Heidegger – Feminism and Religion

Stuart WordPress photo As I mentioned in my January 30, 2016 post, Grace Jantzen in Foundations of Violence makes a compelling case that Diotima is a fictional figure. She does not, however, adequately distinguish her from the poetizing female figures Parmenides and Boethius portray as instructing them in their respective works. If nothing else, the quality of the poetry of Parmenides and Boethius betrays the influence of a very real woman: Sappho.

By contrast, Plato essentially portrays Diotima as the personification of his philosophy–his metaphysics–and it is hard to believe there was such an ancient Greek woman. Although the term ‘metaphysics’ derives from a neologism coined in Greek centuries after Plato and Aristotle lived, its meaning (‘beyond’ (meta) the ‘natural,’ or ‘embodied’ world (physics)) appropriately characterizes what Diotima and hence Plato’s philosophy is all about. A key passage is where she characterizes the most intense love as “gazing at and being with” the beloved, without even the need to “eat or drink.” That leads her to ask rhetorically whether it would not be best to gaze at what is not “infected” by flesh and blood (Symposium (211 d-e)).

Philosophy, Albrecht Dürer (1502)(Die Bayerische Staatsbiliothek)

Continue reading “Plato’s Diotima as a Symptom of Psychosis by Stuart Dean”

I was in college in the sixties before The Sixties really set in. We talked a lot about existentialism in those innocent days, especially in my theater classes. Those were the days when the theater of the absurd was the big thing. We theater majors walked around asking each other, “How do I be in the world? What is the meaning of my existence?”

When I’m in One Of Those Moods, I have fun telling people I was in college while Shakespeare was still writing his plays. Then I watch their lips move as they try to figure out if I’m really 400 years old, and if I’m not that old, then what am I on? Continue reading “Ways of Being in the World by Barbara Ardinger”