File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2003/heidegger.0311, message 245


Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 11:29:54 -0600
From: allen scult <allen.scult-AT-drake.edu>
Subject: Hectoring the Rector


I think the whole disaster grows out of  Heidegger's  presumption 
that the sciences, if properly unified and guided by thinking can 
once again be rooted in their essential ground.  This is the mission 
of university teaching-- to recover the priority of Bildung over 
vocational training (Humboldt).  This notion of the essential unity 
of the sciences naturally found its way into a more general ideal 
founded on the same principle:  That the university as a whole 
community could think and teach its way to a new Grundstimmung 
founded in the presencing of being as actualized in the historicity 
of Volk.  In the Rectoral Address, Heidegger calls this commitment, 
the "will to essence."  This will to essence alone "will create for 
our people its world, a world of the innermost extreme danger, i.e. 
its truly spiritual world."

So how, you might ask,  does this "spiritual enthusiasm,' as Scheler 
called it, jibe with all the talk of "earth and blood" in the 
Address?  It's the earth and blood which grounds the spiritual "in 
the historical singularity of the presencing of being." The 
presencing of being is necessarily "local."  Dasein needs to know its 
place,  to be bounded and grounded--delimited(Scheler again)--or else 
it falls prey to ressentiment, knowing itself only in comparison to 
someone else, to some other group(This is Scheler's Nietzsche).

So as Bernhard Radloff puts it in an essay in the latest Philosophy 
Today:  "The powers of 'earth and blood,' therefore, are not racial 
and biological categories (for Heidegger) but refer to the necessity 
of self limitation founded in a people's act of decision to belong to 
its native soil."(6)  Heidegger calls the THINKING of self limitation 
"Selbstbegrenzung"  -- a self imposed delimitation "within which 
genuine questioning can found and preserve itself."

Of course, this pursuit turns to ashes.  My point is to try to 
understand it as the naive, romantic, INTELLECTUAL vision it was. 
The idea of a "unified (unifying) field theory" had lit up German 
thought for quite a while.  Heidegger, unfortunately, got thrown into 
it at a time when it once again seemed possible.  Radloff connects 
Heidegger's vision of a  new beginning to his  over project of 
re-inscribing Aristotle, especially the Aristotle of the Rhetoric, in 
the rectoral Address, and so re-inventing the German University in 
the image of the Greek polis:

"A dunamis is actualized by the orator insofar as the fundamental 
mood of the community is turned, thus to win new insight and possibly 
prepare the community for decision.  Ethos implicates  a fundamental 
comportment to being, which unfolds itself in a style of "national" 
being to permeate all spheres of life, including the rituals of 
politics. . .The telos of the unfolding of a volk would be the 
actualization of the potential for being of its particular ethos" (18)

So what we have in the Rectoral Address is Heidegger engaged in the 
age old task of integrating rhetoric and philosophy, and thereby, 
through the rightly thought(ethos), and rightly pitched(pathos) 
speech of the ideal orator to bring to presence the local version 
(which is all there is) of the truth of being.

Just thought I'd let you know!

Allen





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