Here’s another random letter to the editor which Jack Matthews sent to the NYTBR in 1990. The essay he is responding to is long and actually quite good, despite Jack’s quibbles. Matthews has always had a deep interest in Continental philosophy, as can be attested in his hybrid biography of Schopenhauer and the Interview with the Sphinx play.
Heidegger for Fun and Profit
Anthony Gottlieb’s essay ”Heidegger for Fun and Profit” (Jan. 7) had some fun in it, and maybe some profit. But when Mr. Gottlieb tried to play fast and easy with one of Heidegger’s premises, he provided some fun that does not profit his argument. This occurs when he dismisses the idea that language creates ”the world we inhabit,” since it is by means of vocabulary that we make distinctions and ”it is the distinctions we draw that make the world.” ”But there have been many objections to this,” Mr. Gottlieb writes, referring to ”all sorts of skills, from that of the chess master to that of a musician, [which] involve grasping distinctions that have no expression in language.”
Here Mr. Gottlieb has obviously drifted off into his own quiddity of what-is-not-ness, for in every way that matters chess and music are languages, revealing precisely those parts of the world that we know as chess and music. What else could they reveal? And what more eloquent surrebuttal of Mr. Gottlieb’s rebuttal could one cite?
Perhaps I should state for the record that while I am not a Heideggerian, I am even less a Gottliebian – which I couldn’t have known until I read this piece on Heidegger.
JACK MATTHEWS, Athens, Ohio
