--- Carl Remick <carlremick at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >From: andie nachgeborenen
> <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com>
> >
> >... H's concern is not with
> >wanting to live foreover in health and strength but
> >with the way the modern world eats up the lives of
> >mortal creates.
>
> I don't see how you can separate the two. If you
> knew you would live
> forever in health and strength, what difference
> would it make if you
> squandered a few decades on the trivialities of the
> modern world?
Obviously, but since we don't, this is not something H considers.
>
> On reflection, I also don't see how the modern world
> that Heidegger
> pillories differs fundamentally from earlier eras.
Quantitative and qualitative changes, companero. Go watch Philip Glass' Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out Of Balance (1983). Or read Marx on the struggle overthe length of the working day.
> Yes, there are more
> distractions now than ever before, but humankind has
> always eagerly sought
> out distractions -- often risky and self-destructive
> ones -- to take
> people's minds off their eventual decrepitude and
> death.
Still misses the point. H is not a stoic or some such talking about how to overcome fear of death. Fear of death is not his interest. (Unlike, for example, Hegel, in talking about master and slave.) It's rather more like, given that we get one short trip, 70 years (a prize for anyone who can identify the quotation), the way we live, immersed in busy-ness and every-dayness, enmeshed in merely instrumental action, is -- he wouldn't put it this way -- against our interest. Bad. The source of the quotation above is actually pretty good on thsi, though its focus is a bit different from H's.
That is at least
> in part what Pascal was talking about in saying,
> "All man's miseries derive
> from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone."
>
> Carl
A sentiment H would sympathize with. But P was writing for urbanites ina world that was in fact beginning to modernize; H retreated to the Black Forest -- as P retreated to religion.
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