- Original
- Huneeus & Orrego
Original
4. Detachment and Objectivity. From the Greeks we inherit not only our assumption that we can obtain theoretical knowledge of every domain, even human activities, but also our assumption that the detached theoretical viewpoint is superior to the involved practical viewpoint. According to the philosophical tradition, whether rationalist or empiricist, it is only by means of detached contemplation that we discover reality. From Plato’s theoretical dialectic, which turns the mind away from the everyday world of “shadows,” to Descartes’s preparation for philosophy by shutting himself up in a warm room where he is free from involvement and passion, to Hume’s strange analytical discoveries in his study, which he forgets when he goes out to play billiards, philosophers have supposed that only by withdrawing from everyday practical concerns before describing things and people can they discover how things really are.
The pragmatists questioned this view, and in this sense Heidegger can be viewed as radicalizing the insights already contained in the writings of such pragmatists as Nietzsche, Peirce, James, and Dewey. Heidegger, along with his fellow student Georg Lukacs, quite likely was exposed to American Pragmatism through Emil Lask. 1
Huneeus & Orrego
- Hans-Georg Gadamer suggested this to me. Heidegger thanks Lask for the insight that our categories correspond to functions that “stem from the use of expressions in living thought and knowing” (Gesamtausgabe, vol. I, GA1 227). He mentions pragmatism and supports its relativizing of knowledge structures to ways of life in his 1921 lectures (Gesamtausgabe, vol. 61, GA61 135).[
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