Heidegger and the aesthetics of living

253 Pages·2008·1.56 MB·English

by  Heidegger

Heidegger and the Aesthetics of Living

Heidegger and the Aesthetics of Living

Edited by

Vrasidas Karalis

Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Heidegger and the Aesthetics of Living, Edited by Vrasidas Karalis

This book first published 2008 by

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2008 by Vrasidas Karalis and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-84718-506-1, ISBN (13): 9781847185068
THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED TO CATHERINE RUNCIE, THE PRESIDENT

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction...............................................................................................vii
Vrasidas Karalis

1. Heidegger and the Philosophy of Emancipation......................................1
Gianni Vattimo

2. Cutting Poets to Size – Heidegger, Hölderlin, Rilke...............................8
Anthony Stephens

3. Geography, Biology and Politics: Heidegger on Place and World........25
Jeff Malpas

4. Heeding Heidegger’s Way: Questions of the Work of Art....................45
Elizabeth M. Grierson

5. The Pitch Black Night of Human Creation: Calling Heidegger’s
Philosophy of Terror to Account...............................................................65
Peter Murphy

6. Martin Heidegger and the Philosophy of Negativity.............................79
Paolo Bartoloni

7. The Interpretation of Da-sein as a Transformative, Poetic and Ethical
Being.........................................................................................................95
Jane Mummery

8. Moods That Matter: Heidegger, Affect and Wallace Stevens’
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”............................................112
Peter Williams

9. Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line and the Question
of Heideggerian Cinema..........................................................................126
Robert Sinnerbrink
viii Table of Contents

10. Reflections on Heidegger’s Saying: “The way what is questioned
essentially engages our questioning belongs to the innermost meaning
of the question of being”.........................................................................142
George Vassilacopoulos

11. Art, Truth and Freedom: Contemplating Heidegger’s Categorial
Vision.......................................................................................................157
Colin Hearfield

12. The Work and the Promise of Technology........................................165
John Dalton

13. The An-Denken of Existentialism: Vattimo’s Heidegger
and the Aesthetics of Living....................................................................189
Ashley Woodward

14. Martin Heidegger and the Aletheia of his Greeks..............................208
Vrasidas Karalis

Contributors.............................................................................................228

Index of Names........................................................................................232
INTRODUCTION
VRASIDAS KARALIS

In December 2005 the Sydney Society for Literature and Aesthetics
organised the first ever international conference in Australia on Martin
Heidegger. The present volume contains a selection of the papers given in
revised form. They address a wide range of issues without aiming to be
exhaustive. What connects them is the unifying theme of the consequences
of Heidegger’s mode of philosophizing for the way we understand
philosophy today.
Most of the contributions avoid the well-known controversies on his
political involvement with Nazism, and offer a critical but ‘post-
politicized’ interpretation of his work. Indeed, the issue with Heidegger
today is not primarily to discuss his personal involvement with the
political ideologies of his era. In general, the papers address the issue of
what is “livable” within Heidegger’s work and what constitutes the
aesthetics that emanate from his work as a new breathing space for
philosophical inquiry. One might claim that, after his connection with one
of the most brutal regimes in the history of humanity, what is “livable” in
his work is of extreme importance for the understanding of his past impact
and his continuing influence. Indeed the main problem his philosophy has
at the beginning of the 21st century is that it suffers from an excess of
uncritical exegesis, especially in the English-speaking world. Because of
approaches which verge on the hagiographical it might be said that
Heidegger is everywhere except in his own philosophy, since his own way
of philosophizing has been idolised and fetishised, losing its radical
character in the process.
The scope of this volume is thus to present a general overview of the
consequences of Heidegger’s philosophy for various disciplines, notably
cultural studies, literary interpretation, aesthetic discourse, ethics,
theatrical performance, film studies, philosophy and, more precisely, the
history of philosophy. The need for such a detached and dispassionate
assessment of his work is evident today after the intense debates of the 80s
and 90s about his political involvement, which tended to obscure the
intricacies of his work and to create instead the mutually contradictory
x Introduction

myths of an ‘evil philosopher’ – or else of a cult-figure in the mould of the
Gnostic Demiurge or even a philosophical super star.
The collection represents a moderate and cautious de-mythologisation
of Heidegger’s hermeneutics – not based on the notoriety of the man but
on the complex nature of his work. Its main purpose is to elucidate its
complexities and insights and present their significance for thinking today
in various fields and disciplines. Certainly, it is a conscious departure from
the aim of such volumes as The Heidegger Case (eds. Tom Rockmore and
Joseph Margolis), Heidegger toward the Turn (ed. James Risser),
Heidegger and the Greeks (D.A. Hyland & J.P. Manoussakis) and A
Companion to Heidegger (H. L. Dreyfus & M. A. Wrathall) that aspire to
addressing aspects of his philosophy in an exhaustive and systematic way.
In our perception individual contributions should engage in a creative
dialogue with specific texts, aspects and problems discussed or delineated
in Heidegger’s own work with the conscious intention of avoiding the
trend to enforce harmonies on it, but rather of detecting the creative
ruptures his philosophy contains.
With this in mind, the essays in the volume are extremely diverse in
their approach, addressing Heidegger’s work from various disciplinary
standpoints. Some of the articles are written by scholars who have
published extensively on 20th century philosophy in other languages
(German, Greek, and Italian) and analyse the relation of Heidegger’s
philosophy to these specific traditions without the mediation of
translations – although the authors have provided them for this volume.
Their freedom from dependence on the standard English versions helps
shed new light on Heidegger’s own interpretation of various texts and
directs the reader towards a fresh approach to his sources.
As mentioned above, the book is focused on a conscious effort to de-
politicize Heidegger’s hermeneutics and promote a nuanced appreciation
of the structure of his philosophy. The structure of his thinking is so multi-
layered that contradictory readings may lay claim to equal validity. Yet
one must try to identify the dominant structures and trans-textual
configurations that give his thinking cohesion and continuity. The early
Christian Heidegger appears in direct conflict with the idea of ‘Dasein’s
thrownness’ for example, although one might claim that Heidegger’s
thinking is in many ways a translation of Christian concepts into the realm
of secular apocalyptics. Yet the translation itself changes the meaning of
what is translated: the semantic fields that surround specific terms develop
unexpected connections with apparently unrelated ones, so that in the new
text that results, the same terms indicate completely incongruous realities.
The same can be claimed about his ideas of ‘inauthenticity’, ‘fallenness’,