The Laughter and Tragedy Weblog

He’s certainly a very interesting thinker, is Heidegger; and a number of people I respect very highly think, in turn, very highly of him, or have been influenced by him. Why I think he’s over-rated is a large question, with lots of complex angles to it: in a nutshell (I don’t want this to sound like a cheap shot, but I’m afraid it will) I don’t think it was a mere coincidence, or unlucky accident, that he joined the Nazi party and supported Hitler. His fascination with autheticity, and his valorisation of a particular notion of grounded, rooted, ‘at home’ ‘being-in-the-world’ misses, I think, the distinctive, exhilarating liberating inauthenticity of contemporary existence, of that thing that is sometimes called ‘postmodernism’; and it elides with a belief that the only existence worth living is one that is conservative, ‘built’, in-the-homeland. What else? Well, I have problems with his ideas about ‘thrownness’ which I don’t think are quite right; I don’t think much about his (I think) very limited concept of the work of art, and I dislike his disdain for popular culture, for gossip, for irreverence, for those more ironic aspects of the human condition. Having said that, there are things in Heidgger that I do like. And this is a personal crotchet. Not everybody thinks that Heidegger’s thought is intrinsically fascistic, of course.

The nutshell in a nutshell: Heidegger isn’t camp enough. (Despite that moustache …)

You’re right that what makes Dasein a unique sort of Being for H. is, as he says in Being and Time, “in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it”; by the same token, he also says that a thing is most itself when we cease to be aware of it as a separate thing: that spectacles (for instance) are most themselves when you forget that you are wearing spectacles, and you are just using them to look at things.