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Title: Heidegger's Confrontation With Modernity Technology, Politics, and Art (Indiana Series in Philosophy of Technology) by Michael E. Zimmerman ISBN: 0-253-20558-1 Publisher: Indiana University Press Pub. Date: May, 1990 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $20.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.25 (4 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Somewhat useful but fundamentally confused
Comment: Michael Zimmerman is confused. Was Heidegger really a Nazi or a new age eco-pansy? It would be much easier for Zimmerman if Heidegger had clearly been the latter, for that is what he thinks of himself as and would therefore like Heidegger to be. But the fact is that Heidegger was a member of the NSDAP and not an eco-pansy, not even in the way Zimmerman thinks he might have been, or perhaps, better yet, might teach us to be.
Zimmerman's study is useful and half correct in some ways. He correctly discerns the influence of Junger on Heidegger and that Heidegger's concern with technology was not nearly as original as some of his American readers think because the critique of technology was--thanks to the influence of Nietzsche--pervasive among conservative intellectuals of Weimar Germany. Unfortunately, this exhausts the usefulness of Zimmerman's exegesis and gets us to the confusion. For example, Zimmerman thinks it is contradictory that the philosopher of the disclosedness of being, of letting be, would not embrace individual liberties and modern democratic politics; or that Heidegger would engage in a masculinist rhetoric while at the same time destructing the categories of oppressive representation. Zimmerman procedes in this manner throughout the entire book, explaining what Heidegger's thought means and then telling us that this somehow "contradicts" the political position Heidegger came to occupy. Zimmerman does make attempts to iterate that you cannot simply discount connections between Heidegger's thought and politics but always reverts back to the notion that Heidegger's "overcoming" of "repressive" metaphysics should have pointed him in a different direction. Who is right, Heiddegger or Zimmerman? Did Heidegger's philosophy contradict his politics or were the two logically connected to each other?
The fact is that Zimmerman has misunderstood or refuses to accept what Heidegger means by "letting be." It should have dawned on Zimmerman that when Heidegger says he is not speaking within the horizon of humanism and liberalism that he is not. Heidegger is not talking about a letting be in terms of respect for individual rights but rather a letting be of natural rank and order--a far more fundamental letting be. Also, when Heidegger criticizes technicity as the drive to master being or nature he is not doing so because he thinks, as the liberal eco-pansy does, it is morally wrong, as if to say "nature has rights too," but rather because it conceals the natural indications that being gives. Heidegger simply had no desire to provide grist for the discordant mill of postmodern environmentalists, as the problems Zimmerman has in trying to even partially assimilate Heidegger to such a position should indicate. The main problem is that Zimmerman oversimplifies and misunderstands Heidegger's own misunderstanding of the history of philosophy. But this is precisely what Zimmerman takes to be the "correct" part of Heidegger's teaching: that Platonism is fundamentally wrong, overly oppressive, etc., etc.
In reality, Heidegger's misunderstanding of Plato's concept of eidos and the consequent concealment of Being and the effect this had on Heidegger's understanding of the history of philosophy is extraordinary. Had Heidegger recognized the dual nature of philosophy prior to the Enlightenment, that there was both a public teaching and a much more radical private understanding of the nature of philosophic problems that transcended the limitations of political acceptability and therefore simply could not be prudently bandied about, then perhaps he would have found it less difficult to be more prudent himself. But Heidegger's understanding of the history of metaphysics is never questioned by Zimmerman; only the political conclusions Heidegger drew from his understanding are critically examined. My suggestion to Dr. Zimmerman is to go back and read Plato and then Nietzsche, and really try to understand what each is saying, not what feminists or French poststructuralists say about them. You will then be in a much better position to understand Heidegger and see where he might have gone astray.
Rating: 5
Summary: Swagger
Comment: I haven't actually read this book, but I have read many other articles by Michael Zimmerman, whose reading of Heidegger is usually very strong. I just wanted to register my disgust at the review of 'zosimos', who would do better to actually READ the people he criticizes (Caputo, Derrida, etc) rather than simply swagger. The question of Nietzsche's misogyny, as a side-note, is in fact much more complicated than 'zosimos' suggests. May I suggest a reading? Jacques Derrida, _Spurs_. He might also enjoy _Nietzsche and the Feminine_ (ed. Burgard). Finally, I find it hard to believe that Marcuse, a hero of 1960s counterculture, would be opposed to freedom of speech. In short: please, gentle reader, ignore the manic ravings (dare I say, hornswoggle) of 'zosimos' and give Heidegger himself a try before leaping into the frightening abyss of secondary literature...
Rating: 4
Summary: Perceptive, careful evaluation of a major philosopher.
Comment: This book is an extremely well-informed and thoughtful evaluation of the historical and political contexts of Martin Heidegger's philosophy. Zimmerman is thoroughly familiar with Heidegger's philosophy and makes it accessible to the reader, without watering it down. He is respectful of Heidegger's contributions to Western philosophy at the same time that he carefully anatomizes the deeply troubling relationship of Heidegger's thought to reactionary Modernism and National Socialist ideology of 1930s Germany. No one interested in twentieth-century philosophy can afford not to read _Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity_.
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Title: The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays by Martin Heidegger ISBN: 0061319694 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 19 February, 1982 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition: An Anthology (Blackwell Philosophy Anthologies) by Robert C. Scharff, Val Dusek ISBN: 0631222197 Publisher: Blackwell Publishers Pub. Date: November, 2002 List Price(USD): $47.95 |
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Title: Thinking Through Technology: The Path Between Engineering and Philosophy by Carl Mitcham ISBN: 0226531988 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: August, 1994 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Science and Technology in World History: An Introduction by James E. McClellan, Harold Dorn ISBN: 0801858690 Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr Pub. Date: April, 1999 List Price(USD): $20.95 |
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Title: Being and Time: A Translation of Sein and Zeit (SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy) by Martin Heidegger, Joan Stambaugh, Joan Stanbaugh ISBN: 0791426785 Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr Pub. Date: October, 1996 List Price(USD): $30.95 |
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