Trevor,
I take exception to your last post.

Despite your previous denials I've read the way you approached Heidegger as looking at his texts through the prism of Adorno. The presupposition behind this way of reading was Adorno had it right---correct. Your last post confirms it.

A gentle reminder. I've read Adorno on Heidegger: the early dense philosophical essays, the polemical Jargon of Authenticity and Negative Dialectics. These are deeply critical and negative in orientation and give a one sided interpretation: the aim is to utterly destroy Heidegger's philosophy. It is a dishonest interpretation because Adorno fails to spell out, or make explicit, the overlap or commonality between his philosophy and Heidegger's. This is pretty bloody obvious in Dialectic of Enlightenment, where there is a philosophical interpretation of the rise of instrumental reason from the Greeks and a concern to develop a thinking otherwise. (For Adorno it is mimesis; for Heidegger the pathway is care, concern and a letting-be).

For me Adorno is not a good guide to understanding Heidegger as builds on Heidegger but he refuses to acknowledge it. Jargon of Authenticity is a frontal and polemical attack that fails to locate Being and Time within the philosophical tradition in a scholarly manner. It is so unlike Adorno's more considered treatment of Hegel.

So we are radically different in the way we approach Heidegger's texts.

If I remember rightly the posts on Heidegger arose as a result of your argument about reading Heidegger as an existentialist and the tight connection between his philosophy and fascist politics.

What I did was to leave the Heidegger who read the poets to one side, and introduce Heidegger's Letter on Humanism to show the way that Heidegger rejected the claim that his was an existentialist philosophy. My responses to the interpretation of an existential Heidegger was twofold: I argued that his metaphysics was not a humanism (Letter on Humanism); and that it was not an individualism (the category of everydayess in Division one of Being and Time)

What was established there was that philosophy for Heidegger was metaphysics; metaphysics understood in the Aristolean/Hegelian sense of ontology.

To counter your trenchant hostility to Heidegger I responded in two ways. I indicated that that he could be usefully read in relation to Australian environmental philosophy and the fight for the forests. I showed that his emphasis on metaphysics highlighted the flaws of the Routley's environmental critique of the forestry industry.

That attempt to show Heidegger's engagement with the everyday in Australia was blocked off. Environmental philosophy is not serious stuff. The metaphysics was forgotten, even though I structured it in terms of instrumental reason to show the overlaps with the Frankfurt School. I tried to show that this modern metaphysics (what Deleuze and Guattari call the image of thought) thinks in terms of subjects and objects, persons and things.

The aim of destruction is to contest the dogmatic metaphysics and its manifestations in our daily lives. (You can read Delueze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus is a similar manner.) Heidegger's second aim is constructive, since it seeks to create a new metaphysics---which Heidegger initially calls Being. (Again you can read A Thousand Plateaus similarly. Delueze and Guattari's new image of thought thinks in terms of multiplicities and assemblages, hecceities and lines of flight.)

What suprised me was an unwillingness to acknowledge the commonality with the Frankfurt School, or the understanding of overcoming the metaphysical philosophical tradition. What you did say is Heidegger's metaphysics was about God, timeless truths, Clayton's theology, and a transcendent philosophy that is not derived from existence.

"The idea of Being in existential philosophy (which text of Heidegger's are we referring to?) depends on the notion that because we are less than being we seek completion – put crudely, that we are nothings seeking completion."

I tried to show the connection of metaphysics to everyday in two ways> First, I indicated that Heidegger's existential anxiety can be read in terms of the category of public moods which I related to the anxiety and depression arising from the economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s in Australia.

That attempt to show how Heidegger's metaphysics is relevant to the everyday in Australia was blocked off. It has none.

I also tackled your understanding of Heidegger's conception of metaphysics as timeless truths with several posts on Dasein in Being and Time by showing how an interpretative (hermeneutical) philosophy after Husserl engages with the ontology of everydayness--Trevor in his garden at Rostrevor. My attempt to show how Heidegger's categories relate to everydayness was blocked---as jargon.

The block again.

What comes through all this is a blanket hostility to Heidegger's philosophy on your part. It has no use. It must be rejected. No concessions can be made. Heidegger cannot be evaluated as other philosophers in terms of what is good and bad; what is living or dead; in terms of overcoming the tradition; what is relevant to us in his project etc etc. Nope. The block has to be put into place.

This block is a bit bloody rich when you start going on about your depression Trevor, and which you then link to living in a depressing world. You are using the category of a 'public mood' whilst denying that Heidegger has anything relevant to say about this.

block block block. That is what is important. Even the way that Heidegger reads the fragments of ancient Greek texts poetically is rejected as a load of crap, without any indication being given of what Heidegger was trying to do wit these texts in relation to theovercoming modern metaphysics. I suspect that the overcoming project is rejected out of hand.

The hostility is pretty marked Trevor.

I suggested that it is the second half of Being and Time that provides the pathway to an existential reading of Heidegger. The first steps along this pathway was taken by introducing the category of 'authenticity' within Hegel's category of 'ethical life' to counter the reading of Heidegger as an individualist in the modernist sense. I suggested that authenticity meant something along the lines of freedom within ethical life, and gestured to it as meaning a resistance (practice) to our thrownness in everyday life.

I get Adorno'sJargon of Authenticity thrown in my face.

Worse, you say that:

"Our two personal choices show up in the way we approach Heidegger. You read him like a non-philosopher. He’s got something that might help you in your quest and you don’t care about the critical issues. Okay. fair enough. But that’s not doing philosophy."

That is close to a personal attack. With Heidegger I'm happy to dump the word philosophy---you can keep it--- and to talk about the task of thinking in a technological mode of being. That means reading texts for the way they work between disciplinary boundaries, create new syntheses, foment epistemic breaks and discover new problems and ways of thinking out of the detritus of the old and the shop-worn. Heidegger was both innovative and political.

And Heidegger? Well here is the block made explicit:

"...this stuff by Heidegger is just reaction, remythologisation – turning philosophical stories back into myths when the process should more than ever remain focused on getting rid of myth. It’s all right to be critical of rationalisation but replacing it with myth is no solution. This point marks the crucial difference between Heidegger and Adorno. More than ever, philosophy must remain philosophical."

You and the analytic philosophers speak with one voice Trevor. That voice of reason has a lot of bile in it, and it is the voice associated with gatekeeping.

I've had enough of the tribal academic gatekeeping based on contempt. It is a sickness that deforms.

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