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