"Truth in Being." You can turn upside down trying to work out why. One of the great minds of the 20th Century, when the French investigators looked into why he was a member of the Nazi Party, classified him as a Fellow Traveler. A verdict that made him a dip-shit in a large number of minds. He didn't deny it and he made no excuses for it, and in 1949, so long as he reached no position of authority he was allowed to start teaching again at his old university in Freiburg. His idea of "Truth in Being" was his version of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Of course, there'll be debate about whether I know what I mean, but we're not locusts, and, as yet, we're not mechanical devices either. There's more to us than being an abacus, which doesn't mean that being un-blessed by the ability to add up makes us any more or less human. It's strange, even here where I currently live, a good chance the odd eyebrows were raised when they read Hannah Arendt's short book on the Trail of Eichmann. Eichmann's defense was to claim he was doing what he was told. Hannah Arendt's defense against the critics of her book was to make a joke about how easy it was to tell when a critic hadn't read her book. Evil, she claimed, was fundamentally banal. The Devil was boring as hell. For one of Arendt's sources of inspiration this idea of "Truth in Being" was the concealed waiting to be unconcealed. Made sense from him, our finite world was an unfolding of meaning. It certainly happened. A revelation occurred. And Maybe for Heidegger the finitude of existence was a good reason for a great mind to let it be, the resounding silence of who am I to care what people think, sat well enough in him. But you have to think about Taliesin, 550 anno domini into 600, the Greatest Bard of Wales whose poems of praise fed him well, bread, butter and mead came his way until he said something nice about a rival Prince. Taliesin made amends for his fickleness by praising his patron's brave son who'd died in battle. A death that broke the old man's heart, without Taliesin's poem of praise to his son and his kingdom, he'd lost his heritage. I have the feeling we've got a whole bunch of "Truth in Being" people, they've stopped trying basically, they'll wait and see, and I suspect there are a good few very fine masked Taliesin's swishing around in front of mirrors whose poems probably won't last.
