MEGILL, Allanl. Prophets of Extremity. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987
By the early 1960s, Heidegger’s influence in Germany had greatly diminished, as his students retired from their professorial chairs and as younger philosophers, highly suspicious of what they saw as their compromised elders, turned in other directions. But this was offset by the growing interest that French intellectuals took in his work. I shall argue in subsequent chapters that the writings of Foucault and Derrida are continuations of, and confrontations with, a Nietzschean and Heideggerian perspective. I shall further argue that the new lease on life that Foucault, Derrida, and others have given to Heidegger’s work closely connects with the evident instability of the modernist position in contemporary art and thought. Modernism is giving way, by and large, to other perspectives. In part, it has given way to “postmodernism.” But postmodernism is even more unstable than modernism, and Derrida can be seen as articulating a critique of it. Nietzsche and Heidegger provide us with something that is rarely given—namely, an intellectual articulation of the assumptions underlying modernism and postmodernism.
Moreover, even within intellectual contexts where “continental” philosophy is ignored and where there is no explicit concern with the problems raised by modernism and postmodernism, one can sometimes still make connections with Heidegger. Consider some recent efforts in the philosophy of science. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, T.S. Kuhn is “tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.” In Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge, Paul Feyerabend attacks the notion of scientific method and declares that science is “much closer to myth than a scientific philosophy is prepared to admit.” These views are close to the later Heidegger (and to Foucault). Though some of Kuhn and more of Feyerabend have been subjected to intense criticism, this is not the point. The point is that Kuhn, and to a lesser extent Feyerabend, have been taken seriously by many people having no explicit interest in Heidegger or Nietzsche, or in the fate of modernism and postmodernism in art, literature, and thought. Thus, a perspective that is in some important ways Heideggerian turns out to have an impact going well beyond the intellectual territory usually designated as Heideggerian.
Similar connections can be made with other figures and movements in addition to Kuhn or Feyerabend. From our point of view, these connections are highly important. For they help us to see that the strand of thought that we are here examining is relevant to far more than a mere fringe coterie of cultural extremists. They help us to see that it raises issues of the widest intellectual significance. The issues and arguments of Heidegger (and of his fellow prophets of extremity) are central to twentieth-century thought in both the humanities and the sciences—though in the latter they are only rarely allowed to breach dominant notions of method. Feyerabend and Kuhn are evidence that these issues and arguments have had to be confronted even in the citadel of citadels, the philosophy of science.