A Note on Three Forgettings and the Task of Modernity, Or, Why Arendt is Right about Heidegger, Strauss, and Gendlin

Heidegger, Strauss, and Gendlin all claim that modernity involves some sort of forgetting.

Each of them use this claim about a forgetting to pose a task.

We have forgotten X, therefore we must learn/recover/think/understand Y. 

This therefore is very peculiar.

Heidegger says we have forgotten Being.

Strauss says we have forgotten the tradition of Esotericism.

Gendlin says we have forgotten the reality of implicit intricacy (or never known it).

For Heidegger this means we must recover a genuine understanding of  Being (as opposed to the beings, which are so well categorized and manipulated by modern science). When we recover Being we will recover authenticity and the experience of Being-in-the-world.

For Strauss this means we must recover the conflict between philosophy and politics, go back before Enlightenment harmonism and remember the real nature of philosophy as an expression of the ambivalence of human nature. This, too, seems to come along with its own form of authenticity.

For Gendlin this means recovering a sense of the more than formal nature of thinking: we must learn to "think beyond patterns," as one of his short books puts it. For Gendlin, too, this means rediscovering authenticity: we will recognize that being authentic or real never means being formal, but always means placing form in service of intricacy.

Arendt is right that all philosophies of history are an attempt to restore human contact with the world. We feel disconnected, estranged, disenchanted, alienated. She is right about all of them in this regard.

All these people posited a forgetting and the need for a recovery.

I am persuaded of some version of this project. I currently favor some synthesis of Strauss and Gendlin, but of course I think this would be a return to Being, as well.

I suppose I want to claim that approaching Being means approaching our particular way of being. 

Approaching our particular way of being means approaching the intertwining of our political-role identities and our deeper-intricate selves. Being is the being of both the esoteric-exoteric divide and the intricate-formal divide.

Eso-exo and intricate-formal are the same problem.

Both are the problem of this being that finds itself strangely open to Being.