enowning
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
 
Abraham Stone examines the controversy between Carnap and Heidegger on who's just doing metaphysics. To summarize:
The problem is not that Heidegger challenges logic, but that he thinks he can challenge it by asserting something which is not a judgment about any being, and over which logic therefore has no sovereignty. This means that, like it or not, Heidegger has in fact placed a limit on the reach of science: he has himself “come to the determination that his questions and answers are not unitable with the mode of thinking of science”. And it is due to that mistake that he remains, as Carnap says, merely one of “the numerous metaphysicians of the present or the past”-rather, that is, than becoming, as he might have, a rare philosopher of the future.

So, in summary, what is Carnap’s accusation against Heidegger? He accuses him of trying to use assertions where only expression is appropriate—and where, given the danger involved, even expression ought to be limited to brief hints. He accuses him, in particular, of putting himself (or leaving himself) in a position where he must treat religious dread as if it revealed a being, an object—accuses him, that is, of idolatry, or (what comes to the same thing from a Kantian point of view) of putting a theoretical dogmatics before ethics. This is a very serious criticism indeed. Without claiming (as I certainly would not) that it is one against which Heidegger could have no defense, I would point out two things about it. First, it is a criticism to which, as I understand it, Heidegger seriously and repeatedly responded. Second, it is a criticism which finds echoes in later members of Heidegger’s own, Continental, philosophical tradition (e.g. in Levinas). This, I think, is enough to establish what I set out to here: not an attack on or defense of either Carnap or Heidegger, but simply a case for taking the one as a serious reader of the other.
It comes back which is more fundamental: logic or ontology? Does logic depend on ontology? Is logic something that can be put in a box, bracketed, by ontology--by thinking outside the box. Or is logic privileged, and anything not covered by logic merely so much ado about nothing?
 
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