Heidegger and a Hippo

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Heidegger and a Hippo stroll up to the Pearly Gates, and Saint Peter says, “Listen, we’ve only got room for one more today. Whoever gives me the best answer to “What is the meaning of life?” gets in.

Heidegger says, “To think Being itself requires disregarding Being to the extent that it is only grounded and interpreted in terms of things and for beings as their ground, as in all metaphysics.”

But before the hippo can put in one word, Saint Peter says to him, “Today’s your lucky day, Hippy!”

[First published in July 2010]

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from Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates: Using Philosophy (and Jokes!) to Explore Life, Death, the Afterlife, and Everything in Between –
Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein

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And who was Heidegger?

He was a philosopher that lived and taught in Nazi Germany. His texts are so foggy that nobody understands him in German, but they do read him in English, if the translator makes him intelligible.

And he is frequently summarized as the philosopher of the existential angst or anguish. Otherwise, much is written about Heidegger, but very little is learned from him. Unlike the great philosophers, he is rarely ever quoted, because there aren’t any representative quotes, though he never stopped talking Metaphysik.

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A Parody….

…and a Warning:

The following sentence  is made of words chosen at random, though linked to each other in correct grammar:

“A nenuphar phrase is not a taboo of immediate solution even if it were  to be seen as leading away from where destiny would find a reasonable or plausible target,  given the preponderance of conditions that invite a non sequitur of disenchanted symbologies and scant permanence in the realm of distraction.”

Now, if you read this sentence two or three times over, you will begin to visualize some meaning, but there isn’t any. The syntax is right, the words are suggestive, because it is a successful make-believe sentence, a delusion. However,  there isn’t any meaning — and that cannot be proven.

Most of Heidegger is just that: a delusion. Sometimes he wrote normal German and then he sounds as flat as any university teacher.
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Was Heidegger a Nazi?

It is not true that he burned books and expelled Jewish students, and yes, he did have Jewish friends all along the Nazi years. He was also under surveillance at one point, but under Hitler even the highest Nazis spied on each other, because all had solid reasons to fear each other; so being under surveillance was just the common lot.

Since Heidegger did not act like a Nazi, it is in his writings that he would show his hoof or his affinities, but since his writings are largely unintelligible….

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However, the Hitler years are such an immense problem for Germany that a  philosopoher who is worth his salt should have spoken out about it at least once the danger was over. But Mr Heidegger never took an explicit distance from that disaster.

He did give an interview to the German magazine Der Spiegel translated into English at

http://lacan.com/heidespie.html

“The secret of the planetary predominance of the un-thought essence of technology corresponds to the preliminariness and inconspicuousness of the thinking that attempts to reflect upon this un-thought essence.”

Arrogant, ugly language.

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[Added November 2011]

In Wikipedia I found this Heidegger quote in whole-sale sentimental support of Hitler:

“Let not propositions and ‘ideas’ be the rules of your being (Sein). The Fuhrer alone is the present and future German reality and its law. Learn to know ever more deeply: that from now on every single thing demands decision, and every action responsibility. Heil Hitler!”

He was probably a true Nazi, but not anti-Semitic until anti-Semitism became obligatory for the people at the top.
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