A German writer\'s aphoristic, poetic, and difficult reflections on Heidegger\'s Being and Time.
The question is whether this courage necessarily secures those vital advantages Heidegger alleges"-that "self-understanding [is] the mental anticipation of death." Lange wrestles with Heidegger\'s position, calling on Tolstoy, Georg Trakl, Herman Bang, and Heinrich von Kleist to argue against it.. "Everyone is possessed of the courage to have angst about death.
He draws on Kant, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Shakespeare\'s Othello for supporting arguments and illustrations. "Heidegger\'s understanding of Being is nihilistic," Lange writes, and then explains his assertion.
Positive Nihilism can be considered a pocket companion to Being and Time.
Thus Hitler could feel unwaveringly, as he wiped out entire populations, the starry sky above him and the moral law within him, as stipulated by Kant." He considers the concept of civilization ("misleading"; "how should one oppose the remedies of civilization to the egomania, the murderous appetites of such outright psychopaths as Stalin or Pol Pot?"), the act of thinking (a fata morgana), the psyche, and Heidegger\'s Dasein.
They collapsed the boundaries of moral reason and refuted Kant\'s analysis of consciousness." He reflects further: "But who shall punish whom? One man\'s virtue is another man\'s crime.
It is temporality") and proceeds almost immediately to extremity: "The twentieth century was governed by psychopaths.
Lange begins with an abyss ("There is an abyss of the finite.
Positive Nihilism is the result of a lifetime of reading Being and Time and offers a series of reflections that are aphoristic, poetic, and (appropriately, considering his object of study) difficult. -Positive Nihilism Like many German intellectuals, Hartmut Lange has long grappled with Heidegger.
It is the human psyche.
There is a beyond of reason and unreason.
A German writer\'s aphoristic, poetic, and difficult reflections on Heidegger\'s Being and Time
