This semester I’ve subjected myself
to two of the more popularly feared texts in philosophy, Immanuel Kant’s “The Critique of Pure Reason” and Martin
Heidegger’s “Being and Time.”
Years of imperiling myself to the tutelage of philosophers has prepared me for Kant, by the looks of it. In fact, I’ve been surprised that so many find the Critique painful to read. It’s actually straight forward compared to the Prolegomena to Future Metaphysics--a summation of this first critique. Or maybe it’s that I’ve already been exposed to the Kant (to his categories) that I find him merely laborious, not complicated.
Reading
Heidegger on the other hand gives me the same feeling as when water
splashes up from those auto-flushing toilets in public restrooms. It’s a mix
of horror and severe agitation and bad memories. It’s also character revealing.
I admit to swearing openly and without remorse during certain reading sessions.
In any event, I’ve reached that
point in my academic ‘career’ where I believe I have covered enough general philosophical
material to feel comfortable in my categorical adaptability and methodological
familiarity. Or, to put it negatively, I’m going to die eventually, so I’ve got
to stop pretending like I can learn everything I need to before trying to do
solid scholarship. It’s all very tragic: very Shakespeare’s Hamlet or any guy
named Cecil’s romantic life; but I’m more or less obliged to attempt saying
something positive at this point.
My thesis on Heidegger aims very much to do this. As far as
my research shows, nobody, not even theologians, are discussing Heidegger on
religious experience tout court. I’m
on my own, as it were. I get to create the theoretical atmosphere: it’s upshots
and downsides.
I’m not worried. And I feel relaxed and calm because
I’ve matured enough to be disenchanted with academia. I always felt that there
was never much too it even when I began, but at that point I still believed it more profound
than I do now. It’s become more of a professional outlet than the sort of
meta-search-for-the-truth-escapade it started as. Chesterton talks about how,
after a while, you are no longer impressed by one idea over another, and become
an ideological lion tamer. Wittgenstein says what? Ok, cool. *Whoopaah! Sit Mufasa! So whether with this thesis I make a
fool of myself or not makes little difference to me anymore. Right or wrong, it
will amount to little more than idea.
Life consists in more than books
and papers. It even consists in more than ideas (I realize the irony of saying
that life consists of “X,” because, of course, “X” is an idea), however
powerful and influential they may be.
A very good friend asked of me
once, “If not books for you, then in what does life consist”? And I answered spasmodically,
“loving people and dying.” And though I still think this true, I would (in the
words of Dumbledore) amend my original statement to this, “loving people and
having faith unto death.”
It’s a sort of Socratean, “true
wisdom is the skill and practice of death” epitaph for myself. Or that, “If you lose your life, you will find it” bit by Jesus.
It’s all very alarming at the
existential level, on the deathbed I mean, knowingly casting oneself into the cavernous, demanding vice
grip that is hope. But it appears to me the eudemonia,
the good life, the good death, even. And seriously, compared to this, what the deuce does Heidegger's import on religious experience matter?
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