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.