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FW: [xmca] Adult before their time?
Not quite the same sort of trauma, but there's plenty of pop analysis on the
life of Michael Jackson these days. p
Peter Smagorinsky
Professor of English Education
Department of Language and Literacy Education
The University of Georgia
125 Aderhold Hall
Athens, GA 30602
smago@uga.edu
-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
Behalf Of Andy Blunden
Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2009 4:19 AM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [xmca] Adult before their time?
Can anyone tell me of any research done on the idea of
children who have "grown up before their time," as a result
of war, family disaster or otherwise having been projected
into the adult world on their own? And how is such a
characterization "adult before their time" made? On the
basis of the use of concepts?? Lack of interest in play??
Andy
Tony Whitson wrote:
> I would add Nietzsche, along with Heidegger and Derrida, to what Michael
> says.
>
> Heidegger is sometimes dismissed as incomprehensible, but Nietzsche and
> Derrida are more often treated as wild and reckless writers who can be
> fun to read, but without looking for any careful argument.
>
> If you don't expect either of them to be writing seriously, you won't
> read them seriously and you won't see what they're writing. N said as
> much, but then if you're not taking him seriously, you won't take him
> seriously when he says that, either.
>
> I saw an interview with D once where the interviewer, in the interview,
> in D's presence, ventured that deconstruction was basically the same as
> the US sitcom "Seinfeld"--It's just a matter of taking everything
> ironically. D replied that if you want to know anything about
> deconstruction, you need to do some reading. The interview was pretty
> much over at that point.
>
> On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, Wolff-Michael Roth wrote:
>
>> I don't know what people read that Heidegger has written. I personally
>> have not met a person who has read Sein und Zeit to the end, people
>> appear to read secondary literature rather than the primary. Moreover,
>> nobody appears to be talking/writing about Unterwegs zur Sprache
>> (David K., this should be of interest to you), or about Holzwege and
>> other works. First, I can't see anything that would fit the political
>> ideas of Nazism, for one, and I can't see anything that would be
>> understandable in terms of the quote that Steve contributes below.
>>
>> I do understand that Heidegger is difficult to read---I had to take
>> repeated stabs since I first purchased Sein und Zeit in 1977.
>>
>> Heidegger, by the way, does very close readings of some ancient Greek
>> philosophers. And when you pay attention to his writing, and do the
>> same with Derrida, for example, then you begin to realize that the
>> latter has learned a lot from the former.
>>
>> Now that my English is better than my German ever has been (although
>> it was my main language for 25 years) I personally know about the
>> problems of translations. Above all, any of the mechanical
>> translations that have been proposed on this list won't do even the
>> simplest of texts. And it is about more than literal content.
>>
>> We can learn from both of them, Heidegger and Derrida, that things are
>> more difficult than they look, and even more difficult than reading
>> their texts.
>>
>> Michael
>>
>>
>>
>> On 21-Oct-09, at 7:37 PM, Steve Gabosch wrote:
>>
>> I appreciate Martin's insights on Heidegger, as I do those of others.
>> I for one don't really know that much about Heidegger's ideas. I am
>> glad to learn from those that have studied him.
>>
>> Here is an interesting glossary entry on Heidegger in a book of
>> Marxist essays by George Novack (1905-1992), Polemics in Marxist
>> Philosophy: Essays on Sartre, Plekhanov, Lukacs, Engels, Kolalkowski,
>> Trotsky, Timpanaro, Colletti (1978). The glossary to the book was
>> written by Leslie Evans and edited by Novack.
>>
>> "Heidegger, Martin (1889-1976) - German existentialist philosopher.
>> His ideas were best expounded in Sein un Zeit (Being and Time, 1927).
>> A philosopher of irrationalism. Heidegger maintained that the chief
>> impediment to human self-development was reason and science, which led
>> to a view of the world based on subject-object relations. Humans were
>> reduced to the status of entities in the thing-world which they were
>> thrown (the condition of "thrownness"). This state of inauthentic
>> being could be overcome neither through theory (science) nor social
>> practice, but only by an inward-turning orientation toward one's self,
>> particularly in the contemplation of death. Heidegger was influenced
>> by Kierkegaard and Husserl (see entries), and in turn deeply affected
>> the thought of Sartre, Camus, and Marcuse. He was himself a chair of
>> philosophy at the University of Freiburg in 1928 after his mentor,
>> Edmund Husserl, had been forced to relinquish it by the Nazis.
>> Heidegger supported Hitler, which led to his disgrace at the end of
>> World War II and his retirement in 1951 to a life of rural
>> seclusion." (pg 307-308)
>>
>> - Steve
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Oct 21, 2009, at 5:04 PM, Andy Blunden wrote:
>>
>>> I think Martin is completely right in the proposition that (taking
>>> account of the continuing fascination the academy has with Heidegger)
>>> his works should be read to understand why and how Fascism and
>>> Heidegger's philosophy supported each other and what should be done
>>> about it.
>>>
>>> As Goethe said "The greatest discoveries are made not by individuals
>>> but by their age," or more particularly every age is bequeated a
>>> certain problematic by their predecessors, but the different
>>> philosophers confront that problematic in different ways. To say that
>>> those on either side of the battle lines in the struggle of a
>>> particular times have something in common, seems to be in danger of
>>> missing the point.
>>>
>>> Also, in my opinion, Husserl and Heidegger may have been responding
>>> to Hegel, but between them they erected the gretest barrier to
>>> understanding Hegel until Kojeve arrived on the scene. But that's
>>> just me. A grumpy old hegelian.
>>>
>>> Andy
>>>
>>>
>>> Martin Packer wrote:
>>>> A few days ago Steve made passing reference to an article that
>>>> apparently Tony had drawn his attention to, titled "Heil Heidegger."
>>>> I Googled and found that it is a recent article in the Chronicle of
>>>> Higher Education.
>>>> <http://www.chroniclecareers.com/article/Heil-Heidegger-/48806/>
>>>> The focus of the article is Heidegger's links with and support of
>>>> the Nazis, and its principal recommendations are that we should stop
>>>> paying attention to Heidegger, stop translating and publishing his
>>>> writing, and "mock him to the hilt."
>>>> I feel I should comment on this, since I have occasionally drawn on
>>>> Heidegger's work in these discussions. I certainly have no intention
>>>> of apologizing for Heidegger, who seems to have been a very nasty
>>>> person, who was responsible for some deplorable actions. I do want
>>>> to question, however, the proposal that because of these facts we
>>>> all would be better off ignoring his writing.
>>>> I was introduced to Heidegger by a Jewish professor of philosophy
>>>> who shared his last name (coincidentally as far as I know) with one
>>>> of the best-known victims of antisemitism. At that time less was
>>>> known about Heidegger's Narzism, but by no means nothing, and I
>>>> recall discussion in the classroom of the issue. I came to feel that
>>>> the last thing one should try to do is separate the man's work from
>>>> his life. Perhaps if he had been working on some obscure area of
>>>> symbolic logic, say, that would have been possible, but Heidegger
>>>> had written a philosophy of human existence, and this would seem to
>>>> *demand* that there be consistency between what he wrote and how he
>>>> lived. Indeed, perhaps it would be important to study the man's
>>>> writings to try to understand where he went wrong; at what point in
>>>> his analysis of human being did Heidegger open the door to the
>>>> possibility of fascism? I think in fact that it is in Division II of
>>>> Being and Time, where Heidegger is describing what he called
>>>> 'authentic Dasein,' which amounts to a way that a person relates to
>>>> time, specifically to the certainty of their own death, that the
>>>> mistake is made and the door is opened to evil.
>>>> Carlin Romano, the author of the article, doesn't seem to know
>>>> Heidegger's work very well. Dasein ("being there," i.e. being-in-
>>>> the-world) is not a "cultural world," nor do "Daseins intersect," as
>>>> he puts it. (But I suppose that he is mocking Heidegger.) And that
>>>> brings me to my other reason for recommending that we continue to
>>>> read Heidegger, his politics and (lack of) ethics notwithstanding.
>>>> It is that his analysis throws light on issues that have been raised
>>>> in this group, and were important to LSV and others. I am sure it
>>>> seems odd to link a Nazi philosopher to a socialist psychologist,
>>>> but I am hardly the first to see connections. Lucien Goldmann wrote
>>>> "Lukacs and Heidegger," a book in which he acknowledged the
>>>> incongruity but argued that there are "fundamental bonds" between
>>>> the two men's work, that at the beginning of the 20th century "on
>>>> the basis of a new problematic first represented by Lukacs, and then
>>>> later on by Heidegger, the contemporary situation was slowly
>>>> created. I would add that this perspective will also enable us to
>>>> display a whole range of elements common to both philosophers, which
>>>> are not very visible at first sight, but which nevertheless
>>>> constitute the common basis on which undeniable antagonisms are
>>>> elaborated" (p. 1).
>>>> What is this common basis? It is that of overcoming the separation
>>>> between subject and object in traditional thought, overcoming
>>>> subject/object dualism, by recognizing the role of history in
>>>> individual and collective human life, and rethinking the relation
>>>> between theory and practice. As Michael wrote, Heidegger reexamined
>>>> the traditional philosophical distinction between an object (a
>>>> being) and what it *is* (its Being), and rejected both idealism and
>>>> essentialism to argue that what an object is (and not just what it
>>>> 'means') is defined by the human social practices in which it is
>>>> involved, and in which people encounter it. These practices, of
>>>> course, change over historical time, so the conditions for an object
>>>> to 'be' are practical, social, and historical. And since people
>>>> define themselves in terms of the objects they work with, the basis
>>>> of human being is practical, social, and historical too.
>>>> I continue to believe that this new kind of ontological analysis,
>>>> visible according to Goldmann in the work of both Lukacs and
>>>> Heidegger, influenced in both cases by Hegel, is centrally
>>>> important. If we can learn from studying Heidegger how to
>>>> acknowledge these cultural conditions without falling into a
>>>> valorization of the folk, without dissolving individuals in the
>>>> collective (a failing of the Left just as much as the Right), then
>>>> we will have gained, not lost, by reading his texts.
>>>> Martin
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--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden http://www.erythrospress.com/
Classics in Activity Theory: Hegel, Leontyev, Meshcheryakov,
Ilyenkov $20 ea
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