic, here. There is a fate in being, and being has put us in the situation that we are now. The destiny of the being can only be seen after the fact however, in metaphysics, ie the history of philosophy.
”Enframing is the gathering together that belongs to that setting-upon which sets upon man puts him in position to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve.”
Standing-reserve is about the things that are there ready to be maximised for gain and exploitation.
It is a structure that governs us, and which makes new revelations unlikely.
Adorno
Getting acquainted with the different thinkers of the continent in order to expose to the kind of vocabularies that they all use, so that one can see what sort of philosophers current philosophers are inspired by.
Modernity is not the same modernisation in modernisation theory.
Modernisation refers to certain processes such as market accumulation and capitalism and so on. Lots of bullshit. Neoliberalism type shit.
Modernity is a philosophical and historical epoche.
Modernisation entities emerge during the modernity epoche.
Already Hegel speaks of the modern age, tempes modernes.
What preceded the modern age was the ”middle ages” when everything sucked. The vanishing of the light of rationalism.
Then in the 16:th century, that light came back.
You can already see glimpses of modernity in the middle of the scholastic age, so saying that the middle ages was some kind of middle entity is totally wrong. What was it even in the middle of? Hard to say.
Ususally eiter 1498 (new world) or 1516/17 (Luther).
The increasing rationalisation of all forms of life is central to modernism.
This neatly continues from Heidegger, the Gestell is the outcome of the overrationalisation of the social and cultural sphere.
At the same time there is a restriction of all religious powers in Europe. It is a religious age too, but as in Weber, protestantism is distinguished from catholism precisely by its new use of rationality in faith. Rationality then, as such, is the heading of the modern age. It changes even how religion is perceived. Religion, according to Luther, does not have to mix up with the secular powers, leading to the seperation between state and church.
Epistemologists and philosophers focus on the modern age by praising the scientific revolution and the implementation of mathematics in all modes of life.
Critical philosophers point rather to the negative modes of these changes.
Horkheimer founded the Frankfurt school of social research in 1923 Institut fur Socialforschung. Kind of stands in the shadow of Adorno now.
Adorno is a multi-talented young man, who is unsure what to do. So he does philosophy. Simple.
Still had a great passion for music, he mixes music and aesthetics with theoretical writings. At the same time he creates a continuation of Hegel’s dialectics in Negative Dialectics. He also wrote a habilitation on Husserl.
Thought that Jazz was the loss of a critical endeavour.
Thought that you have to write difficultly in order to create better people. (jackass)
”Adorno was jew”
Adorno hated the US. He hated everything he saw there, especially TV and cinema, and consumption music.
Was killed in the 68 revolts because a naked woman ran into his auditorium, heartattack. Me too man.
How could it happen that the history of the enlightenment put us to the trajectory towards the holocaust. The holocaust is the event that fuels all of Adorno’s thinking.
He even asked the question of whether there can be culture after the holocaust? Can beauty exist in an ethical sense anymore?
The dialectics of enlightenment is actually a written discussion more or less between Horkheimer and Adorno written by a woman on a type-writer. It had a strange reception, because it was not available during the war, and when it was out, a lot of it was already passed. Especially because it is not really fleshed out and is only really a brainstorm between two guys that always reaches a kind of simplicity. But it is a momentary flashlight at the kind of consternation that many people felt at the time.
They focus on the ambivalence of the promises of the enligthenment. On the one hand personhood, citizenship, democracy etc.
On the other; capitalism, bureaucratic state.
Capitalism is worse than the holocaust.
National socialism is a reckless form of oligarchism, which is only possible in a capitalist system. The baseline construction of the society in which this kind of violence can happen is capitalist.
So the target of the text is actually capitalism, though the holocaust underlies all of their thoughts.
The promise of reason is not realised.
So reality is in contradiction to the enlightenment.
So what is reason then?
Reason is not a subjective faculty as in Kant, but it is a historical objective thing. It is the way in which human beings together organise their society. So reason is institutions and social practices. Reason is not a part of the subject, but the way how I organise with my fellows, this is what is reasonable.
Objective reason: the realisation of emancipatory and rational ideas in the world.
This is a prerequisite, in that we are all rational agents that can align ourselves to the objective reason.
Emancipation: the kantian defintion from what is enlightenement. The outwardgoing from an exterior domination. We are no longer dominated by something exterior, but by our sole reason.
Modernity and the enligthenment is dialectic, and leads to new forms of repression. Enlightenment brings with it new forms of injustice and cruelty. They substantiate this thesis by showing that there is a correlation between myth and reason.
”Just as, myths already entail enlightenment, with every step enlightenment entangles itself more deeply in mythology.”
Myth opens to and produces enligthenment, but once enlightenment progresses, it returns to myth.
”Mythology itself set in motion the endless process of enligthenment”.
Myth is not unreasonable, but a first step towards enlightenment; is the first form of rational explication and has an explanatory power.
Mytholology is the first form of putting a discourse into a narrative. It is not just a putting together of elements, but still the elements of the myth represent certain wishes and desires that we have in the myth. We make society explainable by projecting a kind of order of things.
Myths provide reasons, narratives and discourses.
Ultimately the sciences and rational explanations, go a little bit beyond mythology. All societies produce myth, but why not all produce science?
The figure of relapse: promise of freedom, hapiness and knowledge in modernity remain unredeemed.
”Enlightenments program was the disenchantment of the world. It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge.”
There are no more wonders after protestantism. God has calculated everything and then just lets it roll without interacting any more after that. We can only hope and fear in protestantism. There is no sudden intervention from God. You have no clue about what is going to happen.
Disenchantment already for Weber leads to loneliness and depression.
”Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiated with triumphant calamity”
How can it happen that irrationally, such violence emerges from rationality? One of the most civilised countries in Europe falls back in the most mystified of mystifications.
It’s capitalism.
Capitalism creates new social distortions.
Self- and world-relations are only considered under the sign of their usability.
Capitalism is the social oranisation under which everything becomes treatable as a number and thereby exploitable.
There is no difference between human beings, chairs and artefacts.
For Weber, Instrumental rationality. Reason becomes truly instrumental, insofar, as it is only for the use of things.
This flattens the powers of reasons, the pluriosity of logos that we have in the greeks. Reason is a pure calculation of means and ends. It is purely how much I get in relation to how much I put in.
This kind of resaon is the most prevalent in modernity.
Jurgen Habermas: criticised Adorno and Horkheimer by saying that instrumental reason is the only thing present in modernity. They are correct in that the life-world is more and more colonised by instrumental reason. But argues that other forms of reason are emerging in modernity as well which fight with instrumental reason. The problem with modernity is that there are multiple forces of reason, but that only one of them stands above all. We should try to approach other types of reason in order to get away from instrumental reason.