Typography, Philosophy and the Nazi Question

If you’re pdf-tolerant, Blackletter is available online.

A person who compares someone who does not agree with his preferred typeface choice to nazis and fascist is probably not a “master”. A person who discredits the legibility of sans-serif without actual legibility experiments is at best a dilettante. Comparing a dilettante typesetter’s opinion to any kind of philosopher is a pointless exercise.

Since you were a student of Dreyfus: Is there any basis to the Wikipedia claim that he was the inspiration for the Futurama character Prof. Hubert J. Farnsworth?

I know a bit about Heidegger’s philosophy and I have read his biography. (excellent).

My thoughts, for what they are worth.

First point:

1: As Safranski makes clear, Heidegger was a ‘type’, and a type with which we should all be familiar. This is the academic who spends his adolescence and ‘twenties stuck in with his head in books (Heidegger seems to have barely noticed that the First World War was taking place), who suddenly wakens up in his mid-‘thirties with a not-too-onerous academic position and suddenly realises that he has wasted his youth, and that he had better get living. As with many similar Professors in the ’60s this led to

a: Frantic and embarassingly numerous affairs with much younger female students who idolise him (Arendt was not the only one) while his wife stomps around the kitchen pretending not to notice and

b: ‘radical’ political theorising based on not-too-much knowledge of the realities of actual politics.

At least he didn’t get his ears pierced, or start wearing loud kipper ties, but we all know this type.

Also, like many nerds (the word fits, especially based on photographs), after being a comparatively humble student, albeit one with dreams of grandeur, when given a bit of power and academic prestige, Heidegger suddenly realised that academic professors from provincial universities had been given a God (or ‘Being’) sent task to Set Things Right, and show the world How Things Ought To Be (sic). He was also a man who liked the sound of his own voice, and was a lousy listener. Again, typical academic.

2: Heidegger could also be described, without being wildly unfair to him, as an idiot. He had no grasp of what politics was about. None. He knew no politicians, studied no politics, did not engage in any political activities (except in 1933-1934, when he was quickly outmanoeuvred by more politically adept colleagues). He had little grasp of what Nazi-ism was about at the time, and didn’t really develop much of an idea even as an old man. Like most academics, his main motivations (apart from a desire to put one over on his ‘less intelligent’ colleagues and lust for his attractive female students) were those of abstract philosophical thought, and he had huge difficulties in perceiving that similar beliefs did not motivate other people (specifically, politicians). Thus it is fair to say that Heidegger was a ‘Nazi’ but only if one adds that Heidegger’s view of what a ‘Nazi’ was was one shared by no one else, especially not Hitler.

3: Much of Heidegger’s philosophy is based on gut emotional beliefs that were typical of his era and his class. He was brought up Catholic, and remained in the provinces all his life (he was offered a post in Berlin but turned it down, apparently partly out of fear that he would be shown up as a country bumpkin). His dislike of ‘Modernity’ and Technology based on fear (if he was alive today he would be on Grumpy Old Men, railing against young people and their new fangled I-Pods). As Nietzsche pointed out, exaggerated love of the Greeks is a typical German intellectual vice, as is the belief that ‘It’s been all downhill since Socrates’ (and Nietzsche should know).

4: As Dan Zahavi and other scholars of the ‘New Husserl’ have pointed out, Heidegger’s philosophy, while good and interesting, was not nearly as original or ‘groundbreaking’ as Heidegger made out. (Being and Time was written to secure an academic post and Heidegger had good reasons to exaggerate its originality). Much of it was adapted from Nietzsche, the pragmatists, Ortega y Gassett, Bergson, Kierkegaard, and, especially, Husserl, whose thought has been systematically under-estimated for nearly 100 years (mainly under Heidegger’s influence).

5: Heidegger was a careerist, and could be callous and cruel when he believed he was being crossed. He was also an egotist of the first order. He had little self-understanding, and little sense of humour (his funny, popular, brother was always taking the piss out of his ‘philosophy’, which irritated Martin no end). He was also a German nationalist (there really is no other phrase that fits) who always leaned to the Right, even after the war. His dislike of democracy was based on his gut feeling that it would mean ‘great men’ (guess who?) being ‘dragged down’ by the ‘rabble’.

I haven’t read Faye’s book, but judging from articles by or about Faye, he doesn’t have access to anything that has not already been published in Heidegger’s complete works – albeit not all translated into English yet. What Faye does is pick bits from different lectures and seminars to generate a Heidegger-the-Nazi-philosopher narrative, while ignoring everything else, which indicates the common Heidegger-the-ontologist interpretation of his way of thinking.

8- Gasset, one ‘t’, I knew there was something wrong there, philosophy en castellano – I thank you again!

I really enjoyed Hidari’s comment too, and perhaps we’ll see more attention given to Husserl one day. I didn’t know that Heidegger had a funny, popular, brother who was always taking the piss out of his ‘philosophy’. What a hoot.

Heidegger’s brother was called Fritz, was famous as the town (Messkirch) ‘card’, never went to University, and was famous for his antics and his anarchic sense of humour (he picked fights with the Nazis during the war). In Messkirch (you’ll like this, Alison), Martin was always known as ‘oh you know…..Fritz’s brother!’. This when Martin was one of the most famous philosophers on earth.

I might add that my ‘reading’ of Husserl (as containing most, if not all, of the best of Heidegger) is controversial. But on the other hand it was Martin Heidegger himself who continually presented Husserl as an old fashioned Cartesian and Platonist, whose work was really only interesting insofar as it preceded…..well the work of a certain Martin Heidegger.

For different, more modern views cf: Zahavi’s ‘Husserl’s Phenomenology’. (Stanford, 2002).

Then the NYT article is kinda appropriately Heidegerean

I suppose Heidegger would profess disinterest in what “the They” say about his work.

Great comments, Hidari — just the kind of stuff that we hope will justify our time wasted reading blog threads.

Heidegger’s brother was the bank teller in Messkirch, right? I’ve always loved the thought of the two going camping together – does Safranski go into their relationship much? While I’m not Heidegger, nor my brother a bank teller, we used to have endless fights about low-brow vs. high-brow approaches to culture and life in general when we were students, so maybe that’s one reason why this interests me. Btw, I’m happy to report that we have found common ground in our mutual interest in film and are now actually cooperating on various projects.

Wow, it’s also quite astonishing how Kaplan is totally misinformed about the actual reality of people’s lives (at least in the EU, but it’s not a great leap to suspect that this applies in general) – no struggle my @ss. And yeah, Heidegger and his faux-authenticity nonsense had its roots in similar ignorance or maybe just plain callousness.

how Tschichold is weirdly exactly like Wittgenstein.

If a lion could publish, would we be able to understand the typeface it used?

Hidari, if you ever visit the Husserl-archive in Leuven, let me buy you a coffee.

‘Hidari, if you ever visit the Husserl-archive in Leuven, let me buy you a coffee.’

At last! My years of commenting start to pay off!

Seriously though, if I am ever in Leuven I will take you up on that offer.

So there are people here, who actually understand Husserl – I’m genuinely impressed. No really, there was a time when I could claim to have understood large parts of Hegel, but with Husserl I never had a clue what in the world he was talking about.

‘I found Hidari’s discussion useful, but I still haven’t seen anyone who thinks Heidegger’s work is valuable take the trouble to explain how it led him to support Hitler and how to separate out the valuable bits from the bits that led him to be an (admittedly not very successful) Nazi.’

There are problems with Husserl’s theorising, as there are advantages, so to speak, in Heidegger’s theorising. But the major advantage that Husserl has over Heidegger is that with Husserl one does not have to concern oneself with Heidegger’s view of ‘Being’. Heidegger himself did not make clear what he meant by ‘Being’ (you’ll remember that in his later texts he wrote it Being) but it clearly has some kind of ‘mystical’ ‘religious’ or (possibly) pseudo-religious force. Dreyfus is clearly embarassed by this aspect of Heidegger, and ignores it whenever he can, but Heidegger himself thought it was his one ‘big idea’ that animated his whole philosophy.

I can never make my mind up about this. On the one hand Heidegger was clearly on to something. I just wonder if what he was onto was what he thought he was onto. Wittgenstein of course thought not. What Wittgenstein argued is that what H. was getting at is the sheer ‘thisness’ of the world (the most famous example is ‘the tree’ in Sartre’s Nausea). For example when you open the window on a gorgeous spring day…and there is the world. H. argued (probably rightly) that our drab, technocratic, ‘rational’ society robs of us this sense of ‘wonder’ (H. is very much the Romantic anti-rationalist here) at the sheer thisness of things, the simple fact that we exist and that things are as they are.

Where Wittgenstein thought that Heidegger went wrong was in trying to express this as a philosophical argument. W. was in profound agreement with H.’s distrust of ‘science’ and ‘technology’ and also with his basic emotional insight about ‘Being’. But, to repeat, W. thought that when H. attempted to explain what he meant by this then this became a classic example of ‘Language going on holiday’. The whole point, for W. is that this essentially mystical insight is inexplicable and incommunicable. And of what one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent etc.

But once H. has this concept, or insight, or whatever, of ‘Being’, since he can’t define it, he can do essentially anything he wants with it. So ‘Being’ can ‘withdraw’ as if it’s a person or force, but, of course, H. is always ready to tell us that ‘Being’ is not in actuality, a person or a force (again H. sounds very very like a negative theologian attempting to ‘define’ God here).

One thing H. was keen to stress at all times, however, is that Western Rationalism ‘makes us’ forget Being. Whatever it is, Being is an ‘anti-rational’ concept. Here the demons (as with Nietzsche) are Socrates, Plato and Descartes. Reality, Being, is un-understandable by ‘classic’ Western, rational thinking.

It follows that any attempt to understand society on rational principles is wrong. It also follows from that that any attempt to organise society on rational principles is bound to fail. Therefore, liberalism (especially of the kind seen in the French Revolution, the liberalism of Voltaire and Diderot, the Rationalists) cannot work. But (according to Heidegger) Communism/socialism are merely another kind of rationalism, so they’re out too.

This doesn’t explain why H. turned to Naziism, but it does explain why the radical Right, in some form, was always going to attract him. I think the other pieces of the jigsaw can be found, as I said, in his class background, religious background (right-wing Catholicism), and his position as a (powerful, male) academic.

But this does help to explain, I hope, why H. consistently explained Hitler as part of the ‘rediscovery’ of Being or the ‘return’ of Being. It also explains why Heidegger saw himself as being the only true Nazi (even Hitler misunderstood his own political movement, according to Heidegger), and his own own Naziism as being a ‘private’ or ‘secret’ Naziism. . Heidgger persistently explained his political lapse, not as himself letting anyone else down, but of the Nazis letting him (Heidegger) down. Or more specifically, of the Nazis letting Being down, with Heidegger being, so to speak, Being’s spokesman.

Thanks much!

I’m going to completely ignore the whole Heidegger thing you guys have going on right now, and discuss what science has to say about which typefaces are more readable, in particular the question of serif vs. sans-serif faces.

I turns out that the answer is “it depends”. Most of the research on this was done app. thirty to forty years ago by computer firms (the truly big player in this one was IBM). What they discovered was that the primary answer depended on a very fundamental feature of the surface the person was reading… did it reflect light (like a piece of paper or a stone plinth) or did it emit light (like a computer monitor or a television screen). What they found was that reflective surfaces were most legible with a light background, dark text, and serifed fonts. Light emitting surfaces were most legible with a dark background, light text, and sans-serif bolded text. This is why all the early computer monitors on personal computers were set up they way they were (think text mode); because studies showed that having them like that meant that readers suffered less eye-strain and fatigue during use. It’s also why a lot of illuminated signs had dark backrounds and light text and Futura etc… they were more legible that way.

So the argument advanced by Faye is that the fundamental ontology of Sein und Zeit and the early works is National Socialist political philosophy? Or that the “average everydayness” of Dasein’s being-in-the-world is an advancement of Fascism? I just want to be sure…

halasz: Heidegger considered modernity a breeching of all limits, previously contained by the understanding of Being concealed in metaphysical orderings of meaning, resulting, through an ultimate forgetting/oblivion of Being, in a violent extrusion upon the world, in the guise of nihilism and a self-proliferating system of technology, at the behest of an adventitious subjectivity, which itself becomes reduced, together with all other beings, to a “standing reserve”, to raw material to feed into the self-proliferating system of technology, which operates without agency or responsibility (care).

Could you elaborate a bit, as simply as possible?

I should have stressed more strongly, perhaps, that my view of Heidegger is my own, and that Heidegger experts might not agree with me.

However, in my defence….

‘Heidegger’s “Being” Is basically hatched out of Husserl’s notion of a horizon, the background through and against which an intentional object appears. ‘

Well perhaps, in its later forms, but Heidegger’s initial interest in Being stemmed from Aristotle-as-seen-by-Brentano (On the Manifold Meaning of Being in Aristotle). It was only after reading this book that he turned to Husserl (my understanding is).

In any case, I thought Husserl’s view of the background etc. really only gets stressed in his thought in his works of the ’30s? (I could be wrong about this).

A few other points.

‘Being, as that which gives meaning to beings, can not be derived from the “metaphysical” ordering of beings themselves, but rather amounts to something like the transcendental condition of meaning in general, from which specific meanings derive that render beings interpretable as more-or-less what and how they are/appear to be.’

To repeat, this sounds very similar (to me) to negative theology. The whole point of negative theology, we will remember (as in the ‘Death of God’ controversy in the ’60s) is that God does not ‘exist’, but is instead ‘the transcendental condition of meaning (or things) in general’. Which doesn’t mean that H. was a theist, (he wasn’t) but that his ‘discovery’ or ‘rediscovery’ of Being owed something to theological concepts.

‘But it is a mistake to regard Heidegger as a Romantic, for all his Hoelderlin fetishism. If he is to be correlated with artistic labels, it would be expressionist.’

I don’t see ‘Romantic’ and ‘Expressionist’ as antonyms. Au contraire.

‘But to confuse an inquiry into the ground of the grounds of metaphysical rationalism (and its limits) with irrationalism is a question-begging mistake, even if one thinks that is not the most perspicuous way to address such issues.’

But I never called H. an irrationalist. I said he was not a Rationalist, which is definitely true.

Sorry, those paragraphs got out of order. The one about “lock and key” should be after the one it’s before.

Geo @50:

I’ll try and get back to you later, if I can figure out how to devise a step-wise explication.

do you really think that “anti-rational” domains such as the arts contain no forms of rigor and “logic” of their own, such that they can sloppily be put down to mere “romanticism”

Evidently not, in my case, at least. My point was that, the romantic critique of rationality, or (if you prefer, “inquiry into the limits of ‘reason”) as undertaken by poets seems much more appealing, and its own terms more rigorous, to me than a critique presented in opaque philosophical prose, and ending (on the most favorable possible account) in deep moral and political confusion.

And where does the imputed snark against romanticism come from? It seems as if you are treating it as an inherently pejorative term. To adapt a phrase that Heidegger could certainly have used in its original form, some of my favorite poets are romantics. Not so many, I admit, of my favorite philosophers.

@62:

I really don’t want to endlessly trade nitpicks with you, as is your wont. (Though that was a potted piece of history of philosophy). The basic point at issue is that characterizing Heidegger as “anti-rational”, (with possible sliding into “irrational”), begs the question and badly misses the point, because he is precisely inquiring into the meaning of “rational” and “reason” in various interpretations and guises. (Cf. @61). I myself characterized the issue as “meta-rational”, and then went on to point to an element of a “reactionary, irrationalistic cult of sacrifice” that gets fused into otherwise sober, at least partly intelligible concerns. (Though there’s nothing wrong with sacrifice, in the sense of renunciation and the suffering of loss, which is just part of life: it’s the cultic aspect that renders it reactionary and objectionable). But inquiry into and reflection upon presuppositions is one of the “essential” things that philosophy does, and Heidegger does it in spades.

But then there is the rush to labeling, which is an Analytic habit, whereby all positions must have an identifying label to be considered, and a thoroughly academic impulse, reducing reason to classification, whereby everything is just a specimen to be stored in a museum drawer. But there is a sense in which Heidegger doesn’t have any position, (or he has many different positions across many different pathways). You, on the other hand, operate with some definite presuppositions about reason and rationality, closely assimilating them to logic and cognition. This is an old and arguably still prevailing tradition, going back to the Latin mistranslation of Aristotle’s saying that man is the rational animal, with “rational” largely meaning cognitive. Any attempt to bring philosophy into proximity with the concerns of art rather than science must then be quickly labeled non-rational, if not irrationalistic, and “romantic”, and the proper boundaries must be policed. Rather than actually looking at the matter at hand and attempting to understand its animating concerns and stakes. Heidegger, of course, belongs to the continental tradition of “objective reason”, to borrow Hegel’s phrase, in which reason inheres or not in the structure of the world, to which thinking and understanding are a response, rather than regarding reason as just a subjective faculty of knowledge, which brings out a different range of concerns than just the “epistemological” securement of knowledge. But then perhaps some “deeper” questions are being raised there, rather than being wrong-footed as illogical or anti-rational, about, say, the situatedness of knowledge (and responsibility for it) in the world and its rootedness in the concerns or needs of life (or power). “Authenticity” is non-criterial, and that, indeed, is a problem, though not because it is merely adventitious. But if there is no (longer) metaphysical unity to the world, nor neo-positivist unified science, nor epistemological foundations, then part of the validity of knowledge must be referred to the authenticity, both the truthfulness and the needfulness, of the projects of the knowers.

I do have a bias against romanticism. (I also have a bias against viewing art in terms of aesthetics, as reduced to the subjective perception of form, fine feelings and good taste). Stereotypically, it involves overblown, indulgent, naively enthusiastic, subjectivistic modes of expression, which could hardly constitute a counter-position, let alone a critique, of excessive rationalism. It’s true that some historically so labeled don’t fit the stereotype, and the greatest of them, such as Hoelderlin, transcend the label itself. But it won’t do to put down all artistic expression to mere romanticism, which can be safely ignored or indulged, nor to oppose art to reason. (Cf. Adorno). But the key issue was the break with romanticism, which Nietzsche effected most of all, which involves the rejection of return, of homecoming, and reconciling the world harmoniously in the bosom of nature or tradition. “Eternal recurrence”, (to which Heidegger oddly adds the phrase “of the same”), is precisely the expression of that break, and the leap into modernism. Which involves “harder”, more rigorous and more objective modes of expression.

That “sheesh on a stick” was an accurate characterization of a move basic to expressionism. Heidegger termed it “Befindlichkeit”. Look it up! But then perhaps you’re discomfitted by the resulting exteriority of the self, or think that Heidegger’s attempt to break-out of idealism and obviate any recourse to the concept of subjectivity didn’t succeed. Adorno sardonically remarked that Dasein was just the Fichtean absolute ego decapitated, (an allusion to the French Revolution chapter in Hegel’s PhG). And later Heidegger criticized earlier Heidegger to precisely that effect. But that exposure of self to world, without which there is no self, won’t be gainsaid by the appeal to the interiority of a purely cognitive ego.

The topic of this thread was a) type fonts and b) Faye vs. Rorty on Heidegger and his Nazi past. I’ve nothing to say about a). It’s Faye who argues that no bien-pensant liberal intellectual should have any truck with Heidegger because he was nothing but a dirty rotten Nazi scoundrel, who should be excluded from the philosophical canon, definitely a gesture of liberalistic suppression. (Though I suspect his book might be a late salvo in the backlash against la pensee soixante-huit). Rorty, who could hardly be more bien-pensant, argues that Heidegger remains a central figure in the transformations of late modern philosophy, who can hardly be dispensed with, since no one else so “deeply”, rigorously, and systematically unearthed and undermined the the presuppositions of traditional philosophic thought and its traces and residues. I’m with Rorty. The work of Heidegger and Wittgenstein together brought out the “centrality” of language to thinking and understanding (and thus knowing and doing) in a way that simply had not been comprehended before, (as opposed to prior appeals to consciousness or “mind” as grounds of thought and knowledge). And in my view, they also undermined the concurrent project of the logical analysis of language, as begging the question, (since language usage is the larger, more extensive “category” and it doesn’t necessarily have a purely logical structure, nor solely logical or cognitive functions). That was a huge game-changer, resulting in the ambiguous “end” of philosophy, which I don’t think we’re done with yet. (I.e. we are still re-thinking our ends).

Now, if I do manage to formulate a response to Geo @ 50, would you please just leave it alone.

@70–72:

I have no desire to get into an exchange of nitpicking tu quoques (or IOW a pissing match). Are you claiming that I’ve significantly misread, mis-interpreted, or mis-represented the rough gist of Heidegger’s work/thought here? (At you’ve just slipped from “anti-rational” to “anti-rationalist”, which are much different matters, however “defined”). Look, Heidegger is not anti-rational or irrationalist in the way of e.g. Ludwig Klages. He has a well-defined reasonably rational method in terms of phenomenology, even as he works it out and revises it as he goes along. (Albeit late, he makes claims to have left phenomenology behind, and even hermeneutics, which becomes “a bringing of tidings”. But even those preposterous claims, if they are to be made out, require the following out of the method he claims to have abandoned, with the latter claim presumably referring to the “sendings” of Being). And Heidegger is clearly pursuing a precedented project in his own wise, that others have pursued otherwise, of a critique of reason with respect to its limits, which makes no sense, if one has simply repudiated reason. (Yes, Kant looms large here). But more, “reason” has lost its unity, is subject to differentiations, and provides no guarantees or justifications of “ultimate” outcomes. (Again Heidegger is not the only one to have noticed that; Max Weber, among others, made analogous observations). Heidegger’s inquiry into the ground of the ground of “reason”, (which might not be the most perspicuous approach, as it hypostatizes and entangles itself with the very metaphysics that it is criticizing), ends up with an “Abgrund”. But then that is the result of a rigorous pursuit of the self-referential critique of reason, and the paradoxes that entails. (Which precisely require re-thinking). It doesn’t suffice to dismiss that as merely “anti-rational”, especially if one appeals to some purely logical method, which itself has its origin in the metaphysical substantialism that is at the root of traditional logic. (Though I have no objection to logic per se, provided one recognizes the limits of its applicability, nor to attempt to devise alternative logical formalizations to attempt to remedy defects. It’s just that logic is not the same as or tantamount to “reason”). To assume otherwise is not only to re-assert, fairly dogmatically, one’s own privileged account of reason or what is rational, but to impute a concealed motivation to undermine “reason” for the sake of some irrational “gain”. When what is at stake is perhaps that reason alone guarantees, justifies, or gains us less than we might have hoped.

As to Nietzsche, I do believe that it was Heidegger who added the tag “of the same”, so as to fit him into his scheme as the last metaphysician. But “mature” Nietzsche is intensely oriented toward the future, “projective”, while drawing on both biological-evolutionary and historicist themes. “Eternal recurrence” involves facing “fate”, but there is no notion that its successive iterations would involve the “same” fate. For Nietzsche, the past returns, but only through the future and that past only returns differently. That is the break with “home-coming”, with the strong implication that the “tradition” of the future must be created anew, is not, will not be, a recovery of the past. Just to add one more point, Nietzsche transforms the romantic cult of genius, as the unconscious child of nature. into an exultation of instinct. Surely, there is a sharp irony directed against any romantic antecedents there. But I think I’m making a fairly conventional interpretation of Nietzsche, and not claiming any sort of originality or expertise here.

As to labeling, well, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Davidson are all significantly “externalists”, but that does little to make fruitful comparison. And one can be, say, an “internalist” about cognition and an “externalist’ about ethics (Kant?). Such labels neither catch the cross-hatchings of implications between different areas of a thinkers work, nor does it capture the precise shadings and degrees of their supposed externalism or whatnot, (since no one believes that, e.g., linguistic signs operate without their understanding). Such an apparatus of labeling is meant to make sure the everything is logically “clear” and methodically derived, so no one goes off the reservation and gets too “original”. But I don’t think it suffices to get at the shadings, complications and even obscurities of differing projects of thinking, nor does it somehow obviate mutual misunderstandings. (Elsewhere, I think you’ve over- and mis-applied the label “counter-Enlightenment”, and here I think you’ve over-generalized the label “romantic”).

As to expressionism and Heidegger, I do think I’ve got it correct here. (Not true, since I think emotions are not responses to one’s sheer situatedness in the world, but rather to relational balances and instabilities with others. But in either case they are response to something going on out there, and not merely subjective, interior or psychological, even if that something is not an object). A fauve and an expressionist painting might seem the same, with marked coloration that “distorts” the scene ostensibly represented. But on reflection, each works differently. And I don’t think that such distinctions are not worth making. But my suspicion is that “romantic” is being invoked because all art is merely subjective, imaginary, merely psychological. such that one can submit to the rigors of reason while enjoying the wishful pleasures of art: cake and eating. But all genuine art, romantic or otherwise, is objective expression, not dependent on authorial intention, though certainly on authorial craft. And works of art have an independent existence, just as much a scientific theories do. (If we do without a reflection or correspondence theory of truth, then the same question pertains to works of art as to scientific theories: what, then, are they responsible to?) For Heidegger, art works are a privileged locus for the “worlding of the world”. Adorno’s alternative is that they are “the most sensitive seismograph of historical experience”. I’ll evade any vexing questions about the cognitive status or truth-value of art works, (since their basic paradox is the convincing power of what is obviously a fake), but if unreal, they are nonetheless worldly happenings: they tell us something of the otherness of the world and others in it, and estrange us from self-satisfied interiority or too easy identifications. Since the notion of philosophical evidence, as opposed to argument, is problematical, then why not avail oneself of a resource for non-objectifying thinking, which doesn’t detract from the genuine accomplishments of objectifying thinking within its place and limits?

“Exteriority” is not from Heidegger, but from the French reception of Heidegger. I’ve no idea who invented the term, but it might have been Levinas, perhaps together with his close friend and co-respondent, Blanchot, since that was pretty much the earliest French reception of Heidegger. It signifies not just the intrication of the particular human existence in the world and its exposure to it, but also its exposure in the “face” of the other. It takes aim at Heidegger’s account of Mitsein, as a participation in the world with others on the basis of common communal standards, if not identical ends, which fails to take into account the immanence of the other in the constitution of the interiority of a self, even “prior” to it. (And as I said above, this appeal to participation in common practical standards as norms as the basis of Mitsein already contains a latent functionalism, which comes out if one compares Heidegger to some of his contemporary fellow travellers on the German right). But perhaps the point is that you should be discomfitted by such exteriority, since it means the permanent disruption, the basic impossibility of any undivided unity to the “identity” of an interior self, which can’t be repaired cognitively, since it’s an existential issue. But then for Levinas, at least, such a divided condition in the world before the other is the very condition of responsibility, “sincerity”, which comes “before” cognitive rationality.

Yes, Quiggin is an economist and he doesn’t have to read Heidegger, nor does anyone else. He gets it a bit wrong in that the critique of the limits of reason refers to Kant, and I don’t think that the poets of the romantic reaction against “cold” reason could do the same duty. But then he, qua economist, might be adverse to considering the ambiguity and ambivalence of technological complexes, since innovation must be had at all costs to maintain the rate of profit, er, investment, and “efficiency” is the universal criterion of economic rationality, which doesn’t acknowledge the limits and damages of such sheer instrumentalism. Better to compensate for such concerns by enjoying a good book of poetry. And, of course, war is bad and self-defeatingly destructive and supporting brutally authoritarian regimes is bad and reprehensible. Who knew? But then in history, human beings don’t have infinite options, nor readily malleable preferences, but must chose nonetheless, with results that are not always a wonder to behold. (To be clear, I’m not implying that Quiggin is stupid, and doesn’t think, in his own wise, about some of these issues. I’m suggesting some of the foregoing might in some wise be relevant to re-thinking the priorities of economics, though he may dismiss it as he pleases).

In case you don’t get it, I’m not an Heideggerian or an enthusiast for him. He’s a highly ambivalent figure, both to behold and in the complexion of his own thinking. My eclectic philosophical preferences lie elsewhere. But I think he is a substantial, considerable thinker, who can’t simply be dismissed lazily as a pompous Nazi blowhard. I just been doing yeoman’s work here in roughly explicating his work, so that some might come to judgment on where his Nazi involvement might fit in. I don’t think it a trivial or readily resolvable issue, but I don’t think it’s the whole story. (If I’d take a guess at how to understand his sudden Nazi enthusiasm, I’d point to the “First System Program of German Idealism”, which was “originally” a progressive-liberal reformist proposal to promulgate a popular religion on the basis of “enlightened” philosophical reflection, and thereby renew the German nation, which Heidegger managed to re-interpret in rightist terms).

John C. Halasz, 11/11/09

‘But to confuse an inquiry into the ground of the grounds of metaphysical rationalism (and its limits) with irrationalism is a question-begging mistake, even if one thinks that is not the most perspicuous way to address such issues.’

John C. Halasz : 06/04/05

‘Whether Heidegger’s thought is “fascist through and through”, as Adorno claimed, is not a question that can be readily and easily decided. Certainly Heidegger was always an arch-conservative thinker veering toward the rechts-radikal, and there is a deep strain of a reactionary, irrationalistic, elitist cult of sacrifice built into his thought. ‘

Hidari @76:

I don’t remember the context of the ’05 quote, but I fail to see what you’re getting at, since I’ve said similar things here. Er, the sentence just above the one you cited from @49; “It’s true that there is an element of a reactionary, irrationalistic cult of sacrifice attached to Heidegger’s otherwise meta-rational thinking”. And Adorno’s claim is mention @29.
Very well, I repeat myself.

Fwiw I don’t endorse Hidari’s or John Quiggin’s dismissal of Heidegger, though.

@81:

What is this? An attempt at modus ponens, because we “agree” on one point, you’ve checked your logic manual and found the p’s and q’s, ergo? No, I’ve been attempting to lay out the “rational” content of Heidegger and separate out any “irrational” residues,- (which goes to assessing his Nazi involvement)- and have thereby exposed myself. You have laid out next to nothing. It would be incumbent on you to lay out what you mean by “rational” and to delineate its limits, if you want to make the charge of “anti-rational(ism)”,- (again a slippage), or “irrationalism” stick. In the absence of that, I can only guess. But is the contingency of human existence “irrational”? Or the contingency of historical epochs and social formations? Is the sense of absurdity a sign of irrationalism, or rather of the failure of rationalism? (Or maybe it’s just a communicative disorder). How do you want to demarcate those limits? And how would you remedy them? (Are Kant, Hegel, Husserl, similarly irrational, in your book, and therefore Heidegger, too? Or is it that the deficiencies and failures of those prior projects authorizes a forgetting and a restoration of “logical” norms?)

Wittgenstein analogized what he was up to with psychoanalysis, not because he was sympathetic to psychologism, but because philosophical theories were defensive structures, basically against the “heartache and thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to”, (but also implicitly, at least, against exposure to the other), by which philosophers abstracted themselves from, evaded, buttressed against or hid out from the “real” issues. But contrary to Freud, who claimed to uncover the hidden sense behind apparent non-sense,Wittgenstein sought to uncover the hidden non-sense behind apparent “rational” sense. (Hence the opening of PI, which shows the impossibility of purely ostensive definition, is directed against Russell’s notion that the primary form of knowledge is “by acquaintance”. What could be more reasonable than that?) So maybe relaxing the boundaries of theoretical “rationality” to look at its own hidden non-sense might be in order here. Before one engages in angry, resentful imputations of “irrationality” and seeks to “triumph”over it.

No, it’s not been me who’s been operating in bad faith here, Prof. Holbo. It’s you. Now go back to your comic books or whatnot, boy.

#77 JCH You certainly have some pretty strong assumptions about economists (Try Googling Quiggin+efficiency+excessive for example).

No doubt, as a mere user of the results of philosophical work, my concerns are banal and philistine. I would like to find out about the limits of reason both in epistemological terms (to what extent can economic theories be said to be confirmed or refuted by evidence or logical critique) and as an issue in economics and decision theory (to what extent can people anticipate and plan for all possible contingencies, and how can we reason about the limits on such anticipation and planning). Some things I’ve read suggest that Heidegger might have something useful to say on these questions, but what I’ve looked at is very hard going. And then there’s the whole Nazi thing. This thread (your defences even more than Hidari’s criticism) have convinced me that I can save my time. As you say, I don’t have to read Heidegger, and I intend to exercise my rights in this respect.

But if anyone can point me to philosophers who would actually be helpful to me on the questions I’ve mentioned, I would be very grateful.

because where’s the harm in saying that poetry is ‘not-rational’, or ‘anti-rational’ in this very rough, ordinary sense?

I’m not sure if great harm is being done, but saying so would be ignorant nonsense. Sorry to be so brusque, but you can’t have your cake and eat it.

I think the main problem with this thread is the confusion between ‘irrational’, ‘anti-rational’, ‘anti-rationalist’, also ‘rational’ and ‘rationalist’, and what is meant by thesee terms, and whether these are meant as criticisms of Heidegger’s philosophy in whole or in part. There also seems in some quarters to be a level of personal hostility and suspicion directed at other participants that is a bit hard to understand.

90:Yeah, John, you’re the Big Dog

91:interrogate the other’s position while the other seems unwilling to engage

It’s always about the framing and controlling the discourse, isn’t it? Willing to engage on whose terms, about what?

The Kotsko-Holbo disputes always ended in accusations of “bad faith” versus “unwillingness to engage.” Kotsko had trouble describing what Holbo was really doing, I certainly could do no better than he. There are questions of method, and questions of substance. The K-H arguments were usually about Zizek, and IIRC, the incomprehensibility of the “Real” or “negation of the negation” or whatever (Anglo-American vs Continental?). Whatever. I sense an ideological substrate.

I often try to do an amateurish ignorant kind of discourse analysis on comment threads. Who jumps in, with what intent, etc. I have always felt, even when I understood very little of what he said, that Halasz is trying to help, to inform, to explain.

Holbo is more amusing.

Referring back to my #61 and the recent #92 I’ll try to flesh things out with a couple of examples, so here goes “rational vs the other thing”:

1.) philosophy – rational or the other thing?

It always amazes me how current philosophers simply jump the gun, more or less ignore 2000 years of criticism of / investigation into “rationality” and end up contrasting “philosophy” = rational (and maybe mathematics/physics, even though most of them don’t really have a clue when it comes to that) with “most other stuff” = not rational/insufficiently rational or whatever. Such statements are so swiping as to be completely embarrassing in that they convey either actual or wilful ignorance of the tradition.

2.) art – rational or the other thing?

I’m a film editor and while I’m not sure you would want to call the end product of my efforts art (I don’t care and will leave that to others), I can assure you both from my own experience and that of artists I know, that the production of such works in almost all cases entails a ton of conscious cognitive work – as can easily be seen when one looks at the endless revisions most works of art go through – on the part of those producing it, possibly more cognitive effort, gasp, than goes into your bog standard academic paper. So the whole “strike of genius in the middle of the night” or “unconscious outpouring of emotion that translates immediately into a work of art” is a bunch of hooey that applies in maybe 1 of a 1000 cases. The same goes for the Neo-platonist “artists are lying – philosophy/science speaks the truth” assumption in all its variations.

3.) The self – rational or the other thing?

Try therapy, or deconstruction for that matter – you might be surprised.

Considering the extensive amount of oversimplification you have engaged in above, I think you are not really in a position to voice complaints in this regard.

it is reasonable to think [Heidegger] is an anti-rationalist who tips over at points into a kind of mystical irrationalism

I missed a bunch of posts in the middle there, probably around the time the baby changed my screen resolution to an illegal value, and anyway I make it a kind of policy to stay away from certain kinds of trolls.

But what I want to know is this: Has he provided a philosophical argument–a convincing argument using the tools of philosophy–in favor of his anti-rationalism and mystical irrationalism; and do we really have to assume he has done so, unless and until he is proved either not to have been a real philosopher (as Faye would have it), or excluded on the grounds of being a Nazi, or something? (I am assuming that we cannot replace the second possibility by something like “he was a philosopher and that means he is not in favor of anti-rationalism and mystical irrationalism, so don’t you average NYT readers worry your pretty little heads,” while at the same time those pre-inclined to mystical irrationalism can put Being and Time on their shelves and feel they are not only justified but actually academically superior to people who think the text is, you know, kind of turgid and difficult.)

@100 looks a little hostile in retrospect. I suppose I should ask whether mysticism etc. is really what Heidegger is arguing in favor of, as opposed to whether this is something people who try to understand his real point might conclude about him.

I’m sure as a film editor you have to acquire the ability to make decisive, reliable, good ‘this is good/this is bad/this is not quite there yet’ judgments. Are these rational? Yes, but no. You aren’t just waiting for Zeus to tell you what to do, or going out to flounce in the ruins. But it is also true that you can’t really give reasons for your judgments in a lot of cases.

But this is wrong: it is like saying that when one looks at the sky and says: it is blue! one is being irrational. Of course one isn’t; one is being quite rational when one looks at something that doesn’t work and says `this doesn’t work’. The reason being, of course, it doesn’t work. And one might not be able to articulate in great detail — although you should be very wary when you say this, because in fact I rather think most artists could get quite reasoned about this sort of thing — why it doesn’t work, but the fact remains: it doesn’t work.

When I see a tree I do not go: oh, that is a plant with a trunk and leaves and so-forth; it is a tree! I go: it is a tree, and that is entirely rational.

re #103

“Look”, I’m trying to be reasonably polite here, John, but when you’re on a roll you tend to say stuff that is just preposterous and the caveats you regularly add to such statements, while they are designed to make your position appear more complex than it actually is, are for the most part cya rhetoric. E.g.:

Hegel is “irrational”? – I really don’t know what that is even supposed to mean. Have you really read all the stuff needed to understand Hegel? Have you read him closely (there’s also a problem with reading him in translation)? Have you made a good-faith attempt to understand what he’s trying to say, who and what he was responding to, why he is saying the things he does? Frankly, I doubt it, because had you, it would be strange to come up with such a statement as a result.

But my main point is: even if you grant that there isn’t a bright line between “the rational” and whatever else, you are still heavily relying on those concepts as delimiters of your position, which seeks to locate things somewhere along a scale ranging from a to non-a. The trouble with doing that is not the differentiation as such between statements and behaviours we might want to consider slightly more or less rational – we do that and, as a limited and superficial tool of categorizing stuff, doing so might be useful in day to day life. The trouble is rather, that when one dares to look closer, the dichotomy evaporates: there simply is no “this vs. that” and efforts to force such a distinction upon the phenomena in question regularly fail to do justice to them in order to maintain an artificial concept that just doesn’t hold much water. In an effort to be productive, I’ll provide further examples below:

1.) Editing is partly an intuitive process, correct, but I question the very idea that intuition is something non-rational. One might not always be fully conscious of what one is doing, but then a programmer writing code, a mathematician coming up with a proof or and academic writing a paper aren’t either. Also, it’s really not as if the editor just comes up with stuff and that is that, but rather he is bound by a script, the logic of a narrative and most importantly he is in a constant back and forth with the director, so it is a very conscious and discursive process, and you better be able to explain, jusify and defend all of your decisions (on the last film I’ve done, we must have gone through somewhere around 25 versions of the edit and exchanged 150 emails, each debating several changes). And there are reasons why some things work and others don’t and these reasons can be pinpointed. This is so, because most people share a natural sense of rhythm and coherence, which is your benchmark as an editor – watch a badly edited film and you’ll see immediately what I mean. (Much the same as the above can be said about color grading.)

2.) A couple of my friends are software developers and one might think that writing code is for the most part a rational and logical process – but that just isn’t the case. Most software of some complexity is written by a team of coders who each have their own personal approach to problem solving, their own style of writing code and their own, often exemely strong, convictions on how software should be written – these aspects are to a large part what one might want to call “non-rational”, emotional or personal and both the coders, as well as the project managers who have see these things through, can go on forever about the difficult and often annoying process of streamlining all this quirkiness into a functional end-product. And while they all have their own, abstract vision of how this should be done in an “objective”, logical manner, most software code is a big, cobbled together amalgam of hacks, copy and paste bits and quick fixes to underlying structural problems. Believe me, there is surprisingly little objectivity or stringent logic involved.

3.) I’ll be brief, because this is already very long: whenever some philosopher throws the logic book at you to defend a rationalist position or to bolster claims that analytic pilosophy is oh so scientific, while the “continental” version is a bunch of incoherent gibberish – in such case it’s a good move to simply mention the name Quine.

So in most matter, humans are just muddling through, there is no way of clearly distinguishing the rational from the non-rational parts of their work and the dichotomy of rationality and its other, even if proposed with a lot of caveats, is so abstract as to be quite useless.

Yes, logic. You may not realise this but your problem is Analytic training, where someone delivers a paper, and some small technical, logical point is raised to attempt to knock the whole thing down. But that’s mere academic gamesmanship. There is nothing wrong with clarifying or amending a point. But philosophical arguments come as complex, cross-implicated wholes, which are not reducible to a sequential set of single inferential steps. Further, they involve distinct projects, which motivate them, in terms of a response to a felt need or lack within the overall “field”. They are not all of the same piece and subject to a singular criterion of logical technique. In fact, the whole Analytic attempt to develop philosophy, (whatever is left of it), as the elaboration of logical techniques of argument is mistaken in my book, not just because logic is not something purely self-sufficient, but has distinct limits, but because it amounts to continuing the metaphysical imperative to complete systematicity, all the while resulting in the elaboration, with ever greater refinements, of any and all positions, resulting in sheer argumentative impasses, ending in its own self-defeat. But then philosophical “problems” are aporetic puzzles, and are not susceptible to being stuffed into a definitively defined pro[fessional problematic and “solved” piece-meal, in the manner of “normal” science. That’s precisely the sort of appeal to sheer technicity that Heidegger is criticizing.

You still don’t get it, do you. You must stop using any argument that might be described as ‘logic’ or involving a ‘technical’ point. You must deal only in complete theories, treating them as indivisible wholes, though parts of them may be amended or clarified. You must stop treating philosophical arguments as all suspectible to criticism for being illogical – which is tantamount to assessing them merely on the basis of something You must end the project – which you with your robotic lack of self-awareness you may not realise you are engaged in – of attempting to develop philosophy as the elaboration of logical techniques of argument.

hmm, submitted early by accident, or maybe as a result of subconscious desire to stop wasting time.

There’s a book I read the other week by some philosopher from a University in South of England about creativity that was very much taken by the tailoring comparison. Unfortunately, all I can remember was that it was very British analytical, in a very studiedly informal way, it was from the ’60/70s, and the chap had been a Fellow at Oxbridge.

Tim, why don’t you tell us what’s wrong with Hegel, Quine or Davidson – that might actually be interesting. It’s perfectly possible to criticize holism in a constructive way, there are many examples of eminent philosophers doing so – but just ranting about it without an argument is a bit naff really.

I’m only saying that you seem to have problems with holism (I think you have criticized it before) and mentioned three of its preeminent proponents. It might be interesting to find out what lies at the heart of your criticism and take it from there.

Well, thankfully, this thread is dead. But, just to add to its demise… As far as I’m concerned, it was about Heidegger and not about Holbo. It was Holbo, no doubt with proprietary zeal, who managed to make it about Holbo, to the extent that it ever was. (So it’s not a matter of equal “guilt”; some might feel more sinned against than sinning, though, no doubt, there is always a multitude of sins for love to covereth). The basic point at issue was this: any attempt to deploy the means of reason to critique the limits of reason is inherently paradoxical, (indeed, downright aporetic). And it’s no use to claim to be vouchsafed against any such paradox, since that is to have recourse to the dogmatic self-grounding “authority” of reason. (Nor is the matter to be confused with radical philosophical skepticism, which it was the merit of Wittgenstein to have recognized doesn’t exist, can not be raised coherently as a question, let alone a position, except on the basis of confusion, error, or obfuscation). Hence for Holbo to claim that what I termed “meta-rational” is “anti-rational” is question-begging. It is incumbent upon him, then to “define” or specify what he means by “rational”, 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”. Holbo responds simply that we all understand what is meant roughly by “rational” in an ordinary sense. 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. Then we get a sophistry about how, of, course, some unnamed irrationalist would be claiming to be criticizing “reason”, however incompetently, (which hovers evasively between an assertion and a negation). Hence by cherry-picking only opportunistically selected points from a, er, longer explication/expatiation, which I have some reason to believe was not entirely unclear or inferentially incoherent, a snarking tu quoque pissing match ensues, which disrupts any conversation about the subject matter and diminishes any interest that might be had in the thread.

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.

Look. I’m slower than most. I try and gather together my teeming thoughts and fit them together in a post that is as “clear”, consecutive, coherent, and “complete” as I can muster. It takes some time and effort, but is slightly more remunerative than “Mechanical Turk”. Hence the long paragraphs, the sometimes tortured syntax as I try to fit in all the bits of thought together, the overlooked typos, etc. I’m well aware it might seem self-absorbed and gnarly. And many might scroll past, which is fine. I’m also aware my comment might just be skimmed, and pounced on opportunistically about some particular point, without addressing the balance of what I’ve tried to convey. (It’s a cut-and-paste world, though that didn’t just begin with the internet). Something of that has gone on here. But I’m not a partisan of some unmitigated holism. Nor a Heidegger fan-boy. (Did you just miss the mention of Heidegger’s “gigantic” holism, though that too is a bit of a one-sided misprision. The only thing I definitively said about “holism” is that all interesting philosophies will manifest it in some form or degree, because they involve a cross-implication of disparate matters, topics or concerns, with a quasi-systematic, but never complete implicature. And that is a matter that needs attending to, though I think it a mistake to think that such a cross-stitching of different areas of thought carry necessarily any metaphysical implication of how the world “must” then be).

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”.

That’s better.