The Anhistorical Man in the Age of Aquarius. Pars Prima.

 

~by David Aiken~

 

 

The Age of Aquarius

Prologue

Like so many players in a traveling company wandering up hill and down dale (the simile is from Nabokov, of course!), from our lofty stage we look out over the audience as our various plays unfold. For it is our purpose that those in attendance should be informed, moved, and inspired by our dialogue and our play. To wax lyrical in Bard-ese: thus do “we lay our scene, […which] is now the [two-part] traffic of our stage.”

 

Humanities, Crisis, & Inhumanities

We assume the following to be the case in the prima pars of this two-part essay. First, that it is predominately those areas of academic study leading to jobs and job placement that enjoy intellectual and financial institutional preference. Generally speaking, fields in the Humanities do not lead to jobs. Second, there are limited academic funding resources, all sources combined, and, generally speaking, it is those fields of study that lead to empirically measurable Results&Benefits (e.g., science/medicine, social sciences, and anything of military interest), which will receive systematic funding from our universities; those same fields that will, in turn, become sources of funding revenue for our universities. Finally, modern cultural values, such as globalization, diversity, and the like, must, in the final analysis, create societies that are fragmented and relativistic (i.e., diversified), which will necessarily result in the fragmentation of the classical or traditional (so-called “elitizing”) agenda that, according to many, presently hovers over and around the study of Humanities.

These assumptions address, to some degree at any rate, many of the ‘Problems in the Humanities’ that are commonly advanced in the literature: that they are 1) intellectually marginalized in our institutions; 2) that funding for Humanities programs is constantly threatened; and 3) that there are tensions between classical or traditional Humanities, and the more recent cultural and critical orientation of some Humanities programs.

Now questions of funding aside—although they are certainly not unrelated to the argument of this essay—while it may seem apparent that scholars engaged in the various disciplines of Humanistic studies are desirous of harmonizing the Humanities, i.e., of defining an overarching and common agenda for the study of Humanities in America, it would seem equally obvious that most of these traditional attempts will end in failure. It shall be our task to explain why this must be so.

 

 

Plato's Euthyphro: An Ancient Drama of Religion and Politics

I propose both as an explanation and a metaphor for at least some elements linked to crisis in the Humanities, the various “FAILURES” that were experienced by the great ethicist Socrates, and especially the striking failure so dramatically represented by Plato in the Euthyphro. Because frankly, and perhaps naively, I see little hope of success latterly where Socrates so obviously failed formerly.

Using as our springboard James Arieti’s original and certainly rather provocative readings of the Platonic dialogues as drama (Interpreting Plato, Rowman & Littlefield, 1991), it would seem that in the Euthyphro Plato stages for our consideration the inevitably unproductive and entirely modern dialectic between the flexible spirit of inquiry (Socrates) and the adamantine cocoon of willfully ignorant belief (Euthyphro). The readers of the Euthyphro, because it is a dialogue in philosophy, are entitled to think that an honest attempt is being made by the protagonists in the dialogue to dis- or un-cover some truth concerning the discursive subject, which is traditionally held to be piety and the gods. And yet we are not so fortunate in this case. For as a work of independent philosophy the Euthyphro is ultimately, and very obviously, inconclusive. Socrates is unable to bring Euthyphro to ‘see’ his ignorance concerning the gods, which means that Euthyphro will not, and if we may anticipate upon this young fellow’s future, will probably never question the piety of his own suit against his father for the wrongful death of his (Euthyphro’s) slave. Thus, in following out the metaphor of our argument, Socrates’ failure to persuade the willfully ignorant Euthyphro on the question of piety also foreshadows his soon to be demonstrated inability to persuade the jury at his own trial for impiety, which will, in turn, serve to confirm us in further concluding that the second charge Meletus brings against Socrates during his trial (viz. corrupting the youth of Athens), is highly implausible. For how could Socrates corrupt where he was so obviously unable to persuade?

 

So, at this point we need to step back in an attempt to get Plato’s ‘big’ picture concerning the importance of Socrates as a philosophical teacher, in order to understand how the successes and failures of Socrates might apply to us today as we attempt to solve the riddles brought to light by the various types of discourse with which the Humanities engage. Because from a straight-forward reading of Plato’s Socratic narratives, we are left to suppose that, in reality, Socrates had no more general success in corrupting the minds of the Athenian youths than he had, specifically, in getting Euthyphro to see the obvious errors in his thinking about piety and the gods. Secondly, when read against the background of the Apology, Plato’s Euthyphro seems to problematize the specific futility of an inquiring Socrates who is trying to reason with an ‘un-inquiring’ Euthyphro, which seems perhaps to suggest the general futility of attempting to engage in honest inquiry with anyone of faith. Indeed, at the end of the dramatic action the audience is left wondering what good Socrates has really accomplished in the polis, and whether, in fact, we may not conclude that his life was really, at least in terms of its philosophical import, a series of failures— failure to find philosophical answers to philosophical questions concerning piety and the gods, failure to encourage Euthyphro to a clearer and more appropriate way of reasoning, failure to persuade the jury of his innocence, failure finally either to teach, or even to corrupt, the youth of Athens.

On this reading, does not Plato lead us to the necessary conclusion that genuine “Socratic” dialogue, which should ideally lead us to convert intellectually to the ‘good life’ and thereby transform us into wise men, is in fact futile when confronted with an audience that is disposed neither to conversion nor to wisdom? And by metaphorical extension, are we not guided toward the same conclusion of futility when we consider that the same insurmountable obstacles that faced and finally crushed Socrates, continue to face those who engage in the modern humanistic pursuits?

 

Now assuming the plausibility both of our argument and of the metaphor, there are obviously a variety of possible responses to the question of how the Humanities might position themselves vis-à-vis changing times; but for the most part these responses are ultimately unsatisfactory. There are, for example, metaphorical responses to our metaphor, one of which might be derived from an optimistic reading of another of Plato’s Dialogues, The Theaetetus. On this reading, for example, there will inevitably be some searching, inquiring minds ‘out there’, and we teachers of the Humanities must simply persevere for the sake of those few who may one day come along, such as the humble Theaetetus, in their search for truth-in-the-world. This hopeful optimism is ubiquitous in the Humanities, and is reflected famously in Nietzsche’s bold epigraph to the Antichrist: “Dies Buch gehört den wenigsten. Vielleicht lebt selbst noch keiner von ihnen. (This Book belongs to the very few. And it may well be that none of them are even alive yet.)” However, if we actually and publically dare to formulate this elitizing argument in our various Humanities disciplines, then we must surely also be prepared to accept that, given the democratic accessibility generally underpinning entrance to America’s universities, and the politically correct environment of the modern intellectual and cultural arenas, the vast majority of our universities, which distain this unseasonable discourse, will continue to consider Humanities departments second class intellectual disciplines, and will continue to throw toward the Humanities only the most modest crumbs of financial support.

            However, leaving behind otherwise unsatisfactory “Theaetetian” rejoinders to my Euthyphro-as-metaphor argument, there are also other, certainly more practical interpretations of the role of the Humanities in the modern intellectual arena. What if we assume, for example, that the type of dilemma Plato frames in the Euthyphro does not speak to the current issues addressing the Humanities, and that the over-arching purpose of the Humanistic discourse is in fact rather more practical than philosophical or theoretical? An illustration of one such practical interpretation is the archiving role of the Humanities as suggested by, inter alia, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 or Ayn Rand’s Anthem. From this point of view, it may be said that the broader picture of what we do in the Humanities is to encompass, to archive, and to transmit all facets of human experience and knowledge, both empirical and beyond.

But while this is clearly an accurate depiction of what happens in the various disciplines of Humanistic studies, nonetheless, to consider the Humanities solely, or even only largely, under these auspices still fails to provide adequate answers for the difficult questions concerning why the Humanities are intellectually marginalized; why funding for Humanities programs is constantly threatened; and why there are tensions between classical or traditional Humanities and the more recent cultural & critical orientations of some Humanities programs.

 

 

There are obviously philosophical responses to our Euthyphro-as-metaphor argument. Pierre Hadot is to a large degree responsible in the modern generation for the rekindled interest in philosophy as a servant to the philosophical life, as an exercise in correct thinking and self-examination that helps us to transform our lives into philosophical art. Following in the tradition of the Stoics, the early Christians, Ignatius of Loyola, et al, Hadot suggests a “stoic” impetus that sees value in the practice of a life lived philosophically, and argues that the philosophical practice of life is persuasively reasonable because the life of the mind is the sole means for the individual to arrive at happiness.

From among the plurality of possible life-options that society, which is both fragmented and relativistic, lays out before us, the philosophical life of the mind must certainly be more desirable than the life of men lived as brute beasts. This affirmation is anticipated even in the more traditional, albeit impoverished interpretations of Plato’s Theaetetus, where both the humble Theaetetus as well as the wise Socrates fail to present a solution to the aporia concerning human knowledge, but where Plato’s readers are left with the idea that the dramatic action of life does not necessarily lie in abstractly understanding or interpreting and resolving specific intellectual problems, but is manifest rather in the simple philosophical practice of coming together to reason and to speak about reality and the human experience. At the very least, goes this argument, this process increases human understanding about the human condition. Yet this idealization of human inquiry as the goal of the humanities, especially when the student of ideas begins to understand that, per this reading, human inquiry does not lead necessarily to increase of knowledge, still falls short of addressing meaningfully the hard questions concerning the value of the humanities in higher education.

 

While no interpretation of Plato’s dramatic Socrates may provide a totally unequivocal description and response to problems presently confronting the Humanities, and especially in the American Academy, there does yet remain an American philosophical response to these difficult questions. One persuasive response, which is at once meaningful, intellectually satisfying, and relevant to the specifically American evolution of studies in the Humanities, is the principle of education proposed by Thomas Jefferson of Virginia. Unlike the philosophical exercise of wisdom traditionally embraced by the western and profoundly Platonized intellectual tradition, in the new experiment in self-governance called America, argues Jefferson, the people need to be generally educated in order to watch over and safeguard the orderly outworking of governance by the people—the people need to be educated in order to protect against the corruption of political power into tyranny. “The most effectual means of preventing [the perversion of power into tyranny]”, suggests Jefferson, are,

to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibits, that possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes (Thomas Jefferson: Diffusion of Knowledge Bill, 1779. FE 2:221, Papers 2:526).

Quite distinct from the paideia of the Greeks, the type of education to which Jefferson alludes constitutes in fact the bedrock of a distinctly American liberal education, namely politics, history, and the study of philosophy for virtue. Jefferson speaks of a People even more broadly conceived, though, a People that is at once wise and honest, happy and virtuous.

Laws will be wisely formed and honestly administered in proportion as those who form and administer them are wise and honest; whence it becomes expedient for promoting the public happiness that those persons whom nature has endowed with genius and virtue should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens... (Thomas Jefferson: Diffusion of Knowledge Bill, 1779. FE 2:221, Papers 2:527).

So, although the metaphors and reflections that have been suggested in this essay do not necessarily elucidate the varied problematic of Platonic interpretation, they yet serve the purpose of demonstrating, by a consideration of Socrates’ dramatic dialogues, the insufficiencies of classical western thought to solve the difficulties presently confronting humanistic studies. This allows us to consider in perhaps a new light the radical educational propositions of Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, and to envision a Jeffersonian response to the questions concerning the role, value, and purpose of the study of the Humanities in the American society. At the very least, such a response must include the idea that all teachers of the Humanities must be engaged in the struggle to ensure that humanistic studies represent, finally and definitively, the core of all education in America. Education must be liberal.

Jefferson did not conceive of an America in which the study of the Human Sciences would be in crisis, and in which the Humanities would have to skirmish with the “hard” sciences for institutional approval and funding dollars. In present-day America, among the very first subjects to be funded are the harder sciences, and among those to be cut in times of budget deficit, subjects in the Humanities and the Arts. In Jefferson’s vision of American, however, the education that is necessary to a free, self-governing people does not lie in an understanding of the hard sciences or the social sciences; but in the general improvement of the individual gatekeepers of democracy, which has always been the interest and specific goal of the Humanities.

The value of science [i.e., general and liberal knowledge] to a republican people, the security it gives to liberty by enlightening the minds of its citizens, the protection it affords against foreign power, the virtue it inculcates, the just emulation of the distinction it confers on nations foremost in it; in short, its identification with power, morals, order and happiness (which merits to it premiums of encouragement rather than repressive taxes), are considerations [that should] always [be] present and [bear] with their just weight. (Thomas Jefferson: On the Book Duty, 1821).

To a very large degree indeed, the continuity of a nation’s political, social, and cultural heritage is established and guaranteed by the ties that bind students to their teachers. So to enable a Jeffersonian vision, which strives after the ongoing improvement of democracy’s gatekeepers, teachers of Humanities must continue to argue and to militate for the study of those subjects that keep our eyes riveted upon Power of all sorts, and, how much more, upon the subtle permutations of power into tyranny. We need to study history, and politics, civics and current events in order to keep before our eyes the political institutions whereby Men define and govern themselves; and we need to study foreign languages, philosophy, religions, mythologies and literatures, and all the “sciences” in order to understand that it is through various and diverse languages and “stories” that we as a people initially begin to frame, and then to flesh out, our political and social institutions, which in turn become reflections of the intellectual life of the American demos. Why do we do this? Because, "[i]f the children are untaught, their ignorance and vices will in future life cost us much dearer in their consequences than it would have done in their correction by a good education" (Thomas Jefferson to Joseph C. Cabell, 1818. FE 10:99).

 

Bibliography

·      Arieti, James A. 1991. Interpreting Plato. The Dialogues as Drama. MD:Rowman & Littlefield Pubs.

·      Cornford, F.M. 1971. Principium Sapientiae. Gloucester, Mass: Peter Smith

·      Guthrie, W.K.C. 1975. A History of Greek Philosophy, Vol. IV. NY: Cambridge University Press.

 

Reprised and reworked from an original Phrontisterion essay published in November 2016. This essay was modified from its original form, which was presented as part of a Panel Presentation at The International Humanities Symposium held at Columbia University in 2007, with the title: “Conversations and Conversions: Humanities in the State University.” The complete Panel Presentation was published as "Skepticism, Stoicism, and the Jeffersonian Model" in The International Journal of the Humanities, Vol. 5, No. 8, 2007. ]

 

 

The Space of a Man

~by David Aiken~

 

Borders & Edges.

            Every-thing is just so frustratingly approximative—so imprecise and fluctuating in a very-vague kind of way. This is true of all things, of those things of a physis sort (re: nature & the natural) as with things of a kosmos sort (re: intellect & the interpretative).  For a refresher course on this distinction, have a look at the Phrontisterion essay on Anti-conversion in “An Existential Moment” (February 2013).

         

   Trying to determine the exact boundaries or edges of physical things, for example, which seem so very clear and so very observably present to our senses, is notoriously difficult in this rather hazy kind of world of ours. The classical illustration of this idea for students of philosophy is the good old-fashioned table (or chair): my body tells me that the table is one sort of a thing—it is solid, ponderously weighty, and does not seem to be going anywhere at any given speed; it seems to just want to hang out in the space that it presently occupies. In contrast, however, my mind tells me that the table is also a constituted, and therefore composed kind of ‘event’—it is made up of an unimaginable number of invisible, itsy-bity teeny-weeny other-things that are all zinging around at warp-speed, and which are not at all concrete and stationary like the table-thing of which they are the composing elements. Now which of these two tables, the one that is speaking to my body or the one that is comprehended by my mind, is the most nearly-true definition of this particular table at which I sit and write? It seems obvious that both ‘truths’ are somehow implicated in the ‘thing’ that is this table, but only one of the truths is actually experienced by me. From one point of view—the body’s, the edges of the table seem quite distinct from the edges of me the writer, but from a second point of view—the mind’s, both the table and I seem inseparably implicated in the dance of sub-physical, invisible other-reality that frames the symphonic composition of things-in-the-world that are even now presenting themselves to our senses as visible and therefore stable. As World

            In contrast to our table, language is obviously a very cosmetic (i.e., from kosmos) sort of thing. And although it is the primary tool by means of which humans speak out their recognition of the world, it is also perhaps one of the more disturbingly approximative forms of identifying and articulating object-events. One has only to look at the idea of denotations and connotations, which sets the boundaries for words. The denotative world of a word is actually quite straitjacketed and narrow, and has therefore at least some degree of precision because it is more exclusive, while a word’s connotative world is infinitely richer and inclusive, brimming with associative images and suggestions, and overflowing with emotional and figurative relationships. The word ‘invitation’, for example, is denotatively a “written or verbal request inviting someone to go somewhere or to do something,” as in a wedding or birthday party invitation. Connotatively, however, an ‘invitation’ lives in an entirely different space –it is an incitement to venture out into strange new corridors of the world, a bidding to try new things, a giving of permission to go through doors that stand open but which may, at first blush, seem to us forbidding and ominous.

 

Toward Enlightenment.

            In the historical intervals that have followed upon the heels of Enlightenment in the West, we are offered rare glimpses into an interpretative world, a kosmos, that is almost entirely illuminated and articulated by purely human categories of thinking. Enlightenment created ‘The Individual’. This was obviously the case in the first period of Western Enlightenment in ancient Greece, which gave rise to philosophy as the very first human scientia of things natural, and also in the second period of enlightenment in 18^th century Europe, which superintended the fairly radical dethronement of the Religious Mind, and the gradual enthronement of the rational and thoroughly human Mind as the measure and meaning-giver of man in his world.

            In the first period of Western Enlightenment, the “Space” where The Individual “happens” (—for there are some philosophers who make the case that Socrates was in fact the West’s first individual and that he taught a philosophy where the individual mattered as individuum—) can be measured on a gradation that separates two influential Greek thinkers from the classical period: on the extreme rationalist end of our Scale of Individuality there is the Greek architect-philosopher, Hippodamus (498-408 BC), who originally hailed from Miletus in Asia Minor, and on the spiritualizing end of that scale there is the famous Athenian philosopher, Plato (ca. 428-347 BC).

            According to the Wiki-world on Hippodamus, we discover how, through this first urban planner, Man presumed to impose upon the real topography of the real physical world of hills & valleys and streams & rivers, the rationalizing and abstracted geographical grid-frames of strictly human and cosmetic thought. This was the birthright of rationalism, perhaps already at its worst.

Hippodamus… was an ancient Greek architect, urban planner, physician, mathematician, meteorologist and philosopher and is considered to be the “father” of urban planning, the namesake of Hippodamian plan of city layouts (grid plan). […] According to Aristotle, Hippodamus was the first author who wrote upon the theory of government, without any knowledge of practical affairs. His plans of Greek cities were characterised by order and regularity in contrast to the intricacy and confusion common to cities of that period, even Athens. He is seen as the originator of the idea that a town plan might formally embody and clarify a rational social order.

 

On the other hand, although his dialogue The Republic has been almost entirely co-opted by political philosophers and re-constructed as some kind of feeble humbuggery disguised as a rational ‘theory of state’, Plato in fact allegorizes for us in The Republic, through the analogy of the State, the interior structures—the types of Souls—that can be found among Individual Men. Parenthetically, however, neither this idea nor this metaphor originates with Plato, because we find already a earlier incarnation of both in the nature poem of the Pre-Socratic philosopher-poet, Parmenides. Or, in the even more ancient notion of Hindu castes.

            If we follow out the broad strokes of the narrative in Plato’s Republic, though, Plato’s initiatory intent throughout his mythical “republican” allegory becomes obvious, an idea that can be said to be confirmed through later usage not only by the Christian apostle, Paul, who appropriated and employed the structure of that allegory to good effect in his New Testament letter to the Church in Corinth (I Corinthians 15:45ff), but also through usage by later Neo-Platonic philosophers, such as the late 5^th century Boethius, who, in Book IV of the Consolation of Philosophy, divides man’s life journey into either a descent toward the embodiment of the life of the beasts (evil) or an ascent toward becoming gods (good).

            At a very basic level, in his Republic Plato means to portray for us, in the Gyges myth (Book II), the ‘earthy’ man (Paul’s psychikon or soulish man, i.e., a man like the First Adam/Man; I Cor. 15:46-47) who burrows into the earth and discovers, but does not grasp the importance of, the limitations of earthly dreams and aspirations. Allegorically speaking, as an alternative to the life of burrowing and tunneling into the bowels of the earth, Plato tells us in Book VII a second story in the form of an allegory, the well-known allegory of the Cave, where we learn about the second man, who seeks enlightenment (Paul’s pneumatikon or heavenly/spiritual man, a man like the Second Adam/Man; I Cor. 15:46-47), who struggles to free himself from the earthly Cave, and who, during his ascent out of the earth-womb, discovers the higher and indeed the highest truths in, about, and behind the World. In Plato’s final myth in the Republic (Book X), we discover a character, a Phoenician, whose name is Er. In this last republican myth Plato hopes for the Reader to understand that the choice is given to each of us as to how to live, either as the earthy man or the sky-bound man—the only choice that necessity imposes upon us is that we necessarily must choose the direction of our journey: either our lives will be as diggers and burrowers in the darkness, or as climbers toward the sunlight and the stars. Choose—we must; but in which direction? That is both the reader’s rub, and the philosophical reason behind Plato’s writing of the Republic!

            For the philosophical comparison in a history-of-ideas kind of way, Plato’s earthy man or sky-bound man are also conceptually anticipated (QED) in Jainism, in the Śvētāmbara (White-clad) and Digambara (sky-clad) traditions.

 

The one constant in the enlightened Greece of antiquity is the shift of philosophers and poets away from narratives that are grounded in stories about the gods. And in that shifting away from the Religious Mind, it is possible for us to cherry-pick illustrations of those thinkers who leaned toward the rationalizing interpretative framework of Hippodamus just as easily as one can find illustrations for those who tended to spiritualize Man after the way of Plato and his followers.

 

In the second period of Western enlightenment, the “Space” of The Individual is measurable by the progression of the democratic ideal from its small Western cradle to its pervasively global nesting grounds; and the cornerstone for this enlightenment vision is, obviously, the idea of The Individual. As an idea, The Individual replaced the idea of the Divine Right of Kings (Phrontisterion essay, February 2015).

The model for the democratic vision, of course, is European enlightenment, and flows organically from the beheading of the idea of the divine right of kings. When the one king is dead, then ‘We the People’ is assigned the burden of kingship – each one his own little bit. Upon reflection, though, in the democratic model how does one so tie the power of state to the individual, both philosophically and functionally, that the state is ensured a long, even if complex life? Historically speaking, the model of democracy in the west, inspired by the ideas of enlightenment, began life moored to several fundamental principles: participation in the vote; freedom of expression; separation of religious interference from the function and power of the state; and a press that badgers those holding office in order to inhibit the easy spread of corruption.

 

At some point in our reflection there must unavoidably arise an ambiguity, or perhaps it is only a tension, between The Individual conceived of as physis or as kosmos. Up until this point in our reflection, we have been considering The Individual primarily as a cosmetic entity, as an historical idea whose boundaries have been greatly expanded around the periods of enlightenment in the West. This conclusion is generally confirmed among historians of ideas working in just about every field. In his book Escape From Freedom, for example, the social psychologist Erik Fromm (Ch. II) agrees that as an idea, The Individual emerges as a post-enlightenment phenomenon (although he only refers to one period of Western enlightenment, forgetting the phenomenon of Greek philosophy as an enlightenment), maintaining that what he calls the ‘process of individuation’ or the ‘emergence of the individual’ “seems to have reached its peak in modern history in the centuries between the Reformation and the present.”

            However, there is also a more denotative aspect to the idea of The Individual, and that becomes clear when one begins to wonder what it means to be, essentially, “an” individual; what is that ‘whatever’ that is cocooned inside the more connotative elements that accrue to people as a result of their particular historical circumstances? Is there some essential quantity, or quality, that all men share as humans, which also makes them specifically individual? Is there such a thing as an essential and therefore irreducible human nature?

The two general philosophical theories on this question, which Phrontisterion examined in “The Existentialist ‘Project’ & the Ostensible ‘Problem’ of Existence” (November 2013), might be characterized as the Camusian position and the Sartrian position. Camus, following Nietzsche and others in the mainstream of Western philosophical thought, thinks there is an essentialness to men, which, when considered as a collective, makes it meaningful to speak of individual men as collective Man. Sartre, in contrast, depicts man as, essentially, an empty set = {  }, that he is a bundle of possible choices linked to a specific space in time for a while, then not. In this respect, Fromm (op cit, 13) is Sartrian in his thinking about The Individual, for he writes:

It is not as if we had on the one hand an individual equipped by nature with certain drives and on the other, society as something apart from him, either satisfying or frustrating these innate propensities. […] The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed and biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man. […] Man’s nature, his passions, and anxieties are a cultural product; as a matter of fact, man himself is the most important creation and achievement of the continuous human effort, the record of which we call history.

 

So, up to this point in our reflection we have gained the idea that the history of Western enlightenments has been consistently marked by a shift in the boundaries of men’s view of both themselves as specific objects, as individuum, and of themselves as individual role-players in their world. Both historical shifts toward Western Enlightenment, first in ancient Greece and then in 18^th century France, have been characterized by a vision of human reality wherein otherworldliness has yielded the right-of-way to a this-worldly interpretation and expression of Man in his world, with a resulting progression in thinking from the Religious Mind to the Rational Mind.

           

Away from Enlightenment.

            History pauses for neither man nor idea, however, but turns itself over and over constantly in response to “another shake of the kaleidoscope,” to borrow on Maurice Gee’s felicitous expression [Plumb, p. 142]—which only goes to show, once again, the prescience of old Heraclitus the Obscure, that rJei√n ta» o¢la potamouv di÷khn: “It is the way of things […] that, like the currents of the river, the whole [thing] just streams along” (D/K 12, vol. 1, p. 141; cf B12, 91). And as if in historical response to a free-wheeling period of Free-Thinking that followed hard on the heels of the first period of enlightenment, and which has come to be celebrated as the birth of Greek philosophy, along came the onslaught of the Christian Church. And philosophical enlightenment gave way before it.

Consequently, the Religious Mind would hold intellectual sway in Western History until the rise of the second period of enlightenment in Europe, in the 18^th century. And in the period following the second period of enlightenment, which is the swinging door connecting to our contemporary world, it would seem that, once again, the Religious Mind is seeking to subjugate or vanquish entirely the free-thinking enlightenment ways of Western Nations and Men. The children of the first enlightenment yielded the floor to the Religious Mind of the burgeoning Christian sect and its beliefs. But at our moment in the historical flow of the West, we, the children of the second enlightenment, are certainly not obliged to make the same choices as their intellectual forefathers. For better, as for worse.

            The Western notion of freedom, which is rooted in the rationalistic notions of The Enlightenment Individual, is not an absolute or eternal value, identical for all men at all times. Not all cultures articulate or value freedoms in the same way; and while the desire to be free may be arguably innate, as Fromm [op cit] thinks, he also suggests that “the human aspect of freedom” coexists within a coterie of deadly rivals, which include the longing for submission, and the lust for power. So, when all is said and done it would seem that far from being static and fixed, the idea of freedom for the individual remains a negotiable quantity—philosophically & politically.

 

Our natural world (physis) spins out on a long thread of heat-releasing entropy… an ongoing give-and-take between order and disorder—and we must make our peace with that. But then this physis-principle must also reasonably hold for the reality that is created by and anchored in the human mind—the kosmos. Such, anyway, was Friedrich Nietzsche’s intuition and insight.

The Age of Religion yields to the Religious Mind, which then yields again to the Age of Reason, which seems to want to, once again, yield to the Religious Mind… and on and on in ceaseless flow like Siddhartha’s eternally flowing river. Which then yields again historically to whatever paradigmatic frame arises that can impose itself in the mix and jostle. And the whole of human history, like the currents of the river with all of its nooks & crannies and ebbs & flows, just keeps streaming along, sometimes quickly sometimes slowly; for human history also plays in the streams of entropy where order (The Age of Religion) submits to disorder (The Age of Reason), and then disorder to order, in a constant dance of ideas.  What is disorder, after all, but the intrinsic nature that frames the essential idea of “freedom”?

 

So, what does it mean to live in the West, inside the Western mindset, governed by Reason and the principles of the Rights of Men? And what happens when there is no longer even a general consensus about the value of the enlightenment mindset (kosmos-disorder), but where the children of enlightenment begin to imagine alternative mindsets other than living in an environment of reasonable enlightenment? Where it becomes possible to imagine cohabitation between the Religious Mind and the Rational Mind? Between order and disorder?

            The Sophists of Plato’s day believed they could improve other men through their wise teaching, but Socrates whole-heartedly disagreed with them (Apology 20B). Yet, if we are to believe Socrates, who is after all Plato’s great ethical hero, and if we really cannot improve one another through wise teaching, then at the end of the day we are left, truly, with only The Individual, who must discover and practice his own virtue. For Socrates, of course, the ideal practice was to follow Justice. If we side with Socrates on this idea that the individual is alone to unveil himself through his practice of virtue (i.e., rightness or justice), then it becomes important for the rest of us, as both spectators and players on the theatrical stages of life, and to whatever degree we wish to exemplify virtue, to take our cues from other fine actors. One man can make the difference. But the cost of making the difference can be exacting, as the pacifist journalist, Jean Jaurès, discovered, who was practically the only man in the whole of France to publicly stand against France and her imperious desire, at all costs, to enter the first world war with Germany. The cost to Jean Jaurès was his life, assassinated from behind in a restaurant. 

 

Have the democratic nations of the West really reached the effective and unsuccessful end of Enlightenment Reason as the framework for self-governance? Is a society governed principally by Reason really just a dystopia patiently awaiting the inevitable return of halcyon days of ordered innocence and goodness dripping like manna from the hand of one god or another? This seems to be Western history’s prophetic narrative, to judge the future of the West by its intellectual history.

            By way of concluding, neither optimistically nor pessimistically, but realistically: in an article entitled kant’s depression, the author suggests that Immanuel Kant anticipated precisely this very unsatisfactory end-point of human reason:

“… What Kant doesn’t consider is that reason might actually be connected to depression, rather than stand as its opposite. What if depression – reason’s failure to achieve self-mastery – is not the failure of reason but instead the result of reason? What if human reason works “too well,” and brings us to conclusions that are anathema to the existence of human beings? What we would have is a “cold rationalism,” shoring up the anthropocentric conceits of the philosophical endeavor, showing us an anonymous, faceless world impervious to our hopes and desires. And, in spite of Kant’s life-long dedication to philosophy and the Enlightenment project, in several of his writings he allows himself to give voice to this cold rationalism. In his essay on Leibniz’s optimism he questions the rationale of an all-knowing God that is at once beneficent towards humanity but also allows human beings to destroy each other. And in his essay “The End of All Things” Kant not only questions humanity’s dominion over the world, but he also questions our presumption to know that – and if – the world will end at all: “But why do human beings expect an end to the world at all? And if this is conceded to them, why must it be a terrible end?”

            The implication in these and other comments by Kant is that reason and the “rational estimation of life’s value” may not have our own best interests in mind, and the self-mastery of reason may not coincide with the self-mastery of us as human beings (or, indeed, of the species as a whole). Philosophical reason taken to these lengths would not only make philosophy improbable (for how could one have philosophy without philosophers?), but also impractical (and what would be the use of such a “depressive reason”?). What Kant refers to as depression is simply this stark realization: that thought is only incidentally human. It would take a later generation of philosophers to derive the conclusion of this: that thought thinks us, not the reverse.”

 

Further reading:

·      https://www.nouvelobs.com/les-chroniques-de-pierre-jourde/20201020.OBS34966/aux-musulmans-et-en-particulier-aux-eleves-et-parents-d-eleves-qui-desapprouvent-les-caricatures-de-mahomet.html

 

(Reprised from an original essay published on Phrontisterion on 01/09/2015)

Nietzsche, Eichmann, and Heidegger—Rub-a-dub-dub.

~by David Aiken~

 

In the hallways of history there happened a meeting of minds between a philosophically illuminated poet, a toadying technocrat, and a mystical philosopher given to the arcane. A meeting that gave birth to a catastrophe of all too human proportions.

Nietzsche, in soul and in spirit, is brother in arms to Milton’s Moloc:

                                                            “Scepter'd King
Stood up, the strongest and the fiercest Spirit
That fought in Heav'n; now fiercer by despair:
His trust was with th' Eternal to be deem'd
Equal in strength, and rather then be less
Care'd not to be at all; with that care lost
Went all his fear: of God, or Hell, or worse
He reck'd not….”

The poet-philosopher gave prophetic voice to a foundation myth about the supposed origins, and especially the decline, of morality in the west. Bespeaking an obviously accurate psychological insight, or perhaps it was more truly a philosophical intuition, about the invention and breakdown of morality, Nietzsche’s genealogical myth would subsequently inspire certain knavish and benighted folks who, some 30 years after his death in 1900, would use his philosophical framings as political stage directions for the creation of the German state under the Nazis.

 

Eichmann, on the other hand, as more recent history seems clearly to be attesting, might appear on the world-stage as the incarnation of Milton’s Belial:

                                                            “he seemd
For dignity compos'd and high exploit:
But all was false and hollow; though his Tongue
Dropt Manna, and could make the worse appear
The better reason, to perplex and dash
Maturest Counsels: for his thoughts were low;
To vice industrious, but to Nobler deeds
Timorous and slothful: yet he pleas'd the ear,”

 

Eichmann, a servile architect of a state designed according to Nazi ideology, laboured at a particular period in the history of the German people to create a very specific application for Nietzsche’s mytho-philosophical insight, an application whose composition and legacy was the realization of human engineered death on a mass scale.

 

The last of the protagonists in our all-too-human drama from the hallways of History, Heidegger, the mystical voice of philosophical anti-rationalism and unenlightenment, or obscurantism, continued mulishly to trace his career path within the framework of this technocratic ideology, unhindered. In this, Heidegger the Accommodator is like Milton’s Mammon:

                                                “Let us not then pursue
By force impossible, by leave obtain'd
Unacceptable, though in Heav'n, our state
Of splendid vassalage, but rather seek
Our own good from our selves, and from our own
Live to our selves, though in this vast recess,
Free, and to none accountable, preferring
Hard liberty before the easie yoke
Of servile Pomp. Our greatness will appeer
Then most conspicuous, when great things of small,
Useful of hurtful, prosperous of adverse
We can create, and in what place so e're
Thrive under evil, and work ease out of pain
Through labour and indurance.”

 

We backward-viewers of this dramatic meeting of minds can at least be certain about this, however—which is that Friedrich Nietzsche is in no way responsible for, or causally linked to, Adolf Eichmann’s ideological repurposing of his philosopher’s mytho-poetic explanatory fantasy; nor for another philosopher’s, Martin Heidegger’s, tailspin into a German nationalistic mysticism. Nor would the holocaust of the German period have been avoided had Nietzsche never articulated or published his philo-genealogizing myth.

            From the perspective of Nietzsche’s definition of morality, this latter realization would also seem to suggest for our contemporary consideration that, in a world becoming progressively post-“moral,” the reinvention of a supposed Greek ideal/idyll, which occurred at the historico-philosophical juncture of our three actors, is perhaps not only impossible, but also ultimately undesirable. For in the face of those like Eichmann and Heidegger and other ideologues who appear regularly on the world’s stages, and who seek to embody Nation and Race as material and therefore intuitively “natural” moral values, perhaps, when all the cosmic dust has settled, we may be looking at the true face of Nietzsche’s natural, Zarathustrian Man—the fully human animal.

 

§ NIETZSCHE

            On the Genealogy of Morality is a philosophical myth, and neither a critical philosophical analysis nor an argument of any reasoned sort. It is a retroscopic myth, much like Plato’s Republic, which harks back to the putative roots of moral ideas and moral idea-traditions; and the purpose of this myth is to provide a perhaps more than true explanation, albeit of a once-upon-a-time sort, about how western “morality” came into existence. Mythopoetically, Nietzsche conceives of Morality negatively, as a wrong-headed celebration of the values espoused by a priestly caste: of weakness and vulnerability, of other-worldliness, and of the hatred of the body and the this-worldly body-life, such as in Jesus’ “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.”

            In Nietzsche’s myth, these mentally and physically feeble, priestly-minded ones, who were natural-born “outsiders” to the heroic warrior nobility celebrated and valued by the Greeks (think: Homer and the Heroic Code), achieved ascendancy first by separating themselves from the naturally “good” nobility of the Greeks, then by conflating the value of the naturally good, which espoused this-Life with gusto, with the value of the unnaturally “moral,” which, not measuring up to the challenges of this-Life, championed the life to come hereafter—the after-Life.

            On this telling there were, once upon a time, The Greeks, an ancient people of Virtue who were ethical (good) in the most natural and innocent sense of that term; they were good and noble; a warrior caste in which one man’s worth, in terms of strength or of intelligence or of oration, was always measured over and against another man’s or a god’s. This was in the pre-moral age of the West. Then, at a certain point in the history of Western Man, the Religious Man, the Priest, the weaker, went to war against the naturally Virtuous Man. Out of a sense of outrage and a desire for revenge (Nietzsche’s ressentiment), the Priest and those inspired by the Priest waged war upon the strong and able. The priestly had understood that not all men are excellent warriors, or cunning, or highly valued contenders on the stage of humanly conceived time; and they understood that they themselves were lacking in these natural qualities. These priestly “others,” who fell outside the natural Greek world of values, were the non-contenders, the vulnerable, the meek, the herd; they are, says Nietzsche, the spiritual ancestors of Western Jewish and Christian thought, and therefore the original nihilists – the naysayers of the vigorous Life.

            Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals is a pseudo-historical reconstruction myth. It is not a philosophy argument “in favour of” the breakdown of moral thought, but rather, a philosophical reflection on the birth of “morals” as a nihilistic redefinition of “virtue”; it is a retelling of a changeling myth, where an after-Life replaces a here-and-now Life, an ex-change that went unnoticed for some 2,000 years until its true character began to tell in this, the period of its final disintegration into an existence tale.

            According to the Nietzschean myth, the moralistic nihilism or other-than-this-Life sentiment at the heart of religious thinking, stands in opposition to an entirely human ethic of natural virtue as goodness, as, for example, was articulated in the Greece of antiquity. And Nietzsche prophesies for us in his existential myth a future breakdown of this naysayer “morality.” Nietzsche’s rumination is not an attempt at an applied ethic of any sort; rather, it is the mythical theory of an historical rise, and then the modern fall, of a “moral” system that for lo these many long Christian centuries has been articulating a parallel world that is no world of or for natural men.

           

§ EICHMANN

            Now, what if one were to conceive of the possibility that Nietzsche’s philosophical myth was actually a reasonably plausible genealogical accounting, and that some version of a changeling event occurred in the history of western ideas; and what if one were also to accept the obvious Nietzschean conclusion that the creation of a fully human ethic grounded in the this-worldly experience of the human animal is the future job of men, and that this must especially be a work for philosophers?

            Would it not also be conceivable to envision the possible historical rise of a Nazi political ethic, of the sort articulated by Eichmann in Jerusalem—a wedding between an evolutionary—‘struggle for the survival of the most ‘fit’’—worldview as the frame for human action, on the one hand, and the cogency of a prophetic myth, on the other hand, wherein the religious mythological framing for human value is perceived as ultimately unmenschlich because it is decidedly anti-Life? But then comes the Crito moment of incomprehension. Because although the world listened attentively to this wedded philosophical concoction that Eichmann argued for at his trial, that audience slowly came to the realization that Eichmann was no Socratic man of wisdom, for he arrived at conclusions diametrically opposed to those drawn by Socrates in Plato’s philosophical drama, Crito.

            Plato’s Crito is about the death of Socrates. Just before drinking the hemlock, Socrates is engaged in conversation with his long-time friend, Crito, who tries to persuade Socrates that he must not allow the state to put him to death, that he must live. Crito argues for the survival in the here and now of a valuable human’s life (such as Socrates’ life), while Socrates quietly reminds his friend that the physical life of the body is of little worth when measured against the good life, which is the life lived honourably and justly. And it is on this philosophical question that Eichmann sided with Crito against Socrates. Eichmann argued not only that the physical life of a valuable group—the German nation, is a grounded and worthwhile value, but also that the survival of the preferred group is justified, when historical manifest destiny requires it, by the death of another (in)valuable group—the Jews.

            Truly a concatenation of ideas to die for…

 

But is it really such a stretch to imagine a translation of a philosophical or prophetic myth into a political reality? Is this in fact not absolutely inevitable at some point, and therefore predictable? The “argument” of the Crito is represented by a drama in which Socrates makes the case for the just and honourable life, which is the life of philosophical virtue, but where Crito makes the case simply for the material life of the body. Plato certainly expects his audience to side with Socrates’ reasoning against Crito. But then, enter Eichmann.

 

In her recent book Eichmann Before Jerusalem [Knopf, 2014; original German 2011], the German historian Bettina Stangneth performs two public services. First, she provides a rectification for the myth created by Hanna Arendt concerning the perceived mousy or underwhelming personality of the man Eichmann, by opening up for public perusal all the most recent archives concerning the historical Eichmann and his very personal monument to Nazi thought – the holocaust. And while her historical overhaul of Eichmann does not pose any direct challenge to Arendt’s theoretical notion that evil may be banal in its manifestations, it certainly does abrogate the specific use of Eichmann as an embodiment of that theory. Second, she lays out “in his own words” Eichmann’s philosophical apologia sua vita, which reveals an Eichmann/Crito of horrifyingly insightful philosophical clarity.

Point One in Eichmann’s apology: innocence before the Law, God, and Men (p. 216). “’Without making any kind of Pilate-like gesture, I find that I am not guilty before the law, and before my own conscience; and with me the people who were my subordinates during the war. For we were all… little cogs in the machine of the Head Office for Reich Security, and thus, during the war, little cogs in the great drivetrain of the murdering motor: war.” The oath of allegiance that bound everyone, ‘friend and foe,’ was the ‘highest obligation that a person can enter into,’ and everyone had to obey it. Across the world, leaders had really only given a single order: ‘the destruction of the enemy.’ For Eichmann, the idea that the war had been total and global, in which the goal was to eliminate the enemy, was a simple statement of fact. His radical biologism led to the belief that a ‘final victory’ was imperative: the unavoidable war between the races would leave only one remaining.”

Point Two in Eichmann’s apology: general morality is on Eichmann’s side (pp. 216-217). So ‘What about morality?’ asks Eichmann. […] “’There are a number of moralities: a Christian morality, a morality of ethical values, a morality of war, a morality of battle. Which will it be?’ The leadership of the nation, Eichmann goes on to explain, has always stood above the thought of individuals. To illustrate, he brings in the Old Testament and also modern science: the church, too, recognizes the power of the state as the highest guiding principle on earth….”

Point Three in Eichmann’s apology: Moral thinking in the West leads to the conclusion that the individual must be obedient to authority (p. 217). “…’inner morality’ is all well and good, but the most important thing is always the will of the nation’s leaders—not simply because they have the power to force people to obey, but because they act only on behalf of the people. THEREFORE [emphasis mine] a person should not allow his inner morality to conflict with his orders; he should see that these orders are for the good of the people and carry them out with conviction. […] I found my parallels quite plainly and simply in nature. […] [T]he more I listened to the natural world, whether microcosm or macrocosm, the less injustice I found, not only in the demands made by the government of my people, to which I belong, but … also in the goals of our enemies’ governments and leaders. Everyone was in the right, when seen from his own standpoint.’ In other words: everyone wanted total war, and that fact provided the legitimation of everyone to wage it, using every means necessary, both ‘conventional and unconventional.’”

Point Four in Eichmann’s apology: evolutionary theory as the basis for ethical theory (p. 218-219). ‘Eichmann completely rejected traditional ideas of morality, in favour of the no-holds-barred struggle for survival that nature demanded. […] The struggle among the races was in essence a struggle for resources—a basic idea familiar to many people concerned about future wars over oil and drinking water today. […] The only thing that mattered was one’s own people. […] Philosophy in the classical sense, as the search for transcultural categories and a global orientation, was an error, because it sought universals and did not accept dependence on ethnicity. … As such philosophy has no homeland, but—and it is crucial to realize this connection—to the purveyors of Nazi ideology, philosophy had a people. According to Nazi ideology and Hitler’s tirades, there was one ‘race’ that, having no homeland, had an international bent and revered the unbounded freedom of the mind: the Jews.’”

Point Five in Eichmann’s apology: conclusions about national character (p. 219). ‘Only an ethnic thought makes it possible to build a national character, and humanitarian talk only allows this character to become confused and weakened. In an ideology that sees reconnecting with ‘blood and soil’ as the only means of survival, any international outlook mutates into the ultimate threat. This threat must be destroyed before a global morality destroys concepts of the German ethnic morality and undermines German defences. Or as the head of the NSDAP Head Office for Racial Politics clearly stated in 1939: ‘There can be no possible agreement with systems of thoughts of an international nature, because at bottom these are not truth and not honest, but based on a monstrous lie, namely the lie of the equality of all human beings.”’

 

According to Stangneth (p. 220), Hannah Arendt, who was a classically trained philosopher, was only able to see an Eichmann who used philosophy as a blunt tool without being guided by its undergirding of moral intentionality; thus the imprudent analysis one finds in her Eichmann in Jerusalem. But what one discovers in Eichmann’s apologia is a surprisingly well-informed “Nietzschean” analysis of his historical circumstances.

            As we see in the Crito, there are two sides to the Platonic equation. Heads: Socrates; tales: Crito. So, at the end of the day, Eichmann simply disagreed with Plato’s pro-Socratic conclusion, valuing Crito’s thinking about the life of ‘the good’, instead of Socrates’ dogmatic assertion that “the just life” is better than just life itself.

 

In his “A Message to the 21st Century,” Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote: “[Heinrich Heine] predicted that the armed disciples of the German philosophers—Fichte, Schelling, and the other fathers of German nationalism—would one day destroy the great monuments of Western Europe in a wave of fanatical destruction before which the French Revolution would seem child’s play. This may have been unfair to the German metaphysicians, yet Heine’s central idea seems to me valid: in a debased form, the Nazi ideology did have roots in German anti-Enlightenment thought. There are men who will kill and maim with a tranquil conscience under the influence of the words and writings of some of those who are certain that they know perfection can be reached.”

            Isaiah Berlin’s dying dilemma, of course, also hems us Western thinkers in on every side: “So what is to be done to restrain the champions, sometimes very fanatical, of one or other of these values, each of whom tends to trample upon the rest, as the great tyrants of the twentieth century have trampled on the life, liberty, and human rights of millions because their eyes were fixed upon some ultimate golden future?”

And that very wise Oxford philosopher could only offer this consolation: “I am afraid I have no dramatic answer to offer: only that if these ultimate human values by which we live are to be pursued, then compromises, trade-offs, arrangements have to be made if the worst is not to happen.”

           

§ HEIDEGGER

            Ruin bubbled up out of this historical meeting of minds—a meeting at which an illuminated German poet-philosopher, Nietzsche, fantasized about an alleged moral battle of ideas in our Western historical past, and then prophesied about a free-thinking future for those with the courage of their philosophical insight. At that same historical meeting of minds was a toadying technocrat, Eichmann, who had delusions of philosophy designing and engineering a eugenic future for the German state, who added his own special ingredient of materialism and tunnel-visioned nationalism to the idea of a state liberated from future morality. And then there was Heidegger—a mystical philosopher given to obfuscation and linguistic camouflage, who pursued his pedantic work of “making straight the way” for the future spiritual and intellectual potential of a very material incarnation of the German people.

Martin Heidegger is the mystical voice of philosophical anti-rationalism and unenlightenment; and in at least one respect he is like Milton’s Mammon – that he picked his tedious way along the woodsy paths and by-ways of his thinking entirely occupied with his own affairs, while the Nazi state was busy erecting a nation of corpses around him. It is obvious that Heidegger is Nietzsche’s post-cursor in terms of method and style; because in an attempt to discover a language vehicle appropriate to articulating un- or anti-rational thought, this thinker who “declare[s] war on rationalism right through to the bitter end,” thought to fuse poetry and philosophy to create a new abode for Thinking.

 

There are interesting ‘intersections of ideas’ between Eichmann and Heidegger, which may have been indicative of a discourse wafting on l’air du temp as elements of a nationalist zeitgeist, as they may also be intersections of a truer, deeper philosophical persuasion. For Eichmann, this type of thinking seems clearly to be politico-philosophical. For Heidegger, however, whose reflections on the questions of Volk and Nation become progressively more poignant as the war against Germany begins working toward its dénouement, there is a marked numinous quality that shades his words throughout.

Heidegger on total war: 18.05.1940 (p. 167)—“…our enemies, even though they have their aircraft & armored cars, still think along the old lines & have to rethink matters from one day to the next. With us, however, the complete mastery of technology has in advance produced a quite different kind of strategic thought. In addition, the invasions are sufficiently well rehearsed. Now we will see how a breakthrough of this new sort can also be secured & its consequences turned to account differently from 1917 &’18. The ruthless ‘operation’ is in itself also an unconditional commitment to the inner lawfulness of the unconditional mechanization of warfare. The single person disappears as an individual, but at the same time he has the opportunity to be informed of how the whole thing stands in the quickest possible way at any day & any time.”

Heidegger on the deliberate hiddenness of his philo-poetic writings—22.05.1940 (p. 168)—“There’s no knowing when the time will come for my work to have an ‘effect’. But I believe that in the steps it takes & through the realms it enters, it will –one day in the future when ‘philosophy’ is essential again—have an effect, simply in the way ‘philosophy’ does have an effect, invisibly & indirectly;”

Heidegger on das Volk, not necessarily as a literal people, but as a spiritual assembly—9.06.1942 (p. 132)–in the context of German nationalists: “…we want to try to bring together the people who share an inner bond-”

Heidegger on das Volk as a clearly material or essentialist entity—02.02.1945 (p. 185)—“Yet what really wears one down is the fate of this people, especially when thinking beholds it in its western essence & with a destiny such as this.”

Heidegger on das Volk—17.02.1945 (p. 186) –“Over everything there now lies a rubble of incongruity and strangeness, which is all the more disconcerting because it was heaped by one’s own people over the hidden striving of its own essence to grope its way to the truth.”

Heidegger on the Nation—08.4.1946 (pp. 197-198)– “In everything dark & confused about the path a providence is concealed. The unthinkable destiny of our fatherland & the fate still in store for it is where we belong, in the most secret of workshops, gaining ever fresh heart from the growing knowledge.”

Heidegger also leaves us with his version of a veiled NotaBene—When one is anchored into the world-geist, which is the primordial Seyn of the world, then the only means of abiding in that world-geist is through poetry, because it is both essential [radical]—flowing from the wellsprings of the real self, and creative.

 

It would seem that, at least on one level, the problem with Men and their Ideas and their Technologies, is that Human History is the playground for each and every human experiment, good and bad, right and wrong. History is replete with Frankenstein-type stories—The Garden of Eden, Pandora’s Box, Caligula, Faust, MacBeth, Frankenstein—stories where the kernel revolves around the notion of knowledge gone too far afield too quickly. And Man has not ever demonstrated that he has the spiritual or emotional maturity to keep pace with his knowledge and linked technology.

            But then the problem of knowledge has never been whether man should possess tools or processes & methods that allow him to delve into the unknown. Rather, it has always been about spoilage by misapplication – the slow process of taking one ‘piece’ of information and consistently stretching it by application and misapplication until it becomes a knowing of different things entirely, and for different reasons, and for different ends. Knowledge in the hands of Socrates, framed through his vision of the just man, will thrive differently than knowledge in the hands of Crito, who is ready to do just about everything to keep the physical body alive in the world for just a little while longer.

            For better and for worse, the ideas of philosophy have never been the problem. Rather, we Men do not seem to have the type of Will to Goodness and Justice, the Character of Virtue, to wrap ourselves around the ideas of the world in a way that consistently yields either Beauty or Kindness.

 

(Reprised from a blog version posted November 1, 2014)

 

Phrontisterion on Heidegger:

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-naked-messiah-martin-heidegger.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.com/2018/01/charlie-hebdos-great-heidegger-debate.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2016/02/heidegger-treacherous-millesime.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2017/04/heideggers-greek-inversions-reversals.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2017/11/my-nights-without-heidegger-editorial.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2016/04/martin-heideggeris-lady-philosophys.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2012/08/martin-heidegger-state.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2017/02/potpourri-from-charlie-hebdo-november.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2014/08/august-septembers-essayvoices-on.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2014/11/novembers-essaynietzsche-eichmann-and.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/p/blog-page_24.html

 

Resources and Further Reading:

·      Isaiah Berlin, “A Message to the 21st Century,” in The New York Review of Books; http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/oct/23/message-21st-century/?insrc=hpma

·      Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem, Knopf, 2014; original German 2011

·      Martin Heidegger; Gertrud Heidegger, Letters to his wife, 1915-1979, Polity Press, 2010.

·      David Aiken, “Praxis and Technology. Or, The Stalemate Between Knowing and Doing,” Panel Discussion; 1997.

·      http://triggs.djvu.org/djvu-editions.com/MILTON/LOST/Download.pdf