Heidegger Homecoming

A Poetics of Homecoming

A Poetics of Homecoming: Heidegger, Homelessness and the Homecoming Venture

By

Brendan O’Donoghue

A Poetics of Homecoming: Heidegger, Homelessness and the Homecoming Venture, by Brendan O’Donoghue This book first published 2011 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2011 by Brendan O’Donoghue All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-2994-3, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2994-6

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ....................................................................................................... vii Acknowledgements .................................................................................... xi List of Abbreviations ................................................................................ xiii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Explicating the Title: ‘A Poetics of Homecoming’ Chapter One............................................................................................... 21 Philosophy as Homelessness and Homesickness Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 57 The German Appropriation of the Ancient Greeks: The Hellenizing Ghosts Chapter Three .......................................................................................... 105 Heidegger and the Un-heimlich: The Human Being as Deinanthropus and the Introduction of a New First Stasimon Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 167 Confronting Nihilism Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 217 Heidegger and Modern Technology Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 257 Preparing for the Homecoming Venture, Thinking and Poetry Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 317 Heidegger and the Enactment of a Poetic Homecoming Conclusion............................................................................................... 365 Bibliography ............................................................................................ 373

PREFACE

This investigation addresses a pressing anxiety of our time – that of homelessness. Tersely stated, the philosophical significance of ‘homelessness’ in its more modern context can be understood to emerge with Nietzsche and his discourse on nihilism, which signals the loss and continuing corrosion of the highest values hitherto. Diverging from Nietzsche, Heidegger interprets homelessness as a symptom of the oblivion of being.1 The purpose of the present enquiry is to rigorously confront humanity’s state of homelessness and at the same time reveal the extent to which Heidegger’s thought engages with this pervasive phenomenon. Additionally, Heidegger’s various attempts to overcome, or more specifically, his thought provoking preparations for the overcoming of homelessness are also pivotal to the current investigation. Many commentators including Adorno, Lévinas, Löwith, Lacoue-Labarthe, de Beistegui, Sallis, Dallmayr, Bambach and Young have to some degree acknowledged or highlighted how important the motif of ‘homecoming’ is for Heidegger. While Robert Mugerauer in Heidegger and Homecoming provides a thoroughgoing account of Heidegger’s preoccupations with homelessness and homecoming. Adorno and Lévinas offer scathing critiques of Heidegger’s thought as it relates to the theme of homecoming (Heimkunft) and the idea of the German Heimat, associating it with provincialism, paganism and further maintaining it has pernicious political implications.2 Löwith, LacoueLabarthe, de Beistegui and Bambach also pay heed to the political significance underlying Heidegger’s conception of homecoming and his 1

Cf. PM, p. 258 With regards Adorno’s criticisms of Heidegger see The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. K. Tarnowski and F. Will, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986, (henceforth, The Jargon of Authenticity), Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton, London: Routledge, 1990 (henceforth, Negative Dialectics) and Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-author Max Horkheimer, trans. John Cumming, London: Allen Lane, 1973. In terms of Lévinas’ critique of Heidegger see “Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us”, in Difficult Freedom, Essays on Judaism, trans. Seán Hand, London: The Athlone Press, 1990, (henceforth, “Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us”), Totality and Infinity, An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 2001, (henceforth, Totality and Infinity). 2

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Preface

concern for the German homeland. Although they too can be highly critical of his nationalistic leanings, they provide more balanced interpretations of his writings.3 On the other hand, Dallmayr and Young tend to offer strongly positive accounts of Heidegger’s thinking as it pertains to the notion of homecoming and his reflections on humanity’s state of homelessness. Dallmayr in The Other Heidegger endorses a Heideggerian sense of homecoming over the type of nomadic thinking espoused by Deleuze, and Young in Heidegger’s Later Philosophy deems Heidegger to be a physician of culture.4 Mugerauer in Heidegger and Homecoming, The Leitmotif in the Later Writings offers an intensely close and sympathetic reading of Heidegger. Through detailed accounts of many of Heidegger’s ‘later’ texts, Mugerauer presents the story of Heidegger’s personal and lifelong homecoming. Revealing the polyphonic nature of these later texts, he shows how Heidegger thoughtfully celebrates ‘the multiple, often simultaneous, meanings of the unfolding of our world.’5 Mugerauer does a commendable job in narrativizing Heidegger’s homecoming, and his forensic analysis of this theme is praiseworthy. However, unlike Mugerauer I consider it of great import not only to tell a story but to also critically engage with Heidegger’s thought. Hence, I continually call into question Heidegger’s various positions, for failure to do so allows one to be wholly transfixed by his ‘dramatic tale.’6 In the present enquiry I chiefly focus on the poetic significance of Heidegger’s sense of homecoming. I argue that Heidegger’s discourses on 3

Cf. Karl Löwith’s Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, trans. Gary Steiner, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s Heidegger, Art, Politics, trans. Chris Turner, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990 (henceforth, Heidegger, Art, Politics) Lacoue-Labarthe’s and Nancy’s Retreating the Political, trans. Simon Sparks London: Routledge, 1997 (henceforth, Retreating the Political) Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, trans. Judi Olson, Ed. Christopher Fynsk, Harvard University Press, 1989 (henceforth, Typography) and Miguel de Beistegui, Heidegger and the Political: Dystopias, London: Routledge, 1998 (henceforth, Heidegger and the Political). 4 Cf. Fred Dallmayr’s The Other Heidegger, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Also see Julian Young’s Heidegger’s Later Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 5 Robert Mugerauer, Heidegger and Homecoming, The Leitmotif of the Later Writings, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008, p. xix. 6 Richard Rorty in his essay “Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens” claims that despite Heidegger’s suspicion of epic or storytelling, his ‘ability to spin a dramatic tale’ was his greatest gift. Cf. “Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens” in Essays on Heidegger and Others, Philosophical Papers Vol. 2, New York: CUP, 1991, p.69.


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the notion of homecoming manage to retain fruitful insights that can contribute not just to a Germanic sense of homecoming but to a sense of homecoming that humanity at large can relate to and be enriched by. I make this contention despite some commentators who claim Heidegger’s sense of homecoming is essentially tied to provincialism, paganism and an insidious form of politics. In saying this, the political controversy surrounding Heidegger’s thought, particularly in relation to the period between 1930 and 1936, is not a dominant issue in the current investigation. However, this does not mean that the political import of Heidegger’s homecoming venture will be suppressed or ignored. A more urgent concern for the current enquiry, which has already been alluded to, is humanity’s state of homelessness. One of the foremost tasks of the present enquiry will be to elucidate how Heidegger’s thought can help address this problem in a constructive way. Moreover, illuminating the philosophical significance of ‘homelessness’, uncovering its underlying cause or causes and determining whether or not it is possible for humanity to overcome its homeless condition takes priority in the following investigation. In this regard, Heidegger’s interpretation of the human being as un-heimlich, uncanny or unhomely; his detailed discussions on nihilism, and his meditations on modern technology come to the forefront of this enquiry. Furthermore, it is by confronting those phenomena that contribute to or underlie humanity’s state of homelessness that allows the homecoming venture to get underway.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost I’d like to thank Brian Elliott for his attentive reading of this work. The incisive criticisms he provided over the years, were almost always greatly appreciated. I also thank my parents, Ann and Tadgh for all their much needed support. For her encouragement and being there I should also like to thank Cathy. Last but not least I would like to express my deepest gratitude to John Moriarty who was and continues to be a great source of inspiration.

ABBREVIATIONS Heidegger’s Writings BP: BT: BW: CP: CT: DS:

DT: EHP: FM: GA: HCT: ID: IM: IP:

The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. A. Hofstadter, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and T. Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Basic Writings: Martin Heidegger, ed. David Farrell Krell, London: Routledge, 1996. Contributions to Philosophy, (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. The Concept of Time, trans. William McNeill, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. “Only a God can Save Us”: ‘Der Spiegel’s Interview’ in The Heidegger Controversy, A Critical Reader, trans. Maria P. Alter and John D. Caputo ed. Richard Wolin, London: M.I.T. press, 1993, pp. 91-116. Discourse on Thinking, trans. J. M Anderson and E. H. Freund, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1966. Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller, New York: Humanity Books, 2000. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, finitude, solitude, trans. W. McNeill and N. Walker, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Martin Heidegger: Gesamtausgabe, ed. F. W. von Herrmann, Frankfurt on Main: Klostermann, 1977 - . Numerals refer to volume numbers from this collected works. History of the Concept of Time: prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Identity and Difference, trans. Kurt F. Leidecker, New York: Philosophical Library Inc., 1960. Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Introduction to Philosophy – Thinking and Poetizing, trans. Phillip Jacques Braunstein Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.

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Abbreviations

KM:

Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. James S. Churchill, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962. M: Mindfulness, trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary, New York: Continuum Press, 2006. N: Nietzsche, four volumes, trans. David Farrell Krell, San Francisco: HarperCollins 1979-1987. Roman numerals refer to volume numbers. OBT: Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, Cambridge: CUP, 2002. OM: “Overcoming Metaphysics” trans. Joan Stambaugh in The Heidegger Controversy, A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin, London: M.I.T. press, 1993, pp. 67-90. OWL: On the Way to Language, trans. P. Hertz, New York: Harper & Row 1971. P: Parmenides, trans. A. Schuwer and R. Rojcewicz, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. PK: Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Parvis Ermad and Kenneth Mealy, Indiana University Press, 1997. PLT: Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, New York: HarperCollins, 2001. PM: Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill, Cambridge: CUP 1998. PR: The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. QCT: The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt, New York: Harper & Row, 1977. TB: On Time and Being, trans. J. Stambaugh, New York: Harper & Row, 1972. TI: Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’, trans. W. McNeill and J. Davis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. WCT: What is called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray, New York: HarperCollins, 2004.

Hölderlin’s Writings HEL: HPF:

Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. Thomas Pfau, New York: State University of New York Press, 1988. Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger, London, Anvil Press, 2004.


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Nietzsche’s Writings AC:

The Anti-Christ, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin Books, 1990. BGE: Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin Classics, 1990. BT(N): The Birth of Tragedy, Out of the Spirit of Music, trans. Shaun Whiteside, London: Penguin Books, 1993. DB: Daybreak, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, ed. Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. EH: Ecce Homo, How One Becomes What One Is, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin Books, 1992. GS: The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage Books, 1974. GM: On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Douglas Smith, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. HH: Human All Too Human, trans. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann, London: Penguin Books, 1994. TI (N): Twilight of the Idols, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin Books, 1990. TSZ: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, A Book for Everyone and No One, trans. Graham Parkes New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. WP: The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, New York: Vintage Books, 1968.

INTRODUCTION EXPLICATING THE TITLE: ‘A POETICS OF HOMECOMING’

This enquiry is entitled ‘A Poetics of Homecoming’. Such a title requires explication. Firstly: What is meant by ‘poetics’? and secondly: What does ‘homecoming’ signify? In the opening pages of Poetics of Modernity Richard Kearney provides a very lucid and insightful elucidation of the term ‘poetics’. In this work he explores both a traditional and modern hermeneutic understanding of ‘poetics’, focusing particularly on Plato and Aristotle with respect to its traditional meaning, and then turning to Ricoeur and Heidegger for a more modern interpretation of its significance. In Poetics of Modernity we see how a sense of ‘poetics’ is to be found amongst the ancient Greeks. Herodotus accredited the term to writers such as Homer and Hesiod who helped ‘make’ (poiein) Greek culture by creating master or grand narratives. Within these master narratives a people or culture could be housed as they presented elaborate accounts of the origin of the world and how it was ordered, they also attempted to find truth for unexplainable phenomena and thus distilled meaning from otherwise incomprehensible events. Great poets like Homer and Hesiod told of how the gods were born, while their names, honours, arts and various appearances were also described. Furthermore, it was through the art of poiesis that Chaos became Cosmos.1 1

G.S Kirk in The Presocratic Philosophers describes how Hesiod in his Theogony deals with the relation between gods and goddesses and the ultimate source of Zeus’ power and authority. However, most significantly Hesiod outlines the cosmogonical developments that preceded these events, as he charts the transition from the state of Chaos to the emergence of a Cosmos. Hesiod in his Theogony writes: “Verily first of all did Chaos come into being, and then broad-bosomed Gaia (earth), a firm seat of all things for ever, and misty Tartaros in a recess of broad-waned earth, and Eros, who is fairest among immortal gods, looser of limbs, and subdues in their breasts the mind and thoughtful counsel of all gods and all men. Out of Chaos, Erebos and black Night came into being; and from Night, again, came Aither and Day, whom she conceived and bore after mingling in love

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Introduction

Plato discusses how poiesis is related to artistic and divine creation and also identifies it as having an intellectual as well as practical dimension. Although Plato considers philosophical logos to be more significant than poiesis, in the tenth book of the Republic, Kearney highlights how in other Platonic dialogues such as Ion, Meno and Phaedrus, poiesis is recognized as a form of divine ‘inspiration’ or ‘enthusiasm’ (entheos, that is, full of the god). Kearney writes: “Poiesis, Plato concedes, can provide vision for what is otherwise invisible. It creates existing things from non-existing things.”2 A more methodical and systematic definition of poiesis is provided by Aristotle in book six of his Nicomachean Ethics where he refers to it as an activity which aims at an end separate from itself. Aristotle distinguishes poiesis from praxis, which is taken to be an act that possesses its own end within itself. Furthermore, poiesis refers to the production or creation of something envisaged with respect to an image or notion of a product pre-conceived by the producer. Poetic things, ta poioumena, are those things shaped by human activity. Aristotle identifies three distinct types of knowledge, that is, ‘theoretical’, ‘practical’ and ‘poetical’, he ascribes to this latter category all those activities of production that give rise to some end which persists after the completion of a given activity, for example, the sculpture that remains after being sculpted by the sculptor. Thus for the Greeks the term poiesis can be attributed to any productive or creative activity that has an end beyond itself. ‘Poetics’ as it appears in more modern and post-modern contexts takes on a wide range of meanings. Linda Hutcheon for example offers insight into the significance of a post-modern poetics in A Poetics of Postmodernism. She describes ‘poetics’ as: …an open, ever-changing theoretical structure by which to order both our cultural knowledge and our critical procedures. This would not be a

with Erebos. And Earth first of all brought forth starry Ouranos (sky), equal to herself, to cover her completely round about, to be a firm seat for the blessed gods for ever. Then she brought forth tall Mountains, lovely haunts of the divine Nymphs who dwell in the woody mountains. She also gave birth to the unharvested sea, seething with its swell, Pontos, without delightful love; and then having lain with Ouranos she bore deep-eddying Okeanos, and Koios and Krios and Hyperion and Iapetos…”. Cf. The Presocratic Philosophers, ed. G.S. Kirk, J.E. Raven and M. Schofield, Cambridge: CUP, 1993, p. 35 2 Richard Kearney, Poetics Of Modernity, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1995, p. xii. Henceforth, Poetics Of Modernity.

Explicating the Title: ‘A Poetics of Homecoming’

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poetics in the structuralist sense of the word, but would go beyond the study of literary discourse to the study of cultural practice and theory.3

Ricoeur uses the term ‘poetics’ to name the creative process of ‘semantic innovation’, understood as an imaginative act that creates meaning in and through language, via symbols, poems, myths, narratives and ideologies.4 Heidegger the main focus of the current enquiry also interprets poetics in a broad sense. He remarks in the essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935): “Poetry is thought of here in so broad a sense and at the same time in such intimate unity of being with language and word, that we must leave open whether art in all its modes from architecture to poesy, exhausts the nature of poetry.”5 An important distinction comes to the fore in this particular passage, as Heidegger distinguishes between poetics thought on the basis of all artistic manifestations, including architecture, building and plastic creations and the narrower more specific form of poesy associated with the versifying activity of the poet.6 Heidegger acknowledges architecture, building and plastic creations as being poetic for they participate in the saying of being, a saying that surpasses mere linguistic verbalisations.7 On the other hand, poetry in its more restricted sense also proves crucial for Heidegger, for he relates it to the founding of being, to a distinctive type of building and to the most fundamental form of dwelling. In his address “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” (1936), poetry is interpreted as ‘the founding of being in the word’.8 Moreover, in “…Poetically Man Dwells…” (1951) poetry is construed as a ‘distinctive kind of building’, where building is interpreted on the basis of cultivating, 3 Cf. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, London: Routledge, 1988, p. 14. Henceforth, A Poetics of Postmodernism. 4 Cf. Richard Kearney, Poetics Of Modernity, p. xii 5 PLT, pp. 71-72 6 Cf. PLT, p. 72 7 Heidegger writes: “Language itself is poetry in the essential sense. But since language is the happening in which for man beings first disclose themselves to him each time as beings, poesy – or poetry in the narrower sense – is the most original form of poetry in the essential sense. Language is not poetry because it is the primal poesy; rather, poesy takes place in language because language preserves the original nature of poetry. Building and plastic creation, on the other hand, always happen already, and happen only, in the Open of saying and naming. It is the Open that pervades and guides them. But for this very reason they remain their own ways and modes in which truth orders itself into work. They are an ever special poetizing within the clearing of what is, which has already happened unnoticed in language.” (PLT, p. 72) 8 EHP, pp. 58-59

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Introduction

caring and erecting.9 Poetry in this munificent sense of the word is once again revealed as a productive or creative act that points to something beyond itself, as Heidegger observes: ‘Merits due to this building, however, can never fill out the nature of dwelling.’10 For Heidegger, poetry is also essentially linked to the prospect of human beings being able to dwell poetically. He remarks in “…Poetically Man Dwells…” that poetry is not the imaginary flight of fancy that attempts to flee from the earth but is instead, ‘what first brings man onto the earth, making him belong to it, and thus brings him into dwelling.’11 Thus it is the poet through his poetry that first enables human beings to dwell poetically upon the earth. Throughout the current investigation I seek to employ ‘poetics’ in a way that interweaves both its traditional meaning with its more contemporary significance. ‘Poetics’ as it is emerges in the present enquiry is taken in a broad sense of the word. The term ‘poetics’ is understood here in terms of a critical examination of humanity’s capacity to transform itself to point where human beings may come to dwell poetically upon the earth. This understanding of ‘poetics’ resonates to a certain degree with Kearney’s interpretation of ‘poetics’ as ‘an exploration of the human powers to make (poiesis) a world in which we may poetically dwell.’12 For this to occur it is deemed necessary for human beings to learn how to experience themselves alternatively in a world alternatively experienced. Bearing this extended sense of poetics in mind, something that spans both practice and theory, it can be seen to have affinities with Richard Rorty who claims in “Deconstruction and Circumvention”that ‘poetic’ moments occur from time to time in many different areas of culture, that is, ‘in science, philosophy, painting and politics, as well as the lyric and the drama.’13 Having shed some light on the import of ‘poetics’ it is now necessary to illuminate the meaning of ‘homecoming’. The notion of ‘homecoming’ resounds with a multitude of meanings. It is a notion or theme that recurs extensively in many of the world’s great myths. Joseph Campbell in his examination of the theme of homecoming in myth draws attention to how the hero in these tales generally undergoes a three-part sequence of departure, initiation and return. In many cases the hero sets out on his 9

PLT, p. 213 and p. 215 PLT, p. 215 11 PLT, p. 216 12 Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining, Modern to Post-Modern, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998, p. 8. 13 Cf. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 14 10


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adventure in response to a ‘call’ that orders him to leave home. Once having plucked up the courage to venture beyond the safe haven of his home the hero journeys into the realm of the unknown and undergoes a series of initiatory trials. Having completed the initiation process the hero typically yearns to return back home. Campbell notes: “When the heroquest has been accomplished, through penetration to the source, or through the grace of some male or female, human or animal, personification, the adventurer still must return with his life-transmuting trophy.”14 Once the hero finally accomplishes his homecoming and returns home the adventure is understood to have come to a close. In these typical ‘hero myths’ home appears as a place of belonging and sanctuary where the returning hero is warmly welcomed. It is thus unsurprising to find that the heroic mood is often one infused with a deep sense of homesickness. Homer’s Odyssey, is a poem that could quite rightly be described as a poem of homesickness. The chief character Odysseus, like Campbell’s archetypal hero, leaves his native Ithaca and undergoes a succession of trials over the course of his many adventures, and then seeks to return back home to his wife Penelope. Of the three stages of the heroic sequence identified by Campbell, it is the motif of homecoming (nostos) that most notably comes to the fore in Homer’s work. This Greek word nostos is of particular significance. John Moriarty describes the word nostos as a ‘teeming’ and ‘haunted’ word. In his autobiography entitled Nostos he writes the following: A teeming word it was therefore, this little word, nostos. Meaning return to the homeland, it teems with all the terrors and wonders natural and supernatural, of the ancient Mediterranean. It’s a haunted word. It is haunted by the foul-smelling droppings of Harpies. It is haunted by the allurements of Sirens. It is haunted by the agonized roaring of Cyclops. It is a word to conjure with. […] The word nostos and odyssey mean roughly the same thing. In the course of his nostos, Odysseus encountered and had to overcome everything in the world that contradicts and confounds the elementary yearnings of humanity. At one stage, his nostos became a nekuia, a journey to the land of the dead. As with anodos and kathodos, I thought, so with nostos and nekuia they imply each other. Until in his case they did imply each other Odysseus couldn’t come home.15

Nostos is a word loaded with meaning, hauntingly so, and Moriarty does well to articulate its vast range of meaning in the passage cited above. 14

Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949, p. 193. 15 John Moriarty, Nostos, Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2002, p. 88.

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Introduction

Beyond myths the theme of homecoming has continued to exert influence over poets, philosophers, and artists. A most basic sense ‘homecoming’ involving the return to one’s domestic abode or dwelling place is described by Du Bellay in ‘Heureux qui comme Ulysse’.16 While a homecoming conceived in terms of a return journey to one’s homeland after a sojourn abroad, is found in Hölderlin’s ‘Homecoming/To Kindred Ones’, a poem that proves pivotal to Heidegger. Besides a homecoming to one’s homeland, there is the possibility of a homecoming to what and who one is. This takes on philosophical significance for Heidegger who also turns to the Greek word ‘nostos’ in “Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?”. Heidegger remarks: Toward the end of the third part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra appears a section with the heading ‘The Convalescent.’ That is Zarathustra. But what does ‘convalescent’, der Genesende, mean? Genesen is the same word as the Greek neomai, nostos, meaning to lead home. ‘Nostalgia’ is the yearning to go home, homesickness. ‘The Convalescent’ is one who is getting ready to turn homeward, that is, to turn toward what defines him. The convalescent is under way to himself, so that he can say of himself who he is.17

Whilst recognizing the importance of the various senses of ‘homecoming’ articulated above, the sense of homecoming that is espoused within the present investigation is the homecoming to where one already dwells. Thus as John Moriarty remarks: ‘All otherworlds and this world are one world.’18 In keeping with this broad sense of homecoming, no homeland or geo-political region is singled out for special attention.19 Moreover, undertaking this type of homecoming may involve a pan-ethnic journey whereby one is drawn or in need of appropriating the wisdom of many diverse cultures.20 16

Cf. George Steiner’s After Babel, Aspects of Language and Translation, Oxford: OUP 1992, p. 430. 17 N. II, p. 212 18 John Moriarty, Dreamtime, Revised and Expanded Edition, Dublin: The Lilliput Press 1999, p. 195. Henceforth, Dreamtime. 19 What Nietzsche says in The Gay Science is of relevance here: “We who are homeless are too manifold and mixed racially and in our descent, being ‘modern men’, and consequently do not feel tempted to participate in the mendacious racial self-admiration and racial indecency that parades in Germany today as a sign of a German way of thinking and that is doubly false and obscene among the people of the ‘historical sense’.” (GS, p. 340) 20 Unlike Nietzsche, I do not regard all cultures as being subjugated to the ancient Greeks. In The Birth of Tragedy he declares that all other cultures and peoples are


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Seeking to undergo such a homecoming indicates an acceptance or acknowledgement that humanity exists in a state of homelessness. The motif of homelessness as a philosophical dilemma is dealt with in chapter one: ‘Philosophy as Homelessness and Homesickness.’ Furthermore, it is a motif I engage with throughout the entire enquiry, whether explicitly or implicitly. As was stated at the outset the philosophical significance of ‘homelessness’ can be seen to arise with Nietzsche who through his probing and insightful investigations into nihilism recognized that the highest values hitherto were beginning to lose influence and meaning.21 Heidegger on the other hand interprets ‘homelessness’ as a symptom of the oblivion of being.22 In the “Letter on ‘Humanism”’ he argues that the homelessness of modern humanity exists as a destiny sent by being in the form of metaphysics or nihilism, for Heidegger claims nihilism is another name for metaphysics.23 He remarks: “This homelessness is specifically evoked from the destiny of being in the form of metaphysics, and through metaphysics is simultaneously entrenched and covered up as such.”24 However, Emmanuel Lévinas ardently undermines Heidegger’s construal of modern homelessness. Lévinas criticizes Heidegger’s contention that homelessness is a consequence of the metaphysical neglect of the question of being; instead he argues that homelessness is a universal feature of the human condition that pre-dates Greek antiquity. Lévinas declares: “The notion of a man exterior to being and exiled on earth is older than Greek metaphysics, and has certainly already directed the development and orientation of this metaphysics towards the idea of a man foreign to the earth.”25 Taking horses and chariots to the ancient Greeks who he considers the charioteers, drivers or leaders. He states: “And so we feel both shame and fear before the Greeks; although some, valuing truth above else, have dared confess the truth: that the Greeks are the charioteers of our own and all other cultures, but that chariot and the horses are almost always of too poor a quality, not a match for the glory of the drivers, who then make sport of driving the team into the abyss – clearing it themselves with a leap of Achilles.” (BT(N), p. 72) In this passage Nietzsche could be considered to be voicing a strongly held belief held by many German writers and thinkers from the 18th century till the 20th century. 21 Cf. WP, pp. 12-13 22 Cf. PM, p. 258 23 Heidegger writes in the essay: ‘The Word of Nietzsche: “God is Dead”’: ‘The realm for the essence and event of nihilism is metaphysics itself…’ (OBT, p. 165) 24 PM, pp. 258-259 25 Emmanuel Lévinas, “The Contemporary Criticism of the Idea of Value and the Prospects for Humanism.” in Value and Values in Evolution, ed. Edward A. Maziarz, New York: Gordon and Breach, 1979, p. 184.

8

Introduction

serious heed of Lévinas argument, the current enquiry does not adhere, submit or succumb to Heidegger’s seductive meta-narrative concerning the homelessness of modern humanity. Nonetheless, the type of homecoming that emerges in the present investigation can be seen to be marked by a two-pronged confrontation with nihilism, in the sense of a relentless quest for meaning and purpose on the one hand and the truth of being on the other hand. Therefore, it is perhaps more apt to speak of a poetics of homecoming as a poetics of unceasing venture. Yet, entitling this work ‘A Poetics of Homecoming’ suggests a sense of ‘home’ is prioritized, that is, a place of belonging, meaning and purpose. By prioritizing a sense of ‘home’ a series of questions arise. To what extent is it fruitful to prioritize a sense of ‘home’? If human beings were at home in the world would it lead to a state of complacency, would it bring about an end to all yearnings and venture? Is the challenge for humanity not to become at home in the world but rather for human beings to flourish in its state of homelessness? Have the great human beings been those who have prospered in their state of homelessness rather than those individuals who managed to become at home in the world? Moreover, does the preference for a ‘home’ have adverse political implications, even if unintended? Lévinas would argue that the prioritization of a sense of ‘home’, as a place of belonging has dangerous political consequences, for it implicitly sanctions the distinction between native inhabitants, those who are at home and outsiders, who are not at home.26 Lévinas’ argument is aimed primarily at Heidegger and his espousal of Bodenständigkeit (enrootedness). This argument must be kept in mind when investigating the motif of homecoming as it arises in Heidegger’s texts.

Heidegger’s ‘Later Thinking’ It is a difficult and arduous challenge to elucidate and gain insight into the theme of ‘homecoming’ as it is dealt with by Heidegger, since it arises in his ‘later writings’, which are on occasions extremely elusive and enigmatic.27 Moreover, there are times when reading Heidegger’s later 26

Lévinas writes in “Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us”: “One’s implementation in a landscape, one’s attachment to place, without which the universe would become insignificant and would hardly exist, is the very splitting of humanity into natives and strangers. And in this light technology is less dangerous than the spirits of the Place.” (Cf. Difficult Freedom, Essays on Judaism, trans. Seán Hand, London: The Athlone Press, 1990, p. 232.) 27 Although it is perhaps difficult to pin point or define precisely what is meant by Heidegger’s ‘later writings’ there is a general view that the text Vom Wesen der


9

writings that one finds oneself in a confounded and agitated state and the thought of providing a coherent and meaningful interpretation of some of his utterances seems next to impossible. There are statements to be found within his later texts that appear to be inaccessible and not readily available to any form of rational thinking. Is that their purpose? I find that I am unable to demonstrate the truth of some of these statements and I am compelled to wonder if these statements are inherently unintelligible. With regard to Heidegger’s ‘later philosophy’ Lévinas states: “The light of comprehension and truth streams into the darkness of incomprehension and non-truth; power, bound to mystery, avows its impotence.”28 Heidegger himself is aware of the abstruse nature of his thinking that on occasions defies comprehension. He writes in his third and final major lecture course on Hölderlin’s ‘The Ister’: The river is the locality of journeying. Yet the river is also the journeying of locality. Such statements make it sound as though empty words were being strung together and exchanged, a procedure that only further the already existing indeterminacy of their meaning and of the essence to which they refer. This illusion of a mere playing with words cannot be overcome immediately. We must even concede that such statements cannot be understood directly. […] Even those who once understand such statements are not able to understand them at any hour whatsoever.29

However, Heidegger does offer an explanation for propounding these obscure statements when he remarks: We are excluded from comprehending such statements so long as the appropriation of an essential transformation in our essence has not ‘occurred’ (sich ‘ereignet’). Yet why then do we pronounce such statements? In order to prepare such a transformation, or rather, simply so that we may know that the river is an ‘enigma’ [Rätsel].30

According to Heidegger, certain statements of his remain unintelligible only because human beings have not undergone the necessary transformation that would enable them to comprehend their meaning. Therefore the unintelligible as it emerges in Heidegger’s texts exists only at a surface or basic level, and thus is to be distinguished from mere Wahrheit (1930) represents a crucial point in Heidegger’s Kehre. It is identified as a decisive turning point in Richardson’s Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought with the approval of Heidegger. 28 Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 275 29 TI, pp. 33-34 30 TI, p. 34

10

Introduction

gibberish. These elusive statements are formulated by Heidegger in order to prepare the way for an essential transformation in the way human beings think and are in the world or more simply, to know something is an enigma or a mystery (Geheimnis), in this case the river Ister. This justifies my full attention to these enigmatic utterances in the continued absence of a full understanding of some of Heidegger’s statements. Having alluded to a transformation in the way human beings think and to the ‘mystery’, some seminal aspects of Heidegger’s later thought have managed come to the fore. There is a constant demand in Heidegger’s later texts that human beings learn to ‘think’ anew, that human beings cultivate a manner of thinking radically different from current modes of thought so that they may respond to the ‘call’ of being.31 Heidegger rejects representational, scientific and calculative thinking or what he calls ‘technological-scientific rationalization’32 in favour of thinking that attends to the ‘mystery’ of being.33 A recurring statement of Heidegger’s in a series of lectures entitled What is Called Thinking? (1951/52) is that humanity has yet to learn how to think. By ‘thinking’ Heidegger means ‘meditative thinking’, ‘essential thinking’ (wesentliches Denken) or simply ‘thinking’ (Denken). Only through essential thinking can human beings tend to the truth of being and end their estrangement from being which underlies the nihilism of modernity. In the essay “On the Essence of Truth” (1930) Heidegger notes that thinking the essence of truth entails ‘openness to the mystery’ (die Entschlossenheit zum Geheimnis)’, whereby mystery is understood as the concealing of what is concealed (die Verbergung des Verborgenen) and as such holds sway throughout the Da-sein of human beings.34 For Heidegger, thinking cannot penetrate this mystery, it can only negatively indicate its presence by pointing out that there is ‘something completely and utterly Other.’35 Hence, he would find himself in agreement with Wittgenstein who famously wrote: ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.’36 Heidegger’s conception of thinking as it relates to mystery also concerns his understanding of truth. Heidegger observes that 31

WCT, p. 164. Cf. BW, p. 448 33 See in particular “The Age of the World Picture” (QCT, pp.115-185) and “Science and Reflection” (pp. 155-182) 34 PM, p. 151 and p. 148 35 Cf. EHP, p. 43 and GA, 15, p. 363 (translated by Julian Young in Heidegger’s Later Philosophy, p. 20) 36 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness, London: Routledge, 1999, p. 74. 32


11

truth is traditionally thought of in terms of correctness (Richtigkeit). Such a conception of truth relates to propositional truth, which Heidegger defines as: veritas est adaequatio intellectus ad rem (truth is the adequation of intellect to thing).37 Unsurprisingly, Heidegger disavows this ‘selfevident’ and ‘fundamental’ interpretation of truth in the attempt to attain a more primordial understanding of it. Mystery is central to Heidegger’s endeavour to reveal the essence of truth. Mystery is considered to be that primary untruth which holds sway over humanity and is described by Heidegger as non-essence (Un-wesen).38 Non-essence is not simply absence but is also the covering over of truth. Similarly, ‘to err’ (irren), as a going astray is a consequence of mystery and in a way forms a type of counter-essence to the truth of being.39 Mystery and erring belong essentially to truth; both paths profoundly shape human history and saying.40 Moreover, the way of errancy and of truth both exist as distinct possibilities for human beings and this becomes crucial in his interpretation of modern technology. Heidegger manages to bring the issue of this 1930 essay to a head in a note he added in 1949. Here he introduces the expression Seyn ‘thought as the difference that holds sway between Being and beings.’ Furthermore, he declares: ‘Truth signifies sheltering that clears (lichtendes Bergen) as the fundamental trait of Being.’41 The concealment of being by beings illuminates the prevailing difference, Seyn. To be aware that being and not beings lies in concealment is to recognize and acknowledge the ontological difference. Hence one comes to understand something of the relation between being and beings and what they are. Finally, Heidegger asserts that the essence of truth is the truth of essence.42 He claims that this is not a proposition but instead signifies that the essence of truth is the myth or saying of a turning (die Sage einer Kehre) within the history of Seyn.43 This indicates a radically new understanding of human history as a series of Sagen, of epochs of the revelation of being.

37

Cf. PM, p. 138 Ibid., p. 146 39 Ibid., p. 150 40 Ibid., p. 151 41 Ibid., p. 153 42 Ibid., p. 153 43 In John Salis’ translation of “On the Essence of Truth” he renders the German word Sage as ‘saying’ when its more primary sense is myth or legend. 38

12

Introduction

Heidegger and Homecoming Although Heidegger’s later thought is provocative and at times enigmatic it also proves extremely fertile in contributing to a healthier, more fruitful way of being in the world. Furthermore, the motif or idea of homecoming plays a crucial role in this respect. As George Steiner writes in Heidegger, “‘home-coming’ is…both the process and goal of authentic being.”44 The notion of homecoming drives to the heart of Heidegger’s thinking on being and this too is highlighted by Steiner.45 Heidegger notes in the Introduction to Metaphysics how the Greeks called ‘being’ ousia, or more fully parousia.46 Dictionaries translate this word as ‘substance’ but according to Heidegger this is a misleading translation. The more authentic translation includes a whole cluster of significances comprising of: ‘homestead, at-homeness, a standing in and by itself, a self-enclosedness, an integral presentness or thereness.’47 Heidegger uses the German word Anwesen to adhere more truthfully to the scope of its meaning. Additionally, parousia tells us that ‘something is present to us’, it stands firmly by itself and thus manifests and declares itself, it is. Steiner shows how Heidegger’s thinking on being is tied to ‘homecoming’ when he writes: For the Greeks, ‘being’ basically meant this standing presence. PostSocratic Greek thought, whether in Platonic idealism or Aristotelian substantiality, never returned to this pure and primal ‘ground of being’, to this illumination of and through the presentness of the existing. But it is to just this ground that we must strive to come home.48

Although ‘homecoming’ is essential to Heidegger’s thought; the unhomely and homeless nature of the human being is also of great importance. He states in his address on Hölderlin’s ‘Remembrance’: “The thinker thinks toward what is un-homelike, what is not like home. The poet’s questioning, on the other hand, is a commemorative questioning that puts the homelike itself into poetry.”49 This underscores a crucial distinction between the task of the thinker and the role of the poet. Chapters three, four and five attend to Heidegger’s engagement and encounter with the ‘un-homelike’ and homeless state of humanity. In chapter three, it is the notion of the un44

George Steiner, Heidegger, Glasgow: Fontana 1978, p. 49. Henceforth, Heidegger. Cf. Ibid., p. 49 46 Cf. IM, p. 64 47 Cf. IM, pp. 64-67 48 George Steiner, Heidegger, p. 49 49 EHP, p. 151 45


13

heimlich, the uncanny or unhomely that comes to the fore, while in chapter four it is Heidegger’s confrontation with nihilism, that which constitutes modern humanity’s state of homelessness that takes centre stage. In chapter five, modern technology is examined, for Heidegger regards it not only as being rooted in the history of metaphysics but sees it as signalling the final phase of metaphysics.50 Thus modern technology is essentially related to humanity’s state of homelessness. The final two chapters attempt to redress humanity’s homelessness. In chapter six I explore Heidegger’s discourses on the nature of thinking, and poetry, as they prove crucial in founding the basis for Heidegger’s homecoming venture. While in Chapter Seven I critically examine Heidegger’s sense of homecoming as it emerges through his interpretation of Hölderlin’s poetry. For he believes Hölderlin’s poetry offers intimations of a homecoming for the German people. However, Heidegger does not interpret a poem like ‘Homecoming/To Kindred Ones’ as dealing with the theme of homecoming, instead he understands the poem itself as enacting the homecoming.51 He observes that Hölderlin’s poem is not an occasion for celebration due to the poet returning home but is rather the tragic acknowledgment that one’s ‘homeland’ or sense of ‘home’ remains withheld while the ‘unhomelike ‘resounds all about.’52 By interpreting ‘homecoming’ as signifying more than the mere return to the soil of one’s homeland, Heidegger understands it as a return to ‘nearness to the origin’.53 For Heidegger, this ‘nearness to the origin’ is a mystery and cannot be revealed by any form of analysis; furthermore, its mystery must be preserved.54 According to Heidegger, poetry is capable of preserving its mystery; moreover, poetry as homecoming contributes to the transformation of the poet and those who are capable of listening to, and thinking of his words. These ‘others’ who take heed of the poet help him in his task.55 Heidegger states: “That is why the poet turns to others, so that their remembrance may help in understanding the poetic word, so that each may have come to pass a homecoming appropriate for him.”56

50

Cf. PM, p. 259 Heidegger states: “The elegy ‘Homecoming’ is not a poem about homecoming; rather, the elegy, the poetic activity which it is, is the homecoming itself…” (EHP, p. 44) 52 EHP, p. 32 53 Ibid., p. 42 54 Ibid., p. 43 55 Ibid., p. 49 56 Ibid., p. 49 51

14

Introduction

Opposition to the present Enquiry By investigating and tracing out the motif of homecoming in Heidegger’s writings opposition to this enquiry immediately comes to the fore in the shape of such thinkers as Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Theodor Adorno, Emmanuel Lévinas and Richard Rorty. Tensions emerge between what is argued for in this investigation and what Blanchot claims in The Space of Literature, as he writes: ‘The poem is exile…’ and he also states that the poet is ‘always astray’.57 Blanchot’s understanding of the poet as remaining forever in the foreign and his claims for the essentiality of exile indicate that the poet is in a constant state of exodus. Thus contrary to Heidegger, Blanchot does not envision the poet as being able to provide or illuminate a homecoming for humanity. Gilles Deleuze’s essay “Nomad Thought” can also be seen to lie in conflict with Heidegger, as he sponsors a nomadic type of thinking that resists or refuses to undertake any type of homecoming. Deleuze remarks: We seek a kind of war machine that will not re-create a state apparatus, a nomadic unit related to the outside that will not revive an internal despotic unity. Perhaps this is what is most profound in Nietzsche’s thought and marks the extent of his break with philosophy, at least so far as it is manifested in the aphorism: he made thought into a war machine – a battering ram – into a nomadic force.58

Besides the texts of Blanchot and Deleuze that appear in opposition to the thought of Heidegger, Adorno and Lévinas also provide scathing critiques of some of his writings, particularly those that relate to the home, the homeland, rootedness and autochthony. In The Jargon of Authenticity Adorno is highly contemptuous of the provincialism that emerges in some of Heidegger’s texts. He is especially critical of Heidegger for relating his 57

Cf. Maurice Blanchot, The Space Of Literature, trans. Ann Smock, Lincoln: Nebraska University Press 1982, p. 237. This can be viewed in conflict with a primary tenet of Heidegger’s, who maintains in his lecture on Hölderlin’s ‘Homecoming/ To Kindred Ones’ (1943), that the elegy ‘Homecoming’ is not a poem that meditates upon the theme of homecoming but rather that the poetic activity involved in composing the poem is representative of the homecoming itself. (EHP, p. 44) Moreover, Heidegger also argues the all poems written by poets who have entered into their poethood are poems of homecoming. (EHP, p. 221) 58 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Nomad Thought’, trans. David B. Allison in The New Nietzsche, Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, Cambridge: The MIT Press 1999, p. 149.


15

thinking to the ways of the German farmer: “Philosophy which is ashamed of its name, needs the sixth-hand symbol of the farmer as proof of its primalness, as a way of acquiring some otherwise unavailable distinctiveness.”59 He further condemns Heidegger for his appeal to the notion of ‘rootedness’ regarding it as an ultimately empty concept. He writes “...even in Heidegger, the evidence of language reveals the falsity of rootedness – at least as soon as rootedness descends to something that has a concrete content.”60 Lévinas is also a stern critic of Heidegger’s emphasis on autochthony and all that comes with it. Although Lévinas willingly recognizes the genius of Heidegger he cannot forget or disregard Heidegger’s political involvement with the National Socialism. Lévinas says: “For me, Heidegger is the greatest philosopher of the century, perhaps one of the very great philosophers of the millennium; but I am very pained by that because I can never forget what he was in 1933.”61 For Lévinas, Heidegger’s affiliation with National Socialism was intrinsically intertwined with his emphasis on the ontological significance of place. From Lévinas’ perspective, Heidegger’s thought as it pertains to the sanctification of place requires critical attention. In the short essay “Heidegger, Gagarin and Us”, Lévinas argues that Heidegger’s consecration of place is a manifestation of latterday paganism. According to Lévinas, Heidegger’s emphasis on ‘enrootedness’ engenders nationalism because it establishes a dichotomy between natives and strangers. As was referenced earlier, Lévinas claims: “One’s implementation in a landscape, one’s attachment to place, without which the universe would become insignificant and would hardly exist, is the very splitting of humanity into natives and strangers. And in this light technology is less dangerous than the spirits of the place.”62 However, Jacques Derrida contends in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ that Heidegger’s focus on place is not related to paganism. Derrida claims: “…the solicitation of the site and the land is in no way, it must be emphasized, a passionate attachment to territory or locality, is in no way a provincialism or particularism. […] The thinking of Being thus is not a pagan cult of the site, because the site is never a given proximity but a promised one.”63 59

Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Fredric Will, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973, p. 56. 60 Ibid., p. 57 61 Emmanuel Lévinas, Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. M. Smith and B. Harshav, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, p. 117. 62 Emmanuel Lévinas, “Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us”, p. 232 63 Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, London: Routledge, 2001, p. 181.

16

Introduction

Also worth noting is how Lévinas in Totality and Infinity (1961) offers a detailed discussion on the ‘home’, laying emphasis on its feminine nature and highlighting the home as a place of welcome, of hospitality and a place where wanderers can find sanctuary.64 For Lévinas, the home realizes its potential for being a place of dignity when it becomes open to the Other. Whereas Heidegger’s relationship to place is characterized by Bodenständigkeit, Lévinas’ relation to home is typified by the welcome of otherness. Richard Rorty would also query the fruitfulness of Heidegger’s homecoming venture. For according to Rorty, Heidegger is what Nietzsche would call an ‘ascetic priest.’ As an ascetic priest, Rorty sees Heidegger as someone who removed himself from the struggles and sufferings of ‘his fellow humans by making his mind its own place, his own story the only story that counts’; thereby ‘making himself the redeemer of his time precisely by his abstention from action.’65 Rorty regards Heidegger as a person who has no time for “people who think that mere happiness or mere decrease of suffering might compensate for Seinsvergessenheit, forgetfulness of Being.” From Rorty’s perspective, Heidegger seeks to distance himself from his fellow humans in order to gain contact with his ‘true self’ or ‘Being’ or ‘Brahma’ or ‘Nothingness.’66 Moreover, Rorty envisages Heidegger’s utopia or ultimate sense of home as ‘a pretechnological peasant community with unchanging customs’, a “pastoral, a sparsely populated valley in the mountains, a valley in which life is given shape by its relationship to the primordial Fourfold – earth, sky, man, and gods.”67 Interestingly, Rorty contrasts Heidegger’s ideal community with Kundera’s utopia of the carnivalesque, and Dickens’ ‘crowd of eccentrics rejoicing in each other’s idiosyncrasies, curious for novelty rather than nostalgic for primordiality.’68 In his essay “Deconstruction and circumvention” Rorty goes on to further undermine Heidegger’s enterprise, by claiming his ‘big esoteric problem’, that is, the overcoming metaphysics, is an artificial problem that should be disregarded for ‘lots of little pragmatic questions about which

64

Cf. Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 157 Cf. Richard Rorty, “Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens”, Essays on Heidegger and Others, Philosophical Papers Volume 2, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 70. 66 Ibid., p. 71 67 Ibid., p. 77 68 Ibid., p. 77 65


17

bits of that tradition might be used for some current purpose.”69 Instead of attempting to overcome metaphysics, he seeks out the greatest happiness of the greatest number.70 Despite the contentious issues that have thus far been raised it is believed Heidegger’s thought concerning the theme of homecoming, while not flawless or immune to criticism, is enlightening and can contribute to a healthier way of being in the world for humanity. However, the criticisms leveled against him must be taken on board and if done so appropriately they can help pave the way for a broadened, more enlivened investigation into Heidegger’s texts.

Overview of the Homecoming Venture The opening two chapters of this venture can be viewed as preparatory chapters as they pave the way for the investigation into Heidegger’s extensive thinking on the homeless nature of the human being and how this state may be countered by undergoing a poetic homecoming. Chapter one: ‘Philosophy as Homelessness and Homesickness’ deals predominately with the pervasive problem of ‘homelessness’ as it encountered within the philosophical tradition and other forms of discourse that properly speaking, aren’t philosophical at all. The phenomena of ‘homelessness’ and ‘homesickness’ are interpreted both in a traditional and more modern sense. To illuminate the significance of ‘homelessness’ and ‘homesickness’ in their more ancient sense I look to the Orphic, Pythagorean, Platonic, Gnostic and Christian movements. While for a more modern and contemporary consideration or interpretation of what is meant by ‘homelessness’ and ‘homesickness’ I turn initially to Nietzsche and conclude with thinkers like Deleuze, Derrida and Moriarty. In chapter two: ‘The German appropriation of the Ancient Greeks’ I narrow the focus of my investigation by examining how many prominent Germans writers, starting with Winckelmann in the eighteenth century, attempted to passionately appropriate the ancient Greeks in order to establish their own Germanic sense of ‘home’. Moreover, by concentrating on a diverse range of individuals that include Winckelmann, Hölderlin and Nietzsche, it is believed decisive insight can be gained into the German ‘homesickness’ 69

Cf. Richard Rorty, “Deconstruction and circumvention”, Essays on Heidegger and Others, Philosophical Papers Volume 2, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p.87. Henceforth, “Deconstruction and circumvention.” 70 Cf. Richard Rorty, “Philosophy as Science, Metaphor, Politics”, Essays on Heidegger and Others, Philosophical Papers Volume 2, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 26.

18

Introduction

for ancient Greece. In this regard what Nietzsche writes in The Will to Power is vital to chapter two: German philosophy as a whole – Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, to name the greatest – is the most fundamental form of romanticism and homesickness there has ever been: the longing for the best that ever existed. One is no longer at home anywhere; at last one longs back for that place in which alone one can be at home, because it is the only place in which one would want to be at home: the Greek world!71

Exploring how and why so many important German writers and thinkers sought to orient themselves so resolutely to the Greeks proves decisive to determining what Heidegger has to say in relation to ‘homelessness’ and ‘homecoming’. As Heidegger continues the German tradition of turning to the ancient Greeks in order to found a Germanic sense of ‘home’, although admittedly he does this in his own unique way. Chapter three: ‘Heidegger and the Un-heimlich’ explores the role of the un-heimlich, the uncanny or unhomely in Heidegger’s texts. Beginning with an examination of Freud and the un-heimlich, who can be accredited with inspiring a host of critical discourses on this notion, I go on to reflect upon the significance of the un-heimlich in Heidegger’s writings. Firstly, I allude to some of the texts prior to Being and Time, before encountering his magnum opus, I then focus on Introduction to Metaphysics and his lecture course on Hölderlin’s hymn ‘The Ister’. The notion of the unheimlich is central to Heidegger’s understanding of what the human being is and he traces its meaning back to the ancient Greeks and more specifically to Sophocles’ Antigone. He states: “The human being is, in one word, to deinotaton, the uncanniest. This saying about humanity grasps it from the most extreme limits and the most abrupt abysses of its Being.”72 Hence the un-heimlich provides a good starting point for enquiring into Heidegger’s understanding of what the human being is and its unhomely nature. Following on from chapter three, the ensuing chapter tackles the problem of ‘homelessness’ in its more modern context. In chapter four: ‘Confronting Nihilism’ I provide a critical exposition of Heidegger’s attempt to confront nihilism via Nietzsche, in order to discern the nature of the homelessness besetting humanity. For Heidegger, as was mentioned previously, nihilism is another name for metaphysics, whereby being lies in oblivion. Furthermore, he considers modern technology not only to be a 71 72

WP, p. 225 IM, p. 159


19

manifestation of nihilism/metaphysics but its final stage. Thus in chapter five: ‘Heidegger and Modern Technology’ I seek to show how modern technology contributes to the homelessness of humanity, while its origin and essence are also explored. In chapter six ‘Preparing for the Homecoming Venture, Thinking and Poetry’ I explore the way Heidegger transforms our traditional conceptions of thinking, and poetry. Investigating the ways in which Heidegger manages to ‘unlearn’ and alter the metaphysical conceptions of thinking, and poetry we in the West have inherited, allows a homecoming venture to get underway. Finally in chapter seven: ‘Heidegger and the Enactment of a Poetic Homecoming’ I endeavour to disclose how humanity’s ‘homelessness’ can be responded to or countered by studying Heidegger’s texts on poetry. His recourse to Hölderlin in particular plays a major role in this regard. However, since it is highly questionable that humanity’s state of homelessness can ever be overcome, what impels this investigation is the yearning to dwell poetically. In consequence I critically examine Heidegger’s essay “…Poetically Man Dwells…” for insight. The possibility of humanity dwelling poetically is itself uncertain. Yet, it is believed dwelling poetically nurtures the possibility of a profoundly courteous and healthy way of being in the world. Thus, by way of offering an initial insight into what dwelling poetically could mean and the ‘new intelligence’ that could bring about such a form of dwelling, I invoke the poetry of Wallace Stevens and in particular his poem ‘Thirteen Ways of looking at a Blackbird’.

CHAPTER ONE PHILOSOPHY AS HOMELESSNESS AND HOMESICKNESS

I am a Mana of the great Life. I am a Mana of the mighty Life. Who has made me live in the Tibil, who has thrown me into the body-stump? [...] My eyes, which were opened from the abode of light, now belong to the stump. My heart, which longs for the Life, came here and was part of the stump. It is the path of the stump, the Seven will not let me go my own path. How I must obey, how endure, how must I quiet my mind! How I must hear of the seven and twelve mysteries, how must I groan! How must my mild Father’s Word dwell among the creatures of the dark!1

Much philosophical endeavour has arisen from both a sense of homelessness and homesickness.2 Homelessness and homesickness have come to be prevalent motifs within philosophical discourse from Greek philosophy right through to modernity and beyond. However, there have been many transformations and variations in the meaning and significance of these formative ideas and so elucidating the crucial role they have played in shaping Western philosophy proves to be a hazardous task. Nonetheless, at the risk of over simplification a broad distinction can be made between an ancient or traditional philosophical understanding of homelessness and homesickness and a more modern sense of homelessness and homesickness. The ancient/traditional philosophical sense of homelessness is evident amongst the Orphic, Pythagorean, Platonic, Gnostic and Christian movements, among others, in which the human body and the world it is born into are perceived as being states of exile, states in which the human soul having suffered a failing of the wing finds itself in this earthly realm where it is not truly at home. For these particular movements homesickness is typified by the desire to be released from this corporeal 1

Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, Boston: Beacon Press 1963, p. 67. This understanding of philosophy lies in close proximity to Novalis’ conception of it, when he wrote: ‘Philosophy is really homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere.’ 2

22

Chapter One

and transient world of suffering in favour of a variously imagined transcendental realm. On the other hand, the philosophical problem which homelessness poses for modernity stems not from a descent of the soul into the dark cave of the world or into this vale of tears but rather from a loss of values or more precisely a loss of meaning and purpose. Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God or more accurately speaking the murder of God can in many respects be accredited with ushering in this modern sense of homelessness, in which the dominance of nihilism facilitates the erosion of the highest values hitherto.3 Hence, religious, ethical and aesthetic values become threatened and undermined to the point where they are increasingly difficult to determine and even come to be regarded in some contexts as being extinct.4 Homesickness within this modern context could consequently be considered the pursuit of meaning and the securement of some purpose. Although special attention has been focused here on Nietzsche, there have 3

Nietzsche in The Anti-Christ section 15 attempts to expose the fictitiousness of transcendental ideas employed by Christianity and all other doctrines that have recourse to such concepts and he does so in order to subvert and make redundant these ‘other worldly’ doctrines. He writes: “In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. Nothing but imaginary causes (‘God’, ‘soul’, ‘ego’, ‘spirit’, ‘free will’ – ‘unfree will’): nothing but imaginary effects (‘sin’, ‘redemption’, ‘grace’, ‘punishment’, ‘forgiveness of sins’). A traffic between imaginary beings (‘God’, ‘spirits’, ‘souls’); an imaginary natural science (anthropocentric; complete lack of the concept of natural causes); an imaginary psychology (nothing but self-misunderstandings, interpretations of pleasant or unpleasant general feelings, for example the condition of the nervus sympathicus, with the aid of the sign-language of religio-moral idiosyncrasy – ‘repentance’, ‘sting of conscience’, ‘temptation by the Devil’, ‘the proximity of God’, ‘the Last Judgement’, ‘eternal life’). – This purely fictitious world is distinguished from the world of dreams, very much to its disadvantage, by the fact that the latter mirrors actuality, while the former falsifies, disvalues and denies actuality. Once the concept ‘nature’ had been devised as the concept antithetical to ‘God’, ‘natural’ had to be the word for ‘reprehensible’ – this entire fictional world has its roots in hatred of the natural (- actuality! -), it is the expression of a profound discontent with the actual. [...] But explains everything. Who alone has reason to lie himself out of actuality? He who suffers from it. But to suffer from actuality means to be an abortive actuality. […] The preponderance of feelings of displeasure over feelings of pleasure is the cause of a fictitious morality and religion: such a preponderance, however, provides the formula for decadence…. ” (The AntiChrist, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin Books, 1990, pp. 137-138.) 4 Richard Kearney states that the contemporary traumas to conscience include the death of God, the end of art and the crisis of morality, cf. Poetics of Modernity, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1995, p. xi.

Philosophy as Homelessness and Homesickness

23

been many other great thinkers prior to him whose insights have inflicted serious injurious blows to humanity’s confidence in itself and contributed substantially in challenging and destabilizing any secure sense of being at home in the world that humanity might have. These ‘narcissistic wounds’5 have been inflicted from several quarters, with some of the greatest philosophical, literary and scientific minds contributing to humanity’s growing sense of homelessness in the world. I will deal with the texts relevant to this seminal issue at a later stage but for the moment it will suffice to name certain important figures that have dramatically suffered these insights and have helped propagate this modern sense of homelessness. Various distinguished thinkers have had to endure profound revelations, which have left them homeless in the deepest and most serious sense of the word. Broadly and crudely speaking it is possible to identify thinkers who have had to undergo encounters with a new astronomy, a new epistemology and a new anthropology.6 Kepler, Pascal and Sir James Jean all suffered enormously in their encounters with the new astronomy in which the work of Copernicus was central. Isaac Newton’s ‘natural philosophical’ writings are also of particular relevance here as Coleridge, Melville and Arnold had to endure the epistemological repercussions of his disclosures. Of course, Kant ‘the all-destroyer’ (alles-zermalmender) and the epistemological consequences of his Critique of Pure Reason and the Copernican revolution he performed within philosophy must also be noted. Just as Copernicus sought ‘the observed movements, not in the heavenly bodies, but in the

5

Michel Foucault in an essay “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx” discusses and elaborates upon the idea of narcissistic wounds, first put into currency by Freud, he writes: “Freud says somewhere that there are three great narcissistic wounds in Western culture: the wound imposed by Copernicus; that made by Darwin, when he discovered that man was descended from the ape; and the wound made by Freud himself when he, in his turn, discovered that consciousness was based on the unconscious. I wonder whether we could not say that by involving us in an interpretative task that always reflects upon itself, Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx did not constitute around us, and for us, those mirrors which reflect to us the images whose inexhaustible wounds form our contemporary narcissism.” (Cf. Transforming the Hermeneutic Context (From Nietzsche to Nancy), trans. Alan D. Schrift, ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift, New York: State University of New York Press 1990, p. 61.) 6 John Moriarty speaks of a new astronomy, epistemology and anthropology and the effect they had on certain individuals. (Cf. Nostos, Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2001, p. 322.)

24

Chapter One

spectator’7 so Kant pursued the laws governing the realm of experience not in the objects themselves but in human beings: ‘we can know a priori of things only what we ourselves put into them.’8 In the Critique, Kant examined the legitimate scope of the human mind and what certain and sound knowledge humans could attain by thinking about things independently of experience and perception and he concluded that it was feasible for humanity under these conditions to ascertain only a minimal amount. Prior to Kant, the entire mode or discourse of most philosophy involved drawing conclusions about the nature of the universe, of God, or of the soul through simple logical inferences based upon ‘a priori’ propositions, that is, thinking on purely logical grounds. In accordance with this type of thinking it must be the case that God or the universe is this way or that way, because it makes sense logically. However, in the history of philosophy, for every philosophical theory that God or the universe or the mind must be one way, some other philosopher arrived at another theory stating that it must be precisely the opposite way. Kant called this unproductive, irresolvable and dogmatic method of thinking the ‘dialectic of pure reason’. The lack of success achieved through the dialectic of pure reason was an inevitable consequence of trying to arrive at knowledge on purely logical grounds independently of experience or of scientific knowledge based on the evidence of the senses. For Kant, this entire method of pursuing knowledge was inherently corrupt and must therefore be discarded. According to Kant, philosophy must henceforth operate within the narrow ‘limits of pure reason’ and recognize that most positive knowledge could come only through the sciences based on sense perception and not through metaphysics, which was about things of which humanity could never have direct sense perception. Kant’s influence on Western metaphysics was and remains immense. By radically delimiting the scope of traditional metaphysics he managed to shatter epistemological aspirations in areas of philosophy in which they once thrived. Friedrich Nietzsche in The Gay Science undergoes what could be termed a new anthropology when he experiences the ‘whole primal age’ alive and active within himself. Nietzsche remarks in section 54, (‘The consciousness of appearance’) of The Gay Science: “How wonderful and new yet how gruesome and ironic I find my position vis-à-vis the whole of existence in the light of my insight! I have discovered for myself that the human and animal past, indeed the whole primal age and past of all 7

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. xxii. 8 Ibid., p. xviii.


25

sentient being continues in me to invent, to love, to hate, and infer.” 9 Nietzsche’s new found insight proves pivotal to what could be termed a ‘new anthropology’. Outside of the new epistemology, astronomy and anthropology referred to here, humanity still tends to the wounds inflicted by Darwin and his theory of evolution and Freud’s psychological theory that contends that the conscious mind is founded upon the unconscious mind. Additionally, the sense of homelessness or alienation attested to by Hegel in his Philosophy of History and the extensive social critiques provided by Rousseau and Marx also merit recognition as they too engender an important ‘social’ sense of homelessness. Of course Heidegger, the main focus of this enquiry demands attention too, as humanity’s sense of homelessness and homesickness assumes a vital role in many of his texts. Humanity has been left reeling in the wake of some of the insights attained and suffered by the individuals mentioned above and has as a consequence found itself wandering ever deeper into a no-man’s land. This no-man’s land is described by Hölderlin as being a ‘destitute time’, Nietzsche says of the modern world that: ‘The wasteland grows…’, Heidegger describes our time as ‘too late for the gods and too early for Being’ and according to Hannah Arendt modern humanity exists in an ‘odd in-between period’, an ‘interval altogether determined by things which are no longer and by things which are not yet.’ I begin my discussion of how homelessness and homesickness have come to be central motifs in Western philosophy by examining the Orphic and Pythagorean movements of ancient Greece10 and I conclude with thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida and John Moriarty. The philosophical problematics posed by homelessness and homesickness in their traditional sense is initially dealt with in chronological order. However, when examining these thematics in their more modern context and beyond, a wide range of eminent thinkers are referred to but no strict chronological order is maintained. By pursing this kind of discourse I do 9

GS, p. 116 W.K.C. Guthrie notes: “The whole religious side of this movement (Orphic), which included an elaborate cycle of rebirths, cannot be separated from that adopted by Pythagoras, and to make the attempt would probably be unhistorical. The Pythagoreans not only used the religious books promulgated under the ancient name of Orpheus: prominent members of the school were named in later antiquity as the authors of some of them, and the tradition ascribing some to Pythagoras himself goes back, as we have already noted, to the fifth century B.C.” The earlier Presocratics and the Pythagoreans, Cambridge: CUP 2000, p. 198. (Henceforth, The earlier Presocratics and the Pythagoreans)

10

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Chapter One

not contend nor seek to demonstrate that the themes of homelessness and homesickness provide the basis for all philosophical inquiries hitherto. Rather I wish to illustrate how they are hugely significant and recurrent themes within philosophy and within thinking that isn’t properly philosophical at all, and how they are in need of a comprehensive and sustained exposition.

The Ancient experience of Homelessness and Homesickness Beginning with the Orphic tradition it is evident how those associated with this tradition conceived of the soul as being entrapped in the tomb of the body thus preventing it from experiencing its ‘true life’. 11 Hence within Orphism carnation in a physical body is conceived as a type of death.12 According to Orphic thought humanity’s nature is twofold; on the one hand its nature is considered Titanic, that is, earthly while on the other hand it believes the human being is inherently Dionysiac, that is, divine.13 The goal of Orphic life was to become wholly divine and this was pursued by means of purification, asceticism, and ritual in such a way as to be rid 11

According to I.M Linforth in The Arts of Orpheus, the term ‘Orphic’ is too vague and practically meaningless and is better off being avoided. On the other hand, Guthrie considers Orphism to be sustained by a core set of beliefs evinced by many writers, some of whom ascribe to the teachings of Orpheus, while others do not. Emmet Robbins commenting on Guthrie’s position writes: “…Orphism was the direct antithesis of the common attitudes. It was structured, dogmatic, authoritative, based on holy writings that were inspired by the teaching of a great religious reformer, if not his own composition, and ever peripheral or esoteric, the property of a sect whose ideas never filtered far down into the general consciousness of a nation whose religious life was not characterized by holy books, a priestly caste, personal piety, and moral injunctions, in other words, the very things which those of us reared in a Judaeo-Christian tradition expect of religion and which Orphism alone in the classical period of Greek culture provided.” Cf. “Famous Orpheus” in Orpheus, The Metamorphoses of a Myth, ed. John Warden, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982, p. 12. 12 Guthrie writes concerning this Orphic doctrine: “The doctrine expressed is simply that to be confined in a body is a grim business and prevents it from enjoying its true life.” (Guthrie, The earlier Presocratics and the Pythagoreans, p. 172) 13 According to ancient Greek myth man came into existence when Titans jealous of Dionysus tore him apart and ate his flesh. However, the Titans themselves were subsequently turned to cinders by the thunderbolt of Zeus and from their ashes man was born.


27

of or cleansed of its Titanic nature. The body is understood to be a type of prison house and earthly life is interpreted as being a series of trials and tribulations. In order to be released from its corporal suffering man must attempt to purify itself through a succession of re-births and so break free from the wheel of reincarnation. John Warden in the introduction to Orpheus, The Metamorphoses of a Myth informs us that those who die come before three judges of the underworld and those who are initiated in the Orphic mysteries proceed to the fields of Bliss while the uninitiated are to lie up to their necks in ‘a mass of mud and ever-flowing filth.’ When the soul has undergone its final purification it is ‘brought to the life of blessedness’ and so the divine in man is re-united with the Divine.14 The Pythagoreans also took heed of the Orphic belief that the soul was imprisoned in the body and needed to be released. As Guthrie remarks in The earlier Presocratics and the Pythagoreans: “The words of Philolaus are also worth quoting. This Pythagorean says: ‘The ancient theological writers and prophets also bear witness that the soul is yoked to the body as punishment, and buried in it as in a tomb.”15 The Orphico-Pythagorean traditions considered the soul’s carnation in human form or any other form of physical carnation for that matter to be a sort of death in which it is denied its true abode. This is discussed by Guthrie where he notes: ‘…the whole Pythagorean and Orphic doctrine of the soul as an immortal being for which this earthly life is a kind of death and the body a tomb....’.16 It is apparent that Plato, who likens the world to a darkened cave and the human body to a tomb, naming it the soma sema; the tomb-body, is heavily indebted to his predecessors. In this respect it is quite clear Plato incorporated Orphico-Pythagorean principles into his writings. In the Gorgias for example he articulates through Socrates the notion of this life being a type of death and the body as a tomb; ideas already prevalent within the Orphico-Pythagorean tradition: Socr. ...I shouldn’t, you know, be at all surprised if Euripides were right to say Who knows if all this life of ours is death, And death is life?

14

John Warden, Orpheus, The Metamorphoses of a Myth, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985, p. x. 15 Guthrie, The earlier Presocratics and the Pythagoreans, p. 198 16 Ibid., p. 464

28

Chapter One And perhaps we are really dead. At any rate I once heard a wise man declare that we are, in fact, dead here and now: the body is really our tomb…17

Guthrie in The Greek Philosophers: from Thales to Aristotle draws attention to Plato’s reliance upon Pythagorean thought.18 Additionally, Plotinus in The Enneads affirms Plato’s distrust and disdain for this sensible realm, when he declares: Everywhere, no doubt, he (Plato) expresses contempt for all that is of sense, blames the commerce of soul with body as an enchainment, an entombment, and upholds as a great truth the saying of the Mysteries that the Soul is here a prisoner. In the Cavern of Plato and in the Cave of Empedocles, I discern this universe, where the ‘breaking of the fetters’ and the ‘ascent’ from the depths are figures of the wayfaring towards the Intellectual realm.19

According to Plotinus, Plato asserts that humanity’s existence in the world is to be understood on the basis of an enchainment, entombment and 17

Plato, Gorgias, trans. W.C. Helmbold, New York: Bobbs-Merrill 1952, p. 62. Guthrie writes: “In support of this conviction of his master, Plato reaffirmed the truth of the Pythagorean religious doctrine that the soul belongs in essence to the eternal world and not the transitory. It has had many earthly lives, and before and between them, when out of the body, has had glimpses of the reality beyond. Bodily death is not an evil for it, but rather a renewal of true life. The body is compared both to a prison and a tomb, from which the soul longs to be released in order that it may fly back to the world of Ideas with which it had converse before its life on earth.” (Cf. W. K. C. Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers: From Thales to Aristotle, London: Methuen Publishers 1950, p. 95.) The difficulty of separating Pythagorean thought from Platonic philosophy is further discussed by Guthrie in A History Of Greek Philosophy Vol. 4 (Plato The Man and his Dialogues), he writes: “The very word philosophia as Plato uses it is a link between them and his interpretation of philosophic understanding in terms of religious purification and salvation, his passion for mathematics as a glimpse of eternal truth, his talk of the kinship of all nature, of reincarnation and immortality and of the body as the temporary tomb or prison of the soul, his choice of musical terminology to describe the state of the soul and especially the mathematico-muscial account of the composition of the world-soul which he puts into the mouth of Timaeus of Locri, and finally his adoption of the doctrine of the music of the spheres in the myth of Er – all these are evidence of a close affinity between the two in which Plato must have been a debtor.” (Cf. A History Of Greek Philosophy Vol. 4, Cambridge: CUP, 1993, p. 35.) 19 Plotinus, The Enneads, ‘The Soul’s Descent into Body’, trans. Stephen MacKenna, New York: Penguin Books, 1991, p. 335. 18


29

imprisonment. The simile of the cave in Plato’s Republic gives credence to Plotinus’ claims. The senses, then, deceive us in our quest for the exact truth our minds seek after. Plato emphasizes the necessity of turning away from this world of flux in order to apprehend the Good: “…so the entire soul must be turned away from this changing world, until its eye can bear to contemplate reality and that supreme splendour which we have called the Good.”20 For the Gnostics, it is apparent that those who participated in this particular movement had a wholly negative conception of their embodied and earthly existence. The Mandaeans called this world ‘Tibil’, arising from the Old Testament word tƝvƝl, ‘earth’ or ‘terra firma’; something always to be associated with the notion of baseness opposed to the purity of the divine world. Gnostics considered humanity’s existence in the earthly world to be the result of a ‘fall’, ‘sinking’ and ‘capture’. These terms express sentiments akin to the Orphic, Pythagorean and Platonic traditions, which have been previously alluded to. Nevertheless, they are to be differentiated from these traditions due to the unique nature of the fundamental beliefs and concepts of Gnosticism. The image of the descending or falling soul, something originally part of the first Life or Light, into the physical body is one of the primary metaphors of Gnosticism. The pre-cosmic fall is an essential component of the divine principle that forms the basis for the origin of the world and human existence in it. Phraseology such as ‘The Light fell into the darkness’ announces the commencement of this divine drama. But how this event occurred is open to varying conjectures, with the exception of Manichaeism, which accounts for the fall as being a consequence of the soul’s desire to experience lower realms (whether out of sensual desire, curiosity or vanity). One particular Gnostic source found in Hans Jonas’ The Gnostic Religion explicates what the ‘fall’ entails by writing: The soul once turned toward matter, she became enamoured of it, and burning with the desire to experience the pleasures of the body, she no longer wanted to disengage herself from it. Thus the world was born. From the moment the Soul forgot herself. She forgot her original habitation, her true centre, her eternal being.21

Another fragment detailing the gradual descent of the soul to earth, states:

20

Plato, The Republic, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford, London: OUP, 1945, p. 232. 21 Han Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, p. 63

30

Chapter One Looking down from the highest summit and perpetual light, and having with secret desire contemplated the appetence of the body and its ‘life’, so called on earth, the soul by the very weight of this its earthly thought gradually sinks down into the nether world. […] In each sphere [which it passes] it is clothed with an etherial envelopment, so that by these it is in stages reconciled to the company of this earthen garment. And thus it comes through as many deaths as it passes spheres to what here on earth is called ‘life’.22

The fall or descent of the soul from its original home is a source of great distress and torment for the Gnostics giving rise to a profound sense of homelessness. Their anguish is most poignantly expressed through the tortured questions they have posed, questions that appear to be heavily burdened with deep anxieties: ‘Why did ye carry me away from my abode into captivity and cast me into the stinking body?’23 and ‘Who has made me live in the Tibil, who has thrown me into the body-stump?’24 By describing the human body as ‘stinking’ and as a ‘body-stump’ they most effectively communicate their grief and aversion to life in this sensible world. Consequently within Gnosticism a profound sense of forlornness and homesickness forms the basis of their writings, as one Gnostic writes: “A vine I am, a lonely one, that stands in the world. I have no sublime planter, no keeper, no mild helper to come and instruct me about everything.”25 These testimonies from various Gnostics articulate a profound sense of misery due to their embodied existence, and their experience of forlornness and homesickness for the transcendental realm of Light is quite extraordinary even in comparison with other major religions which seek release from this corporal world. Although Plotinus was at times a severe critic of Gnosticism he too assumes the world to be a depraved state of existence, he writes in The Enneads: ‘Life here, with the things of the earth, is a sinking a defeat, a failing of the wing.’26 He also employs terminology and metaphors that are in keeping with Orphism, Pythagoreanism and Platonism. He remarks: “The human soul next: Everywhere we hear of it as in bitter and miserable durance in body, a victim to troubles and desires and fears and all forms of evil, the body its prison or its tomb, the Cosmos its cave or cavern.”27 22

Ibid., p.158 Ibid., p. 63 24 Ibid, p. 67 25 Ibid., p. 66 26 Plotinus, The Enneads, p. 546 27 Ibid., p. 336. In line with his adherence to Platonism he states: “It has fallen: it is at the chain: debarred from expressing itself now through its intellectual phase, it 23


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Yet, Plotinus’ account of how the world came into existence greatly differs from Gnosticism, as he talks about emanation ex deo (‘out of God’), which confirms the absolute transcendence of the One, making the unfolding of the cosmos purely a consequence of its existence; the One is in no way affected or diminished by these emanations. Plotinus’ idea of emanation can be distinguished from the orthodox Christian notion of creation ex nihilo (‘out of nothing’), which would make God suffer the deliberations of a mind and actions of a will. Plotinus uses the analogy of the Sun which emanates light indiscriminately without thereby ‘lessening’ itself, or reflection in a mirror which in no way diminishes or otherwise alters the object being reflected to clarify his theory. The first emanation is Nous or Thought which can be identified with the ‘demiurge’ of Plato’s Timaeus. From Nous proceeds the World Soul, which Plotinus subdivides into the ‘upper’ and the ‘lower’, identifying the lower aspect of Soul with Nature. From the World Soul proceed individual human souls, and finally, matter, the lowest level of being and thus the least perfected level of the cosmos. Despite this relatively negative assessment of the material world, Plotinus asserted the ultimately divine nature of material creation since it in the end derives from the One, through the mediums of Nous, The Divine Mind and the World Soul or All-Soul: ‘Of all things the governance and the existence are in these Three.’28 The association of philosophy with homesickness is of relevance to Plotinus’ writings as he interpreted philosophy to stem from the desire to be re-united with the Divine or One, its true home. Paul Dillon elucidates what philosophy is for Plotinus when he writes: “Philosophy in Plotinus often means not Metaphysics but the act or state of the Uniate (the human being who has become ‘wholly the Divine’.): it might, often, without much fault of tone, be taken as the equivalent of 1, Sanctity, and 2, the Mystic Way.”29 Porphyry in Vita Plotini (Life of Plotinus) recounts that Plotinus attained such a union several times during the years he knew him. This in turn may of course be associated with ‘enlightenment’, ‘liberation’, and other concepts of mystical union common to many Eastern and Western traditions. Many scholars have compared Plotinus’ teachings to the Hindu school of Advaita Vedanta (advaita ‘not two’, or ‘non-dual’). Turning to the Medieval cosmology supported by Christianity, it is apparent that within this tradition humanity’s homelessness or feeling of exile is once again attested to. Centremost in this cosmology was the operates through sense, it is a captive; this is the burial, the encavement, of the soul.” (Ibid., p. 339) 28 Cf. John Dillon’s introduction to The Enneads, p. xxxi 29 Ibid., p. xl

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Chapter One

Earth. This sublunary sphere was comprised of the four elements (earth, water, fire, and air). Next, followed the wandering stars or the spheres of the seven planets and after these came the sphere of fixed stars. Outermost in this scheme was the Primum Mobile, sometimes divided into three spheres of the Crystalline Heaven, the First Moveable, and the Empyrean, or highest heaven. While not scientifically supportable, this cosmology was eagerly embraced and adapted to fit Medieval Christian theology. The Prime Mover became the Christian God, the outermost sphere became heaven, and the earth was the centre of God’s attention. The spheres, moved by the Prime Mover, existed and rotated in perfect harmony, creating the ‘music of the spheres.’ Human beings, habitants of the sublunary sphere, who had been corrupted since Adam’s fall could no longer hear this music and dwelt in a state of exile from God. A sense of homelessness and homesickness was and remains an intrinsic element to Christianity and it is given voice in the renowned Roman Catholic prayer ‘Hail Holy Mary’, which conveys the belief in the fall and exile of human beings who must endure a world that is regarded as a ‘vale of tears’: Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, hail, our life, our sweetness and our hope! To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve! To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears! Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy towards us; and after this, our exile, show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus! O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary!

From the preceding discussion on the ancient or traditional senses of homelessness and homesickness it is evident that the Orphic, Pythagorean, Platonic, Gnostic and Christian movements all assume the earthly realm to be a place of imprisonment, captivity, deception and immense suffering. A profound sense of homesickness lies at the root of these movements as the individuals who belong to them yearn to return to a variously imagined transcendental realm.

The Modern experience of Homelessness and Homesickness Although this section is entitled ‘The Modern experience of Homelessness and Homesickness’, it is predominately the phenomenon of homelessness that I shall be focusing on. Nonetheless, both Nietzsche and Heidegger make important references to the notion of ‘homesickness’.


33

A critical juncture for the development of the more modern sense of homelessness arises through Copernicus’ astronomical advances. He managed to make redundant the widely held Ptolemaic model created by Ptolemy in the Almagest, dating from roughly 150 A.D. The Ptolemaic system drew on several previous theories that viewed Earth as a stationary centre of the universe as it appeared that everything revolved around the Earth. Copernicus demonstrated how the motion of the heavens could be explained without the Earth (or anything else) being at the geometric centre of the system. Therefore, the assumption that humanity was observing from a favoured position within the universe could be dispensed with accordingly. Copernicus’ revelations established a key principle for astronomy, as applied to the universe it affirms that neither humanity’s place nor time in the universe is in any way privileged. Johannes Kepler, a key figure in the scientific revolution of the 17th century was deeply influenced by Copernicus and became besieged with horror at the thought of an infinite universe, without centre, circumference, and therefore any determinate places. He writes: “This very cognition carries with it I don’t know what secret, hidden horror; indeed one finds oneself wandering in this immensity to which are denied limits and centre and therefore also determinate places.”30 Blaise Pascal, the brilliant mathematician, physicist, theologian and philosopher in his famous work Pensées writes of the fright and dread that the new astronomy induces.31 He remarks at various points in Pensées: When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which comes before and after – as the remembrance of a guest that tarrieth but a day – the small space that I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there…(op. cit., p. 19) Returning to himself, let man consider what he is compared with all existence; let him think of himself as lost in this remote corner of nature; and from this little dungeon in which he finds himself lodged – I mean the Universe – let him learn to set a true value on the earth, its realms, its cities, its houses and himself at their proper value. What is man in the infinite? (op. cit., p. 60)

30

Found in Alexandre Koyre’s From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957, p. 61. 31 Cf. Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, trans. A.J Krailsheimer, London: Penguin Books, 1995.

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Chapter One Anyone who considers himself in this way will be terrified at himself; and seeing his mass, as given by nature, supporting him between these two abysses of infinity and nothingness, he will tremble at these marvels. […] For, after all, what is man in nature? A nothing in comparison with the infinite, an absolute in comparison to nothing, a central point between all and nothing, infinitely remote from an understanding the extremes; the end of things and their principles are unattainably hidden from him in impenetrable secrecy. Equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed. (op. cit., p. 61) The eternal silence of those infinite spaces strike me with dread. (op. cit., p. 66)

These salient passages detail the sheer insignificance of humanity’s place in the universe. Yet, at the same time Pascal declares humanity to be an absolute compared to nothing thus signifying ‘a central point between all and nothing, infinitely remote from understanding these extremes…’. His confession that the infinite vastness of the universe fills him with fright and strikes him with dread is a compelling testament to the more modern sense of homelessness he experienced. Sir James Jeans’ response to the new astronomy is no less alarming than that of Kepler and Pascal, when he writes: We cling to a fragment of a grain of sand until such time as the chill of death shall return us to primal matter. We strut for a tiny moment upon a tiny stage, well knowing that all our aspirations are doomed to ultimate failure and that everything we have achieved will perish with our race leaving the universe as though we had never existed. The universe is indifferent and even hostile to every kind of life.32

Kepler’s, Pascal’s and Sir James Jeans’ encounters with a new astronomy furnish us with valuable accounts of the modern sense of homelessness, for they document a dramatic shift in how humanity sees its place in the universe and the role it has to play in it. By moving from a Ptolemaic model of the universe to a Copernican model, humanity and the Earth are traumatically displaced from being at the centre of a structured universe to being in a universe without centre and which has no determinate places. With Newton’s philosophical writings a new epistemology comes to light, in which a colourless world emerges. He writes determinately and assuredly of a ‘nothing but’ universe in :

32

Found in John Moriarty’s Nostos, p. 31


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If at any time I speak of light and rays as coloured or endued with colours, I would be understood to speak, not philosophically and properly, but grossly and accordingly to such conceptions as vulgar people in seeing, all these experiments would be apt to frame. For the rays, to speak properly, are not coloured. In them there is nothing else than a certain power and disposition to stir up a sensation of this or that colour. For as sound in a bell or musical string, or other sounding body, is nothing but the trembling motion, and in the air nothing but that motion propagated from the object, and in the sensorium it is a sense of that motion under the form of sound, so colours in the object are nothing but a disposition to reflect this or that sort of rays more copiously that the rest; in the rays they are nothing but their dispositions to propagate this or that motion into the sensorium, and in the sensorium they are sensations of those motions under the form of colour.33

Newton’s discovery had enormous epistemological repercussions. Coleridge, Melville, and Matthew Arnold were left reeling in wake of the new epistemology propounded by natural philosophers and modern scientists like Newton. Hence, Coleridge would go on to describe the world as an ‘inanimate cold world’ in ‘Dejection: An Ode’, while Melville in Moby Dick depicts the universe as a ‘palsied universe’ that lies before us like a leper and Matthew Arnold in ‘Dover Beach’ portrays the world as a place that ‘Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain…’ in spite of its beautiful appearance. Coleridge’s writes in ‘Dejection: An Ode’ (1802): My genial spirits fail; And what can these avail To lift the smothering weight from off my breast? It were a vain endeavour, Though I should gaze for ever On that green light that lingers in the west: I may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life, whose fountains are within. O Lady! we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does Nature live: Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud! And would we aught behold, of higher worth, Than that inanimate cold world allowed To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd, 33

Isaac Newton, Newton’s Philosophy of Nature: Selections from His Writings, ed. H. S. Thayer, New York: Hafner Publishers, 1953, p. 100. See also Sir Isaac Newton’s Opticks, or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light, London: William and John Innys, 1721, pp.108-109.

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Chapter One Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the Earth – And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Of all sweet sounds the life and element!34

For Coleridge, human beings receive but what they give and in this way ascribe a whole manner of things to an ‘inanimate cold world’ which are in truth only human projections. In a passage from Melville’s Moby Dick the character Ishmael asserts similar sentiments. Ishmael the mouthpiece for Melville in Moby Dick declares: And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colourless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper…35

Melville/Ishmael could be understood to be undergoing a process of disillusionment here as the theory of natural philosophy hits home the fact that all earthly hues are but subtle deceits and objects or substances themselves do not possess any colours, instead they are ‘laid on from without.’ Matthew Arnold in the poem ‘Dover Beach’ poetically recounts a sense of godlessness in things. He says: The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath 34

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Dejection: An Ode’, The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge., ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, London: Henry Frowde, 1912, p. 365 35 Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Oxford: OUP, 1998, p. 175


37

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world. Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.36

The new epistemology that emerges with Newton and other natural philosophers gives rise to the deep sense of disillusionment experienced by Coleridge and Melville/Ishmael who come to apprehend the world as a cold and inanimate place and the universe as palsied that ‘lies before us a leper’. Also, Arnold speaks of the withdrawal of the Divine, leaving behind the naked shingles of the world. He further alludes to this naked world as being without joy, love, light, certitude or peace. These forlorn poetic statements that arise in response to the new epistemology denote an acute sense of homelessness in a world that is fundamentally without colour, is naked and barren and devoid of meaning. A new anthropology can be identified in Nietzsche’s work when he remarks in The Gay Science: “How wonderful and new and yet how gruesome and ironic I find my position vis-à-vis the whole of existence in the light of my insight! I have discovered for myself that the human and animal past, indeed the whole primal age and past of all sentient being continues in me to invent, to love, to hate, and to infer.”37 He has discovered within himself that all life going back through the Precambrian, Palaeozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic continues to work on in him, love on in him, hate on in him and think on in him. The fact that Nietzsche becomes aware of the entire human, animal and indeed the whole primal age active within himself bears witness to a new anthropology. The traditional anthropology or logos about anthropus conceives human inwardness to be bounded and therefore containable and controllable by ego and will, yet this seems decidedly inadequate in light of Nietzsche’s insight. By Nietzsche attesting to the unfathomable primal depths existent

36

Matthew Arnold, The Poems of Matthew Arnold, 1840-1867, London: OUP, 1913, p. 402. 37 GS, p. 116

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within himself it becomes questionable whether or not it is possible for the human being to be at home in the world. Leaving to one side the new anthropology, Nietzsche also regards the phenomenon of homelessness to be a very much pertinent issue for his age, he goes so far as to dedicate his gaya scienza to his contemporaries who find themselves homeless (in its ‘distinctive’ and ‘honourable sense’) in The Gay Science, book five ‘We Fearless Ones’, section 377 fittingly titled ‘We who are homeless’. He writes: We who are homeless.— Among Europeans today there is no lack of those who are entitled to call themselves homeless in a distinctive and honourable sense: it is to them that I especially commend my secret wisdom and gaya scienza. For their fate is hard, their hopes are uncertain; it is quite a feat to devise some comfort for them—but what avail? We children of the future, how could we be at home in this today? We feel disfavour for all ideals that might lead one to feel at home even in this fragile, broken time of transition; as for its ‘realities,’ we do not believe that they will last. The ice that still supports people today has become very thin; the wind that brings the thaw is blowing; we ourselves that are homeless constitute a force that breaks open ice and other all too thin ‘realities’.38

In the above passage Nietzsche emphasizes both the difficulty and reward in providing comfort for those who are homeless, as they have dispensed with all prevailing ideals capable of providing them with solace. These homeless ones whose discontents cannot be placated denote a dangerous force, breaking open ice, that is, unsettling long established ideals. Furthermore, they encourage and promote the destabilization of the delicate ‘realities’ that these ideals foster. The homeless, those who cannot take refuge in any present or past ideals are assailed by a yawning need and it could perhaps be successfully argued that Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra is an attempt to tend to this need; by attempting to enact a type of homecoming for humanity. In the ‘Introduction’, it was noted how Heidegger underscores the significance of the homecoming evident in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In a piece entitled “Who Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?” he makes the following comments: “Toward the end of Part Three of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, there is a section called ‘The Convalescent’. He is Zarathustra. But what does ‘the convalescent’ mean? ‘To convalesce’ (genesen) is the same as the Greek néomai, nóstos. This means ‘to return home’’; nostalgia is the aching for home, homesickness. The convalescent 38

GS, p. 338


39

is the man who collects himself to return home – that is, to turn in, into his own destiny. The convalescent is on the road to himself, so that he can say of himself who is.”39 For Nietzsche, the aching for home and homesickness is something that is deeply ingrained in German philosophy. Attention was also drawn to this in the ‘Introduction’, where Nietzsche was cited as regarding German philosophy as a whole to be the ‘most fundamental form of romanticism and homesickness there has ever been.’40 According to Nietzsche, this homesickness springs from a yearning to return to ancient Greece, the only place where one would want to be at home. Outside of the new astronomy, epistemology and anthropology already discussed there are others who play important roles in detailing and analysing the modern sense of homelessness. In The Philosophy of History, Hegel focuses on the development of the consciousness in the Oriental, Greek, Roman, and German worlds. However, in terms of the present enquiry it is Hegel’s exploration of the ancient Greek’s that is of most significance. For Hegel identifies the homeless spirit as first manifesting itself in ancient Greece. From his perspective the homeless spirit of Greek antiquity first emerges in the person of Socrates. Before Socrates the Athenian polis was a cohesive, unified and well-functioning city-state, its citizens submitted to the laws that governed their communal existence without questioning it. According to Hegel’s account, the citizens of Athens abided by the rules of the state because the laws were understood as being a product of nature rather than convention. Hegel remarks: “For the concrete vitality found among the Greeks, is Customary Morality—a life for Religion, for the State, without further reflection, and without analysis leading to abstract definitions, which must lead away from the concrete embodiment of them, and occupy an antithetical position to that embodiment.”41 For Hegel, the Athenian city-state was conducive to a democratic constitution and this was suitable for Athens because its citizens were unaware of their particular self-interests. Insofar as Athenians were unaware of their essential individuality there was no conflict between the subjective will of the citizens and the objective will of the state. Hegel notes: “The Democratic Constitution is here the only possible one: the citizens are still unconscious of particular interests, and therefore of a corrupting element: the Objective Will is in their case not

39 Martin Heidegger, “Who Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?” in The New Nietzsche, trans. Bernd Magnus, London, MIT Press, 1999, p. 65. 40 WP, p. 225 41 Georg W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree, New York: Colonial Press, 1900, pp. 267-268. Henceforth, The Philosophy of History.

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disintegrated.”42 With respect to Hegel’s interpretation of the ancient Greek democracy, Herbert Marcuse makes the following apt comment: ‘Hegel held that a society of emancipated individuals conflicted with democratic homogeneity.’43 However, when the questioning Socrates appeared on the scene a major disruption to this hitherto cohesive Athenian polis occurred. Hegel claims that Socrates introduced the principle of subjectivity and with it the ‘absolute independence of thought’. He writes: “And it was in Socrates, that at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, the principle of subjectivity—of the absolute inherent independence of Thought—attained free expression.”44 Socrates’ awakening of human subjectivity through his teachings and passionate pursuit of independently attained knowledge drastically undermined the authority and position of the polis. Socrates taught that man has to ‘discover and recognize in himself what is the Right and Good, and that this Right and Good is in its nature universal.’45 He unfettered subjectivity by impressing on his fellow citizens that inward reflection or introspection was required to reveal the nature of what was good and just. For Socrates, introspection or self examination was needed for individuals to be capable of ethical action. Hence, Hegel deemed Socrates to be the ‘Inventor of Morality’.46 Such a title can be bestowed upon Socrates for he managed to unshackle humanity’s moral sensibility from its bondage to custom. Traditionally understood, a moral individual is someone who performs a good or just deed, yet, with the introduction of the Socratic moral schema, a moral or ethical individual must be conscious or aware that the act that he/she is performing is morally good. By way of inventing morality, Socrates posits the individual as the ultimate source of moral authority. Earlier moral guidelines and norms were authoritatively handed down or established by the country and custom; however, according to Socrates’ moral schema it is the individual who is the supreme arbitrator of ethical action. Hegel states: “Socrates—in assigning to insight, to conviction, the determination of men’s actions—posited the Individual as capable of a final moral decision, in contraposition to Country and to Customary Morality, and thus made himself an Oracle, in the Greek sense. He said 42

Hegel, The Philosophy of History, p. 252 Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977, p. 243. 44 Hegel, The Philosophy of History, p. 269 45 Hegel, The Philosophy of History, p. 269 46 Hegel says: “Socrates is celebrated as a Teacher of Morality, but we should rather call him the Inventor of Morality.” (The Philosophy of History, p. 269) 43


41

that he had a įĮȚȝȩȞȚȠȞ within him, which counselled him what to do, and revealed to him what was advantageous to his friends. The rise of the inner world of Subjectivity was the rupture with the existing Reality.”47 In becoming an ‘oracle’, Socrates sets himself apart from the Athenian polis and its customarily held morality. Consequently, Socrates’ relationship with Athens could be characterized as one of estrangement; moreover, his fidelity to his daimon rendered him alienated from his native city. Hegel proclaims: “Though Socrates himself continued to perform his duties as a citizen, it was not the actual State and its religion, but the world of Thought that was his true home.”48 Having distinguished and differentiated himself from the polis and the commonly held morality, is it then possible for an autonomous individual like Socrates to return to the objective community? Such a return was distinctly impossible for Socrates because the cohesive and unified state of the polis was unable to accommodate this self-directed and questioning individual. Hegel is unambiguous in articulating how the ancient Greek polis was incapable of accommodating someone of Socrates’ nature. He writes: “That very subjective Freedom which constitutes the principle and determines the peculiar form of Freedom in our world—which forms the absolute basis of our political and religious life, could not manifest itself in Greece otherwise than as a destructive element.”49 While Hegel identified the individual subject as being homeless in ancient Greece the idea of the modern state renders reconciliation between the subjective individual and the objective community possible. Nevertheless, many thinkers whose thought was hugely influenced by Hegel have not been as enthusiastic as he about the possibility of overcoming humanity’s state of homelessness or alienation. For these thinkers, the problem of homelessness is as much a problem in the modern world as it was in post-Socratic Greece. Rousseau and Marx are individuals who contend that homelessness is very much a phenomenon at work in the modern world. They provide intriguing and critical investigations into the ‘social’ sense of homelessness. Rousseau for example viewed society as inherently artificial and held that the development of society, especially the growth of social interdependence, had been inimical to the well-being and growth of human beings. Rousseau’s critique of society centres on the transformation of amour de soi, a positive self-love, into amour-propre, or pride. Amour de soi represents the instinctive human desire for self preservation, combined with the human power of reason. In contrast, amour-propre is not natural 47

Hegel, The Philosophy of History, pp. 269-270 Ibid., p. 270 49 Ibid., p. 252 48

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but artificial and forces man to compare himself to others, therefore creating unwarranted fear and allowing humans to take pleasure in the pain or weakness of others. His Discourse on Inequality traces the progress and degeneration of mankind from a primitive state of nature to modern society. He suggests the earliest human beings, who he venerably named ‘noble savages’, were isolated and were differentiated from animals by their capacity for free will and their ability to refine their skills. He also hypothesized that these primitive humans were possessed of a basic drive to care for themselves and were endowed with an innate capacity to feel compassion or pity for others. With the pressure of population growth human beings were forced to associate more closely with one another and so they underwent a psychological transformation and came to value the good opinion of others as an essential component of their own well being. In an important passage from his Discourse on Inequality, he writes the following: Such is indeed the cause of all these differences: the savage lives within himself; the social man, outside himself, lives only in the opinion of others and it is, so to speak, from their judgement alone that he gets the sense of his own existence. It is not my purpose here to show how this disposition gives rise to so much indifference toward good and evil coupled with such fine moralistic talk, or how, because everything is reduced to appearances, everything comes to be sham and put on – honour and friendship, virtue, and often even vices themselves in which one eventually discovers the secret of glorying; or show how as a result of always asking others what we are and never daring to wonder about this ourselves in the midst of so much philosophy, humanity, good manners, and sublime maxims, we have only deceptive and frivolous facades, honour without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness. It is enough for me to have proved that this is not at all the original state of man, and that only the spirit of society and the inequality it engenders transforms and corrupts in this way all our natural inclinations.50

Rousseau’s derisive criticisms of society in which ‘everything is reduced to appearances, everything comes to be sham’ leaves no doubt as to the hollowness of society, for ‘we have only deceptive and frivolous facades, honour without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness’. Through his tirade of criticisms Rousseau seeks to demonstrate how humanity’s ‘natural inclinations’ have been distorted and impeded

50

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, trans. Franklin Philip, Ed. Patrick Coleman, London: Oxford University Press ,1999, p. 84.


43

because of its social existence thus inhibiting humanity from being at home in the world. For Marx, alienation (or ‘estrangement’) indicates humanity’s sense of homelessness. Alienation is essentially experiencing the world and oneself passively, receptively, as the subject separated from the object. Marx most effectively articulates this in his “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts” and particularly in the text entitled “Alienated Labour”. In this text he very clearly states what alienation entails or more specifically the alienation of labour: What constitutes the alienation of labour? First, that the work is external to the worker, that it is not part of his nature; and that, consequently, he does not fulfil himself in his work but denies himself, has a feeling of misery rather than well being, does not develop freely his mental and physical energies but is physically exhausted and mentally debased. The worker therefore feels himself at home only during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless. His work is not voluntary but imposed, forced labour. It is not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means for satisfying other needs. Its alien character is clearly shown by the fact that as soon as there is no physical or other compulsion it is avoided like the plague. External labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is a labour of selfsacrifice, of mortification. Finally, the external character of work for the worker is shown by the fact that it is not his own work but work for someone else, that in work he does not belong to himself but to another person.51

The type of homelessness Marx speaks about in the above passage pertains exclusively to humanity’s labour and economic activities. According to Marx, labourers are not fulfilled in their work because their mental and physical abilities are not freely developed, they are in fact curtailed to a degrading degree, and also it is forced labour, in the sense that it is a means to satisfy other needs. Finally, the labourer is alienated as he is working for someone else not himself/herself and so what is produced does not belong to the worker. Although Marx’s reflections on homelessness are limited in scope it is nonetheless significant as it illuminates a critical concern for many individuals whose lives are centred around work and economic activity.

51

Karl Marx, “First Manuscript, Alienated Labor”, from Economic And Philosophical Manuscripts, trans. T.B. Bottomore, found in Eric Fromm’s Marx’s Concept of Man, New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1961, pp. 98-99.

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Chapter One

In T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, the very title itself suggests homelessness, as a waste land implies a destitute place where no-one could be at home, the first two stanzas read: April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers…. What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either our shadow at morning striding behind you… 52

This poem conveys a sense of homelessness in which people suffer from a lack of rootedness and values. Values cannot take hold to any significant degree, as a culture that is inherently degenerate is unable to supply the ground from which these values could grow: ‘What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/Out of this stony rubbish?’ Bereft of any meaningful values humanity is unable to flourish, not able for the immensities that dwell either within or outside themselves, they must settle for ‘a little life’: …...stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers….

Moving onto Freud, we find that ‘unhomeliness’ or ‘homelessness’ meant more than a simply not belonging; it was the primary tendency of the familiar to turn on its possessors, enabling it to suddenly become 52 T. S. Eliot, ‘The Wasteland’ in Collected Poems, 1909-1962. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963, p. 53.


45

defamiliarized. Freud’s essay “The ‘Uncanny’” (1919) testifies to this when he writes: “Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich.”53 For Freud, the reverse is also the case, whereby the uncanny or unhomely leads back to the homely or familiar: ‘…the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.’54 Beginning with an extensive investigation into the etymology of the word ‘uncanny’ (unheimlich) and by way of further psychological inquiry he establishes a basis for equating the uncanny with the unhomely. While on the face of it, the essay appears a psychological analysis of the literary uncanny found in Hoffmann’s “Sand-Man” and “The Devil’s Elixir”; in which the fear of castration and the uncertainty of whether an object is alive or dead are alluded to and while the theme of the ‘double’ found in Otto Rank (among other interrelated subject matters) also finds prominence, the essay in fact draws the uncanny/unhomely into the more disturbing territory of the death drive. By taking the uncanny/unhomely in this direction Freud reveals a deeper underlying concern beneath these motifs. Anthony Vidler in The Architectural Uncanny describes the relevance of Freud’s text in relation to the crisis posed by ‘unhomeliness’ experienced across Europe: Written in the aftermath of Freud’s attempts to grapple with the traumas of war starting with ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’ and ‘On Transience’ 1915-1916, continuing with ‘Mourning and Melancholia,’ and concluding with his preface to a collective study on war neuroses, ‘The Uncanny’ seems to incorporate, albeit in an unstated form, many observations on the nature of anxiety and shock that he was unable to include in more clinical studies of shell shock. […] Themes of anxiety and dread, provoked by a real or imagined sense of ‘unhomeliness,’ seemed particularly appropriate to a moment when, as Freud noted in 1915, the entire ‘homeland’ of Europe, cradle and apparently secure house of western civilisation, was in the process of barbaric regression; when the territorial security that had fostered the notion of a unified culture was broken, bringing powerful disillusionment with the universal ‘museum’ of the European ‘fatherland.’ The site of the uncanny was no longer confined to the house or the city, but more properly extended to the no man’s land between the trenches, or the field of ruins left after the bombardment.”55

53

Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’” in Art and Literature Vol. 14, trans. James Strachey, ed. Albert Dickson, London: The Penguin Freud Library, 1990, p. 347. 54 Ibid., p. 347 55 Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny : essays in the modern unhomely, Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1992, p.7.

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Freud’s psychological ruminations on the uncanny/unhomely in “The ‘Uncanny’” offers yet another influential perspective from which homelessness can be viewed and as noted by Vidler its a notion that took on a greater and more troubled significance in the aftermath of World War One. In the twentieth century no thinker was more concerned about the problem of homelessness than Heidegger. In the lecture course entitled The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1929-1930), Heidegger alludes to philosophy in terms of homelessness and more specifically homesickness. He outlines this understanding of philosophy based on a short fragment written by the poet Novalis, who discerned the essence of philosophy to be homesickness and an urge to be at home everywhere. Novalis writes: ‘Philosophy is really homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere.’ Heidegger does not consider Novalis’ statement to be some blind demand without direction but one which awakens questions regarding the world, finitude, and individuation.56 He goes on to claim that the homesickness that lies at the heart of philosophy relates to the urge ‘to be once and at all times within the whole.’57 Heidegger writes: Philosophy can only be such an urge if we who philosophize are not at home everywhere. What is demanded by this urge? To be at home everywhere — what does that mean? […] Rather, to be at home everywhere means to be once and at all times within the whole. We name this ‘within the whole’ and its character of wholeness the world. We are and to the extent that we are, we are always waiting for something. We are always called upon something as a whole. This ‘as a whole’ is the world.58

Yet, if this ‘whole’ that Heidegger refers to is a meaningless ‘whole’, could human beings be at home in it? From the nineteen thirties onwards Heidegger focuses very little on ‘homesickness’ as he becomes increasingly concerned with the phenomenon of ‘homelessness’, regarding it to be the fundamental condition of humanity. He defines homelessness in terms of the oblivion of being, which in turn leads to a sense of ontological estrangement, whereby humanity fails to address the question of being. He aims to confront the problem of homelessness by re-opening the disregarded question of being. For Heidegger, the origins of the modern oblivion or forgetfulness of being can be traced back to the thought of the ancient Greeks. By 56

FM, p. 5 Heidegger remarks: “This is where we are driven in our homesickness: to being as a whole. Our very being is this restlessness.” (FM, p. 5) 58 FM, p. 5 57


47

renewing the question of being, Heidegger attempts to return to the ‘house of Being’ neglected by Plato and Aristotle and in doing so endeavours to enact a homecoming for Western humanity. George Steiner concisely states what this type of homecoming signifies: “Post-Socratic Greek thought, whether in Platonic idealism or Aristotelian substantiality, never returned to this pure and primal ‘ground of Being,’ to this illumination of and through the presentness of the existing. But it is to just this ground that we must strive to come home.”59 Heidegger’s most famous pronouncement relating to the plight of modern homelessness is to be found in his “Letter on ‘Humanism’”. In this essay, Heidegger argues that: “Homelessness is the symptom of oblivion of being. Because of it the truth of being remains unthought. The oblivion of being makes itself known indirectly through the fact that the human being always observes and handles only beings.”60 On the basis of this account, modern homelessness is essentially a ‘symptom’ of the oblivion of being, yet it is a symptom that prevents humanity revealing the principal cause of its homelessness. Humanity tries to confront the phenomenon of homelessness by focusing on beings but because it is oblivious to being, humanity is unable to come to terms with the primary cause of its homelessness. Who or what is responsible for the oblivion of being? In the ‘Introduction’ it was indicated that Heidegger conceives of homelessness as a destiny of being that emerges in the form of metaphysics and through metaphysics it is simultaneously embedded and concealed as such.61 However, Heidegger’s most lucid and unambiguous remarks concerning the problem of modern homelessness do not emerge in the “Letter on ‘Humanism’” but in a text entitled “Memorial Address” found in Discourse on Thinking. Heidegger delivered the “Memorial Address” in his hometown of Messkirch to commemorate the 175th birthday of the composer Conradin Kreutzer in 1955. In this address Heidegger illuminates the symptoms of modern homelessness in an uncharacteristically clear manner. Heidegger lays emphasis on how Kreutzer was a native son of the Swabian homeland, representing a long line of illustrious artists and thinkers who had come from this particular locale.62 Insofar as Kreutzer originates from the Swabian homeland, the homeland itself is regarded by Heidegger as being 59

George Steiner, Heidegger, p. 49. PM, p. 258 61 PM, p. 258 and p. 259 62 He writes: “As we hold this simple fact in mind we cannot help remembering at once that during the last two centuries great poets and thinkers have been brought forth from the Swabian land.” (DT, p. 47) 60

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the vital source of his musical compositions for which he was celebrated. According to Heidegger, Kreutzer’s artistic accomplishments like all great works of art depend upon the existence of a homeland that the artist can call home. He says: “For a truly joyous and salutary human work to flourish man must be able to mount from the depth of his home ground up into the ether.”63 However, “the ether” is endangered in the modern world and Heidegger maintains that the most patent evidence of this fact manifests itself in the way modern Germans exist. He observes how many Germans have been driven from their native soil, and how others have relocated to major cities and have settled in industrial waste lands. These Germans are now strangers in their homeland in contrast to Kreutzer who was firmly rooted in his native homeland. How or why has this migration into a state of homelessness happened? Apart from the destruction brought about by world war two, economic-social factors and the industrialization and urbanization of Germany there exists a more essential element to this collective migration into the condition of homelessness. For even those Germans who have remained in their native villages exist in a condition of homelessness. Heidegger remarks: And those who have stayed on in their homeland? Often they are more homeless than those who have been driven from their homeland. Hourly and daily they are chained to radio and television. Week after week the movies carry them off into uncommon, but merely common, realms of the imagination, and give the illusion of a world that is no world. Picture magazines are everywhere available. All that with which modern techniques of communication stimulate, assail, and drive man – all that is already much closer to man than his fields around his farmstead, closer than the sky over the earth, closer than the change from night to day, closer than the conventions and customs of his village, than the tradition of his native world.64

From Heidegger’s perspective, technological devices and the widespread dominance of the media have left native villagers as homeless as those living in big cities by transporting them into an illusory world that is seemingly more concrete than the traditions of their native world. For Heidegger, the homelessness that besets his fellow Germans is representative of the plight of homelessness that assails modern humanity as a whole. Elsewhere he writes of how modern technology brings about the destruction of the home: “Spellbound and pulled onward by all this, humanity is as it were, in a process of emigration. It is emigrating from 63 64

DT, p. 47 DT, p. 48


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what is homely (Heimisch) to what is unhomely (Unheimisch). There is a danger that what was once called home (Heimat) will dissolve and disappear.”65 For Heidegger, the spirit of the age is encapsulated in modern technology: ‘The power concealed in modern technology determines the relation of man to that which exists.’66 Thus humanity’s state of homelessness can be understood as being intrinsically intertwined with modern technology. Contrary to Heidegger, Lévinas does not blame humanity’s homelessness on Western metaphysics. Nevertheless, he does not reject Heidegger’s diagnosis out of hand. He concurs with Heidegger that modern humanity is homeless but contends that human beings have always to some extent been homeless. As was pointed out in the ‘Introduction’ Lévinas argues that the notion of the human being as exterior to being and exiled on earth is older than Greek metaphysics and “has certainly already directed the development and orientation of this metaphysics towards the idea of a man foreign to the earth.”67 By historicizing the phenomenon of homelessness Heidegger fails to recognize its universality. For Lévinas, the Other lies at the heart of humanity’s state of homelessness, as the ego is oppressed by its powerlessness to completely extricate itself from the Other. This contributes to humanity’s homelessness and sense of estrangement for it signals the human being’s inability to avoid his/her infinite responsibility for the well-being of the Other. Being-with-theOther instead of being itself lies behind the ego’s incapacity to consolidate its identity. One must turn to the Hebrew tradition, a tradition Heidegger paid scant attention to, in order to reveal how the relationship between the self and the Other is the principle source of humanity’s homelessness. Heidegger’s sustained concentration on the ancient Greek tradition and his neglect of the Hebrew tradition is an omission or oversight of one of the most influential traditions on Western history. As Matthew Arnold famously remarks in Culture and Anarchy: “Hebraism and Hellenism, – between these two points of influence moves our world. At one time it feels more powerfully the attraction of one of them, at another time of the other; and it ought to be, though it never is, evenly and happily balanced between 65 GA 7, p. 61 (translated by George Pattison in The Later Heidegger, London: Routledge, 2000, p. 60) 66 DT, p. 50. 67 Cf. Emmanuel Lévinas, “The Contemporary Criticism of the Idea of Value and the Prospects for Humanism.” in Value and Values in Evolution, ed. Edward A. Maziarz, New York: Gordon and Breach, 1979, p. 184. Henceforth, “The Contemporary Criticism of the Idea of Value”

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Chapter One

them.”68 Lévinas recognized that Western civilization has been as much indebted to the ancient Hebrews as to the ancient Greeks thus enabling him to consider the problem of modern homelessness with a broader perspective. Lévinas makes several references to Biblical passages in order to highlight how the ancient Hebrews reflected upon the question of homelessness and exile prior to the ancient Greek’s philosophical and mythopoetic explorations of this theme. He cites Psalm 119, verse 19: ‘I am a stranger in the earth: hide not thy commandments from me.’69 Hebraic scripture provides empirical evidence that details reflection upon humanity’s strangeness or homelessness in the world and this illustrates that such deliberations did not originate with the ancient Greeks. Also, Lévinas regards the Hebrew tradition as providing a more authentic account of the true origin of humanity’s homeless state. Platonic metaphysics and the metaphysical thought of earlier thinkers considered the source of the human being’s restlessness and distress to be linked to the conflict between one’s body and soul. On the other hand, the Book of Psalms identifies the source of humanity’s homeless nature to be connected to its ethical obligations, which are imposed upon human beings from their common condition as “strangers” in the world. Lévinas notes: “For in Psalm 119, in the context of this difference which is proclaimed between the self and the world, are to be found the commandments, those which impose an obligation towards other people.”70 Hence, for Lévinas, instead of the oblivion or the forgetting of the question of being, humanity’s homelessness exists because of its ethical responsibilities for the well-being of the Other. More recent writers like Deleuze and Derrida could be said to extol a sense of homelessness as it is possible to describe them as nomadic thinkers who refuse to take up permanent residence in anything that could be considered their home. Deleuze and Derrida among other continental philosophers bring into question traditional Western metaphysics, questioning its endeavour to subsume all modes of experience under universal categories governed by the standards of identity and rational sameness (logocentrism), which has reached a climax within modernity with its emphasis on a self-conscious, self-enclosed subjectivity. Lévinas’ thought is again of relevance here, particularly in Totality and Infinity where he writes: “Western philosophy has most often been an ontology: a 68 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, and other writings, ed. Stefan Collini, Cambridge: CUP, 1993, pp. 126-127 69 Cf. The Bible, (The King James Version), World Bible Publishers, Iowa Falls, 1982, p. 592. 70 Lévinas, “The Contemporary Criticism of the Idea of Value”, p. 185


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reduction of the other to the same by the interposition of a middle and neutral term that ensures the comprehension of being.”71 Contesting this ‘reduction’ through reversals and disruptions of traditional binary oppositions, for example, presence/absence or speech/writing, thinkers like Derrida (if there is a thinker like Derrida) try and emphasize otherness, difference (différence) and multiplicity thus instigating a sense of radical exile from within traditional Western thought. Deleuze can be seen to be an advocate of this type of nomadic thinking when in his essay aptly entitled “Nomad Thought” he discusses ‘nomadic thought’ in relation to Nietzsche’s writings. Deleuze gives credence and weight to ‘nomad thought’ and seeks out its application. He writes: “We seek a kind of war machine that will not re-create a state apparatus, a nomadic unit related to the outside that will not revive an internal despotic unity. Perhaps his break with philosophy, at least so far as it manifested in the aphorism: he made thought into a machine of war – a battering ram – into a nomadic force.”72 Turning to Derrida, we find a thinker who moves beyond the modern sense of homelessness. For Derrida, one’s sense of being-at-home is intrinsically linked to language and is something that one never ceases returning to.73 Derrida’s writings deliberately sustain a state of homelessness with the prospect of an eventual homecoming perennially deferred, as Denis Donoghue accurately describes his work in Ferocious Alphabets: ‘...it dislikes residence and offers itself as a philosophy for nomads.’74 Derrida in Writing and Difference views the various forms of philosophizing both traditional and modern as maintaining philosophical structuralities, whereby they willingly ‘reduce’ their entire structures to ‘a point of presence, or fixed origin, or centre’75 thus establishing a home for themselves. He writes:

71

Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 43. Lévinas continues by writing: “The primacy of the same was Socrates’ teaching: to receive nothing of the Other but what is in me, as though from all eternity I was in possession of what comes to me from the outside – to receive nothing, or to be free.” (Ibid. p. 43) 72 Gilles Deleuze, “Nomad Thought” in The New Nietzsche, trans. David B. Allison, ed. David B. Allison, London: The MIT Press, 1999, p. 149. 73 Cf. Jacques Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah, California: Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 17. 74 Denis Donoghue, Ferocious Alphabets, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1984, p. 157. 75 Cf. Imre Salusinszky’s Criticisms in Society, New York: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1987, p. 10.

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Chapter One The function of this centre was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure - one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure – but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the play of the structure. By orienting and organizing the coherence of the system, the centre of a structure permits the play of its elements inside the total form. And even today the notion of a structure lacking any centre represents the unthinkable itself.76

Derrida reads the history of philosophy as a genealogy of such stabilizing centres or godly ‘transcendental signifiers’, and he calls this history the ‘metaphysics of presence’ or ‘logocentrism.’ Through deconstructing these stabilizing centres he forces humanity to recognize its innately homeless disposition. Susan Handelman in her essay “Jacques Derrida and the Heretic Hermeneutic” in a section entitled ‘Playing in Exile’ aptly describes Derrida’s writings: Derrida’s specific form of Jewish heresy is not metonymy become metaphor but metonymy run amok, metonymy declaring itself to be independent of all foundations and yet claiming to be the origin and law of everything. Différance means in Derrida to differ and to defer, or postpone. Whereas Levinas claims that at some point there must be an unveiling, a redemption however long postponed, Derrida chooses to stay in Exile, to infinitely defer and differ—to play. Derrida will play in the interval between Book and Book, play with the ‘centre,’ and de-centre origin through writing. He will define the centre as only a hole; writing the hole, ‘we plunge into the horizontality of a pure surface, which itself represents itself from detour to detour.’77

Derrida remains in exile as he refuses to ground his thinking in a language that could be considered home. Moriarty’s monumental autobiographical work Nostos is a supreme account of ‘man overboard’. In Nostos, Moriarty passionately recounts how he fell out of his traditional story and was consequently left helpless in a universe which appeared ‘infinitely indifferent, even hostile’ to his ‘purposes and yearnings.’78 For Moriarty, individuals are not housed or sheltered in houses made of bricks and mortar but rather they are sheltered

76

Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, Routledge Classics, London, 2001, pp. 278-279. 77 Susan Handelman, “Jacques Derrida and the Heretic Hermeneutic”, in Displacement: Derrida and After, ed. Mark Krupnick, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983, pp. 222-223. 78 John Moriarty, Nostos, Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2001, p. 21.


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in a master narrative or great story.79 Initially it was the Bible that provided Moriarty with his master narrative and life was understood in a play of five acts: Creation, Fall, Revelation, Redemption and Last Things (that is, the apocalypse), while the Ten Commandments provided the guidelines on how to live within this master narrative. However, on first reading Darwin’s The Origin of the Species, Moriarty encountered or rather came into catastrophic collision with sums he wasn’t prepared for. Professor Ramsey’s calculations of the sedimentary deposits of land masses found in The Origin of the Species, read as follows: Palaeozoic Strata Secondary Strata Tertiary Strata

Feet 57,154 13,190 2,240

– making altogether 72, 584 feet; that is, very nearly thirteen and three quarters British Miles.80 Imagining himself standing under a rockwall thirteen and three quarters British miles high, Moriarty experienced his Biblical world collapse all about him, exiling him to the ‘shadow of those of those infinitely indifferent, yet indefinitely damaging sedimentary miles.’81 Having undergone this initial uprooting, Moriarty goes onto describe his nostos in the hope that it could be of relevance and significance to peoples all over the world, whether they are Australian aborigines, Native American Indians or peoples from the former Soviet Union, as many of these peoples have fallen out of their master narrative or traditional story. It would be possible to describe Moriarty’s nostos as a haunted and at times deeply troubled type of homecoming. In a salient passage he questions the possibility of a homecoming ever being fulfilled, not just for him but for destitute modern humanity. He states: And Ishmael? I wondered. Can there be a nostos for Ishmael? Having harpooned the world-illusion, can there be a nostos for modern western humanity? Ever since Descartes and Newton, our God has been a deus absconditus and the objective thing we naively knew has been a res absconditum. So we have no home to come home to. In a dreadful sense, our nostos is a nekuia. It is an endless, aimless wandering in an Absence 79

Moriarty writes: ‘Only a great story can shelter us. It was my calamity that I had fallen out of my story.’ Nostos, p. 21 80 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, London: Wordsworth Classics, 1998, p. 216. 81 Moriarty, Nostos, p.20

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Chapter One […] I had come to Greece seeking a remedy, but sitting as I now was on a palsied lump of the palsied universe, and smelling as I now was of unthinking thunder. I was back where I started, wherever that was. I was tired, and I was beginning not to care where I was. I was out-of-doors. Epistemologically, I was out-of-doors, and the Fool was still asking his question. ‘How now, nuncle?’82

However, it is not just Moriarty who exists out-of-doors, it could be said that modern humanity itself exists out-of-doors and in this exposed and homeless state it is perhaps the Fool’s question: ‘How now, nuncle?’, which is most hauntingly audible. Moreover, it is possible that the Fool’s question is in need of the most urgent response for modern humanity. It appears as though this question, since it was first posed by the Fool in Shakespeare’s King Lear has continued to gather in force and relevance for modern humanity, whose homeless state in the world continues to grow. The question begged by the Fool can be heard to ring out while a wild tempest rages. Kent would say of this storm: ‘The wrathful skies/Gallow the very wanders of the dark/And make them keep to their caves.’83 The ‘wanders of the dark’ spoken of here are the planets, which were known to be gods or divinities, they included for example, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter and they provided order within the universe. However, while this tempest raged the gods themselves are understood to have retreated to their caves thus allowing chaos to reign. Have these gods ever sought to re-emerge? Just as Hölderlin poetized about the fleeing of the gods and Nietzsche declared the death of God, it is the loss of values, meaning and purpose associated with the departure and death of these gods/God, who acted as sponsor and guarantor of the highest values hitherto that is of greatest consequence for humanity. With the loss of these values it opens the way for individuals to establish their own set of values and so Ivor Karamazov can say in Dostoyevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov that if a belief in God no longer exists then everything is permitted.84 It is only when we come to recognize and reflect upon the extent of humanity’s homeless state in the world that the full significance of the Fool’s question can be taken on board. In the following chapter, the focus will become more refined, as I will concentrate on the Germanic sense of Heimat and the German experience 82

Moriarty, Nostos, pp. 88-89 William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. Patrick Murray, Dublin: The Educational Company, 1987, p. 111. 84 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Karamazov Brothers, trans. Ignat Avsey, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 87. 83


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of homelessness. In doing so I will tend to the German appropriation of the ancient Greeks, for many of Germany’s most brilliant minds and culturally influential figures fervently sought to model themselves on ancient Greece, in order renew and rehabilitate their sense of home.

CHAPTER TWO THE GERMAN APPROPRIATION OF THE ANCIENT GREEKS: THE HELLENIZING GHOSTS

There is but one way for the moderns to become great, and perhaps unequalled; I mean, by imitating the ancients.1 —Johann Joachim Winckelmann (Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture) Oh Greece, with your geniality and your piety, whereto have you come? I myself, too, despite all good will, merely stumble in my deeds and thoughts after these only human beings in the world, and what I do and say I am often only the more inept and inconsistent because I stand, like geese, with my flat feet in the modern water and helplessly beat my wings up to the Greek sky.2 —Friedrich Hölderlin (In a letter to his stepbrother Karl) German philosophy as a whole – Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, to name the greatest – is the most fundamental form of romanticism and homesickness there has ever been: the longing for the best that ever existed. One is no longer at home anywhere; at last one longs back for that place in which alone one can be at home, because it is the only place in which one would want to be at home: the Greek world!3 —Friedrich Nietzsche (The Will to Power)

We are a hugely innovative people and yet it is possible to conceive of our European history as the reprise of our ancient Hebrew and Greek beginnings. As Matthew Arnold writes in Culture and Anarchy: “Hebraism and 1

Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture, in Writings on Art, selected edited and trans. by David Irwin, New York: Phaidon Publications, 1972, p. 61. Henceforth, Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works. 2 HEL, p. 140 3 WP, p. 225

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Chapter Two

Hellenism, – between these two points of influence moves our world. At one time it feels more powerfully the attraction of one of them, at another time of the other; and it ought to be, though it never is, evenly and happily balanced between them.”4 In this chapter I will be chiefly concentrating on the influence of Hellenism on the Western world and more specifically on the powerful impact it has had on Germany. I will in turn be principally focusing on the German appropriation of the Greeks during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and how this phenomenon contributed to the reenvisaging and reinterpretation of the German sense of Heimat.5 For many prominent German thinkers and writers have passionately sought to understand and at the same time establish their sense of Heimat based on the ideal of ancient Greece. Henry Hatfield in Aesthetic Paganism and German Literature speaks of how the most notable German writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were all of a Hellenic persuasion. He remarks: “From Winckelmann to Rilke, from Goethe to George, the majority of the greatest German writers have been ‘Hellenists’ to some significant degree. It is as if Goethe’s successors had taken very seriously his admonition that everyone should be a Greek in his own way. ‘Jeder sei auf seine Art ein Grieche, aber er sei's’.”6 Some commentators have looked unfavourably upon the Germanic appeal to the Hellenic world, as they consider these German writers to have been excessively obsessed and too much under the sway of the Ancients. One such commentator is E.M Butler who writes in the introduction to The Tyranny of Greece over Germany of how Germany has been intellectually and spiritually dominated by ancient Greece. Butler notes: “But Germany is the supreme example of her (Greece’s) triumphant spiritual tyranny. The Germans have imitated the Greeks more slavishly; they have been obsessed by them more utterly, and they have assimilated them less than any other race. The extent of the Greek influence is incalculable throughout Europe; its intensity is at its highest in Germany.”7 It is evident from this short passage that Butler would espouse a cautionary 4

Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, and other writings, ed. Stefan Collini, Cambridge: CUP, 1993, pp. 126-127. 5 The German word Heimat remains untranslated as it signifies both ‘home’ and ‘homeland’. 6 Henry Hatfield, Aesthetic Paganism in German Literature, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1964, pp. 3-4. 7 E.M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany: A study of the influence exercised by Greek art and poetry over the great German writers of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Boston MA: Beacon Press, 1958, p. 6. Henceforth, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany.

The German Appropriation of the Ancient Greeks

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and critical approach to any investigation of the German appropriation of the Greeks. Such an approach is justified in the sense that one needs to be constantly vigilant in any examination of Germany’s appropriation of ancient Greece for what it fosters is not confined to art and thinking. Nevertheless, Germany has not stood alone in its profound fascination with the Greeks. According to George Steiner the whole history of Western thought has been drawn to and shaped by the Greeks, he writes in Antigones: “There is, in consequence, in a sense related to Heidegger’s but on a more secular, pragmatic level, indeed a motion of ‘homecoming to ancient Greece’ in western thought and speech. To articulate experience grammatically, to relate discourse and meaning as we do, is to ‘be Greek’. It is in this fundamental sense that I should want to cite Shelley’s assertion: ‘We are all Greeks.’”8 Furthermore, Germany can be considered a latecomer in its appreciation of the ancient Greeks.9 Throughout Western Europe, especially in Italy, France and England there were strong appeals made to ancient Greece for inspiration and insight prior to any noteworthy interest from Germany. Recourse to the Greeks stemmed from an unbounded admiration that is typified by the Swiss scholar Jacob Burckhardt in History of Greek Culture: What the Greeks did and endured they did and endured different from all other peoples before them. Where others lived and acted from dull compulsion, they were free, spontaneous, original, and aware. Hence in their activities and capacities they appear to be essentially the gifted race of men, subject to all the mistakes and sufferings of such a people. In the world of the intellect the Greeks pushed to limits of accomplishment which mankind must not fail to appreciate and aspire to, even when it cannot equal the Greeks in achievement. Greek accomplishments were such that posterity has had no choice but to study the Hellenic way of life. Those who withdraw from this endeavor will be stranded in the backwaters of culture.10 8

George Steiner, Antigones, Oxford: OUP 1986, p. 135. This idea of Germany being a latecomer is something that Nietzsche attaches significance to in The Will to Power: “The Germans always come after others, much later: they are carrying something in the depths e.g., — Dependence on other countries; e.g., Kant—Rousseau, Sensualists, Hume, Swedenborg. Schopenhauer —Indians and romanticism, Voltaire. Wagner—French cult of the gruesome and of grand opera, Paris and the flight into primeval states (marriage with the sister).” (WP, p. 57) Nietzsche alerts us to how Germany’s intellectual landscape has been shaped through a dependency on the foreign, on thinkers of other countries. 10 Jacob Burckhardt, History of Greek Culture, trans. Palmer Hilty, New York: Frederick Unger, 1963 p. vi. 9

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Chapter Two

The beginnings of Western Europe’s active interest in the Greeks can be dated back to 145311 when as a consequence of the Muslim conquest of Byzantium a dramatic exodus to the West took place and many scholars fled to Europe bringing with them a great wealth of books and an immense fund of knowledge pertaining to the Greeks. During the Renaissance in Florence, the early center of Renaissance learning, Cosimo de’ Medici gathered a circle of humanists who collected, studied, expounded, and imitated the classics. Marsilio Ficino’s (1433-99) translations and commentaries on the Platonic dialogues introduced the Latin-speaking West to Plato for the first time. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-94) drew on all major past traditions including Hermes Trismegistus, the Egyptians, the Chaldean and Greek traditions and brought them all back into play. In 1484 he went to Florence where he soon became one of the most prominent members of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Platonic Academy and the chief exponent of Italian Neoplatonism. He wrote in 1492 Being and the One in which he uses Aquinas and Christianity to reconcile Plato’s and Aristotle’s views about God’s being and unity. In his most famous work Oration on the Dignity of Man (1487) he proclaimed that individuals face no limits to their development except those that are self-imposed. Renaissance painters and sculptors were also greatly moved by the Greeks and those whose works reflect the classical influence include Andrea Mantegna, Raphael, and Michelangelo. The Greek and Roman orders of architecture were revived during the Renaissance and applied to ecclesiastical designs. Leone Battista Alberti wrote the first of several Renaissance treatises on architecture (1485), based on his reading of Vitruvius. In France, Jean Racine (1639-1699) the playwright, poet and master of classical French tragedy drew heavily on the ancient Greeks for his subject matters. Some of his plays include La Thebaïde, Alexandre Le Grand (1665), Iphigénie (1674) and Phédre (1677). French painters of the seventeenth century such as Georges de la Tour, Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorraine also relied greatly on the ancient Greeks unlike many of their contemporaries who were more inclined towards the baroque style. In England, Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) was indebted to the Greeks and this is made evident in his work Epithalamion, a lyric ode honouring the bride and groom. Such classical writers as Pindar, Sappho and Theocritus all wrote epithalamia, which were to be sung at the bridal 11

The generally accepted date for the beginning of modern times, that is, the end of the Middle Ages, is the taking of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453. One among many historical accounts of this event is provided by John Haldon, Byzantium at War, AD 600-1453, New York: Routledge, 2003.


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chamber by an actual chorus. Henry More (1614 – 1687) along with Ralph Cudworth was one of the leading philosophers of the group of philosophical divines known now as the Cambridge Platonists and as the name suggests imported Platonic thought into English philosophy in the seventeenth century. Another indication of the effect ancient Greece had on England is found in Chapman’s translations of Homer and Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Keats’ famous poem ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ captures the awe and wonder that individuals were overwhelmed by when they came into contact with the ancient Greeks for the first time: Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne; Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold. Then felt I like a watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes He strar’d at the Pacific – and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise – Silent, upon a peak in Darien.12 12

John Keats, John Keats Selected Poetry, Ed. Elizabeth Cook, Oxford: OUP 1996, p. 14. Nonetheless, Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ lies in stark contrast to the enthusiasm engendered in ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, as a sense of detachment from the Greek ideal of beauty that knows nothing of death is conveyed in this ode. The third and fifth stanzas are most relevant in this regard: Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unwearied, For ever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! more happy, happy love! For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d, For ever panting, and for ever young; All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue…. O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

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Chapter Two

Keats’ experience of joy and wonderment on encountering the Greeks for the first time could be applied across Europe. Reading the poem backwards into history it becomes evident how there were many individuals who, similar to Keats, were overawed and filled with wonder on discovering the Greeks; as if they too were a watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into their ken. The sheer magnitude of the ancient Greek influence throughout Europe cannot be overstated. Yet, it was not until the 1700’s that Germany began to take any significant interest in the Greeks. However, this interest was to be conspicuously different from the rest of Europe (namely Italy, France and England), the difference manifesting itself by way of an ‘obsession’. The type of obsession that I have in mind here is characterized by Nietzsche in The Will to Power: “…we are growing more Greek by the day; at first, as is only fair, in concepts and evaluations, as Hellenizing ghosts, as it were: but one day, let us hope in our bodies too! Here in lies (and has always lain) my hope for the German character!”13 It has already been shown how Butler regarded Germany to be ‘obsessed by them more utterly’ than any other nation and this notion of obsession is also to be found in LacoueLabarthe’s essay “Hölderlin and the Greeks”. Lacoue-Labarthe states: ‘In any case, nowhere else are the Greeks to this extent an obsession.’14 Is the type of relation that Germany developed with ancient Greece to be construed as an obsession? If this was the case, what constituted this obsession? How did such an obsession take hold and what were the implications both internally and externally for Germany? Is this obsession to be understood in the old sense of the word, that is, to be haunted or possessed by something, and if so, were these ‘Hellenizing ghosts’ themselves haunted by the spectre of the ancient Greeks? The Nietzschean term of ‘Hellenizing ghosts’ is most fitting in characterizing the German relationship with the Greeks as it conveys their sense of obsession with the ancients without the capacity to embody their ideal.

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’--that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (Ibid., p. 178) 13 WP, p. 226 14 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “Hölderlin and the Greeks” in Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, trans. Judi Olson, Ed. Christopher Fynsk, Harvard University Press 1989, p. 237. Henceforth, “Hölderlin and the Greeks”.


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In order to respond to these questions there is a need to examine some of Germany’s most influential intellectual and literary figures that attempted to bring about the Hellenization of Germany. Among the most passionate disciples of the Greek ideal have been Winckelmann, Hölderlin and Nietzsche. The focus here will be primarily on these three individuals, however, it must be noted from the outset that any analysis of their attempts to appropriate the Greeks is fraught with difficulty. Difficulties emerge when dealing with the likes of Winckelmann, Hölderlin and Nietzsche as they problematized the whole process of appropriation itself. Prior to engaging with these very different individuals, an art historian, a poet and a philosopher, a number of key questions impose themselves upon us that lie in tandem with those just previously posed. For instance, why did Winckelmann, Hölderlin and Nietzsche among several other writers and thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Germany seek to appropriate the ancient Greeks? What was there to be found in Greek antiquity that appealed so much to the Germans? Did they envisage Greece as Nietzsche did, as the only place where they could be at home? And if so, how could this perception of Greece assist them in understanding and shaping their own modern Germanic Heimat? How was this appropriation of the Greeks to take place, perhaps through imitation and translations? How could they imitate the Greeks and at the same time assert their German identity? Finally, are the Greeks worthy of appropriation or do there exist inherent dangerous and problematical aspects to their ideas and culture? The German appropriation of the Greeks was essentially ontologically motivated in the sense that they wanted to be Greek. German thinkers and writers did not simply wish to adorn themselves in Greek philosophy, religion and art. They did not approach ancient Greece by means of disinterested scholarship but rather out of a desire for cultural regeneration and this meant reconstituting themselves in the spirit of the ancient Greeks. They were keenly aware of the Greek’s aesthetic superiority, especially the supremacy of their tragedies but their interest was not restricted to one particular aspect of the ancients. The Greeks’ overall way of being in the world indicated a spiritually richer, more centred and whole existence in contrast to the impoverished and fragmented existence of modern Germany, which was without centre. What Yeats says in ‘The Second Coming’ can be ascribed to what Germany was undergoing: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

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Chapter Two The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.15

Silk and Stern in Nietzsche on Tragedy pertinently point out those aspects of the Greek existence which they regard as being of most appeal to the Germans: “They were apt to see contemporary man in a radically alienated situation: estranged from his divine origins, from nature, from his fellowmen. In the culture of ancient Greece, as they saw it, man was the ‘whole man’, with precisely that integrity of experience and that experience of psychic integrity which they missed in the world around them.”16 Baur too in his essay “Winckelmann and Hegel on the Imitation of the Greeks” comments on how the appropriation of the Greeks was stimulated by “...a common issue for Germany’s contemporary Volkserzieher…overcoming the sense of alienation and purposelessness that accompanied modern detachment and artificiality.”17 Nietzsche too alludes to the need that governed his country’s turn towards Greece; however, this was based on the presupposition that it was the Germans who first revealed the Greek spirit, which is a highly questionable assertion. He writes in The Will to Power, fragment 92: “Why the Germans of all people discovered the Greek spirit (the more one develops a drive, the more attractive does it become to plunge for once into its opposite).”18 What developing drive is Nietzsche speaking of here? Could he be speaking of the drive of modern Germany towards homelessness that subsequently leads to it seeking out its antithesis, that is, a place where a people were at home, namely, ancient Greece? It is perhaps a sense of homelessness that provides the fundamental basis for Germany’s ontological orientation towards Greece. With this sense of homelessness a renewed patriotism was also called for thus revealing a political dimension to the German appropriation of the Greeks. Shawn Kelley in his analysis of the relationship between Germany and antiquity not only highlights the problem of alienation as contributing to 15

W. B Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’, W.B Yeats The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright, London: Everyman Publishers, 1994, p. 235. 16 M.S. Silk & J.P. Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy, Cambridge: CUP, 1981, p. 4. Henceforth, Nietzsche on Tragedy. 17 Michael Baur, “Winckelmann and Hegel on the Imitation of the Greeks”, in Hegel and the Tradition, Ed. Michael Baur and John Russon, Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1997, p. 95. Henceforth, “Winckelmann and Hegel on the Imitation of the Greeks”. 18 WP, p. 57


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the German appropriation of the Greeks but he also identifies the political dimension inherent to it. He perceived its presence as a means of addressing this dilemma of alienation. In particular the German portrayal of an ‘organic Greece’ was informed by a growing political nationalism in Germany as they believed by endorsing a sense of an ‘organic’ or ‘pure’19 race they could strengthen patriotism amongst Germans and reinforce their love of the Germanic Heimat or Vaterland. Kelley contends that by reinforcing of the peoples’ bond with die Heimat the growing sense of alienation and estrangement experienced by the German people could to some degree be alleviated: Like Hegel’s philosophical system, the study of the ancient Greeks was designed to overcome the atomism of the modern world and to heal the antinomies created by instrumental reason. The Greeks were suddenly seen as infused with an organic, harmonious attachment to their land, their language, and their culture. During the height of the Enlightenment, Gibbon had criticized the Greeks for their failure to intermingle and had praised the Romans for their cosmopolitanism. A few short decades later, German thinkers would make the opposite case. The Greeks were now seen as racially and culturally pure while the Romans were seen as derivative and degenerate. The construction of ancient Greece as organic had its roots in the post-Enlightenment critique of contemporary society as fragmented and alienated. This construction of the organic Greeks permeated nineteenth-century German philosophy, culture, and educational system. The organic Greeks were seen as an antidote to a fragmented modern Germany, and the study of the Greeks would open the doors to a truly spiritual revolution, a revolution of consciousness rather than a revolution of mere politics, an authentic Germanic revolution that would surpass the revolution of the instrumental, inorganic, Latinic-Romanized French. Contact with the harmonious, culturally pure, organic Greeks would make possible the construction of a harmonious, culturally pure, organic Germany. There is an intimate relationship between the Greek revival and German nationalism.20

19

Nietzsche in Daybreak acknowledges with admiration the purity of the Greeks and hopes for the purification of the European race: “In the end, however, if the process of purification is successful, all that energy formerly expended in the struggle of the dissonant qualities with one another will stand at the command of the total organism: which is why races that have become pure have always become stronger and more beautiful. – The Greeks offer us the model of a race and culture that has become pure: and hopefully we shall one day also achieve a pure European race and culture.” (DB, BK IV p. 274) 20 Shawn Kelley, Racializing Jesus: Race, Ideology, and the Formation of Modern Biblical Scholarship, London: Routledge, 2002, pp. 45-46.

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While the political element is a very important and complex component to the resurgence of interest in the ancient Greeks within Germany; it will not be a primary concern here. In attempting to understand the German appropriation of the ancient Greeks the need arises for an investigation into the nature of appropriation itself and this leads to further more arduous challenges irrupting among us. As Lacoue-Labarthe in the essay “Hölderlin and the Greeks” points out “…any culture (any nation or people, that is, any community of language and of memory) can appropriate itself as such, return to itself – or rather come to itself, attain itself and establish itself – only if it has previously undergone its otherness and its foreignness. Only if it has been initially disappropriated. This means that disappropriation (difference) is original, and appropriation, as Hegel will say – and if it can take place – is its ‘result’.”21 With this in mind, how then does one go about making the foreign or alien one’s own? To what extent could the Germans appropriate the ancient Greeks? Was this event a possibility open to them? To what extent did Greece even exist for Winckelmann, Schiller, Heine and those other German writers who looked to Greece to re-envisage themselves and their homeland? Did these writers experience anxiety and doubt over whether or not it was possible for them to gain contact to what was proper to the Greeks and whether or not their interpretations of the Greeks was a mere invention, as Heidegger did? 22 Lacoue-Labarthe brings into question the very existence of ancient Greece itself: “Behind a thematic still largely dependent on Winckelmann and Schiller (even Hölderlin constructs entirely new categories), we find one thing, first of all, that is completely unprecedented in the age: namely that Greece [la Grơce], as such, Greece itself, does not exist, that it is at least double, divided—even torn. And that what we know about it, which is perhaps what it was or what it manifested of itself, is not what it really was—which perhaps never appeared.”23 If Greece itself lies in obscurity, how then could one even contemplate its appropriation? Lacoue-Labarthe goes on to further develop this point by saying: “For the originary differentiation, the uprooting or estrangement— Unheimlichkeit in the strict sense—is probably irreversible. At any rate, 21

Lacoue-Labarthe, “Hölderlin and the Greeks”, p. 243 Martin Heidegger writes: “But also a hesitation that stems from the doubts that the thought dedicated to the land of the flown gods was nothing but a mere invention and thus the way of thinking (Denkweg) might be proved to be an errant way (Irrweg).” (Cf. Sojourns, The Journey to Greece, trans. John Panteleimon Manoussakis, New York: State University of New York Press, 2005, p. 5.) 23 Lacoue-Labarthe, “Hölderlin and the Greeks”, p. 242 22


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the movement of appropriation, as Hölderlin continually repeats, is what is most difficult and what holds the greatest risk.”24 This makes apparent the inherent complexity of the German appropriation of the Greeks and in many ways undermines its very possibility. Silk and Stern in Nietzsche on Tragedy explicitly state that Germany was incapable of ever appropriating the Greeks: “Germany could not assimilate Greece – perhaps because Greece was simply too great, certainly because Greece was too alien. For all the suppositions of ‘affinity’, Germany – and Western Europe in general – had no direct linguistic or cultural continuity with the ancient Greek world. If only for this reason, it was inevitable, as the nineteenth century wore on, that the sense of purpose one associated with German Hellenism must be lost.”25 Thus it would appear from the very outset that all forms of German Hellenism were destined to failure. Hence any investigation into this phenomenon would seem a futile task, merely an elaboration of what has already been demonstrated. Nevertheless, it would be unwise for there to be any premature closing off of our account on German Hellenism, as its significance is not confined to whether or not it was successful or whether or not it is something that could ever be actualized. The importance of Germany’s appropriation of the Greeks lies in the inestimable influence it has had in shaping Western Europe’s philosophical, spiritual, aesthetic, literary and poetic landscape and no amount of analyses or investigations could circumscribe its effects or possibilities. To reveal how significant the German attempt to assimilate the Greeks was and to respond to those questions that were earlier propounded I will now turn to those three major German figures of Winckelmann, Hölderlin and Nietzsche.

Winckelmann Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68) was born the son of a cobbler in Stendal in the Altmark. Winckelmann is widely regarded as being the instigating force who set Germany ablaze with a passionate interest in the ancient Greeks. He was a hugely significant individual in the development of German Hellenism, as Alex Potts attests to in Flesh and the Ideal (Winckelmann and the origins of art history): Winckelmann’s writing particularly repays close reading now because of his unusually eloquent account of the imaginative charge of the Greek ideal in art. In his impassioned attempt to reconstitute it, he invoked not 24 25

Ibid., p. 243 Silk & Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy, p. 10

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Chapter Two just the utopian aspirations but also the darker anxieties that made it so compelling…he took the Greek ideal so seriously that he could not conceive of it as an abstraction existing beyond the disturbance of bodily desire and ideological conflict.26

Winckelmann’s affect on Germany was immense, something Michael Baur notes in “Winckelmann and Hegel on the Imitation of the Greeks”: “It was largely under the spell of his writings that many German thinkers, including those who went on to influence Hegel, began to develop an appreciation for the ancient Greeks.”27 Baur goes on to cite from Goethe’s autobiographical work Dichtung und Warheit: “Goethe recalls the period of excitement during which anyone interested in art or antiquity ‘always had Winckelmann before his eyes’”28 Silk and Stern remark in Nietzsche on Tragedy that “…Lessing, Herder, and, a generation later, Friedrich Schlegel not only base their diverse theories on material or formulations put into currency by Winckelmann, but might be said to owe him, as Schlegel put it ‘the very history of art’, conceived as the development of a series of individual works towards a perfect beauty.”29 Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy acknowledge Winckelmann’s vital impact on the theoretical studies of the Greeks in The Literary Absolute, where they say: In the beginning, its great concern--around which, in 1794, everything will pivot and suddenly ‘gel’--is Antiquity, the poetry of Antiquity. The Schlegels’ early work (and thus everything that will form the axis of the Athenaeum) gropes vaguely toward a new vision of Antiquity. We will see to what degree Winckelmann becomes their constant point of reference-not simply in an effort to continue in his path or to exploit it, but because serious theoretical work on the Greeks can be undertaken only on the basis of what he managed to establish.30

Although it is beyond dispute that Winckelmann’s reflections on the Greeks inspired a host of major German writers from both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, suspicions still persist as to the profundity of his understanding of the Greeks. As Baur points out “he relied entirely on Roman copies, and in many cases he misidentified the works in question. 26

Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal (Winckelmann and the origins of art history) London: Yale University Press, 1994, p. 1. Henceforth, Flesh and the Ideal. 27 Baur, “Winckelmann and Hegel on the Imitation of the Greeks”, p. 93 28 Ibid., p. 93 29 Silk & J.P. Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy, p. 6 30 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester, New York: State University of New York Press, 1988, p. 10.


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Most significant of all is his misidentification of the group sculpture called the Laocoon. Winckelmann praised the Laocoon as one of the greatest and most representative examples of classical excellence, but this work does not date from the classical period.”31 However, Winckelmann’s preoccupation with the Greeks went far beyond mere scholarship. As an art historian he did not confine himself to the rudimentary duties of cataloguing art works but managed instead to breathe new life back into Greeks through his impassioned interpretations and descriptions of their works of art. He perceived aesthetic perfection to be personified by Greek art and by drawing attention to these works he hoped to awaken a new aesthetic sensibility amongst his fellow Germans. By focusing his attention on classical Greek works of art he was making evident his antibaroque position. Baroque was the dominant artistic expression of the time and Winckelmann was one of its foremost critics. While in his youth he immersed himself in classical literature it was in fact his later examinations of Greek sculpture that helped galvanise his interpretation of ancient Greece as exemplifying an aesthetic ideal, where visual beauty was not simply confined to works of art but was something prevalent throughout the entire Greek way of life. Winckelmann was able to inspire later thinkers as he succeeded in perceptibly portraying classic Greek sculpture as the visual embodiment of the larger values thought inherent in Greek culture as a whole. Alex Potts describes the importance of Winckelmann’s writings on sculpture: “We confront in Winckelmann more vividly than in any other writer of the eighteenth century, the question of how the Greek nude could be seen to embody the ideal of subjective and political freedom with which it came to be so closely identified.”32 The way Greek sculpture embodied subjective and political freedom was not however the primary attraction for Winckelmann. He was drawn to the physical bodies of the Greeks themselves, something that can also be said of Hölderlin33 and Nietzsche34 but for different reasons. 31

Baur, “Winckelmann and Hegel on the Imitation of the Greeks”, p. 94 Potts, Flesh and the Ideal, p. 4 33 Hölderlin details the importance of the Greek masculine body in helping him understand the essence of the Greeks in a letter to Casimir Ulrich Böhlendorff in 1802: “In the areas which border to the Vendée, I have been interested in the wild, the martial [character], the purely male for which the light of life becomes immediate in eyes and limbs and which, in the intimation of death, feels like a [moment of] virtuosity, and which fulfills its thirst for knowledge. The athletic [character] of southern people in the ruins of the ancient spirit made me more familiar with the specific essence of the Greeks; I became acquainted with their nature and their wisdom, their body, the way in which they grew within 32

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According to Potts, the overtly homoerotic aspect to Winckelmann’s texts paves the way for the Greek masculine body itself becoming more charged with significance than what it was supposed to symbolize. He writes: “…what is undeniably the most visibly striking aspect of his writing on Greek art, the unapologetically sensuous homoeroticism of his reading of the Greek male nude. His projection of the Greek nude as erotically desirable masculinity is both more immediate and, if anything, more richly invested than his imagining it as the symbolic embodiment of freedom.”35 Winckelmann never visited Greece although many opportunities presented themselves for him to do so; he rather came into contact with Greek art through copies of them during his time in Germany and Rome. Through his meditations and studies of these works of art he believed he had managed to attain insight into the Greek spirit of art but more importantly he thought he had found the criteria by which all aesthetic judgements could be made. Distilling from classical Greek works of art values he believed to be universally relevant, Winckelmann, did not regard Greek values to be limited to a particular historical epoch. His description of the Laocoon, the sculpture depicting the famous Trojan priest and his two sons arduously wrestling with a ferocious snake, epitomizes all he found noble and great about the Greeks and what he conceived as being representative of ‘a perfect law of art’. While the Laocoon may not have been a sculpture from Greek antiquity itself, he still managed to discern traits and qualities of greatness belonging to the Greeks which were to prove inspiring to subsequent German thinkers and writers. E.M Butler comments: ‘…he was uttering their climate, and the rule by which they protected their exuberant genius against the violence of the elements.” (Cf. HEL, p. 152) Lacoue-Labarthe writes: “Now the three manifestations of the Greeks genius thus defined, in Hegel’s systematic presentation of them, culminate in what Hegel calls ‘the political work of art’: the subjective work of art is, in effect ‘the formation (Bildung) of man himself’, the ‘beautiful corporeality’ fashioned for example by sport in which the body transforms itself into an ‘organ of the spirit’ (this theme, taken from Winckelmann and passed on through Hölderlin’s thoughts on the ‘athletic virtue’ of the Greeks will run through German history right down to the 1936 Olympics and the policy of the Third Reich on sport.” (Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, Politics, trans. Chris Turner, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990, p. 67.) 34 Nietzsche in Daybreak comments on the importance of the male nude for the Greeks and how it influenced their appreciation of women, when he writes: “What does our chatter about the Greeks amount to! What do we understand of their art, the soul of which is – passion for naked male beauty! It was only from that viewpoint that they were sensible to female beauty.” (DB, Bk. III, p. 151) 35 Potts, Flesh and the Ideal, p. 5


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truths which did not apply to the object before him, but were associated with it in his mind.’36 Winckelmann’s tremendous description of this sculpture is to be found in Ewiges Griechentum, Auswahl aus seinen Schriften and E.M Butler in The Tyranny of Greece over Germany has translated this seminal passage: The universal, dominant characteristic of Greek masterpieces, finally, is noble simplicity and serene greatness in the pose as well as in the expression. The depths of the sea are always calm, however wild and stormy the surface; and in the same way the expression in Greek figures reveals greatness and composure of soul in the throes of whatever passions. This spirit is depicted in Laocoon’s face, and not in the face alone, in spite of the most violent sufferings. The pain which is manifest in all the muscles and sinews of the body, and which one almost seems to feel oneself, without aid from the face or other parts, when one contemplates the painful contraction of the abdomen;—this pain, I say, nevertheless does not express itself with any violence either in the face, or in the position as a whole. This Laocoon, unlike the hero in Virgil’s poem, is raising no dreadful cry. The opening of the mouth does not admit of this. It is rather an oppressed and anxious sigh. The pain of the body and the greatness of the soul are equally balanced throughout the composition of the figure, and seen to cancel each other out. Laocoon suffers; but he suffers like Sophocles’ Philoctetes; his misery pierces us to the soul; but we should like to be able to bear anguish in the manner of this great man.37

Those attributes of the Greeks, which Winckelmann regarded so highly, are articulated in the above passage. ‘Noble simplicity’, ‘serene greatness’, ‘composure of soul’ and the ability to endure suffering with dignity, are the qualities which Winckelmann venerated so highly and roused his passionate admiration for the Greeks. For Winckelmann, the spirit of Greek art was encapsulated by these characteristics.38 Where works of Greek art appeared that were seemingly inconsistent with his interpretation of the Greeks, he drew on the idea of ‘development’ to defend his position. This allowed Winckelmann to interpret those harrowing and dread filled Pre-Socratic dramas as manifestations of an immature culture undergoing a particular stage of its development. Once having culturally matured there 36

E. M Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany, p. 47 E.M Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany, p. 46 38 It will be shown later when we come to Nietzsche how these attributes come to be unmasked by him, in a way that reveals a very different Greece. A far darker Greece emerges, one that suffered greatly, and according to Nietzsche, it can only become fully exposed through an understanding of the Apollinian/Dionysian relationship. 37

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is evidence of ‘Greek literature of the best period, the writings of the Socratic school’ and this enabled Winckelmann to bestow those esteemed attributes of ‘noble simplicity’, ‘serene greatness’ and ‘composure of soul’ upon the Greeks. Yet Winckelmann’s writings are to not be considered overtly sentimental or naïve. For there is evidence of his awareness of the darker and more volatile side of the Greeks. This is something Potts underscores when he states: “The analysis of the aesthetic, ideological, and stylistic basis of Greek art in Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity is headed by the illustration of an antique gem representing a dead or fatally wounded female nude lying prone in the arms of a naked warrior. Right at the outset, ideal Greek beauty is associated with violence and death.”39 Nonetheless, in so far as Winckelmann admired the Greeks, to what extent could he hope to realistically imitate them in the modern Germany of the 1700’s? Was it possible for him to come to a true understanding of the ancient Greeks? Were the Greeks too alien to Winckelmann for him to appropriate them? Nietzsche rouses our suspicions and makes us critically alert to Winckelmann’s inability to appropriate the Greeks. He remarks in fragment, from November 1887 to March 1888, found in The Will to Power: “Winckelmann’s and Goethe’s Greeks, Victor Hugo’s orientals, Wagner’s Edda characters, Walter Scott’s Englishman of the thirteenth century—some day the whole comedy will be exposed! It was all historically false beyond measure, but—modern.”40 Another fragment from The Will to Power written during the same period, November 1887 to March 1888 again describes the classical movement in Germany as a comedy. He observes: It is an amusing comedy at which we have only now learned to laugh, which we only now see: that the contemporaries of Herder, Winckelmann, Goethe, and Hegel claimed to have rediscovered the classical ideal—and at the same time Shakespeare!—And the same generation had meanly repudiated the French classical school! As if the essential things could not have been learned here as well as there!—But one desired ‘nature’, ‘naturalness’: oh stupidity! One believed that classicism was a kind of naturalness!41

Nietzsche maintains in these fragments from The Will To Power that the neoclassicism found in Germany, which included the likes of Winckelmann, Goethe and Hegel, is to be thought of as a comedy and one 39

Potts, Flesh and the Ideal, p. 2 WP, p. 438 41 WP, p. 447 40


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that it is ‘historically false beyond measure’. He also ridicules this movement being conceived of as a form of naturalness. This prompts us to question the degree to which Winckelmann’s interpretation of the Greeks was self-invented. It also begs the question of whether or not he ever managed to divine the ‘true’ nature of the ancient Greeks. Winckelmann was aware of the difficulties of his endeavour; nevertheless, he thought it was only through imitating the Greeks in their unique spirit that Germans or more broadly speaking, modern individuals could become great. He writes: ‘The only way for the moderns to become great, and perhaps unequalled; I mean, by imitating the ancients.’ LacoueLabarthe claims this paradoxical statement signifies: ‘A gigantic double bind, and the consequent threat of psychosis.’42 Winckelmann finds himself in a bind whereby he seeks greatness and uniqueness through the imitation of the Greeks who he himself identifies as being peerless. He discusses Greek inimitability in Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (1755): To the Greek climate we owe the production of taste, and from thence it spread at length over all the politer world. Every invention, communicated by foreigners to that nation, was but the seed of what it became afterwards, changing both its nature and its size in a country, chosen as Plato says, by Minerva, to be inhabited by the Greeks, as productive of every kind of genius. But this taste was not only original among the Greeks, but seemed also quite peculiar to their country: it seldom went abroad without loss...43

How can this statement be reconciled with his belief that it is only through imitating the Greeks that modern Germany may itself become great? Winckelmann recognizes the fact that what was peculiar to the Greeks could not be transported abroad without loss. Thus by his own admission, by importing Greek thought and aesthetic values into a foreign land there is a fundamental depreciation of their true nature. How then could Winckelmann seek inimitability for modern Germany through imitation of the Greeks? Surely by engaging in the process of imitation one subverts the possibility of becoming unique. The challenges posed by imitation and appropriation come to the fore at this point. The difficulty of making the foreign one’s own is at issue here and this is something that Winckelmann addresses by way of his lament of the 42

Lacoue-Labarthe, “Hölderlin and the Greeks”, p. 236 Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works, p. 61

43

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destruction of ancient Greece in History of Ancient Art (1764). Winckelmann appears to disarm the problematical dichotomous relationship between what is foreign and what is one’s own (ancient Greece/modern Germany) by asserting in History of Ancient Art that ancient Greece is not foreign to him at all but is his ‘native land’: I have already overstepped the boundaries of history of art, and in meditating upon its downfall have felt almost like the historian who, in narrating the history of his native land, is compelled to allude to its destruction of which he was a witness. Still I could not refrain from searching into the fate of works of art as far as my eye could reach; just as a maiden, standing on the shore of the ocean, follows with tearful eyes her departing lover with no hope of ever seeing him again […] Like that loving maiden we too have, as it were, nothing but a shadowy outline left of the object of our wishes, but the very indistinctness awakens only a more earnest longing for what we have lost, and we study the copies more earnestly than should we had been in full possession of them. In this particular we are very like those who wish to have an interview with spirits, and who believe that they see them when there is nothing to be seen. In a similar manner the authority of antiquity predetermines our judgements…44

From the above passage the initial impression is given that Winckelmann in pursuing the ancient Greeks is not adopting something completely foreign to himself but is instead pursuing what feels like his ‘native land’. The aesthetic values he attributed to the Greeks are not to be conceived as values he arbitrarily took on board and which he is somehow disconnected from, but rather they are values which are imbedded in a tradition to which he seemingly belongs. Baur in his interpretation of the same passage as cited above from History of Ancient Art elucidates how Winckelmann and all moderns belong to the Greeks. He states: But then who are we? Winckelmann suggests an answer to this question 45 when he refers to the lost Greek world as his ‘own fatherland’. In other words, we are offspring of the Greeks and already stand within the tradition initiated by them. Accordingly, the very emptiness and nothingness of the desired object – the apparently unfathomable distance between us and the bygone Greek world – tell us that this object does not stand entirely outside us after all. In fact, the feeling of distance and

44

Johann Joachim Winckelmann, History of Ancient Art, in Writings on Art, Selected, ed. and trans. David Irwin, New York: Phaidon Publishers, 1972, p. 144. 45 In David Irwin’s translation of History of Art it is translated as ‘native land’.


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longing is possible for us only because a prior continuum of meaningfulness still binds us to the Greeks.46

Can such a positive conclusion be drawn from Winckelmann’s remarks? Can Winckelmann be interpreted as laying bare the bond that binds ‘us’ ‘moderns’ to the Greeks? It would appear that Baur is too hasty in his inference from this particular text of Winckelmann’s. Winckelmann explicitly speaks of ‘us’ ‘moderns’ as being like: “those who wish to have an interview with spirits and who believe that they see them when there is nothing to be seen. In a similar manner the authority of antiquity predetermines our judgements…”. This suggests that ‘our’ bond with the Greeks is less certain than Baur would portray it to be. Baur does allude to the ‘emptiness’, ‘nothingness’ and ‘unfathomable distance’ of ancient Greece but sees Winckelmann’s nostalgic appeal as somehow validating his recourse to it, as it apparently testifies to a ‘prior continuum of meaningfulness’. However, Winckelmann disrupts Baur’s claims by associating the Greeks with spirits whom we would like to think that we see and communicate with but who are in fact not there, being only our own projections. Baur’s interpretation of the interconnectedness between the moderns and the ancients is further disturbed by Winckelmann’s insistence on the link between the authority that the Greeks hold over us and the spirits who we think we see but are not really there. Consequently, the spirits that are our own projections are analogous to the Greeks who hold authority over us and ‘predetermine our judgments’. Thus their authority can be deemed to be something that has been established at the behest of ‘us’ ‘moderns’ who desire to exist under the sway of the ancient Greeks although their presence is absent. In other words our understanding of the Greeks is always invented. Does this mean that we are really only abiding by our own precepts which are guised as having been founded by the Greeks? Are we forever severed from the Greeks and are our calls upon them destined to ring out without echo? Baur would vehemently deny that we are alienated from the Greeks and there is substance to his argument but the weight it carries is not derived from Winckelmann’s text. Baur deems the notion that the Greeks are completely alien to us stems from a misconception arising from modern subjectivism: “Modern subjectivism sees the individual subject as essentially separate from all traditions and otherness; as a result, any act of freedom and originality by this subjectivity is necessarily understood as an act of arbitrariness or idiosyncrasy. The basic problem of modern subjectivism, then, is its inability to comprehend the essential unity of 46

Baur, “Winckelmann and Hegel on the Imitation of the Greeks”, p. 100

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freedom and tradition, self-determination and otherness, spontaneity and receptivity, subjectivity and objectivity.”47 He also writes of how in following ourselves we are pursuing the Greek tradition within us: “In following ourselves, we are really only following the Greek legacy that is already alive in us. No matter how we might misconceive our longing for the Greeks, the fact remains that such a longing presupposes a fundamental continuity between ourselves and the Greeks.”48 Winckelmann was not unaware of these problems and in his attempt to resolve them he tried to articulate a way in which moderns could imitate the ancients while at the same time create and strive towards goals based on their own merits. To do so he distinguished between Nachahmen and Nachahmung in the work entitled Erinnerung über die Betrachtung der Werke der Kunst. Nachahmen refers to the simple copying of something without any originality or genius while on the other hand Nachahmung is to be understood as a form of imitation that involves originality and genius. Winckelmann elaborates what this distinction entails for the artist when he writes: ‘Greek rules of beauty to guide his hand and mind’ may allow him to ‘become a rule unto himself.’ This implies that the modern artist is not subordinating himself to aesthetic rules laid down by the Greeks but may use them as a type of springboard for the forging of his own rules that he may wish to establish. Accordingly, when Winckelmann proposed the imitation of the Greeks, imitation here was not so much intended to mean the slavish copying of a dead original but instead meant a renewed way of creating art in the spirit of the Greeks. Hence the imitation of the Greeks in this sense might itself be the hope of an original creation, a hope not entirely unredeemed by the subsequent artistic, indeed philosophical achievements of German culture. The moderns can in this light be seen to look upon the Greeks as a necessary precursor, which could enable them to fulfil their own greatness. Yet even if the problem of the legitimacy of Winckelmann’s recourse to the Greeks is left to the side it still remains unsatisfactory. Winckelmann did not have insight into the Greeks to the same degree to which Hölderlin or Nietzsche had. With Hölderlin and Nietzsche the Greek gods and the Greek tragedies took on a new seriousness, which Winckelmann, for all his achievements did not fully grasp. As Lloyd-Jones Hughes writes: “Behind the calm and dignity praised by Winckelmann, 47 48

Baur, “Winckelmann and Hegel on the Imitation of the Greeks”, p. 101 Ibid., p. 101


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Nietzsche saw the struggle needed to achieve the balance; he saw that the Greeks had not repressed, but had used for their own purposes, terrible and irrational forces.”49 Also by remaining within a restricted aesthetic paradigm, whereby Winckelmann primarily focused on and drew attention to Greek sculpture, his endeavours appear decidedly lacking as they are without sufficient scope to cater for the needs of modern humanity. This is something that Freud attests to in Civilisation and Its Discontents: “Yet the mild narcosis that art induces in us can free us only temporarily from the hardships of life; it is not strong enough to make us forget real misery.” 50 Baur himself writes of the insufficiency of Winckelmann’s work by highlighting that: “his mere pointing will appear to the modern mind as aristocratic, impersonal, antipathetic to individuality and rational protest.” Winckelmann’s enthusiasm for Greek art and the spirit it engendered was incapable of satisfying the needs of his fellow Germans who were to inherit his works for they failed to alleviate them of their sense of homelessness.

Hölderlin What is that To the ancient, the happy shores Binds me, so that I love them Still more than my own homeland? 51

The above lines from Hölderlin’s ‘The Only One’ reveal an inner tension between both his love for ancient Greece and his patriotic bond to his native Germany. This tension is further heightened by the profundity of his reverence for the gods of antiquity and his strong devotion to Christ, something that is also made evident in ‘The Only One’:

49 Lloyd-Jones Hugh, Nietzsche and the Study of the Ancient World, in J. C. O’Flaherty, T. F. Sellner, and R. M. Helm (eds.), Studies in Nietzsche and the Classical Tradition, University of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures, 85, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1976, p. 2. 50 Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents, trans. David McLintock, London: Penguin Books, 2002, p. 18. 51 Cf. Friedrich Hölderlin, The Only One (Second Version), (HPF, p. 545). The original lines read: “Was ist es, das/An die alten seeligen Küsten/Mich fesselt, daß ich mehr noch/ Sie liebe, als mein Vaterland?” (HPF, p. 544)

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Chapter Two …And now my soul Is full of sadness as though You Heavenly yourselves excitedly cried That if I serve one I Must lack the other. And yet I know, it is my own fault. For too greatly O Christ, I’m attached to you…52

Here the bind that Hölderlin finds himself in comes to the fore. His faith in Christ is such that he is unable to attend properly to the Greek gods. However, because of his veneration of the Greek gods he feels guilt over not being exclusively devoted to Christ and so by serving one he lacks the other. These inner conflicts persistently tormented Hölderlin and much of his poetic work was to be borne out of the ongoing strife between these competing yearnings. Gadamer discusses the poetic space that Hölderlin inhabits in the essay “Hölderlin and Antiquity”: “Hölderlin’s stout heart claims as its own the territory between the Greek and the German, between the Greek gods and Christ, the master of the Hesperian-Germanic age.”53 I shall concentrate here on these tensions while at the same time consistently addressing and illuminating how they come to bear on his sense of Heimat. Hölderlin was born in 1770 in Lauffen, a village on the River Neckar to the north of Stuttgart. He had seen the deaths of his father and stepfather before he was nine years old, and four of his brothers and sisters died at birth or in infancy. In spite of the tragedies that befell him as a child, his childhood still managed to become a celebrated theme in his poetry. The poetizing of childhood based in an ideal homeland was an integral element to his whole mythology. One that led him to believe that this ideal could be fulfilled on this earth, as Hyperion having met Diotima, says: ‘Ich hab' es Einmal gesehn…’54 Nevertheless, Hölderlin like all others lost his childhood, but he was also to lose his homeland. He travelled much in his time in an attempt to make his own way, however, as David Constantine writes in his biography Hölderlin: “…he failed, and came home again, but 52

Cf. HPF, p. 545. Original reads: “Und jezt ist voll/Von Trauern meine Seele/Als eifertet, ihr Himmlischen, selbst/Daß, dien’ ich einem, mir/Das andere fehlet/Ich weiß es aber, eigene Schuld ists! Denn zu sehr/O Christus! häng’ ich an dir…”(HPF, p. 544) 53 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Hölderlin and Antiquity” in Literature and Philosophy in Dialogue, trans. Robert H. Paslick, New York: State University of New York Press, 1994, p. 68. Henceforth, “Hölderlin and Antiquity”. 54 Cf. David Constantine, Hölderlin, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, p. 1. Henceforth, Hölderlin.


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could not stay. Only once he had failed utterly (by the world’s standards) could he come home for good, and then to a tower and an adoptive family.” 55 The motifs of home, homeland (Heimat) and homecoming (Heimkunft) play major roles in Hölderlin’s poetry and they do so in conjunction with dependence, if not an obsessive reliance upon his conception of the ancient Greeks. In his poetry, essays and letters Hölderlin persistently re-turns to the Greeks and he does so while at the same time attempting to poetically enact a homecoming to his own Germanic homeland. In a letter to Böhlendorff (1802) he outlines what it is that characterizes the poetry of his time, he writes: ‘…since the Greeks, we have again begun to poeticize in patriotic natural, and in properly original manner.’56 Other German poets writing during the same period as Hölderlin and who also turned nostalgically to ancient Greece for inspiration included Schiller in ‘Die Götter Griechenlands’ and Conz in ‘Phantasieflug nach Griechenland’, these being poems in which the passing of Greece is greatly mourned. However, according to Gilbert Highet in The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature, Hölderlin was ‘the truest Grecian of his generation in Germany.’57 A youthful Nietzsche was also to heap praise upon Hölderlin’s poetizing of Greece: ‘Nowhere has the longing for Greece been revealed in purer tones…’58 It is however too simplistic to perceive Hölderlin’s recourse to Greeks as one steeped in nostalgia and in the hope of retrieving some ideal existence. In Hölderlin Ronald Peacock claims: “…his attitude was not that of a man of no thought or originality coming to the Greeks and receiving from them in his spiritually destitute condition their gifts. He had an ideal of his own, an ideal of life, sprung from life within him.”59 Hölderlin undoubtedly possessed a unique poetic genius and so was able to take on board the Greeks without being creatively suffocated by their greatness. Nevertheless, his poetic vision was imbued with Greek influences to such a degree that one would be unable to understand his poetic endeavour without first grasping his relationship with antiquity. His poetic vision of a rejuvenated Germany revolved around his interpretation of the Greeks. The Greeks were central to Hölderlin’s poetic venture, as they provided the basis for the desired regeneration of his 55

Constantine, Hölderlin, p. 2. HEL, p. 152 57 Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature. New York: OUP, p. 251. 58 Friedrich Nietzsche, found in Silk & Stern’s, Nietzsche on Tragedy, p. 22 59 Ronald Peacock, Hölderlin, London: Methuen & Co., 1938, p. 65 56

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Germanic homeland, and this was a primary concern for the poet of the ‘destitute time’. Constantine draws attention to this when he remarks: “For although he knew the dangers of subservience and insisted on the need for self-assertion, still his conception of the ideal remained unequivocally Greek; and he demonstrated his belief or hope that the new Golden Age would be north of the Alps and have Germany (more precisely Swabia) as its heartland...” 60 Hölderlin was not so much concerned with self-regeneration but was instead preoccupied with the rejuvenation of his fellow Germans and the renewal of their homeland. The poem entitled ‘Homecoming/ To Kindred Ones’ (Heimkunft/ An Die Verwandten) reveals what he poetically pursued, whereby his countrymen are continually addressed. Nonetheless, he does at times provide scathing criticisms of his fellow Germans. In a letter to his brother in 1799 he strongly reproves German provincialism and how Germans remain too strongly attached to their own soil: “For I believe that the most common virtues and shortcomings of the Germans boil down to a rather conceited domesticity. They are everywhere glebae addicti,61 and the majority is in some manner, literally or metaphorically, tied to its soil…”62 Hölderlin contrasts this attribute of the Germans with the openness and worldliness of the Greeks, he refers in particular to Thales and Solon as personifying a worldly wisdom.63 His criticism of the Germans as being captives of their soil could be applied to Heidegger, for he stressed the importance of being rooted in one’s native soil. Hölderlin saw the ideal of natural perfection in the collective as well as in the individual life of the Athenians. In fact the former becomes more pertinent than the latter, for his thought constantly passes beyond the individual to the community. He was convinced like many others of his time that the fragmented and decentred state of Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century fostered the possibility of a new renaissance. However, this time it was thought the renaissance would occur on German soil, and

60

Constantine, Hölderlin, pp. 170-171 This means ‘captives of their soil’. 62 HEL, p.136 63 He writes in the same letter: “...noble pair like Thales and Solon who travelled together through Greece; and Egypt and Asia in order to become acquainted with the constitutions and philosophers of the world; who therefore were universalized in more than one respect, yet who were quite good friends and more humane and more naïve than all those taken together who would like to persuade us that, in order to preserve or naturalness, we should not open to the world⎯which is always worth it⎯our eyes and hearts.” (HEL, p.137) 61


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he further believed it would come about through the re-emergence of the ‘Genius’ that prevailed throughout ancient Greece. The re-emergence of this ‘Genius’ is pivotal to understanding how Hölderlin interpreted the relation between Germany and ancient Greece. For Hölderlin, a migratory Spirit or Genius was active in the world, and this is made evident in his poem ‘The German Song’: And yet, like springtime, genius always roams From land to land. And we? Is there only one Among our youths who does not hide a Heart-premonition, a dark foreknowing? 64

With the arrival of der Genius in Germany there would be an explosion of new life, just as in springtime when nature itself begins to erupt into life, and it was to be anticipated through a ‘Heart-premonition, a dark foreknowing’ (ein Räthsel der Brust, verschwiege). When Hölderlin speaks of the Genius roaming ‘From land to land.’ this can be more specifically interpreted as something that travels from ancient Greece to Germany. Eric L. Santner discusses this stanza quoted above in Friedrich Hölderlin: Narrative Vigilance and the Poetic Imagination: “Athens is remembered as the place where piety, wisdom, the equanimity of heroes, and the communion of mortals and gods reached perfection. The ninth strophe ends with a query: Has not Germany been struck by a bolt of the same cosmic lightening as were the Athenians? Is not Germany to be the locus of a new epiphany, one that places Germany within a Greek lineage?”65 Hölderlin would respond positively to these questions. According to Hölderlin, Germany may be envisaged as the heir to the Genius that manifested itself in ancient Greece. Constantine also pays heed to this seminal issue found in Hölderlin’s poetry, in The Significance of Locality in the Poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin:

64

Cf. HPF, p.163, the original German translation reads: Doch, wie der Frühling, wandelt der Genius Von Land zu Land. Und wir? ist denn Einer auch Von unsern Jünglingen, der nicht ein Ahnden, ein Räthsel der Brust, verschwiege? (HPF, p. 162)

65

Eric L. Santner, Friedrich Hölderlin: Narrative Vigilance and the Poetic Imagination, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986, pp. 30-31. Henceforth, Friedrich Hölderlin: Narrative Vigilance and the Poetic Imagination.

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Chapter Two The idea that the spirit of civilization passes like spring from one land to the next is of major structural importance in Hölderlin's poetic world. It is expounded in a most persuasive imagery: that of localities. The landscapes of Greece are intensely and concretely evoked, and they constitute one pole of Hölderlin’s world and exert a terrific pull. They are countered by the landscapes of the North and the West, by Hölderlin’s own zone; so that the tensions between past and present are embodied in the hemispheres of a mythical geography.66

The idea of a ‘mythical geography’ and the notion of Cosmic Genius or World Spirit was also a prevalent thematic for contemporary thinkers of Hölderlin. Hegel for instance, in The Philosophy of History, interprets the history of civilisation as the history of the self-realization of freedom based also on a mythical geographical schema.67 A more modern conception of this ‘migratory Genius’ is found in D. H Lawrence’s essay entitled “The Spirit of Place” in which he identifies some ‘magnetic or vital influence’ at work in a particular geographical region. As the title of the essay suggests the spirit of a place shapes its inhabitants. He further contends that certain places can develop or lose their ‘psychic-magnetic polarity’: “Every people is polarised in some particular locality, some home or homeland. And every great era of civilisation seems to be the expression of a particular continent or continent region of the earth’s surface, over and above the indisputable 66

David J. Constantine, The Significance of Locality in the Poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, London: The Modern humanities Research Association, 1979, p. 170. Henceforth, The Significance of Locality in the Poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin. 67 He writes in The Philosophy of History: “The Orientals have not attained the knowledge that Spirit—Man as such-is free; and because they do not know this, they are not free. They only know that one is free. But on this very account, the freedom of that one is only caprice; ferocity—brutal recklessness of passion, or a mildness and tameness of the desires, which is itself only an accident of Nature— mere caprice like the former.—That one is therefore only a Despot; not a free man. The consciousness of Freedom first arose among the Greeks, and therefore they were free; but they, and the Romans likewise, knew only that some are free—not man as such. Even Plato and Aristotle did not know this. The Greeks, therefore, had slaves; and their whole life and the maintenance of their splendid liberty, was implicated with the institution of slavery: a fact moreover, which made that liberty on the one hand only an accidental, transient and limited growth; on the other hand, constituted it a rigorous thralldom of our common nature—of the Human. The German nations, under the influence of Christianity, were the first to attain the consciousness that man, as man, is free: that it is the freedom of Spirit which constitutes its essence.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree, New York: Colonial Press, 1900, p. 18.


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facts of climate and geographical condition. There is some subtle magnetic or vital influence inherent in every specific locality…”68 It appears that Hölderlin’s understanding of this idea of a roaming ‘Genius’ was heavily influenced by Pietism and their belief in the coming of the millennium in Swabia. Pietists that included the likes of Bengel, and Oetinger, self-assuredly prophesied, for the early nineteenth century, the coming of the millennium in Swabia. It seems a very likely possibility that they had a strong influence on Hölderlin. Having had a Pietist upbringing there are traces of Pietism to be found in his poetic works, most especially in the vocabulary he uses. Oetinger was also to employ one of Hölderlin’s favourite images, that of an eagle in flight69, to illustrate the Church’s coming from the East.70 For Hölderlin, the coming of the ‘Genius’ to Germany would signal a truly remarkable event, as it would mark the return of a harmonious communion between both mortals and divinities. The emblem for this communion can be found in the festival.71 To what degree did the communion between mortals and the divine constitute the Greek ‘Genius’ for Hölderlin? What was his perception of ancient Greece that inspired him so much? What way of being in the world did the Greeks embody or exemplify that drew Hölderlin to them? And how could his recourse to the Greeks help him realize his aspirations for his Germanic homeland? For Hölderlin was to downplay affiliations between the ancient Greeks and modern Germans. He went as far as to say in a very important letter to Böhlendorff (1801), that they shared nothing identical: …And, I believe that it is precisely the clarity of the presentation that is so natural to us as is the Greeks the fire from heaven… It sounds paradoxical. Yet I argue once again…: [that] in the progress of education the truly national will become the ever less attractive. Hence the Greeks are less master of the sacred pathos, because to them it was inborn, whereas they excel in their talent for presentation, beginning with 68

D. H. Lawrence, The Spirit Of Place, in The Symbolic Meaning (The uncollected versions of Studies in Classic American Literature), ed. Armin Arnold, London: Centaur Press Ltd., 1962, p. 20. 69 In the third stanza of Germania the significance of the eagle is most clearly articulated and of course the poem entitled The Eagle (Der Adler) is important to note too. 70 Cf. David J. Constantine, The Significance of Locality in the Poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, p. 54 71 Many commentators have drawn attention to the significance of the festival in Hölderlin’s poetry. For example, see Santner’s, Friedrich Hölderlin: Narrative Vigilance and the Poetic Imagination, p. 39

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Chapter Two Homer, because this exceptional man was sufficiently sensitive to conquer the Western Junonian sobriety for his Apollonian empire and thus to veritably appropriate what is foreign. With us it is the reverse. Hence it is also so dangerous to deduce the rules of art for oneself exclusively from Greek excellence. I have laboured long over this and know by now that, with the exception of what must be the highest for the Greeks and for us–namely, the living relationship and destiny–we must not share anything identical with them.72

In a similar fashion to Winckelmann, Hölderlin attests to the uniqueness of ancient Greece. Unlike Winckelmann however, Hölderlin appeals to the Greeks in a more cautionary fashion. He regards it as being too dangerous to determine the rules of art based solely on the Greeks, a danger Winckelmann simply ignored or did not recognize.73 Hölderlin advances an interpretation of Greece that moves away from the common perception of it as a place of natural perfection and serenity; a perception forged to large a extent by Winckelmann. Hölderlin attempts to draw attention to the original element of the Greeks, and he does so by using such expressions as ‘fire from heaven’ or the ‘sacred pathos’, terms indicative of how their experience of the divine is interfused with the experience of suffering. That is, an understanding of the Greeks that would be more in keeping with Nietzsche’s view of them, a more modern conception, whereby the tremendous suffering they underwent is brought to the fore. According to Hölderlin’s letter, the Greek disposition can be interpreted as a movement from a state of ‘sacred pathos’ to the state of ‘Junonian sobriety,’ (a transition embodied in the person of Homer). In contrast to the ancient Greeks, modern Western humanity attempts to conquer the ‘sacred pathos’ or the ‘fire of heaven’ as it is foreign to them. Therefore, unlike the ancients what is native to modern human beings is what Hölderlin terms ‘Junonian sobriety.’ By characterizing the Greeks in this way, they appear distinctly foreign to and removed from modern Germans. Nevertheless, Hölderlin claims that if the Greeks had not conquered this ‘sobriety,’ they 72

HEL, pp. 149-150 Hölderlin may exhibit more caution than Winckelmann in his appropriation of the Greeks but traces of Winckelmannian thought can be found in his writings especially with regard to his portrayal of Greek statuary. In an another letter to Böhlendorff in 1802, he writes: “The contemplation of ancient statuary made an impression on me that brought me closer to an understanding not only of the Greeks, but of what is greatest in all art, which, even where movement is most intense, the conception most phenomenolized and the intention most serious, still preserves every detail intact and true to itself, so that assuredness, in this sense, is the supreme kind of representation.” (HPF, p. xxx) 73


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would have been engulfed, as it were, by the ‘fire from heaven’. This same ‘fire from heaven’ is absent in modern Germany, or more broadly speaking in the Western world. Consequently, modern humanity runs the risk of being too distant from the divine. This in turn prompts an uninspiring and insipid way of being in the world to prevail. Hölderlin in the essay “Remarks on Antigone” deems modern humanity’s impoverished and destitute state to be characterized by ‘the lack of destiny, the dysmoron’.74 In the essay “Hölderlin and the Greeks”, Lacoue-Labarthe articulates this point most artfully, when he declares: This is why Hölderlin can say that the Modern – the Hesperian or Western – is the inverse of the Ancient, of the Oriental. What is proper to us is sobriety, clarity of exposition. Because our reign is that of finitude […] For this is what constitutes the tragic for us, that we leave quietly the realm of the living…and not that, consumed in flames, we atone for the flame that we were not able to subdue […] Dereliction and madness, not a brute, physical death; the mind touched, and not the body.75

Perhaps an even more surprising aspect to Hölderlin’s letter, is not so much his recognition of the danger in employing rules of art derived from the Greeks and the distinction he makes between them and moderns; but rather his insistence on the need to learn what is one’s own, the familiar just as much as what is foreign. He writes: “Yet what is familiar must be learned as well as what is alien. This is why the Greeks are so indispensable for us. It is not only that we will not follow them in our own, national [spirit] since, as I said, the free use of what is one’s own is the most difficult.”76 This then becomes an essential pointer to understanding Hölderlin’s relationship with the Greeks. Not only does the pursuit of the Greek ideal become problematized but also what and how one is to be German emerges an arduous challenge. The issue that dwells once again at the heart of this problem is the ever-present tension between the familiar and the foreign. This problematic issue can be summed up in one of the latter versions of ‘Bread and Wine’: For the spirit is not at home At the beginning, not at the source. The homeland preys upon it. The spirit loves the colony and valour forgotten. Our flowers and the shade of our forests give joy

74

HEL, p. 114, ‘the dysmoron’ is the Greek for bad fate or misfortune. Lacoue-Labarthe, “Hölderlin and the Greeks”, p. 242. 76 HEL, p. 150 75

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Chapter Two To the languishing one. Almost consumed by fire was the animator.77

Antoine Berman in The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany attempts to unravel the meaning of the complex interrelationship between the Greek world and modern German in Hölderlin’s poetry, when he remarks: With an unsurpassable rigor the double law of the ‘spirit’ finds expression here: On the one hand, ‘the homeland devours him’; on the other, ‘the shadows of our forests’ save him. The movement by which the ‘spirit’ escapes the mortal (devouring) immediacy of the homeland is also the movement that threatens to consume it by the searing light of the foreign. Henceforth, as the experience [épreuve] of the foreign protects from the bad homeland, so does the apprenticeship of the homeland protect from the fire from heaven--from the foreign. The two movements are inseparable: The task of poetry consists in mastering the imbalances inherent to the experience of what is one’s own and the experience of the foreign.78

Yet, mastering this imbalance was something that eluded Hölderlin, as he says: ‘Much though I wish to, never/I strike the right measure.’79 And so the complexity of Hölderlin’s recourse to the Greeks deepens and becomes ever more intricate. For no single factor lay behind Hölderlin’s turn towards the Greeks. Instead, a number of interdependent and intertwined concerns and drives directed him towards the ancients. Hölderlin sought to understand the ‘divisions in which we think and exist’, and at the same time overcome the discord and tension existent in the subject/object divide, in the division between self and world, and the division between reason and revelation. In a letter to his brother Karl on June 2nd, 1796, he discloses his strategy for diffusing and surmounting these divisions: In the philosophical letters, I want to discover the principle which explains to me the divisions in which we think and exist, yet which is also capable of dispelling the conflict between subject and object, between our self and the world, yes, also between reason and revelation,⎯theoretically, in intellectual intuition, without our practical reason having to come to our aid. For this we need an aesthetic sense, and I will call my philosophical 77

Cf. EHP, p. 144. Antoine Berman, The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany, trans S. Heyvaert, New York: State University of New York Press, 1992, p. 165. 79 The Only One (First Version), HPF, p. 539 78


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letters ‘New Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.’ Also, I will move in [these letters] from philosophy to poetry and religion.80

In the above passage, Hölderlin outlines his need to acquire ‘an aesthetic sense’ based on intellectual intuition, and how he will move from philosophy to poetry and religion in order to diffuse and surmount the conflicts inherent in these divisions. Hölderlin’s desire to disarm such conflicts may suggest his work is intrinsically ‘Romantic’, in that it seeks to reconcile man and nature. But while the convenient label of ‘Romanticism’ is easily applied to Hölderlin, it would show a lack of hermeneutic restraint and reflection to characterize him in this. What has been previously discussed demonstrates how Hölderlin rather than ‘dispelling’ the tensions between subject/object, self/world, reason/revelation (the conflicts between home/foreign, Germany/Greece, sacred pathos/ Junonian sobriety could also be included here) instead reinforces and further problematizes these distinctions. Although not made evident in his letter of June 2nd, 1796, the dichotomy he establishes between the divine filled days of the ancient Greeks and the destitute time of modernity, when the gods have fled, appears the most prevalent and significant conflict in Hölderlin’s poetry. He identified his time as being a destitute time, when a god no longer makes an ‘imprint on the brow of a mortal’. This separation or rift between the divine and mortals was a great source of anguish for Hölderlin. This rift was experienced as a growing absence, to the point where even the absence itself was not being experienced. In contrast to modernity’s state of desolation, he saw the ancient Greeks as inhabiting a world in which the gods were a vital presence. He also notes how the Greeks oriented themselves in worship towards their divinities, thereby centring and instilling their lives with meaning. Gadamer distinguishes between the world of the ancient Greeks and the world of modern Germans by claiming: “…there everyone belonged to the world with sense and soul, and precisely because of that, there developed in characters and relationships a particular interiority; whereas in the case of modern peoples, there prevails an insensitivity for the honour and peculiar character of the community, a narrow-mindedness that paralyzes them all from within, especially the Germans.”81 Mourning the loss of the divine is the most prominent tone of Hölderlin’s poetry, as in Greece, the gods were a real and active presence in the lives of the people, the lives of mortals and divinities were interwoven. However, in contrast to this, more 80 81

HEL, pp.131-132 Gadamer, “Hölderlin and Antiquity”, p.70

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modern times can be characterized as being bereft of any such immanent experiences with the divine. Gadamer states: ‘The lament over the end of divinely fulfilled Days of the Greeks is for us the most characteristic tone of Hölderlin’s poetry…’.82 Hölderlin speaks of this loss or separation from the divine most eloquently in ‘Bread and Wine’: Nothing must see the light but what to those high ones is pleasing, Idle and bungled work never for Aether was fit. So to be worthy and stand unashamed in the heavenly presence, Nations rise up and soon, gloriously ordered, compete One with the other in building beautiful temples and cities Noble and firm they tower high above river and sea – Only where are they? Where thrive those famed ones, the festival garlands? Athens is withered, and Thebes; now do no weapons ring out In Olympia, nor now those chariots, all golden, in games there, And no longer are wreaths hung on Corinthian ships? Why are they silent too, the theatres, ancient and hollowed? Why not now does the dance celebrate, consecrate joy? Why no more does a god imprint on the brow of a mortal Struck, by lightening, the mark, brand him, as once he would do?... But my friend, we have come too late. Though the gods are living, Over our heads they live, up in a different world. Little they seem to care whether we live or do not. For not always a frail, delicate vessel can hold them, Only at times can our kind bear the full impact of gods.83

There is much being said in these lines from ‘Bread and Wine’. It is evident from them that Hölderlin is in a state of questioning wonderment as to why there are no more beautiful temples or cities being built that would be fit for the divine. He also wonders why it is that no divinity communicates with mortals, why it is that a divinity refuses to ‘brand him, as once he would do’. He responds to the questions he poses by identifying modern man as having arrived too late to experience the presence of the divinities of the ancient Greek’s and while they still exist they do so in a dimension far removed from modern mortals. He also states that mortals being the ‘frail’ beings they are, are only at certain times or occasions able to cope with the divine brilliance of a god. Is Hölderlin’s great hope then, as a poet, to see the lost connection between mortals and the divine restored? While Hölderlin would welcome restoration of this connection he would be also wary of it, as he considered 82 83

Ibid., p. 70 HPF, p. 325.


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this relation to form the basis of tragic Greece. Lacoue-Labarthe notes: “The Greece thus discovered by Hölderlin is, in short, tragic Greece – if the essence of the tragic is, as the Notes say, the monstrous coupling of god and man, the limitless becoming-one and transgression of the limit (hubris) and tragedy (a remote echo here of Aristotle) has the function of purifying.”84 As his mature poetry tracks the gods that have fled it was perhaps only in his youth when he knew the silence of the Aether that he could be united with divinities. For in his youth language and thought did not exclude him from the divine. ‘In My Boyhood Days...’, he writes: O all you loyal, kindly gods! Would that you knew how My soul loved you then. True, at that time I did not Evoke you by name yet, and you Never named me, as men use names, As though they knew one another. Yet I knew you better Than ever I have known men, I understood the silence of Aether, But human words I've never understood. I was reared by the euphony Of the rustling copse And learned to love Amid the flowers. I grew up in the arms of the gods.85

Nonetheless, in Hölderlin’s time the gods have fled and as such he is no longer able to invoke them. However, Walter Jens and Hans Küng in their work entitled Literature & Religion maintain that Hölderlin “...doesn’t simply name the gods. He invokes them, appeals to them, and reveres them.” 86 Contrary to this interpretation, Hölderlin himself admits of his inability to invoke the gods of antiquity, when he writes in the opening stanza to the hymn ‘Germania’: Not them, the blessed, who once appeared, Those images of gods in the ancient land,

84

Lacoue-Labarthe, “Hölderlin and the Greeks”, p. 244 HPF, pp. 123-125 86 Walter Jens & Hans Küng, Literature & Religion: Pascal, Gryphius, Lessing, Hölderlin, Novalis, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, trans. Peter Heinegg, New York: Paragon House, 1991, p. 115. 85

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Chapter Two Them, it is true, I may not now invoke…87

If he could not invoke the gods of antiquity then how did he envisage the invocation of the divine for his countrymen? His hope lay in the language of the landscape of his native homeland, through its mountains, rivers and streams, in which earth and sky would meet, these were the signs by which the divine now manifested itself. Mountain, river, earth and sky, these were the angels of the Vaterland and through the poets’ poetizing they could be seen to be mediators and messengers of the divine. In the poem ‘Germania’ this is made apparent: …on us a heaven today, You yearning rivers, casts prophetic shade. With promises it is fraught….88

Thus, his profession of love for ancient Greece and the lament for its vanished glory belong essentially to the poetic experience of a vigorous and vibrant present. This is most visible in the poems ‘At the Source of the Danube’, ‘The Rhine’ and ‘The Ister’. It is in this way that the ancient Greeks attained and sustained their importance for Hölderlin.

Nietzsche Before examining Nietzsche’s interpretation of the Greeks, it would be worthwhile to preface it by way of a very brief discussion of Heinrich Heine (1797–1856). Heine represents an important figure in understanding Nietzsche’s relation with the Greeks, as in his poetry and essays he attempts to undermine and vilify Christ for being the one who dethroned the gods of antiquity. Heine imagines Christ hurling his wooden cross into the company of the Greek gods who were to perish by it. Although 87

HPF, p 423, Hölderlin can be seen to further distance himself from the interpretation put forth by Jens and KÜng when he writes in the second stanza of ‘Germania’: Gods who are fled! And you also, present still But once more real, you had your time, your ages! No, nothing here I’ll deny and ask no favours. (lines 17-19)

While the gods still exist for Hölderlin, their radiance is no longer experienced and as he says, he will not attempt to ask any favours of them, in other words he will not attempt to summon them in this needy time. 88 HPF, p. 491


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Christ’s cross may be interpreted as a symbolic image, the people who destroyed the statues and temples of the Greek and Roman godheads held real crosses in their hands. Heine writes in the essay “Gods in Exile” of the devastating effect Christianity had on the Greek and Roman gods: I am speaking here of that metamorphosis into demons which the Greek and Roman gods underwent when Christianity achieved supreme control of the world […] The latter (Christianity) by no means declared the ancient gods to be myths, inventions of falsehoods and error, as did the philosophers, but held them to be evil spirits, who, through the victory of Christ, had been hurled from the summit of their power, and now dragged along their miserable existences in the obscurity of dismantled temples or in enchanted groves…89

In the poem ‘The Gods of Greece’, Heine’s anger and resentment towards Christianity in its triumph over the ancient gods of Greece is intensely evident. He goes so far as to declare his allegiance to the vanquished gods. Heine writes: Forsaken godheads, Dead night-wandering shadows, Feeble as mist that flees from the wind, And when I consider how craven and hollow The gods are that conquered you, The new, sad gods that rule in your places, That gloat over woe, in sheep’s clothing of meekness⎯ Oh, then black rancour seizes my soul, And then I would smash the new-raised temples And fight for you, you gods old, For you and your good old ambrosial cause…90

Heine’s commitment and loyalty to the Greek gods and his antagonism towards Christ and Christianity strongly appealed to Nietzsche. His stinging criticisms of Christianity were to have a close affinity with the sentiments expressed in Nietzsche’s writings. Nietzsche affirms his admiration and praise of Heine in Ecce Homo: The highest conception of the lyric poet was given to me by Heinrich Heine. I seek in vain in all the realms of millennia for an equally sweet and passionate music. He possesses that divine malice without which I 89

Heinrich Heine, “Gods in Exile” in The Prose Writings Of Heinrich Heine, ed. Ernest Rhys, London: Camelot Series, 1924, p. 268. 90 Heinrich Heine, The Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine, trans. Hal Draper, Boston: Suhrkamp/Insel, 1982, p. 153.

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Chapter Two cannot imagine perfection – I assess the value of people, of races according to how necessarily they are unable to separate the god from the satyr. – And he employs German! It will be one day said that Heine and I have been by far the first artists of the German language – at an incalculable distance from everything which mere Germans have done with it.91

For Nietzsche, the Greeks exemplify a greatness lacking in modern humanity. He juxtaposes ancient Greece with modern Germany to highlight the deficiencies or sicknesses inherent in German culture. Moreover, Nietzsche readily professes his loathing for modern Germany, as he writes in Ecce Homo: ‘It is even part of my ambition to count as the despiser of the German par excellence.’92 Nietzsche’s contempt for his homeland can be traced back to some of his earliest texts, in which his disdain and scorn for Germany is articulated without restraint. In a text entitled “The Relation of Schopenhauer’s Philosophy to a German Culture”, a preface to an unwritten book in 1872, Nietzsche fiercely disparages his fellow Germans: “ …the Germans are at home in narrowness of life, discerning and judging; if any one will carry them above themselves into the sublime, then they make themselves heavy as lead, and as such lead-weights they hang to their truly great men, in order to pull them down out of the ether to the level of their own necessitous indigence.”93 He provides another damning account of Germany, when he writes in the essay “Schopenhauer as Educator” (1874): “Clearly, anyone who has to live among Germans suffers considerably from the notorious drabness of German life and feeling, its shapelessness, apathy, and dullness, its coarseness in the more tender relations of life and still more so from their envy and a certain slyness and uncleaniness of character.”94 Yet, despite his obvious aversion to modern Germany he does seek like many of his predecessors for its renewal or regeneration by appropriating the Greeks. In order to gain insight into Nietzsche’s relationship with the Greeks and how they are to be related to a modern Germany it is perhaps worthwhile to refer to a seminal passage from The Will to Power. Fragment 419 contains an invaluable account of Nietzsche’s belief in an underlying interconnectedness between Germany and Greece. He speaks 91

EH, p. 28 EH, p. 93 93 Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Relation of Schopenhauer’s Philosophy to a German Culture”, in Early Greek Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Maxilian A. Mügge, Edinburgh: T. N Founis, 1911, p. 66 94 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator” in Unmodern Observations, trans. & ed. William Arrowsmith, Yale University Press, 1990, p. 203. 92


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of the ‘bond’ that exists between them and also of his aspirations for a Germany that will attempt to fully assimilate the Greeks. His ambitions are not confined to the intellectual appropriation of the ancients but also encompass his desire for his fellow Germans to become the actual modern embodiment of the Greeks. Nietzsche proclaims: A few centuries hence, perhaps, one will judge that all German philosophy derives its real dignity from being a gradual reclamation of the soil of antiquity, and that all claims to ‘originality’ must sound petty and ludicrous in relation to that higher claim of the Germans to have joined anew the bond that seemed to be broken, the bond with the Greeks, the hitherto highest type of man. Today we are again getting close to all those fundamental forms of world interpretation devised by the Greek spirit through Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Democritus, and Anaxagoras—we are growing more Greek by the day; at first, as is only fair, in concepts and evaluations, as Hellenizing ghosts, as it were: but one day, let us hope in our bodies too! Here in lies (and has always lain) my hope for the German character!95

Although this fragment was written in 1882, Nietzsche became fascinated with the Greeks at a very early age. His initiation into the world of the ancient Greeks began during his schooldays at the prodigious Pforta. While attending Pforta, (a school in which Greek and Latin dominated the curriculum) he set up a philosophical, literary and music society called ‘Germania’ with his friends Pinder and Krug and the papers that remain from this society highlight their great admiration of the Greeks.96 Nicholas Martin discusses in Nietzsche and Schiller the importance of those school days for developing Nietzsche’s appreciation of the Greeks: It was at school that Nietzsche first became immersed in classical literature and began to believe he was linked to the ancients by a special, intimate kinship of a kind that transcended mere intellectual influence: ‘There is no doubt that Nietzsche felt himself peculiarly connected with the past; not only with the past of classical antiquity, but with various men or epochs or causes. Though he is in one sense a revolutionary, he is in another an admirer and upholder of tradition…whose work (or his interpretation of it) he wished to carry on.’97

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WP, p. 226 Cf. R.J Hollingdale, Nietzsche, The Man and His Philosophy, London: Routledge, 1965, p. 23. 97 Nicholas Martin, Nietzsche and Schiller: Untimely Aesthetics, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996, p. 104. 96

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The revolutionary side to Nietzsche’s work can be attributed to the way he contested and made redundant Winckelmann’s claims about the Greeks as being a serene race that embodied a noble simplicity. Opposed this view, Nietzsche offered an interpretation of the Greeks that sought to demonstrate how their serenity was an Apollonian disguise, which managed to mask their suffering and pain. One of Nietzsche’s most thorough examinations of the Greeks’ ‘true’ nature takes place in his renowned work The Birth of Tragedy (Out of the Spirit of Music), later to be re-titled in its reissue in 1886 as The Birth of Tragedy. Or: Greekhood and Pessimism. New Edition with an Attempt at a Self-Criticism. Both these titles allude to the impact of Wagner and Schopenhauer on his thinking.98 Nietzsche in ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’ identified two seminal problems at stake in The Birth of Tragedy, out of which a number of important tributary problems flow. Firstly, there is the problem of Greek art: “Greeks and the music of tragedy? Greeks and the pessimistic art form? The most accomplished, most beautiful, most universally envied race of mankind, those most capable of seducing us into life – they were the ones who needed tragedy? Or ever – more art? What for? – Greek art?...”99 Secondly, the problem of science is broached: “What I got a hold of then, something terrible and dangerous. A problem with horns, not necessarily a bull exactly, but at any rate a new problem – today I should say that it was the problem of science itself...”100 He begs the question: ‘And science itself, our own science – what does all of science mean as a symptom of life?’101 The problem of science is intimately linked to death of tragedy and the influence of Socrates102 and it also tied to modernity and how it signals a ‘flight from pessimism’ and ‘self-defence against – the truth’.103 Thus his reflections on the Greeks are bound to cultural criticisms of his modern Germany. Yet, at the same time he attempts to open up the

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In this regard see section 16 of BT(N). Also when he used the subtitle Or: Greekhood and Pessimism it was intended to reveal how the Greeks overcame pessimism through tragedy, this he did in a challenge to Schopenhauer, see Ecce Homo, ‘The Birth of Tragedy’, p. 48 99 BT(N), p.3 100 BT(N), p.4 101 BT(N), p. 4 102 Nietzsche writes: “And on the other hand, that which brought about the death of tragedy: Socraticism of morality, the dialectics, modesty and cheerfulness of theoretical man – could not that very Socraticism be a symptom of decline, fatigue, infection and the anarchical dissolution of the instincts?” (BT(N)), p. 4 103 BT(N), p. 4


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possibility of a German regeneration or revival based on his interpretation of antiquity. In saying this, Nietzsche in his later writings would go on to distance himself from those hopes he instilled into The Birth of Tragedy: ‘I introduced hopes where all was hopeless, where everything all too clearly indicated an ending!’104 Nietzsche’s atonement for his unwarranted optimism in The Birth of Tragedy stemmed from the remorse he felt for having had recourse to Schopenhauer and Wagner, who he believed distorted his thinking at that time. His irritation over resorting to Schopenhauer’s writings is apparent when he writes: “I now regret even more than having obscured and spoiled Dionysiac intimations with Schopenhauerian formulae: the fact that I spoiled the grandiose Greek problem, as I saw it, by adulterating it with the most modern of ideas!”105 Also, in Ecce Homo Nietzsche cites his turn to Wagner as leading him astray in The Birth of Tragedy: ‘It (The Birth of Tragedy) made its effect and even exercised fascination through what was wrong with it – through its application to Wagnerism.’106 Although he subsequently discredited the optimism pervading The Birth of Tragedy engendered, on first writing this text he believed his insights into the Apollinian and Dionysian aspects of Greek culture could restore an ailing Germany. Apollo and Dionysus and the special significance Nietzsche attaches to these deities take centre stage in The Birth of Tragedy, providing the basis for his interpretation of antiquity.107 He states: 104

BT(N), p. 10, the passage continues: “That I on the basis of the most recent German music, began to fabulate about the ‘German spirit’, as if it were on the point of discovering, refinding itself – at a time when the German spirit, which not long before had had the will to conquer Europe…” 105 BT(N), p.10 106 EH, p. 48 107 Nietzsche understanding and acknowledgement of these two deities does not arise from a sense of religiosity in any traditional sense, he did not have any belief in them as actual existent deities, more ontologically radiant than human beings. In this respect he differs from Hölderlin whose appreciation of Greek divinities was marked by a sincere sense of religiosity. Two crucial extracts from Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy show vividly how he came to comprehend the ancient Greek divinities as inventions of the Greek psyche in attempt to cope with their sufferings: (1) “Now the Olympian magic mountain opens up before us, revealing all its roots. The Greeks knew and felt the fears and horrors of existence: in order to be able to live they had to interpose the radiant dream-birth of the Olympians between themselves and those horrors.” p. 22 and (2) “In order to live, the Greeks were profoundly compelled to create those gods. We might imagine their origin as

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Chapter Two I shall fix my gaze on those two artistic deities of the Greeks, Apollo and Dionysus. For me they are the vivid concrete representations of two worlds of art, utterly different in their deepest essence and their highest aims. Apollo I see as the transfiguring genius of the principium individuationis, the sole path to true redemption through illusion. While in the mystical triumphal cry of Dionysus the spell of individuation is broken and the path is opened to the Mothers of Being, to the innermost core of things.108

Later in The Will to Power Nietzsche explains how his investigations into the Greeks were primarily motivated by the desire to understand how the Apollinian arose from Dionysian foundations and in turn how the Dionysian Greek required the Apollinian to simplify, curtail and confine its excesses. He comments: This antithesis of the Dionysian and the Apollinian within the Greek soul is one of the greatest riddles to which I felt myself drawn when considering with nothing except to guess why precisely Greek Apollinian had grown out of a Dionysian subsoil; why the Dionysian Greek needed to become Apollinian; that is, to break his will to the terrible, multifarious, uncertain, frightful, upon a will to measure, to simplicity, to submission to rule and concept.109

For Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy Dionysus or the Dionysiac denotes an aesthetic principle that can be contrasted with Apollo or the Apolline. The Dionysiac is to be associated with excess, intoxication (Rausch) the emergence of tragedy, the Dionysian festivals, the non-visual and primal unity; it is an aesthetic force that explodes the Apolline. The Apolline on the other hand is an aesthetic principle connected with dream, illusion, visual and plastic arts, form and most importantly the principle of individuation or principium individuationis.110 Nietzsche describes the follows; the Apolline impulse to beauty led, in gradual stages, from the original Titanic order of the gods of joy, just as roses sprout on thorn-bushes.” p. 23 108 BT(N), p. 76, the passage continues: “This tremendous opposition, this yawning abyss between the Apolline plastic arts and Dionysiac music, became so obvious to one of our great thinkers that even without the guidance of the divine Hellenic symbols he said that music differed in character and origin from all the other arts, because unlike them it was not a replica of phenomena, but the direct replica of the will itself, and contemplated everything physical in the world with a representation of the thing-in-itself, the metaphysical (Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, 1, p. 262)” 109 WP, pp. 539-540 110 See section 1 of The Birth of Tragedy for the way Nietzsche contrasts the Apolline with the Dionysiac. However, he does not simply contrast these two


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explosive Dionysian process in which boundaries break down allowing the spell of individuation to be broken and the state of primal unity to be experienced, when he writes: “Now the slave is a free man, now all the rigid and hostile boundaries that distress, despotism or ‘impudent fashion’ have erected between man break down. Now, with the gospel of world harmony, each man feels himself not only united, reconciled, and at one with his neighbour, but one with him, as if the veil of Maya had been rent and now hung in rags before the mysterious primal Oneness.”111 But of what relevance were these aesthetic principles to a modern Germany? Nietzsche perceived his contemporary Germany as concealing or failing to recognize the Dionysiac spirit of the Greeks, instead concentrating their attention on the Apolline. For Nietzsche, this was symptomatic of how a scientific and rational understanding of the world had come to dominate modernity thus veiling the purely instinctual, mystical and non-rational aspects of the Greeks’, as well as their own German existence. According to Nietzsche, Socraticism can be considered to be representative of this scientific and rational world-view, as Socrates personified or embodied its ideal. He remarks in section 15 of The Birth of Tragedy: “...there is a profound illusion which first entered the world in the person of Socrates – the unshakable belief that rational thought, guided by causality, can penetrate to the depths of being, and that it is capable not only of knowing but even of correcting being. This sublime metaphysical illusion is an instinctual accompaniment to science…”112 Nonetheless, Nietzsche also aesthetic phenomena; there is also recognition of a synthesis or ‘coupling’ of these two differing aesthetic principles that gives rise to Attic tragedy. BT(N), p. 14 111 BT(N), p. 17 112 BT(N), p. 73. Two other extracts essential for understanding Nietzsche’s thinking through the end of science’s dominance include (1) “But now, spurred on by its powerful illusion, science is rushing irresistibly to its limits, where the optimism essential to logic collapses. For the periphery of the circle of science has an infinite number of points, and while it is as yet impossible to tell how the circle could ever be fully measured, the noble, gifted man, even before the mid-course of his life, inevitably reaches that peripheral boundary, where he finds himself staring into the ineffable. If he sees here, to his dismay, how logic twists around itself and finally bites itself in the tail, there dawns a new form of knowledge, tragic knowledge, which needs art as both protection and remedy if we are to bear it.” (BT(N) p. 75) and (2) “If tragedy of the ancients was diverted from its course by the dialectical impulse towards knowledge and scientific optimism, we might conclude from this that there is a never-ending struggle between the theoretical and the tragic philosophies. And only after the scientific spirit has been taken to its limits to renounce its claim to universal validity, can we hope for a rebirth of tragedy. We might employ the symbol of the music-making Socrates…” (BT(N), p. 82)

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states that the power of this ‘sublime metaphysical illusion’ is now beginning to wane and with its dissipation a new life begins to dawn, a ‘Dionysiac life and the rebirth of tragedy’. He asserts: Yes my friends, join me in my faith in this Dionysiac life and the rebirth of tragedy. The age of Socratic man is past: crown yourselves with ivy, grasp the thyrsus and do not be amazed if tigers and panthers lie down falling at your feet. Now dare to be tragic man men, for you will be redeemed…Gird yourselves for hard battle, but have faith in the miracles of your god!113

With ‘Socratic man’ becoming a redundant figure in Nietzsche’s eyes, his gaze now turns towards Dionysiac life/tragedy to reinstate the type of healthy existence in the world once experienced by the ancient Greeks. Music and the significance it takes on in both the works of Schopenhauer and Wagner proves a pivotal dimension to this revival of the Dionysian spirit for Nietzsche. Michael Haar in the essay “Nietzsche and Metaphysical Language” observes how in The Birth of Tragedy Dionysian tragedy found “its most original representation in the phenomenon of musical dissonance – i.e., in the pleasure felt in pain itself. Suffering thereby ceases to be an argument against life.”114 Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, volume 1 and Wagner’s essay Beethoven along with his musical productions were vital reference points for Nietzsche’s early work. Schopenhauer’s interpretation of music as a phenomenon that is ‘directly a copy of the will itself’ heavily influenced Nietzsche.115 Also, Wagner’s works particularly Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger provided him with a modern day ‘genius’ whom he believed he could rely on to help develop the Dionysian spirit in the modern age. In a letter to Rohde in 1868 he wrote: “Wagner as I know him from his music, his poetry, his aesthetic, not least from that fortunate meeting with him, is the flesh-and-blood illustration of what Schopenhauer calls a genius.”116 It has already been shown how Nietzsche was to out grow and later criticize his mentors Schopenhauer and Wagner. Yet it is essential to acknowledge how his appreciation of Dionysus and the Dionysiac/Dionysian 113

BT(N), p. 98 Michael Haar, “Nietzsche and Metaphysical Language”, in The New Nietzsche, trans. Cyril and Liliane Welch, ed. David B. Allison, London, The MIT Press, 1999, p. 28. 115 BT(N), p. 78 116 Friedrich Nietzsche in letter to Rohde in 1868, found in Silk & J.P. Stern’s, Nietzsche on Tragedy, p. 29 114


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would never waver and continue to play a positive role in his later writings. Nietzsche was acutely aware of how his works were persistently stimulated by Dionysus when other influences (namely Schopenhauer and Wagner) languished or failed to improve or enhance his philosophical endeavours: “And yet – apart, of course, from all the impetuous hopes and applications to contemporary issues with which I spoiled my first book, the great Dionysiac question mark remains…”117 Whilst Dionysiac life was opposed to Socraticism in The Birth of Tragedy, in his later writings the significance of this conflictual relationship diminishes due to the prominence he gives to the relationship of Dionysus versus the ‘Crucified’ or the Dionysian versus Christianity. Examining the complex difference that Nietzsche perceives between Dionysus and Christ proves to be a most fruitful way of exploring his unremitting discontents with the decadence and sickliness of modernity and how he seeks to transform and overcome this degenerate state in his later writings. The Dionysus/Christ distinction can be interpreted as an ancient Greek/modern Germany (more broadly speaking modern humanity) distinction. Nietzsche distinguishes between these two deities so as to pit his vision of the healthy, world affirming overman against the sickly, decadent world denying Christian who had come to prevail in the modern world. However, this Dionysus/Christian distinction is complicated by Nietzsche’s awareness of the close affinities that lie between these two deities.118 Henry Staten in Nietzsche’s Voice points this out too, when he states: “It is clear that Dionysus and the Crucified are uncomfortably close in significance, and Nietzsche must struggle to drive a wedge between them.”119 The wedge or chasm he creates between them can be found in The Will to Power, fragment 1052 (March-June 1888); The two types: Dionysus and the Crucified: Dionysus versus the ‘Crucified’: there you have the antithesis. It is not a difference in regard to their martyrdom—it is a difference in the meaning 117

BT(N), p. 10 Nietzsche writes of Christ’s affiliation with Dionysus in The Will to Power, fragment 196 (Nov. 1887-March 1888): “Christianity only takes up the fight that had already begun against the classical ideal and the noble religion. In fact this entire transformation is an adaptation to the needs and the level of understanding of the religious masses of that time: those masses which believed in Isis, Mithras, Dionysus, the ‘Great Mother’, and which desired of a religion: (1) hope of a beyond, (2) the bloody phantasmagoria of the sacrificial animal (the mystery), the redemptive deed, the holy legend, (4) asceticism, world-denial, superstitious ‘purification’, (5) a hierarchy, a form of community” (WP, p. 115) 119 Henry Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice, London: Cornell University Press, 1993, p. 147. 118

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Chapter Two of it […] One will see that the problem is that of the meaning of suffering: whether a Christian meaning or a tragic meaning. In the former case, it is supposed to be the path to a holy existence; in the latter case, being is counted as holy enough to justify even a monstrous amount of suffering […] The god on the cross is a curse on life, a signpost to seek redemption from life; Dionysus cut to pieces is a promise of life: it will be eternally reborn and return again from destruction.120

Here Nietzsche makes a very clear distinction between Dionysus and Christ, however, their difference ‘is not a difference in regard to their martyrdom—it is a difference in the meaning of it’. According to Nietzsche, Christianity signifies a denial or an emphatic No to life, seeking redemption from life through its belief in a transcendental realm. On the other hand the Dionysian indicates an acceptance or a resounding Yes to life, accepting all suffering in an eternally renewed will to affirm this worldly existence. Nietzsche denounces Christianity as being antithetical to the Dionysian spirit, calling it ‘ignoble, un-Greek’ and in doing so he re-inscribes his belief in the superiority of the Greeks over modern humanity. In Human, All Too Human, section 114 entitled What is unGreek in Christianity; he distinguishes between the healthy religiosity of the Greeks and the unhealthy religiosity of Christians. Firstly, he writes: “The Greeks did not see the Homeric gods above them as masters and themselves below them as servants, as did the Jews. They saw, as it were, only the reflection of the most successful specimens of their own caste, that is, an ideal, not a contrast to their own nature. They felt related to them, there was a reciprocal interest, a kind of symmachia.”121 He then proceeds to contrast this with Christianity and he furthermore pours scorn on its negative effect on humanity: Christianity, on the other hand, crushed and shattered man completely, and submerged him as if in deep mire. Then, all at once, into his feeling of complete confusion, it allowed the light of divine compassion to shine, so that the surprised man, stunned by mercy, let out a cry of rapture, and thought for a moment that he carried all heaven within him. All psychological inventions of Christianity work toward this sick excess of feeling […] Christianity wants to destroy, shatter, stun, intoxicate: there is only one thing it does not want: moderation, and for this reason, it is in its deepest meaning barbaric, Asiatic, ignoble, un-Greek.122

120

WP, p. 543 HH, p. 85 122 HH, p. 85 121


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It is interesting to note in the above passage how the notion of ‘intoxication’ and lack of moderation connected with Christianity takes on a negative connotation, as they are seen as being ‘un-Greek’. However, in The Birth of Tragedy ‘intoxication’ has a positive undertone and the idea of ‘moderation’ linked with Apollo123 is negatively assessed as being a manifestation of the Apolline Greeks refusal to accept Dionysiac truth. Nietzsche remarks: “The muses of the arts of ‘illusion’ blanched before an art that voiced the truth in its intoxication […] The individual, with all his restraints and moderations, was submerged in the self-oblivion of the Dionysiac state and forgot the Apolline dictates. Excess was revealed as truth…”.124 In Nietzsche’s later writings the Dionysian becomes an ever more potent and powerful force, its highest expression found in the love of fate or amor fati: “The highest state a philosopher can attain: to stand in a Dionysian relationship to existence – my formulae for this is amor fati.”125 Yet, according to Nietzsche, modern humanity from is too degenerate to recognize or too weak to appropriate his Dionysian wisdom: “Dionysus.— What do any latter-day men, the children of a fragmentary, multifarious, sick, strange age, know of the Greek happiness; what could they know of it! Whence would the slaves of ‘modern ideas’ derive a right to Dionysian festivals!”126 Nietzsche does not foresee his contemporaries as being capable of digesting or realizing his Dionysian wisdom and he must rest his hopes in the future: ‘For this present belongs to the mob.’127 He goes so far as to assert the necessity of overcoming ‘man’ in order for his ‘overman’, ‘higherman’ or ‘superman’ to come into existence. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he declares: “The most cautious people ask today: ‘How may man still be preserved?’ Zarathustra, however, asks as the sole and first one to do so: ‘How shall man be overcome?’”128 These questions he poses prepare the ground for what he writes in The Will to Power: ‘Not ‘mankind’ but overman is the goal!’129 Thus for Nietzsche, what the ancient Greeks managed to embody is denied a present and envisaged as a future.

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“Apollo, as an ethical deity, demands moderation from his followers and, in order to maintain it, self knowledge.” BT(N), p.26 124 BT(N), p. 27 125 WP, p. 536 126 WP, 545 127 TSZ, p. 300 128 TSZ, p. 297 129 WP, p. 519

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Heidegger the main focus of this investigation also upholds the belief that there is a profound connection or relation between ancient Greece and Germany. This relation is based upon what he terms German humanity’s ‘call to poetize and think’. He writes in his lecture course on Parmenides “What if German humanity is that historical humanity which, like the Greek, is called upon to poetize and think, and what if this German humanity must first perceive the voice of Being!”130 Is the German appropriation of ancient Greece to be endorsed? Is ancient Greece worthy of the adulation showered upon it by many German writers and scholars? Having discussed Winckelmann’s, Hölderlin’s and Nietzsche’s attempts to appropriate the Greeks in some detail, the question necessarily arises as to whether or not their (amongst so many others) devotion to and eulogizing of the Greeks is warranted? Are the ancient Greeks worthy of such adoration or do there exist problematical aspects to their culture? It would seem that the Greeks are not invulnerable to criticism as they enforced certain beliefs and adhered to certain ideals that are highly questionable. There are certain aspects of Hellenic culture that I regard as being susceptible to criticism. For instance, the existence of slavery in ancient Greece tarnishes their great culture. Would the slaves who had to quarry the pentelic marble from Mount Pentelicus for the Parthenon frieze have been enthusiasts of the achievements of their ancient Greek masters? Secondly, the subordinate role of women in ancient Greece points to a male dominated culture. To what degree would women of more modern times champion a culture in which they would have been severely marginalized with no political status? Thirdly, the Greek’s high regard for the polis or city, found in Plato’s Republic and Thucydides’ Funeral Oration, which upholds the belief that it was only within the polis that the human being could flourish, is indicative of a prejudice or refusal to accept the possibility of human growth or flourishment outside of the polis. For the Greeks, the polis was not just a place for commerce and sex; it was also the place where the human soul could thrive. More modern thinkers can also be seen to inherit this poliscentric prejudice, as is evident in Marx’s Communist Manifesto, where he writes of the ‘idiocy of rural life’.131 To what degree does this prejudice hold true for the likes of Lao Tzu or Black Elk, surely these are to be considered individuals who achieved greatness without the cultural nourishment of any polis or city? Contrary to the Greek support and endorsement of the polis it may be 130

P, p. 167 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, London: Penguin Books, 2002, p. 224. 131


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worthwhile to take note of what Igjugarjuk; a great Eskimo shaman has to say: “True wisdom is only to be found far away from people, out in the great solitude […] Solitude and suffering open the human mind and therefore a shaman must seek his wisdom there.”132 In the following chapter ‘Heidegger and the Un-heimlich’ I will examine Heidegger’s ruminations on the unhomely/uncanny (unheimlich) and critically assess the significance of the insights he attains into these matters. In this regard, his understanding of the human being as the ‘uncanniest of the uncanny’ and how this relates to the unhomely or homeless nature of humanity proves crucial.

132 Joan Halifax, Shamanic Voices, A survey of visionary narratives, New York: Penguin Books, p. 69.

CHAPTER THREE HEIDEGGER AND THE UN-HEIMLICH: THE HUMAN BEING AS DEINANTHROPUS AND THE INTRODUCTION OF A NEW FIRST STASIMON

Manifold is the uncanny, yet nothing uncannier than man bestirs itself… 1 —Sophocles, Antigone The human being is to deinotaton, the uncanniest of the uncanny.2 —Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics

In chapter one an examination of philosophy was outlined in relation to the problems of homelessness and homesickness, while in chapter two the German appropriation of the ancient Greeks was explored so as to help furnish a better understanding of the Germanic sense of Heimat. By pursuing this line of enquiry the way has now been paved for a closer and more attentive investigation into Heidegger’s extensive thinking on the notion of ‘home’ or more precisely, the un-heimlich, the unhomely or uncanny. Heim or home establishes itself at the root of many key locutions in Heidegger’s texts, they include: the home/homeland (die Heimat), notbeing-at-home (das Nicht-zuhause-Sein), homelessness (Heimatlosigkeit), home ground (heimatlicher Grund), the homely (das Heimische), the unhomely (das Unheimische), the uncanny (das Unheimliche), uncanniness (die Unheimlichkeit), the homestead (die Heimstatt), and most significantly with regards this thesis the idea of homecoming (Heimkehr/Heimkunft). The importance of homecoming for Heidegger is especially evident in his later writings and it chiefly arises in texts pertaining to the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin and Georg Trakl.*3 However, in this chapter the main 1

IM, p. 156 IM, p. 159 3 Some of the most relevant texts on these poets and the notion of homecoming include Heidegger’s writings on Hölderlin’s ‘Homecoming/To Kindred Ones’, 2

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focus will be on the uncanny (das Unheimliche) or the unhomely (das Unheimische) in Heidegger, and most critically his various discourses on the un-heimlich nature of the human being. A more detailed discussion of his ruminations on homecoming will be deferred until chapters six and seven.4 In dealing with Heidegger’s understanding of the human being as ‘the uncanniest of the uncanny’ his texts concerning the first stasimon of Sophocles’ Antigone prove pivotal. With this in mind Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) and his lecture course on Hölderlin’s hymn ‘The Ister’ (1942) are essential to the present chapter. Besides exploring these two texts I will also scrutinize and bring into question Heidegger’s recourse to Sophocles’ Antigone, for in the current investigation the first stasimon is considered incapable of providing an adequate understanding of the human being. I will confront the shortcomings of Sophocles’ description of the human being in Antigone by turning to a piece by John Moriarty entitled ‘Deinanthropus, A New First Stasimon’ where he illuminates a more insightful understanding of the human being.5 It is not only Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics and his lecture course on Hölderlin’s hymn ‘The Ister’ that will be examined in this chapter, I will also have recourse to Being and Time, for in this work the unheimlich or more pertinently the notion of Unheimlichkeit, uncanniness surfaces in a vital way. Heidegger equates uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit) with not-being-at-home (Nicht-zuhause-sein) in Being and Time. In doing so, his magnum opus provides essential insight into his meditations on the uncanny. Nevertheless, the notion of the uncanny appears in a number of writings prior to Being and Time. 6 In a letter to Karl Jaspers dated ‘Remembrance’ and ‘The Ister’ and the essay on Trakl entitled “Language in the Poem.” 4 Heidegger illuminates the connection between the uncanny and the unhomely in the lecture course Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’. He writes: “And if, in Hölderlin’s poetic dialogue with Sophocles’ choral ode, this proper poetic care of becoming homely comes to language, then there must presumably be an intrinsic relation between becoming homely, that is, being unhomely of human beings as poetized by Sophocles as Ĳò įİȚȞȩĲĮĲȠȞ, which we translate: das Unheimlichste, the most uncanny. We are hereby pointing to a connection that presumably extends beyond the merely extrinsic resonance of the words ‘unheimisch’ [unhomely] and ‘unheimlich’ [uncanny].” (TI, p. 69) 5 Cf. John Moriarty, ‘Deinanthropus, A New First Stasimon’ found in Slí Na Fírinne, Co. Kerry: Slí Na Fírinne, 2006, pp. 96-11. Henceforth, ‘Deinanthropus, A New First Stasimon’. 6 He writes: “But here ‘uncanniness’ also means ‘not-being-at-home’ [das Nichtzuhause-sein].” (BT, p. 233)

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November 19, 1922, Heidegger writes of how the friendship that formed between the two seemed uncanny: ‘in the same sense as the world and life are uncanny for the philosopher.’7 In the lecture course ‘The Concept of Time’ (Der Begriff der Zeit), delivered to the Marburg Theological Society in July 1924, the idea of ‘uncanniness’ again plays its part.8 However, in the address entitled The History of the Concept of Time (1925) delivered at Marburg University it comes more remarkably to the fore. Theodore Kisiel notes how The History of the Concept of Time is ‘a text that is clearly in transition toward Being and Time’.9 With regard to the current enquiry it is Heidegger’s discussion of die Angst, anxiety or dread and die Unheimlichkeit, uncanniness that is of particular relevance. His 1925 lecture course Heidegger can already be seen to highlight the important distinction between fear and anxiety that was to be so famously formulated in Being and Time (1927). According to Heidegger, fear arises when Dasein feels endangered by something ‘definite’ in the world, alternatively, in anxiety, ‘what threatens is nothing definite and worldly.’10 He writes: “In anxiety being-in-the-world is totally transformed into ‘notat-homeness’ (Nicht-zu-Hause) purely and simply.”11 This statement is noteworthy as Heidegger interprets Dasein’s ‘not-at-homeness’ to be the primary phenomenon. Although Dasein is principally ‘not-at-home-in-the-world’, Heidegger observes that Dasein is for the most part in ‘flight’ from this troubling and challenging truth. In its flight Dasein takes shelter in the ‘they’, that is, in familiar modes of being, thereby managing to avoid or conceal anxiety, and its primary state of uncanniness. Heidegger’s position in 1925 is clearly formulated, whereby Dasein is interpreted as being primordially ‘not-at-home-in-the-world’. He will not only revisit this theme in Being 7

Martin Heidegger, The Heidegger – Jaspers Correspondence (1920-1963), ed. Walter Biemel and Hans Saner, trans. Gary E. Aylesworth, Humanity Books 1990, p. 40. He writes to Jaspers: “The eight days spent with you are continually with me. The suddenness of these days, which was externally uneventful, the sureness of the style in which each day unaffectedly grew into the next, the unsentimental, austere step with which friendship came upon us, the growing certainty from both sides of a mutually secure comradeship-in-arms⎯all of that is uncanny for me in the same sense as the world and life are uncanny for the philosopher.” 8 He remarks: “This being past, as the ‘how’, brings Dasein harshly into its sole possibility of itself, allows it to stand entirely alone with respect to itself. This past is able to place Dasein, amid the glory of its everydayness, into uncanniness.” Cf. CT, p. 13 E 9 Cf. HCT, p. xv 10 HCT, p. 289 11 HCT, p. 289

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and Time but he will also analyze it in greater detail and broaden its significance. However, this will be examined at a later stage. Prior to encountering Being and Time the central notion of this chapter, that is, the ‘unheimlich’ requires further exegesis. I will pursue this exegesis by way of an initial examination of Freud’s conception of the unheimlich, followed by a brief investigation into how this notion is intertwined with some of the more controversial aspects of Heidegger’s thinking, including the political dimension to his thought and his alleged susceptibility to provincialism. This chapter is entitled ‘Heidegger and the un-heimlich’12, whereby the ‘unheimlich’ is hyphenated to vivify and accentuate the various connotations and paradoxes this German word is charged with. It is also hyphenated in order to illumine both the semantic merging of the unheimlich with the heimlich, while at the same time recognizing the rift that persists between them. Traditionally the German word ‘unheimlich’ has been translated into English as ‘uncanny’ but the English translation falls short in capturing the diverse range of meanings the ‘unheimlich’ is imbued with in its native German language. Hence, the ‘uncanny’ cannot be regarded as an equivocal term for the ‘unheimlich’, although certain semantic resonances are evident. Although the term was a relatively common one in eighteenth and nineteenth century gothic literature; during this period there were no critical examinations of the unheimlich to be found. It was not until Freud’s essay “The ‘Uncanny’” (Das “Unheimliche”, 1919) that a thorough investigation into the unheimlich took place.

The Compulsion to Return to Freud It is perhaps fitting to have recourse to Freud at the outset of an investigation into Heidegger and the notion of the un-heimlich as their understanding of this idea takes on great importance in both their writings. It also appears at some level to haunt their respective texts. Derrida promulgates a profound affiliation between these Freud and Heidegger in The Post Card: Here Freud and Heidegger, I conjoin them within me like two great ghosts of the ‘great epoch’. The two surviving grandfathers. They do not know 12

For Freud the prefix ‘un’ is the ‘token of repression.’ Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’ in Art and Literature, trans. James Strachey, ed. Albert Dickson, London: Penguin Books, London 1990, p. 368. The subtitle shall be explicated at a later stage. Henceforth, ‘The “Uncanny”’.


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each other, but according to me they form a couple, and in fact just because of that, this singular anachrony. They are bound to each other without reading each other and without corresponding…two thinkers whose glances never crossed and who, without ever receiving a word from one another, say the same.13

Do Freud and Heidegger say the same? In any attempt to respond to this question arising from Derrida’s contentious claim, the idea of Unheimlichkeit becomes central, for as he writes: “In both discourses, that of Freud and that of Heidegger, this recourse [to Unheimlichkeit…] makes possible fundamental projects or trajectories. But it does so while destabilizing permanently, and in a more or less subterranean fashion, the order of conceptual distinctions that are put to work.”14 To begin to come to terms with the above statement I will initially return to Freud’s essay ‘The “Uncanny”’. This essay represents his most sustained analysis of the unheimlich and in it he meticulously scrutinizes the German lexicon in order to draw attention to the varied range of meanings associated with this word. Yet, to what extent does the consultation of a dictionary, no matter how exhaustive, enable us to think through the ‘unheimlich’ or any other notion for that matter? When investigating the unheimlich, Freud presents extensive extracts from Daniel Sander’s Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache (1860) and Grimm’s dictionary, and he also refers to definitions provided by Greek, Latin, English, French and Spanish dictionaries. While refraining from reiterating or detailing once more the intricate semantic tapestry associated with the unheimlich as Freud has more than adequately done already, I will instead point to the central motif that enlightens his study. Freud’s essential insight relates to the coupling of the unheimlich with the heimlich, citing Gutzkow, he writes: “We call it ‘unheimlich’; you call it ‘heimlich’.”15 Prior to Freud’s work it was customary for the unheimlich to be considered something contrary or opposed to the heimlich. Ordinarily understood, the unheimlich represented the strange, the unfamiliar, the eerie, something haunted and that which aroused horror and terror and was frightening and dreadful. He quotes Schelling when defining it as the: ‘…name for everything that ought to have remained …secret and hidden but has come to light.’16 On the other hand, the ‘heimlich’ was interpreted as signifying 13

Jacques Derrida, The Post Card (From Socrates to Freud and Beyond), trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 191. 14 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International , trans. Peggy Kamuf, London: Routledge 1994, p. 174. 15 Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’”, p. 345 16 Ibid., p. 345

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what was ‘homely, familiar, and something belonging to the house or family, it was intimate’, but it also signified something hidden or secret in everyday German. David Farrell Krell in the essay “Das Unheimliche: Architectural Sections of Heidegger and Freud” describes the German word ‘heimlich’ in the following manner: “Heimlich is a homonym of a special sort. It means both ‘familiar, domestic, candid and ‘unfamiliar, alien, secret.’ It thus appears to be a primal word, an Umwort of the Abelian sort.”17 Freud’s revelatory insight consisted in highlighting vestiges of meaning disclosed by this Umwort, and revealing it as something ‘mystic, obscure, secret’, the notion of ‘something dangerous and hidden.’18 By exposing the subversive sense of the heimlich in this way, which had always been present yet hitherto been paid scant regard, facilitated Freud in equating the heimlich with the unheimlich. He comments: “Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich.”19 Of course Freud does not limit himself to an inspection of the dictionary to elucidate the unheimlich. He also draws on literature, personal experience, the testimonies of his patients and superstitions in order to demonstrate how it has come to signify a unique sense of anxiety arising with the return of repressed fears or by the apparent affirmation of primitive beliefs formerly overcome. He observes: “Our conclusion could then be stated thus: an uncanny experience occurs either when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed.”20 Put succinctly, the unheimlich for Freud is that which emerges from something familiar but has been repressed. Freud acquaints his reader with a number of examples that arouse the sensation of uncanniness, but he also emphasizes the need to distinguish those examples found in literature and those which are imaginatively created from what is experienced in real life. He begins by describing literary instances of the unheimlich, and singles out the psychologist Ernst Jentsch for acknowledging the importance of this notion. Jentsch in On the Psychology of the Uncanny (Zur Psychologie Des Unheimlichen(1906)) describes how the uncertainty of whether an object is animate or inanimate, whether a particular figure is 17

David Farrell Krell, ‘Das Unheimliche: Architectural Sections of Heidegger and Freud’ in Research in Phenomenology, Vol. XXII, Humanities Press, 1992, p. 51. 18 Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, p. 346 19 Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’”, p. 347 20 Ibid., p. 372


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a human being or a automaton, epileptic fits and occurrences of insanity as giving rise to the unheimlich. Additionally, Freud focuses E.T.A. Hoffman: ‘the unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature’ and his story of ‘The Sandman’, focusing on the terrifying figure of the ‘Sandman’ who rips out the eyes of young children. 21 Freud correlates this anxiety of loosing one’s eyes or going blind with the fear of castration.22 Moreover, in ‘The Sandman’ the character Nathaniel falls in love with Olympia, a life size doll thus reaffirming the sense of the unheimlich discussed by Jentsch. Besides ‘The Sandman’ Freud concentrates on Hoffman’s The Devil’s Elixir and in particular the themes of the ‘double’ and the incessant recurrence of the same thing or the inner ‘compulsion to repeat’. The compulsion to repeat has been associated with the death drive or death instinct investigated by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.23 Furthermore, Freud develops a dualistic view of instinctual life, distinguishing between life instincts (sexual instincts) and death instincts (ego instincts). It is the latter that interests us here, for as Freud points out “…‘the goal of all life is death’ and, looking backwards, that ‘what was inanimate existed before what is living. […] In this way the first instinct came into being: the instinct to return to the inanimate state.”24 Nicholas Royle in his thoroughgoing and sometimes bizarre examination of the uncanny in The Uncanny calls attention to how Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’ overlaps with Beyond the Pleasure Principle, published a year later. He writes: “The ghostly presence of the silent, as yet unbaptized ‘death drive’ in Freud’s essay of 1919 is evident above all perhaps in his focus on the 21

Ibid., p. 355 Freud writes: “A study of dreams, phantasies and myths has taught us that anxiety about one’s eyes, the fear of going blind, is often enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated. The self-blinding of the mythical criminal Oedipus, was simply a mitigated form of castration – the only punishment that was adequate for him by the lex talionis.” (‘Ibid., p. 352) 23 Freud himself writes of how it was ‘a compulsion to repeat which first put us on the track of the death instincts.’, Beyond the Pleasure Principle in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XVIII, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, London: The Hogarth Press Limited, 1964, p. 56. Henceforth, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Freud recognizes the ‘compulsion to repeat’ as being more ‘…primitive, more elementary, more instinctual than the pleasure principle’ (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 23). His analysis of traumatic neuroses and the dreams of patients that occur during psychoanalytic treatment which bring to memory the psychical traumas of childhood undermine his belief in dreams as simply being wish fulfillments. 24 Ibid., p 38. The idea that organic life strives towards an earlier state of thing and seeks to restore an inanimate state of existence becomes central to his essay. 22

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notion of ‘compulsion to repeat’…he is trembling on the threshold of letting Beyond the Pleasure invade “The ‘Uncanny’”, and “The ‘Uncanny’” invade Beyond the Pleasure Principle. But the double invasion has already occurred.”25 Interestingly, Freud relates the theme of the ‘double’ to death and its occurrence when childhood or ‘primitive’ narcissism is overcome. He notes: “But when this stage has been surmounted, the ‘double’ reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.”26 Without being able to summarize the many examples of the unheimlich Freud speaks of, I will instead merely mention the way in which he recounts his own experiences of the unheimlich, although he confesses that they were rare27, and also how he describes psychoanalysis itself as being unheimlich.28 Freud’s own experience of the uncanny pertains to the repetition of the same thing, whereby during a spell in a provincial town in Italy he returned three times to the same quarter (supposedly against his own will) where the local prostitutes congregated. He also makes reference to Strand Magazine and how his reading of a story relating to ghostly crocodiles kindled a sense of the unheimlich within him.29 Other important cases of the unheimlich include the real life experiences of the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’, ‘womb fantasies’ and most strikingly for Freud the overwhelming sense of the unheimlich experienced by people in the face of death, dead bodies and the 25

Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003, pp. 87-88. 26 Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’”, p. 357. He also notes that “Many people experience the feeling in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead and to spirits and ghosts.” (Ibid., p. 364) 27 He writes: “The writer of the present contribution, indeed, must plead guilty to a special obtuseness in the matter, where extreme delicacy of perception would be more in place. It is long since he has experienced or heard of anything which has given him an uncanny impression, and he must start by translating himself into that state of feeling, by awakening in himself the possibility of experiencing it.” (Ibid., p. 340) 28 He writes: “The uncanny effect of epilepsy and of madness has the same origin. The layman sees in them the working of forces hitherto unsuspected in his fellowmen, but at the same time he is dimly aware of them in remote corners of his own being. The Middle Ages quite consistently ascribed all such maladies to the influence of demons, and in this their psychology was almost correct. Indeed, I should not be surprised to hear that psychoanalysis, which is concerned with laying bare these hidden forces, has itself become uncanny to many people for that very reason.” (Ibid., p. 366) 29 Ibid., p. 367


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return of ghosts and spirits. The notion of ‘womb fantasies’ is particularly significant for this enquiry, as Freud interprets it as conveying humanity’s sense of home: It often happens that neurotic men declare that they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs. This unheimlich place, however, is the entrance to the former Heim (home) of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning. There is a joking saying that ‘Love is home-sickness’: and whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, while he is still dreaming: this place is familiar to me, I’ve been here before’, we may interpret the place as being his mother’s genitals or her body.30

According to David Bakan in Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition, it is not unusual for Freud to conceive of the female genitalia as ‘home’. Historically the Jews were a people who had no land of their own and were without a place of permanent residence and so it was the mother or wife who came to represent the home.31 Many writers of the twentieth century and of the early part of the twenty first century identify Freud’s essay as providing the foundation for all critical analyses of the unheimlich, despite the fact that Freud himself highlights some earlier sources on this notion, most notably referring to Jentsch, Hoffmann and Schelling.32 Since the publication of his famed essay, the idea of the unheimlich has grown greatly in popularity, still managing to retain a certain potency and vitality. The unheimlich finds 30

Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, p. 368 Bakan writes: “In the light of this tradition (Jewish), that Freud should refer to the female genitals as home is not at all strange. For the Jews, who in the diaspora had no land, who always had a sense of temporariness in connection with their dwelling places, the mother, the wife is the home. With his sense of impeding death Freud is returning home. As is suggested by his speech to the B’nai B’rith, he is returning to membership in the body of Israel. And his remarks concerning the female genitalia as home can be understood in terms of the Kabbalistic tradition.” Cf. Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition, New York: Schocken Books 1969, p. 316. 32 Martin Jay notes in ‘The Uncanny Nineties’ (included in Cultural Semantics), ‘By common consent, the theoretical inspiration for the current fascination with the concept is Freud’s 1919 essay’. Indeed, the one thing that nearly all critics agree on is that Freud’s text ‘The “Uncanny”’ (“Das Unheimliche”) provides the starting point for the twentieth-century conceptualization of the uncanny-…” (This citation is found in Anneleen Masschelein’s, “The Concept as Ghost: Conceptualization of the Uncanny in Late-Twentieth-Century Theory.” in Mosaic: Volume: 35. Issue: 1, Manitoba: University of Manitoba, 2002, p. 53.) 31

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currency in a number of widely divergent discourses including philosophy, psychoanalysis, literary theory and criticism, aesthetics, architecture and cultural studies. Yet despite its prevalence it remains an idea clouded in ambiguity. Moreover, some believe that because of its prevalence, that is, through its mass appeal and use it has become devoid of meaning, being reduced to little more than an overused catchword. Anneleen Masschelein tackles the twofold difficulty, which the notion of the unheimlich presents, in her essay “The concept as ghost: Conceptualization of the uncanny in late-twentieth-century theory.” Firstly, in relation to gradual deterioration of the unheimlich into a meaningless concept, Masschelein alludes to the work of Mieke Bal. Bal cautions against the mishandling of concepts like the uncanny, as she believes such lack of care is detrimental to the health of a concept, as Masschelein states: “However, she (Bal) warns against the ‘misuse’ of concepts that causes them to degenerate into labels. When the framework to which a concept belongs is no longer visible, concepts lose their working force: they are subject to fashion and ultimately become meaningless.”33 As well as the corrosion of the meaningfulness of the uncanny, Masschelein also explores this notion in relation to the quandary of defining concepts in general because: ‘…the uncanny as a concept has come to signify the fundamental difficulty or even the impossibility of defining concepts as such.’34 Masschelein questions whether it can be even deemed a concept, alluding to Samuel Weber, she describes it as a ‘unconcept’, if this itself bears any meaning.35 Successive analyses by structuralists and post-structuralists into the notion of the unheimlich have undermined the possibility of it maintaining any secure sense, to the point where: ‘…the uncanny haunts conceptuality and infects it with the spectre

33

Ibid., p. 53. Ibid., p. 55 35 She writes: “As Weber has pointed out, a negative concept is fairly problematic in the first place, but, when the positive term turns out to be a highly unstable referent as well, the conclusion that the uncanny is not and cannot be a concept seems hard to contradict. ‘The Uncanny, das Unheimliche, remains as abseitig, as marginal a topic as it was when Freud first wrote on it. Perhaps, because it is not simply a ‘topic,’ much less a concept, but rather a particular kind of scene: one which would call into question the separation of subject or object generally held to be indispensable to scientific and scholarly inquiry, experimentation and cognition.’ Thus, the uncanny as an ‘un-concept’ rather than a concept, confronts the conscious subject with its limitations and fundamentally questions the very possibility of conceptualization.” (Ibid., p. 60) 34


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of fiction…’36 The idea that the uncanny haunts is hugely significant here, as the notion of ‘hauntology’ is introduced into Masschelein’s essay, an idea inspired by Derrida’s Specters of Marx. In Specters of Marx, Derrida traces the theme of the ghost and haunting through Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Marx’s The Communist Manifesto’ and Freud’s ‘The “Uncanny”’. Masschelein draws on Martin Jay’s commentary of Derrida to demonstrate how ‘hauntology’ is to be preferred to ontology: Jay notes: ‘Derrida argues that ‘it is necessary to introduce hauntology into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology. [...] Thus, the uncanny becomes not a source of terror and discomfort-or at least not that alone--but also a bulwark against the dangerous temptations of conjuring away plural specters in the name of a redeemed whole, a realization of narcissistic fantasies, a restoration of a true Heimat’ (‘Uncanny’ 161). Ultimately, in this account, the uncanny, like hauntology, differance, and dissemination, signifies the return of the repressed that haunts the pretense to conceptual discourse and exposes the ideological closure of definitions and concepts.37

Consequently the uncanny as a concept challenges and subverts the very ground of conceptuality itself, that is, as a univocal reference schema for reality. Not only that but it undermines the possibility of restoring a ‘true Heimat’, leaving one in a perpetual state of homelessness. The poststructuralist interpretation of the uncanny overturns the belief in an origin of the concept, through either genealogical or etymological investigations. In doing so it appears to render all concepts indeterminate. Masschelein is not perturbed by this however, as she writes: ‘...we notice that it is also lastingly loaded with new connotations and new kernels of meanings.’38 Prior to assessing whether or not the indeterminacy of the notion of the uncanny has positive or negative repercussions for certain disciplines like psychoanalysis, there is a need to question the extent to which this notion has been thought through, and the degree to which it names humanity. In what way can the unheimlich name humanity? Can the notion of the unheimlich to some extent reveal the immeasurable depths and immensities of the human being? Does the indeterminacy of the unheimlich relate to 36

Ibid., p. 61. Masschelein does qualifies this statement by saying that: “...at the same time it maintains enough solidity to travel among disciplines in the wake of the common frame of reference that psychoanalysis, no matter how modified, still provides.” 37 Ibid., p. 61 38 Ibid., p. 62

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the indeterminacy of humanity itself? For Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil deems the human being to be the ‘undetermined animal’.39 Why is the human being the undetermined animal for Nietzsche? Heidegger offers an interpretation of its meaning during the course of his lecture series entitled What is Called Thinking?, where he says: “But since for Nietzsche neither man’s physical, sensual side, nor man’s non-sensual side⎯his reason; have been adequately conceived in their essential nature, man, in the prevailing definition, remains the as yet unconceived and so far undetermined animal.”40 Here there is a seeking out of a more originary understanding of the unheimlich but this does not spring from a desire to dispel the indeterminacy of the notion. Instead a fuller appreciation of the indeterminacy of the unheimlich and the undetermined nature of the human being is sought after and with this a number of pertinent questions arise. Does psychoanalysis, the ‘common frame of reference’ (as Masschelein puts it) for interpreting the unheimlich provide a sufficient basis for an understanding of the unheimlich? How thorough is Freud’s explication of the unheimlich as found in “The ‘Uncanny’”? Does a more primary elucidation of the unheimlich exist? To what extent does Heidegger succeed in providing a more fundamental examination of the unheimlich? Is it wise of Heidegger to rely upon the first stasimon of Sophocles’ Antigone for an understanding of the human being, an understanding founded on the idea of the unheimlich?

Cautionary Remarks Concerning Heidegger and the Un-heimlich The notion of the unheimlich plays a crucial role in Heidegger’s writings and is the focal point for a number of key problematics that occupy his thought. These include Dasein’s relation to being and the revelation of being itself41, his understanding of what humanity42, art43, and nihilism44 39 BGE, sect. 62. In Hollingdale’s translation it reads ‘man is the animal whose nature has not yet been fixed’. Cf. BGE, sect. 62, p. 88 40 WCT, p. 58 41 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy in Retreating the Political observe: “One must note, first of all, that since 1929, since the inaugural lecture at Freiburg, Unheimlichkeit (let us render it as dis-orientation, the un-canny, the unusual or the un-accustomed, even, because the ‘logic’ to which I have just alluded obviously does not exclude what Freud, using Schelling and dictionaries as excuses, thought of as an ‘ambivalence’: uncanny familiarity-but it is better not to try to translate)-since 1929, therefore, Unheimlichkeit defines the ‘relationship to’ being or the


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are and it also has a significant bearing on the political element to be found in his writings.45 While acknowledging these major and wide-ranging problems dealt with by Heidegger, the most significant issue I will be examining will be his interpretation of humanity based on the un-heimlich, with the question: ‘What is a humanity?’ or ‘Who is humanity?’ being chiefly addressed.46 In saying this, the most controversial of the abovementioned problematics found in Heidegger’s writings, is undoubtedly the ‘revelation’ of being, and that is to say the fundamental ordeal or experience, the Grunderfahrung, in anxiety, of the nothing.” (Retreating the Political, trans. Simon Sparks, London: Routledge, 1997, p. 64) 42 Cf. IM pp. 160-180 and TI, pp. 51-115 43 Cf. PLT, pp. 52-53 44 Cf. PM, p. 292 45 In Retreating the Political it says: “Lacoue-Labarthe concedes that his analysis, in many respects, remained systematic. All he wanted to indicate was that there is a trajectory in Heidegger, a precise route which, in fact, is organized through the opposition between the Unheimliche and Heimichkeit, and that this route also has a political logic. But this in no way amounts to saying that the ‘young Heidegger’the ‘tragic’ Heidegger-would be the ‘fascist’ Heidegger. In reality, the Heidegger of 1933 (who is no longer so young, however, and who in any case is not fascist) is precisely not tragic. The tragic thematic only appears (or only reappears) in 193435, in the moment of the ‘retreat’, that is to say the moment of disappointment with respect to Nazism; and it is progressively, towards the end of and after the war (in accordance with a movement that could be shown as being tied in an precise way to the commentary on Hölderlin), that one can detect a relative accentuation of the heimisch thematic, that is, the thematic of the proper and of the close (such as it dominates the “Letter on ‘Humanism’”, for example). But we must not forget that, taken in its fullest rigour, the logic at work in Heidegger is such that it is, in principle, impossible to settle upon either one or the other motif: proper or improper, close or distant. Moreover, it is this logic, what one could call the logic of Ent-fernung, which explains Heidegger’s permanent double gesture, for example with respect to technology. However, the important point here was not to be directed to the most rigorous part of Heidegger’s questioning, but to break with a certain silence and to speak openly, from a position which is in no way antiHeideggerian, about ideology (there is one, inevitably) or, more precisely, about Heideggerian politics. Doubtless Heidegger challenged the word; but nothing precludes one also reading his discourse after 1933 as the ‘rumination’ on a mistake (mistake meaning a fall in relation to the greatest rigour of questioning), and even as a partial admission, which one can admit was difficult but which, being far too implicit, remains equally unpardonable. (‘To my knowledge, says Lacoue-Labarthe, there is not a word about the extermination.’)” (Retreating the Political, pp. 79-80) 46 Consequently the lecture course Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) and the address given on Hölderlin’s ‘The Ister’ are hugely significant.

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political aspect to his texts, which has been the source of numerous discussions. According to David Farrell Krell, the over-abundance of material devoted to this subject-matter is more troubling than the ‘Heidegger scandal’ itself. He comments: Perhaps what is most disturbing about the ‘Heidegger scandal’ today is the avidity with which Heidegger’s involvement in National Socialism has been taken up, a fervour that cannot be explained by reference to the usual dependable pleasures of righteous indignation. Academics and philosophers today seem to hope if they can shift attention to a Heideggerexposed-at-last they will be able to forget the vacuity and aimlessness of their own projects.47

While there is perhaps some truth in what Krell says here, there have also been many worthwhile and discerning investigations into Heidegger’s thought as it relates to German National Socialism. Furthermore, these enquiries have been pursued by philosophers and academics such as Pöggeler, Löwith, Lévinas, Adorno, Derrida, and Lacoue-Labarthe, individuals who can hardly be accused of pursuing vacuous and aimless projects. Bearing this in mind and not wanting to ignore or avoid this contentious issue, and by the same token not wanting it to dominate the present discussion, the fact that the unheimlich is intertwined with the political element to Heidegger’s thinking, means its recognition is warranted. Heidegger’s own account of his involvement with National Socialism is relayed in Der Spiegel interview of 1966. In this interview he describes how he was deeply disturbed by Germany’s political crisis in the early nineteen thirties given the threat of a Bolshevik revolution and the inability of a declining Weimer democracy to cope with the situation, because of this and other contributing factors he decided that there was no alternative but to support Hitler’s movement. In terms of when he was most politically active, that is, when he became rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933, he alleges he only took up the post after being strongly persuaded by Professor von Möllendorf and Professor Sauer. Within ten months of taking on the role of rector he became disillusioned and resigned. One of the most notorious statements attributed to him during his time as rector reads: ‘Let not propositions and ‘ideas’ be the rules of your Being. The Führer alone is the present and future German reality and its law.’48 According to Heidegger, these sentences were not present in the 47

Cf. N.I, p. xxvi Cf. The Heidegger Controversy, A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin, London: M.I.T. press, 1993, p. 47. 48


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rectoral address but only in the Freiburg Students Newspaper, furthermore these remarks arose due to the political climate of the time, that is, he had to make ‘compromises’ and he confesses he would no longer write such things.49 To further distance himself from National Socialism he speaks of how he did not allow any anti-Jewish posters on the university grounds, prevented demonstrations against Jewish lecturers and forbade the burning of books of Jewish authors. He did not allow the books of Jewish authors to be removed from the library and he also highlights how he remained close to some of his Jewish students.50 After his resignation, Heidegger informs us that the Sicherheitsdients (the Security Service) spied on his lectures, that some of his philosophical addresses were criticized in the Hitler Youth magazine Wille und Macht, while his lectures What is Metaphysics? and On the Essence of Truth had to be sold under the counter in plain dust wrappers and in the summer of 1944 he was ordered to work on the fortifications of the Rhine. Despite his post-war remarks, many commentators have contested Heidegger’s own account of his affiliations with National Socialism and there exists a plethora of critical material concerning the interrelationship between his thought and the politics of National Socialism.51 Besides the matter of his personal involvement in establishing the National Socialist programme in the University of Freiburg while acting as rector, the other questions which are most persistently asked concern the relationship between the fundamental notions and motifs of Heidegger’s thought and the political ideology of Nazism. Heidegger appropriated key phrases or words associated with Nazism such as Volk, Blut und Boden but his alliance with National Socialism extends beyond the mere use of nationalistic terminology. With the publication of Gesamtausgabe, Band 16 there are those like Brian Elliott who contend that the problem of whether or not Heidegger’s thought is intertwined with National Socialism can be laid to rest. Elliott in his very concise and enlightening treatment of this issue in Phenomenology and Imagination in Husserl and Heidegger not only claims that Heidegger’s thinking was in keeping with the National Socialist ideology but that he also adapted key figures of his thought in order to align it with 49

Cf. DS, p. 96. Helene Weiss, one of his most gifted students, favourably acknowledges Heidegger in the foreword of her doctoral dissertation. 51 Besides those who have previously been mentioned other commentators who have examined the political dimension of Heidegger’s thought include the likes of Farias (although widely discredited), Rockmore, Sheehan, Wolin, Sluga, de Beistegui and Young. 50

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the Nationalist Socialist programme.52 For Elliott, there is an essential need to elucidate how “…the tension underlying Heidegger’s explication of human existence at once heteronymously receptive and autonomously active is worked out by means of this active assimilation to the NS perspective.”53 In this regard Elliott makes reference to Heidegger’s address ‘The Self-assertion of the German University’ from May 1933. This text signals Heidegger’s belief in National Socialism as the promise of a radical transformation within the spiritual condition of the German nation. Furthermore, Heidegger preserves his notion of human existence as a possibility of self-realization or authentic becoming and at the same time ‘…shifts the concrete site of this possibility from an individual negotiation with one’s own mortality to a collective struggle to fulfil the task historically given to a people.’54 While in Being and Time Heidegger was to use the term ‘resoluteness’, its collective correlative can be found in the expression ‘essential will’ (Wesenswille) of the German people, that which produces its spiritual world,55 additionally, the ‘spirit’ of a people is clearly recognized as collective resolve.56 Elliott also shows how in Being and Time authenticity and therefore the truth of individual Dasein was said to entail a counter-movement against the tendency towards the selfforgetfulness of everyday being-with-others, while national autonomy is understood by Heidegger to be attainable only through confrontation and struggle with other nations.57 Besides the important idea of struggle, a notion of power also comes to the fore in Heidegger’s interpretation of the National Socialist revolution in Germany. In reference to one of Heidegger’s speeches addressed to a general assembly of students and teachers in November 1933, Elliott refers to his understanding of the relationship between the state and the realization of Germany as a selfdirected ‘spiritual world’. Heidegger proclaims: “[The state] is the structure that awakens and binds. In accommodating itself to the state the 52 Cf., Brian Elliott’s, Phenomenology and Imagination in Husserl and Heidegger, p. 141 53 Ibid. pp. 141-142 54 Ibid. p. 142 55 Cf. GA 16, pp. 111-112 56 Heidegger writes: “For ‘spirit’ (Geist) is neither astuteness (Scharfsinn), nor the free play of wit (das unverbindliche Spiel des Witzes), nor the boundless drive of intellectual analysis, nor even world reason (Weltvernunft). Rather, spirit is originally attuned and knowing resoluteness for the essence of being (Entschlossenheit zum Wesen des Seins).” (GA 16, p. 112, trans. Brian Elliott, Phenomenology and Imagination in Husserl and Heidegger, p. 142) 57 GA 16, p. 113


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people is exposed to all great powers of human being. The state becomes and is insofar as it asserts these powers in the existence (Dasein) of the people.”58 According to Elliott, Heidegger’s notion of political community necessitates an immense struggle with ‘the great powers’ determining human society, that is, ‘nature, history, art, technology’.59 Exposure to these powers through the state calls for the collective endeavour of selfrealization through art.60 Retiring from his position as rector in the spring of 1934 Heidegger continued to retain his notion of the state as that through which a people confront the great powers that most strongly influence its destiny. Elliott cites two lectures on the German University delivered in the summer of 1934 as re-confirming Heidegger’s idea of the total state.61 The notion of a total state as it is found in Heidegger is something highlighted by other commentators including Wolin in The Politics of Being62 and Löwith in Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism.63 Heidegger himself seems to confirm his adherence to a total state when he says: “The individual, wherever he may stand, counts for 58

GA 16, p. 200 (trans. Brian Elliott). Elliott also remarks: “The freedom of the collective is thus realized not through rational negotiation aiming at a generally recognized consensual truth; nor does it take the form of an affective community bound through rational negotiation aiming at a generally recognized consensual truth nor does it take the form of an affective community bound by universal ‘moral sentiments’. 59 GA 16, p. 201 60 “In the struggle to create the way (Bahn) and secure the continuity (Dauer) for its own being (Wesen), the people grasps itself in the developing state constitution. In the struggle to constitute in advance (sich vorzubilden) its capacity for greatness and determination as essential truth, [the people] presents itself in an exemplary way (maȕgebend) in art. This attains the grand style only when it brings the whole existence of the people into the form of its being (Wesen).” (cf. GA 16, p. 201, trans. Brian Elliott, Phenomenology and Imagination in Husserl and Heidegger, p. 143) 61 The state is not a mechanical legal apparatus that exists with and in addition to the institutions of economy, art, science, and religion. Rather, the state signifies the living order that is thoroughly dominated by reciprocal trust and responsibility, in which and through which the people realizes its own historical existence. (GA, p. 302, trans. Brian Elliott, Phenomenology and Imagination in Husserl and Heidegger, p. 143) 62 Cf. Richard Wolin’s The Politics of Being, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, pp. 114-117. Henceforth, The Politics of Being. 63 Cf. Karl Löwith’s Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, trans. Gary Steiner, ed. R. Wolin, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, p. 215. Henceforth, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism.

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nothing. The destiny of our nation within the state counts for everything. (Freiburg University archives).”64 In 1934 when Heidegger began lecturing on Hölderlin there is a marked transformation in the political dimension to his thought, what Lacoue-Labarthe has famously called ‘the aestheticization of politics’, a term derived from Brecht and Benjamin.65 Heidegger considered Hölderlin to be the poetic voice and destiny of the German people. Furthermore, he declares that to dedicate oneself to bringing him to power ‘is ‘politics’ in the highest and most authentic sense, so much so that whoever achieves something here has no need speak about the political.’66 In turning to Hölderlin Heidegger was attempting to usher in a new post-metaphysical era and at the same time forge both a poetic national identity and destiny. Heidegger envisaged the historical task of a people as emerging in and through art (chiefly poetry), language and myth. As Lacoue-Labarthe states: It is clear, then, that Heidegger never ceased to connect the possibility of History (historiality) with the possibility of a people or of the people. Which also meant conjointly, as we know, with the possibility of an art (a Dichtung), a language and a myth (a Sage, i.e. a relation with the gods).67

This reveals a Romantic aspect to Heidegger’s writings as he sought out the poetic re-constitution of the German people. In this regard Heidegger’s thought can to a certain degree be seen to resonate with Hölderlin and Nietzsche.68 64

Cf., Hugo Ott’s, Martin Heidegger, A Political Life, trans. Allan Blunden, London: HarperCollins, 1993, p. 240. Henceforth, Martin Heidegger, A Political Life. 65 Cf. Lacoue-Labarthe’s, Heidegger, Art and Politics, p. 61 66 Cf. GA 39, p. 214 (trans. Julian Young, Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism, p. 125) 67 Cf. Lacoue-Labarthe’s, Heidegger, Art and Politics, p. 114 68 Brian Elliott identifies two passages from Hölderlin and Nietzsche in the endnotes to Phenomenology and Imagination in Husserl and Heidegger (p. 172) as signaling a sense of the continuity of Romantic aesthetic politics represented by Heidegger’s thought in the mid 1930’s. Related to this Romantic dimension to Heidegger’s thought is the text attributed to Hölderlin entitled ‘The Oldest SystemProgram of German Idealism’, where he writes: “We need a new mythology, however, this mythology must be at the service of ideas, it must become a mythology of reason. Until we render ideas aesthetic, that is, mythological, they will not be of any interest to the populace, and vice versa: until mythology has become reasonable, the philosopher has to be ashamed of it. Thus the enlightened and the unenlightened finally have to shake hands; mythology must become philosophical in order to make the people reasonable, and philosophy must turn


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Although what has been outlined thus far (especially in relation to Elliott’s text) suggests that Heidegger’s thought was deeply interconnected to National Socialism, there is also evidence that he levelled stinging criticisms at this political movement. For example, in his Introduction to Metaphysics, immediately following the famous passage where Heidegger alludes to Europe being caught between the pincers of America and Russia, (who he regards as being metaphysically ‘the same: the same hopeless frenzy of unchained technology and of the rootless organization of the average man’), he goes on to state: “when a boxer counts as the great man of a people; when the tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph; then, yes then, there still looms like a spectre over all this uproar the question: what for? – where to? – what then?”.69 The boxer Heidegger is referring to here is Max Schmeling, a German world heavyweight champion and the rallies he alludes to are the Nuremburg rallies, these he identifies as other examples of the ‘darkening of the world’, and they too are considered instances of the spiritual decline of the earth.70 Not only that, Heidegger is further noted for his resistance to and dissidence from Nazism in terms of its espousal of biologism and racism. As Derrida writes in Of Spirit, Heidegger’s spiritualizing of Nazism appears to set ‘apart [démarque]’ his ‘commitment and breaks an affiliation.’ 71 He states that Heidegger’s address ‘The self-affirmation of the German University’ “…seems no longer to belong simply to the ‘ideological’ camp in which one appeals to obscure forces – forces which would not be spiritual, but natural, biological, racial, according to an anything but spiritual interpretation of ‘earth and blood.’”72 Although Heidegger’s spiritualizing of Nazism suggests he disinherits its beliefs in any naturalism or racism, it also promotes an inflated sense of mythological in order to make the philosopher sensuous.” (Cf. HEL, pp. 155-156). A passage from Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy also proves significant: “So if we wish to make a proper assessment of the Dionysiac capacity of a people, we must consider not only its music, but also its tragic myth, the second witness to that capacity. Now, given this extremely close connection between music and myth, we may suppose that the degeneracy and degeneration of one will be connected with the atrophy of the other […] A glance at the evolution of the German spirit will leave us in no doubt of this. […] Let no one imagine that the German spirit has lost its mythical home for ever, as long as it still clearly understands the voices of the birds telling it of home. One day it will awaken, in all the morning freshness that follows a tremendous sleep.” (BT(N), p. 116) 69 Cf. IM, p. 40 70 IM, p. 40 71 Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit, p. 39 72 Ibid., p. 39

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his Germanic homeland, people and language. In the Introduction to Metaphysics he declares the Germans to be the ‘most endangered people’ and the most ‘metaphysical people’.73 Additionally, he proclaims: ‘For along with the German language Greek (in regard to the possibilities of thinking) is at once the most powerful and the most spiritual of languages.’74 This leads Derrida to ask the question: ‘Is a metaphysics of race more or less serious than a naturalism or a biologism of race?’.75 Derrida leaves this question in suspension. While it would be fair to assume that Heidegger’s exaltation of the German people and language exhibits a form of Germanic cultural chauvinism; identifying the Germans as the most metaphysical people has less serious ramifications in terms of the physical brutality, violence inflicted by the Nazis in their endeavour to eradicate ‘inferior races’ such as the Jews and the Roma Gypsies, and ‘inferior human beings’ such as the disabled and homosexuals. In saying this, his bias towards the German people as having privileged access to the ‘powers of Being’ may also have serious consequences and one must be wary and vigilant of such a prejudice.76 A less provocative issue than the extensive condemnation of Heidegger’s political activity and politicized thinking, and its relation to his sense of ‘home’ is raised by Adorno. Adorno criticizes Heidegger’s perceived provincialism. Whilst Anthony Vidler interprets Heidegger’s meditations on the notion of home as arising from a nostalgic desire for the premodern and a need for security. Adorno’s dismay towards Heidegger’s provincial inclinations can be found in The Jargon of Authenticity. In this work he reproaches Heidegger for relating his thinking to the ways of the German farmer: “Philosophy which is ashamed of its name, needs the sixth-hand symbol of the farmer 73

Cf. IM, p. 41 IM, p. 60 75 Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit, p. 74 76 Heidegger makes the following remarks concerning the unique vocation of the German people: “We lie in the pincers. Our people, as standing in the centre suffers the most intense pressure – our people, the people richest in neighbours and hence the most endangered people, and for all that, the metaphysical people. We are sure of this vocation; but this people will gain a fate from its vocation only when it creates in itself a resonance, a possibility of resonance for this vocation, and grasps its tradition creatively. All this implies that this people, as a historical people, must transpose itself – and with it the history of the West – from the centre of their future happening into the originary realm of the powers of Being. Precisely if the great decision regarding Europe is not to go down the path of annihilation – precisely then can this decision come about only through the development of new, historically spiritual forces from the centre.” (IM, p. 41, my emphasis.) 74


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as proof of its primalness, as a way of acquiring some otherwise unavailable distinctiveness.”77 He further rebukes Heidegger for his appeal to the notion of ‘rootedness’ regarding it as an ultimately hollow concept. He writes: ‘...even in Heidegger, the evidence of language reveals the falsity of rootedness – at least as soon as rootedness descends to something that has a concrete content.’78 According to Vidler in The Architectural Uncanny, Heidegger’s thinking on the notion of home stems from a desire for security and nostalgia for the ‘premodern’. In response to an extract from Hubert Dreyfus’ Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’, Division 179, he writes the following: “It was of course, for this security that, following the Second World War, Heidegger himself searched; attempting to trace the roots of preanxious dwelling and exhibiting a profound nostalgia for the premodern…”80 Adorno’s and Vidler’s readings of Heidegger are to some degree valid, they are not wholly misguided. However, their characterization of Heidegger is unsustainable, as his writings emphatically indicate a thinker whose thought moves beyond the confines of these limited interpretations imposed upon him. Textual evidence exists to support Adorno’s assertion of a provincialism at work in Heidegger’s writings. This is nowhere more evident than in the short piece entitled: “Why Do We Remain in the Province?”. In this text Heidegger describes why he refused a university post in Berlin,81 and offers a positive account of how his provincial 77 Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Fredric Will, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973, p. 56. 78 Ibid., p. 57 79 Anthony Vidler is responding to the following citation from Dreyfus’s Being-inthe-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’, Division 1: “Not only is the human being interpretation all the way down, so that our practices can never be grounded in human nature, God’s will, or the structure of rationality, but his condition is one of such radical rootlessness that everyone feels fundamentally unsettled (unheimlich), that is, senses that human beings can never be at home in the world. This, according to Heidegger, is why we plunge into trying to make ourselves at home and secure.” Cf. Anthony Vidler’s The Architectural Uncanny, p. 8. 80 Ibid., p. 8 81 Heidegger describes how a 75 year old farmer on hearing the news that he was offered a post in Berlin put his hand on his shoulder and with his mouth tightly shut, shook his head, meaning ‘absolutely no’. (“Why Do We Remain in the Province?” in Philosophical and Political Writings, trans. Thomas J. Sheehan, ed. Manfred Stassen, New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003, p. 18.) Adorno strongly disapproves of Heidegger’s recourse to the peasant farmer in

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existence facilitates and nourishes his philosophical ventures. He remarks: “On a deep winter’s night when a wild, pounding snowstorm rages around the cabin and veils and covers everything, that is the perfect time for philosophy. Then its questions must become simple and rigorous.”82 He also acknowledges an affinity between his philosophical work and the daily work carried out by the rural ‘peasants’, whose activities he would have witnessed during his time in the Black Forest: When the young farmboy drags his heavy sled up the slope and guides it, piled high with beech logs, down the dangerous descent to his house, when the herdsman, lost in thought and slow of step, drives his cattle up the slope, when the farmer in his shed gets the countless shingles ready for his roof, my work is of the same sort. It is intimately rooted in and related to the life of the peasants.83

On the other hand, Vidler’s contention that Heidegger’s concern for ‘home’ is somehow born out of a yearning for security and ‘a profound nostalgia for the premodern’ are not without foundation either. Heidegger could be interpreted as seeking out some secure existence for humanity when discussing the essence of ‘dwelling’ in “Building Dwelling Thinking”: The Old Saxon wuon, the Gothic wunian, like the old word bauen, mean to remain, to stay in a place. But the Gothic wunian says more distinctly how this remaining is experienced. Wunian means: to be at peace, Friede, means the free, das Frye, and fry means: preserved from harm and danger, preserved from something, safeguarded […] To dwell, to be set at peace, ‘Why Do We Remain in the Province?’ he writes: “The description of the old farmer reminds us of the most washed-out clichés in plough-and-furrow novels, from the region of a Frenssen; and it reminds us equally of the praise of being silent, which the philosopher authorizes not only for his farmers but also for himself.” (Cf. The Jargon of Authenticity, p. 55) 82 Martin Heidegger, “Why Do We Remain in the Province?”, p. 16. Adorno continues his tirade against this provincialism when he writes: “Through the ingrained language form of the jargon, that hale life is equated with agrarian conditions, or at least with simple commodity economy, far from social considerations. This life is in effect equated to something undivided, protectingly closed, which runs it course in a firm rhythm and unbroken continuity. The field of association here is a left-over of romanticism and transplanted without second thought into the contemporary situation, to which it stands in harsher contradiction than ever before. In that situation the categories of the jargon are gladly brought forward as though they were not abstracted from generated and transitory situations, but rather belonged to the essence of man, as inalienable possibility. Man is the ideology of dehumanization.” (Cf. The Jargon of Authenticity, p. 59) 83 Ibid., p. 17


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means to remain at peace within the free, the preserve, the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its nature. The fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing and preserving. 84

In respect to above passage Julian Young in Heidegger’s Later Philosophy writes of the quest for an ‘ontological security’. For Young, ‘ontological security’ resides: ‘not in evasion of death – but in overcoming metaphysics, overcoming ‘oblivion of Being’.85 Whether or not Heidegger would consent to Young’s notion of ‘ontological security’ being applied to his thinking is an entirely other matter. It may also be possible to identify a nostalgic element in Heidegger’s writings when he describes with affection and reverence aspects of the peasant’s way of being-in-the-world. His depiction of a peasant woman’s shoes in “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1936) inspired by a painting by Van Gogh, and his description of the way the peasant farmer once cultivated his land in contrast to modern agricultural techniques of cultivating land in “The Question Concerning Technology” (1955) perhaps point to a thinker who harbours nostalgic desires for a pre-modern way of being in the world. In “The Origin of the work of Art” he describes the peasant woman’s shoes in relation to the reliability of equipment: …the peasant woman is made privy to the silent call of the earth; by virtue of the reliability of the equipment she is sure of her world. World and earth exist for her, and for those who are with her in her mode of being, only thus—in the equipment. We say ‘only’ and therewith fall into error; for the reliability of the equipment first gives to the simple world its security and assures to the earth the freedom of its steady thrust.86

And in “The Question Concerning Technology” he portrays the care with which the peasant farmer once looked after his land as distinct from the way modern machinery efficiently exploits the land: The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order [bestelle] appears differently than it did when to set in order still meant to take care of and to maintain. The work of the peasant does not challenge the soil of the field. In the sowing of the grain it places the seed in the keeping of the forces of growth and watches over its increase. But meanwhile even the

84

PLT, p. 147 Julian Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy, Cambridge: CUP, 2002, p. 72. 86 PLT, p. 34 85

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Contrary to Adorno’s and Vidler’s construal of Heidegger as a provincial and nostalgic thinker seeking security, his writings provide ample evidence of a thinker whose thought is not constricted by purely provincial concerns nor by a nostalgia or desire for security. His recourse to and espousal of a preparatory thinking that would bring about the enactment of a poetic homecoming for humanity is inspirited by a thoughtful remembrance (Andenken) that evokes the futurity of the poet and his poetic work in opposition to any reactionary and nostalgic desire to revive an ancient and forgotten Vaterland. In this way Heidegger’s thought turns towards poetry in anticipation of a new and unforeseen understanding of humanity’s sense of being at home-in-the-world being disclosed and realized. It is thus evident that while both Adorno’s and Vidler’s critical remarks expose what could be deemed areas of limitation within Heidegger’s thinking they fail to encompass the scope and complexity of his various discourses on the notion of ‘home’. To criticize Heidegger for being a provincial thinker holds little weight. If a person is to be labeled ‘provincial’ in the sense of someone who has a limited and restricted perspective of the world, who is narrow minded and self-centred, then surely Heidegger cannot be thought of in this light. Taking into consideration his writings on metaphysics, nihilism, technology and the fleeing gods, one would find it absurd to consider his thinking provincial. Living provincially does not necessitate that one’s thinking is also provincial. When Heidegger famously writes: ‘Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world’88 in the “Letter on ‘Humanism’” he manages to debunk the crude caricature of a provincial thinker. For this statement shows him to be gripped by anxieties and difficulties that face humanity at large and these difficulties he unceasingly confronts. It is also naïve if not completely misguided of Vidler to infer from Heidegger’s texts a desire to return to the premodern, as in the lecture course on Hölderlin’s ‘The Ister’ he explicitly repudiates the possibility of such an event ever occurring. He declares: “…nothing of the historical world hitherto will return. It is just as childish to wish for a return to previous states of the world as it is to think that human beings could overcome metaphysics by denying it.”89 When Vidler alleges that 87

QCT, pp. 14-15. Cf. PM, p. 258 89 TI, p. 53 88


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Heidegger’s sense of ‘home’ is tied to a search for security, this is something that cannot easily be asserted or maintained either. Firstly, what ‘security’ meant for Heidegger would have to be determined, for what it signifies could not be assumed. Furthermore, in his earlier writings and especially in Being and Time, Heidegger exposes the groundlessness of the security or what he might term the ‘tranquilized self-assurance’90 (beruhigter Vertrautheit) of being-at-home-in-the-world.

The role of ‘Unheimlichkeit’ in Being and Time Uncanniness is the basic kind of Being-in-the-world, even though in an everyday way it has been covered up.91

Uncanniness or Unheimlichkeit plays a major role in Being and Time and according to John Llewelyn it is ‘one of the keys to Heidegger’s book.’92 Unlike Freud, Heidegger does not interpret the unheimlich or Unheimlichkeit psychologically as an anxious psychic experience of the unconscious; instead he attempts to understand this phenomenon from an existentialontological perspective. Yet despite Freud’s and Heidegger’s diverging perspectives on uncanniness, David Farrell Krell identifies parallels between them. Krell remarks that Heidegger’s phenomenological discussion of fear and anxiety in the 1925 lecture Prolegomena to the History of the Concept of Time bears resemblance to Freud’s catalogue of ‘lived experiences’ articulated in the second part of his essay ‘The “Uncanny’”.93 Moreover, Krell observes similarities between Freud and Heidegger in the

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BT, p. 233, he writes: “This character of Being-in was then brought to view more concretely through the everyday publicness of the ‘they’, which brings tranquillized self assurance⎯Being-at-home, with all its obviousness⎯into the average everydayness of Dasein.” 91 BT, p. 323 92 See John Llewelyn’s ‘Editor’s Foreword’ to Magda King’s A Guide to Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’, New York: State University of New York Press, 2001, p. xv. 93 Cf. David Farrell Krell’s, “Das Unheimliche: Architectural Sections of Heidegger and Freud”, p. 50. He further writes: “This is not the place to rehearse Heidegger’s treatment of the Wovor and the Worum, ‘that in the face of which’ and ‘that about which’ Dasein is afraid or anxious. Yet many details of the analysis would fascinate Freud: the ‘fright’ that arises from an immediate, recognized threat, such as a grenade landing nearby with only a few seconds before detonation; the ‘horror’ of some unidentifiable threat; the ‘terror’ of sudden horror; the general ‘anxiousness’ of timidity, awe, worry, and so on.”

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way they both associate anxiety with uncanniness and both point to ‘darkness’ and ‘solitude’ as giving rise to the unhomelike.94 Nevertheless, there exist major disparities between Freud and Heidegger in relation to how they treat the experience of Unheimlichkeit or uncanniness. While there is evidence of a narrative structure to Freud’s analysis of uncanniness, Heidegger’s handling of it is less obvious. As has already been shown, Freud understands uncanniness to be mainly experienced when infantile complexes which have been repressed reemerge through some traumatic impression, or when primitive beliefs which were thought to have been overcome seem once more to be confirmed. Through the process of psychoanalysis Freud believed one’s experiences of uncanniness could be understood and to a certain extent consciously sublimated. Conversely, in Heidegger’s Being and Time no such clear-cut way of dealing with uncanniness is made evident. Heidegger’s understanding of the notion of uncanniness most significantly materializes in his discussions on Angst, death and conscience. However, despite the lack of any defined procedure or method of dealing with uncanniness, Heidegger’s insights into this idea do prove instructive. Moreover, uncanniness could be considered to take on a positive role in Being and Time as its experience signals a rupture in Dasein’s tranquilized self-assured way of being in the world. This in turn opens up the possibility for an authentic mode of existence to emerge. According to Heidegger in Being and Time, Dasein seeks to evade uncanniness by dwelling in the familiarity of the ‘‘at-home’ of publicness’. He considers the security provided by this way of being-inthe-world to be a mode of Dasein’s uncanniness: “That kind of Being-inthe-world which is tranquillized and familiar is a mode of Dasein’s uncanniness, not the reverse. From an existential-ontological point of 94

Krell writes: “Also relevant is Heidegger’s insistence on the importance of fear for or about someone else, the Other, whom Freud tends to reduce to the mirror image of a narcissistic projection. However, the purpose of Heidegger’s phenomenology of fear is to arrive at that indeterminate fear which is generalized anxiety, the anxiety that Heidegger too equates with uncanniness. Not only that. Heidegger designates two of Freud’s three principle sites of the uncanny: both thinkers name ‘darkness’ and ‘solitude’ (Dunkelheit, Alleinsein) as abodes for the unhomelike, while Freud also writes of ‘stillness’ (die Stille), which has only a positive resonance for Heidegger. Yet not even these two or three sites are essential to what Heidegger calls the unhomelike. Rather, ‘that in the face of which we are anxious is the nothing’ (GA 20: 401).” “Das Unheimliche: Architectural Sections of Heidegger and Freud”, pp. 50-51.


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view, the ‘not-at-home’ must be conceived as the more primordial phenomenon.”95 Through his phenomenological analysis of Dasein and his recourse to the notion of Unheimlichkeit Heidegger seeks determinately and resolutely to disrupt and displace Dasein’s sedated or tranquilized selfassured way of being-in-the-world. Contrary to claims made by Heidegger in §35 of Being and Time that it is impossible for Dasein to disentangle itself from its tranquillized way of being-in-the-world96 (predominately characterized by idle talk (Gerede), curiosity (Neugier), and ambiguity (Zweideutigkeit)), he does suggest that Dasein can unfetter itself from its tranquilized state through the experience of anxiety or dread (Angst). In his initial explication of anxiety he is careful to distinguish it from fear, for although connected there exists a seminal distinction. Fear for Heidegger stems from a definite direction and from entities in the world, while in contradistinction: “That in the face of which one has anxiety is Being-in-the-world as such. […] That in the face of which one has anxiety is not an entity within-the-world.”97 Entities within the world fade away or diminish in significance as Dasein is drawn into anxiety about itself in the face of itself. Anxiety reveals to Dasein its ownmost potentiality-for-being, that is, Dasein’s potential for the freedom of choosing and grasping itself. According to Heidegger, ‘real’ anxiety remains infrequent and rare, undermining Dasein’s secure sense of beingat-home-in-the-world. 98 Accordingly, when Dasein endures this extraordinary sense of anxiety it is thrust into an anxiety about itself in the face 95

BT, p. 234 Heidegger observes: “This way in which things have been interpreted in idle talk has already established itself in Dasein. There are many things with which we first become acquainted in this way, and there is not a little which never gets beyond such an average understanding. This everyday way in which things have been interpreted is one into which Dasein has grown in the first instance, with never a possibility of extrication.” (BT, p. 213) As a result the ‘‘they’ can be seen to prescribe one’s state-of-mind, and determines what and how one ‘sees’ thus allowing Dasein to drift ‘along towards an ever-increasing groundlessness as it floats’ while the ‘uncanniness of this floating remains hidden from it under their protecting shelter.’ (BT, p. 214) 97 BT, pp. 230-231 98 He writes: “After all, the mood of uncanniness remains, factically, something for which we mostly have no existentiell understanding. Moreover, under the ascendancy of falling and publicness, ‘real’ anxiety is rare. Anxiety is often conditioned by ‘physiological’ factors. This fact, in its facticity, is a problem ontologically, not merely with regard to its ontical causation and course of development. Only because Dasein is anxious in the very depths of its Being, does it become possible for anxiety to be elicited physiologically.” (BT, p. 234) 96

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of itself, undergoing an experience of the unheimlich or ‘not-being-athome’. Heidegger comments: In anxiety one feels ‘uncanny’. Here the peculiar indefiniteness of that which Dasein finds itself alongside in anxiety, comes proximally to expression: the ‘nothing and nowhere’. But here ‘uncanniness’ also means ‘not-being-at-home’ (das Nicht-zuhause-Sein). […] Everyday familiarity collapses. Dasein has been individualized, but individualized as Being-inthe-world. Being-in enters into the existential ‘mode’ of the ‘not-at-home’. Nothing else is meant by our talk about ‘uncanniness’.99

Here in lies the crux of Heidegger’s interpretation of the unheimlich in Division One of Being and Time. The self-assured, secure and protected at-homeness in the world is violently disturbed or unsettled through anxiety. Interestingly enough, Freud differs from Heidegger here as he stresses the protective nature of anxiety. Freud notes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: ‘Anxiety’ describes a particular state of expecting the danger or preparing for it, even though it may be an unknown one. ‘Fear’ requires a definite object of which to be afraid. ‘Fright,’ however, is the name we give to the state a person gets into when he has run into danger without being prepared for it; it emphasizes the factor of surprise. I do not believe anxiety can produce a traumatic neurosis. There is something about anxiety that protects its subject against fright and so against frightneuroses.100

On the other hand, Heidegger lays emphasis on the disturbing or disrupting nature of anxiety. As anxiety estranges Dasein from the insulating movement of falling, and urges it towards its existential mode of not-being-at-home in the world. Positively construed, anxiety forces Dasein to endure the unheimlich or not-being-at-home in the world, allowing it to recover from its fallen state and lostness in the ‘they’. Dasein is thus thrown back upon itself as a being for whom its own being becomes a primary concern, opening up both the possibility for its individualization to be realized and of gaining a sense of authenticity. Heidegger writes: “But in anxiety, there lies the possibility of a disclosure that is quite distinctive; for anxiety individualizes. This individualization brings Dasein back from its falling, and makes manifest to it that authenticity and inauthenticity are possibilities of its Being.”101 Anxiety 99

BT, p. 233 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle , pp. 12-13 101 BT, p. 235 100


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presses Dasein into acknowledging that it is perpetually caught up in the midst of objects and the events of daily existence and hence habitually engrossed in them. Dasein remains consistently in flight from accepting its existence as potentiality-for-being-in-the-world, which is always more or other than its present realization and it is consequently never entirely at home in the world. Hence, anxiety can be viewed as a passage of initiation from the false familiarity of being-at-home-in-the-world to the true uncanniness of Dasein. Anxiety enables Dasein to return to its radically unhomely self as radical potentiality for being. Nonetheless, Heidegger’s recourse to the notion of uncanniness is not confined to his examination of anxiety. It also arises in a vital way in relation to death and the idea of conscience. Hermann Philipse in Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being engages in a prolonged and scathing critique of Heidegger’s understanding of death.102 However, what is presented here is expositional. Rather than pursuing a critical analysis of Heidegger’s interpretation of death, the current concern is to illuminate the way he interlinks death with uncanniness. The problem posed by death is tied to the question of whether or not Dasein can be experienced in terms of being-a-whole. Paradoxically, for Dasein to be a whole it must no longer be existent. Hence, it is not possible to understand itself as a whole, and given that Heidegger writes: ‘Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein’, it would appear he regards reaching an understanding of Dasein as being-a-whole is unattainable. However, it would be impulsive and premature to come to such a conclusion. By introducing the notions of ‘anticipation’ (Vorlaufen in den Tod, running ahead into death)103 and ‘resoluteness’ he attempts to explicate Dasein in terms of an authentic potentiality-for-being-a-whole. Resoluteness in particular is crucial in understanding Dasein as a whole, for as Elliott remarks: “resoluteness with respect to one’s own mortality is

102

Cf. Hermann Philipse’s Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being: A Critical Interpretation, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998, pp. 352-374. Henceforth, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being. 103 The idea of ‘anticipation’ is best defined by Heidegger in §53 of BT, where he writes: “But Being towards this possibility, as Being-towards-death, is so to comport ourselves towards death that in this Being, and for it, death reveals itself as a possibility. Our terminology for such Being towards this possibility is “anticipation” of this possibility…Being-towards-death is the anticipation of a potentiality-for-Being of that entity whose kind of Being is anticipation itself. In the anticipatory revealing of this potentiality-for-Being, Dasein discloses itself to itself as regards its uttermost possibility.” (BT, pp. 306-307)

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what ultimately allows for individual existence to be grasped ‘as a whole’…”104 In saying this, the chief preoccupation of the present discussion ought to be kept in mind and so it must be asked: In what way does Heidegger associate Unheimlichkeit with death? His account of death is interwoven with Unheimlichkeit in §50 of Being and Time, entitled, ‘Preliminary Sketch of the Existential-ontological Structure of Death’: Factically, Dasein is dying as long as it exists, but proximally and for the most part, it does so by way of falling. For factical existing is not only generally and without further differentiation a thrown potentiality-forBeing-in-the-world, but it has always likewise been absorbed in the ‘world’ of its concern. In this falling Being-alongside, fleeing from uncanniness announces itself; and this means now, a fleeing in the face of one’s ownmost Being-towards-death.105

It is clear from the above passage how Heidegger underpins an interrelation and identifies a direct affinity between fleeing from uncanniness and fleeing from one’s ownmost being-towards-death. In Division One of Being and Time Heidegger stresses how Dasein in falling and in its everyday way of being-in-the-word flees in the face of the ‘not-at-home’ or uncanniness, whilst in Division Two the same vocabulary is used in his analysis of death: ‘As falling, everyday Being-towards-death is a constant 104

Brian Elliott, in Phenomenology and Imagination in Husserl and Heidegger, p. 119, defines resoluteness in the following manner:“The interpretation of Dasein in its radical originarity and authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) attempts to lead human understanding grasped as ‘disclosedness’ (Erschlossenheit). The interpretation of resoluteness achieves an ‘emancipation’ (Befreiung) of Dasein for its most extreme possibility of existence’, that is, it indicates the possible authenticity of a singular ‘being for death’. Resoluteness itself constitutes nothing less than ‘the ‘originary truth of existence’ and as such the truly unshakeable foundation’ of Dasein’s self certainty.” He goes on to explain how this grasping of the whole is not to be understood in terms of ‘fixing in place or definitive determination of the sense of human being in singularity.’ He provides evidence for his claim by citing a passage from Being and Time: “[The certainty of resoluteness] precisely cannot become fixed to the situation, but rather must understand that resolve, according to its own revelatory sense (Erschließungssinn), must be kept open and free for the respective factical possibility. The certainty of resolve (Gewißheit des Entschlusses) signifies: holding oneself free for one’s possible and in each case factically necessary retraction (Zurücknahme) […] resolute holding-oneself-free for retraction is authentic resoluteness [resolved] to repeat itself (eigentliche Entschlossenheit zur Wiederholung ihrer selbst).” (SZ, pp. 307-308). 105 BT, pp. 295-296


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fleeing in the face of death.’106 Furthermore, he utilizes the same structures in his interpretation of Dasein in its average everyday being-towards-death as he did in his earlier analysis (with the exception of ‘curiosity’ and ‘entanglement’) of the ‘there’ and falling of Dasein.107 Thus the ideas of the ‘they’, ‘idle talk’, ‘ambiguity’, ‘temptation’, ‘tranquillization’ and ‘alienation’ re-emerge and find prominence once again. By following this line of enquiry his association between uncanniness and death becomes more intelligible. He considers Dasein’s relation to death in terms of ‘dying’ (Sterben)108, and as he asserts in the passage quoted above that means: ‘Factically, Dasein is dying as long as it exists’, for it purportedly relates to its death as soon as it is born into the world, although it does not comprehend that its death is inevitable. For Heidegger, dying is the way in which Dasein is bound to death from its very conception: “Death is a way to be, which Dasein takes over as soon as it is. As soon as man comes to life, he is at once old enough to die.”109 Everyday Dasein deals with death in a ‘fugitive manner’. Dread overwhelms Dasein when thinking about death and so it remains concealed or suppressed in the course of everyday existence. Since Dasein is unable to face or confront the fact that it is dying, it deludes itself into thinking that death is an event at the end of life. 110 Most are aware of the certainty of death, yet it remains a distant concern unless a person is faced with illness or old age. When Dasein reassures itself about death and attempts to evade the anxiety that stems from its being-toward-death by using phrases like ‘one dies’ or ‘death is certain’ it manages to obscure the fact that its dying is a constant happening and this allows for an inauthentic mode of existence to prevail. Apart from Heidegger’s scrutinization of the inauthentic, everyday way of avoiding death, he also researches into the possibility of an authentic confrontation with death. However, as Paul Gorner points out, “Authentic being towards death is not just an aspect of existing authentically; it is a precondition of existing authentically because my ‘other’ possibilities of 106

BT, p. 298 Heidegger writes: ‘In setting forth average everyday Being-towards-death, we must take our orientation from those structures of everydayness at which we have earlier arrived. (BT, p. 296) 108 He writes: ‘Let the term ‘dying’ stand for that way of Being in which Dasein is towards death.’ (BT, p. 291) 109 BT, p. 289 110 Heidegger denies that death can be thought of as an event: “Dying is not an event; it is a phenomenon to be understood existentially; and it is to be understood in a distinctive sense which must be still more closely delimited.” ( BT, p. 284) 107

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being can only genuinely be chosen in light of the distinguished possibility that is death.”111 When Dasein accedes to and accepts its own mortality and anticipates death it manages to recognize the decisive limit to its existence. Anticipation enables the individualization of Dasein allowing it to recover itself from being lost to things, thus opening the way for Dasein’s ‘freedom towards death’. Heidegger writes: …anticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself, primarily unsupported by concernful solicitude, but of being itself, rather, in an impassioned freedom towards death - a freedom which has been released from the illusions of the ‘they’, and which is factical, certain of itself, and anxious.112

Consequently, the existential structure of anticipation provides Dasein with the possibility to be a whole. Is Heidegger’s analysis to be accepted? Can Dasein ever be released from the ‘they’ and achieve an authentic way of being-towards-death? Heidegger’s explication of an authentic way of being-towards-death is not necessarily meant to reveal that such an authentic mode of existence is a real possibility but is instead an attempt to demonstrate that authentic existence is an ontological possibility. That is, the being of Dasein does not exclude it as a possibility. Heidegger turns to the phenomenon of ‘conscience’ as an ‘attestation’ (Bezeugung) to such a possibility but also to indicate how authenticity is demanded.113 Furthermore, it is through an inquiry into the concept of ‘conscience’ that the present interpretation of the role of Unheimlichkeit in Being and Time reaches towards its climax. How does Heidegger interlink Unheimlichkeit with the notion of ‘conscience’?114 Everyday Dasein is unable to hear itself as it ‘listens away

111

Paul Gorner, Heidegger’s Being and Time, An Introduction, Cambridge: CUP, 2007, p. 132. 112 BT, p. 311 113 Cf. Paul Gorner’s Heidegger’s Being and Time, An Introduction, p. 135 114 Stephen Mulhall in Heidegger and Being and Time discusses Heidegger’s approach to interpreting the phenomenon of ‘conscience’. Mulhall writes: “This existentiell phenomenon is open to, and has been given, a wide variety of interpretations - religious, psychoanalytical, socio-biological. Heidegger neither endorses nor condemns any of these, but rather explores the ontological or existential foundations of the phenomenon to which they refer. His concern is with what makes it possible for Dasein to undergo the experience to which each of these interpretations lays claim. His suggestion is that this experience is the existentiell realization of Dasein’s primordial capacity to disclose itself as lost and to call upon


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to the ‘they’’.115 For Dasein to break free from this ‘listening away’ a different kind of hearing must be made possible. An alternative mode of hearing emerges through the call of the ‘voice of conscience’ (Stimme des Gewissens). How does the voice of conscience call and what is conveyed in this call? 116 This question allows some light to be shed on how the notion of ‘conscience’ and the notion of Unheimlichkeit are interconnected, as conscience calls in an uncanny silence117 and conveys nothing.118 Conscience manifests itself in an uncanny silence for it has nothing to speak of in the everyday mode of discourse. If the voice of conscience calls silently, whereby nothing is spoken, how then is it to be identified? Heidegger says it ‘…summons Dasein’s Self from its lostness in the ‘they’’.119 But who is this caller and how is the call experienced? Heidegger explains: The caller is Dasein in its uncanniness: primordial, thrown Being-in-theworld as the ‘not-at-home’—the bare ‘that-it-is’ in the ‘nothing’ of the world. The caller is unfamiliar to the everyday they-self; it is something like an alien voice. But what is Dasein even to report from the uncanniness of its thrown Being? What else remains for it than its own potentiality-for-

itself to attain its ownmost potentiality for selfhood.” (Heidegger and Being and Time, New York: Routledge, 1996, p. 125.) 115 BT, p. 316 116 The ‘voice’ is not to be thought as something that speaks or makes utterances, it is not something communicative but it exists ‘rather as a giving-to-understand.’ 117 He writes: “The call dispenses with any kind of utterance. It does not put itself into words at all; yet it remains nothing less than obscure and indefinite. Conscience discourses solely and constantly in the mode of keeping silent. In this way it not only loses none of its perceptibility, but forces the Dasein which has been appealed to and summoned, into the reticence of itself. The fact that what is called in the call has not been formulated in words, does not give this phenomenon the indefiniteness of a mysterious voice, but merely indicates that our understanding of what is ‘called’ is not to be tied up with an expectation of anything like a communication.” (BT, p. 318) 118 Heidegger says: “What does the conscience call to him to whom it appeals? Taken strictly, nothing. The call asserts nothing, gives no information about worldevents, has nothing to tell. Least of all does it try to set going a ‘soliloquy’ in the Self to which it has appealed. ‘Nothing’ gets called to [zu-gerufen] this Self, but it has been summoned [aufgerufen] to itself⎯that is, to its ownmost potentiality-forBeing.” (BT, p. 318) 119 BT, p. 319

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Chapter Three Being as revealed in anxiety? How else is ‘it’ to call than by summoning Dasein towards this potentiality-for-Being, which alone is the issue?120

So it is Dasein who is both the caller and the called. Moreover, according to Heidegger: ‘The call comes from me and yet over me.’121 Does this Heideggerian conception of conscience imply that Dasein is in some way schizophrenic as a call emerges within it that is both unfamiliar and autonomous? To apply the term ‘schizophrenic’ to Heidegger’s understanding of conscience would be misleading; firstly because the voice of conscience says nothing and secondly because Heidegger is not suggesting that there are two distinct entities in Dasein, one which does the calling and the other which is called. Rather, one needs to distinguish between Dasein in its state of uncanniness and Dasein in its mode as an inauthentic everyday tranquilized ‘they-self’. The call of conscience emanates from the caller that is not-at-home-in-the-world, while on the other hand, that who the conscience calls to is also the self but in its state of falling, lost in the ‘they’. Dasein is called from fallenness in the ‘they’ to authentic existence, the possibility of being that is most its own. Yet the call remains strange to the ‘they-self’ since the caller’s call stems from Dasein in its primordial state of uncanniness, that is, not-being-at-home-in-the-world. The call thus sets Dasein apart from those things that it is normally absorbed in and concerns itself with and reveals how Dasein is principally not at home in the world: ‘…in understanding the call Dasein is brought face to face with its own uncanniness.’122 Stemming from a single self thrown into ‘the nothing’ of the world, the call provides no information about current affairs or events of the world.123 Furthermore, uncanniness or not-being-athome-in-the-world is connected to the call of care, and this relationship becomes more intelligible when an important passage from §58, ‘Understanding the Appeal, and Guilt’ in Being and Time is taken into consideration. Heidegger states:

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BT, pp. 321-322 ‘Der Ruf kommt aus mir und doch über mich.’ As Gorner points out Macquarrie and Robinson wrongly translate this as ‘The call comes from me and yet from beyond me.’ (Cf. Heidegger’s Being and Time, An Introduction, p. 137) 122 BT, p. 342 123 He writes: “The call does not report events; it calls without uttering anything. The call discourses in the uncanny mode of keeping silent. And it does this only because, in calling the one to whom the appeal is made, it does not call him into the public idle talk of the ‘they’, but calls him back from this into the reticence of his existent potentiality-for-Being.” (BT, p. 322) 121


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The call is the call of care. Being-guilty constitutes the Being to which we give the name of ‘care’. In uncanniness Dasein stands together with itself primordially. Uncanniness brings this entity face to face with its undisguised nullity, which belongs to the possibility of its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. To the extent that for Dasein, as care, its Being is an issue, it summons itself as a ‘they’ which is factically falling, and summons itself from its uncanniness towards its potentiality-for-Being. The appeal calls back by calling forth: it calls Dasein forth to the possibility of taking over, in existing, even that thrown entity which it is; it calls Dasein back to its thrownness so as to understand this thrownness as the null basis which it has to take up into existence. This calling-back in which conscience calls forth, gives Dasein to understand that Dasein itself—the null basis for its null projection, standing in the possibility of its Being—is to bring itself back to itself from its lostness in the ‘they’; and this means that it is guilty.124

What does Heidegger mean when he writes that in uncanniness, Dasein stands primordially together with itself? It implies that Dasein is from the outset not at home in the world and that a ‘not’ and ‘nullity’ are intrinsic to its existence, which it can never fully appropriate or get behind. Also, to authentically ground itself in its thrownness, it must not turn away nor lose itself to the ‘they’ but must instead undergo and suffer the fact that it is ‘the null basis for its null projection’. This permits Dasein to direct itself ‘towards its potentiality-for-Being’. Additionally, from the above citation it is possible to see how Heidegger further interprets the call in terms of guilt or indebtedness (schuldig)125, in the sense of it being the ground of the groundlessness of itself. Michel Haar in Heidegger and the Essence of Man expounds upon this point: Being indebted means being responsible for a ‘not’, for a nothingness (Nichtigkeit). Heidegger retranslates the moral concept of responsibility into the ontological concept of Grund, ‘cause’ or ‘ground’. Being indebted means being the ground of a ‘not’; it means, above all, being a ground that is affected by a ‘not’.126

124

BT, pp. 332-333 Heidegger writes: ‘All experiences and interpretations of the conscience are at one in that they make the ‘voice’ of conscience speak somehow of ‘guilt’. (BT, p. 325) 126 Michel Haar, Heidegger and the Essence of Man, trans. William McNeill, New York: State University of New York Press, 1993, p. 20. Henceforth Heidegger and the Essence of Man. Haar’s interpretation is reinforced when Heidegger declares: “Hence we define the formally existential idea of the ‘Guilty!’ as ‘Being-the-basis for a Being which has been defined by a ‘not’—that is to say, as ‘Being-the-basis 125

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For Heidegger, Dasein’s lack of ground is an indication of the mortality or finitude of all human beings. It discloses the nothingness of death, while the call of conscience urges Dasein to take responsibility for its own mortal condition, making its mortality its own and therefore ‘authentic’. After Being and Time Heidegger persisted to draw heavily on the notion of the unheimlich, most notably in ‘What is Metaphysics?’, his inaugural Freiburg lecture presented on the 24th of July 1929. Heidegger’s construal of the unheimlich in ‘What is Metaphysics?’ remains close to his in Being and Time. For in ‘What is Metaphysics’ Heidegger describes Dasein’s relationship to being or the revelation of being itself, as constituted by the ‘nothing’ suffered or experienced in and through anxiety.127 By 1935 Heidegger’s recourse to the notion of the ‘unheimlich’ becomes paramount, for he applies it to the very essence of the human being.

of a nullity’.” (BT, p. 329). Heidegger informs us that this ‘nullity’ and ontological ‘not’ are unclear but he does attempt to define them: “The character of this ‘not’, as a ‘not’ may be defined existentially: in being its Self, Dasein is, as a Self, the entity that has been thrown. It has been released from its basis, not through itself but to itself, so as to be as this basis. Dasein is not itself the basis of its Being, inasmuch as this basis first arises from its own projection; rather, as Being-its-Self, it is the Being of its basis. This basis is never anything but the basis for an entity whose Being has to take over Being-a-basis.” (BT, pp. 330-331) 127 Heidegger writes: “In anxiety, we say, ‘one feels uncanny.’ What is ‘it’ that makes ‘one’ feel uncanny? We cannot say what it is before which one feels uncanny. As a whole it is so for one. All things and we ourselves sink into indifference. This however, not in the sense of mere disappearance. Rather, in their very receding, things turn toward us. The receding of beings as a whole, closing in on us in anxiety, oppresses us. We get no hold on things. In the slipping away of beings only this ‘no hold on things’ comes over us and remains. Anxiety makes manifest the nothing. We ‘hover’ in anxiety. More precisely, anxiety leaves us hanging, because it indicates the slipping away of beings as a whole. This implies that we ourselves – we humans who are in being – in the midst of beings slip away from ourselves. At bottom therefore it is not as though ‘you’ or ‘I’ feel uncanny; rather, it is this way for some ‘one’. In the altogether unsettling experience of this hovering where there is nothing to hold on to, pure Da-sein is all that is still there. Anxiety robs us of speech. Because beings as a whole slip away, so that precisely the nothing crowds around, all utterance of the ‘is’ falls silent in the face of the nothing. That in the uncanniness of anxiety we often try to shatter the vacant stillness with compulsive talk only proves the presence of the nothing.” (PM, pp. 88-89)


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The Human Being as to deinotaton Focusing now on Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics (Einführung in die Metaphysik) a lecture course presented at the University of Freiburg in the summer semester of 1935 and Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’ (1942) a most critical juncture in this chapter is reached. Hitherto, it has been shown how the ‘unheimlich’ and ‘Unheimlichkeit’ emerge in Heidegger’s The History of the Concept of Time, Being and Time and ‘What is Metaphysics?’, whereby Dasein is primordially conceived as not being at home in the world. In the Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger’s fundamental position does not alter, however, his elucidation of the unheimlich is made evident in a new and astonishing way through an interpretation of the first stasimon of Sophocles’ Antigone. Heidegger again revisits Sophocles’ Antigone in the series of lectures on Hölderlin’s hymn ‘The Ister’, although this later text varies significantly from what he has to say 1935. Heidegger regards Antigone as the ‘supreme uncanny’ or to put it differently the ‘most unhomely’ human being there is, and he goes to great lengths to come to grips with her and humanity’s unhomely nature.128 His esteem for Antigone is shared by Hegel who in his lectures on the history of philosophy between 1819 and 1830 declares ‘…the heavenly Antigone, that noblest of figures that ever appeared on earth...’.129 That Heidegger should orient his thought to Sophocles’ Antigone is unsurprising, as it has proven to be one of the most enduring tragedies ever to emerge from ancient Greece. George Steiner remarks in his hugely impressive work Antigones: Between 1790 and 1905 it was widely held by European poets, philosophers, and scholars that Sophocles’ Antigone was not only the finest of Greek tragedies, but a work of art nearer to perfection than any other produced by the human spirit.130

A host of brilliant minds have been attracted to Antigone including the likes of Schlegel, Wagner, Hegel, Hölderlin, Schelling,131 and Lessing, 128

TI, p. 104 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Greek Philosophy to Plato. Volume: 1, trans. E. S. Haldane, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995, p. 441. 130 George Steiner, Antigones, The Antigone myth in Western literature, art and thought, Oxford: OUP, 1984, p. 1. 131 Steiner states that Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling who befriended one another at Tübingen remained connected through their undiminishing admiration for 129

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thus establishing it as one of the greatest tragedies ever written. The dominant narrative pervading Sophocles’ Antigone can be crudely summarized in the following manner: Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, resisted the command of her uncle Creon, who representing civil authority refused her permission to bury her brother Polyneices, killed in civil war against him. Torn between her loyalty to the state and her obligation to the law of gods and family, Antigone engages in a courageous struggle with her destiny. Heidegger’s chief interest in Sophocles’ tragedy resides in the first stasimon of Antigone. In this first stasimon Sophocles poetically portrays the resourcefulness and venturesome exploits of the human being. He describes how the human being can take to or sail the most tempestuous of seas, plough the land, entrap birds and other wild animals, catch the fish of the sea with nets, subdue wild beasts, speak, think, and build cities to remain protected from the elements, and cure many human ailments and afflictions. Yet for all the cleverness of the human being it cannot evade death. In his Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger directs his thought towards this stasimon as he seeks assistance in understanding the beinghuman established by Parmenides and especially his saying ‘thinking and being are the same’ (to gar auto noein estin te kai einai).132 Crucial to Heidegger’s interpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone is the fact that the human being is understood as to deinotaton, which he interprets as ‘the uncanniest of the uncanny’. Determining the meaning and implications of such an understanding of the human being is a principal concern here. The significance of the human being as to deinotaton cannot be underestimated. Heidegger writes: …the human is to deinotaton, the uncanniest, does not mean to assign the human a particular property, as if the human were something else in addition; instead the word says: to be the uncanniest is the basic trait of the human essence, into which every other trait must always be drawn.133

Heidegger’s identification of the human essence as to deinotaton gives rise to a number of problematical issues. For example, Michel Haar maintains Antigone. He writes: “Even across subsequent polemics and silences, the Antigone was to remain a bond between the three men. Severally, they were to set it at the pivot of consciousness.” (Ibid., p. 8) 132 Heidegger says: “But because the thoughtful determination of Being-human that Parmenides accomplishes is difficult to approach directly and strikes us as strange, we will first seek help and instruction by listening to a poetic projection of Being-human among the Greeks.” (IM, p. 158) 133 IM, p. 161


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that for Heidegger, the essence of man is fundamentally determined by epochality and that for ‘him there is no nonhistorical or transhistorical human essence.’134 Contrary to Haar’s claim it would appear Heidegger does have recourse to or at least points to a ‘transhistorical human essence’ with his notion of the un-heimlich human being. For Heidegger, the human being as the ‘uncanniest, of the uncanny’ is primarily not at home in the world and this persists and remains the case from Ancient Greece to the modern technological world under the sway of Gestell. Oddly enough Haar seems to argue against himself and at the same time undermine his earlier assertion when he remarks: “Man’s proper site escapes him. He is definitively un-heimlich, ‘a stranger in his own essence,’ deprived of any ontological ‘at-homeness.’”135 Another difficulty arising in relation to Heidegger’s determination of the human being in the Introduction to Metaphysics pertains to the political significance of the text and the influence it exerts on his interpretation of humanity. According to Wolin, Heidegger produces ‘a philosophical glorification of violence’ that possesses ‘patent affinities’ with the National Socialist rhetoric of Sturm und Kampf.136 He also argues that the Heidegger of the early to mid thirties formulated the idea of ‘leader-creators’ who use ‘violence’ as an ‘ontological imperative’ to ‘combat the forces of everydayness and routine, whose predominance prevents the posing of the question of Being.’137 Wolin attributes to Heidegger the belief in: …an elite of poets, thinkers and statesmen – a cadre of authentic ‘leadertypes’ – who stand in a more immediate proximity to Being, and whose historical responsibility it is to lead the unenlightened many into the vicinity of such ‘nearness’ (Nähe). The Führerprinzip thus serves as the essential ground of Heidegger’s thinking about politics, philosophy, and poetic creation.138

For Wolin, these leader-types are Heidegger’s versions of Nietzsche’s ‘superman’. In The Will to Power Nietzsche claims the ‘superman’ is justified in using average man as a ‘base on which he can invent a higher form of being.’139 Wolin draws parallels between the Nietzschean superman and the Heideggerian ‘leader-creators’; the ‘violent men (Gewalt-tätige)’ 134

Michel Haar, Heidegger and the Essence of Man, p. 148 Ibid., p. 184 136 Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being, p. 126 137 Ibid., p. 123 138 Ibid., p. 124 139 WP, pp. 463-464 135

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who ‘use power to become pre-eminent in historical being as creators, as men of action.’140 According to Wolin, these leader-types stand above and outside the law and possess the status of ‘demigods’ as it were and are the ‘shock troops of Being’.141 He further contends it was only in the late thirties when Heidegger began delivering his extensive lecture courses on Nietzsche that he began to critically examine Nietzschean notions, thus signaling an ‘impassioned exercise in self-criticism.’142 Wolin’s assertion that Heidegger identifies and has recourse to an elite group of individuals that include poets, thinkers and statesmen is accurate. For Heidegger, these individuals are particularly significant in terms of their ability to show or prepare the way for the overcoming of nihilism. Nevertheless, the claims Wolin makes on the basis of this observation are highly questionable and dubious. To begin with, to connect Heidegger’s thought uncritically with Nietzsche’s is to certain extent misleading, for in his Introduction to Metaphysics he explicitly confronts and challenges Nietzsche. He comes into conflict with Nietzsche on two major issues. Firstly, Heidegger emphasizes how Nietzsche neglects the question of being, thinking it to be nothing more than a vapour, an error.143 Secondly, Heidegger understands Nietzsche’s thought to be irretrievably entwined with valuative thinking, and is thus unable to reach the ‘genuine centre of philosophy’. He writes: “Because Nietzsche was entangled in the confusion of the representation of values because he did not understand its questionable provenance, he never reached the genuine centre of philosophy.”144 It is also important to clarify Wolin’s misconstrual of Heidegger’s use of the notion of ‘violence’ in the Introduction to Metaphysics by associating it with the National Socialist rhetoric of Sturm und Kampf. Heidegger speaks of violence while attempting to elucidate an understanding of humanity derived from the first stasimon of Sophocles’ Antigone. He seeks to explicate the Greek term deinon, as he believed this idea defines the Greek understanding of the essence of humanity. It is in the course of investigating this notion that Heidegger draws on the idea of ‘violence’. For Heidegger, deinon means on the one hand, the terrible and violent in the sense that it manifests itself as the ‘overwhelming’ or overpowering, which in turn brings about both ‘true anxiety’ and ‘reticent awe’. On the other hand, deinon means ‘…the violent in the sense of one who needs to 140

Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being, p. 125 Ibid., p. 125 142 Ibid., p. 141 143 Cf. IM, p. 38 144 Ibid., pp. 213-214 141


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use violence.’145 These two senses of deinon make apparent how humanity is deinon. Firstly, because humanity is exposed to the overwhelming, that is, to being, and secondly because it is ‘violence-doing’. Heidegger maintains humanity is violence-doing as it ‘uses violence against the overwhelming’, ‘gathers what holds sway and lets it enter into openness’, not because it inflicts physical, psychological or any other type of violence against other beings.146 He remarks: “Humanity is violence-doing not in addition to and aside from other qualities but solely in the sense that from the ground up and in its doing violence, it uses violence against the overwhelming. Because it is doubly deinon in an originally united sense, it is to deinotaton, the most violent: violence-doing in the midst of the overwhelming.” 147 Further on in the text deinon as both the overwhelming and violence-doing will come to signify the conflict between dikƝ and technƝ.148 Humanity understood as to deinotaton signifies the human being as the one who is thrown out of the ‘homely, the accustomed, the usual, the unendangered.’149 Contrary to Wolin’s interpretation, Heidegger’s use of the notion of ‘violence’ is radically different to how it is commonly conceived, that is, doing harm to another in some manner, whether directly or indirectly, and bears little or no affinity to the sturm (storm) and kampf (battle) rhetoric of National Socialism. Clarifying his sense of violence, Heidegger writes: …we are giving the expression ‘doing violence’ an essential sense that in principle reaches beyond the usual meaning of the expression, which generally means nothing but brutality and arbitrariness. Violence is usually seen in terms of the domain in which concurring compromise and mutual assistance set the standard for Dasein, and accordingly all violence is necessarily deemed only a disturbance and offense. […] However, humanity is also deinon because it is violence – doing in the sense we have indicated. [It gathers what holds sway and lets it enter into an openness.]150

When Heidegger speaks of violence it is primarily in relation to the use of language, ‘the violence of poetic speech’151 and technƝ, that is, art involving 145

IM, p. 160 Ibid., p. 160 147 Ibid, p. 16) 148 Heidegger states: ‘The deinotaton of the deinon, the uncanniest of the uncanny, lies in the oppositional relation of dikƝ and technƝ.’ (Ibid., p. 173) 149 Ibid., p. 161 150 Ibid., p. 160 151 Cf. Ibid, pp. 166-167 146

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‘the knowing struggle to set Being which was formerly closed off, into what appears as beings.’152 Hence, Wolin’s critical interpretation proves vacuous to a large extent, as Heidegger’s philosophical preoccupations with violence are intrinsically related to humanity’s violence-doing against the overwhelming, that is, being, and are not remotely linked to violence-doing against other human beings. What has been discussed thus far in this section can be regarded as a confrontation with some of the problems and criticisms associated with Heidegger’s interpretation of the human being as articulated in his Introduction to Metaphysics. What is required now is a more detailed exposition of Heidegger’s conception of the human being, and so the focus turns to one of the most remarkable sections of the Introduction of Metaphysics, entitled ‘The Restriction of Being’.

Heidegger’s conception of the Human Being in the Introduction to Metaphysics …this question about humanity remains alien to us.153

It appears absurd for Heidegger to assert as he does in the Introduction to Metaphysics that the question ‘What is humanity?’ is foreign or alien to humanity. How could such a fundamental and repeatedly posed question remain foreign to humanity? Have there not been entire books devoted to this question?154 Also, this question has not only arisen through various philosophical investigations, but conflicting answers to it have also been formulated. For instance, Aristotle define the human being as the ‘rational animal’, and Nietzsche characterizes the human being in On the Genealogy of Morality as “…more sick, more uncertain, more mutable, less defined than any other animal, there is no doubt about that−he is the sick animal…”.155 Yet in spite of this Heidegger insists the question: ‘What is humanity?’ fails to be properly grasped, since humanity’s passion for questioning has been crippled.156 His remonstrations against the lax way with which this fundamental question is propounded manifests itself in his attack on the Christian writer Theodor Haecker. Heidegger remarks:

152

Ibid., p. 171 Ibid., p. 151 154 Ibid., p. 152 155 GM, p. 100 156 He says: ‘But what is not meaningless is the crippling of all passion for questioning, a crippling that has already held us back too long.’ ( IM, p. 152) 153


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Of course, there are now books with the title What Is Humanity? But this question merely stands in letters on the book’s cover. The question is not asked…because one already possesses an answer to the question, and an answer at the same time says that one is not allowed to ask at all. If someone believes the propositions expressed by the dogma of the Catholic church, that is the individual’s affair and is not at issue here. But if one puts the question ‘What is humanity?’ on the cover of one’s books, even though one is not questioning because one does not want to question and cannot do so, this is a procedure that has forfeited in advance every right to be taken seriously.157

In the above passage Heidegger is directing his thought against the falsifying tendencies of Christian philosophy. However, Hugo Ott is dismissive of Heidegger’s attempts to undermine Haecker’s work: “With what right can Haecker be accused of ‘throwing all standards and viewpoints into confusion’ by someone who has himself thrown restraint to the winds by making the Führer the standard by which all things and all reality are measured – including the reality yet to come.”158 Ott’s cutting remarks are worth mentioning; nevertheless, giving Heidegger his due, he does attempt to pose the question: ‘What is humanity?’ with a renewed sense of purpose and thoroughness in the Introduction to Metaphysics. Moreover, he does so without dependency or reliance upon the Führer or the notion of the Führerprinzip.159 To counter or address the lack of rigour with which the question: ‘What is humanity?’ is asked, Heidegger attempts to revive and reinvigorate humanity’s aptitude for questioning by revealing seven essential points to help direct humanity’s thinking afresh towards this most pertinent of questions. It is not necessary to paraphrase these points for they are articulated in a highly concentrated and precise manner: 1. The determination of the human essence is never an answer, but is essentially a question. 2. The asking of this question is historical in the originary sense that this questioning first creates history. 3. This is the case because the question of what humanity is can be asked only in the questioning about Being. 4. Only where Being opens itself up in questioning does history happen, and with it that Being of the human being by virtue of which the human being ventures the confrontation with beings as such. 157

Ibid., p. 152 Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger, A Political Life, p. 273 159 Cf. Wolin’s, The Politics of Being, p. 124 158

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5. This questioning confrontation first brings humanity back to that being that it itself is and has to be. 6. Humanity first comes to itself and is a self only as questioninghistorical. The selfhood of humanity means this: it has to transform the Being that opens itself up to it into history, and thus bring itself to a stand. Selfhood does not mean that humanity is primarily an ‘I’ and an individual. Humanity is not this any more than it is a We and a community. 7. Because humanity is itself as historical, the question about its own Being must change the form ‘What is humanity?’ into the form ‘Who is humanity?’160 According to Heidegger, the above points facilitate the attainment of a more rigorous and intimate understanding of the question ‘What is humanity?’ or ‘Who is humanity?’. They also prompt a greater appreciation of Parmenides’ essential saying. For Heidegger, this saying establishes the essence of the human being based on being itself. Furthermore, he deems it necessary to turn to Sophocles’ Antigone and more specifically the first stasimon, in order to come to terms with Parmenides’ abstruse saying. The opening line of this first stasimon reads: ‘Polla ta deina kouden anthrpou deinoteron pelei.’ Heidegger’s translation can be rendered as follows: ‘Manifold is the uncanny, yet nothing/uncannier than man bestirs itself...’161 His interpretation of the first stasimon is grounded on the translation of the Greek word deinon into the German word unheimlich. However, in English deinon is more commonly translated into the word ‘wondrous’, as found in both the Oxford and Cambridge editions of Sophocles’ Antigone.162 When Heidegger speaks of the unheimlich he diverges from Hölderlin’s translation, for he employs the words Ungeheuer, meaning extraordinary and in an earlier translation he uses the word

160

IM. pp. 152-153 Ibid., p. 158. In Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’ the German translation reads as follows: ‘Vielfältig das Unheimliche, nichts doch/über den Menschen hinaus Unheimlicheres ragend sich regt.’ (Cf. TI, p. 57) 162 In the Oxford edition of Antigone, translated by H.D.F. Kitto, the first line of the first stasimon reads: ‘Wonders are many, yet of all/Things is Man the most wonderful.’ Sophocles, Antigone, Oedipus the King, Electra, ed. Edith Hall, Oxford: OUP, 1998, p. 13. While in the Cambridge edition translated by David Franklin, the first line states: ‘There are many wonders in the world/But none is more wonderful than man.’, Sophocles: Antigone, ed. John Harrison & Judith Affleck, Cambridge: CUP, 2003, p. 27. 161


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gewaltige, meaning powerful. Why does Heidegger translate deinon into the German word unheimlich? Marc Froment-Meurice claims Heidegger favours the word unheimlich because ‘it maintains an intimate relation with Heim, Heimisch, Heimat, what I will call Dwelling (Herd; the home explicitly assimilated to Being).’163 Furthermore, he employs the German word unheimlich not in order to dilute its sense of the overwhelming or violent-doing but to illumine the way deinon determines the very essence of humanity. Thus the unheimlich is not to be understood in terms of an emotional response to a particular situation or as a certain strange feeling. A clearer sense of how Heidegger understands the unheimlich can be ascertained through the hyphenation of the word; un-heimlich or in English un-canny/un-homely. Heidegger’s grasp of the un-heimlich is twofold and relates back to the notions of the ‘overwhelming’ and ‘violence-doing’. Firstly, the unheimlich prevents the human being from making himself/herself at home in the world for humanity ex-ists within the overwhelming. Moreover, the un-heimlich as the overpowering compels the human being out of ‘…the homely, the usual, the unendangered.’164 Secondly, human beings are capable themselves of venturing beyond the homely into the unheimlich, Heidegger states: ‘…those who do violence, they over step the limits of the homely, precisely in the direction of the uncanny in the sense of the overwhelming.’165 Here Heidegger could be interpreted as describing Dasein in its state of authenticity who, like Antigone, acknowledges the fact that he or she is homeless within being and subsequently through his/her violent-doing has entered into strife with being as the overwhelming. According to Heidegger, these uncanniest human beings ‘…are thrown out of all relation to the homely, and atƝ, ruin, calamity, overtakes them.’166 Although Heidegger finds preference for the word ‘unheimlich’ he recognizes his translation as being ‘…initially alien to us, violent, or in ‘philological terms, ‘wrong.’ Nonetheless, he justifies persisting with this translation by stating: ‘…the blind obstinacy of habitual opinion must be shattered and abandoned if the truth of a work is to unveil itself.’167 Does Heidegger’s interpretation of deinon as discussed thus far, that is, as unheimlich, as the overwhelming power of being and the violence163

Marc Froment-Meurice, That Is To Say, Heidegger’s Poetics, trans. Jan Plug, California: Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 139. 164 IM., p.161 165 Ibid., p. 161 166 Ibid., p. 162 167 TI, p. 63

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doing of the human being, resemble or convey how Sophocles himself conceived of this notion? Is Heidegger venturing into the unsaid and unthought of Antigone with this interpretation of deinon or is he introducing alien ideas into the text? If he is entering into the unsaid or unthought of Sophocles’ Antigone then he is perhaps describing himself when he writes: “The one who is violence-doing, the creative one, who sets out into the un-said, who breaks into the un-thought, who compels what has never happened and makes appear what is unseen, this violencedoing one stands at all times in daring.”168 He also states: “If we restrict ourselves to explicating what is directly said in the poetry, the interpretation is at an end.”169 Hence, the authentic interpretation requires a hermeneutic violence to illuminate what is not written by the author himself. Positively construed, Heidegger’s violent interpretation allows for new insights to be derived from Sophocles’ Antigone; insights inaccessible to traditional or philologically ‘correct’ commentaries and readings. From this perspective Heidegger offers an extra-ordinary interpretation of the first stasimon, for he defies and challenges customary accounts of Antigone, thus managing to foster a radically new approach to the text. Conversely, considered in a more negative light, the degree to which Heidegger’s violent interpretation corresponds to what is actually contained in the first stasimon becomes highly questionable. By introducing foreign notions into the text and ‘wrongly’ translating it, one could argue he obscures and drastically distorts Antigone. Haar queries the legitimacy of Heidegger’s interpretation in Heidegger and the Essence of Man: …the ‘concept’ of deinon is at most merely latent, for the manifest content of the text is a straightforward enumeration of human activities. Certainly man is doomed to Hades, to death. The famous pantoporos aporos, ep’ouden erchetai, however, is surely overtranslated by ‘he comes to the nothing’ (kommt er zum Nichts). It is more likely that the common wisdom of the chorus states that when man fails to find his way (aporos), he ‘achieves nothing’! Apart from Parmenides, the nothing as ouden is rarely likely to be found to mean a route that cannot be taken. It is rather unlikely that Sophocles would have thought of the nothing as the face of being! The notion of the overwhelming seems foreign to the text of the chorus, which Heidegger always makes extreme demands on.170

168

IM, p. 172 Cf. IM, p. 173 170 Michel Haar, Heidegger and the Essence of Man, pp. 154-155 169


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Undoubtedly Haar’s criticism underscores a troubling aspect to Heidegger’s approach to interpreting Antigone. For if Haar’s criticism is to be accepted Heidegger is unquestionably culpable of both distorting Sophocles’ text and deliberately manipulating it towards his own ends. Yet despite Heidegger’s distortive reading of Sophocles, it cannot be denied that in the second phase of his interpretation, where he is arguably at his most violent, his thinking also proves to be most fruitful and insightful. Apart from encouraging us not to think of the sea and earth in a customary geographical or geological way171, Heidegger also undermines the prominent interpretation of the sequence of strophes as describing humanity’s development or evolution from being a hunter-gatherer to a founder of cities, and creator of culture. He declares: The fundamental error that underlies such ways of thinking is the opinion that the inception of history is primitive and backward, clumsy and weak. The opposite is true. The inception is what is most uncanny and mightiest. What follows is not a development but flattening down as mere widening out; it is the inability to hold on to the inception, it makes the inception innocuous and exaggerates it into a perversion of what is great, into greatness and extension purely in the sense of number and mass. The uncanniest is what it is because it harbours such an inception in which, from overabundance, everything breaks out at once into what is overwhelming and is to be surmounted (das Überwältigende, Zubewältigende). 172

The above passage represents a huge challenge to those disciplines and dominant modes of thought that view history as being a series of ‘progressive’ linear events, and it also brings into the question the use of common phrases such as ‘primitive peoples’ and ‘primitive cultures’. Furthermore, Heidegger opposes the common translation of the second strophe, in which humanity is accredited with inventing language or learning to speak, think and build cities, is a major misinterpretation. For Heidegger, this misinterpretation reveals the degree to which humanity is homeless.173 His claim is based on the translation of the Greek word 171

He writes: ‘But here, ‘sea’ is said as if for the first time; it is named in the wintry swells in which it constantly drags up its own depths and drags down into them…he gives the place, he heads out – and ventures to enter the superior power of the sea’s placeless flood.’ (IM, p. 164.) In ancient times there were those who held the belief that sailing was a violation of nature, as it separated lands for the purpose of keeping peoples apart. 172 IM, pp. 165-166. 173 Heidegger states: “The extent to which humanity is not at home in its own essence is betrayed by the human beings cherish of themselves as those who have

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edidaxato. In English this word is conventionally translated as ‘learned’ or ‘taught himself’. While Gregory Fried and Richard Polt acknowledge this in their translation of the Introduction to Metaphysics, they also feel it apt to translate it as ‘invented’. Contrary to this typical translation, Heidegger takes it to mean that humanity ‘found their way into the overwhelming and therein found themselves.’174* In his consideration of the closing strophe Heidegger highlights how deinon articulates something threefold, that is, deinon characterized as technƝ, as dikƝ and finally the interplay of both technƝ and dikƝ.175 According to Heidegger, the primary sense of technƝ is not to be linked with technology in its modern sense nor with art or skill. In contradistinction to these possible misconceptions of technƝ, he understands it as ‘knowledge’. He is careful to clarify what he means by ‘knowledge’, distancing himself from the conception of it as the result ‘of mere observations about something present at hand that was formerly unfamiliar’. Instead, he understands it as ‘…initially and constantly looking out beyond what, in each case, is directly present at hand.’ It also means ‘the ability to set Being into work as something that in each case is in such and such a way.”176 Unsurprisingly, he briefly goes on to relate his interpretation of technƝ to the work of art, for his lecture course “The Origin of the Work of Art” took place around the time of his Introduction to Metaphysics, that is, 1935-1936.177 These texts overlap as they both give rise to the seminal idea of the knowing struggle or strife of setting being ‘which was formerly closed off, into what appears as beings.’178 Moreover, technƝ as either technology or art is related to phusis whereby phusis does not emerge as an object of possession. Rather, phusis is considered a fundamentally indomitable order to which humanity is essentially linked.

invented and could have invented language and understanding, building and poetry.” (Ibid., p. 167) 174 Ibid.,, p. 167 175 Reflecting on the twofold essence of deinon, Miguel de Beistegui begs the following question: “Could the deinon be an early word for Ereignis, for the event through which man and being are brought together and reciprocally appropriated?” (cf. Miguel de Beistegui, Heidegger and the Political, dystopias, p. 123) 176 IM, p. 169 177 He remarks: ‘The work of art is work not primarily because it is worked, made, but because it puts Being to work in a being.’ (Ibid., p. 170) 178 Ibid., p. 171


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Heidegger continues to forge new, unconventional and untraditional translations of ancient Greek words by translating dikƝ as Fug or fittingness.179 He highlights the need for dikƝ to be understood in the sense of joint (Fuge) and structure or framework (Gefüge). In doing so he unsettles the notion of dikƝ conceived in terms of justice, in a moral sense. Continually diverging from standard translations, Heidegger’s thinking persistently wrestles with what is taken for granted as he endeavours to open up new paths of thought. Whether or not these paths of thought lead one astray or to deeper truth is another matter. For Heidegger, the idea of dikƝ refers to how things are joined together according to a certain order, and it is in this regard that it can be understood as a directive to which beings as a whole, including humanity must adhere. Deviating from its traditional political and ethical sense, Heidegger views Fug as signifying the originary power of the gathering of being, and as ‘the Being of beings as a whole.’180 For Heidegger, the fundamental basis of the human being as deinotaton dwells in the interplay between technƝ and dikƝ; they provide the two senses of deinon.181 It now becomes easier to grasp why he characterizes the human being as the uncanniest of all beings. TechnƝ involves bringing the uncanniness of dikƝ to a stand, for example in the work of art. Human beings are therefore the uncanniest of all beings, as in its very opposition to the overwhelming power of being they attempt to bring the uncanniness of being itself to a stand. However, at the point where humanity appears to have found its way amidst beings, human beings are undermined and exposed to the world as the site of their homelessness.182 Subjected to the overwhelming power of phusis, of being, humanity tries relentlessly to transform or manipulate being through technƝ in order to find in it the site of his/her home. But it is precisely through this struggle that the overwhelming reveals itself, leaving human

179

Usually dikƝ is translated as ‘justice’ in English, for example in the Cambridge edition of Antigone already cited. 180 IM, p. 177 181 He declares: “Both throw one out of the homely, each in a different way, the dangerousness of the Being that has been won or lost. Both, each differently, are menaced by perdition.” (Ibid., p. 172. He interprets perdition to mean the possibility of plummeting into what has no site or no way out) 182 Heidegger comments: “The knower fares into the midst of fittingness, draws Being into beings, and yet never surmounts the overwhelming. Thus the knower is thrown this way and that between fittingness and un-fittingness, between the noble and the wretched.” (Ibid., p. 172)

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beings homeless in the deepest and most troubling sense of the word. Heidegger remarks: For the poet, the assault of technƝ against dikƝ is the happening through which human beings become homeless. When one is put of the home in this way, the home first discloses itself as such. But at the same time, and only in this way, the alienating discloses itself, the overwhelming as such. […] This is nothing other than the happening of uncanniness.183

Also, the uncanny human being who ventures beyond the homely and who exceeds the limits of the ordinary is subsequently rejected or expelled from the hearth: Rising high over the site, losing the site is he for whom what is not, is, always, for the sake of daring Let him not become a companion at my hearth, nor let my knowledge share the delusions of the one who works such deeds.184

In the above extract one can see how the health, growth and shelter of the individual and the polis are interconnected. These words spoken by the chorus evoke what Creon says earlier on in his address to the Theban elders: ‘…our city is our safety.’185 For the ancients an individual to be without or exiled from their polis was considered something deeply disturbing, disquieting, and terrible. Philoctetes called such banishment a ‘living death’. According to Heidegger, it is not unusual for the chorus to reject the uncanny individual from the hearth because in their ‘…defensive attitude they are the direct and complete confirmation of the uncanniness of the human essence.’186 Heidegger only briefly alludes to the hearth in

183

Ibid., p. 178 Ibid., pp. 157-158, Fried and Polt in a footnote concerning these lines write: “A more conventional translation of the previous five lines would be: ‘If he follows the laws of the earth and the gods’ sworn justice he is high in the city (or: his city is high), but he is cast out from the city if he dwells with dishonour for the sake of daring.’ In the Cambridge edition these lines are translated as follows: “When he combines the laws of his country/With the justice of the gods he is sworn to,/His city stands tall./But he has no city at all/Who through reckless daring/Lives with evil./ May I not share a hearth/ Nor think like thoughts/ With him who does such things.” (Cf. Cambridge edition of Antigone, p. 29) 185 Sophocles, Antigone, Cambridge edition, p. 15 186 IM, p. 176 184


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the Introduction to Metaphysics but in Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’ it takes on far greater significance.187

Heidegger and the Hearth in Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’ In a series of lectures given in 1942 on Hölderlin’s hymn ‘The Ister’, Heidegger returned again to the first stasimon of Sophocles’ Antigone. On this occasion he focused not so much on the violent nature of the human being who attempts to coerce or compel being to come to a stand, but instead concentrated on that part of the chorus where it says: “Such shall not be entrusted to my hearth, /nor share their delusion with my knowing, /who put such a thing to work”.188 In this later series of lectures on Sophocles’ Antigone, Heidegger recognized that there was another way of being in the world open to humanity than the violent venture against the overwhelming power of being. The hearth was central to this alternative way of being in the world. Heidegger did acknowledge the hearth in 1935 but he paid it scant regard. Approximately seven years later he would consider the hearth essential to the meaning of the tragedy. George Steiner describes the significance of the hearth in Antigone, when he writes: “The hearth is a more ancient, familial focus than the ʌóȜȚc. It tells of an earthly centrality and of the feminine rites and custodies so resonant in the person of Antigone (in the ancient Mediterranean pantheon, the divinity which presides over the hearth is feminine).”189 In a similar vein Heidegger interpreted the hearth as the site

187

In a beautifully written passage Heidegger describes the hearth in the following way: “What is meant by this word concerning the ‘hearth’? The hearth is the site of being-homely, ʌĮȡȑıĲȚȠȢ (from ʌĮȡȐ and ȑıĲȓĮ: ȑıĲȓĮ is the hearth of the house, the locale at which there stand the gods of the hearth. What is essential to the hearth, however, is the fire in the manifoldness of its essence, which essentially prevails as lighting, illuminating, warming, nourishing, purifying, refining, glowing. The word ȑıĲȓĮ is derived from a root meaning ‘to radiate’ and ‘to burn’. In all the temples of the gods and in all sites of human habitation, this fire has its secure locale and, as this locale, gathers around it all that properly occurs (sich ereignet) and is bestowed. Through this fire, the hearth is the enduring ground and determinative middle – the site of all sites, as it were, the homestead pure and simple, toward which everything presences alongside and together with everything else and first is.” (TI, p. 105) 188 Ibid, p. 96 189 George Steiner, Antigones, p. 255

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of the homely.190 He associates it with the goddess Hestia191 and with being itself. Heidegger comments: ‘The hearth is the word for being, it is that appearing that is named in Antigone’s word and that determines everything, even beyond the gods.’192 For Heidegger, the hearth/the homely (das Heimische) and the unhomely/the uncanny stand in close proximity within one another. He recognizes a reciprocal interplay or exchange between the two, however, it is indeterminate.193 The indeterminate nature of the relationship is explained by Dallmayr who states that the unhomely human being or the condition of homelessness can signify “either stark oblivion and denial of home or else a journey toward homecoming guided by ‘remembrance of being and belongingness to the hearth.’”194 Heidegger himself makes a distinction between an inappropriate state of unhomeliness/homelessness and one that is proper to human beings.195 He regarded Sophocles’ tragedy as dealing with the latter type of homelessness. Furthermore, despite Antigone’s expulsion from the hearth by Creon and the Theban elders, 190

Cf. TI, p. 114 Heidegger says of Hestia: “She is the middle of all steadfast constancy and presence – that which essentially prevails in being, that which the Greeks experience in the sense of constant presence.” (TI, p. 113) Miguel de Beistegui draws on an intriguing interpretation of the significance of hestia or the hearth formulated by Vernant. He remarks: “…Vernant suggests that the hestia or the hearth of the Greek home be compared to the mast of a ship, solidly anchored in the deck, yet standing up straight and pointing toward the sky, much in the same way in which, while deeply rooted in the earth, the flame of the hearth elevates itself toward the highest spheres of the cosmos through a hole in the roof of the home, thus establishing communication and continuity between the terrestrial abode and the world of the gods, thus bringing sky and earth together in a single gesture.” (Cf. Heidegger and the Political, p. 139) 192 TI, p. 120. He continues: “Being is not some thing that is actual, but that which determines what is actual in its potential for being, and determines what is actual in its potential for being, and determines especially the potential for human beings to be; that potentiality for being in which the being of humans is fulfilled: being unhomely in becoming homely.” 193 He writes: “Together with the hearth, however, the closing words name the homely and also tell of being unhomely, because they tell of a belonging to the homely and of not being homely of the unhomely one. All this indeed remains indeterminate.” (Ibid., p. 121) 194 Fred Dallmayr, The Other Heidegger, p. 165 195 Cf. TI, p. 117. In relation to the inappropriate type of unhomely human being, he writes: “The unhomely one shall not be someone homely, so long as they stick merely and solely to their being unhomely and thus let themselves be driven about amid beings, without any constancy.” (Ibid., p. 117) 191


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Heidegger believes she adheres to another truth; one determined ‘beyond the upper and lower gods’. For Heidegger, her adherence to a truth that exists beyond all divinities means Antigone can be understood as ‘the poem of becoming homely in being unhomely’. 196 Whereas in the Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger had depicted the violent man as the ‘uncanniest of the uncanny’, in 1942 he would come to identify Antigone as the ‘uncanniest’. Unlike the violent and adventurous man who was compelled to go beyond the confines of the home, Antigone was unhomely because in spite of her state of homelessness she managed to retain a remembrance of the homely. The notion of thoughtful remembrance (Andenken) is pivotal to Heidegger’s text, especially in terms of what has been forgotten, that is, the forgotten home, homeland and the forgotten mystery of the origin.197 The safeguarding and nurturing of thoughtful remembrance is crucial for Heidegger in an age dominated by modern technology and held under the sway of Gestell (Enframing). As the most unhomely one, Antigone represents the possibility of rupturing forgetfulness through “‘thoughtful remembrance’ [‘Andenken’] of being and through a belonging to the hearth.”198 In his series of lectures on Hölderlin’s hymn ‘The Ister’, Heidegger came to see thoughtful remembrance, and remembrance of being and what is homely as denoting the authentic struggle. This struggle takes precedence over the violencedoing of adventurous man found in Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics. In this regard, the way of the hearth and its feminine overtones, coupled with its sense of receptivity and recollection replace the violent-venturing forth and masculine charged interpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone evident in the Introduction to Metaphysics. For Heidegger, the import of thoughtful remembrance is intrinsically linked with the motif of ‘homecoming’, a motif central to Hölderlin’s poetry. The Hölderlinian type of homecoming envisaged by Heidegger entails a return to the mystery of the origin, and the preparation for the

196

Cf. Ibid., p. 116 and p. 121. Heidegger explains this point in greater detail, when he writes: “Antigone assumes as what is fitting that which is destined to her from the realm of whatever prevails beyond the higher gods (Zeus) and beyond the lower gods. Yet this refers neither to the dead, nor to her blood-relationship with her brother. What determines Antigone is that which first bestows ground and necessity upon the distinction of the dead and the priority of blood. What that is, Antigone, and that also means the poet, leaves without a name.” (Ibid., p. 117) 197 Cf. TI, p. 115 198 Ibid., p. 115

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arrival of new unknown gods.199 Moreover, the arrival of these new unknown gods signifies the end of the history of productionist metaphysics and the beginning of a new historical epoch. According to Heidegger, the completion of Western metaphysics signals the possibility of the West returning to a renewed and rehabilitated sense of its origin, from which a new destiny or Geschick of being can unfold. Having explicated Heidegger’s interpretation of the uncanny (unheimlich) nature of the human being in both the Introduction to Metaphysics and the series of lectures given on Hölderlin’s hymn ‘The Ister’ further questions arise in relation to his understanding of the human being and humanity. For instance, does the first stasimon on which Heidegger bases his interpretation of humanity provide an adequate account of being-human? In the present investigation, this stasimon is deemed profoundly inadequate. Its inadequacy leads me to believe that it is not Creon who Antigone should feel most aggrieved with, but rather the chorus of Theban elders who articulated such a rudimentary and superficial understanding of the human being. Although Heidegger’s interpretation of Antigone should be commended for the astonishing manner in which he ventures into the ‘unsaid’ of the text, and for his ability to bring to light totally unexpected insights, it is also susceptible to criticism. For what Heidegger manages to procure from or project into Antigone, and what Sophocles himself articulates are very different things. As has already been mentioned, Sophocles description of the human being in the first stasimon relates to the adventures, exploits and achievements of humanity. Enumerating the skills and capabilities of the human being, Sophocles speaks of how man sails the most tempestuous of seas, ploughs the land, entraps birds and other wild animals, catches the fish of the sea with nets, subdues wild beasts, speaks, thinks, builds cities and invents cures to stave off illnesses. However, this Sophoclean description or account of the human being requires radical revising if a more authentic understanding of humanity is to emerge. In order to present an alternative understanding of the human being to the one found in the first stasimon, I turn to a piece by John Moriarty entitled ‘Deinanthropus, A New First Stasimon’. In this extraordinary text, Moriarty not only outlines the basis for a new conception of humanity but he also sets about articulating how human beings may safely accommodate their inner immensities. The focus here will be primarily based on Moriarty’s 199

Cf. Heidegger’s lectures on Hölderlin’s ‘Homecoming’ (EHP, pp. 24-50) and the lecture on ‘Remembrance’, EHP, pp. 102-174). This theme will be explored more fully in the final two chapters.


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rehearsal of fifteen mahavakayas or great sayings, which he believes make redundant the first stasimon of Sophocles’ Antigone.200

The Human Being as Deinanthropus and the Need for a New First Stasimon ...one never wants to put man into question, i.e, put oneself into question – perhaps because one is secretly not at all that fully certain of the anthropological glory of man.

‘Deinanthropus, A New First Stasimon’ was the original title for a paper John Moriarty intended to present but subsequently didn’t at a conference at the University of Oslo in June 2004.201 However, it was later to be included in a work entitled Slí Na Fírinne.202 In order to open a way into this text one might pose the question: What does the term ‘deinanthropus’ mean? Some sense of what this term means can be gathered from looking back to the early 1800s when fossils began to be examined in more methodical and scientific fashion. These fossils were classified into categories known as phyla, genera and species. The responsibility to designate a name to an extinct and massive sized lizard fell to Richard Owen of the Natural History Museum of London who united the Greek word ‘deinos’, meaning terrible with another Greek word ‘saurus’ meaning lizard, and then shortened the resulting compound to make the word ‘dinosaur’. Nevertheless, ‘deinos’ or ‘deinon’ doesn’t only mean terrible, it also means uncanny, violent, strange, inordinate, wonder, that and more. When this word is combined with anthropus, meaning the human in both an essential and general sense, then the noun ‘deinanthropus’ is formed and the adjective ‘deinanthropic’ comes into being, implying that the human being is everything that the ‘deinon’ signifies, that is, uncanny, terrible, violent, strange, inordinate, a wonder and more.203 The term ‘deinanthropus’ not only provides a new way of naming the human being, more significantly it points the way towards a greater understanding and appreciation of the inner vastness and perilous 200

CP, p. 62 The theme for conference was entitled: ‘Humanism for the 21st Century: Perspectives East and West.’ The paper he was meant to deliver but never did can be found on the internet at: www.sum.uio.no/research/changing_attitudes/humanism/index.html. 202 Cf. Moriarty’s ‘Deinanthropus, A New First Stasimon’, pp. 96-111 203 Cf. John Moriarty, Invoking Ireland, The Lilliput Press, Dublin 2005, p.214. 201

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immensities present within the human being. Although Moriarty is coining a new word and with it a new conception of humanity, it is not to be considered completely novel. For his conception of deinanthropus retains insight into the nature of the human being attained, endured and suffered by many extra-ordinary individuals throughout history. However, their knowledge and insights have been persistently ignored and avoided. Perhaps humanity has consistently shied away and overlooked these insights for fear that the abyssal waters they harbour may one day wash away or render unstable the security of the human psyche, provoke madness or destroy one’s sense of civil identity, as happened in the Bible to Job and Nebuchadnezzar, and as happened to Kurtz in the Heart of darkness, when he journeyed down the primeval river. In his exposition of the deinanthropic nature of the human being, Moriarty draws inspiration from what Jacob Boehme has to say in Dialogues on the Supersensible Life. In these Dialogues Boehme declares: ‘In man is all whatsoever the sun shines upon or/Heaven contains, also hell and all the deeps.’ Moriarty draws attention to the terrifying truth inherent in these words: Only beings who have hell in them can make life a hell-upon-earth for others. Only beings who have heaven, earth, hell and all the deeps in them can deepen hell. And the big achievement of European humanity in the twentieth century is simply that: we deepened hell. Auschwitz is a tenth circle of hell that Virgil and Dante didn’t go down into and that for the reason that it didn’t yet exist.204

As was mentioned previously, Moriarty identifies fifteen mahavakayas or great sayings, which he claims overturn humanity’s traditional sense of itself, and collectively enact a Copernican revolution within anthropology. This revolution involves moving from a Ptolemaic to a Boehmean sense of human inwardness, “…from a sense of human inwardness as bounded and therefore containable and controllable by ego and will to a sense of it as more or less boundless and therefore un-controllable by ego and will.”205 The fifteen mahavakayas are as follows: The Psalmist who says: I am fearfully and wonderfully made.206

204

Moriarty, ‘Deinanthropus, A New First Stasimon’, p. 99 Ibid., p. 99 206 A Psalm of David, Psalm 139.14 in The Bible, King James Version, Iowa: World Bible Publishers, 1982, p. 604. 205


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Heraclitus who says: You would not find out the boundaries of the soul, even by travelling along every path, so deep a measure does it have.207 Jacob Boehme who says: In man is all whatsoever the sun shines upon or heaven contains, also hell and all the deeps.208 Sir Thomas Browne who says: There is all Africa and her prodigies in us.209 William Law who says: Thy natural senses cannot possess God or unite thee to Him; nay, thy inward faculties of understanding, will and memory can only reach after God, but cannot be the place of His habitation in thee. But there is a root or depth in thee from whence all these faculties come forth as lines from a centre, or as branches from the body of a tree. This depth is called the centre, the fund or bottom of the soul. This depth is the unity, the eternity – I had almost said the infinity – of the soul; for it is so infinite that nothing can satisfy it or give it any rest but the infinity of God.210 William Blake who says: In your bosom you bear your heaven and earth and all you behold.211 Wordsworth who says: Not chaos, not The darkest pit of lowest Erebus, Nor aught of blinder vacancy scooped out By help of dreams – can breed such fear and awe As fall upon us often when we look Into our Minds, into the mind of Man – 212

207

Cf. The Presocratic Philosophers, ed. G.S. Kirk, J.E. Raven and M. Schofield, Cambridge: CUP, 1993, p. 203. 208 Jacob Boehme, Dialogues on the Supersensible Life, trans. William Law, Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing, 1992, p. 34. 209 Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici; Hydriotaphia; and the Letter to a Friend, New York: Scribner, Welford, and Co., 1869, p. 22. 210 William Law, The Spirit of Prayer in Liberal and Mystical Writings of William Law, Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing, 2006, p. 14. 211 William Blake, ‘Jerusalem’ in Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, London: Nonesuch Press, 1927, p. 692. 212 William Wordsworth, Wordsworth: Poetical Works, The Excursion, ed. Thomas Hutchinson., Oxford: OUP, 1904, p. 590

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213 Charles Baudelaire, ‘L’ Homme et la Mer’, Les Fleurs du Mal, Paris: Librairie Alphonse Lemerre, 1917, p. 33. The English translation reads: “Free man, you will always cherish the sea!/The sea is your mirror; you contemplate your soul/In the infinite unrolling of its billows;/Your mind is an abyss that is no less bitter.” (trans. by William Aggeler in The Flowers of Evil, Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954.) 214 GS, p. 116 215 Ralph Waldo Emerson, cf. Stephen Whicher’s Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Organic Anthology, Boston: Houghton, 1957, p. 406 216 Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,’ The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W. H. Gardner & N. H. MacKenzie, Oxford: OUP 1970, p. 100 217 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, New York: Penguin Books, 1985, p. 515.


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D.H. Lawrence who says: There is the other universe, of the heart of man, that we know nothing of, that we dare not explore. A strange grey distance separates our pale mind still from the pulsing continent of the heart of man. Fore-runners have barely landed on the shore and no man knows, no woman knows the mystery of the interior when darker still than Congo or Amazon flow the heart’s rivers of fullness, desire and distress.218 Joseph Conrad who says: The mind of man is capable of anything – because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future.219 Rilke who says: However vast the outer space may be, yet with all its sidereal distances, it hardly bears comparison with the dimension, with the depth dimension of our inner being, which does not even need the spaciousness of the universe to be within itself almost unfathomable.220

These fifteen statements testify to the illimitable depths of the human being. In doing so they not only undermine and call into question the significance of the first stasimon but they also challenge all cultures and civilisations, which seek to legislate for human beings on the erroneous basis that human being is anthropus when the truth is that it is deinanthropus. Although it would be possible to engage in a sustained discussion of any one of these mahavakayas, I will concentrate, if only in brief, on Nietzsche’s great saying in The Gay Science. He writes: “I have discovered for myself that the old human and animal life, indeed the entire prehistory and past of all sentient being, works on, loves on, hates on, thinks on in me.” Nietzsche has uncovered something astonishing here. He has discovered within himself that all of life going back through the Precambrian, Palaeozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic continues to work on in him, love on in him, hate on in him and think on in him. This implies trilobite, dinosaur and crocodile are all in some way still active within him, meaning the human mind is Silurian, Jurassic and Eocene. Heidegger would have huge difficulties with the claim Nietzsche makes in The Gay Science, for he would strongly question whether or not animal life had the ability or capacity to love, to hate or to think on in a human being. Is humanity’s animality capable of such things? 218

D.H. Lawrence, ‘The Heart of Man’, in D.H. Lawrence, The Complete Poems, London: Penguin Books, 1964, pp. 606-607 219 Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness, London: Hesperus Press, 2002, p. 41 220 Cf. PLT, p. 126

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By way of coming to grips with the enormity of Nietzsche’s insight, Moriarty has recourse to an infamous biologist and Darwinian named Haechel. Haechel put forth a widely discredited theory claiming ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, that is, in the womb the human being undergoes the entire course of evolution, from being a minute protozoan, to being fish, to being amphibian, to being reptile, to being mammal, to being simian and finally to being human. Yet, according to Moriarty, Haechel’s ill reputed theory could be of ad hoc value in our attempts to understand ourselves. He states: ‘Certain it is that the smell brain of the first mammal is alive and well in us. Also, we only have to part our lips to see our simian dentition, or simian eye-teeth.’221 This suggests human beings have emerged through these previous evolutionary stages, and it is therefore possible to regress to one or other of these former stages. Moriarty declares that Greek myths know what we are at times unwilling to accept. A Greek myth such as the Minotaur myth, in which Queen Pasiphae regresses to bovine all-fours to mate with a bull, articulates knowledge of humanity’s primal heritage. However, he maintains that humanity’s primal heritage constitutes only a fraction of what human beings are. Beyond Nietzsche’s insight into what he phylogenetically is, there is Jacob Boehme’s discovery that heaven and hell and all the deeps are within us. If this is the case, it indicates that there exist immeasurable, parabiological depths within the human being. This in turn would suggest that it is impossible for humanity to be at home in this earthly realm. For according to William Law, the soul ‘is so infinite that nothing can satisfy it or give it any rest but the infinity of God.’ From Law’s perspective, a homecoming for humanity could only take place by being re-united with God. In a similar vein to Law, humanity’s true sense of ‘home’ as it is understood by many traditional metaphysical and religious movements and discussed in the opening of chapter one, relates to the Divine or to a supersensible realm. Is this the case? Does humanity need to undergo a homecoming to Divine ground? As will be shown in the following chapters the sense of homecoming that Hölderlin and Heidegger attempt to articulate differs greatly from any traditional metaphysical sense of homecoming. For Hölderlin and Heidegger, the notion of homecoming predominately entails a homecoming to one’s homeland and ‘becoming homely and dwelling upon the earth.’222 Moreover, in thoughtful dialogue with Hölderlin’s poetry, Heidegger pursues a non-metaphysical sense of homecoming. Meaning, he does not 221 222

Moriarty, ‘Deinanthropus, A New First Stasimon’, p. 105 TI, p. 31


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seek out a supersensible realm or pursue a homecoming in opposition to the Christian doctrine of a life beyond. That is, a homecoming to this life or earth alone. In a seminal passage from his lecture course on Hölderlin’s hymn ‘The Ister’ he attempts to clarify the meaning of this nonmetaphysical type of homecoming: Journeying determines our coming to be at home upon the earth. If one were to interpret the essence of this journey upon the earth as a doctrine pertaining to this life, in contrast to the Christian doctrine of a life beyond, then one would remain wedded to the metaphysical realm and stuck in a mere reverse. […] Hölderlin’s ‘earth’, however, which is presumed to be on this side of life, is not ‘earthly’ in the Christian or metaphysical sense if only because the earth is divine. And it is divine, again not in the Christian or metaphysical sense of being created by God. Becoming homely and dwelling upon the earth are of another essence.223

Before explicating Heidegger’s sense of homecoming, I will enquire into why he so fervently pursued this idea or motif. Taking this approach means the homeless state of humanity must be first addressed. In the following two chapters I will explore Heidegger’s confrontation with humanity’s homeless condition. Consequently, his writings on nihilism and modern technology come to prominence.

223

Ibid., p. 31

CHAPTER FOUR CONFRONTING NIHILISM

For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that has been growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.1 —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power …to think ‘nihilism’ means to stand in that wherein every act and every reality of this era in Western history receives its time and space, its ground and its background, its means and ends, its order and justification, its certainty and its insecurity – in a word, its ‘truth’.2 —Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche Vol.4

Nihilism and its Origin as a Concept What is nihilism? The pre-Nietzschean meaning of nihilism is subject to much debate. It is claimed Friedrich H. Jacobi first used the term ‘nihilism’ as a philosophical concept in a letter to Fichte in 1799.3 According to Jacobi, Fichtean idealism is nihilism. Simon Critchley explains why Jacobi makes such an assertion by illuminating how the deflationary effects of Kant’s critique of metaphysics not only undermined the possibility of human beings having cognitive access to the speculative objects of classical metaphysics, for example, God and the soul, but also destabilized the possibility of knowing things-in-themselves and the ground of the self.4 Jacobi’s primary proposition is that Fichte’s reworking 1

WP, p. 3 N. IV, p.10 3 Cf. N. IV, p. 3, where Heidegger makes the following reference to Jacobi’s employment of the notion of nihilism: “Friedrich H. Jacobi, Werke (Leipzig, 1816), III, 44; from the section ‘Jacobi to Fichte’, which first appeared in the fall of 1799. I am grateful to Dr. Otto Pöggeler, who provided the reference to Jacobi while working on the proofs of the present book.” 4 Cf. Simon Critchley’s Very Little-Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, London: Routledge, 1997, p. 3. Henceforth, Very Little-Almost Nothing. 2

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of Kantian transcendental idealism inevitably leads to a bankrupt sense of egoism which has no knowledge of objects or subjects in themselves. Hence, it is nihilistic as it permits the existence of nothing outside or apart from the ego, and yet the ego is itself considered nothing but a product of the ‘free power of imagination’. Critchley cites a passage from Jacobi, where he rails against the implications of Fichtean idealism: “If the highest upon which I can reflect, what I can contemplate, is my empty and pure, naked and mere ego, with its autonomy and freedom: then rational selfcontemplation, then rationality is for me a curse—I deplore my existence.”5 In opposition to Fichtean idealism, Jacobi argues for what he calls an ‘Unphilosophie’, claiming that beyond the philosophical or scientific fixation with truth (die Wahrheit), there exists the sphere of the true (das Wahie), which is only available through faith or the heart. Similar to ‘Pascal’s wager’, Jacobi speaks of a choice between Fichtean idealism, which is inherently nihilistic, since it offers knowledge of nothing outside of the ego’s projections, and God.6 Jacobi writes: But the human being has such a choice, this single one: Nothingness or a God. Choosing Nothingness, he makes himself into a God; that is, he makes an apparition into God because if there is no God, it is impossible that man and everything which surrounds him is not merely an apparition. I repeat: God is, and is outside of me, a living being, existing in itself, or I am God. There is no third.7

Besides the philosophical sense of nihilism discussed by Jacobi there is also an important kind of ‘Russian nihilism’ or what Nietzsche might call ‘nihilism à la Petersburg’.8 The works of Russian writers such as Ivan Turgenev and Fydor Dostoyevsky are crucial in this regard. In Turgenev’s famous work Fathers and Sons, the hero Evgeny Vasil’evich Bazarov is portrayed as a man of science, a member of the new generation who has decided that at least in theory, nothing in the universe lies beyond the 5

Cf. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, ‘Brief an Fichte’ in Appelation an das Publikum. Dokumente zum Atheismusstreit Jena 1798/99, Reclam, Leipzig, 1987, p. 164, and Ernst Behler in Philosophy of German Idealism, ed. E. Behler, New York: Continuum, 1987, p. 153. (Found in Simon Critchley’s Very Little-- Almost Nothing, p. 4) 6 Cf. Simon Critchley’s Very Little-Almost Nothing, p. 4 7 Heinrich Jacobi, ‘Brief an Fichte’ in Appelation an das Publikum. Dokumente zum Atheismusstreit Jena 1798/99, p. 168 8 GS, p. 289. Michael Gillespie offers a good account of nihilism as it arose in Russia. (Cf. Nihilism Before Nietzsche, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, pp. 135-73.)

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explanatory power of the empirical method. Bazarov is depicted as a nihilist and the character Arkady explains to members of the older generation (the ‘fathers’), what a nihilist is by defining him/her as a person who approaches everything from a critical point of view, someone who does not bow down to any authority and who does not accept a single principle on faith. In a seminal passage from Father and Sons, Turgenev defines nihilism: ‘He’s a nihilist.’ ‘Eh?’ inquired Nikolai Petrovitch, while Pavel Petrovitch lifted a knife in the air with a small piece of butter on its tip, and remained motionless. ‘He’s a nihilist’, repeated Arkady. ‘A nihilist’, said Nikolai Petrovitch. ‘That’s from the Latin, nihil, nothing, as far as I can judge; the word must mean a man who…who accepts nothing?’ ‘Say, ‘who respects nothing’’ put in Pavel Petrovitch, and he set to work on the butter again. ‘Who regards everything from the critical point of view’, observed Arkady. ‘Isn’t that just the same thing?’ inquired Pavel Petrovitch. ‘No, it’s not the same thing. A nihilist is a man who does not bow down before any authority, who does not take any principle on faith, whatever reverence that principle may be enshrined in.’9

A significant sense of nihilism is also to be found in a number of Dostoyevsky’s works. In The Karamazov Brothers nihilism comes most notably to the fore through the character Ivan Karamazov, who observes that without God or belief in an immortal soul, ‘nothing would be immoral’ and ‘everything would be permitted.’10 Besides these 19th century literary forms of nihilism, there is also evidence of a political strain of Russian nihilism. Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky is an important figure in this regard, as in the novel What Is to Be Done?, the main characters behave in accordance with a peculiar amalgam of utilitarianism and enlightened egoism, thereby rendering traditional ethical values defunct. In The Aesthetic Relation of Art to Reality (1855), Chernyshevsky denied the existence of beauty as an autonomous quality in art. He tried to subvert or undermine traditional aesthetic values by claiming that art is not the expression of some absolute conception of 9

Ivan S. Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, trans. Constance Garnett, New York: Modern Library, 1950, p. 24. 10 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Karamazov Brothers, trans. Ignat Avsey, New York: OUP, 1994, p. 87.

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beauty but instead represents the interests of a certain class at a particular point in history. Critchley maintains that beginning with Chernyshevsky one could construct a trajectory of Russian nihilism that would include Bakunin’s anarchistic critique of the state, Nechaev’s Jacobinism and Lenin’s Promethean Bolshevism.11 What distinguishes Russian forms of nihilism from German forms is that the former types take on a predominately socio-political set of meanings, while the latter types relate predominately to metaphysical, epistemological and existential concerns. It is the German sense of nihilism that I will be concentrating on here. Moreover, I will chiefly focus on what nihilism means for Nietzsche and Heidegger; how they sought to reveal the origins of this pervasive phenomenon, and how it relates to humanity’s state of homelessness.

Defining Nihilism The main concern of this investigation lies with the problem of homelessness in Heidegger. For Heidegger, homelessness as the coming destiny of the world is intrinsically linked to nihilism. It could even be argued that homelessness is synonymous with nihilism in Heidegger’s texts. Therefore, to disclose the essence of nihilism could be considered a means of revealing the essence of homelessness. However, as will be shown in the course of the enquiry, to reveal the essence of nihilism is an arduous, perhaps impossible task. To proclaim the era one lives through derives its ‘truth’ from nihilism, as Heidegger has done, is in many ways to offer a thoroughly critical assessment of that era. Traditionally thought, nihilism represents the negation of inherited religious, moral, aesthetic and socio-political values, it implies a profound severance with the past and an aversion to all that is rooted in tradition. Heidegger deems it essential to confront nihilism, though the nature of this confrontation is quite complex and requires careful explication. In volume four of Nietzsche, he discusses what a ‘confrontation’ entails: “Confrontation means meditation on the truth that is up for decision, for a decision not made by us, but one that Being itself, as the history of Being, makes for our own history.”12 Here the strange idea emerges that being makes a decision for us, and this prompts us to raise the question of whether or not this decision involves humanity. However, from what Heidegger says elsewhere, particularly in his “Letter 11 12

Simon Critchley, Very Little-- Almost Nothing, p. 5 N. IV, p. 59


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on ‘Humanism’” it can be concluded that being does in some way require humanity. He states: Human beings do not decide whether and how beings appear, whether and how God and the gods or history and nature come forward into the clearing of being, come to present and depart. The advent of beings lie in the destiny of being. But for humans it is ever a question of what is fitting in their essence that corresponds to such destiny; for in accord with this destiny the human being as ek-isting has to guard the truth of being. The human being is the shepherd of being.13

If it is the case that humanity is the shepherd and the guardian of the truth of being, then humanity is compelled to confront nihilism rigorously and unflinchingly. For Heidegger interprets nihilism to signify the ‘history in which there is nothing to Being itself.’14 Heidegger does confront nihilism, and he does so with exceptional thoroughness, most notably in volume four of Nietzsche, “Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God is Dead’” (1943) and “On the Question of Being” (1951). It is primarily through his reading of Nietzsche that Heidegger both encounters and develops his understanding of nihilism. Nietzsche is especially significant to Heidegger’s later thought, as his critique of the Platonic-Christian tradition provides a springboard for Heidegger’s investigation into nihilism. More importantly, Heidegger came to regard nihilism as culminating in Nietzsche’s mode of valuative thinking. Heidegger procured from Nietzsche’s critical appraisal of Western metaphysics from Plato to Hegel vital insight into the nihilistic tendency present in all metaphysical thinking hitherto. He also credited Nietzsche with being the first to identify nihilism as a historical movement in his declaration of the existence of a ‘European nihilism.’15 This was not just the recognition of one historical movement among others. According to Heidegger, nihilism is “the fundamental movement of the history of the West. Its roots are so deep that its development can entail only world catastrophes. Nihilism is the world-historical movement of the peoples of 13

PM, p. 252 N. IV, p. 201 15 Ibid., p. 4. Heidegger notes: “For Nietzsche, though, the word nihilism means something substantially ‘more’. Nietzsche speaks about ‘European nihilism’. He does not mean the positivism that arose in the mid-nineteenth century and spread throughout Europe. ‘European’ has a historical significance here, and means as much as ‘Western’ in the sense of Western history. Nietzsche uses nihilism as the name for the historical movement that he was the first to recognize and that already governed the previous century while defining the century to come…”. 14

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the earth who have been drawn into modernity’s arena of power.”16 This historical movement comes most poignantly to the fore with Nietzsche’s infamous statement, ‘God is dead’, first uttered in the section entitled ‘The Madman’ of The Gay Science.17 The murder of God at the hands of humanity signals a profound crisis, as all the values that God was sponsor and guarantor of become redundant. Consequently, traditional values are emptied and divested of meaning; they lose their vitality and are no longer able to exert any influence on humanity. Moral values in particular become threatened with the rise of nihilism. It is with this in mind that Nietzsche offers a definition of nihilism, in The Will to Power: “What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; ‘why?’ finds no answer.”18 Nietzsche’s interpretation of nihilism makes apparent its destructive nature. For if the highest values become meaningless individuals cease to derive any purpose or potency from them. Through the devaluation of the highest values hitherto individuals begin to realize, ‘Existence has no goal or end.’19 While Nietzsche’s definition of nihilism can be established with a certain degree of confidence it is more difficult to ascertain what meaning Heidegger ascribes to it. The difficulty of articulating Heidegger’s position is compounded by the fact that he openly renounces the possibility of defining nihilism. He offers two reasons for our inability to determine the essence of nihilism. Firstly, in Nietzsche IV (lecture course of 1940) he remarks: “If the essence of nihilism is the history in which there is nothing to Being itself, then neither can the essence of nihilism be experienced and thought as long as thinking and for thinking there is indeed nothing to Being itself.”20 Here it is proposed that as long as our thinking is blind to the question of being the essence of nihilism will remain unthought. Yet, even when the question of being becomes central to the problem of understanding nihilism, as in “On the Question of Being”, Heidegger still maintains it is impossible to define. In “On the Question of Being”, he states: “Whether a discussion of the line can furnish ‘a good definition of nihilism’, and whether it may even strive for such a thing, becomes questionable for a thinking that is precursory. A discussion of ‘the line’ must attempt something else. This explicit renunciation of a definition appears to relinquish the rigor of 16

OBT, p. 163 GS, p. 181 18 WP, p. 4 19 Ibid., p. 13 20 N.IV, p. 203 17


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thought.”21 I will provide an exposition of ‘the line’ and its relation to nihilism at a later stage. What is important to glean from this statement at the present moment is Heidegger’s belief that the precursory thinking he pursues does not allow him to propose a definition of nihilism. Nevertheless, Heidegger does provide an interpretation of what the essence of nihilism is, and he does so frequently in his lecture courses on Nietzsche in the late thirties and early forties, the essay “Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God is Dead’” and his ‘Letter On “Humanism”’. He speaks of the essence of nihilism in various ways, for instance he talks of it in terms of the ‘oblivion of Being’22, the ‘abandonment of Being’, the ‘forgetfulness of Being’23, the ‘concealment of Being’24, the ‘default’ and ‘staying away’ of being25 and as previously mentioned ‘the history in which there is nothing to Being itself’. It is thus evident that ‘being’ or more accurately speaking, ‘the oblivion of being’ is central to Heidegger’s interpretation of nihilism. What does the ‘oblivion of being’ signify? He sheds light on its meaning in “On the Question of Being”: People have tended to represent the ‘oblivion of being’ as though, to say it by way of an image, being were the umbrella that has been left sitting somewhere through the forgetfulness of some philosophy professor. Yet oblivion does not simply befall the essence of being, as something apparently separate from the latter. It belongs to the issue of being itself, prevails as a destiny of its essence. Correctly thought, oblivion, the concealing of the as yet unrevealed essence (in the verbal sense of essential unfolding) of being, shelters untapped treasures and is the promise of a find that awaits only the appropriate seeking.26

For Nietzsche, on the other hand, ‘being’ is an erroneous human construct, it is a value projected into the world to secure a meaningful existence for humanity. In The Will to Power, he declares: “Briefly: the categories 21

PM, p. 293. QB, p. 313 23 Ibid., p. 253 24 Ibid., p 313 25 Cf. N. IV, p. 216: “The essence of nihilism proper is Being in default of its unconcealment, which is as its own ‘It’, and which determines its ‘is’ in staying away.” 26 QB, p. 314. Derrida picks up on the interconnection between the leaving behind of the umbrella and the oblivion or forgetfulness of the question of being. He provides a fascinating exegesis of a fragment left behind by Nietzsche: ‘I have forgotten my umbrella’, cf. ‘I have forgotten my umbrella’ (‘J’ai oublié mon parapluie’) in Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles trans. Barbra Harlow, Chicago: University Of Chicago, 1978, pp. 122-143. 22

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‘aim’, ‘unity’, ‘being’ which we used to project some value into the world – we pull out again; so the world looks valueless.”27 In Twilight of the Idols, he concurs with Heraclitus’ understanding of ‘being’ as an ‘empty fiction’, he observes: ‘But Heraclitus will always be right in this, that being is an empty fiction.’28 Nietzsche’s demystification of and dismissiveness towards the notion of ‘being’, and Heidegger’s intense preoccupation with it, highlights brilliantly the central distinction between both their interpretations of nihilism. Nietzsche’s account of nihilism is founded upon the will to power (which rejects the notion of ‘being’ as a fallacious human invention), while Heidegger discerns nihilism on the basis of the truth of being. Fandozzi in Nihilism and Technology discusses the implication of this rift: “…for Heidegger, Nietzsche’s voluntarism is the consummation of a tradition which has been severed from Being. Metaphysical thinking, according to Heidegger, is founded upon this cleavage; originally as the separation between being and appearance, as established paradigmatically in Platonic thought.”29 The full ramifications of this separation between being and appearance brought about by metaphysics will be dealt with at a later stage. By making explicit the differences between Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s interpretation of nihilism the challenges involved in any analysis of it become apparent, and there dawns the realization of just how difficult it is ascertain its truth.

Nietzsche and Heidegger’s approach to Nihilism If the truth of nihilism is to be determined it is crucial to cultivate an understanding of how nihilism originated. Both Nietzsche and Heidegger aid us significantly in this regard by providing illuminating expositions of the origins of nihilism. However, prior to elucidating Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s thoughts on this subject matter, it is first necessary to bring to light how they both perceived and confronted nihilism. How one perceives nihilism must be addressed from the outset, for how it is perceived will inevitably influence any enquiry into its origins. Is nihilism to be viewed solely as a negative or destructive phenomenon? Is it to be equated with an illness or sickness that threatens humanity’s existence? Or if it is the case 27

WP, p. 13 TI (N), p. 46 29 Phillip R. Fandozzi, Nihilism And Technology (A Heideggerian Investigation), Washington: University Press of America Inc., 1983, p. 16. 28


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that there is no meaning or purpose to the universe and our existence in it, and an individual is fully conscious of this fact and does not attempt to avoid it, must not this individual’s nihilistic stance prove both courageous and healthy? Or is nihilism something that defies any simple classification whether positive or negative? Does the truth of nihilism extend beyond the remit of conceptual dichotomies? Does nihilism defy all forms of human conceptualization? Is its truth unthinkable? It is by asking these questions that I will attempt to discover how Nietzsche and Heidegger confront the phenomenon of nihilism. Nietzsche offers an ambiguous account of nihilism, portraying it as both a positive and negative phenomenon. He explicitly attests to its ambiguity in fragment 22 (Spring – Fall 1887) of The Will to Power: Nihilism. It is ambiguous: A. Nihilism as a sign of increased power of the spirit: as active nihilism. B. Nihilism as decline and recession of the power of the spirit: as passive nihilism.30

Although Nietzsche interprets nihilism in a predominately negative light, he does illumine its beneficial or positive aspects. For example, in fragment 112 (Spring – Fall 1887) of The Will to Power entitled ‘Overall insight’, he remarks: Actually, every major growth is accompanied by a tremendous crumbling and passing away: suffering, the symptoms of decline belong in times of tremendous advances; every fruitful movement of humanity has also created at the same time a nihilistic movement. It could be the sign of a crucial and most essential growth, of the transition to new conditions of existence, that the most extreme form of pessimism, genuine nihilism, would come into the world.31

Thus from a Nietzschean perspective nihilism can be viewed favourably as an occurrence that signals the advent of a great transformation and growth for humanity. Nonetheless, nihilism is primarily considered a destructive force in Nietzsche’s writings, and is something that one needs to overcome. This is especially evident in the preface to The Will to Power, where nihilism appears to be a preliminary stage to the founding and formation of new values, which would ultimately lead to the forging of the overman

30 31

WP, p. 17 Ibid., p. 69

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(Übermensch). As he says: “Not ‘mankind’ but overman is the goal!”32 And he further states: For one should make no mistake about the meaning of the title that this gospel of the future wants to bear. ‘The Will To Power’: Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values’– in this formulation a countermovement finds expression, regarding both principle and task; a movement that in some future will take the place of this perfect nihilism – but presupposes it, logically and psychologically, and certainly can come only after and out of it. For why has the advent of nihilism become necessary? Because the values we have hitherto thus draw their final consequence; because nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals – because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these ‘values’ really had. – We require, something, new values.”33

Nietzsche’s pointed recognition of nihilism, his critique of the highest values which have prevailed till now, and his passionate pursuit of the creation of new values is tantamount to a philosophical therapeia. He resembles a type of philosophical physician who provides a diagnosis for ailing humanity, with his detection of the symptoms and various strains of nihilism, his identification of its cause, that is, Christian-moral value judgments, and the provision of a cure through the founding of principles for new evaluations. The structure of The Will to Power reinforces this interpretation of Nietzsche as a philosophical physician with Book One entitled European Nihilism, Book Two: Critique Of The Highest Values Hitherto, Book Three: Principles Of A New Evaluation and Book Four: Discipline And Breeding, appearing in tandem with a diagnosis, prognosis and therapy. However, there exists a grave danger in portraying The Will to Power in this manner. It is hazardous to describe The Will to Power in this way because it is posthumous publication, and it is well known the extent to which the material has been manipulated. Many variations of The Will to Power have emerged since Frau Föster Nietzsche first published it in 1901. There has also been the Grossoktav edition (1911), the Musarion edition, the Kröner Taschen edition (1930) with Alfred Bäulmer’s postscript and the Würzbach version of 1940. In the ‘Editor’s Introduction’ to the English translation of The Will to Power, Walter Kaufmann discusses how the accepted version came to be based on a four-line draft (of up to twenty five), that Nietzsche was to reject. But since it only listed the titles for four planned divisions it allowed the editor the greatest degree 32 33

Ibid., p. 519 Ibid., pp. 3-4


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of freedom and was thus chosen.34 One must therefore be wary of depicting Nietzsche as a philosophical physician based on the format of The Will to Power. It is also too simplistic to conceive of him as someone whose singular goal was to undermine ‘the sick’ nihilist in preference of ‘the healthy’ overman who has overcome nihilism. Nietzsche is very much aware of the quandary that exists in distinguishing between the healthy and the sick. He comments in fragment 47 of The Will to Power (MarchJune 1888): Health and sickness are not essentially different, as the ancient physicians and some practitioners even today suppose. One must not make of them distinct principles or entities. […] In fact, there are only differences in degree between these two kinds of existence: the exaggeration, the disproportion, the nonharmony of the normal phenomena constitute the pathological state (Claude Bernard). Just as ‘evil’ can be considered as exaggeration, disharmony, disproportion, ‘the good’ may be a protective diet against the danger of exaggeration, disharmony and disproportion.35

Nietzsche seldom allows himself to found his philosophical arguments on traditionally held distinctions, such as between ‘health’ and ‘sickness’, and between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Instead, he attempts to elucidate the inherent difficulties which these conventional dichotomous concepts possess, while at the same time retaining them but semantically transformed. Heidegger broaches the problematical nature of how nihilism is to be confronted in the essay “On the Question of Being”. The essay originally entitled “Concerning ‘The Line’” was revised so as to reflect his ruminations on the oblivion of being. The essay was written in honour of Ernst Jünger’s sixtieth birthday in response to Jünger’s earlier essay “Across ‘The Line’” (Über die Linie). Heidegger’s reflections on ‘the line’ are central to the essay as it pertains to the manner in which he believes nihilism ought to be thought.

34

Cf. Walter Kaufmann, WP, in the ‘Editor’s Introduction’, he writes the following: “What needs to be said about the standard arrangement followed in the present translation I said in my Nietzsche in 1950: ‘To arrange the material, Frau Föster-Nietzsche chose a four-line draft left by her brother, and distributed the notes under its four headings. Nietzsche himself had discarded this draft, there are a dozen later ones, about twenty five in all; but none of these were briefer than this one which listed only the titles of the four projected parts and thus gave the editor the greatest possible freedom.” (WP, p. xviii) 35 Ibid., p. 27

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‘The line’ also known as the ‘zero meridian’ is representative of the fulfilment (Vollendung) of nihilism. The ‘zero’, ‘indicates the nothing, indeed an empty nothing. Where everything presses toward nothing, nihilism reigns.’36 As the fulfilment of nihilism, ‘the line’ marks and delineates a domain between two distinct world eras. Heidegger describes the alternative world eras open to humanity with the completion of nihilism in the following manner: “By this line will be decided whether the movement of nihilism comes to an end in a nihilistic nothing, or whether it is the transition to the realm of a ‘new turning of being’.37 Heidegger postulates the existence of two world eras that could emerge with the completion of nihilism. However, it calls for an educated guess to envisage what these different world eras would be. One possible world era that could come about through the completion of nihilism is an era in which nihilism has gained total domination. This we presume would lead to nihilism being prevalent in every aspect of human existence, and to the petering out of human existence into a ‘nihilistic nothing’. Alternatively, there exists the possibility of a world era defined by a ‘new turning of being’, in which humanity lets ‘Being itself be the Being it is’38, and has ‘experienced and thought Being itself in its truth’.39 But what are Heidegger’s criteria for positing these two possible world eras? He offers no argument nor provides any evidence for his assertion that there exists two possible world eras with the fulfilment of nihilism. Also, why should we restrict ourselves (as Heidegger does) to the consideration of only two possible world eras with the completion of nihilism? Is it not conceivable that a multitude of potential world eras could exist at this critical juncture? A deeper understanding of ‘the line’ and how it shapes the discourse on nihilism can be achieved by distinguishing between Jünger’s and Heidegger’s interpretations of it. This can be accomplished through an analysis of the German word über. Jünger’s use of the term über is done with the intention of thinking through humanity’s transition beyond the line or humanity’s crossing over it, by examining those intimations which help indicate how this movement is taking place and to what degree. On the other hand, Heidegger refrains from venturing beyond the line, for he claims the line itself must be contemplated. Über as it is found in Heidegger’s thought is therefore a reflection on the locale of the line itself without trespass beyond it. He writes: “…the following remarks 36

QB, p. 291 Ibid., p. 292 38 QCT, p. 108 39 QCT, p. 108 37


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understand über only in the sense of de, ʌİȡȓ. They deal ‘with’ the line itself, with the zone of self-consummating (Vollendung) nihilism […] From the locale of the line, the provenance of the essence of nihilism and its consummation emerge.”40 Deliberation on both Heidegger’s refusal to cross the line, and Jünger’s thinking which seeks to think beyond the line, present us with the problem raised earlier, that is: from what perspective is the phenomenon of nihilism to be confronted? Reluctance to cross the line signifies a meditative engagement with nihilism anterior to any process of therapeia. Alternatively, the crossing of the line involves a form of therapeia, whereby one acts as a type of philosophical physician in attempting to heal humanity of nihilism. In saying this, caution is needed in ascribing any kind of medical terminology to Jünger, who insists that nihilism is not to be thought of as ‘illness, nor for that matter with chaos or evil.’41 Furthermore, he openly discounts the possibility of curing or healing humanity of nihilism: “A good definition of nihilism would be comparable to making visible the cancer-causing agent. It would not mean the healing, but presumably its precondition, insofar as human beings in general play a role here. We are after all, concerned with a process that far exceeds history.”42 Is Jünger’s approach to nihilism not similar to Heidegger’s here? Despite his denial of approaching nihilism in order to heal it, Heidegger claims that Jünger does in fact take such an approach by interpreting nihilism from the perspective of a doctor. He notes: With regard to the essence of nihilism there is no prospect and can be no meaningful claim of healing. And yet your text maintains the stance of a doctor, as indicated by its division into prognosis, diagnosis and therapy. The young Nietzsche once named the philosopher the ‘doctor of culture’. Yet now it is no longer merely a matter of culture. You rightly say: ‘The whole is at stake.’ ‘It is a matter of the planet in general.’ Healing can concern itself only with the malevolent consequences and threatening phenomena that accompany this planetary process.43

From these remarks it is clear that Heidegger is opposed to taking on the role of a doctor or physician, who will heal humanity of nihilism. His reluctance to assume such a position stems from the sheer pervasiveness of 40

In William McNeill’s translation of “On the Question of Being”, he translates Vollendung into the English “consummation”, a more appropriate translation would be ‘completed’ or ‘fulfillment’. Cf. QB, p. 292 41 Ibid., p. 293 42 Ibid., p. 292 43 Ibid., p. 293

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nihilism. For nihilism not only affects cultures and humanity, it threatens the entire planet. Heidegger concedes healing can only address the ‘malevolent consequences’ and the ‘threatening phenomena that accompany’ nihilism. Thus he seeks out an alternative approach to confronting nihilism. Nevertheless, according to Julian Young in Heidegger’s Later Philosophy, Heidegger is to be deemed a ‘doctor of culture’ in the way he approaches nihilism, and other phenomena that contribute to this destitute time. Young writes: “Nietzsche once described the philosopher as the ‘doctor of culture’. Though Heidegger’s taste runs to theological rather than medical metaphors and ‘culture’ is a word that he particularly dislikes, the description is nonetheless apt with respect to his later philosophy.”44 It is most unlikely that Heidegger would think the title ‘doctor of culture’ names who he is, since he is unequivocally dissatisfied with the adequacy of this term, as illustrated in the short extract just cited from “On the Question of Being” . Nonetheless, in his lecture course given in Marburg on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1927-28), Heidegger proclaims it necessary for the reader to better understand the author than he/she did himself/herself. He references Kant in relation to Plato’s doctrine of ideas to emphasize this point: “I need only remark that it is by no means unusual, upon comparing the thoughts which an author has expressed with regard to his subject – whether in ordinary conversation or in writing – to find what we understand better than he understood himself, in that he has not sufficiently determined his concept and therefore has sometimes spoken, or even thought in opposition to his own invention.”45 Furthermore, he asserts that to ‘understand better’ “expresses the necessity of the philosophical struggle that goes on within every real interpretation. We need to see that merely narrating and describing what is in a text does not guarantee anything like – philosophical understanding.”46 Therefore, although Heidegger repudiates the claim that he acts as a type of ‘cultural physician’, given his regard for the necessity of a ‘philosophical struggle’ when interpreting a text, it is possible that Young is justified in his description. Moreover, the appellation Young bestows upon Heidegger may be further warranted if one views his protracted meditations on humanity’s state of homelessness as indicative of a sustained engagement with a symptom of an ailment, that is, a dis-order constituted by the oblivion of being, and the overcoming of metaphysics/nihilism as its cure. If 44

Julian Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy, Cambridge: CUP, 2002, p. 31. PK, p. 2 46 PK, p. 3 45


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Heidegger’s later writings are to be interpreted in this fashion then they could be regarded as some form of therapy. However, Heidegger maintains that the cause of nihilism is ‘heal-less’ or incurable (heillos). It is neither healable or unhealable.47 Hence, Heidegger appears to divest nihilism of any pathological connotations. If the essence or cause of nihilism is without healing then how is it to be confronted? If one does not take on the role of a doctor/physician of culture then how is nihilism to be addressed? Heidegger suggests that our thinking ought to become ‘more precursory’48 (vorläufig), that is, more provisional.49 Through a provisional mode of meditative thinking it becomes possible to illuminate the cause of nihilism. Nurturing this manner of thinking also provides ‘a unique pointer toward the salutary.’50 For Heidegger, the task of thinking is to meditate on the line, which for Jünger means an engagement with the ‘medical assessment of the situation’.51 By engaging the line in this way he relinquishes the opportunity to define nihilism. Heidegger’s ‘renunciation’ or refusal to define nihilism is a demonstration of his efforts to pursue a meditative way of thinking that departs from the path of rational thought. If Heidegger’s discourse deviates from rational thinking, does it remain amenable to rational exposition and explication? The voice of reason would suggest that you cannot rationally understand what is by confession not rational. Nevertheless, Heidegger remains buoyant that the abandonment of rational thinking will lead to a more rigorous mode of thinking. He writes: “Yet it could also happen that this renunciation could first bring thinking onto the path of a rigorous effort that might let us experience the kind of rigour of thought appropriate to the issue.”52 By forsaking rational discourse and its pursuit of definitions, does Heidegger’s thinking become less coherent? Does his thinking lapse into a state of unintelligibility? Heidegger argues that reason is unable to judge whether or not his divergence from the course of rational thought leads to a less or more attentive manner of thinking. He states that reason ‘can never be decided by the judiciary of ratio’ and he further claims that it is not a ‘legitimate judge’ in this matter. Moreover, he goes on to highlight how reason is to be delimited and how it is intertwined with the irrational: 47

QB, p. 293 Ibid., p. 293 49 Heidegger also speaks of engaging nihilism in this manner in the earlier essay “Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God is Dead’” of 1943. 50 QB, p. 293 51 Ibid., p. 294 52 Ibid., p. 293 48

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Chapter Four Reason and its representational activity are only one kind of thinking and are by no means self-determined. They are determined, rather, by that which has called upon thinking to think in the manner of ratio. That the domination of the ratio is erecting itself as the rationalization of all order, as standardization, and as levelling out in the course of the unfolding of European nihilism, should give us just as much to think about as the accompanying attempt to flee into the irrational.53

He continues with the suggestion that rationality and irrationality are “equally entwined in a reciprocal exchange from which they not only are unable to extricate themselves, but from which they no longer wish to escape.”54 Backtracking from his initial bold claims, he declares it is not possible for thought to lie outside the dichotomy of the rational/irrational but it is possible to hazard a few ‘tentative steps…in the manner of historical elucidation, reflection and discussion.’55 Heidegger thus tempers his earlier professions of the renunciation of reason and is now willing to take a few timid steps in the direction of a new kind of thinking. This new type of thinking will be other than a rational/irrational discourse. However, both these methods of thinking will ‘provide mutual assistance’ in understanding nihilism, and he asserts that they could potentially “awaken the ‘sufficient power of the mind’” to overcome it. At this point we may cautiously describe Nietzsche’s engagement with nihilism as a type of philosophical therapy. Whereas Heidegger’s confrontation with nihilism involves an innovative mode of preparatory thinking and discourse, thereby providing ‘a unique pointer toward the salutary.’56 Yet, it must be acknowledged that there is no simple formulation of either Nietzsche’s or Heidegger’s approach to nihilism. To accept this fact helps us appreciate the complexities of nihilism and the multifaceted reflections it requires.

Revealing the Origins of Nihilism It is now possible to proceed with a more detailed analysis of the origin of nihilism. While Heidegger comes to understand the origin of nihilism through his reading of Nietzsche, some commentators have perceived a grievous violence to his reading, rendering it misguided. It is worthwhile drawing attention to these criticisms before any further exegesis of the 53

Ibid., p. 293 Ibid., pp. 293-294 55 Ibid., p. 294 56 QB, p. 293 54


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origin of nihilism takes place. It could be argued that Heidegger does serious violence to Nietzsche’s texts by introducing the whole question of ‘being’ into his reading of them. For Nietzsche, the question of the meaning of being is not a central concern. Yet, for Heidegger the question of being is a constant and unwavering preoccupation. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno castigates Heidegger for his ‘bondage to being’: ‘Faith in Being, a dim weltanschauung derived from critical premonitions, really degenerates into a bondage to being, as Heidegger incautiously defined it once.’57 Löwith in Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism denounces Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche as trespassing far beyond the clarification of what is to be found in his texts. Löwith claims: “It is an inter-pretation that construes, in which something is inserted, and it is a trans-position of the text into another language which purports to think the ‘same’.”58 In spite of this, Löwith does value Heidegger’s reading in other respects, as he writes: “…his subtle disclosedness for the text is just as great as the resolute decisiveness with which Heidegger carries out his fore-having. One can find fault with his violence and admire his subtlety, and yet they complement one another.”59 Derrida provides an alternative critical perspective to Löwith by suggesting that: “Rather than protect Nietzsche from the Heideggerian reading, we should perhaps offer him up to it completely…to the point where, the content of the Nietzschean discourse being almost lost for the question of being, its form regains its absolute strangeness, where his text finally invokes a different type of reading, more faithful to his type of writing… ”60. In saying this, Derrida is ultimately dissatisfied with the Heideggerian reading of Nietzsche, and presents a supplement to his interpretation in Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles to assuage his discontent. According to Alan D. Schrift in Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, Derrida’s supplement ‘both depends upon and exceeds what it supplements.’61 Derrida exceeds Heidegger’s interpretation by highlighting two important issues in Spurs, which are absent from the Heideggerian reading of Nietzsche. Firstly, 57

Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, London: Routledge, 1990, p. 68. 58 Karl Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, p. 106 59 Ibid., p. 106 60 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, A Derrida Reader, Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, p. 35. 61 Alan D. Schrift, Nietzsche and The Question Of Interpretation, New York: Routledge 1990, p. 96. Henceforth Nietzsche and The Question Of Interpretation.

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Derrida gives prominence to role of the woman in Nietzsche’s works, something Heidegger ignored, thus leaving himself open to the charge that he repeats the phallogocentric tradition of Western philosophy, whereby questions concerning women are sidelined or marginalized. This could be considered a failure on the interpreter’s part, whose task is to tackle the entire text, not just those aspects of the text that he/she finds appealing. Secondly, Derrida finds Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche to be inadequate in that he fails to bring to light the question of propre. He writes: “The history (of) truth (is) a process of propriation. And it is not from an ontophenomenological or semantico-hermeneutic interrogation that proper-ty (propre) is to be derived. For the question of the truth of being is not capable of the question of proper-ty (propre).”62 While the question of the truth of being cannot accommodate the question of propre it is exclusively the former question that Heidegger attends to. As Derrida observes: “…Heidegger’s reading subsists, throughout the near totality of its trajectory, in the hermeneutic space of the question of the truth (of being).”63 It is important to make known these criticisms of Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche from the outset so his authority does not go unquestioned. Total acceptance of Heidegger’s interpretation would allow a dominant reading to prevail, thus marginalising all other readings. But as LacoueLabarthe warns in the essay Apocryphal Nietzsche, it is no simple matter to bring into question the Heideggerian interpretation of Nietzsche: …if the Heideggerian reading is to be called into question, it would be naïve, to say the least, to imagine that we can do it simply. Its power of encirclement practically eliminates the recourse to anything but ‘ruse’, so that it is necessary to deploy a whole strategy of infinite complexity in which, as we know, repetition itself, in the Heideggerian sense, must be repeated, and this in such a way that, separating from itself, it folds back and causes to intersect itself, drawing within itself the outer limit of the closure. This strategy bears the name deconstruction.64

Therefore, according to Lacoue-Labarthe, it is only through deconstruction that the insufficiencies in Heidegger’s texts can be brought to the fore. In order to grasp Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche it is also vital to apprehend the methodological decisions he makes in interpreting 62

Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, pp. 111-113 Ibid., p. 115 64 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Apocryphal Nietzsche, trans. Timothy D. Bent, in Nietzsche Critical Assessments Vol.1, Incipit Zarahustra/Incipit Tragoedia, ed. by Daniel W. Conway, New York: Routledge 1998. 63


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Nietzsche’s texts. Alan D. Schrift in Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, maintains that broadly speaking, Heidegger makes three methodological decisions in his explication of Nietzsche. These choices are determined by the following: firstly, the fundamental doctrine of the thinker is to be uncovered in the unsaid, that is, what Nietzsche did not see published, namely The Will to Power. The matter of the unsaid is also essentially linked to the impossibility of a thought being expressed when an individual is immersed in the Western metaphysical tradition. This point relates to the existence of historical hermeneutic boundaries of human understanding operating within a horizon, whose limits can be made explicit only later in history. Furthermore, the import of the unsaid is tied to the ‘unthought’. In What is Called Thinking?, Heidegger acknowledges the significance of the unthought: ‘The more original the thinking, the richer will be what is unthought.’ Heidegger’s principal aim in his elucidation of Nietzsche will be to think the thought of the truth of being. A truth which remained unthought in Nietzsche. According to Heidegger, the truth of being lies unthought in Nietzsche because his thinking remains metaphysical. But on what grounds is Heidegger able to bring to light the unsaid and unthought in Nietzsche? The notions of the unsaid and unthought arguably allow an interpreter to assert anything of a work or an author as the proper unsaid or unthought. As was previously noted, many suspect that such talk about the unsaid/unthought is a way for Heidegger to loosely defend his own interpolations into Nietzsche’s texts. A second guiding principle for Heidegger is the notion that every great thinker has one single thought. This is most eloquently articulated in The Thinker As Poet: To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world’s sky.65

For Heidegger, the notion of eternal recurrence dwelt at the heart of Nietzsche’s thinking. The five rubrics of Nietzsche’s thought, namely; ‘nihilism’, ‘revaluation of all values hitherto’, ‘will to power’, ‘eternal recurrence of the same,’ and the ‘Overman’, considered in their unity provide the basis of his thinking, and find their primordial ground in the idea of the eternal recurrence of the same. Finally, the third methodological principle pursued by Heidegger manifests itself in his view that ‘all serious thinking’ is metaphysics.66 65 66

PLT, p. 4 Alan D. Schrift, Nietzsche and The Question Of Interpretation, p. 19

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Heidegger refuses to characterize Nietzsche as the ‘poet-philosopher’ or ‘life-philosopher’. Instead he emphasizes the need to recognize Nietzsche’s “thinking as the logos of ontos, as ‘that kind of thinking which everywhere provides and accounts for the ground of beings as such within the whole in terms of Being as the ground (logos).”67 In Heidegger’s encounter with nihilism he is forced to go beyond the said, unsaid, and unthought of Nietzsche’s work, for he believed Nietzsche’s metaphysical thinking prevented him from penetrating the essence of nihilism. In Nietzsche, volume four, ‘Nihilism and the History of Being’, Heidegger explicitly states that his task is ‘to have the kind of confrontation with nihilism that will for the first time bring to light the essence of nihilism.’68 Why does Heidegger think it important to attempt to disclose the ‘essence of nihilism’? Why does he think the essence of nihilism is concealed? What factors have prevented any thinker from attaining insight into the essence and origin of nihilism? Does Heidegger succeed in revealing the essence of nihilism? If so, does Heidegger’s thinking through the phenomenon of nihilism provide a footing for its overcoming? If Heidegger seeks out an essential description of nihilism, does a tension not immediately arise that requires exposition? For it has been already pointed out how he openly refuses to provide a definition of nihilism. Nevertheless, an examination of Nietzsche’s understanding of the origins of nihilism, must precede any response to these questions posed. Following this concise investigation I will explore Heidegger’s thought on the source of nihilism, and how it develops in tandem with his commentary on Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, nihilism has its basis in the Christian-moral interpretation of the world: Distress, whether of the soul, body or intellect cannot of itself give birth to nihilism (i.e., the radical repudiation of value, meaning, and desirability). Such distress always permits a variety of interpretations. Rather: it is in one particular interpretation, the Christian-moral one, that nihilism is rooted […] The end of the moral interpretation of the world, which no longer has any sanction after it has tried to escape into some beyond, leads to nihilism.69

Nietzsche explicitly identifies the Christian-moral tradition as providing the historical background for nihilism. Implicitly, he implicates the Western metaphysical tradition beginning with Plato as contributing to the 67

Ibid., pp. 19-20 N.IV, p. 212 69 WP, p. 7 68


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rise of nihilism, for both traditions have recourse to ‘some beyond’. The decisive aspect to both the Christian-moral tradition and the Western metaphysical tradition was the shared belief in a supersensible or transcendental realm existing beyond human experience, and yet provided the standard for our conception of truth. According to Nietzsche, the highest values humanity have held and the ‘truth’ to which it aspired to were all based on an illusory realm: “We have measured the value of the world according to categories that refer to a purely fictitious world.”70 With the development of the natural sciences a growing tension was experienced, for the modern naturalistic explanations of events motivated by a belief in ‘objective’ truth made redundant the reliance on otherworldly doctrines. With the dawn of nihilism in the nineteenth century suspicions emerged that all pursuits of ‘truth’ were founded upon interpretations attributable to subjective values. Although Nietzsche was primarily concerned with bringing into question Christian-moral values, his critical investigations into nihilism managed to call into question the epistemological grounds for the whole of Western thought. The process through which an individual acquires a nihilistic perspective is described by Nietzsche in fragment 12(A) and (B) of The Will to Power, entitled Decline of Cosmological Values. This fragment details the origins of nihilism with respect to psychological states and cosmological values. Three conditions are identified by Nietzsche as forging the psychological state of the nihilist. Firstly, this state is attained when ‘meaning’ is sought for in all events but the discovery of such meaning ends in failure. The failure to ascertain any meaning fosters profound discouragement and dismay, until the stage is reached where it appears absurd to pursue it any longer. Eventually individuals arrive at the point where nothing is sought after. Nietzsche writes: “…and now one realizes that becoming aims at nothing and achieves nothing. – Thus, disappointment regarding an alleged aim of becoming as a cause of nihilism: whether regarding a specific aim or, universalized, the realization that all previous hypotheses about aims that concern the whole ‘evolution’ are inadequate…”71 Secondly, this nihilistic position is reached when man’s faith in his own value diminishes to the point where he believes he has no value. He posits a unity “so that a soul that craves to adore and revere wallows in the general notion of some supreme form of domination and governance,… man, rapt in the profound feeling of standing in the network of, and being dependant on, a totality that is infinitely superior to him, as a mode of 70 71

Ibid., p. 13 Ibid., p. 12

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deity.”72 When this totality can no longer function through man, when man ceases to be the medium through which an ‘infinitely valuable totality’ can operate, there dawns the realization that this final conception of a totality was itself derived from man needing to believe in his own significance and value. Thirdly, according to Nietzsche, such a psychological disposition arises when one refuses to acknowledge any transcendental realms. He states, one “…forbids oneself every kind of clandestine access to afterworlds and false divinities – but one cannot endure this world, which, however, one does not want to deny.”73 Dwelling at the root of this psychological state is the expulsion of all beliefs in supersensible domains. One disassociates oneself from the transcendent and all that pertains to it. Consequently, “the categories ‘purpose’, ‘unity’, ‘being’, which we used to project some value into the world – we pull out again; so the world looks valueless.”74 For the nihilist, ideas such as ‘purpose’, ‘being’ and ‘truth’ are no longer applicable to existence. Thus the nihilist who is aware of the meaninglessness of existence and ‘becoming’ is faced with the difficulty of attempting to affirm this world without falsifying it. Nietzsche goes on to address this dilemma in part (B) of fragment 12. Section (B) describes the effects of the decline of cosmological values. Surprisingly the world is in no way diminished as a result of the weakening of these cosmological values. In fact for Nietzsche, the destruction of these values opens up the possibility of new values being established. The prospect of a revaluation of all values hitherto taking place, paves the way for the overman. Nietzsche further states that nihilism has been brought about through our categories of reason. With ideas like ‘use’ and ‘benefit’, humanity has come to perceive the world in such a way that it ever increases its dominant position. This in turn has led to the most powerful values being “falsely projected into the essence of things. What we find here is still the hyperbolic naiveté of man: positing himself as the meaning and measure of the value of things.”75 Nietzsche’s insight here corresponds with what he says in The Birth Of Tragedy: “…there is a profound illusion which first entered the world in the person of Socrates – the unshakeable belief that rational thought, guided by causality, can penetrate the depths of being, and that it is capable not only of knowing but even of correcting

72

Ibid., p. 12 Ibid., p. 13 74 Ibid., p. 13 75 Ibid., p. 14 73


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being.”76 Naiveté and illusion exist in believing that humanity can penetrate the very depths of being through rational thought. This is a sentiment that Heidegger would most likely share with Nietzsche. If one is overcome with a sense of despair at the lack of any epistemological footing for humanity, and if one denounces the possibility of ever discovering such a footing, one then experiences radical nihilism. In Nietzschean terminology this translates into the ‘most extreme form of nihilism’, which consists in the repudiation of the validity of all beliefs on the grounds that there is no ‘true world’. He proclaims, “every belief, every considering something-true, is necessarily false because there simply is no true world. Thus: a perspectival appearance whose origin lies in us (in so far as we continually need a narrower, abbreviated, simplified world)”77 Nietzsche elaborates upon the idea that humanity reduces and constricts the vastness of reality for its own purposes in fragment 503. He remarks: “The entire apparatus of knowledge is an apparatus for abstraction and simplification – directed not at knowledge but at taking possession of things: ‘end’ and ‘means’ are remote from its essential nature as are ‘concepts’. With ‘end’ and ‘means’ one takes possession of the process (one invents a process that can be grasped); with ‘concepts’, however, of the ‘things’ that constitute the process.”78 Maintaining a radical nihilistic perspective would be a test of one’s resolve, for it amounts to being able to live without recourse to any lies and illusions. As Nietzsche says, “…it is the measure of strength to what extent we can admit to ourselves, without perishing, the merely apparent character, the necessity of lies. To this extent, nihilism, as the denial of a truthful world, of being, might be a divine way of thinking.”79 What does Nietzsche mean here when he speaks of nihilism as a ‘divine way of thinking’? Does he mean that nihilism is to be thought of as being beyond the human, who by his/her very nature cannot endure a world knowing 76

BT(N), Sect. 15 p. 73 WP, p. 15. Parallels with Bergson are evident here, who put forward a physiological theory to account for our need for a simplified world. He claims that the brain along with the entire human nervous system and our sense organs are predominately of an eliminative rather than a productive nature. The function of the brain and nervous system is to reduce reality in order for us to carry out our ordinary and everyday tasks. Without this physiological reductive system we would be overwhelmed by greater reality. There are also strong affinities with Freud’s theory of repression. Towards the close of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud states that his discovery of the unconscious necessitates a ‘revaluation of all values.’ 78 WP, p. 274 79 Ibid., p. 15 77

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there is no ‘true world’? Does he mean it is the highest state of being one can attain? As a ‘divine way of thinking’, is a radically nihilistic perspective unsustainable, or may it be envisaged as something to aspire to? In his attempt to deal with the abstruse nature of nihilism, Nietzsche identifies a number different types of nihilism. For instance, he distinguishes between passive and active nihilism, and he also refers to incomplete and complete nihilism.80 He speaks too of extreme nihilism, the perfect nihilist, nihilism as a normal condition, philosophical nihilism and ecstatic nihilism.81 Of all these different forms of nihilism the distinction between active and passive nihilism is of greatest import. Active nihilism is a sign of enhanced power and strength of spirit. Conversely, passive nihilism indicates a deterioration in one’s power and a weakening of the spirit. In spite of the fact that both forms of nihilism originate from the same psychological disposition, which itself is a response to the belief that there is no ‘true world’, there exists a gulf between them because of a difference in strength of will. Nietzsche states: ‘Just now when the greatest strength of will would be necessary, it is weakest and least confident.’82 The notion of ‘will’ here or more appropriately the ‘will to power’ is pivotal to a comprehension of both the origin of nihilism and how it can be overcome. In a fragment entitled the Causes of nihilism, he remarks: “1. The higher species is lacking, i.e., those whose inexhaustible fertility and power keep up the faith in man. 2. The lower species (‘herd’, ‘mass’, ‘society’) unlearns modesty and blows up its needs into cosmic and metaphysical values.”83 Those great individuals who exercise their will to power appear to be absent for Nietzsche, whereas the ‘herd’ with their weaker natures mistakenly magnify their needs to an extent that enables them to suppress the emergence of the ‘higher species’. This enables the ‘herd’ to gain dominance and consequently contributing to the rise of nihilism. To try and articulate the fullness of Nietzsche’s thought on the will to power and how it is linked to the overcoming of nihilism would require a prolonged and detailed discussion that is beyond the scope of this chapter. For the will to power is also strongly connected to the key idea of the eternal recurrence in Nietzsche. Succinctly stated, Nietzsche’s response to nihilism is not negative but rather affirmative. He is an advocate of amor fati, characterized by a ‘Dionysian affirmation of the world.’ Nietzsche 80

Cf. Ibid., p.17 and p. 19 Cf. Ibid., p. 14, p. 17, p. 25 and p.544 82 Ibid., p.17 83 Ibid., p. 19 81


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draws attention to the significance of amor fati in fragment 1041 of The Will to Power: Such an experimental philosophy as I live anticipates experimentally even the possibilities of the most fundamental nihilism; but this does not mean that it must halt at a negation, a No, a will to negation. It wants to cross over to the opposite of this – to a Dionysian affirmation of the world as it is, without subtraction, exception, or selection – it wants the eternal circulation: - the same things, the same logic and illogic of entanglements. The highest state a philosopher can attain: to stand in a Dionysian relation to existence – my formula for this is amor fati.84

Nietzsche’s love of fate is first introduced in The Gay Science section 276 entitled For the new year: ‘Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth!... And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.’85 Here Nietzsche gives voice to his aspiration to one day be a Yes-sayer in spite of the prevalence of nihilism. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra this ambition is fulfilled. According to Heidegger, nihilism is not only rooted in the metaphysical tradition but it is metaphysics itself. He equates nihilism with metaphysics in a crucial passage from “Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God is Dead’”: The realm for the essence and event of nihilism is metaphysics itself. […] Metaphysics is the space of history in which it becomes destiny for the supersensory world, ideas, God, moral law, the authority of reason, progress, the happiness of the greatest number, culture and civilization to forfeit their constructive power and to become void. We call this essential ruin (Wesenszerfall) of the supersensory its putrefaction (Verwesung).86

For Heidegger, the essential ruin and eventual putrefaction of the supersensible commenced with Plato and came to completion in Nietzsche. Plato and Nietzsche are two seminal figures in Heidegger’s understanding of how nihilism unfolds. Interestingly enough, he considers Platonic thought to be as nihilistic as Nietzschean thought: “The essence of nihilism is historically as metaphysics, and the metaphysics of Plato is no less nihilistic than that of Nietzsche. In the former, the essence of nihilism is merely concealed; in the latter it comes completely to appearance.”87

84

WP, p. 536 GS, pg. 223 86 OBT, p.165 87 N.IV, p. 205 85

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Metaphysics has its source in the Plato, which neglected the truth of being itself, according to Heidegger. Pöggeler highlights this point in Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking: “Philosophy becomes what Plato had already called it; it becomes ‘metaphysics’, a transcendence of shadowy beings toward the Being of beings. Since within the preference for the ideas and the transcendence toward Being there is a demand for correct measuring up to the ideas or to Being, the truth of Being itself – unconcealment – sinks into oblivion.”88 Nietzsche assumes Platonism to be inherently nihilistic as it discovers truth in the transcendental idea, an idea which presents itself to knowledge only when the latter has freed itself from sensibility. The pursuit of transcendental ideas favours the supersensible realm over the sensible; thereby devaluing and weakening immanent reality and embodied existence. For Nietzsche, the devaluation of the sensible world and the body leads to nihilism. His goal will be to overturn Plato’s metaphysical enterprise by paving a way for the coming of the overman’s non-metaphysical reign upon the Earth. In saying this, Heidegger argues that Nietzsche failed to extricate himself from metaphysics, and thus nihilism too because he engaged in valuative thinking. According to Heidegger, by thinking of nihilism in terms of devaluation and its overcoming on the grounds of revaluation, Nietzsche remained entangled in metaphysics. Hence, he was unable to reveal the essence of nihilism. Furthermore, Heidegger claims a deadly consequence of Nietzsche’s valuative thinking is that being is for the first time thought of in terms of value. A more detailed analysis of the significance of the interconnection between valuative thinking and metaphysics will take place at a later stage. Firstly the relation between the notion of ‘value’ and the nihil of nihilism must be established and made clear. Pöggeler in his reading of Heidegger attempts to determine the connection between ‘value’ and ‘nothingness’: “He [Nietzsche] thinks of Being as value, experiences the devaluation of the highest values, and demands revaluation. Nietzsche experiences the Nothing of Being taken as the being-ness of beings. He does not experience the actual Nothing, the Nothing belonging to Being itself and to its truth. Nietzsche’s experience of nihilism and his overcoming of nihilism concern only inauthentic nihilism and in genuine nihilism they falter.”89 Pivotal to Heidegger’s endeavour to divine the essence of nihilism is his meditation on the nihil or nothing of nihilism, something that language 88

Otto Pöggeler, Martin Heidegger’s Path Of Thinking, trans. Daniel Magurshak and Sigmund Barber, Humanities Press International 1989, p. 81. Henceforth: Martin Heidegger’s Path Of Thinking. 89 Ibid., p. 110


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itself demands. His purpose for dwelling on this matter is to displace the interdependency between nihilism and the concept of value or, more precisely devaluation as it is found in Nietzsche. He poses the following question: ‘What does nihilism have to do with values and devaluation?’ To demonstrate his point he provides the very simple example of an unsuccessful search for oil. In the exploration for oil ‘nothing’ was found. Heidegger infers from this, that nothing “implies a thing’s not being to hand, its not being. ‘Nothing’ and nihil therefore mean beings in their Being and are concepts of Being not of value.”90 How persuasive is Heidegger’s argument here, if it is an argument at all? It is apparent that Heidegger is determining the meaning of ‘value’ ontologically but when Nietzsche speaks of value and its interrelation with nihilism it is evidently in connection with the questionable meaning of human existence. Platonism and Christianity clearly offer systems of value as well as ontologies. In Heidegger’s examination of ‘value’ it merely stands for something posited, as to be pursued, realised or maintained through human action. He is assuming that ontology precedes ethics, but is this the case? I would argue that Heidegger’s assumption is essentially true. For humanity’s ontological predisposition appears to shape its ethical behaviour. How humanity experiences being and beings in their being determines and influences humanity’s ethical conduct. If humanity was capable of perceiving the radiance in things that Thomas Traherne attests to, then its ethical behaviour in the world would be radically transformed. In Centuries, Traherne writes: ‘The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown.’91 Traherne’s visionary way of seeing things nurtures a deeply courteous way of being towards other beings. For if corn is perceived as immortal, ‘which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown’ it implies all beings demand such reverence and respect. Returning to Heidegger’s example of the search for oil, we see that when ‘nothing’ was discovered it in no way meant the ‘nothing’ was located. Can ‘nothing’ be found or even pursued? Can ‘nothing’ be philosophically investigated or is it as Heidegger puts it, merely a ‘vacuous word game’? 92 Traditionally thought ‘nothing’ must be either completely void or else a being of some form. The latter sense of nothing is immediately disqualified, therefore nothing must signify a void, deprived of meaning and significance. If this were the case, we would not need to concern 90

N.IV, p.18 Thomas Traherne, Centuries, London: The Editor, 1927, p. 110. 92 N.IV, p. 19 91

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ourselves with the problem of nihilism. As Heidegger remarks: “If nothing is nothing, if it is not, then neither can beings ever founder in nothing nor can all things dissolve in it. Hence there can be no process of becomingnothing. Hence nihilism is an illusion.”93 Does a philosophical enquiry into the notion of nothing run aground at this point? Or is it perhaps the case that it is only at this juncture that an opportunity for the question of nothing, and its relation to nihilism can properly emerge? Heidegger states in “On the Question of Being”: ‘Where everything presses toward nothing, nihilism reigns.’94 How is this assertion to be interpreted? Is it the case that everything which moves towards nothingness results in nihilism? Is the nothingness experienced by Buddhists and the mystics of all traditions to be considered a form of nihilism? Heidegger’s claim that nihilism holds sway over everything which presses towards nothing shows a limited and restricted interpretation of nothingness. He fails to recognize the nihil or nothing is not always nihilistic. Heidegger’s inadequate account of the nihil is comparable to Jean-Paul Sartre’s narrow understanding of nothing found in Being and Nothingness. For neither Heidegger or Sartre take into consideration the nihil as a no-thing-ness. It is important at this stage to make a clear distinction between the negative naught or nihil that constitutes the nihilistic experience of nothingness, and the rich naught or nihil encountered by various mystics. This distinction allows us to illuminate the broader significance which ‘nothingness’ holds. Ahab in Moby Dick denotes an individual who retains a nihilistic perspective of the world. Ahab’s nihilistic perspective is reflected in his belief that it is only by violently harpooning the great white whale that he will somehow manage to penetrate through to the nothingness beyond reality. In chapter 36 entitled The Quarter-Deck, Ahab declares: All visible objects, man are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event – in the living act, the undoubted deed – there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning masks. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me that white whale is the wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond.95

The ‘naught beyond’ which Ahab alludes to is a wholly negative naught or nothingness and he attempts to reveal it by maniacal violence. 93

Ibid., p. 21 QB, p. 291 95 Herman Mellville, Moby Dick, New York: OUP, 1998, p. 145. 94


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Macbeth can also be identified as adhering to a nihilistic perspective, through his apprehension of the nothingness of the world and our existence in it: Macbeth:

She should have died hereafter; There would have been a time for such a word. To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing.96

Contrary to Ahab and Macbeth there have been numerous mystics who have pressed towards nothingness, and they have experienced a radically different sense of the nothing. The nothing discovered and experienced by mystics turns out to be a rich naught. For instance, from the Christian mystical tradition Meister Eckhart describes nothing or ‘the Naught’ in the following manner: “Everything that has being, hangs (is suspended) in the Naught. And that same naught is such an incomprehensible naught that all spirits in Heaven and upon earth cannot comprehend it nor sound it.”97 While St. John of the Cross in his account of the nothing, writes: ‘Nada, nada, nada, nada, nada ey en monte nada.’ (Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing and on the mountain nothing).98 The nothing found here is portrayed in a mystical sense. In the Ascent of Mount Carmel St. John of the Cross recounts a spiritual or mystical journey up a mountain. In the course of the ascent there is nothing for the senses to apprehend or seize upon, and once the summit has been reached there still is nothing for the senses to grasp. Yet, this spiritual ascent is intrinsically meaningful and purposeful. The Rhineland mystic Johannes Tauler also understands ‘nothingness’ in an essential way when he writes: ‘Everything depends on 96

William Shakespeare, Macbeth Act 5 Scene 5 lines 16- 28 , Hertsfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1993, pp. 79-80. 97 Meister Eckhart, in Mysticism East and West (A Comparative Analysis Of The Nature Of Mysticism) by Rudolf Otto, London: MacMillon Company 1932. 98 Cf. St. John of the Cross, John of the Cross: Selected Writings, ed. Kieran Kavanaugh, New York: Paulist Press, 1987, p. 19.

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a fathomless sinking in a fathomless nothingness.’99 And Henri Suso has described a transition into the ‘nakedness of the Nothing.’100 Also from the Lankavatara sutra the Buddha has said: ‘Tasmac Chariputra sunyatayan na rupan, na vedana, na samjan, na samsakarah, na vijnanam.’ (Therefore O Chariputra in emptiness is neither form or feeling nor perception nor karmic formation nor cognition and yet this state of emptiness is greatly to be desired because it is the place of final blissful liberation.) The testimonies of these Christian mystics and the Buddha convey experiences of or encounters with a rich naught, that is, with a nothing that is rich in meaning and significance and does not give rise to nihilism. It is unclear how Heidegger would characterize the ‘mystical’ experience of nothingness and its relation to nihilism.* (Cf. Mindfulness) Nietzsche on the other hand would claim that the Christian mystics are representatives of ‘incomplete nihilism’ by seeking out methods of selfintoxication in order to avoid ‘complete nihilism’. In The Will to Power, fragment 29 entitled ‘The ways of self-narcotization’, he states: ‘…mysticism, the voluptuous enjoyment of eternal emptiness.’101 He is also critical of Buddhism and regards the Buddhist ‘yearning for Nothing’ to typify nihilism. 102 By making apparent the difference between the negative naught and the rich naught of nihilism a greater appreciation of the nihil that constitutes its essence is established. However, Heidegger suggests that humanity fails to understand nothingness and nihilism by thinking of them metaphysically. He comments: “Then nihilism, conceived and experienced in a more original and essential way, would be the history of metaphysics which is heading toward a fundamental position in which the essence of the nothing not

99 Cf. Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness, New York: P. Dutton, 1912, p. 478. 100 Suso writes: “When the soul, forgetting itself, dwells in that radiant darkness, it loses all its faculties and all its qualities, as St. Bernard has said. And this, more or less completely, according to whether the soul -- whether in the body or out of the body -- is more or less united to God. This forgetfulness of self is, in a measure, a transformation in God; who then becomes, in a certain manner, all things for the soul, as Scripture saith. In this rapture the soul disappears, but not yet entirely. It acquires, it is true, certain qualities of divinity, but does not naturally become divine. . . .To speak in the common language, the soul is rapt, by the divine power of resplendent Being, above its natural faculties, into the nakedness of the Nothing.” (Ibid., pp. 443-444) 101 WP, p. 20 C 102 Cf. Ibid., p. 7


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only cannot be understood but will no longer be understood. Nihilism would then be the essential nonthinking of the essence of nothing.”103 I noted earlier how Heidegger considered Nietzsche incapable of deciphering the essence of nihilism due to his adherence to valuative thinking. A more sustained analysis of this crucial issue will now follow. Prior to pursuing this analysis it would be worthwhile to tend briefly to the concept of ‘value’ and its historico-metaphysical lineage. Hubert Dreyfus provides a concise account of its historical background in his essay “Heidegger on the connection between nihilism, art, technology and politics”: Values have an interesting history. Plato starts with the claim that they are what show us what is good for us independent of our interests and desires. The idea of the good shines on us and draws us to it. Only with the Enlightenment do we arrive at the notion that values are objective – passive objects standing over against us – and we must choose our values. These values have no claim on us until we decide which ones we want to adopt. Once we get the idea that there is a plurality of values and that we choose which ones will have a claim on us, we are ripe for the modern idea, first found in the works of Nietzsche, especially in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, that we posit our values – that is, that valuing is something we do and value is the result of doing it.104

Dreyfus’ historical account of values is somewhat contentious, as it is generally accepted that the ancient Greeks did not think in terms of values. Apart from this difficulty his account highlights an important conundrum for modern humanity. When humanity comes to realize that it posits its own values then the possibility presents itself that human beings can just as easily withdraw these same values. The realization that values are of a variable nature undermine their authority and corrode their significance. Heidegger regards Nietzsche’s valuative thinking to belong within this historical context. Due to his valuative thinking, Heidegger maintains that Nietzsche was unable to identify ‘the hidden essence of nihilism. He says: “…in spite of all his insights, he could not recognize the hidden essence of nihilism, because right from the outset, solely on the basis of valuative thought, he conceived of nihilism as a process of the devaluation of the uppermost values.”105 Heidegger argues that the interpretation of nihilism 103

N.IV, p. 22 Hubert L. Dreyfus, ‘Heidegger on the connection between nihilism, art, technology, and politics’, in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles B. Guignon, New York: CUP, 1993, p. 293. 105 N.IV, p. 22 104

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as a phenomenon in which values lose their meaning is intrinsic to the problem of nihilism itself. Why does Heidegger consider Nietzsche’s valuative thinking a hindrance to revealing the essence of nihilism? Heidegger bases his judgement of Nietzsche on the grounds that his valuative thought is interlinked with a metaphysical mode of thinking, and thereby fails to illuminate the truth of being. He remarks: …Nietzsche thought metaphysically, on the path of the history of metaphysics. But it is no accident that valuative thought took precedence in metaphysics, at the core of Western philosophy. In the concept of value lies concealed a concept of Being that contains an interpretation of the whole of beings as such. In valuative thought the essence of Being is – unwittingly – thought in a definite and necessary aspect; that is, in its nonessence.106

Heidegger thus sees Nietzsche’s thought as remaining under the influence of Plato. Nietzsche would vehemently reject being characterized by Heidegger in this way because of his vigorous criticisms of the Platonic two-world theory, and his claim that a belief in the supersensible arises out of a psychological need. Despite his critique of Platonism, Heidegger contends that Nietzsche never managed to overcome the metaphysical dichotomy he so rigorously contested. He writes: “...what is decisive for the essence of metaphysics is by no means the fact that the designated distinction is formulated as the opposition of the supersensuous to the sensuous realm, but the fact that this distinction – in the sense of a yawning gulf between the realms – remains primary and all sustaining. The distinction persists even when the Platonic hierarchy of the supersensuous and sensuous is inverted, and the sensuous realm is experienced more essentially and more thoroughly...”.107 A similar criticism is levelled at Nietzsche in volume three of Nietzsche, in a section entitled ‘Truth and the Distinction Between the ‘True and Apparent “Worlds”’: “The true and the apparent worlds have exchanged their places and ranks and modes; but in this exchange and inversion the precise distinction of a true and apparent world is preserved. The inversion is only possible with this distinction as its foundation.”108 Heidegger also asserts that Nietzsche relies on a Platonic conception of truth even though he rejects it; claiming it to be just another value. By way of coming to terms with Nietzsche’s sense of truth, Heidegger engages in 106

Ibid., p. 23 N. II, p. 230 108 N.III, p.124 107


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prolonged discussions of the statement: ‘Truth is a kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live.’109 He lays emphasis on this utterance in order to illustrate how Nietzsche retains a conventional understanding of truth: ‘…there lies the concession to thinking of the traditional essence of truth as the correctness of making an assertion.’110 Rather than transforming the established conception of truth, Heidegger claims that Nietzsche attempted to fashion a philosophical position whereby he did not require ‘truth’. Is Heidegger’s critical interpretation of Nietzsche and its correlation with Platonism justified? Moreover, does Heidegger manage to establish his critique of Nietzsche’s valuative interpretation of nihilism on sound argumentation? In an attempt to respond to the latter question it must be asked: to what extent did valuative thinking permeate Nietzsche’s works and did he ever manage to overcome such thinking? Löwith insinuates in Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism that Nietzsche did manage to free himself from the positing of values. He writes: “The ‘conception of the world’ that Nietzsche had in mind and that he attempted to develop on the basis of Zarathustra in The Will to Power, is characterized by the idea that life as will to power cannot be evaluated because ‘at every instant’ life is entirely what it is, and has the same value throughout all its changes and has the same significance – without vestiges of the past and without reference to the future [ohne künftige Ausstände].”111 Similarly, Löwith argues that because the notion of eternal recurrence dwells at the heart of Nietzsche’s philosophical endeavour, this ought to dissuade us from regarding Nietzsche’s overall thought as a metaphysics of value. He notes: “If the eternal Being of living world is a constant becoming and if time is a repeating cycle, then in the total character of life or of becoming Being there can be no future-orientated purposes of the will, ends, or postings of value.”112 In contrast to Löwith, Heidegger concentrates his attention on the opening lines of fragment 715 dated Nov. 1887-March 1888 of The Will to Power in order to elaborate his interpretation of Nietzsche’s understanding of ‘value’. The first sentence of this fragment reads: “The standpoint of 109

Cf. WP, p. 272. Heidegger’s focus on this statement is found in the section ‘Truth and the Distinction Between the ‘True and Apparent “Worlds”’ in volume three of Nietzsche’, although he does make numerous other references to it. 110 N. III, p. 128 111 Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, p.121, “The present is absolutely not to be justified as being for the sake of the future, nor the past as being for the sake of the present.” 112 Ibid., p.120

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‘value’ is the standpoint of conditions of preservation and enhancement for complex forms of relative life-duration within the flux of becoming.”113 In opposition to what Löwith has to say, Heidegger interprets Nietzsche’s thinking to be a metaphysics of value. Heidegger regards the meaning of value to be a standpoint or viewpoint (Standpunkt). He preserves this interpretation from the lecture courses given in 1940 to the essay written in 1943 “Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God is Dead’”. In the lecture course he says: “‘Value’ according to its essence, is ‘viewpoint.’”114 The idea of ‘value’ as it is found in Nietzsche’s texts, is according to Heidegger, a viewpoint which provides a point from whence to see. He notes in “Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God is Dead’”: ‘Value is the point of sight for a seeing that has its eye on something.’115 Löwith reproaches Heidegger for providing such an exegesis of Nietzsche, stating: “Contrary to Heidegger’s interpretation, it does not mean that the ‘essence’ of value is itself a ‘standpoint’ and that value is to be understood ‘as’ a standpoint inasmuch as it is posited in a representational manner by a looking-at, looking-away-from, and calculating; rather, the standpoint ‘of’ value means here, as in other places (e.g., sections 567 and 1009), that one must pose the question of value essentially from the standpoint of conditions for preservation and augmentation, and this means fundamentally from the standpoint of ‘becoming’ and growing, increasing and decreasing, but never from the inessential standpoint of a ‘Being’ which is unitary and which stands fast, as in the case of ‘atoms’ and ‘monads’ or even (section 708) ‘the thing in itself’ and the ‘true world’.”116 It is interesting to note that in the course of his critique, Löwith does not provide one single citation from Heidegger. Therefore, Löwith’s criticism of Heidegger appears hollow, for he offers no direct references to substantiate his claims. I am unaware of where Heidegger speaks of the ‘standpoint’ of value in terms of ‘…a representational manner by a looking-at, looking-away-from and calculating.’ Löwith insists that Heidegger is mistaken in his reading of Nietzsche, and that the ‘standpoint’ of value ought to be discerned from the perspective of “...conditions of preservation and augmentation…from the standpoint of ‘becoming’ and growing, increasing and decreasing…” Yet, the interpretation Löwith advocates of ‘value’ is precisely the manner in which Heidegger speaks of ‘value’ in the section entitled ‘Valuation and The Will to Power’ found in Nietzsche Vol. IV. In his discourse on the 113

WP, p. 380 N.IV, p. 63 115 OBT, p. 171 116 Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, p. 120 114


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meaning of ‘value’ as a viewpoint, Heidegger remarks: “Only within becoming, only in relation to individual constructs of power, posited by them for them, are there conditions; that is, viewpoints of the preservation and enhancement of degrees of power; that is, values.”117 In light of this statement Löwith’s criticism of Heidegger appears misplaced. While Löwith’s interpretation of Heidegger seems on occasions to lack substance, this does not mean that Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche as a valuative thinker is immune to criticism. Heidegger’s understanding of Nietzsche as a valuative thinker is inadequate in that it fails to accommodate Nietzsche’s laughter. By ‘Nietzsche’s laughter’ I mean that comical or ironic element present in his texts. One of the purposes behind Nietzsche’s laughter is to instil an ironic element into his work that helps disrupt the possibility of any conclusive resolution being established or attained. This aspect to Nietzsche’s thought reinforces his belief that: ‘The total value of the world cannot be evaluated…’118 Perhaps this ironic aspect to his thought permits allows him liberate himself from the positing of values and goals. In his reflections on the question of the ‘value’ or the meaning of existence which came into being with the weakening of the Christian world-view, he maintains that there can be no overall valuation or estimation of the meaning or purpose to existence. This point is made evident in the opening section to The Gay Science entitled ‘The teachers of the purposes of existence’, in which Nietzsche’s laughter resounds defiantly: “To laugh at oneself as one would have to laugh in order to laugh out of the whole truth – to that even the best so far lacked sufficient sense for the truth...”119 He goes on to mock those great teachers who have attempted to superimpose a purpose on existence,: “What names all these Shalls and Becauses receive and may yet receive in the future! In order that what happens necessarily and always, spontaneously and without any purpose, may henceforth appear to be done for some purpose and strike man as rational and an ultimate commandment, the ethical teacher comes on stage, as the teacher of the purpose of existence; and to this end he invents a second, different existence and unhinges by means of his new mechanics the old, ordinary existence.”120 Nietzsche continues by criticizing these moral teachers as inventing ‘foolish’ and ‘overenthusiastic’ valuations that are ‘anti-natural’. According to Nietzsche, the teacher of the purpose of existence is eventually undermined by laughter as well as reason and nature. He writes: “There is no denying that in the long run 117

N.IV, p. 67 WP, p. 378 119 GS, p. 74 120 Ibid., p. 75 118

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every one of these great teachers of a purpose was vanquished by laughter, reason and nature: the short tragedy gave way again and returned into the eternal comedy of existence; and ‘the waves of laughter’ – to cite Aeschylus – must in the end overwhelm even the greatest of these tragedians.”121 From the passages cited here, Nietzsche can be understood to view the task of formulating valuations for a purposeful existence to be absurd. For Nietzsche, the invention of values originates from humanity’s need for security and faith in existence, as he declares: ‘…man has to believe, to know, from time to time why he exists; his race cannot flourish without a periodic trust in life…’.122 Moreover, in The Will to Power he brings into question the possibility of any value being attached to the idea of ‘becoming’ and man’s capacity to provide an adequate valuative account of the world. In fragment 708 he states: “Becoming is of equivalent value every moment; the sum of its values always remains the same; in other words it has no value at all, for anything against which to measure it, and in relation to which the word ‘value’ would have meaning, is lacking. The total value of the world cannot be evaluated; consequently philosophical pessimism belongs among comical things.”123 Here one’s inability to evaluate the value of the world is made apparent, and this in turn is to be considered ‘among comical things’. By drawing attention to Nietzsche’s laughter and those passages in which he highlights the limitations of value and the process evaluation, Heidegger’s understanding of Nietzsche as a valuative thinker becomes increasingly precarious. Nevertheless, an exposition of valuative thinking is not enough to determine the essence of nihilism. For Heidegger, valuative thinking is fundamentally related to Nietzsche’s principle notion of the will to power. In his series of lectures on Nietzsche, Heidegger claims: “Valuative thinking is itself a ‘function’ of the will to power.”124 Furthermore, in “Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God is Dead’”, he writes: “…nihilism in his interpretation derives from the rule and breakdown of values and so from the possibility in general to posit values. This possibility is itself based on the will to power. This is why Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism and his statement ‘God is dead’ can only be adequately understood on the basis of the essence of the will to power.”125 Heidegger observes that the will to power is not only Nietzsche’s answer to nihilism but it is the very grounds 121

Ibid., p.75 Ibid., p.75 123 WP, p.378 124 N.IV, p.133 125 OBT, p.173 122


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for his understanding of it. Whilst Nietzsche thinks through the notions of ‘unity’, ‘totality’ and ‘truth’ as the highest values, he has already initiated his revaluation of the highest values hitherto. This revaluation involves construing metaphysical concepts as values. Yet, Heidegger maintains that by proceeding in this fashion Nietzsche upholds a metaphysical position by imposing a notion of being upon becoming. This occurs even though the notion of being is no longer comprehended as permanent, that is, ‘being’ is not interpreted by any eternal criteria, but rather as a process of valuation. Consequently, Heidegger identifies the will to power as a primary characteristic of metaphysics; that which names beings in their essential nature. He writes in volume two of Nietzsche: “Will to Power gives the name for the Being of beings as such, the essentia of beings. Nihilism is the name for the History of the truth of beings thus determined. The Eternal Return of the Same means the mode [Weise] in which Being in totality is, the existentia of beings. The Overman characterizes the type of mankind which is demanded by such a totality. Justice is the essence of the truth of beings as Will to Power.”126 Heidegger’s statement that the will to power is the name for the being of beings seems appropriate on the surface, especially as Nietzsche dubs it: ‘the most interior essence of Being’ (das innerste Wesen des Seins). But as will be later demonstrated, this interpretation raises its own difficulties. Heidegger provides an intriguing analysis of the will to power whereby he offers an initial explanation of the notion of ‘will’ and then goes on to illuminate how it is interconnected to the idea of the will to power. He says: “Will strives for it wills not just as for something that it does not yet have. Will already has what it wills. For will wills its willing. Its will is what has willed. Will wills itself.”127 Zimmerman describes the interrelation between the will and the will to power in Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity as follows: “The Will opens a field of vision which discloses possibilities both for the consolidating of the power of Will and for expanding it out beyond itself. Power is power only insofar as it wills: more power. As Will which always wills out beyond itself in an everexpanding spiral, The Will to Power embodies Nietzsche’s other crucial doctrine: the Eternal Return of the Same. The eternally returning Will to Power is the Will to Will.”128 How does Heidegger come to discern the will to power on the basis of the will to will? 126

N. II, p. 156 OBT, p. 176 128 Michael E. Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1990, p. 187. Henceforth, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity. 127

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Provisionally a statement from “Nietzsche’s Word: God is Dead’” should help clarify things: “In the expression the ‘will to power’ the word ‘power’ gives the essence of the mode in which will wills itself to the extent that it is command […] Will exists for itself no more than power for itself […] Will and power, therefore, are not subsequently linked by the will to power; rather, will, as will to will, exists as the will to power in the sense of the empowerment of power […] The will to power is the essence of power. It indicates the absolute essence of will which wills itself as sheer will.”129 It seems as though the ‘will’ and ‘power’ are both self sustaining and self perpetuating. ‘Will’ wills itself and ‘power’ is the empowerment of power. Do these assertions close off any further discussion on the matter; has a satisfactory conclusion been reached regarding these ideas? Hardly, both the will to will and the will to power remain in obscurity. I will first explicate the concept of the ‘will to power’ and then proceed to an analysis of the will to will in order to shed some light on these matters. The meaning of ‘the will to power’ for Heidegger undergoes important transformations from where he first speaks of it in the lecture course of 1936-37, to the 1940 lecture and then in the 1943 essay “Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God is Dead’”. Michael Haar in the essay “Remarks on Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche” recounts these changes in Heidegger’s conception of ‘the will to power’. Firstly, Haar speaks of how in a 1936-37 lecture course Heidegger underscores the transcendental aspect of the will to power. It is both a ‘self affection’ and a ‘passion of the will commanding itself (Affekt des Kommandos)’130 that moves beyond itself. Yet, it is neither a passive selfaffection nor an activity of an objectifying will. Instead it is, ‘ekstasis, as it is first of all to be lifted up beyond oneself towards Being.’131 Heidegger engages in this preparatory investigation in order to demonstrate how the artistic state of intoxication (Rausch) as a mood (Stimmung) is transcendental, whereby it is a “movement towards figures, forms, hyperlucidity, ecstatic opening and ‘ot self-complacence of the subject. ‘Intoxication’, writes Heidegger: ‘explodes the subjectivity of the subject.’”132 Secondly, in chapter six of volume two of Nietzsche (1940) the ‘will to power’ is interpreted as the will to will: ‘power is nothing exterior to will, it is not something the will strives for, as if it did not possess it, but its 129

OBT, p. 176 Michael Haar, “Remarks on Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche” in Critical Heidegger, ed. Christopher Macann, London: Routledge 1996, p. 124. Henceforth, “Remarks on Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche” 131 Ibid., p. 124 132 Ibid., p.124 130


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very essence.’ The will to power has no end in sight other than its own self preservation and perpetuation. The will must will continually even if it is without purpose, for as Nietzsche has said, it would rather will nothingness than not will at all. Heidegger also alludes to the will to power as being a principle of the ‘calculation of values’. Haar describes it in the following manner: “Will to Power is the subjectivity that counts only on itself, and that posits the values that can support it, while it reckons the quantity of forces necessary to maintain and increase itself.”133 This elucidation of the will to power has very similar connotations with its construal in “Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God is Dead.’”, where a third version of the will to power is formulated, according to Haar. Once again Heidegger reveals the ontological foundation of the will to power as the being of beings and its essential relation to the will to will. Heidegger writes: ‘…the will to power is the ‘essentia’ of beings as such.’134 The difference on this occasion as claimed by Haar is that Heidegger “…underlies and develops mainly the theme of the establishment of values, which constitute a stock of presence that prefigures the technological stock. As it pretends to grasp Being, to lay hands on it…”.135 To think in terms of value is detrimental to humanity, according to Heidegger, for he observes: “Then to think in values is to kill radically. It not only strikes down beings as such in their being – in – themselves (An-sich-sein), but it also puts being entirely aside. Being when it is still needed, is taken to be value only. The value-thinking of the metaphysics of the will to power is deadly in an extreme sense because it does not permit being itself to come into dawning…”.136 Of the three versions of the will to power highlighted above, Haar finds most weight with the second one, for “It explains the essential link between Will to Power and Eternal Return; the latter is understood as the ultimate consequence or exigency of this eternally repeated return of the will itself. This circularity finally anticipates the techno-economical circles of consumerism and the techno-political ones of directivism.”137 While a broader appreciation of the meaning of the will to power for Heidegger can be drawn from the above expositions, there is a striking difficulty with all three interpretations. The difficulty arises in relation to Heidegger’s understanding of the will to power as an essence. He relies on fragment 693 of The Will to Power for his interpretation. He writes: “The 133

Ibid., p. 125 OBT, p.181 135 Haar, “Remarks on Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche”, p. 125 136 OBT, p. 196 137 Haar, “Remarks on Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche”, p.126 134

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essence of will to power is, as the essence of will, the fundamental trait of everything real. Nietzsche says: The will to power is “…the innermost essence of Being...’”138 However, fragment 693 of The Will to Power actually reads: ‘If the innermost essence of being is the will to power...’. Heidegger’s omission of the ‘If’ when he cites fragment 693 is of considerable significance, for Nietzsche is highly critical of the concept of ‘essence’. The ‘If’ signals Nietzsche’s hesitancy to impose an ‘essence’ on being and this reluctance is in keeping with his sustained efforts to bring into question the notion of ‘essence.’ By refusing to acknowledge the ‘If’ Heidegger provides a prefigured interpretation of Nietzsche, thereby tailoring Nietzsche’s text to his own design in a most improper manner. In proceeding in this fashion, Heidegger is establishing a reading of Nietzsche in advance or in contradistinction to the textual evidence, thereby precluding utterances that deviate or run against his interpretation. His insistence that the will to power be thought of as an ‘essence’ raises difficulties owing to Nietzsche’s explicit renunciations of the idea of ‘essence’. Nietzsche rigorously queries well-established ideas such as ‘essence’, the ‘thing-in-itself’ and ‘truth’ to expose their perspectival nature and to undermine their assumed validity. In The Gay Science, Twilight of the Idols and The Will to Power Nietzsche’s destruction of the idea of ‘essence’ is explicitly evident. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche makes abundantly clear how there is no ‘essence’ to reality. He writes in section 54, ‘The consciousness of appearance’: “I suddenly woke up in the midst of this dream, but not only to the consciousness that I am dreaming and that I must go on dreaming lest I perish – as a somnambulist must go on dreaming lest he fall. What is ‘appearance’ for me now? Certainly not the opposite of some essence: what could I say about essence except to name the attributes of its appearance! Certainly not a dead mask that one could place an unknown x or remove from it!”139 What Nietzsche is attempting to convey here is; that when awareness is attained that our lived experience in the world is bereft of any objectivity it is necessary to sustain the ‘dream’ or ‘perish’. There is only the experience or consciousness of ‘appearance’ and nothing more; it is not possible to remove the ‘mask’ of appearance from an ‘unknown x’ that constitutes the true reality. Therefore, there is no objective reality or essence to reality there are only appearances, which come to be understood through an interpretation which is itself derived from a particular perspective. Or as Nietzsche writes more elegantly in fragment 556 of The Will to Power: 138 139

QCT, p. 79 GS, p. 116


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“The question ‘what is that?’ is an imposition of meaning from some other viewpoint. ‘Essence’, the ‘essential nature’, is something perspectival and already presupposes a multiplicity.”140 The notion of ‘multiplicity’ is vital to Nietzsche’s thought, for ‘mankind is not a whole: it is an inextricable multiplicity.’141 With this in mind it becomes clear that Heidegger’s interpretation of ‘the will to power’ as the ‘essentia’ of beings as such’ stands on dubious ground. Furthermore, for Heidegger, ‘the will power’ is to be apprehended through the notion of ‘the will to will.’ As he remarks in “Overcoming Metaphysics” (Überwindung der Metaphysik) (which consists of a number of notes from between 1936-41, written at the same time as the Nietzsche lectures): “The will to power can only be understood in terms of the will to will. The will to will, however, can only be experienced when metaphysics has already entered its transition.”142 The notion of the will to power leads to Heidegger’s more challenging idea of the ‘will to will’, which in turn shapes his grasp of humanity’s state of homelessness and its relatedness to nihilism. For he says in “On the Question of Being”: “It (nihilism) is called the ‘most uncanny’ [unheimlichste] because, as the unconditional will to will, it wills homelessness [Heimatlosigkeit] as such.”143 Thus there is an apparent intimacy between nihilism, the will to will and homelessness. How is this ‘will to will’ to be grasped? According to Zimmerman, in Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity the will to will is ‘meaningless’: “According to Heidegger, as we have seen, this nihilism is describable in terms of the grandiose but ultimately meaningless Will to Will.”144 Zimmerman’s analysis is unsatisfactory as he does not attempt to substantiate his claim that the ‘will to will’ is a vacuous term. He makes this assertion without providing any explanation for its meaninglessness. The question of how the will to will is to be understood persists. Perhaps the opportunity for interpreting Heidegger’s notion of the will to will should not be relinquished as easily as Zimmerman has allowed it to be. It may be possible to understand the will to will by placing it in a broader historical context, especially if one examines it in relation to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. In the eighteenth century reason was considered the centre of human activity. However, this changed in the nineteenth century with the decline of the Enlightenment conception of reason. Thinkers like Johann Gottfried 140

WP, p. 301 WP, p.184 142 OM, p. 76 143 PM, p. 292 144 Michael Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity, p. 173 141

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Herder moved away from Kantianism and introduced the notion of ‘vitalism’, which was to have a major influence on Schopenhauer. The chief hypothesis of Schopenhauer’s thought was that the foundation for reality lay in will. He identified will with the Kantian concept of the noumenon which Kant considered unknowable. For Schopenhauer, every phenomenon had a comparable inner reality and hence, the term ‘will’, could be allocated to the inner nature of all things. He states in volume two of The World as Will and Representation: ‘Therefore in this sense I teach that the inner truth of everything is will, and I call the will the thing-initself.’145 I may say ‘I will something’ but in fact it is will that wills it. Schopenhauer asserted that life was suffering and pain because of the relentless striving of the will. In volume one of The World as Will and Representation, he notes: ‘All willing springs from lack, from deficiency, and thus from suffering.’146 Schopenhauer goes so far as to contend that this suffering makes the non-existence of the world more desirable than its existence, as he remarks: “…we have not to be pleased but rather sorry about the existence of the world; that its non-existence would be preferable to its existence; that is something which at bottom ought not to be…”147 He quotes from Byron’s Childe Harold to strengthen his pessimistic perspective: Our life is a false nature, - ‘tis not in The harmony of things, this hard decree, This uneradicable taint of sin, This boundless Upas, this all – blasting tree Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches be The skies, which rain plagues on men like dew – Disease, death, bondage – all the woes we see – And worse, the woes we see not – which throb through The immedicable soul, with heart aches ever new.148

He drew on Oriental philosophy, particularly Hinduism and Buddhism in his endeavour to overcome the will. He argued that it was only by ceasing to will that one could put an end to suffering. Putting an end to Tahna 145

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol.2, trans. E.F.J Payne, New York: Dover Publications, 1966, p. 197. Henceforth The World as Will and Representation, Vol.2. 146 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World As Will And Representation, Vol.1, trans. E.F.J Payne, New York: Dover Publications 1966, p. 196. Henceforth, The World as Will and Representation, Vol.1. 147 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World As Will And Representation, Vol. 2, p. 576 148 Ibid., p. 577


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(Pali word for craving) or Trishna (Sanskrit word for craving) was and remains a central tenet of eastern philosophy. In this regard Schopenhauer would have preference for the wu wei (In Taoist philosophy, action by inaction) way of being in the world rather than the yu wei (In Taoist philosophy, deliberate, self-conscious action) way of being in the world. According to Moira Nicholis in the essay “The Influence of Eastern thought on Schopenhauer”, Schopenhauer had recourse to the Oupnek’hat, Asiatic Journals, the Vedas, the Paranas, the Bhagavad-Gita (translated by A.G Schlegel and Max Müller) and the Upanishads (translated by Rammohun Roy, Poley, Colebrooke and Röer) for inspiration. Profoundly enthused by Eastern thought, Schopenhauer spoke of a Sabbath of the will, a state in which the will ceased to be active: When, however, an external cause or inward disposition suddenly raises us out of the endless stream of willing, and snatches knowledge from the thraldom of will, the attention is now no longer directed to the motives of willing, but comprehends things free from their relation to the will. Thus it considers things without interest, without subjectivity, purely objectively; it is entirely given up to them in so far as they are merely representations, and not motives. Then at all at once peace, always sought but always escaping us on that first path of willing, comes to us of its own accord, and all is well with us. It is the painless state, prized by Epicurus as the highest good and as the state of the gods; for that moment we are delivered from the miserable pressure of the will. We celebrate the Sabbath of the penal servitude of willing; the wheel of Ixion stands still.149

The content of this passage lies in close proximity to the Buddha’s udana, the renowned first words he spoke after he had achieved enlightenment: In birth after birth after birth Into worldiness, I sought, But I did not find, The builder of the house, The pain of repeated birth I found. House-builder I behold you now. That house you will not build again. All its rafters are broken now, Its ridge-pole also destroyed. My mind, its elements dissolved. The end of craving has attained.150

149 150

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol.1, p. 196 Cf. John Moriarty’s Nostos, p. 457

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Schopenhauer’s Sabbath of the will corresponds strongly with the Buddha’s udana in its relinquishment and renunciation of the will. Nietzsche rejects Schopenhauer’s denial of the will. He espouses the will to power, and the overcoming of asceticism, thereby affirming our sensible, immanent world. Zarathustra is Nietzsche’s mouthpiece for the individual who embodies his cruel wisdom and not only accepts but also lives the eternal recurrence in all its implications. Rather than seek repentance over the past as a Christian would or recoil from the world of appearances, and all its sufferings like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche instead affirms this-world through the willing of its eternal recurrence. When Heidegger speaks of the will it concerns calculation. He states: ‘Consciousness belongs to the will. The will to will is the highest and unconditional consciousness of the calculating self-guaranteeing of calculation.’151 Like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Heidegger displaces the anthropocentric conception of the will that locates the source of the will in humanity’s willing. Contrary to Schopenhauer, he thinks humanity is incapable of experiencing its essence, he writes: “The opinion arises that human will is the origin of the will to will, whereas man is willed by the will to will without experiencing the essence of this willing.”152 Heidegger contends that chaos lies at the core of the will to will but this is somehow masked through the imposition of a sense of purposiveness onto what is willed, via the creation of ‘missions’. He notes: “Because the will to will absolutely denies every goal and only admits goals as means to outwit itself wilfully and to make room for this game; because however, the will to will nevertheless may not appear as the anarchy of catastrophes that it really is, if it wants to assert itself in beings; it still must legitimate itself. The will to will invents here the talk about ‘mission.’”153 In a similar vein to Schopenhauer, Heidegger calls for the will to be broken. Although in Heidegger’s case this need arises so ‘Being can occur in its primal truth.’ He states: “Before Being can occur in its primal truth, Being as the will must be broken, the world must be forced to collapse and the earth must be driven to desolation and man to mere labour. Only after this decline does the abrupt dwelling of the Origin take place for a long span of time. In decline, everything, that is, beings in the whole of the truth of metaphysics, approaches its end.”154 For Heidegger, what drives the earth to desolation and man to mere labour is revealed in the dominating presence of modern technology, which is in turn interpreted as ‘completed 151

OM, p. 81 OM, p.82 153 OM, p. 82 154 Ibid., p. 68 152


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metaphysics’. He writes: “The name ‘technology’ is understood here in such an essential way that its meaning coincides with the term ‘completed metaphysics.’”155 How humanity’s state of homelessness is sustained by modern technology, which for Heidegger is analogous to the fulfilment of metaphysics/nihilism is a major concern for him. However, I will defer my investigation into modern technology and its bond with homelessness until the next chapter. Now I will provide an initial analysis of Heidegger’s attempt to overcome nihilism. The section ‘Overcoming Nihilism’ will present some groundwork for the discourse that will take place in the concluding chapter ‘Heidegger and the Enactment of a Poetic Homecoming’, as according to Heidegger there can be no hope for a transformation of humanity unless it is brought to ‘the path of thinking, poetizing building.’156

Overcoming Nihilism Overcoming nihilism entails overcoming metaphysics and humanity’s state of homelessness but since I will be dealing with this theme in the concluding chapter I will proceed in a strictly provisional fashion on this subject matter.157 Heidegger claims that he does not think of nihilism as a negative phenomenon or as a sickness but with his constant reminders that nihilism brings about the oblivion of being, his self-narrative is difficult to credit. He believes humanity cannot be cured of nihilism but he also considers it something that humanity should attempt to overcome. Nonetheless, he doesn’t rest here; talk of overcoming nihilism is itself an abstruse process, a process that may not even be possible.158 In any exposition of Heidegger it must never be attempted to find a solution 155

Ibid., p. 75 Ibid., p. 90 157 Of course someone like Derrida would deny that overcoming metaphysics is possible, he would argue that there is fact no thinking ‘outside’ or ‘beyond’ the remit of metaphysics. Christopher Norris writes: For Derrida, the critique of metaphysics cannot be carried on except by means of those various metaphysical concepts and categories that belong to the very history of thought which ‘deconstruction’ inhabits’ – necessarily so – and sets out to challenge at just those points where its presuppositions come most visibly under strain (Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1974, p. 24). Cf. Christopher Norris’ “Metaphysics” in Understanding Derrida, ed. Jack Reynolds and Jonathan Roffe, New York: Continuum, 2004, p. 16. 158 Cf. OM, pp. 67-68 and LPT, pp. 140-141 156

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where there is none. Heidegger writes on what it means to overcome nihilism in volume four of Nietzsche: What does ‘overcoming’ mean? To overcome signifies: to bring something under oneself, and at the same time to put what is thus placed under oneself behind one as something that will henceforth have no determining power. Even if overcoming does not aim at sheer removal, it remains an attack against something. To want to overcome nihilism – which is now thought in its essence – and to overcome it would mean that man of himself advance against being in its default. But who or what would be powerful enough to attack Being itself, no matter from what perspective or with what intent, and to bring it under the sway of man? An overcoming of Being itself cannot ever be accomplished – the very attempt would revert to the desire to unhinge the essence of man.159

Despite his professions that nihilism cannot be overcome, he does offer indications of how this in fact could be possible. Towards the conclusion to “On the Question of Being” he intimates how an overcoming of nihilism may come about. Language plays a central role in overcoming nihilism. However, Heidegger questions the prospect of the language of metaphysics being able to aid humanity in its ‘transition over the line’, that is, beyond nihilism. He remarks: Is the language of the metaphysics of the will to power, of Gestalt, and of values to be saved over beyond the critical line? What if the language of metaphysics and metaphysics itself whether it is that of the living god or of the dead god, in fact constituted, as metaphysics, that limit which prevents a transition over the line, i.e., overcoming nihilism? If this were the case, would not crossing the line necessarily have to become a transformation of our saying and demand a transformed relation to essence of language?160

From Heidegger’s perspective the language of metaphysics is inextricably interwoven with the will to power, Gestalt and values. When such language prevails, humanity is unable to overcome nihilism, hence the need to transform language and our understanding of it. What Heidegger thoughtfully brings to our attention here is poetically carried out by Wallace Stevens in the poem The Comedian as the Letter C. In this poem the poetic hero Crispin ventures across a great ocean from Bordeaux to Carolina in North America, from the old world to the Mundus Novus (the 159 160

N. IV, p. 223 PM, p. 306


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new world.) However, what is really being ventured by Crispin is a journey from an old way of thinking to a Mens Novus (new mind). Crispin is travelling or venturing away from his old habits of eye and mind. He is beset by a profound hunger to purge or cleanse his eye and mind, for they have been culturally malformed. The first section of the poem ‘The World without Imagination’ speaks of the metamorphosis Crispin undergoes as he endures a mighty tempest whilst traversing the great ocean: ‘Crispin was washed away by magnitude…’161 and ‘Just so an ancient Crispin was dissolved…’.162 With the ancient Crispin dissolved and finding himself in a vast new terrain he becomes aware of the inadequacies of his old language and thinking: Here was the veritable ding an sich, at last Crispin confronting it, a vocable thing, But with a speech beheld out of hoary darks Noway resembling his, a visible thing, And excepting negligible Triton, free From the unavoidable shadow of himself That lay elsewhere around him. Severance Was clear. The last distortion of romance Forsook the insatiable egoist. The sea Severs not only lands but also selves. Here was no help before reality. Crispin beheld and Crispin was made new.163

Crispin beheld and became new and what arose out of this newness is documented in section four of the poem entitled ‘The Idea of a Colony’: Nota: his soil is man’s intelligence That’s better. That’s worth crossing seas to find. Crispin in one laconic phrase laid bare His cloudy drift and planned a colony. Exit the mental moonlight, exit lex, Rex and principium, exit the whole Shebang. Exeunt omnes. Here was prose More exquisite than any tumbling verse: A still new continent in which to dwell. What was the purpose of his pilgrimage, Whatever shape it took in Crispin’s mind, 161

Wallace Stevens, The Comedian as the Letter C, in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, New York: Vintage Books,1990, p. 28. 162 Ibid., p. 29 163 Ibid., pp. 29-30

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Chapter Four If not, when all is said, to drive away The shadow of his fellows from the skies, And, from their stale intelligence released, To make a new intelligence prevail?164

Upon reaching the Mundus Novus or Mens Novus there is a further tremendous happening. There is an ‘exit lex/Rex and principium, exit the whole/Shebang. Exeunt omnes…”. The exit of lex, Rex, principium and the whole shebang is in reference to the exodus and withdrawal of the law, the king, the entire political establishment of the old world and the first principles by which individuals live their lives. Previous political, sociological and philosophical systems no longer have a bearing on Crispin. Everything associated with or established in the old world or the old way of thinking have departed or have been shed, the whole shebang has gone. Exeunt omnes, exit everyone, is an allusion to Shakespearian dramas in which the actors all left the stage when the drama had reached its conclusion. The drama in this case is the European one; it is the end of the historical European drama. These events all took place in Crispin’s mind so as to ‘drive away/The shadows of his fellows from the skies’ and with them their ‘stale intelligence.’ There now begins the forging of a ‘new intelligence.’ The new intelligence will make the world intelligible in a completely new way. Nevertheless, how effortless is a new intelligence born? Do not many difficulties and obstacles lie in the way of such a new intelligence, obstacles that could even render it impossible? Will the old world, the old way of perceiving things and the language of that world disappear completely or will it continue to haunt Crispin? Is an exorcism or overcoming of such a deep rooted past a plausible possibility? Frances Bacon in his work Novum Organum (1620) examines those obstacles that prevent a new intelligence from emerging. He calls these impediments ‘false opinions’ or idols (idola). According to Bacon there are four main types of idols that prevail among humanity, they are idols of the tribe (idola tribus), idols of the cave (idola specus), idols of the market place (idola fori) and idols of the theatre (idola theatre). Idols of the tribe are those innate mental propensities of humanity which consist of the futile pursuit for purposes in nature and the instinct to project one’s own desires into nature. Secondly, idols of the cave refer to those predispositions of individuals whose ideas are formed through social and cultural conditioning. Thirdly, idols of the marketplace are false prejudices 164

Ibid., pp. 36-37


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that come into existence through language, where words thought to be meaningful actually stand for nonexistent things and other words which do actually signify something are inadequately defined. Fourthly, idols of the theatre depend upon the influence of prevailing theories and systems of thought, which would include religions; they provide the backdrops to people’s lives but actually prevent us engaging with true reality. While Bacon focuses on the prevalence of these false opinions and the detrimental impact they have on the development of humanity, Heidegger directs his thought to the dominance of metaphysics and modern technology, which represents its fulfilment. For Heidegger, humanity’s homelessness is rooted in the will to will and sustained by modern technology, which itself is the final phase of metaphysics/nihilism. Heidegger writes in “Overcoming Metaphysics”: “The basic form of appearance in which the will to will arranges and calculates itself in the unhistorical element of the world of completed metaphysics can be stringently called ‘technology’. This name includes all the areas of beings which equip the whole of beings…”.165 Modern technology as ‘completed metaphysics’ thus plays a pivotal role in maintaining humanity’s state of homelessness. I will elaborate upon this fascinating and complex subject matter in the next chapter. Furthermore, Heidegger’s discourse on modern technology is essentially intertwined with his thoughts on thinking, language, poetry and the need to dwell poetically. Through his meditations on thinking, language, poetry and poetic dwelling he hoped to open up an alternative mode of revealing in a world increasingly dominated by modern technology. Whether or not his thinking succeeds in preparing the way for humanity to dwell poetically and undergo a poetic homecoming will be critically examined in the concluding chapters.

165

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CHAPTER FIVE HEIDEGGER AND MODERN TECHNOLOGY

Heidegger’s Path to Modern Technology What is the basis for Heidegger’s preoccupation with modern technology? Commentators such as Hubert Dreyfus have focused on Being and Time in order to come to terms with Heidegger’s understanding of modern technology. In his essay “Heidegger’s History of the Being of Equipment” Dreyfus claims that the instrumentalist orientation of Being and Time endorses a technological disclosure of entities.1 Zimmerman on the other hand, while finding weight in some of Dreyfus’ arguments, ultimately contests his reading of Being and Time for two crucial reasons. Firstly, since human beings are ‘radically finite and dependent’ they are unable to accomplish the goal of making entities completely present and available, even with the aid of modern technology. Secondly, entities defy or resist humanity’s attempts to fully grasp or comprehend them. Zimmerman also shows how in section 15 of Being and Time Heidegger manages to reveal the possibility of a disclosure of entities that is neither instrumental nor objectifying.2

1 Dreyfus comments: “The account of worldhood in Being and Time, however, removes every vestige of resistance – that of physics and earth, as well as that of will and subjectivity – to the technological tendency to treat all beings (even man) as resources. Nothing stands in the way of the final possibility that for Dasein the only issue left becomes ordering for the sake of order itself. This is the understanding of Being definitive of technological nihilism, an understanding prepared but not consummated by the account of equipment in Being and Time.” Cf. Hubert Dreyfus’ “Heidegger’s History of the Being of Equipment” in Heidegger: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, p. 183. 2 Cf. Zimmerman’s Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity, p. 164. The passage from §15 of BT reads: “As the ‘environment’ is discovered, the ‘Nature’ itself can be discovered and defined simply in its pure presence-at-hand. But when this happens, the Nature which ‘stirs and strives’, which assails us and enthrals us as landscape, remains hidden. The botanist’s plants are not the flowers of the

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Nevertheless, rather than concentrating on Being and Time in this chapter I will instead turn to a number of Heidegger’s texts from the midthirties onwards. For it is in these later writings that his deliberations upon modern technology become most urgent and explicit. In saying this, his texts prior to the mid-thirties prove vital in shaping his encounter with modern technology, particularly in relation to his understanding of truth and the susceptibility of humanity to err or go astray (Irre). Heidegger notes in Being and Time and the essay “On the Essence of Truth” (1930), among other texts that Dasein stands both in truth and untruth.3 He derives his interpretation of truth from insight drawn from the Greek notion of alƝtheia and especially as it comes to light in the writings of Parmenides. The goddess of truth directs Parmenides before the ways of unconcealment and concealment, between which he must choose by thoughtfully distinguishing the two and deciding for one. This signifies how Dasein stands in truth and untruth.4 More significantly, Parmenides brought thinking and being together, however, this appreciation of truth was subsequently neglected in favour of logical definitions and propositional truth, that is to say, truth understood in terms of validity and correctness. For Heidegger, humanity’s understanding of truth as alƝtheia not only has to be revived but it must be understood in a more original fashion than it was by the ancient Greeks.5 Although the Greeks experienced the event of un-concealment existing at the core of alƝtheia, it did not preoccupy their thought, and it did not establish itself as a compelling difficulty that demanded the utmost attention. Rather than focusing their thought on the astonishing event that the un-concealment had taken place, the Greeks instead turned to what had emerged through this event, that is, beings as beings, as opposed to the being of beings. Accordingly, truth as it emerges from concealment has been conceived as belonging to being. Conversely, Heidegger interprets being as belonging hedgerow; the ‘source’ which the geographer establishes for a river is not the ‘springhead in the dale.” (BT, p. 100) 3 BT, p. 265 and in the essay “On the Essence of Truth” (1930) in a section entitled ‘Un-truth as Errancy’ Heidegger writes: “Rather, untruth must derive from the essence of truth. Only because truth and untruth are, in essence, not irrelevant to one another, but rather belong together, is it possible for a true proposition to enter into pointed opposition to the corresponding untrue proposition. The question concerning the essence of truth thus first reaches the originary domain of what is at issue when, on the basis of a prior glimpse of the full essence of truth, it has included a consideration of untruth in its unveiling of the essence.” (PM, p. 150) 4 BT, p. 265 5 Cf., OWL, p. 39

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to the event of truth that occurs through the existence of Dasein. For Heidegger, truth, being, and existence are a single event in which untruth, as concealment and erring essentially belongs. Erring is an important notion for Heidegger. Dasein does not err out of a desire to mislead itself or because of intellectual frailties or limited knowledge but because concealment essentially belongs to the event of unconcealment and disclosure. In the essay “On the Essence of Truth”, Heidegger remarks: ‘Errancy and the concealing of what is concealed belong to the originary essence of truth.’6 Untruth as concealment, erring, and covering over originally belong together with truth as unconcealment, disclosure, and discovery; they belong to the same event. It appears contradictory, yet it makes sense to find that the most fundamental truth consists in unveiling the concealed as concealed. Furthermore, Heidegger considers humanity’s propensity for erring in a positive light: “But, as leading astray, errancy at the same time contributes to a possibility that humans are capable of drawing up from their ek-sistence – the possibility that, by experiencing errancy itself and by not mistaking the mystery of Da-sein, they not let themselves be led astray.”7 Humanity can thus never go completely astray and the experience of errancy can provoke humanity’s resolve not to be led astray. Humanity never exists completely closed off from it capacity for authenticity. How does this discussion of truth and errancy concern Heidegger’s exposition of modern technology? Technology is a mode of comportment towards the being of beings; it is a mode of revealing and hence essentially intertwined with truth. Moreover, by concentrating on the notion of technƝ a way can be prepared for illuminating an essential aspect to Heidegger’s preoccupation with modern technology. Heidegger informs us that the Greek word technƝ is inscribed with two decisive meanings. Firstly, it relates to the skills of the craftsman and secondly it is linked to the arts of the mind and fine arts.8 More significant for Heidegger, however, is the fact that the early Greeks associated technƝ with the word epistƝmƝ. These Greek words signify knowledge in the broadest sense.9 Drawing on Aristotle’s Nicomachean 6

PM, p. 151, Heidegger also comments: “Errancy is the essential counteressence to the originary essence of truth. Errancy opens itself up as the open region for every counterplay to essential truth. Errancy is the open site for and ground of error. Error is not merely an isolated mistake but the kingdom (the dominion) of the history of those entanglements in which all kinds of erring get interwoven.” (PM, p. 150) 7 Ibid., p. 151 8 QCT, p. 13 9 QCT, p. 13

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Ethics, Book VI, chapters 3 and 4, Heidegger differentiates between technƝ and epistƝmƝ by pointing out how technƝ is a mode of alƝtheuein and therefore primarily a mode of revealing and truth. He states: “Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where alƝtheia, truth, happens.”10 Heidegger makes a seminal distinction between technology and poiƝsis as modes of revealing. This distinction is of the utmost significance to the current investigation, as art and more specifically poetry forms a type of polemic against modern technology in Heidegger’s texts. The mode of revealing pervading modern technology “is a challenging (Herausfordern), which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such.”11 Alternatively, poiƝsis as a mode of revealing is a ‘bringing-forth’.12 Nonetheless, technology is itself not wholly unrelated to poiƝsis. Heidegger claims the modern technological and scientific view of the world arose from the early Greeks intense effort to bring Apollinian clarity, order and form to their experience of the ‘fire of heaven’. The Greek struggle to cope with divine fire was itself poetic and thus its technological and scientific outcome could also be construed as poetic. Heidegger observes: …the ‘astronomical’ sun and the ‘meteorological’ wind, which we people today suppose to know more progressively and better, are not less, only more awkwardly and more unpoetically, poetized than the ‘fire’ in the poem. The poetizing of astronomy and meteorology, the ‘poetizing’ of nature-explaining is of the sort of calculating and planning. Planning is still a poetizing, namely, the counter-presence and absence of poetry.13

In his later writings he attempts to confront technology and at the same time prepare the way for the ‘restorative surmounting’ of the essence of technology through a meditative engagement with poetry.14 Poetry not the method of philosophical Wissenschaft is needed for the shaping of the Germanic homeland and the world at large. In the mid-thirties Heidegger increasingly turned to Friedrich Hölderlin and later on to poets such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Georg Trakl, Stefan George and Johann Peter Hebel. He did so in the belief that thoughtful encounters with their poetry could 10

Ibid., p. 13 Ibid., p. 14 12 Ibid., p. 14 13 GA 52, p. 40, (translation by Michael Zimmerman in Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity, p. 125) 14 QCT p. 39 11


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prepare the way for a non-representational, non-calculative mode of meditative thinking to prevail, thus allowing a post-metaphysical epoch to emerge. Why does Heidegger seek to surmount the essence of modern technology? Does Heidegger regard modern technology as being a danger and if so, why?

Modern Technology and its Dangers Gestell comes to presence as the danger.15

Considering the devastation and unimaginable suffering brought about by the two world wars and innumerable less infamous ones; the mushroom clouds hanging over Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the threat posed to the world by the nuclear arms race during the Cold War and the continuing ecological havoc being wreaked upon the earth, it is unsurprising to find so many critiques of modern technology emerging in the twentieth century and the early part of the twenty-first century. Heidegger too was acutely concerned with modern technology and he carried out thorough and thoughtful investigations into its nature. However, it was not from out of a sense of horror induced from the above mentioned events or any other catastrophe for that matter, which provided the primary impetus for his rigorous questioning of the significance and meaning of modern technology. In a piece entitled “Overcoming Metaphysics” written between 1936 and 1946, Heidegger would go so far as to assert that the rise of technology was not to be thought of in terms of a ‘decline’ or as something ‘negative’.16 He did however speak of the dangers posed by technology but for him the prospect of nuclear annihilation or an ecologically decimated earth were not the greatest dangers facing humanity. According to Heidegger: ‘The danger consists in the threat that assaults man’s nature in his relation to Being itself and not in accidental perils.’17 Are the well-organized, well-executed and deadly events at Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be thought of as accidental perils? Heidegger would no doubt admit that these horrifying events did not occur inadvertently or haphazardly. Nevertheless, he would not point to the technological devices involved but rather to the hidden danger of the 15

Ibid., p. 37 Heidegger remarks: “The essence of the history of Being of nihilism is the abandonment of Being in that in it there occurs the self-release of Being into machination. This release takes man into unconditional service. It is by no means a decline and something ‘negative’ in any kind of sense.” (OM, p. 83) 17 PLT, p. 115 16

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oblivion of being as the source of such destruction. He notes: “What is dangerous is not technology. There is no demonry of technology but rather there is the mystery of its essence.” 18 For Heidegger, the mystery that lies at the heart of technology is essentially connected with the continuing concealment of being. As has already been shown in the previous chapter, Heidegger conceived of nihilism as denoting the ‘inner logic’ that has helped guide Western history, a history in which being lies in oblivion and has been forgotten. I also succinctly indicated at the end of that chapter how Heidegger understood modern technology as a manifestation of ‘completed metaphysics’, that is, as the fulfillment or final stage of metaphysics/nihilism. Elucidating how Heidegger attained such a position with regards modern technology is one of the principal aims here, along with explaining how it contributes to humanity’s state of homelessness. I will argue that while Heidegger’s radical reflections on modern technology prove insightful in interpreting humanity’s homeless condition, there are also critical questions that arise in relation to his interpretation of this dominant phenomenon. Nonetheless, for this investigation to attain any degree of rigour, the following question must first be asked, namely: What does modern technology mean for Heidegger? Among other things, it predominately means the tools, machines, constructions, techniques and productive methods associated with modern industrialized societies. It also involves the scientific, rationalistic, subjectivist and anthropocentric worldview that remains strongly influential in shaping modernity. However, most importantly, as has already been mentioned, modern technology refers to a mode of revealing. Heidegger states: ‘What is modern technology? It too is a revealing.’19 As a mode or way of revealing, it reveals things as ‘standing-reserve’ (Bestand).20 18

Heidegger continues: “The essence of technology, as a destining of revealing, is the danger […] The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology.” (QCT, p. 28) In the essay “The Turning” (1949), the essence of technology is named not as ‘the mystery’ but ‘Being itself’. ( Cf. QCT, p. 38) 19 QCT, p. 14. 20 Heidegger explains ‘standing-reserve’ in the following manner: “Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. We call it the standing-reserve (Bestand). The word expresses here something more, and something more essential, than mere ‘stock’. The name ‘standing-reserve’ assumes the rank of an inclusive rubric. It designates nothing less than the way in which everything presences that is wrought upon by the challenging revealing. Whatever stands by


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Heidegger uses the term ‘Ge-stell’ or ‘Enframing’ to name this prevalent mode of revealing.21 Gestell as it is customarily used in German means a type of apparatus, for example a frame, a shelf or bookrack but it can also mean a skeleton. For Heidegger, it means a mode of revealing, which allows the world to the represented, arranged, transformed, organized, manipulated and mobilized for human purposes. Gestell is a wholly constricted and one dimensional way of revealing things and serves only to reinforce and enhance the will to will. Symptomatic of this prevailing mode of revealing is the way that the river Rhine comes to be seen as a source of energy to be utilized by human beings or something to be viewed as a tourist attraction, while forests come to be perceived in terms of cubic metres of timber.22 He describes Gestell as a ‘somewhat clumsy’ word for naming the essence of modern technology.23 Nonetheless, in the sense of standing-reserve no longer stands over against us as object.” (QCT, p. 17) William Lovitt points out in a footnote to the above cited passage that Bestand is to be contrasted with Gegenstand (object; that which stands over against). In this way even objects ‘lose their character as objects when they are caught up in the ‘standing-reserve.’ 21 Heidegger defines Gestell in the following manner, cautioning against misinterpretation: “…the reader should be careful not to interpret the word as though it simply meant a framework of some sort. Instead he should constantly remember that Enframing is fundamentally a calling-forth. It is a ‘challenging claim’, demanding a summons, that ‘gathers’ so as to reveal. This claim enframes in that it assembles and orders. It puts into a framework or configures everything that it summons forth, through an ordering for use that is forever restructuring anew […] The word stellen (to set upon) in the name Ge-stell (Enframing) not only means challenging. At the same time it should preserve the suggestion of another stellen from which it stems, namely, that producing and preserving (Her – and Dar – stellen) which, in the sense of poiƝsis, lets what presences come forth into unconcealment.” (QCT, pp. 20-21) 22 QCT, p. 16 and p. 18 23 DS, p. 107. Heidegger explicates what he means by ‘essence’ when he writes: “In the academic language of philosophy, ‘essence’ means something is; in Latin, quid. Quidditas, whatness, provides the answer to question concerning essence i.e. the genus, universal […] but Enframing is never the essence of technology in the sense of genus. Enframing is a way of revealing having the character of destining, namely, the way that challenges forth.” (QCT, pp. 29-30) Moreover, the notion of ‘essence’ (Wesen) as Heidegger interprets it, relates to the way in which something pursues its course and the way it persists through time. It is the past participle of ‘to be’ (gewesen), that the German term for essence (sometimes translated as being), Wesen stems. The old verbal forms from which wesen is derived mean to tarry or to dwell. Heidegger links wesen with währen, to last or endure. Inspired by Goethe’s use of the word fortgewähren, to grant permanently, Heidegger goes on

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Heidegger believes it signifies the fate (Geschick) that holds sway over humanity, whereby ‘…the essence of man is framed, claimed, and challenged…’ by ‘a power which man himself does not control.’24 Like all other historical epochs, modern technology is a fate (Geschick) sent as an ‘assignment of Being.’25 Is humanity therefore helplessly under the sway of Gestell and thereby ineluctably bound to technology? Or can humanity emancipate itself from this constrictive mode of revealing it finds itself ensnared in? Heidegger’s understanding of technology is not meant to invoke the idea of an inescapable destiny oppressing humanity. Rather, he attempts to forge or initiate a way of thinking and questioning that will open up a ‘free relationship’ to technology, a freedom achieved by humanity being exposed to the essence of technology. He comments: But when we consider the essence of technology, then we experience Enframing as a destining of revealing. In this way we are already sojourning within the open space of destining, a destining that in no way confines us to a stultified compulsion to push on blindly with technology or, what comes to the same thing, to rebel helplessly against it and curse it as the work of the devil.26

In saying this, Heidegger does not think humanity can overcome modern technology based on human action or initiative alone. Reminiscent of how he describes the impossibility of overcoming nihilism, he writes: If the essence, the coming to presence, of technology, Enframing as the danger within Being, is Being itself, then technology will never allow itself to be mastered, either positively or negatively, by a human doing founded merely on itself. Technology, whose essence is Being itself, will never allow itself to be overcome by men. That would mean, after all, that man was the master of Being.27

to connect the meaning of währen to gewähren, to grant. Through his etymological investigations and by semantically interrelating various words Heidegger is led to write: “Only what is granted endures. That which endures primally out of the earliest beginning is what grants.” (Cf. QCT, p. 33) 24 DS, p. 107 25 Cf. P, p. 55 26 QCT, pp. 25-26 27 Ibid., p. 38


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Nevertheless, humanity plays a vital role in thoughtfully encountering and ‘surmounting’ modern technology: ‘Man is indeed needed and used for the restorative surmounting of the essence of technology.’28 Why does Heidegger interpret Gestell as a danger and why does he seek to prepare the way for an alternative mode of revealing things?29 The foremost danger posed by Gestell has already been alluded to, that is, humanity’s endangered relation to being. Nonetheless, Heidegger alerts us to a number of other dangers arising through modern technology. Some of these other dangers include a decline in the truth of beings, the collapse of the world, the desolation of the earth and humanity being reduced to the role of the ‘labouring animal.’ In “Overcoming Metaphysics” he speaks of how the ‘completion of metaphysics’, which he equates with the reign of modern technology, brings about these events: The decline of the truth of beings occurs necessarily, and indeed as the completion of metaphysics. The decline occurs through the collapse of the world characterized by metaphysics, and at the same time through the desolation of the earth stemming from metaphysics. Collapse and desolation find their adequate occurrence in the fact that metaphysical man, the animal rationale, gets fixed as the labouring animal. This rigidification confirms the most extreme blindness to the oblivion of Being. But man wills himself as the volunteer of the will to will, for which all truth becomes that error which it needs in order to be able to guarantee for itself the illusion that the will to will can will nothing other than empty nothingness, in the face of which it asserts itself without being able to know its own completed nullity.30

Furthering his claim that the human being has become ‘fixed as the labouring animal’ he envisages humanity itself becoming a raw material or resource. Curiously, he even foresees factories being built in the future for the production of human beings: Since man is the most important raw material, one can reckon with the fact that some day factories will be built for the artificial breeding of human material, based on present-day chemical research. The research of chemist Kuhn, who was awarded the Goethe prize of the city of Frankfurt, already opens up the possibility of directing the breeding of male and female organisms according to plan and need.31

28

Ibid., p. 39 Cf. Ibid., p. 28 30 OM, p. 68 31 Ibid., p. 86 29

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In the essay “The Question Concerning Technology” Heidegger is more restrained in his contention that humanity has become a form of standingreserve or mere raw material. Instead he suggests it as a possibility when things themselves are not even encountered as objects but solely as ‘standing-reserve’. He declares that when “…man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve.”32 The danger facing humanity stands in contradistinction to any instrumental or anthropological understanding of technology, whereby technology is grasped as a means towards an end and something man-made and thus under the control and influence of humanity. The potential exclusivity of Gestell as it ‘challenges forth’ has the tendency to eliminate and preclude other modes of revealing such as poiƝsis. Heidegger writes: ‘But at the same time Enframing, in a way characteristic of a destining, blocks poiƝsis.’33 Curbing or denying other ways of revealing things “threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.”34 As a manifestation of and response to Gestell, modern technology suppresses other nontechnological forms of disclosure and imperils humanity’s relation to the essence of truth.35 Yet, Heidegger does not interpret Gestell in an entirely negative light, he also highlights how it gives rise to the ‘saving power’. He states: “On the other hand, Enframing comes to pass for its part in the granting that lets man endure – as yet unexperienced, but perhaps more experienced in the future – that he may be the one who is needed and used for the safekeeping of the coming to presence of truth. Thus does the arising of the saving power appear.”36 There is a quasi religious element to be found in Heidegger’s interpretation of modern technology, which is often overlooked. This aspect to his writings is especially evident in “What Are Poets For?”, when he adverts to loss of the holy, the hale, the whole and how this conceals the track to the godhead. Heidegger observes:

32

QCT, p. 27 Ibid., p. 30, ‘TechnƝ belongs to bringing-forth, to poiƝsis, it is something poietic.’ (QCT, p. 13) 34 Ibid., p. 28 35 Cf. Ibid., p. 33 36 QCT p. 33, Heidegger’s discussion of the saving power emerges in light of those excessively quoted lines of Hölderlin. 33


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The essence of technology comes to the light of day only slowly. This day is the world’s night, rearranged into merely technological day. This day is the shortest day. It threatens a single endless winter. Not only does protection now withhold itself from man, but the integralness of the whole of what is remains now in darkness. The wholesome and sound withdraws. The world becomes without healing, unholy. Not only does the holy, as the track to the godhead, thereby remain concealed; even the track to the holy, hale and whole, seems to be effaced.37

Herman Philipse examines the significance of the religious aspect to Heidegger’s writings in Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being. Philipse discusses this quasi religious element in relation to a ‘postmonotheist’ motif he identifies in Heidegger’s texts. He considers this motif central to his meditations on technology: …by meditating on the ‘essence’ of technology, we may conjecture that this fundamental stance is sent or granted to us by a Mystery, and that what grants us the reign of technology is the ‘saving power’. […] Heidegger’s message is that we may hope to be saved by being if only we meditate with repentance on the essence of technology and if we only interpret this ‘essence’ as a fate that Being sent to us. It is obvious, then, that Heidegger’s philosophy of technology belongs to the genre of religious meditation.38

A further danger humanity is faced with due to Gestell and the reign of technology is the destruction of things. Humanity does not face the destruction of things as a possible future threat. Rather, humanity has already endured this calamitous event and continues to suffer it, unbeknown to itself. This is why Heidegger can assert in the essay “The Thing”: “Man stares at what the explosion of the atom bomb could bring with it. He does not see that the atom bomb and its explosion are the mere final emission of what has long since taken place, has already happened.”39 Thus, what is truly terrifying and unheimlich, that is, what brings about homelessness in a more serious sense than the ruination of cities and towns or any other human habitat, is the loss and destruction of things themselves. Heidegger declares: The terrifying is unsettling; it places everything outside its own nature. What is that unsettles and thus terrifies? It shows itself and hides itself in the way in which everything presences, namely, in fact that despite all 37

PLT, p. 115 Herman Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being, p. 208 39 PLT, p. 164 38

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The more profound destruction occurs with the displacement of the essence (wesen) of things. Humanity’s understanding of the thing and the meaning of nearness are obliterated since technological advances have eliminated all sense of distance. Things are neither near nor far, as everything seems instantaneously accessible with technology. As Wallace Stevens tersely writes: ‘There is no distance.’41 Things have thus ceased to be things, having sunk into an indifferent nothingness. Language too is debased and corrupted when humanity finds itself under the sway of Gestell and being remains forgotten. Heidegger in his Introduction to Metaphysics notes: “But the emptiness of the word ‘Being’, the complete withering of its naming force, is not just a particular case of the general abuse of language – instead, the destroyed relation to Being as such is the real ground for our whole misrelation to language.”42 Zimmerman describes how language has become instrumentalized in accordance with the increasing ascendancy of technology: “Heidegger argued that the ‘instrumentalizing’ of language in the technological era had turned it into an armament for the human domination of the world […] Such instrumentalized language could take the form of the various media of mass culture, including motion pictures, which ‘projected’ the world as a ‘picture’ to be dominated by the subject.”43 This no doubt contributes to humanity’s sense of homelessness, the prominent theme of the current investigation, for according to Heidegger: “Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell.”44 Having alluded to a number of dangers that Heidegger identifies or associates with modern technology, it is crucial for the present enquiry to point how this phenomenon affects humanity’s sense of being at home in the world. For Heidegger, humanity’s increasing use and dependence upon technology signals the commencement of a collective migration into a state of homelessness. Hence, the way has been paved for the annihilation 40

Ibid., p. 164 Wallace Stevens gives the following illustrative example: “We lie in bed and listen to a broadcast from Cairo, and so on.” (Cf. “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” in The Necessary Angel, Essays on Reality and the Imagination, London: Faber and Faber 1951, p. 18.) 42 IM, p. 54. 43 Michael E. Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity, p. 86 44 PM, p. 239 41


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of humanity’s sense of home, while one’s ‘homeland’ begins to lose all meaning and significance. Heidegger remarks: Spellbound and pulled onward by all this, humanity is, as it were, in a process pf emigration. It is emigrating from what is homely (Heimisch) to what is unhomely (Unheimisch). There is a danger that what was once called home (Heimat) will dissolve and disappear. The power of the unhomely seems to have so overpowered humanity that it can no longer pit itself against it.45

Heidegger is especially concerned with how modern technology endangers his fellow German people, and the Germanic homeland. He considers the German fixation with technological devices such as radio and television as indicative of a people who are homeless in their own homeland, far removed and uprooted from the tradition of their native land: Many Germans have lost their homeland, have had to leave their villages and towns, have been driven from their native soil. Countless others, whose homeland was saved, have yet wandered off. They have been caught up in the turmoil of the big cities, and have resettled in the wastelands of industrial districts. They are strangers now to their former homeland. And those who have stayed on in their homeland? Often they are still more homeless than those who have been driven from their homeland.46

While Heidegger bewails the displacing effect modern technology has on human beings, Emmanuel Lévinas extols it for the very same reason. Although, in the essay entitled “Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us” Lévinas shares some of Heidegger’s anxieties about modern technology: ‘There is some truth in this declamation. Technical things are dangerous. They not

45

GA 7, p. 61 (translated by George Pattison in The Later Heidegger, London: Routledge, 2000, p. 60.) 46 This passage continues: “Hourly and daily they are chained to radio and television. Week after week movies carry them off into uncommon, but often merely common, realms of the imagination, and give the illusion of a world that is no world. Picture magazines are everywhere available. All that with modern techniques of communication stimulate, assail, and drive man⎯all that is already much closer to man today than his fields around his farmstead, closer than the sky over the earth, closer than the change from night to day, closer than the conventions and customs of his village, than the tradition of his native world.” (DT, p. 48)

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only threaten a person’s identity, they risk blowing up the planet.’47 However, Lévinas warns that one has to be critically alert to questionable sources from which the Heideggerian critique of modern technology springs. For example, one such source includes reactionary conservatism. Lévinas observes: “But the enemies of industrial society are in most cases reactionary. They forget or detest the great hopes of our age.”48 Lévinas manages to seriously challenge Heidegger’s thought and its concern for enrootedness, but this is something that will be further explored in the concluding chapter.49 Rallying against reactionary conservatism and what he terms a Heideggerian form of ‘paganism’, Lévinas is supportive of modern technology and the possibilities it opens up for humanity.50 For Lévinas, modern technology frees human beings from irrational attachments to specific places or locales: ‘Technology wrenches us out of the Heideggerian world and the superstitions regarding Place…’.51 In freeing humanity in this way, Lévinas deems modern technology to render redundant the native/foreigner dichotomy, which the pagan emphasis on Place establishes.52 Lévinas remarks: ‘Technology does away with the privilege of enrootedness and the related sense of exile.’53 Through the destruction of the native/foreigner distinction, modern technology opens the way for a new inclusive worldwide order, one liberated from the delusory distinctions which have in the past beleaguered relations between fellow human beings. Thus, the potential for founding new, healthier interrelationships between human beings is made possible through modern 47

Emmanuel Lévinas, “Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us”, in Difficult Freedom, Essays on Judaism, trans. Seán Hand, London: The Athlone Press, 1990, p. 231. Henceforth, “Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us”. 48 Ibid., p. 231 49 The serious questions Lévinas manages to highlight relate to the political implications of Heidegger’s thought as it concerns the notion of ‘enrootedness’. For Lévinas deems the idea of ‘enrootedness’ splits human beings into natives and foreigners, which in turn leads to a negative form of nationalism. Lévinas also criticizes Heidegger for subordinating ethics to ontology, which he again believes has negative political consequences, leading to ‘imperialist domination’ and ‘tyranny’. (Cf. Totality and Infinity, An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 2001, pp. 46-47.) These issues will be given greater scope in the final chapter. 50 Lévinas’ critique of Heidegger’s ‘paganism’ will be dealt with in far greater detail in chapter seven. 51 “Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us”, p. 232 52 Ibid., pp. 232-233 53 Ibid., p. 232


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technology. Lévinas notes: “From this point on, an opportunity appears to us: to perceive men outside the situation in which they are placed, and let the human face shine in all its nudity.”54 According to Lévinas, the achievement of the Russian cosmonaut Gagarin is symbolic of modern technology’s liberating potential, for he was freed from the ‘superstition of place.’ Lévinas is fervent about Gagarin’s deed: “But what perhaps counts most of all is that he left the Place. For one hour, man existed beyond any horizon – everything around him was sky or, more exactly, everything around him was geometrical space. A man existed in the horizon of homogenous space.”55 In this regard modern technology is thought of as a powerfully positive phenomenon, something beneficial and progressive as it undermines paganism’s call for enrootedness, and for Lévinas this means that the native/foreign distinction is made obsolete.56 However, to what extent is Lévinas’ laudation of Gagarin’s feat vindicated? To what degree is his celebration of modern technology and its displacing effects warranted? Bearing in mind Lévinas’ reasons for championing Gagarin’s achievement, does it not remain a very superficial event in human history? Francis Bacon in The Advancement of Learning distinguished between advancement local and advancement essential. Advancement local can be characterized by movement from one place to another, for example, taking a flight from London to New York or taking a space shuttle voyage into outer space. Alternatively, advancement local could be thought of in terms of upward mobility, movement involving a change in one’s status in the world, for example, from being a bank clerk to becoming a bank manager. As Bacon writes: For as those which are sick, and find no remedy, do tumble up and down and change place, as if by a remove local they could obtain a remove internal; so is it with men in ambition, when failing of the mean to exalt their nature, they are in a perpetual estuation to exalt their place.57

Conversely, advancement essential, as the name suggests, is indicative of advancement or movement from one state of being to another, for example, moving from a state of delusion to a state of enlightenment. Gagarin’s achievement is surely to be considered an instance of advancement local. Consequently, it has had and will continue to have only superficial 54

Ibid., p. 233 Ibid., p. 233 56 Ibid., p. 232-233 57 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis, London: OUP, 1951, p. 185. 55

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implications for humanity. It has in no way effected or helped transform humanity’s way of being in the world. For an individual or collective to be mechanically propelled from the earthly world to a point ‘beyond any horizon’, to a point where they exist in ‘homogenous space’, does not involve or represent any form of essential transformation for humanity. A deluded individual who boards a space shuttle and travels into outer space remains a deluded individual. Thus, the significance Lévinas attributes to Gagarin’s feat is highly questionable. Another weak aspect to Lévinas’ critique of Heidegger in “Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us”, is his portrayal of Heidegger as a reactionary wholly opposed to modern technology.58 Although Heidegger’s thought is undoubtedly tied to the reactionary movement that arose in Germany in the early part of the twentieth century, and while he is keen to highlight the dangers of modern technology, as was illustrated in the preceding discussion, he is no Luddite. Heidegger displays quite a relaxed attitude towards technology in a text entitled “Memorial Address”, found in Discourse on Thinking, thereby disturbing or undermining Lévinas’ characterization of him, as someone utterly opposed to technology.

Releasement towards Things In the “Memorial Address”, Heidegger draws attention to the possibility of using technical devices without being slavishly dependent upon them, and of living with modern technology in a free or released manner. In this address, Heidegger distinguishes between two types of thinking, calculative and meditative, ‘…each justified and needed in its own way…’.59 Calculative thinking is organized, schematized and planned; it is purposeful and is directed towards the achievement of goals and results. Heidegger comments: “Such thinking remains calculation even if it neither works with numbers nor uses an adding machine or computer […] Calculative thinking never stops, never collects itself.” 60 Differing from or at odds with calculative thinking is meditative thinking, ‘…which

58

Cf. Lévinas’ “Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us”, p. 231 DT, p. 46 60 Ibid., p. 46, Heidegger says of calculative thinking just prior to this: “Its peculiarity consists in the fact that whenever we plan, research, and organize, we always reckon with conditions that are given. We take them into account with the calculated intention of their serving specific purposes. Thus we can count on definite results. This calculation is the mark of all thinking that plans and investigates.” 59


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contemplates the meaning which reigns in everything that is.’61 The cultivation and nurturing of meditative thinking can, according to Heidegger, provide a way to deal with technology that “…expresses ‘yes’ and at the same time ‘no’…”, thus allowing for a releasement towards things (Die Gelassenheit zu den Dingen).62 In this way, our relation to technology becomes freer: We can affirm the unavoidable use of technical devices, and also deny them the right to dominate us, and so to warp, confuse, and lay waste our nature […] We let technical devices enter our daily life, and at the same time leave them outside, that is, let them alone, as things which are nothing absolute but remain dependent upon something higher…I would call this comportment toward technology…by an old word, releasement toward things.63

For Heidegger, this releasement towards things enables humanity to be more receptive to the mystery inherent in technology, while at the same time preparing the ground for a type of dwelling that is able to withstand the threat of Gestell. He explains this by stating: “Releasement toward things and openness to the mystery belong together. They grant us the possibility of dwelling in the world in a different way. They promise us a new ground and foundation upon which we can stand and endure in the world of technology without being imperiled by it.”64 Accordingly, there exists the possibility for human beings to prepare the way for a ‘turning’ to occur within this technological epoch. But this depends upon humanity’s capacity for retreating or disengaging from calculative thinking, and entering onto the path of meditative thinking. In Der Spiegel interview of September 1966, Heidegger is reluctant to define or make explicit what this new type of thinking involves. He says: “I cannot make this clear. I know nothing about how this thinking ‘has an effect’ (‘wirkt’). It may be that the path of thinking has today reached the point where silence is required to preserve thinking from being all jammed up just within a year. It may also be that it will take 300 years for it ‘to have effect.’”65 The question was raised broached earlier as to whether or not Heidegger’s thinking on technology is of political import. This question will be dealt with in a concise a manner as possible in the following section. 61

Ibid., p. 46 Ibid., p. 54 63 Ibid., p. 54 64 Ibid., p. 55 65 DS, p. 110 62

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Heidegger’s Politicized Confrontation with Modern Technology Heidegger makes explicit the political dimension to his confrontation with modern technology in Der Spiegel interview: …I see the task of thought to consist in helping man in general, within the limits allotted to thought, to achieve an adequate relationship to the essence of technology. National Socialism, to be sure moved in this direction. But those people were far too limited in their thinking to acquire an explicit relationship to what is really happening today and has been underway for three centuries.66

In the above passage Heidegger can be interpreted as both associating with and disassociating himself from National Socialism. He affiliates himself with National Socialism insofar as it attempted to attain an ‘adequate relationship to the essence of technology’. Yet, he distances himself from this political movement due to his dissatisfaction with its other members, who were incapable of taking on the task of thinking through to essence of modern technology. Nonetheless, by aligning himself with National Socialism in an effort to confront modern technology it is most evident that Heidegger’s thought lies in close proximity to the political reactionary movement that arose in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century. Zimmerman who finds inspiration in Jeffrey Herf’s Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich, illuminates the historical and political context in which Heidegger’s confrontation with modern technology emerges. According to Zimmerman, it would not be unreasonable to call Heidegger a political reactionary: Heidegger shared many of these reactionary attitudes towards modernity and industrialism. He hated materialism, scientific reduction, the decline of community, the evils of, spiritual decay, atomistic individualism and alienation from the transcendent dimension. Like other reactionaries, he rejected the economic and political values of the Enlightenment and called for a new social order that could arise only by returning to Germany’s primal roots.67

Although one may describe Heidegger’s thought as reactionary, one can do so only very tentatively or tenuously, for he regarded other reactionaries 66 67

Ibid., p. 111 Michael E. Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity, p. 4


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as philosophically naïve and shallow.68 Heidegger employed his own unique philosophical terminology in his espousal of National Socialism, which promised to forge an alternative political direction to those misguided political movements of capitalism and communism. Contrary to the vast majority of National Socialists, Heidegger considered Germany’s plight to be essentially linked to metaphysics, and originating in the decline in Western humanity’s understanding of being. There is however, much criticism of Heidegger’s own account of his political commitments. According to Hugo Ott, Otto Pöggeler, Karl Löwith and Hermann Philipse, among others, he misinterpreted or more seriously, deliberately misrepresented his Nazi past. Otto Pöggeler for instance, challenges Heidegger’s claim regarding the parenthetical remark attached to his notorious comments made in the Introduction to Metaphysics, concerning the ‘inner truth and greatness’ of National Socialism.69 According to Heidegger, the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism referred to ‘…the encounter between global technology and modern humanity.’ He states that these words were present in the original manuscript but that he did not speak them at the time for he was confident that those in the audience that could understand him, did so. Nevertheless, he refrained from speaking them for: ‘The dumb ones, the spies, and the snoopers wanted to understand me otherwise, and would, no matter what.’70 Pöggeler alleges that the words in parenthesis were not in the text of nineteen thirty five nor were they ‘present even in the page proofs.’71 This suggests Heidegger interfered with his earlier text in order to alter its political significance. Relying on Pöggeler’s research into this issue, Philipse argues that Heidegger tried to launder his political past. For according to Philipse: “Heidegger lied about the origin of the passage 68

Zimmerman points out: “While yearning for a renewal of Volkgeist, Heidegger dismissed those reactionaries who claimed that such a renewal required a return to instinctual, atavistic roots of the Volk. Such appeals to instinctual renewal and racism pretended to fight against the evils of the scientific worldview, Heidegger argued, but in fact they were in a league with the scientific naturalism that interpreted humans as merely clever animals.” (Ibid., p. 4) 69 This well-known passage reads: “In particular, what is peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism, but which has not the least to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely, the encounter between global technology and modern humanity), is fishing in these troubled waters of ‘values’ and ‘totalities.’” (IM, p. 213) 70 DS, p. 104 71 Otto Pöggeler, “Heidegger’s Political Self-Understanding”, in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, trans. Steven Galt Crowell, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press 1993, p. 220.

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between parentheses, offered an interpretation of his text of 1935 that contradicts its original intentions, and accuses readers who took the text at face value of not having learned the craft of thinking.”72 In spite of these critical remarks, Pierre Bourdieu describes Heidegger’s writings as ‘polysemic’. By ‘polysemic’ he means that Heidegger’s texts can be fruitfully read without taking into account their political content and ramifications, nonetheless, they can and ought to be interpreted bearing these political implications in mind. For Bourdieu, Heidegger’s texts cannot be fully understood or dissected in terms of the historical, social and political conditions of his time. There is a degree of autonomy to all texts, according to Heidegger, whereby the author does not have complete control of the meaning and implications of what he/she has written. Thus, the fact that Heidegger chose to interpret his own texts as being in keeping with National Socialism does not mean that his readers must necessarily adhere to this construal and application of his thought.73 Although Heidegger’s texts may well be considered polysemic this notion should in no way be understood to exorcise the political spectres that are present, or more significantly absent from his writings. Few utterances on the Holocaust find their way into his oeuvre, and yet they continue to haunt his writings. This is nowhere more evident than when he equates the motorized food industry, among other things with the German extermination camps. Heidegger writes: Agriculture is now motorized food industry, essentially the same thing as the fabrication of cadavers in the gas chambers of the extermination camps, the same thing as the blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the fabrication of hydrogen bombs.74

This staggering comment incredibly belies the fact that the Holocaust involved the specific targeting of the Jewish people at the hands of a political regime Heidegger supported. He remained resolutely silent in relation to the Holocaust and instead interpreted it as an atrocity befitting the technological epoch endangering the world. The deterioration of agriculture into the motorized food industry, the manufacturing of hydrogen bombs, the reduction of countries to famine and extermination camps were comparable from Heidegger’s perspective because they were 72

Herman Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being, p. 250 Pierre Bourdieu, L’ontologie politique de Martin Heidegger (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1988 (originally published 1976), p. 39. Cf. Michael E. Zimmerman’s, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity, p. 38) 74 Cited by Wolfgang Schirmacher, Technik und Gelassenheit: Zeitkritik nach Heidegger, Freiburg/München: Karl Alber Verlag, 1983, p. 25. 73


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occurrences that happened in response to Gestell, the mode of revealing that reigns throughout modern technology. This dominant mode of revealing permits humanity to conceive of itself and everything else as a resource to be produced and consumed, manipulated and utilized in order to enhance the will to will. In this way, the Jews could be treated by the Nazis as a pestilence of which they needed to be cleansed. Zimmerman in trying to come to terms with Heidegger’s claims makes reference to Edith Wyschogrod. Wyschogrod contends that Heidegger was able to speak of extermination camps, the motorized food industry and hydrogen bombs in the same vein due to his concentration on the history of metaphysics, and his concern with the transformation of things. He focused on how things are produced and used in Western history, rather than ‘…the transformations of social institutions and practices’. Wyschogrod remarks: “The priorities established remain nothing short of astounding. For Heidegger, such facts as the damming of the Rhine are important data attesting devastation, but the unnumbered dead of the two world wars and the creation of death and slave labour camps as institutional forms are never so much as mentioned in his major essays.’”75 The sentiments expressed here bear resemblance to the renowned criticism Lévinas levelled at Heidegger; that his thinking went awry through his prioritization of ontology over ethics. With regards Heidegger’s notorious statement, Lacoue-Labarthe states: This sentence is scandalously inadequate. It is not inadequate because it relates mass extermination to technology. From that point, it is indeed absolutely correct. But it is scandalous and therefore lamentably inadequate because it omits to mention that essentially, in its German version…mass extermination was an extermination of the Jews and that this is incommensurably different from the economico-military practice of blockades or even the use of nuclear arms. Not to speak of the agricultural industry […] The fact that Heidegger was not even able, nor probably wished to state this difference is what is strictly – and- eternally – intolerable.76

For Lacoue-Labarthe, the Jews did not pose a threat to Germany, in the way the Melians threatened the Athenians, as the Christian heretics or Protestants threatened the State based on divine right, or as the Girondins threatened the French Revolution, or the Kulaks threatened established 75

Edith Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger, and Man-made Death, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985, p. 183. Cf. Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity, pp. 129-130 76 Phillippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics (The Fiction of the Political), trans. Chris Turner, Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1990, p. 34.

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socialism. According to Lacoue-Labarthe, the Jews were deemed dangerous and subversive to the German fatherland because they represented a heterogeneous element. He asserts: “…for a nation that was painfully lacking identity or existence of its own and which was, in fact, also facing very real threats both internal and external…the Jewish threat belonged to the realm of projection.”77 Miguel de Beistegui in Heidegger and the political also takes issue with Heidegger’s contentious pronouncement. Miguel de Beistegui interprets the Holocaust as signifying a failure of thinking itself, a failure Heidegger himself failed to recognize. Instead, Heidegger attempted to subsume the events of the Holocaust into his own mode of thinking. Miguel de Beistegui notes: The failure, then, is a failure of thinking itself, insofar as it can think the Extermination only by integrating it into a chain of events (mechanized agriculture, the hydrogen bomb, the Berlin blockade, the fate of the East Germans, etc.), as if the Holocaust had not forced thinking outside of itself, as if thinking had not been exceeded by that which it cannot simply contain and which it must nevertheless think, as if, before the magnitude of what took place, thinking could remain otherwise than distraught and dazed, as if, after Auschwitz, thinking could dispense with questioning anew, as if it could remain intact in the precedence of the event, as if it could ignore this gap in history, this black hole from which we must learn to rethink light and reinvent the day.78

These critical insights alert us to the highly questionable political position Heidegger developed both implicitly and explicitly in his writings. His texts can therefore be understood to inspire a hermeneutics of vigilance, as readers must be intensely attentive to how philosophical ideas can lend themselves to profoundly misguided and dangerous political regimes. The example of Heidegger illustrates this, and shows how great thinkers can try to guide and give credence to a violently wayward political movement but instead end up being led astray themselves.

Heidegger and Jünger: Gestell, Gestalt and the Will to Power Heidegger was hugely influenced by Ernst Jünger and particularly by such works as “Total Mobilization” (“Die totale Mobilmachung”) and The Worker (Der Arbeiter). Heidegger regarded these two texts, among others, 77

Ibid., pp.36-37 Miguel de Beistegui, Heidegger and the political, dystopias, London: Routledge 1998, p. 154. 78


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to offer a most lucid account of the modern-day condition of Western humanity. The grounds for Heidegger’s admiration of Jünger is based upon his ‘essential comprehension of Nietzsche’s metaphysics.’79 Furthermore, Heidegger in the essay “On the Question of Being”, acknowledges the impact Jünger’s thought had on his. He comments: “…‘The Question concerning Technology’ owes a lasting debt to the description in The Worker. It is appropriate to note that your ‘descriptions’ do not merely depict something actual that is already familiar, but make accessible a ‘new actuality,’ in which it is ‘not so much a matter of new thoughts or a new system…’”.80 Heidegger like Jünger was dissatisfied with Marxist economic interpretations of modern technology, believing them to be insufficient for determining its true nature. Both Heidegger and Jünger considered the phenomenon of technology as retaining a further, concealed truth. Drawing on insights attained by Nietzsche, Jünger interpreted modern technology as the most recent manifestation of the eternal will to power, and it was therefore not to be understood on the grounds of technological devices themselves. Jünger writes: ‘In any event, Total Mobilization’s technical side is not decisive. Its basis—like that of all technology—lies deeper.’81 For Jünger, the will power was now taking on the form of the Gestalt of the worker, the latest historical manifestation of Nietzsche’s will to power. What does Jünger mean by the ‘Gestalt’ of the worker? Zimmerman defines the Gestalt of the worker as that which “…names the metaphysical ‘stamping’ (Prägung) and ‘imprinting’ (Stempeln) that organizes the

79

Heidegger considers Jünger’s influence on his thought when he writes: “The way I already viewed the historical situation at that time [i.e., in the early 1930’s] may be indicated with a reference. In 1930, Ernst Jünger’s essay on ‘Total Mobilization’ appeared; in this essay the fundamental outlines of his 1932 book The Worker are articulated. In a small group, I discussed these writings at this time, along with my assistant [Werner] Brock, and attempted to show how in them an essential comprehension of Nietzsche’s metaphysics is expressed, insofar as the history and the contemporary situation of the West is seen and foreseen in the horizon of this metaphysics. On the basis of these writings, and even more essentially on the basis of their foundations, we reflected on what was to come, i.e., we sought thereby to confront the latter in discussions.” Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität/Das Recktorat 1933-34 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1985), p. 24. Found in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, trans. Joel Golb and Richard Wolin, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press 1993, p. 121. 80 PM, p. 295 81 Ibid., p. 129

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worker’s experience and behaviour.”82 To further illuminate its meaning, he writes: The rationality at work in modern technology is merely an expedient means to an inherently non-rational end: production for production’s sake. Hence, the Gestalt of the worker does not ‘mean’ anything apart from the restless activity of the cosmos at work; the new world forged by the worker is simply a more straightforward manifestation of the Will to Power.83

Gestalt can therefore be understood as a type of transcendental force shaping the epoch of modern technology, whereby the Gestalt of the worker characterizes the archetype of the modern human being. Furthermore, through ‘total mobilization’ the Gestalt of the worker becomes ever more dominant: Total Mobilization is far less consummated than it consummates itself; in war and peace, it expresses the secret and inexorable claim to which our life in the age of masses and machines subjects us. It thus turns out that each individual life becomes, ever more unambiguously, the life of the worker; and that, following the wars of knights, kings and citizens, we now have wars of the workers.84

82

Zimmerman clarifies the meaning of Gestalt in the following passage: “What Jünger meant by Gestalt is not entirely clear. In psychological terms, it means a shape or form that is more than the sum of the perceptual elements organized by that shape. Jünger often let the word be defined negatively by that which it stood in contrast: the spineless, fragmented bourgeois world […] Following Spengler, Jünger contrasted Gestalt with reason: the latter was abstract, lifeless, repetitive, and derivative; the former was concrete, lively, novel, and creative. The Gestalt was associated with rooted Kultur, not with rootless Zivilization […] Gestalt ‘stamps’ everyone with its character: leaders and followers alike are shaped by it. The Gestalt of the worker, the, names the metaphysical ‘stamping’ (Prägung) and ‘imprinting’ (Stempeln) that organizes the worker’s experience and behaviour. He writes: ‘By Gestalt we refer to the highest meaningful reality. Its appearances are meaningful as symbols, representations and impressions of this reality. The Gestalt is the whole which embraces more than the sum of its parts. This ‘more’ we call totality.” (Zimmermann, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity, p. 57) 83 Ibid., p. 60 84 Ernst Jünger, “Total Mobilization”, trans. Joel Golb and Richard Wolin, found in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, trans. Joel Golb and Richard Wolin, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press 1993, p. 128.


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Jünger’s Gestalt of the worker foreshadows Heidegger’s notion of Gestell. In “On the Question of Being” Heidegger calls attention to the significance of these notions. However, Heidegger takes issue with Jünger’s Gestalt for he maintains that Jünger’s thinking remains within metaphysics. Quoting Jünger in order to draw attention to limits of his thoughts, Heidegger comments that the notion of Gestalt “…remains housed within metaphysics…The Gestalt is ‘metaphysical power.’ (Der Arbeiter, pp.113, 124, 146).”85 Why does Heidegger regard Jünger’s thinking as remaining confined to metaphysics? He does so because he regards Jünger as having failed to think on the basis of the ontological difference. Consequently, Jünger mistakenly conceived of Gestalt as the ‘source that gives meaning’ (Der Arbeiter, p. 148), thereby equating it with being.86 Moreover, Heidegger claims: ‘Work’, from which the Gestalt of the worker for its part receives its meaning, is identical with ‘being’. Here it remains to be pondered whether and to what extent the essence of ‘being’ is intrinsically a relation to the human essence (cf. What Calls for Thinking?, pp. 73ff.) […] It seems to me that the following questions can hardly be circumvented…does the essence of Gestalt spring in its provenance from the realm of what I call Ge-stell? [...] Or is Ge-stell only a function of the Gestalt of a particular humankind? If this latter were the case, then the essential unfolding of being and above all the being of beings would be a product of human representation. The era in which European thinking came to this opinion continues to cast its last shadow over us.87

It would thus seem that if Ge-stell was a function of Gestalt, humanity would necessarily be the foundation or ground of being and the being of an entity would therefore be the construction or projection of ‘human representation’. Unsurprisingly, Heidegger denies the possibility of humanity providing the ground for being, as this merely inverses the Platonic and Christian metaphysical conception of a supreme entity providing the basis for all beings. Thus, despite his deep respect for Jünger, Heidegger seeks to distance himself from this manner of metaphysical thinking. His determination to distinguish the task of his thinking from Jünger’s is most evident when he asserts: “But the question concerning the essence of being dies off if it does not relinquish the

85

PM, p. 299 Ibid., pp. 298-299 87 Ibid., pp. 302-303 86

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language of metaphysics, because the metaphysical representation prevents us from thinking the question concerning the essence of being.”88 Turning now to the origins of modern technology, there is a need to examine the history of metaphysics as Heidegger has interpreted it. For Heidegger considers the origins of modern technology to be inextricably linked to metaphysics. Given the sheer scope of this task and the limited space to carry it out, it is inevitable that I will be unable to do justice to the subtleties and nuances of Heidegger’s interpretation of the history of metaphysics. There is also a case to be made on behalf of those great thinkers whose thought Heidegger attempts to appropriate, as he constructs his own grand narrative of the history of metaphysics. For example, there are many who would defend Nietzsche from a Heideggerian reading. Despite these weighty difficulties I will endeavour to articulate in a precise a manner as possible why Heidegger envisages modern technology as being rooted in the history of metaphysics.

The History of Metaphysics and Modern Technology As a form of truth technology is grounded in the history of metaphysics…89

The history of Western metaphysics is paramount to Heidegger’s understanding of modern technology, and many key philosophical thinkers and epochs are identified by him as having played major roles in the unfolding of its history.90 Some of the main philosophical figures Heidegger refers to include Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz and Nietzsche, with whom metaphysics seemingly found completion. Additionally, the epochs he has recourse to include the Roman empire, or more specifically the Roman translations of the ancient Greeks; Medieval philosophy and the Enlightenment. Through thoughtful encounters with these philosophical figures and epochs, Heidegger manages to forge a grand historico-metaphysical narrative. Why does Heidegger argue that technology has it origins in the history of metaphysics? He does so because from the outset Western metaphysics 88

PM, p. 306 Ibid., p. 259 90 In a footnote to the essay “The Turning”, Lovitt elucidates the meaning of ‘epoch’ for Heidegger. He writes: “Heidegger never intends ‘epoch’ simply in the sense of ‘era’ or ‘age’. ‘Epoch’ always carries for him the meaning of the Greek epoche, i.e., withholding-to-self (Ansichhalten). (Cf. “Time and Being”, On Time and Being, p. 9) Here, then, the meaning is that the danger is the self-withholding of Being enduring as present in the mode of Enframing.” (Cf. QCT, p. 43) 89


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neglected to think what was most thought worthy, it forget the question of being. In the lecture course What is Called Thinking? Heidegger makes an important distinction between the beginning of Western thought and its origin, and in doing so, he manages to highlight how being is concealed in a twofold manner. Being conceals itself insofar as it is not an entity but rather the event of presencing/concealment (the latter being more primary than the former). However, being also lies in oblivion for from the outset metaphysics failed to pursue the question of being, thus obscuring this seminal question. In a hugely significant passage, Heidegger states: In fact, the history of Western thought begins, not by thinking what is most thought-provoking, but by letting it remain forgotten. Western thought thus begins with an omission, perhaps even a failure. So it seems, as long as we regard oblivion only as a deficiency, something negative. Besides, we do not get on the right course here if we pass over an essential distinction. The beginning of Western thought is not the same as its origin. The beginning is, rather, the veil that conceals the origin – indeed an unavoidable veil. If that is the situation, then oblivion shows itself in a different light. The origin keeps itself concealed in the beginning.91

Furthermore, since the conception of Western metaphysics to ‘be’ has been as grasped as ‘being produced.’ For Heidegger, the inception of metaphysics inaugurated by Plato has shaped all successive metaphysical understandings of being albeit in transformed ways. How did Plato initiate ‘productionist metaphysics’? How can Plato’s metaphysical position be associated with the predominance of modern technology? The basis for Heidegger’s understanding of metaphysics is founded upon his construal of the fundamental concepts of the ancient Greeks. Notions such as matter (hylƝ) and form (morfƝ) were drawn from the realm of artefacts and these ideas were to shape all subsequent metaphysics. Heidegger’s understanding of these basic and essential metaphysical concepts is already evident in the Natorp essay of 1922 and in §6 of Being and Time. It implies that from Plato and Aristotle onwards, to ‘be’ has been understood as ‘being produced.’92 Is it strange that the ancient Greeks interpreted being in terms of ‘being produced’? Is it peculiar that basic notions such as matter and form were understood to have arisen in relation to artefacts, that is, man-made or crafted objects? Perhaps one way of interpreting how the realm of artefacts contributed to this notion of ‘being produced’ is by turning to the fact that human beings are endowed with cerebro-manual dexterity and opposable 91 92

WCT, p. 152 Cf. Ibid., p. 162

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thumbs.93 These capabilities enable humans to be tool users and make possible the skill of craftsmanship. Physiologically conditioned this way tends to promote an understanding of the world and reality in terms of something that can be grasped, manipulated and shaped. Plato’s introduction of the demiurge in his Timaeus, a deity who shapes the material world from the pre-existing chaos reinforces this understanding of being as ‘being produced’. The word ‘demiurge’ comes from the Greek dƝmiourgos, meaning artisan or craftsman. Thus, the demiurge as found in Plato’s Timaeus could be interpreted as a more elaborate version of the human craftsman. Plato’s description of the demiurge, with its ability to shape the visible and material world appears to be directly derived from the way humanity shapes and manipulates nature and the world around itself. This Platonic conception of the world’s origin as something created or produced betrays an anthropocentric bias. If it were possible for a dolphin to imagine how the world came into being it is most likely that it would not imagine the world as something that had been created or produced. Whether or not Heidegger would find credence in such an interpretation of how the Greek’s comprehension of being arose is another matter. In his concern for the oblivion of being, Heidegger is drawn to Plato’s doctrine of the eternal Forms or Ideas, which constitute the eternal essence of things. Plato uses the words eidos and idea to name those Forms that determine what an entity is. These Forms are the prototypes or archetypes that exist prior to the appearance of the entity itself.94 The idea provides the eternal model, of which sensible, corporal and changeable things are but deficient copies. Conceived metaphysically the idea is the ‘really real’, the permanently present ‘aspect’ which provides the ontological basis for sensible and finite things.95 Nonetheless, according to Heidegger, Plato’s idea as it relates to the essence of being as ‘emergent shining’ or 93

It was in conversation with John Moriarty that I was alerted to the significance of how cerebro-manual dexterity contributed to humanity’s understanding of the world. 94 Cf. IM, pp. 196-197 and in “The Question Concerning Technology” he writes: “For eidos, in common speech, meant the outward aspect (Ansicht) that a visible thing offers to the physical eye. Plato exacts of this word (eidos), however, something utterly extraordinary: that it name what precisely is not and never will be perceivable to with physical eyes. But even this is by no means the full extent of what is extraordinary here. For idea names not only the nonsensuous aspect of what is physically visible. Aspect (idea) names and is, also, that which constitutes the essence in the audible, the tasteable, the tactile, in everything that is any way accessible.” (QCT, p. 20) 95 BP, pp. 106-108


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‘appearing’ (Scheinen) manages to preserve some of the original insight into the meaning of being as phusis, that is, as the play between appearance and concealment.96 He remarks: “In fact, it cannot be denied that the interpretation of Being as idea results from the fundamental experience of Being as phusis. It is, as we say, a necessary consequence of the essence of Being as emergent shining (Scheinen).”97 Despite his experience of being as phusis, Heidegger regards Plato’s idea as chiefly relating to the permanently present Form, and this in turn provides the ground for entities in the sensible realm. The idea therefore takes precedence over the event of presencing/concealment. Heidegger comments: ‘…the idea rises up as the sole and definitive interpretation of Being.’98 Hence Plato can be understood to have brought about productionist metaphysics by transforming being into something definite and permanently present; as the transcendent and eternally present Form which makes things possible. Heidegger also considers Aristotle’s metaphysical thinking as playing a vital role in humanity’s forgetting of being (Seinsvergessenheit), for through his ‘ousiological reduction’ he managed to reduce the fundamental question of philosophy, that is, the question of ‘being qua being’ to the question of ousia (substance).99 Consequently, from a Heideggerian perspective Aristotle’s ontology neglected being in favour of beings. Aristotle failed to encounter being in its most primordial mode as the play between presencing and absencing, unconcealment and concealment, phusis and alêtheia. Moreover, by conceiving of entities as ‘formed matter’, Aristotle’s thinking like Plato’s, draws inspiration from the realm of artefacts and the craftsman, with whose skill the material is formed and shaped. Hence, Aristotle like Plato could be regarded as projecting onto all entities the structure of artefacts.100 According to Heidegger, the Roman translations of the Greeks have helped shape modern interpretations of the ancients, while at the same 96

Heidegger’s understanding of phusis derives inspiration from Heraclitus’ words ‘phusis kruptesthai philei’ (Nature loves to hide). Cf. IM, p. 121 97 The German word ‘Scheinen’ usually translates as ‘appearing’ but in Fried’s and Polt’s translation of Introduction to Metaphysics it is rendered ‘emergent shining’. ( IM, p. 194) 98 Ibid., p. 194 99 Cf. Ted Sadler’s, Heidegger and Aristotle, The Question of Being, London: Athlone Press 1996, p. 21. Heidegger claims ‘substance’ is a reckless translation of ousia and it should be instead rendered as ‘coming-to-presence’ (An-wesen, which also means self-contained farm or homestead). (Cf. IM, p. 64) 100 Cf. Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity, p. 157

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time encouraging the growth of productionist metaphysics.101 In a series of lectures on Parmenides he investigates how the Romans transformed the meaning of central Greek notions such as ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’ in a way that was detrimental to the prospect of gaining insight into the meaning of being. Heidegger calls attention to the event that marked the transformation of the Greek word ȥİȪįȠȢ into the Latin word falsum. Heidegger translates the Greek word for truth alêtheia into unconcealment (Unverborgenheit). Occasionally he hyphenates this word to render it unconcealment in order to lay emphasis on the integral relation it bears to concealment.102 Heidegger contends that the Greeks considered concealment to be of more primary significance than unconcealment: “…in the existence of the Greeks, i.e., in their dwelling in the midst of beings as such, the essence of concealment holds sway essentially. From this we can clearly surmise more readily why they experience and think truth in the sense of ‘concealment’.”103 Nevertheless, the Romans did not translate the opposite of truth (unconcealment) as concealment, but rather defined its opposite as falsum. What does the Latin ‘falsum’ signify for the Romans, and why was it endowed with this meaning? According to Heidegger, falsum was intrinsically related to the notion of ‘bringing to a downfall’ and was indicative of the Roman imperialistic way of being in the world. He remarks: “The Greek ȥİȪįȠȢ, as hiding and consequently as ‘deceiving’, is now no longer experienced and interpreted on the basis of concealing but instead on the basis of subterfuge. The Greek ȥİȪįȠȢ, by being translated into the Latin falsum, is transported into the Roman-imperial domain of 101

Heidegger asserts in Parmenides: “A more remote, but by no means indifferent, consequence of the Romanizing of Greece and of the Roman rebirth of antiquity is the fact that we today still see the Greek world with Roman eyes – and indeed not solely within historiographical research into ancient Greece but also, and this is the only decisive thing, within the historical metaphysical dialogue of the modern world with that of the ancients. The metaphysics of Nietzsche, whom we like to consider the modern rediscoverer of ancient Greece, sees the Greek ‘world’ exclusively in a Roman way, i.e., in a way at once modern and un-Greek. Similarly, we still think the Greek ȆȩȜȚȢ and the ‘political’ in a totally un-Greek fashion. We think the ‘political’ as Romans, i.e., imperially…our usual basic ideas, i.e., Roman, Christian, modern ones, miserably fail to grasp the primordial essence of ancient Greece.” (P, p. 43) 102 Heidegger writes: “Indeed it appears unconcealment is involved with concealedness in a ‘conflict’, the essence of which itself remains in dispute.” (P, p. 16) This is intimately linked to Heraclitus’ saying ‘War is the father of all things…’ 103 P, p. 25


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bringing to a downfall.”104 For Heidegger, this translation was in keeping with the dominative conduct of the Romans. Furthermore, Heidegger interprets imperium on the basis of ‘command’ and goes onto depict Roman commanding in a similar fashion, that is, as a constrictive and forceful mode of revealing things. He writes: What is the basis for the priority of fallere in the Latin formation of the counter-essence to truth? It lies in this, that the basic comportment of the Romans toward beings in general is governed by the rule of the imperium. Imperium says im-parare, to establish, to make arrangements: prae-cipere, to occupy something in advance, and by this occupation to hold command over it, and so to have occupied as territory. Imperium is commandment, command.105

The Roman determination of truth and falsity provides a driving force for the West’s will to power, and desire to dominate things: “This originally Roman stamp given to the essence of truth establishes the all-pervading basic characteristic of the essence of truth in the Occident…”.106 Is the connection Heidegger establishes between the Roman sense of falsum to imperium credible or highly fanciful? One cannot help but be slightly skeptical of Heidegger’s claim here, as the inference he makes on the basis of his etymological investigations is questionable. Medieval philosophy and its Christian persuasion, is also viewed by Heidegger as contributing significantly to the oblivion of being. For he regards Christianity as furthering the interpretation of being as the productive basis for things. Heidegger argues that Christianity’s emphasis on creation, and its conception of God as the all powerful creator who is the source of all creation and therefore of all beings solidifies and enhances productionist metaphysics. This in turn contributes to the ‘arrival of Technik’. Heidegger comments: Christendom, then, which as a result of the technƝ-like notion of creation which it believes and teaches is – metaphysically seen – also one of the reasons for the arrival of modern Technik, would have an essential share in the formation of the domination of the self-reflection of subjectivity, such that Christendom can do nothing to overcome this reflection.

104

Ibid., p. 41 P, p. 44 106 Ibid., pp.48-49 105

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Chapter Five Whence, then, otherwise the historical bankruptcy of Christendom and its Church in world history? Is yet a third world war needed to prove it?107

Heidegger sees the Christian metaphysical understanding of God as a type of conceptual precursor for technological humanity, whereby a Supreme Being represents an omnipotent ordering power that creates and sustains all living creatures. For Heidegger, Christian metaphysicians’ quest for the ultimate ground, that is, God tends to misconstrue being as an entity or a being. Also, throughout the middle ages the philosophical concern for uncovering the foundation of reality was in some cases driven by the yearning for certainty, with respect to salvation of the Christian soul. Zimmerman claims the Christian search for salvation or security found in the middle ages helped prepare the way for Descartes’ assertion that human reason is the absolute certain foundation for determining the truth and reality of all beings.108 The self-certain subject then becomes the measure for all things. The modern subjectivist tradition established by Descartes opened the way for humanity to assume the role of God as the producer of all things. Descartes’ philosophical arguments and insights meant the revelatory ‘truth’ offered by religion became increasingly redundant. While the knowledge and truth attained through the cognizing subject’s own self certainty became ever more credible and prevalent. Descartes understood that for something to ‘be’ meant for it to be the object of a self certain subject.109 Also, in Principles of Philosophy he endeavours to reduce natural phenomena to quantitative descriptions of arithmetic and geometry: ‘my considerations of matter in corporal things,’ he writes ‘involves nothing apart from divisions, shapes and motions.’110 Heidegger interprets Descartes’ mathematical/scientific representation of the external world as res extensa or extended matter as giving rise to the possibility of modern machine technology, the new world and its people.111 How can Heidegger credit Descartes with bringing about the machine age and at the same time claim that technƝ has been the dominant understanding of being since Plato? This question seems to raise doubts 107

GA 55, p. 209, this translation comes from Zimmerman’s “The Religious Dimension of the ‘Destiny of Being” in Phenomenology and the Understanding of Human Destiny, Washington, D.C., University Press of America, 1981, pp. 303304. 108 Cf. Zimmerman’s Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity, p. 180 109 Cf. QCT, p. 127 110 Cf. René Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, trans. Valentine Rodger Miller and Reese P. Miller, London: Reidel, 1983. 111 N. IV, p. 116


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about the meta-narrative Heidegger attempts to establish. However, the questionability of Heidegger’s meta-narrative concerning the origin and development of modern technology will be examined shortly. In terms of Heidegger’s interpretation of Descartes, he finds that with regards the advance of modern technology, the vital notion of the ‘will’ was absent from his thinking. The idea of ‘will’ was to become pivotal for Leibniz, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. A decisive development in metaphysics was brought about by Leibniz with his notion of the principle of reason. The principle of reason states that for everything that exists there must be a reason for its existence. Heidegger considers the principle of reason to be central to the epoch of modern technology and science: “The calculability of objects presupposes the unqualified validity of the principium rationis (the principle of reason). It is in this way that the authority of the principle of reason, so understood, determines the essence of the modern technological age.”112 Despite modern science giving the impression or appearance of humbling humanity through the Copernican revolution and Darwinism, it in fact establishes human rationality at a level never before thought possible. In the essay “The Age of the World Picture” Heidegger elucidates how scientific research now unfolds: Research has disposal over anything that is when it can either calculate it in its future course in advance or verify a calculation about the past. Nature, in being calculated in advance, and history, in being historiographically verified as past, become, as it were, ‘set in place’ (gestellt). Nature and history become the objects of a representing that explains. Such representing counts on nature and takes account of history. Only that which becomes object in this way – is considered to be in being. We first arrive at science as research when the Being of whatever is, is sought in such objectiveness.113

Nietzsche represents the completion of metaphysics, according to Heidegger’s meta-narrative, for he claims that all entities are subject to the will to power. According to Heidegger, Nietzsche’s metaphysics names and underscores humanity’s primary way of being in the world, and the present epoch of modern technology. Nietzsche made willing an end in itself and consequently everything appears as something that can contribute to the enhancement of the will to power. Heidegger maintains that this opens the way for everything to be encountered as standingreserve. As was highlighted in the previous chapter Nietzsche interprets 112 113

PR, p. 121 QCT, p. 127

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‘being’ as a vacuous notion. In Twilight of the Idols he finds himself in agreement with Heraclitus’ understanding of ‘being’ as an ‘empty fiction’.114 Instead of thinking in terms of the question of being, he turns to the question of value and more specifically the transformation of values and how their transformation could lead to the augmentation of the will to power. For Heidegger, this only strengthens the will to will and leads to the further obliteration of being. Having briefly recounted important aspects of Heidegger’s understanding of the history of metaphysics and its interrelation with modern technology, a most apparent paradox presents itself. If modern technology is a fate sent to humanity by being, as stated in “The Question Concerning Technology”, how can Heidegger also interpret it as a phenomenon established in the history of metaphysics? How can Western metaphysicians be held accountable for the emergence of modern technology if it is a fate sent by being? Heidegger could contest the charge that a fatal contradiction manifests itself in his interpretation of modern technology, for in typical Heideggerian fashion his interpretation of ‘fate’ differs from how it is commonly understood, that is, as an event that will inevitably occur. However, Heidegger resists this definition of ‘fate’: ‘Being as fate has its origin not in the pushing of something decreed, assigned or purely unalterable…’.115 Nevertheless, in taking up the idea of ‘fate’ in an idiosyncratic manner he could be regarded as coercing the meaning of this notion in a direction that is foreign and even discordant to its original meaning. Another difficulty facing Heidegger, relates to how he envisages history as a sequence of epochs emerging as ‘sendings’ in the destiny of being.116 Although Heidegger resolutely claims that being is not an entity, he seems on occasions to imply that it is an entity, as he describes being as acting in some sense, for it guides the destiny of the West. It is possible that Heidegger’s attempt to appropriate theological concepts, while at the same time semantically transforming them, and divesting them of their theological meaning and content for his own philosophical purposes ended up re-mythologizing the history of being in quasi religious terms. As has previously been acknowledged, Philipse expends much effort elucidating how quasi religious overtones and a prevalent post-monotheist motif can be found running through Heidegger’s later thought.

114

He writes: “But Heraclitus will always be right in this, that being is an empty fiction.” (TI (N), Sec. 2 p. 46) 115 GA 39, p. 235 116 Cf. TB, p. 9


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A further problem identified by Philipse involves Heidegger’s construal of history as the revelation of being, whereby being provides history with its logic. Yet, if being remains concealed is it not untenable for humanity to reveal or disclose the logic underpinning the epochs sent by being? Heidegger was aware of this difficulty and addresses it in his seminar On Time and Being (1962), where he tried to resolve it by distinguishing between the ‘why’ and the ‘that’ of the history of being. Although the abandonment by being prevents humanity from knowing why the sequence of epochs in history are the way they are, humanity is nonetheless capable of knowing ‘that’ it is the case and ‘within this That…human thought is able to establish something like a necessity in the succession, something like lawfulness and logic.’117 ‘Logic’ understood in this context evidently suggests that the history of metaphysics is a history of increasing abandonment by being. Yet, this explanation faces a dilemma. For as Philipse observes: Perhaps Being has really abandoned us. In this case, we can never know whether the ‘logic’ we discover in deep history is Being’s logic. It might just as well be an accidental pattern, or a projection of our provincial prejudices. But then we can never know that Being has really abandoned us, because the logical pattern that Heidegger claims to have discovered is the very pattern of an increasing abandonment by Being. Or, alternatively, we are able to discover the logic of deep history, and we can know that this logic is Being’s logic. In that case, however, Being has not really abandoned us, because we are able to fathom Being’s logic. We must conclude that Heidegger’s reversal of Hegel leads to inconsistency.118

Besides these critical comments made by Philipse, the earlier criticisms made by Lévinas and those relating to Heidegger’s political thought, there are still others who would strongly challenge Heidegger’s account of modern technology. They include Marxists, Derrida and feminist thinkers such as Rosemary Ruether.

Further Questions Concerning Heidegger’s Construal of Modern Technology Marxists would neither be satisfied nor contented with a Heideggerian interpretation of modern technology. Those with Marxist leanings would more than likely accuse Heidegger of providing an esoteric account of 117 118

Cf. Herman Philipse’s Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being, p. 218 Ibid., pp. 217-218

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modern technology, of mystifying it rather than illuminating how complex economic, sociological and scientific developments have contributed to its widespread dominance. Technology by itself is not alienating in the eyes of Marxists; it only becomes so through capitalism. Contrary to Heidegger’s reservations concerning the possibility of human initiative alone being able to help alter or transform the dominance of modern technology, Marxists maintain the view that human beings are capable of not only transforming their relationship with technology but are also able to reform those social and economic structures which are responsible for humanity’s state alienation in the first place. Marxists would contend that Heidegger’s interpretation of technology as the final phase of nihilism and the completion of metaphysics arising from the self-concealment of being is closely affiliated with the religious belief that humanity’s distress and afflictions are a consequence of the hidden God who is concealed due to the sinfulness of man. Thus, Heidegger’s meditations on and recourse to being can be seen as offering an alternative but similar account of the Christian and religious need to turn to God in order to explicate human suffering, instead of confronting and challenging unjust and despotic socio-political regimes and conditions. Derrida too queries the basis of Heidegger’s understanding of modern technology. While Heidegger’s destruction and critical investigations into the history of metaphysics, its foundationialism and its desire for security have gathered widespread plaudits, others like Derrida have argued that Heidegger did not pursue his interpretation of metaphysics far enough. For instance, in The Post Card, Derrida claims Heidegger failed to deconstruct the notion of a primordial sender (being), who sends epochs to humanity, the pre-ordained recipient or addressee. Heidegger’s On Time and Being proves central here, for in this text he states: “What is historical in the history of Being is determined by what is sent forth in destining, not by indeterminately thought up occurrence. The history of Being means the destiny of Being in whose sendings both the sending and the It which sends forth hold back with their self-manifestation.”119 Derrida takes issue with this reading and exposition of history in a piece dated 6th of September 1977: If the post (technology, position, ‘metaphysics’) is announced at the ‘first’ envoi, then there is no longer A metaphysics, etc. (I will try to say this one more time and otherwise), nor even AN envoi, but envois without destination. For to coordinate the different epochs, halts, determinations, in a word the entire history of Being with a destination of Being is perhaps 119

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the most outlandish postal lure. There is not even the post or envoi, there are posts and envois. And this movement (which seems to me simultaneously very far and very near to Heidegger’s, but no matter) avoids submerging all the differences, mutations, scansions, structures of postal regimes into one and the same great central postal office. In a word (this is what I would like to articulate more rigorously if I write it one day in another form), as soon as there is, there is différance…120

In the above passage Derrida suggests that Heidegger’s thought remains bound to metaphysics, whereby ‘…the entire history of Being with a destination of Being is perhaps the most outlandish postal lure.’ Derrida’s confrontation with Heidegger’s insistence upon the history of being as a sequence of epochs is also found in “Sending: On Representation” (1982). In a similar vein to those sentiments expressed in the citation from The Post Card, Derrida questions the unity of a destiny of being in light of the discord active in any sending. This leads him to beg the question: “wherever this being together or with itself of the envoi of being divides itself, defies the legein, frustrates the destination of the envoi, is not the whole schema of Heidegger’s reading challengeable, in principle, deconstructed from a historical point of view?”121 Hence, for Derrida, the history of metaphysics is not unified but rather plural, that is, there is no single sending (envoi) to be sent or delivered through the philosophical tradition, but many. Following Derrida’s lead, Caputo argues that Heidegger should have widened his critical examination of metaphysics to include deconstructions of the notions of ‘being’, ‘meaning’, ‘man’, and ‘truth’, and his preference for nearness, unity, ownness, rootedness, origin, and primordiality prevalent in his writings.122 Zimmerman notes (without any supportive citations or references) that in his later writings Heidegger was able to at times dissociate himself from a nostalgia for an ‘originary presencing’ and to accept that there was a never a time when human being dwelt nearer to being. This permits Heidegger to assert like Eckhart that things have no origin and that all things are in play without a why. In spite of these aspects to his later texts Zimmermann declares that “…he never really abandoned what Derrida has

120 Jacques Derrida, The Post Card, From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1987, p. 66. 121 Jacques Derrida, “Sending: On Representation”, p. 322 122 John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, repetition, deconstruction, and the hermeneutic project, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987, p. 154.

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described as the Platonic yearning to overcome fallenness and to attain authentic nearness to being.”123 Those who would also bring into question Heidegger’s construal of modern technology are feminist thinkers. Feminists argue that the source of modern technology does not simply lie within ancient Greek philosophy and the beginnings of Western metaphysics, whereby the truth of being was concealed and forgotten. They would consider Heidegger’s view of Western history as being closed off to an alternative understanding of the domineering nature of modern technology, one that has its source in the patriarchal domination of woman, body, and nature. Patriarchy, as a historical movement suppresses and renounces the feminine, which perpetually threatens to unsettle and destabilize the masculine basis of all things. As Rosemary Ruether writes: The nineteenth-century concept of ‘progress’ materialized the JudeoChristian God concept. Males, identifying their egos with transcendent ‘spirit’, made technology the progressive incarnation of transcendent ‘spirit’ into ‘nature’. […] Now one attempted to realize infinite demand through an infinite expansion of productive power. Infinite demand incarnate in finite nature, in the form of infinite exploitation of the earth’s resources for production, results in ecological disaster: the rapid eating up of the organic foundations of life under our feet in an effort to satisfy evergrowing appetites for goods. The matrix of being, which is no less the foundation of human being, is rapidly depleted […] The patriarchal selfdeception about the origins of consciousness ends logically in the destruction of the earth.124

Ruether thus provides a radically alternative understanding of the origin of modern technology, one that would steadfastly reject Heidegger’s contention that the degeneration of the West was based on the forgetting of being. Ruether would see this as but another example of elucidating human history on the grounds of some transcendent source, whether it is a father God or a self-concealing origin. Keeping in mind the above mentioned difficulties it is also worth acknowledging the uniqueness and boldness of Heidegger’s interpretation of modern technology, as the final stage in the fulfillment of Western 123

Jacques Derrida, “Ousia and Gramme” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. (Cf. Zimmermann’s Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity, p. 259.) 124 Rosemary Radford Ruether, New Woman, New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation, New York, Seabury Press 1975, pp. 194-195.


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metaphysics due to the concealment of being. Furthermore, by naming the essence of technology with his notion of Gestell (that constricted mode of revealing things as standing-reserve, which reigns as a fate in this epoch) he also managed to open up an alternative way of investigating the phenomenon of modern technology. Many have been drawn to Heidegger’s exposition of modern technology, as they too consider it to be something beyond the control of humanity, with its ever increasing dominance appearing to take place apace beyond the best intentions of human beings. Also, his critical examination of Western metaphysics, with its totalizing drive is something that inspired a host of major thinkers. Herbert Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man elaborates upon Heidegger’s notion of the totalizing impulse that lies behind modern technology. He too acknowledges the existence of a dominant mode of revealing to be pervasive in this modern technological epoch, one which excludes all other modes of revealing. Like Heidegger who calls for a ‘step back’ from modern technology, Marcuse pleads for a ‘great refusal’ in face of the totalizing drive empowering modern technology. Also, in a similar vein to Heidegger, he too turned to great art in order to disclose an alternative mode of revealing to one governing this modern technological and nihilistic epoch. In the final two chapters I will examine how Heidegger attempts to prepare the way for the overcoming of humanity’s homeless condition. In doing so the motif of homecoming comes most strikingly to the fore.

CHAPTER SIX PREPARING FOR THE HOMECOMING VENTURE, THINKING AND POETRY

Heidegger and Thinking The desert grows: woe to him who harbours deserts within!1 —Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra Most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.2 —Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?

Having examined in some detail humanity’s homeless condition in chapters three, four and five, the present chapter turns towards the possibility of undergoing a homecoming venture. Preparations are made for participating in such a homecoming in the full and continued acknowledgement of the uncanniness of the human being and the deeprooted pervasiveness of nihilism and modern technology. By seeking to prepare for a homecoming with the aid of Heidegger’s thought, his various texts on the nature of thinking and poetry prove crucial. For Heidegger, questioning and transforming traditional metaphysical conceptions of thinking, and poetry plays a pivotal role in tending to the truth of being. Moreover, it enables a homecoming venture to get underway. What is thinking for Heidegger? A most succinct response to this question can be garnered from his “Letter on ‘Humanism’”, where thinking is essentially understood as pondering ‘the truth of being’.3 This Heideggerian sense of thinking deviates from an interpretation of thinking as a process of representation, whereby one represents beings as objects, 1

Cf. TSZ, p. 267. The original words read: ‘Die Wüste wächst: weh Dem, der Wüsten birgt!’ Following Graham Parkes translation, I translate ‘Wüste’ as ‘desert’ although others have translated it as ‘wasteland’ or ‘wilderness.’ 2 Cf. WCT, p. 6 3 PM, p. 271

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and it also disavows valuative thinking, that is, thinking in terms of values. By disengaging from representative and valuative thinking, Heidegger is clearly distinguishing himself from Kant and Nietzsche.4 For Heidegger, thinking involves meditating upon being itself by thinking the truth of being. Aware that speaking about the ‘truth of being’ can lapse into ‘idle talk’, Heidegger demands that the truth of being ‘come to language and thinking attain to this language.’5 How are Heidegger’s discourses on thinking related to a homecoming venture? A connection between thinking, or more specifically ‘preparatory thinking’ and Heidegger’s sense of homecoming is made evident in “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead’”, where he speaks of thinking as enabling being ‘to take man, with respect to his essence, into a primal relationship.’ He states: “For the reflection we are attempting here, it is a question of preparing for a simple and inconspicuous step in thought. What matters to preparatory thinking is to light up that space within which being itself might again be able to take man, with respect to his essence, into a primal relationship.”6 According to Heidegger, the emergence of a ‘primal relationship’ between being and man can only begin when thinking becomes preparatory, and thereby submits to its ‘obligation of first finding its own abode,’ in the midst of a technological epoch in which calculative thinking reigns.7 For Heidegger, calling into question the nature of thinking in an age increasingly dominated by modern technology is of particular import. In Mindfulness, he observes how in this technological age thinking is impelled to come under the ‘sway of machination.’ Profoundly influenced by machination, thinking is obstructed from enquiring into the truth of being. He notes: “...machination compels the thinking of the sway of machination to be of the same kind as machination, and this leads to a situation that does not allow this thinking, that is, metaphysics, ever to 4

At the beginning of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty provides an apt description of the central role representation plays in philosophical thinking. He writes: “To know is to represent accurately what is outside the mind; so to understand the possibility and nature of knowledge is to understand the way in which the mind is able construct such representations. Philosophy’s central concern is to be a general theory of representation, a theory which will divide culture up into the areas which represent reality well, those which represent it less well, and those which do not represent it at all (despite their pretense of doing so).” (Cf. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979, p. 3. 5 Ibid., p. 261 6 WN, p. 55. 7 Ibid., p. 56.

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come across the truth of be-ing as inquirable.” 8 The preponderance of machination is most pervasive when it subsumes thinking, “and arranges machinationally the thinking of the beingness of beings, such that being itself is made into something that makes itself, arranges and erects itself. Its precondition primarily is interpretation of being as ‘objectivity’ of ‘objects’, as ‘objectness’ of objects.” 9 In the later essay “The Question Concerning Technology” Heidegger develops this insight by claiming the most prevalent manner of ‘natural’ or ‘ordinary thinking’10 is under the sway of Gestell/Enframing, and as a result things are revealed as ‘standing-reserve’ (Bestand).11 Besides speaking of ‘natural’ and ‘ordinary thinking’ Heidegger also identifies other modes of non-essential thinking, that include ‘one-sided thinking’, ‘one-track thinking’ and ‘ideational or representational thinking.’12 He claims everything becomes a being through representational thinking. Consequently, the significance of the duality of being and beings, as something twofold, dissolves. For Heidegger, the beginning of Western thought is characterized by the unacknowledged dissipation of this duality. However, this decline is no trivial event, as Heidegger observes, “it imparts to Greek thinking the character of a beginning, in that the lighting of the Being of beings, as a lighting, is concealed. The hiddenness of this decline of the duality reigns in essentially the same way as that into which the duality falls.”13 When non-essential thinking, in all its different guises, reigns, Nietzsche’s ‘scream’ about how ‘the desert grows’ and Heidegger’s reserved utterance that ‘we are still not thinking’ resound most forcefully. Heidegger’s use of the word ‘scream’ to describe the tone of Nietzsche’s statement is striking. As a scream, Heidegger considers Nietzsche to be putting forward the following question: ‘Must one smash their ears before they learn to listen with their eyes? Must one clatter like kettledrums and preachers of repentance?’ Heidegger then proclaims: “But riddle upon riddle! What was once the scream ‘The desert grows…,’ now threatens to turn into chatter.” * For those who remain capable of hearing Nietzsche’s scream the challenge is to retain its shrill, urgent and thoughtful intent, and not to allow it to collapse into comfortable cliché. As according to Heidegger, 8

M, p. 16 Ibid., p. 16 10 Ibid., p. 16 11 Cf. QCT, p. 17 12 Cf., WCT, p. 64 13 EGT, p. 87 9

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the danger persists that this ‘most thoughtful thought’ will become a ‘platitude to spread and circulate’.14 Furthermore, describing Heidegger’s statement as a ‘reserved utterance’ is of consequence too. As ‘reservedness’ (die Verhaltenheit) marks the style of the non-metaphysical thinking, namely ‘inceptual thinking’ (das anfängliche Denken), he attempts to pursue, particularly in Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning)/Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), and Mindfulness (Besinnung). Not only determining the style of inceptual thinking, Heidegger describes reservedness as signifying ‘the style of future humanness’ as grounded in Dasein. He also considers reservedness to be the mid-point of startled dismay (das Erschrecken) and deep awe (die Scheu); the strongest and the gentlest preparedness of Dasein for enownment (die Er-eignung); a preliminary stage for reticence (dem Schweigen) and deep stillness (die große Stille)’, and the ground for care.15 The multifaceted and complex nature of reservedness plays a decisive part in the unfolding of inceptual thinking; a manner of thinking that will be dealt with at a later stage. In What Is Called Thinking? Heidegger declares Nietzsche’s words regarding the harbouring of inner deserts, and his own statement concerning what is most thought-provoking in our age, are linked in ‘a destiny to which, it seems, our whole earth is destined to its remotest corners.’16 This destiny, he says, will ‘shake the foundations of all man’s thinking’.17 Yet, such seismic activity does not necessarily entail ‘revolution and collapse.’ Instead the destiny in which the foundations of humanity’s thinking quake may allow a state of stability to emerge. Heidegger claims a form of rest never before experienced could arise ‘because that rest, that peace, is already present at the heart of the shock.’ 18 The paradoxical nature of a destiny involving both the quaking of all human thinking and the emergence of an unprecedented state of rest resonate with Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s proclamations about the growing desert. He notes: The African Sahara is only one kind of desert.* The devastation of the earth can easily go hand in hand with a guaranteed supreme living standard for man, and just as easily with the organized establishment of a uniform state of happiness for all men. Devastation can be the same as both, and 14

Cf. WCT, p. 49 and TSZ, p. 15 Cf. GA 65, pp. 14-15 and p. 34; CP, p. 12 and p. 25 16 WCT, p. 65 17 Ibid., p. 65 18 Ibid., p. 65 15


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can haunt us everywhere in the most unearthly way – by keeping itself hidden. Devastation does not just mean a slow sinking into the sands. Devastation is the high – velocity expulsion of Mnemosyne. The words, ‘the desert grows,’ come from another realm than the current appraisals of our age.19

For Heidegger, the words, ‘the desert grows…’, also signify the spread of devastation which ‘blocks all future growth and prevents all building.’20 However, it is unclear from the text what type of ‘growth’ and ‘building’ Heidegger has in mind. Also worth noting from the passage cited above is the way Heidegger distances Nietzsche’s thought from ‘current appraisals’ or critical evaluations of our age. He does so by suggesting his thinking stems from ‘another realm’. Repudiating the view that Nietzsche is some type of cultural critic, Heidegger seeks to strengthen an intimacy and rapport between his and Nietzsche’s thinking. For he maintains his saying: ‘Most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking,’ is ‘not part of the same chorus of voices that disparage modern Europe as sick, and our age as on the decline.’ 21 Why does Heidegger distinguish his and Nietzsche’s voice from the chorus who speak of the degeneration of Europe? He distinguishes himself and Nietzsche from the denigrating judgments of commonplace critics, not because these critics valuate everything in a negative way but because ‘they evaluate at all.’ Heidegger comments: What is decisive about such judgments, however, is not they evaluate everything negatively, but that they evaluate at all. They determine the value, so to speak the price range into which the age belongs. Such appraisals are considered indispensable, but also unavoidable. Above all, they immediately create the impression of being right. Thus they promptly win the approval of the many, at least for whatever time is allotted to such judgments. That time now grows steadily shorter. If people today tend once again to be more in agreement with Spengler’s proposition about the decline of the West, it is because Spengler’s proposition is only the negative, though correct, consequence of Nietzsche’s words: ‘The desert grows.’* We emphasized that these are words issuing from thought. They are true words.22

19

Ibid., p. 30. *‘Wüste’ is re-translated as ‘desert’ and not ‘wasteland.’ Ibid., p. 29 21 Ibid., p. 30 22 Ibid., p. 38. * See footnote 18. 20

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A deep-seated sense of irony underlies Heidegger’s train of thought here, and it goes some way to unhinging an important aspect of his reading of Nietzsche. For as was repeatedly pointed out in chapter four, Heidegger’s lecture courses of the late 1930’s and early 1940’s went to great lengths to show how Nietzsche remained a valuative thinker, even if he did attempt a revaluation of all values hitherto. Moreover, since Nietzsche engaged in valuative thinking, Heidegger considered his thought to be bound to metaphysics and consequently removed from the truth of being. Thus the great irony of the passage from What Is Called Thinking? in which Heidegger tries to disassociate Nietzsche’s ‘true words’ from valuative thinking and the merely ‘correct’ evaluations of Spengler. A possible rebuttal of my interpretation is that Heidegger considers Nietzsche’s valuative thought to be of a far superior calibre or rank to that of Spengler; who simply taps into the Zeitgeist of his time without the necessary knowledge of what has been and what is to come. Hence, the basis for Heidegger’s distinction. However, a retort of this kind runs into difficulty, as Heidegger explicitly states that what is important about valuative judgments, is not that ‘they evaluate everything negatively, but that they evaluate at all.’ This implies entering into any type of valuative thinking or evaluative process leads to errancy; regardless of how commonplace or lofty one’s valuations/revaluations may be. Given so much hinges on Heidegger’s portrayal of Nietzsche as a valuative thinker, the contrary strategy of disassociating him from this manner of thinking greatly problematizes Heidegger’s reading of him. It also reveals the difficulties of trying to trap Nietzsche’s ‘wild wisdom’.23 Yet, supposing one was to grant to Heidegger that his and Nietzsche’s statements are worthy of being differentiated from ‘the chorus’ who bemoan the fall of Europe, the West and humanity. What separates their voices from the herd’s bilious bellowing? How are their statements, and in particular Heidegger’s, to be distinguished from the widespread discernment of our collective deterioration? He responds, ‘listen more closely!’. Heidegger contends the tone of his assertion ‘that we are still not thinking’ is in no way negative, it is not melancholic, despairing nor attuned to optimism, pessimism or indifference. He notes: ‘The key in which our assertion is tuned cannot, then, be determined simply like that of an ordinary statement.’ 24 Presumably a statement of an uncommon kind, Heidegger’s utterance does not suggest humanity is no longer thinking, nor more boldly, that humanity is not thinking at all. If the words ‘still not’ 23 24

Cf. TSZ, p. 73. WCT, p. 36


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are given thoughtful consideration, Heidegger claims they will reveal how “we already on our way toward thinking, presumably from a great distance, not only toward thinking as a conduct some day to be practiced, but on our way within thinking, on the way of thinking.”25 Disclosing how we are already on the way within/of thinking, the simple phrase ‘still not’ indicates ‘something still to come, of which we absolutely do not know whether it will come to us.’26 Not knowing whether or how the essential nature of thinking will be reached, Heidegger acknowledges the immense challenges involved in pursuing such an undertaking. In an important passage, he declares: Let us be honest with ourselves: the essential nature of thinking, the essential origin of thinking, the essential possibilities of thinking that are comprehended in that origin – they are all strange to us, and by that very fact they are what gives us food for thought before all else and always; which is not surprising if the assertion remains true that what is most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking age is that we are still not thinking. But that assertion says also that we are on the way, in thought, to the essence of thought. We are underway, and by such ways have taken our departure from a thinking whose essential nature seems to lie in the forming of ideas and to exhaust itself in that. Our own manner of thinking still feeds on the traditional nature of thinking, the forming of representational ideas. But we still do not think inasmuch as we have not yet entered into that nature which is proper to thinking, and which is still reserved, withheld from us. We are still not in the reality of thought.27

Underway but still not having entered into what is proper to thinking or into the reality of thought, Heidegger prepares the way for essential thinking; prepares himself for such thinking or alternatively allows what is essential/proper to thinking to prepare him for the event of thinking. What constitutes ‘essential thinking’ for Heidegger? In response to this question I will explore three different modes of thinking that prepare us for what is ‘proper to thinking,’ and may even allow us enter into the reality of thought. These different ways of thinking include ‘preparatory thinking’, ‘recollective thinking’, and ‘inceptual thinking.’

25

Ibid., p. 30 Cf. GA 65; p. 3; CP, p. 3 and WCT, pp. 35-36 27 WCT, p. 45 26

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Preparatory Thinking We are still inter vias, between divergent ways.28

What significance lies in the description of Heidegger’s thinking as ‘preparatory’? In what way is his thought preparatory? Heidegger’s thought is preparatory to the extent that it attempts to move away from a traditional manner of metaphysical thinking, and instead prepares for ‘the other beginning of thinking’ (der andere Anfang des Denkens), in which ‘truth is recognized and grounded as the truth of be-ing and be-ing itself is recognized and grounded as be-ing of truth…’.29 Hence, the importance of describing his thinking as preparatory; for it signals a transition from ‘the first’ to ‘the other’ beginning. In Contributions to Philosophy Heidegger differentiates between the first and other beginning, by stating that ‘the origin’ of Western thinking is bifurcated in terms of the ‘first’ metaphysical beginning and the ‘other’ non-metaphysical beginning. 30 Furthermore, Heidegger claims this other non-metaphysical beginning retains an exclusive relation to ‘the one and only first beginning.’ He states: “The ‘other’ beginning of thinking is named thus, not because it is simply shaped differently from any other arbitrarily chosen hitherto existing philosophies, but because it must be the only other beginning according to the relation to the one and only first beginning.” 31 What entitles Heidegger to suppose the other non-metaphysical beginning ‘must be the only other’ beginning? This question relates back to a point raised in chapter four regarding the fulfillment of nihilism, where Heidegger envisages the possibility of two distinct world eras existing at this critical 28

WCT, p. 46. CP, p. 130. The status of truth in the first beginning is described by Heidegger in the following manner: “In the first beginning truth (as unconcealment) is a mark of beings as such; and, according to the transformation of truth to correctness of assertion, ‘truth’ becomes a determination of beings as they are transformed to objectness. (Truth as correctness of judgment, ‘objectivity’, ‘actuality’ – ‘being’ of beings.” 30 The difference between the first metaphysical beginning and the other nonmetaphysical beginning is made most evident when Heidegger writes: “In the domain of the other beginning there is neither ‘ontology’ nor anything at all like ‘metaphysics’. No ‘ontology,’ because the guiding question no longer sets the standard or determines the range. No ‘metaphysics,’ because one does not proceed at all from beings as extant or from object as known (Idealism), in order then to step over to something else…Both of these are merely transitional names for initiating an understanding at all. (Cf. CP, pp. 41-42) 31 GA, 65 p. 5; CP, p. 4 29


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juncture. 32 The contention raised earlier is relevant here, for once again Heidegger offers no arguments, evidence, nor supporting insights to sustain his statement. Is it not conceivable that a multitude of potential beginnings exist at the origin of Western thinking and not just two? One can only surmise that in response to this question Heidegger would return to his basic position, and argue that one can either attend to the question and truth of being or remain ‘constrained and transfixed by the sphere of the traditional question: What is a being? i.e., transfixed by metaphysics of every kind.’33 However, must all philosophizing ultimately cohere around these two fundamental questions? Is it not possible that these fundamental questions give rise to further more basic questions? Does Heidegger’s notion of Ereignis open up more basic questions? Since Heidegger’s unique undertaking involves taking up the neglected task of tending to the question and truth of being, he seeks to prepare the way for this question and truth. Such pre-paration (Vor-bereitung) does not involve ‘acquiring preliminary cognitions as the basis for the later disclosure of actual cognitions,’ but rather implies ‘opening the way, yielding to the way – essentially, attuning.’ Nonetheless, opening and yielding to the way of the other beginning, that is, to the truth of being, proves extremely arduous as its territory remains unmapped. The unfamiliar territory of the other beginning is revealed through the passage or pathway (den Weg) forged by what he calls the ‘enthinking of being’ (Erdenkens des Seyns). But this pathway too remains unknown at every stage of the way.34 One could be forgiven for despairing at Heidegger’s refusal to articulate substantive, intelligible statements in Contributions to Philosophy, especially with regards to the meaning and nature of the other nonmetaphysical beginning. However, the mysterious and unknown nature of the other non-metaphysical beginning and the equally puzzling crossing (der Übergang) and leap (der Sprung) to it, is in some ways inevitable due to ‘strangeness and uniqueness (incomparability) of be-ing’ itself.35 Since Heidegger deems traditional modes of thinking to ignore or obscure the inimitability of being, it becomes necessary to search out more originary ways of approaching being. Thus he writes: ‘Something entirely other must begin, beyond counter-forces and counter drives and counterestablishments.’ Moreover, he calls for a ‘great turning around’ which goes beyond all ‘revaluations of all values’; ‘in which beings are not 32

Cf. Chapter Four, ‘Confronting Nihilism’, p. 126 Cf. GA, 65, p. 187; CP, p. 130 34 GA 65, p. 86; CP, p. 60 35 Cf. CP, p. 178 33

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grounded in terms of human being, but rather human being is grounded in terms of be-ing.36 How can this great turning around be brought about, and how can something entirely other be initiated? Is Heidegger’s thinking or any manner of thinking capable of accomplishing such a momentous feat? Or is it the case that this event can only occur as a destiny (Geschick) sent (geschickt) by being itself? For Heidegger, one cannot create ‘something entirely other’ nor bring about ‘a great turning around’ by oneself. But this is not an endorsement of complete passivity, rather it is a matter of preparing for the truth of being. These thoughtful preparations for the truth of being have a profound impact on the nature of thinking, as they supplant metaphysical thinking. He states: ‘Historical preparedness for the truth of be-ing replaces the systematization and deduction.’37 Here Heidegger advocates a shift away from systematic, logical, representational, and deductive thinking to thinking that is receptive to the truth of being. By seeking to enact this transition suspicions may arise that Heidegger’s construal of thinking suffers from a dearth of intelligibility, as he dispenses with traditional methods of thinking that have been the bearers of truth, meaning and sense for close to two and a half millennia. However, these legitimate misgivings can to a certain degree be allayed by his insistence on a ‘historical preparedness’ (geschichtliche Bereitschaft). The notion of ‘historical preparedness’ suggests that he will not and cannot dispense with metaphysics or traditional thinking all together. Acknowledging the need to come to terms with the first metaphysical beginning, Heidegger recognizes the importance of recollective thinking (Andenken). Recollective thinking becomes essential for Heidegger as it allows a more originary retrieval of the first beginning to take place. This is in turn significant for those willing to undergo a homecoming venture, as in order to recover from a state of homelessness one must go back to its source. From a Heideggerian perspective, this means going back to the ancient Greeks.

Recollective Thinking Especially we moderns can learn only if we always unlearn at the same time. Applied to the matter before us: we can learn thinking only if we radically unlearn what thinking has been traditionally. To do that, we must at the same time come to know it.38 36

Cf. CP, p. 131 and p. 129 CP, p. 171 38 WCT, p. 8 37


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Why does Heidegger return to the ancient Greeks to attain a more originary insight into their way of thinking? Why the incessant preoccupations with the history and origins of Western thought? Why the need for recollective thinking? As was previously stated, Heidegger’s return to the early Greek thinkers and his attentiveness to the history of Western thought is fundamentally related to his concern with humanity’s state of homelessness, and the possibility of redressing this condition. For a chief feature of his homecoming venture is a persistent recollection of humanity’s homelessness coupled with the simultaneous movement towards being. This movement or transition towards being passes through the originary thinking of the Pre-Socratics; Western metaphysics and its inherent homelessness, and the thinking of home yet to come. Thus the importance of revisiting the Greeks, for as Heidegger tersely remarks: ‘The history of being is never past but ever stands before.’39 Furthermore, by recalling the thinking of the ancient Greeks, Heidegger seeks to unlearn the metaphysical manner of thinking that informs the modern mind, for he believes it obscures the truth of being. He argues that it is only possible to learn thinking ‘if we radically unlearn what thinking has been traditionally.’ Additionally, unlearning the traditional manner of thinking requires a knowledge of what it is. In Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger reveals how the experience of the abandonment of being is the reason why he continually goes back to the Greeks. 40 Notably, he identifies two key aspects to this experience. Firstly, to experience the abandonment of being one must recall ‘the abandonment of being in its long, hidden, and self-hiding history.’ Focusing on what belongs to the present time is not sufficient for experiencing the abandonment of being. Secondly, there is a need to experience the distress of the crossing to the other beginning. He maintains that it is necessary, ‘to experience the abandonment of being equally as the distress that towers over into the crossing and animates the crossing as access to what is to come.’ He also says: ‘The crossing too must be experienced in its entire range and its many ruptures.’41 Experiencing the abandonment of being in these two ways mirrors the two-fold nature of recollective thinking outlined by Heidegger. As recollective thinking is not simply a matter of thinking upon what has been. Recollective thinking must also ‘fore-think into the unthought that is 39

LH, p. 194 He writes: ‘Abandonment of being must be experienced as the basic event of our history and be elevated into a knowing awareness that shapes and guides.’ (Cf. CP, p. 78) 41 CP, pp. 78-79 40

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to be thought.’ Offsetting possible misinterpretations of what he means by ‘recollective thinking’, Heidegger explains that it neither reflects upon what has been as represented by historiography, nor prophesizes about a supposedly known future. The purpose of recollective thinking is not to rehabilitate or restore ancient times, but to enter into a state of astonished wonderment at the coming of what is early. 42 Heidegger explains recollective thinking and the recollectively anticipatory leap as happening in time: “Thinking as a recollective fore-thinking is the leaping of the leap. This leap is a movement to which thinking submits. Implied in this is that thinking must ever anew and more originally make the leap.”43 Therefore the return to the ‘former dawn’ of philosophy is undertaken in the expectation of a ‘dawn to come’ and with the expectation that, although we seem to be ‘latecomers’ in the history of ‘the land of the evening’, we may yet prove to be the ‘precursors of an altogether different age.’44 To come to an understanding of Heidegger’s sense of recollective thinking one is required to re-think the meaning of recollection, that is, to non-representationally think the meaning of memory. This difficult task is carried out in What is Called Thinking?. According to Heidegger, discovering the true meaning of memory is demanding because traditional epistemology and psychology veil its original sense. From the perspective of representational thinking, memory involves the retention of ‘a mental representation, an idea, of something which is past.’ Although Heidegger does not deny that memory is a mental capacity of humans, he refuses to reduce it to such a process. He states: “Within the radius of what the originary word ‘memory’ designates, it still looks at first as though memory…were nothing more than a part of man’s natural equipment. Thus we take it for something specifically human. And so it is – but not exclusively, nor even primarily.”45 Refusing to rest with this representational sense of ‘memory’, Heidegger with the support of Hölderlin’s poetry speaks of memory or Mnemosyne as ‘a gathering and convergence of thought upon what everywhere demands to be thought first of all.’ He describes memory as a recollection, a thinking back, that guards, harbours and keeps what gives food for thought, and frees what is ‘most thoughtprovoking’ as a gift.46 In order to reveal the true nature of recollective thinking, Heidegger has recourse to the Old English words thencan, to think; thancian, to 42

Cf. QCT, p. 22 PR, p. 94 44 Cf. EGT, pp. 17-18, and WCT, p. 185 45 Cf. WCT, p. 150 46 Ibid., p. 11 and p. 151 43


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thank, and to the Old English noun for thought, thanc or thonc, a grateful thought. The word thanc survives in the English language in its plural form of ‘thanks.’ While customarily a thought is taken to signify an idea, a notion, a view or opinion, Heidegger argues that the old English word thanc provides a more decisive clue to the orginary meaning of ‘thought’ and ‘thinking’. Not only providing a clue to the original meaning of thinking and thought, the thanc also discloses the deeper meaning of memory. Claiming ‘memory’ did not primarily imply the power to recall, Heidegger suggests it originally meant devotion, that is, “a constant concentrated abiding with something – not just with something that has passed, but in the same way with what is present and with what may come.”47 Linking thinking, thought and memory to the thanc, Heidegger traces them to a thanks owed for being, for what is.48 Diverging from a representational understanding of thinking, Heidegger’s interpretation of it is significantly different. The conventional and long-established representational conception of thinking is grounded in the subject and object divide, whereby the goal of thinking and memory is to bridge the chasm existing between one’s inner thoughts and an external object. Not wholly misguided, it is possible for representative thinking to attain and articulate correct statements and propositions, as it allows one’s inner thoughts to correspond to the external world. This manner of thinking is based on the assumption that the subject is separated from the object, and it supposes that an inner and outer world exists. Refusing to engage in representational thinking, Heidegger’s more orginary recollective thinking does not give birth to an inner and outer world. For Heidegger, thinking, thoughts and memory cohere in the thanc, and because of this he maintains ‘the idea of an inner and outer world does not arise.’ He states: “The thanc means man’s inmost mind, the heart, the heart’s core, that innermost essence of man which reaches outward most fully and to the outermost limits, and so decisively that, rightly considered, the idea of an inner and an outer world does not arise.[…] The thanc, the heart’s core, is the gathering of all that concerns us, all that we care for, all that touches us insofar as we are, as human beings.” 49 Furthermore, by interpreting memory in light of the old word thanc, Heidegger asserts that the relationship between memory and thanks will emerge. This profound bond will manifest itself: ‘For in giving thanks, the heart in thought recalls in memory is the original thanks.’50 47

Ibid., p. 140 Ibid., p. 141 49 Ibid., p. 144 50 Ibid., p. 145 48

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By emphasizing a rapport between memory and thanks; a thanks that is ultimately owed to being, Heidegger’s construal of recollective thinking raises serious questions. Is his interpretation of recollective thinking an ultimately vacuous attempt to pay homage or thanks to being? For Heidegger, being gives being, and Dasein owes thanks to being for its gift. However, abiding by a Heideggerian sense of giving and thanking is not comparable to the giving and thanking that takes place between persons, or between a person and his/her God/gods. As Caputo writes: ‘there is nothing benevolent about the giving of the Event; there is not gratitude in the thanking of Dasein.’ 51 Caputo argues that Heidegger’s sense of thinking and thanking lacks substance as it “rests not on any personalistic overtones of the Event but on the kinship—etymological or otherwise—of ‘Denken’ and ‘Danken.’” For Caputo, there is no benevolence in the giving of Ereignis and no gratitude in the thanking of receptive Dasein; therefore Heidegger’s description of thinking is meaningless.52 Caputo’s critique is worth bearing in mind, as it remains vital to continually question the soundness of Heidegger’s statements; otherwise one is liable to become captivated by all he says, and unthinkingly adhere to his every precept. However, one cannot reduce Heidegger’s description of thinking to a thanks to being. A reductive reading of this kind runs the risk ignoring other aspects of Heidegger’s original discourses. Heidegger’s novel reading of the Pre-Socratic philosophers, especially ‘the pre-metaphysical thinking’ of Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus exemplifies the type of recollective he seeks to pursue, and offers intimations of how a non-metaphysical thinking might unfold.53 By recollectively thinking the thoughts of the early Greek philosophers in a more originary way, Heidegger considers it possible to illumine ‘the other beginning’. Hence, Heidegger’s sense of homecoming does not imply a return to an early Greek way of being in the world. Rather, an originary recollection of early Greek thinking provides an opportunity for a hitherto unrealized homecoming to the truth of being to get underway. In a lecture course on Parmenides during the winter semester 1942-43 at the University of Freiburg, Heidegger identifies Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus as the ‘only primordial thinkers.’ He remarks: ‘They are primordial thinkers because they think the beginning. The 51

Cf. John D. Caputo’s “Meister Eckhart and the Later Heidegger: The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought”, p. 169. Found in Martin Heidegger. Critical Assessments. 4 vols. ed. Christopher Macann; London and New York, Routledge,1992. 52 Ibid., p. 169 53 Cf. P, p. 7.


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beginning is what is thought in their thinking.’54 In relation to this enquiry the thinking of these primordial philosophers is also fundamentally linked to the motifs of homelessness and homecoming as they arise in Heidegger’s writings.

Anaximander and the Surmounting of Disorder If one acknowledges an affinity between the notions of disorder and homelessness it is possible to identify a sense of homelessness in Anaximander’s thinking. The Anaximander fragment that especially relates to this motif reads as follows: “But that from which things arise also give rise to their passing away, according to what is necessary; for things render justice and pay penalty to one another for their injustice, according to the ordinance of time.” 55 Homelessness arises in Anaximander’s thinking when he claims that what is present, through its determination to persist, linger and hang on as present inevitably thwarts itself. Heidegger maintains that since beings are dominated by ‘the craving to persist,’ and seek after ‘everlasting continuance,’ they do not heed ‘the order of the while.’ As a consequence of this, Heidegger alleges that beings lingering in presence stand in disorder. 56 Not only standing in disorder, Heidegger interprets Anaximander’s fragment as stating that everything lingering awhile, ‘strikes a haughty pose toward every other of its kind.’57 However, Anaximander’s thinking does not rest here. His thought opens itself up to the possibility of disorder being surmounted. According to Heidegger’s reading of Anaximander, beings which linger awhile, ‘do not entirely dissipate themselves in the boundless conceit of aiming for a baldly insistent subsistence.’ 58 Instead, beings have the potential to be considerate to one another, and they can also ‘let order belong.’ Thus, disorder can be overcome when beings allow order and ‘reck’ to belong to one another. Worded in a way that corresponds to the present investigation, one could say that the surmounting of disorder is tantamount to the overcoming of homelessness; thus facilitating the realization of our homecoming venture. There is much to unpack from Heidegger’s interpretation of Anaximander, as he constantly forges new translations of ancient Greek 54

Ibid., p. 7 EGT, p. 20 56 Ibid., pp. 45-47 57 Ibid., p. 45-46 58 Ibid., p. 47 55

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words. Additionally, some of the German words he uses to translate and elucidate Anaximander’s thought are themselves subject to etymological examination. For instance, when translating the Greek word ĳտĲț into German, he considers Ruch/reck to be the most appropriate word. By investigating the etymology of Ruch he is drawing attention to aspects of the word’s meaning commonly overlooked. Proclaiming that the meaning of Ruch is no longer known, Heidegger explores the roots of the word in order to retrieve some of its earlier meaning. Returning to the Middle High German word ruoche; meaning solicitude or care, he interprets ‘care’ to mean tending ‘to something so that it may remain in its essence.’ Associating Ruch with geruhen (respect) Heidegger broadens and emboldens the significance of care, as it comes to signify esteeming something, and allowing something to be itself. He writes: “Our word geruhen [to deign or respect] is related to reck and has nothing to do with Ruhe [rest]: to deign means to esteem something, to let or allow something to be itself.” 59 Furthermore, Heidegger relates ruoche to ‘consideration’ thought of in terms of human relations, and taking advantage of the fact that this old German word has fallen into disuse, he speaks of reck as corresponding to order.60 Besides focusing on the word ruoche when translating Anaximander’s fragment, Heidegger also pays heed to the word ‘usage’ (der Brauch). ‘Usage’ comes to prominence in ‘The Anaximander Fragment’ as an unorthodox translation of the Greek word ĳր[Ȣıօȟ, usually translated as ‘necessity.’ Through a magnificent re-interpretation of ‘usage’, Heidegger manages to transform the customary understanding of this word, and in the process alters the utilitarian meaning ascribed to it. Ordinarily, ‘usage’ and the phrase ‘to use’ signify ‘utilizing and benefiting from what we have a right to use.’ To use something typically suggests manipulating something in order to gain or benefit from it. However, Heidegger maintains that if one abides by the root-meaning of the word ‘use’ it means handing ‘something over to its own essence,’ and keeping ‘it in hand, preserving it as something present.’61 More than this, Heidegger considers usage (der 59

Ibid., p. 46 Ibid., p. 47 61 Heidegger writes: “Usually we understand ‘to use’ to mean utilizing and benefiting from what we have a right to use. What our utilizing benefits from becomes the usual. Whatever is used is in usage. ‘Usage,’ as the word that translates Ĳ xȡİ Ȟ, should not be understood in these current, derived senses. We should rather keep to the root-meaning: to use is to brook [bruchen], in Latin frui, in German fruchten, Frucht. We translate this freely as ‘to enjoy,’ which originally means to be pleased with something and so to have it in use. Only in its derived 60


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Brauch) to designate ‘the manner in which Being itself presences as the relation to what is present, approaching and becoming involved with what is present as present: ĳր[Ȣıօȟ.’62 Through his masterful re-interpretation of ‘usage’, Heidegger is able to semantically resuscitate a word that has been a long time dead through utilitarian misuse. Moreover, instilling the word ‘usage’ with a renewed sense of meaning bears significance for Heidegger’s homecoming venture and his understanding of thinking. For he wonders if being needs to use man, and if the essence of man consists in the thinking the truth of being. He writes: “But what if Being in its essence needs to use [braucht] the essence of man? If the essence of man consists in thinking the truth of Being? Then thinking must poeticize on the riddle of Being. It brings the dawn of thought into the neighborhood of what is for thinking.” 63 Heidegger’s belief that being requires the use of the essence of man in order for its truth to be realized, and his conviction that man’s vocation resides in thinking the truth of being, offers a strong indication of what a homecoming means for him.

Parmenides: Thinking belongs to Being In his lecture course entitled “Moria (Parmenides VII, 34-41)”, Heidegger focuses on Parmenides’ oft cited saying: ‘For thinking and Being are the same.’ 64 Interestingly, when elucidating this statement, Heidegger lays emphasis on the inconspicuous word ‘the same,’ claiming this enigmatic key word ĳրį՘ĳȪ, the Same, expresses the relation of thinking to being.65 Furthermore, he contends that silently concealed within this essential word “is the revealing bestowal of the belonging-together of the duality and the thinking that comes forward into view within it.” 66 This notion of ‘the senses does ‘enjoy’ mean simply to consume or gobble up. We encounter what we have called the basic meaning of ‘use,’ in the sense of frui, in Augustine’s words, Quid enim est aliud quod dicimus frui, nisi praesto habƝre, quod diligis? Frui involves praesto habƝre. Praesto, praesitum is in Greek ՙʍȡȜıտȞıȟȡȟ, that which already lies before us in unconcealment, ȡ՘ĲȔį, that which lingers awhile in presence. ‘To use’ accordingly suggests: to let something present come to presence as such; frui, to brook, to use, usage, means: to hand something over to its own essence and keep it in hand, preserving it as something present.” Ibid., pp. 52-53 62 Ibid., p. 53 63 Ibid., p.58 64 Cf. EGT, p. 79. The original Greek reads: ĳրȗոȢį՘ĳրȟȡı‫ה‬ȟԚĲĳտȟĳıȜįվıՂȟįț 65 Ibid., p. 94 66 Ibid., p. 95

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duality’ is also central to Heidegger’s reading of Parmenides. But what does ‘the duality’ mean? ‘The duality’ refers to the duality of being and beings, and it is of considerable import for Heidegger, as he maintains that you cannot find thinking apart from it.67 More significantly, according to Heidegger’s interpretation, Parmenides seeks out the abode or home of thinking: “For only where it belongs and is at home can we find it; only there can we experience through our findings how far thinking belongs with Being.”68 Heidegger suggests that thinking houses the duality insofar as it unfolds the duality of presencing and what is present, and invokes “letting-lie-before, and with the released letting-lie of what lies before us, grants ȟȡı‫ה‬ȟ something it can take heed of and thus preserve.”69 Heidegger’s understanding of thinking as the ‘letting-lie of what lies before us,’ and preserving diverges radically from the way modern philosophy experiences beings as objects. In many ways the Heideggerian sense of thinking challenges and usurps the conception of thinking as it is conceived by modern philosophers such as Leibniz, who deem perception to be comparable to an appetite which seeks out a particular being and ‘attacks it, in order to grasp it and wholly subsume it under a concept…’.70 Unlearning or disengaging from this aggressive and forceful manner of modern thinking, Heidegger allows thinking to unfold in a way that is more caring, considerate and respectful of beings, and of what is present. This more considerate way of thinking advocated by Heidegger, which lets a being be itself is crucial for a homecoming to where the duality, thinking and being belong. Whilst homelessness is tantamount to the separation from the belonging together of the duality and thinking; our homecoming consists in a return to this mutual belonging. He states: In one respect thinking is outside the duality toward which it makes its way, required by and responding to it. In another respect, this very ‘making its way toward...’ remains within the duality, which is never simply an indifferently represented distinction between Being and beings, but rather comes to presence from the revealing unfolding. It is this unfolding that, as pǺȝսȚıțį, bestows on every presencing the light in which something present can appear. But the disclosure, while it bestows the lighting of presencing, at the same time needs a letting-lie-before and is a taking-up-into-perception if what is present is to appear and by this need binds thinking to its

67

Cf. Ibid., p. 91 Ibid., p. 90 69 Ibid., p. 91 70 Ibid., p. 82 68


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belonging-together with the duality. Therefore by no means is there somewhere and somehow something present outside the duality.71

Although Heidegger argues that Parmenides did not think through the duality, the passage cited above would seem to indicate that homecoming proceeds through the unfolding of the duality, and the letting-lie-before of presencing. 72 As he proclaims: “The duality conceals within itself both ȟȡı‫ה‬ȟ and its thought (ȞȩȘȝĮ) as something said. What is taken up in thinking, however, is the presencing of what is present. The thoughtful saying that corresponds to the duality is the ȜȑȖİȚȞ, the letting-lie-before of presencing. It occurs, and occurs only on the thought-path of the thinker who has been called by ’ǺȝսȚıțį.” Summoned by ’ǺȝսȚıțį, the thinker who enjoins his thinking and saying enables the presencing of what is present to come home to where it belongs in thought and language. Thinking the truth of being into language directs mortals in their journey home; gathering them and all beings where they belong. Furthermore, as gleaned from “The Anaximander Fragment”, being needs to use the essence of man, while man’s task is to think and poetize ‘the riddle of being,’ and thereby gather and preserve in language, through recollective thinking, the truth of being. Despite Heidegger’s assertion that Parmenides did not fully assume the task of thinking through the duality, aspects of the homecoming venture do manifest itself in Parmenides’ thought. For Heidegger, Parmenides attained insights into the nature of thinking that can inspire futural ways for a homecoming to unfold. It is for this reason that Heidegger will consider the dialogue with Parmenides unceasing, and suppose the return to his thinking essential: The dialogue with Parmenides never comes to end, not only because so much in the preserved fragments of his ‘Didactic Poem’ still remains obscure, but also because what is said there continually deserves more thought. This unending dialogue is no failing. It is a sign of the boundlessness which, in and for remembrance, nourishes the possibility of a transformation of destiny.73

71

Ibid., p. 96 Cf. Ibid., p. 91 73 Ibid., pp. 100-101 72

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Heraclitus: Re-collecting Logos Heraclitus is a thinker who figures prominently in many of Heidegger’s later texts. The nature of his thinking greatly appeals to Heidegger. Furthermore, the themes of homelessness and homecoming underlie Heidegger’s most important expositions of Heraclitus. In “Aletheia” and “Logos” homelessness emerges as man’s separation from and incomprehension of Logos. 74 Heidegger cites a saying attributed to Heraclitus toward the close of “Aletheia” to show how mortals are removed or detached from Logos. The saying reads: “From that to which for the most part they are bound and by which they are thoroughly sustained ȂȪȗȡ‫؃‬, from that they separate themselves; and it becomes manifest: whatever they daily encounter remains foreign (in its presencing) to them.” 75 The Greek word Logos carries a vast freight of meanings, as it has been interpreted to mean Ratio, Verbum, cosmic law, the logical, necessity in thought, meaning and reason. Adding to the various meanings associated with this word, Heidegger interprets it to signify the being of beings but he declares that this sense of Logos has been neglected. He remarks: “In the thinking of Heraclitus the Being (presencing) of beings appears as Logos, as the Laying that gathers. But this lightning-flash of Being remains forgotten. And this oblivion remains hidden…”.76 This Heideggerian sense of Logos reveals itself as the laying that gathers; the purely appropriating event [das reine Ereignen] and a self-veiling that is most obscure.77 Although bound to Logos, Heidegger echoing Heraclitus, claims mortals, through their everyday, self-assured and stubborn opinions, and their immersion in everyday commerce are completely unaware of Logos, even though they come and go in its lighting. By simply asking the question: ‘how could anyone whose essence belongs to the lighting ever 74

“Aletheia” was first presented as an unpublished lecture course on Heraclitus in the summer semester 1943, and later presented as a contribution to the Festschrift in honour of the 350th anniversary celebration of the Humanistic Gymnasium in Constance. “Logos” was an unpublished lecture course entitled ‘Logic’ delivered in the summer semester of 1944, and later published as ‘Logos’ as a contribution to the Festschrift für Hans Jantzen (1951), and it was also presented to the Bremen Club on May 4th , 1951. 75 EGT, p. 121. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi translate this fragment into English from Jean Brun’s French collection, Héraclite, ou le philosophe de l’éternel retour (Paris: Seghers, 1965), p. 188: ‘However, closely united they are to the Logos which governs the world, they separate themselves from it, …’. 76 EGT., p. 76 77 Ibid., p. 123


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withdraw from receiving and protecting the lighting?’; Heidegger believes mortals could awaken to the Logos and its all-pervasive lighting. Despite their inherent ability to divine this lighting mortals neglect it in favour of ‘everyday opinion’. As Heraclitus says: ‘Asses choose hay rather than gold.’ Responding to Heraclitus’ stinging words, Heidegger maintains that the mortal, “does not see the quiet gleam (the gold) of the mystery that everlastingly shines in the simplicity of the lighting.” It is difficult for the mortal to see the golden gleam of the lighting because it is ungraspable, that is, it cannot be grasped conceptually as ‘it is not itself something grasping.’ Instead, for Heidegger, the lighting is the opaque appropriating event that self-conceals itself.78 If it is the case that the lighting is profoundly obscure and cannot be grasped through representational thinking, how is it possible for one to gain awareness of it and access its presencing? From a Heideggerian perspective, the need arises to cultivate a manner of thinking that does not attempt to grasp the ungraspable. Broadening or heightening awareness of the lighting, Heidegger sets out to re-interpret the meaning of Logos in a non-metaphysical way. In doing so he seeks to redress our separation from Logos and guide us home to its true meaning. Directing mortals to the true nature of Logos, Heidegger reveals it as ‘the fateful’, which sends everything into its own. It does so as the “Laying that gathers assembles in itself all sending by bringing things and letting them lie before us, keeping each absent and present being in its place and on its way; and by its assembly it secures everything in the totality. Thus each being can be joined and sent into its own.”79 This sense of Logos discloses a seminal stage in Heidegger’s homecoming adventure. Moreover, he brings its ambiguous meaning further to fruition by quoting the following Heraclitean fragment: ‘But lightning steers (in presencing) the totality (of what is present).’ The lightning draws all things homeward by bringing them forward to their proper place. Hence, Heidegger equates the lightning with Logos: ‘Such instantaneous bringing is the Laying that gathers, the ȂȪȗȡȣ’. 80 This thoughtful ancient Greek saying unveils the primal home of the ancient Greeks, but this in turn is of relevance for homeless modern humanity. For Logos is intrinsically related to homecoming as it steers us homeward by laying home before us by gathering and sheltering its essence. Heidegger remarks: “In this fashion ȁȩȖȠȢ occurs essentially as the pure laying which gathers and assembles. 78

Ibid., pp. 122-123. EGT, p. 72 80 Ibid., p. 72 79

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ȁȩȖȠȢ is the original assemblage of the primordial gathering from the primordial laying. ’O ȁȩȖȠȢ is the laying that gathers, and only this.’81 Is Heidegger’s sense of Versammlung, gathering, something to be endorsed and adhered to in pursuit of a homecoming? Derrida criticizes Heidegger for privileging gathering over dissociation, for he claims to do so leaves ‘no room for the other, for the radical otherness of the other, for the radical singularity of the other.’ In “The Villanova Roundtable, A Conversation with Jacques Derrida”, Derrida maintains that far from undermining a community or a society, dissociation is its condition. He states: Dissociation, separation, is the condition of my relation to the other. I can address the Other only to the extent that there is a separation, a dissociation, so that I cannot replace the other and visa versa. That is what some French-speaking philosophers such as Blanchot and Lévinas call the ‘rapport sans rapport,’ the relationless relation. It is a relation in which the other remains absolutely transcendent. I cannot reach the other. I cannot know the other from inside and so on. That is not an obstacle but the condition of love, of friendship, and of war, too, a condition of the relation to the other. So, dissociation is the condition of community, the condition of any unity as such. So, the state, to come back to the state: a state in which there would be only unum would be a terrible catastrophe. And we have had, unfortunately, a number of such experiences. A state without plurality and a respect for plurality would be, first, a totalitarian state, and not only is this a terrible thing, but it does not work. We know that it is terrible and it does not work. Finally, it would not even be a state. It would be, I do not know what, a stone, a rock, or something like that. Thus, a state as such must be attentive as much as possible to plurality, to the plurality of peoples, and so on. That is the condition of a state.82

Derrida’s ability to question Heidegger’s seemingly innocuous emphasis on ‘gathering’ is significant here, as it highlights the possible political implications of appropriating ‘simple’ words or notions. This is to be welcomed as it heightens one’s vigilance when reading Heidegger and illuminates the dangers of assimilating his thoughts unquestionably.

81

Ibid., p. 66 Cf. “The Villanova Roundtable, A Conversation with Jacques Derrida”, in Deconstruction in a Nutshell, edited with a commentary by John D. Caputo, New York: Fordham University Press, 1997, pp.14-15. 82


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Inceptual Thinking Heidegger’s unique manner of inceptual thinking (das anfängliche Denken), is most notable in Contributions to Philosophy and Mindfulness. But what is inceptual thinking? From Heidegger’s perspective, few are able to respond adequately to this question, as only those who can speak of the way to the other beginning, and who are willing to venture into and prepare for what is futural are capable of inceptual thinking. Conversely, those, that is, the many who attempt to explicate inceptual thinking based on what belongs of today destroy everything! He says: The work of thinking in the epoch of the crossing can only be and must be a passage in both senses of the word: a going and a way at the same time – thus a way that itself goes […] Will this attempt ever find its expounder? The one who can speak of the way that goes into and prepares for what is futural? But no the one who calculates out of it only what belongs of today and thus ‘explains’ destroys everything.83

Despite the immense and even impossible difficulties involved in revealing the true nature of inceptual thinking it is possible to draw attention to some of its essential features. Aspects of inceptual thinking that demand serious consideration include the notion of Ereignis; the deep foreboding in which it originates, and the way it addresses the human condition of homelessness. Inceptual thinking is a mode of thinking that is appropriated by being. Consequently, the extent to which Heidegger directs and guides inceptual thinking becomes questionable. As Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly in the ‘Translators’ Forward’ to Contributions to Philosophy observe: Heidegger the thinker is not in total command of the thinking of being. He is not in total command and control of the thinking of being because this thinking is not a thinking about being but rather is enowned by being. The key to an appropriate assessment of the difficulty of the thinking of being lies in enownment.84

Does this mean that Heidegger is preparing himself for the word of being to speak through him? If so, it is impossible to challenge his position because he does not self-consciously attempt to engage in rational argumentation, nor does he propound or formulate a set of rationally conceived propositions. Heidegger contends that thinkers in the crossing, 83 84

CP, p. 57. CP, p. xli

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are essentially ambiguous, and that their saying is unintelligible for today. Wary of the destructiveness of ‘intelligibility’, Heidegger deems ambiguity necessary for those futural thinkers attempting to nurture inceptual thinking. Moreover, he claims those who undergo and enact the crossing to the other beginning do so by questioning ‘what is foremost and unique, namely be-ing’; they are the ‘inceptual wanderers’, who coming from afar, carry within themselves the highest future. In making the crossing, Heidegger suggests these wanderers abandon the ‘urge for intelligibility’, as they realize that philosophy and the thinking of being, cannot be verified through facts or beings. This leads him to make a startling statement: ‘Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.’85 Heidegger disregards the basic philosophical practice of articulating propositions, statements or utterances that make sense. Does this mean his thinking streams into an opaque, incomprehensible darkness? Or can the ambiguity of his thinking be interpreted as a ‘rich ambiguity’ that fosters the emergence of an unprecedented manner of thinking? Moreover could this new mode of thinking redress humanity’s homeless condition? Foregoing the need to write intelligibly about the crossing to the other non-metaphysical beginning, Heidegger’s distinctive manner of discourse emerges in accordance with the ‘enowning’/appropriation of being. Emad and Maly are thus wholly justified in identifying ‘enownment’ or Ereignis as the key to unlocking the mystery of inceptual thinking. However, since Ereignis itself is an extremely difficult notion to elucidate it perhaps renders the mystery of inceptual thinking ever more mysterious.

Ereignis as the Mangrove Tree of Inceptual Thought Translators, researchers and commentators of Heidegger have struggled to come to a consensus when attempting to find the most fitting word in English for Ereignis. Conventionally translated as ‘event’ those more aware of the subtleties and complexities of Heidegger’s thought have found ‘event’ an inappropriate translation, as it is metaphysically linked with the ideas of ‘the unprecedented’ and ‘precedent’, which are seemingly unrelated to Ereignis. Additionally, according to Contributions to Philosophy, Ereignis cannot be represented as an ‘event’ or ‘novelty’.86 Furthermore, in a number of postwar essays, Heidegger clearly distinguishes Ereignis from an ‘occurence’ (Vorkommnis) or a ‘happening’ (Geschehen

85 86

Ibid., pp. 306-307 Ibid., pp. 179-180


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or Geschehnis). 87 Distancing Ereignis from these notions, Heidegger suggests in a seminar in 1969 that Ereignis is not caught up in historical destiny, precisely because it is the sending of this destiny: “There is no destinal epoch of enowning. Sending is from enowning [Das Schicken ist aus dem Ereignen].” 88 Having expended much effort in finding the apt English equivalent, Theodore Kisiel has translated Ereignis as the ‘properizing event’, while Emad and Maly in their ‘Translators’ Introduction’ offer a thoroughgoing exposition of Ereignis and come to the conclusion that there is no word in the English language that corresponds to Ereignis, thus they invented the word ‘enowning’ to capture its manifold meanings. ‘Enowning’ appears a somewhat peculiar word, and I share Thomas Sheehan’s concern that this ‘new translation will at least promulgate, and at worst inculcate, the more bizarre forms of expression that have come to typify the ultra-orthodox interpretation’ of Heidegger.’89 Sheehan understands Ereignis as ‘the opening of the open’, and Richard Polt simply interprets it as ‘appropriation.’ Whilst these commentators provide good arguments for their various translations of Ereignis, the disparities in their reasonings highlight what a complex term it is. Yet, despite their differences they confirm the centrality of Ereignis for Heidegger’s thinking. Theodore Kisiel in The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time states that Ereignis was destined from the outset to be “the central ‘terninus technicus’ of Heidegger’s entire Denkweg.” Claiming Ereignis is the very source and ‘primal leap’ (Ur-sprung) of experience, Kisiel describes it as an etymologically rich term. 90 Although not paying heed to its etymological lineage in Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger does examine its linguistic roots in other writings. Like Freud in his essay on the unheimlich, Heidegger in GA 71 (Das Ereignis, 1941-42) turns to Jacob and Wilhelm Grimms for insight into the meaning of Ereignis and its familial word associations. Moreover, the story of the origins of Ereignis is explored with great clarity and precision by Thomas Sheehan in his paper, “A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research.”91 Sheehan tells us that the noun Ereignis (‘event, occurrence’) refers to the reflexive verb 87

Cf. OWL, p. 27; TB, p. 20 and ID, p. 36 FS, p. 61 89 Cf. Thomas Sheehan’s “A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research”. Sheehan’s paper can be found at: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/relstud/faculty/sheehan/pdf/parad.pdf. 90 Cf. Theodore Kisiel’s The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, University of California Press, 1993. pp. 494 – 495. 91 Cf. Thomas Sheehan’s “A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research”. 88

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sich ereignen, ‘to happen, occur’, with the primary form of sich er-eignen being sich er-eigen. The Old High German ouga, ‘eye’, provides the basis for the Old High German ir-ougen and the Middle High German er-öugen, ‘to place before the eyes.’ Sheehan notes how the diphthongs äu and eu devolved into ei, er-äugen and how er-eugen became er-eigen. The Grimms translate er-eigen with the Latin infinitives monstrare and ostendere, to stretch something out in front, or ‘to show something, to bring it forth into view.’ Hence, sich ereigen, ‘to occur’ can be equated with sich erweisen, sich erzeigen (ostendi, monstrari), ‘to come forth, to show itself as it is.’ Since er-äugen and er-eugen contracted into er-eigen, eigen became linked with the unconnected adjective eigen, ‘own,’ as in the Latin proprium, and the infinitives eignen became ‘to fit with, belong to’, while an-eignen/zu-eignen evolved to become ‘to appropriate something to oneself’. By the early seventeenth century the etymon ‘own’ began to seep into verbs like er-eigen, er-äugen, and er-eugen; with a supplementary ‘n’ (e.g. eignen) entering into the aforementioned words to form er-äugnen and er-eugnen. Although er-äugnen and er-eugnen have become extinct, er-eignen has survived. In Das Ereignis Heidegger takes note of the Grimms’ etymology, accepting that eigen/proprium is not the primary etymon. Instead, he considers sich ereignen to originally mean ‘to come into view, to appear, to be brought forth and revealed.’ However, diverging from Grimms’ erweisen and erzeigen Heidegger also refers to lichten, ‘to disencumber and free up, to open up or clear’. Consequently, sich erweisen and sich erzeigen, ‘to show up or appear as what one is,’ is associated with sich lichten, ‘to be opened up and cleared.’ Sich ereignen, ‘to occur’ thus means that something is brought out into the open, comes into the clear: ‘in die Lichtung einbeziehen.’ Sheehan concludes from his succinct analysis that Ereignis for Heidegger means the following: “the opening of the open on the basis of a concealment. If we can call Ereignis an event at all, it is the ‘apriori event’ of the opening up of the open. And clearly this apriori event is less about ‘appropriation’ or ‘enowning’ than about ‘opening up and appearing’.” He adds an important caveat when he remarks that ‘appropriation’ remains a possible translation of Ereignis, and that it might work if the proprium of appropriation is understood as the opening up of openness. Notwithstanding Sheehan’s reservations about it, I deem ‘appropriation’ to be the most fitting translation of Ereignis because of the possibility of refining this word (as suggested by Sheehan himself); for the reasons put forward by Richard Polt in The emergency of being: on Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy, and from Heidegger’s own understanding of


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language. Sheehan shows how Heidegger interpreted the original etymon of Ereignis to be eräugen/ereugen, ‘bringing something out into view’ and not eigen, ‘own,’ a word paralleling the Latin proprium, which in turn gives rise to ‘appropriation’ and ‘enowning’. However, elsewhere Heidegger retains a sense of eigen, as in ‘becoming one’s own’ (sich zu eigen werden). In Identity and Difference Heidegger outlines a relation between seeing, happening, and owning: ‘Ap-propriating [Er-eignen] originally means, er-äugen, that is, to catch sight (erblicken), to call to oneself in looking, to ap-propriate.” 92 Furthermore, Polt observes that while there is no etymological relation between Ereignis and eigen (own), (which lies at the root of Eigenschaft, property; geeignet, appropriate, and eigentlich, authentic) there is an audible resonance between the two words. The resemblance in sound between eigen and Ereignis “provides a unique combination: it names happening, but also suggests unconcealment and belonging – or as Albert Hostadter puts it, ‘light’ and ‘right’.”93 Heidegger attempts to think Ereignis/appropriation non-metaphysically, and as a consequence he finds customary interpretations of it unsatisfactory. Ereignis is not an event in any usual sense of the word; it is not an essence or a universal, it is a not an a priori pre-condition for the possibility of experience, and it is not an entity, but instead allows beings to manifest themselves. Ereignis cannot simply be subsumed under everyday concepts expressed in the word event. Rather, Ereignis is to be understood as a worded way of opening up the truth of be-ing in ‘a transformed saying.’94 However, this transformed saying does not involve the invention of a new language. What is essential is ‘to say the most nobly formed language in its simplicity and essential force, to say the language of beings as the language of be-ing.’ In a seminal passage from Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger writes: The truth of be-ing cannot be said with the ordinary language that today is ever more widely misused and destroyed by incessant talking. Can this truth ever be said directly, if all language is still the language of beings? Or can a new language be invented? No. And even if this could be accomplished – and even without artificial word-formation – such a language would not be a saying of language. All saying has to let the ability to hear arise with it. Both must have the same origin. Thus only one thing counts: to say the most nobly formed language in its simplicity and 92

ID, pp. 100-101 Cf. Richard F. H. Polt, The emergency of being: on Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy, New York: Cornell University Press, 2006, p. 73. Henceforth, The emergency of being. 94 CP, p. 54 93

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Chapter Six essential force, to say the language of beings as the language of be-ing. This transformation of language pushes forth into domains that are still closed off to us, because we do not know the truth of be-ing. Thus speaking of ‘refusal of follow-through,’ ‘clearing of sheltering,’ ‘enowning,’ ‘Da-sein,’ is not picking truths out of the words but rather opening up the truth of be-ing in such a transformed saying.95

A crucial point to be drawn from this passage is that Ereignis is one word among many which is capable of opening up the truth of be-ing through a transformed saying. To further explicate this point; the meaning of Ereignis and its relation to inceptual thinking an analogy drawn from Andy Clark’s Natural-Born Cyborgs proves helpful. Clark imagines being in the midst of the humid swamplands of the Ten Thousand Islands – a maze of black mangrove trees extending from Key West to the Everglades, in the United States. He is taken aback by the distribution and density of these unusual trees, some of which are eighty feet tall. These enormous trees stand neatly, one per island, on their own small beds of land, and he wonders how this came about. The answer is surprising, for the trees did not seed upon the islands but rather, the islands were built by the trees. The mangrove tree constructs islands by catching floating debris in long vertical roots shot through the water from floating seeds. Thus, the mangrove tree builds the ground it seems to stand on. Clark notes how in these swamplands, our standard expectations (that trees need land to grow on) are unsettled, as the trees come first, the island second. Moreover, how these mangrove trees and islands grow could help us better understand the nature of words, language and thought. As Clark remarks: In much the same way, I suggest, we tend to think of words and language as simply built upon the preexisting islands of our intelligence and thought. But sometimes, perhaps, the cycle of influence runs the other way. Our words and inscriptions are the floating roots that actively capture the cognitive debris from which we build new thoughts and ideas. Instead of seeing our words and texts as simply the outward manifestations of our biological reason, we may find whole edifices of thought and reason accreting only courtesy of the stable structures provided by words and texts. 96

If it is possible for words to build thoughts rather than merely expressing them, it is then possible to think of Ereignis as a word capable 95

Ibid., p. 54 Cf. Andy Clark’s Natural-Born Cyborgs, Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence, New York: OUP, 2003, pp. 80-83. 96


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of gathering inceptual thoughts and building inceptual thinking. Cohering around Ereignis, these inceptual thoughts would provide the foundation for inceptual thinking. What features or aspects of Ereignis enable it to gather inceptual thoughts? Ereignis is able to gather inceptual thoughts as according to Heidegger it is ‘originary history itself’. 97 For Heidegger, history is not to be confused with a linear ‘movement’ of past events nor with ‘becoming’.98 Instead, history relates to how humanity belongs or fails to belong to being. Moreover, appropriation is the grounding of the there; whereby the inception of history is the interplay of owning and estrangement from being. It is humanity’s task to remember and question the meaning of being it has inherited and sustain this questioning so our belongingness to the truth of being may grow. Through remembrance and questioning, the uniqueness of being is continually acknowledged. According to Heidegger, only inceptual thinking can attend to the ‘non-ordinariness of the one-time-only and this-time-only’ of being. Yet, he concedes the language for this is still lacking, that is, the naming and being-able-to-hear that is adequate to being.99 Heidegger’s repeated recourse to Ereignis is his attempt to attain a language that is adequate to being. As was explained in the previous chapter, Heidegger also views history as a sending (Schickung) of being in which humanity’s destiny (Geschick) is given or donated. This destiny appropriates humanity, but human beings can also succeed or fail to appropriate being. The use of the term ‘appropriation’ is questionable here, as Emad and Maly point out how appropriation can mean ‘seizing, ruling and hegemony.’100This sense of appropriation obviously runs counter to Heidegger’s understanding of Ereignis, as he in no way suggests that humanity can seize, rule or gain control of being, although he does famously describe humanity as the shepherd of being. Furthermore, Polt maintains that ‘appropriation’ is ‘broad enough, that given the right usage and context, it can work well as a parallel to Ereignis.’ Polt argues that appropriation does not necessarily entail injustice or violence, for one can appropriately appropriate a style of dressing or cooking. 101 Humanity can prepare for the appropriation of be-ing by opening itself to gift of ‘es gibt/there is.’ For humans cannot ‘be there’ unless being happens. On the other hand, according to Heidegger’s narrative be-ing 97

CP, p. 23 Ibid., p. 332 99 Ibid., p. 326 100 Ibid., p. xxi 101 Cf. Richard F. H. Polt, The emergency of being, pp. 82-83 98

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needs humanity to hold sway in order to happen essentially. The vacillation between this need and belonging constitutes appropriation.102 The problem for Heidegger is that humanity does not realize it belongs to being, hence there is a shadow side to Ereignis/appropriation known as Ent-eignung, ex-propriation, or dis-owning. 103 Through Ent-eignung humanity is left homeless, alienated from be-ing and nothingness. However, by continually acknowledging this homeless condition the possibility for a genuine dwelling at home emerges. Moreover, without the strife between belonging to and alienation from being, there would be no appropriation, and the question of the truth of being would not arise. Appropriation might therefore be understood not as a universal, or concrete event but as a far-reaching futural possibility that can be discerned by the few who are able to cross from the first to the other inception. For Heidegger, to thoughtfully prepare for this transformative transition is to participate in the greatest and most significant venture, for it is to participate in a homecoming to the truth of being.

Inceptual Thinking and Deep Foreboding In Contributions to Philosophy and Mindfulness Heidegger seeks out an uncharted and unknown other non-metaphysical beginning in order to experience the truth of be-ing and to inquire into the be-ing of truth. He does so ‘to ground the essential swaying of be-ing and to let beings as the true of that originary truth spring forth.’ For Heidegger, preparing for the emergence of this other beginning will bring about a homecoming to the truth of being. However, unlike the philosophical beginnings of the ancient Greeks, the commencement of this new journey in thinking does not originate in wonder, instead it stems from a sense of startled dismay or deep foreboding. Heidegger writes: In the first beginning: deep wonder. In another beginning: deep foreboding.104

Both deep foreboding and startled dismay signify a retreat from the ‘estranging and confusing’ comfort and ease of our comportment in what is familiar.105 In a similar vein to what he has to say in Being and Time, Heidegger considers perseverance with the familiar, and the determination 102

CP, pp. 177-179 GA, 66, p. 312 104 CP, p. 16 105 Ibid., p. 11 103


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to remain at home in the world, as leading to inauthenticity and errancy. Thus, the importance of ‘the uncanny’ in his earlier writings and ‘startled dismay’ in his later texts, for both enable us to awaken from our sedated unquestioning everyday existence with the familiar, and from ‘the bewitchment of technicity.’106 By refusing to experience startled dismay, Heidegger claims we fail to ‘touch upon what is uncanny in this epoch’, however, submitting to it allows a most profound displacement to prevail, whereby everything becomes defamiliarized and open to questioning.107 Inceptual thinking is essential for addressing this displacement from home, as it attains insight into the abandonment of being and attunes itself to the echo of being. Nonetheless, the possibility of transforming displacement or the condition of homelessness, by undergoing a homecoming to the truth of being can only arise out of being itself. 108 According to Heidegger’s account of the history of be-ing, be-ing not only withdraws and conceals itself from humanity but ultimately abandons humanity. Consequently, for Heidegger, there must be a ‘great turning around’ for humanity to come home to the truth of being: But now the great turning around is necessary, which is beyond all ‘revaluations of all values,’ that turning around in which beings are not grounded in terms of human being, but rather human being is grounded in terms of be-ing. But this requires a higher strength for creating and questioning and at the same time a deeper preparedness for suffering and settling within the whole of a complete transformation of relations to beings and to be-ing.109

A homecoming venture to the truth of being is grounded in a turning by be-ing itself, yet for this to happen it behooves human beings to undergo a painful metamorphosis, whereby human beings radically alter the way they relate to beings and to being. For such a transformation to transpire, Heidegger deems it necessary to move away from metaphysical modernity toward what is other than modernity, and to participate in a beginning more originary than the first. 110 However, an undertaking of this nature seems utterly incomprehensible and untenable as there is no clearly defined route to the other beginning that Heidegger posits: ‘there are no bridges, and the leaps are not yet accomplished.’ 111 Not explicitly 106

Ibid., p. 87 Ibid., p. 77 108 Ibid., p. 130 109 Ibid., p. 129 110 Ibid., pp. 60-63 111 Ibid., p. 23 107

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elucidating what the other beginning is or how to reach it, the atypical manner of thinking found in Contributions to Philosophy tentatively sounds out the other beginning by offering hints.112 Moreover, according to Heidegger, inceptual thinking fosters the ‘hinting of a hint’ that prompts a crossing over to the other beginning. This crossing is spurred on by distress, but Heidegger’s sense of distress is not to be associated with misery or grief. Rather he understands distress as something experienced as ‘startled dismay in the jubilation of belongingness to being, which as hinting moves abandonment of being into the open.’ Not seeking to expel distress, he claims it cannot be eliminated nor denied, nor overcome through cheerfulness and delight in the wonders of beings. Instead of trying to dispel distress, he seeks to inceptually invoke it. For from Heidegger’s perspective, distress allows humanity to recognize both its estrangement from being and belongingness to it.113 Furthermore, tending to the truth of being loosens the hold metaphysics has on thinking, permitting humanity to respond to its homeless condition. Yet, homelessness is not analogous to a mathematical problem that can be solved. Homelessness is a condition that perennially exists. Any pretence to its overcoming is eventually revealed, hence it is to be continually remembered and acknowledged. Acutely aware of the need to repeatedly recall homelessness, Heidegger appeals for a remembrance of being, and the history of being.114 Thus the overcoming of homelessness through the surmounting of metaphysics is a continuous venture without final fulfillment. Heidegger remarks: “we may not presume to stand outside of metaphysics because we surmise the end of metaphysics. For metaphysics overcome in this way does not disappear. It returns transformed, and remains in dominance as the continuing difference of being and beings.”115 Seeking to avoid the ‘metaphysical’ inversions and reversals carried out by Nietzsche, which continue to vacillate between beings and being but fail to tend to being itself, Heidegger’s inceptual thinking involves a stepping back from metaphysics. This retreat from metaphysics, if only temporary, is indicative of a humbling homecoming movement that 112

In the Preview to Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger remarks: “What is said in the preparatory exercise is a questioning that belongs neither to the purposeful activity of an individual nor to the limited calculation of a community. Rather, it is above all the further hinting of a hint which comes from what is most question-worthy and remains referred to it.” (CP, p. 4) 113 Ibid., p. 69 114 Cf. OM, p. 84 115 Ibid., p. 85


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attempts to deviate from representational thought, and the willing and valuing intrinsic to metaphysical thinking. Abstaining from representational and valuative thinking, he favours a thinking appropriated by being. 116 Gathering the simple saying of being, the step back from representational and valuative thinking of which Heidegger speaks, allows ‘the habitual opining of philosophy’ to fall away. 117 Furthermore, such a step back signals a return to originary thought, and facilitates a homecoming to being. For Heidegger, the retreat from metaphysics and the simultaneous return to being would bring about an essential transformation of language, thinking, and humanity.

Heidegger and Poetry Gesang ist Dasein/Dasein ist Gesang118 BOSWELL. ‘Then, Sir, what is poetry?’ JOHNSON. ‘Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light it is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.119

What is poetry? For Heidegger, poetry is much more than a form of literature. Poetry cannot be limited to literature or its literary manifestations. He attributes a far greater significance to poetry than is commonly done. From Heidegger’s vantage point, poetry is not to be understood as the fanciful expressions of an individual nor interpreted as a mere cultural phenomenon. He declares: “Poetry is the sustaining ground of history, and therefore not just an appearance of culture, above all not the mere ‘expression’ of the ‘soul of a culture.’” 120 Moreover, poetry is deeply ambiguous according to Heidegger, whereby the meaning of ‘ambiguity’ is understood in a unique manner. He writes: “The poetic work speaks out of an ambiguous ambiguousness. […] The ambiguity of this poetic saying is not lax imprecision, but rather the rigor of him who leaves what is as it is, who has entered into the ‘righteous vision’ and now submits to it.”121 116

Cf. LH, p. 242 Ibid., p. 222 118 ‘Song is existence’ (‘Gesang ist Dasein’) comes from part one of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, while the inversion of this ‘Existence is Song’ can be found in John Moriarty’s Invoking Ireland, p. 130. 119 James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, Vol. III, London: G Walker, 1820, p. 34. 120 EHP, p. 60 121 OWL, p. 192 117

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As well as alluding to the ambiguity of poetry, Heidegger is also unwilling to define it in terms of a universally valid concept. He refuses to articulate or name the essence of poetry in a way that would only serve to provide a neutral or indifferent grasp of it. He remarks in “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” (An address given in Rome in 1936): ‘…if we understand by ‘essence of poetry’ whatever is drawn together into a universal concept, one that would be valid for every kind of poetry’ then “…a universal like that, equally valid for every particular instance, always proves to be something neutral or indifferent. An ‘essence’ of that kind always misses what is truly essential.”122 Despite his aversion to determining the essence of poetry in terms of a universally valid concept, he does endeavour to gain insight into what is essential to poetry. For Heidegger, the meaning of poetry and what is essential to it, is very much dependent upon the poem(s) or poetic motif he is dealing with at a given time. As such, the poem or the motif he engages with shapes and colours his construal of poetry. For instance, in his lecture course on Hölderlin’s ‘Remembrance’ he declares: ‘Poetry is remembrance,’ while in his address on Hölderlin’s ‘Homecoming/To Kindred Ones’ poetry is conceived in relation to joy and homecoming, and in ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’ poetry is understood as an essential type of dwelling and measuring. 123 His most noteworthy exploration of the essence of poetry is found in “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry”. Here he focuses on five poetic statements and verses written by Hölderlin. For what is essential in poetry, according to Heidegger, comes to light in Hölderlin’s poems, as his poetic mission consists in composing poems that concern the essence of poetry.124 The five poetic statements/verses that 122

EHP, p. 52. In terms what ‘essence’ means for Heidegger see the footnote to page 7 of this chapter. 123 Cf. ‘Remembrance’ (EHP, p. 172), ‘Homecoming/To Kindred Ones’, where he says: “Poesis does not merely bring joy to the poet, but rather it is the joy, the brightening, because it is in poesis first of all that homecoming takes place. […] Poesis means to be in joy…” (EHP, p. 44) Also see ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’ where he writes: ‘Poetry is a measuring.’ (PLT, p. 219) 124 Ibid., p. 52. Developing this point, Heidegger declares towards the conclusion of the text what this signifies: “Hölderlin puts into poetry the very essence of poetry – but not in the sense of a timelessly valid concept. This essence of poetry belongs to a definite time. But not in such a way that it merely conforms to that time as some time already existing. Rather, by providing anew the essence of poetry, Hölderlin first determines a new time. It is the time of the gods who have fled and of the god who is coming. […] The essence of poetry which is founded by Hölderlin is historical in the highest degree, because it anticipates a historical time. As a historical essence: however, it is the only true essence.” (EHP, pp. 64 -65)


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are central to Heidegger’s text are as follows: (1) ‘This most innocent of occupations.’ (2) ‘That is why language, the most dangerous of goods, has been given to man…so that he may bear witness to what he is…’ (3) ‘Much has man experienced/Named many of the heavenly ones/Since we have been a conversation/ And able to hear from one another.’ (4) ‘But what remains is founded by the poets.’ and finally (5) ‘Full of merit, yet poetically, man/Dwells on this earth.’ These five poetic utterances are all integral to Heidegger’s attempts to distil the essence of poetry. While each of Hölderlin’s poetic statements carry great weight I will tend to the last line of ‘Remembrance’ (‘Andenken’): ‘But what remains is founded by the poets.’ (Was bleibet aber, stiften die Dichter.)125 What is it that remains? What is founded by the poets in poetry? What remains, according to Heidegger, is the remembrance of the poet, a remembrance that recollects what has been, and thinks ahead to what is coming, but most significantly it recalls the origin and the venture through the foreign that is required to reach this origin. He comments: The poesis of the poets is now what founds everything that remains. What remains is the remembrance of the poet. It does not only think of what has been and what is coming; rather, it ponders from where the coming had first been uttered, and thinks back to where what has been must be concealed, so that this foreign element itself can remain what it is even when it is appropriated. Remembrance thinks of the location of the place of origin in thinking of the journey of the voyage through the foreign.126

The importance of the ‘origin’ and the journey through the ‘foreign’ will be dealt with at a later stage. Heidegger maintains that what is founded in poetry is ‘a founding by the word and in the word’, and also a ‘founding of being in the word.’127 Parallels can be drawn here between Heidegger’s notion of poetry as the founding of being in the word, and the Hindu notion of Shabda Brahman, the Brahman of sounds as it manifests itself in mantras and hymns. A key distinction must nonetheless be made here between a transcendental and empirical sense of Brahman. The transcendental conception of Brahman relates to the notion of Brahmanirguna, meaning the attributeless Brahman, the ultimate reality out of which universes emerge and into which they return. Brahmanirguna cannot be grasped by human thought. On the other hand, Brahman also retains empirical meaning. Its empirical 125

HPF, pp. 576-579. EHP, p. 171 127 EHP, pp. 58-59. 126

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meaning is experienced in mantras and hymns, and understood through the Upanishads. In the essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” Heidegger again speaks of poetry in terms of a founding but on this occasion the founding is in terms of truth. Additionally, ‘founding’ is interpreted in a threefold manner: “The nature of art is poetry. The nature of poetry, in turn, is the founding of truth. We understand founding here in a triple sense: founding as bestowing, founding as grounding, and founding as beginning.”128 This threefold sense of founding offers a sense of what poetry is capable of. Poetry as ‘founding’ in the Heideggerian sense of the word opens up the prospect of human beings dwelling poetically upon the earth. For in “…Poetically Man Dwells…”, he observes how poetry is not the imaginary flight of fancy that attempts to flee from the earth but is instead: ‘…what first brings man onto the earth, making him belong to it, and thus brings him into dwelling.’129 Thus, it is the poet through his poetry that first enables human beings to dwell poetically upon the earth. Heidegger notes: ‘The dwelling of the poet who founds shows and consecrates the ground for the poetic dwelling of the sons of the earth. Something that endures comes to remain.’130 How does the poet prepare or ‘consecrate’ the ground for humanity to dwell poetically? By way of an initial response to this question, we see that for Heidegger the poet, by calling or naming thegods and by founding being by naming beings manages to ground a people. Although the gods speak to a people only through hints (Winke), the poet has the ability to discern 128

PLT, p. 72. Does this conception of poetry mean that all other arts, music, sculpture and painting are to be deemed subordinate to it? George Pattison highlights how Hegel in his Aesthetics outlined a hierarchy of the arts, which was ordered along a scale measured in terms of the progressive diminishment of the role of spatiality and externality in favour of temporality, interiority and spiritual truth. Poetry is understood as the highest art in the Hegelian schema as it is both temporal and inward. However, Heidegger radically differs from Hegel, as Pattison duly observes: “Language, and poetry as the art of language, is, then, privileged by Heidegger after all – but not, as for Hegel, because it subordinates the thingly element of its object, its matter, or because it expresses a higher mode…of consciousness. Poetry, no less than the temple or the jug, is what it is by virtue of its power to let rock become hard, metals to shimmer and colours to glow: i.e., to let the world be made present in its worldly character. Poetry is not a means of transcending or spiritualising experience but a mode of unconcealment, of letting beings appear in their being, as what they are.” The Later Heidegger, London: Routledge 2000, p. 161. 129 PLT, p. 216 130 EHP, p. 172


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these hints and pass them on to his people.131 In Heidegger’s “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” it transpires that although poetry as the founding of being in the word is a ‘free gift’, the poet is bound in a twofold way.132 For Heidegger, the poet is bound to the gods and to the people. He has recourse to Hölderlin’s Empedocles and the two different versions of the final stanza of ‘Voice of the People’ (‘Stimme des Volks’) to support these claims. The lines from Empedocles read: ‘…and hints are,/From time immemorial, the language of the gods.’133 While the final stanza of the first version of ‘Voice of the People’ state: Because it is pious, for love of the heavenly I honour the voice of the people, the calm, But for the sake of gods and men, May it not always rest too willingly.134

And in the concluding verse of the second version ‘Voice of the People’, Hölderlin says: …and sayings Are indeed good, for they are a memory To the highest, yet there is also a need of One to interpret the holy sayings.135

Accordingly, Heidegger thinks of poetry as being intimately tied to the ‘god’s hints’ and the ‘voice of the people.’136 He envisages the poet, in this case Hölderlin, as standing between the gods and the people. Standing between the gods and the people, the poet deciphers the hints of the hidden gods and tries to trace them in their absence. This is one of the primary tasks of the poet in a ‘destitute time’, a theme which comes to prominence in “What Are Poets For?” (‘Wozu Dichter?’).137 As the act of founding being is bound by the hints of the gods this founding proves profoundly arduous, for this is a destitute time. The gods have fled and no new God has arrived. For Heidegger, this means the ‘ground’ hangs in the abyss 131

Ibid., p. 64 Ibid., p. 63 133 Ibid., p. 63 134 Ibid., p. 63 135 Ibid., p. 63 136 Cf. Ibid., pp. 63-64 where he writes: “Thus the essence of poetry is joined to the laws which strive to separate and unite the hints of the gods and the voice of the people.” 137 Cf. LPT, p. 92 132

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(Abgrund). 138 These comments concerning the task of the poet can be considered merely precursory remarks to the discussion that will be taken up in the following section. By moving outside the realm of Heidegger’s texts, one can garner further insight into the nature of poetry as a fundamental type of founding. Knowledge of what poetry is can be gleaned from T.S Eliot’s ‘East Coker’ part of the ‘Four Quartets’, where he writes: …And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate.139

The poet is the one who breaks into the inarticulate and in doing so he/she helps furnish humanity with the words and language necessary to name and call into being things, nature, the world, gods and what it means to be human. Through his/her poetry the poet manages to name things in a far fuller and enriched manner than other modes of discourse. There are occasions when poetic speech is so majestic and successful in its articulations, as in Yeats’ ‘Byzantium’ for example, that there is no need to try and say anew what has already been spoken in these great poems. Simply to recite such poetic works suffices. In and through poetry, language and its many modes of saying and singing, is bestowed upon humanity in ways that would otherwise remain closed off. To be impervious or unreceptive to poetry is to exclude oneself from modes and moods of reality that reveal themselves only through poetic speech. Deprived of poetry, one could be described as Ajax was by Thersites in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, that is, as a ‘land-fish, languageless’.140 The inverse of which would also be true. For a human being that is language-less could be portrayed as a land-fish, that is, as a being which is removed or separated from its natural element. Heidegger has famously said in his “Letter on ‘Humanism’”: ‘Language is the house of being. In its 138

Heidegger writes in “What Are Poets For?”: “Because of this default, there fails to appear for the world the ground that grounds it. The word for abyss – Abgrund – originally means the soil and ground toward which, because it is undermost, a thing tends downward. But in what follows we shall think of the Ab- as the complete absence of the ground. The ground is the soil in which to strike root and to stand. The age for which the ground fails to come, hangs in the abyss.” (PLT, p. 90) 139 T.S Eliot, ‘East Coker’ part of “Four Quartets” in T.S Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909-1962, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, p.183. 140 William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida in The Works of William Shakespeare, New York: Oxford University Press, 1938, p. 736.


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home human beings dwell.’141 If language is humanity’s home, the degree to which human beings are able to inhabit it and allow it to speak reveals the extent to which human beings are at home in the world, even if it is homelessness which constitutes humanity’s basic way of being in the world. Another question that arises in relation to an exposition of what is essential to poetry, and has already been faintly touched upon, pertains to the nature of poetic speech itself. What does poetic speech signify? What is to be given the name poetry? On many occasions Heidegger refers to poetry and poetic speech as song (Gesang). He affirms this in a number of texts, such as “What Are Poets For?”, “Language in the Poem” (1953) (Originally entitled Georg Trakl, Eine Erörterung seines Gedichtes.), “Words” (‘Das Wort’) and “The Way to Language” (1959) (‘Der Weg zur Sprache’). He also associates song with tragedy: ‘Lied, tragedy, and epos.’142 There exists an etymological link between song and tragedy, for the Greek word tragǀidia, stems from tragos meaning goat, and ǀidƝ meaning song, the goat song. Heidegger’s sense of song is broadened in “Language in the Poem”, where song or more precisely ‘to sing’ becomes connected with the idea of praise: ‘To sing means to praise and to guard the object of praise in song.’ 143 Whilst in “Words”, he connects song (Lied) with the Latin word laudes, meaning song of praise, and he does so through Stefan George’s ‘Song’ (‘Das Lied’). As well as this, Heidegger speaks of the importance of song as the gathering of Saying.144 He writes: “Pondering, framing, loving is Saying: a quiet, exuberant bow, a jubilant homage, a eulogy, a praise: laudare. Laudes is the Latin name for songs. To recite song is: to sing. Singing is the gathering of Saying in song.”145 In an endnote to chapter nine of Of Spirit, Derrida observes how there is a ‘necessary path’ that leads from “speech to saying (sagen), from saying to poetic saying (Dichten), from Dichten to song (Singen, Gesang), to accord of consonance (Einklang), from this to the hymn and thus to praise.”146 Derrida qualifies what he means by stating: ‘I am not here pointing to an order of logical consequences, nor to the necessity to regress from one

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PM, p. 239 Cf. Derrida’s Of Spirit, p. 128 143 OWL, p. 187 144 The relevant line of Stefan George’s ‘Song’ read: “What I still ponder and what I still frame, / What I still love – their features are the same.” (Cf. Martin Heidegger’s “Words”, trans. Peter D. Hertz in OWL, p. 147) 145 OWL, p. 148 146 Cf. Derrida’s Of Spirit, p. 128 142

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meaning to another.’ 147 He is merely highlighting how these meanings seem ‘indissociable’ for Heidegger. Heidegger’s interpretation of poetry as song in “What Are Poets For?” is of particular interest to the present enquiry. In this text Heidegger’s interpretation of poetic speech as song revolves around a line from Rilke’s 148 Sonnets to Orpheus: ‘Song is existence’ (‘Gesang ist Dasein’). Prompted by what Rilke wrote, Heidegger declares that the poets are the more adventurous ones, whose poetic utterances or singing, is neither concerned with self-assertions nor egocentric desires. Furthermore, poetry as song gathers saying and entities in a way that allows them to manifest themselves as the entities they are. He notes: “The more venturesome are those who say in a greater degree, in the manner of the singer. Their singing is turned away from all purposeful self-assertion. […] The saying of the more venturesome which is more fully saying is the song. […] To sing the song means to be present in what is present itself. It means: Dasein, existence.” 149 Through Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus Heidegger claims ‘Song is existence’. But does he go far enough in the espousal of this claim? In Invoking Ireland John Moriarty appears to go beyond what both Rilke and Heidegger have to say, as he not only claims that ‘Song is existence’ (Gesang ist Dasein) but he also contends that ‘Existence is song’ (Dasein ist Gesang).150 The idea that ‘Dasein ist Gesang’ is not an isolated intuition nor is it a shockingly new idea. A sense of its meaning can be gleaned from Hindu thought. An examination of the epilogue to Dreamtime reveals what Moriarty means when he says, ‘Dasein ist Gesang’. Inspired by the Hindu notion or sound known as ‘Om’, Moriarty is open to the possibility that the universe is a mantraverse. For Hindus who know it and chant it, Om is the first sound to emanate from Brahmanirguna, meaning attributeless Brahman, the ultimate divine reality out of which universes emerge and return. Om is a sound but not of any two things striking together (Hindus call this event anahata shabda), it is thus a metaphysical sound, and consequently cannot be heard with our everyday and customary mode of hearing things. Moriarty remarks: “The universe is an elaboration, of Om, a blossoming of it, and so it is that the Chandogya Upanishad advises us:

147

Ibid., p. 128 Cf. PLT, p. 135 149 Ibid.,, p. 135 150 Cf. John Moriarty’s Invoking Ireland, p. 130 148


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Revere the sun up there which radiates heat as the syllable Om; for on rising it sings aloud for the sake of all creatures; on rising it strikes down darkness and fear. So too shall he who knows this smite down darkness and fear.151

Although modern scientists may hear the origin of the universe in a Big Bang, and while Matthew Arnold might only hear the Sea of Faith’s ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’, leaving behind ‘the naked shingles of the world’, there are those who hear the Mandukya Om.152 Furthering his claim that the universe is lyrical in nature, Moriarty poses a number of questions. He asks: “…why in order to be respectable must philosophy conduct itself in logical argument, as dialectics? Why must philosophy read like Aristotle’s Metaphysics? […] If the universe is lyrical, how can it be philosophically improper to be lyrical with it? ‘Perhaps there is’ Nietzsche says, ‘a realm of wisdom from which the logician is exiled.’” 153 If the universe is to be conceived lyrically, this suggests that there exist spontaneities within the universe that cannot be uncovered or revealed through rigid human laws. Or as Moriarty puts it ‘there are no laws of nature, only surprises of nature…’.154 If the universe is lyrical in nature, then dwelling and thinking poetically would appear the most harmonious way of being in the world. Countering Marx’s claim that the purpose of philosophy was not to interpret reality but to change it, Moriarty suggests one shouldn’t feel compelled to either. Instead, one ought to sing with it.155 Having shed some light on what poetry means for Heidegger, it is apparent that he considers it profoundly ambiguous. He refuses to articulate a universal definition of poetry to the point where he repudiates the possibility of doing so. Nonetheless, it was revealed how the impossibility of defining poetry did not deter him from seeking out what is essential to it. This is nowhere more evident than in “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry”. When focusing on this text, attention was specifically drawn to the notion of poetry as a founding. Also, the nature of poetic speech was examined, whereby its relation to song and to praise came to the fore. 151 John Moriarty, Dreamtime, Revised and Expanded Edition, Dublin: The Lilliput Press 1999, pp. 256-257. 152 Cf. Ibid, p. 259. The Mandukya Om relates to the Mandukya Upanishad, a canonical Hindu text from which philosophical monism derives. 153 Ibid., p. 260 154 Ibid., p. 260 155 Ibid., p. 260

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Now it is necessary to explore how Heidegger interprets the task of the poet, with special attention being paid to Hölderlin. For in Der Spiegel interview Heidegger acknowledged an affinity between his thought and Hölderlin’s poetry. 156 Why Hölderlin? What is the significance of Hölderlin’s poetry? As a poet, what was the task he took upon himself or perhaps more fittingly, what task was he anointed with?

Heidegger’s appeal to Hölderlin Now come, fire!157 —Hölderlin, ‘The Ister’ Everything that is to be fruit must enter into the fire. 158 —Heidegger, ‘Remembrance’

There are a number of reasons why Heidegger had recourse to Hölderlin’s poetry and I will focus on five main reasons in this section. The first two reasons can be dealt with in a concise manner but the remaining three require greater elaboration. Firstly, the region of Germany from which Hölderlin hailed from, who have had influence on Heidegger. Hölderlin grew up in the town of Lauffen on the Neckar, and this meant that he too was a Swabian. This would have had a strong bearing on Heidegger, for he believed that the region one dwelt in and its landscape had a profound impact on who and what one was.159 Secondly, Hölderlin was considered by Heidegger to be Germany’s lost poet. Goethe, Schiller and to a degree Schelling, all contemporaries of Hölderlin did not fully appreciate the genius of his poetry, and it was not until Norbert Von Hellingrath’s editions of his poetry and translations of Greek tragedies that he came to prominence. Thirdly, Heidegger regarded Hölderlin as the ‘poet’s poet’, that is, the poet who meditated throughout his work upon the very nature 156

He writes: “My thinking stands in a definite relationship to the poetry of Hölderlin. I do not take Hölderlin to be just any poet whose work, among many others, has been taken as a subject by literary historians. For me Hölderlin is the poet who points to the future, who expects god and who therefore may not remain merely an object of Hölderlin research and of the kind of presentations offered by literary historians.” (DS, p. 112) 157 The original German reads: ‘Jezt komme, Feuer!’ in ‘Der Ister’, HPF, p. 580 158 HPF, p. 138 159 Cf. ‘Why Do We Remain in the Province?’ in Philosophical and Political Writings, trans. Thomas J. Sheehan, ed. Manfred Stassen, New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003, and also The Heidegger Controversy, pp. 40-42.


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of poetry. Fourthly, and most importantly Heidegger envisaged Hölderlin as the messenger who stood between the gods and the German people. In a certain way Hölderlin was a conduit, who conveyed as best he could to the people what he learned of and from the gods. Fifthly, Heidegger viewed him as ushering in a new historical epoch, one in which old gods had fled and no new god had yet arrived. Of these five reasons, the fourth one, the poet as the intermediate between gods and mortals will give most attention. Heidegger’s various discourses on Hölderlin’s poetry have been regarded by some as highly controversial and viewed by others with utmost contempt. For instance, Dieter Henrich a student of Hans-Georg Gadamer was deeply critical of Heidegger’s interpretations of Hölderlin. Henrich remarks: Heidegger is no help at all in methodically uncovering Hölderlin’s approach or the kind of thinking from which it derives. He speaks instead with the conviction of someone in touch with Hölderlin’s ideas from the outset and is therefore imperious rather than thoughtful and reflective. We can thank Heidegger for contemplating Hölderlin’s work in relation to real philosophical questions, and here we can agree with him. But depth without flexibility in questioning can easily distort and obstruct: moreover it encourages mindless imitation.160

Henrich’s cutting comments seek to undermine Heidegger’s approach to Hölderlin and those who pursue his hermeneutic path. However, Henrich seems to remain blind to the care and attentiveness exhibited by Heidegger in his elucidations of Hölderlin’s poetry. Although, there does exist an inherent difficulty to Heidegger’s texts on Hölderlin, for he insists on altering and challenging our commonly held beliefs and notions. His writings on Hölderlin therefore eschew conventional methods of literary interpretation; consequently find his texts uncomfortable reading. Heidegger proclaims in the preface to a lecture in Stuttgart entitled “Hölderlin’s Earth and Heaven”: “Our reflection is concerned solely with Hölderlin’s poem. It is an attempt to transform our accustomed way of representing things into an unaccustomed, because simple, thinking experience.” 161 He also cautions that each way taken into Hölderlin’s poetry is a ‘mortal one – an errant way.’162 Timothy Clark declares that Heidegger’s approach to poetry proves hugely frustrating for analytical 160

Dieter Henrich, The Course of Remembrance and Other Essays on Hölderlin, ed. Eckart Förster, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997, p. 294, n. 94. 161 EHP, p. 176 162 Ibid., p. 176

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philosophers. Clark supposes analytical philosophers would be extremely perturbed by his elucidations of a poet like Hölderlin for: “…Heidegger affirms the value of the text in an act of clarification that not only repudiates traditional methods of interpretation or contextualization, but which finally affirms the text’s withdrawal from understanding.” 163 Heidegger’s hermeneutic strategy involves bringing: …the poem nearer by stressing its remoteness, so that the elucidation is a contradictory double movement of approaching and holding off, as in ‘Homecoming’: ‘How can we preserve it – this mystery of nearness – without our knowing it? For the sake of this knowledge there must always be one who first returns home and says the mystery again and again.’164

In this regard, Heidegger’s approach to poetry and in particular the poetry of Hölderlin can be distinguished from the likes of Dilthey, Gadamer and Henrich. Dilthey elucidates poetry from a psychological perspective, basing his interpretation on a poet’s ‘lived experience.’ In a passage from Dilthey’s writings on Hölderlin, he remarks: Underlying every poem – as well as every instrumental musical composition – there is a psychic process that has been lived through, which relates back to the inner emotional life of the individual. Whether such a sequence of inner states is evoked by a particular lived experience that is determined from without, or by moods that spring from within, independently of the external world, or even by a body of historical or philosophical ideas, this course of feeling always constitutes the point of departure for the poem and the content which comes to expression within it.165

It appears from the above passage that Dilthey approaches poetry psychologically, focusing on the lived experience and inner emotional state of the poet. However, Jacob Owensby asserts in the essay “Dilthey and the Historicity of Poetic Expression” that Dilthey’s interpretations of poetry are not restricted to a psychological theory of poetic genius. According to Owensby, Dilthey also takes on a hermeneutical, ontological approach to poetry, whereby poetry is understood as presenting new perspectives on how we are situated within a world of values and 163

Timothy Clark, Martin Heidegger, London: Routledge 2002, p. 118. Clark, Martin Heidegger, p. 118, see also EHP, p. 43 165 Wilhelm Dilthey, “Friedrich Hölderlin” trans. Joseph Ross, Poetry and Experience, Selected Works, Vol. 5, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985, pp. 372-373. Henceforth: “Friedrich Hölderlin”. 164


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meanings. 166 Dilthey writes: “Every genuine poetic work accentuates some characteristic of life which has not been seen in this way before.” He also notes: ‘Through the eyes of the great poets we perceive the value and connectedness of things human.’167 Thus Owensby can claim: Poetry is no longer viewed as the articulation of an individual’s psychic life as was the case in the original version of the Poetics. The articulation of the effective presence of the past in an individual’s life is part of the larger process of the self-articulation of the structures of the historical lifenexus within which all individual lives are situated.168

Hence the poet is not merely bringing to expression inner states or moods but is also fashioning ‘the most vivid experience of the interconnectedness of our existential relations in the meaning of life.169 In addition, the poet’s life-relations to humanity’s existential conditions are not simply represented but are drawn together and made more determinate in the poetic work. Gadamer’s and Henrich’s methods of interpreting poetry are also be distinguished from Heidegger’s. Bernard Freydberg in an essay entitled “On Hölderlin’s ‘Andenken’: Heidegger, Gadamer and Henrich – A Decision?” contrasts Gadamer’s and Henrich’s hermeneutic approach to poetry with Heidegger’s, and he does so with specific attention being paid to Hölderlin’s poem ‘Remembrance’.170 Freydberg’s essay is informative, although his portrayal of Gadamer is somewhat misleading. According to Freydberg, Gadamer and Henrich both affirm that the source of the poem and the poem itself are significantly rooted in biographical detail. Although this is true of Henrich it does not fully account for Gadamer’s interpretation of poetry. In terms of Hölderlin’s poem ‘Remembrance’, the port-city of Bordeaux provides the setting for the poem. It has been well 166

Owensby writes: “Central to Dilthey’s new approach to poetics is his turn away from psychological explanations of the creative process in favour of an analysis of the value and meaning found in the poetic expressions themselves.” (Cf. “Dilthey and the Historicity of Poetic Expression” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 46, No. 4, 1988, p. 503. Henceforth “Dilthey and the Historicity of Poetic Expression.” 167 Wilhelm Dilthey, “Friedrich Hölderlin”, p. 251. 168 Jacob Owensby, “Dilthey and the Historicity of Poetic Expression”, pp. 504505. 169 Wilhelm Dilthey, “Friedrich Hölderlin”, p. 238. 170 Cf. Bernard Freydberg’s “On Hölderlin’s ‘Andenken’: Heidegger, Gadamer and Henrich – A Decision?” in Research in Phenomenology, Vol. 34, Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 2004, pp. 181-198.

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documented that Hölderlin visited Bordeaux and had a good knowledge of the city. For Henrich, the imagery of the poem is drawn directly from Hölderlin’s visit to the city. In The Course of Remembrance Henrich goes to great lengths to recreate much of the appearance and history of lateeighteenth century-early-nineteenth century Bordeaux so as to establish its accord with Hölderlin’s imagery. Freydberg points out how Gadamer is supportive of Henrich’s approach to ‘Remembrance’. Gadamer writes in the essay “Thinking and Poetizing in Heidegger and in Hölderlin’s ‘Andenken’”: “It is odd that the interpreters of this poem, above all Heidegger, cast aside this relationship with reality, although the poem from the first to the last strophe has to do with the ships and not with the poet, who almost, as a surprise, has the last word, although it is certainly an illuminating last word.”171 Yet, contrary to what Freydberg alleges, Gadamer also regularly claims that a distinctive feature of poetry is its autonomy. By this he means that poems “interpret themselves insofar as one needs no additional information about the occasion and the historical circumstances of their composition.”172 Poetry, like all language and all art, exceeds the context of its origins, furthermore, unlike most prose a poem stands alone as a single object to be interpreted in its uniqueness. Background information concerning the author or the circumstances of its creation attain legitimacy only to the extent that the poem itself bears that interpretation, but even then these additional facts are merely supplements to the ideality of the poem, it never constitutes the poem’s meaning. For Gadamer, the poem stands on its own, its meaning is its own, rather than it being a vehicle for its author’s meaning. As Gadamer remarks: “…in listening to a poem, one is not permitted to take the word as just a sign pointing to a specific meaning; rather, one must simultaneously perceive all that the word carries with it.”173 In order to substantiate the meaning of poetry’s autonomy Gadamer has recourse to Paul Valéry’s ‘currency’ metaphor, in the essay “Philosophy and Poetry”. Gadamer draws an analogy between poetry and a gold coin. The gold coin is useful for exchange but it is also valuable in its own right, even after the images on the coin marking it as currency 171

Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Thinking and Poetizing in Heidegger and in Hölderlin’s ‘Andenken’”, trans. Richard Palmer, in Heidegger Toward the Turn: Essays on the Work of the 1930’s, ed. James Risser, Albany: SUNY Press, 1999, p. 154. Henceforth, “Thinking and Poetizing”. 172 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Religious and Poetical Speech” in Myth, Symbol and Reality, ed. by Alan Olson and Leroy Rouner Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980, p.86. 173 Gadamer, “Thinking and Poetizing”, p. 154


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have worn off. Valéry contrasted the poetic word with the everyday use of language; an enlightening comparison, which alludes to the old days of the gold standard. The use of everyday language resembles small change, and like paper money it does not actually posses the value it symbolizes. On the other hand, the famous gold coins used before the First World War actually possessed as metal the intrinsic value imprinted upon them. Similarly the language of poetry is not a mere pointer that refers to something else, but, like the gold coin is what it represents.174 Gadamer’s recourse to Valéry’s ‘currency’ metaphor signals his attempt to show how in poetry, words have an intrinsic value. Regardless of the insights one may derive from a poem, poetic words preserve the power to reveal, thereby retaining the potential for further interpretations to be made. As was mentioned previously, Gadamer argued that when listening to a poem, one is not permitted to take a word to be a sign alone. One ought not assign to a poetic word a specific meaning. Instead, one must bear in mind the full freight of meaning that the word carries. 175 Heidegger’s influence on Gadamer’s thought is evident here, however, noteworthy differences exist between the two. Unlike Heidegger, there is a dialectical mode of thinking at work in Gadamer’s texts. This dialectic manifests itself in his reading of poetry, and defines his understanding and philosophy.176 Robert J. Dostal in “Gadamer’s Relation to Heidegger and Phenomenology” highlights how Heidegger continually attacks dialectical thinking as a conceptual sleight of hand or symptom of confusion, yet Gadamer relies on it.177 According to Dostal, Gadamer was inspired by Hegel but it was ultimately Plato who provided the grounds for his understanding of dialectic, for he describes it as dialogue. 178 Gadamer comments: “Philosophy is dialectic—the art of conducting a dialogue in 174

Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s “Philosophy and Poetry” in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. Nicholas Walker, New York: CUP, 1986, p. 133. 175 Cf. Gadamer, “Thinking and Poetizing”, p. 154 176 “Self-bestowal and self-withdrawal – such a dialectic of uncovering and withdrawal seems to hold sway in the mystery of language, both for poets and for philosophers, from Plato to Heidegger.” Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Philosophy and Poetry”, p. 139 177 Dostal cites the following texts where Heidegger criticizes dialectical modes of thinking: Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt: Klostermann), volume 29/30, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, pp. 276, 306, 353, volume 32, Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes, pp. 105, 162, 200; vol. 65, Beiträge, p. 412, Identity and Difference, pp. 32, 95. 178 Robert J. Dostal, “Gadamer’s Relation to Heidegger and Phenomenology” in The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, Cambridge: CUP, 2002, p. 257.

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which in the end nobody is conducting, but both partners are conducted, in such a way that the dialogue leads somewhere.” 179 Hence, the way Gadamer thinks of and tends to poetry diverges significantly from Heidegger. Heidegger’s approach to poetry could be characterized in terms of a thinking Gespräch with poetry, as set out in the essay “Language in the Poem” (originally entitled ‘Georg Trakl, Eine Erörterung seines Gedichtes’ (‘A Discussion on Georg Trakl’s Poetic Work’). In this essay Heidegger explores the site of Trakl’s poetic work. If one examines the word ‘Erörterung’ it is evident that it contains the root ‘Ort’ meaning ‘site’ or ‘place’. Heidegger employs the verb ‘erörtern’ to mean: ‘in den Ort weisen’, that is, ‘to point out the proper place or site of something.’180 The ‘site’ as Heidegger understands it pertains to a place of gathering: “The site, as gathering power, gathers in and preserves all it has gathered, not like an encapsulating shell but rather penetrating with its light all it has gathered, and thus releasing it into its own nature.”181 For Heidegger, the ‘place’ of poetry is the source which gathers all the individual poems which arise in and from that place. Heidegger attempts to gain insight into the unspoken source of Trakl’s poetry through an elucidation of his individual poems. The place or site of Trakl’s poetry is the being of language. The decisive purpose for entering into a thinking Gespräch with poetry is to recall the being of language so mortals may learn how to dwell in language. Such re-collection preserves an essential openness to who we are as language-beings. Heidegger writes: “The dialogue of thinking with poetry aims to call forth the nature of language, so that mortals may learn again to live within language.”182 By referring to Heidegger’s Gespräch with poetry the neighbourhood (Nachbarschaft) of thinking and poetry draws together. Thinking (Denken) and poetry (Dichten) are considered neighbours as both have their being in the same common element, namely language. Moreover, thinking and poetry, both in their own inimitable ways point to the primal mystery (das Geheimnis), that is, to being as the self-concealing origin (Ursprung) and hidden presencing of entities. 179

Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s “Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Metaphysics” in Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 25, 1994, p. 109. In an interview in 1992 Gadamer characterizes his differences with Heidegger in the following way: ‘This was my way—that I told Heidegger that language is not the powerful word; language is reply.’ (Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 26 (1995), p. 123.) 180 OWL, p. 159 and Unterwegs zur Sprache, Pfullinger 1979, p. 37 181 Ibid., pp. 159-160 182 Ibid., p. 161


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However, they differ from one another in that thinking and poetry have both distinct modes of saying. Also, according to Heidegger, the saying of poetry is more capable of preserving the mystery. 183 Young states in Heidegger’s Later Philosophy that Heidegger recognizes how thinking can only negatively point to the mystery, while poetry brings it to ‘positive presence.’ 184 In this regard he shares a tenet commonly held by philosophers including Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein.185 Besides tending to the source of poetry, Heidegger has a tendency to interpret poetry in both violent and non-violent ways. His violent interpretative tendencies appear in “…Poetically Man Dwells…” where he introduces foreign or alien notions into the poetic utterances of Hölderlin. By disrupting and displacing traditional methods of interpreting poetry, Heidegger is able to interpose his own notions when interpreting a particular poetic text. Furthermore, he arbitrarily establishes connections between his own ideas and the poetic words of Hölderlin. He is acutely aware of the hermeneutic violence he inflicts upon Hölderlin’s texts. As he remarks: “We now even run the risk of intruding foreign thoughts into Hölderlin’s poetic words. For Hölderlin indeed speaks of man’s dwelling and his merit, but he still does not connect dwelling with building, as we have just done.” 186 Heidegger’s justification for these hermeneutic intrusions involves a brief exposition of the nature of the relationship between poetry and thinking, and a re-interpretation of the common understanding of ‘the same’. He comments: Accordingly, Hölderlin does not speak of poetic dwelling as our own thinking does. Despite all this, we are thinking the same thing that Hölderlin is saying poetically. […] Poetry and thinking meet each other in one and the same only when, and only as long as, they remain distinctly in the distinctness of their nature. The same never coincides with the equal, not even in the empty indifferent oneness of what is merely identical. […] The same, by contrast, is the belonging together of what differs, through a 183

Cf. EHP, p. 43 Julian Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy, p. 20. 185 Schopenhauer says philosophy: “…should be communicable knowledge and must therefore be rationalism. Accordingly, at the end of my philosophy I have indicated the sphere of illumination as something that exists, but I have guarded against setting even one foot thereon.” (Parega and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, 2 vols., trans. E.F.J. Payne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), vol. II, p. 10. And Wittgenstein famously says: ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.’ (Tractatus, Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears & B.F. McGuinness, London: Routledge, 1999, p. 74. 186 PLT, p. 216 184

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In the above passage one could argue that Heidegger is having his cake and eating it, as he attempts to justify his violent rendering of Hölderlin’s poetry to overlap with his own manner of thinking and philosophical preoccupations. Paradoxically, the non-violent aspect to Heidegger’s approach to poetry allows for its violent element to manifest itself. His non-violent approach to poetry involves a non-objectifying and non-totalizing interpretation, whereby the poetic text and its language become defamiliarized in a way that the reader’s most accustomed notions and habitual modes of thought are disputed and brought into question. Disputing this understanding of Heidegger, Véronique M. Fóti argues that he ‘totalizes’ poetic texts, in his reading of Hölderlin’s poetry. Fóti observes: “Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin totalizes the text not only in Gasché’s sense, namely in that it legitimates a certain unity (as well as historically prescriptive) reading, but also by its sweeping unification of Greece and Hesperia, antiquity and modernity, poetry and politics, interpretation and political action.” 188 Fóti claims that what underlies Heidegger’s proclivity to totalize a poetic text is made evident in his lecture courses on Hölderlin. For in these lectures he reveals that spiritual unification is intrinsically ‘differential’ or ‘polemic’, and thus nontotalizing. This, according to Fóti, ‘accounts for his own blindness to his tendency to totalize the Hölderlinian texts.’189 While there may be some merit to Fóti’s comments they appear to eschew important aspects of Heidegger’s non-violent interpretative approach to poetry, whereby he clearly does not seek to totalize a poem nor lay bare its concealed meaning. Contrary to totalizing a poem, he instead tries ‘letting the unsayable be not said’ and of ‘doing so in and through its own saying’. 190 In keeping with this approach, Heidegger is keen to conserve the ‘mystery’ inherent to poetry. As he notes ‘Homecoming/To Kindred Ones’: ‘…we never know a mystery by unveiling or analyzing it to death, but only in such a way that we preserve

187

Ibid., p. 216 VƝronique M. Fóti, Heidegger and the Poets, PoiƝsis, Sophia, TechnƝ, New Jersey: Humanity University Press 1992, p. 53. 189 Ibid. p. 53 190 GA 39, p. 119: ‘…sondern Unsagbare ungesagt lassen, und zwar in ihrem und durch ihr Sage.’ 188


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the mystery as mystery.’191 Having examined the violent and non-violent aspects of Heidegger’s interpretative approach to Hölderlin it is now necessary to explicate why he turned to Hölderlin in the first place. Returning to the question of why Heidegger held Hölderlin’s poetry in such high regard, the fact that he named Hölderlin the ‘poet’s poet’ must be taken into consideration. By naming him the poet’s poet, Heidegger attests to the fact that throughout his work Hölderlin reflected upon the very nature of poetry and was destined to put his meditations into words. Heidegger recounts in “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry”: “I did not choose Hölderlin because his work, as one among many, realizes the universal essence of poetry, but rather because Hölderlin’s poetry is sustained by his whole poetic mission: to make poems solely about the essence of poetry. Hölderlin is for us in a pre-eminent sense the poet’s poet.”192 Heidegger’s elucidation of five of Hölderlin’s poetic utterances highlighted earlier on, represent his attempt to clarify and substantiate this claim. It is not only Hölderlin’s poetry, however, that reveals his ‘mission’ to determine what is essential to poetry. According to Heidegger, his essays “On the Operations of the Poetic Spirit”, “On the Difference of Poetic Modes” and “On the different Forms of Poetic Composition”, his translations of “The Tragedies of Sophocles”, his “Remarks on ‘Oedipus’” and “Remarks on ‘Antigone’” all outline and bear testament to his unwavering self-examinations, in which he searches for what it is that determines his poetry and poetic experiences.193 Moreover, by composing poems about the essence of poetry, Heidegger also accredited Hölderlin with making poetry that was historical in the highest sense, as it anticipated a new historical time. However, an examination of the historical aspect to Hölderlin’s poetry will be postponed for now, as this will be addressed shortly. The fourth and most important motive behind Heidegger’s turn to Hölderlin concerns his unique status among mortals. For Heidegger, Hölderlin stood between the gods and the people. The ‘between’ Hölderlin inhabited meant he was dangerously exposed to the lightening of the gods 191

EHP, p. 43 Ibid., p. 52, see also Heidegger’s “The Poem” where he writes: “In Hölderlin’s poetry we experience the poem poetically. ‘The poem’ – this word now reveals its ambiguity. ‘The poem’ can mean poems in general, the concept of the poem that holds true for all the poems of world literature. But ‘the poem’ can also mean that exceptional poem, the one poem which is marked out to concern us uniquely and fatefully, the one which is the poesis of the destiny wherein we stand, whether we know it or not, whether we are ready to submit to it or not.” (EHP. p. 210) 193 Cf. Ibid., p. 211 192

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but it also meant he was receptive to their hints, for he stood bare-headed beneath the heavens.194 Heidegger remarks: “Thunder and lightning are the language of the gods and the poet is he whose task is to endure and gather up this language and to bring into the Dasein of the people.”195 Hölderlin himself confessed in a letter to Casimir Ulrich Böhlendorff that: ‘…Apollo has struck me.’196 While in the poem ‘As on a holiday…’(‘Wie wenn am Feiertage…) Hölderlin speaks of how it is necessary for the poet to be open to the divine so he can ‘offer to the people/The heavenly gift wrapped in song…’: Yet us it behoves, you poets, to stand Bare-headed beneath God’s thunderstorms To grasp the Father’s ray, itself, with our own hands And to offer to the people The heavenly gift wrapt in song… 197

Heidegger tackles the question of the role of the poet most extensively in “What Are Poets For?”, a title derived from Hölderlin’s ‘Bread and Wine’ (‘Brod und Wein’). In this text Heidegger seeks to uncover what the task of the poet is in a ‘destitute time’. What does this destitute time signify? What constitutes the destituteness of a destitute time? Heidegger names a number of factors that contribute to our destitute time. With respect to Hölderlin’s poetry he speaks of the fugitive gods and the default of God, he also alludes to the oblivion of being and in relation to Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus; he refers to the concealed nature of pain, death and love.198 Attention here will be centred on the fugitive gods and the default of God, as Heidegger states that the destituteness of this epoch is ‘defined by the god’s failure to arrive, by the ‘default of God.’’199

194

Heidegger comments elsewhere: ‘Excessive brightness drove the poet into darkness.’ (EHP, p. 62) 195 GA 39, p. 31: “Gewitter und Blitz sind die Sprache der Götter, und der Dichter ist der, der diese Sprache ohne Ausweichen auszuhalten, aufzufangen und in das Dasein des Volkes zu stellen hat.” 196 EHP, p. 62, also see HEL, p. 152. 197 EHP, p. 61, the original lines read: “…Doch uns gebührt es, unter Gottes Gewittern,/Ihr Dichter! mit entblößtem Haupte zu stehen/Des Vaters Stral, ihn selbst, mit eigner Hand/Zu fassen und dem Volk ins Lied/Gehüllt die himmlische Gaabe zu reichen.” (HPF, pp. 464 and 466) 198 With regards the motif of the oblivion of being see PLT, p. 93, while in respect to the problems of pain, death and love see PLT, p. 95. 199 Ibid., p. 89


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Who or what are the gods that Heidegger speaks of, and why have they fled? With respect to “What Are Poets For?” it is assumed that the gods Heidegger refers to are the ancient Greek gods. The departure of these gods was an event most memorably recounted by Heinrich Heine in the essay “Gods in Exile”, and his poem ‘The Gods of Greece’, discussed in chapter two. However, in a broader context the gods Heidegger alludes to are incredibly difficult to define and impossible to name, as he speaks of nearing unknown gods.200 Many commentators have struggled to discern who or what Heidegger’s gods are, and their meaning remains obscure. Yet, what is clear is that the gods Heidegger speaks of are essentially connected to the gods found in Hölderlin’s poetry. Caputo speaks of ‘a new mythopoetics of the gods’ and further notes in Demythologizing Heidegger that: “Heidegger now invokes not no God but new gods, new Greek gods in which the energy of the revolution and of thinking are simultaneously concentrated”201NeverthelessHeidegger in “The Poem” (1968) explicitly denies that the unknown gods he refers to are to be thought of in any way as returning Greek gods.202 Julian Young interprets Heidegger’s gods as a synthesis of Hölderlinian and Nietzschean ideas. He notes how Heidegger perceives the gods to be messengers of the god-head, as found in “Building Dwelling Thinking”203 but he also argues that the gods correspond to the heroes of Being and Time, and are therefore to be thought of as ‘charismatic, inspiring, and so authoritative, messengers.’204 Timothy Clark contributes to the debate over the identity of Heidegger and Hölderlin’s gods, when he writes: “Hölderlin’s phrase ‘the gods’ is singular in standing mainly for a lack, almost a cipher marking a space that might one day be filled, and not a name whose originals might be pointed out.”205 Perhaps Clark comes closest here to illuminating the meaning of Heidegger’s gods. Yet, it would appear that these various accounts of who and what the gods are, as they arise in Heidegger’s texts on Hölderlin remain inadequate. In many respects the unknown gods that Heidegger speaks of are precisely that, unknown. Heidegger writes: 200

Cf. “The Poem” in Heidegger’s Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry John D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1993, p. 177. He writes: “Heidegger issues a call for a ‘spirit’ that is at once Greek and German, metaphysical and interrogatory, radical and revolutionary. The myth here is a myth of a monumental age of mighty Greek gods and great Greek questioning uniquely and spiritually allied to a German Geist.” 202 EHP, p. 211 203 PLT, p. 147 204 Cf. Julian Young, The Later Heidegger, p. 97 205 Timothy Clark, Martin Heidegger, p. 105 201

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Chapter Six If, from time to time, we are forced to talk of the ‘gods’ and ‘goddesses’ in our remarks on Hölderlin’s poetry, then we must not let this give the illusory impression that we are enlightened about this in the way that an academic must be enlightened concerning that about which he is speaking. The names ‘gods’ and ‘goddesses’ here merely make evident our lack of knowledge, if not indeed something more fateful, more needful.206

Thus, according to Heidegger, the ‘gods’ and ‘goddesses that Hölderlin refers to in his poetry remain deeply obscure and it is only by pretence that we imagine we know who and what they are. Although Heidegger speaks of gods whose identities and significance remains opaque, as has been made evident here, there are also references to traditionally known gods who have fled. Why have these gods fled? Heidegger provides an answer to this question in “The Age of the World Picture”: The loss of the gods is a twofold process. On the one hand, the world picture is Christianized inasmuch as the cause of the world is posited as infinite, unconditional absolute. On the other hand, Christendom transforms Christian doctrine into a world view (the Christian world view), and in that way makes itself modern and up to date.207

In keeping with Heine, Heidegger attributes the loss of the gods (most notably the Greek gods) to Christianity. However, his position on Christian religiosity is complex. Roughly speaking, his view of Christianity can be understood to stem from the populist ‘corruption’ theory of the nineteenth century, whereby it was thought that original Christianity did not survive the establishment of the Church and Church doctrine. Furthermore, Heidegger considers the metaphysical God of Aristotle, the God of philosophy to have replaced and displaced the genuine divine God of factical life-experience. He writes in Identity and Difference: “… and that is the cause of causa sui. This is the right name for the god of philosophy. Man can neither pray nor sacrifice to this god. Before the causa sui, man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god.” 208 Even though it is historical and present-day fact that Christians play music and fall to their knees in reverence to their Christian God, Heidegger believes that such religious worship is inherently bankrupt. Nonetheless, Heidegger does see genuine Christian experiences preserved in the writings of individuals like Luther and Meister Eckhart among others. 206

TI, p. 33 QCT, p. 117 208 ID, p. 72 207


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In relation to the significance of his notion of the ‘default of God’ in “What Are Poets For?”, he explains the meaning of this idea in a letter to a young student named Mr. Buchner written in 1950. Heidegger explicates what he means by the ‘default of God.’ by writing: “The default of God and divinities is absence. But absence is not nothing; rather it is precisely the presence, which must first be appropriated, of the hidden fullness and wealth of what has been and what, thus gathered, is presencing, of the divine in the world of the Greeks, in prophetic Judaism, in the preaching of Jesus.” 209 In “What Are Poets For?” it is evident that Heidegger in concurrence with Hölderlin does not deny that individuals and churches retain a relationship with the Christian God.210 Nevertheless, he notes: The default of God means that no god any longer gathers men and things unto himself, visibly and unequivocally, and by such gathering disposes world history and man’s sojourn in it. The default of God forebodes something grimmer, however. Not only have the gods fled, but the divine radiance has become extinguished in the world’s history.211

When Heidegger speaks of how no god any longer visibly gathers men and things unto itself, the goddess Athena comes to mind. Athena drew a people around her and a temple was built in her honour, she bestowed her name upon the people and city of Athens. The Parthenon frieze exemplifies the status conferred upon her, by depicting scenes of Athenians in reverential procession towards the Acropolis on her birthday in order to pay tribute to their patron goddess. Nevertheless, for Heidegger, there is something more portentous to this destitute time than the fleeing of the gods or the default of God; he believes the divine radiance has been dispelled from the world’s history. Julian Young observes: “That (unlike ancient Greek, Polynesian, Aboriginal or Mbuti culture) our culture no longer responds to nature as a sacred place, that it no longer responds to it as, in the words of Being and Time, that ‘which ‘stirs and strives’, which assails us and enthrals us as landscape’…”.212 Heidegger claims that humanity must remain attentive and listen to the poets and Hölderlin in particular, if the destitute time is to give way to a new epoch, for it is they who are able to trace the gods in flight and thus point the way toward ‘the turning.’ Heidegger illuminates the principal task of the poet when he says: 209

Martin Heidegger, ‘A Letter to a Young Student’, LPT, p. 182 LPT, p. 89 211 Ibid., p. 89 212 Julian Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy , p. 35 210

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Chapter Six Poets are those mortals who, singing earnestly of the wine-god, sense the trace of the fugitive gods, stay on the god’s tracks, and so trace for their kindred mortals the way toward the turning. […] The element of the ether for the coming of the fugitive gods, the holy, is the track of the fugitive gods. But who has the power to sense, to trace such a track? Traces are often inconspicuous, and are always the legacy of a directive that is barely divined. To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world’s night utters the holy.213

From the above extract the impression is given that the poet pursues the gods who have fled by following their tracks. This implies that the gods are absent, distant and a long way off. In what way are the gods distant? Is the distance that separates them from mortals to be understood in a spatial sense, in the way the earth is distant from the sun? Not so it seems. In “The Poem” while meditating upon lines from Hölderlin’s ‘The Archipelago’ and ‘Patmos’, Heidegger asserts that the gods and the god reside too near. 214 The lines from ‘The Archipelago’ that are central to Heidegger’s discourse read as follows: But because the present gods are so near I must be as if they were far away, and dark in the clouds Must their name be for me… I name them quietly to myself…215

While the line from ‘Patmos’ that proves crucial reads: ‘Near and hard to grasp is the god.’216 Heidegger’s interpretation of the poet’s task in “The Poem” diverges from “What Are Poets For?” in two major respects. Firstly, the theme that dominates “The Poem” pertains to how the poet tends to the arrival or nearing of the gods, rather than to their flight. Who are these nearing gods? Heidegger openly denies that they are returning Greeks, rather the nearing gods are unknown divinities, in the sense that they remain unnamed for ‘holy names are lacking.’ 217 Secondly, Heidegger emphasizes the gods need for the poet as distinct from how the 213

EHP, p. 92 Heidegger writes: “How strange – one would like to assume that when the present gods are so near to the poet, then the naming of their names would result by itself and require no particular directions to the poet. But this ‘so near’ does not signify ‘near enough’, but rather ‘too near.’” (EHP, p. 213) 215 EHP, p. 215 216 Ibid., p. 213 217 Ibid., p. 211 214


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people require the poet’s mediations with the gods, as found in “What Are Poets For?”. According to Heidegger, the arriving gods are too near and near-going for poet: ‘For man is incapable of openly and directly perceiving their perfect presence, and thus of receiving the good bestowed by them.’218 One is prompted to think of Semele here, and how she was consumed by flames and turned to ashes when she was exposed to the divine radiance of Zeus. In his address entitled “Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘As When On a Holiday…’” (1939/40) Heidegger himself attests to the ominous significance of Semele, stating: ‘The desire to see the god in a human manner carried Semele away into the unique blaze of his unchained lightning-flash. She who conceived forgot the holy.’219 A dramatic reversal of what is articulated in “What Are Poets For?” takes place in “The Poem”, for in the latter text, it is the poet who must withdraw from the gods as their divine radiance is too overwhelming for a mere mortal to withstand. So radiantly near are the gods to Hölderlin that he is unable to name them directly, as Heidegger declares: ‘Their presence is so very near that he is compelled to divert his naming, i.e., his saying, to another locale at a distance from them…’.220 The poet averts his naming from the nearing divinities in order to maintain a necessary distance. Maintaining this distance enables the gods to ‘remain precisely those who are coming.’ Heidegger remarks: The name, in which this naming speaks, must be dark and obscure. The place from which the poet is to name the gods must be such that, in the presence of their coming, those who are to be named remain distant from him, and thus remain precisely those who are coming. So that this distance may open itself up as distance, the poet must withdraw from the oppressing nearness of the gods, and ‘only quietly name’ them.221

The quiet naming of the poet constitutes both a revealing and a concealing of the gods.222 Furthermore, Heidegger claims that the nature of the poet’s naming is essential for the gods’ manifestation: “For the poet’s saying is needed – showing, veiling-unveiling – to allow the appearance of the 218

EHP, p. 214. Heidegger has recourse to the fifth stanza of Hölderlin’s ‘Bread and Wine’ to make clearer his claims: “Such is man; when the good is there, and a god himself / Cares for him with gifts, he neither knows nor sees it. / First he must suffer; but now he names his most loved, / Now, now words for it, like flowers, must spring to life.” 219 Ibid., p. 91 220 Ibid., p. 217 221 Ibid., p. 215 222 Cf. Ibid., p. 215

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advent of the gods, who needs the poet’s words for their appearance, because only in their appearing are they themselves.” 223 This would suggest that both the gods and human beings are in need of the poet. The gods require the poet’s dark-lighted words to appear, while mortals are unable to receive the gods without the poet’s words, that is, without the language to name and receive them. Mortals are in want of the poet’s song, in order to welcome and protect themselves from the gods. Fifthly, Heidegger viewed Hölderlin as ushering in a new era, an era in which the ‘old gods’ had departed and no ‘new god’ had yet arrived, this ‘double lack’ is considered fundamental to humanity’s destitute time. By heralding this new era, Heidegger regarded Hölderlin’s poetry as being historical in the highest sense, for it anticipated a new historical time.224 The historical significance that Heidegger attributes to Hölderlin’s poetry is not to be understood in any conventional sense. An indication of what history signifies for Heidegger and its relation to Hölderlin’s poetry emerges in “The Origin of the Work of Art”: “History means here not a sequence in time of events of whatever sort, however important. History is the transporting of a people into its appointed task as entrance into that people’s endowment.”225 Inspired by Hölderlin, Heidegger considered all historical people to be bestowed with both an endowment (Mitgegebene) and an anointed task (Aufgegebene). Concurring with Hölderlin, Heidegger believed the Germans were endowed with ‘clarity of presentation’, as they had an inherent aptitude for planning, calculating and organizing, while he supposed their anointed task was to be touched by being. 226 This is a crucial motif in Heidegger’s texts, and it will be dealt with in greater detail in the next section ‘Hölderlin and Homecoming.’ Heidegger also deemed Hölderlin to be a precursor to poets in this lean time. The precursory nature of his poetry meant its significance was unsurpassable as long as the historical epoch he was to announce continued to reign. This led Heidegger to lay emphasis on the futurity of Hölderlin’s poetic works: “The precursor, however, does not go off into a future; rather, he arrives out of that future, in such a way that the future is present only in the arrival of his words.”227 Hölderlin’s capacity or ability to anticipate this historical time meant a prophetic element was at play in

223

Ibid., p. 218 Cf. “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry”, EHP, pp. 64-65 225 PLT, p. 74 226 Cf. EHP, p. 112 227 LPT, p. 139 224


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his poetry. However, Heidegger denied that the prophetic nature of his poetry was of religious significance.228 The five aspects to Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin that have been examined, and particularly the last three are vital to his conception of the poet’s task. Yet, the main concern of the current investigation is to understand how the poet enacts a homecoming for his people and more broadly speaking humanity. Thoughtful examination of how the poet undergoes a homecoming venture while simultaneously revealing the way for others will take place in the concluding chapter.

228

Heidegger notes: “The poets are, if they stand in their essence, prophetic. They are not, however, ‘prophets’ according to the Judeo-Christian sense of the term. The ‘prophets’ of these religions do not only utter in advance the primordial word of the holy. At the same time they prophesy the God on whom they count for the security of their salvation in celestial blissfulness. Let one not disfigure Hölderlin’s poetry by the ‘religious element’ of a ‘religion’ which expresses the Roman interpretation of the relation between men and gods. […] The holy which is foretold poetically merely opens the time for an appearing of the gods, and points into the location of the dwelling of historical man upon this earth.” (EHP, p. 137)

CHAPTER SEVEN HEIDEGGER AND THE ENACTMENT OF A POETIC HOMECOMING

…it is in poesis first of all that homecoming takes place.1

Following the preparations for the homecoming venture that were made in chapter six, the need now arises to question whether or not humanity’s homecoming venture can be fulfilled or accomplished. Is it possible for humanity to come home to who and what it is upon the earth? In response to this question I will critically examine Heidegger’s attempt to trace out and enact a poetic homecoming. While some commentators consider Heidegger’s preoccupations with the motif of homecoming to be intrinsically intertwined with his much maligned political thought, I will argue that his various discourses on this theme manage to retain fruitful insights that contribute not just to a Germanic sense of homecoming but to a sense of homecoming that humanity at large can relate to and be enriched by. Heidegger’s endeavour to both undergo and bring about a poetic homecoming can be understood to concern humanity at large, as it arises in relation to his protracted confrontations with nihilism and modern technology (discussed in detail in chapters four and five), and to an originary mode of dwelling upon the earth. The relevance of these phenomena is not confined a specific people. Nihilism, modern technology and poetic dwelling relate to the whole of humanity. In his later writings Heidegger increasingly turns to poetry. His turn to poetry or poesis (ʌȠȚȑȦ) is central to his search for an alternative mode of revealing to the one pervading our modern nihilistic technological age.2 Through his meditations on poetry Heidegger envisages the possibility of 1

EHP, p. 44. Cf. “The Question Concerning Technology”, where he writes: “Because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art” (QCT, p. 35)

2

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bringing forth a ‘saving power’ in an epoch in which Gestell endangers humanity and all beings. In the essay “The Question Concerning Technology” he asks: “But might there not perhaps be a more primally granted revealing that could bring the saving power into its first shining forth in the midst of the danger, a revealing that in the technological age rather conceals than shows itself?”3 Heidegger identifies poetry as the more primally granted mode of revealing. Moreover, as a mode of revealing it opens a way for the saving power to emerge, and is capable of ushering in a post-metaphysical epoch. Heidegger’s regard for poetry is principally related to the belief that through it, from its source, a people’s language springs. According to Heidegger, the language belonging to a given epoch is forged in and through poetry. Poetry and its composition is the founding of language, and hence is the making of history and of a people itself.4 For Heidegger, language alone speaks in poetry. To support this claim he observes how in great poetry the personality or name of the poet is irrelevant because in the poem something other than the poet speaks.5 What is decisive in poetry is neither its content nor form but rather that with it, the speaking/singing of language happens.6 Heidegger’s Gespräch with Hölderlin and to a lesser extent Trakl proves crucial to his pursuit of a poetic homecoming.7 By focusing on the 3

QCT, p. 34 Cf. EHP, p. 60, where he writes: “Poetry is the sustaining ground of history […] Poetry is the primal language of a historical people. Thus the essence of language must be understood out of the essence of poetry and not the other way around.” The notion of poetry as the original language of a historical people is a view that came into existence in the 18th century with the German thinkers Hamann and Herder. Nevertheless, Heidegger offers no arguments to support his claims in this particular text. Also in Introduction to Metaphysics, he says: “Language is the primal poetry in which a people poetizes Being. In turn, the great poetry by which a people steps into history begins the formation of its language.” (Cf. IM, p. 183) 5 Cf. “The Origin of the Work of Art”, PLT, p. 39: “It is precisely great art – and only such art is under consideration here – that the artist remains inconsequential as compared with the work, almost like a passage way that destroys itself in the creative process for the work to emerge.” See also to the essay “Language” where Heidegger remarks: “The poem was written by Georg Trakl. Who the author is remains unimportant here, as with every other masterful poem. The mastery consists precisely in this, that the poem can deny the poet’s person and name.” (PLT, p. 193) 6 Cf. PLT, p. 192. 7 ‘Gespräch’ is normally translated as meaning dialogue or conversation but as Derrida points out in Of Spirit (when discussing the essay “Language in the 4

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motif of homecoming in Heidegger, the criticisms levelled at him by Lévinas turn out to be hugely significant. Lévinas vigorously contests Heidegger’s various discourses on homecoming, the homeland and all other notions and themes pertaining to ‘home’. For Lévinas, these texts engender a type of paganism that gives rise to an insidious form of politics. Lacoue-Labarthe also provides a number of pertinent critical examinations of the relation between poetry and the politics of National Socialism in Heidegger, claiming: “…his ‘Hölderlinian’ preaching is the continuation and prolongation of the philosophico-political discourse of 1933.”8 This relates back to the aesthetisizing of Heidegger’s nationalist politics referred to in chapter three. Furthermore, Lacoue-Labarthe maintains that ‘Heidegger’s nationalism is undeniable’9, and there is considerable Poem”) these translations only confuse matters when describing Heidegger’s relation to poets such as Hölderlin and Trakl. Derrida remarks: “Between thinker and poet, Gespräch does not signify conversation, as it is sometimes translated, nor dialogue, nor exchange, nor discussion, and still less conversation. The speech of the two who speak, the language which speaks between them divides and gathers according to a law, a mode, a regime, a genre which can receive their name only from the very thing which is said here, by the language or speech of this Gespräch. Language speaks in speech. It speaks about itself, refers to itself in deferring itself.” (Of Spirit, p. 83) A little further on Derrida offers a glimpse into the meaning of ‘Gespräch’: “Nothing is more foreign to Heidegger than commentary in its ordinary sense – if indeed the word has any other, the concept of which might lay claim to any rigor. Certainly, Heidegger’s statements let themselves be carried, conducted, initiated here by lines of Trakl’s which they seem rather to precede or attract, guide in their turn. To set in motion [agir], even. But it is precisely of the coming and going according to this double movement (ducere/agere), of this double orientation, that the Gespräch speaks.” Cf. Of Spirit, Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 85. 8 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics (The Fiction of the Political), trans. Chris Turner, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990, p. 12. He also states elsewhere: “…it is in the reading of Hölderlin that one would in the first place have to locate the text of Heidegger’s Auseinandersetzung with the question of the ‘political’. It is no surprise, moreover, if, in the logic of the determinationdestination of the people or of the historical-being of a people, Hölderlin is designated as the Dichter ‘whose work still confronts the Germans as a test to be stood’ or whom ‘it still remains for the Germans to face up to, to withstand’ (bestehen). These are the last words of ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’.” (Retreating the Political, ed., Simon Sparks, London: Routledge, 1997, p. 64.) 9 Lacoue-Labarthe writes: “It (Heidegger’s nationalism) expresses itself, in 1933, in all its most suspect political consequences, and in the worst of rhetorics. I will not dwell on the polemic aroused by the use he made of the word völkisch or of

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evidence to support this assertion when one takes into account Heidegger’s texts devoted to the poetry of Hölderlin in the mid-nineteen thirties and early forties. For these texts are specifically directed towards the German people and the German homeland. Yet in saying this, Heidegger might well contest being labelled a ‘nationalist’, for in the “Letter on ‘Humanism’” he explicitly criticizes nationalism: ‘Every nationalism is metaphysically an anthropologism, and as such subjectivism.’ Also, in this essay, he speaks indirectly of the need to overcome nationalism.10 Nevertheless, a certain strain of nationalism is most evident in Heidegger’s writings. His nationalistic leanings come to the fore in his proclamations concerning the pre-eminence of Germany over all other countries past and present. Although ancient Greece is an exception to his rule of thumb, for it matches Germany in the greatness of its language, poetry and thought. He asserts the supremacy of the German and the Greek languages over all other languages in the Introduction to Metaphysics: “For along with the German language, Greek (in regard to the possibilities of thinking) is at once the most powerful and the most spiritual of languages.”11 Even Julian Young a strong defender of Heidegger deems his belief in the supremacy of the German language to be a form of ‘irrational chauvinism.’12 Heidegger further contends that a special destiny and unique status belongs to the German people, comparing them once again to the great ancient Greeks in an addendum to the lecture course entitled Parmenides given in the winter semester 194243, at the University of Freiburg. He writes: “What if German humanity is that historical humanity which, like the Greek, is called upon to poetize and think, and what if this German humanity must first perceive the voice of Being!”13 It is apparent from this statement that Heidegger upholds the German tradition of both revering and invoking the ancient Greeks when attempting to understand Germany as a nation. This subject matter was barely altered forms of the watchwords of the German far right. Even if völkisch does not mean ‘racist’ it is quite sufficient to speak, in connection with the people, of ‘the power that most deeply preserves [or safeguards: Bewahrung]…[its] strengths, which are tied to earth and blood’. (‘Transcendence Ends in Politics’ in Typography, Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, trans. Peter Caws, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989, p. 287.) 10 PM, p. 260. In terms of his remarks concerning overcoming nationalism, he writes: “Nationalism is not overcome through mere internationalism; it is rather expanded and elevated thereby into a system.” This seems to suggest that Heidegger was contemplating the need to overcome nationalism. 11 IM, p.60 12 Julian Young, Heidegger, philosophy, Nazism, Cambridge: CUP, 1997, p. 216 13 P, p. 167.


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examined in some detail in chapter two. Heidegger reiterates the significance of the German people in the 1943 lecture on Hölderlin, ‘Homecoming/To Kindred Ones’, proclaiming them to be ‘…the people of poetry and of thought.’14 His laudation of the German fatherland is not without prestigious philosophical precedence. In the inaugural address to his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, delivered at Heidelberg on the 28th of October 1816, Hegel declared: ‘We have received the higher call of Nature to be the conservers of this holy flame…’.15 Are the Germans to be singled out as the people of ‘poetry and of thought’? Is the poetry and thought to emerge in Germany to be distinguished in greatness from that which has come to light in Europe and the rest of the world over the centuries? Although it is important to acknowledge the nationalistic element found in many of Heidegger’s texts from the nineteen thirties and early forties, it is also necessary to recognize those aspects of his oeuvre that diverge from or oppose it. In the lecture course on Hölderlin’s hymn ‘The Ister’, a sense of insular nationalism is somewhat offset when he speaks of the need to pass through the foreign in order to come home to what is one’s own: What is one’s own in this case is whatever belongs to the fatherland of the Germans. Whatever is of the fatherland is itself at home with [bei] mother earth. This coming to be at home in one’s own in itself entails human beings are initially, and for a long time, and sometimes forever, not at home. […] Coming to be at home is thus a passage through the foreign. And if the becoming homely of a particular humankind sustains the historicality of its history, then the law of the encounter [Auseinandersetzung] between the foreign and one’s own is the fundamental truth of history, a truth from out of which the essence of history must unveil itself.16

Despite what is expressed in this passage, Heidegger’s allusion to the ‘foreign’ is to some extent mitigated by the fact that the ‘foreign’ in this case refers to ancient Greece. Thus the insular nature of the Germanancient Greece relationship remains intact.17

14

EHP, p. 48. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume: 1, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968, p. xii. 16 TI, p. 49 17 Cf. Ibid., p. 48 15

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However, Heidegger’s attempt to pursue and disclose a sense of homecoming enacted by a poet such as Hölderlin does not simply relate to a return to the German homeland/Vaterland and to the German people. The motif of homecoming in Heidegger is also fundamentally connected to the notion of dwelling poetically upon the earth and to humanity, as opposed to the German Volk. His post-war texts that speak of dwelling poetically upon the earth, especially the essay “…Poetically Man Dwells…” (…dichterisch wohnet der Mensch…(which was first presented as a lecture in 1951)), appear to relate to the earth and concern human beings in general, and not a specific nation or designated people. Nonetheless, his discourses relating to Hölderlin and homecoming in the 1930’s and early forties are marked by an intense preoccupation with the German Volk and German Heimat. Bearing this in mind, I will refer to a ‘people’ or ‘humanity’ depending upon the relevant context. The idea of dwelling poetically upon the earth is central to what Heidegger envisages for humanity, and it must therefore be carefully and critically scrutinized. Whether or not such a way of being in the world is possible or whether it is just some naively romantic ideal is open to questioning. Can humanity hope to dwell poetically upon the earth in the aftermath of Auschwitz? Can human beings dwell poetically in face of the savageries of nature?

Challenges Facing Heidegger’s sense of Homecoming Yet, the concern of the current investigation is to understand how the poet enacts a homecoming for his people and more broadly speaking humanity. Many commentators and philosophers such as Lévinas, Lacoue-Labarthe, Löwith, Miguel de Beistegui, Dallmayr and Clark, have all highlighted how important this role of the poet is for Heidegger. The theme of homecoming most notably arises in Heidegger’s lectures on Hölderlin’s ‘Remembrance’ (1941/42), ‘The Ister’ (1942) and ‘Homecoming/To Kindred Ones’ (1943), while it also comes to the fore in his essay on Trakl, “Language in the Poem” (1953). Heidegger’s war time lectures on Hölderlin predominately concern his German homeland but in later years they take on a broader significance, encompassing the destiny of the West as a whole, and the possibility of humanity dwelling poetically upon this earth.18 However, as was indicated at the outset of this chapter Heidegger’s recourse to the notion of homecoming has been met with hostility by some commentators who consider it to engender undesirable 18

Cf. PM, p. 257


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political and nationalistic sentiments. Lacoue-Labarthe is critical of Heidegger’s nationalism and his propensity to use highly dubious vocabulary. For Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger’s use of words such as ‘völkisch’ raises concerns regarding his understanding of the German people and homeland. Lacoue-Labarthe writes: “Even if völkisch does not mean ‘racist’ it is quite sufficient to speak, in connection with the people, of ‘the power that most deeply preserves [or safeguards: Bewahrung] …[its] strengths, which are tied to earth and blood’ (‘Self-Assertion’, p. 475).”19 Löwith in Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism also questions the nature of Heidegger’s thinking as it relates to the German homeland. Löwith makes reference to a ‘pompous’ memorial speech Heidegger delivered on a German combatant Albert Leo Schlageter who died ‘the hardest and greatest death’ in battle against the French in 1923. Heidegger asks the question: from where did this ‘firmness of the will’ and ‘clarity of the heart’ come? He responds by saying they came from the ‘primitive stone’ of the Black Forest mountains (Schlageter’s home) and its autumnal clarity. He goes on to describe how the powers inherent in German soil coursed through the will and the heart of this young hero.20 The implication being that the Germanic homeland with its mountains and soil somehow instills its native habitants with a unique power, and thus distinguishes the German people from other peoples. Heidegger portrays the German people as distinctive and inimitable once again in the Introduction to Metaphysics, where he describes them as the ‘most endangered people’ and ‘metaphysical people’ whose vocation it is to “transpose itself – and with it the history of the West – from the centre of their future into the originary realm of the powers of Being.”21 In line with this extolment of the German people and the German homeland, he goes so far as to assert that “the ‘fatherland’ is being itself, which from the ground up bears and articulates the history of a people as an existing one…”.22 This further cements one’s suspicions of a cultural or national

19

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘Transcendence Ends in Politics’ in Typography, Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, trans. Peter Caws, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989, p. 287. 20 Cf. Karl Löwith’s Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, p. 161. See also The Heidegger Controversy, pp. 40-42. 21 IM, p. 41 22 GA 39, p. 121: “Das ‘vaterland’ ist das Seyn selbst, das von Grund aus die Geschichte eines Volkes al seines daseienden trägt und fügt: die geschichtlichkeit seiner Geschichte.”

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chauvinism at work in Heidegger’s writings. While Löwith goes on to critique Heidegger’s thought and its affinities with National Socialism: Without exception, it is expressions of violence and resoluteness that characterizes the vocabulary of National Socialist politics and Heidegger’s speeches. Corresponding to the dictatorial style of politics is the apodictic in Heidegger’s pathetic formulations. It is simply a distinction of degree rather than one of method which defines the internal differences among the followers, and in the end it is ‘fate’ which justifies all willing and drapes upon it an onto-historical mantle.23

However, besides the criticisms and misgivings of Lacoue-Labarthe and Löwith towards Heidegger, Emmanuel Lévinas also articulates some of the most well formulated arguments against him. Lévinas provides a devastating critique of Heidegger’s homecoming project. He maintains that Heidegger establishes a place-bound ontology, underscored by a sense of ontological superiority. He also argues that Heidegger espouses a pagan form of religiosity. For Lévinas, Heidegger’s support of German National Socialism was essentially interlinked with his meditations on the ontological significance of place. Moreover, from Lévinas’ perspective, Heidegger’s preoccupation with the sanctification of place needs to be philosophically deconstructed. In various writings Lévinas levels provides stinging criticisms of Heidegger’s place-bound ontology. For he claims a place-bound ontology retains an inherent capacity to accommodate and generate nationalistic and chauvinistic political sentiments. According to Lévinas, Heidegger’s emphasis on the ontological importance of place is therefore especially menacing. Also, Heidegger’s concern for the need to build and cultivate seems to supersede the ethical imperative to tend to the needs of the Other. In Totality and Infinity, Lévinas comments: “In bringing together under the firmament of the heavens, the waiting for the gods and the company of mortals in the presence of the things – which is to build and cultivate – Heidegger, with the whole of Western history, conceives of the relation with Other as enacted in the destiny of sedentary peoples, the possessors and builders of the earth.”24 The dweller’s relationship with the earth takes priority over his/her relationship to the Other and because he/she acts in obedience to being, the Heideggerian dweller is also free to totalize the Other, thus leading to tyranny. Lévinas states: “…Heideggerian ontology, which subordinates the relationship with the Other to the relation with Being in general, remains under obedience to the anonymous, and leads inevitably 23 24

Karl Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, p. 165 Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 46


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to another power, to imperialist domination, to tyranny.”25 For Lévinas’, Heidegger’s ontology has inimical political consequences. He asserts that Heidegger’s ontology does not give rise to individual heroism, nor to the founding of an authentic community, nor even to a revitalized relationship towards things but instead involves the quiet sanction or even the advancement of an impersonal state power. In the context of a philosophical schema that subordinates human beings to an ontological arche and freedom to ethics, such a conclusion is understandable.26 Hence, for Lévinas, Heidegger’s ontology is a ‘philosophy of power’ and ‘injustice’. Furthermore, his thought is considered a tragic symptom of the dangerous political tendencies inherent in philosophical discourses that subordinate ethics to ontology.27 According to Lévinas, Heidegger’s later thought espouses paganism, as it calls for the consecration of the earth as a sacred place. Furthermore, he suggests that this paganism is a source of tyranny: “Tyranny is not the pure and simple extension of technology to reified men. Its origin lies in the pagan ‘moods,’ in the adoration that enslaved men devote to their masters.”28 However, it is in the essay, “Heidegger, Gagarin and Us” that Lévinas’ views on Heidegger’s ‘paganism’ are most clearly expressed: “I am thinking of one prestigious current in modern thought, which emerged from Germany to flood the pagan resources of our Western souls. I am thinking of Heidegger and the Heideggerians.”29 Lévinas states that Heidegger’s continual focus on the imminent world involves the rediscovery of the ineffable mystery it contains. He understands the Heideggerian task of worldly rediscovery as a call to experience the mysteriousness of everyday things and nature itself. Lévinas writes: To rediscover the world means to rediscover childhood mystery snuggled up inside the Place, to open up to the light of great landscapes, the fascination of nature, and the delight of camping in mountains. It means to follow a path that winds its way through fields, to feel the unity created by the bridge that links the two river banks and by the architecture of buildings, the presence of the tree, the chiaroscuro of the forests, the mystery of things, of a jug, of the worn-down shoes of a peasant girl, the gleam from a carafe of wine sitting on a white tablecloth. The very Being of reality will reveal itself behind these privileged experiences, giving and

25

Ibid., pp. 46-47 Cf. Ibid., p. 45 27 Cf. Ibid., pp. 46-47 28 Ibid., p. 47 29 Lévinas, “Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us”, p. 231 26

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Chapter Seven trusting itself in man’s keeping. And man the keeper of Being, will derive from his grace his existence and his truth.30

In the above passage Lévinas seems to criticize Heidegger for alluding to or seeking out the mystery of things. But how could Heidegger’s allusions to the mystery of things be interpreted as something negative? According to Lévinas: ‘The mystery of things is the source of all cruelty towards men.’31 How is this so? Lévinas maintains that the endorsement of the mystery of things found in Heidegger is related to a type of pagan religiosity that leads to an overemphasis on the ontological significance of Place, and thus complements political nationalism.32 He argues that Heidegger’s focus on the significance of Place and his desire to consecrate the earth has sinister political ramifications, as it implicitly endorses a distinction between native inhabitants and outsiders. Paganism for Lévinas signifies a ‘putting down (of) roots, almost in the etymological sense of the term.’33 In turn, the pagan emphasis on ‘enrootedness’ engenders nationalism because it effectively constructs an ontological dichotomy between natives and strangers. As Lévinas declares: “One’s implementation in a landscape, one’s attachment to Place, without which the universe would become insignificant and would scarcely exist, is the very splitting of humanity into natives and strangers. And in this light technology is less dangerous than the spirits of the Place.”34 The distinction between those who are rooted in a place and those who are not stigmatizes the latter on the basis of a wholly arbitrary distinction.

Broadening the Horizon of Heidegger’s Homecoming The language of the poetry whose site is apartness answers to the homecoming of unborn mankind into the quiet beginning of its stiller nature.35

In light of the deeply damaging criticisms made by Lévinas, Löwith and Lacoue-Labarthe, can anything be salvaged from Heidegger’s homecoming venture? Can Heidegger’s various discourses on the motif of homecoming bear any fruitful insights for humanity or are they irretrievably lost to an 30

Ibid., p. 232 Ibid., p. 232. 32 Cf. Ibid., p. 231 33 Emmanuel Lévinas, “Simon Weil Against the Bible”, in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Seán Hand, London: The Athlone Press, 1990, p. 137. 34 Lévinas, “Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us”, p. 232 35 LP, p. 191 31


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insidious form of German National Socialism? I believe the Heideggerian homecoming venture has not been made redundant or rendered obsolete by the criticisms cited above. Moreover, I contend that Heidegger’s homecoming venture proves fruitful not just for the German people but for humanity at large. Also, some of the criticisms leveled at Heidegger by Lacoue-Labarthe, Löwith and Lévinas are not incontestable, and I will demonstrate how Heidegger’s thought exceeds their critique. In saying this, I do not seek to resolutely and unhesitatingly defend Heidegger against these criticisms, they play a crucial role in stimulating one’s vigilance in reading his texts and they probe weaknesses and areas of limitations in his thinking. Nonetheless, their criticisms are not fatal to Heidegger’s homecoming venture. Some of the insights and statements articulated by Heidegger concerning the theme of homecoming do not conform or in certain cases lie in stark contradiction to those criticisms leveled against him. The main claims made against Heidegger include the charge of racism, the use of expressions of violence and resoluteness that are in keeping with the vocabulary of National Socialist politics and correspond to a dictatorial style of politics, the establishment of a place-bound ontology, and the espousal of a type of paganism that places emphasis on the native, thereby excluding the stranger. By tackling these criticisms I do not wish to deny or refute their relevance but rather to point out how they are insufficient in their characterization of Heidegger’s thought. Moreover, in challenging these criticisms and illuminating where Heidegger’s texts exceed or diverge from these critical interpretations it will be possible to reveal how the significance of his homecoming venture is not restricted to the destiny of the German people and the Germanic homeland. Although Lacoue-Labarthe does not label Heidegger a racist he insinuates Heidegger’s use of the term ‘völkisch’ has dubious racist overtones. In chapter three the issue of Heidegger’s alleged ‘racism’ was highlighted but this complex subject-matter was not addressed in an adequate manner. It was argued in chapter three that Heidegger attempted to spiritualize National Socialism and in doing so, could be seen to reject the Nazi espousal of racism and biologism. A number of texts give credence to this portrayal of Heidegger. For instance, he writes: In the first semester after the resignation of the office, I lectured on logic and dealt with the essence of language under the title The Doctrine of Logos. It was necessary to show that language is not an object of expression of the biologically and racially conceived human being, but

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Chapter Seven conversely that the essence of man is grounded in language as the fundamental actuality of spirit.36

This extract suggests Heidegger did not seek to discriminate against individuals based on their race. Furthermore, in his Nietzsche lectures he confronted biological readings of Nietzsche; hence, it is evident that Heidegger challenged those within the Nazi regime who sought to use ‘Nietzschean biologism’ for political purposes.37 He maintained those who limited themselves to biological readings of Nietzsche only moved in the foreground of his thinking: Whether one votes yes or no on Nietzsche’s ‘biologism’ one always gets stuck in the foreground of his thinking. The predilection for this state of affairs is supported by the form of Nietzsche’s publications. His words and sentences provoke, fascinate, penetrate, and stimulate. One thinks that if only one pursues one’s impressions one has understood Nietzsche. We must first unlearn this abuse that is supported by current catchwords like biologism. We must learn to ‘read’.38

Heidegger’s insistence on the superficiality of those who concentrate on Nietzsche’s ‘biologism’ seems to establish without doubt his aversion to racism. Does this mean that Heidegger sees no significance in ‘race’ (Rasse)? Does Heidegger refuse to uphold any form of racial superiority? According to Tom Rockmore and Berel Lang, there is a evidence of a metaphysical form of racism in Heidegger’s texts.39 Lang does not specify what this ‘metaphysical racism’ signifies but he says it is ‘not only beyond personal prejudice but beyond psychological or

36

Martin Heidegger, ‘An das Akademische Rektorat der Albert-LudwigUniversität’, dual language version with translation by Jason M. Wirth, Graduate Faculty Journal, 1991, pp. 538-539. (Found in Robert Bernasconi’s “Heidegger’s alleged challenge to the Nazi concepts of race.” in Appropriating Heidegger, ed. James E. Faulconer and Mark A. Wrathall, Cambridge: CUP, 2000, pp. 50-51.) 37 Alfred Baeumler a Nazi activist quoted Nietzsche’s call for the extinction of misfits, weaklings and degenerates. (Alfred Baeumler, “Nietzsche und der Nationalsozialismus”, in Studien zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte, Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1937, esp. p. 292. This reference is found in Robert Bernasconi’s “Heidegger’s alleged challenge to the Nazi concepts of race.” in Appropriating Heidegger, p. 164 38 N. III, pp. 46-47 39 Cf. Tom Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, p. 59, and Berel Lang, Heidegger’s Silence, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996, p. 39.


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social categories…’.40 It is quite possible that Lang derived the notion of a ‘metaphysical racism’ from volume three of Nietzsche where Heidegger writes: “Just as Nietzsche’s thought of will to power was ontological rather than biological, even more was his racial thought metaphysical rather than biological in meaning.”41 Lang could also have drawn on the Introduction of Metaphysics, where Heidegger speaks of the German people as the most endangered and metaphysical people, who have a unique vocation as a historical people to transpose themselves and the history of the West; ‘into the originary realm of the powers of Being.”42 ‘Metaphysical racism’ is more menacing than biological racism, according to Lang, as it ‘comes unburdened by the pseudoscientific biological ground’, something that renders biological racism so susceptible to criticism.43 This allegation could be interpreted as a response to the question posed by Derrida in Of Spirit, when he asked: ‘Is a metaphysics of race more or less serious than a naturalism or a biologism of race?’44 For Lang, the answer to this question is obvious; the former is more serious than the latter. Nevertheless, Julian Young disputes the legitimacy of a term like ‘metaphysical racism’. He argues ‘metaphysical racism’ is a contradictory term, as racism is an exclusively biological notion.45 In the essay entitled “Heidegger’s alleged challenge to the Nazi concepts of race”, Robert Bernasconi provides a good account of Heidegger’s thoughts on race. Bernasconi challenges the likes of Young who ardently defend Heidegger from charges of racism, and he also calls into question Derrida’s contention that Heidegger endeavoured to spiritualize Nazism.46 He further contests the meaning of Lang’s use of ‘metaphysical racism’. Central to Bernasconi’s argument is his interpretation of Heidegger’s statement from Nietzsche volume three, cited above. In this passage, Heidegger maintains that Nietzsche’s will to power is to be considered ontological rather than biological, and that his racial thought is

40

Berel Lang, Heidegger’s Silence, p. 68 N. III, p. 231 42 IM, p. 41 43 Cf. Ibid., p. 39 44 Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit, p. 74 45 Julian Young, Heidegger, philosophy, Nazism, Cambridge: CUP, 1997, p. 44 46 He makes the following remarks concerning those who defend Heidegger’s thought too readily against charges of racism: ‘…in their defensiveness they have been too quick to imagine that Heidegger in opposing biologism could attain a notion of Volk that was free from all reference to race. (Cf. “Heidegger’s alleged challenge to the Nazi concepts of race”, p. 62) 41

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to be interpreted metaphysically rather than biologically.47 For Bernasconi, Heidegger’s statement has little to do with Lang’s interpretation of a ‘metaphysical racism’ but instead means a thought of race is inextricably intertwined with metaphysical reflection, and secondly, that ‘racial thought’ belongs to Western metaphysics.48 Furthermore, according to Bernasconi, this passage was not an attempt to replace a Nazi biological idea of race with a spiritual idea of race, whereby the notion of race was to be divested of biological significance.49 He therefore resists Derrida’s claim that Heidegger attempted to supplant a Nazi biologism with a spiritual conception of race. Bernasconi points out that the statement in question was written in 1960 and cannot be regarded as a statement of resistance or defiance to the Nazi regime, which held power in the 1930’s and 1940’s.50 Drawing attention to Heidegger’s unpublished manuscripts from the late 1930’s and the early1940’s, Bernasconi contends he was inclined to ascribe a certain necessity to race when analyzing Western metaphysics.51 Hence, the thrust of Heidegger’s thinking on race during the war years, according to Bernasconi, is about the difficulty of avoiding racial thought not for ethical or political reasons but because it is imposed on us by Western metaphysics.52 Bernasconi’s essay is to be commended for stressing the complexity of Heidegger’s thought as it relates to race and his insistence that the question of the significance and meaning of race is something that still confronts humanity today. However, he is too quick to disregard evidence of Heidegger’s confrontation with Nationalism. So far the complexities of Heidegger’s thinking on race have been revealed, but what bearing does this have on the present enquiry? This discussion attains significance in determining whether or not Heidegger’s homecoming venture is solely intended or devised for a specific race, Volk or people, namely the Germans and whether or not it is orientated towards 47

N. III, p. 231 Robert Bernasconi, “Heidegger’s alleged challenge to the Nazi concepts of race.”, p. 160 49 Ibid., p. 60. Cf. N. III, pp. 231, 40-47 50 Ibid., p. 60 51 Ibid., p. 62, Bernasconi makes reference to GA 16, pp. 70-71, where Heidegger identifies racial science with its projects of race breeding, cultivation and ranking as a manifestation of Western metaphysics. He also refers to GA 38, pp. 65, 67-68 where Heidegger did not disassociate the notion of Volk from race but argued that both terms share the same level of ambiguity because they belong together. (Ibid., p. 54) 52 Ibid., p. 62 48


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a specific place, or country, namely Germany. From Heidegger’s essay “Language in the Poem” it is unambiguously clear that his homecoming venture does not simply relate to the German people alone but instead concerns humanity at large. This is made explicit towards the conclusion of “Language in the Poem”, where Heidegger refers to a ‘homecoming generation’ (heimkehrenden Geschlechtes), a ‘generation’ that ‘names the races, tribes, clans, and families of mankind.’53 Thus the homecoming envisaged by Heidegger relates to the whole of humanity, and is not restricted to a single designated race or people. However, does the motif of homecoming in Heidegger not relate to the German homeland alone? In “Language in the Poem” it is apparent that Heidegger’s homecoming venture does not involve a return to his Germanic homeland but instead necessitates a return to the earth, which is the homecoming generation’s stiller home.54 Hence, the earth and not some geopolitical region is identified by Heidegger as the home to which human beings come home to. Rather, Heidegger’s sense of homecoming pertains to humanity at large and involves a homecoming to the earth. Furthermore, his homecoming venture appears to undermine Löwith’s contention that Heidegger’s use of the terms ‘violence’ and ‘resoluteness’ are compatible with the dictatorial politics of National Socialism. While Wolin’s construal of ‘violence’ in Heidegger’s texts was challenged in chapter three, Löwith’s interpretation can also be contested. Löwith’s reading of Heidegger seems particularly overstated when one takes into account his exposition of Hölderlin’s poetic homecoming. In his lecture on Hölderlin’s poem ‘Remembrance’ (1942), Heidegger speaks of how the venture of homecoming is imbued with an essential mood of shyness. Whereby, shyness proves far more decisive than any form of violence: Shyness is that reserved, patient, astonished remembrance of that which remains near in a nearness which consists solely in keeping something distant in its fullness, and thereby keeping it ready for its arising from its source. This essential shyness is the mood of homecoming which commemorates and remembers the origin. Shyness is the knowledge that the origin cannot be directly experienced. […] Shyness does not obstruct. But it sets what is slow and patient on its way. […] Shyness attunes the course of poetic paths. Shyness determines that one go to the origin. It is more decisive than all violence. 55

53

OWL, p. 195 OWL, p. 196 55 EHP, p. 153 54

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The mood of shyness is essential to Heidegger’s sense of homecoming and is ‘more decisive than all violence’. By ascribing much significance to the mood of shyness, Heidegger’s thought appears in stark contradistinction to the brutality and hostility prevailing in the Nazi Germany of 1942. Additionally, Heidegger’s adoption of the notion of Gelassenheit, signifying a releasement towards things, enables humans to be more receptive to the mystery of things, and this lies in stark contrast to expressions of ‘violence’ and ‘resoluteness’ attributed to him by Löwith. Heidegger writes: “Releasement toward things and openness to the mystery belong together. They grant us the possibility of dwelling in the world in a different way. They promise us a new ground and foundation upon which we can stand and endure in the world of technology without being imperiled by it.”56 He goes on to relate this different way of dwelling in the world to the ideas of peace, sparing and preserving. One could not find notions more disparate to expressions of violence than these. Heidegger notes in the essay “Building Dwelling Thinking” how: “Wunian means: to be at peace, brought to peace, to remain in peace. The word for peace, Friede, means the free, das Frye, and fry means: preserved from harm and danger, preserved from something, safeguarded. To free really means to spare.”57 ‘Sparing’, as Heidegger understands it, signifies letting something be in its own nature, returning it to its being and freeing it ‘into a preserve of peace’. He goes on to proclaim that dwelling is constituted by sparing and preserving.58 Heidegger’s understanding of what poetic dwelling means is essential to his homecoming venture, furthermore, it is a mode of dwelling he fervently espouses. Consequently, Löwith’s characterization of Heidegger appears drastically inadequate. Lévinas’ critique of Heidegger centres on the argument that his thought is connected to a place-bound ontology and to a sinister form of paganism. To re-iterate once more, I consider these pertinent criticisms, but I do not believe they irrevocably undermine Heidegger’s homecoming venture. Heidegger’s attachment to his native homeland is not as enclosed or limited as Lévinas makes out. Heidegger’s homecoming venture is a profoundly arduous undertaking that may never be fulfilled, and involves both exposure to and adventuring into the foreign. He writes: This coming to be at home in one’s own in itself entails that human beings are initially, and for a long time, and sometimes forever, not at home. And this in turn entails that human beings fail to recognize, that they deny, and 56

DT, p.55 LPT, p. 147 58 Ibid., p. 147 57


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perhaps even have to deny and flee what belongs to the home. Coming to be at home is thus a passage through the foreign.59

Homecoming and being at home are therefore not instantly acquired, they are possible only through estrangement or openness to the foreign, to this extent, homecoming calls for exodus. Furthermore, his call for the German people to undergo a homecoming, something he believed was urgently needed can be interpreted in a different light when taking into account his “Letter on ‘Humanism’”. In the “Letter on ‘Humanism’” Heidegger attempts to divest his interpretations of Hölderlin’s poetry of any patriotic or nationalistic significance. Heidegger does not think of ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ patriotically or nationalistically, but rather in relation to humanity’s condition of homelessness. The condition of homelessness, as Heidegger understands it, is suffered or endured by very few. According to Heidegger, Nietzsche was the last to undergo it: The word (homeland) is thought here in an essential sense, not patriotically or nationalistically, but in terms of the history of being. The essence of the homeland, however, is also mentioned with the intention of thinking the homelessness of contemporary human beings from the essence of being’s history. Nietzsche was the last to experience this homelessness. From within metaphysics he was unable to find any other way out than a reversal of metaphysics. But that is the height of futility. On the other hand, when Hölderlin composes ‘Homecoming’ he is concerned that his ‘countrymen’ find their essence. He does not at all seek that essence in an egoism of his people.60

Heidegger’s comments reveal his unwillingness to conceive of the German homeland patriotically or in terms of a national egoism. Yet, in saying this, 59

TI, p. 49 PM, p. 257. Heidegger advocates, via Hölderlin’s poetry, an interpretation of the homeland as a sacred site. Furthermore, it is only through the sacred that it is to be approached so a non-domineering understanding of it may prevail. By attempting to understand, appreciate and dwell in the homeland in light of the sacred, Heidegger refuses to reduce the homeland to a politico-economical site or entity. He remarks: “What Hölderlin means by fatherland is not exhausted by politics or the political – no matter how broadly the latter is construed […] Even if the fatherland and the political could be equated, one still has to realize that fatherland is a fruit that can grow only in light and ether, that is, in the element of the highest or the sacred. The latter is the grounding of fatherland and its historical being. But fatherland is highest only to the extent that it originates in the height of the sacred and insofar as this height is discovered as the native home in which, as a shared origin, everyone can at least participate.” (GA 52, pp. 140-141, translated by Fred Dallmayr in The Other Heidegger, p. 158) 60

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Heidegger’s “Letter on ‘Humanism’” could be viewed as a retrospective account given when he was undergoing ‘de-Nazification’ and was banned from teaching; thus his self-interpretation cannot be accepted uncritically. Nonetheless, Heidegger’s sense of the homeland is not rooted in any politico-historical concept but rather relates to the history of being. This is evident in texts prior to the “Letter on ‘Humanism’”. Fred Dallmayr in The Other Heidegger claims Heidegger is unambiguous in rejecting the ‘identification of self or native homeland with an empirical possession or else its elevation to an ideological or chauvinistic doctrine.’61 Citing Heidegger, Dallmayr comments: “‘The native or ‘indigenous’ we read (in a passage challenging Nazi propaganda), …cannot be acquired through a compulsive and brutally coercive grasping of one’s own being – as if the latter could be fixated like an empirical state of affairs. One’s own distinctiveness cannot be proclaimed like a dogma whose dictates are implemented on command. Rather, such distinctiveness is most difficult to find and hence most easy to miss. (GA 52: 123, 131) 62

Moreover, to dwell at home in the homeland as it is conceived by Hölderlin and Heidegger is largely an elusive task, for not only is the spirit not at home at the beginning but it is expelled from the homeland.63 The homeland, as the fruit that ‘everyone should taste last’ indicates the restraint and patience required in becoming at home in the homeland, for the ‘will to immediate acquisition is the deluded relation to the homeland…’.64 Hölderlin’s sense of homecoming to the homeland, something advocated by Heidegger, demands patience and reserve. As Heidegger remarks: “Do we have the slightest inkling of the patience required for this search in the homeland? But can we also surmise the generosity that must animate this patience so that everyone who seeks the 61

Fred Dallmayr, The Other Heidegger, Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1993, p. 154 62 Ibid., p. 154 63 Hölderlin writes: ‘For the spirit is not at home/ At the beginning not at the source’ (neimlich zu Hauss ist der Geist/ nicht im Anfang, nicht an der Quell. Ihn zehret die Heimath) and Heidegger says: “Turned toward the homelike and wanting to find the homeland in it, at the beginning the spirit is expelled from the homeland and pushed into an always more fruitless search. Thus, because of its will to be immediately at home in what is proper to it, the spirit consumes and exhausts its essential powers. It is the homeland itself, which has withdrawn, that preys upon spirit. It puts the poetic into the danger of wasting away. That signifies the loss of its being.” (EHP, p. 116) 64 EHP, p. 141


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distinctiveness of the fatherland can develop the free employment of one’s own endowment in freedom?”65 With respect to this passage, Dallmayr observes: “What is striking in this passage is the emphasis on generosity (Grossmut) and freedom, features that surely were completely alien to fascism and the Germany of the war years.”66 The meaning of homecoming and the significance of the homeland for Heidegger, as it has been elucidated thus far, diverges radically from Lévinas’s interpretation. Lévinas’s claims are further tested by Derrida. In ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ Derrida defends Heidegger from Lévinas’s accusations. Derrida argues against Lévinas’s claims that Heidegger’s thought fosters an insidious form of paganism: … how can one accuse this thought of interminable wandering of being a new paganism of the Site, a complacent cult of the Sedentary? (TI, DL). Here, the solicita-tion of the Site and the Land is in no way, it must be emphasized, a passionate attachment to territory or locality, is in no way a provincialism or particularism. It is, at very least, as little linked to empirical ‘nationalism’ as is, or should be, the Hebraic nostalgia for the Land, a nostalgia provoked not by an empirical passion, but by the irruption of a speech or a promise.67

Derrida’s efforts to disarm Lévinas’s criticisms of Heidegger are justified. As was highlighted in chapter three, to associate Heidegger’s thinking with provincialism, understood in terms of narrow mindedness and an insular attachment to a specific locale is absurd when one takes into account his concern with humanity’s homeless condition, and his extensive confrontations with nihilism and modern technology. Furthermore, Lévinas believes Heidegger’s thought gives rise to paganism, as he alludes to mystery of things. The mystery of things is the source of all cruelty towards men, according to Lévinas.68 Does Heidegger’s acknowledgement of the mystery of things have sinister implications? An exploration of his lecture on Hölderlin’s ‘Homecoming/ To Kindred Ones’ renders Lévinas’ critique decidedly questionable. Heidegger deals most explicitly with the motif of homecoming in his lecture on Hölderlin’s ‘Homecoming/To Kindred Ones’ in the University of Freiburg during the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Hölderlin’s death, June 6th 1943. He does not regard the elegy ‘Homecoming’ 65

GA, 52, pp. 134-135 (trans. Fred Dallmayr, The Other Heidegger, p. 159) Fred Dallmayr, The Other Heidegger, p. 159. 67 Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, London: Routledge, 2001, p. 181. 68 Lévinas, “Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us”, p. 232. 66

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to be a poem that meditates on the theme of homecoming. Instead, he interprets the poetic activity involved in composing the poem as representative of the homecoming itself.69 Hölderlin’s poem begins in the heights of the Alps and speaks of a return journey to the native soil of one’s homeland. On arriving home the poet is greeted by his fellow countrymen. Although the poet is once again amongst his own countrymen he remains estranged from those he meets.70 Nevertheless, Heidegger contends that: “The one returning home has not yet reached his homeland simply by arriving there. And so the homeland is ‘difficult to win, what is self-reserved.’”71 For this reason the one who returns to the homeland is still in search of something, is still underway to the homeland. Heidegger also maintains that one cannot truly return to the homeland through violent venture. Instead one’s homecoming must be accompanied or imbued by the mood of shyness. He attests to the essentiality of shyness in his address on Hölderlin’s poem ‘Remembrance’.72 As was previously stated, the mood of shyness, which is ‘more decisive than all violence’, lies diametrically opposed to the intense aggression and barbarity plaguing Germany at that time. Besides the mood of shyness, Heidegger also points to the significance of the ‘joyfulness’ of the poet’s homecoming: “What is most inviting in the homeland, and what comes to meet him half-way, is called ‘full of joy’, the joyful. This name outshines all others in the entire poem ‘Homecoming’.”73 However, as has already been observed, what lies at the heart of Heidegger’s meditations on homecoming is a return to ‘this nearness to the origin’.74 Nearness to the origin remains a mystery, and it cannot be penetrated or explicated by human thought.75 The mystery is not 69

Cf. EHP, p. 44 Hölderlin writes: “Cares like these, whether he likes it or not, a singer/Must bear in his soul, and often, but the others not.” 71 EHP, p. 33 72 Ibid., p. 153 73 Ibid., p. 34 74 Heidegger remarks: “What is most characteristic of the homeland, what is best in it, consists solely in its being this nearness to the origin – and nothing else beside this. […] Homecoming is the return to nearness in the origin.” (EHP, p. 42) 75 Heidegger writes: “We usually understand nearness as the smallest possible measurement of distance between two places. Now, on the contrary, the essence of nearness appears to be that it brings near that which is near, yet keeping it at a distance. This nearness to the origin is a mystery. But now, if homecoming signifies becoming at home in nearness to the origin, then must not the return home consist first of all, and perhaps for a long time, in knowing the mystery of this nearness, or even prior to this, in learning to know it? Yet we never know a 70


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to be subjected to violent scrutinization but is to be protected and safeguarded by the one ‘who first returns home and says the mystery again and again’.76 Heidegger’s allusion to mystery proves crucial, for human beings need to be constantly reminded of the mystery of things. For the knowable and the entirety of what can be explained by human beings can never exhaust reality. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche outlines the limitations of reason and at the same time acknowledges the inherent mystery to all beings: “…there is a profound illusion which first entered the world in the person of Socrates – the unshakable belief that rational thought, guided by causality, can penetrate to the depths of being…”.77 Ludwig Wittgenstein also recognizes the pervasive significance of mystery or the inexpressible in Culture and Value, where he writes: “Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against whatever I could express has its meaning.”78 However, Lévinas takes issue with the espousal of mystery: ‘The mystery of things is the source of all cruelty towards men.’79 Denouncing the Heideggerian sense of mystery, Lévinas alleges that it leads to the splitting of humanity into natives and strangers. How can attesting to the mystery of things be considered the source of cruelty towards men? Would not the appreciation of the mystery of things dissuade someone from carrying out any act of violence against another being? Lévinas’s contention is intimately tied to his belief that Heidegger’s ontology ‘subordinates the relationship with the Other to the relation with Being’, leading to imperialist domination and tyranny.80 However, is Heidegger’s assumption that ontology precedes ethics misguided? Does Heidegger’s supposition have dominative and tyrannical implications ? It could be argued that Heidegger’s basic supposition is true. ‘There is’ (es gibt) precedes any human ‘ought’. Furthermore, ones fundamental ontology can shape humanity’s ethical behaviour in a positive way. How humanity experiences being and beings in their being determines and essentially shapes humanity’s ethical conduct. If human beings were mystery by unveiling or analyzing it to death, but only in such a way that we preserve the mystery as mystery. But how can we preserve it – this mystery of nearness – without our knowing it? For the sake of this knowledge there must always be one who first returns home and says the mystery again and again. “ (EHP, pp. 42-43) 76 Ibid., p. 43 77 BT(N), p. 73 78 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, Oxford: Blackwell 1980, p. 68. 79 Lévinas, “Heidegger, Gagarin and Us”, p. 232 80 Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, pp. 46-47

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capable of perceiving the radiance of things, as William Blake did, when he says ‘…everything that lives is holy’, then humanity’s ethical behaviour in the world would be dramatically transformed.81 Blakean vision cultivates a profoundly courteous way of being towards other beings. Heidegger too invokes ‘the holy’, albeit in a unique sense, when attending to the truth of being, and he also has recourse to Gelassenheit; a non-domineering mode of being towards other beings. These essential aspects of Heidegger’s thought distance him from Lévinas’s crude and over-generalized contention. Furthermore, the homecoming Heidegger pursues in his lectures on Hölderlin’s ‘Remembrance’ and ‘The Ister’ is not confined to what is native. The homecoming that emerges in these lectures is founded upon an encounter between the native and the foreign. Although it could be strongly argued that this encounter is itself intensely insular, as it is limited to an encounter with the ancient Greeks.82 Heidegger understands that being at home in the homeland is not something readily acquired. Homecoming requires exposure to the foreign and involves exodus.83 Nonetheless, the Taoist sage Lao Tzu would counter such claims, as he declares in chapter 47 of the Tao Te Ching: Without leaving his door He knows everything under heaven. Without looking out of his window He knows all the ways of heaven. For the further one travels The less one knows. Therefore the Sage arrives without going, Sees all without looking Does nothing yet achieves everything.84

Yet, Heidegger supposes a homecoming to involve venturing through the foreign. Inspired by Hölderlin, Heidegger understands this to entail a German encounter with the ancient Greeks. Moreover, the nature of this encounter as it comes to light in Heidegger’s texts is shaped in many ways by a letter written by Hölderlin to Böhlendorff in 1801. This letter was considered at length in chapter two. Hölderlin’s distinction between the 81

William Blake, William Blake, Selected Poetry, ed. Michael Mason, Oxford: OUP, 1994, p. 94. 82 Cf. TI, pp. 48-50 83 TI, pp. 48-49 84 Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Arthur Waley, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth 1997, p. 50.


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Germans and the ancient Greeks revolved around the problem of the appropriation and free employment of one’s own native endowments. He considered the Greeks to be endowed or innately open to the fire of heaven, and he thought ‘clarity of presentation’ (Darstellung) was natural to modern Germans. The Greek’s openness and receptiveness to the divine meant they were able to exist in proximity to their gods and the sacred; their difficulty was channeling and articulating their experiences without being devastated by the sheer intensity of inspiration. In his letter of 1801, Hölderlin describes the Greeks as moving from a state of ‘sacred pathos’, their native disposition, to a state of ‘Junonian sobriety’, which is foreign to them, and exemplified in the person of Homer. The movement outlined by Hölderlin lies in opposition to the condition of modern Western humanity, which is need of the fire of heaven since their nature is one of sobriety. The ancient Greeks, as they are portrayed by Hölderlin, are utterly different to modern Germans. If the Greeks had not conquered sobriety they would have been seared by the fire from heaven. Yet, without heavenly fire modern Germany, or more broadly speaking the Western world faces the prospect of being detached from the divine; thereby allowing a wholly depraved way of being in the world to prevail. Relying directly on Hölderlin’s letter, Heidegger distinguishes the Germans from the ancient Greeks in a lecture course on Hölderlin’s ‘Andenken’: What is natural to the Germans, on the contrary, is clarity of presentation. The ability to grasp, the designing of projects, the erection of frameworks and enclosures, the constructions of boundaries and divisions, dividing and classifying, these are what captivate them. This native trait of the Germans, however, does not become authentically their own as long as this ability to grasp is not tested by the need to grasp the ungraspable and, in the face of the incomprehensible itself, to bring them into the proper ‘disposition’. What the Germans must encounter as foreign to them, and what they must become experienced with in the foreign land, is the fire of heaven. Through the shock of being struck by this fire, they will be compelled to appropriate and to need and use their proper character.85

Availing of Hölderlin’s insights, Heidegger recognizes the need for the Germans to find balance to their existence. Their native endowment or ability for clarity of presentation, structure, organization, classification and their capacity to grasp things must be in some way offset or counterbalanced by the ‘ungraspable’ or the ineffable if they wish to gain free use of their proper or native character. For Hölderlin and Heidegger, 85

EHP, pp. 112-113

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what is native or proper to the Germans, is clarity of presentation, and the capacity to grasp, organize, classify and structure things, yet these inherent ‘German’ attributes could also be said to characterize modern humanity. In this regard, Heidegger’s homecoming venture speaks to humanity as it seeks to counterbalance these modern attributes. Ironically, the notion of ‘instrumental reason’ discussed by Horkheimer and Adorno, a severe critic of Heidegger, could be considered analogous or in close alignment with what Hölderlin and Heidegger say in relation to the German people’s native ability. According to Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment, it has been the success of instrumental reason as the privileged mode of cognition that has most profoundly shaped and determined nearly all socioeconomic, cultural and psychic processes, and which has brought about humanity’s descent into ‘a new kind of barbarism’.86 In the Dialectic of Enlightenment Horkheimer and Adorno challenge the Western rationalist’s conception of ‘progress’. While the Western rationalist tradition considers the domination of nature a vehicle for progress, Horkheimer and Adorno interpret it as the means towards world-historical regression. They write: “A philosophical conception of history would have to show how the rational domination of nature comes increasingly to win the day, in spite of all deviations and resistance, and integrates all human characteristics.”87 These sentiments would be very much in keeping with Heidegger’s thinking.88 Furthermore, Horkheimer and Adorno maintain that humanity’s attempt to liberate itself from subjugation to nature has 86

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, New York: Continuum, 1972, p. xi. Henceforth, Dialectic of Enlightenment. 87 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 223 88 Parallels can be further drawn between how Heidegger and Adorno view art and ‘leisure time’ or ‘holidays’ (in Heidegger’s case) as a prolongation of work. Adorno claims art no longer even promises happiness but only provides easy amusement, or relief from labour: ‘Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought as an escape from the mechanized work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again.’(Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 137). While Young remarks on Heidegger: “There is, to be sure, something we call the holiday and regard as a ‘break from work’. But really, this is nothing but ‘rest and recreation [Mittel der Entspannung und Erholung] and, as such, ‘work-serving’. Speaking of our culture as a whole, we can say that since, as an institution, the holiday has become just a form of stress-relief (like nearly all modern art, according to Heidegger) the point of which is to preserve our efficiency as workers, the modern holiday is ‘defined in relation to work.’ (GA, 52, p. 64) (Cf. Young’s Heidegger’s Later Philosophy, p. 58)


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created new and more all-encompassing forms of domination and repression. In differentiating itself from nature, humanity transforms nature into an object to be manipulated and controlled in the interests of its needs and desires. Yet, by objectifying nature, and opposing itself to nature in order to gain control over it, humanity also manages to alienate itself from its own nature. The struggle to dominate external nature turns inward, natural drives, instincts, and passions are repressed, domesticated and distorted; sensuous experience is renounced, flesh becomes the source of all evil, and the body becomes simply an object of possession, to be used and manipulated.89 Similar to Freud in Civilization and its Discontents, Horkheimer and Adorno see the renunciation of natural desires as a key element in the preservation and expansion of civilization. The history of civilization is for them ‘the history of renunciation.’90 Horkheimer and Adorno also contend that the growing dominance of instrumental rationality has meant that the transcendent and subversive character of culture has been weakened, if not irrevocably damaged. Culture in contemporary society has become an industry fully integrated into the capitalist system, serving its needs. Adorno argues that ‘genuine’ art can break the stranglehold of instrumental reason and protest against it, as it points beyond modernity’s destitute state. For Adorno, art is ‘the social antithesis of society’.91 He also writes: “Art, and so-called classical art no less than its more anarchical expressions, always was, and is, a force of protest of the humane against the pressure of domineering institutions, religious and others, no less than it reflects their objective substance.”92 Heidegger too privileges art (especially poetry but also paintings by such artists as Van Gogh and Cezanne) as being able to disrupt and challenge calculative modes of thinking, but it would be utterly naïve if not disingenuous to attempt to align Heidegger’s thinking on art with Adorno’s. For central to Heidegger’s meditations on art is his attentiveness to the truth of being and this is something Adorno ferociously attacks in Negative Dialectics. Adorno is intensely scornful of Heidegger’s ‘mythologization of Being as the sphere of ‘sending’, his ‘mythical hubris’, and ‘his disguise of his own voice as that of Being.’93 He is also critical of Heidegger’s

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Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 231-236 Ibid., p. 55 91 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 8 92 Theodor W. Adorno, “Theses upon Art and Religion Today”, Kenyon Review 3, no. 4, 1945”, p. 678. 93 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, London: Routledge, 1990, p. 88 90

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perceived philosophical authoritarianism: ‘Any consciousness that fails to go along (with Heidegger) was disqualified as ‘oblivious of Being’.94 In a move that would see Heidegger further distance himself from Adorno and other critical theorists; he claims in his lectures on Hölderlin’s ‘Remembrance’ that modern Germans now need to experience the fire of heaven in order to counter their native ability for calculative rationalizing. In keeping with this tenet, Elliott highlights how Heidegger understands the poet as not merely creating human works that ‘amuse and instruct’. Instead, Heidegger ‘speaks of a sense of truth as something arrived at through an enigmatic and singular communion with the divine.’95 He contends that one can experience heavenly fire or the divine in the foreign land of ancient Greece. However, he warns that Germans will have to depend upon their own innate qualities if they are to endure the heavenly fire. But do the Germans and modern humanity need to turn to the ancient Greeks in order to experience the fire of heaven?96 Perhaps Heidegger could have looked to Blaise Pascal and his ‘night of fire’ when seeking exposure to heavenly fire. Pascal speaks of a God not known by philosophers or scholars. In fact Pascal alludes to a God not known to the world. Bearing this in mind, Heidegger would find it difficult to incorporate or subsume Pascal’s experience of God into his ontotheological conception of Western history. Pascal writes: 94

Ibid., p. 88. I have inserted ‘(with Heidegger)’. Brian Elliott, Phenomenology and Imagination in Husserl and Heidegger, p. 150. This is indicative of the mythopoetic aspect to Heidegger’s thinking, whereby he defines poetry in the following manner: “Projective saying (Sagen) is poetry: the myth (Sage) of the world and the earth, the myth of the horizon (Spielraum) of their strife and thereby of the place (Stätte) of all nearness and distance of the gods. (Cf. ‘Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes’, Holzwege, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980, p. 60 (Trans. Brian Elliott, Phenomenology and Imagination in Husserl and Heidegger, p. 150. Also see LPT, p. 71. I have chosen Elliott’s translation as he rightly points out “rendering Sage as ‘saying’, fails to acknowledge the primary meaning of the term in German, namely fable or myth.” (Cf. Phenomenology and Imagination in Husserl and Heidegger, p. 173). 96 Evelyn Underhill elaborates on the significance of ‘fire’ for Christian mystics when she writes: “This image of the divine vitality successively experienced as a painful Fire and a heavenly Light--of the purging of the soul as in a furnace; the anguish through which it passes to that condition of harmony in which, itself becoming fire, the flame that had been in its onslaught a torment to the separated will becomes to the transmuted creature an indwelling radiance, a source of joy and life,--all this is found again and again in the later Christian mystics.” in The Mystic Way: A Psychological Study in Christian Origins, London: J. M. Dent & Sons 1913, p. 324 95


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L'an de grace 1654. Lundi, 23 novembre, jour de Saint Clément, pape et martyr, et autres au martyrologe, Veille de Saint Chrysogone, martyr et autres, Depuis environ dix heures et demie du soir jusques environ minuit et demie, Feu. Dieu d'Abraham, Dieu d'Isaac, Dieu de Jacob, Non des philosophes et des savants. Certitude. Certitude. Sentiment. Joie. Paix. (…) Oubli du monde et de tout, hormis Dieu. (…) ‘le monde ne t'a point connu, mais je t'ai connu. Joie! joie! joie! pleurs de joie!97

Do modern Germans need an encounter with the ancient Greeks in order to learn how to ‘grasp the ungraspable’? It is perhaps the case that the Germans Heidegger addressed in his lecture courses need not have ventured any further than their own homeland in order to encounter what is foreign to them. By turning to Meister Eckhart and the other Rhineland mystics, they would have encountered the Divine Abgrund or abyss, and with it a most profound sense of the ungraspable or ineffable.98 Heidegger himself acknowledges and respects ‘great mysticism’, particularly the writings of Eckhart: The whole saying is so astonishingly clearly and tightly constructed that one might come to the idea that the most extreme sharpness and depth of

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Blaise Pascal’s famous memorial to his night of fire found on a scrap of parchment after his death by his servant girl, who discovered it sewn into his doublet. Unedrhill informs us that on the parchment was a rough drawing of the Flaming Cross, a few strange phrases written, abruptly and in broken words describing his mystical experience. Cf. Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness., New York: P. Dutton, 1912, pp. 228-229. A translation of this text is found in John Moriarty’s Dreamtime, p. 31: “Year of grace 1654/ Monday, 23 November, day of St. Clement, pope/ and Martyr, and others in the martyrology/ Eve of St. Chrysogonus, martyr, and others,/ From about half past ten in the evening to half past midnight/ Fire/ God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,/ Not the God of philosophers and scholars/ Certainty, certainty, emotion, joy, peace (…)/ The world has not known you, but I have known you/ Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.” 98 William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience considers ‘ineffability’ and a ‘noetic quality’ to be the constant characteristics of the mystical experience.’ Cf. The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 380

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Eckhart speaks of the Divine abyss as a ‘still wilderness where no one is at home.’100 While Johannes Tauler encounters the ungraspable or the ineffable while undergoing his own mystical journey. He writes of how in returning to Divine Ground ‘reason cannot come’. Tauler also says of Divine ground: ‘This ground is so desert and bare that no thought has ever entered there.’ 101 The vision Heidegger teases out of Hölderlin’s poetry radically defies and differs from the economically, rationalistically and technologically driven modern world. Furthermore, the homeland which Hölderlin and Heidegger seek for and offer intimations of, is not a politically defined homeland but is instead a sacred site. As a sacred site it does not reveal itself to those who violently attempt to dominate, appropriate or possess it. Hölderlin writes of the fatherland: ‘Forbidden fruit, like the laurel, however,/Is most of all the fatherland. This (fruit)/Everyone should taste last.’ In a dedication attached to his translation of Sophoclean tragedies, Hölderlin speaks of how he shall ‘sing the angels of the sacred fatherland’. Also, in ‘Homecoming’, he states: ‘…for whatever poets meditate,/Or sing it mostly concerns either the angels and him.’102 Heidegger highlights how Hölderlin is not concerned with the creation of nationalist poems or songs but is instead gripped by the yearning to poetically honour the fatherland as a sacred (das Heilige) land. Thus, Hölderlin’s songs of praise are not oriented towards any King, Queen or sovereign ruler but towards the angels who are guardians of the sacred fatherland.103 99

Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund, Pfullingen: verlag Gunther Neske, 1965, p. 71, translated in John D. Caputo’s The Mystical Element in Heidegger. Villanova University 1978, p. 192. 100 Cf. Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness, p. 403 101 Johannes Tauler, Sermon on St. John the Baptist “The Inner Way,” pp. 97-99 (found in Underhill’s Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness, p. 405) 102 ‘…denn, was auch Dichtende sinnen/Oder singen, es gilt meistens den Engeln und ihm;’ (HPF p. 322) 103 The angels Hölderlin refers to are not thought of in a traditional religious sense; he therefore does not have in mind any of the Christian archangels such as Gabriel or Michael. According to Heidegger, Hölderlin’s angels include the earth, the ‘angels of the house’ and light, ‘the angels of the year’. Heidegger notes: “Both, earth and light, the ‘angels of the house’, and ‘the angels of the year’ are called ‘preservers’ because as the greeting ones they bring to light the gaiety in whose


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The sacred or the holy (Heilige) is closely linked to the whole, the hale or the healthy (heil), while its loss indicates a lack of the heil.104 Heidegger thinks of the holy in such a way that it has no theological equivalent, as ‘wherever theology arises, the god is already in flight.’105 Distancing or estranging ‘the holy’ from how it is customarily understood, he says: “‘holiness’ is no way a property borrowed from a determinate god. The holy is not holy because it is divine; rather it is divine because in its way it is ‘holy’…”.106 In Hölderlin’s poetry the holy appears as that which is ‘unapproachable’ (das Un-nahbare) by any individual, be that a god or man, it is the ‘awesome itself’, ‘older than the ages’ and ‘above the gods’ but it is also the ‘original healing’ or ‘redemptive’ power (das ursprüngliche Heile).107 In his address on Hölderlin’s ‘As When On a Holiday…’ Heidegger describes the holy as the ‘terror of universal shaking’ and ‘the immediate’, whereby humanity is need of the poet’s song to mediate the holy, thereby tempering its danger.108 The importance of Hölderlin’s construal of the holy for Heidegger is acknowledged by Ted Sadler in Heidegger and Aristotle: “What could be called the poet’s ‘homiletic’ relation to the holy is the model for the Seinsdenker, who similarly wishes to ‘testify’ to Being. Like the poet, the Seinsdenker seeks to ‘dwell’ in the world: ‘to dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at

clarity the ‘nature’ of things and people is safely preserved. What remains preserved, safe and sound, is ‘homelike’ in its essence. The messengers’ greeting comes out of the gaiety that allows everything to be at home. The granting of this feeling of being-at-home is the essence of the homeland.” (EHP, p. 36) The angel of earth as Heidegger interprets it refers to ‘the house’, which signifies the space opened up for a people in which they can be ‘at home’ and thus are enabled to fulfil their proper destiny. He says: “This space is bestowed by the inviolate earth. The earth houses the people in their historical space. The earth brightens up ‘the house’. Thus the brightening earth is the first angel ‘of the house.” On the other hand, the angel of light takes on a type of temporal significance for ‘the year’ refers to those ‘times that we call the seasons.’ These seasons denote the interplay of ‘fiery brightness and frosty darkness’ whereby things ‘blossom and close up again’. Heidegger remarks: “‘The year’ extends its greeting in the play of light. The brightening light is the first ‘angel of the year.’” (EHP, p. 38) 104 Heidegger comments: ‘What is always former is the holy (Heilige). It is the primordial, and it remains in itself unbroken and ‘whole’ (heil).’ (EHP, p. 85) 105 GA 52, p. 133: ‘…wo die Theologie aufkommt, der Gott schon die Fluct begonnen hat.’ 106 EHP, p. 82 107 Cf. EHP, p. 85 and p. 97 108 Cf. Ibid., p. 95

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peace within the free, the preserve, the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its nature.’”109 In summation, Heidegger views Hölderlin as ‘the most futural poet’, whose poetry speaks to the heart of the German people by enacting a poetic homecoming.110 Through the enactment of a poetic homecoming Hölderlin also manages to disclose the essence of modernity as a destitute time in which human beings are homeless in the most serious sense of the word. Heidegger envisages Hölderlin’s poetry as aiding the German people’s return to the earth, and initiating them into a more original poetic dwelling. According to Heidegger, the homecoming readied by Hölderlin entails the preparation of the ground for the nearing gods, and involves a return to the nearness to the origin. Thus, the return to the homeland that Heidegger has in mind is not to be thought of in any customary geopolitical or historical sense. For Heidegger, the notion of homecoming is analogous to going to the source or origin; it signifies the arduous and difficult journey of self-discovery that entails finding what is proper to oneself while at the same time cultivating its free employment.111 However, Maurice Blanchot in The Space of Literature argues against the possibility of poetry fulfilling any type of homecoming. For Blanchot, art and poetry remain within the darkness of the earth. Furthermore, the poetic, as a literary space retains an “anarchic acultural force that is never fully reducible to meaning nor capable of even the self-identity of an object, but which makes up a perpetual outside to history and the work of meaning.”112 Blanchot asserts that the poet belongs to the foreign “to the outside which knows no intimacy or limit, and to the separation which Hölderlin names when in his madness he sees rhythm’s infinite space.”113 In this regard, Blanchot’s position can be viewed in direct opposition to Heidegger’s, for whom poetry (particularly Hölderlin’s and Trakl’s) opens up the possibility of a homecoming for the German people and the ‘homecoming generation’, by returning in nearness to the origin and retrieving a relation to being. For Blanchot, the poet is essentially a wanderer in exile, and estranged from the rest of humanity; this could be interpreted as an implicit criticism of Heidegger’s who claims the poet’s task is to prepare a homecoming for human beings. 109

Ted Sadler, Heidegger and Aristotle, The Question of Being, London: Athlone Press 1996 pp. 179-180. 110 Cf. GA 65, p. 401 and CP, p. 281 111 Cf. EHP, pp. 112-113 112 EHP, p. 148 113 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1982, p. 237.


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Besides the criticisms of Blanchot, those who subscribe to any of the major religions of the world would also question the soundness of Heidegger’s understanding of what a homecoming signifies. Not only the major religions of the world but the Orphic, Pythagorean, Platonic and Gnostic traditions would also have grave difficulties with Heidegger’s sense of homecoming. For these various philosophical and religious traditions fervently believe that release from this earthly and bodily existence and re-union with the Divine (metaphysically conceived), is the only way for a homecoming venture to be fully realized. The motif of homecoming pervading Heidegger’s lecture courses on Hölderlin’s ‘Remembrance’, ‘The Ister’ and ‘Homecoming/To Kindred Ones’ was not a fleeting concern. Although it is possible to interpret his preoccupations with homecoming as a response to what Germany was going through during World War II, it continued to exert great influence on Heidegger’s post war writings. His lectures on Hölderlin in the early nineteen forties attempted to forge and illuminate an alternative understanding of the German homeland. Heidegger stressed the immense difficulties involved in discovering the homeland and becoming at home within it. However, after World War II Heidegger’s investigations and meditations encompass a broader problematic, as he endeavours to outline an alternative future not just for Germany but for humanity. For Heidegger, the German capacity for clarity of presentation, and its ability to grasp and organize things is now characteristic of humanity at large. Hence, his call for the German people to undergo a homecoming extends to humanity, as he speaks of a ‘homecoming generation’. Broadening in significance, Heidegger’s homecoming venture becomes increasingly linked to his concern with the growing dominance of calculative thought and modern technology. Consequently, Heidegger’s sense of homecoming can be viewed as a response to the predominance of Gestell, the reductive metaphysical framework that facilitates and promotes humanity’s subjugation of the earth and all beings to its own purposes and intentions. Heidegger’s broadened or extended sense of homecoming relates is most evident in his essay on Trakl, entitled “Language in the Poem”. In his elucidation of Trakl’s poetry the notion of a ‘homecoming generation’ emerges. The idea of a ‘homecoming generation’ supplements and substantiates his attempts to disclose a way for humanity to undertake a poetic homecoming.114 Thus, Heidegger’s homecoming venture can be 114

Heidegger writes in this essay: “The language of the poetry whose site is apartness answers to the home-coming of unborn mankind into the quiet beginning of its stiller nature. […] According to the words of the poem ‘Revelation and

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understood to embody a greater vision than one confined to his German homeland. However, the exegesis required to do justice to this densely rich text is beyond the scope of the present enquiry. In view of Heidegger’s understanding of what a homecoming means and entails as discussed thus far, what significance can it have for human beings dwelling outside of the German homeland? What can humanity hope to glean from his writings? What vision can be garnered from his thoughtful elucidations of Hölderlin’s poetry? It could be argued that Heidegger’s discourses on and preparations for dwelling poetically upon the earth are of the greatest significance for humanity. Emphasis must be placed here on the notion of ‘preparation’, for humanity by itself cannot bring about such a mode of dwelling. If such a mode of dwelling is to prevail it will arise as an abrupt event. Yet, humanity remains capable of preparing the conditions for this event to take place.

Dwelling Poetically The poetic is the basic capacity for human dwelling.115

Heidegger observes that humanity ‘dwells unpoetically’, if this is so, human beings have a profoundly impoverished and diminished sense of themselves.116 More worryingly, however, is that this diminished sense of what it means to be human has major repercussions for how we behave towards other beings and the earth. Yet, is the primary impulse to dwell poetically utterly naïve? Is the yearning to dwell poetically upon the earth rooted in romantic sentimentality? Can human beings dwell poetically and flourish in the face of and in the full cognizance of hard facts? Can human beings dwell poetically in the aftermath of Auschwitz, in the aftermath of Hiroshima? As Adorno has famously written: ‘After Auschwitz to write poetry is barbaric.’117 However, it is not only the terror and horror brought about by humanity that one must be mindful of. Taking into consideration Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness and Aldous Huxley’s essay “Wordsworth in the Tropics” one becomes acutely aware of the savageries and horrors present in nature itself. The earth as it appears in these texts reveals itself as a fiercely inhospitable place. As Huxley notes: ‘The Descent’, the ‘Song of the Departed’ sings of ‘the beauty of a homecoming generation’ (‘Language in the Poem’, OWL p. 191) 115 LPT, p. 226 116 Cf. Ibid., p. 226 117 Theodor Adorno, Cultural Criticism and Society, London: Neville Spearman, 1967, p. 83.


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Wordsworthian who exports this pantheistic worship of Nature to the tropics is liable to have his religious convictions somewhat rudely disturbed.’118 Yet, the terrors of nature are not confined to the jungles of Africa. Even in the Lake District of north England the ravenous side to nature manifests itself, as a stout killing a hare and a fox tearing a rabbit asunder are daily occurrences. Bearing in mind the hostile place the earth is, is it possible to dwell poetically upon it? For Heidegger, dwelling poetically can take place upon the earth alone. In his lecture course on Hölderlin’s ‘The Ister’ he calls the earth ‘Hertha’, the Germanic name for terra mater, meaning ‘mother earth.’ His allusion to ‘mother earth’ implies a nurturing, caring earth but this neglects or plays down its savage and inhospitable nature. This could be also said of his divinization of the Danube and the Rhine, which he calls demi-gods. Are these rivers divine in a benign sense? Would Heidegger have been as quick to name the Congo, infested and teeming with piranhas and crocodiles a demi-god? Heidegger’s understanding of the earth is hugely influenced by Hölderlin’s poetry. One sees how their sense of the earth differs greatly from traditional interpretations of the ‘earth’. In particular, the Hölderlinian/Heideggerian sense of the earth diverges radically from Orphic, Platonic, Gnostic and Christian understandings of the earth. For the Gnostics, the earth is known as ‘Tibil’, which stems from the Old Testament word tƝvƝl, ‘earth’ or ‘terra firma’, something associated with baseness opposed to the purity of the divine world, while for Christians, 118

Cf. Aldous Huxley, “Wordsworth in the Tropics” in The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, Vol. II, ed. Frank Kermore and John Hollander, New York: OUP, 1973, p. 2084. In a stunning passage, Huxley de-romanticizes the Worthsworhian pantheistic worship of nature. He writes: “The jungle is marvellous, fantastic, beautiful; but it is also terrifying, it is also profoundly sinister. There is something in what, for a lack of a better word, we must call the character of great forests – even in those temperate lands – which is foreign, appalling fundamentally and utterly inimical to intruding man. The life of those vast masses of swarming vegetation is alien to the human spirit and hostile to it. Meredith, in his ‘Woods of Westermaine’, has tried reassuringly to persuade us that our terrors are unnecessary, that the hostility of these vegetable forces is more apparent than real, and that if we will but trust Nature we shall find our fears transformed into serenity, joy and rapture. This may be sound philosophy in the neighbourhood of Dorking; but it begins to be dubious even in the forests of Germany – there is too much of them for a human being to feel himself at ease within their enormous glooms; and when the woods of Borneo are substituted for those of Westermaine, Meredith’s comforting doctrine becomes frankly ridiculous.” (Ibid., p. 2085)

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the earth is a vale of tears. However, Heidegger states that the quest for a homecoming to the earth and the longing to dwell poetically upon it is not to be contrasted with the Christian belief in a life beyond, as this would involve a simple metaphysical reversal. Thus, one would remain tied to the metaphysical realm.119 According to Heidegger: “Those metaphysical perspectives dealing merely with life ‘on this side’ are entirely dependent upon the denial of a life beyond, that is, everything moves within the distinction between the sensuous and the suprasensuous, a distinction that has already been decided and is interrogated no further.”120 In his exposition of Hölderlin’s ‘The Ister’ he attempts to interpret the earth based upon Hölderlin’s understanding of it. Heidegger’s construal of the earth proves extremely difficult to define, as it is not to be equated with any traditional Christian or metaphysical understanding of it. He remarks: Hölderlin’s ‘earth’, however, which is presumed to be on this side of life, is not the ‘earthly’ in the Christian or metaphysical sense, if only because the earth is divine. And it is divine, again, not in the Christian or metaphysical sense of being created by God. Becoming homely and dwelling upon the earth are of another essence.121 119

Cf. TI, p. 31 Ibid., p. 31 121 Ibid., p. 31. Zimmerman drawing on Haar’s Le chant de la terre explores four meanings that Heidegger assigns to the earth. Firstly, there is the sense of the earth as something self-concealing and self-emergent, in which things show themselves. Secondly, the earth is understood to refer to ‘native ground’ which contains the ‘destiny’ of the people and ‘pre-figured possibilities’. Zimmerman writes: ‘…earth is always specific, and never merely the territory depicted by the cartographer. […] Earth involves what a Volk can become.’ The third meaning of the ‘earth’, as illuminated in Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity draws on Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” where it implies an autonomous and extrahistorical dimension that is perpetually in conflict with the world. Zimmerman notes: “As world dawns it discloses that which is measureless, and thus discloses the need for measuring. But earth rises up within that world, as that which bears everything, which shelters itself in its own law, and which is selfcontained (HW: 51/63). The conflict between the disclosing which wants to measure and the self-rising which contains its own law involves an essential conflict, a rift (Riss) which makes up the ‘innerness’ of the event of being, the event of truth. The art work can never represent the primal rift, the struggle between earth and world, but it does somehow embody it.” The fourth and the final aspect to Heidegger’s interpretation of the ‘earth considered by Zimmerman pertains to the Greek notion of physis and Hölderlin’s idea of nature. Hölderlin could not rely entirely upon the Greek conception of physis because that had culminated in the rise of modern technology. For Heidegger, nature as it emerges 120


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In order to gain insight into what becoming homely and dwelling upon the earth means for Heidegger, the lecture “…Poetically Man Dwells…” (‘…dichterisch wohnet der Mensch…’) given on October 6th 1951 at Bühlerhöhe proves pivotal. In Heidegger’s attempt to disclose the nature of dwelling, and a way for humanity to dwell poetically upon the earth, he explores the etymology of some basic German words for insight. In “Building Dwelling Thinking” he reveals how the word bin belongs to bauen, meaning to build and this old German word primarily meant ‘to dwell.’ The German phrases ‘ich bin’, ‘du bist’, ‘I am’, ‘you are’ and the German word ‘bis’ (sei), and ‘be’ are considered by Heidegger to be forms of the archaic word bauen; signifying ‘I dwell’, ‘you dwell’. Hence, bauen, to build primarily meant ‘to be’. Heidegger notes that humanity’s most basic way of being upon the earth is Buan, that is, dwelling.122 Furthermore, for Heidegger, ‘to be’ in no way signifies an abstract mode of ‘to be’ but is instead a concrete mode of being, and implies taking care of things. He declares: “The old word bauen, which says that man is insofar as he dwells, this word bauen however also means at the same time to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for, specifically to till the soil, to cultivate the vine.”123 He also relates bauen to the Old Saxon word wuon and the Gothic word wunian, that is, remaining or staying in a place. The Gothic word wunian expresses more explicitly the meaning of such remaining: “Wunian means: to be at peace, brought to peace, to remain in peace. The word for peace, Friede, means the free, das Frye, and fry means: preserved from harm and danger, preserved from something, safeguarded. To free really means to spare.”124 ‘Sparing’ is understood by Heidegger to mean letting something be in its own nature, returning it to its being and freeing it ‘into a preserve of peace’. For Heidegger, the essential nature of dwelling is constituted by sparing and preserving.125 in Hölderlin requires humanity, while it is also regarded as that which grants the open, thus allowing the poet to bring forth his saying that enables an encounter with the gods and a grounding of the world. (Cf. Zimmerman’s Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity, pp. 122-125. ) 122 LPT, p. 145 123 Ibid., p. 145 124 Ibid., p. 147 125 Ibid., p. 147. These ideas of ‘sparing’ and ‘preserving’ which are fundamental to dwelling are intrinsically linked to the fourfold (Geviert) of earth, the heavens or the sky (Himmel), the gods and mortals. Heidegger writes: “Mortals are in the fourfold by dwelling. But the basic character of dwelling is to spare, to preserve. Mortals dwell in the way they preserve the fourfold in its essential being, its presencing. Accordingly, the preserving that dwells is the fourfold.” LPT, p. 148.

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Tersely put, Heidegger claims mortals dwell insofar as they save the earth by setting it free into its own presencing, and to the degree they receive the heavens as heavens, allowing sun, moon and stars take their own course, and do not turn night into day. He also asserts that mortals dwell to the extent that they anticipate the arrival of divinities as divinities, and do not conjure up their own gods or worship false idols. Finally, mortals dwell in that they are initiated into their nature, meaning they are able for death as death, which does not mean ‘to darken dwelling by blindly staring toward the end.’126 According to Heidegger, dwelling poetically can open the way for humanity to dwell upon the earth in a hale and salutary manner. This gives rise to the idea that poetry and poetic dwelling can contribute to some form healing.127 As Wallace Stevens curtly declares: ‘Poetry is health’ and he also states: ‘Poetry is cure of the mind.’128 Poetry can heal humanity of its narrow economic and calculative way of seeing things. However, to shed light on Heidegger’s unique understanding of what poetic dwelling signifies we must turn to “…Poetically Man Dwells…”, a title derived from a late poem by Hölderlin that begins ‘In lovely blueness...’ (‘In lieblicher Bläue…’). In this text the idea of dwelling is not to be misconstrued with the way one occupies a house or any other form of abode. Heidegger seeks to relinquish any conventional sense of dwelling as he attempts to think through Hölderlin’s poetic utterance. He writes: “When Hölderlin speaks of dwelling, he has before his eyes the basic character of human existence. He sees the ‘poetic’, moreover, by way of its relation to this dwelling, thus understood essentially.”129 For 126

Cf. LPT, pp. 148-149 In a number of texts Heidegger alludes to the idea of ‘healing’. In the “Letter on ‘Humanism’” Heidegger states that thinking is related to healing. He remarks: ‘Thinking conducts historical eksistence, that is, the humanitas of homo humanus, into the realm of the upsurgence of healing (des Heilen).’ (PM, p. 272) However, his claims in the “Letter on ‘Humanism’” conflict with what he says in “On the Question of Being”, where he dissociates himself from the possibility of thinking being able to heal humanity of nihilism. He says: ‘With regard to the essence of nihilism there is no prospect and can be no meaningful claim of healing.’ (PM, p. 293) Nonetheless, he does acknowledge the possibility of nihilism providing ‘…a unique pointer toward the salutary.’ (PM, p. 283) Heidegger’s repeated references to the ‘saving power’ also indicate a therapeutic or curative element present in his texts, something Julian Young picks up on by calling Heidegger a ‘physician of culture’. 128 Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, New York: The Library of America 1997, p. 913. 129 PLT, p. 213 127


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Heidegger, that humanity dwells poetically means that poetry is that which first brings about dwelling as dwelling. This imposes a twofold demand on humanity, as Heidegger professes: (1) we are to think of what is called man’s existence by way of the nature of dwelling; for another, (2)we are to think of the nature of poetry as a letting-dwell, as a – perhaps even the – distinctive kind of building. If we search out the nature of poetry according to this viewpoint, then we arrive at the nature of dwelling.130

Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin’s poetry and how it enables humanity to dwell is based on an understanding of poetry as a measuring or measure-taking.131 However, should Hölderlin’s poetry be interpreted in this? Heidegger begs this question of himself, but his response is somewhat disquieting: “Yet how shall we prove that Hölderlin thinks of the nature of poetry as taking measure? We do not need to prove anything here. All proof is always only a subsequent undertaking on the basis of presuppositions. Anything at all can be proved, depending only on what presuppositions are made.”132 There is perhaps truth in what Heidegger says here, however, his forthright disregard for substantiating the claims he imposes upon Hölderlin’s poetry radically undermines the credibility and trustworthiness of the assertions he makes. Thus, from the outset, his reading of Hölderlin is called into question. Heidegger considers poetry to be an inimitable type of measuring: ‘In poetry there takes place what all measuring is in the ground of its being.’133 What type of measure-taking is established in and through poetry? For Heidegger, poetry provides a distinctive kind of measuring, and he describes it as a ‘strange measure’ that ‘becomes ever more mysterious’.134 Its mysteriousness never dissipates or subsides but always 130

Ibid., p. 213 Cf. Ibid., p. 219. He also writes “But dwelling occurs only when poetry comes to pass and is present, and indeed in the way whose nature we now have some idea of, as taking a measure for all measuring. This measure-taking is itself an authentic measure-taking, no mere gauging with ready-made measuring rods for the making of maps. Nor is poetry building in the sense of raising and fitting buildings. But poetry, as the authentic gauging of the dimension of dwelling, is the primal form of building. Poetry first of all admits man’s dwelling into its very nature, its presencing being. Poetry is the original admission of dwelling.” (PLT, pp. 224-225) 132 PLT, p. 220 133 PLT, p. 219 134 Ibid., p. 222 131

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remains, according to Heidegger, if ‘we are really prepared to make our stay in the domain of poetry’s being.’135 Hence, the measuring Heidegger has recourse to in this text does not conform to any customary form of measuring; it does not relate to the way one would measure a room by placing one foot in front of another, and it is not something which could be measured by a ruler or any other measuring device. In fact Heidegger’s sense of measure is in no way to be conceived in terms of number or quantity. He writes: Yet it strikes us as strange that Hölderlin thinks of poetry as measuring. And rightly so, as long as we understand measuring only in the sense current for us. In this sense, by the use of something known – measuring rods and their number – something unknown is stepped off and thus made known, and so is confined within a quantity and order which can always be determined at a glance. Such measuring can vary with the type of apparatus employed. But who will guarantee that this customary kind of measuring, merely because it is common, touches the nature of measuring? When we hear of measure, we immediately think of number and imagine the two, measure and number, as quantitative. But the nature of measure is no more a quantum than is the nature of number.136

If the measure-taking inherent to poetry is not related or connected to number and quantity, then what does it measure? Heidegger declares the measuring intrinsic to poetry has its own unique metric that ‘gauges the between, which brings the two, heaven and earth, to one another.’137 Furthermore, he maintains that man’s dwelling is dependent upon an ‘upward-looking measure-taking of the dimension, in which the sky belongs just as much as the earth.’138 Is such an upward-looking measure adequate for humanity’s dwelling? Is humanity also in need of a downward-looking and even an inward-looking measuring? To what extent is any type of measuring applicable to humanity’s dwelling and existence? Heidegger asserts that humanity has always measured itself against the heavenly, including Lucifer who descended from heaven.139 Relying on lines from Hölderlin’s ‘In lovely blueness...’, and a poem called ‘What is God?’…’ (‘Was ist Gott?...), Heidegger also contends that the godhead provides the measure for poetry and humanity’s dwelling

135

Ibid., p. 222 Ibid., p. 222 137 Ibid., p. 219 138 Ibid., p. 219 139 Cf. Ibid., p. 218 136


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upon the earth.140 Yet if God exists, is God not immeasurable and therefore not something (not any-thing) to be measured against. Heidegger’s discourse on poetry as the fundamental form of measuretaking also leads him to argue that the human being acquires the measure for the scope of his being in and through poetry. He remarks: “To write poetry is measure-taking, understood in the strict sense of the word, by which man first receives the measure for the breadth of his being.”141 Is it possible for poetry to measure the breadth or scope of humanity’s being? Does the Heideggerian metric or metron prove sufficient in measuring the breadth of a human being’s being? Heidegger should have perhaps paid more heed to the letter written by Rilke, dated 11th August 1924, which he himself quotes in “What Are Poets For?” to realize that, no metric or metron is capable of measuring or gauging the breadth of humanity’s being. Rilke writes: However vast the ‘outer space’ may be, yet with all its sidereal distances it hardly bears comparison with the dimensions, with the depth dimensions of our inner being, which does not even need the spaciousness of the universe to be within itself almost unfathomable.142

It is not only Rilke who testifies to the unfathomable depths and immeasurability of the human being, Heraclitus says: ‘You would not find out the boundaries of soul, even by travelling along every path: so deep a measure does it have.’143 Also, Sir Thomas Brown in Religio Medici goes beyond any customary or normal sense of measure when examining the inner immensities that lie within himself, and in doing so he renders measure-taking redundant. He speaks of his circle as being above three hundred and sixty degrees, and he also states that there exists something more than the great to his being, that is, a piece of Divinity that is prior to the physically known universe. Brown identifies a paracosmic element inherent to his being:

140

Cf. PLT, p. 222 and p. 219. The relevant lines from ‘In lovely blueness...’ read: ‘…man/Not unhappily measures himself/Against the godhead…’. While the lines from ‘What is God?...’ that Heidegger cites are as follows: ‘What is God? Unknown, yet/Full of his qualities is the/Face of the sky. For the lightnings/Are the wrath of a god. The more something/Is invisible, the more it yields to whats alien.’ 141 PLT, p. 219 142 This passage from a letter by Rainer Maria Rilke is found in Heidegger’s “What Are Poet’s For?” p. 126 143 This saying attributed to Heraclitus, can be found in The Presocratic Philosophers, ed. G.S Kirk, J. E. Raven, M. Schofield, Cambridge: CUP p. 203.

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While William James in his conclusion to The Varieties of Religious Experience observes: ‘The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and the merely ‘understandable’ world.’145 If this is so, then it is impossible to gauge the scope of a human being’s being. Although Rilke’s, Brown’s and James’ insights bring into question Heidegger’s discourse on poetic dwelling as he relates it to a type of measure-taking, they are not inimical to the primary impulse to dwell poetically upon the earth or to undergoing a homecoming venture.

Wallace Stevens and the birth of a New Intelligence Furthermore, by drawing attention to the poetry of Wallace Stevens and more specifically, the poem ‘Thirteen Ways of looking at a Blackbird’, we can attain or illuminate a revitalized sense of what dwelling poetically might mean. According to Simon Critchley, Wallace Stevens is ‘…the philosophically most interesting poet to have written in English in the twentieth 144

Sir Thomas Brown, Religio Medici, and Other Writings, Everyman Library: London 1965, p. 83. Sir Thomas Brown observes in Religio Medici: “I could never content my contemplation with those general pieces of wonder, the Flux and Reflux of the Sea, the increase of the Nile, the conversion of the Needle to the North; and have studied to match and parallel those in the more obvious and neglected pieces of Nature, which without further travel I can do in the Cosmography of myself. We carry with us the wonders we seek without us: there is all Africa and her prodigies in us; we are that bold and adventurous piece of Nature, which he that studies it wisely learns in a compendium what others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume.” (Religio Medici, and Other Writings, p. 19) 145 William James, The Variety of Religious Experience, A Study in Human Nature, New York: Penguin Books, 1985, p. 515.


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century.’146 Critchley claims that Stevens’ poetic oeuvre may be regarded as an extensive deliberation upon the foremost question of epistemology, that is, the relation between thought and things, or the relation between the mind and the world.147 He also asserts that Stevens’s poetry is neither to be conceived in terms of anti-realism nor transcendental realism.148 For Critchley, Stevens’ poetic thought takes on a more phenomenological sense of the real. Yet, what does this phenomenological position signify? What is phenomenology? Critchley writes:

146 Simon Critchley, Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, New York: Routledge, 2005, p. 15. 147 Ibid., p. 22 148 Critchley outlines the following argument for his claim that Stevens is neither an anti-realist nor a transcendental realist: “Stevens has been widely interpreted as an anti-realist, for example in the influential interpretations of Harold Bloom and Joseph Riddel. The latter rightly reads Stevens’s poetry as an ‘act of the mind’, but mental activity is wrongly understood in entirely solipsistic terms without reference to reality. For Riddel, Stevens’s poetry exhibits the ‘tropological’ quality of the real that reduces ‘things as they are’ to ‘a chain of fictions’. Bloom focuses his interpretation of Stevens’s important 1936 poem, ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’. Bloom understands the concept of order in entirely solipsistic terms as the Schopenhauerian reduction of the world to an idea and the latter to consciousness. Poetry is here reduced to the effusions of a will that projects an illusory world of its own confection. For Bloom, like Riddel, the poem is entirely an act of the mind without reference to reality, a view that he ingeniously, but somewhat obsessively, traces back to Emerson, Whitman and the tradition of American transcendentalism. If Stevens were a straightforward anti-realist or linguistic idealist, then the only category in his poetics would be the imagination. But it is not, and his work begins from what Gardner terms a certain, oppressive or contracted sense of the real - what Hilary Putnam would call ‘realism without a human face’ – and attempts to put in its place a transfigured sense of the real, the real mediated through the creative power of imagination – ‘realism with a human face’. However, to say that Stevens is not an anti-realist does not entail that he is what we might call a transcendental realist. For the latter, all human activity is epiphenomenal to a subject-independent material realm explicable by the natural sciences. Such would be the contracted world, free from the cognitive, aesthetic and moral values that give colour and texture to the world we inhabit. Stevens’s poetry is overwhelmingly concerned with reality but he believes that the real can be apprehended under different aspects or categories – the contracted, the transfigured. Simply stated, his conviction is that a poeticized, imaginatively transformed reality is both preferable to an inhuman, contracted and oppressive sense of reality and gives a truer picture of the relation humans entertain with the world.” (Ibid. pp. 26-27)

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Chapter Seven Phenomenology is a description of things as they are that seeks to elicit the sense or significance of our practical involvement with the world. Again, more paradoxically stated, phenomenology brings out the meaning of the fact that, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, ‘we are condemned to meaning’. Phenomenology gives us the meaning of meaning. Or so we say. Phenomenological descriptions, if felici-tous, foreground things as they are experienced in the everyday world we inhabit, the real world in which we move and have our being, the world which fascinates and benumbs us.149

However, Denis Donoghue is wary of philosophically classifying Stevens’s poetry: “…the philosophic positions registered in Stevens’s poems are severely in contradiction. If we were to list every variant reading in the argument of epistemology, for instance, we could quote a poem by Stevens in favour of each.”150 J. Hillis Miller makes a similar observation when he states: “The critic can develop radically different notions of Stevens’s aims as a poet, and for each of these it is easy to find apposite passages from the text.”151 There is no doubt some truth in the widely held belief that poetry vacillates between idealism and realism, and Stevens’s poetry appears to embody this tensional, fractious and even sometimes frenetic relationship between the imagination and reality. Tension between the imagination and reality persists, for there exists a temptation for the imagination to reduce reality to itself. Conversely, it is possible for reality to render one’s imaginative power superfluous. Critchley remarks: “Stevens’s verse seems to oscillate first one way and then the other, between high summer and deep winter, between ideas about the thing and the thing itself.”152 Under 149

Ibid., pp. 28-29 Denis Donoghue, “Nuances of a Theme by Stevens” in The Act of the Mind: Essays on the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce and J. Hillis Miller, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965, p. 226. 151 J. Hillis Miller, “Wallace Stevens’ Poetry of Being” in The Act of the Mind: Essays on the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce and J. Hillis Miller, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965, p. 146. 152 Simon Critchley, Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, p. 86. To the credit of Critchley he does not retain an over sentimentalized understanding of poetry as he too identifies the need to recognize and face up to the horrors of existence. He writes: “At its best, poetry offers an experience of the world as meditation, the mind slowing in front of things, the mind pushing back against the pressure of reality through the minimal transfigurations of the imagination. Such meditation, and this is crucial, does not shut its eyes to things, to the dark and bloody violence of the world, trying to imagine another world. Rather, those things are seen under a different aspect, subject to what I called in 150


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the excessive strain of the conflict between the imagination and reality Critchley suggests that the poetry of Stevens, and perhaps the poetry of modernity as a whole is marked by failure. Here failure is ‘defined by the courage to persist with failure’. As Beckett remarks, ‘try again, fail again, fail better’.153 Despite the failure of Stevens’s poetry, Critchley believes that through his poetry human beings can become more attentive to world around them, and more significantly they can acquire ‘soul-peace’. He notes: Poetry increases our feeling for reality by allowing us to see it, to focus on that which we normally pass over in our everyday activity: the world. By attending to the meditative voice of Stevens, I think we can acquire something of the craft of this calm, what he calls in German in the Adagia, ‘Seelenfriede durch Dichtung’ (OP 190), soul-peace through poetry. Or so we say.154

Yet, can ‘soul-peace’ be achieved through Stevens’s or any other poet’s poetry for that matter? Can poetry fill the void left by an absent or deceased God, and gods who have fled? Stevens is very much representative of the modern poet who is heir to the death of God and the gods who have fled. He is a poet who has also been dispossessed of the values associated with these divinities. Stevens believes poetry must emerge and flourish in the absence of these values, as he writes in ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’: The earth, for us, is flat and bare. There are no shadows. Poetry Exceeding music must take their place, Of empty heaven and its hymns, Ourselves in poetry must take their place, Even in the chattering of your guitar.155

Unlike Hölderlin, Stevens does not write in preparation or expectation of the arrival of a new god. This is evident in ‘Notes Toward a Supreme

my opening propositions a felt variation, minimally but decisively transfigured.” p. 85 153 Ibid. p. 88 154 Ibid. p. 89 155 Wallace Stevens, ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, New York: Vintage Books, 1990, p. 167.

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Fiction’ where he says, ‘The death of one god is the death of all.’156 Poetry is instead envisioned by Stevens as something which can replace religion by way of redeeming, revitalizing and healing humanity’s existence. Poetry preserves a therapeutic element by being able to create supreme fictions which can restore significance to the lives of human beings, and can bring meaning to the world. It is thus apparent that Stevens does not have recourse to any transcendental realm. Moreover, he does not consider it the task of the poet to be a mediator between humanity and a world beyond. For he proclaims in his notebooks: “The poet is the intermediary between people and the world in which they live, and also between people as between themselves; but not between people and some other world.”157 Consequently, for Stevens, the task of poet involves instilling humanity’s existence with meaning but without the reassurances of any theological or metaphysical answers for support. Once again turning to Stevens’ notebooks we find a number of statements that make this evident: “After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.”158 He also writes: ‘It is belief and not the god that counts.’159 The type of belief that Stevens’s poetry seeks to establish is based in and through a supreme fiction: “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is fiction and you believe in it willingly.”160 For Stevens, it is possible for poetry to reinvigorate one’s perception of the world by reviving and invoking the world once more through the imagination. With refreshed impetus, poetry can summon the imaginative resources necessary to transfigure and transform the world in a way that provides humanity with a sense of order. Stevens’s ‘Anecdote of the Jar’ reveals how a poem can found this order: I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. 156

Ibid., p. 381 Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, New York: The Library of America 1997, p. 919 158 Ibid., p. 901 159 Ibid., p. 902 160 Ibid., p. 903 157


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The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. It took domain everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.161

The minimalist gesture of placing a man-made jar upon a hill brings order to the wilderness that surrounds it, as the presence of this gray, bare jar dominates the landscape: ‘And tall and of a port in air./It to took domain everywhere.’ For Stevens, it is possible for poetry, like the jar to impose order on wilderness. Stevens’s ‘Anecdote of the Jar’ discloses how the idea of order is something which human beings can imaginatively impress upon reality. From this perspective the world is how you perceive it to be. Perceiving poetry’s ability to enlarge, broaden and enliven life, Stevens supposes poetry to give ‘to life the supreme fictions without which we are unable to conceive of it’, and sees it as ‘one of the enlargements of life.’162 Poetry’s capacity to enlarge life is vital to the present investigation but not for the sake of enlargement or growth itself. Rather, poetry as the enlargement of life is taken to signify the broadening of humanity’s vision, and the enlargement of humanity’s capacity for dwelling poetically. This in turn could encourage or nurture a more considerate and ethical attitude towards other beings and the earth. From this perspective, poetry can be understood to cultivate what Stevens calls a ‘new intelligence’. Furthermore, it is a firm contention of the present enquiry that this ‘new intelligence’ manifests itself in the poem ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.’ B. J. Leggett suggests that Stevens found inspiration for the title ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ from a paper published by Arthur Lovejoy in The Journal of Philosophy entitled “The Thirteen Pragmatisms.” Leggett claims the number thirteen has always retained significance; representing uncontainability and irreducible plurality.163 These notions of ‘uncontainability’ and ‘irreducible plurality’ are essential 161

Ibid., p. 76 Ibid., p. viii 163 B. J. Leggett, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory: Conceiving the Supreme Fiction, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1987, p. 65. On the other hand, John J. Enck argues that the number thirteen is chosen by Stevens out of sheer arbitrariness, ‘it may contain further poems, four-and-twenty, or more.’ (Cf. Wallace Stevens: Images and Judgments, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press 1964, p. 11.) 162

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to interpreting Stevens’s ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, and they help reveal the poem’s ability to foster a pluralistic and deeply courteous way of seeing things. Nonetheless, the number thirteen is not the only aspect of the poem’s title which is noteworthy. For the title reads ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ not ‘Thirteen ways of Seeing a Blackbird.’ Hence, it is not a matter of passively perceiving the blackbird, there is creative perception at play in the poem: I Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was the eye of the blackbird. II I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds. III The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds. It was a small part of the pantomime. IV A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one. V I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after. VI Icicles filled the long window With barbaric glass. The shadow of the blackbird Crossed it, to and fro. The mood Traced in the shadow An indecipherable cause.

Heidegger and the Enactment of a Poetic Homecoming VII O thin men of Haddam, Why do you imagine golden birds? Do you not see how the blackbird Walks around the feet Of the women about you? VIII I know noble accents Add lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know. IX When the blackbird flew out of sight, It marked the edge Of one of many circles. X At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply. XI He rode over Connecticut In a glass coach. Once, a fear pierced him, In that he mistook The shadow of his equipage For blackbirds. XII The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying. XIII It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs.164

164

Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, pp. 93-95

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Through modesty and unpretentiousness ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ attains a sense of supreme splendour. This poem keenly encourages and nurtures the possibility of humanity dwelling poetically upon the earth, as the plurality of perspectives that emerge in it provides humanity with a deeply courteous way of beholding and seeing things. Not only encouraging and nurturing poetic dwelling, this poem is the very embodiment of poetic dwelling itself. Perhaps this is the most poetry can achieve; not the realization or attainment of peace or ‘soul-peace’, but the cultivation of a profoundly more courteous way of perceiving and encountering other beings. Herein lies the possibility of dwelling poetically upon the earth.

CONCLUSION

Homecoming: An Unceasing Venture Having outlined Heidegger’s poetic response to humanity’s state of homelessness, it is now necessary to attain an overall perspective on the philosophical significance of the theme of homecoming as it has developed in the course of this investigation. As was made evident at the outset of the enquiry, ‘homecoming’ is both the process and goal of authentic being, and it is this venture that the current study has sought determinately to take up. In this investigation the notion of ‘homecoming’ was accompanied by an acute awareness of ‘homelessness’. For it is by both confronting and seeking to understand what underlies humanity’s state of homelessness that the venture of homecoming is most fruitfully pursued. Hence, when tackling and engaging with humanity’s state of homelessness a homecoming is most effectively underway. The notion of ‘homelessness’ carries a great freight of philosophical meaning, it bears significance not only for traditional philosophical and religious modes of thought, but also for a diverse range of modern philosophers, poets and other types of thinkers. ‘Homelessness’ as it was traditionally conceived by the Orphic, Pythagorean, Platonic, Gnostic and Christian movements, related to humanity’s sense of exile in this earthly world. For these various movements, the sensible world and corporeal existence meant imprisonment, captivity, deception and the experience of immense suffering. In order to be liberated from their imprisoned and bound existence they sought to undertake a homecoming to a variously imagined metaphysical realm. The philosophical significance of ‘homelessness’ associated with modernity takes on a very different meaning with the revelatory writings of Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s conception of nihilism gives birth to a new sense of homelessness, whereby the highest values hitherto are emasculated and individuals come to disbelieve in any metaphysical world or any true world for that matter. Besides Nietzsche’s discourses on nihilism, a host of other modern thinkers and writers have testified to experiencing homelessness in its most serious sense. In ‘Chapter One’ the testimonies of a multitude of thinkers and writers were presented in order to display the multifarious range of perspectives that exist on humanity’s state of

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homelessness. I revealed the sense of homelessness endured by Kepler, Pascal and Sir James Jeans through the emergence of the new astronomy. I also acknowledged the epistemological sufferings of Coleridge, Melville and Arnold; Nietzsche’s astonishing deinanthropological discovery; Hegel’s sense of alienation and homelessness in the Philosophy of History; the social analyses of homelessness provided by Rousseau and Marx; T. S. Eliot’s “Wasteland”; Freud’s psychological construal of homelessness; Heidegger’s and Lévinas’ thoughtful, yet conflicting interpretations on humanity’s state of homelessness; the nomadic thought of Deleuze and Derrida, and finally I drew attention to Moriarty’s sense of homelessness, as he suffered the weight of the Fool’s question: “How now, nuncle?”. Thus, a very broad canvas was needed to introduce this pertinent and much addressed theme. Narrowing the focus of the investigation, the German appropriation of the Greeks was examined. This enquiry was pursued in order to highlight the underlying sense of homelessness experienced by modern Germany, and to illuminate how some of Germany’s most inspiring figures and brightest minds sought to re-appropriate the ancient Greeks. This reappropriation of the ancient Greeks played an essential role in the reshaping of the Germanic homeland, as many great German thinkers attempted to engender the spirit of ancient Greece and establish a renewed and fertile sense of home. Winckelmann, regarded by many as the initial instigating force behind the Germans turn to the Greeks, passionately studied ancient Greek art and sculpture in the hope of gaining insight into the genius of the Greek spirit in a way that could help his modern Germany undergo a cultural renaissance. Hölderlin, the renowned German poet based his vision of a culturally regenerated Germany on the ancient Greeks too. He fervently sought to restore the lost connection between mortals and divinities. In this way, he invoked the fire of heaven, as this was the necessary element that modern Germans lacked. The German’s capacity for clarity of presentation needed to be offset by the foreign element of heavenly fire, according to Hölderlin. Appealing to the Greek gods in vain, Hölderlin realized he was unable now to invoke their presence and so he called upon the angels of his fatherland. The angels of the homeland included its mountains, rivers and streams, the earth and the sky; these were now the signs by which the divine manifested itself for Hölderlin. Nietzsche, the great German philosopher extolled the virtues of the ancient Greeks in order to highlight the deficiencies and sicknesses inherent in modern Germany’s culture. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche opposed Dionysiac life to Socraticism, whose degenerative influence he believed still held a strong influence over modern humanity by way of the


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dominance of scientific knowledge and rationalism. Nevertheless, in his later writings, the significance of this relationship diminishes due to prominence he gives to the relationship of Dionysus versus the ‘Crucified’ or the Dionysian versus Christianity. Nietzsche rejects Christianity as being antithetical to the Dionysian spirit, calling it ‘ignoble, un-Greek’. For Nietzsche, particularly in his later writings, the Dionysian becomes an ever more potent and powerful force with its highest expression found in the notion of amor fati or love of fate. He remarks: “The highest state a philosopher can attain: to stand in a Dionysian relationship to existence – my formulae for this is amor fati.”1 At the end of ‘Chapter Two’ the German obsession with the ancient Greeks was queried. Questions arose in relation to the ancient Greeks that raised doubts about whether or not they should be unquestionably adulated and appropriated. For instance: Is slavery something to be espoused? Is the subordination of women to men to be endorsed and reinstated in the modern world? In ‘Chapter Three’ the focus turned to the notion of ‘the unheimlich’ so as to explicate Heidegger’s understanding of humanity as being essentially unhomely. However, the chapter began with Freud’s psychological conception of ‘the unheimlich’. Dealing predominately with his famed essay ‘The “Uncanny”’ it was shown how he understood ‘the unheimlich’ to signify that which emerges from something familiar but has been repressed. Many Freudian examples of what gives rise to the experience of ‘the unheimlich’ were enumerated, including the uncertainty of whether or not an object is animate or inanimate and whether or not a particular figure is a human being or a automaton, epileptic fits, occurrences of insanity, the theme of the ‘double’, the inner ‘compulsion to repeat’, the repetition of the same thing, ghostly crocodiles, omnipotence of thoughts, womb fantasies, dead bodies and the return of ghosts and spirits. Yet, having studied Freud’s analysis of the unheimlich, suspicions surfaced regarding whether or not he had managed to bring to light the full significance of this notion, if such a thing is possible. Heidegger’s exploration of the unheimlich then came to the fore by way of Being and Time, in which he conceived of Dasein as being primordially not at home in the world. In Being and Time he investigated the notion of Unheimlichkeit not psychologically, as an anxious psychic experience of the unconscious, but rather from an existential-ontological perspective. Furthermore, his understanding of the notion of Unheimlichkeit in Being and Time most notably materialized in his discussions on Angst, death and conscience. Nonetheless, the key text to ‘Chapter Three’ was Heidegger’s 1

WP, p. 536

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Introduction to Metaphysics in which his elucidation of the unheimlich was made evident in a new and astonishing way through an interpretation of the first stasimon in Sophocles’ Antigone. Central to Heidegger’s interpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone is the fact that the human being is understood as to deinotaton. His construal of the first stasimon is grounded on the translation of the Greek word deinon into the German word unheimlich, whereby the human being is regarded as being essentially unhomely. Heidegger’s grasp of the un-heimlich is twofold and relates to the notions of the overwhelming power of being and the violence-doing of the human being. Later in his lecture series entitled Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’, Heidegger returned to Sophocles’ Antigone but on this occasion the significance of the violence-doing of the human being diminished while the way of the hearth became central. However, having studied Heidegger’s insightful investigations into the essence of humanity, his reliance on the first stasimon of Antigone was challenged, for it was felt that this text proved inadequate for providing a proper account of the human being. Turning to Moriarty and the piece entitled ‘Deinanthropus, A New First Stasimon’, fifteen mahavakayas or great sayings were highlighted. These great sayings drew attention to the abyssal depths inherent in the human being and in a way could be seen to overturn humanity’s traditional sense of itself. By illuminating these mahavakayas, humanity’s homeless or unhomely nature was further bolstered and reinforced. In elaborating in great detail the unhomely nature of the human being one would think that all sense of ‘home’ had vanished, but not so. As Heidegger states: “Being unhomely is no mere deviance from the homely, but rather the converse: a seeking and searching out the homely, a seeking that at times does not know itself.”2 To further understand humanity’s state of homelessness, the phenomenon of nihilism was scrutinized in ‘Chapter Four’. It was revealed in this chapter how Nietzsche’s interpretation of nihilism was intertwined with the deterioration of the highest values hitherto. According to Nietzsche, this process of devaluation led individuals to begin to realize that existence had no goal or end. For Heidegger on the other hand, nihilism signified the oblivion of being. In order to reveal the origin of nihilism, Nietzsche looked to the Christian-moral interpretation of the world. However, he also pointed the finger at the Western metaphysical tradition beginning with Plato for having recourse to ‘some beyond’. According to Nietzsche, the highest values humanity held and the ‘truth’ which human beings sought were all based on a fictitious world 2

TI, p. 74.


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and thus helped prepare the ground for nihilism to flourish in. Like Nietzsche, Heidegger deemed nihilism to be rooted in Western metaphysics but unlike Nietzsche he interpreted metaphysics itself as being nihilism. Plato and Nietzsche are two hugely significant points of reference for Heidegger. For according to Heidegger, nihilism was first concealed in Plato while in Nietzsche it attained its full appearance. Pivotal to Heidegger’s nihilistic characterization of Plato and Nietzsche, and the whole of Western metaphysics, is his claim that the question of being has been neglected and that the truth of being remains concealed. How Heidegger attempted to address this difficulty in a way that could overcome nihilism and humanity’s homelessness was left in suspense at the end of chapter four, for it was to be dealt with in chapters six and seven. But by way of offering an initial intimation of what it might mean to overcome nihilism, Wallace Stevens’ poem The Comedian as the Letter C was examined. Following on from the examination of nihilism, Heidegger’s thought on modern technology was explored as he considered modern technology to be the final phase of metaphysics/nihilism. Hence it was regarded by Heidegger as not only sustaining humanity’s homeless state, but of exasperating this condition. It was shown how Heidegger interpreted modern technology as a mode of revealing that revealed things as ‘standing-reserve’ (Bestand). Heidegger used the term ‘Ge-stell’ or ‘Enframing’ to name this prevalent mode of revealing. Furthermore, he viewed this dominant mode of revealing as precluding other modes of revealing such as poiƝsis thus denying humanity the possibility of entering into a more original revealing and hence the experience of a more primal truth. For Heidegger, a most serious consequence of humanity’s increasing use and dependence upon technology was that it brought about humanity’s collective migration into a state of homelessness. Heidegger was especially alarmed by the danger that modern technology posed to his fellow German people and to the deteriorating significance of the Germanic homeland. He considered the German fascination with technological devices such as radio and television as indicative of a people who were homeless in their own homeland, far removed and uprooted from the tradition of their native land. Although not a Luddite, he sought persistently to uncover the origins and essence of modern technology in a way that could alleviate its dominance. The history of Western metaphysics was central to Heidegger’s understanding of modern technology and he identified many key philosophical thinkers and epochs in the unfolding of this history. Heidegger paid particular interest to Plato, Aristotle, the Roman translations of the ancient Greeks, Medieval philosophy, the

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Enlightenment, Descartes, Leibniz and Nietzsche, with whom metaphysics apparently found completion. Nevertheless, Heidegger’s account of Western metaphysics and how it contributed to the rise of modern technology did not go unchallenged. Critical questions were levelled at Heidegger and his construal of Western metaphysics and modern technology, by way of well articulated queries formulated by Philipse, Derrida and others. In ‘Chapter Six’ Heidegger’s response to humanity’s state of homelessness finally came to the forefront of my investigation. I enquired into the nature of thinking and poetry, as overturning our customary metaphysical understanding of thinking and poetry is crucial for Heidegger’s homecoming project. It was found that his sense of thinking and poetry was profoundly ambiguous. I placed emphasis on Heidegger’s ‘inceptual thinking’ as it is this mode of thinking which best enables a homecoming to unfold. I also suggested that his preoccupations with words such as ‘Ereignis’ were ways of gathering inceptual thoughts. Heidegger showed great hesitancy in establishing a universal definition for poetry to the point where he rejected the possibility of being able to do so but he nevertheless sought out what was essential to poetry, especially in “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry”. Attention in this chapter was chiefly drawn to the notion of poetry as a type of founding. By turning his thought to poetry Heidegger particularly appealed to the poetry of Hölderlin as a way of outlining a homecoming for his fellow German people. In the concluding chapter, ‘Chapter Seven’, important criticisms raised by Lévinas, Löwith and Lacoue-Labarthe in relation to Heidegger’s homecoming project were highlighted. They argued that his homecoming venture had dangerous political overtones and implications. However, I contended that while their criticisms were valuable it did not undermine Heidegger’s homecoming venture because his thought explicitly breached the criticisms made against him. In this regard, criticisms of racism, of violence of thought that was in keeping with a dictatorial style of politics, of a restricted place-bound ontology and of paganism were dramatically displaced. Heidegger’s homecoming venture illuminated a path of radical German estrangement, a path open to the otherness of ancient Greece and particularly to the sacred fire that kindled the ancient Greek spirit. His lectures on Hölderlin presented at the height of German military power were a manifesto of ‘inner emigration’ from destructive brutality to a more subdued or ‘spiritual’ mode of German being, a mode of being imbued with the mood of shyness, which he considered ‘more decisive than all violence.’ In his post-war essay on Trakl, at a time when he was


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increasingly distressed at the growing dominance of modern technology, Heidegger significantly referred to a ‘homecoming generation’, one that alluded to the whole of mankind. In this essay another kind of exodus was called for, one away from global domination in the direction of a ‘gentler entwinement’ of humankind, accompanied by a ‘going under’ of the Occident into the twilight of spiritual years. Apart from countering charges of fascist chauvinism, these writings also temper allegations of provincialism and of self-enclosed autochthony far removed from world events. As Heidegger understands it, homecoming is by no means a native possession, but is rather the farthest horizon of the human being’s journey abroad. Furthermore, the homecoming brought about through poetic remembrance is not be interpreted in terms of a revivalist nostalgia for an ancient or past sense of ‘home’, but the anticipation of new possibilities of home hitherto unforeseen or unimagined. Such remembrance evokes the futurity of homecoming rather than a distant past. Homecoming in this sense does not mean nostalgic return, but openness to an unfulfilled promise, the promise of new more enriched way of being in the world. Hence, rather than reaching a conclusion, one realizes that a homecoming is an unceasing venture.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Primary Texts of Martin Heidegger Texts in English The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. A. Hofstadter, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Basic Writings: Martin Heidegger, ed. David Farrell Krell, London: Routledge, 1996. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell 2001. Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund, New York: Harper & Row, 1966. Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank Capuzzi, New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller, New York: Humanity Books, 2000. The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh, New York: Harper and Row, 1973. The Essence of Truth, trans. Ted Sadler, London, Continuum, 2002. Existence and Being. Introduction and Analysis by Werner Brock, Washington: D.C., Regnery Gateway Company, 1949. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, finitude, solitude, tr. W. McNeill and N. Walker, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. The Heidegger – Jaspers Correspondence (1920-1963), ed. Walter Biemel and Hans Saner, trans. Gary E. Aylesworth, New York: Humanity Books, 1990. History of the concept of Time: prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’, trans. W. McNeill and J. Davis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Identity and Difference, trans. Kurt F. Leidecker, New York: Philosophical Library Inc., 1960. Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

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Other German Texts by Heidegger Der Satz vom Grund, Pfullingen: verlag Gunther Neske, 1965. Einführung in die Metaphysik. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1953. Gelassenheit. 10th edn. Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1992. Holzwege, 5th edn. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1972.

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