Well, it may be that we just have a misunderstanding, which our mutual irritations have exacerbated out of all proportion. First, I wouldn’t call – and haven’t called – Heidegger an irrationalist any more than I would call Wittgenstein one (or not much more). But I do think both of them have their moments, in this regard. And I have said so. Second, I don’t put down Heidegger’s thought as romantic irrationalism (to the limited extent that I do) in light of his Nazi involvement. That is, the fact that he had this massively unfortunate – to say the least – ethical lapse is not part of the evidence set that he’s a romantic irrationalist. The evidence that he’s a romantic irrationalist, such as it is, is the set of his philosophical writings and lectures. I do think that the fact that he had his late-romantic side may have been part of what made him susceptible to being clueless about Nazism. He found it too easy to see the romance of blood and soil in a positive – or at least forgiveable light. He thought he could accommodate himself to all this. But this is a fairly weak and uncontroversial point: namely, blood and soil was this vaguely romantic and very unfortunate concoction. And Heidegger should have known better than to touch all that with a 10-foot pole. But he didn’t.

Third, even if I had said that his romanticism caused his Nazism – which I didn’t, not exactly, although I’m sure it didn’t help – that wouldn’t be to imply that he could have saved himself by being a rationalist. (That would be a very screwy argument, so it’s a bit uncharitable to stick it to me without first hearing me actually make it.) You make the point that it isn’t as though the other philosophers did so much better in keeping themselves out of trouble, but this is precisely the final point of my post, so I think we can agree to agree. I finish up by recommending Sluga’s book, which makes precisely this argument: Heidegger is the famous one, so he gets the blame. But the mostly forgotten Kantians and Platonists and Aristotelian academic philosophers of the time generally fell down as badly, or almost as badly. This doesn’t excuse Heidegger, but it does make it implausible for people to go rooting around for extra special reasons why he failed.

But then my point, the insistence on which has brought your last somewhat more forthcoming response, is that this has not be all about you, nor about me, who is of little importance, but this thread is about Heidegger, and his “Nazism”. I’ve been simply trying to explicate roughly the gist of his work to render the context of his self-implication in Nazism available for readers’ judgment. (And I’ve marked several points of criticism, though haven’t attempted any “systematic” critique, as rather beyond my feeble powers.) So are you claiming that I’ve mis-characterized him or gallingly overlooked some crucial aspect? I’m not selling Heidegger,- (except that I think Rorty is right that he was a centrally important thinker, crucial to understanding much of the later developments in modern philosophy, and that Faye is likely a repressive fool in attempting to erect a cordon sanitaire around his work, so as too protect us poor souls from thinking evil thoughts),- so you don’t have to “buy” it. You might not like Heidegger’s idiom of the excess of Being over beings, but it is a discernable and rather central issue, since the excess (or surplus) of meaning/potential over existents amounts to a kind of fundamental “fact”, without which, er, there would be no understanding (of existents or anything else). That “fact” can be,- and has been,- construed in other terms and handled differently, though simply ignoring or denying it would scarcely advance “clarity”. (And the “eruptions” of such an excess of Being is partly a matter of just reading philosophical texts, since such spots will occur, not least because such texts are registering historical changes in the world and its understanding, however much they might deny or claim to master such change). Citing the German quasi-pun is just a way of making plain that apparently portentous talk of the “abyss” follows quite “naturally”: the loss of secured foundations is already a showing forth of the world, (and something we can learn to live with and even relax about, because in some sense we’ve always been there). And one last point. Heidegger is not just criticizing substantialist metaphysical thought, he’s actively liquidfying it through phenomenological investigation and disclosure of “experience”,- (“Everything that solid melts into air”). It follows then that he’s not trying to restore “substantial” community. Rather the dubious bet undertaken is that, by following through the “oblivion of Being” in nihilism and technology, it’s reversal can be brought about in a transformed attitude toward that world.

I’m not asking you to buy any of this. But I am asking whether there is any conception of “reason” that can secure or guarantee one against such issues, (since part of what H. is questioning is what exactly do philosophical theories guarantee or justify, as opposed to how they actually “work” and how they exceed what they can actually deliver or master). You appeal repeatedly to the “rough ground”,- (but is that all that different from “thrownness”, since part of the point of that is that skepticism of the reality of the world isn’t really possible, since that is where you already are and from where you must pick up your life and walk, which “death” only re-enforces?). But the counterpart of that rough ground was getting off the slippery ice of logico-semantic abstractions and idealizations, which lead us astray. Is “reason” tout court not such an abstraction? And are you still claiming that philosophers would have some special monopoly on “reason” by virtue of what? Specialized logical techniques, unavailable to ordinary competent reasoners? And are you denying the widespread awareness of of the proliferation of different rationalities? You might try citing “family resemblances”, but I don’t think that would be adequate to the difficult issues involved in differentiation. I’m not saying that somehow you should pay obeisance or submit to the “authority” of Heidegger as great Thinker. Not at all. But I am saying you should be able to feel the “force” of some of the questions his work raises. Perhaps one could say that “reason” is a structure of inferences. But we don’t know in advance which of our sets of inferences might fail and how. Or you could say that “reason” is a structure of norms, which would mean it could neither be a purely subjective faculty, nor something simply given in reality. But that structure of norms undergoes contestation and revision, so its “justificatory” reach will exceed its grasp. (It’s not the business of philosophy to dictate epistemologically to science its concepts and methods, even if only with respect to their “form”, for example, but rather the sciences must work those issues out for themselves in the course of research, though it might be useful to follow up after them in explicating and explicitating those disciple specific norms, to render them available to more general public understanding). I think the best answer to the question about reason is the oldest one about the speaking animal. People might talk all sorts of craziness or nonsense, but they all have a fundamental existential need to make sense of themselves and the world, in order to orient themselves in the world and with others in it. Such sense-making activity is fundamental to human being, “prior” to any formal logic or conceptual scheme, and is ongoing and never ends, since the boundaries between sense and nonsense are not set and settled once and for all. “Reason” then would be a giving of accounts and involve accountability, though there is nothing to say that everything we might think or intuit could necessarily be articulated or “translated” into the terms of discursive reasoning. In that light, inquiry into the sources of sense and the needs and valuings we invest in the world and one another, oh so finitely, would seem rather germane.

Your putting down Heidegger’s thought to “romantic irrationalism”, in the light of his Nazi involvement, strikes me as far too pat, as if unromantic rationalism would thereby provide an immunity to such a debacle, and as if Heidegger could be subsumed with all the other crazies. (One look at the membership of the German Philosophical Association at the time should put a rest to such a notion: were Oskar Becker and Nicolai Hartmann “romantic irrationalists”?) But what if it were precisely Heidegger’s “rationalism” that accounts for his Nazi commitment? Worse for him, and worse for us.

I have no general animus against all Analytic philosophy, (as opposed to positivism), and am not playing for “our side” against theirs. These issues have been addressed before: how inference in natural language is not the same as that in formal logic, and how, though either might be mistaken, it’s not clear that the latter should take precedence over the former; how formalization is of little avail, if it is not based on already understanding a matter; how obsession with precise logical reconstruction of arguments in linear step-wise fashion leads to mis-readings of texts and even out-right failure to read large potions of texts; etc. But I can well seen why Rorty went off the reservation. And my objection to the “knockdown” style is that it’s inconducive to a more genuine negotiation of differences and often might involve a petitio principii or a pulling of rank in favor of established “positions”. (Tim the Blade night have been facetious, but he was also supercilious. And since, by his own account, he “hasn’t a clue about Hegel”, it’s likely he hasn’t dipped his fingers into Heidegger either. So what is he adding?) As to the issue of your general professional deformation as an Analytic philosopher, well, that’s a continental topic, Bildung, and I’d just hate to see that translated into “necessary and sufficient conditions”.

John, are you aware of any methods of critiquing the limits of reason that are safe against any threat of inherent paradox? I’m not. Hence I don’t think the issue is anyone claiming to be ‘vouchsafed’ security while dancing over the abyss. Rather the puzzle is why you seem so sure your side has the upper hand, just because the other side is sure to be at some risk. Who isn’t? We might avoid the dogmatic self-grounding “authority” of reason, only to find ourselves afflicted with the dogmatic self-grounding authority of Heidegger’s claim to be a Thinker. That might not be worse, but it’s not obviously better. Hence the concern.

“Hence for Holbo to claim that what I termed “meta-rational” is “anti-rational” is question-begging.”

Indeed, and that’s why I didn’t claim any such thing. I merely said that it could be. Isn’t this sorta obvious, John? See my Adorno-on-Hegel quote above (although admittedly, Hegel is his own kettle of fish). There is a serious risk in this sort of philosophy. You try to go beyond reason, to get a better handle on reason, and you just lose your grip. Do you really deny that this is an occupational hazard hereabouts?

“It is incumbent upon him, then to “define” or specify what he means by “rational”, in the face of the groundlessness of “reason” …”

Why? Why can’t I be sort of later Wittgensteinian about it? We start where we are, with our ordinary terms like ‘rational’. That is, we don’t start in the face of the groundlessness of ‘reason’. Why should we?

” … in the face of the groundlessness of “reason”,- ( “der Grund” has become “ein Abgrund”, an “off-ground”, such that “reason” undergoes displacement, is “thrown”), of the loss of unity of “reason” and the world, and of the differentiation within “reason”.”

Sez you. I don’t buy it. Why should I? Gimme a reason. I don’t mean by this anything more than: convince me. if someone tells me something and it doesn’t sound right, I must be convinced. Give me a reason. (Yes, I know, I am supposed to read Heidegger. But here’s the problem: I have, and I don’t buy it. I take it seriously, but I am always coming back from the Abgrund to the rough ground, Wittgenstein-style. That seems to me wisest.)

“If I then impute a few commonplaces, (rational as associated with formal logical inferences aimed at the securement of cognition), I am accused of intolerable projectiveness in the absence of all evidence.”

Look, what you imputed were unnamed – but darkly hinted at – errors on my part, no doubt due to my bad upbringing by analytic philosophers. It is no good saying you don’t have to specify what they are because they are quite common among analytic philosophers, so it can go without saying. Maybe so, but I am not just going to sign a confession without even knowing what I am charged with. Why should I? You have this picture in your head of a target Anglo-American philosopher who believes lots of (sort of vague) bad, stupid stuff. You are eager to fight with this picture. Fine. But leave me out of the middle of it. That’s all I ask.

“As to Tim the Blade, I’ve never attended a grad seminar in Analytic philosophy, so my notion is more a rumor of war than war itself. But then he himself seems to relish the knock-down style, with it’s concern above all for correctness, which strikes me as merely academic, (and also, peculiarly English, if I may say so): ew! a mistake! But of course, one might be mistaken on a particular point without being mistaken in the main, or, conversely, correct in all points, but completely mistaken with respect to one’s project and its fundamental premises.”

John, I think you are failing to appreciate a key element of the psychic dynamics hereabouts. Tim “the blade” Wilkinson and John “wrong-foot” Holbo like to engage in this sort of picky-picky stuff when arging with John “knitting spaghetti with a hammer” halasz because your holism seems to us excessive. You are saying, in effect: how dare you raise picky objections when what I am asking is for you to consider this whole alternative picture? But the reason is that we don’t accept the whole alternative picture. We are trying to give you a sense of why we don’t. Because, after all, it is possible to be mistaken about little picky points and ALSO mistaken in the big picture.

There’s a nice passage in Kierkegaard about this conflict in styles between the Socratic, dialogic approach to philosophy, and the Hegelian, holistic approach – which is, inevitably, more monologic, with a paradigm handed down from on high. Kierkegaard notes that Socrates would simply ignore Hegel’s demand that all picky questions be held until he was done with the Logic. Socrates would soon have Hegel ‘by the hip’ in some irritating judo lock of an elenchus. And there would be dialogic justice in that, too. Not that Hegel is wrong. But if you don’t see the Socratic point of view as well, you are actualy missing one of the key ingredients in dialogue.

True, dialogue doesn’t mean you have to be a passive-aggressive jerk about it. But the impulse to puncture huge, inflated holistic offerings that allegedly have to be accepted whole, and can’t be critiqued piecemeal – is very Socratic and dialogic. Maybe this is just comment box bad blood between you and I, but you don’t seem sufficiently appreciative of how my style of pickiness can facilitate dialogue and, thereby, mutual understanding. If you disagree with someone, you should try to isolate the source of the disagreement, break it down. But you seem to see, behind any such piecemeal maneuver, the stalking horse of analytic philosophy error. But it could be: desire to treat the other as an equal, hence as someone to whom appeals must be made in terms that the interlocutor has reason to accept.

Of course it is often not possible to isolate the source of the disagreement and work it out in tidy logical fashion. But one should at least try – there is no harm in trying – before resorting to the holistic approach, which certainly has its own risks: namely, that it can devolve into a mordant and merely rhetorical clash of paradigms, or alleged fundamental insights.

As to the late discussion of “tact”, the locus classicus of the issue was Kant’s third “Critique”, whereby aesthetic judgments of taste, provided they were differentiated out from cognitive or ethical judgments in the rational infrastructure of “reason”, could be rationally argued for, but not rationally and definitively decided. But I found it odd for that to be referred to “practical reason”, (though Kant also discusses there analogous teleological judgments and the role of both in the sensus communis). It’s true that there are artistic practices, just as there are cognitive ones, but that’s different from the matter of ethical,- (or political, economic, etc.),- practice, unless we’re going for full-fledged, flat-out pragmatism. But then the problem of intuition/Anschauung has always been a vexed one in philosophy, as to its rationality or irrationality. In my view, Kant was decisively right in his reposte to Hume, not just with respect to the “necessity” of causality in construing experience, but more broadly, that any adequate conception of experience already requires synthesis, rather than mere association. Hence the continental tradition’s attempts to generate adequate conceptual syntheses to disclose the world of experience, rather than pursuing a logical analysis of already given concepts/objects, on the basis of self-evident evidence and atomistic assumptions. That’s clearly where Heidegger’s thinking derives from, which has nothing to do with his having an inadequate grasp of logic or of conceptions of reason. Analytics often complain that phenomenological investigations are inadequately argued, though they do contain rational argumentative and procedural elements. But then that whole style of philosophy is based on a peculiar notion of philosophical evidence. (“Don’t think. Look!”). It simply won’t do to demand (ever more) complete arguments, while ignoring the issue of evidence, or naively assuming a transparent notion of it, (since what would count as evidence is always organized through some sort of conceptual framework). At any rate, the guiding animus of any project of philosophical thinking always involves intuition, whether conceptual or not, regardless of whether that animating intuition ever comes to complete “clarification” or not.

Though this matter of “tact” might be of some use here. (And, thanks, Novakant, for dealing with that tergiversation about Hegel and Adorno; I would have side-stepped it, to avoid further entanglements). To some of us, Holbo’s tact in making certain distinctions/judgments strikes us as off, “incorrect”, dare I say, tactless. De gustibus, non disputandum, my mother used to say. I”d think, “Yeah, ma, I know what you’re talking about”.

Though, I’m amazed that Holbo takes his stand on TLP rather than PI. He’d know TLP much better than I would, since I find it inscrutably opaque. But it needs attending to, since not only is PI a thorough-going self-criticism and transformation of the views of TLP, so that what PI is getting at becomes much clearer with TLP as background, but there are some “deeper” lines of continuity between the two, in terms of animating project and some core distinctions, not least between what can be said and what can only be shown, which determines the indirection of PI. But presumably the point of TLP was to delimit (transcendentally?) through a reduction/integration of Frege’s truth-functional logic the whole realm of what could be asserted, empirically or otherwise, about the existent world, so as, by a kind of via negativa, to show the sort of normativity that is not reducible to formal logic. “Woran man nicht spechen kann, muess man schweigen”. From a certain modernistic, if rather positivistic standpoint, to say only what one can say, and no more, to state the facts and nothing but the facts, amounts to a form of authenticity, call it “Joe Friday existentialism”. But the “mystical” is then explicitly identified with the ethical. Which, as involving counterfactual norms, can’t be derived from or grounded in the order of factical existence. Other than by appealing to Schopenhauer, I fail to see the “romantic irrationalism” in such “mysticism”. But then W. did think the better of it, and re-drew the boundaries of his whole thinking, (as its original conception was obstructive, he found, to his animating project). But the fundamental ethical concern hasn’t disappeared, only become more recessive, since much of PI is concerned with the relation to the other, the very “root” of the ethical, even if in his personal life W. was routinely out-of-sorts with others. (If one re-reads PI with Levinasian goggles on, it’s odd how “Jewish” W. seems). Perhaps the whole unspoken, underlying animating impetus of PI has nothing directly to do with the various “problems” he presents or “dissolves”, but rather concerns the salvation of the soul, namely, W.’s own. Perhaps that is what is “irrational”?

But we’ve been through this all before. PI, far from being a work of Analytic philosophy, is concerned partly with showing the essential impossibility of such a thing, understood as a formal-logical clarification of language with an at least implicit view toward the epistemological certification of knowledge. Neither the priority of formal-logic over linguistic understanding, (from which W. did start out), nor the epistemological certification of knowledge remains. And, yes, when the likes of John Emerson or I take objection to Analytic philosophy, we’re thinking mainly of logical positivism and Quine, whose work is a sympathetic and only partial critique of logical positivism and whose “epistemology naturalized” is either a piece of dogmatic scientism or oddly relativistic. And as well, of the reduction of the “natural” interest of philosophy, of which Kant spoke, to a purely academic elaboration of formal logical techniques. (It might be a considerable merit of Davidson to have dug his way out of such an unnecessary detour, but I’ll note that he seems to end up with a peculiar residue of Hegelian-type rationalism: I can only understand or accord the rationality of another, if it can be subsumed in or identified with my rationality). But that is not to deny that Analytic philosophy has not developed since, or that some of its “names” might represent considerable philosophical thinkers in their own right, or that, indeed, some of its latter-day adherents have taken up topics, arguments, concerns to be found in continental philosophy (100+ years later). In fact, Analytic philosophy has lost its unity as a distinctive project and amounts nowadays just to a style of doing philosophy, or at any rate, what’s left of it, since the claim of philosophers’ to have some uniquely authoritative, exclusive possession of the concept of “reason” or what is “rational” is now just a deflated flat tire that has gone off its rim, so that philosophical projects wander in many directions, without an exclusive content of their own.

As to Tim the Blade, I’ve never attended a grad seminar in Analytic philosophy, so my notion is more a rumor of war than war itself. But then he himself seems to relish the knock-down style, with it’s concern above all for correctness, which strikes me as merely academic, (and also, peculiarly English, if I may say so): ew! a mistake! But of course, one might be mistaken on a particular point without being mistaken in the main, or, conversely, correct in all points, but completely mistaken with respect to one’s project and its fundamental premises. And there is little sense that such “knockdowns” might actually involve a “dialectic” of negations and affirmations or that one can’t just assume a prior identity and unity to rationality and its criteria, but one might have to engage with significant difference, that such difference might be “prior” to any mediation, (which is actually a key premise for any genuine dialogue).. But then he shows no awareness for the sort of hermeneutic issues my “word salad” was raising. Or simply dismisses them with dry, rather jejune irony. But it turns out that Heidegger the “totalitarian” was actually a philosophical pluralist. His conception of “project” or, more exactly, of the hermeneutic circle between thrownness and projection and of the worldhood of the world as the counterpart of existential intentionality, was the powerfully original conception by which the early Heidegger made his name. And he had to do some fancy footwork about Dasein being at once ontic and ontological, blah, blah, etc, to nominate his “Seinesfrage” as “die Hauptfrage”, while admitting a variety of other possible, if more “ontic”, projects. An emendation might clarify or better enable a project, but it doesn’t substitute for reflection on underlying projects and their differences. Otherwise it is, indeed, just game-playing.

As to holism, IMO any philosopher worth his salt ends up in some sort of holism, however limited. It, of course, needn’t be as “gigantic” as Heidegger’s, which goes, perhaps impossibly, to the limit. Indeed, an argument against his conception of authenticity is that it appeals to an impossible, unattainable sense of wholeness, as what would “heal” or “save” us. Levinas’ analogous counter-position of “sincerity” makes that point: only a divided form of “wholeness” is ever possible, and it doesn’t come from or as a revelation of Being itself. But a logical reductionism in the name of “realism” is of little interest. It precludes, without obviating, too many possible questions.

End of spiel.

Well, quite, hence my push-button irritation at the italicised chunk from Mr Halasz. I probably would have discarded the post if I hadn’t accidentally submitted it, though as mentioned that did at least release my time for something else. It was certainly not intended as a rant against Quine and Davidson. Are you saying that Halasz’s remarks were Quinean or Davidsonian (I won’t pretend to have much of a clue about Hegel), or my clumsy pastiche aplicable to them, or did you think Halasz’s words were mine and the irony absent? That is a straightforward question and no criticism is intended or deemed appropriate, in case there is doubt (and even the slightest concern).

Re the crazy famous person with scissors still in his hands – he might have replaced them in his pocket by then.

I would also feel compelled to indulge and appease the crazy famous person with scissors still in his hands agree with his sound aesthetic judgment. :)

W. uses tailoring examples a lot, actually. (This looks right. This isn’t long enough.) Now this actually covers a range of cases. Tailors have ‘rules of hand’ for performing precise geometrical operations. Mostly matching operations. Ways of ensuring that this is exactly the same length/size as that. But then there is also the judgment that ‘this needs two fewer buttons’, which is equally precise – and equally numeric – but a bit less rationally scrutable or rationally reconstructable.

I’m just going to assume that Tim Wilkinson is having a bit of fun.