My study of the Jaspers/Heidegger dialogue appears in the Journal of the Existential Psychoanalytic Institute of Seattle (EPIS). The web address for the EPIS is http://episjournal.com/?p=175.
Here are two excerpts:
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"We do not solve the problem of being obsessed with wealth by becoming obsessed with power – or happiness, or goodness, or truth – or anything else. The solution is not to replace one worry with another. The solution is to take control of worry – which Heidegger interprets to mean inhabiting the worry – being it – keeping a “firm hold” and a “willful resolution” – concentrating on the fundamental experience of worry and asking the most important questions in a philosophically rigorous manner. The point is to know and feel “the nature of the intuitive experiences lying at the basis” of philosophical questioning, and not become sidetracked with late developments and refinements of this basic worrying attunement.
Heidegger’s formulations for this ‘taking control’ stress its interminability – this is “incessant actualizing,” “continual renewal,” “constant renewal,” “constantly standing at the starting point.” The end goal is “an infinite process of radical questioning that always includes itself in its questions and preserves itself in them” (this is the last line of Heidegger’s review).
This is his 1920 statement on “thinking without presuppositions” – an idea that he continued to reformulate over the years – later it is called Gelassenheit, for example (“releasement,” or “meditative thinking” as opposed to “calculation” or “calculative thinking,” from Discourse on Thinking, 1959).
The final Heidegger has given up the idea of staying in the process of questioning expectations andpreserving oneself in problematizing experience because these formulations speak to a powerful sense of agency that he no longer feels. But his quietist or meditative ideas from late years speak to a similar ‘remaining in process’ – e.g. “dwelling,” “staying open to Being,” or “standing in the draft,” to cite a few Heideggerian formulations of similar ideas from the 1950s and 60s. Philosophy grows out a certain kind of worry. Initially the task seems to be to take over the worry machine, reset the dials and decide for oneself what to worry about. Later the task seems to be to convert the worry machine into a listening device and start listening to Being."
My study of aesthetics is called "Lines of Thinking in Aesthetics" and is available from Amazon -- Daimonion Press.
http://www.amazon.com/Lines-Thinking-Aesthetics-Steven-Brutus/dp/1470167034
Here is an excerpt:
"Socrates is especially drawn to examples that compare physical health to justice and inner harmony, making the legislator a kind of physician for the city; also to the analogy that as medicine is to the body, so is justice for the soul. He appears to dismiss mere art or mere craft in comparison to true art or true craft; and the defining characteristic of true art, versus its mere appearance, is the care that it takes for the excellence of the thing it is trying to make. Sometimes he says that this makes the difference between knowledge and wisdom. Sometimes he says that this is the difference between trying to evoke pleasure and trying to promote the good. Sometimes he says that craft-art-science emerges from handiwork (knowing hands) which involves hard practice, and that justice is like this and takes practice; sometimes he says that the practice of honesty heals the soul (as medicine heals the body) and makes us happy."
