Anarchist Spirit

Spots of Time

William Wordsworth - There Are In 0ur Existence... by poetictouch

Heidegger On Romanticism

Romanticism has not yet come to its end. Romanticism attempts once again a transfiguration of beings, which as re-acting against the thorough explaining and calculating strives only to evolve beyond or next to this explaining or calculating. This transfiguration "calls upon" the historical renewal of "culture," urges its rootedness in the "people," and strives for communication to everyone. GA 65, 496; 1999, 349.

In other words, for Heidegger, the Romantic "re-action" to our modern Weltnacht did not go far enough. Even so, as Pol Vandevelde argues in his Heidegger and the Romantics (Routledge, 2012), Heidegger's desire to "do something more radical than romanticism" does not exclude the possibility that he "[built] upon the romantic project and [attempted] to offer the ontological foundation, the [Stiftung] of this romanticization" (15).

Vandevelde's use of the German term "Stiftung" (misprinted in the text as "Sitftung") translates in English as "foundation," but it connotes the kind of foundation that involves an endowment or donation (as in the English phrase "charitable foundation"). Understood in this fashion, we have to do with a more consistently Heideggerian notion than "foundation" in the sense of a base or basis. The Stiftung is an act of generosity, not an immovable rock upon which to build a church.

Balzac

Why he matters.

Heideggerian Restlessness

"Heidegger's thinking does not come to rest. Each time we believe we have finally arrived at the goal and prepare to latch onto it we are thrown into a new interrogation. Every resting point is shaken. What seemed to be the end and goal becomes a departure for renewed questioning. If Descartes sought an unshakable foundation for philosophizing, Heidegger tries to put precisely this foundation in question."

--Walter Biemel, Heidegger, pp. 8-9.

The Heidegger Stone

"To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world's sky."

Thus did Heidegger think, and such was his accomplishment: a body of work that stands still in the philosophical world's sky like a "Rosetta" stone--a device that enables the translation of the Western philosophical canon (Plato to Kant) from metaphysical speculation (the search for substance or a bedrock of "whatness" or quiddity called "Being") into a new, and different, direction of thought and practice. Heidegger abandoned the presiding pretense of Western metaphysics (that there is an Archimedean standpoint upon which one may place a philosophical lever to "move the world") and adopted, instead, a more humble prospect: a new place from which to pose the question of how things hang together. The move from "what" to "how" is the true hallmark of Heideggerian genius.

The greatest difficulty with Heidegger's project is encountered in his insistence on pouring this new wine into old wineskins: he does not abandon the old metaphysical vocabulary (a la Wittgenstein) but attempts to invest it with new significances. The result of this strategy is much tortured prose. The most important prerequisite of Heidegger studies is perseverance. Through perseverance, the stone that the builders rejected becomes the chief corner stone.

The Heideggerian Republic

Heidegger bids us to enter "the clearing"--the place where we no longer impose upon the found world our own notions of how that world is "supposed" to "hang together" (to be). He acquired this ideal from his teacher Husserl and held on to it tenaciously throughout his life. He bids us to abandon the will-to-power over nature (i.e., our heavy reliance upon modern technology) and texts (i.e., interpretative schemes that amount to little more than special pleading for inherited dogmas). He admonishes us to have faith in Being itself (the world's own way of "worlding"). He asks us to see the world with renewed wonder. In the Heideggerian republic, poets rule and philosophers are banished. In the Heideggerian republic, phenomenology is king.