Subject: RE: Hectoring the Rector Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2003 01:17:11 +0100 From: "Bakker, R.B.M. de" <R.B.M.deBakker-AT-uva.nl> -----Oorspronkelijk bericht----- Van: owner-heidegger-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU namens Malcolm Riddoch Verzonden: vr 21-11-2003 19:18 Aan: heidegger-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU CC: Onderwerp: Re: Hectoring the Rector On Saturday, November 22, 2003, at 12:17 AM, Bakker, R.B.M. de wrote: > A world, dangerous of itself, and not because of Heidegger's > "dangerous words". They're mostly dangerous, when ignored, as > can be seen now. Yeh buddy, why do you think the Heidegger hype > does not take an end? Don't turn everything upside down by making > the only one responsible, who looked so straight into the danger. Is this addressed to me? If so I think you've taken me the wrong way. Certainly not, Malcolm. You're doing a serious reading of Heidegger, and together with your quicksilver dialogue, i can only say: volo ut sis. I'm more optimistic about the course the list takes than your fellowman in Koeln, who lives amidst the aboriginal Germans. Somebody -not a philosopher- once said to me: don't you ask yourself why you live here, in this part of the world, and in this time? One way or the other, it is, when one deals with Heidegger, necessary to face oneself and acknowledge that the enemy is solely oneself, or otherwise some kind of revenge is unevitable: it leaves a mark. Hoelderlin writes, that the abyss, carried by the earth, and up to humans to hide for the gods, marks everything. I cannot but repeat that it is dangerous business. One day you're suddenly the co-writer of Habermas! There is certainly some malice in Heidegger, the demon, who throws his curse and disappears in the woods. "They know it better." All right, if they want it, they'll have it. We're in delay since 1830, since what is called, in the philosophical literature, the Zusammenbruch des deutschen Idealismus, since the reactionary turn after Napoleon, the strangling Biedermeier climate, since the foundation of the Berlin university, we're losing ground, walk in the footprints of the events. Nietzsche deplores the two possibilities in European history to change the course: the Renaissance and Napoleon. Protestantism, Luther, overcame the first , the nationalist European states, now in alliance with the proud new German empire, was about to destroy Europe. What would come then, would not be controlable. It's incredibly naive to blame 'terrorists', as the ontological experts do. Sorry to disturb those still dreaming, but if it's true that what has been underway since Parmenides, has been left to itself for alsmost 200 years now, some new seriousness might be needed. No morality will be able to stop the extremest measures some nations or groups will seize when they see chances to secure their power. They might even, like Goebbels, lend Nietzschean gold, but in their hands it turns immediately into shit. Confound means and end... Nietzsche's own 'ends' lie infinitely remote from the rancorous character of these nihilists. There is no question of Heidegger "supporting" Nietzsche, or WtP. He knew Nietzsche all the time, but he came only in, as everyone for Heidegger, when he was there himself, no doubt about that. And that is in 1929: GA29/30 and "What is metaphysics." There is simply no overcoming of, or opposition to Nietzsche possible, die Wueste waechst. More danger again. Nietzsche's word of ER as a selective power -those who cannot master it, will perish because of it- might, as gloomy as it sounds, not be so far away as we like to think. And lastly: what is surprising of the Nietzsche lectures, is that Heidegger never refers to actuality. Except once when he clarifies the selfinterest of all power, and points to the French fleet in Oran, that was destroyed by the British, so that the Germans could not seize it. Both parties are right from their angle, there's no absolute measure. But it's almost disconcerting to read such when WtP is philosophically interpreted. Behind all the politics, there is something else. Now 'Gestell' is the word. In a note to QCT, Heidegger uses the crossed-out Sein with regard to Gestell. Can one think of something typographaphically more refusing than: Sein / \, all three at once? Those who have stopped to be Presocratics have lost the game, wrote Kenneth. regards buddy rene we are, since 1917, in war, civil world war. I might have taken you wrong Heidegger is important here precisely because he did 'look so straight into the danger', and he's dangerous because what he saw is a Nazism that can no longer be simply dismissed as a 'crude vulgar nonsense indicative of a fundamental misreading of Nietzsche', at least not if you want to read Heidegger's Nietzsche. But I'm not suggesting Nazi philosophy is the issue here, and Rosenberg is crude and vulgar, it's their world view that's the problem, a world view that Goebbels in particular was rather good at expressing. Heidegger saw in this world view a self-conscious relation to truth as will to power, and while I'm convinced that he repudiated what became of this world view as the will to will, even this repudiation is fraught with danger as it collapses Nazism into the same willful relation to truth as Americanism and communism. They're all will to will in the service of power and all subjected to the enframing of the understanding of being. Even worse, the Nazi will was apparently at first closer to a self-conscious confrontation with this problem than anyone else on earth. On the one hand this can lead to a particularly cynical but I think rather interesting view of US power today. And on the other it does tend to elide the fundamental problem of the evil that was Nazism and totalitarianism. Heidegger offers us an insiders deeply philosophical view of Nazi power as a model for global power relations that informs his thinking on not only the Gestell but also Ereignis, an anti-democratic view that is silent on the problem of evil. So all I'm saying is that we need to proceed with due caution, the way is not clear cut here and all rote 'Heideggereanisms' are suspect. Regards, Malcolm --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- Ҷ2)Yxmifz{l騽ɞƠzfrj)umifz{lz*+/y'֥֜g'+-JȦyq,y0JZةjj[^v{V^w/mױm_~&+-zb)ej*xn
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