Ravi, who likes mathematics, read what Heidegger says about math.
Such a compilation of nonsense.
I opened "What is a Thing?" at random to discover one of my underlined passages: So let us have the monumental intellectual con job which is the philosophy of Heidegger speak in his own terms.
"How does the mathematical, according to its own inner drive, move toward an ascent to a metaphysical determination of Dasein? We can abridge the question as follows: In what way does modern metaphysics arise out of the spirit of the mathematical? It is already obvious from the form of the question that mathematics could not become the standard of philosophy, as if mathematical methods were only appropriately generalized and then transferred to philosophy.
"Rather, modern natural science, modern mathematics, and modern metaphysics sprang from the same root of the mathematical in the wider sense. Because metaphysics of these three, reaches farthest - to what is, in totality - and because at the same time it also reaches deepest toward the being of what is as such, therefore it is precisely metaphysics which must dig down to the bedrock of its mathematical base and ground."
"What is a Thing" pp. 97-98.
This stuff goes on and on, until Heidegger finally comes to the point that the experiential and the axiomatic descriptions of mathematics are not the same thing. No kidding, Marty? Really? You mean that our senses don't "experience" a complex plane? Or the calculations that allow us to plot the orbits of stars is not the same as the experience of looking at a night sky? No kidding Marty?
Well if it was only this that the great Heidegger had to say then maybe 99% of what he wrote could be ignored and we can be happy that he comes to the same conclusion about the difference between experience and theory that I can find beautifully enough stated in Shelley and Wordsworth.
But it is not this. His further conclusion is that we must assert the experiential, we must act, throw ourselves into the experiential situation, even if doing so is counter to what we know through science and reason. All previous philosophy is a conspiracy to hide the primal secret and source of the experience of "being," and essentially we must reject all else in order to get back to this primal experience. Heidegger puts it this way in "Being and Time"....
"Dasein can be reached by the blows of fate only because in the depths of its Being Dasein is fate in the sense we have described. Existing fatefully in the resoluteness which hands itself down, Dasein has been disclosed as Being-in-the-world both for the 'fortunate' circumstances which 'comes its way' and for the cruelty of accidents. Fate does not arise from the clashing together of events and circumstances. Even one who is irresolute gets driven about by these—more so than one who has chosen; and yet he can 'have' no fate." p.5
Well what I can say is that what is interesting about this reflection on fate can be found with poetic beauty in Shelley or Sophocles. But neither Shelley nor Sophocles would ever ask me to reject reason and rationality and the enlightenment for a basically fascist philosophy.
Yes, it is not simply that Heidegger was a fascist, but that his philosophy was specifically developed to justify an extreme rightwing romantic-naturalism leading on to submission to nationalism. Johannes Fritsche in his book Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger's Being and Time does well going through Being and Time, comparing it to the ramblings of Hitler's "Mein Kampf". Take the time to read "Mein Kampf" sometime and what you will find is an "ontology" not much different from Heidegger's. Hitler got there first. To be fair to Heidegger, he wasn't plagiarizing Hitler he was simply simply one with the world-view of the extreme rightwing romantic nationalists. The Volkisch ideology and its scurrilous reaction against enlightenment values is both root and bloom of Heidegger's philosophy.
Why do intellectuals involve themselves with this philosophical obscurantism? Despair perhaps.
Yesterday, when I was overposted I replied to Ravi who called me out (justifiably) for a certain amount of mean-spiritedness.....
> I hear a lot of contempt for the thinking of fundamentalist Christian's
> from most of my fellow intellectuals, but nothing can match the wilful
> stupidity of those who actually think that Heidegger has anything at all
> to contribute to intellectual culture.
"This is a mean-spirited attack on those of us who have already expressed interest in or respect for Heidegger. You may be entitled to your bitterness over having had to read Heidegger (just as I might be bitter over my wasted years learning Science) but does that justify the gratuitous insult?"
And I repeat it is dangerous and sadly wilful blindness (substituting blindness for the objectionable other word). It's a march backward. Instead of teaching mathematics to the masses as the great civil rights leader Bob Moses or trying to help people in the basics of thinking and acting as the Highlander Folk School did, intellectuals retreat into their own ontological obscurity, and revel in meaningless prose.
But perhaps I am the one who is stupid and I am simply unable to understand the subtlety of "being" repeated ad nauseum in a hundred different ways, or the metaphysical deficiencies of mathematics, or, for that matter, perhaps I am unable to understand why Heidegger must make up things about Galileo in order to "prove" his point..... or lie about his own political opportunism and how he hoped that his philosophy would be the philosophy of fascism. When so many intellectuals believed that "historical materialism" was a science, then the scientism of Marxism was the opium of the intellectuals in conservative Raymond Aron's apt phrase. But today the anti-science of Heideggerian derivatives is the excuse to retreat into the corner and look down one's nose at any idea of learning and teaching science, math, history in a way that is beyond the official ideology of the masters. Give me intellectuals such as Etta James, Myles Horton, Erich Fromm, Moe Foner, Bob Moses, Chomsky, Stephen Jay Gould or for that matter Richard Feynman, who all really believed that they could communicate with the rest of us, and help us to learn, literature, math, physics, biology, history.
In most cases it would be much harder to work with a hardened Heideggerian to support the fragile and limited enlightenment values of equality, solidarity, freedom, and democratic institutions than it would be to work with a fundamentalist Christian. This at least was my experience from Central American solidarity work. .....
Personally, I would rather have one Bob Moses, Myles Horton, Etta James, Moe Foner, or even Feynman, on my side, for every Heidegger follower in the world. Those people are "great" intellectuals.
Jerry Monaco