From: Ted Winslow <egwinslow at rogers.com>
Chris Doss wrote:
> OK I said I wasn't going to do this, but the "sway,"
> the "overwhelming," refers to beings as a whole,
> which, if you've read B&T, you know is revealed in the
> experience of Angst (basically meaninglessness).
> (Elsewhere Heidegger says that "beings as a whole" are
> also revealed in profound boredom, overwhelming joy,
> and love, but Angst is how they show up in B&T.)
> Meaning is "wrested" from this meaninglessness through
> human activity making unconcealed what has been hidden
> by the "overwhelming." "Violence" is understood as the
> act of doing so. I suspect he owes a lot here to
> Jaspers and Hugo Ott's idea of the Holy.
Ted replied:
That's in the passage I quoted, i.e. "the overwhelming sway" "induces
panicked fear, true anxiety". But what is revealed in this
experience of "true anxiety" is that "the violent, the overwhelming
is the essential character of the sway itself", so, as I said, "the
violent" isn't the act of revealing, it's what the act reveals about
"the essential character" of "beings as a whole".
Chris:
> "On the one hand, *deinon* names the terrible, but it does not
> apply to petty terrors and does not have the degenerate, childish,
> and useless meaning that we give the word today when we call
> something 'terribly cute.' The *deinon* is the terrible in the
> sense of the overwhelming sway, which induces panicked fear, true
> anxiety, as well as collected, inwardly reverberating, reticent
> awe. The violent, the overwhelming is the essential character of
> the sway itself. When the sway breaks in, it *can* keep its
> overwhelming power to itself. But this does not make it more
> harmless but only *more* terrible and distant."
Ted:
"Humanity" is "violence-doing" in the sense that "using violence is
the basic trait not just of his doing but of his Dasein" and in this
"violence-doing" "it gathers what holds sway [i.e. 'the violent, the
overwhelming'] and lets it enter into openness."
Heidegger claims "authenticity" in this sense was present at the "inception" of human being. Rejecting Marx's idea of human "authenticity" as the "rich individuality" requiring a long historical process of "bildung" for its actualization, Heidegger claims the "inception is what is most uncanny and mightiest. What follows is not a development but flattening down as mere widening out ... etc".
"We have already alluded to the fact that this [the passage from Antigone] is not a matter of describing and clarifying the domains and behavior of the human, who is one being among many; instead, this is a poetic projection of human being on the Basis of its extreme possibilities and limits. In this way, we have also warded off the other opinion, according to which the ode recounts, the development of humanity from a wild huntsman and a traveler by dugout canoe to a builder of cities and person of culture. These are notions from cultural anthropology and the psychology of primitives. They arise from falsely transferring a science of nature that is already untrue in itself to human Being. The fundamental error that underlies such ways of thinking is the opinion that the inception of history is primitive and backward, clumsy and weak. The opposite is true. The inception is what is most uncanny and mightiest. What follows is not a development but flattening down as mere widening out; it is the inability to hold on to the inception, it makes the inception innocuous and exaggerates it into a perversion of what is great, into greatness and extension purely in the sense of number and mass. The uncanniest is what is because it harbors such an inception in which, from over-abundance, everything breaks out at once into what is overwhelming and is to be surmounted (das Überwältigende, Zubewältigende).
"The inexplicability of this inception is no defect, no failure of our knowledge of history. Instead, the genuineness and greatness of historical knowing lie in understanding the character of this inception as a mystery. Knowing a primal history is not ferreting out the primitive and collecting bones. It is neither half nor whole natural science, but, if is anything at all, it is mythology." (Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 165-6)
Does Heidegger's idea of primal humanity as "violence-doing" owe anything to Nietzsche?
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I'd say that Heidegger gets a lot of his conception that humanity has fallen (from perfection) from the first book of the BIBLE. Heidegger seems to be asserting that humanity's inception is a mystery which cannot be known through scientific methods or through examining history or the development of conscious as time ticks on. The development of conscious itself seems to do violence to God's will. For this crime (knowledge), humans were cast out of Eden.
Nietzsche was both a critique of Christianity and a clever user of its ideological style, attempting to turn its moral dictums on their heads. It's only lay speculation on my part, but I'd say that unlike Heidegger, Nietzsche was inspired more by De Sade's PHILOSOPHY OF THE BEDROOM than the BIBLE.
Best, Mike B)
Read "Penguins in Bondage": http://happystiletto.blogspot.com/
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