Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1999 03:40:23 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: Heidegger in Germany


On Mon, 25 Jan 1999, John Foster wrote:

> 
> "But evil is not to be reduced to sin and cannot be grasped under the
> heading of sin alone. To the extent that our interpretation is attached to
> the real fundamental metaphysical question, the question of Being, it is
> not in the shape of sin that we question evil, but it is in the optic of
> the essence and truth of Being that we seek to situate it. And by that very
> fact it also appears, in mediate fashion, that the ethical horizon does not
> suffice to conceive of evil and that, much more than this, ethics and
> morality only aim, on the contrary, to legislate with a view to fixing the
> attitude to be adopted faced with evil, in the sense of the victory to be
> won against it, of the rejection or the diminishing of evil." (Shelling, p.
> 175 [p.146]). 

This is fairly typical; either ethics as "fixing attituted" (hence within
the general rubric of "correctness"), and within the general theme of
*legislation*, or else: evil. No sense of violence or nonviolence. Even
"sin" is always implying an "incorrectness", and the idea, as we know, is
to preserve authenticity from this failing, the failing both of Western
Ethics and of Western reactive anti-ethics. The course of evil, which is
completely covered over, and forgotten probably *more* than Being, is
*violence*, the experience of violence and of vulnerability, etc. The
quest for the *immediate* then rushes back into "evil" without grasping
that the immediacy that is sought is found, in part, in the jutting
through of pain in its absolute immediacy. LIkewise, the various plunging
back into and affirmation of *war*, *polemos*, etc. tha we find in
Nietzsche and Hediegger. What called for thinking? 

TMB



     --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---