I'm reading a brief 1966 interview with Martin Heidegger from Der Spiegel. One poignant quote stuck out to me (so far):
SPIEGEL: A clear answer – but can and may a thinker say: Just wait, something will occur to us in the next three hundred years?
HEIDEGGER: It is not a matter of simply waiting until something occurs to human beings after three hundred years have gone by; it is about thinking ahead, without prophetic claims, into the coming time from the standpoint of the fundamental characteristics of the present age, which have hardly been thought through. Thinking is not inactivity, but in itself the action that has a dialogue with the world’s destiny. It seems to me that the distinction, stemming from metaphysics, made between theory and praxis, and the conception of a transmission between the two, obstructs the path toward insight into what I understand to be thinking…
The rest of the interview is quite good. It does not go very deep into Heidegger's work, though I didn't expect it to. It does, however, give a great snapshot of his life and way of thinking. I love seeing personal interviews with such big thinkers.
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