“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, November 29, 2010

Early Heidegger vs. University Cuts

Cor blimey, this series of lectures on Aristotle is a cracking read. What happened to the older Heidegger? Early Heidegger is super duper good. He sure could teach, there's no doubt of that, as Graham has remarked.

Here he is with some useful language about how science, if pressed to justify itself, couldn't do it:

If the sciences were not seen ... from the outside and in terms of their progress and results, i.e., according to a merely apparently proper but in fact wrongheaded theory of science, then it would have to become clear that every science, at its birth, has made a decision of principle and now lives on that basis, and conversely, from there each science also derives its characteristic way of going astray. It is never asked whether the sciences, either in general ... or in particular ... can actually furnish the idea of concrete research.


What does this mean? For starters it means that the pressure put on humanism to justify its existence all the time would easily cause science to collapse if the same pressure were applied.

Also unmissable: his critique of “worldview philosophizing,” in particular scientistic genres. Respect!

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