Heidegger

—– Original Message —–
From: “Michael Eldred”

> Anthony Crifasi schrieb Sat, 14 Apr 2007 23:09:39 -0500:
>
>> then the point is that Spain will be religionized - whether by Islamists
>> alone or by both Christians and Islamists. My point was that the native
>> secular population have demographically doomed themselves, so if any
>> “sublation” between religion and atheism is going to occur in Europe, it
>> probably won’t be to Michael Eldred’s “atheist with room for mystery.”
>>
>
> ME: You could very well be right, or turn out to be right, on this point.
> Philosophical thinking is not in the business of making historically
> verifiable predictions. The precious little that philosophy has to offer
> concerns thoughts, in this case, the thought of mystery without mysticism,
> or
> of godliness without a god, of a mystery that can be experienced in the
> midst
> of everyday life.
>
> No philosophy can ever tell whether, when or how a philosophical thought
> will
> realize itself in history. But in the very first place, the thought itself
> has to be thought, and that’s the philosophical thinker’s job.
>
> Looking back, with the onset of the modern age we see the idea (or, in
> Hegelian terms: the concept) of freedom articulated philosophically and
> ardently. Freedom is a hallmark of the modern age, not necessarily
> factically, nor merely as an ideal, but as an historical contour of being
> which first of all has been _thought_ — starting with the Greeks, and
> with
> renewed energy in the modern age. The concept of freedom has become real
> in
> many instances. Factically, however, unfreedom predominates throughout the
> world. All the worse for reality, not for the philosophical concept of
> freedom.
>
> Similarly, the thought (or ontological concept) of mystery without
> mysticism
> has been emerging for some time in philosophy, but so far this seems like
> precious little when compared with the facticity of the world. Such a
> thought
> can be true and, at the same time, largely incorrect.

That’s definitely Heidegger, but it is Hegel? Isn’t Hegel’s point precisely
that the development of Absolute Spirit manifests in factical history no
less than in thought?

Posted on Wednesday, April 18th, 2007 at 12:15 pm
comment | rss 2.0 | trackback