Continental
Very debated essay
Was the inauguration talk of Heidegger when he took the position of Husserl at Freiburg. Husserl was present at the talk, and Heidegger was his most gifted student. Husserl was devastated after this talk. He thought ”What have I done??”. This was not the kind of heritage that he wanted to give to the future of the method of phenomenology.
Husserl gave different regions of phenomenology for each of his students to investigate. Heidegger was supposed to do history, and Husserl accused him of being utterly unscientific. ”Heidegger is brilliantly unscientific. Brilliant but not scientific.”
Heidegger ended up attracting more students than Husserl ever did. Heidegger was very charismatic, and a lot of young german students were attracted by his philosophy and his manner of speech. Soon his classrooms were overcrowded. He ended up with the reputation as ”the new philosopher”.
His texts became famous, and people engaged with his writings despite having wanted to avoid him.
One such is Rudolf Carnap, who worked undr Schlick and the circle of Vienna. Carnap wrote an essay against Heidegger based on this lecture. Carnap tries to dismantle the irrational and unscientific method of Heidegger. This inaugurates the analytical-continental divide. Carnap offers a method in order to identify the metaphysical statement in the bad sense, in the way of being irrational.
”The overcoming of metaphysics through logical analysis of language”. As such the method Carnap offers is a method that detects the errors in the mode of expression of a philosopher. We can identify logical categorical mistakes in the philosophers, and if we can do so, then it does not agree to the most basic logical rules which constitute the medium of the language of thought.
Heidegger would fully embrace the reproach of Carnap. Because Heidegger thinks this problem is beyond logic. But they cannot listen to each other because their agendas are so wholly split.
In 1927 Heidegger published Being and Time, as such having a large background in existentialist ideas.
All essays and lecture courses Heidegger starts on the most fundamental level, with no presuppositions at all. He wants to always map out a beginning from the start at each point of questioning.
Each Question is the whole. The whole is everything that is.
The collective ’we’ of the students are all engaged in a metaphysical question. Concerns most strongly the one who asks the question. Heidegger says it is always about ”me” and ”my students”. Everyone needs to be present.
The collective ”we” of Heidegger is the German people, and not just the students he speaks of.
You can identify some trains of thought here which are later expressed more fascistically.
Every quetion concerns the one who asks it, and in order to understand the question of what is being, we have to understand what we understand as an existing being, there, a dasein. What is being for us?
Dasein is the being whose Being is Existenz, a certain kind of beingness, distinct from a chair or a table. The enquiry into the kind of being that is realised in us as the beings that we are, is only preliminary in order to get into the real Being. This method is called fundamentalontologie: Enquiry into the kind of being that asks the queston of being.
Nothingness is actually always at the background of the sciences, because it delimits the entire domain that the sciences are enquiring into. And so by understanding what nothing is, we can understand what the sciences are really working on.
Heidegger underlines the sciences as regions, which Aristotle called regions of being. So science cuts out of being certain stones that are their own. As such, each science approaches the world as what they are carved out as.
It is the ontological freedom of dasein to consider things under certain regional determinations, which then allows sciences to emerge. This in turn is not an arbitrary determination but is what lets being to themselves. This is not an imposition, but it is the freeing of these things in their ontological character. We should ”let things be” to reveal them in the way they are. Dasein has the ontological force to let things be revealed to itself. There is no metaphysics if it is not for a dasein that things are revealed. This is incredibly anthropocentric. Heidegger realises that it raises the subject of the medieval age, which he critiques later. The fundamental ontology is a very subjectivist engagement with the problem. He wanted to dismantle the centrality of dasein. At that time, he still wanted to use dasein as the agent that lets reveal. This kind of ontological force is later rejected. It goes hand in hand with Heidegger’s deception in the political sphere. As long as he believes he can’t control the brain of Hitler, he gets a more pacifistic way of viewing the dasein. He still believes here that he can have an influence on the course of German history.
”We” the scientists, care about how things are revealed to us. But we do not care about nothing. But we have to care about the nothing to understand what we do as scientists. This gives us a hint as to how we need to understand the nothing, because it is intertwined structurally with what is. You can only have them together.
Carnap says that the nothing is not something you can make a subject, and as such is only a logical grammatical mistake. But Heidegger notes this at length as well. The same goes for the question of what Being is. You cannot ask this kind of question, because you have already clouded it.
We ontify (the turning into a thing) the nothing, but it isn’t. As such it cannot be answered in the realm of logic, which Heidegger notes.
Nothing – what we are looking for
Not – the prescientific nothing, that we use in grammar
Negation – the logicians logical operation
Does the not come out of nothing and negation out of not? Yes!
Heidegger utilises the hermeneutical circle here. In order to understand a certain problem, we have to scrutinise our pre-understanding of the problem by asking what the certain thing is, because we know where to look at it. This is the hermeneutical primary idea we have of the definition, a propaedeutic definition.
The intellect is incapable to conceive of the totality of beings, but it is not an originary contact with that, but merely an idea. As such, look for an experience where the totality of beings is given to us.
Heidegger is the first philosopher who understood that we have attunement and atmospheres, and that these are relevant and important subjects of philosophical reflection. It is not about emotions, but rather an ambiance, something outside of me. It is the world itself that shows itself in such a way: the findlichkeit, or the attunement. Refers to existential states in which there is an idistinction between the inside and the outside, what appears for the dasein and what actually is. You cannot decide an attunement of your own. This he then calls befindlichkeit. This finding refers to a topos, a space, which is outside of me, which spreads out and worlds itself, and experience has a place: the world.
Heidegger renames existence as transcendence, because it is a movement that was never inside itself, but continually becomes outside of itself.
Profound boredom is a fundamental attunement. What distinguishes fundamental and normal attunement, in the fundamental, we access the whole of beings.
In this in the tiny limit layer of anxiety that we can experience the nothing, which we are hovering in.
As an attuned being only can we do this. It is something between the spiritual and the physical. The attunement are neither psychical or physical, only embody beings with higher development of psychology, but are in things.
Goldstein and Freud agree that anxiety and fear are different. Fear is the negative emotion towards something specific, whereas anxiety is undetermined. It does not necessarily have an object. It is just there, in the background to everything we do.
The one who fears is disoriented, whilst anxiety is pervaded by a peculiar calm. It is anxiety and anxiety concerning, but rather an concerning and indeterminateness. The essential impossibility of determining it. The indeterminateness comes to the fore. Uncannyness.
Heidegger has apparently never felt anxiety. Because he would know that anxiety leads to a loss of the entire structure. It is a defensive reaction to a situation which cannot be mastered, there is no corresponding answer. There should be no calm or unification at all.
Heidegger things that anxiety should be a special kind of experience from which we get to experience the nothing, and as such ourselves.
Heidegger shamanises. If you’re in you’re in, dsvdv.
You only have nothing if you have beings as a whole.
The judgement of the nothing as the negation comes too late in the experience of it. As such, the nothing comes before.
As such, the whole is only given to us as it slips away.
One can no longer escape anymore in any praxical behaviour, the things are only present to me as they are, as bear beingness.
Beings become accessible as a whole, but as such become inaccessible as something I can ”do something” with.
Nihilation is the activity of the nothing. The nothing noths. It is the witholding of the access to things, as such is why the things slip away.
Duns Scotus and Suarez understood that the concept of being is the most universal concept, except for nothing (in its idiomatic sense too).
It is the nothing that describes the region of metaphysics, ie. Metaphysics is about nothing! Though more rather about letting things appear as bear beings.
Being an existence is to be held out into nothing. Holding itself out into the nothing, dasein is beyond beings as a whole. It is already beyond beings as a whole. It has an access to the wholeness of beings. As such we are transcendent.
We escape in praxical behaviour from the nothingness.
Heidegger urges us to be authentic by enduring anxiety and therefore nothingness by not escaping into everyday behaviour.
To be finite is to have concsiousness of its own death.
He usually uses the notion of wonder as what aristotle concludes to be the grounding of metaphysics, the amazement. Tau mazein. Maybe this wonder is a result of us going through anxiety, is the wonder of our time. We are struck by the strangeness of the experience of things in their brute beingness.
This is a total defiguration, when beings appear as beings, they are entirely non-human, they are uncanny.
Heidegger has a positive idea of language. There is a content that is revealed and only revealable in language. But at this point he does not speak of it much. Every understanding occurs in language, and the hermeneutical understanding is an understanding that goes through language.
As such, Being and Nothing are the same, they are two dimensions of the same. Some years later he says that the essence has to be understood as an activity of essentialisation, and this is what being is. Being is an activity, the activity of revelation. In this conference, the nothing takes the role of the revelating activity as the nihilating activity. But it is always a process, but which occurs not through our consciousness, but which just occurs, and we are exposed to this.