Andrew Mitchell on Martin Heidegger—Entitled Opinions 10/18/2005

10/18/2005

Andrew Mitchell on Martin Heidegger

Andrew J. Mitchell (Ph. D., Philosophy) is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University with research interests in contemporary continental philosophy, philosophy and literature, and the philosophy of nature and technology. Recent publications include “Heidegger and Terrorism” (Research in Phenomenology 35), “Torture and Photography: Abu Ghraib” (Radical Philosophy Review; forthcoming) and “Fassbinder: The […]

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00:00:00.000	[Music]
00:00:14.500	This is KZSU Stanford.
00:00:18.800	Welcome to entitled opinions. My name is Robert Harrison
00:00:24.800	and we're coming to your live from the Stanford campus.
00:00:28.000	[Music]
00:00:49.000	The growing and unacknowledged anxiety in the face of thinking,
00:00:52.500	no longer allows insight into the oblivion of being,
00:00:55.800	which determines the age. The growing and unacknowledged anxiety in the face of thinking,
00:01:02.300	no longer allows insight into the oblivion of being which determines the age.
00:01:07.800	Martin Heidegger, 1973, three years before he died.
00:01:13.800	Oh, Martin. Oh, mustah. Oh, mustin.
00:01:18.800	If you only knew how complete and total the oblivion of being has become
00:01:22.800	you shuffled off your mortal coil. Oh, holy memory, mother of muse,
00:01:28.800	where are you now and at the hour? Your horrors drove you out of your house
00:01:34.800	and now you ride the wind remembering nothing. It's all just bricks in the wall now.
00:01:43.800	Silence must be heard. Oh, I'm telling you how to spread better.
00:01:52.800	Then I come to winter.
00:01:56.800	[Music]
00:02:10.800	Yes, my friends, if only Heidegger could be with us today.
00:02:15.800	What would he say I wonder, would he be speechless or would he simply declare,
00:02:20.800	"I saw it all coming? I told you what the oblivion of being leads to,
00:02:26.800	the unearthing of the earth, the unwearlding of the world,
00:02:31.800	the devastation of the bonds between people, the setting in place of an absolutely
00:02:36.800	technical state, or better, a biotechnical state, which orders and in frames all things,
00:02:43.800	all available energies and resources, putting them on standing reserve for
00:02:48.800	general distribution and human consumption."
00:02:52.800	I told you that when beings are abandoned by being, they lose their density,
00:02:56.800	their power of resistance, their very thingness and fall prey to
00:03:01.800	objectification, exploitation and manipulation. When being with draws from the world,
00:03:07.800	the world becomes an unworld no longer hospitable to human habitation.
00:03:12.800	Yes, Heidegger may weigh, may well say something like that if he ever returns from the grave,
00:03:19.800	but I have a feeling that even he would be shocked and incredulous at just how monstrous
00:03:25.800	the phenomenon of planetary technicity has become. The machine is everywhere with no way left to rage against it.
00:03:36.800	What's with the doom and gloom, Harrison, you ask?
00:03:41.800	Things are better now than they've ever been looked at objectively. What's all the fuss about you ask?
00:03:47.800	The fuss, my friends, is about our relationship to the earth, about our being at home on the earth.
00:03:54.800	In an interview he gave in 1969 to the German magazine Der Spiegel, Heidegger declared that we presume to control,
00:04:04.800	direct and regulate our technologies, but in fact human beings do not control the inner
00:04:12.800	drive that compels us to amass more and more technical capability and to inframe all beings in an ever-expanding
00:04:21.800	network of circulation and consumption.
00:04:25.800	Technicity in its essence he told his interviewers is something that man does not master by his own power.
00:04:34.800	His interviewers playing dumb asked Heidegger, but what must be mastered in this case? Everything is functioning.
00:04:42.800	More and more electric power companies are being built. Production is up.
00:04:47.800	In highly technologize places of the earth people are well cared for, we are living in a state of prosperity.
00:04:54.800	What really is lacking to us?
00:04:58.800	To which Heidegger answered, I quote, "Everything is functioning."
00:05:02.800	That is precisely what is terrifying. That everything functions. That the functioning propels everything.
00:05:09.800	More and more toward further functioning. And that technicity increasingly dislodges man.
00:05:16.800	And up roots him from the earth.
00:05:20.800	Well, this uprooting is more or less complete in some places, still underway in others,
00:05:26.800	but there is not a place on earth that escapes it.
00:05:31.800	In my humble yet nevertheless entitled opinion,
00:05:34.800	Martin Heidegger is the most important philosopher of the modern era,
00:05:38.800	and it is my distinct pleasure, if that is the right word,
00:05:42.800	to devote the next hour to discussing various aspects of his thought,
00:05:46.800	with a young and brilliant scholar who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Heidegger,
00:05:50.800	and who has translated one of Heidegger's books from German into English.
00:05:55.800	Before I introduce him to you, let me say, and I'm fully aware that my opinion about Heidegger's importance is controversial,
00:06:02.800	and that Heidegger himself remains controversial.
00:06:06.800	I have nothing against putting him on trial.
00:06:09.800	I have both prosecuted and defended him in the past,
00:06:13.800	and one day I'll invite someone to this program who is hostile to Heidegger,
00:06:18.800	and see where the debate might lead.
00:06:20.800	But our objective today is to introduce us to Heidegger,
00:06:25.800	to review the path that his thinking took,
00:06:28.800	and to give us a sense of the kinds of problems his philosophy addressed.
00:06:33.800	I like to squabble as much as the next man,
00:06:37.800	but despite the prevailing dogma among educators today,
00:06:41.800	squabbling is not the best method for coming to terms with the thinkers' thought.
00:06:45.800	In fact, it's one of the worst, so we'll save the squabbling for another time.
00:06:52.800	Alright, as I mentioned, I have with me in the studio a young scholar of Heidegger,
00:06:56.800	his name is Andrew Mitchell, and he teaches here at Stanford in the IHUM program,
00:07:00.800	Andrew, thanks for joining us today.
00:07:04.800	We're going to talk about Heidegger's career,
00:07:09.800	maybe starting from being in time, his first kind of Magnus Opus,
00:07:13.800	and then move on to the later stuff.
00:07:15.800	But Andrew, can you tell our listeners how you got interested in Heidegger in the first place?
00:07:22.800	What drew you to him when you were a student?
00:07:25.800	What drove you also to write a dissertation on him?
00:07:28.800	Well, sure. It started in high school, I would say.
00:07:31.800	It arose out of my interest in philosophy, and my interest in philosophy itself arose through my preoccupation with literature.
00:07:38.800	I was constantly reading Dostyevsky, Kafka, Beckett, absurdists, theater,
00:07:45.800	especially everything that grow press published I would read.
00:07:49.800	And this led me to Nietzsche, Rilke as well.
00:07:54.800	These were two, my first loves, in philosophy and poetry, Nietzsche and Rilke.
00:07:59.800	And through further reading, I've encountered the name Heidegger, Heidegger.
00:08:04.800	And so it seemed to me that I should read Heidegger.
00:08:08.800	I started reading him in English.
00:08:10.800	Yes, certainly.
00:08:11.800	And I was quite enamored, taken with it.
00:08:13.800	I still remember when I first read the essay, "What is Metaphysics in a Library?"
00:08:17.800	And Heidegger asks this question about science.
00:08:20.800	He says that science proceeds in a certain manner, and nothing more,
00:08:25.800	thinks in a certain way, and nothing else, and then he asks, "But what is this nothing?"
00:08:30.800	And when he asked that, the scales fell from my eyes, and I knew I was going to read Heidegger for a long time to come.
00:08:37.800	In reading him, however, I found he was quite hostile to Nietzsche, quite hostile to Rilke.
00:08:44.800	And so coming to terms with that, in a sense, was coming to terms with my own cast.
00:08:50.800	And so, reading Heidegger was, if it's not too cliche to say, "A voyage of self-discovery in some way."
00:08:57.800	I'm not sure I would use the word hostile when it comes to his reading of Rilke and Nietzsche.
00:09:02.800	Clearly, he wants to, for he presumes a stand outside of their thinking or their poeticizing,
00:09:09.800	and to retrieve things that might be unspoken or unthought in them.
00:09:14.800	And I presume that we'll discuss this maybe in the second half of the hour of the way, so much of Heidegger's career is really a rereading of the history of philosophy from his own sort of Heidegger in a way.
00:09:27.800	So, he impressed you enough that you went on to learn German, and did you learn German in order to read Heidegger?
00:09:34.800	Is that the main reason that you...
00:09:36.800	Well, I wouldn't say that. Nietzsche probably, I was quite taken with Nietzsche as a stylist, and German philosophy as a whole, Hegel, Schopenhauer.
00:09:47.800	It seemed that if you wanted to study philosophy, you needed to know German, and so that's what led me to study German.
00:09:55.800	Let's try to give our listeners a sense of... You don't have to agree with me that he is the most important thinker of the modern era, but I think it's relatively uncontroversial that he is an important thinker.
00:10:07.800	Time magazine said, "Vickenschne? Well, it could be. It could be big concern. It could be a bit more than I'd ever go."
00:10:13.800	For us.
00:10:15.800	Let's try to give our listeners a sense of what is momentous about his thinking, starting with being in time, which is a book that you've erupted on the scene of philosophy in Germany in 1926-27, and was really like a bombshell.
00:10:37.800	What was it about that book that had such an impact at the time?
00:10:42.800	Well, I think in being in time, Hädiger moves from what could be considered a more arid phenomenology of Husserl to a conception of life and existence.
00:10:55.800	So, being in time has been taken as a cornerstone of existentialism, though Hädiger himself tries to distance himself from the term.
00:11:06.800	What, being in time added to the philosophical landscape, I think, is a certain persistence in questioning, a devotion to thinking that hadn't been seen beforehand, except perhaps...
00:11:21.800	Well, Kant, Hädiger, he returned philosophy to its roots, I would say, in this thinking of the question of being that he approached in a entirely new way.
00:11:33.800	Okay, let's lay it out. So, in his introduction to being in time, he says that he wants to raise a question that has not been asked since the time of Erus-Odlin Plato, which is what is the meaning of being?
00:11:44.800	That this word that we use all the time in all of our copulas and sentences with the word is that although philosophers have always asked what is the being of beings, or what is the essence of everything that is, Hädiger claims that,
00:12:02.800	the meaning of being, what we mean when we use the word being, or even think of it as the essence of things, is a question that has laid dormant and not raised in the entire tradition of Western philosophy, and he wants to raise it again, and therefore being in time is supposed to be like the first step towards reawakening this question of the meaning of being.
00:12:25.800	But then it takes the form, at least in the first parts, of this massive analysis of one specific being among others, which is what he calls design, a German word, hard to translate into English, but basically means us.
00:12:43.800	It's human existence, design is literally being there, but it's the human being. Why does Hädiger approach the question, the general meaning of being through this intensive analysis of who we are as human beings?
00:12:58.800	Yes.
00:12:59.800	One thing I want to say is a preparatory to answering that question, is that being in time itself is an incomplete work.
00:13:05.800	The text, as we have it, is only a third of what Hädiger projected for the entirety.
00:13:10.800	So to discuss the book is a fragment in some sense, it's an artifact of a particular point in his career, and he abandons it for philosophical reasons.
00:13:23.800	The issue of being as articulated in being in time is formulated around dasain, as you said, and this is because being for him is nothing abstract, nothing general, but always something concrete, we could say.
00:13:42.800	It takes place here, it's for dasain. If there's a meaning to being, that meaning is in relation to dasain, in relation to our existence.
00:13:57.800	And the reason, presumably being that dasain, as if I remember correctly, he says, is the one being whose own being is an issue for it.
00:14:07.800	Exactly.
00:14:08.800	In a way that's not the case, presumably with other sorts of reasons.
00:14:11.800	In stone, for example, being is completely indifferent to it.
00:14:15.800	So as he undertakes the sort of analysis of what he calls the existential structures, namely the kind of universal basic, fundamental structures of dasain, what does he find?
00:14:30.800	Who are we in this existential level of universality?
00:14:36.800	Well, one thing he finds is that we're not always ourselves, or not even most often ourselves, and this is what he refers to as dasman, the they, in the sense that they say this is a good movie.
00:14:51.800	They say you should see that. This impersonal existence he finds to be determinative of our existence.
00:14:58.800	We flee from ourselves, he says, which isn't the complete loss of ourselves, but most of the time we are not ourselves.
00:15:08.800	Yeah, but in order to understand why he says that we have to know what ourselves means to know that we're running away from.
00:15:14.800	What is it that we're running away from? What is dasain when it's in its, what hydro recalls its inauthentic modes of being?
00:15:22.800	As you say, the dasman, the they self, what does inauthentic dasain flee from?
00:15:31.800	Right. And before answering that, I just want to add that it shouldn't be taken as a moral evaluation.
00:15:38.800	No, I understand. Inauthentic doesn't mean inferior in any way.
00:15:42.800	I know hydrocarons are very fond of the first thing every time you talk about authenticity or inauthenticity.
00:15:47.800	The hydrocarons just have to always come down on your head saying these are not moral categories. These are ontological categories.
00:15:54.800	But frankly, being in time is pervaded with a bunch of terms that come out of a kind of moral lexicon.
00:16:01.800	And there is no way that you'll ever convince me that inauthenticity doesn't have some kind of moral overtone. But nevertheless, let's just say it's an ontological category.
00:16:09.800	It's inescapable, you'll agree, though. Yes.
00:16:12.800	Well, then it gets better. So inauthenticity would be simply put understanding yourself on the basis of objects, thinking of yourself as a thing.
00:16:26.800	In a sense, you could say if you believe your life to be completely determined, you're treating yourself as a thing.
00:16:34.800	If you lose yourself in the world, this is almost an Augustinian theme in Heidegger, you're treating yourself as an object.
00:16:43.800	And so this objectification of existence is inauthentic. It's a misunderstanding, a misrecognition of who we are and how we exist.
00:16:53.800	Again, but the question is, who are we? What is the self misunderstanding a misunderstanding of?
00:17:02.800	In other words, I'm trying to get us to talk about what would design in its authenticity consistent that causes us to flee from it and we think what Heidegger calls anxiety or angst.
00:17:17.800	We exist in a completely destabilized, de-substantialized manner. We don't have an essence.
00:17:25.800	This is one of the key theses of being in time that the essence of Daza and lies in its existence, which is to say that our being is nothing that we have, nothing we possess.
00:17:37.800	It's not a predicate, but rather we always have it to be. It's a future in this regard.
00:17:45.800	We always have our being to be. And that absence of an essence, that lack of a pre-established or pre-programmed direction or path can be troubling to people.
00:18:00.800	And, cosm to flee?
00:18:04.800	Here, I think you're approaching, timidly, the whole question of Dazaing's temporality. Let me praise it the way I would put it. Dazaing is not a thing and it doesn't have a being which can be possessed or even conceptualized as such.
00:18:20.800	And to say that Dazaing's essence is in its existence, I understand existence to mean that Dazaing is temporally dynamic, that it's thrown into a world which is not of its own choosing.
00:18:33.800	And once it's thrown into the world, it finds itself projected beyond itself into possibilities.
00:18:42.800	Almost all of Dazaing's, every day activities are projects of some sort or another.
00:18:49.800	As banal is driving to work and you know that you're driving to work in order to get there and you're doing that work in order to make a salary.
00:18:57.800	You make your salary so that your kids can get an education and the final analysis, Dazaing is always finding itself beyond itself temporally in its existence.
00:19:08.800	So there is this whole realm of possibilities that we're projected into.
00:19:13.800	And this is a key point to that Hetiger's notion of the self in being in time shatters the traditional metaphysical notion of a encapsulated subject.
00:19:23.800	This self is already temporally ecstatic, temporally outside of itself.
00:19:29.800	And this outside of itself is its entry into the world that Dazaing exists essentially if we can use that term in the world.
00:19:42.800	Right, let's talk about that because Hetiger says one of the basic existential structures of Dazaing is being in the world.
00:19:51.800	What does he mean by that exactly?
00:19:55.800	Well, if you compare this with Descartes and the meditations on first philosophy,
00:20:03.800	Descartes says that if we want to really understand ourselves, if we want to understand what the subject is, what the eye is, then we need to extract it from its environment.
00:20:14.800	We need to remove it from its surroundings so that we can better see it for what it purely is.
00:20:22.800	And the subject that he envisions is an extractable encapsulated subject.
00:20:28.800	He goes so far as to even eliminate the imagination as being part of the self because this is too closely allied to the sense organs and the impressions that they receive.
00:20:39.800	So Hetiger's notion to subject contrary this is that it's always within this world of projects, of concerns that it's being is always at issue for it, that it's always confronted with other beings.
00:20:56.800	It's always exposed to others, to things.
00:21:00.800	It's always runs the risk of mistaking itself for one of these things.
00:21:07.800	It's embedded, in other words, is embedded in its body and its projects, in its environment, and ultimately on the earth.
00:21:17.800	And this is why mood is so important in being in time because mood is something that a philosophy as a whole has overlooked and then being in time, Hetiger gives great pride of place to mood.
00:21:30.800	And if we think about this, a mood is not something that we have at our disposal. You can't make yourself happy on a moment's notice. You can't make yourself sad.
00:21:40.800	It's something that comes over you from outside of you.
00:21:44.800	And for Hetiger, this seeming passivity, so this would be perhaps the wrong term, this passivity of the self, is just as important as every other aspect of it.
00:21:56.800	What's the German word for mood?
00:21:58.800	Stimung.
00:21:59.800	Stimung.
00:22:00.800	And what does that mean?
00:22:02.800	Well, literally.
00:22:03.800	It's a musical metaphor.
00:22:05.800	Yeah, tuning a tune-
00:22:07.800	A tune-
00:22:08.800	Yeah, that's why I think a tune-
00:22:10.800	would probably be a better translation of "stimung" than "mood" although what he really does mean is mood, but to understand our moods as a form of a tune-
00:22:19.800	and I agree with you, that's one of the great insights of being in time that design is never without its mood.
00:22:25.800	And it's never without an attunement to its world and to others.
00:22:31.800	And I agree with you as well that this is one of the most under-thematized, if not non-thematized,
00:22:38.800	existentially of in philosophy.
00:22:44.800	So, it's true that mood comes in. Then mood is linked to the body as well in many ways.
00:22:49.800	Also, a bio-rhythmic old foundation.
00:22:53.800	Yeah, I think so.
00:22:54.800	And Hädiger has an understanding of the body which obviously can't view it as simply an object at our disposal or a tool that we use.
00:23:03.800	Okay, so we have design that's always a being in the world.
00:23:07.800	The world is its dah or its there.
00:23:10.800	The design meaning literally being there.
00:23:14.800	And therefore, we start from this presupposition that design is always situated.
00:23:22.800	It doesn't have this Cartesian capacity to be an abstract entity.
00:23:26.800	It's not extractable from it.
00:23:28.800	It's not expected to be.
00:23:29.800	It's never disembodied in other words.
00:23:31.800	So, it's in the world.
00:23:33.800	We also said that it's temporarily ecstatic.
00:23:36.800	I mean, we're projected into the future and into possibilities of the future.
00:23:40.800	But we're also thrown into a world and we're thrown into a world that was there before we got into it.
00:23:45.800	That comes with a whole baggage and past.
00:23:50.800	And we find ourselves already in the world in the sense of having inherited.
00:23:57.800	We're finite in other words.
00:23:59.800	Yeah.
00:24:00.800	So, yeah, we have a being that is, as you were saying earlier, always outside of itself in one form or another.
00:24:12.800	And this, so this temporal structure that design has is finite.
00:24:24.800	That's the very important word that you just use there.
00:24:27.800	It's a, you could say, to speak high-diggers language, design is transcendent.
00:24:32.800	It's always self-transcendent, but it's finitely self-transcendent.
00:24:37.800	What is the importance of finitude in the temporal equation?
00:24:42.800	Well, this touches on a theme I know to be dear to your heart, death.
00:24:47.800	The design doesn't have its death once again.
00:24:52.800	No one has their death. Our death is always ahead of us.
00:24:57.800	And so, in being in time, high-diggers speaks about our being towards death.
00:25:04.800	Yeah, what's that mean? Being toward death.
00:25:07.800	Well, I mean, we're being unto death, I think it was the older translation.
00:25:10.800	Thanks, I'm told.
00:25:11.800	We don't have death as a possession.
00:25:13.800	When death's there, we're not there.
00:25:16.800	This is a thesis you could find in Epicurus, for example.
00:25:20.800	What Hetagur does with this is say that as long as we're alive, something is outstanding.
00:25:26.800	And what is outstanding is death.
00:25:29.800	But death is precisely what is most our own.
00:25:33.800	No one can die in my place.
00:25:35.800	People could teach my classes for me, people can drink my alcohol for me,
00:25:40.800	but no one can die for me.
00:25:42.800	So this is inextricably my own, and yet paradoxically perhaps,
00:25:48.800	I never have it. I don't possess it.
00:25:51.800	What's most my own is this outstanding possibility.
00:25:57.800	Death, and that itself is a shattering or an opening of the subject of the self into this world.
00:26:04.800	Yeah, Hetagur calls death my own most possibility of being, which is founded upon an impossibility of being,
00:26:11.800	because once you die, you are no more designs who comes to an end with its biological,
00:26:17.800	death which I don't agree with by the way, I mean, I hide a Gary in enough in many respects,
00:26:25.800	but I also don't agree with what he says that you repeated that no one can die for me.
00:26:33.800	Someone can die for you?
00:26:35.800	I, well put it this way, in anthropologically speaking, if you were to ask a,
00:26:44.800	I don't mean just someone heroically dying so that I can live on, no.
00:26:48.800	But if you ask a believing Christian whether Christ's death on the cross was not an instance of someone dying,
00:26:57.800	you know, for me, then so that I could live, or that part of my rejoining Christ would entail my own death
00:27:04.800	so that I could rise again.
00:27:05.800	Well, exactly.
00:27:06.800	So even though Christ dies in my name perhaps, I still have my own life to live, my own death to die.
00:27:13.800	Yes, well, it depends on how you read someone like Saint Paul where, you know, he says it, Christ died so that we can live.
00:27:21.800	Anyway, if we don't want to get into that, it's not the only, that's not the basis of my,
00:27:25.800	Saint Paul died, didn't he?
00:27:27.800	My skepticism about the fact that no one can die for me is that,
00:27:32.800	or no one can die in my stead, or someone can die in my stead, I suppose.
00:27:38.800	That it makes my death a completely individual event that separates me from others,
00:27:51.800	isolates me.
00:27:52.800	In fact, Heidegger says that death is that which individualates design radically.
00:27:57.800	Right.
00:27:58.800	And there's different ways of interpreting these passages and being in time, however,
00:28:02.800	one could say that through this relationship to death, what I lose relationships with others,
00:28:11.800	but I lose my inauthentic relations with others.
00:28:14.800	I no longer see others as replaceable beings or myself as one just like them,
00:28:21.800	in realizing my own uniqueness, let's say, my own singularity,
00:28:25.800	there's a transformation of the world as well.
00:28:28.800	And so in recognizing myself as an open self, an open subject, I'm actually able to entertain relations with others.
00:28:39.800	I'm already, relationally, disposed towards them, as opposed to an understanding of the self that would be encapsulated
00:28:46.800	and would have nothing, could have no way of escaping itself in order to communicate with another.
00:28:51.800	So I think death is the possibility of being with others.
00:28:56.800	Well, I like it when you say it that way, and I'll go along with that.
00:28:59.800	As long as we can account for the fact that in traditionally in almost all human cultures,
00:29:05.800	the event of death is one of the most communal, collective, social, ritualized events that bring entire communities together around the morning rituals and so forth.
00:29:17.800	And this is where one would need to give Heidegger's ontology a little bit of an anthropological supplement.
00:29:25.800	But let's keep the focus on the point which is that this is astonishing that a philosopher of Heidegger's caliber,
00:29:33.800	because he was already well known by 1927, he comes out with this book being in time in which things like my being under death,
00:29:43.800	my authenticity. He also speaks about the call of conscience, that if design is going to embrace its own authenticity,
00:29:52.800	it's going to have to hear this call of conscience which he says is coming to me out of the very nullity or nothingness of my being.
00:30:03.800	And he speaks about anxiety and all these things that had such a resonance for these people, which wasn't that long after World War I,
00:30:12.800	and very, very unusual for high, brow, academic philosophy to be talking about these highly existentially charged consequences.
00:30:21.800	This is what distinguishes it from Husserl's phenomenology in a certain regard.
00:30:27.800	It's concrete, it's real, it's about life and how we live it.
00:30:33.800	Yeah.
00:30:36.800	Before we move on from being in time by diving, obviously we're just scratching the surfaces.
00:30:41.800	The text is such a complex one.
00:30:44.800	I think that in the question of the meaning of being the design analysis serves, I think to emphasize the fact that it's really designs finite transcendence, it's temporality,
00:30:58.800	it's being projected beyond itself into possibilities that all this, let's say these recessive,
00:31:05.800	absentual dimensions that surround the moment of presence, past future and so forth, possibility instead of reality, that this creates a distance, it gives design a distance from the immediate involvement with things, and is able to disclose the world or the horizon of intelligibility, give it access to what
00:31:26.800	the high degree will then call the being of being. It's really through an analysis of design that he puts himself on the track to asking that fundamental question.
00:31:38.800	And one thing I would add is that perhaps we speak a little too strongly if we say that design is embedded in the world, because one of the things that I had to go on to maintain is that there's also, the world itself is composed of differences and distances.
00:31:55.800	His criticism of Nietzsche, of Rilke and also of Ernst Junger, is that their ideal figures, their ideal subjects are completely a piece of the world. They blend seamlessly into that world and in so doing annihilate the world.
00:32:15.800	After being in time, Heidegger's career takes a so-called turn, or not everyone agrees that there's a Heidegger one and Heidegger two, but clearly something happens in the 30s. He has that moment where he embraces the national socialist movement, becomes the rector of Freiburg University, and that ends up in a kind of disaster.
00:32:43.800	And do you agree with the orthodoxy that there is a turn in Heidegger's thinking somewhere in the late 30s or early 40s?
00:32:52.800	Well, yes and no. It depends on what's at stake in this notion of a turn. On the one hand, I would say no, insofar as Heidegger's thinking has always been, from the outset to the very end, thinking of the cobra longing of, let's say, dasine or the mortal,
00:33:12.800	and being, a thinking of this difference or spacing. On the other hand, there is a definite shift in his thinking in the 30s, and we could even speak more specifically and say around the time of his contributions to philosophy, the bi-trigates of philosophy.
00:33:32.800	Here, I think what becomes more prominent, more emphatic than before, is the role of history in the text that I translated for seminars. Heidegger says that being in time lacked a sense of a proper sense of history.
00:33:51.800	In these works of the 30s, Heidegger develops a what he calls it, being historical thinking. And here, the history of philosophy of metaphysics is no longer thought so much as the history of an error or the history of a lie or a force of sedimentation that covers over a truth that has to be exposed again or brought to light.
00:34:18.800	Instead, he sees this covering, if you will, of metaphysics as essential to question of being itself. In other words, being is no longer thought of without concealment. This isn't the opposite of what he says in being in time in any way, but the emphasis changes.
00:34:40.800	The emphasis changes also away from design as the very center of the focus to being as such. He gets away from the existentialist, at least the lexicon being in time.
00:34:54.800	Whereas nothing but necessarily the issue as you were saying.
00:34:57.800	There's a certain subjectivism you could say of being in time that he wants to avoid. The whole apparatus of being in time, the structure of the book itself is thoroughly metaphysical.
00:35:11.800	We could say, Heidegger wrote very few books. What he published were often essay collections, lectures, slightly revised lecture courses, but apart from being in time, maybe continental
00:35:25.800	physics, there's not much that's very interesting about Heidegger is that even being in time he was forced really to come out with it in order to get tenure.
00:35:33.800	We were all connected to get a post and philosophy and a lot of it were based on his lecture notes.
00:35:39.800	Yeah, he very rarely did he actually write a book as such.
00:35:45.800	In that sense, I think he's a very pure philosopher in the Socratic tradition.
00:35:49.800	He's now to think of the book.
00:35:50.800	There is some place where he says that it's a mystery why all thinkers after Socrates were fugitives into the art of writing.
00:36:03.800	And that Socrates was the only pure philosopher who philosophized strictly by word of mouth or in the lecture or in the room or the marketplace I go out on.
00:36:14.800	I think Heidegger had, he had his brother, he wouldn't have published a book as such, but nevertheless, let's say.
00:36:21.800	Fortunately, we have all those lectures that one other thing that I think needs to be mentioned in regards to this turn in his thinking is that he changes his conception of being.
00:36:36.800	And for him comes to be a matter of withdrawal.
00:36:41.800	Okay, let's specify before we go on.
00:36:44.800	The way I understand it from being in time, being comes to mean designs, ecstatic projectionality that enables design to come back from the kind of
00:36:57.800	the same way.
00:37:06.800	It's not something that's out there on its own.
00:37:10.800	It's something that as you were saying it in the opening, it's in radical relation to design.
00:37:15.800	It's design's relationality to things that disclose as the realm of being.
00:37:18.800	So how does it differ later?
00:37:20.800	Well, it is sense that it becomes more radicalized, more finite even, because designs opening onto the world has the risk of sounding like a willful endeavor, as though design were completely in control and that design determined being in some way.
00:37:39.800	And what the transition or the change in how to grow thinking is to see that there's also a movement on the part of being that beyond designs control.
00:37:52.800	So you have these two interrelated, inbricated movements simultaneously.
00:38:00.800	This idea of withdrawal just briefly put, if you think of being as a whole or as a single sphere, almost permanently in manner, then there would be no differences, no space, no room in that.
00:38:19.800	Withdrawal, in the first moment, makes the world of differences and distances possible by evacuating that area.
00:38:29.800	But the shift that we have to understand is that withdrawal is actually a way that the things exist.
00:38:39.800	They exist in this withdrawn manner, which is to say, they exist partially.
00:38:46.800	They are not whole or discrete or encapsulated things, but everything itself is opened into this space of the world.
00:38:57.800	And that's sort of what I had to think under the direction of withdrawal, which is incredibly technical moment or intense moment of this contribution to philosophy.
00:39:08.800	Yeah, and I think Hite Garians often have a tendency to mystify the retreat of being, the withdrawal of being.
00:39:15.800	I like the way you put it, that the withdrawal of being is something that is constitutive of things themselves in the world.
00:39:24.800	In other words, there's something about a tree or another person or another where I cannot fully appropriate.
00:39:33.800	There is a distance there. There is a certain resistance.
00:39:38.800	And an opacity. And that same distance is what allows us to relate to the tree.
00:39:45.800	It's like Jean-Paul Satset, I think, in being in nothing but he says that if the chess board were completely full, you could never have a game.
00:39:54.800	It's only when you take a thing out, you have a hole. Now all these things become possible because there is a void there.
00:39:59.800	Likewise, in our relationship with things, if there's not a distance, we could never know them as what they are.
00:40:07.800	And being is nothing but knowing things as what they are.
00:40:10.800	And the point I'm making about withdrawal is that it's not that we take away a few of the pieces and that whole pieces remain.
00:40:17.800	It's that all of the pieces can't be thought of as complete or encapsulated pieces, which all permeates them.
00:40:25.800	Exactly. And this is where I think he's origin of the work of art, which is a fundamental essay on aesthetics.
00:40:31.800	I think he points out, I mean, that's very difficult for people to read and the language is very technical, but I don't know if I would be over trivializing to say that for hide-a-gore artworks remind us that things are not radically available, totally, at our disposal.
00:40:49.800	But that the artwork shows that no matter how much I try to grasp whatever is being painted or the statue, that there's something that draws away from me.
00:41:02.800	And it's the power or the beauty of it is precisely the fact that I cannot hold it in my hands in an intangible way.
00:41:10.800	And it gives itself on the one hand, but gives itself a, you say, partially.
00:41:16.800	And any artwork that doesn't throw into relief the extent to which things are available to me only in this shrouded, well, shrouded might be the wrong metaphor.
00:41:28.800	But most utilitarian men are possible, let everything be either a tool or a stone, that idea is shattered.
00:41:35.800	And, you know, since these discussions go really quickly, Andrew, and we don't have that much time left, why don't we just take this into the question of technology with which we began at the beginning, at least with my opening remarks, that if the artwork is something that shows how things have, as you say this, left-ic dimension, this withdrawing distance.
00:41:59.800	Technology as Heidegger understands it in his famous essay, the question concerning technology, wants to insist that everything is radically available and disposable to us.
00:42:11.800	Right. And Heidegger views this as the culmination of metaphysics.
00:42:15.800	Metaphysics as the history of philosophy has constantly misunderstood being, if you could say.
00:42:23.800	It's overlooked this partial character of existence that we've just mentioned, and seen complete presence.
00:42:32.800	That becomes hypothesized into...
00:42:36.800	Now you have to explain to our listeners what that word means, the question.
00:42:39.800	We're not in the classic, hypostasize.
00:42:42.800	Well, it's an all theological term, I think.
00:42:45.800	Let's say that things become reified into that means objectified into objects.
00:42:52.800	That are held to be discrete entities.
00:42:57.800	And that technology is the culmination of this transformation in things into sheer presence.
00:43:06.800	Right.
00:43:07.800	Where in technology everything becomes completely available at our disposal.
00:43:12.800	Heidegger talks about it in terms of ordering and availability.
00:43:15.800	And the internet is the perfect example of this.
00:43:17.800	Everything is available.
00:43:18.800	Everything is at our disposal.
00:43:20.800	And everything is replaceable.
00:43:22.800	If you lose a watch, you can buy the exact same watch.
00:43:25.800	So, you know that I share your unease at that,
00:43:33.800	modern technology, the technology, especially contemporary biotechnology.
00:43:38.800	But I don't think a lot of people share our kind of anxiety.
00:43:42.800	And so if I were to play the devil's advocate again and say,
00:43:45.800	"Well, what's wrong with using our ingenuity as human beings to create a technology that gives us complete mastery and possession of the earth that puts all of its resources, makes them all available for our own ends, which we always want to believe are good ends.
00:44:08.800	And what's wrong with substitutability?
00:44:12.800	And the endless availability of things for our own consumption."
00:44:18.800	Well, this is an age-old response that has to do with the disenchantment of the world, we could say.
00:44:27.800	That what we find so agreeable about existence is the singularity of it, the uniqueness of it, the specificity of it.
00:44:41.800	And it's precisely that specificity and singularity that paradoxically enough we're able to share with others, right, through this communication with others.
00:44:50.800	And technology, which I'd also think is a way of thinking or approaching the world that thinks in terms of values.
00:45:01.800	When one something has a value or a price, it becomes replaceable by something else of equal value or equal price,
00:45:08.800	drains the world of the very distinctions that we would like to attribute to it.
00:45:18.800	So if we say that God, for example, is the greatest being, then we've degraded God by making him or it comparable with other things.
00:45:31.800	And the same idea holds for technology, what technology does to the world.
00:45:36.800	It makes our existence into homogenized, pre-packaged existence and takes the surprise of the world away from us.
00:45:48.800	We should make it clear that, you know, Heitiger was not a luddite and he wasn't, you know, the unibomber.
00:45:56.800	His critique of technology was also part of his reading of the history of philosophy, as you said, of history of metaphysics.
00:46:02.800	And he believed that every major epoch in Western history had a certain mode in which things reveal themselves to design.
00:46:12.800	And that somehow, with modern metaphysics, day card and so forth, that the technology was a, that the essence of technology, which he called "technicity" was an epochal way in which things reveal themselves, reveal themselves to us as always at our disposal.
00:46:34.800	And are there to be brought into a system of a network, of a circuit, of endless circulation and availability and so forth.
00:46:43.800	So this, he said, the way that things reveal themselves are not dependent upon us.
00:46:49.800	They're dependent on what he called the history of being whatever that means.
00:46:53.800	And that there's no way to fight against the evils of technology or excesses of it.
00:46:59.800	And we're going to have to wait for the era to change and somehow things will show a different side of themselves to us than they do at, as they do at present.
00:47:11.800	One other thing I'd point out in regards to the technology issue is that the technological approach short changes ourselves as well.
00:47:20.800	We place ourselves in the position of mastery and we have to be that master.
00:47:26.800	Everything is at our disposal.
00:47:28.800	Everything is according to our will.
00:47:30.800	The history of metaphysics is the history of the will for Haidagah.
00:47:33.800	And in so doing that, we eliminate from our own reality all the wonderful passions, path theory and
00:47:45.800	and passivities of life. That are so pleasurable.
00:47:50.800	I think something much more sinister and diabolical has been going on in the last decade that Haidagah obviously he died in '76, I believe.
00:48:00.800	Probably couldn't have suspected, but it's the way that the, in framing of all things is not just the world of objects.
00:48:11.800	Or ourselves as consumers, but now with biotechnology, the way in which we're going right into the very fabric of life.
00:48:23.800	And presuming again to be the total masters and play God. In fact, that's what Haidagah understands technology.
00:48:32.800	It's just rendering concrete the power of God in terms of the means of production.
00:48:41.800	And to do this with life itself, with the biotic and to without anyone really, and the moral issues surrounding the biotechnology are so primitive compared to the complexity of the phenomenon.
00:48:56.800	I mean, I was reading this morning that some scientists have found ways to extract stem cells without compromising embryos.
00:49:02.800	And so this is supposed to solve the moral problem that it's all about, you know, embryos, about aborting embryos or not aborting.
00:49:11.800	This is not the issue, my friends. The issue is who the hell are we to go into the, you know, the very constituency of the biotic and start playing around and recreating the world.
00:49:24.800	And so as if, you know, we are the masters of that destiny, we know that we're not.
00:49:31.800	And yet there is a drive, what's so profound for me of Haidagah's thing about technology is that there's a drive there of which we are not in control.
00:49:40.800	And for the most part, we're not even aware. And it might be, I think one would have to conjugate it with Freud's notion of the death drive to maybe do full justice to the demonic element of contemporary life.
00:49:53.800	Yeah, I had to think this out of Nietzsche. This is one of his strongest criticisms of Nietzsche. And I agree that his reading of Nietzsche is not necessarily hostile to Nietzsche because Nietzsche cannot be the complete decimation of philosophy or of being. His views can't reflect that because that would be the end of being. And being is never wholly present or wholly absent in this manner.
00:50:21.800	But to return to this point regarding technology, it's as if we were trying to secure ourselves so much from anything different from us that we end up erecting so many mirrors around us only to reflect back ourselves.
00:50:40.800	It's if we were going to add something from Freud, I would also add a theorization of narcissism because it seems that we want to be all that there is. And there will be nothing outside of us. No others. It will be a program of complete homogenization.
00:50:55.800	And this is in a sense what people fear in globalization as well. I think Haidagah is a precursor to the thinking of that.
00:51:01.800	I agree with it. I agree with you there.
00:51:03.800	What do you think he meant that I began with the sentence that I came across in the preface to the second edition of Kant and the problem of metaphysics where he's giving all the kind of bibliographical information in the years.
00:51:18.800	And then there's just that one sentence which I read at the beginning that just pops out of nowhere, the growing and unacknowledged anxiety in the face of thinking no longer allows insight into the oblivion of being which determines the age.
00:51:32.800	Yeah, that's a Haidi sentence isn't it?
00:51:37.800	And I was the preface to the third edition of Kant and the problem metaphysics also says that the reading of philosophers has to be a violent reading of it's to do any justice to them.
00:51:47.800	So when I said that he had a hostile read of Nietzsche, that's what I meant.
00:51:50.800	But to return to this question of what Haidagah means by thinking here.
00:51:56.800	For him, thinking is a matter of letting yourself be exposed to something beyond you in some way.
00:52:07.800	It's not a matter of conceptualizing or comprehending in a sense of completely grasping something within a hand that literally the word comprehending would entail.
00:52:19.800	But instead of letting yourself be exposed to the matter of thought, letting yourself be attuned to that matter and not dominating it.
00:52:33.800	Letting it be, we could say, to use another Haidagah in term.
00:52:37.800	What I think he's getting at in that sense, the pity sentence you read is that comprehension cannot comprehend.
00:52:48.800	What was the word he used to be a bizabean or the oblivion of being?
00:52:53.800	We also speak about the anxiety in the face of thinking.
00:52:56.800	Do you think that there's this anxiety in the face of thinking today?
00:53:01.800	Oh, certainly.
00:53:02.800	Especially anyone who's in philosophy faces this because philosophies, precisely not a matter of calculation or reckoning, it can't provide certain answers, it can't provide results.
00:53:16.800	Anytime it does, it's not thinking any longer.
00:53:20.800	Thinking is not, we could look at being in time.
00:53:23.800	It's a book of thought and all it wants to do is figure out how to ask the question, what is the meaning of being, and it can't even get a third of the way there.
00:53:33.800	That's thinking.
00:53:35.800	Thinking is a failure.
00:53:36.800	It can't be useful.
00:53:38.800	This anxiety in the face of thinking, I have to ask you, because I read this brilliant essay you wrote, that's just come out in the research and phenomenology on Haidagah and terrorism, where you talk about terrorism, not just abstractly, but also the real phenomenon that we know is terrorism.
00:54:00.800	We relate the age of terror to this anxiety that we might have that being as abandoned beings and that there's something ultimately terrifying.
00:54:14.800	What convinced me in your essay is that we don't acknowledge the extent to which we are terrified by the era to which we belong.
00:54:27.800	I would say that it's because we are terrified that terrorists can actually successfully spawn terror in our psyches.
00:54:36.800	Yeah, definitely.
00:54:37.800	One thing I would add to that is that the effect of terrorism isn't in the actual bombings or the destruction that takes place, but in the threat.
00:54:49.800	What terrorism can be understood as an ontological issue, a matter of being, in the sense that everything is a potential target.
00:55:00.800	Everything and everyone could be the victim of the next terrorist attack.
00:55:07.800	That's very hard to wrap your head around. To do so requires no longer thinking of ourselves as separate beings that would then be destroyed by some outside force that would fall upon them or not fall upon them.
00:55:22.800	But instead it changes the very nature of being itself, insofar as things now exist as terrorized, which is to say that the threat of their destruction is constitutive of how they are.
00:55:38.800	And they're no longer stable objective presences.
00:55:45.800	Things exist as terrorized. That's a really beautiful way to understand what Heidegger would call the abandonment of being of the world.
00:56:00.800	I think the terrorism gives us an opportunity to think being is no longer discreet and encapsulated entities, but as threatened and as threatened somehow unstable destabilized, opened.
00:56:17.800	So, since we only have just a couple of minutes left, do you think it's through awakening a sense of terror or this or heightened awareness of the threat that hangs over the whole story, the whole world that it's only through exasperating the terror that there can be the possibility of stepping outside of the frame of technicality and maybe finding a way to allow beings to reveal themselves.
00:56:46.800	And other modes than just as available for our own consumption.
00:56:54.800	Well, yes, I do. And that's hard to say, because on the one hand, it seems that things can get worse.
00:57:10.800	That's obviously we don't mean that we need terrorist bombs or anything. Clearly, we're talking about attuning ourselves to this other sort of hydro, it's anxiety in the face of thinking.
00:57:22.800	Things get worse and worse and things seem bleaker and bleaker. And I think for Heidegger, they can always get worse and they can continue to get worse.
00:57:33.800	It's so disturbing, but because they can continue to get worse, there's always also this possibility that they're not yet completely annihilated. They're not yet completely destroyed.
00:57:46.800	There's still a call to responsibility. And to find that, to be sensitive to our responsibilities in this age is an uplifting thought, I think.
00:58:00.800	And so within terrorism, within the destruction around us, there's still cause for...
00:58:09.800	Don't say hope. That's a long word.
00:58:12.800	Celebration. That's a long word.
00:58:14.800	The famous line of hooted in that Heidegger is so fond of there where the danger is the saving power also grows.
00:58:24.800	We have to hope that that's true because we certainly have plenty of danger around us to deal with.
00:58:35.800	That's the nature of danger.
00:58:37.800	Yes.
00:58:38.800	Well, Andrew, it's really been a pleasure to talk to you about Heidegger. We're going to talk about Heidegger a lot on this program. Imagine if it continues into the future.
00:58:47.800	I'll be listening.
00:58:48.800	You'll be coming back, I hope. Thank you.
00:58:51.800	So thanks again. And to all your listeners, this has been entitled "
00:59:04.400	We also have a home page of the Stanford French and Italian department, and that will refer you to our home page for entitled opinions where you can also listen to previous programs online.
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00:59:29.400	Thanks again. And we'll see you next week.
00:59:33.400	[Music]