Re: Heidegger? List?


On Fri, 2 Feb 1996, Laurence Paul Hemming wrote: > What is it to build a
"slow and difficult consensus" in a discussion primarily concerned with
the work of Martin Heidegger? In what sense might we interpret him as
encouraging such a thing? Did not in fact he stand against the formation
of opinion or outlook or understanding as "consensus"? Or have I been
misreading him for years? If he did stand against such a thing, might a
little more care and thought, a little more self-questioning in our
venturing of opinions and questions be appropriate? > > There is an
increasing concern in the study of Heidegger to produce the "definitive"
answer - to "clean up" the study of this difficult and controversial
thinker, and so to create a "consensual" discourse to which each of us, if
we are going to be allowed to participate, must be conformed.

*
There is a good point in this post that, I think, needs some
clarification. For the interpretation of Heidegger, consensus is both
good and bad. It is good in the sense that as people increasingly study
Heidegger, and as more texts become available, many interpretations of
Heidegger's thought become more obviously untenable. For instance, the
tendency once prevalent to regard Heidegger as a somewhat stranger version
of Sartre is mercifully decreasing.
The positive results of this consensus in scholarship is that it
makes it clearer what Heidegger *wasn't* saying. But such a consensus
inevitably leads to complacency, to scholarship without philosophy (or at
least very little). Heidegger's philosophy becomes something everyone
can understand, and preferably without actually reading him.
It is this latter kind of consensus that Heidegger resisted.
Heidegger did not write primarily to lay down the definitive answers to
philosophical problems, but rather to make us think. Since truth is
something that has to be dragged into the open ever anew, Heidegger knew
that "Heideggerian philosophy" would go out of date. He would have
encouraged the kind of radical rethinking (violence) against his own
philosophy that he practised on others (but let's make sure it is
creative violence).
So consensus about Heidegger is good in so far as it can help
curtail the tendency to stop thinking because of stupid misunderstandings,
bad in that encourages the idea that all the serious thinking about
Heidegger has already been done by a previous generation. Consensus is
inevitable, and it can be helpful, but it never frees us from the work of
thinking for ourselves.
Martin Weatherston
Philosophy & Religious Studies Dept.
East Stroudsburg University


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