Philosophy: Martin Heidegger's METAPHYSICS part 1. (appendix)

If you liked my story about my encounter with the metaphysical thought of Martin Heidegger and you are interested in this topic in a more general way, than I highly recommend that you go to the library or order 'Basic Writings' and read it for yourself. Also, when reading philosophy it is easy to drown in labyrinth of language, this can make your reading experience feel like a waste of time, downright terrifying, or extraordinarily exhilarating. For me it's most often all three at once, and I happen to like this ‘emotional cocktail, so that’s why I do it, but if you find yourself overwhelmed while reading such a text and you don’t happen to like being overwhelmed then I recommend you get some help.




There are a lot of modes of help out there; you could enroll yourself in school, but that’s a big commitment, and you might just end up in a pile of debt, you could get yourself a study guide, (introduction, idiots guide, for beginners est.) or you could utilize the wide array of on-line recourses, the most imfamous of which is Wikipedia, who cares what experts say. It’s great. as you probably know YouTube is another great resource (it's not just for cat videos, and watching idiots puck on themselves, or whatever people watch on YouTube these days).



There are quite a few philosophy commentators on YouTube many are quite good even inspiring, but probably the most prolific of these would have to be 0ThouArtThatO and John David Ebert. These two guys have pretty much opposite styles; 0ThouArtThatO is casual and seems to spend a good deal of his videos improvising, it's clear he's brilliant, and he will leave you with more than just a basic understanding of each topic, but if you are over the age of 30 I must warn you if you have any taste propensity for ageism he will surely dish you out a healthy slice of humble pie (he looks very young I think he's got to be like 14 in some of these videos), and he is brilliant. Then there’s John David Ebert, he’s very thorough! He presents quite possibly the greatest summaries ever to exist. Both of these guys have hundreds of videos, if you watched them all you could be a smart ass philosopher king in no time.




Here’s John David Ebert on Heidegger's Intro to Metaphysics ½ to get you started:

Philosophy: Martin Heidegger's METAPHYSICS part 1.

Chapter 1: Mississsippi.

It's often said that Heidegger's great philosophical achievement was the murder of metaphysics, and of course whenever I heard this statement I took it at face value, assuming it meant that he had developed a mode of thought that needed no recourse to ideas outside the physical world, "ideas “such as God, soul, or platonic forms, to explain its true existence, or something to that effect. But one day this notion was shattered to bits; it was about 3:30 4 O' clock or so and I was waiting for the neighborhood bee man to call me back, he told me that he could introduce me to some people that had been farming some land owned by Toby Hemingway, the Permaculturalist, I have a deep interest in Permaculture for its practical meditation of the interconnectedness of organisms, and its application as a sustainable food production system. I like Heidegger for the same reason actually, for Heidegger, we human beings, what he calls Dasein, only have our being in the way we relate to others, organisms/things ect.. Dasein means Being-there, and is an indivisible unit that implies that our very essence is defined by the way things and people appear to us, or in other words we are nothing without other, people and things.

The Fresh Pot on Mississippi Shaver--my neighborhood.

Now, it was about 3 or 4 o-clock and I work grave yard so I had just got up, and was still pretty groggy so I figured I would go to the fresh pot on Mississippi and Shaver while I waited for the Bee Man to call me back. I get there and get my coffee and sit outside and start to read a book, when this guy Cody comes by, Cody's got a blue baseball cap, and is holding a copy of “Hi-fidelity.” Cody is kind of an enigma to me because he speaks with an English ascent but he says he's for South Dakota, or I could be getting the state rung but it's like some mid-western state obviously vary far from the British isles. Anyway, the whole thing doesn't add up, but he's a cool guy so it's not like I'm suspicious, I just don't really get what’s going on. Anyway he studied philosophy in collage, and was really turned off by the whole rigmarole of it all, but still really like's Deleuze and some of the other guys I like so I like to talk to him about such things, I mean I like to talk about philosophy any chance I get, but really not a lot of people get Gilles Deleuze, or Heidegger so I think it's kind of awesome when someone gets it. We got talking and I was comparing Heidegger's theory of temporality with Burgeson's, and D&G's (Deleuze and Guattari) theory of the plain of imminence with Heidegger’s referential totality. Then I asked him what he was reading, he said that he was enjoying hi-fidelity and that he tried to read some Heidegger recently, but he just couldn’t get his head into it, he said the Heidegger was called, "what is metaphysics?" from his Basic Writings. Hmm, I thought, didn’t Heidegger spell the end of metaphysics? and really what would metaphysics even mean to Haidegger any way? how can there be anything outside of the physical world when all meaning comes from our being-there in the world? It was about that time when the Bee Man called me back so I had to go, but as I was living I remembered that my house had Heidegger's Basic writings on our book self, and thought I'd check it out after I went to the garden.

I kind of forgot about the whole thing for a while, but then I came accuse a certain blog that proclaimed that Gilles Deleuze was responsible for reviving metaphysics after Heidegger had left it for dead, and I remembered that conversation I had with Cody and decided to investigate, so I went to my house book shelf, found the 'basic writings,' cracked it open, and as I read I came across this passage;

 "Our inquiry concerning the nothing is to bring us face to face with metaphysics itself. The name "metaphysics" derives from the Greek Meta ta physical. This peculiar title was later interpreted as characterizing the inquiry, the Meta or trans extending out "over" beings as such."

Reading this passage it accord to me that Heidegger associates metaphysics with nothingness and that in this way perhaps he is destroying metaphysics, a startling thought I know but as I read it started to make more and more sense to me.

It all starts in anxiety. Kierkegaard called anxiety the dizziness of freedom, but Heidegger says that "in anxiety there occurs a shrinking back before....that is surely not any sort of flight but rather a kind of bewildered calm." This calm sort of anxiety is the opining up of possibility, it is the same freedom that Kierkegaard is talking about, but Heidegger calls freedom nothingness because he wants to express it as an 'opening' of possibilities. This might sound startling at first to equate freedom with "nothingness" but it makes sense when you realize that if the future already exists then there could be no freedom in the present.
If the future doesn’t exists then it is "nothing," and is therefore a pure possibility for the present.

Heidegger Says, "Without the original revelation of the nothing, no selfhood and no freedom," by which he means that nothingness is the opening up to meaning in the world, and is essential to Dasein’s being in the world and its freedom. So we see that not only does "nothingness" provide the possibilities of freedom it also grants us our "selfhood", this is because once again if the future or our identity where already fixed then we could have no control over our actions and we would then be strictly speaking like cogs in a machine.

This anxiety that provides the possibilities for freedom and identity is not necessarily the same as what is meant in its normal usage, infect for Heidegger's anxiety need not even be unpleasant; "the anxiety of those who are daring cannot be opposed to joy or even to the comfortable enjoyment of tranquilized bustle. It stands--in secret alliance with the cheerfulness and gentleness of creative longing." Anxiety is joyful because it is the limitless possibility in art and of life itself, because it "Anxiety", "robs us of speech (...) as a whole slips away, so that just the nothing crowds round, in the face of anxiety all utterance of the "is" falls silent. That in the malaise of anxiety we often try to shatter the vacant stillness with compulsive talk only proves the pres-immediately demonstrates when anxiety has dissolved. In the lucid face of which and for which we were anxious was "properly"--nothing. Indeed: the nothing itself--as such --was there."

So it’s through anxiety that we, Dasein, come to the nothing, and it is the nothing that opens us to other beings making their meaning possible for us, for "human existence can relate to being only if it holds itself out into the nothing. Going beyond beings occurs in the essence of Desein, but this going beyond is metaphysics itself." Because "nothingness" is none-being Heidegger makes the surprising conclusion that in order for being to be free it must stay open to none-being, a kind of Hegelian twist that brings harmony to what would ordinarily be conflict.

So there we have it in the connection between anxiety, nothingness, and metaphysics; the possibilities of free will. If there was some definite future then freedom would be imposable, if the future is open, that is nothing, then it can become anything. If the role that each person will play in our lives is already defined then our relationships will never change, it's only the nothingness that is an open possibility which make's new love or collaboration possible. Heidegger proves that nothingness is necessary in order for the state of things to exist as it does.



Chapter 2: America.

On another occasion I was at a party with my friends Andy, and Ben and Chrystal Anderson, we were all excited to see each other because it been a while, and on a whim we decided to go see the movie Moon Rise Kingdom by Wes Anderson--no relation. The only theater that was playing it was Clackamas Town Center, now as I wright this I get chills realizing that this would later be the site of an unspeakable tragedy.

It's vary interesting to me the way places hold certain moods, some places are cheery, while others are profoundly sad, still others send you into a state of emotional vertigo, most places have a degree of chaos to them, and then there are places where you have never been that somehow hold a degree of nostalgia, very mysterious--but there isn't even a single place in the universe that doesn’t hold some mood even if that mood is a very bland one.

We were out in Vancouver at the time so it was a long drive which gave us plenty of time to catch up. Unfortunately when we got there the theater was closing, so we just wondered around the mall. Clackamas Town Center is an outdoor mall and all the shops look like old Victorian aria houses (in a really fake way) so it kind of felt like we were walking through a ghost town, I'm sorry if this word choice sounds crass, honestly this is the way I felt at the time, but it really wasn't all that scary just kind of lonely, all those empty buildings. We found a play gound and started climbing on it, and pretending we where kids again, we tried special challenges like climbing up the later with no hands. I remember one time when my brother went down a fire pull upside down, it was a worm spring day I think it had just rained, safe bet in the Willamette valley. It was at a video shooting for a political campaign advertisement, a conservative senator that was running at the time. One of the other kids keep going down that fire pull over, and over, and I could see it in my brothers eye's, he wanted to give it a go, so he did; he hit his head real hard, then got up walked around screaming, all the adults where like see shouldn’t do that stuff, and eventually he just got over it and ran back to the play ground.

After we finished with the play ground we just walked around, and I think someone commented on the ghostliness of the seen, "think of all this empty buildings, and all the people without a home to go to, you think some one would think of something to do about this!?" I just staired at the items in the windows. One store of sunglasses had all these weird futuristic modals that I had never seen before and really couldn’t picture any one wearing them, and this profound anxiety came a pone me and I realized that this was the emptiness of Capitalism commented on so often by leftist social commentates. It certainly wasen't a pleasant feeling but it did have a kind of calming effect, perhaps it was one inflection of what Heidegger meant by "anxiety," it certainly was disconcerting (If this was what Heidergger called anxiety then bumer it was the unpleasant kind). I don't mean to say that Heidegger was talking about commoditized identity because I know he wasn't, but perhaps there’s something about "emptiness" as Heidegger speaks of it that is somehow at the heart of capitalist dissatisfaction. For Heidegger the anxiety is supposed to make an opening to a new possibility but for some reason in our society the opening leads to no possibilities, it's just one product after another each failing to deliver on its promise of fulfillment.

The ride home from the mall that night was a quiet one, I wander if my friends where feeling what I was feeling, like this immense opening to God knows what, like standing over a great chasm, dizzy with disappointment. I tried to talk, but I instantly realized that if I did I would enviably begin to cry. No! Thats not right. I felt as if I could never cry again, and this saddened me all the more. I tried to grasp my memories and ring them for whatever bit of refreshment they may have held, as if perhaps maybe just maybe, then I would see that it's all connected, that somehow the opining of time, the great void swirling with anxiety might perhaps lunched out at me some hidden gift of meaning, and in a way it did, but I was so tier, and it still wasn't time for me to see it.

Joy Division (Review of Unknown Pleasures)

Music review: Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures (Full Album) [HD] 

John Rotten snarled out, "no future", and Ian Curtis declared a resounding question. "Where will it end?" Joy division is not joyous to say the least but it is ecstatic none the less. Ecstatic? This might sound like the wrong word for them, usually when one thinks of ecstasy one thinks of enthusiasm, or fun, or something joyous, but while the music of Joy division is none of these things it is ecstatic...It's an ecstatic sadness.

The thing about Ecstasy is it’s a loss of control, but there is no band that is more in control then Joy division, from the never ending sprawling linearity of Stephen Morris's drums to the high flying register of Peter Hook's melodic bass lines, to the stiff church choir chores of Bernard Sumner's desperate guitar voicing’s, to Ian Curtis's lonesome sorrowful heart sick pronouncements, it’s all to in control. But isn't it true, that the mark of a psyche out-of-control is its strong focus on what can be controlled, an obsession with little details. That’s what I've heard any way.

The unknown pleasure is known, according to the logic of the mystic. What is the unknown pleasure? I think it’s the pleasure of remembering future projections of a past disconnected from the present, it's a lost dream, and not a good dream but not really a bad dream either; It’s no man’s land, the unknown pleasure is an anxiety that sets a soul free, free as fire. It's this memory that makes Ian Curtis announcement, "I'm not afraid anymore!" what it is, a pronouncement of lose.

As I ponder the unknown pleasure I realize that it is in us all, at least I think so. It's not as scary as it sounds. Or maybe it is! I hear that Ian Curtis was an epileptic, and maybe this has something to do with the unknown pleasure. I was an epileptic once myself. I discovered my epilepsy before breakfast one morning. My family was staying at an RV camp ground with a small store on the property where us kids would go and buy cheap toy's and candy. One morning I was coming back from the store with a box of cereal in my hands and there it hit me, I lost control. I was standing in the door way of our motorhome blank faced, later my mom told me that she was yelling at me to shut the door, but I just stood there. I was rushed off to the hospital in an ambulance; I remember that they cut my shirt to take my vitals. That’s pretty scary stuff, I couldn't imagine that honestly being called pleasure, but I do get some pleasure recounting the story, maybe that’s the unknown pleasure. Ian Curtis sings "I could live a little better with the myths and the lies..

When the darkness broke in, I just broke down and cried." I feel these words, indeed, the affect of the unknown pleasure radiates out from an experience, and finds new forms in the sounds of albums like this one, I feel it now as in the affect of wright my story. The unknown pleasure is like the joy of listening to this album and even the fun of singing it.

The last word of She's Lost Control is,

"When the change is gone, when the urge is gone,
To lose control. When here we come."

 The will to lose control is the will to be changed by somthing more powerful then you, so maybe that is also the joy of the unknown pleasure. Maybe when this urge is gone something yet even darker is on its way. To will the loss of control is to will life, becuase life does as it pleases. Do we dare to will the freedom of life its self. I think the unknown pleasure is a safety net, but it’s also a catalyst for new possibilities, the point is though that it becomes most apparent when old hopes, or dreams start to fall apart, and is there for also like a warning sign warning us to recollect our self’s before the darkness settles in. No good thing will come with out risk, risk is the lose of control, risk is the true love of life.

The music of Joy Division always makes me want to sing along, but when I sing along to Joy Division I scream the words, I can't seem to help myself. I'm over taken by the unknown pleasure of it. And you know I always thought that Ian Curtis was controlled in his delivery of his words but when you see him on stage he's a total spaz, and somehow when you sing along to these songs you take on a spastic affect and somehow all the control is burnt up in an offering of an unknown pleasure. Yes! There is something of the austere in this music and yet there’s also an ecstatic heart at its core that is trying to get out, I can hear it, and it is powerful and true! God Love's Ian Curtis!