Customer Reviews

Timely Meditations: Martin Heidegger and Postmodern Politics

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In spite of global economic tendencies, politics makes associations national in character and any attempt to sympathize with targets of the economic hit men will be highly suspect and might even be considered supportive of terrorism. The book Timely Meditations, Martin Heidegger and Postmodern Politics (1995) by Leslie Paul Thiele was published before the most recent wave of the wars on drugs, terrorism, and money laundering. Part Three: The Politics of Dwelling (pp. 169-252), starts with a chapter on Saving the Earth: The Plight of Homelessness. The next chapter considers The Devastation of the Midas Touch as a topic on The Challenge of Technology.

Individual attempts to work within national boundaries are considered in a section called The Fictioning of the Political (pp. 146-151). As this book analyzes its central problem, it goes right to the heart:

Heidegger's effort to blaze the trail for knowledge gave way to the celebration of art. (p. 147).

Heidegger's real politics emerged in an effort to reassert what he held to be the movement's "inner truth and greatness." . . . Nazism was a crude and distinctively modern attempt at the "aestheticization of politics." (p. 147).

If we understand architectonic Platonism to be defined chiefly not by its ahistoricism but by its effort to incarnate metaphysical ideals in the political world through a masterful, representative artistry, then Heidegger's effort at Freiburg remains eminently Platonic. In his attempt to bridge the gap between philosophy and the political exigencies of his day, Heidegger would seek the support of ancient metaphysical foundations. (p. 148).

For the Nazis and Heidegger, what lay hidden was the genius and historic destiny of the German people. To fiction the political, a people must be conceived as a unitary and organic whole with an identifiable developmental potential. (p. 148).

American ideals at the end of 2010 might consider Social Security, Medicare, and universal health insurance coverage the kind of organic whole that has been achieved by lesser nations before a gambling addiction shattered the political economy of the global financial system like a bobsled going down clear through to China. I already get Social Security and expect to have Medicare in a few years, but the funding for medical care is unlikely to keep up with a population that is rapidly aging. This will not be like the endowment Heidegger imagined in:

" . . . History is the transporting of a people into its appointed task as entrance into that people's endowment" (PLT 48, 74, 77). (p. 149).

Americans are likely to recant anything for which all the money has already been spent. We are not going to send people to Mars.