Chapter 10: Hermeneutics Flashcards
Martin Heidegger is the most controversial 20th century thinker most well-known for his influential “Being and Time”. What are two of his famous essays?
“What Are Poets For?” and “Language”
In What Are Poets For?, what does Heidegger critique in Western culture and thought?
And what does he propose poetry can solve?
Heidegger critiques modern reason and modernity (particularly modern science) and argues that Western man’s dominion over the natural world has culminated in modernity, with disastrous consequences for the natural and human world.
Poets have the momentous task of undoing the damage, finding a way out of modernity and reconnecting us with the earth and also with the true nature of our own being.
How does Heidegger describe Western thought and science as not only complicit with exploitation of nature, but the epistemology that underpins this?
What does he feel about the idea of representation?
The division and distance between the human knowing subject and the object of knowledge as old as Plato, is fundamental to modern science
Heidegger unequivocally rejects this distinction, arguing that it legitimizes the objectification of the world
He effectively rejects the very idea of representation, where Man stands as if apart from the world and places before himself the world as if it were something objective
What does Heidegger feel about production (economic or literary)?
What does Heidegger feel about Marx’s concept of alienated and unalienated labor?
Heidegger rejects what we commonly understand as production, whether economic or literary.
Like Marx, he is a vocal critic of alienated labor, but unlike Marx, he equally criticizes Marx’s conception of unalienated labor.
Heidegger rejects the very possibility of authentic production and presupposed distinction between an active human producer and a passive material object transformed by the encounter.
Consequently, he would reject any understanding of literature and literary criticism as a human productive activity.
How does Heidegger feel about the idea of an active subject and passive object in the concept of production?
How does Man, then implicate himself in the process of exploitation?
Ideas of the active subject and the passive object - since Plato but particularly since the triumph of the modern subject with Descartes - are the the ideological ground out of which modern technological civilization has grown
Modern technological man rises up as the producer, while the whole objective inventory in terms of which the world appears is given over to self-assertive production.
Modern man’s productive self-assertion as the “character of command…forcing everything under its dominion” - the earth becomes “raw material” and “all living things are technically objectivated in exploitation.
The irony of of modern technology is that even Man becomes human material. Self-willing mean everywhere reckons with things and men as objects.
If Heidegger opposes modernity and science but also the liberal individualist democratic model of man as self-reliant, what is the alternative he proposes?
What do poets like Rilke do for man in a science-centered modern time?
Heidegger privileges in particular, poetry (but also art more broadly) for its authentic attitude to the world, and characterizes his own thinking as poetical, instead of conventionally philosophical.
The role of poets is to use language in such a way as to reveal and performatively bring about the healing whole.
Heidegger affirms humans’ belonging to nature and praises Rilke for surpassing the technological view of the world in poetry which evokes experiences of the non-objective character of nature - what Rilke calls “the Open”.
The relation between humans and the world is redefined as an interaction or a communication, initiated by the world: the world calls or touches us and the authentic poet turns to the world, receiving its call or touch.
Heidegger finds in Rilke a reversal of the technological relation between man and the world.
How does Heidegger think of the world and its relation to poets?
How do poets use language?
Heidegger is a thinker whose understanding of the world includes a spiritual realm of deities, as well as the forefathers, the dead…those who are to come.
He describes poets as those who answer to the call and the will of the world, understood by the Open; unlike the producers who will their domination of the world, poets display a different kind of willing - that of receiving the call of the world - which is imperceptible
The role of poets is to use language in such a way as to reveal and perfomatively bring about the healing whole.
He insists that poets do not use language to signify or represent a reality assumed to be external and separate from it. On the contrary, Language is the house of being.
This authentic speaking is the opposite of purposeful self-assertion or willful production because the authentic poet, Heidegger claims, is a selfless medium voicing the world rather than himself
What are the main points of Heidegger’s essay, “Language”?
