20th-century German philosophy

The hermeneutical tradition represented by Yorck, Heidegger, and Gadamer has distrusted Dilthey as suffering from the two sins of modernism: scientific “positivism” and individualistic and aesthetic “romanticism.” On the one hand, Dilthey’s epistemology is deemed scientistic in accepting the priority of the empirical, the ontic, and consequently scientific inquiry into the physical, biological, and human worlds; on the other hand, his personalist ethos and Goethean humanism, and his pluralistic life- and worldview philosophy are considered excessively aesthetic, culturally liberal, relativistic, and subjective. This essay involves two tasks in response to this negative evaluation of Dilthey that has shaped our current understanding of his philosophical project; first, an interpretation of the issues at stake in Heidegger’s reception of and struggles with Dilthey. These issues touch upon language, historicity, and the nature of hermeneutics. Second, by pursuing this task in light of Guignon’s interpretation of Dilthey and Heidegger, I hope to question and challenge the “overcoming” of Dilthey’s epistemic and life-philosophical hermeneutics in the “ontological” or “philosophical” hermeneutics of Heidegger.

Vor genau 100 Jahren wurde der bis dahin weitgehend unbekannte Privatgelehrte Oswald Spengler (1880– 1936) mit seinem Monumentalwerk vom Untergang des Abendlandes auf einen Schlag berühmt und avancierte zu einem der einflussreichsten Denker der Weimarer Republik. Dem durch und durch von der Goetheschen Formenlehre und vom Nietzscheanischen Elitismus Geprägten waren die Nationalsozialisten in ihrer Pöbelhaftigkeit und Gemeinheit zutiefst verhasst.

Während das Buch in der Zwischenkriegszeit in fast jedem bildungsbürgerlichen Haushalt zu finden war und auch ausländische Intellektuelle wie etwa José Ortega y Gasset, André Fauconnet, F. Scott Fitzgerald oder Henry Miller beeinflusste, spielten Werk und Verfasser nach 1945 jahrzehntelang eine immer geringere Rolle.

Indes: Fast siebzig Jahre, nachdem Theodor W. Adorno voreilig das Vergessen Spenglers konstatierte, hält sich der Universalgelehrte immer noch hartnäckig in der Diskussion und feiert in jüngster Zeit geradezu eine Wiederauferstehung. Vom Feuilleton über die Literatur bis zur wissenschaftlichen Debatte in verschiedensten Disziplinen beeinflusst er zunehmend das geistige Leben.

Das hat seinen Grund. Mit seiner grandiosen Gesamtschau der Weltgeschichte überwand Spengler als einer der ersten Denker die eurozentrische Betrachtungsweise. Seine Prognosen erweisen sich bis heute oftmals als hellseherisch visionär. Im vorliegenden Band finden sich die Gedanken von zehn deutschen und internationalen Autoren über Spenglers Bedeutung für das einundzwanzigste Jahrhundert vereint. Ob es um seinen Stellenwert für das Verständnis der Frühgeschichte, der Geschichtsphilosophie, der Rechtsgeschichte, des modernen Finanzkapitalismus, der Rolle der USA als eines »faustischen« Imperiums oder der gegenwärtigen Identitätskrise des Westens geht – in allen Beiträgen zeigt sich: Spengler bleibt weiterhin brandaktuell.

In this article, I explicate Husserl’s phenomenology of the person as found in Ideen II by examining the most important aspects of persons in this work. In the first section, I explicate the concept of the surrounding world (Umwelt) with special attention to the difference between the different attitudes (Einstellungen) that help determine the sense of constituted objects of experience. In the second section, I investigate Husserl’s description of the person as a founded, higher order, spiritual (geistig) objectivity. I consider this description of the person by examining the symmetry between the organization of Ideen II as a whole and the order of the constitution of the person. In the final section, I look at the relationship between the constitution of the person and the spiritual (geistig) world.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s intellectual autobiography *Ecce Homo* has always been a controversial book. Nietzsche prepared it for publication just before he became incurably insane in early 1889, but it was held back until after his death, and finally appeared in 1908.

For much of the first century of its reception, *Ecce Homo* met with a sceptical response. It was viewed primarily as evidence of its author’s incipient madness. This was hardly surprising, since Nietzsche is deliberately outrageous with the "megalomaniacal" self-advertisement of his chapter titles. Notoriously, Nietzsche also exclaims "Ich bin kein Mensch, ich bin Dynamit" ("I am not a man, I am dynamite"), as he attempts to explode one misconception after another in the Western philosophical tradition.

In recent decades there has been increased interest in Nietzsche's *Ecce Homo*, especially in the English-speaking world, but the present volume is the first collection of essays in any language devoted to the work.

Contributors include established and emerging Nietzsche scholars from the UK and the USA, as well as from Germany, France, Portugal, Sweden and the Netherlands.

When female intellectuals become celebrities in America, much of their notoriety seems to derive from their sex. The female intellectual is packaged as a personality. Publicists and the public feel no shame in gossiping about such women's lives, condescendingly slighting their intellectual accomplishments. Hannah Arendt became such a celebrity in the United States in the second half of her life. But however fascinating her life story was, it was not at all easy to neglect her work. She was just too formidably serious. Taking her seriously was therefore hard work. To be sure, in part this was because her contributions could not be easily pigeonholed. Her writings created classificatory dilemmas for specialized scholars, if not for the general public. Had she been a philosopher? A historian? A political theorist? Her ideologies were as hard to pin down as was her intellectual discipline. Had she been a conservative? An anarchist? A Zionist? A "self-hating" Jew? A feminist?

In his entire oeuvre Brentano defended a scientific conception of philosophy and advocated the adoption of a rigorous, scientific method. Given this background it might come as a surprise that in his reflections on aesthetics he firmly rejected the classic definition of aesthetics as the science of beauty. This must not be read as an expression of disinterest in – or a dismissal of – aesthetics, though. It is rather an expression of Brentano's view concerning the position of aesthetics in his overall system. He conceived it – on a par with logic and ethics – not as a theoretical science, but as a practical discipline that was rooted in psychology: aesthetics, Brentano suggests, is not constituted by a set of intrinsically related propositions; it rather serves the practical purpose of instructing those who want to experience the beautiful with correct taste or to create works of art. The task of aesthetics is, in other words, to formulate a set of rules or instructions that teach us how to correctly experience beauty, how to come to prefer the more over the less beautiful, but also how to create beauty and how to produce works of art that have the power to bring about aesthetic pleasure in the beholder.

The advancements of human development, both economical and technological, have changed the relationship that people have with nature. In recent years with the acknowledgement of climate change and the climate crisis, the paradigm of the human approach to nature has seen some challenges through technology. Is technology a solution? Is technology the only solution or are there others that haven't yet been considered? These are just a couple of questions to attempt to find a solution to, that might lead to a more balanced framework on people's part in the relationship with nature. Can a solution ultimately be found? This essay seeks to provide an answer to the many challenges to reach such a solution.

Reactionary modernism' is a term happily coined by the historian and sociologist Jeffrey Herf to refer to a current of German thought during the interwar years. It indicates the attempt to 'reconcile] the antimodernist, romantic and irrationalist ideas present in German nationalism' with that 'most obvious manifestation of means-ends rationality ... modern technology'. 1 Herf's paradigm examples of this current of thought are two best-selling writers of the period: Oswald Spengler, author of the massive domesday scenario The Decline of the West in 1917 and, fifteen years later, of Man and Technics, and Ernst Jiinger, the now centenarian chronicler of the war in which he was a much-decorated hero, whose main theoretical work was Der Arbeiter in 1932. The label is also applied by Herf to such intellectual luminaries as the legal theorist and apologist for the Third Reich, Carl Schmitt, and more contentiously Martin Heidegger. At a less elevated level, reactionary modernism also permeated the writings of countless, now forgotten engineers, who were inspired at once by the new technology, Nietzschean images of Promethean Ubermenschen, and an ethos of vb'lkisch nationalism. As befits his profession, Herf's primary concern is with the role of reactionary modernism in the aetiology of National Socialism. As befits mine, my aim is rather different: to locate reactionary modernism within post-Kantian German philosophy. I shall argue that it was a radical completion of tendencies that had their beginnings in Kant's own day. Acceptance of that conclusion requires an understanding of Spengler, Jiinger et al. as being reactionary and modern in more philosophically charged senses of those terms than the essentially political and sociological ones intended by Herf. Such a view of them, moreover, will dissolve what he sees as the 'paradoxical' character of their attempt to wed rational technology and romantic hostility towards Enlightenment reason. First, however, let me fill out Herf's conception of reactionary modernism. He is rightly concerned to dispel such familiar leftist perceptions of Nazism as either an ideology-less, purely opportunistic move-291

During the Fifties and the Early Sixties Hans Jonas developed a theory of man based on a series of concepts as separation of form from matter, image and symbol. By reflecting on these themes, Jonas seems to refer to the aesthetic abilities man embodies as the essence of human life. In this article I try to analyse Jonas’ thoughts on man and to determine to what extent it is possible to consider his theory as an aesthetic anthropology. Eventually, I discuss what Aesthetics may win by directing its attention to this author.

The most significant philosopher of Being, Martin Heidegger has nevertheless largely been ignored within communications studies. This book sets the record straight by demonstrating the profound implications of his unique philosophical project for our understanding of today’s mediascape. The full range of Heidegger’s writing from "Being and Time" to his later essays is drawn upon.

Topics covered include:
- an analysis of Heidegger's theory of language and its relevance to communications studies
- a critical interpretation of mass media and digital culture that draws upon Heidegger's key concept of Dasein
- a discussion of mediated being and its objectifying tendencies
- an assessment of Heidegger's legacy for future developments in media theory

Clear explanations and accessible commentary are used to guide the reader through the work of a thinker whose notorious reputation belies the highly topical nature of his key insights.
In a world full of digital networks and new social media, but little critical insight, Heidegger and the Media shows how a true understanding of the media requires familiarity with Heidegger’s unique brand of thinking.

The aim of this essay consists in elucidating the manner in which Gadamer’s reflections on language relate and contribute to the notion of place, which is here to be understood in terms of Heimat and Fremde. While Gadamer’s engagement with the question of place may not be evident at first glance, especially when one is largely concerned with his major work Truth and Method (1960), it is nevertheless possible to identify in and through his later works the respect in which he took up and engaged with the question, most notably through the contemplation of language. By bringing out the relation between language and place, I hope to indicate the way in which Gadamer advances a thought that is at once nuanced and radical.

This book focuses on the key motif of Heidegger’s later thought: the ontology of being as Ereignis or ‘event.’ It proposes a new methodology for explaining Heidegger’s philosophy – diagenic analysis – that solves a set of interpretive problems that have stymied previous approaches to his difficult later work and led to substantial inconsistencies in the available scholarship. Using this approach, it reconstructs Heidegger’s concept of event in relation to his theories of history, truth, difference, ground, and time-space. In these contexts, the book argues that Heidegger’s logic of events entails a logic of difference that is prior to and constitutive for the logic of identity essential to traditional metaphysics. The logic of events explains the generation of ontological structures grounding individuated finite domains – that is, it explains the generation of the logic of worlds of beings.

Государственная академия художественных наук (ГАХН) — уникальная научно-культурная институция, возникшая на стыке Серебряного века и «авангарда», — представляет собой одну из ярких, хотя до сих пор недостаточно изученных страниц истории российской гуманитарной науки ХХ столетия. Академия была основана в 1921 году в Москве как «высшее исследовательское учреждение, имеющее целью всестороннее изучение всех видов искусств и художественной культуры». За неполные десять лет своего существования она сложилась в крупнейший исследовательский центр, программой которого стало новое определение наук об искусстве и синтез эстетической теории с художественным опытом. В создании и развитии Академии принимали участие художники и искусствоведы, литературоведы и философы, деятели музыки и театра. В первом томе настоящего издания представлен систематический анализ основных направлений теории искусства, которую разрабатывали ведущие ученые Философского отделения ГАХН (А.Г. Габричевский, Г.Г. Шпет, С.Л. Франк, А.Ф. Лосев, А.А. Сидоров и многие другие). Особое внимание уделено русско-немецким научным связям, благодаря которым деятельность Академии предстает значительным явлением не только российской, но и европейской гуманитарной науки ХХ века. Второй том содержит архивные материалы. Они демонстрируют весь спектр теоретических дискуссий в ГАХН, посвященных науке об искусстве, и включают в себя тексты докладов, тезисы и протоколы прений; публикуются впервые

“Con Platone non si finisce mai”: questa forte e convinta affermazione costituisce una sorta di ‘basso continuo’ in questo libro. Esso intende infatti riproporre momenti e snodi cruciali, che hanno segnato in profondità la relazione intellettuale intrattenuta da Hans Jonas con la lontana, ma sempre fondamentale eredità platonica. Emergono così in primo piano non solo alcuni ‘debiti’ contratti da Jonas nei suoi scritti pubblici e pubblicati, ma anche, e forse soprattutto, la centralità che egli riconosce alla figura di Platone nella sua attività di docente. Proprio questa dimensione didattica consente di valutare ‘sul campo’ quanto e fino a che punto molte dottrine platoniche risultino decisive per poter riconsiderare, ancora oggi, aspetti per nulla marginali della lunga storia del pensiero occidentale. Alla luce di questo incontro, animato insieme da una prospettiva storica e da una mai celata esigenza teoretica, si può inoltre apprezzare la capacità di Jonas di costruire la sua filosofia, nuova e originale, grazie anche a un raffinato rapporto dialettico con il pensiero platonico, caratterizzato insieme da una continuità piena di stima e da una discontinuità carica di autonomia.

Working from newly available texts in Heidegger’s Complete Works, Krzysztof Ziarek presents Heidegger at his most radical and demonstrates how the thinker’s daring use of language is an integral part of his philosophical expression. Ziarek emphasizes the liberating potential of language as an event that discloses being and amplifies Heidegger’s call for a transformative approach to poetry, power, and ultimately, philosophy.

Der Artikel stellt verschiedene Verbindungen zwischen Wittgenstein und der Literatur bzw. der Philosophie der Literatur dar und gibt im zweiten Teil eine Einleitung zu den Artikeln des Sammelbandes "Wittgenstein und die Literatur" (hrsg. von John Gibson und Wolfgang Huemer, Suhrkamp 2006)

Il volume raccoglie alcune riflessioni composte da Husserl nel 1927. Nei testi, l’autore insiste sull’importanza del “mondo–della–vita” soggettivo–relativo, utile “terreno di fondazione” anche per il mondo oggettivo delle scienze. Le teorie scientifiche conservano, infatti, un loro contenuto positivo, un riferimento oggettivo alla realtà, proprio mediante nozioni pre–scientifiche che cercano invece di naturalizzare; di fatto, quando si verifica una crisi, il ricorso a questo “mondo–della–vita” pre–scientifico, come si manifesta nelle nostre esperienze intuitive, diviene necessario. Questa visione offre un’alternativa filosofica valida alla posizione naturalistica adottata ancora oggi da molti filosofi analitici.

Mit der Veröffentlichung von Martin Heideggers »Schwarzen Heften« hat sich die Debatte zur Verstrickung von Philosophie und Nationalsozialismus erneuert und verschärft. Offen antisemitische Äußerungen in diesen Denktagebüchern haben auch in der nichtakademischen Öffentlichkeit für Empörung gesorgt. Die entscheidende Frage ist jedoch, welche Veränderungen der Perspektive auf Heideggers Denken insgesamt sich dadurch ergeben und ob damit zugleich eine Neubewertung des Gesamtwerks eines der einflussreichsten Philosophen des 20. Jahrhunderts nötig ist. Die Beiträge in diesem Band erkunden Heideggers philosophische und politische Aussagen sowie seine Selbstinszenierung und seine Verwendung von Ideologemen seiner Zeit.

Resumen: Este artículo quiere proponer un paralelismo entre, por un lado, la objeción de Aristóteles a las célebres paradojas de Zenón y por otro la crítica de Zubiri a la concepción heideggeriana del ser. Abstract: This article aims to propose an intrinsic relationship between, on the one hand, the Aristotle´s objection to the famous paradoxes of Zeno, and on the other hand, the Zubiri´s objection to Heidegger´s conception of being.

Uno de los aspectos menos estudiados de la obra de Walter Benjamin es el papel que desempeña el mito en sus escritos de juventud. Entre 1915 y 1916, años tan cruciales como oscuros en la biografía de Benjamin, este interés por la mitología aparece asociado a consideraciones sistemáticas sobre la filosofía de la historia. La oposición entre mitología y mística,  será el presupuesto de estas reflexiones sobre la lectura del Simposio de Platón que Benjamin lleva a cabo en 1916 y plasma en un ensayo titulado “Sokrates”, cuya copia manuscrita ha sido conservada por Scholem. El propósito de este trabajo es mostrar que Benjamin, analizando la función del personaje de Sócrates en los diálogos platónicos, no considera a éste ni como el origen del logos ni como la muerte del mythos, sino más bien como el pasaje de la enunciación del uno al otro o, según sus propias palabras, “como el argumento y el muro de Platón contra elmito” . En su retrato de Sócrates como seductor de los jóvenes griegos, es posible ver de qué manera Benjamin se aparta a la vez de las interpretaciones tradicionales y de la dada por Nietzsche en Die Gebürt der Tragödie, donde presenta el eídos socrático-platónico como antagonista de la sabiduría trágica. Mientras estas posiciones establecen una identificación o continuidad entre Sócratesy Platón, Benjamin señala una diferencia, una cesura entre la discursividad del maestro y la del discípulo, que puede comprenderse a la luz de una idea mística de la filosofía (“teología”, la llamará en 1918) concebida como metacrítica de la razón.

This is a translation of an early essay by the German philosopher Nicolai Hartmann (1882–1950). In this 1923 essay Hartmann presents many of the fundamental ideas of his new critical ontology. He summarizes some of the main points of
his critique of neo-Kantian epistemology, and provides the point of departure for his new approach in an extensive criticism of the errors of the classical ontological tradition. Some of these errors concern the definition of an ontological category or
principle, and others concern the relations among categories themselves. The outline for the new ontology is sketched through the correctives Hartmann appends to the treatment of each error, prefiguring his mature ontological system.

The attack on natural right in the name of history takes in most cases the following form: natural right claims to be a right that is discernible by human reason and is universally acknowledged; but history (including anthropology) teaches us that no such right exists; instead of the supposed uniformity we find an indefinite variety of notions of right or justice. Or, in other words, there cannot be natural right if there are no immutable principles of justice, but history shows us that all principles of justice are mutable. One cannot understand the meaning of the attack on natural right in the name of history, before one has realized the utter irrelevance of this argument. In the first place, “consent of all mankind” is by no means a necessary condition of the existence of natural right. Some of the greatest natural right teachers have argued that, precisely if natural right is rational, its discovery presupposes the cultivation of reason, and therefore natural right will not be known universally: one ought not even to expect any real knowledge of natural right among savages. In other words by proving diat there is no principle of justice diat has not been denied somewhere or at some time, one has not yet proven that any given denial was justified or reasonable. Furthermore, it has always been known that different notions of justice obtain at different times and in different nations. It is absurd to claim diat the discovery of a still greater number of such notions by modern students has in any way affected the fundamental issue.

in: J. Gibson and W. Huemer (eds): 文人维特根斯坦, Shanghai: Sanghui Culture and Press, 2008, pp. 1–18. (Chinese Translation of: “Wittgenstein, Lnaguage, and Philosophy of Literature”, in: J. Gibson and W. Huemer: The Literary Wittgenstein, originally published London: Routledge, 2004.

On the occasion of the first centenary from the publication of the first edition of "The Spirit of Utopia" (1918), this work presents a detailed interpretation of Ernst Bloch's philosophy of music from a historical and theoretical standpoint. On the one hand such work takes into account the primordial concept of utopia, and on the other hand it takes into account the prolific and elaborate constellation of entities in which the utopia itself unfolds-indeed, the utopia, taken as a concept, owes a relevant part of its theoretical inspiration and genesis to the reflections on themes of philosophy of music.

Es kann meines Erachtens nicht bestritten werden, daß eine der anregendsten, dauerndsten und breitesten Diskussionen der internationalen Heidegger-Forschung, die in den letzten zwei Jahrzehnten stattfanden, um das Heideggersche Denken vor Sein und Zeit kreiste. Die Anzahl der mit diesem Problemfeld zusammenhängenden Veranstaltungen (Vorträge, Vorlesungen, Seminare und Symposien), Veröffentlichungen und Übersetzungen legen dafür ein deutliches Zeugnis ab. Trotz, aber zugleich eben wegen der ständig wachsenden Literatur zu diesem Thema bleibt ein Überblick über dieses reiche Schrifttum noch aus 1 . Daß es kaum ein Autor zu finden ist, der sich ausdrücklich auf alle wichtigen Forschungsbeiträge bezieht, bezeugt aber nicht so sehr eine eventuelle Verlegenheit, als vielmehr die Lebendigkeit der Diskussion, deren Ergebnisse sich noch in keinen systematischen, endgültigen Rahmen einordnen lassen.

En este trabajo, nos abocamos al análisis de la cuestión del conocimiento y de la posibilidad de la crítica en dos libros capitales de Jürgen Habermas: Conocimiento e interés [1968] y Teoría de la acción comunicativa [1981]. Procuramos así dilucidar las continuidades y los desplazamientos en el tránsito entre estas obras, bajo la hipótesis de lectura de que se produce una reorientación en el pensamiento habermasiano que remite a la manera de entender la crítica y sus fundamentos. De este modo, la temprana crítica ideológica se verá desplazada por la crítica concebida como dilucidación de los diferentes tipos de acciones y racionalidades que sustentan los ámbitos sociales, políticos y económicos.  A la vez que, los fundamentos de la crítica se reorientarán desde los intereses rectores del conocimiento con un estatus cuasi-trascendental y sustentados en un sujeto de conocimiento hacia el horizonte pragmático-discursivo de las condiciones de posibilidad de la acción comunicativa. Estos dos movimientos, son los que habilitarían la potencialidad crítico-política de la perspectiva habermasiana desde un horizonte postmetafísico.

“Bauen Wohnen Denken” was originally published from a lecture Heidegger presented in 1951. The goal of this translation is to overcome some of the issues found in other English translations of Heidegger's lectures from this period. Occasionally, I have re-worded sentences in order to use non-gendered language, however, overall I have attempted render the English as close to the original German as possible, while also aiming to make the text readable and clear. To that end, I have also changed much of the formatting. Furthermore, I have provided commentary to explain some of my translation decisions, as well as some basic information about the text.

Films represent society and in a society there is a struggle between people and classes made by the people. In any type of film there is an underlying philosophy. Marxist philosophy or Marxism came out of classical German philosophy and it has a strong presence in countries like Russia and India. Marxism deals with various ideologies like capitalism, class struggle, class conflict and economy struggle. The study aims to analyze the portrayal of those ideologies through two Russian and two Indian films by applying qualitative (content analysis and in depth interview) methodology.

I argue that there is a confluence of authenticity and inauthenticity inherent to the structure of average everydayness in Being and Time. I support this reading by recasting Heidegger's notion of fallenness in Being and Time in terms of its precursor, ruinance, which he introduces in his 1921-22 lecture course, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research (GA 61). In this lecture course, Heidegger explains that ruinance is constituted by a dual movement of relucence and prestruction: the former, an intentional openness to the world; the latter, a securing that conceals that openness. While this dual movement is not expressed explicitly in these terms in Being and Time, I show that it is nevertheless tacitly operative in the structure of falling and that it grounds the duality of average everydayness. I frame this study around the debate on how Dasein can be authentic despite its fallenness, given that fallenness paradoxically renders Dasein essentially inauthentic.

Faced with a world where technology aimed at the control of nature has become ubiquitous, it becomes increasingly important to understand what technology and nature themselves are.  The Western philosophical tradition and philosophers within it have often understood these two concepts by looking to Aristotle’s concepts of physis and techne.  While these are typically translated as “nature” and “art”, respectively, modern, contemporary, and postmodernist views have distorted and twisted their original meanings in such a way as to, at times, make Aristotle nigh-unintelligible.  The intention of this essay is to show that Martin Heidegger's analyses of physis and techne bring certain insights which the philosophical tradition, especially the Christian philosophical tradition, when confronted with these issues of technology and nature, should not dismiss too readily.  Both physis and techne are causes of a thing's coming-to-be, but in rather different ways.  However, based upon the understanding of techne as a technical skill consisting in the bringing-into-being of an artifact it would seem that, with the recent advancements in biological engineering, gene manipulation, and quantum physics, techne will soon be able to replicate the effects of physis.  If the natural world, the product of physis, is infinitely malleable in its response to techne, what objections can there be to the notion that techne ought to guide, direct, and accelerate the slower and more chaotic progress of physis?  In two important essays, “The Question Concerning Technology” and “The Essence and Concept of Physis in Aristotle’s Physics B, I” Heidegger makes important and insightful distinctions—in the former between technology and techne, and in the latter between techne and physis—which are invaluable in answering the seemingly-indomitable advance of technology upon nature.

En este trabajo intentaré recorrer las reflexiones heideggerianas sobre el arte y la cosa partiendo de la pregunta griega sobre la physis y la téchne. El objetivo de las siguientes páginas pasa por demostrar la enorme importancia que para Heidegger reviste la mirada griega a ambos conceptos. De hecho, creemos que de aquí parten nociones tan centrales para el pensador alemán como Cuaternidad (Geviert), cosa (Ding) o acontecimiento (Ereignis). El camino del pensar que nos propone Heidegger nos induce a ello: el tema príncipe de su preguntar, la cuestión del ser, se abre y se disputa en el centro de la mirada de Aristóteles y de los presocráticos. Aunque la interpretación heideggeriana de la mirada griega al ser será la piedra angular de nuestro trabajo, nuestra tarea quedaría incompleta si no explorásemos también el proyecto filosófico-histórico de la metafísica, ya que éste se alza en el mismo seno de la pregunta sobre el ser del ente. Así, el destino de la téchne griega se bifurca: por un lado, encontramos el camino interpretativo que Heidegger recorre, y que está ligado a la pregunta sobre la physis y la téchne, donde el concepto de poiesis es central; por el otro, encontramos el camino que lleva a su consumación, y que se agota precisamente al desplegar todas sus consecuencias, lo que ocurre en la técnica moderna. Heidegger tiene en cuenta ambos; es más, una reinterpretación apropiadora del pensar griego no puede darse sin asumirse como respuesta-propuesta nacida de un sentimiento de urgencia ante la amenaza que supone la «presentificación» de todas las posibilidades de nuestra existencia, de todo actuar, a manos de la relación pragmáticotécnica que nuestra época ha llevado a su máxima realización.

Heidegger's Black Notebooks demonstrate that there have been serious misconceptions about the status and aim of his philosophy and language. They show this to be a result of intentional misdirection which finds a twofold expression in his language: For one, an exceptional 'few' are addressed rather than the reader or listener in general. Being is seen as struggle of intuitive insight against common rationality, and communication must, thus, be intentionally ambivalent. Secondly, for the selected few the understanding and guiding of our Being is a matter not of human emancipation but a process of völkisch 'awakening' and 'perception.'