‘Celebration . . . is self-restraint, is attentiveness, is questioning, is meditating, is awaiting, is the step over into the more wakeful glimpse of the wonder—the wonder that a world is worlding around us at all, that there are beings rather than nothing, that things are and we ourselves are in their midst, that we ourselves are and yet barely know who we are, and barely know that we do not know all this.’
Martin Heidegger, quoted as the epigraph to the first chapter of Richard Polt’s Heidegger: An Introduction.
There is a stillness I return to in Heidegger: not the stillness of resolution, but of proximity to something unspeakable. I’m preparing for another attempt at Being and Time, spurred this time not by duty but by the quiet provocations in Danyl McLauchlan’s Tranquility and Ruin. I had expected a kind of resistance reading, a skeptical distance, but found myself drawn into McLauchlan’s mix of metaphysics, meditation, and a hesitant openness to Heidegger. Even his engagement with effective altruism didn’t feel alien to that tradition; it touched something tremulous, undecidable.
It’s another rabbit hole, though that phrase is perhaps too quick. This path resembles the one that led me from Andrei Bely to Nietzsche: a pursuit not of coherence but of resonance, a kind of attentiveness to the shifting undercurrents of thought.
Altruism? Heidegger? who said openly and loudly that all Jews should be killed?
and Ahrendt killed herself
for being so brainless as …falling for such a drek
yes, she was misundersttod about the meaning of evil… but
there are reasons that Reason is unaware of…
I am capable of admiring a particular text without conflating that writing with an author’s life or desires. A text, once written, belongs to readers and can be liberated from the author. Heidegger can be a repellant human being and still have left texts that are worth trying to understand.
it´s your opinion. I resoect it indeed
as I hope you will do with mine…
I lost my familly in the Holocaust, and no, I do not admire
hienas who enjoyed the opera…I certainly do not.
Of course I respect and understand your position. Heidegger, for multiple reasons, may be an extreme case, but if we remove from our libraries all the writers with a problematic moral of ethical position, what remains is somewhat barren. Thank you for taking the time to comment and for respecting my opinion.