what is it good for?
June 7th, 2009, search relatedRelated posts :: Germans outplayed by Ahmadinejad in their own Spiegel/Mirror :: Trannie *Logic* :: biography :: The Parable of the Tree and the House
Tags: Gestell
> Michael, you arer disposing too easily of the fuller ur-gestalt of
Heidegger.
> Keep in mind that would include his Roman Catholic background, his later
interest
> in Meister Eckhart’s understanding of gelassenheit and then his regression
to the
> devilization, or I should say the Wotonization, of the enframing will to
power by
> the Third Reich. In that case gelassenheit was not even a thought if at
all ever
> party to a “thinker’s” understanding.
Knowing some of Heidegger’s writings, I consider that Heidegger would have
thought that calling real situations as either good or bad is a display of
bad taste. He read his Nietzsche and he understood that his own thinking has
to go beyond good and evil, which are primitive, or better said, arbitrary
concepts (relative, subjective, socially constructed, culture-specific). For
Heidegger, things are, events are, and whether we consider them good or bad
that’s just our own all too human propensity to place the stickers upon real
events, according to our own taste.
Heidegger said that optimism and pessimism are childish conceptions.
Optimism sees reality as inherently good and pessimism sees it as inherently
evil. So, I guess he characterized optimism and pessimism as childish due to
his conceit for the arbitrary notions of good and evil. I think he would
have characterized himself as a realist (not in the metaphysical sense, but
as compared to optimism and pessimism).
Speaking of metaphysical realism, Heidegger’s phenomenology is just a higher
form of empiricism. In fact, his theory of Gestell is just a no-nonsense
form of von Bertalanffy’s systems theory. Heidegger just described highly
abstract historical processes, he was descriptive not prescriptive about
them.
So, there is no devilization (of Gestell) in Heidegger’s work. Such
devilization exists only in the eyes of the beholder. It is Heidegger’s
reader who considers Gestell as evil and the fate of the world afflicted by
the Gestell as tragic and dramatic, not Heidegger himself, since Heidegger
is beyond such global melodrama.
And Wotonization is a straw man, when applied to his theory of Gestell.
Wotan’s adepts (the Nazis, as drawing their substance from journals as
Ostara and from occult organizations such as Thulle Society) were just
adepts of the metaphysics of the imbeciles, as Adorno characterized
occultism. Heidegger rendered his theories in a scholarly acceptable way, so
he was beyond the temptation to become a guru for those addicted to popular
(Volk-ish) metaphysics. Heidegger did not write that Jews are inherently bad
for two reasons: first since he did not share the pseudoscientific
assumptions of Nazi racism and second because he considered that it was not
his task to call people good or evil. For him, people were, they were
performing actions, creating events, creating culture, thinking, but he did
not saw them as good or bad.
And, beyond his formal membership of the NSDAP, there is little trace of
Nazi ideology in Heidegger’s writings. The only suspicion of nationalism in
his work is a deep philosophical concern for the cultural fate of the
metaphysical people (the Germans), smashed between American materialism,
Russian materialism and the rule of its own idealistic but metaphysically
imbecile political elite.
As I said some time ago, Gestell is Heidegger’s version of the Biblical fall
into sin. Only, Heidegger is not moralistic, he does not believe in sin and
redemption and as said above, speaking about good and evil is for him a
proof of lack of metaphysical insight. His concept of Gestell is amoral and
beyond good and evil.
Greetings,
Tudor
