/lit/ - Literature

>>17020825
Heidegger claims yet another victory. The army-towards-truth marches ever on.

Why did it take Heidegger to realize your beliefs were retarded

>i want to move forward

this necessitates the idea of progress, which is nonsense itself.

>>17020825
brainlet non-reader here, but how would being a right wing traditionalist contradict being a being from your time? You're reacting to present circumstances. The resonance with and widespread yearning for "traditionalism" is a product of the tech capitalism as much as the dehumanizing hedonistic/hyper individualistic cultural aspects.

>>17020901
I do not believe that intellectual progress is nonsense

>>17020825
>In essence, Heidegger believes that Traditionalism/Conservatism will not amount to anything more than LARP because you're trying to divorce your Being from your Time. I came to terms with this idea just a few weeks ago and after (now realizing it) LARPing for the past 4 years as a Right Wing Traditionalist and longing for a "Retvrn to Tradition", I now no longer see any redeeming qualities in these ideologies. I want to move forward.
Wait does Heidegger actually say this? Holy shit I always thought this, maybe I should read him. Wasn't he a literal nazi though? Doesn't that contradict this?

>>17020920
Yes, this is a retarded take. Heidegger talks about the return of the Greek pantheon to the earth as being necessary for a true return to western civilization and to genuine philosophical and political being

>>17020920
>Wasn't he a literal nazi though? Doesn't that contradict this?
Facism of the 30s were actually at the forefront of Futurism and Progress and Heidegger saw potential in this. Nazi Germany was against the Church and wanted to go beyond the old structure.

>>17020908
You're reacting against present circumstances by using old weaponry. You have to go forward in order to go back (meaning the future will possess the spirit of the past but not the past itself)

>>17020930
>Heidegger talks about the return of the Greek pantheon
This is not Traditionalism in the slightest. Heideggers yearn for a return of the Greek pantheon is actually a call for right wing progressivism and not stagnated (freeze Time) Conservatism. Conservaitism is reactionary because it's always reacting against the drive of Culture. Conservatism is always two steps behind Liberals, they never create or drive culture but they always try to react against it (to no avail). This is why I see no redeeming qualities in LARPing as a Trad Catholic or something like that. Even the Church is about to legalize homosexual marriage in a decade for fucks sake, being a Conservative is simply self torture

>>17020825
People aren't (but should be) reading Chapter 15 of Ride the Tiger.
>>17020914
It is.
>>17020941
Fascism was extremely difference and can not be reduced to either being "trad" or being "progressive".
>>17020956
>(meaning the future will possess the spirit of the past but not the past itself)
This is literally the point of Traditionalism, though?

>>17020825
>b-but m-muh Heidegger-
Haha, NOPE. Fuck that guy, I've read hundreds of books ranging from fantasy to philosophy, watched, read, and pondered on many different characters and real-life personalities, the pattern of their lives, their patterns of behavior. I harbor far greater understanding than he's ever possesed. That KEK was limited to the views of his comfy little european court lifestyle, which might have served him well back then, but is beyond useless nowadays.

But say he's got a pearl of wisdom or two in that book of his—who knows, I haven't read it—and I can still apply it today, instead of using his advise and personality as a model for what a certain kind of individual would have behaved like under a different society (not really useful save for an ongoing mental construct of human behavior at large). I am still better than him. I am happier than him, more important than him, a greater, far more powerful soul than him, just by virtue of being myself. So it's not up to ME to beg this corpse's book for insight, I'm not gonna get on my knees and negotiate for how to absorb this withered skeleton's almighty advice. Just like with every other kind of literature, I'm gonna rip out the bits that are worthwhile and throw away the fluff. You are a KEK if you believe otherwise.

>>17020930
His call for a "return" to the Greek pantheon is simply to find inspiration in thinking not mired in millennia of worn-out conceptualizations. He is quite clear that the type of thinking begun by the Greeks had run its course by Nietzsche and that the best we can do now is wait for an experience with Being that would create "another beginning."

>>17020920
Check out "Age of the World Picture" and Basic Questions of Philosophy. As far as I know, he doesn't devote a single essay to the issue of modern politics (more aptly: the politics of modernity), but usually when he's discussing technology he touches on the issue.

Keep in mind the Nazism of the 30s was quite different from the total war machine it became during WWII. Basically, Heidegger was part of the mystical/pastoral camp of NatSoc that lost out to the bureaucratic, technologically dependent faction. It's why he distanced himself from the party even before WWII.

>>17020825
You only live for 80 years, historical movements can last for up to 500 years without significant change. I understand your concern but sometimes people have to die for being right yet being anachronistic. Some can bear the weight of this cross, some cannot. Jesus and his followers bore the cross and died for being anachronistic in the sense you describe, yet ultimately they were right. In God's view this little modern era is but a blip in history.

>Heidegger was born in 1889 into a devout Catholic family in Messkirch, southwest Germany, the first child of the sexton of the local church. It was the height of the “Modernist crisis”, when a movement to introduce modern critical methods into theology and biblical studies was meeting ferocious opposition in the Vatican. The pugnacious counter-cultural perfectionism of the Vatican line impressed Heidegger. He tried to join the Jesuits, but was quickly dismissed because of an early manifestation of his chronic heart problems. Nevertheless, he remained intent on becoming a priest, and enrolled at Freiburg University to study theology.

>In Freiburg, Heidegger came under the influence of Protestant critical scholarship, and when Pope Pius X’s anti-Modernist oath of 1910 forbade Catholic scholars to use such methods of enquiry, Heidegger was deeply conflicted. His health collapsed and he had to break off his studies for almost a year.

>When he returned to Freiburg in late 1911, it was as a student of philosophy, not theology. His plan now was to work theologically within the philosophy faculty, developing a Catholic theology through a dialogue of medieval and modern Kantian thought. The anti-modern neo-Scholasticism championed in seminaries and Catholic theology departments now seemed to him a debased and mechanised system, straitjacketing the potential especially of medieval mysticism. Heidegger acerbically wrote to his doctoral supervisor: “The motu proprio about philosophy was really the cherry on the cake. Perhaps you as an ‘academic’ could apply for an even better procedure for gutting the brain of anyone who dares to have an independent thought, and replacing it with ‘Italian salad’.”

>Outside of the Black Notebooks we know a great deal about Heidegger’s attitude to Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular.

>that Christian thought is straight-jacketed by a commitment to explanation and specifically to the construction of a First Cause; and that Christianity has effectively thrown in its lot with a correspondence notion of truth: the sign refers to a thing, with all the consequences of the reification of reality that one would think its important, as well as supreme, instance exceeds percepts and concepts.

Heidegger was a failed theological dabbler, middling intellect and a brutal spiritually empty man (as Benhard rightfully noted) who got filtered by Aquinas and Aristotle and whose philosophy was largely built upon this ressentiment against them.

Heidegger thought that being unfolded or made itself present throughout history/time in such a way as to conceal it's true nature.

The presocratic Greeks recognised the primacy of being and came close to being connected to it but as history unfolded this was lost to us. We have metaphysics which conceals being as representation and techñe. Representation and techñe finds itself predominant in modern society as science or scientific rationality. This rationality blinds us to being. We can get closer to being with poetry and "'thinking'''.

Heidegger thought that a people's past determines to a great extent the horizon of a people's present (being and time). The future gives possibilities to us but is constrained by the present and past. This includes culture, language, philosophy, science and all that stuff.

Traditions are important but being progresses through time and reveals itself in manifest ways in a people's time/horizon. We interpret being and traditions and such as history goes on unfolding in being. Heidegger was kind of a historicist but would have denied that as it wouldn't explicate his philosophy of history well, it's too reductive.

Heidegger was criticised by leftists like Marcuse I think ??? as a dangerous radical forward thinking conservative revolutionary. Someone who tried to break western people away from reactionary and conservative false constructs. I think these leftists want right wing people reactionary and two steps behind them at all times, Heidegger threatened their easy wins since the enlightenment, at least that's what I interpreted them as implying.

I haven't read this article but it was just posted a couple days ago
https://counter-currents.com/2020/12/heidegger-against-the-traditionalists-part-one/

I think your reading of Heidegger is wrong though.. He certainly would disagree with hypostatizing an ABSTRACT conception of tradition, but he was an ur-organicist conservative who saw human life as meaningful only within a "tradition," similar to T.S. Eliot's conservatism. Historical cultures may also have "abstract" notions that govern or preoccupy their being.

>>17021384
Right, he's pretty much advocating for a "new tradition," as paradoxical as that sounds.

>>17020825
Why did it take reading Heidegger for you figure this out when Justin Trudeau and John Oliver already told you it was current year half a decade ago?

>>17021384
I like this interpretation and it seems more widely applicable compared to a binary model.

>>17021273
>filtered by x and y
Lmao shut the fuck up you pseud midwit image board peasant

>>17021432
>2016 was half a decade ago
>that feel
>I've been here since 2006

>>17021486
Let me rephrase this to not hurt your fee fees. Heidegger wanted to be a Catholic theologian but didnt like that the Church subscribed to Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions, which he found too rigid, systematic and so on. Little Heidegger dreamed of mysticism, of wonder and so because he could not cope with Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy, created his own little shit philosophical ruminations. There you go little reader. Please do not be offended.

>>17021575
So there's no possible way Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions could actually be too rigid? Anyone who departs from them is automatically rejected?

>>17021575
So he wasn't filtered then, but found them inadequate. This is why I hold you to be a retard anon

>>17021575
This isn't really accurate. Heidegger was part of a generation of Catholics who had very little belief that the church was abreast of modernity and any kind of safe harbour from it. The vigorous neo-thomism and neo-aristotelianism you are thinking of hadn't been created yet. It was just starting to attain new prominence with thinkers like Brentano, who was one of the inspirations of Heidegger's own inspiration, Husserl, but Brentano never really formed a "school" and only vaguely fanned the flames of neo-realism in the late 19th century.

The realist turn wasn't really satisfying on its own until it integrated phenomenology. Heidegger was inspired by Blondel, but didn't really know what to make of him. He doesn't seem to have encountered Bergson, at least not in any deep way. He did encounter Husserl, but during the latter's "middle" phase (around 1900, the Logical Investigations, but pre-transcendental phase), in which most of his followers took him for, surprise, some kind of Aristotelian realist and anti-neo-Kantian. But Heidegger didn't know what to make of Husserl until a few years later, when he began publishing his more obviously transcendental-phenomenological ideas.

Until that happened, Heidegger wasn't pulled away from a philosophy grounded in Catholic traditions and theology. Even after first encountering the Investigations, he spent another several years, almost a decade, continuing on with his earlier plans. It's only when he really discovered phenomenology that he had some kind of transformation, and then he mobilised various Christian thinkers, like Augustine and Kierkegaard, perfectly well. He was also well read in the tradition, far better than anyone today probably, enough to write books deconstructing Leibniz's rationalist metaphysics etc.

This was common to Catholic thinkers of this time. Thomism wasn't much comfort to Maritain, one of leading the forerunners of modern neo-thomism, when he formed a suicide pact with a friend and only called it off after discovering Bergson. The common theme isn't that the "systematic" philosophies you mention were too difficult for them but that they didn't seem to stand on any firm base, and they were only recommended by a church that seemed as degenerate as modernity itself. The renewed excitement for Aristotle and thomism you are probably accustomed to came after their re-grounding by men who felt that they had found phenomenological first principles capable of upholding metaphysical and epistemological first principles.

Good book on the topic, Jazz Age Catholicism.

>>17021772
>The vigorous neo-thomism and neo-aristotelianism you are thinking of hadn't been created yet.

Hahahaha what?! Who do you think the Nouvelle Theologie (having much the same problem as Heidegger and even ironically being influenced by Blondel too) was reacting against in mid 20th century? Precisely against the dominance of neo-scholasticism which in turn was dominated by neo-Thomist figures such as Réginald Marie Garrigou-Lagrange who condemned this Nouvelle Theologie from the very start. Incidentally, it sprang from very much the same reaction as Heidegger had when encountering this systematic Aristotelian Thomism which dominated Catholic theology at the time.

>Thomism wasn't much comfort to Maritain

Maritain is already a degeneration of Thomism.

>The common theme isn't that the "systematic" philosophies you mention were too difficult for them but that they didn't seem to stand on any firm base
Their reaction against this systematic philosophy that dominated at the time stems precisely from the same angle, which is the same reason why de Lubac was criticized, it is an overzealous approach and a desire to be more "mystical" and "supernatural" and "beyond" than necessary. The criticism from the Thomist camp was that it is precisely THEM, these new thinkers, who stood on shaky grounds. And history has proven them right, at least in the Church's case as doctrinal confusion dominates contemporary Catholic discourse. Heidegger of course, ultimately ending up being a secular philosopher, was absolved from this charge, but he tracks very much the same curve as his spiritual "brothers" inside the Church.

>The renewed excitement for Aristotle and thomism you are probably accustomed to came after their re-grounding by men who felt that they had found phenomenological first principles capable of upholding metaphysical and epistemological first principles.
There never was a controvers inside the Church or Thomism in a classical sense about first principles. People like Lagrange denounced the "radical new" thinking and thinkers around that time as being shaky and not new in any real sense of the word, but merely compromises with modernity, taking up not new ideas, but old heresies that were already denounced and re-packaging them. It is obvious now in retrospect that he was right. And the only judgement we can make on Heidegger and his similar ilk inside the Church is precisely the one I had made, they suffered from an overzealous fascination with the mystical and detested the Aristotelian-Thomistic system not because it was untenable but because it did not go along with their modern sensibilities. Ultimately, there was no great refreshement in the Church by taking up these ideologies, but a disaster. The opposite of what the "mystical revoltionaires" like de Lubac thought would happen (and he admitted it himself later on).

>>17021963
With Heidegger we cannot judge because secular philosophy is not singularly tied to an institution, but he too initially supported Nazis on the basis of the same kind of spring towards the new and mystical as his philosophical "brothers" inside the Church had. Ultimately like them, he grew disillusioned. In the end Aristotle and Aquinas stand victorious and this will become only more clear in future decades, unfortunately quite likely with further disasters generated by this irrational romantic/mystical spring that dominated the modern era and is just now starting to look burned out, which nothing much to show for it.

>>17021985
>irrational romantic/mystical spring that dominated the modern era and is just now starting to look burned out
unless you think modernity is going to last forever, I don't see any other way out other than with a romantic leap into the unknown

>>17021963
If you think Maritain is a degeneration of thomism you are defending a very peculiar subset of neo-thomism, I suspect on pedantic grounds because you also write in a disrespectful way. I don't want to continue the conversation much. But the main thrust of my response is that we are not talking about neo-scholasticism within the church, we're talking about the church's ability to maintain its hold on thinkers like Heidegger and Maritain, and thus on the layperson who is likely far more familiar with Maritain, let alone Heidegger, than Garrigou-Lagrange.

It's a little bit like I'm telling you that liberal theology was incapable of exciting Ernst Troeltsch, and you are replying that Barth's neo-orthodoxy already encompassed this critique. Or, really, more like some even less well-known predecessor of Barth did. The question isn't "was there some neo-orthodox guy in 1870 and was he correct," it's "why were people drifting to kulturprotestantismus in the first place, why did neo-orthodoxy seem like a stopgap to so many?" And this example actually breaks down because neo-orthodoxy did a far better job of holding onto promising Protestant theologians than arid neo-scholasticism did of holding onto promising Catholics.. As I said, Maritain formed a suicide pact.

Your derision for the "pseudo-mysticism" of Lebensphilosophie is understandable as a position although I don't agree, what I object to is your self-confidence that it is self-evident, when if this were the case, we wouldn't be having the discussion.

>It is obvious now in retrospect that he was right.
To whom? You clearly like Garrigou-Lagrange, and I suspect some of your allegiance comes from how relieved you are to have a position you can articulate and a fight you can take up after having studied these subjects in recent years. It's good to be full of piss and vinegar. But it may be narrowing your vision and leading you to become yet another example of a common phenomenon nowadays - twentysomething lapsed Catholics rediscovering their faith through theology because it gives them an opportunity to be aggressive contrarian cunts to people on the internet. Not calling you this, but warning you it's an archetype - anyone who has used /lit/ for the last 10 years has seen the rise and fall (into bad repute) of the "tradcath LARPer" with bizarrely strong opinions.

>>17022023
The main problem is people think there is a total disconnect between what reason and the mystical can arrive to. They are not opposite forces but two sides of the same coin. I see the revolt against systematic theology as an overzealous desire for the mystical, where the individual wrongly thinks that he has to discard that system entirely to return to some primordial mystical state of "being". The leap forward will be when we can show that the mystical and the rational are one and the same. That one can mystically meditate on rational systemic conclusions and rationally systemize mystical revelations without losing the balance. This is the balance we have lost we are totally unhinged either in one direction or the other. In fact my claim is that the true mystical experience is precisely in this confluence, common ground. In the totally removed-from-reason knowing in revelation and in seeing the mystical incidence in reason-based systematization. This has been violently torn apart in that people tend to either be completely tilted into reason and removed from mystery and the mystical or tend to (often in reaction against the seeming dominance of reason in Enlightenment) abandon the reason at least in a systematical categorization sense and focus on primordial mystery, mystical or being and then apply reason to that after-the-fact. We will have to merge the two to achieve the fullness.

>>17022143
Do you think christianity could be a hindrance past a certain point here? Past overcoming nominalism, it seems to me that the church has been one of the primary forces in history upholding this rigidity of reason and revelation. I'm not sure the renewed 20th and 21st century christian interest in neoplatonism is enough, how is christianity taking initiative compared to people like Husserl, Heidegger, Scheler, Strauss, etc., when the stakes seem to be very high?

>>17022065
>If you think Maritain is a degeneration of thomism you are defending a very peculiar subset of neo-thomism

I'm not, a simple google search would tell you that. Even wiki would tell you that Maritain is an Existential-Thomist while Lagrange and his ilk are the neo-scholastic Thomists who dominanted the Catholic Church theology in the era we are speaking of.

This was the mainstream:
>n the first half of the twentieth century Angelicum professors Edouard Hugon, Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange among others, carried on Leo's call for a Thomist revival. Their approach is reflected in many of the manuals[132] and textbooks widely in use in Roman Catholic colleges and seminaries before Vatican II.

Again, I know many people might have not known individual persons connected to this movement, but that's not really surprising as there is no reason to think that Catholic theologians were ever in a competition to be read as cult-like philosophical icons.

Overall, it appears to me that we are speaking of two different things. I was inclined to think myself that one should react against the systematical Thomist-influenced-like thinking and actually came close to holding positions closer to this "beyond", "we have to go back to the primordial sources and being" kind of way, until I engaged with both sides of the discussion more closely and realized that I was in fact making a concession and basically giving up on systemic reason and "common sense", approaching fideism even at points and creating a split that was not really necessary. Much like described here: >>17022143

I always felt in discmfort to be honest, because most modern philosophy to me seemed to be spinning in rhetorical circles after all. I could engage with it, even passionately, but ultimately there was a feeling of emptiness.

So I tried engaging with what I initially disliked, thinking it was excessively legalistic, pharisaical even in Thomism and Aristotle (I had the greatest distate for his creation of such things as categories and different kinds of ends and substances and potentialities which all seemed ridiculous to me at the time) and that made me realize that I lacked a the fullness of the perspective, it was not that I couldn't understand them before, rather it was a simple intuitive distaste and that was because I was grossly submerged in completely modern sensibilities. I'm going to make a conjecture based on what I read that this is quite likely the reacion Heidegger and the people involved with the Nouvelle Theologie experienced as well. This was my first point, articulated a little bit with a bombastic tone, because we are on 4chan after all. My second point is simply that time has and will continue to vindicate the position of Garrigou-Lagrange and the like, those who saw past the historical moment and understood that this was an unecessary "unhinging" that created an imbalance. My third point was the re-integration into balance in this sense: >>17022143

>>17022238
First, for me the primary consideration is the Catholic Church. And the answer is I don't know how the Church is going to get there, but I am frankly not that concerned about it. Because I do believe in God being able to direct his Church to reach such a state. I dont even see the Church as an institution whose goal should be to engage with modern movements or compete with secular philosophers. I think the Church has a simple job of providing priests and Sacraments to the faithful, holding to that which she knows to be true. The right move in this specific instance was to take the cross on her arms and stick to her doctrine whatever the price would be. The alternative, the confusion of post Vatican II, the apostasy despite the seeming willingness to engage with modernity has been the worse option of the two. I think the job for future theologians will be to look back at the sources, to look back at the tradition and find a way to say something in a new way that is at the same time the eternal truth. Unlike the engagement with modernity, or simply sticking to old ways of things without doing anything (though the latter is far less conducive to grave errors), the Church will at some point in future articulate the eternal truth in a new, more radical way. And by more radical I mean even more honest to tradition and to the Jesus and Apostolic Age than it seems possible now. The wonder of faith could only be produced in this paradoxical synthesis. And it is simply not clear how this could come to be right now, but the alternative is never to do something stupid, sometimes waiting out the storm holding fast to your roots is the right thing to do. But as mentioned, I am not concerned for two reasons. The Church is the only institution (perhaps there are others, I'm sure it's not common though) who predicts its own demise as the final chapter of its incorporation. It is one of the few institutions who has prophets prophecizing its destruction, error and apostasy. The renewal of the Church will not come from men but from God himself, because the victory belongs to God alone. And it is said by the Catholic Church itself that the Church will follow Jesus in replicating his crucifixion and resurrection. For this reason, I am not concerned about Catholic theologians having to compete or follow the World. When the fullness of time is here, when the time is right, even in a Hegelian sense, the new era will be ushered in and men hierachy of the Church and laity alike will participate in it. But this time will not be ushered in by men's philosophical efforts, but God himself. This is why I have no worry and this is why I ultimately hold the positions I hold.

>>17022286
That's fair, sorry if I seemed acerbic as well. I really wasn't saying you were doing the thing I mentioned, just being a bit cagey because I've had some real bad encounters. But I still could have said it better. Thanks for being the bigger man and doing what I should have done in the first place, keeping it 100% civil.

I see what you mean now, I guess I just don't see any intrinsic value in being part of the Catholic church. For example I would rather have the Orthodox sophiologists or "modernist," existentialist Orthodox philosophers of the early 20th century, with all the suspicions of heresy they received, than the toned-down attempts to de-hereticise them and teach them as systematic theology by the official Orthodox Church. The churches just seem to suck the true theology out of everything. Theology is supposed to be true metaphysics, the science of the highest and most real, διὰ τὸ θαυμάζειν.

I understand what you mean but I honestly think you're wrong about modern distaste for rigour being the sole or greatest cause of reaction against systematic theology. Maybe for some people it is/was simply a gut-level dislike of systematicity, in any capacity, but like I said in my first wall of text post, Heidegger and Maritain and others were desperately searching for foundations, first and foremost. They didn't feel like any of the existing systems fundamentally answered the critiques of Kant, Nietzsche, etc. Phenomenology just happened to be what gave them some firm ground to stand on, immediate and certain ground that wasn't destroyed/deconstructed by the critiques. From there they could start a new prima philosophia, which could then come into relation with the old, pre-critical forms of philosophy (e.g. proving the ultimate soundness of Aristotelian categories or Platonic metaphysics).

Heidegger wasn't a vulgar mystic, he was a systematiser of Nietzschean metacritique and a phenomenologist, and so good at both that he applied each to the other and scoured away what he perceived as even their own lingering pre-critical naivities. These critiques were necessary, it was necessary to push the critical revolution to the point that everyone now has to confront it as a sort of antechamber to doing philosophy. Like it or not, most neo-scholastics did not and still do not even realise that Kant and Nietzsche need to be answered to. You can't just "go back" to arbitrary schemes. It is exactly analogous to the ancient Greek sophists challenging the arbitrary schemes of the philosophers, which triggered a crisis of nihilism and relativism, to which Plato then replied by showing that knowledge of the world is still possible, provided it's grounded in knowledge of the divine. We are waiting for our Plato right now.

Any merging of rationalism and irrationalism will have to SHOW how the two are really interrelated (real synthesis), not just achieve a fallacious golden mean between them (false synthesis).

>>17022143
Nicely said, I see where you're coming from. I agree with your sense that there can be a mystical rationality and a rational mysticism, but I think the skepticism of Heidegger, po-mo, et al. toward "rationality" is that seemingly any romantic/mystical experience that is arrogated by rationality will eventually lose its essence in the shuffling of the rational system. Perhaps this is a distinction between the ideal and real levels of mysticism and rationality (whereas rationality in an ideal sense would not degenerate into the scientific-capitalistic morass we are in today), but I find it hard to trust in the impulse to systematize since its usefulness nowadays is to benefit institutions I believe have failed us. Unless a rational system is constantly being refreshed by an influx of mysticism, it will become empty dogma, but the problem is that a rational system has no problem running without this rejuvenation. In fact, rationality functions better when its fundamentals aren't challenged, so maybe I'm being defeatist here, but I can't help but see the impulse to rationalize as being the road to a system where dogma has forgotten whatever ecstatic experience gave rise to it in the first place. But maybe that's just me being jaded by being unable to imagine an institution that uses rational systematization for good.

>>17022421
One thing more that I think. I think this will require a theology of action. I do ironically believe with some more progressively inclined that the Church will have to go out in the world and engage and stop being so institutionalized in its beliefs and start doing as Jesus was doing etc. I absolutely believe all of that but from a different perspective. I don't think the Church has to compromise on its eternal truth or tradition, engage in false ecumenism or take upon itself moden sensibillities and ideologies. I think the Church, when the time is right and God will help with this, will go out to the nations again. Quite rightly stripped of its institutionalized glamour, but holding fast to its eternal truths and engaging with modernity and people by being even more radically truly Christian. I don't believe people need to see a Church that compromises to their tendencies and speaks to them in that way, I believe deep down that people thirst to see the authentic Christianity of Jesus and the Apostolic Age. They want to see that in a hopeless modern world, that authentic belief, that authentic action, that this sacred thing we have lost, is sitll possible. This will cause conversions, not speaking to people in a concession with modernity. I have read once that many things could be averted and changed if just a few (in fact it might have been even one) person held the kind of faith and conviction that Apostles did. I thought it was ridiculous at the time, but now it seems to me upon further inspection to be ultimately correct. There is no authentic faith like that, there are no more martyrs, there are no more people selling everything they have and following Jesus, there are no more people sure that God is with them and that nothing can happen to them except holy martyrdom. What we do have and I do not absolve myself from this is a sort of cultural Christianity, a sort of I believe in the story quite seriously, but where are my actions that reflect this? If I believe the Kingdom of God is at hand, if I believe Jesus could really return at any hour, then where is my act? So my thesis is that the engagement with the world on its own terms is not going to produce what certain people thought it would, I take the opposite position, that the modern world is desperately thirsty to recover the sacred, the authentic, the saintly, the godly. And any through revival will certainly incorporate a revival of this kind, of a new era of saints who in 4chan's terms do really unironically believe and act as Saints. But the fertile grounds for this act to take place will ultimately be determined and provided for by God. One should always act as if this is already taking place, but you also cannot be discouraged, here too one must not fall into an imbalance between the idea that all historical events are social constructions and can be brought into being by mere action and the idea that everything is already pre-determined so all action is irrelevant.

>>17022238
Not him, but it isn't on any considerable scale, as far as I know. Lonergan's transcendental thomism was an attempt at something like it though. Since you know all these people, you'll get what I mean: Lonergan wanted to move beyond the critical deconstruction of the tradition by Heidegger, by affirming Strauss' critique of relativism and nihilism as the endpoint of an uncritical and total acceptance of Heidegger's metacriticism as the final form of philosophy, but going beyond Strauss' uselessly vague gesturing at secular platonism and trying to do something like a neo-platonic transcendental phenomenology a la Husserl.

Lonergan was supposed to be some big thing decades back, but then nothing much came of it, because the academic philosophy structure of the secular west has absorbed everything and dragged everything down to the level of bourgeois blathering. I like Charles Taylor but who seriously gives a fuck about his dumbass debate with Habermas, or whatever the latest tempest in a teapot is. The existential stakes of salvation have been lost and I don't know if anything but a cataclysm will restore them.

Even the healthy renewal of interest in neo-platonism is pointless without something to show for it. If Christian gnosis is real, we should set our sights on siddhis or bust. Serious, hardcore, lifelong asceticism and philosophical study, anew Platonic Academy, and the ultimate goal of creating a spiritual elite that can actually transmit gnosis/wisdom and anchor a renewal and reenchantment of the west. Anything short of this is atheism, "noble lie" shit.

>>17022476
No problems, I'm guilty of being vulgar on 4chan to generate some responses and discussion. I apologize if I offended someone, it was not really my intenion. Anyhow, this is all I've got to say on this account. I'll let people proceed with Heidegger.

>>17022497
The key for me is not that the mystical and reason are identical (they are obviously not), rather that they are not opposing forces but two sides of the same coin (reality). I think you can have rationality without the mystical as well as mystical without rationality. But I think what we will have to recover is the interplay of these two. We have to transcend the idea that reason undermines the mystical and that mystical is hopelessly removed from reason saying anything about its revelation without undermining it. I'm not so much arguing for collapsing one into the other, but saying that they are two perspectives that can work together. You could arrive to an utterly rational conclusion and then mystically meditate on it or you could have a mystical revelation and then rationally meditate on it. This has happened to me a few times with Aquinas. I would start with something completely rational and follow his thought completely rationally and I was even getting frustrated by this in the sense of "why is he being so rational in approaching something as mystical as God? This seems wrong." and then I reached the conclusion of his argument and it was almost like an epiphany. I realized that what I was rationally thinking in relation to what I knew from revelation was not even the full scope of what this mystical revelation entailed EVEN from a rational sense. This is what really blew my mind and I was in awe then to see that reason could supplement revelation rather than always disintegrate it, it was a movement towards the completely opposite direction than I expected. I found that reason supported the revelation even more than what I thought my skeptical reason would ever allow if I were to explore revelation/the mystical in a rational sense. And I think there exists a flip side to this, that is perhaps a little more easier to get (at least for me, maybe for other people it's different) in that you might have a mystical/revelation case and you can then apply pure reason to it in order to derive some conclusions about it. But mostly, I think in the modern world you have this setting apart of reason and revelation where they are almost like enemies and I dont believe that this has to be the case. I was in fact very close to just making the concession and turning into a full blown fideist because my thinking was going into that path where I was tackling skepticism about faith and I knew I could prove that this skepticism championed by pure reason was untenable. So I felt the "winning" move was simply to prove that pure reason cannot be the foundation, that there is in fact a fideist underpinning to all positions whatever they might be. Only later did it occur to me that I basically gave up on reason due to entirely modern sensibilities rather than re-integrating it into its rightful place where reason and faith, the rational and the revelation sit side by side and reinforce eachother.

>>17022476
>Like it or not, most neo-scholastics did not and still do not even realise that Kant and Nietzsche need to be answered to. You can't just "go back" to arbitrary schemes.

I think most neo-scholastics would hold that neither Kant or Nietzsche adequatly challenged the system compiled by Aquinas and that its on Nietzscheans and Kantians to prove they have in fact done so. I think most would hold that Aquinas has not been so much aptly criticized let alone "disproven" as much as simply bypassed and that this is not that surprising because of the absolute enormous task of engaging with his massive output and denying it. If Aquinas really was critically disproven, there would be no chance of a Thomist continuity or rather he would be relegated to a historical medieval peculiarity with limited contemporary usage. But that didn't end up being the case, if anything we're having a second wave of Thomism. I think one could view your story from the opposite angle, that it is Aquinas who needs to be answered to by modern philosophy and that he never adequatly was answered as much as simply bypassed by it.I think most neo-scholastics would claim that one cannot confuse philosophical developments and changing tastes through the ages with truth itself, but on the other hand many from the secular angle would see this as them failing to rise to the challenges of modern philosophy. Ultimately there is a distinction between a Catholic theologian and a secular philosopher. The former simply are not necessarily going to feel the need to engage if they are still confident in their doctrine holding up under scrutiny, I personally can say that I haven't seen anything out there that compromises Aquinas that would necessarily challenge one's capacity to rationally believe in his thought. From a purely secular perspective I can understand though that this might seem archaic and that non-engagement with critiques (at least in a significant sense) can be quickly interpreted as "defeat" or untenability. But frankly, I don't consider these a convincing devastating critique of Aquinas' work and I imagine the Catholic theologians would not necessarily feel the need to go out of their way to publically address it for this reaon. They don't really feel that they are "going back" let alone going back to an "arbitrary scheme". I think a Catholic theologian would hold a more atemporal view of this than what you are describing and given the Thomistic revival there is no reason to think that they did anything wrong in simply holding to what they felt was secure and not devastated by critique. The idea that things have to be "responded to" that are not ultimately devastating but a product of a specific time and place is more of a secular idea, the theologian speaking about eternal truth and first causes isn't going to be so quick to engage with that, unless he feels he was in fact critically devastated. But I think in the final analysis Aquinas suffered no such devastation.

>>17022677
Sincere and wonderful post. You've left me with a satisfying conclusion so I don't feel there's much for me to add.

Great thread all around, lads.

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of heidegger.

>>17022861
Kant and Nietzsche didn't address Thomas but christianity. Ultimately I don't know how to respond to a committed christian, nor do I feel the need to.

>>17022677
This is well said.

>>17022535
The problem to me is the stakes seem to require doing a lot to just stop yourself from drowning. The elementary-political is definitely a factor here. I can hardly cooperate and organize with you if you or I or both are absorbed in shoring up our very personal integrity, or I won't want to take the chance.

Amusingly, I have been watching David Graeber videos and even he says things like for the right the ultimate reality is one of force or violence, whereas his side is that of imagination, as if that were all there was to learn for each and as if there were something exhaustive or necessary about the opposition of force and imagination.

I'm not familiar with Lonergan, but I have no desire to placate or cultivate christians at this point nor am I concerned with re-enchantment. The latter is for professors and booksellers.

>>17020825
But Heidegger was unironically for a return to Tradition, just not an empty LARPing. Heidegger wasn't a moral relativist you know.

He's open to too much misunderstanding because of how his philosophy relates to the very highest.

>>17020835
>The army-towards-truth marches ever on.
Carlyle?

>>17023708
Excuse me?

>>17023106
This comment is absolutely meaningless if you don't explain what OP's misunderstanding actually is.
Please enlightenment us.

>>17020825
>. In essence, Heidegger believes that Traditionalism/Conservatism will not amount to anything more than LARP because you're trying to divorce your Being from your Time.
I guess it's time to become a trannie, I need to actualize my being to the zeitgeist UWU
thanks german "philosophy", thanks Heinigger

>>17020920
He doesn't say anything of that - only in the sense that "historical reconstruction" is misguided. Tradition needs to be subjected to "destruktion" so that it can be freed from obsolescence and irrelevance for us "moderns". Heidegger treats tradition as something living and present, while a historian would just encounter it from a more contextual and scholarly point of view, which he then forgets about when he leaves his study and lives his life.

>>17021273
>taking cues on Heidegger solely from his wikipage and from a novelist
embarrassing

remain in onto-theology, brainlet

>>17020825
Yes, any idea of a "retvrn" is a historicist cope. Instead, you should focus on reordering your life according to natural law. Time to get into Aristotle, my friend.

>>17020901
>be 6
>just learnt addition
>want to move forward to an understanding of multiplication
>anon tells me progress is nonsense
>get stuck at addition

>>17021182
Nice pasta but this bit
>comfy little european court lifestyle
doesn't apply to Heidegger, it should be changed for greater immersion.

>>17025254
you don't need multiplication. there's barely an argument for learning addition.

>>17024742
>This comment is absolutely meaningless if you don't explain what OP's misunderstanding actually is.
That's the exact point. Anons who simply say "you don't understand x" do so to derail the conversation and spread FUD, ignore retardslike that

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>>17023321
Great conversation, read you guys with much interest. /lit/ would be much better if it happened more often.

>>17021026
>traditionalism
>freeze time conservativism
You don't know what traditionalism is you dumb retard. Stop using words you know nothing about

>>17023700
>>17025206
The thread would benefit from an elaboration on what tradition means in a Heideggerian sense, so I'll bite.

"Tradition" in the vulgar sense nowadays refers to a behavior that is repeated because of its connection to the past, especially when the action itself has little utility outside of its tradition. This begs the question, however, why do some actions become tradition while others are relegated to obsolescence? For Heidegger, the meaning of any object or action is in its "gathering" of Being. When an object is invented, what is really happening is a group of behaviors is being made possible and clustered around an object. Think of the difference between a hearth and a thermostat. The thermostat is undoubtedly a more efficient way to heat a home since it doesn't require constant supervision and performs the adjustments of temperature automatically, but it fundamentally changes the nature of the home. Because the hearth has a limited range of heating, the family must gather around it for warmth, facilitating a physical closeness that makes the hearth a meeting place, a symbol of family unity, a source of light for reading, the domain of the mother who also uses it for cooking, etc. The thermostat is only "better" in a technologically efficient sense; while most of us choose it over archaic wood-heating, really it's a matter of selecting which behaviors you would like to engage in.

Heidegger doesn't condemn "technology" wholesale because the technifying impulse is inherent to Dasein - without it, a whole range of beneficial behaviors would be impossible. However, where technology degenerates is when its need for efficiency becomes a self-referential justification and obscures the behaviors that will actually issue from its implementation. In pre-modern times, the physical difficulty of most tasks meant that man always had to have a goal in mind: a man chops down trees because he is directly intending to warm his family around the fire. He submits to the technology of the hearth because it is a means to an end of producing a life where he provides for his family. Modern man, in installing Google Nest in his home, for instance, does so with the vague idea that things will be "easier." Was it ever a problem for him to walk around the room to turn up the heat? Probably not, but now that the idea of "efficiency" has introduced the idea that he doesn't have to, that's all the justification he needs.

>>17027346
So, to answer the main question: What is "tradition" for Heidegger? It is a reflection on Being that creates an authentic selection of behaviors and technologies which unify a life in meaning. As I mentioned in a previous post, Heidegger seems to want a "new tradition". This might be paradoxical, but it would come from a renewed reflection on what we are actually trying to do by living. Readers of Nietzsche might recognize here the "transvaluation of values": the old values don't disappear, but since they no longer hold value in the day-to-day, their best usage would be to become the seeds of higher values yet to be seen.

What might an example look like? Perhaps when you are a father you'll know all too well the deleterious effects of constant internet usage and seek to make sure your children don't befall the same fate. So, you institute the policy of "Only use the internet to answer specific questions." To enforce this policy you'll need to supervise internet usage, so smartphones, which can be hidden and accessed in private, will be banned. You still want to use the internet for useful things, so you buy a family computer and put it out in the open where everyone can see the screen, and you stipulate that you'll be checking the browser history often.

So effectively, you're not any less technologically "advanced" than everyone else who uses the internet, but you've supplanted its self-justifying efficiency with a bigger picture of only using it as a tool to improve yourself for higher purposes. On the scale of a few generations, you could imagine new objects and behaviors forming around this conception of "internet only being used for specific questions." Furniture would be designed to make the computer immobile. Families might devote time every night to browse the internet and answer their children's questions. Constantly using your phone would be seen as an addiction and mocked accordingly. All this might seem quaint, but that's the point: the same technologies in slightly different arrangements can produce radically different behaviors. All it takes is a having a goal outside of self-referential efficiency increasing, and the idea of inescapable "progress" vanishes.

>>17025281
based

>>17021575
Based.