philosophical conversations

Heidegger: confusions & clearings

Trevor,
Heidegger is difficult. Dam difficult. Like Hegel, he presupposes that you have the history of western philosophy at your fingertips and that you understand it inside out. If we are to sort through our confusions, then we need to put aside a few understandings and interpretations that get in the way.

I do not particularly care whether you reckon Heidegger is an existentialist or not. To me that issue is more a scholarly debate that is primarily of concern to those residing in the academy. For me there are different interpretations of Heidegger and different Heideggers. Mine is the late ecological Heidegger who tried to overcome an instrumental reason and technological metaphysics (more accurately a technological understanding of being) in order to save the earth. I read Heidegger backwards from late to early.

I have no intention of trying to persuade you away from the existentialist interpretation, or to argue that my Australianized eco-Heidegger is the correct one. We have to converse from within these different perspectives.

I introduced the theme of Heidegger is 'not an existentialist' for two reasons. First, to draw your attention to his Letter on Humanism, where he repudiates the French existential interpretation of Being and Time. What I was trying to say is that, if you want to persist with the exisentialist interpretation, then you need to address that particular text of Heidegger's. My intention was to point you in the direction of that text.

Secondly, my theme of Heidegger is 'not an existentialist' was introduced to indicate that my own interpretation of Heidegger is quite different to that of Ansell Pearson:--it is one that locates Heidegger firmly within the philosophical (metaphysical) tradition of Aristotle and Hegel, where metaphysics refers to understanding being as an ontology. The ethos of this philosophical tradition is an overcoming of metaphysics whilst working within it. In modernity it means overcoming the (atomistic and mechanist) metaphysics of science--ie., the one defended by Australian materialists in the analytic school.

Hegel did this overcoming by replacing mechanism with an organic metaphysics (I go along with him on this) in the Philosophy of Nature. Heidegger returned to our everyday life and explored the metaphysics presupposed in everyday life through hermeneutics---not social science (eg. neo-classical economics or Marxist political economy) That is what I tried to show in looking at What is Metaphysics. I follow the phenomenologist pathway in returning to philosophy to everyday life, where it becomes an interpretative (hermeneutical) philosophy. I take this pathway because it enables such a philosophy to speak otherwise to merely being a part of science (Australian materialism) or literature (aesthetics). This hermeneutical philosophy would then overcome the taken-for-granted individualist metaphysics.

Gadamer is good on both the metaphysical tradition of Heidegger, Hegel and the Greeks and Heidegger and everyday life. It is what lies outside the horizons of most postmodern philosophy in Australia, which is largely Francophile and content to take the French at face value. So they happily go along with the rejection of the French interpretation of Hegel and Heidegger, turning it into a rejection of Hegel and Heidegger in the process.

Heidegger has been introduced into the discussion because his category of being-in-the-world is a different pathway to Bataille's standpoint of inner experience, which remains within, and a part of an individualist (Cartesian) metaphysics grounded on consciousness or subjectivity. Being-in-the-world refers to human beings living in their world; and so living within a circle of interpretations and, to give it a more materialist twist, a set of relations that enframe and shape us.

Once again, this ontological metaphysics of social practice is a working within, and development of Hegel's relational metaphysics. Our culture (of a body of interpretations) provides a background understanding of what counts as things,(objects); what counts as human beings (individuals); and what it makes sense to do on the basis of which we can direct our actions towards particular things and people. I'm following Dreyfus here as he gives a clear pathway into Heidegger. Dreyfus says the particular historical:

"....understanding of being is the style of life manifest in the way everyday practices are coordinated. A culture's understanding of being allows people and things to show up as something -- people show up as heroes in Greece and as Saints in the Middle Ages, for example, and things for the Homeric Greeks were flashing up to be admired, while for Christians they were creatures to be mastered and interpreted."

From a Frankfurt School perspective, it is held that in modernity objects and individuals are manipulated through instrumental reason for the sake of utility. You need to stand in a particular space (a clearing) in order to be able to see our culture's understanding of being. What we need to bring into focus is modernity's technological understanding of being. It takes a bit of philosophy to being to see this and discern another or different kind of being--one with a more ecological focus.

So I read Heidegger and the philosophical tradition from that perspective.

What Heidegger does is to give us a (metaphysical) history of being thrrough thinking the metaphysical history of the West in order to free ourselves from the technological understanding of being. The history shows that we have had different relations to being in our histor,y and this implies that we could have again. Dreyfus puts it clearly:

"For Heidegger the history of being in the West has been the history of misunderstandings of the clearing. From Plato on, philosophers have sensed that something beyond ordinary beings was responsible for their existence as anything, but since the clearing always stays in the background -- or, as Heidegger puts it, withdraws -- philosophers have replaced it with a highest being that is the ground of beings and the source of their intelligibility. For Plato the highest being was the good, for Aristotle the unmoved mover, for the Christians the creator God, and after the Enlightenment it was man himself. Heidegger calls all these attempts to replace the clearing with a "beingest being", onto-theology or metaphysics."

In modernity human beings dominating everything and exploit all beings for our own satisfaction. When this is put into an understanding of society as market capitalism then we get the ongoing destruction of the ecological world we live with. This points to the Australian eco-Heidegger. This is a Heidegger who is critical of those who are still caught in the subject/object picture and think that technology is dangerous because it embodies instrumental reason. The technological understanding of being is more complex than that.

Heidegger argues that technological metaphysics treats everything as a standing reserve (as resources is our language) for its own sake. The goal of technology is more and more flexibility and efficiency for its own sake. (Is that not what economics says? There is no longer an onto-theological center (--the idea that some entity is the ground of everything) -- that provides a goal for all activity. There is ordering but no orderer in the technological understanding of being.

In the technological understanding of being we become cogs in the technological machine of market capitalism.

Confusions

Gary,

I’ve been going through some of this stuff you’ve been posting on Heidegger and I’m getting confused. It seems contradictory, unconvincing, and doesn’t dispel my initial concerns. I’ll try to spell out my confusion.

Back on the 23rd of March, I talked about the conference and in relation to that, said something about Heidegger derived from one of the abstracts. I mentioned that, if Heidegger was as painted in that abstract, I could see why he might get enthusiastic about fascism. On the 28th I claimed that Heidegger was an existentialist because he was about completeness, about being instead of nothing.

Why my criticism misses its mark is that my view is couched in metaphysical language, in the language that in Being And Time Heidegger himself attempted to use. He used it to destroy modern Cartesian metaphysics, which turns on the distinction between subject and object. He couldn’t win from such a position – I think Hegel pointed out the general problem with such approaches somewhere. Thus, we conceive of humans and Being (no one has explained about the capital in ‘Being’ yet but never mind) as two distinct entities, as beings seeking Being, but for Heidegger Being isn’t something independent of beings and after which they might aspire.

So far so good, but here’s where it starts to get tricky for me. The older non-metaphysical language: phrases like ‘the throw of Being’ and ‘the call of Being’ are couched in this language. In particular ‘the language from Ereignis is more primordial than metaphysics and therefore not metaphysical.’ What is a language of Ereignis? You say that it is a language of events – ‘Ereignis’ means event, happening, something like that. It is in this language of events that claims of ‘the being “enowned” of humans through Being and in terms of the belonging of humans to Being’ make sense. Hmmm. The ‘belonging of humans to Being’ sounds to me pretty metaphysical in the subject-object sense. Perhaps you can explain.

As far as I understand the tradition of existentialism, it is a breaking with the ‘classic concept of “being” as an abstract pondering of existence’ for some sort of concept of ‘being-in-the-world’, whatever that means – I have a rough idea. Is the language of Ereignis is meant to be the language of being-in-the-world? The notion of authentic existence is key in existentialism. Either ‘enowning’ relates to this notion or it relates to ‘the belonging of humans to Being’, either its an event of authentic existence or it is about belonging in a basically religious (subject-object) sense.

Heidegger is not just for being-in-the-world – he’s for authenticity too. This latter notion is key to existentialism. That’s why Keith Ansell Pearson (in the article in the library) calls Klossowski’s approach ‘a superior kind of existentialism’, because of a notion he detects in Klossowski of the authenticity of dissolution. For him this notion is superior to the notion of ‘authentic existence’, or something like that

Now, if this view isn’t Heidegger’s then explain to me simply and clearly what it is that Heidegger is supposed to be saying. If it is Heidegger’s view, or close enough to Heidegger, then explain to me why this isn’t existentialism. Nothing you’ve said so far shows that it’s not existentialism. Okay, so there is some development from the 19th century stuff – Kierkegaard, Bultmann, etc. – to the 20th century stuff – Heidegger, Jaspers, Sarter, Merleau-Ponty, etc. In particular history gets a guernsey in the 20th century brand. Heidegger’s thought is often referred to as phenomenological existentialism. All right, I’ll wear that one, but not existentialism at all – I don’t come at that.

Anyway, let’s move on – if I’m getting anywhere with the stuff up till now, your April 27 contribution leaves me wondering. I’ll go through it and perhaps you can sort it out. I’ll skip the point about historical standpoints being ‘manifestations or embodiments of being itself’ and its obvious subject-object (i.e., metaphysical) language. According to your mate Tom, today ‘science determines the way in which we understand being or reality’. Further, ‘we must define [the inquiry into Being] in terms of the standpoint proper to science … in order to define the nature of an inquiry about being as being’ (a little ‘b’ has now replaced the big ‘B’ – is this accidental or deliberate?).

Okay, then reading on I find out that science is losing its status as the pinnacle of rationality and knowledge. This crisis of science is the occasion to reopen ‘the question of being’. Now I’m really lost. We have to define the inquiry into Being or being in terms of a standpoint proper to science, which has lost or is losing its epistemological status and its domination over reasoning. I don’t get it. It doesn’t make sense.

Then you compound the problem by saying that Heidegger engages in metaphysical reflection, which you earlier claimed he’s superseded or abandoned. Heidegger is doing metaphysics but it is everyday metaphysics, instead of scientific metaphysics. How does this metaphysics differ from science? You imply that everyday metaphysics isn’t bound by impartiality and objectivity, although you don’t actually say it. Perhaps you could spell this point out. Is Heidegger proposing a metaphysics of the gaps left by the procedures of science? Or is he proposing something more comprehensive than science?

I’m afraid that terms like ‘en-owning’ and ‘thrownness’, and big B Being and little b being, and being-in-the-world sound more than ever like the jargon of authenticity to me. I’d hazard a guess and say that most people don’t know what’s going on here. How come this approach is supposed to connect with real situations but ordinary understandings of being, et cetera, aren’t good enough? We must have this obscure non-metaphysical metaphysical language that is accessible only to a strictly limited group of specially informed and thus élite intellectuals. They can wank on about being-in-the-world precisely because they not in the world. They’re in some ivory tower. The comparative beauty of Marxism, as one example, is that it doesn’t require a special understanding of exploitation – the ordinary everyday sense will do just fine.

Of course, the meaning of this terminology of pre-scientific non-metaphysical metaphysics isn’t merely obscure. It’s obscure but it seems to people that they almost know what it means, and that’s it’s real danger. If they try very hard and they make an effort to be sympathetic, ordinary folk can sort of understand what the Heideggerians are saying, sort of. It all relies too much on the will to understand. In the very secular 20th century what better replacement for religion is there for those who want to fill the secular gap? Existentialism – it’s the religion you have when you’re not having a religion.

I’m sorry, but I’ve been reading all this stuff on Heidegger very closely for over a month now and it just doesn’t make sense. If I’m wrong please tell me exactly where I’m wrong and what the right answer is. I’m not trying to be smart. I’m trying to understand what it’s all supposed to be about.

Deleuze: kissing Hegel goodbye

Trevor, I've just picked up a copy of Deleuze's Difference and Repetition. It's a large tome. I notice that it renounces Hegel: --ie., the Hegel of French philosophy in the late 40s/early 50s; a construction of Hegel that is based on the Kojevean/Hyppolitean interpretation of Hegel that Bataille worked within.

Hegel is a central target in this Deleuze's Difference and Repetition.

I have not read Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy (it's on order ) so I do not know if the renunciation of Hegel begins there. I suspect that it does.

It does, according to this account over at Smoke Writing.

From this I infer that Deleuze interprets Nietzsche as having a anti-Hegelian ontology (the will to power as different forces) and an ethics. Nietzsche becomes a philosopher of difference.

Why is Hegel a target?

Here is my guess. In order to establish his philosophy of difference Deleuze considered that it was necessary to displace Hegel because he had a "merely conceptual account of difference."

So what does that mean? Presumably, Deleuze wants to establish a non-dialectical account of difference; one that has no or little connection of negation. Hence contradiction is not the ground of difference. Difference is substituted for Hegel's negation and opposition.

On the Delueze reading of the French Hegel, Hegel was a target because he gave primacy to identity and made difference secondary or derivative. Hence we a critique of identity (sameness) and the overcoming of the metaphysical tradition represented by Hegel.

It is a shift away from the Hegel and Marx combination of the Kojevean-Hyppolitean interpretation of Hegel towards a philosophy of multiplicities.

Heidegger: anxiety

Terri Brooks

Back to Heidegger's text. In para 36 of What is Metaphysics Heidegger asks:

"But now a suspicion we have been suppressing too long must finally find expression. If Dasein can relate itself to beings only by holding itself out into the nothing and can exist only thus; and if the nothing is originally disclosed only in anxiety; then must we not hover in this anxiety constantly in order to be able to exist at all? And have we not ourselves confessed that this original anxiety is rare? But above all else, we all do exist and relate ourselves to beings which we may or may not be ? without this anxiety. Is this not an arbitrary invention and the nothing attributed to it a flight of fancy?

The questions I am interested are: 'Is anxiety a flight of fancy'? 'If it is not, then must we live in anxiety in order to live'?

Heidegger does not explicitly address these questions. He is more concerned to show that the nothing is the origin of negation, not vice versa. He says that:

"No matter how much or in how many ways negation, expressed or implied, permeates all thought, it is by no means the sole authoritative witness for the revelation of the nothing belonging essentially to Dasein."

Heidegger then talks about nihilative behavior in which Dasein remains shaken by the nihilation of the nothing. He says that unyielding antagonism, stinging rebuke, galling failure, merciless prohibition and bitter privation are not types of mere negation. he says that nihilative behavior testifies to the constant though doubtlessly obscured manifestation of the nothing that only anxiety originally reveals. Such anxiety is usually repressed.

But it is always there ready to open out within our:

"...comfortable enjoyment of tranquilized bustle. ..... Original anxiety can awaken in existence at any moment. It needs no unusual event to rouse it. Its sway is as thoroughgoing as its possible occasionings are trivial. It is always ready, though it only seldom springs, and we are snatched away and left hanging."

Repressed because it is marked by our finitude?

In the light of this account the expression of anxiety in the Terri Brooks painting could have been more turbulent and distorted, since anxiety ties us up in a lot of jarring emotional knots:

Stacha Halpern, Multiple Frames

In the last paragraphs of What is Metaphysics Heidegger turns back to the philosophical tradition and the nature of philosophy.

Heidegger: Metaphysics, anxiety, drugs

This lecture course by Tom Bridges is useful in putting the historical context of Heidegger's understanding of metaphysics in What is metaphysics. That text is very austere and it is difficult to get a handle on it Tom's lecture course is useful as it locates Heidegger's text within the philosophical tradition. However, the text also represents an overcoming of the metaphysical tradition as its concern with anxiety opens up new ground.

Tom makes two points. The first is the Hegelian background to Heidegger's understanding of metaphysics. Tom says:

"We see in this text the influence of an Hegelian understanding of metaphysical inquiry....Hegel introduced historical reflection into metaphysical inquiry. For Hegel, the metaphysical inquirer cannot apprehend being or reality apart from the historical standpoint that he or she occupies. Particular historical standpoints are themselves manifestations or embodiments of being itself. Therefore, an inquiry about being as such is necessarily an inquiry about the historical manifestation of being embodied in the standpoint of the inquirer. This seems to be Heidegger's understanding of this own inquiry."

In this Hegelian tradition it is presupposed that we live in the age of science we live in the age of science. So science determines the way in which we understand being or reality. Science has its metaphysics. To engage in an inquiry about being or reality, we must define that inquiry in terms of the standpoint proper to science -- not in order to validate the standpoint of science, but in order to define the nature of an inquiry about being as being.

So how did Heidegger understand science in 1929? Tom says:

"Heidegger at this time followed his teacher, Husserl, in his belief that the sciences in the early twentieth century had lost their foundation. ..... it did....seem to many German academics between 1900 and the 1930s that there did in fact exist a "crisis of the European sciences" (the title of Husserl's last book). In this essay, Heidegger is reflecting that view. Very few philosophers or scientists still believed that the Cartesian project of seeking an absolute foundation for scientific knowledge was still viable. As a result, it seemed to them that the objectivity of scientific knowledge was no longer capable of proof. Science, therefore, seemed to be on the verge of losing its status as the paradigm of human rationality and objective or universally valid knowledge."

We have become more familar with the crisis of science with the realist foundationalist being abandoned in favor of pragmatist and technological-sociological accounts of the status of scientific knowledge as in Thomas Kuhn's book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Tom says that Heidegger saw the crisis of the European sciences as an occasion to reopen what he called "the question of Being" -- he wanted to re-establish the sciences on their essential foundation by renewing the kind of metaphysical or ontological reflection found above all in Aristotle's writings.

It is a metaphysics of our understandings embodied in our everyday world, as opposed to a metaphysics of science.

Heidegger has a radical understanding of science. What Husserl thought of as the crisis of the European sciences Heidegger interpreted the crisis as the realization of the essentially technological nature of scientific knowledge. The Baconian conception of the neo-liberals who see science as a technological instrument to increasing the weath of the nation.

Heidegger distinquishes between scientific discourse and pre-scientific discourse and he explores the metaphysics of the pre-scientific discourse. Since the scientific attitude of impartiality and objectivity excludes the pre-scientific or our everyday conception of things, that leaves philosophy a space to explore the everyday conception of things. Heidegger does this in terms of doing metaphysics concerned with the nature of being through anxiety.

Anxiety is a good pathway to being because of the centrality of anxiety in everyday life. This editorial in The Age

"Last year, antidepressant drugs were prescribed to a quarter of a million Australian children and adolescents, which is 30,000 more than the number treated in this way in 2002.

That so many young people are afflicted by anxiety disorders and other conditions treated by psychotropic drugs is in itself alarming and perplexing; that the drugs used to treat them sometimes carry risks of their own - risks that may outweigh the benefits of using them - is even more worrying.

In particular, clinical evidence overseas indicates that there is an increased incidence of suicide among adolescents taking the class of antidepressants called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors."

Anxiety leads to depression then to drugs. This is a national issue. It is argued that depression and anxiety are the most common complaints of all mental health complexes. Together they account for most of the economic, social and personal costs of mental disorders in Australia.

Philosophy engaging with this situation of anxiety represents an overcoming of the metaphysical tradition.

Heidegger, anxiety and death

It is at about this point in What is Metaphysics that doubts begin to arise about Heidegger's conception of human beings living in a state of dread expressed through the nothing.

Heidegger does sum things up a bit for us. He says:

"Without the original revelation of the nothing, no selfhood and no freedom. With that the answer to the question of the nothing is gained. The nothing is neither an object nor any being at all. The nothing comes forward neither for itself nor next to beings, to which it would, as it were, adhere. For human existence the nothing makes possible the openedness of beings as such." (para 35)

This lecture course by Tom Bridges helps to clarify things a little. And we do need clarification. Tom usefully says that a key has to do with what Heidegger means by moods. He says:

"One of the ways that "the nothing" is encountered is in certain moods.....the term "mood" (Stimmung, in German) -- [means] to tune up, as in to tune up a guitar) is a technical term for Heidegger. He introduced it in Being and Time and he uses it in this essay with the full expectation that his audience will have some idea of its technical meaning. We tend to understand moods psychologically, as emotional states, states of feeling. Heidegger rejects that interpretation. For Heidegger, moods are manifestations of a fundamental and specifically human capacity or faculty that he calls Befindlichkeit -- another technical term that refers roughly to the fact that we always "find ourselves" in a situation, that our understanding of things is always a situated understanding, that the things we deal with and talk about are always things-in-a-situation.

Thus, for Heidegger, moods are ways in which our "situatedness" is revealed at any given time. Moods, then, are not just emotions dwelling in private consciousness. Moods have something like a cognitive function. Moods are our attunement to the situation in which we find ourselves at any given moment. They reveal something about that situation..."

Thus the mood of anxiety reveals our situatedness as a whole whereas fear always expresses our engagement in a particular situation.

We can step back a moment here, and remind ourselves that Heidegger is arguing that we are dealing with a domain that science itself can never address. Tom Bridges says that Heidegger's understanding of science is that science excludes all the everyday perspectives, considerations, and descriptions that normally determine the way we talk about things to "let things themselves alone determine how they are described." The pursuit of the scientific ideal impartiality and objectivity depends upon that exclusion. So what is essentially other to, and excluded from, scientific discourse is nothingness or "the nothing."

It is up to philosophy to explore the nothing.

The nothing is an way of describing the everyday world that we inhabit--what latter came to be called the lifeworld by Husserl. As Tom Bridges says, science is only concerned with the things themselves and so 'the nothing else' "aspect of the scientific ideal suggests a putting aside, or out of play, the sort of economic, cultural, and psychological considerations that normally determine our descriptions of the world." The ideal attitude of scientific impartiality and objectivity -- i.e., the attitude by which scientists let the things themselves, and nothing else, excludes all our normal, everyday, interested, one-sided, biased ways of describing and understanding things, in order then to be able to let our descriptions be governed by the things themselves.

Tom says that "The nothing" is our understanding of that which "clears the decks" of all our preconceptions and our wishful thinking about things and allows us to confront things stripped of the normal, everyday meanings with which we always clothe them. It is by virtue of our understanding of "the nothing" that we can dis-cover things and say of things that are that they are such and such.

If the mood of anxiety reveals our situatedness as a whole then what does anxiety refer to? It is at this point that we come to the doubts expressed by Dylan over at Poetics of Decay. He says Heidegger’s use of anxiety is both a being-towards-death (in Being and Time) and a holding-out into the Nothing (in What is Metaphysics?) A more important question is at stake: is nothingness synonymous with death? I have tacitly interpreted it as such, even though Dasein’s mortality is absent from What is Metaphysics? I have been presupposing that What is Metaphysics is a development from Being and Time, not a turning away.

Heidegger: anxiety & nothing

Heidegger says that nothing is what produces in us a feeling of dread {Ger. Angst}. He spells it out this way in What is Metaphysics:

"With the fundamental mood of anxiety (dread) we have arrived at that occurrence in human existence in which the nothing is revealed and from which it must be interrogated. How is it with the nothing? " (para 26)

He then proceeds to answer, or rather interrogates the question he has posed:

"The nothing reveals itself in anxiety — but not as a being. Just as little is it given as an object. Anxiety is no kind of grasping of the nothing. All the same, the nothing reveals itself in and through anxiety, although, to repeat, not in such a way that the nothing becomes manifest in our malaise quite apart from beings as a whole."

If we some up the argument from the previous post, then anxiety (dread) is unlike its near-neighbour fear, which is fear of something. Anxiety is indeterminate and objectless. Heidegger suggests that this lack of determination means "[w]e can get no hold on things": beings recede, things slip away. Because of this, anxiety brings us face to face with the nothing.

He then characterises our response to the nothing revealing itself in our anxiety:

"In anxiety occurs a shrinking back before . . . which is surely not any sort of flight but rather a kind of bewildered calm. This “back before” takes its departure from the nothing. The nothing itself does not attract; it is essentially repelling. But this repulsion is itself as such a parting gesture toward beings that are submerging as a whole. This wholly repelling gesture toward beings that are in retreat as a whole, which is the action of the nothing that oppresses Dasein in anxiety, is the essence of the nothing: nihilation. It is neither an annihilation of beings nor does it spring from a negation. Nihilation will not submit to calculation in terms of annihilation and negation. The nothing itself nihilates."

The nothing 'nihilates', literally, the nothing nothings. It is rather stange is it not?

I guess its a kind of dialectical argument that reworks Hegel's Encycl Logic that that being and nothing belong together and give rise to beccoming. For Heidegger our being-there or being in the world {Ger. Dasein} is subject to a systematic, radical uncertainty. Because we know that we will die, concern with our annihilation is an ever-present feature of human experience: Death is the key to Life. In the face of dread we need to create our existence. As he says:

"In the clear night of the nothing of anxiety the original openness of beings as such arises: that they are beings — and not nothing. But this “and not nothing” we add in our talk is not some kind of appended clarification. Rather it makes possible in advance the revelation of beings in general. The essence of the originally nihilating nothing lies in this, that it brings Dasein for the first time before beings as such." (para 32)

This then is Heidegger''s version of the dialectical interchange of being and nothing that is becoming.

Heidegger: anxiety & fear

I want to return to Heidegger's phenomenology of anxiety in his What is Metaphysics. I return because Heidegger talks about the realms of sentiment, emotion, fellow feeling and thought that is ignored by the neo-classical economists. It is the realm of everyday life in which we live that is dismissed by economists as the realm of the bleeding hearts.

It is not only Adorno who becomes increasing relevant to us with the process of the internationalization of capital. Heidegger also. I reckon Heidegger is saying something important in relation to the examples I gave of anxiety from economic reforms of the 1980s in relation to people carrying the burden of adjustment. That 'phrase carrying the burden of adjustment' is economic talk of the neo-classical zealots, and it ignores the human experience of carrying that burden. That public experience is what Heidegger is exploring.

It is a public experience that was changed by the brutality of the 1990s recession. We never bought the story of progress to salvation through renovating the economy.

If we pick up What is Metaphysics from where we left of here, then we find that Heidegger is distinquishing anxiety from fear (para 21). He says:

'We become afraid in the face of this or that particular being that threatens us in this or that particular respect. Fear in the face of something is also in each case a fear for something in particular. Because fear possesses this trait of being “fear in the face of” and “fear for,” he who fears and is afraid is captive to the mood in which he finds himself. Striving to rescue himself from this particular thing, he becomes unsure of everything else and completely “loses his head.” '

Might not what I 'd been talking re the effects of opening up the Australian economy about be fear rather than anxiety?

This mood was non-specific. It wasn't about this or that as such. True, it was about us being the buffer at the end of the station, the shock absorber, as we carried the burden of adjustment of an economy in transition on our backs. We were fearful---especially about becoming unemployed as the economy sank to the bottom as unemployment hit 11%. Or we were fearful about decreasing job security We had few grounds for hope, were depressed and lived in a state of from all the restructuring that was really a process of destructuring.

It was a kind of anxiety about stepping out into the ocean from a leaky boat without any plans to build even a raft. The public mood was more than fear.

Heidegger continues (para 22):

"Anxiety does not let such confusion arise. Much to the contrary, a peculiar calm pervades it. Anxiety is indeed anxiety in the face of... ,but not in the face of this or that thing. Anxiety in the face of . . . is always anxiety for . . . , but not for this or that....

....In anxiety, we say, “one feels ill at ease [es ist einem un­heimlich].” What is “it” that makes “one” feel ill at ease? We cannot say what it is before which one feels ill at ease. As a whole it is so for him. All things and we ourselves sink into indifference. This, however, not in the sense of mere disappearance. Rather in this very receding things turn toward us. The receding of beings as a whole that closes in on us in anxiety oppresses us. We can get no hold on things. In the slipping away of beings only this “no hold on things” comes over us and remains. Anxiety reveals the nothing."

In the 1980s and 1990s we were ill at ease and unable to get a hold on things as we faced a big black hole and a slow drift to oblivion.

Heidegger gives us another way of talking to that of the pointyhead's doctrine of the main game by which they meant restructuring the economy to make it compatible with internal economic flows. Their economic talk was about pulling the economic levers to get the belts and pulleys moving; current account deficits and inflation rates; economic laws that had to be accepted; and recessions as a necessary section of the journey to economic growth.
start previous

Philosophy and politics

Gary,

I’ve been silent for a week and a half, which incidentally led to the average hits per day jumping significantly. Perhaps I should shut up altogether. I’m only joking. If I was going to shut because no one is listening I would have done so years ago.

There are a number of reasons for my silence: first and foremost the conference, which is eating more and more of my time. Often all morning is taken up with it and after that I feel brain-dead and seem to be devoid of the kind of thoughts we are discussing here.

To add to this, I imprudently decided to change internet provider, and I thought I’d give Bigpond a go. Perhaps it was a coincidence but a worm jumped onto my computer as soon as I connected to them – another day down the drain. I’m just starting to feel like I’m getting on top of it all.

So I connect up to Philosophical Conversations and… you haven’t been silent in the meantime. There’s tons of stuff on Heidegger, other web sites, et cetera, and you’ve gone back to Bataille. I think this is a good move. I have a student (informal) who is working on the photographers Bellmer and Witkin from a Bataillean perspective, and she’s keeping me thinking about this stuff, but I must say that preparation for my conference paper is taking precedence. As well, I’m down to give a talk on Minima Moralia for Philosophy Jammm in July.

It’s all making me think mostly of Adorno and, interestingly, from a different perspective than any I’d taken in the past. Because of the reading group on Rosenzweig, I’ve come at Adorno from here, starting with Kracauer’s criticisms of Rosenzweig. If we could look at these two as a kind of dialectic, with Rosenzweig as the thesis and Kracauer as the antithesis, then Benjamin can be seen as a synthesis of the two, and Adorno as a critical appropriation of Benjamin. It all makes sense, at least to me.

What do they all have in common? A critical rejection of 19th century ideas, practices and arrangements. Here is a line from the Epistemo-critical Prologue to Benjamin’s Trauerspiel as an example:

‘The alternative philosophical forms represented by the concepts of the doctrine and the esoteric essay are precisely those things which were ignored by the nineteenth century, with its concept of system.’ (p. 28)

This is modernism – a radical reappraisal of constructive standards (a phrase from Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory). It is what Einstein was doing, what Schoenberg was doing, what Picasso was doing. It is what these guys are doing in philosophy. It was what Heidegger was doing – reappraising constructive standards.

This stuff is all monadic, windowlessly monadic. It epitomises its time. There was also a radical reappraisal of constructive standards at this time in politics, and along came Hitler, Roosevelt, Mussolini, Stalin, and others. The crucial event that changed the whole attitude towards the 19th century was the internationalisation of capital, which took place in the wake of the 1848 revolutions. There’s a really good film on this being shown in Adelaide at the moment. It is Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard, in a restored and complete version – three and a half wonderful hours.

In my view, Adorno increases in relevance precisely because this process of the internationalisation of capital is still with us and intensifies all the while. The corporate faction’s idea of a world economy is the pinnacle of the process. If at all, it can only be achieved through mass murder, which is why the political leaders of our country, as well as the UK and the US are criminals. Criminals are what is needed to pursue the internationalisation of capital at this point. There are two choices: murder or give up, and these boys are no quitters.

I’ll finish with a quotation from Canetti’s The Human Province – I hope I haven’t quoted it before. I’ve got the first signs of arthritis two weeks ago and I suppose that dementia is just around the corner. Anyway, repetition is a good pedagogical device. Back to Canetti:

‘Some people delude themselves with the idea that things could come to an end, and they calculate catastrophes on top of catastrophes. But the deeper intention of this torment is the eternal one. The earth remains young, its life multiplies, and new, more complicated, more distinct, or more complete forms of wretchedness are devised. One man pleads with another: Help me make it worse!’ (p. 107)

Heidegger: anxiety

Dylan over at The Poetics of Decay makes the following comment. He says that he has:

"...criticised Heidegger’s notion that anxiety discloses the nothing on account of the absence of self involved. From my own perspective, an element of ambiguity must arise so that consciousness can simultaneously hold itself out into nothingness whilst still retaining the reflective faculty of self-consciousness in order to gratify itself through gradual negation. I mistrust Heidegger’s reading of anxiety for the reason that he used it as a mantelpiece to extol his fixation on being qua being. There the desire to disclose the ‘totality’ of being through anxiety takes precedence. When Heidegger therefore speaks of the dormant groundlessness of being, then whilst taking Hegel’s “Pure Being and pure Nothing are the same thing” to its logical conclusion, it is quite possible that the term giddiness would have served better, a term which the Existentialists would later use to emphasize the indeterminacy of freedom to their own merit."

The significance of the account of anxiety I gave in the previous post is that subjectivity was one of being overwhelmed.

Those in the Keating Government were overwhelmed by the dread of the hangman's rope.

We ordinary folk felt passive and helpless as global forces swept through the country transforming our way of life and leaving many of us stranded without jobs.

The working poor were overwhelmed by the grind of poverty as the price of essential services went up from privatisation, people could only obtain casual/seasonal jobs at best and they were able to put less and less food on the table during the recession of the early 1990s.

Subjectivity was caught up in this overall general anxiety that had no name and so it was akin to a nothing. The self is swept along by both the global economic forces that had been unleashed by opening Australia to the global economy, and the political reaction to those forces from being forced to carry the adjustment burden of microeconomic reform.

If you remember during that decade of reform the pointy head economists talked about restructuring and adjustment of the economy nonstop. The economy was the main game. For this puritan economic ethic it was about getting the economic essentials right. Everything else was decoration.

Little consideration was given to the human experience of it all. That was dismissed as bleeding heart psychology. So Heidegger fills the vacuum.

start previous next

Heidegger: anxiety & place

Well. What do you know. Other people are also reading Heidegger. Glueboot says that, "When I first came across Heidegger's notion of anxiety and nothingness I felt as though someone had gripped me about the throat and started strangling me." There is a sophisticated and creative discussion in the comment box to the Heidegger post.

Over at The Poetics of Decay Dylan says that he was disappointed with Heidegger's account of anxiety in What is Metaphysics. He says:

"I am again disappointed by his lack of sensibility to the contingency of place when it comes to unearthing anxiety. Ascribing the nothing to the experience of anxiety, he thus reduces anxiety to something wholly universal, a state in which consciousness is lost ‘hovering’ in a state whose contents remain occult. Nevertheless, Heidegger is right to correlate the nothing with a sense of the uncanny through which the “repelling gesture” of being discloses itself, thereby allowing the strange facticity of Dasein to emerge. But that this should transpire through anxiety seems a misguided affectation on Heidegger’s behalf: “In the clear night of the nothing of anxiety the original openness of beings as such arises: that they are beings – and not nothing.”

Dylan is dead right. There is no conception of a particular place in this text of Heidggers. All we have is anxiety in general with no mention of place.

And yet. There is something to the generality. The public mood of Australia is one of anxiety. It has been since the 1980s.

Can we put a finger on it?

Perhaps the effects of economic reforms to open up Australia to the global marketplace in the 1980s and 1990s. Then the whole indigenous landrights movement arising from Mabo in the 1990s Now terrorism after 2001. Looking back we can see that it a general state of anxiety in this place:a vague sense of foreboding that the country was going to the dogs.

Let me quote from a passage from a book I'm currently reading, Don Watson's Recollections of a Bleeding Heart. In it he is referring the moments after Keating ALP won the 1993 federal election agaisn the odds. Watson says that:

"Now that we had realised we had won, we also realised how profoundly we thought we must lose. The dread was in the marrow. The hand of the hangman had been stayed, but it felt more like the rope has snapped. Is it part of our design that as a sentence of death concentrates the mind so powerfully, some other part of us withers and dies. We had been in denial for so long no-one noticed that somewhere in our minds we had given up the ghost. That night it felt less like survival, than rebirth. We could have our life over again. The moment of victory was wonderful; it was also a species of trauma."

Is not that a description of general anxiety that only becomes identifiable after the event? A description based around dread, the rope of the hangman and death?

start previous next

Heidegger: What is Metaphysics

I would like to briefly turn back to Heidegger in the light of the comments here and here on the analytic continental divide.

One of the suggestions made in those posts was that epistemology (the key analytic concern) was displaced by a concern for metaphysics in continental philosophy. This is clear in Heidegger, especially his lecture 'What is Metaphysics', written in 1929 after Being and Time. This works with a conception of the disclosedness of Dasen as being-in-the-world. What is disclosed is not knowledge or opinions but moods. The primary or primoridal mood is anxiety when I realize that I have been thrown into the world and that my life and death is something that I have to face.

In What is Metaphysics (different translation) Heiddger probes this public mood of anxiety in terms of the category of nothing. He says that nothing ts not a suitable subject of the sciences:

"The nothing is rejected precisely by science, given up as a nullity.....science must now reassert its seriousness and soberness of mind, insisting that it is concerned solely with beings. The nothing — what else can it be for science but an outrage and a phantasm? If science is right, then only one thing is sure: science wishes to know nothing of the nothing. Ultimately this is the scientifically rigorous conception of the nothing. We know it, the nothing, in that we wish to know nothing about it. Science wants to know nothing of the nothing."

He goes on to say the nothing is what we seek and that "the nothing is the complete negation of the totality of beings." He then makes a distinction:

"In the end an essential distinction prevails between comprehending the ensemble of beings in themselves and finding oneself in the midst of beings as a whole. The former is impossible in principle. The latter happens all the time in our existence. It does seem as though we cling to this or that particular being, precisely in our everyday preoccupations, as though we were completely abandoned to this or that region of beings."

Heidegger then gives an example of what he means --boredom:

"Even and precisely then when we are not actually busy with things or ourselves this “as a whole” overcomes us — for example in genuine boredom. Boredom is still distant when it is only this book or that play, that business or this idleness, that drags on. It irrupts when “one is bored.” Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals beings as a whole."

Anxiety is a fundamental mood that reveals the nothing.

I mention this here to show how far Heidegger has moved away from science---the positivists (eg Carnap) thought that he was simply talking nonsense. But this philosophy is talking about the 'fundaments' of everyday existence and is making public mood a subject of philosophical concern. It is a long way from the concerns of analytic philosophy.
next

Bataille: the sacred

In this ABC Encounter programme some insightful remarks about Bataille, the sacred and intense erotic mysticism are made by Mark Taylor. Taylor is referring to the period between 1941 and 1944, when Bataille's wrote Madame Edwarda and Inner Experience, Guilty, and On Nietzsche. In a sense Bataille's work at this time was a continuation of the kind of sacred experiment he'd been undertaking with Acephale.

The founding belief of the Acephale was that rational thought wasn't going to be enough to save the world from the catastrophe that appeared to be looming on the horizon. The formation of Acephale was in part a response to the failure of the political groups opposed to Fascism. They tended to become fascistic themselves ---to become obsessed by seizing power. Acephale, being "headless", was an attempt to decapitate any kind of idea of seizing power. The image they chose for Acephale was the sorcerer's apprentice--- what the sorcerer's apprentice does is release forces that he can't control. Acephale was intended to be a kind of detonator to set off an explosion (a human sacrifice) that would destroy both French society and world society.

The war intervened, the group disbanded, Bataille resigned from his job at the Bibliotheque Nationale, left Paris for the countryside, and lost himself in writing. In writing, the above texts Bataille wasn't just trying to describe the sacred, but to unleash its energies. Taylor says:

"He saw in various kinds of literary texts a substitution for that kind of ritual enactment - in other words, one of the kinds of things that happens not just with Bataille but with a lot of these figures, right down to the present day, is that literature comes to play the role that religious ritual had played heretofore. Just as religious ritual can function as a way of displacing social conflict, containing it in a certain sense, by setting it in a ritual context in which it can be controlled, so religious ritual can get displaced into literary texts - so an author like the Marquis de Sade he finds fascinating, for precisely those reasons. But you also see in his texts (e.g. in one of his most interesting texts called Inner Experience), it's a sort of poetic text, but part of what he's trying to do with language is to enact the kind of disarticulation that he sees at work in the sacred. In the kind of text that I'm talking about here, Inner Experience or some of his fictions which are - well, "pornographic" is not right, but they're over the top in terms of transgressive excess. The text is not about the experience, the text is intended to be the occasion for the experience.

This is within a whole mystical tradition within the West as well - I mean, St Ignatius' spiritual exercises have as their goal, to occasion the one undergoing them, the experience itself. I mean, the carnality of the experience that Bataille is seeking to trigger, is in a certain sense an incarnation of the word - it is the word made flesh, made carnate in the eroticism of the experience. And if you look back in the history of western mysticism, the texts are often shot through with eroticism."

Bataille & Sexuality: a recap

I'm trying to reconnect with my previous posting of Bataille.

For all his innovative linking of the sexual, the violent, and the sacred, Bataille's understanding of sexuality is an old one. He associates sexual shame with original sin (or evil). It's basically a Christian conception.

With a difference.

Sex leads to excess; sexual desire is linked with death. The erotic is the loss of one’s individual being. When you have sexual intercourse, it's something like a little death; when you have an orgasm, it's a point at which you're in some fundamental way no longer yourself. It's a state of ecstasy and a little death.

The same thing happens in experiences of sacrifice. So religion---the sacred--- is eroticism, sacrifice, and excess.

Alva Bernadine The Shrine

The sacred, when associated with excess, is that which exceeds the social and cultural structures that have been constructed to contain it. The sacred is associated with what Nietzsche called the Dionysian. The profane is what he calls the world of work and distinction, the world of utility, or purposefulness, whereas the sacred for him is always associated with that excess which disrupts or transgresses utility, use, purpose, reason, meaning.

Transgressing meaning means stepping into meaninglessness, or "excess" or "transgression". For Bataille our lives our grounded in and surrounded by sets of taboos. These taboos generally surround the two extreme limit points of our life, namely birth and death, or sexuality and death. The states of excess or transgression are those experience of going beyond our mode of being autonomous, isolated individuals. This happens when we transgress those taboos that normally surround our lives. At that moment we live with a sense of meaninglessness.

Most of the time we habitually live within a world of meaning where we push away that meaninglessness that lies at the boundaries of our everyday lives. But to have meaning in our lives we need to experience the states of excess.

This is a reworking of Nietzsche in terms of sexuality. Christian culture has been traditionally concerned with the excess of sexuality. It has built around sexuality many taboos and it keeps sexuality confined to a monogamous heterosexual marriage relationship. It says that, since sex and eroticism are dangerous, they need to be circumscribed with taboos to make sex acceptable within the realm of everyday life.

the sacred & pornography

Trevor,
I'm tired of all that heavy philosophy and politics. Here's something different--an article about whores and academics courtesy of this link.

It's a way of easing back into Bataille, bodies and desire. A few steps along the path and we come across this passage:

"Max Weber noticed long ago that the religious meaning that had transformed the west had escaped, leaving behind the domination of economics in western lives and a culture that imagined itself the culmination of history but was actually a nullity -- a society of cold calculation that lacked access to any form of higher meaning. But to the extent that culture in the west has become a nullity, it is a nullity that is obsessed with sex. Sexual meaning, empty as it may seem, has clawed into the iron cage and taken the place that religious meaning left behind."

The sacred is commodified, tied to the profit motive and eternally reproduced while never losing its concentration on its own romantic authenticity.

What results is pornography as a creative industry:

Guy Bourdieu, Hose

So one would then find academics in cultural/communication studies looking at the sacred as pornography as the intertextual relationships between pornography and other media genres and how pornography is integrated into everyday life.

Knut Ethret

For many in the society of the spectacle it's just showbiz or lifestyle.

Well, we've left that heavy philosophy and politics behind. We've started retracing our steps back to Bataille.

Heidegger & authenticity

Trevor,
well I'm glad that the case of the invisible correspondent has been cleared up. I thought that you were siding with Karl Lowith's interpretation of Heidegger and politics in challenging the autonomy of philosophy; or worse that you were supporting those who took political sides without a knowledge of the texts.

With repect to Heidegger I concur with your statement:

"I don’t think it’s silly to suggest that someone who is looking for completion and on the lookout for the right moment or the messianic event, or whatever, might not think that the Nazis represented just such a moment."

And I concur your judgement here:

"....if Heidegger thought this way, it is not surprising that he might have misread the advent of Nazism as an instance of the sort of event he thinks is crucial."

Heidegger did misread the politicla situation. He said as much. In the Der Spiegel interview, he d sais that the essence of Nazism (in his view, the confrontation between man and technology) was good, but that the German leadership had perverted it. He says:

"A decisive question for me today is: how can a political system accommodate itself to the technological age, and which political system would this be? I have no answer to this question. I am not convinced that it is democracy....... I see the task in thought to consist in general, within the limits allotted to thought, to achieve an adequate relationship to the essence of technology. National Socialism, to be sure, moved in this direction. But those people were far too limited in their thinking to acquire an explicit relationship to what is really happening today and has been underway for three centuries.”

For this conservative reolutionary Nazism, as a political movement, was moving in the right direction. It failed because its leaders did not think radically enough about the essence of technology. In response the Americans in 1945 imposed a half-decade teaching ban on Heidegger.

With that cleared away maybe we can concentrate on the linkages between modern Jewish thought and the history of modern German philosophy in the sense of post-Nietzschean religious sensibility that is condensed into the paradox of a "redemption-in-the-world" that can be connected to Heidgger's category of authenticity.

Let me briefly indicate this authenticity as it is developed in Being and Time by slightly rephrasing this interpretation. Being-in-the-world for Heidegger is the public world of social norms, conducts and rituals. This "publicness," this "being-with-one-another, involves our "thrownness" into the conventions and "groupthink" of society. So we come to exist not on our own terms but on those of what Heidegger calls das Man---the "they" whose beliefs and behaviors make up the "average everydayness" of human existence. Most of us prefer and thus naturally "fall" into this tempered mode of existence, are happy not to think for ourselves but to follow instead the routines and fashions of those around us.

Salvation --to use a theological term---consists in the fundamental realization that "truth" exists not in the people and institutions among which we are thrown, but is in us as beings who question and think the nature of Being. Authenticity appears at this point since the questioning and thinking must be an authentic expression of human beings in their freedom from das Man.

In contrast, inauthenticity means being at home in the world of publicness-the world of rules, rituals, and conventions that disburdens existence of its personal responsibility for choice. How then must we act to recover the authentic existence we have lost by living in the conventional public world of the other?

The salvation is a standard philsoophical one. We turn from living by the conventional rules and habits and project a world of particular significance to ourselves. We insist upon our right to be creative and free in our questioning and articulating of Being, creating worlds of meaning around those things that are, and through modifying the world into which we find we have been thrown.

So we have a "theological" discourse with the categories of fallenness and authenticity, on being-towards-death and freedom, a post-theological discourse following on modernity's eclipse of God (ie., Nietzsche) that involves a reworking of a theological legacy. And that is not suprising since Heidegger was a Catholic prior to Being and Time.

Heidegger and Marxism

Gary,

There seems to be a misunderstanding about the mysterious commentator who doesn’t speak (April 08). This person remains silent because she’s not aware of being part of the conversation. I’ll just recap on what has happened so far on Heidegger, from my end. I thought, as a way of advertising the forthcoming conference if nothing else – or just for something to say – I’d discuss one of the abstracts sent in, one that interested me. I remarked that, if Heidegger thought this way, it is not surprising that he might have misread the advent of Nazism as an instance of the sort of event he thinks is crucial. Nothing you have said so far has dissuaded me from this view, although I must say how insightful and informative I’ve found your contributions to my own understanding, and I must thank you for that.

I’d like to distance myself from all the criticisms of Heidegger you listed (April 10), which I agree are just based on ignorance – and I also suspect laziness, complacence, and a not very scholarly attitude, in short a comfortable bourgeois perspective.

I disagree that the promotion of the so-called ‘irrationalism of Heidegger’ prepared the way for Hitler. Changes in the territory – in the Deleuzian sense – prepared the way for Hitler. In the meantime and since the beginning of the age of imperialism (1850 onwards), there arose a constant criticism of the constructive standards that sustained all aspects of culture. Heidegger played a role in this, with Einstein, Picasso, Kafka, et al. Hitlerism is by no means an irrationalism but a rather outcome of the imperialist territorialisation. Hitler is modern and logical, not irrational and archaic.

The guys you are talking about don’t know what Marxism is. They’re armchair Marxists, very comfortable. They should read Hannah Arendt and forget about para-consistent reasoning, not that it would make any difference.

I think the idea that Heidegger’s philosophy bears a logical and necessary connection to his support for Hitler is silly. But I don’t think it’s silly to suggest that someone who is looking for completion and on the lookout for the right moment or the messianic event, or whatever, might not think that the Nazis represented just such a moment. On the other hand, somebody who thought that all positive pronouncements were suspect is unlikely to be so deluded.

Similarly, the idea that Heidegger’s ideas were a cause of Nazism is ridiculous. Ideas are epiphenomenal, particularly the ideas of some obscure philosopher whom most Germans in 1930 had never heard of. This kind of thinking isn’t historical materialism. It’s idealist thinking. The causes of Nazism are to be found in the somatic realm. Nazism – or fascism, Stalinism, New Dealism, Blairism, Bushism, et cetera – is an administrative approach, a particular administrative approach that is inseparable from the practice of imperialism, this latter being the international transportation of capital. Fascism is corporatism in the public sphere. Max Weber will tell you all about corporatism and how it fits into the grand scheme of things administrative, including its opposition to democracy.

I think there is a lot of truth in what Charles Bukowski wrote about Hamsun, Céline and Pound and their so-called ‘allegiance’ to fascism. Bukowski’s view was that these guys had to revolt against the mainstream, whatever it was. That’s what it meant to them to be a writer. I’ve read a lot of Céline and he seems a pretty strange sort of fascist to me. Hitler and the boys don’t show up in such a good light in his books, although they show up in the same light as everybody else. Maybe that’s what people don’t like about him.

I think something like this is true of Heidegger. Hannah Arendt never saw him as a fascist and she knew him, well, intimately. I think what she saw was something like what Bukowski saw in Hamsun and his mates.

Does any of this help you to understand my perspective on Heidegger? I hope I’m getting somewhere in explaining myself. I feel that I’ve got somewhere in my thinking as a result of this conversation anyway.

The poverty of philosophy

Trevor,
I met the crude kind of reasoning of philosophy and politics mentioned in relation to the Victor Farias text when I was a student of philosophy at Flinders University in South Australia. I was reading continental philosophy (Hegel) at the time and I had to contend with a crude Marxist interpretation of continental philosophical history.

This interpretation held that continental philosophy after Marx was damned. It was not science. It was romanticism. It was irrationalism. It lead to fascism.

They--the academics ---had never read the continental texts of Nietzsche & Heidegger. They said there was no need to. Bertrand Russell was enough. He said it all. I even sat through seminars in which it was held as truth that continental philosophers did not argue, so they were not philosophers. Hence there was no need to engage with them.

In the same breath they were defending the liberal university as a place of scholarship, research and truth against the attacks of the neo-liberals who wanted to revolutionize the university so that it was an instrument to help generate the wealth of the conservative nation.

Adorno, to his credit, posed the issue as a question: "is Heidegger's philosophy "fascist in its most intimate components"? That way of addressing the issue leaves room to make a judgement using the tools of philosophy.

Some answer the question as yes. When I was a postgraduate I read The Destruction of Reason by the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukacs. The book made the above interpretation explicit, since Lukacs set out to show that Nazi ideology and practice was derived from the philosophy of Jacobi, Hamann, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Max Scheler, Jaspers, and Heidegger.

The argument? All the above philosophers attacked reason, all promoted irrationality, and hence they all prepared the way for Hitler. I thought that the Lukacs interpretation indicated the poverty of marxist philosophy residing in Stalin's Moscow.

The marxist ideologues at Flinders were not concerned to engage philosophically with Heidegger's philosophy. They saw no reason at all
to read and reread Heidegger within a rethinking and recontextualizing of of the pre-war european intellectual endeavors and politics. They simply related to a conservative/nationalist Heidegger as politicians.

Their central task was to prove that the philosophy of the rightwing Martin Heidegger bears a logical and necessary connection to his support of National Socialism in Germany in the 1930s and 40s; and that his philosophy constitutes an historical cause of that experience. They would then intimidate any student who thought it important to read Nietzsche or Heidegger.

What has happened since then--the late 1980s--- is that people--primarily American liberals --- have read Heidegger's speeches on the university when he was a rector. These speaches show that Heidegger was a Nazi. Thomas Sheehan, in his review of Victor Faria's book, sums up what is known:

"In outline, the story of Heidegger and the Nazis concerns (1) a provincial, ultraconservative German nationalist and, at least from 1932 on, a Nazi sympathizer (2) who, three months after Hitler took power, became rector of Freiburg University, joined the NSDAP, and tried unsuccessfully to become the philosophical Führer of the Nazi movement, (3) who quit the rectorate in 1934 and quietly dissassociated himself from some aspects of the Nazi party while
remaining an enthusiastic supporter of its ideals, (4) who was dismissed from teaching in 1945, only to be reintegrated into the university in 1951, and who even after his death in 1976 continues to have an im- mense following in Europe and America."

The political case, that Heidegger's ideas were a cause of National Socialism, is now developed along the lines that Heidegger amplified pernicious intellectual fashions. And, as authoritarian, undemocratic rector and department chair at an important university, Heidegger implemented party policies to "revolutionize" the liberal research university. So Heidegger was both a philosopher and an active party member who implemented at least some of the party's policies. So his philosophy is contaminated with fascist politics.

If the prosecution does give a philosophical interpretation of Heidegger's philosophy, then it is along the lines that Heidegger's conception of being in-the-world makes impossible any principled ethics (ie., moral rights and obligations) promotes a nihilism and give rise to the politics of Nazi Germany. It is only universal liberal rights, no the particular ethical category of care or concern, that is able to oppose historical decline, nihilism and Nazism.

This kind of criticism primarily relates to the second part of Heidegger's Being and Time; the one concerned with historicity, authenticity, anxiety, resoluteness, dread, the destiny of the community and the Volk. It is these categories that lead to, or point towards, the possibility and even desirability of political activism.

Heidegger: Letter on Humanism

Trevor.
There is continuity and discontinuty in Heidegger's Letter on Humanism. I will try and spell it briefly.

In the Letter Heidegger distinguishes his thought from humanism when he claims that being, not the human being, is what is essential, and states that his intention is not to elevate “the human being to the center of beings” At the same time, Heidegger acknowledges that, despite his own hesitations, it would be possible to characterize his thought as a type of humanism due to its concern with the essence and dignity of the human being.

The Letter on Humanism' has two changes in relation to Being and Time. Instead of practical acting in a world of interpretations it is thought and poetry that are primary'; and instead of attempting to answer the question 'what is Being', Heidegger is more concerned about us becoming a 'custodian' of Being.

Hence the remark about language is the house of Being. that human beings dwell in this house and that those who think and those who create poetry are the custodians of the dwelling.

The letter is an attack on French existentialism, it is anti-humanist in the sense that man is not primary: it is not man who determines Being, but Being which, via language, discloses itself to and in man. 'Hence we have phrases such as, Thrown into the truth of Being by Being', man is now watchman over this truth. He is the sentinel in the 'clearing', 'the shepherd of Being'.

So the emphasis on this pathway away from Being and Time is on conservation and caring instead of domination and mastery. This discontinuity is ignored in the Lowith/Wolin interpretation of Heidegger's philosophy.

Heidegger & heebie jeebies

I wasn't able to post last night. I lost the connection and I could not reconnect with my IP. An hour was spent on the phone waiting for tech support only to discover the problem lay with Telstra. Their telephone infrastructure had an outbreak of the "heebie jeebies" in parts of South Australia.

So that was that. Telstra were meant to advise me when they had voodooed the heebie jeebies out of their telecommunications system, but they never did. I was just left with the after effects of the heebie jeebies, not knowing what it was all about.

I mention this little episode because it is difficult to deal with the "mysterious correspondent" who knows Heidegger but does not speak, makes not mention of the texts or indicates which ideas support the thesis of continuity in Heidegger and the claim that Heidegger's philosophy is fascist in its very core.

Why doesn't the correspondent use the comments box? Why do they not post? Why do they remain silent? Silence is not an ideal way to do philosophy. I'm just left with the after effects of the heebie jeebies.

Well let give a placeholder name to the mysterious correspondent who does not communicate. Richard Wolin is the one who runs the line that Heidegger's embrace of Nazism represented a logical outcome of his Being and Time position in the 1920's. This is pretty much a recycling of Karl Lowith's Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism. The concerns here are with the political implications of Heidegger's "existentialism". They do avoid the simplistic equation of Heideggerism with Nazism that was implied by Victor Farias.

The strength of the political reading is that it rejects the purely philosophical or textual readings, which say Heidegger's politics has nothing to do with his philosophy. It reconnects philosophy's relation to politics, reconnects philosophical passion to political passion. However, it is not the philosophy per se----the forgetfulness of Being--- that is of interest in Karl Lowith's political reading. It is the political influence that emanated from his fascism and his evasion of that political history that is the key concern.

What can we make of this interpretation ?

The Lowith reading points the finger at the German philosophical tradition, Nietzsche, the advent of nihilism and the transvaluation of values. This radicalization ---the nihilistic spiriit of revolution----disconnects Germany from its traditional/inherited spiritual moorings, and leads to a coming barbarism. Heidegger's philosophy with its ethos of destruction is part of this movement.

I guess you can say that Heidegger's disappointment with Nazism as a confrontation with instrumental/technological reason lead to the turn in his philosophy. What I would say is that Heidegger gave a political reading to the philosophical project of Being and Time:-- a national revolutionary reading that walked a line between America and Russia.

However, I do not accept Lowith's claim that there is a direct line from Nietzsche via Heidegger to Nazism with its tact premise that the response to nihilism is a return to the traditional values and heritage. This ignores the philosophical categories of Being and Time. The central category is Dasein, (the German word for "existence" or "being-there"). The meaning of Dasein is temporality and though Dasein is not homo sapiens, in German usage the category does tend to refer to human beings.

Dasein implies not only presence, but involvement in the world:--what Heidegger calls being-in-the world as opposed to being essentially a consciousness which we must then attempt to 'hook-onto' the world. This being-in-the-world is given a hermeneutic interpretation along the lines of the hermeneutic circle, in which every interpretation is itself based on interpretation. After provisional conclusions, based on presuppositions, one returns to the starting point, to continue the inquiry into deeper understanding in the circular process of interpretation.

The phenomenon of philosophical phenomenology is the being of beings or entities. The being of Dasein is such that Dasein understands its own being, and at the same time its pre-theoretical understanding makes it possible to understand the being of entities other than itself.

Heidegger argues that human beings is not one thing among many things, but relates to the world in a particular way; we relate to the world with 'concern' since we care about the way things are and we are interested in what will happen. Heidegger then attempts to characterise our general activities in the world along the lines of n both our practical activities encountering things as just 'there', as being 'present-at hand' and the tools that we use as things that lie ready to hand 'ready-at-hand'.

Heidegger and post-modernism

Gary,

You’ve been busy since my last entry over a week ago. I hardly know where to start. Perhaps I’ll just try a few remarks as they come to me reading through your contributions.

The idea of a discontinuity in Heidegger: I don’t really know enough about him to comment, although I would say that my correspondent isn’t simply reading Being And Time but the later works as well. I guess that where one of you sees a discontinuity the other sees a continuity.

Even if I accept the discontinuity thesis it doesn’t seem to weaken my argument, which is about the choices Heidegger made during the 1930s, before he purportedly broke with metaphysics.

On the question of breaking with metaphysics, I’m with Gaston Bachelard, who said that while the mind may change its metaphysics, it cannot do without it. The later Heidegger and the analysts have something in common – they both thought that they’d disposed of metaphysics, which means that they both had an implicit metaphysics, a hidden metaphysics. Where do you find it if it’s hidden? Well, start looking in their dogma. That’s usually where it’s buried.

Heidegger and the post-modernists: I think what you’ve got to say here is most interesting – that they’ve both ditched metaphysics in the same way. They’ve both tried to be positive but only achieved positivism. Positivism is the rejection of metaphysics. I see this in Habermas too. He’s also a Heideggerian in the sense you describe, which means that he has something in common with the post-modernists.

I see Habermas and the post-modernists in terms of the actual contemporary practices of tertiary education, as well as simply theoretically, which is perhaps the source of my concern with various ideas. I’m not talking about individuals here – I’m talking about the ideological usage of ideas in relation to current administrative practices, or what Deleuze called ‘territories’ or ‘rule-governed spaces’ (‘striated spaces’). So-called ‘critical theory’ and post-modernism have both played a major ideological role in relation in the current reterritorialisation, and I don’t think it’s through their misuse. Most of my publications in administration have been on this topic.

Here’s something with which I am in complete agreement with Adorno. Adorno wrote that Kracauer taught him to see Kant’s critical reason as ‘a kind of coded text from which the historical situation of spirit could be read’, to which Kracauer attached the ‘vague expectation that in doing so one could acquire something of truth itself’. This is how Heidegger and Habermas and the post-modernists should be approached, in my view, as coded texts from which the historical situation of spirit can be read.

I’m sorry to be so brief but I’m really pressed for time, which is why you haven’t been hearing much from me.

Heidegger: Letter on Humanism

In the opening page of his 1947 Letter on Humanism Heidegger says that:

"Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home. Their guardianship accomplishes the manifestation of Being insofar as they bring the manifestation to language and maintain it in language through their speech."

In the letter Heidegger gives a reason for his 1930's turn against Being and Time. The way that text posed the question of being was a failure of language. In its destruction of the subject object dualisms of modern (Cartesian) metaphysics, that text attempted to use the language of metaphysics.

Heidegger: overcoming humanism

This essay by Tom Rockmore may be of some help in showing the way that the French interpreted Heidegger in the 1930s and 1940s. They (mis) interpreted Heidegger as a humanist.

I have not been able to find Heideger's Letter on Humanism online. In its absence we can work with this article by Daniela Neu,, since it offers a more philosophical interpretation. Daniela says:

"In the Letter on Humanism, Heidegger claims that we need to think the relation between Being and humans more originally than metaphysics. But this requires also a language which is no longer indebted to metaphysics. The problem in speaking of the relation between Being and humans or, as Heidegger states it in the Letter on Humanism, of the relation of Being to humans is that our traditional language invites us to conceive humans and Being as two separate entities, the relation of which is in question. Our traditional language is the language of metaphysics, and more specifically of modern metaphysics, for which the object of thinking is that which the thinking subject represents to itself."

Heidegger is trying to speak otherwise to the modern humanist metaphysical tradition. However, in the Letter Heidegger here consciously speaks the language of metaphysics whilst the 'non-metaphysical' language remains in the background. The latter is indicated by, or gestured to, through phrases such as the throw or call of Being. In Heidegger's understanding, the language from Ereignis is more primordial than metaphysics and therefore not metaphysical.

The task of philosophy is to help bring back humans and beings in general to the place which they originally belong, i.e., to their most fulfilled way of being which is their proper or own [das Eigene, eigen]. The term "En-own-ment" or "Ap-propri-ation" [Er-eign-is] — the key word in Heidegger's thinking since the 1930's — marks his attempt to think more originally than metaphysics the relation between Being and humans in terms of the being "enowned" of humans through Being and in terms of the belonging of humans to Being.

picking up the traces

I'm back in Adelaide after a long month of contract work in Canberra. I'm certainly experiencing a life of decline and fatigue at the moment. It will take some time to find some energy.

My previous two posts indicate or suggest that Heidegger is critical of the way that man is God. So how does that reading relate to Trevor's interpretation of Heidegger?

A suggestion. The people he is relying on are referring to the Heidgger of Being and Time. Heidegger turns against Being and Time, the existentialist reading of his work, and addresses the modernist humanist/individualist metaphysics through a confrontation with Nietzsche.

Trevor, you have the (4 volumes) of Nietzsche texts on your bookshelf.

Being and Time tackles the classical essential problem of ontology as understood by Aristotle-- "What is being?" Heidegger breaks from the classic concept of "being" as an abstract pondering of existence and throughout this work refers instead to Dasein or "being-there," which implies a more thorough connectedness to the world that unfolds over time or being-in-the-world.

In between Being and Time and the postwar Letter to Humanism addressed to the French, stands the difficult Contributions to Philosophy written in the mid-to late thirties. This text is an expression of Heidegger's struggle to think at the edge of words and to bring to language what remains beyond the written or the spoken. What we have in this turn against Being and Time is the transformative turn from prepositional thought to the poietic, performative character of thinking and language.

The turn is well under way with Heidegger's Letter on Humanism that is directed against an existentialism that stands for a world of human subjectivity, with absolute human freedom, and complete human responsibility—resonate with a humanist worldview. If we define humanism strictly as the belief in human centrality, then existentialism is a version of humanism—albeit an extreme one.

In contrast, human beings are not, in Heidegger’s philosophy, accorded the central role demanded by humanism after Being and Time.