Heidegger's Interpretation Research Articles

The impact of Heideggerian Philosophy on art and psychological well-being: A social psychological examination

Heidegger is one of the most famous philosophers from the 20th century who presented great insights about various themes such as politics, Arts, and metaphysics. This paper intends to study Heidegger’s concept of Art. It traces the origin and development of Heidegger’s philosophy and explains his philosophies in terms of great Artworks and their role in depicting and representing tradition, history, and transformation. A culturally rich environment can contribute to the well-being of individuals by providing a sense of connection and rootedness. In addition to presenting a literature-based review of Heidegger’s philosophies’ history and origins, this paper includes a detailed look at his various works and discusses them in literary terminologies. Heidegger’s philosophical inquiries touch upon ethical dimensions, and art can be a powerful tool for conveying ethical messages and provoking ethical contemplation. Societies that engage with art in this way may foster a collective ethical awareness, contributing to a sense of social responsibility and potentially enhancing the well-being of the community. Moreover, the present review highlighted the interpretation of Heidegger’s philosophy and its implications for society can vary among scholars and individuals. The impact on well-being depends on how these ideas are understood, applied, and integrated into the broader cultural and social context.

Wolfgang Beltracchi and the authenticity of forgery: Not a moral failure

Reiner Schurmann’s Broken Hegemonies is a philosophical approach to how humans have historically created a rhetorical framework of ideas to operate in their existence. For this article, I will discuss Schurmann’s text, specifically his Hegemonic Fantasms of Nature and Modern Consciousness (as well as the associated concepts of the tragic condition and tragic denial) in order to understand Wolfgang Beltracchi as a skilled albeit complicated artist, researcher and art forger. Beltracchi operates within the Hegemonic Fantasm of Nature as the law (per Marcus Tullius Cicero and Marcus Aurelius) as well as with nature as the destitution of the hegemonic construct of nature (per Meister Eckhart) and the Hegemonic Fantasm of Modern Consciousness of the subject ‘self’ (per Luther and Kant), as well as the diremption of hegemonic concepts (per Martin Heidegger). I will further discuss Nature as the law of authenticity and provenance within the twentieth-century art market as discussed in Anthony Amore’s The Art of the Con, Arne Birkenstock’s documentary, Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery, as well as articles from Deutsche Welle (DW) and Times Magazine, and then define diremption as the self-reflexive gaze as discussed in Martin Heidegger’s essays from Basic Writings and Schurmann’s interpretation of Heidegger’s text, Contributions. While I am of the opinion that Beltracchi is operating under the particulars of laws and ‘ethics of naturality’ (via Roman Stoicism), he is also operating outside of Nature and into the narration of singularity that contradicts the Hegemonic Fantasm of Modern Consciousness. I will argue that Beltracchi utilizes the fantasm of the art market to operate within the fantasm of forgery and, in doing so, becomes an ‘obedient spirit that lets itself be broken’ and re-subsumed by art itself.

Being with the machine: The diremptive subject and algorithmic multiplicity

In this article, I use Reiner Schürmann’s interpretation of Heidegger’s ‘diremption’ as a framework to examine how subjectivity is constructed in light of surveillance technology. I explore the use of algorithmic technologies – first in the context of surveillance capitalism and second in the context of art – in order to make a case for the present epoch as a site of movement towards a fundamentally multiple subject, whose singularization emerges from its embodied relationship to technology.

Entre Husserl y Tomás de Aquino. Aspectos metafísicos y epistemológicos del diálogo entre fenomenología y escolástica según Edith Stein

The fundamental program of Stein’s philosophy after his conversion was the relationship between modern philosophy and scholasticism. This article deals with new metaphysical and epistemological aspects of Stein’s work that reflect the encounter between both philosophical currents, starting from her reading of Thomas Aquinas’ De veritate, which have not yet been treated in the Edith Stein Forschung. Thus, from the metaphysical point of view, the question of the relationship between unity and multiplicity and the problem of the conditions of possibility of organic development are identified. And from the epistemological point of view, the following relevant aspects are raised: the starting point of philosophizing; the principles of knowledge; the extent to which habit influences knowledge; the question of whether angelic knowledge can serve to clarify human knowledge; the relationship between mathesis universalis and divine knowledge; the relationship between abstraction and intuition; and the critique of the Heideggerian interpretation of the concept of truth in the philosophical tradition.

Asteroids, Holoblack and Clearance Futurism

Abstract In this paper, I argue that the video game Asteroids’ enduring appeal turns on its ability to be read as futurist text. I connect Asteroids’ black and white aesthetic to the phenomenologist Vivian Sobchack’s notion of postfuturism. Central to postfuturism is a change from representations of space as deep to representations of space as surface, incapable of concealment. I consider materials designed to absorb almost all visible light—which I call holoblacks—as pushing past representations of space as surface into a paradigm of non-representation of space or space as non-representation. I argue that this non-representation is what is meant by Martin Heidegger in the concept of a thing. I therefore offer an interpretation of Heidegger’s Lichtung, or clearing, in which holoblacks act as a vehicle for the gathering, disclosure and nearing of world which I call ‘clearance futurism’. I conclude by reading Asteroids as a clearance futurist text.

CONSIDERACIONES CRÍTICAS A LA EQUIPARACIÓN ENTRE COMPRENSIÓN Y KNOW-HOW EN ALGUNAS INTERPRETACIONES PRAGMATISTAS DEL PENSAMIENTO DE HEIDEGGER

This paper discusses how the Heideggerian concept of understanding (Verstehen) is typically equated with the notion of know-how, particularly in pragmatist interpretations of Heidegger’s work. The relevance of G. Ryle’s thought in the development of the philosophical notion of know-how is well known. The first part of this article shows that, in despite of some general similarities, the Heideggerian notion of understanding and Ryle’s notion of know-how differ in fundamental aspects. The second part discusses some of the relevant appraisals of Brandom’s interpretation of the Heideggerian Verstehen. The third part considers and discusses Okrent’s pragmatist interpretation of Heidegger’s notion. Finally, the article shows that this reading has a limited scope as the modal distinction between authentic and unauthentic understanding becomes irrelevant.

Is Finitude Original? A Rereading of “Violence and Metaphysics”

Abstract This article seeks to challenge what may seem to be an obvious assertion: that finitude is original in the sense that it must be presupposed that any possible meaning can only be thought beginning from this finitude. I do this through a rereading of Derrida’s epochal essay “Violence and Metaphysics,” which perhaps is the most decisive interpretation of the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. In the essay, Derrida demonstrates how Levinas is forced to betray his own intentions in his attempt to describe the Other as transcendent. By making use of a newly published lecture series, Derrida held at the same time as writing the essay, I show how Derrida’s reading of Levinas is intimately tied to his interpretation of Heidegger’s critique of the metaphysics of presence, and how both Levinas and Derrida end up in the paradox I call “original finitude.” I then show how new commentary literature on Levinas’ analysis of enjoyment gives us an alternative to Derrida’s notion of original finitude. I do not propose that this alternative overcomes Derrida’s problematic, but rather that it gives another option of how to relate to that which escapes the grasp of philosophy. The key difference will be whether transcendence is conceived as a failure of philosophy or its excess.

"We're protecting them to death"-A Heideggerian interpretation of loneliness among older adults in long-term care facilities during COVID-19: Contact details.

In this paper, I draw on Heidegger’s phenomenology of “moods” (Stimmungen) to interpret loneliness as a diffused and atmospheric feeling-state that often undergirds the lives of older adults, shaping the ways in which they are attuned to and make sense of the world. I focus specifically on residents in long-term care facilities to show how the social isolation and lockdown measures of the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically intensified the mood. The aim is to shed light on how profound and totalizing the experience has been for residents. Making use of Heidegger’s account of the affective “collapse” or “breakdown” (Zusammenbruch) of meaning, I argue that when older adults are functionally locked in their rooms for months at a time and cut off from the orienting routines and rhythms of the relational world, the result is a crumbling of the fundamental meaning-structures that constitute subjectivity. The global sense of abandonment and disconnection strips away the possibility for self-understanding, and residents are often left confused and abandoned to an existence that has been drained of meaning and significance.

The Call: Leo Strauss on Heidegger, Secularization, and Revelation

The Call: Leo Strauss on Heidegger, Secularization, and Revelation

Martin Heidegger’s Interpretation of the Ontological Distinction between Ground and Existence in Friedrich Schelling’s System of Freedom

The Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809) is the most coherent form of Schelling’s attempt to describe the absolute system or the system of freedom. For the first time in the twentieth century, with Heidegger's careful reference to his treatise on freedom and his repeated commentary in 1936 and 1941, the importance of this treatise in the history of Western thought became apparent. Heidegger focuses on Schilling’s thinking, especially with Schilling’s treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, research into the formation of the system, and the question of the possibility of a system of freedom as a question of the essence of being. Schilling bases his research on the system of freedom on a correct ontological basis in order to transcend formal freedom as an independent determinant of mechanical causation and to achieve the true definition of freedom as the ability to do good and evil. And after proposing the inadequacy of formal freedom in the idealist systems before it, it introduces the real and living concept of freedom as the ability to do good and evil. Heidegger demonstrates the independence of the Schelling system in comparison with the Fichte and Hegel systems, and his innovations in response to issues such as evil, freedom, identity, and the relation of being and “is” are most evident in the metaphysical realm of the will; however, remaining within the metaphorical framework also prevents Schilling from approaching the question of the truth of existence. Schilling’s important issue is the elimination of the opposition between freedom and necessity, which, in his view, is the focus of philosophy. For this reason, the discussion of freedom is at the heart of the system in its true sense, and in his opinion, his dissertation is for the first time the design of a system based on the idea of human freedom. The possibility of a system of freedom must be created in accordance with the principle of identity, which does not ignore the meaning of the relation of theology. In Schelling’s Heideggerian interpretation of the principle of identity, the priority of ontological issues in matters of theological nature such as all theism is given more importance and the question of all theism as a question of the system to the question of “is” and how to connect the structure of beings as a whole. The purpose of this paper is to analyze Heidegger’s interpretation of the concept of the system of freedom according to Schelling with emphasis on the ontological distinction between ground and existence. This study seeks to answer these two questions: how does the design of the real concept of freedom open the way to explain the ontological foundation of the possibility of evil and the possibility of freedom in the system? Also, how does the distinction between ground and existence lead to Schelling's main goal in resolving the conflict between system and freedom? Moreover, according to Heidegger, to what extent does this distinction arise from Schilling’s metaphysical and subject-centered thinking?

Retrieving Heidegger's temporal realism

AbstractEarly Heidegger argues that a “homogenous space of nature” can be revealed by stripping away the intelligibility of Dasein's everyday world, a process he calls “deworlding.” Given this, some interpreters have suggested that Heidegger, despite not having worked out the details himself, is also committed to a notion of deworlded time. Such a “natural time” would amount to an endogenous sequentiality in which events are ordered independently of Dasein and the stand it takes on its being. I show that Heidegger was indeed committed to such a temporal realism even though his treatment of these issues is somewhat scattered and pulled in different directions. In the course of my reconstruction, I renew an interpretation of Heidegger that stresses Dasein's thrownness into nature and I answer William Blattner's powerful interpretation of Heidegger as a failed temporal idealist who was unable to derive the sequentiality of ordinary time from Dasein's non‐sequential originary temporality. Heidegger did not attempt to derive sequentiality; instead, he understood it as a built‐in feature of the natural universe by which Dasein's activities are constrained. World‐time turns out to be a co‐production of Dasein's non‐sequential originary temporality and the endogenous sequentiality of events in nature.

The Question of Regionalism

In Of Grammatology (1967), Jacques Derrida explains that Western culture undergoes a transformation of knowledge and discourses that unfolds as the grammatization of experience. By resorting to the code of writing (grammē), as the elementary code of experience, modern sciences call into question ontological regionalism, that is, their traditional subordination to a fundamental ontology that assigns them the region of being corresponding to their field of investigation. Within this framework, Derrida develops a twofold schematic reading of Heidegger’s question of being in light of the question posed by scientific research to ontological regionalism. In this article, I focus on this reading, which has been overlooked by scholarship and yet undergirds Derrida’s later engagements with Heidegger, and I show that it draws on the overall interpretation of Heidegger’s thought developed by Derrida in his 1964–65 lecture course.

Two Refutations of the Vorhanden Reading of Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science in Being and Time

The dominant interpretation of Heidegger’s philosophy of science in Being and Time is that he defines science, or natural science, in terms of presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit). I argue that this interpretation is false. I call this dominant view about Heidegger’s definition of science the vorhanden claim; interpreters who argue in favor of this claim I call vorhanden readers. In the essay, I reconstruct and then refute two major arguments for the vorhanden claim: respectively, I call them equipmental breakdown (Section 1) and theoretical assertion (Section 2). The equipmental breakdown argument, stemming mainly from Hubert Dreyfus, advances a vorhanden reading on the basis of three other interpretive claims: I call them, respectively, the primacy of practice claim, the decontextualization claim, and the breakdown claim. While I remain agnostic on the first claim, the argument fails because of decisive textual counterevidence to the latter two claims. Meanwhile, the theoretical assertion argument, which I reconstruct mainly from Robert Brandom, premises its vorhanden claim on the basis of some remarks in Being and Time indicating that theoretical assertions, as such, refer to present-at-hand things. Since science is taken to be a paradigmatic case of an activity that makes theoretical assertions, the vorhanden claim is supposed to follow. I refute this argument on the grounds that it equivocates on Heidegger’s concept of “theoretical assertion” and cannot account for his insistence that science does not principally consist in the production of such assertions. I conclude that, with the failure of these two arguments, the case for the vorhanden claim is severely weakened.

Changing the interpretation of Heidegger's philosophy in the discourse of Soviet Marxism

The talk reveals the transformation logic of Heidegger's philosophy interpretation in the domestic Soviet Marxism. The stages of development of Heidegger's philosophy interpretation are highlighted. The talk demonstrates that the transformation of Heidegger's philosophy interpretation in the Soviet Union takes place against the background of the degeneration of Soviet Marxism in the USSR. In particular, this process determines the weakening of the radicalism of the Russian criticism of Heidegger’s philosophy and the legitimation of Heideggerian studies in Russia.

SIGNIFICANCE OF METAPHYSICS’ CRITICISM IN M. HEIDEGGER'S CREATIVITY

Despite various interpretations of Heidegger's philosophy, he is undeniably a deep critic of the metaphysical tradition in European philosophy. His task of overcoming metaphysics once again aroused interest in the fundamental issues of life in the era of the total dominance of private sciences. In the article, the authors explore the concept of metaphysics and its criticism in the work of M. Heidegger, as well as subsequent interpretations, in particular by O. Peggeler (“New Ways with Heidegger”, 1992). Criticism of metaphysics was a necessary condition for overcoming it to build a fundamental ontology. Having experienced the influence of Nietzsche, Heidegger does not remain a Nietzschean, because he considers him the last metaphysician to be overcome. In this regard, Peggeler recognizes Heidegger's main work not as “Being and Time”, but as “Reports to Philosophy” (1936), where he sought to reveal the primary sources of the concept of metaphysics. Heidegger's views regarding the interpretation of the development of metaphysics in different historical eras are specially considered.

Post-Neo-Kantianism. What is this?

The article attempts to define the concept of “post-neo-Kantianism” based on the nature of its relationship to the concept of “neo-Kantianism”. Concerning this matter, the author poses the following tasks: to characterize the phenomenon of neo-Kantianism, to point out the problems of its definition, to identify the relevance of the term “post-neo-Kantianism” and its relation to the philosophy of I. Kant in particular. The author emphasizes the need to introduce this term in the classification of philosophy of the XX century with the appropriateness of building the model of “Kantianism - Neo-Kantianism - Neo-Neo-Kantianism - Post-Neo-Kantianism”, where each new stage is determined by the nature of the reflection of thinkers of a certain period over the fundamental philosophical problems articulated in Kant's “Critics”. Among the post-Neo-Kantians, A. Noras names thinkers traditionally considered to be german phenomenologists, such as E. Husserl and M. Heidegger: it is from the philosophical concept of Husserl that one can speak of the emergence of post-Neo-Kantianism, and the semantically correct interpretation of Heidegger, according to author, is most clearly understood in the framework of Baden Neo-Kantianism. Investigating the phenomenon of post-Neo-Kantianism, the need is established for answering a question regarding the preceding Neo-Kantian tradition, within which there is still a number of contradictions unresolved in the history of philosophy regarding the classification of Neo-Kantian schools and the distinction between the two periods of Neo-Kantianism: early (classical) and late (“correct”). Neo-Kantianism shows the relevance of Kantian philosophy, highlighting the ongoing debate about understanding the Kantian “Critique of Pure Reason”. Post-Neo-Kantianism plays an important role in terms of the perspectives of modern Kant studies, which include Gottfried Martin, Manfred Brelage, or Hans-Michael Baumgartner.

Identidade prática e normatividade: considerações sobre o problema a partir de Heidegger e Korsgaard

The purpose of this article is to present Martin Heidegger's and Christine Korsgaard's conceptions about the normative problem and the practical identity problem. The work goes through a brief reconstruction of the debate raised by Mark Okrent and Steven Crowell in relation to the thesis of normativity and agency in Korsgaard, recognizing that despite the possible approximations, Heidegger's interpretation would be more pertinent to address the problems. First, it presents how Heidegger interprets and elucidates the existential possibilities based on the structure of comprehension and what he calls in-order-to. Then, Korsgaard's theory is presented, already recognizing the approximations and distances with the Heideggerian elucidations. Finally, the critics made to Korsgaard by Okrent and Crowell and the possible interpretive advantage over the normative questions of the problem of personal identity constituted from practical terms are reconstructed.

OTHER TURNINGS

This article is an attempt to interpret Yuk Hui’s ambitious and promising project of cosmotechnics and technodiversity as a kind of “critical synthesis” of the philosophies of technology of Martin Heidegger and Bernard Stiegler, arguably his most important interlocutors besides Gilbert Simondon, whose crucial influence will have to remain undiscussed here unfortunately. It argues that the cosmotechnics–technodiversity project – motivated foremost by the concern for the relentless destruction of planetary diversity in all its forms (biological, ecological, ethnic, psychological, sociological, cultural, etc.) engendered by a globalized “mono-technological” technosphere originating from Western technology – criticizes but also aims to do justice to both Heidegger’s ontological or onto-historical understanding of technology as a singular yet universalizing imperative or claim driving the development of concrete technologies [Gestell or enframing], and Stiegler’s organological understanding of technology as an evolutionary process of technical exteriorization or exosomatization fundamentally conditioning any ontological and cosmological opening of anthropos, i.e., of what Heidegger called Dasein. Hui’s plural cosmotechnics critically acknowledges yet pluralizes both perspectives, thus teaching a pluri-ontological and pluri-cosmological conditioning of technology as well as a pluri-technological conditioning of the ontological and the cosmological. Using terms derived from Peter Sloterdijk’s interpretation of Heidegger’s “ontokinetics,” it is shown that it thus gives due to both a “vertical,” Heideggerian or “spiritual” dimension and a “horizontal,” Stieglerian or “materialist” dimension to the question concerning technology. This new and original, cosmotechnical perspective on these two fundamental views on the question concerning technology allows Hui to engage philosophy of technology in the overdue debate with contemporary anthropology’s so-called ontological turn, increasingly urgent in today’s age of the Anthropocene.

Poetics of History, Logics of Collapse: On Heidegger's Hölderlin

The question of Heidegger's Nazism has been raised and reignited across the history of the philosopher's reception. Scholarly accounts of the relationship between Heidegger's philosophy and politics abound, but relatively few focus their attention on the substantial connection between Heidegger's reading of Hölderlin and the ideology that facilitated his choice to follow Nazism. Those who acknowledge this connection generally tend toward careless confusion of Heidegger's interpretation and Hölderlin's actual thought, despite ample evidence that Heidegger's reading amounts to a radical distortion of the poet's words. This essay accounts for Heidegger's misreading through the apocryphal poem “In lieblicher Bläue,” which Heidegger mistakenly attributes to Hölderlin. This is followed by a critique of Heidegger's interpretation through an exposition of Hölderlin's theory of Greek tragedy and the poetics of his late hymns. Theory and praxis alike stand opposed to Heidegger's aesthetic enterprise, and they defy any attribution of proto‐Nazism to Hölderlin himself.

In the Crosshairs of the Fourfold: Critical Thoughts on Aleksandr Dugin’s Heidegger

ABSTRACTIn Part 1, we situate Dugin’s interpretation of Heidegger in relation to the better known, broadly left-liberal approaches to interpreting Heidegger’s thought, stressing Dugin’s unusual focus on the German thinker’s “middle” or Nazi-era texts, and showing how this periodizing optic affects Dugin’s culminating reading of Sein und Zeit and its key axiological notion of authenticity (Part 1). Part 2 examines Dugin’s appropriation of Heidegger’s radically pessimistic, trans-epochal critique of Western thought, centring around his striking reading of the esoteric notion of the “fourfold” or Gewiert. In this account, the essence of reality itself, the “crosshairs” of the fourfold, is provocatively depicted by Dugin as war, Polemos, Kampf, or Krieg, following the Heidegger of 1933–1936. In a move which echoes Heidegger’s own post-1938 relativizations of all distinctions between Nazism, liberalism and socialism – as well as the Shoah and mechanized agriculture – the Russian thinker hence ends by obviating any distinctions between liberal or democratic and totalitarian regimes, war and peace, and genocide and consumerism. All must be overcome in the “another beginning” destined for the new Russia, if it has the ears to hear.