Heidegger's involvement with Nazism casts a shadow over hislife. Whether, and if so to what extent, it casts a more concentratedshadow over at least some of his philosophical work is a more difficultissue. It would be irresponsible to ignore the relationship betweenHeidegger's philosophy and his politics. But it is surelypossible to be critically engaged in a deep and intellectuallystimulating way with his sustained investigation into Being, to findmuch of value in his capacity to think deeply about human life, tostruggle fruitfully with what he says about our loss of dwelling, andto appreciate his massive and still unfolding contribution to thoughtand to thinking, without looking for evidence of Nazism in every twistand turn of the philosophical path he lays down.
Building Dwelling Thinking Martin Heidegger Pdf To Word
Heidegger has been influential in research on the relationship between Western philosophy and the history of ideas in Islam,[148] particularly for some scholars interested in Arabic philosophical medieval sources. These include the Lebanese philosopher and architectural theorist Nader El-Bizri,[149] who, as well as focusing on the critique of the history of metaphysics (as an 'Arab Heideggerian'), also moves towards rethinking the notion of "dwelling" in the epoch of the modern unfolding of the essence of technology and Gestell,[150] and realizing what can be described as a "confluence of Western and Eastern thought" as well. El-Bizri has also taken a new direction in his engagement in 'Heidegger Studies' by way of probing the Arab/Levantine Anglophone reception of Sein und Zeit in 1937 as set in the Harvard doctoral thesis of the 20th century Lebanese thinker and diplomat Charles Malik.[151]
The main terms are: building, dwelling and the four quarters, which have the closest relation towards architecture. There are minor important terms, which will be explained when they appear in the text, because they do not seem to valued enough to be in this paragraph about terms.
I selected the four authors mentioned on the following grounds. First, they can all be called phenomenologists in a particular meaning of the term. Second, they all wrote thoughtful papers on dwelling, house and home in the fifties and sixties of the twentieth century. Third, they all present their views of home in the context of the five constituents of the lifeworld and stress that dwelling, building a house and being at home are fundamental aspects of human existence. The selected writings are:
Malpas often describes the presence of place in experience in terms of the bounded or limited situatedness of existence. This is the import, for example, of chapter 4, which focuses on the theme of the limit, and it is also the focus of chapter 9 on death, what Malpas characterizes as "the limit-character of death" (61). A topological thinking would pay attention to the limited, bounded, that is, placed, character of existence and experience. Indeed, as Malpas reminds us (89-90), it was Heidegger who conceived of place in terms of limit, as in this passage from "Building Dwelling Thinking" where Heidegger explained that, "A space is something that has been spaced or made room for, something that is cleared and free, namely within a boundary, Greek peras. A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greek recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing." Heidegger then refers to the essential role of the limit, adding that space essentially includes the horismos, the horizon, the boundary, and that "space is in essence that for which room has been made, that which is let into its bounds" (GA 7, 156/PLT, 152, tr. slightly modified, my emphasis, cited, 89-90). Further, throughout the book, Malpas claims that existence is always a being in place, as for instance when he writes that "dwelling is the mode of human being, so human being is essentially a being in place, just as it is also a being in the world" (63). In fact, the claim is even more radical, as Malpas states that to be is to be in place: "To be is to be in place, and to be a phenomenon, in appearing, is similarly to be placed, or, as one might say, totake place" (46).
When evoking the nostalgic, Malpas develops the notion of a return to place, as return home. The thinking of topos, Malpas explains, takes "the form of a returning to place, a refinding of oneself, a reorientation (even, perhaps, a repositioning) -- as Heidegger himself refers to it, a form of homecoming, although a coming-home to that from which we never really departed" (111). However, this emphasis on place as home, and topological thinking as homecoming, must be qualified, not only in light of what we have just seen regarding ecstasis, but also in terms of Heidegger's own thinking of home. For as early as Sein und Zeit, we are told that the "not-at-home" (das Un-zuhause) must, in relation to the familiarity with oneself or to the being-at-home, "be conceived as the more primordial phenomenon,"[5] and in later texts, such as the 1942 lecture course, Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister" (GA 53), Heidegger shows that any homecoming signifies a journeying in the foreign. Do these latter characterizations not go against the grain of Malpas' insistence on place as home and dwelling, as homecoming? How does one think together the notion of a being-at-home-in-a-place with the essentially ecstatic character of the human being? Finally, does this ecstatic expropriation not point towards a certain excess with respect to place and to being in a place, and point toward a certain being "out of place" or "without a place"? In paragraph 40 of Being and Time, Heidegger evokes the presence in anxiety of a certain nowhere. "The fact that what is threatening is nowhere characterizes what anxiety is about" (SZ, 186/BT, 180). What is this nowhere, this being out of place, in relation to the return to place that Malpas emphasizes? Can one not raise here Levinas' objection to Heidegger's emphasis on dwelling as suppression of a certain errancy of an existence without a proper topos? 2ff7e9595c
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