iambiguous wrote: ↑Wed Mar 16, 2022 5:31 am
Heidegger, Nazis, the Holocaust and Dasein.
Is there anyone here willing to take a crack at it?
::: timorously raises hand :::
"Me, Sir, I'll take a crack at it. But it will have to be done in parts, Sir, because it is really a difficult topic.
As for my own understanding of dasein, I would speculate that given the life that Heidegger lived, i.e. the accumulation of personal experiences, personal relationship and access to particular information and knowledge and ideas, it all predisposed him subjectively to acquire the political prejudices that he did. And that had his life been very different [for any number of reasons] he might have come to just the opposite frame of mind about the issues that sustained the 2nd World War.
Now, how is that related to his conclusions about Dasein in Being and Time?
First, let us contextualize the conversations that go on here, on this forum, in which we are engaged. Let's define what is *really* being talked about on these threads where religion, Christianity, 'belief', metaphysics, and the power-struggles that are in evidence
here go on.
My understanding is that we are all involved, like it or not, in dasein-related conflicts. In one way or another an entire realm of contrary ideas -- apperceptions -- about the world (ie reality and being in this reality) have entered very strongly into the modern-day conversation and we must recognize -- here, among us, in what we discuss -- that there is a will to overturn previous overlording ideas. Call it morality, call it 'rules', call it theological impositions, call it metaphysical assertions that are used to herd, dominate and control people in ways that, some, do not like or appreciate. The nature and scope of this battle is completely evident in the scope of the conversations that go on here. There are, therefore, opposed wills that, Titan-like, battle other wills for dominance.
Where did Dasein come from and who came up with it and why? I think it is wise to consider *it* an activist's idea. Whatever *it* is, whatever we refer to, and whatever *it* is that propels us all (I suggest we are all in the midst of *it* and cannot be otherwise) must be seen, made conscious, so that it can directly and fairly be talked about. Whatever Dasein is (this is my sense) it is not Heidegger's idea so much as it is the manifestation of a directed, concrete, human striving. So in order to understand what it is and why and how it manifest, some back-tracking must be undertaken.
Whatever *Heidegger* is, and I obviously separate his person from his manifestation in Germanic culture, he represents something phenomenologically expressible and to some degree non-personal. What is that? My answer is 'the manifestation of a will to throw off a constraining will understood to be incommensurate with Germanic or Nordic, or *Aryan*, or simply Northern-European
being). This of course has manifestations that go back rather obviously to Luther. What is connoted of course is a very large 'refusal' to remain
subject. My sense is that we will only find an answer to what Heidegger's Dasein
means when we examine the
Christian context. The simplest way I have been able to express this refusal and resistance is to understand Germanic Christianity as a sort of rebellion against Mediterranean Christianity. As I have indicated in other posts I accept the theory that the Germanic world, the Germanic person, and Germanic *being* to introduce the Heideggarian notion, transformed the Christianity received by the northern peoples. In brief what this meant is 'bending' and modifying an other-worldly religious modality to one that supported 'being in the world' and being in the world in time. This shift is not a small thing by any means.
And again I refer to the necessary backdrop to what I here suggest as the obvious backdrop to the conversations that proceed on this forum and in these specific threads.
In the largest sense what is this 'refusal'? How and when did it get set in motion? Why? I must stress again that it has to do with rejecting an other-world apperception-structure, which leads to a certain sort of schizophrenic self-separation and dissonance, and returning, with deliberateness, but not without conflict and a certain
agony, to an 'embodied condition' (if you will accept my specific terms). The evidence must be brought forward to support this. But that evidence is not hard to come by. Consider in the most essential sense what many people *take away* from a close reading of Nietzsche. It is a 'return' to embodiedness. It is an acceptance of this condition, this reality, this necessity. My citations will perhaps be limited, and literary on the whole, but I will refer to, say, the novel
Doctor Glas by Hjalmar Soderberg (1905) (I regard this novel
as a study in what I refer to here), but also the works of Hermann Hesse and also Andre Gide. In fact there are
too many examples. But what happens in these novels? Well, I suggest it is largely as I say: a return to embodiment and a return to the Earth. I do not want to be too broad nor to engage with the over-simplification and reduction I accuse others of, but I believe strongly that we must see this in order to better understand the conflicts of our day and age.
Now we have to broach the
Emblem of Evil that the word
Nazi embodies. My understanding is that this is one of the most difficult things. The term itself has been invested with many many layers of
semiotic intensity. It operates in a profoundly 'religious' sense and I suppose it is fair to say that it contains and holds the sense of what Satan is, or at least was. Everything about evilness has been cast onto that world. The notion that the word expresses comes up
everywhere, comes up daily and even minute-by-minute. The notion, in this sense, is a backdrop to a person's perception about the world and his or her being in that world. This seems like an exaggeration but I do not think it is.
Now why is Heidegger seen as both a Nazi and as (subtly? or not so subtly?) aligned with this evil of a metaphysical sort to which I allude? That is the biting question, isn't it? Why is his 'philosophy', which is not really
his, but rather a rejection or refusal of an imposed
other-idea through a longish cultural process, why is this seen as being aligned with absolute terrestrial evil? The fact of the matter is that
this is the case. I myself have not done enough research into how Heidegger is framed, or explained, through these terms, yet I have at least begun.
Now I will try to say something about why Heidegger's ideas, and the notion of 'return to embodiedness', is so problematic. All according to my
provisional understanding of course.
To propose
Dasein is to propose and assert coming into or realizing a specific embodiedness. A situational embodiedness, a cultural and social embodiedness. It is the specific that is emphasized against, shall we say, the abstract and the general. One way that I understand this, though it is simplistic, is to grasp what people mean when they take issue with 'globalization'. What do they mean? They seem to mean that they resent and they refuse to be molded by forces outside of their own specific domain -- their specific being 'in time' I might add. So we must introduce it seems to me the notion of the counter-current that turns against the motions and currents of the present. This implies contrariness. This implies all that turning against the current implies. It is 'rebellion' and 'refusal'. But against what? and to what end?
When you examine those platforms of those who are actively and dedicatedly involved in these counter-current projects you will find a group and a set of guiding ideas. And most if not all of them have to do, it has seemed to me, with the specificity of specific people in specific circumstances who resist impositions and want, let's say, 'to be themselves'. To be what they are. To become what they are which, naturally, implies throwing off
layers of imposition. Are their projects *authentic*? Are they justifiable? Who decides?
So my understanding is that those pesky Germanic peoples and the movements that precipitated the War, which were pan-European and had to do, at least this is my understanding, with specific people in specific localities determining just what, and who,
they were and who and what
they desired to be, as-against other determining forces and powers which, as they always will, seek to dominate and control them for their own purposes.
I admit that my grasp of this is sketchy. But when you consider 'social reaction' such as the case of social conservatism reacting against extreme forms of novelty (for example encroaching and expanding Marxist-Lenninism in the Interwar Period) it is always the case that what those social conservatives do is to
set anchors in
specific definitions of what is thought and held to be good & proper, right & necessary. It always seems to involve defining and asserting older idea-modes and also ways of being that are presented as, say, immutable and constant. And what is immutable and constant, perhaps from the perspective of a Dasein-philosophy, is the authentic being of a given people. Be they Japanese, Germans, Nigerians or rural Americans.
[Suite a la prochaine]
To me philosophy is about being adept at both. Dishonesty and ivory tower my ass. So now I have this little suspicion that dasein is whatever you want it to be, from your unchecked first-person pov.