Was Heidegger Postmodern?
Strauss and Bloom vs. Derrida and Rorty
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There are two main lines of criticisms against Heidegger:
1) Heidegger is too postmodern, too relativistic, and thus nihilistic.
2) Heidegger is not postmodern enough, too romantic, and thus fascistic.
In one telling, Heidegger fails to give us standards by which we can judge anything to be right or wrong. In the other telling, Heidegger gives us standards that are too inflexible and illiberal. The former view can be found in the writings of Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom; the latter in the work of Richard Rorty and Jacques Derrida.
Ironically, Strauss says he started off in his youth as a Nietzschean, before repenting of his perspectivalism and seeking to return to the ancients. Rorty began as an analytic philosopher who moved in an increasingly postmodern direction. Rorty and Strauss are kind of photographic negatives of one another, coming to the other’s starting position in reverse. Both are readers and critics of Heidegger. But Heidegger functions as their double, the path not taken, the great temptation.
Why does any of this matter?
Because the culture wars raging within and outside academia turn on our assessment of postmodernism, and Heidegger is a liminal figure in the history of postmodernism, standing at once as its founder and as its enemy.
To take one example, Critical Race Theory is downstream of Critical Legal Theory, which may or may not be downstream of existential hermeneutics—the notion that one’s subject position is inextricable from one’s conclusions so that the Enlightenment quest for truth, separated from politics, or separated from self-interest, or ideology, is naive. A general skepticism of scientific institutions—of the notion that one can cordon off questions of justice or “ought” from questions of fact or “is”—is a hallmark of postmodernism.
Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics is said to be the beginning of postmodernism, and yet it is also said by thinkers who came after Heidegger that Heidegger is the last bastion of metaphysics.
The debate over Heidegger is thus itself postmodern because the question of what Heidegger supports is inseparable from the question of what we ought to support. Heidegger becomes a Rorschach test for whether you are pro or anti-objectivity.
Heidegger himself, as I understand him, was not so radical as to say truth is merely conventional; nor was he so naive as to claim that one could just declare oneself to be a realist and wave away the real insight that one’s position and attitude “in the world” determine one’s capacity to care for it.
Heidegger is a critic of rationality, or a certain version of it, but he’s not therefore a defender of irrationality.
The fact that we can’t overcome “care as the basis for understanding” doesn’t mean that there aren’t such things as facts, or that epistemology is impossible, or that we can’t aim to update our heuristics to afford better accuracy and prediction. Heidegger’s critique occurs on a different level. It is a polemic not against the pursuit of correctness but against our sense that this is all there is to pursue.
And yet it does baffle readers—and Heidegger himself is guilty of inducing this through his rhetoric—how the pursuit of more mystical and higher-order priorities, like “the question of Being” relates to more concrete questions like “How hot is the ozone right now?”
In his Zollikon Seminars, Heidegger did undertake this sort of questioning, but his findings remain difficult. All we know is that he thought medical practitioners and psychiatrists should consider testimony from patients—and the dynamic between doctor and patient—as fundamental to the practice of medicine. But as to how to weight testimony, in practice, vs. what shows up on a brain scan is not something Heidegger describes in detail.
While this post is also not concretely it expresses a hope for more integration between the world of fact and the world of what Heidegger called “Unconcealment.” More scientists should read Heidegger; even if the result is a version of Heidegger that Heidegger himself would not agree with, his thought is too important to remain cloistered in the minds and spirits of non-technical humanists.