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eightieth anniversary of being and time
Can it really be that long ago? Eighty years! What do we think now about that whole project? Was it useful or even necessary at the time but now not so much? Reading it now, does it seem like something that is important from the history of philosophy and that's all, or is it still 'actual'?
To answer or even dispute the questions, I suppose we need to think about what 'the whole project' was in the first place. If someone asked me, "what do you think Heidegger was up to with Being and Time?" I would answer like this:
Heidegger is the culmination of a long tradition of German/European thought that sought to provide a secular account of human knowledge once the religious account of its origins and grounding lost its persuasive power. This same tradition is also opposed to the kind of naive realism familiar from Locke. (No doubt Locke adds a little philosophic make-up to his reflections, but the actual effect of his Essay on Human Understanding was to promote naive realism.)
The opening insight of this tradition is: the human mind participates in the construction of reality. Members of the traditon then go to work describing the, for lack of a better word, 'interaction' between the human mind and the reality it constructs. Kant is the first thinker in this tradition, but one of its worst representatives: that's because he's so cautious and shame-faced about expressing his main ideas. Fichte is a much better champion of Kant's insights than Kant -- just ask Fichte, who will be happy to confirm this to you.
Kant says, "Look, humans have a specific sensory array. And while most do, not even all humans share the same sensory array -- there are blind people, etc. Well, first of all, it shouldn't be hard for us to admit that the particular sensory array we walk around with is not able to capture every possible level or kind of reality around us. Just the inherent selectivity of our sensory apparatus is going to mean we sense some things, but not others. And the fact that they are the senses that they are and not other conceivable senses: that's going to color how we see things. And so it doesn't seem far-fetched at all to conclude that our specific, limited sensory array is not just recording sensory data 'without comment,' as it were, but is at least to some extent 'shaping' and helping to 'construct' that sensory data -- which means the same thing as saying that the human mind is participating in the construction of reality, because where else do we get ideas of reality from if not from the senses?" [not an actual quotation]
My comment's not finished but that's enough for now and I will continue later.
By Swifty | March 23, 2007 in Heidegger | Permalink
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I think it is impossible to comment on Heidegger's contribution to 20th century theory/philosophy without talking about the two major things which--I think--most impacts his reception.
1. Derrida's reading of Heidegger via Deconstruction.
2. Political criticism stemming from his participation in the Nazi party.
Not that either are final determinants on his thoughts, but it seems that anyone who writes on Heidegger today has to give lip service to at least one of them.
Posted by: Roger Whitson | Mar 24, 2007 11:03:26 AM
>Reading it now, does it seem like >something that is important from the >history of philosophy and that's all, or >is it still 'actual'?
This assumes a very un-Heideggerian either/or.
Also, I'd like to hear more about what you think Heidegger is actually up to, since I'd basically agree about the tradition he culminates, yet what he is doing is not what that tradition has been doing before Heidegger, I'm sure you'd agree...so the post seemed truncated.
Posted by: CBR | Mar 24, 2007 1:21:00 PM
In light of its unfinished character, I have always thought "How Are We Doing For Time?" might have been a good alternative title for Heidegger.
I think it is misleading to present Kant's transcendental idealism, as you do, as if it were a form of empirical idealism. I realize there is a long tradition, maybe starting with Schopenhauer, of regarding the latter flavor of idealism as more compelling, and of criticizing Kant for falling away from what he allegedly should have said. But it seems clear that, for better or worse, Kant was a transcendental idealist. Kant would not start by saying "Look, humans have a specific sensory array." That would never do for proving anything, by his lights. This view that you seem to favor is, if anything, closer to Locke on secondary qualities than Kant on the categories. Speaking of which: your equation of empiricism and realism is going to get problematic.
Just a snip from the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Locke:
"Locke probably holds some version of the representational theory of perception, though some scholars dispute even this. On such a theory what the mind immediately perceives are ideas, and the ideas are caused by and represent the objects which cause them. Thus perception is a triadic relation, rather than simply being a dyadic relation between an object and a perceiver. Such a dyadic relational theory is often called naive realism because it suggests that the perceiver is directly perceiving the object, and naive because this view is open to a variety of serious objections."
Do you dispute the 'triadic' reading of Locke? (If so, why?) Or are you using 'naive realism' in a different sense? (If so, what?)
Posted by: jholbo | Mar 24, 2007 1:31:05 PM
Nominalist writes:
First, Locke discusses empiricism , (taking his cue mostly from Hobbes), not "realism" in philosophical sense. [end Nominalist]
I'm not sure what the difference is between empiricism and realism. But jholbo also writes: "your equation of empiricism and realism is going to get problematic" so maybe that is something I need to worry about.
I loosely take "naive realism" to be the view that we are familiar with from everyday life. This is the view that there are objects out there, and a subject in here, and the interaction of the two produces an understanding of the real world. A "realist" in everyday speech is someone who lets the realities of the world work on him so that his thinking reflects the world "as it is." Thinking is passive and receptive; objects are the actors, the reality, the truth. Bush, it is said, needs to rejoin the "reality-based community."
Nominalist continues: "Is gravity constructed? No. The relationships are out there; yes, it required centuries to accurately describe it, and the nomenclature could be altered, reformulated in different terms, but gravity, and the world exists independently of mind" [end]
Let me focus on the last part: "gravity, and the world exists independently of mind." Gravity can't exist "independently of mind" because it's the mind that came up with the darn concept. Planets were spinning around each other just fine long before anyone said "gravity." I also don't think it makes sense to say the world exists independently of mind, because only in the mind does anything like the phrase "the world exists" appear. You underestimate the uniqueness of the human perspective. My cat would never say "the world exists" -- she can barely meow, frankly.
To which you will perhaps say: "I didn't say the world can be *perceived* independently of (a human) mind; I said it *exists* independently of mind." But it seems to me the attempt to separate out what the world really is from our (limited, biased, partial) perception of it is a nonstarter.
And I think that's the conclusion of, or one of the effects of, Kant's position. He wants to defuse the debate. He's a pacifier. He wants to take into account the skeptical arguments from thinkers like Hume while also assuring us of the reliability and predictability of our statements about the world, thus satisfying the dogmatists. And so he says, "the human mind is structured in such a way that only certain kinds of experiences can count for it as experience." Objects "must" present themselves in a certain way, or else they won't be perceived. But the same point can doubtless be made using a different emphasis: "The structure of the human mind shapes the phenomena that it perceives." The result is an interaction between mind and object to the point where distinguishing those two in any kind of rigorous way starts to seem a mistake.
Posted by: Swifty | Mar 24, 2007 6:23:13 PM
swifty, I think your cat example suggests that you are, in fact, countering naive realism with equally and oppositely naive constructivism. That way lies getting blindsided by any even moderately sophisticated realism.
Please notice that the fact that there are different perspectives - the way things appear to me, the way they appear to my cat - does nothing to even suggest any sort of constructivism about the world itself; merely about perspectives on the world. Why should I regard the way the world is as 'created' by me, merely because things look different to my cat? (HINT: the answer is - you shouldn't. This isn't to say that Kantianism is wrong, merely that the cat argument - which is more Lockean - is not Kantian. Indeed, it is not a constructivist argument at all unless ... keep reading.)
Suppose I simply say: I believe there is a way the world is, independently of the way it appears to me or any mind, with any particular perspective. What is real is what is there 'anyway'. (This is more or less how Bernard Williams sketches a position that he calls 'the absolute conception of reality'.)
What is wrong with the 'absolute conception'? Your cat case touches it not at all (obviously). You might come back and say: but how are you sure you POSSESS this absolute conception? (Someone might stand to us the way we think we do to our cats, i.e. we might not be cognitively perfectly situated.) And the realist says back: I didn't say I had access to this perspective. Perhaps both my cat and I are both totally wrong about how things really stand. I just said there is one (at any rate, it is conceivable there is one). This sort of realism is consistent with radical skepticism. To put it another way: realism is not the assertion that one has perfect knowledge of reality.
Suppose you say: but there will always be alternative schemes for describing that are equally good. The 'absolute conception' does not exactly deny that. To say that there is 'a way things really are, independent of how anyone perceives them to be' is not to deny that there might be alternative - equivalent but notationally variant (in effect) - ways of characterizing that 'what is really there'.
Last but not least, you write: "I also don't think it makes sense to say the world exists independently of mind, because only in the mind does anything like the phrase "the world exists" appear." Here your Lockeanism is precipitating you into Berkeleyanism. I would note: 1) Berkeley is not Kant. Kantianism argues that this position you are advocating, as Kantianism, is in fact naive empiricism. Why do you disagree? That is, what do you have to say, against Kant, to show that you are not, in fact, a naive empiricist of Berkeleyan persuasion. 2) Getting back to the point about constructivism above: the only way your cat argument can be an argument for constructivism at all is if you are a Berkeleyan. So we get the same result by a different route.
You are an empirical idealist (Berkeleyan). Whereas Kant is a transcendental idealist and an empirical idealist. So the reason you find Kant a poor representative of Kantianism is that what you are calling 'Kantianism' is in fact Berkeleyanism. And, it is true, Kant is a very poor Berkeleyan. Fichte, as you say, is a less poor one.
Posted by: jholbo | Mar 25, 2007 2:20:51 AM
Pardon my German: empirical realist. Kant is an empirical realist.
Posted by: jholbo | Mar 25, 2007 2:35:26 AM
One important component of Heidegger's contribution to 20th century thought is not specific to Heidegger at all. Heidegger's influence on Alexandre Kojève's readings of Hegel was huge, and Kojève's translations of Hegel into French use a mainly Heideggerian vocabulary. Kojève's readings of Phenomenology of Spirit through the lens of Being and Time and Marxist materialism set the stage for postwar continental philosophy. Kojève's pupils read like a who's who of postwar French intellectual culture: Queneau, Bataille, Merleau-Ponty, Breton, Sartre, Lacan, Raymond Aron... to say nothing of his influence on Foucault and Derrida.
Posted by: Dave McDougall | Mar 25, 2007 10:20:47 AM
Nominalist suggests a look at Locke's Essay concerning human understanding, where he talks about seeing versus being in a fire. The purpose being, I think, that it will show us Locke's position on the old subject/object question. It appears in Book IV, Chapter II, numbered paragraph 14, available online at
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/locke/locke1/Book4a.html
The title of the chapter is 'Of the degrees of our knowledge.' Book IV itself is titled 'Knowledge and probability.' The subject text reads:
14. Sensitive knowledge of the particular existence of finite beings without us. These two, viz. intuition and demonstration, are the degrees of our knowledge; whatever comes short of one of these, with what assurance soever embraced, is but faith or opinion, but not knowledge, at least in all general truths. There is, indeed, another perception of the mind, employed about the particular existence of finite beings without us, which, going beyond bare probability, and yet not reaching perfectly to either of the foregoing degrees of certainty, passes under the name of knowledge. There can be nothing more certain than that the idea we receive from an external object is in our minds: this is intuitive knowledge. But whether there be anything more than barely that idea in our minds; whether we can thence certainly infer the existence of anything without us, which corresponds to that idea, is that whereof some men think there may be a question made; because men may have such ideas in their minds, when no such thing exists, no such object affects their senses. But yet here I think we are provided with an evidence that puts us past doubting. For I ask any one, Whether he be not invincibly conscious to himself of a different perception, when he looks on the sun by day, and thinks on it by night; when he actually tastes wormwood, or smells a rose, or only thinks on that savour or odour? We as plainly find the difference there is between any idea revived in our minds by our own memory, and actually coming into our minds by our senses, as we do between any two distinct ideas. If any one say, a dream may do the same thing, and all these ideas may be produced in us without any external objects; he may please to dream that I make him this answer:- 1. That it is no great matter, whether I remove his scruple or no: where all is but dream, reasoning and arguments are of no use, truth and knowledge nothing. 2. That I believe he will allow a very manifest difference between dreaming of being in the fire, and being actually in it. But yet if he be resolved to appear so sceptical as to maintain, that what I call being actually in the fire is nothing but a dream; and that we cannot thereby certainly know, that any such thing as fire actually exists without us: I answer, That we certainly finding that pleasure or pain follows upon the application of certain objects to us, whose existence we perceive, or dream that we perceive, by our senses; this certainty is as great as our happiness or misery, beyond which we have no concernment to know or to be. So that, I think, we may add to the two former sorts of knowledge this also, of the existence of particular external objects, by that perception and consciousness we have of the actual entrance of ideas from them, and allow these three degrees of knowledge, viz. intuitive, demonstrative, and sensitive: in each of which there are different degrees and ways of evidence and certainty. [end Locke excerpt]
My first reaction is a happy one: I was right, above, when I said, in a not-too-careful aside, that Locke endorsed a common sense kind of realism. Locke is blissfully free of the doubt that that drives (post)modern philosophy. I wonder what everyone thinks of the dreams argument above. Pretty weak! Let me tell you Mr. Locke, there have been some dreams! And besides, that's not even the point -- whether, at the moment I am being burned at the stake, I reflect back and say to myself, "you know it's true, this is nothing like all those dreams I had where I was being burned at the stake. Those experiences pale in comparison!"
All that shows is that humans describe as more 'real' those experiences that strike them with greater intensity, until a certain level of intensity is reached, after which they describe the scene as 'unreal.' "The dream was so real," someone can say. Another situated differently will say: "The scene after the bomb attack was so unreal." These people know what they are talking about! What is reality, at least in the *only place in the universe where we know that term is 'posited', namely, in the minds of humans*? It is a certain level of intensity of experience, below which events are treated as unreal due to an insufficient intensity level, and above which events are seen as unreal due to an excess of the same.
Schelling has a great line on this topic: "From time immemorial the most ordinary people have refuted the greatest philosophers with things understandable even to children and striplings. One hears, reads, and marvels that such common things were unknown to such great men and that people admittedly so insignificant could master them. It does not occur to anybody that perhaps the philosophers were also aware of all that; for how else could they have swum against the stream of evidence? Many are convinced that Plato, if he could have read Locke, would have gone off ashamed; many a one believes that even Leibniz, if he arose from the dead to go to school for an hour with [Locke], would be converted, and how many greenhorns have not sung triumphal songs over Spinoza's grave?
What was it, then, you ask, that drove all these men to forsake the common way of thinking of their age and to invent systems opposed to everything that the great mass of people have always believed and imagined? It was a free inspiration which elevated them into a sphere where *you* no longer even understand their task, while on the other hand many things became inconceivable to them, which seem very simple and understandable to you.
It was impossible, for them, to join and bring into contact things which, in you, Nature and mechanism have always united. They were also unable to deny the world outside them, or that there was a mind within them, and yet there appeared to be no possible connection between the two. To you, if you ever think about these problems, there can be no question of converting the world into a play of concepts, or the mind within you into a dead mirror of things."
(_Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature_, Cambridge, 14-15)
Posted by: Swifty | Mar 25, 2007 2:01:36 PM
swifty, what makes you so sure there are dreams? I suggest that you not simply help yourself to this assumption, because, as you yourself write:
"But it seems to me the attempt to separate out what the world really is from our (limited, biased, partial) perception of it is a nonstarter."
Surely a precondition of conceiving of the possibility of dreaming is finding some way to start this 'separation' you regard as a non-starter.
(Also, until you find a way to start the non-starter, you probably shouldn't be so quick to help yourself to adjectives like 'limited, biased, partial', which likewise seem to presuppose the intelligibility of a separation you deny.)
Posted by: jholbo | Mar 25, 2007 8:45:16 PM
Nominalist writes:
What is more likely--that the Sun, which has been seen every day for years, exists in some tangible, objective sense (even if the perception of it is filtered by our visual-cognitive apparatus), or that it's complete illusion? [end]
Why privilege the object? Why not emphasize instead the creativity of the subject? Day after day, year after year, we create these incredible sunrises and sunsets. I think we are often misled by the seeming everydayness of the human perspective. You, Nominalist, "are the crown of creation." Who else is it, aside from other humans, who says things like "the sun exists"? What is more likely, that humans, who have created beautiful and ugly sunsets day after day, year after year, are the creators of their world, or that dead objects like the sun impress themselves on us carbon-copy like?
Posted by: Swifty | Mar 26, 2007 10:42:38 AM
I don't think it's an accident that finite, mortal creatures such as ourselves see the world as occurring in *time*. Isn't that coincidence just a little too convenient for comfort (intellectual comfort, anyway)? Neither a surprise that these creatures, existing in a time produced by their own nature, see the world in terms of successions of states. 'Space' and 'time'? Aren't those just precisely the categories that mortals would come up with? Shouldn't we all be a little suspicious when we capture some amazingly structured snowflake and we brim over with aesthetic pleasure? All a little too perfect -- like the Village in *The Prisoner* or Jim Carey's movie about being trapped in a managed environment.
Or when you look at a cut-away beehive and there are all these, I think, octagonal cells. And our mind 'perceives' it that way! And then, after these two things -- the perceiver and the perceived -- after they have been manifestly combined, we are told that the mixing has had no effect on either, or at least not on the perceived. The bee hive is *real* and exists that way *independently* of the mind that perceives it.
Posted by: Swifty | Mar 26, 2007 3:50:19 PM
Or even better: we see 'organization' and 'purpose' in nature, 'wholes' and 'parts': but *purposive* wholes only make sense and are only ever thought of by a purposive, planning creature. Schelling in Ideas for a philosophy of nature writes about the organic world of nature:
"[The idea that in an organism the] parts are only possible through the whole, and the whole is possible, not through assembling, but through interaction, of the parts, is a *judgment* and cannot be judged at all save only by a mind, which relates whole and part, form and matter, reciprocally one to another, and only through this . . . does all purposiveness and attunement to the whole arise and come to be in the first place. . . .
"Even those who will have it that the organic product itself arises from a wonderful collision of atoms admit this. For in that they derive the origin of these things from blind chance, they also promptly abolish all purposiveness in them and with it all conception of organization itself -- that is, if consistently thought out. For since purposiveness is conceivable only in relation to a judging intellect, the question must be answered how the organic products arise independently *of me*, as if there were no relation at all between them and a judging intelligence, that is, as if there were no purpose in them anywhere."
Posted by: Swifty | Mar 26, 2007 4:03:22 PM
an unobjectionable overview?
The opening plot of Heidegger's Being and nothingness is not hard to understand.
He starts by saying that the Western tradition has forgotten the question of Being, except perhaps for a few very early Greek thinkers.
But 'Being', Heidegger himself asks – isn't that just the most general thing of all? And consequently not that interesting? Here we all are – the stars, planets, blades of grass, poems, professional wrestling – we all 'exist.' We 'be'. But if you are asked to say something about poems, and you answer, "poems exist; poems 'are'" then have you really said anything of interest? Or if we turn it around and put 'being' at the start of the sentence to ask, "What is the being of poems?" are we any better off? Heidegger writes:
On the foundation of the Greek point of departure for the interpretation of being a dogma has taken shape which not only declares that the question of the meaning of being is superfluous but sanctions its neglect. It is said that "being" is the most universal and the emptiest concept. As such it resists every attempt at definition. Nor does this most universal and thus indefinable concept need any definition. Everybody uses it constantly and also already understands what is meant by it. Thus what has troubled ancient philosophizing and kept it so by virtue of its obscurity has become obvious, clear as day, such that whoever persists in asking about it is accused of an error of method.
Auf dem Boden der grieschischen Ansätze zur Interpretationen des Seins hat sich ein Dogma ausgebildet, das die Frage nach dem Sinn von Sein nicht nur für überflüssig erklärt, sondern das Versäumnis der Frage überdies sanktioniert. Man sagt: "Sein" ist der allgemeinste und leerste Begriff. Also solcher widersteht er jedem Definitionsversuch. Dieser allgemeinste und daher undefinierbare Begriff bedarf auch kener Definition. Jeder gebraucht ihn ständig und versteht auch schon, was er je damit meint. Damit ist das, was als Verborgenes das antike Phiosophieren in due Unruhe trieb und in ihr erhielt, zu einer sonnenklaren Selbstverständlichkeit geworden, so zwar, daß, wer darnach auch noch fragt, einer methodischen Verfehlung bezichtigt wird. (Being and Time, §1)
The superficiality and unsatisfactory nature of treatments of Being leads Heidegger to criticize the very way the question of Being has been formulated. A new approach to Being is needed if we are to understand its importance. So far, the reader has been taken through two steps. 1. Typical treatments of Being trivialize it one way or another, as self-evident (and so no need to discuss) or as too general a term to be meaningful (and so, again, no need to reflect on it). 2. A whole new approach is needed to get this topic going again.
What kind of approach? A hermeneutical one.
Every questioning is a seeking. Every seeking takes its direction beforehand from what is sought. Questioning is a knowing search for beings in their thatness and whatness. The knowing search can become an "investigation," as the revealing determination of what the question aims at....As what is really intended, what is to be ascertained lies in what is questioned; here questioning arrives at its goal. As an attitude adopted by a being, the questioner, questioning has its own character of being. Questioning can come about as "just asking around" or as an explicitly formulated question.
Jedes Fragen ist ein Suchen. Jedes Suchen hat sein vorgängiges Geleit aus dem Gesuchten her. Fragen ist erkennendes Suchen das Seienden in seinem Daß- und Sosein. Das erkennende Suchen kann zum "Untersuchen" werden als dem freilegenden Bestimmen dessen, wonach die Frage steht....Im Gefragten liegt dann als das eigentlich Intendierte das Erfragte, das, wobei das Fragen ins Zeil kommt. Das Fragen selbst hat als Verhalten eines Seienden, des Fragers, einen eigenen Charakter des Seins. Ein Fragen kann vollzogen werden als "Nur-so-hinfragen" oder als explizite Fragestellung. (§2)
In a word, "As a seeking, questioning needs prior guidance from what it seeks./Als Suchen bedarf das Fragen einer vorgängigen Leitung vom Gesuchten her."
It is about beings (poems, etc.) that we ask the question of Being.
But if [beings] are to exhibit the characteristics of their being without falsification they must for their part have become accessible in advance as they are in themselves. The question of being demands that the right access to beings be gained and secured in advance with regard to what it interrogates....Is the starting point arbitrary, or does a certain being have priority in the elaboration of the question of being? Which is this exemplary being and in what sense does it have priority?
Soll es aber die Charaktere seines Seins unverfälscht hergeben können, dann muß es seinerseits zuvor so zugänglich geworden sein, wie es an ihm selbst ist. Die Seinsfrage verlangt im Hinblick auf ihr Befragtes die Gewinnung und vorherige Sicherung der rechten Zugangsart zum Seienden....Ist der Ausgang beliebig, oder hat ein bestimmtes Seiendes in der Ausarbeitung der Seinsfrage einen Vorrang? (§ 2)
A little problem: first Heidegger says he's going to look at being using a hermeneutical approach. Then he says he'll look at beings, because after all it is of them that it is said there is Being. But then he says he wants to look at those beings 'as they are in themselves' – and that last bit seems in tension with the hermeneutic approach.
The particular being we should investigate in order to get at Being itself is the famous Dasein. Heidegger writes:
Regarding, understanding and grasping, choosing, and gaining access to, are constitutive attitudes of inquiry and are thus themselves modes of being of a particular being, of the being we inquirers ourselves in each case are. Thus to work out the question of being means to make a being – one who questions – transparent in its being. Asking this question, as a mode of being of a being, is itself essentially determined by what is asked about in it – being. This being which we ourselves in each case are and which includes inquiry among the possibilities of its being we formulate terminologically as Da-sein. The explicit and lucid formulation of the question of the meaning of being requires a prior suitable explication of a being (Dasein) with regard to its being.
Hinsehen auf, Verstehen und Begreifen von, Wählen, Zugang zu sind konstitutive Verhaltungen des Fragens und so selbst Seinsmodi eines bestimmten Seienden, des Seienden, das wir, die Fragenden, je selbst sind. Ausarbeitung der Seinsfrage besagt demnach: Durchsichtigmachen eines Seienden – des fragenden – in seinem Sein. Das Fragen dieser Frage ist also Seinsmodus eines Seienden selbst von dem her wesenhaft bestimmt, wonach in ihm gefragt ist – vom Sein. Dieses Seiende, das wir selbst je sind und das unter anderem die Seinsmöglichkeit des Fragens hat, fassen wir terminologisch als Dasein. Die ausdrückliche und durchsichtige Fragestellung nach dem Sinn von Sein verlangt eine vorgängige angemessene Explikation eines Seienden (Dasein) hinsichtlich seines Seins.
The first two major steps of the discussion were:
1. Typical treatments of Being trivialize it one way or another, as self-evident (and so no need to discuss) or as too general a term to be meaningful (and so, again, no need to reflect on it).
2. A whole new approach is needed to get this topic going again. A hermeneutic approach.
and now we can add a third
3. The being who asks about being is best situated for an investigation into being, and that being's name, invented by Heidegger, is Dasein.
Posted by: Swifty | Apr 3, 2007 12:58:33 PM
The reference to "Being" and poetics suggests something about the entire Heideggerian project which should, I believe, be cause for some concern. I am not some worshipper of Platonic tradition and the greeks, but I think it's important to remember that Plato was not really sympatico with aesthetics (see Book X of the Republic for one, and various sections of the dialoques); Heidegger's love of poesy is itself contra-Republic, as is much conty aestheticizing (including Nietzsche's unfortunate belle-lettrism). That doesn't mean that the Republic should be taken as the final word on politics, culture or philosophy itself, but in some sense, I believe that Heidegger stands in opposition to the cool rationality of platonic tradition.
It is the analytical school of Frege (and Russell to some extent) which really carries on the platonic tradition--not that ah believe that a platonic view of universals and "abstract entities" (whether logic, mathematics, or justice and ethics), is ultimately defensible (a cognitive or at least psychological reading of platonic realism however seems somewhat plausible), but merely that the greek rationalist heritage which continentalists routinely invoke is not only the property of existentialists and leftists. Early Russell for instance had a far more pronounced platonic aspect than the continentalists............
Posted by: Phritz | Apr 3, 2007 2:21:22 PM
Rilly, I resign man: without some common ground--either empirical or analytical--dialogue is mostly pointless. Dasein, like his cuz Beelzebub, is too powerful. Being 1, Non-being 0. Delete my stuff.
Fare thee well LS.
Posted by: Phritz | Apr 3, 2007 5:35:52 PM
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