'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.

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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.

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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?

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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"

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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'?

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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.

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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.

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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.

A Correspondence

"A philosopher can be deceived regarding political matters; in which case he will openly acknowledge his error. But he cannot he deceived about a regime that has killed millions of Jews - merely because they were Jews - that made terror into an everyday phenomenon, and that turned everything that pertains to the ideas of spirit, freedom and truth into its bloody opposite. A regime that in every respect imaginable was the deadly caricature of the western tradition that you yourself so forcefully explicated and justified. And if that regime was not the caricature of that tradition but its actual culmination - in this case, too, there could be no deception, for then you would have to indict and disavow this entire tradition. " Marcuse writing to Heidegger about his silence regarding National Socialism

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Only a god can save us?

I have been quite discouraged by recent political events, particularly in the US Senate where the democrats continue to curl up in the fetal position, pee on themselves and ask for forgiveness. Secretary Strangelove and President Nimrod have admitted that the insurgency in Iraq is strong enough to continue for years. And though the citizenry are uneasy, not many people seem to care.

Amidst the current climate this infamous phrase of Heidegger’s came to mind. Of course, it occurred during the notorious Der Spiegel interview where Heidegger is attempting to settle accounts and fabricate more lies about his relationship to the Nazis movement. Without getting into the bottomless morass of that controversy, I wanted to take a moment and think about what is suggested by the phrase. It seems to me that there is something relevant to our current situation:

Philosophy will not be able to effect an immediate transformation of the present condition of the world. That is not only true of philosophy but of all merely human thought and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The sole possibility that is left for us is to prepare a sort of readiness, through thinking and poetizing, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god in the time of foundering; for in the face of the god who is absent, we founder.

Traditionally, this quote has been seen in one of two ways. The obvious reading is that Heidegger has given up and thrown in the towel, that the overwhelming technological domination of the globe has taken hold to such degree that all is lost. The only thing left is to mourn the loss and wait for the next dispensation of Being to occur eons from now.

But the other way is to look at this quote (and the Der Spiegel interview in general) within the larger context of Heidegger’s body of work. What is of particular interest is the meaning of "god" and "save." Notice that Heidegger does not refer to the one God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, nor to the many Gods of Greek polytheism. The god he is referencing is associated with the "Es Gibt," that which grants the various dispensations of Being. What gives is not a thing and is not subject to human control. It gives because it gives.

Saving has a deep resonance for Heidegger and he deploys it in many contexts. Perhaps the most relevant is the appropriation of the Holderlin line "But where danger is, grows the saving power also."

This quote is referenced in "The Question Concerning Technology" where Heidegger identifies technology as dangerous for at least two reasons: (1) It threatens to obliterate our awareness of the "truth" of Being and (2) It threatens to contaminate all other alternative modes of revealing (like art and philosophy).

He now looks to apply Holderlin’s epigram to the extreme danger of Enframing. If Gestell is the extreme danger then the redemptive power must also lie within it: "the essence of technology must harbor in itself the growth of the saving power."

The key lies in the fact that Gestell not only commands us to disclose beings in terms of standing reserve - Gestell can only disclose beings in and through us. The world and all that is in it only reveals itself in the process of human activity. Though we are not in control of this process, we are an active participant to the degree that we "belong to the coming to pass of truth." The saving power reveals itself in our ability to bare witness to unconcealment as such, recognizing the dangers of the technological form of disclosure, and realizing that Enframing is only one mode of revealing among others. This is why Heidegger says that "all saving power must be of a higher essence than what is endangered, though at the same time kindred to it." The granting that sends technological disclosure is also the granting that has the power to send something else. It is in this insight that we are "granted" human freedom.

What I find compelling in this account is that it points to the contingency of all systems, no matter how monolithic they may appear. Though many find Heidegger’s account too fatalistic, he demonstrates that it is possible to grapple with an experience that we do not yet have words to describe. In doing so he begins the task of thinking of an alternative way of being.

There is much that I dislike about Heidegger: His Black Forest, tree hugging fetish, his Grecco-Germanic prejudice, and the fact that he was a rather despicable human being. But none of this eclipses the grandeur and audacity of his thought. He still was one of the great philosophers of the 20^th century. In revisiting his path of thinking I hope to get insight into our own way of being and living today. Consider this attempt a prolegomena to future work.

A Parapraxis and a Half

Your author is thankfully not going to follow the latest ‘meme’ (why do I dislike that word so much?) and list how many books he owns. He could list all the books whose price he has ‘self-lowered’ (as the Autonomist euphemism goes). But no, instead he is going to tell you about what he has been reading in the library, and following Thomas Mann’s perceptive comment, display “that childish impulse to force upon the reader verbatim all that the writer has read and drawn his consolation from, instead of allowing it to form the silent and reassuring background of his message.”

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