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.

Chapter 6 of The Human Condition: The Vita Activa and the Modern Age

I have posted a first pass at annotating Chapter 6, "The Vita Activa and the Modern Age" of Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition. The posted versions are: plain text and text with my emphasis added.

For all of Arendt's attention to homo faber she has no mention of garments or clothing.  She comes close: mentioning "weave" and "silk".  She does mention the "toga" in a footnote on slaves.  This may be because she escaped before the requirement to wear a yellow Star of David.  The word "naked" occurs a few times but not "nursing" or "breast-feeding". The word "rape" occurs twice. She speaks even of "the labor of the woman in giving birth" but may herself never been engaged in the deliberate effort to act so as to increase her own chance of becoming pregnant.

She says: "women who with their bodies guarantee the physical survival of their species" but has no comment to parallel those of Heidegger on her own clothing when she first entered his office, wearing a hat which obscured her face.

Quote:

The fact that the modern age emancipated the working classes and the women at nearly the same historical moment must certainly be counted among the characteristics of an age which no longer believes that bodily functions and material concerns should be hidden. It is all the more symptomatic of the nature of these phenomena that the few remnants of strict privacy even in our own civilization relate to "necessities" in the original sense of being necessitated by having a body.

The depth psychologist would be struck by the term "remnants". The experience of the body is neglected by this student of  post-phenomenology.

She speaks of "marble torn out of the womb of the earth" but her consideration reification is pre-feminist. She speaks of "tame animals" as if oxen were parakeets or Syrian cats or gerbils - as if horses are "tamed" and not "broken".

The one occurence of "sex" is in "the odd notion of a division of labor between the sexes".

The word "gender" is absent.

The word "procreation" is present and birth is analyzed in the abstract: but what in experience precedes procreating is absent.

Had she lived to re-write or revise her book today, she could not ignore the two healthful activities of vigorous sex and vigorous exercise - both of which she, a heavy smoker, may have viewed as lacking telos.

There is no question that her marriage to Guenther Stern began as loveless and certainly was for some time sexless before she met Blücher.  Heidegger's language both in his letters and elsewhere makes it very clear what she, his "saucy wood--nymph" disclosed to him.

Sex without disrobing was practiced in a variety of communities in the western world in the early decades of the 20th Century.  The issue of nudity is documented by Bertrand Russell with regard to his first marriage.  Heidegger, like Wittgenstein, was very particular about his garb (both so unlike, say, Iris Murdoch.) but there is no reason to think that his "open marriage" with Elfride was any too modest (and the recent claim that Hermann Heidegger is not his son may be seen as confirming this.)

The current view of Neandrathal is that both sexes hunted, had elementary animal hide garments and decorated their skin.  It is too little appreciated that grooming for lice and skin decoration lie at the heart of the hominid social life as much as the hunt or seeking shelter: they were very important activities.  Unlike the apes, whom she mentions, the hominid female does not have an estrous cycle: experience and procreation are different activites in homo sapiens than in distant hominid species.  What is now clear, is that the "tool-maker" hominid may have come much earlier than previously thought.

In the annotations to Chapter Six the limitations of the Heideggerian view of man and technique should be made clear in so far as his standpoint constricted her view on topics ranging from the advances in arrow heads in the New World to the place of calculation in science.