Photo Victor Dragomiretchi
Heidegger’s
Dasein – Be-ing
Still
a Radical Alternative to Identity Politics Today
Recently, before an international online poetry
reading, as a guest reader I was invited along with the other participants to
meet up with the other readers half an hour before the event went live for the
purpose, I assumed, of getting to know a little about the other participating
writers when in fact one of the main reasons why we were meeting, I was
informed by our overtly gracious American host, was that she wanted to
establish which pronouns we would feel most happy to describe ourselves by! It
was the first time that I had experienced first- hand the very bizarre world of
contemporary gender politics in such an overt way and while the subsequent
exchange of pronouns went on its way, I couldn’t help thinking of Heidegger’s
radical alternative to Descartes cogito, and shortly after the
reading I took down again my English translation, a first edition, of Beiträge
zur Philosophie ( Vom Ereignis ) which was written between 1936 and
1938, though not appearing in print in Germany until 1989, at Heidegger’s
insistence, and Contributions to
Philosophy ( From Enowning ) which was published in 1999. For the purposes
of the present essay, I would like to contrast some of my findings on From
Enowning, also known as Of the Event
due to a later translation made by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela
Vallega- Neu ( 2012), with those of Charles Bambach, who published a book
called Heidegger’s Roots; Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks (
Cornell University Press, 2003) which I believe may be useful in the context of
identity politics today, as illustrated in the anecdote above, Heidegger’s
ideas on Be-ing and how his ideas, as I see it, have been completely railroaded
( ideas that could have deep meaningful implications on our lives today) because
of so called Woke culture.
One of the most sinister things in academia today is the
rather shoddy rigor of argument when academics are trying to support an
argument, for example Heidegger’s Nazism, by confusing the man, who like all
men was flawed, and the work, which in the context of modern philosophical
ideas is simply unparalleled in scope. For example, in Heidegger’s Roots[1],
Charles Bambach attempts to demonstrate that the political ideology of the
Nazis is basically an essential part of all of Heidegger’s thought, and so by
implication would suggest to the public at large that the thinker can have very
little to contribute to society when nothing could be further from the truth. I
take the case of Bambach here in this essay, but he is just one of many
academics over the last few years who have jumped on the “Heidegger was a Nazi”
claim which I would counter that if one reads the actual books that Heidegger
wrote during the 1930’s and indeed also during the war you would actually find
that Heidegger’s thought as put forward in the books has actually nothing to do
with Nazi ideology. I will be taking the case of two such books here, one
written in the mid to late thirties already mentioned which I will be referring
to as From Enowning[2],
and another from the early 40’s which was written on the subject of Heraclitus
at the height of the war while the fate of Stalingrad was being decided.[3]
But let us
start first with Bambach. In Heidegger’s Roots, for example, when
discussing the now infamous Rectoral Address given by Martin Heidegger in 1933
when Heidegger was made Rector of the University with the support of the Nazi
party, Bambach states that unlike other academics he will actually read the
text as a serious piece of philosophical writing on the part of Heidegger and
which is wholly consistent with his philosophical thinking, and this is basically
the substance of Bambach’s book; that Heidegger’s politics is an intimate
extension of his entire philosophical outlook and that one cannot distinguish
between the Nazi and the thought, as they would both come from the same source.
This is of course a very interesting idea, and Bambach puts up a very meticulous
case, at least when it comes to this very questionable period in Heidegger’s
life and thought. Even as late as 1935, with the publication of Introduction
to Metaphysics[4],
there are still pro-German passages which
are deeply shocking to read even today and which would reveal completely to
what extent Heidegger was under the sway of Nazi ideology, and how he tried to
use it to promote his own ideas. Such ideas are very off-putting, on a personal
note I remember putting this particular book down, despite having been excited
by Heidegger’s notions on early Greek thinkers, such as Heraclitus, I found the
cheap Nazi sentiment really difficult to stomach.
Bambach is very good when explaining the mood of the
times, and how Heidegger was very much apart of that mood when Hitler was being
made Chancellor of Germany, thus making the Nazis the most powerful and legitimate
political party in the whole of Germany, a thing that was simply unthinkable in
the nineteen twenties.
If
other Germans responded to the National Socialist takeover with
“a
widely held feeling of redemption and liberation from democracy”
and
felt relief that an incompetent and petty-minded government would
no
longer be left to solve the profound crisis of the times, Heidegger
concerned
himself with greater issues. He interpreted the events of early
1933
not as a political transfer of power, but as an epochal shift within
being
itself, a radical awakening from the slumbers of Weimar politics as usual.[5]
Two years later, while still Rector of the University
of Freiburg, in the summer of the year ( 1935), Heidegger, while offering an
interpretation of Heraclitus’s fragment number 59, generally translated as
‘War/conflict is the Father and King of all.” He is also claiming that “along
with the German language, Greek ( in regard to the possibilities of thinking)
is at once the most powerful and the most spiritual of languages.” This is just
one quote of many which peppers the text, and in the historical context of
German rearmament and aggressive foreign policies which would eventual
culminate a few years later with all out war, it makes for very unsavoury
reading, particularly when one considers the power of the man’s thought and so
the influence that he must have had on a lot of German people. [6]
However, jumping forward to the next year, after the Introduction
to Metaphysics, to 1936, one comes to a radically different text when one
approaches Contributions to Philosophy ( From Enowning ). It is as if
the book is written by a very different man. Gone is all the hyperbole. The
very register and tone are completely different. But most importantly, there is
no mention of German supremacy. There is no mention of Germany at all! And this
is why it is such an important work, as apart from Sein und Zeit ( 1926
) or Being and Time, Vom Ereignis or From Enowning
( 1936 ) is without any doubt the most important text that Heidegger was to
write and the one that he himself felt was the most important of all his books.
[7] After stating ten
years earlier in Being and Time that his task was to ‘destroy’ the
history of Ontology, or western metaphysics as we know it; in other words
Descartes cogito ergo sum by replacing it with Dasein or Be-ing, in Vom
Ereignis/ from enowning/ of the Event Heidegger sets out, for the first
time, a philosophical structure in six parts in which he attempts, using the
concept of Be-ing/ Dasein, a way to return to inceptual Greek thinking. This
will become the most important thing now for Heidegger to put down in writing.
Bambach actually acknowledges this shift in thinking in Vom Ereignis,
but nowhere near as forcefully as he possibly should, I would make the case. As
the content of Vom Ereignis/from enowning/of the Event, I would
postulate in the current environmental and global crisis that we are all facing
today, a crisis that one could say is even more severe than the one that
Heidegger faced in the 1930s in Nazi Germany, as today we do, as a species face
actual extinction if we do not seek to radically change the way we live as a
species Dasein on earth.
For example, in Vom Ereignis one of the
major contentions that Heidegger has with the world of men is machination. In
part two of the book Echo, in which Heidegger attempts to grasp
inceptual historic thinking originating from the Greeks with an attempt at
recuperating Be-ing which has been abandoned, as he sees it, as opposed to following cause and effect
metaphysics which are the result of Christian thinking. There are whole
passages in this text which are profoundly in disagreement with Nazi German
policy at the time of the books composition and which, quite frankly, apart
from a mere sentence acknowledging this fact, Bambach largely ignores this most
fundamental work in Heidegger’s thinking, it is after all referred to as ‘the
turn’ or the seminal event in his thinking in which he fundamentally goes
completely on his own path in philosophical thinking which remains completely
unparalleled today.
One
is accustomed to calling the epoch of “civilisation” one of dis-
enchantment,
and this seems for its part exclusively to be the same as
the
total lack of questioning. However, it is exactly the opposite. One
has
only to know from where the enchantment comes. The answer:
from
the unrestrained domination of machination. [8]
At the time of writing, historically, the German army
marched into the Rhineland in March and in June they were supplying General
Franco with ‘several formations of Junkers 52’s’[9]. German military might was
to grow and grow into one of the most technologically advanced armies in the
world. But Heidegger was not only critical of this particular phenomenon. In
the same passage, he continues:
The
bewitchment by technicity and its constantly self-surpassing
progress
are only one sign of this enchantment, by virtue of which
everything
presses forth into calculation, usage, breeding, manageability,
and
regulation. Even “taste” now becomes a matter for this regulation,
and
everything depends on a “good ambiance”.[10]
The Degenerate Art Exhibition ( Die Ausstellung
“Entartete Kunst ) took place from July to November of 1937, while
Heidegger was working on his masterwork Vom Ereignis – from Enowning
– Of the Event. The term ‘bewitchment’ which Heidegger uses is a very
interesting one, considering the mesmeric effect Hitler was to have on the
masses at Nurnberg. During the same year, 1937, the “Rally of Labour” was held
( Reichsparteitag der Arbeit ) in which masses of people converged on the
city. In the Pathé newsreels of the time you can see the machination of
people converging in the stadium marching like machines. Heidegger repeats the
phrase again, even placing it in italics in the text – ‘the epoch of total
lack of questioning of all things and of all machinations.’[11]
Heidegger did not allow for the books publication until 50 years after its
composition. So far, it has been translated into English twice. It is the most
extraordinary testament to Martin Heidegger’s thought, as it is a complete
break with western metaphysical thinking.
I started off this essay with the issue with pronouns
today, in terms of gender identity, and I spoke of Heidegger’s concept of Dasein
or Be-ing in English as an alternative designator for the subject.
Heidegger is of course Aristotelian in thinking the multiple in the One, Be-ing
being representative of all living creatures regardless of race, sex etc. It is
a wonderfully free and natural idea, totally revolutionary in concept, and here
is the thing; the majority of people living in the world today have absolutely
no idea of the existence of such a philosophical idea as people are much more
interested in banging on about a, yes, extremely regrettable period in the
German thinker’s career. But enough already, I say. If we are really serious as
a species, in other words if we are really serious about surviving as opposed
to becoming extinct, we had better put such petty notions of self behind us and
start concentrating on some new ideas about the way we perceive one another as
Be-ing!
As I stated in the introduction, I wish to speak about
two works by Heidegger. The second book that I now wish to turn my attention on
is Heraclitus : The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Logic: Heraclitus’s
Doctrine of the Logos which was originally written by Heidegger in the middle
of WW2 while the Wehrmacht was to meet its first total an utter annihilation at
Stalingrad in 1943. One of the first things I noticed was, again, the register
or tone of the book. Considering that it was written during the period in
question, it is, for my [12]money at least, one od the
most peaceful books by Heidegger that I have ever read. This fact alone is a
miracle. None of the posturing that appeared in Introduction to Metaphysics is
on display in this book. Of course Bambach does not refer to this work as it
was only published in English for the first time in 2018, so a period of 15
years separate the publication of his book in 2003 and this second work. The
piece I would like to explore here in this essay is Heidegger’s very beautiful
meditation on the God who has become so synonymous with Heraclitus, and that is
of course Artemis the Goddess of the hunt.
Heidegger refers to fragment number 51 which he
translates as, ‘The jointure ( namely, the self differentiating )unfolds
drawing- back, as shows itself in the image of the bow and lyre.’ This
meditation is taken from the first section of the book and whose title is The
Inception of Occidental Thinking. This point is important to underline as
it forms a continuum with Contributions to Philosophy ( From Enowning ) of
which we have already looked very briefly at. Heidegger sets out in the former
work the six ways to inceptual thinking ( 1. Preview, 2. Echo, 3. Playing
Forth, 4. Leap, 5. Grounding and finally 6. The Last God.) in which he rejects
all causality in place of what he defines as inceptual Greek thinking. In other
words, pre-Platonic. Nietzsche had already made this distinction in his early
lectures when he was a lecturer at Basel in the 1870s[13], so Heidegger was taking
up from his former Master, in many ways. For Heidegger, the elegance of this
fragment, contrasting the bow and the lyre, is emblematic of all of Heraclitus’s
essential doctrine of unity in opposites. The laws of attraction. Heidegger
uses the terms ‘submerging’ and ‘emerging’ to remarkable effect, drawing out
the subtlety of Heraclitus’s thought in his own very particular way using the idea
of unconcealment which of course for Heidegger is the essence of authentic
Greek thinking before Plato when truth was emerging from the abiding sway of
Be-ing and could only be perceived in the clearing of the mind momentarily,
before being obscured again. There is something extremely sensual about
Heidegger’s engagement with the Artemis fragment, and it is a testament to the
translators who have managed to capture the wonderful poetry of the meditation throughout
the entire work.
Therefore,
she roams, as the huntress, the entirety of what we call ‘nature’.
We
certainly must not think about the essence of ‘tension’ in modern
dynamical
and quantitative terms, but rather as the lightened apartness of an
expanse
that is, at the same time, held together. In emerging, emerging
receives
the self-concealing in itself, because it can emerge as emerging
only
out of self-concealing: it draws back into this. [14]
Again, as in Contributions to Philosophy ( From
Enowning ), in Hercalitus, Heidegger has departed from the 20th
century with all of its woes, its abandonment of Dasein Be-ing. In order to
return to historic thought. Such is ‘the Turn’ – at least what has become known
as ‘the Turn’ – in his thinking. When Heidegger abandoned not only Nazi
ideology, at least in his thinking proper, as written in these books, but
western metaphysics from Plato to Nietzsche and the results are simply
extraordinary. This is why I feel compelled, living in a world that seems to
have abandoned all sense, to critique writers like Charles Bambach who only
seem to focus on, quite simply, the very negative element of Heidegger which
seems to me much more a part of the man, the lesser part, as distinct from the
work.
[1] Bambach, Charles: Heidegger’s
Roots – Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks, Cornell University
Press, London, 2003.
[2] Heidegger, Martin: Contributions
from Philosophy ( From Enowning ), Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly,
Indiana University Press, 1999.
[3] Heidegger, Martin: Heraclitus –
The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the
Logos, Translated by Julia Assaiante and S. Montgomery Ewegen, Bloomsbury
Academic, London, 2018.
[4] Heidegger, Martin: Introduction
to Metaphysics, New Translation by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, Yale
Nota Bene, Yale University Press, 2000.
[5] Bambach, Charles: Heidegger’s
Roots; Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks, Cornell University
Press, 2003, p.70.
[6] The German TV miniseries Generation
War ( Unsere Mütter, unsere Vätter ) has one of the leading characters
mention the possibility of attending a lecture by Heidegger when he gets his
leave and he can return to Germany from the Eastern Front. Once can only
imagine the very powerful feelings generated in the minds of young Germans who
were exposed to such very powerful and interesting ideas, yet which were put to
the service of National Socialism.
[7] In a marginal note of Letter on
Humanism, the Editor F.-W. von Hermann notes, that Heidegger wrote the
following; “enowning” has been since 1936 the guiding word of my thinking’.
Heidegger,
Martin: Contributions to Philosophy ( From Enowning ) – p.364.
[8] Heidegger,
Martin: Contributions From Philosophy ( From Enowning ), Translated by
Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, Indiana University Press, 1999, p.86.
[9] Fest, Joachim C.: Hitler,
Penguin, Classic Biography, Penguin Books, London, p.500.
[10] Heidegger, Martin: Contributions
From Philosophy ( From Enowning ), Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth
Maly, Indiana University Press, 1999, p. 87.
[11] Ibid, p.86
[12] Heidegger, Martin: Heraclitus,
Translated by Julia Goesser Assainte and S. Montgomery Ewegen, Bloomsbury,
London, 2018, p.115.
[13] Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Pre-Platonic
Philosophers, Translated from the German and Edited, with an Introduction
and Commentary, by Greg Whitlock, University of Illinois Press, First Paperback
Edition, 2006.
[14] Heidegger, Martin: Heraclitus,
Translated by Julia Goesser Assainte and S. Montgomery Ewegen, Bloomsbury,
London, 2018, p.116.
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