Buddha

People worship Jesus, too, but that doesn't mean I can't love him.

The Two Party System In A Nutshell

ANAXIMANDER and the BOUNDLESS (Apeiron)

Holderlin

Philosopher-Poet.

Cat Stevens - Catch Bull At Four - Ruins

The Heideggerian Fourfold

The Turkish city of Side.

The mortal witness is the fourth.

Antonio Gramsci

While Heidegger struggled (perhaps unsuccessfully) to escape the corner into which Western metaphysics from Plato to Kant had painted him, Gramsci redefined the philosophical task as "a concrete social activity in which, implicitly, all [human beings] are engaged." For Gramsci, the question is not whether one will engage in philosophy, but how; and, for him, how one ought to engage in philosophy is by achieving an historical consciousness through critical analysis of one's own inherited and, perforce, ideologically-charged assumptions about the nature of the world. (See Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (1971), pp. 321-343).

It would not be fair to Heidegger to suggest that he did not participate in the struggle to achieve an historical consciousness--his substitution of Beyng for Being reflects his participation in that struggle. But the Marxian point about changing the world (i.e., the famous 11th thesis on Feuerbach)--a point that set Gramsci's philosophical activity in motion--was not embraced by the Sage of Messkirch except during his days as a National Socialist.

It is understandable, I suppose, that Heidegger retreated from active political involvement after 1934 (although, it is not understandable why he did not resign from the Nazi Party at the same time that he resigned his Rectorship of the University of Freiburg); but (as Gramsci would argue) political inactivity is a form of politics.

In any case, Heidegger's philosophical struggles fell short of the Gramscian ideal insofar as he was not able to release himself from the tar baby of Western metaphysics. Gramsci, on the other hand, ignored (as best he could) the Plato to Kant canon. Did he, thereby, escape it? That is a question well worth pondering.