Possibilities of Modern Understanding of Being: A defense against Heidegger’s Critiques, on Richard Rorty’s neo-pragmatic Point of View

Nouri, Morteza

doi:10.30465/os.2024.46646.1932

Possibilities of Modern Understanding of Being: A defense against Heidegger’s Critiques, on Richard Rorty’s neo-pragmatic Point of View

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Morteza Nouri

Assistant professor in department of philosophy, faculty of letters and human sciences, Shahid Beheshti university, Tehran, Iran.

https://doi.org/10.30465/os.2024.46646.1932

Abstract

Richard Rorty considers "liberal ironism" to be the best formulation of what the West has been pursuing since the Enlightenment, a position that works out the ideals of enlightenment ethics without relying on a metaphysical worldview. According to him, alongside Dewey and Wittgenstein, Heidegger can be considered one of the most influential figures in achieving such an optimistic perspective. This pivotal role can mainly be attributed to Heidegger's intellectual efforts to depict the finitude of human beings and the contingency of their ultimate vocabularies, an awareness that can dispel any illusion that one’s most important values are eternal and immutable, hanging on something beyond time and chance. Another skill of Heidegger, according to Rorty, is his emphasis on the most elemental words through which each period of human history has its own understanding of being. In a sense, Rorty's pragmatist critique of the epistemology-centered culture of the West owes much to these aspects of Heideggerian thought. However, it seems that Heidegger sometimes overlooks all of implications of acknowledgment of finitude and contingency of final vocabularies and identifies himself as a recipient of a call from Bing that is incompatible with his own facticity; on the other hand, he occasionally has a one-sided judgment regarding the capabilities of modern understanding of Being, alongside its damages and threats:

1) Like other ironist theorists, Heidegger constantly tends towards spreading his self-creation project to others and prescribing his own special version for existence, even its political fatal consequences. He believes that the most elemental words he has discovered in re-describing the past - words like "Plato," "Aristotle," "Parmenides," "alétheia," "will to power," and similar ones - should resonate the same for anyone in contemporary Europe because it is these very words that have shaped Europe's destiny.
In addition, it seems that Heidegger considers words such as "ethics," "technology," "striving for the greatest happiness of the most individuals," and similar elemental words as lacking a "constructive force" and discredited in modern understanding of being. However, a liberal ironist can still use them towards the main ideals of enlightenment, namely freedom and equality, even by removing their metaphysical halo.

2) Heidegger's strong inclination towards a kind of fatalism and a descending trajectory of human understanding of being can be considered another inconsistency in his thinking. On one hand, he believes that being is revealed solely through the passage of "understandings of being," and therefore, as soon as elemental words of each period are found, one can determine that the understanding of that period is equally revealing of being in its successive revealing and concealing, just like the pre-Socratic understanding for example. On the other hand, he places the Greeks in a better position throughout his works for their relationship with being and considers their understanding to be more primordial. Since according to Heidegger any understanding of being in any historical epoch is a gift of Being itself, it seems that this evaluation accompanied by valuation is only possible through fatalistic reasoning. If we accept Heidegger's fatalism, concepts such as "forgetfulness of being" or "neglecting being" become problems that humans have no possibility to solve.

3) According to Rorty, it is possible to interpret the concept of "primordiality" of an understanding of Being as our acknowledgment of the contingency of ourselves and our own final vocabularies, facilitating our readiness to be changed as much as possible. In other words, it makes us more cautious about false self-confidence and the illusion of control over the field of all beings and their possibilities, and strengthens our ability to be skeptical about our final vocabularies and be more sensitive to their potential falsehood. If we accept this interpretation of the concept of "primordiality," then from Rorty's perspective, Heidegger's evaluations of the possibilities of modern understanding of being have been unfair and one-sided because it cannot be denied that human beings have been increasingly eager and deliberatively receptive to alternative possibilities and radical changes in their thinking, actions, and way of life since enlightenment.

Keywords

pragmatism

final vocabulary

modernity

Heidegger

Rorty

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