Monday, October 18, 2004
In-der-Blog-sein
Brown Like Me revisits an interview with Jurgen Habermas that was published earlier this year in the journal Logos. Habermas is answering a question on why him and Derrida are suddenly getting along (they have diametrically opposite views on Heidegger):
Seinsdenken, being-thinking, is what Heidegger is remembered for. Call it a botch job if you must, but what ever else he did is footnotes.
A caesura is a break in a line, and serves as the break into what Habermas is thinking. There was no break on Mount Sinai, that story is pure mythology, ask a historian, and today let me stick to the facts, but the "Enlightenment of Socrates" is the clue. The there was no illumination of Socrates, like the awakening on Sinai. Socrates, asked questions, rather than having truth revealed to him. The projecting back of the enlightenment, is an illusion of Habermas's modernism. Heidegger does not go for breaks, or do any breaking (he is, however, sensitive to turning events!). Thinking beyng puts modernism in a box. What we hear from Habermas is the rage of the prisoner who does not recognize the box he confines himself in. ¶ 8:19 PM
Brown Like Me revisits an interview with Jurgen Habermas that was published earlier this year in the journal Logos. Habermas is answering a question on why him and Derrida are suddenly getting along (they have diametrically opposite views on Heidegger):
But even as a philosopher, he is suspect to me because, in the 1930s, he received Nietzsche precisely as a neo-pagan, as it was then the fashion to do. Unlike Derrida, whose reading of "Andenken" accords with the spirit of monotheistic tradition, I take Heidegger's botch-job "Seinsdenken" as a leveling of that epochal threshold in the history of consciousness that Jaspers had called the "axial age." According to my understanding, Heidegger committed treason against that caesura which is marked, in various ways, by the prophetic-awakening Word from Mount Sinai, and by the Enlightenment of a Socrates.When I read the above in Logos, I was befuddled. The whole poly/mono-theism sounds like a red herring. After all, Heidegger was the atheologist who said:
God -- that is the most worthy object of thought.Andenken, typically "rememberance", is a poem by Hölderlin that Heidegger addressed in a lecture course of that name in 1941, and examined again in a book on Hölderlin's poems. Gadamer helpfully interprets what it means to Heidegger in his essay on the poem. And yes, Heidegger does use Hölderlin as a vehicle to a pre-Platonic and pre-Chrisitian thinking; contemporaneous to his studies of Hölderlin were his lectures on the pre-Socratics. But he was not doing so for an either, nor an or, but in an enveloping beyng.
Seinsdenken, being-thinking, is what Heidegger is remembered for. Call it a botch job if you must, but what ever else he did is footnotes.
A caesura is a break in a line, and serves as the break into what Habermas is thinking. There was no break on Mount Sinai, that story is pure mythology, ask a historian, and today let me stick to the facts, but the "Enlightenment of Socrates" is the clue. The there was no illumination of Socrates, like the awakening on Sinai. Socrates, asked questions, rather than having truth revealed to him. The projecting back of the enlightenment, is an illusion of Habermas's modernism. Heidegger does not go for breaks, or do any breaking (he is, however, sensitive to turning events!). Thinking beyng puts modernism in a box. What we hear from Habermas is the rage of the prisoner who does not recognize the box he confines himself in. ¶ 8:19 PM
