Apply-Degger Onassis Foundation, Simon Critchley

Making sense of Heidegger - Being is time and time is finite – We are a thrown open clearing – Hamlet’s question – Reawakening the taste for perplexity - Mineness – Authenticity – Average everydayness – Phenomenology – Dasein is Being-in-the-world – Ecstasy – Categories and existentials – Not seeing the world with philosopher’s spectacles – Facticity – Leaving the cabinet of consciousness – Having a fascination with the world, and not just staring at it.

What is the world and how does the world show up? – Avoiding all ideas of subjectivity – Against epistemology – There is no problem of perception – We are the worldhood of the world – Our inside is outside – Praxis not theory – Why nature and science do not describe the primary phenomenon of the world – Handiness and thrusting aside our interpretative tendencies – The pragmatics of stuff – The primacy of concern and environment – When the hammer breaks – Signs and Heidegger’s funny examples – Situation and the meaningfulness of the world – Wallace Stevens on the idea of order.

What is wrong with Descartes’ picture of the world – Extension renders the world invisible - Phenomenology and the destruction of the modern world picture – Why is this book not called Being and Space? – Space as room and roomliness – The unavoidable character of spatial metaphors – Nearness, place and neighborhood – Art and space – The sacred, temple and templum – The near, clearing away and bringing things close – Churches, graves, radios, telephones – In Dasein, there is a collapsing of distance – Heidegger’s theory of social media – Against the metrical measurement of space – Freeing place and why architects love Heidegger – Fernando Pessoa and lessons in unlearning.

We are defined by a ‘who’ not a ‘what’ – Dasein is the with – Everyone is the other and no one is himself – I am Nobody (Emily Dickinson) – Networked being – “They think me” (Rimbaud) – Displacing the Cartesian starting point for philosophy, the ‘I’ – Moments in the precipitation of the Self in “Being and Time” (Anxiety, Death, Conscience, Resoluteness, The People) – How others show up in the workshop of the world – Being alone – Caring for, leaping in and leaping ahead of the other – Considerateness and forbearance – Do we really understand others? (Levinas) – An encoded social psychology of modernity (Sloterdijk) – The dictatorship of the They – Every secret loses its force – How to become authentic.

The difficulty of stating the obvious – Not splitting the phenomenon – We are ourselves the clearing – The movement of disclosure and closing over as learning the rhythm of existence – The music of “Being and Time” – The four key concept clusters – State of mind, always already finding oneself there – Mood, Heidegger on the passions – Into this world we’re thrown – Dasein exists factically – Projection, Understanding, Potentiality for being, freedom – Discourse is the condition of possibility for the articulation of the clearing that is us – Logos – We are the being that talks – Falling as horizontal, not vertical, not Satanic – Falling at the world – Authenticity as a modified way in which everydayness is seized upon – Fear – Giant bears and my mother – Interpretation as the layout out of understanding – Meaning is not deep, but a question of surfaces – Being is not the rabbit in the hat – Learning to see the hat without wanting the rabbit.

Interpretation as taking something as something prior to propositions – The hermeneutic circle – Virtuous and not vicious – Judgement is not the primary locus of truth – Cribbing Aristotle – Comparison with Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus” – Important nonsense and silence – Taking things hermeneutically – The distinction between discourse and language – Communication – Language is not inside the head, it is ecstatic – Dasein has to have clean ears – The voice of the friend – Hearing, hearkening, silence and reticence – Keeping quiet – Proposal for a reticence bar called Helsinki – The human being shows itself as a being that talks – non-human language – Excursus on the octopus.