real Martin

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summer 1924.... Young Gadamer organized a picnic, including a cart that had to be pulled to the site, which he enlisted philosophers Hartmann and Heidegger to endure, each pulling one shaft of the 2-shafted cart (meant for a mule). Late in life, Gadamer recalled that day (citation available):

“Heidegger on such occasions displayed a charming boyish sense of humor. When, on the return journey, the cart was empty, he suddenly let Hartmann do all the pulling on his own...jumped onto the cart and opened his umbrella.”

Martin was 34, composing Being and Time.

for Its Arriving

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Heidegger to a student, 1950:

"The default of God and the divinities is absence. But absence is not nothing; rather it is precisely the presence, which must first be appropriated, of the hidden fullness and wealth of what has been and what, thus gathered, is presencing, of the divine in the world of the Greeks, in prophetic Judaism, in the preaching of Jesus. This no-longer is in itself a not-yet of the veiled arrival of its inexhaustible nature.”
from: “A Letter to a Young Student, 18 June, 1950,” Poetry, Language, Thought, 182

By the way, his response isn't excluding there being the divine beyond regioning of Europe; rather, he addresses what's appropriate to the student's letter of 1950.

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spring 2014

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June 6:

I added my August 2013 posting on “the better way” to the short list of “philosophy for good.” I’m amazed by the oversight: The posting was written the same week that the philosophy for good project was first indicated here.

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given all due regard…

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My manifold dwelling with Habermas’s sense of truth, “Habermas and Truth,” evinces from years of engagement, but expresses an activity of a few days, late September and early October, 2003. Its first part, “What is truth for?,” begins:

Given all due regard for technicalities, a theory of truth must (as a practical imperative) be realistic, in at least the pragmatic sense of according with what we do when we look for truth or ask for truth in everyday life, as well as via methodic determinations.

That first sentence of the presentation basically distinguishes theoretical and practical interest in truth, in order to emphasize practical interest. It begs the question: How may a theory be a practical imperative in being “realistic”? I’m implicitly presuming association of the English idiomatic sense of ‘realistic’ with practicality, prudence, or candor. The movement of attention is from theory as conceptual analytics (“technicalities”) to practicality in theoretical terms, then (back? “back”?) to theory as inquiriality—from interest in conceptual analytics to theory of practices to interest in method. (I don't believe that my present comment here clarifies anything; rather, it emphasizes unreconstructed background context.)

notes on truth

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evening | days of ‘truth’

What’s truth?

Look it up in an unabridged dictionary, which I’m doing below.

I love doing that with auratic (e.g., ‘love’), mystified (e.g., ‘spirit’), and allegedly difficult words (e.g., ‘truth’). It’s a tickle. (That reminds me of my undergraduate professor of ancient philosophy giggling regularly during lectures. He was very elderly, and loved his calling. When the very Christian man died, he had his gigantic library shipped to a mission in central Africa.)

The oldest definition of ‘truth’ is allegedly “1 a archaic : the quality or state of being faithful: fidelity, constancy” “Archaic” is not “obsolete”; the lexicographers use ‘obsolete’ frequently, when apt. I think of “true to form” or “being true” in friendship. Merriam-Webster uses S. T. Coleridge: “…whispering tongues can poison truth…” Pithy. Anyway, think a moment of the consanguinity of fidelity, constancy, being true to form, and faithfulness (as a non-religious notion, simply consanguineous with the others here). Archaic may be far beyond primitive (a basic meaning of ‘archaic’) because the meaning is archetypal, in this case evincing from Old English, akin to Old High German and Old Norse: fidelity, trustiness, faith. Truth in trust, an intimacy of reliability, as if deep need for reliability in life is integral to there being good life. Indeed—in deed. Etymology is anthropology.

reverence for the future

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In Heidegger’s 1975 television interview, he referred the viewer to a specific work, 1964, which is available in the book On Time and Being (1972). He died in May, 1976. Born on a 26th, he died on a 26th, a few months after Hannah Arendt, December, '75.

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What is his sudden look in the last fraction of the last second of the video—a little, very private recoil: embarrassment toward a fatefulness of the word? von Kleist's reverence has been made into an interview object, there and gone, like so much of our talktalktalk?

what is translation?

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The great translator Ralph Manheim (namesake of a coveted award given to translators, the “PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation, ” “likened his work...,” says the New York Times obituary, 1992—“likened his work to acting, saying a translator’s challenge was ‘to impersonate his author,’” not to impersonate the author, but to enown the author, “his author,” in the act of translation.

Is this the Act belonging to the translation; or is it the translation belonging to the Act of translating? The latter, of course. The translating is an enowning of the authorship, an intimacy with the authorship that results in a possession by the author (as best one can) of the text at hand. The author may say, in the intimacy of the writing—in gaining the time that is to let go of the writing and, in effect, saying in the Act of releasing the writing into the version of itself that is now:— “This is the text that I’ve become, through which I am for you." That surely seems unduly poetic (if not oblique), but enowning thought is integral to Heidegger’s thinking.

In the intimacy of the writing, the author becomes of his/her text. The text born from the authorship is by the author of the text—the author understanding himself as of this text. The writing is alive in setting forth what is set up “now” as the text of the authorship, by the author who, relative to the text, has become the author of the text.