This is what interests me about Heidegger and part of what catalyzed me to write Heidegger’s Glasses. Like most people in the world, Heidegger was crazily dissociated. In Being and Time, written years before the war, he spoke about the nature of existence as one of care and of how Dasein (his word for Being, or human existence) creates a fragilely constructed world that tries to move away from mortality. Heidegger of all people should have known that substructure of the Reich was antithetical to the needs and nature of Dasein. Yet he was either oblivious or didn’t care.

To this writer’s mind, Heidegger’s behavior is only a dramatic instance of the way most people live their lives. That people are continually surprised by this lack of integration illuminates the fact that we don’t understand how mundane needs for love, approval, power--even the reduction of stress--result in unconscious and even brutal behavior.

¶ 11:12 AM