[lbo-talk] Grappling with Heidegger

[Charles Brown]

Chris Doss 
Well, Heidegger and strutuaraliism certainly do
intersect, and I think it's not an accident that
post-Heideggerians like Derrida attacked Levi-Straus.
But anyway phenomenology is an analysis of experience
as lived by a person. It is an analysis of the
first-person point of view. Talk about "societies" and
so forth is meaningless to phenomenology, except
insofar as it relates to the first person. Just as
physics and chemistry are meaningless from the phen.
point of view, except insofar as it relates to the
first person experience. Heidegger is trying to
describe the structure of human experience in general,
regardless of whether the human in question is Karl
Marx, me, Charles Brown, Adam Smith, Adolph Hitler,
Stalin, Ghandi, my third-grade teacher, a
third-century Roman, or a neanderthal. Basically he's
trying to eludicate what it means to be a "first
person," describing the world as it appears to an
individual, or rather describing the general structure
of the world as experienced by an individual.

^^^^^
CB: I guess the here and now of it gives the word "existentialism". The
emphasis on the individual over the system reminds of Kierkegards' favor of
the really existing individual over Hegel's system. Levi-Strauss' structure
is a social structure, so I can see how Individualist structuralism would be
antagonistic to Levi-Strauss's structurualism. The commonality with
Levi-Straussian structuralism is that it is ahistorical , like Heidegger's
ahistoricalism.

In general, the theory I follow denies that there is such a thing as an
abstract, ahistorical human Individual. We hold there are _only_ social
individuals. But this clarifies very much what Heidegger is doing, how we
differ with Heideggerism.

If I understand, Heidegger is talking about an ahistorical , asocial
Individual, a Universal Individual, rooted in itself.