Cologne, 09-Feb-2000
Gary schrieb:
> --- Bob Guevara <guevara2@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> > what did you all think of rorty's take on bert?? (say again - richard
> > rorty??)
> >
> >
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/
> >
> > bob
>
> I think Rorty's comments are genuine--and reflect an ambiguity within pragmatic
> philosophy regarding the project of "pragmatism", between more realistic aspirations
> (with "realism" about how far *this* aspiration can practically go--Dreyfus's tendency,
> perhaps) and more instrumentalist aspirations--or resignations (with tendencies toward
> cynicism about Progress in inquiry--Rorty's tendency, perhaps). But I'm biased: I've
> never liked Rorty. I've found him rude and self-possessed in public presentations, and I
> have trouble not reading his approach to philosophy as a kind of tourism of the schools.
>
> Nonetheless, I applaud his generous attitude toward Bert Dreyfus's career, especially
> Bert's openness to diverse views.
>
> Michael Eldred's comments earlier today bring up important distinctions, but I don't
> believe that his caveats are applicable to _Being in the World_. Imagine, if you will,
> Merleau-Ponty trying to team-teach with John Austin, and you have the central reality of
> Bert's long-grown project that became _Being in the World_, which attempts to perform a
> neo-Husserlian appropriation of the first part of _Being & Time_ with, it seems to me,
> his buddy John Searle in mind (or, at least, with explicit attention to Searle's
> intentionalistic philosophy of mind). Funny that, by 1983, Searle considered philosopher
> of mind as prior to philosopher of language (theory of mind as basis for theory of
> language). I believe that Bert Dreyfus is directly responsible for that change of
> background thinking with Searle (whom I also don't like).
>
> To do this, though--to do a Husserlian appropriation of _Being & Time_--does not
> necessarily imply that Heidegger's critique of Husserl is being missed. Thanks to
> Heidegger, perhaps, Husserl grew to appreciate a sense of the lifeworld basis of
> phenomenological understanding, which Husserl had not yet come to appreciate at the time
> of _Being & Time_, and a notion of the lifeworld background--as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty,
> and others have developed it--can do a lot to foster understanding of proximal worldness,
> in keeping with Heidegger's intentions in the first part of _Being & Time_ to perform a
> rhetoric of disclosure of key aspects of The World, working from a most proximal,
> everyday stance into more primordial considerations.
>
> Dreyfus enters into this venture for a largely Analytical audience who is just then (the
> 1980s) translating their problematics of philosophy of mind into the terms of the new
> cognitive science. The notion of the background plays into Dreyfus' longstanding
> rhetorical stance toward hermeneutical holism, to give cognitivistic thinking a way into
> the special difficulties of phenomenological work.
>
> Accordingly, it would be a mistake to confuse (a) talk of lifeworld background at a
> proximal point of discourse with (b) a presumption of a notion of Background at a
> primordial level. In fact, the notion of the background, ordinarily understood, is an
> open-ended notion that is neutral toward scale and depth, thereby providing a very
> appropriate vehicle for opening thinking into a pathway of deepening and broadening,
> which Heidegger seeks to do in his 1927 idiom. By the way, when Jurgen Habermas was in
> Berkeley during the latter days of his composition of his _Theory of Communicative_
> action, the time he spent with Dreyfus is directly the cause of the notion of lifeworld
> background becoming, for the first time in Habermas' work, so important for Habermas' own
> analysis of the lifeworld basis of communicative action.
>
> To Michael Eldred's caveat about, in effect, ontologizing the notion of background I
> would pose a counter-caveat about scientizing cognitive science. That is: While Bert
> Dreyfus has fought long against the scientistic dreams of the AI community, he has (it
> seems to me) sustained an insight about the potential of cognitive science (that time has
> vindicated, by the way, given the auspicious project of _Naturalizing Phenomenology_)
> which has made the Husserlian project continually appealing (if not Husserl's particular
> results) for a bridge between Analytical and Phenomenological philosophy.
>
> To this end, one has to be grateful to Bert Dreyfus's long project of creating a
> pragmatic school of Heidegger reading in America (in complement to John Sallis's more --
> what? -- Derridean school).
>
> But is Bert old enough to have a Festschrift? I don't think so!
>
> Gary Davis
Gary,
These are enlightening comments (for me) on the politics of philosophical institutions in the
US. So Dreyfus translates Heidegger's thinking into a kind of pragmatism palatable in the US
climate? This seems to me to be an instance of the trickle-down effect, or more precisely,
the seep-up effect of Heidegger's thinking -- it slowly creeps and seeps into the ways even
professional philosophers think, subliminally, so to speak.
But the politics of thinking should not be confused with thinking itself. Philosophical
thinking has its own time, which is different from the time of being heard and taken
seriously in the established institutions.
Michael
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