Trevor,
I'm in Canberra this week. So my posts can only be short questions developed when I can snatch a free moment from dealing with energy policy.
In this post you wrote:
"This is where this approach differs from Heidegger’s dogmatic metaphysics, which tries to throw tradition away and make up its own. Instead of attempting any metaphysical resurrection, Adorno and Benjamin are concerned with the critical appropriation of the Western philosophical tradition."
Does Heidegger throw the tradition away and make up his own? I would have thought that he rebuilds through an interrogating the tradition. That interrogation discloses the technological mode of being and he develops (rebuilds) on centred around letting be, poetics and dwelling.
Why is not his ecological mode of being not a critical appropriation of the Western philosophical tradition? Did he not go back and re-read the Greeks?
It seems to me that Heidegger is made into a whipping boy to make Benjamin and Adorno the good guys. Heidegger actually delivered on what Adorno only gestured to in his Dialectic of Enlightenment: an alternative to an instrumental reason that dominates nature.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at June 15, 2004 09:04 AM | TrackBack