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Re: [xmca] "Creature Consciousness," "Heil Heidegger!," etc.



Heidegger's work has been taken much further. In this sense, Heidegger is of historical interest. But, for example, the implications on the social and the being in the world, which is inherently being-with, I would recommend Jean-Luc Nancy (e.g., Being Singular Plural or his essay on culture, reprinted in Finite Thinking, I think). As far as Being is concerned, Derrida has taken this much further----Habermas calls Derrida an "orthodox Heideggerian". So those who want may draw on more recent scholars to find the ideas further developed.

But many like to go back, and in the way Vygotsky is discussed here on this list rather than more recent developments of ideas that he initially seeded, so others like to go back to Heidegger----or so I think.

Michael



On 24-Oct-09, at 11:10 AM, Martin Packer wrote:

If Heidegger's work has any value today, I would say, it is as an example of an approach that tries to describe human existence as throughly and inescapably social and material - along with both the advantages and perils of such an approach. Heidegger's starting point was that human being is always "in-the-world." Any time I give to discussing Heidegger's work is motivated to try to figure out how this kind of approach can work, and not to try to defend Heidegger's philosophy.

Having said that, I have never seen Heidegger distinguishing public and private morality, or inner or outer sources of morality. I don't even know what this would mean in a social, material ontology. Heidegger's account, as I understand it, was that we are, from the outset, thrown into the public social practices of a specific form of life, and as we develop we can only understand who we are in terms of these practices. Professor, student, nurse, adolescent - all these are ways of being in a form of life. We have to choose - one cannot be *both* nurse *and* plumber, for example - but the choices, although made by an individual and playing a part defining that person - are choices among social options. Usually such choices are made unreflectively, without much deliberation. But it is possible to engage in a kind of reflection that takes the form chiefly of anxiety (or angst) in which we come to appreciate the contingency of our social practices, and recognize the arbitrary character of such self definitions. At this point it is not a question of choosing between the personal and the public, because the public has *defined* the personal. The best one can do is be "resolute," continuing to participate in public practices *despite* the fact their arbitrariness is now evident.

Martin

On Oct 24, 2009, at 9:12 AM, Victor wrote:

Heidigger's notion of dual morality, private and public, appears to me as a misguided attempt to unify Kant's theory of logically innate moral imperatives with Hegelian objective idealism (and ignoring without refutation, Hegel's critique of just that concept of Kant's). Arendt's thinking on the development of private moral intropection as a function of interaction with others is the appropriate complement to Hegel's theory of the ideal explaining both the origins and development of ethical conventions - an important element of Ilyenkov's paper on the Ideal -as well as the formulation of private morality.
Victor
----- Original Message ----- From: "Duvall, Emily" <emily@uidaho.edu>
To: "Vera Steiner" <vygotsky@unm.edu>; "eXtended Mind, Culture,Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Saturday, October 24, 2009 12:57 AM
Subject: RE: [xmca] "Creature Consciousness," "Heil Heidegger!," etc.


I find it most useful to consider Hannah Arendt's view of moral philosophy, her ethic of moral introspection, as developing as we engage with others rather than what she saw as Heidegger's perspective, which was that the moral comes from within. This doesn't excuse Heidegger, but rather it explains his activity with the Nazis as having its origins and justification from a sense of private morality versus public morality. That Heidegger could live with a duality of morality so to speak. I really find Arendt's 'dialogical concept of citizenship' to be quite powerful and a wonderful critique of Heidegger's moral philosophy...
My 2 cents...
~em

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca- bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Vera Steiner
Sent: Friday, October 23, 2009 3:18 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] "Creature Consciousness," "Heil Heidegger!," etc.

Hi,
I think Adorno having been forced to emigrate and suffer the loss of friends (and possibly family members) was more deeply touched by the role of Nazi supporters than are people of a later generation. I live in a town full of Jungians who have a hard time understanding why I am unable to teach his
theories.(He,too, was a Nazi sympathizer.)
It is a great challenge to live in the shadows of the 20th century,
Vera
----- Original Message ----- From: "Wolff-Michael Roth" <mroth@uvic.ca>
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 5:36 PM
Subject: Re: [xmca] "Creature Consciousness," "Heil Heidegger!," etc.


Martin,
thanks for the extended note. I personally grounded quite a bit of my
work in Heidegger, and so have numerous philosophers, including of
Jewish faith, such as Derrida and Levinas. I do not think that anyone
is in support of anything that Heidegger might have written to
support Nazism, or his everyday behavior that would have given
support to Nazism while it was operating at its worst.
For those interested in the issue, there is an interesting
discussion of the question of forgiveness in Derrida's book of the
name, and he deals precisely with the question of Heidegger and
Nazism, on Jankélévitch and his writings on the Shoah and pardon, and
Paul Celan, his poem "Todtnauberg", and the visit to Heidegger. There
is also the question why Heidegger did not ask for forgiveness.
I think it is one of the master pieces of Derrida (I only have the
French version, "Pardonner: l'impardonnable et l'imprescriptible")
because he says that we can only forgive the unforgivable, because if
you forgive something that is forgivable, then you have done nothing.
The relationship between giving and forgiving is brought to that of
temporalization, the very question Heidegger began to investigate in
the relation of Sein (Being) and Seiendes (being).
Michael


On 21-Oct-09, at 4:12 PM, 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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