“The reason I made the response that I did is because I feel that Heidegger has many important things to offer to those engaged in philosophy and otherwise.
That Heidegger was revealed as anti-semitic doesn’t really surprise me since he was engaged under the Nazi regime, and it doesn’t bother me in terms of reading and contemplating his work. As someone engaged in philosophy, I consider it my role to contemplate whether what he said is true, not whether those things agree with my politics.
I do wish that Heidegger had made an effort to be more clear, and I can admit that when I read him I have even found myself for a long time on a single sentence trying to think of what he means — this is sometimes because he is using a term that he introduced and defined prior and which I was unable to remember and contextualize as I moved on. It remains to be seen (for me) whether his writing style was necessary for his project, and again whether his project led to the discovery or aided the pursuit of truth.
I personally find more value in Heidegger than Foucault. I have not read Deleuze, Lacan, or Foucault’s lectures. This point of view might change in the future, maybe because I grasp something in their work I hadn’t before.
So again, the reason I made the response I did was because I feel Heidegger has something to offer and reducing his work to his politics (or prejudging it on those grounds) will be a disservice to philosophical pursuit.
It might, in the future, be worthwhile to engage in something like a study of one of Heidegger’s works going over each paragraph, but that is only as yet an idea.” -The Artful Pauper: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=187860&p=2536528#p2536528
First of all, I hope that I am reading in an apologetic tone to this since it would be completely unnecessary. And on second thought, I can’t help but feel that bringing Heidegger’s anti-Semitism into this may have been a bit of a red herring. Thank God (whatever it is (that I have the denial of nose-blindness in my corner. I only brought it up to point to the clearly anti-democratic disposition that he had and what was the issue for me and Rorty. But that is a different issue than the one you are bringing up and are doing an impressive job of arguing. I mean I haven’t seen a point I could disagree with. Still, what I was arguing (via Rorty (was that Heidegger appears to have used a good method to bad ends by rebelling against the classicist hierarchy only to establish the hierarchy of the poet/priest.
What might help us here is Rorty’s distinction, in Philosophy and Social Hope, between interpretation and use when it comes to reading text. And what seems most important to me here is that you are finding things you can use in Heidegger. And that is all that should really matter as long as you are aware of the risks involved as Heidegger demonstrated. I myself, found something I could use (and still can (in the first essay of Ayn Rand’s The Virtue of Selfishness: the idea that accusations of selfishness can too often be expressions of the selfishness of the individual making the accusation. But then by the 3rd or 4th essay, I got so nauseous with the smug fascism of it that I had to put it down. I just couldn’t go any further. But I can still use the point about selfishness without being obliged to accept the rest of her nonsense. And the same goes for you and Heidegger.
Luckily, this offers me a smooth segway (for the purposes of this rhizome (into an article in Philosophy Now (issue 107): Yonathan Listik’s Derrida’s Performance:
“Derrida’s use of the performative aspects of language attempts precisely to take the road not taken. His argument is that proper and improper uses of language are not separate, but in fact dependent on one another, because language is built not on its successes, but on its failures.” -https://philosophynow.org/issues/107/Derridas_Performance
The term I want to focus on here is “uses”. If we focus on use, as compared to interpretation, how do we distinguish between “proper” and “improper”? A use is a use –proper or improper. The neo-classists may zero in on a gotcha moment and argue that this is exactly why we should focus on proper interpretation rather than use. But then doesn’t that constitute just another “use” (perhaps proper, perhaps improper (of language?