Dr W Large

Nihilism art technology and politics

24 February 2007

13:37

What is the difference between H of Being and Time and the later Heidegger? In BT, it is a question of describing the ahistorical transcendental  structure of human existence. From the 1930s onwards it increasing becomes a question of history. What is the understanding of being that is particular to the West now.

Does the structure of human existence remain the same, and only the content changes through history?

295

How we understand ourselves is how we end up relating to things.

Social practices thus transmit not only an implicit understanding of what it is to be a human being, an animal, or an object, but, finally, an understanding of what it is for anything to be at all.

297

The art work sets truth to work - it reflects what our social practices are.

298

Thus artworks are not representations or symbols, but produce a 'shared understanding'.

300

The resistance of this process to complete rationalisation - paradigms are what give the source for our values and rationality, and thus in themselves cannot be completely open to rationalisation and normative inquiry. This resistance, H calls 'earth'.