File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2003/heidegger.0311, message 268


Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2003 13:26:05 +0100
From: artefact-AT-t-online.de (Michael Eldred)
Subject: Re: Hectoring the Rector


Cologne 19-Nov-2003

allen scult schrieb Tue, 18 Nov 2003 11:29:54 -0600:

> 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
>
>

Allen, yes indeedy, a unification of science is one string in Heidegger's
bow of yearning.

The university itself practised onto-theology: 'turned towards the one'.
Heidegger, like many others, yearns for the one, for unity. He conjures a
unified will of the Volk. And yet, at the same time, he sees clearly that
philosophy and its "turning of the soul" is an INDIVIDUAL enterprise.

"It is therefore essential to the being of the philosopher that he is
_solitary_. ... The one who has been liberated returns to the cave. He
should be in the cave himself if only to liberate just _one_ other."
(WS1933/34 GA36/37:183)

Human being arises historically in the emergence of the truth of being.
Human being is an historical happening "because the basic happening is
precisely that fore-casting creative envisioning of the essence of
things". (GA36/37:177)

This "fore-casting creative envisioning" is done by creative individuals,
but these co-casters participate in opening an historical world for a
people. Heidegger dreamt of such a world-opening for the German Volk. In
terms of historical time, he was in a bit of a rush.

A creative fore-caster cannot fore-see how his casting will assume a cast
form in a future historical reality.

Michael
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