“I don’t want to derail your thread, but I will just add one thing since it is relevant to what has gone before. You (and others interested) might consider checking out the works of Heidegger generally collected under the title Basic Works. In them you will find a Heidegger much more generous in his presentation than in his other works. Also, a little bird told me that if you find out their names and search for them you should be able to find them.
I will add though, to understand Heidegger’s focus on poïesis you have to understand his stance on modern technology and the problem he felt arises from a hegemony of instrumental reasoning. Poetry, you might admit, does bring humanity closer to its connection with nature, the world, existence, or what have you, than for example creating machines. — I might say that creating machines is something essentially human, but it doesn’t really improve out spiritual connection with Being. Heidegger’s position was that thinking of Being brought us closest but poetry has the ability to absorb us and make us feel closer to existence even as an audience if not as performers or creators.
Has our modern world of ubiquitous technology brought us closer to eudaimonia (roughly, ‘the good life’) or have we perhaps even lost something that older civilizations had by living closer to nature? Is it desirable for humanity to change its trajectory? Is it possible any longer or have we entered an era where we are determined by our technology to pursue conquest at all costs?” –The Artful Pauper….
“I don’t want to derail your thread, but I will just add one thing since it is relevant to what has gone before.”
I think that too often we encounter people on these boards who take what they’re doing way too seriously –or may be posing as people who do when all they’re really looking for is an opportunity to heckle: this constant bitching about “serious philosophy” and staying on topic. This comes from a failure to see message boards for their real value: that as a workshop or jam in which we engage in a kind of play in order to find material for our more serious philosophical pursuits. I, personally, see any string I start as a catalyst to a rhizomatic series of associations (experimentation (that must go where it will to produce. And if anyone is responsible for bringing it back to topic, it is the person that started the string.
“You (and others interested) might consider checking out the works of Heidegger generally collected under the title Basic Works. In them you will find a Heidegger much more generous in his presentation than in his other works. Also, a little bird told me that if you find out their names and search for them you should be able to find them.”
This works with my sense of it. Clearly Being and Time is not the best place to start. Along with your suggestion, I have Walter Kaufman’s Existentialism: from Dostoevsky to Sartre which I need to get back to if I can ever get out of the mire I find myself in with these other GODDAMN Frenchmen. I mean it: Damn the French and their weird obscure philosophies anyway!!!
But one way or the other, I do hope to get back to Heidegger –if through nothing else, at least secondary text. I have found things in him I can use, not just what I will describe below, but his concept of Anguish which, as Mary Warnock describes it, is about being tapped into the underlying nothingness of things. Or as I got from a documentary on him (topdocumentaryfilms.com/heidegge … g-the-unth…/ : the ungroundedness of things. This closely parallels my concept of the nihilistic perspective –which I would need another rhizome to articulate on.
“I will add though, to understand Heidegger’s focus on poïesis you have to understand his stance on modern technology and the problem he felt arises from a hegemony of instrumental reasoning. Poetry, you might admit, does bring humanity closer to its connection with nature, the world, existence, or what have you, than for example creating machines. — I might say that creating machines is something essentially human, but it doesn’t really improve out spiritual connection with Being. Heidegger’s position was that thinking of Being brought us closest but poetry has the ability to absorb us and make us feel closer to existence even as an audience if not as performers or creators.
Has our modern world of ubiquitous technology brought us closer to eudaimonia (roughly, ‘the good life’) or have we perhaps even lost something that older civilizations had by living closer to nature? Is it desirable for humanity to change its trajectory? Is it possible any longer or have we entered an era where we are determined by our technology to pursue conquest at all costs?”
As Keats said: poetry is the pick-axe by which we penetrate the frozen sea of knowledge. Art is a direct confrontation with being that passes into the evanescence of abstraction into nothingness. Philosophy, on the other hand, works in abstraction and struggles away from the evanescence and the pull of nothingness back to that confrontation with Being and existence.
And Heidegger’s anti-technological stance is a little hard to deny given that we face our own self destruction through our arrogance and man-made climate change. And while our current approach (modern technology (hasn’t so much given us the “good life”, it has given us the comfortable life very similar to junkies with a full stash of heroin or the narrators in Tennyson’s Land of the Lotus Eaters.
Capitalism and technology has turned us into the Land of the Lotus Eaters. Heidegger has relevance, despite his flaws.