Heidegger 1: Metaphysics So What?

[koganbot]

Am currently reading Martin Heidegger's "The Word Of Nietzsche" (it's in The Question Concerning Technology And Other Essays, no preview available through Google Books, unfortunately), at the recommendation of Philosophy David 1.* I'm only a few pages into the essay, but I have a question that I think is quite discussable whether one has read the

Comments

[dubdobdee]

somewhere in my house i have a copy of "question of technology and other essays" but i TOTALLY cannot kind it this morning -- it does bring home to me what a chaotic mess my books have got into though

g'day bruce!

[carsmilesteve]

oh you!

now i'm going to be singing the philosophers drinking song all day!!!!

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-manuel kant was a real pissant etcetcetc

yes i may have owned several monty python tapes as an impressionable youth...

[byebyepride]

Hi Frank

[koganbot]

Alex, I think it's terrific you're commenting, and you're helping to remove some confusion.

it doesn't really matter to him whether or not those answers are what you call beliefs. So the constructive force he ascribes to them is the power those 'answers' have in building philosophical constructions.

I don't know if I understand you here. Is the distinction you're drawing between believing those "answers" and using those "answers"? This seems like six of one, half a dozen of the other (people are a thousand times more likely to use them if they believe them, no?). Or are you drawing some other distinction?

It would be odd to claim that Augustine didn't believe in God and that Kant didn't believe in the a priori; but yes, what's at issue isn't their belief per se but how they used their belief in "God" or the "a priori." My fundamental question is "How important are these beliefs (or 'answers,' or values or what have you)?" And the way to answer the question is by asking "What did the people who believed (or asserted, or whatever)

[byebyepride]

Is the distinction you're drawing between believing those "answers" and using those "answers"?I was drawing another distinction, but it may have been based on a misconstruction (oops!) of your question. I thought you were asking about the identification of philosophies with epochs (implying a hierarchical identity of sorts between philosophical thinking and 'ordinary' thinkers-doers) i.e. did 'common' beliefs rest on notions such as aim for the greatest happiness of the greatest no. [Actually, I think the choice of utilitarianism as an example for HD is interesting because it would be hard in the mid C20th to argue that it was ever more than a partial reflection of the thought-world of a particular time and place.] So are you asking instead about whether HD thinks the philosophers he is criticising believe in the terms they use

[koganbot]

So are you asking instead about whether HD thinks the philosophers he is criticising believe in the terms they use?

No. I assume that they generally do (though Nietzsche played around with the slipperiness of language, is said to have invented the scare quote). I'm basically asking about the IMPORTANCE of the ideas. And one can relate that to epochs if one wants (though I didn't have epochs in mind): the importance of the ideas to the people who held them, who disputed them, to the other people these people had an impact on, to the people that these people didn't have an impact on, etc

[tarigwaemir]

My memory of Heidegger is that he rather attempts to disassemble metaphysics: he claims that our understanding of an object's "being" is grounded in its immediate utility ("ready-at-hand") as opposed to an abstract conception of what it is.

The way my intellectual history professor put it: Nietzsche reacts to centuries of philosophy and claims that there is no metaphysics; Heidegger critiques Nietzsche in pointing out that Nietzsche just develops a new metaphysics of power to replace the old metaphysics.

[koganbot]

One could say in defense of Nietzsche that "power" is so obviously about relative, temporal importance rather than eternal, ultimate grounds that it's no more metaphysical than "immediate utility" is.

[koganbot]

I think of the "will to power" as being fundamentally a psychological principle, Nietzsche's countering Schopenhauer's "will to life"; Nietzsche thinks the will to dominate and create and to bring order trumps the will to survive (or the will to critique or the will to describe or anything else). Now, were Nietzsche still alive, I'd want to ask him why he thinks one psychological principle has to be preeminent, but still, I don't see where there's anything metaphysical in assuming that creativity is more important than the others. Even if the assumption is wrong. (It would be a strange and weak use of the word "metaphysics" to make it mean "one's assumptions about the relative importance of some things in relation to other things.")

[tarigwaemir]

Hm, I disagree that Nietzsche's conception of power is merely "relative", and I think that Heidegger's criticism is in fact that Nietzsche says "one psychological principle has to be preeminent" because Nietzsche does not seem to question that the will to power itself is contingent rather than an independent force that exists in and of itself.

Is nihilism just another word for nothing left to lose?

[koganbot]

Philosophy David 1 asks this question, if any of you would care to take a shot at it:

"Is nihilism just another fiction for nihilists to believe in - perhaps to replace the God fiction?"

(I myself wouldn't get hung up on the fiction here, just ask whether or not you think the nihilist story that Nietzsche tells explains a lot.)