Discourse on Thinking: Memorial Address

tags

Martin Heidegger LAW 328 Green Legal Theory

Heidegger discusses instrumental rationality, although of course he doesn't call it that, because he's such a special little boy and he has to use his own names for things

Notes

Do playing and singing alone make our celebration a thoughtful celebration, one in which we think? Hardly!

NOTER_PAGE: (3 . 0.4869072894550602)

In listening to such a story, no thinking at all is needed, no reflecting is demanded on what concerns each one of us immediately and continuously in his very being.

NOTER_PAGE: (3 . 0.7317763623496107)

nowadays we take in everything in the quickest and cheapest way, only to forget it just as quickly, instantly.

NOTER_PAGE: (4 . 0.1967445152158528)

He will say-and quite rightly- that there were at no time such far-reaching plans, so many inquiries in so many areas, research carried on as passionately as today.

NOTER_PAGE: (4 . 0.8067940552016986)

whenever we plan, research, and organize, we always reckon with conditions that are given. We take them into account with the calculated intention of their serving specific purposes. Thus we can count on definite results.

NOTER_PAGE: (5 . 0.21939136588818117)

mere meditative thinking finds itself floating unaware above reality. It loses touch

NOTER_PAGE: (5 . 0.7098372257607927)

meditative thinking need by no means be "high-flown." It is enough if we dwell on what lies close and meditate on what is closest; upon that which concerns us, each one of us, here and now; here, on this patch of home ground; now, in the present hour of history.

NOTER_PAGE: (6 . 0.34253361641896674)

As we hold this simple fact in mind, we cannot help remembering at once that during the last two centuries great poets and thinkers have been brought forth from the Swabian land. Thinking about it further makes clear at once that Central Germany is likewise such a land, and so are East Prussia, Silesia, and Bohemia.

NOTER_PAGE: (6 . 0.5173389950460014)

does not the flourishing of any genuine work depend upon its roots in a native soil?

NOTER_PAGE: (6 . 0.6871903750884643)

The loss of rootedness is caused not merely by circumstance and fortune, nor does it stem only from the negligence and the superficiality of man's way of life. The loss of autochthony springs from the spirit of the age into which all of us were bom.

NOTER_PAGE: (8 . 0.16772823779193208)

a completely new relation of man to the world and his place in it. The world now appears as an object open to the attacks of calculative thought, attacks that nothing is believed able any longer to resist. Nature becomes a gigantic gasoline station, an energy source for modern technology and industry. This relation of man to the world as such, in principle a technical one, developed in the seventeenth century first and only in Europe.

NOTER_PAGE: (9 . 0.48973814578910124)

What we know now as the technology of film and television, of transportation and especially air transportation, of news reporting, and as medical and nutritional technology, is presumably only a crude start. No one can foresee the radical changes to come. But technological advance will move faster and faster and can never be stopped.

NOTER_PAGE: (10 . 0.5152158527954707)

these forces, since man has not made them, have moved long since beyond his will and have outgrown his capacity for decision.

NOTER_PAGE: (10 . 0.7565463552724699)

We can use technical devices as they ought to be used, and also let them alone as something which does not affect our inner and real core.

NOTER_PAGE: (13 . 0.2208067940552017)

keep open to the meaning hidden in technology, openness to the mystery.

NOTER_PAGE: (14 . 0.4900990099009901)

Releasement toward things and openness to the mystery give us a vision of a new autochthony

NOTER_PAGE: (14 . 0.7107496463932108)

calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking.

NOTER_PAGE: (15 . 0.3177636234961076)

the issue is the saving of man's essential nature.

NOTER_PAGE: (15 . 0.5145081387119604)