Chris. I enjoyed your post, and am still up on the net running from the
work I should be doing, so I thought I'd add something to your remarks.
It is true that many critics have tried to discredit Heidegger's
philosophical enterprise by making vulgar and gloating references to his
politics. This is true of Continental Philosophy in general, and became
an issue involving Deconstruction and other formalist lit crit theories
after the revelations about Paul de Man's wartime journalism. But I'm
not sure the way to respond to attempts to discredit the philosophy is to
disassociate ontology from the political. This is what I think Nik was
going for by saying Heidegger's politics were uninteresting, and I think
it may be throwing the baby out with the bath water.
While you're surely right that it takes a lot of gall (I'm quoting you
from memory here) to imagine that Being could accomodate the needs and
desires of specific cultures and eras, I'm not sure it follows that the
inquiry into Being has nothing to do with ethical and political
formulations. Aristotle didn't just happen to write on ethics, politics,
metaphysics, motion, etc.; he thought they all were part of the same
thing and all explained one another. I think a harder, and more
challenging question (in the face of all the ad hominum attacks on
Heidegger's philosophy) would be to try to back-walk through the links he
himself tries to develop between Being and ethics. In an earlier post I
mentioned some guys who were working at such a project.
I really enjoyed Shapin and Shapiro's book _Leviathan and the Air Pump_,
which is about the viscious ad hominum polemic between Hobbes and Robert
Boyle over the success of Empiricism and the founding of the Royal
Academy, which is in large part concerned with the issues you raise.
Michael Harrawood
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
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work I should be doing, so I thought I'd add something to your remarks.
It is true that many critics have tried to discredit Heidegger's
philosophical enterprise by making vulgar and gloating references to his
politics. This is true of Continental Philosophy in general, and became
an issue involving Deconstruction and other formalist lit crit theories
after the revelations about Paul de Man's wartime journalism. But I'm
not sure the way to respond to attempts to discredit the philosophy is to
disassociate ontology from the political. This is what I think Nik was
going for by saying Heidegger's politics were uninteresting, and I think
it may be throwing the baby out with the bath water.
While you're surely right that it takes a lot of gall (I'm quoting you
from memory here) to imagine that Being could accomodate the needs and
desires of specific cultures and eras, I'm not sure it follows that the
inquiry into Being has nothing to do with ethical and political
formulations. Aristotle didn't just happen to write on ethics, politics,
metaphysics, motion, etc.; he thought they all were part of the same
thing and all explained one another. I think a harder, and more
challenging question (in the face of all the ad hominum attacks on
Heidegger's philosophy) would be to try to back-walk through the links he
himself tries to develop between Being and ethics. In an earlier post I
mentioned some guys who were working at such a project.
I really enjoyed Shapin and Shapiro's book _Leviathan and the Air Pump_,
which is about the viscious ad hominum polemic between Hobbes and Robert
Boyle over the success of Empiricism and the founding of the Royal
Academy, which is in large part concerned with the issues you raise.
Michael Harrawood
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
------------------