From: Rene de Bakker To: heidegger@lists.village.virginia.edu
August 28, 2000
Hello Gary,
Very good writing. I'm reminded of the television
interview with Heidegger, as reported in
"Erinnerung an M. H." In a discussion
before the interview the interviewer proposes
his questions and H. makes some changes.
The last question is: Can H., as the eighty-year-old
philosopher he is, tell the people something
about his understanding of death and loneliness?
Heidegger, very sharply: With this question
you hit yourself in the face! Long silence.
Interviewer feels offended, it reminds him
of Zen-tactics. Then Heidegger begins: Mein
lieber Herr .... You cannot know about my
loneliness, which is what your question suggests.
28-8-00., Gary C. Moore wrote:
Dear Calypso , One of the absolute necessities
for a voice like Catweasle's (Jud Evans)
is to bring one's own position into an objective
perspective. This cannot be done when everyone
is basically in agreement with each other
because then key problematic concepts never
get analyzed. It is not simply telling somebody
they are wrong, but the necessity of explaining
why they are wrong logical point by logical
point, or all this list becomes is a mutual
admiration society going around in meaningless
circles discussing concepts that 'feel' good
but have absolutely no rational content.
In other words, one must be able IN REALITY
to stand back from what one writes and truly
THINK, "Is what I have stated ridiculous?"
In other words, are you ABLE to really tear
into your own thinking that you have work
very hard at to achieve? Because whatever
your credentials, whatever effort you have
put into a project mean nothing to anyone
else, and, as a philosopher, SHOULD MEAN
NOTHING TO YOU. All that counts is if you
are right or if you are wrong. This is exactly
the way the early Heidegger worked. He was
passionately filled with self-questioning
and also took on in agonistic contest everyone
else's thought. He never hesitated to attack
people who had helped him to develop like
Bergson, Dilthey, Jaspers, and especially
Hegel because, as he said himself, "He
came so close!" Heidegger has always
defined his thought antagonistically to Hegel
because, even though dead and his work 'finished',
Hegel was still his most severe and unrelenting
critic. You must be able to see if what you
say fits rightfully or not into the framework
of the word "ridiculous" for the
sake of your own 'salvation'. For instance,
Heidegger MUST be a kind of materialist.
Otherwise his concern in the early years
with "throwness" and "facticity"
and "fate" would be meaningless.
Hegel's so-called "Idealism" incorporates,
and never excludes, and certainly does not
refute, materialism. This is why, in his
own self-debate, since he considered no one
else his equal as was the truth, that he
evolved what he called an "atheistic
methodology" as stated in his
1922 Aristotle thesis. He started as a firm,
conservative Catholic absorbed in Scholastism,
then having, like Hegel, absorbed that into
his personal experience, became a fervent
but liberal Protestant, absorbed in Luther
and Schleiermacher. In other words he became
totally absorbed in his subject from the
inside out like a 'true believer' but in
the inner core of his self could stand back
eventually, see what was good with that kind
of thinking and what was disposable, absorb
it and go on to the next stage. This is due
to the fundamentally detached, totally uncommitted
st methodology". And having learned
a new way to approach Aristotle specifically
from Luther who only appreciated the NICOMACHIAN
ETHICS and hated the rest of Aristotle, Heidegger
became certainly the most innovative Aristotle
scholar of all time. Yet having made a tremendous
investment in that, he absorbs Aristotle
like he did everyone else, utterly careless
of his status and investment in that field,
and goes on to Kant. All this time he is
also deeply absorbed in contemporary scientific
methodology, never questioning its fundamental
materialistic basis but discarding naive
concepts of cause and effect determinism
because there are fundamentally two things
wrong with such an approach. One, you can
never fully or even adequately know the cause
or the effect of anything since they can
only occur within a total context of world
one cannot grasp in detail nor fully experience.
Two, whether there is a materialistic determination
or not is a matter of complete indifference
since such a position requires, to comprehend
it and know whether it is true, the viewpoint
of God. And even the later Heidegger still
holds to a materialistic base since, one,
though there is freedom in some sense, it
is never a matter of one's arbitrary control.
He totally denies any rational understanding
of any immortality. He constantly says "Being"
is not in any way "God" (In fact,
in "What is Metaphysics?" he makes
it clear that not only is "Being"
finite, it is dependent on Dasein for its
'existence). He might call himself a "Christian
theologian" (I would like to know exactly
where that came from), but that must be taken
from a point of view of one who has digested
Scholasticism and Martin Luther and Kierkegaard
WITHIN an atheist methodology.
H. didn't like it when Husserl, around 1920,
referred to him as a theologian. Heidegger
later said, that, without theology, he wouldn't
have been the philosopher he had become.
(I guess that theology here must be taken
as broad as possible, incl. the faith of
his youth.)
Maybe it is interesting to compare with a
statement of "Kant's thesis on being",
where he says, that the sentence "God
is" (absolute position) is the hidden
prickle, the "geheime Stachel",
that was driving Kant on his critical ways.
And, though the latter Heidegger SEEMS less
self-critical and open to religious manipulation,
he has essentially climbed Wittgenstein's
ladder out of that turmoil, and has achieved
a personal viewpoint that he has not really
shared with anyone else. Heidegger is not
a public philosopher. He has absolutely no
interest or pretension that he has a public
'message'. This leaves him open to other
people to find one, but what is public in
his work he essentially left behind. And
what he 'truly believed' no one will ever
know. This is where biography becomes relevant
because the material, personal acts of a
person shows IN A NEGATIVE WAY, like the
blind men trying to define what an 'elephant'
is, what he is intent upon. He obviously
wanted to be much more than just a professor,
or even for that matter a philosopher. But
he DID NOT want to become a religious prophet
or a mystic in the popular sense of the word.
What he did think of himself is unknown much
more so of him because he deliberately and
systematically hid it, unlike, for instance,
Sartre. But like Sartre you can at times
see the purely personal existence that really
grounds his philosophical endeavor peep through--MAKING
THE WHOLE THING BECOME RIDICULOUS AS A PUBLIC
SPECTACLE. And if the philosopher himself
can do that, then someone like Catweasle
is merely criticizing a public facade left
behind by the philosopher to be torn apart--or
not with equal indifference. In other words,
it is a thing to be examined initially just
like a used car. And if it cannot stand up
to that level of examination, of what possible
use is it? In other words, "To thine
own self be true/And thou shalt be false
to no man." An over obviously appropriated
saying to the one of triteness--until one
realizes an old fool like me is saying it.
One must always assume one might be the fool.
Heidegger said once that philosophy was anyhow
a crazy business. In it one is always "ueber
sich hinaus", or: ver-rueckt, which
can be seen as a translation of "transcendent",
but verrueckt means also plainly: crazy.
Gary C. Moore |
