more on Heideggerians

Here’s one reader comment from the Paul Ennis blog:

“I hate to be so flippant, but who cares? Is Heidegger wrong about being-in-the-world because he betrayed Husserl? Is he wrong about the collapse of metaphysics and its implications for us because he was a cold-hearted snake? Is he wrong about techne because of this?

Please tell me why this is important. It seems to me that the whole discussion speaks to a very unfortunate tendency to argue about thinkers rather than ideas. I know that this is an old-fashioned critique, but I stand by it. Gossip is excusable in our interpersonal relationships, but has no place elsewhere.”

It’s called biography, not “gossip.” A great dead philosopher was a person, not just a disembodied set of arguments, and we want to know what sort of person a philosopher was, just as with a politician, scientist, or inventor. It enriches our sense of the drama of their lives, thoughts, and actions.

The first paragraph in the comment above is a simple straw man. As far as I’m aware, literally no one has ever claimed that Heidegger was “wrong about the collapse of metaphysics and its implications for us because he was a cold-hearted snake.”

It’s funny to imagine, though: “In this paper, I will argue that due to abundant evidence that Heidegger was a cold-hearted snake, his arguments about the collapse of metaphysics should be ruled invalid.”

For my part, I think biography is the best genre there is. Why? Precisely because it shows the emergence of new thinking from some prior state.