Justifying Our Existenceexamines the ways in which human beings attempt to calm their existential concerns by magnifying and proving their existence through phenomena such as self-righteousness, ...careerism, nationalism, and religion.
1. This work is a novel reading of Heidegger against what consciousness means for being and the animal and other-than-human world. 2. Author is part of an early wave of feminist phenomenologists. 3. ...This book grapples with the question of our relationship to the natural world and our consciousness, or ability to perceive and experience the world. It does Heidegger studies in a new way.
And if my secret self, that which can be revealed only to the other, to the wholly other, to God if you wish, is a secret that I will never reflect on, that I will never know or experience or possess ...as my own, then what sense is there in saying that it is "my" secret, or in saying more generally that a secret belongs, that it is proper to or belongs to some "one", or to some other who remains someone?Derrida, The Gift of DeathBut I would make of this trans-political principle a political principle, a political rule or position taking: it is necessary also in politics to respect the secret, that which exceeds the political or that which is no longer in the juridical domain. This is what I would call the "democracy to come".Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness
There is a beyond of reason and unreason. It is the human psyche. --Positive Nihilism
Like many German intellectuals, Hartmut Lange has long grappled with Heidegger.Positive Nihilismis the result of ...a lifetime of reading Being and Time and offers a series of reflections that are aphoristic, poetic, and (appropriately, considering his object of study) difficult. Lange begins with an abyss ("There is an abyss of the finite. It is temporality") and proceeds almost immediately to extremity: "The twentieth century was governed by psychopaths. They collapsed the boundaries of moral reason and refuted Kant's analysis of consciousness." He reflects further: "But who shall punish whom? One man's virtue is another man's crime. Thus Hitler could feel unwaveringly, as he wiped out entire populations,the starry sky above him and the moral law within him, as stipulated by Kant." He considers the concept of civilization ("misleading"; "how should one oppose the remedies of civilization to the egomania, the murderous appetites of such outright psychopaths as Stalin or Pol Pot?"), the act of thinking (a fata morgana), the psyche, and Heidegger's Dasein.
Positive Nihilismcan be considered a pocket companion toBeing and Time. "Heidegger's understanding of Being is nihilistic," Lange writes, and then explains his assertion. He draws on Kant, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Shakespeare'sOthellofor supporting arguments and illustrations. "Everyone is possessed of the courage to have angst about death. The question is whether this courage necessarily secures those vital advantages Heidegger alleges"--that "self-understanding is the mental anticipation of death." Lange wrestles with Heidegger's position, calling on Tolstoy, Georg Trakl, Herman Bang, and Heinrich von Kleist to argue against it.
On the Essence of Freedom Bradford, Ken
Existential analysis,
07/2023, Letnik:
34, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Informed by Nietzsche's notion of amor fati, Heidegger and Buddhism, Rollo May's understanding of 'essential' as distinct from 'existential' freedom is critiqued and found wanting. The essence of ...freedom is explicated as unconditional openness: love as our innate capacity for all-inclusive, non-dualistic attunement. The essential, innermost freedom of being transcends both outer, existential, and inner, psychological, freedoms of doing.
What calls for thinking about law? What does it mean to think about? What is aboutness? Could it be that law, in its essence, has not yet been thought about? In exploring these questions, this book ...closely reads Heidegger's thought, especially his later poetical writings. Heidegger's transformation of the very notion and process of thinking has destabilising implications for the formation of any theory of law, however critical this theory may be. The transformation of thinking also affects the notions of ethics and morality, and the manner in which law relates to them. Interpretations of Heidegger's unique understanding of notions such as 'essence', 'thinking', 'language', 'truth' and 'nearness' come together to indicate the otherness of the essence of law from what is referred to as the 'legal'.
The banality of Heidegger Nancy, Jean-Luc; Fort, Jeff; Nancy, Jean-Luc
2017, 20170301, 2017-03-01
eBook
Heidegger and Nazism: Ever since the philosopher's public involvement in state politics in 1933, his name has necessarily been a part of this unsavory couple. After the publication in 2014 of the ...private Black Notebooks, it is now unambiguously part of another: Heidegger and anti-Semitism.
What do we learn from analyzing the anti-Semitism of these private writings, together with its sources and grounds, not only for Heidegger's thought, but for the history of the West in which this thought is embedded? Jean-Luc Nancy poses these questions with the depth and rigor we would expect from him. In doing so, he does not go lightly on Heidegger, in whom he finds a philosophical and "historial" anti-Semitism, outlining a clash of "peoples" that must at all costs arrive at "another beginning." If Heidegger's uncritical acceptance of prejudices and long-debunked myths about "world Jewry" shares in the "banality" evoked by Hannah Arendt, this does nothing to lessen the charge. Nancy's purpose, however, is not simply to condemn Heidegger but rather to invite us to think something to which the thinker of being remained blind: anti-Semitism as a self-hatred haunting the history of the West-and of Christianity in its drive toward an auto-foundation that would leave behind its origins in Judaism.
The Time of Life explores Heidegger's rethinking of ethics and of the ethical in terms of an understanding of the original Greek notion of ?thos. Engaging the ethical in Heidegger's thought in ...relation to Aristotle, Michel Foucault, and Friedrich Hölderlin, William McNeill examines the way in which Heidegger's thought shifts our understanding of ethics away from a set of theoretically constructed norms, principles, or rules governing practice toward an understanding of the ethical as our concrete way of Being in the world. Central to this study is the consideration of the ethical in relation to time: the time of biological life, the time of human life as biographical and historical, the temporality of human action, and the historicality of human thought. In addition, this book critically examines the predicament of ethical responsibility in a scientific-technological era, considering how the world of modern science and technology call upon us to rethink the nature of ethical responsibilities.
The early Heidegger of Being and Time is generally believed to locate finitude strictly within the individual, based on an understanding that this individual will have to face its death alone and in ...its singularity. Facing death is characterized by the mood of Angst (anxiety), as death is not an experience one can otherwise access outside of one's own demise. In the later Heidegger, the finitude of the individual is rooted in the finitude of the world it lives in and within which it actualizes its possibilities, or Being. Against the standard reading that the early Heidegger places the emphasis on individual finitude, this important new book shows how the later model of the finitude of Being is developed in Being and Time. Elkholy questions the role of Angst in Heidegger's discussion of death and it is at the point of transition from the nothing back to the world of projects that the author locates finitude and shows that Heidegger's later thinking of the finitude of Being is rooted in Being and Time.
PDF
