Jean-Luc Nancy provides an analysis of the anti-Semitic aspects of Heidegger's recently published Black Notebooks. Nancy refers to a philosophical or "historial" anti-Semitism marked, nonetheless, by the "banality" of ordinary anti-Semitism pervading Europe. Heidegger's thought is placed in the broader context of the European (especially Christian) impulse toward new beginnings.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:POETRY AS THE NAMING OF THE GODS by Phyllis Zagano There have been many attempts to define poetry, and there is copious advice to would-be poets. Horace writes somewhere "Sit quod vis, simplex dumtaxat et unum" which can be comfortably rendered as "make anything at all, so long as it hangs together." The hanging together is the quality most writers point to as evidence of success: simply, it works. (...) What poetry does is the more complex question, since it is the understanding of its internal kinesis which allows for its definition. Essentially, it takes an object from objective reality (insofar as we can agree such exists) and creates an oxymoronic entity: a static consciousness. This is always seen in phenomenological terms, that is, it must be consciousness of something. The poet recognizes this in deference to the common consciousness and the common understanding of the everyday, by the use of metaphor, simile, and the other accouterments of the trade. Things must be as they appear, and they must be as they appear to some majority of the people, in order for the poet to argue his private vision with clarity. The analogy must have some common ground before it has meaning, before the "naming" takes place. For Martin Heidegger the activity of creating poetry, dichten, is not only an indispensable part of human life, it signals the humanness of the person. He has two principal essays on poetry which show how this activity ofdichten combines his concepts Dasein and Vorhandenheit (despite his later abandonment of Dasein for Lichtung). Heidegger's essay, "Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry," seeks to determine what is common to poetry, that is, what constitutes its essence. 340 Phyllis Zagano341 Another ofhis essays, "What are Poets For?" begins where the first ends (with considerations of Friedrich Hölderlin's "Bread and Wine"). Each essay comments on specific poems and somewhat imperfectly attempts a poetic theory in consonance with the rest of Heidegger's work. Since "Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry" concentrates more on poetic theory than "What are Poets For?," investigation of it will prove more helpful in understanding and appropriating Heidegger's contention that "The writing of poetry is the fundamental naming of the Gods____"· In his "Letter on Humanism," Heidegger calls language the "House of Being," while man is the "Shepherd of Being." This understanding ofthe function oflanguage and the methodweuse tocreateand recreate ourselves and our world recurs often in Heidegger's work. The essay, "Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry," stands as a seeking after what is common to poetry and, while Heidegger recognizes that Hölderlin's work is "only one among many others" (p. 294) and therefore cannot be used as the sole criterion to determine what constitutes poetry, he says that if what we recognize as the "essence of poetry" is present in a universal concept, then it ought to be able to be extrapolated from Hölderlin's poetry as well as from that of any other poet. What constitutes the "essence" of poetry, Heidegger argues, ought to be equally valid in every poem, but it is perhaps well to remind him that what ought to be equally valid in every poem is only equally valid in every poem which "hangs together," that is, every poem which performs its function as poem. Such insistence is ofcourse mere definition of terms, but in this case, without prior argument on the metaphysics of art, it is necessary. In any event, Heidegger concludes that the essence of Hölderlin's poetry is the "essence ofpoetry" itself (p. 294), and that what is common to poetry is found in it. While some critics might argue that Heidegger makes too much of Hölderlin here, the more dangerous weakness in this method of argumentation is the possibility that an idiosyncrasy might be mistaken for an essential element or, more probably, that too much will be generalized from this particular example or set of examples. The trained literary critic can cast a cold eye on such magnification of a single poet as the presenter of both form and content for the meaning of the "essence of poetry." In fact, it... (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss Martin Heidegger's position on the so-called godlessness of our current age. Rather than holding that we must either await the advent of god or enthusiastically embrace our godlessness, Heidegger holds that a third option is available to us: we could fundamentally change the way we experience the world by leaving behind all remnants of metaphysical thinking. In Section II, we show that, despite the absence of god, our current historical moment shares a metaphysical structure with (...) the god-oriented epochs that preceded it. A metaphysical epoch involves a single, all-encompassing understanding of the entities in the world and how they ought to be arranged, usually established by a God who serves as a paradigm for those entities. In Section III, we discuss how the metaphysical age arose in the first place; the polytheistic world of the ancient Greeks was tumultuous and unpredictable, such that its inhabitants began to desire a stable, planned-out world that could be established by a single God. In the final section, we examine Heidegger's obscure discussion of the last god, who is to lead us out of metaphysics by a fundamental shift of the sort that led us into metaphysics. We discuss the basic features that will define a post-metaphysical age, and the last god's role in bringing this age about. We argue that this age resembles the pre-metaphysical age of the ancient Greeks, but rather than being polytheistic, it will be “polydivinistic”. (shrink)

Heidegger’s discussion about the rise of the arbitrary power of “machination” in his late 1930s writings does not just echo his well-known later thinking on technology, but also affords a profound insight to the ontological mechanism of oblivion behind the history of Western thinking of being. The paper shows how this rise of the coercive power of ordering signifies an emergence of historically and spatially significant moment of completion: outgrowth of the early Greek notions of tekhne and phusis in terms (...) of globally expanding systems of calculative orderings. The paper thus aims to show how the condition of machination marks a fundamental implementation of the hidden consummation of the mechanism of oblivion now being re-adopted into the operational clarity of calculative rationality. It is argued that the rise of machination became possible through the historical process of replacing the early Greek disposition of existence, the wonder, with calculative rationality of ordering. (shrink)

In a paradoxical manner, Heidegger's work is deeply tainted by his complicity with totalitarian (fascist) oppression, despite the fact that his philosophy, in its basic tenor, was always dedicated to freedom and resistance to totalizing uniformity. While acknowledging his early fascination with power struggles, the essay tries to show how, as a corollary of his turning (Kehre), Heidegger steadily sought to extricate himself from the tentacles of oppressive power (Macht) and manipulative domination (Machenschaft). The focus here is on recently published (...) treatises of the 1930's. The conclusion inserts Heidegger's thought into the contemporary arena of global standardization. (shrink)

In Division One of Being and Time Heidegger presents a novel categorization of what there is, and an original account of the project of ontology and consequently of the nature and genesis of those ontological categories. He officially recognizes two categories of Being: Zuhandensein and Vorhandensein. Vorhandene things are roughly the objective, person-independent, causally interacting subjects of natural scientific inquiry. Zuhandene things are those which a neo-Kantian would describe as having been imbued with human values and significances. In addition to (...) these categories, there is human Being, or Dasein, in whose structure the origins of the two thing-ish categories are to be found. This essay concerns itself with three of Heidegger’s conceptual innovations: his conceiving of ontology in terms of self-adjudicating anthropological categories, as summed up in the slogan that “fundamental ontology is the regional ontology of Dasein,” his corresponding anti-traditional assertion of the ontological priority of the domain of the Zuhandensein to that of the Vorhandensein, which latter is seen as rooted in or precipitated out of that more basic world of human significances, and the non-Cartesian account of awareness and classificatory consciousness as social and practical. (shrink)

Grappling with the place of Jewish philosophy at the margin of religious studies, Robert Erlewine examines the work of five Jewish philosophers—Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Joseph Soloveitchik—to bring them into dialogue within the discipline. Emphasizing the tenuous place of Jews in European, and particularly German, culture, Erlewine unapologetically contextualizes Jewish philosophy as part of the West. He teases out the antagonistic and overlapping attempts of Jewish thinkers to elucidate the philosophical and cultural meaning of (...) Judaism when others sought to deny and even expel Jewish influences. By reading the canon of Jewish philosophy in this new light, Erlewine offers insight into how Jewish thinkers used religion to assert their individuality and modernity. (shrink)

The Principle of Reason, the text of an important and influential lecture course that Martin Heidegger gave in 1955–56, takes as its focal point Leibniz’s principle: nothing is without reason.

Machine generated contents note: PART I: HEIDEGGER'S FUNDAMENTAL -- ONTOLOGY OF DASEIN -- Section A: Being and Time -- 1 Dasein and the World -- 2 Dasein's Being-in, Care, and Truth -- 3 Dasein and Temporality -- Section B: Heidegger's Rejection of the I-Thou -- 4 Phenomenology and Dasein -- 5 Heidegger's First Critique of the I-Thou -- 6 The I-Thou in Heidegger's Study of Kant -- 7 Metaphysics and Logic -- PART II: BUBER'S I-THOU -- Section A: I and (...) Thou -- 8 First Presentation of the I-Thou -- 9 Living the I-Thou -- Section B: Beyond I and Thou -- 10 The I-Thou and Dialogue -- 11 Buber's Critique of Heidegger -- 12 Conclusion and Some Implications -- Selected Bibliography -- Index. (shrink)

Heidegger is now widely recognized as one of the most influential and controversial philosophers of the twentieth century, yet much of his later philosophy remains shrouded in confusion and controversy. Restoring Heidegger's understanding of metaphysics as 'ontotheology' to its rightful place at the center of his later thought, this book demonstrates the depth and significance of his controversial critique of technology, his appalling misadventure with Nazism, his prescient critique of the university, and his important philosophical suggestions for the future of (...) higher education. It will be required reading for those seeking to understand the relationship between Heidegger's philosophy and National Socialism, as well as the continuing relevance of his work. (shrink)

The saying reads, "The waking have a single cosmos in common," i.e., a single world-shape in which they take part in common. By this is already expressed what the later moral philosopher Plutarch, who preserved the fragment for us, pointed to in his interpretation: in sleep each turns away from the common cosmos and turns to something which belongs to him alone, something thus which he does not and cannot share with any other. That Heracleitus himself, on the contrary, understood (...) this less as the sleep of an individual, including the sphere of dreams, than as a cosmos, one among numberless fleeting world-shapes, in no way corresponds to what we know of his teachings. (shrink)

I am trying...to go back through all those places where I was exiled-enclosed so he could constitute his there. To read his text to try to take back from it what he took from me irrecoverably...I am trying to re-discover the possibility of a relation to air. Don’t I need one, well before starting to speak?