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Since I know you guys looooved my Kant essay so much (lol), I decided to write one on Heidegger next. Something about his argumentative method just rubs me the wrong way. So here it is!
A Commentary on Martin Heidegger's use of Historical Language as a Basis for Argument
In his quest for the truth of Being, Martin Heidegger almost invariably turns to language as the basis for his arguments. In an attempt to find the essences of things or ideas, Heidegger often looks at the history of the words which describe them. Based on the original meanings of words, Heidegger tries to gain some insight into what he believes they really denote and what the essential nature of their objects are. He commonly attempts to show that seemingly unrelated words are actually related to each other by going back to the language of the old Germans or the ancient Greeks and pointing out that they have common roots and synonyms. This method of argumentation is frequently used by Heidegger to comment on the essential nature of things.
However, this type of argument may be a bit troublesome. Whether or not language actually has the capacity to contain the essences of things is a subject of debate. Heidegger will have to contend with Saussure's conception of language which seems to refute this. Assuming that language does have such a capacity, it is unclear why ancient languages have greater insight or authority over these essences than that of their modern counterparts, and it would seem that inconsistencies between different linguistic systems might throw a wrench in our attempts to use our own language (or its ancient counterpart) to universally describe the essence of a thing. It is my position, therefore, that Heidegger's method of argumentation is not entirely convincing, and that he may have placed too much faith in historical language as an indicator of the essential natures of real-world[1] objects, actions, etc.
It is first necessary to understand Heidegger's conception of language and some of his assumptions about the world and language's relation to it in order to understand why he chooses his method of argument. In Building Dwelling Thinking, Heidegger very clearly explains his understanding of language and its authority when he says that "it is language that tells us about the essence of a thing, provided that we respect language's own essence" (Heidegger 348)[2] . To some, this may seem like a strange statement. How does language get such authority? One might ask how it is that language, an invention of humankind, can contain within it the essences of real-world objects, which are seemingly independent of human thought. Heidegger's response to this question is that "man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man" and that while care in speaking is good, "it is of no help to us as long as language still serves us even then only as a means of expression" (Heidegger 348). So for Heidegger, language is not merely a tool invented by humankind as a means for expressing our thoughts. It would seem that language actually shapes the way we think about things according to Heidegger, and it has the potential to be more than a mere means of expression. This is why, in his examination of "building" and "dwelling" in Building Dwelling Thinking, Heidegger claims that language "gives us a standard. . . by which we can take the measure of the essence of dwelling and building" (Heidegger 348).
On paper, this may seem reasonable. The idea that language shapes the way we think rather than language being shaped by our thoughts is not unique to Heidegger. There is significant support for that position from the likes of Benjamin Lee Whorf and Wilhelm von Humbolt, whom Heidegger quotes frequently in The Way to Language. Indeed, our thinking (even when thinking to ourselves in solitude) is tied to language in the form of self-speech. Although we do not necessarily verbalize them, we do think mostly in words, though there is something to be said for thoughts in the forms of images. Thus the idea that our thought processes are shaped by our language is plausible.
Although how Heidegger comes up with the idea that language contains insight into the essences of real-world things is not entirely clear, this too seems justifiable. If we think of language as being formed through our interactions with real-world objects, then it would be reasonable to assume that the essential nature of those objects may somehow have influenced the structure of our language. For example, if the essences of two real-world objects are related, then this relation would be translated into a relation between their designated signs in our language. If this is the case, then it is not unreasonable to conclude that we can at least find clues in our language about what those essential natures are.
But since language has undergone many changes since its birth and its original interaction with these objects, it must be assumed, as Heidegger does, that modern language no longer contains those essences. Words that originally had a certain meaning now mean something entirely different. It is for this reason that Heidegger's method of argument involves going back in time to the origins of words in order to root out their original meanings and thus uncover the essential nature of their objects, since as he says, "every language is historical. . . in the sense of, and written within the limits set by, the current age. Our age begins nothing new, but only brings to utter culmination something quite old, something already prescribed in modernity" (Heidegger 422). So to Heidegger, language in its current state has offered no new information, but it still contains the essences of things which were present from its birth. The problem, as he sees it, is that there is a lot of corruption and twists and turns in language which have occurred through the ages. As such, Heidegger seeks to disentangle all of the twists and turns that language has taken since its birth in order to get back to the original meanings of words to find their essences. In a sense, this is Heidegger's project.
This historical way of looking at language and the resulting argumentative method which Heidegger employs are, however, problematic in some ways. First, why is it to be assumed that the changes in language over the ages have added nothing new? It is possible that our original understandings of the essential natures of things were incomplete, and that the changes that have occurred in language are the result of our further uncovering of the truth. Thus, when the meaning of a word changes, it could be the result of our greater understanding of the true essence of its object. Why must we assume that we have lost wisdom and drifted away from the truth over the ages rather than having gained new insight and gotten closer to the truth?
The idea that the language of the ancient Greeks somehow contained a greater insight into the essences of things than the languages of our age is insufficiently justified. In Being and Time, Heidegger comments on the "necessity of an explicit recovery of the question of Being" (Heidegger 41). Here, he claims that the question of Being "sustained the avid research of Plato and Aristotle but from then on ceased to be heard as a thematic question of actual investigation" (Heidegger 41). Certainly, if the ancient Greeks were the only people who were actually investigating the essence of Being, it would be plausible to assume that they had gained some sort of insight into the question of Being which has since then been forgotten or distorted, as Heidegger claims. It would therefore be reasonable to attempt to continue working on the question from where the Greeks left off, using their language as a starting point for investigation.
However, it is uncertain whether or not the Greeks were even headed in the right direction. Even if they were the only people to have truly worked on the question of Being, we have no reason to assume that the work they were doing yielded even remotely correct answers. In fact, in the case that the Greeks actually had it all wrong, and that the insights they supposedly gained into the question of Being were actually false, then starting from where they left off could actually be counterproductive. In this case, it would be better to start anew, using our own language as a basis for investigation. And since we have no way of knowing with any degree of certainty whether or not the Greeks were headed in the right direction, the safest bet would be to start from scratch with our own language.
Using only historical language as a basis for argument can be somewhat limited, and discrediting the language of our age in favor of its ancient counterpart may result in the discarding of important information. Linguist Ferdinand de Saussure warns against this in his Course in General Linguistics when he says "Is traditional[3] grammar to be condemned in the name of historical grammar? No. That would be to see only one side of the reality. One must not suppose that historical facts are the only important ones, or that they suffice to constitute a language" (Saussure 136)[4]. Saussure makes a good point here. If we simply disregard our current language and the system that it belongs to and focus only on the language of the ancients, we are not really considering the entire picture. If language truly does contain within it the essences of things, then we cannot afford to throw away ages of linguistic transformation which could potentially be seen as progress towards our goal.
At the same time, though, we have to question whether or not language actually has such a capacity in the first place, as Heidegger posits. That is, can language tell us about the essence of a thing? Saussure's linguistics may not leave room for this capacity. The fundamental unit of a language according to Saussure's linguistics is called the sign. The sign is made up of two parts: the signifier and the concept or meaning. The signifier can be a sound pattern (as in speech) or a symbol (like a letter/written word) which denotes that sound pattern. For the sake of simplicity and for relevance to this discussion, we can just refer to this as a "word" as it is written or spoken. The signal part of the sign is tied to the conceptual part of the sign. This is essentially the meaning of our word as we interpret it in our mind. It is very important to note that this is only a concept, as Saussure points out, "A linguistic sign is not a link between a thing and a name, but between a concept and a sound pattern" (Saussure 98). For example, the word "book" could be considered a sign. Now, "book" itself, meaning the combination of letters or phonemes of which it is composed, is the signal part of the sign. The meaning of "book" is the concept of a book as we see it in our mind. This is only conceptual, though. It says nothing about an actual book as it exists in the real world and thus it provides no insight into the essential nature of books. So according to Saussure's linguistics, it would seem that the only information one could draw from the meaning of a word is the knowledge of how we conceive something to be, and it would be difficult to infer from this any kind of essential nature of the real-world counterpart to that conception. This would be a problem for Heidegger, since he seeks to move beyond mere conception of things and into the essences of things. This is especially true when it comes to the essence of Being, since it is something for which our conception is very limited.
This is not to say definitively, of course, that Saussure is right and Heidegger is wrong, or to say that Saussure's linguistics decisively refute Heidegger's position on language. This may be a subject of debate for Heidegger, since for him, "it's [language's] showing (through words)[5] does not culminate in a system of signs. Rather, all signs arise from a showing in whose realm and for whose purposes they can be signs" (Heidegger 410). It seems that from Heidegger's position, signs are like labels created for the purpose of describing things, which is a direct disagreement with the position that Saussure takes. I do not have the necessary expertise to intelligently comment on whether Heidegger's or Saussure's conception of language is correct. Since it is Heidegger with whom I have a disagreement, it is appropriate, then, to grant that Heidegger's conception of language is correct and to argue from there.
So let us assume that language does in fact contain within it some connection to real-world things and not just concepts. Does that connection allow for us to gain insight into the essences of those things? In Building Dwelling Thinking, Heidegger examines the German word bauen, which means "build." He goes back into the Old High German origins of the word bauen and after some explanation of its original meaning and context, he concludes that "building is really dwelling" (Heidegger 350). In this way, he argues that building means the same thing as dwelling, and that to build is to dwell. Thus it would seem that Heidegger has gained some valuable information about the essence of building and dwelling by examining the language of the ancients.
But is this argument convincing? Perhaps a German might find this argument compelling. A German might look at Heidegger's investigation into the origins of his language and realize that it makes perfect sense. However, we must remember that Heidegger does not seek to look into the essence of German building and German dwelling, but to examine the essence of building and dwelling in general.
For example, how would Heidegger's arguments be received by a person of East Asia whose language is not German and does not have any German, Greek, or Latin roots? The Japanese words for "build" (tateru) and "dwell" (sumu) may have no direct connection at all, regardless of how far back into the history of their language we look. In this case, it would seem that Heidegger's argument may not apply, since the essences of building and dwelling should be the same regardless of the language describing them. Thus Heidegger's method of argumentation is at risk of producing inconsistencies across multiple languages which undermine his efforts toward finding the essences of things.
Heidegger may object, however, that the Japanese language is simply ill-equipped for dealing with the essences of building and dwelling. He may say that if the Japanese words for building and dwelling are unrelated, it just means that the Japanese language does not have the necessary tools for showing the connection. This would be difficult to justify, however, since it is difficult to say whether the Japanese language is lacking connections, or if the German language simply has too many superfluous connections. And what if a Japanese philosopher tried to use a similar argument for connecting the essences of two words in their own language which, no matter how hard we look, we cannot find a connection for in German? Would this imply that the German language is also ill-equipped?
Of course Heidegger shows no indication of giving preference to one language over the other at all times. He often recognizes the insufficiency for dealing with things in German and turns to ancient Greek or Latin for answers instead. In fact, it is likely that Heidegger would say that there does not exist a language which has all of the necessary tools for articulating the essences of things, and that we must continually evolve language so that we may one day find the words to do this. Though, this may be difficult to do if Heidegger is right when he says that "language remains the master of man" (Heidegger 348) and not the other way around.
While his project is a noble one, and the task of articulating the essences of things is one that certainly deserves attention, Heidegger's approach in doing so may be a bit shaky. Looking at language only in a historical way limits what language can be allowed to do. The trust that Heidegger has in the wisdom of the ancients and the assumption that ancient languages are closer to truth than the languages of our current age needs more support. Most importantly, it is unclear whether or not language really can contain insight into the essences of real-world things. Saussure's linguistics seem to argue otherwise, and inconsistencies across multiple languages make it difficult for Heidegger's arguments to be convincing for everyone.
Works Cited
Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2010. Print.
Saussure, F. D. Course in general linguistics. Illinois. Open Court Publishing Company, 1983. Print.
Notes
[1] When I say "real-world", I am referring to the material world, or a world outside of mere concepts.
[2] I will cite Heidegger from David Farrell Krell's Basic Writings collection of Heidegger's work according to the page numbers of Basic Writings from which I draw my information. So this first quote can be found on page 348 of Krell's Basic Writings.
[3] I take "traditional" to mean something like "contemporary" here, since that makes the most sense in opposition to "historical."
[4] I will cite from Saussure's Course in General Linguistics according to the margin numbers corresponding to the page numbers of the original Swiss work rather than citing according to the page numbers of the translation I am using.
[5] I add this myself in order to avoid a lengthy discussion of context involving how he comes up with the term "showing." Basically, through his standard argumentative method in which he goes back to Latin roots of words and whatnot, he shows that "saying" really means "showing." See pages 408-410 in Basic Writings.
 
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As a philosopher (currently doing my master's degree), I love your posts!
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On June 11 2013 05:51 SoSexy wrote:
As a philosopher (currently doing my master's degree), I love your posts!
Thanks, friend. I appreciate it! :D
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As a guy who has no idea about philosophy, I wish you'd explain what Heidegger means by "the essence of real-world objects" and why this is interesting.
I liked this one a lot more than the one about Kant. I predict that you'll do David Hume next.
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There's a philosopher in each and every one of us. Nice read.
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On June 11 2013 06:33 prplhz wrote:
As a guy who has no idea about philosophy, I wish you'd explain what Heidegger means by "the essence of real-world objects" and why this is interesting.
I liked this one a lot more than the one about Kant. I predict that you'll do David Hume next.
Essence for Heidegger is pretty much the same as "essential nature." So when we take a concept like "build", and we ask what the essence of building is, we are kind of asking "Well, what does it really mean mean to build?" Heidegger uses his historical language argument style to say that "building is really dwelling", and then later in his essay he says that dwelling is really "thinking". So building, dwelling, and thinking are all pretty much the same thing. When we are building something, it is our way of dwelling (living in the world and creating a space for ourselves), and when we are dwelling, this also means that we are thinking (to dwell on something, I guess? Heidegger did all of this stuff using Old German words, so it might be harder to see the connections in English sometimes...). So as human beings, the actions of building, dwelling, and thinking all have the same meaning, or the same essential nature.
When Heidegger wants to find "the truth of Being" (this is Heidegger's main project), he is trying to find the essence of being, or the meaning of being. What is existence, really? What does it mean to be? This is what metaphysics is actually all about according to Heidegger. I guess put really simply, it's kind of like looking around and wondering, "Where do we come from? Why are we here? What am I, really? What is the world? What IS all of this?" That kind of thing... One of those types of questions where, not only is the answer hard to find, but even if you find the answer, it is probably impossible to accurately and completely put it into words, and it is often difficult to even put the question itself into words to ask it properly. And, I guess that's really what Heidegger gets frustrated about, and it's what he's trying to work on (and thinks we should all work on over time to eventually figure out how to articulate things). He's trying to put things into words, but it's hard to find the words to articulate things using the languages we have to work with, so he believes the ongoing project for human beings to have is to figure out how to think and say the truth of Being.
Not sure how understandable that was... Let me know if you need more clarification, since I'm not really confident that my answer was written well enough to be understood, so I might need to try again if this was a miss 
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On June 11 2013 05:15 MichaelDonovan wrote:
While his project is a noble one, and the task of articulating the essences of things is one that certainly deserves attention, Heidegger's approach in doing so may be a bit shaky. Looking at language only in a historical way limits what language can be allowed to do. The trust that Heidegger has in the wisdom of the ancients and the assumption that ancient languages are closer to truth than the languages of our current age needs more support. Most importantly, it is unclear whether or not language really can contain insight into the essences of real-world things. Saussure's linguistics seem to argue otherwise, and inconsistencies across multiple languages make it difficult for Heidegger's arguments to be convincing for everyone.
I believe that Heidegger didn't necessarily think that older language are better used to describe material essence but rather that primitive concept of words made those objects real in the sense that they could be named. His research of purity in language can also be interpreted as a desire to grasp the initial concept of the world itself - Heidegger being a Existentialist and Phenomenologist after all. That being said, his terminology is so void that it lets too much room for over-interpretation.
As a side note, if you want everyone to be able to expand on your introduction, I suggest you put in the effort to mention the original article. Basic Writings is a compilation of numerous works but here, if I'm not mistaken, you only mention Building, Dwelling, Thinking which is in Basic Writings but - and again, if I'm not mistaken - your subject would be better covered if you linked Poetry, Language, Thought which also contains aforementioned article and more. Special mention to On the path to language which covers this subject too.
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On June 11 2013 06:54 Kuni wrote:
There's a philosopher in each and every one of us. Nice read.
Thanks. This is true! Anyone with a love of wisdom can technically be considered a philosopher since that's what the word actually means (to use a Heideggerian method of argument, haha). If you like to think about stuff and want to work on understanding things more, then you are a philosopher, I think. 
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On June 11 2013 07:05 Otolia wrote:Show nested quote +On June 11 2013 05:15 MichaelDonovan wrote:
While his project is a noble one, and the task of articulating the essences of things is one that certainly deserves attention, Heidegger's approach in doing so may be a bit shaky. Looking at language only in a historical way limits what language can be allowed to do. The trust that Heidegger has in the wisdom of the ancients and the assumption that ancient languages are closer to truth than the languages of our current age needs more support. Most importantly, it is unclear whether or not language really can contain insight into the essences of real-world things. Saussure's linguistics seem to argue otherwise, and inconsistencies across multiple languages make it difficult for Heidegger's arguments to be convincing for everyone.
I believe that Heidegger didn't necessarily think that older language are better used to describe material essence but rather that primitive concept of words made those objects real in the sense that they could be named. His research of purity in language can also be interpreted as a desire to grasp the initial concept of the world itself - Heidegger being a Existentialist and Phenomenologist after all. That being said, his terminology is so void that it lets too much room for over-interpretation. As a side note, if you want everyone to be able to expand on your introduction, I suggest you put in the effort to mention the original article. Basic Writings is a compilation of numerous works but here, if I'm not mistaken, you only mention Building, Dwelling, Thinking which is in Basic Writings but - and again, if I'm not mistaken - your subject would be better covered if you linked Poetry, Language, Thought which also contains aforementioned article and more. Special mention to On the path to language which covers this subject too.
Yeah, that's fair. He does clearly say, though, that the ancient Greek thinkers had better insight into the essences of things, so their language is best suited to be referenced as a starting point for thinking the truth of Being and whatnot. But yeah, the way he goes about writing things makes it difficult sometimes to know if we're interpreting his ideas correctly. Maybe that's just one more reason for us to be frustrated by language, like he is, haha.
In response to your side note: Yeah, I was a bit lazy about citing the individual articles here, and I just cited from my Basic Writings collection. I mention Building Dwelling Thinking specifically, but I also have material from The Way to Language (which I did mention by name in there somewhere), and Being and Time (which I do not mention by name edit: Oh wait, I did mention it by name. I just couldn't find it because my Italics got destroyed! Haha, I will Italicize that now ). Although I did not quote directly from it, I did write this with material in mind from Letter on Humanism, in which he discusses the place of language and its relation to Being and whatnot.
I would also like to note that I wrote this in a word processor first and then copy-pasted it into my post. This actually lost my Italicized words, and I forgot to go back in and Italicize my article titles and whatnot, so I'll do that now I guess for the sake of clarity since it can be a little tricky to read otherwise, I think.
Thanks for your feedback. I don't disagree with anything you said, really.
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I can't wait till I start my philosophy major in college . This post just makes me more happy I chose to be a Philosophy/History double major haha.
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On June 11 2013 07:39 docvoc wrote:I can't wait till I start my philosophy major in college . This post just makes me more happy I chose to be a Philosophy/History double major haha.
Good luck, have fun! :D I actually double majored in Philosophy and Mathematics. I feel like a lot of Philosophy majors probably also major in something else at the same time, or at least grab a minor in something else. Philosophy for fun, Mathematics for food! Hahaha.
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thats what you think until you are given reading assignments of 200~ pages a week
then you wish you never took those classes
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On June 11 2013 07:47 ktimekiller wrote:
thats what you think until you are given reading assignments of 200~ pages a week
then you wish you never took those classes
Yeah, if you don't like reading and writing, I wouldn't recommend majoring in Philosophy, but I would say everyone should take a class or two on the subject at least. I mean, no professor is going to give you 200 pages per week (I certainly wouldn't), but if you are taking 3 or 4 Philosophy classes at a time, it can add up to be that much across all of them.
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Uhm, i came here expecting that HYA HYA HYA guy from FF7, im such a lowly nerd with no intelligence
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On June 11 2013 07:01 MichaelDonovan wrote:Show nested quote +On June 11 2013 06:33 prplhz wrote:
As a guy who has no idea about philosophy, I wish you'd explain what Heidegger means by "the essence of real-world objects" and why this is interesting.
I liked this one a lot more than the one about Kant. I predict that you'll do David Hume next. Essence for Heidegger is pretty much the same as "essential nature." So when we take a concept like "build", and we ask what the essence of building is, we are kind of asking "Well, what does it really mean mean to build?" Heidegger uses his historical language argument style to say that "building is really dwelling", and then later in his essay he says that dwelling is really "thinking". So building, dwelling, and thinking are all pretty much the same thing. When we are building something, it is our way of dwelling (living in the world and creating a space for ourselves), and when we are dwelling, this also means that we are thinking (to dwell on something, I guess? Heidegger did all of this stuff using Old German words, so it might be harder to see the connections in English sometimes...). So as human beings, the actions of building, dwelling, and thinking all have the same meaning, or the same essential nature. When Heidegger wants to find "the truth of Being" (this is Heidegger's main project), he is trying to find the essence of being, or the meaning of being. What is existence, really? What does it mean to be? This is what metaphysics is actually all about according to Heidegger. I guess put really simply, it's kind of like looking around and wondering, "Where do we come from? Why are we here? What am I, really? What is the world? What IS all of this?" That kind of thing... One of those types of questions where, not only is the answer hard to find, but even if you find the answer, it is probably impossible to accurately and completely put it into words, and it is often difficult to even put the question itself into words to ask it properly. And, I guess that's really what Heidegger gets frustrated about, and it's what he's trying to work on (and thinks we should all work on over time to eventually figure out how to articulate things). He's trying to put things into words, but it's hard to find the words to articulate things using the languages we have to work with, so he believes the ongoing project for human beings to have is to figure out how to think and say the truth of Being. Not sure how understandable that was... Let me know if you need more clarification, since I'm not really confident that my answer was written well enough to be understood, so I might need to try again if this was a miss
that is an awful way to describe what heidegger means by essence, and given the complete lack of any discussion of a clearing or an understanding of being i think that you might as well be informed of it.
essence for heidegger is Wesen, and he uses it as a verb that essentially means "to presence" "to come on the scene" (so similar to anwesen). for heidegger the essence of something is in flux and determined by a clearing. what is the essence of a chair? it is not the necessary and sufficient conditions of being a chair, for H. instead, it is the way a chair comes to presence in the world.
take the question concerning technology. heidegger asks "what is the essence of modern technology?" and his answer has nothing to do with "what does it really mean to be modern technology?" the essence of modern technology is enframing, and this means that enframing is the way that modern technology comes to presence. the being of modern technology is determined essentially by enframing, meaning that its character and its significance in the world etc is all determined by enframing. it's not that a hydroelectric dam really is enframing, but rather enframing is what determines the character and presence of the hydroelectric dam.
anyway as for your main essay, it's clear that you don't know much about heidegger's view of history. heidegger doesn't think the greeks were smarter than us or that their language was somehow inherently better. rather, as you should have seen in your B&T quote but thoughtlessly brushed past, the investigations of the greeks into the meaning of being have determined the course of Western society. so by looking closely at greek words, we can see the roots of our own concepts. H would not say that the greek word for truth (aletheia) or false (pseudos) is some fundamentally accurate word that will forever describe the essence of what is true and false. (aletheia is obviously a bit of an exception). if you read, say, his work on parmenides, you'll see him frequently state that "the greeks experienced the essence of falsity as dissemblance" whereas for moderns "the essence of falsity is un-truth, uncorrectness." essences constantly change with turnings of being, and the only reason greek words are worth investigating is because greek thought determined western history and metaphysics.
you would do yourself well to read a lot more heidegger (but first study aristotle for 10 to 15 years).
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On June 11 2013 10:28 Lixler wrote:Show nested quote +On June 11 2013 07:01 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 06:33 prplhz wrote:
As a guy who has no idea about philosophy, I wish you'd explain what Heidegger means by "the essence of real-world objects" and why this is interesting.
I liked this one a lot more than the one about Kant. I predict that you'll do David Hume next. Essence for Heidegger is pretty much the same as "essential nature." So when we take a concept like "build", and we ask what the essence of building is, we are kind of asking "Well, what does it really mean mean to build?" Heidegger uses his historical language argument style to say that "building is really dwelling", and then later in his essay he says that dwelling is really "thinking". So building, dwelling, and thinking are all pretty much the same thing. When we are building something, it is our way of dwelling (living in the world and creating a space for ourselves), and when we are dwelling, this also means that we are thinking (to dwell on something, I guess? Heidegger did all of this stuff using Old German words, so it might be harder to see the connections in English sometimes...). So as human beings, the actions of building, dwelling, and thinking all have the same meaning, or the same essential nature. When Heidegger wants to find "the truth of Being" (this is Heidegger's main project), he is trying to find the essence of being, or the meaning of being. What is existence, really? What does it mean to be? This is what metaphysics is actually all about according to Heidegger. I guess put really simply, it's kind of like looking around and wondering, "Where do we come from? Why are we here? What am I, really? What is the world? What IS all of this?" That kind of thing... One of those types of questions where, not only is the answer hard to find, but even if you find the answer, it is probably impossible to accurately and completely put it into words, and it is often difficult to even put the question itself into words to ask it properly. And, I guess that's really what Heidegger gets frustrated about, and it's what he's trying to work on (and thinks we should all work on over time to eventually figure out how to articulate things). He's trying to put things into words, but it's hard to find the words to articulate things using the languages we have to work with, so he believes the ongoing project for human beings to have is to figure out how to think and say the truth of Being. Not sure how understandable that was... Let me know if you need more clarification, since I'm not really confident that my answer was written well enough to be understood, so I might need to try again if this was a miss that is an awful way to describe what heidegger means by essence, and given the complete lack of any discussion of a clearing or an understanding of being i think that you might as well be informed of it. essence for heidegger is Wesen, and he uses it as a verb that essentially means "to presence" "to come on the scene" (so similar to anwesen). for heidegger the essence of something is in flux and determined by a clearing. what is the essence of a chair? it is not the necessary and sufficient conditions of being a chair, for H. instead, it is the way a chair comes to presence in the world. take the question concerning technology. heidegger asks "what is the essence of modern technology?" and his answer has nothing to do with "what does it really mean to be modern technology?" the essence of modern technology is enframing, and this means that enframing is the way that modern technology comes to presence. the being of modern technology is determined essentially by enframing, meaning that its character and its significance in the world etc is all determined by enframing. it's not that a hydroelectric dam really is enframing, but rather enframing is what determines the character and presence of the hydroelectric dam. anyway as for your main essay, it's clear that you don't know much about heidegger's view of history. heidegger doesn't think the greeks were smarter than us or that their language was somehow inherently better. rather, as you should have seen in your B&T quote but thoughtlessly brushed past, the investigations of the greeks into the meaning of being have determined the course of Western society. so by looking closely at greek words, we can see the roots of our own concepts. H would not say that the greek word for truth (aletheia) or false (pseudos) is some fundamentally accurate word that will forever describe the essence of what is true and false. (aletheia is obviously a bit of an exception). if you read, say, his work on parmenides, you'll see him frequently state that "the greeks experienced the essence of falsity as dissemblance" whereas for moderns "the essence of falsity is un-truth, uncorrectness." essences constantly change with turnings of being, and the only reason greek words are worth investigating is because greek thought determined western history and metaphysics. you would do yourself well to read a lot more heidegger (but first study aristotle for 10 to 15 years).
Thanks for your response.
Well, to start with your response to my description of essence for Heidegger, I described it that way in an attempt to communicate the idea to somebody who claims to have "no idea about philosophy." This is why I tried to simplify it and use terminology that would appeal to everyone. If I was discussing the idea with a fellow philosopher, I would of course be more inclined to discuss things relating to Heidegger's phenomenology and all of that, but I felt it more appropriate to relate Heidegger's ideas to more accessible concepts and keep it as simple as possible, avoiding all of that background discussion. I expect therefore that anyone familiar with Heidegger would think that the explanation I gave was insufficient and even inaccurate to a degree. Writing for a specific audience is tough sometimes because people outside of the target audience will receive your words differently
Now as for your response to the essay itself:
I don't think I ever said that Heidegger believes the Greeks or their language to be inherently smarter/better than moderns or anything like that. I'm not sure why you are getting that impression. In fact I pretty clearly said that the reason he believes the Greeks were closer to the essence of being was because they were the only people actually investigating the question according to him, and as Heidegger says, the only being who could think of the question of Being is a being for whom Being is important. It was because the Greeks were the only people who were actively thinking about the question of Being that Heidegger believes their language to be closer to it. I may not explain this in-depth in my essay, but I do not overlook it either. See paragraph 8. I do discuss this a little bit. If you believe my discussion of this to be insufficient, you might be right, but keep in mind I'm not writing this for an audience of scholars, and this is not the kind of work that I would try to publish. These are just short little essays where I think out loud a bit. So, if you consider yourself to be a Heidegger scholar of sorts, then it would make sense if you felt my writing to be a bit shallow or something like that.
Now this may be the fault of my poor writing here, but I do not believe you understood what I was actually saying about Heidegger's conception of language. When a reader does not understand what a writer is trying to say, it is often the fault of the writer himself for not being clear enough, so I won't fault you for this, but I think you assumed too much about my ideas and ended up with an inaccurate impression of me.
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On June 11 2013 11:09 MichaelDonovan wrote:Show nested quote +On June 11 2013 10:28 Lixler wrote:On June 11 2013 07:01 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 06:33 prplhz wrote:
As a guy who has no idea about philosophy, I wish you'd explain what Heidegger means by "the essence of real-world objects" and why this is interesting.
I liked this one a lot more than the one about Kant. I predict that you'll do David Hume next. Essence for Heidegger is pretty much the same as "essential nature." So when we take a concept like "build", and we ask what the essence of building is, we are kind of asking "Well, what does it really mean mean to build?" Heidegger uses his historical language argument style to say that "building is really dwelling", and then later in his essay he says that dwelling is really "thinking". So building, dwelling, and thinking are all pretty much the same thing. When we are building something, it is our way of dwelling (living in the world and creating a space for ourselves), and when we are dwelling, this also means that we are thinking (to dwell on something, I guess? Heidegger did all of this stuff using Old German words, so it might be harder to see the connections in English sometimes...). So as human beings, the actions of building, dwelling, and thinking all have the same meaning, or the same essential nature. When Heidegger wants to find "the truth of Being" (this is Heidegger's main project), he is trying to find the essence of being, or the meaning of being. What is existence, really? What does it mean to be? This is what metaphysics is actually all about according to Heidegger. I guess put really simply, it's kind of like looking around and wondering, "Where do we come from? Why are we here? What am I, really? What is the world? What IS all of this?" That kind of thing... One of those types of questions where, not only is the answer hard to find, but even if you find the answer, it is probably impossible to accurately and completely put it into words, and it is often difficult to even put the question itself into words to ask it properly. And, I guess that's really what Heidegger gets frustrated about, and it's what he's trying to work on (and thinks we should all work on over time to eventually figure out how to articulate things). He's trying to put things into words, but it's hard to find the words to articulate things using the languages we have to work with, so he believes the ongoing project for human beings to have is to figure out how to think and say the truth of Being. Not sure how understandable that was... Let me know if you need more clarification, since I'm not really confident that my answer was written well enough to be understood, so I might need to try again if this was a miss that is an awful way to describe what heidegger means by essence, and given the complete lack of any discussion of a clearing or an understanding of being i think that you might as well be informed of it. essence for heidegger is Wesen, and he uses it as a verb that essentially means "to presence" "to come on the scene" (so similar to anwesen). for heidegger the essence of something is in flux and determined by a clearing. what is the essence of a chair? it is not the necessary and sufficient conditions of being a chair, for H. instead, it is the way a chair comes to presence in the world. take the question concerning technology. heidegger asks "what is the essence of modern technology?" and his answer has nothing to do with "what does it really mean to be modern technology?" the essence of modern technology is enframing, and this means that enframing is the way that modern technology comes to presence. the being of modern technology is determined essentially by enframing, meaning that its character and its significance in the world etc is all determined by enframing. it's not that a hydroelectric dam really is enframing, but rather enframing is what determines the character and presence of the hydroelectric dam. anyway as for your main essay, it's clear that you don't know much about heidegger's view of history. heidegger doesn't think the greeks were smarter than us or that their language was somehow inherently better. rather, as you should have seen in your B&T quote but thoughtlessly brushed past, the investigations of the greeks into the meaning of being have determined the course of Western society. so by looking closely at greek words, we can see the roots of our own concepts. H would not say that the greek word for truth (aletheia) or false (pseudos) is some fundamentally accurate word that will forever describe the essence of what is true and false. (aletheia is obviously a bit of an exception). if you read, say, his work on parmenides, you'll see him frequently state that "the greeks experienced the essence of falsity as dissemblance" whereas for moderns "the essence of falsity is un-truth, uncorrectness." essences constantly change with turnings of being, and the only reason greek words are worth investigating is because greek thought determined western history and metaphysics. you would do yourself well to read a lot more heidegger (but first study aristotle for 10 to 15 years). Thanks for your response. Well, to start with your response to my description of essence for Heidegger, I described it that way in an attempt to communicate the idea to somebody who claims to have "no idea about philosophy." This is why I tried to simplify it and use terminology that would appeal to everyone. If I was discussing the idea with a fellow philosopher, I would of course be more inclined to discuss things relating to Heidegger's phenomenology and all of that, but I felt it more appropriate to relate Heidegger's ideas to more accessible concepts and keep it as simple as possible, avoiding all of that background discussion. I expect therefore that anyone familiar with Heidegger would think that the explanation I gave was insufficient and even inaccurate to a degree. Writing for a specific audience is tough sometimes because people outside of the target audience will receive your words differently Now as for your response to the essay itself: I don't think I ever said that Heidegger believes the Greeks or their language to be inherently smarter/better than moderns or anything like that. I'm not sure why you are getting that impression. In fact I pretty clearly said that the reason he believes the Greeks were closer to the essence of being was because they were the only people actually investigating the question according to him, and as Heidegger says, the only being who could think of the question of Being is a being for whom Being is important. It was because the Greeks were the only people who were actively thinking about the question of Being that Heidegger believes their language to be closer to it. I may not explain this in-depth in my essay, but I do not overlook it either. See paragraph 8. I do discuss this a little bit. If you believe my discussion of this to be insufficient, you might be right, but keep in mind I'm not writing this for an audience of scholars, and this is not the kind of work that I would try to publish. These are just short little essays where I think out loud a bit. So, if you consider yourself to be a Heidegger scholar of sorts, then it would make sense if you felt my writing to be a bit shallow or something like that. Now this may be the fault of my poor writing here, but I do not believe you understood what I was actually saying about Heidegger's conception of language. When a reader does not understand what a writer is trying to say, it is often the fault of the writer himself for not being clear enough, so I won't fault you for this, but I think you assumed too much about my ideas and ended up with an inaccurate impression of me.
you said this, maybe i misinterpreted it
He does clearly say, though, that the ancient Greek thinkers had better insight into the essences of things, so their language is best suited to be referenced as a starting point for thinking the truth of Being and whatnot
in any case i'd really be surprised to find that your understanding of heidegger is adequate and you just left out a lot of things you knew in this essay. for instance, you use the japanese language as an example but don't discuss what heidegger himself had to say about japanese (in e.g. a dialogue on language). additionally, in the same place, i get the impression you don't know that heidegger thought that only western (that is, post-greek) society has history proper and is the only place Being with a capital B shows up. for instance, you say
However, we must remember that Heidegger does not seek to look into the essence of German building and German dwelling, but to examine the essence of building and dwelling in general.
and i don't think your discussion is insufficient, or at least i wouldn't see any point in making that utterance. i think that you're expressing a legitimate qualm with heidegger's method, but this kind of a half-opinion piece about it shows a kind of stilted thinking that isn't going to do you much. your disagreements with his method might be put into a slightly more precise form, but i think that if you wanted to deal with heidegger philosophically, and not as a linguistics student brushing past his work might, you would take the issue you had with this method and see how it fits into his thought as a whole. in studying Dead White philosophers, i don't think the aim is ever to determine if they were right or wrong (because they were all wrong).
take a sentence from your essay.
Most importantly, it is unclear whether or not language really can contain insight into the essences of real-world things.
now you obviously know that not much is actually said by this. imagine if someone writing on kant said "it is unclear whether or not we really do have a faculty for making synthetic a priori judgments." this might be an expression of a particular sympathy i have, but i don't think i do myself much philosophical good by construing a couple quotes by a modern neuroscientist to be contradicting kant. of course it might just not matter to you whether your thinking w/r/t any given philosopher does you any good, but i think philosophy would be a substantial(ly larger) waste of time if it consisted only in reckoning up statements by dead men who said Being and Truth a lot and seeing whether they were true or false
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On June 11 2013 11:40 Lixler wrote:Show nested quote +On June 11 2013 11:09 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 10:28 Lixler wrote:On June 11 2013 07:01 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 06:33 prplhz wrote:
As a guy who has no idea about philosophy, I wish you'd explain what Heidegger means by "the essence of real-world objects" and why this is interesting.
I liked this one a lot more than the one about Kant. I predict that you'll do David Hume next. Essence for Heidegger is pretty much the same as "essential nature." So when we take a concept like "build", and we ask what the essence of building is, we are kind of asking "Well, what does it really mean mean to build?" Heidegger uses his historical language argument style to say that "building is really dwelling", and then later in his essay he says that dwelling is really "thinking". So building, dwelling, and thinking are all pretty much the same thing. When we are building something, it is our way of dwelling (living in the world and creating a space for ourselves), and when we are dwelling, this also means that we are thinking (to dwell on something, I guess? Heidegger did all of this stuff using Old German words, so it might be harder to see the connections in English sometimes...). So as human beings, the actions of building, dwelling, and thinking all have the same meaning, or the same essential nature. When Heidegger wants to find "the truth of Being" (this is Heidegger's main project), he is trying to find the essence of being, or the meaning of being. What is existence, really? What does it mean to be? This is what metaphysics is actually all about according to Heidegger. I guess put really simply, it's kind of like looking around and wondering, "Where do we come from? Why are we here? What am I, really? What is the world? What IS all of this?" That kind of thing... One of those types of questions where, not only is the answer hard to find, but even if you find the answer, it is probably impossible to accurately and completely put it into words, and it is often difficult to even put the question itself into words to ask it properly. And, I guess that's really what Heidegger gets frustrated about, and it's what he's trying to work on (and thinks we should all work on over time to eventually figure out how to articulate things). He's trying to put things into words, but it's hard to find the words to articulate things using the languages we have to work with, so he believes the ongoing project for human beings to have is to figure out how to think and say the truth of Being. Not sure how understandable that was... Let me know if you need more clarification, since I'm not really confident that my answer was written well enough to be understood, so I might need to try again if this was a miss that is an awful way to describe what heidegger means by essence, and given the complete lack of any discussion of a clearing or an understanding of being i think that you might as well be informed of it. essence for heidegger is Wesen, and he uses it as a verb that essentially means "to presence" "to come on the scene" (so similar to anwesen). for heidegger the essence of something is in flux and determined by a clearing. what is the essence of a chair? it is not the necessary and sufficient conditions of being a chair, for H. instead, it is the way a chair comes to presence in the world. take the question concerning technology. heidegger asks "what is the essence of modern technology?" and his answer has nothing to do with "what does it really mean to be modern technology?" the essence of modern technology is enframing, and this means that enframing is the way that modern technology comes to presence. the being of modern technology is determined essentially by enframing, meaning that its character and its significance in the world etc is all determined by enframing. it's not that a hydroelectric dam really is enframing, but rather enframing is what determines the character and presence of the hydroelectric dam. anyway as for your main essay, it's clear that you don't know much about heidegger's view of history. heidegger doesn't think the greeks were smarter than us or that their language was somehow inherently better. rather, as you should have seen in your B&T quote but thoughtlessly brushed past, the investigations of the greeks into the meaning of being have determined the course of Western society. so by looking closely at greek words, we can see the roots of our own concepts. H would not say that the greek word for truth (aletheia) or false (pseudos) is some fundamentally accurate word that will forever describe the essence of what is true and false. (aletheia is obviously a bit of an exception). if you read, say, his work on parmenides, you'll see him frequently state that "the greeks experienced the essence of falsity as dissemblance" whereas for moderns "the essence of falsity is un-truth, uncorrectness." essences constantly change with turnings of being, and the only reason greek words are worth investigating is because greek thought determined western history and metaphysics. you would do yourself well to read a lot more heidegger (but first study aristotle for 10 to 15 years). Thanks for your response. Well, to start with your response to my description of essence for Heidegger, I described it that way in an attempt to communicate the idea to somebody who claims to have "no idea about philosophy." This is why I tried to simplify it and use terminology that would appeal to everyone. If I was discussing the idea with a fellow philosopher, I would of course be more inclined to discuss things relating to Heidegger's phenomenology and all of that, but I felt it more appropriate to relate Heidegger's ideas to more accessible concepts and keep it as simple as possible, avoiding all of that background discussion. I expect therefore that anyone familiar with Heidegger would think that the explanation I gave was insufficient and even inaccurate to a degree. Writing for a specific audience is tough sometimes because people outside of the target audience will receive your words differently Now as for your response to the essay itself: I don't think I ever said that Heidegger believes the Greeks or their language to be inherently smarter/better than moderns or anything like that. I'm not sure why you are getting that impression. In fact I pretty clearly said that the reason he believes the Greeks were closer to the essence of being was because they were the only people actually investigating the question according to him, and as Heidegger says, the only being who could think of the question of Being is a being for whom Being is important. It was because the Greeks were the only people who were actively thinking about the question of Being that Heidegger believes their language to be closer to it. I may not explain this in-depth in my essay, but I do not overlook it either. See paragraph 8. I do discuss this a little bit. If you believe my discussion of this to be insufficient, you might be right, but keep in mind I'm not writing this for an audience of scholars, and this is not the kind of work that I would try to publish. These are just short little essays where I think out loud a bit. So, if you consider yourself to be a Heidegger scholar of sorts, then it would make sense if you felt my writing to be a bit shallow or something like that. Now this may be the fault of my poor writing here, but I do not believe you understood what I was actually saying about Heidegger's conception of language. When a reader does not understand what a writer is trying to say, it is often the fault of the writer himself for not being clear enough, so I won't fault you for this, but I think you assumed too much about my ideas and ended up with an inaccurate impression of me. you said this, maybe i misinterpreted it Show nested quote +He does clearly say, though, that the ancient Greek thinkers had better insight into the essences of things, so their language is best suited to be referenced as a starting point for thinking the truth of Being and whatnot in any case i'd really be surprised to find that your understanding of heidegger is adequate and you just left out a lot of things you knew in this essay. for instance, you use the japanese language as an example but don't discuss what heidegger himself had to say about japanese (in e.g. a dialogue on language). additionally, in the same place, i get the impression you don't know that heidegger thought that only western (that is, post-greek) society has history proper and is the only place Being with a capital B shows up. for instance, you say Show nested quote +However, we must remember that Heidegger does not seek to look into the essence of German building and German dwelling, but to examine the essence of building and dwelling in general.
and i don't think your discussion is insufficient, or at least i wouldn't see any point in making that utterance. i think that you're expressing a legitimate qualm with heidegger's method, but this kind of a half-opinion piece about it shows a kind of stilted thinking that isn't going to do you much. your disagreements with his method might be put into a slightly more precise form, but i think that if you wanted to deal with heidegger philosophically, and not as a linguistics student brushing past his work might, you would take the issue you had with this method and see how it fits into his thought as a whole. in studying Dead White philosophers, i don't think the aim is ever to determine if they were right or wrong (because they were all wrong). take a sentence from your essay. Show nested quote +Most importantly, it is unclear whether or not language really can contain insight into the essences of real-world things. now you obviously know that not much is actually said by this. imagine if someone writing on kant said "it is unclear whether or not we really do have a faculty for making synthetic a priori judgments." this might be an expression of a particular sympathy i have, but i don't think i do myself much philosophical good by construing a couple quotes by a modern neuroscientist to be contradicting kant. of course it might just not matter to you whether your thinking w/r/t any given philosopher does you any good, but i think philosophy would be a substantial(ly larger) waste of time if it consisted only in reckoning up statements by dead men who said Being and Truth a lot and seeing whether they were true or false
Well for the first quote, I think this was just poorly written on my part. I didn't really choose my words carefully here. What I meant by that is that since the essences of things ultimately stem from the essence of Being, and since the Greeks were the only people interested in the question of Being, they have (according to Heidegger) greater insight into the essence of Being and by extension the essences of things. Of course, this may be a bit careless for me to say since Heidegger doesn't really like it when people lose sight of Being by becoming too preoccupied with beings. He might roll over in his grave if he read what I wrote
Now for the bit about the Japanese, I have read and know exactly what you are referring to I just didn't feel the need to mention it explicitly in my essay because I go on to explain what Heidegger's objections to my argument would be (how the Japanese language is ill-equipped etc.), and I felt that was sufficient to get my point across so I could move on. Again, I'm not writing this to be published, otherwise I would have probably gone into more detail about that.
As for the next quote you pulled about German building and German dwelling vs. building and dwelling in general, I believe this is very true and I stand by what I wrote. While it's true that Heidegger doesn't much care for languages outside of Western culture, this does not mean he thinks that the essences of things found in Europe are different from the essences of the same things found in Asia. He is looking into the essences of building and dwelling as they are for everyone, it's just that he does not care much for what other languages have to say about building and dwelling and only considers Western history/language in his pursuit of this. This is what I'm really arguing against, I guess.
And in response to your last argument there: The aim of this essay is not to determine whether Heidgger's way of thinking is wrong, or whether his conception of language is correct or not. I am only arguing against his use of historical language as a basis for argument. My claim is that it is a shaky way to argue for something. So, whether Heidegger's ideas were right or wrong is not what is at stake here. It is his way of arguing for those ideas that I don't like. And this is why I don't try to "take the issue I had with this method and see how it fits into his thought as a whole." I'm not interested in exploring how his method fits into his thought as a whole. I'm looking only at his method and whether or not it is an acceptable way to argue about things.
However, I should note that I do not consider myself to be a Heidegger scholar in any way! I have spent much less time on Heidegger than I have on others such as Kant, for example, so if you consider yourself to be an expert on Heidegger, then it is not unreasonable to assume that I do in fact have a weaker understanding of him than you do. But I do believe I understand him a bit better than you think I do based on what I've written here. Again, these essays that I post on TL are really just me thinking out-loud and sketching out some ideas.
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On June 11 2013 12:11 MichaelDonovan wrote:Show nested quote +On June 11 2013 11:40 Lixler wrote:On June 11 2013 11:09 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 10:28 Lixler wrote:On June 11 2013 07:01 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 06:33 prplhz wrote:
As a guy who has no idea about philosophy, I wish you'd explain what Heidegger means by "the essence of real-world objects" and why this is interesting.
I liked this one a lot more than the one about Kant. I predict that you'll do David Hume next. Essence for Heidegger is pretty much the same as "essential nature." So when we take a concept like "build", and we ask what the essence of building is, we are kind of asking "Well, what does it really mean mean to build?" Heidegger uses his historical language argument style to say that "building is really dwelling", and then later in his essay he says that dwelling is really "thinking". So building, dwelling, and thinking are all pretty much the same thing. When we are building something, it is our way of dwelling (living in the world and creating a space for ourselves), and when we are dwelling, this also means that we are thinking (to dwell on something, I guess? Heidegger did all of this stuff using Old German words, so it might be harder to see the connections in English sometimes...). So as human beings, the actions of building, dwelling, and thinking all have the same meaning, or the same essential nature. When Heidegger wants to find "the truth of Being" (this is Heidegger's main project), he is trying to find the essence of being, or the meaning of being. What is existence, really? What does it mean to be? This is what metaphysics is actually all about according to Heidegger. I guess put really simply, it's kind of like looking around and wondering, "Where do we come from? Why are we here? What am I, really? What is the world? What IS all of this?" That kind of thing... One of those types of questions where, not only is the answer hard to find, but even if you find the answer, it is probably impossible to accurately and completely put it into words, and it is often difficult to even put the question itself into words to ask it properly. And, I guess that's really what Heidegger gets frustrated about, and it's what he's trying to work on (and thinks we should all work on over time to eventually figure out how to articulate things). He's trying to put things into words, but it's hard to find the words to articulate things using the languages we have to work with, so he believes the ongoing project for human beings to have is to figure out how to think and say the truth of Being. Not sure how understandable that was... Let me know if you need more clarification, since I'm not really confident that my answer was written well enough to be understood, so I might need to try again if this was a miss that is an awful way to describe what heidegger means by essence, and given the complete lack of any discussion of a clearing or an understanding of being i think that you might as well be informed of it. essence for heidegger is Wesen, and he uses it as a verb that essentially means "to presence" "to come on the scene" (so similar to anwesen). for heidegger the essence of something is in flux and determined by a clearing. what is the essence of a chair? it is not the necessary and sufficient conditions of being a chair, for H. instead, it is the way a chair comes to presence in the world. take the question concerning technology. heidegger asks "what is the essence of modern technology?" and his answer has nothing to do with "what does it really mean to be modern technology?" the essence of modern technology is enframing, and this means that enframing is the way that modern technology comes to presence. the being of modern technology is determined essentially by enframing, meaning that its character and its significance in the world etc is all determined by enframing. it's not that a hydroelectric dam really is enframing, but rather enframing is what determines the character and presence of the hydroelectric dam. anyway as for your main essay, it's clear that you don't know much about heidegger's view of history. heidegger doesn't think the greeks were smarter than us or that their language was somehow inherently better. rather, as you should have seen in your B&T quote but thoughtlessly brushed past, the investigations of the greeks into the meaning of being have determined the course of Western society. so by looking closely at greek words, we can see the roots of our own concepts. H would not say that the greek word for truth (aletheia) or false (pseudos) is some fundamentally accurate word that will forever describe the essence of what is true and false. (aletheia is obviously a bit of an exception). if you read, say, his work on parmenides, you'll see him frequently state that "the greeks experienced the essence of falsity as dissemblance" whereas for moderns "the essence of falsity is un-truth, uncorrectness." essences constantly change with turnings of being, and the only reason greek words are worth investigating is because greek thought determined western history and metaphysics. you would do yourself well to read a lot more heidegger (but first study aristotle for 10 to 15 years). Thanks for your response. Well, to start with your response to my description of essence for Heidegger, I described it that way in an attempt to communicate the idea to somebody who claims to have "no idea about philosophy." This is why I tried to simplify it and use terminology that would appeal to everyone. If I was discussing the idea with a fellow philosopher, I would of course be more inclined to discuss things relating to Heidegger's phenomenology and all of that, but I felt it more appropriate to relate Heidegger's ideas to more accessible concepts and keep it as simple as possible, avoiding all of that background discussion. I expect therefore that anyone familiar with Heidegger would think that the explanation I gave was insufficient and even inaccurate to a degree. Writing for a specific audience is tough sometimes because people outside of the target audience will receive your words differently Now as for your response to the essay itself: I don't think I ever said that Heidegger believes the Greeks or their language to be inherently smarter/better than moderns or anything like that. I'm not sure why you are getting that impression. In fact I pretty clearly said that the reason he believes the Greeks were closer to the essence of being was because they were the only people actually investigating the question according to him, and as Heidegger says, the only being who could think of the question of Being is a being for whom Being is important. It was because the Greeks were the only people who were actively thinking about the question of Being that Heidegger believes their language to be closer to it. I may not explain this in-depth in my essay, but I do not overlook it either. See paragraph 8. I do discuss this a little bit. If you believe my discussion of this to be insufficient, you might be right, but keep in mind I'm not writing this for an audience of scholars, and this is not the kind of work that I would try to publish. These are just short little essays where I think out loud a bit. So, if you consider yourself to be a Heidegger scholar of sorts, then it would make sense if you felt my writing to be a bit shallow or something like that. Now this may be the fault of my poor writing here, but I do not believe you understood what I was actually saying about Heidegger's conception of language. When a reader does not understand what a writer is trying to say, it is often the fault of the writer himself for not being clear enough, so I won't fault you for this, but I think you assumed too much about my ideas and ended up with an inaccurate impression of me. you said this, maybe i misinterpreted it He does clearly say, though, that the ancient Greek thinkers had better insight into the essences of things, so their language is best suited to be referenced as a starting point for thinking the truth of Being and whatnot in any case i'd really be surprised to find that your understanding of heidegger is adequate and you just left out a lot of things you knew in this essay. for instance, you use the japanese language as an example but don't discuss what heidegger himself had to say about japanese (in e.g. a dialogue on language). additionally, in the same place, i get the impression you don't know that heidegger thought that only western (that is, post-greek) society has history proper and is the only place Being with a capital B shows up. for instance, you say However, we must remember that Heidegger does not seek to look into the essence of German building and German dwelling, but to examine the essence of building and dwelling in general.
and i don't think your discussion is insufficient, or at least i wouldn't see any point in making that utterance. i think that you're expressing a legitimate qualm with heidegger's method, but this kind of a half-opinion piece about it shows a kind of stilted thinking that isn't going to do you much. your disagreements with his method might be put into a slightly more precise form, but i think that if you wanted to deal with heidegger philosophically, and not as a linguistics student brushing past his work might, you would take the issue you had with this method and see how it fits into his thought as a whole. in studying Dead White philosophers, i don't think the aim is ever to determine if they were right or wrong (because they were all wrong). take a sentence from your essay. Most importantly, it is unclear whether or not language really can contain insight into the essences of real-world things. now you obviously know that not much is actually said by this. imagine if someone writing on kant said "it is unclear whether or not we really do have a faculty for making synthetic a priori judgments." this might be an expression of a particular sympathy i have, but i don't think i do myself much philosophical good by construing a couple quotes by a modern neuroscientist to be contradicting kant. of course it might just not matter to you whether your thinking w/r/t any given philosopher does you any good, but i think philosophy would be a substantial(ly larger) waste of time if it consisted only in reckoning up statements by dead men who said Being and Truth a lot and seeing whether they were true or false Well for the first quote, I think this was just poorly written on my part. I didn't really choose my words carefully here. What I meant by that is that since the essences of things ultimately stem from the essence of Being, and since the Greeks were the only people interested in the question of Being, they have (according to Heidegger) greater insight into the essence of Being and by extension the essences of things. Of course, this may be a bit careless for me to say since Heidegger doesn't really like it when people lose sight of Being by becoming too preoccupied with beings. He might roll over in his grave if he read what I wrote As for the next quote you pulled about German building and German dwelling vs. building and dwelling in general, I believe this is very true and I stand by what I wrote. While it's true that Heidegger doesn't much care for languages outside of Western culture, this does not mean he thinks that the essences of things found in Europe are different from the essences of the same things found in Asia. He is looking into the essences of building and dwelling as they are for everyone, it's just that he does not care much for what other languages have to say about building and dwelling and only considers Western history/language in his pursuit of this. This is what I'm really arguing against, I guess.
greeks did not have greater insight into the essence of being. the pre-socratics had a special relationship to being, but they failed to think it properly (because this wasn't their task, according to marty). heidegger is specifically doing something the greeks did not and could not do, which is to ground an investigation of being on the ontological difference and to think the nature of aletheia. greek language is not worth investigating because the greeks were more in tune with being or something (and certainly they might have been); greek language is worth investigating because our own concepts and understanding of being are grounded on greek metaphysics, and a destruction has to be done to take these greek terms into their primordial ground (which ground was never and could never be explored by greek thinkers).
i think it's very easy to establish the case that heidegger thought that western society was privileged, and that the essences of things here really are different. first of all, H says that true history is only the history of being. and what does the history of being consist of? western (i.e. greek -> latin -> german) metaphysics. heidegger has a bigger or smaller set of different understandings of being, and they are all centered around the words of western thinkers. there's physis and poeisis and ens creatum and appetitio et perceptio and will to power, but there is definitely nothing from a japanese or an indian thinker. metaphysics from anaximander up to nietzsche has exhausted all its essential possibilities, and none of these essential possibilities were seen outside of western culture.
and you've already conceded that the essences of things stem from the essence of being. if the essence of being is something that changes along with (or, more precisely,, constitutes) western history, then why wouldn't the essence of things also be something that changes along with western history?
have you read the thing, or any of his exposition on holderlin? i'll quote a little something from the thing that's pretty relevant
The jug's essential nature, its presencing, so experienced and thought of in these terms, is what we call thing. We are now thinking this word by way of the gathering-appropriating staying of the fourfold. At the same time we recall the Old High German word thing. This reference to the history of language could easily tempt us to misunderstand the way in which we are now thinking of the nature of the thing. It might look as though the nature of the thing as we are now thinking of it had been, so to speak, thoughtlessly poked out of the accidentally encountered meaning of the Old High German thing. The suspicion arises that the understanding of the nature of the thingness that we are here trying to reach may be based on the accidents of an etymological game. The notion becomes established and is already current that, instead of giving thought to essential matters, we are here merely using the dictionary.
this too is worth reading
The consecrated libation is what our word for a strong outpouring flow, "gush," really designates: gift and sacrifice.
"Gush," Middle English guschen> gosshen—cf. German Guss> giessen—is the Greek cheein, the Indoeuropean ghu. It means to offer in sacrifice. To pour a gush, when it is achieved in its essence, thought through with sufficient generosity, and genuinely uttered, is to donate, to offer in sacrifice, and hence to give. It is only for this reason that the pouring of the gush, once its nature withers, can become a mere pouring in and pouring out, until it finally decays into the dispensing of liquor at the bar.
unless you have some special reason to think that building, dwelling, and thinking are all special terms that heidegger wants to talk about outside of the context of western society, it seems clear that he thinks the essences of the smallest things (jugs, pouring) as well as of the largest (being truth) change, and that he is only concerned with investigating the western versions of these essences, and so it is the same too with bauen/wohnen/denken. i think you're underestimating heidegger's eurocentrism by thinking it only extends to a priority in the truthiness of their languages.
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On June 11 2013 13:01 Lixler wrote:Show nested quote +On June 11 2013 12:11 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 11:40 Lixler wrote:On June 11 2013 11:09 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 10:28 Lixler wrote:On June 11 2013 07:01 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 06:33 prplhz wrote:
As a guy who has no idea about philosophy, I wish you'd explain what Heidegger means by "the essence of real-world objects" and why this is interesting.
I liked this one a lot more than the one about Kant. I predict that you'll do David Hume next. Essence for Heidegger is pretty much the same as "essential nature." So when we take a concept like "build", and we ask what the essence of building is, we are kind of asking "Well, what does it really mean mean to build?" Heidegger uses his historical language argument style to say that "building is really dwelling", and then later in his essay he says that dwelling is really "thinking". So building, dwelling, and thinking are all pretty much the same thing. When we are building something, it is our way of dwelling (living in the world and creating a space for ourselves), and when we are dwelling, this also means that we are thinking (to dwell on something, I guess? Heidegger did all of this stuff using Old German words, so it might be harder to see the connections in English sometimes...). So as human beings, the actions of building, dwelling, and thinking all have the same meaning, or the same essential nature. When Heidegger wants to find "the truth of Being" (this is Heidegger's main project), he is trying to find the essence of being, or the meaning of being. What is existence, really? What does it mean to be? This is what metaphysics is actually all about according to Heidegger. I guess put really simply, it's kind of like looking around and wondering, "Where do we come from? Why are we here? What am I, really? What is the world? What IS all of this?" That kind of thing... One of those types of questions where, not only is the answer hard to find, but even if you find the answer, it is probably impossible to accurately and completely put it into words, and it is often difficult to even put the question itself into words to ask it properly. And, I guess that's really what Heidegger gets frustrated about, and it's what he's trying to work on (and thinks we should all work on over time to eventually figure out how to articulate things). He's trying to put things into words, but it's hard to find the words to articulate things using the languages we have to work with, so he believes the ongoing project for human beings to have is to figure out how to think and say the truth of Being. Not sure how understandable that was... Let me know if you need more clarification, since I'm not really confident that my answer was written well enough to be understood, so I might need to try again if this was a miss that is an awful way to describe what heidegger means by essence, and given the complete lack of any discussion of a clearing or an understanding of being i think that you might as well be informed of it. essence for heidegger is Wesen, and he uses it as a verb that essentially means "to presence" "to come on the scene" (so similar to anwesen). for heidegger the essence of something is in flux and determined by a clearing. what is the essence of a chair? it is not the necessary and sufficient conditions of being a chair, for H. instead, it is the way a chair comes to presence in the world. take the question concerning technology. heidegger asks "what is the essence of modern technology?" and his answer has nothing to do with "what does it really mean to be modern technology?" the essence of modern technology is enframing, and this means that enframing is the way that modern technology comes to presence. the being of modern technology is determined essentially by enframing, meaning that its character and its significance in the world etc is all determined by enframing. it's not that a hydroelectric dam really is enframing, but rather enframing is what determines the character and presence of the hydroelectric dam. anyway as for your main essay, it's clear that you don't know much about heidegger's view of history. heidegger doesn't think the greeks were smarter than us or that their language was somehow inherently better. rather, as you should have seen in your B&T quote but thoughtlessly brushed past, the investigations of the greeks into the meaning of being have determined the course of Western society. so by looking closely at greek words, we can see the roots of our own concepts. H would not say that the greek word for truth (aletheia) or false (pseudos) is some fundamentally accurate word that will forever describe the essence of what is true and false. (aletheia is obviously a bit of an exception). if you read, say, his work on parmenides, you'll see him frequently state that "the greeks experienced the essence of falsity as dissemblance" whereas for moderns "the essence of falsity is un-truth, uncorrectness." essences constantly change with turnings of being, and the only reason greek words are worth investigating is because greek thought determined western history and metaphysics. you would do yourself well to read a lot more heidegger (but first study aristotle for 10 to 15 years). Thanks for your response. Well, to start with your response to my description of essence for Heidegger, I described it that way in an attempt to communicate the idea to somebody who claims to have "no idea about philosophy." This is why I tried to simplify it and use terminology that would appeal to everyone. If I was discussing the idea with a fellow philosopher, I would of course be more inclined to discuss things relating to Heidegger's phenomenology and all of that, but I felt it more appropriate to relate Heidegger's ideas to more accessible concepts and keep it as simple as possible, avoiding all of that background discussion. I expect therefore that anyone familiar with Heidegger would think that the explanation I gave was insufficient and even inaccurate to a degree. Writing for a specific audience is tough sometimes because people outside of the target audience will receive your words differently Now as for your response to the essay itself: I don't think I ever said that Heidegger believes the Greeks or their language to be inherently smarter/better than moderns or anything like that. I'm not sure why you are getting that impression. In fact I pretty clearly said that the reason he believes the Greeks were closer to the essence of being was because they were the only people actually investigating the question according to him, and as Heidegger says, the only being who could think of the question of Being is a being for whom Being is important. It was because the Greeks were the only people who were actively thinking about the question of Being that Heidegger believes their language to be closer to it. I may not explain this in-depth in my essay, but I do not overlook it either. See paragraph 8. I do discuss this a little bit. If you believe my discussion of this to be insufficient, you might be right, but keep in mind I'm not writing this for an audience of scholars, and this is not the kind of work that I would try to publish. These are just short little essays where I think out loud a bit. So, if you consider yourself to be a Heidegger scholar of sorts, then it would make sense if you felt my writing to be a bit shallow or something like that. Now this may be the fault of my poor writing here, but I do not believe you understood what I was actually saying about Heidegger's conception of language. When a reader does not understand what a writer is trying to say, it is often the fault of the writer himself for not being clear enough, so I won't fault you for this, but I think you assumed too much about my ideas and ended up with an inaccurate impression of me. you said this, maybe i misinterpreted it He does clearly say, though, that the ancient Greek thinkers had better insight into the essences of things, so their language is best suited to be referenced as a starting point for thinking the truth of Being and whatnot in any case i'd really be surprised to find that your understanding of heidegger is adequate and you just left out a lot of things you knew in this essay. for instance, you use the japanese language as an example but don't discuss what heidegger himself had to say about japanese (in e.g. a dialogue on language). additionally, in the same place, i get the impression you don't know that heidegger thought that only western (that is, post-greek) society has history proper and is the only place Being with a capital B shows up. for instance, you say However, we must remember that Heidegger does not seek to look into the essence of German building and German dwelling, but to examine the essence of building and dwelling in general.
and i don't think your discussion is insufficient, or at least i wouldn't see any point in making that utterance. i think that you're expressing a legitimate qualm with heidegger's method, but this kind of a half-opinion piece about it shows a kind of stilted thinking that isn't going to do you much. your disagreements with his method might be put into a slightly more precise form, but i think that if you wanted to deal with heidegger philosophically, and not as a linguistics student brushing past his work might, you would take the issue you had with this method and see how it fits into his thought as a whole. in studying Dead White philosophers, i don't think the aim is ever to determine if they were right or wrong (because they were all wrong). take a sentence from your essay. Most importantly, it is unclear whether or not language really can contain insight into the essences of real-world things. now you obviously know that not much is actually said by this. imagine if someone writing on kant said "it is unclear whether or not we really do have a faculty for making synthetic a priori judgments." this might be an expression of a particular sympathy i have, but i don't think i do myself much philosophical good by construing a couple quotes by a modern neuroscientist to be contradicting kant. of course it might just not matter to you whether your thinking w/r/t any given philosopher does you any good, but i think philosophy would be a substantial(ly larger) waste of time if it consisted only in reckoning up statements by dead men who said Being and Truth a lot and seeing whether they were true or false Well for the first quote, I think this was just poorly written on my part. I didn't really choose my words carefully here. What I meant by that is that since the essences of things ultimately stem from the essence of Being, and since the Greeks were the only people interested in the question of Being, they have (according to Heidegger) greater insight into the essence of Being and by extension the essences of things. Of course, this may be a bit careless for me to say since Heidegger doesn't really like it when people lose sight of Being by becoming too preoccupied with beings. He might roll over in his grave if he read what I wrote As for the next quote you pulled about German building and German dwelling vs. building and dwelling in general, I believe this is very true and I stand by what I wrote. While it's true that Heidegger doesn't much care for languages outside of Western culture, this does not mean he thinks that the essences of things found in Europe are different from the essences of the same things found in Asia. He is looking into the essences of building and dwelling as they are for everyone, it's just that he does not care much for what other languages have to say about building and dwelling and only considers Western history/language in his pursuit of this. This is what I'm really arguing against, I guess. greeks did not have greater insight into the essence of being. the pre-socratics had a special relationship to being, but they failed to think it properly (because this wasn't their task, according to marty). heidegger is specifically doing something the greeks did not and could not do, which is to ground an investigation of being on the ontological difference and to think the nature of aletheia. greek language is not worth investigating because the greeks were more in tune with being or something (and certainly they might have been); greek language is worth investigating because our own concepts and understanding of being are grounded on greek metaphysics, and a destruction has to be done to take these greek terms into their primordial ground (which ground was never and could never be explored by greek thinkers). i think it's very easy to establish the case that heidegger thought that western society was privileged, and that the essences of things here really are different. first of all, H says that true history is only the history of being. and what does the history of being consist of? western (i.e. greek -> latin -> german) metaphysics. heidegger has a bigger or smaller set of different understandings of being, and they are all centered around the words of western thinkers. there's physis and poeisis and ens creatum and appetitio et perceptio and will to power, but there is definitely nothing from a japanese or an indian thinker. metaphysics from anaximander up to nietzsche has exhausted all its essential possibilities, and none of these essential possibilities were seen outside of western culture. and you've already conceded that the essences of things stem from the essence of being. if the essence of being is something that changes along with (or, more precisely,, constitutes) western history, then why wouldn't the essence of things also be something that changes along with western history? have you read the thing, or any of his exposition on holderlin? i'll quote a little something from the thing that's pretty relevant Show nested quote +
The jug's essential nature, its presencing, so experienced and thought of in these terms, is what we call thing. We are now thinking this word by way of the gathering-appropriating staying of the fourfold. At the same time we recall the Old High German word thing. This reference to the history of language could easily tempt us to misunderstand the way in which we are now thinking of the nature of the thing. It might look as though the nature of the thing as we are now thinking of it had been, so to speak, thoughtlessly poked out of the accidentally encountered meaning of the Old High German thing. The suspicion arises that the understanding of the nature of the thingness that we are here trying to reach may be based on the accidents of an etymological game. The notion becomes established and is already current that, instead of giving thought to essential matters, we are here merely using the dictionary.
this too is worth reading Show nested quote +The consecrated libation is what our word for a strong outpouring flow, "gush," really designates: gift and sacrifice.
"Gush," Middle English guschen> gosshen—cf. German Guss> giessen—is the Greek cheein, the Indoeuropean ghu. It means to offer in sacrifice. To pour a gush, when it is achieved in its essence, thought through with sufficient generosity, and genuinely uttered, is to donate, to offer in sacrifice, and hence to give. It is only for this reason that the pouring of the gush, once its nature withers, can become a mere pouring in and pouring out, until it finally decays into the dispensing of liquor at the bar. unless you have some special reason to think that building, dwelling, and thinking are all special terms that heidegger wants to talk about outside of the context of western society, it seems clear that he thinks the essences of the smallest things (jugs, pouring) as well as of the largest (being truth) change, and that he is only concerned with investigating the western versions of these essences, and so it is the same too with bauen/wohnen/denken. i think you're underestimating heidegger's eurocentrism by thinking it only extends to a priority in the truthiness of their languages.
Ah yes, The Thing. "The thing is a thing insofar as it things." I found this to be most interesting, although it makes me giggle when I read it for some reason. To thing is to come forth as a thing and show its thingness. This really shows how Heidegger thinks about Being and how it relates to the essences of things, and it is an interesting way of thinking about existence.
It is important for understanding Heidegger's work because it shows how Heidegger understands the essence of Being as it determines our perception of Being. Rather than light shining upon Being and revealing it to us, the light comes from within Being as a glow. This glow is the truth of Being. This is how I understand it, anyway.
As for the Greek thing, I don't think we disagree here. I'm just not wording stuff right I don't think "insight" was the correct word to use.
Anyway, you might be right about his Eurocentrism as you describe it, but I guess I just want to give him more credit than that. I don't believe Heidegger wants to say that the "Western versions of these essences" are any different from their actual essences in general. A jug is a jug insofar as it jugs, whether we use the German word for jug or the Japanese word for jug, it still jugs the same way and is therefore a jug with jugness (lol). I think Heidegger knows this, but he just thinks that other languages are not well suited for articulating how a jug comes forth as a jug by jugging. In the end, I don't think Heidegger really believes that any of our current languages are sufficiently equipped to deal with the question of Being.
Maybe. I'm not sure, really. As I've said, I have not really given Heidegger as much time (due primarily to a lack of interest) as I have with other thinkers since I've dedicated a large chunk of my time to Kant and Spinoza, for example. I have read a lot of Heidegger's work, but I have not spent time re-reading most of those works for a better understanding like I have with other thinkers, since I don't feel like it's really worthwhile to do so. So maybe I am misinterpreting what Heidegger wants to say. But then again, I think that anyone who claims to have a 100% correct understanding of Heidegger's work is probably lying, just like if anyone tells you that they understand exactly what Freud was trying to say they are definitely lying.
But yeah, I would be willing to admit that my understanding of Heidegger is not complete (though nobody's is, I think), and that I may be misinterpreting his ideas. Somebody who has spent more time on Heidegger might have a more accurate interpretation of his thoughts. I do not think I am grossly misunderstanding him, though; at least not to the point where my argument against his use of historical language should be thrown out with the trash.
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On June 11 2013 14:00 MichaelDonovan wrote:Show nested quote +On June 11 2013 13:01 Lixler wrote:On June 11 2013 12:11 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 11:40 Lixler wrote:On June 11 2013 11:09 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 10:28 Lixler wrote:On June 11 2013 07:01 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 06:33 prplhz wrote:
As a guy who has no idea about philosophy, I wish you'd explain what Heidegger means by "the essence of real-world objects" and why this is interesting.
I liked this one a lot more than the one about Kant. I predict that you'll do David Hume next. Essence for Heidegger is pretty much the same as "essential nature." So when we take a concept like "build", and we ask what the essence of building is, we are kind of asking "Well, what does it really mean mean to build?" Heidegger uses his historical language argument style to say that "building is really dwelling", and then later in his essay he says that dwelling is really "thinking". So building, dwelling, and thinking are all pretty much the same thing. When we are building something, it is our way of dwelling (living in the world and creating a space for ourselves), and when we are dwelling, this also means that we are thinking (to dwell on something, I guess? Heidegger did all of this stuff using Old German words, so it might be harder to see the connections in English sometimes...). So as human beings, the actions of building, dwelling, and thinking all have the same meaning, or the same essential nature. When Heidegger wants to find "the truth of Being" (this is Heidegger's main project), he is trying to find the essence of being, or the meaning of being. What is existence, really? What does it mean to be? This is what metaphysics is actually all about according to Heidegger. I guess put really simply, it's kind of like looking around and wondering, "Where do we come from? Why are we here? What am I, really? What is the world? What IS all of this?" That kind of thing... One of those types of questions where, not only is the answer hard to find, but even if you find the answer, it is probably impossible to accurately and completely put it into words, and it is often difficult to even put the question itself into words to ask it properly. And, I guess that's really what Heidegger gets frustrated about, and it's what he's trying to work on (and thinks we should all work on over time to eventually figure out how to articulate things). He's trying to put things into words, but it's hard to find the words to articulate things using the languages we have to work with, so he believes the ongoing project for human beings to have is to figure out how to think and say the truth of Being. Not sure how understandable that was... Let me know if you need more clarification, since I'm not really confident that my answer was written well enough to be understood, so I might need to try again if this was a miss that is an awful way to describe what heidegger means by essence, and given the complete lack of any discussion of a clearing or an understanding of being i think that you might as well be informed of it. essence for heidegger is Wesen, and he uses it as a verb that essentially means "to presence" "to come on the scene" (so similar to anwesen). for heidegger the essence of something is in flux and determined by a clearing. what is the essence of a chair? it is not the necessary and sufficient conditions of being a chair, for H. instead, it is the way a chair comes to presence in the world. take the question concerning technology. heidegger asks "what is the essence of modern technology?" and his answer has nothing to do with "what does it really mean to be modern technology?" the essence of modern technology is enframing, and this means that enframing is the way that modern technology comes to presence. the being of modern technology is determined essentially by enframing, meaning that its character and its significance in the world etc is all determined by enframing. it's not that a hydroelectric dam really is enframing, but rather enframing is what determines the character and presence of the hydroelectric dam. anyway as for your main essay, it's clear that you don't know much about heidegger's view of history. heidegger doesn't think the greeks were smarter than us or that their language was somehow inherently better. rather, as you should have seen in your B&T quote but thoughtlessly brushed past, the investigations of the greeks into the meaning of being have determined the course of Western society. so by looking closely at greek words, we can see the roots of our own concepts. H would not say that the greek word for truth (aletheia) or false (pseudos) is some fundamentally accurate word that will forever describe the essence of what is true and false. (aletheia is obviously a bit of an exception). if you read, say, his work on parmenides, you'll see him frequently state that "the greeks experienced the essence of falsity as dissemblance" whereas for moderns "the essence of falsity is un-truth, uncorrectness." essences constantly change with turnings of being, and the only reason greek words are worth investigating is because greek thought determined western history and metaphysics. you would do yourself well to read a lot more heidegger (but first study aristotle for 10 to 15 years). Thanks for your response. Well, to start with your response to my description of essence for Heidegger, I described it that way in an attempt to communicate the idea to somebody who claims to have "no idea about philosophy." This is why I tried to simplify it and use terminology that would appeal to everyone. If I was discussing the idea with a fellow philosopher, I would of course be more inclined to discuss things relating to Heidegger's phenomenology and all of that, but I felt it more appropriate to relate Heidegger's ideas to more accessible concepts and keep it as simple as possible, avoiding all of that background discussion. I expect therefore that anyone familiar with Heidegger would think that the explanation I gave was insufficient and even inaccurate to a degree. Writing for a specific audience is tough sometimes because people outside of the target audience will receive your words differently Now as for your response to the essay itself: I don't think I ever said that Heidegger believes the Greeks or their language to be inherently smarter/better than moderns or anything like that. I'm not sure why you are getting that impression. In fact I pretty clearly said that the reason he believes the Greeks were closer to the essence of being was because they were the only people actually investigating the question according to him, and as Heidegger says, the only being who could think of the question of Being is a being for whom Being is important. It was because the Greeks were the only people who were actively thinking about the question of Being that Heidegger believes their language to be closer to it. I may not explain this in-depth in my essay, but I do not overlook it either. See paragraph 8. I do discuss this a little bit. If you believe my discussion of this to be insufficient, you might be right, but keep in mind I'm not writing this for an audience of scholars, and this is not the kind of work that I would try to publish. These are just short little essays where I think out loud a bit. So, if you consider yourself to be a Heidegger scholar of sorts, then it would make sense if you felt my writing to be a bit shallow or something like that. Now this may be the fault of my poor writing here, but I do not believe you understood what I was actually saying about Heidegger's conception of language. When a reader does not understand what a writer is trying to say, it is often the fault of the writer himself for not being clear enough, so I won't fault you for this, but I think you assumed too much about my ideas and ended up with an inaccurate impression of me. you said this, maybe i misinterpreted it He does clearly say, though, that the ancient Greek thinkers had better insight into the essences of things, so their language is best suited to be referenced as a starting point for thinking the truth of Being and whatnot in any case i'd really be surprised to find that your understanding of heidegger is adequate and you just left out a lot of things you knew in this essay. for instance, you use the japanese language as an example but don't discuss what heidegger himself had to say about japanese (in e.g. a dialogue on language). additionally, in the same place, i get the impression you don't know that heidegger thought that only western (that is, post-greek) society has history proper and is the only place Being with a capital B shows up. for instance, you say However, we must remember that Heidegger does not seek to look into the essence of German building and German dwelling, but to examine the essence of building and dwelling in general.
and i don't think your discussion is insufficient, or at least i wouldn't see any point in making that utterance. i think that you're expressing a legitimate qualm with heidegger's method, but this kind of a half-opinion piece about it shows a kind of stilted thinking that isn't going to do you much. your disagreements with his method might be put into a slightly more precise form, but i think that if you wanted to deal with heidegger philosophically, and not as a linguistics student brushing past his work might, you would take the issue you had with this method and see how it fits into his thought as a whole. in studying Dead White philosophers, i don't think the aim is ever to determine if they were right or wrong (because they were all wrong). take a sentence from your essay. Most importantly, it is unclear whether or not language really can contain insight into the essences of real-world things. now you obviously know that not much is actually said by this. imagine if someone writing on kant said "it is unclear whether or not we really do have a faculty for making synthetic a priori judgments." this might be an expression of a particular sympathy i have, but i don't think i do myself much philosophical good by construing a couple quotes by a modern neuroscientist to be contradicting kant. of course it might just not matter to you whether your thinking w/r/t any given philosopher does you any good, but i think philosophy would be a substantial(ly larger) waste of time if it consisted only in reckoning up statements by dead men who said Being and Truth a lot and seeing whether they were true or false Well for the first quote, I think this was just poorly written on my part. I didn't really choose my words carefully here. What I meant by that is that since the essences of things ultimately stem from the essence of Being, and since the Greeks were the only people interested in the question of Being, they have (according to Heidegger) greater insight into the essence of Being and by extension the essences of things. Of course, this may be a bit careless for me to say since Heidegger doesn't really like it when people lose sight of Being by becoming too preoccupied with beings. He might roll over in his grave if he read what I wrote As for the next quote you pulled about German building and German dwelling vs. building and dwelling in general, I believe this is very true and I stand by what I wrote. While it's true that Heidegger doesn't much care for languages outside of Western culture, this does not mean he thinks that the essences of things found in Europe are different from the essences of the same things found in Asia. He is looking into the essences of building and dwelling as they are for everyone, it's just that he does not care much for what other languages have to say about building and dwelling and only considers Western history/language in his pursuit of this. This is what I'm really arguing against, I guess. greeks did not have greater insight into the essence of being. the pre-socratics had a special relationship to being, but they failed to think it properly (because this wasn't their task, according to marty). heidegger is specifically doing something the greeks did not and could not do, which is to ground an investigation of being on the ontological difference and to think the nature of aletheia. greek language is not worth investigating because the greeks were more in tune with being or something (and certainly they might have been); greek language is worth investigating because our own concepts and understanding of being are grounded on greek metaphysics, and a destruction has to be done to take these greek terms into their primordial ground (which ground was never and could never be explored by greek thinkers). i think it's very easy to establish the case that heidegger thought that western society was privileged, and that the essences of things here really are different. first of all, H says that true history is only the history of being. and what does the history of being consist of? western (i.e. greek -> latin -> german) metaphysics. heidegger has a bigger or smaller set of different understandings of being, and they are all centered around the words of western thinkers. there's physis and poeisis and ens creatum and appetitio et perceptio and will to power, but there is definitely nothing from a japanese or an indian thinker. metaphysics from anaximander up to nietzsche has exhausted all its essential possibilities, and none of these essential possibilities were seen outside of western culture. and you've already conceded that the essences of things stem from the essence of being. if the essence of being is something that changes along with (or, more precisely,, constitutes) western history, then why wouldn't the essence of things also be something that changes along with western history? have you read the thing, or any of his exposition on holderlin? i'll quote a little something from the thing that's pretty relevant
The jug's essential nature, its presencing, so experienced and thought of in these terms, is what we call thing. We are now thinking this word by way of the gathering-appropriating staying of the fourfold. At the same time we recall the Old High German word thing. This reference to the history of language could easily tempt us to misunderstand the way in which we are now thinking of the nature of the thing. It might look as though the nature of the thing as we are now thinking of it had been, so to speak, thoughtlessly poked out of the accidentally encountered meaning of the Old High German thing. The suspicion arises that the understanding of the nature of the thingness that we are here trying to reach may be based on the accidents of an etymological game. The notion becomes established and is already current that, instead of giving thought to essential matters, we are here merely using the dictionary.
this too is worth reading The consecrated libation is what our word for a strong outpouring flow, "gush," really designates: gift and sacrifice.
"Gush," Middle English guschen> gosshen—cf. German Guss> giessen—is the Greek cheein, the Indoeuropean ghu. It means to offer in sacrifice. To pour a gush, when it is achieved in its essence, thought through with sufficient generosity, and genuinely uttered, is to donate, to offer in sacrifice, and hence to give. It is only for this reason that the pouring of the gush, once its nature withers, can become a mere pouring in and pouring out, until it finally decays into the dispensing of liquor at the bar. unless you have some special reason to think that building, dwelling, and thinking are all special terms that heidegger wants to talk about outside of the context of western society, it seems clear that he thinks the essences of the smallest things (jugs, pouring) as well as of the largest (being truth) change, and that he is only concerned with investigating the western versions of these essences, and so it is the same too with bauen/wohnen/denken. i think you're underestimating heidegger's eurocentrism by thinking it only extends to a priority in the truthiness of their languages. It is important for understanding Heidegger's work because it shows how Heidegger understands the essence of Being as it determines our perception of Being. Rather than light shining upon Being and revealing it to us, the light comes from within Being as a glow. This glow is the truth of Being. This is how I understand it, anyway. As for the Greek thing, I don't think we disagree here. I'm just not wording stuff right I don't think "insight" was the correct word to use. Anyway, you might be right about his Eurocentrism as you describe it, but I guess I just want to give him more credit than that. I don't believe Heidegger wants to say that the "Western versions of these essences" are any different from their actual essences in general. A jug is a jug insofar as it jugs, whether we use the German word for jug or the Japanese word for jug, it still jugs the same way and is therefore a jug with jugness (lol). I think Heidegger knows this, but he just thinks that other languages are not well suited for articulating how a jug comes forth as a jug by jugging. In the end, I don't think Heidegger really believes that any of our current languages are sufficiently equipped to deal with the question of Being.
I'm no expert on Heidegger, but I think you're missing a point about the sort of concept The West is. In performing genealogical analysis as Heidegger and every other post-Enlightenment German does, we need to locate our source of derivation at some historically 'original' point in the past. For a litany of reasons (they had good thoughts, they were especially productive, the Roman empire disseminated their ideas in variable forms, etc etc) we generally locate that birth-of-consciousness to be Ancient Greece. As such, the West is conflated (correctly or incorrectly I don't know) with objective rational consciousness. There's a definite and not totally imperialistic sense in which we might want to believe that the relationship between object and denotation is most clearly found in original Western speech. Conversely, it strikes me as strident a bit too neo-liberal multiculturalistic if we are to propose that all words access objects with the same level of precision. While it's good to keep these questions of Eurocentrism in mind, they're not simply questions of political arrogance, imo.
edit: I should add that I really like this thread! Very cool to see philosophy types around TL. Makes me feel like I want to write a series on the stuff I study (classical social theory)!
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On June 11 2013 14:00 MichaelDonovan wrote:Show nested quote +On June 11 2013 13:01 Lixler wrote:On June 11 2013 12:11 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 11:40 Lixler wrote:On June 11 2013 11:09 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 10:28 Lixler wrote:On June 11 2013 07:01 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 06:33 prplhz wrote:
As a guy who has no idea about philosophy, I wish you'd explain what Heidegger means by "the essence of real-world objects" and why this is interesting.
I liked this one a lot more than the one about Kant. I predict that you'll do David Hume next. Essence for Heidegger is pretty much the same as "essential nature." So when we take a concept like "build", and we ask what the essence of building is, we are kind of asking "Well, what does it really mean mean to build?" Heidegger uses his historical language argument style to say that "building is really dwelling", and then later in his essay he says that dwelling is really "thinking". So building, dwelling, and thinking are all pretty much the same thing. When we are building something, it is our way of dwelling (living in the world and creating a space for ourselves), and when we are dwelling, this also means that we are thinking (to dwell on something, I guess? Heidegger did all of this stuff using Old German words, so it might be harder to see the connections in English sometimes...). So as human beings, the actions of building, dwelling, and thinking all have the same meaning, or the same essential nature. When Heidegger wants to find "the truth of Being" (this is Heidegger's main project), he is trying to find the essence of being, or the meaning of being. What is existence, really? What does it mean to be? This is what metaphysics is actually all about according to Heidegger. I guess put really simply, it's kind of like looking around and wondering, "Where do we come from? Why are we here? What am I, really? What is the world? What IS all of this?" That kind of thing... One of those types of questions where, not only is the answer hard to find, but even if you find the answer, it is probably impossible to accurately and completely put it into words, and it is often difficult to even put the question itself into words to ask it properly. And, I guess that's really what Heidegger gets frustrated about, and it's what he's trying to work on (and thinks we should all work on over time to eventually figure out how to articulate things). He's trying to put things into words, but it's hard to find the words to articulate things using the languages we have to work with, so he believes the ongoing project for human beings to have is to figure out how to think and say the truth of Being. Not sure how understandable that was... Let me know if you need more clarification, since I'm not really confident that my answer was written well enough to be understood, so I might need to try again if this was a miss that is an awful way to describe what heidegger means by essence, and given the complete lack of any discussion of a clearing or an understanding of being i think that you might as well be informed of it. essence for heidegger is Wesen, and he uses it as a verb that essentially means "to presence" "to come on the scene" (so similar to anwesen). for heidegger the essence of something is in flux and determined by a clearing. what is the essence of a chair? it is not the necessary and sufficient conditions of being a chair, for H. instead, it is the way a chair comes to presence in the world. take the question concerning technology. heidegger asks "what is the essence of modern technology?" and his answer has nothing to do with "what does it really mean to be modern technology?" the essence of modern technology is enframing, and this means that enframing is the way that modern technology comes to presence. the being of modern technology is determined essentially by enframing, meaning that its character and its significance in the world etc is all determined by enframing. it's not that a hydroelectric dam really is enframing, but rather enframing is what determines the character and presence of the hydroelectric dam. anyway as for your main essay, it's clear that you don't know much about heidegger's view of history. heidegger doesn't think the greeks were smarter than us or that their language was somehow inherently better. rather, as you should have seen in your B&T quote but thoughtlessly brushed past, the investigations of the greeks into the meaning of being have determined the course of Western society. so by looking closely at greek words, we can see the roots of our own concepts. H would not say that the greek word for truth (aletheia) or false (pseudos) is some fundamentally accurate word that will forever describe the essence of what is true and false. (aletheia is obviously a bit of an exception). if you read, say, his work on parmenides, you'll see him frequently state that "the greeks experienced the essence of falsity as dissemblance" whereas for moderns "the essence of falsity is un-truth, uncorrectness." essences constantly change with turnings of being, and the only reason greek words are worth investigating is because greek thought determined western history and metaphysics. you would do yourself well to read a lot more heidegger (but first study aristotle for 10 to 15 years). Thanks for your response. Well, to start with your response to my description of essence for Heidegger, I described it that way in an attempt to communicate the idea to somebody who claims to have "no idea about philosophy." This is why I tried to simplify it and use terminology that would appeal to everyone. If I was discussing the idea with a fellow philosopher, I would of course be more inclined to discuss things relating to Heidegger's phenomenology and all of that, but I felt it more appropriate to relate Heidegger's ideas to more accessible concepts and keep it as simple as possible, avoiding all of that background discussion. I expect therefore that anyone familiar with Heidegger would think that the explanation I gave was insufficient and even inaccurate to a degree. Writing for a specific audience is tough sometimes because people outside of the target audience will receive your words differently Now as for your response to the essay itself: I don't think I ever said that Heidegger believes the Greeks or their language to be inherently smarter/better than moderns or anything like that. I'm not sure why you are getting that impression. In fact I pretty clearly said that the reason he believes the Greeks were closer to the essence of being was because they were the only people actually investigating the question according to him, and as Heidegger says, the only being who could think of the question of Being is a being for whom Being is important. It was because the Greeks were the only people who were actively thinking about the question of Being that Heidegger believes their language to be closer to it. I may not explain this in-depth in my essay, but I do not overlook it either. See paragraph 8. I do discuss this a little bit. If you believe my discussion of this to be insufficient, you might be right, but keep in mind I'm not writing this for an audience of scholars, and this is not the kind of work that I would try to publish. These are just short little essays where I think out loud a bit. So, if you consider yourself to be a Heidegger scholar of sorts, then it would make sense if you felt my writing to be a bit shallow or something like that. Now this may be the fault of my poor writing here, but I do not believe you understood what I was actually saying about Heidegger's conception of language. When a reader does not understand what a writer is trying to say, it is often the fault of the writer himself for not being clear enough, so I won't fault you for this, but I think you assumed too much about my ideas and ended up with an inaccurate impression of me. you said this, maybe i misinterpreted it He does clearly say, though, that the ancient Greek thinkers had better insight into the essences of things, so their language is best suited to be referenced as a starting point for thinking the truth of Being and whatnot in any case i'd really be surprised to find that your understanding of heidegger is adequate and you just left out a lot of things you knew in this essay. for instance, you use the japanese language as an example but don't discuss what heidegger himself had to say about japanese (in e.g. a dialogue on language). additionally, in the same place, i get the impression you don't know that heidegger thought that only western (that is, post-greek) society has history proper and is the only place Being with a capital B shows up. for instance, you say However, we must remember that Heidegger does not seek to look into the essence of German building and German dwelling, but to examine the essence of building and dwelling in general.
and i don't think your discussion is insufficient, or at least i wouldn't see any point in making that utterance. i think that you're expressing a legitimate qualm with heidegger's method, but this kind of a half-opinion piece about it shows a kind of stilted thinking that isn't going to do you much. your disagreements with his method might be put into a slightly more precise form, but i think that if you wanted to deal with heidegger philosophically, and not as a linguistics student brushing past his work might, you would take the issue you had with this method and see how it fits into his thought as a whole. in studying Dead White philosophers, i don't think the aim is ever to determine if they were right or wrong (because they were all wrong). take a sentence from your essay. Most importantly, it is unclear whether or not language really can contain insight into the essences of real-world things. now you obviously know that not much is actually said by this. imagine if someone writing on kant said "it is unclear whether or not we really do have a faculty for making synthetic a priori judgments." this might be an expression of a particular sympathy i have, but i don't think i do myself much philosophical good by construing a couple quotes by a modern neuroscientist to be contradicting kant. of course it might just not matter to you whether your thinking w/r/t any given philosopher does you any good, but i think philosophy would be a substantial(ly larger) waste of time if it consisted only in reckoning up statements by dead men who said Being and Truth a lot and seeing whether they were true or false Well for the first quote, I think this was just poorly written on my part. I didn't really choose my words carefully here. What I meant by that is that since the essences of things ultimately stem from the essence of Being, and since the Greeks were the only people interested in the question of Being, they have (according to Heidegger) greater insight into the essence of Being and by extension the essences of things. Of course, this may be a bit careless for me to say since Heidegger doesn't really like it when people lose sight of Being by becoming too preoccupied with beings. He might roll over in his grave if he read what I wrote As for the next quote you pulled about German building and German dwelling vs. building and dwelling in general, I believe this is very true and I stand by what I wrote. While it's true that Heidegger doesn't much care for languages outside of Western culture, this does not mean he thinks that the essences of things found in Europe are different from the essences of the same things found in Asia. He is looking into the essences of building and dwelling as they are for everyone, it's just that he does not care much for what other languages have to say about building and dwelling and only considers Western history/language in his pursuit of this. This is what I'm really arguing against, I guess. greeks did not have greater insight into the essence of being. the pre-socratics had a special relationship to being, but they failed to think it properly (because this wasn't their task, according to marty). heidegger is specifically doing something the greeks did not and could not do, which is to ground an investigation of being on the ontological difference and to think the nature of aletheia. greek language is not worth investigating because the greeks were more in tune with being or something (and certainly they might have been); greek language is worth investigating because our own concepts and understanding of being are grounded on greek metaphysics, and a destruction has to be done to take these greek terms into their primordial ground (which ground was never and could never be explored by greek thinkers). i think it's very easy to establish the case that heidegger thought that western society was privileged, and that the essences of things here really are different. first of all, H says that true history is only the history of being. and what does the history of being consist of? western (i.e. greek -> latin -> german) metaphysics. heidegger has a bigger or smaller set of different understandings of being, and they are all centered around the words of western thinkers. there's physis and poeisis and ens creatum and appetitio et perceptio and will to power, but there is definitely nothing from a japanese or an indian thinker. metaphysics from anaximander up to nietzsche has exhausted all its essential possibilities, and none of these essential possibilities were seen outside of western culture. and you've already conceded that the essences of things stem from the essence of being. if the essence of being is something that changes along with (or, more precisely,, constitutes) western history, then why wouldn't the essence of things also be something that changes along with western history? have you read the thing, or any of his exposition on holderlin? i'll quote a little something from the thing that's pretty relevant
The jug's essential nature, its presencing, so experienced and thought of in these terms, is what we call thing. We are now thinking this word by way of the gathering-appropriating staying of the fourfold. At the same time we recall the Old High German word thing. This reference to the history of language could easily tempt us to misunderstand the way in which we are now thinking of the nature of the thing. It might look as though the nature of the thing as we are now thinking of it had been, so to speak, thoughtlessly poked out of the accidentally encountered meaning of the Old High German thing. The suspicion arises that the understanding of the nature of the thingness that we are here trying to reach may be based on the accidents of an etymological game. The notion becomes established and is already current that, instead of giving thought to essential matters, we are here merely using the dictionary.
this too is worth reading The consecrated libation is what our word for a strong outpouring flow, "gush," really designates: gift and sacrifice.
"Gush," Middle English guschen> gosshen—cf. German Guss> giessen—is the Greek cheein, the Indoeuropean ghu. It means to offer in sacrifice. To pour a gush, when it is achieved in its essence, thought through with sufficient generosity, and genuinely uttered, is to donate, to offer in sacrifice, and hence to give. It is only for this reason that the pouring of the gush, once its nature withers, can become a mere pouring in and pouring out, until it finally decays into the dispensing of liquor at the bar. unless you have some special reason to think that building, dwelling, and thinking are all special terms that heidegger wants to talk about outside of the context of western society, it seems clear that he thinks the essences of the smallest things (jugs, pouring) as well as of the largest (being truth) change, and that he is only concerned with investigating the western versions of these essences, and so it is the same too with bauen/wohnen/denken. i think you're underestimating heidegger's eurocentrism by thinking it only extends to a priority in the truthiness of their languages. Ah yes, The Thing. "The thing is a thing insofar as it things." I found this to be most interesting, although it makes me giggle when I read it for some reason. To thing is to come forth as a thing and show its thingness. This really shows how Heidegger thinks about Being and how it relates to the essences of things, and it is an interesting way of thinking about existence. It is important for understanding Heidegger's work because it shows how Heidegger understands the essence of Being as it determines our perception of Being. Rather than light shining upon Being and revealing it to us, the light comes from within Being as a glow. This glow is the truth of Being. This is how I understand it, anyway. As for the Greek thing, I don't think we disagree here. I'm just not wording stuff right I don't think "insight" was the correct word to use. Anyway, you might be right about his Eurocentrism as you describe it, but I guess I just want to give him more credit than that. I don't believe Heidegger wants to say that the "Western versions of these essences" are any different from their actual essences in general. A jug is a jug insofar as it jugs, whether we use the German word for jug or the Japanese word for jug, it still jugs the same way and is therefore a jug with jugness (lol). I think Heidegger knows this, but he just thinks that other languages are not well suited for articulating how a jug comes forth as a jug by jugging. In the end, I don't think Heidegger really believes that any of our current languages are sufficiently equipped to deal with the question of Being. Maybe. I'm not sure, really. As I've said, I have not really given Heidegger as much time (due primarily to a lack of interest) as I have with other thinkers since I've dedicated a large chunk of my time to Kant and Spinoza, for example. I have read a lot of Heidegger's work, but I have not spent time re-reading most of those works for a better understanding like I have with other thinkers, since I don't feel like it's really worthwhile to do so. So maybe I am misinterpreting what Heidegger wants to say. But then again, I think that anyone who claims to have a 100% correct understanding of Heidegger's work is probably lying, just like if anyone tells you that they understand exactly what Freud was trying to say they are definitely lying. But yeah, I would be willing to admit that my understanding of Heidegger is not complete (though nobody's is, I think), and that I may be misinterpreting his ideas. Somebody who has spent more time on Heidegger might have a more accurate interpretation of his thoughts. I do not think I am grossly misunderstanding him, though; at least not to the point where my argument against his use of historical language should be thrown out with the trash.
are you aware that heidegger says "language structures the clearing?" it's not like our languages are somehow messed up and improper and they can't get to the real essences of things. the language we use is what determines the way things show up in our world (i.e. their essences). a jug is a jug because of the language we use surrounding it, not because of some prior reason that might or might not be shown clearly by the language we use.
i really don't know why you would think heidegger thinks that everything has generalizable essences that exist everywhere. a jug really does thing in different ways in different places. to steal an example from dreyfus, take the example of a cup. now we all know what cups are and what they're for: they hold liquid so you can drink it. but let's look at prototypical cups for modern america and for japan. in america, the best cup is a cheap styrofoam cup because it keeps your drink hot or cold, it's disposable, it's cheap, etc. but in japan, the best cup is an expensive ceramic tea cup, which really isn't as good at regulating temperature and it's a lot of work to maintain and you have to be careful with it. now the essences of these cups are different: the essence of the cup is not what is general to them, but the specific way they show up in the world. in america, a cup simply shows up as a different thing, has a different bearing in the world, is something else than in japan.
where do you get the impression that heidegger thinks essences are totally generalizable over all the world and all time, and why do you think heidegger sees our current languages as inadequate? like what is your textual basis for those beliefs?
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After reading the discussion following my question I understand even less what the essence of something is. Funnily enough I also thought about "What is the essence of a chair?".
But in the words of Martin "Marty" Heidegger: "If you didn't already read 15 years of Aristotle then don't even bother, we don't need your kind here."
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@prplhz: The word 'essence' in the context of Heidegger can be incredibly confusing and unhelpful. To put it very simply, in B&T his primary concern is with 'Being' and he goes on to distinguish different modes of Being, like Dasein (the way we as humans tend to be), ready-to-hand (the way equipment is), present-to-hand (the way objects are), each with their own structures and so on. They are, however, merely modes of being, so that it all basically runs down to us always already being-in-the-world, coping with stuff in an absorbed, already familiar, pre-reflective manner.
So the 'essence' of a chair would depend on the way we as Dasein disclose and cope with it: We all come into the world already familiar with chairs due to our upbringing (but again, different cultures understand chairs differently, some of them not at all!), so we have an implicit understanding of what chairs are and what we can use them for. When we use a chair to destroy shopping windows, the being of the chair is as a ready-to-hand tool for breaking windows; when we look at it as an object (most often done when the chair somehow fails as a form of equipment, i.e. breaks down or is too squeaky or something), we articulate our pre-reflective understanding of it in terms of predicates (either situated aspects like 'too squeaky' or de-situated properties like 'mass').
So the idea is that there really is no such thing as what we usually would understand as 'essence' in an everyday manner, i.e. a kind of stable, enduring, always true 'thing' that holds across all time and places. Lixler is pointing this out against the OP's assertion that Heidegger somehow thought that some words or languages could better capture the way things really are.
There's not much here to add to the argument here because Lixler pretty much said it, except maybe that I believe the OP might have confused Heidegger's critique of the philosophical tradition for somesort of a historico-linguistic argument. Heidegger critiques the tradition for having lost sight of the question of being, mostly because mostly Latin authors (starting from Cicero's famous project to translate the Greek classics into Latin, i.e. the translatio philosophiae) have misunderstood the Greek 'to on' (being) for 'res' (thing), which lead to all kinds of fuzzy shmuzzys like Descartes' 'res extensa' or the whole idea of an undifferentiated reality that we project meaning upon and eventually something like the scientific worldview that takes the 'meaningless' present-to-hand 'stuff' as the very basic fabric of everything.
Although from that we see that Heidegger had somewhat of a softspot for the Greeks (my kind of person), it doesn't follow that he thought that the question of Being could be somehow determined through linguistics (he actually thought almost the opposite: our everyday understanding of certain terms tends to be a result of inauthentic fleeing from being, because being as such is an unsettling thing for us etc etc.) In B&T 166 he writes for example (my translation): "Philosophical research will have to forego "linguistics" to get to the "beings themselves" and thus get the status of a conceptually clarified problematic."
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On June 12 2013 02:38 Lixler wrote:Show nested quote +On June 11 2013 14:00 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 13:01 Lixler wrote:On June 11 2013 12:11 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 11:40 Lixler wrote:On June 11 2013 11:09 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 10:28 Lixler wrote:On June 11 2013 07:01 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 06:33 prplhz wrote:
As a guy who has no idea about philosophy, I wish you'd explain what Heidegger means by "the essence of real-world objects" and why this is interesting.
I liked this one a lot more than the one about Kant. I predict that you'll do David Hume next. Essence for Heidegger is pretty much the same as "essential nature." So when we take a concept like "build", and we ask what the essence of building is, we are kind of asking "Well, what does it really mean mean to build?" Heidegger uses his historical language argument style to say that "building is really dwelling", and then later in his essay he says that dwelling is really "thinking". So building, dwelling, and thinking are all pretty much the same thing. When we are building something, it is our way of dwelling (living in the world and creating a space for ourselves), and when we are dwelling, this also means that we are thinking (to dwell on something, I guess? Heidegger did all of this stuff using Old German words, so it might be harder to see the connections in English sometimes...). So as human beings, the actions of building, dwelling, and thinking all have the same meaning, or the same essential nature. When Heidegger wants to find "the truth of Being" (this is Heidegger's main project), he is trying to find the essence of being, or the meaning of being. What is existence, really? What does it mean to be? This is what metaphysics is actually all about according to Heidegger. I guess put really simply, it's kind of like looking around and wondering, "Where do we come from? Why are we here? What am I, really? What is the world? What IS all of this?" That kind of thing... One of those types of questions where, not only is the answer hard to find, but even if you find the answer, it is probably impossible to accurately and completely put it into words, and it is often difficult to even put the question itself into words to ask it properly. And, I guess that's really what Heidegger gets frustrated about, and it's what he's trying to work on (and thinks we should all work on over time to eventually figure out how to articulate things). He's trying to put things into words, but it's hard to find the words to articulate things using the languages we have to work with, so he believes the ongoing project for human beings to have is to figure out how to think and say the truth of Being. Not sure how understandable that was... Let me know if you need more clarification, since I'm not really confident that my answer was written well enough to be understood, so I might need to try again if this was a miss that is an awful way to describe what heidegger means by essence, and given the complete lack of any discussion of a clearing or an understanding of being i think that you might as well be informed of it. essence for heidegger is Wesen, and he uses it as a verb that essentially means "to presence" "to come on the scene" (so similar to anwesen). for heidegger the essence of something is in flux and determined by a clearing. what is the essence of a chair? it is not the necessary and sufficient conditions of being a chair, for H. instead, it is the way a chair comes to presence in the world. take the question concerning technology. heidegger asks "what is the essence of modern technology?" and his answer has nothing to do with "what does it really mean to be modern technology?" the essence of modern technology is enframing, and this means that enframing is the way that modern technology comes to presence. the being of modern technology is determined essentially by enframing, meaning that its character and its significance in the world etc is all determined by enframing. it's not that a hydroelectric dam really is enframing, but rather enframing is what determines the character and presence of the hydroelectric dam. anyway as for your main essay, it's clear that you don't know much about heidegger's view of history. heidegger doesn't think the greeks were smarter than us or that their language was somehow inherently better. rather, as you should have seen in your B&T quote but thoughtlessly brushed past, the investigations of the greeks into the meaning of being have determined the course of Western society. so by looking closely at greek words, we can see the roots of our own concepts. H would not say that the greek word for truth (aletheia) or false (pseudos) is some fundamentally accurate word that will forever describe the essence of what is true and false. (aletheia is obviously a bit of an exception). if you read, say, his work on parmenides, you'll see him frequently state that "the greeks experienced the essence of falsity as dissemblance" whereas for moderns "the essence of falsity is un-truth, uncorrectness." essences constantly change with turnings of being, and the only reason greek words are worth investigating is because greek thought determined western history and metaphysics. you would do yourself well to read a lot more heidegger (but first study aristotle for 10 to 15 years). Thanks for your response. Well, to start with your response to my description of essence for Heidegger, I described it that way in an attempt to communicate the idea to somebody who claims to have "no idea about philosophy." This is why I tried to simplify it and use terminology that would appeal to everyone. If I was discussing the idea with a fellow philosopher, I would of course be more inclined to discuss things relating to Heidegger's phenomenology and all of that, but I felt it more appropriate to relate Heidegger's ideas to more accessible concepts and keep it as simple as possible, avoiding all of that background discussion. I expect therefore that anyone familiar with Heidegger would think that the explanation I gave was insufficient and even inaccurate to a degree. Writing for a specific audience is tough sometimes because people outside of the target audience will receive your words differently Now as for your response to the essay itself: I don't think I ever said that Heidegger believes the Greeks or their language to be inherently smarter/better than moderns or anything like that. I'm not sure why you are getting that impression. In fact I pretty clearly said that the reason he believes the Greeks were closer to the essence of being was because they were the only people actually investigating the question according to him, and as Heidegger says, the only being who could think of the question of Being is a being for whom Being is important. It was because the Greeks were the only people who were actively thinking about the question of Being that Heidegger believes their language to be closer to it. I may not explain this in-depth in my essay, but I do not overlook it either. See paragraph 8. I do discuss this a little bit. If you believe my discussion of this to be insufficient, you might be right, but keep in mind I'm not writing this for an audience of scholars, and this is not the kind of work that I would try to publish. These are just short little essays where I think out loud a bit. So, if you consider yourself to be a Heidegger scholar of sorts, then it would make sense if you felt my writing to be a bit shallow or something like that. Now this may be the fault of my poor writing here, but I do not believe you understood what I was actually saying about Heidegger's conception of language. When a reader does not understand what a writer is trying to say, it is often the fault of the writer himself for not being clear enough, so I won't fault you for this, but I think you assumed too much about my ideas and ended up with an inaccurate impression of me. you said this, maybe i misinterpreted it He does clearly say, though, that the ancient Greek thinkers had better insight into the essences of things, so their language is best suited to be referenced as a starting point for thinking the truth of Being and whatnot in any case i'd really be surprised to find that your understanding of heidegger is adequate and you just left out a lot of things you knew in this essay. for instance, you use the japanese language as an example but don't discuss what heidegger himself had to say about japanese (in e.g. a dialogue on language). additionally, in the same place, i get the impression you don't know that heidegger thought that only western (that is, post-greek) society has history proper and is the only place Being with a capital B shows up. for instance, you say However, we must remember that Heidegger does not seek to look into the essence of German building and German dwelling, but to examine the essence of building and dwelling in general.
and i don't think your discussion is insufficient, or at least i wouldn't see any point in making that utterance. i think that you're expressing a legitimate qualm with heidegger's method, but this kind of a half-opinion piece about it shows a kind of stilted thinking that isn't going to do you much. your disagreements with his method might be put into a slightly more precise form, but i think that if you wanted to deal with heidegger philosophically, and not as a linguistics student brushing past his work might, you would take the issue you had with this method and see how it fits into his thought as a whole. in studying Dead White philosophers, i don't think the aim is ever to determine if they were right or wrong (because they were all wrong). take a sentence from your essay. Most importantly, it is unclear whether or not language really can contain insight into the essences of real-world things. now you obviously know that not much is actually said by this. imagine if someone writing on kant said "it is unclear whether or not we really do have a faculty for making synthetic a priori judgments." this might be an expression of a particular sympathy i have, but i don't think i do myself much philosophical good by construing a couple quotes by a modern neuroscientist to be contradicting kant. of course it might just not matter to you whether your thinking w/r/t any given philosopher does you any good, but i think philosophy would be a substantial(ly larger) waste of time if it consisted only in reckoning up statements by dead men who said Being and Truth a lot and seeing whether they were true or false Well for the first quote, I think this was just poorly written on my part. I didn't really choose my words carefully here. What I meant by that is that since the essences of things ultimately stem from the essence of Being, and since the Greeks were the only people interested in the question of Being, they have (according to Heidegger) greater insight into the essence of Being and by extension the essences of things. Of course, this may be a bit careless for me to say since Heidegger doesn't really like it when people lose sight of Being by becoming too preoccupied with beings. He might roll over in his grave if he read what I wrote As for the next quote you pulled about German building and German dwelling vs. building and dwelling in general, I believe this is very true and I stand by what I wrote. While it's true that Heidegger doesn't much care for languages outside of Western culture, this does not mean he thinks that the essences of things found in Europe are different from the essences of the same things found in Asia. He is looking into the essences of building and dwelling as they are for everyone, it's just that he does not care much for what other languages have to say about building and dwelling and only considers Western history/language in his pursuit of this. This is what I'm really arguing against, I guess. greeks did not have greater insight into the essence of being. the pre-socratics had a special relationship to being, but they failed to think it properly (because this wasn't their task, according to marty). heidegger is specifically doing something the greeks did not and could not do, which is to ground an investigation of being on the ontological difference and to think the nature of aletheia. greek language is not worth investigating because the greeks were more in tune with being or something (and certainly they might have been); greek language is worth investigating because our own concepts and understanding of being are grounded on greek metaphysics, and a destruction has to be done to take these greek terms into their primordial ground (which ground was never and could never be explored by greek thinkers). i think it's very easy to establish the case that heidegger thought that western society was privileged, and that the essences of things here really are different. first of all, H says that true history is only the history of being. and what does the history of being consist of? western (i.e. greek -> latin -> german) metaphysics. heidegger has a bigger or smaller set of different understandings of being, and they are all centered around the words of western thinkers. there's physis and poeisis and ens creatum and appetitio et perceptio and will to power, but there is definitely nothing from a japanese or an indian thinker. metaphysics from anaximander up to nietzsche has exhausted all its essential possibilities, and none of these essential possibilities were seen outside of western culture. and you've already conceded that the essences of things stem from the essence of being. if the essence of being is something that changes along with (or, more precisely,, constitutes) western history, then why wouldn't the essence of things also be something that changes along with western history? have you read the thing, or any of his exposition on holderlin? i'll quote a little something from the thing that's pretty relevant
The jug's essential nature, its presencing, so experienced and thought of in these terms, is what we call thing. We are now thinking this word by way of the gathering-appropriating staying of the fourfold. At the same time we recall the Old High German word thing. This reference to the history of language could easily tempt us to misunderstand the way in which we are now thinking of the nature of the thing. It might look as though the nature of the thing as we are now thinking of it had been, so to speak, thoughtlessly poked out of the accidentally encountered meaning of the Old High German thing. The suspicion arises that the understanding of the nature of the thingness that we are here trying to reach may be based on the accidents of an etymological game. The notion becomes established and is already current that, instead of giving thought to essential matters, we are here merely using the dictionary.
this too is worth reading The consecrated libation is what our word for a strong outpouring flow, "gush," really designates: gift and sacrifice.
"Gush," Middle English guschen> gosshen—cf. German Guss> giessen—is the Greek cheein, the Indoeuropean ghu. It means to offer in sacrifice. To pour a gush, when it is achieved in its essence, thought through with sufficient generosity, and genuinely uttered, is to donate, to offer in sacrifice, and hence to give. It is only for this reason that the pouring of the gush, once its nature withers, can become a mere pouring in and pouring out, until it finally decays into the dispensing of liquor at the bar. unless you have some special reason to think that building, dwelling, and thinking are all special terms that heidegger wants to talk about outside of the context of western society, it seems clear that he thinks the essences of the smallest things (jugs, pouring) as well as of the largest (being truth) change, and that he is only concerned with investigating the western versions of these essences, and so it is the same too with bauen/wohnen/denken. i think you're underestimating heidegger's eurocentrism by thinking it only extends to a priority in the truthiness of their languages. Ah yes, The Thing. "The thing is a thing insofar as it things." I found this to be most interesting, although it makes me giggle when I read it for some reason. To thing is to come forth as a thing and show its thingness. This really shows how Heidegger thinks about Being and how it relates to the essences of things, and it is an interesting way of thinking about existence. It is important for understanding Heidegger's work because it shows how Heidegger understands the essence of Being as it determines our perception of Being. Rather than light shining upon Being and revealing it to us, the light comes from within Being as a glow. This glow is the truth of Being. This is how I understand it, anyway. As for the Greek thing, I don't think we disagree here. I'm just not wording stuff right I don't think "insight" was the correct word to use. Anyway, you might be right about his Eurocentrism as you describe it, but I guess I just want to give him more credit than that. I don't believe Heidegger wants to say that the "Western versions of these essences" are any different from their actual essences in general. A jug is a jug insofar as it jugs, whether we use the German word for jug or the Japanese word for jug, it still jugs the same way and is therefore a jug with jugness (lol). I think Heidegger knows this, but he just thinks that other languages are not well suited for articulating how a jug comes forth as a jug by jugging. In the end, I don't think Heidegger really believes that any of our current languages are sufficiently equipped to deal with the question of Being. Maybe. I'm not sure, really. As I've said, I have not really given Heidegger as much time (due primarily to a lack of interest) as I have with other thinkers since I've dedicated a large chunk of my time to Kant and Spinoza, for example. I have read a lot of Heidegger's work, but I have not spent time re-reading most of those works for a better understanding like I have with other thinkers, since I don't feel like it's really worthwhile to do so. So maybe I am misinterpreting what Heidegger wants to say. But then again, I think that anyone who claims to have a 100% correct understanding of Heidegger's work is probably lying, just like if anyone tells you that they understand exactly what Freud was trying to say they are definitely lying. But yeah, I would be willing to admit that my understanding of Heidegger is not complete (though nobody's is, I think), and that I may be misinterpreting his ideas. Somebody who has spent more time on Heidegger might have a more accurate interpretation of his thoughts. I do not think I am grossly misunderstanding him, though; at least not to the point where my argument against his use of historical language should be thrown out with the trash. are you aware that heidegger says "language structures the clearing?" it's not like our languages are somehow messed up and improper and they can't get to the real essences of things. the language we use is what determines the way things show up in our world (i.e. their essences). a jug is a jug because of the language we use surrounding it, not because of some prior reason that might or might not be shown clearly by the language we use. i really don't know why you would think heidegger thinks that everything has generalizable essences that exist everywhere. a jug really does thing in different ways in different places. to steal an example from dreyfus, take the example of a cup. now we all know what cups are and what they're for: they hold liquid so you can drink it. but let's look at prototypical cups for modern america and for japan. in america, the best cup is a cheap styrofoam cup because it keeps your drink hot or cold, it's disposable, it's cheap, etc. but in japan, the best cup is an expensive ceramic tea cup, which really isn't as good at regulating temperature and it's a lot of work to maintain and you have to be careful with it. now the essences of these cups are different: the essence of the cup is not what is general to them, but the specific way they show up in the world. in america, a cup simply shows up as a different thing, has a different bearing in the world, is something else than in japan. where do you get the impression that heidegger thinks essences are totally generalizable over all the world and all time, and why do you think heidegger sees our current languages as inadequate? like what is your textual basis for those beliefs?
Well, as I admitted earlier, I haven't spent much time re-reading Heidegger like I would do for other thinkers. There are two consequences of this: First, it is probable that my initial reading of Heidegger gave me an impression of Heidegger which is not entirely accurate or complete. Second, though, if you ask me to go back and start citing stuff again it's going to give me a headache lol. I have to kind of dive back into some texts that I've only read once and scan through them to find what I'm looking for. I can point to a few things, but as my interest in Heidegger does not offer sufficient motivation for doing so, I probably will not be able to go back and find all of the evidence I need to show where I got these impressions.
But, I guess I can try. I'll just pull one or two excerpts for each of your two questions and call it good. You can tell me how I'm misinterpreting them I guess :D. So where do I get the impression that he thinks essences are generalizable over all the world etc?
First, I guess when I think of the essence of a thing, I think of its essential nature as itself rather than what an individual language might assign to it or interpret from it. Heidegger in The Way to Language:
What unfolds essentially in language is saying as pointing. It's showing does not culminate in a system of signs. Rather, all signs arise from a showing in whose realm and for whose purposes they can be signs. However, in view of the well joined structure of the saying, we dare not attribute showing either exclusively or definitively to human doing. Self-showing as appearing characterizes the coming to presence or withdrawal to absence of every manner and degree of thing present. Even when showing is accomplished by means of our saying, such showing or referring is preceded by a thing's letting itself be shown.
To me, this sounds like the thing is what it is because it is. This idea of self-showing is what makes me feel like individual things have essences which show themselves when a thing comes to presence as a thing by thinging. Since the thing showing itself as a thing does not speak a language, I assume that its thingness is independent of language, and language serves to point (by saying) to the essence of a thing as it comes to light on its own.
When I imagine a thing letting itself be shown, I don't imagine the thing thinking about where it is and what language the people speak in the area. It appears as it is because it is. We notice it, and language points to what we notice about it. Maybe. Clearly you think I'm interpreting this incorrectly, and since I'm assuming you are more comfortable with Heidegger than I am, I would say you might be right. 
As for why I get the impression that Heidegger thinks language has been corrupted over time or misused so that the original meanings of things have been lost: Well, there's this, from The Way to Language:
There is no such thing as a natural language, a language that would be the language of a human nature at hand in itself and without its own destiny. Every language is historical, also in cases where human beings know nothing of the discipline of history in the modern European sense. Nor is the language as information the sole language itself. Rather, it is historical in the sense of, and written within the limits set by, the current age. Our age begins nothing new, but only brings to utter culmination something quite old, something already prescribed in modernity.
So here I think what he's saying is that everything in the language of the current age has its roots in the language of the ancients. This tells me there is little of value to be found in our current language that cannot be found in its ancient counterpart.
And another excerpt from Building Dwelling Thinking:
That language in a way retracts the proper meaning of the word bauen, which is dwelling, is evidence of the original one of these meanings; for with the essential words of language, what they genuinely say easily falls into oblivion in favor of foreground meanings. Man has hardly yet pondered the mystery of this process. Language withdraws from man its simple yet high speech. But its primal call does not thereby become incapable of speech; it merely falls silent. Man, though, fails to heed this silence.
Combining this with the previous quote, it would seem since the language of the current age has its roots in the language of the ancients (as every language is historical), these foreground meanings which take the place of what language genuinely says are what I interpret to be the meanings of words in the current age. How we currently use the words exiles the original meanings into oblivion? I dunno. What do you think?
Like I said, these are just a couple little excerpts I ripped out, and they are not the only thing I'm going on. But go ahead and tell me how I'm horribly misunderstanding them. I can't wait
Edit: This isn't sarcasm. I actually want to hear it.
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On June 12 2013 04:32 prplhz wrote:
After reading the discussion following my question I understand even less what the essence of something is. Funnily enough I also thought about "What is the essence of a chair?".
But in the words of Martin "Marty" Heidegger: "If you didn't already read 15 years of Aristotle then don't even bother, we don't need your kind here."
lol
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On June 12 2013 06:54 MichaelDonovan wrote:Show nested quote +On June 12 2013 02:38 Lixler wrote:On June 11 2013 14:00 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 13:01 Lixler wrote:On June 11 2013 12:11 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 11:40 Lixler wrote:On June 11 2013 11:09 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 10:28 Lixler wrote:On June 11 2013 07:01 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 06:33 prplhz wrote:
As a guy who has no idea about philosophy, I wish you'd explain what Heidegger means by "the essence of real-world objects" and why this is interesting.
I liked this one a lot more than the one about Kant. I predict that you'll do David Hume next. Essence for Heidegger is pretty much the same as "essential nature." So when we take a concept like "build", and we ask what the essence of building is, we are kind of asking "Well, what does it really mean mean to build?" Heidegger uses his historical language argument style to say that "building is really dwelling", and then later in his essay he says that dwelling is really "thinking". So building, dwelling, and thinking are all pretty much the same thing. When we are building something, it is our way of dwelling (living in the world and creating a space for ourselves), and when we are dwelling, this also means that we are thinking (to dwell on something, I guess? Heidegger did all of this stuff using Old German words, so it might be harder to see the connections in English sometimes...). So as human beings, the actions of building, dwelling, and thinking all have the same meaning, or the same essential nature. When Heidegger wants to find "the truth of Being" (this is Heidegger's main project), he is trying to find the essence of being, or the meaning of being. What is existence, really? What does it mean to be? This is what metaphysics is actually all about according to Heidegger. I guess put really simply, it's kind of like looking around and wondering, "Where do we come from? Why are we here? What am I, really? What is the world? What IS all of this?" That kind of thing... One of those types of questions where, not only is the answer hard to find, but even if you find the answer, it is probably impossible to accurately and completely put it into words, and it is often difficult to even put the question itself into words to ask it properly. And, I guess that's really what Heidegger gets frustrated about, and it's what he's trying to work on (and thinks we should all work on over time to eventually figure out how to articulate things). He's trying to put things into words, but it's hard to find the words to articulate things using the languages we have to work with, so he believes the ongoing project for human beings to have is to figure out how to think and say the truth of Being. Not sure how understandable that was... Let me know if you need more clarification, since I'm not really confident that my answer was written well enough to be understood, so I might need to try again if this was a miss that is an awful way to describe what heidegger means by essence, and given the complete lack of any discussion of a clearing or an understanding of being i think that you might as well be informed of it. essence for heidegger is Wesen, and he uses it as a verb that essentially means "to presence" "to come on the scene" (so similar to anwesen). for heidegger the essence of something is in flux and determined by a clearing. what is the essence of a chair? it is not the necessary and sufficient conditions of being a chair, for H. instead, it is the way a chair comes to presence in the world. take the question concerning technology. heidegger asks "what is the essence of modern technology?" and his answer has nothing to do with "what does it really mean to be modern technology?" the essence of modern technology is enframing, and this means that enframing is the way that modern technology comes to presence. the being of modern technology is determined essentially by enframing, meaning that its character and its significance in the world etc is all determined by enframing. it's not that a hydroelectric dam really is enframing, but rather enframing is what determines the character and presence of the hydroelectric dam. anyway as for your main essay, it's clear that you don't know much about heidegger's view of history. heidegger doesn't think the greeks were smarter than us or that their language was somehow inherently better. rather, as you should have seen in your B&T quote but thoughtlessly brushed past, the investigations of the greeks into the meaning of being have determined the course of Western society. so by looking closely at greek words, we can see the roots of our own concepts. H would not say that the greek word for truth (aletheia) or false (pseudos) is some fundamentally accurate word that will forever describe the essence of what is true and false. (aletheia is obviously a bit of an exception). if you read, say, his work on parmenides, you'll see him frequently state that "the greeks experienced the essence of falsity as dissemblance" whereas for moderns "the essence of falsity is un-truth, uncorrectness." essences constantly change with turnings of being, and the only reason greek words are worth investigating is because greek thought determined western history and metaphysics. you would do yourself well to read a lot more heidegger (but first study aristotle for 10 to 15 years). Thanks for your response. Well, to start with your response to my description of essence for Heidegger, I described it that way in an attempt to communicate the idea to somebody who claims to have "no idea about philosophy." This is why I tried to simplify it and use terminology that would appeal to everyone. If I was discussing the idea with a fellow philosopher, I would of course be more inclined to discuss things relating to Heidegger's phenomenology and all of that, but I felt it more appropriate to relate Heidegger's ideas to more accessible concepts and keep it as simple as possible, avoiding all of that background discussion. I expect therefore that anyone familiar with Heidegger would think that the explanation I gave was insufficient and even inaccurate to a degree. Writing for a specific audience is tough sometimes because people outside of the target audience will receive your words differently Now as for your response to the essay itself: I don't think I ever said that Heidegger believes the Greeks or their language to be inherently smarter/better than moderns or anything like that. I'm not sure why you are getting that impression. In fact I pretty clearly said that the reason he believes the Greeks were closer to the essence of being was because they were the only people actually investigating the question according to him, and as Heidegger says, the only being who could think of the question of Being is a being for whom Being is important. It was because the Greeks were the only people who were actively thinking about the question of Being that Heidegger believes their language to be closer to it. I may not explain this in-depth in my essay, but I do not overlook it either. See paragraph 8. I do discuss this a little bit. If you believe my discussion of this to be insufficient, you might be right, but keep in mind I'm not writing this for an audience of scholars, and this is not the kind of work that I would try to publish. These are just short little essays where I think out loud a bit. So, if you consider yourself to be a Heidegger scholar of sorts, then it would make sense if you felt my writing to be a bit shallow or something like that. Now this may be the fault of my poor writing here, but I do not believe you understood what I was actually saying about Heidegger's conception of language. When a reader does not understand what a writer is trying to say, it is often the fault of the writer himself for not being clear enough, so I won't fault you for this, but I think you assumed too much about my ideas and ended up with an inaccurate impression of me. you said this, maybe i misinterpreted it He does clearly say, though, that the ancient Greek thinkers had better insight into the essences of things, so their language is best suited to be referenced as a starting point for thinking the truth of Being and whatnot in any case i'd really be surprised to find that your understanding of heidegger is adequate and you just left out a lot of things you knew in this essay. for instance, you use the japanese language as an example but don't discuss what heidegger himself had to say about japanese (in e.g. a dialogue on language). additionally, in the same place, i get the impression you don't know that heidegger thought that only western (that is, post-greek) society has history proper and is the only place Being with a capital B shows up. for instance, you say However, we must remember that Heidegger does not seek to look into the essence of German building and German dwelling, but to examine the essence of building and dwelling in general.
and i don't think your discussion is insufficient, or at least i wouldn't see any point in making that utterance. i think that you're expressing a legitimate qualm with heidegger's method, but this kind of a half-opinion piece about it shows a kind of stilted thinking that isn't going to do you much. your disagreements with his method might be put into a slightly more precise form, but i think that if you wanted to deal with heidegger philosophically, and not as a linguistics student brushing past his work might, you would take the issue you had with this method and see how it fits into his thought as a whole. in studying Dead White philosophers, i don't think the aim is ever to determine if they were right or wrong (because they were all wrong). take a sentence from your essay. Most importantly, it is unclear whether or not language really can contain insight into the essences of real-world things. now you obviously know that not much is actually said by this. imagine if someone writing on kant said "it is unclear whether or not we really do have a faculty for making synthetic a priori judgments." this might be an expression of a particular sympathy i have, but i don't think i do myself much philosophical good by construing a couple quotes by a modern neuroscientist to be contradicting kant. of course it might just not matter to you whether your thinking w/r/t any given philosopher does you any good, but i think philosophy would be a substantial(ly larger) waste of time if it consisted only in reckoning up statements by dead men who said Being and Truth a lot and seeing whether they were true or false Well for the first quote, I think this was just poorly written on my part. I didn't really choose my words carefully here. What I meant by that is that since the essences of things ultimately stem from the essence of Being, and since the Greeks were the only people interested in the question of Being, they have (according to Heidegger) greater insight into the essence of Being and by extension the essences of things. Of course, this may be a bit careless for me to say since Heidegger doesn't really like it when people lose sight of Being by becoming too preoccupied with beings. He might roll over in his grave if he read what I wrote As for the next quote you pulled about German building and German dwelling vs. building and dwelling in general, I believe this is very true and I stand by what I wrote. While it's true that Heidegger doesn't much care for languages outside of Western culture, this does not mean he thinks that the essences of things found in Europe are different from the essences of the same things found in Asia. He is looking into the essences of building and dwelling as they are for everyone, it's just that he does not care much for what other languages have to say about building and dwelling and only considers Western history/language in his pursuit of this. This is what I'm really arguing against, I guess. greeks did not have greater insight into the essence of being. the pre-socratics had a special relationship to being, but they failed to think it properly (because this wasn't their task, according to marty). heidegger is specifically doing something the greeks did not and could not do, which is to ground an investigation of being on the ontological difference and to think the nature of aletheia. greek language is not worth investigating because the greeks were more in tune with being or something (and certainly they might have been); greek language is worth investigating because our own concepts and understanding of being are grounded on greek metaphysics, and a destruction has to be done to take these greek terms into their primordial ground (which ground was never and could never be explored by greek thinkers). i think it's very easy to establish the case that heidegger thought that western society was privileged, and that the essences of things here really are different. first of all, H says that true history is only the history of being. and what does the history of being consist of? western (i.e. greek -> latin -> german) metaphysics. heidegger has a bigger or smaller set of different understandings of being, and they are all centered around the words of western thinkers. there's physis and poeisis and ens creatum and appetitio et perceptio and will to power, but there is definitely nothing from a japanese or an indian thinker. metaphysics from anaximander up to nietzsche has exhausted all its essential possibilities, and none of these essential possibilities were seen outside of western culture. and you've already conceded that the essences of things stem from the essence of being. if the essence of being is something that changes along with (or, more precisely,, constitutes) western history, then why wouldn't the essence of things also be something that changes along with western history? have you read the thing, or any of his exposition on holderlin? i'll quote a little something from the thing that's pretty relevant
The jug's essential nature, its presencing, so experienced and thought of in these terms, is what we call thing. We are now thinking this word by way of the gathering-appropriating staying of the fourfold. At the same time we recall the Old High German word thing. This reference to the history of language could easily tempt us to misunderstand the way in which we are now thinking of the nature of the thing. It might look as though the nature of the thing as we are now thinking of it had been, so to speak, thoughtlessly poked out of the accidentally encountered meaning of the Old High German thing. The suspicion arises that the understanding of the nature of the thingness that we are here trying to reach may be based on the accidents of an etymological game. The notion becomes established and is already current that, instead of giving thought to essential matters, we are here merely using the dictionary.
this too is worth reading The consecrated libation is what our word for a strong outpouring flow, "gush," really designates: gift and sacrifice.
"Gush," Middle English guschen> gosshen—cf. German Guss> giessen—is the Greek cheein, the Indoeuropean ghu. It means to offer in sacrifice. To pour a gush, when it is achieved in its essence, thought through with sufficient generosity, and genuinely uttered, is to donate, to offer in sacrifice, and hence to give. It is only for this reason that the pouring of the gush, once its nature withers, can become a mere pouring in and pouring out, until it finally decays into the dispensing of liquor at the bar. unless you have some special reason to think that building, dwelling, and thinking are all special terms that heidegger wants to talk about outside of the context of western society, it seems clear that he thinks the essences of the smallest things (jugs, pouring) as well as of the largest (being truth) change, and that he is only concerned with investigating the western versions of these essences, and so it is the same too with bauen/wohnen/denken. i think you're underestimating heidegger's eurocentrism by thinking it only extends to a priority in the truthiness of their languages. Ah yes, The Thing. "The thing is a thing insofar as it things." I found this to be most interesting, although it makes me giggle when I read it for some reason. To thing is to come forth as a thing and show its thingness. This really shows how Heidegger thinks about Being and how it relates to the essences of things, and it is an interesting way of thinking about existence. It is important for understanding Heidegger's work because it shows how Heidegger understands the essence of Being as it determines our perception of Being. Rather than light shining upon Being and revealing it to us, the light comes from within Being as a glow. This glow is the truth of Being. This is how I understand it, anyway. As for the Greek thing, I don't think we disagree here. I'm just not wording stuff right I don't think "insight" was the correct word to use. Anyway, you might be right about his Eurocentrism as you describe it, but I guess I just want to give him more credit than that. I don't believe Heidegger wants to say that the "Western versions of these essences" are any different from their actual essences in general. A jug is a jug insofar as it jugs, whether we use the German word for jug or the Japanese word for jug, it still jugs the same way and is therefore a jug with jugness (lol). I think Heidegger knows this, but he just thinks that other languages are not well suited for articulating how a jug comes forth as a jug by jugging. In the end, I don't think Heidegger really believes that any of our current languages are sufficiently equipped to deal with the question of Being. Maybe. I'm not sure, really. As I've said, I have not really given Heidegger as much time (due primarily to a lack of interest) as I have with other thinkers since I've dedicated a large chunk of my time to Kant and Spinoza, for example. I have read a lot of Heidegger's work, but I have not spent time re-reading most of those works for a better understanding like I have with other thinkers, since I don't feel like it's really worthwhile to do so. So maybe I am misinterpreting what Heidegger wants to say. But then again, I think that anyone who claims to have a 100% correct understanding of Heidegger's work is probably lying, just like if anyone tells you that they understand exactly what Freud was trying to say they are definitely lying. But yeah, I would be willing to admit that my understanding of Heidegger is not complete (though nobody's is, I think), and that I may be misinterpreting his ideas. Somebody who has spent more time on Heidegger might have a more accurate interpretation of his thoughts. I do not think I am grossly misunderstanding him, though; at least not to the point where my argument against his use of historical language should be thrown out with the trash. are you aware that heidegger says "language structures the clearing?" it's not like our languages are somehow messed up and improper and they can't get to the real essences of things. the language we use is what determines the way things show up in our world (i.e. their essences). a jug is a jug because of the language we use surrounding it, not because of some prior reason that might or might not be shown clearly by the language we use. i really don't know why you would think heidegger thinks that everything has generalizable essences that exist everywhere. a jug really does thing in different ways in different places. to steal an example from dreyfus, take the example of a cup. now we all know what cups are and what they're for: they hold liquid so you can drink it. but let's look at prototypical cups for modern america and for japan. in america, the best cup is a cheap styrofoam cup because it keeps your drink hot or cold, it's disposable, it's cheap, etc. but in japan, the best cup is an expensive ceramic tea cup, which really isn't as good at regulating temperature and it's a lot of work to maintain and you have to be careful with it. now the essences of these cups are different: the essence of the cup is not what is general to them, but the specific way they show up in the world. in america, a cup simply shows up as a different thing, has a different bearing in the world, is something else than in japan. where do you get the impression that heidegger thinks essences are totally generalizable over all the world and all time, and why do you think heidegger sees our current languages as inadequate? like what is your textual basis for those beliefs? Well, as I admitted earlier, I haven't spent much time re-reading Heidegger like I would do for other thinkers. There are two consequences of this: First, it is probable that my initial reading of Heidegger gave me an impression of Heidegger which is not entirely accurate or complete. Second, though, if you ask me to go back and start citing stuff again it's going to give me a headache lol. I have to kind of dive back into some texts that I've only read once and scan through them to find what I'm looking for. I can point to a few things, but as my interest in Heidegger does not offer sufficient motivation for doing so, I probably will not be able to go back and find all of the evidence I need to show where I got these impressions. But, I guess I can try. I'll just pull one or two excerpts for each of your two questions and call it good. You can tell me how I'm misinterpreting them I guess :D. So where do I get the impression that he thinks essences are generalizable over all the world etc? First, I guess when I think of the essence of a thing, I think of its essential nature as itself rather than what an individual language might assign to it or interpret from it. Heidegger in The Way to Language: Show nested quote +What unfolds essentially in language is saying as pointing. It's showing does not culminate in a system of signs. Rather, all signs arise from a showing in whose realm and for whose purposes they can be signs. However, in view of the well joined structure of the saying, we dare not attribute showing either exclusively or definitively to human doing. Self-showing as appearing characterizes the coming to presence or withdrawal to absence of every manner and degree of thing present. Even when showing is accomplished by means of our saying, such showing or referring is preceded by a thing's letting itself be shown. To me, this sounds like the thing is what it is because it is. This idea of self-showing is what makes me feel like individual things have essences which show themselves when a thing comes to presence as a thing by thinging. Since the thing showing itself as a thing does not speak a language, I assume that its thingness is independent of language, and language serves to point (by saying) to the essence of a thing as it comes to light on its own. When I imagine a thing letting itself be shown, I don't imagine the thing thinking about where it is and what language the people speak in the area. It appears as it is because it is. We notice it, and language points to what we notice about it. Maybe. Clearly you think I'm interpreting this incorrectly, and since I'm assuming you are more comfortable with Heidegger than I am, I would say you might be right. As for why I get the impression that Heidegger thinks language has been corrupted over time or misused so that the original meanings of things have been lost: Well, there's this, from The Way to Language: Show nested quote +There is no such thing as a natural language, a language that would be the language of a human nature at hand in itself and without its own destiny. Every language is historical, also in cases where human beings know nothing of the discipline of history in the modern European sense. Nor is the language as information the sole language itself. Rather, it is historical in the sense of, and written within the limits set by, the current age. Our age begins nothing new, but only brings to utter culmination something quite old, something already prescribed in modernity. So here I think what he's saying is that everything in the language of the current age has its roots in the language of the ancients. This tells me there is little of value to be found in our current language that cannot be found in its ancient counterpart. And another excerpt from Building Dwelling Thinking: Show nested quote +That language in a way retracts the proper meaning of the word bauen, which is dwelling, is evidence of the original one of these meanings; for with the essential words of language, what they genuinely say easily falls into oblivion in favor of foreground meanings. Man has hardly yet pondered the mystery of this process. Language withdraws from man its simple yet high speech. But its primal call does not thereby become incapable of speech; it merely falls silent. Man, though, fails to heed this silence. Combining this with the previous quote, it would seem since the language of the current age has its roots in the language of the ancients (as every language is historical), these foreground meanings which take the place of what language genuinely says are what I interpret to be the meanings of words in the current age. How we currently use the words exiles the original meanings into oblivion? I dunno. What do you think? Like I said, these are just a couple little excerpts I ripped out, and they are not the only thing I'm going on. But go ahead and tell me how I'm horribly misunderstanding them. I can't wait Edit: This isn't sarcasm. I actually want to hear it.
okay, so as for essences. this isn't definitive but i'll cite a little something from origin of the work of art
To submit to this displacement means: to transform our accustomed ties to world and to earth and henceforth to restrain all usual doing and prizing, knowing and looking, in order to stay within the truth that is happening in the work. Only the restraint of this staying lets what is created be the work that it is. This letting the work be a work we call the preserving of the work.
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However, if a work does not find preservers, does not at once find them such as respond to the truth happening in the work, this does not at all mean that the work may also be a work without preservers.
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Preserving the work, as knowing, is a sober standing-within the extraordinary awesomeness of the truth that is happening in the work.
this is meant to counter your quote from the way to language. H doesn't think works of art can just be what they are by standing there in a museum. they have to be preserved, which means a specific human activity has to take place, in order for them to be what they are. it's obviously another move for me to say that what these things are is variable and changes, but there's plenty of ground for that too. marty says that truth occurs as the struggle between earth and world, truth is dynamic, truth is a fluctuating essence, etc. it would be strange if truth changed but the being of beings didn't. or this from discourse on thinking
From this arises a completely new relation of man to the world and his place in it. The world now appears as an object open to the attacks of calculative thought...Nature becomes a gigantic gasoline station, an energy source for modern technology and industry.
nature has changed what it is because of modern man's relation to the world. nature becomes a gasoline station, not because nature was always all along really a gasoline station, or because nature is really not a gasoline station and we're stupid and covering up its real essence, but because nature's essence is dependent on man's relation to the world.
with my second question you answered something i didn't ask. the original meanings of things have certainly been lost. but i asked you this: "why do you think heidegger sees our current languages as inadequate?" which could have been continued "sees our current languages as inadequate for describing the true essences of things?" i've never seen H say anything like "german is woefully inadequate for expressing this concept i've found." why do you think he sticks with the primordial and simple words like building, dwelling, thinking, thing, etc.? why would he continue to use these simple words when modern german is simply not able to really describe the essences of things? man's relation to language is what is lacking, not language itself
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On June 12 2013 08:43 Lixler wrote:Show nested quote +On June 12 2013 06:54 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 12 2013 02:38 Lixler wrote:On June 11 2013 14:00 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 13:01 Lixler wrote:On June 11 2013 12:11 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 11:40 Lixler wrote:On June 11 2013 11:09 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 10:28 Lixler wrote:On June 11 2013 07:01 MichaelDonovan wrote:[quote] Essence for Heidegger is pretty much the same as "essential nature." So when we take a concept like "build", and we ask what the essence of building is, we are kind of asking "Well, what does it really mean mean to build?" Heidegger uses his historical language argument style to say that "building is really dwelling", and then later in his essay he says that dwelling is really "thinking". So building, dwelling, and thinking are all pretty much the same thing. When we are building something, it is our way of dwelling (living in the world and creating a space for ourselves), and when we are dwelling, this also means that we are thinking (to dwell on something, I guess? Heidegger did all of this stuff using Old German words, so it might be harder to see the connections in English sometimes...). So as human beings, the actions of building, dwelling, and thinking all have the same meaning, or the same essential nature. When Heidegger wants to find "the truth of Being" (this is Heidegger's main project), he is trying to find the essence of being, or the meaning of being. What is existence, really? What does it mean to be? This is what metaphysics is actually all about according to Heidegger. I guess put really simply, it's kind of like looking around and wondering, "Where do we come from? Why are we here? What am I, really? What is the world? What IS all of this?" That kind of thing... One of those types of questions where, not only is the answer hard to find, but even if you find the answer, it is probably impossible to accurately and completely put it into words, and it is often difficult to even put the question itself into words to ask it properly. And, I guess that's really what Heidegger gets frustrated about, and it's what he's trying to work on (and thinks we should all work on over time to eventually figure out how to articulate things). He's trying to put things into words, but it's hard to find the words to articulate things using the languages we have to work with, so he believes the ongoing project for human beings to have is to figure out how to think and say the truth of Being. Not sure how understandable that was... Let me know if you need more clarification, since I'm not really confident that my answer was written well enough to be understood, so I might need to try again if this was a miss that is an awful way to describe what heidegger means by essence, and given the complete lack of any discussion of a clearing or an understanding of being i think that you might as well be informed of it. essence for heidegger is Wesen, and he uses it as a verb that essentially means "to presence" "to come on the scene" (so similar to anwesen). for heidegger the essence of something is in flux and determined by a clearing. what is the essence of a chair? it is not the necessary and sufficient conditions of being a chair, for H. instead, it is the way a chair comes to presence in the world. take the question concerning technology. heidegger asks "what is the essence of modern technology?" and his answer has nothing to do with "what does it really mean to be modern technology?" the essence of modern technology is enframing, and this means that enframing is the way that modern technology comes to presence. the being of modern technology is determined essentially by enframing, meaning that its character and its significance in the world etc is all determined by enframing. it's not that a hydroelectric dam really is enframing, but rather enframing is what determines the character and presence of the hydroelectric dam. anyway as for your main essay, it's clear that you don't know much about heidegger's view of history. heidegger doesn't think the greeks were smarter than us or that their language was somehow inherently better. rather, as you should have seen in your B&T quote but thoughtlessly brushed past, the investigations of the greeks into the meaning of being have determined the course of Western society. so by looking closely at greek words, we can see the roots of our own concepts. H would not say that the greek word for truth (aletheia) or false (pseudos) is some fundamentally accurate word that will forever describe the essence of what is true and false. (aletheia is obviously a bit of an exception). if you read, say, his work on parmenides, you'll see him frequently state that "the greeks experienced the essence of falsity as dissemblance" whereas for moderns "the essence of falsity is un-truth, uncorrectness." essences constantly change with turnings of being, and the only reason greek words are worth investigating is because greek thought determined western history and metaphysics. you would do yourself well to read a lot more heidegger (but first study aristotle for 10 to 15 years). Thanks for your response. Well, to start with your response to my description of essence for Heidegger, I described it that way in an attempt to communicate the idea to somebody who claims to have "no idea about philosophy." This is why I tried to simplify it and use terminology that would appeal to everyone. If I was discussing the idea with a fellow philosopher, I would of course be more inclined to discuss things relating to Heidegger's phenomenology and all of that, but I felt it more appropriate to relate Heidegger's ideas to more accessible concepts and keep it as simple as possible, avoiding all of that background discussion. I expect therefore that anyone familiar with Heidegger would think that the explanation I gave was insufficient and even inaccurate to a degree. Writing for a specific audience is tough sometimes because people outside of the target audience will receive your words differently Now as for your response to the essay itself: I don't think I ever said that Heidegger believes the Greeks or their language to be inherently smarter/better than moderns or anything like that. I'm not sure why you are getting that impression. In fact I pretty clearly said that the reason he believes the Greeks were closer to the essence of being was because they were the only people actually investigating the question according to him, and as Heidegger says, the only being who could think of the question of Being is a being for whom Being is important. It was because the Greeks were the only people who were actively thinking about the question of Being that Heidegger believes their language to be closer to it. I may not explain this in-depth in my essay, but I do not overlook it either. See paragraph 8. I do discuss this a little bit. If you believe my discussion of this to be insufficient, you might be right, but keep in mind I'm not writing this for an audience of scholars, and this is not the kind of work that I would try to publish. These are just short little essays where I think out loud a bit. So, if you consider yourself to be a Heidegger scholar of sorts, then it would make sense if you felt my writing to be a bit shallow or something like that. Now this may be the fault of my poor writing here, but I do not believe you understood what I was actually saying about Heidegger's conception of language. When a reader does not understand what a writer is trying to say, it is often the fault of the writer himself for not being clear enough, so I won't fault you for this, but I think you assumed too much about my ideas and ended up with an inaccurate impression of me. you said this, maybe i misinterpreted it He does clearly say, though, that the ancient Greek thinkers had better insight into the essences of things, so their language is best suited to be referenced as a starting point for thinking the truth of Being and whatnot in any case i'd really be surprised to find that your understanding of heidegger is adequate and you just left out a lot of things you knew in this essay. for instance, you use the japanese language as an example but don't discuss what heidegger himself had to say about japanese (in e.g. a dialogue on language). additionally, in the same place, i get the impression you don't know that heidegger thought that only western (that is, post-greek) society has history proper and is the only place Being with a capital B shows up. for instance, you say However, we must remember that Heidegger does not seek to look into the essence of German building and German dwelling, but to examine the essence of building and dwelling in general.
and i don't think your discussion is insufficient, or at least i wouldn't see any point in making that utterance. i think that you're expressing a legitimate qualm with heidegger's method, but this kind of a half-opinion piece about it shows a kind of stilted thinking that isn't going to do you much. your disagreements with his method might be put into a slightly more precise form, but i think that if you wanted to deal with heidegger philosophically, and not as a linguistics student brushing past his work might, you would take the issue you had with this method and see how it fits into his thought as a whole. in studying Dead White philosophers, i don't think the aim is ever to determine if they were right or wrong (because they were all wrong). take a sentence from your essay. Most importantly, it is unclear whether or not language really can contain insight into the essences of real-world things. now you obviously know that not much is actually said by this. imagine if someone writing on kant said "it is unclear whether or not we really do have a faculty for making synthetic a priori judgments." this might be an expression of a particular sympathy i have, but i don't think i do myself much philosophical good by construing a couple quotes by a modern neuroscientist to be contradicting kant. of course it might just not matter to you whether your thinking w/r/t any given philosopher does you any good, but i think philosophy would be a substantial(ly larger) waste of time if it consisted only in reckoning up statements by dead men who said Being and Truth a lot and seeing whether they were true or false Well for the first quote, I think this was just poorly written on my part. I didn't really choose my words carefully here. What I meant by that is that since the essences of things ultimately stem from the essence of Being, and since the Greeks were the only people interested in the question of Being, they have (according to Heidegger) greater insight into the essence of Being and by extension the essences of things. Of course, this may be a bit careless for me to say since Heidegger doesn't really like it when people lose sight of Being by becoming too preoccupied with beings. He might roll over in his grave if he read what I wrote As for the next quote you pulled about German building and German dwelling vs. building and dwelling in general, I believe this is very true and I stand by what I wrote. While it's true that Heidegger doesn't much care for languages outside of Western culture, this does not mean he thinks that the essences of things found in Europe are different from the essences of the same things found in Asia. He is looking into the essences of building and dwelling as they are for everyone, it's just that he does not care much for what other languages have to say about building and dwelling and only considers Western history/language in his pursuit of this. This is what I'm really arguing against, I guess. greeks did not have greater insight into the essence of being. the pre-socratics had a special relationship to being, but they failed to think it properly (because this wasn't their task, according to marty). heidegger is specifically doing something the greeks did not and could not do, which is to ground an investigation of being on the ontological difference and to think the nature of aletheia. greek language is not worth investigating because the greeks were more in tune with being or something (and certainly they might have been); greek language is worth investigating because our own concepts and understanding of being are grounded on greek metaphysics, and a destruction has to be done to take these greek terms into their primordial ground (which ground was never and could never be explored by greek thinkers). i think it's very easy to establish the case that heidegger thought that western society was privileged, and that the essences of things here really are different. first of all, H says that true history is only the history of being. and what does the history of being consist of? western (i.e. greek -> latin -> german) metaphysics. heidegger has a bigger or smaller set of different understandings of being, and they are all centered around the words of western thinkers. there's physis and poeisis and ens creatum and appetitio et perceptio and will to power, but there is definitely nothing from a japanese or an indian thinker. metaphysics from anaximander up to nietzsche has exhausted all its essential possibilities, and none of these essential possibilities were seen outside of western culture. and you've already conceded that the essences of things stem from the essence of being. if the essence of being is something that changes along with (or, more precisely,, constitutes) western history, then why wouldn't the essence of things also be something that changes along with western history? have you read the thing, or any of his exposition on holderlin? i'll quote a little something from the thing that's pretty relevant
The jug's essential nature, its presencing, so experienced and thought of in these terms, is what we call thing. We are now thinking this word by way of the gathering-appropriating staying of the fourfold. At the same time we recall the Old High German word thing. This reference to the history of language could easily tempt us to misunderstand the way in which we are now thinking of the nature of the thing. It might look as though the nature of the thing as we are now thinking of it had been, so to speak, thoughtlessly poked out of the accidentally encountered meaning of the Old High German thing. The suspicion arises that the understanding of the nature of the thingness that we are here trying to reach may be based on the accidents of an etymological game. The notion becomes established and is already current that, instead of giving thought to essential matters, we are here merely using the dictionary.
this too is worth reading The consecrated libation is what our word for a strong outpouring flow, "gush," really designates: gift and sacrifice.
"Gush," Middle English guschen> gosshen—cf. German Guss> giessen—is the Greek cheein, the Indoeuropean ghu. It means to offer in sacrifice. To pour a gush, when it is achieved in its essence, thought through with sufficient generosity, and genuinely uttered, is to donate, to offer in sacrifice, and hence to give. It is only for this reason that the pouring of the gush, once its nature withers, can become a mere pouring in and pouring out, until it finally decays into the dispensing of liquor at the bar. unless you have some special reason to think that building, dwelling, and thinking are all special terms that heidegger wants to talk about outside of the context of western society, it seems clear that he thinks the essences of the smallest things (jugs, pouring) as well as of the largest (being truth) change, and that he is only concerned with investigating the western versions of these essences, and so it is the same too with bauen/wohnen/denken. i think you're underestimating heidegger's eurocentrism by thinking it only extends to a priority in the truthiness of their languages. Ah yes, The Thing. "The thing is a thing insofar as it things." I found this to be most interesting, although it makes me giggle when I read it for some reason. To thing is to come forth as a thing and show its thingness. This really shows how Heidegger thinks about Being and how it relates to the essences of things, and it is an interesting way of thinking about existence. It is important for understanding Heidegger's work because it shows how Heidegger understands the essence of Being as it determines our perception of Being. Rather than light shining upon Being and revealing it to us, the light comes from within Being as a glow. This glow is the truth of Being. This is how I understand it, anyway. As for the Greek thing, I don't think we disagree here. I'm just not wording stuff right I don't think "insight" was the correct word to use. Anyway, you might be right about his Eurocentrism as you describe it, but I guess I just want to give him more credit than that. I don't believe Heidegger wants to say that the "Western versions of these essences" are any different from their actual essences in general. A jug is a jug insofar as it jugs, whether we use the German word for jug or the Japanese word for jug, it still jugs the same way and is therefore a jug with jugness (lol). I think Heidegger knows this, but he just thinks that other languages are not well suited for articulating how a jug comes forth as a jug by jugging. In the end, I don't think Heidegger really believes that any of our current languages are sufficiently equipped to deal with the question of Being. Maybe. I'm not sure, really. As I've said, I have not really given Heidegger as much time (due primarily to a lack of interest) as I have with other thinkers since I've dedicated a large chunk of my time to Kant and Spinoza, for example. I have read a lot of Heidegger's work, but I have not spent time re-reading most of those works for a better understanding like I have with other thinkers, since I don't feel like it's really worthwhile to do so. So maybe I am misinterpreting what Heidegger wants to say. But then again, I think that anyone who claims to have a 100% correct understanding of Heidegger's work is probably lying, just like if anyone tells you that they understand exactly what Freud was trying to say they are definitely lying. But yeah, I would be willing to admit that my understanding of Heidegger is not complete (though nobody's is, I think), and that I may be misinterpreting his ideas. Somebody who has spent more time on Heidegger might have a more accurate interpretation of his thoughts. I do not think I am grossly misunderstanding him, though; at least not to the point where my argument against his use of historical language should be thrown out with the trash. are you aware that heidegger says "language structures the clearing?" it's not like our languages are somehow messed up and improper and they can't get to the real essences of things. the language we use is what determines the way things show up in our world (i.e. their essences). a jug is a jug because of the language we use surrounding it, not because of some prior reason that might or might not be shown clearly by the language we use. i really don't know why you would think heidegger thinks that everything has generalizable essences that exist everywhere. a jug really does thing in different ways in different places. to steal an example from dreyfus, take the example of a cup. now we all know what cups are and what they're for: they hold liquid so you can drink it. but let's look at prototypical cups for modern america and for japan. in america, the best cup is a cheap styrofoam cup because it keeps your drink hot or cold, it's disposable, it's cheap, etc. but in japan, the best cup is an expensive ceramic tea cup, which really isn't as good at regulating temperature and it's a lot of work to maintain and you have to be careful with it. now the essences of these cups are different: the essence of the cup is not what is general to them, but the specific way they show up in the world. in america, a cup simply shows up as a different thing, has a different bearing in the world, is something else than in japan. where do you get the impression that heidegger thinks essences are totally generalizable over all the world and all time, and why do you think heidegger sees our current languages as inadequate? like what is your textual basis for those beliefs? Well, as I admitted earlier, I haven't spent much time re-reading Heidegger like I would do for other thinkers. There are two consequences of this: First, it is probable that my initial reading of Heidegger gave me an impression of Heidegger which is not entirely accurate or complete. Second, though, if you ask me to go back and start citing stuff again it's going to give me a headache lol. I have to kind of dive back into some texts that I've only read once and scan through them to find what I'm looking for. I can point to a few things, but as my interest in Heidegger does not offer sufficient motivation for doing so, I probably will not be able to go back and find all of the evidence I need to show where I got these impressions. But, I guess I can try. I'll just pull one or two excerpts for each of your two questions and call it good. You can tell me how I'm misinterpreting them I guess :D. So where do I get the impression that he thinks essences are generalizable over all the world etc? First, I guess when I think of the essence of a thing, I think of its essential nature as itself rather than what an individual language might assign to it or interpret from it. Heidegger in The Way to Language: What unfolds essentially in language is saying as pointing. It's showing does not culminate in a system of signs. Rather, all signs arise from a showing in whose realm and for whose purposes they can be signs. However, in view of the well joined structure of the saying, we dare not attribute showing either exclusively or definitively to human doing. Self-showing as appearing characterizes the coming to presence or withdrawal to absence of every manner and degree of thing present. Even when showing is accomplished by means of our saying, such showing or referring is preceded by a thing's letting itself be shown. To me, this sounds like the thing is what it is because it is. This idea of self-showing is what makes me feel like individual things have essences which show themselves when a thing comes to presence as a thing by thinging. Since the thing showing itself as a thing does not speak a language, I assume that its thingness is independent of language, and language serves to point (by saying) to the essence of a thing as it comes to light on its own. When I imagine a thing letting itself be shown, I don't imagine the thing thinking about where it is and what language the people speak in the area. It appears as it is because it is. We notice it, and language points to what we notice about it. Maybe. Clearly you think I'm interpreting this incorrectly, and since I'm assuming you are more comfortable with Heidegger than I am, I would say you might be right. As for why I get the impression that Heidegger thinks language has been corrupted over time or misused so that the original meanings of things have been lost: Well, there's this, from The Way to Language: There is no such thing as a natural language, a language that would be the language of a human nature at hand in itself and without its own destiny. Every language is historical, also in cases where human beings know nothing of the discipline of history in the modern European sense. Nor is the language as information the sole language itself. Rather, it is historical in the sense of, and written within the limits set by, the current age. Our age begins nothing new, but only brings to utter culmination something quite old, something already prescribed in modernity. So here I think what he's saying is that everything in the language of the current age has its roots in the language of the ancients. This tells me there is little of value to be found in our current language that cannot be found in its ancient counterpart. And another excerpt from Building Dwelling Thinking: That language in a way retracts the proper meaning of the word bauen, which is dwelling, is evidence of the original one of these meanings; for with the essential words of language, what they genuinely say easily falls into oblivion in favor of foreground meanings. Man has hardly yet pondered the mystery of this process. Language withdraws from man its simple yet high speech. But its primal call does not thereby become incapable of speech; it merely falls silent. Man, though, fails to heed this silence. Combining this with the previous quote, it would seem since the language of the current age has its roots in the language of the ancients (as every language is historical), these foreground meanings which take the place of what language genuinely says are what I interpret to be the meanings of words in the current age. How we currently use the words exiles the original meanings into oblivion? I dunno. What do you think? Like I said, these are just a couple little excerpts I ripped out, and they are not the only thing I'm going on. But go ahead and tell me how I'm horribly misunderstanding them. I can't wait Edit: This isn't sarcasm. I actually want to hear it. okay, so as for essences. this isn't definitive but i'll cite a little something from origin of the work of art Show nested quote +
To submit to this displacement means: to transform our accustomed ties to world and to earth and henceforth to restrain all usual doing and prizing, knowing and looking, in order to stay within the truth that is happening in the work. Only the restraint of this staying lets what is created be the work that it is. This letting the work be a work we call the preserving of the work.
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However, if a work does not find preservers, does not at once find them such as respond to the truth happening in the work, this does not at all mean that the work may also be a work without preservers.
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Preserving the work, as knowing, is a sober standing-within the extraordinary awesomeness of the truth that is happening in the work.
this is meant to counter your quote from the way to language. H doesn't think works of art can just be what they are by standing there in a museum. they have to be preserved, which means a specific human activity has to take place, in order for them to be what they are. it's obviously another move for me to say that what these things are is variable and changes, but there's plenty of ground for that too. marty says that truth occurs as the struggle between earth and world, truth is dynamic, truth is a fluctuating essence, etc. it would be strange if truth changed but the being of beings didn't. or this from discourse on thinking Show nested quote +From this arises a completely new relation of man to the world and his place in it. The world now appears as an object open to the attacks of calculative thought...Nature becomes a gigantic gasoline station, an energy source for modern technology and industry. nature has changed what it is because of modern man's relation to the world. nature becomes a gasoline station, not because nature was always all along really a gasoline station, or because nature is really not a gasoline station and we're stupid and covering up its real essence, but because nature's essence is dependent on man's relation to the world. with my second question you answered something i didn't ask. the original meanings of things have certainly been lost. but i asked you this: "why do you think heidegger sees our current languages as inadequate?" which could have been continued "sees our current languages as inadequate for describing the true essences of things?" i've never seen H say anything like "german is woefully inadequate for expressing this concept i've found." why do you think he sticks with the primordial and simple words like building, dwelling, thinking, thing, etc.? why would he continue to use these simple words when modern german is simply not able to really describe the essences of things? man's relation to language is what is lacking, not language itself
Well, with the essences bit, I'm still not quite convinced. You introduced your quote to "counter" my quote, but that really just tells me that Heidegger says two different things which counter each other. I was actually hoping you could tell me why the quote I highlighted does not mean what I think it means. Now I'm just seeing inconsistencies within Heidegger's own thinking perhaps, and that makes things kind of icky to deal with in my head. Maybe you could help me out with that?
And with the language thing, I think the way you said it is probably way better than how I said it. Man's relationship with language in the current age is inadequate. It's not that the language itself is inadequate. That makes more sense. Still, though, if modern German is completely adequate for expression (though Heidegger does say that we have to move on from using language as a mere means of expression, so I'm not quite sure if this is the right word to be using here. Maybe showing?), then it is a bit odd to me that Heidegger finds it necessary to go back to old High German roots and what not in order to show the essences of things like building and dwelling. It seems to me that he's trying to say that the relationship between building and dwelling is not properly shown in modern German, which is why he has to go back to old High German in order to show that relationship. This is why I get the feeling he finds modern language inadequate, and that we've strayed away from the original and proper meanings of things. I dunno. I mean, if modern German was adequate, then the old meanings of building and dwelling (and by extension the relationship between them that was shown in the old language) shouldn't matter, should it? If modern language is adequate, there should be no need to go back into the history of the language and show old connections that no longer seem to exist in modern language. Does that make sense?
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On June 12 2013 09:20 MichaelDonovan wrote:Show nested quote +On June 12 2013 08:43 Lixler wrote:On June 12 2013 06:54 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 12 2013 02:38 Lixler wrote:On June 11 2013 14:00 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 13:01 Lixler wrote:On June 11 2013 12:11 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 11:40 Lixler wrote:On June 11 2013 11:09 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 10:28 Lixler wrote:
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that is an awful way to describe what heidegger means by essence, and given the complete lack of any discussion of a clearing or an understanding of being i think that you might as well be informed of it.
essence for heidegger is Wesen, and he uses it as a verb that essentially means "to presence" "to come on the scene" (so similar to anwesen). for heidegger the essence of something is in flux and determined by a clearing. what is the essence of a chair? it is not the necessary and sufficient conditions of being a chair, for H. instead, it is the way a chair comes to presence in the world.
take the question concerning technology. heidegger asks "what is the essence of modern technology?" and his answer has nothing to do with "what does it really mean to be modern technology?" the essence of modern technology is enframing, and this means that enframing is the way that modern technology comes to presence. the being of modern technology is determined essentially by enframing, meaning that its character and its significance in the world etc is all determined by enframing. it's not that a hydroelectric dam really is enframing, but rather enframing is what determines the character and presence of the hydroelectric dam.
anyway as for your main essay, it's clear that you don't know much about heidegger's view of history. heidegger doesn't think the greeks were smarter than us or that their language was somehow inherently better. rather, as you should have seen in your B&T quote but thoughtlessly brushed past, the investigations of the greeks into the meaning of being have determined the course of Western society. so by looking closely at greek words, we can see the roots of our own concepts. H would not say that the greek word for truth (aletheia) or false (pseudos) is some fundamentally accurate word that will forever describe the essence of what is true and false. (aletheia is obviously a bit of an exception). if you read, say, his work on parmenides, you'll see him frequently state that "the greeks experienced the essence of falsity as dissemblance" whereas for moderns "the essence of falsity is un-truth, uncorrectness." essences constantly change with turnings of being, and the only reason greek words are worth investigating is because greek thought determined western history and metaphysics.
you would do yourself well to read a lot more heidegger (but first study aristotle for 10 to 15 years). Thanks for your response. Well, to start with your response to my description of essence for Heidegger, I described it that way in an attempt to communicate the idea to somebody who claims to have "no idea about philosophy." This is why I tried to simplify it and use terminology that would appeal to everyone. If I was discussing the idea with a fellow philosopher, I would of course be more inclined to discuss things relating to Heidegger's phenomenology and all of that, but I felt it more appropriate to relate Heidegger's ideas to more accessible concepts and keep it as simple as possible, avoiding all of that background discussion. I expect therefore that anyone familiar with Heidegger would think that the explanation I gave was insufficient and even inaccurate to a degree. Writing for a specific audience is tough sometimes because people outside of the target audience will receive your words differently Now as for your response to the essay itself: I don't think I ever said that Heidegger believes the Greeks or their language to be inherently smarter/better than moderns or anything like that. I'm not sure why you are getting that impression. In fact I pretty clearly said that the reason he believes the Greeks were closer to the essence of being was because they were the only people actually investigating the question according to him, and as Heidegger says, the only being who could think of the question of Being is a being for whom Being is important. It was because the Greeks were the only people who were actively thinking about the question of Being that Heidegger believes their language to be closer to it. I may not explain this in-depth in my essay, but I do not overlook it either. See paragraph 8. I do discuss this a little bit. If you believe my discussion of this to be insufficient, you might be right, but keep in mind I'm not writing this for an audience of scholars, and this is not the kind of work that I would try to publish. These are just short little essays where I think out loud a bit. So, if you consider yourself to be a Heidegger scholar of sorts, then it would make sense if you felt my writing to be a bit shallow or something like that. Now this may be the fault of my poor writing here, but I do not believe you understood what I was actually saying about Heidegger's conception of language. When a reader does not understand what a writer is trying to say, it is often the fault of the writer himself for not being clear enough, so I won't fault you for this, but I think you assumed too much about my ideas and ended up with an inaccurate impression of me. you said this, maybe i misinterpreted it He does clearly say, though, that the ancient Greek thinkers had better insight into the essences of things, so their language is best suited to be referenced as a starting point for thinking the truth of Being and whatnot in any case i'd really be surprised to find that your understanding of heidegger is adequate and you just left out a lot of things you knew in this essay. for instance, you use the japanese language as an example but don't discuss what heidegger himself had to say about japanese (in e.g. a dialogue on language). additionally, in the same place, i get the impression you don't know that heidegger thought that only western (that is, post-greek) society has history proper and is the only place Being with a capital B shows up. for instance, you say However, we must remember that Heidegger does not seek to look into the essence of German building and German dwelling, but to examine the essence of building and dwelling in general.
and i don't think your discussion is insufficient, or at least i wouldn't see any point in making that utterance. i think that you're expressing a legitimate qualm with heidegger's method, but this kind of a half-opinion piece about it shows a kind of stilted thinking that isn't going to do you much. your disagreements with his method might be put into a slightly more precise form, but i think that if you wanted to deal with heidegger philosophically, and not as a linguistics student brushing past his work might, you would take the issue you had with this method and see how it fits into his thought as a whole. in studying Dead White philosophers, i don't think the aim is ever to determine if they were right or wrong (because they were all wrong). take a sentence from your essay. Most importantly, it is unclear whether or not language really can contain insight into the essences of real-world things. now you obviously know that not much is actually said by this. imagine if someone writing on kant said "it is unclear whether or not we really do have a faculty for making synthetic a priori judgments." this might be an expression of a particular sympathy i have, but i don't think i do myself much philosophical good by construing a couple quotes by a modern neuroscientist to be contradicting kant. of course it might just not matter to you whether your thinking w/r/t any given philosopher does you any good, but i think philosophy would be a substantial(ly larger) waste of time if it consisted only in reckoning up statements by dead men who said Being and Truth a lot and seeing whether they were true or false Well for the first quote, I think this was just poorly written on my part. I didn't really choose my words carefully here. What I meant by that is that since the essences of things ultimately stem from the essence of Being, and since the Greeks were the only people interested in the question of Being, they have (according to Heidegger) greater insight into the essence of Being and by extension the essences of things. Of course, this may be a bit careless for me to say since Heidegger doesn't really like it when people lose sight of Being by becoming too preoccupied with beings. He might roll over in his grave if he read what I wrote As for the next quote you pulled about German building and German dwelling vs. building and dwelling in general, I believe this is very true and I stand by what I wrote. While it's true that Heidegger doesn't much care for languages outside of Western culture, this does not mean he thinks that the essences of things found in Europe are different from the essences of the same things found in Asia. He is looking into the essences of building and dwelling as they are for everyone, it's just that he does not care much for what other languages have to say about building and dwelling and only considers Western history/language in his pursuit of this. This is what I'm really arguing against, I guess. greeks did not have greater insight into the essence of being. the pre-socratics had a special relationship to being, but they failed to think it properly (because this wasn't their task, according to marty). heidegger is specifically doing something the greeks did not and could not do, which is to ground an investigation of being on the ontological difference and to think the nature of aletheia. greek language is not worth investigating because the greeks were more in tune with being or something (and certainly they might have been); greek language is worth investigating because our own concepts and understanding of being are grounded on greek metaphysics, and a destruction has to be done to take these greek terms into their primordial ground (which ground was never and could never be explored by greek thinkers). i think it's very easy to establish the case that heidegger thought that western society was privileged, and that the essences of things here really are different. first of all, H says that true history is only the history of being. and what does the history of being consist of? western (i.e. greek -> latin -> german) metaphysics. heidegger has a bigger or smaller set of different understandings of being, and they are all centered around the words of western thinkers. there's physis and poeisis and ens creatum and appetitio et perceptio and will to power, but there is definitely nothing from a japanese or an indian thinker. metaphysics from anaximander up to nietzsche has exhausted all its essential possibilities, and none of these essential possibilities were seen outside of western culture. and you've already conceded that the essences of things stem from the essence of being. if the essence of being is something that changes along with (or, more precisely,, constitutes) western history, then why wouldn't the essence of things also be something that changes along with western history? have you read the thing, or any of his exposition on holderlin? i'll quote a little something from the thing that's pretty relevant
The jug's essential nature, its presencing, so experienced and thought of in these terms, is what we call thing. We are now thinking this word by way of the gathering-appropriating staying of the fourfold. At the same time we recall the Old High German word thing. This reference to the history of language could easily tempt us to misunderstand the way in which we are now thinking of the nature of the thing. It might look as though the nature of the thing as we are now thinking of it had been, so to speak, thoughtlessly poked out of the accidentally encountered meaning of the Old High German thing. The suspicion arises that the understanding of the nature of the thingness that we are here trying to reach may be based on the accidents of an etymological game. The notion becomes established and is already current that, instead of giving thought to essential matters, we are here merely using the dictionary.
this too is worth reading The consecrated libation is what our word for a strong outpouring flow, "gush," really designates: gift and sacrifice.
"Gush," Middle English guschen> gosshen—cf. German Guss> giessen—is the Greek cheein, the Indoeuropean ghu. It means to offer in sacrifice. To pour a gush, when it is achieved in its essence, thought through with sufficient generosity, and genuinely uttered, is to donate, to offer in sacrifice, and hence to give. It is only for this reason that the pouring of the gush, once its nature withers, can become a mere pouring in and pouring out, until it finally decays into the dispensing of liquor at the bar. unless you have some special reason to think that building, dwelling, and thinking are all special terms that heidegger wants to talk about outside of the context of western society, it seems clear that he thinks the essences of the smallest things (jugs, pouring) as well as of the largest (being truth) change, and that he is only concerned with investigating the western versions of these essences, and so it is the same too with bauen/wohnen/denken. i think you're underestimating heidegger's eurocentrism by thinking it only extends to a priority in the truthiness of their languages. Ah yes, The Thing. "The thing is a thing insofar as it things." I found this to be most interesting, although it makes me giggle when I read it for some reason. To thing is to come forth as a thing and show its thingness. This really shows how Heidegger thinks about Being and how it relates to the essences of things, and it is an interesting way of thinking about existence. It is important for understanding Heidegger's work because it shows how Heidegger understands the essence of Being as it determines our perception of Being. Rather than light shining upon Being and revealing it to us, the light comes from within Being as a glow. This glow is the truth of Being. This is how I understand it, anyway. As for the Greek thing, I don't think we disagree here. I'm just not wording stuff right I don't think "insight" was the correct word to use. Anyway, you might be right about his Eurocentrism as you describe it, but I guess I just want to give him more credit than that. I don't believe Heidegger wants to say that the "Western versions of these essences" are any different from their actual essences in general. A jug is a jug insofar as it jugs, whether we use the German word for jug or the Japanese word for jug, it still jugs the same way and is therefore a jug with jugness (lol). I think Heidegger knows this, but he just thinks that other languages are not well suited for articulating how a jug comes forth as a jug by jugging. In the end, I don't think Heidegger really believes that any of our current languages are sufficiently equipped to deal with the question of Being. Maybe. I'm not sure, really. As I've said, I have not really given Heidegger as much time (due primarily to a lack of interest) as I have with other thinkers since I've dedicated a large chunk of my time to Kant and Spinoza, for example. I have read a lot of Heidegger's work, but I have not spent time re-reading most of those works for a better understanding like I have with other thinkers, since I don't feel like it's really worthwhile to do so. So maybe I am misinterpreting what Heidegger wants to say. But then again, I think that anyone who claims to have a 100% correct understanding of Heidegger's work is probably lying, just like if anyone tells you that they understand exactly what Freud was trying to say they are definitely lying. But yeah, I would be willing to admit that my understanding of Heidegger is not complete (though nobody's is, I think), and that I may be misinterpreting his ideas. Somebody who has spent more time on Heidegger might have a more accurate interpretation of his thoughts. I do not think I am grossly misunderstanding him, though; at least not to the point where my argument against his use of historical language should be thrown out with the trash. are you aware that heidegger says "language structures the clearing?" it's not like our languages are somehow messed up and improper and they can't get to the real essences of things. the language we use is what determines the way things show up in our world (i.e. their essences). a jug is a jug because of the language we use surrounding it, not because of some prior reason that might or might not be shown clearly by the language we use. i really don't know why you would think heidegger thinks that everything has generalizable essences that exist everywhere. a jug really does thing in different ways in different places. to steal an example from dreyfus, take the example of a cup. now we all know what cups are and what they're for: they hold liquid so you can drink it. but let's look at prototypical cups for modern america and for japan. in america, the best cup is a cheap styrofoam cup because it keeps your drink hot or cold, it's disposable, it's cheap, etc. but in japan, the best cup is an expensive ceramic tea cup, which really isn't as good at regulating temperature and it's a lot of work to maintain and you have to be careful with it. now the essences of these cups are different: the essence of the cup is not what is general to them, but the specific way they show up in the world. in america, a cup simply shows up as a different thing, has a different bearing in the world, is something else than in japan. where do you get the impression that heidegger thinks essences are totally generalizable over all the world and all time, and why do you think heidegger sees our current languages as inadequate? like what is your textual basis for those beliefs? Well, as I admitted earlier, I haven't spent much time re-reading Heidegger like I would do for other thinkers. There are two consequences of this: First, it is probable that my initial reading of Heidegger gave me an impression of Heidegger which is not entirely accurate or complete. Second, though, if you ask me to go back and start citing stuff again it's going to give me a headache lol. I have to kind of dive back into some texts that I've only read once and scan through them to find what I'm looking for. I can point to a few things, but as my interest in Heidegger does not offer sufficient motivation for doing so, I probably will not be able to go back and find all of the evidence I need to show where I got these impressions. But, I guess I can try. I'll just pull one or two excerpts for each of your two questions and call it good. You can tell me how I'm misinterpreting them I guess :D. So where do I get the impression that he thinks essences are generalizable over all the world etc? First, I guess when I think of the essence of a thing, I think of its essential nature as itself rather than what an individual language might assign to it or interpret from it. Heidegger in The Way to Language: What unfolds essentially in language is saying as pointing. It's showing does not culminate in a system of signs. Rather, all signs arise from a showing in whose realm and for whose purposes they can be signs. However, in view of the well joined structure of the saying, we dare not attribute showing either exclusively or definitively to human doing. Self-showing as appearing characterizes the coming to presence or withdrawal to absence of every manner and degree of thing present. Even when showing is accomplished by means of our saying, such showing or referring is preceded by a thing's letting itself be shown. To me, this sounds like the thing is what it is because it is. This idea of self-showing is what makes me feel like individual things have essences which show themselves when a thing comes to presence as a thing by thinging. Since the thing showing itself as a thing does not speak a language, I assume that its thingness is independent of language, and language serves to point (by saying) to the essence of a thing as it comes to light on its own. When I imagine a thing letting itself be shown, I don't imagine the thing thinking about where it is and what language the people speak in the area. It appears as it is because it is. We notice it, and language points to what we notice about it. Maybe. Clearly you think I'm interpreting this incorrectly, and since I'm assuming you are more comfortable with Heidegger than I am, I would say you might be right. As for why I get the impression that Heidegger thinks language has been corrupted over time or misused so that the original meanings of things have been lost: Well, there's this, from The Way to Language: There is no such thing as a natural language, a language that would be the language of a human nature at hand in itself and without its own destiny. Every language is historical, also in cases where human beings know nothing of the discipline of history in the modern European sense. Nor is the language as information the sole language itself. Rather, it is historical in the sense of, and written within the limits set by, the current age. Our age begins nothing new, but only brings to utter culmination something quite old, something already prescribed in modernity. So here I think what he's saying is that everything in the language of the current age has its roots in the language of the ancients. This tells me there is little of value to be found in our current language that cannot be found in its ancient counterpart. And another excerpt from Building Dwelling Thinking: That language in a way retracts the proper meaning of the word bauen, which is dwelling, is evidence of the original one of these meanings; for with the essential words of language, what they genuinely say easily falls into oblivion in favor of foreground meanings. Man has hardly yet pondered the mystery of this process. Language withdraws from man its simple yet high speech. But its primal call does not thereby become incapable of speech; it merely falls silent. Man, though, fails to heed this silence. Combining this with the previous quote, it would seem since the language of the current age has its roots in the language of the ancients (as every language is historical), these foreground meanings which take the place of what language genuinely says are what I interpret to be the meanings of words in the current age. How we currently use the words exiles the original meanings into oblivion? I dunno. What do you think? Like I said, these are just a couple little excerpts I ripped out, and they are not the only thing I'm going on. But go ahead and tell me how I'm horribly misunderstanding them. I can't wait Edit: This isn't sarcasm. I actually want to hear it. okay, so as for essences. this isn't definitive but i'll cite a little something from origin of the work of art
To submit to this displacement means: to transform our accustomed ties to world and to earth and henceforth to restrain all usual doing and prizing, knowing and looking, in order to stay within the truth that is happening in the work. Only the restraint of this staying lets what is created be the work that it is. This letting the work be a work we call the preserving of the work.
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However, if a work does not find preservers, does not at once find them such as respond to the truth happening in the work, this does not at all mean that the work may also be a work without preservers.
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Preserving the work, as knowing, is a sober standing-within the extraordinary awesomeness of the truth that is happening in the work.
this is meant to counter your quote from the way to language. H doesn't think works of art can just be what they are by standing there in a museum. they have to be preserved, which means a specific human activity has to take place, in order for them to be what they are. it's obviously another move for me to say that what these things are is variable and changes, but there's plenty of ground for that too. marty says that truth occurs as the struggle between earth and world, truth is dynamic, truth is a fluctuating essence, etc. it would be strange if truth changed but the being of beings didn't. or this from discourse on thinking From this arises a completely new relation of man to the world and his place in it. The world now appears as an object open to the attacks of calculative thought...Nature becomes a gigantic gasoline station, an energy source for modern technology and industry. nature has changed what it is because of modern man's relation to the world. nature becomes a gasoline station, not because nature was always all along really a gasoline station, or because nature is really not a gasoline station and we're stupid and covering up its real essence, but because nature's essence is dependent on man's relation to the world. with my second question you answered something i didn't ask. the original meanings of things have certainly been lost. but i asked you this: "why do you think heidegger sees our current languages as inadequate?" which could have been continued "sees our current languages as inadequate for describing the true essences of things?" i've never seen H say anything like "german is woefully inadequate for expressing this concept i've found." why do you think he sticks with the primordial and simple words like building, dwelling, thinking, thing, etc.? why would he continue to use these simple words when modern german is simply not able to really describe the essences of things? man's relation to language is what is lacking, not language itself Well, with the essences bit, I'm still not quite convinced. You introduced your quote to "counter" my quote, but that really just tells me that Heidegger says two different things which counter each other. I was actually hoping you could tell me why the quote I highlighted does not mean what I think it means. Now I'm just seeing inconsistencies within Heidegger's own thinking perhaps, and that makes things kind of icky to deal with in my head. Maybe you could help me out with that? And with the language thing, I think the way you said it is probably way better than how I said it. Man's relationship with language in the current age is inadequate. It's not that the language itself is inadequate. That makes more sense. Still, though, if modern German is completely adequate for expression (though Heidegger does say that we have to move on from using language as a mere means of expression, so I'm not quite sure if this is the right word to be using here. Maybe showing?), then it is a bit odd to me that Heidegger finds it necessary to go back to old High German roots and what not in order to show the essences of things like building and dwelling. It seems to me that he's trying to say that the relationship between building and dwelling is not properly shown in modern German, which is why he has to go back to old High German in order to show that relationship. This is why I get the feeling he finds modern language inadequate, and that we've strayed away from the original and proper meanings of things. I dunno. I mean, if modern German was adequate, then the old meanings of building and dwelling (and by extension the relationship between them that was shown in the old language) shouldn't matter, should it? If modern language is adequate, there should be no need to go back into the history of the language and show old connections that no longer seem to exist in modern language. Does that make sense?
alright, i'll quote your quote from the way to language again so i can interpret it the way i see it.
What unfolds essentially in language is saying as pointing. It's showing does not culminate in a system of signs. Rather, all signs arise from a showing in whose realm and for whose purposes they can be signs. However, in view of the well joined structure of the saying, we dare not attribute showing either exclusively or definitively to human doing. Self-showing as appearing characterizes the coming to presence or withdrawal to absence of every manner and degree of thing present. Even when showing is accomplished by means of our saying, such showing or referring is preceded by a thing's letting itself be shown.
what unfolds essentially in language is saying as pointing (to things who come into the world based on the understanding of being they are present in). its showing does not culminate in a system of signs (that is, language's showing isn't maximized by being a self-contained system of things that refer to things out in the world). rather, all signs arise from a showing in whose realm and for whose purposes they can be signs (so signs are words, which means that signs arise from a showing [this showing is the showing itself of things, or rather the things letting themselves be shown, their making-themselves-accessible], and they are only signs within that realm [so words only work as signs within the realm {and this realm is something that gets opened up by certain human practices, it isn't existing forever in the background} of the showing they refer to]). however, in view of the well joined structure of the saying (saying's structure is indeed well joined to refer to the things that are shown), we dare not attribute showing either exclusively or definitively to human doing (this is the crux of the matter, i think. this looks like heidegger is saying "humans have nothing to do with how things are showing," but the only reason he needs to put this hedge in is to mark his view off of the more modern view that sees language as a tool. humans are responsible for saying, but humans are what language speaks through, or they're the site of being. humans don't control being and determine it however they please, but they do play a crucial role in shepherding and preserving what is shown). self-showing as appearing characterizes the coming to presence or withdrawal to absence of every manner and degree of thing present. even when showing is accomplished by means of our saying, such showing or referring is preceded by a thing's letting itself be shown. (okay, so there is a background structure set up by language that allows certain things to be shown and other things not to be. to be sure, we do show some things when we say words, but this showing is always preceded by this thing's letting itself be shown. and the thing does not let itself by shown through some arbitrary process where random things show themselves how they are and other things close themselves off. rather, the background of social practices and the current understanding of being set up a realm wherein certain things can show themselves. what lets itself be shown is not a matter of what objects happen to suddenly spring into action for no reason, but rather is dependent on what can be shown based on the practices we have at the time. for instance, the gods have withdrawn into absence not because gods don't really exist, but because our current practices aren't set up so that the gods could become present)
so the language stuff is more subtle at this point. heidegger goes back into these old roots to show meanings that have gotten paved over in our modern usage of the words, but which really are still there. now our modern usages of words are defunct and "worn-out," but this doesn't mean that our language can't describe being. somehow the originary concepts are buried in our words for H. so if we trace our words back, we can sometimes see these originary concepts. but this doesn't mean that the old words themselves describe being perfectly. if moderns reappropriated some fundamental past word, say aletheia, it isn't like in using that word being would suddenly show itself to them. something like a real experience with language is necessary for that, and this experience is not going to come about through any dumb change in vocabulary.
so there's a sense in which our language is worn-out and defective, and the old language is productive and glowing. but this doesn't mean that the problem lies in our language: our language preserves, i think, all the concepts that are shown more clearly in the old language, but our usage covers these up. but our language doesn't cover up these concepts just randomly, because it's stupid and dumb. our language's lack of connection with things like the greek sense of truth and being is due to our own lack of connection with those things. or rather these two are the same phenomenon. it's neither the case that a really good investigation into being will suddenly change our language's connection with it nor that using a language that accurately expresses all our fundamental concepts will give us a good grasp of these (and what's at hand here isn't an intellectual grasp). it simply wouldn't make sense to speak of a people who were really in tune with Being but had a defective language for expressing it, or of a people who had a really great language for talking about Being but failed to do so because of their own lack of connection with it.
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On June 12 2013 12:28 Lixler wrote:Show nested quote +On June 12 2013 09:20 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 12 2013 08:43 Lixler wrote:On June 12 2013 06:54 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 12 2013 02:38 Lixler wrote:On June 11 2013 14:00 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 13:01 Lixler wrote:On June 11 2013 12:11 MichaelDonovan wrote:On June 11 2013 11:40 Lixler wrote:On June 11 2013 11:09 MichaelDonovan wrote:[quote] Thanks for your response. Well, to start with your response to my description of essence for Heidegger, I described it that way in an attempt to communicate the idea to somebody who claims to have "no idea about philosophy." This is why I tried to simplify it and use terminology that would appeal to everyone. If I was discussing the idea with a fellow philosopher, I would of course be more inclined to discuss things relating to Heidegger's phenomenology and all of that, but I felt it more appropriate to relate Heidegger's ideas to more accessible concepts and keep it as simple as possible, avoiding all of that background discussion. I expect therefore that anyone familiar with Heidegger would think that the explanation I gave was insufficient and even inaccurate to a degree. Writing for a specific audience is tough sometimes because people outside of the target audience will receive your words differently Now as for your response to the essay itself: I don't think I ever said that Heidegger believes the Greeks or their language to be inherently smarter/better than moderns or anything like that. I'm not sure why you are getting that impression. In fact I pretty clearly said that the reason he believes the Greeks were closer to the essence of being was because they were the only people actually investigating the question according to him, and as Heidegger says, the only being who could think of the question of Being is a being for whom Being is important. It was because the Greeks were the only people who were actively thinking about the question of Being that Heidegger believes their language to be closer to it. I may not explain this in-depth in my essay, but I do not overlook it either. See paragraph 8. I do discuss this a little bit. If you believe my discussion of this to be insufficient, you might be right, but keep in mind I'm not writing this for an audience of scholars, and this is not the kind of work that I would try to publish. These are just short little essays where I think out loud a bit. So, if you consider yourself to be a Heidegger scholar of sorts, then it would make sense if you felt my writing to be a bit shallow or something like that. Now this may be the fault of my poor writing here, but I do not believe you understood what I was actually saying about Heidegger's conception of language. When a reader does not understand what a writer is trying to say, it is often the fault of the writer himself for not being clear enough, so I won't fault you for this, but I think you assumed too much about my ideas and ended up with an inaccurate impression of me. you said this, maybe i misinterpreted it He does clearly say, though, that the ancient Greek thinkers had better insight into the essences of things, so their language is best suited to be referenced as a starting point for thinking the truth of Being and whatnot in any case i'd really be surprised to find that your understanding of heidegger is adequate and you just left out a lot of things you knew in this essay. for instance, you use the japanese language as an example but don't discuss what heidegger himself had to say about japanese (in e.g. a dialogue on language). additionally, in the same place, i get the impression you don't know that heidegger thought that only western (that is, post-greek) society has history proper and is the only place Being with a capital B shows up. for instance, you say However, we must remember that Heidegger does not seek to look into the essence of German building and German dwelling, but to examine the essence of building and dwelling in general.
and i don't think your discussion is insufficient, or at least i wouldn't see any point in making that utterance. i think that you're expressing a legitimate qualm with heidegger's method, but this kind of a half-opinion piece about it shows a kind of stilted thinking that isn't going to do you much. your disagreements with his method might be put into a slightly more precise form, but i think that if you wanted to deal with heidegger philosophically, and not as a linguistics student brushing past his work might, you would take the issue you had with this method and see how it fits into his thought as a whole. in studying Dead White philosophers, i don't think the aim is ever to determine if they were right or wrong (because they were all wrong). take a sentence from your essay. Most importantly, it is unclear whether or not language really can contain insight into the essences of real-world things. now you obviously know that not much is actually said by this. imagine if someone writing on kant said "it is unclear whether or not we really do have a faculty for making synthetic a priori judgments." this might be an expression of a particular sympathy i have, but i don't think i do myself much philosophical good by construing a couple quotes by a modern neuroscientist to be contradicting kant. of course it might just not matter to you whether your thinking w/r/t any given philosopher does you any good, but i think philosophy would be a substantial(ly larger) waste of time if it consisted only in reckoning up statements by dead men who said Being and Truth a lot and seeing whether they were true or false Well for the first quote, I think this was just poorly written on my part. I didn't really choose my words carefully here. What I meant by that is that since the essences of things ultimately stem from the essence of Being, and since the Greeks were the only people interested in the question of Being, they have (according to Heidegger) greater insight into the essence of Being and by extension the essences of things. Of course, this may be a bit careless for me to say since Heidegger doesn't really like it when people lose sight of Being by becoming too preoccupied with beings. He might roll over in his grave if he read what I wrote As for the next quote you pulled about German building and German dwelling vs. building and dwelling in general, I believe this is very true and I stand by what I wrote. While it's true that Heidegger doesn't much care for languages outside of Western culture, this does not mean he thinks that the essences of things found in Europe are different from the essences of the same things found in Asia. He is looking into the essences of building and dwelling as they are for everyone, it's just that he does not care much for what other languages have to say about building and dwelling and only considers Western history/language in his pursuit of this. This is what I'm really arguing against, I guess. greeks did not have greater insight into the essence of being. the pre-socratics had a special relationship to being, but they failed to think it properly (because this wasn't their task, according to marty). heidegger is specifically doing something the greeks did not and could not do, which is to ground an investigation of being on the ontological difference and to think the nature of aletheia. greek language is not worth investigating because the greeks were more in tune with being or something (and certainly they might have been); greek language is worth investigating because our own concepts and understanding of being are grounded on greek metaphysics, and a destruction has to be done to take these greek terms into their primordial ground (which ground was never and could never be explored by greek thinkers). i think it's very easy to establish the case that heidegger thought that western society was privileged, and that the essences of things here really are different. first of all, H says that true history is only the history of being. and what does the history of being consist of? western (i.e. greek -> latin -> german) metaphysics. heidegger has a bigger or smaller set of different understandings of being, and they are all centered around the words of western thinkers. there's physis and poeisis and ens creatum and appetitio et perceptio and will to power, but there is definitely nothing from a japanese or an indian thinker. metaphysics from anaximander up to nietzsche has exhausted all its essential possibilities, and none of these essential possibilities were seen outside of western culture. and you've already conceded that the essences of things stem from the essence of being. if the essence of being is something that changes along with (or, more precisely,, constitutes) western history, then why wouldn't the essence of things also be something that changes along with western history? have you read the thing, or any of his exposition on holderlin? i'll quote a little something from the thing that's pretty relevant
The jug's essential nature, its presencing, so experienced and thought of in these terms, is what we call thing. We are now thinking this word by way of the gathering-appropriating staying of the fourfold. At the same time we recall the Old High German word thing. This reference to the history of language could easily tempt us to misunderstand the way in which we are now thinking of the nature of the thing. It might look as though the nature of the thing as we are now thinking of it had been, so to speak, thoughtlessly poked out of the accidentally encountered meaning of the Old High German thing. The suspicion arises that the understanding of the nature of the thingness that we are here trying to reach may be based on the accidents of an etymological game. The notion becomes established and is already current that, instead of giving thought to essential matters, we are here merely using the dictionary.
this too is worth reading The consecrated libation is what our word for a strong outpouring flow, "gush," really designates: gift and sacrifice.
"Gush," Middle English guschen> gosshen—cf. German Guss> giessen—is the Greek cheein, the Indoeuropean ghu. It means to offer in sacrifice. To pour a gush, when it is achieved in its essence, thought through with sufficient generosity, and genuinely uttered, is to donate, to offer in sacrifice, and hence to give. It is only for this reason that the pouring of the gush, once its nature withers, can become a mere pouring in and pouring out, until it finally decays into the dispensing of liquor at the bar. unless you have some special reason to think that building, dwelling, and thinking are all special terms that heidegger wants to talk about outside of the context of western society, it seems clear that he thinks the essences of the smallest things (jugs, pouring) as well as of the largest (being truth) change, and that he is only concerned with investigating the western versions of these essences, and so it is the same too with bauen/wohnen/denken. i think you're underestimating heidegger's eurocentrism by thinking it only extends to a priority in the truthiness of their languages. Ah yes, The Thing. "The thing is a thing insofar as it things." I found this to be most interesting, although it makes me giggle when I read it for some reason. To thing is to come forth as a thing and show its thingness. This really shows how Heidegger thinks about Being and how it relates to the essences of things, and it is an interesting way of thinking about existence. It is important for understanding Heidegger's work because it shows how Heidegger understands the essence of Being as it determines our perception of Being. Rather than light shining upon Being and revealing it to us, the light comes from within Being as a glow. This glow is the truth of Being. This is how I understand it, anyway. As for the Greek thing, I don't think we disagree here. I'm just not wording stuff right I don't think "insight" was the correct word to use. Anyway, you might be right about his Eurocentrism as you describe it, but I guess I just want to give him more credit than that. I don't believe Heidegger wants to say that the "Western versions of these essences" are any different from their actual essences in general. A jug is a jug insofar as it jugs, whether we use the German word for jug or the Japanese word for jug, it still jugs the same way and is therefore a jug with jugness (lol). I think Heidegger knows this, but he just thinks that other languages are not well suited for articulating how a jug comes forth as a jug by jugging. In the end, I don't think Heidegger really believes that any of our current languages are sufficiently equipped to deal with the question of Being. Maybe. I'm not sure, really. As I've said, I have not really given Heidegger as much time (due primarily to a lack of interest) as I have with other thinkers since I've dedicated a large chunk of my time to Kant and Spinoza, for example. I have read a lot of Heidegger's work, but I have not spent time re-reading most of those works for a better understanding like I have with other thinkers, since I don't feel like it's really worthwhile to do so. So maybe I am misinterpreting what Heidegger wants to say. But then again, I think that anyone who claims to have a 100% correct understanding of Heidegger's work is probably lying, just like if anyone tells you that they understand exactly what Freud was trying to say they are definitely lying. But yeah, I would be willing to admit that my understanding of Heidegger is not complete (though nobody's is, I think), and that I may be misinterpreting his ideas. Somebody who has spent more time on Heidegger might have a more accurate interpretation of his thoughts. I do not think I am grossly misunderstanding him, though; at least not to the point where my argument against his use of historical language should be thrown out with the trash. are you aware that heidegger says "language structures the clearing?" it's not like our languages are somehow messed up and improper and they can't get to the real essences of things. the language we use is what determines the way things show up in our world (i.e. their essences). a jug is a jug because of the language we use surrounding it, not because of some prior reason that might or might not be shown clearly by the language we use. i really don't know why you would think heidegger thinks that everything has generalizable essences that exist everywhere. a jug really does thing in different ways in different places. to steal an example from dreyfus, take the example of a cup. now we all know what cups are and what they're for: they hold liquid so you can drink it. but let's look at prototypical cups for modern america and for japan. in america, the best cup is a cheap styrofoam cup because it keeps your drink hot or cold, it's disposable, it's cheap, etc. but in japan, the best cup is an expensive ceramic tea cup, which really isn't as good at regulating temperature and it's a lot of work to maintain and you have to be careful with it. now the essences of these cups are different: the essence of the cup is not what is general to them, but the specific way they show up in the world. in america, a cup simply shows up as a different thing, has a different bearing in the world, is something else than in japan. where do you get the impression that heidegger thinks essences are totally generalizable over all the world and all time, and why do you think heidegger sees our current languages as inadequate? like what is your textual basis for those beliefs? Well, as I admitted earlier, I haven't spent much time re-reading Heidegger like I would do for other thinkers. There are two consequences of this: First, it is probable that my initial reading of Heidegger gave me an impression of Heidegger which is not entirely accurate or complete. Second, though, if you ask me to go back and start citing stuff again it's going to give me a headache lol. I have to kind of dive back into some texts that I've only read once and scan through them to find what I'm looking for. I can point to a few things, but as my interest in Heidegger does not offer sufficient motivation for doing so, I probably will not be able to go back and find all of the evidence I need to show where I got these impressions. But, I guess I can try. I'll just pull one or two excerpts for each of your two questions and call it good. You can tell me how I'm misinterpreting them I guess :D. So where do I get the impression that he thinks essences are generalizable over all the world etc? First, I guess when I think of the essence of a thing, I think of its essential nature as itself rather than what an individual language might assign to it or interpret from it. Heidegger in The Way to Language: What unfolds essentially in language is saying as pointing. It's showing does not culminate in a system of signs. Rather, all signs arise from a showing in whose realm and for whose purposes they can be signs. However, in view of the well joined structure of the saying, we dare not attribute showing either exclusively or definitively to human doing. Self-showing as appearing characterizes the coming to presence or withdrawal to absence of every manner and degree of thing present. Even when showing is accomplished by means of our saying, such showing or referring is preceded by a thing's letting itself be shown. To me, this sounds like the thing is what it is because it is. This idea of self-showing is what makes me feel like individual things have essences which show themselves when a thing comes to presence as a thing by thinging. Since the thing showing itself as a thing does not speak a language, I assume that its thingness is independent of language, and language serves to point (by saying) to the essence of a thing as it comes to light on its own. When I imagine a thing letting itself be shown, I don't imagine the thing thinking about where it is and what language the people speak in the area. It appears as it is because it is. We notice it, and language points to what we notice about it. Maybe. Clearly you think I'm interpreting this incorrectly, and since I'm assuming you are more comfortable with Heidegger than I am, I would say you might be right. As for why I get the impression that Heidegger thinks language has been corrupted over time or misused so that the original meanings of things have been lost: Well, there's this, from The Way to Language: There is no such thing as a natural language, a language that would be the language of a human nature at hand in itself and without its own destiny. Every language is historical, also in cases where human beings know nothing of the discipline of history in the modern European sense. Nor is the language as information the sole language itself. Rather, it is historical in the sense of, and written within the limits set by, the current age. Our age begins nothing new, but only brings to utter culmination something quite old, something already prescribed in modernity. So here I think what he's saying is that everything in the language of the current age has its roots in the language of the ancients. This tells me there is little of value to be found in our current language that cannot be found in its ancient counterpart. And another excerpt from Building Dwelling Thinking: That language in a way retracts the proper meaning of the word bauen, which is dwelling, is evidence of the original one of these meanings; for with the essential words of language, what they genuinely say easily falls into oblivion in favor of foreground meanings. Man has hardly yet pondered the mystery of this process. Language withdraws from man its simple yet high speech. But its primal call does not thereby become incapable of speech; it merely falls silent. Man, though, fails to heed this silence. Combining this with the previous quote, it would seem since the language of the current age has its roots in the language of the ancients (as every language is historical), these foreground meanings which take the place of what language genuinely says are what I interpret to be the meanings of words in the current age. How we currently use the words exiles the original meanings into oblivion? I dunno. What do you think? Like I said, these are just a couple little excerpts I ripped out, and they are not the only thing I'm going on. But go ahead and tell me how I'm horribly misunderstanding them. I can't wait Edit: This isn't sarcasm. I actually want to hear it. okay, so as for essences. this isn't definitive but i'll cite a little something from origin of the work of art
To submit to this displacement means: to transform our accustomed ties to world and to earth and henceforth to restrain all usual doing and prizing, knowing and looking, in order to stay within the truth that is happening in the work. Only the restraint of this staying lets what is created be the work that it is. This letting the work be a work we call the preserving of the work.
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However, if a work does not find preservers, does not at once find them such as respond to the truth happening in the work, this does not at all mean that the work may also be a work without preservers.
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Preserving the work, as knowing, is a sober standing-within the extraordinary awesomeness of the truth that is happening in the work.
this is meant to counter your quote from the way to language. H doesn't think works of art can just be what they are by standing there in a museum. they have to be preserved, which means a specific human activity has to take place, in order for them to be what they are. it's obviously another move for me to say that what these things are is variable and changes, but there's plenty of ground for that too. marty says that truth occurs as the struggle between earth and world, truth is dynamic, truth is a fluctuating essence, etc. it would be strange if truth changed but the being of beings didn't. or this from discourse on thinking From this arises a completely new relation of man to the world and his place in it. The world now appears as an object open to the attacks of calculative thought...Nature becomes a gigantic gasoline station, an energy source for modern technology and industry. nature has changed what it is because of modern man's relation to the world. nature becomes a gasoline station, not because nature was always all along really a gasoline station, or because nature is really not a gasoline station and we're stupid and covering up its real essence, but because nature's essence is dependent on man's relation to the world. with my second question you answered something i didn't ask. the original meanings of things have certainly been lost. but i asked you this: "why do you think heidegger sees our current languages as inadequate?" which could have been continued "sees our current languages as inadequate for describing the true essences of things?" i've never seen H say anything like "german is woefully inadequate for expressing this concept i've found." why do you think he sticks with the primordial and simple words like building, dwelling, thinking, thing, etc.? why would he continue to use these simple words when modern german is simply not able to really describe the essences of things? man's relation to language is what is lacking, not language itself Well, with the essences bit, I'm still not quite convinced. You introduced your quote to "counter" my quote, but that really just tells me that Heidegger says two different things which counter each other. I was actually hoping you could tell me why the quote I highlighted does not mean what I think it means. Now I'm just seeing inconsistencies within Heidegger's own thinking perhaps, and that makes things kind of icky to deal with in my head. Maybe you could help me out with that? And with the language thing, I think the way you said it is probably way better than how I said it. Man's relationship with language in the current age is inadequate. It's not that the language itself is inadequate. That makes more sense. Still, though, if modern German is completely adequate for expression (though Heidegger does say that we have to move on from using language as a mere means of expression, so I'm not quite sure if this is the right word to be using here. Maybe showing?), then it is a bit odd to me that Heidegger finds it necessary to go back to old High German roots and what not in order to show the essences of things like building and dwelling. It seems to me that he's trying to say that the relationship between building and dwelling is not properly shown in modern German, which is why he has to go back to old High German in order to show that relationship. This is why I get the feeling he finds modern language inadequate, and that we've strayed away from the original and proper meanings of things. I dunno. I mean, if modern German was adequate, then the old meanings of building and dwelling (and by extension the relationship between them that was shown in the old language) shouldn't matter, should it? If modern language is adequate, there should be no need to go back into the history of the language and show old connections that no longer seem to exist in modern language. Does that make sense? alright, i'll quote your quote from the way to language again so i can interpret it the way i see it. Show nested quote +What unfolds essentially in language is saying as pointing. It's showing does not culminate in a system of signs. Rather, all signs arise from a showing in whose realm and for whose purposes they can be signs. However, in view of the well joined structure of the saying, we dare not attribute showing either exclusively or definitively to human doing. Self-showing as appearing characterizes the coming to presence or withdrawal to absence of every manner and degree of thing present. Even when showing is accomplished by means of our saying, such showing or referring is preceded by a thing's letting itself be shown. what unfolds essentially in language is saying as pointing (to things who come into the world based on the understanding of being they are present in). its showing does not culminate in a system of signs (that is, language's showing isn't maximized by being a self-contained system of things that refer to things out in the world) . rather, all signs arise from a showing in whose realm and for whose purposes they can be signs (so signs are words, which means that signs arise from a showing [this showing is the showing itself of things, or rather the things letting themselves be shown, their making-themselves-accessible], and they are only signs within that realm [so words only work as signs within the realm {and this realm is something that gets opened up by certain human practices, it isn't existing forever in the background} of the showing they refer to]). however, in view of the well joined structure of the saying (saying's structure is indeed well joined to refer to the things that are shown), we dare not attribute showing either exclusively or definitively to human doing (this is the crux of the matter, i think. this looks like heidegger is saying "humans have nothing to do with how things are showing," but the only reason he needs to put this hedge in is to mark his view off of the more modern view that sees language as a tool. humans are responsible for saying, but humans are what language speaks through, or they're the site of being. humans don't control being and determine it however they please, but they do play a crucial role in shepherding and preserving what is shown). self-showing as appearing characterizes the coming to presence or withdrawal to absence of every manner and degree of thing present. even when showing is accomplished by means of our saying, such showing or referring is preceded by a thing's letting itself be shown. (okay, so there is a background structure set up by language that allows certain things to be shown and other things not to be. to be sure, we do show some things when we say words, but this showing is always preceded by this thing's letting itself be shown. and the thing does not let itself by shown through some arbitrary process where random things show themselves how they are and other things close themselves off. rather, the background of social practices and the current understanding of being set up a realm wherein certain things can show themselves. what lets itself be shown is not a matter of what objects happen to suddenly spring into action for no reason, but rather is dependent on what can be shown based on the practices we have at the time. for instance, the gods have withdrawn into absence not because gods don't really exist, but because our current practices aren't set up so that the gods could become present) so the language stuff is more subtle at this point. heidegger goes back into these old roots to show meanings that have gotten paved over in our modern usage of the words, but which really are still there. now our modern usages of words are defunct and "worn-out," but this doesn't mean that our language can't describe being. somehow the originary concepts are buried in our words for H. so if we trace our words back, we can sometimes see these originary concepts. but this doesn't mean that the old words themselves describe being perfectly. if moderns reappropriated some fundamental past word, say aletheia, it isn't like in using that word being would suddenly show itself to them. something like a real experience with language is necessary for that, and this experience is not going to come about through any dumb change in vocabulary. so there's a sense in which our language is worn-out and defective, and the old language is productive and glowing. but this doesn't mean that the problem lies in our language: our language preserves, i think, all the concepts that are shown more clearly in the old language, but our usage covers these up. but our language doesn't cover up these concepts just randomly, because it's stupid and dumb. our language's lack of connection with things like the greek sense of truth and being is due to our own lack of connection with those things. or rather these two are the same phenomenon. it's neither the case that a really good investigation into being will suddenly change our language's connection with it nor that using a language that accurately expresses all our fundamental concepts will give us a good grasp of these (and what's at hand here isn't an intellectual grasp). it simply wouldn't make sense to speak of a people who were really in tune with Being but had a defective language for expressing it, or of a people who had a really great language for talking about Being but failed to do so because of their own lack of connection with it.
This is great man. I love it. I think the way you explain this makes enough sense to me now. It's always fun to read something and interpret it one way, and then listen to somebody else's completely different way of reading it. This has been a productive discussion for me! Thanks for hanging out and answering my questions. This is actually the kind of stuff I hope for when I post these little essays.
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