MP wrote:
Recently Tom Blancato wrote:
>It seems to me that the problem with Heidegger, in this
context, is his
>failure to broach the question/problem of violence.
>
>Tom B.
---Thanks for your response. I will try to deal by by weaving into your
post, a certain violence, one might suppose, and that will always be
partly true. All of my remarks are preceded by a triple dash (---). This
is very incomplete, but then this is an e-mail list, not a dissertation.
Sorry Tom, I hate to do critique by citing over-sights,
but Heidegger posed questions concerning violence
throughout.
--- Why do you hate it? It's very helpful. But for me it remains open as
to whether and how Heidegger approached the question of violence directly,
or whether it rather surfaced occasionally as handmaiden to his other
projects and tasks (roughly, Being and Time).
As an example in 'An Introduction to Metaphysics' Heidegger reads
Sophocles and finds in the Antigone the word "deinotaton". Man is
deinotaton: the strangest of the strange, the terrible in the sense of
overpowering power that can hold itself in check. But also:
"... deinon means the powerful in the sense of one who
uses power, who not only disposes of power but is violent
insofar as the use of power is the basic trait not only
of his action but also of his being-there (dasein). Here
we use the word violence in an essential sense extending
beyond the common usage of the word, as mere arbitrary
brutality. In this common usage violence is seen from the
standpoint of a realm which draws its standards from
conventional compromise and mutual aid, and which
accordingly disparages all violence as a disturbance of
the peace."
--- There are so many things that one can say about this quote. Leaving
the sexism aside, there are several issues here that strike me as very
important, problematic, and potentially wrong:
1. That the use of power is *the* basic trait of Dasein.
2. The consignment of the everyday understanding of violence in certain
senses to a "mereness" of the pre- ontological, pre-essential. To the
*banality* of pre- philosophy, as if there ever really is or were such a
thing. (Heidegger as one who decides who is and who is not (yet)
thinking.)
3. The immense danger and problems associated with the critique of
violence that seeks to release it from the prison-house of peace.
4. The economics of peace as reciprocal, and hence untrue/fallen,
nonviolence.
5. The more general themes (for which I profess insufficient scholarship)
of war as being man's essential Being, as these can be found in Nietzsche
and pre- socratic philosophers, and elsewhere.
6. The general regimes and violences of the major divisions which
Heidegger enacts in setting up the "prephilosophical"/"preontological" as
against the "essential", "ontological", "properly philosophical", and by
heritage, "phenomenological", etc. This casts into question, if one may so
question, the appropriateness and truth of the designations of the
"everyday", the "naive", the "common", the "mere", the They, etc. And at
the same time, I think, the structures of transcendence obtaining in
Heidegger.
Heidegger here is stressing Sophocles' thought that
human-being is essentially violent in the sense that
animals are not, in the sense that the human will not
remain at home, at peace with the homely, departing from
the familiar, un-resting, reck-less (without reck - care-
less).
--- The equation here is of peace as at-home-ness, and the being
un-at-home is at the same time a cessation of care. That care's only
fruition is home. The thinking here is that departure, traveling,
exploring, and let us add extra-diplomatic contest, is all an entry into
violence, the outer walls of "home", as if home were founded on a
surrounding projection of violence, or rather, not "as if", but by
constitution and projectional system. An example of such a "home" can be
seen in simple racism: "they", on "the other side", are enemies. Our
"home" is our being-here in peace with one another, and beyond that, there
is war, where the enemy lies. Or else, we transgress the limits of home in
order to dominate: we can travel, leave home, only in order to enact
violence, and every such gesture and movement is only violence.
Precisely customary notions of violence derive from this
elemental thought of violence. At other points in
Heidegger's thought the very irruption of Language is
seen as violence - to tear the air with articulation, to
scratch the surface with the marks that become the very
epitome of human domination of the planet. Nietzsche's
prison-house of language becomes also a violent power-
house: the power-house that imprisons through its very
possibility of power - power is con-fine-ment, limit.
--- A "first" violence, something primordial, an essential
de-structiveness and displacement, which is *also* an en-structivness, is
the being "given" speech that constitutes dasein from birth onwards. To
take this violence (with its etymological roots in the signification of
the "vi-" of vitality, of "life itself", I think, correct me if I'm wrong)
*as violence* in either an essential or everyday sense (if we can maintain
this di-vision) is to misunderstand Dasein in its thrownness and to
mis-attribute being born with choice and intention. But we are already
lost in the *violence of violence*, that danger in which in the *dazzling
power of the image or thought of violence* we cut through Being, even at
this cosmological level, and cite only those occurrences of being,
emergence, growth, presence, becoming, language, etc., in a kind of
"ontological war hysteria" which are examples of violence. Just as much as
the nativity of Dasein may have its *cosmological violence*, so it has
its *nonviolence*: slow growth, reciprocal interminglings, positive
parasitic relationships, quietudes, etc. Violence becomes, in the
sensibility you cite, a *dominating, violent organizing principle*, one
that seeks to assert itself over and above everything else, which seeks to
eclipse and subsume, using the special power it has, everything else. In
recognizing violence as an organizing principle, in attempting to put it
in its place, we do not do violence to violence by eliminating it (for
which violence would surely exact the most severe retribution
imaginable), but rather regain ourselves in our standing in nonviolence
in the gravity of the possibility of violence. We who think, here, are not
of the order of cosmological violence you have invoked, but rather are the
"shepherds of being" who in thinking's craft, must work carefully to see
to it that dominance does not violate the multiplicity.
--- Vis a vis speech, speech is Daseins first nature. This violence, as a
"thrown" condition, is not violence at all, but *destruction*, and, again,
is *not only destructive*. The greater violence, it appears to me, on the
order of speech, is *silence* and *silencing*, as this takes place both in
well-known political contexts (disappearances, threats, control of the
press), in family contexts (regimes of repression, coercion, strict codes
of speech, unmentionable rape of younger children by older family members,
etc.) and, highly problematically and pro-vocatively, on the order of
Christian conscience as this appears to be understood in Heidegger's
analysis of guilt.
--- We have a couple of propositions, or a form of proposition, that will
probably be important to consider more fully: that dominance dominates,
that violence violates. That dominance, as a theme, can seek to dominate,
and that violence, as a theme, can seek to do violence to being by
asserting itself violently, in domination of and over other phenomena. The
"we" who are consigned to this carefulness are, it appears to me, above
all nonviolence, non-dominion. Never an total accomplishment, of course,
but an attaining, a *standing- in the possibility of violence*. This
"above all" of nonviolence, this "dominance" of nonviolence is the
dominance of the anti-dominant preservation of the plurality of
beings/phenomena which dasein's clearing reveals and lights. But this
Dasein, as lighting, appears to be the opposite of dasein as power, just
as language as world-disclosive, appears to be the opposite of prison
house. The disclosive power of langauge as articulating and accomplishing
the *understanding of Being*, the forgotten *thinking of Being*, forgotten
but remembered *in the heritage of language*, a thinking of being which
can remember itself only by thwarting the violence of rationcinations,
utilitarian thought, phenomena- dominating gestures, etc.
--- Even *power*, it seems to me, will have to be examined for the
insistence that "power" as such relates only and primarily to violence.
Arendt is very helpful here, noting that political phenomena of power can
only be seen in their "authentic diversity" (again, multiplicity) when
released from the dominion of dominion itself. There are *many* powers,
only some, or a few, of which have the form of the absolute dominion, the
violent dominion which is impacted into the term "power" as it is used in
this vast cosmological undertaking you see in Heidegger. To relinquish
this power is, in a usual logic of nonviolence in the spiritual-political
sense, to gain power. To release power from its dominion function into the
fullest *range* (and a range is a kind of opening) of diversity possible,
is to *gain power*.
McLuhan plays with the notion that the technological
outering of our sense-lives in tools, gadgets, language
etc results in the amputation of those sensory realms
within us - they become numbed. Number numbs. The very
existence of numbers marks a trace of violence
culminating in a mind-numbing multiplication of
Hiroshimas. As Heidegger says: the greatest danger will
arise precisely if we do *not* engage in nuclear war.
--- This point about nuclear war is most troublesome. Does Heidegger say
precisely this? Do you agree with it? To some extent, I guess I can see
the point: If we don't commit suicide, only then can we manifest our
greatest danger (some royal-cosmological "we", I guess.) I'll have to
leave the numericity things go for now, but they are very interesting.
Violence is our ever-present danger, like nihilism it is
wedded to the very fact of being and remaining human.
--- I quite agree with this: that violence is our ever- present danger.
But here we should rather say, according to your comments above, that
violence is our *ever- present accomplishment*, or the condition of the
possibility of our presence. But to say this is to attempt, in a kind of
"will to power" to take over that thrownness which, as Heidegger
ambivalently shows, is precisely *what is out of our power*. It is
necessary to draw a line between violence and elemental destruction,
which, *again I must point out*, is also "enstruction" and which involves
the whole play of those softer, less or non-violent thrownnesses. Let me
note that the "throwing" of thrownness must probably always derive its
disclosive linguistic/conceptual power from its roots in simple
throwing...throwing a ball or a rock, etc. But Dasein is not only
*thrown*, but *grown* (pardon my rhyme). What does it mean to say this:
that Dasein is *grown*?
--- It is worth noting that the most successful *nonviolence* in history
may well have been Gandhi's, and this was *founded* on an acceptance and
recognition of the omnipresent possibility, or gravity, and even
necessity, at times, of violence. It must be immediately stressed very
clearly that this necessity was not invoked by Gandhi as the cheap excuse
for violence (and might the "primeval violence" of Heidegger's thinking
excuse all too much concerning the inner greatness, and one might guess
the "necessary" violence to the Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, and others in
the Camps?). This is as opposed to the *extremis* of the highly polarized
attempts to found an active nonviolence in many "faith" settings and
religious movements. I touch on this extremis and its concomitant
polarizations below, and note here simply that this well-known situation
of dichotomy, often an extremely violent one, is precisely what inherently
cripples so many attempts to undertake "faith politics", and relates
immediately to current day atrocities such as the US prison system and the
ongoing holocaust being undertaken in Iraq.
--- If we see the dazzling power of violence, and its concomitant
phenomenology, as an *organizing principle*, we may call into question
Heidegger's selection of fear and anxiety as royal roads to access Being.
First, this element, within the broader range of what is available,
immediately is given to dominate, in _Being and Time_, in that the
phenomenology of *fear/terror*, which links up, either explicitly or
implicitly with the transcendental emergence of *anxiety*, is given reign
to *dominate* the other phenomena of existence/being-in-the-world(-with-
others), etc. For it is seen as a foregone conclusion that the worlded
structure of fearing as a state of mind may be assumed to be isomorphic
with other states of mind: loving, hating, etc. This is probably not the
best prima facie hypothesis. In any event, fear and its Ontological
counterpart, anxiety, are invoked and *exploited*, one might say, for
their *eclipsing power* in order to draw forward the existential analytic
without being caught in the throes (pun intended) of world of inter*es*ted
Dasein. In Heidegger's account Dasein's worldedness in its concerns, to
point out what I've said on this list many times, people generally do not
figure into the picture, even if they are brought in as constitutive in
the *mitsien*. This is to say, where a thorough-going analysis is
undertaken, this never opens on to the Other as such, and only on tools,
the workshop, etc.
--- Two *means*, then, by which Dasein is described and, in the
existentiel (still not sure if I understand this right) progression of any
*my* Dasein, is brought into the truth of its being. Means which take
Dasein *out* of its concerns, either by finishing them off in the
constitutive boredom of *tools* as pre-designed equipment of a
constitutively *finished* nature, within the work- world and workshop
which remains *adjacent* to the *home*; or via the invocation of
fear/terror, and dread, by which anything, regardless of its class of
Being for Dasein, is liable to drop away, including the *home* which one
loses and must find again when Dasein loses its head. The *anxiety* of
Dasein is especially devoid of content and worldly concerns, and in
special ways.
--- These movements *out*, *over*, and *above*, but especially *out*, are
characteristic of *ek-sistence*, that standing *out* of being which
Heidegger clarifies. But, were other(-)routes pursued, in which the Other
was thematized first and foremost, in which the manifold of world
phenomena were released into their authentic diversity, there would be
little time, if any, to ever "finish" with things as one can with tools,
or fear them enough to stand out of them. Such an ontology would look very
different, I think, and would be characterized, perhaps, by *insistence*,
an insistence in which one can't "get out" fully, never fully, is always
caught in something else, in relationships with others, in involvements
and concerns, in love and growing, relationships with family and friends,
raising children, etc., but also in probabilities, statistics, unanswered
questions, interrelationships on scientific and literary orders, etc., an
everything which would make simplifying and taking dasein as-a-whole
impossible in the manner attempted, and accomplished in some ways, by
Heidegger.
--- I'm suggesting here that through a definite violence, Heidegger takes
the existential analytics and the thinking that can come after it to its
fruition. I in- stand against this violence. Where you will tell me (where
we even speak or have dialogue) that this violence is elemental and of the
nature of Dasein (Nazi Dasein, for example), I will say that that is
rather where Dasein falls and loses its essence. Since the thrown clearing
of Dasein is precisely what it can't, as born, control, chose, change,
Dasein attains its essential being precisely in all the ways in which it
takes over from this naturality into its understanding, careful, growing,
revealing, disclosive dwelling, intercession in violence, interceding even
in the very *violences* of the Heideggerian texts, questioning possible
linkages to the Heidegger-Nazism problems, for example. And drawing into
question the structures of guilt and conscience which so inadequately
freed Heidegger to respond to the problem of his specific political
engagements, and the more general problem of finding ways for thought to
take place in active Dasein. The gift of the essential thinking of
existence of Heidegger may be, taken in this way, as true a gift as there
ever was: a thinking of existence which, in its very violence, makes
insistence, diversity and nonviolence possible, an essentiality which
gives itself over to the life-affirming critique of that very thinking of
essentiality.
---I draw several preliminary conclusions from all of this. I'll just
trot out two:
1. That Heidegger is *definitely* a borderline textuality, encompassing in
a truly uneasy fashion both problematic political engagments bordering on
hienous and tragic, and a strangely extreme quietude of the "shepherd"
and, one might say, polemically induced "peacefulness". This kind of
polarization, characteristic of a polemical ground, can be seen in many
arenas besides the Heideggerian, notably the extremes to be found in
Catholic meditation and nonviolent action concerning peace.
2. That if "Man" is constantly circling about "his" essence, this essence
is, more than anything else, the standing in and attaining to nonviolence
in word and deed. This circling can be seen *everywhere* in so many texts
in which a theme, such as "totalization", or "morality" is taken to task
*due to its violence" but without this "violence moment" being clarified.
Such a clarification would mean a kind of "coming up behind" the
"caught"/absorbed/invested engagement with the given theme/issue, and
grasping its original moment in pain and the problem of violence.
peace brother
MP
Peace,
Tom B.
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