Ten

Heidegger’s influences

Heidegger has been, on many reckonings, the most influential philosopher of (both in and from) the twentieth century. Due, however, to his sharp divisiveness, his influence has taken an unusually polarized form. He moves some to emulation and development, while others push off from him, away in directions partly favored by their being not his. His saying what he says persuades some to it, and some against it, both because of how he says it, and because he’s Heidegger (and was a Nazi etc.).

This divide happens not just at a macro-level, separating camps of “friends and enemies,” but also at the micro-level within many individual readers. Of course we do pick and choose what we take from any philosopher—almost nobody “swallows him whole.” But Heidegger’s readers tend to sustain sharper conflicts of respect and aversion, I think. This is exemplified in the way many of his most ardent disciples came to define themselves primarily against him.1

For reasons of space and optimism I’ll focus on the positive and emulative effects—on some ways his ideas and views have spread. Since even this positive influence has been so wide and diverse, I can only survey it, and try to organize it under some general headings.² Obviously it’s a further question whether this influence is “positive” in another sense: is a good and truth-promoting influence. But just as obviously it would be pointless to try to adjudicate that in these last few pages.

There’s another question about this influence that deserves some address: did—or would—Heidegger approve of it? Would he judge that his “followers” were taking on views that were really his? We’ve seen his constant radicalizing—trying always to get a step further, and so keeping a step ahead; he was very ready to doubt that he was being understood, even by sympathetic hearers. The most famous case of this was his rejection of “existentialist” readings of Being and Time, in his “Letter on ‘Humanism’.” The common thrust of these disavowals is of course the usual: sight is always getting lost of being, the indispensable topic.

Heidegger would—and did—dislike the extent to which his ideas have been extracted from their relation to the question of being. In this light he may indeed seem not to have left much of a mark at all, inasmuch as there doesn’t seem to have been the kind of renaissance of attention to being, an ontological revival, he seemed to want. But appearances are here deceiving. What we find when we attend to the different waves of his influence, I suggest, is in each case a stage or aspect of his own path towards being. Each of the main ways he tried to convey a sense of it—of how to find it—has spun off a group of other thinkers. These correspond roughly to the different “isms” Heidegger has operated through.

Before getting to these isms, however, we should note a kind of base-line influence Heidegger has, which is almost contentless. He conveys a passion for philosophy; he brings philosophical problems and concepts to life. This is what his lectures were so famous for, and we see the effect in his early students: Gadamer, Arendt, Marcuse, Jonas, Löwith, Levinas. The diversity of their later philosophical paths shows the great malleability of this basic effect, this philosophical energizing. And it operates through his writings as well.3

But of course usually Heidegger conveys more than just this neutral thrust: he passes on a particular philosophical stance, a conception of how to do philosophy. This conception is interwoven with several main lessons, his chief lines of influence. None of these lessons is uniquely taught by Heidegger, but he articulates them in forms that have been uncommonly persuasive. I’ll illustrate these abstract lessons by associating each with a couple of prominent adherents, in whom Heidegger’s influence can be pursued and evaluated. (Of course these philosophers underwent shifts in thinking themselves, and what I say about them won’t hold true of them throughout.)

(a) The first lesson is, in brief, the notion of world: the idea that all of our particular beliefs, discoveries, experiences depend upon a certain background understanding of “a world”—and that the business of philosophy (at least part of it) is to uncover the secret logic or structure or goal in this deep understanding. This idea is conveyed in the first portion of Being and Time, but it is an ongoing presumption in Heidegger’s later thinking too. It is, as it were, his first step to being.

Put so generally the point is quasi-Kantian, but Heidegger fills it out in several ways that make it more distinctively his. First, this world is not principally constituted by theories or beliefs or statements, but by (something like) our practical stance. So there’s an anti-Cartesian conviction that it is not as “subjects” that we project the world. Second, this world is embodied in language, and is principally studied by exposing the ways we use words, and in particular certain privileged and founding uses. Third, this projected world has an historical character, and needs to be understood developmentally and in historical context. But fourth, despite this linguistic and historical complexity, there is still a deep unity in our projected world: it is organized bottom-up from a single principal character or aim, which permeates and explains all the rest.

This set of ideas is, I suggest, the first main line of Heidegger’s influence. Others before him held all these ideas, but he conveyed them in forms, and as a package, that spread them widely. As the fourth point makes clear, the picture is more rationalist than empiricist, and I think this is an important part of its appeal. It gives philosophy a field of its own to study, with vast real-life significance. We don’t get at this background understanding by piling up sociological or psychological facts, but by stepping somehow down or back to a meaning present in every one of our views and experiences. Philosophy’s job is to take this step down.

This is, on the one hand, the “phenomenological” strand of Heidegger’s influence. Much of European philosophy after him has been phenomenological in the broad sense of aiming to expose deep structures of human intentionality. Of course philosophers have taken this approach from Husserl as well as from Heidegger—some more one, some the other. But Heidegger’s pragmatic and anti-Cartesian version has dominated. We may take Hubert Dreyfus as our sample here: within a generally hostile “analytic” environment, he shows the power of Heidegger’s account of our practicality, and its fruitful potential as a method that can lead to further insights. His arguments against the feasibility of (a certain program in) artificial intelligence gave this phenomenology a voice in consequential debates, as did his ongoing argument with John Searle in the philosophy of mind. At the heart of Dreyfus’ contribution is his phenomenology of “skilled coping,” which he shows at the crux of Heidegger’s break with Husserl.4

In a less hierarchical and more historical aspect, this line of Heidegger’s influence can be called “hermeneutic”: philosophy’s business is to show how to interpret human meaning. It’s under this rubric that Hans-Georg Gadamer took over that set of ideas, and can serve as its clearest exponent. He develops the method by which that meaning needs to be studied, due to its non-subjective, linguistic, and historical character. He focuses on the situation in which one interprets a past text, and must exploit both what one shares from the tradition descending from the text, and also one’s difference from it; interpreter and text reflect two “horizons,” which overlap in a way that makes understanding possible. Indeed this understanding is not just of that historical text, but of oneself, in one’s own historical place. This method is largely present in Heidegger’s historical writing, but Gadamer forgoes the latter’s step into ontology. His hermeneutics is done for its own sake—for the sake of the particular insights it gives of the tradition and our place in it.5

(b) The second main lesson many draw from Heidegger is the existentialist adjunct to his phenomenology: in brief, the idea that we’re challenged to become a self through facing and making a groundless choice. This idea was expressed in the second portion of Being and Time, though Heidegger largely abandoned it after the turning. Again he was not original in it, but brought points from Kierkegaard (especially) into a conceptual order that has proven enormously compelling. The idea of humans as confronted with a deep lack or “nothing,” and of authenticity or freedom as facing and “living in the light” of this lack, was absorbed by many philosophers—and many “civilians”—as the ultimate character of our human situation.

In France in the 1930s this line of influence ran importantly through Alexandre Kojeve, whose famous lectures (in Paris) on Hegel presented him in Heideggerianly existential fashion: we’re called to heroically embrace our own finitude, overcoming the metaphysical effort to conceal the “becoming” of desire and its negativity. These lectures were attended by Lacan, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Bataille, and many others who absorbed this Heideggerian lesson through them—and then spread it by their own wide influence.

Jean-Paul Sartre can be our first example of this line of effect. Although there are important ways in which his phenomenology is more Husserlian—especially its Cartesian stress on consciousness—he turns it in an existential direction that borrows heavily from Heidegger in its overall shape, and even in the micro-structure of some arguments. The overall dichotomy between projection and thrownness, the temporal grounding of these, the stress on the limit-situation of “anguish” and the “nothing” this exposes, make much of Being and Nothingness (1943) a rewrite of Heidegger’s book (along with the 1931 “What Is Metaphysics?”). Sartre very fruitfully extends this existential story, above all with his powerful account of our relations to others, as well as with his great talent for concrete illustrations.

A second instructive figure here is Emmanuel Levinas, who likewise absorbed a great deal of Being and Time’s existential structure, but who carried out a more insistent critique of it than Sartre. He links that book’s failure to give us an ethics with Heidegger’s later mistake about Nazism. Levinas tries to correct this fault by giving ultimacy to positive (“face-to-face”) relations to individual others, in which their “mystery” shakes us out of our usual self-absorbed dealings. It’s in these relations, not in solitude, that we need to face death, and it’s here that we find our true temporality. These ideas amount to a reconfiguration of Heidegger’s existentialism; Time and the Other (1947) gives a condensed statement of them.

(c) A third main line of influence lies in the lesson “against reason” that Heidegger promotes, partly in Being and Time’s anti-Cartesianism, but more decisively in his later diagnosis of rationality as an expression of technology and enframing. This suspicion against the usual methods of definition, statement, and argument, and the belief in a kind of “truth” that requires a more allusive, indirect, and “literary” approach, was a key element in a second wave of effect Heidegger had in France, on thinkers usually labeled “post-structuralists” and “deconstructionists.”

It may be Jacques Derrida who took over the most of Heidegger’s later thinking, and developed it. He explicitly rejects the Sartrean, existential lesson as subjectivistic and ahistorical. He absorbs instead Heidegger’s idea of presence as the crux to the Western understanding of being—along with a suspicion against this basic project, and a will to diagnose and question it. Since this project lies so deep we can’t escape it, but only raise it to attention by disrupting it; this is the method of déconstruction, a term rooted in Heidegger’s Destruktion and Abbau. Derrida serves some analytic philosophers as a kind of reductio of Heidegger: with pupils like this, he must have been off track himself. But this is unjust to both. We saw that Heidegger’s critique of “reason” wasn’t indiscriminate; it prompted a revision not a dismissal of reason, leaving a method designed, for reasons, the better to secure the truth we should want. And so it is, mostly, for Derrida too—at least in his earlier years, and in his less self-indulgent moods. He works out the implications of that suspicion against presence, and conveys glimpses how human meaning might have a logic—of différance—that disappears each time we bring it to presence.6

Michel Foucault turns Heidegger’s historical critique in a different direction; he melds it with Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the power relations of social forces. This Nietzschean aspect is more evident in his work, and Heidegger is seldom mentioned; the empiricist focus on concrete social practices looks very unlike a “history of being.” Yet there is a strong Heideggerian frame to those concrete studies: first in the presumption of an overall direction of the social process towards a completed control of individuals by something systemic (a control that paradoxically turns them into “subjects”), and second in the evident dissatisfaction with this development. So it’s really less will to power than enframing that is at issue for Foucault; his accounts how “knowledge” belongs to the project of control mirrors Heidegger’s analysis of science as deeply technological.⁷

(d) I think we can distinguish a fourth main line of influence which is more widespread but less philosophically articulated. Heidegger serves many as a pole or alternative to Nietzsche—as rejecting the latter’s embrace of a godless, inherently meaningless world, and of the will to make ourselves (our power or growth) the only meaning for things. We’ve seen how Heidegger articulates, against this Nietzschean vision, a nostalgic hope that we will find a way back to a world with higher meanings than our own. So he stands for an alternative not just to Nietzsche, but to our modern secularism, and our scientific and technological relation to nature. This gives him special appeal in theology or religion,⁸ of course, as well as in environmentalism.⁹

These seem to me the principal lines of influence Heidegger has had and will continue to have. Obviously the geographical center of this influence has been France, Germany, and Europe generally, but on all four of these points he has had many followers in the US and England as well. He has also been paid great attention in non-Western countries, especially Japan.10

We’ve seen how this influence reaches outside philosophy departments. Special features of his writing make it available and appealing to readers outside the discipline—help it address them in their own concerns, and not through that discipline (of structured argument). So his influence shows in such unexpected places as architectural theory.¹¹ But it extends especially into literary theory: he is a crucial figure in many literature departments, which (in the US) are often dissatisfied with philosophy departments’ neglect or dismissal of him (and them). So there is the awkward circumstance that Heidegger’s ideas are addressed in venues that don’t interact with the main stream of philosophy.

Will this circumstance continue? Will Heidegger remain a thinker non grata in most analytic departments—will his standing even fall in Europe as analytic approaches make inroads there? I hope to have indicated the philosophical interest of his ideas, early and late, and their susceptibility to treatment in relatively rigorous fashion. So I can only be optimistic that that “main stream” of philosophy will develop ways to treat him in argument, that will let it absorb the value in his thinking, not spit it out.

Summary

Heidegger is strongly polarizing; his writing attracts and persuades some, but repels and dissuades others. To some he seems the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, to others not a philosopher at all—or a very poor one. Focusing on his positive influence, we can categorize his “followers” (each of whom also disagrees with Heidegger on many points) by certain abstract lessons they learn from him.

First is the lesson about the world: that all our concrete experience depends on the prior projection of a web of possibilities for experience to then instantiate. Heidegger insists that we project this world historically, linguistically, and practically (not in our beliefs). Followers of this line include phenomenologists like Dreyfus and hermeneuticists like Gadamer. A second lesson is the existential project to become a self by facing and making a groundless choice (this is an idea Heidegger himself gave up). Followers here include Sartre and Levinas, who redesign Heidegger’s existential phenomenology. A third lesson is the critique of reason or rationality: the diagnosis of it as a device for control that distorts what it examines. It’s the French “post-structuralists” who most famously follow him here, Derrida and Foucault foremost among them. A fourth lesson is the anti-Nietzschean, anti-humanistic nostalgia for a world with higher meanings than our own. Here Heidegger’s influence extends outside philosophy into theology, environmentalism, and fields beyond.

Further reading

See in the bibliography representative works by Dreyfus, Gadamer, Sartre, Levinas, Derrida, and Foucault.