This is in response to Christopher Morrissey's recent note:
You bring so much of your Other to your reading of me that I just don't
know where to begin to discuss this. This is so easy to do in this
medium. I do it myself. You don't know anything about me, or my
scholarship, or my particular way of approaching Heidegger, except the
little I have said, and you make sense of that, of course, by your
understanding of the way others approach Heidegger. And there are plenty
of interlocutors out there who disparage Heideggerrian philosophy because of
his supposed moral depravity. That is not what is most interesting to
me, however. I believe Heidegger was a great philosopher, that he has
left ideas that have shown up in the writings of many since him, from
Sartre, to Derrida, to Lacan. I am not inclined to read him with the
primary goal of understanding how he became the Nazi sypathizer, and that
is not my purpose here.
> > What is interesting to me, however, is the way in which these values seem
> > to slip surrepticiously into his ontology. In my reading of him, he was
> > quite original in doing this. I think it lends his ontology a power to
> > inspire, as well as elucidate, and has something to do with the enthusiasm
> > that he sometimes wins from his readers. I read him as blending moral
> > imperative with ontology and that this sort of blending was carried
> > further by Sartre, at least. I recently re-read Hegel's Phenomenology,
> > and I must say I don't really see this moral imperative there, either.
> Haven't a clue what this "moral imperative" in Heidegger is. If you mean
> the fantasy some people have
There is your Other, and what you say next shows your frustration with
this Other.
about being among the chosen few who dare to
> think the Seinsfrage (everyone else being blind slaves), so what?
Is it just that you are going to treat me as someone to argue against,
when you want to say what you have in your mind to say?
So what
> if there's a deluded Heidegger club, even if it included Heidegger
> himself in his weaker moments (anyone with talent is exposed to this
> temptation)?
The authentic Heidegger is Heidegger at his best and at what
> he has not yet thought. The inauthentic Heidegger is, among other things,
> this philosopher king baloney.
Again, who are you talking to?
>
> > But please don't read me as complaining about Heidegger. I find him
> > quite remarkable. As someone else said here recently, I am trying to
> > understand him.
> Me too. But how can you understand him by reducing everything he
> says to, "Gee, that Heidegger thought he was hot stuff" ?
It stuns me that you read so much into my writing.
I'll have to think how to jolt you into another mindset. Let me say this
by telling you that I am persuaded by postmodern deconstructions to give
up our love affair with objectivity and neutrality. It is not
particularly negative to me to say that, from my reading of Heidegger,
'authenticity' is a value-laden concept.
Now, can you stop reading me as a member of your "a deluded Heidegger club"?
Can you look over this note without seeing that you are presuming quite a
bit about me that you do not yet know?
..Lois Shawver
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