Robert Pippin is the author of two of the best books on Hegel I know, and much else of interest besides. In The Culmination: Heidegger, German Idealism, and the Fate of Philosophy (2024), he promises to thoroughly examine the thorny issues of Martin Heidegger’s claims about the history of metaphysics and the meaning of Being, which philosophically villainize both Hegel and Aristotle. For some time I have felt a need to better settle accounts with Heidegger, and this looks like a good occasion for it.
In my youth, I was impressed by secondary descriptions of Heideggerian “being-in-the-world”, and was for a while attracted to the poeticizing approach of his later works. At a very broad level, he seemed to endorse a principle that was my own first independent philosophical thought — that relations should be understood as coming before “things”. His name was associated with a critique of the Cartesian subject that I broadly agreed with. I agreed with some of his critique of Sartre. For several years I was even an enthusiast for Derrida’s extension of Heidegger’s critique of the notion of presence. But I always felt there was something repugnantly unctuous in the Heideggerian talk about Dasein — his special word for specifically human being — which stands sharply counterposed to Aristotle’s more empirical characterization of humans as rational or talking animals.
When fascism is even remotely in the mix, otherwise innocent philosophical doubts about the legitimacy of reason take on a whole different character. I have come to take much more seriously the implications of Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism (lengthy Wikipedia article here). Whatever one concludes about that, his strong identification with the agenda of the Weimar German “Conservative Revolution” (another lengthy Wikipedia article here) is undisputed. Though not technically fascist in the sense of being grounded in a mass movement of the displaced petit bourgeoisie, the Weimar Konservative Revolution embodied many of the attitudes typical of fascism, and has been a wellspring for the European New Right. While it is not my aim to write directly about politics here, let me say bluntly that fascism is close to pure evil, and the road to it is built on many lesser evils. What needs to be assessed is the extent to which the concerns about Heidegger are more than just an invalid ad hominem, and affect what should be said about the substance (that word, again) of his thought.
Finally, I have come to adamantly oppose reductive broad-brush negative generalizations about “Western metaphysics”, which long ago I too easily accepted from Alan Watts (Wikipedia here) and similar sources. Heidegger was the 20th century’s most authoritative and influential promoter of claims of this sort. This kind of gross oversimplification is the direct opposite of the kind of carefully differentiated and nuanced philosophical “archaeology” to which my work here is dedicated. Sometimes it is indeed necessary to simplify in order to make a point (for instance, I just suggested a very un-archaeological polar opposition), but I believe that due diligence entails an obligation to be able to answer questions about what the simplification leaves aside, so I want to make good on that.
Meanwhile, my own attitudes toward Kant and Hegel have undergone almost a 180 degree shift. Influenced by writers associated with so-called structuralism in France (even more confusingly called “post-structuralism” in the English-speaking world), I formerly related German idealism as a whole to a bad philosophy of subject-centeredness, while retaining sympathy for the Greek philosophers precisely because they did not seem to be subject-centered (see The Dreaded Humanist Debate.) But I have learned to leaven and indeed overturn some of these judgments, and now seek the best of both worlds, just as I have found a space for sympathetic reading that can include everything from anti-authoritarian secularists to medieval theologians and neoplatonists.
Next in this series: Availability of Being?
The Postmodern Peripatetic 