Yesterday, I began a wonderful venue—calling it “Pathmaking with Teacher: a preface,”—that quickly got so deliciously complex (as something I’ve wanted to address for years) that I’ve quickly become obsessed with it and thus written myself into a miasma not suited yet to presentation, though very fruitful for project development. I need to do “Heidegger & Habermas“ in an entirely different way than yesterday’s desire initiated. That’s the way it goes in philosophical writing, the way it should go. So, this page URL stably locates the future of the project, but I’ve shelved yesterday’s discussion of Habermas.

But I’ll let some parts stay, like a journal of disconnected passages that may be interesting alone.

Hermeneutics is about the appropriation of the text of an Other authentically, which pertains intimately to the truth-and-method of critique. This matter of authenticity is a technical feature of translation, which may inhabit all communication. It’s what theorists of interpretation may seek to thematize rigorously. Doctrines about this have constituted Biblical exegesis historically.

But what about the especially Heideggerian mode of reading? Not to seem bizarre, but imagine a Stephen Hawking facing the matter of choosing words (as it’s so difficult that he surely doesn’t waste effort by choosing words lightly, even in his trademark light-heartedness, as he was supposed to have died in the late ’70s, I believe). To read as if the other is wringing words like a “strong poet” (Harold Bloom’s designation) on a peak, like opening a book and finding an intimate letter, may create a self-reflectivity about language validly independent of the text, without being exploitive of the author. Literary teaching is filled with this! This is how Heidegger regarded language in the poem and Greek philosophy (notwithstanding Classicists’ handwringing about Heidegger’s “Greeks”). He was a philosophical teacher in an epochally unique sense, self-reflectively and rigorously recapitulated (beyond the classroom) as his published texts.

The general idea here is that Heidegger is a practitioner of rigorously pragmatic, critically appropriative thinking, using vocabularies dispensably.

[My own Heraclitean fragments....]

In any case, hermeneutics is very much a matter of what Habermas calls “dramaturgical action.” As the actor channels the character, so communicative personality channels self-expression. Self-representation is text of self-expression, and “author” is authorship (as intentionality of the author is reconstructively formulated in the reading). “Heidegger” is inevitably a textual figure. The best reading of “Habermas” is as a textual figure (a matter of fidelity to the work). Validity of interpretation is not about erasing the difference between author and authorship.

Heidegger’s legacy suffers penitence beyond his mental breakdown, 1947, for his failed dramaturgy of subverting Hitlerism, 1933-35, by now being re-entombed as the narrative figure “Heidegger” for those who hadn’t cared for his work long before the politics of gossip made that Correct (like a Girardian “scapegoat” or Derridean deferral in différance: the displaced Other—displacive Othering—in the other, which “annuls“ difficulty).

There’s really no such thing as “Heidegger’s politics” outside the fact that critique of ontotheology is already political critique. The critique of “Being” (and the Derridean quotation) is political critique.

French sociologist Lucian Goldmann says that Being & Time, c1927[really: ’24-’26], was also a “response” to Lukács’ History & Class Consciousness, 1922. I knew H&CC when I began reading B&T—at that time, when H&CC had recently come into English, I was a grad student under a professor who had recently finished work with Lukács shortly before Lukács died—and I agree that Heidegger must have been keenly aware of H&CC, because H&CC seemed to have partly set me up for B&T, though much else had as well: Merleau-Ponty, the “existential” nature of late ’60s counterculture—and Heidegger’s just-translated What Is Called Thinking?, as B&T was not my first exposure to Heidegger. As first reading became second, I read B&T in light of readings of other “later”-Heidegger translations, which had the effect of framing B&T as a conceptual pragmatic made for its period’s audience: a way of working with the language of its time, rather than “fundamental ontology” beyond the pragmatics of the time’s desire for such (which was to be postmetaphysicalist, to Heidegger’s way of thinking)—a way of working with the language of the times. Let me say it again: a way of working with the language of the times. Heidegger’s career after 1947 was a propadeutic for how to do what B&T sought to do in its time (not a matter of someday revising B&T, by the way). “Language in the Poem,” for example, is an instruction manual in reading. “The Thing” is a field excursion in critical conceptual design. Heidegger’s thinking was not about becoming Heideggerian, in the sense of re-presenting Heidegger’s work. The error of thinking-as-re-presentation is the keynote of What Is Called Thinking?. It’s about a way of working with thought.

Habermas’ critique of Heidegger bothers me none. The problem of the German Question relative to Platonic Shadows was intimate and integral to Heidegger’s career; but it’s unsurprisingly not integral to Habermas’ burden as a child growing out of the end of that period; Heidegger was expendable for German intellectual cultural reconstruction (where Habermas was especially concerned about an authentic, albeit critical, revival of modern German philosophy, especially Kant, before moving on). Understanding the difference between Heidegger (who said repeatedly that there was no such thing as “Heidegger’s philosophy”) and “Heidegger” was not part of German intellectual history’s renewal, understandably so. It was part of Germany’s exorcism of “Germanness” that Heidegger’s critique of Platonic Germanity, of the Germanized Greek longings that made the end of metaphysicalism into Holocaust, would have to be forgotten in the concealed difference that was just not practical to Reconstruction. Germany’s own self-examination didn’t begin until years after Heidegger died, whereas Heidegger was delicately raising the question locally, “What is most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking age, is that still, we are not thinking,” 30 years before the public generally faced its past.

The likes of Richard Wolin trade in confusing the difference between Heidegger and “Heidegger,” though he had no interest, apparently, in Heidegger’s work before Victor Farias’ bad scholarship. ‘Round and ’round one may go, as people who never gave any time to Heidegger’s work are quite happy to have further excuse to not do so, and I’m not now aiming to suggest that they do dwell in Heidegger’s work. But the critical sophistry of philosophical teaching is not what it may seem at first glance.

There might have been little hope for Heidegger being read well in Germany after The War. Readers in the U.S. can be grateful for the work that Heidegger did with translators before he died, sculpting the issue of how to do in English what MH sought to do with German (not a matter of standard translation). Hubert Dreyfus and his school of reading in the U.S. found Heidegger to be a pragmatist (Heidegger was certainly prudent). Hermeneutics can be validly regarded as pragmatics of interpretation, and Heidegger is made exemplar of that.

Anyway, it’s plausible to read Heidegger this way and so to not see in Habermas an exemplar of critical pragmatism relative to a Heideggerian sense of appropriative thinking. TCA is a critical hermeneutics, at least, there done well enough that one has to presume that JH’s later focus on Heidegger, c1985, is willfully misread (sacrificing Heidegger on a discursive alter of German rehistorization). At any rate, I would have a fun time retracing Habermas’ distorting views on “Heidegger” in a way that nonetheless preserves the integrity of JH’s critique of subject-centered reason and his appreciation of critical hermeneutics, apart from his reading of “Heidegger”. Misreading may be politically justified, but the philosopher might take a closer look.