Summary of Jargon of Authenticity

[Ralph Dumain]

I've read so much other stuff since reading this book not long ago, I 
couldn't comment without consulting my notes, but your description pretty 
much jibes with the text as I remember it.

Coincidentally, I've come across critiques of Heidegger with special 
reference to his jargon in my recent reading on American philosophy, of 
such authors as Roy Wood Sellars and Marvin Farber.  Farber was very 
critical of Husserl's subjective idealism but took his usable techniques 
seriously.  Farber, however, had nothing but contempt for Heidegger.  One 
of Farber's essays starts out thus:

T0 MANY readers of philosophical literature, Martin Heidegger appears to
have made great contributions to philosophy. But to those who have taken
the trouble to read his writings with logical standards in mind, he has
very little to offer, and he rates primarily as a pretentious verbal
philosopher. He has taken care to create severe linguistic barriers between
himself and his readers, which serve to make plausible the claim to untold
profundity and novelty. It will be instructive and quite disillusioning to
some to examine a piece of Heidegger's more audacious writing carefully.
Nothing could be better for this purpose than his essay on "The Essence of
Truth."

The reader has the right to expect something definite from any discussion
of the concept of truth. He is not likely to be deceived, or impressed, by
anything else. Once he has departed from the murky intricacies of the
language dealing with "being" and "existence," Heidegger becomes quite a
different kind of figure. The change is, roughly, from tragedy (a
linguistic tragedy, at least) to comedy or the commonplace. . . .

SOURCE: Farber, Marvin. "Heidegger on the Essence of Truth", in: Radical
Currents in Contemporary Philosophy, ed. David H. DeGrood, Dale Riepe, John
Somerville (St. Louis, MO: Warren H. Green, Inc., 1971), pp.
79-89. Reprinted from Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Vol.
XVIII, #4, June, 1958, pp. 523532.

This essay looks very similar to a chapter in Farber's NATURALISM AND 
SUBJECTIVISM, published in the subsequent year. I've been
corresponding with people who knew Farber. While admiring of Husserl with 
strong qualifications, Farber may never have considered himself a
phenomenologist. He is described as a methodological pluralist who was open 
to everybody and not just closed groups. Hence people like Carnap published 
freely in Farber's journal. However, Heidegger got his goat, and Farber 
went on the warpath.

Again, let me remind you of Pierre Bourdieu's  THE POLITICAL ONTOLOGY OF 
MARTIN HEIDEGGER, which also delves into Heidegger's insulation of his 
philosophy from profane interpretation.  All of these approaches are 
different, but they all zero in on Heidegger's duplicity.  And don't forget 
Stephen Eric Bronner's essay.

BTW, Herf in a footnote brings Lukacs and Adorno together briefly, 
mentioning their common contempt for Heidegger whilst Adorno trashed 
Lukacs' THE DESTRUCTION OF REASON.

The moral of the story, to head off those who take Heidegger's garbage 
seriously, is what a sewer idealist philosophy is, intellectually as well 
as morally.  We need to remember that Adorno and Horkheimer were 
materialists, though strange materialists.  BTW, I would like to know more 
about their relation to dialectical materialism if any in the 
1930s.  However, there were other anti-positivist materialists (e.g. a 
whole lineage in the USA) who developed independently of Marxism though 
were ultimately sympathetic, like Sellars and Farber.  They criticized both 
positivism and reactionary lebensphilosophie.  While they did not cover the 
same territory as the Frankfurters, they approached the issues from their 
interest in the philosophy of science.  Depending again on the terrain, 
they would have been less sophisticated in some areas, but much more so in 
philosophy of science, and not rigid like the Stalinists.

It's really important to understand this to overcome the provincialism of 
specialization which allows people to cover up the ideological determinants 
that govern their invisible colleges, or should I say circle 
jerks.  Heidegger was a very small, small thinker, and it is only the 
bourgeois mentality that elevates his pseudo-profundities to serious 
consideration.  Too bad critical theory in certain hands has just become 
another traditional theory and not critical at all.

But yeah, your summary is pretty decent, so far.

At 11:44 PM 5/9/2003 -0400, Jim Rovira wrote:
>Any comments would be appreciated as I come to grips with this text...
>
>Jim