[lbo-talk] Grappling with Heidegger

[andie nachgeborenen]

Seems to be H is more anti-technology than
anti-science, and he makes some valid points similar
to ones you can find in Marx on alienation from the
process of production. If my memory serves he even
quotes Marx favorably on this point. He takes his
skepticism about the value of technology and a
quantitative approach to the world in a right
reactionary romantic direction, but in substance it is
not that difference from people who start with similar
doubts but turn left -- the Frankfurters, William
Morris and his Arts & Crafts crowd, some of the people
surveyed in Michael Lowy's book on Lukacs as romantic
leftists, including L himself, who definitely had a
string anti-science bent.

Shane, this is a partial answer to your question about
why Heidegger's political affiliation does not make
his philosophical contribution valueless. Another part
of the answer is that for all you say about H's
irrationalism, he had an awesomely brilliant mind with
immense reasoning powers -- to watch him go to work on
Kant of Nietzsche or Aristotle and take the text apart
word by word, illuminating every facet -- even on the
written page one get some sense of how he came to
regarded with such awe as a scholar and a teacher,
respected by Jews like Husserl and even loved by (and
loving) Hannah Arendt -- intellectually as well as
otherwise.  

What you identify as H's "irrationalism" is in some
way not that different from the super rationalist
highly scientific logical positivists' insistence that
metaphysics is poetry -- and H's metaphysics _is_
poetry. Some of it is his recovery of the idea that
truth is not propositional but involves alathea, an
openness to the world involved in interacting with it
in non-merely-instrumental ways -- a view related to
pragmatism, which, however, takes the test of truth be
instrumental success, and to Marx, at least the Young
Marx influenced by Feuerbach. One might not in the end
want to say that H's notion of alathea identifiers a
notion of truth, but it identifies something
important, I think.

Then there his H's insistence on the fact of mortality
as central in understanding human life. This is
something that philosophers have paid rather too
little attention to; indeed; H gave substantial
attention to the questions of the meaning of life in a

  way that philosophers since Plato have dodged. Maybe
less Plato than most thinkers since. His own conduct
reflects a bad character in dealing with these issues,
but lots of philosophers had bad characters. Rousseau
abandoned five children. That doesn't mean that Emile
is a worthless book.

Your defense of Plato and of the tyrant Dionysus of
Syracuse is jaw-dropping.  

--- Charles Brown <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> wrote:


> Chris,
>  
> Maybe you could elaborate why you think Heidegger's
> anti-science approach is
> "good " ?  
>  
> Charles
> > ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk

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