> Consider, for example, the French anthropologist-philosopher Bruno Latour, who claimed that Pharaoh Ramses II didn’t die of tuberculosis because the bacteria wasn’t discovered until 1882.
This is not really accurate - though Latour has no one to blame for that but himself. He's trying to call attention to the fact that "Ramses II died of tuberculosis in 1213 BC" should actually be understood as "according to our best scientific theories (Ramses II died of tuberculosis in 1213 BC)" by pretending that it instead means "according to the best scientific theories of 1213 BC (Ramses II died of tuberculosis)". It's a terrible strategy, but it's one he's deliberately taking.
One of the most glaring left-Heideggerian critiques of this reading that occurs to me is this:
The framing of the question of whether nature exists independent of human minds is wrong. Positing that nature exists independent of human minds, i.e. as “objective”, paves the way for the material objectification of nature that capitalism has engaged in from the start. It suggests, falsely, that nature as such would be intelligible without human beings; that is, that human involvement in nature is not integral to its processes (for better or worse), but rather fundamentally independent. This objectification of nature opens the intellectual door to reduce human subjects and labor to the concept of an objectified nature (a free and expendable resource first defined by John Locke), thus justifying their exploitation by the same logic. We are part of nature too, and the fragmentation of world into “Human Culture” and “Nature” is dangerous. The materialist view often lapses into the oppressive logic it tries to resist.
[The french Heideggerian geologist Augustin Berque has written extensively about this kind of thinking.]
This piece argues that the Marxist left should reject Heidegger's thought not because he was a Nazi or Nazi simp, but because his "subjective idealism" is incompatible with Marxist dialectical materialism. ( I'm not sure why the Nazi sympa stuff is included here, although maybe it is a requirement now when writing about Heidegger at all..) I have some hesitation accepting the reading of Heidegger offered here (i.e., that Heidegger's focus on the meaning of being reduces objectivity to human existence), but let's set that aside. The argument seems to be that Heidegger, with his brand of subjective idealism, undermines the materiality of the world, the hard reality of matter. (I wonder, would we want to say the same about Hegel's idealism, and German idealism in general? Shoudl the left disavow Hegel?) I feel that the argument boils down to something like saying that Heidegger's project is not Marx's project, which would be unfair to both. But, at the risk of making the author's argument for him, it occurs to me that the linchpin here is Aristotle. Marx relies on the materialism that is handed down from Aristotle, and Heidegger is throwing precisely that ontological order into question. So Heidegger probably does reject a simple view of materialism and a simple objectivity, but this is not to say that what matters doesn't show up in his account. The world is very much there for Heidegger, as are relations of alienation, they just don't look the same. Rather than agreeing that the left should reject Heidegger on these grounds, I think we should say this would be an excellent study to bring these two into account, much in the way that Deleuze and Guattari set to bring Marxism and Psychoanalysis into account.
At this point, it is not possible for the left to reject Heidegger given his influence on everyone from Foucault to Derrida (and their influence on untold sums of scholars and activists) can't be undone at this point. You can't have a version of Derrida or Foucault that is free of Heidegger. That may be unpleasant to those who would like to run purity tests on the history of philosophy but that's reality. Additionally, yes it's terrible Heidegger was a national socialist and did not formally apologize, but the truth is that any number of philosophers we might cite, including Hegel, would not pass even the most milquetoast purity tests of the 2020s. These figures from bygone centuries each had their own views which would be prejudicial abominations by today's standards, so to single Heidegger out simply because we can point to his involvement with NS is not only lazy but disingenuous. I am trying to give Colin the benefit of the doubt here, but simply saying that Heidegger's involvement with NS is the secret genesis of his major ideas is a claim that you need to back up with examples, full stop. So for instance early on when Colin writes:
___
They also show Heidegger developing some of his most famous philosophical concepts directly out of Nazi ideology. In 1933, Heidegger writes:
The Führer has awakened a new actuality, giving our thinking the correct course and impetus. Otherwise, despite all the thoroughness, it would have remained lost in itself and would only with great difficulty have found its way to effectiveness.
___
but then he skips on from there, offering no examples of what major concepts were developed "directly out of Nazi ideology." Thus we must ask the question of why the reader should be so easily convinced by his proclamation that does not see it necessary to cite examples. Overall, this is hardly the first piece of its kind insofar as it sees Heidegger as a problematic albatross to be jettisoned for self-respecting leftys. The problem, however, is twofold: first, while the writing is polished, just such polish is what allows it to skip over the holes in the argument or the lack of evidence/examples cited. In short, it's not a fully developed rigorous argument. But even if the arguments were more detailed and layered, and more examples were given, what we are left with is the fact that he can no more extract Heidegger's influence on Foucault and Derrida (and others of whom the contemporary left would not exists without) than we can separate hydrogen atoms from water and believe we can keep the integrity of water intact. Then there is the larger question of why it is in our moment that we seem to value our own purity so highly and why we tolerate ambivalence less than ever before. To consider this essay emanating from a philosopher presently in the academy is to see someone at work in sophisticated virtue signaling. For we all know Heidegger's influence cannot be undone and thus the more mature approach would be to try to understand him all the more; precisely because he can't be jettisoned. Instead we are reading a piece meant to impress the people one needs to impress to advance and gain status in academia: colleagues, admins, and students. If anything should be rejected, it's this mentality.
You should read the whole article. The entire point is about criticizing Heidegger's ideas, which should be rejected because they are bad ideas, not just because Heidegger was a Nazi.
You should read a few lines down where I say that it's important to criticize, not just Heidegger the person, but Heideggerian thought generally.
Foucault and Derrida should also be rejected, not because they were influenced by Heidegger, but because their ideas aren't good, well-researched, or useful for the left.
So now we need to jettison Foucault and Derrida too? Are you out of your mind? How would you do that and keep any critical theory whatsoever? There would be nothing left. How would you have Judith Butler without Derrida and Foucault? Answer: you wouldn't. You would have to be willfully ignorant to think you could even attempt such a mission. And in any event, shouldn't we be concerned about proving there is some pipeline that leads from reading Heidegger to becoming deranged/fascist? In other words, what exactly is the danger we are averting by canceling these thinkers? I can see one might gain status by engaging in such cancellations, but that's about it.
At the end of the day, these thinkers are just commodities for you, and you feel like you need to have the "latest one," but do they have any actual use-value? No.
If you want useful thinkers read Marx, Engels, and Lenin
Lol... I'm out, dude. You go have fun canceling thinkers who you'll never even come close to approaching; canceling thinkers who you and I both know can't actually be cancelled because their influence is already cemented a thousand times over. Keep on misrepresenting these thinkers to boost your own career. Keep on tearing other thinker's ideas down simply because you don't have the imagination or ability to construct your own. I think it's sad you feel the need to write things like this, and I know that the day will come that you realize how self-serving the whole project was. On that day you will weep with regret. But in the mean time, keep that super self-serious sensibility, keep staring into that camera with that laughable self-regard, keep fooling the students who don't know better, keep impressing the colleagues you need to in order to advance your career. Existentially inauthentic though it is, it'll get you the university posts you want to hold, and the material items you desire. I've no doubt your buddy Marx would see right through you as an example of a capitalist striver. Sad story, son.
Yeah, as I mention in the first few paragraphs of the essay, even if we dismiss Heidegger the person, Heideggerian thinking would still remain uncriticized and influence our thinking through Derrida, Foucault, Arendt, etc
Heideggar's problem is that he understands that the concept of subjectivity denotes a metaphysical category. Subjective experience, subjectivity per se, is NOT a metaphysical category, it is a common sense one. As is the category of objectivity. Heidegger turns the common sense banality of the idea of a point of view into a transcendental idiolect, into a privileged viewpoint that philosophers cluster around like wasps on an abandoned sandwich. Subjectivity, as an idea void of metaphysical content, then allows the thinker to systematise and underwrite the "individual" as thus dispensed with, since that system is self operating and does not need an actual individual to affirm itself. As with his theory of conscience. It takes after Hegel in this. It removes the individual from the individual. It is all just a system seductively incorporating its human wasp.
And common sense isn't metaphysical? Doesn't common sense suppose something metaphysical? It is metaphysical, and to suggest it isn't is to pretend metaphysics doesn't have a role in some cases and must be brought in. To even speak and have a language is to have a metaphysics.
Common sense cannot tolerate paradox. Metaphysics tries to define what is absolutely real, but reality is paradoxical. Absolutely. What is absolutely real? The objective world? Ask 20 different physicists and get 20 unique answers.
Partly because of the intercession of common sense into the issue of what is real they get muddled. Who wouldn't? After all, if something is real, it must exist! But does the imaginary exist? Yes and no. Do numbers exist? Common sense absolutely cannot grasp what is absolutely real because it is absolutely paradoxical. The concept of subjectivity is not absolutely real. It is a language game. Heidegger absolutely failed to understand that the route to a technical solution to metaphysics is to be found in using common sense against common sense. As a common sense disproof of the common sense idea that common sense can be used as an indicator of itself of the absolutes of reality.
Common sense is metaphysics asleep. Common sense tells us that God exists. Common sense also tells us that God doesn't exist. Common sense tells us that the mind is identical to the brain; it also tells us that the mind is not identical to the brain. Common sense tells us that time exists. It also tells us that there is only the present moment. As Aristotle asks in Physics: if the past doesn't exist and the future doesn't exist, is there anything that exists as to time? What is common sense going to tell us about "the passage of time"? It only tells us that it "started" at some point and will "end" at another. Complete nonsense?! It is the common sense idea that "common sense" can grasp absolutes that is the entire problem. "What we do is bring words back from their metaphysical [ie. their commonsensically metaphysical] use, to their ordinary use." Wittgenstein. Common sense can only construct houses of cards. That is the first and only commonsensical metaphysical principle.
I don't think Wittgenstein ever saw that he could not get the metaphysical out of the metaphysical, but to bring down murky technicality to common and ordinary use (which is still metaphysical).
That is almost an analytic philosopher's view of metaphysics (which they claimed to dispose of). But the point is that even if common sense isn't a terribly deep or ponderous part of the metaphysical pool, it still is part of it nonetheless. Like you said, "common sense" may be used to say God does or does not exist; indeed, common sense can be used as a justification to supply plenty of common talking points, contradictory or not. That is not the objective. The objective is to say that no matter what angle you look at it from, "common sense" is a metaphysical idea, and its contents, whatever they may be, also play in the field of reality and thereby are metaphysical.
Really late comment, but I'm curious what you think about the idea that a future universe (such as one after the collapse of this one/another big bang type scenario), the laws of physics may be different. You don't even have to accept a multiversal paradigm either, although I will mention that some 100% materialist scientists accept one as well. So we may be able to philosophically question the notion that laws of natural science are eternal, as you quoted from Engels. I think this is quite a dialectical point of view as well.
Hi, Rex, just noticed this. You say "no matter what angle you look at it from, "common sense" is a metaphysical idea, and its contents, whatever they may be, also play in the field of reality and thereby are metaphysical" That is correct. Common sense always does carry a metaphysical point of view. But this is why it is the problem. It *can't* be justified but all the same the attempt is made to justify it, to explain why it is that God exists, or why it is that God does not exist. What Wittgenstein does is return us to silence. As in the final remark of the Tractatus.
As mentioned before, Latour does not endorse that claim. The original paper accepts the common-sensical statement that the pharaoh died of tuberculosis, but that we should be aware of the extended network of actors that make such a statement possible in the first place. The archeologists, the technological equipment, the natural and artificial processes that kept the body accessible. The point is not that "He died of tuberculosis" was a false statement beforehand, but that it lacked meaning. Meaning is given through social practice.
A similar point was made by Marxists a long time ago. Gyorgy Lukacs talks of "natural science“ as ideological, as somewhat complicit in fetishism, as it seems to reify phenomena which are born out of, disclosed, by social practice. Kohei Saito brings attention to this in his 'Towards Degrowth Communism.'
Here is a Heideggerian quote from Cesaire: They talk to me about progress, about ‘‘achievements,’’ diseases cured, improved standards of living. I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out. They throw facts at my head, statistics, mileages of roads, canals, and railroad tracks . . . I am talking about millions of men torn from their gods, their land, their habits, their life – from life, from the dance, from wisdom . . . I am talking about millions of men in whom fear has been cunningly instilled, who have been taught to have an inferiority complex, to tremble, kneel, despair, and behave like flunkeys
Super interesting read, but I think it misses the point of the title. The left, whoever that is, should reject Heidegger because it seems the questions he was trying to answer are absurd. Until we understand the nature of consciousness, it's impossible to define what being is. And understanding the nature of consciousness itself is likely impossible, at least by the human mind. It's as absurd as asking my cat if she's a cat and expecting her to answer the question. She doesn't have the tools to understand the question, much less to answer it.
The left doesn't only need to reject Heidegger; it needs to reject all forms of philosophy that are wasting our time with unanswerable questions. It needs to reject an arrogant philosophy that assumes reason can explain everything. What the left needs is a philosophy that attempts to understand why we live the way we do—harming ourselves, each other, and everything that is around us—and find ways we can change that reality. The left needs to be the left and focus on the material so we can change it for the better.
Thanks for this wealth of info. But I take issue with the statement "Philosophy has failed to consider “being itself,” that is, being apart from beings.."
This is true if one completely ignores Plato, which of course is de rigueur. When one considers Plato however a new world of metaphysics opens up---one in which "being itself" is the foundation and starting point.
Heidegger took advantage, IMO, of Western philosophy's historical refusal to even hypothetically consider what Plato proposed about the topic as true. He built his ideas on top of this enforced ignorance.
"This pure givenness, the fact that anything exists at all, this “unconcealment” or “manifestness” is what Heidegger identifies with being as such."
This is nihilism, beautifully packaged to make something really simple read as ohhh-so smart. No offense intended to you, for the accurate reporting on the thoughts of this really influential figure.
Heidegger writes: “Being (not beings) is dependent upon the understanding of being, that is, reality (not the real) is dependent upon care” (SZ, 212).
And this is a great quintessential statement of existentialism. Back to Protagoras' "Man is the measure of all things." As if Plato hadn't refuted this in many ways.
> Consider, for example, the French anthropologist-philosopher Bruno Latour, who claimed that Pharaoh Ramses II didn’t die of tuberculosis because the bacteria wasn’t discovered until 1882.
This is not really accurate - though Latour has no one to blame for that but himself. He's trying to call attention to the fact that "Ramses II died of tuberculosis in 1213 BC" should actually be understood as "according to our best scientific theories (Ramses II died of tuberculosis in 1213 BC)" by pretending that it instead means "according to the best scientific theories of 1213 BC (Ramses II died of tuberculosis)". It's a terrible strategy, but it's one he's deliberately taking.
appreciate this take on Heidegger, but that is not a fair reading of Latour! He is a Whiteheadian realist, not a Heideggerian subjectivist.
One of the most glaring left-Heideggerian critiques of this reading that occurs to me is this:
The framing of the question of whether nature exists independent of human minds is wrong. Positing that nature exists independent of human minds, i.e. as “objective”, paves the way for the material objectification of nature that capitalism has engaged in from the start. It suggests, falsely, that nature as such would be intelligible without human beings; that is, that human involvement in nature is not integral to its processes (for better or worse), but rather fundamentally independent. This objectification of nature opens the intellectual door to reduce human subjects and labor to the concept of an objectified nature (a free and expendable resource first defined by John Locke), thus justifying their exploitation by the same logic. We are part of nature too, and the fragmentation of world into “Human Culture” and “Nature” is dangerous. The materialist view often lapses into the oppressive logic it tries to resist.
[The french Heideggerian geologist Augustin Berque has written extensively about this kind of thinking.]
Definitely provocative. I am assigning this piece (with comments ) to my decolonization theory graduate seminar in the fall.
Huge honor to hear this!
“For both Heidegger and Bill Clinton everything depends on “what is is.””
Nice.
This piece argues that the Marxist left should reject Heidegger's thought not because he was a Nazi or Nazi simp, but because his "subjective idealism" is incompatible with Marxist dialectical materialism. ( I'm not sure why the Nazi sympa stuff is included here, although maybe it is a requirement now when writing about Heidegger at all..) I have some hesitation accepting the reading of Heidegger offered here (i.e., that Heidegger's focus on the meaning of being reduces objectivity to human existence), but let's set that aside. The argument seems to be that Heidegger, with his brand of subjective idealism, undermines the materiality of the world, the hard reality of matter. (I wonder, would we want to say the same about Hegel's idealism, and German idealism in general? Shoudl the left disavow Hegel?) I feel that the argument boils down to something like saying that Heidegger's project is not Marx's project, which would be unfair to both. But, at the risk of making the author's argument for him, it occurs to me that the linchpin here is Aristotle. Marx relies on the materialism that is handed down from Aristotle, and Heidegger is throwing precisely that ontological order into question. So Heidegger probably does reject a simple view of materialism and a simple objectivity, but this is not to say that what matters doesn't show up in his account. The world is very much there for Heidegger, as are relations of alienation, they just don't look the same. Rather than agreeing that the left should reject Heidegger on these grounds, I think we should say this would be an excellent study to bring these two into account, much in the way that Deleuze and Guattari set to bring Marxism and Psychoanalysis into account.
At this point, it is not possible for the left to reject Heidegger given his influence on everyone from Foucault to Derrida (and their influence on untold sums of scholars and activists) can't be undone at this point. You can't have a version of Derrida or Foucault that is free of Heidegger. That may be unpleasant to those who would like to run purity tests on the history of philosophy but that's reality. Additionally, yes it's terrible Heidegger was a national socialist and did not formally apologize, but the truth is that any number of philosophers we might cite, including Hegel, would not pass even the most milquetoast purity tests of the 2020s. These figures from bygone centuries each had their own views which would be prejudicial abominations by today's standards, so to single Heidegger out simply because we can point to his involvement with NS is not only lazy but disingenuous. I am trying to give Colin the benefit of the doubt here, but simply saying that Heidegger's involvement with NS is the secret genesis of his major ideas is a claim that you need to back up with examples, full stop. So for instance early on when Colin writes:
___
They also show Heidegger developing some of his most famous philosophical concepts directly out of Nazi ideology. In 1933, Heidegger writes:
The Führer has awakened a new actuality, giving our thinking the correct course and impetus. Otherwise, despite all the thoroughness, it would have remained lost in itself and would only with great difficulty have found its way to effectiveness.
___
but then he skips on from there, offering no examples of what major concepts were developed "directly out of Nazi ideology." Thus we must ask the question of why the reader should be so easily convinced by his proclamation that does not see it necessary to cite examples. Overall, this is hardly the first piece of its kind insofar as it sees Heidegger as a problematic albatross to be jettisoned for self-respecting leftys. The problem, however, is twofold: first, while the writing is polished, just such polish is what allows it to skip over the holes in the argument or the lack of evidence/examples cited. In short, it's not a fully developed rigorous argument. But even if the arguments were more detailed and layered, and more examples were given, what we are left with is the fact that he can no more extract Heidegger's influence on Foucault and Derrida (and others of whom the contemporary left would not exists without) than we can separate hydrogen atoms from water and believe we can keep the integrity of water intact. Then there is the larger question of why it is in our moment that we seem to value our own purity so highly and why we tolerate ambivalence less than ever before. To consider this essay emanating from a philosopher presently in the academy is to see someone at work in sophisticated virtue signaling. For we all know Heidegger's influence cannot be undone and thus the more mature approach would be to try to understand him all the more; precisely because he can't be jettisoned. Instead we are reading a piece meant to impress the people one needs to impress to advance and gain status in academia: colleagues, admins, and students. If anything should be rejected, it's this mentality.
You should read the whole article. The entire point is about criticizing Heidegger's ideas, which should be rejected because they are bad ideas, not just because Heidegger was a Nazi.
You should read a few lines down where I say that it's important to criticize, not just Heidegger the person, but Heideggerian thought generally.
Foucault and Derrida should also be rejected, not because they were influenced by Heidegger, but because their ideas aren't good, well-researched, or useful for the left.
So now we need to jettison Foucault and Derrida too? Are you out of your mind? How would you do that and keep any critical theory whatsoever? There would be nothing left. How would you have Judith Butler without Derrida and Foucault? Answer: you wouldn't. You would have to be willfully ignorant to think you could even attempt such a mission. And in any event, shouldn't we be concerned about proving there is some pipeline that leads from reading Heidegger to becoming deranged/fascist? In other words, what exactly is the danger we are averting by canceling these thinkers? I can see one might gain status by engaging in such cancellations, but that's about it.
Lol, yeah, how would philosophy survive without Foucault making up fake history and mistranslating Nietzsche to sound clever
Ah yes, one who makes up fake histories to sound clever -- now there is a subject which I think you could expound on without any problem.
At the end of the day, these thinkers are just commodities for you, and you feel like you need to have the "latest one," but do they have any actual use-value? No.
If you want useful thinkers read Marx, Engels, and Lenin
Lol... I'm out, dude. You go have fun canceling thinkers who you'll never even come close to approaching; canceling thinkers who you and I both know can't actually be cancelled because their influence is already cemented a thousand times over. Keep on misrepresenting these thinkers to boost your own career. Keep on tearing other thinker's ideas down simply because you don't have the imagination or ability to construct your own. I think it's sad you feel the need to write things like this, and I know that the day will come that you realize how self-serving the whole project was. On that day you will weep with regret. But in the mean time, keep that super self-serious sensibility, keep staring into that camera with that laughable self-regard, keep fooling the students who don't know better, keep impressing the colleagues you need to in order to advance your career. Existentially inauthentic though it is, it'll get you the university posts you want to hold, and the material items you desire. I've no doubt your buddy Marx would see right through you as an example of a capitalist striver. Sad story, son.
Because he was a Nazi collaborator isn’t enough reason?
Yeah, as I mention in the first few paragraphs of the essay, even if we dismiss Heidegger the person, Heideggerian thinking would still remain uncriticized and influence our thinking through Derrida, Foucault, Arendt, etc
Heideggar's problem is that he understands that the concept of subjectivity denotes a metaphysical category. Subjective experience, subjectivity per se, is NOT a metaphysical category, it is a common sense one. As is the category of objectivity. Heidegger turns the common sense banality of the idea of a point of view into a transcendental idiolect, into a privileged viewpoint that philosophers cluster around like wasps on an abandoned sandwich. Subjectivity, as an idea void of metaphysical content, then allows the thinker to systematise and underwrite the "individual" as thus dispensed with, since that system is self operating and does not need an actual individual to affirm itself. As with his theory of conscience. It takes after Hegel in this. It removes the individual from the individual. It is all just a system seductively incorporating its human wasp.
And common sense isn't metaphysical? Doesn't common sense suppose something metaphysical? It is metaphysical, and to suggest it isn't is to pretend metaphysics doesn't have a role in some cases and must be brought in. To even speak and have a language is to have a metaphysics.
Common sense cannot tolerate paradox. Metaphysics tries to define what is absolutely real, but reality is paradoxical. Absolutely. What is absolutely real? The objective world? Ask 20 different physicists and get 20 unique answers.
Partly because of the intercession of common sense into the issue of what is real they get muddled. Who wouldn't? After all, if something is real, it must exist! But does the imaginary exist? Yes and no. Do numbers exist? Common sense absolutely cannot grasp what is absolutely real because it is absolutely paradoxical. The concept of subjectivity is not absolutely real. It is a language game. Heidegger absolutely failed to understand that the route to a technical solution to metaphysics is to be found in using common sense against common sense. As a common sense disproof of the common sense idea that common sense can be used as an indicator of itself of the absolutes of reality.
Common sense is metaphysics asleep. Common sense tells us that God exists. Common sense also tells us that God doesn't exist. Common sense tells us that the mind is identical to the brain; it also tells us that the mind is not identical to the brain. Common sense tells us that time exists. It also tells us that there is only the present moment. As Aristotle asks in Physics: if the past doesn't exist and the future doesn't exist, is there anything that exists as to time? What is common sense going to tell us about "the passage of time"? It only tells us that it "started" at some point and will "end" at another. Complete nonsense?! It is the common sense idea that "common sense" can grasp absolutes that is the entire problem. "What we do is bring words back from their metaphysical [ie. their commonsensically metaphysical] use, to their ordinary use." Wittgenstein. Common sense can only construct houses of cards. That is the first and only commonsensical metaphysical principle.
I don't think Wittgenstein ever saw that he could not get the metaphysical out of the metaphysical, but to bring down murky technicality to common and ordinary use (which is still metaphysical).
That is almost an analytic philosopher's view of metaphysics (which they claimed to dispose of). But the point is that even if common sense isn't a terribly deep or ponderous part of the metaphysical pool, it still is part of it nonetheless. Like you said, "common sense" may be used to say God does or does not exist; indeed, common sense can be used as a justification to supply plenty of common talking points, contradictory or not. That is not the objective. The objective is to say that no matter what angle you look at it from, "common sense" is a metaphysical idea, and its contents, whatever they may be, also play in the field of reality and thereby are metaphysical.
contagion narrative?
Really late comment, but I'm curious what you think about the idea that a future universe (such as one after the collapse of this one/another big bang type scenario), the laws of physics may be different. You don't even have to accept a multiversal paradigm either, although I will mention that some 100% materialist scientists accept one as well. So we may be able to philosophically question the notion that laws of natural science are eternal, as you quoted from Engels. I think this is quite a dialectical point of view as well.
Hi, Rex, just noticed this. You say "no matter what angle you look at it from, "common sense" is a metaphysical idea, and its contents, whatever they may be, also play in the field of reality and thereby are metaphysical" That is correct. Common sense always does carry a metaphysical point of view. But this is why it is the problem. It *can't* be justified but all the same the attempt is made to justify it, to explain why it is that God exists, or why it is that God does not exist. What Wittgenstein does is return us to silence. As in the final remark of the Tractatus.
As mentioned before, Latour does not endorse that claim. The original paper accepts the common-sensical statement that the pharaoh died of tuberculosis, but that we should be aware of the extended network of actors that make such a statement possible in the first place. The archeologists, the technological equipment, the natural and artificial processes that kept the body accessible. The point is not that "He died of tuberculosis" was a false statement beforehand, but that it lacked meaning. Meaning is given through social practice.
A similar point was made by Marxists a long time ago. Gyorgy Lukacs talks of "natural science“ as ideological, as somewhat complicit in fetishism, as it seems to reify phenomena which are born out of, disclosed, by social practice. Kohei Saito brings attention to this in his 'Towards Degrowth Communism.'
Here is a Heideggerian quote from Cesaire: They talk to me about progress, about ‘‘achievements,’’ diseases cured, improved standards of living. I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out. They throw facts at my head, statistics, mileages of roads, canals, and railroad tracks . . . I am talking about millions of men torn from their gods, their land, their habits, their life – from life, from the dance, from wisdom . . . I am talking about millions of men in whom fear has been cunningly instilled, who have been taught to have an inferiority complex, to tremble, kneel, despair, and behave like flunkeys
God, I wish Substack had dislikes.
Super interesting read, but I think it misses the point of the title. The left, whoever that is, should reject Heidegger because it seems the questions he was trying to answer are absurd. Until we understand the nature of consciousness, it's impossible to define what being is. And understanding the nature of consciousness itself is likely impossible, at least by the human mind. It's as absurd as asking my cat if she's a cat and expecting her to answer the question. She doesn't have the tools to understand the question, much less to answer it.
The left doesn't only need to reject Heidegger; it needs to reject all forms of philosophy that are wasting our time with unanswerable questions. It needs to reject an arrogant philosophy that assumes reason can explain everything. What the left needs is a philosophy that attempts to understand why we live the way we do—harming ourselves, each other, and everything that is around us—and find ways we can change that reality. The left needs to be the left and focus on the material so we can change it for the better.
Thanks for this wealth of info. But I take issue with the statement "Philosophy has failed to consider “being itself,” that is, being apart from beings.."
This is true if one completely ignores Plato, which of course is de rigueur. When one considers Plato however a new world of metaphysics opens up---one in which "being itself" is the foundation and starting point.
Heidegger took advantage, IMO, of Western philosophy's historical refusal to even hypothetically consider what Plato proposed about the topic as true. He built his ideas on top of this enforced ignorance.
"This pure givenness, the fact that anything exists at all, this “unconcealment” or “manifestness” is what Heidegger identifies with being as such."
This is nihilism, beautifully packaged to make something really simple read as ohhh-so smart. No offense intended to you, for the accurate reporting on the thoughts of this really influential figure.
Heidegger writes: “Being (not beings) is dependent upon the understanding of being, that is, reality (not the real) is dependent upon care” (SZ, 212).
And this is a great quintessential statement of existentialism. Back to Protagoras' "Man is the measure of all things." As if Plato hadn't refuted this in many ways.