A Mental Disturbance

The other day I made a short post on my reading. Heidegger, John Gray, and Rilke.

These are my boys right now.

Especially Heidegger talking about Rilke. I just finished the essay 'What Are Poets For?'. I don't understand it entirely.

But Heidegger's answer has something to do with the fact that Modern Western man has been caught up in an unwilled willing of sorts: We are trapped in a culture in which we use language to objectify the world so that we can assert ourselves, and manipulate the world, changing it into something of our own making. This unwilled willing, this self-assertion, somehow leaves us unshielded in the world, it leaves us vulnerale in our Being.

Only by coming to some different kind of willing, a more venturesome willing, can Modern man rescue himself from this unwilled will to dominate nature. For this unwilled willing leaves us in a sort of technological nihilism, in a position in which our culture has no ground upon which to rest.

In other words, the spirit of our age leaves us standing before the Abyss, gawking at the meaninglessness of the world we have created.

The task of Modern man, Heidegger claims, is to turn away from the Abyss, to find a way to be more comfortably. We must turn to what Heidegger calls the Open. We must embrace the world not as a collection of objects, but as a harmonious whole, as the fourfold of earth and sky, divinities and mortals. As a simple, unified oneness to which we belong.

This turn to the Open, this appreciation of the simple unity of the fourfold, Heidegger claims, must be accomplished by some Beings that are more venturesome than others. Moreover, this turn must come through language, since language is the 'house of being', the ultimate foundation of human existence. Poets, then, are the more venturesome beings that can  reach into the Abyss, expose the nature of our age, and aid modern man in his quest to turn away from the Abyss.

The Abyss, I think, has plenty to do with scientific materialism. It has a lot to do with all the things I'm reading about in Gray's The Immortalization Commission.

Either way, my mind is deeply disturbed, in a good way.

I feel all these tentative connections to Collingwood.

There is something happening in my mind right now.

For the first time in a long time I feel like I'm really ruminating on my reading.

Interestingly, it is because my reading has once again become largely philosophical and poetic.

Sigh.

How will I ever figure out how to think for a living?