Abstract
In the last chapter, we saw how ontology —understood not as a theory about Being, but as a holistic and embodied engagement with the questionability of our own Being in both its singularity and commonness—can be construed as an ethical enterprise. We saw, in particular, how ontology helps us approach ethical questions as questions that concern not just moral behavior, but more broadly, the existential health and wholesomeness of how we “dwell” in the world. But an important question remains: how, given our position in a world that does not define ethics in this way, can we bear a world where a more holistic, non-metaphysical understanding of ethics holds sway?
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Notes
- 1.
Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 9.
- 2.
For fatalistic readings see Richard Wolin , The Politics of Being, 137–171; Karsten Harries, “Heidegger as a Political Thinker,” The Review of Metaphysics 29, no. 4 (1976): 642–669; and Jürgen Habermas , “The Undermining of Western Rationalism Through the Critique of Modern Metaphysics: Martin Heidegger,” in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 138–152.
- 3.
“Poetically Man Dwells,” 225.
- 4.
Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” trans. R.F.C. Hull and Alan Crick, in Existence and Being (Chicago: Henry Regnery and Co., 1988), 360; GA 9, 312.
- 5.
Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 242.
- 6.
See Marx’s eleventh book on Feuerbach (1845) in Karl Marx, The German Ideology (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998), 574.
- 7.
In Heidegger’s 1969 interview on German public television, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQsQOqa0UVc (accessed August 12, 2013), he makes this critique of Marx’s eleventh book on Feuerbach (1845) explicit. For Heidegger’s more extended critiques of Marx, see “Letter on Humanism,” 225; What Is Called Thinking?, 24–25.
- 8.
Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), 153.
- 9.
SZ, 182/ BT, 170.
- 10.
For an incisive essay on anti-Platonism in the thought of Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche , see Hannah Arendt , “Tradition and the Modern Age,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 2006), 17–40.
- 11.
SZ, 50/ BT, 46.
- 12.
George Lukacs once described Heidegger’s project as a “carnival of fetishized interiority.” Quoted in Jean-Paul Sartre, The Problem of Method, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London: Methuen & Co., 1963), 52.
- 13.
See Mary Jane Rubenstein, “Thinking Otherwise,” in The Immanent Frame, December 3, 2010, http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2010/12/03/thinking-otherwise/ (accessed June 7, 2013); see also Strange Wonder, 49–52.
- 14.
See Eugene T. Gendlin, “Befindlichkeit: Heidegger and the Philosophy of Psychology,” Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry 16, nos. 1–3 (1978–79): 43–71, http://www.focusing.org/gendlin_befindlichkeit.html (accessed March 20, 2013).
- 15.
Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 138, 206; GA 65, 175, 261–262; Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volume IV, 215–216; GA 6.2, 355.
- 16.
Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?,” in Poetry, Language, and Thought, 111.
- 17.
Heidegger, “The Turning,” in The Question Concerning Technology, 46.
- 18.
Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?,” 91. It is worth noting the resemblance between Heidegger’s claims and that of the Hasidic rabbi, Rav Hanokh Heynekh HaKohen Levin (1798–1870), who, according to Martin Buber , taught that “the real exile of [the Israelites] in Egypt was that they had learned to endure it.” Buber, Tales of the Hasidim: The Late Masters, trans. Olga Marx (New York: Schocken, 1961), 315. Taken together, these passages suggest that one of the most calamitous effects of an oppressive system is the resignation it instills such that it becomes difficult for the oppressed even to recognize their conditions as oppressive. For a discussion of this problem in the context of philosophy of education, see Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Continuum, 2005), 54–55.
- 19.
“Overcoming Metaphysics,” 102; GA 7, 89; Contributions to Philosophy, 11; and “Building Dwelling Thinking,” 159. Heidegger’ claim is particularly salient in the German, since Not can also translate as “need ,” making the phrase mean, “our greatest and most concealed need is our lack of [a sense of] need .” See Chapters 5 and 6 for a greater exploration of ontological need .
- 20.
On the Way to Language, 42.
- 21.
“The Thing ,” 179.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
The temptation to read Heidegger’s thought as a philosophy of “mindfulness” is evident in the 2006 translation of Heidegger’s Besinnung, a collection of posthumously published writings written between 1936 and 1944, as Mindfulness. See Heidegger, Mindfulness, trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary (London: Continuum, 2006). My reservation about using the word “mindfulness” to describe ontology, however, has to do with the fact that in popular culture “mindfulness” has become an industry in which what is sold under this name is largely a “technique” for self-, i.e., ego-improvement. Moreover, I am concerned that the word “mindfulness” connotes a certain dualism between “what’s in here” (mind) and “what’s out there” (world) that Heidegger’s ontology questions. The popular conception of “mindfulness,” moreover, as a practice of observing one’s own thoughts, risks privileging the interior experience of the person “practicing mindfulness” over and above anything social, ethical, or political. In so doing, it conflates feeling good with doing good. For important critiques of this tendency, see Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminished Expectations (New York: Norton, 1978); Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
- 24.
For an excellent essay on the classic error of spiritual seekers, who, in their search for “Enlightenment,” end up commodifying, instrumentalizing, and reifying it, see Chögyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (Boston: Shambhala Press, 2002). For a work that deconstructs the concept of “Enlightenment” (satori) altogether, see Shunruyi Suzuki, Zen Mind: Beginner’s Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice (Boston: Shambhala, 2011); for a work that reads phenomenology as a practice of perpetual beginnership, see John Sallis, Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings (Pittsburgh: Dusquesne University Press, 1973).
- 25.
“The Question Concerning Technology ,” 18.
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
Ibid., 4.
- 28.
Patricia Huntington , “Stealing the Fire of Creativity: Heidegger’s Challenge to Intellectuals,” in Feminist Interpretations of Martin Heidegger, ed. Nancy J. Holland and Patricia Huntington (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2001), 351–376, 356.
- 29.
Ibid., 357.
- 30.
Heidegger, Four Seminars, 75; GA 15, 128.
- 31.
Contributions, 16; GA 65, 18.
- 32.
“Der Spiegel Interview,” The Heidegger Reader, 326. Heidegger’s claim that philosophy consists in “preparing a readiness” is ultimately not far off from his earlier characterization of authenticity in Being and Time as a posture of “anticipatory resoluteness,” (Vorlaufende Entschlossenheit) i.e., of resoluteness to be underway, in process, incomplete, partial. In his commentary on Höldelrin’s poem, “Der Ister,” Heidegger figures this stance as a poetic one, writing, “What is fittingly destined for us sends its destining in one way and another and always remains in coming. In such coming, however, it can be thought only in being taken up and preserved as what is coming” (my emphases). Der Ister, 128; GA 53, 159–160. Heidegger’s claim that readiness and resoluteness are inseparable is also not far from the understanding enacted in the Zen Buddhist ritual practice of tea, according to which, the preparation of the tea is considered to be just as significant as the actual drinking of it. For it is only through the preparation of the tea that one can drink the tea in its truth, and thereby enjoy the truth of tea. On the explicit influence of Zen on Heidegger, see William Barrett, “Zen For the West,” in Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings of D.T. Suzuki, ed. William Barrett (New York: Image Books, 1996), xii–xiii.
- 33.
“The Question Concerning Technology ,” 18.
- 34.
Ibid., 19.
- 35.
Ibid., 28.
- 36.
That both “the danger” and the “saving power” are named, and in particular, named by the poet, should give us a clue as to the onto-ethical importance of how we understand and inhabit language.
- 37.
Contributions to Philosophy, 90; GA 65, 114.
- 38.
Nietzsche IV, 223; GA 6.2, 365–366.
- 39.
Der Ister, 142; GA 53, 177–178.
- 40.
Zollikon Seminars, 217; GA 89, 272.
- 41.
What Is Called Thinking?, 88.
- 42.
“Overcoming Metaphysics,” 110.
- 43.
Country Path Conversations, 70; GA 77, 108–109.
- 44.
Nietzsche IV, 223; GA 6.2, 365–366.
- 45.
SZ, 351/ BT, 321.
- 46.
“Letter on Humanism,” 258; GA 9, 356–357.
- 47.
“The Question Concerning Technology ,” 25.
- 48.
SZ, 285/ BT, 352. Stambaugh translates “Kampf” as “battle,” clearly bringing out the ominous, martial resonance of this passage. I prefer to translate “Kampf” here as “struggle,” not to foreclose this other translation , but simply so that it does not distract us from appreciating the ways in which one can “struggle” without resorting to physical force.
- 49.
“The Question Concerning Technology ,” 25.
- 50.
Benjamin, Illuminations, 254.
- 51.
Ibid., 261, 264.
- 52.
Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 260.
- 53.
Der Ister, 9; GA 53, 8–9.
- 54.
“The Origin of the Work of Art,” 201–202.
- 55.
For a literary illustration of this point, see P.D. James, The Children of Men (London: Penguin, 1994). For historiographic study of how the existential understanding of time developed in Jewish history, see Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (New York: Schocken, 1989). Finally, for a critical precursor of the anti-historicist, or counter-historicist streaks in Heidegger and Benjamin, see Friedrich Nietzsche , On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), who lambasts historicism as an “idolatry of the factual” (Götzedienste des Tatsächlichen), 47.
- 56.
SZ, 388/ BT, 355.
- 57.
Der Ister, 127; GA 53, 158–159. For similar articulations of this point, see also Der Ister, 9; GA 53, 9; Introduction to Metaphysics, 189; GA 40, 144; Four Seminars, 9; GA 15, 21–23; On the Way to Language, 31, 54.
- 58.
Heidegger, Parmenides , trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 149; GA 54, 222. A parallel sentiment can be found in Adorno’s claim that “the task of thought” is both “the simplest of all things” and “the utterly impossible thing.” Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections From a Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2006), 247.
- 59.
Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche,” 111.
- 60.
BT, 162/ SZ, 174.
- 61.
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 19.
- 62.
Der Ister, 142.
- 63.
“Building Dwelling Thinking,” 159.
- 64.
Ibid., 213.
- 65.
“What Are Poets For?”, 125.
- 66.
“The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, and Thought, 72.
- 67.
Ibid.
- 68.
Elucidations of Höldelrin’s Poetry, 55–56.
- 69.
“…Poetically Man Dwells…,” 226.
- 70.
The Heidegger Reader, 295; GA 13, 123. A more literal, though more awkward translation would be: “It brings the unmanifest to manifestation.”
- 71.
“…Poetically Man Dwells…,” 216.
- 72.
A careful reader may wonder if it is not too hasty to call a condition a vocation, and may rightly wonder, in the spirit of Leonard Cohen, if the real question is not whether ontology can be described as a vocation, but rather, “Who shall I say is calling?” These are questions we will address further in Chapter 5. For now we might simply note that the language of calling is not exterior to Heidegger’s thought. As he writes, “Being […] is a call to man and is not without man.” “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 211.
- 73.
On the Way to Language, 120.
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Atkins, Z. (2018). “Dwelling Poetically” in a Metaphysical World. In: An Ethical and Theological Appropriation of Heidegger’s Critique of Modernity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96917-6_3
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