Trevor,
I want to build on what on what I written in this post. There I was addressing the situation of being stranded in the desert in the film, A Japanese Story. This is a situation that involved anxiety due to the realization that their average or normal understanding with its rules and standards was of little help.
Hurbert Dreyfus says that:
"Holding onto this anxiety makes possible the openness, involvement and willingness to take risks that, in turn, make possible the acquisition of expertise. Resoluteness thus makes possible the virtuosity of the Heideggerian phronemos who, because he has held onto anxiety and so no longer takes for granted the banal public interpretation of events, can see new possibilities in the most ambiguous and conflicted situations and so can do something that all who share his world will retroactively recognize as what was factically possible at the time Such a person’s understanding of his society is richer and deeper than the average understanding and so he is generally more effective. But he is not yet fully authentic."
The situation of being stranded the Pilbara desert was such a situation. It in required resoluteness and decisive action to get out of being bogged and death. In an earlier post I said that the two characters affirmed an authentic existence for themselves in the face of certain death. Through this resoluteness they overcome their cultural lostness.
That situation in this film involves a primordial understanding of the current situation that makes possible a skillful coping in the current world (Aristotle) and a primordial understanding of Dasein itself that makes possible a transformation of self and world. This Christian moment is one of St Paul on the Road to Damascus and it is I presume the Kierkegaardian strand that runs through Being and Time. The two characters changed after that situation.They put their cultural prejudices and habits to one side and became lovers. They became different people.
Gary,
you can call me an ‘analytic philosopher’ if you like. I’m just not going to take any notice of it. One of the things I dislike the most about the Heideggerian stuff is that it’s always holier than thou. It’s like the Wagnerian who remarks, ‘What? You can’t recognise the combination of the such-and-such motif with the something-or-other motif?’ It’s like asking, ‘When are you going to mature?’
I think we need to distinguish between the philosophical baggage, the techniques, the dogmas, that a philosopher drags along with him, and what it is that he’s actually saying. This is what I was trying to say about Medlin. I completely agree with what he said and he values he proclaimed. Materialism is the truth about philosophy. There are no universals. Transcendence is to be found only in the particular and the ephemeral.
The philosophical concepts and ideas in which Medlin tried to express these views led him into contradiction. I’ll give you one anecdotal example:
Medlin was a consistent critic of romanticism, always from an outspokenly rationalist perspective, yet one night when I was going into the Capri Cinema on Goodwood Road Medlin was coming out with one of his sons. I was going to see Babette’s Feast, which was on in continuous session, so he’d just seen the film. He was keen to talk about it. He’d been to see it for the seventh time. It was one of the greatest films he had ever seen. I can’t remember his exact words but that was the substance. Medlin was a person who could become enthusiastic about things. The strange thing about his enthusiasm was that it was for one of the great works of 20th century romanticism and by the greatest romantic writer of the century. It tells the story of transformation through art, a messianic happening and also something in which Medlin believed to his very core.
This is the point, isn’t it? Who gives a stuff about the analytic baggage? Medlin preferred his contradictions than to ever deny the nature of art, to ever deny transcendence or materialism. It’s this basic set of ideas that I share with him. Now if you want to call me an analytic philosopher you can but I think that’s just something to bang me over the head with. Let’s talk about the issues of materialism and nominalism and transcendence that I just raised, and the we’ll see whose who with Heidegger and Adorno?
Trevor,
If you recall we had some problems about authenticity as a particular mode of life. Let me have another go at trying to make sense of what this could mean for our own mode of life in Australia.
The problem with authenticity had arisen from my argument in some earlier posts that the account of everydayness I gave, (based on Division I of Being and Time) with its tacit knowledge of coping and average public practices that are articulated in ordinary language was the source of the intelligibility of the world and of Dasein. This reworking of Aristotle's techne, (everyday skill and tacit knowledge) provides a way for us to make sense of things in our world.
Heidegger has characterized the first division about everydayness as "preparatory" in the sense of an incompleteness. I then showed that this average everydayness was an inferior form of understanding in Division II. As we have seen the distinction is made in terms of authentic and inauthentic. The average way of acting is to obey standards and rules.
So what is an authentic mode of living?
In that earlier post I quoted William Lange's understanding of authenticity:
"To be inauthentic is to live for the most part the lives of others, whereas to be authentically is to choose one’s own life in the face of one’s mortality. For the most part, Heidegger would say we live inauthentically, and only in certain key moments is authentic existence a possibility."
Herbert Dreyfus says that:
"Given the phenomenology of skill acquisition, it should be clear that the concrete Situation does not have some special metaphysical or private kind of intelligibility cut off from the everyday. Rather, intelligibility for the phronemos is the result of the gradual refinement of responses that grows out of long experience acting within the shared cultural practices."
In the film the appropriate thing to do for Sandy the Australian geologist, and Hiromitsu, the Japanese businessman, was not to just do what is generally regarded as right:eg., the rule of not leaving the car, or the rule of covering up the body from the sun. Rather it is more what past experience of being in the desert leads us to do in that particular situation: of how to respond in an especially appropriate way to being stranded out of mobile range. This appropriate way involves a special moment of decisive action that involves resoluteness.
Hiromitsu, the Japanese businessman, did this in the morning after the night in the desert when he tossed off his shame and embarrasment and laid down twigs and sticks in the sand to give the wheels some sort of grip. That resoluteness is an example of decisive action.
This decisive action (judgement and conduct) is then retroactively recognized by others as what is appropriate or right.
Exhausted. Depleted. Wasted. That is me today.
I'm unable to write. Or read. I just sit soaking up as much of the sun in my study that I can. Outside the shack it blows a gale.
Life has been sucked out of me by living and trying to do philosophy in the political life. That involves deconstructing the workings of instrumental reason as it constructs a water and an energy market and trying to figure out the history of this construction in national competition policy. A history that conceals, is covered over by a forgetting of sustainability and is rewritten as being concerned with efficient competitive markets.
I saw a film last night on video. It was called A Japanese Story. A review here and here.
This is the bland description of the philosophical heart of the film:
"But they come to see each other in a different light when their four-wheel-drive Land Cruiser gets bogged down in the desert miles from anywhere. They experience shared danger and develop a deep affection for each other. From then on the movie is anything but predictable."
This desert encounter has Heidegger all over it, even if Heidegger never gets mentioned. The word 'authentic existence' never gets mentioned in the film, but it is there in their sexual encounter that affirms both of them. That is how they understand themselves.
Trevor,
I managed to get away from Canberra late this afternoon on the direct flight to Adelaide. It's been a helluva fortnight working from 7.30 am to close to midnight each night. I went straight down to Victor Harbor after dropping my bags off in the city.
I'm bombed out and I need to try to recover my energy over the weekend. I'm really exhausted.
On a biographical note I came into postgraduate philosophy at Flinders University as a believer in scientific naturalism (eg., Marxism as a critical social science) and left as a critic of it. Most of my time as a postgraduate was spend in trying to find the tools to crawl out of the flybottle of analytic philosophy's understanding of scientific naturalism.
What I encountered in academic analytic philosophy is described in the paragraph below from this text by Matthew Ratcliffe:
"Much of current Anglophone philosophy of mind privileges the scientifically described world over our everyday experience of things and takes as its problematic the issue of how the mind, self or subject might be coherently integrated into the objective world of empirical science. The subject is construed from the start as a kind of thing in the world, whose capacity to experience other worldly things requires an explanation that does not go beyond the natural order. Hence the assumption is that subjects of experience, in order to be philosophically acceptable, must be shown to be just another part of the objective world."
Here is my response to all that Medlin stuff and reductive physicalism that you and many analytic philosophers find so attractive. More on this can be found here and here.The response in these posts highlight lived bodily existence as a way to deconstruct physicalism. Embodiment is very appropriate to the political life of Canberra since people need to have the tacit knowledge to read what is going on in terms of body language in order to get by and thrive in that hothouse. Embodiment is the key to understanding the political process within Parliament House. A lot of political activity in the hothouse involves, and depends upon, a hermeneutics of factical political life.
Other responses to physicalism you know about: the turn away from philosophy as part of natural science (eg., scientism) to a hermeneutical philosophy that interprets cultural meaning; and the return to everydayness in opposition to science. In previous posts I have highlighted the metaphysics of everydayness (being-in-the-world) described in this paragraph in Matthew Ratcliffe's text:
"Heidegger claims that the world does not first present itself to us as a collection of objects that we look upon from a detached perspective, but as a holistic web of interconnected equipment with which we are inextricably entangled. Objects only show up in the context of a background of purposes, concerns, practices and equipmental dealings that is constitutive of our Being-in-the-world. The subject-object perspective is thus a derivative, incomplete understanding, which is blinded by its failure to recognise the primacy of concernful engagement with things over theoretical scrutiny. Heidegger also proposes that, in our everyday dealings with things, we do not come across other selves as distinct entities, isolated from ourselves. Instead, we are always with others, in an irreducible togetherness or ‘Being-with-others’ that cannot be conveyed through a picture of fundamentally distinct selves relating to other such selves."
Another response by Heidegger to the metaphysics of physicalism is his emphasis on the centrality of mood to our everyday understanding of the world. As Mathew says, Heidegger argues that we do not relate to the world first and foremost through a detached, emotionally neutral stance.Rather we do so through our moods, which disclose the world and render it meaningful in a way that again defies objectivist articulation of scientific naturalism.
Trevor,
I'm very rushed. It's hectic in Canberra. I was going to write on Heidegger and historicity but I do not have time to think. Anyway I'm too tired to think. Maybe I can write about historicity when I get back to Adelaide on the weekend.
So I'll just link to this article by Eric Nelson. Eric says the following about historical understanding:
"Historical understanding refers not only to what is being understood (history), for which Heidegger criticized traditional hermeneutics and historiography, but to how it is understood as a way of our own being in a situation and world (historicity). My claim is that because understanding is historical in this double sense, understanding occurs according to an orientation that arises out of the experience of historicity in its facticity."
June 26
So what is meant by facticity? Eric Nelson addresses this by acknowledging that the word facticity is in one sense an unfortunate choice to convey both the unrecognized and unthematized everydayness and the fallenness, thrownness and uncanniness (ruination) of life. He says that:
"Acknowledging the problematic character of this word, other senses can still be clarified.....The word facticity is derived from the Latin factum. Factum refers to human activity and production. Factum is an artifact of human practice. Following this usage, Giambattisto Vico formulated the axiom verum factum; the true is the made....In humanist thought from Vico to Marx, humans know history insofar as they make history. The identity of subject and object guarantees the possibility of knowledge and action based on knowledge. The model of productive activity that this presupposes is inherently instrumental. The real is defined as a set of objects created and transformed by a subject. The meaningfulness of these objects is thus determined by their purposefulness and usefulness for the productive agent.The meaning of fact as something constructed was, however, increasingly lost in modernity. The notion of facticity functioned in the Kantian and positivist discourses of the Nineteenth-century as an appeal to truths that are not made by humans but given to them as incapable of being doubted. "Facticity" shared a similar fate with the word "positivity" in referring to the actual or real that cannot be circumvented."
"....state that the practice of phenomenology, which itself is a practice of formal and situated understanding, leads inevitably to hermeneutics. Responding to this claim does not, however, lead to a return to the traditional hermeneutics of the text but rather to the explication of the inherently contextual, perspectival and thus prejudicial character of life to which I belong.Historicity poses a question that requires phenomenology to be not only genetic but also hermeneutical. Insofar as it is to become a hermeneutics of factical life, rather than of the interpretation of texts, phenomenology is exposed to the generative and historical character of life."
"....designates both the already known insofar as it is [154] unknown, namely everydayness, and that which potentially resists, reverses, and places into question this understanding and its derivative forms, uncanniness. In experiencing uncanniness, the ruination and questionability of life are encountered."
Gary, writing this paper on Adorno’s metaphysics is really taking all my time and energy. The conference approaches (about five weeks away) and the end of my paper is not in sight. I’m feeling stressed by it. I have downloaded the two articles you mentioned and I will endeavour to read them as soon as I can. In the meantime there is not much time for anything other than reading for my paper. I thought I should say a few things about Australian materialism in case anybody reading is wondering what we can be talking about, however.
My remarks were admittedly brief but I think I said enough to differentiate between my own views and Australian materialism in general. Let me stick my neck on the block and just fire from the hip – the mind-body problem has been a big topic in Australian university philosophy, a philosophy that began life as the offspring of British analytic philosophy (Frege, Russell, Carnap, Popper, Wittgenstein, et cetera). Central state materialism is a widely regarded thesis among the Australians – briefly, the idea is that when we think physical events occur within our body. I haven’t got any problem with physicalism or whatever variants of the identity thesis there are as long as it is treated as trivial. Cognitive science wants to erect a whole new dogmatic metaphysics on the basis of this claim. It is bad stuff.
Most Australian philosophy is a kind of dogmatic materialism in something like this sense. And most Australian philosophers do not advocate historical materialism, and certainly not in the sense I attach to this concept. Lenin is enigmatic but I take him to be referring to what I mean by historical materialism when he says that idealism is closer to historical materialism than is dogmatic materialism. As far as I understand it, historical materialism is a philosophical advancement beyond idealism (if you’ll excuse the idealist language). It is the notion that we come to know the world as it conforms to our idea, as freedom and necessity are progressively reconciled. Historical materialism is the rejection through criticism of this argument. The world will never conform to our ideas. Philosophy must break with this way of seeing.
Historical materialism implies nominalism. Human existence has remained under the influence of myths, these being claims to timeless and incontrovertible truths – in essence, universals. The whole point of Adorno’s Dialectic Of Enlightenment is to chart the course of demythologisation in European history, a course that never runs smoothly but is continually turning back on itself. Historical materialism is seen as a development in the historical expression of this process.
Here is an interesting point and perhaps an indication of a site of tension in Adorno’s thought: in the aesthetic theory, Adorno equates modernism with a complete nominalism. He says of cubism that it is a system of aesthetic universals in an era when all such universals have been abolished. Modernism is not only nominalism, however, but is also historical materialism, as I have described it – that is, as a philosophy that abandons universals. Historical materialism is negative dialectics. Modernist – or historical materialist – metaphysics has to be universal-free – that is why Proust is of such significance to Adorno: remember, memory of a lost form is really regret for some past event. In Proust lost love provides all the material for what has traditionally been considered as metaphysical reflection.
Before I finish, I must say something about Brian Medlin, who was mentioned but not introduced in my previous entry. Brian Medlin was Professor of Philosophy at Flinders University in South Australia between the mid sixties and the late eighties – I might be a little bit out one way or another. He came to public prominence during the Vietnam War demonstrations and was also associated with student activism. Part of his notoriety within Australian philosophical circles was due to his 1st year course at Flinders, which was called ‘A Materialist History Of Philosophy’ and aimed to present the main events in the history of western philosophy from a broadly Marxist perspective – this was at a time when most of the other 1st year courses throughout Australia were composed of arguments for the existence of God, free will and determinism, Darwinism and the philosophy of mind, and informal reasoning (which, in deference to Kant, they called ‘critical reasoning’). Flinders philosophy suffered over a decade of isolation from the Australian philosophical community as a result of this curriculum development. I could say a lot more but this is enough to give any reader the flavour of the Flinders philosophy professor we are discussing.
Medlin established his early reputation through his work on central state materialism. I found him to be a mass of contradictions. I don’t think I am doing him an injustice if I say that epistemologically he was essentially a logicist and positivist. He was certainly a physicalist. When pressed he would admit that there weren’t any truths of history in the sense that there were truths of physics. This was coupled to a commitment to historical materialism, by which was meant Marx’s theory of history. You can see from what I’ve just said that this isn’t what I mean by historical materialism, although I am in broad agreement with Marx’s theory of history. But I am not talking about a theory of history – I am talking about a philosophy.
I suppose you could say that I am pursuing the same ends Medlin pursued and beginning at some of the same starting points, but we’re following different paths to get there, the high road and the low road. The only problem is, his highroad is a dead end.
Trevor,
in this post your write:
"The existentialists don’t subscribe to the idealist thesis of the universality of reason. Nonetheless, both existentialist versions [French and German] are about the mastery of the will, whereas for surrealism freedom lies in the relinquishment of the will."
This turn is what lies behind Heidegger's critical reading of Nietzsche in which he argues that Nietzsche's concept of superman to be the culmination of metaphysics.
Trevor,
I'm due to catch a plane back to Canberra for another week of sittings in a few hours. It promises to be a long and hectic week possibly the last before the election is called.
Some of the issues on which Heidegger and Adorno are in dispute can be highlighted from reading this text. These issues are:
the subject object problem and the displacement of traditional epistemology
the nature of metaphysics
the existentialism of Heidegger
the nature of philosophical terminology and the use of philosophical language
the emancipatory potential of modernity and cultural modernism
No doubt there are more issues.
This opens up a pathway whereby the philosophical relationship between Adorno and Heidegger is overshadowed by, and collapsed into, politics. That has led a tendency in philosophy to view one from the perspective of the other or to tackle their work on the basis of crude caricatures. It is an approach that I have rejected.
Dunno if this helps. Just complicates matters I reckon. This textual background to Adorno's critique of Heidegger may be of some use.
On the subject object problem Heidegger argued that the metaphysical distinction between the knowing subject and the object of thought was completely artificial in the sense that a subject in always already en-worlded, embedded in the ‘objects’ it seeks to know. A human mind is therefore simply unable to step ‘outside’ of the sensible world in order to represent that world from the point of view of some kind of omniscient interpreter.
There is the givenness of our being in the world; we wake to ‘thrownness’, ("enowed by Being") and are ‘called’ to make some kind of response. That response is a form of freedom.
Trevor,
This text may be of help to both of us. A conversation about Heidegger and Adorno is difficult, given that it is usually structured around the claim of the implicit connection between fundamental ontology and totalitarianism.
As I have mentioned previously I found Adorno's criticisms of Heidegger to be deeply polemical and I have pretty much interpreted Adorno as misrepresenting Heidegger almost beyond recognition--eg. the claim that Heidegger threw away rationality and embraced irrationalism and myth.
I do acknowledge that, and have sympathy with, Adorno's deep challenge to systematic large-scale theories (e.g., the Enlightenment narrative of the emancipation of the rational subject and instrumental reason) that subsumed the particularity of a certain historical condition under general principles and rules. This totalizing thinking was displaced by recognizing the specificity and singularity of events. I presume that Adorno's criticism is that Heidegger's use of language covers up the particularity and complexity of historical experience.
What I find disconcerting about Adorno is that he does not--refuses to--- recognize a similar movement in Heidegger. Or that he--and you for that matter-- do not acknowledge the similarities between Adorno and Heidegger: their critique of purposive (technical) rationality and modern epistemology; their attempts to base aesthetics on a notion of truth rather than beauty; their shared emphasis on temporality and their critique of modernity.
Trevor,
you pose the issue of Heidegger and history here. In that post you say:
"I find the same difficulty with [W] that comes up in conversation with you, and that is a certain equivocation over concepts such as that of anxiety. It seems to me that both of you want to see anxiety as an historical and an existential category. I’m not saying that Heidegger does this but I do feel that somehow there is a struggle between history and metaphysics that is never quite resolved in Heidegger’s philosophy."
I do read Heidegger very historically-- pretty much like Hegel reads the history of western philosophy. Philosophy is entrenched in history and it has its own history. If we put Heidegger's claim about western metaphysics in Gadamer's terms, then we can say that Heidegger sees Western metaphsyics as prejudiced in the sense of operating with a bias. That bias or shift began with Plato. This review of this book explains this bias quite well. It says that:
"Rather than being the "guiding spirit of Western thinking" in a positive sense, Heidegger regards Plato as an early symptom of decline. His philosophy began an "intensification and hardening of 'theoreticism', the drive toward technical and objectifying modes of knowledge and, with it, the oblivion of any more primordial or more reverential kind of existence".
As the reviewer says that if "Plato is the beginning of Western thought, then that beginning, Heidegger says, is still with us." He then connects this to instrumental reason when he says that we "still see the world as an object of knowledge to be understood, manipulated and utilised. It is an anthropocentric attitude that has profound consequences. Heidegger claims it set us on course toward nihilism and I would add, a technological mode of being."
That is the way I understand history and metaphysics in Heidegger. Where is the equivocation?
Trevor,
Well well well. I suspected that you may have a lot of sympathy with all that Australian materialism stuff. There we have a fundamental dividing line. I turned to Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger to dig my out of that particular materialist flybottle that was so hegemonic in academic philosophy at that end of last century. You are quite right. The kind of modern scientific metaphysics (technological mode of being), with its distorted lens of representational thinking, that you find attractive is what Heidegger sets out to destruct.
Just a quick note in a free moment late at night about philosophy and death. Death is an integral part of political life. Political death is experienced most acutely at the moment. To give it a Heideggerian twist political life, does and must, take the fundamental orientation towards death as part of its practice.
Death is a key part concern of Heidegger's.
I have argued that the previous posts on everydayness outlined a social ontology or metaphysics of being. Outlining that was the task of Division 1 in Being and Time, where our comportment is one of care, which manifests itself as concern and as solicitude. The horizon of the future shapes the way things show up for us in that the projects that define us extend into the indefinite future. Thus they run ultimately up against death. Death is a non-place, a no-where which is non-being and unrepresentable.
So Being is fundamentally linked to its own negativity, its own non-Being. ( A reworking of Hegel's Logic?) When pus within the ontology of everydayness it means that we recognize that our lives are limited—and therefore shaped—by death.
In our everydayness we move toward and the rebound back from the possibility of death. Death gives rise to an "uncanny" feeling of not being at home in the things with which we are most familiar.
Heidegger then makes a distinction between inauthentic and authentic being. The implication is that the structure of the human world, so far as it has been described to us, and everydayness, belongs only to the inauthentic being of Dasein. What authentic being might be is still something that we do not know.
Hence we have authenticity and inauthenticity as possible ways of existing. The above modes of care (concern and solicitude) are disclosed authentically by resoluteness. Resoluteness anticipates and is constantly certain of death--- it is always face to face with the certainty of death. The argument is that self-awareness leads to the authenticity of a life in the face of dread.
Authentic being is linked to death.
Hey Gary,
I heard on the grapevine that ‘Philosophical Conversations’ was mentioned in Samela Harris’s column in the Adelaide Advertiser. I don’t know what was said. I didn’t see the article, but guess what – we’re bickering away over Heidegger and Adorno and somewhere out there people are watching and reading.
Talking of bickering, here is a reply to your entry of June 15. It deals with the idea of death, which is central to Heidegger’s metaphysics, and is essentially a paraphrasing – with lots of quotations – of the lecture ‘On Dying Today’ from Adorno’s Metaphysics: Concept And Problems. It is in the sense specified here relating to the issue of death that I see Heidegger’s metaphysics as being dogmatic.
One of the first points Adorno makes in lecture is that the ‘failure of culture does not give thought a kind of free passage to some natural state’. There is no way to ‘appropriate metaphysics as a collection of pure categories which are immediate to consciousness, since knowledge can never disown its own mediateness, … its dependence on culture in every sense’. A metaphysics that proceeded ‘as if it were rendered immediate by some allegedly primal questions which elevate it above culture’ is blinded to its own conditions. Knowledge cannot repudiate its mediations but merely reflect them.
Death has been used as a way to break into metaphysics but the impotence of the metaphysics of death is neither to do with the fruitlessness of brooding nor with the belief that in the face of death a posture of readiness is seemly. The problem with this metaphysics is that it ‘necessarily degenerates into a kind of propaganda for death, elevating it to something meaningful, … in the end, preparing people to receive the death intended for them by their societies and states as joyfully as possible’. Reflections on death tend to be of ‘such a necessarily general and formal kind that they amount to tautologies’.
The inability of consciousness to extract meaning from death has to do not only with the absolute inaccessibility of the subject of the conversation and nor is it simply a consequence of the fact that the experience of death is ‘undoubtedly determined in part by society’. Beyond this, Adorno maintains, human consciousness is not able to withstanding the experience of death. Humans are the only animals with a general consciousness of the fact that they must die but, for reasons to do with social arrangements, ‘our mental organisation is not equal to this knowledge’. We are so governed by self-preservation and self-perpetuation ‘that we can only have this experience in a curiously abstract form’.
Consciousness is too weak to withstand the experience of death because it imagines itself to be something eternal, and so ‘it fortifies itself against anything which might remind it of its own unsteady floor, its own frailty’. Only when no human being fails to realise her or his potential might we be reconciled to death, and this is indicative of the extent to which the metaphysics of death is ‘bound up with history and with the deepest strata of humanity’s historical life’.
The metaphysics of death is more than merely solace because humans lost that which in earlier times made death bearable, ‘the unity of experience’. Resurrected metaphysical systems act as a kind of substitute for this, conveying the message that things are not so bad and trying to ‘reassure people about certain essentialities which … have become problematic’, above all time. People’s awareness of time, the possibility of their continuous experience of time, ‘has been deeply disrupted’. In response, ‘the current metaphysical systems are now attempting to rescue this conception of time, which is no longer accessible to experience, and to present temporality as a constituent of existence itself’. There is a tendency in such systems to conjure up that which is no longer experienced, and this is the reason why this kind of thinking is in sympathy with archaic conditions, especially ‘agrarian conditions or those of a simple, small-town barter economy’. Epic deaths are not possible because life no longer has any wholeness. In such circumstances, ‘the notion of wholeness is a kind of ersatz metaphysics’, attempting to underline notions of meaningful existence with ‘the positivist credentials of something immediately given’. It is this idea of completeness and meaningfulness that must be abandoned.
As people become aware that they have not really lived, death becomes more frightening, taking on the guise of a misfortune. ‘It is as if, in death, they experienced their own reification: that they were corpses from the first… The terror of death today is largely the terror of seeing how much the living resemble it. And it might therefore be said that if life were lived rightly, the experience of death would also be changed radically, in its innermost composition… Death and history form a constellation.’ This brings to mind the title of Céline’s book, Death On The Installment Plan, an image of death as average everyday life.
It is this constellation of death and history that is missing from Heidegger’s theory and necessarily so because once it is taken into account the whole edifice of his metaphysics collapses. Without the historically untarnished experience of death there is no way of defining authentic existence, and whether this is fleshed out in terms of inward withdrawal or social interrogation it matters not. There is just the same nothing other than reified history dressed up as existential categories.
I have also been discussing this with W. and I find the same difficulty with him that comes up in conversation with you, and that is a certain equivocation over concepts such as that of anxiety. It seems to me that both of you want to see anxiety as an historical and an existential category. I’m not saying that Heidegger does this but I do feel that somehow there is a struggle between history and metaphysics that is never quite resolved in Heidegger’s philosophy.
I don’t see this as in any way making Heidegger into a whipping boy. It is a perfectly reasonable philosophical criticism. Adorno may be wrong on some point or points. If he is I am sure it will come up in future discussion and we’ll explore the matter further. It is certainly making me look much more closely at what Adorno is saying. That is good in itself.
Before I forget, there is one other point I want to take up. You say that Heidegger ‘delivered on what Adorno only gestured to in his Dialectic Of Enlightenment: an alternative to an instrumental reason that dominates nature.’ I am not sure that this is quite the right way of seeing what is going on in this book – I presume you mean the book by Horkheimer and Adorno, and not just the concept of the dialectic of enlightenment.
The book turns on an historical thesis regarding the role of enlightenment in the development of European culture. This concept of enlightenment doesn’t just point at a period towards the end of the 18th century but at something that reaches back to the origins of this culture. It refers to a process of rationalisation that leads to the demythologisation and secularisation of culture, but this is not a straightforward process. Rather, enlightenment can only be conceived as a struggle of opposites, on the one hand seen as the rational realisation of the sovereign individual, and on the other as a nihilistic power opposed to life. In the Dialectic Of Enlightenment, this conception is attributed to Nietzsche. The danger in the dialectic of enlightenment is that it ever threatens to revert into myth. This is what Adorno sees happening at the present time.
Myth is always a response to the yearning for the eternal that is a part of the dialectic. I suppose that, put crudely (and this is me and not Adorno saying it), all accounts of universals are myths. In this one respect at least, Adorno is like Goodman and Quine – he is a committed nominalist. The current return of enlightenment to myth is because of a new universal – universal reason.
In Adorno’s view, this cannot be avoided by reverting to unreason, by giving up on the dialectic, as he sees Heidegger doing. Adorno is committed to the idea of enlightenment and that means turning the course of this dialectic back from the path of myth to the path of history, completing Kant’s project. Now, right or wrong, that seems to me fundamentally different from what Heidegger is doing.
Listen, Gary, one last point: you have to remember that I am a Medlinist – perhaps I am the only one. I won’t go into all the details now. It means nominalism, central state materialism and historical materialism, among other things. When I first read Adorno I was like a stranger in a strange land who suddenly comes across someone who speaks his language. I felt I knew him well. If I thought Heidegger was also speaking this language I’d go with him but I don’t think he is. But I’m not trying to whip him. I’m trying to say why I don’t think his is the path to take.
Trevor,
I'm in Canberra this week. So my posts can only be short questions developed when I can snatch a free moment from dealing with energy policy.
In this post you wrote:
"This is where this approach differs from Heidegger’s dogmatic metaphysics, which tries to throw tradition away and make up its own. Instead of attempting any metaphysical resurrection, Adorno and Benjamin are concerned with the critical appropriation of the Western philosophical tradition."
Does Heidegger throw the tradition away and make up his own? I would have thought that he rebuilds through an interrogating the tradition. That interrogation discloses the technological mode of being and he develops (rebuilds) on centred around letting be, poetics and dwelling.
Why is not his ecological mode of being not a critical appropriation of the Western philosophical tradition? Did he not go back and re-read the Greeks?
It seems to me that Heidegger is made into a whipping boy to make Benjamin and Adorno the good guys. Heidegger actually delivered on what Adorno only gestured to in his Dialectic of Enlightenment: an alternative to an instrumental reason that dominates nature.
Gary,
I’ve been going through your June 12 entry and I have these comments:
1. The French existentialists advocate an inner withdrawal into a private meaningfulness from a nihilistic world. This presupposes that being is the subject, the individual who does the withdrawing.
2. You suggest that for Heidegger being is the community – at least, that is what I take you to be saying, although I suspect that I detect an ambiguity here. We’re born into an historical situation in which we are constrained, which conditions our engagement and the way we conceptualise. To live authentically means to break with these constraints. So far we’re still in step with the French existentialists.
3. Here’s the first difference: authenticity is a way of interrogating our historical existence, rather than just being a way of coping – as, essentially, it is for the French.
4. In order to be able to carry out this interrogation, we need self-understanding, which comes not from negative dialectics but from care and concern within a world of potentialities. Freedom is acting to realise these potentialities. Authentic existence is resolute commitment to this pursuit.
5. Awareness of, and preparedness for, death allows us to choose between contending potentialities.
The first thing I’d say is that both versions of existentialism are subjectivist and they both recognise a collective, albeit in one case a nihilistic aggregation and in the other a community. The dispute between the versions is over how to establish meaning and to live freely. In the French view, meaning is established by breaking inwardly from the collective, and freedom comes from establishing this meaning. In the German view, meaning comes from the great universal of death in its interrogation of the collective, and freedom from the pursuit of some consequent collective potential.
Bataille compares existentialism with surrealism:
‘The profound difference between surrealism and the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre hangs on the character of the existence of liberty. If I do not seek to dominate it, liberty will exist: it is poetry; words, no longer striving to serve some useful purpose, set themselves free and so unleash the image of free existence, which is never bestowed except in the instant. This seizure of the instant – in which the will is relinquished at the same time – certainly has a decisive value. It is true that the operation is not without difficulties, which surrealism has revealed but not resolved. The possibilities brought into play go further than they seem. If we were genuinely to break the servitude by which the existence of the instant is submitted to useful activity, the essence would suddenly be revealed in us with an unbearable clarity. At least, everything leads one to believe so. The seizure of the instant cannot differ from ecstasy (reciprocally one must define ecstasy as the seizure of the instant – nothing else – operating despite the concerns of the mystics).’
This contrasts with the kind of meaning the two existentialist groups pursue in the above account, where rising above or breaking with the collective in some way is the key to meaning and freedom. It is essentially the same idea that is found in German idealism but it is achieved in a different way. The existentialists don’t subscribe to the idealist thesis of the universality of reason. Nonetheless, both existentialist versions are about the mastery of the will, whereas for surrealism freedom lies in the relinquishment of the will.
On the other hand, the surrealist position is very close to that of Adorno and Benjamin. So, once again, I would emphasize the differences between the Heidegger-type approach and the Adorno-type approach. The negative approach demands that we are critical of any universal we might erect to justify our own existence as authentic, and it requires that we look for the reification just where we feel most certain and comfortable in our certainty. There is no abstract certainty in death – there is only death and dying today, and our memories of certain events. As Proust says, a memory of a certain form is always regret for a certain event. Regret isn’t a universal but it tends to function like one. It helps to focus the light of redemption.
Gary,
The messianism and redemption in Adorno and Benjamin leaves you cold, especially its alien Judaic form. I’m sorry to hear it.
Let me try to give Adorno’s main point in a nutshell. Whatever it is that theology is after still plays a role in our lives, our experience, our consciousness. When we say ‘this is shithouse!’ there is something, no matter how intangible, against which we compare the unpleasantness. You might say that this is the metaphysical residue not soaked up by Kantian epistemology. This residue is what theology has always been pursuing, although theology has become secularised, rationalised and demythologised through the process of reflective metaphysics, which has gone on to perform the same process on itself. The result of this tradition is that the residue sought by theology has passed into the hands of those philosophers willing to take up the unfinished process of metaphysical development.
Okay, what’s messianism about? It is the drive to end oppression. Messianic thought draws on two sources: 1) revelation, which is essentially the result of theoretical deduction, and 2) the direct experience of oppression – this is according to Scholem.
The messianic age is the end of history. History is the history of oppression, the history of human beings judging other human beings. This is where at least this version of Judaism differs from Christianity. The Christian idea of the day of judgment is a day just like any other. In the messianic age there will be no judgment. There will only be laughter. Not only Jews subscribe to this idea. You can also find it in Karen Blixen’s writings and it underpins the thought of numerous secular Christians (if this last notion isn’t an oxymoron).
Another idea that comes from the Jews is that listening to tradition is the way in which we prepare for the onset on the messianic age. This relates to the ban on speaking about God. We can only talk about the ungodly. This is where this approach differs from Heidegger’s dogmatic metaphysics, which tries to throw tradition away and make up its own. Instead of attempting any metaphysical resurrection, Adorno and Benjamin are concerned with the critical appropriation of the Western philosophical tradition. This is what leads Adorno to his view of contemporary metaphysics.
The problem I have with your attitude to Adorno in your June 10 entry is that you grab a few lines and ask what seems to me a rather childish question – why is it so? – instead of completing the hermeneutic task – this is from Gadamer – of finding out what Adorno means by these sentences. It reads as if you’ve already made up your mind.
You don’t like words like ‘redemption’ and ‘messianism’. Okay. I’ll say it in the terms of my previous discussion: ‘The only philosophy to be responsibly practised in the face of despair is to attempt to contemplate all things from the perspective of the end of oppression. Knowledge that is not from this vantage point is just reconstruction, mere technique.’
If you read the whole passage you’ll find an implicit critique of Heidegger’s position there: ‘The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered up to the world.’ Adorno could be describing Heidegger and his embrace of Nazism, which no doubt from his abstract perspective seemed to be just the thing he was seeking in his philosophy.
I prefer Benjamin’s position: write in such a way that your words are never useful to fascists. This is the hardest thing in the world to do but it is a worthwhile goal.
Trevor ,
I want to go back and pick up this post here on Heidegger on authenticity. If you recall I suggested that authenticity opened up a pathway that explored human finitude, death, nothingness. It is this pathway which has led many observers to associate Heidegger with existentialism.
As I understand it the French existentialists picked up on Heidegger's category of authenticity, interpret this as severing human beings from public life, throwing us back on ourselves as individuals, leaving us alone to create our private meanings and values in a nihilistic world of nothingness. On this interpretation existential is a humanism that presupposes an ontology of the individual subject.
If you recall I argued against it. The argument was directed at the individualist ontology of existentialism in favour of a more communitarian one. Heidegger says that when we’re born, we’re “thrown” into a historical world; we are involuntary recipients of family, culture, and nationality—into which we fall. “Fallen” means that we rest in the “place” where we have landed. We are being-in-the world in that we are concretely engaged in a specific historical situation and we have a particular conception (interpretation) of what it is be in that situation.
We can never be authentic if we remain in the fallen state and just go with the flow of the opinions and conventions of those around us. The background public interpretations of our social practices determine our understanding of being and provide the possibilities of who we are and can become. So we are permeated with publicness, convention, averageness.
Authenticity is a way of interrogating our throwness in every day life, rather than just coping with our daily affairs: it is a form of freedom within a life embedded in a shared world. Connecting authenticity to freedom is where we had got to in the previous posts.
For Heidegger, authentic existence begins from self-understanding. This is not negative freedom (freedom from opinion or convention) since it is tied to care (being concerned about, or taking care) within a world of possibilities that may or may not actualize. Freedom is positive freedom, as it is linked to actuality (or self-actualization) that is realized is resolutedness.
Heidegger argues that authentic life is possible if our being-toward-death is resolutely confronted:
"Once one has grasped the finiteness of one's existence, it snatches one back from the endless multiplicity of possibilities which offer themselves as closest to one - those of comfortableness, shirking and taking things lightly - and brings Dasein into the simplicity of its fate. This is how we designate Dasein's primordial historicism which lies in authentic resoluteness and in which Dasein hands itself down to itself, free for death, in a possibility which it has inherited and yet has chosen."
Trevor,
I have to admit that the messianic/redemption current in Adorno and Benjamin leaves me cold. It is alien, especially in its Judaic form.
The Christian form makes no sense to me in living my life. It is an a old cultural form that is all about the deliverance of a new age/salvation/an ideal era of peace that is coupled to deliverance from sin through the incarnation, sufferings and death of Christ or atonement for guilt. The only way that I can relate to all of this is through Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathrustra.
I recoil when I read paragraph 153 in Adorno's Minima Moralia:
"Finale: 'The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique."
But for ethics? Why not Nietzsche's revaluation of values in the face of the process of nihilism. After all Minima Moralia is concerned with the teaching of the good life. Here is opening part of Dedication:
"The melancholy science from which I make this offering to my friend relates to a region that from time memorial was regarded as the true field of philosophy, but which, since the latter's conversion into method, has lapsed into intellectual neglect, sententious whimsy and finally oblivion: the teaching of the good life. What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own. He who wishes to know the truth about life in its immediacy must scrutinize its etranged form, the objective powers that determine individual existence even in its most hidden recesses."
The melancholy science links back to Nietzsche's The Gay Science; a book written by someone who knew they lived on the edge of disaster; yet whose title suggests a light-hearted defiance of convention, immoralism and revaluation of values. It is a poetic philosophy that not only sings and sizzles about life, it also affirms life.
Let me quote some of para 377 Bk V of the Gay Science:
"We who are homeless. Among Europeans today there is no lack of those who are entitled to call themselves homeless in a distinctive and honorable sense: it is to them that I especially commend my secret wisdom and gaya scienza. For their fate is hard, their hopes are uncertain; it is quite a feat to devise some comfort for them—but what avail? We children of the future, how could we be at home in this today? We feel disfavor for all ideals that might lead one to feel at home even in this fragile, broken time of transition; as for its "realities," we do not believe that they will last. The ice that still supports people today has become very thin; the wind that brings the thaw is blowing; we ourselves who are homeless constitute a force that breaks open ice and other all too thin "realities."We "conserve" nothing; neither do we want to return to any past periods; we are not by any means "liberal"; we do not work for "progress"; we do not need to plug up our ears against the sirens who in the market place sing of the future: their song about "equal rights," "a free society," "no more masters and no servants" has no allure for us. We simply do not consider it desirable that a realm of justice and concord should be established on earth...."
"We who are homeless are too manifold and mixed racially and in our descent, being "modern men," and consequently do not feel tempted to participate in the mendacious racial self-admiration and racial indecency that parades in Germany today as a sign of a German way of thinking and that is doubly false and obscene among the people of the "historical sense." We are, in one word—and let this be our word of honor—good Europeans, the heirs of Europe, the rich, oversupplied, but also overly obligated heirs of thousands of years of European spirit. As such, we have also outgrown Christianity and are averse to it—precisely because we have grown out of it, because our ancestors were Christians who in their Christianity were uncompromisingly upright: for their faith they willingly sacrificed possessions and position, blood and fatherland. We—do the same. For what? For our unbelief? For every kind of unbelief? No, you know better than that, friends! The hidden Yes in you is stronger than all Nos and Maybes that afflict you and your age like a disease; and when you have to embark on the sea, you emigrants, you, too, are compelled to this by—a faith!"
I have to admit that in terms of living my life Nietzsche speaks to me in a way that Adorno does not.
Gary,
I'm still being completely consumed by my conference paper, so I thought that what I could do is post the introduction to my paper. Here it is:
Secularity, messianism and redemption
In the thought of Theodor W. Adorno
by Trevor Maddock
Perhaps no one person typifies 20th century German thought more than the philosopher and musicologist, Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969). Born in Frankfurt to a middle-class Jewish father and Catholic mother, Adorno experienced directly the First World War, then the Weimar Years and the advent of Nazism, the life of a refugee, and the post-war reconstruction of Germany. He attended the University of Frankfurt, studied composition with Alban Berg, and advised Thomas Mann on the musical aspects of the writing of his great elegy to the 20th century, Doctor Faustus. Adorno returned to German academic life after the war and died at the height of the student upheavals in the last years of the 1960s – to some extent he may have even died because of those upheavals. Secular in orientation, his critical philosophy owes much to radical strains in German Jewish thought in the era following World War One. This was a sub-culture searching for its Judaism in time of upheaval and was replete with theological concepts and ideas. Adorno’s major influence at this time was the idiosyncratic Jewish philosopher, Walter Benjamin, who committed suicide while fleeing the Nazis in 1940, leaving behind some of the most unique and important writings of the century. Messianism, redemption and secularism were the constant foci of Benjamin’s attention. The following paper shows how these ideas manifest themselves in Adorno’s thought and give what otherwise would be a relentlessly negative view of both culture and the life that sustains it a touch of something positive, not the last and final judgment but something different. Negation, writes Adorno, ‘can pass over into pleasure but not into positivity’. The transformation of negativity is indeed something greater than judgment, far greater – it is laughter.
While living in the US in the years during and immediately after the Second World War, Adorno wrote an aphoristic work, called Minima Moralia. In his book on aesthetics, he describes black as the dominant colour of the 20th century palette, and it is the literary equivalent of black that colours Minima Moralia. It draws on a ‘melancholy science’. The book is at one with Benjamin’s earlier collection of aphorisms, One-Way Street. The Australian literary theorist, Dorothy Green remarked of Minima Moralia that:
'the twenty years between its first publication in 1951 and its availability in English in the 1970s [have] provided appalling evidence of the truth of its central prediction: that there would be a further advance in the collectivisation and dehumanisation of mankind, which capitalism now demands for its survival.'
The book covers a range of topics from the most personal to the most general, comprising direct experiences, confessions, observations and criticisms, and philosophical reflections. It is in the course of such reflections that the concept of redemption is raised, at the very end of the book, as if it and it alone has the power to make sense of this work and the world that inspired it. It is as if only redemption has the capacity to bring about an aesthetic transformation, to lighten the blackness, to overcome the melancholy – melancholy – and indeed that is exactly what Adorno intends. In an aphorism entitled ‘Finale’ he writes:
'The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from self contact with its objects – this alone is the task of thought. It is the simplest of all things, because consummate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror-image of its opposite. But it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hair’s breadth, from the scope of existence, whereas we well know that any possible knowledge must not only be first wrested from what is, if it shall hold good, but is also marked, for this very reason, by the same distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape. The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered up to the world. Even its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the sake of the possible, but beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters.'
Green’s claim to the contrary, Minima Moralia is not a work of prescience or prophesy – in this sense there is no apocalyptic vision in Adorno’s writings. In the same context, Benjamin said of Kafka that the latter listened to tradition and he who listens hard does not see. This is also true of Adorno. His conception of philosophy comes not from some prescient vision of the future of a world that created Auschwitz and the atomic bomb but from the philosophical tradition itself, a tradition that demands not only the perspective of messianism and redemption, but also – and at first glance paradoxically – that thought be completely secularised if such a perspective is to be found. As he remarks:
'The idea of truth is supreme among the metaphysical ideas, and this is where it takes us. It is why one who believes in God cannot believe in God, why the possibility represented by the divine name is maintained, rather, by him who does not believe.'
What follows is an account of Adorno’s approach particularly to the tradition of Western metaphysics inaugurated by Aristotle and brought to an apparent end by Immanuel Kant’s Critique Of Pure Reason. It is Adorno’s approach to this tradition that leads him ultimately to secularism, redemption and messianism.
Trevor,
I'm going to be on the road for a days in the Riverland.
Worst and Best
in the hospitals and jails
it's the worst
in madhouses
it's the worst
in penthouses
it's the worst
in skid row flophouses
it's the worst
at poetry readings
at rock concerts
at benefits for the disabled
it's the worst
at funerals
at weddings
it's the worst
at parades
at skating rinks
at sexual orgies
it's the worst
at midnight
at 3 a.m.
at 5:45 p.m.
it's the worst
falling through the sky
firing squads
that's the best
thinking of India
looking at popcorn stands
watching the bull get the matador
that's the best
boxed lightbulbs
an old dog scratching
peanuts in a celluloid bag
that's the best
spraying roaches
a clean pair of stockings
natural guts defeating natural talent
that's the best
in front of firing squads
throwing crusts to seagulls
slicing tomatoes
that's the best
rugs with cigarette burns
cracks in sidewalks
waitresses still sane
that's the best
my hands dead
my heart dead
silence
adagio of rocks
the world ablaze
that's the best
for me.
Charles Bukowski
Gary,
This is just a brief note to say that I am still reading your contributions but I am absolutely snowed under at the moment, which is why I have not posted anything for some time. Please keep your stuff coming. I'll get something out as soon as possible.
Just quickly - you wrote something very brief (perhaps too brief) on empiricist philosophy that intrigued me. What did you have in mind? Can you say more? I'd like to take up the discussion but I'm not sure what you are getting at.
Trevor,
Some late night speculation.
Australian philosophy (empiricism) has remained in the thrall of a spectatorial epistemology based on a subjectivist self, reflecting on an objective world exterior to it.
Its rhetoric is steppped in visual metaphors of clarity, theory is based on observation, science was centred on manipulation and control of nature, an interested science is based on visual manipulation; the modern humanist subject stands apart from the world he surveyed and manipulated.
That is the philosophical core of our Australian culture. This staring aggressively at the land was embodied in in the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electricity Scheme of the 1940s. The engineers and technocrats never saw themselves a part of,or situated within, the ecology of the country.
The ecological devastation of that scheme for the Murray-Darling Basin was what remained hidden. It was disclosed 50 years latter.
Some People
some people never go crazy.
me, sometimes I'll lie down behind the couch
for 3 or 4 days.
they'll find me there.
it's Cherub, they'll say, and
they pour wine down my throat
rub my chest
sprinkle me with oils.
then, I'll rise with a roar,
rant, rage -
curse them and the universe
as I send them scattering over the
lawn.
I'll feel much better,
sit down to toast and eggs,
hum a little tune,
suddenly become as lovable as a
pink
overfed whale.
some people never go crazy.
what truly horrible lives
they must lead.
Charles Bukowski
I first mentioned Heidegger & poetics here. In the light of the previous postings of Bukowski's poems I thought it may be useful to briefly describe the reason behind Heidegger's turn in the 1930s from philosophical to poetic language as best-equipped to reveal being. The turn was based on the differences between philosophy and poetry and his reading of the pre-Socratics.
The reasoning here is that the language we use in everyday life often conceals as much as it reveals. Our everyday or common language is used to communicate the common, everyday work of the world and is geared to quick, efficient communication. We use the words to communicate and negotiate with others in everyday life but in doing so we do not have to think very deeply about the words themselves. We rarely have to think deeply at all because the prosaic nature of our instrumental language does not call for it.
Poets like Bukowski use language differently. Bukowski uncovers a world that is hidden by instrumental language.
According to Heidegger our task is to find another kind of language that lets beings be, to engage them and uncover them. Instead of pulling beings (trees, birds and rivers) out of the world to look at them and "figure them out," the letting things be is to let beings show themselves to Dasein in their unconcealedness. So we need a language that uncovers the world, depicts and explores the various relationships between beings.
Hence Heidegger's turn to poetics.
Heidegger's interpretations of Hölderlin, begun in 1934 after he resigned as the president of the University of Freiburg. These are often seen as pre-modern. According to Heidegger's interpretations of Holderin's poetry, the aim of Hölderin's poetics was to revive an religion of art that was based on the models of classic antiquity. This would restore a meaningful center to modern society, which had lost its point of reference.
In Heidegger's poetics the reference to the past, in the form of remembering poetry was capable of evoking an element of the future in the present. The aim of Heidegger's concept of remembering poetry is a language capable of shaking the foundations of instrumental calculative reason; poetic language is seen as a means of opening up a new experience of time, which will allow people to become historical beings. The poet is a key figure in the building and the
preserving of the historical world.
Heidegger's poetics investigated the links between the historical nature of human life and the role of poetry in the emergence and continuity of historical tradition. Heidegger's notion of remembrance (recollection) is not a retrieval of the past, as it is in psychoanalysis. Instead it is a way of moving into the future by taking over one's destiny, authentically and with resolve. This kind of recollection might enable human beings to "dwell poetically on this earth."
short order
I took my girlfriend to your last poetry reading,
she said.
yes, yes? I asked.
she's young and pretty, she said.
and? I asked.
she hated your
guts.
then she stretched out on the couch
and pulled off her
boots.
I don't have very good legs,
she said.
all right, I thought, I don't have very good
poetry; she doesn't have very good
legs.
scramble two.
Charles Bukowski