From: "Aglio Luciano" <lupo-AT-mbox.virtualbit.it>
Subject: R: thinker and thought
Date: Fri, 8 May 1998 12:10:51 +0200




>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

Dear Michael

It could be, but let us consider for a moment that the problem ought to be
thought from another point of view. We should consider that Sein und Zeit
should be considered only as a part of a whole. In his works on Nietzsche it
is set clear that H. refuses Descartes' thought as the most horrible
deconstruction of the worldliness . I agree with  you when you say that
solipsism is something from which H. detaches himself. In Nietzsche his
considerations concerning the reduction of the Seiendes to the power of the
Self are those which tend to determine our "poor age" in which only a god
can save us. But this fact is pointed out only briefly in being & Time and
it is developed in a more complete way in What is Metaphysic? & in the works
on Nietzsche in which our final reduction is proved by technique which is
the "accomplishment" of this disrupted metaphysic in our everydayness in
which the "ens" is only our own & produced by the "fallen" Dasein.
Don't you think? Perhaps a bit of discussion on this topic could give me a
more stable knowledge of H.'s system.

Regards
Luciano




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