4 posts tagged “heidegger”

What is your favorite quote and why?

"Two things always fill me with wonder:  the starry heavens above and the moral law within."--Immanuel Kant  (that quotation gets various translated, but the gist remains the same)

Well, I don't know.  Isn't it obvious why I like that one so much?  It's not only the moral law but the faculties that have given us the power of making and following moral law.  The consciousness, the language, and okayyyyy the compassion.  Whatever.  You feely types.

"If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself."--Martin Heidegger

I have found this absolutely to be true.  And right now I'm reading a Don DeLillo book (Falling Man) and I wonder, as I have before reading his books, if he is aware that he is essentially Heideggerian, or if it's just coincidence.  White Noise is almost as Heideggerian as Being and Time.  Only without the jargon and confusing capitalizations.

Eh, every time one of these questions comes up about favorite quotations, I'm always there with the dour Germans.  I don't know what gets into me.  But Don DeLillo isn't German!

How about this one, then:

"You may not be strong, you may not be smart, but you sure are a hairy little monkey."--some sitcom a long time ago.

And finally I leave with one I have seen so many times but have only just learned to appreciate in the past few years:  AMOR FATI. 

People get a lot of weird ideas about the study of philosophy, the most irritating of which is that philosophy is very simple and anyone could do it (uh huh, sure, go read Sources of the Self, and then we'll talk, ok?  No, really, go read it.  It's one of the most important books that came out in the 20th century.  I'll wait).  But one of the most constant is that philosophy majors are let in on the secret to the Meaning of Life at some point in the game, probably just before graduating.  Whenever some nincompoop has come up and asked me what this big secret is, I have usually hemmed and hawed.  Heidegger is fucking hard to explain in the 30 second American attention span.

But more and more I am finding the links between disparate philosophies and religions, finding more connections than points of dispute.  I don't really do political philosophy, admittedly, and I long ago gave myself over to Continental (as opposed to Anglo-Saxon--silly crackers) thought.  There is much that can be said about it--there is a lot of ontological frottage in there--but if you put the Heidegger quote together with the notion of loving your fate, I think that's all there really is.  I think that's the meaning of life, right there.  It's the key to beauty, to ethics, to happiness, to truth such as it is. 

There.  I've just shared with you all the meaning of life. 

Sadly, it seems to be difficult for weak and filthy humans to do.  Work on it, people.

P.S.  Do not go look "frottage" up in the dictionary, ok?

I've had the Mormons* over a few times now--you know, the earnest young men in suits who come around trying to convert you, like the Jehovah's Witnesses, only Mormon instead.  T thought I should have shooed them off a long time ago, but I like having company.  They've been putting my lack of faith to the test, and it's been interesting.

No, no, I'm not converting, not at all, but it was interesting trying to explain to people who clearly have a lot of faith in God what it means to have none at all and how you could come to be like that (to be honest, I don't know how I came to be like this--I just am and always have been, though certainly living with an archaeologist and a physical anthropologist has not helped). 

Anyway, it got me to thinking about atheism.  I've been an atheist as long as I can remember, but for me it means exactly what it says--a lack of belief.  Nothing more, nothing less.  It has never meant to me that I'm absolutely dead certain that no god exists or has ever existed.  It does not profess some alternate belief.  It does not define me or anything about me.  It only means I don't believe in God or any other god (and, OK, it also means that when confronted by that heinous song, "Our God is an Awesome God" I am prompted, unlike Christians, to ponder whether any of the other gods implied by the phrasing are more awesome or at least equally awesome--the song does not rule out such a possibility, which I think would really piss the Old Testament God off a lot.  Ahem.)

The point is that I was always somewhat confounded by the accusations occasionally hurled by Christians that atheism is a religion, too.  But looking around at other atheists, including but by no means limited to the Atheist group on Vox, I can kind of see their point.

Atheists, let me ask you this:  Whence the fucking moral superiority?  I understand you think people who believe are stupid and intellectually inferior because they have just not seen the light understood the wonders of science as deeply as you have.  Also, you think "religion kills" which is akin to saying "guns kill" or "silver hammers kill"--the point is that none of those things kill in the absence of people (and specifically, people named Maxwell). 

Let's start there.  The first point is obviously falsifiable.  Stupidity has plenty to go around and it does not spare those who do not believe in God.  Some of the smartest people I've ever known have been religious.  The rest of the smartest people I've ever known haven't been.  There has been no discernible difference in quantity or quality of intelligence between the two groups.  It seems to be true that more educated populations tend to be less religious, but that doesn't say anything about the intelligence of any given individuals, and even in less religious societies you will find intellectuals who believe in God. 

As to the second point, "religion" does not kill and cannot, being a concept rather than a concrete thing.  Certainly, all manner of craziness and slaughter has been perpetrated in the name of religion.  On the other hand, there has been all kinds of craziness and slaughter perpetrated by humans that had nothing to do with religion or had to do with religion in name only.  The current quagmire in Iraq would be a case in point, I believe.

Furthermore, just as we insist that you cannot prove the existence of God (and you can't--if St. Thomas Aquinas failed, if Descartes failed, then so, surely, will you), neither can we prove the nonexistence of God.  It is generally held to be logically impossible to prove nonexistence, but even if this were not the case--if nonexistence of a thing can be proven--and even if we thought we had proved that the Judeo-Christian God does not exist, this does not demonstrate that no other god or gods exist, and so the work of disproving "god" is not ever really going to be done, even if it were theoretically possible (with an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of typewriters...). 

There are good arguments that gods generally and God specifically are inventions of the human mind.  Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and Julian Jaynes put forth a whole slew of direct and indirect arguments that this is so, enough that I find their logic compelling.  It is worth noting two things about that, though.  The first is that I was already a person lacking faith.  The second is that the fact that we invented god/God does not mean God didn't or doesn't exist.  Hear me out.

If the notion of "god" is a product of human imagination, this would have to mean that no god exists independently of humans, that the gods we usually think of, and certainly God as written in the Bible, do not exist in the absence of human consciousness.  But to say that something cannot exist if it is the mere product of our minds is, again, patently false.  We would have to say, then, that music does not exist, that language is not real, that consciousness itself is nothing.  It's true that there are differences between language and God or music and God, yes, but there are also similarities (not the way Christians think of God, as a being who created us and exists completely independently of us, no, but in the way that I think gods came to be).

To me, faith is a beautiful thing and belief in God is not essentially less worthwhile than sincere appreciation of music or linguistic art.  That's not to say that I believe in God or any god.  I don't.  While I do appreciate music and especially linguistic art, my faith component is missing.  I look to other sources to explain the same things that people who believe explain via gods (or I just don't explain them and let things be all cool and mysterious), but I don't think this makes me a better or smarter person than someone who has the faith that I don't.

Back in the grad school days, when I was taking a lit seminar called The Literature of American Imperialism (one of the best classes I ever took, by the way), I wrote for my seminar paper an essay about otherness.  Obviously, the class was permeated with opportunities to curse Privileged Dead White Men--it was an excellent survey of the peculiar sorts of horror that colonialism and even just the imperialist attitude can perpetrate.  "Other" was a term that got tossed around a lot, too, and in the wrong hands even such a simple word takes on an air of jargon, but generally speaking, it means someone who is not like you, but particularly someone who is oppressed in some way by you and people of your ilk.  The idea in such seminars is that the Other who was once objectified and silenced is now given space and respect and individuality and Thou-ness (to borrow somewhat obnoxiously from Buber). 

But apparently that meant that the former objectifier--the aforementioned Privileged Dead White Man--became the objectified, the vilified, the silenced.  Now I am not so silly as to have tried to argue that the Dead White Man was right in his opinions and actions--certainly not--but I was naive enough to venture the argument, just occasionally, that these Dead White Guys were Other to us now.  Even though we're white (we all were in that seminar, go figure) and think we are therefore similar, we are actually not.  Not only has the elapsed time made us think much differently than they did, the changes in religion vs secularism, changes in science and education about the world, et cetera, have made us so different from those guys (OK, sure, not the guys who perpetrated the Vietnam War, but from Columbus and Cortez?  Uh, yes) as to make them unknown and Other to us.  We think, because of our skin color, that we know them, but we don't and if we silence them, we never will--and that means not understanding our own history as well as the histories of the Others (because those histories are intertwined, see?).

It was a long essay, and I'm oversimplifying here (the actual essay was apparently so complicated, and so infused with Heidegger, that when I presented it at a conference, some of the audience confessed to me that they hadn't understood it at all--okayyyyyyyy), but the point is that it's become commonplace for atheists to denounce Christians as stupid bigots, and maybe you think that since they are the majority there can be no serious bigotry against them (which would mean you don't believe in "reverse racism" and so forth either, probably).  But I say that that is wrong--wrong and immoral.  The fact is that since everyone is Other to you in some way, everyone deserves identical respect as an individual and an equal, fair hearing.  Bigotry is bigotry, no matter what college it went to.  And I'm having no more of it.

Obviously, my general contempt for humans remains.  Sure, I can think we all suck equally and still provide everyone, no matter their race or creed, an equal opportunity to suck.  We suck as a species, and the general self-righteous bigotry from all sides just kind of supports that thesis.  A few days ago I was sad about William Buckley's death because I had a lot of respect and admiration for him, even though we obviously disagreed about many, many things.  Doesn't matter, see?  It isn't only the people who are like you already who are worth listening to.

*By the by, is anyone else surprised to hear that Mormons and Jews each constitute approximately 1.6 percent of the US population?  I would have thought there were many more Jews than that and certainly more than Mormons, but apparently it is the case. 

**A lot of this post probably needs further development to make it really coherent and sound.  But it's very late, and I'm getting tired, so it will have to wait.  No doubt my brilliant commenters will have things to add, too, that I never even thought of.  I hope so.  The era of my moderation is still in its infancy, and it could use some help growing up.

Which Existentialist Philosopher Are You?
created with QuizFarm.com

Via RPM.

Dude, that was totally predictable.  Actually, my results are probably skewed because I knew exactly what philosopher most of the questions were referring to, and I know Marty is my man.  I am a very wordy person, as anyone who has read even a post or two by me knows.  (and, by the way, Sartre was just ripping off Heidegger)

As far as the Nazi sympathies, well, no.  Not really.  Although I did once say that we all have a little tiny Hitler inside us, waiting to get out.  You could substitute any dictator's name for "Hitler," and, in fact, you probably should.  Hitler has become known almost exclusively as an anti-Semitic dictator, although he also hated Gypsies, gays, and many others with equal virulence. 

I do know why Heidegger sympathized with the Nazis, though, and I really don't think it had anything to do with the Jews or any of the other groups Hitler persecuted.  Heidegger was a nationalist; you can get nationalism from his theory, but I am not a nationalist.  He was and I am a communitarian, and he took this a step further and went nationalist.  I think that times of great economic hardship, such as those of Germany after WWI, tend to turn people that way.  Heidegger believed, as do I, that by being thrown into a culture, we are bound by that culture in some crucial way; it defines the possibilities and fundaments of our lives.  He wanted Germany to be German in culture.  In that, he shared something with Hitler.  It is reprehensible that he therefore ignored the extermination of the Jews and others (despite his ongoing correspondence with Hannah Arendt, too).

But, while I do believe as he did that culture is important and fundamental, I do not believe that culture equates with nation, and I do not believe that our culture or nation requires either the exile or the extermination of others.  I totally disavow the xenophobia.  Does that make me a Nazi sympathizer?  I don't really think so, because nationalism was, to them, a logical extension of their sense of culture (and cultural superiority, another trait I find repugnant)--they weren't the National Socialists without Nationalism, see? 

And I am in no way a nationalist.

Also, some of my best friends are Jews!   And Gypsies!

Sorry, I totally had to do that.

Last but not least, here's a fun tidbit:  Did you know that if you Google "some of my best friends are black!" you get this from the Economist:  "NINE out of ten Britons have few or no black or Asian friends."   Mmmmmkayyyyyy.

Later Edit:  I just took another one of those quizzes and found out I'm also Stan Marsh!  At least I'm not Kenny!

What's one of your favorite quotes? 
Submitted by Georgie-boy. 

"Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe - the starry heavens above and the moral law within."
Immanuel Kant

I also like this one, again from Kant:

"Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness."

Man, that Kant.  He was nothing if not fun and lighthearted.

I'm actually much more into Heidegger and the likeminded philosophers who have followed--Buber, Charles Taylor, Albert Borgmann, Sartre, Camus.  But Heidegger is not great with the quotes.  His sentences tend to lack horizons.

But here's a good one from old Marty:

"If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself.”

Nice, huh?  Again, with the fun and lighthearted German.  Makes you want to go give 'em both a big, squishy hug. 

I'm going to go drink heavily now.