[lit-ideas] Re: Why Heidegger?
- From: Phil Enns <phil.enns@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 23:21:39 +0600
Alongside the importance of Heidegger's essay, 'The question concerning
technology', which discusses instrumental reason and the role of technique
as Chris mentions, I would also add Heidegger's work on language in *Being
and Time* as well as his later essays, such as 'The way to language'. In
these writings, Heidegger explores the ways in which language is
constitutive of understanding and the intelligibility of the world, not as
a tool or lens with which we encounter the world, as though language were
something through which we picture, represent or refer to the world, but
rather as being human. Whether it is in his discussion of how language is a
necessary condition for human life in the world, or the way in which
language precedes our understanding of the world, Heidegger tries to show
us that language is much more than a means of communication. While the
later Heidegger does occasionally indulge in a mystification of language,
in both the early and later writings, his aim, to borrow a phrase from
Davidson, is to re-establish unmediated touch with the familiar objects
whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false.
How any of this relates to Heidegger's involvement with Nazism,
strikes me as being a very different kind of question. I come down on the
side of arguing that consideration of the writings of a philosopher can be
independent of consideration of their politics or personal life. Heidegger
is a favourite philosopher of mine, but given what I know of his treatment
of Husserl, I don't think I would have enjoyed sharing his company. Now,
Hume, on the other hand, with him I can imagine playing billiards and
drinking scotch.
Feeling a warmish wind sweeping across the steppes,
Phil Enns
Other related posts:
