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