Heidegger's Critique Research Articles

Fundierung und Motivation

In several of his early lectures and also in Being and Time, Heidegger rejects the traditional conception of “cultural objects” as objects comprising a primary layer of natural thing-reality and a secondary, subjective layer of value, opposing it a concept of “meaningfulness” as an immediate sense structure of situational life-experience. In opposition to the traditional concept, often associated in a more or less overt fashion with Husserl himself, Heidegger stresses that the foundational relationship we are dealing with here is actually directed the other way around: meaningfulness is not founded in natural reality, but instead the latter already presupposes the former. The present article aims to question this heideggerian critique by analyzing the concept of „foundation“ employed by Husserl and by tracing it’s evolution from the Logical Investigations to several later notations from the 1930’s, in order to obtain a more nuanced understanding of the term.

Gadamer and Cusanus on Creation

The creation of the world may not seem, at first glance, to be a Gadamerian topic. Gadamer's discretion on religious matters as well as his critique of metaphysics might make us think that the philosopher from Heidelberg was more interested in a historical theory of comprehension and a secular ontology of language rather than in such ample religious and metaphysical scenarios as the creation of the world. The understanding of creation is nonetheless crucial for Gadamer, because it radically influences the way we live. Creation has therefore a wide relevance that is not limited to the question Why there is something rather than nothing? In fact, Gadamer sees in the understanding of creation the background of philosophical ideas as well as of modern mentality. The way we are and the way we experience our world today depends in large part on the way we conceive creation. In this essay I will try to show that Gadamer addresses the Christian dogma of creation by focussing on the inwardness of God in reaction to a modern reception of the Christian dogma of cratio ex nihilo that neglects the role of divine interiority in creation. The starting oint is Gadamer's interpretation of some major themes of Nicolaus Cusanus' philosophy that help Gadamer revisit a dogma endangered by modernity. In modern times, the dogma of creation was separated from the complementary dognas of the Trinity and the Incaranation; a retrieval of the original theological context allows Gadamer to go back to a genuine sense of creation and to work out the philosophical relevance of some theological figures that are not usually considered by philosophy. I will also argue that this treatment is congruent with Gadamer's interpretation of verbum interius in the third part of Truth and Method, and that this significant continuity emphasizes the relevance of both references: to Cusanus, as well as to the founders of the tradition of inner word, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Gadamer's sensitivity to medieval philosophy proves therefore to be more than a marginal excitement and to resonate with the whole of his thought. In his reading, the representation of creation encapsulated in the tradition of verbum interius is fulfilled by Cusanus's terminological innovation complicatio-explicatio. The inwardness of the divine spirit is the leitmotiv of this development and constitutes Gadamer's main concern. The idea of a creation based not on an external and blind causality but rather on the fecund inwardness of the divine spirit represents a precious resource of Christianity that can bear fruit against the current mentality characterized by a degeneration of creation in sterile productivity. Moreover, this idea helps Gadamer reformulate speculative and metaphysical problems in a mode different from the onto-theological one. The validity of these problems remains untouched by the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics, as his discussion on Augustine, Thomas, and Cusanus is able to show; Gadamer's involvement in the metaphysical realm is not a minor moment in his thought, but rather a discrete rearticulating of major questions in this area.1 Gadamer's interest in Nicolaus Cusanus has also a formal expression: he was director of the Cusanus-Kommission of Heidelberger Akademie and edited Cusanus's works for this academy. In his capacity as editor, Gadamer underlined that a great part of Cusanus's legacy has still to be discovered. The reception of Cusanus in the nineteenth century was largely conditioned by the emergence of science, and less by a genuine philosophical reading. Even in the case of Neokantianism, Cusanus's thought was perceived only in its epistemological dimension. On the contrary, the strength of Cusanus's philosophy lies, according to Gadamer, in its discussion of metaphysical topics which shaped the passage from medieval to modern philosophy. Gadamer thus reacts to a Neokantian reading of Cusanus's theology as forerunner of modern natural scienees. …

Time/History, Self-disclosure and Anticipation: Pannenberg, Heidegger and the Question of Metaphysics

This essay examines Wolfhart Pannenberg’s defense of metaphysics’ foundational importance for philosophy and theology. Among all the modern philosophers whose claims Pannenberg challenges, Martin Heidegger’s discourse against Western metaphysics receives the major portion of criticism. The first thing one concludes from this criticism is an affirmation of a wide intellectual gap that separates Pannenberg’s thought from Heidegger’s, as if each stands at the very opposite corner of the other’s school of thought. The questions this essay tackles are: is this seemingly irreconcilable difference between Pannenberg and Heidegger fully justifiable? What if there is a reading of Panneberg’s and Heidegger’s view of metaphysics that can reveal deeper similarities between the two thinkers than the first reading of Pannenberg’s criticism of Heidegger allows us to see? It then answers these questions by showing that both thinkers actually share a common emphasis on the concepts of ‘time/history’, ‘self-disclosure’ and ‘anticipation’, and their reliance on these notions reveals that Heidegger’s and Pannenberg’s approaches to the phenomenon of understanding and to metaphysical ontology are not fully contradictory but rather hold noticeable hermeneutical similarities.

Information, Bodies, and Heidegger: Tracing Visions of the Posthuman

Discussion of the posthuman has emerged in a wide set of fields through a diverse set of thinkers including Donna Haraway, Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, N. Katherine Hayles, and Francis Fukuyama, just to name a few. Despite his extensive critique of technology, commentators have not explored the fruitfulness of Heidegger's work for deciphering the various strands of posthumanism recently formulated in response to contemporary technological developments. Here, I employ Heidegger's critique of technology to trace opposing visions of the posthuman, visions that are both tied intimately to new information technologies. For those seeking to extend humanist ideals, information technologies are employed to extend the vision of an ultra-humanist view of a ‘scientific posthuman’ that dangerously understands the body to be a forfeitable nuisance, rather than an inherent aspect of being human. Along Heideggerian lines, thinkers such as N. Katherine Hayles and Thomas Carlson have developed an alternative trajectory related to Dasein's Being-in-the-world. This trajectory posits the self as constituted by a lack or abyss, enabling the formulation of a ‘mystical posthuman,’ celebrating, rather than forfeiting, humanity's embodied existence.

Transhumanism, Metaphysics, and the Posthuman God

After describing Heidegger's critique of metaphysics as ontotheology, I unpack the metaphysical assumptions of several transhumanist philosophers. I claim that they deploy an ontology of power and that they also deploy a kind of theology, as Heidegger meant it. I also describe the way in which this metaphysics begets its own politics and ethics. In order to transcend the human condition, they must transgress the human.

Restoring Place to Aesthetic Experience: Heidegger's Critique of Rilke

Atypical among Heidegger's numerous discussions of poets is the condemnation of Rilke in the 1942-43 lecture course Parmenides. At stake is the definition of "the open" (das Offene): Rilke reserves the open for animals as freedom from conceptual determinacy, whereas Heidegger reserves it for human beings as the place of Being in which things first appear as what they are. The open, for Heidegger, names the existential conception of place (as distinct from a geographical point) and features in his life-long attempts to articulate the relations between language, human existence, poetry and the everyday. By denying that human beings have access to the open, Rilke runs athwart this project and by denying it in a poem he confounds the expectations that Heidegger harbours with respect to the work of art as a site of the opening up of aesthetic experience, within the everyday, to ontological questioning.

THE LABYRINTH OF PHILOSOPHY IN ISLAM

This paper focuses on the methodological issues related to the obstacles and potential horizons of approaching the philosophical traditions in Islam from the standpoint of comparative studies in philosophy, while also presenting selected case-studies that may potentially illustrate some of the possibilities of renewing the impetus of a philosophical thought that is inspired by Islamic intellectual history. This line of inquiry is divided into two parts: the first deals with questions of methodology, and the second focuses on ontology and phenomenology of perception, by way of offering pathways in investigating the history of philosophical and scientific ideas in Islam from the viewpoint of contemporary debates in philosophy. A special emphasis will be placed on: (a) interpreting the ontology of the eleventh century metaphysician Ibn Sina (known in Latin as: Avicenna; d. 1037 CE) in terms of rethinking Heidegger's critique of the history of metaphysics, and (b) analyzing the philosophical implications of the theory of vision of the eleventh century polymath Ibn al-Haytham (known in Latin as Alhazen; d. ca. 1041 CE) in terms of reflecting on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception.

What Makes an Image Singular Plural? Questions to Jean-Luc Nancy

This article examines the connection between Jean-Luc Nancy’s thinking of images and his radical ontology of the singular plural. It shows how Heidegger’s conception of Dasein becomes operative in Nancy’s understanding of the visual and examines the implications which Nancy’s critique of Heidegger carries for a new ontology of the image. The article’s central concern is the question of what it means for a philosophy of the visual to embrace the singular plural? In what senses is the singular plural the foundation of an image’s being? How should the singular plural play itself out in a thinking of the image? Focusing on Nancy’s interpretation of painting’s origins, the article questions the manner in which the ethical consequences of Nancy’s ontology are brought to bear on his understanding of art.

Nishida on Heidegger

Heidegger and East-Asian thought have traditionally been strongly correlated. However, although still largely unrecognized, significant differences between the political and metaphysical stance of Heidegger and his perceived counterparts in East-Asia most certainly exist. One of the most dramatic discontinuities between East-Asian thought and Heidegger is revealed through an investigation of Kitarō Nishida’s own vigorous criticism of Heidegger. Ironically, more than one study of Heidegger and East-Asian thought has submitted that Nishida is that representative of East-Asian thought whose philosophy most closely resembles Heideggerian thought. In words that then and now resound discordantly within the enshrined, established view of Heidegger’s relationship to East-Asian thought, Nishida stated uninhibitedly his own view of Heidegger in the noteworthy statement: “Heidegger is not worth your time… He…does not recognize that which is indispensible and decisive, namely, God.” This present study lays out for the first time in English, the significant differences between the metaphysical and political stances of Nishida and Heidegger, Nishida’s own critique of Heidegger, and Heidegger’s own rather dismal assessment of non-Western philosophy, all of which demonstrate a remarkable, hitherto unrecognized discontinuity between Heidegger and East-Asian thought.

A Postmodern Defence of Universal Liberal Legal Norms

The idea of universal liberal legal norms has long been under attack from a variety of sources. One of the most sustained and sophisticated philosophical versions of such an attack is found in the work of Martin Heidegger. His argument from the social embeddedness of the self to the ultimate contingency and groundlessness of any claims of normativity has been highly influential across a number of fields. This paper argues that legal theorists who wish to contest such a view should look to the work of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. In his critique of Heidegger, Levinas affirms the significance of the human beyond the particular context in which we find ourselves embedded. Levinas wrote very little about law; his main focus was on ethical responsibility and the claim that an “other” makes on me. I argue that legal responsibility is fundamentally different, concerned instead with the claims that a self can make on others. Drawing upon Levinas’ understanding of the self as constituted through ethical responsibility, I argue that a Levinasian account of justice can support liberal-democratic norms such as freedom, equality and dignity. Indeed, Levinas himself endorsed universal human rights and even indicated a strong affinity with Kant’s idea of justice. What he denied, however, was that justice is a fully rational and coherent concept. I argue that this does not render justice incoherent or call into question the basic status of the norms of justice. Rather, a Levinasian account of justice shifts the emphasis to the community practice of reasoning about universal norms, a practice that is never complete. I further suggest that such a practice of reasoning should be familiar to lawyers as it bears a strong resemblance to common law reasoning.

Contra Heidegger

This paper confronts Heidegger's critique of Platonism and defends Plato as a productionist metaphysician. Heidegger misunderstands and abuses Platonic metaphysics. Rather than initiating the reification of being (Sein) in beings (das Seiende) and the subordination of nature to human control, as Heidegger accuses, Plato offers us a non-dogmatic metaphysics of human possibility oriented by and subordinated to being, conceived equally as the good and the beautiful. The relevant production constitutes the ethical counterpart of Platonic metaphysics: it is the responsible bringing of ourselves to presence in accordance with the measures given in nature, a process that is erotic, progressive, and always on-the-way.

HEIDEGGER, ROUSSEAU, NACIONALISMO Y UNIVERSALIDAD

This article puts forward Heidegger's criticism of Rousseau's idea of the Social Contract and shows how it leads the German thinker to affirm prevalence of facticity over universalism. This drift helps to explain why Heidegger fell into nationalism and why he sympathised with Nazi politics, moving away from the universalist purposes entailed by every philosophy.

Information design and the world that comes before us

Technology or art? The practice of information design occupies an ambiguous position in relation to these very different approaches to making. Heidegger's critique of the metaphysical concepts of being, spatiality and mood provides fertile ground for developing an understanding of the way in which `information design as technology' conceals. The ethical imperative for an alternative conception of information design is explored.

El humanismo mexicano como humanismo analógico

This article analyses the Mexican Humanism as an alternative proposal to Heidegger's critique of European Humanism. Beuchot argues that Mexican Humanism has an analogical character, because Humanism of Indian and European culture converges and integrates here.

The Way toward Wisdom: an Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Introduction to Metaphysics. By Benedict M. Ashley, O.P.

The Way toward Wisdom: an Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Introduction to Metaphysics. By Benedict M. Ashley, O.P.

Parkour, Anarcho-Environmentalism, and Poiesis

As innovated by French “free runners” David Belle and Sébastien Foucan in the1990s, Parkour is a physical cultural lifestyle of athletic performance focusing on uninterrupted and spectacular gymnastics over, under, around, and through obstacles in urban settings. Through the public practice of Parkour across late modern cities, advocates collectively urge urban pedestrians to reconsider the role of athleticism in fostering self—other environment connections. This article taps ethnographic data collected on Parkour enthusiasts in Toronto (Canada). For 2 years, the author spent time in the field with “traceurs” (i.e., those who practice Parkour) and conducted open-ended interviews with them regarding their experiences with the movement. In this article, the author explores Parkour as an emerging urban “anarcho-environmental” movement, drawing largely on Heidegger's critique of technology along with Schopenhauer's understanding of the will to interpret the practice of Parkour as a form of urban deconstruction.

HEIDEGGER AND THE APPROPRIATION OF METAPHYSICS

Heidegger's deconstruction of the history of Western metaphysics has been a major influence behind poststructural critiques of modernity as well as more apologetic attempts to maintain a dialogue with historical sources, such as Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. This bifurcation has intensified the ambiguity of Heidegger's project: was it an attempt to relinquish philosophical ties to the past or a call for a fundamental reinterpretation of them? In this article I argue the latter, focusing my analysis on Heidegger's notions of appropriation and historicity. On the one hand, appropriation is the hermeneutical event by which ontology is reinfused into a reading of historical sources. On the other hand, historicity is the self‐reflexive historical involvement by which we become aware of what contemporary, philosophical conditions necessitate this reengagement. In the end, Heidegger's critique of metaphysics arises from this self‐reflexivity. It deconstructs the prevailing misunderstandings of philosophical sources in order to allow for reinterpretation at a revivified ontological level constantly in view of the question of being.

Levinas and the Triple Critique of Heidegger

As twentieth century philosophy fades into the distance, Martin Heidegger seems to be standing the test of time. His stature in continental philosophy is beyond question, and those French thinkers who avoid his influence most noticeably (such as Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze) are often difficult for precisely this reason, since it is Heidegger who has shaped our vision of philosophy more than anyone else. Even analytic philosophers have begun to find useful insights in Heidegger's works, while no analytic thinker has a comparable influence in the other direction - not even Wittgenstein. As the dust settles on the past hundred years of philosophy, it is Heidegger who looms as the ancestor whose influence we most need to absorb and resist. No one has seen this more clearly than Emmanuel Levinas. His claim that we must leave the climate of Heideggerian philosophy, and that we cannot do so by returning to a philosophy that would be pre-Heideggerian, strikes me as definitive. Nor does Levinas offer this statement as merely a vague program: in my view, he has done more than anyone else to move us into the post-Heideggerian climate that he recommends. In the works of Levinas, the lasting breakthroughs of Husserlian phenomenology are present in easily recognizable form, even if played in a strange new key. He grapples with Heidegger's question of being and his famous tool-analysis, reworking them in ways their author never attempted. Levinas does this along two separate paths. First and most famously, he senses the lack of any ethical philosophy in Heidegger, and also identifies a new space for such an ethics: the famous alterity or exteriority of the other. In this way Heidegger is challenged from above, with an appeal to the good beyond being. In a second and less prominent sense, Levinas challenges Heidegger from beneath, with his concepts of enjoyment and the elemental. While Heidegger submits all objects to a relational system of tools serving a series of purposes, Levinas objects to this form of holism. Entities are not simply dissolved in some global system of purposes, but close off in themselves, with a sort of inviolable integrity apart from all networks or functions. Humans always stand somewhere in particular, bathing in the material reality of wind, water, and stars, not to mention hammers and cigarettes, none of them entirely used up by their assignment to wider purposes. It is often forgotten that this second criticism of Heidegger is the basis for the first: for in Totality and Infinity, it is separation that paves the way for exteriority and transcendence.1 In this article, I will claim that there is also a third critique of Heidegger to be found in Levinas, one more closely related to the second than to the first. As Alphonso Lingis has lucidly observed,2 Levinas gives us a new definition of individual substance without relapsing into the traditional substance discredited by Heidegger's shifting system of tools. For Levinas, specific things are not just ontic debris to be dissolved in a mighty ethical Other, but neither are they just formless elements such as water or clouds. Things are substances, closed off in themselves even while permeated by what lies beyond them. If metaphysics for Levinas is inconceivable without the command of the Other, it is also unthinkable without the integrity and resistance of specific, autonomous entities. Heidegger misses the ethical moment, but perhaps more fatefully, he also misses the unyielding autonomy of specific objects. While Heidegger is quick to dismiss drums, houses, and tea plantations as ontic, Levinas glimpses the metaphysical dimension of particular things. My one criticism of the Levinasian approach is that it remains too human-centered, too much in the shadow of Kant's Copernican Revolution. Things may hide behind their contours in substantial plenitude, resisting human effort, but Levinas also seems to grant them independence only when humans are on the scene to feel resistance. …

Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas Between Revelation and Ethics (review)

Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas Between Revelation and Ethics, by Samuel Moyn. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. 268 pp. $29.95. Academic interest in the work of Emmanuel Levinas (1906-95), the Lithuanian-born philosopher who articulates as first philosophy, has reached a critical mass in the last several years. Samuel Moyn, Associate Professor of History at Columbia University, sounds a cautionary note to this wide-spread and often uncritical attitude by tracing the philosophical roots and historical progression of thought, its sources and influences, up until Totality and Infinity in 1961. Against the laudatory or even hagiographical interpretation of Levinas as the ethical philosopher par excellence, Moyn seeks to contextualize the development of thought by showing how it emerges out of specific historical situations and philosophical controversies. Moyn's itinerary begins with academic apprenticeship in the 1920s and early 1930s in the shadow of Husserl and particularly Heidegger, his philosophical development during the European conflict of World War II, and the consolidation of his thought in the post-war period. Central throughout Moyn's analysis is the legacy of Heidegger's turn toward National Socialism in 1933, and most crucially and perhaps controversially, Moyn argues that Levinas cannot be understood except as a secularization of a transconfessional, but originally Protestant, theology of encounter with the divine (p. 12). That protestant theology of encounter is found in the work of Jean Hering and Karl Barth, and Moyn argues that Levinas retrojected his creation [of the other] into the foundations of his own particular (p. 12). own faith is, of course, Judaism. Moyn's Origins of the Other follows a chronological outline along two parallel paths, one emphasizing philosphy and the other theology/ethics. Chapter One, True Bergsonianism: Beginnings of a Philosopher, begins with a brief biographical sketch designed to correct the view of Levinas as a talmudic scholar reacting to antisemitic violence from the outset of his life. point of Moyn's reconsideration of cultural and educational origins is to insist that tutn toward an intersubjective ethics of the other was an immediate product neither of his early religious education nor of his initial philosophical study. Chapter Two, The Controversy over Intersubjectivity, details Heidegger's critique of Husserl and then analyzes two of Heidegger's own students, Karl Lowith and Hanna Arendt, and their different appropriations of their teacher's thought. Chapter Three, and Crisis: Interruption of a Trajectory, focuses upon reaction to Heidegger's 1933 membership in the Nazi Party, for Heidegger's Nazism forced Levinas to seek a path different from Heidegger's.Totaliter Aliter: Revelation in Interwar Theology, Chapter 4, parallels the earlier chapters in that Moyn traces a path through the First Quest for the historical Jesus and early 20th century Protestant theology, primarily Rudolf Otto and Karl Barth, before turning to a fine, detailed re-reading of Franz Rosenzweig's 1935 Star of Redemption. next section, Chapter 5, Levinas's Discovery of the Other in the Making of French Existentialism, concentrates on Kierkegaard's reception in France and the impact of the Danish Christian existentialist's thought upon those in circle. In Chapter 6, The Ethical Turn: Philosophy and Judaism in the Cold Moyn attacks the idea that the Holocaust caused Levinas to consider the relation to the other as an ethical demand. Instead, Moyn claims that the Cold War, rather than World War II, is determinative for evolution into an ethical philosopher. Moyn is at his analytical best in detailing the intricate philosophical connections between Levinas and his influences, and he is at his argumentative best when he tackles detailed readings of texts, but despite Moyn's fulsome accounting of philosphical development, I am left with several reservations. …

God – A phenomenon?

Phenomenology describes everything that appears to consciousness in the how of its experiential givenness, that is, as a phenomenon. But is it adequate to describe the presence of the transcendent God as a phenomenon? This is the guiding question of my exploration. It proceeds in three steps: First, Husserl's reasons for excluding divine transcendence from the field of phenomenological research and Heidegger's criticism of so-called “onto-theology” and “metaphysics of presence” come into focus as background for the debates on the (im)possible gift and the “theological turn” in French phenomenology. Second, Marion's description of God's presence as givenness of a self-giving “saturated” phenomenon is discussed in confrontation with the counterarguments by Lévinas, Derrida, Husserl and Heidegger. Third, as a conclusion of these discussions, a model of theology as semiotic “phenomenology of the Invisible” is outlined, taking into account that God's transcendence can become phenomenal either in or in contrast to the ambiguity of appearances.