Monday, June 16, 2008

Philosopher's Carnival

The Seventy-First Philosopher's Carnival, er, Karneval, is up at The Ends of Thought. Roman has done a great job here, selecting some excellent posts and giving thoughtful summaries and commentary. This is the first Philosopher's Carnival in a long time (perhaps ever?) where I have liked every entry quite a bit. (There's perhaps too much Davidson, but that's a forgivable lapse of good taste.)

My post on sublimity is in the carnival. Roman says of it:

I am sympathetic to this project, but worry whether the contemporary scene can competently tend to the sublime: the French flirtation with sublimity in the late '80s, one might recall, was short-lived and not wholly productive.


I think this is a legitimate worry. I haven't read all or even much of the French work Roman mentions, but what little I have read is certainly a mixed bag. What's often called the 'religious' or 'theological' turn in phenomenology, such as one finds in Marion, is really a turn to the sublime, religion simply being one of the few contemporary fields where recognition of the sublime is still common (even if not often reflected upon). There are a few interesting things there (although perhaps only covering a limited range of the sublime). But I think Roman's right to worry that the resources for an adequate approach to the sublime are not as available today as they would need to be for there to be a serious change on this point.
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Anonymous
0 points
14 years ago

I have a hard time buying this sentiment as authentically Ryle's (and Google doesn't show anything substantiating it). Ryle wrote a generally positive review of "Being and Time", and when asked about SuZ later he didn't have much to say other than "Oh, yeah, I read that a long time ago and wrote a book review, which I worked hard on but no one ever asked me about. Haven't really thought of it since. Dunno whether it influenced me or not. I liked logical positivism more, at the time, but I might've found appealing anti-Cartesian/proto-behaviorist stuff in SuZ." (I paraphrase; the full quote is in the appendix on p. 290 of Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, which also reprints Ryle's book review from Mind.)

I also don't see what's wrong with the sentiment Ryle genuinely had about SuZ: There're helpful things to be gleaned from it, but the project as a whole isn't the way to go.

I don't know what his character has to do with whether, say, his criticisms of Husserl hit their mark, despite the fact that Being is all over the place in a lot of those; the fact that a Nazi says that everything he's done with his work had to do with his Nazism doesn't make it so. I've never seen a defense of Husserl which takes the form "But this criticism only holds water if you're a Nazi, ergo Husserl escapes the charge."

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Anonymous
0 points
14 years ago

I doubt it's Ryle's, as well; it's a Rylean-like summation, though, even if it's not Ryle's own opinion. But Polt doesn't get into questions of provenance.

Since Ryle's sentiment in the comment really doesn't tell us anything about how to handle the question of Heidegger's Nazism, I'm not sure how it's relevant. Likewise, whether or not Heidegger's criticisms of Husserl are untowardly connected is something that has to be determined, not assumed. The fact that a Nazi says something doesn't make it false, true, but it also doesn't make it non-Nazi in attitude, formulation, or substance; given that we are quite literally talking about a Nazi, that there is nothing about it that is Nazi has to be shown, not insisted upon a priori. As I say, it has to be unwound and then rewound in such a way as to show that there is no Nazi distortion in it. If we can do that, fine and dandy; before we do it, though, we have no license to pretend that all is obviously safe.

Much of the problem lies precisely in reasoning by analogy here, which generally involves merely fooling ourselves by glossing over obviously significant differences. Nazism isn't a limited foible like drinking too much or sexual perversion, that might affect some philosophical fringes here and there but no more. It is a large-scale commitment; and, contrary to the tendency to insist on it as 'politics', it's not a merely political commitment like deciding one will support the Green Party in local elections. It carries a vision of technology, society, humanity. And this is undeniably so in Heidegger's case; Heidegger's own characterizations of his involvement, vague and weasely though they often are, links it with some of this major philosophical concerns. We should not fall into the hubris of pretending to know prior to all evidence what distortions such a commitment may or may not introduce into a philosophical approach, method, position, or system.