What's good about Heidegger?

[littlebabyjesus]

I think betrayed is a bit strong. The way I see it, Heidegger took Husserls Phenomenology, and overcame it. The problem with Husserl is that he did not acknowledge that we are 'being-in-the-world' and this is the great step that took Heidegger beyond the work of Husserl. It was this that provided the link between phenomenology and existentialism, and something that Merleau-Ponty expands upon quite a bit, after Heidegger. Put very very simply. I am still thinking of what to write.

Would I be right in saying that Heidegger's was fundamentally a dialectic approach, which is where he differs from/improves upon Husserl?

 

[Dillinger4]

Are these available online to access? Even limited previews would be good. Thanks.

Just off the top of my head, I remember this link being pretty good:

http://www.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/heidegger/guide1.html

The wikipedia page has a short summary, but is not as good, IMO.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Question_Concerning_Technology

I think I have a lot more, but they are in my notes from university, I am not sure where they are!

I don't think the actual lecture itself is online. You will probably have to get a book.

 

[Santino]

Would I be right in saying that Heidegger's was fundamentally a dialectic approach, which is where he differs from/improves upon Husserl?

I think I'm correct in saying that that is entirely false.

 

[Dillinger4]

Would I be right in saying that Heidegger's was fundamentally a dialectic approach, which is where he differs from/improves upon Husserl?

No. I struggle talking about, Philosophy, I don't have the vocabulary. But here is a good link:

irst, here and everywhere Heidegger sees dialectic as a misuse of logos that tries to subordinate being to propositional thinking: Platonic dialectic, for example, is "a genuine philosophical embarrassment" (Being and Time, German p. 25; cf. 286, 300-301, 432). Secondly, according to Heidegger, truth as unconcealment is so fundamental to our condition that a sincere attempt to do away with it would amount to "suicide" (p. 229). Of course one could proceed to deconstruct the concept of suicide, but Heidegger would hardly condone such a move.

It is true that Heidegger himself tries to deconstruct many traditional conceptual structures, but he does so phenomenologically, not dialectically: that is, he makes a case that the tradition fails to describe the phenomena incisively enough, not that the traditional concepts are formally inconsistent or incomplete.

http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13686

 

[butchersapron]

I've just uploaded this book

The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader

here.

It's not a searchable pdf but it's perfectly readable.

"This should become the standard sourcebook for those troubled by the links between arguably the greatest philosopher of our century and unarguably its most infamous political movement."
—Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley

Product Description
This anthology is a significant contribution to the debate over the relevance of Martin Heidegger's Nazi ties to the interpretation and evaluation of his philosophical work. Included are a selection of basic documents by Heidegger, essays and letters by Heidegger's colleagues that offer contemporary context and testimony, and interpretive evaluations by Heidegger's heirs and critics in France and Germany.

In his new introduction, "Note on a Missing Text," Richard Wolin uses the absence from this edition of an interview with Jacques Derrida as a springboard for examining questions about the nature of authorship and personal responsibility that are at the heart of the book.

Got a few others Heidegger Dictionary, companion. cambridge guide, haberman on the contoversy, various guides to his books etc etc which i can upload later if there's any interest.

 

[Dillinger4]

I've just uploaded this book

The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader

here.

It's not a searchable pdf but it's perfectly readable.



Got a few others Heidegger Dictionary, companion. cambridge guide, haberman on the contoversy, various guides to his books etc etc which i can upload later if there's any interest.

Cheers Butchers. I will have a read of that now.

 

[Santino]

In his new introduction, "Note on a Missing Text," Richard Wolin uses the absence from this edition of an interview with Jacques Derrida as a springboard for examining questions about the nature of authorship and personal responsibility that are at the heart of the book.

I don't think I've ever read a book that didn't have an absence of interviews with Jacques Derrida, and I never even realised until now!

Continental philosophy can be so up its own arse sometimes.

 

[Luther Blissett]

His work was actually in some ways a subtle critique of nazism, at a time when the options for ordinary germans were pretty much limited to join the party, or get the fuck out.

Really? Do you have an example for us?

I reckon Heidegger was no nazi. More a mystic, and someone who knew that sometimes messages are better conveyed without expressing them literally, even in philosophy.

I think he was a revolutionary, but his turn towards Nazism was simply a turn in the wrong direction.

He's probably my favourite Nazi.

In all seriousness, we shouldn't let his appalling political judgement get in the way of appreciating his philosophy. He grappled with and described many phenomena which had been ignored or misdescribed by all thinkers before him.

[/quote]

"Not doctrines and 'ideas' be the rules of your being. The Führer himself alone is the present and future German reality and its law. Learn ever deeper to know: that from now on each and every thing demands decision, and every action, responsibility. Heil Hitler!"

I find it hard not to condemn his philosophy at all for his naziism. He grappled with what it meant to be in the world, but his insight didn't stop him from being a failure at being in the world.

This is closest to where I am regarding Heidegger & his philosophy at present. I am still unconvinced as to why I ought to accept this western-european, secular christian philosophy of Heidegger. From what I gleaned from the BBC documentary that Spion earlier contributed, it surely must be of immense philosophical significance that Heidegger became an open Nazi, five years after writing his opus 'Being and Time (Sein und Zeit). Heidegger most definitely was anti-Jewish and openly supported the racial ideology that held that east europeans and semites were racially inferior to the "German race" by through his political action against his colleagues. How then am I to separate the political Heidegger from the philosophical Heidegger?

 

[Luther Blissett]

I've just uploaded this book

The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader

here.

It's not a searchable pdf but it's perfectly readable.

Cheers, butchersapron.

Got a few others Heidegger Dictionary, companion. cambridge guide, haberman on the contoversy, various guides to his books etc etc which i can upload later if there's any interest.

This is very helpful. Will give you a shout when I've worked my way through "The Heidegger Controversy: A critical reader".

 

[Dillinger4]

Really? Do you have an example for us?





This is closest to where I am regarding Heidegger & his philosophy at present. I am still unconvinced as to why I ought to accept this western-european, secular christian philosophy of Heidegger. Surely it must be of immense philosophical significance that Heidegger became an open Nazi, five years after writing his opus 'Being and Time (Sein und Zeit). Heidegger most definitely was anti-Jewish and openly supported the racial ideology that held that east europeans and semites were racially inferior to the "German race" by through his political action against his colleagues. How then am I to separate the political Heidegger from the philosophical Heidegger?

In Defense of Lost Causes by Slavoj Zizek is pretty good on this. I have been meaning to read bits of it again, so I will use this as an excuse to go and flick through it, and see if I can find any quotable bits that could possibly answer your question.

 

[Luther Blissett]

In Defense of Lost Causes by Slavoj Zizek is pretty good on this. I have been meaning to read bits of it again, so I will use this as an excuse to go and flick through it, and see if I can find any quotable bits that could possibly answer your question.

Thanks!

 

[Dillinger4]

Here is one example

To return to Heidegger, in his Nazi engagement, he was not "totally wrong" - the tragedy is that he was almost right, deploying the structure of a revolutionary act and then distorting it by giving it a fascist twist

 

[Luther Blissett]

Here is one example

Who said that then? When did they say it? I do like a bit of context with my quotes

 

[Spion]

However, if you come with the attitude that he is a Nazi and that therefore someone is going to have to work hard to persuade you to bother with him at all, then why bother?

Well, that depends on whether someone can put together an argument that teases out the valuable from the dross in his life and work. I could make a very good case for, say, Heinz Guderian or Erwin Rommel as brilliant military theorists and practitioners despite their blazingly obvious Nazi pedigrees.

It always bothers me when people can't sum up a thinker and give and assessment of them. It makes me think the thinker in question actually hasn't got much to give.

But, I'll keep reading and also wait and see if anyone else can come up with something

 

[Dillinger4]

And another bit

According to the memoirs of a leading member of the German student movement in the late 1960s, a delegation of student protestors visited Heidegger in 1968, and he professed his full sympathy and support for the students, claiming that they were trying to do what he had tried to do in 1933 as rector in Freiburg, although from a different political position. One should not dismiss this claim as Heidegger's hypocritical illusion. What Heidegger was looking for in Nazism (to avoid a misunderstanding: not only due to an accidental error in his personal judgement, but due to the flaws of his theoretical edifice itself) was a revolutionary event, so that even some of the measures he imposed on the Freiburg university during his brief tenure as its rector bear witness to his intention to enact there a kind of "cultural revolution" (bringing students together with workers and soldiers, which, in itself is not a fascist measure, but something maoists tried to do in the cultural revolution).

BTW, I will still try and answer your other questions about Heidegger's philosophy. It has been a little while since I thought properly about this stuff, I need to get my thoughts in order.

 

[Dillinger4]

Who said that then? When did they say it? I do like a bit of context with my quotes

I told you, it is from In Defense of Lost Causes by Slavoj Zizek

 

[Knotted]

The World Socialist Website did a rather good series of articles on Heidegger.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/apr2000/heid-a03.shtml
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/apr2000/heid-a04.shtml
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/apr2000/heid-a05.shtml

 

[Dillinger4]

And another bit from there

Heidegger was closest to the truth precisely where he erred most, in his writings from the late 1920s to the mid 1930s. Our task thus is to repeat Heidegger and retrieve this lost dimension/potential of his though. In 1937-1938, Heidegger wrote:

What is conservative remains bogged down in the historiographical; only what is revolutionary attains the depth of history. Revolution does not mean here the subversion and destruction but an upheaval and recreating of the customary so that the beginning might be restructured. And because the original belongs to the beginning, the re-structuring of the beginning is never a poor imitation of what was earlier; it is entirely other and nevertheless the same

 

[Dillinger4]

The World Socialist Website did a rather good series of articles on Heidegger.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/apr2000/heid-a03.shtml
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/apr2000/heid-a04.shtml
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/apr2000/heid-a05.shtml

Excellent. I will print them off and read them tonight.

 

[Dillinger4]

From the first one of those articles:

The most important postwar statement Heidegger made about his prewar political activity was in a 1966 interview with the magazine Der Spiegel. This interview was first published, at Heidegger's insistence, after his death in 1976. A great deal of the discussion centers on the question of technology and the threat that unconstrained technology poses to man. Heidegger says at one point:
“A decisive question for me today is: how can a political system accommodate itself to the technological age, and which political system would this be? I have no answer to this question. I am not convinced that it is democracy.”[19]
Having set up an ahistorical notion of technology as an absolute bane to the existence of mankind, Heidegger then explains how he conceived of the Nazi solution to this problem:
“ ... I see the task in thought to consist in general, within the limits allotted to thought, to achieve an adequate relationship to the essence of technology. National Socialism, to be sure, moved in this direction. But those people were far too limited in their thinking to acquire an explicit relationship to what is really happening today and has been underway for three centuries.”[20]
It is thus beyond dispute that at the time of his death Heidegger thought of Nazism as a political movement that was moving in the right direction. If it failed then this was because its leaders did not think radically enough about the essence of technology.

I would agree with that view.

 

[Knotted]

Excellent. I will print them off and read them tonight.

I don't think you'll like them. They're mainly about his nazism and the nazi ideology in his philosophy.

 

[Knotted]

From the first one of those articles:



I would agree with that view.

I spoke too soon!

 

[littlebabyjesus]

What is conservative remains bogged down in the historiographical; only what is revolutionary attains the depth of history. Revolution does not mean here the subversion and destruction but an upheaval and recreating of the customary so that the beginning might be restructured. And because the original belongs to the beginning, the re-structuring of the beginning is never a poor imitation of what was earlier; it is entirely other and nevertheless the same

Loads of problems with that.

What does he mean 'attains the depth of history'? Where does history start?

'Recreating of the customary'? Again, what is customary? I would argue that human culture has developed out of our evolutionary heritage, and that there is no clear dividing line between the two.

This makes no sense whatsoever. It appears to be a dangerous harking back to a non-existent time before a fall that never happened. No wonder he fell for fascism. Sorry, but he sounds like a fool.

 

[Dillinger4]

I don't think you'll like them. They're mainly about his nazism and the nazi ideology in his philosophy.

On the contrary, I think it is pretty interesting. I will enjoy reading them.

 

[Luther Blissett]

The World Socialist Website did a rather good series of articles on Heidegger.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/apr2000/heid-a03.shtml
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/apr2000/heid-a04.shtml
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/apr2000/heid-a05.shtml

Thanks! This site's perspective/bias (neutral, not a criticism) is easy to see (Socialist, 4th inertnational).
I do prefer it if a bias is made clear in advance

 

[Knotted]

I suppose Heidegger's revolutionary thought is akin to the revolutionary thought of the Strassers and Ernst Rohm rather than Hitler and Goebels. Street thug Nazism as opposed to the more bourgeois varieties. The criticism of technology, proto-environmentalism etc. were quite standard fare amongst some of the 'left' fash.

 

[Dillinger4]

Loads of problems with that.

What does he mean 'attains the depth of history'? Where does history start?

'Recreating of the customary'? Again, what is customary? I would argue that human culture has developed out of our evolutionary heritage, and that there is no clear dividing line between the two.

This makes no sense whatsoever. It appears to be a dangerous harking back to a non-existent time before a fall that never happened. No wonder he fell for fascism. Sorry, but he sounds like a fool.

As I quote parts of the book, I think it is taken out of context of the rest of the argument. I could quote more, but I think it would be better for you to read it, if possible.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

But again, where does he see technology as starting? With flint tools? I don't get his argument at all.

 

[Dillinger4]

But again, where does he see technology as starting? With flint tools? I don't get his argument at all.

He is not talking of technology in the everyday way we think of it. He is talking about the essence of technology, technics.

This is a pretty good guide to it, I liked to it earlier.

http://www.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/heidegger/guide1.html

The problem for Heidegger is not so much the existence of technology or the forms it takes, but rather our orientation to technology. If we accept this formulation of the problem, then it becomes clear that our response to the various problems brought about by technology cannot be solved simply by making the technology better. It is also impossible to ignore these difficulties simply by "opting out" of technology:

Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely conceive and push forward the technological, put up with it, or evade it. Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. (287)

 

[littlebabyjesus]

He is not talking of technology in the everyday way we think of it. He is talking about the essence of technology, technics.

I read a little of that. I'm far from convinced.

I need to do something, I use a tool, be it my hand or a stick or a computer. That tool then becomes a part of me. Your brain, when you are for instance using a knife and fork, acts as if they are literally part of you. Where does 'technics' come in? I don't see where it is necessary to the description.