Some thoughts regarding death, guilt and other matters, within the horizon
of the question of violence and prompted by a recent post from Paul
Murphy.
The movements of *laying bare* (note the resonance with the "skeletal") in
Division 2, section 3 of SZ are exemplary of a certain operation that
takes place frequently, to say the least, throughout Being and Time. The
operation here can be characterized as a certain polemos which installs
itself, setting up an opposition between the everyday/common sense, etc.,
and the authentic, ontologically clarified understanding, etc. The two
face-off like charicatures in a political cartoon.
It appears to me that there are several problems with this.
The *actual* violence (but this term is in question) enacted by
Heidegger's procedure does not seem to be the violence to the everyday *in
its mistakenness*, but in what is dismissed and passed off as "mere" and
"everyday", which I'll refer in the shorthand (and ironic) "mid-zone" and
Dasein's multiple-meaninful ownmosts. The "mid-zone" is a zone between the
"height" of Death and the "low" of Dasein's everydayness. This "zone" is
also what I take to be *the multiplicity of that which is ownmost for
Dasein, which has "existential" or "insistential" purchase for Dasein,
etc.*
The kind of foreclosure -- and foreclosure is a crucial issue for the Q of
V, and an unopened (forclosed?) theme in SZ -- I am pointing to here is
typical of the scene of violence, but only a rigorous phenomenological
investigation could show this. This, in turn, takes us immediately to the
ground of the self-wresting of nonviolence: this condition of the hiding
of that which can show the violence of the hiding, see the violence of
seeing, is a species of *metaviolence*. In terms of phenomenology, this
might be regarded as necessarily involving a phenomenology of
phenomenology, a seeing of seeing. (I should note that any phenomenology
is already meta-phenomenological, but may not, in some first instance,
understand itself as such. Note that the possibility of metaphenomenology
is pointed to in Husserl without understanding that his own development of
phenomenology is *already* metaphenomenological.) This violence is not the
violence Heidegger himself notes. And along the way, we have to reaffirm
that the mere mention of violence or the *deployment* of its theme (which
is not its *thematization*) in adjudicated violence or even its thematic
development and interpretation in an explicit thematic-substantive
thinking-ethos of *nonviolence* does not guarantee an absence of violence
nor an absence of failing, error, biolence, "structural violence",
foreclosure, etc. The same goes for this writing, as usual.
Set up in SZ is a distinction between the everyday -- a certain proximal
availability to Dasein which has the characteristics of arbitrariness,
"lowness" and a being-leveled-over of import, value, worth, ontological
purchase, a mereness and chaotic nature, a lostness, etc. -- and the
authentic care of Dasein as guilty-indebted being-towards-death in,
through, or over and above the factical Situation.
But this characterization is patently, or demonstrably and phenomenally,
false. What is available even to (supposedly or actually) unreflective
Dasein is not proximally and for the most part mere chaos, nor "physical
things", though no doubt many a philosopher has had the tendency to take
things this way. (More below.) While this polemical gesture accomplishes
itself somewhat freely in certain stages of Heidegger's progression, it
must be noted that it does not occur as freely in other stages. For
example, when anticipatorily resolute Dasein understands itself according
to its own Death, the factical Situation gives Dasein *potentialities for
Being*, which must be assumed here to arise out of the "everyday" in a
somewhat wholistic manner and which include that which takes place in the
"mid-zone". But this wholism, which stands in contrast to the
polemos/division in question, only aggravates the problem.
To be very clear here, I am suggesting that:
1. Death is simply one item in the mid-zone. Recognizing this threatens a
certain Dasein with a loss of its ownmost among the *multiplicity of that
which is ownmost for Dasein*.
2. In particular, it threatens *thoughtless Dasein* and *non-non-violent*
Dasein, since it is *thought* and *nonviolence* which specifically handle
the *problem of multiplicity* and *irreducibility of essential
meaningfulness*.
3. Death is not the "highest" thing for Dasein: there is no particular
"highest" for Dasein, or the heights of Dasein are many and
incommensurable/incomparable via any simple schema such as "low-high".
4. Death's being commensurate with other existentialia is part of what
enables its being-forgotten.
5. Death is exploited in Heidegger's progression as a master organizing
principle, not (only) by virtue of its essential "function", but by virtue
of the *desirability* -- as part of a *desire* which is alienated from the
being awakened to the gravity of violence, from *thought* -- of the
operation of *any master principle* in the face of multiciplicity and
irreducible meaningfulness.
6. The *other beings*/existentialia in the meaning-multiplicity of that
which is ownmost for Dasein have an *interactive and developing effect*
for Death in Dasein, and vice versa.
That Dasein breathes, lives, loves, eats, sleeps and pays taxes (well,
maybe not paying taxes), etc. is also true and undeniably Dasein's ownmost
which can not be done for Dasein by another individual Dasein. Such
beings, doings, feelings, activities, engagements, relationships, modes of
care and world disclosure, etc., are *all beings*. Yet, death is also true
for Dasein, and is not a being in the way that other *beings* a r e. But
the same in fact goes for the *other* beings in which Dasein in-sists.
Does Heidegger find in death a mode of certainty which is *commensurate*
with a conception and style of truth and repertoire or workshop of
thinking to which he himself holds, a certain "logical rigor"? The
simplistic structures of Being-with-others for authenticated Dasein
(solicitude, finding one's hero, etc) mentioned by Heidegger seem to
suggest this. Does he in fact employ as central for Dasein in its
existentiel understanding precisely the crudest aspect of Being: the "and
not rather nothing" that accompanies every sense of Being? Doesn't the
exploitation of the negational aspect of Being, in mining Dasein for the
gold of death-truth in Dasein constitute a dismissal of any *content* of
the "is" and the unfolding of its multiple senses, in favor of that which
can be *grasped ahold of* *across* Being: the sheer negation? That is to
say, is Dasein, having clarified its understanding of Being to restrict
itself precisely from developing that understanding fully, and is
therefore the clarification of the understanding actually in primary
service to being-towards-death? Is the *intentional element* of Dasein as
a *laying ahold* able precisely to lay ahold of death while "remaining
open" to the content of the current Situation, precisely in the manner of
leaving aside *as unthematized in Heidegger's progression* all of the
*dealings* which, unlike the hammering, grasping hands of the carpenter's
workshop, require multiplicities of finnesse, projectional dealing,
growing, learning, struggling, slow disclosure, ambiguity, ambivalence,
slow courage, soft resoluteness, love, sensuality, language, etc., that is
the *dissolution of the "hand", the manipulation, the manceps-mancipium
into the multiplicity of irreducible meaning*? Does death *eclipse* in a
stellar fashion a "fuzzy realm" that is too troublesome to deal with? Is
it false to say that love, friendship, family, society are as "ownmost" as
Death is for Dasein? Is there a good reason for priveliging the Fact of
Death *over and above* these other ownmosts? Or does their being put at a
secondary level of priority not, on the contrary, constitute a *violence
to death* as well as to these other things?
The arising of *nonviolence*, I hypothesize, takes place precisely on the
basis of the opening of this "multiplicitous-meaningful ground" in a
vigilance against its being foreclosed, as opposed to the clarified and
death-dominated ground in SZ. There are numerous "ontical" circumstances,
which are in fact permeated with their own *ontological* import, meaning
and self-maintaining *understanding*, albeit in a manner less or otherwise
developed than that of Heidegger, which can be cited as examples of how
death can operate in such a stellar, eclipsing fashion.
In olympian, heroic fashion, Heidegger "goes for the gold". The "gold",
*a* shining truth, is there, I'm not denying this, but it is not the only
gold. I am suggesting that the (strip) mining for this gold, as it occurs
in Heidegger, is not without (potentially extreme) "environmental"
consequences, in numerous ways. Just as the first investigations of SZ
must be rethought according to the horizon of *time*, the existential
Analytic, or at least *Heidegger's* existential Analytic must be rethought
according to nonviolence.
One consequence of the "olympian" in SZ is an inadequacy as regards
violence, or the question of violence. But this inadequacy is not a mere
"environmental" *byproduct*, or *issue*, when the "mid-zone" is opened up.
In truth, in the opening of the "mid-zone", which is not a mid-zone at all
(it is not commensurable with a low-medium-high schema, let alone a
low-high schema), the possibility and ontological *function* of
*nonviolence* becomes accessible in its *primordiality*, even if in its
primordiality it is *also* an historically determined emergence.
Nonviolence "is", in part, *this very opening against* the foreclosures of
violence, and is a *constant* *mode of concern* for Dasein, even if Dasein
denies it. The *emergence* of nonviolence, which is *not a determinate
Being* but a condition of possibility and *manner* or *style* of being,
"is" in precisely the kind of "dialogue" and series of contestations
taking place quite *minimally* in the question of violence or the
preparations for it, its self-wrestings, its physis of "primordial genius"
(projection) and historical indebtedness (thrownness) and emergence into
self-standing as standing-in-nonviolence.
What is at work in setting the stage of this polemos between an everyday
which is a mere idling chaos and the arbitrariness of what is closest to
hand, and the purity of death? Why are the *most proximal things
available* to Dasein not *others*? Why are *others* (as has been explored,
of course by Levinas and others) not the primary *things* that Dasein
encounters? In point of fact, in most cases, they are: one's friends,
parents, lover(s), aquaintances, teachers, etc. And why do not "mere"
*things*, objects in the world, pieces of chalk, motorcycles, etc., dinner
tables devoid of diners, lead more or less immediately to others? I'm
sorry, but this appears to be something of a ruse or a foreclosure whose
strategy is, to say the very least, highly questionable, even if
philosophy may not simply "admit" such a presupposition. Even though
*mitsein* is a primordial condition of Dasein and Dasein i s its mitsein
always already, it appears that the structural/ontological consequences of
this condition are not adequately developed from the stanpoint of the most
fundamental and *predeveloped* stages of the question of Being.
One example of this inadequacy is in this example of the omission of the
"mid-zone" and the *passing over* the mitsein via the *mere mention*. If
Heidegger's progression depends *utterly* on a certaion phenomenal
convincing, then we must stand firm at the scene of the polemos in
question and *refuse to proceed* -- a kind of civil disobedience? -- when
that which is shown is seen to be truncated and phenomenally incorrect. We
must, as does Heidegger and in the spirit of phenomenology, *deconstruct*
those "takings of Dasein" which are inaccurate. One such inaccuracy is the
discrepency between the portrayal of that with which Dasein concerns
itself as being the "lowly realm" of mere things in arbitrayr chaos or
sheer untility and the recognition of Dasein as always already being with
otehrs. While Heidegger is *not* taking Dasein as a thing *present at
hand*, he is taking Dasein as a confluence of self-gathered
*existentialia* whose constituent are not adequately displayed and thought
through in terms of their ontological function. He is covering over this
inadequacy, perhaps simply in the sway of semblances and errance, in the
polemos between the Cartesian (et al) misconceptions and some initial
attempts to redefine Dasein. (This polemos takes place as well in
Merleau-Ponty, for example.) This polemos, which even extols and *defines
essentially* polemos, does not take *polemos* into question and does not
raise the question of violence, a question which belongs *even more
essentially* in such a project as Heidegger's than it belongs in more
mundane thinking and activity. Indeed, its importance rises
exponentially, just as the stakes of violence on the order of the
"ontological" rise exponentially as well.
But we may also say that Heidegger is himself at issue with a certain
*violence* to the phenomena, and to Dasein, as this occurs both inside and
outside of philosophy. My contention here is that philosophy has tended to
proceed in the manner of an identification of violence, and errance, in a
manner that has not been able to clarify its own essential grounding *in
nonviolence*, and thus has remained circling about itself in a certain
"lostness". Nonviolence is taken up repeatedly, and out of a certain
necessity, without it dawning on people to finally say, "let us also be
vigilant about violence as such, in an independent way." This of course
does not guarantee an absence of violence, but it effects significant
changes. Heidegger is fully in keeping with *this* unreflective (vis a vis
nononviolnece) sense of "philosophy", and I think that much of the
well-known post-philosophical thought, including that of Heidegger, arises
out of a condition of *alienated or not yet authenticated nonviolence*.
As I've suggested, to say that the stellar eclipsing or "death-star"
phenomenon (even with shades of _Star Wars_ and its popular version of
primordial polemos and the Oedipal) of SZ operates in that text as a
"master organizing principle" is not to say that Dasein doesn't die, nor
that a certain "lighting of Death" is not crucial for
disalienation/authentication for Dasein. I think that it is *easier* to
pursue the thinking of Being and Time without including or by glossing
over the elements of the "mid-zone" of that which is neither the mere
chaotic/sheer objectivity nor death "in the highest" -- and yet,
death-infused as dying -- despite the fact of their phenomenal Facticity.
The *crisis of violence* is the *very multiplicity and irreducible
meaninfulness of crises*, in part. Also, when multiplicity is released,
and death is released from the lower-higher schema, it is better able to
take its "rightful"/proper place as constitutive for Daseins' multiple
beings, being-multiple, in the *irreducibility* of these items of the
multiplicity.
(It may be noted that this writing is a kind of polemic. Indeed, it is a
kind of *anti-polemic* founded on *minimally non-naive or non-totalitarian
nonviolence* as the struggle with and contestation precisely of/with
*polemos*. And as I've repeatedly noted, it is a first cause for
nonviolent thoughtaction for non-totalitarian nonviolence to be
steadfastly vigilant against the abuse of the admission of *polemos* and
even adjudicated violence.)
In working to grasp Dasein's essence in pursuit of the question of Being,
the thinking of SZ works to *getting its hands on it*, to get it under
hand, putting the mid-zone ready-to-hand, even if this appears to be a
somewhat underhanded, albeit handy, way of (man)handling the question. But
this ease is one of the *very characteristics* of the scene of violence:
violence organizes worlds cheaply and in privative and foreclosing ways.
(But, we are asked, why not be violent?) The forgetting of violence in
Heidegger is at the same time that which enables the violence of the
Heideggerian (and any such) progression. It *is* the violence of the
Heideggerian progression to reduce, restrict, cover over, misportray,
foreclose, take as illegitimate or lowly *anything but Being/Death* and to
put the "mere content" of the Being of Dasein in its current Situation in
a pure subservience to Death. It is not enough that nonviolence be tacked
on here and there as a merely "desirable" state of affairs that virile
Dasein tosses in simply when possible or convenient while the virile man
of thought sheds a tear when things "must" get violent. In the
Interpretation of Dasein, the very structures and movements of the
Analytic themselves have a special, reflective relation to that which is
explored and thematized/developed. The entry of pre-thematic ontology
into something more "properly" ontological is a slow, careful, utterly
reflective process of rethinking, appropriation, questioning,
reintroduction, etc. Just as the *sense* of given phrases and
preontological data preliminary for the progression must be held in place
and questioned, so too must the sense of "violence" be introduced in an
independent, thematic way into the substance of ontological progression.
And so, too, must the *condition* of nonviolence be maitained in an
authentic standing immanent in questioning and thinking.
In taking note of this problem, it is especially important to see how the
*active intelligence* of Dasein is "moved up" to Death and placed solely
in the question of Being in its finitude, to the detriment of the *other
existentialia* and multiple-meaninful onwmosts constitutive for Dasein's
being-in-the-world. In *grasping* Death in anticipatory resoluteness, and
in the sway of the stellar grip of Death whose drama Heidegger
painstakingly lays out, the dismissed elements remain unthematized and are
to be accessible *only by openness*. Dasein is reduced to a receptivity
regarding the current Situation and its potentialities for Being, or is
"left on its own" to grasp, seize, deal with, develop, act on, understand,
etc., these other matters, which are reduced to a kind of "mere content"
of the structure of Dasein in its being-towards-death wherein its
authentic thoughtfulness is to main-tain itself, perhaps in the tacit hope
that their not being introduced to Thought is to preserve their
authenticity. To be sure, were they introduced, the specific "contents" of
the current factical Situation would not be appropriate for the level of
investigation undertaken in SZ, but these things themselves are *shot
through with ontological import and constitutive structures fully
appropriate for philosophy, only one of which is Being-Death/Dying*. These
"other things", such as love, (non)violence, the Other, etc., should
*prima facie* be held suspect of the *very same kinds of commonsense
misinterpretations that Heidegger shows take place in the thinking of
Death and Time*. Also, Death *can* be "in service" to, understood by, and
under the care of other aspects of Dasein as can violence, and of course,
violent death or rupture, lesion and tearing. Perhaps it is time that
thinkers learn to think more than one thought.
If thinking is released into the multiplicites of Dasein's multiple
ownmosts, the hammering (polemical) *handling* of the thinking of Death in
SZ, thought's hand in the matter reduced to a sheer, singular
significational mode or a truncated range of possible activities -- rather
like an opening of only *carpentry* in Heideggers "philosophical shop*,
while leaving aside things such as shoe-making, ballet, gardening, massage
-- is dis-solved out of its *resolve* into the gesturing and genuinely
*linguistic*, sentential, meaningful, poetic hand-writing which is
subservient to understanding and entered irreducibly into the multiple
play of beings *in language, dialogue and world*. Anticipatory resolve is
not lost in minimally nonnaive nonviolence; only a "polemical" or violent
interpretation would attempt the sheer reversal of a truncation in the
manner of *elimination*. Nonviolence eschews stylistically unitary,
digital, telegraphic, truncated, reductive manners of signification, but
only if it can courageously stand in the ground of free speech/writing and
authentic discourse. And this has profound consequences for the the way
Death permeates Dasein's Being and for reticence of the understanding of
Death.
Likewise, the *reticence* of guilt -- thought not guilt/responsibility
itself -- which I won't see simply in terms of indebtedness, following
Heidegger's own (apparent) clarification of Guilt, is *also* that which
can become phenomenally manifest and operational precisely when the
"mid-zone" is silenced *as the low-zone of idle chatter* or pleading. From
mere chatter to sheer silence/reticence. But the reticence of the
relentlessly exacting and demanding conscience appears to me also to be a
certain logic/condition of silence as punitive, or, as Heidegger puts it,
"critical". The free reign for this exaction is made clear by the founding
polemos which eliminates the midzone from thought and puts it in the mode
of sheer receptivity.
But neither will I separate gulit from *punishment*. Isn't punishment
precisely *critique in the mode of hammering*? Dasein's pants pulled down
in order that death can "slap its bottom" which is in turn to turn red
authentically, which is of course all Dasein asks, consciencewise? Doesn't
critique derive radically from "crisis"? If there is crisis and critique
as a certain putting-to-crisis, should not or must not this "critique" be
maintained in *that which is best able to handle crisis and the
multiplicity of crises as very crisis of crisis itself*? Again, the
"mid-zone" would have to truly *remain open* *as thought and thematized*
and would have to be maintained by that which is *best equipped to handle
it*: thought and nonviolence and, independently, *the full body of
Dasein*, inclusive of speech/writing (which is *already founded on
silence, in part*) and dialogue -- it's legs, so to speak -- as
irreducible meaning refusing the bare bottom of signification, the crude
sign grounds, the freezing of the speech and language which rather must
remain open and flexible. The pants are left up and freedom of movement is
maintained. Silence is not the best mode of letting-be; it's the worst
mode, the most privative, the least able to disclose the world in the most
faituful way. Silence is not the only mode of Being towards Death and
hearing the call of conscience. It is rather a polemical, violent and
truncated mode.
The *withholding* that takes place in silence as Heidegger develops this
sense appears to me to be something of an "interrogational tactic" which,
by the same gesture by which the "mid-zone" is shoved aside *as lowly
mereness*, shoves aside not only the irrelevant, but the entire range of
relevance which can presence in the *ground of speech/writing* which
Heidegger himself cites as *central to worlding*, but which,
conscience-wise, is to be taken as "mere pleading" or, perhaps, "looking
for a better deal". But what is at issue here, then, is in particular the
freedom, in speech, to be self-critical, as opposed to the irresponsible
speech which is assumed (by Heidegger, I suspect) to predominate as that
through which Dasein can only be "for itself" and can "think against
itself" (Nietzsche) only rarely, and must be cornered and have guilt
*exacted* or *extracted* from it, like pulling teeth.
Nonviolent Dasein does not have to be cornered and in Fact resists such
cornering *fundamentally* and *ontologically*. This implies that I, the
writer of this text, should *say*, somewhere along the line of this
thinking, *I am guilty, I am responsible*. It is no surprise (to me) that
for Gandhi, nonviolence was intrinsically related to the capability of the
self-proclamation of failings. But, in the hermeneutic condition of
meta-nonviolence requisite for thoughtful nonviolence, *just as
questioning of questioning is essential for thoughtful questioning for
Heidegger*, it is *only nonviolence itself which can secure the ground for
such admission*.
I should note that the silence in question is *also* the silence
accompanying the *form of the treatise*, in which the writer tells the
reader what he or she thinks, where there is any semblance of dialogue.
I'll leave this undeveloped here. The length of this post is of a piece
with its anti-polemos: I am guilty of writing something too long, but I do
so under duress.
That Dasein can always be guilty and *is constantly guilty* in authentic
Dasein just as much and insofar as it is always dying leaves open the
question: how far can or should such a guilt-death elision be brought to
obtain, *if its system can be guaranteed, a priori, to disclose (hermetic)
truth*? How much of a conscience does Dasein want, and in what manner is
this conscience to develop and maintain itself? And in a ground of silence
or of speech/writing? How and when are we to tell, having banished all
speech and the "mid-zone" entirely, de facto and de jure, when guilt is
being exacted *as authentic* and when it is being *extracted* as truth is
extracted from a political prisoner, wherein only the answer which is
anticipated is accepted, while the self-admittedly and adjudicated
"'violent'" hand (of philosophy, for example) stands ready to "slap" any
speech which doesn't fit the polemos or stands ready to head off all
speech by pre-setting the stage as one of the polemos between the "mere"
and the "highest"? Thus, the regime of Heideggerian-style conscience,
perhaps having little or no conscience about style, manner, "howness"
(this lst owing to a certain capitalism) and nonviolence, appears to be
upheld not by what is true in an ethos founded on thought and nonviolence,
since its (non)violence is not given to thought and its thought is not
given to (non)violence, but rather by the very *constitution* of truth for
Factical Dasein, and by the strongmen and strongwomen who have the stomach
for so severe, continuous and apparently corrupt a scene of polemos and
gestures of dismissal. (I testify that I have been such a strongman in
reading and Understanding Heidegger at times, and I have strongly refused
a straight-forward maintenance in such an Understanding at other times, as
well.) This is of a piece with Heidegger's own progression, which is of
course of his time, of his and preceding epochs, of the treatise and of
formalism/structuralism, the inauthentic and incorporated dialogue which
*speaks for the reader*, etc.
For *if the grounds of Heidegger's movement regarding Death and Guilt are
held in place, a truth will light* because Dasein, as being-in-the-truth,
can not deprive itself of truth altogether, at least *not without
rupture*. It does not take much thinking to see where such a condition of
the deprivation of truth, which, to be clear, is at stake in this
questioning of Heidegger and the thinking of _SZ_, would lead. This is
precisely one of the prime conditions of (potential) violence arising out
of the progression of -- not "The", but *Heidegger's* -- Existential
Analytic. It would remain to be asked where, how and why such deprivation
of truth in a pure or total sense can occur; to what extent it would be in
the form of *rupture*; where, whether and to what extent such a rupture
would also be a violence; and what forms such violence would take.
Final note: It is of the nature of nonviolence to open alternativity, and
is the failing of polemos-based progress and progressivisms to fail to
develop, even to foreclose, alternatives. The alternatives which would
develop out of the antipolemos of the thinking in this writing would
involve numerous changes to how a "Heideggerian" thinking would proceed.
While I can't develop such alternatives here, for want of time and space,
I would minimally suggest that a "proper" "Heideggerian" and philosophical
setting would look more like a cross between a traditional academic
setting and a kind of exploratory "therapeutic" or "ashramic" one, one
more interactive, personal, difficult, supportive, exploratory,
experimental, personal, historically bound and grounded and more fully
rooted to dwelling. This is but one example of what is a "nonviolent
thoughtaction ground".
Tom B.
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