The Atheist & the Foxhole
Catriona Hanley asks: Is God still dead?
In fact, millions upon millions of human beings have gone from the cradle to the grave interacting in precisely this manner. And have given but the occasional passing thoughts spaced days, weeks, months apart about the course of their lives “philosophically” in this way. Historically and culturally, for the overwhelming preponderance of us, that is the role of religion.
But then those who do set aside time spaced days, weeks, months apart to contemplate it all…intellectually. To concoct one or another TOE. From RM/OA to Value Ontology, we have ourselves been deluged with them. There have in fact easily been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them down through the ages.
And the only limitations they all seem to recognize is that everyone must think as they do about the part that transcends the so much more complex, convoluted…even catastrophic…reality of our day to day lives. Heidegger himself seemed to settle on one of his own.
So, he too just shrugs off the part where the dots are connected between how it is that he believed he understood being and all there is that he didn’t have a clue about regarding all there is to be known about being going back to, well, you tell me. Thus his “understanding” here, not unlike yours and mine, is just a more sophisticated WAG. As opposed to those millions upon millions who do go to the grave entirely ensconced in the reality that they have been indoctrinated as children to believe is true about themselves in the world.