Chuck Grimes wrote:
> And yet it isn't the heart, that requires explanation or that becomes
> the ultimate mystery in this context. It's the Head, the intellect
> that can't be explained.
>
> In an odd reversal, it isn't the low motives that need the
> justification, but the high motives. When the little head tells you
> Hannah was sexy, fun, smart, articulate---all that is
> understandable. When the Big Head tells you to stay with Germany (and
> your wife) all the way down---for higher principles---that's the part
> that requires justification.
Heidegger doesn't make this division between the heart and the head in his approach to "knowing,* does he? He appears to claim that insight must be mystical. In the following he makes claims opposite to those of Hegel and Marx about the "inception of history." He then goes on to claim that "the genuineness and greatness of historical knowing lie in understanding the character of this inception as a mystery" so that "knowing a primal history ... is neither half not whole natural science, but, if it is anything at all, it is mythology." I take it this is also true of "knowing" "the inner truth and greatness of" National Socialism (Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 213).
"We have already alluded to the fact that this [an ode from Sophocles' Antigone] is not a matter of describing and clarifying the domains and behavior of the human, who is one being among many; instead, this is a poetic projection of human being on the Basis of its extreme possibilities and limits. In this way, we have also warded off the other opinion, according to which the ode recounts the development of humanity from a wild huntsman and a traveler by dugout canoe, to a builder of cities and person of culture. These are notions from cultural anthropology and the psychology of primitives. They arise from falsely transferring a science of nature that is already untrue in itself to human Being. The fundamental error that underlies such ways of thinking is the opinion that the inception of history is primitive and backward, clumsy and weak. The opposite is true. The inception is what is most uncanny and mightiest. What follows is not a development but flattening down as mere widening out; it is the inability to hold on to the inception, it makes the inception innocuous and exaggerates it into a perversion of what is great, into greatness and extension purely in the sense of number and mass. The uncanniest *is* what it is *because* it harbors such an inception in which, from over-abundance, everything breaks out at once into what is overwhelming and is to be surmounted (*das Überwältigende, Zubewältigende*).
"The inexplicability of this inception is no defect, no failure of our knowledge of history. Instead, the genuineness and greatness of historical knowing lie in understanding the character of this inception as a mystery. Knowing a primal history is not ferreting out the primitive and collecting bones. It is neither half nor whole natural science, but, if is anything at all, it is mythology." ( Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 165-6)
Ted