Date: Wed, 27 Jan 99 21:35:37 -0500
Subject: Re:  Heidegger in Germany


In <Pine.BSI.4.02.9901271954340.15506-100000-AT-frogger.lm.com>, on 01/27/99 
   at 08, TMB <tblan-AT-telerama.lm.com> said:



>Whatever. In any event, Heidegger was mistaken from the start in thinking
>in a being-centered fashion and not in developing nonviolence. The
>message that rings loud and clear, from those times and from these, is
>that violence has an independent and primary function and issue, and port
>of our "becoming who we are" is in our taking up the nonviolence we
>already are, rather than systematically ignoring it. In Heidegger's case,
>this is a bit more reprehensible, on a scholoary level or on the level of
>thought, becuase the data were and are there, are here. All the time.
>Everwhere. Nonviolence speaks, always, and everywhere, as the gravity of
>being. That gravity is not simply to be mechanized into the loop of guilt
>as a secondary phenomenon. The issue of violence in relation to political
>power is crucial and was never adequately addressed in Heidegger's
>thought. I know that if I don't bring nonviolence up, no one will. In the
>proximity of Heidegger's sort of "being", there was genocide. Of many
>kinds. There is genocide to this day, and often very much in the very
>close proximity of where "being" not only is remembered, but accomplishes
>itself in ongoing baroque develpments of absolute assuredness. The
>"being" of which Heidegger spoke clearly was meant to point to religions
>dasein, "who is sinner, who is saint", "the bridge" and so forth. Such
>religious Dasein turned away Jews in the US, burned them in Germany, was
>silent across Europe, fomented antisemitic hatred throughout the world,
>and more recentlly ignored genocides in Rwanda and quite likely in Iraa.
>Such "Dasein" sent troops to Vietnam for years, playing the role of
>savior. And throughout, we are spaking not of a forgetting of being, but
>of a remembering through and through. We are sold, again and again, in
>the utterly false conclusion that all violence of this century is
>attributable to taking people as things. But the greatest violence is
>founded on taking people as people, and commiting violence to them on
>that basis. Who is sinner? Who is saint? I don't know. I do know that I
>genuinely do not want to think the world, "being", being with others,
>existence, truth, reality, in such terms, in the main. And those are the
>terms to which Heidegger points, in every way possible, at all times,
>from the preliminary questions of being to the dwelling in the fourfold.
>He is and remains my beloved teacher, but I honestly can't believe you
>people can't make it through these questions. I think it is because you
>are so busy "alingning" yourself to remain "open to being". Well how
>about getting a little more open to nonviolence for a change?

I'm interested in how you think non-violence, as in the West non-violence
has mostly been thought through the concept of 'peace', which ultimately
doesn't seem a properly non-violent mode (of what? of existence? of being?
- you see the beginning of the problem).  I am somewhat suspicious also of
attempts to appropriate other thinking (Indian, aboriginal, Chinese, etc)
into a western context, as in many cases I find that I disbelieve the ease
with which thoughts inspired by complex and fascinating traditions can be
"incorporated" into that context.  And it does do well to remember that
the author of "Zen and the Art of Archery" became a committed Nazi ...

Looking forward to your future posts ...

Andrew Glynn  


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