Interview with Lee Braver

Our first interview is with Lee Braver, author of 'A Thing of this World' and Heidegger's Later Writings (which I thoroughly recommend). Braver's A Thing of this World is currently the subject of an online reading group over at Perverse Egalitarianism. OK enough from me...over to the questions:

AHB: You’ve been involved in an online reading group for your new book ‘A Thing of This World’. Can you tell us whether you consider the exercise a success and do you think such reading groups have anything to tell us about the emerging blog culture associated with many contemporary philosophical movements?

LB: I think it's a success in raising the book’s profile and getting feedback from readers. Keep in mind that several hundred thousand books in English are published each year, so bringing titles to the attention of those who may be interested in them presents a real problem. Our training in graduate school, by its very nature, gives a highly distorted picture of the profession: we study with prominent scholars, who get invited to speak all over the world and whose writings are avidly discussed and reviewed. By default, this moulds our impression of the profession, but they represent a highly atypical, tiny minority of professors. The vast majority, if they get jobs at all, work at teaching schools and, if they publish, their publications sink beneath the surface with barely a ripple. This has been perhaps my greatest surprise in publishing, how little attention one’s work gets, largely because my expectations were, naturally, formed by the important works, the ones that everyone reads and discusses and writes about. So, getting my book onto people’s radar and seeing people engage with it has been very gratifying and I feel very fortunate for the opportunity. Let me add a word of advice: if you read something that impresses or intrigues you, drop the author a line. Generally, they are very friendly, even grateful to know that someone’s reading their work and, from a self-interested point of view, these contacts can be surprisingly valuable for one’s career.

AHB: You’ve written an excellent reader’s guide to Heidegger’s Later Writings. Why do you think the later Heidegger has proved so popular with critical theorists today and do you think there is still room for the existential analytic?

LB: Existentialism had many beneficial effects on continental philosophy, but it also suffered from a number of flaws. It was pinned to a historical situation (the end of WWII) with particular stubbornness, making it simultaneously extremely popular at that time and primed for quick obsolescence. Many people have a reflex suspicion of philosophy that achieves mass popularity, assuming that it can only achieve such wide appeal by spreading itself thin. Sartre was an unfortunate representative; I find that where he alters Heidegger’s ideas, it’s almost always for the worse and more superficial. I’ve always had high regard for Kierkegaard, and both Nietzsche and early Heidegger have successfully escaped getting pigeon-holed as existentialists. While both have some overlap with the movement, neither can be reduced to it.

Personally, I’m surprised that later Heidegger isn’t more influential. The narrative I trace in A Thing of This World shows why he deserves such a high place in the pantheon by exploring his innovations with precision. Being and Time is unquestionably a masterpiece, but a flawed one. I find the later works more important and innovative. I suspect that part of the reason for its comparative popularity is that Being and Time is more accessible, especially given the number of figures one can use to triangulate it (Kant, Husserl, Kierkegaard, Dilthey), and it plays the role of the magnum opus. Right from the outset, grasping the later work is harder because it lacks a single work that can give one the gist of it. That’s why I used Krell’s Basic Writings as the subject of my guide. It does a very good job of picking representative essays from across his career, and it serves quite well in lieu of a single book. Since it’s the book actually used in many courses, I thought an essay-by-essay guide would be the most useful approach.

AHB: As a scholar well versed in the later Heidegger what do you think he would have made of the technological beast that is the internet?

LB: Bert Dreyfus has written a book on the internet which I haven’t read, but which would I’m sure be illuminating on the topic. The internet does in many ways fit the culmination of technology in “cybernetics” (BW 434): it forms an enormous, frictionless, almost instantaneous circulation of knowledge, putting tremendous amounts of information at our fingertips. This makes us take a great deal for granted, perhaps the most pernicious feature of technology. On the other hand, he was a great letter-writer and we’re living through a tremendous rebirth of correspondence due to the internet.

AHB: Your latest book deals with both continental and analytic philosophy. Do you think the ‘divide’ is somewhat artificial? What do you think Heideggerians could learn from analytic thinkers and vice versa?

LB: There is a way in which the divide is artificial, and a way it is not. I think there are substantive differences in the way continental and analytic thinkers approach issues, in general (of course, there are plenty of exceptions), some of which I try to trace in my book. It is the lack of communication that I find both artificial and unfortunate. It’s a meaningful distinction, but an artificial division. What we’re supposed to be doing is arguing with each other, and the wall of silence is both unnecessary and harmful. We have a lot to learn from each other—especially since we employ different approaches—although I don’t think one can just list particular ideas that one branch should adopt from the other. It’s more a matter of Gadamer’s notion that we only see our own taken-for-granted prejudices upon encountering those who don’t share them. This kind of dialogue does require a considerable amount of ground-laying, some of which I do in the book (e.g., giving a Heideggerian response to Davidson’s denial of conceptual schemes, a Derridean deconstruction of Frege, etc.), the lack of which I suspect to be the primary reason so little interaction takes place. My book tries to prepare the ground by constructing a common vocabulary and demonstrating the existence of common topics.
AHB:
There has been a lot of discussion about the speculative realist movement on this blog and many others that are not firmly rooted within that movement. Since your latest book attempts to show how the two big traditions of analytic and continental philosophy are more or less concerned with the problems of realism/anti-realism, albeit from their respective trenches, what do you make of speculative realism?

LB: I’m just starting to get a sense of this movement; I want to undertake a more serious study of it once I’m done with my present project. When I first encountered it—in Graham Harman’s work on Heidegger—I didn’t know what to make of it. I was firmly entrenched in anti-realism and couldn’t conceive of a sophisticated realism; it seemed to me that any realism would have to ignore all the ideas generated in Kant’s wake. So much realism amounts to Johnsonian rock-kicking, or ad hominem attacks on the intelligence of anyone who doesn’t subscribe to a sufficiently robust realism. I’m finding the movement very intriguing. The first part of Meillassoux’s After Finitude loosened my unquestioning allegiance, though it didn’t quite convince me to jump ship.

AHB: Now that you’ve tackled a whole range of thinkers, and even attempted to straddle the divide between the two traditions what are you planning to take on next?

LB: Surprisingly, I’ve stuck to the plan announced in A Thing of This World. I’m almost finished with a thorough comparison of Heidegger and Wittgenstein, tentatively titled Standing on Groundless Grounds. I’m still carrying on the project of dialogue across the divide but, instead of the breadth of A Thing, I’m now focusing on a deeper and more focused analysis. It’s simply astonishing how much agreement there is between the two greatest philosophers of the century who happen to work in different traditions.