Heidegger dead at 40

HEIDEGGER DEAD AT 40
blog post of January 20, 2009

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Heidegger dead at 40
by doctorzamalek

An interesting thought experiment has long fascinated me. If we wanted to make a great change in the course of twentieth century philosophy, one way to do so would be to have Heidegger killed off in some sort of accident during the summer of 1930.

“11 August, 1930. Stuttgart. The philosopher Martin Heidegger, age 40, was confirmed among the dead in yesterday evening’s terrifying rail accident just outside the city, authorities said…”

Let’s look briefly at some of the things this would change.

1. There would be no “Heidegger’s politics” issue. Though one or two students report having been surprised to hear Heidegger voice pro-Nazi sympathies in the late 1920’s, those reports are not widely known even now. If not for the Rectorate period under Hitler, they might be altogether unknown, or if known then excused as some sort of casual reaction against Weimar that would never have continued as the Nazis rose to power.

Statements like this would become possible: “Unfortunately, Heidegger was no longer alive to make an undoubtedly loyal defense of his honored mentor Husserl…”

So, the political problems would be largely missing. What about the rest of the picture?

2. Under this scenario, Heidegger’s recent work would have been among his most interesting. “What is Metaphysics?” and “On the Essence of Ground” are extremely important works (though the latter is less widely read).

The 1929/30 lecture course, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, would have been a tantalizing note on which to disappear. This is well known as Heidegger’s “sexiest” course… The analysis of the three forms of boredom is superb, the most literarily skilled treatment of any mood that we find in Heidegger.

The discussion of animal life doesn’t really move the ball. Heidegger says that the stone is worldless, the animal is world-poor, and the human is world-forming, but then he doesn’t really shed any light at all on world-poverty or world-forming. He just keeps repeating his old mantra that animals encounter world, but not “as” world, which is more a placeholder for a pre-philosophical intuition than an actual philosophical insight. Nonetheless, even the animal parts of the book are exciting, filled with interesting anecdotes drawn from the sciences. Also, in the Leibniz lecture course a few years earlier, Heidegger had called for a “metonotology” to deal with such themes as ethics and sexual difference.

I think it’s safe to say that at that point in time, we would have been expecting Heidegger to take a far more concrete turn. He was getting into metontology-type particular topics, and was also starting to write more like a good novelist.

3. We would all still be haunted by the specter of “the unpublished second part of Being and Time.” Heidegger was able to make this a non-issue during his lifetime by effectively renouncing the project of completing the book. But if he was dead in 1930, we would still have expected it to get done, and we would be mourning its loss even now.

Under this scenario, my reading of Heidegger would pay a price, but so would that of mainstream Heideggerians.

My loss would be the great works from the 1949 Bremen “Einblick in das was ist” through the 1950’s. The fourfold is the core of my reading of Heidegger, and though I’ve argued you can find it in germinal form in 1919 and 1929, admittedly I only looked for it there because of its later full-blown appearance. My thought process was really pretty simple: “Wait a second, Heidegger talks about the fourfold all the time in those later works, and the scholars just ignore it because they don’t know what to do with it. Heidegger can’t just be pulling four poetic terms out of a hat for the fun of it– the man is an ontologist. They must be derivable from some basic structure he sees at work in the world, and people are just afraid to try to find it,” etc. etc.

So, my own life would be different. Presumably I would still have been drawn to the tool-analysis, but without the fourfold to chew on I probably would have been obsessively rereading the 29/30 course looking for traces of some way to get a “metontology” out of there.

However, I also would have been surrounded by different people. The mainstream Heideggerian is, by and large, a 1930’s Heideggerian… The endless appeals to veiling and unveiling… The dead-end wanderings in the Hölderlin crypt… The only moderately fruitful attention to his readings of Nietzsche.

So, the mainstream Heideggerian would be more of a Being and Time Heideggerian. Given the upsurge of concreteness just before Heidegger’s “death,” I suppose the more concrete passages from the magnum opus might retroactively take on greater significance– I refer to the analysis of everydayness, of course.

And incidentally, if there is one way in which my reading of Heidegger has changed since Tool-Being, it is probably my renewed appreciation for that part of Being and Time. I still think Max Scheler is better on those “anthropological” issues, but Heidegger does them better than I thought. In particular, I’m more delighted than ever by the observation that every Dasein chooses its hero, and some choose “das Man” as their hero.