The Use of Heidegger

Abstract

Nobody could be more kosher than Jaakko Hintikka in the bracing climate of Anglo-American analytic philosophy. In the festschrift recently offered to him, nevertheless, Dagfinn Follesdal evidently thought nothing of writing as follows: “Heidegger’s main contribution to philosophy, it seems to me, is to focus attention on the idea that all human activity, all our ways of relating to the world, to one another and to ourselves, contribute to constituting the world”. A few pages further on he writes: “Heidegger’s analyses of the many ways in which we may relate to the world . . . anticipate in many respects some of Wittgenstein’s later analyses of forms of life”. That last statement, of course, implies a somewhat controversial reading of Wittgenstein’s later work. The only point here, however, is that, for an analytic philosopher, such statements as those just quoted represent an unprecedentedly positive assessment of Heidegger’s work. This is of particular interest to students of recent theology, both Protestant and Catholic, where, for better or for worse, Heidegger’s influence has been considerable.

Scandinavian philosophers have always been well placed, culturally and linguistically, to mediate between the analytic and the phenomenological camps into which philosophers are still largely divided. Roughly speaking, the genealogy of the analytic line begins with Frege (1848 - 1925) and runs through Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein and Carnap to such philosophers as Quine, Donald Davidson, Elizabeth Anscombe and Michael Dummett. The alternative line descends from Hegel (1770 - 1831), deviates by reaction into Kierkegaard and Marx, and is disseminated diversely through Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, to such contemporaries as Foucault, Derrida, Gadamer and Habermas.