10 Contrarian Ideas Inspired by Heidegger

The Case for Non-Dogmatic, Avant-Garde, Poetic Traditionalism

This week, I give you 9 contrarian ideas (inspired by Heidegger). The 10th, implied, is the contrarian idea of gleaning insights from a contaminated source.

1. You can't become a hero unless you first have a hero.

2. There is no such thing as being free of tradition. The only two options are inhabiting a tradition authentically by making it one's own or inhabiting a tradition inauthentically (be it by blindly accepting it, blindly rejecting it, or blindly ignoring it.)

3. Evolutionary psychology, sociology, economics, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, physics, chemistry, history, theology - none of these penetrates the meaning of being human. No explanation of life can help us understand why we are beings who care about our existence.

4. Empty chatter, be it about celebrities, the weather, where you are from, where you went to school, and what you do, is a ruse to avoid anxiety about death.

5. True mastery is surrender to mystery. We can make the world a more meaningful place not by seeking to maximize impact, but by holding and creating space for something that is not of ourselves. Cultures try in vain to name that something else but always go astray.

6. Philosophy is experiential, not cerebral. Just as churches and ashrams use incense to awaken a a sensory encounter, great thinkers and poets use words not simply to describe reality, but to awaken us to reality.

7. The meaning of a work of art is not what the author intends, but what is “unthought” in the work. It is this “unthought” aspect that ensures the work’s longevity.

8. Religion is unphilosophical when it posits God’s existence without engaging in the question of what it means “to be.” While secularism is unphilosophical when it posits the meaning of Being to be irrelevant, non-sensical, or self-evident and obvious.

9. If you criticize the game, you’re still playing it. Just play a different game. Poets don’t write treatises against metaphysics. They simply show another way.