Sunday, October 31, 2004
Received Paul Edward's book Heidegger's Confusions from Prometheus Press.
As can be gathered from the title, this is an anti-Heideger book, but unlike many other books out there with similar intentions, that invent a strawman to punch, this one is quite well informed about Heidegger's works and reasonable in many places. For starters, it quickly disposes with Heidegger the Nazi and concentrates on Heidegger the thinker. It proceeds by identifying some of the inconsistencies in Heidegger's works. These inconsistencies are familiar to writers sympathetic to Heidegger's thinking, and are the subject of different interpretations and much debate. The author is perhaps most critical of those that have sympathetically translated and commented on Heidegger's way of thinking.
In part the book is about comparing what is said about being in different translated passages and it's all jolly good fun. The ancient problem of being as the attribute of every entity that that cannot be isolated is revisited. Similar criticisms could, of course, also be raised about anything else that is important to humans but impossible to measure scientifically, like poetry.
If a philosopher is a lover of wisdom, as per the Greek, then how does Mr. Edwards understand the word love? Might not all his criticisms of being also be leveled at love? Is he merely reiterating that science cannot say anything outside the box it has defined for itself?
Although the book quotes extensively from Heidegger translations, it feels driven more by the history of Being & Time's penetration of the anglophone world, than by Heidegger's way of thinking.
Well, withstanding criticisms is a key factor, a requirement, for any reasonable thought. If Heidegger's way of thinking has a future in philosophy, it will be in part because it weathers the criticisms in this book. I think it already has, but if you are an anti-Heidegger frame of mind, feel that it's all wrong at a gut level, and want to explain why, this book a good starting point.
And you'll have to read a lot more Heidegger for your arguments to improve beyond this book. A double-edged sword that. ¶ 1:57 PM
As can be gathered from the title, this is an anti-Heideger book, but unlike many other books out there with similar intentions, that invent a strawman to punch, this one is quite well informed about Heidegger's works and reasonable in many places. For starters, it quickly disposes with Heidegger the Nazi and concentrates on Heidegger the thinker. It proceeds by identifying some of the inconsistencies in Heidegger's works. These inconsistencies are familiar to writers sympathetic to Heidegger's thinking, and are the subject of different interpretations and much debate. The author is perhaps most critical of those that have sympathetically translated and commented on Heidegger's way of thinking.
In part the book is about comparing what is said about being in different translated passages and it's all jolly good fun. The ancient problem of being as the attribute of every entity that that cannot be isolated is revisited. Similar criticisms could, of course, also be raised about anything else that is important to humans but impossible to measure scientifically, like poetry.
If a philosopher is a lover of wisdom, as per the Greek, then how does Mr. Edwards understand the word love? Might not all his criticisms of being also be leveled at love? Is he merely reiterating that science cannot say anything outside the box it has defined for itself?
Although the book quotes extensively from Heidegger translations, it feels driven more by the history of Being & Time's penetration of the anglophone world, than by Heidegger's way of thinking.
I have given a few samples of Heidegger word-torrents, but for the most part I have extracted the more or less discussable conclusions. No matter what the starting point of a discussion is in the later works, whether it is a passage from Parmenides, a poem from Hölderlin, or a quotation from Nietzsche, the end is always the same: Being west, the Presence presences, Being conceals itself but reveals itself in its very concealment or the other way around, the Appropriation appropriates (I skipped this one out of mercy for my readers),But wait, that's the best bit! And how to quantify that mercy? Precisely.
Well, withstanding criticisms is a key factor, a requirement, for any reasonable thought. If Heidegger's way of thinking has a future in philosophy, it will be in part because it weathers the criticisms in this book. I think it already has, but if you are an anti-Heidegger frame of mind, feel that it's all wrong at a gut level, and want to explain why, this book a good starting point.
And you'll have to read a lot more Heidegger for your arguments to improve beyond this book. A double-edged sword that. ¶ 1:57 PM
