**ASSIGNMENT: Reader, p.80**

Heidegger's most famous work, BEING IN TIME, was published in 1927.

His essay "The Thing" was written in the late 1940s. 

How to we get from Nietzsche to Heidegger? One way is through an examination of things, and a questioning of what the "world" is for us. Compare the following quotes and ask yourself what understanding of the world the two authors -- a generation or two apart -- are critiquing. For his part, how does Heidegger attempt to get beyond "objects" and discover a sense of the "nearness" of things?

NIETZSCHE, GAY SCIENCE, 110 (169).

"Origin of knowledge.-- Over immense periods of time the intellect produced nothing but errors. A few of these proved to be useful and helped to preserve the species: those who hit upon or inherited these had better luck in their struggle for themselves and their progeny. Such erroneous articles of faith, which were continually inherited, until they became almost part of the basic endowment of the species, include the following: that there are things, substances, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is also good in itself."

[Nota bene: In the same aphorism, Nietzsche goes on to praise the Eleatics as "exceptional thinkers." These philosophers "posited and clung to the opposites of the natural errors, believed that it was possible to live in accordance with these opposites." But, he says, in order to do this, they had "to deceive themselves about their own state: they had to attribute to themselves, fictitiously, impersonality and changeless duration; they had to misapprehend the nature of the knower; they had to deny the role of the impulses in knowledge; and quite generally they had to conceive of reason as a completely free and spontaneous activity. They shut their eyes to the fact that they, too, had arrived at their propositions through opposition to common sense, or owing to a desire for tranquillity, for sole possession, or for dominion."]

HEIDEGGER, "THE THING" (177).

"Because the word thing as used in Western metaphysics denotes that which is at all and is something in some way or other, the meaning of the name "thing" varies with the interpretation of that which is--of entities. Kant [...] means by this term something that is. But for Kant, that which is becomes the object of a representing that runs its course in the self-consciousness of the human ego. The thing-in-itself means for Kant: the object-in-itself. To Kant, the character of the "in-itself" signifies that the object is an object in itself without reference to the human act of representing it, that is, without the opposing "ob-" by which it is first of all put before this representing act. "Thing-in-itself," though in a rigorously Kantian way, means an object that is no object for us, because it is supposed to stand, stay put, without a possible before: for the human representational act that encounters it."

[Nota bene: To get beyond the idea of the OBJECT and recover our sense of the nearness of things seems, for Heidegger, to point to a state of activity that precludes "human cognition" and the "will to explain." Consider this remarkable passage (180): "[T]he inexplicable and unfathomable character of the world's worlding lies in this, that causes and grounds remain unsuitable for the world's worlding. As soon as human cognition here calls for an explanation, it fails to transcend the world's nature, and falls short of it. The human will to explain just does not reach to the simpleness of the simple onefold of worlding. The united four are already strangled in their essential nature when we think of them only as separate realities, which are to be grounded in and explained by one another."

***

In thinking about the problem of objectification and nature of nearness, maybe it would help to consider one or more of the following fragments of Heraclitus (from the Curd ed.). You may also want to revisit the passages of the Eleatics -- Zeno, and especially Parmenides (see Curd, esp. passages 3-8) and Anaxagoras (Curd, any one of the quotes from 1-25).

27. The wise is one [thing] alone; it is unwilling and willing to be called by the name of Zeus.

39. Nature loves to hide.

41. Wisdom is one thing, to be skilled in true judgment, how all things are steered through all things.

43. Right thinking is the greatest excellence, and wisdom is to speak the truth and act in accordance with nature, while paying attention to it.

46. They do not understand how, though at variance with itself, it agrees with itself. It is a backwards-turning attunement like that of a bow and lyre.

47. An unapparent connection (harmonia) is stronger than an apparent one.

49. What is opposed brings together; the finest harmony (harmonia) is composed of things at variance, and everything comes to be in accordance with strife.

57. The most beautiful arrangement is a pile of things poured out at random.

60. The road up and the road down are one and the same.

61. Upon those who step into the same rivers, different and again different waters flow.

63. We step into and we do not step into the same rivers. We are and we are not.

71. It is death to souls to become water, death to water to become earth, but from earth comes water and from water soul.

72. The turnings of fire: first, sea; and of sea, half is earth and half fiery waterspout... Earth is poured out as sea, and is measured according to the same ratio (logos) it was before it became earth.

73. Fire lives the death of earth and air lives the death of fire, water lives the death of air, earth that of water.

75. Changing, it rests.

83. God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and hunger, but changes the way fire, when mingled with perfumes, is named according to the scent of each.

88. The sun is new each day.

103. Corpses are more fit to be thrown out than dung.

104. You would not discover the limits of the soul although you travelled every road: it has so deep a logos.

**Finally, I'd save this for Sartre (Heidegger's most famous student), but I think it also relates to the problem posed above:

112. A person's character is his daimon.

***

A final note: Heidegger was a National Socialist. You may want to read about him on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philsophy. Start with the following two links:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-it-phenomenology/

You might also want to think about how we get from Freud to Heidegger -- and beyond Heidegger to Sartre -- in terms of the correspondence I posted for Week 14 - Sartre, "Existentialism"