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To: Cicero

I should add that postmodernist philosophy is even more hopeless. It posits that there is no objective reality; everything is relative; "truth" is meaningless; and therefore that the purpose of academic argument is to change the language so that everyone is forced to agree with what you say.

That's basically what Heidegger, who lies behind the more popular Derrida and outweighs him, did. It has been said that if you spend enough time trying to understand Heidegger, it will drive you mad, which was evidently his intention. At least, to drive you out of the real world and into his world.


144 posted on 10/30/2006 8:45:31 AM PST by Cicero (Marcus Tullius)
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To: Cicero; Alamo-Girl; cornelis; hosepipe
It has been said that if you spend enough time trying to understand Heidegger, it will drive you mad, which was evidently his intention. At least, to drive you out of the real world and into his world.

Yes, out of "First Reality" into a "preferred" alternative reality, or "Second Reality," as Robert Musil, Heimito von Doderer, Eric Voegelin, et al., have termed it. Second realities, in principle, are flights from first reality and usually boil down to "contempt for reason" -- aspernatio rationis as your namesake put it. In classical times, such flights were regarded (e.g., by Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus, Cicero) as cases of pneumopathological disorder.

Heidegger, I gather, was just all hyped up on the disorder of the Weimar period, and actually helped set the stage for Hitler.... he "softened up" the German people for their future destruction with his irrational confusions.

155 posted on 10/30/2006 11:33:41 AM PST by betty boop (Beautiful are the things we see...Much the most beautiful those we do not comprehend. -- N. Steensen)
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