Heidegger, the Pólis, the Political and Gelassenheit

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Notes

1 Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know, 502. On the political attractions see Michael Mann, Fascism, 78–91.

2 Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, 55.

3 See Barbara Dall Pezze, “Heidegger on Gelassenheit”.

4 Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, 54.

5 Ibid., 79–80.

6 Germans speak of, e.g., Kunstwissenschaft (“Art Science”) and Theologisches Wissenschaft (“Theological Science”).

7 Heidegger, “Self Assertion of the German University”, 3.

8 Tekne generally means “knowledge of principles with intent to making something”. James Scully's Oxford translation gives: “Art is far feebler than Necessity.” It is worth noting that the previous line and a half is “μυρίαις δὲ πημοναῖς δύαις τε καμϕθεὶς ὧδε δεσμὰ ϕυγγάνω” which gives “Only when I have been bent by pangs and tortures infinite am I to escape my bondage.” Scully gives: “Ten thousand sorrows must wrench me. That's the way I escape my chains.” 514 is a much discussed passage. See Stephen Daitz, “A Re-interpretation of Prometheus Bound 514, 13–17, who reads tekne as referring to the craftsmanship of Hephaestus (and not to Prometheus) and anangke to a universal necessity beyond the power of Zeus. Prickard's Oxford edition of 1878 has the same reading.

9 I retain the diacritical mark to signal the difference between the pólis and the “city-state”.

10 Ibid., 73.

11 Carl Schmitt claimed to be doing the same for jurisprudence.

12 See Otto Pöggeler's essay “Den Führer führen; Heidegger und kein Ende”, 26ff.

13 Heidegger, The Essence of Truth, 66. I am informed and assisted in this paragraph by the excellent discussion in Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Strange Wonder. The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe, 51–54. See the discussion of freedom below.

14 Heidegger, idem., 61, 62.

15 Idem., 65.

16 Martin Heidegger, Das Ister, 82.

17 See the discussion in Mark Blitz, “Heidegger and the Political”, esp. 182–86.

18 Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 162–63.

19 See the similar conclusion in Elden, “Rethinking the Polis”, 416.

20 Antigone 370: ἄλλοτ᾽ ἐπ᾽ ἐσθλὸν ἕρπει, /νόμους γεραίρων χθονὸς θεῶν τ᾽ ἔνορκον δίκαν, /ὑψίπολις: ἄπολις ὅτῳ τὸ μὴ καλὸν / ξύνεστι τόλμας χάριν. Most translations give little sense of “above the city: without a city”. A rendering of Heidegger's translation gives: “Rising high over the site, losing the site is he for whom what is not, is, always, for the sake of daring.” There is a parallel here to the discussion of übersehen in chapter eight of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy: one is both above the “world of culture” and without it.

21 The Origin of the Work of Art is written in 1934; the same year, Heidegger summarizes his views on art in Nietzsche I, section 12.

22 Heidegger, Nietzsche I, 111 (German: N I 130–31). See the remarks (to which I am indebted) in Jacques Taminiaux, “On Heidegger's Interpretation of the Will to Power as Art”.

23 “Origin of the Work of Art” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 56.

24 Idem. See J.M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art, 125–29. My italics.

25 In his introductory letter to William J. Richardson, Through Phenomenology to Thought. Being and Time is not about the single individual as Heidegger's discussion of Mitsein [being-with] and Fürsorge [solicitude] makes clear. See on this the forthcoming chapter by Babette Babich in her Heidegger et la solicitude. Being and Time starts from the individual and sees him or her as necessarily in a world with others. The later considerations deal with how a collectivity comes into being and as such is set on its way. See Hamilton, Federalist paper, # 1 and below.

26 See Strong, “Politics without Vision”, esp. chapter one.

27 Thus I disagree here with Bernstein, op. cit, 130 and distance Heidegger from Walter Benjamin.

28 “Origin of the Work of Art” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 77. My italics.

29 See Jacques Derrida, “Declarations of Independence” and Bonnie Honig, “Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Founding a Republic”.

30 “Origin of Work of Art” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 78.

31 Hannah Arendt takes up this theme. See Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt.

32 One already found much the same thing at the end of “A Modell of Christian Charitie”, the sermon that John Winthrop preached on board the Arabella to the settlers arriving in New England in 1630.

33 See similar remarks in Graeme Nicholson, “Justifying Your Nation”.

34 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 156–57. Nicholson makes the same link.

35 Cited from Guido Schneeberger, Nachlese zu Heidegger, 149.

36 GA = Gesamtausgabe [volume #] (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014).

37 “Die Frage nach der Rolle des Weltjudentums ist keine rassische, sondern die metaphysische Frage nach der Art von Menschentümlichkeit, die schlechthin ungebunden die Entwurzelung alles Seienden aus dem Sein als weltgeschichtliche »Aufgabe« iibernehmen kann.”

38 Heidegger, Nature, History, State, 56. The same idea occurs at the end of Ernst Kantorowicz, Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite: rex quondam, sic futurus. Kantorowicz might also have found affiliation with National Socialism except for the fact that he was Jewish. See the highly critical account in Norman Cantor, inventing the Middle Ages, 79–117.

39 Joachim Prinz, Wir Juden, 155.

40 “His Majesty's government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, … ” (http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/foreignpolicy/peace/guide/pages/the%20balfour%20declaration.aspx). Balfour and Lloyd George were also responding favourably to urgings from Chaim Weizmann, a British Zionist chemist who had developed a way to synthesize acetone, then desperately needed for munitions.

41 On this see Babich, “Heidegger et ses juifs” in Babich, op. cit., chapter three.

42 Being and Time §74, 436 (also cited in a different translation by Bernstein).

43 I am assisted here by Hannah Arendt, “Concern with Politics in Recent European Thought”, esp. 432. I note that Luther's word for “vocation” is Schickung. I think there is an echo here of Weber's understanding of “vocation” except that this is with others rather than by oneself.

44 See my discussion of a similar distinction in the work of Stanley Cavell between “horizontal” and “vertical” understandings in Joseph Lima and Tracy B. Strong, “Telling the Dancer from the Dance: On the Relevance of the Ordinary for Political Thought”.

45 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 298–99.

46 Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 39.

47 Being and Time §44 (229/272). This is one of the reasons that Richard Rorty found affinity with Heidegger.

48 Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 432.

49 That Nietzsche went much further in this pursuit than he is generally given credit for, indeed that this was Nietzsche's central enterprise, is established in Babette Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science. Reflecting Science on the Ground of Art and Life.

50 See Thiele, “Heidegger on Freedom”.

51 Heidegger in Petzel, Encounters and Dialogues, 222. I do not hold, however, as does Dominik Finkelde (“Gegen die politische Philosophie”, that this means that Heidegger is “against” all political involvement, although he clearly played his cards carefully as when in the Letter on Humanism, for instance, he warns against political involvement. In What is Called thinking? (New York. Harper, 1968), 66–73, Heidegger asserts that World War II decided nothing and cites favourably Nietzsche's distress about the “decline of the state”.

52 Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 141/102.

53 I owe these references to Fried, Heidegger's Polemos 259–61. The omission comes after the end of the first paragraph of page 36 of the 1961 German edition and on page 27 of the English edition (after first paragraph).

54 Contrary to what Fried asserts (op. cit., 259), this particular sentence is not omitted in 1961. The next one is. See the German text without this paragraph in Nietzsche I, 183 and in English in Nietzsche I and II, 156.

55 Although Heidegger certainly shared with Schmitt the sense of the importance of polemos. See Fried, op. cit. and Faye, Heidegger, op. cit., esp. chapter six. Faye argues that Heidegger is a further radicalization of Schmitt's radicalization of Hegel and refers to Heidegger's discussion of the “total state” in seminars from 1933 to 1934 for which he has notes. See Faye, 228–37. Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 134, has convincingly argued for the difference between Hegel and Heidegger, arguing that “Heidegger's concept of the Leader confounds” the objective aspect of governing with the subjective one (whereas Hegel keeps them separate.). For a critique of Faye, see Thomas Sheehan, “Emmanuel Faye: The Introduction of Fraud into Philosophy”.

56 Daniel Gross, “Introduction”, 9. This paragraph follows Gross's analysis.

57 Thus, contrary to what Dana Villa argues (Arendt and Heidegger) there is, prior to Being and Time, an affinity between Heidegger and Arendt. She remembers to her last days Heidegger's seminar on the Statesman.

58 See Heidegger, Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, 78–81.

59 Heidegger, Das Ister 83.

60 Hannah Arendt, “What is Existential Philosophy”, 181. This is her first-major English language publication and is her most overtly anti-Heideggerian.

61 Ibid., 180.

62 Heidegger, Being and Time §25, 110/Sein und Zeit, 117.

63 George Kateb, “Thinking About Extinction: (I) Nietzsche and Heidegger”, 24.

64 An article in the SS journal Das schwarze Korps said: “Schmeling's victory was not only sport. It was a question of prestige for our race.” Schmeling lost the 1938 re-match in the first round. See Clarence Lusanne, Hitler's Black Victims: the Historical Experience of Afro-Germans, European Blacks, Africans, and African-Americans in the Nazi Era, 202–03.

65 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 40.

66 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 41.

67 Miguel de Bestegui, Heidegger and the Political, 8.

68 Žižek (op cit., 151–52) argues almost perversely that the problem with the Nazis is that they did not go far enough to “disturb the basic structure of the modern capitalist social space” and that Heidegger never managed to transcend this limitation.

69 Heidegger, “Plato's Doctrine of Truth”, 171. Mary Jane Rubenstein, to whom I am indebted here, [Strange Wonder (New York. Columbia, 2011), 54] makes the same point and quotes this same passage.

70 Heidegger, The Essence of Truth: On Plato's Cave Allegory and Theateatus, 65–66.

71 This is, if I read correctly, Rubenstein's reading, op. cit., 47–56.

72 This is incidentally also Rousseau's complaint about modernity in the Discourse on Arts and Sciences: instead of requiring Socrates (i.e. Rousseau) to drink hemlock he is invited to a salon.

73 Heidegger, op. cit., 61 (my italics).

74 Ibid., 62, 63.

75 See Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer and Heidegger.