Long Sunday

'The Most Radical Historicist'

It seems Leo Strauss is referring to one of two people - both of whom he greatly admired: either Heidegger or Schmitt. Which is the more likely candidate?

It is only at this point that we come face to face with the serious antagonist of political philosophy: historicism. After reached its full growth historicism is distinguished from positivism by the following characteristics. (1) It abandons the distinction between facts and values, because every understanding, however theoretical, implies specific evaluations. (2) It denies the authoritative character of modern science, which appears as only one form among many of man's thinking orientation in the world. (3) It refuses to regard the historical process as fundamentally progressive, or, more generally stated, as reasonable. (4) It denies the relevance of the evolutionist thesis by contending that the evolution of man out of non-man cannot make intelligible man's humanity. Historicism rejects the question of the good society, that is to say, of the good society, because of the essentially historical character of society and of human thought: there is no essential necessity for raising the question of the good society; this question is not in principle coeval with man; its very possibility is the outcome of a mysterious dispensation of fate. The crucial issue concerns the status of those permanent characteristics of humanity, such as the distinction between the noble and the base, which are admitted by the thoughtful historicists: can these permanencies be used as criteria for distinguishing between the good and bad dispensations of fate? The historicist answers this question in the negative. He looks down on the permanencies in question because of their objective, common, superficial and rudimentary character: to become relevant, they would have to be completed, and their completion is no longer common but historical. It was the contempt for these permanencies which permitted the most radical historicist in 1933 to submit to, or rather to welcome, as a dispensation of fate, the verdict of the least wise and least moderate part of his nation while at the same time to speak of wisdom and moderation. The biggest event of 1933 would rather seem to have proved, if such proof was necessary, that man cannot abandon the question of the good society, and that he cannot free himself from the responsibility for answering it by deferring to History or to any other power different from his own reason. ("What is Political Philosophy?" in What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies, 26-7)

As a matter of context, "What is Political Philosophy?," is the published version of the Judah L. Magnes lectures Strauss delivered at the Hebrew University in December 1954 and January 1955.

(Cross-posted to theoria.)

tradition and appropriating the past in heidegger

A huge task for Western reason has been showing us that there is a gap between the particular world an agent happens to occupy and the dictates of reason itself. This is necessary because of the strong tendency to view one's own environment as the right and just one. For instance, if you ask a group of high school or college students what the right kind of political system is for humans, they will answer, "democracy." Or, if you ask them about the prospects of a political system that is not the one they grew up in, they will say it is unreasonable and irrational. They have a hard time separating out what is just and rational from what they are familiar with.

How is it with being in Iraq?

Pepe Escobar from Asia Times Online is back in Baghdad. He's in a car with two other Iraqi journalists.

There's a checkpoint ahead. Incoming traffic has to slow down in front of a Hummer of the Iraqi Defense Forces. A soldier is talking to the driver of a van. Suddenly there is a shot. The soldier falls to the ground, right before our eyes, screaming in pain. He is not dead instantly. His companion, by the Hummer, takes some time to react, then also starts shooting. People duck in their cars; general wisdom is that if these were US troops, they would be shooting at random and every car would be sprayed with bullets.

We think we're in the present, but we're not

Dasein is hard to get at, as we learn in §5 of Being and Time.

True, Dasein is ontically not only what is near or even nearest – we ourselves are it, each of us. Nevertheless, or precisely for this reason, it is ontologically what is farthest removed. / 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.

What accounts for this inability to see what is nearest?

seizing upon or neglecting possibilities

Section 4 of the Introduction to Being and Time contains a lot of preliminary characterizations of Da-sein that will be filled out later.

First Heidegger links up the terminology of Da-sein to human being. "As ways in which human beings behave, sciences have this being's (the human being's) kind of being.  We are defining this being terminologically as Da-sein. / Wissenschaften haben als Verhaltungen des Menschen die Seinsart dieses Seienden (Mensch).  Dieses Seiende fassen wir terminologisch als Dasein"

Deserving jibes at Sartre, included

This space has been on an absolute roll lately. Go see. Courtesy of, and since we're watching film, the following may be of interest, particularly in light of recent conversations:

Online Videos by Veoh.com

eightieth anniversary of being and time

Can it really be that long ago? Eighty years! What do we think now about that whole project? Was it useful or even necessary at the time but now not so much? Reading it now, does it seem like something that is important from the history of philosophy and that's all, or is it still 'actual'?

Baudrillard and Heidegger

[Cross-posted from Ghost in the Wire]

I think that one of the fundamental points of confusion in Heidegger's Being and Time comes when, in analyzing why it is that human beings so often ignore their being or Dasein, choosing the crowd over resolute and authentic existence, thereby voiding the Eigen in Eigentlichkeit.  Heidegger characterizes it this way: Dasein is "dispersed into the 'they' and must find itself."  This dispersal is, for Heidegger, part of the existential structure of Dasein, and as a consequence Heidegger offers no substantive discussion of the means or methods of this dispersal, at least not back in 1927 (arguably the "turn" towards historicity and the forgetting of Being may offer an explanation for it, but that comes some years later).

I think that one productive way to address this question is to consider the overall project of Being and Time, which is really an analytic of the subjectivity of Dasein, even if it distances itself from subjectivity as understood in Western metaphysics.  What I mean is that the investigation of Dasein starts by investigating Dasein itself as the subject of the analysis, and so there remains a bit of an emphasis on the subjectal determination of the world, which I think you can see in the discussion of "thrownness" and the "call of conscience."  Again this changes later, as Heidegger explicitly admits this as a limitation of his early work, altering his analytical emphasis away from Dasein in his On Time and Being, and elsewhere segues from the "call of conscience" to the "call of being."  Still, without necessarily following Heidegger's turn, we can look at this "error" as a productive one.

To do so, we can begin to think a brief bit about Walter Benjamin, whose work had a considerable emphasis on Baudrillard's thought.

deleuze guatarri heidegger

The position of many writers with respect to democracy is complex and ambiguous. The Heidegger affair has complicated matters: a great philosopher actually had to be reterritorialized on Nazism for the strangest commentaries to meet up, sometimes calling his philosophy into question and sometimes absolving it through such complicated and convoluted arguments that we are still in the dark.

A Note on the World Picture

In contrast to the modern age of the world picture, Heidegger invokes the world of the Greeks:

“Man is the one who is looked upon by that which is; he is the one who is – in company with itself – gathered toward presencing, by that which opens itself. to be beheld by what is, to be included and maintained within its openness and in that way to be born along by it, to be driven about by its oppositions and marked by its discord – that is the essence of man in the age of the Greeks.”

‘to be driven about..” Note how man is here the object of something which encompasses and precedes him. As such, he must attune himself to, respond to that prior world and the demands it makes. For the Greeks, says Heidegger, the world is an extended or continuous question addressed to man. Man is defined by this answerability to this address; he is beholden to that which beholds him. The presence of the non-human works to distribute across humanity a kind of ontological humility.

All this (irrespective of whether it accurately ‘depicts’ the Greeks) is significant as the exact reverse of modern man. We look at, direct and interrogate the world – an interrogation always for human ends. We do not apprehend the world we represent or enframe it. We render it as a picture.

The idea is that to render something as a ‘picture’ is to render it manipulable. The proverbial Lacanian mirror image: the self has slipped inside a frame and become, thereby, an object of control. To say picture is to imply frame. The picture is framed by and for us. And the frame sunders us from the world, is an immediate exemption certificate.

It’s here I’d like to pause again. I wonder if the notion of the modern world picture, and its contrast to that other sense of being ‘beheld’ by the world, can productively be brought into proximity with some of what Lacan says about picturing and about the ‘gaze’ as embedded in the world outside us. For Lacan too speaks of being seen by things, by ‘points’ outside us in the world, but this within a rather different set of concerns and problems from Heidegger. So there may be no overlap here. These two ‘genres’ of thinking may be simply on different planes. Any comments welcome.