If there is a crisis in Heidegger scholarship, it's not what you think

Heidegger scholarship is in crisis these days, and not just because his anti-Semitism has recently been put on full display. The crisis, rather, is that almost ninety years after his major work was published and sixty years after his best work was finished, Heidegger scholars still cannot agree on what he was driving at.--Thomas Sheehan, reviewing Krzysztof Ziarek, Language After Heidegger.

I admire Sheehan's review of Ziarek's book (which I have not read). It tries to be fair to Ziarek (and Heidegger). Not unlike this review, it avoids the hysterical praise and hysterical dismissiveness that characterizes so much of the reception of Heidegger. Even though Sheehan disagrees with Ziarek methodologically and substantially, he tries to be informative and (I hope) fair to the book under review. It also makes a useful  distinction between two approaches in the history of philosophy that goes beyond Heidegger scholarship. I quote:

One approach (the one that I prefer) is to hose down Heidegger’s language to get at what he was trying to articulate, and then to express that in what Milton called “an answerable style.” An alternative approach is the circular one of remaining within Heidegger’s language while attempting to explain it. This approach, which medieval logicians called modus psittacinus (Aristotle, τρόπος ψιττάκινος, Hist. anim. VIII 12, 597b27-29), is widely favored in contemporary Heidegger scholarship

So far so good. So why the critical title to this post? First, I deny that Heidegger's antisemitism  is a source of crisis. Not because it is unproblematic or irrelevant (and for good measure we can throw in other unsavory behavior and silences/evasions by Heidegger); rather Heidegger's problems with complicity in badness (or worse) recur through philosophical history. Those of us that do philosophy in an institutional context would be politically and philosophically naive, if not self-deluded (the worst philosophical sin in light of the Delphic injunction), if we thought that we avoid complicity with badness (of varying horribleness) just because we are not nazi-fellow-travellers. If we fail to confront our own inner (and institutional) Heidegger -- and merely treat him as the easily to be dismissed other --, we don't start the project of understanding our own place/role in the world we claim to wish to understand (change/improve/explain, etc.).  

Second, and less important, Sheehan (and he is not alone) misunderstands the point of the history of philosophy. He thinks that what really, really matters (in the sense of avoiding crisis!) is to get at Heidegger's intentions (and what he means or might have tried to say, etc.). But if Heidegger is fruitful or highly suggestive to ongoing research -- and while it is not my genre there is considerable evidence this is so -- then I do not see any reason to think there is any scholarly crisis at all. Even if some scholars do not intend or understand themselves as contributing to ongoing research, their efforts may (indirectly) do so--and we should rejoice in that rather than despair about getting some professor's mere intentions right.  

Comments

[Chike]

I like your first point. I wonder about the second... I think, for example, about Du Bois and the notion of double consciousness. Now, it seems to me that scholars in various humanistic and social scientific disciplines and educated people in contexts of unlimited kinds evoke the term and sometimes use it as if we all know what it means, while it is actually the case that first chapter of Souls is enigmatic in a lot of ways and it's not clear to me that we have a consensus on what Du Bois meant. Now, I'm happy to agree with you that when people are using the reference to make points about race and identity today, its fruitfulness is what matters more so than Du Bois' intentions. But when people are trying to do history of philosophy - and here's a recent effort: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/phc3.12001/abstract - should we not expect them to be trying to help us figure out what he meant? If they are not trying to do that, is it really history of philosophy - isn't it just a historical reference in a work that is beholden only to contemporary concerns?

[Eric Schliesser]

Chike, I am not against trying to infer the intentions of thinkers from the past, especially if we are interested in their agency or evaluating their moral stances. But I argue (in various papers and blog posts) that (a) it is a mistake to reduce the history of philosophy to this enterprise, and (b) we can understand the meaning(s) of texts from the past without access to the intentions of their authors.