July 22, 2011.
Stapleton. Staten Island.
Friday. Day off. 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
Having trouble getting oriented again. What we are confronted with is beyond normal politics, and it requires an evolution of individual beings.
The clock is still ticking on the debt ceiling crisis. I can’t help but think we are moving into some kind of global economic phase change, and the American people have completely lost control over their destinies.
Question #1: How do we get rid of planetary plutocracy?
Question #2: What does it mean mean to be fully human and what social forms enable us to be such?
Right now Safranski’s biography of Heidegger is on my docket to finish reading. As far as this enterprise is concerned, I have classified Heidegger’s work under #2, expansion of consciousness. The reason I can’t push Heidegger aside is because he has seized on a great piece of truth:
that Dasein as such is demanded of man, that it is given to him--to be there. Anyone evading this essential oppressiveness lacks that defiant “in defiance of” that to Heidegger makes up everyday heroism. He who has not experience life as a burden in this sense knows nothing of the enigma of Dasein. In consequence, what is lacking is the inner terror that every mystery carries with it and that gives Dasein its greatness. …
This terror is the dramatically heightened astonishment that there is something and not nothing, the terrifying enigma is the Being in its naked THAT....
No political event, not even the World War, had been able to cause that awakening by itself. We are therefore still dealing not with a political but a philosophical awakening. Hence also Heidegger’s critique of all attempts to erect a worldview as an edifice in the political field and all calls to live in it. Once Dasein becomes transparent to itself, it ceases to erect such edifices. (Safranski, pages 196-197)
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