Philosopher views

WE MUST QUESTION AND CRITIQUE ALL COMMONLY HELD TRUTHS

1. COMMONLY HELD TRUTHS CAN EASILY BECOME UNTRUE

Martin Heidegger, German Philosopher. WHAT IS A THING? 1979, p. 29.

For this purpose we take a scrap of paper and we write the truth down: “Here is the chalk.” We lay this written statement beside the thing of which it is the truth. After the lecture is finished and both doors are opened, the classroom is aired, there will be a draft, and the scrap of paper, let us suppose, will flutter out into the corridor. A student finds it on his way to the cafeteria, reads the sentence “Here is the chalk,” and ascertains that this is not true at all. Through the draft the truth has become an untruth. Strange that a

truth should depend on a gust of wind.
2. THERE IS NO CLOSURE TO CRITICAL EXAMINATION; WE MUST ASK AGAIN AND AGAIN Martin Heidegger, German Philosopher. WHAT IS A THING? 1979, p. 14.

For this reason we must ask everyone and ask again and again, in order to know it, or at least in order to know why and in what respects we do not know it. Have man and the nations only stumbled into the

universe to be similarly slung out of it again, or is it otherwise? We must ask. For a long time there is first something much more preliminary: we must first again learn how to ask. That can only happen by asking questions--of course, not just any questions.
3. MUST BE WILLING TO WANDER FROM CERTAINTY IN ORDER TO FIND TRUTH

Martin Heidegger, German philosopher. EXISTENCE AND BEING, 1949, pp. 278-9.

Homecoming is the return into the proximity of the source. But such a return is only possible for one who has previously, and perhaps for a long time now, borne on his shoulders as the wanderer the burden of the

voyage, and has gone over into the source, so that he could there experience what the nature of the Sought-For might be, and then be able to come back more experienced, as the Seeker.

Martin Heidegger, German philosopher. EXISTENCE AND BEING, 1949, pp. 280-1.

To say that something is near and that at the same time it remains at a distance--this is tantamount either to violating the fundamental law of ordinary though:, the principle of contradiction, or on the other hand to

playing with empty words, or merely to making a presumptuous suggestion. That is why the poet, almost as soon as he has spoken the line about the mystery of the reserving proximity, has to descend to the

phrase: “Foolish is my speech.” But nevertheless he is speaking.
5. ABANDONING CERTAINTY HELPS US UNDERSTAND OTHERS

Martin Heidegger, German philosopher. EXISTENCE AND BEING, 1949, p. 289.

But because the word, once it has been spoken, slips out of the protection of the care-worn poet, he cannot easily hold fast in all its truth to the spoken knowledge of the reserved discovery and of the reserving

proximity. Therefore the poet turns to the others, so that their remembrance may help towards an

understanding of the poetic word, with the result that in the process of understanding each may have a homecoming in the manner appropriate for him.

“VALUE” THINKING MUST BE CRITICALLY REJECTED

1. TO “VALUE” SOMETHING IS TO DEGRADE IT INTO A MERE OBJECT FOR HUMAN USAGE

Martin Heidegger, German philosopher. ~Letter on Humanism,” in BASIC WRITINGS, 1977, p. 228. To think against “values” is not to maintain that everything interpreted as “a value”--”culture,” “art,” “science,” ”human dignity,” “world,” and “God,”--is valueless. Rather, it is important to realize that precisely through the characterization of something as “a value” what is so valued is robbed of its worth. That is to say, by the assessment of something as a value what is valued is admitted only as an object for man’s estimation. But what a thing is in its Being is not exhausted by its being an object, particularly when objectivity takes the form of a value. Every valuing, even where it values positively, is a subjectivizing. It does not let beings: be. Rather, valuing lets beings: be valid--solely as the objects of its doing. The bizarre effort to prove the objectivity of values does not know what it is doing. When one proclaims “God” the altogether “highest value,” this is a degradation of God’s essence. Here as elsewhere thinking in values is the greatest blasphemy imaginable against Being.
2. THINKING AGAINST VALUES LETS THE TRUTH OF WHAT IS VALUED COME TO BE

Martin Heidegger, German philosopher. ‘Letter on Humanism,” in BASIC WRITINGS, 1977, p. 228. To think against values therefore does not mean to beat the drum for the valuelessness and nullity of beings. It means rather to bring the lighting of the truth of Being before thinking, as against subjectivizing beings into mere objects.

Usually philosophers tell each other that the truth is something which is valid in itself, which is beyond time and is eternal, and woe to him who says that truth is not eternal. That means relativism, which teaches that everything is only relatively true, only partly true, and that nothing is fixed any longer. Such doctrines are called nihilism. Nihilism, nothingness, philosophy of anxiety, tragedy, unheroic, philosophy of care and woe--the catalog of these cheap titles is inexhaustible. Contemporary man shudders at such titles, and, with the help of the shudder thus evoked, the given philosophy is contradicted. What wonderful times when even in philosophy one need no longer think, but where someone somewhere, occasionally, on higher authority, cares to provide shuddering.