Evans Experientialism
 Evans Experientialism
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| The Ethical Alpha and the Linguistic Omega: Heidegger's Anti-Semitism and the Inner Affinity Between Germany and Greece |
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The Ethical Alpha and the Linguistic Omega: Prof. Babette E. Babich At the extreme limit of suffering [Leiden:
pathos] nothing indeed remains but the conditions
of time or space. At this moment, the man
forgets himself because he is entirely within
the moment; the God forgets himself because
he is nothing but time; and both are unfaithful.
Time because at such a moment it undergoes
a categoric change and beginning and end
simply no longer rhyme within it; man because,
at this moment, he has to follow the categorical
turning away and that thus, as a consequence,
he can simply no longer be as he was in the
beginning. [Hölderlin, "Remarks on Oedipus:
3"] Introduction
In what follows, I discuss the rhetoric of
equivocation, that is, the logical ambiguity
that advances the causes of the politics
of suspicion in the case of Heidegger's Nazism,
his anti-Semitism, his silence. The equivocation
is between Heidegger's Nazism (that is, his
party membership) and Heidegger's Nazism
(that is: his anti-Semitism). The first assertion
concerns Heidegger's political affiliation
with Nazism and the matter of Heidegger's
biographical fact as the first Nazi Rector
of the University of Freiburg and Nazi party
member until the end of World War II, that
is, as a party member up until such an affiliation
ceased to have any meaning. One can argue
that these facts of Heidegger's own life
imply the second general and effective sense
of Nazism as an expression of anti-Semitism:
Heidegger's Nazism thus tacitly condoning
the sense of the party line against Jews
to the extreme of the mass murder of six
million Jews, the Holocaust which resulted,
following precisely from that same "party
line." Heidegger's political Nazism,
his party affiliation, redounds to his affective
Nazism: his anti-Semitism.
Working neither to validate nor to invalidate
such an argument in its possible expression
(the points mentioned above outline but do
not articulate such an argument), the functioning
of equivocation as a rhetorical figure sidesteps
argument altogether. In this discussion,
I am not seeking to make formal, logical,
or any other points against such a rhetorical
campaign. Rather I seek to identify the workings
of such rhetoric in what is said about Heidegger's
Nazism. This is not to say that a formal
analysis could not be offered only that to
date such an analysis has not been offered
just because such a formal argument or proof
is not necessary where what is at stake is
persuasion on the matter of Heidegger's (political)
persuasion and his (political) persuasiveness.
All in all, an ethical issue in the realm
of logic, a domain traditionally ruled by
rhetoric.
On another rhetorical level, Heidegger's
silence on Nazism (and anti-Semitism) is
the literal and metaphorical enthymeme for
the same kind of ethical judgment concerning
political and affective orientation. An enthymeme,
when it is not defined as a Ciceronian rhetorical
figure ending in two contraries, is the logical
description of a syllogism consisting of
only two propositions, that is, a syllogism
in which one premise is suppressed. Thus
one may conclude, as important contemporary
thinkers have already argued, that the connection
between Heidegger and National Socialism
is not only racist but impenitent, pernicious
evil. In this way, the connection between
Heidegger and Nazism not only renders the
man morally culpable but his philosophy morally
corrupt and, where the turns of argument
move fast and easy in enthematic connection,
it also renders the study of his philosophy
morally corrupting. Secondarily then, it
is necessary to consider Heidegger's silence
as itself constituting the enthymeme legitimating
the suspicions of Farías and almost all of
Heidegger's recent commentators, right and
left, on this point. These commentators do
not suppress what Heidegger simply does not
say. A logical or rhetorical figure is not
necessarily telic. But by Heidegger's silence
he gives voice to his guilt, precisely because
anything said is also impotent before the
tribunal of right. In the end I seek to indicate
but not to prove, where, once again, all
arguments directed to this question are inherently
enthematic, the philosophical relevance of
the discussion of Heidegger's Nazism and
the suspicion of his anti-Semitism and conviction
of racism, to philosophy and what, appropriating
Hölderlin here, may be called the extreme
limit of suffering.
The problem of suspicion as we know, when
it is not a matter of an ingredient in a
recipe, calling for, as the French say, a
suspicion of nutmeg, is directed to or raised
against a person. What is meant by the expression,
"the politics of suspicion" is
also directed to issues of personality, of
persons, and personal circumstances, or,
in a word: associations. One can also, of
course, name this problem with an old-fashioned
term borrowed from scholastic catalogings
of formal offenses, offenses against argument,
against logic, the chaining of judgments,
of words and consequences, as argumentum
ad hominem. Such an argument violates formal
procedures if it also gets its job done,
as it were, by rhetorical aspersion. Here
we are speaking about the person of Martin
Heidegger. Despite the prejudice of logic
it is important to consider the personal
here and to argue precisely ad hominem because
the man is what is under attack, is suspect,
and because in the case of Heidegger, who
spoke no less than if also subsequent to
Nietzsche against the strictures of school
logic, hithertofore one had not been permitted
to name the person where the question to
be thought was being, the task of thinking
itself. Thus the case of Heidegger so called
has released a tender flood of personal reminiscences,
retributions, and restitutional accountings
of Heidegger's personality and spirit --
all rather more than less at the expense
of his philosophy. There is a hint, a suspicion
of scholarly Schadenfreude in all of this.
If, in the past commentators have supposed
that for the sake of rigour, Heidegger would
have liked to have it said of his life as
he said of Aristotle's -- he was born, he
worked, he died -- they are no longer bound
by this restriction.
The upshot of this "Vermenschlichung"
of Martin Heidegger -- "The Man"
foregrounding and backgrounding "The
Thinker" -- now allows access to the
matter of Heidegger's guilt: the substance,
or the question -- in the best Heideggerian
sense -- of Heidegger's philosophy, but without
the effective person of Heidegger or the
stuff of thinking getting in the way. Just
how this works we may be able to see below.
But let me emphasise here that the major
issue to be discussed is not a matter of
what is philosophically relevant or not.
What follows is not a discussion of points
of philosophy as such. Quite the opposite.
Indeed, the rhetorical question of Heidegger's
Nazism does not connect Heidegger with a
complex historical phemomenon which specialists
are fond of discussing with reference to
particular years -- the years in question
being 1927, the date of publication of Being
and Time and the efforts, for or against,
to see Nazi connections or preconditions
in that text, 1929, 1933, 1934, 1935, 1937,
1944, and of course, 1945, all have special
value for historically minded specialists,
for Lebensphilosophen, for philosophers with
one axe or another to grind, etc. These technical
details, important as they are for academic
specialists are not important on the common,
the public, the average level. What is important
are colloquial images and personal associations,
that is, what is important are the equivocal
details. "1 And it is this rhetorical
level that is effective in drawing general
attention to the political fortunes of a
philosopher (where presidential candidates
and moviestars have more selling appeal)
just because as Heidegger would say, we are
(academics included) proximally and for the
most part [zunächst und zumeist] common and
average (a typification Heidegger with uncommon
restraint -- or else with uncanny kindness
-- named uneigentlich, that is: inauthentic,
not truly our own, not truly what we are,
except, and this exception turns the claim
around again, in what is closest to us and
most ordinary in us). And with the best philosophic
interest in the world, one informed by Heidegger's
own anthropological or hermeneutic concessions
to the connections between biography and
philosophy we turn to the level of the individual,
the man Heidegger, just because unlike Socrates,
to recall one reader's analysis, Heidegger
was just Swabian (or Allemanic or German)
enough to be reticent about himself and not
like a Mediterranean type, not at all like
the people Ted Kisiel characterizes as the
"loquacious" Greeks. For Kisiel,
a former engineer and currently a philosophy
professor from Illinois, seeking an answer
to the question of Heidegger's silence we
are "left to eavesdrop on the private
record which [Heidegger] graciously left
behind. Even Heidegger's intimacies now belong
to the world."2 Babich, "The Ethical Alpha and the Linguistic
Omega," p. 5 But what is the meaning of such a suggestion,
betraying the rehabilitation of approaches
traditionally damned in philosophic discourse,
namely that of the argument(um) ad hominem,
a rehabilitation now effected to excess in
the bibliography growing and proliferating
into subsections and research specialties
of such a personal history used as a pernicious
rhetorical device? At the very least the
results of such an effort are embarrassing.
Thus in an equally embarrassing connection,
it is important to note that in the USA when
one speaks of Nazism one refers, more or
less, apart from generally unfavourable characterizations
of the German as such, quite single mindedly
to the Holocaust and nothing else but the
Holocaust. In this quasi- Aristotelian association,
the Nazi history of Germany is the history
of the holocaust, which it surely is if it
is not, and this is the pernicious advantage
of an enthymeme, only that. To say from an
American perspective that Heidegger was a
Nazi, to marshal -- with Victor Farías and
others writing exposées conducted in the
same spirit -- all manner of details showing
the permanence and depth of Heidegger's Nazi
commitment, convicts in one move, this one
premise leads to the conclusion against Heidegger:
finding him guilty of every bit of the biological
racism in its most virulent form, that is
again, of the radical anti-Semitism that
lead to the instauration, the still consequent
execution and ongoing results, that constitute
the meaning, the fact of the Holocaust. This
association occurs against the intentions
of even Heidegger's most extreme opponents.
3
What is problematic here is the rhetorical
twist, a kind of metaphorical swerve, or
clinamen in the scheme of argumentative cause
and effect. To be a Nazi as Heidegger was
is to stand for, in causal and necessary
connection, to be a representation, of absolute
evil, the diabolical, sheer horror, as claimed
by more than one commentator on the matter.
But, at the same time, and this is the luxury
of equivocation, trading on one term to mean
something else also signified by the same
term -- one need not actually maintain that
Heidegger, in his own person, was actually
evil. Or then again, one can. In any case
one now knows what this kind of evil looks
like: it writes Sein und Zeit and Zeit und
Sein; speaks of Ereignis and Gelassenheit,
quotes Heraclitus, claims an essential connection
between its own philosophy and a poet known
to be mad, has a personal history of neurasthenia
and general gutlessness, and holds in just
this connection, mysticism can go so far,
that thinking and poetry are the same. Babich, "The Ethical Alpha and the Linguistic
Omega," p. 6 Silence: Heidegger's Racist Humanism and
The Name of the Jews
And we do begin with the Greeks, for the
problem of anti-Semitism is also the problem
of the opposition between Jerusalem and Athens.
With Christianity, the problem is Latinized,
Romanicized to the conflict between duties
to Ceasar and duties to God or what we in
the US are fond of discussing as the separation
between Church and State, but note that even
here the opposition is the same. If Heidegger
repudiates the translation of Greek into
Latin, it is because Heidegger together with
a longer German tradition, historically and
most notably, the Romantics, who are nevertheless
according to one account, absolved as guiltless
in this connection simply by virtue of their
earlier birth, 6 find a special linguistic
and spiritual affinity between German and
Greek. Hence if Heidegger claims, as he does
in the Spiegel interview, in reference to
his thinking's "essential connection"
with Hölderlin, that the Germans have special
world-historical task, his point is that
this task is mediated by "the special
inner relationship between the German language
and the Greeks."7 Babich, "The Ethical Alpha and the Linguistic
Omega," p. 7 Heidegger assumes then that we begin as his
thinking most primordially begins with the
Greeks. Tom Rockmore, whose anti-Heideggerian
credentials are patent, writes that if "there
is no reason to believe that Heidegger shared
the Nazi race hatred of the Jews ... there
is evidence in his writing that he believed
in the ... racial superiority, of the Germans,
as well as the intrinsic philosophical superiority
of the German language."8 This conviction
yields what is for Rockmore the ultimate
sense of Heidegger's Nazism: "the concern
to realize the historical destiny of the
German people."9
What is problematic here is the implicit
barb, the intended and effective slight to
be heard in the claim of the "inner
affinity" between German and Greek just
where ancient Greece continues to have the
preeminence it does have in Western culture,
as a reserve uttered against all other peoples
and languages within the same Western, Greek
heritage. 10 One would have to be half-deaf
in heart and spirit not to hear the implicit
condescension and insult in Heidegger's pronouncement
of impossibility of philosophizing in languages
that are not Greek or German. 11 The contest
between Athens and Jerusalem is given a different
tone, a different resonance -- to be heard
in the Nietzschean contrast that may be made
between thumos and chutzpah (although, obviously
enough, these were not Nietzsche's words).
With all his Germanness and his claims for
Greek affinities, Heidegger is best characterized
by the latter -- and that merits further
attention. Thus as Rudolf Augstein puts it,
the boldest assault against speakers and
thinkers of other languages was explicit
in the claim Heidegger made during his interview
with Der Spiegel, "Just as little as
one can translate a poem can one translate
a thought."12 Supplying a fuller context
to Heidegger's statements, 13 and in the
process paralleling Heidegger's alethiology
in quasi-juridical fashion, 14 Augstein points
out that from the start Heidegger's articulation
of the pride of German place in language
and the house of Being, is a veritable coup
against the French (if also against the English,
the Italians, and of course, to Heidegger's
everlasting pain, having insulted that "certain"
Victor Farías, against the Spanish).
It is of course significant that to these
terms and on these terms even the French
surrender not only in fact but as a fact
that Heidegger takes to full account. In
the house not of Being but philosophy, as
practiced under the "continental"
rubric, that is between contemporary .
Babich, "The Ethical Alpha and the Linguistic
Omega," p. 8
German and French philosophers, Heidegger's
coup has been successful. The French, that
chauvinistic people par excellence, those
of Heidegger's personal acquaintance and
those who follow his thought today -- who
in the estimation of many authors so comprise
the horizon of French philosophy that the
problem of Heidegger is very nearly a "French
question"15 -- are given to declare
(or to concede?) "again and again ...
[that] when they begin to think they speak
German. They insist that they could not get
through with their own language."16
As a reflection on this point, it is worth
remembering what we have heard not merely
from Nietzsche or even Schopenhauer, but
in this same connection, from Freud and the
subsequent psychoanalytic tradition that
it is part of the thinking of innocents and
victims, part of the psychology of violation
that offense is rarely rebuked as such but
swallowed. The primordial transference yields
the complicity between trauma and the psycho-pathology
that in repression constitutes the everyday
-- that is, that tells us who we are, proximally
and for the most part. It is the negative
word, the word of abuse that tells us our
own names. One becomes a victim simply by
receiving an insult, where one quite literally
-- this is the assault of naming -- has no
other choice than to take the abusive word
at its word. This efficacy of the negative
word against the individual works coming
and going. And to protest an insult confirms
the full force of the slight. We are reminded
once again of the irrecusable violence of
the name. It is not only Heidegger who cannot
by any number of uttered (or unuttered as
we see) words defuse the charges made against
him, but no Jew, no Black, no woman, no abused
child, 17 has the power to refuse an insult,
to defuse a characterization, a name, or
to deflect a hand raised in suspicion against
what is suspected. There is no defense against
being, against being called a Jew. Nietzsche
has shown us that even the positive becomes
its inverse when the claim of being what
one is rather than something else is held
against one. Thus strength, thus the expression
of strength becomes a weakness: what is becomes
a defect in being. And this for Heidegger
is the essential violence of logos, the word.
But let us be clear here, just to keep to
the rhetorical track. Heidegger's philosophy
includes, exactly as Rainer Marten has categorized
it, in a frequently cited article, "A
Racist Conception of Humanity."18 Elsewhere
Marten details, with both balance and passion,
a discussion of the issue in question. For
Marten it is not a matter of prejudice, but
what he calls in a deliberate reductive reference
to Jacques Derrida, as well as perhaps unconsciously
to a rather local, even specifically provincial
German sense, "Heideggers Geist."
What Farías's book makes possible renders,
as mentioned at the start, Heidegger discussable,
19 as a philosopher in the spirit of philosophy.
If the atmosphere of Heidegger studies was
previously one of trans-human reverence,
this circumstance no longer obtains. "Heideggerians"
are now prepared to take their revenge upon
and self-declared anti-Heideggerians their
own sweet way with the father.
But what this means is not a season of openness
but here where the fall season coming upon
us is also the hunting season, an "open
season" on Heidegger and those who read
his work. What this means in a scientific
age, the era of technicity, of techno-complicity
-- if one may coin a word here where so many
words have been coined -- is that it is ranged
under the opposite sign, the sign of regress
and indeed of religion. Thus so-called "Heideggerians"
have been and will continue to be -- if one
may predict -- attacked and abused in a postmodern
but still scientific age by the explicit
use of quasi-religious terms. To this effect,
Heidegger is named "the Master,"
Heidegger's philosophy "Dogma,"
or "Dogmatics," his "followers"
"devotees," "acolytes,"
or quite simply "the faithful."
The religiously inclined (the Catholic) or
the mystical (here we have the proof of the
catholicity of scientific anti-religious
prejudice) is per se ideological, fanatical,
capable of anything and in this then not
properly philosophic. This is the rhetorical
use of enthymeme and with it we are quite
nearly landed back where we started with
the traditional analytic philosophic suspicion
against Heidegger's philosophy proper. The
positivistic ghost of Carnap could not be
more if more perversely vindicated.
It must be noted that there is surely an
hagiographic tendency among Heidegger scholars,
if it is unclear that such hiagiography is
missing in studies of Nietzsche or among
Rilke or Hölderlin enthusiasts. 20 But one
denounces the literal consequences of that
sanctity in Heidegger's case, namely his
mysticisn and of course, this is the point
of the attack: his opposition to technology
and science. It is this opposition which
as two social science critics observe, Pierre
Bourdieu and Richard Wolin, one a sociologist
and the other a political theorist, pits
Heidegger against the average person. According
to this review, Heidegger is nothing but
an elitist mandarin, expressing the privileges
and values of the priest at the expense of
the ordinary, the average man. After all,
the average, common person is no one else
but the one who stands to benefit in whatever
dimension from the speciously, intellectually
maligned advances of modern technology. Technology
makes life better for the common man, just
as the Enlightenment ideal has always promised.
Thus Luc Ferry and Alain Renault decry Heidegger's
anti-humanism as making possible at once
both "the return of the nationalistic
myth and the fanatical hatred of modernity."21
Babich, "The Ethical Alpha and the Linguistic
Omega," p. 10 Technology is not the problem as Marten sees
it. Instead, the problem is the egregious
absence of protest, of protestantism, anti-clericalism,
anti-papism, here to be heard as dissonance
or dissidence: what one had in the case of
Heidegger was nothing like the case of Wagner
-- still on the musical index in Israel --
rather one had an "unconditional and
fervent for, without a corresponding against."22
Thus Heidegger could "complain not of
opposition but much rather ignorance."
Dogma once again. But for Marten the telling
consequence here and now will be that at
last "the recollected Heidegger case
can no longer be handled by way of the to
and fro of explicit clarification and inarticulate
obfuscation with regard to 'Heidegger, the
human being,' but places a question mark
after his philosophy instead."23 It
is this question that leads to the issue
of racism and thereby to anti-Semitism as
such. The issue for Marten is that already
named: the connection between Germany and
Greece. The fact that Heidegger's spirit
is "primordially Greek," means
for Marten what it signifies for other philologically
sensitive readers. To say that Greek and
German may be counted as a single spiritual
race is -- using the deliberately militant
language of Nicholas Rand, an American commentator
on the same theme -- to retroactively "annex"
a people's (however dead) language. Rand goes further
than Marten here and notes, without blinking,
that once having seen the future of one's
illusions, the resultant philosophical thought
must be entirely renounced as "infused
with an ideology linked to the impenitent
perpetration of evil."24 Whether protesting
or dogmatic Catholic, it would seem that
the religious impulse remains the same.
Marten for his part suggests that in the
claim made, from Heidegger's historical perspective
and time, that "the Greek spirit is
at home simply and solely in German blood
and on German soil,"25 a certain violence
is done to the Greeks as such. We have seen
that more crucially, more significantly,
violence is also done to those who no matter
how much they may second the deed are excluded
from this common heritage. For philological
sensitivities, the problem is the same as
it ever was: Heidegger is in error. Hence
the connections Marten finds are typically
tendentious ones, and not just in subtle
ways -- for Marten "What is at stake
is major and basic: it concerns the central
concepts and positions of the Greek doctrine
of being."26 It is hardly necessary
to note that the remedy -- more rather than
less preoccupation with or study of Greek,
27 -- is one that might have been taken from
Heidegger.
And in all the general conclusion to be drawn
is the one claimed by Heidegger: that we
are not yet thinking. And we are indeed not
yet thinking, at least not enough, not to
the point, not to the philosophy, the philosopher
in question. For the issue remains unposed
before its. We fail, as ever in Heidegger's
regard, to think or to question so long as
we fail to pose the question in the proper
way. And what belongs to thought, or to questioning
Heidegger here? Babich, "The Ethical Alpha and the Linguistic
Omega," p. 11 There are two rhetorical tacks to the equivocal
question of the relation between Heidegger,
the man and the thinker. The first stylistic
approach -- and for all his ferocity and
thickness vis-a-vis Heidegger's thought,
Habermas takes this tack -- separates the
thought from the thinker, the thinker from
the thought, and the sinner and the sin in
a move common to both Catholic and Protestant
but not, let it be noted, to the Greek, allowing
us to condemn the one and embrace, or even
love the other. It is remarkable once more
that this tack is not the other, the second
interpretive turn, sophisticated readers
other than Habermas or philologists who flatter
the innocence of the same sophisticated readers,
are given to take after Heidegger. For what
Heidegger taught more than anything else
is not, as Heribert Boeder has claimed as
a point of perplexity -- to read Aristotle
for ten years ---- or, in other apocrypha,
to read Lotze's Logik (this according to
Georg Picht) -- but as Hannah Arendt could
enthuse, "to think." What Heidegger
taught his students to do, despite the philologists'
fury at the audacity implied by this inversion,
made attentive, reflective thinking on a
text primary for, made it the preparation
for careful, resonant reading.
To read Heidegger is not to read a philosophy
of Nazism or anything else but it is to read
philosophically. What we have to learn from
Heidegger in the phenomenological tradition
after Husserl is a dedication to thinking.
To prepare for thinking in this way is no
matter of mere reading but a task to be undertaken,
a doing which must, as it is thought, undertake,
or as Nietzsche taught in another sense,
overtake us. In this way Heidegger took seriously
Nietzsche's own injunction that "thinking
has to be learned in the way that dancing
has to be learned" just as much as "reading"
is to be practiced as an art. In all Heidegger
read Nietzsche and took him seriously as
a philosopher. 28 From Heidegger too, following
the hermeneutic turn, one read Freud, one
read Marx, one read Kierkegaard, one read
Schopenhauer and even Wittgenstein and found
cause to confirm Nietzsche's subterranean
strategies in the genealogy of reason, the
morality, the grammar of science and philosophy.
Not merely desire continues to speak in the
name of the logos but power, ambiguity, and
fear. "29 What we have from Heidegger
is a complex legacy, one addressed only with
comparable complexity.
In the present context, to advert to the
ineluctability of ambiguity admits -- in
Reiner Schürmann's expression accuses --
as Nietzsche charges us to see, that it is
a compound lie to pretend that all truths
are simple. Here the problem does continue
to be, in the spirit of Heidegger, again,
not a matter of opposition or disagreement
but still understanding. And of all the many
expressions on this topic, Schürmann's efforts
to limn the original meaning of ambivalence
-- the Real as Lacan has it -- speaking of
the bifrontal essence of technology and Western
Culture and the ethical meaning for life
of triple binds, a tracking of subtle turns
to trace one's way to the heart of Heidegger's
question and to the old tradition of the
question, the love of sophia, wisdom, and
the importance of the thinker's, that is,
of one's own journey in thought, seem to
this one reader to go the best way in this
unmasterable direction. Babich, "The Ethical Alpha and the Linguistic
Omega," p. 12 But that said, focusing on the exigence of
understanding, we may not forget what it
means to understand differently. Our questions
to Heidegger's philosophy, to the topics
of his questioning, to his affirmations,
to his collaboration, our suspicions raised
against his silence, his commission, where
we note that he gives consent by silence
to a crime at the extreme of expression,
beyond image and against reason in its most
perfect expression. Heidegger's complicity
with this crime of abyssal, abysmal, cataclysmal,
horribly sublime proportions inaugurated
the terms on which this thinking must acquit
itself or stand the threat to be quitted.
This is the threat behind the question Löwith
began to pose and seconded by Adorno, and
raised now with far greater venom and vengeance:
"Why read Heidegger?" The greatest
evil, we say, perpetuated here once again
by refusing to name the Jews, that people
singled out now not by God but by evil itself,
by what was done, and what thereby is perpetually
done against the Jews. As I write this, this
is to be said in the wake of Yom Kippur,
the subsiding awe of the Day of Atonement.
It is this thought of the horror and the
consequences of anti-Semitism that sets the
stakes for thinking from now on. For as Sandor
Gilman writes, "This is not the age
of 'post-modernism,' it is the post-Holocaust
age."30
Speaking of the Jews, as Heidegger did not,
Heidegger's racism embraces rather more than
the violence done to an ambivalently, complicatedly,
nuancedly magnificent people, that is the
Greeks -- as articulated in Marten's catalog
of the ambivalent meaning of Greek culture
-- by the assertion that the German captures
the spirit the Greeks themselves failed to
master and forgot, so that in the predictable
formula here: German becomes for Heidegger
more Greek than Greek itself. The problem
of nuance and complexity is that the thinker
is thereby permitted, following his star,
to forget the gross and rude matter at hand.
I would repeat, we would repeat: Heidegger
failed to express significant sensitivity,
horror, pain, remorse; Heidegger failed to
confess responsibility for and complicity
with the Nazi programme of exterminating
Jews, the murder of the Jews. It is this
last awful fact that weighs on us, that gives
the equivocal force to the expression of
Heidegger's Nazism, as the ultimate meaning
of anti-Semitism today. We are not merely
talking about Heidegger's "racist"
conception of humanity.
Babich, "The Ethical Alpha and the Linguistic
Omega," p. 13
Hence although there are expressions of this
last issue ruled by little more than a moralizing
fury, raising this questioning accusation
at this penultimate point now concerns Heidegger's
failure to affirm and to speak to and to
speak of the pain and horror of the Holocaust
as a German crime against other cultures
(where the Nazi programme was, of course,
so hyper inclusive in its extermination,
its exclusion of "others," that
it would seem to have made it possible in
the post-Nazi, post-Holocaust era to speak,
as Adorno and Horkheimer could, of the "invention"
of "other Jews"). Heidegger's silence
condemned these events to silence. More crucially,
what follows from Heidegger's thinking is
that by failing to let these events come
to word, by breaking off not only the word
for these events but the very possibility
of words for Jews and non-Germans (non-Greeks)
Heidegger's silence is not simply an omission.
With the claim that thinking is possible
only in the language of ancient Greece (and
in German as Nächstverwandte), one closes
off the words for counting certain events
as happenings, as things that matter. Turns
of expression, cliches, idioms, phraseologies
all speak in the hermeneutical space and
play of a language. Whether one follows Gadamer,
Quine, or Wittgenstein here, the hermeneutic,
the experience, the game of learning a language
confirms that to learn a language is to learn
to catch, to learn to see or to hear what
is cast forth by the play of words. To learn
Greek then is to learn to catch this same
glimmering playing of a phrase, of what is
spoken in what can be, what is said by this
one in that time and that place. For a Sophocles
is not a Plato in word or in the constellation
of words offered and the difference in expression
bespeaks more than the difference between
tragedy and philosophic literature but a
different resonant efficacy, where the time
in which both styles "flourish"
is roughly the same fifth and fourth (if
not sixth) century Athens. What Heidegger,
what Hölderlin, what Goethe and what Milton
saw first reading the Greeks is an intimation
of a way of being that can be made to speak
and in speaking to us be restored as a possibility
for us to know and in knowing to share. This
flash of recognition, the vestige of humanism,
subjective primacy at its best or worst,
betrays a "special linguistic and spiritual
affinity" not only for the German student
of Greek but the English student of Greek
(or German). For something hike this occurs
in every apt scholar of another language
and culture just as Nietzsche saw it occurring
between cultures of genius. The nature of
an affinity is not a given: it is no "second-nature"
as such and from the start.
Babich, "The Ethical Alpha and the Linguistic
Omega," p. 14
Are we to say, following Heidegger in specific
reference to the French, that a Dumézil,
a Vernant, or (even via Hungary) a Nagy,
must lack some "special affinity"
for the language of his special scholarship?
Surely not but if one were to do so, if one
yielded to the presumption of such an essential
failing, one would thereby lose what makes
any kind of historical and scholarly sense
possible. As the art-historian Ludwig Curtius
wrote long ago, in a quaintly vituperative
review of Spengler, what makes history possible
is continuity: Einigung, here understood
musically as consonance. 31
It is important to question the nature of
these "dragon's teeth," that is,
to question the meaning of the autochthonous
as such and the meaning of related or affine
being, to question those who have an affinity
with the original, share the same, the autochthonous
essence? This is the question of the relation
in Heidegger's word of Germany and Greece.
Nietzsche saw "genius" as the resonant
capacity which alone and in the end expresses
the meaning of affinity. For Nietzsche speaking
about "Philosophy in the Tragic Age
of the Greeks," "nothing would
be sillier than to claim an autochthonous
development for the Greeks. On the contrary
they invariably absorbed other cultures.
The very reason they got so far is that they
knew how to pick up the spear and throw it
onward from the point where others had left
it."32 Such skill in time "art
of fruitful learning" is the key to
affinity. It is this that constitutes genius
-- like the spirit which lists where it will
and is no where limited.
The question of interpretive affinity can
only be raised in a liminal way and not elaborated
here. But we have seen enough to suggest
that a "special spiritual and linguistic"
affinity cannot be a given but must be learned.
The need to learn recalls Nietzsche's warning
precisely, if perhaps all too appositely
here, on the matter of "What the Germans
Lack." The question for Nietzsche as
he posed it both at the beginning and in
the end of his reflections on culture, turns
on the matter of hearing, seen again as if
for the first the. "[O]ne has to learn
to see, one has to learn to think, one has
to learn to speak and write." Learning
to see is for Nietzsche, the philologist,
the disciplinarian and advocate of careful
reading, the hardest of all, requiring one
to habituate oneself to a veritable epoche
in the best Husserlian and scientific sense
-- even where Nietzsche names this the "first
preliminary schooling in spirituality":
"habituating the eye to repose, to patience,
to letting things come to it, learning to
defer judgement, to investigate and comprehend
the individual case in all its aspects."33
Such an eye for details or subtlety is perhaps
a "listening" or attuned eye, an
eye that would be able to see and to hear.
If we would condemn Heidegger it cannot be
for his silence where, as the path of another
inquiry would show, silence, the still point
between tone (caesura) and the breath (diaresis)
is the very condition of full speech and
best affinity. Rather what is to be continually
deplored is only, if this is also, as Marten
says it above, very grave, Heidegger's silencing
of the significance of the silence of other
languages, of other words. Heidegger's crime
then is in forgetting the resonant sense
or working of affinity. This forgetfulness
impelled him in a move that like nothing
else in Heidegger is truly reminiscent of
Spengler, thus a move marking Heidegger as
a writer if not a child of his own the, an
author alongside Curtius, to condemn other
languages to silence. Heidegger's expression
fails as a silence that would be like Nietzsche's
"strong will," a silence that in
the end would finally "hear," let
be, and thus be able to "defer decision."34 Babich, "The Ethical Alpha and the Linguistic
Omega," p. 15 Heidegger and Nazism: Philosophy and Tragedy
I have not sought to prove or disprove Heidegger's
Nazism. As Jürgen Habermas's own word has
it: "Martin Heidegger? Nazi, sicher
ein Nazi! "35 And Heidegger himself,
in his interview with Der Spiegel, expressly
acknowledges his then conviction of "the
'greatness and magnificence' of Hitler as
Chancellor of the Reich,"36 a judgment
which easily parallels the infamous passage
where Heidegger declares that the works "peddled
about nowadays as the philosophy of National
Socialism have nothing whatever to do with
the inner truth and greatness of this movement."37
I have suggested that the effect of acknowledging
what one has done, giving the deed a name
naming oneself as the doer, as responsible
ultimately legitimates, recognizes the past
and so naming it, sanctions it, defuses its
violence, admits it into presence as what
was done. This naming, this setting into
language, this failure of failure, of the
breaking of the word is, we remember, for
Heidegger and in the same classic text: the
purest heart of violence. The prime rhetorical
effect of linking Heidegger and Nazism, as
such and as Farías has done, yields guilt
by association much on the order of Gilbert
Ryle's reported laconic and very British,
very analytic statement uttered in 1960:
"Heidegger. Can't be a good philosopher.
Wasn't a good man."38 Citing this comment
from a journalistic review of the Heidegger
problem, Robert Bernasconi, in an article
elliptically and titularly quoting Levinas,
goes on to repeat Jean-Francois Lyotard's
point: "One should not seek to neutralize
the intrinsic inequality of this affair by
regulating it through its alternative: if
a great thinker, then not a Nazi; if a Nazi,
then not a great thinker -- the implication
being: either negligible Nazism or negligible
thought."39 But as Lyotard hastens to
remind us, it is not merely Heidegger who
is on trial here. The rhetorical English
put on the questions puts us, we ourselves,
"we" -- to use Nietzsche's pronoun
as Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe likes to use
it in connection with nothing less than the
final solution (so that we do not forget
whose solution it was) -- "good Europeans"
in question. Babich, "The Ethical Alpha and the Linguistic
Omega," p. 16 Lacoue-Labarthe, in an appendix to the English
translation of La fiction du politique, Heidegger,
Art and Politics, offers an abject illustration
of the impossibility of articulating the
demand to express the meaning of Nazism --
in spite of his best efforts, where he seeks
to express the impossibility of his own expression,
and is thereby condemned to condemn himself.
It is this neutralizing distinction that
is deeply problematic and not just in the
directions not quite given voice by Lyotard.
For when one begins as we do, as we all tirelessly
seek to show that we do begin, from a position
of revulsion, a perspective of condemnation,
by recognizing, acknowledging, and denying
Nazism for what it was and must be, in all
that caused it and all that steadily results
from it as its constant effect, we find ourselves
on the track not of the diabolical but the
repressed. We are thereby condemned to the
repetition here and elsewhere, to the compulsion
to name Nazism as Lacoue-Labarthe does "an
absolutely vile phenomenon both in its goals
and its result -- without question the most
grave -- by a long way -- that the West has
known (i. e., that it has produced.)"40
We could analyze the character of this qualification
and others like it as the necessary anacoluthon,
nay the very series of breaths and hesitations
and indirections required to purchase the
space for a near consent (a la Levinas) to
horror or again (with Levinas) for a sanctioned
transaction with the diabolical.
The limits of the present essay do not permit
m to trace the essentially philosophic implications
of this question to the anacoluthon that
is only a blind aposiopesis, an admonishing
hesitation that stumbles in its stammering
refusal. But I must say that such breaths
are far from the caesura, the "pure
word" to speak with Hölderlin of a "counter-rhythmic
interruption" of a null or turning point
of balance and decay so that what appears,
what conies to stand in appearance is finally
"representation itself."41 The
key to Schurmann's discussion of law, of
Heidegger's awful privileging of the No,
the mortal and god-awful height of the meaning
of Heidegger's utterance that higher than
actuality stands possibility -- like William
J. Richardson's deep concern with the nature
of die Irre -- is found in Hölderlin's titling
expression of a fragment from Pindar, as
The Law [Das Gesetz]. We do not need Lacan's
strictures on the meaning of law, or Adorno's
discussion of mimesis in turn, to understand
the dynamic between the imaginary of reflective
phantasy and the symbolic of mastery and
denial to understand Hölderlin's expression
of the Law of finitude: "'The immediate
as impossible for both mortals and immortals
... But rigorous mediateness [Mittelbarkeit]
is the law.'"
Babich, "The Ethical Alpha and the Linguistic
Omega," p. 17 Conclusion
By questioning the virtue of our expectations
and our questions, one might in the end underline
something of Heidegger's own special integrity,
his consuming preoccupation with philosophy.
For it is not in the end a fascination with
a "word-tinker of the first order"42
that draws one to Heidegger, not at least,
not I would hope, among philosophers. What
is compelling instead is the realization,
as almost all of Heidegger's students have
confirmed and that a reader's encounter with
his works can still offer, that here one
has to do with what it is that thinkers think
about, what there is, what calls for thinking.
And what is to be thought can be called Being
-- it can be called truth-- it can be called
the tragic essence of the event or law --
it can be called destiny -- but it always
speaks to the reader as a thinker as that
which is given, as mine, to be.
The political scientist, Richard Wolin, in
a recent study that baldly states its ambitions
to be nothing less than "an immanent
philosophical analysis"of Heidegger's
"political thought as such,"43
traces what he will call Heidegger's decisionism
to "the unabashedly elitist motifs that
inform the existential analytic" and
adds somewhat gratuitously that the "de
facto separation of human natures into authentic
and inauthentic is radically undemocratic."44
For Wolin, as an extension of the consequent
"politics of authenticity," to
use his term here: "authentic Dasein
alone, as a type of existential 'elect,'
can endow a thoroughly rationalized and disenchanted
cosmos with renewed greatness. If authentic
Dasein is to lead, inauthentic Dasein must
follow."45 This is, at the very least,
a very flawed reading of Heidegger's position,
but Pierre Bourdieu also subscribes to it
(if Wolin does not simply follow Bourdieu)
and hence it must be compelling enough to
deserve some concluding mention here.
Wolin's reading can be easily corrected with
recourse to the text in question, a return
to Sein und Zeit. Obviously we cannot here
review that text at any length. But briefly,
we recall that in reference to the "Full
Existential Conception of Death," if
we are told that "inauthenticity rests
on the possibility of authenticity"46
we also recall that authentic Being-one's-self
is "an existentielle modification of
the 'they' as an essential existentiale."47
With this expression of the "they,"
Heidegger invokes a proximal and primordial
inauthenticity without negative, because
without excluding, elitist undertones. Heidegger
does not separate human types into authentic
and inauthentic natures, in an undemocratic
or in any other political fashion because
such a distinction is foreign to his analysis.
By such talk, that is, proximally and for
the most part, Heidegger speaks of all of
us, as we are in our nearest and dearest
way of being human. For "authentic Dasein
to lead" then, it is not necessary,
as Wolin suggests, that "inauthentic
Dasein must follow" but rather that
Aristophanes' jesting myth in Plato's Symposium
be invoked to split not humanity but the
human being, this time into two unequal halves:
one great inauthentic part and one authentic
sliver. This is deliberate buffoonery in
Aristophanes but inevitably -- for such is
the force of the moral turn -- as Wolin interprets
Heidegger, it is in earnest. Babich, "The Ethical Alpha and the Linguistic
Omega," p. 18 Beyond such biased interpretation, so effective
in the equivocal way I have here sought to
explain, the turn to the personal, to the
man as the thinker, recalls the anthropology
and history, psychology and genealogy of
concepts and reference characterizing a casual
expression of hermeneutic phenomenology as
existentialism. With this one asks as Heidegger
does at the start of his Introduction to
Metaphysics "Why are there beings rather
than nothing? "48 That is, why
is there what is at all, or better still,
the one who is, rather than not-being, rather
than the higher possibility of nothing? This
high question is the question of possibility
as such, of what is mine to be, and the question
of my ownmost never-to-be-outstripped possibility,
and that is again to say: the tragic essence
of being. This is the height of suffering,
once grasped as a law, even if the law transgressed
is -- to the point at which Hölderlin broke
off in his reflection on punishment and law
-- unknown to me. Thus Heidegger ends by
observing "the true problem is what
we do not know and what insofar as we know
it authentically, namely as a problem, we
know only questioningly."49
NOTES
1. In this connection, the exchange between
a Farías-forerunner, as it were, Paul Hühnerfeld
and Heidegger is illuminating. Heidegger,
in a typically professorial, intellectual
expression of smugness and distance refused
to cooperate with Hühnerfeld's request for
biographical information, saying that his
life was "totally uninteresting."
Bitterly angered, Hühnerfeld d responded
with a book published at his own expense,
Im Sachen Heidegger: Versuch über ein deutsches
Genie. (Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 1959).
Guido Schneeberger's later Nachlese zu Heidegger
(Bern: Suhr, 1962), is better known. For
Heidegger's account of his correspondence
with and reaction to Hühnerfeld , see Heinrich
Petzet, Auf einen Stern zugehen. Begegnungen
und Gespräche mit Martin Heidegger, 1929-1976
(Frankfurt: Societäts-Verlag, 1983), pp.
9 and 91.
2. Theodore Kisiel, "Heidegger's Apology:
Biography as Philosophy and Ideology,"
Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, XIV:
2-XV: 1; 1991, p. 398.
3. There is the minor exception of Farías
himself but his slanderous views on this
point, intending to attribute every kind
of guilt to Heidegger, have been sacrificed
or better tacitly ignored as the sheer thatness
or there thereness of his book has been lionized.
Warts and all, the Farías thesis stands on
the philosophical best-seller list and if
Farías has not as a result been transformed
into a philosopher as such, with a book polished
via a storm of publishing and editorial support
invented for the purpose, Farías has become
a known name, an author, an authority and
that is close enough in the academic world.
See too Note 19 below.
4. This now notorious silence was a silence
in connection not with the well-publicised
Rektoratsrede (Heidegger himself oversaw
the publication of that text and referred
to it both at the post-war "clean-up"
hearings, and indirectly in other texts as
well as directly in a 1945 reflection, "Facts
and Thoughts" published by his son in
1983, timed either to memorialize the 50th
anniversary of the rectorial address itself,
or else as Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore
suggest in their introduction to the English
language edition of Farías's Heidegger and
Nazism, Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore,
"Foreword," V. Farías, Heidegger
and Nazism, tr. P. Burrell, et al. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989),
p. xi, "possibly... to coincide"
with the anniversary of Hitler's rise to
power) nor does it concern the sheer fact
of Heidegger's being named rector, and thus
the fact of his collaboration as such with,
National Socialism (this too Heidegger himself
discussed, referring to it not only through
the patent and notoriously unaltered references
in Einführung in die Metaphysik but also
in the posthumously published interview with
Der Spiegel).
5. Though one must ask what could count as
"satisfactory" where the stakes
in question are increased with every decade
that sees the issue of Heidegger's political
involvement emerge once again, and there
have already been a number of such decades.
6. Cf. Nicholas Rand, "The Political
Truth of Heidegger's 'Logos': Hiding in Translation."
MLA 436-447. For Rand it is unavoidably self-evident
that "The Romantics' imperious exaltation
of emergent nationhood and their claim to
a prestigious cultural past (by way of Greece,
Christian, and the medieval tradition) differ
from Heidegger's attempt to establish German
as the measure of what is authentic in ancient
Greek. Cultural patriotism and chauvinism
are not to be conf used with the retroactive
annexation of a people's linguistic heritage."
The contemporaneity of Heidegger's essay
is crucial here. "Had the same commentary
been written by an early nineteenth-century
Romantic -- for example Hölderlin -- its
political significance would be vastly different
from what it is six years after the end of
World War II." p. 445, emphasis added.
Apart from the prima facie difficulty of
delimiting such an anachronistic claim, the
fact that not all commentators are as scrupulous
in distinguishing the temporality of effects
is evident in the recent trend to find responsible
connections between not only Nietzsche's
thinking and the Nazi reception of that thought
but also Kant, Hegel, Schiller, Hölderlin
(despite Heidegger's recent popularity) and
so on.
7. Heidegger, "die besondere innere
Verwandtschaft der deutschen Sprache mit
der Sprache der Griechen und ihrem Denken."
"Spiegel-Gespräch," p. 107 in Antwort.
Martin Heidegger im Gespräch. Günther Neske
und E. Ketterinig, Hrsg. (Pfüllingen: Neske,
1988). English: Martin Heidegger and National
Socialism: Questions and Answers. G. Neske
& E. Kettering, eds., (New York: Paragon
House, 1990).
8. Tom Rockmore "On Heidegger and National
Socialism: A Triple Turn?" in The Graduate
Faculty Philosophy Journal XIV: 2-XV: 1 1991.
9. Rockmore, ibid.
10. Heidegger writes in Hölderlin Hymne "Der
Ister," Gesamtausgabe 53 (Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 1984), "Tell me what you
think about translation and I will tell you
who you are."
11. The idea of German as a superior language,
the concept of the destiny of Germany, is
not innocent -- not where the American Germanist
(and self-described "Ost-Jude"),
Sander Gilman can find a flyer circulating
at an upstate New York and Ivy League university
challenging the "facts of" and
"proofs for" the Holocaust to be
no more than the latest instantiation, of
the "long (and constant) association
of the study of the German, with the ingrained
anti-Semitism present within German and American
society." Sander Gilman, Inscribing
the Other (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1991), p. 16.
12. Heidegger, "So wenig, wie man Gedichte
übersetzen kann, kann man ein Denken übersetzen."
"Das Spiegel-Interview," Antwort,
p. 108. Cited by Augstein, p. 189.
13. Augstein furnishes what Heidegger specifically
admits with the fuller context of the putatively
unsaid. Thus, for one illuminating example
in a suggestive series, Augstein repeats
the query concerning the strain in Heidegger's
relations with Jaspers because Jaspers' wife
was Jewish and with Heidegger's assertion
that Jaspers sent him all his publications
with warm greetings, but adds "however
that from 1937 from Jaspers received no acknowledgment
from Heidegger." [Sein Verhältnis zu
Jaspers getrubt? Vielleicht wegen dessen
jüdische Frau? Jaspers hat ihm seine Veröffentlichunge
zwischen 1934 und 1938 alle mit herzlichen
Grüssen zugeschickt. Nur Jaspers bekamm vom
1937 an keine Antwort mehr von Heidegger.]
Augstein, "Aber bitte nicht philosophieren"
in Die Heidegger Kontroverse, p. 194.
14. At the very least such a casual und literal
tour de force proves if nothing else that
Augstein has more than outgrown his youthful
fear of the "famous thinker" --
on Heinrich Petzet's report. See Petzet,
"Nachdenkliches zum Spiegel-Gespräch"
in Antwort. Neske & Kettering, hgg.,
p. 11f. "Afterthoughts on the Spiegel-Interview,"
Martin Heidegger and National Socialism.,
p. 67f.
15. For Augstein, Heidegger "influenced
French thought like no other, a mystagogue
of the word" [ hat französisches Denken
beinflusst wie kein anderer, ein Mystagoge
des Wortes.] Augstein, "Aber bitte nicht
philosophieren," p. 188.
16. Heidegger, "Das bestätigen mir heute
immer wieder die Franzosen. Wenn sie zu denken
anfangen, sprechen sie deutsch; sie versichern,
sie kämmen mit ihrer Sprache nicht durch."Antwort,
p. 107-108.
17. And please remember here who it is who
is found to be at fault, and at fault from
the very beginning -- for this is the force
of Masson's neglected charge in Freud's own
essay on the subject of the abused, the "beaten"
child.
18. Rainer Marten, "Ein rassistisches
Konzept von Humanität." Badische Zeitung.
December 19-20, 1987.
19. Once again we may seek to refrain from
rehearsing an account of its excesses or
its factual errors, If we are not allowed
as Marten is also not permitted to dispense
with a reference to the complementary, ameliorating,
journeyman work of Hugo Ott. Thus one commentator
notes of Farías's book that "it only
appeared in the 'original' Spanish and German
after the 'original' French edition, and
then only in re~written form. If ever there
has been a book that wrote itself in public
and corrected itself with the help of its
translators while en route to its original
it is this book." Dennis Schmidt, "Changing
the Subject: Heidegger, 'the' National and
the Epochal." Graduate Faculty Philosophy
Journal Vol. 14, No. 2 -- Vol 15, No 1, 1991.
Footnote 34.
20. It would seem that quasi-worshiping reverence
can be detected at every level in the university
where a residual clericalism belongs to the
academic way of life.
21. Luc Ferry and Alain Renault, Heidegger
and Modernity, tr. F. Philip (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 108.
22. "ein bedingungloses und heisses
Dafür, ohne entsprechendes Dagegen."
Rainer Marten, "Heideggers Geist"
In Die Heidegger Kontroverse, J. Altwegg,
Hrsg. (Athenaeum: Frankfurt am Main, 1988,) p,
226. And below, "So beklagte sich Heidegger
auch weniger über Gegnerschaft als vielmehr
über Ignoranz." For Marten this will
be one ironic sense of Seinsvergessenheit,
the oblivion or ignorance of Being as the
failure to properly receive the word, from
Heidegger.
23. "Der wiedererinnerte Fall Heidegger
lässt sich nicht mehr durch das Hin und Her
redlicher Erhellungen und unredlicher Verdunklungen
des 'Menschen Heidegger' behandeln. sondern
setzt ein Fragezeichnen hi miter seine Philosophie."
Marten, p. 226.
24. See Rand, p. 445, citation: p. 446.
25. "ist der griechische Geist einzig
und allein im deutschen Blut und auf der
deutschen Erde daheim." Marten, p. 228.
26. "Es geht um Grosses und Grobes:
um die zentralen Begriffe und Positionien
griechischer Seinslehre" Marten, p.
229.
27. Marten observes "Andernfalls hatte
ihm Sappho am Ende geistig dazu verführt,
über menschliches Lieben ein Wort mehr zu
sagen als dies, dass es ein Mögen sei, und
Aischylos, dem Hassen der Fremden eine dem
Lieben der Eigenen korrespondiere, machtstabilisierende
Funktion zuzutrauen: "Und auch hassen
eines Sinns/Das ist's, was viel Leid dem
Menschen heilt." ("Eumeniden"
v. 986f.)." p. 228.
28. Thus it is not insignificant that by
time grace of the Heidegger case as such,
the older case of Nietzsche, thought to have
been effectively chloroformed by the deficient
manipulations of a Princeton professor has
been given new life. By the case of Nietzsche,
we mean not the continuing and yearly ever
more ecstatic volumes exposing his homosexuality
or his hypochondria, but rather the case
of Nietzsche and fascism: his totalitarian
politics, his elitism, his biologism, his
ideology of the Will to Power, redone to
be sure by his sister but demanding hardly
anything of her maligned imagination for
the purpose -- all this muck is back in style.
29. Cf. Dennis Schmidt's assessment of modernity:
"'Thinking was called upon to face its
own certain uncertainty and confess that
it could never free itself from desires."
30. Sander L. Gilman, Inscribing the Other,
p. 17.
31. "Geschichte [ist nicht] ... ein
Speicher nebeneinander aufgeschichteter Produkte
des Geschehens und Leitens, Geschichte ist
unauflöslich weitergestaltende Kraft des
Menschen. ... Geschichte ist nichtTrennung,
sondern Einigung, nicht Auflösung. sondern
Band, nicht blosser Verlauf, sondern unsterbliche
Wirkung, die Fuge im Goethes grossem Wort.
Die Einigung aber, das ist ihre Tradition
durch die Rezeption ihrer Kulturgestalten."
Ludwig Curtis, "Morphologie der antiken
Kunst," Logos IX. 2 1920/21:195- 221; p. 217. Curtis's style (characteristic
of reviews of the time) is bombastic, he
tends to be overwhelmed by the great minds
of his time (kindly disposed towards Troeltsch,
chiding his life-antipode in Riegl) and today
most readers would so concur with his judgment
of Spengler as to find it overstated. Nonetheless
his expression of Wirkungsgeschichte as "Einigung"
is worth recalling here.
32. In his early essay on Philosophy in the
Tragic Age of the Greeks, Nietzsche writes"Nichts
ist thörichter als dem Griechen eine autochthone
Bildung nachzusagen, sie haben vielmehr alle
bei anderen Volkern lebende Bildung in sich
eingezogen, sie kammen gerade deshalb so
weit, weil sie es verstanden in den Speer
von dort weiter za schleudern, wo ihn ein
anderes Volk liegen liess. Sie sind bewunderungswürdig
in der Kunst, fruchtbar zu lernen."
Die Philosophie im tragischem Zeitalter der
Griechen. KSA 1, p. 806.
33. As Nietzsche reminds us in Twilight of
the Idols, "Man hat sehen zu lernen,
man hat denken zu lernen, man hat sprechen
und schreiben zu lernen .... dem Auge die
Ruhe, die Geduld, das Ansichheranikommen-lassen
angewöhnen ... Das ist die erste Vorschulung
zur Geistig keit." "Was dem Deutschen
abgeht," 6 Götzen-Dämmerung.
34. Nietzsche, "die Entscheidung aussetzen
k ö n n e n." Ibid.
35. "Ein Gespräch mit Jürgen Habermas,"
in Die Heidegger Kontroverse, pp. 172-175.
36. Heidegger, "The Spiegel Interview,"
p. 44.
37. [Was heute vollends als Philosophie des
Nationalsozialismus herumgeboten wird, aber
mit der inneren Wahrheit und Grösse dieser
Bewegung nicht das Geringste zu tun hat]
Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik,
(Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1953,1976) p. 152. Introduction
to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1959) p. 199.
38. The Times Higher Educational Supplement,
No 850, February 17, 1989, p. 12. Cited by
Robert Bernasconi, "Habermas and Arendt
on the Philosopher's 'Error': Tracking the
Diabolical in Heidegger." Graduate Faculty
Philosophy Journal, 14:2/15:1, 1991. p. 4.
39. Jean-Francois Lyotard, Heidegger et "les
juifs", Paris: Galilee, 1989, p. 90;
Heidegger and "the jews," trans.
A. Michel and M. S. Roberts, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1990, p. 52.
Cited by Robert Bernasconi, "Habermas
and Arendt 0n the Philosopher's 'Error':
Tracking the Diabolical in Heidegger."
Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 14:2/15:1,
1991. p. 4.
40. Lacoue-Labarthe, "Victor Farías's
Heidegger et le Nazism." in Heidegger.
Art and Politics, trans. C. Turner, Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1990, p. 127.
41. Hölderlin, Remarks on Oedipus: 1. For
Hölderlin further: "The (re)presentation
of the tragic rests, principally, on the
fact that the monstrous (das Ungeheure] --
how god and man join together and the power
of nature and the innermost being of man
boundlessly become as one in the fury --
is to be understood through the boundless
becoming-one purified by boundless separation."
Remarks on Oedipus: 3.
42. Augstein's phraseology, my translation.
43. Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being:
The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger,
New York: Columbia University Press, 1990,
p. xv.
44. Wolin, p. 56.
45. Emphasis added. Wolin, p. 66.
46. Heidegger, "Uneigentlichkeit hat
mögliche Eigentlichkeit zum Grunde"
p. 259 in Sein und Zeit.
47. "Das eigentliche Selbstsein ...
ist ein existentielle Modifikation des Man
als eines wesenhaften Existentials."
ibid., 130.
48. "Warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und
nicht vielmehr Nichts ?" in Einführung
in die Metaphysik, p. 1.1n his translation,
An Introduction to Metaphysics, Mannheim
has "WHY ARE THERE ESSENTS rather than
nothing?" p. 1
49. "Das eigentlich Aufgegebene ist Jenes, was wir nicht wissen und was wir, sofern wir es echt wissen nämlich als Aufgegebenes, immner nur fragend wissen" p. 157. Mannheim, p. 206. |
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