From the paper on Heidegger I linked above:
". . . Taken as a whole, one thing
all of these major thinkers help confirm is that we think best with a hermeneutic phenomenologist like Heidegger only when we learn to read him “reticently”—that is, slowly, critically, carefully, thoughtfully, with reservations and alternatives left open rather than too quickly foreclosed. If we can adopt a critical yet charitable approach to Heidegger’s views on the matters of deep concern that we continue to share with him, then we can find our
own ways into “
die Sache selbst,” the matters themselves at stake in the discussion. Focusing on the issues that matter in this way can also help us avoid getting too bogged down in the interminable terminological disputes that too often turn out to be merely “semantic” misunderstandings or confusions of translation, noisy distortions in which those trained in different traditions and languages continue to unknowingly talk past one another.[7] Our hermeneutic goal should instead be genuine understanding and so the possibility of
positive disagreement, that is, disagreements that generate real alternatives and so do not remain
merely criticisms (let alone pseudo-criticisms, confused epiphenomena of unrecognized misunderstandings, distortions passed down through generations or sent out across other networks). The modestly immodest goal of post-Heideggerian thinking, in sum, is to
think the most important issues at issue in Heidegger’s thinking further than he himself ever did. At the very least, such attempts can succeed in developing these enduringly-important issues somewhat
differently, in our own directions and inflections, in light of our own contemporary concerns and particular ways of understanding what matters most to our time and generations.
Heidegger’s provocative later suggestion about how best to develop the deepest matters at stake in the thinking of another can be helpful here: We need to learn “to think the unthought.” Thinking the unthought of another thinker means creatively disclosing the deepest insights on the basis of which that thinker thought. When we think their unthought, we uncover some of the ontological “background” which rarely finds its way into the forefront of a thinker’s thinking (as Dreyfus nicely put it, drawing on the Gestalt psychology Heidegger drew on himself). Thinking the unthought does mean seeing something otherwise unseen or hearing something otherwise unheard, but such hermeneutic “clairvoyance” (as Derrida provocatively dubbed it) should not presume that it has successfully isolated the one true core of another’s thinking (a mistake Heidegger himself too often committed).[8] But nor should we concede that “death of the author” thesis which presumes that there is
no deep background even in the work of our greatest thinkers. We post-Heideggerian postmodernists should just presume, instead, that any such deep background will be plural rather than singular, and so irreducible to any one over-arching interpretive framework. In that humbler hermeneutic spirit of ontological pluralism, we can then set out to develop at least
some of a thinker’s best insights and deepest philosophical motivations beyond whatever points that thinker was able to take them.[9]
In such a spirit, my own work focuses primarily on some of the interconnected issues of enduring concern that I think we continue to share with Heidegger, including (1) his deconstructive critique of Western metaphysics as
ontotheology; (2) the ways in which the ontotheology underlying our own late-modern age generates troublingly nihilistic effects in our ongoing
technologization of our worlds and ourselves; (3) Heidegger’s alternative vision of learning to transcend such technological nihilism through ontological
education, that is, an education centered on the “perfectionist” task of “becoming what we are” in order to come into our own as human beings leading meaningful lives. My interest in those interconnected issues (of ontotheology, technology, and education) led me to try to explicate (4) the most compelling phenomenological and hermeneutic reasons behind the enduring appeal of Heideggerian and post-Heideggerian visions of
postmodernity; and so also (5) the continuing relevance of
art and poetry in helping us learn to understand being in some enduringly meaningful,
postmodern ways. The point of this postmodernism, to put it simply, is to help us improve crucial aspects of our understanding of the being of our worlds, ourselves, and each other, as well as of the myriad other entities who populate and shape our interconnected worlds. (It is, in other words, a continuation of the struggle against
nihilism, to which we will turn next.)
Beneath or behind it all, I have also dedicated much of the last decade to working through some of the philosophical issues that arise, directly and indirectly, from the dramatic collision between Heidegger’s life and thinking (as I have been working on a philosophical biography of Heidegger). I have thus taken up, for example, Heidegger’s views on the nature and meaning of
love (which prove surprisingly insightful, once again, when approached with critical charity), while also continuing to participate in that ongoing re-examination of the significance of Heidegger’s early commitment to and subsequent break with Nazism, as well as the more recently revealed extent of his ignorant anti-Semitism (fraught and difficult topics).
In what follows I want to focus on the role that art—understood as
poiêsis or ontological disclosure—can play in helping us learn to live meaningful lives. So I shall try briefly to explain some of my thoughts on nihilism as our deepest historical problem and art as our best response. How can art and poetry encourage existential trajectories that move beyond the nihilism of late-modernity? Let me take up this question while acknowledging the apparent irony of doing so in this technological medium. In fact, this need not be ironic at all, given my view that we have to find ways to use technologies against
technologization—learning to use technologies without being used by them, as it were—by employing particular technologies in ways that help us uncover and transcend (rather than thoughtlessly reinforce) the nihilistic
technologization at work within our late-modern age. What Heidegger helps us learn to undermine and transcend, in other words, is not technology but rather nihilistic
technologization. By “nihilistic
technologization,” I mean the self-fulfilling ontological pre-understanding of being that reduces all things, ourselves included, to the status of intrinsically-meaningless stuff standing by to be optimized as efficiently and flexibly as possible. (That, of course, will take some explaining.) . . . . ."
Nihilism as the Deepest Problem; Art as the Best Response
