[lbo-talk] Grappling with Heidegger

Ted Winslow egwinslow at rogers.com
Tue May 9 09:11:37 PDT 2006


Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:


> I am not an expert on Heidegger, but based on what I read, he does
> not strike me as being “anti-science.” He merely objects to a
> certain mode of science that developed in modernity and substitutes
> action for understanding, that is to say, concentrates on constant,
> almost ritualistic, research activities -or “research activistism”
> as Doug would say.
>
> Personally, I do not think that there is any “understanding” beyond
> human experiences – which consists in a large part of research
> activities – linguistic exercises of much of the philosophical
> thought notwithstanding. Btw - the connection between philosophy
> and poetry did not escape Heidegger. Both are exercise of creating
> meaning from syntax and word usage rather than empirical
> procedures. However, this also seems like a valid criticism of
> what passes for science (or art) nowadays i.e. whatever scientists
> (or artists) do is science (or art), and its truth function does
> not matter as long as it is accepted as science or art.

Two alternatives to Heidegger's critique of modern science - Husserl's phenomenology and Whitehead's philosophy of organism - make experience the ultimate ground for rational belief, including rational beliefs about the nature of "being" in general and "human being" in particular. What they dispute are particular claims about experience and reality taken for granted in Western science since the 17th century.

They elaborate a conception of human being as a potentially "transcendental subject" defined as a subject whose "experience" is of a kind capable of grounding universally valid claims. As part of the argument defending this, they point out that the logical implication of the conventional concept of experience they are disputing is "solipsism of the present moment", an implication they treat as a reductio ad absurdum.

Heidegger's idea of the essence of human being is set out in the following passage from the Introduction to Metaphysics. The argument he seems to offer for it is that it can be shown to be Sophocles's idea by means of an interpretation of a passage from Antigone (the passage is available here: <http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ ptext?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0185:line=332>).

"The first two verses [of a passage from Antigone] cast forth what the following ode as a whole will seek to capture in the details of its saying, and which it must fit into the structure of the word. The human being is, in *one* word, *to deinotaton*, the uncanniest. This saying about humanity grasps it from the most extreme limits and the most abrupt abysses of its Being. This abruptness and ultimacy can never be seen by eyes that merely describe and ascertain something present at hand, even if a myriad such eyes should want to seek out human characteristics and conditions. Such Being opens itself up only to poetic-thoughtful projection. We find no delineation of present-at-hand exemplars of humanity, no more than we find some blind and foolish exaltation of the human essence from beneath, from a dissatisfied peevishness that snatches at an importance that it feels is missing. We find no glorified personality. Among the Greeks there were no personalities yet [and thus nothing suprapersonal either]. The human being is *to deinotaton*, the uncanniest of the uncanny. The Greek word *deinon* and our translation call for an explication here. This explication is to be given only on the basis of the unspoken prior view of the entire ode, which itself supplies the only adequate interpretation of the first two verses. The Greek word *deinon* has that uncanny ambiguity with which the saying of the Greeks traverses the opposed con-frontations of Being.

"On the one hand, *deinon* names the terrible, but it does not apply to petty terrors and does not have the degenerate, childish, and useless meaning that we give the word today when we call something 'terribly cute.' The *deinon* is the terrible in the sense of the overwhelming sway, which induces panicked fear, true anxiety, as well as collected, inwardly reverberating, reticent awe. The violent, the overwhelming is the essential character of the sway itself. When the sway breaks in, it *can* keep its overwhelming power to itself. But this does not make it more harmless but only *more* terrible and distant.

"But on the other hand, *deinon* means the violent in the sense of one who needs to use violence - and does not just have violence at his disposal but is violence-doing, insofar as using violence is the basic trait not just of his doing but of his Dasein. Here we are giving the expression 'doing violence' an essential sense that in principle reaches beyond the usual meaning of the expression, which generally means nothing but brutality and arbirtrariness. Violence is usually seen in terms of the domain in which concurring compromise and mutual assistance set the standard for Dasein, and accordingly all violence is necessarily deemed only a disturbance and offense.

"Beings as a whole, as the sway, are the overwhelming, *deinon* in the first sense. But humanity is *deinon*, first, inasmuch as it remains exposed to this overwhelming sway, because it essentially belongs to Being. However, humanity is also *deinon* because it is violence-doing in the sense we have indicated. [It gathers what holds sway and lets it enter into openness.} Humanity is violence-doing not in addition to and aside from other qualities but solely in the sense that from the ground up and in its doings violence, it uses violence against the over-whelming. Because it is doubly *deinon* in an originally united sense, it is *to deinotaton*, the most violent: violence-doing in the midst of the overwhelming." (Introduction to Metaphysics, Fried/Polt translation, pp. 159-160)

Ted



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