Building Dwelling Thinking Martin Heidegger Pdf Download Torrent Author by: Neil LeachLanguage: enPublisher by: RoutledgeFormat Available: PDF, ePub,. View Download PDF. In his essay “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Heidegger etymologically traced. Being and Time, by Martin Heidegger.

On Heidegger’s “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”

Note: in the following document notes on the article alternate with questions related to the project placed in brackets.

Martin Heidegger asks two main questions in this lecture/article.

(1) What is it todwell?(The what-is-it? question is the classical Greek ontological question but dwelling is not an ancient Greek topic).This is the question answered in Part I.

(2) How does building belong to dwelling.This is the question answered in Part II.

Both of these questions carry us outside our normal way of thinking, first, because we take dwelling for granted as something obvious, self-evident, and therefore lacking in interest; and, second, our ideas of building and dwelling rely on the ordinary sense of the words, which are not what MH has in mind.

[What can artistic dwelling mean?Heidegger does write about poeticdwelling.What does it imply for how we arrange material things in our home, work area, or elsewhere?What does it imply for our being able to find ourselves at home here or there?How do we act differently when we feel at home?What makes the difference in whether or not we feel at home?]

I

In the first paragraph, Heidegger gives voice to our conventional ideas, gently expanding them, and leading us forward.In an extended sense, we can be at home on the road, and we can live in our house without truly dwelling there.

It is language that unfolds these meanings—unless we are merely manipulating language in the ways typical in our age of technology.(Note: Heidegger writes about language as “the house of being,” sheltering the essence of things as though it has a certain kind of agency, as though it is on the side of Being, even though we thoughtlessly seem to use language as a tool.When we let it speak, when we listen to it, it will tell us—or speak through the poets, who dwell with language in a way that is extraordinary for our age—what things are.[Remember the sentence in “On the origin of the work of art” about every word being in the storm of the conflict in today’s world.])

This introduction to language prepares us for the etymological study that follows, linking building (bauen) with being and dwelling (one suspects it was this etymological research and interpretation that led to the article).Images of agriculture are associated with patience and care, allowing things to come forth naturally.(What kind of argument is this?Does this associative, interpretive history of words truly show that building really is being, namely dwelling on the earth?If we are unpersuaded that “listening” discloses this to the attuned person, what good may we still find in studying this article?)The next series of etymological associations include peace and sparing (from destruction), which MH interprets as promoting the flourishing of that which is in its own essence or nature (again, the contrast is with the technological practice of making everything, including man himself, a tool for the exploitation driven by the human project of exercising power over things).

Now we can unfold the answer to the question to what it is to dwell.To dwell on the earth means to dwell under the sky.But when “we” think sky, we also think divinities—even if they have withdrawn.And in contrast to divinities, we know ourselves as mortals, beings who know we will die, and can prepare ourselves for that in such as way as to die (and live) well.

[How do we dwell in harmony or not in those dimensions?What ontological dimensions do we acknowledge?Things and beings?Energy, matter, life, mind, spirit, personality?God and man?Whatever ontological regions we acknowledge, how do they belong together?How do we establish ourselves, in language, and in our way of being, so that we live attuned to those dimensions in their essential belonging-together?]

II

Heidegger addresses his second question about building with the example of a bridge.As a thing, the bridge brings earth and sky, morals and divinities together.

[See the remarkable discussion in the fourth paragraph of the meaning of human life toward death, and the bridge which can recognize, obstruct, or push wholly aside the recognition of divinities.Life is a bridge, and we want to arrive healthy, sane, and sound on the other side.What do you think?]

The bridge is a location.We’ll cross the river there, at the bridge.Before the bridge, there was just an indeterminate array of possibilities for a bridge, with no location really distinguished yet.A location establishes a space for the fourfold at the site, a space which may stretch out in particular places (closer to the bridge or farther from it, e.g., along the roads to the bridge).The distance between those places and the bridge may be measured quantitatively in ways that tend to make us forget the fourfold.Nevertheless, “the nature of building is letting dwell” in the sense that building (whether cultivation of plants or buildings) opens a space for the fourfold, in which dwelling occurs.And “only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build.”

[For beginners, Heidegger is often clarified by contrasting authentic living with the ontological oblivion of the age of technology.Note: the original meaning of techne in MH’s interpretation is that it discloses, brings forth, makes appear.Thus techne is ontological.How can our way of living, our way of doing, our way of creating things be ontological in the best sense we can presently bring forth?]

Our dwelling in the fourfold is so fundamental that even our depression—loss of rapport with things (in this ontological sense) or our failure to be concerned about them is only a mode, a deficient mode, of belonging in the fourfold.It is like Heidegger’s saying in Being and Time that being withdrawn remains a mode of being-with others.

The clearly described example of the traditional farmhouse (six paragraphs before the end of the essay) prepares Heidegger’s comment that it will be enough if we begin to question what it is to dwell and if we think of that question as continually worthy of our thinking.Thinking also belongs to dwelling.And now we are able to return in the next-to-last paragraph to the earlier-mentioned housing shortage and its misery.Heidegger utters a remarkable proclaimation: “As soon as man givesthought to his homelessness, it is a misery no longer.”

Heidegger’s conclusion includes this sentence.“The summons that calls mortals to dwelling arrives in their thinking, and their answer to this summons is to try to bring dwelling to its fullness and to “build out of dwelling and think for the sake of dwelling.”

[This conclusion is Heidegger’s way of assigning to his reader/hearer a project that overlaps considerably with our project of artistic living.]