Episode #215 ... How Mysticism is missing in our modern lives. (Critchley, Heidegger)

Hello, everyone. I'm Steven West. This is Philosophize This. Thank you to everyone who supports the podcast on Patreon, patreon.com/philosophize this. So please listen to at least last episode before this one. But a couple episodes ago, I brought up Heidegger in relation to Nietzsche. And I said that a classic Heidegger style question that really shows the differences between him and Nietzsche is that he asked, is it possible to think without the will? Meaning, is it a part of our thinking to not only be able to have freedom of the will, to be able to will yourself on to situations when you choose to? But beyond freedom of the will, is there also a freedom from the will that's an important part of our thinking as well? Now what this question refers to is Heidegger's later work after being in time, after Dasein, after showing the limitations of only framing things in terms of subjects and objects, willing ourselves onto reality. After that, he moves on to a very interesting stage of his philosophy, where the main thing that he wants to explore in his later work is what he calls releasement or letting be. Let's talk more about what that might look like. See if the world around us, to Heidegger, is made up of a bunch of people that have a technological and framing to everything, where everything and everyone is just an object that we need to will ourselves onto. Let's structure things. Let's manipulate them, optimize them. And if by doing that, it leads to a world where we're constantly seeing everything in terms of how to manipulate people to produce the most efficient outcome, then what would happen if someone decided there was more to life than doing that all the time? What if somebody didn't buy the whole sales pitch that you're a bad person if you aren't constantly trying to educate yourself about the problems of seven and a half billion people? What if there's more to what we are than constantly trying to save the world all the time through rational utilitarianism? What if somebody instead decided to focus on trying to understand the nature of their own being better by putting in the work to maybe try to uncover a far more meaningful, richer, fuller experience of what it is to even exist? Well, first of all, real question. Should this person have to apologize for spending their time in this way? In other words, is this just a poorly disguised move of a selfish person who's ignoring all the really important work we have to do of projecting ourselves onto the world and fixing it? Or could this more meaningful connection with the world be something that we're sadly missing in the modern world? Something that people have not only forgotten about as they spiritually drown every day in their political video game. But could it be something that explains why Heidegger's Dasein, we talked about last …