Saturday 14 December 2013

martin Heidegger unrepentant !

1 comment:

  1. Well thank God (Yahweh) I'm no Heideggerian! Heinrich Himmler the architech of the Holocaust loved to read the Bhagavad-Gita. He was very spiritual. The Japanese war criminals loved Zen literature. Zen priests wrote of "holy wars" and "compassionate killing" - spirituality and immorality do not exclude each other. This is not merely a question of personality. I think it goes deeper. It's when spirituality becomes one-sided, only obsessed with "emptiness" or "the Absolute" or "Dharmakaya" or "noumenon" and dismissive of conventional reality aka "phenomenal reality" aka "everyday reality" that things go wrong. Heidegger has good and bad parts. Being and Time his magnum opus has some very lucid insights about this very topic (the precedence of everydayness) - but things go wrong later on. - This is why I find that only a spirituality that asserts phenomenal reality as also ultimate is complete. Master Zhiyi of Tiantai called this the "Integrated Teaching" or "The Perfect Teaching" which is the highest Mahayana teaching given in the Lotus Sutra (and the Nirvana Sutra). Compared to these teachings, the "emptiness" literature is one-sided and lacking. To put it in simple terms, if everything is empty, dreamlike and devoid of self-nature - then isn't the Holocaust itself equally empty? Aren't the sins of war criminals empty and dreamlike? The Lotus Sutra and Tiantai philosophy instead speaks of 1) Emptiness; 2) Conventional Reality; 3) Middle (unity of 1 & 2). - This doesn't deny the everyday stuff, the relationship to my neighbour is not erased as irrelevant compared to questions of the "Absolute" or even "Enlightenment". Heidegger still remained trapped withing this sick paradigma of one-sided fixation on "Being" - forgetting beings, real beings that surrounded him in his life. This is a sickness suffered by many philosophers. I myself can say do not suffer from it. Fortunately.

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