ARCHETYPAL ASSETS

To get to the bottom of this, says Heidegger, we need to jettison 2500 years of Western thought and philosophy which has focused solely on what it means ‘to be’ but not what it means ‘to be of something’.

According to Barrett, this might well have been the first conscious articulation of one of Nietzsche’s most famous concepts, the Will to Power, although it hadn’t started there.

Whilst a superhero like Nietzsche’s Übermensch, or Superman, might have been able to bridge the gap, unfortunately like Nietzsche himself, Zarathustra couldn’t.

Like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche had developed an overarching pessimism toward life, a pessimism he was convinced had been center state in Greek tragedy; the hero suffers and the crowd enjoys the show.

My summer reading:  Willem Barrett’s 1959 classic, Irrational Man, A Study in Existential Philosophy. What complaint did Kierkegaard along with Nietzsche and others, levy against the intellect? In their view, intellect gobbles you up until you’re so obsessed with your ‘naval gazing’ that, like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, you’re paralyzed, unable to take action. Luckily there areContinue reading “A Study in Existential Philosophy (Part 6)”

Is this forerunner for Heidegger’s ideas of being-in-the-world? Quite possibly, says Barrett even if such the concept was furthest from Wordsworth’s thoughts.

My summer reading:  Willem Barrett’s 1959 classic, Irrational Man, A Study in Existential Philosophy. As Hellenist reason takes hold of Western culture, Christianity comes on the scene, and with it, new concerns and questions. Faith vs. Reason In the first century, Saint Paul, the Apostle, asserted that the faith he preached was foolishness to theContinue reading “A Study in Existential Philosophy (Part 4)”

Note that this dualistic opposition between black and white is a Western construct. Witness the difference between the Chinese treatment of black and white, Ying and Yang.

Change that construct, and you’re well on the road to resolving ‘angst’ or that deep seated, irrefutable, insatiable anxiety from which, 20th century writers like Eliot, Forster, and Woolf and 20th century Existentialists like Heidegger were suffering.