File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_1998/heidegger.9808, message 47


From: "Prof. Dr. Rafael Capurro" <capurro-AT-hbi-stuttgart.de>
Subject: Re: cont.
Date: Sat, 8 Aug 1998 12:39:44 +0200


Dear Robert Scheetz,

thank you for your clarifying mail. I enjoy your English (?!) although it is
sometimes a little bit too difficult for me!
I have nothing against a _deconstruction_ of any kind of _right wing_
heideggerianism (as after Hegel we have also a _left wing_ one!).
But sometimes you may be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Your
second point shows clearly (!) a very strong sense of self criticism: I a
very pleased to see this, otherwise, you would be just doing, what you think
Heidegger did (and what he in fact, at least up to a certain extent did),
i.e. exaltating German (American) values, blind for the problems within
one's own world. I was in Japan last week. A colleague made come comments on
Bill Clinton in China. He said: well, you see, this guy says to the Chinese:
"we, in America, we have also problems with human rights" and (what Bill did
not say) now, this is the reason why I cannot present myself as an example.
I respect your problems because I have these problems too etc.
The question(s) of the _other_ as well as of _destiny_ might be considered
differently within _Heidegger_ (I put the name into quotation marks, as this
name is a _code_, I use it as a code, not as an intent to _dis-cover_ the
_true_ Heidegger ): The question of the _other_ as stated for instance by
Levinas (apparently in contrast to phenomenology (Husserl and Heidegger),
but probably much more oriented against Spinoza!) can be stated by
_Heidegger_ in a different way as _neutrality_ or _totalite_ (levinas). I
think in Hegel there is no dimension of _otherness_ (at least in the final
stage of absolute knowledge), whereas H. insists permanently on the dimensio
of hiddenness (the _lethe_ of the _a-letheia_) which is a permanent (!)
dimension. There is no possibility of _totality_ (the _Ganzheit_ of the
Dasein, i.e. of existence, is a mortal, finite one)
This gives the possibility of meeting oneself as an other as well as the
other (person) with respect concerning this non manipulative (I do not know
how to express myself here) dimension.
The question of destiny should (could) not be understood in the sense of
some kind of _moira_, but it H.'s effort for the deconstruction of the
the idea of _progress_ in the sense of a linear history (which is indeed
much (!) more concerned with destiny, with a _final_ (!!) destiny).
Destiny, in the sense of _Geschick_ had, on the contrary, to do with sending
(schicken), i.e. with a process you (we) cannot dominate (for ourselves or
for/over others). So destiny in this sense, is a much more (revolutionary)
concept as the concept of a historical _destiny_.

I do not like the academy either. This is why I think this kind of
_communication_ is in some way liberating,

Sincerely yours,

Rafael






-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Robert V. Scheetz <ay581-AT-yfn.ysu.edu>
An: heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
<heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
Datum: Samstag, 8. August 1998 04:46
Betreff: cont.


>
>
>Dr. Capurro,
>
>surely h's anti-americanism is germane here... on a heidegger list,
>and his ideology, and the german traditions of idealism
>and romanticism?
>
>for the rest, and tho i'd have thought it plain to see,
>i guess i can defend myself to the extent of correcting
>ceartain apparent  misconconceptions.
>however, unlike my chum henry, while i am lamentably no scholar
>i am happily unconstrained by  bourgeois liberal  decorum...
>
>1. re ethnicity:...the world i see rather resembles
>    the bellum omnium pictured in spike lee's
>    "do the right thing": blacks hating arabs
>    hating jews hating koreans hating italians
>     hating irish hating anglos hating japs...and on, and on.
>    and in each case the sentiment seeming richly  deserved.
>    the tendancy  to aggrandize one's puny self ,
>    get the advantage in this general maelstrom,
>    by joining some blood club, masons, aoh, saxons... (call it the mafia
syndrome)
>    and excluding the "other",
>    is always mean and tawdry.
>      ...and don't mh's german "destiny " fit here?
>
>  2. h's anti-americanism... were unexceptionable had he
>    referenced imperialism (manifest destiny, the war in the phillipines),
>    the clearing the land of indigenes (trails of tears),
>    racism (nite riders and lynchings),
>    carnegie, rockefeller, & co.  (the super-exploitation in factories,
mines and mills),
>   ...nso on.
>    but his actual conception,  culture of the masses
>    and technology,  where in fact  the US has always been
>    a plutocracy,  the masses being allowed to contribute only in the role
of mindless
>    affirmation; and, technology, being of course the defining
>    modality of the industrial stage of capitalism, a regimen forced
>    on a population of pathetically desparate immagrants  by the
>    big bourgeois for purposes of super-exploitation.
>    ...is the supreme malignity of blaming the victims for
>    bearing the marks of their oppression...an offensiveness and
>    stupidity  typical of snobbery, no?
>
>3.  re "this kind of ironic stuff not gettting us anywhere:"
>     you might consider how, outside the hothouse world of the academy,
>     obsessing with  jargon, semantics,  the canon,  seems pretty  quaint.
>     if postmodernity is anything it is the world of the eiron.
>
>4. ...and as for the insistance that h be exempted from deconstruction,
>    the while he subjects evrybody else to the most breathtaking
>    partial and tendentious reductions,  simply too absurd...
>
>
>    respectfully,
>    bob
>
>
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