Heidegger’s nostalgia rejected Plato and Socratic philosophy as the point of decay
Evidence
But here there is a great difference between them. Heidegger’s writings on the history of Being are suffused with a longing for some home time, a lost age or place to which philosophy should be traced, and from which it should be renewed. Heidegger’s dream-home often calls to mind the forested Germanic world of his childhood, with its craftsmanship and silent wisdom. At other times, it evokes archaic Greek culture, which he considered the last period in which humanity had philosophised properly. Heidegger was not alone in being fascinated by Greece; it was a sort of mania among Germans at the time. But other German thinkers often focused on the flowering of philosophy and scholarship in the fourth century BC, the time of Socrates and Plato, whereas Heidegger saw that as the period in which everything had started going wrong. For him, the philosophers who truly connected with Being were pre-Socratics such as Heraclitus, Parmenides and Anaximander. In any case, what Heidegger’s writings on Germany and Greece share is the mood of someone yearning to go back into the deep forest, into childhood innocence and into the dark waters from which the first swirling chords of thought had stirred. Back — back to a time when societies were simple, profound and poetic. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 427
Categorization
- SEED: The contrast between Heidegger’s anti-Platonic primitivism and the more common German reverence for Greek philosophy could anchor an article on reactionary longing in 20th-century thought.
- XREF: This nostalgia-for-a-lost-origin theme resonates with the reactionary traditionalism also seen in Heidegger’s politics, which later chapters of this book explore. — connects to: War experiences convinced thinkers traditional philosophy was obsolete — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 530