Tumbling Away
Today I am reading, while “leaning in” to process What Is Called Thinking by Martin Heidegger. Heidegger is difficult. At the beginning of the year I signed up with an online book club with two objectives in mind. I desired a virtual “community” of motivated adults to serve as a current of momentum to carry me along with reading a philosophy text each month, a text I wouldn’t otherwise read, if left to my preferences. Also, a circle of subscribers, each offering perspectives from a life-lived in another part of the world, is likely to have a flavor of graduate school, that is, the delight and intensity of working together to write and to speak well. So far, the Book Club has met my expectations.
I offer for your consideration an excerpt from Martin Heidegger, originally published in 1954. Keep in mind that Heidegger, one of Europe’s foremost philosophers joined with enthusiasm the German Nationalist Workers Party. In hind sight the Nazi Party affiliation proved a mistake too enormous that words are able to characterize. The “philosopher of thinking” was a demonstration of his argument as to the difficulty posed by thinking.
The world, men find, is not just out of joint but tumbling away into the nothingness of absurdity. Nietzsche who from his supreme peak far ahead of it all, as early as the eighteen-eighties had for it the simple, because thoughtful, words: “The wasteland grows.” It means, the devastation grows wider. Devastation is more than destruction. Devastation is more unearthly than destruction. Destruction only sweeps aside all that has grown up or been built so far; but devastation blocks all future growth and prevents all building. Devastation is more unearthly than mere destruction…
The devastation of the earth can easily go hand in hand with a guaranteed supreme living standard for man, and just as easily with the organized establishment of a uniform state of happiness for all men. Devastation can be the same as both, and can haunt us everywhere in the most unearthly way–by keeping itself hidden…
“Woe to him who hides wastelands within.”
What Is Called Thinking by Martin Heidegger, trans by J. Glenn Gray, Part I, Lecture III
The last line of the excerpt is a quotation from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. A concluding question comes to mind: Is a parallel here for us today?
What is living without music? For today, this durable tune by Simon and Garfunkel, Slip Slidin’ Away.
