Speaking Being: Werner Erhard, Martin Heidegger, And A New Possibility Of Being Human

Speaking Being: Werner Erhard, Martin Heidegger, and a Technology of Transformation has two central features existing in dialogue with each other. One feature is a full transcript of a four-day long course called “the Forum” that was delivered by Werner Erhard in 1989. The other feature exists in juxtaposition with the transcript and provides an extended discussion that seeks to reveal Heideggerian points of intersection with the transcribed dialogue of the course. This extended discussion itself has two forms that braid throughout the transcript: first is a comprehensive series of “sidebar” discussions that occur alongside the conversations taking place between Werner Erhard and participants of the Forum, and these sidebar discussions open out to the second form: wider arcs of thought taking place in “Intervals”—more lengthy ruminations that happen on breaks between sessions of the course. Intervals concern the central theme of the manuscript, namely, what it means to speak in such a way that the unsayable gets spoken and evoked, and yet, when a being speaks and evokes Being, Being already begins to disappear.

The Landmark Forum is a personal and professional development program, based on the discipline of applied ontology and phenomenology. Erhard created the work in the early 1970’s and continued its development until in 1991 Landmark took over its ongoing development as expressed in The Landmark Forum and other Landmark programs. As of the writing of this book, the material and structure of the Forum have continued to be developed during nearly three decades since the 1989 Forum presented in this book.

Dr. Drew Kopp is an Associate Professor in the Writing Arts department at Rowan University. With a research interest focused on the theory and history of rhetorical pedagogies. Dr. Kopp has published articles in prominent journals in the field of rhetoric and writing studies, including Rhetoric Review (2013), JAC: Rhetoric, Writing, Culture, Politics (2012), and Kairos (2010). He also contributed to the edited collection Disrupting Pedagogies in the Knowledge Society (2011).

Dr. Bruce Hyde?was a Professor of Communication Studies at St. Cloud State University until his death on October 13th, 2015. His primary interests as an educator have been the ontological dimensions of language and communication; and dialogue as a non-polarized and non-polarizing form of public discourse.