Had a conversation about Heidegger with my friend Govert today.

My introduction to Heidegger as an undergraduate painted him as reducible to his Nazi politics, and I am still recovering from that inaccurate reading. But as I try to understand and embrace his holistic views, I am always a bit repelled as well.

My current take is that his philosophy was an admirable but ultimately unsuccessful attempt at holism. I feel that his negativity towards Western metaphysical/scientific/technological rationality is too dualistic…Manichaean as Walter Kaufmann would say. His thought fails to answer the question why, if Western metaphysics is so harmful, is it so widespread?

Aurobindo’s (and, subsequently, Wilber’s) approach does critique scientific rationality as limited, but also sees it as an important and necessary stage on the way towards nondual whole consciousness.