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.)