To reframe something I wrote off-list....
The authoritarian Volk or Hobbits and Heidegger: My problem with Heidegger is not his lack of intelligence. It is that his deep ontological history is bound inextricably to an authoritarian ethos-ethnos of a romantic Volk-Nation. I believe that it is silly to try to make sense of Heidegger by disentangling Heidegger from his anti-enlightenment authoritarian and reactionary "agrarian" context. For those of you who care, Heidegger's attitudes toward the agrarian world is a late reaction to industrialism that is quite common. Just like all of Heidegger's "interesting" attitudes on death can be found in any good hard-boiled private eye novel, all of Heidegger's "interesting" attitudes on agrarian society can be found in Tolkein's "Lord of the Rings." If anyone wants a benign example of Heidegger's utopian society, if such were possible, look at Hobbit society.
Deep History and its substitutes: Ultimately, Heidegger's deep history of Being, makes no sense to me at all. His deep history of Being is a "master narrative" that can suffer no counterexample from any interpretation of history, self, story, poem, or from empirical observation of human language, biological evolution, etc. Since I see everything else in Heidegger (his ideas about art, technology, death, anxiety, violence) in tow to his narrative of Being, I don't see much sense in talking about his beliefs about other subjects as if they could subsist on their own. Derrida tries to disambiguate Heidegger's ontology (and his authoritarian romanticism) by putting Saussure's views of language in the place of "Being," and thus creating an eternal cycle of meaning to substitute for Heidegger' s deep history. Language and "meaning" become a fetish (almost in a Marxist sense of the word); where ontology was once the "under"-ground of history, language is not put into its place. (I use the term "language" very loosely here in order to comprehend Derrida's conception.)
"Real" Violence: Now here is something that is important. There has been some discussion of "violence" on this list from Ted and others. If you will notice in the likes of Heidegger and Derrida, they never talk about what most of us would recognized as violence. To Heidegger "violence" is done to the conception of Being itself. This ontological violence is the real violence and everything else is simply an example of this ontological violence, and often an unimportant example. In Derrida violence is always done to "language." This is the most frustrating and absurd thing I encounter when talking to the epigones of Heidegger and Derrida all the time. According to them, the "real" violence in the world is not the slaughter of peasants, the soldier at your door, or the fascist in the street, the "real" violence is in our attitude to Being or in what we do with language, or in how we create the "other."
I don't think anything can substitute for Heidegger's ontology without turning Heidegger's views on all other topics into a kind of punditry, i.e. opinions, speculations and occasional truisms.
Yoshie points to Domenico Losurdo's HEIDEGGER AND THE IDEOLOGY OF WAR. I think that the reference is apt given that the book also analyzes Carl Schmitt, the current darling of the postmodern left and of the Bush ideological legal apparatchiks. The book (I once browsed through it at Labyrinth Books but I haven't read it) seems to make some good points. Jingoism, war fever, and love of authority can take hold of the most abstract philosophers and spread among them like a virus (a meme?). Such attitudes often motivate their philosophies and play a small role in mobilizing the intelligentsia in their task of justifying the powerful.
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/
Notes, Quotes, Images - From some of my reading and browsing http://www.livejournal.com/community/jerry_quotes/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20060514/22d1e515/attachment.htm>