Heidegger is deeply reactionary in the proper, not necessarily condemning sense of the word. His thinking aligns him with those who ‘see modernity instead as a movement of ethnic and class domination, European imperialism, anthropocentrism, the destruction of nature, the dissolution of community and tradition, the rise of alienation, the death of individuality in bureaucracy’ (ibid). Although the term post-dates him, Heidegger is also a major thinker of ‘globalization’. Heidegger was a philosopher who gave supreme importance to some poetic texts. He retained, however, a philosopher’s contempt for the field of literary criticism, with its mix of moralism and amateur philosophizing. If the literary takes on a new importance for Heidegger, it is because his thinking also disputes what ‘philosophy’ has always meant since classical Greece.

¶ 7:27 PM