The Letter on Humanism

I’ve spent all of today reading Heidegger’s ‘Letter on Humanism’… brain is mush.

Here’s one of the bits I liked though:

To think against ‘values’ is not to maintain that everything intepreted as ‘a value’ – ‘culture’, ‘art’, ’science’, ‘human dignity’, ‘world, ‘God’ – is valueless. Rather, it is important finally to realise that precisely through the characterisation of something as ‘a value’ what is so valued is robbed of its worth. That is to say, by the assessment of something as a value what is valued is admitted only as an object for man’s estimation. But what a thing is in its Being is not exhausted by its being an object, particularly when objectivity takes the form of value. Every valuing, even where it values positively, is a subjectivising. It does no let beings: be. Rather, valuing lets beings: be valid- solely as the objects of its doing. The bizarre effort to prove the objectivity of values does not know what it is doing. When one proclaims ‘God’ the altogether ‘highest value,’ this is a degradation of God’s essence. Here as elsewhere thinking in values is the greatest blasphemy imaginable against Being. To think against values therefore does not mean to beat the drum for the valuelessness and nullity of beings. It means rather to bring the clearing of the truth of Being before thinking, as against subjectivising beings into mere objects.

Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Routledge; 1999), 251.

Filed under: Heidegger, Philosophy, phenomenology, quotations , Heidegger, Letter on Humanism

Metaphysics of the disc

A little exercise in compare and contrast.  Some books I’ve been reading recently: Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novel ‘Jingo’, and Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’.

“It was much better to imagine men in some smoky room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over the brandy.  You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn’t then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told their children bedtime stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people.  It was so much easier to blame it on Them.  It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us.  If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault.  If it was Us, what did that make Me?  After all, I’m one of Us.  I must be.  I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them.  No-one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them.  We’re always one of Us.  It’s Them that do bad things.”

Jingo, p.199

And Heidegger:

“We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the ‘great mass’ as they shrink back; we find shocking what they find shocking.  The ‘they’ which is nothing definite, and which all are, though not as the sum, prescribes the Being of everydayness.”

Being and Time, p.127

This is, of course, why we need football.  It is us against them, and moreover there is us who plays the real football, and them, who don’ts.  Don’t even mention those guys who jump around all over the place, don’t get me started on that round ball mullarkey…

Filed under: Heidegger, Terry Pratchett, books, hilarious

Irrationalism at large

“…Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida are no more than convenient illustrations of the irrationalism at large in the twentieth-century European mind.”

Warren Wagar in the American Historical Review, 1986.

I love these kinds of comments!

Filed under: Derrida, Foucault, Heidegger, Historiography, hilarious