[Music]
This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions. My name is Robert Harrison
and we're coming to your live from the Stanford campus.
[Music]
The growing and unacknowledged anxiety in the face of thinking,
no longer allows insight into the oblivion of being,
which determines the age. The growing and unacknowledged anxiety in the face of thinking,
no longer allows insight into the oblivion of being which determines the age.
Martin Heidegger, 1973, three years before he died.
Oh, Martin. Oh, mustah. Oh, mustin.
If you only knew how complete and total the oblivion of being has become
you shuffled off your mortal coil. Oh, holy memory, mother of muse,
where are you now and at the hour? Your horrors drove you out of your house
and now you ride the wind remembering nothing. It's all just bricks in the wall now.
Silence must be heard. Oh, I'm telling you how to spread better.
Then I come to winter.
[Music]
Yes, my friends, if only Heidegger could be with us today.
What would he say I wonder, would he be speechless or would he simply declare,
"I saw it all coming? I told you what the oblivion of being leads to,
the unearthing of the earth, the unwearlding of the world,
the devastation of the bonds between people, the setting in place of an absolutely
technical state, or better, a biotechnical state, which orders and in frames all things,
all available energies and resources, putting them on standing reserve for
general distribution and human consumption."
I told you that when beings are abandoned by being, they lose their density,
their power of resistance, their very thingness and fall prey to
objectification, exploitation and manipulation. When being with draws from the world,
the world becomes an unworld no longer hospitable to human habitation.
Yes, Heidegger may weigh, may well say something like that if he ever returns from the grave,
but I have a feeling that even he would be shocked and incredulous at just how monstrous
the phenomenon of planetary technicity has become. The machine is everywhere with no way left to rage against it.
What's with the doom and gloom, Harrison, you ask?
Things are better now than they've ever been looked at objectively. What's all the fuss about you ask?
The fuss, my friends, is about our relationship to the earth, about our being at home on the earth.
In an interview he gave in 1969 to the German magazine Der Spiegel, Heidegger declared that we presume to control,
direct and regulate our technologies, but in fact human beings do not control the inner
drive that compels us to amass more and more technical capability and to inframe all beings in an ever-expanding
network of circulation and consumption.
Technicity in its essence he told his interviewers is something that man does not master by his own power.
His interviewers playing dumb asked Heidegger, but what must be mastered in this case? Everything is functioning.
More and more electric power companies are being built. Production is up.
In highly technologize places of the earth people are well cared for, we are living in a state of prosperity.
What really is lacking to us?
To which Heidegger answered, I quote, "Everything is functioning."
That is precisely what is terrifying. That everything functions. That the functioning propels everything.
More and more toward further functioning. And that technicity increasingly dislodges man.
And up roots him from the earth.
Well, this uprooting is more or less complete in some places, still underway in others,
but there is not a place on earth that escapes it.
In my humble yet nevertheless entitled opinion,
Martin Heidegger is the most important philosopher of the modern era,
and it is my distinct pleasure, if that is the right word,
to devote the next hour to discussing various aspects of his thought,
with a young and brilliant scholar who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Heidegger,
and who has translated one of Heidegger's books from German into English.
Before I introduce him to you, let me say, and I'm fully aware that my opinion about Heidegger's importance is controversial,
and that Heidegger himself remains controversial.
I have nothing against putting him on trial.
I have both prosecuted and defended him in the past,
and one day I'll invite someone to this program who is hostile to Heidegger,
and see where the debate might lead.
But our objective today is to introduce us to Heidegger,
to review the path that his thinking took,
and to give us a sense of the kinds of problems his philosophy addressed.
I like to squabble as much as the next man,
but despite the prevailing dogma among educators today,
squabbling is not the best method for coming to terms with the thinkers' thought.
In fact, it's one of the worst, so we'll save the squabbling for another time.
Alright, as I mentioned, I have with me in the studio a young scholar of Heidegger,
his name is Andrew Mitchell, and he teaches here at Stanford in the IHUM program,
Andrew, thanks for joining us today.
We're going to talk about Heidegger's career,
maybe starting from being in time, his first kind of Magnus Opus,
and then move on to the later stuff.
But Andrew, can you tell our listeners how you got interested in Heidegger in the first place?
What drew you to him when you were a student?
What drove you also to write a dissertation on him?
Well, sure. It started in high school, I would say.
It arose out of my interest in philosophy, and my interest in philosophy itself arose through my preoccupation with literature.
I was constantly reading Dostyevsky, Kafka, Beckett, absurdists, theater,
especially everything that grow press published I would read.
And this led me to Nietzsche, Rilke as well.
These were two, my first loves, in philosophy and poetry, Nietzsche and Rilke.
And through further reading, I've encountered the name Heidegger, Heidegger.
And so it seemed to me that I should read Heidegger.
I started reading him in English.
Yes, certainly.
And I was quite enamored, taken with it.
I still remember when I first read the essay, "What is Metaphysics in a Library?"
And Heidegger asks this question about science.
He says that science proceeds in a certain manner, and nothing more,
thinks in a certain way, and nothing else, and then he asks, "But what is this nothing?"
And when he asked that, the scales fell from my eyes, and I knew I was going to read Heidegger for a long time to come.
In reading him, however, I found he was quite hostile to Nietzsche, quite hostile to Rilke.
And so coming to terms with that, in a sense, was coming to terms with my own cast.
And so, reading Heidegger was, if it's not too cliche to say, "A voyage of self-discovery in some way."
I'm not sure I would use the word hostile when it comes to his reading of Rilke and Nietzsche.
Clearly, he wants to, for he presumes a stand outside of their thinking or their poeticizing,
and to retrieve things that might be unspoken or unthought in them.
And I presume that we'll discuss this maybe in the second half of the hour of the way, so much of Heidegger's career is really a rereading of the history of philosophy from his own sort of Heidegger in a way.
So, he impressed you enough that you went on to learn German, and did you learn German in order to read Heidegger?
Is that the main reason that you...
Well, I wouldn't say that. Nietzsche probably, I was quite taken with Nietzsche as a stylist, and German philosophy as a whole, Hegel, Schopenhauer.
It seemed that if you wanted to study philosophy, you needed to know German, and so that's what led me to study German.
Let's try to give our listeners a sense of... You don't have to agree with me that he is the most important thinker of the modern era, but I think it's relatively uncontroversial that he is an important thinker.
Time magazine said, "Vickenschne? Well, it could be. It could be big concern. It could be a bit more than I'd ever go."
For us.
Let's try to give our listeners a sense of what is momentous about his thinking, starting with being in time, which is a book that you've erupted on the scene of philosophy in Germany in 1926-27, and was really like a bombshell.
What was it about that book that had such an impact at the time?
Well, I think in being in time, Hädiger moves from what could be considered a more arid phenomenology of Husserl to a conception of life and existence.
So, being in time has been taken as a cornerstone of existentialism, though Hädiger himself tries to distance himself from the term.
What, being in time added to the philosophical landscape, I think, is a certain persistence in questioning, a devotion to thinking that hadn't been seen beforehand, except perhaps...
Well, Kant, Hädiger, he returned philosophy to its roots, I would say, in this thinking of the question of being that he approached in a entirely new way.
Okay, let's lay it out. So, in his introduction to being in time, he says that he wants to raise a question that has not been asked since the time of Erus-Odlin Plato, which is what is the meaning of being?
That this word that we use all the time in all of our copulas and sentences with the word is that although philosophers have always asked what is the being of beings, or what is the essence of everything that is, Hädiger claims that,
the meaning of being, what we mean when we use the word being, or even think of it as the essence of things, is a question that has laid dormant and not raised in the entire tradition of Western philosophy, and he wants to raise it again, and therefore being in time is supposed to be like the first step towards reawakening this question of the meaning of being.
But then it takes the form, at least in the first parts, of this massive analysis of one specific being among others, which is what he calls design, a German word, hard to translate into English, but basically means us.
It's human existence, design is literally being there, but it's the human being. Why does Hädiger approach the question, the general meaning of being through this intensive analysis of who we are as human beings?
Yes.
One thing I want to say is a preparatory to answering that question, is that being in time itself is an incomplete work.
The text, as we have it, is only a third of what Hädiger projected for the entirety.
So to discuss the book is a fragment in some sense, it's an artifact of a particular point in his career, and he abandons it for philosophical reasons.
The issue of being as articulated in being in time is formulated around dasain, as you said, and this is because being for him is nothing abstract, nothing general, but always something concrete, we could say.
It takes place here, it's for dasain. If there's a meaning to being, that meaning is in relation to dasain, in relation to our existence.
And the reason, presumably being that dasain, as if I remember correctly, he says, is the one being whose own being is an issue for it.
Exactly.
In a way that's not the case, presumably with other sorts of reasons.
In stone, for example, being is completely indifferent to it.
So as he undertakes the sort of analysis of what he calls the existential structures, namely the kind of universal basic, fundamental structures of dasain, what does he find?
Who are we in this existential level of universality?
Well, one thing he finds is that we're not always ourselves, or not even most often ourselves, and this is what he refers to as dasman, the they, in the sense that they say this is a good movie.
They say you should see that. This impersonal existence he finds to be determinative of our existence.
We flee from ourselves, he says, which isn't the complete loss of ourselves, but most of the time we are not ourselves.
Yeah, but in order to understand why he says that we have to know what ourselves means to know that we're running away from.
What is it that we're running away from? What is dasain when it's in its, what hydro recalls its inauthentic modes of being?
As you say, the dasman, the they self, what does inauthentic dasain flee from?
Right. And before answering that, I just want to add that it shouldn't be taken as a moral evaluation.
No, I understand. Inauthentic doesn't mean inferior in any way.
I know hydrocarons are very fond of the first thing every time you talk about authenticity or inauthenticity.
The hydrocarons just have to always come down on your head saying these are not moral categories. These are ontological categories.
But frankly, being in time is pervaded with a bunch of terms that come out of a kind of moral lexicon.
And there is no way that you'll ever convince me that inauthenticity doesn't have some kind of moral overtone. But nevertheless, let's just say it's an ontological category.
It's inescapable, you'll agree, though. Yes.
Well, then it gets better. So inauthenticity would be simply put understanding yourself on the basis of objects, thinking of yourself as a thing.
In a sense, you could say if you believe your life to be completely determined, you're treating yourself as a thing.
If you lose yourself in the world, this is almost an Augustinian theme in Heidegger, you're treating yourself as an object.
And so this objectification of existence is inauthentic. It's a misunderstanding, a misrecognition of who we are and how we exist.
Again, but the question is, who are we? What is the self misunderstanding a misunderstanding of?
In other words, I'm trying to get us to talk about what would design in its authenticity consistent that causes us to flee from it and we think what Heidegger calls anxiety or angst.
We exist in a completely destabilized, de-substantialized manner. We don't have an essence.
This is one of the key theses of being in time that the essence of Daza and lies in its existence, which is to say that our being is nothing that we have, nothing we possess.
It's not a predicate, but rather we always have it to be. It's a future in this regard.
We always have our being to be. And that absence of an essence, that lack of a pre-established or pre-programmed direction or path can be troubling to people.
And, cosm to flee?
Here, I think you're approaching, timidly, the whole question of Dazaing's temporality. Let me praise it the way I would put it. Dazaing is not a thing and it doesn't have a being which can be possessed or even conceptualized as such.
And to say that Dazaing's essence is in its existence, I understand existence to mean that Dazaing is temporally dynamic, that it's thrown into a world which is not of its own choosing.
And once it's thrown into the world, it finds itself projected beyond itself into possibilities.
Almost all of Dazaing's, every day activities are projects of some sort or another.
As banal is driving to work and you know that you're driving to work in order to get there and you're doing that work in order to make a salary.
You make your salary so that your kids can get an education and the final analysis, Dazaing is always finding itself beyond itself temporally in its existence.
So there is this whole realm of possibilities that we're projected into.
And this is a key point to that Hetiger's notion of the self in being in time shatters the traditional metaphysical notion of a encapsulated subject.
This self is already temporally ecstatic, temporally outside of itself.
And this outside of itself is its entry into the world that Dazaing exists essentially if we can use that term in the world.
Right, let's talk about that because Hetiger says one of the basic existential structures of Dazaing is being in the world.
What does he mean by that exactly?
Well, if you compare this with Descartes and the meditations on first philosophy,
Descartes says that if we want to really understand ourselves, if we want to understand what the subject is, what the eye is, then we need to extract it from its environment.
We need to remove it from its surroundings so that we can better see it for what it purely is.
And the subject that he envisions is an extractable encapsulated subject.
He goes so far as to even eliminate the imagination as being part of the self because this is too closely allied to the sense organs and the impressions that they receive.
So Hetiger's notion to subject contrary this is that it's always within this world of projects, of concerns that it's being is always at issue for it, that it's always confronted with other beings.
It's always exposed to others, to things.
It's always runs the risk of mistaking itself for one of these things.
It's embedded, in other words, is embedded in its body and its projects, in its environment, and ultimately on the earth.
And this is why mood is so important in being in time because mood is something that a philosophy as a whole has overlooked and then being in time, Hetiger gives great pride of place to mood.
And if we think about this, a mood is not something that we have at our disposal. You can't make yourself happy on a moment's notice. You can't make yourself sad.
It's something that comes over you from outside of you.
And for Hetiger, this seeming passivity, so this would be perhaps the wrong term, this passivity of the self, is just as important as every other aspect of it.
What's the German word for mood?
Stimung.
And what does that mean?
Well, literally.
It's a musical metaphor.
Yeah, tuning a tune-
A tune-
Yeah, that's why I think a tune-
would probably be a better translation of "stimung" than "mood" although what he really does mean is mood, but to understand our moods as a form of a tune-
and I agree with you, that's one of the great insights of being in time that design is never without its mood.
And it's never without an attunement to its world and to others.
And I agree with you as well that this is one of the most under-thematized, if not non-thematized,
existentially of in philosophy.
So, it's true that mood comes in. Then mood is linked to the body as well in many ways.
Also, a bio-rhythmic old foundation.
Yeah, I think so.
And Hädiger has an understanding of the body which obviously can't view it as simply an object at our disposal or a tool that we use.
Okay, so we have design that's always a being in the world.
The world is its dah or its there.
The design meaning literally being there.
And therefore, we start from this presupposition that design is always situated.
It doesn't have this Cartesian capacity to be an abstract entity.
It's not extractable from it.
It's not expected to be.
It's never disembodied in other words.
So, it's in the world.
We also said that it's temporarily ecstatic.
I mean, we're projected into the future and into possibilities of the future.
But we're also thrown into a world and we're thrown into a world that was there before we got into it.
That comes with a whole baggage and past.
And we find ourselves already in the world in the sense of having inherited.
We're finite in other words.
Yeah.
So, yeah, we have a being that is, as you were saying earlier, always outside of itself in one form or another.
And this, so this temporal structure that design has is finite.
That's the very important word that you just use there.
It's a, you could say, to speak high-diggers language, design is transcendent.
It's always self-transcendent, but it's finitely self-transcendent.
What is the importance of finitude in the temporal equation?
Well, this touches on a theme I know to be dear to your heart, death.
The design doesn't have its death once again.
No one has their death. Our death is always ahead of us.
And so, in being in time, high-diggers speaks about our being towards death.
Yeah, what's that mean? Being toward death.
Well, I mean, we're being unto death, I think it was the older translation.
Thanks, I'm told.
We don't have death as a possession.
When death's there, we're not there.
This is a thesis you could find in Epicurus, for example.
What Hetagur does with this is say that as long as we're alive, something is outstanding.
And what is outstanding is death.
But death is precisely what is most our own.
No one can die in my place.
People could teach my classes for me, people can drink my alcohol for me,
but no one can die for me.
So this is inextricably my own, and yet paradoxically perhaps,
I never have it. I don't possess it.
What's most my own is this outstanding possibility.
Death, and that itself is a shattering or an opening of the subject of the self into this world.
Yeah, Hetagur calls death my own most possibility of being, which is founded upon an impossibility of being,
because once you die, you are no more designs who comes to an end with its biological,
death which I don't agree with by the way, I mean, I hide a Gary in enough in many respects,
but I also don't agree with what he says that you repeated that no one can die for me.
Someone can die for you?
I, well put it this way, in anthropologically speaking, if you were to ask a,
I don't mean just someone heroically dying so that I can live on, no.
But if you ask a believing Christian whether Christ's death on the cross was not an instance of someone dying,
you know, for me, then so that I could live, or that part of my rejoining Christ would entail my own death
so that I could rise again.
Well, exactly.
So even though Christ dies in my name perhaps, I still have my own life to live, my own death to die.
Yes, well, it depends on how you read someone like Saint Paul where, you know, he says it, Christ died so that we can live.
Anyway, if we don't want to get into that, it's not the only, that's not the basis of my,
Saint Paul died, didn't he?
My skepticism about the fact that no one can die for me is that,
or no one can die in my stead, or someone can die in my stead, I suppose.
That it makes my death a completely individual event that separates me from others,
isolates me.
In fact, Heidegger says that death is that which individualates design radically.
Right.
And there's different ways of interpreting these passages and being in time, however,
one could say that through this relationship to death, what I lose relationships with others,
but I lose my inauthentic relations with others.
I no longer see others as replaceable beings or myself as one just like them,
in realizing my own uniqueness, let's say, my own singularity,
there's a transformation of the world as well.
And so in recognizing myself as an open self, an open subject, I'm actually able to entertain relations with others.
I'm already, relationally, disposed towards them, as opposed to an understanding of the self that would be encapsulated
and would have nothing, could have no way of escaping itself in order to communicate with another.
So I think death is the possibility of being with others.
Well, I like it when you say it that way, and I'll go along with that.
As long as we can account for the fact that in traditionally in almost all human cultures,
the event of death is one of the most communal, collective, social, ritualized events that bring entire communities together around the morning rituals and so forth.
And this is where one would need to give Heidegger's ontology a little bit of an anthropological supplement.
But let's keep the focus on the point which is that this is astonishing that a philosopher of Heidegger's caliber,
because he was already well known by 1927, he comes out with this book being in time in which things like my being under death,
my authenticity. He also speaks about the call of conscience, that if design is going to embrace its own authenticity,
it's going to have to hear this call of conscience which he says is coming to me out of the very nullity or nothingness of my being.
And he speaks about anxiety and all these things that had such a resonance for these people, which wasn't that long after World War I,
and very, very unusual for high, brow, academic philosophy to be talking about these highly existentially charged consequences.
This is what distinguishes it from Husserl's phenomenology in a certain regard.
It's concrete, it's real, it's about life and how we live it.
Yeah.
Before we move on from being in time by diving, obviously we're just scratching the surfaces.
The text is such a complex one.
I think that in the question of the meaning of being the design analysis serves, I think to emphasize the fact that it's really designs finite transcendence, it's temporality,
it's being projected beyond itself into possibilities that all this, let's say these recessive,
absentual dimensions that surround the moment of presence, past future and so forth, possibility instead of reality, that this creates a distance, it gives design a distance from the immediate involvement with things, and is able to disclose the world or the horizon of intelligibility, give it access to what
the high degree will then call the being of being. It's really through an analysis of design that he puts himself on the track to asking that fundamental question.
And one thing I would add is that perhaps we speak a little too strongly if we say that design is embedded in the world, because one of the things that I had to go on to maintain is that there's also, the world itself is composed of differences and distances.
His criticism of Nietzsche, of Rilke and also of Ernst Junger, is that their ideal figures, their ideal subjects are completely a piece of the world. They blend seamlessly into that world and in so doing annihilate the world.
After being in time, Heidegger's career takes a so-called turn, or not everyone agrees that there's a Heidegger one and Heidegger two, but clearly something happens in the 30s. He has that moment where he embraces the national socialist movement, becomes the rector of Freiburg University, and that ends up in a kind of disaster.
And do you agree with the orthodoxy that there is a turn in Heidegger's thinking somewhere in the late 30s or early 40s?
Well, yes and no. It depends on what's at stake in this notion of a turn. On the one hand, I would say no, insofar as Heidegger's thinking has always been, from the outset to the very end, thinking of the cobra longing of, let's say, dasine or the mortal,
and being, a thinking of this difference or spacing. On the other hand, there is a definite shift in his thinking in the 30s, and we could even speak more specifically and say around the time of his contributions to philosophy, the bi-trigates of philosophy.
Here, I think what becomes more prominent, more emphatic than before, is the role of history in the text that I translated for seminars. Heidegger says that being in time lacked a sense of a proper sense of history.
In these works of the 30s, Heidegger develops a what he calls it, being historical thinking. And here, the history of philosophy of metaphysics is no longer thought so much as the history of an error or the history of a lie or a force of sedimentation that covers over a truth that has to be exposed again or brought to light.
Instead, he sees this covering, if you will, of metaphysics as essential to question of being itself. In other words, being is no longer thought of without concealment. This isn't the opposite of what he says in being in time in any way, but the emphasis changes.
The emphasis changes also away from design as the very center of the focus to being as such. He gets away from the existentialist, at least the lexicon being in time.
Whereas nothing but necessarily the issue as you were saying.
There's a certain subjectivism you could say of being in time that he wants to avoid. The whole apparatus of being in time, the structure of the book itself is thoroughly metaphysical.
We could say, Heidegger wrote very few books. What he published were often essay collections, lectures, slightly revised lecture courses, but apart from being in time, maybe continental
physics, there's not much that's very interesting about Heidegger is that even being in time he was forced really to come out with it in order to get tenure.
We were all connected to get a post and philosophy and a lot of it were based on his lecture notes.
Yeah, he very rarely did he actually write a book as such.
In that sense, I think he's a very pure philosopher in the Socratic tradition.
He's now to think of the book.
There is some place where he says that it's a mystery why all thinkers after Socrates were fugitives into the art of writing.
And that Socrates was the only pure philosopher who philosophized strictly by word of mouth or in the lecture or in the room or the marketplace I go out on.
I think Heidegger had, he had his brother, he wouldn't have published a book as such, but nevertheless, let's say.
Fortunately, we have all those lectures that one other thing that I think needs to be mentioned in regards to this turn in his thinking is that he changes his conception of being.
And for him comes to be a matter of withdrawal.
Okay, let's specify before we go on.
The way I understand it from being in time, being comes to mean designs, ecstatic projectionality that enables design to come back from the kind of
the same way.
It's not something that's out there on its own.
It's something that as you were saying it in the opening, it's in radical relation to design.
It's design's relationality to things that disclose as the realm of being.
So how does it differ later?
Well, it is sense that it becomes more radicalized, more finite even, because designs opening onto the world has the risk of sounding like a willful endeavor, as though design were completely in control and that design determined being in some way.
And what the transition or the change in how to grow thinking is to see that there's also a movement on the part of being that beyond designs control.
So you have these two interrelated, inbricated movements simultaneously.
This idea of withdrawal just briefly put, if you think of being as a whole or as a single sphere, almost permanently in manner, then there would be no differences, no space, no room in that.
Withdrawal, in the first moment, makes the world of differences and distances possible by evacuating that area.
But the shift that we have to understand is that withdrawal is actually a way that the things exist.
They exist in this withdrawn manner, which is to say, they exist partially.
They are not whole or discrete or encapsulated things, but everything itself is opened into this space of the world.
And that's sort of what I had to think under the direction of withdrawal, which is incredibly technical moment or intense moment of this contribution to philosophy.
Yeah, and I think Hite Garians often have a tendency to mystify the retreat of being, the withdrawal of being.
I like the way you put it, that the withdrawal of being is something that is constitutive of things themselves in the world.
In other words, there's something about a tree or another person or another where I cannot fully appropriate.
There is a distance there. There is a certain resistance.
And an opacity. And that same distance is what allows us to relate to the tree.
It's like Jean-Paul Satset, I think, in being in nothing but he says that if the chess board were completely full, you could never have a game.
It's only when you take a thing out, you have a hole. Now all these things become possible because there is a void there.
Likewise, in our relationship with things, if there's not a distance, we could never know them as what they are.
And being is nothing but knowing things as what they are.
And the point I'm making about withdrawal is that it's not that we take away a few of the pieces and that whole pieces remain.
It's that all of the pieces can't be thought of as complete or encapsulated pieces, which all permeates them.
Exactly. And this is where I think he's origin of the work of art, which is a fundamental essay on aesthetics.
I think he points out, I mean, that's very difficult for people to read and the language is very technical, but I don't know if I would be over trivializing to say that for hide-a-gore artworks remind us that things are not radically available, totally, at our disposal.
But that the artwork shows that no matter how much I try to grasp whatever is being painted or the statue, that there's something that draws away from me.
And it's the power or the beauty of it is precisely the fact that I cannot hold it in my hands in an intangible way.
And it gives itself on the one hand, but gives itself a, you say, partially.
And any artwork that doesn't throw into relief the extent to which things are available to me only in this shrouded, well, shrouded might be the wrong metaphor.
But most utilitarian men are possible, let everything be either a tool or a stone, that idea is shattered.
And, you know, since these discussions go really quickly, Andrew, and we don't have that much time left, why don't we just take this into the question of technology with which we began at the beginning, at least with my opening remarks, that if the artwork is something that shows how things have, as you say this, left-ic dimension, this withdrawing distance.
Technology as Heidegger understands it in his famous essay, the question concerning technology, wants to insist that everything is radically available and disposable to us.
Right. And Heidegger views this as the culmination of metaphysics.
Metaphysics as the history of philosophy has constantly misunderstood being, if you could say.
It's overlooked this partial character of existence that we've just mentioned, and seen complete presence.
That becomes hypothesized into...
Now you have to explain to our listeners what that word means, the question.
We're not in the classic, hypostasize.
Well, it's an all theological term, I think.
Let's say that things become reified into that means objectified into objects.
That are held to be discrete entities.
And that technology is the culmination of this transformation in things into sheer presence.
Right.
Where in technology everything becomes completely available at our disposal.
Heidegger talks about it in terms of ordering and availability.
And the internet is the perfect example of this.
Everything is available.
Everything is at our disposal.
And everything is replaceable.
If you lose a watch, you can buy the exact same watch.
So, you know that I share your unease at that,
modern technology, the technology, especially contemporary biotechnology.
But I don't think a lot of people share our kind of anxiety.
And so if I were to play the devil's advocate again and say,
"Well, what's wrong with using our ingenuity as human beings to create a technology that gives us complete mastery and possession of the earth that puts all of its resources, makes them all available for our own ends, which we always want to believe are good ends.
And what's wrong with substitutability?
And the endless availability of things for our own consumption."
Well, this is an age-old response that has to do with the disenchantment of the world, we could say.
That what we find so agreeable about existence is the singularity of it, the uniqueness of it, the specificity of it.
And it's precisely that specificity and singularity that paradoxically enough we're able to share with others, right, through this communication with others.
And technology, which I'd also think is a way of thinking or approaching the world that thinks in terms of values.
When one something has a value or a price, it becomes replaceable by something else of equal value or equal price,
drains the world of the very distinctions that we would like to attribute to it.
So if we say that God, for example, is the greatest being, then we've degraded God by making him or it comparable with other things.
And the same idea holds for technology, what technology does to the world.
It makes our existence into homogenized, pre-packaged existence and takes the surprise of the world away from us.
We should make it clear that, you know, Heitiger was not a luddite and he wasn't, you know, the unibomber.
His critique of technology was also part of his reading of the history of philosophy, as you said, of history of metaphysics.
And he believed that every major epoch in Western history had a certain mode in which things reveal themselves to design.
And that somehow, with modern metaphysics, day card and so forth, that the technology was a, that the essence of technology, which he called "technicity" was an epochal way in which things reveal themselves, reveal themselves to us as always at our disposal.
And are there to be brought into a system of a network, of a circuit, of endless circulation and availability and so forth.
So this, he said, the way that things reveal themselves are not dependent upon us.
They're dependent on what he called the history of being whatever that means.
And that there's no way to fight against the evils of technology or excesses of it.
And we're going to have to wait for the era to change and somehow things will show a different side of themselves to us than they do at, as they do at present.
One other thing I'd point out in regards to the technology issue is that the technological approach short changes ourselves as well.
We place ourselves in the position of mastery and we have to be that master.
Everything is at our disposal.
Everything is according to our will.
The history of metaphysics is the history of the will for Haidagah.
And in so doing that, we eliminate from our own reality all the wonderful passions, path theory and
and passivities of life. That are so pleasurable.
I think something much more sinister and diabolical has been going on in the last decade that Haidagah obviously he died in '76, I believe.
Probably couldn't have suspected, but it's the way that the, in framing of all things is not just the world of objects.
Or ourselves as consumers, but now with biotechnology, the way in which we're going right into the very fabric of life.
And presuming again to be the total masters and play God. In fact, that's what Haidagah understands technology.
It's just rendering concrete the power of God in terms of the means of production.
And to do this with life itself, with the biotic and to without anyone really, and the moral issues surrounding the biotechnology are so primitive compared to the complexity of the phenomenon.
I mean, I was reading this morning that some scientists have found ways to extract stem cells without compromising embryos.
And so this is supposed to solve the moral problem that it's all about, you know, embryos, about aborting embryos or not aborting.
This is not the issue, my friends. The issue is who the hell are we to go into the, you know, the very constituency of the biotic and start playing around and recreating the world.
And so as if, you know, we are the masters of that destiny, we know that we're not.
And yet there is a drive, what's so profound for me of Haidagah's thing about technology is that there's a drive there of which we are not in control.
And for the most part, we're not even aware. And it might be, I think one would have to conjugate it with Freud's notion of the death drive to maybe do full justice to the demonic element of contemporary life.
Yeah, I had to think this out of Nietzsche. This is one of his strongest criticisms of Nietzsche. And I agree that his reading of Nietzsche is not necessarily hostile to Nietzsche because Nietzsche cannot be the complete decimation of philosophy or of being. His views can't reflect that because that would be the end of being. And being is never wholly present or wholly absent in this manner.
But to return to this point regarding technology, it's as if we were trying to secure ourselves so much from anything different from us that we end up erecting so many mirrors around us only to reflect back ourselves.
It's if we were going to add something from Freud, I would also add a theorization of narcissism because it seems that we want to be all that there is. And there will be nothing outside of us. No others. It will be a program of complete homogenization.
And this is in a sense what people fear in globalization as well. I think Haidagah is a precursor to the thinking of that.
I agree with it. I agree with you there.
What do you think he meant that I began with the sentence that I came across in the preface to the second edition of Kant and the problem of metaphysics where he's giving all the kind of bibliographical information in the years.
And then there's just that one sentence which I read at the beginning that just pops out of nowhere, the growing and unacknowledged anxiety in the face of thinking no longer allows insight into the oblivion of being which determines the age.
Yeah, that's a Haidi sentence isn't it?
And I was the preface to the third edition of Kant and the problem metaphysics also says that the reading of philosophers has to be a violent reading of it's to do any justice to them.
So when I said that he had a hostile read of Nietzsche, that's what I meant.
But to return to this question of what Haidagah means by thinking here.
For him, thinking is a matter of letting yourself be exposed to something beyond you in some way.
It's not a matter of conceptualizing or comprehending in a sense of completely grasping something within a hand that literally the word comprehending would entail.
But instead of letting yourself be exposed to the matter of thought, letting yourself be attuned to that matter and not dominating it.
Letting it be, we could say, to use another Haidagah in term.
What I think he's getting at in that sense, the pity sentence you read is that comprehension cannot comprehend.
What was the word he used to be a bizabean or the oblivion of being?
We also speak about the anxiety in the face of thinking.
Do you think that there's this anxiety in the face of thinking today?
Oh, certainly.
Especially anyone who's in philosophy faces this because philosophies, precisely not a matter of calculation or reckoning, it can't provide certain answers, it can't provide results.
Anytime it does, it's not thinking any longer.
Thinking is not, we could look at being in time.
It's a book of thought and all it wants to do is figure out how to ask the question, what is the meaning of being, and it can't even get a third of the way there.
That's thinking.
Thinking is a failure.
It can't be useful.
This anxiety in the face of thinking, I have to ask you, because I read this brilliant essay you wrote, that's just come out in the research and phenomenology on Haidagah and terrorism, where you talk about terrorism, not just abstractly, but also the real phenomenon that we know is terrorism.
We relate the age of terror to this anxiety that we might have that being as abandoned beings and that there's something ultimately terrifying.
What convinced me in your essay is that we don't acknowledge the extent to which we are terrified by the era to which we belong.
I would say that it's because we are terrified that terrorists can actually successfully spawn terror in our psyches.
Yeah, definitely.
One thing I would add to that is that the effect of terrorism isn't in the actual bombings or the destruction that takes place, but in the threat.
What terrorism can be understood as an ontological issue, a matter of being, in the sense that everything is a potential target.
Everything and everyone could be the victim of the next terrorist attack.
That's very hard to wrap your head around. To do so requires no longer thinking of ourselves as separate beings that would then be destroyed by some outside force that would fall upon them or not fall upon them.
But instead it changes the very nature of being itself, insofar as things now exist as terrorized, which is to say that the threat of their destruction is constitutive of how they are.
And they're no longer stable objective presences.
Things exist as terrorized. That's a really beautiful way to understand what Heidegger would call the abandonment of being of the world.
I think the terrorism gives us an opportunity to think being is no longer discreet and encapsulated entities, but as threatened and as threatened somehow unstable destabilized, opened.
So, since we only have just a couple of minutes left, do you think it's through awakening a sense of terror or this or heightened awareness of the threat that hangs over the whole story, the whole world that it's only through exasperating the terror that there can be the possibility of stepping outside of the frame of technicality and maybe finding a way to allow beings to reveal themselves.
And other modes than just as available for our own consumption.
Well, yes, I do. And that's hard to say, because on the one hand, it seems that things can get worse.
That's obviously we don't mean that we need terrorist bombs or anything. Clearly, we're talking about attuning ourselves to this other sort of hydro, it's anxiety in the face of thinking.
Things get worse and worse and things seem bleaker and bleaker. And I think for Heidegger, they can always get worse and they can continue to get worse.
It's so disturbing, but because they can continue to get worse, there's always also this possibility that they're not yet completely annihilated. They're not yet completely destroyed.
There's still a call to responsibility. And to find that, to be sensitive to our responsibilities in this age is an uplifting thought, I think.
And so within terrorism, within the destruction around us, there's still cause for...
Don't say hope. That's a long word.
Celebration. That's a long word.
The famous line of hooted in that Heidegger is so fond of there where the danger is the saving power also grows.
We have to hope that that's true because we certainly have plenty of danger around us to deal with.
That's the nature of danger.
Yes.
Well, Andrew, it's really been a pleasure to talk to you about Heidegger. We're going to talk about Heidegger a lot on this program. Imagine if it continues into the future.
I'll be listening.
You'll be coming back, I hope. Thank you.
So thanks again. And to all your listeners, this has been entitled "
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