Speaking Being Werner Erhard, Martin Heidegger, and a New Possibility of Being Human

PRAISE FOR SPEAKING BEING

"Millions have experienced the ideas of Werner Erhard, one of the most incisive and insightful thinkers of our generation. This book gives two additional and rare opportunities: to read the text of a Forum led by Erhard, and in parallel, to walk with a guide to the synergies between Erhard and the thinking of Martin Heidegger."
—DAVID EAGLEMAN, PhD, neuroscientist at Stanford University, New York Times bestselling author

"This book is powerful, imaginative, frustrating, amusing, threatening, and enlightening—all at the same time. It also has the power to transform your life."
—JONATHAN D. MORENO, University of Pennsylvania Professor of Ethics, author of Impromptu Man

"The profound impact of Werner Erhard's work on culture and society is a manifestation of an incredible insight, the experience of being, presented in this book through a comparative analysis of a transcript of a 1989 Forum led by Erhard alongside Heidegger's reflections on the meaning of 'being there.' The authors have drawn amazing parallels between these two extraordinary thinkers and have demonstrated the intersections of Heidegger's language with Erhard's ontological rhetoric of transformation. Erhard has at times described aspects of his method as ruthless compassion, and like all forms of compassion, evident here is a fundamental motivating desire to alleviate the suffering of others."
—JAMES R. DOTY, MD, Founder and Director, The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, Professor of Neurosurgery, Stanford University School of Medicine, and Senior Editor of the Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science

"Speaking Being is not a book. It is a multimodal tour de force of ontological rhetoric that hails its reader into an event and in so doing performs as an event, rather than what is commonly rendered as a book between two covers. Its status as an event is performed on every page wherein the 'showing' of Being is enacted via its remarkable design. Kaleidoscopically, Bruce Hyde and Drew Kopp have drawn their readers into a dazzling display, where the participants in dialogue with Werner Erhard in a specific Forum in 1989 are put into dialogue with Martin Heidegger. The result is arguably one of the most astounding academic interventions into both Erhard's methodology and Heideggerian thought. Citing David Farrell Krell, Hyde and Kopp remind us that 'to be on a woodpath means to be in a cul-de-sac, a path that leads nowhere and has no exit.' Speaking Being puts its readers in a dizzying cul-de-sac within which they may never leave, but rather transform into one of the glittering particles of this rhetorical kaleidoscope."
—CYNTHIA HAYNES, Professor of English, Clemson University, author of The Homesick Phone Book: Addressing Rhetoric in the Age of Perpetual Conflict