Heideggers Critique of Cartesianism Essays -- Philosophy Papers

Heidegger is one of the few Western thinkers to have succeeded in going beyond the Western philosophic tradition. Because his radical criticism is believed to have fractured the foundations of modern philosophy, his thinking is usually at the center of the controversy between the defenders of the tradition and those who wish to break with it and start afresh. In the heat of this debate, the question of Heidegger's place in relation to that tradition in general and to Cartesianism in particular has been neglected. I wish to address the question by focusing on the major aspects of Heidegger's critique of Cartesian philosophy and the modern tradition. I will first show that the strength of his criticism lies in its all-encompassing penetration of the foundations of modern philosophy, running through both the ontological and epistemological channels. Ontologically, Heidegger presents a critique of subjectivism; epistemologically, he discredits the correspondence conception of truth and i ts underlying visual metaphor. I will then look at his view of history and the meaning of his concept of "overcoming" in order to show that his aim is not to destroy the tradition, but to provide a wider basis for it by rescuing forgotten elements imbedded in the tradition itself. Finally, I will show that in this process of "overcoming," Heidegger did not really depart from the tradition, but absorbed some of its basic tenets, as his concept of death echoes major elements of Cartesian doubt. 1. The Critique of Subjectivism One of the major features of Heidegger's thinking is his criticism of Cartesian subjectivity. According to Heidegger, in regarding the ego cogito as the guarantor of its own continuing existence and as the basis of all things... ...d: Basil Blackwell, 1980); Abbau can be find Heidegger's Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Verbindung is discussed mainly in "The Principle of Identity," in Identity and Difference (New York: Harper and Row, 1969, pp. 23-41); for Uberwindung see Heidegger's Nietzsche. (4) Nietzsche, vol. 4 p. 97. See Aristotle's words: "that which is called a substance most strictly, primarily, and most of all, is that which is neither said of a subject nor in a subject, e.g., the individual man or the individual horse." (Aristotle's Categories, 2a 11-13). (5) Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology p.111. (6) Heidegger M., Discourse on Thinking New York: Harper and Row, 1966, p. 7. (7) Nietzsche, vol. 4, p. 106. (8) Heidegger, M. History of the Concept of Time, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992, pp. 316-317.