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:

Das Geschenk des Gusses kann ein Trink sein.
Er gibt Wasser.
Er gibt Wein zu trinken. [S. 164]

Why "kann ... sein"?  If this does not bring the gushing labia [Schamlippen] to the mouth itself, then consider this:
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 Fassen
das Fassende
die Leere
die Ausgieß als Spenden

The 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.

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.

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.

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.

The Physiology of Grief: the absent body in Heidegger

notes: macaques and the old fellow

notes: the elephant and her exhausted calf

notes: grief, closure and the physical remains

Heidegger on "lebendige"

Evasive Heidegger: avoidance and lies