follow-up to the previous post

One anecdote about the strange tendency of Heideggerian maxims to produce smirks of triumph rather than reflection…

While writing Guerrilla Metaphysics, I was trying to track down the exact reference of that “Aristotle was born, worked, and died” phrase (in order to attack it, not praise it). And it turns out it’s really only worded that way in Gadamer’s Philosophical Apprenticeships; in the Gesamtausgabe the sentence is slightly more complicated than that.

In any case, the point is that I couldn’t remember where that passage was at first, and asked someone in the profession (in the most neutral and matter-of-fact way) if he knew. He didn’t know either, but upon hearing my question he immediately gave me one of those Heidegger Smirks– a “just you and me kid” moment, as if we were about to team up to knock off a Brinks armored car with impunity.

I don’t blame this person (who is not a reader of this blog). Heidegger’s the one who gets away with disseminating that tone, and tone is always contagious.