Heideggerian cud-chewing

Oh, these complacent, tweedy Heideggerians, grazing contentedly a life long within their enclosure, chewing endlessly on Gesamtausgabe-cud, quoting and promoting each other's narrative scholarly work and careers!

The question: Is there life after death? must become: Is there thinking after Heidegger? Certainly not from within this circle. Heidegger's famous question, "What calls for thinking?" here becomes a call to mime the master with a straight face.

Abolition of freedom through thinking

These days neuroscience is telling us that free will is an illusion.
Well, it has to say that, doesn't it?
And we willingly go along with that?
Believing nonetheless we live in 'free' democracies.

Science is going to make us live to 103.
Is that what we wanted?
Is this what it's come to?

We're well underway to abolishing our free selves
through the very (scientific, physicalist) way we think.
Who notices?

Ministration to the dying

To die nowadays, you don't need a minister -- but an administration.

"Language thinks much more than we do"

"Language thinks and opens up much more than we do. In the next few centuries, however, this will probably be forgotten. No one knows whether anyone will ever come back to this [insight]." (Martin Heidegger in a seminar on Heraclitus with Eugen Fink WS 1966/67)

(German: Die Sprache ist viel denkender und eröffnender als wir. Doch das wird man vermutlich in den nächsten Jahrhunderten vergessen. Niemand weiß, ob man einmal wieder darauf zurückkommen wird. Seminare GA15:205)

The scientific will to power strives constantly and unconditionally to enhance its effective control over movement and change of all kinds -- including the movement of human life toward death. In view of this headlong rush of unquestioned progress, who is brave enough to step back and take a look?

Happiness in a brave new world

"The world's stable now. People are happy: they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death: they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they're plagued with no mothers or fathers; they've got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave." (A. Huxley Brave New World 1932 Folio Society ed. 1971 p.151)

Sounds like a neuroscientist's ideal for the future, doesn't it? Totalized efficient causality in linear time.