Hi JMC,
Just got out of one wave of assignment marking. Now for the next
semester!! Unit outlines, lectures to write, films to order, etc etc.
Kvetch, kvetch!
I cannot answer the question of the appeal to CS Peirce - simply don't know
about it. But the undemocratic character of Heidegger does interest
me. Really he is the last of the scholastic philosophers is he not (except
for Maritain??) Heidegger is more interesting for me than Maritain, because
he kicks against the goad more.
So he is locked into a tradition which is hundreds of years old and has
been deeply undemocratic for most if not all of of that time. Despite what
my Catholic Worker friends allege, I do not think there is a historical
democratic church which can be recovered.
At a conference four years ago Roy Bhaskar said that he could read
Heidegger and learn from him, and that is certainly my attitude too. I
hate cheap cracks about his Nazism, though of course I am not for ignoring
that. What I am against is the facile dismissal of Heidegger's thought. It
is actually much too troubling to be easily dismissed.
But I feel you are absolutely correct to insist on its Germanness. There is
also, as you remarked, the connection to German romanticism. This
particular brand of Romanticism tends to foreground the dark side of the
Force. It is the difference between Coleridge's Christabel and
Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of Immortality and I suppose Dionysus
and Apollo.
I am interested in all this because of the last Critical Realist conference
in Lancaster and also because of a seminar Michael Renov gave here at QUT
recently.
At the last Critical Realist Conference, where Roy Bhaskar came out as a
god believer much to the dismay of many of his followers, he explicitly
endorsed the re-enchantment of the world and quoted quite movingly from
Wordsworth. But the aesthetic for Bhaskar is defined as "living well" and
is ultimately subsumed under the ethical. So Bhaskar is to Heidegger as
Wordsworth is to Coleridge and the early Marx is to Nietzsche - [and
yourself to ??]
At the moment I am working on what kind of documentary films are suggested
by Bhaskar's turn to what he terms Transcendental Dialectical Critical
Realism. That is in response to what I read as Michael Renov's attempt to
turn documentary theory in the direction of Dionysian "delirium". When he
used that expression here it was very under-theorised and I am looking
forward to seeing him in October and finding out how far he has taken his
ideas.
regards
Gary
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