Nikhil R. wrote to me in response to this post, saying,

“Chris, This has been happening a lot lately. That which is not re-interpretable, such that it becomes what you are, is not some[thing] to be responsible towards, no matter who you are: that kind is not to which I’m listening. If I could make the attempt, you might say that the Right is barbarism, and so never learned beyond the quotes that they must have stolen from the Left. Please, among contrasting simple quotes, tell what you see as learned. Otherwise, I might be dealing with nothing, least of all a thinker. — For the record, a subject title doesn’t cut it. Thanks.”

It’s not so much a matter of what is or is not “re-interpretable” (i.e., my own thinking) as much as one of concepts and arguments available in texts. — I don’t think, for example, that Heidegger is being especially rhetorically complex in the passages I have cited, but is making a rather straightforward philosophical argument, in which his use of “metaphysics,” “reason” and “philosophy” is being clarified in certain ways (laying out what he might mean by “thinking,” which is not addressed in what’s quoted above).

The similarities and differences I am posing between/among Korsch, Heidegger and Adorno (in what are obviously extremely brief quotations above) are meant to be provocative of discussion of what could be meant by “the end of philosophy;” I am not doing a thorough treatment of the issue in these authors’ works, nor am I myself making any developed argument (not that I could not or don’t want to, only not here). I am trying to provide interesting food for thought, for the individual pursuits of others — in a specific, Platypus context.

But if it is already so self-evident that the Right has just ripped off (“stolen quotes”) from the (Marxian) Left, then I guess there might be less to discuss than I presupposed in making my post.

It’s not so much that I think there’s much to be learned from Heidegger, but it is interesting at least that he seemed to have recognized (in a sense) what Marx had done (or tried to do), but that he evaluated it quite differently than I might.

If I put this uncharitably, I would say that Heidegger sought to downplay the significance of the work of Marx (and Nietzsche!), et al. (and he perhaps even ripped off from — was responding to without citing — Adorno!) in order to be able to further aggrandize himself (if only in his own thinking).

Heidegger banalized the importance of others’ work in order to purvey his own banal platitudes as somehow more profound. — For Heidegger to have recognized properly Marx’s work would have been too challenging for him, politically as well as philosophically, I think, and so he had to seek to neutralize it (and falsely, I think), instead.

I think that Marx, Korsch, and Adorno were simply trying to do more, and dressing it up less, than Heidegger was attempting. (In particular, I recognize in Heidegger’s prose the distracting rhetorical fireworks — not at all what Nietzsche ever did! — that might lead one to presume otherwise, that he’s saying something radically challenging when he’s not, a style then mimicked with success by Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, et al.) That’s why he expressed the Right while they expressed the Left.

But one needs to properly (i.e., politically) read Marx, Lukacs, Korsch, Benjamin and Adorno to see what it means for me to say that they go far “beyond” Heidegger and are already taking up, much more responsibly, what he claims are his concerns.

This is another reason — shared concerns, and the matter of “responsibility” — that they can be compared favorably to Heidegger, and contrasted politically, as Left vs. Right.

I think that Heidegger makes deliberately slippery arguments in order to remain irresponsible, whereas the others, in their writing, right or wrong, at least allow themselves to be held accountable.

Especially where a case can be made that thinkers are trying to address the same phenomenon (i.e., the “end of philosophy” as a phenomenon of modern history), their arguments can be fruitfully compared.

I am simply pointing to that possibility in arranging the quotations above.

“This struggle will only end when the whole of existing society and its economic basis have been totally overthrown in practice, and this consciousness has been totally surpassed and abolished in theory. — Philosophy cannot be abolished without being realized!”

http://www.marxists.org/archive/korsch/1923/marxism-philosophy.htm

The following is an extract from Heidegger on “The end of philosophy and the task of thinking” (1969), followed by an extract from the beginning of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (1966):

[Heidegger:]

“1. The title designates the attempt at a reflection that persists in questioning. Questions are paths toward an answer. If the answer could be given it would consist in a transformation of thinking, not in a propositional statement about a matter at stake.

“2. The following text belongs to a larger context. It is the attempt undertaken again and again ever since 1930 to shape the question ofBeing and Time in a more primordial fashion. This means to subject the point of departure of the question in Being and Time to an immanent criticism. Thus it must become clear to what extent the critical question, of what the matter of thinking is, necessarily and continually belongs to thinking. Accordingly, the name of the task of Being and Time will change.

“3. We are asking:
1). What does it mean that philosophy in the present age has entered its final stage?
2). What task is reserved for thinking at the end of philosophy?

“I. What does it mean that philosophy in the present age has entered its final stage?

“4. Philosophy is metaphysics. Metaphysics thinks beings as a whole — the world, man, God — with respect to Being, with respect to the belonging together of beings in Being. Metaphysics thinks beings as being in the manner of representational thinking that gives reasons. For since the beginning of philosophy and with that beginning, the Being of beings has showed itself as the ground (arche, aition, principle). The ground is that from which beings as such are what they are in their becoming, perishing, and persisting as something that can be known, handled, and worked upon. As the ground, Being brings beings to their actual presencing. The ground shows itself as presence. The present of presence consists in the fact that it brings what is present each in its own way to presence. In accordance with the actual kind of presence, the ground has the character of grounding as the ontic causation of the real, as the transcendental making possible of the objectivity of objects, as the dialectical mediation of the movement of the absolute Spirit and of the historical process of production, as the will to power positing values. What characterizes metaphysical thinking that grounds the ground for beings is the fact that metaphysical thinking, starting from what is present, represents it in its presence and thus exhibits it as grounded by its ground.

“5. What is meant by the talk about the end of philosophy? We understand the end of something all too easily in the negative sense as a mere stopping, as the lack of continuation, perhaps even as decline and impotence. In contrast, what we say about the end of philosophy means the completion of metaphysics. However, completion does not mean perfection as a consequence of which philosophy would have to have attained the highest perfection at its end. Not only do we lack any criterion which would permit us to evaluate the perfection of an epoch of metaphysics as compared with any other epoch, the right to this kind of evaluation does not exist. Plato’s thinking is no more perfect than Parmenides’s. Hegel’s philosophy is no more perfect than Kant’s. Each epoch of philosophy has its own necessity. We simply have to acknowledge the fact that a philosophy is the way it is. It is not for us to prefer one to the other, as can be the case with regard to various world views.

“6. The old meaning of the word “end” means the same as place: “from one end to the other” means from one place to the other. The end of philosophy is the place, that place in which the whole of philosophy’s history is gathered in its most extreme possibility. End as completion means this gathering.Throughout the whole history of philosophy, Plato’s thinking remains decisive in changing forms. Metaphysics is Platonism. Nietzsche characterizes his philosophy as reversed Platonism. With the reversal of metaphysics which was already accomplished by Karl Marx, the most extreme possibility of philosophy is attained. It has entered its final stage. To the extent that philosophical thinking is still attempted, it manages only to attain an epigonal renaissance and variations of that renaissance. Is not then the end of philosophy after all a cessation of its way of thinking? To conclude this would be premature.”

– Martin Heidegger, “The end of philosophy and the task of thinking” (1969)

http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/heidegger8a.htm

[Adorno:]

“Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed. The summary judgment that it had merely interpreted the world, that resignation in the face of reality had crippled it in itself, becomes a defeatism of reason after the attempt to change the world miscarried. . . .

“Having broken its pledge to be as one with reality or at the point of realization, philosophy is obliged to ruthlessly criticize itself.”

– Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (1966), “Introduction: The possibility of philosophy”

http://books.google.com/books?id=5ppaldMS7XQC&pg=PA3&dq=Adorno+Negative+Dialectics+%22A+practice+indefinitely+delayed%22