Of hegemonies yet to be broken: Rhetoric and philosophy in the age of accomplished metaphysics

Abstract

This paper situates itself in Reiner Schürmann's theory that the metaphysical representations have hegemonically governed epochs of western history. It argues that the contemporary alertness about the acute loss of affinity between rhetoric and philosophy reports the end of metaphysics. Specifically, the paper discusses that the phenomenon of globalization of scientific rationalism, with its homogenizing effects requires an anarchic mode of thinking and acting and a certain political life that refuses ultimate representations. As such, the proper epochal response to the rift between rhetoric and philosophy is an anarchic one. The ease with which a whole age continues to graze, in spite of exterminations still alive in our memories and planetary asphyxiations already in our throats, gives ground for perplexity (Reiner Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies).

Notes

Reiner Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).

Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990), 50–1. Unless cited otherwise, all references to and quotes from Nietzsche are taken from these pages.

Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy (Stanford: University of Stanford Press, 1997), 7.

The reference is, of course, to Heidegger's famous Der Spiegel interview. See: Martin Heidegger, “Only a God Can Save Us: Der Spiegel's Interview with Martin Heidegger,” Philosophy Today 20(4) (Winter 1976): 267–84.

Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, trans. Christine-Marie Gros (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 14.

Ibid., 3.

As Michel Haar convincingly shows, the influence of Nietzsche is evident in many key arguments of Schürmann's Heidegger on Being and Acting. See Michel Haar, “The Place of Nietzsche in Reiner Schürmann's Thought and in His Reading of Heidegger,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 19(2)/20(1) (1997): 229–45.

Reiner Schürmann, “Principles Precarious: On the Origin of the Political in Heidegger,” in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (Chicago, IL: Precedent Publishing, 1981), 247.

For an extensive elaboration on this synoptic account of origination, see Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting, 97–154.

Ibid., 81.

In this regard, see Schürmann's refreshing account of the Inca civilization in Ibid., 26–9.

Ibid., 29.

Ibid., 11.

Friedrich Engels, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” in The Marx–Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (London: W. W. Norton, 1978), 683.

Schürmann, “Principles Precarious,” 248.

Martin Heidegger, “In Memory of Max Scheler,” in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Sheehan, 159.

See Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977), 17.

Ibid., 19.

Ibid., 27.

Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting, 12.

Reiner Schürmann, “Adventures of the Double Negation: On Richard Bernstein's Call for Anti-Anti Humanism,” Praxis International 5(3) (1985): 288–9; my emphasis.

The term “enowning” is the coinage of Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, translators of Heidegger's latest major work into English, Contribution to Philosophy (From Enowning), a translation of Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). They argue that “Enowning approximates the movement of er- that runs through eignen and the eignis in Ereignis. Part of this movement is a ‘going all the way into and through' without possessing. We consider it a significant confirmation of the appropriateness of the word enowning that this word provides a unique possibility for bringing into English what Heidegger does, at important junctures of Contributions, when he hyphenates Ereignis” [“Translators' Foreword,” in Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), xx].

Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting, 81. Original italics.

Schürmann, “Principles Precarious,” 248–9.

See Reiner Schürmann, “The One: Substance or Function?” in Neoplatonism and Nature: Studies in Plotinus' Enneads, ed. Michael F. Wanger (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 157–77. See also Reiner Schürmann, “Neoplatonic Henology as an Overcoming of Metaphysics,” Research in Phenomenology 13 (1983): 25–41.

In Schürmann's words: “The One assigns all things their locus, their site, in a given economy of presence. It does so, however, not as a demiurge (and even less as a creator), but as a principle, arché—this term understood as the mere function by which things present enter into commerce, as the coming about of their mutual rapport” (Schürmann, “The One: Substance or Function?” 163).

Ibid., 164.

See Martin Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1993), 427–49.

A brief historico-epochal note about the inceptive moment of separation between rhetoric and politics: Hannah Arendt names the trial and death of Socrates as the beginning of the chasm between philosophy and politics. Questioning the validity of the art of persuasion (peithein) as the political form of speech, which started with Plato's renunciation of doxa, she observes, functioned against Socrates. Rhetoric as persuasion, which always presupposes diverse opinions, was replaced with the Aristotelian dialectic as dialogue between two. As Arendt observes, “Socrates' mistake was to address his judges in the form of dialectic, which is why he could not persuade them. His truth, on the other hand, since he respected the limitations inherent in persuasion, became an opinion among opinions, not worth a bit more than the nontruths of the judges.” Hannah Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” Social Research 57(1) (1990): 79.

As regards the conditions of possibility of post-hegemony, see Peyman Vahabzadeh, “Technological Liberalism and the Anarchic Actor,” in Anarcho-Modernism: Toward a New Critical Theory; In Honour of Jerry Zaslove, ed. Ian Angus (Vancouver: Talon Books, 2001), 241–50.

Schürmann, “Adventures of the Double Negation,” 288.

See Heidegger, “Only a God Can Save Us,” 282.

Martin Heidegger, “On My Relation to National Socialism,” Semiotext(e) 4(2) (1982): 253. Of course, one cannot find a fundamental critique of National Socialism in Heidegger, who ultimately judged the demise of the movement in terms of its prosaic leadership.

Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Geoffry Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 40.

See Domenico Losurdo, Heidegger and the Ideology of War: Community, Death, and the West, trans. Marella and Jon Morris (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2001), Chap. 3. To play the devil's advocate, allow me to point out that the European purity of the Greek is probably as fictional as the German-Aryan purity. One can observe that the original “nation of Being” in fact receives its purity and distinct “Europeanness” from a Heidegger obsessed, as numerous of his German contemporaries, with “Germanic essentialism.” The civilizational cradle that Greece represented was only a mélange of cultures of the Mediterranean coast, North Africa, and Asia Minor. As such, the philosophical origins of Europe were nothing but manifold and multiple. How ironic that the original “nation of Being” was as hybrid and as dispersed as the Germany that the Aryan-fanatics of the twentieth century violently tried to deny through their racial supremacist ideology. In fact, the demoi of the original “nation of Being” had to guard themselves against the ethnoi of the North, that is, of central and northern Europe, which included the German tribes. But is this really a cause for perplexity? Properly understood, a nation of Being must by definition be no unitary or monolithic nation: the motility of Being, manifest in the works of pre-Socratics (I am inclined to add non-Europeans such as Lao-tzu as well) does not allow it.

Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, Vol. 2, Part 3, Sec. 2.

Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 18.

Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 152.

Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 89.

Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1971), 16.