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.

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,

[...]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.

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:

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.

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.

Written in 1929; published in 1930: Heidegger and Langer

The last chapter of Suzanne Langer's, Tthe Practice of Philosphy" (it's preface by Whitehead is dated 1929)  concerns wisdom and appears in print in 1930.  It would appear to be a forgotten book - even among women in philosophy interested in the topic of woman philosophers.

The last chapter - an Epilogue -  provides a striking contrast to the Heidegger of 1927-1939 (and his Davos confrontation with Cassirer.)

Of note is Chapter VII, "Insight", which is said to have influenced Bernard Lonergan.

Three topics

Stephen A. Erickson opens his "Language and Being" with three questions.

I propose 3 topics, each with an exemplar:

1. The elephant and her fallen calf (Q: does she later avoid that spot?)
2. The macaque "aunties" and the fallen "old alpha" (Q: what was their behavior when the young tyrant died?)
3. The bottle-nose dolphin and the camouflaged cuttlefish (Q: Do the dolphins look for "coral" which is not coral?  Do they co-ordiante this search (lead and wingman) to detect cuttlefish fleeing/escaping the "deceived" predator? )

Additional topic: we are not the "naked ape" but the hominid who hides his pigment markings under mats and hides.  Pigmented marks on the skin are the beginning of the human.

These topics seem to be more in the spirit of Jaspers and science than Heidegger and oracular obscurantism.

The fundamental question in instance 1) is whether we have only an observed object (the calf) and mere causally explained behavior (and not an emotion of distress and then loss and grief.)

The fundamental question in 2) is whether we are looking into an evolutionary appendix, a mere dead-end, and not a stage on the way towards culture.

The fundamental question in 3) is whether dolphins understand that some coral is in fact a cuttlefish disguised as coral (and only secondarily whether they are noting a mental representation of coral by the unlucky cephalopod - or if they are observing an inadequate misrepresentation - or if they are merely forming a belief - or merely handling inputs and producing output behavior?  Can our understanding complement a causal explanation without undermining the marine science? [this as a response to Heidegger on the merely clever heliocentrism of the few astronomers]