Heidegger

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

John Perry
…except your intelligence. I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. We’re here at the studios of KALW San Francisco…

John Perry
…continuing conversations that began at philosophers corner at Stanford where Ken teaches philosophy, and I did for 40 years.

Ken Taylor
Now, today we’re thinking about the philosophy and life the life and thought of Martin Heidegger.

John Perry
One of my favorite philosophers, Ken.

Ken Taylor
John, you are kidding me! Surely you’re kidding me. Heidegger is the continental philosopher that analytically-trained philosophers like you and me both—we love to hate that guy!

John Perry
Well, Ken, I admit that was my attitude for a long time. And I’m exaggerating a little in calling him a favorite. He’s not up there with Hume.

Ken Taylor
I’m glad to hear that John.

John Perry
But Kevin Gin, a graduate student at UC Riverside, convinced me to take another look at Heidegger, and with his help, I’m getting a bit of sense of what Heidegger was all about. And I’m finding it very interesting.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, like “Das Nichts nichtet?” You find that int—I didn’t even know what that means! Or maybe it’s “Dasein” you think is so cool?

John Perry
Well, “Das Nichts nichtet” in English means “nothing noths.” Rhat perhaps isn’t yet quite clear. We don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about nothing. So let’s talk about Dasein. I think that’s a much more interesting, or at least a much more accessible idea of Heidegger’s. You and I are Deaseins. Rocks aren’t. Lizards aren’t. Most other animals aren’t. But we are.

Ken Taylor
Okay, Daseins—human beings are Daseins. Why didn’t he just say, “Well, I want to talk about human beings.” What’s with the Dasein thing?

John Perry
Well, I think this special terminology, “being there,” gets at his idea that that’s where human beings start out, we’re thrown into the world, we’re part of the world. We don’t—we’re not something… Anyway, it’s supposed to contrast, say, with a Cartesian point of view. A Cartesian ego is basically just a thinker and observer, an immaterial entity who reasons from its own existence and ideas, to God’s existence and hence to the world and other people. The starting point is an immaterial soul in its ideas. Heidegger rejects all that. For Descartes, the struggle is to justify belief in the rest of the world, but not for Heidegger.

Ken Taylor
Wait, wait, wait, wait a minute. Are you saying is Heidegger saying that if I’m a Dasein, then I’m not a thinker and an observer? That doesn’t sound so cool!

John Perry
No, no, no—Heidegger doesn’t deny that we think and observe. But for him, seeing yourself as a mind that’s separate from the world, like Descartes does, can only be the result of an intellectual struggle. It’s not the starting point of human life or a philosophy. For Heidegger, the world isn’t presented to me through my ideas. As Dasein I’m basically in the world. I’m basically an agent and a doer fully immersed in the world and using various of its parts as tools for my project.

Ken Taylor
I don’t get it, John. I mean, isn’t having a mind that can represent, you know, represent the outside world and form ideas about it and have thoughts about it—isn’t that what makes us different from rocks? And even from lizards that just stick out its tongues at things?

John Perry
No, no, the basic difference isn’t that rocks and lizards are immersed in the world and your some have some kind of Cartesian ego that’s not. Rock simply persists through time. Animals—and plants too, for that matter—react to circumstances in order to survive and reproduce. But humans lead lives, they form projects, they have goals, and they make choices about how to achieve them. And the world comes in as tools that they as providing tools that they use for those activities.

Ken Taylor
Well, okay, I’m gonna try and be more open minded than I was taught to be about Heidegger. You know, he sounds sorta kinda maybe a little bit like a naturalist. I’m a card-carrying naturalist, card-carrying member of the naturalistic party. We think consciousness intentionality thought all that stuff is just part of nature, immersed in the material world and not really separate from. Is that is that kind of what he’s thinking?

John Perry
Well, you’re having an inside Ken, although I wouldn’t want to overdo it. I mean, Heidegger’s—you don’t find a lot of talk in Heidegger about evolution and biology and humans being part of all that. But I think he has this insight, this position that naturalists have to have, which is that we are part of the world and all of our thinking and all of our philosophy and all of our literature is older, mostly grounded in this very basic relationship that we have to things when we use them in our projects. So he agrees with a naturalist I think in a fundamental way.

Ken Taylor
Well, that’s cool. That sounds kind of cool. I can get around that. But there’s one thing, you know, it’s one thing you sort I left out: the guy with a Nazi. Come on, how can we be talking about a Nazi?

John Perry
Well, it makes me a little bit uncomfortable that Heidegger was a member of the Nazi Party. But then good ideas are where you find them. All I really know, I’m not a scholar about this—Heidegger did join the Nazi Party in the early 30s, probably as a condition or as a part of becoming Rector at the University of Freiburg, which he wanted to do. He gave up that job not too long after that. In the meantime, people disagree about whether he was an enthusiastic Nazi, or a reluctant and somewhat opportunistic dupe.

Ken Taylor
Well, you know, we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Shuka Kalantari, to find out about this dark side of Heidegger. She files this report.

Shuka Kalantari
in 1925, Martin Heidegger was a philosophy professor in Freiburg, Germany. And he was quite the superstar.

Joshua Rothman
Heidegger was a real celebrity, when he was a young professor in his 30s.

Shuka Kalantari
That’s Joshua Rothman, an editor at the New Yorker. He says Heidegger was a really charismatic guy,

Joshua Rothman
As a young professor, you know, people had a fervent admiration for Heidegger and and students, you know, fell under his spell.

Shuka Kalantari
Including female students, like 19 year old Hannah Arendt.

Joshua Rothman
She was an undergraduate student in his philosophy class, and he sent her a note being like we should meet.

Shuka Kalantari
More specifically, Heidegger wrote…

Martin Heidegger
Dear Miss Arendt: I must come to see you this evening and speak to your heart. I will never be able to call you mine. But from now on, you will belong in my life.

Shuka Kalantari
That led to their affair, even though Heidegger was married. But let’s step back a few years. Heidegger was born in rural Germany in 1889. In university he studied philosophy, and by 1923, Heidegger was the intellectual star of Germany. Two years later, his affair with Hannah Arendt began, but that ended when Arendt fled Germany. The Nazi Party had risen to power, and she was Jewish.

Joshua Rothman
Shortly after that, you know, Heidegger became a Nazi.

Adolph Hitler
[speaking in German]

Joshua Rothman
When Hitler came to power, Heidegger got promoted, he became the president of the university.

Shuka Kalantari
Heidegger embraced the Nazi Party. When his esteemed mentor Edmund Husserl got fired from Freiburg University for being Jewish, Heidegger did nothing to defend him. He also denied financial aid to non-Aryan students. After the war ended, the Nazi Party fell, and Heidegger fell from grace. But his Jewish lover from almost two decades earlier, came to his defense.

Joshua Rothman
A big reason why Heidegger’s reputation survived being a Nazi is because Han Arendt defended him, because he did very little to defend himself or to apologize for his membership in the Nazi party during the war.

Shuka Kalantari
Heidegger remained pretty much silent on the subject.

Joshua Rothman
Hannah Arendt, in defending him, essentially argued, like, that he had—he was politically stupid, and he was bad at politics, but he was great at philosophy, was sort of the idea.

Shuka Kalantari
But Rodman says that’s a weak argument.

Joshua Rothman
It’s hard to say if someone who was supposed to be a genius that they just got swept up in it because they weren’t thinking very clearly.

Shuka Kalantari
Especially after Heidegger’s secret memoir, the so-called Black Notebooks, were published in 2014.

Joshua Rothman
So he wrote in these black notebooks his whole life, and he, before he died, set up a schedule of publication for the notebooks.

Shuka Kalantari
The final notebooks published were the ones he wrote during World War II, in which he used his own philosophy to make anti-semitic statements.

Joshua Rothman
He’ll say, well, you know, Jews are a naturally calculating race. And, like more so than other people, you know, they’re less good at authentic being because they’re, they actually, in some sense, embody the modern impulse towards making use of everything that you see around you.

Shuka Kalantari
Rothman says that raises a big question.

Joshua Rothman
Does it mean that intrinsically Heidegger’s ideas are bad, that they can be used in this bad way? So, you know, I tend to think Heidegger took his own thoughts and he screwed them up, but it doesn’t mean that his original thoughts weren’t good.

Shuka Kalantari
Joshua Rothman admits it’s hard to read Heidegger and ignore his racist politics, but it’s also a shame to disregard Heidegger’s philosophy because of his politics. Martin Heidegger himself once said, “he who thinks great thoughts often makes great errors.” Maybe he was talking about himself. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Shuka Kalantari.

John Perry
Thanks for that report on a difficult and distressing subject, Shuka. I’m John Perry. With me is my fellow Stanford philosopher, Ken Taylor.

Ken Taylor
And today we’re thinking about—actually we’re skillfully coping with—the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. We’re joined now by Thomas Sheehan. He’s professor of religious studies at Stanford. He’s author of “Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift.” Tom, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Thomas Sheehan
Thank you. Good morning, John. And Ken.

John Perry
Good morning, Tom. Now, we’re gonna mostly talk about Heidegger’s good ideas, I hope but but let’s talk a little bit about this Nazism just to get it out of the way, I hope you’re really one of the first to focus our attention on this issue back in the 70s. Now, these diaries that document a long standing anti semitism have been unearthed. Still, it’s clear that you think Heidegger was a profound philosopher well worth our attention. So give us a hint, how should we fit all of this together in our mind in a way that makes sense?

Thomas Sheehan
Well, that’s an excellent question, John. I think we have to distinguish between the biography and the philosophy, and we have to find out whether the biography which includes Nazism and anti semitism, hemorrhages into the philosophy at all, this is not just Heidegger’s problem. I mean, one thing’s for example, the anti semitism of Franca, which was found in his notebooks does that hemorrhage into his philosophy or not? Not to mention, of course, Kant, Hegel, and other anti Semites, in the German tradition. In any case, Heidegger was a very conservative nationalist, he supported the Nazis from at least 1931 to 1934. And idiosyncratically up until the end of the world World War 1945. We can attribute it to his conservatism, his nationalism, the defeat in World War One, a whole bunch of things, but it doesn’t absolve him as a philosopher from the bad decisions that he made. My question is, how do we read the philosophy now that we know about his most despicable convictions?

John Perry
Well, let’s let’s move to that philosophy now now as as admittedly analytic philosophy in a 21st century that’s probably outgrown the analytic, continental shift. Knowing much less about continental philosophers than we expect graduate students who now I learned two things about Heidegger. He said nothing nuts, which doesn’t make much sense on the surface, and which Rudolf Carnap he rove analytical philosophers use as a paradigm example of meaningless unverifiable jibberish, characteristic of metaphysics. But on the other hand, he invented the word Dasein. And that seems a lot more promising it is, as we discussed in the opening remarks. So let’s leave. Let’s not talk about nothing. Let’s talk about Dasein. How far off was Ken and my discussion at the beginning?

Thomas Sheehan
No, it was a quite a good discussion, I would say. There’s no question Heidegger uses weird language. So of course, it Aristotle who invented all sorts of neologisms, like until they care and other things like that. But I would be in favor of throwing out the window. Such words as Dasein, they make no sense. They’re a German word when we speak English here.

Ken Taylor
Oh, but he wrote in German.

Thomas Sheehan
he certainly wrote in German, does it

Ken Taylor
Does it make sense to a German reading Heidegger?

Thomas Sheehan
Absolutely. Absolutely. Once you understand what he’s getting at the word does I mean, it means existence in German, like the existence of God, Khan talks about the does and Goddess. Heidegger goes to the etymology of the word. And it means to stand out ahead to be thrown open as an arena of sensemaking. So I say throw out the word design, let’s use the word existence putting a little hyphen in there. And let’s just simply say it, the nature of the human being is to be thrown open for purposes of meaning.

Ken Taylor
Well, that sounds like a profound thought. I’m not quite sure what it means to be thrown open for the purposes of meaning. But it sounds very profound. Can you do it briefly?

Thomas Sheehan
I would like to say, what is consciousness? What is mind? It’s not within our heads, mind CK ourselves, it is all over the world. You’re thrown out upon things. That’s what we’re representing stuff like that. That’s what he’s getting at with Dasein.

Ken Taylor
We’ll have to explore that in more depth—like I said, it sounds like a profound notion. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about Martin Heidegger with Thomas Sheehan, author of “Making Sense of Heidegger.”

John Perry
Are you a Cartesian ego, or a design, or just a Giants fan? Or just a Warriors fan? Or just a sports fan of some team not in the Bay Area?

Ken Taylor
Heidegger hammers and the human condition—plus your calls and emails, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Pete Seeger
I’d hammer out danger / I’d hammer out a warning / I’d hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters all over this land.

John Perry
Welcome back to the program. I’m John Perry. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
….except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor. And we’re thinking about the philosophy of Martin Heidegger.

John Perry
Our guest is Thomas Sheehan from Stanford University, author of “Making Sense of Heidegger.”

Ken Taylor
So Tom, I want to go back to Dasein but take another avenue and because I know again, I’m no Heidegger by any means, but I know Heidegger has this thing about skillful coping and tools and all this sort of stuff and the philosopher, Hubert Dreyfus makes a lot about hammers as an parade example of our relationship to being as a relationship does does. Can you explain what’s the big deal with Heidegger’s hammers? And Heidegger’s?

Thomas Sheehan
Yeah, I think that’s been really exaggerated. Heidegger has probably 500 words on hammers in being in time, but it’s still an important idea, right? Well, it’s important as an example, what he really means to get at is that in any action, any practice, we’re looking ahead to the task to be done to the action to be performed. And the hammer is just an example of carpentry, we’re looking forward to building a house, right? That’s our goal. A hammer is a means to that. And if there’s no hammer a rainbow, maybe we’ll use a rock to pound in a nail. The point is, means ends in Heidegger says we are thrown ahead to our purposes, our ends and our goals. That’s the throne, open throne, a headedness that I referred to earlier, any kind of tool is looking forward to that for the purpose of which it’s being used.

Ken Taylor
. So that’s this is part of his thing about, as I understand it, give me tell me if I’m right, this is this thing about the world, right? Because once you start thinking about that, you get a whole network of these relationships. And a Daza is a being embedded in a world with these tools that are that throw it that you know, they throw their head, this thing you’re talking about, but this don’t add this gets to be a really big, all encompassing, Cetera relations.

Thomas Sheehan
Yes, I would agree with John’s earlier remarks. Heidegger stuff definitely was a naturalist. There’s no question about that. And he does talk about biology and evolution in his courses in the 1920s, and 30s. So he’s a naturalist. However, the world that he’s talking about is the real world that you and I live in, which is a world of meaning, not just a things, right. So when he says being in the world, he means being within a world of meaning, that gives its significance to hammers to rocks to whatever we happen to be using pens, pencils, etc. So being in the world means being a head in a meaning giving purpose, right? The purpose that I’m driving at is what gives meaning to the hammer that I use, this one may not work that one does. So that’s what he’s driving at. We live ahead in purposes, meaning giving purposes. And that’s where the so called being of the hammer comes from, we should throw out the word being, as we throw out the word Dasein. It means the significance of the hammer.

John Perry
So as I understand it, I mean, I mean, Heidegger, the conservative politically, what was an atheist? I mean, I think,

Thomas Sheehan
Yes, it philosophically he certainly was, yeah—no way to find God in his philosophy.

John Perry
So meaning isn’t something that comes to us from from God, it’s something that we give to the universe, because we have these active purposes that, that the meaning, I mean, in the philosophy of action, you have what you the means, as you do this by doing that, and by doing that you do this other and so forth, and so on, right. And that’s our primary conception of the world. But now, as I understand Heidegger, that’s only kind of stage one, at least if you’re a philosopher, you get beyond that to something a bit more theoretical, yes. Is that right? Yes.

Thomas Sheehan
What he’s interested in is the gap between here and there between me and my purposes, that’s called discursive at mediation, I don’t have an intellectual intuition of the meaning of a hammer, right, I have to run through things I have to discursively see what the project is and whether the hammer will fit. What he’s interested in is that gap. That’s what he means John by nothing. And when he says nothing, nothing’s bad translation, it means that nothing is operative, that gap is operative, we should pay attention to that, as well as to the two things on either side of it, the subject and the predicate, or the tool in the task.

John Perry
Now, my understanding is that when you when you fail, when your hammer breaks, that’s, that’s the beginning of this reflection. I think that’s why I became a philosopher because I spent a lot of time earning money, hammering things, but it was usually my thumb. And it really, I think Heidegger’s got an answer,

Ken Taylor
I will go back to that failing part because I have one I want to get. So John, contrast it Heideggerian approach to what the human being in the world is with a Cartesian him approach to what the human being in the world is. I mean, for Descartes, the world is a problem. It’s like, I got me, I’ve got my representations. Is there a world out there? Is there a body? How am I connected to it? And then he’s got some arguments that get to solve the problem, but the world is first presented as a problem. Right? It sounds like you’re saying that for Heidegger, the world becomes a problem. If it ever does become a problem. It becomes a problem when things go awry when things are interrupted. But the world is not first present to us as a problem.

Thomas Sheehan
No, it’s not first present to us. We know our way around what Dreyfus calls skillful coping, which is a very bad translation of Hoonigan in any case we know what we’re doing when we’re in the kitchen, we’re in the classroom etc. The world isn’t a problem. It’s something that we’re living through. Now break down crisis with a John referred to in YouTube can, yeah, tools can break down and then we realize what the world of meaning is that we’re living in. I got a hammer in those damn nails, right? What if you have a personal breakdown? Nothing makes sense. There’s stuff still out there, but it doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t matter. This is what he calls the experience of dread. All of a sudden you realize that you are responsible for the meaning that you make and that there is no reason no ground no explanation for why you’re thrown ahead as a discursive temporal sense-making being.

Ken Taylor
Heidegger sounds like—this all sounds kind of cool to me. And like I haven’t much thought hard about how to go I’ve taught a lot more about the existentialist I think I’ve become an existentialist in my old age or something of an existentialist except I guess I don’t believe in radical freedom.

John Perry
You’re not old, Ken. I’m old, you’re middle-aged.

Ken Taylor
Anyway, so what’s really I mean, this kind of sounds. Sarge was influenced by Heidegger, but Heidegger thought sorry, I misread them or something. What’s the relationship between existentialism and Heidegger?

Thomas Sheehan
There are three stages in the reception of Heidegger first he was looked upon as an existentialist for 20 years, and Sartre was his sort of representative in the state. Secondly, beginning in the 60s, he was looked upon as a philosopher of being, and it’s only with the book that is now published, making sense of Heidegger, that we realize that his whole philosophy is about making sense over our and because of our mortality. So Heidegger, the existentialist is what produces throughout all of his readings. And I maintained that the being phase 40 years of discussion of being was really a waste of time.

Ken Taylor
Wait a minute, wait. It was waste of time in Heidegger or it was waste of time interpreters of it. I just just clear that up.

Thomas Sheehan
First of all, two things. Heidegger was not clear. He was famously sloppy, I think, notoriously vague in his language. That’s why books like mine have to be written. Right. And he, he presented him so you’re glad he was like that? Well, I it took me 50 years to figure out what he was getting at, I would say, but he is an existential as to the end who’s after not being, but how we make sense and why we make sense. And the reason why we make sense, he argues, is that we are mortal, finite and have to put this world together for ourselves before we die.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re talking about the life and times the life and philosophy of Martin Heidegger. We’d love to have you join this conversation. And Sam from Riverside is on the line. Welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Sam
Hi. So earlier in the program, you were mentioning Heidegger’s relationship with his mentor, and I was wondering if you can say a bit about what I do you think Heidegger and where Heidegger tend to diverge?

Ken Taylor
Well, now this is complicated, because we don’t really want to get into a whole discussion on glycerol, Tom, because that’s a whole nother program. But can you give us a really briefly a characterization of the relationship between Heidegger and hosts? For the uninitiated, I mean, Sam, our caller, it seems like he’s initiated but we’re talking mostly to uninitiated.

Thomas Sheehan
Well, I would prefer to use the word phenomenology rather than continental philosophy. Heidegger learned phenomenology as a method from whoso. And the area the things that he keeps from visceral are number one lived experience. That’s the primary focus in phenomenology. Secondly, the logic of lived experience, there is a logic in phenomenology, right. But it’s about pre predicate of experience. What’s the logic of that? And thirdly, what is the ground of both the logic and the lived experience that he inherits from Oesterle the notion that the mind is not locked in your head like a Cartesian closet but it’s all over the world—that intentionality is a notion that you get from Husserl

Ken Taylor
So I want to ask you a question about Descartes and his role, and Heidegger and all that, because I got the point lived experience I lived experience is not of the world presented as a problem, right? But you know, for Descartes to reach that stage, what he had to do was retreat to his study, and engage in this elaborate intellectual discipline that got him some distance from his lived experience, and got him the chance to examine his ideas critically and then probe them. And that’s a distinctively philosophical mode of being It’s not everyday lived experience. So is there really such a deep? I mean, does does the do the phenomenologist really, fundamentally disagree with that? Cartesian thought that if we retreat to the study, and engage in a meditative discipline we can with struggle be brought to, you know, see that achieve this distance?

Thomas Sheehan
Yes. They radically disagree with Descartes on that Descartes is an Augustinian basically go inside yourself is the Augustinian model, read a anti Ipsum in Latin, right? That’s not at all what phenomenology about is about it’s about being already out there and involved it’s ours to tilian Rather than Oh,

Ken Taylor
I get that one I want to asking is, though, take her kind of agrees with that as an account of everydayness if he ever did have an account every day, but he’s philosophy is not about the everyday it has philosophy is about this distinctive kind of discipline. Right. So when you’re in the mode of philosophizing, you’re doing something different than having everyday lived experience.

Thomas Sheehan
Okay, let me disagree. I think that’s one way of doing philosophy to do the reduction back to the interior self, the Cartesian, the Augustinian self, Heidegger speaks of he duction being led out into the world where we live, and then unfolding the meanings that are operative there. So it’s only one way to do philosophy à la Allah Augustine and Descartes

Ken Taylor
So Augustine, Descartes, I think even Kant, think that there’s a distinctive point, there’s a really deep philosophical point to trying to recover this self, this Cartesian self, this transcendental ego, from the morass of the everyday because now you get to see its true nature or something like that, you get to see what really moves reason or should move, reason, does Heidegger reject even that kind of project, achieve this critical distance, then see what what the way whether wait of reason really lie,

Thomas Sheehan
I would disagree with your typification of Kant as part of that, but he certainly does disagree with the and natural attitude of a Descartes or Augustine, he does want to unfold meaning but he’s claiming that it’s in the world that we find our meaning not back inside of our heads in the closet of a Cartesian consciousness. So we have this idea that getting ideas is like the mind is a stomach and we put in data, chew it up and get representations Heidegger’s Absolutely, phenomenology, is absolutely against that unnatural act.

John Perry
So we don’t want to get too technical here, but there is this. This phrase transcendental ego start criticized Husserl on the issue of the transcendental ego. Husserl seems to have claimed there was a transcendental ego, which I guess means the self that is doing the phenomenology as opposed to the self that is disclosed in the phenomenology or something like that. Sark disagreed, and I believe Heidegger did too, is that

Thomas Sheehan
Absolutely nobody certainly no. husserlian knows what the transcendental ego is, I defy any was surely to call us and tell us what that is. You know, it’s an invention of glycerol, because of Descartes. However, Heidegger says, We’re not transcendental egos. We’re operating in the world, if you want, Dreyfus is coping. That’s where we live. Let’s find out what’s going on there.

Ken Taylor
But let me ask you another question. The world is a mess. It pushes us around in all kinds of ways. It pushes, puts urges on us. One of the things I learned about Descartes but one of the thing Kant believes in is that there is an autonomy to the will that’s different from mere inclination, which comes from like empirical sources. There’s pure reason moving the will and all that sort of stuff. I take it, I’m guessing that Heidegger probably doesn’t believe in anything like that.

Thomas Sheehan
Well, the world is a mess. If you take it as simply the stuff out there. world means the meaningful stuff out there. There’s where we already live. Okay, so for Heidegger, yeah, it’s a mess, except that we’re forever organizing it conflict. We organize it through categories, Hegel thought it was organized by absolute spirit, Heidegger thinks it’s organized by our practical activity.

John Perry
It turns out, it’s the NSA.

Ken Taylor
Wait a minute, though, help me more time. I mean, I think we’re getting somewhere deep. But help me more. Because yeah, there are all kinds of proposed meanings out there. You’re a meaning generating creature, John’s a meeting generating creature, I’m another one, you guys throw these meanings at me. But isn’t it kind of up to me to either accept or reject these meanings to make a meaning of my own? And this kind of, I mean, what does he think about that? contest over meaning?

Thomas Sheehan
Well, let’s make a distinction. Aristotle’s always making distinctions between meaning and truth. Right? Everything is meaningful. Not everything is true. Even when I’m wrong, I’m meaningful, right? If I think that’s a dear across the studio, and it’s not, well, that’s meaningful, but it doesn’t happen to be true. Heidegger is after first of all, how we make meaning and why we have to,

Ken Taylor
Truth, though, sounds like it’s independent of my takings. There is a way the world is this sounds may be non I don’t know what Heidegger thinks about you. This sounds kind of maybe non Heideggerian. I have thoughts I take the world to be a certain way I take you to be a deer. Oh, my God, you’re not a deer. Nothing I can do can endow you with dear hardness because there’s a way you are independently of my takings. What does he think about that, but that there’s a way the world is independently of by taking and it can embarrass my takings by saying, Oh, that taking is false.

Thomas Sheehan
Oh, he’s absolutely convinced of that. Of course, the world’s out there. There’s no no question about that. However, we do recognize that truth is no absolute. I don’t always get it absolutely right. Because in 10 years, my graduate student will undo what I’ve done. So truth is evolving, right and there are different ways And that we talk about truth, right? But it’s a subjective community that decides what the truth of subatomic particles is not some absolute out there knows.

Ken Taylor
Okay, so there is truth out there. There’s an out there as an app. How did you put it?

Thomas Sheehan
No, there’s no truth out there. Truth is between me and what’s out there.

Ken Taylor
Old-fashioned philosophical idea: truth is correspondence to reality. So there that’s kind of sounds like there’s an idea over here. There’s a world out there. Those two things are different. If they match, then there’s truth if they don’t match, but that doesn’t sound very high to Gary.

Thomas Sheehan
It is very high to Gary. And really, yeah, you find that in Section 4040 Being in time, however, the question of it’s out there, I’m over here. Wait a minute, I’m constructing what’s out there. I see a bunch of squiggles on my computer. And I say that’s a meze on a subatomic particle, right? I’ve interpreted it that way. And in 10 years, somebody else will interpret it as not amazing, but a gluon. So there is that we have no access to what’s out there except in terms of our relation to what’s out there. That’s what the truth problems about.

John Perry
Okay, so to anticipate a little what we’re going to discuss in the next section, Heidegger spent a lot of time thinking about Bolshevism, which he didn’t much like the kind of European point of view, which he saw as coming from classical Greece and being exemplified by Germany and American capitalism, and he thought there was a objective difference between them, didn’t he is this truth extend to these kinds of political ideologies? As I say we’ll talk a lot about this in a minute, but give us a quick answer.

Thomas Sheehan
A quick answer is he was absolutely naive about the political, sociological economic structure of the modern world including Bolshevism, Americanism, capitalism, etc. And I think he was absolutely stupid to pontificate on all of that without having done the labor of the concept. And actually, he traces phenomenology by making those kinds of absurd generalization.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re talking about Heidegger with Thomas Sheehan, author of “Making Sense of Heidegger.”

John Perry
In the next part, we’ll learn more about Heidegger’s conception of humans in the world and also ask morality fits, or the idea of a good life. Where does this fit or not fit in his system?

Ken Taylor
The right, the wrong and Dasein—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Trio
Da da da, I don’t love you, you don’t love me—da da da.

John Perry
Da-da-dasein, one of many important difficult but still very catchy concepts put forth by Martin Heidegger and turned into rock music for the improvement of life of all of us. I’m John Perry. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
…except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor. Our guest is Thomas Sheehan from Stanford University and we’re thinking about the life and thought of Martin Heidegger.

John Perry
So Tom, you’re a leading Heidegger scholar and expositor. You just finished a book offering what in many ways is a new interpretation? In a way you spent 50 years on that book you’ve been reading Heidegger. Now Heidegger says the main benefit of his philosophy is an improved understanding of who you are, and, and a deep understanding of your own life. So how do you think about your 50 years reading Heidegger? Do you think it was right that reading Heidegger improves your life?

Thomas Sheehan
No, actually, the only thing that proves your life is your living of your life, right? First live then philosophize at Seneca and I think that’s what we could learn from Heidegger.

Ken Taylor
But Heidegger was in the tradition was any of the Greeks who thought that philosophy wasn’t just a theoretical undertaking. It was about coming to live more authentically or better or more human right

Thomas Sheehan
Heidegger’s philosophy, philosophy, is finally an exhortation to live well, but does he cash out an answer to that exhortation, he’s all about authenticity in the early writings, that is to say, become who you really are, to quote Pindar. But in Heidegger, well, he does invite you to have that experience of awe and dread over the nothingness under the your feet, the groundlessness of human existence right over which you make sense. He has no ethics at all. He never wrote an ethics and probably couldn’t write an ethics because he had no social philosophy whatever he says about the social is generally negative you know, you get pulled down into what he calls the common man the crowd self.

Ken Taylor
But that’s the problem with not just him, but the existential is generally it seems to me, right but but there is a thing though, there is a there is something about authentic self within in in Heidegger right, I mean, what is it to live to be an authentic self to live an authentic life? Just help us think about that.

Thomas Sheehan
Bottom line, he wants you to live mortally aware of the fact that you are thrown out over nothing into a sense making thing that finally comma, you die. That’s the bottom line. That’s this thing about being toward death being towards death. And I think it’s better translated as being ever on the edge of death. It’s not like my death is up the road. It’s right here haunting looking at every corner. Exactly. I mean, Elliot is great on that in Prufrock and other poems.

Ken Taylor
But help me think of what why that should matter that death lurks lurks around every corner.

Thomas Sheehan
What he’s concerned about is the total rationalization and technologized ation of everyday experience and life, we think that we can control everything, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t try. But what he wants us to be aware of is a realism about our finitude in our mortality. That’s the existential dimension of Heidegger, that I think is probably the most important.

John Perry
Well, I like that part of Heidegger insofar as I understand it. I’ve been working on a book on melancholy, and then the Riverside student, Kevin Gin, and Sam Richards said, Hey, Heidegger uses the word melancholy. So I was both thrilled and disappointed to find this scooped have been actually

Thomas Sheehan
John, actually, it’s Sartre who uses the word melancholy. That was the first title of his book of his novel nausea. Heidegger uses dread rather than melancholy.

John Perry
So, but somehow, between the part that I don’t like, I mean, between the part that I like about his metaphysics, and the part I like about existential philosophy, there seems to be this idea that for his authentic being, it meant identifying with the European point of view, the German point of view, I mean, it’s just part of part of recognizing who you really are meaning mean that, you know, like, I have to say, Well, I’m really an Nebraskan. So I can’t really reject my card and has carrion attitudes towards things. Was there a bit of self deception? Or how do these two parts of Heidegger fit together at all it’s kind of nationalism, and, in the worst case, Nazism and this idea that you have to get meaning where you can.

Thomas Sheehan
What’s a polite word that one can use on radio? That’s BS in Heidegger, it’s Teutonic bombast. He’s just, he’s just a man of his times, and he was not able to just distance himself from his determinism is nationalism. So I hope we can leave that stuff aside, you know, that was definitely his shadow, and he could not jump over the shadow. But there should be a lesson for all of us about that. I mean, think of think of American anti communism in the academy in the 1950s. Let’s at least, say 93% of all German professors signed on to Nazism in the 30s, and wasn’t just Heidegger. So it’s a lesson for all of us about being embedded in our traditions and not being reflective. So I would leave all of that aside and say, No, we do all of us have the chance to look into that grave and say, That’s me. Now, let’s get on with business. That’s what I think Heidegger’s about.

Ken Taylor
We’ve got a call from Mitt in Oakland. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Mitt.

Milt
It’s Milt. My problem with Heidegger is trying to find out what Heidegger means by meaning we here on Earth, understand, meaning is being ratified. We play the piano, we are in love. That’s very powerful. And we say, that gives me meaning. Seems like Heidegger means something else by meaning.

Ken Taylor
So what do you think?

Thomas Sheehan
I don’t think so. I think you’ve got it exactly right. Meeting has a number of layers. One is simply basic familiarity, what I call knowing our way around what Dreyfus calls coping. And I think you’re exactly right. Meaning significance is ratified in the very doing of the act, whether it’s playing piano, making love being a friend eating dinner, that’s the kind of meeting that he’s after. He’s not talking about, although one can talk about propositional rational representations that we would call meaningful, Heidegger saying, we’re, we’re swimming in meaning all the time.

Ken Taylor
And that that seems deeply correct and, and the kind of whole ism that he seems to me, as I understand it gets into because these were swimming and networks of meaning, right. But I want to take you back to you. You easily threw off, and I understand the impulse, the Heidegger’s fascination with the rising Nazi party. I don’t know if you ever read in minecon because anybody who read that would not be fascinated by those folks, they would be repulsed. But I mean, you think of the broken, defeated Germany and this, this voice rising up to insist on that quote, that we have only in ourselves, that it only in themselves as the future of the German people lie or something like that? Mirror? Yeah. What did he say? No. Did he was referring to himself or he meant the fury or law. You know, he was awful. Yeah, no, he was definitely awful. But you can see how before you saw how terrible that guy was, he did something to the German people and Heidegger’s philosophy seems to me like it could be used to give Some kind of intellectual foundations to a charismatic person who really instills meaning and a broken defeated people.

Thomas Sheehan
Yep, that’s definitely possible. And the core is what he calls historicity, that is to say, what can you pick out of your national and personal DNA to actualize? In your future? He picked his own conservative political background, he picked Hitler, I would have picked Harry Bridges. And I think that would have gone with Heidegger, you could have picked Rosa Luxemburg, his biography not his philosophy, his biography made him pick Hitler.

Ken Taylor
But the act of picking a thing and enthusiastically living by it and endorsing it and full heartedly owning it rather than shirking from it and running from it. That’s a very Heideggerian sounding act.

Thomas Sheehan
Well, look at Sartre. Sartre picked the Communist Party. He was never a member, but he was a fellow traveler. He did it passionately. He’s the only philosopher I know that visited Cuba, right. So how do you make your decisions? The most important thing is to have chosen your mother and father wisely. And Heidegger didn’t

John Perry
Yeah, so Heidegger’s philosophy gives us a good understanding of the choices he had. And also a good understanding of the mistake he made.

Thomas Sheehan
Yeah, I think so. And he refused to acknowledge that mistake. He claimed he’d never done anything wrong. And by the weekend, he did read mine comp, part two, he thought was great. That’s all that’s all the theory part one the life of Hitler, he thought was banal.

Ken Taylor
Mike in San Francisco. Be brief, Mike, cuz you’re gonna be our last caller.

Mike
Hi Mike, political science PhD from UC, and I’d like to suggest a possible answer to the question of Heidegger and Nazism. You have to think of him as a theorist rather than somebody who’s analyzing practice. And I think that when he was looking at the theory of fascism or national socialism, he was following up on Hegel’s idea of the organic state that the individual could surpass or defeat his own mortality, which you correctly identify as one of his chief concerns by becoming a member of the immortal organic state. And that that was the reason for his fascination with this idea of a immortal super Germany, so to speak. And I’ll stop right there. Take any comments off the air. Thank you very much.

Ken Taylor
Thanks, Mike. Good question.

Thomas Sheehan
Yeah, a lot of people have tried to find that organic fascist stored community in Section 74. Being in time, we don’t have time, but I think that’s really BS. It’s not there. He reads it into that later from in the 1930s. But in Manuel fi and other intellectually challenged types, Richard Wolin has been trying to say that that is what Heidegger is about. It’s not, nonetheless, I’ll say this, he was not absolved from knowing what was going on in Germany. He is at fault for that.

Ken Taylor
Well, but you know, but I think we got into something deep, because I think it’s also true of the existentialist office authenticity, making a choice, affirmatively living, it is not sufficient. Absolute is not sufficient. And that’s the thing they never really came to grips with.

Thomas Sheehan
That’s right. But on the other hand, we didn’t want to turn ethics into whether I turn the trolley car this way and kill three people or that way until the fat guy. I mean, we don’t have an ethics in Heidegger and I would maintain, we’re still looking for one a social ethics in both analytic and phenomenological.

Ken Taylor
I totally agree with you. I think this is a really hard, hard problem. And, you know, it’s it does get to be where we see the limits of Heidegger’s philosophy. But I do think you’ve both convinced me that there’s a lot there, nonetheless, that is worth deep thinking about.

Thomas Sheehan
Yeah, the last two chapters of this famous book that we’re talking about, “Making Sense of Heidegger,” is all about his limitations, and I think his history of being is just doesn’t compute. And I think that we have to look at the early stuff before 1930 for the real Heidegger.

John Perry
So both Heidegger and Frege trace back to Lutze. And one wonders if Frege had written as obscurely as Heidegger and Heidegger as clearly as Frege how different the 20th century Yeah, absolutely.

Thomas Sheehan
Heidegger should have learned something from the Aristotle that he loves so much, which was clarity.

Ken Taylor
So Tom, this has been a fascinating conversation and, but it has to come to a close now I’m gonna thank you for joining.

Thomas Sheehan
I want to thank both of you—thanks.

Ken Taylor
Our guest has been Tom Sheehan. He’s a professor of religious study at Stanford University author of “Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift.” So John, you got a brief thought now?

John Perry
Yeah… Now that I know that I am but Dasein / I’m thinking things will turn out fine. / First, I’ll be something / then I’ll be nothing / and noth away til the end of time.

Ken Taylor
Well, on that intriguing and cheerful—so you do understand “nothing noths.”

John Perry
Yeah, I’ve come to believe that not only nothing nothd, but I’m going to spend a lot of time nothing.

Ken Taylor
This conversation, this scintillating conversation, continues at Philosophers Corner—that’s at our online community of thinkers—where our motto is very Cartesian and anti-Heideggerian: Cogito ergo Blogo, I think, therefore, I blog. And you too, can become a partner in that great one and that great community of thinkers by visiting our website, philosophy talk dot ORG.

John Perry
Now it’s Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Dasein.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales. From time to time, philosophers become caught up in kerfuffles that may or may not have anything whatsoever to do with their philosophies. In the case of Heidegger, insinuations of Nazi sympathies do not seem to have had an overly dampening effect on his legacy. That’s probably because he did not go around kicking in doors like a jackbooted thug… he was a philosopher. Any kicking was purely theoretical. Most modern folks, I suspect, only notice philosophers when they’re Twitter fodder, or some gossip item you read in the dentist’s office in a six month old People Magazine. Beyond being philosophers, in those cases they’re generally French adulterers. We Americans don’t go in for thinking. It just leads to trouble. Certainly when it comes to Heidegger, even if his rep was not besmirched, even if he were the tallest and best in a coterie of thoughtful angels. Think of the sad fates of philosophers past. Spinoza, excommunicated as a Jew for his writings. Sir Francis Bacon, stripped of his office as Lord Chancellor, and put in the Tower of London for corruption. Nietzsche stopped the beating of a horse in the street, then lapsed into silence, dementia, and death. What was that all about? Years earlier he had written, “… I was reading the confessions of St. Augustine…. What a high-falutin wordsmith! Such tear jerking phoniness! How hard I laughed, for instance of a ‘pear theft’ in his youth, made the basis for an account of his student days.” Yes, St. Augustine, who according to some had been quite the lady’s man before his conversion, didn’t write about sex or murder in his confessions, but about the senseless theft of a bunch of pears. Yet it gave St. Augustine his notions of sin, which led to some mighty ferocious heresy hunting in the early Catholic Church. Not so funny now, is it Nietzsche? Then there’s the Marquis de Sade, not much of a philosopher, or a Catholic, certainly, but his gaudy writings gave his sins permission to be. Hippies, libertarians, filmmakers, playwrights, and novelists, have all dined richly on the feast that was the Marquis de Sade. If it feels good, do it. What thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Yet The Marquis De Sade spent most of his adult life in prison. And Ayn Rand wound up on Social Security – which does not seem to have diminished her stature as anti big government goddess. Socrates, of course, for his sins, wound up being killed by big government. Schopenhauer knocked his cleaning lady down a flight of stairs because she was making too much noise, which did not diminish HIS stature as a cranky misogynist. Leibniz and Newton came up with the calculus at the same time. Newton, being a prickly fellow, accused Leibniz of stealing it. As a result of that, and other pieces of bad fortune, Leibniz was shunned by the king of England, and when he passed, the Royal Society pretended not to notice. Not only that, Voltaire mocked him cruelly in Candide as Pangloss, the optimistic philosopher believing that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Centuries later, Leibniz is just now getting his due. From his friend’s memoir I learned that Immanuel Kant, in his waning days, became a frail old man, who could barely summon the strength to fire his alcoholic manservant. It was embarrassing to read about. Nobody wants to see frailty in a big brain titan. But I also learned, according to this same memoir, that Kant did not perspire. Now that’s more like it. Think up a storm. Avoid trouble. And never let ‘em see you sweat. That’s my advice to young philosophers. And another piece of advice. If you’re looking to get advice, never take it from people like me. I gotta go.

John Perry
Philosophy Talk is the presentation of Ben Manila productions and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2015.

Ken Taylor
Our executive producer is David Demarest.

John Perry
The program is produced by Devin Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our director of research. Our marketing director is David Millar.

Ken Taylor
Thanks also to Ted Muldoon, Merle Kessler, Erika Topete and Mark Stone.

John Perry
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and the partners at our online community of thinkers.

Ken Taylor
And from the members of KALW San Francisco, where our program originates.

John Perry
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford Universit, or of our other funders.

Ken Taylor
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophy talk dot ORG, where you too can become a partner in our community of thinkers.

John Perry
I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening.

John Perry
And thank you for thinking.

The Producers
We must have some order here. Will all the dancing Hitlers please wait offstage right, amd all the singing Hitlers offstage left!