• edge [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    No idea who that is but I think this is all I need to know

    In April 1933, Heidegger was elected as rector at the University of Freiburg and was widely criticized for his membership and support for the Nazi Party during his time as rector. After World War II he was dismissed from Freiburg and was banned from teaching after denazification hearings at Freiburg. There has been controversy about the relationship between his philosophy and Nazism.

    • anarchoilluminati [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      Yes, but he is still worth engaging with and reading if you’re at all interested in philosophy beyond specific individuals.

      What is considered Late Heidegger is more heavily Nazistic, in my opinion, but his Early and Middle period not as much. His Early work is especially interesting, his lectures in particular. And his Middle period, when he wrote Being and Time, is far more “proto-existentialist” and religiously influenced than anything else.

      At the end of the day, his philosophy is not overtly political and it is not at all ethical so it’s easier to engage with despite him being a Nazi. I’m not even a huge fan of Heidegger though and I’m not denying he was a Nazi, for the record. Heidegger even refused to apologize for being a Nazi to Jewish philosophers that would still visit him to learn from him after the War. But Schmidt was a Nazi too and it’s still good to learn them. There are not too many intelligent Nazi/fascist writers anymore, and Heidegger was a genius for his part.

      I do prefer Levinas to Heidegger, though. He is the Jewish, anti-Nazi answer to Heidegger. Levinas was Heidegger’s former student and deliberately sought to undo Heideggerian philosophy. He is more founded in Talmud and tries to find a rupture with the history of Western philosophy up to that point and was temporarily held as POW during the War. But Levinas is also anti-Communist/USSR/Marxist, unfortunately. His philosophical understanding of “the political” isn’t bad though and still informs my thinking.

      Recommend both! Enlightened Centrist Philosophy moment.

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      The pinnacle of Western philosophy is 100% Marxism. Marxism represent a qualitative leap of Western philosophy. The problem is that since academia tries very hard to pretend Marx doesn’t exist, they are forced to teach Western philosophy without teaching the pinnacle of Western philosophy, which is why you are forced either read about dudes who have been dead for centuries or a bunch of bunk bullshit by some dude talking nonsense. The rationale they give to teaching Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and so on is some bullshit about “being a better critical thinker” when the real reason why you should read them is because their works are the foundation in which Marx, who was also Western philosopher, would use for his works. You read Hegel so when you get to Marx, you can appreciate how Marx took Hegel’s incomprehensible bullshit and turn it into something that even illiterate workers can understand and more importantly, apply towards a liberatory political project.

      The analytic vs continental divide in academic philosophy is basically a divide between a branch of Western philosophy that pretends Marx doesn’t exist vs a branch of Western philosophy that at least acknowledges Marx exists but isn’t itself Marxism. And it should come as no surprise that in the completely reactionary environment that is the Anglosphere, it’s the branch of Western philosophy that rejects Marxism that is completely dominant where you get to read philosophers who spend 200+ pages to prove that 1+1=2 or argue about qualia. It’s only recently that students are starting to get taught influenced-by-Marx-but-not-actually-Marxist philosophy.

    • Chronicon [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      Originally I thought philosophy as a discipline was basically so far up its own ass as to be useless, then I took one or two philosophy classes and had some genuine interest, then I got politically engaged and read more philosophy outside of a classroom environment, and ultimately decided my original feeling was mostly correct.

      • invalidusernamelol [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        I feel like every time I go down a philosophy rabbit hole I’m getting on a train to go to some destination only to realize after a few circuits that I stepped into a carousel.

        The only exception being dialectical materialism because it destroys and remakes itself constantly as the world around it shifts.

        Instead of trying to pigeonhole and describe the world in a system, why not just have the system be the world as it is? Apply the scientific method you fools.

        • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          3 months ago

          I feel like every time I go down a philosophy rabbit hole I’m getting on a train to go to some destination only to realize after a few circuits that I stepped into a carousel.

          The only exception being dialectical materialism because it destroys and remakes itself constantly as the world around it shifts.

          This is by design. You really think the ruling class would actually teach people how to actually analyze and change the world? Better to mislead the intelligentsia into getting stuck in mental carousels.

          • invalidusernamelol [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            3 months ago

            Agree on that too. The basic concept of it though is still pretty rare in philosophy. The fact that your theory is meant to adapt and change over time as you gain more information about the world.

  • REgon [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    Okay but that’s also just a very weird way of phrasing it.
    As far as I can parse it, it’s saying that there is a german word dasein. This word describes a being that is metaphorically in a world of its’ own.
    Heidegger instead uses the same word to refer to a being that cares about existing in general.

    I don’t know if that’s what his phenomenology actually is, but that’s more or less what that sentence seems to want to communicate. Either that or the first bit about being in a world of your own is also something Heidegger says, which would strike me as weird. I imagine “being in a world of your own” is something akin to daydreaming mixed with a little bit of weed-brain “perception is reality, reality is perception bro” but I dunno.

    It needs an editor to cut down on the commas and the usage of the words “rather” and “that is”. Reeks of college essay trying to up the word count.

    Edit: Dasein is a verb meaning “to be there” but it’s probably better translated as “to be present in the moment”. Incredibly terrible explanation and trying to google it just gives you a bunch of redditors discussing Heidegger.
    I have a feeling he’s much less incomprehensible if you speak his language.

    • OhNoMoreLemmy@lemmy.ml
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      3 months ago

      Having drunkenly talked to German philosophers about this, some of them actually prefer reading him in English.

      Heidegger does all kinds of fuckery with the German language, and imposes new technical meanings on words. If you’re reading it in English and you come across a loan word from German in italics at least you know there’s some fuckery going on, and you don’t make the mistake of assuming he’s using the word in the same way everyone else does.

      • REgon [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        I wonder if there’s some language wherein he would have been perfectly coherent. Maybe a polysynthetic language would have done him well. Heidegger in Inuktitut or Kalaallisut would have done numbers

  • SpiderFarmer [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    Philosophy was fun in middle school and high school, but watching some twenty or thirtysomething nerd on the internet try and look deep cause he referenced Twilight of the Gods…

    Well it, fills me with a certain mix of pity and contempt.