Seinsfrage

I have just reviewed Heidegger's The Question of Being. Some of you may be interested.
Joe

Thanks for posting, just noticed today but read the review with interest.

Thanks, elenchus. There is an apathy (a _not_ doing) in the later Heidegger that I wanted to underline in my review. Heidegger's turn (Kehre) introduced a new level of interpretational difficulty for students of Heidegger. There are now 3 Heideggers: early, turning, late.
The early is the existential phenomenologist. The middle is the great reassessment of philosophy itself. Here Heidegger may not know where his thought is going. The later (postwar) is the final period of waiting on whatever gift (the other beginning) Be-ing might (or might not) bestow.
In the review I wanted to underline how different the late Heidegger is from all activist modern philosophy. Even leaving aside the 'makings' of Nietzsche and Marx (a new _religious_ ethos, a new political economic order), the central gesture of modern philosophy has been construction of worlds.
These constructions can be done, for instance, through language or phenomenological witnessing. In either case, the world waits on us. Heidegger reverses that.
Now it is we who wait upon the world to shape and re-create us!
Joe

That's an intriguing assessment of both modern philosophy and Heidegger. I recognise the "world building" projects of modern philosophy, and acknowledge it is in fact responsible for a great deal of my own interest. As suspect and incomplete as any attempt may be, and even must necessarily be (depending upon one's take on this question), it remains a compelling question for me.

I don't see Heidegger's reversal as necessarily incompatible with the former projects, though in many specific cases I suspect it is: the world under "construction" by any specific philosophical viewpoint, for instance, assumes the cosmos is "given" or fixed, and seeks merely to delineate it. But I don't think that's a necessary position. In fact, your point makes me realise I assume the reverse: that the cosmos is always "free" to do anything new or contradictory, and I simply must accept it if / when it does. Until then, however, I look for a system that explains the patterns and regularities evident "so far", and at the same time acknowledges that the future is not necessarily beholden to those patterns.

Agreed. But you are thinking more in terms of nature/cosmos, I am thinking more in terms of History/Progress. And so sometimes progress can be achieved and sometimes it can't.
One day it might be a commonplace to say that within a World Order (classical, medieval, modern) where there is agreement regarding fundamentals one might be able to see and say that Man (to a certain extent) is in control. (By 'fundamentals' I mean that world orders agree about broad parameters regarding (at minimum, say) economy and religion and cosmology: slavery/paganism/geocentric, feudalism/monotheism/geocentric+finite in time, capitalism/secularism/heliocentric.)
All this goes out the window, however, when world orders are decaying/rising. There are so many possibilities in these situations, so many different choices that can be made that more and more people feel helpless. One might argue that the 'waiting on Be-ing' position of the later Heidegger has been vindicated by the rise of our postmodernism. They both feed off each other.
Of course, one could also argue that Heidegger contributed mightily to the rise of postmodernity.

All very provocative points, and I like your point / reminder that I tend to look at cosmology, but that's not the only way to look at the world, even when exploring ontologies.