Existential coffee

March 7, 2008 7:35 AM

Does anyone speak Heidegger? If so, which of his terms might be used to describe coffee drinking?

I recently had coffee with someone who's written on Heidegger. I tried to turn down a third cup, saying that he must be busy. He replied: 'Take your time, take your time! Heidegger has this wonderful, untranslatable word: [insert untranslatable German word]. It means a sort of flowing. And that is how it should be with your coffee.'

What the hell could the word have been?

posted by Mocata to religion & philosophy (7 comments total)

Dasein? Gelassenheit? Perhaps vorhanden?
posted by angry.polymath at 8:26 AM on March 7

Definitely not dasein. Gelassenheit might be what he was thinking of. I found this had a good synopsis of what Heidegger was getting at with "gelassenheit:"

"Martin Heidegger’s Conversation On A Country Path About Thinking (1966a) deals with the concept of Gelassenheit experienced as the essence of thinking, a thinking that is not intended as representing, as self-determining thinking, but is conceptualized as "meditative thinking." Meditative thinking is the kind of thinking that thinks the truth of being, that belongs to being and listens to it. To understand Gelassenheit as the essence of thinking means to have a different and more radical insight into the essence of who we are. "
posted by Nelsormensch at 8:32 AM on March 7 [1 favorite]

I've never read any Heidegger, but I remember reference to his "thrown-ness" (geworfenheit) in Fernando Flores and Terry Winograd's Understanding Computers and Cognition as a condition of unwilling pre-reflective reaction, i.e. being forced into the flow of a situation without resort to disengaged reasoning. I can't say whether this is an accurate interpretation of the term, but if it is, I suppose it's a way to enjoy coffee.
posted by jacobbarssbailey at 11:51 AM on March 7 [1 favorite]

'Geworfenheit' and 'dasein' definitely don't make sense in that context, though 'gelassenheit' might be it.
posted by xanthippe at 10:50 PM on March 7

Gelassenheit. There's even a whole book with texts about Gelassenheit by Heidegger. Here's a text in English about Heidegger on Gelassenheit, I have no idea whether what he says could in any way be applied to coffee:
"...the concept of Gelassenheit experienced as the essence of thinking, a thinking that is not intended as representing, as self-determining thinking, but is conceptualized as “meditative thinking.”
I imagine you can probably drink coffee in a meditative way. At least if you're into Heidegger. (In normal, non-Heideggerian German, I would translate gelassen as "laid-back", but probably the Heideggerian concept is more...uhm...nebulous).
posted by The Toad at 1:39 AM on March 8 [1 favorite]

Gelassenheit- releasement toward things, including cups of coffee
posted by madstop1 at 12:01 PM on March 8

I think that's probably it. Many thanks to all of you.
posted by Mocata at 12:43 AM on March 9