God loveth adverbs

Letters

Vol. 13 No. 1 · 10 January 1991

From James Lund

According to Jonathan Glover, Heidegger is ‘a bogus philosopher’ (LRB, 22 November 1990). If this is so, what in fact was Heidegger doing when he claimed to be doing philosophy?

Perhaps you should give Glover a chance to tell us, and there might then follow some serious discussion of Heidegger in your paper, instead of the present series of hit-and-run attacks. Isn’t that the way to do things in the republic of letters? John Passmore in The Encyclopaedia of Philosophy also wished to deny the title of philosopher to Heidegger. He proposed instead that we should think of Heidegger as a sage. So much for wisdom in the empiricist and analytic movements in philosophy in the medium of the English language. Perhaps this is what Glover has in mind. It might in the interim occur to him, when once again he contemplates Charles Taylor’s considerable contribution to Western philosophy in recent decades, characterised by Glover in an extraordinary figure ramifying round the supermarket, that Taylor’s opinion of Heidegger merits serious consideration on his part.

James Lund
London SE22

Vol. 13 No. 5 · 7 March 1991

From John Passmore

James Lund rebukes me (Letters, 10 January) for having described Heidegger as a sage, rather than as a philosopher. In the encyclopedia article from which he cites this judgment, I go on to say that an individual writer can be a sage at one time, a philosopher at another. If Mr Lund consults the second edition of my A Hundred Years of Philosophy, he will find there a relatively full account of Heidegger’s earlier, more philosophical writings. Since in his later Holzwege Heidegger explicitly describes philosophy as ‘the enemy of thinking’, he could scarcely be displeased with the judgment that he is in such writings ‘not a philosopher at all’. That does not automatically imply that he has nothing of any consequence to say; there are writings of my own that I should not describe as contributions to philosophy. To say that is not to denigrate them. Simply, they do not reach their conclusions by close reasoning of a philosophical kind. James Lund thinks of this attitude as typical of analytical-empirical philosophy. But I do not think that Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant would reject my judgment. Incidentally, in the article from which James Lund quotes I reject the view that the practice of analysis is the distinguishing mark of philosophy, and no reader of my book on Hume could see in me a defender of classical empiricism; indeed, on this point I find myself in agreement with Heidegger. I stand by, however, the tradition of free, rational discussion as Heidegger most certainly did not. In retrospect, I worry about calling him a ‘sage’, since it is not easy to ascribe wisdom to anyone who was at any point taken in by Herr Hitler. (I speak not from hindsight but as a younger contemporary.) But whether their name is Carlyle or Heidegger, sages tend to combine a capacity for making occasional perceptive remarks with a strong leaning towards that authoritarianism to which those who defend the principles of critical discussion are by no means inclined.

John Passmore
Australian National University,