Timothy ClarkThinkers

Martin Heidegger teaches us that the obvious has a history and so becomes newly questionable.

Martin Heidegger offers the counterintuitive idea that we do not actually understand a phenomena by breaking it down into smaller elements. When we walk into a lecture hall, we do not see a brown box with such and such angles and conclude that it is a lectern; no! We see, first and foremost, a lectern.

Martin Heidegger is a holistic thinker: in perception, a sense of the whole in some sort precedes the parts of which it might seem constructed. We walk into the lecture hall and, at a single stroke, we see a lectern — we do not see a box and then deduce that it is a lectern.

Martin Heidegger argues against a whole tendency of Western thought to valorize theoretical understanding as the only true mode of understanding. He homes in on what actually happens in the most ordinary everyday experience, demonstrating that our basic forms of knowledge are non-conceptual.

Martin Heidegger is not offering a new systematic theory of the world, according to the engineering model of understanding. He works to render explicit what we already understand prereflectively, invisible merely because so deeply taken for granted, even by centuries of philosophers and scientists.

Martin Heidegger's writing may not have an ethics but, in a sense, is one with his attack on the deeply anthropocentric assumptions of Western thought and religion and an acceptance o human finitude.

Martin Heidegger's one, pervasive intention is to free us from the numbing familiarity of productionist metaphysics.

Martin Heidegger is a thinker concerned with the trace of what (a) was not explicitly thought, but was precisely ‘unthought’; and (b) which could never have been present as an object of thought, for what is ‘unthought’ was never an entity in the world, but is precisely the holistic all-pervading world and context out of which particular things emerged

Martin Heidegger uses etymology to draw out a legible trace of the pre-representional, holistic realm of unconcealment presupposed in all understanding; a pre-rational sense of order in the world of the Greeks, a pre-analytic synthesis whereby the world gave itself as non-chaotic, harmonious in certain ways.

Martin Heidegger uses etymology in a process of ‘internal translation’ and defamiliarization, as ‘hints’ ‘gestures’ or as a ‘freeing word’, opening up the language of the text from its dominant, metaphysical interpretation, and by so doing becoming sensitive to the mode of worlding that holds sway there, unthought.

Martin Heidegger's experiments strive to practice a non-representational thinking.

Martin Heidegger's style of writing is marked by pauses, spacing and the use of lineation to draw thinking into the pull of the unthought.

Martin Heidegger's style opens up a space for thinking, not an object thought, with its faltering movements of pause and restart.

Martin Heidegger turns to poetry to do justice to modes of being and thinking that are still not fully determined by productionist metaphysics.

Martin Heidegger's etymology, or internal translating, is an effort to carry us towards that point at which the poetic words would become no longer just objects of our thinking but that through which we think, without need of paraphrase, so delivering us over to the unique realm opened in the poetry.

Martin Heidegger's pervading concern is to challenge what ‘knowledge’ usually means, diagnosing and repudiating the reductive violence implicit in the kinds of knowledge that have become dominant in the West, with their vocabulary of ‘mastering’, ‘conquering’, ‘grasping’, ‘making certain’ and so on.

Martin Heidegger performs criticism in a way that aims to respect the irreducible singularity of the text is moving towards the practice of non-appropriative knowing.