[lbo-talk] Grappling with Heidegger

andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com
Tue May 9 08:55:43 PDT 2006


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

__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list