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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