ARTS3374 Heidegger and Metaphysics: Existential Phenomenology

ARTS3374 Heidegger and Metaphysics: Existential Phenomenology

3 March 2014

This is a third-year course in the history of philosophy in which we will read a series of texts by the twentieth-century German thinker Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). Prescribed for this course are the volume Basic Writings and a course reader that I have compiled: both are for sale in the UNSW bookshop. By the end of the semester we will have examined texts spanning four decades and covering many of the facets of Heideggers philosophical undertaking his confrontation with the history of metaphysics, his critique of the ways in which time, truth and humanism are understood, his reappraisal of mood and human finitude, and his interpretations of German and Ancient Greek poetry. As Heideggers immense corpus extends to over a hundred volumes in the Klostermann edition of his collected works, we will not be able to tell ourselves that we have dealt with him comprehensively. But we will have made a beginning. By the end of the semester I hope it will have become clear why Heidegger is accounted one of the most significant philosophers of the modern period and what challenges he presents for the future of philosophy.The texts set for this week are the lecture What is Metaphysics?, the magazine interview known in English by the title Only a God Can Save Us and the address The Self-Assertion of the German University. I have chosen these three texts because they introduce Heidegger the historical individual and Heidegger the thinker. Heidegger delivered the lecture What is Metaphysics? in 1929 on the occasion of his appointment to a professorship at the University of Freiburg in south-western Germany. Prima facie it is a more accessible text than Heideggers writings from earlier in the 1920s when he was engaged in a highly scholarly interrogation of the history of philosophy. It is not composed in the Byzantine language of Being and Time (1927), the work for which Heidegger is still best known and which first established his reputation in Germany. Although Being and Time amounts to a fundamental contestation of academic philosophy as it was then practised in Germany, it can hardly be claimed that Heidegger tailors his mode of presentation so that he might reach a non-academic public. In the lecture Heidegger articulates in an aggressively direct manner the metaphysical project to which he sees himself and his age committed. Rudolf Carnap published a famous critique of Heideggers lecture from the perspective of logical positivism, which we will read in week 6. The less technical style of the lecture is evidence of Heideggers newfound conception of the public mission of his philosophy. This conception informs Heideggers subsequent engagement with Hitlers dictatorship. By declaring his allegiance to the National Socialist regime in 1933, Heidegger committed what he later called the greatest stupidity of his life. In the interview conducted by the German news weekly Der Spiegel in 1966 and published only after his death, ten years later, Heidegger is asked to clarify details of his actions from the Nazi period. It is in this text that Heidegger makes his plainest statement regarding his tenure as head of the University of Freiburg and his interactions with the Nazi regime. The interview was prompted by a letter that Heidegger wrote to Der Spiegel to protest inaccuracies in an article on him that the magazine had printed earlier in 1966. In his responses to the two journalists, Heidegger is at pains to minimise the extent to which his political engagement might be perceived to have compromised his thinking. Nothing obliges us to take him at his word (the biographies by Ott, Safranski and Farias flesh out and correct Heideggers account). No doubt we would be right to be on guard against Heidegger. If we reject the cult of personality that grows up around a famous name, we give ourselves the chance to enter into a properly philosophical, properly critical dialogue with the writings signed with that name. But why should we even bother to read Heidegger? If we want to exercise our critical faculties in the evaluation of claims and their contexts, why choose this particular author? If we suspect that Heidegger was implicated in National Socialism to a greater degree than he is willing to admit, then what exactly do we stand to gain by a close reading of his works beyond the inspection of an error? In the interview with Der Spiegel Heidegger contends in what might seem a self-serving remark that after stepping down as rector of the University of Freiburg he took issue with the metaphysical foundations of National Socialism in his lectures. Should we decide that Heidegger is simply pursuing his self-exculpation with this remark, then we risk missing what critique of Nazism there is in Heideggers writings. It is for the sake of this critique and the perspectives it opens on the history and metaphysics of the West that I believe Heidegger is worth the study. Few readers of Heidegger would maintain that he represents what might pass for an orthodox Nazi position. He has been charged with crypto-fascism by thinkers such as Adorno and Lukcs. Is there a philosophy of Nazism that lies beneath the ostensible critique of the biologism and the militarism of the regime? If there is, how does it relate to the historical phenomenon known as Nazism? The third text that I have chosen for this weeks reading is the text where Heidegger states the philosophical basis for his decision to assume the rectorship under Hitler: if we are looking for crypto-Nazism in Heidegger, this address The Self-Assertion of the German University is the place to start looking. The lines of Heideggers critique of National Socialism predate his engagement with the regime. In the writings from the 1920s Heidegger already voices his stark opposition to the physicalist understanding of human beings that was to be a mainstay of Nazi eugenics. He reiterates this opposition in the 1930s and 40s. It is not to the Nazism of breeding programmes and the pseudo-biology of race that Heidegger declared his allegiance. Arguably what motivated Heidegger to join the movement was, on the one hand, a cultural nationalism to which the Nazis were happy to pay lip-service and, on the other hand, a dissatisfaction with Western liberal democracy that in Heidegger took the form of a critique of the Cartesian subject and in Nazism took the form of a suppression of individual rights. As a result of his complicity with the regime Heidegger lost his academic position at the end of the Second World War. This complicity is real and no one should pretend otherwise. It marks a low point in the history of philosophy. If we nonetheless choose to read Heidegger, we do not need to reproach ourselves that we are making light of his error, let alone of the enormities of the Nazi period. What we should want is for us to be able to take the measure of this low point, and for this task Heideggers own radical questioning of the definition of the human recommends itself. Heideggers political engagement marks a low point in the history of philosophy rather than its simple abandonment. The history of philosophy is compromised by it because the history of philosophy is not altogether removed from its disgrace. The shame of Heideggers engagement is extreme rather than singular. It is not the only objectionable episode in the lives of the great philosophers. We cannot single Heidegger out for unreadability on the grounds of his political position without asking ourselves why Aristotle and Locke, for instance, can excuse slavery without suffering a similar ban. But nor do we have to adopt the vantage ground of moral relativism with regard to the history of philosophy and its history of morally reprehensible utterances. The critique of philosophy is not an enterprise alien to philosophy itself, since it is philosophy that furnishes the concepts and criteria by which we may ascertain the deficiencies of Aristotle, Locke, Heidegger and others on specific matters.Lets first look more closely at the interview from 1966, as it shows Heidegger in the act of self-criticism. The German title of the interview is Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten, which we might translate as Only another god can save us rather than Only a god can still save us (p. 57). The sentence is an abjuration of human agency as much as of the deities of Christianity and paganism. As Heidegger immediately thereafter invokes the absence of the god and the assistance it provides, we cannot straightforwardly ascribe to late Heidegger the quietism of a resignation to a new god. Even though Der Spiegels title for the interview stems from one of Heideggers answers, it reduces his position to a somewhat unconventional, but not particularly disconcerting mysticism (it furthermore exposes him to the common caricature of the members of a failed authoritarian movement: the hopes that had been invested in a given political leader are spiritualised and the submissive position is carried over to the relationship with the divine). Heideggers reference to the absence of the god (die Abwesenheit des Gottes) is an allusion to the poem The Poets Vocation (Dichterberuf) by Friedrich Hlderlin (1770-1843) in which the absence of the god (Gottes Fehl) is itself that to which the poet looks for help. It is an anti-messianism, which retains the eschatological temporality of a coming event but empties it of the traditional presence of the deity. Heidegger wrote many hundreds of pages in commentaries on the poetry of Hlderlin. A portrait of Hlderlin accompanies the interview in the pages of Der Spiegel. Spliced in among the pages of the interview are also a couple of advertisements for anti-impotence devices. Are they there to undercut any gravitas that Heidegger might be held to possess? The incongruity calls attention to itself. Perhaps no derision was intended; we would then not need to think that an old man (Heidegger was 77 at the time of the interview) who sees no remedy besides the advent of a new god or a gods absence is being told that a solution is indeed at hand and available for purchase by mail order. Perhaps a sexualised consumerism is a way to ward off the spectres of the Nazi past. The apocalyptic register in which Heidegger pronounces on the course of world history is, if only in its sweep and in its despair, a throwback to the discourse of Hitlers dictatorship. One of the ways in which post-war West Germany turned its back on National Socialism, with many of its citizens dismissing appeals to the nation and the fate of Europe as bombastic abstractions, was through the development of a hedonistic individualism and a domestic consumerism (if this feuilletonistic generalisation is permissible). The Federal Republic of Germany thereby also cultivated a resemblance to American society and was able to advance its rehabilitation in the eyes of the West. If apolitical individualism is a line of defence against a return of the Nazis politics of the mobilised masses, it is not for that reason intrinsically unexceptionable. In the 1960s and 70s resistance arose in West Germany to the prevailing culture of consumerism and apolitical individualism. The statements of the terrorist Rote Armee Fraktion, for instance, often dwelt on the oppressiveness of the contemporary state and the spuriousness of its democratic credentials. A populace that out of political lethargy and self-absorption leaves the government to pursue its ends in effect legitimates it (the Latin expression qui tacet consentire videtur one who keeps silent is seen to agree enjoys the status of a procedural principle). In the interview with Der Spiegel Heidegger situates his analysis of National Socialism in the context of his reflections on technology. However, during the early 1930s, in the period of his term as Rector of the University of Freiburg, Heidegger does not treat technology with the explicitness and animus of his later writings. By criticising National Socialism as an aggravated expression of the general evils of technology, Heidegger can be said to blunt the edge of any denunciation he might have to make of the regime the world at large is not in a position to condemn the Nazis because the world at large is complicit in the technological civilisation of whose destructiveness the Nazis were simply the most legible manifestation (and Heidegger has nothing to apologise for). Insofar as Heideggers position amounts to self-righteous apologetics, then we should find fault with the mans moral blindness and weakness of character. Yet insofar as it throws a different light on the structures and practices of our age, then it should be assessed on its descriptive merits.What Heidegger addresses under the name of technology is not the totality of gadgets and machines, but rather a way in which the world is disclosed. Technology is a mode in which beings are shown as what they are. The successes of technology presuppose the dominance of this mode of disclosure and do not call it into question. The world of technology is a world that gives itself up to be manipulated. It is a world in which we recognise beings as material and employ them in our projects and designs. It is a world in which beings are judged as present, as objects either determinate or determinable and to be found in specific times and places. It is a world that gives itself up to human control. More precisely, as Heidegger refines it, it is a world that gives itself up to being controlled at the same time as human beings are given up to a definition of themselves as controllers. Heidegger is sceptical of what human agency might achieve in the face of technological civilisation because human agency is constitutive of the problem of this civilisation. And it is not just a problem with human agency. An abdication of human agency to the new god that will come would be an abdication of a particular agency and would not confront the issue of agency itself. The absence of God, as an absence of the very prototype of agency, is here an occasion for neither the believers despair nor the atheists jubilation. During the interview (pp. 45-46) Heidegger refers to the compromises he made while serving as rector. One of these compromises is the extravagant statement that identifies Hitler with the law and reality of Germany. We do not have to accept Heideggers remark to Der Spiegel in which he backs away from the statement, dismissing it as a strategic concession to the regime. We might conjecture that Heidegger is more concerned with his post-war reputation (if he revealed himself to be an unrepentant Nazi, he would have to forget about being taken seriously as a philosopher) than with a truthful confession of how he judges the continuity and cohesion of his utterances. Yet for this to be more than a conjecture, we would have to construct an interpretation of Heideggers thought in which the statement regarding Hitler would be of a piece with the life-long reflections on the question of being (I am not confident that such an interpretation is feasible). Heidegger declares that he stands by the rectorial address The Self-Assertion of the German University among his public pronouncements from 1933. In terms of the trajectory that Heidegger traces in the interview, the continuity of his thought is not interrupted by the political misadventure with Nazism. In this text, following the Heidegger of 1966, we might expect to see how close Heidegger the thinker came to the regime, which is also to say, what distance Heidegger the thinker preserved between himself and the regime.The Self-Assertion of the German University is not a manifesto in which Heidegger champions academic freedom in the face of government interference. Heideggers counterintuitive claim in the address is that the university can first properly realise its academic mission under a National Socialist government. The claim is counterintuitive not just in retrospect, since already by 1933 the Nazi Party had given clear indication of its disregard for the protocols of intellectual debate and the verification procedures of the sciences (the most infamous case would be Philipp Lenards disputing of Einsteins theory of relativity on the grounds that its author was Jewish). Corresponding to Heideggers enthusiasm for the new regime is his discontent with the nature of the German university under the Weimar Republic. We need not be so generous to Heidegger as to suggest that his discontent with the old university was so great that it blinded him to the realities of the Nazis education policies. What is the problem with the university as Heidegger sees it? It stands apart from the life of the nation. Heidegger does not propose that it throw over its commitment to science for the sake of a more practical engagement. It is not a matter of making a choice between the two, for according to Heideggers definition of science if we stand apart from the world and from the existential thickness of history, we forego the pursuit of knowledge. In his objections to the abstractness of modern science Heidegger may seem to tack perilously close to the Nazi slogan True is that which is useful for the people. But the people cannot function as the extrinsic measure of the worth of the university because, as Heidegger queries at the very start of the address, it is uncertain that the Germans know who they are. The German university, as Heidegger conceives it, will not become a centre for technical training in the service of the National Socialist regime so much as a site where the self-certainties that the modern sciences had attained through their abstractness are plunged back into the questionability of the people. The disintegration of the university into distinct faculties and disciplines will be reversed, not by a unifying set of objectives imposed from without by the government, but rather by the questionability that inhabits every discipline and that has been by and large repressed. Knowledge, inasmuch as it is bound up with comprehensiveness, cannot draw back from a confrontation with the existential thickness of the world. In Being and Time Heidegger argues that the modern sciences rely on a flattening of the world. Space as a mensurable continuum is substituted for the lived experience of the world around us and the success of modern physics plays itself out within the restrictions of this abstract space. Heidegger exhorts the sciences to push beyond the constructed domains over which they are sovereign to an encounter with fate. It could be said that Heidegger adheres to the motto of Husserls phenomenology, To the things themselves! (Zu den Sachen selbst!). Unlike Husserl, Heidegger depicts the undertaking as tragic. The encounter with fate, to which the inmost essence of the sciences binds them, will not turn out well. At stake is not an extension of the scope of the sciences. The sciences are to fail. In the interview with Der Spiegel Heidegger expresses dismay that his address was not better received. Otto Wacker, the education minister of the state of Baden, for his part, considered the address something of a missed opportunity, commenting on its private, i.e. unrecognisable National Socialism (Hitler goes unmentioned, for instance).Heidegger invokes the failure of the sciences. It is a failure, however, that will come as the reward of their exertion in the pursuit of knowledge. It is through failure rather than through resignation and surrender that the sciences will arrive at the truth of the entire might of the concealedness of what is (p. 31). The concealedness of beings (die Verborgenheit des Seienden) is a recurrent question in Heideggers writings: as we will see, it plays a pivotal role in the treatment of truth in the essay On the Essence of Truth. In taking up the concealedness of beings in the rectorial address Heidegger establishes the text in the continuity of his philosophical enterprise. Having been appointed the head of the university, Heidegger seeks to win over his colleagues for his own thinking. Is this a resurgence of that dream of philosophys supremacy in the university which Kant touches upon when he calls metaphysics the queen of the sciences? Is it yet another of those attempts, criticised by Jean-Franois Lyotard, in which philosophy sets out to install itself as the master narrative over the other disciplines? Heidegger, however, is not laying claim to a discursive truth to which the other disciplines must subordinate themselves and by which their own findings are to be evaluated. The overarching frame that he introduces is the failure in which all the disciplines, philosophy included, might participate.What could have induced Heidegger to imagine that the Nazis seizure of power presented the conditions for this reshaping of the vocation of the university? Heidegger was susceptible to the martial rhetoric of the movement, to the idea that everything is at stake and that everything should be at stake, even if it means defeat. The idiosyncratic translation of Plato with which Heidegger ends the address inserts a reference to the storm an orthodox Nazi image where Platos word episphale would be translated more conventionally as precarious, unstable or in danger.The third text that I have set for this week is the first written of the three, the lecture What is Metaphysics? from 1929. In the lecture Heidegger laments that the sciences are drifting apart. Heidegger cites this lecture in his interview with Der Spiegel when he names the disintegration of the university as the fundamental motive behind his decision to accept the rectorate of the University of Freiburg (p. 43). What is Metaphysics? is one of Heideggers most famous texts. It is somewhat of a taster for Heideggers writings of the period, offering abridged treatments of dread (Angst) and boredom (Langeweile) where Being and Time and The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics are more expansive. In its employment of the term metaphysics the lecture marks itself as belonging to Heideggers early period. From the late 1930s on Heidegger no longer sees himself as endeavouring to revive and reinvent metaphysics; instead, he is committed to its critique and exhaustion. This difference should be borne in mind throughout the semester. In the writings from the 1920s and early 30s, when Heidegger refers to his own project as metaphysics, he is not claiming that it complies with the conventional, modern understanding of metaphysics (Being and Time is anything other than business as usual). He wants to indicate that his own thinking is in dialogue with the primordial questioning of ancient Greek philosophy. His later pejorative use of the term does not entail a repudiation of the questioning of the ancient Greeks as such. It is the rigidification of metaphysics in the succeeding centuries that Heidegger now employs the term to denote. Heideggers lecture departs markedly from the norms of academic discourse. It does not flout these norms from ignorance. This willingness to reinvent the style of philosophy is commonly regarded as a Nietzschean legacy. Philosophy has come to a dead end. It is only by redefining itself that it might hope to remain in contact with its original questions. On a feuilletonistic level, Heidegger won for himself a readership among the broader public by his analyses of such phenomena as anxiety and by his disenchantment with the status quo. He seemed to speak to the times. But even if his hymn to nothingness does not appear at odds with the pessimism prevailing in Germany in the wake of its defeat in the First World War and in the grip of economic depression and political instability, it is conceived with an ontological agenda. The fear of nothingness is, in a certain respect, grist to the mill for Heidegger, since his reflections on it are contributions to his larger, life-long undertaking, which is the question of Being (behind the German Expressionist in Heidegger there is a pre-Socratic).Reading What is Metaphysics? and The Self-Assertion of the German University together, we might tell ourselves that the 1929 lecture furnishes us with another way of understanding the failure to which the 1933 address pledges the sciences. The disintegration of the university with which both texts begin is countered in the 1929 lecture with the proposal that the sciences, however different in their methods and avowed objects, all share a relationship to the nothing. But the nothing is not the common ground on which we might rebuild a unified edifice of the sciences. In a substitution that Heidegger makes more than once in his writings, it is an abyss (Abgrund) rather than a ground (Grund). This abyssal common ground will be the occasion of the common failure of the sciences. In the 1933 address Heidegger speaks of fate (Schicksal) rather than the nothing as that on which the sciences are to founder. The term fate is not a concession to the terminology of the Nazi regime (Hitler, in his megalomania, was wont to identify himself with providence). 74 of Being and Time already discusses fate at some length. It is hard to believe that Heidegger intends fate and the nothing to be convertible, although both terms operate in a discourse on the nature of human finitude (both terms signify the limits of human agency).Heidegger argues that the nothing contaminates all of human endeavour. He denies that this is to be understood in the logical sense by which Spinoza and Hegel, for instance, understand negativity. The Latin phrase of Hegels that he wrongly attributes to Spinoza reads omnis determinatio est negatio (all determination is negation). Whatever distinctness an entity possesses is through a negative relation to other entities. A tree is recognisable as a tree because it is simultaneously recognisable as not-a-walrus, not-a-preposition, not-a-gesture, etc. The negativity that Heidegger declares permeates beings does not originate in the human mind as a linguistic act that we have at our disposal. It is not, in Hegels sense, the power of Spirit. For Heidegger, the nothing precedes and enables/disables the negations in which the human mind finds its way among entities. Heidegger and Hegel agree on negativitys saturation of the world, but Heidegger diverges from Hegel in holding that negativity is not the power of the human spirit, but rather that which overpowers human existence. In writings in the 1930s and 40s Heidegger takes issue with the way in which Hegel understands finitude. He censures the earlier thinker for dodging the challenge of finitude, translating the nothingness to which we are exposed as existing beings into the power of negativity of human thought.All the sciences brush up against the nothing, which is not simply their respective determinations, the limit beyond which they are not themselves. In order to grasp themselves in the specificity of their fields and procedures, the sciences use the nothing to mark off their jurisdictions. The nothing is constantly invoked but as soon as we ask what the nothing is, we find that our question is inadequate because the question is directed towards the comprehension of an entity (What is x?), which the nothing is not. Heideggers disagreement here with the normal approach to figuring out the nature of the world (we ask what something, standing over against us, is) is a disagreement with the understanding of the world as a collection of objects standing over against a subject. By stressing the primordiality of the nothing, Heidegger wants to upset the schema according to which negativity occurs between entities as a proof of the power and independence of the human mind. Heidegger raises up nothingness at the same time as he appears to downgrade human beings. The apparent misanthropy of this move attracted criticism from all sides, from among Nazi enthusiasts and from migr intellectuals such as Ernst Cassirer. For Heidegger, it is the insight into finitude rather than any decadent misanthropy that is behind his reassessment of humanity. A proper understanding of finitude is needed in order to make sense of the nature of time and Being. Being and Time, from which we will read excerpts starting in week 3, is a book on finitude. 1