Heidegger

Hi, all (again—after some years),

Michael Wheeler replied today to a short query from me, saying that
he’s finished his article on Heidegger for the Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy, now going through peer review and revision, and he
expects to upload it around October.

This should be important, as the SEP is supposed to provide a
reliable English baseline (and standard) for its topics. I can’t
imagine any article on Heidegger that wouldn’t be unsatisfactory to
*someone*, and I expect I’ll be one of the dissenters. But I’m not
going to pester Mike Wheeler with my pet themes. (He seems to be in
the Dreyfus school of readers, rather than the Sallis/Derrida school.
I’ve had my days with Burt, but now, of course, he doesn’t recognize
me—or anyone.)

Regretfully, I haven’t read any recent postings from the group—just
now subscribed—so I feel I don’t have much right to voice any
opinion, but: Though I can appreciate why the URL for the group
carries a “not Swastika” icon, the effect is to always remind anyone
of that dead issue. To me, it has the effect that’s contrary to its
good intent. It’s metonymic of Heidegger’s own plight: The phoney
issue occluded openness to his work after the war. I’ve long had the
fantasy that he had to turn to the U.S., in the ’60s and ’70s
(innocent of the issue) to get the hearing for his WORKS that he
couldn’t get in Germany. Translators in the U.S. who were able to
work with him on how to do the English versions were not just
providing English translations. The focus on M.H.s later work was
M.H.’s effort to determine how he would be read in earlier work,
which of course he claims to already be prevalently appropriative of
its topics tacitly as his later work is overtly. When he reads a
poem, he is instructing you on how to read B&T.

I would suggest that the group get rid of that URL icon, derive a
group-accepted discussion of the political issue, and make into a
separate page for whomever has a problem with the issue. I was
dissatisfied with the Wikipedia page on this, so I revised the page
in favor of Prof. Heidegger, but had my revisions erased under the
pretext that I was biased, which resulted in the return of the page
that was (and is, in my view) distinctly biased toward connoting that
MH was a Nazi. So it goes.

Gary Davis
Berkeley

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____________________________________
Gary Davis
P. O. Box 9247
Berkeley, CA 94709
Home: 510-841-6522
Work: 510-987-3775 (8-4 PST)
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Posted on Sunday, July 13th, 2008 at 6:00 am
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