In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

[ 111 ] 6 ] Heidegger: A Pragmatist by Any Means Joseph Margolis As early as 1974, Richard Rorty was drawn to a fateful comparison between Martin Heidegger and John Dewey that appeared to confirm the “ontological” superiority of Heidegger’s innovations over Dewey’s and may therefore have led Rorty to propose his own “pragmatist” version of philosophy—that is, his “postmodernist” dismissal of philosophy—more in the spirit of his reading of Heidegger’s having “overcome” the tradition of Western metaphysics than of Dewey’s seemingly blander, very different kind of reform.1 The linkage remains an uneasy one because Rorty misreads Heidegger—deliberately, I would say—misreads Dewey, misreads the similarity between the two, and misjudges the support either might provide for legitimating his own undertaking . None of this would have occasioned much of a correction except for the extraordinary fact that, almost single-handedly and through just such deformations, Rorty revived a badly sagging pragmatism and, because of that, obliged the academy to reconsider a whole nest of redescriptions of what pragmatism (originally) was, is (still), or (from this point on) ought to be.2 Of course, Rorty could hardly have proposed a more outrageous or intriguing comparison, since Heidegger was known for his contempt for American pragmatism and a flamboyant commitment to his own brand of transcendental phenomenology. Rorty played his part marvelously well, but he produced a lot of mischief—as we shall see. The problem is to get back to a useful way of reading the convergence between pragmatism and European philosophy, but that concern itself affords an unanticipated, much-needed escape from the parochial habits of academic philosophy. There is, in fact, no convincing evidence that either Dewey or Heidegger believed that philosophy had exhausted its resources or come to an end. On the contrary, each believed (along the lines of Rorty’s charge) that canonical philosophy was profoundly deficient, misguided, in need of a drastic reorientation ; but each also believed that he personally had found the essential nerve of the correction required and could present its instruction persuasively. And )DLUILHOG&KLQGG $0 112 Joseph Margolis of course their visions were irreconcilably opposed. In effect, Rorty’s double mischief comes to this: first, he deformed both Dewey’s and Heidegger’s innovations so that they appeared to be little more than ingenious repudiations of philosophy’s self-deception—and, in that sense, anticipated his own “postmodernism”; and, second, he read each through the eyes of the other, so that all apparent oppositions between the objectives of each turned out to be little more than variations on the underlying existentialism and pragmatism that they shared. Dewey’s correction of canonical philosophy was thoroughly naturalistic: the whole of the human world, he supposed, arises out of animal sources, which it transforms in sui generis ways but never supersedes; the pragmatist revision was a spare descendant of G. W. F. Hegel’s decisive critique of Immanuel Kant’s first Critique, now cast in Darwinian terms, opposed to every form of cognitive privilege and real fixities, committed existentially in instrumentalist ways in accord with practical interests as they arise in the flux of life, without a priori first principles of any kind, without any telos beyond life itself, guided by pragmatist appraisals of meaning, truth, and value within the confines of nature, shared with other humans with whom we live and who are always in our purview. Heidegger’s correction was very different, though it seemed to favor similar existential themes that it qualified in altogether different ways. Human beings , taken in their natural (or “ontic”) guise, exhibiting their characteristic kinds of diversity, might be said (though never more than paradoxically) to be the contingent or historied incarnations of certain “transcendent” (or “ontological”) constancies (or “possibilities”), which could never be grasped by the categories we apply in describing the phenomena of the merely natural world. The conceptual relationship between the “ontic” and the “ontological ” is never made entirely clear and recedes in Heidegger’s later work. On some readings, in fact, Heidegger’s well-known concern for the complexities of Being (Sein), sans phrase, as opposed to any inquiry into plural beings (Seiende)—which could include but would not be primarily addressed to the distinction between the ontic and the ontological—begins to yield in the direction of pondering the very surd of Being, in a sense akin to the unnamable Void of Buddhist and Taoist thought, from which the discourse about Being itself might ultimately arise.3 More...

Share