Politics of Philosophy

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of the phrases Hedeigger used to say. The emancipation of Heidegger’s philosophy had more implications: the truth of knowledge depends on a language that does not characterize itself through the exhaustive production of objectivity and inter-subjectivity; it is actually the other way around: just as we cannot escape from being-in-the-world (In-der- Welt-sein) in order to confront the world thanks to an alleged autonomy, we cannot escape either from language even if we make it the object of our investigations. As Heidegger writes in On the Way to Language (Unterwegs zur Sprache): “in order to be who we are, we human beings remain committed to and within the being of language, and can never step out of it and look at it from somewhere else. Thus we always see the nature of language only to the extent to which language itself has us in view, has appropriated us to itself. That we cannot know the nature of language [...] is not a defect, however, but rather an advantage by which we are favored with a special realm, that realm where we, we, who are needed and used to speak language, dwell as mortals” (On the Way to Language: 134).

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few years before. An annihilative move is thereby carried out: not

“destruction” in the sense of “appropriation” (Aneignung) as discussed in the first chapter, but rather “annihilation” (Vernichtung) in the sense of the Black Notebooks. Within this context, “annihilation” means something like disempowerment or making something ineffective or meaningless forever, whereas “destruction” is something to be used in a new context.

On the other side, the implementation of this dialectic serves a restoration of the Original of which we are guilty to have forgotten.

This complementation is subject in Heidegger to different variations and modifications: it structures his whole work and moulds its attitude to other philosophies, both past and present. Perhaps, the diverse versions of this complementation could have outlived Heidegger –the Meta- National Socialist, the enemy of the Jews, the fanatical fundamentalist–

for a couple of decades since the end of the Second World War without having carried over Heidegger’s biographical stigma. But now the ‘Black Notebooks’ might definitely have caught him up, and there is no place to play the game “Heidegger against Heidegger” as Jürgen Habermas recommended years ago. Cassirer would not be surprised about this development, either before Davos or after it.

Epilogue

No one excluding Heidegger’s philosophy will also survive this new scandal provoked by the publication of the Black Notes. If there is to discover any relevant philosophical content which some day might be discussed beyond being poisoned by the political implications of Heidegger’s work it could be the following series.

1. The methodical complementation between violence and the production of evidence: this complementation becomes, in fact, demonstratively effective in the multiple violent hermeneutic readings that Heidegger develops against diverse texts. He does this in order to appropriate or, even better, to absorb, often enough with the effect of presenting also fascinating evidence. This happens, for instance, in the case of his prominent interpretation of Heraclitus’ concept of φύσις, or in the metaphor of imagination as the root of both trunks of knowledge in Kant. This careless care (rücksichtslose Rücksichtnahme) regarding an intention that remains unknown to the author himself has been radicalized in Derrida’s deconstructionism. At the same time, it offers

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a plausible application of the principle according to which one should

“interpret the author better than himself” as was formulated by Kant and Schleiermacher.

2. The semantic complementation between form and content of language: language speaks and always says something; the house of being is never uninhabited, being is never homeless. Through speaking, language expresses being and also expresses itself. Necessarily, the a priori of language comes into existence through the actualization of the Parmenidean identity between εἶναι and νοεῖν. Therein lays Heidegger’s contribution to the linguistic turn.

3. The disciplinary complementation between ontological reductionism and reductionist ontology: the so called “fundamental ontology” is the ultimate foundation of all philosophy. It is an ontology that presents itself as its own fundament. In this sense, one can find in Heidegger a new answer to the ancient problem of the ultimate grounding.

4. The ideological complementation between tradition and authenticity: the above mentioned § 6 from Being and Time demonstrates that authenticity can only be achieved against tradition, but never without it.

Already in Davos, Cassirer should have been able to notice this ambiguity in the relationship to what is called “tradition”, and he could have plausibly demonstrating how a philosophy of cultural symbols provocatively competes with Heidegger’s philosophy in the following aspects corresponding to the above mentioned four points:

a. Methodically through the identification of history and culture;

b. Semantically, on one hand, through the individuation of language as a symbolical form among others; and, on the other hand, through its integrating function of all symbolical forms: for the latter are all cases of verbalizing the world, and for this reason, they also validates Wittgenstein’s premise according to which “the world is everything that is the case”;

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c. Disciplinarily through the inclusive claim of the “critique of culture”, insofar as it understands itself explicitly as a comprehensive philosophy in the wake of the critique of reason; and,

d. Ideologically through privileging humanism as the substratum of the only tradition that confers authenticity to the animal symbolicum.

Except for the contemptuous review of the volume on myth of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1932), Heidegger avoided the challenge of this contest thanks to the fatal protection he had already received in 1929 from the majority of the academic elites. Later on, he will allow the Nazis to help him to leave this contest aside without thanking them, however, for his own lasting influence.

Discussion

André Laks

It is, of course, difficult to discuss as we should in Enno Rudolph’s absence. Nevertheless, I would like that we share our impressions and reactions, so that we can submit them to him and he can react. This is very important because he insists in the epochal significance of the Davos debate between Heidegger and Cassirer and because he stands on the side of those who think, contrary to our first two exponents, that even the so-called first Heidegger is engaged in a problematical philosophical enterprise.

Denis Thouard

Personally, I would like to discuss the part of the text in which Enno Rudolph explains the new essentialism that Cassirer criticizes in Heidegger’s thought. I found it very interesting the way in which Enno Rudolph recalls the alternative substance or function as something that opposes both authors, since Heidegger refuses both terms. This opposition and the evolution from substance to function is also found in the philosophy of Georg Simmel in his analysis of calculability and other aspects of modernity, and it is one of Heidegger’s targets. Even if he rejects this modern functionalism, it remains provocative to identify Heidegger with a new kind of essentialism. I have always heard and it

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was usually repeated as I work on the concept of subjectivity that the subject was something substantial since it comes from substance, which is the analysis that Heidegger presents. I have also heard that with the conception of Dasein we could escape from this old-fashioned conception of subjectivity in order to provoke a pure movement that could be called “ipseity” or “selfhood”. On the contrary, all representatives of transcendental philosophy, Cassirer included, were suspected to act and think on the basis of this already outdated conception of subjectivity.

Enno Rudolph’s succeeds to prove the contrary, namely, that the Dasein without substance leads toward a new kind of essentialism which integrates Dasein into a greater whole. By the same token, Cassirer’s conception of subjectivity is ordered to a conception of functionality.

In addition, there are many ways to consider a relation to myth, politics and science, a fact that Cassirer tried to take into account pleading for a kind of polyglotism of the symbolical functions and betting on plurality and not on the attempt to turn back to a pure and authentic origin.⁷

I think that the demonstration in this first part of Enno Rudolph’s talk is very convincing, and for me it would be a good start for our discussion.

Steven Crowell

Returning to Denis Thouard’s impression, I must say that I also was struck by this early section of the text, which I do not quite understand.

First, I would like to address some of the points Denis Thouard raised but from the other way around. In general, the text that we have just heard seems to follow a new pattern of reading the Davos disputation, originally pioneered by Peter Gordon in his Continental divide. This book was quite illuminating in terms of digging out the context and texts that were not familiar to earlier commentators on this debate.

What seemed clear to me in Gordon’s presentation of this material, and in my opinion is confirmed in Enno Rudolph’s interpretation, is the complete lack on the part of these interpreters of any understanding of, or concern for, the phenomenological context of Heidegger’s thinking, the phenomenological character of that thinking through Being and Time and, I would argue, through 1929. The absence of any consideration of phenomenology makes discussion of essentialism and everything that

7  See Cassirer (1993: 303).

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goes with it, namely, the discussions on authenticity, the categories and decision, ambiguous and equivocal. I cannot go through all of these matters, but maybe later on we could discuss them.

We have talked about how to understand the categories of Being and Time, for which we used Heidegger’s own term “formal” and there is no doubt that there is a kind of essentialism in Heidegger. There is a structure of Dasein, an essential structure for entities of this sort, and there is also a transcendental philosophy that goes along with this.

Both notions, however, must be understood phenomenologically. So, the question is whether this kind of essentialism locks us into a certain interpretation of terms like “fundamental”, which in this text and in other contemporaneous ones seem, to some people, to have proto-fascist connotations. The latter is a very delicate matter. What does it mean to attribute essential structures to Dasein? It does not mean that Dasein is locked into some eternal radicalism, being incapable of fulfilling the roles that would belong to a philosophy of culture. This supposed opposition is itself politically motivated on the basis of subsequent events, but it is also fueled by what, admittedly, was Heidegger’s insulting attitude at Davos itself. He may have had his reasons, but that cannot be allowed to serve as a blanket condemnation of the work from beginning to end.

The discussion at Davos was, of course, a controversial performance.

But interpreting works from the beginning to the end of Heidegger’s thinking on the basis of the perception of how he occupied the role of a radical in the dispute with Cassirer, seems to me hermeneutically suspicious.

Finally, if the idea is that Cassirer was the road not taken, and that philosophy as such was poisoned by Heidegger’s victory at Davos – which seems to be both Rudolph’s and Gordon’s position–, then one has to say that with or without Heidegger a position like Cassirer’s would have had a hard time against the onslaught of contemporary analytic philosophy. For all its reasonableness, that position has the wrong form to gain much traction in contemporary discussions of subjectivity or selfhood. It would be yet another avenue that one might take, but it is not as if the philosophical landscape was destroyed by the fact that Cassirer did not stand up for himself a little bit more vigorously in this encounter. In my opinion, this is not plausible: Cassirer is a very interesting thinker, but Heidegger is perhaps deeper despite his flaws.

Who can say what is ultimately good for philosophy?

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Concerning the praise given to substance-and-function description or approach to subjectivity, I can only say that a phenomenological critic of this proposal would point out that this is just a basic form of cybernetic reduction of subjectivity to a function in one system or another, something that Heidegger did to a certain extent. That is what I would like to have a discussion about. What does it mean to say that all concepts of “being” are now turned into functional concepts? The latter is to me what goes on in a lot of cognitive science and computer modelling discussions. Such approaches can be useful, perhaps, and they certainly seem to have the air of scientificity upon them, but to me they leave many important philosophical questions about what we call “subjectivity” very open. I would like to say that to engage in this kind of discussion about Heidegger without recognizing the phenomenological background of his thinking during the period in question is an irresponsible move.

Denis Thouard

We should maybe add concerning the points that Steven Crowell just raised that at this stage of Cassirer’s thought he proposed the symbolic forms as an attempt to provide a more complex design of this group of functions, so that his aim was not to develop an abstract functionalism, but to attempt to think them together. Cassirer admitted, on one hand, substantialist ways to find the self through art or language, as well as he considered, on the other hand, the discoveries of contemporary sciences.

So, in my opinion, it is not a matter of choosing the one and excluding the other, that is to say, it is not a matter of deciding either in favor of a substantialist subject or in favor of the dissolution of subjectivity into functions. I think Cassirer tries to bring a multi-synthesis of the diverse ways in which the subject can be related to different objects.

I see very substantialist ways to find the self through art or language, and I also think that it is important to consider the discoveries of the contemporary sciences. So, in my opinion, it is not a matter of choosing one and excluding the other, that is to say, it is not a matter of deciding either in favor of a substantialist subject or in favor of the dissolution of subjectivity into functions. I think Cassirer tries to bring multi-synthesis of the diverse ways in which the subject can be related to different objects.

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André Laks

What Denis Thouard said may alleviate the debate to some extent.

On one hand, Heidegger’s way of writing and using words is ambiguous and can lead onto various paths. This raise an interesting and, I would say, a fundamental hermeneutical problem. Steven Crowell is of course right when he says that “Entschluss” is not by itself a fascist word; and surely if one takes this word and other ones as referring to formal or transcendental features, all doors remain open, one can choose to be fascist, democrat or marxist, these are all ontic decisions. Nevertheless, in the cultural settings in which Heidegger was speaking, the terms

“Entschlossenheit” and “Entschluss” are loaded, and that cannot be set aside, as if phenomenology could be immune to it. So, the question amounts to whether we recognize or not an ambiguity, and what we can make of it. Saying that Heidegger is victim of misunderstanding or retrospective reading does not seem to me to be quite enough. This is not to say that Steven Crowell or for that matter Alejandro Vigo are wrong to say that we must interpret formally these words and concepts, because of the methodological and philosophical project of Heidegger; this boils down to the very respectable recommendation to read Heidegger on his own terms. Nonetheless, in my opinion, the other side, in this case Enno Rudoph, is correct too. How to get responsibly out of this difficulty is an important question beyond Heidegger, because it has to do with the general question of how to read.

Steven Crowell

The formal approach that I am recommending does not imply that I cannot see the ambiguity of Heidegger’s language. Actually, I would insist on it. I agree with Rudolph, Gordon and others, who point out that Heidegger himself, having made his choice for Hitler, so to speak, was in some way using his language to support a certain political stance.

The ambiguity of notions of terms like “destruction of the tradition” is deliberate. Husserl, who was engaged in much the same project, did not use that language, and one can wonder why not. Pierre Bourdieu and others have done a good job explaining why Heidegger might have used that kind of language. I do not condone it; I am not interested in this hyperventilating crisis talk. If one thinks that there is something

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methodologically and philosophically honest about what Heidegger is doing, then one is obliged to understand these terms in light of that philosophical project. Afterwards, one must ask whether, and if so, where, Heidegger himself may have done an injustice to his philosophical position or used it for philosophish-politische purposes. In my opinion, this is a matter of judgment, namely, philosophical φρόνεσις, which has to be guided by something. What normally guides discussions on Heidegger, or at least seems to guide interpretations like Gordon’s and Rudolph’s, is hostility toward the entire post-Heideggerian state of philosophy. However, I would prefer to judge these things by what I take to be phenomenological evidence. I know that this is a complex matter, and I am certainly open to discussion about what it means or whether it is even possible. But too many discussions of Heidegger, especially now, seem to be intent on either unthinking acceptance or vicious rejection.

What I am objecting to in both Gordon’s and Rudolph’s text is that there is not the least recognition that Heidegger is employing a well thought out philosophical method; this is typical of contemporary philosophy, which overlooks and ignores the phenomenological tradition.

One further point that I found astonishing was the cavalier way in which the relationship between Heidegger and the tradition was presented as one of a radical overthrow of the normative claims of tradition. As we have seen in our own discussions here, this is an extremely reductive way of reading Heidegger’s complicated attitudes towards what we inherit. What would be a proper attitude? Are we supposed to say that tradition is ultimately and absolutely normative whatever that tradition might be? Heidegger’s fundamental question is what it is to be a norm-responsive being, and Being and Time presents us with a very nuanced analysis of how we are bound, in a distinctive and complicated way, by tradition. These are fundamental questions, and the discussion runs in circles if we reduce this to the idea that Heidegger throws out the tradition in favor of some blind authenticity. This sort of decisionism charge has been around a long time, but that does not make it any more convincing. If anything, Heidegger’s discussion of the heritage and of destiny in Being and Time section 74 does not leave enough room for critical decision. But I cannot pursue that here. Rudolph’s reading of the idea of the destruction of the tradition completely dismisses Heidegger’s complex phenomenology of the human condition that underlies this