As you can see, Martin, I have to talk to you about the Master's great work. Can you imagine Rainer Minder, with his brown combat uniform, his cap, his armband with the swastika, his Luger? Can you imagine him saying, freezing, almost without air from the stupor, astonished by such a revelation: "It is for Being and Time that we are fighting in our cities." Imagine something even worse: National Socialism isn't the blood thirsty adventure of a band of rough Germans, brutal and deranged. Their ideology does not lie in the unscrupulous readings that Alfred Rosenberg did of Nietzsche. It does not lie in the paranoid, racist grumbles, poorly written in Mein Kampf. This, my son, is the greatest philosophy book that the German soul has written since the Phenomenology of Spirit.

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Being and Time threw us into existence. Finally we were done with Kant and neo-Kantianism. The relationship with the world was not a cognitive relationship but existential. We were thrown into the world. We were in it. We were beings-in-the-world. We were "there". This throwing opened up our possibilities. We were thrown towards our possibilities. We were that which Heidegger called Dasein. We were thrown amongst the entities; amongst things, amongst objects. Dasein was the there-being because it could only be an entity within a world, an entity amongst the other entities. (Years later I would read a long essay, well written, perhaps too well written, the fruit of a French disciple of Heidegger, a literary scholar more than a philosopher. This condition, that of novelist, gave a certain air of melodrama to some of his formulations. In that way, he was capable of saying that Dasein was "in danger in the world". It was never for me more than piously acceptable, this phrase. All the same, let's recognize it, if one tries to signal the enormous difference between the Kantian subject and the there-being of Heidegger, one should signal this condition of danger, of public display. What does the subject of the Critique of Pure Reason risk? It's relation to the world commits it only to the mode of knowing. Kant's subject seeks to know things. The there-being of Heidegger can only throw itself amongst things. Its existence is in play, not his cognitive ability. The literary Frenchman could say it well: if the there-being compromises its existence amongst the objectivities of the world, if it is only more amongst the others, if not protected by the Newtonian categorical apparatus from good Kant, then there-being is in danger.) We were leaving the sticky interiors of French subjectivity: we left Descartes. We left that haughty and solitary subject that doubted everything except itself. Existence was ex-istence because it threw us into the world. Here, son, Heidegger, our professor, proposed an admirable take-off, only possible from his genius. I want you to be clear on this: Being and Time is not only an existential work, it is an ontological book. Its question is the big one, the only question in philosophy: the question of being. Let us leave the remaining questions to the sciences or sociology, psychology, economics, and even theology. Philosophy is the decision to face the question of being. The Master would say: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" And here we come to what, in my humble judgment, was for all of us, his early readers, the heroic point of Being and Time. Dasein, because of its state of throwness, was the there-being. But Dasein was, also, the entity that in its being asks itself about being. No other worldly entity asks itself about being. "Can you imagine a hammer asking itself about being? Asking some tongs? An airplane? The question of being brings the world to Dasein. So, Dasein is the "there" of being.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 4:07 AM