The thing with Heidegger, is that you never know (philosophically) if it’s not Nothing, which can contradict itself.
In Finnish, more subwords are combined to one word than in English. For example, we write ‘Moottoriurheilukeskus’ instead of Motor sports center. Understanding or reading the long names is not more difficult than learning ‘airplane jet turbine engine auxiliary mechanic non-commissioned officer student’. It is much more difficult to try to learn and remember the small words between in English language. We do not have such words in Finnish.
Finns are more interested in the length of palindromes. Saippuakauppias is perhaps the longest common palindrome word in Finnish. It means ‘soap seller’.
Edit:
Lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilaskaan is as valid word and slightly longer. It means ‘not even an airplane jet turbine engine auxiliary mechanic non-commissioned officer student’.
As I wrote, Finnish does not have ‘the small words between’ so all such meanings are expressed by changing the ending of the basic word, except the gender. Finnish does not have ‘he’ or ‘she’ or words that would be classified as masculine or feminine. If you want to tell that the person was a male, you have to use words like man or boy. A truly gender neutral language, if you wish.
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How delightful, Kai!
When we’re not used to looking at the really long words, it just looks like alphabet soup, but when one’s eye is trained by using those smaller words all the time, it’s not hard to see the divisions.
You mentioned “small words in between” in English and “he’ and ‘she”. Can you give some more examples? Do you only mean pronouns, or maybe prepositions? German uses prepositions a lot but also exploits gender, case and endings in ways that English can’t. In English we have to use prepositions more for the same expressions, and word order/sentence structure for others.
A language that delights itself in long palindromes seems to include a light-heartedness that would rarely be associated with linguistics!
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Prepositions are difficult because Finnish has only a small number of prepositions. It is surprisingly difficult to try to remember what prepositions to use and I make often errors. A large proportion of my edits are changing a wrong preposition to a hopefully correct one to avoid misunderstandings.
‘A’/‘the’ is also something that Finnish does not have.
The worst part of learning Finnish is remembering the names of all different cases. Finnish has 14 cases plus one that is mostly used with pronouns (accusative). Luckily, you do not need the names in real life, only in the school.
Nominative, partitive, genetive, inessive, elative, illative, adessive, ablative, allative, essive, translative, abessive, instructive, comitative.
One easy feature in Finnish is that all words are read exactly as they are written. You never have to think how to pronounce something.
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And (American) English speakers are overwhemed by 4 cases in German (plus 3 grammatical genders) that predictably alter endings on articles, nouns and modifiers. 14! Finns must really be a light-hearted bunch! And with a case called ‘elative!’ I must find out more about that.
German spelling is also “cleaned up” in helpful ways. What I missed as a student of German, though, is the etymology that is reflected in our “haphazard” English spelling conventions. One way German got around this historically was by regularly rooting out foreign words and promoting a Germanic equivalent. So there is a beautiful concreteness to German that we fail to perceive in English, because we no longer understand that very aspect of the foreign words we have incorperated into English.
How is this in Finnish?
I think prepositions are murderous as well. The meanings are so subtle (or aparently absent) they sometimes seem entirely random in their application. They can even be different by region. Often it is just a matter of memorizing a convention, rather than trying to figure out some logical application. Sigh.
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One complicating thing is that ‘elative’ in Fenno-Ugric languages does not mean the same as in Semitic languages.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/elative
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The use of English words or modified versions of these words have increased a lot during the last decades. Finnish is a tiny language with crudely 6 million speakers. The younger generation spends lots of time in the internet, mostly in groups where the participants speak English. At some point, my son seemed to have more opinions based on what he had read in Reddit than anything in Finnish. No wonder that the younger generations use more English words.
I prefer translating foreign words to Finnish. With some colleagues, we have started to use more Finnish because the professional words may have gotten a too used or negative tone. Biodiversity is one of those words. I prefer the word ‘elonkirjo’ (life spectrum) because it sounds better in Finnish and people do not associate it with the past fights dealing with protection of species or areas. Biodiversity is so much used word that it would be very difficult to get funding for a project that plans to study biodiversity - it just does not sell.
The Finnish way of spelling English words is - very Finnish. If we speak with foreigners, we try to spell the words as in English, sometimes added with a tone typical to a Finnish dialect. Some say it may be difficult to understand. With other Finnish speakers, we often spell the words as they would be Finnish words, exactly as they are written. With ‘we’ I mean the older generations - the younger ones often speak fluent English, British or American depending on personal history.
There is also a difference between ‘old’ names and new. For example, there is an old Finnish family with the name ‘von Wright’. It has included some brilliant painters. The family name is not spelled as the name Wright from England, it is spelled as it is written. So, the Finnish Wright can be immediately separated from any foreign Wright based on how the name is pronounced.
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“Some have hoped that our recognition of our rootlessness would rescue meaning from the chaos of nothing. But Heidegger denies us such solace.”
“Heidegger does think freedom is rooted in nothingness. He also says we derive our concept of logical negation from this experience of nothing. This suggests a privileged perspective for human beings. We differ from animals with respect to nothing.”
Making more deliberate progress with my VSI to Kierkegaard has been good but challenging in ways that have nothing to do with technical aspects of reading. Even the secondary material is convicting:
As Kierkegaard expressed it elsewhere, in such a view the self is ‘a dative1, like the “me” of a child its concepts are: good luck, bad luck, fate’ (Sickness unto Death 51). Hence it is the mark of the aesthetic individual that he does not seek to impose a coherent pattern on his life, having its source in some unitary notion of himself and of what he should be, but rather allows ‘what happens’ to act upon him and to govern his behaviour.
Gardiner, Patrick. Kierkegaard: A Very Short Introduction: 58 (Very Short Introductions) (p. 49). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.
In crucial respects the account provided of the ethical point of view appears to focus uncompromisingly upon the individual. Personality is the ‘absolute’, is ‘its own end and purpose’; in describing the emergence and development of the ethical character, the judge treats as basic the notion of ‘choosing oneself’, this in turn being closely associated with the ideas of self-knowledge, self-acceptance, self-realization. The ethical subject is portrayed as one who regards himself as a ‘goal’, a ‘task set’. Unlike the aestheticist, who is continually preoccupied with externals, his attention is directed towards his own nature, his substantial reality as a human being with such and such talents, inclinations, and passions, this being something which it constantly lies within his power to order, control, and cultivate. There is thus a sense in which he can be said, consciously and deliberately, to take responsibility for himself; he does not, as the aestheticist is prone to do, treat his personal traits and dispositions as an unalterable fact of nature to which he must tamely submit, but regards them rather as a challenge – his self-knowledge is not ‘a mere contemplation’ but a ‘reflection upon himself which itself is an action’ (Either/Or ii 263). Moreover, by such inward understanding and critical self-exploration a man comes to recognize, not only what he empirically is, but what he truly aspires to become; thus the judge refers to an ‘ideal self’ which is the ‘picture in likeness to which he has to form himself’. In other words, the ethical individual’s life and behaviour must be thought of as infused and directed by a determinate conception of himself which is securely founded upon a realistic grasp of his own potentialities and which is immune to the vicissitudes of accident and fortune. He is not, as the aestheticist was shown to be, the prey of what happens or befalls, for he has not surrendered himself to the arbitrary governance of outside circumstances and incalculable contingencies.
Gardiner, Patrick. Kierkegaard: A Very Short Introduction: 58 (Very Short Introductions) (pp. 52-53). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.
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1[T]he dative case…used in some languages to indicate the recipient or beneficiary of an action, as in “Maria Jacobo potum dedit”, Latin for “Maria gave Jacob a drink”. In this example, the dative marks what would be considered the indirect object of a verb in English.
From: Dative case - Wikipedia
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Yes, while living in Finland (Turku and Kauhava) , I recall Finnish friends mentioning that it was popular to play word-games in the language, palindromes and rhyming games. My Finnish language proficiency never progressed far enough to understand what was going on, unfortunately, but the sound and rhythm of the language was beautiful. and yeah…the cases were really confusing as @Kendel alluded to!! The good thing was that it was always pronounced as spelled.
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That can’t be good!
Unless you lose your place and accidentally repeat something. 
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I agree. It did not take long before he realized the limitations of that source.
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Yes, it’s pretty glaringly obvious.
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Speaking of reading Heidegger, this is a rich passage from the SEP entry on Nothingness:
Rudolf Carnap thinks Heidegger’s contorted sentences malfunction. To illustrate, Carnap quotes snippets from Heidegger’s What is Metaphysics?:
What is to be investigated is being only and—nothing else; being alone and further—nothing; solely being, and beyond being-nothing. What about this Nothing? … Does the Nothing exist only because the Not, i.e. the Negation, exists? Or is it the other way around? Does Negation and the Not exist only because the Nothing exists? … We assert: the Nothing is prior to the Not and the Negation…. Where do we seek the Nothing? How do we find the Nothing…. We know the Nothing…. Anxiety reveals the Nothing…. That for which and because of which we were anxious, was ‘really’—nothing. Indeed: the Nothing itself—as such—was present…. What about this Nothing?—The Nothing itself nothings. (Heidegger as “quoted” by Carnap 1932, 69)
This paragraph, especially the last sentence, became notorious as a specimen of metaphysical nonsense.
Not a bad place to get a lead on Lego sales
On a vacation cruise, but continuing to read Jesus and John Wayne was intrigued with the author’s statement that “…the battle over inerrancy was in part a proxy fight over gender.” I had not thought about it in that way, feeling it more due to our love of legalism and control, but realize through this writing that the control aspect of it was largely an issue of gender roles and patriarchy. I suppose I am pretty naive at times, not realizing that “code words” are a real thing in public discourse, even if they are working on the sub-conscience level.
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Good observations, Phil, it’s been a while since I read it, and I don’t remember noticing this bit.
J.I. Packer’s blessing to the coming generation was encouraging. While there are a number of bright lights out there, I can’t say I know of anyone that can be compared to that man as of yet. But I am hopeful for the Church and the Scriptures that have been providentially given and preserved for her.
I’d like to look more into this. Does she support it or was it simply asserted?
If you’re interested I found this to be a gracious review and yet seasoned with salt:
Edit: I’m not sure how the blurb on the link is getting pulled, but it doesn’t catch the sense in which I felt the review was written.
This quote from the review does a better job of conveying the sense of the love that was lost:
“Loving the dead means we tell the truth about them, as far as it is possible given our limitations and the complexities of the past.”
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She doesn’t elaborate much, as it is really an aside in the book, but if you look at the era she is referring to, the last 70’s at this point in the book, the fight over inerrancy is made by the same participants who were also fighting over integration and racial issues, gender issues, and the strong male model of church leadership, so it makes sense that they are linked, as you can argue about inerrancy as a way of supporting those issues that are unseemly, without arguing for the offending positions themselves. To quote from the book,” Inerrancy mattered because of its connection to cultural and politically issues. It was in their efforts to bolster patriarchal authority that Southern Baptists united with evangelicals across the nation, and the alliances drew them into the larger evangelical world…Patriarchy was at the heart of this new sense of themselves.”
So, no smoking gun, but it seems to be that it does go hand and hand. Inerrancy makes it easy to use the argument, “The Bible says it, so that is that, argument over.”
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