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June 18, 2004
Trevor,
you pose the issue of Heidegger and history here. In that post you say:
"I find the same difficulty with [W] that comes up in conversation with you, and that is a certain equivocation over concepts such as that of anxiety. It seems to me that both of you want to see anxiety as an historical and an existential category. I’m not saying that Heidegger does this but I do feel that somehow there is a struggle between history and metaphysics that is never quite resolved in Heidegger’s philosophy."
I do see anxiety as historical, existential and metaphysical category. However, it is not clear from your post what the struggle between history and metaphysics in Heideger is.
I do read Heidegger very historically-- pretty much like Hegel reads the history of western philosophy. Philosophy is entrenched in history and it has its own history. If we put Heidegger's claim about western metaphysics in Gadamer's terms, then we can say that Heidegger sees Western metaphsyics as prejudiced in the sense of operating with a bias. That bias or shift began with Plato. This review of this book explains this bias quite well. It says that:
"Rather than being the "guiding spirit of Western thinking" in a positive sense, Heidegger regards Plato as an early symptom of decline. His philosophy began an "intensification and hardening of 'theoreticism', the drive toward technical and objectifying modes of knowledge and, with it, the oblivion of any more primordial or more reverential kind of existence".
Theoreticism is what I would call an abstract theoretical reason. It dominated analytic philosophy where it was equated with a fundamental physics. It dominates Canberra primarily in the form of mathematical neo-classical economics. These economists are Platonists through and through. They see the world in numbers and their axioms are Forms.
As the reviewer says that if "Plato is the beginning of Western thought, then that beginning, Heidegger says, is still with us." He then connects this to instrumental reason when he says that we "still see the world as an object of knowledge to be understood, manipulated and utilised. It is an anthropocentric attitude that has profound consequences. Heidegger claims it set us on course toward nihilism and I would add, a technological mode of being."
That is the way I understand history and metaphysics in Heidegger. Where is the equivocation?
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