A Boozy Beggar Who Could Think You Under The Table: Being and Time, and What is Metaphysics, by Martin Heidegger
Human existence can relate to be-ing only if it is itself beholden to no-thing. Going above and beyond being is of the essence of existence. This going beyond, however, is metaphysics itself. That is how metaphysics belongs to "the nature of man". It is neither a branch of academic philosophy nor a realm of scattered notions. Metaphysics is the basic event of existence. It is existence itself. Because the truth of metaphysics dwells in this unfathomable ground, it has about it the ever lurking possibility of deepest error about what is in closest proximity [to it]. Hence, no strictness of a science attains the seriousness of metaphysics. Philosophy can never be measured by the yardstick of the idea of science.
Being and Time is Heidegger's most important book. "What is Metaphysics?" is the brief essay that represents him in the revised Great Books set. You can barely read the essay without first reading the book, since the essay refers to the book countlessly.
The answer to what metaphysics is is, "The study of why there is stuff rather than no stuff"...or as he puts it, "Why be-ing and not no-thing?" And yes, he or his translator puts hyphens into the words "being" and "nothing" each and every time he uses them, which is frequent, and jar-ring every time.
Like most of the German philosophers, his translators appear to take pride in rendering his thought as incomprehensible as possible, either so that only those who want it bad enough will understand at last, or because the thoughts are revealed as stoned college sophomore-level nonsense if you strip away the big words. He goes on and on about "be-ing" and "no-thing", marveling at the apparent paradox that one cannot even discuss "no-thing" without rendering it into "be-ing" by giving it qualities....and yet elsewhere, he defines "be-ing" with such particularity that he gets to insist that people are the only entities that exist (a horse IS, but it does not EXIST. Da fuq, Heidegger?). Seems to me, one cannot box "be-ing" as applying to only some things and then calling all of what lies outside "be-ing" as a void too all-encompassing to be described. Do things that ARE but do not EXIST count as being, or nothing? This is why non-philosophers dismiss philosophy as ridiculous navel-gazing.
A synonym for "be-ing" is "Dasein", which again, is used throughout Being and Time instead of "existence", and again, has the effect of rendering the ideas thick and dull via unfamiliar words. It cost me mental energy to translate "dasein" into "existence" every time it appeared.
Heidegger also takes great mileage out of the fact that we are creatures coming out of the past, living in the present, and going towards the future. It's almost too much for his poor overwhelmed soul to handle, or at any rate, he is sure it's too much for ours.
I'm not sure I get it, not sure if I want to, and not sure there's anything worthwhile to be got. If your mileage varies, I'd love to hear your explanation.
The Golden Age of Uncertainty, by Werner Heisenberg
It is obvious that the invention of new weapons, especially of the thermonuclear weapons, has fundamentally changed the political structure of the world. Not only has the concept of independent nations or states undergone a decisive change, since any nation which is not in possession of such weapons must depend in some way on those very few nations that do produce these arms in large quantity, but also the attempt of warfare on a large scale by means of such weapons has practically become an absurd form of suicide. Hence one frequently hears the optimistic view that therefore war has become obsolete, that it will not happen again. This view, unfortunately, is a much too optimistic oversimplification. On the contrary, the absurdity of warfare by means of thermonuclear weapons may, in a first approximation, act as an incentive for war on a small scale. Any nation or political group which is convinced of its historical or moral right to enforce some change of the present situation will feel that the use of conventional arms for this purpose will not involve any great risks; they will assume that the other side will certainly not have recourse to the nuclear weapons, since the other side being historically and morally wrong on this issue will not take the chance of war on a large scale.
Drink whenever something in the 20th century volumes of the Great Books set was originally presented as a series of lectures.
Physics and Philosophy was Heisenberg explaining quantum physics to...yes! Other scientists, who knew what all the big concepts were already. #ZeemanEffect #BohrSommerfieldModel Fortunately, I'd already read works from the same 20th Century Science volume by Planck, Schrodinger, Einstein, Bohr and Eddington, so I got at least some of the main ideas, though it still left me struggling.
Heisenberg touches briefly here on his biggest generally known idea--the theory that experimental data is affected by the act of observing it--but this isn't the main paper in which he sets that forth. Instead, his main idea is to feel the pain of those who thought they knew geometry until 19th century mathematicians started fucking with Euclid, and of people who thought they knew physics until relativistic quantum physics fucked with Newton. The older versions lasted so long because they pragmatically get usable results in the human sized real world, and only break down when studying huge astronomical distances or matter so small that it could not even be identified or measured before the 20th century. But where it breaks down, Heisenberg finds that no theory yet accounts for all of the data, and that further, theoretical science and all unobservable quantities can go out the window. We might as well get used to eternal paradox.
Seems to me, the late great Jordin Kare put it more succinctly in his song about the Unified Field Theory:
You've got your quantum mechanics, got your QED
Some special and some general relativity
But you might as well go looking, just as sure as you're born
For a unified field theory as a unicorn.