Trevor,
Heidegger is difficult. Dam difficult. Like Hegel, he presupposes that you have the history of western philosophy at your fingertips and that you understand it inside out. If we are to sort through our confusions, then we need to put aside a few understandings and interpretations that get in the way.
I do not particularly care whether you reckon Heidegger is an existentialist or not. To me that issue is more a scholarly debate that is primarily of concern to those residing in the academy. For me there are different interpretations of Heidegger and different Heideggers. Mine is the late ecological Heidegger who tried to overcome an instrumental reason and technological metaphysics (more accurately a technological understanding of being) in order to save the earth. I read Heidegger backwards from late to early.
I have no intention of trying to persuade you away from the existentialist interpretation, or to argue that my Australianized eco-Heidegger is the correct one. We have to converse from within these different perspectives.
I introduced the theme of Heidegger is 'not an existentialist' for two reasons. First, to draw your attention to his Letter on Humanism, where he repudiates the French existential interpretation of Being and Time. What I was trying to say is that, if you want to persist with the exisentialist interpretation, then you need to address that particular text of Heidegger's. My intention was to point you in the direction of that text.
Secondly, my theme of Heidegger is 'not an existentialist' was introduced to indicate that my own interpretation of Heidegger is quite different to that of Ansell Pearson:--it is one that locates Heidegger firmly within the philosophical (metaphysical) tradition of Aristotle and Hegel, where metaphysics refers to understanding being as an ontology. The ethos of this philosophical tradition is an overcoming of metaphysics whilst working within it. In modernity it means overcoming the (atomistic and mechanist) metaphysics of science--ie., the one defended by Australian materialists in the analytic school.
Hegel did this overcoming by replacing mechanism with an organic metaphysics (I go along with him on this) in the Philosophy of Nature. Heidegger returned to our everyday life and explored the metaphysics presupposed in everyday life through hermeneutics---not social science (eg. neo-classical economics or Marxist political economy) That is what I tried to show in looking at What is Metaphysics. I follow the phenomenologist pathway in returning to philosophy to everyday life, where it becomes an interpretative (hermeneutical) philosophy. I take this pathway because it enables such a philosophy to speak otherwise to merely being a part of science (Australian materialism) or literature (aesthetics). This hermeneutical philosophy would then overcome the taken-for-granted individualist metaphysics.
Gadamer is good on both the metaphysical tradition of Heidegger, Hegel and the Greeks and Heidegger and everyday life. It is what lies outside the horizons of most postmodern philosophy in Australia, which is largely Francophile and content to take the French at face value. So they happily go along with the rejection of the French interpretation of Hegel and Heidegger, turning it into a rejection of Hegel and Heidegger in the process.
Heidegger has been introduced into the discussion because his category of being-in-the-world is a different pathway to Bataille's standpoint of inner experience, which remains within, and a part of an individualist (Cartesian) metaphysics grounded on consciousness or subjectivity. Being-in-the-world refers to human beings living in their world; and so living within a circle of interpretations and, to give it a more materialist twist, a set of relations that enframe and shape us.
Once again, this ontological metaphysics of social practice is a working within, and development of Hegel's relational metaphysics. Our culture (of a body of interpretations) provides a background understanding of what counts as things,(objects); what counts as human beings (individuals); and what it makes sense to do on the basis of which we can direct our actions towards particular things and people. I'm following Dreyfus here as he gives a clear pathway into Heidegger. Dreyfus says the particular historical:
"....understanding of being is the style of life manifest in the way everyday practices are coordinated. A culture's understanding of being allows people and things to show up as something -- people show up as heroes in Greece and as Saints in the Middle Ages, for example, and things for the Homeric Greeks were flashing up to be admired, while for Christians they were creatures to be mastered and interpreted."
So I read Heidegger and the philosophical tradition from that perspective.
What Heidegger does is to give us a (metaphysical) history of being thrrough thinking the metaphysical history of the West in order to free ourselves from the technological understanding of being. The history shows that we have had different relations to being in our histor,y and this implies that we could have again. Dreyfus puts it clearly:
"For Heidegger the history of being in the West has been the history of misunderstandings of the clearing. From Plato on, philosophers have sensed that something beyond ordinary beings was responsible for their existence as anything, but since the clearing always stays in the background -- or, as Heidegger puts it, withdraws -- philosophers have replaced it with a highest being that is the ground of beings and the source of their intelligibility. For Plato the highest being was the good, for Aristotle the unmoved mover, for the Christians the creator God, and after the Enlightenment it was man himself. Heidegger calls all these attempts to replace the clearing with a "beingest being", onto-theology or metaphysics."
Heidegger argues that technological metaphysics treats everything as a standing reserve (as resources is our language) for its own sake. The goal of technology is more and more flexibility and efficiency for its own sake. (Is that not what economics says? There is no longer an onto-theological center (--the idea that some entity is the ground of everything) -- that provides a goal for all activity. There is ordering but no orderer in the technological understanding of being.
In the technological understanding of being we become cogs in the technological machine of market capitalism.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at April 30, 2004 05:44 PM | TrackBack