Oskar Becker - Later Thought

Later Thought

At the end of his life Becker re-emphasized the distinction between intuition of the formal and Platonic realm as opposed to the concrete existential realm, moved to the terminology, at least, of divination. In his Dasein und Dawesen Becker advocated what he called a "mantic" divination. Hermeneutics of the Heideggerian sort is applicable to individual lived existence, but "mantic" decipherment is necessary not only in mathematics, but in aesthetics, and the investigation of the unconscious. These realms deal with the eternal and structural, such as the symmetries of nature, and are properly investigated by a mantic phenomenology, not an hermeneutic one. (Becker's emphasis on the timelessness and formal nature of the unconscious has some parallels with the account of Jacques Lacan.)

Read more about this topic:  Oskar Becker

Famous quotes containing the word thought:

    “But real action is in silent moments. The epochs of our life are not in the visible facts of our choice of a calling, our marriage, our acquisition of an office, and the like, but in a silent thought by the way-side as we walk; in a thought which revises our entire manner of life, and says,—”Thus hast thou done, but it were better thus.””
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “The final upshot of thinking is the exercise of volition, and of this thought no longer forms a part; but belief is only a stadium of mental action, an effect upon our nature due to thought, which will influence future thinking.”
    —Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)