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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Philosophy Conference « Previous | |Next »
March 23, 2004

Gary, I haven’t written anything for awhile for a number of reasons, among which, I’m in the process of changing my internet provider and am restricted in the time I have available, and W. has gone o.s. and left me to look after the conference for six weeks. It’s been a bit of a tangle that has taken some time to work out. I’m starting to get somewhere I think.

I’ve read everything you’ve written lately and I must admit that I don’t know how to reply. Perhaps I’m just tired. I haven’t been sleeping well lately for some unknown reason. And maybe some of it is just too hard to reply to. Firstly, there’s the stuff on Bataille. I’m a bit distant from all that at the present moment and anyway you often just chuck in some elliptical remark that can be as obscure as Bataille’s original. Somewhere you say something about Bataille overcoming death, if I get you rightly. I don’t think Bataille wants to overcome death. I think he wants to embrace it. ‘The trouble with death,’ he says somewhere, ‘is that it only lasts for an instant.’ This sort of remark suggests that its not overcoming death that he’s interested in, but something else, something altogether different.

I won’t go on with this. Instead, I think I might tell you about the conference. Who knows, it might attract some participants. One of my jobs is to put the program together, after wresting abstracts from those who offered papers, just to make sure they’re coming. Believe me, it’s like pulling teeth. But I’m getting somewhere. I’ve just about got a full program. It goes like this:

Remember, it’s called ‘Messianism, Apocalypse, Messianism and Redemption: 20th Century German Thought.’ Papers offered cover three broad areas: philosophy, theology, and literature. The problem is to sort them into some kind of useful order. At present, the plan is that they go like this:

Two keynote addresses will aim to give a broad introduction to apocalyptic-messianic thought in philosophy and culture generally, and in theology.Then I’ve got four papers under the provisional category of ‘general background’, on Ludwig Klages, the Stephan George Circle, German expressionism, and Karl Barth, who advocated a kind of historical Christianity (I hope I don’t offend anybody with the carelessness of my words). The next category is broadly existential, in the sense that Bataille gives this word. Under this heading there are papers on Rudolf Bultmann, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Heidegger, and Karl Rahner. Rahner seems a bit out of place here and may end up some place else. As a kind of anti-existentialism, there are four papers on Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. The next category is large and not so well organized. I’ve called it ‘the following generation’. It includes papers on Gerhard von Rad, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Gunter Anders and Karl Jaspers, W.G. Sebald, Jurgen Moltmann, Gunter Grass and Erich Kastner. Papers have been promised on Buber, Tillich, Metz, Hildesheimer and Bonhoeffer but I haven’t seen the abstracts yet.

I’m most interested in the story involving Rosenzweig, Bloch, Kracauer, Benjamin and Adorno. It’s the most unique and peculiarly 20th century of all the stories, in my view. The theologians Metz and Moltmann interestingly take up this strain, while there is a tendency in late 20th century philosophy to neglect it in favour of a kind of Habermasian liberalism or post-modernist anti-liberalism. The Benjamin-Adorno philosophy is a distinctively different approach to either of these two.

In an effort to wet some appetites, I’ll try to tell the Heidegger story as it might be presented at the conference.

One of Heidegger’s most important concepts is that of the ‘decisive moment’, which is a ‘moment of vision’ that is not reducible to mere eyesight or to a sudden occurrence in time but, rather, represents insight, a moment of vision. These are rare events and must be sought after and discovered. For Heidegger, this is one’s project of Being. The notion allows Heidegger to avoid giving primacy to non-theoretical immediate experience. This seeking redeems Dasein from lostness in the everyday, because it requires a fundamental or authentic ‘attunement’ to essential possibilities. The decisive moment is related to owning one’s experience.

It’s easy to see how this philosophy can lead one into all sorts of awkward predicaments. Dear old Martin saw the early 20th century as chockers with these decisive moments and he was wracked with anxiety in case he missed the crucial event. When you couple this with his idea of providing a radical new philosophy underscored by the everyday situation of Being-in-the-World, Blind Freddy can see where it’s all heading. The project becomes to redeem Being from its ‘fallen’ state and the restoration of its ownership of experience. This isn’t just a subjective thing but involves the transformation of all beings into ‘coming future ones’. When Martin saw the Nazis as the coming future ones he was just following the philosophy he’d developed. To borrow from Benjamin, you could say that Martin listened hard to tradition and those who listen hard do not see, except it wasn’t tradition he listened to but his own ravings, inspired by a dose of Kierkegaard and a dash of his own particular brand of Nietzsche – everybody has their own brand. It’s the cave of a thousand Nietzsches. In Nietzsche’s house there are many palaces – who was it that said something like that? Oh yes, the Christians. It’s one of their favourite lines.

Heidegger wasn’t a very good Nietzschean. When Nietzsche said that philosophers always appear more stupid than they actually are, Martin didn’t understand what he meant and so he became one of the stupid ones and invented a philosophy that, in the name of direct experience, provided something to stand in the way of direct experience. Existentialism is just another form of nihilism in Nietzsche’s sense. It’s what Adorno called the ‘jargon of authenticity’.


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