Monday, December 13, 1999
Heidegger, animals and gods, emotions
and
Sartre, David Farrell Krell
Re other letters. I have been re-reading
this morning David Farrell Krell's
DAIMON
LIFE and then continuing your SANTARASA.
Even though Krell is quite competent
as a
scholar, he is not a philosopher who
commits
himself very often to a firm statement
of
belief that puts his head on the guillotine
block. (On THE MUPPET SHOW, Miss Piggy
singing
"Staying Alive" as Marie
Antoinette
in a palace ballroom. She moves away
from
the window at the end where their is
a shadow
of a guillotine. Your book SANTARASA
is many
times more exciting and immensely more
daring
than anything Krell's written.) I haven't
reread very much, just part of what
he says
about THE FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF METAPHYSICS,
and maybe I'm wrong but it's a point
I do
not think I would have missed in the
rest
of the book in my first reading, but,
as
he does often, he leads up to what
could
be a revelation, a "moment of
vision",
then stops and wanders off into ambiguity.
He definitely accords with my comparison
with Hannibal Lecter and the weird
dialectic
of denigration and ecstatic praise.
He focuses
on the German word "Benommenheit"
which (to use that beautiful Attic
image)
'on the one hand" means benumbed
behavior
but 'on the other hand' also means
dazzled
and is used by Nietzsche to mean rapture
somewhere (I do not know German. Hands
and
language are important to both Heidegger
and Derrida. Gorillas and chimpanzees
can
use sign language and manipulate tools
(?)
with hands (?), but they haven't exactly
taken to them like wildfire have they?
That
their brains are mechanically inept
is unacceptable.
But then why are mentally retarded
people
retarded when logic and therefore learning
are simple steps of block building
and ladder
climbing to so-called intelligence?
The physical
brain of a dog could do as well. I
don't
know Greek either.) "Santarasa"
in the animal? Krell quotes from THE
FUNDAMENTAL
CONCEPTS that this "Benommenheit"
--"benumbed behavior, appears
to slip
into closest proximity
(nachste Nahe) to what we determined
as a
characteristic of profound boredom,
what
we called the binding/banding (Gebannheit)
of Dasein within beings as a whole
"(Heidegger).
Krell doesn't bring forward the saying
in
Aristotle that pops into my mind, "A
man that is not social is either a
beast
or a god". In one part that I
have read
of the Heidegger, he says, "In
other
words, language is something that belongs
to the essence of man in his finitude.
To
imagine a god expressing himself in
speech
is utterly meaningless."
(p. 238). The "other words"
he
refers to are incredibly strangely,
"language
in all this is not subject to logic,
and
that a certain inconsequentiality belongs
rather to the essence of language and
its
meanings," which refers in turn
to the
page before (237) to his deliberate
equivocation
of the use of his words comportment
and behavior,
saying it's all right to use either
one for
animals or humans as though the fundamental
distinctions he has been talking about
are
merely playtime, a child playing draughts,
a image he took from Heraclitus and
uses
to powerful effect at the end of THE
PRINCIPLE
OF REASON. As my former professor Alexander
von Schoenborn once rhetorically asked
the
class, "Is all this etymology
and playing
with words he indulges in merely a
game?"
He had no resolve whatsoever to the
question.
So is Heidegger saying the dog is a
beast
or God? The dog certainly exists in
a state
most of the time of santarasa bliss
and detachment.
All we have to do is change the order
of
letters and pray. Since to me human
beings
are the lowest form of life, that is
very
interesting. If a dog could talk would
it
make us feel incredibly stupid and
guilty?
One critic of your books said it was
totally
unacceptable to compare the destruction
of
animals to the holocaust. If what I've
been
saying has any truth at all, that seems
perfectly
acceptable to me. It may even be a
comparison
on far too small a scale. Think about
it.
If I cannot figure out what my daughter
is
thinking, how can I possibly comprehend
what
'my' dog is thinking? The dog is the
embodiment
of emotion. Sartre says emotions are
magical,
i. e., they want to jump beyond logic
to
grasp the desired object no matter
what the
irrationality or consequences.
You ought to read some the Greek magical
formulas archeologists have dug up
in Egypt.
Love is bought by dealing with horribly
repulsive
substances and the deaths of others.
No holds
barred. Logic goes step by step and
when
it reaches a rational dead end, it
wants
to stop and go back, go somewhere else
that's
actually attainable. Passion says attain
or die. Like a dog it goes all out.
Sartre's
negative emotional magic proposes that
something
can be that cannot be. Heidegger might
be
said to have a positive magic of mood
where
where there was no object before, i.
e.,
dread in the face of nothingness, suddenly
in a moment of vision you discover
that little
object "being" (or is it
nothingness?)
that is no object at all in any form
or fashion
whatsoever, just like Brahma or Shiva.
Is
not that frightening? In regard to
the religious
virtue of detachment, the Greek heychast
saint Gregory Palamas whom the Roman
church
found so unacceptable called it "apathy"
and so did the Marquis de Sade. In
regard
to ethics, if "honesty is the
only virtue",
this is so fundamentally because the
heart
of reason is consistency. The essence
of
identity is that it stays consistently
the
same with itself at the same time and
same
place (people tend to forget that last
qualification).
There is then an implicit promise made
through
logical honesty that if one makes a
statement
about a member of a class that is an
NOT
essential quality of that particular
member,
i. e., that a fly has no wings because
a
child has pulled them off, breaks that
promise
when it is applied to all members of
that
class. "Socrates is a man. All
men are
mortal. Therefore Socrates is mortal."
If one makes a statement that there
are actually
such entities as "peoples"
or "cultures"
that share physical, animal human nature
but have different values due to whatever
reasons (which I reject not only because
they are abstractions and therefore
do not
exist, but because of the necessary
corollary
that necessarily contradicts societies
that
each person is an individual, utterly
separate
and ontologically alone, and yet share
fundamentals
such as hunger and bodily functions,
all
the things that originate desire. Utterly
different yet utterly the same.), then
consistency
demands that, as human beings, each
people
and culture are motivated by similar
desires
expressed differently through mere
historical
and geographical differences. They
come into
conflict because of differences of
values
that cross over physical boundaries.
Heidegger at one time said Russians
and Americans
were the ultimate evils in the world
(but
not in those terms) which left of course
the Germans not only in the middle
but as
the good guys. The Russians and Americans
destroyed their spirituality by destroying
tradition, and respect for the earth
(in
some ways he is a most extreme conservationist!).
All they value is technique, acquisition,
and making everybody the same while
in the
process of exhausting the earth for
the benefit
of the masses. The Germans are the
protectors
of tradition, history, culture, and
the earth
(how ludicrous this sounds when one
thinks
of Hitler, von Braun, the German general
staff, Krupp, Bayer, etc.). He only
once
(?) brings up the German worship of
mechanization
and technique when he mentions in an
obscure
speech the processing of human beings
in
concentration camps. In the rector's
speech,
he makes the implicit statement statement
of the necessity of discipline of Germans
to be the same. He violated everything
he
said in BEING AND TIME, including what
he
said about history, and for that matter
everywhere
else in his philosophical writings
(am I
stretching too far? I'm an old man
with a
poor memory. Re Abraham a Santa Clara).
"Ein
Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Furher."
So where
did the Jews fit into this scheme of
things?
He never identified them as a people
or culture,
but he attacked specific people as
Jewish
or Jewish sympathizers. Yet he retains
a
ludicrous respect for Husserl not only
in
the retained footnote in the 1941 edition
of BEING AND TIME while omitting the
dedication.
And when Husserl's son is arrested
by the
Nazis, he and his even more fanatical
Nazi
wife send flowers of consolation to
him.
At least Hitler believed in the great
Jewish
conspiracy and that the Jewish people
held
a higher allegiance to itself than
to its
host nations. He believed a Jew was
a Jew
genetically and could not help himself
being
Jewish. Heidegger not only never mentions
race, one of the most ridiculous pseudo-concepts
ever created, but his whole philosophy,
especially
in BEING AND TIME, rejects any possible
basis
for such a concept. Heidegger did not
keep
the promise (that basis of morality
as Nietzsche
said, but then Nietzsche was an immoralist)
of consistency in the closed off, most
important
part of his soul. When confronted with
this
contradiction at the denazification
interrogation
at the end of the war, he had a nervous
breakdown
which the local archbishop tried to
take
advantage of to bring him back to the
Catholic
faith which he utterly rejected however.
But from that point on he deliberately
and
consciously lied.
What did the so-called 'Jews' do to make
him act so? Even Celine could relate his
anti-Semitism to a specific cause and person.
Whereas Heidegger obviously did not regard
Husserl, Arendt, and Lowith as Jews (remember
Heidegger talking so openly to Lowith in
Rome in 1937 while wearing his Nazi party
pen on his lapel). He implies they were unGerman
but never says specifically why that I know
of (which reminds me of the pathetic effort
Hindenburg made to protect civil service
Jews who had served in the front line). Lack
of tradition? That would have applied to
90% of the Nazi who, like Eichman, only had
an interest in their advancement, and who
created the terribly efficient, absurdly
rule bound, and utterly indifferent beauracracy
of the camps.
Wednesday, December 15, 1999
David Farrell Krell, Animality, &
Heidegger
Seventh letter.
Forget what I said about Krell. His
style
is irritating but he really has a thorough
grasp, not only of Heidegger, but especially
of the nature of animal life. You would
get
a lot out of reading DAIMON LIFE. He
does
discuss the similarity of God and dog,
the
divinity of animal, but always with
an air
of hesitancy as though he's afraid
he is
going to make an absurd statement that
his
colleagues are going to laugh at him
for.
And yet he still lays it plainly on
the line
even though at times he resolves in
the form
of a question left hanging which, unfortunately,
also leaves the discussion hanging
in the
air with a failure to fully commit
when one
has just presented all the evidence
like
a defense lawyer concluding, "Now
do
you really think my client is guilty?"
This does have the virtue of not determining
what the reader should believe, but
does
leave the subject inconclusive when
we are
on the verge of going on to fabulous
things!
He quotes Heidegger saying (p17), "human
analysis practically runs out of alternatives
when it rejects mechanistic views of
animality"
which sums up the difficulty of reading
THE
FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS. He notes that
the main
difference between animal and man is
that
man can speak but misses the key ambiguity
on p. 259 that, "From the perspective
of the animal (captivation) we should
never
take these other things as beings,
though
for us it is only possible to approach
such
things by way of naming through language.
But linguistic naming, and all language,
always already involves an understanding
of beings . . ." LINGUISTIC NAMING,
not human naming. Maybe this is unjustified
also, but Krell's insistence on the
superhumanism
of Heidegger (footnote
23, p. 323) ignores statements Heidegger
made numerous times that language speaks
man, not the other way around. Therefore
Heidegger's whole analysis of animal
life
as "poor in world" is an
analysis
of the "They-self" of man,
the
inauthentic necessity of human life
as opposed
to the purely momentary "moment
of vision"
of authenticity. "It is nothing
enduring
that could stand over against the animal
as a possible object--whether as something
changed or unchanged in the process.
The
self withdrawal of that which disinhibits
(uncovers, a description of being 'itself'--
from me) corresponds to the essential
inability
to attend to it which is involved in
behavior,
that is, the inability to attend to
that
which disinhibits as something present
to
hand." The categories "present
to hand" and "ready to hand"
in the purposeful context of the human
WORK
world cover over how these beings reveal
themselves presenting their active
phenomena
that "shine", as both Heidegger
and Indian philosophers say, that arise
from
"phusis" and return to it
("It
is nothing enduring that could stand
over
the animal as a possible object . .
.").
Must go now, shall conclude with an
important
quotation from THE FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS
(p.
257):
"Thus we can see that the circumsized
range of possible disinhibition or,
as we
put it, the disinhibiting ring, is
intrinsic
to the animal itself; that in its factical
life amongst beings in each case the
animal
itself carves out a quite specific
encircling
ring within which it can be stimulated,
i.
e., a prior ring of potential disinhibition.
Every animal surrounds itself with
such an
encircling ring, but it does not do
so subsequently,
as if the animal initially lived or
ever
could live without this encircling
ring altogether,
as if this encircling ring somehow
grew up
around the animal at a latter stage
(pre-ontological
understanding from BEING AND TIME from
me).
On the contrary, EVERY LIVING BEING
(me),
how every rudimentary (go in the opposite
direction--me) it might appear (! me)
to
be, is surrounded in every moment of
its
life by such an encircling ring of
possible
disinhibition (the clearing, uncovering,
"aletheia"--me). More precisely,
we must say that life (all life--me)
is nothing
but the animal's encircling itself
and struggling
with its encircling ring, a ring by
way of
which the animal is absorbed without
its
ever being with itself in the proper
sense
(the "They" self--me)."
I hope you haven't responded because
you
are too busy and not because something
has
happened to you. I am about the same
age
as you and am all too aware of the
frailty
of fleshly existence. And I want to
read
your future planed books, especially
animals
and fatherhood and, of course, FALLEN
HEROES.
But I also want you to write a book
on your
life and studies in India. The passing
hints
you have given in your books are extremely
intriguing and I would love to find
out why
you specifically choose Abhinavagupta
to
study instead of what would seem to
be the
automatic choice of Shankara! Thank
you for
your time.
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