Morning breaks in the Black Forest

For some reason this morning, I stumbled upon a series of posts in the Guardian blog called "How to Believe" and started reading. The series on the whole looks at philosophies of belief, et al, and the first two articles are about Heidegger (of course), who thanks to a couple of uni professors I have a very 'fleeting' familiarity with.

So far this resume of his 437 page master work is making for a pretty easy morning read. However as always, when someone is para-phrasing the old curmudgeon I feel like those professors who assigned 'The Question Concerning Technology' (yes I had to read it twice and it still wasn't enough), would say " well, maybe, but that's not quite it either." Anyways, here's a quote to start you off:

Note the radical nature of this initial move: philosophy is not some otherworldly speculation as to whether the external world exists or whether the other human-looking creatures around me are really human and not robots or some such. Rather, philosophy begins with the description – what Heidegger calls "phenomenology" – of human beings in their average everyday existence. It seeks to derive certain common structures from that everydayness.

But we should note the difficult of the task that Heidegger has set himself. That which is closest and most obvious to us is fiendishly difficult to describe. Nothing is closer to me than myself in my average, indifferent everyday existence, but how to describe this? Heidegger was fond of quoting St Augustine's Confessions, when the latter writes, "Assuredly I labour here and I labour within myself; I have become to myself a land of trouble and inordinate sweat." Heidegger indeed means trouble and one often sweats through these pages. But the moments of revelation are breathtaking in their obviousness.

Micro-blogging et al, while interesting to me as a practice is less meaningful than the continued maintenance of this blog because I think the breathtaking obviousness of revelation is exactly what blogging was made for.

140 characters is not exploring it's just babbling.