echo from the blogging past

By following Critical Animal’s link to one of his past citations of this blog (in its first incarnation) I’m able to retrieve the following post from almost exactly a year ago. And I would still write these words today:

“Imagine that you spent your formative years in a specific church. You were always critical of it, but valued its insights highly. You were never especially welcome there, but also not rudely unwelcome. And then gradually you realized that everyone was not just reading the Scripture, but also sipping a bit of the Kool-Aid every Sunday, and that you were tacitly expected to do the same. Worse yet, you’d often overhear the other church members saying: ‘These people are crazy! I’m the only sane person in this church.’ That’s sort of what Heideggerianism can be like, and I’m not sad to have little to do with it anymore.”

However, I do agree with the notion that the worst is past. The heavy-duty piety phase of Heidegger is fading away somewhat, and I agree with Ennis that much of it is due to sheer increasing historical distance. Heidegger is passing from live idol to distant classic, and I think it will do him a lot of good in the long run.