Hans Ruin

Technology as Destiny in Cassirer and Heidegger Continuing the Davos Debate

In recent years the legendary encounter and debate between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger in Davos in April 1929 has received a renewed interest, notably through the work of Michael Friedman, and also Peter Gordon.1 It is then interpreted as a decisive event in twentieth-century philosophy, as an event both antedating and anticipating the sharp divides between different schools of thought that eventually came to characterize the philosophical landscape. At the time of the debate there was no clear and definitive division between an analytic-linguistic and a phenomenological philosophy, nor between a philosophy of culture in Cassirer’s sense and an existential ontology. Nor had the political landscape taken on the disastrous shape that was to project many of the colleagues and discussants forever into different orbits, geographically and politically. In 1931 Rudolf Carnap – who was among the participants at the Davos meeting – published his sharp criticism of the inaugural address that Heidegger had delivered when taking over the Rickert-Husserl chair in Freiburg in 1928, thus establishing the fateful antagonism between logical positivism and existential phenomenology.2 And from 1933 the political turmoil and Heidegger’s initial support for the new regime, which included assuming for a time the rectorate in Freiburg, would forever colour the public image of his philosophy, and his relation to many Jewish colleagues.

The Passivity of Reason : On Heidegger's Concept of Stimmung

Summary The concept of Stimmung – attunement or mood – is a key notion in Heideggers existential ontology as this is articulated in Sein und Zeit. Not only does it designate a significant aspect of human existence, which Heidegger portrays as “tuned” throughout its different comportments; it also plays a decisive role as a methodological step within the course of the ontological analysis. Only through the cultivation of specific moods can the route to a qualified philosophical contemplation be accessed. Throughout his life Heidegger remained a devoted reader of Aristotle, who plays a particularly important role during the early twenties when the existential analytic is developed. This background is one important key to understanding the philosophical implications of Heideggers analysis of Stimmung. In the end this theme also invites us to distinguish in very broad terms how the relation between passion and reason has been articulated in Greek and Christian thinking respectively. Against the background of such a general account, it is my purpose here to situate Heideggers analysis of Stimmung in a context in which it can hopefully both be better appreciated and critically assessed.

Origin in Exile: Heidegger and Benjamin on Language, Truth, and Translation

The text develops a comparison between the philosophies of language of Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. The key question concerns the relation between language and reason, the two sides of logos. As ...

Tove Jansson, Nietzsche and the poetics of overcoming

Abstract This article explores the connections between Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra and Tove Jansson and the world of the Moomins. It begins with a short summary of the impact of Nietzsche in the Nordic countries and of his most important book, focusing on passages that are of particular relevance for the analyses that follow. It then proceeds to explore its meaning and significance for Jansson in three sections. The first concerns Atos Wirtanen, the writer and politician with whom she lived for ten years, and who encouraged her to publish her first book, while he himself was completing a book on Nietzsche. In the second section, the article analyzes an early semi-autobiographical literary experiment from the Jansson family archive that displays her as a passionate reader of Nietzsche long before her meeting with Wirtanen. In the third and last section, the framework of the Zarathustra narrative is used to interpret some of the figures and scenes from the Moomin books.

Death, Sacrifice, and the Problem of Tradition in the Confucian Analects

ABSTRACT Taking its point of departure in an enigmatic passage from the Analects, in which the interlocutor is likened by the master to a sacrificial vase, the essay explores how this teaching can be read as a indirect commentary on the proper way of inhabiting and communicating tradition. The relation to the ancestors and the proper way of handling the rites for the dead is shown to reveal a more basic hermeneutic argument in Confucian thinking, opening the text to its own future transformation.

In the Spirit of Paul: Thinking the Hebraic Inheritance (Heidegger, Bultmann, Jonas)

This chapter explores the relation between Heidegger, Rudolf Bultmann and Hans Jonas, through the figure of Paul. Bultmann was Heidegger’s friend and colleague from Marburg who used an existential ontology to reinvent Lutheran theology. Hans Jonas was a student of both of them, who left Germany for USA in 1933. For Heidegger, Paul was a voice of original facticity and historicity, but also a source for his choice of National Socialism and anti-Judaism. For Bultmann, Paul and Christianity served as a defence against totalitarian temptations. Jonas’s return to Paul in his later years is both a response to Heidegger’s betrayal and a celebration of his original interpretation in a reinvention of Paul as a Jewish existential thinker.

Philosophy, Freedom, and the Task of the University : Reflections on Humboldt’s Legacy

In Wilhelm von Humboldts programmatic text for the new university of Berlin from 1809, the university is presented as a unique institution in which human beings could reach their highest potential in a shared unbound search for truth. Such a place should be established and maintained by the state and provided for through public funding, yet the state should interfere as little as possible in its internal affairs; by allowing the university to operate freely, the state itself would grow in freedom, and, ideally, the university then becomes the very place in which the free state can expect to find its own idea embodied. The themes that have left their mark on the debate about the university as an institution are intimately and inextricably tied to Enlightenment philosophy and its central concepts, reason, knowledge, truth, critique, and Bildung , all of which are gathered in the idea of freedom . Keywords: Berlin; Bildung ; freedom; philosophy; Wilhelm von Humboldt

Truth and the Hermeneutic Experience : A Phenomenological Approach to the Theory of Interpretation

In recent times, philosophy has undergone an “interpretative turn”. This is at least a judgment that is frequently passed, and echoed in numerous publications.1 After the linguistic turn, whereby philosophical thought became aware of the inescapable linguistic mediation of reality, the interpretative turn now marks the awareness that our relation to the world is contextual, historical, and that all knowledge rests on an interpretative process. In Gianni Vattimo’s words, hermeneutics has become the koine of contemporary philosophy. Thinkers from the continental and the analytical tradition can now supposedly all agree, in a post-positivistic mood, about the necessary element of interpretation in all epistemic processes. Although the legend is perhaps still cultivated in isolated parts of the theorizing community that the natural sciences are engaged in a plain description of how it is, and although the humanities is somehow still searching for the proper method, many philosophers of science today seem to agree that in no area of knowledge do we escape contextuality and inscrutability of reference. As proclaimed by Nietzsche, and later by Heidegger, interpretation has eventually become the name for the basic epistemic comportment of “the rational animal”. This is also what Gadamer meant by the “universality of the hermeneutic problem”, that the epistemological lessons from hermeneutics and the theory of interpretation apply to all forms of knowledge.2