Yes, I should have made myself clear here: on the one hand, I don't mean
to "point a finger" at "Dasein", or at specific philosophers. *On the
other hand*...there are some seemingly important logics involved in
placing a burden of responsibility on Dasein and specific thinkers, logics
which I have not yet found a way to articulate. I think it's not an all or
nothing thing, a *yes* or a *no*, but a matter of degree. Could it be
that *standing* as such does not admit of degrees? Certainly, Dasein can
do violence to itself, just as Dasein can call itself, even if the
issuance of this call is furthest from Dasein. And the history of violence
is a history of Dasein's violence to itself. But those aren't the the kind
of logic I'm thinking of here. This thinking, here, will have to be
incomplete for the time being.
I'm thinking, rather, of what happens when we "blame" Plato, for example,
to a certain extent. Now, straight off, please recall that for me this
question, and it is a question, presumes utterly that it is a matter of
degree, a question of criteria, thresholds, limits. The center stage must
be displaced for this question. Displaced, but not removed. There is a
totality involved in the conception of the center stage, and it is of the
stage of the center (stage) to frame the critique of the center stage in
totalities: either Dasein is "center stage" or off the center stage
altogether. (I.e., naive or minimally non-naive composure, etc.) Greatness
and heroism, or shepherding... Nor will the middle ground suffice here; to
displace opens the opening which displays the *mis en scene*, which Dasein
occupies *variously*. The opening of the structural placement reveals,
even if just for a moment, the *poetics of place*, provided that one has
eyes to see this. Dasein's responsibility permeates stage, audience,
directorial aspects, dramaturgy, curtains (staying with a theater metaphor
here) not as specific *roles*, but as permeations *in each role*. This
seems fitting with what I take to be the firm insights of Heidegger
regarding hermeneutic conditions, the constitution of the "there", Dasein
as thrown-projection, etc.
The opening of the question of violence (in nonviolence) is the disclosing
not of any central event, but the "marbleized", so to speak, veins
throughout actor, stage, audience, choreographer, text, etc. Veins of
intention. As this opening, and as the *awakening* to the gravity of
violence, it is rather like a color already present in a spectrum which,
owing to some shift in basic vision now becomes available to Dasein
wherever there is light, in whatever is lighted. This "flooded" structure
of the there, Dasein as its disclosedness, is part of what Heidegger is at
such pains to make clear. Not that the question of violence is, as it
were, the royal road to the clearing. (Or is it?)
Now, when we take this view, historically vis a vis the history of Being,
what happens? There is a sense of "shift", and so many motifs of gradual
movement, world movement, world withdrawl, etc., which mark the shifts in
the history of Being, as Heidegger sees it. This is posed against the
notion of Dasein's doing violence to itself, or of pointing a finger at
Plato. The tendency to intentionalize even mundane historical developments
and world conditions is something to be guarded against, I think. But if
we recognize the problem of violence as such, the hiding of violence, the
"failure" to *take up* nonviolence, the failure to hear what has called
most loudly throughout history for thinking, which must certainly be
violence, part of the self-emburdening-enlightening disalienation of
nonviolence is the *recognition that nonviolence, and violence-as-an-issue
has always already been there*.
Just as Heidegger's rethinking recuperation of Being clarifies at the same
time the operations of the thinking of Being in Plato, Aquinas, Nietzsche
and Kant, so too does nonviolence *recognize* how it stands with violence
in such thinkers and in epochs or epistemes. Heidegger avoids casting the
moral gaze because his own, as alienated from its nonviolence, remains
violent. The de-moralization of the moral, a la Nietzsche, is not the same
as the disalienation of nonviolence, which I view as a certain
recuperation of primordial genius which each Dasein is/has. The poles of
thrown-projection parallel this aspect of *physis* in this way, I
speculate: thrownness corresponds to primordial genius, and projection
corresponds to *standing in the gravity of the possibility of violence in
nonviolence*.
In any event, the transformation of the present transforms history.
Is what is recognized in the "lighting of nonviolence", if it can be
called that, then a culpibility permeating such thinkers? (I am
forestalling, just for a moment, for the sake of this questioning the
important consequences for "finger-pointing" and what that signifies here,
for culpability, responsibility, guilt, etc.) But what is disclosed and
retro-disalienated is not a *specific* culpability, but the culpability
and responsibility of Being, Being's charge, the always-there charge *of
the there*, just as "Dasein is always guilty" (in the alienated
formulation). Primordially and in the first instance, Dasein is always
*responsible*. In *every* "is", *there is responsibility*, and this
*responsibility is always in part the possibility of violence and Dasein's
standing in nonviolence, as nonviolence*. Whether Dasein is *guilty*,
historically, is another matter. Guilt presupposes *punishment*,
intrinsically, I think. Responsibility does not. Nonviolence makes this
distinction. Heidegger does not. Heidegger is responsible for "guilt".
Does this thinking seek to save Plato (et al), and Dasein, from guilt?
>From the scene of accuasation? Or the thinking of Michael and Paul here?
That is not quite what is at work here. Nor is it, am I, saying that
Heidegger is guilty of guilt, nor that Plato, Kant and Nietzsche are
guilty of guiltlessness, though to a certain extent, that is clearly part
of what Heidegger is doing. Or, if he is not doing that, if it is not so
clear, he is definitely recuperating and circling through these thinkers
in search of lost guilt. But what is at work in this thinking is different
>from that.
In Heidegger and in Paul and Michael's reading, the pointed identification
is tempered and recast, however, not as "guilt" but as a neutral
"movement" of placement and *errance*. (We can bear in mind the softening
of "sin" as "error" as this occurs in some religious discourses.)
But what is at work here is not even a softening, and is not a
de-intentionalizing/de-responsibilizing. It is a "responsibilizing" in a
certain way. To clarify the crucial moment in this juncture: the movement
of "how it is, and has been" with regards to the history of Being from
casting Dasein as being in the center to the displacement in favor of a
Being whose epochs are beyond the arrogance of narcissistic or
self-aggrandized Dasein, *or* for reactive, blaming Dasein, even a kind of
"paranoid" Dasein, is one which de-responsibilizes Dasein, individually
and in various collectivities, *too much*. (I'm not really hitting this
off fully, only partly.) My suspicion here is that this shift from "sin to
errance", and especially, from capability to the "incapability" of a kind
of acqueisence to Being, its extremism and structuralism, the striking
shift of emphasis, from center stage to right out of the theater, is a
function of the *violence* which is still unrecognized. It is never a
total violence, yet it is never totally not a violence, either. Here,
probability probably wrests itself, does not "call" itself, but rather
en-gend-ers, generates itself in *primordial genius* which Dasein in every
case is, in a certain physis and emergence into standing: the standing in
nonviolence.
Incompletely,
Tom B.
On Thu, 8 Aug 1996, Paul Murphy wrote:
> The weather here is positively tropical, so forgive me if this is muddled.
>
> Michael Eldred writes:
>
> >I am not implying beyng as violence is on centre stage, but that to interpret
> >the oblivion to beyng as a violence done to beyng by human being would make
> >humans the agents/subjects of the oblivion and in this sense put them or leave
> >them 'on centre stage'. Dasein as an event in the history of beyng whereby the
> >essencing of truth turns, thus using humans in an event-ful way, precludes a
> >centre-staging of human beings.
>
> I think this is exactly right. Heidegger himself came to have misgivings
> about the term Seinsvergessenheit (I believe these are expressed in the
> Vier Seminare), precisely because it implies some activity -- some violence
> -- on the part of human being, making oblivion to being something for which
> man is responsible. Such a claim, applied to the recollection of the
> history of being, might imply that Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas,
> Descartes, etc. etc. got it 'wrong', make a mistake, messed up somewhere,
> which is not Heidegger's point.
>
> For this reason Heidegger adopted different terms: withdrawal, default,
> staying-away [Ausbleiben]. This way of thinking is explored in some detail
> in the essay from the end of the _Nietzsche_ volumes, "Nihilism as
> Determined by the History of Being". (Mr. Blancato: if you haven't read
> this essay, I recommend it highly. Indeed, besides _Intro. to Metaphysics_,
> the lecture and essays on nihilism in the Nietzsche book are an exemplary
> source for beginning to pose the question of violence).
>
> Here Da-sein is described as the abode of being's default: "Being bestows
> [begabt] itself by betaking [begibt] itself into its unconcealment, and
> only in this way is It Being -- along with the locale of its advent as the
> abode of its default [mit der Ortschaft seiner Ankunft als der Unterkunft
> seines Ausbleibens]. This 'where' as the 'there' of the shelter belongs to
> Being itself, 'is' Being itself and is therefore called Da-sein".
>
> Being, as unconcealment, withdraws in the very unconcealment of entities,
> thereby sending Dasein historically. Or as Heraclitus says, "physis
> kryptesthai philei": physis loves to hide. Heraclitus attributes so
> self-inflicted violence to this sheltering, this encryptment, and neither
> does Heidegger.
>
> Cheers,
> Paul N. Murphy
> University of Toronto
>
>
>
>
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>
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"I'll take my coffee without sugar produced in slave labor camps, third
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