In an article first published in 1951 entitled 'Is Ontology Fundamental?', Lévinas briefly presents a case for a negative answer to this question. This negative answer bears and marks his entire thinking, and that to such an extent that it is by and large a negative movement, akin even to negative theology. There is no doubt that Lévinas has a genuine phenomenon in view, a phenomenon that opened up and provided the essential impetus for dialogical philosophy and is roughly indicated by the grammatical difference between the third person and the second person. Lévinas is also correct in pointing out that Heidegger's fundamental ontology, as presented in Sein und Zeit and lecture courses throughout the twenties, does not enter into an interpretation of this phenomenon but rather keeps it at arm's length. But whereas Lévinas argues for a strong distinction between what he calls metaphysics, which is concerned with infinitude, and ontology, which he claims to be totalizing, the thesis presented in the present excursus is that Heidegger, even in shying away from the dialogical phenomenon, provides an indispensable placeholder and starting-point for adequately interpreting it. To put it colloquially, Lévinas throws the baby out with the bath-water. Moreover, he insists on mixing theology with philosophy, with the result that his texts take on the hue of a dogmatic, morally exalted, incantatory insistence. This will be shown in the following by selecting passages from the above-mentioned article which is representative of and quintessential to Lévinas' enduring stance toward Heidegger's thinking. Some comments will also be made on Totalité et Infini and Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence.
Read on.
15 May 2014
23 April 2014
Negative and positive freedom
The distinction between negative and positive freedom stems from the liberal philosopher, Isaiah Berlin's 1958 inaugural address at Oxford University entitled 'Two Concepts of Liberty', in which he treats 'liberty' and 'freedom' as synonyms. On "the notion of negative freedom", Berlin states, "I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity." On the other hand, "the 'positive' sense of the word 'liberty' derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not of other men's, acts of will." This positive notion of freedom is summed up in the word "self-mastery". Note that both these notions are of individual freedom of an individual subject with its own will vis-à-vis an objective world of other things and, especially, other persons. There is thus a dichotomy between individual and society.
In contemporary discussion of negative and positive freedom, the latter "has often been thought of as necessarily achieved through a collectivity" (SEP). This opens the way to the individual's will being trumped by and subsumed under an effective collective will that is able to realize a collective aim through the appropriate social institutions, mainly the state, its organs and agencies. In particular, positive freedom collectivized is congruous with the welfare state, but also with other totalitarian and authoritarian regimes in the name of some version of the social good. As a liberal, Berlin warns against (social-)totalitarian interpretations of positive freedom in which, say, a "true self" or a "rational self" is posited to trump the merely empirical individual self with its desires and passions. In this connection he quotes the illiberal German, Fichte, e.g.: "'No one has ... rights against reason.' 'Man is afraid of subordinating his subjectivity to the laws of reason. He prefers tradition or arbitrariness.’"
Yet in all this exposition, Berlin does not make the essential connection between freedom and power, even though the word 'power' occurs in his speech several times, mainly in the footnotes. Similarly, the SEP also does not discuss the intimacy between freedom and power. The closest it comes is the notion of "republican freedom", which "can be thought of as a kind of status: to be a free person is to enjoy the rights and privileges attached to the status of republican citizenship", so that your negative freedom not to be interfered with is supplemented and reinforced by a republican political power.
The flaw in this kind of analytic thinking is that freedom is on the one side and power on the other, just as the individual is on one side and society or government on the other. Both of these schemata are fallacious. Why? Because both freedom and power, individual and society are each two sides of their own respective coins, and the two coins themselves are interlinked.
Freedom relates to the movement of human life. Each single human being is an origin or source of power for its own life-movements out of the ultimate fathomlessness of its own volition. The actualization of power is life-movement itself toward some self-posited end, whether it be good or bad. This is the lesson of the Aristotelean ontology of power with its famous triad of key concepts, du/namij, e)ne/rgeia and e)ntele/xeia. The notion of individual negative freedom is that there is no obstacle to your actualizing your potential, i.e. your power to initiate some sort of life-movement toward a goal. The movement is without resistance, at least from others. The individual is in splendid isolation, pre-social or asocial. Such pre-sociality corresponds to those Rousseauian types of socio-political theory that proceed naively from some imagined state of nature consisting of a scattered bunch of isolated individuals which, in turn, is associated with the childish notion of individual (negative) freedom as being able to do what you like. This notion of freedom is rightly criticized by Hegel as caprice (Willkür), however, without his criticizing the very notion of the abstractly free individual (abstraktes Recht) that corresponds to the phantasy of a state of nature.
Rather than imagining a resistanceless freedom, it must be admitted to view that i) the individual is always already sharing the world with others and ii) individuality itself is a mode of sociation. It seems that not only liberal thinking, but all stripes of political thinking, left, right and centre, have missed both these points by not paying attention to the ontology of (social) power itself. And this despite (or rather: because of) the recent fashionability of shallowly talking about 'social ontologies' without knowing what ontology means.
Re i): individual freedom is at core neither negative nor positive but both in the sense that it is an exercise of individual power in a power play with others (a kind of sociating movement), and hence of itself comes up against the resistance of other individual and collective, i.e. bundled individual, powers. Negative freedom is associated more with du/namij, i.e. potentiality, whereas positive freedom is associated more with e)ntele/xeia, i.e. actualization in perfected presence; hence the one-sidedness of both notions. If this power play is to be free, it must be fair in the sense that you have a fair chance of achieving your ends without the power play being rigged against you from the start. Since you are always already sharing a world with others, who are likewise exercising their individual powers, the fairness of power play depends upon a superior political instance to guarantee fair rules of power play without, however, guaranteeing particular outcomes (achieved ends), i.e. the what-you-have-in-the-end of e)ntele/xeia. Hence freedom is intimately coupled with fairness conceived as the beauty of power play among people, but you don't always get what you want.
Re ii): the individual itself is only a particular historical mode of sociation first enabled by the social power of reified value which serves as the medium of sociation for the power plays of individual freedom. Neither liberals nor Marxists nor other leftists nor conservatives get this. On markets of all kinds, individuals engage in power plays mediated in particular by the reified value-form of money. Apart from being a reified power for acquiring personal consumption goods and services, this money also may be a particular value-form of capital in its circuit through its various value-form stages of money-capital, productive capital and circulation capital. It is precisely reified value in the form of money, purchased commodities and acquired land that enables the modern individual to actually be (presence as) an individual with a private world not interfered with by others, including the government. By virtue of the income you receive and the wealth you have accumulated, you are then free to do what you like with it within a realm of privacy guaranteed by the political power of government. Likewise, and conversely, you are individually free to engage in power plays to gain income, in particular, by hiring out your personal powers and abilities. With any other mode of (non-reified) sociation, you would not have this risky freedom of singularity, but would have to negotiate (perhaps even each instance of) your exercise of practical free will with others (e.g. a State bureaucracy, a council or committee of some sort, a public meeting, etc.). The reified power play would become a political power play with entirely different rules of play, and the individual as such, along with its freedom, would cease to exist, i.e. to presence in the historical world of an historical age.
Further reading: 'Social Power and Government' excerpted from my Social Ontology. See also here Commutative and distributive justice and Potentiality and Actuality.
In contemporary discussion of negative and positive freedom, the latter "has often been thought of as necessarily achieved through a collectivity" (SEP). This opens the way to the individual's will being trumped by and subsumed under an effective collective will that is able to realize a collective aim through the appropriate social institutions, mainly the state, its organs and agencies. In particular, positive freedom collectivized is congruous with the welfare state, but also with other totalitarian and authoritarian regimes in the name of some version of the social good. As a liberal, Berlin warns against (social-)totalitarian interpretations of positive freedom in which, say, a "true self" or a "rational self" is posited to trump the merely empirical individual self with its desires and passions. In this connection he quotes the illiberal German, Fichte, e.g.: "'No one has ... rights against reason.' 'Man is afraid of subordinating his subjectivity to the laws of reason. He prefers tradition or arbitrariness.’"
Yet in all this exposition, Berlin does not make the essential connection between freedom and power, even though the word 'power' occurs in his speech several times, mainly in the footnotes. Similarly, the SEP also does not discuss the intimacy between freedom and power. The closest it comes is the notion of "republican freedom", which "can be thought of as a kind of status: to be a free person is to enjoy the rights and privileges attached to the status of republican citizenship", so that your negative freedom not to be interfered with is supplemented and reinforced by a republican political power.
The flaw in this kind of analytic thinking is that freedom is on the one side and power on the other, just as the individual is on one side and society or government on the other. Both of these schemata are fallacious. Why? Because both freedom and power, individual and society are each two sides of their own respective coins, and the two coins themselves are interlinked.
Freedom relates to the movement of human life. Each single human being is an origin or source of power for its own life-movements out of the ultimate fathomlessness of its own volition. The actualization of power is life-movement itself toward some self-posited end, whether it be good or bad. This is the lesson of the Aristotelean ontology of power with its famous triad of key concepts, du/namij, e)ne/rgeia and e)ntele/xeia. The notion of individual negative freedom is that there is no obstacle to your actualizing your potential, i.e. your power to initiate some sort of life-movement toward a goal. The movement is without resistance, at least from others. The individual is in splendid isolation, pre-social or asocial. Such pre-sociality corresponds to those Rousseauian types of socio-political theory that proceed naively from some imagined state of nature consisting of a scattered bunch of isolated individuals which, in turn, is associated with the childish notion of individual (negative) freedom as being able to do what you like. This notion of freedom is rightly criticized by Hegel as caprice (Willkür), however, without his criticizing the very notion of the abstractly free individual (abstraktes Recht) that corresponds to the phantasy of a state of nature.
Rather than imagining a resistanceless freedom, it must be admitted to view that i) the individual is always already sharing the world with others and ii) individuality itself is a mode of sociation. It seems that not only liberal thinking, but all stripes of political thinking, left, right and centre, have missed both these points by not paying attention to the ontology of (social) power itself. And this despite (or rather: because of) the recent fashionability of shallowly talking about 'social ontologies' without knowing what ontology means.
Re i): individual freedom is at core neither negative nor positive but both in the sense that it is an exercise of individual power in a power play with others (a kind of sociating movement), and hence of itself comes up against the resistance of other individual and collective, i.e. bundled individual, powers. Negative freedom is associated more with du/namij, i.e. potentiality, whereas positive freedom is associated more with e)ntele/xeia, i.e. actualization in perfected presence; hence the one-sidedness of both notions. If this power play is to be free, it must be fair in the sense that you have a fair chance of achieving your ends without the power play being rigged against you from the start. Since you are always already sharing a world with others, who are likewise exercising their individual powers, the fairness of power play depends upon a superior political instance to guarantee fair rules of power play without, however, guaranteeing particular outcomes (achieved ends), i.e. the what-you-have-in-the-end of e)ntele/xeia. Hence freedom is intimately coupled with fairness conceived as the beauty of power play among people, but you don't always get what you want.
Re ii): the individual itself is only a particular historical mode of sociation first enabled by the social power of reified value which serves as the medium of sociation for the power plays of individual freedom. Neither liberals nor Marxists nor other leftists nor conservatives get this. On markets of all kinds, individuals engage in power plays mediated in particular by the reified value-form of money. Apart from being a reified power for acquiring personal consumption goods and services, this money also may be a particular value-form of capital in its circuit through its various value-form stages of money-capital, productive capital and circulation capital. It is precisely reified value in the form of money, purchased commodities and acquired land that enables the modern individual to actually be (presence as) an individual with a private world not interfered with by others, including the government. By virtue of the income you receive and the wealth you have accumulated, you are then free to do what you like with it within a realm of privacy guaranteed by the political power of government. Likewise, and conversely, you are individually free to engage in power plays to gain income, in particular, by hiring out your personal powers and abilities. With any other mode of (non-reified) sociation, you would not have this risky freedom of singularity, but would have to negotiate (perhaps even each instance of) your exercise of practical free will with others (e.g. a State bureaucracy, a council or committee of some sort, a public meeting, etc.). The reified power play would become a political power play with entirely different rules of play, and the individual as such, along with its freedom, would cease to exist, i.e. to presence in the historical world of an historical age.
Further reading: 'Social Power and Government' excerpted from my Social Ontology. See also here Commutative and distributive justice and Potentiality and Actuality.
19 April 2014
Science and scholarship don't think
Heidegger famously said, "Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht." (Science doesn't think.)
He neglected to add, "Scholarship doesn't think either."
The explication of Heidegger's statement is that modern science as a way of thinking is unable to see and think through its own deepest presuppositions, for these are not accessible at all to scientific method. Rather, they are ontological in nature, i.e. they are a cast of the being of beings in our own epoch, the Modern Age, whose end is now dragging out, perhaps for centuries, despite all annunciations and asseverations of post-modernity..
The methods of scholarship, such as analysis and comparison of texts from the tradition, or biographical narrative about the stages of a thinker's thinking, serve at most as a preliminary working-up of the issues themselves for thinking. Valuable as they might be in these restricted respects, scholarship itself is unable to hermeneutically assess a cast of the being of beings (the presencing of presents AS such-and-such), for this is a task of thinking requiring conceptual clarity as to the simplest of phenomena that are "hardest to see" (Aristotle). Short-cuts to ontic self-evidence that flatten the ontological difference are disallowed, but such bans are not only ignored, they are not even seen and understood. This contributes to certain scholars' success, for it makes them easily and broadly understood. They gain a following and enjoy the accolades. No matter that it is a sell-out of what calls for thinking, scholarship blabs on and on under false pretences. It talks forever merely about the issues themselves, without thinking them through with hermeneutic-phenomenological rigour. For instance, Heidegger scholars talk endlessly about the ontological difference, without ever practising it in their thinking. In Hegelian language, scholarship is "begrifflos" (conceptless) and is even clueless about what this means. Hence scholarship cannot practise truth, i.e. the disclosing of what calls for thinking.
And what calls for thinking? How to cast loose from and recast a cast of being through fore-casting into the future.
Modern scientists and scholars don't get it, nor do they want to twig. Each in their own different ways, they miss the point and proceed, pussyfooting along their fateful paths in the ruts inscribed by our epoch's cast of being, fearful of leaving the beaten track.
He neglected to add, "Scholarship doesn't think either."
The explication of Heidegger's statement is that modern science as a way of thinking is unable to see and think through its own deepest presuppositions, for these are not accessible at all to scientific method. Rather, they are ontological in nature, i.e. they are a cast of the being of beings in our own epoch, the Modern Age, whose end is now dragging out, perhaps for centuries, despite all annunciations and asseverations of post-modernity..
The methods of scholarship, such as analysis and comparison of texts from the tradition, or biographical narrative about the stages of a thinker's thinking, serve at most as a preliminary working-up of the issues themselves for thinking. Valuable as they might be in these restricted respects, scholarship itself is unable to hermeneutically assess a cast of the being of beings (the presencing of presents AS such-and-such), for this is a task of thinking requiring conceptual clarity as to the simplest of phenomena that are "hardest to see" (Aristotle). Short-cuts to ontic self-evidence that flatten the ontological difference are disallowed, but such bans are not only ignored, they are not even seen and understood. This contributes to certain scholars' success, for it makes them easily and broadly understood. They gain a following and enjoy the accolades. No matter that it is a sell-out of what calls for thinking, scholarship blabs on and on under false pretences. It talks forever merely about the issues themselves, without thinking them through with hermeneutic-phenomenological rigour. For instance, Heidegger scholars talk endlessly about the ontological difference, without ever practising it in their thinking. In Hegelian language, scholarship is "begrifflos" (conceptless) and is even clueless about what this means. Hence scholarship cannot practise truth, i.e. the disclosing of what calls for thinking.
And what calls for thinking? How to cast loose from and recast a cast of being through fore-casting into the future.
Modern scientists and scholars don't get it, nor do they want to twig. Each in their own different ways, they miss the point and proceed, pussyfooting along their fateful paths in the ruts inscribed by our epoch's cast of being, fearful of leaving the beaten track.
07 April 2014
Alternative to David Harvey's 17 Contradictions
David Harvey's 2014 book, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, has received abundant media attention, including at the LSE. Overcoming the 17 contradictions of capital from the "foundational" through the "moving" to the "dangerous contradictions" points to "the end of capitalism" and its replacement by an alternative, "happy but contested future" of "revolutionary humanism". Contradictions are presented as something inherently to be overcome, whereas in truth, anything that moves and, in particular, anything living, i.e. self-moving, is a contradiction, since it is simultaneously both what or how, how much or where it presently is and what or how, how much or where it will be.
Harvey names the most fundamental contradiction as that between use-value and exchange-value. Anything valuable for use can also, secondarily, be exchanged for something else useful, a distinction that goes back to Aristotle that was taken up also by Marx. Exchange-value develops into money, and money into capital, resulting in a contradiction between use-value and capital as reified value in circular movement.
Harvey employs the example of housing, which is a basic use-value, that comes into conflict with capital invested in real estate because, unless you can afford it, you can't gain access to housing. Use-value here becomes a basic need, and human being itself is cast as essentially needy. Abolition of the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value, according to Harvey, would result in the satisfaction of human needs (through what kind of power play? see below). Human being is cast as (modestly) essentially needy. That it is essentially desirous is left out of account, or rather, (limitless) desire in human being is treated as a perversion of authentic human being into the alienated human being of consumerism as manipulated by capital in its striving to realize surplus-value. So capital is cast once again as the culprit, perverting and alienating human nature, a naive Rousseauian perspective that never fails to find a following, because it is most flattering and painless.
Flattery is the working-capital (not only) of left-wing, Marxist thinking, for the victims of capital are cast as essentially good-natured, their perversions being attributed to capital's manipulation of its objects of exploitation. That human being itself could be 'wilfully infinitely desirous' is not considered.
More to the point: left out of consideration is that human being itself is will to power, since anything living is an origin of self-movement, i.e. of power. Hence human beings' sharing the world with one another is always also a power play in all shades of meaning, since human beings exercise their abilities and powers not only competitively against each other, but also mutually for each other, co-operatively with each other and (mostly) indifferently next to each other.
Harvey does not consider that the exchange-value he wants to abolish is an historically developed mode of sociating human beings economically that, as such, is also a power play -- for better or worse, ugly or fair. If the mode of economic sociating via reified value (that historically enables also the modern, 'contradictory' sociated individual) is to be replaced historically, the alternative is also essentially an estimating, valuating, power play. Harvey, however, following Marx, is content to suggest "freely associating and self-creating individuals" as the 'natural' alternative. This is supremely naive for it leaves the question concerning social power and its relation to human freedom unposed. Is something resembling 'economic democracy' supposed to suffice?
I could go on at length and in detail pointing out the many important issues Harvey misconceives or misses. There is an alternative line of thinking that digs deeper, reconstructing and extending Marx's Capital, starting with the 'results' of the Sydney-Konstanz Project from 1984, and proceeding with my Capital and Technology: Marx and Heidegger (2000/2010) and Social Ontology: Recasting Political Philosophy Through a Phenomenology of Whoness (2008/2011).
Harvey names the most fundamental contradiction as that between use-value and exchange-value. Anything valuable for use can also, secondarily, be exchanged for something else useful, a distinction that goes back to Aristotle that was taken up also by Marx. Exchange-value develops into money, and money into capital, resulting in a contradiction between use-value and capital as reified value in circular movement.
Harvey employs the example of housing, which is a basic use-value, that comes into conflict with capital invested in real estate because, unless you can afford it, you can't gain access to housing. Use-value here becomes a basic need, and human being itself is cast as essentially needy. Abolition of the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value, according to Harvey, would result in the satisfaction of human needs (through what kind of power play? see below). Human being is cast as (modestly) essentially needy. That it is essentially desirous is left out of account, or rather, (limitless) desire in human being is treated as a perversion of authentic human being into the alienated human being of consumerism as manipulated by capital in its striving to realize surplus-value. So capital is cast once again as the culprit, perverting and alienating human nature, a naive Rousseauian perspective that never fails to find a following, because it is most flattering and painless.
Flattery is the working-capital (not only) of left-wing, Marxist thinking, for the victims of capital are cast as essentially good-natured, their perversions being attributed to capital's manipulation of its objects of exploitation. That human being itself could be 'wilfully infinitely desirous' is not considered.
More to the point: left out of consideration is that human being itself is will to power, since anything living is an origin of self-movement, i.e. of power. Hence human beings' sharing the world with one another is always also a power play in all shades of meaning, since human beings exercise their abilities and powers not only competitively against each other, but also mutually for each other, co-operatively with each other and (mostly) indifferently next to each other.
Harvey does not consider that the exchange-value he wants to abolish is an historically developed mode of sociating human beings economically that, as such, is also a power play -- for better or worse, ugly or fair. If the mode of economic sociating via reified value (that historically enables also the modern, 'contradictory' sociated individual) is to be replaced historically, the alternative is also essentially an estimating, valuating, power play. Harvey, however, following Marx, is content to suggest "freely associating and self-creating individuals" as the 'natural' alternative. This is supremely naive for it leaves the question concerning social power and its relation to human freedom unposed. Is something resembling 'economic democracy' supposed to suffice?
I could go on at length and in detail pointing out the many important issues Harvey misconceives or misses. There is an alternative line of thinking that digs deeper, reconstructing and extending Marx's Capital, starting with the 'results' of the Sydney-Konstanz Project from 1984, and proceeding with my Capital and Technology: Marx and Heidegger (2000/2010) and Social Ontology: Recasting Political Philosophy Through a Phenomenology of Whoness (2008/2011).
24 March 2014
Continuum and Time: Weyl after Heidegger
A new study is out:
Continuum and Time:
The mathematician, Hermann Weyl, struggles in his 1918 book, Das Kontinuum, with the antinomies of the real number continuum, seeking a phenomenal basis in the subjective intuition of inner-time which, however, he ultimately rejects. Retrieving Aristotle on time and Heidegger on three-dimensional, ecstatic time offers an alternative path beyond Weyl. A bit of mathematics is required along the way.
Continuum and Time:
Weyl after Heidegger
The mathematician, Hermann Weyl, struggles in his 1918 book, Das Kontinuum, with the antinomies of the real number continuum, seeking a phenomenal basis in the subjective intuition of inner-time which, however, he ultimately rejects. Retrieving Aristotle on time and Heidegger on three-dimensional, ecstatic time offers an alternative path beyond Weyl. A bit of mathematics is required along the way.
1. Interest in Weyl's work on the continuum
2. Attempt to break out from inside consciousness: intersubjectivity
3. Time and continuum according to Aristotle
4. Dedekind's attempt at grounding the real number continuum
5. The mathematical continuum recast
5.1 A recast real continuum R
5.2 Arithmetic operations on R
5.3 Continuity of functions on R
5.4 Differentiability of continuous functions on R
6. Indeterminacy of movement and time
7. Clock-time and three-dimensional, ecstatic time
8. References
9. Notes
19 March 2014
Elimination of time
It is very consistent on the part of those who believe absolutely in mathematics to eliminate time from the equations of motion to produce a so-called ‘block theory’ of the universe. However, does a mathematical trick to eliminate the variable, t, — as numerous physicists and philosophers of science (such as Julian Barbour, Huw Price et al.) propose — amount to convincingly eliminating the phenomenon of time as an illusion?
Or is it the other way round: Is the mathematical conception of time as real, linear variable a tendentious crudity made for the sake of calculating movement and change of all kinds? If the latter, then it is mathematics that is delusional about the phenomenon of time we all experience with every move we and anything else makes.
In my view, modern science and its appendant analytic philosophy are driven by an absolute will to efficient power over movement and change.
The now long-held absolute belief in mathematics as THE key to the secrets of the universe (cf. e.g. the Big Bang theory and the Large Hadron Collider) makes modern science blind. Against the foil of the recent publication of Heidegger's Black Notebooks and the outpourings of vitriol it has occasioned (see my blog entry: Heidegger Back in Black), I find it ironic that this absolute belief allows a founding forefather of analytic philosophy, Gottlob Frege, to pass as a great and creative thinker in the area of mathematical logic (which he doubtless was) without the least qualms with regard to his reactionary political views and deep anti-Semitism. It was Frege who introduced formalism to the foundations of mathematics, which amounts to asserting that logic and mathematics can be conceived as purely analytic truths, independently of any reference to intuitions of phenomena in the world, in particular, to the phenomenon of TIME.
It seems to me that philosophers of all ilks today are still incapable and unwilling to fathom the momentousness of mathematized linear time, including its elimination as a mere real variable in a set of equations.
17 March 2014
Heidegger Back in Black
In my 1996 study, Heidegger's Hölderlin and John Cage,
published also in Italian in Rome in 2000, I pose several
questions, including the following:
"Does the historical 'matchlessness' ('Einzigartigkeit', Heidegger) of National Socialism consist in German being having destroyed itself in an orgy of self-annihilation? Was the attempted annihilation of the Jews the successful suicide of Germany, i.e. German being, as an independent historical magnitude?"
"Is it not, properly speaking, the German spirit that dissolved in the smoke of the stacks at Auschwitz? Is the genocide committed on the Jews at the same time the suicide of the Germans historically?"
Such questions concern not just Heidegger's thinking, but the historical German Geist itself.
Apart from more thoughtful reflections from commentators such as Peter Trawny and Jonathan Rée, the comments posted in response to articles in The Guardian, Prospect Magazine and elsewhere show that Heidegger's Back in Black with the Schwarzen Heften is apparently a welcome opportunity for many to engage in renewed thoughtless bashing.
So what's new?
In 1941 Heidegger notes in his Black Notebook: "World Jewry, stirred up by the emigrants let out of Germany, is everywhere intangible and, despite all its expansion of power, does not need to participate in military actions anywhere, whereas we are left with having to sacrifice the best blood of the best of our own people." (my translation)
Disturbing, nationalistically ugly.
I share Jonathan Rée's critical attitude toward Heidegger's thinking. To be critical means to distinguish (from Gk. _krinein_), in this case, the philosophically invaluable from the untenable and worthless and even downright repugnant.
That so much affective vitriol is stimulated by the name 'Heidegger' in Pavlovian response indicates obliquely that something is at stake here.
If I had to boil down the message of Heidegger's 1927 opus magnum, 'Being and Time', I'd say, "Being means time" and "Time is the open clearing of absencing and presencing". Today's mainstream philosophical and scientific thinking is not up to speed on this, remaining content with the washing-line of linear time on which to hang its effective causality between beings, and viciously repudiating any philosophical attempt to rethink time after two-and-a-half millennia.
Heidegger's detractors like to make fun of him by mockingly citing, out of context, sentences such as, "The world worlds". To them I reply:
What about the mathematically exact statement of the continuity of motion, namely:
"Motion is continuous at time t' if, for any positive epsilon, there is a positive delta such that for all t on the real time-line closer to t' than delta, position f(t) is closer to f(t') than epsilon."?
Now, isn't that a fine joke and absurdity to mull over?
"Does the historical 'matchlessness' ('Einzigartigkeit', Heidegger) of National Socialism consist in German being having destroyed itself in an orgy of self-annihilation? Was the attempted annihilation of the Jews the successful suicide of Germany, i.e. German being, as an independent historical magnitude?"
"Is it not, properly speaking, the German spirit that dissolved in the smoke of the stacks at Auschwitz? Is the genocide committed on the Jews at the same time the suicide of the Germans historically?"
Such questions concern not just Heidegger's thinking, but the historical German Geist itself.
Apart from more thoughtful reflections from commentators such as Peter Trawny and Jonathan Rée, the comments posted in response to articles in The Guardian, Prospect Magazine and elsewhere show that Heidegger's Back in Black with the Schwarzen Heften is apparently a welcome opportunity for many to engage in renewed thoughtless bashing.
So what's new?
In 1941 Heidegger notes in his Black Notebook: "World Jewry, stirred up by the emigrants let out of Germany, is everywhere intangible and, despite all its expansion of power, does not need to participate in military actions anywhere, whereas we are left with having to sacrifice the best blood of the best of our own people." (my translation)
Disturbing, nationalistically ugly.
I share Jonathan Rée's critical attitude toward Heidegger's thinking. To be critical means to distinguish (from Gk. _krinein_), in this case, the philosophically invaluable from the untenable and worthless and even downright repugnant.
That so much affective vitriol is stimulated by the name 'Heidegger' in Pavlovian response indicates obliquely that something is at stake here.
If I had to boil down the message of Heidegger's 1927 opus magnum, 'Being and Time', I'd say, "Being means time" and "Time is the open clearing of absencing and presencing". Today's mainstream philosophical and scientific thinking is not up to speed on this, remaining content with the washing-line of linear time on which to hang its effective causality between beings, and viciously repudiating any philosophical attempt to rethink time after two-and-a-half millennia.
Heidegger's detractors like to make fun of him by mockingly citing, out of context, sentences such as, "The world worlds". To them I reply:
What about the mathematically exact statement of the continuity of motion, namely:
"Motion is continuous at time t' if, for any positive epsilon, there is a positive delta such that for all t on the real time-line closer to t' than delta, position f(t) is closer to f(t') than epsilon."?
Now, isn't that a fine joke and absurdity to mull over?
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