Greg Krehbiel
“That’s so impenetrable it must be really deep”
by Greg Krehbiel on 10 November 2009
I found this gem of a paragraph in a review of a book on Heidegger.
“His prose is so dense that some scholars have said it could be interpreted to mean anything, while others have dismissed it altogether as gibberish. He is nonetheless widely considered to be one of the century’s greatest and most influential thinkers.”
2009-11-10 » Greg Krehbiel
10 November 2009 @ 1:15 pm
Okay, let’s get this right — half the world thinks his writing is meaningless, the other half thinks he’s an idiot — exactly who DID he influence?
I know, I know, they didn’t say “all” scholars fall into one of those two categories, but generally speaking you don’t call someone “the greatest and most influential” if a significant number of authorities in the same field think his stuff was rubbish.
10 November 2009 @ 1:19 pm
Have you read Fashionable Nonsense? It deals with a lot of the same stuff.
As far as the review is concerned, the rejection of Heidegger because he was a Nazi is as much a Fallacy as my tendency to reject him because he is influential with practitioners of Literary Criticism.
10 November 2009 @ 1:24 pm
Pentamom — kinda reminds me of well-known Reformed writer named Van Til.
John — what I found interesting was the implication that his Nazi ideas somehow suffused all his work in such a way that if you accepted his opinions on architecture it would somehow push you towards Naziism.
The very same people who say that would probably reject the idea that we might get tainted by watching an actor who has odd political views.
10 November 2009 @ 2:16 pm
I think that’s a fair point about Van Til. Put it this way: a Van Tillian is still entitled to think Uncle Kees was right even if most of the rest of the theological world think he was a nut, but the Van Tillian is going too far if he claims that Van Til was highly influential over the whole scope of theology, when obviously many people think he was off his rocker and pay his approach little mind.
That’s my point — Heidegger could still (theoretically) have been great, spot-on, you name it — but you can’t really call him “the most influential” if a large proportion of the community in which he functioned wants to throw his stuff in the round file with hardly a backward glance.
10 November 2009 @ 2:25 pm
Sounds right to me.
You’re probably heard this story before, but I remember reading a collection of essays praising Van Til.
Essay 1 said, “Van Til says A, and he’s a genius. But nobody understands Van Til.”
Essay 2 said, “Van Til says B, and he’s a genius. But nobody understands Van Til.”
And on and on it went. They were all sure he was a genius. They were all sure he said completely different things. And they were all sure nobody understands him.
Okay, so he may be a genius, but he’s not a very good communicator, and whatever his ideas really were, they couldn’t have been that influential.
13 November 2009 @ 11:07 am
My college roommate was taking a course on existentialism. He admitted having no idea what Heidegger was saying. He went to class and took notes on the professor’s translation and interpretation. I doubt he could tell you the difference between “being” and “nothingness.”
13 November 2009 @ 2:22 pm
Acadamic philosophy for quite a few decades has been divided into large camps: analytic and continental. (These terms are very unfortunate. “Continental” does not at all mean “whatever comes from the European continent”. Their heroes come from there, but so do a lot of the heroes of analytic philosophy.) Heidegger is generally venerated and certainly influential in continental philosophy, whereas he is generally despised in analytic philosophy. I myself regard him as a Major Bullshit Artist, but I do belong to either of the two camps.
13 November 2009 @ 2:35 pm
I meant to say, “I do not belong to either of the two camps”.
Let me add that one of the big heroes of analytic philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein, is also very cryptic.