Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1999 23:10:56 +0100
Subject: Re:  Heidegger in Germany


Cologne 25 January 1999

h.vantuijl-AT-kub.nl schrieb:
> > Levinas was not a pupil of Heidegger, perhaps of 
> > Husserl.
>
> This is new to me. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy but also De Boer
> and Peperzak who have known Levinas personally maintain that he was a
> student of Heidegger in 1928/1929.

Henk,

I do not regard someone a pupil of a thinker merely by by virture of having 
attended some of that thinker’s lectures/seminars. That is a superficial, 
external criterion. If that were the case, then I would be a pupil of Albrecht 
Welmer, Ralf Darendorf, Martin Seel, David Armstrong, George Markus (who was my 
PhD supervisor), etc. etc. To be a pupil in my understanding of the term is to 
have entered into the deepest thoughts of a thinker and to have grappled with 
them, both in adopting them and attempting (and probably failing) to go beyond 
them in some respect. In short, to be a pupil of a thinker is to have learned 
from him. I am a pupil of Heidegger although I never met him personally. I don’t 
think Levinas learned from Heidegger, nor did Tugendhat. Both missed the point. 
Levinas understands Dasein as an egocentric subject!

> > Levinas' main work doesn't even bother with a 
> > translation/interpretation of the famous Platonic 
> > phrase _epekeina taes ousias_ which gives it its 
> > title. Instead the obsessive, dogmatic assertion  
> > that ethics comes first. Levinas also does not 
> > engage with the Seinsfrage but polemicizes 
> > against it in a kind of mantra rhythm.
>
> You are clearly not referring to Levinas' _En decouvrant l' existence_.

No, I’m referring to _Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence_ Cf. my critique 
of Levinas at the artefact website (Worldsharing). 

> If the beating heart of Heidegger's thinking turns out to be fascistoid
> one needs vigilance of not allowing it to beat any longer.

That is what I would love to see: someone trying to show that the thinking of 
the “truth of being” i.e. _alaetheia_ is fascistoid or fascist, thus ripping out 
the heart of Heidegger’s thinking. I have not yet seen anyone attempting to do 
this. Perhaps I’ve missed something. 

> I believe that one should take Heidegger's entanglement with National
> Socialism seriously. His thinking went wrong somewhere and somehow.

That’s begging the question. It assumes that all the actions of a thinker during 
his life including e.g. going to prostitutes, etc. (as Aristotle is supposed to 
have done), are of one piece with the heart of his thinking. That is a rather 
monstrous totalization and, frankly, pretty silly. Heidegger for a time 
misrecognized the NS movement as the vehicle for a ‘new dawn’ in German history 
in which his ‘new thinking’ could also be some sort of guiding force. That was 
Heidegger's Syracuse.

> And fundamentalist Heideggerians refuse to answer these two questions:
> where and how did it go wrong?

As I say, you’re begging the question. Anyone who enters into the heart of 
Heidegger’s thinking and grapples with it is labelled a fundamentalist. That is 
convenient for the detractors of Heidegger’s thinking. The rhetoric of guilt by 
association. They cannot perceive whether a genuine critical engagment with 
Heidegger’s thinking is taking place because the heart of it is lost on them. 

> Habermas is indeed one of the most influential social
> philosophers of our times. It does not help Heidegger to belittle his
> thinking. It is Heidegger's thinking that has become tainted in the
> worst possible way, not Habermas's.

Habermas’ theory doesn’t interest me (anymore), as I have said in this forum 
before. But what he says about Heidegger (and Marx, for that matter) is 
ultimately just waffle because he does not carry himself across to and enter the 
realm of experience from which Heidegger is speaking. 

Consider just one short passage:
“Zwischen Werk und Person darf kein kurzschluessiger Zusammenhang hergestellt 
werden. Heideggers philosophisches Werk verdankt, wie das anderer Philosophen, 
seine Autonomie der Kraft seiner Argumente.” (Foreword to Farias’ book, German 
edition S.34)

translation:
“There must not be any short-circuited connection construed between oeuvre and 
person. Heidegger’s philosophical oeuvre, like that of other philosophers, owes 
its autonomy to the power of its arguments.”

This is a formal kind of observation. And it is said from the metaphysics of 
rationality for which truth is located in statements, and truth is established 
by moving from one true statement to another by way of admissible, compelling 
inferences (“zwangloser Zwang des besseren Arguments”). Heidegger’s experience 
of truth is deeper, however. Truth for Heidegger is not (on the deepest level) a 
matter of argument but, more originarily than that, of the uncovering 
(_alaetheuein_) which takes place in Dasein, which can also (subsequently) come 
to speech (in ‘argument’). Heidegger’s writings, from beginning to end, point to 
this possible experience (_formale Anzeige_). The uncovering is prior to any 
statement which could be true or false or any other purely linguistic 
phenomenon. There is nothing in Habermas (or Levinas, for that matter) to my 
knowledge (maybe I have missed something) to indicate that he has understood 
this. Perhaps you could point to just one passage in Habermas which shows that 
he has understood the innermost heart of the thinking of being. To engage in a 
genuinely critical way with Heidegger’s thinking, one has to question the nature 
of the uncovering that takes place in Dasein (which certainly _is_ possible!), 
not just fall back into metaphysical positions which have already been 
irrevocably undermined by the uncovering of the dimension of _alaetheia_. A 
rational subject can make true or false statements and argue from one statement 
to the next, but Dasein as being-in-the-world is immersed in the play of 
disclosure and covering-over itself. This shift changes everything. One has to 
be clear about the metaphysical stance from which Habermas is speaking. 

Without having understood _alaetheia_ and thinking from within the space which 
this insight has opened, all talk about Heidegger remains empty, more or less 
sophisticated chatter. All talk of “fascistoid” tendencies remains empty 
rhetoric as long as it fails to make a connection with this deepest level of the 
thinking of being (which in no way should be pinned entirely to the person of 
Heidegger). (It’s akin to trying to dismiss Plato without having really 
understood what _eidos_ means.) 

That is the reason I cited the passage from Christian Lotz’s article. He comes 
to the heart of Heidegger’s thinking (the truth of being), balks, and resorts to 
polemics. This could be called the tactics of evasion of the heart of the issue 
at stake. Lotz is only one among very many. 

Michael
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