This is not connected up well and is too long, as usual.
Among other things, Iain wrote:
"Nietzsche's critique of Paul in _The Antichrist_ fits nicely
here, though the question of the violence of the interpretation
(which Heidegger readily acknowledged and accepted as part of the
facticity of the hermeneutic situation), and thus of the relation
between autheniticty and violence (which are not nearly as
heterogenous as you seem to suppose) still remains unanswered.
I take it also that this criterion of authentic martyrdom,
that we bear witness to our belonging to the earth, also provides
ample theoretical leverage for the resistance of various
essentialisms (specifically the Nazi biologistic racism and
nationalism to which the Hoelderlin piece is speaking, albeit
obliquely)."
--- The authenticating functions disclosed in Being and Time
do, I believe, open the way to a more authentic moral
condition. But I think perhaps I have not made certain
things clear on my view, or I haven't clarified them even
for myself. (By the way, it is something I like about 'net
discussions, like person to person discussions; one is not
"presenting a paper" which has pretentions, other than
substance or rhetoric, that is, institutional pretentions
of, say, the "dissertation defense", etc., and so can have a
more adaptive, recursive, and growing thinking with others).
The moral does not mean the good. Hitler was "moral". The
men who built the atomic bomb were moral. And the same goes
for "faith". It takes a great deal of faith to build an
atomic bomb. Or to kill several million people. The mistake
is in associating "moral", "ethic", "faithful", "good faith"
with nonviolence.
You say,
" But what I was suggesting was that authenticity is
insufficient as a moral or, better (thanks to the etymological link
to ethos) ethical notion. I find the later notion of 'Gelassenheit
zu den Dingen' much more promising. The quote I gave from 1936
finds Heidegger somewhere in between authenticity and Gelassenheit.
Thus, when you ask what would distinguish the authentic from the
inauthentic martyr, or the martyr properly speaking from the martye
improperly speaking, the answer is in Heidegger's own words..."
Could you translate the German? I agree (I think), and I
think I've indicated this on other posts, that authenticity
is not a sufficient ethical/moral notion. But three
questions: "moral"? "ethical"? and "notion"? Leaving them
aside for the moment, it is precisely on the basis of this
insufficiency, and on the aporetic founding condition of
earth that the possibility of the independent-substantivity
of the question of violence, or for Derrida, the authentic
conditions of justice are founded. Your own, perhaps my own
(probably not here) performative contradiction here needs to
be addressed, at least minimally, as you are still giving an
account. The mastery of your discourse, be it of a critical
kind, never the less is such that it itself falls before its
own determination of impossibility of exhaustion.
But in addition to that, it appears to be in a certain
service to a founding moral desideratum of nonviolence. Why
does the founding condition of earth get *used* to thwart
the essentializing/totalizing notions? It is convenient
enough that it does, and within a certain range of
substance, it is a crucial substantive response. But, the
founding issue is the violence of such totalizing notions.
The "attack" point is the very assumptions of the violent in
so far as they make certain kinds of generalization. But it
leaves the "moral ground" in a certain way fully untouched,
unopened. This is precisely what I was saying permeates
Heidegger, and many other spaces: the background operation
of the principle of nonviolence, without an independent
thematic/substantive opening of the question of violence,
the issue of violence.
Moral is not nonviolence. Nonviolence is nonviolence. It is
primordial. Now, perhaps you can come around again with the
earth. Or maybe it is a bad "earth first" approach... I
don't know.
The thing about the inauthenticity, that is, the moral
inauthenticity, is a little complicated in our backandforth.
I'm setting up two kinds of authenticity, and two kinds of
fallenness, maybe more than two. Moral and existential. Then
you have authentic and inauthentic.
So you have all kinds of possibilities, not just for "people
wholes" but actions, events, things, gestures, etc.
A number of things:
Falls into
Authenticity Inauthenticity
Morality Immorality
Nonviolence Violence
Unviolated Ruptured
Disalienated Alienated
Healthy Unhealth
Ethical Homeless?
I tend to associate "ethos" with dwelling/abode, as per
Heidegger's development of this notion (I *think*). I think
of "moral" in terms of *ends*. This simple personal
etymology just relates to the "moral of the story", and so
forth. Ethical relates not so much to means ends
projectional thinking and activity but the aroundness of
world, style, the various styles and ways of a given Dasein,
etc, while morality relates to the degree to with projective
activity is bound up with ends. Neither of these simply
either violence or nonviolence.
I think nonviolence as an independent substantive primordial
comes *out* of the ground of moral, ethical, authentic
dwelling. It separates off and out into an independent issue
for Dasein in so far as it awakens into an understanding of
violence that is separated off from the pressures of the
historical/militaristic/narrativic/etc. complex in which
violence as such occur. This accounts for the famous
literature on nonviolence, its radical positions with
regards to history, the structure of its thematizations, and
so forth.
The various attempts to say "moral" is good constitutes the
"congealed" state in which the moral discourse finds itself.
"Immoral!", that is, having *no* morals, is what is said of
people who some take to be violent."Unethical!" Is it
"unethical"? Or is it *violent*? Is it "immoral" or is it
"moral but bad". Is it perhaps still ethical, still in-
house, but violent/transgressive? The move I'm trying to
isolate here contains a certain violence, like the
determination "animals! Those people are *animals*!" The
move here is one of ontolotical violence. "You don't *have*
morals!" No, the prostitute, for example, has morals (as
ends), just not your set. "You're not a human being!" No,
the attacker is a human being, that's part of the problem.
If you try to enforce the "not human!", we will see very
quickly how far it gets. So people keep secret about this,
their own, violence, or they don't, as the case may be. I
don't know if I'm able to articulate this "congealed"
business well enough. Another example: "Capitalists!", when
in "fact" the issue is not the movement of capitalization,
as such, which we all do all over the place in certain ways,
but *greed*, and, yup, *violence*.
Your point may be fine with regard to the in/authenticity of
the martyr, but I think you're leaving out the situation of
"doing what one does up to the gas chamber", especially, "as
a protester". I think "we", a lot of people, are caught in
strong binds with regards to "activism", for example,
precisely because of the accretion of "famous images" (Che
Gueverra, Martin Luther King, Abbie Hoffman), and, to throw
in another fascinating element, because the authenticity of
that time (the sixities, which had a few extra martyrs, and
the possibility of martyrs as such), was such that it was a
pressured one not borne of thought. In other words, the
authenticating force was, basically, the draft. "Death" in
the form of the "death threat", which is quite opposed to
the death projected in Being and Time. The sixties, we
should recall, spawned the seventies, which is already quite
enough to put the sixties in serious question for me. But
this structural element: death from without while young (the
draft, the war) is very important to open up and contrast
with the movement described in Being and Time. It could not
heed Nietzsche's call to "die at the right time". And the
move there is a very radical break with standing, everyday
notions of history.
The theme of "martyrdom" as such blinds us to the general
themes of action by taking the extreme example and fixating
on it, while I'm using it as an in here to general issues
concerning action and authenticity.
Now, "earth" may come back around in that you can say: "yes,
when you get through all the elements you are talking about,
you can turn around and say, earth's the thing here." Which
is why I often think, very strongly, that Heidegger's later
writings constitute certain "reductions" of movements in
Being and Time, not any simple kind of departure. But
"earth" and its founding condition, it's transcendeces of
the pretentions of world, might have something to do with
violence as well. I dont' know.
You set up a certain task. You invoke the world happening
here as: We're working on essences, that's our role in
things, we can look for leverages against bad guys like
Nazis, that's our job. We can use the criterion of authentic
martyrdom for this. What does "ample" mean? What are you
judging this "enough" according to?
Somehow, this general situations the task at hand as
essentially theoretical. The "ample" links up here, too, I
susptect. You stay in the "Heideggerian" formation
concerning how it is with the question of violence. It
remains hidden. The ground is laid, but you bring it back to
ground (I was going to say earth) in this way. I'm very
unsure about this ground, this general complex, but it is
all very thick and I don't know how to approach it well.
It appears to me to be quite possible that Nietzsche was on
the verge of the "discovery of violence" in his critique. He
was still "strangely" calling for it. In Nietzche, this
"violence" is in the form of *rupture* via the concept of
*health*. I think violence as such lurks behind in some way.
Again, my point here is that the cheif issue here is
*violence*, not the means by which a given totalization
accomplishes itself. Nietzsche looks at the violence and
says, simply, "How evangelical!" Or he mocks, he dances, he
labors and makes hybrid philoso-poetic-scientific language
which disrupts, plays, deconstructs, etc. He satyrizes,
chastizes, shouts and underlines. It is clear that what is
going on here is a kind of moral confrontation concerning
rupture and violence. With regards to talization, let me
give an example. I can say, the Fourth Ballade is ABSOLUTELY
Chopin's TOTALLY BEST PIECE. No big deal. The unseating you
point to, by invoking earth, by understanding the role of
earth, is, for you, a contact point for the *action*
concerning a certain violence. The fundamental movement in
Nietzsche here might not be the discovery of the
(in)finitude of the totalization, stylistic limits of truth,
etc., but the transcendence of the moral/historical (and
also ethical/stylistical) via, but not because of, the
development of the transvaluational. His comments on "a
talent for justice" in Human, All Too Human are interesting
in this respect. The whole movement of some serious
nonviolence as a certain kind of "post-christian" or later-
christian development (ala Tolstoy, Gandhi, Nietzsche)
operates in a radical contestation of the grounds of
violence. The deconstructive move, or even the condition of
its possibility (earth, sky, divinities, mortals, language,
etc.) can be there. But who is to take the move? The one who
has reached a certain point with regards to violence/rupture
and "the good". That's why I say, "the positivities" when
approaching this horizon. In Nietzsche's case, this the
"discovery" is not, again, deconstruction, "postmodernism",
etc., but *health*. This is reductive, but we know that
health is a really big theme in Nietzsche. Unhealth is the
ground of the violence he sees. Rupture (sickness) and/or
violence. Somehow, this has to be opened up. And this can't
be opened up, I contend, if the situation of the discourse
is not, from the start, in certain ways, already in a free
and robust contact with the question of violence as such,
just as music starts from the beginning in musical study,
and therefore, only if the discourse is in a certain way
already in the space of thoughtaction. We do not expect a
child to play nothing but scales and arpeggios and only
begin to encounter musical pieces at the age of 18 (draft
age).
The "lateness" of such a point, of the transvaluational
(which again is not enough to account for nonviolence as
such) owes to its synthentic principality, surviving enough
worlds, living or projecting out and through enought morals,
getting beyond revenge, etc. "Thought" as such it is a
necessary but insufficient condition. In his project of
disalienation, there seems to be a certain "strategy" of "do
not touch" in Heidegger, in so far as he does in certain
ways hope for a renewing of the moral via the authentication
of experience by helping to bring dasein into what is its
ownmost possibilities. World and ends, that is, ethics and
morals, (being and time?), (will and style?) are
*authenticated*, activated, potentially preserved in such
movement and understanding. Only "then" can we grasp
violence as such, perhaps. Now, I think there are *very
serious problems with this*. Roughly, Heidegger's "method of
dissection", his "method and practices of division",
thematization, etc., are all questionable (in a neutral
sense). The condition of childhood, childhood morality,
ethicality, authenticity, inauthenticity, violence, being
towards death, guilt, are all imporant. Only some of which,
of course, have room in Heidegger. It becomes much more an
issue of artistry how any separating off from the issue of
violence should occur, just as some pianists learn scales
and arepeggios separately from pieces, and some do not.
There is no one right way here, whether we are talking about
ones own path in thinking or in "leaping ahead" for the sake
of others. I'm making a lot of assumptions you may not agree
with here.
---
There is no path to peace. Peace is the path.
Tom Blancato
tblancato@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Eyes on Violence (nonviolence and human rights monitoring in Haiti)
Thoughtaction Collective (reparative justice project)
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
------------------
Among other things, Iain wrote:
"Nietzsche's critique of Paul in _The Antichrist_ fits nicely
here, though the question of the violence of the interpretation
(which Heidegger readily acknowledged and accepted as part of the
facticity of the hermeneutic situation), and thus of the relation
between autheniticty and violence (which are not nearly as
heterogenous as you seem to suppose) still remains unanswered.
I take it also that this criterion of authentic martyrdom,
that we bear witness to our belonging to the earth, also provides
ample theoretical leverage for the resistance of various
essentialisms (specifically the Nazi biologistic racism and
nationalism to which the Hoelderlin piece is speaking, albeit
obliquely)."
--- The authenticating functions disclosed in Being and Time
do, I believe, open the way to a more authentic moral
condition. But I think perhaps I have not made certain
things clear on my view, or I haven't clarified them even
for myself. (By the way, it is something I like about 'net
discussions, like person to person discussions; one is not
"presenting a paper" which has pretentions, other than
substance or rhetoric, that is, institutional pretentions
of, say, the "dissertation defense", etc., and so can have a
more adaptive, recursive, and growing thinking with others).
The moral does not mean the good. Hitler was "moral". The
men who built the atomic bomb were moral. And the same goes
for "faith". It takes a great deal of faith to build an
atomic bomb. Or to kill several million people. The mistake
is in associating "moral", "ethic", "faithful", "good faith"
with nonviolence.
You say,
" But what I was suggesting was that authenticity is
insufficient as a moral or, better (thanks to the etymological link
to ethos) ethical notion. I find the later notion of 'Gelassenheit
zu den Dingen' much more promising. The quote I gave from 1936
finds Heidegger somewhere in between authenticity and Gelassenheit.
Thus, when you ask what would distinguish the authentic from the
inauthentic martyr, or the martyr properly speaking from the martye
improperly speaking, the answer is in Heidegger's own words..."
Could you translate the German? I agree (I think), and I
think I've indicated this on other posts, that authenticity
is not a sufficient ethical/moral notion. But three
questions: "moral"? "ethical"? and "notion"? Leaving them
aside for the moment, it is precisely on the basis of this
insufficiency, and on the aporetic founding condition of
earth that the possibility of the independent-substantivity
of the question of violence, or for Derrida, the authentic
conditions of justice are founded. Your own, perhaps my own
(probably not here) performative contradiction here needs to
be addressed, at least minimally, as you are still giving an
account. The mastery of your discourse, be it of a critical
kind, never the less is such that it itself falls before its
own determination of impossibility of exhaustion.
But in addition to that, it appears to be in a certain
service to a founding moral desideratum of nonviolence. Why
does the founding condition of earth get *used* to thwart
the essentializing/totalizing notions? It is convenient
enough that it does, and within a certain range of
substance, it is a crucial substantive response. But, the
founding issue is the violence of such totalizing notions.
The "attack" point is the very assumptions of the violent in
so far as they make certain kinds of generalization. But it
leaves the "moral ground" in a certain way fully untouched,
unopened. This is precisely what I was saying permeates
Heidegger, and many other spaces: the background operation
of the principle of nonviolence, without an independent
thematic/substantive opening of the question of violence,
the issue of violence.
Moral is not nonviolence. Nonviolence is nonviolence. It is
primordial. Now, perhaps you can come around again with the
earth. Or maybe it is a bad "earth first" approach... I
don't know.
The thing about the inauthenticity, that is, the moral
inauthenticity, is a little complicated in our backandforth.
I'm setting up two kinds of authenticity, and two kinds of
fallenness, maybe more than two. Moral and existential. Then
you have authentic and inauthentic.
So you have all kinds of possibilities, not just for "people
wholes" but actions, events, things, gestures, etc.
A number of things:
Falls into
Authenticity Inauthenticity
Morality Immorality
Nonviolence Violence
Unviolated Ruptured
Disalienated Alienated
Healthy Unhealth
Ethical Homeless?
I tend to associate "ethos" with dwelling/abode, as per
Heidegger's development of this notion (I *think*). I think
of "moral" in terms of *ends*. This simple personal
etymology just relates to the "moral of the story", and so
forth. Ethical relates not so much to means ends
projectional thinking and activity but the aroundness of
world, style, the various styles and ways of a given Dasein,
etc, while morality relates to the degree to with projective
activity is bound up with ends. Neither of these simply
either violence or nonviolence.
I think nonviolence as an independent substantive primordial
comes *out* of the ground of moral, ethical, authentic
dwelling. It separates off and out into an independent issue
for Dasein in so far as it awakens into an understanding of
violence that is separated off from the pressures of the
historical/militaristic/narrativic/etc. complex in which
violence as such occur. This accounts for the famous
literature on nonviolence, its radical positions with
regards to history, the structure of its thematizations, and
so forth.
The various attempts to say "moral" is good constitutes the
"congealed" state in which the moral discourse finds itself.
"Immoral!", that is, having *no* morals, is what is said of
people who some take to be violent."Unethical!" Is it
"unethical"? Or is it *violent*? Is it "immoral" or is it
"moral but bad". Is it perhaps still ethical, still in-
house, but violent/transgressive? The move I'm trying to
isolate here contains a certain violence, like the
determination "animals! Those people are *animals*!" The
move here is one of ontolotical violence. "You don't *have*
morals!" No, the prostitute, for example, has morals (as
ends), just not your set. "You're not a human being!" No,
the attacker is a human being, that's part of the problem.
If you try to enforce the "not human!", we will see very
quickly how far it gets. So people keep secret about this,
their own, violence, or they don't, as the case may be. I
don't know if I'm able to articulate this "congealed"
business well enough. Another example: "Capitalists!", when
in "fact" the issue is not the movement of capitalization,
as such, which we all do all over the place in certain ways,
but *greed*, and, yup, *violence*.
Your point may be fine with regard to the in/authenticity of
the martyr, but I think you're leaving out the situation of
"doing what one does up to the gas chamber", especially, "as
a protester". I think "we", a lot of people, are caught in
strong binds with regards to "activism", for example,
precisely because of the accretion of "famous images" (Che
Gueverra, Martin Luther King, Abbie Hoffman), and, to throw
in another fascinating element, because the authenticity of
that time (the sixities, which had a few extra martyrs, and
the possibility of martyrs as such), was such that it was a
pressured one not borne of thought. In other words, the
authenticating force was, basically, the draft. "Death" in
the form of the "death threat", which is quite opposed to
the death projected in Being and Time. The sixties, we
should recall, spawned the seventies, which is already quite
enough to put the sixties in serious question for me. But
this structural element: death from without while young (the
draft, the war) is very important to open up and contrast
with the movement described in Being and Time. It could not
heed Nietzsche's call to "die at the right time". And the
move there is a very radical break with standing, everyday
notions of history.
The theme of "martyrdom" as such blinds us to the general
themes of action by taking the extreme example and fixating
on it, while I'm using it as an in here to general issues
concerning action and authenticity.
Now, "earth" may come back around in that you can say: "yes,
when you get through all the elements you are talking about,
you can turn around and say, earth's the thing here." Which
is why I often think, very strongly, that Heidegger's later
writings constitute certain "reductions" of movements in
Being and Time, not any simple kind of departure. But
"earth" and its founding condition, it's transcendeces of
the pretentions of world, might have something to do with
violence as well. I dont' know.
You set up a certain task. You invoke the world happening
here as: We're working on essences, that's our role in
things, we can look for leverages against bad guys like
Nazis, that's our job. We can use the criterion of authentic
martyrdom for this. What does "ample" mean? What are you
judging this "enough" according to?
Somehow, this general situations the task at hand as
essentially theoretical. The "ample" links up here, too, I
susptect. You stay in the "Heideggerian" formation
concerning how it is with the question of violence. It
remains hidden. The ground is laid, but you bring it back to
ground (I was going to say earth) in this way. I'm very
unsure about this ground, this general complex, but it is
all very thick and I don't know how to approach it well.
It appears to me to be quite possible that Nietzsche was on
the verge of the "discovery of violence" in his critique. He
was still "strangely" calling for it. In Nietzche, this
"violence" is in the form of *rupture* via the concept of
*health*. I think violence as such lurks behind in some way.
Again, my point here is that the cheif issue here is
*violence*, not the means by which a given totalization
accomplishes itself. Nietzsche looks at the violence and
says, simply, "How evangelical!" Or he mocks, he dances, he
labors and makes hybrid philoso-poetic-scientific language
which disrupts, plays, deconstructs, etc. He satyrizes,
chastizes, shouts and underlines. It is clear that what is
going on here is a kind of moral confrontation concerning
rupture and violence. With regards to talization, let me
give an example. I can say, the Fourth Ballade is ABSOLUTELY
Chopin's TOTALLY BEST PIECE. No big deal. The unseating you
point to, by invoking earth, by understanding the role of
earth, is, for you, a contact point for the *action*
concerning a certain violence. The fundamental movement in
Nietzsche here might not be the discovery of the
(in)finitude of the totalization, stylistic limits of truth,
etc., but the transcendence of the moral/historical (and
also ethical/stylistical) via, but not because of, the
development of the transvaluational. His comments on "a
talent for justice" in Human, All Too Human are interesting
in this respect. The whole movement of some serious
nonviolence as a certain kind of "post-christian" or later-
christian development (ala Tolstoy, Gandhi, Nietzsche)
operates in a radical contestation of the grounds of
violence. The deconstructive move, or even the condition of
its possibility (earth, sky, divinities, mortals, language,
etc.) can be there. But who is to take the move? The one who
has reached a certain point with regards to violence/rupture
and "the good". That's why I say, "the positivities" when
approaching this horizon. In Nietzsche's case, this the
"discovery" is not, again, deconstruction, "postmodernism",
etc., but *health*. This is reductive, but we know that
health is a really big theme in Nietzsche. Unhealth is the
ground of the violence he sees. Rupture (sickness) and/or
violence. Somehow, this has to be opened up. And this can't
be opened up, I contend, if the situation of the discourse
is not, from the start, in certain ways, already in a free
and robust contact with the question of violence as such,
just as music starts from the beginning in musical study,
and therefore, only if the discourse is in a certain way
already in the space of thoughtaction. We do not expect a
child to play nothing but scales and arpeggios and only
begin to encounter musical pieces at the age of 18 (draft
age).
The "lateness" of such a point, of the transvaluational
(which again is not enough to account for nonviolence as
such) owes to its synthentic principality, surviving enough
worlds, living or projecting out and through enought morals,
getting beyond revenge, etc. "Thought" as such it is a
necessary but insufficient condition. In his project of
disalienation, there seems to be a certain "strategy" of "do
not touch" in Heidegger, in so far as he does in certain
ways hope for a renewing of the moral via the authentication
of experience by helping to bring dasein into what is its
ownmost possibilities. World and ends, that is, ethics and
morals, (being and time?), (will and style?) are
*authenticated*, activated, potentially preserved in such
movement and understanding. Only "then" can we grasp
violence as such, perhaps. Now, I think there are *very
serious problems with this*. Roughly, Heidegger's "method of
dissection", his "method and practices of division",
thematization, etc., are all questionable (in a neutral
sense). The condition of childhood, childhood morality,
ethicality, authenticity, inauthenticity, violence, being
towards death, guilt, are all imporant. Only some of which,
of course, have room in Heidegger. It becomes much more an
issue of artistry how any separating off from the issue of
violence should occur, just as some pianists learn scales
and arepeggios separately from pieces, and some do not.
There is no one right way here, whether we are talking about
ones own path in thinking or in "leaping ahead" for the sake
of others. I'm making a lot of assumptions you may not agree
with here.
---
There is no path to peace. Peace is the path.
Tom Blancato
tblancato@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Eyes on Violence (nonviolence and human rights monitoring in Haiti)
Thoughtaction Collective (reparative justice project)
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
------------------