Re: Heidegger's use of the word "polis"



>As usual, Chris raised a set of important and difficult questions,
>which--since they haven't been endlessly rehashed here already,
>deserve to be further elaborated, if possible. Toward that end let
>me say the following.
>
>Given the political questions with which this intersects, the dates
>here become very important. GA 53, from which Chris's quote is
>drawn, is Heidegger's lecture course on f Hoelderlin's Hymn, Der Ister,
>the Greek name for the Danube) from the Summer Semester of 1942. As
>Chris points out, in this lecture Heidegger employs a subtle
>etymological twist, refusing to identify the _polis_ either with the
>state (_Staat_) or with the city-state (_Stadt_), preferring instead
>to translate Polis as "place" or spatio-temporal "site" (_die
>Statt_), namely as the "site of the historical dwelling of man in
>the midst of being." Polis is thus the arena of the contest of
>being, the implicit but constant _agon_ whereby intelligibility is
>contested, constituted, and maintained. On 100-101 of GA 53,
>Heidegger writes, "perhaps polis is the place and space around which
>everything that is questionable and undomesticated revolves in a
>preeminent sense. Polis then is _polos_, that is, the pole or
>vortex in which and around which everything turns." It is thus
>misleading to equate the polis with the state too quickly.
>
>To emphasize this point, and to understand the philosophical grounds
>for Heidegger's hesitanncy here (the political grounds could also be
>discussed, and should be...), it is useful to examine the lecture
>from the following semester (Winter, 1942/43), GA54 now translated
>as _Parmenides_, where Heidegger returns to these issues. Here,
>perhaps displaying a vigilance against equating political life with
>the state, he writes "The polis is just as little something
>political as space itself is something spatial" (96). Rather, "The
>polis is the polos, the pole, the place around which everything
>appearing to the Greeks as a being turns... The polis is the essence
>of the place (ort) or settlement (Ortschaft) of the historical
>dwelling of Greek humanity. Because the polis lets the totality of
>beings come in this way or that into the unconcealedness of its
>condition, the polis is therefore essentially related to the Being
>of beings." In other words, while Heidegger maintains the
>importance of the ontopolitological, the fact that society shapes
>the way things show up (reflecting and driecting), the Greek polis
>is "essentially related" to metaphysics (!), in its attempt to
>ground and secure a political community in, on, or around the Being
>of beings. In contrast, Heidegger maintains that our
>ontopolitological condition is primordially one of homelessness. In
>this way he connects the _apolis_ to what he takes to be the essence
>of tragedy, the we "far exceed abodes, and are homeless." This
>ontological overflowing, defying conceptual (and political, Prop 187
>in CA) xenophobia, means we can't exclude the Dionysian in favor of
>the Apollonian, can't simply *root* a historical home (here the
>political disgruntelment shows through, I believe). Obviously, the
>differences between semesters will be subtle (in fact, the critique
>I've located in the _Par_ shows up in Andenken, the semester before
>Der Ister), but the difference between this treatment of the
>political and that from 1935's IM is immense (and it is from this
>difference that I would draw, or begin to draw, the lessons
>Heidegger learned from his previous political affiliations and
>beliefs).
>
>Iain Thomson

A thoughtful response. If I understand you correctly, you are saying that
our postmetaphysical condition of homelessness undermines any attempt to
ground or root the state in a sending of being. Although I would question
your emphasis on dating (the same thing is found in the Ister lecture as
well, not to mention the Nietzsche series of 1940; I would argue that it is
even found in a more muted form in 1934), it does capture an essential part
of Heidegger's thinking.

The questions would be: what does "our homelessness" mean? Does the "we"
refer to humans in general or to those living in the age of nihilism? And
what does it mean to be rooted? Can nihilism be overcome?

I don't think there are easy answers to these questions, all the more so
because I believe that Heidegger gives two sorts of answers to these
questions. If we look at his analysis of "Unheimlich" in 1942 (and I agree
that he has shifted emphasis from his 1935 lecture), we find that man is
the most uncanny being. However, he has now reinterpreted this in light of
his Seinsgeschichte, which is the abandonment of beings in metaphysics,
which is the essence of nihilism; now, to be uncanny means to be that being
which is capable of omitting being itself in favor of beings and taking the
apparent for the true and vice versa. He has, in effect, reinterpreted the
uncanny to show how and why nihilism is possible. By opposing the being of
the herd, which has an understanding of being itself, from man who as
unheimlich is also homeless and uprooted (oh so different from the 1935
lecture), he has tried to show that nihilism is homelessness.

Of the issues between deconstructionism and Heidegger, one of the most
important is the historicality of nihilism or our essential homelessness.
While Heidegger also points to the essential uncanniness of humans, the
essence is always twofold or possibility: nihilism is possible but not the
only possibility. In my belief, the Derridean wing of postmodernism (I'm
thinking not only of Derrida, but also of Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe), makes
homelessness the only possible outcome of the human condition, in essence,
ridding the epochality of the historical condition of nihilism (I'm
following Schurmann here). Even as I write this, I'm uncertain by the
force of this, because I also know that Heidegger often writes as if our
homelessness was in fact our abode (Aufenthalt). Only by experiencing the
essential homelessness of modernity do we gain our Aufenthalt; we become
rooted by experiencing our rootlessness. On the face of it, there is a
paradox at work here: how does one become rooted by experiencing our
essential rootlessness? Again, I (and I believe, Heidegger) work out this
paradox by interpreting it historically. The historical condition of
humans today is nihilism, the possibility of which belongs to the essence
of humans (because it belongs to the essence of Being itself). However,
higher than actuality is possibility. By thinking the essence of nihilism,
which is to find our Aufenthalt in the rootlessness of modernity, we enable
the condition for the repetition of the question of being and for the
"other beginning." Derrida et al. denounce this as Heidegger's nostalgia
or hope, which we can do away with by understanding Heidegger's thinking
better than he himself did. Derrida may be right in the end in his
understanding of the world, but it is not quite Heidegger.

I suppose the big question is whether it is possible to ground anything in
being, which is essential groundlessness. You write that we cannot forgo
the Dionysian in favor of the Apollonian. If we are to believe Poeggeler,
such an attempt to ground the community in the Dionysian is what led
Heidegger to his engagement with the Nazis. Poeggeler claims that
Heidegger thought that National Socialism was the Dionysian movement of his
time. Be that as it may, in Nietzsche, as in Heidegger, the one does not
exist without the other. The Dionysian manifests itself only in form,
language, shape - the Apollonian. Here is the difficulty. Being is
manifested only in language (or the saying of the poet or the work of art;
what Schurmann calls the ontic economic system), yet it is also that which
cannot be said in language and which undermines it own manifestations.
Being is only in its there, but it is never the there. Being grounds
itself, but the ground is an abyss. I think the only way of resolving this
is what Heidegger does: each time, each being-there, has its while. How
long a while is (awhile, I would guess) is indeterminate, but the last one
has lasted over two millenia.

Chris




--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---


Folow-ups
  • Re: Heidegger's use of the word "polis"
    • From: Iain Thomson
  • Partial thread listing: