Re: Heidegger, Humanism, Regionalism, and Nazism

Ian:
We are not really so much talking about reducing the man Heidegger or his
work to a "discursive regularity", although I'm glad you brought this up.
It's simply that we need not agree with Heidegger's lifestyle or his career
objectives in order to appreciate that he really opened up for thought a
mode of thinking that is seminal and worth studying. I am able to appreciate
and admire the works of artists in a similar way without succumbing to
evaluating their art in terms of their creator. I am appalled that Van Gogh
could cut his ear but I value his paintings. Why are philosophers to be
treated differently?

Also: I don't think it is true of Schurmann to say that he takes Heidegger's
thought as merely a discursive regularity. But because Heidegger had died,
there was a certain closure to the movement of thought he had initiated.
Others might continue it. Hence Schurmann could write : ".. if it is
possible to exhibit a few general rules of procedure in his writings, it may
be possible also to steer what is said in a direction the man Martin
Heidegger would not have wished to be led." In other words, Schurmann is
offering a certain interpretation of what Heidegger stated that proceeds
otherwise than by equating his thought to an expression of fascism, a much
more interesting and worthy direction. Those who reduce Heidegger's work to
a kind of ideological thinking are the ones that are susceptible to your
accusation. On the other hand, Schurmann's *hermenutical* approach is much
closer to the spirit of phenomenlogy with which Heidegger himself proceeded.

I don't necessarily want to bring good 'ole Derrida into this fray, but
perhaps it is a matter of thinking of the several "ghosts" Heidegger has
left for us, where we must select the one that is most authentic to our
spirit. And I believe that Schurmann's approach to Heidegger is similar to
Derrida's approach to Marx in _Spectres of Marx_ . Perhaps the unmasking of
communism that has occurred in the past five years is being reenacted in the
philosophical scene by a corresponding devaluation of Heideggerian ideology.

Significantly, Derrida will be speaking tomorrow at the New School in a
conference in Memorium of Hannah Arendt and Reiner Schurmann. Topic: "A
History of Lies".

Thanks
Bob Wendel

At 02:14 PM 10/5/95 -0700, you wrote:
>The discursive regularity provisonally called Heidegger? Why not
>the nondiscursive (unthought) regularity? Why even call him
>Heidegger? We could just assign him a bar code. Perhaps we could
>render his thought into a set of heuristics that could be used to
>write a computer program that would continuously generate new texts
>under the name Heidegger.
>
>Does anyone really think that Heidegger's work is so programatic
>that it reduces to dicursive regularity?
>
>If anything, the regularities which can be observed in the work stem
>from something that exceeds the work, a non-constant trajectory of
>thinking--with an immanent logic that cannot be reduced to his
>discourse, in other words, a human be-ing.
>
>One should be able to see this once one reflects Dreyfus's prescient
>critique of artificial intelligence back upon the nontotalizable
>work of thinking from whence it emerged (Heidegger).
>
>And if so, then one wants to ask: Why do we find common reference
>to a 'discursive regularity' from as deep a reader of Heidegger as
>Schuermann? To protect the thought from its contamination by the
>man?
>
>No theoretical prophylactic can sever us from the task of responding
>to issues raised by the simple Faktung that it was a man named
>Heidegger who wrote Heidegger's works.
>
>Iain Thomson
>
>
>
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>
>
"The time is out of joint"
Derrida/Shakespeare



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