Heidegger’s birthday

Heidegger would have been 122 today.

The only scary thing about that is that I clearly remember his 100th. I was a senior in college, and a few of us held a small reading session in honor of the occasion. The Beiträge had just been published, and since I wouldn’t see a copy of it for another year, I simply assumed that it must really be the second Sein und Zeit (it isn’t). The East Block was coming apart just months after my first and only visit to a bit of it, and the future looked nicely unpredictable for the first time in my bored Cold War geopolitical life. The Chicago Cubs even clinched a rare division title that very night (which they would waste with a thoroughly mediocre losing performance against San Francisco in the NLCS). Good times in those days.

Also, I was reading Fichte enthusiastically at the time, and truly believed that by thinking a thing outside thought, you thereby convert it into a thought.