Simon Critchley

A Philosopher Laughs at Death — and the Public Listens

By Mark Dery

A brief excerpt from the article:

Having read Heidegger in the original, taught him for years, and published widely on his work, Critchley knows his subject back to front. Yet Apply-degger’s lectures never feel pretentious or pedantic. Critchley grew up in a working-class family in Hertfordshire, north of London, and was, as he told an interviewer in 2010, “a big-time punk” in the late ‘70s, with “bondage trousers, 10-hole Dr. Martens boots, and a Lewis leather jacket,” playing guitar in bands with names like the Fur Coughs. (Think about it for a minute.) He harbors an undying detestation of pedantry, which is synonymous, in his mind, with upper-class twits with Oxbridge airs. His teaching and writing are built on the unshakable conviction that “genuine philosophy can be explained simply and clearly,” an article of faith drummed into him at the University of Essex by his professor Frank Cioffi, who had zero tolerance for self-mystifying obscurantism. (When Critchley requested Cioffi’s permission to switch from a course on Foucault to one on Derrida, he signed off — under protest: “Man, that’s like going from horseshit to bullshit.”)

Click on the link above to read Mark Dery’s article in its entirety, published in The Journal of Higher Education

An Eight-Part Commentary on Being and Time

Part 1: Why Heidegger Matters

Part 2: Mineness

Part 3: Being-in-the-World

Part 4: Thrown into the World

Part 5: Anxiety

Part 6: Death

Part 7: Conscience

Part 8: Temporality

Apply-Degger: A Podcast Series on Heidegger

Apply-degger is a long-form, deep dive into the most important philosophical book of the last 100 years. Each episode of this podcast series will present one of the key concepts in Heidegger’s philosophy. Taken together, the episodes will lay out the entirety of Heidegger project for people who are curious, serious and interested, but who simply don’t have the time to sit down and read the 437 densely-written pages of the book. What is said in these episodes will hopefully be clear and helpful, but not easy.

“Apply-degger is not intended for everyone. I am not seeking to make philosophy simple or offer patronizing banalities about life. These are not Ted talks. In many ways, they are the opposite. They are slow, clear and intimate explorations of Heidegger’s ideas in Being and Time. It is my conviction that genuine philosophy can be explained simply and clearly. But it takes the time that it takes. And that can’t be rushed.” – Simon Critchley

Episode 1: Heidegger's Project in Being and Time

Making sense of Heidegger - Being is time and time is finite – We are a thrown open clearing – Hamlet’s question – Reawakening the taste for perplexity - Mineness – Authenticity – Average everydayness – Phenomenology – Dasein is Being-in-the-world – Ecstasy – Categories and existentials – Not seeing the world with philosopher’s spectacles – Facticity – Leaving the cabinet of consciousness – Having a fascination with the world, and not just staring at it.

Episode 2: World

What is the world and how does the world show up? – Avoiding all ideas of subjectivity – Against epistemology – There is no problem of perception – We are the worldhood of the world – Our inside is outside – Praxis not theory – Why nature and science do not describe the primary phenomenon of the world – Handiness and thrusting aside our interpretative tendencies – The pragmatics of stuff – The primacy of concern and environment – When the hammer breaks – Signs and Heidegger’s funny examples – Situation and the meaningfulness of the world – Wallace Stevens on the idea of order.

Episode 3: Space

What is wrong with Descartes’ picture of the world – Extension renders the world invisible - Phenomenology and the destruction of the modern world picture – Why is this book not called Being and Space? – Space as room and roomliness – The unavoidable character of spatial metaphors – Nearness, place and neighborhood – Art and space – The sacred, temple and templum – The near, clearing away and bringing things close – Churches, graves, radios, telephones – In Dasein, there is a collapsing of distance – Heidegger’s theory of social media – Against the metrical measurement of space – Freeing place and why architects love Heidegger – Fernando Pessoa and lessons in unlearning.

Episode 4: Being with Others

We are defined by a ‘who’ not a ‘what’ – Dasein is the with – Everyone is the other and no one is himself – I am Nobody (Emily Dickinson) – Networked being – “They think me” (Rimbaud) – Displacing the Cartesian starting point for philosophy, the ‘I’ – Moments in the precipitation of the Self in “Being and Time” (Anxiety, Death, Conscience, Resoluteness, The People) – How others show up in the workshop of the world – Being alone – Caring for, leaping in and leaping ahead of the other – Considerateness and forbearance – Do we really understand others? (Levinas) – An encoded social psychology of modernity (Sloterdijk) – The dictatorship of the They – Every secret loses its force – How to become authentic.

Episode 5: Thrown Projection

The difficulty of stating the obvious – Not splitting the phenomenon – We are ourselves the clearing – The movement of disclosure and closing over as learning the rhythm of existence – The music of “Being and Time” – The four key concept clusters – State of mind, always already finding oneself there – Mood, Heidegger on the passions – Into this world we’re thrown – Dasein exists factically – Projection, Understanding, Potentiality for being, freedom – Discourse is the condition of possibility for the articulation of the clearing that is us – Logos – We are the being that talks – Falling as horizontal, not vertical, not Satanic – Falling at the world – Authenticity as a modified way in which everydayness is seized upon – Fear – Giant bears and my mother – Interpretation as the layout out of understanding – Meaning is not deep, but a question of surfaces – Being is not the rabbit in the hat – Learning to see the hat without wanting the rabbit.

Episode 6: Language and Interpretation

Interpretation as taking something as something prior to propositions – The hermeneutic circle – Virtuous and not vicious – Judgement is not the primary locus of truth – Cribbing Aristotle – Comparison with Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus” – Important nonsense and silence – Taking things hermeneutically – The distinction between discourse and language – Communication – Language is not inside the head, it is ecstatic – Dasein has to have clean ears – The voice of the friend – Hearing, hearkening, silence and reticence – Keeping quiet – Proposal for a reticence bar called Helsinki – The human being shows itself as a being that talks – non-human language – Excursus on the octopus.

Episode 7: Inauthentic Life

Back to everyday life – This is not a philosophy of culture – Idle talking, gossiping, scribbling, updating – Curiosity, the delight in sight - Concupiscence, eye-lust - The horror of liveliness (Hedda Gabler) - Flirting and the phenomenology of the sexy – Ambiguity, the speed of life – Everything means something else – Being against one another – Falling is not bad – Tempting – Tranquilizing (cultural exoticism, Western Buddhism) – Alienating (self-deception) – Entangling (the triumph of the therapeutic) – Turbulence (groundless floating) – The structure of thrownness – Not a night view of Dasein, but day-time.

Episode 8: Anxiety and Care

Bringing the whole thing together - Anxiety is way in in which the whole of Dasein is disclosed – Defining the whole as Care – The 12 steps of the Care structure - Articulated thrown projection – We are not simple - We are a hinge – We are a unified but multi-faceted stretch (future, past and present) – Temporality as the meaning of care – A stunning personal revelation about my anxiety – Why I do philosophy – Approaching Heidegger aquatically – Opening oneself to the tender indifference of the world – Anxiety as the mood of the novel (Crusoe) – Falling out of the homely – Party being - Time and tide – Being alone with others – Excursus on Terrence Malick – Anxiety, calm and courage – Anxiety reveals the Nothing – Darkness can help - The Christian background to anxiety (Kierkegaard) – Saint Paul and anxious waiting – Heidegger tells us a story and gives us a happy ending – Marrying Aristotle and Christianity within atheism.

Episode 9: Reality

Four incorrect theses on reality - Empirical idealism (Berkeley) - Transcendental realism (from Plato to Meillassoux) - Empirical realism (Samuel Johnson kicks a stone) - Transcendental idealism (Kant) – Why the question of reality is the wrong question – Why Kant is wrong (about the subject, representation, and the priority of the present-at-hand – Heidegger’s existential deepening of Kant – The scandal of philosophy is expecting that reality requires proof – Being-in-the-world is prior to both proof and faith – Epistemology is a symptom of Dasein’s falling – Both realism and idealism are consistent with being-in-the-world and both wrong – The wrinkle in the fabric of Heidegger’s argument: the Real – The hard core to reality: physical nature, matter, the earth – A possible dualism of reality and the Real: doesn’t this split the phenomenon?

Episode 10: Truth

Heidegger’s reefer moment – Ek-sistence – The history of truth – Deconstructing the traditional concept of truth – Getting beneath the theory of truth as correspondence – Being-uncovering – Aletheia as unconcealment - Heracleitus on sleeping like sheep – Preserving the force of the most elemental words – We are in the truth - How to live in a totalitarian lie (Havel) – Dasein is in the truth and the untruth, the two paths (Parmenides) – Truth is relative to Dasein – No Dasein, no truth – Newton’s laws – There are no eternal truths – Skepticism is unintelligible because a skeptic has never existed – Heidegger’s refutation of suicide - Finishing Division One and why we need Division Two of Being and Time.

Episode 11: Death

Full metal Heidegger in lockdown – Why you need to become an existential phenomenologist in the pandemic – Authentic being a whole, the themes of Division Two – Unfairness to Kierkegaard - Death as one’s ownmost, non-relational and not to be outstripped – Virility and impotence in relation to death – How others die (Tolstoy) – The certainty and indeterminacy of death – I am my not-yet – Authenticity and inauthenticity spin around in Heidegger’s analysis – The difference between expecting and anticipating death – Anticipation as the possibility of the possible – Violent language - Shattering oneself against death as a wrenching away from the They – I am possibility – Enter Nietzsche – Enter Freedom (towards death) – Having death in your mouth – Fruit – Corpse – Mourning is secondary – Dying for the other (Levinas’s discretion) – Sacrifice, holocaust – Undermining Heidegger on death – The relational character of finitude – How I see being-towards-death – The ontology of weakness.

Episode 12: Conscience

Exoteric and esoteric (Leo Strauss) – The 10-minute exoteric version of conscience – The much longer esoteric version: watching the ice-floe of Being and Time break up – The null basis-being of a nullity (the shape of the argument) – The peculiar character of the call of conscience – It says nothing (Cordelia in King Lear) – It is silent – Me, myself and I - The call comes from me and yet beyond me – Stranger voice (Nietzsche) – The nothing of the world – The self divided between two nothings – The three Rs: repetition, repetition, repetition (Mark E. Smith) – Guilty! – Heidegger’s genealogy of morals – Mortgage, death-pledge, money – Dasein is a nullity that does not have power over itself – Double impotence – Lagging behind one’s possibilities – An anti-heroic Heidegger (Beckett) – Dasein is a double nullity – The experience of freedom – Guilt is the pre-moral source for any morality (Kafka) – Double zero – Quasi-transcendental philosophy (Derrida) – Weakness is the brand (Maria Bamford) – Wanting to have a conscience – Action! – Resoluteness – Stillness (Stars of the Lid) – Situation as the seizing hold of space – Resoluteness as both taking action and the passivity of resistance.

Episode 13: Anticipatory Resoluteness

What do death and the concrete situation of action have in common? – A puzzling footnote on sin – Holding-for-true as the certainty of conscience – Resoluteness is repetition – How death has power over Dasein’s illusions – Sober anxiety – The presence of Freud(e) in Being and Time – Joy - Discourse on the method – How we must do violence to ourselves in order to become authentic – Virtuous circularity – How do we conceive the unity of the self? – Heidegger’s relation to Kant’s ‘I think’ – How Kant is both right and wrong – Kant’s response to Hume on the self – Cogito without an ergo sum – Self as activity (Fichte) – Heidegger on the constancy of the self – Dasein is itself in the silent resoluteness of action in a situation – The constancy of the self consists in repetition – performance – Descartes’ dilemma with the cogito and Heidegger’s attempt to think self without ground – We are our acts, nothing more.

Episode 14: Ecstatic Temporality

Unwavering discipline – Authentic Dasein is the unity of the three ecstases of time – The three-step rhythm of temporality – The future as coming towards itself – What comes out of the future is my having-been, the past –The past is null, but not annulled – The curtains lift on action – The future opens up the past and releases itself into the present – The moment of vision, the glance of the eye – Kairos as the fulfilment of time (without Christ) – How can time be said without metaphysics? – Verbalizing nouns, speaking in tautology - Temporality temporalizes itself – Dasein is the ecstatic one (Taminiaux’s story) – The meaning of finitude – End-ly time –Towards oneself! Existing as the nullity that I am - Sketch of a critique of Heidegger on time: the primacy of the past over the future.

Episode 15: The Time of the Everyday World

The repetition of average everydayness from the standpoint of authentic temporality – Awaiting – Rapture – More unfairness to Kierkegaard – Making present – Forgetting – Repetition and memory – Bewildered fear, a burning house – Beckett – Resolute Dasein has no fear – Anxiety in the face of the nothing of the world – A taxonymy of moods – Hope comes in to tickle your feet – Equanimity – Being dragged along in thrownness – The authentic and inauthentic ecstases do not come in succession – The future is not later than the past – The genesis of the theoretical view of the world – An existential conception of science - Life-world practices and science – Phenomenology as pre-science – Deliberation is not absent from Heidegger (Tugendhat) – Different ways of philosophizing with a hammer – The importance of place – How nature is seen by modern science – Mathematical projection, data, modelling – Dasein is its world existingly – How the transcendence of being-in-the-world gets covered over in subject/object dualism – Horizonal schemas defined (with Kant) – The time of spatiality – Taking space in, literally – Leeway, play-space - Back to the everyday – The relation between authenticity and the everyday – There is no breakout from the cave – The enigma of everydayness – Philosophy and the enigmatic apriori.

Episode 16: Historicity and Politics

Death-obsessed male philosophers and the question of birth (Arendt) – The power of beginning – Stretchedness, persistence, movedness – Historizing as happening – History is rare – World history (a Greek temple) – The past lies ahead of us – Natural history – The ring – The loyalty of existence – Inauthentic history and the craving for the new – Recurrence and the love of fate – How to approach the science of history on the basis of existence – Monumental, antiquarian and critical (Nietzsche on history) – Heidegger’s debt to Dilthey – Philosophy as a manifestation of life – Fatigue – Why paragraph 74 of Being and Time is so important – Heidegger’s reply to Löwith – ‘See you later, alligator’, excursus on Lacoue-Labarthe – Heidegger’s revolutionary conception of history – Fate as individual, Destiny as collective – My struggle - The People (Volk) – The inner truth and greatness of National Socialism – Young Habermas – Who are the Germans? – Heidegger’s thinking of the One (henology) – Against authenticity - Defusing the link between philosophy and politics – Radicalizing facticity – Tragic and comic Heidegger – powerlessness – Heritage as the counter-concept to tradition – History as repetition – A weird thought: we repeat from out of the future – History is not the past – History comes to be from out of the future (Sandinista).

Episode 17: Existential and Vulgar Time

Three conceptions of time: primordial time, world time and vulgar time – The genesis of the tyranny of the present – Time-reckoning – Datability – Duration or the span of world time – Inauthentic Dasein has no time – Authentic Dasein is its time and always has time – Take your time – Time first shows itself in the sky – Brightness, night – Tide – Heidegger is not a thinker of the sea – ‘Primitive’ Dasein, the peasant’s clock, shadow and the sundial - ‘Advanced’ Dasein and electricity – Footnote on the theory of relativity – Time and physis – The genesis of linear Now-time – Time in Aristotle’s Physics – Counted nows, the flow, the stream of time – What is wrong with eternity – Primordial time is finite, reversible, ecstatic and episodic – How time becomes leveled off – Time and the soul – Spirit falling into time (Hegel) – Why Hegel is wrong – The long, final footnote to Being and Time (Derrida) – The endurance of Aristotle’s conception of time in Bergson – Time-consciousness in Husserl.

Episode 18: Coda: Opening and Presence

The relation between the construction and destruction in Being and Time – How the incompletion of Heidegger’s project has been exaggerated – The fetishization of failure and the provisional Heidegger’s marginalia on his own book – What happens when we destroy the tradition - Presencing out of the source – The end of philosophy and the task for thinking – Being as opening, time as presence – The last words of Being and Time; or WTF Martin? - The risk of self-paralysis in false philosophical modesty – Against Towardism – Having the courage of your convictions – The massive amount that we have learned from Being and Time – Polemic: why this is the right path to be taken in philosophy – Finitude restated – Naming the experience of the appropriative event – There is no turning in Heidegger’s work, just a deepening – The importance of building castles in the air – All that there is, is air – How Being and Time changes one’s life and approach to philosophy – Leaving the climate of Heidegger’s thinking (Levinas).

Episode 19: Extra: Eat Your Funky Dasein

Slow down, take your time, open your ears and enjoy the music. With Apply-Degger podcast series coming to an end, Simon Critchley teams up with musician, composer and sound designer, John Simmons to present a bonus track supported by the Onassis Foundation. In other words, this is the perfect season finale.