:rofl: I lost a bet with myself too about your restraint!

If only there were such bots, ready to pounce at every reverent mention of his name.

I think the bot metaphor genuinely fits in here. Chatter is the swamp of hazy everyday intelligibility from which we emerge. Everybody knows that Hiedegger was a Nazi, that Nazis are bad. Or that a certain kind of philosopher is mumbo-jumbo fraud. It's so easy that repeating it is just being a bot.

Proximally and for the most part, we are bots. Even our philosophical selves are ripe for replacement by bots. Let's go ahead and install an anti-Heidegger bot on the site.

This spiel too is easily automated. I want a bot that says 'proximally and for the most part, we are bots.' It switches on whenever either Heidegger or AI is mentioned.

If only there were such bots, ready to pounce at every reverent mention of his name. — Ciceronianus the White

I just suggested installing one...

And I know that you're not really a bot, so no offense intended.

"The present -- as soon as we have named it by itself, we are already thinking of the past and the future, the earlier and the later as distinct from the now. But the present understood in terms of the now is not at all identical with the present in the sense in which the guests are present. We never say and we cannot say: 'The celebration took place in the now of many guests.'" Time and Being, p. 10

This helps understand a little Heidegger's distinction between "presencing" (or "presence"), which has been the mode from which "being" has been interpreted since the Greeks, and a successive sequence of "nows," which is how "time" is ordinarily understood (on the basis of presencing -- so that time itself becomes a present-at-hand fact, a kind of number line).

The entire thesis of Being and Time is that being has been interpreted on the basis of time, and a specific aspect of it: the "present." Our ordinary conception of "world time," or "clock time," comes out of our experience of the world, in the sense that we are temporally. Perhaps we could say "embedded time" or "experiential time" as someone put it, and which Heidegger calls "temporality."

This has interesting consequences for the history of philosophy (and science), and so for politics, technology, and values as well -- right to the present day. It flies in the face of 2,500 years worth of tradition, to boot. This is why I find Heidegger relevant and interesting, and at least worth taking a look at carefully.

Proximally and for the most part — path

Someone's been reading too much Heidegger :rofl:

I think Heidegger probably was thinking he would be the Third Reich's go-to philosopher, and so that was tempting. He was also apparently pretty naive politically. — Xtrix

Yeah. The way I read it is that he was an applied philosopher. We just don't like the way he did it. His world-historical fantasy of himself is pathetic...and Van Gogh cut his ear off, etc.

It would appear that Germany is finally awakening, understanding and seizing its destiny.

I hope that you will read Hitler’s book; its first few autobiographical chapters are weak. This man has a remarkable and sure political instinct, and he had it even while all of us were still in a haze, there is no way of denying that. The National Socialist movement will soon gain a wholly different force. It is not about mere party politics—it’s about the redemption or fall of Europe and western civilization. Anyone who does not get it deserves to be crushed by the chaos. Thinking about these things is no hindrance to the spirit of Christmas, but marks our return to the character and task of the Germans, which is to say to the place where this beautiful celebration originates. — Heidegger letter to brother

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/10/18/in-his-own-words/

But Pound is not a bad poet for liking Mussolini, and Heidegger's stupidity on Hitler doesn't cancel what is good in his work. [Jesus this is a bot-like thing to say. We also need an anti-anti-Heidegger bot.]

Someone's been reading too much Heidegger :rofl: — StreetlightX

I think you are missing the joke.

Nah it was legit good. I actually laughed out loud. That phrase is just so trademark Heidi and I wasn't expecting it.

Thanks! Yeah, that's what I was going for. Being a bot about being a bot...

Everyone knows he was a Nazi, yes. Some even know he was a devoted one. But this is trivial to philosophers and students of philosophy, a concern only to bots, yes?

I understand. It's a sophisticated perception. There are bad Nazis, assuredly, but good ones as well, and Heidegger was a good one; our favorite Nazi, in fact. There never was a Nazi quite like him. He was the best of them. Such a perceptive, insightful Nazi. Surely we can all agree about that.

So no bots on my account, please.

We start with a world -- so it's not a scandal that no one can "prove" the existence of the external world; it's a scandal that anyone is trying to. — Xtrix

Indeed, and we just echo the 'problem' of the 'scandal' like bots. Or (as I am doing now) the scandal of the scandal. But Hegel saw that we had to be bots to catch up with the conversation. I need to work through this now classic philosophy. I mean Heidegger is old news, Hegel is older news. But I, stupid mortal that I am, have to work through the wreckage for myself.

This bygone mode of existence has already become an acquired possession of the general mind, which constitutes the substance of the individual, and, by thus appearing externally to him, furnishes his inorganic nature. — Hegel

We start with a world -- so it's not a scandal that no one can "prove" the existence of the external world; it's a scandal that anyone is trying to. — Xtrix

Indeed. There are different ways that philosophers can try to show us the way out of this bottle. Like trace its development (Rorty in PMN, inspired by Heidegger, Dewey, Sellars, Quine, others). Or Wittgenstein can try to wake us up with homely comments. I think you've followed Heidegger's etymologies more. That's a harder path for me.

Or perhaps scientism and "mysticism," but I take your meaning of "theology" in this sense as well. Excellent point -- I think that's what we're left with, yes. Along with one very important third position (usually embodied in science or in a reaction to the "death of God"): nihilism. — Xtrix

I like the phrase 'technical interpretation of thinking.' Theology is (to me) mechanical when it isn't mystical. Even anti-scientism tends to be scientistic in its methods. It demonstrates a taking-for-granted of this technical interpretation of thinking. One proves God. Or one generates a philosopher's god out direct access to concepts that just ignores Witt's critique of such beetles. Even 'intentionality' is theological in this sense. All these systems need their beetles. I wish that some of them would admit it, which is to admit that they are poets without anchors, but then I'd have no targets. I'd be a bot without a purpose.

On the other hand the 'honest' nihilist just drops the metaphysical pretense and chases power and money. This is 'true' sophistry. Who cares what X really is? It's standing reserve, canned whatever-we-need-it-to-be. Pretty soon we are canned whatever-we-need-us-to-be.

OK, he was a creep. But do I also have to pretend that all of Woody Allen's movies suck? That Louise CK was never funny? Where does it end? Why not also blast Aristotle? Frege? Or the slave-owning founding fathers? At some point we'll need our hand held as we walk through the dangerous library. Blast them at people, but maybe let me explore their work for myself.

Don't worry about Cic. He does this every time Heidi is mentioned. It's pathological. He can't help it. Let him be.

Funny, I just started in on Hegel this year. I've heard for years that he's the "hardest" philosopher to read. But so far I don't find him hard at all. — Xtrix

To me it's just like it is with Heidegger. I can find passages or lectures that speak to me. But then there are long passages that remain obscure, or rather suggestive. Maybe he means this. Even if I didn't have to work non-philosophically for a living and knew 5 languages, I think I'd still end up thinking that life is just too short.

Heidegger comes down favorably on Hegel, however, and so I thought it worth while to actually read the man and see what all the fuss is about. So far I see why he was so influential. — Xtrix

I got into Hegel first, which is maybe why I prioritized historicity when reading Heidegger. Roughly I think that Heidegger added a kind of subconceptuality to Hegel. The zeitgeist is enacted. This is where Dreyfus comes in. The who of everyday dasein (the 'one') is not primarily conceptual. The stance we take on our existence is so deep that we don't have to think about it. Interpretative phenomenology is hard work! The familiar is too close.

I think Hegel in the quote below is trying to be a proto-Heidegger, but he's still caught in the language of thought, thought, thought. That last line sounds like 'destruction.' We are so thoughtlessly theoretical that the problem is getting under all this machinery, to grasp it as machinery, not building it up in the first place.

The manner of study in ancient times is distinct from that of the modern world, in that the former consisted in the cultivation and perfecting of the natural mind. Testing life carefully at all points, philosophizing about everything it came across, the former created an experience permeated through and through by universals. In modern times, however, an individual finds the abstract form ready made. In straining to grasp it and make it his own, he rather strives to bring forward the inner meaning alone, without any process of mediation; the production of the universal is abridged, instead of the universal arising out of the manifold detail of concrete existence. Hence nowadays the task before us consists not so much in getting the individual clear of the stage of sensuous immediacy, and making him a substance that thinks and is grasped in terms of thought, but rather the very opposite: it consists in actualising the universal, and giving it spiritual vitality, by the process of breaking down and superseding fixed and determinate thoughts. — Hegel

Heidegger's notion of 'restoring force' to elementary words seems related. We usually just chug along in our inherited bot-speak. We don't even hear ourselves. This is our 'inorganic nature.' And we thought cyborgs had to set off metal detectors...(I say we are cyborgs because we are thrown into this bone-machine that we speak and think with that's invisible to us most of the time.)

Perhaps we could say "embedded time" or "experiential time" as someone put it, and which Heidegger calls "temporality." — Xtrix

Right. And we can think of physics time as deworlded time. I think we can also drag in Sellars. The 'manifest image' is like the holistic network of equipment. The 'scientific image' is the system of prsent-at-hand entities for a deworlded dehistorized 'I' or 'pure' abstract subject.

Could manifest objects reduce to systems of imperceptible scientific objects? Are manifest objects ultimately real, scientific objects merely abstract constructions valuable for the prediction and control of manifest objects? Or are manifest objects appearances to human minds of a reality constituted by systems of imperceptible particles? Sellars opts for the third alternative. The manifest image is, in his view, a phenomenal realm à la Kant, but science, at its Peircean ideal conclusion, reveals things as they are in themselves. Despite what Sellars calls “the primacy of the scientific image”(PSIM, in SPR: 32; in ISR: 400), he ultimately argues for a “synoptic vision” in which the descriptive and explanatory resources of the scientific image are united with the “language of community and individual intentions,” which “provides the ambience of principles and standards (above all, those which make meaningful discourse and rationality itself possible) within which we live our own individual lives” (PSIM, in SPR: 40; in ISR: 408). — link

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sellars/

'Synoptic vision' is nice, and I understand the desire to do justice to both images. Personally I lean toward interpreting the scientific image as 'valuable for prediction and control.' If we say that the world is really particles or waves, then I don't think we know what we are talking about. 'The finite has no genuine being.' Or things depend on context for their determination. 'Atoms & void' are a picture. Waves are a picture, and so on. Only mathematical Platonism can try to dodge this.

Then that Peircean ideal conclusion is Hegelian af, shoving metaphysical difficulties into the future. Things are revealed in themselves? Because our models get better? I can't make sense of it. Maybe Kant had the substratum the least wrong by saying the least about it, if one was not going to just attack the notion as problematic.

[Heidegger's] 'interpretation' of Nietzsche is also egregiously anti-Nietzschean.

The lack of playful humor or a role for music in his 'thinking', as George Steiner points out, is quite telling of his decadent, constipated, "spirit of gravity" (Nietzsche). — 180 Proof

Though I was referring to Heidi's mystagogic heideggerization of 'will to power' 'eternal recurrence' etc, I'm always mindful that, in Heidi's case more than most 'thinkers', the man fertilizes the philosopher. To wit:

"It would appear that Germany is finally awakening, understanding and seizing its destiny.

I hope that you will read Hitler’s book; its first few autobiographical chapters are weak. This man has a remarkable and sure political instinct, and he had it even while all of us were still in a haze, there is no way of denying that. The National Socialist movement will soon gain a wholly different force. It is not about mere party politics—it’s about the redemption or fall of Europe and western civilization. Anyone who does not get it deserves to be crushed by the chaos. Thinking about these things is no hindrance to the spirit of Christmas, but marks our return to the character and task of the Germans, which is to say to the place where this beautiful celebration originates."
— Heidegger letter to brother

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/10/18/in-his-own-words/ — path

- yet Freddy presciently calls Heidi on this sort of 'Reichpolitik scheiße' the year before he was born:

One will notice that I wish to be just to the Germans: I do not want to break faith with myself here. I must therefore also state my objections to them. One pays heavily for coming to power: power makes stupid. The Germans — once they were called the people of thinkers: do they think at all today? The Germans are now bored with the spirit, the Germans now mistrust the spirit; politics swallows up all serious concern for really spiritual matters. Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles — I fear that was the end of German philosophy.

Even a rapid estimate shows that it is not only obvious that German culture is declining but that there is sufficient reason for that. In the end, no one can spend more than he has: that is true of an individual, it is true of a people. If one spends oneself for power, for power politics, for economics, world trade, parliamentarianism, and military interests — if one spends in the direction the quantum of understanding, seriousness, will, and self-overcoming which one represents, then it will be lacking for the other direction.

In the history of European culture the rise of the “Reich” means one thing above all: a displacement of the center of gravity. It is already known everywhere: in what matters most — and that always remains culture — the Germans are no longer worthy of consideration. One asks: Can you point to even a single spirit who counts from a European point of view, as your Goethe, your Hegel, your Heinrich Heine, your Schopenhauer counted? That there is no longer a single German philosopher — — What Germans Lack ...

and delivers a coup de grace premonition of SuZ nearly forty years before:

One need only read German books: there is no longer the remotest recollection that thinking requires a technique, a teaching curriculum, a will to mastery — that thinking wants to be learned like dancing, as a kind of dancing. Who among Germans still knows from experience the delicate shudder which light feet in spiritual matters send into every muscle? The stiff clumsiness of the spiritual gesture, the bungling hand at grasping — that is German to such a degree that abroad one mistakes it for the German character as such. The German has no fingers for nuances. — ... Twilight of the Idols (1888)

(emphasis is mine)

The lack of playful humor or a role for music in his 'thinking', as George Steiner points out, is quite telling of his decadent, constipated, "spirit of gravity" (Nietzsche). — 180 Proof

I think this nails it, and I agree. Heidegger is a constipated priest. No golden laughter there, instead a heavy mystic gloom, a sort of concentrated hysteria, somehow tangled in the being-toward-death stuff that I could never quite get --because maybe it wasn't there to get. It was just a storm cloud for a god.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, at his best, was well beyond metaphysics. Better a clown than a priest, and he meant it. I like thinkers who can laugh at themselves, who aren't quite convinced by themselves. I want them to laugh with the abyss as it laughs at them. Don't they hear the laughter of the gods?

[Derrida tries in some sense to assimilate Heidegger to Nietzsche, raid him for parts in a spirit of play, if there is such a thing as a Derrida.]

To chime in a bit, I find Heidegger to be overly… simplistic. Not an accusation he’s usually charged with, I’m sure, but as with @fdrake, but I feel like Heidegger takes a very specific, over idealised conception of human experience and extrapolates it to very creative but ultimately narrow ends. I find I learn far more in reading a chapter of Levinas or Merleau-Ponty than I do in all of B&T sometimes. The best way I think I’ve heard it put is that Heidegger offers a ‘serene phenomenology’ in which:

“life and foreknowledge of death, individuality and connectedness, choice and foreclosure, individual and collective life in the present and projections of future prospects for both, presume, first, a close alignment between the identity the self seeks to realize and socially available possibilities of self-formation and, second, a shared sense of confidence in the world we are building, a confidence that links the present to the future through effort and anticipation at one time and memory and appreciation at another.” (William Connolly, Identity/Difference).

The lack of political and social analysis in Heidegger is no accident, but a constitutive element of his Daseinanalysis. There’s lots to learn from in Heidegger, and I always feel edified after having read him, but his whole approach has always been overly narrow to me. His peasant romanticism, his haughty disparagement of das man, his luddism are all awful aspects of his philosophy. His most interesting concept to me has always been the clearing - the Lichtung - along with his more topological considerations of Being (documented brilliantly in Jeff Malpas’ Heidegger’s Topology). But in general, he’s a thinker that’s more fun to forage around in and plunder than to take wholesale.

But in general, he’s a thinker that’s more fun to forage around in and plunder than to take wholesale. — StreetlightX

Seconded. And this can probably be generalized. Who can we take wholesale?

That's a good question. Maybe no one. My favourite philosophers have always been ones who encourage an exploration beyond themselves, who offer new frames of thinking to be implicated elsewhere. Deleuze - who is my fav - offered his philosophy as a 'set of weapons' to be picked up as needed as discarded when not. I guess it's more a question of - who encourages this, and who does not? Who attempts to open philosophy to an outside, who attempts to cloister it within more philosophy? Heidi hews closer to the latter imo - which accounts for the cultic atmosphere that surrounds his followers. Nietzsche, another philosopher being discussed, seems to do the former.

Zizek writes somewhere that the only way to stay true to the spirit of a philosopher is to betray them in a direction they would not have considered. I think there's alot to that.

I think you've followed Heidegger's etymologies more. That's a harder path for me. — path

Oh that's a shame! I think this is exactly where Heidegger is most "useful" in a scholarly sense; the man certainly knew his Greek. I think he is still underestimated as a "philologist," or perhaps linguist.

An excellent place to get into this particular aspect is where he himself says to begin in the preface to B&T: with the Introduction to Metaphysics. Have you tackled that one yet? I would substitute 20 secondary sources and "interpreters" for this one book alone (really a series of lectures).

On the other hand the 'honest' nihilist just drops the metaphysical pretense and chases power and money. This is 'true' sophistry. Who cares what X really is? It's standing reserve, canned whatever-we-need-it-to-be. Pretty soon we are canned whatever-we-need-us-to-be — path

I laughed at that one. There's a lot of truth to that, yes.

he was a creep. — path

Eh, I wouldn't say that myself. He never killed anyone or advocated for the holocaust. If simply being a member of a dangerous political party makes you evil, then we currently have a lot of equally evil people in the US alone- called Republicans. (In former times I'd write "Republicans and Democrats", but I can't equate the two anymore with good conscience.)



Re: Heidegger and Nietzsche. I've read nearly everything Nietzsche has written, and he remains in my view one of the most challenging and relevant thinkers of all time. But comparing the two isn't altogether fair, and I'd recommend checking out Heidegger's (4 volume) lectures on Nietzsche. Jump over the rather shallow secondary interpretations and see what you think, if you ever have the time to kill.

but I feel like Heidegger takes a very specific, over idealised conception of human experience and extrapolates it to very creative but ultimately narrow ends. — StreetlightX

I'm not sure what you mean by "idealized" here. Until that's explained, there's no way to tell if whatever conception you're referring to is narrow or not.

Who can we take wholesale? — path

No one. And I'd be very skeptical of anyone recommending such. Heidegger himself, over and over, says his work is interpretative, provisional, incomplete, and probably wrong in unforeseeable ways.

Every "proximally and for the most part" is also a "maybe not".

I'm not sure what you mean by "idealized" here. Until that's explained, there's no way to tell if whatever conception you're referring to is narrow or not. — Xtrix

Yeah that's fair enough. Basically that Heidi offers a narrow slice of human experience passed off as a generalized phenomenology in which lots of interesting features are obscured and dropped out. I could substantiate it but I don't care enough about Heidi to spend that energy. If I had to point you in a direction, I'd say check out Alphonso Lingis's reading of Heidi in his Sensation: Intelligibility in Sensibility.

As for Heidi's philology, there's an interesting phD thesis by Rui de Sosa that meticulously tracks the responses by different philologists to Heidegger's reading of alethia, and concludes that the majority of them - although not all - more or less reject Heidi's reading. And, that even Heidi offered a half-hearted retraction of his earlier reading on the topic which barely anyone has noticed:

"The late period in the discussion of aletheia by Heidegger and the philologists is marked by Heidegger's retraction of his earlier views on early Greek truth. This cornes as a direct result of Friedlander's criticism of Heidegger and no doubt is also due to a widespread agreement with Friedlander among philologists. Heidegger's retraction remained equivocal and stated only in a cursory fashion; in his very latest work he continued to affirm that there was a fundamental difference between Greek and modem thought.

...Despite Heidegger's equivocations on the question of aletheia in his very latest work, he never again attempted to put into question the communis opinio of the philologists on the meaning of this word. He refrained from doing so, despite the fact that he continued to make pronouncements on the general character of Greek thought that seemingly set him at odds with mainstream philological opinion. There seems to be a great divide between the communis opinio growing around Friedlander's thesis that in the end andent Greek alethea was fundamentally akin to the modem concept of truth and Heidegger's daims that the fundamental premisses of the Greeks are very different from our own". (de Sosa, "Martin Heidegger's Interpretation of Ancient Greek Aletheia and the Philological Response to It")

He goes on to conclude that while there are good reasons to suspect that Friedlander's position is also not universally supported, most modern philologists have mostly just stopped any sort of dialog with Heidegger altogether. So it's still a somewhat open question, although I think it's pretty fair to remain quite suspicious of Heidi's readings as being faithful - albeit productive and philosophically entrancing.

Don't worry about Cic. He does this every time Heidi is mentioned. It's pathological. — StreetlightX

That may be so, I'm afraid, or close to the mark. There is a kind of revulsion.

But do I also have to pretend that all of Woody Allen's movies suck? That Louise CK was never funny? Where does it end? Why not also blast Aristotle? Frege? Or the slave-owning founding fathers? At some point we'll need our hand held as we walk through the dangerous library. — path

It may be a fault in me, but I'm unable to separate the man and his work so blithely.

Sort of like Tom Lehrer and Wernher von Braun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro

Yeah that's fair enough. Basically that Heidi offers a narrow slice of human experience passed off as a generalized phenomenology in which lots of interesting features are obscured and dropped out. I could substantiate it but I don't care enough about Heidi to spend that energy. If I had to point you in a direction, I'd say check out Alphonso Lingis's reading of Heidi in his Sensation: Intelligibility in Sensibility. — StreetlightX

I appreciate the sources, and both yourself, Path and 180 Proof have now provided me with a lot of reading material which I will check out, but the reason I created this thread was exactly for that reason: substantial criticism (or substantial "praise"), with the goal of understanding Heidegger even better. So if I may:

You're saying he's mistaking a narrow slice of human experience for a totality, and that he isn't justified in claiming this? What does the "in which lots of interesting features are obscured and dropped out" refer to, the "generalized phenomenology" or "the narrow slice of human experience"? It's ambiguous but relevant to clarify I think. Regardless, can you give an example? Because I'm certain he leaves many, many things out his analysis of human experience. His main concern, and he takes a while to get there, is "time," which he does consider rather obscured -- or concealed.

As for Heidi's philology, there's an interesting phD thesis by Rui de Sosa that meticulously tracks the responses by different philologists to Heidegger's reading of alethia, and concludes that the majority of them - although not all - more or less reject Heidi's reading. — StreetlightX

That's really a shocker to me. That's a major part of his entire thought, as you know. I was always under the impression that his translations, while considered outside the mainstream of scholarship, were still accurate in terms of their (several) meanings. (So while logos as a "gathering" is indeed found in Homer, for example, and so was used in that sense at one time, this still doesn't prove that this sense applies to the writing of Aristotle in any meaningful way [as Heidegger claims it does.]) If it does turn out to be "accuracy" in this sense, then I would be very surprised, but I have a hunch that it's the latter. I couldn't find a PDF initially but I'll take a look at it.

So it's still a somewhat open question, although I think it's pretty fair to remain quite suspicious of Heidi's readings as being faithful - albeit productive and philosophically entrancing. — StreetlightX

I agree. The question for me arose years ago regarding the philologic community's consensus on Heidegger's translations, and all I remember is finding something like I described above. When de Sosa states, for example, that

There seems to be a great divide between the communis opinio growing around Friedlander's thesis that in the end andent Greek alethea was fundamentally akin to the modem concept of truth and Heidegger's daims that the fundamental premisses of the Greeks are very different from our own". — StreetlightX

I wonder if the bolded part is historically probable? We know from our own experiences just how quickly words can take on new meanings, how quickly its usage changes, and even how a meaning can be created and, within a generation, can predominate (like the word "gay"). So while Heidegger may be completely wrong in his attributing meanings in the wrong contexts, I can't imagine our "modern" conception of truth being at all similar to what the ancients meant, any more than "democracy" or "justice" is. Of course there will likely often be aspects which are the same -- otherwise there would be no traceable historical evolution to a word -- but the semantics will especially be very different, since meanings shift so quickly, even philosophical terms or scientific technical notions.

:up:

:clap:

↪path That's a good question. Maybe no one. My favourite philosophers have always been ones who encourage an exploration beyond themselves, who offer new frames of thinking to be implicated elsewhere.

Zizek writes somewhere that the only way to stay true to the spirit of a philosopher is to betray them in a direction they would not have considered. I think there's alot to that. — StreetlightX

(ramble on)

And that may be the key: fidelity only to a philosopher who also, in this way, stays true to the spirit of his or her philosophers.

Reflective (like artistic, or improvisational) provocateurs.

Dialectical rodeo clowns.

Exemplars - philosophical surgeons, not therapists, as Clément Rosset says, yet mindful of Freddy's "Beware lest a statue slay you" - from which to learn how to unlearn and live for unlearning.

Heidi has his uses, no doubt, like many of others; but you're spot-on, Street, that, also like many others, his concerns are too narrow and often shallow (even retrograde, such as his 'peasant ludditism'). And it's arguable, I think, whether or not Heidi stays true to the spirit of any of his philosophers ...

(ramble off)

My favourite philosophers have always been ones who encourage an exploration beyond themselves... — StreetlightX

Yes, I too like philosophers who gesture beyond themselves.

Deleuze - who is my fav - offered his philosophy as a 'set of weapons' to be picked up as needed as discarded when not. — StreetlightX

I still need to really look into Deleuze. The set of weapons metaphor in nice, and goes well with Nietzsche's army of metaphors metaphor. I like this distance that thinkers can take from what they say. The pragmatists were on to something with the 'tool' metaphor, but (like anything maybe) it's easily made banal, conformist, sleepy. The philosopher forges tools or weapons with uses that cannot be anticipated, and being open to this is connected to that gesture beyond themselves. I like that they know they will be recontextualized, that they can't dominate the future.

Zizek writes somewhere that the only way to stay true to the spirit of a philosopher is to betray them in a direction they would not have considered. I think there's alot to that. — StreetlightX

Totally agree. Betray them even with the tools they've given us, which is both loving and hateful. Escapes age into new traps, or something like that.