I'm not qualified to say much about Heidegger, but with respect to Nietzsche and Adorno, I think it would be more precise to say that their critiques of science presuppose some standard of rational discourse which is not, itself, reducible to or parasitic on scientific or mathematical conceptions of rationality. That is, they are interested in promoting a form of rationality which is non-scientific -- one that is erotic, sensual, embodied, historicized, etc.

Adorno, certainly, insists that the problem with capitalist modernity is that it is not rational enough -- not that it is too rational. But to an audience unfamiliar with dialectical argument -- much less Adorno's peculiar transformations of dialectic -- it can seem "irrational," on account of the importance of true contradictions to dialectical argument.

So, while I agree with you, Gary, that Nietzsche, Adorno, and Foucault should be read as "critiquing the Enlightenment from within," I would hasten add that I don't know how else to understand what an immanent critique could be like which is not, in soms minimal sense, commmitted to playing the game of giving and asking for reasons.

It may be, to be sure, a different form of rationality -- but experimentation with different forms of rationality only appears to be irrationalism to those who are fixated on a specific (and reified?) form of rationality -- that of late modern techno-science and mathematical logic -- in the first place.

Though his critique of Cartesian modernity works with a practical conception of rationality as a coping with the everyday that involves a tacit or embodied knowledge.

In order to read Heidegger as offering no more than "a coping with the everyday," I think that one would have to read Division I of Being and Time without Division II (where death, anxiety, and temporality move into the fore). But without Division II, what distinguishes Heidegger from Wittgenstein or Dewey?

Heidegger does ascribe to the existential analytic of Dasein (in Division I) an a priori status that neither Wittgenstein nor Dewey insist upon. (Though it may be implicit in Wittgenstein's remarks on grammar and natural history.)

I don't wish to deny the enormous influence Heidegger has exercised on Adorno, Merleau-Ponty, or Foucault -- precisely through the painstaking analyses of Division I. But Heidegger without Division II just isn't Heidegger, and the tendencies towards National Socialism cannot be excised from Division II.

I don't wish to slander Heidegger, but I also don't want to participate in the Dreyfus/Okrent/Rorty liberal whitewashing, either.
(No more than I want to participate in the Kauffman whitewashing of Nietzsche.)

Dr.S,
re your comments on Division 11 in Being and Time. I agree fully, whilst wanting to highlight the importance of the word Ereignis (as an event of appropriating and disclosing) that suggests that we can never truly be detached from the world and become timeless, placeless observers. The world opens up for us only because we are engaged participants in it.

What is downplayed in the liberal Anglo-American reception and interpretation of Heidegger is the tradition of historical pessimism and the sense of the tragic in Heidegger. Rorty hates this side of Heidegger. He blocks it.

What is blocked is the tradition of the tragic view of life point out that the shortness of human existence and death can only be overcome by the heroic intensity of living.

Why is this displaced? Three reasons suggest themselves:

#The philosophy of the tragic is incompatible with the Christian dogma of salvation or the optimism of some modern ideologies.

#liberal political philosophy works on the assumption that "the radiant future" is always somewhere around the corner, and it holds that that existential fear and anxiety can best be subdued by the acceptance of a linear and progressive concept of history.

#the assumption in a consumer culture that death can be postponed by a deliberate pursuit of happiness ie., death can be outwitted through the search for the elixir of eternal youth and the "ideology of the beautiful as good looks.

What also distinquishes Heidegger from Wittengstein and Dewey is Heidegger's latter turn against a technological mode of being, the critique of science and and the gesture towards ecology. Heidegger is definitely not American pragmatism.

That tradition rarely talks abaout courage, the ability to face painful and frightening things. and which enables us to risk death on behalf of our community or country. When Heidegger, in Being and Time, speaks about facing death he describes a solitary and dreadful confrontation that jolts us into the question of Being; it raises the question of the whole only to show that the whole is fractured, that we are finite, throwing us back on ourselves.

The virtue of courage for Heidegger is to accept our finitude, to take our life in hand, and to philosophize. Tis many steps to Nazism from this. To get there you have to plug in the social and political dimensions of German conditions in 1933--the 7-million unemployed, Germany's economic throttling by the Treaty of Versailles, collapse of social democracy, mass confusion that spread to the universities, etc.

Why do you see Dewey as still embracing a technological mode of being?

I'm not disagreeing. I simply don't know Dewey sufficiently well enough to dare argue one way or the other. But I think the idea of Dewey as being quite similar to Heidegger in terms of the latter's ontic analysis is quite right. Perhaps he's still blind to Being somewhat. But one could also simply say that Dewey, like Peirce before him, recognizes the issue of Being, but simply doesn't want to get into the analysis Heidegger does. But still ends up adopting many of the implications of H's ontological analysis, even if not the explicit analysis.

Clarke,
It is a long time since I've read Dewey. But I do remember his acceptance of instrumental reason, science and technology and his strong American optimism---this meant a lack of questioning of instrumental rationality.

It runs through American pragmatism.Technology solves human social problems is the message I got.

I couldn't find anything like a critique of instrumental reason or any sense that we may be living life wrongly, or that daily life had been annexed by the market economy and politics as administration. There was no sense that the Enlightenment had turned in on itself.

Maybe the emphasis Dewey placed on democracy provides a counter to an instrumental reaaon concerned with the control of nature and human self preeservation. Maybe we could find a sense of living well or flourishing around democracy and citizenship?

I never read Dewey deep enough to find out.

From what I recall of Experience and Nature, Dewey is confident that there can be a rational critique of technology, which he understands as the application of intelligence to itself. I can dig up chapter and verse, if there's interest.

There is something naive, one might say, about Dewey's faith in instrumental reason -- a faith that is hard to maintain after Auschwitz. But this is not to say that it is reason which failed! Habermas is faithful to the spirit of Adorno when he argues that technocratic capitalism suffers from a deficiency of rationality.

(So I'll admit that I have a somewhat unusual reading of Adorno -- one that puts him closer to Marx and Dewey and further from Kierkegaard and Heidegger than is typical, and this colors how I situate Adorno relative to Heidegger.)

By contrast, Heidegger's critique of technology doesn't go in this direction. He argues that the modern understanding of Being as standing-reserve closes off the possibility of the very sort of immanent critique that Adorno demands.

(Where Habermas parts ways from Adorno, perhaps, is that Adorno doesn't think that such a critique is readily forthcoming, because the avenues to it are systematically blocked off by "the culture industry" -- whereas Habermas has a certain faith in intersubjective argumentation that Adorno lacks -- but this only heightens the pathos of the demand that Adorno makes.)

So I read Heidegger's infamous and late remark, "only a god can save us" as saying, in effect, that (a) we require a radically different understanding of Being and (b) there is no way to motivate such an understanding of Being from within the conceptual resources available to us here and now.

Am I being unfair to Heidegger -- and if so, in what respects?

Why do people have low opinions of "authentic," anti-liberal totalitarians, along with their philosophical progenitors, who struggled to restore a pre-capitalist past by cleansing the world of Jewish, ahem, I meant bourgeois influences? I guess we will never know.