Martin Heidegger - Tumblr Posts

The Ancient Greeks think with their eyes, i.e., through glances. The λόγος, thinking, is a letting appear of what here has come to appearance from itself, of what is brought into the light from out of the darkness and its sheltering. With this, thinking thus becomes a true thinking, a letting appear that each time in a certain respect discloses and lights up what is concealed. Hereby what is dark is not dissolved in a vain brightness, but rather the dark remains what is concealed and thereby itself first comes to appearance. The light remains invariably a dark light. The basic action of the λόγος is the letting appear of what lies before. This λόγος is the basic act of thinking. If we experience thinking in its logical essence in terms of the λόγος, then it is revealed: Thinking dwells inceptually in the essential space of a dark light. This is the location where the gods were present to the Greeks.

Martin Heidegger, Logic

Being means “synthesis” and the unity (of this synthesis). Non-being means non-synthesis and multiplicity. Specifically, this is the character of the being of those beings that always are what and how they are, the ἀδύνατα ἀλλώς ἔχειν— those which, by the very meaning of their being, cannot be otherwise. Martin Heidegger, Logic

We moderns, or, to speak more broadly, all post-Greek humanity, have for a long time been so deflected that we understand looking exclusively as man’s representational self-direction toward beings. But in this way looking does not at all come into sight; instead it is understood only as a self-accomplished “activity,” i.e., an act of re-presenting. To re-present means here to present before oneself, to bring before oneself and to master, to attack things. The Greeks experience looking at first and properly as the way man emerges and comes into presence, with other beings, but as man in his essence. Thinking as moderns and therefore insufficiently, but for us surely more understandably, we can say in short: the look, θέα, is not looking as activity and act of the “subject” but is sight as the emerging of the “object” and its coming to our encounter. Looking is self-showing and indeed that self-showing in which the essence of the encounter-ing person has gathered itself and in which the encountering person “emerges” in the double sense that his essence is collected in the look, as the sum of his existence, and that this collectedness and simple totality of his essence opens itself to the look—opens itself at any rate in order to let come into presence in the unconcealed at the same time the concealment and the abyss of his essence.

Martin Heidegger, Parmenides

To grasp the riddle is to leap, especially when the riddle involves being as a whole. Here there is no particular being or assortment of beings from which the whole could ever be disclosed. To make surmises on this riddle we must venture a journey into the open region of what in general is concealed, into that untraveled and uncharted region which is unconcealment (aletheia) of what is most concealed. We must venture into truth.

Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche II

As a consequence of the calculability of spatio-temporal relations of order, space itself, and time itself, together with their unity, are considered to be so clear that any further attempt to undertake to explain them is merely frowned upon, especially since such an “explanation” would yield no useful result. A meditation on the essence of time, for example, accomplishes nothing in terms of improving our apparatus for measuring time, which is why a meditation on the essence of time is rightly counted as one of those things that produces no results. And there are similar grounds pertaining to that stance that says that whatever is not worth inquiring into any further in a calculative manner is simply not worthy of inquiry at all. Thus, the sphere of whatever is intrinsically clear comes to be delimited by that which one has already tacitly unified so as to no longer have to think about it… And yet a single step of thinking is already enough to destroy this semblance of clarity.

Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”

Poetizing is founding, a grounding that brings about that which remains. The poet is the one who grounds beyng [sic]. What we call the real in our everyday life is, in the end, what is unreal.

Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymns

When understood correctly and literally (in the strict sense of that word), the Greek word for “being true”— ἀληθεύειν—means to uncover in the sense of unveiling something, removing the hiddenness from something. An adequate word for that is “to un-cover”—not in the strong sense of bringing something to light for the very first time, but in the more general sense of unveiling something that is still veiled or of again unveiling that which has again become veiled-over. In short, it means to uncover what has been covered until now, or that has become covered again.

Martin Heidegger, Logic

Human existence is handed over to itself in its having-to-be [Zu-sein]. “Handed over”—that means: already in, already ahead-of-itself, already familiar with the world, never something just-there but always already a possibility that has been decided one way or the other. Such human existence is always already prior to what it de facto is at any given moment. But prior to every possible “prior” is time itself, which makes it possible that human existence can be the very possibility of its self.

Martin Heidegger, Logic

The unexpressed basis of traditional logic is a specific temporality which is oriented primarily to making-present, which is expressed in an extreme form in the formulation of the Greek concept of knowledge as θεωρία, pure intuiting. All the truth of such a logic is the truth of intuition, where intuition is understood as making-present. But should more radical temporal possibilities be found in the temporality of human existence, these would necessarily set an essential limit to traditional logic and ontology. Whether philosophical research can be intense enough and firm enough to make this limit a lived fact is a question that concerns the very fate of philosophy.

Martin Heidegger, Logic

In order to think the Anaximander fragment we must first of all, but then continually, take a simple step: we must cross over to what that always unspoken word, έόν, εόντα, εΐναι says. It says: presencing into unconcealment. Concealed in that word is this: presencing brings unconcealment along with itself.  Unconcealment itself is presencing. Both are the Same, though they are not identical. What is present is that which, whether presently or not, presences in unconcealment. Along with the 'Αλήθεια which belongs to the essence of Being, the Λήθηremains entirely unthought, as in conse[56]quence do "presently" and "non-presently," i.e. the region of the open expanse in which everything present arrives and in which the presencing to one another of beings which linger awhile is unfolded and delimited. Because beings are what is present in the manner of that which lingers awhile, once they have arrived in unconcealment they can linger there, they can appear. 

Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking

What shines into beings, though can never be explained on the basis of beings nor constructed out of beings, is Being itself.

Martin Heidegger, Plato's Sophist

If we want to lay hold of Being it is always as if we were reaching into a void. The Being that we are asking about is almost like Nothing, and yet we are always trying to arm and guard ourselves against the presumption of saying that all beings are not. But Being remains undiscover-able, almost like Nothing, or in the end entirely so. The word "Being" is then finally just an empty word. It means nothing actual, tangible, real. Its meaning is an unreal vapor. So in the end Nietzsche is entirely right when he calls the "highest concepts" such as Being "the final wisp of evaporating reality"

Martin Heidegger, Plato's Sophist

System comes from the Greek συνίστημι, I put together, and this can mean two things. First, order things in such a way that not only is what is present and occurring distributed and preserved according to an already existent network of places for example, the way the windowpane is inserted into a completed windowframe--but order in such a way that the order itself is thereby first projected. But this projection, if it is genuine, is not only thrown over things, not only dumped on top of them. A genuine projection throws beings apart in such a way that they precisely now become visible in the unity of their inmost jointure for example the jointure which determines a living thing, a living being, σύστημα τοῦ σώματος; we still speak today of the nervous system, of the systems of digestion and procreation.

Martin Heidegger, Plato's Sophist

Plato says: Δεινόν γάρ που τοϋτ' έχει γραφή, και ώς αληθώς δμοιον ζωγραφία (cf. d4f.): "What is written is as uncanny as a painting." και γάρ τά εκείνης έκγονα έστηκε μέν ώς ζώντα (d5f.), what is presented in it looks as if it were alive, έάν δ" άνέρη τι, σεμνώς πάνυ σιγά (d6), yet "if you interrogate it, it maintains a solemn silence." Thus what is spoken and written is silent and delivers nothing. Plato then asks: δόξαις μέν αν ώς τι φρονοϋντας αυτούς λέγειν (d7f.); "do you really believe that what is written down could speak ώς τι φρονούν, as if it had understanding?" No, on the contrary, to anyone who wants to learn something on the basis of what is said there, "it always shows one and the same thing and no more"; έν τι σημαίνει μόνον ταύτόν άεί.

Martin Heidegger, Plato's Sophist

It is the inept guardians of tradition who should be fought against. This can happen only if we ourselves strive to create an occasion for the transformation of the basic problems, for the metaphysica naturalis in Dasein itself. This is what I mean by the destruction of tradition. It is not a matter of doing away with two millenia and setting up oneself in their place. But, as decidedly as we must find our way back to the elemental force of central problems conceived in their universality and radicality, so would it be fatefully misguided were we to absolutize these very problems and so negate them in their essential function. We humans have a tendency, not just today and just on occasion, by which we either mistake what is philosophically central for that which is interesting or easily accessible, or we absolutize a central point immediately, blindly, and once we grasp it, we fixate on a single potential stage of the originating problematic and make it an eternal task, instead of summoning and preparing the possibility of new originations. 

Martin Heidegger, Metaphysical Foundations of Logic

The finitude of philosophy consists not in the fact that it comes up against limits and cannot proceed further. It rather consists in this: in the singleness and simplicity of its central problematic, philosophy conceals a richness that again and again demands a renewed awakening.

Martin Heidegger, Metaphysical Foundations of Logic

This knowledge, this μάθημα, this making public in writing of what has been said, έν ψυχαΐς παρέξει, "will create in people λήθην, forgetting," or, more properly, λανθάνω, a concealing, a covering, "of themselves, in relation to what they have learned," τών μαθόντων. Hence what the god is offering will cover over in people precisely that to which they relate in their comportment toward the world and themselves, because the knowledge of writing entails άμελετησία μνήμης, "unconcern with retention," i.e., with retaining the things themselves. λόγος as communicated in writing is capable of promoting an unconcern with retaining the matters spoken of, i.e., with retaining them in their proper substantive content. And then comes the more precise reason: ἅτε διὰ πίστιν γραφῆς ἔξωθεν ὑπ᾽ ἀλλοτρίων τύπων, οὐκ ἔνδοθεν αὐτοὺς ὑφ᾽ αὑτῶν ἀναμιμνῃσκομένους (a3ff.). They will retain what they learn διά πίστιν γραφής, "by relying on what is written," Εξωθεν, "from the outside," i.e., on the basis of the written word, "by means of foreign signs," ones which have, in their own character, nothing at all to do with the matter they refer to. 

Martin Heidegger, Plato's Sophist

The “divine” is incapable of jealousy, not because it is absolute goodness and love but rather because in its being as pure movement it can neither hate nor love at all. 

Martin Heidegger on Aristotle

Where motion is experienced time is unveiled. In such a mental action we can stop and dwell on something. We may recall the passage in De interpretatione: ΐστησι ή διάνοια, thinking stands still with something. The mind, too, has the character of a moving thing. Even when we are not experiencing something moving in the sense of some entity presently at hand, nevertheless motion taken in the broadest sense, hence time, is unveiled for us in experiencing our own self.

Martin Heidegger, Basic Problems

Αύτά μέν ούν καθ' έαυτά λεγόμενα τά ρήματα ονόματα έστι και σημαίνει τι (ίστησι γάρ ό λέγων τήν διάνοιαν, και ό άκούσας ήρέμησεν): [Verbs themselves, spoken by themselves, are names and signify something (for the one speaking brings his thinking to a halt and the one listening pauses):] "Whoever says something brings the process of opining to a standstill." When we naturally go along living, then the world is here. We deal with it, we are preoccupied with it. If a word is then spoken, the process of opining is placed before something; in understanding the word I linger with that thing; in meaning something, I have come to a pause. He who listens pauses in understanding the word: ό άκούσας ήρέμησεν. In understanding the word, I pause with what it means. 

Martin Heidegger, Basic Problems