Trevor,
you may find this article by Abraham Stone of interest, in the light of your criticism of Heidegger's metaphysics. It is a paper on metaphysics and the slippage back to pre-Kantian metaphysics in continental philosophy. It does this in terms of Husserl, Carnap and Heidegger and so would be the background to Adorno.
Although Kant is generally seen as the great destroyer of the traditional metaphysics he also develops a metaphysics for am natural science. Abraham says:
"We can take Kant's procedure as paradigmatic of what it means to "overcome'' metaphysics. It has three important features. (I) Far from simply rejecting it, Kant explains what is right about traditional metaphysics, and in particular preserves its grounding and unifying functions with respect to the special sciences. But (II) he limits its scope and pretensions, denying that it has its own supersensible sphere of subject matter. And (III) he does so in order to save practical philosophy, by establishing our right to think freedom and morality for practical purposes--or, as he puts it, by eliminating knowledge (Wissen) to leave room for faith (Glauben)."
Hegel's response is not mentioned by Stone. He jumps to the early Husserl.
However, in previous posts I have shown Hegel's response. He denied the claim of a metaphysics-free science by those empiricist (and positivists) scientific philosophers who see themselves to be philosophers of the future. Then to argue that the categories we use to make sense of natural and social being are historical ones and that it is philosophy's job to critique the taken-for-granted metaphysical categories of science.
What Abraham does is give a detailed account of Heidegger and Carnap's response to Husserl and then Carnap's criticism of Heidegger. From my perspective all this is of scholarly interest. We can pick Stone up towards the end. He says:
"So, in summary, what is Carnap accusing Heidegger of? He is accusing him of trying to use assertions where only expression is appropriate--and where, given the danger involved, even expression ought to be limited to brief hints. He is accusing him, in particular, of putting himself (or leaving himself) in a position where he must treat religious dread as if it revealed a being, an object--accusing him, that is, of idolatry, or (what comes to the same thing from a Kantian point of view) of putting a theoretical dogmatics before ethics. This is a very serious criticism indeed. Without claiming (as I certainly would not) that it is one against which Heidegger could have no defense, I would point out two things about it. First, it is a criticism to which, as I understand it, Heidegger seriously and repeatedly responded..... Second, it is a criticism which finds echoes in later members of Heidegger's own, Continental, philosophical tradition (e.g. in Levinas). This, I think, is enough to establish what I set out to here: not an attack on or defense of either Carnap or Heidegger, but simply a case for taking the one as a serious reader of the other."
What I do pick up on is Stone's conclusion. He says:
"We cannot take sides in this debate in part because it has changed from a debate into a fundamental structural fact about the philosophical world as we have inherited it. Here in the English-speaking part of that world, in particular, the stamp of Carnap's will is everywhere present. The way we "do philosophy''--the way we speak, write, publish; the way we divide our field into disciplines; the way we arrange requirements and syllabi for our students--none of this, of course, is the product of Carnap's influence alone.
What Heidegger was able to achieve was to open up another way of doing philosophy ---to return philosophy to the everyday world where we live. He opens up new terrain. This is what Stone misses. He follows Carnap in treating Heidegger's turn to everydayness through public moods as personal psychology without even stopping to question his own metaphysical individualist (atomistic ) assumptions.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at July 10, 2004 11:44 PM | TrackBack