Weg, Frage, Denken

The debt of Heidegger to Husserl's antipsychologism is nowhere clearer than in Heidegger's approach in Die Frage nach der Tecknik.

It would be too easy to be distracted by what he says about das Wesen des Baumes. That would be a distraction.

What the reader should consider is the near parallel to Wittgenstein's confidence in ordinary speech.

Das Frage baut an einem Weg.

The confidence here - perhaps misplaced, but nonetheless - is that whoever genuinely pursues this questioning may arrive at an opening.

This confidence is not unlike that of Husserl with regard to the horizonality of a presentation - a horizonality which - with some training - any attentive reflection will note.  Of course, more and more with Husserl the structure to adumbrate is on the side of the ego, but co-constitution remained the norm.

With Husserl, there was a certain way of framing things.  A more peripatetic philosopher might have said: "try looking at it this way" or "try thinking of it this way" or just "go away and think it over."  There might be no prescription as to how to proceed to achieve an analytical or a synthetical result.

What is naturally worrisome is the confidence which Heidegger places not in the pragmatics of everyday language, but it the revelations of etymologies. In many ways, the belief in what "lies behind" the word as used today, by us, is not unlike a variety of doctrines concerning true natures and their possible - or even inevitable - revelation.

There is of course no reason to think that the fundamental requirements for the tasks of thinking are to be found in Parmenides and Heraclitus.  Why not Lao Tzu? Why the belief that no one more evocative than Heraclitus will not appear in some remote village of some distant land?  Because Homer's achievement is unique?  And if the work of Plato and Aristotle had been lost?  And dare we ask, if nothing of Parmenides and Heraclitus had come down to us?

Heidegger's romance of the Greeks has no claim on a Chinese, Korean or Indian reader.  Why should it exercise a claim on a reader in Minnesota?  The answer can only be in a presumed common heritage, a tradition to be recovered.

This is quite irrational in a way in which Born seeing the applicability of matrix algebra to the first results of Heisenberg - seeing them as incomplete - is not irrational.  Someone other than Born could have had this insight if she had come to Heisenberg's paper by way of matrices - even if for her matrices were only a pointless hobby, an amusement.

Why should we feel convinced that the solar astronomer with her automated binocular telescope does not appreciate the warmth of the rising sun on the day of a transit of Venus or Mercury?  Why should the technical expert be cut off from poesis?  If a Heraclitean figure were present in the Caritas asylum where Heidegger found himself, would that ecstatic figure not rightly have been impatient with pedestrian Heidegger?

But Heidegger was not an amateur astronomer nor schooled as a sailor in celestial navigation.  Nor was he an amateur botanist or musician.  But he was at times, in his way, a bit of a poet. He made no sketches when in Rome. He never troubled to learn Polish - he had nothing to learn from Ingarden.

What Heidegger could not suspect is that crows make tools, that apes make tools, that some cats and dogs recognize mere images as objects of interest. Inter-est. For Heidegger, a Catholic, could not allow that the beasts were betimes puzzled, even if they ask no questions. As Leibniz wrote his French: Estre. The Hawaiian humpback whale observing the male scuba diver has no Zweck and need use no instrument.  The humpback whale observing the scuba diver needs no telos. The whale observing the diver.

So what can be learned from Heidegger about thinking outside the confines of anthropocentrism?

First: that Heidegger was himself trapped in his enthrallment with a tradition and being a thinker and known and recognized as a thinker. To this, Arendt fell prey.

Second: that Heidegger was more focussed on knowledge than on learning - more concerned with insight than over-coming metaphors and bias. It is an irony of Heidegger on knowledge that he knew so little about the how of learning. In so many ways, he remains in the grip of a Husserl, a Cassirer.  It is not enough that God is dead if the theology of Aquinas had been adequate in its time.  This is the lesson of navigation and the peril of going too far from shore when not equipped to navigate. As perilous as being too close to shore in a storm. And Heidegger might have known, for all of Hoelderlin on the sun, ships and shores. The issue was not speed or the Raketenflugzeug. Homer's time was not ready for the open sea.

Perhaps if Heidegger had taken the post in Japan, he would have overcome his German tradition - or at least stepped off his path  - and not simply onto another.

Question: what was Heidegger's comprehension of Japanese ceramics?