File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2003/heidegger.0311, message 326


Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2003 22:06:09 +0100
From: artefact-AT-t-online.de (Michael Eldred)
Subject: Re: Hectoring the Rector


Cologne 20-Nov-2003

Thu, 20 Nov 2003 11:48:39 +0000  michaelP <michael-AT-sandwich-de-sign.co.uk> schrieb:

> on 20/11/03 11:00 am, Michael Eldred at artefact-AT-t-online.de wrote:
>
> > As it is, we muddle along with these myriad conflicting truths. If being, as
> > Heidegger claims, is in withdrawal, perhaps it would be better if it withdrew
> > altogether, say, to Mars, and left us in peace to be driven purely by drives.
> > Genetics may one day hold the key to this problem, and discover a switch that
> > could be switched off in the human DNA  -- then the human body would refuse
> > being's call and evade being cast out into the exposed open. Off the hook.
>
> Michael, is being in partial withdrawal then? What can this mean? A
> quantitative withdrawingness? But is it not the case that being's withdrawal
> *is* being (in the manner of withdrawal)?
>
> Is it peace to be "driven by drives"? Sounds like war to me! Eternal mayhem
> for humans. Finally, and these points are linked, can a body-qua-body refuse
> anything, nevermind the call of being (even in its holding back)? You seem
> to be asking for the existence of the humanly non-human. Only humans can be
> inhuman... In some sense you appear to be close (but not *that* close, g-d
> forbid :-)) to Jud's nihilistique no-name-al-isms. Pour qua?
>
> hoping you get well soon :-)
>
> michaelP
>

Of course I was joking, but only half. The serious half was trying to throw
something into stark relief. This concerns the individualization of the
truth/openness of being. As human beings we all share the open truth of being and
cannot avoid the apophanitic _as_, i.e. that beings show up and reveal themselves
_as_ what they are, but this showing of their faces (_idea_, _eidos_) is taken in
by us individually. Thus Plato/Socrates paraphrases Protagoras:

"as what an individual thing shows itself to me, such a look does it have for me;
as what it shows itself to you, on the other hand, thus is it, in turn, for you;
for you are a human being and so am I?" (Theaitetos 152a translation adapted from
Heidegger Nietzsche II S. 136)

An animal is not confronted with the apophantic _as_; it is driven by drives. There
is no such thing as "war" for an animal. That is only our human view from the
outside -- the struggle for survival is _our_ interpretation, _our_ understanding
of animal being.

Of course the "body-qua-body" cannot refuse the call of being. But human know-how,
now in the form of genetic science, can do lots to influence the human body.
Heidegger says that human bodiliness is "put into" (versetzt GA36/37:178) human
existence. I was only fantasizing that human knowledge would one day know how to
shut down the human body's receptivity to being. That is perhaps not so far-fetched
as it seems at first sight. Aldous Huxley's _Brave New World_ probably unknowingly
thinks in this direction (I'm not suggesting that Huxley knew anything about the
thinking of being!). Certain diseases produce 'human vegetables' who are 'out of
it'. Black humour.

Finally, being's decampment to Mars is a pure flight of fancy. Beings as such are
granted in the withdrawal of being itself. Heidegger shows how the truth of being,
_alaetheia_, is presupposed by Greek thinking without it being thought in itself
and he calls on us (in the _Beitraege_) to now, in an other historical beginning,
to think beings _as_ sprung from beyng itself. We have hardly begun to do that, and
it will be a long, hard struggle, not only because the phenomena of being itself
are hardest to learn to see (because so obvious), but also because truth has to
pass individually through human being. Thus we have strife and contention not only
in every sphere of human life, but also and especially in philosophical thinking.

Michael
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