Thursday, August 30, 2018

Heidegger's entanglement

"Had Heidegger ever come up with a saying to sum up his philosophy it would have been: ‘I dwell, therefore I am.’ For him, identity is bound up with being in the world, which in turn means having a place in it. We don’t live in the abstract space favoured by philosophers, but in a particular place, with specific features and history. We arrive already entangled with the world, not detached from it. Our identity is not secured just in our heads but through our bodies too, how we feel and how we are moved, literally and emotionally.

"Instead of presenting it as a puzzle to be solved, Heidegger’s world is one we should immerse ourselves in and care for: it is part of the larger ‘being’ where we all belong. As Malpas puts it, Heidegger argues that we should release ourselves to the world, to find our part in its larger ebb and flow, rather than seek to detach ourselves from it in order to dominate it." ~ Charles Leadbeater summarizes a lot of what I like about Heidegger in as clean a language as one could care for.

----------

A quick word about Heidegger's Nazism: I want to say that Heidegger was like Ezra Pound, whom I feel gets a pass for being a good poet, but a political and social idiot. Pound was selfless enough to encourage many world-class poets. But, Heidegger wasn't selfless. He was man of poor character, a bigot, a coward. He did not practice what he preached. Reading Heidegger is like coming back to what was a family home, now made rubble by a spring twister. Tragedy everywhere, but some keepsakes remain.

2 comments:

  1. Descartes launched the distinctively modern tradition, culminating in Hegel’s systematic presentation of the whole Western tradition, philosophical and religious. More recently, Heidegger approached that tradition in terms of its hidden ground in the Mystery of Being, recalling us to meditative thinking as the secular counterpart to prayer. (from a book review)

    ReplyDelete
  2. "All of us, in many ways, contribute to the brokenness of the world. And the brokenness of the world shapes people who grow up to do terrible things. And all of us have to come to terms with the fact that we are part of this world that is broken and we contribute to it." ~ Dr. Isabelle Hamley and a more cruciform way to think about Thrownness.

    ReplyDelete