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

[Wolff-Michael Roth <mroth@uvic.ca>]

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,  
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