File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_1998/heidegger.9812, message 164


Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1998 15:18:45 -0500
From: Daniel McGrady <dMcGrady-AT-compuserve.com>
Subject: Re: Heidegger in Germany


Message text written by INTERNET:heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>Tom

>thanks for your clarifications. It was not my purpose to misread you of
>course. It seemed to me you were asking for a _hero_, Gandhi or so and
this
>sounds, to my hears at least, very _american_ (superman etc.) and very
>_german_ too!

>H.'s thinking is, in my view, essentially _non violent_ in the sense that
it
>is a permanent questioning of _ground_ and _will to power_ (of
>_metaphyics_).

>Kind regards,

>Rafael

Rafael,

How do you read this kind of violence from 'Introduction to Metaphysics'?  
Is it acceptable violence?

'It is this breaking out and breaking up, capturing and subjugating that
opens up the essent as sea, as earth, as animal.  It happens only insofar
as the powers of language, of understanding, of temperament, and o
fbuilding are themselves mastered (bewaeltigt) in violence.   The violence
of poetic speech, of thinking projection, of building configuration, of the
action that creates states is not a function of faculties that man has, but
ataming and ordering of powers by virtue of which the essent opens up as
such when man  moves into it.   This disclosure o fthe essent is the power
that man must master in order to become himself amid the deinon here in the
second strophe must not be misinterpreted as invention or as a mere faculty
or attribute of man.

'Oly if we understand that the use of power in language, in understanding,
in forming and building helps to create (i.e. always, to bright forth) the
violent act (Gewaltat) of laying out paths into the environing power of the
essent.'  (Mannheim's translation, Yale, (1974) [1959] p. 157)   

What is it that Mannheim is translating as violence?   I can't give any
German references.  I only have the English copy.   It is the discussion of
the choral ode in Sophocles's 'Antigone'.

And then the violence of interpretation in 'Kant and the Problem of
Metaphysics'

'It is true that in order to wrest from the actual words that which these
words "intend to say," every interpretation must necessarily resort to
violence.   This violence, however, should not be confused with an action
that is wholly arbitrary.   The interpretation must be animated and guided
by the power of an illuminative idea.   Only through the power of this idea
can an interpretation risk that which is always audacious, namely,
entrusting itself to the secret e/lan of a work, in order by this e/lan to
get through to the unsaid and to attempt to find an expression for it.  
The directive idea itself is confirmed by its own power of illumination.'  
(translation, James Churchill, Indiana, p. 207 (1972) [1962]

Daniel






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