Category: Heidegger

Neglected Philosophers

It is unfortunate that a philosopher like Heidegger receives a vast amount of attention, and indeed more than he deserves, while a philosopher such as Wolfgang Cramer is scarcely read at all. I have German correspondents who have first heard of Cramer from me, an American. I admit to being part of the problem: I have published half a dozen articles on Heidegger, but not one on Cramer, or on Maurice Blondel, or on Constantin Brunner, or on Brand Blanshard.

Jacques Derrida is another philosopher who has received an excess of attention. (Because he out-Heidegger's Heidegger?)  Why read him when you can read Blondel or Blanshard? Just because he has made a big splash and people are talking about him? Are you a philosopher or a fashionista? 

Form your own opinion. Try this. Set a volume of Derrida side by side with a volume of Blanshard. Read a few pages back and forth. Then ask who you are more likely to learn something from. But being as perverse as we are, we often prefer the far-out, novel and radical, even when  incoherent, to the boringly solid and sensible.

Our aim ought to be the true, not the new.

Nominalism and Being

Today I preach on an old text of long-time commenter and sparring partner, London Ed:

Nominalism is the doctrine that we should not multiply entities  according to the multiplicity of terms. I.e., we shouldn't  automatically assume that there is a thing corresponding to every  term. Das Seiende is a term, so we shouldnât automatically assume there is a thing corresponding to it. Further arguments are needed to show that there is or there isnât. A classic nominalist strategy is to rewrite the sentence in such a way that the term disappears.

 My first concern is whether this definition of 'nominalism' is perhaps too broad, so broad that it pulls in almost all of us. Does anyone think that every term has a referent? Don't we all hold that there can be no automatic assumption that every occurrence of a term in a stretch of discourse picks out an entity? For example, one would be hard pressed to find a philosopher who holds that 'nothing' in

   1. Nothing is in the drawer

refers to something. (Carnapian slanders aside, Heidegger does not maintain this, but this is a separate topic about which I have written a long unpublished paper.) Following Ed's excellent advice, the
apparently referential 'nothing' can be paraphrased away:

   2. It is not the case that there is something in the drawer.

This then goes into quasi-canonical notation as

   2*. ~(Ex)(x is in the drawer).

In (2*) the tilde and the particular quantifier are syncategorematic elements. On the face of it, then, there is no call to be anything other than a nominalist about 'nothing,' using 'nominalism' as per the
suggestion above.

Whether there is call to be a nominalist about 'being' is another matter. Before proceeding to it, consider the following example:

   3. Peter and Paul are blond

which could be parsed as

   3*. Peter is blond and Paul is blond.

Now I rather doubt that anyone maintains that every word in (3*) — or rather every word in a tokening of this sentence-type whether via utterance or inscription or some other mode of encoding — has an entity corresponding to it. This suggests a taxonomy of nominalisms:

Mad-Dog Nominalism: No word has an existing referent, not even 'Peter' and 'Paul.' (I write 'existing referent' to disallow Meinongian objects as referents. The waters are muddy enough without bringing Meinong into the picture — please pardon the mixed metaphor.)

Extreme Nominalism: The only words that have existing referents are names like 'Peter' and Paul'; nothing in reality corresponds to such predicates as 'blond.' And a fortiori nothing corresponds to copulae and logically connective words like 'and' and 'or.'

Nominalism Proper: Particulars (unrepeatables) alone exist: there are no universals (repeatables). This view allows that something in reality corresponds to predicates such as 'blond.' It is just that what this predicate denotes is not a universal but a particular, a trope say, or an Aristotelian accident.

Methodological Nominalism: This is just Ed's suggestion that we not assume that for each word there is a corresponding entity.

I hope no one is crazy enough to be a mad-dog nominalist, and that everyone is sane enough to be a methodological nominalist. The two middle positions, however, are subject to reasonable controversy. What I am calling Extreme Nominalism has little to recommend it, but I think Nominalism Proper is quite a reasonable position.  There has to be something extralinguistic (and extramenal) corresponding to the predicate in 'Peter is blond,' but it is not obvious that it must be a universal.  

Now let's think about whether we should be nominalists with respect to words like das Seiende, that-which-is, the existent, beings, and the like. Heidegger has been known to say such things as Das Seiende ist,  or

   4. That-which-is is. (Beings are.)

Now is there anything in reality corrresponding to 'that-which-is' and 'beings'? Well of course: absolutely everything comes under 'that-which-is.' There is nothing that is named by 'Nothing.' And if I met nobody on the trail, that is not to say that I met someone named 'Nobody.' But absolutely everything falls under 'a being,' 'an existent,' ein Seiendes, das Seiende.

So I see no reason to have any nominalist scruples about the latter expressions. I don't see any problem with forming the substantive das Seiende from the present participle seiend.  But you will be forgiven if you balk at the transformation of the infinitive sein into the the substantive das Sein and take the latter to refer to Majuscule Being.

The Thing About Kierkegaard

He presupposes the truth of Christianity.  The question for him is not whether it is true  but how it is properly to be lived.  His concern is the existential appropriation of what is antecedently accepted as true.  This is reflected in his otherwise absurd dictum, "Truth is subjectivity."  So Heidegger was right when he called him, not a philosopher, but "a religious writer."

Heidegger: Nazi Philosopher or Nazi Philosophy?

My old friend Horace Jeffery Hodges over at Gypsy Scholar  comments on a New York Times book review by Adam Kirsch entitled The Jewish Question: Martin Heidegger.  One of the books reviewed is  Emmanuel Faye's The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935 (translated by Michael B. Smith).  Hodges writes,

I'd be interested to know what my philosopher friend Bill Vallicella thinks about this matter, for I can mostly just direct attention to a matter outside my expertise. Heidegger's personal culpability is beyond question, but the question concerning the culpability of his philosophy remains, and I think it an important one, intellectually, for Heidegger the philosopher is considered a major thinker of the 20th century, and his ideas have influenced the intellectual left, continental philosophy, literary criticism, theology, and many other fields.

I thank  Jeff for the link and for his interest in my opinion.  As it turns out, I had already commented on an earlier NYT article on Faye's book and so I will now repost with some additions and deletions my commentary on that earlier article.  In so doing I will engage Hodges' question concerning whether culpability is as it were transmissible from a thinker to his thought.

I should begin by saying that I haven't yet read Emmanuel Faye's Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy.  But if the earlier NYT article is to be trusted — a big 'if' —  Faye's book

. . . calls on philosophy professors to treat Heidegger’s writings like hate speech. Libraries, too, should stop classifying Heidegger’s collected works (which have been sanitized and abridged by his family) as philosophy and instead include them under the history of Nazism. These measures would function as a warning label, like a skull-and-crossbones on a bottle of poison, to prevent the careless spread of his most odious ideas, which Mr. Faye lists as the exaltation of the state over the individual, the impossibility of morality, anti-humanism and racial purity.

If this is what Faye is saying, then his book is rubbish and ought to be ignored.  Hate speech?  That's a term leftists use for speech they don't like.  No one in his right mind could see Heidegger's magnum opus, Sein und Zeit  (Being and Time),  published in 1927, as anything close to hate speech.  The claim that it is is beneath refutation.  Nor can his lectures and publications after 1933, when Hitler came to power, be dismissed in this way.

Heidegger undoubtedly inspires violent passions: he was a National Socialist, and what's worse, he never admitted he was wrong about his political alignment.   But according to Michael Dummett, the great logician Gottlob Frege was an anti-Semite.  (Dummett says this in either the preface or the introduction to Frege: The Philosophy of Language. ) Now will you ignore Frege's seminal teachings because of his alleged anti-Semitism?  That would be senseless.  And let's not forget that the later Jean-Paul Sartre was not just a Commie, but a  Stalinist.  Should Critique of Dialectical Reason be dismissed as hate speech?  Should we deny Sartre the title 'philosopher' and re-classify him as a Commie ideologue?  Of course not.  And please no double standard.  Why is being a Nazi worse than being a Stalinist?  Why is murdering people because of their ethnic affiliation worse than murdering people  because of their class affiliation?

You have two highly influential philosophers.  One aligns himself politically with the mass murderer Hitler, the other with the mass murderer Stalin.  That is extremely interesting, and no doubt troubling, but in the end it is truth that we philosophers are after, and in pursuit  of it we should leave no stone unturned:  we should examine all ideas in order to arrive as closely as we can to the truth.  All ideas, no matter what they are, whether they come from a Black Forest ski hut or a Parisian coffee house, or the syphilitic brain of a lonely German philologist.  Haul them one and all before the tribunal of Reason and question them in the full light of day.  To understand the content of the ideas it may be necessary to examine the men and women behind them.  But once a philosopher's propositions have been clearly set forth, the question of their truth or falsity is logically independent of their psychological, or sociological, or other, origin.  To think otherwise is to commit the Genetic Fallacy.

Sartre claimed that man has no nature, that "existence precedes essence." He got the idea from Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, p. 42:  Das 'Wesen' des Daseins liegt in seiner Existenz.  It  is an interesting and influential idea.  What exactly does it mean?  What does it entail?  What does it exclude?  What considerations can be adduced in support of it?  Questions like these are what a real philosopher pursues.  He doesn't waste all his time poking into the all-too-human philosopher's dirty laundry in the manner of Faye and Romano.  Are people in this Age of Celebrity incapable of focusing on ideas?

And then there is Nietzsche.  If the Gesamtausgabe of Heidegger ought to be marked with a skull-and-crossbones, then a fortiori for the Gesammelte Schriften of Nietzsche.  There are dangerous ideas in Nietzsche.  See my post Nietzsche and National Socialism.  Indeed, Nietzsche's ideas are far more dangerous than Heidegger's.  Should we burn Nietzsche's books and brand The Antichrist as hate speech? Stupid!

The Nazis burned books and the Roman Catholic Church had an index librorum prohibitorum.  Now I don't deny that certain impressionable people need to be protected from certain odious influences. But Heidegger writings are no more 'hate speech' (whatever that is) than Nietzsche's writings are, and they don't belong on any latter-day leftist's index librorum prohibitorum.    Are they both philosophers?  Of course.  Are they on a par with Plato and Kant?  Not by a long shot!  Are their ideas worth discussing?  I should think so: they go wrong in interesting ways.  Just like Wittgenstein and many others. 

According to Carlin Romano in "Heil Heidegger!"

Faye's leitmotif throughout is that Heidegger, from his earliest writings, drew on reactionary ideas in early-20th-century Germany to absolutely exalt the state and the Volk over the individual, making Nazism and its Blut und Boden ("Blood and Soil") rhetoric a perfect fit. Heidegger's Nazism, he writes, "is much worse than has so far been known." (Exactly how bad remains unclear because the Heidegger family still restricts access to his private papers.)

From his earliest writings? Absurdly false.  Heidegger's dissertation was on psychologism in logic, and his Habilitationschrift was on Duns Scotus.  No exaltation of the State or Blut und Boden rhetoric in those works.  Trust me, I've read them.  Have Faye and Romano?

One more quotation from Romano:  "The "reality of Nazism," asserts Faye, inspired Heidegger's works "in their entirety and nourished them at the root level."   That is an absurd claim.  The ideas in Being and Time were worked out in the 1920s, long before Hitler came to power in '33, and are a highly original blend of themes from Kierkegaard's existentialism, Dilthey's Lebensphilosophie, Husserl's Phenomenology, Kantian and ne0-Kantian transcendental philosophy, and Aristotelian-scholastic ontological concerns about the manifold senses of 'being.'  There is no Nazism there.  The rumblings of Nazi ideology came later in such works as Introduction to Metaphysics (1935).  But even in these works from the '30s on, what is really going on is a working out of Heidegger's philosophical problematic concerning Being.  The notion that Heidegger's work is primarily an expression of Nazism is delusional and not worth discussing.

So why did I discuss it?

 

Günther Anders

I'm rereading portions of Günther Anders' posthumous Über Heidegger. Like Adorno's it is a critique from the Left. Here is a worthwhile webpage on Anders put together by Herbert Marcuse's grandson, Harold Marcuse.

Anders was Hannah Arendt's first husband, but apparently his pessimism was too much for her. They were married from 1929-1937. Anders was born with the surname Stern. "When a Berlin editor with too many writers named Stern on his staff suggested he name himself 'something different,' he responded 'then call me 'different' (anders)."

If any American philosophers are aware of Anders, it is probably due to his article, "On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger's Philosophy" in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 3, 1948.

The Latest Heidegger Controversy

Court Merrigan writes,

I wonder if you'd like to weigh in on the newly-intensified debate surrounding Heidegger.  Should the man's odious politics disqualify him from being taken seriously as a philosopher, as this book newly translated into English seems to indicate?

You may have seen this article, also, on Faye's forthcoming book.

This is apart from whether Heidegger's philosophy should be taken seriously in the first place.  Many, I understand, do not think so. 

I'm very curious to see where you stand on this and, more generally, the question of whether a philosopher's biography ought to be considered along with his body of work. 

I should begin by saying that I haven't yet read Emmanuel Faye's Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy.  But if the NYT article is to be trusted — a big 'if' —  Faye's book

. . . calls on philosophy professors to treat Heidegger’s writings like hate speech. Libraries, too, should stop classifying Heidegger’s collected works (which have been sanitized and abridged by his family) as philosophy and instead include them under the history of Nazism. These measures would function as a warning label, like a skull-and-crossbones on a bottle of poison, to prevent the careless spread of his most odious ideas, which Mr. Faye lists as the exaltation of the state over the individual, the impossibility of morality, anti-humanism and racial purity.

If this is what Faye is saying, then his book is rubbish and ought to be ignored.  Hate speech?  That's a term leftists use for speech they don't like.  No one in his right mind could see Heidegger's magnum opus, Sein und Zeit  (Being and Time),  published in 1927, as anything close to hate speech.  The claim that it is is beneath refutation.  Nor can his lectures and publications after 1933, when Hitler came to power, be dismissed in this way.

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Wonder: Theaetetus 155 d with Aristotelian and Heideggerian Glosses

Plato puts the following words in the mouth of Socrates at Theaeteus 155 d (tr. Benjamin Jowett): "I see, my dear Theaetetus, that Theodorus had a true insight into your nature when he said that you were a philosopher, for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder."

Aristotle echoes the Theaetetus passage at 982b12 of his Metaphysics: "It was their wonder, astonishment, that first led men to philosophize and still leads them." Martin Heidegger, commenting on both passages, writes in Was ist das — die Philosophie?:

Das Erstaunen ist als pathos die arche der Philosophie. Das griechische Wort arche muessen wir im vollen Sinne verstehen. Es nennt dasjenige, von woher etwas ausgeht. Aber dieses "von woher" wird im Ausgehen nicht zurueckgelassen, vielmehr wird die arche zu dem, was das Verbum archein sagt, zu solchem, was herrscht. Das pathos des Erstaunens steht nicht einfach so am Beginn der Philosophie wie z. B. der Operation des Chirurgen das Waschen der Haende voraufgeht. Das Erstaunen traegt und durchherrscht die Philosophie.

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The Copula: Adorno Contra Heidegger

Adorno Time was when I was much interested in the philosophers of the Frankfurter Schule.  That was in the 'seventies and 'eighties. Less interested now,  I am still intrigued by Adorno's critique of Heidegger. Is it worth anything? For that matter, are Heidegger's ideas worth anything? Let's see.

I will explain one aspect of Heidegger's notorious Seinsfrage, an aspect centering on the role of the copula in predicative sentences/judgments. True-blue Heideggerians may not recognize much of their Master here, but I'm a thinker not an exegete. I will also consider what Adorno has to say in criticism of Heidegger in the section on the copula in Negative Dialektik.

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Action and Existenz: Blondel and Heidegger

Maurice_Blondel Commentators on Maurice Blondel have often noted the similarity of his thought to existentialism. Blondel’s concept of action, for example, is remarkably similar to the concept of existence that we find in Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre and other existentialists. Herewith, a brief comparison of action in Blondel’s L’Action (1893) with Existenz in Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1927) with a sidelong glance in the direction of Jean-Paul Sartre.

One doesn’t have to read much Blondel to realize that he uses ‘action’ in a broader way than is philosophically usual. Thus he does not oppose it to theory or contemplation. It includes the latter. Action in Blondel’s sense is a "synthesis of willing, knowing, and being . . . it is the precise point where the world of thought, the moral world, and the world of science converge." (Action, 40) Thus action is not the same as will when the latter is contrasted with intellect: action is at the root of both intellect and will. Action, we could say, is man’s Being, as long as we do not oppose Being to willing or knowing. (I write ‘Being’ rather than ‘being’ to mark what Heidegger calls the ontological difference between das Sein und das Seiende – but I can’t explain that now.)

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Paul Edward’s Heidegger’s Confusions: A Two-Fold Ripoff

(This was written 30 January 2006.  Paul Edwards, though he made some significant contributions to contemporary philosophy, was a notorious Heidegger-hater.  I slap him around good in this piece, ending with a nice polemical punch.  He asked for it, and he deserves it.  Not that I think that much of Heidegger.  Recently, controversy about the old Nazi has erupted anew.  More on that later today or tomorrow.)

I recently purchased, but then returned, Paul Edward’s Heidegger’s Confusions (Prometheus, 2004) when I found that it is nothing but an overpriced reprint of previously available materials. Twenty dollars for a thin (129 pp.) paperback is bad enough, especially given the mediocre production values of Prometheus Books; but the clincher was my discovery that there is nothing in this volume that has not appeared elsewhere. Edwards and his editors didn’t even bother to change the British quotation conventions in two of the reproduced articles to their Stateside counterparts.

There is also the question of the quality of Edward’s Heidegger-critique, a topic that needs to be treated more fully in a separate post. But for now a comment on Edwards’ refutation-strategy in his second chapter, "Heidegger’s Quest for Being." (What follows summarizes, but also extends, the discussion in my article, "Do Individuals Exist?" Journal of Philosophical Research, vol. XX (1995), pp. 195-220, and my book A Paradigm Theory of Existence (Kluwer 2002), Chapter 4.)

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