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Health & Fitness

Was Heisst Denken? What Calls for Thinking?

We need to start thinking about our nation. What does it mean to think?

Was heisst Denken? “What calls for thinking?

The matter of thinking is always confounding.

“Any kind of polemics fails from the outset to assume the attitude of thinking. The role of thinking is not that of an opponent. Thinking is thinking only when it pursues whatever speaks for a matter.” (M Heidegger).

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Was heisst Denken? We lose the pun inherent in the German. We aren’t even aware that there could be words at play, words with which we should be playing. Does language matter? Consider this: As the “target” of an aggressive sales campaign are you looking forward to them penetrating and to their conquest of you? Or, would you rather be a customer embraced and assimilated into a partnership?

We no longer stop to think about such things in America. We are a nation on a slow, continuous, painful declining slope. We slip backwards, now a second tier nation, having lost our once-vaunted place of national leadership in education, living conditions, health, innovation, etc. Now we suffer — on many levels — while partisan paralysis tips the angle of our decline steeper with each passing day.

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Sadly, many people find the leading question prompting this note not worthy of consideration; not critical enough for our future for their consideration. Boring, stupid, too intellectual, snobbish, are only a few of the more polite phrases one can imagine might be heard upon being asked, “what calls for thinking?” What about everyday life in America? Does that call for thinking? Or, lemmings of the North Shore parallel universe nation, shall we watch you marching in lock-step behind the Plutes (who must own you) piping from their recorders and flutes with the melodies of “no’s”, unable to right the ship of the nation from the stasis now becoming a whirlpool dragging everyone down.

“What is essential”; “what is most thought-provoking?" Heidegger is challenging each individual to come alive and to deal actively with those core questions of being. Personally, I came to believe and to realize for myself that co-creating a sustainable future; one characterized by flourishing for all, is of such an essential nature; and, that I need to allow IT to wash over me, to submerge me in each of its elemental states – wave and particle - and to live within that questioning framework. Thus I can begin to be on the way to, unterwegs zu; towards an unreachable goal, needed to be sought, worthy of thoughtful attainment. Awakened to that question, I came to understand that one method, one way, one tool — if you prefer — with which to attain my own desired end-state of a sustainable future characterized by flourishing for all is Language. And it is not “words that work”!

Two additional Heideggerian truisms I would like you to consider: "Language is the house of being”; “language makes world.”

What even do those two statements denote? Are there connotations of which we need apprise ourselves?

When a talk-show host uses inflammatory descriptions that awfulize an unknown, an as-yet-unknown, outcome and then proleptically assigns blame to one who really isn’t to blame; when a political party has been diminished in thought and in power so that it knows only the word “no!”, what world has been made?

Judging by the awfulizing of our local radio talk show hosts, America is becoming a nation in decline led by the Pied Pipers of the Plutocratic Oligarchy; its citizen, lemming-like, being led to live in a make believe construct that in reality is but a parallel universe of pretense, disconnected from - although able to see – its counterpart, the flat interconnected global reality of 2011. We need to listen authentically. We need to look for what is concealed. It is what is hidden which must be unconcealed, so that we may better understand what is truth. “Truth is unhiddenness.” In this present America, Democrats are being forced to raise their own voices, lest they be drowned out, against a multi-channel media dominated by Tea Party and Republican rhetoric and by their theme “No!” Today, Facebook and Paul Ryan; tomorrow…God, protect us from manipulative panderers of plutocratic obfuscation, distortions, exaggerations, manipulative fear-mongering and lies.

My chief concern is that, as a result of the passions that surround the upcoming election, we have stopped thinking. While neither “side” in our political debate is without fault in its speech, I do allege that one political party is quite pleased that we do not, and they are hopeful that we will not, think. It is in the best interest of the Tea Party and Republicans that we not think for ourselves. Just listen to their talking heads, the Becks, the Sykes, the Limbaughs and the Hannitys. No news; no substantial journalism; certainly no fully revelatory, unbiased journalism. Merely talking-heads spewing froth forth with no substance, and the only flavor they serve is “no."  But, “lemming-like” a group of US citizens are, without asking for truth or pushing back on incomplete answers, screaming “down with the president” and “down with Democracy." The Tea Party reveal in the past. They say: Take us back to 1786. I worry about 2050.

About what do you think and worry?

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