Heidegger and metaphysicalism

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Metaphysical-ism (‘metaphysics’ with quote marks) is an ideology that seeks to totalize conceptual views resulting from inquiry into this area of philosophy. Metaphysics (conceptuality in terms of the rhetoric of classical metaphysics) is part of history and has a place in history, e.g., for development of conceptual competence (historicity of one's thinking) and for appreciating our historicality. We will always have conceptual issues about conceptuality as such. In that sense, every generation has its “metaphysical” issues of conceptuality, just as every life has its youth.

The translator of Heidegger's notes on “overcoming metaphysics” indicates the difference (The End of Philosophy, p. 84): It’s the difference between [A] “something... being... incorporated” (into a history of conceptuality that is growing/thinking beyond this history, yet as integral to how we came to where we are in going on) and [B] “something...being...defeated and left behind.” Heidegger works to defeat totalizing conceptualities: metaphysical-ism, while not negating metaphysics as part of Our history.

Heidegger: to malicious readers

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Toward the end of Heidegger’s Collected Works (GA: Gesamtausgabe, “Total Output”), in a volume of “Comments” (Anmerkungen 2, #77, in GA 97), Heidegger makes a critical comment (c1946) about claims of prophecy as “will to power” (leading, e.g., to heinous messiansm), which—Heidegger notes—includes the Jewish tradition of prophets—a comment that a noted Jewish scholar of Heidegger agrees with (Allen Scult) in some detail. (I might do a long posting someday on Scult’s comment about Judaism during the Babylonian Exile). Heidegger ends his main comment with a parenthetical comment. Quoting that now from another Jewish scholar’s translation of Heidegger’s parenthetical comment in German:

Heidegger: “...(A note for jackasses: this [his] remark [about prophecy] has nothing to do with ‘anti-Semitism’ [sic: H’s quote marks, as he continues...], which is as foolish and abominable as the bloody, and above all unbloody, actions of Christianity against ‘the heathens’ [sic]. The fact that even Christianity brands anti-Semitism ‘un-Christian’ is a mark of the high development of the refinement of its power technique.)…”

The quote marks are as important as the notion of “They” in Being and Time or a notion of enframing in critique of ideology.

This power technique—i.e., perhaps, a capacity for deceitful posturing, which relates to the 1930s’ well-known Vatican support for fascism (as well as relating to Heidegger leaving the Catholic Church before WW-I)—is the political dimension of what Heidegger later (c1954) calls the “ontotheological” character of metaphysics (Identity and Difference, which Heidegger, 1969, regarded as among his most important sets of lectures, according to the English translator at that time).

But there’s a difference between metaphysical-ism and metaphysics, a difference which is integral to Heidegger’s thinking, but easy to miss, because he notes the difference in terms of misunderstanding his de-construction of metaphysics.

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Heidegger’s leadership

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briefly hoping that philosophical practice could be emancipatory administration

[May 2016: This was part of my Facebook project on Heidegger, which I’m gradually transposing to this blog. It was intended for persons not very familiar with Heidegger who may be steered away by hermeneutical gossip.]

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Living with, working with, and thinking through Heidegger’s texts can be wonderful—delightful and profoundly engaging.

Heidegger letter to Richardson, 1962

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Famously, Heidegger wrote a letter in 1962 to Father William J. Richardson, S.J., which I’ve made available.

The letter (originally in German) was in response to Richardson’s query for his book Heidegger: through phenomenology to thought (1963), which was the first authoritative attempt to understand the entirety of Heidegger’s career in thinking. The book is outdated now, but famous (reprinted, 2003) for its role in mid-century English-language understanding of Heidegger. Indeed, it was important to me circa 1974-76.

a note on Heidegger’s early philosophy

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Here is a review by Theodore Kisiel (the leading scholar in English of Heidegger’s early development) of a 2008 book, Heidegger’s Early Philosophy: The Phenomenology of Ecstatic Temporality. Kisiel uses the occasion of his review to provide the best succinct conception of Heidegger’s early thinking that I’ve ever read (as something short). What can be said briefly about Being and Time? Kisiel shows the reader.

January 2008 — September 2013

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June 9, 2017

This blog began during spring of 2017, but inherited postings from other blogs, one canceled, one re-purposed. The canceled blog had begun in 2013; the re-purposed blog had postings routed also to “our evolving,” but it had ceased (more or less) by 2010, as I focused on writing that didn’t pertain to that blog. So, the gap here between 2008 and 2013 echoes that situation.

Aren’t you glad to know.

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Heidegger and onticism of globalization

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Heidegger never supported Nazism. Bernhard Radloff published an outstanding book, to that effect, in 2007 on Heidegger’s critique of German ideology, Heidegger and the Question of National Socialism, which has not come into paperback; but he later provided a thorough synopsis of his book as a response to two critical reviews of the book, which is available here: “Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Globalisation.”