In The Imperative of Responsibility, Hans Jonas opens in a movement from the Antigone chorus (natality, the absence of Antigone), to man and nature to the island city.
The great island city that is Manhattan is a phenomenon behind which lies one of the wonders of the modern world, the awaited new aquaduct (Tunnel No. 3.) It brings to mind the great Greek tunneling venture - tunnelling from two directions.
The keystone plays an important role in the Roman achievements that remain as functioning aquaducts.
What is missing from view is often the watershed. High above the cities of North and West Vancouver lie their watersheds upon which thou shalt not trespass. For New York City, the Catskills are one such watershed (American usage - British "catchment".)
A typical drainage basin reveals a fractal pattern. Local topography determines whether forests ensure the quality of that water and dampen the rate of drainage by forming an immense sponge.
In the city of Los Angeles, many tourists miss the Los Angeles River, a great concrete trough intended to prevent dangerous flash floods.
One surveys and sees techique: another sees decisions and fore-sight. Some of the "tunnels" are better understood as covered trenches (keystone?) and others as immese culverts.
After rainfall, area and slope appear as the determining factors. And with area, slope and flow we return to the heirs of Galileo.
Bolzano made first steps to characterizing the organization of the 19th Century European state - how to best characterize the state employment of science and engineering may prove far more challenging and those habitual characterizations much more in need of critique.
In the area of transparency, great technical undertakings may now be more examples than embarrassments. That transparency may have been lacking in the proposals for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico - and threatens to tar more than wildlife and beaches.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
MESSAGER EUROPEEN
The No. 1 of LE MESSAGER EUROPEEN opens with an annotated text of the Spiegel "interview" with Heidegger.
Today the same text would require facing pages which could be alternated: from these facing pages by Jan Patočka to facing pages exerpted from Hugo Ott or Tom Rockmore.
For examples see http://phil.aule-brwser.com/
Since its publication in 1987, so very much has changed in post-1989 Europe - but also in the assessment of post-WW-I German philosophers and the European intelligensia. In 1987 Heidegger had been gone for a decade and the crushing of the Prague Spring was two decades past.
In his responses (Heidegger left page, Patočka, right page or blank) Patočka invokes both Masaryk and the Husserl of Prague and after.
In the P.O.L. volume the facing pages of interview-response are followed by an essay by Elisabeth de Fontenay.
Today the same text would require facing pages which could be alternated: from these facing pages by Jan Patočka to facing pages exerpted from Hugo Ott or Tom Rockmore.
For examples see http://phil.aule-brwser.com/
Since its publication in 1987, so very much has changed in post-1989 Europe - but also in the assessment of post-WW-I German philosophers and the European intelligensia. In 1987 Heidegger had been gone for a decade and the crushing of the Prague Spring was two decades past.
In his responses (Heidegger left page, Patočka, right page or blank) Patočka invokes both Masaryk and the Husserl of Prague and after.
In the P.O.L. volume the facing pages of interview-response are followed by an essay by Elisabeth de Fontenay.
technique domination prediction responsibility
A decision was made not to review a petroleum drilling proposal for the Gulf of Mexico.
Was it to curb an expense against a budget? Was the decision subject to review?
Was it to curb an expense against a budget? Was the decision subject to review?
physis, natura and natality between Heidegger and Arendt
If it offends Heideggerians to consider Arendt and Heidegger bodily, so be it.
Other students of Heidegger are struck by her emphasis on natality. A fate may be unknown, but a birth is historically conditioned in a rather different sense.
Heidegger's etymology of the Latin translation of Greek physis leaves no doubt.
What is more difficult is the link with Galileo and the phenomena: that were critical: the phases of Venus. Not the depictions of Venus by artists through the ages. The Galilean phases of Venus cast Venus into the orbit of Apollo: the modified geocentrism could not be evaded once these observations becames bold assertions exposing an inconsistency. Perhaps the sun went about the earth: but Venus went about the sun. Then came the transit of Mercury.
Could an exceptionally acute human eye, armed only with a filtering glass, have detected the phases of Venus? Visual acuity can be astonishingly surprising. Galileo's spyglass was built from spectacle lenses.
What should be kept from sight? For the Japanese, the taboo has sometimes been pubic hair. The flowing hair of Venus, the head of Venus: das Hymen. Venerate. Ehren. Irren. Die Hymen Hoelderlins. Diotima.
Heideggger never addresses Einstein's achievement concerning the orbit of Mercury: mere measurements made using instruments. And Eddington was no philosopher.
Bolzano: on the State and war as acute observations.
Ricoeur: a rhapsody of ideas (random sodomy)
Other students of Heidegger are struck by her emphasis on natality. A fate may be unknown, but a birth is historically conditioned in a rather different sense.
Heidegger's etymology of the Latin translation of Greek physis leaves no doubt.
What is more difficult is the link with Galileo and the phenomena: that were critical: the phases of Venus. Not the depictions of Venus by artists through the ages. The Galilean phases of Venus cast Venus into the orbit of Apollo: the modified geocentrism could not be evaded once these observations becames bold assertions exposing an inconsistency. Perhaps the sun went about the earth: but Venus went about the sun. Then came the transit of Mercury.
Could an exceptionally acute human eye, armed only with a filtering glass, have detected the phases of Venus? Visual acuity can be astonishingly surprising. Galileo's spyglass was built from spectacle lenses.
What should be kept from sight? For the Japanese, the taboo has sometimes been pubic hair. The flowing hair of Venus, the head of Venus: das Hymen. Venerate. Ehren. Irren. Die Hymen Hoelderlins. Diotima.
Heideggger never addresses Einstein's achievement concerning the orbit of Mercury: mere measurements made using instruments. And Eddington was no philosopher.
Bolzano: on the State and war as acute observations.
Ricoeur: a rhapsody of ideas (random sodomy)
The stellar furnaces and a universal grammar: Gamow, Hoyle, Husserl, Benoist
The course of understanding is not linear.
The success of chemistry comes very late in European science.
But the realization must be this: that in a cosmos of diffuse hydrogen as an endpoint of a highly structured evolution - there is simply no foothold for a reflexivity with regard to that structure.
In a cosmos where diverse heavy elements are projected by exploding stars, carbon can be viewed as a topic or oxygen as an adverb of great interest. H2O. Herself, ardently, herself.
The eventual sentences will be in a double helix - short statements confirmed or suppressed by the murmering chorus - seemingly unstructured - that lies entwined with them but between them. Not mere caesura.
And the seemingly random but inevitable mis-crossings and mutations (in the rain of stellar particles that penetrate the great magnetic shield, gift of a molten core) are not so unlike an unexpected turn of phrase that bears repeating.
The pause to breathe is there in each segment of the poem transmitted (with interruptions - some Schopenhauer correcting the sage in the presence of his audience.)
Canetti: atem and acoustische Maske
Topology and the animalian torus: podia
The success of chemistry comes very late in European science.
But the realization must be this: that in a cosmos of diffuse hydrogen as an endpoint of a highly structured evolution - there is simply no foothold for a reflexivity with regard to that structure.
In a cosmos where diverse heavy elements are projected by exploding stars, carbon can be viewed as a topic or oxygen as an adverb of great interest. H2O. Herself, ardently, herself.
The eventual sentences will be in a double helix - short statements confirmed or suppressed by the murmering chorus - seemingly unstructured - that lies entwined with them but between them. Not mere caesura.
And the seemingly random but inevitable mis-crossings and mutations (in the rain of stellar particles that penetrate the great magnetic shield, gift of a molten core) are not so unlike an unexpected turn of phrase that bears repeating.
The pause to breathe is there in each segment of the poem transmitted (with interruptions - some Schopenhauer correcting the sage in the presence of his audience.)
Canetti: atem and acoustische Maske
Topology and the animalian torus: podia
psychologism evolution realism
The difficult thing to grasp is that an evolutionary view the human capacity for procedures, protocols, defenses and objections which are distinctly logical in their character - this view is consistent with a certain realism. It is in a world in which certain mappings are preserved, in which certain relations of exckusion and inclusion hold, that this manner of taking the world evolves.
It is for this reason that Hume on induction is simply not relevant to the gorilla who next taps for the bottom of the pond expecting that the stick wills erve with this tap as it did with the last probe.
Understood as a distal instrument, the "walking stick" is used in conjunction with an unright locomotion and a hesitant gait with a horizon: the topisms here are all inherited from aeons of evolutionary failures, extinctions and reproductive successes.
The gorilla taps for an unseen ground: she has a confidence about her. She has left her child on the shore.
see: Bergson on plumbing a depth, in this Introduction to Metaphysics.
It is for this reason that Hume on induction is simply not relevant to the gorilla who next taps for the bottom of the pond expecting that the stick wills erve with this tap as it did with the last probe.
Understood as a distal instrument, the "walking stick" is used in conjunction with an unright locomotion and a hesitant gait with a horizon: the topisms here are all inherited from aeons of evolutionary failures, extinctions and reproductive successes.
The gorilla taps for an unseen ground: she has a confidence about her. She has left her child on the shore.
see: Bergson on plumbing a depth, in this Introduction to Metaphysics.
Friday, May 28, 2010
Leah, the gorilla with the walking stick
The gorilla in the elephant pool is documented at PLOS biology.
No viable account of lived-experience, Erlebnis or Lebenswelt is now defensible which is not also adequate to expliate the world of at least great apes, elephants and perhaps also dolphins and whales, our porcine companions and the crow. Husserl, perhaps under the influence of Heidegger, did phenomenology (at least as a propaedeutic to a philosophy of leved experience) a disservice in his attack on Galileo as much as in his misplaced Cartesianism (which has so little to do with Descartes.)
The day of a Peter Geach speaking of "brutes" in a text on mental acts is at an end (at least outside the confines of theology.)
One step in the right direction has been taken by Colin McGinn (also an atheist) is restoring some of the terms of conscious experience, awareness, attention and reverie.
The ethnological accoutn will be that Leah acted without thinking and without awareness or experience. But without regard for Heraclitus she steps into the pond a second time but not as she did the first time. At what point did she become cognizant of her predicament: when the water proved deep or when she noticed the stick?
The challenge is laid out quote clearly in a Merck manual for veterinarians on swine:
A pheromone explanation is also relevant in many human contexts: but it is not the singular determinant for most human action in the arena of eros, sexuality and sexual relations.
Until we have studies of porcine social groups in relatively natural settings, we will be ill-positioned to assess the behavioral determinants in boar and sow behaviour.
When the Mangalitza pigs recently arrived in Great Britain, some may have been unaware of what necessitated their delivery. The last Lincolnshire curly-coated pigs are reported to have been sent to slaughter when they lost interest for a "large firm" and its "research purposes". That was in 1972. Hopefully such action would be unthinkable in the western world today.
Descriptions of novel tool use by great apes in response to different circumstances aids us in understanding the factors favoring the evolution of tool use in humans. This paper documents what we believe to be the first two observations of tool use in wild western gorillas (Gorilla gorilla). We first observed an adult female gorilla using a branch as a walking stick to test water deepness and to aid in her attempt to cross a pool of water at Mbeli Bai, a swampy forest clearing in northern Congo. In the second case we saw another adult female using a detached trunk from a small shrub as a stabilizer during food processing. She then used the trunk as a self-made bridge to cross a deep patch of swamp. In contrast to information from other great apes, which mostly show tool use in the context of food extraction, our observations show that in gorillas other factors such as habitat type can stimulate the use of tools.Elsewhere it is noted that the gorilla testing the depth of the pond is nick-named Leah.
No viable account of lived-experience, Erlebnis or Lebenswelt is now defensible which is not also adequate to expliate the world of at least great apes, elephants and perhaps also dolphins and whales, our porcine companions and the crow. Husserl, perhaps under the influence of Heidegger, did phenomenology (at least as a propaedeutic to a philosophy of leved experience) a disservice in his attack on Galileo as much as in his misplaced Cartesianism (which has so little to do with Descartes.)
The day of a Peter Geach speaking of "brutes" in a text on mental acts is at an end (at least outside the confines of theology.)
One step in the right direction has been taken by Colin McGinn (also an atheist) is restoring some of the terms of conscious experience, awareness, attention and reverie.
The ethnological accoutn will be that Leah acted without thinking and without awareness or experience. But without regard for Heraclitus she steps into the pond a second time but not as she did the first time. At what point did she become cognizant of her predicament: when the water proved deep or when she noticed the stick?
The challenge is laid out quote clearly in a Merck manual for veterinarians on swine:
Postweaning sows and prepubertal gilts should be kept in the sight and smell of a boar to induce synchronous estrus (the Whitten effect). They also experience a dormitory effect (the McClintock or Fraser-Darling effect) with regard to synchrony due to the presence of other females. Sexual behavior in pigs is almost universally associated with the “chant de coeur” or song of the heart. Courting pigs are vocal. Boars have a gape response (flehmen), and some boars can detect estrous females through olfactory means. Boars will nuzzle the head, shoulders, flank, and anogenital area of sows during courtship. If the pheromonal cues are present, boars progress to pushing on a sow to see if she will move. If she stands, she is willing to mate. Boars exhibit a unique, pheromonally based solicitation behavior toward females: they “champ”—chewing and gnashing their teeth, producing frothy saliva that is rich in the pheromone androstenol. Androstenol is also present in preputial fluids. Courting boars mark trees with urine and saliva produced by champing. Boars are naturally slow to ejaculate (up to 30 min), which may be a correlate of their long courtship, but mate best if raised in a rich social environment. Boars raised in isolation have decreased sexual performance later in life.The pheromone explanation would have appealed to the Viennese neuroanatomist who reassured Ludwig Binswanger that he would find a place for his higher concepts in the chemical basement. What a philosophy of the self-aware organism must achieve is not a rejection of reductionism, but an alternative in which reductionism is side-stepped or at least taken out of the focus. In past years, history was thought to offer such an explanatory example.
A pheromone explanation is also relevant in many human contexts: but it is not the singular determinant for most human action in the arena of eros, sexuality and sexual relations.
Until we have studies of porcine social groups in relatively natural settings, we will be ill-positioned to assess the behavioral determinants in boar and sow behaviour.
When the Mangalitza pigs recently arrived in Great Britain, some may have been unaware of what necessitated their delivery. The last Lincolnshire curly-coated pigs are reported to have been sent to slaughter when they lost interest for a "large firm" and its "research purposes". That was in 1972. Hopefully such action would be unthinkable in the western world today.
Wolin, modernism and Charles Taylor
Richard Wolin cites Charles Taylor on "strong evaluation" at the close of Heidegger's Children.
It is my reading of Taylor (for whom I had an exaggerated respect from the early seventies through to the late 80's) that he is another Catholic crypto-Heideggerian.
Taylor has impeccable political credentials from many viewpoints, but where he is suspect - at least to me - is in his inobvious Catholicism (and perhaps also that I find him not at all likeable in person - and found myself so very alone in that response at McGill among his admirers.)
Taylor strikes me as someone who never got past the Eliot of his schooldays. It is only an impression. My opinion of his later great tomes is that they were in need of a critical editor. Whether he his a windbag or no, he did receive 1.5 million dollars to explore "spiritual realities" as a Templeton Prize. Is there a comparable prize awaiting the atheist Colin McGinn?
The issue, however, is what water is to be carried by Taylor's notion of "strong evaluation" - which I would like to consider in parallel with Margalit on our "thick relations".
To dissociate Taylor on "telos" from the Catholic background of the philospher is to ignore his own teachings (though he is apt to insist that certain of his theses must stand or fall on their own - one suspects that he will set aside a line of argument for "telos" but not "the reality of telos" for we are not seeking to clarify a concept but to adumbrate a lived reality - but within certain preferred categories.)
Is it ad hominem to renouce an argument with a fideist? What is it that is missing in the background of Steven Weinberg or Colin McGinn? Or is it something lacking in them as men?
By converting the categories of a faith to the background, Taylor deftly shifts the burden from the shoulders of the theist to this most intangible of supports.
I wonder if Taylor simple took Anscombe at her word that Wittgenstein was a covert Catholic?
See: prominent Anglicans in Canada: Bob Ray and Adrienne Clarkson.
See: Heidegger on the South German Catholic way of life
It is my reading of Taylor (for whom I had an exaggerated respect from the early seventies through to the late 80's) that he is another Catholic crypto-Heideggerian.
Taylor has impeccable political credentials from many viewpoints, but where he is suspect - at least to me - is in his inobvious Catholicism (and perhaps also that I find him not at all likeable in person - and found myself so very alone in that response at McGill among his admirers.)
Taylor strikes me as someone who never got past the Eliot of his schooldays. It is only an impression. My opinion of his later great tomes is that they were in need of a critical editor. Whether he his a windbag or no, he did receive 1.5 million dollars to explore "spiritual realities" as a Templeton Prize. Is there a comparable prize awaiting the atheist Colin McGinn?
The issue, however, is what water is to be carried by Taylor's notion of "strong evaluation" - which I would like to consider in parallel with Margalit on our "thick relations".
To dissociate Taylor on "telos" from the Catholic background of the philospher is to ignore his own teachings (though he is apt to insist that certain of his theses must stand or fall on their own - one suspects that he will set aside a line of argument for "telos" but not "the reality of telos" for we are not seeking to clarify a concept but to adumbrate a lived reality - but within certain preferred categories.)
Is it ad hominem to renouce an argument with a fideist? What is it that is missing in the background of Steven Weinberg or Colin McGinn? Or is it something lacking in them as men?
By converting the categories of a faith to the background, Taylor deftly shifts the burden from the shoulders of the theist to this most intangible of supports.
I wonder if Taylor simple took Anscombe at her word that Wittgenstein was a covert Catholic?
See: prominent Anglicans in Canada: Bob Ray and Adrienne Clarkson.
See: Heidegger on the South German Catholic way of life
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Philosophical Tropes
At various points when Hans Jonas spoke of power over nature I find myself wondering what he could have meant.
The orbiting astronaut or cosmonaut demonstrates no such power: if any critical equipment failure occurs, we are most often powerless to intervene. They orbit in constant exposure to micro-meterorite strikes. Journalists report their high-velocity free-fall in the earth's gravitational well as "gravity-free" or "floating free of earth's gravity" in a foolish declaration of a falsehood as a triumph.
The fallout of the Soviet reactors should remind us how powerless we were to protect the Laplanders and their lichen-eating reindeer.
The most important features of the earth are the magnetic field shielding us from the solar wind and the molten inner core generating that field about the rotating planet. We demonstrate no power over solar activity. The magnetic field will reverse as it has reversed through the life of the planet.
What we are often powerless to do, is to undo the damage that we do. Whether in the result of draining the bogs of Europe or in the deforestation in the Levant, we do not seem to demonstrate so much power as our aptitude for triggering unintended consequences.
The hyperbole about our power over nature may have the unintended consequence of undermining efforts to explain such undesirable effects as climate change, species extinction and ocean pollution.
When a fool such a Palin rejects the reality of climate change on the basis that man does not control nature, we should all see some problem in this rhetoric.
If we succeed in recreating a wooly mammoth, you can be sure that we will be powerless to restore the elephant herds of Africa or the prairie grasslands.
Perhaps what is meant by "nature" is what suggests this trope of "man's power over nature".
Our inability to predict such a wide range of serious unintended consequences should sober us: the power was supposed to begin in prediction.
Consider Hans Jonas on the fundamental consideration that man is an organism. Some will contest that this is an optional "theoretical" standpoint. It is a fact. Jonas on the subject of death might have done better to consider the generations in populations.
What power over nature is being demonstrated by the gorilla with the "walking stick" or other innovations? [see: PLOS on gorilla use of tools.]
Man is no longer the "tool-using" organism. When we finally reassess the "laboratory" handling of "Nim Chimsky" we will eventually concede that we are not so exclusively the language-using organism.
The UN report on the devastation of coral reefs since 1970 is not a testament to our power over nature.
Hans Jonas on death might have benefited from consideration of petroleum: millenia of dead plant matter entrusted to the shale in the earth's crust now gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. Surely the reliance on petroleum is a metaphor worth perserving: refined as paraffin it brought odourless smoke to the candles and lamps of those who could afford it - while poisoning them silently with its fumes (as had the creosote of fires through the millenia.) The poor burned smelly fish oil or worse.
The orbiting astronaut or cosmonaut demonstrates no such power: if any critical equipment failure occurs, we are most often powerless to intervene. They orbit in constant exposure to micro-meterorite strikes. Journalists report their high-velocity free-fall in the earth's gravitational well as "gravity-free" or "floating free of earth's gravity" in a foolish declaration of a falsehood as a triumph.
The fallout of the Soviet reactors should remind us how powerless we were to protect the Laplanders and their lichen-eating reindeer.
The most important features of the earth are the magnetic field shielding us from the solar wind and the molten inner core generating that field about the rotating planet. We demonstrate no power over solar activity. The magnetic field will reverse as it has reversed through the life of the planet.
What we are often powerless to do, is to undo the damage that we do. Whether in the result of draining the bogs of Europe or in the deforestation in the Levant, we do not seem to demonstrate so much power as our aptitude for triggering unintended consequences.
The hyperbole about our power over nature may have the unintended consequence of undermining efforts to explain such undesirable effects as climate change, species extinction and ocean pollution.
When a fool such a Palin rejects the reality of climate change on the basis that man does not control nature, we should all see some problem in this rhetoric.
If we succeed in recreating a wooly mammoth, you can be sure that we will be powerless to restore the elephant herds of Africa or the prairie grasslands.
Perhaps what is meant by "nature" is what suggests this trope of "man's power over nature".
Our inability to predict such a wide range of serious unintended consequences should sober us: the power was supposed to begin in prediction.
Consider Hans Jonas on the fundamental consideration that man is an organism. Some will contest that this is an optional "theoretical" standpoint. It is a fact. Jonas on the subject of death might have done better to consider the generations in populations.
What power over nature is being demonstrated by the gorilla with the "walking stick" or other innovations? [see: PLOS on gorilla use of tools.]
Man is no longer the "tool-using" organism. When we finally reassess the "laboratory" handling of "Nim Chimsky" we will eventually concede that we are not so exclusively the language-using organism.
The UN report on the devastation of coral reefs since 1970 is not a testament to our power over nature.
Hans Jonas on death might have benefited from consideration of petroleum: millenia of dead plant matter entrusted to the shale in the earth's crust now gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. Surely the reliance on petroleum is a metaphor worth perserving: refined as paraffin it brought odourless smoke to the candles and lamps of those who could afford it - while poisoning them silently with its fumes (as had the creosote of fires through the millenia.) The poor burned smelly fish oil or worse.
Heidegger Four Mirrors
Heidegger's four mirrors have a counterpart I have not seen suggested elsewhere.
The first hint to me was his remark to Jaspers on Hitler's hands and the observation that Elfride made his sandals.
I suggest the mirrors are also the two hands and the two feet.
This has an obvious link to the HakenKreuz. It places a different interpretation on his alternative to the sometime Christian view of the Cross as relation man-to-man and relation man-to-God.
Heidegger's four (Geviert) could be viewed as two which are earthly and two which are not.
It need not be rejected for being anthropomorphic.
Q: What was Heidegger's knowledge of the Michelson-Morley apparatus? Heidegger: involution and revolution.
The first hint to me was his remark to Jaspers on Hitler's hands and the observation that Elfride made his sandals.
I suggest the mirrors are also the two hands and the two feet.
This has an obvious link to the HakenKreuz. It places a different interpretation on his alternative to the sometime Christian view of the Cross as relation man-to-man and relation man-to-God.
Heidegger's four (Geviert) could be viewed as two which are earthly and two which are not.
It need not be rejected for being anthropomorphic.
Q: What was Heidegger's knowledge of the Michelson-Morley apparatus? Heidegger: involution and revolution.
Heidegger, Arendt, Jaspers
I have not seen a plain word spoken on Heidegger handing his willing Arendt to his friend Jaspers.
Heidegger remarks somewhere about Jaspers refusal to leave his Jewish wife. Did Heidegger imagine in some way that they would share his wood nymph?
Ambiguity remains in just how Heidegger and Arendt negotiated her transfer from Marburg to Heidelberg. Jaspers response to Arendt's disclosure decades later was something of a surprise. Was he inept at feigning ignorance?
The "transfer" to the esteemed Jaspers has its counterpart in her loveless marriage to the despised Guenther Stern. And with regard to both Stern and Arendt, the name of Hans Jonas.
In Heidegger's Children, Richard Wolin seems to indicate that there was nothing more to say about Jonas seeking out Arendt: there is no reference to a source. Heidegger simply sent him.
Heidegger remarks somewhere about Jaspers refusal to leave his Jewish wife. Did Heidegger imagine in some way that they would share his wood nymph?
Ambiguity remains in just how Heidegger and Arendt negotiated her transfer from Marburg to Heidelberg. Jaspers response to Arendt's disclosure decades later was something of a surprise. Was he inept at feigning ignorance?
The "transfer" to the esteemed Jaspers has its counterpart in her loveless marriage to the despised Guenther Stern. And with regard to both Stern and Arendt, the name of Hans Jonas.
In Heidegger's Children, Richard Wolin seems to indicate that there was nothing more to say about Jonas seeking out Arendt: there is no reference to a source. Heidegger simply sent him.
Heidegger the Fox, in the words of Arendt (die nackte Venus)
Arendt on Heidegger as Fox has a curious slip:
The fox is almost as old as literature itself, perhaps coming to us from Persia.
There is something a play here: the fox and the vixen, die nackte Venus.
The cheap woman is wearing the fox stole: there is a double play as she easily casts off this fur, will she reveal another or will she present as the prepubescent child? Heidegger is always about unveiling.
Was there ever a boa of fox fur? (see: Mr. Fox, wearing his tail as a cravate; voice of Ge. Clooney)
In French the animal is the cat, for which there is the feminine la chatte. And French has the ready slips to chastise and chaste.
We almost have a burrow in the Venus Flytrap and the buzzing flies.
It is not a simple parable; it is an involuted tale of an involution which is not.
I pass by "Fuchs" without mention.
I once charmed a fox kit from a burrow with vocalization: when the vixen bounded back minutes later it was not to the burrow opening to confront me, but to the dense brush behind the exposed den: the kit went to her there, not back into the burrow. What did Arendt know of foxes? Mere literary allusion to parable?
and now that not one intact piece of fur was left on him, so to speak,we have the naked fox.
The fox is almost as old as literature itself, perhaps coming to us from Persia.
There is something a play here: the fox and the vixen, die nackte Venus.
The cheap woman is wearing the fox stole: there is a double play as she easily casts off this fur, will she reveal another or will she present as the prepubescent child? Heidegger is always about unveiling.
Was there ever a boa of fox fur? (see: Mr. Fox, wearing his tail as a cravate; voice of Ge. Clooney)
In French the animal is the cat, for which there is the feminine la chatte. And French has the ready slips to chastise and chaste.
We almost have a burrow in the Venus Flytrap and the buzzing flies.
It is not a simple parable; it is an involuted tale of an involution which is not.
I pass by "Fuchs" without mention.
I once charmed a fox kit from a burrow with vocalization: when the vixen bounded back minutes later it was not to the burrow opening to confront me, but to the dense brush behind the exposed den: the kit went to her there, not back into the burrow. What did Arendt know of foxes? Mere literary allusion to parable?
"The Image of Hell": Arendt on the "factories" of the Holocaust
The "factories" of Heidegger's one mention of the Holocaust are already in Arendt's 1946 "The Image of Hell".
But these "factories" - if one were to use that term - came later. Arendt is not a witness from Poland or Lithuania. She had not seen that photographic documentation of human slaughter, open, in public, of the early days of Operation Reinhard (Einsatz Reinhard) and the like.
She uses the word "cattle". She is mistaken. We owe a debt to Oliver Sacks for his chapter devoted to Temple Grandin on the slaughter of cattle.
When mobile units were first in use, we have Eichmann's testimony (see Ernst Klee, The Good Old Days) of how slaughter proceeded.
The failures of engines generating exhaust fumes have no counterpart in the slaughter house, the abatoir.
Her account is utterly flawed: the mother sheltering her child has not been reduced to "organic life" - she may have fated her child to a death of having been buried alive.
Nor are these naked women filing into a shallow ravine to be likened to sheep. These are not the buffalo driven over the cliffs on the prairies of the new world.
When Arendt humiliated Mary McCarthy by saying that she had been in a concentration camp, her lie betrays a wound to narcissism. Somehow her vulnerable admission ties into their friendship. Arendt was not there, was not truly a survivor. To some extent, in some respects, she will be a poseur.
Concerning slaughter and Schlacht: Elias Canetti on the camel market; Robert Walser on the march to Sempach.
But these "factories" - if one were to use that term - came later. Arendt is not a witness from Poland or Lithuania. She had not seen that photographic documentation of human slaughter, open, in public, of the early days of Operation Reinhard (Einsatz Reinhard) and the like.
She uses the word "cattle". She is mistaken. We owe a debt to Oliver Sacks for his chapter devoted to Temple Grandin on the slaughter of cattle.
When mobile units were first in use, we have Eichmann's testimony (see Ernst Klee, The Good Old Days) of how slaughter proceeded.
The failures of engines generating exhaust fumes have no counterpart in the slaughter house, the abatoir.
Her account is utterly flawed: the mother sheltering her child has not been reduced to "organic life" - she may have fated her child to a death of having been buried alive.
Nor are these naked women filing into a shallow ravine to be likened to sheep. These are not the buffalo driven over the cliffs on the prairies of the new world.
When Arendt humiliated Mary McCarthy by saying that she had been in a concentration camp, her lie betrays a wound to narcissism. Somehow her vulnerable admission ties into their friendship. Arendt was not there, was not truly a survivor. To some extent, in some respects, she will be a poseur.
Concerning slaughter and Schlacht: Elias Canetti on the camel market; Robert Walser on the march to Sempach.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Galileo's Starry Messenger in Curl web-content markup
Over at http://phil.aule-browser.com/ there is now a text of Galileo's Starry Messenger complete with marginal glosses.
The page requires the Curl plugin for your browser, which is available at http://www.curl.com/download/rte.
Galileo's text, also known as Sidereal Messenger or Sidereus Nuncius, recounts his construction of his telescope, his noting the surface of the moon, some nebula as themselves stars, the Milky Way as stars and the 4 great satellites of Jupiter.
I was able to find two other text versions on the internet, but both had deficiencies.
The marginal glosses had disrupted the OCR scan of the PDF images: they were restored manually using a custom Curl text procedure. Documentation on these can be found at the Curl site of Cambridge, MA. Curl Corporation, a subsdiary of Sumisho or by visiting an SCS web site.
Each marginal gloss is wrapped simply in {gloss } and placed before the text, itself wrapped in {para }.
Here is the gloss definition used at this time:
My versions of Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition on Galileo and his telescope can be found at http://phil.aule-browser.com/
Mention of a telescope is in Eugen Fink's Conversations with Husserl. For Husserl on Galileo, see his Krisis. For Heidegger on science and the instrument makers, see his Technik lecture. For excellent telescopes at fair prices, see http://www.astronomics.com/
The page requires the Curl plugin for your browser, which is available at http://www.curl.com/download/rte.
Galileo's text, also known as Sidereal Messenger or Sidereus Nuncius, recounts his construction of his telescope, his noting the surface of the moon, some nebula as themselves stars, the Milky Way as stars and the 4 great satellites of Jupiter.
I was able to find two other text versions on the internet, but both had deficiencies.
The marginal glosses had disrupted the OCR scan of the PDF images: they were restored manually using a custom Curl text procedure. Documentation on these can be found at the Curl site of Cambridge, MA. Curl Corporation, a subsdiary of Sumisho or by visiting an SCS web site.
Each marginal gloss is wrapped simply in {gloss } and placed before the text, itself wrapped in {para }.
Here is the gloss definition used at this time:
{define-text-proc public {gloss ...}:anywhich is found in the top-level curl file which includes the Galileo text as an scurl file. A reference to the top-level Curl file is embedded as an OBJECT in a regular HTM page at http://phil.aule-browser.com/messenger.htm
{return {paragraph font-size = 12pt,
font-family = "serif",
paragraph-left-indent = 8pt,
text-preserve-whitespace? = true, {italic {splice ...}}}}
}
My versions of Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition on Galileo and his telescope can be found at http://phil.aule-browser.com/
Mention of a telescope is in Eugen Fink's Conversations with Husserl. For Husserl on Galileo, see his Krisis. For Heidegger on science and the instrument makers, see his Technik lecture. For excellent telescopes at fair prices, see http://www.astronomics.com/
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Balderdash or Hyperbole? Canovan's Arendt.
Cambridge U. Press Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought by Margaret Canovan opens with this gem:
While I'm trying to be fair: the buffoonery of a Blücher lecture can be traced almost word-for-word to a paragraph in Max Scheler's Man's Place in the Cosmos. Only Blücher did not see fit to tell his Bard undergrads that he was quoting Scheler - if his bombast can be termed 'quoting'. Call it 'playing the part' of the professor. So I will try to get around to posting that, as well.
Arendt and Blücher considered the Americans to be less than their intellectual equals - caveat emptor as ever. So few pronouncements are new under the sun - or any critical light.
Hannah Arendt is one of the great outsiders of twentieth-century political thought, at once strikingly original and disturbingly unorthodox.In fairness to Arendt I would like to say that much of her thesis on technique in The Human Condition, Chapter VI, need not be traced to her master and lover, Heidegger - it can be taken from Husserl's Krisis. But some insist that this Husserl material itself came from Heidegger. Some of the Husserl passages seem closer to the Arendt text, so I will get them up in Curl markup over at http://phil.aule-browser.com/ along with links to browse the Canovan quote in Google Books (she wrote the preface to the posthumous second edition of The Human Condition.)
While I'm trying to be fair: the buffoonery of a Blücher lecture can be traced almost word-for-word to a paragraph in Max Scheler's Man's Place in the Cosmos. Only Blücher did not see fit to tell his Bard undergrads that he was quoting Scheler - if his bombast can be termed 'quoting'. Call it 'playing the part' of the professor. So I will try to get around to posting that, as well.
Arendt and Blücher considered the Americans to be less than their intellectual equals - caveat emptor as ever. So few pronouncements are new under the sun - or any critical light.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Heidegger and Body: Krug, Ding and the elevation of sex to gnosis
In May 1950, Heioegger is writing to Arendt about distance and intimacy: this is the Venus letter.
In June 1950 Heidegger delivers a talk, Das Ding, in which he extends a talk originally delivered to a well-heeled private audience in Bremen.
The talk is rendered almost untranslatable due to its reliance on northern dialect: the term in question is Krug.
Heidegger is addressing the Fine Arts audience and he chooses the useful Krug and not the fine Greek amphora or other form. Heidegger is not always averse to Kitsch, and the reader should know that a beer mug is also a Krug - a Bierkrug. We will ignore that one layer behind lies the Putsch and Krieg.
The Krug for the esteemed listener is that from which water poured over the feet of the apostles, that they might be washed. The Krug is that which was borne by the woman at the well, it is what is borne on the heads of women the world over.
But the Krug for the North Germans of Bremen is also the pub or inn - Schenke - and now we have reached Mary and the trusting Joseph at the inn and the gift, Geschenk.
But more than that, Krug is the vessel with the neck, the col, and so we delve.
Krug will return in a poem of Celan, some two years later.
It is essential to know that 'womb' or utero - the ultimate locus of Geborgenheit - comes to us with a close connection to buc and bucket as the old leather water bucket would swell as it filled. So we even return to wine skins, as will Heidegger in his talk, for the Krug is also the Weinkrug.
The published talk begins with what could be a citation from the letter to Arendt: distance which is not.
S. 167 gives us Das Keimen und Gedeihen der Gewächse (see my previous post on Heid. and eros)
The principal moments come in parallel verses, almost Hebraic in manner:
What is so remarkable in his choice of "laben" as we have now returned also to "laver" and the washing of the feet.
Das Ding is also the maiden. And we remember the scent that was in the house after Mary annointed His feet. This was the Magd and not a priestess.
But Heidegger can also be quite low-brow, and he moves on the gushing blood and the "Opfer" - the victim offered in sacrifice.
And deeper still:
Einfalt gives us both the innocence and also the folds and creases. We are back to the Tal on the mons veneris. Heidegger knew how to keep his audience in thrall. He will give us the Mondlauf and we will have mens one layer below his explicit ens.
I leave off with this before turning to sciences: astronomy and anatomy.
The four which is barely suppressed as Geviert is gender + walten: father, mother, daughter, son (the Heideggers adopted Erika.)
Without these four, whence the shepherding of Being? Lamb are begotten, male and female. The key phrase is missing, as in: Sorgfalt walten lassen (but far from "prudence' or 'phronesis'.)
Gender is what cuts across all of the genera and species. And gender brings us to Symposium.
Heidegger in the hands of Arendt has a focus on Galileo and astronomy. But this is short-sighted. Heidegger also had his sites set on anatomy. What astronomy to had done to Heaven by violating Venus (exposing her phases), anatomy had done to body, Leib. The connection here is intimate in all respects: both the depiction of the anatomy lesson and the etymology with tomos. With the slices we return to the false analyses of time.
The ana- here is not the animal: it is merely the sense of slice "up completely" as in ana-temnein.
Heidegger is at pains to distinguish man from animal in Das Ding. But he will not have recourse to reason or even language: man is the one who dies. The animal merely comes to an end. The parallel with gender and sex should be obvious: the sexual act, despite the clear anatomical similarities across female mammals and male mammals - the act between man and maiden is not bestial. In man the climax is "the little death". But "climax" is the climbing of steps: it only came into use with regards to orgasm in pamphlets on birth control - Heidegger often refers to "steps" and surely understood birth control with all of his affairs - but we must not look there: we have simply "organismus" which in German is Lebewesen and so no direct connection to Orgasmus.
But Lebewesen we do have: and we have Geheimnis. [to be continued in another section] (my pun)
In order to pursue "Das Ding dingt" it is necessary to place his text so that translations and selective annotations are available: glosses at the conventional, polite level (for which Heidegger had such disdain) and those properly Nietzschean notices that he would wish to share only with what he called "womanly" company - for certain of his insights he was loathe to share with men (see his letter to Elfride indexed in my post on that Briefwechsel book's incomplete index.) I will endeavor to do this at http://phil.aule-browser.com/ once I have completed a posting of Galileo's pre-Venusian Sidereal Messenger.
In June 1950 Heidegger delivers a talk, Das Ding, in which he extends a talk originally delivered to a well-heeled private audience in Bremen.
The talk is rendered almost untranslatable due to its reliance on northern dialect: the term in question is Krug.
Heidegger is addressing the Fine Arts audience and he chooses the useful Krug and not the fine Greek amphora or other form. Heidegger is not always averse to Kitsch, and the reader should know that a beer mug is also a Krug - a Bierkrug. We will ignore that one layer behind lies the Putsch and Krieg.
The Krug for the esteemed listener is that from which water poured over the feet of the apostles, that they might be washed. The Krug is that which was borne by the woman at the well, it is what is borne on the heads of women the world over.
But the Krug for the North Germans of Bremen is also the pub or inn - Schenke - and now we have reached Mary and the trusting Joseph at the inn and the gift, Geschenk.
But more than that, Krug is the vessel with the neck, the col, and so we delve.
Krug will return in a poem of Celan, some two years later.
It is essential to know that 'womb' or utero - the ultimate locus of Geborgenheit - comes to us with a close connection to buc and bucket as the old leather water bucket would swell as it filled. So we even return to wine skins, as will Heidegger in his talk, for the Krug is also the Weinkrug.
The published talk begins with what could be a citation from the letter to Arendt: distance which is not.
S. 167 gives us Das Keimen und Gedeihen der Gewächse (see my previous post on Heid. and eros)
The principal moments come in parallel verses, almost Hebraic in manner:
Das Geschenk des Gusses kann ein Trink sein.Why "kann ... sein"? If this does not bring the gushing labia [Schamlippen] to the mouth itself, then consider this:
Er gibt Wasser.
Er gibt Wein zu trinken. [S. 164]
What is so remarkable in his choice of "laben" as we have now returned also to "laver" and the washing of the feet.
Im Wasser das Geschenkes weilt die Quelle.
...
Er labt ihnen Durst. [laben - both to drink in and to feast upon but also to quicken as with life*]
Er erquickt ihre Muße
Das Ding is also the maiden. And we remember the scent that was in the house after Mary annointed His feet. This was the Magd and not a priestess.
But Heidegger can also be quite low-brow, and he moves on the gushing blood and the "Opfer" - the victim offered in sacrifice.
And deeper still:
Im Geschenk des Gusses weilt die Einfalt der Vier.This is one of the more troubling passages in Heidegger: he returns to four, as he often does: and next will be four mirrors. Place four mirrors in an intersection of Heaven and Earth, godly and mortal and we have the elements of the Hakenkeuz and not the Christian cross. It is very likely his offering of the ancient Swastika.
Einfalt gives us both the innocence and also the folds and creases. We are back to the Tal on the mons veneris. Heidegger knew how to keep his audience in thrall. He will give us the Mondlauf and we will have mens one layer below his explicit ens.
I leave off with this before turning to sciences: astronomy and anatomy.
das Zwiefache FassenThe Geschenke is indeed a Spende, but one layer below is the fountain that spends water - but we are also back to Keim, for man in German also spends his seed and must not do so on the ground, Erde. And Heidegger dwells on Erde without mention of die Frau.
das Fassende
die Leere
die Ausgieß als Spenden
The four which is barely suppressed as Geviert is gender + walten: father, mother, daughter, son (the Heideggers adopted Erika.)
Without these four, whence the shepherding of Being? Lamb are begotten, male and female. The key phrase is missing, as in: Sorgfalt walten lassen (but far from "prudence' or 'phronesis'.)
Gender is what cuts across all of the genera and species. And gender brings us to Symposium.
Heidegger in the hands of Arendt has a focus on Galileo and astronomy. But this is short-sighted. Heidegger also had his sites set on anatomy. What astronomy to had done to Heaven by violating Venus (exposing her phases), anatomy had done to body, Leib. The connection here is intimate in all respects: both the depiction of the anatomy lesson and the etymology with tomos. With the slices we return to the false analyses of time.
The ana- here is not the animal: it is merely the sense of slice "up completely" as in ana-temnein.
Heidegger is at pains to distinguish man from animal in Das Ding. But he will not have recourse to reason or even language: man is the one who dies. The animal merely comes to an end. The parallel with gender and sex should be obvious: the sexual act, despite the clear anatomical similarities across female mammals and male mammals - the act between man and maiden is not bestial. In man the climax is "the little death". But "climax" is the climbing of steps: it only came into use with regards to orgasm in pamphlets on birth control - Heidegger often refers to "steps" and surely understood birth control with all of his affairs - but we must not look there: we have simply "organismus" which in German is Lebewesen and so no direct connection to Orgasmus.
But Lebewesen we do have: and we have Geheimnis. [to be continued in another section] (my pun)
In order to pursue "Das Ding dingt" it is necessary to place his text so that translations and selective annotations are available: glosses at the conventional, polite level (for which Heidegger had such disdain) and those properly Nietzschean notices that he would wish to share only with what he called "womanly" company - for certain of his insights he was loathe to share with men (see his letter to Elfride indexed in my post on that Briefwechsel book's incomplete index.) I will endeavor to do this at http://phil.aule-browser.com/ once I have completed a posting of Galileo's pre-Venusian Sidereal Messenger.
Friday, May 21, 2010
Arendt, Venus and Telescopes: Galileo or Kepler or Newton?
In Chapter VI of The Human Condition Hannah Arendt makes no distinction between the refracting telescope of Galileo and that of Kepler (let alone the Newtonian reflector.)
There is, of course, a world of difference. Galileo's "telescope" was an improved "glass" or "tube" - a spyglass - such as an artillery officer might use. He likely first constructed one using spectacle lenses.
Heidegger - when he first taught on science and instrument-makers - was not wearing spectacles.
What Galileo was reporting to Castelli was that Venus had the phases of the moon. This was a crucial defeat for geocentrism as a theory (as a fact - as opposed to mere theory - the Earth and Sun move approximately about their common center of mass - which happens to be within the radius of the Sun.)
What Kepler predicted was the transit of Venus across the face of the Sun (but it was not in fact visible in Europe that year of 1631 (and Kepler already dead) - but the transit of Mercury was.)
The next transit of Venus is June 6, 2012 after which there will not be another for more than 100 years.
What Arendt soft-pedals is that these phases of Venus and transits of the Sun were phenomena in the very sense in which that word was used by Greeks speaking of the night sky. But in Kepler's case, his telescope was not a mere spyglass: the "image" was not the "normal" view of a spyglass. Kepler used a subjective lens with a short focal length and an objective lens with a long focal length; Galileo's subjective lens was concave; Kepler's was not. Kepler's "image" was inverted - but the field of view was wider and provided eye relief - essential to those wearing spectacles. But Kepler's view of Venus would have been plagued by false colors (unlike Newton's.)
Heidegger would have noted that an early telescope maker was none other than an instrument maker. But was Galileo's inclined plane an instrument distorting the things as given?
And those who sought to be the first to name the moons of Venus?
Some of these remarks I will add as annotations at http://phil.aule-browser.com/arendt.htm
cf: Heidegger, "Die Frage nach der Technik" in Vortraege u. Aufsaetze
There is, of course, a world of difference. Galileo's "telescope" was an improved "glass" or "tube" - a spyglass - such as an artillery officer might use. He likely first constructed one using spectacle lenses.
Heidegger - when he first taught on science and instrument-makers - was not wearing spectacles.
What Galileo was reporting to Castelli was that Venus had the phases of the moon. This was a crucial defeat for geocentrism as a theory (as a fact - as opposed to mere theory - the Earth and Sun move approximately about their common center of mass - which happens to be within the radius of the Sun.)
What Kepler predicted was the transit of Venus across the face of the Sun (but it was not in fact visible in Europe that year of 1631 (and Kepler already dead) - but the transit of Mercury was.)
The next transit of Venus is June 6, 2012 after which there will not be another for more than 100 years.
What Arendt soft-pedals is that these phases of Venus and transits of the Sun were phenomena in the very sense in which that word was used by Greeks speaking of the night sky. But in Kepler's case, his telescope was not a mere spyglass: the "image" was not the "normal" view of a spyglass. Kepler used a subjective lens with a short focal length and an objective lens with a long focal length; Galileo's subjective lens was concave; Kepler's was not. Kepler's "image" was inverted - but the field of view was wider and provided eye relief - essential to those wearing spectacles. But Kepler's view of Venus would have been plagued by false colors (unlike Newton's.)
Heidegger would have noted that an early telescope maker was none other than an instrument maker. But was Galileo's inclined plane an instrument distorting the things as given?
And those who sought to be the first to name the moons of Venus?
Some of these remarks I will add as annotations at http://phil.aule-browser.com/arendt.htm
cf: Heidegger, "Die Frage nach der Technik" in Vortraege u. Aufsaetze
Heidegger and Eros: one or two layers down is the body
While I lament the lack of index in so many published philosophy texts, an index would be of little help on the subject of sex and the body in Heidegger.
Heidegger is reported by many to have been a magnetic speaker (on occasion) and it is my view that his lasting texts are in layers. Die Frage nach der Technik is not at all deeply layered. When someone asserts that Heidegger left politics behind after 1934, they need only be reminded that after the war he changed his target audience to the afluent of Bremen and the Spa.
One reason that I advocate for e-texts with annotations and marginalia is that a text such as Die Frage has so many points for a gloss - for Heidegger is a seductive speaker in his speech acts.
S.14 opens with "Wir heutigen" and a nearby text reads "Mit diesem Ende hört das Ding nicht auf" which is no mere allusion to the "Horizont" dear to Husserl but an echo of his own conviction about the future of his Volk.
S.15 has the citation of Plato's Symposium on eros. While Heidegger is transitioning his text to poesis, he is also turning to physis and das Aufbrechen der Blüte ins Erblühen. Here the rose. Psychoanalytic biases are not required to step down one layer to his Venus. He is speaking in München on art and technique - in the city whose museum holds a famed picture of the Greek goddess (see his letter to Arendt.)
In German Scham- covers both pudendal, pudic and pubic: the pubic symphysis is Schambeinsymphyse - Symphysis pubica. In German mons veneris is Venusberg which opens a different reading to his Entbergen.
The verb walten is omnipresent in the essay as is the prefix ver- repeatedly exploited to effect - and we are one step from seduction and Vergewaltigung.
The silber Schale is none other than that on which Salomé was served up her Opfer.
And then comes Gefahr - the danger that he knew full well in seducing studetns such as Elfride and Hannah. But his poet transitions him to the verb retten. And he who rescues, possesses. Repeatedly Heidegger somes back to das Geschick - what he imagines Nietzsche enjoyed with Lou Andreas: an artful speech which sealed a fate - rather than the deformations of clumsy seductions.
And Heidegger can be crude: Wo etwas wächst, dort wurzelt es, von dorther gedeiht es. Beides geschiet verborgen und still und zu seiner Zeit. [Seite 32-33] This last passage is one of many that should raise the question whether in fact Heidegger suffered from a schizo-form illness - a schizoaffective disorder which would account for his depressions, his promiscuity and his curious misperceptions. What we have in these sentences is a multi-faceted expression which a better poet might have distained: a psychoanalyst might readily wonder at the anal and near coprolalic text: is he describing a bowel movement in the woods one line after alluding to arousal, intercourse and fecundation?
A good deal of Heidegger can be read as written for the woman in his audience with whom he will later confide. What, indeed, is ultimately menschliches Thun? Lateinisch: mens and Geschlecht + ver-kehr = Geschlechtsverkehr. These are not mere puns. This is the language philosophy of the seducer. This is the philosopher of unveiling. Geschick is both an art and destiny.
There is, of course, a feminist reading, in which Heidegger would have the young female student a woman not reduced to a Bestand in a Reihe there before his erect podium. There would be no caution required in being indiscreet. No Schuld. No Scham. No Opfer. No enticing little confiding.
A useful comparison is between Freud and Schnitzler. The biographies of Elias Canetti provide an even greater disguise, in which his very stature is disguised, his attraction to the deformity of Veza's arm unmentioned. Canetti denies us even a layering in his masterful prose. Heidegger is an exhibitionist in comparison.
If it offends Heideggerians that the transitions from Heidegger's podium through the Symposium to his physis are tasteless puns, then I would remind that Heidegger himself had no use for high Kultur and refined sensibility. Heidegger was well aware of the homesexual Symposium as he was aware of the homosexuals in the SA from the leader Roehm on down. It is my thesis that Elfride tolerated Heidegger's affairs because she knew that he abhorred begetting a child with one of these women and that the nature of his relations with these women ensured that no progeny would result. He offers repeated hints and they require careful annotation of his texts. Heidegger was comfortable taking people off into the woods: in some matters he was not a prude; he was not interested in some idea of a young woman any more than he was interested in their ideas. He was an inveterate seducer and liar. What we fools mistake for truth is the very construction of non-truth. He preferred Luther to Saint Paul and he preferred Luther to Augustine - but without any demand for consistency. Did Heidegger know or suspect what the Japanese language and culture could have offered him (in that culture with its curious pudic taboo) ?
For a European culture with discreet promiscuity without shame: Finland. Compare: linguistic cousin, Hungary.
It cannot be mentioned that in polite society the only bare-breasted women are those of art: Kunst. Heidegger rejects the Christian myth of shameful awareness of nudity in the garden: he embraces the noble Greeks, wrestling in the nude. These are matters he may have discussed with Max Scheler.
German prudery of the 1950's has the BH - and Heidegger makes a point of stressing "unter-schieden" or as the manufacturer might advertise: lift and divide. This is not mere farce: even clothing had become "machines" to present a woman as a Bestand. Some feminists agreed. What was the corset, if not a "machine" in the guise of clothing? (Elfride made Heidegger's sandals, he was particular about his slippers and most particular about his headgear and other attire right down to the stick in his hand.)
With the BH vanished the simple choice to be a bit more revealing: décolleté (the very word itself another polite lie.) And we can ignore the rigid etymology into the Latin collum and opt to link collect with sammeln, then to legere and lecture before home again to logos.
Where does the seducer first lie? In his speaking. In his speaking to her of nothing.
It is quite possible that it is in Heidegger that anatomy emerges again as destiny.
Note:
Heidegger on science: contrary to Arendt's appeal to Koyré, it was Galileo's exposing the phases of Venus that sealed the fate of geocentrism. It was done with a mere spyglass - as though he were a voyeur. But then, Heidegger did not need spectacles to judge a young woman.
Heidegger is reported by many to have been a magnetic speaker (on occasion) and it is my view that his lasting texts are in layers. Die Frage nach der Technik is not at all deeply layered. When someone asserts that Heidegger left politics behind after 1934, they need only be reminded that after the war he changed his target audience to the afluent of Bremen and the Spa.
One reason that I advocate for e-texts with annotations and marginalia is that a text such as Die Frage has so many points for a gloss - for Heidegger is a seductive speaker in his speech acts.
S.14 opens with "Wir heutigen" and a nearby text reads "Mit diesem Ende hört das Ding nicht auf" which is no mere allusion to the "Horizont" dear to Husserl but an echo of his own conviction about the future of his Volk.
S.15 has the citation of Plato's Symposium on eros. While Heidegger is transitioning his text to poesis, he is also turning to physis and das Aufbrechen der Blüte ins Erblühen. Here the rose. Psychoanalytic biases are not required to step down one layer to his Venus. He is speaking in München on art and technique - in the city whose museum holds a famed picture of the Greek goddess (see his letter to Arendt.)
In German Scham- covers both pudendal, pudic and pubic: the pubic symphysis is Schambeinsymphyse - Symphysis pubica. In German mons veneris is Venusberg which opens a different reading to his Entbergen.
The verb walten is omnipresent in the essay as is the prefix ver- repeatedly exploited to effect - and we are one step from seduction and Vergewaltigung.
The silber Schale is none other than that on which Salomé was served up her Opfer.
And then comes Gefahr - the danger that he knew full well in seducing studetns such as Elfride and Hannah. But his poet transitions him to the verb retten. And he who rescues, possesses. Repeatedly Heidegger somes back to das Geschick - what he imagines Nietzsche enjoyed with Lou Andreas: an artful speech which sealed a fate - rather than the deformations of clumsy seductions.
And Heidegger can be crude: Wo etwas wächst, dort wurzelt es, von dorther gedeiht es. Beides geschiet verborgen und still und zu seiner Zeit. [Seite 32-33] This last passage is one of many that should raise the question whether in fact Heidegger suffered from a schizo-form illness - a schizoaffective disorder which would account for his depressions, his promiscuity and his curious misperceptions. What we have in these sentences is a multi-faceted expression which a better poet might have distained: a psychoanalyst might readily wonder at the anal and near coprolalic text: is he describing a bowel movement in the woods one line after alluding to arousal, intercourse and fecundation?
A good deal of Heidegger can be read as written for the woman in his audience with whom he will later confide. What, indeed, is ultimately menschliches Thun? Lateinisch: mens and Geschlecht + ver-kehr = Geschlechtsverkehr. These are not mere puns. This is the language philosophy of the seducer. This is the philosopher of unveiling. Geschick is both an art and destiny.
There is, of course, a feminist reading, in which Heidegger would have the young female student a woman not reduced to a Bestand in a Reihe there before his erect podium. There would be no caution required in being indiscreet. No Schuld. No Scham. No Opfer. No enticing little confiding.
A useful comparison is between Freud and Schnitzler. The biographies of Elias Canetti provide an even greater disguise, in which his very stature is disguised, his attraction to the deformity of Veza's arm unmentioned. Canetti denies us even a layering in his masterful prose. Heidegger is an exhibitionist in comparison.
If it offends Heideggerians that the transitions from Heidegger's podium through the Symposium to his physis are tasteless puns, then I would remind that Heidegger himself had no use for high Kultur and refined sensibility. Heidegger was well aware of the homesexual Symposium as he was aware of the homosexuals in the SA from the leader Roehm on down. It is my thesis that Elfride tolerated Heidegger's affairs because she knew that he abhorred begetting a child with one of these women and that the nature of his relations with these women ensured that no progeny would result. He offers repeated hints and they require careful annotation of his texts. Heidegger was comfortable taking people off into the woods: in some matters he was not a prude; he was not interested in some idea of a young woman any more than he was interested in their ideas. He was an inveterate seducer and liar. What we fools mistake for truth is the very construction of non-truth. He preferred Luther to Saint Paul and he preferred Luther to Augustine - but without any demand for consistency. Did Heidegger know or suspect what the Japanese language and culture could have offered him (in that culture with its curious pudic taboo) ?
For a European culture with discreet promiscuity without shame: Finland. Compare: linguistic cousin, Hungary.
It cannot be mentioned that in polite society the only bare-breasted women are those of art: Kunst. Heidegger rejects the Christian myth of shameful awareness of nudity in the garden: he embraces the noble Greeks, wrestling in the nude. These are matters he may have discussed with Max Scheler.
German prudery of the 1950's has the BH - and Heidegger makes a point of stressing "unter-schieden" or as the manufacturer might advertise: lift and divide. This is not mere farce: even clothing had become "machines" to present a woman as a Bestand. Some feminists agreed. What was the corset, if not a "machine" in the guise of clothing? (Elfride made Heidegger's sandals, he was particular about his slippers and most particular about his headgear and other attire right down to the stick in his hand.)
With the BH vanished the simple choice to be a bit more revealing: décolleté (the very word itself another polite lie.) And we can ignore the rigid etymology into the Latin collum and opt to link collect with sammeln, then to legere and lecture before home again to logos.
Where does the seducer first lie? In his speaking. In his speaking to her of nothing.
It is quite possible that it is in Heidegger that anatomy emerges again as destiny.
Note:
Heidegger on science: contrary to Arendt's appeal to Koyré, it was Galileo's exposing the phases of Venus that sealed the fate of geocentrism. It was done with a mere spyglass - as though he were a voyeur. But then, Heidegger did not need spectacles to judge a young woman.
Karl Jaspers and Uni Heidelberg (Ruprecht-Karls) August 1933
In the Kirkbright autobiography, pg 150, we find this excerpt from a letter of Karl Jaspers:
Dear parents,
In the the post-war years Jaspers repeatedly speaks of 1933 as an endpoint - but he does not give a month. This is August 28. Heidegger became Rector of Freiburg on April 21, 1933. The Reichstag Fire was February 27, 1933. Gleichschaltung can be dated to January 30, 1933. By August 28, 1933 the SA or Sturmabteilung are roaming freely.
It is the contention of Steven Remy in The Heidelberg Myth: the Nazification and Denazification of a German University, that after 1945 Jaspers can be blamed for the ineffectiveness of denazification. In Kirkbright's autobiography, it is none other than Robert Heiss who is reported as contacting Jaspers concerning Heidegger.
By 1949 Jaspers will already be writing in support of Heidegger's return to teaching - and writing in terms that flatly contradict Jaspers letters to Hannah Arendt (who was not yet back in touch with Heidegger.)
Jaspers assertion in a letter to Arendt that Heidegger was not so much an anti-Semite as one who would stoop to anti-Semitic remarks when talking with an anti-Semite is an assertion concerning which I remain very sceptical given the tone of remarks elsewhere in Heidegger's writing - including his letters to Elfride.
In the their September 1953 correspondence, Jaspers in anxious that Arendt read his piece on Heidegger for the Schillp volume (it was suppressed in the first edition.)
It was not until June of 1937 that Jaspers was informed that his marriage to a Jew would require forced retirement - but that law dates to April 1933. Jaspers application to the Ministry to protect his pension was supported by none other than Ernst Krieck. Anyone wondering what Japsers is doing relying on Krieck would have to know that Jaspers has invested his small fortune in his library (after the war he will take this library over the border to Basel.)
What are we to make of Jaspers claim that Heidegger was silent about his dismissal because he had lost interest in him (letter to Arendt)? Jaspers problem was in fact quite different: when Heidegger embraced the SA, Jaspers was still enamoured with his "Germans". The extent to which Jaspers - who had relocated to a fine professorial villa by the university - still considered himself as rejecting "mediocrity" and "machinations" so typical of mere democracy without a guiding elite or aristos - has to be gleaned from his edits to critical texts for their re-edition. To my knowledge, we have only Jaspers word for his reaction to Heidegger's addresses at Freiburg and Heidelberg and only Jaspers word that he had come to fear Heidegger. What he did have to fear was the content of his letters in which he had compromised himself.
Jaspers the untainted is a myth which he permitted in the late 1940's given his ambition for a role in the new University. It became something he could not tolerate (he was writing on guilt) and he wisely withdrew to Basel. The only hard line that can be drawn between the Jaspers of late 1933 and the Heidegger of late 1933 is that the latter had become enamoured with the SA.
That the "Spiessburger" were troubled by the SA would seem little concern to the Jaspers who despised Husserl as just one such - and who saw his alliance with Heidegger as built on this revolt. Both men, physical weaklings, never faced a test of force. Gertrud's brothers fled before any were befallen by a squad of SA Männer.
As late as March 1945, Jaspers is relying on his personal prestige to protect Gertrud. The intervention with the SS in Berlin is reported by Kirkbright as Paul Schmitthenner, a Nazi architect leater purged from his university without pension (Heidegger stooped much lower at about the same time - to try to avoid service to his Volk.)
Heidegger's speech at Heidelberg was June 30, 1933. The Rector of Heideberg, Willy Andreas, passes without mention in Kirkbright's autobiography - astonishing given her quotation from Jaspers' letter of August 1933.
To my knowledge Steven Remy is the only author to have brought Jaspers into question. The myth of Jaspers is very much part of the ethos of 1950's Germany and the importance attached to his radio broadcasts and his "stature" as a philospher of Existentz.
Jaspers' letter to Arendt of Sept 1, 1949, cannot be reconciled with Jaspers' letter to Gerd Tellenbach, Rector of Freiburg, earlier in 1949 [quoted in Kirkbright, pp 372-3.] Or did Jaspers imagine that one day Heidegger would give him his due - for Existenz, for van Gogh.
Kirkbright's book is sub-titled "Navigations in Truth" - but might better be labeled "Navigations in Murky Waters". Until historians have complete access to the papers of Jaspers and Heidegger, a good deal will remain murky.
Dear parents,
[...]Now a new university constitution has been drawn up according to the 'Führerprinzip'. The Rector is to be appointed by the Ministry; the Deans nominated by the Rector. No elections take place. As longs as the faculties remain intact, they are only to be given an advisory role - decisions are not voted upon. The earlier 'scholars' "republic" is at an end. After my experience of it, that suites me well enough, especially if I myself could become Rector, or another name that I trust just as much as myself! Excuse my high spirits![...]At this date Heidegger is Rector of Freiburg.
In the the post-war years Jaspers repeatedly speaks of 1933 as an endpoint - but he does not give a month. This is August 28. Heidegger became Rector of Freiburg on April 21, 1933. The Reichstag Fire was February 27, 1933. Gleichschaltung can be dated to January 30, 1933. By August 28, 1933 the SA or Sturmabteilung are roaming freely.
It is the contention of Steven Remy in The Heidelberg Myth: the Nazification and Denazification of a German University, that after 1945 Jaspers can be blamed for the ineffectiveness of denazification. In Kirkbright's autobiography, it is none other than Robert Heiss who is reported as contacting Jaspers concerning Heidegger.
By 1949 Jaspers will already be writing in support of Heidegger's return to teaching - and writing in terms that flatly contradict Jaspers letters to Hannah Arendt (who was not yet back in touch with Heidegger.)
Jaspers assertion in a letter to Arendt that Heidegger was not so much an anti-Semite as one who would stoop to anti-Semitic remarks when talking with an anti-Semite is an assertion concerning which I remain very sceptical given the tone of remarks elsewhere in Heidegger's writing - including his letters to Elfride.
In the their September 1953 correspondence, Jaspers in anxious that Arendt read his piece on Heidegger for the Schillp volume (it was suppressed in the first edition.)
It was not until June of 1937 that Jaspers was informed that his marriage to a Jew would require forced retirement - but that law dates to April 1933. Jaspers application to the Ministry to protect his pension was supported by none other than Ernst Krieck. Anyone wondering what Japsers is doing relying on Krieck would have to know that Jaspers has invested his small fortune in his library (after the war he will take this library over the border to Basel.)
What are we to make of Jaspers claim that Heidegger was silent about his dismissal because he had lost interest in him (letter to Arendt)? Jaspers problem was in fact quite different: when Heidegger embraced the SA, Jaspers was still enamoured with his "Germans". The extent to which Jaspers - who had relocated to a fine professorial villa by the university - still considered himself as rejecting "mediocrity" and "machinations" so typical of mere democracy without a guiding elite or aristos - has to be gleaned from his edits to critical texts for their re-edition. To my knowledge, we have only Jaspers word for his reaction to Heidegger's addresses at Freiburg and Heidelberg and only Jaspers word that he had come to fear Heidegger. What he did have to fear was the content of his letters in which he had compromised himself.
Jaspers the untainted is a myth which he permitted in the late 1940's given his ambition for a role in the new University. It became something he could not tolerate (he was writing on guilt) and he wisely withdrew to Basel. The only hard line that can be drawn between the Jaspers of late 1933 and the Heidegger of late 1933 is that the latter had become enamoured with the SA.
That the "Spiessburger" were troubled by the SA would seem little concern to the Jaspers who despised Husserl as just one such - and who saw his alliance with Heidegger as built on this revolt. Both men, physical weaklings, never faced a test of force. Gertrud's brothers fled before any were befallen by a squad of SA Männer.
As late as March 1945, Jaspers is relying on his personal prestige to protect Gertrud. The intervention with the SS in Berlin is reported by Kirkbright as Paul Schmitthenner, a Nazi architect leater purged from his university without pension (Heidegger stooped much lower at about the same time - to try to avoid service to his Volk.)
Heidegger's speech at Heidelberg was June 30, 1933. The Rector of Heideberg, Willy Andreas, passes without mention in Kirkbright's autobiography - astonishing given her quotation from Jaspers' letter of August 1933.
To my knowledge Steven Remy is the only author to have brought Jaspers into question. The myth of Jaspers is very much part of the ethos of 1950's Germany and the importance attached to his radio broadcasts and his "stature" as a philospher of Existentz.
Jaspers' letter to Arendt of Sept 1, 1949, cannot be reconciled with Jaspers' letter to Gerd Tellenbach, Rector of Freiburg, earlier in 1949 [quoted in Kirkbright, pp 372-3.] Or did Jaspers imagine that one day Heidegger would give him his due - for Existenz, for van Gogh.
Kirkbright's book is sub-titled "Navigations in Truth" - but might better be labeled "Navigations in Murky Waters". Until historians have complete access to the papers of Jaspers and Heidegger, a good deal will remain murky.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Jean Ullmo, Henri Bergson and Heidegger
Jean Ullmo died in 2002 and has little visibility on the web. The two exceptions are
Ullmo's book is notable for his attention to Bergson (although it lacks an index.) The eclsipse of Bergson by Heidegger in post-1945 France is a phenomenon debated in its own right: Bergson perished during the war.
What struck me most forcefully some weeks ago was the language of the 1909 German translation of Bergson's Introduction to Metaphysics (surely Heideggerians cannot reject out of hand what language alone has conveyed.) Heidegger links Bergson with Scheler but is otherwise dismissive of him in Being and Time.
By Ingarden's account, Husserl only became aware of Bergson on time consciousness in early 1914.
I have added a link to this note at aule-browser.com
See also:
- The Agreement Between Mathematics and Physical Phenomena at Mario Bunge on Google Books
- Is Mathematics By Nature Incapable of Describing Real Change? at Le Lionnais on Google Books
Ullmo's book is notable for his attention to Bergson (although it lacks an index.) The eclsipse of Bergson by Heidegger in post-1945 France is a phenomenon debated in its own right: Bergson perished during the war.
What struck me most forcefully some weeks ago was the language of the 1909 German translation of Bergson's Introduction to Metaphysics (surely Heideggerians cannot reject out of hand what language alone has conveyed.) Heidegger links Bergson with Scheler but is otherwise dismissive of him in Being and Time.
By Ingarden's account, Husserl only became aware of Bergson on time consciousness in early 1914.
I have added a link to this note at aule-browser.com
See also:
- Bergson and modern physics: a reinterpretation and re-evaluation (Milič Čapek)
- Intuicja i intelekt u Henryka Bergsona (Roman Ingarden)
- Scheler on Bergson and homo faber
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Suzanne Kirkbright's Karl Jaspers biography
Suzanne Kirkbright's 2004 Karl Jaspers biography contains one remarkable omission and at least one incomprehensible sentence.
I can make no sense of this:
Which actions of his were "halted"?
The footnotes to a book she cites are more revealing: Ehrlich and Wisser pg 334 explicitly discuss Gustav Adolf Scheel and his likely or possible role in the protection of Jaspers. Perhaps her intent was not to tar the name of Jaspers with the misdeeds of Scheel - Wisser and Ehrlich are less circumspect and do not suppress the Hans Saner footnote.
It is troubling that Gertrud advised Jaspers against publishing his note on Heidegger in the first Edition of the Schilpp volume on Jaspers: Jaspers would have preferred to keep quiet about Heidegger even - or perhaps especially - during the "whitewash" years at Heidelberg. Had it been common knowledge that Heidegger was so close to Jaspers, had Jaspers August 23, 1933 letter to Heidegger been known - Jaspers could not have been called upon by Heidelberg. It places the eventual post-war flight of Jaspers to Basel in quite a different light.
We are told that during the war Jaspers took inner flight to the thought of the East, as did Hermann Hesse - but not Dietrich Bonhoeffer and many others. There is no record of Jaspers speaking up when the first objections slowed the implementation of Action T4 "euthanasia" as a key step in selective democide.
One aid will be to have the 1923, 1946 and 1961 editions laid out as web e-documents along with the 1933 "Theses" of Jaspers and his letter to Heidegger.
In many matters we have only Jaspers declarations to go by, so his letter to his parents [quoted in Kirkbright, pg 150] is critical to assessing his thought and not his thought as he chose to present it in the post-war years.
I am still without access to a first edition of Die Geistige Situation der Zeit which is also critical: one must see the actual revisions just as we now look for these in Heidegger's work and in such texts as Elfride Heidegger's letter to Malvine Husserl.
I can make no sense of this:
Jaspers' actions on behalf of his wife's and his own sense of dignity were, however, largely halted by Hitler's takeover of power as Chancellor on 30 January 1933." [pg 142]She is speaking of 1937 and after - specifically his diary from 1939 to 1942. She completely evades the question of how Jaspers obtained exemption. She utterly evades the issue of what was required of him morally - ethically - to protect Gertrud in light of what befell her brothers in the years 1933 and after given that Gertrud had sacrificed all for him: she had no career which she could pursue upon emigration or even as grounds for emigration other than to Palestine.
Which actions of his were "halted"?
The footnotes to a book she cites are more revealing: Ehrlich and Wisser pg 334 explicitly discuss Gustav Adolf Scheel and his likely or possible role in the protection of Jaspers. Perhaps her intent was not to tar the name of Jaspers with the misdeeds of Scheel - Wisser and Ehrlich are less circumspect and do not suppress the Hans Saner footnote.
It is troubling that Gertrud advised Jaspers against publishing his note on Heidegger in the first Edition of the Schilpp volume on Jaspers: Jaspers would have preferred to keep quiet about Heidegger even - or perhaps especially - during the "whitewash" years at Heidelberg. Had it been common knowledge that Heidegger was so close to Jaspers, had Jaspers August 23, 1933 letter to Heidegger been known - Jaspers could not have been called upon by Heidelberg. It places the eventual post-war flight of Jaspers to Basel in quite a different light.
We are told that during the war Jaspers took inner flight to the thought of the East, as did Hermann Hesse - but not Dietrich Bonhoeffer and many others. There is no record of Jaspers speaking up when the first objections slowed the implementation of Action T4 "euthanasia" as a key step in selective democide.
One aid will be to have the 1923, 1946 and 1961 editions laid out as web e-documents along with the 1933 "Theses" of Jaspers and his letter to Heidegger.
In many matters we have only Jaspers declarations to go by, so his letter to his parents [quoted in Kirkbright, pg 150] is critical to assessing his thought and not his thought as he chose to present it in the post-war years.
I am still without access to a first edition of Die Geistige Situation der Zeit which is also critical: one must see the actual revisions just as we now look for these in Heidegger's work and in such texts as Elfride Heidegger's letter to Malvine Husserl.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Albert Hofstader's Heidegger
Albert Hofstader's translation of Heidegger's Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie comes with a lexicon which doubles as a partial index. We may have the National Endowment to thank for this as it was often not the norm with Indiana University Press.
Page 371 of the Lexikon offers us the Four Basic Problems of the "science" of being:
The lectures come to us through Fritz Heidegger and F-W von Herrmann almost 50 years after they were delivered as lectures in Marburg in 1927. The German reader, without an index, had the one benefit that von Herrmann broke up many long passages into paragraphs.
On the basis that Sein und Zeit was completed in 1926, these pages offer some additions: pg 173 has Heidegger on Rilke:
To ignore Heidegger's tone is to miss everything he says of Stimmung, Besinnung - especially when he speaks of concepts. In this regard, the tone taken in his letters to Jaspers is invaluable. By 1927 in Marburg Heidegger was not mincing his words as he had in the early days in Freiburg.
Jaspers is, however, absent in these lectures and receives no credit for this Begriff der Existenz. Shrewd foresight on Heidegger's part. From the name of the lectures no one not present could guess that Kant and Aristotle figure more largely than Husserl, whom Heidegger is soon to replace in Freiburg.
Page 371 of the Lexikon offers us the Four Basic Problems of the "science" of being:
- ontological difference
- articulation of being
- modifications of being and unity of concept of being
- truth-character of being
What does being signifiy?What is baffling for a philosphical lexicon by a translator is that its entries are most often without the original equivalent in German.
Whence can something like being in general be understood?
How is understanding of being at all possible?
The lectures come to us through Fritz Heidegger and F-W von Herrmann almost 50 years after they were delivered as lectures in Marburg in 1927. The German reader, without an index, had the one benefit that von Herrmann broke up many long passages into paragraphs.
On the basis that Sein und Zeit was completed in 1926, these pages offer some additions: pg 173 has Heidegger on Rilke:
Rilke versteht auch das Philosophische des Lebesbegriffes, den Dilthey schon ahnte und den wir mit dem Begriff der Existenz als In-der-Welt-sein faßten.which Hofstader renders with
which Dilthey had already surmisedcutting the reader off from the satisfied tone of Heidegger. The distance from ahnen to vermuten would not have been lost on Heidegger if said of him and his works by another.
To ignore Heidegger's tone is to miss everything he says of Stimmung, Besinnung - especially when he speaks of concepts. In this regard, the tone taken in his letters to Jaspers is invaluable. By 1927 in Marburg Heidegger was not mincing his words as he had in the early days in Freiburg.
Jaspers is, however, absent in these lectures and receives no credit for this Begriff der Existenz. Shrewd foresight on Heidegger's part. From the name of the lectures no one not present could guess that Kant and Aristotle figure more largely than Husserl, whom Heidegger is soon to replace in Freiburg.
Arendt on Schelling
June 18, 1972, Arendt writes to Heidegger. His husband, Heinrich Blücher has died, and in this year she is reading Merleau-Ponty (who died about a decade earlier) and still lecturing. The next year she will give her Gifford Lectures on the Mind and the Will. She speaks of Heidegger on Schelling and quotes Stefan George.
In her letter she says that she kept Schelling out of her current lecture.
In her letter she says that she kept Schelling out of her current lecture.
I have never been able to handle him by myselfShe notes the need for an index to the published work. She is writing to the man who taught her to "read". It is rather more sad than pathetic.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Embracing the body: oxytocin
The afternoon was spent walking in a bog preserve where horsetails - water horsetails - stood together with rings of gold in their tiny hair-like "leaves" at each joint.
Allow me to say that these are ancient plants: I first knew the dry land variety.
In the Letter on Humanism, Heidegger is already confident in his insight into "science" and "technique".
Consider our walk: the varied symmetry of the now rare plants of the sheltered reserve: these have the symmetry of the hand, these others of the eyes and nose. We map plant to body without numbers. We need not not be "reckoning". Varieties of trillium, so distinct from varieties of ancient ferns.
Unlike Paul Celan, Heidegger offers us little in the way of botany: a stand of "Kiefer" on occasion, or "Eiche".
Consider the body. We now know the role of oxytocin not only in labor and maternal bonding, but in the male staying around for 18 months to 2 years after childbirth - if not longer. Why not embrace this hormonal, real embodiment? Heidegger despised the authority of the Church but was not opposed to the "genuine" assent to the authoring "few". This hormonal view of a human relationship need not be based on any falsifications and distortions - not the marriage contract or even avowed paternity. But it is based on the authority of medical science - applied science.
Heidegger could not accept this in his terms because the result is due to a controlled experiment in which experience was "rapt", forced to yield a pre-conceived expectation (Heidegger ignores disconfirmation and refutation.)
Why should not the hormonal body, the endocrine body, be a "ground" from which one might speak of a human relation without the subject-object reifications? This is the very sort of "basement" of chemistry which Freud had promised Binswanger - but it turns out not to be a "basement" as all. The metaphor is utterly misleading.
It was Jaspers who was opposed to "magic" in psychiatry - could Jaspers have oppposed hormonal science? On what grounds? Why should a human existence which is prey to hormones be less authentic than an existence which acknowledges itself as prey to lightning strikes, influenza or infarctus?
Was Heidegger's own life not rather prey to the action of testosterone?
See: our post and the likelihood that Heidegger fell prey to hypoglycemia and may have exploited the same.
Allow me to say that these are ancient plants: I first knew the dry land variety.
In the Letter on Humanism, Heidegger is already confident in his insight into "science" and "technique".
Consider our walk: the varied symmetry of the now rare plants of the sheltered reserve: these have the symmetry of the hand, these others of the eyes and nose. We map plant to body without numbers. We need not not be "reckoning". Varieties of trillium, so distinct from varieties of ancient ferns.
Unlike Paul Celan, Heidegger offers us little in the way of botany: a stand of "Kiefer" on occasion, or "Eiche".
Consider the body. We now know the role of oxytocin not only in labor and maternal bonding, but in the male staying around for 18 months to 2 years after childbirth - if not longer. Why not embrace this hormonal, real embodiment? Heidegger despised the authority of the Church but was not opposed to the "genuine" assent to the authoring "few". This hormonal view of a human relationship need not be based on any falsifications and distortions - not the marriage contract or even avowed paternity. But it is based on the authority of medical science - applied science.
Heidegger could not accept this in his terms because the result is due to a controlled experiment in which experience was "rapt", forced to yield a pre-conceived expectation (Heidegger ignores disconfirmation and refutation.)
Why should not the hormonal body, the endocrine body, be a "ground" from which one might speak of a human relation without the subject-object reifications? This is the very sort of "basement" of chemistry which Freud had promised Binswanger - but it turns out not to be a "basement" as all. The metaphor is utterly misleading.
It was Jaspers who was opposed to "magic" in psychiatry - could Jaspers have oppposed hormonal science? On what grounds? Why should a human existence which is prey to hormones be less authentic than an existence which acknowledges itself as prey to lightning strikes, influenza or infarctus?
Was Heidegger's own life not rather prey to the action of testosterone?
See: our post and the likelihood that Heidegger fell prey to hypoglycemia and may have exploited the same.
Friday, May 14, 2010
Trust: was Heidegger molested as a boy?
14 Feb, 1950 Martin Heidegger to Elfride Heidegger
One simple practicality was that his mistresses not become pregnant. If we accept that Hermann was this child of Friedl Caesar a picture begins to form which suggests that Heidegger may have been abused as a child.
For years he was dependent on Catholic charity and at the time of his breakdown, he, an ardent anti-Catholic, turns to the archbishop for protection. What this suggests is that this man had once failed to protect him and now in extremis Heidegger is owed this. This is not Heidegger the penitent but Heidegger seeking protection - for his home, his library, his livelihood. This is not the behavior of the hero embracing his destiny - which would have taken Heidegger to Argentina or Paraguay. Heidegger was not being asked to renounce and to commit to some renewal. Even his pension was at risk. He has been undermined at the end of a career, his dreams for Germany dashed - just as he was undermined as a boy.
At various points he is reported as athletic and as a robust skiier and hiker, but he has palpitations and "asthma" preventing him from military service.
Late in life he is preoccupied that physics is leaving nothing "object-like". His preoccupation is to feel at home - to have gratitude (he often mentions gratitude) - but he is utterly unable to be truthful to his wife about his infatuations. He requires "womanly" understanding for his ideas - not the understanding of males (see his letter of Jan 1922.)
Heidegger uses his marriage to Elfride to escape the Church. She does not come to Catholicism: he abandons it. He is prepared to take Luther instead of Aquinas. His later preoccupation that instruments are more fundamental to the secular view than theoria - that what is actually done and how it is done and whether it respects a tradition - is more basic than cultured talk - all this hints at an instability, fears.
Even after the war, Heidegger remains tied to Juenger, von Weizsäcker, Heisenberg - all of them tainted. He never makes an apology, never acknowledges that wrong was done.
It does not require much imagination to see this troubled man as having been injured, harmed - if not physically, then at least emotionally. He does not leave his wife, but instead gives her constant occasion to find fault with his unreliability.
While there are various hints in Heidegger's published work and his published letters as to his erotic inclinations, his erotic orientation, there are much stronger indications that he is unable to come to terms with what is: he rejects ethics, values, permanence. Everything of importance is fated, temporalized, fluid. While he cannot deny the defeat of Germany, it is only a foreshadowing of an even greater conflagration. Everything about the victors is false - and everything that happened can be relativized.
Consider what befell Hoelderlin - denied the woman he loved by the moralizers (marriage) and then losing his Diotima to death - and then the loss of most of his life, while he yet goes on living with the self-educated carpenter. Kierkegaard, denying himself even a word with his Regina. Nietzsche, who most likely never knew intimacy with Frau Lou. Nietzsche falling back on eternal recurrence. And the constant repetition by Heidegger of failing to confess to Elfride that he has again confided something.
Heidegger was unable to speak the truth about some acts by some persons in confession. This would seem to open a view of how he came to tell Husserl that you must not commit - you must wait to see where things are going. Something will happen. There will be some unveiling.
Heidegger did not have an "open marriage" with Elfride. That is not how he speaks of it and that is not what she reproaches him for - he has an ambiguous relationship with her - and she passes this on to Hermann, feeling the need to have this secret with her son, that he is not Martin's boy. There is almost a mirror in this drama.
When Heidegger talks about what one might be able to find in the Church - but then there are all the falsehoods of those in authority. As long as those liars are there, he cannot dwell in the historical Church.
I am constantly wondering why Heidegger had no interest in Philo of Alexandria or Stoic alternatives to Jeshua of Nazareth and Saul of Tarsus. He must be true to his homeland, to what he has left behind back home, but he will reject Latin and embrace Greek. But there is Alcibiades. And Martin's preference for the pre-Socratics.
One radical possibility is that Heidegger was troubled in his gender, and for this reason was in need of repeat daliance - the disclosure of yet another nakedness. Heidegger is not unaware of embodiment. He speaks to Jaspers of the hands of Hitler - and yet he cannot see through Hitler's bombast, the blood read, the perverted crosses.
Heidegger's certainty that he has a path - despite the setbacks, the disillusionment - and this very certainty suggests that very early on when he thought he was "on his way" something disrupted this - he had left home and now he was utterly not at home, unable to dwell in what could have been a stable new home. Everything has still not happened. Circumstances become unfathomable. The war is lost, but there he is with royalty and a mistress! Fabelhaft! Nicht wahr!
Somewhere at sometime Heidegger was left ill at ease with idle chatter, seeming "culture", he must endear himself to Husserl who has lost a son - and he absorbs Husserl's orientation but cannot take it as his own, further it, embrace it, even in modest ways - he must instead overcome, undermine - and in the end he will not even attend his mentor and sponsor and benefactor's funeral - he, Heidegger, occupying Husserl's chair in the Catholic university of Freiburg im Briesgau. Was it Husserl's God of the quasi-totality of transcendental ego's that offended Heidegger? Or the falseness that he could not but feel, himself a Catholic masquerading as a Protestant with a Lutheran mentor whom he, Heidegger, considered to be a Jew (there is no question that the Freiburg faculty viewed the converted Husserl as a Jew - after all, he had merely converted to Lutheranism!)
Heidegger's need for young followers always shifts his attention to some woman among them - he is even unaware that Werner Brock is a Jew - so it may come down to this: Heidegger's embrace of the SA and SS is some curious denial of some gender inappropriate conflict in his past.
Heidegger at various places seems to suggest that not all end of life is a "death" ( he himself will die in his sleep) - not all unavowed liasons should undermine a family bond, of husband to wife - these are only the hints that he leaves other than the more obvious strains of his philosophizing in his distant traipsing about Eros, as if he is always lurking there, furtive, camouflaged.
We do not have the foundation we thought we had - all grounds are in question - all outcomes are ultimately irrational, fated. Yet he yearns for the real, the genuine, to remove the scare quotes from 'culture', 'science' and 'history'. What is it that we are forgetting, might forget, must not forget, confide, hint at, moving around and about in circles, never direct.
When Jaspers encounters Van Gogh, Heidegger embraces Van Gogh, but like Merleau-Ponty, meditates on Cezanne. Where are the nudes of Cezanne. Van Gogh? Those of Cezanne only appear to be in a clearing and unveiled: they are murky, outlined, lacking in any detail - but did he ever see the nudes of Van Gogh?
The future arrives, and it is false. Even the past is false - it is not what they are saying. The American future, the Russian future, both will be negated in a confrontation. At some critical moment in Heidegger's early life something was true, was unexpected, was accepted, will not be mentioned, did not happen, this is the way it is and this is not the way it is. Does someone care? Does he tell his mother? Did his father blame him?
Was it not unreal? He finally ends up at war, but then it is over, he has survived. Was it not unreal, the posting to Marburg, the call to Freiburg? Was it not just unbelievable, Elfride stays after the session on Kant, Hannah comes to his office - does she take off her hat? Will she take off her coat? He takes a risk with each. And now he has insight, deep. a thinking that does not even belong to him - and now it is all unfathomable.
Heidegger's breakdown is characterized by withdrawal and paranoia. But not so much so that he is unable to be helped, he is open to being helped - von Gebsattel is nobility, he is later almost a colleague and Heidegger, from one breakdown, from mere conversations with Jaspers, goes on to advise psychiatrists. What could be more false, more preposterous, more unreal. The Germans are defeated, but he is putting his faith in Jean Beaufret. The French are controlling Baden, Sartre is a travesty, but his faith in Beaufret is unwavering. Beaufret the denier, the belittler of what of what everyone else views as absolutely essential!
How else explain Heidegger's confidence in his own lies, his own pretentions, his infidelities, his complete lack of political realism. Heidegger, a nobody, replaces Husserl the trained mathematician. It is almost as if Heidegger became a Cardinal without first having been even a priest. The forester, the farmer, the steward, the shepherd. Anything but the priest.
[...] My disposition and the manner of my early upbringing, instability and cowardice in being able to trust & then again inconsiderateness in the abuse of trust, these are the poles between which I swing & thus only too easily & only too often misjudge & overstep the measure with regard to Hera and Eros.Heidegger's deceitfulness and dishonesty were remarked upon some of those closest to him: Karl Jaspers from the late 1920's to early 1930's, Hannah Arendt much later to Jaspers and Elfride in various places.
One simple practicality was that his mistresses not become pregnant. If we accept that Hermann was this child of Friedl Caesar a picture begins to form which suggests that Heidegger may have been abused as a child.
For years he was dependent on Catholic charity and at the time of his breakdown, he, an ardent anti-Catholic, turns to the archbishop for protection. What this suggests is that this man had once failed to protect him and now in extremis Heidegger is owed this. This is not Heidegger the penitent but Heidegger seeking protection - for his home, his library, his livelihood. This is not the behavior of the hero embracing his destiny - which would have taken Heidegger to Argentina or Paraguay. Heidegger was not being asked to renounce and to commit to some renewal. Even his pension was at risk. He has been undermined at the end of a career, his dreams for Germany dashed - just as he was undermined as a boy.
At various points he is reported as athletic and as a robust skiier and hiker, but he has palpitations and "asthma" preventing him from military service.
Late in life he is preoccupied that physics is leaving nothing "object-like". His preoccupation is to feel at home - to have gratitude (he often mentions gratitude) - but he is utterly unable to be truthful to his wife about his infatuations. He requires "womanly" understanding for his ideas - not the understanding of males (see his letter of Jan 1922.)
Heidegger uses his marriage to Elfride to escape the Church. She does not come to Catholicism: he abandons it. He is prepared to take Luther instead of Aquinas. His later preoccupation that instruments are more fundamental to the secular view than theoria - that what is actually done and how it is done and whether it respects a tradition - is more basic than cultured talk - all this hints at an instability, fears.
Even after the war, Heidegger remains tied to Juenger, von Weizsäcker, Heisenberg - all of them tainted. He never makes an apology, never acknowledges that wrong was done.
It does not require much imagination to see this troubled man as having been injured, harmed - if not physically, then at least emotionally. He does not leave his wife, but instead gives her constant occasion to find fault with his unreliability.
While there are various hints in Heidegger's published work and his published letters as to his erotic inclinations, his erotic orientation, there are much stronger indications that he is unable to come to terms with what is: he rejects ethics, values, permanence. Everything of importance is fated, temporalized, fluid. While he cannot deny the defeat of Germany, it is only a foreshadowing of an even greater conflagration. Everything about the victors is false - and everything that happened can be relativized.
Consider what befell Hoelderlin - denied the woman he loved by the moralizers (marriage) and then losing his Diotima to death - and then the loss of most of his life, while he yet goes on living with the self-educated carpenter. Kierkegaard, denying himself even a word with his Regina. Nietzsche, who most likely never knew intimacy with Frau Lou. Nietzsche falling back on eternal recurrence. And the constant repetition by Heidegger of failing to confess to Elfride that he has again confided something.
Heidegger was unable to speak the truth about some acts by some persons in confession. This would seem to open a view of how he came to tell Husserl that you must not commit - you must wait to see where things are going. Something will happen. There will be some unveiling.
Heidegger did not have an "open marriage" with Elfride. That is not how he speaks of it and that is not what she reproaches him for - he has an ambiguous relationship with her - and she passes this on to Hermann, feeling the need to have this secret with her son, that he is not Martin's boy. There is almost a mirror in this drama.
When Heidegger talks about what one might be able to find in the Church - but then there are all the falsehoods of those in authority. As long as those liars are there, he cannot dwell in the historical Church.
I am constantly wondering why Heidegger had no interest in Philo of Alexandria or Stoic alternatives to Jeshua of Nazareth and Saul of Tarsus. He must be true to his homeland, to what he has left behind back home, but he will reject Latin and embrace Greek. But there is Alcibiades. And Martin's preference for the pre-Socratics.
One radical possibility is that Heidegger was troubled in his gender, and for this reason was in need of repeat daliance - the disclosure of yet another nakedness. Heidegger is not unaware of embodiment. He speaks to Jaspers of the hands of Hitler - and yet he cannot see through Hitler's bombast, the blood read, the perverted crosses.
Heidegger's certainty that he has a path - despite the setbacks, the disillusionment - and this very certainty suggests that very early on when he thought he was "on his way" something disrupted this - he had left home and now he was utterly not at home, unable to dwell in what could have been a stable new home. Everything has still not happened. Circumstances become unfathomable. The war is lost, but there he is with royalty and a mistress! Fabelhaft! Nicht wahr!
Somewhere at sometime Heidegger was left ill at ease with idle chatter, seeming "culture", he must endear himself to Husserl who has lost a son - and he absorbs Husserl's orientation but cannot take it as his own, further it, embrace it, even in modest ways - he must instead overcome, undermine - and in the end he will not even attend his mentor and sponsor and benefactor's funeral - he, Heidegger, occupying Husserl's chair in the Catholic university of Freiburg im Briesgau. Was it Husserl's God of the quasi-totality of transcendental ego's that offended Heidegger? Or the falseness that he could not but feel, himself a Catholic masquerading as a Protestant with a Lutheran mentor whom he, Heidegger, considered to be a Jew (there is no question that the Freiburg faculty viewed the converted Husserl as a Jew - after all, he had merely converted to Lutheranism!)
Heidegger's need for young followers always shifts his attention to some woman among them - he is even unaware that Werner Brock is a Jew - so it may come down to this: Heidegger's embrace of the SA and SS is some curious denial of some gender inappropriate conflict in his past.
Heidegger at various places seems to suggest that not all end of life is a "death" ( he himself will die in his sleep) - not all unavowed liasons should undermine a family bond, of husband to wife - these are only the hints that he leaves other than the more obvious strains of his philosophizing in his distant traipsing about Eros, as if he is always lurking there, furtive, camouflaged.
We do not have the foundation we thought we had - all grounds are in question - all outcomes are ultimately irrational, fated. Yet he yearns for the real, the genuine, to remove the scare quotes from 'culture', 'science' and 'history'. What is it that we are forgetting, might forget, must not forget, confide, hint at, moving around and about in circles, never direct.
When Jaspers encounters Van Gogh, Heidegger embraces Van Gogh, but like Merleau-Ponty, meditates on Cezanne. Where are the nudes of Cezanne. Van Gogh? Those of Cezanne only appear to be in a clearing and unveiled: they are murky, outlined, lacking in any detail - but did he ever see the nudes of Van Gogh?
The future arrives, and it is false. Even the past is false - it is not what they are saying. The American future, the Russian future, both will be negated in a confrontation. At some critical moment in Heidegger's early life something was true, was unexpected, was accepted, will not be mentioned, did not happen, this is the way it is and this is not the way it is. Does someone care? Does he tell his mother? Did his father blame him?
Was it not unreal? He finally ends up at war, but then it is over, he has survived. Was it not unreal, the posting to Marburg, the call to Freiburg? Was it not just unbelievable, Elfride stays after the session on Kant, Hannah comes to his office - does she take off her hat? Will she take off her coat? He takes a risk with each. And now he has insight, deep. a thinking that does not even belong to him - and now it is all unfathomable.
Heidegger's breakdown is characterized by withdrawal and paranoia. But not so much so that he is unable to be helped, he is open to being helped - von Gebsattel is nobility, he is later almost a colleague and Heidegger, from one breakdown, from mere conversations with Jaspers, goes on to advise psychiatrists. What could be more false, more preposterous, more unreal. The Germans are defeated, but he is putting his faith in Jean Beaufret. The French are controlling Baden, Sartre is a travesty, but his faith in Beaufret is unwavering. Beaufret the denier, the belittler of what of what everyone else views as absolutely essential!
How else explain Heidegger's confidence in his own lies, his own pretentions, his infidelities, his complete lack of political realism. Heidegger, a nobody, replaces Husserl the trained mathematician. It is almost as if Heidegger became a Cardinal without first having been even a priest. The forester, the farmer, the steward, the shepherd. Anything but the priest.
Missing in the Martin - Elfride Heidegger epistolary index
These are some of the missing items in the 2008 index of "Letters to His Wife 1915-1970" by Martin Heidegger (original published in German in 2005.)
biophysics 200
conservatives 299
culture 133,137,190, 197, 236
determinism 303
death 275
eros 246
fate 197
framework (Ge-stell) 257
freedom 303
gods 297
Hera 213
infidelities (missing rendez-vous of p.314)
Indian 277
lies 255
logos (missing p.241)
mathematics 257
marriage 77, 237
motivation 303
poetry 297
psychiatry 284
party (NSDAP) 273, 274
'philosophers' 308
physics 235, 237, 250,256-7,269,284,300,308
responsibility 266
revolution 73,141,295
science 157,294,303,309 (sometimes in 'scare' quotes)
spirit 137
trust 213,255
worldview 101, 157, 303, 309
Also missing:
Any mention of Einstein or Weyl in the many mentions of physics (where Heisenberg dominates.)
Grund 248, 259 (with the "camouflage" quote being on page 249)
human being 123
music 243
Insight 241
dwelling 219, 225-6
tractors, cars and paths 273, 305
women 83, 127
record (his recorded voice) 287
object-like (in relation to physics and functional terms) 257
tradition (university) 215
neo_kantianism 267
sacrifice 164
will 175
Brock 294
It is often unclear to me when he is mentioning Ernst Jünger (example: 242.)
On page 131 there is a curious remark of Gertrud about the "available letters": 1933, 1934 and 1935 have but one letter each which is preposterous given the number of times he lectured outside of Freiburg and his habit of writing to Elfride when away from Marburg or Freiburg.
Page 119 gives the lie to any claim that Heidegger was physically unfit for duty.
June 14, 1945 (page 189) should trouble any philosopher:
Contrast this with his letter to Elfride when the war is going as expected:
warriors 167
Again, June 14, 1945,
Now he would wait for the clash of the titans, America and Russia, the outcome of the hubris of reckoning.
Strangely - or not - economics is not in the index, and I recall but one mention of an economist (economics was Elfride's academic interest.) See page 83.
For Derrida on Heidegger on spirit, see pages 133 and 137.
For index entries on other Nazi "thinkers" see his mentions of Bäumler, Krieck and Rosenberg. Note the entries for Carl F. von Weizsäcker whose view of ethics and "camouflage" and revisionism may have been close to that of Heidegger.
Compare: Elfride and mistresses; Veza Canetti and the mistresses
Note: neither "soul" not "Stein, Edith" nor "Geiger, Afra" are found in the index.
Neither Bonhoeffer - neither Karl nor Dietrich - figure in the annotated index of names or the index tout court.
In the annotated index of names, Elisabeth Blochmann (Lisi) is listed as a friend.
Geiger, Afra is found in the in the annotated index of names.
Blackamoor is not in the index.
Moritz Geiger is missing.
Erich Frank is missing and is his death (1945)
The death of Ernst Cassirer is missing (also 1945). See "neo_Kantianism".
The death of Bergson is missing (but see letter pg 71)
Love is not in the index (nor was responsibility, trust, guilt, shame ... )
Comparison: womanizers Elias Canetti, Paul Tillich and Bertrand Russell; promiscuous Ludwig Wittgenstein, André Gide.
Note: Heidegger was almost engaged or engaged when he met his student Elfride Petri and "confided" in her - some nine years before confiding in Hannah Arendt.
biophysics 200
conservatives 299
culture 133,137,190, 197, 236
determinism 303
death 275
eros 246
fate 197
framework (Ge-stell) 257
freedom 303
gods 297
Hera 213
infidelities (missing rendez-vous of p.314)
Indian 277
lies 255
logos (missing p.241)
mathematics 257
marriage 77, 237
motivation 303
poetry 297
psychiatry 284
party (NSDAP) 273, 274
'philosophers' 308
physics 235, 237, 250,256-7,269,284,300,308
responsibility 266
revolution 73,141,295
science 157,294,303,309 (sometimes in 'scare' quotes)
spirit 137
trust 213,255
worldview 101, 157, 303, 309
Also missing:
Any mention of Einstein or Weyl in the many mentions of physics (where Heisenberg dominates.)
Grund 248, 259 (with the "camouflage" quote being on page 249)
human being 123
music 243
Insight 241
dwelling 219, 225-6
tractors, cars and paths 273, 305
women 83, 127
record (his recorded voice) 287
object-like (in relation to physics and functional terms) 257
tradition (university) 215
neo_kantianism 267
sacrifice 164
will 175
Brock 294
It is often unclear to me when he is mentioning Ernst Jünger (example: 242.)
On page 131 there is a curious remark of Gertrud about the "available letters": 1933, 1934 and 1935 have but one letter each which is preposterous given the number of times he lectured outside of Freiburg and his habit of writing to Elfride when away from Marburg or Freiburg.
Page 119 gives the lie to any claim that Heidegger was physically unfit for duty.
June 14, 1945 (page 189) should trouble any philosopher:
We go about our daily business with great sorrow and the essential truth is still quite unutterable.Not long after we have February 17, 1946 (pg 191 - the letters are not numbered by the editors) with
Given the essential unfathomability & unpredictability of events today, one can never say for sure such things as that the officers have been kept behind.Yet he never went on to speak of "total war" and the slaughter of the Polish officers and intellectuals at Katyn?
Contrast this with his letter to Elfride when the war is going as expected:
Nov 6, 39There is no lament for the Poles.
Great transformations in thought & human existence are perhaps already preparing themselves, the contours of which we can hardly conceive.
May 18, 40This is the letter in which is reference to "warriors" was not deemed suitable for an entry in the index. Here he speaks as if Ernst Jünger spoke truth.
In addition, the invasions are sufficiently well-rehearsed.
warriors 167
the single person disappears as an individual, but at the same time he has the opportunity to be informed of how the whole thing stands in the quickest possible way at any day & any time.His apologists will have this as meant to reassure his delicate spouse. A few years later he will have no word of the fate of his sons for weeks, months. For many others it would be years, with some not returning for ten years if they returned at all.
Again, June 14, 1945,
As long as the young men are missing from university, any work is only half-done, with no opportunity fir venturing another attempt at sowing the seeds of a real spiritual tradition. Perhaps we ought to try to bring people together in our house, without falling prey to the usual culture industry.Within weeks people not of his choosing were under his roof. And of course the houses in which Heidegger had lived in Marburg came through the war unscathed.
Now he would wait for the clash of the titans, America and Russia, the outcome of the hubris of reckoning.
Strangely - or not - economics is not in the index, and I recall but one mention of an economist (economics was Elfride's academic interest.) See page 83.
For Derrida on Heidegger on spirit, see pages 133 and 137.
For index entries on other Nazi "thinkers" see his mentions of Bäumler, Krieck and Rosenberg. Note the entries for Carl F. von Weizsäcker whose view of ethics and "camouflage" and revisionism may have been close to that of Heidegger.
Compare: Elfride and mistresses; Veza Canetti and the mistresses
Note: neither "soul" not "Stein, Edith" nor "Geiger, Afra" are found in the index.
Neither Bonhoeffer - neither Karl nor Dietrich - figure in the annotated index of names or the index tout court.
In the annotated index of names, Elisabeth Blochmann (Lisi) is listed as a friend.
Geiger, Afra is found in the in the annotated index of names.
Blackamoor is not in the index.
Moritz Geiger is missing.
Erich Frank is missing and is his death (1945)
The death of Ernst Cassirer is missing (also 1945). See "neo_Kantianism".
The death of Bergson is missing (but see letter pg 71)
Love is not in the index (nor was responsibility, trust, guilt, shame ... )
Comparison: womanizers Elias Canetti, Paul Tillich and Bertrand Russell; promiscuous Ludwig Wittgenstein, André Gide.
Note: Heidegger was almost engaged or engaged when he met his student Elfride Petri and "confided" in her - some nine years before confiding in Hannah Arendt.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Ernst Klee's Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich
The University of Minnesota has its own Holocaust documents but the state of Minnesota has no copy of Ernst Klee's Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich in any of its libraries listed on the internet.
In the Martin and Elfride Heidegger letters there is his 19450614 in which he mentions Hugo Friedrich in connection with Paul Valéry (who died later that summer in Paris on July 20, 1945.)
Documents on Hugo Friedrich tend to pass over his 1937 appointment and his arrest by the occupying French. If you have a comment to clarify, please post it. It was not until 1957 that he was called to the Academy.
The journalist Ernst Klee's publications made it impossible to continue the "whitewash" of the 1950's particularly in regard to the medical profession and the NSDAP. Re-examination of the reopening of German universities and the reestablishment of their autonomy has only occurred later. Those teaching law, political science and history may have been more of a concern in 1945 and 1946. The international reputation of an institution out-weighed issues of individual culpability. Compare the reestablishment of medical careers and academic careers and the role of secondary centers such as Tubingen and Marburg. Compare the initial assignment to Ricoeur in France.
Hugo Friedrich was very close to Hannah Arendt and Benno von Wiese during their student days in Heidelberg. Benno von Wiese was allowed to continue teaching based on a written declaration which he was required to submit.
On Hugo Friedrich: his arrest is mentioned by both Hugo Ott and Rüdiger Safranski.
See records on requisitioning of homes of collaborators by the French military occupation authority.
Cf: Steven P. Remy, The Heidelberg Myth
In the Martin and Elfride Heidegger letters there is his 19450614 in which he mentions Hugo Friedrich in connection with Paul Valéry (who died later that summer in Paris on July 20, 1945.)
Documents on Hugo Friedrich tend to pass over his 1937 appointment and his arrest by the occupying French. If you have a comment to clarify, please post it. It was not until 1957 that he was called to the Academy.
The journalist Ernst Klee's publications made it impossible to continue the "whitewash" of the 1950's particularly in regard to the medical profession and the NSDAP. Re-examination of the reopening of German universities and the reestablishment of their autonomy has only occurred later. Those teaching law, political science and history may have been more of a concern in 1945 and 1946. The international reputation of an institution out-weighed issues of individual culpability. Compare the reestablishment of medical careers and academic careers and the role of secondary centers such as Tubingen and Marburg. Compare the initial assignment to Ricoeur in France.
Hugo Friedrich was very close to Hannah Arendt and Benno von Wiese during their student days in Heidelberg. Benno von Wiese was allowed to continue teaching based on a written declaration which he was required to submit.
On Hugo Friedrich: his arrest is mentioned by both Hugo Ott and Rüdiger Safranski.
See records on requisitioning of homes of collaborators by the French military occupation authority.
Cf: Steven P. Remy, The Heidelberg Myth
Another absence in the Martin Heidegger letters
The absence of an index in the GA volume of Vorträge unde Aufsätze may reflect Heidegger's view on "der Leser".
The absence of one particular entry in the index to the English translation of "Letters to his Wife" is vexing: it may reflect the use of digital indexing and the exclusion of "common words". The missing term is culture or Kultur. There are a few old Indo-European words which any reader should know and this is one.
I have added two notes: page 137 and page 190 which correspond to his letter 19320620 and his 19450614.
While both remarks are distasteful as quotations, they are perhaps not as troubling as his repeated mention in other works of those who "reckon" or "calculate".
Unlike correspondence between Jaspers and Arnedt with its many discussions of "German" and "Jewish", in the letters to Elfride the English translators have the term "Jews" in the index refer the reader to "anti-Semitism." This is astonishing. If many politically radicalized Jews were attracted to Communism then his remark to that effect is to indicate what? A lack of anti-Semitism? His literary executors proved unable to translate one of his remarks; another appears to be a repetition of a stereotypical insult.
But the absence for me will always be the Jews of Marburg. How many mezuzah were neglected on doorframes? Where is the map of Marburg for December 1938? Who later retired in comfort from the sale of such a house in 1965, 1975? How were the tax-rolls of Marburg lost in the undamaged town? Lost in a town so free of the "culture" that the Heideggers despised? What would be a simple index on such a map?
When Heidegger says hegen it is as if the forest has not only a steward, but a shepherd. And the houses in the town, what he called "Wohnhäuser" - who was to be the steward of those absent names and each Mezuzuh "en-framed"?
The absence of one particular entry in the index to the English translation of "Letters to his Wife" is vexing: it may reflect the use of digital indexing and the exclusion of "common words". The missing term is culture or Kultur. There are a few old Indo-European words which any reader should know and this is one.
I have added two notes: page 137 and page 190 which correspond to his letter 19320620 and his 19450614.
While both remarks are distasteful as quotations, they are perhaps not as troubling as his repeated mention in other works of those who "reckon" or "calculate".
Unlike correspondence between Jaspers and Arnedt with its many discussions of "German" and "Jewish", in the letters to Elfride the English translators have the term "Jews" in the index refer the reader to "anti-Semitism." This is astonishing. If many politically radicalized Jews were attracted to Communism then his remark to that effect is to indicate what? A lack of anti-Semitism? His literary executors proved unable to translate one of his remarks; another appears to be a repetition of a stereotypical insult.
But the absence for me will always be the Jews of Marburg. How many mezuzah were neglected on doorframes? Where is the map of Marburg for December 1938? Who later retired in comfort from the sale of such a house in 1965, 1975? How were the tax-rolls of Marburg lost in the undamaged town? Lost in a town so free of the "culture" that the Heideggers despised? What would be a simple index on such a map?
When Heidegger says hegen it is as if the forest has not only a steward, but a shepherd. And the houses in the town, what he called "Wohnhäuser" - who was to be the steward of those absent names and each Mezuzuh "en-framed"?
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Balderdash in Arendt's The Human Condition
This is just a quote from Chapter VI of The Human Condition:
This alternative treatment of a text is rather easy using Curl as the web-content language.
For a philosophy course, it might mean that, for the first n days of an assignment period, an online text would be "plain" and then on days following would be annotated progressively as the maximum grade for a paper on that text also changed - in a downward direction from 100% to, say, 65%. Think of it as a variant of "no student need be left completely behind."
Other variants are easily imagined for a philosophy course with a mixed group of undergrads and graduates.
Here is a variant with simple falsehoods in bold:
High-lighting what little may be true in the Arendt text is sobering:
Since then, scientific and philosophic truth have parted company; scientific truth not only need not be eternal, it need not even be comprehensible or adequate to human reason. It took many generations of scientists before the human mind grew bold enough to fully face this implication of modernity. If nature and the universe are products of a divine maker, and if the human mind is incapable of understanding what man has not made himself, then man cannot possibly expect to learn anything about nature that he can understand. He may be able, through ingenuity, to find out and even to imitate the devices of natural processes, but that does not mean these devices will ever make sense to him — they do not have to be intelligible. As a matter of fact, no supposedly suprarational divine revelation and no supposedly abstruse philosophic truth has ever offended human reason so glaringly as certain results of modern science.The conjunction of conditionals is false, so the rest may be neglected. Here is that conjunction in bold:
Since then, scientific and philosophic truth have parted company; scientific truth not only need not be eternal, it need not even be comprehensible or adequate to human reason. It took many generations of scientists before the human mind grew bold enough to fully face this implication of modernity. If nature and the universe are products of a divine maker, and if the human mind is incapable of understanding what man has not made himself, then man cannot possibly expect to learn anything about nature that he can understand. He may be able, through ingenuity, to find out and even to imitate the devices of natural processes, but that does not mean these devices will ever make sense to him — they do not have to be intelligible. As a matter of fact, no supposedly suprarational divine revelation and no supposedly abstruse philosophic truth has ever offended human reason so glaringly as certain results of modern science.Placing such a falsehood in BOLDFACE may help a reader. But it would also help to have links to those who supposed the age of the sun to be some scientific "unintelligibility" or the need for medical practitioners to wash their hands when going from anatomy or pathology lab to patient rounds (Semmelweis).
This alternative treatment of a text is rather easy using Curl as the web-content language.
For a philosophy course, it might mean that, for the first n days of an assignment period, an online text would be "plain" and then on days following would be annotated progressively as the maximum grade for a paper on that text also changed - in a downward direction from 100% to, say, 65%. Think of it as a variant of "no student need be left completely behind."
Other variants are easily imagined for a philosophy course with a mixed group of undergrads and graduates.
Here is a variant with simple falsehoods in bold:
Since then, scientific and philosophic truth have parted company; scientific truth not only need not be eternal, it need not even be comprehensible or adequate to human reason. It took many generations of scientists before the human mind grew bold enough to fully face this implication of modernity. If nature and the universe are products of a divine maker, and if the human mind is incapable of understanding what man has not made himself, then man cannot possibly expect to learn anything about nature that he can understand. He may be able, through ingenuity, to find out and even to imitate the devices of natural processes, but that does not mean these devices will ever make sense to him — they do not have to be intelligible. As a matter of fact, no supposedly suprarational divine revelation and no supposedly abstruse philosophic truth has ever offended human reason so glaringly as certain results of modern science.Obviously for some presentation tasks, BOLDFACE will not be adequate: a stripped-down text placed in parallel or simply converting some text to whitespace may better serve ones purpose.
High-lighting what little may be true in the Arendt text is sobering:
Since then, scientific and philosophic truth have parted company; scientific truth not only need not be eternal, it need not even be comprehensible or adequate to human reason. It took many generations of scientists before the human mind grew bold enough to fully face this implication of modernity. If nature and the universe are products of a divine maker, and if the human mind is incapable of understanding what man has not made himself, then man cannot possibly expect to learn anything about nature that he can understand. He may be able, through ingenuity, to find out and even to imitate the devices of natural processes, but that does not mean these devices will ever make sense to him — they do not have to be intelligible. As a matter of fact, no supposedly suprarational divine revelation and no supposedly abstruse philosophic truth has ever offended human reason so glaringly as certain results of modern science.But such is the work of the famed author.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Ge-stell u. entbergen
My children tell the story of how we walked on the grounds of the great dinosaur museum after a rain. A small piece of shale had slid down to the path. I turned it over to expose the most exquisite fossil (I shall not describe it.) When all had seen it, I placed it down, again not exposed, a mere piece of stone, unmarked, on the edge of the path.
In the early days of science, it would have been a curiosity to display in our collection. In the hey-day of paleontology, who knows - something to put forward in an article in a journal? Photographed. Sketched. Catalogued.
But Heidegger cannot account for the other great man of Goettingen: Gauss. Gauss did not try to be the first in everything, to have it all to ihis credit. Much of what he discovered, others would be left to re-discover.
In the Heidegger account, Darwin ought to have come home with all his drawings and notes and specimens and then when he had it all pieced together, had a laugh, and then headed off to church with his wife where he might engage in genuine exchanges with his fellows.
And what of the poet? Should the best of Hoelderlin have gone unpublished? Should Brod have burned Kafka? What was the rush of Heidegger to protect his papers as the French forces approached?
Noteworthy is that the volume of GA with the Tecknik essay also has no index. This makes it a nuisance for readers to track down where Arendt got her bit on apparatus and where the bit on Heissenberg (look at the date Heidegger cites - 1954 - is that not the year that Born was finally recognized?) I will set that staright over at phil.aule-browser.com/arendt.htm
Has Heidegger told us why he cannot resist publishing? What could be more Ge-stell than the fine binding and flawless printing of yet another exemplar of a book. You can see it there, in the Klostermann window, on display. Heidegger did not lug about the fonts with him, as did Kepler.
Why was it not enough for the Greeks to have gone on repeating Homer? Can Heidegger not see the organized scrolls of Alexandria as Bestände? Feu, said Pascal.
In the early days of science, it would have been a curiosity to display in our collection. In the hey-day of paleontology, who knows - something to put forward in an article in a journal? Photographed. Sketched. Catalogued.
But Heidegger cannot account for the other great man of Goettingen: Gauss. Gauss did not try to be the first in everything, to have it all to ihis credit. Much of what he discovered, others would be left to re-discover.
In the Heidegger account, Darwin ought to have come home with all his drawings and notes and specimens and then when he had it all pieced together, had a laugh, and then headed off to church with his wife where he might engage in genuine exchanges with his fellows.
And what of the poet? Should the best of Hoelderlin have gone unpublished? Should Brod have burned Kafka? What was the rush of Heidegger to protect his papers as the French forces approached?
Noteworthy is that the volume of GA with the Tecknik essay also has no index. This makes it a nuisance for readers to track down where Arendt got her bit on apparatus and where the bit on Heissenberg (look at the date Heidegger cites - 1954 - is that not the year that Born was finally recognized?) I will set that staright over at phil.aule-browser.com/arendt.htm
Has Heidegger told us why he cannot resist publishing? What could be more Ge-stell than the fine binding and flawless printing of yet another exemplar of a book. You can see it there, in the Klostermann window, on display. Heidegger did not lug about the fonts with him, as did Kepler.
Why was it not enough for the Greeks to have gone on repeating Homer? Can Heidegger not see the organized scrolls of Alexandria as Bestände? Feu, said Pascal.
Weg, Frage, Denken
The debt of Heidegger to Husserl's antipsychologism is nowhere clearer than in Heidegger's approach in Die Frage nach der Tecknik.
It would be too easy to be distracted by what he says about das Wesen des Baumes. That would be a distraction.
What the reader should consider is the near parallel to Wittgenstein's confidence in ordinary speech.
This confidence is not unlike that of Husserl with regard to the horizonality of a presentation - a horizonality which - with some training - any attentive reflection will note. Of course, more and more with Husserl the structure to adumbrate is on the side of the ego, but co-constitution remained the norm.
With Husserl, there was a certain way of framing things. A more peripatetic philosopher might have said: "try looking at it this way" or "try thinking of it this way" or just "go away and think it over." There might be no prescription as to how to proceed to achieve an analytical or a synthetical result.
What is naturally worrisome is the confidence which Heidegger places not in the pragmatics of everyday language, but it the revelations of etymologies. In many ways, the belief in what "lies behind" the word as used today, by us, is not unlike a variety of doctrines concerning true natures and their possible - or even inevitable - revelation.
There is of course no reason to think that the fundamental requirements for the tasks of thinking are to be found in Parmenides and Heraclitus. Why not Lao Tzu? Why the belief that no one more evocative than Heraclitus will not appear in some remote village of some distant land? Because Homer's achievement is unique? And if the work of Plato and Aristotle had been lost? And dare we ask, if nothing of Parmenides and Heraclitus had come down to us?
Heidegger's romance of the Greeks has no claim on a Chinese, Korean or Indian reader. Why should it exercise a claim on a reader in Minnesota? The answer can only be in a presumed common heritage, a tradition to be recovered.
This is quite irrational in a way in which Born seeing the applicability of matrix algebra to the first results of Heisenberg - seeing them as incomplete - is not irrational. Someone other than Born could have had this insight if she had come to Heisenberg's paper by way of matrices - even if for her matrices were only a pointless hobby, an amusement.
Why should we feel convinced that the solar astronomer with her automated binocular telescope does not appreciate the warmth of the rising sun on the day of a transit of Venus or Mercury? Why should the technical expert be cut off from poesis? If a Heraclitean figure were present in the Caritas asylum where Heidegger found himself, would that ecstatic figure not rightly have been impatient with pedestrian Heidegger?
But Heidegger was not an amateur astronomer nor schooled as a sailor in celestial navigation. Nor was he an amateur botanist or musician. But he was at times, in his way, a bit of a poet. He made no sketches when in Rome. He never troubled to learn Polish - he had nothing to learn from Ingarden.
What Heidegger could not suspect is that crows make tools, that apes make tools, that some cats and dogs recognize mere images as objects of interest. Inter-est. For Heidegger, a Catholic, could not allow that the beasts were betimes puzzled, even if they ask no questions. As Leibniz wrote his French: Estre. The Hawaiian humpback whale observing the male scuba diver has no Zweck and need use no instrument. The humpback whale observing the scuba diver needs no telos. The whale observing the diver.
So what can be learned from Heidegger about thinking outside the confines of anthropocentrism?
First: that Heidegger was himself trapped in his enthrallment with a tradition and being a thinker and known and recognized as a thinker. To this, Arendt fell prey.
Second: that Heidegger was more focussed on knowledge than on learning - more concerned with insight than over-coming metaphors and bias. It is an irony of Heidegger on knowledge that he knew so little about the how of learning. In so many ways, he remains in the grip of a Husserl, a Cassirer. It is not enough that God is dead if the theology of Aquinas had been adequate in its time. This is the lesson of navigation and the peril of going too far from shore when not equipped to navigate. As perilous as being too close to shore in a storm. And Heidegger might have known, for all of Hoelderlin on the sun, ships and shores. The issue was not speed or the Raketenflugzeug. Homer's time was not ready for the open sea.
Perhaps if Heidegger had taken the post in Japan, he would have overcome his German tradition - or at least stepped off his path - and not simply onto another.
Question: what was Heidegger's comprehension of Japanese ceramics?
It would be too easy to be distracted by what he says about das Wesen des Baumes. That would be a distraction.
What the reader should consider is the near parallel to Wittgenstein's confidence in ordinary speech.
Das Frage baut an einem Weg.The confidence here - perhaps misplaced, but nonetheless - is that whoever genuinely pursues this questioning may arrive at an opening.
This confidence is not unlike that of Husserl with regard to the horizonality of a presentation - a horizonality which - with some training - any attentive reflection will note. Of course, more and more with Husserl the structure to adumbrate is on the side of the ego, but co-constitution remained the norm.
With Husserl, there was a certain way of framing things. A more peripatetic philosopher might have said: "try looking at it this way" or "try thinking of it this way" or just "go away and think it over." There might be no prescription as to how to proceed to achieve an analytical or a synthetical result.
What is naturally worrisome is the confidence which Heidegger places not in the pragmatics of everyday language, but it the revelations of etymologies. In many ways, the belief in what "lies behind" the word as used today, by us, is not unlike a variety of doctrines concerning true natures and their possible - or even inevitable - revelation.
There is of course no reason to think that the fundamental requirements for the tasks of thinking are to be found in Parmenides and Heraclitus. Why not Lao Tzu? Why the belief that no one more evocative than Heraclitus will not appear in some remote village of some distant land? Because Homer's achievement is unique? And if the work of Plato and Aristotle had been lost? And dare we ask, if nothing of Parmenides and Heraclitus had come down to us?
Heidegger's romance of the Greeks has no claim on a Chinese, Korean or Indian reader. Why should it exercise a claim on a reader in Minnesota? The answer can only be in a presumed common heritage, a tradition to be recovered.
This is quite irrational in a way in which Born seeing the applicability of matrix algebra to the first results of Heisenberg - seeing them as incomplete - is not irrational. Someone other than Born could have had this insight if she had come to Heisenberg's paper by way of matrices - even if for her matrices were only a pointless hobby, an amusement.
Why should we feel convinced that the solar astronomer with her automated binocular telescope does not appreciate the warmth of the rising sun on the day of a transit of Venus or Mercury? Why should the technical expert be cut off from poesis? If a Heraclitean figure were present in the Caritas asylum where Heidegger found himself, would that ecstatic figure not rightly have been impatient with pedestrian Heidegger?
But Heidegger was not an amateur astronomer nor schooled as a sailor in celestial navigation. Nor was he an amateur botanist or musician. But he was at times, in his way, a bit of a poet. He made no sketches when in Rome. He never troubled to learn Polish - he had nothing to learn from Ingarden.
What Heidegger could not suspect is that crows make tools, that apes make tools, that some cats and dogs recognize mere images as objects of interest. Inter-est. For Heidegger, a Catholic, could not allow that the beasts were betimes puzzled, even if they ask no questions. As Leibniz wrote his French: Estre. The Hawaiian humpback whale observing the male scuba diver has no Zweck and need use no instrument. The humpback whale observing the scuba diver needs no telos. The whale observing the diver.
So what can be learned from Heidegger about thinking outside the confines of anthropocentrism?
First: that Heidegger was himself trapped in his enthrallment with a tradition and being a thinker and known and recognized as a thinker. To this, Arendt fell prey.
Second: that Heidegger was more focussed on knowledge than on learning - more concerned with insight than over-coming metaphors and bias. It is an irony of Heidegger on knowledge that he knew so little about the how of learning. In so many ways, he remains in the grip of a Husserl, a Cassirer. It is not enough that God is dead if the theology of Aquinas had been adequate in its time. This is the lesson of navigation and the peril of going too far from shore when not equipped to navigate. As perilous as being too close to shore in a storm. And Heidegger might have known, for all of Hoelderlin on the sun, ships and shores. The issue was not speed or the Raketenflugzeug. Homer's time was not ready for the open sea.
Perhaps if Heidegger had taken the post in Japan, he would have overcome his German tradition - or at least stepped off his path - and not simply onto another.
Question: what was Heidegger's comprehension of Japanese ceramics?
The Heidegger Case
Domenico Losurdo's contribution "Heidegger and Hitler's War" in Rockmore and Margolis The Heidgger Case opens its Sec II with an egregious error.
From that bit of idiocy I find it difficult to take seriously anything that Losurdo says in this piece. A marxist, he sees Hitler and Stalin's dictatorships as the outcome of western theology. The history of China he is able to neglect safely as it lies outside the western corpus, the western opere.
But to say that war "broke out" is not just to offer an interpretation, a characterization, an impression, it is to mistate the simple facts.
Roy Elveton of Carleton College has an article in The Journal of Value Inquiry "Domenico Losurdo, Heidegger and the Ideology of War: Community, Death and the West" which may or may not shed some light.
"The war.. broke out .. in the West."The war did not "break out": that characterization of the onset of hostilities may characterize many wars but not this one: the war begins on September 1, 1939, with the invasion of Poland. It followed one day after an SS propaganda stunt today known as the Gleiwitz incident.
From that bit of idiocy I find it difficult to take seriously anything that Losurdo says in this piece. A marxist, he sees Hitler and Stalin's dictatorships as the outcome of western theology. The history of China he is able to neglect safely as it lies outside the western corpus, the western opere.
But to say that war "broke out" is not just to offer an interpretation, a characterization, an impression, it is to mistate the simple facts.
Roy Elveton of Carleton College has an article in The Journal of Value Inquiry "Domenico Losurdo, Heidegger and the Ideology of War: Community, Death and the West" which may or may not shed some light.
Taking Arendt at her word
In Sylvie Courtine-Denamy's Three Women in Dark Times we find this troubling quote:
Nothing in this matches Hugo Ott's documentation of the facts: but then again, Arendt was not there to know.
What is at issue is not an "image". In 1946, Arendt is speaking as a journalist. Having been briefly in Gurs Camp, she may have believed that she understood what a Vernichtungslager was: but she did not.
The Goshgarian translation dates from 2000, Cornel University Press, long after it was known that Heidegger was no "old-fashioned nationalist" blabbing at a Bavarian Stammtisch and hankering for the days of Bismarck.
The scholars first put to one side by the Nazis as of relatively little use to them were old-fashioned nationalists like HeideggerG.M.Goshgarian may have meant "such as Heidegger" but the text bears a reference in footnote 88 of the English version to Arendt, "The Image of Hell".
Nothing in this matches Hugo Ott's documentation of the facts: but then again, Arendt was not there to know.
What is at issue is not an "image". In 1946, Arendt is speaking as a journalist. Having been briefly in Gurs Camp, she may have believed that she understood what a Vernichtungslager was: but she did not.
The Goshgarian translation dates from 2000, Cornel University Press, long after it was known that Heidegger was no "old-fashioned nationalist" blabbing at a Bavarian Stammtisch and hankering for the days of Bismarck.
Philosophers, presence and disclosure
We are no longer confined to refer to the songs of the humpback whales: for some time it has been known that African elephants emit low frequency sound which travels long distance.
This is so much unlike smoke signals or flashing mirrors.
One imagines a foghorn when lost, a foghorn indicating the coast. Or a alphorn resounding in a valley. Or a distant carillon. But all of those are as signs of us or them, the others.
These elephants are not "beings", the philosopher tells us. Bluecher's contemporary, Peter Geach, still speaks of "brutes" in his Mental Acts.
And now we have elephants known to pass the mirror test of self-recognition. Oh, but not a "self", of course. Even Richard Hughes in his Jamaica tale remains quite Cartesian.
It is as if Heidegger almost reaches the body: he speaks of the body, but he is limited to the voice, the hand. The hands of Hitler. The voice of Hitler. The unveiling of of his Hannah.
cp: Michel Tournier, in "Le Roi des Aulnes" - a book not listed as in Arendt's library.
This is so much unlike smoke signals or flashing mirrors.
One imagines a foghorn when lost, a foghorn indicating the coast. Or a alphorn resounding in a valley. Or a distant carillon. But all of those are as signs of us or them, the others.
These elephants are not "beings", the philosopher tells us. Bluecher's contemporary, Peter Geach, still speaks of "brutes" in his Mental Acts.
And now we have elephants known to pass the mirror test of self-recognition. Oh, but not a "self", of course. Even Richard Hughes in his Jamaica tale remains quite Cartesian.
It is as if Heidegger almost reaches the body: he speaks of the body, but he is limited to the voice, the hand. The hands of Hitler. The voice of Hitler. The unveiling of of his Hannah.
cp: Michel Tournier, in "Le Roi des Aulnes" - a book not listed as in Arendt's library.
Northwestern University Press and Hugo Friedrich
When Northwestern University Press published Joachim Neugroschel's translation of Hugo Friedrich's Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik in 1974 they included a page "About the author" and a multi-page timeline.
Page ix tells us that Friedrich became a professor in Freiburg in 1937.
It goes on to tell us that iin 1957 he became a regular member of the German Academy of Language and Literature.
His habilitationschrift was on anti-romanticism in France.
There is no mention of Heidegger, Benno von Wiese or Hannah Arendt.
The note on the author in this translation presumes to tell us that he owe the most to a long list - including Jaspers - but where is Heidegger. Another absence.
We are left to determine whether the French occupying forces arrested Friedrich in 1944 or 1945 (as reported by Hugo Ott.)
We are left to puzzle over his lengthy absence from the rolls of the Academy.
His book, now something of a classic, has no mention of Hoelderlin or Heidegger.
Klaus L. Berghahn in his article on Celan offers a clue concerning Friedrich on expressionism. As Arendt would declaim in The Human Condition, "Expressionist art, but not abstract art, is a contradiction in terms."
It was none other than Hugo Friedrich who put Arendt in touch with Heidegger in 1950, providing his address.
Page ix tells us that Friedrich became a professor in Freiburg in 1937.
It goes on to tell us that iin 1957 he became a regular member of the German Academy of Language and Literature.
His habilitationschrift was on anti-romanticism in France.
There is no mention of Heidegger, Benno von Wiese or Hannah Arendt.
The note on the author in this translation presumes to tell us that he owe the most to a long list - including Jaspers - but where is Heidegger. Another absence.
We are left to determine whether the French occupying forces arrested Friedrich in 1944 or 1945 (as reported by Hugo Ott.)
We are left to puzzle over his lengthy absence from the rolls of the Academy.
His book, now something of a classic, has no mention of Hoelderlin or Heidegger.
Klaus L. Berghahn in his article on Celan offers a clue concerning Friedrich on expressionism. As Arendt would declaim in The Human Condition, "Expressionist art, but not abstract art, is a contradiction in terms."
It was none other than Hugo Friedrich who put Arendt in touch with Heidegger in 1950, providing his address.
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