Thread by @ZoharAtkins

Here goes my @threadapalooza on Heidegger, the greatest thinker of the modern era, a social, political, and cultural conservative (who briefly flirted with fascism and Nazism), a mystic, a contemplative, a contrarian, and a thinker whose influence extends far beyond academia...

What was Heidegger's main thesis?

He's hard to pin down & scholars fight about what it means to be "Heideggerian." But Heidegger himself said that his best readers should not be Heideggerian, i.e., followers, but should instead take up his thought in their own original way. 2/

Being a Heideggerian is a performative contradiction--follow Heidegger or reduce him to a thesis and you've missed the forest for the trees. To write about Heidegger as an academic is to be at odds with Heidegger's spirit. 3/

Everything Heidegger criticizes about modernity the professors writing intros to Heidegger are guilty of; My threadapalooza is possibly guilty of the same things, except the sin of pretension. 4/

Before we get into the weeds on why Heidegger matters, let's appreciate that he wrote over 100 volumes of work, and that his style is poetic and musical...with leitmotifs recurring over the course of 60 years of writing...5/

Heidegger is the Warren Buffet of philosophy; his work compounds over time, and he establishes himself as a great not by being a one hit wonder, but by constantly making it new over a long time horizon. Few modern thinkers are as prolific as Heidegger. 6/

Heidegger took one metaphysical topic, "Being," and spent his whole life riffing on it, which led him to topics as diverse as the nature of technology to the purpose of art and poetry to the experience of time and history, death, community, and authentic relationships. 7/

His singular focus (the hedgehog knows one big thing) is remarkable, but so is his dexterity--he's influenced everyone from architect Daniel Liebeskind (of World Trade Towers renown) to Werner Erhard, founder of EST now the Landmark Forum to poets Paul Celan and Renee Char...8/

Intellectually, Heidegger is a big influence on American pragmatists like Richard Rorty, deconstructionists like Derrida, genealogists like Foucault, as well as on new age spirituality. 9/

Go to any yoga or meditation class and you'll hear words that Heidegger and his translators helped popularize. 10/

The secular trend (in the double sense) of taking God out of religion, but preserving the experience of the tribe (as in reconstructionist Judaism) or of higher consciousness (as in renewal Judaism or Ram Das/Leary/Watts/Wilber/Suzuki followers) owes Heidegger a debt. 11/

Heidegger also influenced Emmanuel Levinas (who credits Being and Time as the foundation for his own work), Marcuse, Arendt and more--even when his students and critics argued against them they owed their projects to him. 14/

Heidegger is a rare thinker who, though of the political and cultural right, managed to have a lot of influence on the political and cultural left. He transcends partisan politics in part because he claims that philosophy and thinking are not reducible to politics 15/

He was an antisemite--it's complicated, it always is. But he argued against biological conceptions of race. 16/

Heidegger was what we'd call a cultural supremacist, not a biological supremacist. The Germans are great not because of their DNA, but because of their language. 17/

If you think this romantic idea is politically dangerous, you're right-but it's a common idea found across cultures: whether one's enshrining Hebrew, Arabic, English, Greek, Latin, the sacralization of one specific language often involves demoting every other language...18/

I digress on the topic of language because what makes Heidegger compelling is that he's an unabashed particularist or localist who thinks that philosophy is not universal and categorical but rather poetic. 19/

Each people has a unique way of saying what is by virtue of its language. 20/

Heidegger was obsessed with translation--it's impossibility--as well as what it means to appropriate wisdom from other cultures. 21/

He tried at one point to translate the Tao Te Ching, but abandoned the project. He believed there was such a thing as East vs West, but also worried that globalization would destroy what is great about Eastern contemplative traditions, such as Buddhism and Taoism. 22/

Sidenote--some Nazis were into the Occult as well as Eastern thought and "religion." Check this out: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938–39_G…

Heidegger wasn't a typical Nazi--and left his public role as Rector after a year, in 1934. But his interest in the East is hardly atypical. 23/

Martin Buber, a Jewish theologian, translated the Zhuangzi, which Heidegger read, and read favorably. 24/

In it, one sage says to another, crossing a bridge over a stream: for the fish, the water is so cold.

Other sage: How do you know?

First sage: How do you know I don't know? 25/

Heidegger cites this as an example of how we can be in relationship with others even as we can't be them or be inside their heads. 26/

One of Heidegger's core ideas is that philosophy has it backwards--it tries to reason from world to self or self to world rather than starting with experience. If we started with experience we wouldn't have to ask how subject meets object or object subject 27/

We'd realize that we are being-in-the-world, i.e., that the world and our being in it come together, as a primordial pair. 28/

Here's a metaphor for thinking about it a la both Plato and the Midrashic tradition: just as man and woman were originally one hermaphrodite that got separated, so initially we (perceivers) and the world (object) are one whole being. 29/

How does the "fall" occur? In contrast to Christianity which posits an original sin, Heidegger secularizes the Fall, seeing it as a structure of consciousness itself. 30/

We fall into subject object thinking because our being in the world is such that we end up focusing on what he calls the ontic realm, rather than the ontological one. 31/

In contrast to Plato and dualists who think you can separate ontic and ontological, Heidegger is nondual--the ontic expresses the ontological and the ontological is always demonstrated in a specific ontic situation 32/

Some examples: fear (ontic), anxiety (ontological): I fear getting hit by a car or losing my job or getting rejected by someone; I'm anxious about my existence/mortality/sense of what I'm doing with my one precious life. 33/

I'm being kinda loose, but one of the other main themes in Heidegger is that revelation and concealment come together--so the revelation of X also hides Y. Ontic hides ontological and ontological hides ontic. 34/

But I digress, which is to say, I'm "fallen"; in Heidegger, erring, getting lost, getting distracted is an inevitability, not a moral failing. It's also, in its own way, a mode in which we discover new things. 35/

"Where the danger is, there grows a saving power also" (Hoelderlin). This line is core to Heidegger's thought and represents his non dual ethics, whereby good things can come from seemingly bad things and vice versa. 36/

Danger is good precisely because it unlocks discovery; safety is bad because it shuts it down. For Heidegger, the absence of existential risk is 'worse' than a venture that fails--if there is a virtue or call to action in Heidegger it is, "dare to live a singular life." 37/

But the existentialist dimension in Heidegger's thought which is captured well in the Hubert Dreyfus school with its trickle down into Silicon Valley Culture...and epitomized by someone kitesailing or surfing or racing down the street in their convertible is notthe point. 38/

Individualism + consumerism is not inherently a life of singularity--one can be singular in many ways that don't involve extreme sports, such as devoting oneself to the study of ancient text or living a life of piety and generosity or even as a paper pusher...39

a topic explored often in the work of David Foster Wallace: authenticity doesn't mean I have to be a monk or a founder or an artist or a master craftsman...40

Authenticity is a weird word and not the best translation of Heidegger's "eigentlichkeit" which means "being own-most." But basically an authentic life is one responsible to my holistic vision of the life I want to live, which can change and does change all the time. 41/

Authenticity isn't an accomplishment. And it's not a feeling and it's not a state of mind. It's not gonna show up on a brain scan...it's more like living with spiritual integrity, except instead of "fearing [an external] God" the charge comes from my self...42

This is the part of being and time that's kinda protestant, w/ conscience getting a big role...Heidegger later abandons it, feeling that it's too metaphysical...43/

But it's definitely not egotistical or self centered because the being that I'm accountable to is being in the world, which is a social world constituted by relationships and community, and yes, for believers, God. 44/

Heidegger's relationship to God should be its own @threadapalooza. He's hard to pin down. A bit of biography--at one point he wanted to be a priest, but decided to leave the Catholic Church as a philosophy grad student (the Church paid for his education, b/c he was poor) 45/

I think Heidegger was neither secular nor religious but both. Or what academics call "post-secular". Btw, Heidegger's had a huge influence in theology from Rabbi Soloveitchick to Paul Tillich; even Dr. Martin Luther King cites Heidegger and Kierkegaard as influences. 46/

Heideggers' problem with rational philosophy and theology is the same--they start w/ first principles, with logic, with axioms, rather than w/ experience or "revelation." 47

Religion isn't about why God lets bad things happen to good people, or whether God can make a stone that's too heavy for him to lift--it's about the experience of transcendence and mystery, whose truth is of a different nature than that of factuality. 48

You can hear me hedging in that b/c bottom line, questions like did the revelation at mount sinai happen or did Jesus in fact feed the poor with loaves and fishes are questions of fact--and they are questions that separate believers from skeptics. 49

Secularists scorn the irrationalism of those who believe because or although it is absurd--ie. dinosaur bones are a test to see if we can believe in 7 days of creation despite evidence of evolution 50/

But Heidegger doesn't engage in this kind of shallow critique, b/c he doesn't think the secular world is all that much of an improvement over traditional religion, and in some ways is worse. 51

he has a great line in being and time: that irrationalists see what rationalists can't, albeit w/ a squint. 52

so there really is something to see that secularists can't see--but traditional religion and faith often misrepresent it; they are thus ambiguous in that they preserve mystery but they also then reduce it at the same time. Fundamentalism is problematic not b/c it is false...53

but b/c it is distracted, overly invested in concepts, and in "orthodoxy" in the sense of "correctness," instead of in insight, lived experience, poetry, the uniqueness of the moment. 54

Tradition is supposed to help us disclose the singularity of the present moment and our place in it; but too often it becomes rote, divesting us of our singularity. 55

Heidegger's thought is compatible w/ religious existentialism, even if it isn't existentialist or religious. For me, the best way I can respond to Heidegger's thought is not as a college professor of Heidegger studies, but as a rabbi, poet, and itinerant teacher. 56/

Should we call God God or something else? This goes back to the issue of language, which has the ability to hide & reveal. Answer: it depends. Don't get too attached to terminology or you become an idolater, which is to say, a person who misses the ontological for the ontic. 57

Traditionalists can do what is called paleonymy--finding new meaning in old terms. Heidegger does this w/ words like "being," "thinking," and "unconcealment." 58

But sometimes old terms don't suffice and we need neologism--new words. Heidegger does this with strange concoctions like "presence at hand," "readiness to hand," "being towards death," "null ground of a nullity." 59

Heidegger's language is hard for beginners, but it's also hard for native speakers, b/c he invents a new language, a hybrid of old words repurposed in new ways and new words that point obliquely to new ideas. To philosophize, reveal, one must be a poet, making language new. 60

Sing to God a new song, says the psalmist. And this Heidegger does, even if his song is often to the pagan gods of the Black Forest. 61

Why gods and not God? Is Heidegger actually a pagan? Buber says yes, but that's polemic. I don't think so. No. Heidegger is trying to recapture the spiritual experience of old traditions; his concern is that Christianity is too burdened by familiarity. He's a provocateur. 62

Heidegger has another awesome line: "We're too late for the gods and too early for Being." What does that mean?? One possibility is that we can't have the immediate and naive experience of awe in the elements and nature as the ancients did...but we're not so enlightened that /63

we have figured out what they were after. They were on the right track, even if they were philosophically naive. We who are philosophically advance are spiritually/existentially regressed. 64

Yeah, Heidegger's a nostalgic dude. People don't like him-or distrust him-because there's a part of him that seems like it's pining for "the good old days" which progressives think is code for all kinds of bad undemocratic and inegalitarian things 65

The Greeks were a patriarchal, slave-owning society. Why should we long for the world of Thales and Anaximander? 66

It's true--Heidegger is an aristocrat and an elitist in certain ways (though he nods his head to the noble peasants). But the nostalgic dimension isn't all Heidegger is about. The Unabomber probably took a page from some of the late Heidegger but...69

Heidegger is more like the Jewish sage, Yochanan ben Zakkai (*l'havdil)--my Jewish readers will have to forgive my comparison. ben Zakkai knew the Temple would be destroyed so he bargained with the Roman Emperor to spare Yavneh, the rabbinic academy. 70

Heidegger understood the modern era would be own epitomized by superficial mass culture, environmental degradation, the loss of local cultures, the flattening of differences into a bland consumerist supermall where our options are McDonalds, Starbucks, etc. 71

He understood the difference between being a thinker and being a philosophy professor (under the gun of publish or perish); the reality that people are reduced to resumes, algorithms, "skills," as if on a conveyer belt. 72

Marxist criticisms of mass culture focus on exploitation and inequality; Heidegger shares the Marxist concern for alienation, but is less interested in economic exploitation; his nemesis is "ontological forgetfulness" 73

which is a high faultin way of saying an inability to know ourselves as radically free b/c we are trapped in bad, loops that keep us cerebral, reactive, head-down, uncreative, low-key anxious, and gridlocked. 74

It starts with the forest--we see trees as lumber, lumber as paper, paper as part of a news industry, etc....but it's not about the forests; it's about us. We objectify ourselves and one another to our own detriment. 75

We do things because that's what one does. This has always been true. But modernity exacerbates it. Heidegger wrote this 50 years before #FAANG. 76

Capitalists don't like Heidegger because he's not triumphalist about material success and flourishing. Basically everyone loves and hates him for different reasons. 77

Capitalists are like, but we got a steam engine, we got search engines, we got vaccines. I can get Being and Time today on Amazon Prime! For 3 dollars! I can read a tweet storm about your work, Heidegger! Isn't it amazing?! 78

Isn't it awesome that I can go on Wikipedia and read about Heidegger and the Question of Being? No--it's not that great, and possibly net negative, says Heidegger. That's gotta be threatening and maddening to techno utopians and trans humanists. 79

Why isn't it great? Because knowledge isn't the same as wisdom--b/c hearsay and looking smart aren't the same as depth and personal insight. Because information can also be a kind of pornography or form of escapism. 80

Reading Heidegger in the wrong way or for wrong reasons and you might as well be watching trashy TV. Alternatively, you can watch trashy TV as a "thinker" and redeem the experience. Unconcealment is everywhere available, but also elusive. 81

Even if modernity gives us prosperity and, from a utilitarian pov is better than previous eras, Heidegger would say that we shouldn't get too excited b/c our progress in technical know how or even our moral or political progress don't help us flourish--they distract at best. 82

This idea is epitomized in his essay "BUILDING DWELLING THINKING" where he says that just because we have houses doesn't mean we know how to dwell. That's pretty retro. And definitely a "privileged" thing to say, in the midst of a housing shortage but there you have it. 83

Is philosophy the best way to live? The best discipline? For Heidegger, in contrast to Plato/Socrates, the answer is no. You can experience the heights and depths of "what is" as a dancer or a carpenter or a magician or cashier or a bus driver (as in the twee film Paterson). 84

In this way, Heidegger is a populist, not an elitist, and saves his ire and critique for professional philosophers, who he thinks are off the path, fallen into credentialism and disembodied metaphysical speculation having nothing to do with life as lived. 85

But though Heidegger can give a good fire and brimstone sermon, I have a more therapeutic, less bombastic approach to his work (or in my own appropriation of it). I think Heidegger is offering medicine precisely to philosophy students, much like Wittgenstein and Nietzsche. 86

Heidegger is trying to help philosophy students recover the awe and love and joy that set them on their path before their egos took over and turned being a scholar into a persona they took refuge in. He's jazz for classically trained--a way of healing from a tough upbringing 87/

But it's also best appreciated by those who went through it--as Heidegger did. His education was grueling in a way we don't grasp--he knew advanced math and science as well as the humanistic canon. He could criticize the sour grapes because he'd eaten them. 88

His core message to cerebral types, to philosophy geeks is "Why do you care? Why is this your question now? What's at stake for you in this moment? How does this line of thinking make you feel? What does your attitude have to teach you about the life you want to live?" 89

Lots of things are correct, interesting, but unless there's passion, a personal connection, so what? Metaphysics can only matter if there's skin in the game, other wise it's a distraction. MH says that philosophy is a mode of being, not just an intellectual exercise...90

Why do we question? Because the world is dynamic and forces us to ask all kinds of things. We can answer technical questions, but never satisfactorily the question, Why am I here. 91

Something broke when we were kids and we discovered the world could be different. We learned to use a shoe for a hammer that was missing. We learned that rain doesn't come just because we ask for it...92

Each time our expectations broke (trauma, surprise), we became philosophical, contemplative. For people for whom the world is good enough, no need to question, but also no awe, no higher consciousness. Pain is the gateway to insight. Philosophy begins with "wo(u)nder" 93

But when philosophy becomes a bandage or a crutch and we forget the source, we become addicted to philosophy instead of lovers of wisdom. The goal of philosophy isn't to know more, but to be more open; in this way, Heidegger, as I read him is Socratic. "Theory" is for losers. 94

You can be a student of Heidegger and disagree with everything he says about German language, about technology, about analytic philosophy and more, if you understand that the point of thinking is to be one's best self. 95

not best self in some vanity metric way, and not in the sense that there is a core self we have to obey a la those who speak of following one's soul, but rather in the sense of making the most of the gift of life, however one understands it, now. 96

I'm of the view that to do this is much harder than it sounds & that the study of other great thinkers, a poetic life of community, reflection, study, as well as diverse encounters with "the other" are preconditions for living well. I'm a pluralist as to the forms it can take 97

There is a Hasidic teaching that Zusha should try to be not like Moses, but like Zusha. This is also the Heideggerian call: we should philosophize with our whole being, not imitate Heidegger or become sycophants of his method whatever it might be. 98

This said, Heidegger is impressive because he did his own philosophizing as a commentator on other people's primary texts. He's a rare breed in that many of his best works are both secondary and primary texts. 99

In this humble way, he models that "originality" is not at odds with belonging to a tradition, but often belonging to a tradition is what enables it. I hope, as a commentator on Heidegger I can be both secondary and primary...100

that we can meet in a clearing beyond each of us. I think good readings do this; they open a place where you can't tell what's them and what's you; (or in Jewish speak, what's "pshat" and "drash") 101

One of the frequent criticism I've gotten in an and out of academic contexts from teachers, peers, and readers, is that it's not clear if I'm trying to be a scholar or something else. The answer, as I hope is evinced by this thread is something else. 102

It's what the master, or my idea of his spirit, would have wanted. 103

This is the end of the thread. Thank you for reading. Life continues, but is always mindful of its end. Become who you are.

For folks who are interested, I just wrote about the Exodus story through a (post)-Heideggerian lens.

From Philosopher to Prophet etzhasadeh.substack.com/p/from-philoso…