[lit-ideas] Re: Heidegger and the "Ideas of 1914"
- From: "Mike Geary" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:23:27 -0600
LH:
But I'll ask you that question, Mike. Who have you read about Heidegger
that has convinced you that he is someone not to be read?<<
I've never said he was not worth reading. I don't read him anymore, but I
have read most of "Being and Time", most of the essays in the collections
"Basic Writings", "Existence And Being", and "Poetry Language And Thought."
I sat through a graduate seminar in Heidegger (a course I was woefully
unprepared for -- but it was an audit course so no loss). I've read I don't
know how many interpretive essays on Heidegger and almost none were any more
lucid than Heidegger himself. When I was reading Heidegger, I thought he
was more poet than philosopher, that he didn't really have any more
knowledge of what any of it means than I do, he just had a new way of
expressing his awe at the fact of existence which is all that any good art
does. "Why is there anything rather than nothing?" Why? Because there is.
What other possible answer could there be that's accessible to our knowing?
The fact that there IS existence is the source of awe and beauty and etc.,
etc., etc., but not knowledge, or so I believe. Heidegger's philosophy is
very succinct, it's captured in one short sentence: "We are always already
immersed in a World." There's not much more to be said philosophically.
Heidegger realized that and turned to poeticizing the Nordic race as was his
ridiculous world's wont. I still like reading certain passages of
Heidegger, for example:
"Man alone of all beings, when addressed by the voice of Being, experiences
the marvel of all marvels: that what-is is.
Therefore the being that is called in its very essence to the truth of Being
is always attuned in an essential sense. The clear courage for the
essential dread guarantees that most mysterious of all possibilities: the
experience of Being. For hard by essential dread, in the terror of the
abyss, there dwells awe (Scheu). Awe clears and enfolds that region of
human being within which man endures, as at home, in the enduring." (What
Is Metaphysics)
Is that philosophy? To me it's not, but evidently some philosophers think
so. To me it's a description of the feeling of awe that comes from the
sudden awareness that one is here -- in the here and now -- an awareness
made possible by knowing nothingness (or imagining it). It's clunky prose
poetry (of the German sort), not pursuit of knowledge.
What I was asking you is why you are so concerned about Heidegger's Nazism
if you find significance in his thought. Are you afraid you'll be
unwittingly contaminated? You're already contaminated -- not with Nazism
that I know of -- but with Americanism and all the bullshit that carries
with it. Every human being is contaminated with some crackerbarrel
Weltanschauung. That's what Dasein is all about.
Mike Geary
poetically dwelling
in Memphis
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