But maybe I am a hopeless bricoleur -- I don't buy Hegel's ontology for two seconds, but I find a lot of value in his insights as disconnected from that drive shaft. If (as some think) the labor theory of value or value theory or whatever you want to call it, or alternatively some sort of stagist forces-of-production-driven theory of history and a commitment to a nonmarket society is required to be a Marxist, then I am no Marxist, but I find a lot of value in Marx. I certainly don't by Nietzsche's petty-bourgeois pseudo=aristocratic posing or what can be superficially read as his praise of violence and his very real misogyny, but I take a lot away from Nietzsche. I think Schmitt has important things to say, some of which may be true; Francis Fukayama too (I share Perry Andersom's high evaluation of him). I'm not a libertarian like Hayek, but his contribution to the calculation debate seems to me decisive. There's huge chunks of Quine, Davidson, and Rorty -- their behaviorist verificationism, their demand that we abandon scientific psychology, their cavalier attitude towards truth, their antirealism (Quine maybe excepted), but they are formative influences on my thought. I think Rawls' basic argument for his two principles of justice is utterly wrongheaded, but he's still one of the half dozen most important political philosophers of the last hundred, maybe 200 years. I could go on. But I'm a pragmatist, for me philosophy is a tool kit; I once found (haven't looked in years) useful tools in Heidegger.
Now you may be right that Heidegger's basic ontology is upgefucked, and certainly explaining why in some detail would be a useful contribution to Heidegger studies and maybe to people who just wanted to get a grip on what the old Nazi was on about. But since you think, without really explaining why, and frankly I'm not that interested in your explanation, that you might as well read Dashiell Hammett, why not let's talk about Hammett, who in my mind was a GI with something to say. I do not understand why you feel compelled to keep harping (really without much argument) on a guy whose ideas you think are trivial, banal, or uninterestingly wicked, or maybe all three. Give it a rest.
--- Jerry Monaco <monacojerry at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/14/06, andie nachgeborenen
> <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > Jerry, will you stop asking questions that you
> don't
> > really want answers to? You'd decided that
> Heidegger
> > is a moron with to say that isn't banal
> onscurantism
> > and nothing will persuade you otherwise. In the
> > circumstances, the thing to do is to ignore the
> old
> > Nazis and quietly think less of those of who think
> he
> > might have something to offer.
>
>
> 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/
> > ___________________________________
>
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