Laurence,
Thanks for your comments. The truth is that I am not finished with my
thinking on Heidegger and the ethical. I have a stack of articles here to
get through that assess points of contact between Levinas and Heidegger,
and I am planning to write an article that shows precisely where Heidegger
falls short, if, in fact, he does fall short.
In general, my speculation is that, though Being certainly is, in some
sense, Other, it is not personal. It seems to me that Heidegger is
mistaken to see the individual as derivative from the social order. (I may
not be putting this in the precise language.) Another concept of
individuality sees it arise as the taking-on-of-responsibility. The I
emerges precisely as responsible whereas for Heidegger the authentic
projection toward one's death is the principle of individuation.
The earlier conception of the individual as one-in-responsibility is
present in pre-Greek culture, in particular, Hebrew culture, but one can
also see traces of it in early Indian culture where the individual is the
one singled out by God. While we can see the ontological difference
operative in India, for instance, (in the form of the difference between
the manifested and unmanifested, in, say, the Bhagavad Gita, for instance,
and in various Upanishads), there is, at the same time, an ethical
awakening that comes from contact with a transcendence that is beyond
being. For the Hebrew culture, especially, this contact with the
transcendent is ethical awakening in the same gesture that it is the
principle of individuation. This responsibility as a principle of
individuation is what is missing in Heidegger.
In my recent thinking on this issue, I am inclined to agree with the basic
tenets of Heidegger's history of Being, except that this history does not
start in ancient Greece. The Greek epoch itself is a moment in this
history, a moment that rests on a prior tradition that pre-exists the
ontological language of the Greeks. Heidegger seems to forget that the
Near East holds the secret to the Western world's other and older parent.
(Is it conceivable that a member of the Nazi party would even consider
this??? Especially a thinker who heralds ancient Greece as the origin of
the West and Germany its logical successor??)
This older parent sees the individual-in-responsibility as the condition
for the social order. Society is founded on ethics, not ethics on society.
But this means, in turn, that while it is true that the history of the
West might be seen as a forgetting of the meaning of Being, it is also, at
the same time and at a deeper level, the forgetting of responsibility. (I
am here presupposing that there is a difference between responsibility
(viewed existentially) and ethics that is prior to Heidegger's ontological
difference.) And this means, in turn, not that Heidegger's analysis is
bogus, but that he does not pursue transcendence to its deepest
existential level. Slipping this other level "underneath" Heidegger's
philosophy does not nullify his thinking; rather, it moderates it a bit.
If I can put this into yet another language, Heidegger's ontological
difference is akin to the difference between the second and third
hypostasis in Plotinus, meaning, of course, that there is another
difference that is its prior, that is, the difference between the first
and second hypostasis. I am wondering what happens to Heidegger's analysis
when this deeper level is exposed.
On a final note, even though I find Heidegger's thinking to be "ethically
bankrupt," I do think he is the greatest philosopher of the 20th Century.
Yours,
Tony
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A.F. Beavers, Ph.D. Assoc. Prof. Philosophy & Religion
U of Evansville, Evansville, IN 47722 812-479-2682
Metaphysics, Contemporary Continental Philosophy
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