enowning
Sunday, January 02, 2011
 
Thomas Langan's problem with Heidegger.
Despite this constant awareness of the reality and fundamental position of the Seiende as thing-in-itself, despite his apparent realization that the otherness of the Seiende is somehow a controlling factor in our encounter with things, Heidegger at no time squarely confronts the problem of the otherness of the thing as otherness. The lack seems even more acute when we have penetrated the fourfold erection of the thing to the source of all meaning, even in Seienden revealed in the past: it is only the projection of Dasein which can be the source of the “other’s” meaning—i.e., a source that is not other at all! Heidegger renders great service to contemporary thought by warning us against a naive realism that would ignore the inevitable coloration of the thing by the interpretative intentional horizon within which we encounter it, and against a transcendental idealism which, denying access to the thing-in-itself, would destroy the possibility of our proceeding beyond positivism without succumbing to arbitrary subjectivism. He nevertheless leaves us without the principles of a solution to this twofold problem.

P. 229
 
Comments:
MH's discussion in Origin of the Art Work gives the work so much otherness that his conception boggles esthetics. MH's later formulation of the fourfold continues down the same path.

Father Langan would seem to share the critical perspective of Derrida, as does his colleague Caputo. Caputo's analysis is valuable. His conclusion that MH does not offer anything that cannot already be found in the Roman Catholic tradition, however, seems based on Caputo's bias.
 
So....Langan (or Caputo) doesn't seem that far from reading MH as neo-scholastic.

against a transcendental idealism which, denying access to the thing-in-itself, would destroy the possibility of our proceeding beyond positivism.........

these sorts of grand statements seem rather typical of postmodernism (including the religious sort). Kant's "rose-colored spectacles" can hardly be denied--we can't step outside of our own perceptive givens (transcendental or not), such as humans' visual apparatus itself. Most positivists agreed with that, a refused the grand tradition, ie isms


Humans posit various ontologies, and weigh them according to various criteria--but Im still tempted to agree with Quine that the final word, ontologically speaking, tends to be pragmatist; the proof's in the pudding, or "cash value of truth," however ugly or reductionist. Even in a normative sense--or religious-- that could be said to hold: the categorical imperative matters because rational humans via the CI, or something like it (even...sunday school) pause to consider their potential acts as universalized--to some degree (and in many situations, we do).
 
"[Caputo's] conclusion that MH does not offer anything that cannot already be found in the Roman Catholic tradition"

If that's the case, then we wouldn't know that the ontological difference already existed in the Roman tradition if Heidegger had not unconcealed it -- or remembered it, if you're a Platonist.

I'll post the remarks by Borges on how Kafka uncovers his precursors.
 
I believe that Heidegger, along with his immediate predecessor Nietzsche, mostly sides with.... Callicles' faction (from "Gorgias") in scorning Socratic reason, objective justice and...procedure for lack of a better term--instead of Nous, it's win, baybe, win. MH's Beying may be rather more complex than that offered by Nietzsche--with scholastic aspects--but they're on the same team--e.g. eliminating the proceduralism had political aspects as well (as did the anti-Kantian ism). Beying as conducive to occidental Dasein, which is to say...Deutschland ueber alles. (thats not the end of the story, but a big part of it)
 
There does seem to be a consistent pattern that many of these guys consider their own context superior to everyone else's. I suppose German readers will consider such things in Nietzsche and Heidegger, but to everyone else, except Germanophiles, it is just a cointingent curiosity, and they read them for their broader insights--that everything is contingency. So it goes.
 
Isn't this just more dualistic rearranging of the dust? The whole point of Marty's Phenomenology is to study the encounter of Dasein with beings, and I always felt he took great care to never boil that encounter down to one being or the other. This complaint strikes me as quaintly Modern.
 
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