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CB: Recently I was wondering if the owl of Minerva thing is the same idea as "hindsight is 20/20 " ?
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But they're wrong, we're didn't know it until they told us we did. I read the young Heidegger as a sort of Teutonic pragmatist, a perceptive critic of modern technology-dominated life, a thinker who calls in us to open our lives to non-habitual ways of living, a phenomenbologist of what Marx called alienation.
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CB: I was looking a Husserl. Phenonmenology strikes me as the same as positivism. But then he claims it is different. It's hard for me to see where there is room for being anything else, if one is so focussed on phenomena and still reject Hegel/Marx approach of looking beyond appearances.
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He was very impressed with Marx's explorations of alienation, btw.
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CB: One commentator I read in the past considered that Heidegger, Nietschze et al. reflect (unconsciously ! turnabout is fair play), particularly in their irrationality, the aggravated alienation of the imperialist stage of capitalism. Again a form of petit bourgeois rebellion. Calling it petit bourgeois doesn't mean it is not justified or even the basis for combination with more radical forms of anti-capitalism. However, it is difficult for me to see where N and H's thought has contributed to the left side of the movement. As you say, for whatever reason, Heidegger interpreted his own thought to mesh with Nazism to some extent.
Of course, Nazism itself, was based demogogically on anti-capitalist half-truths, as reflected in the name of the party as "National Socialist Workers" . Hitler was a petit bourgeois rebel channelled perversely ( understatement !). I don't mean this as another crack at N or H, but I guess there is a rebellious consciousness that can go to either extreme at a certain point. Something like that.
But Heidegger must be examined for that "rational kernel" I guess, as paradoxical as it might seem. I mean Hegel was part of a reactionary govt. too.
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Incidentally all these things are reasons he was perversely attracted to Nazism.
As Chris says, H is a brilliant exegete: his Nietzsche's amazing, he's awesom on Kant. He illuminated everything he touched: for all his antitechnologicall attitudes, he understood early modern science more deeply than a lot of self-styled philosophers of science, anticipated Kuhn in a lot of ways. The translations don't get it, but his German is beautiful, just gorgeous. If you want an introduction, Charles, get the David Farrel Krell anthology The Basic Writings of Heidegger, and nose around it, you won't be disappointed. Good stuff! And yet he was a Nazi creep.
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CB: Thanks for the reference.