Strident atheist intellectual, author and journalist Christopher Hitchens dies, aged 62, after battle with cancer

-Even after diagnosis he maintained his atheism: 'No evidence or argument has yet been presented which would change my mind. But I like surprises'

-In a debate with Tony Blair last year over religion he likened God to a 'celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea

-His editor at Vanity Fair: 'Christopher Hitchens was a wit, a charmer and a troublemaker, and to those who knew him well, he was a gift from, dare I say, God'

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2074866/Christopher-Hitchens-dead-Writer-dies-aged-62.html

Quote Unquote: Arthur Schopenhauer

Certain it is that work, worry, labor and trouble, form the lot of almost all men their whole life long. But if all wishes were fulfilled as soon as they arose, how would men occupy their lives? what would they do with their time? If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease, a land flowing with milk and honey, where every Jack obtained his Jill at once and without any difficulty, men would either die of boredom or hang themselves; or there would be wars, massacres, and murders; so that in the end mankind would inflict more suffering on itself than it has now to accept at the hands of nature.

Arthur Schopenhauer: Studies in Pessimism

Libertarianism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Libertarianism is a political philosophy that upholds individual liberty, especially freedom of expression and action. Libertarianism includes diverse beliefs and organizations, all advocating minimization of the state and sharing the goal of maximizing individual liberty and freedom.

Libertarian schools of thought differ over the degree to which the state should be reduced, with minarchists advocating reduction to only state protection from aggression, theft, breach of contract, and fraud. Some libertarians go further, such as by supporting minimal public assistance for the poor. Then there are anarchists, who advocate complete elimination of the state. Additionally, some schools are supportive of private property rights in the ownership of unappropriated land and natural resources while others reject such private ownership and often support common ownership instead.Another distinction can be made among libertarians who support private ownership and co-operative ownership of the means of production; the former generally supporting a capitalist economy, the latter a libertarian socialist economic system.

Wikipedia

Russell's teapot

Russell's teapot, sometimes called the Celestial teapot, Cosmic teapot or Bertrand's teapot, is an analogy first coined by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), to illustrate the idea that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making scientifically unfalsifiable claims rather than shifting the burden of proof to others, specifically in the case of religion. Russell wrote that if he claimed that a teapot were orbiting the sun, it would be nonsense for him to expect others not to doubt him just because they could not prove him wrong. Russell's teapot is still referred to in discussions concerning the existence of God. The analogy has also been used by sociologists to denote correlations with religion and social conformity.

Wikipedia

Crowds

It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude; enjoying a crowd is an art; and only he can relish a debauch of vitality at the expense of the human species, on whom, in his cradle, a fairy has bestowed the love of masks and masquerading, the hate of home, and the passion for roaming.

Multitude, solitude: identical terms, and interchangeable by the active and fertile poet. The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd.

The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself of someone else, as he chooses. Like those wandering souls who go looking for a body, he enters as he likes into each man's personality. For him alone everything is vacant; and if certain places seem closed to him, it is only because in his eyes they are not worth visiting.

The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.

What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.

It is a good thing sometimes to teach the fortunate of this world, if only to humble for an instant their foolish pride, that there are higher joys than theirs, finer and more uncircumscribed. The founders of colonies, shepherds of peoples, missionary priests exiled to the ends of the earth, doubtlessly know something of this mysterious drunkenness; and in the midst of the vast family created by their genius, they must often laugh at those who pity them because of their troubled fortunes and chaste lives.

Charles Baudelaire

From: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/crowds/

'Criminal' manipulation of Nietzsche by sister to make him look anti-Semitic

Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, was the victim of "criminally scandalous" manipulation by his anti-Semitic sister who condemned him to being considered a forerunner to the Nazis, a new book has claimed.

By David Wroe in Berlin
Published: 6:30AM GMT 19 Jan 2010

Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who went on to become a prominent supporter of Adolf Hitler, systematically falsified her brother's works and letters, according to the Nietzsche Encyclopedia.

Christian Niemeyer, the publisher, said he wanted to clear the revered thinker's reputation by showing the "criminally scandalous" forgeries by his sister had tainted his reputation ever since.

"Förster-Nietzsche did everything she could – such as telling stories about Nietzsche, writing false letters in the name of her brother, and so on – to make it seem that Nietzsche had been a right-wing thinker like herself," he told The Daily Telegraph.

"It was she who created the most destructive myth of all: Nietzsche as the godfather of fascism."

The Nazis selectively used Nietzsche's writings to bolster their ideology and built a museum in Weimar to celebrate the philosopher, though it is unlikely Hitler himself read much, if any, of Nietzsche's work.

Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche edited her brother's writings after his mental breakdown in 1889 and quickly began to add, remove and change passages to align his philosophy with her own beliefs and those of her virulent anti-Semite husband Bernhard Förster.

Along with her husband, she founded a Utopian "Aryan" colony in the Paraguyan jungle called Nueva Germania in 1887. It was a disaster: her husband committed suicide in 1889 and Förster-Nietzsche returned to Germany. When she died in 1935, Hitler attended her funeral.

While it has been known to Nietzsche scholars that Förster-Nietzsche meddled with her brother's work, particular after his death, the new encyclopedia – consisting of entries by about 150 scholars – shows the sheer breadth and depth of her forgeries as never before.

Niemeyer, a psychologist and Nietzsche expert from Dresden University, scoured through Nietzsche's letters to catalogue the extent of the falsifications.

Of the collection of 505 of her brother's letters that Förster-Nietzsche published in 1909, just 60 were the original versions and 32 of them were entirely made up, he claims.

She had used a "long list of dirty tricks" to hide Nietzsche's loathing for the leading anti-Semite Theodor Fritsch in letters he wrote in 1887, Niemeyer said.

At the same time, she fabricated remarks that made Nietzsche appear to endorse the views of the French philosopher Arthur de Gobineau, who advocated the racial superiority of "Aryan" people.

In her edition of the famous book, The Will to Power, Förster-Nietzsche included only 270 of the 374 aphorisms her brother wrote – and most of them were incorrect.

She cut out the maxim in which her brother condemned anti-Semitism with the words: "Have nothing to do with a person who takes part in the dishonest race swindle."

Niemeyer also discovered that in her edition of Beyond Good and Evil, Förster-Nietzsche removed the sentence: "The anti-Semites cannot forgive the Jews for the fact that they have 'spirit'."

He added: "All of her falsifications were held together by the idea that Förster-Nietzsche and her husband Bernhard Förster, who was a Hitler-precursor similar to Theodor Fritsch, thought the same or nearly the same."

While acknowledging some of Nietzsche's early writings could be interpreted as fascist and he shared an early friendship with the anti-Semitic composer Richard Wagner – a relationship that later broke down – the philosopher was never a fascist or anything like it, Niemeyer said.

Rather, he was above all an iconoclast who was deeply contemptuous of both anti-Semitism and nationalism.

Although the falsifications have been largely corrected in later editions, they helped cement Nietzsche's reputation early on as a fascist – a stigma from which he has never fully recovered, Niemeyer said.

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/7018535/Criminal-manipulation-of-Nietzsche-by-sister-to-make-him-look-anti-Semitic.html

MARTIN HEIDEGGER (1889-1976)

"Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being. Man loses nothing in this "less"; rather, he gains in that he attains the truth of Being. He gains the essential poverty of the shepherd, whose dignity consists in being called by Being itself into the preservation of Being's truth." (Letter on Humanism, 1964)

"Philosophy gets under way only by a peculiar insertion of our own existence into the fundamental possibilities of Dasein as a whole. For this insertion it is of decisive importance, first, that we allow space for beings as a whole; second, that we release ourselves into the nothing, which is to say, that we liberate ourselves from those idols everyone has and to which they are wont to go cringing; and, finally, that we let the sweep of suspense take its full course, so that it swings back into the basic question of metaphysics which the nothing itself compels: Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?" (What is Metaphysics?, 1977)

Biography

Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher, was born September 26th, 1889, to Friedrich and Johanna Heiddeger, in the Black Forest region of Messkirch. He began gymnasium at Constance in 1903, but was later transferred, in 1906, to Bertholds gymnasium in Freiberg. Here, he boarded at the archiepiscopal seminary of St. Georg. Heidegger was impressed early on with Franz Brentano. A mentor, Dr. Conrad Grober, had given him a copy of Brentano's "On the Manifold Meaning of Being According to Aristotle." This early exposure to Brentano, who influenced Husserl's phenomenology, and the Greeks, most likely set Heidegger on his path toward greatness as a 20th century philosopher.

In 1909, Heidegger entered the Society of Jesus at Tisis in Austria to study as a Jesuit. However, most likely for health reasons, his canditature was rejected. Instead, Heidegger entered into study for the priesthood at the Albert-Ludwig University in Freiberg. At this time, Heidegger first began lecturing and publishing papers, and he was first exposed to Husserl's writings. For reasons that are unknown, Heidegger was directed by his superiors to change his path of study from theology to mathematics and philosophy. Heidegger took their advice, and, before long, had diligently read the works of Husserl and went on to complete his doctorate. Heidegger married his wife, Elfride Petri, in March, 1917. Shortly thereafter, Heidegger entered into the German army. He was promoted from private to corporal ten months later, but was soon discharged for health reasons. Shortly after the birth of his son, Jorg, in 1919, Heidegger, in a letter to a colleague, wrote that he had decided to break with "the dogmatic system of Catholicism."

In 1919, Heidegger became Edmund Husserl's assistant at Freiburg. There, he lectured and first met Karl Jaspers; from thereon, they would form a correspondence relationship for many years. During this time, Heidegger's second son, Hermann, was born. By 1924, Heidegger moved on to become an associate at the University of Marburg, where he would write his magnum opus, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit). At Marburg, Heidegger also met Hannah Arendt, who would become his lover. Through his brilliant lectures at Marbug, Heidegger influenced many thinkers, including Herbert Marcuse, who would become a primary figure in Critical Theory. Through Count Kuki Shuzo, Jean-Paul Sarte was first introduced to the work of Heidegger. Shuzo would also become the first to offer a book-length study of Heidegger, "The Philosophy of Heidegger," published in Japan.

In 1933, Heidegger became the rector of the University of Freiburg. At this time, he also joined the National Socialist Party. One year later, Heidegger would resign as rector due to disputes with faculty and local Nazi officials. Up until 1945, Heidegger continued his involvement with the National Socialist Party, although the degree of his involvement is still under debate. Nevertheless, Heidegger officially broke with the National Socialist Party in 1945 -- however, despite the urgings of Marcuse and others, Heidegger never publically apologized for his involvement with National Socialism. This shadow which hangs over the work of Heidegger is not something to be taken lightly, and any reader of Heidegger is urged to be mindful that Heidegger's philosophy does contain the possibility for a National Socialist perspective -- though it remains heatedly debated whether this is any reason to dispense with Heidegger's work altogether. In my opinion, Heidegger has too much to offer the world in his philosophy to cast him away, despite the dark-side of his politics. I believe it is possible to read and learn from Heidegger without either condoning or making light of his National Socialist affiliation. It is clear that Heidegger did suffer consequences for his National Socialist affiliation. With the denazification hearing in 1945, Heidegger was banned from teaching. Heidegger suffered a nervous breakdown. One would like to think that Heidegger's breakdown involved a recognition of his guilt due to his, most likely passive, complicity with the evil deeds of the Nazi party. This may hold some truth; yet, Heidegger was also threatened with the dissolution of all that he had worked toward his entire life. Following his nervous breakdown, Heidegger applied for Emeritus status, declaring that he would refrain from teaching. He was granted Emeritus status, provided he refrain from teaching. By 1950, Heidegger was reinstated to his teaching position, and, one year later, he was made professor Emeritus.

During Heidegger's hiatus from teaching, he met Medard Boss. With the help of Heidegger, Boss drafted "Existential Foundations of Medicine and Psychology," which would become a seminal work in existential psychology. Heidegger hoped that Boss' application of his philosophy to psychology would help those in need of aid, as well as take his thought from the academic world to a larger audience. Throughout his career, Boss would continue to promote a Daseinanalytic approach to psychotherapy and medicine.

After writing Being and Time in 1927, Heidegger later had a "turn" (kehre) in his thought. At what point this "turning" took place is still debateable, but it offered a radical transformation in his thought (see "thought" below). Heidegger's later work, following his "turn," would pave the way to hermeneutics (i.e., Gadamer) and poststructuralism (i.e., Foucault, Derrida, Levinas).

Heidegger died in Frieburg on May 26th, 1976. In the United States, the news of his death went largely unheeded. Interestingly, the news of Heidegger's death was received with widespread coverage in Japan. The connection of Heidegger' s thought to the East has not received much attention over the years. But it is clear that he first had his greatest impact in Japan with the writings of Count Kuki Shuzo. Further, Heidegger carried on a relationship with D.T. Suzuki, whom he met with on several occassions. Further, Heidegger at one time attempted to translate Lao Tzu into German, but never finished the project.

Thought

Heidegger's lifelong project was to answer the "question of Being" (Seinsfrage) (See the Why page). In Being and Time, Heidegger argued that, to understand Being, one must first understand the human kind of being, Dasein ("Being-there"), the kind of Being who asks the question of Being. To even ask the question, remarks Heidegger, implies that at some level the answer is already understood. As a student of Husserl, Heidegger felt that phemenology, which lets the phenomena "show itself from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself," was the only method by which to do ontology, the study of Being. On the other hand, for Heidegger, modern philosophy had forgotten the question of Being; that is, modern philsophy has become concerned with the ontic (beings), and, thus, covers over that which makes such an understanding of beings possible: the "isness" (Being) of beings such that beings can presence. And the concealing-revealing presencing of Being is Dasein. However, contrary to Husserl's Transcendental Phenomenology, Heidegger argues that ontology as phenomenology must necessarily be hermeneutic, or interpretive. For Heidegger, truth or aletheia is always both concealing and revealing. When one interpretation is opened up, other interpretations are necessarily closed off. In this sense, ontology is always provisional.

In Being and Time, Heidegger's existential analysis of Dasein, the human kind of Being, reveals that Dasein is uncanny -- that is, "not-at-home" -- as Being-in-the-world. Dasein, Heidegger will conclude, is, proximally and for the part, not as itself as it is lost in the "they." Therefore, as "fallen" into the "they-self," in which Dasein exists in its "average everydayness," Dasein's authentic self as "uncanny" has been "covered up." Dasein's authentic, "ownmost" self as uncanny "pursues" Dasein via the call of conscience through the attunement of anxiety in which Dasein's 'world' is revealed as that which it is unable to fall into.

Heidegger's existential analytic follows the progression from an analysis of Dasein in terms of that which is "closest" to it: its "average everyday," existentiell, pre-ontological, pre- thematic, "lived" understanding of itself, towards the hidden meaning and ground of Dasein's primordial existential structure which lies concealed in its "everyday" understanding. The "who" of "everyday" Dasein is that which is closest to Dasein. Yet, proximally and for the most part, one's own Dasein is not itself. This "who" of "everyday" Dasein is the "they" [das Man], which is characterized by distantiality, averageness and levelling down and constitutes "publicness." The "they" is both everybody and nobody "to whom every Dasein has already surrendered itself in Being-among-one-another." The "they-self" is the "not itself" of Dasein to be distinguished from authentic Dasein. Authentic Being-one's-Self, therefore, is an existentiell modification of the "they" as an essential existentiale, and, therefore, the former is the more primordial disclosure of Dasein.

Heidegger uncovers the Being of Dasein as "care" [Sorge]: "Ahead-of-itself-Being- already-in-(the world) as Being-alongside (entities encountered within the world)." Through his analysis of anxiety, as a state-of-mind which provides the phenomenal basis for explicitly grasping Dasein's primordial totality of Being, Heidegger reveals Dasein's Being to itself as care.

Falling, explains Heidegger, is a turning-away or fleeing of Dasein into its "they-self." This turning-away is grounded in anxiety. Anxiety is what makes fear possible. Yet, unlike fear, in which that which threatens is other than Dasein, anxiety is characterized by the fact that what threatens is nowhere and nothing. In anxiety, Dasein is not threatened by a particular thing or a collection of objects present-at-hand. Being-in-the-world itself is that in the face of which anxiety is anxious. In anxiety, first and foremost, the world as world is disclosed as that which one cannot fall into.

Heidegger defined Being-in as "residing alongside" and "Being-familiar with." This Being-in is understood in the everyday publicness of the "they" as a 'Being-at-home," a tranquillized self-assurance. However, as Dasein falls, anxiety brings it back from its absorption in the 'world' and "everyday familiarity collapses." Thus, Dasein is individualized as Being-in-the-world. Being-in enters into the existential mode of the "not-at-home" of uncanniness. Thus, "Being-not-at-home" is the basic kind of Being of Dasein, even though in an everyday way Dasein flees from this understanding in the tranquillized "at-homeness" of das Man. Yet, what is the nature of this uncanniness which pursues Dasein as the "they"? Dasein, writes Heidegger, is uncanny in that uncanniness "lies in Dasein as thrown Being-in-the-world, which has been delivered over to itself in its Being."

From an existential-ontological viewpoint, uncanniness ("not-at-home") is the more primordial phenomenon, the hidden meaning and ground of Dasein as fleeing into the "they" in its everyday concern and solicitude. In the state-of-mind of anxiety, Dasein's care structure is uncovered from its concealment in which Dasein, as lost in the "they" in its everyday engagement with things, understands itself in terms of the world as a thing present-to-hand. For, anxiousness is a way of Being-in-the-world in which Dasein flees in the face of its thrownness (facticity), has anxiety about its potentiality-for-Being-in-the-world (existentiality), and flees into the "they-self" in its fallenness. Thus, Dasein's care structure is revealed as existentiality, facticity and fallenness. State-of-mind reveals Dasein as it is in its factical thrownness, understanding reveals that Dasein is its possibilities as "Being-ahead-of-itself," and, finally, Dasein's fallenness is its "Being-alongside" as, proximally and for the most part, it is occupied by its average everyday engagement with the world as the "they."

What compels Dasein's flight into the "they" as fallenness? Dasein is tempted into the lostness of das Man by the tranquility which disburdens Dasein from having to face its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. In its inauthentic tranquility, Dasein compares itself with everything and thereby drifts along towards an alienation in which its ownmost potentiality-for-Being is hidden from it. Dasein engages in a downward plunge in which it becomes closed off from its authenticity and possibility. Dasein, as fallen, is characterized by idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity which involves a levelling down of all possibilities of Being. In idle talk, the "they" closes off the hidden meaning and ground of what is talked about. In curiosity, Dasein is constantly uprooting itself and concerned with the constant possibility of distraction. As ambiguous, the "they" acts as though it "knows everything," yet, at bottom, this understanding is superficial in that nothing is genuinely understood. The "they" is essentially death-evasive in that it conceals Dasein as Being-towards-death.

Death is a way of Being which Dasein takes over as soon as it is. "Dying," therefore, stands for the way of Being in which Dasein is towards its death. Death, as "Being-towards-the- end," is defined by Heidegger in terms of the basic state of Dasein as care. Death is "the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein." Death reveals itself as that "possibility which is one's ownmost, which is non-relational, and which is not to be outstripped." Dasein stands fully before itself as assigned to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being as death, the possibility of no-longer-being-able-to-be-there. Moreover, Dasein will die alone in that death cannot be shared, and, finally, death cannot be avoided. Anxiety, as state-of-mind, discloses Dasein as it exists as thrown Being towards its end. Yet, proximally and for the most part, Dasein covers up its Being-towards-death by falling.

How does Dasein, as its "they-self", "cover up" its Being-towards-death? The 'they" does not deny death, but, instead, understands death in the "indifferent tranquility" in which death is seen as an actuality rather than as possibility. The "they" covers up what is peculiar in death's certainty: that it is possible at any moment. By assigning definiteness upon death (i.e., "I will die someday"), everyday Being-towards-death evades the indefiniteness of the "when" of the certainty of death. When death is understood authentically, it is understood as the possibility of not having anymore possibilities. In anticipation, Dasein is as an authentic Being-towards-death as letting death be as possibility. When we are closest to our death, it is as far as it will ever be as an actuality. If Dasein makes death an actuality, then it is no longer death. Dasein cannot understand death in terms of the world as the "they" -- for death is the possibility which radically individualized Dasein in that it can only be taken up as its own possibility. Death discloses what Dasein cannot have: All the possibilities.

Being-towards-death is essentially anxious. Anxiety is the attunement of anticipation, and, being so, becomes a way for Dasein to understand itself in an authentic disclosure of itself. Anxiety reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-self in that Dasein is unable to understand itself in terms of the world as concernful solicitude. As lost, Dasein can be brought back to itself since, as fallen, Dasein has neglected to choose itself. Authenticity is an existential modification of the existentiell manner of existing. In terms of its possibility, Dasein is already a potentiality- for-Being-its-self, but it needs to have this attested. This attestation is disclosed as the call of conscience.

Conscience is the call from Dasein's ownmost self to its "they-self" which recalls Dasein from its lostness back to its ownmost, authentic self. In the state-of-mind of anxiety, Dasein is wanting-to-have-a-conscience. The call discourses in the mode of silence. As reticent, Dasein is disinclined from engaging in the idle talk in which Dasein fails to hear itself. The call tells us nothing. It is the voice which Dasein, as "lost in the manifold 'world' of its concern," finds as the "alien" voice of the self which has been individualized down to itself in its uncanniness. The call of conscience calls out "Guilty!" in recognition of itself as a null basis; that Dasein is in the process of not being any more possibilities and must, therefore, eliminate choices whenever it makes a choice. Dasein is revealed as thrown, as delivered over to Being without Being the author of itself. Yet, as this null basis, Dasein is its basis. Conscience calls us to appropriate ourselves as the kind of Being that we are.

Dasein is authentic in its resoluteness: a "reticent self-projection upon one's ownmost Being- guilty, in which one is ready for anxiety." In resoluteness, Dasein is most fully disclosed to the kind of Being that it is. Resoluteness brings Dasein into solicitous Being with others alongside things as one's ownmost self, not as the "they." Dasein's authentic self as uncanny, therefore, pursues Dasein and threatens the "they-self" in which it has become lost. Dasein, at first, understands itself in terms of its concernful solicitude as the "they" in which it understands itself as a thing. This existentiell familiarly, however, covers up Dasein's existential, primordial understanding of itself as uncanny. Heidegger's hermeneutical phenomenological approach to his existential analytic of Dasein uncovers the phenomenal structure of existing in such a way that it uncovers what would have been missed had the analysis followed the "order of the sequence in which experiences run their course."

Through this existential analysis of Dasein, Heidegger then pursues an understanding of time, including his understanding of history. For a thorough examination of Heidegger's understanding of history, I recommend my paper, Kuhn in Light of Heidegger as a Response to Hoeller's Critique of Giorgi. In this paper, I also introduce the reader to "later" Heidegger after his "turning." Heidegger had intended to complete a third part of Being and Time (there are two parts), but he never completed the project.

In Heidegger's later writings, he moved away from the kind of humanism that characterized Being and Time. That is, Heidegger no longer placed Dasein at such a central place in the presencing of Being. Rather, the human being is understood as the "shepherd of Being." Though Being is needful of human beings, so that beings can presence, the human being is, consistent with Being and Time, finite. More importantly, Heidegger's understanding of "resoluteness" is replaced by the idea of releasement or Gelassenheit. With releasement, the human being engages in a meditative thinking which is characterized by a profound humility, which understands the "gift" of Being and holds itself open to the "call" of language. With Gelassenheit, Heidegger turned toward the subject of language, the logos, by which beings are gathered and named. Yet, in naming, Being remains concealed. In my opinion, Heidegger's conception of Galessenheit truly reveals his indebtedness to Lao Tzu, whose writings on "wu wei" (non-action) hold greater similarities to Heidegger's releasement-toward-things.

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

"Consciousness is a being whose existence posits its essence, and inversely it is consciousness of a being, whose essence implies its existence; that is, in which appearance lays claim to being. Being is everywhere...We must understand that this being is no other than the transphenomenal being of phenomena and not a noumenal being which is hidden behind them...It requires simply that the being of that which appears does not exist only in so far as it appears. The transphenomenal being of what exists for consciousness is itself in itself.... Consciousness is the revealed-revelation of existents, and existents appear before consciousness on the foundation of their being...Consciousness can always pass beyond the existent, not toward its being, but toward the meaning of this being. A fundamental characteristic of its transcendence is to transcend the ontic toward the ontological. The meaning of the being of the existent in so far as it reveals itself to consciousness is the phenomenon of being...This elucidation of the meaning of being is valid only for the being of the phenomenon....For being is the being of becoming and due to this fact it is beyond becoming. It is what it is. This means that by itself it can not even be what it is not...It is full positivity. It knows no otherness; it never posits itself as other-than-another-being. It can support no connection with the other. It is itself indefinitely and it exhausts itself in being...Consciousness absolutely can not derive from anything, either from another being, or from a possibility, or from a necessary law. Uncreated, without reason for being, without any connection with another being, being-in-itself is de trop for eternity." (Being and Nothingness, 1943)

About Jean-Paul Sartre

Sartre was a French philosopher and writer, the leading advocate of existentialism during the years following World World II. The heart of his philosophy was the precious notion of freedom and its concomitant sense of personal responsibility. He insisted, in an interview a few years before his death, that he never ceased to believe that "in the end one is always responsible for what is made of one," only a slight revision of his earlier, bolder slogan, "man makes himself." To be sure, as a student of Hegel, Marx, Husserl and Heidegger--and because of his own physical frailty and the tragedies of the war--Sartre had to be well aware of the many constraints and obstances to human freedom, but as a Cartesian, he never deviated from Descartes' classical portrait of human consciousness as free and distinct from the physical universe it inhabits. One is never free of one's "situation," Sartre tells us, though one is always free to deny ("negate") that situation and try to change it. To be human, to be conscious, is to be free to imagine, free to choose, and responsible for one's lot in life.

As a student, Sartre was fascinated by Edmund Husserl's new philosophical method, phenomenology. His first essays were direct responses to Husserl and applications of the phenomenological method. His essay on The Imagination in 1936 established the groundwork for much of what was to follow: the celebration of our remarkable freedom to imagine the world other than it is and (following Kant) the way that this ability informs all of our experience. In Transcendence of the Ego (1937) he reconsidered Husserl's central idea of a "phenomenological reduction" (the idea of examining the essential structures of consciousness as such) and argued (following Heidegger) that one cannot examine consciousness without at the same time recognizing the reality of actual objects in the world. In other words, there can be no such "reduction." In his novel Nausea (1938), Sartre made this point in a protracted example: his bored and often nauseated narrator confronts a gnarled chestnut tree in the park and recognizes with a visceral shock that its presence is simply given and utterly irreducible. In The Transcendence of the Ego Sartre also reconsiders the notion of the self, which Husserl (and so many earlier philosophers) had identified with consciousness. But the self, Sartre argues, is not "in" consciousness, much less identical to it. The self is out there "in the world, like the self of another." In other words, the self is an ongoing project in the world with other people; it is not simply self-awareness or self-consciousness as such ("I think, therefore I am").

This separation of self and consciousness and the rejection of the self as simply self-consciousness provide the framework for Sartre's greatest philosophical treatise, Being and Nothingness (1943). Its structure is unabashedly Cartesian, consciousness ("being-for-itself") on the one side, the existence of mere things ('being-in-itself") on the other. (The phraseology comes from Hegel). But Sartre does not fall into the Cartesian trap of designating these two types of being as separate "substances." Instead, Sartre describes consciousness as "nothing"--"not a thing" but an activity, "a wind blowing from nowhere toward the world." Sartre often resorts to visceral metaphors when developing this theme (e.g., "a worm coiled in the heart of being"), but much of what he is arguing is familiar to philosophical readers in the more metaphor-free work of Kant, who also warned against the follies ("paralogisms") of understanding consciousness as itself a (possible) object of consciousness rather than as the activity of constituting the objects of consciousness. (As the lens of the camera can never see itself--and in a mirror only sees a reflection of itself--consciousness can never view itself as a consciousness and is only aware of itself--"for itself"--through its experience of objects). Ontologically, one might think of "nothingness" as "no-thing-ness," a much less outrageous suggestion than those that would make it an odd sort of thing.

It is through the nothingness of consciousness and its activities that negation comes into the world, our ability to imagine the world other than it is and the inescapable necessity of imagining ourself other than we seem to be. And because consciousness is nothingness, it is not subject to the rules of causality. Central to the argument of Being and Nothingness and Sartre's insistence on the primacy of human freedom is his insistence that consciousness cannot be understood in causal terms. It is always self-determining and, as such, "it always is what it is not, and is not what it is"--a playful paradox that refers to the fact that we are always in the process of choosing.

Consciousness is "nothing," but the self is always on the way to being something. Throughout our lives we accumulate a body of facts that are true of us--our "facticity"--but during our lives we remain free to envision new possibilities to reform ourself and to reinterpret our facticity in the light of new projects and ambitions--our "transcendence." This indeterminancy means that we can never be anything, and when we try to establish ourselves as something particular--whether a social role (policeman, waiter) or a certain character (shy, intellectual, cowardly)--we are in "bad faith." Bad faith is erroneously viewing ourself as something fixed and settled (Sartre utterly rejects Freud and his theory of the unconscious determination of our personalities and behavior), but it is also bad faith to view oneself as being of infinite possibilities and ingore the always restrictive facts and circumstances within which all choice must be made. On the one hand, we are always trying to define ourself; on the other hand we are always free to break away from what we are, and always responsible for what we have made of ourselves. But there is no easy resolution or "balance" between facticity and freedom, rather a kind of dialectic or tension. The result is our frustrated desire to be God, to be both in-itself and for-itself. But this is not so much blasphemy as an expression of despair, a form of ontological original sin, the impossibility of being both free and what we want to be.

Life for Sartre is yet more complicateed. There is a third basic ontological category, on a part with the being-in-itself and being-for-itself and not derivative of them. He calls it "being-for-others." To say that it is not derivative is to insist that our knowledge of others is not inferred, e.g., by some argument by analogy, from the behavior of others, and we ourself are not wholly constituted by our self-determinations and the facts about us. Sartre gives us a brutal but familiar everyday example of our experience of being-for-others in what he calls "the look." Someone catches us "in the act" of doing somethig humiliating, and we find ourself defining ourself (probably also resisting that definition) in their terms. In his Saint Genet (1953), Sartre describes such a conversion of the ten-year-old Jean Genet into a thief. So, too, we tend to "catch" one another in terms that are often unflattering. But these judgments become an essential and ineluctable ingredient in our sense of ourselves, and they too lead to conflicts--indeed, conflicts so basic and so frustrating that in his play No Exit (1943) Sartre has one of his characters utter the famous line, "Hell is other people."

In his later works, notably his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1958-59), Sartre turned increasingly to politics and, in particular, toward a defense of Marxism on existentialist principles. This entailed rejecting materialist determinism, but it also required a new sense of solidarity (or what Sartre had wistfully called, following Heidegger, Mitsein or "being with others"). Thus in his later work he struggled to find a way of overcoming the conflict and insularity he had described in Being and Nothingness. Not surprisingly (given his constant political activities) he found it in revolutionary engagement. Consonant with his rejection of bourgeois selfhood, Sartre turned down the 1964 Nobel prize for literature.

--Excerpt from The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosopy, edited by Robert Audi

Philosophy – "Friedrich Nietzsche"

Nietzsche on Truth and Knowledge

There are no facts, only interpretations.
(from Nietzsche's Nachlass, A. Danto translation.)


Enemies of truth.-- Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
(from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.483, R.J. Hollingdale transl.)


Linguistic danger to spiritual freedom.-- Every word is a prejudice.
(from Nietzsche's The Wanderer and his Shadow,s. 55, R.J. Hollingdale transl.)


Man and things.-- Why does man not see things? He is himself standing in the way: he conceals things.
(from Nietzsche's Daybreak, s. 483, R.J. Hollingdale transl.)


Mystical explanations.-- Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial.
(from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.126, Walter Kaufmann transl.)


Metaphysical world.-- It is true, there could be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it is hardly to be disputed. We behold all things through the human head and cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut it off.
(from Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human, s.9, R.J. Hollingdale transl.)


Just beyond experience!-- Even great spirits have only their five fingers breadth of experience - just beyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space and stupidity begins.
(from Nietzsche's Daybreak, s. 564, R.J. Hollingdale transl.)


What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms -- in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors - in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all...
('On truth and lie in an extra-moral sense,' The Viking Portable Nietzsche, p.46-7, Walter Kaufmann transl.)


Truth.-- No one now dies of fatal truths: there are too many antidotes to them.
(from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.516, R.J. Hollingdale transl.)


What are man's truths ultimately? Merely his irrefutable errors.
(from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.265, Walter Kaufmann transl.)


Because we have for millenia made moral, aesthetic, religious demands on the world, looked upon it with blind desire, passion or fear, and abandoned ourselves to the bad habits of illogical thinking, this world has gradually become so marvelously variegated, frightful, meaningful, soulful, it has acquired color - but we have been the colorists: it is the human intellect that has made appearances appear and transported its erroneous basic conceptions into things.
(from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.16, R.J. Hollingdale transl.)


The reasons for which 'this' world has been characterized as 'apparent' are the very reasons which indicate its reality; any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable.
(from Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols, ch.3, s.6, Walter Kaufmann transl.)


The total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos--in the sense not of a lack of necessity but a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms...Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: it is neither perfect nor beautiful, nor noble, nor does it wish to become any of these things; it does not by any means strive to imitate man... Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses... But when will we ever be done with our caution and care? When will all these shadows of God cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin to "naturalize" humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?
(from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.109, Walter Kaufmann transl.)


We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live - by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith nobody could now endure life. But that does not prove them. Life is no argument. The conditions of life might include error.
(from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.121, Walter Kaufmann transl.)


Over immense periods of time the intellect produced nothing but errors. A few of these proved to be useful and helped to preserve the species: those who hit upon or inherited these had better luck in their struggle for themselves and their progeny. Such erroneous articles of faith... include the following: that there are things, substances, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is also good in itself.
(from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.110, Walter Kaufmann transl.)


Origin of the logical.-- How did logic come into existence in man's head? Certainly out of illogic, whose realm originally must have been immense. Innumerable beings who made inferences in a way different from ours perished; for all that, their ways might have been truer. Those, for example, who did not know how to find often enough what is "equal" as regards both nourishment and hostile animals--those, in other words, who subsumed things too slowly and cautiously--were favored with a lesser probability of survival than those who guessed immediately upon encountering similar instances that they must be equal. The dominant tendency, however, to treat as equal what is merely similar--an illogical tendency, for nothing is really equal--is what first created any basis for logic.

In order that the concept of substance could originate--which is indispensible for logic although in the strictest sense nothing real corresponds to it--it was likewise necessary that for a long time one did not see or perceive the changes in things. The beings that did not see so precisely had an advantage over those who saw everything "in flux." At bottom, every high degree of caution in making inferences and every skeptical tendency constitute a great danger for life. No living beings would have survived if the opposite tendency--to affirm rather than suspend judgement, to err and make up things rather than wait, to assent rather than negate, to pass judgement rather than be just-- had not been bred to the point where it became extraordinarily strong.
(from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.111, Walter Kaufmann transl.)


Cause and effect: such a duality probably never exists; in truth we are confronted by a continuum out of which we isolate a couple of pieces, just as we perceive motion only as isolated points and then infer it without ever actually seeing it. The suddenness with which many effects stand out misleads us; actually, it is sudden only for us. In this moment of suddenness there are an infinite number of processes which elude us. An intellect that could see cause and effect as a continuum and a flux and not, as we do, in terms of an arbitrary division and dismemberment, would repudiate the concept of cause and effect and deny all conditionality.
(from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.112, Walter Kaufmann transl.)


To renounce belief in one's ego, to deny one's own "reality" -- what a triumph! not merely over the senses, over appearance, but a much higher kind of triumph, a violation and cruelty against reason -- a voluptuous pleasure that reaches its height when the ascetic self-contempt and self-mockery of reason declares: "there is a realm of truth and being, but reason is excluded from it!"
But precisely because we seek knowledge, let us not be ungrateful to such resolute reversals of accustomed perspectives and valuations with which the spirit has, with apparent mischievousness and futility, raged against itself for so long: to see differently in this way for once, to want to see differently, is no small discipline and preparation for its future "objectivity" -- the latter understood not as "contemplation without interest" (which is a nonsensical absurdity), but as the ability to control one's Pro and Con and to dispose of them, so that one knows how to employ a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge.
Henceforth, my dear philosophers, let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a "pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject"; let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as "pure reason," absolute spirituality," "knowledge in itself": these always demand that we should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective "knowing"; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our "concept" of this thing, our "objectivity," be. But to eliminate the will altogether, to suspend each and every affect, supposing we were capable of this -- what would that mean but to castrate the intellect?
(from Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals, s III.12, Walter Kaufmann transl.)