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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Heidegger: The Age of the World Picture « Previous | |Next »
May 28, 2004

Trevor,
In the previous post you wrote:


"There is one thing you say that I am still having trouble with and that is that you say you don’t work in terms of interpretations being correct but at the same time get irate about things I say about Heidegger. I can’t see how you can have it both ways – either mine is just a different story about Heidegger or its wrong. Or is it both? I don’t know. Perhaps you can sort this one out."

I got irate because you said that I was not addressing the issues raised by your interpretation of the differences and relationships between Adorno and Heidegger around metaphysics. I thought that was a misreading, as I was addressing the issue of Heidegger's metaphysics, albeit from a different perspective.

Context is impotant here. The North American political reception of Heidegger appropriates Heidegger fascist as part of larger reactionary strategy to discredit the critique of humanism enabled by Heidegger's writings and by other recent works in contemporary philosophy. The argument in this reception of Heidegger by liberal humanist critics holds that, since Heidegger is guilty of complicity with Nazism, we can then delegitimize his critique of humanism. The object of this policing action is to tainting Heidegger as fascist to the core so as to innoculate Anglo-American philosophy against questions posed to its hegemony by contemporary poststructuralism.

I have previously addressed some of the concerns you raise about Heidegger's metaphysics. If by metaphysics we mean something in the Aristotlean sense of ontology, then I have suggested that Heidegger can be read as undertaking a destruction of the scientific metaphysics of modernity. I interpret him to be working within the tradition of Hegel's critique of atomistic/mechanistic metaphysics of the Enlightenment's conception of natural science in his Philosophy of Nature. This reading of Hegel is to be contrasted with those analytic philosophers who hold Hegel is caught up in animist magic, a pantheist fog, or the self-development of an anonymous Spirit.

The relevant text of Heidegger's is the essay, "The Age of the World Picture" in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. As far as I know the essay is not online, but I have found this excerpt. There is enough there to get some idea of what Heidegger is doing.

This is the questioning bit:


"When we reflect on the modern age, we are questioning concerning the modern world picture [Weltbild].We characterize the latter by throwing it into relief over against the medieval and the ancient world pictures. But why do we ask concerning a world picture in our interpreting of a historical age? Does every period of history have its world picture, and indeed in such a way as to concern itself from time to time about that world picture? Or is this, after all, only a modern kind of representing, this asking concerning a world picture?"

This critical reflection upon a historically-formed metaphysics of science ineeds to be taken into account if you flavour an Adornoesque reading, that places an emphasis on an ahistorical or timeless account of metaphysics and metaphysics as a re-mythologizing.

The historical emphasis can be seen in the next fragment of Heidegger's essay:


"What is a world picture? Obviously a picture of the world. But what does "world" mean here? What does "picture" mean? "World" serves here as a name for what is, in its entirety. The name is not limited to the cosmos, to nature. History also belongs to the world. Yet even nature and history, and both interpenetrating in their underlying and transcending of one another, do not exhaust the world. In this designation the ground of the world is meant also, no matter how its relation to the world is thought."

Heidegger then goes on to give an account of what is meant by world picture in two stages. First:

'With the word "picture" we think first of all of a copy of something. Accordingly, the world picture would be a painting, so to speak, of what is as a whole. But "world picture" means more than this. We mean by it the world itself, the world as such, what is, in its entirety, just as it is normative and binding for us. "Picture" here does not mean some imitation, but rather what sounds forth in the colloquial expression, "We get the picture" [literally, we are in the picture] concerning something. This means the matter stands before us exactly as it stands with it for us. "To get into the picture" [literally, to put oneself into the picture] with respect to something means to set whatever it is, itself, in place before oneself just in the way that it stands with it, and to have it fixedly before oneself as set up in this way.'

However, there is something still missing from this account as it does not dig deep enough:


'But a decisive determinant in the essence of the picture is still missing. "We get the picture" concerning something does not mean only that what is, is set before us, is represented to us, in general, but that what is stands before us -- in all that belongs to it and all that stands together in it -- as a system....Hence world picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture. What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth.'

The fact that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age.

This text is usually read as Heidegger furnishing philosophers and others with a stick to beat the scientists. This holds that modern science and technology represent the cancer that needs to be eradicated if we are to be true to ourselves. There is a different way of reading Heideger's text that is more in tune with your concerns.

Patrick Heelan makes some points that are of relevance here. He says that the common [Platonic] view of natural science (physics) in the early 20th century held that scientific theory and the timeless theoretical categories were the historical expression of the transcendental entities. This was grasped by the infinite process of pursuing better and better empirical approximations in physical measurements.

Heidegger, in contrast, saw:

"...these same mathematical models, not as transcendental eidoi or metaphysical entities, but as historical inventions of the human spirit intending to reduce the world of experience to manipulable ontic entities with the suppression of what is particular, historical, contingent, creative, poetic, and ontological in Dasein's 'being-in-the-world.' From the start Heidegger saw the scientific culture of modernity as the 'Age of the World Picture' in which the 'real' is constituted by the theoretical representations of modern science rather than as a revelation of what constitutes the foundational structure of what is, or what Heidegger called, 'ontology.'"

Heelan adds that the 'world' for Heidegger, like the Lifeworld for Husserl, is, perhaps, best seen as the everyday world after the removal of all theoretical representational elements objectified as 'real.'

I presume that you'd want to say that the everydayness that is disclosed after this process of destruction or displacement is what constitutes the remythologizing. I interpret this in an ecological way: as doing what Adorno promised but never delivered on.


| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:26 PM | | Comments (0)
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