Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Only a god can save us now...",
By benjamin (USA) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Identity and Difference (Paperback)
For the majority of people, it is the second of the two essays in this volume that will compel them to buy Identity and Difference. Both essays, however, are about the nature of metaphysics and given that the very possibility of metaphysics is a hot issue today, readers will likely find themselves benefitting by giving both essays a deep reading. The book also contains the original German of the essays, which makes the book twice as long; if one reads German then one will certainly benefit from this as it gives one the opportunity to study Heidegger's nuanced and technical prose more closely.
"The Onto-Theological Constitution of Metaphysics" has become something of a classic little work in the realm of post-modern religious and theological studies; however un/intentionally, Heidegger managed, with it, to open up the door for a return of the theological right in the middle of all philosophical discourse. Perhaps this is ironic, given that Heidegger was quite insistent that philosophy was fundamentally secular in its orientation. Or, perhaps this is intentional and serves to support the medieval Scholastic contentional the philosophy is the "hand maid" of theology and that reason finds its necessary completion in plenitudinous event of Revelation. How does one find or speak of the God that is beyond the "causa sui" (ie, self-caused) God of metaphysics? Where is the God that can be prayed to and danced before, worshipped and adored when metaphysics has turned the concept of God into nothing more than that of the unmoved mover? Heidegger does not seek to give a theological explanation here to this question, but simply to note that the problem exists. This does not mean the end of God, however, but necessitates a rethinking of the function and nature of metaphysics: we need to step out of metaphysics so that we might step back into its "active essence". This is a work that complements Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics well. Written in the post-war period, it witnesses to much of the confusion that was prevalent during the time and the urgent feeling that certain long-standing notions could no longer make sense of the late modern experience. Heidegger's seeking a God beyond the idol-god of metaphysics has paved the way for much contemporary thought concerning the relation of philosophy to theology (and its most acute exposition has been given by Jean-Luc Marion in his fine book God Without Being). Identity and Difference is essential reading.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent, but brief,
By
This review is from: Identity and Difference (Paperback)
"The problem of identity has been a basic philosophical issue since Parmenides. Parmenides stated it in the form: `thought and being are the same,' with a radicality and a simplicity perhaps never again possible for later thinkers. Heidegger has pondered over Parmenides' statement for years, returning to it again and again in his writings. Thus it came as no surprise to this translator when Heidegger stated that he considered Identity and Difference to be the most important thing he has published since Being and Time."
So says Joan Stambaugh, the translator of this excellent lecture course by Heidegger delivered at the University of Frieburg during 1957. In it he discusses the problems of identity, sameness, and relations of beings in Parmenides, Plato, on to the logic of Hegel. The latter part of the lecture is devoted to further metaphysical questions of the meaning of Being initially taken up in Being and Time, and finally concludes with remarks of onto-theology. This volume includes the German text which is helpful, however there is really only 74 pages of material here and the volume is $16 so it's not a great bang for your buck, but the edition is as lovely as the content.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Thinking the ground of metaphysics...,
This review is from: Identity and Difference (Paperback)
This is a very short book composed of two essays (The Principle of Identity and The Ontotheological Constitution of Metaphysics). The actual text of the English translation is only around fifty pages which means the text is very dense and terse in formulation even by Heidegger's standards. In order to understand what Heidegger is up to in this text you either have to already be in possession of a basic understanding of Heidegger's later philosophy (especially Heidegger's understanding of the 'truth of Being', 'event of appropriation', and the belonging together of thought and Being) or you will have to find a good secondary source that deals with this text (there is a short but enlightening discussion of the two essays in this book in a book by Otto Poggeler titled Martin Heidegger's Path of Thinking). While this is a very interesting book the fact that it is so short does not make it a good stand alone text, or a good general introduction, to Heidegger's late philosophy. I will attempt to summarize, to the best of my limited abilities, the two essays contained in this work. Anyone choosing to read my summaries should bear in mind that I am by no means an expert in Heidegger (yet) so these summaries should be taken as very provisional. If anyone spots what they consider to be errors in my interpretation please feel free to respond under the comments section of this review.
In the first essay Heidegger attempts to think through the principle of identity (A is A) which is often considered the highest principle of thought. This principle is not, however, merely the highest law of thought, the principle to which all thought must conform in order to be coherent, it is also supposed to say something about the Being of beings, namely: every being is in such a way that it is identical to itself. If beings were not encountered in their identity with themselves something like science would not be possible. The principle of identity as it applies to Being is, therefore, a necessary presupposition for something like science. But is this the most profound understanding of identity? Heidegger does not think so. Heidegger believes there is a more profound form of identity which underlies our ability to encounter beings in terms of the identity they bear towards themselves. In order to elucidate this more profound notion of identity Heidegger turns to one of his favorite sayings of Parmenides "For the same perceiving (thinking) as well as being" (pg27). This is a strange translation but what is being asserted here is an identity between perceiving (thinking) and being. This identity is no longer the identity which we represent as a characteristic of the Being of beings since Being is one of the terms of this identity (it cannot, therefore, ground the identity). Heidegger interprets this identity as a belonging together of man and Being. Being only is within the clearing that man provides while man is only the response to Being. Heidegger believes that Being becomes present to man today primarily in the form of technology. Beings present themselves as what is manipulable or representable. The most difficult aspect of Heidegger's later thought is that he no longer conceives this as a projection of man. In Being and Time Heidegger analyzed what he believed was an inherent tendency of Dasein to misunderstand the world in terms of merely present-at-hand things. This tendency could still be overcome, however, by providing a deeper ontology of Dasein and Dasein's various modes of comportment. But the later Heidegger (the Heidegger after the turn) no longer believes that things are quite this simple when he writes, "Technology conceived in its broadest sense and in its manifold manifestations, is taken for the plan which man projects [which would be the standpoint of Being and Time]...Caught up in this conception, we confirm our own opinion that technology is of man's making alone. We fail to hear the claim of Being which speaks in the essence of technology" (pg34). Reducing technology to a projection of man is itself part of the technological worldview which views everything in terms of its origin in the subject. Heidegger is attempting to understand how man is 'delivered over' to such a worldview which he calls the frame while not being the origin of this understanding. The frame, according to Heidegger, is "more real than all of atomic energy and the whole world of machinery" (pg35) but we are not aware of the frame because the frame itself determines the Being of beings as presence and the frame itself is not something that is present. It is not too difficult to understand the notion of an impersonal conceptual framework that determines our relation to beings (similar in its own way to Kuhnian paradigms). What is difficult to understand is Heidegger's insistence that this frame is a claim of Being which man is delivered over to in what Heidegger calls the event of appropriation (I believe that some of the post-Heideggerians attempt to overcome what might be called Heidegger's mystical understanding of the 'sendings of Being' by connecting these impersonal frameworks to more material structures like social practices and institutions and language). Heidegger does believe there is a way out of this impasse. If we are able to think technology and metaphysics in terms of the history of Being then we can pass onto an experience of the 'event of appropriation' which is the belonging-together of man and Being. We can, to some degree, free ourselves from the thinking which takes what is representable by the human subject as the measure of what is real and remain open to the mystery that is necessarily a part of every unconcealment of Being (since concealment belongs necessarily to every unconcealment). We can do this by thinking the more profound identity between thinking and Being which lies behind identity as a characteristic of the Being of beings. The goal of the first essay is precisely to think this more profound identity as the 'event of appropriation'. In the second essay Heidegger attempts to determine the nature of metaphysics as onto-theo-logical thought which is itself grounded in the oblivion of the ontological difference (the difference between Being and beings). Metaphysics does think the difference between Being and beings but it thinks it in terms of the difference between 'what-a-thing-is' and 'that-it-is', or as Otto Poggeler writes, "the true world of the permanent what-it-is is distinguished from the apparent world of the vanishing and transitory that-it-is" (pg120). Metaphysics thinks the Being of beings in terms of constant presence which serves as a ground for the transitory existence of beings. Plato, for example, thinks of the Being of beings as Idea, that which remains identical beyond the transitory and fleeting world of sense-perception. But as Poggeler observes this winds up destroying the unity between beings and Being (which is why Platonism winds up positing another transcendent world of Being in contrast to the world of becoming) and this difference remains merely ontic (a difference between two beings rather than a difference between Being and beings). Heidegger is attempting to rethink the ontological difference in a way that does not lead to the positing of another, true realm of reality in contrast to the world that we actually live in (he is, therefore, carrying forward a project of Nietzsche, namely, the overturning of Platonism, though he attempts to overturn Platonism in a way that is not a mere reversal of terms which is what he thinks Nietzsche does). For Heidegger the Being of beings is not a true Being that is separate from beings; rather, "the Being of beings means Being which is beings" (pg64). Heidegger argues that the 'is' in this sentence must be understood transitively. In other words, not in the sense of identity (Being is beings in the sense that they are identical which would obliterate the ontological difference), but in the sense that Being becomes present in the transition to beings (as a sidenote: this terse discussion by Heidegger of the nature of the 'is' as transitive when it relates Being to beings is a key to understanding Heidegger's discussion of Schelling and his relation to pantheism in his book on Schelling). This is a difficult thought to grasp but I think we can understand this thought with an example. The table that lies in front of me 'is', it has Being. But the table itself is not Being (it is not identical to Being, and this is the meaning of the ontological difference). On the other hand, Being (though different from beings) is not something that lies in another realm beyond the realm in which we live. The Being of the table is right in front of us; it does not reside in some inaccessible realm that we can only reach through thought (nor is Being a logical category which we can manipulate in thought). Being is the unconcealment of Being and is present as beings and yet it is not identical to beings nor is it a being (Lee Braver, in his book on Heidegger's later writings, expresses this by saying that Being is an adverb rather than a noun; it expresses a way Being, or a how, rather than a substantive Being; in this work Heidegger argues it is "impossible to represent Being as the general characteristic of particular beings," since, "there is being only in this or that historical character: phusis, logos, en, idea, energeia, substantiality, objectivity..." (pg66); these are the great epochal understandings of Being which determine the how of how we encounter beings; it is impossible to find a single, general concept of Being which would underlie all of these understandings of Being). This is what Heidegger means when he says that "the Being of beings means Being which is beings" (pg64) and that the 'is' in that sentence must be understood transitively. Being is always the Being of beings but it is also always a particular way of... Read more ›
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
See all 10 books this book cites
See all 100 books citing this book
|
|
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
|
