Abhinavagupta, Jeffrey Mousaieff Masson, & Heidegger

 
(Weds, December 8, 1999

First, almost all so-called philosophical scholars (as opposed to an ordinary person who must endure the realities of daily life irrevocably) roundly condemn Heidegger’s Nazism within what should be a ‘modern’ philosophical consciousness questioning the very existence and meaning of good and evil. Yet they talk as if such questions have obvious and self-evident answers that do not need to be brought into a discussion of Heidegger. And some of the same people complain that he never wrote an ‘Ethics" and therefore is neither a complete philosopher as they obviously are nor took the concept of ethics seriously. An ordinary person must believe they know what good and evil are in order to be able to act at all in an environment where action is demanded both instantaneously and continually without respite. But a philosopher is bound by the virtue of honesty, despite the ‘necessity’ of ‘deferment’ and its partner ‘difference’ to never commit oneself. Though one never understands the full ramifications of any fundamental question, a philosopher is bound to ‘deconstruct’ if not destroy those very concepts. Therefore from the point of view of the so-called immoralist Nietzsche ("Why, he said so himself, didn’t he? And must we not take him at his word?), one of the most moral men that ever existed, and Dostoyevsky and Camus and Sartre and Heidegger, and even in their own way Kant and Aristotle (if you have read Plato’s Laws—I only got two-thirds of the way through—do you remember how tiresome and trivially detailed it was—except when he got the sour old men drunk so they’ll sing in the chorus—was it because he could find no ethical system in its truth? but only bits and pieces he felt he had to put together?), one does not KNOW "of course" and "obviously" that Nazism is wrong.

In the course of history, philosophy, economics (crime is a legal concept, not an economical one) when one fundamentally questions the validity of ethics in one place, then such a questioning applies to all judgements of good and evil! If they searched out why he made his political decision, they would find he violated his own philosophy of authenticity in order to go along with ‘everybody else’. Heidegger felt a tremendous pull of tradition, a need for being German among Germans. Maybe as nihilistic Americans we find this hard to understand. But still, considering that extreme mode of individuality he developed in Being and Time which must of ontological necessity transform history and tradition and all that which is handed down in understanding into mineness, why then, as a philosopher, does Heidegger need Germans? This means, in this context, being patriotic, proud of his country and wanting to restore it to its ultimate glory in World War I just like Hitler (in Hitler’s case glorifying the horror, in Heidegger’s case being totally ignorant of it). As many Germans saw it, Germany took on the whole world, while ignoring the justice of that fight (there was one German general that was court-martialed for refusing to invade Belgium), and held it at bay for four years. It was then cheated out of its reward at the last minute (whether the failure of Ludendorf’s all or nothing offensive, or ‘the stab in the back’ by the ‘Jews’ which really turned out to be Germans of every kind exhausted and exasperated by endless, fruitless war), and then viciously punished by the victors afterwards (which included a blockade which lasted into 1920, rarely mentioned in the history books). One must remember that every person, who commits what another considers evil, thinks they are justified, righteous, in what they do, however bizarre the reasoning, or they cannot act! Committing an unjustified act would be just like committing an act with no reason, literally no cause, whatsoever.

A human being must at least pretend rationality and consistency in order to act at all. Every murderer thinks his victim deserved to be killed at the time of the murder (Gary Gilmore, who recognized his irrationality after the fact, is a rarity, and that was afterwards). Every rapist thinks, "The woman asked for it". And to push this repulsive point further as a fundamental trait that, to me, distinguishes (probably due to my lack of knowledge) Western culture from Indian culture, Giordano Bruno and Michael Servetus were burned at the stake to save their souls and, as examples, the souls of others. And what is even more important, these acts were necessitated by those who condemned them in order to affirm their own faith and save their own souls. So, in order to save yourself, you must burn the heretic. Heresy hunting in India and China, as I understand it, was mainly a matter of kings and emperors trying to maintain an orderly and well functioning domain. So saying that good and evil are obvious is ludicrous since the cause of ‘good’ has created 99.9% of the evil in the world. This is why Heidegger’s ignoring Aristotle’s principle of epiekeia, equity, was so wrong not only because he had to be intimately aquatinted with it, if nothing else, through his student Hans Georg Gademer for whom it is a major principle in his magnum opus Truth and Method but also because epiekeia is a major aspect of phronesis which Heidegger does talk about extensively. Phronesis is basically ‘learning through experience’ and becoming wise, prudentia, in the ways of the world that one cannot learn from reason. And this is exactly what epiekeia is, relating to projective judgement, trying to find, not the abstract truth of the matter, but a balance in understanding another person’s act through examination. One’s own experience.

What Heidegger’s decision does exemplify is two basic approaches to politics. The method of democracy and republic which we take so for granted as to never think about it is a method of working things out slowly, stretched over a long course in time, without KNOWING whether it is the right way or the wrong way, in fact, not knowing where it is going ultimately at all! All you can do is use balanced judgement, equity, and hope things work out for the better. But this is an experienced politician’s viewpoint. The ordinary voter, the "They" of Heidegger, sees the obvious right and wrong of the situation and wants it immediately fixed, i. e., "Germany is going to the Communists and that must be stopped right now!" or "If people didn’t have guns they couldn’t kill people!" But to stop the Communists right now you must also stop democracy. There is no other way about it. And to take away everybody’s gun would be to take away what many people deeply, however irrationally, feel is the last bastion in the modern world of human dignity, individuality, and freedom. In other words, a politician must be careful in the ‘good’ laws he passes use equity constantly and in review as I do in rewriting, or he may bring the whole damn house down as happened in Germany.

Also in relation to religious fantasy in your book Oceanic Feeling (as to gurus, I completely missed that point since they mean nothing to me) and an analyst’s deciding what is right and wrong for a patient (when, morally, he is just an ordinary person which means they are as compromised as everybody else), have you changed your mind? If so, have you stated it somewhere? I may have already read it and completely missed it. One of the fascinating aspects of the aesthetics, philosophy, and religion of Abhinavagupta is the no hole barred, wide open range of thought he has. He has no inquisition looking over his shoulder, no neighbor to call the police, complaining about his behavior, no education board stating his books encourage obscene acts and words. I have found in him, also in reading Shankara’s Brahmasutrabasrya, a working out of consistent monist philosophy where there is a proper place for every point of view which it exemplified in Hegel’s often derided statement, "What is is rational". Another philosopher, Ayn Rand, despite all my disputes with her, did make plain what the real issues of philosophy are (and her philosophy is also ‘based’ on Aristotle), that they must do with actual living, and that a being lives to be happy. She sets limits on thinking which, though they should be respected and literally observed, cuts off the exploring mind, specifically, that reason is the only means by which to understand reality. What reality in experience is beyond language and reason we cannot talk about but only describe it in a consistent context which, in experience, comes up against something beyond any context per se. As an example, the burden of proof lies positively upon the person who proposes the existence of God; otherwise you have no ground on which to construct rational statements. This is perfectly correct as far as it goes. But someone like Abhinavagupta, rationalizing about the nature and personality of Siva, explores fascinating fields of imagination without requiring "You must believe or else!" which Ayn Rand does do, and her followers commit in extreme excess. Discussing god’s personality, regardless of whether it exists or not, clarifies many issues. For, in the beginning, man judges god, not god man. Each person is bound to decide about the good or evil of god. And then quickly turns the table of responsibility so that it seems the only real and serious demand has always already been determined beforehand as the demand of a personified God to do His commands. Therefore the ultimate responsibility every person always already had and exercised is ‘erased’ and laid on an invisible and always absent figure who cannot question his responsibility for the way things are. In other words, man has always already exercised his freedom to deny his freedom. Everyone then makes himself or herself believe the only real decision involved is between God’s goodness and existence, i. e., if God is not good, then he does not exist. Therefore any range of the ‘in between’ is totally erased. And yet we have always already set up the goodness of god according to our own puny standards of good and evil. I hope this is beginning to sound familiar because this is exactly what you are saying about psychoanalysts. When you describe Freud’s analysis of ‘Dora’, you show a very brilliant intellect demonstrating the completely unexamined morality of a very ordinary man. In other words, you must take your criticism of Freud’s sorry exercise of human decency and even common sense, and of psychoanalysis in general, and apply it to the ‘drum head court-martial ‘ of Heidegger’s philosophy.

Abhinavagupta and Shankara provide a detachment from all this. Shankara gives you the bedrock of reality, the unwitnessed witness, and Abhinavagupta the undetermined consciousness of continuity in language and memory that is in a deep sense outside of humanity per se. This is Heidegger’s dasein, which is NOT the same as "human being" as many scholars would have it. Shankara gives you a solid sense of the reality that always supports the continuity of human existence yet stands utterly detached from it, and stands behind it, literally, like the unseen darkness that always stands between the consciousness of your physical or dreaming eyesight. That is certainly a pest of an image isn’t it? It is not a symbol, but a literal, experiential reality that goes on every waking and sleeping moment of your life. It is not what you are but what lets you be what you are. It is on the basis of this that Abhinavagupta can have his playtime with the gods--his drama, tragedy and comedy all in one solid whole, called the Paratrisika Vivarana, a ‘harmless’ fantasy within this utterly unrewarding, so called rational but definitely real world where all battles are always already lost. At least tell me if you are receiving these messages. I must go to work.