29 May 2008

In Which I Complain About Things I Like

Lately I've been looking for articles that try to tie in Heidegger and what came after him with current "analytic pragmatist" philosophy. This strikes me as a potentially very fruitful area of research, but I keep being frustrated by how little fleshing-out a lot of claims are given.

"What Does The (Young) Heidegger Mean By The Seinsfrage?" is a nice example: Despite what the title might lead one to expect, most of the article is devoted to discussing Marburg neo-Kantianism (especialyl Cassirer and Cohen) and relating their concerns to those of Rorty and Brandom. (It's enlightening to see how easily one can be lead to Rortyan views from an explicitly scientistic starting-point. In an attempt to revise philosophy to be "in tune" with modern science, Cohen is said to have rejected the correspondence view of truth, limited the world's contribution to our knowledge to a "merely causal" one, adopted an explicitly social notion of "reason" as the various ways in which we justify and revise our beliefs, severely limited all claims to a priority (leaving only a vague imperative to understand nature as law-governed as genuinely a priori), delimited "reality" to just whatever our best physical theories talked about, and denied any epistemic role whatsoever to experience. And he billed all of this as "Kantian"!) Sellars is mentioned once or twice in the paper; Davidson a little more often. None of these four analytic-type figures is quoted in the paper; they don't even make it into the bibliography. They are all mentioned in the article abstract, though!

The author likes to throw in lines like this: "With this, the neo-Kantians have basically adopted the thoroughly coherentist conception of experience currently advocated by Sellars, Davidson, Rorty, and Brandom." At no point in the paper are the various views on "experience" held by these philosophers discussed; they are merely gestured at, and associated with the figures Heidegger is about to be introduced as overcoming. Also, by the point this paper was written, Sellars hadn't advocated any sort of view for a good decade. He’d been dead since '89.

I actually really like this article; I am inclined to agree with most of the unsupported claims the author throws out, and often find them insightful. For instance, take this footnote: "Hegel, of course goes a step further than Fichte, claiming to demonstrate philosophically that this Anstoss does not just factically occur, but rather for the sake of initiating Reason’ s process. Consequently, Fichte, not Hegel, is the more appropriate precedent for neo-Kantianism, and indeed for Brandom’ s social pragmatism." I find this a very suggestive remark: Both Brandom and Fichte want (in some sense) to found their systems on practical reason; both (in some sense) ground objective purport in the imperative that others should agree with a judgement; Brandom distinguishes perceptual judgements from others by their being casually, but not epistemically, distinctive (they are judgements which arise as the result of reliable differential responsive dispositions); Fichte's account of the genesis of consciousness is that it is "ocassioned" by a "shock" (Anstoss) which stimulates the Ego to posit both the Ego and the Non-Ego (but the "shock" is neither Ego nor Non-Ego; it is outside of cognition generally, a "noumenon in the negative sense" which Fichte uses to justify his claim to being a "realist"). In all of these, Brandom is closer to Fichte than to Hegel -- Hegel doesn't want to give primacy to either thinking or doing, objectivity or intersubjectivity, and his understanding of the world's "causal" role in our epistemic lives is one that lets it contribute genuinely conceptual matters for us to take up.

For Hegel on Fichte's "shock", see the second addition to ss60 in the Encyclopedia Logic. This is the last section before Hegel moves on to "The Third Position of Thought with Respect to Objectivity: Immediate Knowing", wherein Jacobi is taken to task in a way that is strikingly reminscent of "Mind and World" -- Jacobi manages to both affirm the Mythical Given and spin frictionlessly in the void. On Jacobi's account, our only true knowledge is of what is immediately given without mediation; all mediation is a form of ungrounded speculation. This is a form of the Myth of the Given, since our knowledge of particulars is supposed to be independent of all other sorts of knowledge (which we just don't have, on Jacobi's account; he takes Hume to have refuted all claims to knowledge of anything beyond bare sense-data). To compensate for denying that we can have knowledge of anything beyond these barren particularities, Jacobi attributes tremendous import to Faith, which includes both everyday beliefs which are unable to be grounded in our knowledge of particulars (such as whatever Hume believed when he stopped philosophizing) and more particularly religious doctrines, all of which are "immediately" held to -- they are not held for any reasons; reason cannot speak to matters of Faith. It is this Faith that Jacobi holds to actually be important; what we can know is nothing for us, is of no use in living. Hence in Jacobi Hume becomes a Fideist, and the Myth of the Given is tied to a "frinctionless coherentism" among our beliefs. (It's a good section. Hegel even argues against Jacobi by reminding us of the role of education in what is "immediate", as McDowell does, and as Sellars did in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind". And unlike McDowell & Sellars, Hegel goes on to use his line of argument to object to Fideism in religion, which is something I'm always in the market for.)

But in the article, the remark is just hanging there. Not even a footnote to other work which discusses it, not even a “(forthcoming)” or “(manuscript)". The literature is seriously gappy, and name-dropping is a real problem.

The article doesn’t actually get around to giving much of an answer to “What does the (young) Heidegger mean by the Seinsfrage”; the neo-Kantians eat up most of the space, and then the Heidegger stuff is mostly just about his criticisms of them. Certainly I don’t have a better grip on what “the question of Being” is supposed to be than I did before reading the article. But I like the article. It’s fun. But it’s becoming clear that some of the stuff I’d like to read still needs to be written.

15 comments:

J said...

You're even too pathetic and weak to be a nazi, S-Dan. Frege (not to say Heisenberg) did far more for the Vaterland than Heidegger's muck. Hegel may have been Feldmarshall of the pep rally (along with Nietzsche), but "History is Rational" does not build tanks. (that's not to give a blessing to the crazy Fuhrer or other miseries, but they did kill some stalinist swine that deserved it)

Kantians like most liberal lutherans were, uh, lampshade materiel---javoll, the transcedental apperception of the Lampshade

Kevin Winters said...

The work of Taylor Carman does a good job of dicussing Heidegger's relation to so-called analytic philosophy. I would also suggest Sean Kelly's dissertation, "The Relevance of Phenomenology to to the Philosophy of Mind and Language." Hubert Dreyfus, of course, has done a lot with critiquing Searl through Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.

Kevin Winters said...

Oh, and as an aside, Nietzsche's works were heavily edited before they were distributed within Nazi circles, including some of his very pronounced anti-socialist proclamations. Nietzsche would not have been impressed with nor would he have associated himself with the Nazi regime.

J said...

That's the cafe-left's standard line now (William Shirer thought differently, as did that fiendish Bertie Russell).

Of course the cafe-leftists conveniently overlook Nietzsche's repeated praise of Caesar and Frederick II, his denials of democracy, and his invocations of the german/scandanavian blond beast (at time verging a sort of totemism--think wolves), and his embracing of Darwinian naturalism ( with a few reservations). Nietzsche did align himself with Bismarck for a time, ( and apparently did not object to Bismarck's outlawing of the leftist). That's not to diss Herr Nietzsche. He rocks, like WAY dread. even if one objects to some of his pep rally speech.

The left seizes on a few commentsof FN contra-Wagner and against the Christian anti-semites, without realizing, one, Wagner was considered partly jewish by some (and RW and Cosima and most likely Liszt (RW"s palsie) had ridiculed Nietzsche on occasion--Wagner indeed told his doctor Nietzche was ill do to excessive, yes, masturbation--(role model, s-dan!), and secondly, Nietzsche did not care for the German plebes who were Christian and anti-semitic. Yet given his routine rants against slave morality, his praise of Fred II (anti-semite, indeed pro-Islam), his referring to jewish clergy (and xtian) as chandala, there's little doubt he too sided with the anti-semites, or at least anti-zionists.

The irony of it is rather obvious: given Nietzsche's own Will Zu Macht and supreme naturalism--(what do philo-wanks call that?? anti-normativity, or somethin'), he really couldn't have said much--he may have found it distasteful--perhaps not. The nazis certainly found inspiration in his writings.

J said...

And the real question for the Conty-philosoph wank concerns the interpretation of Heraclitus. Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger had their varying interpretations. Let's just say Nietzsche realized early on that Heraclitus was no proto-Lutheran mystic (and Hegel never forgets his Vati Luther).

Heraclitus is with the artillery, rubes--er, the officers of the artillery (and they have a cannon, or at least catapault, pointed at those queery platonists). Nietzsche is with Heraclitus style physicalism (and militarism) as well, at least Walter Mitty style--tho sans Hegel's ghost (er, Geist). Yr right he's no statist or socialist (few would call the nazis real socialists anyway), then neither were the prussian Junkers. Nietzsche's a Ludendorff of the imagination.

J said...

and technically Nietzsche quite modern in his denunciations of the "a priori." That doesn't mean one sides with brit-imps, or even in yokelspeak, the "pragmaticists". It means ones sides with, yeah, artillery. Really, Nietzsche's sort of a primitive Quine, tho' without the logicist aspects. Logic is pretty paltry compared to gunpowder (or plutonium for dat matter)

(j-k spunk-dan. Let's see the great reconciling of Conty and Anal phil!)

Daniel Lindquist said...

I've liked what I've read of Sean Kelly's stuff; his defense of non-conceptual content actually contains some of the ablest defenses I've seen of conceptual content against its critics. In fact, I think he ends up doing a lot more to argue for the "unboundedness of the conceptual" than for the position he explicitly holds. Dreyfus's work I'm more ambivalent towards, though he certainly has done more good than harm. I think he recoils too far away from "mentalism" in his criticisms of Searle, though. Some of his stuff on "motor intentionality" is reminiscent of the Churchlands.

I hadn't come across Carman's name before; thanks.

Also, don't mind the troll. Though I have to admit that "Frege did more to help the Nazis than Heidegger ever did" got a pretty good laugh from me.

J said...
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J said...

Churchlands, eh. You don't know phuck about that either (holy synapse, batman). And I doubt your preacher would approve of eliminative materialism (or Quine---not a metaphysician, either, as you keep mistaking him for)

Stick with like yr Kant for Sunday schoolers, or is it now Dasein (hey, there's good one--define Dasein, er, besser--point to it).

Kevin Winters said...

Why don't we compare spelling, grammar, and punctuation as that will do just about as much to show superiority as GPA or GRE scores...

And with that, I'm done with J. May you have a prosperous life full of learning and humility.

Duck said...

It's enlightening to see how easily one can be lead to Rortyan views from an explicitly scientistic starting-point.

Indeed, Rorty's own case shows this. His early stuff is pretty much party-line eliminative materialism. And as rejections of "metaphysics," positivism and pragmatism are at least cousins, if not siblings. Carnap actually sounds very Rortyan at times; and as I recall, Churchland's main article, "Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes," makes a much better case for that view than you'd think possible, in that it is pretty good at keeping anti-metaphysics front and center (rather than materialist metaphysics). Not that I think that position is stable (or that I've read the article at all recently), but the point here is the family resemblance w/pragmatism.

As for Heidegger and pragmatism, I know Rorty was big on Mark Okrent's book ... Heidegger's Pragmatism. But I understand that's a minority view – at least according to Taylor Carman, whom I managed to talk to a few times (even sat in on half a semester of a class on the Phenomenology, before deciding to get back to writing). I've got Carman's book, which looks good and seems to be written in English rather than untranslated Heideggerese. As I recall there's quite a bit on Dennett and Searle (not so much on Davidson and Wittgenstein).

But it’s becoming clear that some of the stuff I’d like to read still needs to be written.

Tell me about it. Not to mention most of the stuff I'd like to write.

J said...

Sure Kev. I'm done with you as well, except like for sending the petition out to where you are finishing your Sunday School cert to have you expelled.


Holy DASEIN Batman. Let's see like a snapshot of DASEIN. Heck, let's have one of ye olde synthetic a priori too............

J said...
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J said...

What do the Churchland's mean for pro-philosophasters?? Something like, "goldang it, should have gone for the RN at Bonehead JC instead" (tho' organic chem. a bit of a stretch).................

Kevin Winters said...

I'm currently a Masters student in the psychology program at the University of West Georgia (one of the top universities in Georgia, rated by the state right up there with Georgia Tech and Georgia State). My undergraduate career was in philosophy and I've been doing consistent philosophical research since those days, having an extensive and ever-growing philosophical library, despite my being in a psychology program. I have presented at various conferences on philosophical and psychological topics, have received a few awards and reseach grants for my work, and may or may not pursue a PhD program in either philosophy or psychology (or, preferably, both, but I haven't been able to find a university willing to let me do both). My thesis deals with the phenomenology of embodiment and the body's place in psychosis (beyond being a mere physico-chemical object). I plan to get it published when I am finished.

So, please, feel free to write to UWG and get me expelled.