Over at Enowning there was a funny Heidegger test. Basically one opens any Heidegger text to any page, read any sentence, and then try to make sense of it. From the web site Enowning was quoting from. ". . .I can understand that sentence as comprehensible English sentence. That is not the case with this [Being and Time] book." So in honor of the test, I thought I'd pick out a few of my Heidegger books, grab a sentence or two and try to figure them out. Maybe this can be the latest philosophy blog meme. (grin) I expect not...
These are from just the books I had laying close at hand. So no particular order. And no Being and Time as my copy was upstairs.
"Nihilism" is the increasingly dominant truth that all prior aims of being have become superfluous. (Nietzsche, v.4 pg. 5)
That one isn't actually that bad at all. I'd say it's just because its near the beginning of the book. But that can't be it. About all one has to know is what Being means. But two paragraphs earlier we have a good explanation that contextualizes it even if one doesn't know Heidegger.
For Nietzsche, therefor, nihilism is in no way some kind of viewpoint "put forward" by somebody, nor is it an arbitrary historical "given," among many others, that can be historically documented. Nihilism is, rather, that event of long duration in which the truth of being as a while is essentially transformed and driven toward an end that such truth has determined.
Maybe that'd still confuse a few. But if you point out being is be-ing or existing and what lets things exists as they do then it makes a little more sense.
One more from that same book.
"Will to Power" is the word for the Being of beings as such, the essentia of beings. (Nietzsche, v.3 pg. 189)
That one's probably a tad trickier. After all it has Latin in it. (grin) And it probably would require a bit more unpacking than the prior quote.
In other words, this concept of intuitus implies the orientation to the ideal described earlier as God's way of knowing, the knowledge of the simplest being, ens simplicissimum. (The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, pg 64)
OK, that one's definitely harder and has even more Latin! But I'm not sure it's really that hard to figure out.
OK, this one was harder since its technically a transcript of a series of lectures by Fink and Heidegger discussing Greek texts. Further Fink seemed to speak more than Heidegger. I kept picking either sentences mostly in Greek or sentences from Fink. (Heraclitus Seminar, 60)
Rather, time is there taken in view as that which first grants the sequence - similarly as in the last paragraphs of Being and Time, although the problem is there viewed from Dasein.
The immediately prior sentence contextualizes here.
As I investigated the archaic idea of time with Pindar and Sophocles, it was striking that nowhere is time spoken of in the sense of the sequence.
So what's up? Is Heidegger not as confusing as thought? Well, allow me one pick from An Introduction to Metaphysics
This function of demonstration and indication always plays and eminent role in language. (69)
Wow. That was the clearest one and from the text I expected some of the wilder stuff. Huh.
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and Theology
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