A problem I have been dealing with in Heidegger is that In BEING AND TIME, Heidegger takes a very radical view of dasein's authentic appropriation of tradition which, by necessity, completely takes it apart and puts it back together again as dasein actually knows it instead of the 'everyday' passive acceptance of a vague theme of what tradition is that never examines it rationally in detail or judge even if it fits together coherently.

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.