It sounds like Being and Time didn’t make sense for Steiner. — Joshs

Steiner wasn't saying that Being and Time doesn't make sense. He was explaining that it's incomplete and that people who heard him speak said his lectures went beyond what he wrote. I guess the same was said of Plato. Apparently there is a recording of him somewhere, and Steiner says it reveals a magnetic personality.

I'm thinking of how mesmerizing I found What is Metaphysics. Maybe that gives me a hint as to what Arendt and the others are talking about.

Dialectics? You mean Hegelian dialectics? — Joshs

Or Neoplatonic, yea.

The irony is that reductive naturalism is the product of Enlightenment philosophy, and is often aligned with rationalist theology and deism, where humanism is more closely aligned with atheistic existentialists like Sartre. — Joshs

Theists can definitely be a-humanistic to the extent that sinners are tossed away like garbage into a fire.

Steiner wasn't saying that Being and Time doesn't make sense. He was explaining that it's incomplete and that people who heard him speak said his lectures went beyond what he wrote. I guess the same was said of Plato. Apparently there is a recording of him somewhere, and Steiner says it reveals a magnetic personality. — frank

70% of Heidegger’s published work is lectures or seminars.

70% of Heidegger’s published work is lectures or seminars. — Joshs

Okay?

Yes. That would be part of the intelligent resolution of real problems, not philosophical ones. Dewey called the tendency to neglect context "the philosophers fallacy."

↪Joshs
Yes. That would be part of the intelligent resolution of real problems, not philosophical ones. Dewey called the tendency to neglect context "the philosophers fallacy." — Ciceronianus

Heidegger initially called his approach philosophy but then called it ‘thinking’ in order to distance it from the association between philosophy and abstraction.

Heidegger initially called his approach philosophy but then called it ‘thinking’ in order to distance it from the association between philosophy and abstraction. — Joshs

According to this essay, it's rationality itself he wants people to learn to get past.

This is the kind of thing that Habermas wouldn't have been able to accept because he and others perceived that the Holocaust was a manifestation of the indulgence of irrationality. In fact, the Nazis in general were thought of as such a manifestation. For Habermas, it was imperative to bolster rationality in every way possible to return to psycho-social stability.

If that meant giving up what Heidegger thought of as the special destiny of the Germans, it wouldn't have even been a consideration. Redemption wasn't on the table after WW2. There was nothing but silence. I never realized what the intellectual climate of post-WW2 Germany was like. It was a like a dark, empty cave. Just pure desolation.

Not a moral content but an ethical process. Authenticity guards against reifying experience into totalizing moral categories, and that is an ethical achievement. — Joshs

We need a thread on this alone. :wink:

This is the kind of thing that Habermas wouldn't have been able to accept because he and others perceived that the Holocaust was a manifestation of the indulgence of irrationality. In fact, the Nazis in general were thought of as such a manifestation. For Habermas, it was imperative to bolster rationality in every way possible to return to psycho-social stability. — frank

Wasn't the Holocaust also a product of scientisitc thinking and misapplied rationalism with a technocratic final solution? Zygmunt Bauman ( a philosopher and death camp surviver) argues that the Holocaust was a product of modernity, made possible by bureaucratic rationality, which allowed ordinary people to participate in genocide without personal hatred or direct violence. I have always thought of the Holocaust as what happens when rational calculation overrides people’s emotions and moral instincts.

This is the kind of thing that Habermas wouldn't have been able to accept because he and others perceived that the Holocaust was a manifestation of the indulgence of irrationality. In fact, the Nazis in general were thought of as such a manifestation. For Habermas, it was imperative to bolster rationality in every way possible to return to psycho-social stability — frank

Habermas was a long way from Heidegger philosophically. His longing for a metaphysical and moral foundation causes him not only reject Heidegger and poststructuralism, but Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Gadamer, Freud and the many philosophical movements they were connected to which questioned foundationalism and recognized the need to reconcile
the rational and the irrational.

Wasn't the Holocaust also a product of scientisitc thinking and misapplied rationalism with a technocratic final solution? Zygmunt Bauman ( a philosopher and death camp surviver) argues that the Holocaust was a product of modernity, made possible by bureaucratic rationality, which allowed ordinary people to participate in genocide without personal hatred or direct violence. I have always thought of the Holocaust as what happens when rational calculation overrides people’s emotions and moral instincts. — Tom Storm

I suggested that previously in this thread. I'm reading a book called Another Country which covers the intellectual scene in Germany after the war and into reunification. People who lived through it said the German tendency toward irrationality was the real problem. What occurred to me was that eugenics, which Hitler loved about the USA, was a product of scientism, not irrational nationalism and what not.

Habermas was a long way from Heidegger philosophically. His longing for a metaphysical and moral foundation causes him not only reject Heidegger and poststructuralism, but Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Gadamer, Freud and the many philosophical movements they were connected to which questioned foundationalism and recognized the need to reconcile
the rational and the irrational. — Joshs

I get that. But whatever you and I may love, you have to respect the attitude of people who are trying to find the way for their culture to come out of shock and take a step into the future. I'd leave it to them to figure it out, even if that means burying something had potential.

Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass tried to talk about it. Their attempts listened to the silence.