Thought 40: A Note on Twelve Angry Men

The juror who goes against

the consensus is angry,

and makes all the

others angry.

Thought 39: On Suicide

Suicide is the most

honest appraisal

of the human

condition but

it does rob

one of

one's

mystery.

Thought 38: Notes on The Iliad

• Warriors made poetic.
• Honour and power are everything.
• Minor correctives towards the meek such as the rights of priests and supplicants who are sacred to Zeus.
• Importance of the law of reciprocity, including histories of guest-friendship.
• The low-ranking and ugly Thersites raises similar objections against King Agamemnon as Achilles but, being unpopular and a commoner, he is punished by Odysseus for doing so, unlike Achilles who finds vindication for his resentment among the gods by way of his divine mother.
• Gods and goddesses have their favourites based on extra-moral considerations, such as the honour they have been bestowed by the mortals in question and their general prowess and courage on the battlefield.
• Gods and goddesses play tricks on mortals, as does Athena against Hector in book 22.
• Troy is finally sacked and burned, its inhabitants made prisoner and sold into slavery. 
• The sole escapee and survivor of the fall of Troy is Aeneas who will go on to found Rome, such that the Romans are, mythically speaking, the descendants of the Trojans. 
• In turn, Brutus of Troy, mythical founder of the city of London, was himself a Roman descendant of Aeneas to whom a stone is dedicated in Cannon Street outside the Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation: 'So long as the stone of Brutus is safe, London will flourish.' 
• Thus, there is a mythical continution that goes: Troy → Rome → Britain

Review 1: Seven Books by Martin Heidegger

(1) 

Hölderlin's Hymns 'Germania' and 'The Rhine'

Witty, Subversive, Magnetic: Quintessential Heidegger

To those who know their philosophy, Martin Heidegger is to thinking what Stanley Kubrick is to film-making, that is, meticulous, tasteful, and committed from the start.

This lecture course, which runs just shy of three-hundred pages, is a long commentary and dissection of two Hölderlinian hymns, with plenty of scattered references to other texts, including letters, written by the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin.

To Heidegger enthusiasts, this lecture book contains familiar territory with Heideggerian takes on poetry, the gods, commencements, the perceived cheapness and gratuity of modern representations of culture and religion; in short the long list of anti-modern posturings which make up Heideggeriana. 

In his own words,

'Everything modern is always already out of date before it has even seen the light of day.'

For most writers, such partis pris would jar in their ludicrous generality and negative outlook, glossing over all the great and interesting facets of the modern world and, to be sure, Heidegger has his detractors.

But, for want of a better word, books by Heidegger have something sacred about them in their poetical sensitivity and care for the German language which translate well into English.

At times, reading the text, I could not help but smile or even chuckle at Heidegger's wit and cynicism, which nonetheless is not of the cheap, easy, hollow kind, but rings true to those who have an eye and sensation for all that is profoundly contradictory and alarming in the world of modern technology, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon. 

In conclusion, I recommend this book to those of you who have already been seduced by Heidegger's printed Geist; for others, perhaps new to or lukewarm towards Heidegger, I would suggest turning your attention to texts of his that are more canon like Being and Time and, better still, What Is Called Thinking?.

(2)

The Basic Problems of Phenomenology

A Good'un

As is usually the case with the German philosophy professor Martin Heidegger, this is a wonderful lecture course.

To be clear, I read Heidegger books for fun and often find tremendous nourishment in Heidegger's idiosyncratic but nonetheless philosophically effective prose and use of language which works in English as well as in German.

The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (BPP) deals with similar bread and butter as Being and Time, but in a slightly more academic and historical way, as Heidegger goes through the philosophies of Kant, Lötze, Hobbes, Mill, not to mention the obligatory Plato and Aristotle, and not forgetting medieval thinkers like Thomas, Augustine, and Suarez, to illuminate the concept of being and of Dasein in contradistinction from what is, i.e. things that are extant. 

In particular, much scrutiny is brought to bear on Kant's assertion that being, understood as existence, is not a real predicate.

A great deal, if not all, of the lecture consists in philosophical fine-tuning and the phenomenological drawing of distinctions between core philosophical concepts, such as essence, presence, absence, the spannedness of time, and many others, but the effort by Heidegger is so sustained and elaborate that one certainly does come out of it all the wiser, only to quickly forget the argumentative niceties of the text in favour of a firmer grasp of the Dasein which in each case we ourselves are, to use a Heideggerian turn of phrase.

A must-read for Heidegger fans and students of his, BPP does become a bit of a slog after page 250, at least in my personal reckoning with the text, but as others have noted, this book is a very good complement to Being and Time.

I deduct a star out of sheer annoyance with the transliteration of the Greek passages into the Latin alphabet, which is a move contrary to the norms of Heideggerian scholarship, and one that offends my taste as a small-time reader of Classical Greek. 

The translation itself, however, is excellent.

(3)

The Essence of Truth

One of My Faves

This is one of my favourite lecture courses by the German professor of philosophy Martin Heidegger. 

His fastidious penetration of two of Plato's dialogues, including an outstanding unravelling of the parable of the cave from Book Ten of Republic, should be but pure delight for the spiritually-inclined among you. 

A knowledge of Classical Greek—or, at the least, of its alphabet and pronunciation—is certainly recommended by this reviewer to appreciate the book's scope and spirit, as Heidegger dissects Plato's language with razor-sharp precision.

I cannot stress enough how beautiful this lecture is.

(4)

Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event)

Propriation

This new translation chooses the term 'event' to translate the German concept Ereignis, over what would have been my preferred choice of 'propriation'. 

This disagreement aside, and the strengths or weaknesses of the present translation over the older one notwithstanding, this monograph pinpoints the fact that, like Friedrich Nietzsche, the German professor of philosophy Martin Heidegger is a global thinker whose thought will inspire others to make the leap into thinking and become creators in their own right.

Contributions to Philosophy is not an impossible read, but requires a high degree of thoughtfulness which one must fight tooth and nail to achieve in our distracted times. 

In the shortest possible way, I would say that Contributions is a preparation for a redefinition of man's essence, away from the calculating rational animal, to Dasein, the being who grounds the there. 

Time and space, for Heidegger, can only be adequately grasped in terms of Dasein and this is because metaphysics, in light of the death of the Christian moral god, is at an end in the sense that it has reached its fulfilment as well as power of illumination.

It is now time for the 'other' thinking, whose nature Heidegger will describe in the two sequels to Contributions: Mindfulness and The Event.

What, ultimately, is Heidegger's contribution to Western thought? 

I would say that Heidegger's contribution lies in decisively bringing metaphysics as metaphysics to light and to completion, something Nietzsche wanted to happen but was unable to achieve himself (no thinker can leap over his own shadow), and thereby create the spiritual conditions necessary for a few individuals here and there across the globe to assert themselves in their naked creativity, 'beyond good an evil', in the absolving releasement of being let and of letting be otherwise known as freedom.

(5)

The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics

—World, Finitude, Solitude

Dense and Intense

Philosophy is philosophising. 

And this book is philosophising on a dense and intense level. 

The structure of the philosophising of this lecture course by the German philosophy professor Martin Heidegger, on my reading, follows a six part movement.

(1) The first movement concerns what philosophy is which, according to German poet Novalis, lies in 'the desire to be at home everywhere,' i.e. the act of philosophising stems from a form of homesickness. 

In this first part, Heidegger looks into the history of the word 'metaphysics' and what that history tells us about our philosophical tradition. 

This is more of a historical analysis and I was particularly piqued by the realisation that causal knowledge, i.e. knowledge of causes, stems from Medieval preoccupations around God, the ultimate cause or uncreated being, and all that follows from that.

(2) The second movement takes a long, hard look at boredom and dissects it in three main forms: being bored by... (e.g. waiting for a train); being bored with... (e.g. a dinner party); it is boring for one... (e.g. walking through city streets on a Sunday afternoon). 

The third form, the most profound, underlies and sustains the other two forms. 

Boredom is an attunement and as such has the potential to bring us to an awareness of our being as human beings, i.e. our temporality. 

Heidegger asks: has contemporary man become boring for himself? 

For Heidegger, what is oppressive in feeling bored is precisely the lack of oppressiveness on our there-being, i.e. our Dasein is not yet burdened, it is free-floating and thus susceptible to being oppressed by temporality which we try hard to outdo by 'passing the time'. 

Within Heidegger's anatomy of time, three perspectives come to the fore: prospect with regards to the future, respect with regards to the present, and retrospect with regards to the past.

(3) The third movement, in anticipating a discussion on the animal as distinguished from man, analyses in some depth organs and the organic as distinguished from instruments or equipment. 

For Heidegger, it is because we are capable of seeing that we have eyes; not the reverse. 

While equipment or products, such as a pen, are characterized by readiness for use, they are not in themselves capable, i.e. the pen lying on the table without being put into use by a hand is incapable of writing, whereas my eye sees, is capable, and does not require me to 'use' it to see; it is inherently capable of seeing as part of the capability of my organism which includes it. 

That is, the organ is subservient to the organism, i.e. the eye is subservient to the organism which is capable of seeing, whereas a product is only ever serviceable in the sense of apt (or not) to be put to use.

(4) The fourth movement concerns the metaphysical understanding of the word 'world'. 

In order to bring about an understanding of 'world', Heidegger, in perhaps my favourite analysis of his I have read so far, distinguishes man and animal, not on the basis of the absence or presence of 'reason', but in terms of their relationship to the world, defined as 'the accessibility of beings as such and as a whole.' 

The animal is poor-in-world in that while it is taken in or captivated by beings in its own 'encircling disinhibiting ring', it does not apprehend beings as beings. 

A dog may lie under a table, say, but the dog does not apprehend the table as a table. 

For Heidegger, behaviour is proper to animals whereas comportment is proper to human beings, because we are not merely taken in by beings and captivated by them in a moving behavioural pattern, but we apprehend them and acknowledge them as such. 

Man, therefore, is world-forming, world is given to man as world and from this manifestness of beings (world) derives the logos apophantikos, propositional discourse.

(5) The fifth movement goes on to analyse propositional discourse, the logos apophantikos, and takes its cue from Aristotle as well as Kant. 

Words are symbols (from the Greek συμβάλλω, 'to bring together') with a meaning that emerges from the agreement or disagreement we have with one another on beings around us. 

Philosophical concepts, for their part, are indicative concepts that point to there-being. 

Propositional discourse is an asserting or denying which conceals (pseudesthai) or reveals (aletheuein) by pointing out something. 

Deception lies in the fact that when I assert something I am pointing out something and my listener takes that pointing out to to be true. 

Heidegger goes on to analyse the copula, i.e. something 'is' something, e.g. the board in the lecture theatre 'is' black, the board in the lecture theatre 'is' badly positioned and so on. 

Interestingly, when considering the possibility of whether or not the blackboard is badly positioned in the lecture theatre, Heidegger states that it matters not in relation to whom this is the case but only in relation to the room itself. 

To summarise, logos, in the sense of discourse or speech, hinges on the manifestness of beings as such and as as a whole which constitute the 'world', and the world thus manifested comes to prevail in the word.

(6) The sixth movement is basically a summation of the previous five movements and deals with the concept of projection as an opening for human beings for that which makes the possible possible. 

Conclusion to my review: The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics—World, Finitude, Solitude provided me with a much clearer understanding of the phenomena that Heidegger analyses, which all forms part of a program of transforming oneself into the there-being of Dasein. 

Short of coming into one's own and having the will to do so, Heidegger can only ever come off as turgid verbiage. 

At any rate, as a direct result of reading this book, not only do I understand myself better as an organism, such as when I had my eyes tested earlier this week for a new pair of glasses, but his analysis of animality also makes me grasp animals and their difference with ourselves in a much clearer way, such as when I see my local cats going round their daily business.

(6)

Being and Time



Is It for You?

The newer translation by Joan Stambaugh aside, this book is certainly more aesthetically pleasing than the original edition by Macquarrie and Robinson and the notes more helpful, particularly in translating Greek and Latin passages. 

A big change with the original translation is that what was rendered as 'ready-to-hand' has now become 'objective presence', but this semiotic change does not adversely affect the overall text which, with the participation of the reader, has a clear internal coherence and meaning.

As far as my personal taste is concerned, I have collected many if not all of Heidegger's volumes over the course of my life; I also own most of his output in the German and have philosophised along similar lines as he. 

I have of course paid some, but not much, attention to the Heidegger controversy. 

The reason for this latter choice is that I am more interested in evaluating Heidegger's discourse on terms that are suited to and are fruitful for my own thinking, but I certainly do not denigrate those who believe that the man and the context behind the discourse should also be scrutinised.

The book: I give it a four star rating, not based on any objective scale of the book's worth relative to other books, but on the very personal scale of 'I like it' but do not 'love it'. 

The good points, for me, are Heidegger's understanding of human existence as rooted in care and of authentic existence as liberated from the 'they-self', once I have grasped the fact that my death belongs to me as an individual which forces upon me an ethical choice, which in Heidegger's language is rendered as 'wanting-to-have-a-conscience', between accepting myself as an entity caught in time destined to die, or to endorse and take on board everyday public discourse and forget myself entirely in whatever the 'they' are saying in the news or on the radio. 

It is not a case of repudiating public discourse altogether but it is a case of finding oneself first so that one may evaluate it appropriately and with a reduced degree of vengeful conceit.

Ironically indeed, given Heidegger's reputation, the book's greatest strength in my view is to provide the foundations for an ethical understanding which is more in tune with the pressures and realities of our modern-world era. 

Coming to grips with temporality is also a strong point of the book, and wonderfully liberating, since once one understands that one's being does not 'have' time but actually is time, such frustrations that arise from always feeling like one is 'running out of time' may come to reduce in intensity, provided of course one overcomes guilt, regret, and angst and is willing to make the sacrifices and efforts necessary that follow from such an insight. 

It hardly needs pointing out that those who are not interested in having a conscience, as so defined, need not bother with any of the above but such people are unlikely to be an audience for Being and Time.

Heidegger is also very good at understanding what we call 'world' as a totality of significations. 

In particular, his analysis of 'things' is very astute since they always have a contextual significance which we tend to forget the more we are engaged with them in the flow of our activity.

And, to finish this very brief and inadequate summary, as human beings we are beings-in-the-world, that is, we are born, live and die in the world; in other words, we bring the world with us as human beings, without human beings there can be no world as we know it. 

In his lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics—World, Finitude, Solitude, Heidegger will indeed interpret man as being 'world-forming'. 

Why, then, only four stars? 

Part of it is what Heidegger does not and could not include in this book such as the meaning of living with others given the plurality of types and personalities within the human population; the nature of money and what it means for the possibility of thought (Heidegger was a paid philosopher, which is fine, but neither he nor Friedrich Nietzsche ever explicitly dealt with the significance of money unlike Karl Marx who saw it as key); and, linked to this, the meaning of politics and the extent to which power can determine discourse of any kind in an exclusive fashion (Arendt and Foucault went a long way in covering these last question marks, however).

In addition, this book can comfort one's own philosophical intuition or, at most, spur it into action, which is indeed a lot, but like most philosophy, the discourse leaves the world untouched and has a role to play only in personal perception—nor does it pretend to do otherwise.

However, for those seeking solutions and answers for their problems or social ills generally, my thought is that this book is unlikely to be of great help.

That said, Being and Time is powerful enough to provide a strong theoretical basis for one's context-sensitive life situation which I think can be just as effective, if not more so, than subscribing to a religion, provided one thinks through the many gaps left by Being and Time and becomes one's own Martin Heidegger, so to speak.

Lastly, and I've experienced this before with the professor's larger books, is that reading him can become a tad tedious after a while; he continuously reiterates the same themes and few concrete ideas are put across, as opposed to an overarching structure, and the text is on the heavy side which can make one long for the light-footed prose of a Nietzsche or even a Proust.

In conclusion, to answer the title of this review, I think that, deep down, you already know within you whether or not Being and Time is for you, and the question becomes one more of whether or not you are willing to take a dive and explore questions that go deeper and further than most information and chatter that are immediately accessible. 

Based on my personal experience, I certainly think that, controversy or no controversy, engaging with Heidegger is a necessary stop in the long, hard but ultimately salutary and highly rewarding journey to philosophical and spiritual wisdom.

(7)

What Is Called Thinking?

What Calls Us to Think? The Thought-Provoking.

The title of the book under review, What Is Called Thinking?, coming from the German Was heisst Denken?, could also have been translated as 'What Calls Us to Think?' or even 'What Calls for Thinking?'. 

The short answer to this question is: that which is thought-provoking and, for the German philosophy professor Martin Heidegger, 'most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking times is that we are still not thinking.'

Readers of the book will find out that the professor includes himself in this 'we'.

At any rate, the book is a transcript of a lecture course Heidegger delivered in the nineteen fifties, and is divided into two parts. 

The first part, in the main, is an appreciation of and confrontation with Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra—A Book for Everyone and Nobody and the Persian prophet's cry that 'The wasteland is growing. Woe to him who hides wastelands within!', a sentence addressed to the superman, whose nature and difference with the last man is discussed at length in this section.

Essentially, the bridge to the superman is one of renunciation, in the sense of the gentle releasement of being let and of letting be, and manifests in the deliverance from revenge, defined as the 'ill will towards time and its "it was"' rooted in past suffering and, prey to that which has been and cannot be changed, gets frustrated by its incapacity to will backwards. 

Revenge and its most common manifestation, resentment, is essentially an attunement that is at odds with time that wills the world away.

According to Heidegger, the beginning of the modern world began the moment when the type 'man' thought that he was running out of time. 

In learning thinking we are learning to deliver ourselves from revenge and to think our habits in a non reactive way. 

This is no easy task but unavoidable for the advancement of homo sapiens who has been defined by the metaphysical tradition as the animal rationale, 'the beast endowed with reason.'

The second part of the book deals most of all with a fragment from the pre-platonic thinker Parmenides, illuminating in the process the phenomenon of thinking beyond the narrow confines of a shallow rationality content with calculating and representational ideation in favour of a more heart-and-head based approach to reality, but, I would add, not without heeding the words of German poet Friedrich Hölderlin's 'Good Advice':

'You've a head and a heart? Reveal only one of the two for

They'll damn you doubly should you reveal both equally.'

A knowledge of the Greek alphabet and Greek pronunciation is recommended by this reviewer to read through this section of the book since Heidegger always goes back to the original tongue—most usually Greek or Latin—of the thinkers he brings to task and whose fruits he unravels in his immense bibliography.

In conclusion, this book will appeal to profound natures who want to overcome the spirit of revenge which mires our world today and who want to reflect in a way that is deeper and more holistic than the norm. 

It sheds important lights on the modern world bible that is Thus Spoke Zarathustra and puts us to the test; are we willing to learn thinking and heed, in the sense of take seriously, that which provokes us to thought?