Truth, Language, and History
290411: my brain hurts- in a good way. reading this, i can imagine why he would be such an inspiring lecturer. he always comes at ideas from new angles, he has entire new arguments that seem very convincing, about truth conditions more than correspondence, on ‘unconcealment’, on ‘idle talk’, on ‘conversation’ more than ‘discourse’, on religious world ‘disclosure’. this work was wrathall’s ten year project, so he has done the heavy lifting in translations and various interpretations, thus this work is easy to read without too much jargon, yet wonderfully engaging with ideas.
first essay is the most difficult, most essential to follow his other chapters. ‘on our positive ability to be deceived’ was my favorite, referenced merleau-ponty, characterized exactly what ‘phenomenology’ means. his reading of ‘plato, truth, and unconcealment’ was another great chapter. his ‘history’ did not really interest me, his religious concepts of ‘the fourfold’, his critique on neitzche’s anti-metaphysics… all these will reward the second reading they deserve.
i do not know what analytic philosophers would get out of it, but it certainly convinces me that this mode of philosophical thinking can be very fruitful, very engaging, much more than obsessive logic-chopping. arguments against technological world view, against the real as calculation, are interesting but not to me more than ranting of dangers of what seems to me an original description of the human, as a toolmaker, as a technologist, as embodying various ‘stances’ to the world that predate any modern tech.
maybe it is true he is not a sentimentalist, but i read once he was a ‘black forest-redneck’. his adventures with the nazis make him an inherently controversial thinker. how can you be so brilliant and yet so wrong? m-p is probably still my favorite philosopher.