Date: Mon, 4 May 1998 20:23:01 +0100
Subject: Re: thinker and thought


In message <354DE49C.7A363012-AT-argusqa.com>, Mike Staples
<mstaples-AT-argusqa.com> writes
>Christopher Honey wrote:
>
>> Even if the question does lead to solipsism, did Heidegger really
>> address it (solipsism, I mean)?  Would it have mattered to his
>> philosophy if this were all a solipsistic fantasy or not?  Surely
>> most of his philosophy didn't care about solipsism or God or
>> Cartesian malignant geniuses.  And since he began with phenomenology,
>> we could all be, in a certain sense, solipsistic, and still be
>> Heideggerian in dealing with whatever hallucinations our mind or our
>> Cartesian demons threw at us in the guise of reality.
>
>Christopher,
>
>Perhaps there is an implicit interest, and an explicit admonition of
>solipsism in Heidegger's work, don't you think?. Weather or not he set
>out to combat solipsism directly is probably beside the point, though in
>a way you could probably make a case for that. The topic of God is
>entirely different, and I don't think this topic should be treated quite
>the same way. But I don't think it is in fact possible that we could all
>be solipsistic and still be Heideggerian.
>
>Michael Staples
>
>
>
>
>     --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
Christopher,
I think that if we not only endorse, but appropriate in our own thinking
the Heideggerian project of "de-constructing" the traditional
metaphysical and epistemological "Mind-World" picture, one which
arguably engenders such problems as (philosophical) skepticism -- as
Barry Stroud formulates it -- and solipsism, then we wouldn't be
entertaining the questions you raise, but, rather, late-Wittgensteinian-
type questions about these very questions. Aren't such questions as
solipsism and (Cartesian) skepticism (in Stroud's sense) "questionable
questions" (as somebody once put it)? How could someone -- the
'tradition'? -- have so misconstrued Worldliness, Everydayness, in a
word, Dasein, as to engender not only these questionable questions, but
their apparent genuineness, legitimacy, urgency, (philosophical) "plain-
ness" or "ordinariness"? If "this" (and I'm not sure to what this
demonstrative refers) "were all a solipsistic fantasy" -- in just your
words, understood and read as just the words upon which the Tradition
confers sense, legitimacy, urgency -- then, arguably, a great deal of
Heidegger's interpretation, characterization, and formulation of
Worldliness, Everydayness, Dasein, would simply be wrong. And that not
only "would ... have mattered," but does matter.

As Michael put it above, "
>I don't think it is in fact possible that we could all
>be solipsistic and still be Heideggerian.

Cheers


-- 
James Michael Drayton


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