The problem with Heidegger is that once the ideas are taken out of his special technical language the ideas themselves are not complicated but rather very simple to state. So the purpose of the complicated language is to dress things up so that only specialists can throw about their brains on the stuff.
Set theory is quite complicated but I can explain what it does to you quite quickly and I can show you how to learn it and use it. I can explain it to you in a way that will help you to understand why it is important and how it was original when invented. When people try to explain Heidegger to me they either come up with something very common place about technology or death, or they say it is too complicated to understand. When I read Heidegger myself, I find it both complicated and banal once decoded. So there is truly nothig there. But the philosophical dung-shifting machine keeps moving along, because that is how the academic superstructure works. When the dung stops shifting it will all collapse.
The one aspect of Heidegger that I think is worth while is what might be called his "literary criticism." But even here most of what he says can be stated in language that is not more complicated than the kind of language Edmund Wilson uses or at most Umberto Eco.
I think the argument that the left can't
> communicate because people are reading too much obscure theory is a
> bad one. Someone on lbotalk, Doug I think, used to post this survey
> that showed that the most politically active students on college
> campuses in the u.s., this was a few years ago, were the students
> disparagingly referred to as "pomos".
Finally, the problem is not that some people are influenced by post-modernism or post-structuralism or post-humanity. And it is not how people are labled politically. To the world at large, with my beliefs that there is no "foundation" to scientific theories, and that we must assume that all theories are simply no better than their particular historical moment, I must seem like a pomo. So what?
The real question is how much do we want to communicate with others, educate ourselves along with others, and how much do the values of solidarity, equality, and freedom mean to you in everyday practice. Many of the people I know who have been caught in the prison house of Heidegger are harder to work with on this level than the deeply religious, sometimes fundamentalist, Christians I worked with in Central America.
This is an impression of course. But the philosophy a person chooses (and develops) means something. I would not expect a follower of Ayn Rand to support the TWU strikers or "free" day care for all, for instance. In general the hardened Heideggerians (the lonely Lacanians? diddling Derridians?) tend toward the same lack of response.
Jerry Monaco
-- Jerry Monaco's Philosophy, Politics, Culture Weblog is Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, and Culture http://monacojerry.livejournal.com/
His fiction, poetry, weblog is Hopeful Monsters: Fiction, Poetry, Memories http://www.livejournal.com/users/jerrymonaco/
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