/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14006056]

Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time was first published in 1927. Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality was first published in 1929. Two enormous philosophy books, almost exact contemporaries. Both responding to the situation of modernity, to the immensity of scientific and technological change, to the dissolution of old certainties, to the fast pace of life, to the massive reorganizations that followed the horrors of World War I. Both taking for granted the inexistence of foundations, not even yearning for them, or fixating on them as absent, but simply going on without concern over their absence. Both anti-essentialist, both anti-positivist, both working out new ways to think, to do philosophy, to exercise the faculty of wonder.
Yet how different these books are in concepts, in affect, in spirit.
I’ve long detested Heidegger, for a number of reasons. Heidegger embodies for me, more than any other thinker in the Western tradition, what Nietzsche called the “spirit of gravity.” He’s heavy and morbid, without an ounce of humor or irony or even sense that we human beings are/have bodies. He picks up on the worst part of Nietzsche, the heavy-handed, pompous, self-obsessed, doom-laden, apocalyptic, romantic rhetoric — so stereotypically “Germanic” — of Zarathustra, but completely misses Nietzsche’s gaiety, sarcasm, “French” scepticism, and general sense of dancing over the abyss. I’ve never been able to decide which part of Heidegger is worse: the existential part, all about authenticity and resoluteness and the earth and the dwelling and being-towards-death (i.e. the Nazi side), or the ontological part, with its endless dissection of concepts by returning to their etymological roots, its walking on forest paths, its idiotic hatred of technology, its mythology of (capital-L) Language, its waiting and hearkening, its twisting of its own formulations into an endless process of self-confirmation through self-undoing (i.e. the deconstructionist side).

[Anonymous No.14006058]

>>14006056
>Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time
>translation
lmao kek fuckin pleb

[Anonymous No.14006062]

>>14006056
Whitehead is different. His language is dry, gray, and highly abstract. (Occasionally a joke shimmers through, but rarely; you have to work hard in order to make it to the jokes; and as soon as you’ve gotten one, it is on to something else). But in this degree-zero, “academic,” fussy and almost pedantic prose, Whitehead is continually saying the most astonishing things. His “coldness” (in a Deleuzian sense) or “coolness” (in a McLuhaneque sense) or “neutrality” (in a Blanchotian sense) is in fact the enabling condition of his discourse: it is what permits him the freedom to analyze, to construct, to reorient, to switch direction, to re-ignite the philosophic sense of “wonder” at every step. Whitehead’s style is a kind of strategic counter-investment: it allows him to step away from his own particular passions and interests, without thereby falling into the pretense of a universal, above-it-all, higher knowledge. It’s a kind of detachment that continues to insist upon that from which we have become detached: particulars, singularities, perspectives that are always incomplete and partial (in both senses of this word: partial as opposed to whole, but also partial in the sense of partiality or bias). There is no universal, transcendent point in Whitehead’s cosmos; there are only partialities. But each of these partialities “transcends” all the others.
The cliche objection to “relativism” has always been to point out that the statement “everything is relative” is itself an absolute one, so that any relativist necessarily contradicts him/herself. Of course this is a bogus objection: because the argument depends upon separating the assertion “everything is relative” from the contexts of its utterance, in order to turn it into a universal statement. Whitehead’s neutral style is precisely a way of pointing out how everything is relative, without turning this observation (or really, a potentially infinite series of observations) into a universal.
Whitehead’s philosophy is all about change, creativity, and the production of novelty. There are no entities in the universe according to Whitehead, but only events. Or rather, events (which he usually calls “occasions”) are themselves the only entities. These “occasions” are each of them radically new — each of them is something that never existed before — and indeed, it is only because of this perpetual creativity and novelty that we are even able to think in terms of a “before” and an “after,” of time passing and irreversible — and yet each of them is radically intertwined with, affected by and affecting in its own turn, everything else. Everything is singular, but nothing is isolated.

[Anonymous No.14006071]

>>14006062
Whitehead doesn’t ask (as Heidegger does) “why is there something rather than nothing?” (which in itself, is the ultimately nihilistic question: since it is demanding a reason for existence itself, when it is only within existence, and from an existing standpoint, that questions of value and purpose make any sense), but rather: “how is it that there is always something new, rather than just the same old same-old?”. He doesn’t “hearken” to (genuflect before) Language, as Heidegger and his deconstructionist heirs are always doing, but rather notes language’s inadequacies alongside its unavoidability. He doesn’t yearn for a return before, or a leap beyond, metaphysics, but (much more subversively) just does metaphysics, inventing his own categories and working through his own problems, in order to make metaphysics speak what it has usually denied and rejected (the body, inconstancy and change, the relativeness of all perspectives and of all formulations). And he doesn’t “critique” the history of philosophy, but rather twists it in wonderfully ungainly ways, finding, for instance, arguments in Descartes that are themselves already the best response to Cartesian dualism, or anti-idealist moves in Plato.

[Anonymous No.14006156]

Whitehead went off the deep end. Heidegger returned from it.

[Anonymous No.14006248]

>>14006156
Other way around

[Anonymous No.14006264]

Wittgenstein squad comin through ending Heidegger's career
http://kinkatso.blogspot.com/2016/01/heideggers-cow-butchered-by-thomas.html?m=1

[Anonymous No.14006270]

>>14006056
>>14006062
Buzz buzz buzz kys pseud hack

[Anonymous No.14006371]

>>14006264
Lmao btfo.

[Anonymous No.14006655]

Bump

[Anonymous No.14006674]

>>14006056
god heidegger was a crusty motherfucker

[Anonymous No.14006692]

>>14006674

What's that supposed to mean?

[Anonymous No.14006702]

>>14006692
just look at OP's picture and compare with the beautiful smoothness of whitehead's forehead

[Anonymous No.14006741]

Nice write up op

[Anonymous No.14006820]

>>14006264
classic bernhard

[Anonymous No.14008130]

Buump

[Anonymous No.14008297]

>>14006702
Kek. Based anon.

>>14006071
It seems like you have not read whitehead

[Anonymous No.14008363]

>>14006056
>anti-positivist
Why are you normalizing mental illness anon?

[Anonymous No.14008444]

>>14008297
>It seems like you have not read whitehead
That post is part of the OP what is wrong with it???

[Anonymous No.14008790]

I like your writing, OP.

[Anonymous No.14008865]

this desu
this desu so fucking hard
hate heidegger so much

[Anonymous No.14009047]

[Anonymous No.14009074]

So would you say Being & Time is not worth reading? I'm still going to read it if only for the significance of it's influence on later philosophy

[Anonymous No.14009492]

>>14009074
I mean I've never read it(I haven't even finished Plato lol) but don't take /lit/'s advice, read it yourself

[Anonymous No.14009516]

>>14009074
I don't like Heidegger but read it for yourself

[Anonymous No.14009539]

>>14006056
if you don't read heavy philosophical treaties for the jokes then you should stop posting on /lit/

[Anonymous No.14009550]

>>14009539
If you have no reading comprehension keep posting on /lit/

[Anonymous No.14010633]

Bump

[Anonymous No.14011597]

>>14006056
>I’ve never been able to decide which part of Heidegger i love more...

[Anonymous No.14011955]

Bump

[Anonymous No.14012504]

>>14009074
I unironically say that once you read what Heidegger says about being and thinking it's actually very difficult, even in regular conversation or in unrelated subjects, to not see what he says literally everywhere. Believe me, it's no system of thinking, Heidegger really does what Socrates did but for the 20th century. He opens up Pandora's box and we still inhabit this world that he's created, remember that he only died in 1976. I realize I'm saying this in an apparently Whitehead-biased thread but Whitehead really should have stuck to science and mathematics, his philosophy just has no bearing on reality like Heidegger's does

[Anonymous No.14012548]

>>14006056
>I’ve never been able to decide which part of Heidegger is worse: the existential part, all about authenticity and resoluteness and the earth and the dwelling and being-towards-death (i.e. the Nazi side),
>(the Nazi side)

I wish you could palpably feel the strange emotions of wryness and amused contempt I have right now.

[Anonymous No.14012576]

Shallow reading of Heidegger, shallow reading of Whitehead, both used as platforms for the author's self-aggrandizement and LARPing as a wise scholar with opinions about Heidegger and Whitehead. Not familiar with the (terrible) scholarship on process philosophy at all, so unsurprisingly doesn't really get into process philosophy at all, except to gesture vaguely at the fact that Whitehead is apparently doing metaphysics while Heidegger remains transcendental. Reduces Whitehead to some vague garbage typical of a Deleuzian, who is himself an arch-transcendental thinker. If this person had read Whitehead, he'd also know how much of a pragmatist "linguistic," "deconstructive" streak is in his thought.

Just boring. Nothing wrong with preferring Whitehead to Heidegger. But in the few places this critique says anything, it's saying shit that has been said by everybody for ages. It's just an excuse for the author to jerk himself, by showing that he knows about Nietzsche's "French" side, and doing absolutely undergraduate little flourishes like this:
>“coldness” (in a Deleuzian sense) or “coolness” (in a McLuhaneque sense) or “neutrality” (in a Blanchotian sense)

[Anonymous No.14013869]

>>14006056
NatSoc is about Life, not Death.

[Anonymous No.14015034]

>>14006264
This isn't even saying anything though.

[Anonymous No.14015153]

>>14009074
its really good lol