Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Another excerpt (p 21) on philosophy and philosophizing from The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (a seminar-lecture course from 1929/30) by Martin Heidegger:

Insight into the multiple ambiguity of philosophizing acts as a deterrent [abschreckend] and ultimately betrays the entire fruitlessness of such activity. It would be a misunderstanding if we wished in the slightest to weaken this impression of the hopelessness of philosophizing, or to mediate it belatedly by indicating that in the end things are not so bad after all, that philosophy has achieved many things in the history of mankind, and so on. This is merely idle talk that talks in a direction leading away from philosophy. We must rather uphold and hold out in this terror [Schrecken]. For in it there becomes manifest something essential about all philosophical comprehension, namely that in the philosophical concept [Begriff], man, and indeed man as a whole, is in the grip of an attack [Angriff]---driven out of everydayness and driven back into the ground of things. Yet the attacker is not man, the dubious subject of the everyday and of the bliss of knowledge. Rather, in philosophizing the Da-sein [there-being] in man launches the attack upon man. Thus man in the ground of his essence is someone in the grip of an attack, attacked by the fact 'that he is what he is', and already caught up in all comprehending questioning. Yet being comprehensively included in this way is not some blissful awe, but the struggle against the insurmountable ambiguity of all questioning and being.





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