What Is Called Thinking takes its name from Heidegger’s 1954 lecture course. There, Heidegger writes, “The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.”
“To care only for one’s peers’ opinions seems the basic sin of sophistry. To care only for truth seems the basic sin of prophecy.“
“Philosophical writing, in my view, can be like a kind of daily prayer or sacrifice, a ritual. It need not be a treatise or a fully formed argument. There is a power to making a fixed time for thought as opposed to thinking only when the mood strikes.“
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Time for a @threadapalooza on Martin Buber (1878-1965), philosopher, theologian, sociologist, translator, novelist, mystic, and romantic. Buber would not be on Twitter, seeing it as a degraded form of relationship and emblematic of what he called "the Eclipse of God."
An existential and spiritual crisis in his youth led him to break from his family's rabbinic lineage (which, according to lore, traces back to King David) to become an "enlightened" scholar. 2
But Buber, over his life, cannot be easily placed in either the religious or secular camp, and is a useful thinker, even when he is wrong (or over-zealous), for causing us to rethink the boundaries between the sacred and the profane. 3
A sign of salvation and hope in the midst of despondency and horror. (Symbolizing the ram in the thicket that Abraham sees just as he thinks he is condemned to sacrifice his son).
A trumpet blast for battle (as in the battle of Jericho).
The time has arrived for a @threadapalooza on Richard Rorty (1931-2007), pragmatist, ironist, liberal, and romantic; a self-cancelling philosopher who imported European postmodernism into the American mainstream, and believed fiction could do what metaphysics could not.
Rorty is one of those thinkers whom it is fruitful to think with even if you disagree. His position is beautifully clear & his synthesis of traditions wide ranging and admirable. If for no other reason we owe him a debt for making difficult 'continental' thinkers intelligible. 2
For me, the most compelling insight in Rorty is that the blessings and challenges of private life conflict with those of public life. We can't reneg on our responsibility either for being a self or for belonging to society, but each requires a different set of habits. 3
Liberalism is premised on our epistemological weakness. But once you argue that the main obstacle to knowledge is not cognition, but something like will, or something like leadership, it’s not clear why we should value liberalism. Instead we should value aristocracy.
Perhaps the liberal and aristocratic ideals both have some merit and so we must be condemned to cognitive dissonance.
I am delighted to bring you a @threadapalooza on Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), philosopher, poet, novelist, critic, founding figure of German romanticism. An atheist at first, Schlegel converted later in life to Catholicism. Schlegel is the unsung muse of hipsters.
The first thing to note about Schlegel is that he sounds like a joke-ified version of Hegel. "Hegel, Schlegel. Bagel." The Schlegel spills the philosophy; the Schlamegel gets spilt on. In seriousness, though, Hegel knew Schlegel and was once his student. 2/
Schlegel was a mischief maker who had a lot of fun, but he was a serious thinker, too. His humor and love of irony comes out of his thoughtful consideration that philosophy can't know as much we'd like it to. Skepticism animates his love of art, creativity, and faith. 3
Here goes my @threadapalooza on Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), a heartfelt thinker, passionate seeker, Jewish community leader, avant garde translator & major influence on Walter Benjamin, Emmanuel Levinas & Leo Strauss. He died young (from ALS), 4 years before Nazis took power.
His last works were composed using a single finger tapping method, a la Stephen Hawking, which his wife would then transcribe. Like many of his generation, Rosenzweig also struggle with depression. He believed every person should have at least one "dark night of the soul." 2
Rosenzweig is a genius but doesn't get the play he deserves, outside of a small devoted readership of Jewish and Christian readers (and some idiosyncratic academics) for a few reasons. 3