Recalibrating the Noumenal: Hölderlin’s Translational Intervention from Kant to Heidegger

SPEP 2025

This article explores how Friedrich Hölderlin’s radical translational techniques in Antigone challenge Kant’s epistemic framework and extend the status of language beyond mere representation. By highlighting internalized sensation, Hölderlin simulates an effect akin to intellectual intuition without discarding Kant’s phenomenon–noumenon divide. His estranged forms reintroduce archaic sociopolitical tensions, thereby demonstrating that translation can partially disclose what remains inaccessible to finite cognition. Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger subsequently amplified this insight, grounding hermeneutic phenomenology as the necessary response to Kant’s lingering restrictions. Thus, language emerges as an irreducible locus of ontological articulation rather than a neutral conduit. It redefines poetic thinking.

Keywords: Philosophy of translation; Hölderlin; Post-Kant aesthetics; Hermeneutic phenomenology

Cyclical Worldliness in Machines: Dreyfus, Heidegger, and a Phenomenological Reformulation of AI Critique in the Context of Educational Philosophy

NAAPE 2024
https://www.naape.org/en/program

Large-scale models like ChatGPT challenge our understanding of consciousness in machines and have far-reaching implications for the philosophy of education. This paper revisits Dreyfus’ 1970s critique of artificial intelligence within this context, examining how AI’s capabilities and limitations impact our understanding of human learning and cognition. Dreyfus argued that the limitation of AI is its “knowing that,” derived from explicit rules such as definitions and calculations, rather than the “knowing how” found in human embodied cognition—crucial in educational settings. Contemporary language models, adept at exploiting implicit human context, undermine this view. However, the fundamental difference between machine mind and human mind cannot be measured solely by performance; it lies in the contrast between causation and correlation. Looking at Heidegger’s foundational ontology, heavily referenced by Dreyfus, I find causation rooted in the existential depth beneath worldly activities, in the essence-absent nature of Dasein that drives its search for its ownmost purpose. Heidegger sees this as a commitment to an ethically charged openness of Being and beings he calls conscience. It’s this teleological search for causation, I posit, that distinguishes consciousness and underpins human formation. Drawing on Heidegger’s reading of Heraclitus’ polemos, which describes the decision within Being that leads to different modes of presence, this paper speculates about AI’s potential to develop consciousness and its anticipated impact on education in the future. I conclude by considering two possible ontological relationships between future AI and humans based on these reflections.

Keywords: consciousness; worldliness; Heidegger’s fundamental ontology; Dreyfus’ critique; causation vs. correlation; Dasein; human learning

The Sacred in Thinging: Heidegger’s “Design” in the Light of Kantian Aesthetics and the Telos of Nature

Religions 2024, 15(10), 1181
https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15101181

This article offers a fresh exegesis of Heidegger’s philosophy of art, focusing on his conceptualization of artwork as the reproduction of the thing’s general essence. Grounding the analysis in Heidegger’s revisit of Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic, this study explores Heidegger’s interpretation of a thing as a “composed homogeneity” that reveals inherent determinations of temporality and spatiality in the self-presence of beings as a phenomenon grasped within finite human cognition. This is inextricably linked to the ecstatic temporality of Dasein, elucidating a cyclical human–thing dynamic integral to Heidegger’s ontology. Going deeper, I draw parallels between Kant’s “supersensible” realm and Heidegger’s “earth”, revealing a teleological (ethical) design manifested in art that captures the dual essence of Nature—using Kantian terminology, its purposiveness and contrapurposiveness—intersecting with Heidegger’s notion of the counter-essence of ἀλήθεια in relation to freedom. Finally, I show how the manifold aesthetic metamorphoses of this existential scheme within the existentiell ordinariness through nonradiant φαίνεσθαι, such as equipmentality, emerge as the everyday incarnation of this design.

Keywords: Art; Thingness; Composed homogeneity; Ecstatic temporality; Design; Aesthetic metamorphosis

Heidegger’s World: Re-Enchanting through Thingness

Religions 2024, 15(1), 3 https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15010003

This study investigates how Martin Heidegger’s notion of “the thing” (Das Ding) can help rescue modern disenchantment with regard to its root in the World, a concept developed from “being-in-the-world” presented in Being and Time, and later taken as a participant in the bilateral polemos illustrated in die Gestalt (signifying Being’s strife to disclose itself against the Earth: self-concealing concealment). In Section 1, I analyze the occurrence of disenchantment by critically reviewing several thinkers’ discussions of it, pointing out that “faciality”—which has structured the modern Western understanding of reality—is the cornerstone of ontotheology, as well as the collapse of it: disenchantment. In Section 2, to demonstrate how Heidegger’s rediscovery of usefulness in a de-subjectified discourse of signification has challenged the positivistic view attached to “faciality”, I examine Heidegger’s idea of “readiness-to-hand,” revealing the basic temporal–spatial units composing the “handiness” of categorical beings and its relation to Dasein, progressing thereon to the analysis of a thing-centered worldview of Heidegger’s phenomenology. In Section 3, I demonstrate how this thing-centered worldview has the potential to form a preparative stage for re-enchantment of the World by uncovering the concealed existentiality within things, aligning with Heidegger’s polemos in his philosophy of art.

Keywords: Heidegger; Das Ding; being-in-the-world; readiness-to-hand; disenchantment; existentiality

Heidegger’s Polemos: An Aesthetic Inquiry

Columbia Academic Commons https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/beg8-kq12.

In mid-later Heidegger’s thought, polemos, an idea he borrows from Heraclitus’ Fragment 53, prevails in his works as that which creates the possibility of a fundamentally metaphysical decision of to-be-or-not-to-be. This decision clearly corresponds to the primal conflict between the “world” and the “earth” (the concealment and the unconcealment of Being) in a “rift-design” that he depicts in “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Based on a textual analysis of “The Origin” and related writings, which follows a phenomenological examination of the guiding questions in Heidegger’s progression from the study of Dasein to the study of being as such, I provide an exegesis that clarifies how, in Heidegger’s conception of art, polemos preserved by thinghood is entangled with other elements in his entire metaphysical inquiry. I show that polemos is a re-enchanting path in the light of which Heidegger ontologically uncovers the predetermined ethical connection between the human and the sacred, having as its medium the thing and as its end freedom, with the potential of bringing salvific power to a destitute age characterized by positivistic machination. Moreover, by interpreting Heidegger’s concept of beauty as phainesthai engaged in and with aletheia conditioned by polemos, I illustrate Heidegger’s reconfiguration of the history of Western metaphysics in order to illuminate its repetitive moments through which he overcomes it.

Keywords: Metaphysics; Aesthetics; Art and morals; Heidegger; Heraclitus

Heidegger’s Polemos in Mythos

Central APA, 2022 https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.apaonline.org/resource/resmgr/central2022/c2022_meeting_program_draft.pdf

This paper delves into Heidegger’s conceptualization of Erde (earth) as an expression of Being’s self-concealing nature, tracing its lineage back to ancient Greek mythology. An ontological exploration elucidates the inherent duality within the foundation of Being: Grund (ground), which facilitates yet remains veiled in the emergence of meanings, contrasted with Abgrund (abyss) that counteracts the forces of Grund. Further, a survey of Heidegger’s works reveals the triadic interplay of Grund and Abgrund implied in his commentary on Hölderlin’s “Germania,” where the idea of earth is first touched upon. Drawing on Contributions to Philosophy, I show that for Heidegger, Abgrund signifies the primordial intersection where the humans and the divine converge at the spatio-temporal inception of the cosmos. The paper then clarifies the semantic commotion between Heidegger’s understanding of Abgrund and the ancient Greek Underworld. Of particular note is the notion of lethe as interpreted by Heidegger, placed in the context of Plato’s myth of Er in the Republic, positioning it as a pivotal junction of forgetting (oblivion of beings) and existential significance for Dasein. The relationship of Dasein to lethe is contingent upon its philosophical inclination, affecting its interaction with the revelation of meanings. Such intricate dynamics bear pronounced relevance in our contemporary era, where the urgent retrieval of meanings stands sharply against the prevailing scientific reduction of the multi-dimensional world.

Keywords: Heidegger; polemos; mythos; Grund; Abgrund; lethe; Dasein

Heidegger on Art and Religious Phenomena

Regional Conference, Society for the Phenomenology of Religious Experience, 2019 https://sophere.org/archive/regional-conference-indiana-2019/indiana-program

This paper argues that though Heidegger explicitly takes an atheistic stance in doing metaphysics, his phenomenology is essentially compatible with the religious dimension of human life. This is demonstrated through my analysis of his philosophy of art formed in his middle years around the “turn,” which is, as I would show, not only a continuation of Being and Time but also a preface to his later idea of “fourfold.” My argument includes four parts: 1) Based on Heidegger’s definition, “truth” (aletheia) as the openness of the endless strife (polemos) between concealment and unconcealment, is consistent with, to a significant extent consisting of, but not limited to the inevitable dual-condition of Dasein as finite openness existing in both authenticity and inauthenticity described in Being and Time; 2) The possible openness of the whole realm of such disentangleable interplay between concealment and unconcealment is exactly what Heidegger calls phusis, or logos in the pre-Socratic sense, or “the thing,” or “fourfold” as the “gathering of sky and earth, mortals and divinities” in his later thinking; 3) Art as “the becoming or happening of truth,” in letting the realm discussed in 2) open, does not aim to eliminate seeming, which should be regarded as the embodiment of a self-concealing part of “truth,” but only urges to bring its meaningfulness into intelligibility; 4) Though the atheist Heidegger considers religious experience as a kind of dissemblance covering up Dasein’s authenticity, the artist/poet Heidegger, in attempting to make open the full range of “truth” to his audience, has come to appreciate the beauty of religious phenomena as seeming appearing in forming a link of the “fourfold,” which also marks the transition of his view of human existence from “uncanny” to “poetic dwelling.”

Keywords: Heidegger; art; religious phenomena; aletheia; Dasein; fourfold; polemos; phusis;