His name is Bryan *Magee*, writer of the best introduction to philosophy I have ever read: "Confessions of a Philosopher". Dreyfuss has written the best commentary on Being and Time, which is totally necessary read if you are ever to understand Heidegger. This is the best interview the BBC has ever put out! So good to see it again, the BBC is too dumb these days to reshow it...
Dreyfus's suggests that Sartre generated Being and Nothingness as a Cartesian program returning to his roots in Husserl's phenomenology. But one doesn't necessarily have to construe Sartre as reviving the two substance ontology of Descartes. Only the in-itself is conceivable as substance or “thing.” The for-itself is a no-thing, Dreyfus also suggests it is "a disaster" for Sartre to write about existential themes like death and guilt "because that's what Heidegger was trying to free us from." Sartre's main themes, in fact, were consciousness, subjectivity, freedom, bad faith, negation, responsibility and the self. In my mind these are proper themes for an existential essay on ontology, even if he remains more loyal to Husserl than Heidegger. And after Heidegger's Nazi affiliation has been publicized perhaps, Sartre showed foresight not to base his phenomenological investigations on Being and Time. Here, it appears Dreyfus may be be engaged in a smear campaign, rather than a professional critique.
I might be wrong as well... :) It's been a while since I looked through these clips, so I'd be hard pressed right now to give more exact comments. My point, though, is that, while there certainly has been a chain of thought that has followed us from past to present, that chain is not necessarily a chain of worse=>better, but rather a chain of changes, period. I've grown a bit sensitive to this kind of thinking that puts the present at the peak of some sort of ever rising evolutionary pyramid.
What about Merleau Ponty? Dreyfuss really sings his praises for filling in blanks left by Heidegger. Foucault and Derrida also get much praise for enagaging the biggest question -- what do we do with our 'orrible anxiety?
I might add to this, if there is no distinction between subject and object, then we can come to an understanding of what knowledge actually is. Knowledge is when subject and object become one, and the subject completely stands over the object as if the object is to become the subject itself. It is only when the subject actually becomes the object that we can say that the subject can come to know anything at all. If the subject doesn't become anything else, then it cannot relate to anything else.
LOL Kaaru, I have to admit even better than Quine :-) Although being more familier with Quine I really didn't learn much from McGee's conversation with Quine...
I can't help but feel entirely uncomfortable with Dreyfus here too. To say for Heidegger perception is identical to seeing is enormously misleading, since he doesn't take perception as something different than acting in the traditional sense. What he does say is that perception of objects, in the traditional sense, restricts our understanding of being to categorial determinations of present-at-hand entities. Perception or intuition, in the broader sense, is radically reinterpreted, not ignored
For good reasons not all of which were philosophical or academic. Many denounced Sartre as an apologist for tyranny and terror because of his support for Stalinism, Maoism, and Castro's regime in Cuba. And Sartre's ideas influenced the Khmer Rouge. The events in Cambodia in the 1970s, in which between one-fifth and one-third of the nation was starved to death or murdered, were entirely the work of a group of intellectuals, who were for the most part pupils and admirers of Jean-Paul Sartre.
Be that as it may, a similar reasoning would have to be launched in the direction of Heidegger himself. With Sartre it was the case that he supported certain types of fascism, at a distance, which were not labelled as such and with Heidegger he directly participated in the one sole manifestation which has been classified that way. Merleau-Ponty and Sartre had their falling out over exactly what you have outlined and the former wrote his text 'Humanism and terror' as a response to the Soviet totalitarian machine. I believe that in order to make use of theory, in this case, one must extricate the author' relevance from the theory being pursued. Both Heidegger and Sartre claimed that what they had supported politically was better than the alternative, not the end all be all. Heidegger claimed an opposition to both western capitalism and soviet style state-socialism. Sartre claimed an opposition to western capitalism and German neo-imperialism ('fascism'). They were both right and wrong in my view. Heidegger, in responding to a letter to Herbert Marcuse, wrote that he hadn't determined the end in the beginning (concerning the National Socialists), however his own participation the the NS seems to directly contradict his notion of authenticity as it concerns not being swayed by 'the they' or so-called masses. Marcuse calls him out, correctly in my opinion, on this matter. Yet, this rhetoric, this ideological function, concerning what is called 'they' or 'masses' is used in the exact same manner in both Soviet Russia and Fascist Germany. It is also the same under western capitalism, although the latter is far more insidious and efficient. Marcuse wrote a text on Soviet 'communism' drawing the parallel between Stalinism and capitalism. This is all to say that all these thinkers were, as Heidegger would point out, already in a world, a context, and never removed from it and making independent observations. What Heidegger certainly failed to do was analyze this as it relates to himself and therefore seems not to attempt to suss out the consequences of his own actions. Sartre runs a similar course, yet actually does focus on people actions and their consequences, yet also seems to fail to take into account the consequences of his unwavering support for alternative fascisms. Merleau-Ponty also makes this mistake by shifting away from Marx to the realm of liberalism.
This is unbelievable. Undoubtedly the dismissal of Sartre here is a product of the fashionable contemporary treatment of him, and perhaps rightly so, for at that time in his philosophical development (his Marxist revolutionary years) I think Sartre was writing muck. But his pre-1946 works, among which the gems "The Transcendence of the Ego" (1936), "The Imaginary" (1940), and "Being and Nothingness" (1943) shine brightest, are all brilliant in their scope and their ramifications. It is a travesty that these men would shit on "Being and Nothingness" as Sartre taking Heidegger and attempting to make it Cartesian. Sartre is explicitly anti-Cartesian, as he makes clear in his attack on Husserl's reliance on the Cartesian cogito in "Transcendence of the Ego." I'd advise anyone who isn't familiar with Sartre to ignore what these two gentlemen say in regards to Sartre here (although the rest of this episode with Dreyfus is otherwise quality philosophical discussion).
Thanks for the note! But that doesn't mean Sartre was correctly following Heidegger (not that he needed to) and Heidegger was right in dismissing it as not being Heideggerian. Although I would emphasize your last bracketed remark. On another note, my view is that both the first Heidegger and, specially, the second one are missing the point about historicity - if Heidegger reaches the point of recognizing cuts in the historicity of Being (the Greeks, Christianity/feudalism, and Modernity), why doesn't he finish the job by looking at that which determines each and every one of those modes of Being, that is, the three different modes of production? For one thing, I found it wrong at the end of this conversation to suddenly forget about the link between Ponty and the deconstructionists - Althusser. He was more into Spinoza, I know, but his most underrated disciple, Juan Carlos Rodríguez, wrote a whole theory and history of the 'ideological unconscious' (apart from a marvelous little book on Heidegger) which not only explains the historicity of all phenomenology (and Heidegger), but the historicity of those three ideological matrixes (the Greek/Roman, the feudal, and the capitalist) which are what determine (dominant) discourse, that is, the ideological production of a Mode of Production, and so on. Discourse, yes, the thing we use (according to Heidegger) when something goes wrong, is also, and above all, the discourse of the System coping with its own contradictions in order to reproduce itself. Indeed, us individuals are 'always-already' within it: economically, politically and ideologically. The difference with Althusser here is that he thought only in terms of 'subject'. His disciple, JCR, corrected that: there have been Master/slave social relations, Lord/serf social relations, and subject/subject (either of them with capital letters, of course). Yes, Heidegger was right, only subjects perceive objects (the human sciences are about objects/phenomena, but not Greek science (sic), because the idea of science begins with the idea of a literal world, that is, the world of phenomena in themselves, etc.)... Well, I thought I'd contribute this.
Thank you for your contribution. What you said about discourse being a device by which the System copes with its own contradictions is of utmost interest. Could you please detail some of the key works wherein those ideas are further developed? (Sorry for my English, not a native speaker).
Which is your native language? Because if it happens to be Spanish, you really hit the jackpot - those ideas are developed in detail (though it takes a bit of effort at first on the part of the reader, because it's really not about thinking out of the box, but gaining consciousness of what it means to think within the box) in the works of Juan Carlos Rodríguez (any of them, really, will do the job, though if you are all for theory you could just start by reading his masterpiece, 'Teoría e historia de la producción ideológica. Las primeras literaturas burguesas', just re-issued by Akal). There are some good articles written on JCR's theory out there by Malcolm K. Read. And a few translations (very difficult to find): one is the translation of 'Teoría e historia...'; the other two are titled 'State, Stage, Language: The Production of the Subject', and the last is a long article on Althusser, titled 'Althusser Blow-Up'. Thanks for letting me know that you found my observation interesting! Anytime!
Oh yes, I forgot to mention: Spanish is in fact my first language. I'm from Colombia. There happens to be a very large book festival going on right now in Bogota and I'm sure I saw Akal's section the other day, so with a little luck I might be able to find it there. Thank you so much for taking the time to recommend those works. I'll look for them posthaste. It's nice to find such helpful and kind people around here. Have a good day!
Despite ebullient praise for Being and Nothingness when it was first published (look it up), the later Heidegger finds in a work whose central contention is "you ARE the sum total of your choices" nothing but "muck". Perhaps had the former nazi party member who threw his own mentor under the bus in exchange for a university rectorship made decisions in HIS life that reflected on who he was I wonder if his view would still have changed.
It is incredibly interresting to listen to this. However, there is a slight tendency to view reasonings to be evolutionary is essence: one thing leading to another and building onto that, ridding itself of the useless and adding something new (better). Strikes me as slightly... wrong for some reason.
This allergy towards Sartre is based on a more severe foundation : his alignment with Marxism and his overwhelming influence on the Sixties radical movement. Reading Jameson on Sartre would be enough for Dreyfus to understand his ongoing vitality and importance.
There is no distinction between subject and object when things go well. When driving you don't notice the clutch as an object. A subject without desire still has a disposition (B&T p.173). Being and time obviously exist! They are ways we see the world. Sartre is not the father of existentialism. Kirkegaard? Magee condemns Sartre in his book "Confessions". Sartre though Stalin was a good guy, some morals!
Just your last sentence was a bit wierd in defending heidegger. Should we detract anything from heidegger because he was a nazi? Or sartre because he supported the soviet union?
Sartre definitely had something with bad faith. But that was a decisively poignant identification of a singular phenomenon. That Sartre fell into what "Heidegger is trying to overcome" is a bit off. Sartre "endorsed" what Heidegger had laid down as his own groundwork which ignored historicism completely. Sartre took this myopic view and made his "contribution" by denying any chance of authenticity. Later Heidegger focused on language, but still sadly neglected Husserl /Kant too much
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His name is Bryan *Magee*, writer of the best introduction to philosophy I have ever read: "Confessions of a Philosopher". Dreyfuss has written the best commentary on Being and Time, which is totally necessary read if you are ever to understand Heidegger. This is the best interview the BBC has ever put out! So good to see it again, the BBC is too dumb these days to reshow it...
This one was pretty sharp. Dreyfus seems like a bit of a legend.
I just like hearing smart people talk.
The very end is so hilarious yet epic.
love the trumpet music.
Wow, I'm going to have to watch this one soon, best of the series, huh?
Awesome. One of the best, perhaps the best, of the whole McGee series.
This series was great and easily accesible breakdown of heidegger.
Dreyfus's suggests that Sartre generated Being and Nothingness as a Cartesian program returning to his roots in Husserl's phenomenology. But one doesn't necessarily have to construe Sartre as reviving the two substance ontology of Descartes. Only the in-itself is conceivable as substance or “thing.” The for-itself is a no-thing, Dreyfus also suggests it is "a disaster" for Sartre to write about existential themes like death and guilt "because that's what Heidegger was trying to free us from." Sartre's main themes, in fact, were consciousness, subjectivity, freedom, bad faith, negation, responsibility and the self. In my mind these are proper themes for an existential essay on ontology, even if he remains more loyal to Husserl than Heidegger. And after Heidegger's Nazi affiliation has been publicized perhaps, Sartre showed foresight not to base his phenomenological investigations on Being and Time.
Here, it appears Dreyfus may be be engaged in a smear campaign, rather than a professional critique.
I might be wrong as well... :) It's been a while since I looked through these clips, so I'd be hard pressed right now to give more exact comments.
My point, though, is that, while there certainly has been a chain of thought that has followed us from past to present, that chain is not necessarily a chain of worse=>better, but rather a chain of changes, period.
I've grown a bit sensitive to this kind of thinking that puts the present at the peak of some sort of ever rising evolutionary pyramid.
Fascinating - thanks for posting this!
Amazing.
What about Merleau Ponty? Dreyfuss really sings his praises for filling in blanks left by Heidegger. Foucault and Derrida also get much praise for enagaging the biggest question -- what do we do with our 'orrible anxiety?
I might add to this, if there is no distinction between subject and object, then we can come to an understanding of what knowledge actually is. Knowledge is when subject and object become one, and the subject completely stands over the object as if the object is to become the subject itself. It is only when the subject actually becomes the object that we can say that the subject can come to know anything at all. If the subject doesn't become anything else, then it cannot relate to anything else.
@LooksAeterna I fell the same way. Transparent coping blah blah. Of course there are things like memory, and habit......
@TheAlby21 I wholeheartedly agree.
Yes. It makes them morally repugnant. But this doesn't mean that we can't use their philosophies, if we are so inclined.
@dantean This series appeared on BBC in 1987.
@ghandi8749 Yeah, they really got that whole bit about Merlaugh-Ponty's work outlasting Sartre's pretty wrong.
@dantean My pleasure. I'm sorry it 4 months or so to get an answer.
in what year did this discussion take place?
LOL Kaaru, I have to admit even better than Quine :-) Although being more familier with Quine I really didn't learn much from McGee's conversation with Quine...
@hugogirardisking Thank you.
I can't help but feel entirely uncomfortable with Dreyfus here too. To say for Heidegger perception is identical to seeing is enormously misleading, since he doesn't take perception as something different than acting in the traditional sense. What he does say is that perception of objects, in the traditional sense, restricts our understanding of being to categorial determinations of present-at-hand entities. Perception or intuition, in the broader sense, is radically reinterpreted, not ignored
Wow they just skipped over Sartre, which is a major disappointment.
For good reasons not all of which were philosophical or academic. Many denounced Sartre as an apologist for tyranny and terror because of his support for Stalinism, Maoism, and Castro's regime in Cuba. And Sartre's ideas influenced the Khmer Rouge. The events in Cambodia in the 1970s, in which between one-fifth and one-third of the nation was starved to death or murdered, were entirely the work of a group of intellectuals, who were for the most part pupils and admirers of Jean-Paul Sartre.
Be that as it may, a similar reasoning would have to be launched in the direction of Heidegger himself. With Sartre it was the case that he supported certain types of fascism, at a distance, which were not labelled as such and with Heidegger he directly participated in the one sole manifestation which has been classified that way.
Merleau-Ponty and Sartre had their falling out over exactly what you have outlined and the former wrote his text 'Humanism and terror' as a response to the Soviet totalitarian machine.
I believe that in order to make use of theory, in this case, one must extricate the author' relevance from the theory being pursued. Both Heidegger and Sartre claimed that what they had supported politically was better than the alternative, not the end all be all.
Heidegger claimed an opposition to both western capitalism and soviet style state-socialism. Sartre claimed an opposition to western capitalism and German neo-imperialism ('fascism'). They were both right and wrong in my view.
Heidegger, in responding to a letter to Herbert Marcuse, wrote that he hadn't determined the end in the beginning (concerning the National Socialists), however his own participation the the NS seems to directly contradict his notion of authenticity as it concerns not being swayed by 'the they' or so-called masses. Marcuse calls him out, correctly in my opinion, on this matter.
Yet, this rhetoric, this ideological function, concerning what is called 'they' or 'masses' is used in the exact same manner in both Soviet Russia and Fascist Germany. It is also the same under western capitalism, although the latter is far more insidious and efficient. Marcuse wrote a text on Soviet 'communism' drawing the parallel between Stalinism and capitalism.
This is all to say that all these thinkers were, as Heidegger would point out, already in a world, a context, and never removed from it and making independent observations. What Heidegger certainly failed to do was analyze this as it relates to himself and therefore seems not to attempt to suss out the consequences of his own actions.
Sartre runs a similar course, yet actually does focus on people actions and their consequences, yet also seems to fail to take into account the consequences of his unwavering support for alternative fascisms.
Merleau-Ponty also makes this mistake by shifting away from Marx to the realm of liberalism.
@@henryberrylowry9512 Tour de Force many thanks!
From what year is this?
This is unbelievable. Undoubtedly the dismissal of Sartre here is a product of the fashionable contemporary treatment of him, and perhaps rightly so, for at that time in his philosophical development (his Marxist revolutionary years) I think Sartre was writing muck. But his pre-1946 works, among which the gems "The Transcendence of the Ego" (1936), "The Imaginary" (1940), and "Being and Nothingness" (1943) shine brightest, are all brilliant in their scope and their ramifications. It is a travesty that these men would shit on "Being and Nothingness" as Sartre taking Heidegger and attempting to make it Cartesian. Sartre is explicitly anti-Cartesian, as he makes clear in his attack on Husserl's reliance on the Cartesian cogito in "Transcendence of the Ego." I'd advise anyone who isn't familiar with Sartre to ignore what these two gentlemen say in regards to Sartre here (although the rest of this episode with Dreyfus is otherwise quality philosophical discussion).
Thanks for the note! But that doesn't mean Sartre was correctly following Heidegger (not that he needed to) and Heidegger was right in dismissing it as not being Heideggerian. Although I would emphasize your last bracketed remark. On another note, my view is that both the first Heidegger and, specially, the second one are missing the point about historicity - if Heidegger reaches the point of recognizing cuts in the historicity of Being (the Greeks, Christianity/feudalism, and Modernity), why doesn't he finish the job by looking at that which determines each and every one of those modes of Being, that is, the three different modes of production? For one thing, I found it wrong at the end of this conversation to suddenly forget about the link between Ponty and the deconstructionists - Althusser. He was more into Spinoza, I know, but his most underrated disciple, Juan Carlos Rodríguez, wrote a whole theory and history of the 'ideological unconscious' (apart from a marvelous little book on Heidegger) which not only explains the historicity of all phenomenology (and Heidegger), but the historicity of those three ideological matrixes (the Greek/Roman, the feudal, and the capitalist) which are what determine (dominant) discourse, that is, the ideological production of a Mode of Production, and so on. Discourse, yes, the thing we use (according to Heidegger) when something goes wrong, is also, and above all, the discourse of the System coping with its own contradictions in order to reproduce itself. Indeed, us individuals are 'always-already' within it: economically, politically and ideologically. The difference with Althusser here is that he thought only in terms of 'subject'. His disciple, JCR, corrected that: there have been Master/slave social relations, Lord/serf social relations, and subject/subject (either of them with capital letters, of course). Yes, Heidegger was right, only subjects perceive objects (the human sciences are about objects/phenomena, but not Greek science (sic), because the idea of science begins with the idea of a literal world, that is, the world of phenomena in themselves, etc.)... Well, I thought I'd contribute this.
Thank you for your contribution. What you said about discourse being a device by which the System copes with its own contradictions is of utmost interest. Could you please detail some of the key works wherein those ideas are further developed? (Sorry for my English, not a native speaker).
Which is your native language? Because if it happens to be Spanish, you really hit the jackpot - those ideas are developed in detail (though it takes a bit of effort at first on the part of the reader, because it's really not about thinking out of the box, but gaining consciousness of what it means to think within the box) in the works of Juan Carlos Rodríguez (any of them, really, will do the job, though if you are all for theory you could just start by reading his masterpiece, 'Teoría e historia de la producción ideológica. Las primeras literaturas burguesas', just re-issued by Akal). There are some good articles written on JCR's theory out there by Malcolm K. Read. And a few translations (very difficult to find): one is the translation of 'Teoría e historia...'; the other two are titled 'State, Stage, Language: The Production of the Subject', and the last is a long article on Althusser, titled 'Althusser Blow-Up'. Thanks for letting me know that you found my observation interesting! Anytime!
Your English is excellent, by the way!
Oh yes, I forgot to mention: Spanish is in fact my first language. I'm from Colombia. There happens to be a very large book festival going on right now in Bogota and I'm sure I saw Akal's section the other day, so with a little luck I might be able to find it there. Thank you so much for taking the time to recommend those works. I'll look for them posthaste. It's nice to find such helpful and kind people around here. Have a good day!
Sartre dismissed in under a minute, lol
@pulsating123 hahaha i feel you man
Despite ebullient praise for Being and Nothingness when it was first published (look it up), the later Heidegger finds in a work whose central contention is "you ARE the sum total of your choices" nothing but "muck". Perhaps had the former nazi party member who threw his own mentor under the bus in exchange for a university rectorship made decisions in HIS life that reflected on who he was I wonder if his view would still have changed.
It is incredibly interresting to listen to this. However, there is a slight tendency to view reasonings to be evolutionary is essence: one thing leading to another and building onto that, ridding itself of the useless and adding something new (better). Strikes me as slightly... wrong for some reason.
This allergy towards Sartre is based on a more severe foundation : his alignment with Marxism and his overwhelming influence on the Sixties radical movement. Reading Jameson on Sartre would be enough for Dreyfus to understand his ongoing vitality and importance.
For very good reason, I'm convinced Dreyfus and MP did not spend enough time with B&N and Sartre's subsequent philosophical development.
I think they are focusing on the phenomenologists here, primarily. Nietzsche isnt one.
There is no distinction between subject and object when things go well. When driving you don't notice the clutch as an object. A subject without desire still has a disposition (B&T p.173). Being and time obviously exist! They are ways we see the world. Sartre is not the father of existentialism. Kirkegaard? Magee condemns Sartre in his book "Confessions". Sartre though Stalin was a good guy, some morals!
cont...
But, as I said, I might have grown overly sensitive... Right now I couldn't say. :)
@Sgirardacus Sartre surrendered to materialism.
Just your last sentence was a bit wierd in defending heidegger.
Should we detract anything from heidegger because he was a nazi? Or sartre because he supported the soviet union?
Sartre definitely had something with bad faith. But that was a decisively poignant identification of a singular phenomenon. That Sartre fell into what "Heidegger is trying to overcome" is a bit off. Sartre "endorsed" what Heidegger had laid down as his own groundwork which ignored historicism completely. Sartre took this myopic view and made his "contribution" by denying any chance of authenticity. Later Heidegger focused on language, but still sadly neglected Husserl /Kant too much
December 6th, 1987
2:28
sartre, pwned.
"Sart"
Hee hee hee
Sartre is likely to stick longer than Heidegger in the history of philosophy.