Feb 4, 2020, 1:01 PM
by Predmetsky Rosenborg
Heidegger is oftentimes very near the surface when it comes to post-structuralist advocacy of diversity, especially in the work of someone like Chantal Mouffe who draws on Derrida, the later Wittgenstein and Carl Schmitt to try to articulate a scenario in which multiple incompatible worldviews could coexist in the same region.
R selected types like conflict because they extract resources from the conflict itself and from its leftovers. She tries to modify Schmitt’s view of politics as inherently antagonistic and rooted in the friend enemy distinction, by advocating friendly agonism rather than lethal antagonism.
But underneath this is this Heideggerian idea that people basically don’t think that their own ideas correspond to a mind-independent reality; that a MusIim and a Christian can be convinced to discard whatever is “problematic” in their worldview and settle for a highly redacted and westernized counterfeit.
You see this especially in obnoxious Heideggerian readings of Christianity in “neo-Orthodox” theologians like Rudolf Bultmann who argues that it doesn’t even matter for Christianity if Jesus really died because it’s all about the experience of the story.
Most people don’t actually think like this though. They think that their beliefs are true and that their truth matters and they aren’t willing to pretend like it’s just a meaningless story whose truth-value is irrelevant. People take their worldviews very seriously, and as Carl Schmitt understood, they are often willing to kill or die in their defense.
CD: I admire this work. I cannot engage in this kind of literary analysis and exposition of emotion and intuition without first converting it to existential “laundered” (value neutral) terms. I only work with what is false, possible, impossible, and irreciprocal or reciprocal. The challenge is finding the VERY FEW others that can discuss these subjects in a scientific paradigm of consistent rational terms, and organizing what I consider sophistry, or secular theology into the scientific frame but while comparing and maintaining the frame of each original author. I suspect this is why i just can’t stand reading what I consider sophistry and secular theology – because converting it is extraordinarily burdensome, and I perceive every sentence as an attempt to lie.