Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1999 13:57:36 +0100
Subject: Re:  Heidegger in Germany


Cologne 27 January 1999

Thanks to Rene, Henk, Greg, Rafael, Antti for all the responses yesterday. I’ll 
try to reply to some of them. 

Henk:
> In the case of Heidegger, I _just_ plead for a
> critical attitude until we know where and how -
> i.e. what to avoid.

Avoid the illusion that philosophical thinking could find an immediate 
precipitation in political life. It seems that Heidegger realized this after 
lurching into the breech, later on in his Auseinandersetzung with Nietzsche 
(“Thoughts that come on pigeons’ feet steer the world.”) Marx, too, wanted to 
short-circuit philosophical thinking and politics, and that in a more 
deep-seated, programmatic way. His popularized theory was an historical 
disaster. 

I plea for a “critical attitude” altogether, not just because of political 
dangers. I plea for critical engagement (Auseinandersetzung) with the core of 
Heidegger’s thinking. How does _alaetheia_ reveal itself? Does Heidegger cover 
its full scope and reach? (Cf. my _Quivering of Propriation_, esp. the new 
Section 5, which I only put on site yesterday.)

> Lotz tries to show that Husserl and Heidegger have more in
> common than Heidegger allows for. He is one of those who
> keep Heidegger alive - i.e. part of the philosophical
> discours.

I think Lotz is one of those who help put on the lid and shovel on a bit more 
dirt. The tone of his article is imbued with ownership rights, i.e. who thought 
what first, who is indebted to whom. It’s petty. Heidegger knew full well that 
he was deeply indebted to his teacher in phenomenology, and he also had his 
understanding of what separated him from Husserl. Whether this understanding was 
a misunderstanding is a secondary, academic question in my view. 

> For those who have devoted a lifetime to the study of his
> thinking it must be painful to see how others treat it as
> a thing: dissect it, quantify or qualify it, compare it,
> etc. etc. Anyhow ... not taking it for what it pretends
> to be - is.

I don’t find it painful, just annoying and infuriating at times. As to pretence, 
it seems that many readers have their sport in trying to knock the thinker with 
his great insight down a peg or two. Call it inverted admiration, inferiority 
complex, the tall poppy syndrome or what you will. With this indignant attitude 
such a reader is not in the position to learn much from Heidegger. This does not 
disturb many academic readers. One can read a lot of books without thinking much 
at all.

Antti: 
> I would agree with your interpretation of Heidegger - there's brilliant
> stuff on this in GA 29, for example, where he patiently explains why he
> believes propositional truth is secondary, and, incidentally, _argues_ for
> it. The problem is that Habermas knows this too, and criticizes Heidegger
> nonetheless. I'd say that the short version of his argument on the link
> between Heidegger's philosophy and his Nazism is as follows: when you
> believe that Truth-with-a-capital-T "takes place" in some "deeper" level of
> "experience" than public discussion, you risk sliding towards taking the
> originary "revelation" to the chosen ones, Thinkers-with-a-capital-T, as
> something that does not have to be justified before and to the Other: "All
> refutation in the field of essential thinking is foolish." (Letter on
> Humanism, p. 239 in _Basic Writings_). Belief in the inner truth and
> greatness of your own thinking, your own German nation, regardless of what
> others think or say is what makes possible silencing, or gassing, the
> others, the parasites.

I do not see any necessary link between regarding oneself as great and wanting 
others to be silenced. That is a merely suggestive concatenation. As for wanting 
others to be murdered, a few more monstrous links would be necessary. Greatness 
can go only with humility. 

Rafael has already replied to you with some insightful remarks, including the 
one that it is a mistake to think of _alaetheia_ as truth with a capital T or 
otherwise. _alaetheia_ is the opening for the play of disclosure _and_ covering 
up. It is where truth can take place, not truth itself. We are beings exposed to 
seeing and failing to see, to lucid views and distorted ones. It is not as if 
the insight into _alaetheia_ were the guarantee for privately possessing _a_ 
truth. Nor does the step back from propositional truth into the clearing mean 
that one has moved simply to a zone of experience that cannot be brought to 
language. Phenomenology means, after all, putting the phenomena into words, and 
that implies that phenomenological truth is necessarily shared. (But it is 
shared even before words!) 

If, like Habermas, one wants to insist on rational argument (no matter how this 
rationality is conceived) to the exclusion of what cannot be put into words, 
this amounts to truncating what human being is and can be by pushing out of 
sight what is out of proportion with this _ratio_. It must then bear the ominous 
title, the Irrational, as something to be feared and kept under control by 
rationality. That is Habermas’ tack against thinkers like Heidegger and 
Nietzsche, who for him are Irrationalists. Heidegger is for Habermas a thinker 
who “undermines occidental rationalism” (cf. the title of the Heidegger chapter 
in _Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne_). The alternative is to enter into 
the full openness of what human being means in its full exposure to beyng and 
try to point to the phenomena associated with this ‘being human’. Our 
bodiliness, for instance, will never be amenable to propositional truth but 
requires another sensibility and perceptiveness if we are to escape the 
natural-scientific understanding of our body. We don’t just share the truth of 
statements but the reverberation of atmospheres, say, of excitement. What shows 
itself in the moodedness of existence? Does it _show_ itself? 

One way of understanding the quote: "All refutation in the field of essential 
thinking is foolish." is that all the great thinkers are guided by an insight 
which serves as fountain-head for their respective philosophies. This insight 
has always been (in the history of metaphysics) a casting of the being of 
beings. To move beyond a thinker, one first has to try to catch a glimpse 
oneself of this guiding insight, i.e. to _learn_ from that thinker. Refutation 
is an inadequate concept for understanding the relationship of Aristotle to 
Plato, Leibniz to Descartes, Hegel to Kant, Marx to Hegel, Heidegger to Husserl, 
etc. 

By chance I have also found the passage in Habermas where you quote him quoting 
Heidegger’s "All refutation...”. The very next sentence after that (in the 
“Letter on Humanism”, Heidegger writes: “The  dispute between thinkers is the 
‘loving dispute’ about the issue itself.” (_Wegmarken_ S.333) Whereas 
“refutation” can be conceived in rational terms, a “loving dispute” bursts this 
rationalistic framework and brings in the passion of philosophy and the exposure 
to the thinker’s task of a total casting of the world. 

> For Habermas, truth can never be anybody's private property. Having said
> that, I don't mean to imply that Heidegger would think otherwise;

In GA27 you will find sections where Heidegger shows why the clearing of truth 
is necessarily shared. Mitsein means, first and foremost, sharing the clearing. 

> Heidegger
> is not a philosopher of will-to-power, on the contrary, and _aletheia_ is
> not subjective. This, I grant, Habermas might well have missed. But it
> would be foolish to deny that Heidegger has a tendency to use a dangerous
> rhetoric of privileged access, from beginning to end. The very idea of a
> depth beyond the reach of ordinary people and public discourse is what
> metaphysics is all about.

I don’t see it as “privileged access” at all because there is nobody handing out 
privileges here. Certainly it is a matter of the “rare few”, for access to 
philosophical thinking is difficult and involves giving back (putting on hold) 
all the ways of thinking which one takes for granted. But in principle it is 
open to anyone. Philosophy is one of the few human endeavours which cuts across 
social class. Nietzsche wrote for “Everybody and Nobody”, i.e. the door is open, 
but few enter. And there are diverse potentials for cross-fertilizations between 
philosophers and people involved in other endeavours. Heidegger’s talk of the 
“rare few” in the _Beitraege zur Philosophie_ (GA65) seems to me to be born (at 
least in part) of the bitter realization that a fundamental shift within the 
history of Western thinking cannot connect with any mass movement or even a 
reform of the German universities. He could also see by that time just how 
thoroughly _Sein und Zeit_ was being misunderstood. And he was very inept in 
politics. 

> propositional conceptions of truth are metaphysical. And Habermas is
> one of the very few philosophers who have actually argued why truth should
> be conceived as property of statements rather than experience (see his
> 'Wahrheitstheorien' in _Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des
> kommunikativen Handelns_, Suhrkamp 1984).

Thanks for the reference.

> What I would like to see is an account of truth that gives absolute
> privilege neither to discourse or to disclosure.

I don’t know what “absolute privilege” is with respect to _alaetheia_ (which 
should not be equated with disclosure). Isn’t it just a matter of gaining an 
insight into what is meant by the “clearing”? And with this insight, other 
phenomena too could become clearer (for instance, the Other) and thought through 
more adequately. 

> I thought the innermost heart of the thinking of being could not be brought
> to argumentative language.... Seriously, it will always be possible to for
> you to say that someone hasn't understood "the innermost heart of the
> thinking of being"; you can not be refuted by any number of passages, and
> that is precisely the problem.

Having quickly looked over the Heidegger chapter in Habermas’ _Der 
philosophische Diskurs der Moderne_ once again, I think I can see where you are 
coming from with your remarks. I think Habermas is appallingly bad on Heidegger, 
but I do not expect anybody to take me at my word. There would be a lot to say 
in an adequate critique of Habermas’ Heidegger critique. Here just a couple of 
points.

1) Habermas is keen on nailing Heidegger to a fixation on his teacher, Husserl. 
Habermas wants to show that Heidegger thus remains tied negatively tied to 
Husserl and what Habermas calls “Subjektphilosophie”. Habermas does not realize 
just how much Heidegger owes to Aristotle and Plato. It is the interpretation 
(the phenomenological reading) of these fathers of metaphysics which allows 
Heidegger to unearth what _alaetheuein_ means. Habermas does not venture to 
comment on Heidegger’s reading of Pl. and Arist., presumably because he is out 
of his depth in the beginnings of metaphysics. 

2) Habermas therefore reads the Zeuganalyse in SuZ as a kind of pragmatism which 
does not offer anything beyond the “pragmatism from Peirce to Mead and Dewey” 
(Habermas S.176) He can only do this because he fails to see that Heidegger’s 
aim in analyzing equipment is to show that handling equipment in everyday life 
is a mode of _alaetheuein_! This becomes especially clear if one reads e.g. GA19 
_Sophistes_. For Habermas, Heidegger overcomes “Bewusstseinsphilosophie”, but so 
does pragmatism, so Heidegger is merely on a par with Peirce, Mead and Dewey. 

3) Habermas represents SuZ as the result of several “begriffsstrategischen 
Entscheidungen” (decisions relating to conceptual strategy; S.174). This is 
antithetical to Heidegger’s phenomenological approach in which it is a matter of 
pointing to (in language, with the _logos_) the phenomena as they show 
themselves of themselves. Habermas refuses to acknowledge that Heidegger’s 
analysis of das Man is not motivated by cultural critique (as Heidegger 
explicitly points out), but insists it is part of a “conceptual strategy” to 
include “existenzphilosophische Motive” (S.174) which could “at the same time 
serve as an answer to the practical question as to how to live correctly” 
(S.175) It does not seem to have any effect that the text _SuZ_, and also later 
texts, explicitly attempt to rule out this existentialist misunderstanding and 
point in another direction. Rather, das Man has to be understood, if at all, as 
a happening of _alaetheia_ too, namely, as a covering-over. Only on this basis 
can this phenomenological analysis be criticized, not by violently attributing 
“strategic conceptual decisions” to its author and treating him as just another 
“German mandarin” (S.167).

4) Because Habermas has no insight into _alaetheia_, he cannot conceive of the 
world as a space where the play of _alaetheia_ happens and where Dasein is only 
the playmate of _alaetheia_, not an originator of theoretical models. He thinks 
the life-world as “being suspended, so to speak, in the structures of linguistic 
intersubjectivity” (S.177) and laments that Heidegger did not pass down the path 
of “such an answer in terms of communication theory”. But this shows that 
Habermas himself remains tied to the metaphysics of subjectivity, namely, that 
of intersubjectivity. The world can only be thought as something between the 
subjects, not as a being-in-the-world for which the play of the world itself is 
primary. 

5) Because Habermas has no insight into _alaetheia_, he also cannot follow 
Heidegger’s thinking beyond _SuZ_. In reading SuZ, Habermas can at least 
understand Dasein as a sort-of subject. Once Heidegger dispenses with the 
preludium of a Daseinsanalytik, he becomes totally incomprehensible to Habermas. 
Heidegger becomes then a mere master in rhetoric. For instance: 
“Because being eludes assertative grasping by descriptive sentences, because it 
can only be circled and ‘ensilenced’ in indirect speech, the destinies of being 
remain unfathomable. The propositionally substanceless talk of being has 
nevertheless the illocutionary sense of demanding submission to destiny. Its 
practical-political side consists in the perlocutionary effect of a willingness 
to obey an auratic but indeterminate authority whose content is diffuse. The 
rhetoric of the late Heidegger...” (S.168) Then come the skilfully arrayed 
quotes about the “shepherd of being”, etc. So the late Heidegger is for Habermas 
a preacher of blind submission to destiny. Habermas gets nervous at the idea 
that there could be something happening which is not in the hands of subjects. 
He insists on language games as the (rational) limits of playfulness. He insists 
on disclosure and does not want to acknowledge that there could be something 
like a play of disclosure _and_ covering-over. But already in SuZ, Dasein is 
exposed to the play of revealing and concealing in the Da; it just does not look 
as threatening in an analysis of everyday life. Habermas hangs onto and is 
“suspended in the structures of linguistic intersubjectivity” for dear life.

That’s enough for now.

Plato says roughly:

_Oudeis hekon hamartanei_ (cf. Rep. 589c)
"Nobody misses the point willingly."

Michael
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