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. 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 | ||||
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