[lit-ideas] Re: Heidegger and the "Ideas of 1914"
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 9 Nov 2009 23:23:24 -0800
Interesting note, Mike.
You read further in Being and Time than I did. I tend to build up small
libraries of writers I think I should know more about, or that I think I
might want to read or reread some day. I mentioned encountering Heidegger
while reading Thiselton's The Two Horizons, New Testament Hermeneutics and
Philosophical Description. I also was confronted by Heidegger while reading
Gadamer, and also about Gadamer. I also encountered him while reading
Bultmann.
Right there, with Gadamer and Bultmann I was faced with two provocative
questions. Gadamer was one of Heidegger's students. How could someone as
rational and insightful as Gadamer appreciate Heidegger, if what they say
about him is true? Something similar can be said about Bultmann. I don't
think Bultmann was one of his students, but he knew Heidegger. How could a
Christian theologian as brilliant as Bultmann be influenced by a philosophy
as antithetical to Christianity as they said it was. [By "they" I just mean
his detractors.]
And I can throw Hannah Arendt into this arena. I am very impressed with
what I've read by Arendt, and she too appreciated Heidegger before and after
the war.
Also, I was impressed by Ferry & Renaut's French Philosophy of the Sixties,
an Essay on Antihumanism, especially their section on "French
Heideggerianism (Derrida)," but in a negative sense. They were concerned
about anti-Humanist Germans being taken up by French philosophers (sometimes
after they were rejected in Germany).
When I first read Being and Time I thought Heidegger was being purposely
obscure so that his less-intelligent Gestapo overseers wouldn't know what
the heck he was talking about and leave him alone. I received no support
for that early theory of mine. But some detractors thought he wrote nothing
but nonsense. They belittled his entire philosophy. The person who wrote
Robert Paul's article is in that category. But then what do they do with
Gadamer, Bultmann and Arendt, three that spent far more time studying
Heidegger's philosophy than I ever expect to, dogged though I may be.
I confess to being bored by Heidegger, but I understand he doesn't translate
well; so my small Heidegger collection was collecting dust until Robert Paul
stirred me up with his provocative article. I took that "stirring up" as
inspiration to tackle a bit more of my Heidegger library.
As to why I am interested in Heidegger's involvement in National Socialism?
Well that question was in the post that Robert Paul used to stir up trouble.
But also, it is one of the questions any student of Heidegger is going to
have to address at some point. I didn't have a theory about this
involvement clearly in mind, but perhaps I shall be closer to one if I keep
on for another week or so.
As to Gadamer being more poet than philosopher, he did indeed emphasize
poetry. And I don't have his purpose in regard to poetry clearly in mind
either. When whoever it was said that poets were the legislators of mankind
(or something like that) they must have had the earlier epic poets in mind.
Modern poets like Lowell or Auden weren't doing any legislating. But I read
a recent review in the NYROB that asserted Wallace Stevens wrote as though
that was what he was doing. I can see that in his poetry. He wrote as
though he were pronouncing law, but he is at least as obscure as Heidegger;
so what good is a law (or a philosophy) if no one understands it?
Lawrence
-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Geary
Sent: Monday, November 09, 2009 10:23 PM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Heidegger and the "Ideas of 1914"
LH:
>>But I'll ask you that question, Mike. Who have you read about Heidegger
that has convinced you that he is someone not to be read?<<
I've never said he was not worth reading. I don't read him anymore, but I
have read most of "Being and Time", most of the essays in the collections
"Basic Writings", "Existence And Being", and "Poetry Language And Thought."
I sat through a graduate seminar in Heidegger (a course I was woefully
unprepared for -- but it was an audit course so no loss). I've read I don't
know how many interpretive essays on Heidegger and almost none were any more
lucid than Heidegger himself. When I was reading Heidegger, I thought he
was more poet than philosopher, that he didn't really have any more
knowledge of what any of it means than I do, he just had a new way of
expressing his awe at the fact of existence which is all that any good art
does. "Why is there anything rather than nothing?" Why? Because there is.
What other possible answer could there be that's accessible to our knowing?
The fact that there IS existence is the source of awe and beauty and etc.,
etc., etc., but not knowledge, or so I believe. Heidegger's philosophy is
very succinct, it's captured in one short sentence: "We are always already
immersed in a World." There's not much more to be said philosophically.
Heidegger realized that and turned to poeticizing the Nordic race as was his
ridiculous world's wont. I still like reading certain passages of
Heidegger, for example:
"Man alone of all beings, when addressed by the voice of Being, experiences
the marvel of all marvels: that what-is is.
Therefore the being that is called in its very essence to the truth of Being
is always attuned in an essential sense. The clear courage for the
essential dread guarantees that most mysterious of all possibilities: the
experience of Being. For hard by essential dread, in the terror of the
abyss, there dwells awe (Scheu). Awe clears and enfolds that region of
human being within which man endures, as at home, in the enduring." (What
Is Metaphysics)
Is that philosophy? To me it's not, but evidently some philosophers think
so. To me it's a description of the feeling of awe that comes from the
sudden awareness that one is here -- in the here and now -- an awareness
made possible by knowing nothingness (or imagining it). It's clunky prose
poetry (of the German sort), not pursuit of knowledge.
What I was asking you is why you are so concerned about Heidegger's Nazism
if you find significance in his thought. Are you afraid you'll be
unwittingly contaminated? You're already contaminated -- not with Nazism
that I know of -- but with Americanism and all the bullshit that carries
with it. Every human being is contaminated with some crackerbarrel
Weltanschauung. That's what Dasein is all about.
Mike Geary
poetically dwelling
in Memphis
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