“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Which Heidegger?

Someone asked me a while back about what other works of Heidegger I'd recommend other than Being and Time for someone interesting in things (that is, objects) and OOO in particular.

Well I'm not a Heidegger scholar like Graham. As a literature scholar by training of course I have a big old soft spot for “The Origin of the Work of Art” and “Language,” which are about things, very much so. I am also beginning to be interested in What Is a Thing? which seems to have some resonant arguments in it.

In particular I'd say that to put in context Graham's work on the fourfold structure of objects, you should read “The Origin of the Work of Art.”

One thing I will say. For someone who writes so (supposedly) abstractly about being, there are quite a few pliers, rivets, lizards, bridges, plants, shoes and on and on...in Heidegger.

1 comment:

camerontw said...

Most enjoyable to my mind, i.e., most able to be experienced as a course designed for people not mired in Heideggeriana debates, are
"What is Called Thinking?" and the 1929 World Finitude Solitude course. The former has interesting replays of the "What is a Thing?" course, especially around learning (repeating the claim that the teacher is the one with the most to learn). And the latter is the great OOO enemy with its insistence that the stone is not just animally poor in world but worldless.