On Mon, 29 Jan 1996, jeff wrote:
> Nicklas,
>
> >By the way...Is there any evidence that Heidegger ever
> >read *anything* by Wittgenstein?
> >Any notes? Any studies? I would be glad to
> >know, I am reading "Der Lowe spricht ...und wir kann
> >ihn nicht verstehen", and the comparison between
> >Heidegger and Wittgenstein, especially Rortys
> >is very interesting. Is there any other stuff of this kind around?
>
> 2) There is an excellent study that you might be interested in, as might
> anyone who is interested in Heidegger (hence the response here). It's an
> original and close study of the affinities and otherwise between Derrida
> and Wittgenstein, called, appropriately enough: "Derrida and Wittgenstein"
> (or was it the other way round?). It's by Henry Staten and it's very well
> done. It ended up also giving me another interesting angle by which to read
> Heidegger and Husserl.
>
>
> -Jeff
> university of colorado
> department of physics
> http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~biggus
I know of no evidence that Heidegger ever read Wittgenstein, but there
has been considerable discussion of the relationship between "late"
Wittgenstein and "early" Heidegger, for instance Stephen Mulhall's book
"On Being In The World," about aspect-seeing in both philosophers.
Comparisons between "early" Wittgenstein and "early" Heidegger (between
Sein und Zeit and the Tractatus, mostly) are less rare than they used to
be. One important place is certainly Apel's Transformation der
Philosophie, Vol. 1 Sprachanalytik, Semiotik, Hermeneutik:
particularly Part II.
In general, Wittgenstein was less than hostile to Heidegger, but had
nothing but scorn for Husserl's eidetic science, at least around the time
of his flirtation with the Vienna Circle. In conversations with
Waismann, he evinced a certain sympathy with the ethical import (broadly
understood) of Heidegger's attempt at a fundamental ontology, despite the
fact that it was bound to be "mere nonsense." It was in this context that
Wittgenstein gave his memorable translation of Augustine's et vae
tacentibus de te, quoniam loquaces muti sunt (roughly, Woe to those who
are silent about Thee, because the glib speak nonsense): What, you swine!
you want to talk nonsense! Go ahead and talk nonsense, it does not matter!
[quoted in Waismann's Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, p 69].
There is reason to believe, it seems to me, that Wittgenstein's
anti-philosophy of absolute superficiality and clarity intersects with
Heidegger's description of Dasein's Being-in-the-World precisely where
Wittgenstein suggests it does: at the world experienced in Angst. In this
respect, the discussions of the "Wortgoetzen" [SZ 156] validity and the
limitations of propositional truth in Sein und Zeit are of limited
relevance for an understanding of Wittgenstein, despite the role he plays
as a co-founder of analytic philosophy.
I'm still quite unclear about much of this, and I'm probably still
shooting at straw men and women, before I get to any genuinely valuable
insights, but since I spent most of the fall semester working on just
this relation, I thought I'd share my results, as they now stand.
Jim McFarland
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