Chris-
I enjoyed your response as well, though I'm still in the process of
digesting it... Perhaps a little Nietzschean mastication is order:
One line from your first note that I said nothing about was:
> The site of being is the clearing of being which manifests itself
as the
> being of beings. Thus I would say that the polis is being.
I just want to be sure that we are in agreement here; that, you mean
"being" as the 'Being of beings,' i.e., the subject matter par
excellance of metaphysics. Yes? I ask only because just prior to
that line you wrote:
"Being is...the event of beings as what they are."
This phrasing raises to questions for me:
1. Are you conflating Being and Ereignis? I take ereignis to be
the way in which being happens for human beings, perhaps even a
universal condition of the possibility of intelligibility, but all
the same not the same as Being (as such) which is the fount of
intelligibility, inexhautible in any phenomenal manifestation of
beings.
2. What does the phrase "beings as what they are" mean for you? I
ask this because--while Heidegger clearly speaks this way in the
40's, it is by no means clear what he means, or whether he is being
consistent. If there is no revealing outside a clearing, and every
clearing entails a preexisting tacit interpretation shaping what can
show up for us (the implicit interpretation involved in every act of
Ereignis), it begins to look like the idea of beings showing up as
what they are can only mean that they show up in terms of what the
(perhaps epochal) clearing of Being allows. But since no clearing
of Being can exhaustively manifest the Being of a being (that was
the false step underlying the metaphysician's ambition (to 'ground',
for example, a being securely and completely in its Being)), a being
can never fully show up in its Being (Being isn't). If a being
could manifest all its Being, there would be no possibility of a
sufficiently great poetic act renaming, focusing/gathering another
understanding of Being (from out of beings). This, then, is what I
take to be the essential connection between nihilism and
metaphysics; metaphysics represents itself as having succeeded in
'getting it right' about beings--if it succeeded in convincing
everyone of this fact (or lullying them into apathy with its
conveniences) we could forseeably never generate another
understanding of Being (why should we, if we really believed we'd
gotten it right?) I have reservations about the 'epochality' of his
analysis (I see intelligibility as a p[roduct of an interlocking
nexus of language-games, discursive and nondiscursive practices, and
take it that the question of how substantive the understanding
shared by these various ways of understanding being is at least open
to question). I also wonder if he might not be too pessimistic, in
that it seems to me to be at least possible that poetic revealing
(and the dissemination of thinkers) could take place in a very
highly totalized society/culture/world. If perfect totalization is
highly implausible from a practical-historical perspective (another
lesson from the War?), and theoretical totalization is unlikely
(given the necessity of the existence of the margins to reinforce
the conformity of the center, the them for the us, as Nietzsche put
it).
Anyway, I wonder how you work through some of these difficulties in
your own work, or what solutions you envision?
Some minor points:
You say that the idea that "our postmetaphysical condition of
homelessness undermines any attempt to ground or root the state in a
sending of being" is "found in a muted form in 1934". Can you
elaborate? Are you thinking of the "earth" in the earth vs. world
of OWA? (Also, this 'condition' is ontological for Heidegger, and
thus not 'postmetaphysical' except in the sense that it is the
failure of metaphysics to secure their own grounds that makes the
theretofore concealed homelessness explicit.)
You define the uncanny as follows,
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.
This seems to me to be the B&T definition of the Uncanny. In B&T,
not-being-at-home means understanding ourselves in terms of the
Vorhanden and Zuhanden entities we encounter, rather than as
ontologically reflexive be-ings. But in the later Heidegger,
not-being-at-home comes to be the understanding of humanity best
expressed by Sophocles most famous chorus (What a wondrous being is
man...) We are not at home because metaphysics cannot succeed
(hence, as you point out, another thinking of homecoming is needed,
one that premises itself upon the realization of our ontological
groundlessness. Hence the importance of the post-Heideggerian
attempts to elaborate a thinking of post-foundationalist
justification.
Your remarks about "the Derridean wing of postmodernism" seem to me
to overemphasize the disagreement between, e.g., Derrida and
Heidegger on the Q of Heidegger's 'nostalgia' for a non-nihilistic
understanding of being. Derrida doesn't throw out the idea of the
possibility of an event ushering-in such a non-nihilistic event. He
just transforms this from the form it takes in Heidegger (waiting
for a futural historical event/Advent) to a new form, namely, the
discovery of a textually immanent transformative event in
Heidegger's texts! I'd thus say that Derrida's rethinking of the
event contributes to Heidegger's in a historically appropriate
(non-naive) way.
The one hermeutically ungenerous ascription with which you credited
me was in the following:
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.
This makes it sound as if my comment that we cannot "exclude" the
Dionysian was tatamount to an advocation that we "ground the
community in the Dionysian". I take it that it's pretty
self-evident that that doesn't follow, but should perhaps add that I
would not advocate the latter, in any case. I further wonder about
the depth of Poeggeler's assessment; what does it say? How does it
help us understand the mistake Heidegger made, or, more saliently,
avoid lending support to fascistic or totalitarian ideas without
avoiding the political altogether? From afar, it sounds as if
Poeggeler means "Dionysian" in a Euripedean rather than Nietzschean
sense (though there is of course no clean separation between the
two). My use of "Dionysian" was meant in the Nietzschean sense of
that which resists conceptual totlization--it is thus pretty bizarre
to hear that the what is ontologically a source of resistance to
conceptual totalization could in fact be the ground of a
totalitarian political movement. If that paradox is meant, I'm
afraid I don't understand it. (If its the Euripedean sense of a
furious mob movement in which one gets caught up, the comment makes
sense but seems of questionable value as a contribution to the Q of
Heidegger's politics).
One more note. On your enigmatic but provacative last lines:
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.
What is the being there that has lasted for over two millenia? The
only sense i can make of this is as a Derridean remark about the
"epoch of the diapherein," the 2500 yr epoch of presence. Of course
that is meant as a very strong critique of Heidegger, and I don't
know if that's what you meant.
Thanks for the opportunity to work through these questions a little
further!
Iain
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
I enjoyed your response as well, though I'm still in the process of
digesting it... Perhaps a little Nietzschean mastication is order:
One line from your first note that I said nothing about was:
> The site of being is the clearing of being which manifests itself
as the
> being of beings. Thus I would say that the polis is being.
I just want to be sure that we are in agreement here; that, you mean
"being" as the 'Being of beings,' i.e., the subject matter par
excellance of metaphysics. Yes? I ask only because just prior to
that line you wrote:
"Being is...the event of beings as what they are."
This phrasing raises to questions for me:
1. Are you conflating Being and Ereignis? I take ereignis to be
the way in which being happens for human beings, perhaps even a
universal condition of the possibility of intelligibility, but all
the same not the same as Being (as such) which is the fount of
intelligibility, inexhautible in any phenomenal manifestation of
beings.
2. What does the phrase "beings as what they are" mean for you? I
ask this because--while Heidegger clearly speaks this way in the
40's, it is by no means clear what he means, or whether he is being
consistent. If there is no revealing outside a clearing, and every
clearing entails a preexisting tacit interpretation shaping what can
show up for us (the implicit interpretation involved in every act of
Ereignis), it begins to look like the idea of beings showing up as
what they are can only mean that they show up in terms of what the
(perhaps epochal) clearing of Being allows. But since no clearing
of Being can exhaustively manifest the Being of a being (that was
the false step underlying the metaphysician's ambition (to 'ground',
for example, a being securely and completely in its Being)), a being
can never fully show up in its Being (Being isn't). If a being
could manifest all its Being, there would be no possibility of a
sufficiently great poetic act renaming, focusing/gathering another
understanding of Being (from out of beings). This, then, is what I
take to be the essential connection between nihilism and
metaphysics; metaphysics represents itself as having succeeded in
'getting it right' about beings--if it succeeded in convincing
everyone of this fact (or lullying them into apathy with its
conveniences) we could forseeably never generate another
understanding of Being (why should we, if we really believed we'd
gotten it right?) I have reservations about the 'epochality' of his
analysis (I see intelligibility as a p[roduct of an interlocking
nexus of language-games, discursive and nondiscursive practices, and
take it that the question of how substantive the understanding
shared by these various ways of understanding being is at least open
to question). I also wonder if he might not be too pessimistic, in
that it seems to me to be at least possible that poetic revealing
(and the dissemination of thinkers) could take place in a very
highly totalized society/culture/world. If perfect totalization is
highly implausible from a practical-historical perspective (another
lesson from the War?), and theoretical totalization is unlikely
(given the necessity of the existence of the margins to reinforce
the conformity of the center, the them for the us, as Nietzsche put
it).
Anyway, I wonder how you work through some of these difficulties in
your own work, or what solutions you envision?
Some minor points:
You say that the idea that "our postmetaphysical condition of
homelessness undermines any attempt to ground or root the state in a
sending of being" is "found in a muted form in 1934". Can you
elaborate? Are you thinking of the "earth" in the earth vs. world
of OWA? (Also, this 'condition' is ontological for Heidegger, and
thus not 'postmetaphysical' except in the sense that it is the
failure of metaphysics to secure their own grounds that makes the
theretofore concealed homelessness explicit.)
You define the uncanny as follows,
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.
This seems to me to be the B&T definition of the Uncanny. In B&T,
not-being-at-home means understanding ourselves in terms of the
Vorhanden and Zuhanden entities we encounter, rather than as
ontologically reflexive be-ings. But in the later Heidegger,
not-being-at-home comes to be the understanding of humanity best
expressed by Sophocles most famous chorus (What a wondrous being is
man...) We are not at home because metaphysics cannot succeed
(hence, as you point out, another thinking of homecoming is needed,
one that premises itself upon the realization of our ontological
groundlessness. Hence the importance of the post-Heideggerian
attempts to elaborate a thinking of post-foundationalist
justification.
Your remarks about "the Derridean wing of postmodernism" seem to me
to overemphasize the disagreement between, e.g., Derrida and
Heidegger on the Q of Heidegger's 'nostalgia' for a non-nihilistic
understanding of being. Derrida doesn't throw out the idea of the
possibility of an event ushering-in such a non-nihilistic event. He
just transforms this from the form it takes in Heidegger (waiting
for a futural historical event/Advent) to a new form, namely, the
discovery of a textually immanent transformative event in
Heidegger's texts! I'd thus say that Derrida's rethinking of the
event contributes to Heidegger's in a historically appropriate
(non-naive) way.
The one hermeutically ungenerous ascription with which you credited
me was in the following:
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.
This makes it sound as if my comment that we cannot "exclude" the
Dionysian was tatamount to an advocation that we "ground the
community in the Dionysian". I take it that it's pretty
self-evident that that doesn't follow, but should perhaps add that I
would not advocate the latter, in any case. I further wonder about
the depth of Poeggeler's assessment; what does it say? How does it
help us understand the mistake Heidegger made, or, more saliently,
avoid lending support to fascistic or totalitarian ideas without
avoiding the political altogether? From afar, it sounds as if
Poeggeler means "Dionysian" in a Euripedean rather than Nietzschean
sense (though there is of course no clean separation between the
two). My use of "Dionysian" was meant in the Nietzschean sense of
that which resists conceptual totlization--it is thus pretty bizarre
to hear that the what is ontologically a source of resistance to
conceptual totalization could in fact be the ground of a
totalitarian political movement. If that paradox is meant, I'm
afraid I don't understand it. (If its the Euripedean sense of a
furious mob movement in which one gets caught up, the comment makes
sense but seems of questionable value as a contribution to the Q of
Heidegger's politics).
One more note. On your enigmatic but provacative last lines:
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.
What is the being there that has lasted for over two millenia? The
only sense i can make of this is as a Derridean remark about the
"epoch of the diapherein," the 2500 yr epoch of presence. Of course
that is meant as a very strong critique of Heidegger, and I don't
know if that's what you meant.
Thanks for the opportunity to work through these questions a little
further!
Iain
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---