Philosophy Now Forum

THE BESIEGED BILDUNG (Or, A Recrudification of the Students or they Who Stand Before the Pestilence of the Escarpment of Unintelligability and Silence.)

A Dialogue Between a Wenren Heideggerian and a Straussian of the Genetic Circle

(This discourse is a solicitation for a dialogical discussion in the form of responses. Please notify "Faust" account on Twitter.)


Genetic Straussian. Mein geschätzter praeceptor totus! (My esteemed complete teacher!)

So, there is a DAMNATIO MEMORIÆ on being. An evil sister of the Sphinx who makes everything enigmatic into perfect clarity. And you say that the master who fell from heaven, technology, is all to blame for the evil label on the world that reads "forgetfulness" and that only your school can tear off.

Wenren Heideggerian. We haven't been introduced, but I know of your teacher. Leo Strauss. I was given to understand he had a certain reverence for genuine philosophy? And, indeed, for Heideger. Your tone, however, rather belies that.

GS. Forgive me. If it weren't so I wouldn't be here. But, between ourselves, I can't believe any Heideggerian, of the school of Chinese synthesis or otherwise, who would deny Heidegger showed a decided tendency towards a concept of nature which spelled the abandonment of reason simpliciter. Who taught faith in history and abandoned stable essences. For me, philosophy stands or falls on reason; ist aus reason.

WH. We too honor reason.

GS. You would grant that reason is something more than mere intelligability?

WH. Provided we speak loosely, and that your "more than" is not thought to bring us a genuine conceptual clarity, I do.

GS. To say that, eg, Richard Wolin says many things that are quite intelligible about the biography of Heidegger, if not always einfach, simply, or in the one fold, reasonable raises a question about the one for which it is reasonable.

WH. In his introduction to the Spinoza book, Strauss says something like, to set the study of the Bible on a new basis, to treat it as a literary document, is clearly more important than to found a discipline of study of ancient Egypt or Babylon. Yet, these civilizations, too, had their sacred books.

GS. Strauss must speak from the ground of the people to whom he belonged. The pre-war decay of the Prussian order amidst the imposition of the unasked for French order, the Weimar Constitution.

But, to do so is only to observe a starting point. Levi-Strauss, the anthropologist, was once asked what culture attracted him most. The questioner intended to elicit a rainbow variety of considerations, but Levi-Strauss answered, curtly, the French.

For the participant observer of other groups of human beings is not the one who belongs to their world properly. But, this need not be taken as a final measure of what is possible. A detente with a deeper ground of unity of reality may be still sought.

WH. That is why, although the Chinese have not thought being, we seek them in our human reason.

GS. Then clarify this, how can you claim to honor reason if Heidegger teaches that the logos is aimed, for the erstwhile Greeks, at calculation in the broadest sense. And that ratio or rationality is a derived term, linked to Plato and his ideas?

WH. I clarify it thusly. Language is not only reason in the specifically Greek sense, which comes from the experience of the First Beginning, but this logos, speech (not glossa or language,) is the former interpretation of being, now resting in its decay. Otherwise what point would there be in our speaking here?

GS. The scholar, Martin Jay, at Berkeley says that he spent his life trying to understand what the likes of the Frankfurt School meant by reason. Leo Strauss recognized Lukács, who came out with a book called "The Destruction of Reason," as a properly educated man. This, now destroyed, reason or rationality seems very political. It is linked to "responsibility" in the sense one denies Heidegger in connection to his affirmation of the "inner greatness" of Nazism, since it offered the chance of opposing mere technological existence. As he claims.

WH. You know that Heidegger spoke of Naumann and the Burgfrieden?

GS. Yes, but that too is all synonymous with the fierce grips of some bird of political prey. And with the specific situation of a consolidation of a people under external assaults. What has it to do with Heidegger's claim that biography is unimportant?

WH. He does not say that the example of the teacher is unimportant. The remarks in the lecture introducing Aristotle and the habit of distancing "Heidegger" the work from himself, must be understood to mean only that the conditions of one's life are the ground of one's thought. And that we must free ourselves of the world view we are at home in, and its prejudices, to read a philosopher genuinely in the unheimlich realm of thought.

GS. Like a good Catholic, then he argued that the pedaphilia of the clergy and the slaughter of the Jews during the Crusades, however
characteristic of the historical Church, must not be treated as the deciding thing. But whether the teaching is true must decide.

WH. There is something in that. But, what is crucial is the possibility of authenticity. The text called Heidegger, for Heidegger himself, was something heteronomous. Or, inauthentic.

GS. The whole thing?

WH. As a ghost of what might obstruct free remembrance of being. Yes, even the whole text could be a barrier. On the other hand there is another consideration.

All Bildung or cultivation must be stimulated by example, as a paedia which is no longer the education of children, but the very last meadow on the earth, the edge where no one can reach those who wander through it like the gods walking across the stars in the days before there were public opinions and mass "individuals" to manipulate.

GS. That is all very poetic and fine. What good is such an example except for a very few, the inner circle that falls under its powerful umbra? A wisdom above the citizen and his myths?

WH. One must be cautious in limiting the attempt to get at reality.

GS. It goes far away from what just anyone could attempt. But, don't we all first come upon these subjects from the political world we find ourselves in?

WH. Doesn't Strauss teach that wisdom and knowledge are broken apart only in the modern world?

GS. Yes, or, not really, but, indeed, by the prejudice of the authority that FOX News uses as much as those signs one sees on lawns in California which say that "Science is real." Both political parties play to the public reverence for science and the so-called facts.

Each claiming the other is the ruin of them. And they the champions. Because, as Strauss' teaches, what plagues us is the forgetfulness of the ground of the certainty in progress. So that all movement in STEM fields is taken, by the right and the left, to be human advance simply. And anything that holds it back is assumed from the outset to be evil.

WH. And Strauss teaches further that this ostensible vigorous and sharp contestation of left and right forgets the very origin of the distinction between facts and values which permeates the current dispensation of thoughtless public prejudices. The wertfrei science or natura wissenschaft of Max Weber and the like.

GS. Yes. Strauss' attempted to rescue genuine rationality from the conservative (in the sense of promoting the conservation of the power of the modern idea of science as positive or without goal) prejudice about the wertfrei conception of science. Which is to say, the attitude of 90 percent of the public.

WH. The students, the personal students of Strauss', maintain that he was "in rebellion agst the academic establishment" (T Pangle).

GS. And you claim Heidegger was as well?

WH. In America education was once called "the great equalizer," but in Humboldt's time the great leveling power of the gent epiciere, of people who put signs on their lawns and who cancel their subscription to news services that put out a single piece that goes against their values, already presaiged the forces of "method" and everything that have now prepared men to accept in the mass the most enslaving manipulations by elites.

In a small circle like that around a real teacher the underlying unity of the ideology, of the teaching which avoids the violence of unearthing its foundation, prepares each "individual" to become a "minority of one" seeking refuge in a party unity at the price of total absorption in the group and the elites and mouthpieces of the group. What the Bildung means is two fold. First the best example of the teacher as guide, but also the link between the concept of wissenschaft and the guidance of the guide.

GS. How can the teacher guide a "self cultivation," a genuine Bildung? Where is the independence of thought to be found in this apprenticeship?

WH. At what age would you begin the "independence?" Would it include the right of the toddler to refuse the earliest trainings? Or, to be made to learn to write, later on?

GS. That is all a difficulty, and we genetic Straussians admit the entrance point of the citizen's understanding must fluctuate and be unstable according to the decisions taken before their maturity, and, a fortiori, before their birth.

WH. Let us suppose the citizen is of an age to refuse the guidance when they come to the teaching that goes beyond mere publicness, the realm of the doxoi of the citizen. And towards the the concept of a fresh start.

GS. What concept does Heidegger provide?

WH. He gives the concept of basic experience called Dasein.

GS. And not the claim of a disinterested subjectivity of the scientific tester and his experimental objects and data?

WH. Such concepts appeal to the claim of disinterested subjectivity. And yet, the heart must want to pursue what it calls knowledge. The claim that we are "subjects" who cast nets of rope called "interests" all about us fails to see the reality of being.

GS. Yet, one can understand that a repeated invention is a kind of solid knowledge, and very reliable. And the knowledge is had by those men who have it.

WH. This is a hazy kind of truth. One which leads to the view that facts must then be artificially interpreted for the sake of the requirements of some group or military complex.

GS. The cave has risen into a mountain. And now you want to clear away its whole mass.

WH. Yes. The regnant conception of experience in scholastic Theology built, a form like Psychology or Biology intended as a wissenschaft or scientifically determined region of study productive of knowledge.

Again, and not like Husserl's basic stratum in his Phenomenology. Where he tried to remember, in his own way, the possibility of a view free from the clutter.

"Dasein" admits the "repelling of limits" or Apeiron into Husserl's conception, meaning that presence, that of the "object" of Plato's everlasting region, can not simply maintain itself as presence. As though everlasting availability of the kinds of things or ideas which show in all intelligibility could fix a final limit.

GS. This ἄπειρον is from the Greeks. And from a thinker already of the calculative logos, is it not?

WH. Yes, that is correctly said. The calculative or available things, on, what is there as a "that," what one can point to, stands even in the first determinations. But, only correctly.

GS. A Professor Emeritus, from a good school, said to one of our circle in a private conversation "In my view Heidegger is worthless as a guide to Aristotle." I can't help but think that there is something correct in this view.

WH. That is dark. Heidegger grants the classicists their "notional types" and their lofty view, which praises the Greeks, especially Aristotle, insofar as they approximate the scientific research now in power.

GS. I don't speak of classicists or philology, but of philosophy.

WH. Here is a case that is sharp. Cassiere schooled Heideger in Kant. Heidegger had read Kant in his youth, but only began to study him closely when past the age of thirty. His Kant book came out in 1929. Heiddeger accepted the correctness of Cassiere's criticism, as evidenced in the remark added to later editions about the "shortcomings" of thinkers. However, ἄπειρον does not allow for presence, that of correctness, to dominate, to be sum as such.

GS. You speak ad hominem. You address yourself in a bespoke manner to what you take to be my school's favouring of a genetic circle. Attempting to seduce us.

WH. Perhaps. It is true that our school most often asserts simply that Heiddeger saw "more correctly" than the professors. Or, they do so extrinsically to avoid the accusation of "mysticism" or "obscurantism" and the like which appear in the prevailing publicness or weltanschauung. The teaching leads to the unheimlich. It is rejected by the bond of the current society. The ideology of methodical progress into bliss or happiness through control of the material.

GS. The ἄπειρον seems to play a role not unlike that of Nietzche's usurpation of Catholic creativity, of the potential of God, potentia absoluta. The attack on Thomas.

WH. However, Nietzche speaks of something available to the will. Or, more subtly, of what the "will to will" pours as its light or becoming, as its way of being. Like Anaximander, Nietzche asks, what is being, and fixes before himself an answer that belongs to a thinking: being is will.

He falls I to the availability for the sake of mere "life" or what is as yet only sporadically, and not systematically in being. He "remembers" constantly his desire to serve life. Thusly, he fails to start from Dasein and the unheimlich. He is at home in his "life-giving lie."

GS. And yet, even Heidegger must start somewhere.

WH. How does your school differ from the orthidox Straussians?

GS. We don't say that "man as man" must always, to speak with Augustine, stand equidistant to eternity. But, only that reason has some correct standing which is never wholly outstripped by what lies "beyond" its borne.

WH. If a cat opens a door by leaping and turning the knob with its paw, you then do not insist that something has been learned of the stable essence of a "cat as cat?" Of a possibility.

GS. Such knowledge may not be the only sort that reason as what can discover the good is about.

WH. So you say the truth must be good, but how it is to be reached is uncertain.

GH. Not that, but that the reasoning we do with what is called speech is the manner of investigation, and that it stems from the ground of First Philosophy, which we understand not as Metaphysics (of availability), but as Political Philosophy as it gurgles up in the citizenry.

WH. Perhaps Strauss also thought this way.

GH. We have only his texts and his recorded lectures. But, these, as you teach, could serve to obstruct us. Or, even could have obstructed Strauss himself during his lifetime.

WH. Philosophers are misunderstood even by their own works.

GH. That is, however, a matter of strange subtlety. And unknown to the ancients.

WH. How do you mean?

GH. With the ancients the "use" of language by individuals, as in the Euthydemus, was limited by language itself, as in the enumerated meanings of phusis, nature, in the fifth book of Aristotle's Metaphysics. The "ownmost" character of the use according to a peculiar mortal dispensation did not occur to the ancients.

WH. Heidegger says one must not mistake oneself for someone else. And that in the unmistakable principle of our decisions this lives.

GH. Nietzsche at times reduced the plethora of languages to a biological function. Saying all languages are the same at bottom. Inventions, as it were, like the "knowledge" his clever animals "invented."

WH. Nietzche often holds several thoughts superimposed. Thusly, the "life-giving lie" of a "knowledge" stands within the abnegation of that Greek Truth which the "Letzter Mensch" (English "last men") still live according to. At the same time he thinks of his "ipsissimosity" which, itself, reminds of Kierkegaard and his hidden or invisible "eastern" sage, the "knight of faith."

GS. However, judging this way, is there reason at all. Didn't it dissolve into variety?

WH. There is as yet a sense in which being in the old sense is still thought in Heidegger. In Hume the "is" wanted to name the "fact" out of the reasoning of men which after naming historical things suddenly concludes that it ought be, he claims to deny the "value." Or, the science of deriving values. But, indeed, by the Greek thinking the ascent to the "value" is nothing other than coming to what is or the sunlight. Ergo, Kant speaks of what "is" when he says a man who lies uses himself for a "means."

GS. It is hard to follow you. You mean that the right behavior is truly being, the "end" and that all else is but opinion?

WH. It is simple. By example, if an artisan builds a bench properly he has the being of his art. Or, if one learns the right way to pitch a curve ball, that is entering knowledge.

GS. In this sense the concept of experience suggested by Hume and developed later by Kant, Nietzche, Simmel and Max Weber deviates entirely from the ancient discussion. Since, of course, the "is" is said in many ways.

WH. Yes. But how can you keep to reason if you don't still divide understanding or "sense data," on the one side, from gheist or intellect?

GS. For the moment we allow that intelect, roughly the holding in knowing attention of anything and reflecting or drawing conclusions from it, does not nearly come apart from mere immersion in the umwelt, environment. The shiver of a cold wind or the lunge of hunger of animal ratio also extends at times into the problem solving in effective imagination of a crow who calculates over a solution to a mechanical difficulty.

WH. But, what does such reason seek in the face of the "long run" as Leo Strauss called the concern of Nietzche. When he compared it to the historical vision of Marx and Engels and the ascent to what Kojeve latter called "homogeneous" society (a society where a "Dreyfus Affair" was ruled out as anything more than sporadic,) or, true Liberalism, which as Engels said would one day see its "declining branch." And such things reminding, unhistorically speaking, of Spenglarism.

GS. One has to stay with the division above mentioned, between the merley intelligible and the cogent reasonable. And here one has one's feet on a moving earth, but one that is at least at rest in some real sense. And philosophy thus can survey all things from this reason that is able to judge correctly.

WH. And what of stupidity and insanity?

GS. If the student of Derrida, for example, who wrote of stupidity, shows something to reason, than reason must listen. As did Heidegger to his great friend Jaspers, the psychiatrist who worked with the subject matter of schizophrenia. Even Dugin is want to emphasize that all cultures at least make a bare distinction between the sick mad and the divinely gifted.

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