258
ZOLLIKON SEMINARS
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I thank you for the short, but important, notes about the discussion.
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Thank you for you informative letter and for the book [textbook on psychiatry by Bleuler].
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The chaos generated by conceptual confusion is indeed great. A basic flaw already appears externally: The description of a well-functioning memory scarcely comprises two pages, while disorders are dealt with in six pages.
I do not yet see how one can cope with this "science," which comes up with [such] erudite titles. The whole thing proceeds from purely mechanistic, causal, calculative representations.
A few hints about thinking, thanking, and memory can be found in What Is Called Thinking? [Was heisst Denken?] (pp. 5 ff., 91
The oldest, detailed discussion of memoria can be found in Augustine's Confessions X.8 ff
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Now that we have received a supply of heating oil, your visit on the 16th would be possible indeed. I would prefer that to a written presentation of the questions, where I would not be sure if it addressed your concerns. Everything remains more open in the give-and-take of a dialogue.
The domination of technical-calculative thinking depends so much on the effect and on the fascination with progress that it can hardly be shaken off nowadays. But for that reason, the simple "seeing" of phenomena must not be abandoned, if only because technical thinking is also necessarily, and therefore everywhere, grounded on a minimum of phenomena, seen immediately. The main difficulty is that one does not see the forest through the trees of technical successes, that is, [one cannot see] simple Da-sein. In the meantime, even Da-sein is increasingly exposed to the corrosive effect of technology.