Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 13:07 — 12.1MB)
A short summary of Heidegger's "Essay on Humanism," read by Seth Paskin. After you listen to this, listen to the full episode.
This is a new kind of mini-episode for us, and you should tell us at partiallyexaminedlife.com whether we should keep recording them. Our hope is that this will encourage more people to want to read the text in advance of our full-length discussions, and that it also might be less confusing for some folks than our usual multi-voiced presentation.
Nathan Schock says
July 15, 2013 at 1:06 pmGents,
I really liked this and would definitely listen to these more often. Allow me to make one suggestion. It was dumb luck that I stumbled upon this because (mea culpa) I don’t regularly check the PEL blog. Another podcast that I listen to puts lots of things other than their weekly podcast into their podcast feed: speakers and speeches, book reviews, even cuts from the weekly show. Then, they make two different versions of their feed available: the everything feed or just the episodes. From PEL, I would definitely subscribe to everything. Thanks again for the great content!
Mark Linsenmayer says
July 15, 2013 at 1:59 pmThanks. It’s in the regular feed.
Lynda OReilly says
July 16, 2013 at 10:53 amThis is great. I’ve listened to it three times (10-15 minutes is a good length for a primer) and I think I’ll be more on board for the reading and podcast. I’ll let you know.
dmf says
July 16, 2013 at 1:04 pmLOR, would it help to have some textual references to follow along with the source materials on maybe the 2nd time thru?
Lynda OReilly says
July 16, 2013 at 3:08 pmdmf, what a honey you are. I’ve gotten the book from the library and I’ll poke around on the web to pick up some clues but if you have suggestions I’m all ears.
I’m not as backward as I seem, I just got into this kind of stuff late in life.
Playing Catch-Up,
dmf says
July 16, 2013 at 4:19 pmhi Lynda, just trying to get sense of how the podcasts are being used/absorbed and how to make them more handy, certainly wasn’t suggesting any lack of capability/know-how on your part or anyone else’s but did notice that this particular precogcast had a number of characterizations of the texts that might not be obvious/explicit from the reading, maybe when you get a chance to dive in you can give a quick report/update (I’m sure your experience will be like many other folks who don’t chime in), my usual starting place/referral for this things is: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/
thanks, d.
Lynda OReilly says
July 16, 2013 at 6:25 pmdmf, I’m pretty sure that most of us know where to pick up the basic literature on these subjects. Some of these philosophers are pretty opaque though. And some of them are too dry for me too get caught up with: Lacan…I think that Heidegger may be that way too so the precognition will be helpful. One thing I was happy to find out was that it’s okay to read the secondary literature first, I’ve been doing that all along and I felt like a cheat.
I can’t think of a thing that would’ve helped me with Lacan.
Eric Trowbridge says
August 16, 2013 at 11:03 amThe Heidegger I have read is not at all dry and it’s no surprise he had things to say on art, poetry, aesthetics, which may explain why he can be so difficult to read. He’s like an austere version of Pollock.
Wayne Schroeder says
July 17, 2013 at 9:33 amGreat summary Seth.
As Heidegger is offering up an entirely new philosophical perspective, I guess he would not want to associate his view of ex-istence, not only with philosophy in general, but with humanism or any other -ism either.
dmf says
July 17, 2013 at 1:26 pmnot sure how entirely new his work was (tho groundbreaking, pardon the pun, in his own way) but certainly he wouldn’t have wanted to be associated with Sartre’s efforts:
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm
Eric Trowbridge says
August 16, 2013 at 10:59 amThese summaries are good, and I think they fall within the rule of name-dropping/referencing – we don’t assume the audience knows anything about the subject, but if Heidegger were here, he might say that PEL can’t help but to already be in the philosophical world, and therefore its broadcasters are doomed to referencing, unless they are authentic, which is true, and why I continue to listen. Thanks y’all.
Jewelweed says
August 27, 2013 at 6:49 amReally enjoying the precognitions. Could somebody explain (with a simple proposition, if possible) the difference between “normal” unreflected thought and the thought associated with Heidigger’s casein being-in-the-world? How does he get out of the unreflected thought versus reflected thought dichotomy?
Jewelweed says
August 27, 2013 at 6:52 amThats “dasein” not “casein” ( error due to ironic correction by computer spelling program -maybe it does have a consciousness after all if it can make this pun).
Jewelweed says
August 27, 2013 at 7:02 amCould one say that when a being is in a state of dasein, all thought is “ready-to-hand?”
Wayne Schroeder says
August 27, 2013 at 11:23 amJewelweed,
What a great question. There are others on this site who can answer this question better than I, so here are some thoughts in the meantime.
Michael Wheeler states ( http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/):
“Being and Time itself has a spiral structure in which a sequence of reinterpretations produces an ever more illuminating comprehension of Being. As Heidegger puts it later in the text:”
“What is decisive is not to get out of the circle but to come into it the right way… In the circle is hidden a positive possibility of the most primordial kind of knowing. To be sure, we genuinely take hold of this possibility only when, in our interpretation, we have understood that our first, last and constant task is never to allow our fore-having, fore-sight and fore-conception to be presented to us by fancies and popular conceptions, but rather to make the scientific theme secure by working out these fore-structures in terms of the things themselves.” (Being and Time 32: 195)
Heidegger’s whole project is to explain being ontologically, i.e.,without subject/object division, without I-It (but as I-Thou?), vocabulary. Almost all of his mystical statements can be attributed to this effort. In fact you can consider his magnus opus, Being and Time itself as his clearing and opening onto being, created by his unique spiraling structured phenomenological language, the dwelling house of being. The subject, the I, thus becomes a disappearing entity which is part of Dasein, closer to present at hand than ready to hand. We do not think, or act but be. The best example of what you refer to as reflective thinking would be Being and Time itself–a way of dwelling, abiding.
“How does he get out of the unreflected thought versus reflected thought dichotomy?” He just doesn’t get into the dichotomy to begin with.