File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2003/heidegger.0312, message 35


Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2003 00:15:44 +0800
Subject: Re: Liberal vs. social democracy - Gestell/Gewinnst
From: Malcolm Riddoch <m.riddoch-AT-ecu.edu.au>



On Tuesday, December 2, 2003, at 12:54  AM, Bakker, R.B.M. de wrote:

> Malcolm wrote:
>
> What is ontical is what is known, and what is known are factical
> entities, or beings as a whole,
>
>
>    Things yes, but not das Seiende im Ganzen (world), which is only
>    disclosed in fundamental mood.

Agreed, the whole is not generally known in the sense of an authentic 
disclosure, I meant 'known' in the sense of the aggregate of everything 
that can theoretically be said to be something. This knowing, the sum 
of ontical knowledge in the sciences and so on is finite but only 
because, as you say, it opens onto the infinite possibilities for 
knowing everything that is yet to be uncovered, and we'll never know 
the infinite as a whole. That's god's realm and unfortunately he's 
apparently dead.

>    We can never bring the whole of
>    things in front of us, just as we cannot bring the whole of our
>    Dasein in front of us, because to Dasein belongs as extremest
>    possibility: being-no-more.
>    (cf. also Husserl's Abschattung)

The being of Dasein is disclosed in the structure of care which already 
constitutes Dasein's authentic potentiality-for-Being-a-whole. The 
possibility of authentic disclosure in BT is the possibility of 
disclosing the whole of Dasein and this holistic disclosure is based on 
the anticipation of death, of being-no-more. But this ontological 
disclosure of the whole isn't a theoretical knowing about Dasein, it's 
not a logical predicate of a subject, and Heidegger's notion of 
finitude is of a different order to scientific knowledge although that 
seems to be what you are wanting to say as well.

>    We have, first, to re-think (because it is already-thought) this
>    metaphysical structure, in order to be able to estimate - by way
>    of destruction - Heidegger's no longer metaphysical concepts of
>    finiteness, possibility (etc.) in BT.

Yes, that's the necessity of his Destruktion but it's an ongoing 
necessity on the basis of which he posits his disclosure of being. It's 
a twofold path of thinking, of self-critique and phenomenological 
construction, that never ends. We are always on the way, and that seems 
to be our nature, there is no end to being-true apart from death which 
can't even be an end for itself.

>    SuZ par 5, p. 15:
>    "Das Dasein ist zwar ontisch nicht nur nahe oder gar das nächste - 
> wir sind
>    es sogar je selbst. Trotzdem oder gerade deshalb ist es ontologisch 
> das Fernste."

BT, p. 36/15 (Macquarrie Robinson)
"Ontically, of course, Dasein is not only close to us - even that which 
is closest: we are it, each of us, we ourselves. In spite of this, or 
rather for just this reason, it is ontologically that which is 
farthest".

>    When it is so, that the ontical (near) IS the ontological (remote), 
> and Dasein
>    even is this connection of ontics and ontology, then ontological 
> distinction a la
>    rigueur would mean: schizophreny. And so it is.

Schizophrenia as far as I know is a catastrophic failure of cognition 
with affective and hallucinatory disfunctions, a dreadful malady and 
probably not particularly helpful in disclosing the ontological 
difference in Dasein. I'd personally say that the authentic disclosure 
is much more of a silent meditative way of bringing the phenomenon of 
one's own lived experience of time (as time) to light. For you is that 
disclosure a sort of splitting of the personality? I guess I have much 
more of a scientific (as 'pre-empirical') interpretation of it.

>    (The modern primacy of Seiendes (the extant) above Sein, is itself 
> ontologically
>    founded: in the sense of being as being extant. It works so that we 
> think that
>    there are only things and nothing else, and that also we are just a 
> thing)

Ontically, our selves and the familiar everyday world we live in is 
something we know intimately, cos that's who we are from birth to 
death. I think it's this intimate familiarity that makes it so 
difficult knowing how to even approach the problem of the ontological 
structure of one's own familiar everyday understanding of the world and 
oneself. Even simply thinking Dasein as a holism of self and world, or 
especially as subject and object, already falls into the familiar way 
of taking something apart from everything else as a 'thing' to be 
thought about, but the 'thing' here is the thinking itself as such, and 
we're back at the hermeneutical circle. I think it's this assertive 
aporia that makes the ontological dimension such a distant prospect for 
one's understanding as it necessitates a different understanding of 
what truth means: Truth as the disclosure of concealing unconcealment 
rather than as logical assertion, or meditative as opposed to 
theoretical truth.

>     Why do you think will-to-will and nazism have a special 
> relationship?
>     When Heidegger saw that the nazi's were not interested in the 
> direction
>     his thinking took  - they appreciated rather Staudinger's 
> direction  -
>     he knew all hope for a change had become idle. And that means: 
> will to
>     will was now inevitably everywhere, doesn't it?

Well for me the special relationship is simply the fact of his 
Nietzsche interpretation in which will to will comes to the fore 
precisely as a critique of the failure of Nazi leadership and its 
perversion of will to power. He wasn't a Russian communist nor an 
American democrat, he was a German nationalist living through the Nazi 
revolution, how much more special can you get? The disappointment with 
this failure that leads to the pessimism of his notion of 'will to 
will' means that, yes, for Heidegger will to will was now inevitably 
everywhere. But that absolutising move from Nazi will to will 
encompassing all other forms of the uniformity of leadership and the 
uniform subjectivity appropriate to its order is itself a problem and 
not something I think we should simply accept as a given.

This is where my moral problem with Nazism gets in the way of simply 
following Heidegger's lead. For me something fundamental happened in 
the history of being with the collapse of Nazism, something much more 
optimistic than the collapse of the last hope for humanity to face up 
to the problem of technology. If you accept that the disaster that was 
WW2 defines an extremity of human suffering, an extremity of evil, then 
something good happened on a very fundamental level when 
totalitarianism came up against the democratic idealism of human 
rights, peace, racial equality and so on. And yes I realise that actual 
democratic systems aren't all that different from Nazism and Stalinism 
in a lot of respects, and I think democracy is also infected with the 
amorality of the will to will and its militarism, but at least this 
'grand experiment' still allows for a degree of freedom, a modicum of 
the true the good and the beautiful no matter how much we rail against 
its modern perversion. I think there's a fundamental moral dimension to 
human being beyond Nietzsche's amorality of the good and bad of will to 
power. I also think this morality is embedded in the Care structure of 
Dasein but unfortunately Heidegger's pragmatism gives us few leads 
here, only the anti-democratic hopelessness of his silent gods.

Regards,

Malcolm



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