Heidegger’s most embarrassing brilliant passage

The first occurrence of the tool-analysis dates way back to 1919 and the Freiburg War Emergency Semester. Heidegger was just 29 years old, so this is a pretty early breakthrough.

Unfortunately, there is no way to read this gem of an analysis without cringing in agony all the way through, for reasons that will immediately become clear. (This is from pages 57-58 of Ted Sadler’s 2003 translation for Continuum, which has the English title Towards the Definition of Philosophy.)

And I hope Peter Gratton is reading this (he’s a specialist on African philosophy, for those who don’t know).

“If someone saw a box, then he would not be seeing a piece of wood, a thing, a natural object. But consider a Negro from Senegal suddenly transplanted here from his hut. What he would see, gazing at this object, is difficult to say precisely: perhaps something to do with magic, or something behind which one could find good protection against arrows and flying stones… So my seeing and that of a Senegal Negro are fundamentally different…

Assuming that the experiences were fundamentally different, and that only my experience existed, I still assert that universally valid propositions are possible. This implies that these sentences would also be valid for the Senegal Negro. Let us put this assertion to one side, and focus once again on the experience of the Senegal Negro… The Negro will see the lectern much more as something ‘which he does not know what to make of.'”

It’s really a shame, because those few pages are startlingly good in purely philosophical terms, but it’s just too painful to go back and read them very often.