In memory of an existentialist clinician and his children

the existentialists on their children

  Nietzsche on his son, Hugo, as a middle child
 
  Kierkegaard on his oldest daughter, Sarah
 
  de Beauvoir on her youngest daughter, Claire
 
When Richard (Dick) Eaton Johnson was working on his book on Henri Bergson - a book he abandoned for an effort to write a book on Karl Jaspers - he was writing with two young children at home.

An existentialist reading of Bergson as an author treating lived-temporality has an awkward moment - my relation with my adult child - even my grey-haired adult offspring - is not my relation with a child. There is the extreme border case of my relation to the dying child - or the young child to the dying parent - but in the normal case (oh, a troubling notion, that) this is not the relation to the growing child.

There is the case of the male existentialist author and his young bride: as a mature woman she may have quite a different relation to her former husband and his young companion.  But from age 2 to 10 this is not the manner of disruption/irruption/rupture usually characteristic of a healthy relation of
parent to child.  'Healthy', I say, for having been free of violence verbal or physical, whether as victim or witness; for having been free of threat of starvation, loss, pointless separation or complete lack of privacy or lack of other respect of boundaries as accepted in a cultural community. And a child not ridiculed before peers or shamed before peers without provocation or cause. And a child not exposed to wanton drunkeness as a daily regimen.

Gabriel Marcel has written of the child, but who was the child Isaac to Kierkegaard?  Or the child Jeshua, later called 'the Nazarene', an itinerant stone-cutter, preacher, healer - and even if not of his own choosing - prophet.

Not that we have always had our notions of child, teen, single young adult woman, single mature woman, bored retiree, retired female executive.

What we do now have is a spectrum of relations of parnet to child charateristic of Aspergers and varying degrees and styles of autism.  This might have given the existentialist pause.  These are neither extreme of the prodigee, the genius or the psychotic or simply demonically evil.

What will count as a cure for the existentialist child psychiatrist?  Would it not be a more or less normal relation of the child to parent? But what about the child's independence and relation to arbitrary school children - the normal lot in urban life?

What we come to here is repetition: the parent reports that her child brought her flowers and said,

"These are for you - do you like them?"

What is key is that she reports* this.  And if this were one singular instance, never repeated, and before no witness?  Here is the nexus where Spinoza and Hume collide with Heidegger and in which we can see most clearly that Jaspers was the existential clinician's philosopher.

* To report is not to recount.  In recounting I often repeat myself, or even mistake the context. What I recount about my child, most often my wife has heard me tell before.  [ to be continued ]

Ricoeur on recognition

The Vienna lectures on Recognition have a spectre which I cannot shake: Ricoeur and Gusdorf, Ricoeur immediately after the war and Ricoeur with Eliade.

The extent of the falsity and brutality of the post-war French purges is very sobering.  de Gaulle is influenced not to commute a death sentence by the impression - the recall - that he had seen that man on a magazine cover in a German uniform (likely he was mistaken as to that magazine cover.)  It was imaginable that André Gide be hanged (the doctine of homosexual and esthete weakness) when in fact the Wehrmacht may have triumphed because of the tyranny of military college maxims ("retreat to form a line") and misapprehensions of intent and counter-deception ("they will think that this is a ruse, so instead it will in fact be our intent ...").

Could Ricoeur not recognize himself in those "errors of his youth" ?  He was already married.  He was already a hero.  This was not the case with Eliade in Romania.

His first tasks are paraphrase:  paraphrase Jaspers, Marcel, then Husserl. 

Mikel Dufrenne later had a falling out with the appropriation of Heidegger in France (he was himself a case in point) - but how much of it could he see at work in Ricoeur (Ricoeur sees laborious intersubjectivity constructions as an argument against such efforts - would such be an argument against linguistics?  Evolution?  Economics? The search to identify authors of the Old Testament?)

Husserl and Jaspers abandoned: the strange case of Dufrenne and Ricoeur in the early 1950's; the role of Merleau-Ponty, Jean Wahl and others.

note: Ricoeur on "gift", "giving", "receiving", "gratitude" at the close of the lectures.

Arendt and the Two Escapes

I have been able to find no mention of any documentation of the reports that Arendt escaped Gestapo custody twice: first in Berlin in 1933 and then in France in 1939 (the camp of the Gurs.)

Once is miraculous.  Twice should have invited someone to look for some documentation.  Are we to believe that the captors wanted no record of their bungling?

There is a document said to be the list of deportees to round up which we are told bears Karl Jaspers name and that of his wife Gertrud (what is the explanation of how she escaped so long - who did Jaspers know who provided this protection or this exception?  Jaspers had not served in WWI.  What was her exemption?)

re-readig Karl Jaspers: 1930 - 1937

I had intended to cotnrast Jaspers post-1945 on the idea of the university and Liz Coleman on her plan for Bennington College (while noting the seeming collapse of the FNCU in Saskatchewan.)

But I cannot reconcile Heidegger's letter to Elfride of March 19, 1933.  The Reichstag fire had been on Feb 27 of that year.  Granted, the next act in the consolidation of Hitler's power is March 23.  So I look to the letters of Jaspers to Heidegger and Arendt for some sign that he grasps what is happening.  It is more than sad and disillusioning.

One reason that I work on site-specific research browsers and the Curl web content language at aule-browser.com is to be able to place side-by-side such texts as these with and without combinations of links and annotations - and to let the reader or researcher determine that quotations are not out of context or poorly translated.

Start with the letter to Elfride.  We seem to learn from the assessment of Heidegger which Jaspers held back from the 1st Ed. of the Schilpp "Jaspers" collection that Jaspers found a kindred spirit in Heidegger.  Their first meeting is so telling: it is an "occasion" at the Husserl home.  We have only Jaspers word that he confronted Husserl on the matter of Afra Geiger.  What I take from my reading is that Jaspers and Heidegger were given to mocking Husserl, Cassirer and the like (see Jaspers 1930 on "The Sophist".)

In the letter to Elfride, Heidegger makes one of his unkind references to Jaspers wife. Gertrud, a Jew.  Jaspers is portrayed by Heidegger as open to the possibilities that are opening up.  Now comes the name of Kriek.  Then Baumgarten. This latter is key.  Why would Heidegger lie to Elfride about Jaspers' views?

I flip to the Jaspers letters to Hannah Arendt of this period: full of "the German character" and his doubts about what roots a Jew could have in sharing the fate of Europe's Jews (he is imagining assimilation here, not annihilation - the focus is the Arendt book on Rahel.)

I then flip to the Jaspers letters to Heidegger (these are noa vailable in German in Minnesota colleges and universities, so I am reduced to an incomplete "preview" on Google Books.)

One possibility is that Jaspers now fears Heidegger and is bilking him for information - deceiving the ever mendatious Heidegger (one could take this impression from the post-war letters between Arendt and Jaspers - but we now know how much she deliberately misrepresented her role in rehabilitating Heidegger in those very letters to her "most Honoured").  I see no sign to indicate this.

Here is what I am able to read in "Briefwechsel 1920-1963" by Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Walter Biemel, Hans Saner.  Jaspers would have us believe that it was only in 1934 that he learned of Heidegger's deunciation by letter (Dec. 1933).  What they were they discussing in early 1933 - Baumgarten and American pragmatism?  The Heidegger letter to Elfride suggests that there was an issue of "funds" that needed to be brought to the attention of Max Weber's widow.  Baungarten joined the NSDAP in 1937 and was later linked with Konrad Lorenz in Koenigsberg.  What is essential to know is whether Baungarten's opposition in Freiburg was to the SA (Rohm's SturmAbteilung was Heidegger's preferred movement.)

It is almost impossible to form a clear opinion of where Jaspers stood without being able to lay side-by-side the original 1930 text of "Die Geistige Situation der Zeit" and the sanitized 1946 version.

In the letter to Elfride, Heidegger asserts that it was Jaspers who ensured the career of Ernst Krieck!. (task: look for the connection of Kriek and Elisabeth Blochmann.)  Kriek had already been censured in 1931 for his use of the Hitler salute (which we now know Heidegger retained even after 1936.)

Jaspers to Arendt: that Heidegger spoke like an anti-Semite when with an anti-Semite, spoke like a radical conservative when with him; spoke like a Lutheran when with Husserl; spoke very carefully while first at Catholic Frieburg and later with often wirh caution at Protestant Marburg (see Husserl's letter to Natorp; see Heidegger to Elfride on "debate" at Marburg.)

From reading the letters to Elfride where so much is not said:
  My suspicion: that a DNA test would show that Hermann was in fact Heidegger's biological son - and not the son of Friedel Caesar. 
  My second suspicion: that Erike Birle was compromised by Heidegger: in 1945 her first son is named Martin.  She was 14 at the time she became a foster daughter.

Jacques Taminiaux on Husserl and Merleau-Ponty

Yesterday I had the misfortune of learning of Taminiaux and the Wallon movement (as if they were somehow oppressed or wronged - a frequent view of the Wallons among Quebeckers in the 80's.)

The political positions of Searle and Ricoeur in 1968: who could be further apart? (see his interviews with Marcel in that year); Hilary Putnam - rather extreme - but not as consistently so as Chomsky.

The great contrast: Bernard Bolzano.  A century ahead of his time.

Today re-reading the 1930-31 "Geistige Situation" of Jaspers - without acess to a pre-1946 edition.  But it has not been so very sanitized: very sobering reading - another radical conservative - and the mocking of the likes of Cassirer in which he indulged with Heidegger.

In 1968 the Protestant philosopher Ricoeur uses a military metaphor - the advancing frontlines - to introduce the interviews with the Catholic Marcel.  Ricoeur: a real fool, no matter how revered for his balancing acts - all performed on a more a hawser than a cable - and over a rather shallow pit.

Latest moment to gag: Denys Turner on the "Atheism Tapes" invoking Heidegger without mention but as the ultimate ground for religious faith.  Jonathon Miller chooses to be polite and almost deferential to the buffoon - or even in 2003 too ignorant to object - (that interview was suppressed in the PBS broadcast.)

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.

The other funeral

In February, 1969, Hannah Arendt is in Germany for Karl Jaspers funeral. She uses the occasion to arrange a meeting with Heidegger: he wants Wednesday morning for his work, but he can see he in the afternoon. After all his many train trips to Heidelberg to meet with Jaspers, he does not attend the funeral.

Arendt using this occasion to meet with the Master - the funeral of her "most honoured" - deeply offends my sensibilities. I may be alone in this.

That Jaspers failed to grasp who Heidegger was - as evidenced in Jasper's most explicit letter to Arendt - but that Arendt did not - I find I am quite sure of the former and unsure of the latter - in spite of what she wrote to Jaspers in her most explicit letter.

Even more disturbing for a reader of philosphy, is her letter to Heidegger of 1972 which reveals that only now is she reading Merleau-Ponty. This is the author of the human condition who had spent a term as a student of Husserl.

As boggling - if true - is her assertion in another letter to Heidegger that she does not understand the Jaspers "attack" on Bultmann when any reading of the alter Jaspers makes clear theology must not fog into philosophy or philosophy cloud itself with theology. His reply to Ricoeur in the Schilpp volume is very incisive (Ricoeur, in so many ways riding on the coattails of Bultmann and then drawing back in the Gospel as "narative".)

Jaspers saw clearly what theology would be tempted by in Heidegger - Loewith saw it very clearly - and yet the non-religious Arendt cannot see it. And yet she had spent daya and days with Jaspers in Basel - communing and arguing.

Jaspers never had his open dialogue with Heidegger or his Heidegger book. Women in philosphy also cannot look back to an open exchange between Susanne Langer and Hannah Arendt - perhaps at Bard instead of Davos.

And then the shadows: what we know now that suggests that Heidegger may have been abused as a boy - can we ignore what may have befallen Hannah at the hands of the step-father (especially if he saw her as divided from her mother, said to be close to his daughters?) Surely any feminist reading of Arendt should ask: where her book on the victims whom she knew personally as women - such as Afra Geiger? All that we have is Hannah and the great men ... one chapter on Rosa L. and one chapter on Isak D. Was she unaware of Edith Stein's fate and it's parallel with that of Afra Geiger? Did Heidegger never speak of Stein?

note: for the critical year of 1918, in addition to Ott see Martin Heidegger: between good and evil by Rüdiger Safranski

The Shadows quotes:

helpless, betrayed youth

This reading is suggested if only out of respect for the victim of molestation and her "fastasies" at the hands of Freud and the others who came to Daseinanalyse as "weak" in the eyes of that master and magician.

Heidegger and Physics: space and Time

Hugo Ott reports on Heidegger's study in natural sciences and his pretentious claims with regard to philosophy, physics and relativity theory: most striking his Ott's confirmation that Heidegger sat no exams for these lectures.

I suggest that Heidegger had no grasp of either the relevant mathematics or the physics: when Heidegger states later in life that the theory of electromagnetic wave propagation is only understood by a handful of experts he repeats an old cliché about relativity theory: but he is talking about Maxwell, not Einstein and Planck, for his example for his listners is radio and television.  Even the most rudimentary knowledge of the actual history of late 19th Century science reveals the importance of Maxwell's simplifications and the hyptheses drawn from them which were confirmed as wireless telegraphs emerged as a technique (Maxwell of 1864 predates such relevant patent applications as those of 1872 and 1896.)

Heidegger seems to have believed that he would provide a correction to physics: whether he intended to correct Weyl or Einstein is not clear, for Heidegger was never a guest of von Neumann at Princetion.  When Heidegger gave lectures later in Munich, he lectured in the Fine Arts and not as a guest of mathematics or physics departments.

In stark contrast, Heidegger's opponent at Davos, polymath Ernst Cassirer, understood Special and General Relativity as well as did his contemporaries Russell and Whitehead.

Nowhere does Heidegger insist on the requirement to be based in science as emphasized by his interlocutor of the 1920's, Karl Jaspers.  It is very likely that Heidegger truly believed that Aristotle on motion had been left unscathed by Galileo, Kepler and Newton.

Heidegger certainly believed that his Zeit-raum was the philosphical alternative to Einstein Raum-zeit.

For another view, see Catherine Chevalley "Heidegger and the physical sciences"in "Martin Heidegger: critical assessments, Volume 1" edited by Christopher E. Macann