Heidegger

Cologne 31-Jan-2007

michaelP schrieb Wed, 31 Jan 2007 13:51:11 +0000:

> > michaelP schrieb Wed, 31 Jan 2007 05:45:37 +0000:
> >
> >> MichaelE donated this recently:
> >>
> >> > “Der Tod, wenn wir jene Unwirklichkeit so nennen wollen, ist das
> >> > Furchtbarste, und das Todte festzuhalten, das, was die größte Kraft
> >> > erfordert. Aber nicht das Leben, das sich vor dem Tode scheut und von
> >> > der Verwüstung rein bewahrt, sondern das ihn erträgt und in ihm sich
> >> > erhält, ist das Leben des Geistes. Er gewinnt seine Wahrheit nur, indem
> >> > er in der absoluten Zerrissenheit sich selbst findet. Diese Macht ist er
> >> > nicht, als das Positive, welches von dem Negativen wegsieht, wie wenn
> >> > wir von etwas sagen, dies ist nichts oder falsch, und nun, damit fertig,
> >> > davon weg zu irgend etwas anderen übergehen; sondern er ist diese Macht
> >> > nur, indem er dem Negativen im Angesicht schaut, bei ihm verweilt.
> >> > Dieses Verweilen ist die Zauberkraft, die es in das Sein umkehrt.”
> >> > (Hegel, Briefe)
> >> >
> >> > “Death, if we want to call this unreality thus, is the most terrible
> >> > thing, and to firmly hold what is dead, is what demands the greatest
> >> > power. But the life of thinking spirit is not the life that shies away
> >> > from death and keeps itself pure, untouched by devastation, but the life
> >> > that bears death and maintains itself in it. The thinking spirit gains
> >> > its truth only by finding itself in absolute turmoil/tornness. This
> >> > power it is not as the positive which looks away from the negative, like
> >> > when we say of something that it is nothing or false, and now, over and
> >> > done with, pass on away from it to something else, but it is this power
> >> > only by looking the negative in the face, tarrying with it. This
> >> > tarrying is the magical power that turns it around into being.” (Hegel,
> >> > Letters)
> >> >
> >> > Fancy getting a letter like that.
>
> mP:
> >> … and we just have (thanks, Michael). To whom was this letter originally
> >> written? Can you say what translates to “thinking spirit” in the second and
> >> third sentences? I remember that, given Derrida’s considerable and subtle
> >> energies in this, Heidegger’s (thinking and speaking of) ’spirit’ has a most
> >> convoluted and complex trajectory in his thinking (much like ‘metaphysics’
> >> in a way that accompanies his thinking in both tension and relaxation,
> >> turnings and rest, strife and love, (even, mention and use)). Is it simpler
> >> in Hegel?
>
> >> ps: I have largely avoided reading Hegel (in much the same way I used to
> >> avoid hearing Beethoven), but every now and then his thinking seems so
> >> utterly essential and certainly necessary for hearing and bearing
> >> Heidegger’s thinking-fugues.
> >
> > ME: “Thinking spirit” is my rendering of “Geist”. I came across this Hegel
> quote
> > in an art catalogue on the work of Uwe Lausen (committed suicide young), where
> > it is cited without date or addressee of the letter or reference. My own
> edition
> > of Hegel only has the works, not the correspondence. There’s no dispensing
> with
> > Hegel. For one thing, Marx’s philosophy (i.e. insofar as Marx is a philosophy,
> > and not an historian or social theorist) cannot be understood without Hegel’s
> > Logik.
> >
> > Heidegger claims that, along with the Phänomenologie, Hegel’s Logik is a
> > “Theologie”, and that this “theology is worldly. They [Logik und
> Phänomenologie
> > des Geists] think the worldliness of the world insofar as world means here:
> > beings in their totality…” (’Hegels Begriff der Erfahrung (1942/43)’
> > _Holzwege_ 1st ed. S.187)
>
> Thanks, Michael; Heidegger’s point, or rather zone, then, is that Hegel (as
> ontotheology) still takes his bearings from and with beings (as a whole)
> rather than the be-ing of beings?

ME: No, not at all. Hegel is the finest of metaphysicians/ontologists. There is no
metaphysics/ontology without the ontological difference.

> That Hegel (if read with some subtlety and
> grace) points to be-ing in his leaving it out as beings-as-a-whole?

ME: No, not at all. For that would mean that Hegel were a positivist. But Hegel,
like Heidegger, fights against positivism (as represented e.g. by our resident kynic
= dog-philosopher who, from dog-perspective, sees only turds).

> In the
> same sense that Plato’s sophist speaks false speech, but a speech that
> points to true speech as that which false speech finishes too soon, stops
> too short with and thus rushes past without thinking…?

ME: No, Hegel is by no means a sophist, although he appreciates the sophists as the
educators of ancient Greece. They got people to _think_, a rare achievement.. In our
era of total immersion in media lethal to thinking, that could be welcomed.

> If I have gotten it
> not too falsely, this would make Heidegger’s thinking somewhat sub-versive,
> under-handed in his twisting-turning-stepbacking (like the ironies of the
> Platonic Socrates and Platonic Parmenides). In a way, Heidegger goes further
> than just finding Hegel in-dis-pensible: simply not to be gotten around, but
> threaded through into the weave (verwindung?).

ME: Heidegger does not go further, he goes backward — the step back to the clearing
of _alaetheia_. That has its own justification, but he (the Catholic) misses what
Hegel (the Swabian Protestant) has to offer. Heidegger butchers the question of the
political; Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie offers a wealth of thought on precisely that
question. Heidegger is also too hasty in classifying Hegel as a subjectivist
metaphysician; that label applies to Kant, but not to Hegel, and there are strong
parallels between Hegel’s critique of Kantian subjective idealism and Heidegger’s
critique of Kantian subjectivism.

Even an anti-liberal, anti-modern thinker such as Heidegger, who undertakes a
deconstruction of the metaphysics of subjectivity, can formulate the problem of
shared, social being as a problem of freedom, at least in 1928: “Being-together in a
genuine relationship of existence is only possible if each co-existing human being
can be and is properly him or herself. This freedom of being together with one
another, however, presupposes first of all the possibility of self-determination of
a being of the character of Dasein, and _it is a problem_ how Dasein as essentially
free can exist in the freedom of factically bound being-together-with-one-another.”
(Das Mitsein als eigentliches Existenzverhältnis ist nur so möglich, daß jeder
Mitexistierende je eigentlich er selbst sein kann und ist. Diese Freiheit des
Miteinander aber setzt die Möglichkeit der Selbstbestimmung eines Seienden vom
Charakter des Daseins überhaupt voraus, und _es ist ein Problem_, wie das Dasein als
wesenhaft freies in der Freiheit des faktisch gebundenen Miteinanderseins existieren
kann, _Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz_ Summer Semester
1928 GA26:175, my emphasis)

For Heidegger in 1934, however, freedom has become “freedom as a binding to the law
of the people’s spirit” (Freiheit als Bindung an das Gesetz des Volksgeistes,
GA16:295) and he claims that it was only after 1830 that “the binding to the law of
the people’s spirit was turned upside down into the arbitrariness of views and
individual opinion” (die Bindung an das das Gesetz des Volksgeistes wurde in das
Gegenteil verkehrt: Beliebigkeit der Ansichten und des Meinens des Einzelnen, ibid.)
– i.e. blatant individualism.

Hegel, as the thinker of mediation (Vermittlung), offers in his Rechtsphilosophie a
way of thinking the mediation between individual freedom and the universal, i.e.
social living in this case. Heidegger skips any mediation and proclaims a
totalitarian identity, just as Ernst Jünger does in _Der Arbeiter_: “…the type [of
the worker] knows no dictatorship because for it freedom and obedience are
identical” (Der Typus kennt keine Diktatur, weil Freiheit und Gehorsam für ihn
identisch sind. _Arbeiter_ p. 151). The explicitly anti-liberal, totalitarian trait
in Heidegger’s post-1929 thinking is not a match for Hegel’s more mediated thinking
of the political (even though the older Hegel could be called arch-conservative)
and, instead of bothering to weave in what Hegel’s thinking has to offer, Heidegger
opts for an abstract negation of individual freedom and the obliteration of the
human subject.

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_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ Dr Michael Eldred -_-_-
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Posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 9:50 pm
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