Standingunder Understanding

I won't speak for Heidegger. Everyone knows the man was a Nazi. He's famous for his questionable style. His etymologies have been doubted by experts. From the beginning of knowing the least bit about him I have been aware of all of this. In fact, I learned of him first from those against him. So I put off looking into him.

I speak for myself here. Take or leave it. Yes, I'm influenced by Heidegger, but also by many others.

Philosophy is not just debate, argument, the making of a case. Perhaps it was Plato who put this attitude into Western philosophy. Then Aristotle came in with his formal logic, etc. The point is to not take it for granted that dialectic is the royal road to truth. Personally, I love a good argument. But that's not the only way to communicate. Sometimes an aphorism is better. Sometimes a paradox is preferable. Sometimes a poetic-suggestiveness is the right method to communicate one's experience.
I don't care if it looks like poetry. In my eyes, it's all poetry. It's the creative use of language. And any text on the nature of text is subject to the next text. As far as I can tell, argumentation requires axioms, implicit or explicit. From the beginning then, dialectic is a bluff. Dialectic is persuasion that pretends to be "scientific."

---------- Post added 02-20-2010 at 03:41 PM ----------



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To understand is to stand under.
Western Man likes to rip Nature's dress off. If not that, then some other dress or curtain. The intellectual is conceived of as a person with x-ray vision who "sees through." [...] To stand under and look up.

All this talk about tearing dresses reminds me of the beginning scene from Zizek's Perverts Guide to the Cinema where he says "I want a third pill." (He is making a Matrix reference) Zizek's quip is a bit like stopping ourselves before we tear the dress off and saying to the Goddess, "Let's leave the dress on this time."

Well, it saves on dresses. :devilish:

You mentioned in another post (sorry, haven't got the hang of quoting from several posts in a long thread - is it that "multi-quote" button I can no longer see?) about Heidegger being the opposite of Francis Bacon. I just want to mention having read somewhere recently that the remark about "putting nature on the rack" which is often attributed to Bacon is actually due to Leibniz.

All this talk about tearing dresses reminds me of the beginning scene from Zizek's Perverts Guide to the Cinema where he says "I want a third pill." (He is making a Matrix reference) Zizek's quip is a bit like stopping ourselves before we tear the dress off and saying to the Goddess, "Let's leave the dress on this time."