The Necessity, Structure, and Priority of the Question of Being
§1 The Necessity for Explicitly Restating the Question of Being
In the opening epigraph and the initial section of the Introduction, Heidegger develops what will come to be the central concern of his whole philosophical project, not just in Being and Time, but throughout his career, although it will take on different forms after 'the turn [Kehre]' in his thought beginning around 1930. It amounts to a seemingly simple question: what is the meaning [Sinn] of 'being' [Sein]? According to Heidegger, today not only do we lack an answer to this question, but we have forgotten it entirely. Even more, we aren't even 'perplexed' by our inability to define the meaning of being. As a result, he wants to 'reawaken' an appreciation for our understanding of being. Heidegger sees the aim of his analysis in Being and Time as 'to work out the question of the meaning of being' by way of 'an interpretation of time as the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of being.'1
Before we go any further, I want to skip around a bit here in order to draw out just what Heidegger means by 'being' [Sein]. He defines 'being' as 'that which determines entities [Seiendes]2 as entities, that on the basis of which entities are already understood, however we may discuss them in detail.'3
By 'determines' Heidegger does not mean anything causal. Since being is itself 'not an entity,' it would be misguided to go about 'defining entities as entities by tracing them back in their origin to some other entities, as if being [Sein] had the character of some possible entity.'4
Notes
1. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 1. At this point, I'm going to use the somewhat standard English translation of Being and Time by Macquarrie and Robinson. I have the Joan Stambaugh translation, which has been revised by Dennis J. Schmidt, as well. I'll give a heads up by way of a footnote to which translation I use. But, initially, it should be assumed that the quotations I grab from Being and Time are from the Macquarrie and Robinson edition. Also, it should be pointed out, I take liberties with the translation at points where I disagree with the interpretation of Macquarrie and Robinson. Specifically, I've chosen to not translate Sein as 'Being' here, but as 'being,' since it takes away the mystical connotation.
2. Seiendes can be translated as 'entity' or 'entities,' as in the Macquarrie and Robinson translation (this is in order to distinguish it from being [Sein]), or as 'existent' (Stambaugh's choice, though she usually simply translates it as 'being' wherever the difference between Sein and Seiendes is explicit). But Charles B. Guignon makes the case that it's better to translate Seiendes as 'what-is': 'Such translations ignore the fact that das Seiendes is singular and refers not to a collection of items or (even more misleading) "things" or "objects." See his Preface in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, 2nd ed., edited by Charles Guignon (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. xxiv-xxv. I somewhat sympathize with this view, but I'm going to go with the standard 'entities,' considering it's used predominately in a lot of the secondary literature, although Dreyfus, Blattner and Haugeland have together developed an agreed upon terminology of their own.
3. Heidegger, op cit., p. 25-26.
4. Ibid., p. 26.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Introduction
Martin Heidegger is inarguably one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century—and from 1933-45 he was openly a Nazi. How enthusiastic of a Nazi he was, and whether or not this means anything for how his philosophy should be interpreted, or if we should read him at all,1 has come to be debated and discussed almost as much as his philosophy itself.
It took a while for scholars and practicing philosophers to come to terms with the full extent of Heidegger's relationship with Nazism. Judging from his initial reception, the French never seemed to care either way (aside from Bourdieu2) until Victor Farias, a former student of Heidegger, published his Heidegger et le nazisme in 1987.3 What could before be passed off as an 'error' or flirtation by Heidegger's apologists became undoubtedly something more nefarious.4 Further complicating the issue is that Heidegger never implicated himself in his guilt.5 For Richard Rorty, interviewed in the BBC documentary Human, All Too Human, Heidegger is an exemplary case of a 'bad man writing a spectacular book.'
Today, despite of this, Heidegger is embraced by a growing number of philosophers working in the analytic tradition—Hubert Dreyfus, John Haugeland, William Blattner, Charles Taylor, to name a few—and it is practically impossible to understand 20th century continental philosophy without him. Foucault acknowledged that Heidegger was 'the essential philosopher' and that his 'entire philosophical development was determined by [his] reading of Heidegger' (though Nietzsche ultimately came out on top).6 Derrida was Heidegger's most obvious disciple. Merleau-Ponty's influence is heavily indebted to Heidegger's silence concerning the body and perception in Being and Time. Bourdieu, in conversation with Dreyfus, called Heidegger his 'first love' in philosophy. And Habermas, originally enamored by Heidegger as a student but who denounced him after he stumbled upon Heidegger's pronouncement of 'the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism' in a lecture of 1935, can still find it in himself to declare Being and Time the greatest work of philosophy since Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. While Hannah Arendt, famous for her 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism, herself a former student of Heidegger and, more interestingly, a Jew—not to mention his one-time lover—referred to him before the publication of Being and Time as 'the hidden King' of philosophy. It goes without saying that the reputation Heidegger has enjoyed is complicated by the questioning of the relation between two extremes: his profound and original contribution to philosophy, and his unquestionable involvement with Nazism.
Adding to the history of the many ambivalent and controversial responses to his work—and something that makes approaching Heidegger difficult to navigate, not just morally but intellectually—is the obscurity of his writing. Heidegger's prose prompted A. J. Ayer to denounce him as a 'charlatan'. Carnap basically founded logical positivism on his encounter with Heidegger in his influential article, 'The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language,' which was published in 1932 on the cusp of Heidegger's most fervent embrace of Nazism as rector of the University of Freiburg. Adorno wrote his The Jargon of Authenticity in response to Heidegger and other existential authors, who he saw as undermining the very authenticity and freedom they sought to advance through an abuse of language that was entangled within the logic of contemporary capitalism.
[Post in progress.]
Notes
1. See Immanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-35 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Faye represents the latest attempt to directly link Heidegger's philosophy to Nazism. See also Adam Kirsch's review, 'The Jewish Question: Martin Heidegger,' New York Times, May 1, 2010.
2. Bourdieu published a book on the connection between Heidegger's thought and politics in 1975. For an English translation, see The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (Stanford: Standford University Press, 1991).
3. It was an event that inaugurated a public debate among many European intellectuals and prompted Jean-Francois Lyotard to publish Heidegger and 'the Jews' (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). Richard Wolin has collected and presented with an introduction many of the contributions to this debate, along with relevant texts by Heidegger, as editor of The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992). Derrida's response is notably absent from the volume due to a legal quibble with Wolin. For a discussion of this see Thomas Sheehan's review, 'A Normal Nazi,' The New York Review of Books, January 14, 1993.
4. When Heidegger turned 80 years-old in 1969, Hannah Arendt contended during a radio address in West Germany that his affiliation with Nazism was an 'escapade' that should not influence how the work of Heidegger is understood, apart from his politics. See Kirsch, op. cit. However Farias' book, along with Hugo Ott's Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie, which was published shortly after, and with the dearth of articles and books on Heidegger's politics that followed, has made any apology for Heidegger which argues that his Nazism was somehow 'episodic' impossible.
5. 'What is irritating is the unwillingness and the inability of this philosopher, after the end of the Nazi regime, to admit his error with so much as one sentence—an error fraught with political consequences.' Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990), p. 155.
6. Qtd. in Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, eds. Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters (Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 2003), p. 3. The quote comes from an interview Foucault gave shortly before his death in 1984.
Today, despite of this, Heidegger is embraced by a growing number of philosophers working in the analytic tradition—Hubert Dreyfus, John Haugeland, William Blattner, Charles Taylor, to name a few—and it is practically impossible to understand 20th century continental philosophy without him. Foucault acknowledged that Heidegger was 'the essential philosopher' and that his 'entire philosophical development was determined by [his] reading of Heidegger' (though Nietzsche ultimately came out on top).6 Derrida was Heidegger's most obvious disciple. Merleau-Ponty's influence is heavily indebted to Heidegger's silence concerning the body and perception in Being and Time. Bourdieu, in conversation with Dreyfus, called Heidegger his 'first love' in philosophy. And Habermas, originally enamored by Heidegger as a student but who denounced him after he stumbled upon Heidegger's pronouncement of 'the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism' in a lecture of 1935, can still find it in himself to declare Being and Time the greatest work of philosophy since Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. While Hannah Arendt, famous for her 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism, herself a former student of Heidegger and, more interestingly, a Jew—not to mention his one-time lover—referred to him before the publication of Being and Time as 'the hidden King' of philosophy. It goes without saying that the reputation Heidegger has enjoyed is complicated by the questioning of the relation between two extremes: his profound and original contribution to philosophy, and his unquestionable involvement with Nazism.
Adding to the history of the many ambivalent and controversial responses to his work—and something that makes approaching Heidegger difficult to navigate, not just morally but intellectually—is the obscurity of his writing. Heidegger's prose prompted A. J. Ayer to denounce him as a 'charlatan'. Carnap basically founded logical positivism on his encounter with Heidegger in his influential article, 'The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language,' which was published in 1932 on the cusp of Heidegger's most fervent embrace of Nazism as rector of the University of Freiburg. Adorno wrote his The Jargon of Authenticity in response to Heidegger and other existential authors, who he saw as undermining the very authenticity and freedom they sought to advance through an abuse of language that was entangled within the logic of contemporary capitalism.
[Post in progress.]
Notes
1. See Immanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-35 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Faye represents the latest attempt to directly link Heidegger's philosophy to Nazism. See also Adam Kirsch's review, 'The Jewish Question: Martin Heidegger,' New York Times, May 1, 2010.
2. Bourdieu published a book on the connection between Heidegger's thought and politics in 1975. For an English translation, see The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (Stanford: Standford University Press, 1991).
3. It was an event that inaugurated a public debate among many European intellectuals and prompted Jean-Francois Lyotard to publish Heidegger and 'the Jews' (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). Richard Wolin has collected and presented with an introduction many of the contributions to this debate, along with relevant texts by Heidegger, as editor of The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992). Derrida's response is notably absent from the volume due to a legal quibble with Wolin. For a discussion of this see Thomas Sheehan's review, 'A Normal Nazi,' The New York Review of Books, January 14, 1993.
4. When Heidegger turned 80 years-old in 1969, Hannah Arendt contended during a radio address in West Germany that his affiliation with Nazism was an 'escapade' that should not influence how the work of Heidegger is understood, apart from his politics. See Kirsch, op. cit. However Farias' book, along with Hugo Ott's Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie, which was published shortly after, and with the dearth of articles and books on Heidegger's politics that followed, has made any apology for Heidegger which argues that his Nazism was somehow 'episodic' impossible.
5. 'What is irritating is the unwillingness and the inability of this philosopher, after the end of the Nazi regime, to admit his error with so much as one sentence—an error fraught with political consequences.' Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990), p. 155.
6. Qtd. in Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, eds. Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters (Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 2003), p. 3. The quote comes from an interview Foucault gave shortly before his death in 1984.
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