Henri Bergson and Martin Heidegger

I have put up a page here on Bergson in German translation as "Einführung in die Metaphysik".  There are striking parallels of that German version of Bergson to Heidegger's own text of the same name.

You might not see this if you do not have Heidegger in the original to compare to that translation from the Eugen Diederich Verlag, Jena 1909.

Husserl was of course very much aware of Bergson on time and time was an early topic for Heidegger as an assistant to Husserl.  And then there is all of Heidegger's work on Aristotle as relates to motion, space and other related topics especially just before 1927 in his effort to secure the chair at Freiburg.

It is so striking to think that Heidegger saw himself as overcoming the dominant French philosopher - a Jew - and then to consider the sad fate of Bergson in occupied France in 1941.  Heidegger, through Jean Beaufret and others, would triumph in spite of - or even because of - the misappropriations of Heidegger's thinking and his very thoughts by the crypto-Hegelian and Cartesian J-P Sartre.  A territory reclaimed. A Bereich dominated (but a Beriech was to remain in the air ...)

It will be a happy irony if renewed interest in Schopenhauer is accompanied by renewed interest in Aristotle and Bergson: the texts of all three should be laid out on your desk when making sense of Heidegger's peculiarities as the Fuehrer - the oddities of what is Gestell - in the Heideggerian Einfuehrung and its particular Bestimmung from which Derrida says Heidegger was never to distance himself.

I will post a reconstruction at aule-browser.com (the text I have is in Fraktur) once I have a text and tie it to the Heidegger text using the Curl web content language for text from http://www.curl.com/

Heidegger and Physics: space and Time

Hugo Ott reports on Heidegger's study in natural sciences and his pretentious claims with regard to philosophy, physics and relativity theory: most striking his Ott's confirmation that Heidegger sat no exams for these lectures.

I suggest that Heidegger had no grasp of either the relevant mathematics or the physics: when Heidegger states later in life that the theory of electromagnetic wave propagation is only understood by a handful of experts he repeats an old cliché about relativity theory: but he is talking about Maxwell, not Einstein and Planck, for his example for his listners is radio and television.  Even the most rudimentary knowledge of the actual history of late 19th Century science reveals the importance of Maxwell's simplifications and the hyptheses drawn from them which were confirmed as wireless telegraphs emerged as a technique (Maxwell of 1864 predates such relevant patent applications as those of 1872 and 1896.)

Heidegger seems to have believed that he would provide a correction to physics: whether he intended to correct Weyl or Einstein is not clear, for Heidegger was never a guest of von Neumann at Princetion.  When Heidegger gave lectures later in Munich, he lectured in the Fine Arts and not as a guest of mathematics or physics departments.

In stark contrast, Heidegger's opponent at Davos, polymath Ernst Cassirer, understood Special and General Relativity as well as did his contemporaries Russell and Whitehead.

Nowhere does Heidegger insist on the requirement to be based in science as emphasized by his interlocutor of the 1920's, Karl Jaspers.  It is very likely that Heidegger truly believed that Aristotle on motion had been left unscathed by Galileo, Kepler and Newton.

Heidegger certainly believed that his Zeit-raum was the philosphical alternative to Einstein Raum-zeit.

For another view, see Catherine Chevalley "Heidegger and the physical sciences"in "Martin Heidegger: critical assessments, Volume 1" edited by Christopher E. Macann