Tag: Martin Heidegger

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CHAPTER 6
THE FERN AND THE LATHE

The Technocratic Fallacy

Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (more…)

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Part 1 of 15

Introduction: The Peak of the Metaphysics of German Idealism

In 1936, Martin Heidegger delivered a lecture course on F. W. J. Schelling’s 1809 treatise Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, which scholars often refer to simply as the Freiheitsschrift (Freedom Essay).[1] (more…)

You can order Derek Hawthorne’s book Being & The Birds or: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Heidegger (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) here.

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Derek Hawthorne‘s new book, Being and “The Birds,” was the subject of the latest broadcast of Counter-Currents Radio. Philosopher and film critic Hawthorne draws on the thought of Martin Heidegger to illuminate Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 classic film The Birds, about a series of savage and inexplicable bird attacks on Bodega Bay, a sleepy California fishing village. Hawthorne argues that The Birds depicts a Heideggerian “event” (Ereignis): a sudden and fundamental transformation of the meaning of everything. Modern men believe we are masters of our own destiny. Heidegger calls this “humanism” and rejects it completely. The Birds is an anti-humanist film. In the space of one weekend, all pretensions to the understanding and mastery of nature are shattered, and man is reduced to helplessness in the face of unfathomable mystery. (more…)

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz with retired basketball star Earvin “Magic” Johnson. (Image source: Twitter/X)

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Every waking hour, every moment of the day, everywhere we look, whether it’s breakfast cereal boxes, pop-up advertising dross, or sportsball team group photos, we are bombarded by Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity — the DIE machine. It is so all-pervasive that we seemingly pay it no mind, but unconsciously we are alarmed by the presence of the hostile other. Even though it is in our faces all the time like a leering, ubiquitous transgender version of Big Brother — picture Michelle Obama posters the size of teetering skyscrapers — we often have the option of scrolling away, clicking to dismiss, or turning the channel. (more…)

William Blake, The Ancient of Days, 1794

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Part 14 of 14

(Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here, Part 6 here, Part 7 here, Part 8 here, Part 9 here, Part 10 here, Part 11 here, Part 12 here, Part 13 here)

Editor’s Note:

I will conclude my commentary on the Gorgias with a second series of articles beginning in November. (more…)

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As Valentine’s Day approached, I decided that I should perhaps commit myself to the insane asylum that is modern technological courtship. I knew it would be painful and time-consuming, but this year I decided to devote more effort to finding my own modern-day Brünhilde. (more…)

Walter Kaufmann

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What, then, is this that we call existentialism? –– Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism

Sartre formulates the basic formula of existentialism in these words: existence precedes essence. — Martin Heidegger, “What Is Humanism?”

Schools of philosophical thought are usually quite clear in their lines of demarcation. (more…)

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Translations: Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Ukrainian

Martin Heidegger is one of the giants of twentieth-century philosophy, both in terms of the depth and originality of his ideas and the breadth of his influence in philosophy, theology, the human sciences, and culture in general.

Heidegger was born on September 26, 1889 in the town of Meßkirch in the district of Sigmaringen in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. He died on May 26, 1976 in Freiburg and was buried in Meßkirch. (more…)

Heidegger (right) and Husserl in 1921.

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In my “Notes on Strauss and Husserl,” I discuss the following passage from Leo Strauss’ Natural Right and History:

To grasp the natural world as a world that is radically prescientific or prephilosophic, one has to go back behind the first emergence of science or philosophy. It is not necessary for this purpose to engage in extensive and necessarily hypothetical anthropological studies. The information that classical philosophy supplies about its origins suffices . . . (more…)

Edmund Husserl

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Leo Strauss credited Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology as a critical resource for his project of overthrowing modern political thought and vindicating the ancients. This may come as some surprise to readers of Strauss, given the prominence of his critique of historicism, which applies to Husserl as well. But Strauss’s late essay, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy”[1] as well as posthumously published lectures and correspondence reveal significant debts to Husserl.

Husserl was not, moreover, a mere “negative influence” — i.e., someone whose ideas Strauss rejected. Husserl was a “positive influence,” meaning that Strauss accepted and incorporated some of his ideas. (more…)

Portrait of Schelling by Karl Joseph Stieler

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Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

In the first part of this essay I introduced readers to Schelling, who is one of the first philosophers to react against what Heideggereans have called “the metaphysics of presence”: the hidden will in Western metaphysics that gives primacy to human subjectivity, adjusting our understanding of the Being of beings to the human desire that beings should be completely transparent to us, hiding nothing, and readily available for our manipulation. In response to this, Schelling argues that it is nature, not human subjectivity, that should be the starting point of philosophy. (more…)

A daguerreotype of F. W. J. Schelling from 1848, the first known photograph of a philosopher.

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Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

1. Introduction: A Philosophical Rebel

This essay is a continuation of my series on “Heidegger’s History of Metaphysics.” With Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854) we have reached a significant milestone, in a number of ways. Behind us, in our journey toward Gelassenheit, we have Plato, the philosophers of the Middle Ages, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and Fichte. Ahead of Schelling we have only two more philosophers to discuss, Hegel and Nietzsche, before we turn to cover in more detail Heidegger’s response to the metaphysical tradition and to modernity. (more…)

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Having already published two extensive articles on The Prisoner (see here and here), I didn’t expect to ever write about the series again. But times have changed, and so has The Prisoner. Works of art are living things, and their meaning changes over time. This ultimately has little to do with the artist’s intentions. That The Prisoner had changed was brought home to me one evening when, on a whim, I chose to revisit an episode I had always disliked. (more…)