prefacing a riverrun
I had occasion to share some thoughts about Heidegger teaching via a letter to someone, which has caused desire here to share relevant parts of that and to expand it into titled sections. So it goes with joys of writing: benefitting gratefully from correspondence.
thinking
One conceals the potential of thinking with the text by regarding (as my correspondent does) “that questioning is the key to Heidegger’s thinking.” Questioning is good, vital, and a way to enlightenment. Yet, the key is openness that allows dwelling, from which thinking arises, from which questioning receives its motive.
But the true starting point is that education of individuation (K-12 education, university—historicity of actualized potential) that gives a person capability for opening to discovery—more than remedial disclosure (unconcealment)—so to dwell for the sake of thinking that also, too, questions. Questioning is vital to inquiry and asute thinking, but fundamentally we want to self-enhancively learn (which is mediately served by emancipatory interest).
“Building” one’s capabilities, “dwelling” in the open (re: possibility, challenge, confusion, prospect, venture), we then gain more possibility for thinking to be fruitful, if not originary for one’s work, for one’s way of life—for one’s enowning of Our humanity and, at best, contributing to some legacy.
for planetary thinking
Making a life—or, as one Heidegger commentor was called to say, decades ago—“build[ing one’s] own way through thinking”—is implicitly enframed by the planetary condition that everyone shares: thinking of one’s humanity in making a life.
The refrain to What Is Called Thinking? echoes more today than ever (e.g., re: consumerist citizenship, episodic “texting,” 24/7 “news” as entertainment): “What is most thought-provoking in this thought-provoking age is that still we are not thinking.”
Heidegger was overtly calling for “planetary thinking” (1962, “Time and Being,” in Time and Being) years before the first “Earth Day,” April, 1970. Now, we are faced with the prospect of our grandchildren inheriting an uninhabitable Earth.
• criticism as hermeneutics vs. as critique
• Ereignis as teaching event of appropriation
• teaching Heidegger teaching
• Working (poiesis) toward the work (logos) that bases the work of teaching (ethos)
• teaching Being and Time
flowing on
being “poetic” (for the sake of the originary, poiesis), being language (for the sake of the logos, “the house of being”), being thoughtful (for the sake of advancing the ethos)...Poetry, Language, Thought...“Building, Dwelling, Thinking.”
In a sense the achievement of language transcends its appropriation in its time; logos “contains” ethos. In a sense, the lifetime oriented achieving Work transcends the resulting work, the “pathmark,” of cohering; poiesis as being in Time “contains” the produced work of art.
That’s a fair preface for my trope of “...[poiesis [logos [ethos]]]...” at “originary flow, conceptual design, and concerted cultivation,” 2015, which gels with the work of Habermas and others (although that would seem obscure by my linking into the middle of my river).