Prof. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)

"A spectre is haunting Western Philosophy -- the spectre of Martin Heidegger....

Professor Heidegger is obviously correct that we find ourselves, apparently as mortals, [always already...] thrown into the world. We didn't ask to be here; we find ourelves already stuck here, with no warrant for expecting anything in future.

I do not think, however, that this thrownness has anything to do with "earth", under whatever interpretation of that term. Only a peasant is bound to the earth, and a university professor with a lederhosen fetish may imagine he is. No wonder Prof. Heidegger liked Vincent van Gogh's painting of peasant shoes, which appear to examplifiy his "blut und boden" thesis.

In the 1955–1956 lecture course published as The Principle of Sufficient Reason (Der Satz vom Grund), Heidegger writes of abstract art: "The techno scientific construction of the world launches its own claims on the creation of all beings that force themselves into its light. (Google search)

A Kandinsky painting ('example, supra) shows no connection to earth: it is a world that floats in space, spiritually, like, physically, astronauts do. I doubt Prof. Heidegger knew about Kandinsky's paintings and that if he did, I expect he did not like them. I think Prof. Heidegger was a Kitshmensch: a man with banal esthetic predilections, like Lawrence Welk's champagne music making, although Mr. Welk may not have naively bought the product he was selling (may not have ate his own dogfood).

I speculate Prof. Heidegger's Nazism w no aberration. Had he been less gullible, he might not have fallen for Adolf Hitler, but only becaue Hitler was not a good enough Fuhrer, not becaue he was a Leader. Raised a Catholic, always a Catholic? i never read him saying that Dasein is a being that/who is a judge of Being (Sein). Rather that we should grovel before Being. Why? If we can think it we can (must...) judge it. If we can't think it, it just cannot be a desideratum, period.

Addendum: Reading Giorgio Agamben's "The Open", I am wondering how well Prof. Heidegger understood higher animals' living experience. I could accept "world poor" in a general way, but the clarification of this here does not seek right to me. Heidegger's instinct-captovated animal seems not all that much better then Rene Descartes' clockwork animal. What is the living experience of a cat watching the world thru a living room window?

I don't think Prof. Heidegger knows about house cats. And I don't know about orangutans. Also: Is it possible that animal "experience" (whatever it is) and human experiencing may converge at least sometimes in the respective creatures' hours of death?