I came across this paragraph in the essay “SORGE and KARDIA” by John D. Caputo. It’s from a collection of essays on the early Heidegger entitled, READING HEIDEGGER FROM THE START: ESSAYS IN HIS EARLIEST THOUGHT, the best collection I’ve come across. Especially interesting are two essays on Aristotle’s influence, one bearing the title, BEING AND TIME: A ‘TRANSLATION’ OF THE NICOMACHEAN ETHICS? Anyway, I thought some SOLOISTs would find this interesting, despite the technical terminology from both Husserl and Heidegger.

“Pleasures and pains establish a new register of events, with a table of categories of their own, . . . The significance of pleasures and pains . . .lies in the way they close factical life in upon itself and deprive it of a world. The ‘subjectivity’ of ‘feelings’ is an objection to them only if one is enforcing a transcendental-ontological reduction. In fact, feelings explain how the ‘subject’ in one important sense is constituted. Postmodernist critics have done considerable damage to the modernist notion of subjective agency, individual autonomy, reflective transparence, and prelinguistic interiority. They have in effect finished the job of demolishing the Cartesian subject first launched in [Heidegger’s] BEING AND TIME. But the result of this critique is to bring to the fore another subject, the subject as patient, as subject to grief and misfortune, power and oppression. What I mean by ‘my’ life, by ‘I’ myself, in the most elemental sense is the incommunicability of ‘my’ pleasures, the pleasures and pains., the feelings, which define my factical life. What I mean by the subjectivity of the ‘other’ is the one in pleasure or pain, the one whose fact is twisted with torment [think of Linz listening to Slayer--tee-hee] or streaked with a smile [think of thinking of Linz listening to Slayer—tee-hee].” (“SORGE and KARDIA,” p. 338)

Since the author blames postmodernists for denying that “emotions are tools of cognition” does this make Rand a postmodernist. Ahhhhhhhh. Maybe only a postmodernist light. Less calories than regular postmodernists. And she certainly didn’t care for Descartes.
Fred