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zarakhast (January 7, 2009 at 2:11 pm)

I think that what makes Heidegger's thinking more than a rehashing of questions asked many times by many others before (which you seem to be implying that he was somehow unaware of) is his enquiry into the essence of truth. Even the Greeks never explicated what they called 'a-letheia' and how this relates to lethe. But how we conceive of truth determines how we relate to beings. A-letheia belongs to Being, is a function of it. That the spectre of 'Nothing' keeps appearing in H.'s thought ...

zarakhast (January 7, 2009 at 2:18 pm)

.. is no accident, nothing inessential to his thought as a whole. The contrary is the case. How does Nothing remain Nothing ? How does that which remains concealed remain concealed ? By concealing itself ? But what is the concealment of concealment if not un-concealment ? Heidegger is the first thinker in history to explicitly ask the question concerning Nothing. How this question relates to talk about lethe and a-letheia is not an idle question.

zarakhast (January 7, 2009 at 2:06 pm)

Heidegger, as I'm sure you'll also remember, often spoke of 'woodpaths'. These paths can come to an end and can sometimes lead the woodsman astray, lead him nowhere. Heidegger's philosophy never claims to be an irrefutable system. In fact when he says the 'questioning is the piety of thought' we see that his view of the task of thinking is in a sense endless. The question (TO question) is in a sense the answer. The uncanny is the element in which philosophy occurs.

mitohistoriador (January 7, 2009 at 2:16 pm)

Yes I know it, another of my favorite H books. What you say is true and beautiful and applies in general to philosophy since Aristotle traced its origin to a state of wonder in the form of mythic consciousness. But it sidesteps my criticism that Hedeggerans have of taking Being and Time as a dogma to be "converted to" and forget that remains one of the great failures in the history of philosophy: a grandiose and ground-breaking failure which HAD to be aborted. The question is what THAT implies.

zarakhast (January 7, 2009 at 2:26 pm)

But when Nietzsche sketches the 'history of a lie' this suggests the opposite of an unbroken relation to Being ! Philosophy does indeed begin with wonder. Nietzsche somewhere, however, states that today (i.e. in his day) it really ought to be begin with FEAR. I can't speak for everyone one might call a 'Heideggerian'. I don't think that Being And Time was a failure. H. later abandoned much of the terminology he used in it because it blocked the way to understanding. His later works even ..

zarakhast (January 7, 2009 at 2:29 pm)

.. cross out the word 'Being' ! 'Truth' is no longer called truth but 'a-letheia'. When the later Heidegger speaks ever and again of the poetic he has renounced the language of metaphysics. But this does not invalidate his earlier philosophy. He admits that one must begin by speaking the language of metaphysics. If someone tried to teach you Chinese IN Chinese you wouldn't learn much ! Heidegger makes few 'errors' ..

mitohistoriador (January 7, 2009 at 2:40 pm)

Not a TOTAL Failure, to be sure, but it is a fact that to H it was IN SOME SENSE a failure, for the failure of BEING AND TIME for h becomes the failure of philosophy itself, the so-called "forgetfulness of Being" (a projection of H's own self-forgetfulness). Not just the terminology of B&T had to be abandoned but the whole ontologistic ambition and intellectualist hubris, the whole FRAMEWORK of B&T had to be aborted. This is something that realy needs to be THOUGHT and not merely contemplated.

zarakhast (January 7, 2009 at 3:18 pm)

You might be interested to read (or re-read) what H. has to say (in his lectures on him) about the problems that Nietzsche experienced in expressing his thought in the language of the categories, i.e. of traditional philosophy. A remarkable thing about Nietzsche's work is that it seems to contradict itself consistently. But this springs a) from the nature of what he is talking about ; and b) from the fact that traditional language was not up to the task. H., too, sometimes fell under its spell.

zarakhast (January 7, 2009 at 2:35 pm)

NT - remember the exhortation of Nietzsche : 'Follow me. Follow yourselves !' We can take it that Heidegger, as the one who wanted simply 'to bring to a full unfolding the accomplishment of Friedrich Nietzsche' wanted anything but 'followers'.

mitohistoriador (January 7, 2009 at 1:58 pm)

Being and Time was dedicated to Husserl and remains contaminated by Husserlian Cartesianism--hence H had to abandon this rigid "ontological" form of inquiry to really bring about a different kind of phenomenology, one which stopped being so concerned about the correct "method"--hence the word "method" is avoided in the humanities in favor of "approach" just as "analysis" is there just another "reading", The word "method" is too steeped in a scientistic fantasy of objectivity undermining soul