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06 Sep 09

Madison (background) - Coping with Nietzsche's Legacy: Rorty, Derrida, Gadamer

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nietzsche heidegger philosophy metaphysics derrida gadamer rorty postmodernism lecture2 creativity tragedy phd

- can we have some references here? - on 2009-09-06
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For us who today read Nietzsche after Heidegger, Nietzsche symbolizes the end of
metaphysics (the death not only of "God" but also, as a necessary consequence, of
the human "subject").
52 more annotations...
- We are now in the process of wakening from the nightmare of modernity, with its
  manipulative reason and fetish of the totality, into the laid-back ["joyful," as
  Nietzsche would say] pluralism of the postmodern, that heterogeneous range of
  life-styles and language games which has renounced the nostalgic urge to totalize and
  legitimate itself....Science and philosophy must jettison their grandiose metaphysical
  claims and view themselves more modestly as just another set of narratives.
  - T. Eagleton - on 2009-09-06
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- - N makes us question the legimitacy of the trad "philosophical enterprise" - truth being its holy grail (but needn't be, even oughtn't: it's thinking, which we still don' t do etc?) - on 2009-09-06
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- (true heirs to Parmenides and Pythagoras,
  present-day physicists are currently expending a great deal of money and energy in
  search of what they call the Theory of Everything, "a single equation that describes the
  entire universe")
- Modern philosophy can be said to have begun when, bedazzled by this
  new development, philosophers took the new science as the supreme model of genuine,
  foundational knowledge.
- "It is still a metaphysical faith that
  underlies our faith in science--and we men of knowledge of today, we godless men and
  anti-metaphysicians, we, too, still derive our flame from the fire ignited by a
  faith millennia old, the Christian faith, which was also Plato's, that God is truth,
  that truth is divine."
  - compare retrospective foreword to birth of T, "What I managed to seize upon at that time, something fearful and dangerous, was a problem with horns, not necessarily a bull exactly, but in any event a new problem; today I would state that it was the problem of science itself—science for the first time grasped as problematic, as dubious." - on 2009-09-06
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- In other words, as Nietzsche would say, when the value of (representational) truth is
  called into question, everything becomes (mere) interpretation ("There is only
  a perspective seeing, only a perspective 'knowing'").
- - comparing twilight of idols to Baudrillard's phases of the image (reflecting, masking, perverting, lying about reality, becoming pure simulacrum) - on 2009-09-06
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- When the "real world" at last becomes a myth, a simulacrum, we are witnessing the
  death not only of Truth and of Science, but also of Philosophy itself. At least
  Philosophy with a capital P, as Rorty would say.
- have sought to cope with Nietzsche's legacy, each in his
  own quite distinctive way.
  - what is there to cope with, you big decadent nihilist?! - on 2009-09-06
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- Indeed, in the
  light-hearted joyfulness of his new-found philosophical innocence, he has wholeheartedly
  embraced Nietzsche's pronouncements about the demise of Truth.
- Not
  Socrates' "Don't tell a lie," but Johnny Carson's "Don't be boring" seems to have become
  Rorty's watchword.
  - cp Heidegger on being "interessant" (inter-esse) - on 2009-09-06
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- What is liberating and exhilarating about the book is the way in which it was able to
  open the eyes of so many people to the utter bankrupcy of traditional, foundationalist
  philosophizing. European philosophers (e.g., Derrida) had of course already said much
  the same thing, but Rorty's easy style of writing served to bring the message home with
  great éclat.
- Gadamer himself has characterized
  his philosophizing--hermeneutics--as an attempt to overcome the modes of thought of "the
  epistemological era (l'ère de la théorie de la connaissance)."
- Rorty says that in a post-Philosophical age the attempt to understand things (by
  means of philosophical theory) is passé. The important thing, he says, is to learn how
  to cope.
- it is quite
  another, however, to deny to theory a legitimate and, indeed, central role in the
  formation and sustenance of life practices and socio-political modes of
  being-in-the-world--in other words, their justification or, as Habermas would say much
  to Rorty's displeasure, "legitimation."
- Rorty obviously likes to view himself as a kind of social or culture critic,
  denouncing cruelty and promoting solidarity.
- the best Rorty can do when confronted with "cruelty" is to express
  his personal distaste for it by not admitting cruel people to his own comfy club of "we
  postmodernist bourgeois liberals," i.e., "people who are more afraid of being cruel than
  of anything else."
- What
  right do we have, therefore, to "impose" it on people in other cultures and historical
  circumstances? None, it would seem, since there are no "general principles," only
  historical narrations whose validity (if that's the proper word) is limited to a given
  community at a given time.
  - in one sense it is of course stupid to maintain the "i have no right to stipulate x" - for equally you have every right to stipulate x. Mix Rorty with Arendt's personal ethics (in Responsibility & Judgment) and you have something. - on 2009-09-06
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- Rorty has deconstructed the metaphysical absolutism of the Tradition only to
  land himself in the quagmire of a quite traditional form of ethical relativism.
  - bollocks; it is more complex than merely "quagmire of relativism". Add Nietzsche... - on 2009-09-06
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- Rorty has not so much overcome
  modernism as he has simply abandoned it for its opposite (absolutism for relativism,
  necessity for contingency, [essentialist] universalism for "localism"); he is not so
  much a postfoundationalist as he is a mere antifoundationalist who has
  simply (as Searle would say of Derrida) "turned the world upside down."
  - possibly? - on 2009-09-06
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- Derrida, at
  least, has realized that "metaphysics" is not simply something one can drop at one's
  pleasure, like an old, worn-out pair of shoes, or simply set aside, like a game with
  which one has become bored or a conversation which has gone stale. Like (as some would
  say) Nietzsche himself, Rorty has not succeeded in "overcoming metaphysics"--although he
  has at least managed, willy-nilly, to find a way of coping with the nihilism which, as
  Nietzsche pointed out, tends inevitably to follow upon the overthrowing of metaphysics.
- Derrida is clearly a child of Nietzsche's,
  an heir, as Rorty sees it, to Nietzsche's joyful wisdom who, beyond all metaphyscial
  seriousness, extols the playful "innocence of becoming."
- And yet
  there is a kind of seriousness to the Derridian enterprise that escapes Rorty's notice
  or, to be more precise, that Rorty prefers to ignore, to which he turns a blind eye.
  - eh, obviously. - on 2009-09-06
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- What is referred to as
  "deconstruction" is not a set of theses or beliefs, not even loosely articulated ones
  like those of Rorty, but is simply, so to speak, a method, a way of reading
  texts, philosophical ones in particular.
- The aim of a
  deconstructive reading is to show how texts laying claim to knowledge are full of
  internal tensions and contradictions or antinomies which end up by subverting their
  stated goals and their own claims to truth.
- Derrida's deconstructive undertaking calls into question not only modern philosophy but
  the entire philosophical tradition, or what Derrida calls the "metaphysics of presence."
- This is
- "liberating
  and exhilarating."
- it frees us from the tyranny of two particularly
  insidious notions which, from the beginning, have dominated philosophy: the notions of
  totality and essence.
- invariably leads to the
  suppression of all sorts of loose ends to thing
- oppressive
- totalizing thinking is hazardous
  to human life because it serves to lend philosophical legitimacy to totalitarianism,
  i.e., the totalized society (the socio-political equivalent of the unified science
  dreamed of by modern rationalists).
  - this is a bit noddy... bit simple... - on 2009-09-06
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- Essence" is the grounding notion of philosophical science
- essentialism upholds the rule of the Principle of
  Identity, the cornerstone of logocentrism
  - pace Heidegger... - on 2009-09-06
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- Essentialism provides a handy justification for the tyranny of the status quo
  and of established power structures.
- There is an honesty here
  that one does not find in Rorty who seems to believe that whenever it strikes our fancy
  we can change ourselves overnight by simply inventing new "vocabularies."
- fter having
  deconstructed metaphysics, we are left, in a way similar to Rorty, with an immense
  philosophical void, with, indeed, a kind of nihilism.
  - bollocks. - on 2009-09-06
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- Because (as Derrida rightly perceives) nothing means any one thing
  in particular, he concludes that in the last analysis nothing means anything at all.
- Derrida's rejection of logocentrism is not revolutionary, and because he thinks it
  is, he is unable to take advantage of the sophistication that the debate on essentialist
  thinking has already reached; as a result, he jumps from one extreme (meaning is a
  matter of fixed, immutable concepts) to the other (meaning is a matter of the
  indeterminate, infinite play of signs).
  - this is a somewhat unfair criticism of D, it falls back into a very traditional political thinking "play is all fair and well, but what is to be done, where will we be if we doubt everything, theory *& truth must have their place somewhere" blablabla - on 2009-09-06
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- Carefree and Dionysian though he
  may appear to be, I do not believe that Derrida has succeeded in freeing himself from
  the bad conscience of the metaphysicians.
- Derrida is at least to be
  congratulated on having abandoned the modernist tactic of previous left-wing
  intellectuals who extolled confrontational politics ("revolutionism"), in line with
  Lenin's exhortation to "suppress the suppressors."
- "All beginnings lie in the darkness,
  and what is more, they can be illuminated only in the light of what came later and from
  the perspective of what followed."
- Gadamer has no qualms about
  retelling one of the greatest metanarratives of all time, that of the progressive
  liberation of humankind
- For Gadamer, there is only one thing we can know for
  sure, and that is that any kind of Hegelian absolute is irremediably beyond our grasp.
  "Philosophical thinking," he writes," is not science at all....There is no claim of
  definitive knowledge, with the exception of one: the acknowledgement of the finitude of
  human being in itself."
- In "Text and
  Interpretation" Gadamer writes: "[T]he special feature of historical experience is that
  we stand in the midst of an event without knowing what is happening to us before we
  grasp what has happened in looking backwards. Accordingly, history must be written anew
  by every new present."
- Dissemination and hermeneutics should
  not be contrasted so extremely
- Hermeneutics, I would argue, is as fully "postmodern" as deconstruction. What is
  often overlooked is that there are, in fact, two quite different trends in postmodern
  thinking.
- The first proclaims that modernity is over, that a new age has begun. The new age
  makes use of the past, and of modern achievements, but it has its own new freedoms and
  its own self-definition. The second type of thought is deconstructive, and works to
  undermine the unities and closures found in modernity, without escaping from them into
  some new age.
- "Knowledge," for hermeneutics, is
  nothing other than the shared understanding that a community of inquirers comes to as a
  result of a free exchange of opinions.
- For Gadamer, understanding "is a process of
  communication." In reconceptualizing matters in this way, and in insisting on the
  "communicative" nature of human understanding, hermeneutics offers us something more
  than does deconstruction, i.e., something more than the mere cacophony of everyone's
  parodying, fanciful interpretations of things (the "private fantasies" of Derrida that
  Rorty speaks of).
- Truth is not something simply to be discovered ("represented") but
  something to be made--through the exercise of communicative rationality. Truth is
  a practical concept. It is something that can exist only if we take
  responsibility for its existence. "Philosophy" is one name for the exercise of this kind
  of responsibility.
- In contrast to the cultural and epistemological relativists, Gadamer
  reminds us that although understanding is inescapably language-bound, "this assertion
  does not lead us into any kind of linguistic relativism." Or any kind of Rortyan
  "ethnocentrism."

06 Jul 08

20th WCP: A Thematic Unity for Heidegger's Was Heisst Denken?

www.bu.edu/...ContStar.htm - Preview

heidegger thinking thematic unity history phd

Most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is
that we are still not thinking

26 May 08

Laurence Paul Hemming - Heidegger's Atheism: The Refusal of a Theological Voice - Reviewed by Jean Grondin , Universite de Montreal - Philosophical Reviews - University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame Review of Heidegger book by Laurence Paul Hemming; mostly not impressed by Hemming's work: old stuff, and unkind to whoever came before him.

ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm - Preview

Kehre theology review Heidegger turning God atheism phd

how can a thinker who, despite his own Catholic origins, professes a philosophical atheism and emphatically reiterates Nietzsche’s word «God is dead» have anything to say to theologians?
His basic thesis is straightforward, but by no means original: Heidegger’s atheism, the author argues, must be read as a destruction of the metaphysical God, that is nothing but an idol of subjectivity, and as an opening up of the place for a more divine God.
9 more annotations...
- Heidegger’s silence is, on the whole, the best way to speak of this unspeakable God.
- «What if there is no later Heidegger?», challengingly asks the author (3)
- He goes to great lengths to demonstrate that this Kehre must not be understood as a biographical turn on Heidegger’s path
- The author gives the impression that this notion of a biographical conversion has been created by Löwith and Richardson and reiterated by every interpreter ever since.
- Heidegger’s negative theology can best be described as mystical, in continuity with St. Gregory of Nissa, Catherine of Siena and Meister Eckhart
- Furthermore, it has also long been registered in the literature that the Kehre must primarily be understood as a historical turn «in Being».
- In sum, if the author has every right to read Heidegger’s «pious» atheism as a «vibrant pedagogy», i.e. as a self-criticism for theologians, it fails to do justice to and acknowledge the critical and diversified reception it has already enjoyed in the theology and philosophy of the last century.
- The only theologian discussed at any length is Jean-Luc Marion, but here again, the discussion remains uncompromising, accusing Marion of a host of misunderstandings: contrary to what Marion would allege, Heidegger never thought of God as a being (257) and Marion never escapes a notion of being that remains metaphysical (265).
- Gadamer’s indication that Heidegger remained a «God-seeker» throughout his life.

Speaking out of Turn : Martin Heidegger and die Kehre = Parler du tournant: Heidegger et die Kehre

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Kehre Heidegger turning phd

ar from confirming Richardson's view that there is a 'Heidegger I' and 'Heidegger II' connected by the 'reversal' or turning, Heidegger sought to indicate with (sometimes indirect) reference to his own works that the 'turning' is a movement in thought that it was part of the original project of Being and Time to carry through, but which he only succeeded in describing much later.

13 Apr 08

IngentaConnect A Guide to Educational Philosophizing After Heidegger

article chastising lack of understanding of H's BT in philo of edu in Vol 37(4); and annoyed that he (D Vandenberg) had not been read. A vanity project?

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06 Jan 07

20th WCP: Heidegger On Poetry And Thinking: Some Educational Implications

www.bu.edu/...ContGord.htm - Preview

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17 Dec 06

Die moderne Technik und die Suche nach dem Wahren - Artikel

"Martin Heidegger und sein Verstehen der Technik" - article of 2004.

www.hrstud.hr/...Pro-2004-1-Cl-Kordic.pdf - Preview

Heidegger Technology PhD nihilism phd

06 Jul 06

Questioning Efficiency: Human Factors and Existential Phenomenology

Hubert Dreyfus course @ Berkeley; includes audio files on Heidegger and Technology...

www.sims.berkeley.edu/...index.html - Preview

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06 May 06

Crockett - Review of Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy - JCRT 2.3

a more sympathetic review of the Beitraege than Simon Blackburn's, by Clayton Crockett; from secular-theological position; comparisons made to Kristeva;

www.jcrt.org/...crockett.shtml - Preview

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