The philosophical fugue: Understanding the structure and goal of Heidegger's Beiträge

Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

Volumn 34, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 57-73

  Thomson, Iain ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 62549159658     PISSN: 00071773     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00071773.2003.11007396     Document Type: Article

References (58)

1. See Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. P. Emad and K. Maly (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999)
2. hereafter "CP"/Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1989)
3. Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 65; hereafter GA65
4. and - although from more of a distance - 1941s Basic Concepts, trans. G.E. Aylesworth [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993]/GA51)
5. These lectures include, most promisingly (pace Pöggeler, Heidegger's Path of Thinking, trans. D. Magurshak and S. Barber [Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989], p. 178)
6. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, 1968
7. cf. Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p.198 note 25
8. See Charles Guignon, "Introduction", in C. Guignon, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
9. Schürmann, "Riveted to a Monstrous Site: On Heidegger's Beiträge zur Philosophie" (in Rockmore and Margolis, eds., The Heidegger Case: On Philosophy and Politics [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992], p.313. (Schürmann's footnotes make clear his polemical implication that Derrida is the "Heideggerian plagiarist" in question.)
10. See Alexander Schwan, "Heidegger's Beiträge zur Philosophie and Politics," trans. E. Brient, in Harries and Jamme, eds., Martin Heidegger: Politics, Art, and Technology [New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1994], p.71
11. See e.g. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, "Way and Method in Philosophy: Hermeneutic Phenomenology in Thinking the History of Being," trans. P. Emad (in C. Macann, ed., Critical Heidegger [London: Routledge, 1996], p.185
12. (See also the jacket-cover of The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993].)
13. Pöggeler, "Heidegger und die hermeneutische Theologie," p.481
14. (quoted by Schürmann, in "A Brutal Awakening to The Tragic Condition of Being: On Heidegger's Beiträge zur Philosophie" in Harries and Jamme, eds., Martin Heidegger: Politics, Art, and Technology, p.104, note 2)
15. cf. Pöggeler, Martin Heidegger's Path of Thinking, p.116)
16. Rüdiger Safranski, Heidegger: Between Good and Evil , trans. E. Oslers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p.307
17. cf. GA66 p.433
18. 'Technicity, Topology, Tragedy: Heidegger on "That Which Saves' in the Global Reich" (in A.M. Meltzer, J. Weinberger, and M.R. Zinman, eds., Technology in the Western Political Tradition [Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1993]; and "A Brutal Awakening to the Tragic Condition of Being: On Heidegger's Beiträge zur Philosophie."
19. See CP 57/GA65, pp.81-2 and below
20. See CP 56-7/GA65, p.81 for Heidegger's defense of the "rigor," "unity," and "clarity" of this fugal construction. E.g., Heidegger justifies "the rigor of the fugal-articulation of this construction [die Strenge des Gefüges im Aufbau]" as an attempt to envision an alternative way of accomplishing what has always been for philosophy "the impossible," namely, "to grasp the truth of Beyng in the fully unfolded richness of its grounded essence [die Wahrheit des Seyns in der voll entfalteten Fülle seines begründeten Wesens begreifen]." This fugue appears to be Heidegger's last-ditch attempt to accomplish precisely the kind of project he soon turns against; as Pöggeler aptly observes, "Only slowly did Heidegger's thinking relinquish its wanting to ground" ( Martin Heidegger's Path of Thinking, p.130)
21. See James Murray, et al., eds., The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, second edition [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991], henceforth "OED," p.642
22. See Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. C. Turner (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp.45-6
23. and Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory, ed. and trans. Thomas Pfau (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988), p.102
24. Without recognizing the Beitrüge's fugal structure, Schürmann insightfully points out that as such a cœsure, Ereignis is meant as Heidegger's own answer to what (like Hölderlin and Nietzsche) Heidegger takes to be a historical call for "decision," and thus the enactment of the latest in the series of "epochal breaks 'severing' (caedere) eras of truth" (Schürmann, "Riveted to a Monstrous Site," p.316)
25. Although we cannot discuss it much here, one of the most interesting of these is der Anklang, by which Heidegger means a kind of echo of reminiscence. Among Anklang's multiple connotations is the first glimpse of twilight, a glimpse that has a trace of dawn in it (as in "I hear 'traces' of Bach in that"), and Heidegger's Anklang thus anticipates Benjamin's theory of "reminiscences" (based on his analysis of Proust's remembrances -the famous Madeleine - and Baudelaire's analogous understanding of the relation between current Spleen and past Ideal). This "ringing echo" is literally a "reminiscence" triggered by a sound received through the ear, and we should remember that as the son of a Catholic Sexton, childhood memories involving the ringing of church bells were certainly close to Heidegger's heart (in 1935's An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Manheim [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959], Heidegger describes the "call" in terms reminiscent of that "ringing of silence" in which Yahweh is said to have spoken to Abraham)
26. Der Sprung ("The Leap") and die Gründung ("The Grounding") are directly related; the latter is "The Landing" from the neo-Kierkegaardian leap, an arrival at the site for building a new dwelling for historical humanity (hence Heidegger's claim that this "ground" is something we work toward rather than from). I return (all too) briefly to these fuguings and to die Xu-künftigen ("The Futural One/Those [who remain] To-Come") and der Letzte Gott ("the Ultimate God") below
27. von Herrmann, Technology, Politics, Art.
28. At least on the "modernist" interpretation of Nietzsche's style; for an insightful elaboration of the differences between the traditional, modern, and post-modern "readings of Nietzsche," see Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso Press, 1999), p.171
29. For a revealing treatment of Heidegger's pervasive use of religious metaphor in the Beiträge, see Alexander Schwan, "Heidegger's Beiträge zur Philosophie and Politics," pp.71-88
30. See Stambaugh, The Finitude of Being (New York: The State University of New York Press, 1992), pp.112-3
31. The proximity to Celan is politically-charged; a fact connoted by the original title of Safranski's biography of Heidegger (Ein Meister aus Deutschland), which links Heidegger to the German "death" of the concentration camps, described by Celan with a "terrible beauty" in his famous poem, "Death Fugue." There remains much to be said about Celan's relation with Heidegger (see Safranski, Martin Heidegger, pp.421-5)
32. quoted in Ungar, Scandal and Aftereffect: Blanchot and France since 1930 [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995], p. 63)
33. Wolin too implies that Heidegger was at least partially responsible for Celan's suicide (see Wolin, "Review of Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, by Rüdiger Safranski," Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 12, 1998, p.6)
34. See Michael Hamburger, "Introduction," in Celan, Poems of Paul Celan, p.23
35. Boss, "Martin Heidegger's Zollikon Seminars" in K. Holler, ed., Heidegger and Psychology. Special issue of Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, [1988], pp.13, 20
36. The irony here of course is that Heidegger's effacement of his own authorial presence implicitly reinforces the other impression which calling these Fügungen also conveys; viz., that Heidegger seems to be writing here as a perfectly receptive vehicle of Providence, as if indulging in the daydream of purely passive agency, the metaphysical fantasy of being a self-grounding authority, an authority whose words derive their legitimacy from nowhere other than themselves (a dream shared by the "Enlightenment" [Aufklärung] as well as by some of the most dogmatically authoritarian systems, as Horkheimer and Adorno artfully show in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. J. Cumming [New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1972])
37. Alexander Schwan, " Beiträge zur Philosophie and Politics," p.72
38. Thus I cannot agree with Schwan's judgment that the Beiträge "fail to match even remotely the density of thought, content, and structure evidenced in" Being and Time (see Schwan, Heidegger's Beiträge zur Philosophie and Politics, p.72); put simply, Schwan is misled here by the radical stylistic differences between these texts
39. I take it that this is what Olafson is getting at when he remarks (insightfully, if perhaps according to an overly Hegelian script) that the Beiträge's "pensées" trace the "stages...in the progress of a form of thought that undertakes to move toward a 'new beginning'" (Olafson, Heidegger and the Ground of Ethics: A Study of Mitsein [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], p.103 note 5)
40. and what von Herrmann means when he says that "[t]he six divisions must thus be enacted in thought" ("Technology, Politics, and Art," p.59)
41. For a much more detailed development and defense of these claims, see my "Ontotheology? Understanding Heidegger's Destruktion of Metaphysics," International Journal of Philosophical Studies 8:3 (2000), pp.297-327
42. See Derrida, "Philopolemology: Heidegger's Ear (Geschlecht IV)," in J. Sallis, ed., Reading Heidegger: Commemorations [Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1993]
43. "Ontopolitological" is Derrida's term for the way in which the understanding of Being in the background of our social practices filters our decisions in such a way that metaphysics helps to shape the very intelligibility of (what during the thirties Heidegger refers to as) the "domain of space-time" [Zeit-spiel-raum]. Heidegger's idea - that metaphysics, by "doubly" (that is, onto-theologically) "grounding" intelligibility, acts "ontopolitologically" - has been hugely influential in recent political theory (this emphasis on ontological politics underwrites Ernesto Laclou and Chantal Mouffe's seminal Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards A Radical Democratic Politics, trans. W. Moore and P. Cammack [London: Verso, 1985] and makes itself felt in the work of Bourdieu, Wolin, Dallmayr, Connolly, and others)
44. Stambaugh nicely suggests "ultimate" as a translation for Letzte (Emad and Maly use "last"). Of course, the question of this God's finality - that is, of the supposed permanence of this last God's presence - is an issue near the heart of Heidegger's reading of Hölderlin (see esp. Existence and Being, pp.263-7)
45. Hölderlin, "The 'Ground' for Empedocles" (in Essays and Letters on Theory, p.56)
46. and Hölderlin's "Bread and Wine," in which he speaks of the suffering preceding "naming that which is dearest [nennt er sein Liebstes]" [see Hyperion and Selected Poems, ed. and trans. Eric L. Santner [New York: Continuum, 1994], pp.182-3, translation modified]). Clearly, the Beiträge is a text ripe with Heidegger's Hölderlinian-Nietzschean dreams for a political realization of his own dearest philosophical ambitions
47. See Necske & Kettering, eds., Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers (New York, Paragon House: 1990), p.57
48. Hubert L. Dreyfus proposes this "equally possible translation" in his "Heidegger on Gaining a Free Relation to Technology" (in Andrew Feenberg and Alastair Hannay, eds., Technology and the Politics of Knowledge [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995]), pp.105, 107 note 34)
49. See CP 283-93/GA65, pp.403-17
50. Wolin, The Politics of Being, p.13
51. See CP 365/GA65, pp.514-16
52. I develop and defend Heidegger's critique of "enframing" (our ontologically-reductive, technological mode of revealing) in "What's Wrong with Being a Technological Essentialist? A Response to Feenberg," Inquiry 43:4 (2000), pp.429-44
53. This is shown clearly by Derrida, in Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989)
54. Hölderlin, Hyperion and Selected Poems, p.130
55. As Benn shows, "the conception of salvation involved here is very different from the orthodox Christian conception" (see Benn's "Introduction" to Hölderlin, Der Tod des Empedokles, ed. E.M. Benn [London: Oxford University Press, 1968], pp.27, 34)
56. As Ananda Spike-Tumer has recognized, Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra begins with Nietzsche symbolically overcoming the event named in the title of Hölderlin's The Death of Empedocles (Empedocles throws himself into the volcano; Zarathustra carries his own ashes to the mountain to be reborn). Indeed, Hölderlin's Empedocles and Nietzsche's Zarathustra come together in a way that likely helped encourage Heidegger to revitalize the dangerous Platonic dream of the philosopher-statesman. See my "Heidegger and the Politics of the University," Journal of the History of Philosophy (forthcoming)
57. See Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy, p. 110/GA45 p.127
58. On this revolutionary return home to ourselves, see my "Heidegger on Ontological Education, or: How We Become What We Are," Inquiry 44:3 (2001), pp.243-68