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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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To: betty boop

I've put in a little time, at least, on people like Descartes, Gides, Camus, Sartre, and Derrida, but I draw the line at Heidegger. What he means by "being" is not what I mean by it, I'm quite sure. It's got to be "being toward death," or something of the sort, but I don't find that very helpful.

I've met Derrida, actually, but didn't quite know what to say to him. That St. Augustine had already answered his problems about absence and differance in The Confessions? Fortunately he was surrounded by young women eager to butter him up.


156 posted on 10/30/2006 1:00:22 PM PST by Cicero (Marcus Tullius)
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