Apologies to the bored (although Heidegger thought that genuine
boredom could be ontologically revelatory of your pure 'being
there'), falling somewhere between Heidegger's technophobia and the
postmodern technophilia, I have yet to acquire and master an email
editing program (and must thus make do with this
repetition/insertion format); it is easy enough to delete of skim
the new, and it has the advantages of a certain continuity...
>
>
> >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).
They might all be 'the same' (in the Parmenidean sense of to auto)
but they are surely not identical. Being is not a thing, and
especially not a 'substance.' I say below, echoing Heidegger,
"Being isn't." Being is not a being, is not a thing. Is Being
then, as Derrida says in "Denials" "nothing"? Being is no thing,
but it is not for that reason nothing. It shows up as the nothing
(as pure difference from all beings), which seems to be why Heid
holds that the nothing is part of Being and not the reverse. Nor
can Being and the clearing be equated; beings show up in the
clearing of a sending of Being, but Being "withholds itself" (hence
these sendings are called "epochs"--from the Gk epokhe, holding off
or bracketing, 'putting in parentheses,' Derrida would say). I said
that 'Being is the fount of intelligibility.' By this I mean that
Being is, as you put it, "the inexhaustible origin" of what shows up
for us. Es ereignet, as you say; Being occurs/happens through
Ereignis, for Dasein(s). Being happens, and happens *through*
Ereignis, for Dasein; but Being *is* not. (This is, as Derrida put
it when I asked him about precisely this question, an aporia through
which thinking must nevertheless pass.)
>
> >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.
I think this sidesteps the problem (a problem in Heidegger) in an
interesting way. You are surely right to say that in the clear-ing
(in the active sense) the 'is' is an 'as'--and herein is to be found
Heidegger's continuation of the phenomenological tradition of
hismentor Husserl. But to connect the fact that things show up *as*
the things they are (for us, i.e., in the 'light' of a particular
historical understanding of Being, i.e., against the background of a
preexisting interpretation, clearing in the nominal sense) too
closely to the function of being as a copula seems to me to be a
mistake. Why? Because the grammatical structure of
subject/predicate reflects the metaphysics of the Cartesian ontology
of substance, specifically, it reflects in grammar the
subject/object dichotomy (and I would say that Heidegger's attempt
to undermine that very entreched way of viewing ourselves and the
world a constant part of Heidegger's lifelong endeavor).
A thing is its particular temporal appearance, as you put it, to us,
withi this sending of Being. But no particular historical
understanding of Being can exhaustively capture the Being of a
being. The idea that Being grants each historical understanding of
being(s), but is not itself fully present in such understandings, is
what makes historical change possible (because beings have
not--ever--been exhaustively interpreted it is always possible for
them to show up differently than 'how they are' to a poet, for this
poet to name them in this new light, and for the rest of us to
eventually come around to seeing them that way).
>
> What I find in your formulation is some sort of thing or substance that
> stands outside of a particular disclosure,
I hope I have addressed this misconception; Being does stand outside
any particular disclosure, and is *for that very reason* not a thing
or a substance.
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.
What ould would "perspectivism" entail (I am thinking of Nehamas's
reading of Nietzsche, but not sure how it applies). I myself worry
that I am ascribing to Heidegger some form of belief in a Kantian
Ding-an-sich, something in the thing that escapes every perspective
and thus enables the very possibility of the New perspective.
Would a thing-in-itself, without the subject/object ontology
presupposed by Kant, be such a terrible thing to ascribe to
Heidegger?
>
> 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.
Your comments on Versagen are very interesting (thanks, I'll have to
think about this).
> >
> >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
[that should say "understanding of Being! Ooops]. 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 [*Being*] besides metaphysics was possible, and could revolutionize our
> total existence.
>
It is this other way of thinking Being that we have been talking
about. It is, formally at least, not so oscure. Metaphysics thinks
that it has, each time anew, finally succeeded in 'getting it right'
about what beings really are. Heidegger argues that such a thing
cannot be gotten right, and further, that this uncanny/unhomelike
claim, that Being cannot be exhaustively captured by any
understanding of Being, must itself be taken as (a perhaps abyssal)
founding presupposition of thinking.
>
> >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).
Point well taken. But, and for me this is part of the pain of
'thinking through Heidegger" (polysemically meant): the fact that
Heidegger could harness Being to such an end shows either an extreme
naivete about what the movement was about (a less and less tenable
interp.) or else a willingness to profoundly violate his own insight
for political gain. Being, as discussed above, cannot be employed
(consistently) to justify totalitarian ends--it's a brute
contradiction to argue that Being, that which can nver be
exhaustively captured in any understanding of Being, in fact "takes
the side of" this particular understanding (one that included the
obliteration of the otherness, difference, or alterity for which
Being stands). I take it that this is why Heidegger's thinking is
justly responded to, even if the man behind the words betrayed that
that thiking, those words, when a tempting opportunity presented
itself.
>
> >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).
You are right that Derrida critiques the idea of epochality; and i
take it that his claim that there is in fact one 2500 yr. epoch is
meant (at least partially) facetiously. For Heidegger each epoch is
a sending (see the first pages of T&B). I have already said that I
agree that the idea of a single overarching cultural clearing seems
a bit ontologically monistic to be tenable (though Heidegger would
no doubt say that I am too entrenched in the technological
understanding of Being to see the big picture), but I also think
that Derrida's critique of Heidegger's 'metaphysical epoch of
presence'--"the epoch of the diapherein"--is premised on an
ungenerous (though almost universal) interpretation of Anwesen (as
presence rather than presencing or emerging) that Kenneth Maly and
others have been working hard to correct.
>
> >Thanks for the opportunity to work through these questions a little
> >further!
> >
> >Iain
>
>
>
>
> --- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
>
Again, thanks. And I don't apologize to the Babette Babiches out
there who find serious attempts to address the difficult questions
uninteresting.
Iain
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
boredom could be ontologically revelatory of your pure 'being
there'), falling somewhere between Heidegger's technophobia and the
postmodern technophilia, I have yet to acquire and master an email
editing program (and must thus make do with this
repetition/insertion format); it is easy enough to delete of skim
the new, and it has the advantages of a certain continuity...
>
>
> >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).
They might all be 'the same' (in the Parmenidean sense of to auto)
but they are surely not identical. Being is not a thing, and
especially not a 'substance.' I say below, echoing Heidegger,
"Being isn't." Being is not a being, is not a thing. Is Being
then, as Derrida says in "Denials" "nothing"? Being is no thing,
but it is not for that reason nothing. It shows up as the nothing
(as pure difference from all beings), which seems to be why Heid
holds that the nothing is part of Being and not the reverse. Nor
can Being and the clearing be equated; beings show up in the
clearing of a sending of Being, but Being "withholds itself" (hence
these sendings are called "epochs"--from the Gk epokhe, holding off
or bracketing, 'putting in parentheses,' Derrida would say). I said
that 'Being is the fount of intelligibility.' By this I mean that
Being is, as you put it, "the inexhaustible origin" of what shows up
for us. Es ereignet, as you say; Being occurs/happens through
Ereignis, for Dasein(s). Being happens, and happens *through*
Ereignis, for Dasein; but Being *is* not. (This is, as Derrida put
it when I asked him about precisely this question, an aporia through
which thinking must nevertheless pass.)
>
> >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.
I think this sidesteps the problem (a problem in Heidegger) in an
interesting way. You are surely right to say that in the clear-ing
(in the active sense) the 'is' is an 'as'--and herein is to be found
Heidegger's continuation of the phenomenological tradition of
hismentor Husserl. But to connect the fact that things show up *as*
the things they are (for us, i.e., in the 'light' of a particular
historical understanding of Being, i.e., against the background of a
preexisting interpretation, clearing in the nominal sense) too
closely to the function of being as a copula seems to me to be a
mistake. Why? Because the grammatical structure of
subject/predicate reflects the metaphysics of the Cartesian ontology
of substance, specifically, it reflects in grammar the
subject/object dichotomy (and I would say that Heidegger's attempt
to undermine that very entreched way of viewing ourselves and the
world a constant part of Heidegger's lifelong endeavor).
A thing is its particular temporal appearance, as you put it, to us,
withi this sending of Being. But no particular historical
understanding of Being can exhaustively capture the Being of a
being. The idea that Being grants each historical understanding of
being(s), but is not itself fully present in such understandings, is
what makes historical change possible (because beings have
not--ever--been exhaustively interpreted it is always possible for
them to show up differently than 'how they are' to a poet, for this
poet to name them in this new light, and for the rest of us to
eventually come around to seeing them that way).
>
> What I find in your formulation is some sort of thing or substance that
> stands outside of a particular disclosure,
I hope I have addressed this misconception; Being does stand outside
any particular disclosure, and is *for that very reason* not a thing
or a substance.
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.
What ould would "perspectivism" entail (I am thinking of Nehamas's
reading of Nietzsche, but not sure how it applies). I myself worry
that I am ascribing to Heidegger some form of belief in a Kantian
Ding-an-sich, something in the thing that escapes every perspective
and thus enables the very possibility of the New perspective.
Would a thing-in-itself, without the subject/object ontology
presupposed by Kant, be such a terrible thing to ascribe to
Heidegger?
>
> 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.
Your comments on Versagen are very interesting (thanks, I'll have to
think about this).
> >
> >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
[that should say "understanding of Being! Ooops]. 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 [*Being*] besides metaphysics was possible, and could revolutionize our
> total existence.
>
It is this other way of thinking Being that we have been talking
about. It is, formally at least, not so oscure. Metaphysics thinks
that it has, each time anew, finally succeeded in 'getting it right'
about what beings really are. Heidegger argues that such a thing
cannot be gotten right, and further, that this uncanny/unhomelike
claim, that Being cannot be exhaustively captured by any
understanding of Being, must itself be taken as (a perhaps abyssal)
founding presupposition of thinking.
>
> >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).
Point well taken. But, and for me this is part of the pain of
'thinking through Heidegger" (polysemically meant): the fact that
Heidegger could harness Being to such an end shows either an extreme
naivete about what the movement was about (a less and less tenable
interp.) or else a willingness to profoundly violate his own insight
for political gain. Being, as discussed above, cannot be employed
(consistently) to justify totalitarian ends--it's a brute
contradiction to argue that Being, that which can nver be
exhaustively captured in any understanding of Being, in fact "takes
the side of" this particular understanding (one that included the
obliteration of the otherness, difference, or alterity for which
Being stands). I take it that this is why Heidegger's thinking is
justly responded to, even if the man behind the words betrayed that
that thiking, those words, when a tempting opportunity presented
itself.
>
> >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).
You are right that Derrida critiques the idea of epochality; and i
take it that his claim that there is in fact one 2500 yr. epoch is
meant (at least partially) facetiously. For Heidegger each epoch is
a sending (see the first pages of T&B). I have already said that I
agree that the idea of a single overarching cultural clearing seems
a bit ontologically monistic to be tenable (though Heidegger would
no doubt say that I am too entrenched in the technological
understanding of Being to see the big picture), but I also think
that Derrida's critique of Heidegger's 'metaphysical epoch of
presence'--"the epoch of the diapherein"--is premised on an
ungenerous (though almost universal) interpretation of Anwesen (as
presence rather than presencing or emerging) that Kenneth Maly and
others have been working hard to correct.
>
> >Thanks for the opportunity to work through these questions a little
> >further!
> >
> >Iain
>
>
>
>
> --- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
>
Again, thanks. And I don't apologize to the Babette Babiches out
there who find serious attempts to address the difficult questions
uninteresting.
Iain
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---