File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2003/heidegger.0312, message 248


Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2003 23:33:33 +0100
From: artefact-AT-t-online.de (Michael Eldred)
Subject: Re: roots of anti-semitism


Cologne 14-Dec-2003

allen scult schrieb Sat, 13 Dec 2003 14:45:16 -0600:

> Hi frank, thanks for your note.
>
> As near as I can tell, I was pointing to a perceived similarity
> between the return of German
> idealism to the truth generating earth-ground of ancient Greece, relocating it
>   on/in German soil and in the German language, and the return of
> modern Judaism to the language and land of their fathers (In
> Benselers Griechisch-Deutsches Schuelwoerterbuch, autochthonos is tied
> to the Vaterland [Bambach, 52]),  both to
> find what Wallace Stevens  noticed as
>
> the exact rock where his inexactnesses
> would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,
> where he could lie, and gazing down at the sea,
> recognize his unique and solitary home.. .,
>
> and how the universal truth of the Greek/German/Jewish sort must be
> paradoxically rooted
> in a particular piece of earth to which the particular people whose
> texts hold that
> truth in safe-keeping are forever uniquely and distinctively
> tethered, thereby excluding
> other peoples, often particular other peoples, from that truth giving
> Bodenstaendigkeit.
>
> That's probably not much better, but unfortunately I tend almost irreversably
> toward wordiness.
>
> Regards,
>
> Allen

Charles Bambach has been following the trace of autochthony for some time. I know
one Heideggerian personally who was driven from Silesia/Schlesien at the end of
WWII as a child and still feels bitterness about it. He longs for a view of the
Schneekoppe. Those German conservatives who want to reclaim Silesia still have
some political weight in Germany, and they deeply resent having to share the shame
for the attempt to exterminate the Jews. After all, they have suffered too! So
they say.

I wonder what this yearning for rootedness in the soil has to do with the German
penchant for staying in one place. I am still surprised to discover how many
Germans live in their flats for forty years or more and regard it as completely
normal. German inflexibility is proverbial, as the grinding attempts to reform the
German Sozialstaat over the past few years exemplify. Perhaps the gravity of
social inertia weighs more heavily over this Teutonic swath of latitude and
longitude than elsewhere on the globe? Or is it a more general 'law' that long
historical traditions develop roots that emanate social and political inertia?

Gk. _aethos_ has to do with habitual living in its inertia. Ethics is perhaps just
what we have gotten used to. Like many Russians long to have Stalin back, or many
Iraqis Saddam. Life is then predictable, continues along in its ruts, and one has
'respect' for the tyrant. The wandering Jews were forced to be adaptable, like
those Sephardic Jews who were driven from Spain long ago and settled in Istanbul.

Michael
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>
>
> >Thanks, Allen. I refrain from responding because I'm unsure of your point
> >about autochthony. Would you supply it if I've missed it?
> >Thanks,
> >
> >Frank
> >
>







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