A "dictatorship of relativism" and the specter of Nietzsche: Between Heidegger and Fink

American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 84, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 257-281

  Wilkerson, Dale ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84875280447     PISSN: 10513558     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/acpq201084222     Document Type: Review

References (68)

1. Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009).
2. Godfrey Hodgson, The Myth of American Exceptionalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
3. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, with a new introduction by Andrew J. Bacevich (first published by Charles Scribner's Sons, 1952) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
4. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, with a new afterword (first published by Free Press, 1996) (New York: Free Press, 2002).
5. Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World (New York: Norton, 2008).
6. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
7. John Gray, "Beyond Reasonable Doubt. Nostalgia for Enlightenment values such as rationality and progress has become a rallying cry for sections of both right and left. But it was in the name of these principles that some of the worst crimes of the 20th century were committed." New Statesman, May 31, 2004.
8. Victor Davis Hanson, "Losing the Enlightenment: A Civilization that Has Lost Confidence In Itself Cannot Confront the Islamists," Wall Street Journal, November 29, 2006.
9. See also Ron Chusid, "Losing the Enlightenment," Liberal Values: Defending Liberty and Enlightened Thought, November 29, 2006.
10. See also, What's Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question, ed. Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hanns Reill (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
11. Jacques Derrida remarks that the ostensibly distinct cultural modalities named here "are more than ever welded together by the same apparatuses or by ones that are indissociable from them." Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge Classics, 2006), 66.
12. See for example, Edward Rothstein, "Attacks on U.S. Challenges the Perspectives of Postmodern True Believers," New York Times, September 22, 2001;
13. Paul Berman "The Philosopher of Islamic Terror," New York Times, March 23, 2003;
14. and Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: Norton, 2004).
15. For a response to these kinds of charges, see Neal Curtis, "Nihilism, Liberalism, and Terror," Theory, Culture & Society 13.3 (2004): 141-57;
16. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
17. See also, Jürgen Habermas, The Divided West, ed. and trans. Ciarin Cronin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006).
18. Adam Curtis's BBC Documentary, "The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear" 2004.
19. Curtis is quoted by Tim Adams in The Observer (October 24, 2004) as claiming to be attempting to show how "Sayyaid Qutb and Leo Strauss had both deduced from Nietzsche the way that liberal society was heading for nihilism. The real basis of my films is that Nietzsche's ideas have shaped the world we live in, but in totally unpredictable ways."
20. See also, John Gray, Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern (New York: The New Press, 2005).
21. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990).
22. See also, Habermas, "Conceptions of Modernity" in The Postnational Constellation, ed. and trans. Max Pensky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001).
23. For a study on related problems, with themes much broader than the title suggests, see Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy, ed. Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).
24. See also, Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra, ed. Clayton Koelb (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1990).
25. Robert Pippin, for example, reminds us that "[t]here are all sorts of ways, after all, to say goodbye," even if it can be granted that saying goodbye to the Enlightenment and modernity is what Nietzsche is doing. See "Nietzsche's Alleged Farewell" in The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Bernd Mangus and Kathleen Higgins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 252-80, at 254.
26. Babette Babich, in her introductory remarks to an entire volume of essays devoted to the sorts of questions posed here, asks "[w]hy do we position Nietzsche against the Enlightenment, or, indeed, against the progress ideal of Western reason? Is this right?" See "Habermas, Nietzsche, and the Future of Critical Theory," in Habermas, Nietzsche and Critical Theory, ed. Babette Babich (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2004), 20.
27. See also Michael Allen Gillespie, Nihilism Before Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
28. Ratzinger of course, was soon thereafter elected Pope and took the name Benedict XVI. Ratzinger's homily does not specifically take a philosophical position against Nietzsche, nor does it invoke his name. Its theme is much more generally stated. Yet, the association I have drawn seems appropriate. Cf. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, "Homily Pro Eligendo Romano Pontifice," Common Knowledge 13.2/3 (2007): 451-5, at 453.
29. Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1991).
30. Geoff Waite remarks that Vattimo's theoretical attempt, "initially from an explicitly leftist point of view," to expand the values of liberal democracy is built upon "the shaky, seepy quicksand soil of Heidegger's exoteric thinking only-and therefore by extension, of Nietzsche's." Nietzsche's Corps/e (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 152.
31. Gregory Fried, Heidegger's Polemos: From Being to Politics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 186-99.
32. Gianni Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation, trans. William McCuaig, ed. Santiago Zabala (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 52 and 91ff.
33. See, for example, Human, All-Too Human's "Of First and Last Things."
34. Rudolf Carnap, "The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language" (1932) in Logical Positivism, ed. A. J. Ayer (New York: Free Press, 1959), 80;
35. "Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache," Erkenntnis 2 (1931): 220n41.
36. For a study of the Carnap-Heidegger encounter see Michael Friedman, "Overcoming Metaphysics: Carnap and Heidegger" in Origins of Logical Empiricism, ed. R. N. Giere and A. W. Richardson (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 45n79;
37. and M. Friedman, A Parting of the Ways. Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago and La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 2000).
38. Charles Taylor, "Overcoming Epistemology," in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).
39. Richard Rorty, "Metaphilosphical Difficulties of Linguistic Philosophy" The Linguistic Turn, ed. R. Rorty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
40. For further provocation for raising epistemological questions within a broader range of concerns, see Santiago Zabala, The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy: A Study of Ernst Tugendhat (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
41. Heidegger, "Overcoming Metaphysics" in The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 84-110.
42. Although Stambaugh offers a footnote to the title of this essay, emphasizing the difference between The Überwindung and Verwindung of a thing, following Heidegger's use of the two words through the essay requires the German text. "Überwindung der Metaphysik" in Vortraege und Aufsaetze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), 67-95.
43. See also, Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 36-7 and 101.
44. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 54.
45. I have modified the translation slightly to capture the sense of the German better. Was Heisst Denken? (Niemeyer: Tübingen, 1997), 23-4.
46. Vattimo, End of Modernity, 11.
47. See also, Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation.
48. On the "hermeneutics of suspicion" see Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977).
49. Heidegger and Fink, Heraclitus Seminar, trans. Charles H. Siebert (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993).
50. This edition will henceforth be referenced as "HS." First published in German as Heraklit (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1970), and included in the 15th volume of Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe with other materials under the title Seminare. References to The Gesamtausgabe will henceforth be made with "GA" followed by the volume number.
51. This simple review of their relationship is warranted if Dermont Moran is correct to say that Fink is still an obscure figure, even in phenomenological circles ("Fink's Speculative Phenomenology: Between Consciousness and Transcendence," Research in Phenomenology 37 [2007]: 3-31, at 30).
52. Ronald Bruzina, Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink: Beginnings and Endings in Phenomenology, 1928-1938 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004). On the dominance of Heidegger's shadow, even in Fink's later life, Safranski relays a curious anecdote from Hannah Arendt about a proposed meeting in Freiburg with Fink. Arendt's popularity was soaring by this time, which Heidegger allegedly resented. A book tour through Europe took Arendt to Freiburg at a time when Heidegger was away; nevertheless, Arendt's request for a visit with Fink, who was in Freiburg at the time and, according to Arendt, under the sway of Heidegger's resentment, was briskly refused.
53. This work would one day be published as Sixth Cartesian Meditation, and Moran notes its problematic relationship with Husserl's thought ("Fink's Speculative Phenomenology," 30).
54. "The Heraclitus Seminar," Research in Phenomenology 1 (1971): 137-46, at 138n.2.
55. David Ferrell Krell, "Towards an Ontology of Play: Eugen Fink's Notion of Spiel," Research in Phenomenology 2 (1972): 63-93, at 65n.4.
56. HS 112/GA 15.181-2. Heidegger and Fink appear to be attempting a phenomenology of what Vattimo, drawing from Heidegger's Identity and Difference, describes as "'a first flash of The Ereignis' the (new) event of being" of the sort "on which the possibility of an overcoming of metaphysics depends." Nihilism and Emancipation, 14. As concerns Heidegger's interpretation of Heraclitus, see Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000)/GA 40;
57. "Logos (Heraclitus, Fragment B 50)," and "Aletheia (Heraclitus, Fragment B 16)" in Early Greek Thinking, trans. David F. Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper, 1984)/GA 7.
58. As concerns Heidegger's general interpretation of the Greek experience of being, one could refer to Heidegger's lectures, Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister", trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996)/GA 53;
59. and Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewiz (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1992)/GA 54;
60. and to "The Anaximander Fragment" in Early Greek Thinking/GA 5.
61. Bruzina, Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink, 67.
62. Two of the most insightful readings of this decisive period in the development of Heidegger's later thought are Michael Zimmerman's Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, Art (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1990)
63. and Charles Bambach's Heidegger's Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003).
64. Cf. Twilight of the Idols, "Reason in Philosophy" (part 2).
65. Eugen Fink, Nietzsche's Philosophy, trans. Goetz Richter (London: Contiuum, 2003), 171;
66. Nietzsches Philosophie (Kohlhammer: Stuttgart, 1960), 187.
67. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. i-ii, trans. and ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper:, 1979), xxxil-xxxl.
68. Heidegger, Nietzsche I (Neske: Pfullingen, 1961), 9-10.