Something you're not likely to see from me again soon

[Justin Schwartz]

You should have learned German anyway: Heidegger is actually beautiful in 
German. The comparison to Habermas' turgid, social-sciency prose is 
insulting to a writer is is the most poetic of German philosophers of the 
last century. I do not consider myself a Heideggerian of any sort, but I do 
think the old Nazi creep has a lot to offer, although I frankly haven't 
studied his work for a decade. You can get a lot of the same thing from 
Lukacs as far as romantic anticapitalism goes; Lucian Goldman has a little 
book on this. --jks
>
>On Fri, 1 Jun 2001, Peter Kosenko wrote:
>
> > 1. If there are "Heideggerian Marxists" out there who believe that
> > Heidegger's concept of the history of "Dasein" (in "Sein und Zeit")
> > actually has anything to offer, maybe you could try to enlighten me.
>
>It has something to offer, a theory of meaning and perception in the broad
>sense of both terms that is more applicable to social life and cultural
>phenomena than that proferred by the Anglo-American tradition.  The best
>no bullshit reconstruction of those ideas I've found is in an unpublished
>dissertation deposited at Columbia in 1972 by Thomas William Bridges
>called _The Concept of Meaning in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit_.
>Unfortunately I don't believe he ever made it into a book.  But perhaps it
>is available on inter-library loan.
>
>But if you are more concerned with the ideas than in their origins in
>Heidegger, I'd skip ahead to Merleau-Ponty's _Phenomenology of
>Perception_, for my money the best book in that tradition the 20th century
>has to offer.
>
>Although, if for some reason you feel like reading it again, I hasten to
>mention that _Sein and Zeit_ was retranslated in 1996, and the difference
>is astonishing.  Sometimes I think everyone who struggled through the
>Macquerie translation should be able to band together and mount a class
>action.  Years of life were lost pondering difficulties that weren't
>actually part of the book.  Open the new version at random and you'll be
>shocked to see that it's no more complicated than, say, Habermas.  In
>retrospect, it would have been less work to learn German and read the
>original with a dictionary that to squeeze sense out of that translation.
>
> > One might call Bourdieu's book a "deconstruction" of Heidegger, except
> > that it exhibits very little of the waffling word-play of a Jacques
> > Derrida.
>
>I think less ambiguous description of the book would be that it's one of
>the few very succesful extended essays in the sociology of knowledge.  In
>some ways it reminds me of nothing so much as Karl Mannheim's essay
>"Conservative Thought," which is about the same length, and which made a
>similar argument about the Junker roots of Lebensphilosophie from Hegel
>onwards.
>
>Michael
>
>__________________________________________________________________________
>Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com
>

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