I Hear Heidegger Laughing
Moving through the wasteland that is medieval philosophy, I found myself joining the forces of the scary people: The Ones Who Doubted, The Ones Who Laughed at Reason.

Nominalists, Skeptics and Mystics. These prefigures of postmodernism--didn't Heidegger turn to Meister Eckhart ?--all seem to rhyme with my move away from Rationalism, my deconstruction of the Enlightenment cart blurring with the Christian horse. While the mystics tend away from the phenomenolgy I find needful, they stake a claim past certainty. Finding no outside, no place from where the world could be moved by the folcrum of mind, no knowledge absolute, they accepted.

Nominalists, Skeptics and Mystics were broadly blown off and explained away by appeals to presuppositions of Reason and Aristotle. Reading Augustine's argument against skeptics, I heard Heidegger laughing.

"So much the worse for reason!"

For reason will not let us ask the questions which are always already asking, let us move beyond it and let us not attempt this circumfrance of God by Aristotle and logic. It took a long time to realize that the three great doctrines of Christianity are paradoxes: Trinity, Incarnation, Resurrection. All bending reason and defying the reductionism of Aristotle.

Hearing the prattle of the medievals--and knowing I have prattled like that--I doubt. And in doubting I move to away from the abstraction of essences, embracing the scary nominalists. Stop talking about forms, give me life.

Laughing at the Medievals in the middle of class is not a good way of endearng oneself to the proffesor, however. Claiming this is your attempt at the immortal laughter of the postmodernists seems to be of no use.