Heidegger: Thought and Historicity

by Christopher Fynsk

Christopher Fynsk here offers a sustained critical reading of texts written by Martin Heidegger in the period 1927-1947. His guiding concerns are Heidegger's notions of human finitude and difference, which he first addresses through an analysis of the role played by Mitsein in Being and Time. This analysis in turn affords a critical perspective on Heidegger's own interpretive encounters with Nietzsche and Hölderlin. In a reading of Heidegger's Nietzsche, Fynsk points to a far more ambivalent interpretation than the one commonly attributed to Heidegger. After further elaboration of the problematic of finitude in the context of Heidegger's writings of the 1930s on politics and art, Fynsk looks closely at Heidegger's commentary on Hölderlin. He calls into question Heidegger's claims for the gathering and founding character of poetry, and seeks to raise some basic questions in respect to the nature of the text and the act of interpretation. Presenting a critical confrontation with Heidegger that places itself within what Fynsk refers to as a contemporary "thought of difference," this book should be of interest not only to all students of Heidegger but also to anyone concerned with contemporary literary theory or modern Continental philosophy.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published October 20, 1986

Reviews

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not the best book out there on Heidegger’s thought and historicity. The author is erudite and the book is chock full of footnotes, and the author clearly thinks in terms of dialectics as literary criticism and sees Heidegger through post-structuralism (it’s a word he uses) so that everything that is written is always subject to revision (there’s even a Derrida blurb on the back of the book).

When I read this book I got the strange feeling that I was seeing the world under consideration through the author’s interpretation of Heidegger’s interpretation of Heidegger’s own interpretation on metaphysics, or on Art, or on poetry or on Nietzsche’s interpretation mostly through Heidegger of the matter at hand. So, it had a meta-meta-meta analysis that stood in the way of what was being said. It doesn’t mean the author didn’t have really interesting things to say or points to make but it meant by the time the text got interpreted by me I no longer felt relevant to the conversation.

I was concurrently reading Hannah Arendt’s book ‘Life of the Mind’ as I was reading this book and there was a lot of overlap in topics between those two books when it came to Heidegger and Nietzsche and Heidegger’s take on Nietzsche. Arendt just got things differently from how I understand them from my readings while Fynsk was mostly in agreement with how I saw things. Contra to Arendt, Fynsk would say that Nietzsche’s inversion of Plato doesn’t lead to more Plato but leads to Nietzsche’s own project, and Fynsk realized that the trans-valuation of all values does not lead to no values and that Nietzsche’s ‘nihilism’ as explicated by Heidegger in Volume I & II of ‘Nietzsche’ is not the renouncing of all values and meaning, but the beginning of values and meaning. Arendt clearly took a different point of view from Fynsk on those items. I really enjoy reading Heidegger and Nietzsche because the way Fynsk sees them are how I see them thus making them for me thinkers of substance and worth understanding.

The ‘eternal recurrence of the same’ is a way to get at the meaning we each have and the repetition of the now leads to our ‘resoluteness’ which gives us the temporal ontological structure based on the future from our ‘care’ (German: Sorge). Heidegger will make a ‘turn’ from Being as meaning and he makes it between Volume I and Volume II of his book ‘Nietzsche’ and of course he starts ‘turning’ with ‘Intro to Metaphysics’. Fynsk’s book gets into detail about this in this book and the text was fun to read and follow.

All one has to do is read “Being and Time” Division I or Division II or Heidegger’s works on Kant or on metaphysics and one can figure out Heidegger is a proto-Nazi (read ‘Heidegger, The Philosophy of Politics: The Heidelberg Conference’, published before this book, or read ‘Dangerous Minds’ by Beiner published this year. Each book makes the same points). The appeal to emotion and a return to ‘gratitude’, ‘awe’ and ‘wonder’ and Heidegger’s adoration of the ‘volk’ oozes out of his books, and at the root of all fascism is an appeal to the emotional level and the creation of an exclusive Nationalism that trumps inclusive Patriotism. President Macron of France said it best last week, when he basically said this but paraphrased and amplified by me ‘Nationalism is antithetical to inclusive Patriotism since Nationalism only appeals to the selfish interest of one’s own tribe and excludes those not part of the tribe not like them while inclusive patriotism reaffirms our moral values in our pursuit of excellence’. I only mention this about Heidegger’s fascism because the author has a somewhat convoluted deconstruction Postface as an add-on to this book that strikes me as superfluous today.