To Whom it May Concern

This purpose of this blog is to collect occasional thought-provoking passages from books, blogs, and other sources. The blog title is stolen from the epigraph to John Cage's Silence.

Thursday, May 26, 2011

Heidegger on Encountering the Thought of Another

From Martin Heidegger's What is Called Thinking? (1954):

"One thing is necessary, though, for a face-to-face converse with the thinkers: clarity about the manner in which we encounter them. Basically, there are only two possibilities: either to go to their encounter, or to go counter to them. If we want to go to the encounter of a thinker's thought, we must magnify still further what is great in him. Then we will enter into what is unthought in his thought. If we wish only to go counter to a thinker's thought, this wish must have minimized beforehand what is great in him. We then shift his thought into the commonplaces of our know-it-all presumption. It makes no difference if we assert in passing that Kant was nonetheless a very significant thinker. Such praises from below are always an insult."

Or as Bob Dylan put it, "please don't underestimate me, and I won't underestimate you."