Do you think it is more rationalistic and pragmatic cultures like America and France, then, that in some ways are desperate for an injection of some mystical element -- which opens them up to Heidegger?
I think that's true. The Germans had their fill of mystical irrationalism. And Americans need some of it. Of course, irrationalism is a pejorative term. But I do think we need some Heidegger. That would be one way of putting it.
What element of Heidegger do you think America needs?
Science and technology have a leading role in our culture. They're often seen as the arbiters of truth. One of Heidegger's main points is that science and technology are built upon something that cannot be understood in scientific or technological terms. Poetry and art, for instance, might be ways of reaching that deeper truth, that experience of the world that is pre-scientific. Often we in America don't know what to do with poetry and art. For us they're just entertainment or relaxation. What if there were a deeper truth? Maybe there's a strain of American culture that longs for that.
Heidegger spent a lifetime trying to capture the primordial experience of life itself, life as it's experienced before rational thought orders and structures our experience, with some notion that regaining this experience would somehow inform our lives in a way that would allow us to live more fully and more truthfully. Was he successful?
It depends on what you mean by success. If success means to prove something once and for all, to give us a final interpretation of life, then the answer is no. But part of his thinking is that there is no final interpretation. Instead there is an ongoing process of reinterpretation. In my view he was successful in alerting us to certain dimensions of human existence.
There's a substantial body of work that compares Heidegger to Eastern thought and particularly to Buddhism, to the attempt to awaken oneself from the jail cell of ego and the aging, sickness and ultimate death of the body. Do you think such comparisons are valid or useful? Was Heidegger, in effect, a Western Buddha?
He was definitely interested in Buddhism and Taoism. It's also true that his thought found resonance in Japan. He gets a lot of attention in Japan. What a lot of Japanese say is that there is connection between Buddhism's notion of emptiness and some Heideggerian notions of nothingness or unconcealment. We do need to be a bit skeptical about this, though. There is one passage in the "Contributions to Philosophy," which were written by Heidegger between 1936 and 1938, in which he simply makes the remark, "Not Buddhism. The very opposite." What he means by that I don't know, except that I think he probably had in mind that Buddhism seems to try to release us altogether from existence, from the body, whereas Heidegger wants a more engaged dwelling or involvement in existence. Now it might be that that's a misinterpretation of Buddhism, and of course there are many different strands of Buddhism. But that's why I think that he might have been reluctant to say that he was a Western Buddha.
Heidegger is seen as the fount, along with Nietzsche, of much of the postmodern thought that has developed over the past three decades. Yet much of postmodern thought seems to have hit a dead end as a result of its own deconstructive strategies. The most renowned example of this is the infamous Sokal affair, in which a physicist submitted a parody concerning the supposed "hermeneutics of quantum gravity" to a leftist postmodern journal, and the editors accepted it as legitimate. Do you believe postmodernists have misused Heidegger? Or are we witnessing the logical outcome of the circularity that's inherent in Heidegger's method?
I think it is a misuse. As we were saying earlier, Heidegger points to the particularization of truth, its historicity. But I think he does not thereby become a relativist who dismisses scientific findings altogether. He is just saying that scientific statements do in fact reveal things to us, but let's not forget that they're possible only in an interpretive context. That scientific theories are open to revision, and it's possible that better interpretations may come along. Which is different from taking any scientific statement and trying to deconstruct it and reduce it to its background in intellectual history, its cultural resonances, which ultimately, I think, ends up in a sort of Nietzschean interpretation, reducing all truth to power.
Next page: Beyond the mere facts of science
