Subject: RE: A Taster
Date: Fri, 3 Oct 2003 13:45:43 +0200
From: "Bakker, R.B.M. de" <R.B.M.deBakker-AT-uva.nl>


Michael,

I am reminded of the dialogue of Tom Sawyer 
and a fancy boy, who keeps on saying that
he's going to hit him. Tom: "Then do it,
don't just say it!" 

rene





-----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
Van: Michael Eldred [mailto:artefact-AT-t-online.de]
Verzonden: vrijdag 3 oktober 2003 0:16
Aan: heidegger-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU
Onderwerp: Re: A Taster


Cologne 03-Oct-2003

"Bakker, R.B.M. de" schrieb  Thu, 2 Oct 2003 16:57:50 +0200:

> -----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
> Van: Stuart Elden [mailto:stuartelden-AT-btconnect.com]
> Verzonden: donderdag 2 oktober 2003 10:49
> Aan: heidegger-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU
> Onderwerp: RE: A Taster
>
> Well, I'm not sure it can be dismissed like that. The problem of this
> address, for me, has always been the way in which his philosophy is
> developed and appropriated for his political purpose. It's not that Being
> and Time is, in itself, fascistic, but that elements within it can be used,
> and were used by Heidegger, to justify particular political positions.
>
> The shift from individual to collective Dasein is, as i've argued elsewhere,
> the key to Heidegger's politics. He just doesn't think through the notion of
> being together politically very clearly. I've argued this against his
> reading of Aristotle's notion of phronesis - for Aristotle phronesis is
> something which has different registers: the individual, the household, the
> polis. Heidegger strips this out in his reading of the Nicomachean Ethics,
> and concentrates only on the former, and it seems to me this problem is the
> root of his politics. Section 74 of B&T is the one Fritsche examines in
> detail. See also Heidegger's Roots by Charles Bambach.
>
> I'd like a close reading of the full text of the Rectoral address - this is
> part of it posted here by Jud - and doing this would require a range of
> contexts: Heidegger's own work, the political situation at the time, the
> notions here plucked from Junger, etc.
>
> Stuart
>
>   Stuart,
>   That would be interesting. Of course, when we deal with a philosopher
>   whose claim it is that his own thinking is not metaphysical anymore,
>   we would be on false paths when we expect of him an ethics/politics
>   *based on* an ontology. The word "fundamental ontology" is ambigious
>   in this respect, reason for Heidegger to drop it, from 1930 on.
>   An ethics/politeia *based on* ontology, that's originally Plato, the
>   way metaphysics dis-tinguishes .... (what?, in what dimension?)
>   So, if the *based on*,ground, is not thought through  - Vom Wesen des
>   Grundes/the essence of ground (1929) -, one does not escape metaphysics.

Who's talking about an ethics or politics "based on" a "fundamental ontology"? I've
been hearing these kinds of excuses for why Heidegger ignored certain phenomena for
around fifteen years. The line always goes: "But that's metaphysics -- Heidegger is
beyond metaphysics." This is apologetic obfuscation that serves only to immunize
Heidegger against any sort of critique, i.e. further questioning. It's insufferable,
stodgy conservatism. Instead, his blind spots have to be brought into the open,
whilst not forgetting "that now beings _are_ no longer, but that _beyng_ springs to
'beings'." (GA65:248 Section 130) That is a task _for us_ -- to unfold what this
could mean.

I have yet to see a skerrick of putting Heidegger's thinking into question in
anything you say.
I have yet to see a skerrick of a question at all in what you have to say.

Heidegger, at least, was always dissatisfied, was always questioning himself. That
did not prevent him, however, from being blind to certain phenomena.


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>
>
>   If this is not seen, a funding of Heidegger's 'political ideas' in
>   or on his ontology, is inevitable more metaphysical than metaphysics.
>   That's why i wrote on metaphysics as "the incorporated errors/illusions"
>   (Nietzsche). To be short: metaphysics would not be in a Plato text,
>   but in US, and it must be overcome *there*. "The world play blands YOU
>   in ('To Goethe') This step is first to be set (the biting of the snake's
>   head), only then the free/open space of the Ab- of the abground can
>   come into view. View? View would be idea. So no view. BEFORE the view.
>   Still closer to oneself than ... oneself. And the closeness of this
>   closer therefore turns AGAINST, away from the self, the subject.
>
>   In 1932, writes von Herrmann, the plan for the Beitraege was born.
>   And in 1933 a revolution, a chance to change all that was rotten and
>   frozen  - everybody agreed on that -  , the chance to act, to discard
>   all that had become merely traditional, and 'create the free space' for
>   something new, that should not be filled in on beforehand (>metaphysics).
>   The coincidence of the two was too much, and he would have been a traitor
>   to his own 'ideas', if he would not have caught the moment, because these
>   ideas consisted in the insight in the inevitable logic of nihilism, as
>   showed by Nietzsche, and still dominating everything. To this moment
>   Heidegger has kept, the chance, with the national socialists, who still
>   had committed no crimes, to reach a questioning of technology. Now, that
>   we hardly feel anymore the possibility of such (except Heideggerians in books),
>   we also cannot grant Heidegger his revolution, as we grant it to the French and
>   the Americans (and the Russians). And when he later spoke himself of a
>   'stupidity', it still points to the child, without which there is no thinker,
>   probably also no politician. That's how it is, and that's why today nothing
>   happens without dissolution: it is not really 'begun'.  But rather than going
>   after this, we will go on willing the nothing on our oneway-track, without
>   even realizing. Instead Heidegger is laid under the microscope.
>
>    regards
>
>    rene
>








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