"purity of heart is to will one thing" -Kierkegaard

"How's this for one thing?" -Heidegger

Only where leader and led together bind each other in one destiny, and fight for the realization of one idea, does true order grow. Then spiritual superiority and freedom respond in the form of deep dedication of all powers to the people, to the state, in the form of the most rigid training, as commitment, resistance, solitude, and love. Then the existence and the superiority of the Führer sink down into being, into the soul of the people and thus bind it authentically and passionately to the task. And when the people feel this dedication, they will let themselves be led into struggle, and they will want and love the struggle. They will develop and persist in their strength, be true and sacrifice themselves. With each new moment the Führer and the people will be bound more closely, in order to realize the essence of their state, that is their Being; growing together, they will oppose the two threatening forces, death and the devil, that is, impermanence and the falling away from one's own essence, with their meaningful, historical Being and Will. (Quoted in Faye, 140)

from a review of Emmanuel Faye's recent book on Heidegger via Rob Sica (rss)

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Jack Handey FTW

concluding unscientific poll

With 43 votes cast, we now know, unscientifically, that Jack Handey is a greater philosopher than Martin Heidegger.



also, Kierkegaard '08!

Edwards on Heidegger and Wittgenstein

A couple interesting quotes from this book review of The Authority of Language: Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and the Threat of Philosophical Nihilism - James C. Edwards.

Edwards connects representational thinking with nihilism in terms of a reading of Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche's discussion of nihilism, which Edwards "most emphatically" judges to be a poor reading of Nietzsche (18).
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Edwards mentions but does not discuss Heidegger's actual involvement with Hitler's political program, but he does discuss the political direction of Heidegger's path beyond representational thinking. That direction is away from the rational criticism so characteristic of Socratic inquiry and enlightenment politics. Though he concedes Heidegger would quickly reject any identification of LANGUAGE with a particular deity or leader, Edwards is convinced that the position of LANGUAGE in the later thought of Heidegger is pervaded by what he calls a "totalitarian architecture" (226).

Wittgenstein's turn away from representational thinking is also a turn from the attempt to understand or represent linguistic practice as a calculus. Since rules need to be interpreted and rules don't interpret themselves, there must be more to language than a calculus of rules. But interpretation itself won't be the answer, because interpretations-no less than the voices of angels or the whispers of LANGUAGE-are in precisely the position that rules are in. They stand in need of interpretation. According to Wittgenstein, linguistic practice rests on the "brute fact that most of us are able to master certain physical routines of appropriate imitation and continuation" (156). In the end, language leans neither on far-sighted calculation, nor on pious listening, but on "utter contingency" (239).

Edwards emphasizes that Wittgenstein does not replace the authority of rational principles with the authority of a mysterious, primordial LANGUAGE. But he cautions that this does not mean anything goes. Languages lean on the authority of nature, our natural reactions. These natural facts are not unified in any person or principle; they are dispersed and various. They include our having upright posture and our being likely to notice this and to laugh at that: the whole of the biological dimension-there are others-of what Wittgenstein calls forms of life.

The central difference between Heidegger's and Wittgenstein's turn away from the principles-rules-of the enlightenment is that Wittgenstein proposes "a grammatical dispersal of authority, not its centralization" and mystification (227). Edwards calls him a "polytheistic thinker;" thus implicitly contrasting Heidegger's monotheism (227). In this way Wittgenstein's path away from the enlightenment does not, like Heidegger's, lead in a totalitarian direction.

"Polytheistic" is a great term to play with but maybe "pluralistic" would be sufficient there. Bearn goes on to suggest Wittgenstein's take may not be totalitarian but that it may not stand up well to charges that it is oligarchic.

Related: Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Zen, Wittgenstein and the inescapable

Handey and Heidegger on tradition

A Heidegger quote I actually like this time--

The flight into tradition, out of a combination of humility and presumption, can bring about nothing in itself other than self-deception and blindness in relation to the historical moment.

Martin Heidegger - The Age of the World Picture

We tend to scoff at the beliefs of the ancients. But we can't scoff at them personally, to their faces, and this is what annoys me.

Jack Handey

Anyone got a better Handey quote on tradition?

only 20 days left to vote - Heidegger vs. Handey

Jack Handey vs Martin Heidegger

In my ongoing fatuous quest to determine the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, today I'll compare a quote from Jack Handey and Martin Heidegger.

What is a world picture? Obviously, a picture of the world. But what does "world" mean here? What does "picture" mean? "World" serves here as a name for what is, in its entirety. The name is not limited to the cosmos, to nature. History also belongs to the world. Yet even nature and history, and both interpenetrating in their underlying and transcending of one another, do not exhaust the world. In this designation the ground of the world is meant also, no matter how its relation to the world is thought.

Heidegger - The Age of the World Picture

[a couple more pages defining 'picture' follow]

Maybe in order to understand mankind, we have to look at the word itself. Basically, it's made up of two separate words — "mank" and "ind." What do these words mean? It's a mystery, and that's why so is mankind.

Handey - Deeper Thoughts: All New, All Crispy (1993)

Who is the greater philosopher? Mankind may never know.

More quotes-- Handey and Heidegger on tradition

Update 8/4: Charlie Huenemann has a follow up to this post.
It looks like Handey is still out in front.

true or false

A living thing can indeed also be grasped as a spatiotemporal magnitude of motion, but then it is no longer apprehended as living. The inexactitude of the historical humanistic sciences is not a deficiency, but is only the fulfillment of a demand essential to this type of research. It is true, also that the projecting and securing of the object-sphere of the historical sciences is not only of another kind, but is much more difficult of execution than is the achieving of rigor in the exact sciences.

The Age of the World Picture - Heidegger

Heidegger's complicity with the Nazis

I watched this BBC series episode on Heidegger. This part deals with his involvement with the Nazis.

Wittgenstein and the inescapable

Can one negate a picture? No. And in this lies the difference between picture and proposition. The picture can serve as a proposition. But in that case something gets added to it which brings it about that now it says something. In short: I can only deny that the picture is right, but the picture I cannot deny.

Wittgenstein Notebooks 1914-1916 p. 33e

Even the inescapable shouldn't necessarily be called true, "truth" is something we add to the picture. We have to come to grips with those things we cannot escape (e.g. a most skeletal common-sense realism, life's perspective, etc.), that coming-to-grips-with is unavoidable but the associated value judgment is quite avoidable. Here I embrace Wittgenstein and pass over Heidegger (i think).

Update 7/9: This is better said by Nietzsche,

But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The "apparent" world is the only one: the "true" world is merely added by a lie.

Twilight of the Idols "Reason in Philosophy" #2

My note following that passage was "->phenomenology". I wonder when I wrote that, it probably had something to do with Husserl.