Cologne, 28 July 1996
Dear Tom,
Thank you for your extended elucidations on the 'question of violence'. They are
highly persuasive and allay some of my qualms concerning this morally loaded
area. Yes, I do tend to shy away from this question of violence, partly because
of an abhorrence of moralism, but also because of a felt impotence in the face
of the phenomenon of human violence.
I was always impressed by Hegel's admonishments against the mere Sollen,
pointing out its impotence, even though he juxtaposes it to the necessity of
reason. But Heidegger's shying away from ethics has to do with his focus on
possibility, which he regards (in SZ, for example) as a modality of being higher
than necessity (or ought-to-be). For me (being of sorts a disciple of
Heidegger) thinking has to do largely with opening up historical possibilities.
Since violence is such an horrendous and ubiquitous phenomenon, it seems to me
that it cannot be addressed directly without quickly taking on moral hue.
Much of what you say I can subscribe to. Heidegger's inability to say anything
about the Holocaust (apart from the notorious lines in his Bremen lecture) has
worried me for some time, also his inability to come clean in a political
context about his brief commitment to National Socialism.
Here some further random remarks: Your reference to a question of nonviolence
causes me to ask: Is this an originary phenomenon? The negation in nonviolence
seems to indicate this. By nonviolence you probably do not mean the 'merely'
absence of violence, but a positive phenomenon. How is this to be named?
To ask about violence in the context of Heidegger, there is probably no better
place to start than with *polemos*.
The phenomenon of violence: Can we ask: What is violence? (ti estin...;)
Violence is an aspect of being-together (Mitsein). As very many have pointed out
since SZ, Mitsein remains relatively undeveloped in Heidegger. (The entire
dimension of the political has to be thought from being-together. The polis is
the clearing for being-together.) Levinas is one thinker who has concentrated on
Mitsein, focussing on a 'primordial scene' and pushing the claim of ethics to
the fore, before any claim of being. This, I think, has considerably impaired
the value of Levinas' insights, because in order to insist on ethics so
obsessively he is forced to interpret being as some sort of disgusting dimension
involved with egocentricity. Therefore, he never comes to elucidating
being-together in its own right as a dimension of being. It is not at all clear
to me in which dimension at all that the other is encountered in Levinas.
The capitalization of the Other in English (and, I presume, in French too)
suggests a substantivation that I suspect does not pertain. The problem of
capitalization of Dasein is something inherent in this term's German origins,
but the habit of making substantives and sticking a 'the' in front seems a
problematic procedure in philosophical discourse. I propose a mode of writing
that makes a difference between the substantiated discourse of metaphysics (with
its origins in the third person) on the one hand, and another dimension of the
second person requiring a completely different language on the other. (Buber was
one of the first to try this, but he did not have any of the means of
phenomenology at his disposal.) This dovetails with my concerns about developing
a sensitivity for presencing, standing and otherwise (inclined, declined,
enclitic, undefined, unconfined, etc.).
So I am relieved when you write:
"The designation "thematic-substantive" is meant in a *very minimal and
provisional way*".
Paul Murphy has brought in the theme of bodiliness in the context of suffering.
I did not at all want to suggest that the phenomenon of bodiliness was beyond
thinking (my qualms are about morals and morally loaded questions). Nor do I
think that Heidegger had a deprecating attitude towards bodiliness (Paul:
"bodily experience is only Erlebnis, lived experience, somatic tingling severed
>from genuine Erfahrung"). Rather, he regards it as one of the hardest things to
gain a view of phenomenologically. (So it is not the case that "bodily
experience [in Heidegger's view] is not at all open to the revealing /
concealing of Being" (Paul).) The whole problematic of moodedness is tied up
with the phenomenon of bodiliness which is in turn perhaps the prime condition
of dasein's finiteness.
And the animals: here it seems just as difficult to say anything de-finitive.
For Heidegger, the openness to beyng is pretty much equivalent to the openness
to language (or the compulsion to speak). He follows Aristotle in the
distinction between aisthesis and noein. Since animals cannot speak (yet), there
does not seem much hope of saying what they are open to. Perhaps there are
transitions and passageways between having language and being open to the AS.
Sensitive thinking about the mysteries of our own bodiliness may provides clues
to animal-being.
Regards to you both,
Michael
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