Re: The question of Guilt revisited.


Dear Mr. Rommel John Miller:

You are hardly alone in your opposition to Heidegger nor indeed to
your reasons for your opposition. Be opposed: but be aware that
inconsistency and failure, inadequacy and limit are the human
condition. And that beyond moralising opposition is the recognition
that a man's reach should exceed his grasp. And you might, as Hoelderlin
reflected at the beginning of his Lebenslauf (longer version), yourself
have also aspired higher once, only to find that (of all things, and
so contrary to Plato's philosophic fanaticism) it is love itself that
takes you down, bending you and your aspirations with it, and then
what love has not done, suffering does to break the beginner who knows
(as all beginners do: that is what it means to start) everything and so
to return him from whence he came.

Almost none of us are capable of even the most mild of desiderata
on a consistent basis. What is even more important is that the Nazism
Heidegger supported in the early years of the ascendancy of Hitler's
dominion, and whatever his vision of the party after the party itself
rejected (as it did fairly early on) Heidegger's own worth for its
purposes (you yourself noted the utilitarian surge), it was assuredly
not the complete and whole understanding of Nazism that we now have,
as grateful, benign, blessed victors. For as Walter Benjamin himself
noted, crushed as he was in soul by the Nazis, it is the victors who tell
history's story. Thus it all seems so obvious to us now and everyone
so culpable then. But Emmanuel Levinas, who died this past Christmas
Day 1995 in Paris, also remembered more and more until the year of his
death the very crucial, decisive thing it was to have been Heidegger's
student. And it is Levinas who gives your questioning its heart; it
is Levinas who has given the sign for all philosophising henceforth.

We ask the question of the highest importance of ethics through Levinas
who began to ask this question (as Heidegger began to think) through
phenomenology.

With all due respect,
Babette E. Babich
Assoc. Prof, Contemporary Philosophy
Fordham University at Lincoln Center


--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---


Replies
Re: The question of Guilt revisited., Nicklas Lundblad
Partial thread listing: