Rorty reaches critical mass over Heidegger's things.
One incidental and belated product of this failure to grasp das Wesen des Dinges (the essence of the thing) was, according to Heidegger, the probability of nuclear annihilation: "Man gazes upon what might come with the explosion of the atomic bomb. Man does not see what already arrived long ago, and which transpires as that which only casts forth the explosion of the atomic bomb as its final eruption [...] What does this helpless anxiety still await, when the horrifying thing has already happened?" The elimination of mortal life between earth and sky, Heidegger thinks, is just the sort of thing you have to expect if you get das Wesen des Dinges wrong. Nuclear catastrophe "is only the crudest of all crude confirmations of the annihilation of the thing that already transpired long ago."
Passages such as these help to remind us what a self-infatuated blowhard Heidegger was. He is a perfect example of the idiot, the sort of person who has no sense of citizenship and whom you would never want to represent you in parliament. All that nuclear annihilation meant to him was one more bit of evidence for his claim to have understood das Wesen des Dinges better than Plato and Aristotle. The idea that we might gather together in public assemblies and agitate for a reform of the United Nations, one that would enable it to cope with nuclear proliferation, would have struck Heidegger as showing a ludicrous failure to understand the priority of Denken (thinking) over mere politics.
