Making sense of Heidegger - Being is time and time is finite – We are a thrown open clearing – Hamlet’s question – Reawakening the taste for perplexity - Mineness – Authenticity – Average everydayness – Phenomenology – Dasein is Being-in-the-world – Ecstasy – Categories and existentials – Not seeing the world with philosopher’s spectacles – Facticity – Leaving the cabinet of consciousness – Having a fascination with the world, and not just staring at it.
What is the world and how does the world show up? – Avoiding all ideas of subjectivity – Against epistemology – There is no problem of perception – We are the worldhood of the world – Our inside is outside – Praxis not theory – Why nature and science do not describe the primary phenomenon of the world – Handiness and thrusting aside our interpretative tendencies – The pragmatics of stuff – The primacy of concern and environment – When the hammer breaks – Signs and Heidegger’s funny examples – Situation and the meaningfulness of the world – Wallace Stevens on the idea of order.
What is wrong with Descartes’ picture of the world – Extension renders the world invisible - Phenomenology and the destruction of the modern world picture – Why is this book not called Being and Space? – Space as room and roomliness – The unavoidable character of spatial metaphors – Nearness, place and neighborhood – Art and space – The sacred, temple and templum – The near, clearing away and bringing things close – Churches, graves, radios, telephones – In Dasein, there is a collapsing of distance – Heidegger’s theory of social media – Against the metrical measurement of space – Freeing place and why architects love Heidegger – Fernando Pessoa and lessons in unlearning.
We are defined by a ‘who’ not a ‘what’ – Dasein is the with – Everyone is the other and no one is himself – I am Nobody (Emily Dickinson) – Networked being – “They think me” (Rimbaud) – Displacing the Cartesian starting point for philosophy, the ‘I’ – Moments in the precipitation of the Self in “Being and Time” (Anxiety, Death, Conscience, Resoluteness, The People) – How others show up in the workshop of the world – Being alone – Caring for, leaping in and leaping ahead of the other – Considerateness and forbearance – Do we really understand others? (Levinas) – An encoded social psychology of modernity (Sloterdijk) – The dictatorship of the They – Every secret loses its force – How to become authentic.
The difficulty of stating the obvious – Not splitting the phenomenon – We are ourselves the clearing – The movement of disclosure and closing over as learning the rhythm of existence – The music of “Being and Time” – The four key concept clusters – State of mind, always already finding oneself there – Mood, Heidegger on the passions – Into this world we’re thrown – Dasein exists factically – Projection, Understanding, Potentiality for being, freedom – Discourse is the condition of possibility for the articulation of the clearing that is us – Logos – We are the being that talks – Falling as horizontal, not vertical, not Satanic – Falling at the world – Authenticity as a modified way in which everydayness is seized upon – Fear – Giant bears and my mother – Interpretation as the layout out of understanding – Meaning is not deep, but a question of surfaces – Being is not the rabbit in the hat – Learning to see the hat without wanting the rabbit.
Interpretation as taking something as something prior to propositions – The hermeneutic circle – Virtuous and not vicious – Judgement is not the primary locus of truth – Cribbing Aristotle – Comparison with Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus” – Important nonsense and silence – Taking things hermeneutically – The distinction between discourse and language – Communication – Language is not inside the head, it is ecstatic – Dasein has to have clean ears – The voice of the friend – Hearing, hearkening, silence and reticence – Keeping quiet – Proposal for a reticence bar called Helsinki – The human being shows itself as a being that talks – non-human language – Excursus on the octopus.
Back to everyday life – This is not a philosophy of culture – Idle talking, gossiping, scribbling, updating – Curiosity, the delight in sight - Concupiscence, eye-lust - The horror of liveliness (Hedda Gabler) - Flirting and the phenomenology of the sexy – Ambiguity, the speed of life – Everything means something else – Being against one another – Falling is not bad – Tempting – Tranquilizing (cultural exoticism, Western Buddhism) – Alienating (self-deception) – Entangling (the triumph of the therapeutic) – Turbulence (groundless floating) – The structure of thrownness – Not a night view of Dasein, but day-time.
Bringing the whole thing together - Anxiety is way in in which the whole of Dasein is disclosed – Defining the whole as Care – The 12 steps of the Care structure - Articulated thrown projection – We are not simple - We are a hinge – We are a unified but multi-faceted stretch (future, past and present) – Temporality as the meaning of care – A stunning personal revelation about my anxiety – Why I do philosophy – Approaching Heidegger aquatically – Opening oneself to the tender indifference of the world – Anxiety as the mood of the novel (Crusoe) – Falling out of the homely – Party being - Time and tide – Being alone with others – Excursus on Terrence Malick – Anxiety, calm and courage – Anxiety reveals the Nothing – Darkness can help - The Christian background to anxiety (Kierkegaard) – Saint Paul and anxious waiting – Heidegger tells us a story and gives us a happy ending – Marrying Aristotle and Christianity within atheism.
Four incorrect theses on reality - Empirical idealism (Berkeley) - Transcendental realism (from Plato to Meillassoux) - Empirical realism (Samuel Johnson kicks a stone) - Transcendental idealism (Kant) – Why the question of reality is the wrong question – Why Kant is wrong (about the subject, representation, and the priority of the present-at-hand – Heidegger’s existential deepening of Kant – The scandal of philosophy is expecting that reality requires proof – Being-in-the-world is prior to both proof and faith – Epistemology is a symptom of Dasein’s falling – Both realism and idealism are consistent with being-in-the-world and both wrong – The wrinkle in the fabric of Heidegger’s argument: the Real – The hard core to reality: physical nature, matter, the earth – A possible dualism of reality and the Real: doesn’t this split the phenomenon?
Heidegger’s reefer moment – Ek-sistence – The history of truth – Deconstructing the traditional concept of truth – Getting beneath the theory of truth as correspondence – Being-uncovering – Aletheia as unconcealment - Heracleitus on sleeping like sheep – Preserving the force of the most elemental words – We are in the truth - How to live in a totalitarian lie (Havel) – Dasein is in the truth and the untruth, the two paths (Parmenides) – Truth is relative to Dasein – No Dasein, no truth – Newton’s laws – There are no eternal truths – Skepticism is unintelligible because a skeptic has never existed – Heidegger’s refutation of suicide - Finishing Division One and why we need Division Two of Being and Time.
Full metal Heidegger in lockdown – Why you need to become an existential phenomenologist in the pandemic – Authentic being a whole, the themes of Division Two – Unfairness to Kierkegaard - Death as one’s ownmost, non-relational and not to be outstripped – Virility and impotence in relation to death – How others die (Tolstoy) – The certainty and indeterminacy of death – I am my not-yet – Authenticity and inauthenticity spin around in Heidegger’s analysis – The difference between expecting and anticipating death – Anticipation as the possibility of the possible – Violent language - Shattering oneself against death as a wrenching away from the They – I am possibility – Enter Nietzsche – Enter Freedom (towards death) – Having death in your mouth – Fruit – Corpse – Mourning is secondary – Dying for the other (Levinas’s discretion) – Sacrifice, holocaust – Undermining Heidegger on death – The relational character of finitude – How I see being-towards-death – The ontology of weakness.
Exoteric and esoteric (Leo Strauss) – The 10-minute exoteric version of conscience – The much longer esoteric version: watching the ice-floe of Being and Time break up – The null basis-being of a nullity (the shape of the argument) – The peculiar character of the call of conscience – It says nothing (Cordelia in King Lear) – It is silent – Me, myself and I - The call comes from me and yet beyond me – Stranger voice (Nietzsche) – The nothing of the world – The self divided between two nothings – The three Rs: repetition, repetition, repetition (Mark E. Smith) – Guilty! – Heidegger’s genealogy of morals – Mortgage, death-pledge, money – Dasein is a nullity that does not have power over itself – Double impotence – Lagging behind one’s possibilities – An anti-heroic Heidegger (Beckett) – Dasein is a double nullity – The experience of freedom – Guilt is the pre-moral source for any morality (Kafka) – Double zero – Quasi-transcendental philosophy (Derrida) – Weakness is the brand (Maria Bamford) – Wanting to have a conscience – Action! – Resoluteness – Stillness (Stars of the Lid) – Situation as the seizing hold of space – Resoluteness as both taking action and the passivity of resistance.
What do death and the concrete situation of action have in common? – A puzzling footnote on sin – Holding-for-true as the certainty of conscience – Resoluteness is repetition – How death has power over Dasein’s illusions – Sober anxiety – The presence of Freud(e) in Being and Time – Joy - Discourse on the method – How we must do violence to ourselves in order to become authentic – Virtuous circularity – How do we conceive the unity of the self? – Heidegger’s relation to Kant’s ‘I think’ – How Kant is both right and wrong – Kant’s response to Hume on the self – Cogito without an ergo sum – Self as activity (Fichte) – Heidegger on the constancy of the self – Dasein is itself in the silent resoluteness of action in a situation – The constancy of the self consists in repetition – performance – Descartes’ dilemma with the cogito and Heidegger’s attempt to think self without ground – We are our acts, nothing more.
Unwavering discipline – Authentic Dasein is the unity of the three ecstases of time – The three-step rhythm of temporality – The future as coming towards itself – What comes out of the future is my having-been, the past –The past is null, but not annulled – The curtains lift on action – The future opens up the past and releases itself into the present – The moment of vision, the glance of the eye – Kairos as the fulfilment of time (without Christ) – How can time be said without metaphysics? – Verbalizing nouns, speaking in tautology - Temporality temporalizes itself – Dasein is the ecstatic one (Taminiaux’s story) – The meaning of finitude – End-ly time –Towards oneself! Existing as the nullity that I am - Sketch of a critique of Heidegger on time: the primacy of the past over the future.
The repetition of average everydayness from the standpoint of authentic temporality – Awaiting – Rapture – More unfairness to Kierkegaard – Making present – Forgetting – Repetition and memory – Bewildered fear, a burning house – Beckett – Resolute Dasein has no fear – Anxiety in the face of the nothing of the world – A taxonymy of moods – Hope comes in to tickle your feet – Equanimity – Being dragged along in thrownness – The authentic and inauthentic ecstases do not come in succession – The future is not later than the past – The genesis of the theoretical view of the world – An existential conception of science - Life-world practices and science – Phenomenology as pre-science – Deliberation is not absent from Heidegger (Tugendhat) – Different ways of philosophizing with a hammer – The importance of place – How nature is seen by modern science – Mathematical projection, data, modelling – Dasein is its world existingly – How the transcendence of being-in-the-world gets covered over in subject/object dualism – Horizonal schemas defined (with Kant) – The time of spatiality – Taking space in, literally – Leeway, play-space - Back to the everyday – The relation between authenticity and the everyday – There is no breakout from the cave – The enigma of everydayness – Philosophy and the enigmatic apriori.
Death-obsessed male philosophers and the question of birth (Arendt) – The power of beginning – Stretchedness, persistence, movedness – Historizing as happening – History is rare – World history (a Greek temple) – The past lies ahead of us – Natural history – The ring – The loyalty of existence – Inauthentic history and the craving for the new – Recurrence and the love of fate – How to approach the science of history on the basis of existence – Monumental, antiquarian and critical (Nietzsche on history) – Heidegger’s debt to Dilthey – Philosophy as a manifestation of life – Fatigue – Why paragraph 74 of Being and Time is so important – Heidegger’s reply to Löwith – ‘See you later, alligator’, excursus on Lacoue-Labarthe – Heidegger’s revolutionary conception of history – Fate as individual, Destiny as collective – My struggle - The People (Volk) – The inner truth and greatness of National Socialism – Young Habermas – Who are the Germans? – Heidegger’s thinking of the One (henology) – Against authenticity - Defusing the link between philosophy and politics – Radicalizing facticity – Tragic and comic Heidegger – powerlessness – Heritage as the counter-concept to tradition – History as repetition – A weird thought: we repeat from out of the future – History is not the past – History comes to be from out of the future (Sandinista).
Three conceptions of time: primordial time, world time and vulgar time – The genesis of the tyranny of the present – Time-reckoning – Datability – Duration or the span of world time – Inauthentic Dasein has no time – Authentic Dasein is its time and always has time – Take your time – Time first shows itself in the sky – Brightness, night – Tide – Heidegger is not a thinker of the sea – ‘Primitive’ Dasein, the peasant’s clock, shadow and the sundial - ‘Advanced’ Dasein and electricity – Footnote on the theory of relativity – Time and physis – The genesis of linear Now-time – Time in Aristotle’s Physics – Counted nows, the flow, the stream of time – What is wrong with eternity – Primordial time is finite, reversible, ecstatic and episodic – How time becomes leveled off – Time and the soul – Spirit falling into time (Hegel) – Why Hegel is wrong – The long, final footnote to Being and Time (Derrida) – The endurance of Aristotle’s conception of time in Bergson – Time-consciousness in Husserl.
The relation between the construction and destruction in Being and Time – How the incompletion of Heidegger’s project has been exaggerated – The fetishization of failure and the provisional Heidegger’s marginalia on his own book – What happens when we destroy the tradition - Presencing out of the source – The end of philosophy and the task for thinking – Being as opening, time as presence – The last words of Being and Time; or WTF Martin? - The risk of self-paralysis in false philosophical modesty – Against Towardism – Having the courage of your convictions – The massive amount that we have learned from Being and Time – Polemic: why this is the right path to be taken in philosophy – Finitude restated – Naming the experience of the appropriative event – There is no turning in Heidegger’s work, just a deepening – The importance of building castles in the air – All that there is, is air – How Being and Time changes one’s life and approach to philosophy – Leaving the climate of Heidegger’s thinking (Levinas).
Slow down, take your time, open your ears and enjoy the music. With Apply-Degger podcast series coming to an end, Simon Critchley teams up with musician, composer and sound designer, John Simmons to present a bonus track supported by the Onassis Foundation. In other words, this is the perfect season finale.
Aref Riant
Splendid intro to Heidegger