Thread by @DarrenJBeattie

Not really true but it would take too long to explain all the ways in which this is misguided

1 st point--- it begs the question as to what is ontologically prior, the "moral" or a full acount of Being

https://twitter.com/DamonLinker/status/1400859702662250497

Secondly, Damon smuggles in a version of Strauss that Velkley explicitly and implicitly critiques in his work

Velkley is not defending Strauss the moralist at all.
According to the aporetic interpretation of Strauss rather than the more childish "moralist" account...

it is just as problematic to defend any one moral position over the other. Or, at least, the aporetic Strauss is not primarily concerned with morals in a sense that would give Damon's critique here real bite

Of course, even though Velkley pretends to offer a critique motivated chiefly by philosophy, I believe there is a moral dimension that he smuggles into his foregone conclusion that Strauss "wins."

But to make the win palatable philosophically Velkley has to pretend that its not morally grounded.

Secondly, Damon is very wrong that Heidegger's account is about formalism or formal structure

But again this requires more sophisticated and lengthy critique

Even the early Heidegger was put off by the Marburg Neo-Kantians

Being for Heidegger is the precise opposite of formalism, it is what gives things thier thingness.

Being is not emptiest formalism, this goes all the way back to his engagement with Brentano

As for how Heideggerianism could satisfy our modern moral intuitions, I recommend my brief exchange with Mark Blitz

There I say

It is important that for Heidegger technology is essentially a form of revelation, the manner in which beings appear to us, and that this mode of revelation is not subject to choice but rather itself conditions the possibilities for choice.

One might interpret Heidegger’s comparison of mechanized agriculture with nuclear weaponry not as a dismissal of important moral distinctions, but instead as reflective of an understanding that the threat of technology is of such depth as to encompass even moral considerations.

To simply reject Heidegger’s account of technology for not focusing on morality is thus to risk ignoring a much more fundamental threat involving the conditions for the possibility of morality.

To accept Heidegger’s account of technology does not therefore entail the sort of moral-political insensitivity of which he (whether rightly or not) is so often accused.