Gary,
Forget about reading me through somebody-or-other’s prism. What I am trying to do is read Heidegger critically, and that means among other things seeking answers to all the questions about him that are bothering me. And there are a lot.
Now on May 6 I wrote at length about how I understood what Heidegger was doing in relation to Kant, about various of his terms, like ‘ontology’, for instance, and asked to be corrected wherever necessary, if I was misrepresenting him or getting him wrong in some way. You never commented on anything I raised there but instead outlined what you called a ‘hermeneutic’ interpretation of Heidegger (May 9), which you used to criticise the approach of the Routleys to conservation and other mostly related matters. Where you directly used Heidegger’s terms you used them for quite different purposes than Heidegger, and they don’t mean the same things they do in Heidegger’s discourse. If this strategy is useful to what you are doing then I’ve got no problem with it – good luck with your endeavours – but it doesn’t interest me. That is why I was happy when you started to talk about things I found more interesting – Bataille et al. You can talk about your stuff, which you derive from Heidegger, all you like. I just haven’t got anything to say about it. I just keep quiet until you say something that provokes a reply or until I have something I want to say about some topic.
This doesn’t mean that I haven’t got an interest in discussing Heidegger. I still have all the critical problems I had at the beginning, I might add, partly because you haven’t tried to show me where I’m going wrong if I’m misinterpreting Heidegger. I feel as if you talk past me and I talk past you.
Most of what you wrote in your last post is just a giant ad hominem. The problems with analytic philosophy have got nothing to do with the bile-filled analytic philosophers but reside in their philosophy. All the stuff about blocking and bile is irrelevant.
What you said about Adorno being unfair because of what he didn’t say is also wrong. He has no obligation to identify aspects of similarity between his ideas and Heidegger’s. What possible purpose would be achieved by this? Adorno does not ‘build on Heidegger’. Historically the claim is false. If you think that it is not false produce the documentary evidence. The major contemporary influences on Adorno’s thought were Kracauer and particularly Benjamin. If you mean that Adorno’s theory somehow inadvertently profits from Heidegger’s ideas, that claim is also false, as I will try to briefly show.
Heidegger and Adorno – and Sartre – have in common that they see Kant’s approach as effectively reducing philosophy to epistemology. Metaphysics, for one, lives on in most post-Kantian philosophy but in a form and with a content derived from epistemology and subservient to it. The metaphysical invariants have become the invariants of (abstract) reason. So metaphysics becomes much reduced and generally unacknowledged. Heidegger, Adorno et al want to reinstate metaphysics as a more substantial component of philosophy. Both Kracauer and Benjamin also saw things this way.
This is where Adorno and company part company from Heidegger, however. Whereas Adorno and Benjamin maintain that Kant’s epistemological critique cannot be ignored in specifying this new metaphysics (I’m being a bit crude in my description) Heidegger looks elsewhere, or perhaps I should say that he thinks differently than Kant. He relates this new thinking about metaphysics to everyday existence and also to philosophy prior to Kant. For Heidegger, we have a new metaphysical invariant – the story about being, death, anxiety, et cetera. As you show so amply in your own appropriation of Heidegger for the environmental story, it can be shown to fit anywhere. It’s a new story of being, of essence – an ontology.
For Benjamin and Adorno, metaphysics can no longer have any invariants. So, while there are some close similarities in various things that Adorno and Heidegger say, their approaches are diametrically opposed. Your assertion that Adorno builds on Heidegger is simply incorrect.
Now, according to Adorno, Sartre is preferable to Heidegger when it comes to appropriate metaphysics, because he gives existence priority over being. The problem is that he then makes existence into a new essence, undoing all the good work.
I think there is some justification in the criticism – from a number of sources – that Adorno is sometimes less than fair in his interpretation of certain elements of Heidegger’s ideas, and so perhaps he doesn’t get them right. That’s a problem. But nobody has yet shown that he misrepresents the core of Heidegger’s philosophy and thus mistakes a fellow traveller for someone going in the opposite direction. You may be able to do this – it’s not impossible that it could be shown – but you haven’t done so yet, at least not in any way I find convincing. That could be a topic for a future fruitful discussion.
The literature on Heidegger’s creative misinterpretation of the Greeks is quite extensive – see the Macmillan Encyclopaedia Of Philosophy article by Margorie Green. Adorno gives a good example himself and it is not from poetry but a well-known phrase by Aristotle. I won’t bother with all the Greek letters. Heidegger translates this phrase as ‘the care of seeing is essential to man’s Being’. The standard translation is ‘All men by their very nature feel the urge to know’. There are a variety of other interpretations but they are all more or less similar to the standard one, whereas Heidegger’s sentence even contains a word that doesn’t occur in the Greek and for which there is no precedent in interpreting the way he does. The sentence is interpreted so that it fits his perspective. As I said, there are other examples around.
I don’t know what to make of all this but it seems to me that Heidegger is doing something very different from Adorno, and in my view he’s doing something very wrong. I won’t go into all the details here but I’m happy to provide them later if you want.
And if we put all this to one side, my point about the use of ordinary expression in your own discourse hasn’t been answered yet either. Can phrases like ‘an awareness of being thrown into everydayness and being-with others’ be expressed in ordinary language? If it can please do so. If it can’t please can you explain what it means. This has got nothing to do with blocks or bile. This has to do with getting it right.
Philosophy is about infinite questioning – what does that mean? I can’t understand that. Can you say that another way? What are your reasons for saying that? But x says p. How do you reply to that? and so on, and so on – and not about blocks and bile. One of my philosophy teachers used to say that there’s only one rule in philosophy – everybody else is wrong. It’s not true but it’s a heuristic device. It doesn’t mean that I want to denigrate your views or Heidegger’s, or belch bile onto anyone. I’m just trying to do philosophy as I understand it. If Heidegger’s philosophy is any good it should be able to take it.