[lit-ideas] On Weltanschauungs, crackerbarrel and otherwise

  • From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2009 08:26:39 -0800

Geary writes, "Every human being is contaminated with some crackerbarrel
Weltanschauung.  That's what Dasein is all about."

That seems unnecessarily harsh.  Here is Julian Young putting the matter
into terms Heidegger would probably be willing to accept:

"Heidegger's view of the relation between tradition and the self is deeply
influenced by Hegel's 'communitarian' understanding of the relation between
identity and morality in the sense of 'custom' or Sittlichkeit.  It is
interesting to observe an almost perfect agreement between Heidegger and the
British Hegelian, F. H. Bradley:

'the child . . . is born . . . into a living world . . . He does not even
think of his separate self; he grows with his world, his mind fills and
orders itself; and when he can separate himself from that world, and know
himself apart from it, then by that time his self, the object of his self
consciousness, is penetrated, infected, characterized by the existence of
others.  Its content implies, in every fibre, relations of community.  He
learns, or already perhaps has learnt, to speak, and here he appropriates
the common heritage of his race, the tongue that he makes his own is his
country's language, it is . . . the same the others speak, and it carries
into his mind the ideas and sentiments of the race . . . and stamps them
indelibly.  He grows up in an atmosphere of example and general custom . . .
The soul within him is saturated, is filled, is qualified by, it has
assimilated, has got its substance, has built itself up from, it is one and
the same life with the universal life, and if he turns against this he turns
against himself."

Lawrence

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