OPM 243(244), October 15th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 239-240

Heidegger, Heidegger, Heidegger….1933-1945!?!?!!

Stepping back, for a moment, I have to just let that be…

…there’s never been a question of his member in the Nazi party, but only just what it meant for him to have been active, then passive, and then the silence in and about his involvement in the party.   Arendt offers an apology with her “Heidegger at 80” essay in the New York Review of Books.  And Schürmann’s book ignores it.  Between Arendt (writing in the 70’s) and Schürmann (writing in the 80’s) one finds ‘cover’.   But here we are in 2014, and the cover is blown, as the song says.   Last week there was the sincere but naïve push-back from my student, who had discovered the recent documentary about the recently published black notebooks.  [A  Heidegger Conference which I hoped to attend, was held at the CUNY Grad Center on September 11 & 12; the linked video features a panel with the filmmaker.]  I was challenged to the core by the student’s concern that, in fact, Heidegger’s was a thinking that was reactionary and fascist in nature, a position articulated by Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe in his Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry.  I picked up Lacoue-Labarthe’s book yesterday when I was working at the USM Portland Glickman library.   The challenge for Lacoue-Labarthe is to understand Heidegger as the thinker of the movement, that is, the one who understood the destiny unfolding with the National Socialist party.   No sooner had I finished reading Lacoue-Labarthe, when I turned back to Castoriadis who, not surprisingly, confronts Heidegger at the beginning of his book Figures of the Thinkable.  Castoriadis wants to make clear, from the onset, that his reading of the ancient Greeks stands not only apart but in opposition to Heidegger’s ‘interpretations’ and ‘translations’, which, he argues, “violate horrendously” the originals.  The so-called ‘translations’ are bent and twisted to serve his category of Dasein, says Castoriadis, and for this reason he is blinded to the most basic historicity.  “…like everything Heidegger writes about the Greeks…[it is] characterized to an incredible and monstrous degree…by a systematic ignorance of the city, of politics, of democracy, and of their central position in Greek creation.   The inevitable result of this ignorance is obviously a twisted ‘understanding’ of Greek philosophy, which is indissociably connected with the city and with democracy, even when it is hostile to them.  Even Plato, and especially Plato, is not only unthinkable and impossible without the democratic city but quite simply incomprehensible as a philosopher without his persistent struggle against democracy.  That is something the Nationalist-Socialist Heidegger (1933-1945) is neither willing nor able to see.”(p. 9)

There is a bit of catharthis happening here with the citation of Castoriadis, a purgative release that I have felt compelled to make since last Tuesday’s seminar.  It became necessary yesterday after reading Lacoue-Labarthe and then Castoriadis, and then wondering what to make of Heidegger’s appropriation of the misanthropic Heraclitus, and what to make of my appropriation of Heidegger and Heraclitus?  It is clear that the ancient is no friend of the polis, nor of democracy, but I have maintained that the place of his thinking is properly in Nature, and his obedience to the law disclosed therein, his duty to the force of Logos gathering him into the close proximity with phusis.   I see in Heraclitus what I see in Thoreau, which is the discovery of a more primordial and originary place of thinking.   But I can hardly say the same of Heidegger, although there are moments, for sure, and the naturalist turn may be the place to initiate a confrontation with his thinking.  For that is what is called for now: a confrontation, and not simply an engagement, nor a discussion.   The meditations from a decade ago are the latter, and I will continue to revisit them as such.  However, moving forward, especially with the project of koinonia, I will have to be mindful of the apolitical implications of post-humanism, and confront those head on.  

The confrontation can begin with the meditation written this day ten years ago.  What is the ‘risk’ happening with the going-under, the diminishment, the dwelling in-between ‘self’ and ‘self’?  “…the principal risk is associated with the diminishment of the self occurring in the renunciation of ‘self’ as the subject of ‘certainty’.”(10/15/04 BL 240)  The risk is happening with the reception of the advent, the new.    To become a learner is to take a risk because in learning one is “wandering into the realm of uncertainty.  Such wandering is the occasion of questioning…Those who go-under raise the essential questioning that opens the realm of dialogic enjoinment.”(10/15/04 BL 240)   

Reiteration: going-under is the movement of Zarathustra, the figure of the thinking that is organized in Being and Learning chapter 9; this movement is the descent to the ground of the Open, passing through the opening where the threshold scholar dwells.  [A question remains unexamined: is the threshold scholar that teacher identified in the paper on apathetic reading, the one who holds back the beginner, the novitiate not yet ready to move on the region of the Open? “Apatheia is a holding back of the desire to leap onto those country paths, a disciplined restraint that compels us to dwell in that threshold, that portal, in the stoa, from whence the Stoic name is derived.”(excerpt from my PES 2013 New Mexico paper)]   The ongoing preparation happens in the threshold; the gathering of the learning community in the Open.  Is there an interplay between the two places?  Perhaps, especially if the threshold is the place of study and the Open the place of dialogic interaction; the threshold is akin to that dark porch where Socrates found retreated by himself before entering Agathon’s home and the symposium. 

Going-under is thus a going onto the Open, that primal ground where, to paraphrase the young Marx, everything is questioned.  The mature Heidegger is cited on 10/15/04: “Those who go-under are the one who constantly question.”  In the confrontation with Heidegger we might take up that old strategy I remember from my grad school days: reading Heidegger against Heidegger.    In this instance the Auseinandersetzung would be the one that would set against one another the figures of ‘Heraclitus’ and ‘Socrates’, the lonely (weeping) solitary figure [a Nietzschean hero if there ever was one], and man of the marketplace seeking to ‘make friends of the Athenians’ as Arendt put it.  The confrontation between the lover of mountain forest and the lover of the streets would allow us to push back against Heidegger’s identification of Socrates as the ‘purest thinker in the West’ because he endured the ‘draft’.  It is not enough to rest this claim on the fact that Socrates never wrote anything, although this is most certainly a significant point of emphasis.  And the category of ‘pureness’ is dubious because his strength to endure the gathering force of Logos that places him into questioning.  Socrates would himself have wholeheartedly confronted that label on the ontological grounds that no human could claim ‘purity’.   He more than anyone he knew of embraced the totality of his impurity.  He fundamentally flawed in the sense that he claimed to possess no knowledge.  What he had was strength and courage, the power to endure questioning and to compel others to do the same.  It is a matter of the strength to endure the corruption (impurity) of our mortal being, and to bring others into the full embrace of that corruption.   The Athenians well understood this was what Socrates was about, and for this reason brought him to trial for ‘corrupting the youth.’

The holding back happening with apathetic reading is a preparation for the risk taking venture that is the critical movement of Logos gathering human logoi and setting it in motion.   The risk, as I written about since the first meditations of this project, happens when the self-certain (Cartesian?) subject is subjected to critical question, an agonistic interrogation.  This is described by Heidegger as “disquiet questioning” and the “gathering unto the most question-worthy” that “withstands the utmost fury of the abandonment of being.”(cited on 10/15/04, BL 240)  This ‘withstanding’ happens with the Socratic endurance that is capable of remaining in the draft, that current created by the withdrawal and blowing through those cracks, the gap between ‘self’ and  ‘self.’  The one who can remain steadfast in that draft has the strength to dwell in the ontological uncertainty of the gap between past and future, the moving present.  The fury is withdrawal of being felt by the experience of uncertainty, of not knowing, which is the mark of the Socratic wisdom, the Socratic strength to embrace the corruption of our mortal being.  “Uncertainty arrives with the questioning the enjoins the standing before the unfathomable depth of the ‘not yet’.” (10/15/04, BL 240)