[lit-ideas] Re: Heil Heidegger?

--- On Thu, 5/11/09, John Wager <jwager@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> The current discussion here isn't all that interesting to me. 

If only Saddam had shown such chutzpah.

>The more interesting question is why Heidegger is so popular. 

This question is nearly always interesting, says Prof.Moriarty, especially 
where popularity is difficult to straightforwardly explain on grounds of 
incontrovertible merit. [Part of the explanation I would guess is the tendency 
of philosophic orthodoxies to be self-perpetuating, at least till replaced, and 
for orthodoxies to have ways of putting critics in their place, at least ways 
that satisfy most inculcated with the orthodoxy and so constitute part of its 
'protective belt'. In short a Heideggerian school of philosophy will not award 
its highest academic accolades to an anti-Heideggerian etc.].

> My dissertation was
> mostly on Karl Jaspers, 

[and what else, one wonders?]

>who has always seemed to me to be
> both more philosophically interesting and more politically
> helpful than Heidegger, but Jaspers is hardly known at all
> outside of Germany. 

According to on-line Stanford Encyc. of Phil. entry on Jaspers/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/jaspers/:-
"...both neo-Kantians and phenomenological philosophers subjected his work to 
trenchant criticism in the early stages of his philosophical trajectory, and 
members of both these camps, especially Rickert and Edmund Husserl, accused him 
of importing anthropological and experiential questions into philosophy and 
thus of contaminating philosophical analysis with contents properly pertaining 
to other disciplines."

Shades, then, of Walter and Levi-Strauss.

Not to worry about the misattribution. It pales against JLS's ability to 
translate words written in English into another, different set of English words 
before "quoting" them. Heidegger, btw, arguably outdoes 
Levi-Strauss, with "Being And Time" being a song 
- http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:fvfuxqqaldje -
an album 
- http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:0cfixqejldse -
and single
- http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:gzfixzw0ld0e

Whether these match Circus Devils' "Ringworm Interiors" take on "World 3" may 
be doubted - 
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:avfuxql0ld0e
as may the existence of World 3 itself.

Donal
Waiting for Rick Wakeman's prog masterpiece "The Open Society By One Of Its 
Enemies" to be released from the vaults


 



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