File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_1998/heidegger.9812, message 190


From: andrew.glynn-AT-ca.pwcglobal.com
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1998 09:54:44 -0500
Subject: Re: Heidegger in Germany


"Yet just as "thought" is limited, it is also released and charged with
*more*, with a greater burden and possibility. Thought and action are not
a simple dyad and are not independent. Thinking itself thinks this
hybridity, and action undertakes this thinking, this thinking acts, not
simply "insofar as it thinks" but insofar as one thinks and acts, and
thinks what one is doing. But that thinking finds itself in a condition
that is not freedom, but mooded and sensate. Yet, even this highly
Heideggerian conception falls short of the insurmountable issue here.
Thinking is always already *charged* with "ethics" from the start. One of
its tasks is to guard against the ethical falling way from being what it
is, just as Heidegger charges thinking with a certain Ur-humanism: that of
understanding that to be human is to be in danger of falling into the
"inhuman". Yet part of how the human falls in this way is that it loses
contact with the essence of nonviolence as the ground of ethics"

Violence itself marks itself in Dasein through mood, which suggests a
connection with being and being-thought.   In extremes of mood disorders
self-violence is common as a way to reduce anxiety.  Yet I'm not sure why
you find thinking that is "mooded and sensate" unfree as  a result.   The
phrase "essence of nonviolence" also seems problematic, when violence and
nonviolence often seem to straddle one another.

I'm far too ignorant of Gandhi's thought and life unfortunately to comment
on his particular type of nonviolence.  It reminds me immediately though of
another eastern form of nonviolence, the practice of judo, which straddles
violence and nonviolence by teaching gentleness in battle. I'm not sure how
well either form (and I'm sure there's many others) get translated or
re-created in western terms.

Violence and nonviolence seem to me moments, there are moments of both in
thinking, and even an ontological destruction of a text implies a
gentleness and respect reminiscent of nonviolence.

Please ignore the legalese below, I'm responding from work ...

cheers
Andrew


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