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

At 03:06 PM 11/3/95 -0800, you wrote:
>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 ---
>
>

for n/ev er r/is[..]sunder stan ding *being* as pol*is* h...

th es i(gh)t e of ort (w)ort...(m)ort... be(i)ng is/(k)no/t(s)he cl ear (i)ng:
a n ear (i)n gd (r)is[..]s tance
a/s o v er(r)eign *is*
as ad v ent ure
ad(e s)ign at (i)ng
an a re a : as p(l)ace for t(s)he da nce...



--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---


Partial thread listing: