Heidegger on Dewey

To add to the above and be fair – one can read Dewey as advocating the purpose of philosophy as producing a kind of production. It’s fairly easy to read this as the very thing Heidegger rails against in his critique of technology. I’m just not versed enough on the details of Dewey’s thought on this matter to say whether this can be resolved. Certainly Heidegger is often seen as advocating a kind of poetic quietism – especially in his later thought. The aim of philosophy then becomes nearly a way of encouraging an re-original encounter with Being. Is that really opposed to pragmatism though? I don’t see why. In particular I think Peirce’s conception of signs is quite fruitful for thinking the latter Heidegger. The following quote might be helpful.

When anything is present to the mind, what is the very first and simplest character to be noted in it, in every case, no matter how little elevated the object may be? Certainly, it is its presentness. So far Hegel is quite right. Immediacy is his word. To say, however, that presentness, presentness as it is present, present presentness, is abstract, is Pure Being, is a falsity so glaring, that one can only say that Hegel’s theory that the abstract is more primitive than the concrete blinded his eyes to what stood before them. Go out under the blue dome of heaven and look at what is present as it appears to the artist’s eye. The poetic mood approaches the state in which the present appears as it is present. Is poetry so abstract and colorless? The present is just what it is regardless of the absent, regardless of past and future. It is such as it is, utterly ignoring anything else. Consequently, it cannot be abstracted (which is what Hegel means by the abstract) for the abstracted is what the concrete, which gives it whatever being it has, makes it to be. The present, being such as it is while utterly ignoring everything else, is positively such as it is. Imagine, if you please, a consciousness in which there is no comparison, no relation, no recognized multiplicity (since parts would be other than the whole), no change, no imagination of any modification of what is positively there, no reflexion — nothing but a simple positive character. Such a consciousness might be just an odour, say a smell of attar; or it might be one infinite dead ache; it might be the hearing of a piercing eternal whistle. In short, any simple and positive quality of feeling would be something which our description fits that it is such as it is quite regardless of anything else. The quality of feeling is the true psychical representative of the first category of the immediate as it is in its immediacy, of the present in its direct positive presentness. Qualities of feeling show myriad-fold variety, far beyond what the psychologists admit. This variety however is in them only insofar as they are compared and gathered into collections. But as they are in their presentness, each is sole and unique; and all the others are absolute nothingness to it — or rather much less than nothingness, for not even a recognition as absent things or as fictions is accorded to them. The first category, then, is Quality of Feeling, or whatever is such as it is positively and regardless of aught else. (CP 5.44)

It should be noted that this is not presentism of the sort Derrida criticizes. This is more the saturated phenomena of Marion.

Umm. Isn’t the whole conception of ready-at-hand an example against that view? Meaning arises out of linguistic practices. But this is only a discussion of linguistic meaning. I don’t think Heidegger ever says only linguistic meaning counts though.

I also don’t think this describes the pragmatism. They reject the primacy of language but simultaneously see language as one practice among many. For Peirce in particular there is a move from linguistics to general semiotics.

For both meaning arises out of general practices. We can’t escape language of course, but the pragmatists had that kind of holism as well.