Martin Heidegger (part 1)

In the four major divisions of Continental Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction, Andrew Cutrofello (the Virgil of my infernal summer vacation) allots to Martin Heidegger three chapters. That’s one more than any other twentieth-century philosopher gets. So I’m splitting my thoughts on this difficult philosopher into three posts, one for each section. Today’s edition amounts to an introduction not so much to Heidegger’s theoretical apparatus (as have my first two posts, on Bergson and Husserl) as to his privileged yet contested status in the recent history of philosophy.

Many commentators have accused Heidegger of charlatanry. Apparently it’s obligatory to mention this at the commencement of any piece of exegetical writing about Heidegger, whether the writer at hand is friendly or hostile to Heidegger’s work. The most frequently cited objection regards his non-conformity to analytic philosophy’s standards of philosophical rigor. Very similar accusations were leveled at Jacques Derrida by analytic philosophers protesting Cambridge’s decision to bestow upon Derrida an honorary degree. In both cases the opponents’ objections are intended to shore up a self-imposed boundary separating philosophy from literature, thus at once protecting analytic philosophy’s constructed access to unambiguously statable, definitely demonstrable truths, as well as legitimating the ever lingering logical-positivistic claim (never fully eradicable from the analyticist project) that only such truths should be admissible to philosophical discourse.

The rhetoric of Roger Scruton, a conservative British philosopher and popularizer of the history of philosophy, makes these stakes quite clear. He complains that Heidgger’s language is “metaphorical and contorted to the point almost of incomprehensibility” so that no one can “understand [it] completely” (A Short History of Modern Philosophy, 270). Furthermore, Heidegger “does not give any arguments for the truth of what he says,” relying instead exclusively upon “compound assertions, with hardly a ‘thus,’ ‘therefore,’ ‘possibly,’ or ‘it might follow that,’ to indicate the relations which are supposed to hold between them.” “Even if the whole of Heidegger’s philosophy is both meaningful and true, therefore, we have yet to be given a reason to accept it. Looked at critically, Heidegger’s ideas seem like spectral visions in the realm of thought; vast, intangible shadows cast by language” (274).

Just a few years after his death, Derrida’s legacy is still in the process of being decided. It seems likely that his star, so very bright in the intellectual climate of the 1980s, will finally be eclipsed by that of Gilles Deleuze—but I’ll further address that speculation in a few weeks. Setting Derrida aside, it’s clear that, outside the narrow confines of analytic philosophy, Heidegger’s current influence is almost unparalleled among early-to-mid-twentieth-century philosophers. (His only serious competitors in a popularity contest held today would be Wittgenstein and—provided you accept him as a philosopher, a title he never claimed—Freud.)

Frank Lentricchia voices a very different objection to Heidegger, one that commonly emerges from discursive communities more essentially hospitable to the Continental style of thinking. Heidegger appears in Lentricchia’s text as “the last humanist” (96). (Lentricchia, reading Derrida’s essay “The Ends of Man,” which is collected in Margins of Philosophy, initially assigns this notion to Derrida. Ultimately, Lentricchia fully endorses the characterization.) The conclusion to Lentricchia’s chapter on phenomenology is worth quoting at length:

To suggest a unity and wholeness just the other side of history which becomes dispersed or fragmented in time [which is Lentricchia’s interpretation of Heidegger’s concept das Verfallen, the falling into Uneigentlichkeit (inauthenticity) that characterizes Dasein (human being)] is a fundamentally idealistic way of mythologizing a narrative of human being. In this mythology, the “thrown” character of being-in-the-world, a supposedly primordial condition, becomes a falling from unity, a secondariness. Verfallen retains the stubborn theological implication of The Fall. In its disposition to recover unity from dispersion, Heidegger’s philosophy is fundamentally nostalgic and world-weary. It is a last-ditch defense of the concept of man as a unified and gathered totality, secure in his neighborhood, existentially limited, of course, and confined by the biological trap, but in the freedom for death, free at the heart of its being.

The early and the late Wittgenstein disagree on many points, but in both periods he hopes to preserve a space for Voltaire’s retired Candide to tend his garden without being troubled by metaphysical questions. This is thanks, in the early Wittgenstein, to having disproved metaphysics; and in the late Wittgenstein, to having dissolved it. In direct contrast Heidegger explicitly presented his project in terms of reviving metaphysics, or rather un-forgetting it. Heidegger famously characterized the history of Western philosophy since Aristotle as the history of the forgetting of the question of being—that is, a series of repressions of metaphysics. Lentricchia’s Heidegger is concerned not with persuading the pre-philosophical individual to remain untroubled by nagging existential doubts (as is my hastily sketched version of Wittgenstein) but rather with leveraging those doubts (Heidegger’s Angst) in order to recover the always-already lost subjectival unity that goes by the names of Eigentlichkeit (authenticity) and Freiheit zum Tode (being-free-for-death). Of the three contenders I earlier nominated for the title of most influential early-to-mid-twentieth-century philosopher, we would be left with only Freud to argue for a human subject that is both non-unified and non-unifiable.


Note on sources: In every post in my present project, I rely principally upon Andrew Cutrofello’s Continental Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction. For many posts I also consult relevant sections of The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought and Simon Critchley’s Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction. For the present post (and the other two planned posts on Heidegger, which will follow in due time) I’ve referred to the following secondary texts. Asterisks indicate that I read the text for the first time specifically for this project:
Jae Emerling, Theory for Art History
Roger Scruton, A Short History of Modern Philosophy
Michael Inwood, Heidegger: A Very Short Introduction*
Adam Sharr, Heidegger’s Hut*
Vincent Gérard, “Husserl et Heidegger: La rupture silencieuse,”* (in Le Magazine littéraire #468)
Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism
Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey