In his 1969 “Translator’s Introduction” to the Northwestern University Press English version (called, The Essence of Reasons) of Heidegger’s Vom Wesen des Grundes, being nearly forty years prior to the 2005 production and 2006 general release of The New World, Malick argues that the writer was announcing to the world his contradiction of the classical rational heritage. The recent Oxford dropout—something about (surprise!) not getting along with the classical rational lifer assigned to tutor him—lays stress upon the uniqueness of the study’s weave between “world” and human individual, and ventures to insist that, “There is a way in which one cannot agree with Heidegger ‘on certain points’ any more than one can, even in a manner of speaking, be insane or revolutionary on certain points.” The crux of the text he worked upon could contribute to contradicting that claim. Provision of serious (sufficient) grounds, “is that which makes the question ‘Why?’ [questioning about causes] possible in the first place.” In another study, Heidegger proposes that taking to heart the couplet, “The rose is without why, blooms because it blooms,/ Has no concern for itself, no need to be seen,” comes to the workings of “because” trumping the workings of “why.” But Heidegger’s lifelong ulterior motive was surreptitious rehabilitation of a precedence of “why” due to a coagulative omnipresence within a primal dynamic. It is very definitely possible to appreciate that writer’s bravado as to “because” and, at the same time, drop his dead duck in the form of twitchy (dialectical) re-enshrinement of “why,” as lurking within Heidegger’s Hegelian snare, “onto-theo-logic.” In light of The New World, it becomes apparent that Malick—who was, in fact, once ready to put his head in that noose—took pains to get over the supposed everlasting grandeur of that classical rational heritage doing very well for itself apropos of Jamestown and apropos of today.
