[lit-ideas] Re: Why Heidegger?
- From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 10:43:14 -0700 (PDT)
Perhaps I should clarify my original question. The National Socialist Party of
Germany had a membership of around 8 million at its peak. Being a Nazi at the
time certainly does not make a person special or interesting, and proposals to
discuss a middle-ranking Party member only make sense if he was important or
interesting in some way. I presume that it must be thought that he was
important as a philosopher. It is this assumption that I am skeptical of.
O.K.
On Thursday, March 27, 2014 6:21 PM, Phil Enns <phil.enns@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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
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