>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.
Yes, in the sense that both are the inexhaustible origins. Ereignis,
clearing, difference, Being: they are all the same. If I understand your
formulation, Being is a fount: a thing, whereas Ereignis is a verb. For
Heidegger, Sein, despite its nominalization, is also a verb, and a
transitive one at that; it occurs (es ereignet).
>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).
I'm thinking the "is" as an "as". Less cryptically, a being shows itself
in a clearing as what it is through its being; a being is what it is only
in the particular (jeweilig) sending of Being. Heidegger's life-long task
was to explore the mystery of the copula, the "is" that connects subject
and predicate. In my opinion, by making being temporal, he interprets the
copula as an "as"; a thing is what it is as its particular, temporal
appearance.
What I find in your formulation is some sort of thing or substance that
stands outside of a particular disclosure, almost, if I can put words into
your computer, a perspectivism. I believe that Heidegger has eliminated
substance in the traditional meaning, replacing it with an essence which is
the same as its existence; what-being and that-being become conflated in a
temporal event of a being.
As for whether this interpretation is bound only to the 40's, I would have
to say that to think Being as Time begins long before, sometime perhaps
around 1919 and continues through the rest of his life.
>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?
No, I was thinking of the Holderlin lecture course of 1934. In both the
earlier and later lectures (and writings on language), Heidegger gives the
same twofold dimension of language: as saying and as pointing to that which
cannot be said. In 1934, the emphasis is on the saying (Sagen) that
founds; later, he emphasizes much more the "failure" (Versagen) of
language. Both dimensions, though, are found in all of his writings on
language.
>
>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.
I was taking it from Der Ister lecture, but anyway.
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.
Derrida himself as said we must do without Heidegger's nostalgia, although
as for the hope for a new beginning (or change in terrain, as the case may
be), I think Derrida has changed since the Sixties in noting the
inevitability of metaphysics. We must guard ourselves against it, but it
always reinscribes itself. I think Heidegger genuinely thought another way
of thinking besides metaphysics was possible, and could revolutionize our
total existence.
>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.
Sorry. Throwing in Poeggeler was not really meant for you, but more
generally anyone who thinks that the dionysian is a cure for our stable
world. I take you to be saying that "grounding" the political realm in the
dionysian amount to not grounding it at all.
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?
I can in the barest of terms sketch Poeggeler's argument. Heidegger wanted
to connected his ontological investigations with a more historically
determined argument, in essence, to make being world-historical. To do
this, Heidegger turned to Nietzsche, especially the early writings on the
Greek state. I don't know where Poeggeler finds textual support for this;
I would be interested in finding out. (That he turned to Nietzsche is
without a doubt; what he found or took from it is somewhat vague at this
point in the publishing process.) Heidegger, according to Poeggeler,
wanted to reconnect our lived world with the deeper dionysian undercurrents
to life and history. Politics must become "great politics". Although
Poeggeler is a little vague on the exact connection, this led Heidegger to
embrace the most radical political movement, a movement seen as rejecting
most radically the inherited politics of a failed liberalism and modernity
in general. Poeggeler's lesson: think radically and in a politically
undifferentiated manner, you get bad politics.
>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.
One of my pet peeves against Schurmann: his insistence that the local is
the opposite of the totalitarian (and the political is opposed to the
metaphysical). He ignores the possibility, articulated well by Rousseau, of
local totalitarianism; one might even call it "national socialism."
Advocating "the total reeducation of the german people" (as Heidegger puts
it in 1933) in accordance with the dictates of a sending of being, does not
seem to me to be paradoxical nor contradictory. That being so, the source
of resistence, the plurality of the sendings of being, does not seem to
necessarily resist totalitarianism; it merely makes it temporal. After
all, Hitler's regime was the "Thousand-Year Reich" (or the Twelve-Year
Reich, whichever comes first).
>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.
yes, that's what I meant. I don't see how this could be taken as a strong
critique of Heidegger, since it repeats him. His critique comes in his
remark that he does not believe in a single sending of being, which is
Heidegger's belief (the Plato-Nietzsche line).
>Thanks for the opportunity to work through these questions a little
>further!
>
>Iain
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