Influences and Acknowledgements 02:
Martin Heidegger
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OK, before I talk to you about Martin Heidegger, I have to explain that I am not an academic genius about Heidegger's life and teachings. I'm going to set forth the important stuff about this guy from the perspective of this coaching. It may not be the same perspective that an academic genius might take. But that doesn't matter.
Heidegger was a German philosopher who lived from 1889 to 1976. He published a book (described as a "fundamental text") in 1927 entitled "Being and Time." This book, and Heidegger's life work, is a big deal in philosophical and academic circles. Some people say that Heidegger was the most important philosopher of the 20th century.
I've studied Heidegger's work for years, and I'm still studying it. It's radically different stuff about an unusual topic: "being." Many academic and philosophical folks are still studying and debating Heidegger's work.
Here's the thing: certain people that have studied Heidegger have found that there is something of an unusual, indecipherable, "hard to put your finger on", "hard to explain" potency and power to his work. In other words, in the view of these people, there's something about Heidegger's work that has the potential to make a difference in the quality of human life.
You can get a certain sense of this, if you wish, by viewing this youtube video. It's worth a look, if not now, then maybe later.
However, the people that have "understood" Heidegger have, almost universally, been very smart academics. Some of them have tried to bring forth Heidegger's work in an understandable way, such that regular people can take hold of it and use it to make their lives better.
They have all failed.
I ran across Heidegger's name sometime in the 1980's. As I mention at other places in SkyVillage, in 1980 I took a course called the "est training". The est training was developed by a fellow named Werner Erhard, whom I discuss below. In my participation with the various courses offered by Erhard's organization, it came to light that Erhard's work had certain correlations with the work of Heidegger. Erhard himself would bring up Heidegger's name from time to time. That was all that I knew about Heidegger back then.
However, around the time that I turned 50, in 2011, I began to wonder what had happened thirty years previously, when I had taken the est training. I wanted to understand how and why the training worked. I remembered the correlation with Heidegger, so I undertook a personal study of his work. It's a study that continues to this day.
(In case you are interested, there's a book that delves into the correlation between the work of Erhard and the work of Heidegger, entitled "Speaking Being; Werner Erhard, Martin Heidegger, and a New Possibility of Being Human," written by Bruce Hyde and Drew Kopp.)
Anyway, maybe five years ago, around the year 2017, I thought I had arrived at an understanding of Heidegger, and I thought that I could explain the key aspects of his work. So I thought. Back then, the words that I used to describe Heidegger's work were accurate, more or less, but, truth be told, I didn't really get it.
The difference maker was a course I took in 2019--the Heidegger course offered by a guy named Hubert Dreyfus. You could write a few volumes about this guy Dreyfus, but this is already getting out of hand, so I'll simplify it.
Dreyfus walked planet Earth from 1929 to 2017. He was a professor at Berkeley and was one of the world's acknowledged experts on Heidegger. Among other courses, he taught a course at Berkeley, specifically about Heidegger's work, for many years. People traveled from all over the world to take this course. Dreyfus won awards for his teaching abilities and style. He was, by all accounts, down to earth, friendly, relatable, and a genuinely good guy. (Maybe he wasn't, I don't know, but that's what's usually said about him.) You can access lots of youtube videos about him, and in which he appears, if you want.
Dreyfus wrote a book that purported to explain Heidegger for the masses. When I tried to read Dreyfus's book, I found myself reaching for the dictionary no less than ten times a page. I finally gave up. It's basically incomprehensible. You are welcome to pick Dreyfus's book up. You can buy it on Amazon. Maybe it's in your local library, I don't know. But I wouldn't bother. Look, I admire Dreyfus, but he didn't get the job done with his book. Heidegger remained incomprehensible to the masses.
So, I was left with Dreyfus's course at Berkeley. He's dead now, but his course on Heidegger was recorded in audio form a few times. I got hold of the audio that was recorded during the Heidegger course he taught in 2001. I obtained all of the necessary books that Heidegger wrote--most importantly, "Being and Time" itself--and, by listening to the audio, I took Dreyfus's course. It went well, too. In these recordings, Dreyfus is in his prime. He talks in understandable English. Students ask questions that flesh things out.
And, at a certain point, while immersing myself in Dreyfus's course on Heidegger, I got it. I "got" the basics of what Heidegger was saying. It was a big deal, too. An eye-opener. A mind-blower.
So, now, I have my head around Heidegger, although, frankly, I suspect that there are other layers to his teachings that I have yet to master, because it is rich, dense stuff.
Now, look, we have to explore the next topic, so here we go. I'm going to simplify this by saying the following:
Martin Heidegger was an asshole.
The fact that Martin Heidegger was an undeniable asshole has been a major stumbling block when it comes to the appreciation and understanding of his work. Explanations are required, so here we go.
Please note: the following is my perspective. It is my opinion. This is not an academic thesis. This is the way I look at things. In other words, I'm going to summarize things in a way that might bring forth the ire of academic philosophical folks.
In the wake of Nietzsche's work, an idea seized the minds of certain academic and philosophical people, and to some degree, of some others as well: "morality is for losers". Here's my opinion: having abandoned morality--OK, having "outgrown" morality--many of these folks thought they were becoming more evolved, but, in fact, they were becoming more primitive. This post-Nietzchean academic perspective became an excuse to give into one's more base motivations, in order to seek more primitive "rewards". Thus, "morality" gave way to the pursuit of values such as dominance, acquisition, ego, and gratification, and, in many cases, even lesser pursuits such as genocidal bigotry, sexual manipulation and abuse, and the willingness and desire to inflict harm upon others.
Heidegger was one of these guys. Let me explain.
Heidegger was a Nazi. No kidding, for real: Heidegger was a Nazi. It seems that he was, in fact, an enthusiastic Nazi. Apparently, he was also an anti-Semite. He was a serial cheater on his wife. He set forth to damage and destroy the careers of his contemporaries, to his own advantage, even those that had helped him and served as mentor to him. I mean, if you study this guy, you are going to be appalled at the shit he did. He was one motherfucker of an asshole.
His work was similarly amoral. Not "immoral"--"amoral." All of this teachings concern what we might call the "mechanics" of being a human being. Referring to the words that I used above, he was all about movement, and he completely ignored direction. Being and Time is lengthy, but in it's entirety, it doesn't mention the word "love" even once.
I'm going to tell you what I think about all of this.
I think that Martin Heidegger was a brilliant genius who studied philosophy and came upon a unique way of looking at human beings and "beingness" in general, in a similar way, and at a similar level of genius, as Albert Einstein when he studied physics and came upon the special theory of relativity.
I also think that Heidegger, at the time he came upon his ideas, was a fucking asshole whose mind worked in a certain direction: how can I selfishly use these ideas to provide me with a good life and all the stuff I really want?
He then set forth and wrote his magnum opus, "Being and Time", in a manner that was intentionally difficult to comprehend, because he wanted everyone to think he was a raving genius, and he wanted to use the incomprehensibility of the way that he expressed his ideas so as to barricade and safeguard his academic position.
You get this, right? You see this kind of thing all the time. Just turn on one of the business channels, on your television set. It won't be any time at all before some hotshot talking head shows up on the screen, and will go on using fast-paced and damn near incomprehensible jargon about inverse yield curves and IPO's and OTC markets and structural efficiencies and arbitrage and goodness knows what else. They do this so as to make themselves appear smart and indispensable, so to speak--to intimidate casual viewers and investors and thereby carve out for themselves a safe sinecure in the world of money.
Heidegger did the same thing when he came up with Being and Time. In my opinion, he didn't care about making a positive difference in the quality of human life. Instead, he wanted this book to serve up the following message: "I'm uniquely and irreplaceably special, and if you want to understand this wonderful stuff that I've developed, you'll have to give me tenure and a special chair on your academic staff."
It worked. That's how the academic world operates--and a lot of other worlds too, like, as we've seen, the business world, or the legal world, or the scientific world, etc. People tend to serve up their ideas in an opaque and un-understandable way so as to intimidate others and safeguard the preciousness and irreplaceability of their positions.
So, Being and Time is about the most incomprehensible book ever written. You know, pretty much, it's tough to rank incomprehensibility. Is Ulysses more incomprehensible then The Sound and the Fury? I don't know. I can tell you what, though. You pick up any of these three books--Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury, and Being and Time--and try to read them on your own, and you are in for a world of hurt. A WORLD of hurt.
In fact, I'm kind of surprised that anyone tried to make sense of Being and Time when it was first published, but people did, and people have. Of course, then they tried to explain it to us regular mortals, and, so far, they've come up empty. The ideas it contains are so far removed from our normal understanding of things that this alone makes it challenging to explain. But the language that Heidegger uses? I mean, he makes up all sorts of words, and he explains things in a very difficult and challenging way. Plus, he wrote in German, which is a language that works differently from English in many significant ways, so translating Heidegger can be problematic.
So, that's the thing you have to get about Heidegger. He came up with some amazing ideas, and, used properly, they can make a difference in the quality of human life that I describe as essential, but Heidegger didn't care about that in the least.
Heidegger was, and is, an asshole. In fact, his way of thinking and being can be dangerous. No kidding. This means that you have to keep a distance from him, and take his work with a grain of salt. Heidegger can teach you some things, but he makes for a damn lousy mentor.
I've done that. I've kept a distance from his teachings, both in my life, and in this website.
I am doing that for you, as well.
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