Anti-Climacus

LINK: Wonkish detail David or Dara might enjoy, about the think between theory and practice via Heidegger.

"Heidegger did not merely bring the old books alive. He re-energized the meaning of philosophical concepts and the whole point of philosophy. Marcuse wrote to Heidegger that he had taught him what philosophy is. Heidegger freed the traditional topics by seeking to locate them in their ground. He placed words back in the soil from which they grew and were drawn. Philosophy had become academic or scholastic, an ordinary or acknowledged pursuit even if one with special power. Its possibility was taken for granted because its existence was actual in academic life. Heidegger, however, raised the following question: What is the ordinary or basic perspective from which philosophy arises, and how does it originate from this perspective? Philosophy's radical questioning is most unusual because it questions the ordinary. Yet its very activity must somehow originate in the ordinary. The "everyday" itself, however, is mysterious in the sense that it manifests itself less as a single ordinary perspective or horizon than as a variety of peoples, cultures, histories, and political regimes. One important step that Heidegger took to revitalize philosophy was to attempt to root it again in ordinary existence."