Why is Heidegger Significant?

We can see from our critique of Zizek’s ahistorical presentation of Lacan one of the reasons that Heidegger is important. Heidegger sets off this whole progression. Without Heidegger there would have not been this progression. There would have been something else, something probably closer to Husserl, and thus nothing nearly as deep. The whole progression revolves around the transition to existentialism which was actually pioneered by Jaspers, but after the fact was associated with Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche. But it was Heidegger that pushed Existentialism over the edge into its popularity by delving deeply into the facticity of life, i.e. the lifeworld, in the form of dasein as being-in-the-world. Heidegger established a new universe of discourse with a new terminology borrowed from Jaspers but deepened by a thorough analysis of dasein, i.e. what is before the difference between Subject and Object in the realm of meaning with respect to the facticity of life. Being and Time is a tour de force in every respect, especially when we understand it as Kisiel does in the context of the courses Heidegger taught beforehand. Heidegger in B&T did something unprecedented, which was to push into a completely new territory for philosophy by going back to Aristotle and seeing that the kinds of knowledge that he described were actually wider than the modern concept of knowledge which had been narrowed to epiteme only. Heidegger then used the different types of knowledge identified by Aristotle to push back into techne and then into phronesis as ways of knowing that had been more or less abandoned by Philosophy, and gave them an ontological interpretation as ways of being-in-the-world. Phronesis is equivalent to Dasein, Techne to ready-to-hand and Episteme to present-at-hand which are equiprimordial kinds of Being, i.e. Pure and Process Being. Heidegger thus opened up the realm of the meta-levels of Being that Continental Philosophy has explored. These higher kinds of Being were known in antiquity, by Plato and in Myth and Epic but had been forgotten. Heidegger opened up the realm of the kinds of Being to be discovered again. French Continental Philosophy launched into that new realm and that produced a Renaissance of Thought of which Zizek and Badiou are the last vestiges. But what happened in France after the war for the last 60 years or so will be the basis for all significant philosophy for a long time to come. And it is all primarily Heideggarian in its impetus. It shows the slow and measured digestion of Heidegger’s philosophy that followed out the way that it had sketched discovering much more than Heidegger could ever have imagined. In fact Heidegger went completely the opposite way from the meta-levels of Being by discarding Ontological Difference and developing his ideas of Beyng (Seyn). He unleashed Pandora’s box and that scared him, he tried to put the genie back in the bottle. But by doing that he pushed to an even deeper level which has not yet been appreciated fully. How could it we are still coming to terms with Being and Time and its implications as played out in French Philosophy in the later part of the Twentieth Century. Our point is that if we take it as a whole it makes a lot of sense, especially when interpreted based on the Higher Logical Type theory of Russell as the disclosure of meta-levels of Being. Each thinker makes a discrete transform based on his understanding of Heidegger’s initial position in B&T or in the later works. This series of transformations is like what we read in Phenomenology of Mind/Geist/Spirit, except it is a supplement or an appendix that goes beyond Hegel and thus Kant. They are positions with an inner logic which is being worked out. In the Phenomenology Hegel may describe more than two positions at a given stage in the unfolding of spirit. The dialectical working out of the relation of one stage to another can have multiple dialectical moments. What we are saying is that the French reception of Heidegger and Husserl has this type of inner logic which we can ultimately understand as being based on the meta-levels of Being. In other words there is a progressive process by which disclosure is disclosed. This is unlike anything described by Hegel in the Phenomenology. But this is because Heidegger broke through to the level at which disclosure revealed itself as fundamental. Of course, the French Philosophers had no idea where they were going. They were each performing their own analysis of the situation at each stage and reacting to what had been revealed previously by others. They were making moves in accord with the logic of the situation as it stood at each point along the way. But because each of them were in the new territory opened up by Heidegger, the basic impetus and understanding of the realm in which they were in has to be taken back to Heidegger’s B&T for us to understand it.

Heidegger gives us the basic reference guide to the region he opened up which was being explored and elaborated beyond his expectations and dreams by others who sometimes understood the new territory better than he did. In fact, while they opened up the territory revealed by Ontological Difference he instead opened up a new territory which is its dual, that of Ontological Indifference, i.e. Beyng. And there is plenty of more room for this exploration to continue. There is a whole continent new to thought out there to be explored, claimed and settled. There are many French Colonies in this new territory but that does not mean that they will end up owning it ultimately. Sometimes colonies declare independence. But if they hardly have an overview of what has happened, what has been disclosed about disclosure, then how can we expect Americans to understand what is going on. The Americans are savaging for the most part the remains of what the French have achieved and have not gotten to the point where they themselves can contribute as yet. But there is a shift because we can see that Badiou and Zizek are the spent energy of the renaissance that occurred in France. The French are so desperate some of them have actually taken on the mantle of Analytic philosophers. Slowly, very late to the party American Universities are starting to produce Ph.D.s in Continental Philosophy. And with so many English Departments needing to have students who have viewpoints on literature to write about, the tide is turning toward Continental philosophy in Academia. Unfortunately, those in English Departments for the most part do not understand Continental Philosophy very well as yet. But when there are American Philosophers with a Continental bent to consult this will slowly change. We are right at the turning point where Continental Thought has not yet been corrupted completely by American interest as yet and when some of those who were alive during the heyday of the renaissance of Continental thought are still with us. That is we are right at the point where histories of the various French movements are starting to be released. And when Heidegger’s courses and other unpublished works are seeing the light of day. And most of the main streams that come out of Heidegger’s thought have been explored enough to see the big picture. So we are lucky to be living right at this time when philosophy has been renewed but has not yet reified completely. And at the center of this whole spectacle is the works of Heidegger which are amazing in their depth and their breadth. So lets take advantage of it to learn as much as we can about our worldview, now that this new perspective on it has opened up, before the door closes again. Reification is inevitable, especially when Academia in America gets into full swing digesting this new way of looking at the world. We need to pay attention to what has been disclosed before it is covered over again, with its own style of reification, like what happened with Deconstruction. As has been mentioned Deconstruction is an American phenomenon not a Continental phenomenon. It is the nihilistic outcome of the American adoption and interpretation of the work of Derrida mostly in English Departments. It is an imitation of Derrida’s style of thinking probably without understanding the fundamental impetus that led to it, i.e. the exploration of Hyper Being. And of course the Americans going to extremes in it has given Deconstruction a bad name, making it synonymous with Nihilism. Whether the later works of Derrida deserve this ignominy I do not know, but the early works were on to something very interesting, i.e. exploring for the first time Hyper Being which eventually was realized by Sallis to be the Third Kind of Being in Plato’s Timaeus, and thus justified as having a reserved but forgotten place within the tradition.