John Dunn

Between birth and death a clearing emerges, in which we can decide to choose our world. It is a place in which authenticity demands that we undertake a ‘critical ontology of ourselves’ in order to escape the banal clutches of Das Man, or ‘the they’. We can inscribe this place of temporality with the temporarily improvised self-expression of our own being. This, for Heidegger, was freedom.
John Dunn

He was wrong in this idealistic and naive belief. The truth is that deconstruction has evolved into a new logocentrism. I think that he eventually saw the truth of this, and that he thought that ‘only a god’ could save us from it, the ‘god’ being an alternative onto-theology.
John Dunn

Derrida’s formulation of there being ‘nothing outside the text’, combined with the destruction of ultimate meaning in the text, left a border-free grammatical landscape on the page. This was analogous to globalism in its implications. Like Luria and Spinoza before, the exiled Derrida found a home in the One by deconstructing the sovereignties of the many.
John Dunn

In the mould of Martin Luther, Heidegger may only have wanted to ‘stake out the positive possibilities’ of tradition, but he opened a Pandora’s Box in doing so. Derrida delved into the box and found a way of deconstructing the whole of tradition rather than revitalising it.
John Dunn

Nietzsche declared God to be dead, i.e. that God the idol is dead.

Perhaps the corollary of this is that God, the metaphorical concept associated in some way with the active creation of the cosmos, is very much alive as aesthetic life.
John Dunn

Schelling ultimately is a Spinozist, i.e. holds a worldview best summed up by the Spinozist credo that freedom is the recognition of necessity.

In Schelling’s romantic Spinozism there is heroism in standing up to necessity, but there is tragedy in succumbing to the inevitable.
John Dunn

Because the unity of the ‘All’ is projected as the future, the reader is called upon to realise that same unity in actuality. What Rosenzweig is actually calling upon the reader to do is commit the suicide of the self. In other words, exchange the sovereignty of independent thinking for subsumption into world unity.
John Dunn

Death for Heidegger sets the limit to separateness as a human being. In the end all is subsumed into the Oneness. In this context therefore, human life is a temporary aberration, something with which Heidegger reluctantly had to deal. Ironically, Heidegger had to deal with this because of the uniquely human ability to stand back and think about this aberration.
John Dunn

Heidegger’s failure to become führer to the Führer, i.e. transform the political revolution of 1933 into the philosophical revolution of Being and Time, did not deter him from pursuing the new authentic future.

The vacuum left by his disengagement from politics and resignation from the rectorship was filled by an engagement with literature, in particular the poetry of Hölderlin.
John Dunn

This matrix not chosen need not be utterly binding or deterministic, which leaves an alienation against which human beings can struggle and find an opening for freedom.

Such a view needs the ‘other’ against which to struggle. The ‘other’ are the formulators of the matrix into which we are thrown. To struggle successfully against the ‘other’ is to open a clearing, a chink in the matrix, through which we will see.
John Dunn