Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 16:23:45 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: Heidegger in Germany


On Fri, 29 Jan 1999 aglynn-AT-cibcfinance.com wrote:

> 
> 
> I'm sorry to hear your personal living conditions are not well.  Hopefully
> 'fate' will send you some good luck this year...  I've personally been
> through a number of severe depressions (manic-depressive disorder
> unfortunately) and empathise as much as possible in this medium with that
> plight.
> 
> A good friend of mine whom I often converse with on these topics is heavily
> involved in Japanese traditions and I find her comments often illuminating.
> At times though I'm not sure if she is misinterpreting something or I am
> misinterpreting her but there seems to be some sort of comprehension
> problem when those ideas get rephrased in a western context.  I hope I
> didn't put you off by using the word 'suspicion', as having thought about
> it later I would rather get across that it is my own comprehensive ability
> with regard to such ideas,  western and even more so  non-western, that I
> entertain doubts about.
> 
> The 'double negative' of non-violence doesn't bother me as such.  But how
> to think non-violence without a relation to human being, and thus to being,
> is the problem that has concerned me in the past about your posts.  Rage
> and malice are, as you rightly point out, not themselves simply due to
> 'forgetting of being', and I have not read anything in Heidegger that
> analyses or discusses things like rage and malice in an originary fashion,
> but I think Heidegger's point (to the degree he took it) was that the
> indifference of the majority that allows the rage and malice of certain
> people to have such widespread effects in modern society, could be
> construed as a forgetting of the concern and care that constitiute our own
> being.
> 
> Take care,
> Andrew
> 

I see, and thanks. Well, with Heidegger it is in a certain way "care, for
one's own". The "other" of Heidegger, "another", on the other hand, could
be "any other", or not. Care and its explication (for-the-sake-of), and
therefore "sake", is all pregnant with the kind of implication you are
giving it. The basic structure in Heidegger is that all care boils down
to: my losing my being with the other and my being guilty. I favor the
elevation of a sense of the precious. This sense goes beyond my care for
my own "being with". This, and, obvously, an elevated sense of
nonviolence. Care is too positive. Violence is the violability of the
cared for and of the care that "Dasein" "is". Nonviolence is the devotion
of care to, specifically, the matter, question, burden, responsibilty,
topic, issue of violence and violation of the precious as such. It is a
specific topicality, in a way, however general, at this level of
discourse, at the same time. The relation to the precious can be free and
is more original than "responsibiltiy" thought according either to guilt
or the "right to exist" (Levinas). Nonviolence is too busy to be
concerned, in a way, with either of these, and tends, as far as I can see,
to see them as derivative and secondary "phenomena". It can be thought in
very simple, "ontic" terms: in an argument where there is violation, guilt
says: "who did this?", responsibilty says, "do I have a right to be?", but
nonviolence says, "I don't care who did it, I don't care whether I have a
right to be or not, I care about that person who is hurt, about any of us
getting hurt, and am working as hard as I can to either prevent that or
ameliorate what hurt has been done". It maintains itself in its fullness
("working as hard as I can") not in the negative light of either guilt or
the question of one's "right to be", but in a direct relation, known as
love, I guess, to the precious, and within the *positive* framework of
*the good*. This is "standing in nonviolence", as best as I can see here.
Was Hitler's thing a "forgetting of concern or care"? No. he genuinely
cared about German and aryans. Sifting through Heidegger to cleart it all
up doesn't seem to me to be hitting of the most fundamental points here,
though, since Heidegger is so brilliant, it's always fruitful to do in any
case, I guess. But these fundamental issues appear to me to exceed
Heideggers grounding thematics and work.

Regards,

TMB



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