if Plato were alive today

The dialogues would contain not Sophists, but Trolls. Critique for the sake of critique is the more serious danger to thought right now than the charlatans who get rich on philosophy. The latter may still be around, but they are easily detectable and not taken too seriously by most.

I was thinking today that if I had a bit of spare time on my hands this week (I don’t), I would try to put up a mock page of “What if the first page of Being and Time were a blog post?”

Here’s the first page:

“Do we in our time have an answer to what we really mean by the word ‘being’? Not at all. So it is fitting that we should raise anew the question of the meaning of Being. But are we nowadays even perplexed at our inability to understand the expression ‘Being’? Not at all. So first of all we must reawaken our understanding for the meaning of this question. Our aim in the [next few posts on this blog] is to work out the question of the meaning of Being and to do so concretely. Our provisional aim is the Interpretation of time as the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of Being.”

It’s not hard to imagine the sorts of nitpicking sneers that one could make in the “Comments Thread” of this blog post. One could even imagine the people who would make them and the things they would say. And where would it get us?