Leaping Cholla Podcast

We finally conclude section 76 with a short section about newspaper science (the humanities) and machine science (the natural sciences). Heidegger states that “newspaper and machine are meant here…as the impelling modes of that final objectification…which sucks all the substantiveness out of beings, leaving them mere occasions for lived experience.” After parsing this all out,...

We continue going through section 76 with readings on the universities becoming business establishments bent on system-building erudition, the hidden goal of complete boredom at scientific innovation, and how the great unsettlement comes from essential knowledge, not powerlessness or hopelessness. We conclude with discussions of the degradations of the universities via the rot of money,...

We conclude Section 74 which includes explications on how historiology seeks to avoid history by standardizing interpretative viewpoints, how “newspaper science” and “humanities departments” have institutionalized knowledge, and how the closure against nature as much as history is due to technicism self-interpreting as “organic worldview.” We conclude with thoughts on the new era of unknowing,...

We continue reading through section 74 about science’s failure to determine the essential beings in its area of study, about its politicized “meaning-conferrals,” and about historiology as a comparative method of erasing difference. We then look at some recent media stories as examples of a liberalized (aka performatively politicized) epistemology as well as the way...

In Section 74 we continue following Heidegger’s meditations on science as “knowledge of an essential truth experienced in advance.” Via science’s determinate direction of explainability, we are enmeshed in a nexus of cause-effect relations that places everything under its jurisdiction of explanation and produces historiological machination via the perpetual instituting of “correct findings.” We co...

In sections 74 and 75 we read of “total mobilization” as the setting in motion and undermining of all previous contents of still-enduring formations, the priority of procedures and contrivances, and the pressing of the masses into service. This is the outcome of modern science as a derived instituting of knowledge that places what is...

Section 73 of Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) links “science” and the “abandonment by being.” Science has become the “conceptually pre-formed consequence of the interpretation of the beingness of beings under the guideline of thinking.” In short, a “concoction of ‘world-views’ composed of indiscriminately adopted forms of thought.” Heidegger says we must meditate on...

In section 72, we get an expansion of Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism from being without a goal (telos) to being the essential occurrence of the abandonment by being, aka machination, lived experience, and liberalism. Two “oppositional forms of nihilism” are discussed – Christianity and Bolshevism – whose “denial of a lack of goals” gives birth...

In the middle of section 69 of Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), we read more of the gigantic and how it is the incalculable in the form of the plight of the lack of a sense of a plight due to the distorted essence its “world as picture” and quantitative sense of time and...

We start section 69, entitled the Gigantic, and read about its being “quantity as quality” due to representation’s systematic spacialization and its hatred for limitations. This being-historical state in which “everything is humanly possible” manifests in liberalism’s fixation on what things represent and the anxiety that a limitless representational possibility can foster. Comparison is made...

In section 68 of Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) we read about machination and lived experience reciprocally drive each other to the extreme (thereby extending the deformations of beingness), how the discovery of “nature” was prepared for by the supernatural, and how the attitude of imitating and continuing the same “believes itself to be...

Our glimpses into the distorted essence of beyng via machination and lived experience continue in sections 64-67. We read how “farthest from them is the power of preservation, whose place is taken by exaggeration, out-yelling, and mere blind screaming, in the wail of which one crows over oneself and deludes oneself in order to escape...

In sections 62-63 we read about machination concealing itself through the prescriptive force of “lived experience” as actuality, objectivity, and correctness. This uncovers how the addiction to lived experience supports and is supported by such standard liberal dogmas as relatability, community, and affirmation. We conclude by discussing the implications of Harvard’s rejection of Trump’s “activist...

We start at section 60 of Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) and read how self-certainty, calculability, unquestionability, machination, and knowing “who we are and what we are supposed to do” contribute to the lack of a sense of plight and the loss of the knowledge that “genuine selfhood occurs in a grounding beyond oneself.”...

In section 59, we read of the denuding of every disposition until all is common and average, of the era of complete unquestionableness, of the new bewitchery as the dominance of machination, and of humans falling prey to the hunt for lived experience. From this vantage we look at several aspects of liberalism: the bias...

In section 58 we dive into Heidegger’s exegesis on the three ways the abandonment by being cloaks itself – in calculation as a “basic law of comportent,” in speed as “the inability to withstand stillness of concealed growth,” and in the massive as “the most acute opposition to the rare and the unique.” We then...

We finish reading section 56 of Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), which involves making our way through Heidegger’s list of those elements “wherein the abandonment by being announces itself,” and includes such items as art as cultural utility, the destruction of the earth by speed, calculation, and the massive, an obduracy against all intimations,...

In section 56 of Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) we read of how the truth of beyng is conditioned by the abandonment by being and how this uprootedness causes our insensibility to the ambiguity in what is held to be essential, for instance “everything that is meant by a people: the communal, the racial,...

Section 55 of Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) gives a deep and beautiful description of the abandonment by being and by beyng that beings have suffered due to the compulsion for objectivity, for the “in itself,” and for the nihilism that has flowed through metaphysics since Plato and culminated in the “secular successors” of...

Sections 53 and 54 are combed thru this episode, and they’re all about the difference between plight and progress. Progress has to do with well-being, prosperity, an unbroken supply of useful and enjoyable things, but it has no future, as it merely “takes things that already are and expedites them ‘further’ on their previous path....

We read through section 52 of Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) and hear about the transition from the Christian dogma of “created being” to the liberal dogma of “objectivity and machination” and the need for the future ones to experience the abandonment by being as the basic occurrence of our history by remembering it...

In this episode, wherein we read section 51 of Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), we definitively decide not to change the format of the podcast. as the proposed change, on further consideration, felt inorganic. Well, at least we tried! So back in the good times, we read about how in the age of unquestioning...

In section 50 we get a kind of greatest hits list of the main concepts of the book hereto, including the assertion that we live in “the age of a complete absence of questioning and an unwillingness to establish any goals,” with “mediocrity as status symbol.” We then discuss the hyper-politicization of art and its...

We dive into sections 47 – 49 of Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) and end up finishing Part 1 of the book, entitled Projection. Herein we read about decision as something other than an either/or choice, about the drive to self-preservation as a kind of decision, and of the temporal-spatial character of decision as...

In Ep 45 we read through section 46, entitled “the decision (preliminary concept)”, of Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) by Heidegger. Herein we discover and partake in more musings on decision as choice vs. decision as the saving of beings and the justifying preservation of the law and assignment of the West through stepping...