Only a god can save us

>Only a god can save us

What does this mean?

we're fucked and beyond redemption

I don't know where he wrote this, but here is my guess:

Heidegger was deeply influenced by Nietzsche who famously proclaimed that
>God is dead.
by which he meant that the old morality and values lost their authority when we figured out that lightning isn't God and falsified most of the proclaimed proofs of the existence of God. This is the source of nihilism in Nietzsche's eye.
Hence his program: become more godlike so you have the authority to set new values and do away with both the empty old ones and the nihilism.
I guess his dislike of modernity stems from the lack of values and the constant intellectual decay that this caused. He proclaiming that "Only a god can save us" in my opinion is he making the same claim that Nietzsche made but instead of making them on a personal level he makes it on a greater (societal or civilizational) level: If no new (absolute) values are put forward to do away with the "everything is relative/optional/personal" attitude (that characterizes most of modern and post-modern philosophy and is also manifesting itself in the broader culture ) and give a sense of direction of growth to both man and society then this decay will be unstoppable and threatens to eat away at every intellectual and artistic achievement of the last two millennia of western civilization. (see Oswald Sprengler.)

This is my guess, I can easily be wrong here. Sorry for rambling.

This is a good post. I think you nailed it.

this

Thank you user.

From the line:
>I guess his dislike of modernity[...]
onward I talk about Heidegger, although much of it is applicable to Nietzsche himself. Just to avoid misunderstandings.

>modernity and postmodernity are characterized by moral relativism
>Nietzsche wants us to make our own values that destroy the old values
>Heidegger agrees this is the only way to save Sid Meiers civilization
>see Spengler
You sound confused. The argument does not support the thesis or your conclusion.

that's a good guess but its not 100% true

"Only a god can save us" refers to the later, messianic turn that Heidegger's thought had taken. If you've read Nietzsche's "The Birth of Tragedy" you'd notice how Dionysus figured as an absent god who would eventually return (somewhat similar to Christ's return) Whereas calculative thinking has enslaved us to Technos, true meditative thinking does not measure objects by use, but is a form of "waiting", simply to let things be in whatever may be their uncertainty and their mystery. He started to converge with eastern mysticism here. By the end he totally privileged poetic and mythic means of expression above rational examinations.

While he seems distinctly unique to westerners, Heidegger's thoughts on many issues are extremely representative of a tradition called "german mandarinism" (I recommend The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933 by Fritz Ringer as great example on the subject). They were late nineteenth century men of letters who were overeducated in the humanistic traditions of classical languages, art, history, and philosophy, and as the curriculum transformed to suit the needs of the emerging twentieth century (and industrialization) they turned to a deep pessimism about the way education and public thought was transforming. They were basically Late Romantics.

I guess I cuold have been more articulate. I meant to say that I think Heidegger meant that the decline could only be stopped if new absolute values are put forward. And the only authority in the western tradition to do that is a god.

This sounds absolutely invigorating. Thank you for the book recommendation, will read it as soon as time allows. I have not yet read all of Heidegger's work so my knowledge is as of yet superficial. In which book did he develop/discuss this idea of Technos and meditation as waiting? Would you recommend any good commentary on it?

'digger is irrelevant, who cares?

Just read Nietzsche-->Deleuze--->Land

basically this. "Only a God" means that the transformative effect of technology on human destiny it outside our control

Land is more like Heidegger than he himself admits. He’s also a romantic anti-rationalist and his philosophy borders on techno-mysticism.

Meaningless buzzwords; they have nothing in common. Land is at war with transcendental philosophy, which includes Heidegger.

Heidegger is more about how technology will not redeem us at all. He does not share that much of vitalism with Nietzsche.

The Question Concerning Technology, but be aware that Heidegger's difficulty does nothing but increase over time, so if you think Being and Time is hard, you're in for a wild ride.

Land is at war with human beings also.

The quote is from a famous interview he game,

user please. Just because you like 2 philosophers with opposing view, does not mean they are kinds the same.

Land is basically the end-game of the Victorian anglo mindset, that includes capitalist cameralism, mapping everything with Enlightenment values(classical Enlightenment, not SJW and marxist cuckgames) and methodology, like how the Victorians did.

Heidegger is the mystic, who things materialism will not safe us, even if it works. Land believes that Capital exists as a God, that will surely kill us and there is nothing we can do without it, basically materialist whig history without the optimism.

Land starts his writings with a polemic critique of Kant as “bourgeoise philosopher” and believes the natural sciences to be reductionist, opting for a physics of drives instead. He’s no friend of the enlightenment.

Tolerance is also an enlightenment value, by the way.

land is a meemee for /pol/tards who want some kind of obscurantist "thinker" to buy into who wasn't from post ww2 french academia.

>He’s no friend of the enlightenment.
He's no friend of anyone.

>Tolerance is also an enlightenment value, by the way.
Yes, the tolerance of Spinoza and the freedom of speech of Voltaire, nothing to do with the censorship of 1984.

Land rambles page after page about Bataille and Guattari. He’s a French philosopher through and through.

>Land is a /pol/ meme
>Land is a French pomo cuck
You would think with all these contradictory rumors floating about, people would make an effort to read him and see what he actually thinks

>Tolerance is also an enlightenment value, by the way.

On paper, maybe(Enlightenment Despotism is also part of the Enlightenment as you should remember). Land is extremely consistent with the anglo Victorian mindset, that basically owned almost the whole world at it's time. Literally an extremely educated, smart and prophetic Dawkins.

The Question Concerning Technology is his most direct treatment of it in his work, but the "later" heidegger (Being and Time was some his earliest work) is entirely different from the early phenomenological heidegger. Check out his Black Notebooks and Contributions to Philosophy (Of The Event) and see what I mean

I don't understand the pessimism in.his words. Save us from what? Posmodermism? Why are we in need of a saving from a god? Isn't enough Nietzsche's vitalism and the life which overpassess constantly itself?

I mean, I have read your post and taken note on the book. Just asking for a bit more of info regarding that pessimism.

Btw, very good posts. Thnx.

Also, for the others anons, pls stop turning the discussion into what /pol/ likes and why is/isn't retarded.

>be Heidegger
>believe that man ought to live for spirituality and poetry above all

>spend your life fucking young students and even die fucking one

What a hypocrite

crushing prime puss sounds pretty spiritual and poetic to me senpai

So he was living the dream basically.

Probably what you think it means.

We need a religious revival to take us out of bourgeois techno-capitalist democracy. But he's implying a new religion or at least a heterodox revival of an older one (hint: he loved Greek paganism AND Luther)

nice rec!

>and even die fucking one

wait what

Do you really need to read some book to be able to understand him?

English is not my native language so bear with me here. I'll talk about wht this means from the point of view of his late aesthetics.

Not quite it but you're onto something here:
>If no new (absolute) values are put forward [...] and give a sense of direction of growth to both man and society...

Is right in that he is refering to Dyonisus or "the absence/whtidrawal of the Gods"

The quote is from his interview to Der Spiegel and goes like this:
>“Only a god can still save us [...] I think the only possibility of salvation left to us is to prepare, through thinking and poetry, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god during the decline; so that we do not, simply put, die meaningless deaths, but that when we decline, we decline in the face of the absent god.”

Heidegger thought that (great) Art was the motor of history. Historical communities manifest and change their own ontologies through art. That is, the great artwork changes the “understanding of being” of a historical people, its most basic and ultimate understanding of what is and what matters.

For Heidegger, poetry is the most paradigmatic of all Arts, and perhaps the most human of activities. For Man is who he is when he "testifies" to himself what he is. (Much clearer in the original: "Wer is Mensch? jener, der zeugen muss, was er sei"). Our Dasein is to be a project of being, a historical unfolding of the being. This is done through language. In the language is where entities first appear, when an entity is first given a name, it is also given a sense, it is "called into being". The one who names entities in accord to their essence is the poet. Poetry is not mere wordplay, nor a common form of speaking. It is the form of language where we discover everything that is later talked about in the ordinary language.

(1/2)

>Save us from what?
The terrible fucking ideas and inventions going on in the first half of the 20th century, that haven't fucked off. And now there are drones.

Hölderlin writes:
>"We have given many names to the Gods
>Since we were a dialogue
>and we could hear eachother"

Two things here:
1) This process of naming into being is not something that we are in control of. The language speaks itself, and we are who we are because we can determine what is through language, but we are at the same time historical beings determined by language and culture.
2) The Gods are named by the poet. The poet is him who sits next to the Gods and can see everything in its essence. The great sculptor (for Heidegger, all arts are poetry) can shape the metal in a way that shows us what the metal IS (that is, it shows us its essence). Science can give us the composition and the properties of the alloy, but it cannot show us the resilience of iron, the heaviness of the stone. "Colour glows and only wants to glow. If we try to understand it by decomposing it into a number of vibrations, this glow will be gone". Great art shows us what entities are, and poetry and literature "show is what is holy and what is unholy, what is great and what is lesser, what is worthy and what is not".

When he asks us to prepare "through thinking and poetry" he is saying that the philosopher's task is to interpret the words of the poet, and to give them to the leader who will drive the people to its historical destiny (Hölderlin>Heidegger>Hitler). Great art can, therefore, open a new age.

Now, as you guys have pointed out, Heidegger is advocating for a rupture with modernity. Modernity is characterized in Heidegger's thinking not only by the rise and dominance of technological and scientific thinking, but also by the Entgötterung of the world, the "de-godding" if you will. When he's saying "only a God can save us” he is not crying for a return of platonism, a universal reason or a God that serves as basis of absolute values. He is crying for a poet (or an artist) that opens the post-modern age. A postmodern poet that can open an ontology where we overcome technical thinking, where “we don't die meaningless deaths”. That is, a poet that shows us how to live in the absence of a God. This new paradigm that will be opened will be both historically determined (by tradition and language, it will be a product of our dialogue) and radically new. At the same time, its values and its understanding of being won't be perennial nor universal, for they too will succumb to the historical process.

You can get all you need from just a couple of shitposts my dude.

>when an entity is first given a name, it is also given a sense, it is "called into being". The one who names entities in accord to their essence is the poet. Poetry is not mere wordplay, nor a common form of speaking. It is the form of language where we discover everything that is later talked about in the ordinary language.
This is because in Greek the word "poiesis" means to create from nothing, the English word "creation" borrowing from Latin "creatio" to mean this same thing. Poiesis also refers to poetry, in ancient sources like Plato and Herodotus, it refers in particular to the poetry of the greatest of poets, Homer.

To make this simpler to an English-speaking reader, in English, and not just in English, an artist is not infrequently called a "creator." This whole idea is taken very seriously by the late Heidegger.

>The poet is him who sits next to the Gods
Remember how the epic poem begins with an invocation to the Muses? Exactly. Divine inspiration flows into the poet, and so the power to create is his.

>The great sculptor (for Heidegger, all arts are poetry) can shape the metal in a way that shows us what the metal IS (that is, it shows us its essence).
Remember Aristotle's four causes, present all over Heidegger ever since his What is Metaphysics? and before, since German philosophy is heavily based on Scholasticism, itself Aristotelian.

Material cause: the mineral the statue was made of.
Formal cause: the form the statue has been given.
Efficient cause: the sculptor that made the statue into what it is.
Final cause: that for the sake of which a thing is what it is. For a seed, it might be an adult plant. For a sailboat, it might be sailing. For a ball at the top of a ramp, it might be coming to rest at the bottom.
And for the block of mineral, the final cause is the work of art. That is its essence, the reason it was taken from the cave.

>When he's saying "only a God can save us” he is not crying for a return of platonism, a universal reason or a God that serves as basis of absolute values. He is crying for a poet (or an artist) that opens the post-modern age. A postmodern poet that can open an ontology where we overcome technical thinking, where “we don't die meaningless deaths”. That is, a poet that shows us how to live in the absence of a God.
This would be a moment to remind everybody that Plato had a very low opinion of poets, no matter how divine, they wouldn't be welcome at all in his Republic, they corrupt the youth, they teach them senseless things like gods killing their families...

*gods killing their own families...

he was talking about me. I'm the best philosopher of the 21st c. and people often metaphorically refer to people who are really good at things as god.

that's what he meant

I think you are mistaken. If Heidegger lacked faith in technology than why'd he fight inside that giant robot? If anything he placed TOO MUCH faith in technology.

Great point about poiesis>poetry. German uses both "Poesie" and "Dichtung" (from Latin "dictare", to dictate, to speak"). In this sense, the poet (Dichter) is "the one who speaks".

bump

>die fucking one
Wut

He's waiting for a streetwise Hercules to fight the rising odds.

We are too late for the gods and too early for Being. Being’s poem, just begun, is man.

What does this mean?

Not sure about the first line but
>Being’s poem, just begun, is man.
Heidegger often refers to Dasein (the mode of being, or the kind of entity that humans are) as a project of being. Man gives himself his own appearance, and also gives sense (or being) to all the entities around him.

>And for the block of mineral, the final cause is the work of art. That is its essence, the reason it was taken from the cave.
I'm not sure that Heidegger would agree here. While the final cause = essence holds for utilities or man-made objects, Heidi seems to consider the essence of the stone as something lying in what he calls "the strife between Earth and World", and not some telos or definite description that encompasses all the characteristics of a certain entity.

>I think Heidegger meant that the decline could only be stopped if new absolute values are put forward

Most shitty and misunderstood reading of Heidegger ever.

>The great sculptor (for Heidegger, all arts are poetry) can shape the metal in a way that shows us what the metal IS (that is, it shows us its essence)

You are misreading Heidegger as if his thought is in line with traditional metaphysics - it isn't.

You can say that the arts show the 'essence of things', insofar that they reveal that the way in which things appear before us (in a phenomenological, pre-predicative way) is always both a showing and a concealment.

That is, the artwork establishes/shows a world (in the heideggerian sense, world = a referential whole of zuhanden-seiendes) that clashes with the watchers' own world and thus uncovers the Earth/ground (the aspects of das seiende that remain concealed in our own ap-propriation of the world). It is an experience of the CONTINGENCY of our experience. Heidegger would never say that the arts can give a final discovery of 'the essence of the WHAT of the stone' for example.

In Ursprung Des Kunstwerkes, the ruins of the greek temple uncover the mountainside as 'bearing ground' as opposed to the way we ap-propriate the natural world through Das Gestell in the nihilistic age of the world-picture; as resource in reserve. Thus it can open a NEW space for thinking on the original givenness of Beings in their being (the question of the meaning of being).

It shows the originary moment of phenomenological givenness through the original double-sidedness of truth as Aletheia; both an uncovering and a concealment; always an appropriation (Ereignis).

In a way, you are touching on it further down in your post by saying that the poet is to show us how to live in the absence of a God; this is more accurate. But the way you framed your first remarks made Heidegger sound more classical metaphysician than he is; he is trying to re-think being in a post-metaphysical fashion; without final grounds.

Good posts

Where does one start with Heidegger? I tried B&T but he has this habit of introducing new concepts and explaining them after like 10 pages, so I felt I was lost the whole time

What Is Metaphysics, also do they not have glossaries at the end of the books in Angloland?

This post alone fully exculpates the eternal anglo and his distaste for 20th century continental pseudointellectual masturbation (in the heideggerian sense = mit-Händen-runterholen).

>the artwork establishes/shows a world (in the heideggerian sense, world = a referential whole of zuhanden-seiendes) that clashes with the watchers' own world and thus uncovers the Earth/ground (the aspects of das seiende that remain concealed in our own ap-propriation of the world). It is an experience of the CONTINGENCY of our experience. Heidegger would never say that the arts can give a final discovery of 'the essence of the WHAT of the stone' for example.

THANK YOU. I have to say I never quite got the part about truth as unconcealment and concealment and how it related to the fight between earth/world. Your post has made it so much clearer. I understood that the truth that art shows is contingent, and that he was not talking about essence in the classic sense, but I could never quite reconstruct the argument.

I'm wondering if you have read his later works. Specially Bauen Wohnen Denken, Die Kunst und der Raum and the writings where he talks about the Fourfold. If so, I'd love to hear your take on them.

Well, I was using the german term so I wouldn't have to explicate in a long paragraph - if that constitutes 'pseudointellectualism', be that as it may.

I think it's pretty important to understand that when Heidegger says world, he is not talking about the sum of physical entities, but the referential whole of relations we form as we inhabit our existence and that ultimately make up the hermeneutic horisont from which we interprete the situations before us. Would you agree?

figure out who God is (hint it's really obvious when you think about it...or don't think about it)

You're welcome. I struggled quite a bit myself for some time.

I had a guest lecturer at my uni do a weird/crazy OOO reading of Das Geviert in late Heidegger where I read some of that stuff, but it's been a while.

I'm not versed in Heidegger at all, so it may be that I'm missing something, but based on your explanation I'd reckon I could come up with a number of more intuitive terms and designations than Zuhanden-Seiendes, episteme or any other private language words used to denote the temporally local conception of the world at large. Anyways the pseudointellectualism remark wasn't geared towards terminology, but rather to lack of any practical insight in this overly intricate mess.

Not him but the explanation was relevant to his point and anyone who has engaged with Heidegger should be familiar with the concept of zu and vor handen anyhow

>lack of any practical insight in this overly intricate mess

???

It is a phenomenologically descriptive investigation of what happens in the experience of an artwork - the 'practical insight' is basically that art can possibly open up a space for reflection on fundamental questions that we forget to ask because we are caught up in instrumental and abstract thinking all the time. It does so by critically reflecting the context in which it is being viewed/experienced.

It is first of all descriptive and not normative, but if there is a normative project in what Heidegger is saying, it is trying to legitimize other kinds of erkenntnis (what english term is fitting here? not knowledge) than strictly theoretical/logical or instrumental. By pointing to the spaces it opens for reflecting on the truisms of our time.

Why? Because it's needed. In Heidegger's eyes, the dropping of the atomic bombs and the instrumental logic of the extermination camps (yes, he stated this) are the outcomes of a way of thinking that got to run it's course unhinged without critical reflection.

go in this order:

The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology by Edmund Husserl
Introduction to Metaphysics
Being and Time
Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics
Mindfulness
Off the Beaten Track
Pathways
Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event)
The History of Beyng
The Event
Ponderings: II - IV : Black Notebooks 1931-1938
Ponderings VII–XI: Black Notebooks 1938–1939
Ponderings XII–XV: Black Notebooks 1939–1941

many of his works have long introductions or glossaries that explain many of the concepts he's coining. Husserl's work is very important to understanding Heidegger's projects.

I recommend having at least one secondary work (by someone else examine his thought) for every primary work you have by heidegger

It's a shallow observation. The fact that exposure to art produced within a different philosophical framework forces us to reflect upon and critically assess our own current Weltanschauung is intuitive and self-evident to anyone who has ever witnessed art. 'Practical insight' was the wrong choice of words, rather 'insight' at large. What am I missing?

>What am I missing?
That we are talking about the specifics of a detail in Heidegger's larger unfolding in 'The Origin of The Work of Art', which also includes very sharp philosophical analyses on the ways in which what constitutes a 'thing' have historically been theorized in philosophy and phenomenological reflection at length on the fundamental event with which things are given to us. I think Heidegger is sharpest when he does his historical analyses and the whole project of doing ontology with a phenomenological basis makes much more intuitive sense to me than classic metaphysics or scientific theory. Especially given the fact that - and this is what the phenomenologists stress from the beginning - the way the world is given to us is first of all pre-theoretical with a basis in a life-world.

This.