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Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift
Making Sense of Heidegger presents a radically new reading of Heidegger’s notoriously difficult oeuvre. Clearly written and rigorously grounded in the whole of Heidegger’s writings, Thomas Sheehan’s latest book argues for the strict unity of Heidegger’s thought on the basis of three that his work was phenomenological from beginning to the end; that “being” refers to the meaningful presence of things in the world of human concerns; and that what makes such intelligibility possible is the existential structure of human being as the thrown-open or appropriated “clearing.”
Sheehan offers a compelling alternative to the classical paradigm that has dominated Heidegger research over the last half-century, as well as a valuable retranslation of the key terms in Heidegger's lexicon. This important book opens a new path in Heidegger research that will stimulate dialogue not only within Heidegger studies but also with philosophers outside the phenomenological tradition and scholars in theology, literary criticism, and existential psychiatry.
Sheehan offers a compelling alternative to the classical paradigm that has dominated Heidegger research over the last half-century, as well as a valuable retranslation of the key terms in Heidegger's lexicon. This important book opens a new path in Heidegger research that will stimulate dialogue not only within Heidegger studies but also with philosophers outside the phenomenological tradition and scholars in theology, literary criticism, and existential psychiatry.
- GenresPhilosophy
370 pages, Paperback
First published October 16, 2014
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i-want-money
December 11, 2014Sheehan interviewed by Polt & Fried ::
"no one can jump over his own shadow"
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/no-one...
"no one can jump over his own shadow"
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/no-one...
December 13, 2017
This book takes us all the way through Heidegger's works, and presents Heidegger's thought as guided by one question throughout: how is there such a thing as meaningfulness at all? It enters into standard interpretive controversies concerning Heidegger, and fares well when it does so. I don't know if it constitutes a paradigm shift, since it seems to be in line with the way others read Heidegger, especially Steven Crowell. That said, the text has 2 major weaknesses, one rhetorical and the other philosophical. First, the rhetorical weakness: Sheehan is dismissive of some of Heidegger's concerns and claims, and gives into virtue-signaling rhetoric when it suits him. For example:
"Liberalism and democracy, however they might be defined--let alone "the Jews"--were not Heidegger's favorite friends. And cultural modernity--everything from radio and cinema to "modern art"--did not sit comfortably in the world of this socially blinkered, culturally narrow, and profoundly conservative man." The argumentative strategy here is rhetorical:
1. implicitly link critiques of liberalism and democracy to antisemitism, making such critiques rhetorically unviable.
2. link Heidegger's conservatism to the reactionary fear of spooky Jackson Pollocks.
3. Put up your feet and call it a responsible philosophical day.
The second issue is that Sheehan takes it for fairly obvious that Heidegger's conception of the way that meaning is formed is existential in the way that Sartre's is: condemned to live in meaning, in a universe that does not have any meaning outside of what we make of it, we are free to make it up as we go along. (So long as, Sheehan says, we remember that we'll someday die.) Sheehan represents Heidegger as reading this back into Aristotle by the very free-wheeling translations of Heidegger's texts that he provides. This does an injustice to Heidegger and to Aristotle. Arguably (I would argue), Heidegger's later reflections on technology are the place where Heidegger most clearly tries to see how we can be *receptive to meaning* and not only *constructive of it*. That is, Heidegger thinks meaning is shaped by our ways of life, but it s clear that for him, in places, this sets up a puzzle: how can humanly constituted meaning "get it right"? In my view, this is one of the most interesting philosophical puzzles that Heidegger discovered, and Sheehan misses it completely. Perhaps it's not surprising that Sheehan is so dismissive of the writings on technology, then, since he does not feel the force of the problem that motivated those writings.
A vast and erudite reading of Heidegger, though.
"Liberalism and democracy, however they might be defined--let alone "the Jews"--were not Heidegger's favorite friends. And cultural modernity--everything from radio and cinema to "modern art"--did not sit comfortably in the world of this socially blinkered, culturally narrow, and profoundly conservative man." The argumentative strategy here is rhetorical:
1. implicitly link critiques of liberalism and democracy to antisemitism, making such critiques rhetorically unviable.
2. link Heidegger's conservatism to the reactionary fear of spooky Jackson Pollocks.
3. Put up your feet and call it a responsible philosophical day.
The second issue is that Sheehan takes it for fairly obvious that Heidegger's conception of the way that meaning is formed is existential in the way that Sartre's is: condemned to live in meaning, in a universe that does not have any meaning outside of what we make of it, we are free to make it up as we go along. (So long as, Sheehan says, we remember that we'll someday die.) Sheehan represents Heidegger as reading this back into Aristotle by the very free-wheeling translations of Heidegger's texts that he provides. This does an injustice to Heidegger and to Aristotle. Arguably (I would argue), Heidegger's later reflections on technology are the place where Heidegger most clearly tries to see how we can be *receptive to meaning* and not only *constructive of it*. That is, Heidegger thinks meaning is shaped by our ways of life, but it s clear that for him, in places, this sets up a puzzle: how can humanly constituted meaning "get it right"? In my view, this is one of the most interesting philosophical puzzles that Heidegger discovered, and Sheehan misses it completely. Perhaps it's not surprising that Sheehan is so dismissive of the writings on technology, then, since he does not feel the force of the problem that motivated those writings.
A vast and erudite reading of Heidegger, though.
Read
November 11, 2020A difficult (intentionally so) but exceptionally useful book for understanding Heidegger. My initial reaction was that this book probably is all that the ordinary, curious reader ever needs to read to understand Heidegger, notwithstanding that Sheehan offers a new “paradigm” for understanding him. I discuss what I meant below. But I must add two things. First, one needs to know that Heidegger was a Nazi — at the least, the books discussing anti-Semitism in Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (see Michell & Trawny, eds.) and general information one picks up along the way are important for understanding Heidegger.
Second, Berel Lang’s profound study (Heidegger’s Silence), which I read right after Sheehan, shows connections between Heidegger’s Nazism and his philosophy that Sheehan omits or elides, and that don’t really get discussed in the books about the Black Notebooks. By connections, I mean in particular how Heidegger’s anti-Semitism (or, with Lang, his belief that Jews — and many other races, but Jews in particular in the Germany of the first half of the 20th century) simply didn’t matter because Heidegger’s prescriptions for resolve and finding the truth were directed to and about, and reflected his historical understanding of, Aryans. But to Sheehan.
As a preliminary matter, I note that Sheehan makes two critical choices at the outset. These choices allow him to explicate Heidegger’s philosophical program without having to address issues that are cankers at its very root — though, in fairness, he addresses these issues at the end of the book.
Sheehan mentions Heidegger’s discovery that pre-Socratic Greek philosophizing was the astonishing inception of true philosophizing (really seeing things as things), which subsequently got farther and farther from being or reality until Heidegger’s great instauration. But until almost the very end of the book he doesn’t mention that Heidegger’s discovery was based on willfully fanciful, baroque etymological analysis. For Heidegger, ordinary words always break down into etymological morphemes that are vivid assertions. For example, “ex-sistence,” a made up word (to translate a made-up German word), doesn’t mean “existence,” but “being made to stand out” (ex + sistere) as possibility among possibilities” (p. 26).
To support what he takes as Heidegger’s insight into the world-view of the pre-Socratics, Sheehan mentions a “noted classicist” who says that Homer’s world (in his poems) is one of bright colors, solid shapes, vividness. This observation is supposed to be evidence supporting the argument that the pre-Socratics were closer to “being” or “the clearing” than anyone till the advent of Heidegger. Bright as Homer’s depictions are, the Parry-Lord theory of the oral origin of his poems provides a better, empirically discussable explanation for that characteristic. And Auerbach, in “The Scar of Odysseus,” puts the Homeric literature into a context in which it can be compared with a different kind of literature and evaluated not only for what it has but also for its deficiencies. The upshot is that Heidegger’s reading of the pre-Socratics, which can be quite exciting (e.g., his lecture on Anaximander), has the same status as the Yaqui way of knowledge. If Heidegger’s description of the pre-Socratic world view is fictional, the same may be said of his view of the evolution of philosophy up to him, and of his notion of the true philosophical approach. Sheehan finally deals with this issue cogently and eloquently:
“The problem, of course, is that the narrative Heidegger lays out is a meta-history that makes no contact with what is usually called history except through the texts of a dozen metaphysicians. His “‘deep history’ of the West has nothing to say about lived history as the medium and the product of human action in nature and society. Rather, ever since Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus failed to inquire into what is responsible for φύσις and ἀλήθεια, history has been tumbling toward disaster. Heidegger takes his individual “synchronic” analyses of those dozen or so philosophers and strings them together diachronically to chart how the West ended up, almost inevitably, in the dark Satanic mills of technology.” (P. 287)
Up to this point I was critical of Sheehan’s approach — his acceptance, for example, of Heidegger’s use of Aristotle, which (as with everything Heidegger seems to have read) involved interpretation/mistranslation of important terms. Perhaps Heidegger scholars know and accept this or take it into account. Certainly, Sheehan’s book is written for scholars. Also, as. noted, Sheehan may have wanted to explicate Heidegger on Heidegger’s terms without interrupting himself with critical provisos. In the end, it doesn’t matter. The reader doesn’t have to fully understand Heidegger to understand Heidegger.
Sheehan also doesn’t mention — again, until the end of the book — that Heidegger’s notion of “world” — the expression, projection, and result of one’s true being — is infected by anti-Semitism and German volkism, and ultimately National Socialism as it presented itself at least through 1936. For Heidegger, Jews are “worldless people,” (see the essays in The Black Notebooks), and Germans at least in Heidegger’s early view, have (and later had, but lost) the potential to be a true philosophic race. So his philosophy, when it comes down to cases, situates itself comfortably within the previous 200 years of German volkish and anti-Semitic thought, accepting particular views which are either repellant or simply absurd. How can Heidegger’s specific analyses not lead back to the heart of his message?
As noted, Sheehan also addresses this issue, but not quite as forthrightly as the previous one. He does condemn Heidegger’s volkism and National socialism. But apparently he was not willing to make a connection between Heidegger the man and the Heidegger’s “authentic man.” But there may be a reason. Sheehan underplays authenticity, and may not see it as a true value apart from one’s (anyone’s) realization that one must provide one’s own meaning in a godless world. At the end of the book Sheehan concludes that for him, “Heidegger’s philosophical work stands, and may endure for a while, as the text in which radical human finitude was shown to be the ungroundable ground of the phenomenal world we inhabit. It is also the text in which Western metaphysics, with the God-pretensions of its onto-theology, found a proper and respectful burial.” (P. 294) His failure to mention “authenticity” certainly is not accidental. Nor is the fact that the word “volk” is appears only one time in the book and is not listed in the appendix.
Sheehan thoroughly downplays key Heideggerian terms “authenticity” and “resolve.” The reason, I think, is that his dismissal of Heidegger’s purported history of the West eliminates the notion that authenticity and resolution are virtues of the survivor, the extraordinary man. So “living mortally” no longer appears as an exercise in grim determination to embrace meaning, but rather the ordinary person’s acceptance of him- or herself. In Sheehan’s reading, existential living means establishing a “new relation of the concrete human being to his or her thrown-openness, precisely within the world of exploitation [the modern world of technology]. This requires an act of resolve, yes, but seen less as a Promethean act on one’s own part and more as ‘being called’ by one’s appropriation to accept that appropriation, just as Being and Time had spoken of the ‘call’ from one’s existential essence to one’s everyday self to embrace one’s mortal thrown-openness.” (P. 264)
Yet even the notion of acceptance of oneself is vague — Sheehan refuses to offer, or find in Heidegger, any interpretation that would constitute an attempt at ethics or good living. Heidegger’s “meaning,” he writes, “is clear. Already ‘claimed’ by appropriation, we become what we essentially are by understanding ourselves in terms of (‘projecting ourselves towards’) our mortal finitude as the source of all meaning.
“But what [Sheehan asks] does all this come down to in one’s daily life? What guidance can Heidegger’s work provide regarding concrete choices and decisions? Where is the philosophical ethics that Heidegger might have worked out in the metontology that was projected as a sequel to Being and Time? Heidegger has no answer to such questions. The best he can say, and it’s not much, is this: ‘The question of ex-sistence gets straightened out only by ex-sisting.’” (P. 266)
Heidegger’s answer to the question of existing (immediately above) is one key to understanding why Sheehan’s book, notwithstanding its attempt at a paradigm shift, can still be so useful. In short, Heidegger is all about emotive abstractions chasing one another around. Sheehan’s new paradigm cuts out some of those words and argues that others either mean the same thing or express such fine shades of meaning that no one other than Heidegger can hope to discern a difference. Indeed, Sheehan frequently criticizes Heidegger for misusing his own key words, asserting that one thing depends on another when both things are the same, and exaggerating, erroneously reifying, or hopelessly mystifying his message.
Sheehan’s paradigm shift involves his taking Heidegger as a brilliant writer critically in need of an editor. “[W]hen it comes to the needless confusion that dogs Heidegger’s philosophy (not only among analytical philosophers but among Heideggerians as well), much of the blame must be laid at Heidegger’s own doorstep.” (P. 11) Sheehan will be Heidegger’s Maxwell Perkins. He shows, for example that “a non-‘temporal’ meaning of ‘time’ [as often used] in Heidegger’s work is the chief reason why his early use of ‘temporal’ language can easily mislead the reader,” (p. 97) even the expert reader. The two translators of Being and Time into English mistranslate “time” in a critical section of that book, but Sheehan shows Heidegger’s “rock-bottom definition of ‘temporality’ as the dynamic structure of thrown-openness” (p. 174). Similarly, Heidegger’s use of “being” misleads because he’s not concerned at all “about ‘being’ as Western philosophy has understood that term for over twenty-five hundred years, but rather about sense itself: meaningfulness and its source.” (P. xi) Indeed, Heidegger “was notoriously sloppy in how he used his key term, Sein (being).” (P. xiv)
The result is that Sheehan seems to bring some order into Heidegger’s kingdom. But it is illusory because, notwithstanding recourse to terms like “structure,” Heidegger’s kingdom is a house of flashcards with abstract and often made-up words written on them, with the motto above in sky-writing: Be true to yourself — but the motto is translated into Heideggerese to make it more impressive. Hence, Sheehan says, the “early Heidegger’s wager was that if we understood // ourselves as the understanding of meaning (Seinsverständnis), we would come to understand, in a formal and general way, all that can be understood by that understanding.” (P. 190) That’s Heidegger in a nutshell, but unfortunately there are some 100 volumes that reiterate this point.
How does one get to know oneself? That’s not Heidegger’s question. Sheehan says that the prior question is, Where does understanding or meaning come from? The answer is “the clearing.” The clearing is the “basis for the disclosure of everything meaningful,” but “while the clearing enables the meaningful presence of things, it itself remains intrinsically undisclosed or ‘hidden’ —unknowable in its why and wherefore.” “This is the ur-insight, the founding vision that drove all Heidegger’s work, early and late. To adapt the words of William J. Richardson, it is ��‘the living center of Ur-Heidegger.’” (P. 225)
One might think that a clearing is a place that something could enter — but if the clearing is hidden, no one can enter it. But this is not so. Ex-sistence — very roughly, “the ‘essence’ or existential structure of any human being” (p. xvi.) — ex-sistence can enter the clearing. Except that this is not so either. “Strictly speaking,” “it is incorrect to speak of ex-sistence as ‘open to’ the clearing, as if the clearing were a space that ex-sistence could possibly enter.” Rather, ex-sistence and the clearing “are actually the same phenomenon considered from distinct viewpoints: either ex-sistence as the clearing or that same clearing as what makes possible all meaningfulness. As thrown-open, ex-sistence always already is the existential space in which the existentiel understanding of things-in-their-being takes place.” Ex-sistence and the clearing have an “oscillating sameness.” (P. 241)
This leads to the nub of Heidegger and the usefulness of Sheehan’s book. Heidegger is the quintessential existentialist: he huffs and he puffs through a hundred volumes of earnest platitudes mixed with mystifying jargon. Even if Sheehan’s new paradigm doesn’t accurately capture Heidegger — it doesn’t matter. Sheehan has organized Heidegger’s hopelessly abstract, arbitrary and mystifyingly mystical philosophy into a shape that enables the reader to follow the drift of the argument at least up to the point of “ur” assertions. Even the ur-assertions can be read “as-if” they made sense, a philosophical “Jabberwocky.”
What is behind Heidegger, then? What is the subject or issue he addresses, even if only laterally, that might persuade one to take an interest? To me there’s a good answer. The answer to the question, what makes us who or what we are? is consciousness. Consciousness is how (or where, or by which, or within which) we recognize ourselves, and within which meaning (among other things) is recognized. Consciousness can’t be defined except to say that death destroys the existence of consciousness (and we think other animals lack it). (Years ago I read about a project to teach, or otherwise bring, a captive ape to consciousness. One of the researchers said that, if they succeeded, they would never tell the ape about death. For that ape, consciousness would be all cakes and ale.
People have avoided the realization that consciousness appears to have an end by positing existences after death. Heidegger says that this is a kind of escapism. Many before him have said that people make meaning and values, just as many religious thinkers have said that the notion of non-existence after death is abhorrent to human awareness. Heidegger challenges people to embrace the fact of their death, making that embracement a sign of one’s positive stance with regard to one’s life. Perhaps this worked for Heidegger. I don’t see why it should or shouldn’t work for anyone else, or why it should be recommended. But it is what Sheehan, Heidegger’s editor and conservator, finds of lasting value in Heidegger.
Second, Berel Lang’s profound study (Heidegger’s Silence), which I read right after Sheehan, shows connections between Heidegger’s Nazism and his philosophy that Sheehan omits or elides, and that don’t really get discussed in the books about the Black Notebooks. By connections, I mean in particular how Heidegger’s anti-Semitism (or, with Lang, his belief that Jews — and many other races, but Jews in particular in the Germany of the first half of the 20th century) simply didn’t matter because Heidegger’s prescriptions for resolve and finding the truth were directed to and about, and reflected his historical understanding of, Aryans. But to Sheehan.
As a preliminary matter, I note that Sheehan makes two critical choices at the outset. These choices allow him to explicate Heidegger’s philosophical program without having to address issues that are cankers at its very root — though, in fairness, he addresses these issues at the end of the book.
Sheehan mentions Heidegger’s discovery that pre-Socratic Greek philosophizing was the astonishing inception of true philosophizing (really seeing things as things), which subsequently got farther and farther from being or reality until Heidegger’s great instauration. But until almost the very end of the book he doesn’t mention that Heidegger’s discovery was based on willfully fanciful, baroque etymological analysis. For Heidegger, ordinary words always break down into etymological morphemes that are vivid assertions. For example, “ex-sistence,” a made up word (to translate a made-up German word), doesn’t mean “existence,” but “being made to stand out” (ex + sistere) as possibility among possibilities” (p. 26).
To support what he takes as Heidegger’s insight into the world-view of the pre-Socratics, Sheehan mentions a “noted classicist” who says that Homer’s world (in his poems) is one of bright colors, solid shapes, vividness. This observation is supposed to be evidence supporting the argument that the pre-Socratics were closer to “being” or “the clearing” than anyone till the advent of Heidegger. Bright as Homer’s depictions are, the Parry-Lord theory of the oral origin of his poems provides a better, empirically discussable explanation for that characteristic. And Auerbach, in “The Scar of Odysseus,” puts the Homeric literature into a context in which it can be compared with a different kind of literature and evaluated not only for what it has but also for its deficiencies. The upshot is that Heidegger’s reading of the pre-Socratics, which can be quite exciting (e.g., his lecture on Anaximander), has the same status as the Yaqui way of knowledge. If Heidegger’s description of the pre-Socratic world view is fictional, the same may be said of his view of the evolution of philosophy up to him, and of his notion of the true philosophical approach. Sheehan finally deals with this issue cogently and eloquently:
“The problem, of course, is that the narrative Heidegger lays out is a meta-history that makes no contact with what is usually called history except through the texts of a dozen metaphysicians. His “‘deep history’ of the West has nothing to say about lived history as the medium and the product of human action in nature and society. Rather, ever since Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus failed to inquire into what is responsible for φύσις and ἀλήθεια, history has been tumbling toward disaster. Heidegger takes his individual “synchronic” analyses of those dozen or so philosophers and strings them together diachronically to chart how the West ended up, almost inevitably, in the dark Satanic mills of technology.” (P. 287)
Up to this point I was critical of Sheehan’s approach — his acceptance, for example, of Heidegger’s use of Aristotle, which (as with everything Heidegger seems to have read) involved interpretation/mistranslation of important terms. Perhaps Heidegger scholars know and accept this or take it into account. Certainly, Sheehan’s book is written for scholars. Also, as. noted, Sheehan may have wanted to explicate Heidegger on Heidegger’s terms without interrupting himself with critical provisos. In the end, it doesn’t matter. The reader doesn’t have to fully understand Heidegger to understand Heidegger.
Sheehan also doesn’t mention — again, until the end of the book — that Heidegger’s notion of “world” — the expression, projection, and result of one’s true being — is infected by anti-Semitism and German volkism, and ultimately National Socialism as it presented itself at least through 1936. For Heidegger, Jews are “worldless people,” (see the essays in The Black Notebooks), and Germans at least in Heidegger’s early view, have (and later had, but lost) the potential to be a true philosophic race. So his philosophy, when it comes down to cases, situates itself comfortably within the previous 200 years of German volkish and anti-Semitic thought, accepting particular views which are either repellant or simply absurd. How can Heidegger’s specific analyses not lead back to the heart of his message?
As noted, Sheehan also addresses this issue, but not quite as forthrightly as the previous one. He does condemn Heidegger’s volkism and National socialism. But apparently he was not willing to make a connection between Heidegger the man and the Heidegger’s “authentic man.” But there may be a reason. Sheehan underplays authenticity, and may not see it as a true value apart from one’s (anyone’s) realization that one must provide one’s own meaning in a godless world. At the end of the book Sheehan concludes that for him, “Heidegger’s philosophical work stands, and may endure for a while, as the text in which radical human finitude was shown to be the ungroundable ground of the phenomenal world we inhabit. It is also the text in which Western metaphysics, with the God-pretensions of its onto-theology, found a proper and respectful burial.” (P. 294) His failure to mention “authenticity” certainly is not accidental. Nor is the fact that the word “volk” is appears only one time in the book and is not listed in the appendix.
Sheehan thoroughly downplays key Heideggerian terms “authenticity” and “resolve.” The reason, I think, is that his dismissal of Heidegger’s purported history of the West eliminates the notion that authenticity and resolution are virtues of the survivor, the extraordinary man. So “living mortally” no longer appears as an exercise in grim determination to embrace meaning, but rather the ordinary person’s acceptance of him- or herself. In Sheehan’s reading, existential living means establishing a “new relation of the concrete human being to his or her thrown-openness, precisely within the world of exploitation [the modern world of technology]. This requires an act of resolve, yes, but seen less as a Promethean act on one’s own part and more as ‘being called’ by one’s appropriation to accept that appropriation, just as Being and Time had spoken of the ‘call’ from one’s existential essence to one’s everyday self to embrace one’s mortal thrown-openness.” (P. 264)
Yet even the notion of acceptance of oneself is vague — Sheehan refuses to offer, or find in Heidegger, any interpretation that would constitute an attempt at ethics or good living. Heidegger’s “meaning,” he writes, “is clear. Already ‘claimed’ by appropriation, we become what we essentially are by understanding ourselves in terms of (‘projecting ourselves towards’) our mortal finitude as the source of all meaning.
“But what [Sheehan asks] does all this come down to in one’s daily life? What guidance can Heidegger’s work provide regarding concrete choices and decisions? Where is the philosophical ethics that Heidegger might have worked out in the metontology that was projected as a sequel to Being and Time? Heidegger has no answer to such questions. The best he can say, and it’s not much, is this: ‘The question of ex-sistence gets straightened out only by ex-sisting.’” (P. 266)
Heidegger’s answer to the question of existing (immediately above) is one key to understanding why Sheehan’s book, notwithstanding its attempt at a paradigm shift, can still be so useful. In short, Heidegger is all about emotive abstractions chasing one another around. Sheehan’s new paradigm cuts out some of those words and argues that others either mean the same thing or express such fine shades of meaning that no one other than Heidegger can hope to discern a difference. Indeed, Sheehan frequently criticizes Heidegger for misusing his own key words, asserting that one thing depends on another when both things are the same, and exaggerating, erroneously reifying, or hopelessly mystifying his message.
Sheehan’s paradigm shift involves his taking Heidegger as a brilliant writer critically in need of an editor. “[W]hen it comes to the needless confusion that dogs Heidegger’s philosophy (not only among analytical philosophers but among Heideggerians as well), much of the blame must be laid at Heidegger’s own doorstep.” (P. 11) Sheehan will be Heidegger’s Maxwell Perkins. He shows, for example that “a non-‘temporal’ meaning of ‘time’ [as often used] in Heidegger’s work is the chief reason why his early use of ‘temporal’ language can easily mislead the reader,” (p. 97) even the expert reader. The two translators of Being and Time into English mistranslate “time” in a critical section of that book, but Sheehan shows Heidegger’s “rock-bottom definition of ‘temporality’ as the dynamic structure of thrown-openness” (p. 174). Similarly, Heidegger’s use of “being” misleads because he’s not concerned at all “about ‘being’ as Western philosophy has understood that term for over twenty-five hundred years, but rather about sense itself: meaningfulness and its source.” (P. xi) Indeed, Heidegger “was notoriously sloppy in how he used his key term, Sein (being).” (P. xiv)
The result is that Sheehan seems to bring some order into Heidegger’s kingdom. But it is illusory because, notwithstanding recourse to terms like “structure,” Heidegger’s kingdom is a house of flashcards with abstract and often made-up words written on them, with the motto above in sky-writing: Be true to yourself — but the motto is translated into Heideggerese to make it more impressive. Hence, Sheehan says, the “early Heidegger’s wager was that if we understood // ourselves as the understanding of meaning (Seinsverständnis), we would come to understand, in a formal and general way, all that can be understood by that understanding.” (P. 190) That’s Heidegger in a nutshell, but unfortunately there are some 100 volumes that reiterate this point.
How does one get to know oneself? That’s not Heidegger’s question. Sheehan says that the prior question is, Where does understanding or meaning come from? The answer is “the clearing.” The clearing is the “basis for the disclosure of everything meaningful,” but “while the clearing enables the meaningful presence of things, it itself remains intrinsically undisclosed or ‘hidden’ —unknowable in its why and wherefore.” “This is the ur-insight, the founding vision that drove all Heidegger’s work, early and late. To adapt the words of William J. Richardson, it is ��‘the living center of Ur-Heidegger.’” (P. 225)
One might think that a clearing is a place that something could enter — but if the clearing is hidden, no one can enter it. But this is not so. Ex-sistence — very roughly, “the ‘essence’ or existential structure of any human being” (p. xvi.) — ex-sistence can enter the clearing. Except that this is not so either. “Strictly speaking,” “it is incorrect to speak of ex-sistence as ‘open to’ the clearing, as if the clearing were a space that ex-sistence could possibly enter.” Rather, ex-sistence and the clearing “are actually the same phenomenon considered from distinct viewpoints: either ex-sistence as the clearing or that same clearing as what makes possible all meaningfulness. As thrown-open, ex-sistence always already is the existential space in which the existentiel understanding of things-in-their-being takes place.” Ex-sistence and the clearing have an “oscillating sameness.” (P. 241)
This leads to the nub of Heidegger and the usefulness of Sheehan’s book. Heidegger is the quintessential existentialist: he huffs and he puffs through a hundred volumes of earnest platitudes mixed with mystifying jargon. Even if Sheehan’s new paradigm doesn’t accurately capture Heidegger — it doesn’t matter. Sheehan has organized Heidegger’s hopelessly abstract, arbitrary and mystifyingly mystical philosophy into a shape that enables the reader to follow the drift of the argument at least up to the point of “ur” assertions. Even the ur-assertions can be read “as-if” they made sense, a philosophical “Jabberwocky.”
What is behind Heidegger, then? What is the subject or issue he addresses, even if only laterally, that might persuade one to take an interest? To me there’s a good answer. The answer to the question, what makes us who or what we are? is consciousness. Consciousness is how (or where, or by which, or within which) we recognize ourselves, and within which meaning (among other things) is recognized. Consciousness can’t be defined except to say that death destroys the existence of consciousness (and we think other animals lack it). (Years ago I read about a project to teach, or otherwise bring, a captive ape to consciousness. One of the researchers said that, if they succeeded, they would never tell the ape about death. For that ape, consciousness would be all cakes and ale.
People have avoided the realization that consciousness appears to have an end by positing existences after death. Heidegger says that this is a kind of escapism. Many before him have said that people make meaning and values, just as many religious thinkers have said that the notion of non-existence after death is abhorrent to human awareness. Heidegger challenges people to embrace the fact of their death, making that embracement a sign of one’s positive stance with regard to one’s life. Perhaps this worked for Heidegger. I don’t see why it should or shouldn’t work for anyone else, or why it should be recommended. But it is what Sheehan, Heidegger’s editor and conservator, finds of lasting value in Heidegger.
September 26, 2015
from the library
ILL
hard to read but get again someday
reading MH was easier.
ILL
hard to read but get again someday
reading MH was easier.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 27, 2016
I didn't expect to read this entire book but it's well written and in it Sheehan makes a very important, if controversial, contribution to the literature.
February 2, 2015
Outstanding!!
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