After All These Years, Still Not Thinking
I am reading What Is Called Thinking by Martin Heidegger. I have finished nine of the lectures which he delivered in 1951 and 52. One more and I will have finished the tenth one, and the reading though difficult has been satisfying. Anyone who believes that Martin Heidegger is not inordinately difficult to understand is just kidding themselves. I recall when I was in grad school in my thirties, I decided to purchase a copy of Being and Time, his magnum opus work. Since I had read a fair amount of philosophy I thought I was ready for Heidegger. I pushed through one or two sections before giving up. I just did not have enough intellectual tools, to make sense as I read the text. I gave the tome away to a friend. That was forty some years ago.
Martin Heidegger is a transgressive thinker. He does not directly criticize the usual manner of doing philosophy, the analytic style of serious scholarship. Rather, he suggests what is most provocative – that we have not yet begun to think. That my friend, according to Heidegger, is what ought to stimulate us to begin to think. Well, ok. Then the question that hangs out there – what does he mean by think(ing)? As far as I have read, up to lecture no. 9, he is closing upon the answer to that query.
A thought or two more to close out this post. Professor Heidegger, suggests that the world/reality is essentially “willing”, the forward thrust of Being, or of life. In this he follows Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. Then he suggests the fracture of conventional thinking, is that frustration, a chronic irritation due to the effects of time, the inevitable erasure of our endeavors. He goes to some length to piggy back on what Nietzsche wrote:
This, yes, this alone is revenge itself: the wills revulsion against time, and its ‘It was’.”
– Thus Spake Zarathustra, Part II, On Deliverance.
This bias to “settle up” on account of the tacit, the subconscious outrage on account of the oblivion that time entails, contaminates and skews what goes for conventional thinking. I am speculating here because I have not finished the book. However I think this is the direction that he is taking.
If so, how does one bridge this proclivity for wreaking “justice” upon those who happen to have been born into a different culture, are adapted to different life ways, believe in another God, inhabit a different POV? This, – my flawed and irritable will entangles my thinking. Such is the case for others too. How am I (are we) to get past that?
I’ll let you know, if/when I learn more as I read on.
