CB: By rejecting anthropology and science, Heidegger sort of sets himself up for the question, "how do you know primal humanity is "violence-doing" ?
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``Does Heidegger's idea of primal humanity as "violence-doing" owe anything to Nietzsche?..'' Ted Winslow
I think Heidegger's concept of primal humanity was shared by Nietzsche and links to earlier... all the way back to at least Hegel and the entire neo-classical movement at the turn of the 18-19thC when Europeans (French, English, and Germans) were trying to rediscover-reinvent their own origins or roots. The choice was between Medieval Europe which they were in process of dismantling or antiquity of which they had only a limited grasp---through the rise of archaeology and various national scientific societies. Of course they had most of the ancient arts, literatures and philosophies and that gave the most comprehensive view they had---so it became the default source of primal humanity. In effect that became the European mythological origin for civilization.
As far as I can tell as an American completely divorced from this tradition, the real intellectual problem was most of the German academy were schooled in an a-historical idealism (Kant, Frickt, Schelling, Jacobi, et at), which was a by-product of both the enlightenment and neo-classicism, where works, ideas and concepts as such were understood completely independent of their origin, time, place and circumstance. This kind of a-historic knowledge was part of the foundation of German cultural-studies, or cultural science in the period. On the one hand it commanded a grand analytical insight but at the cost of very little historical context dependent understanding.
Heidegger was certainly not alone. There was Strauss as a very poor example, and Cassirer as a vastly better one. (I can't remember exactly when, but) Cassirer changed his disciplinary focus on a philosophy of science, when he took charge of the Wurberg(?) Library which was apparently a loosely guided assembly of works, artifacts, and manuscripts of mostly non-European(?) source material. I don't know exactly what it contained, but I imagine it to have held something like the strange works I once tracked down at UCB.
[I was given a list of European colonial period studies, dictionaries, narratives, and other works on African folk lore and languages. My job was to locate these materials, order them through interlibrary loan service and bring them to an Anthropology professor compiling a bibliography of all existing works on the subject. It was a vast project and I was one of maybe a dozen library researchers for that year. The single example that stays in my mind was a small, falling a part book titled, A Tonga-Portuguese-English dictionary, compiled by some missionary society in London in 1890-something. The British Museum catalogue had a copy and I ordered it. When it arrived it was wrapped in brown glazed paper and held together with string.]
The effect of managing the Wurberg library had a profound effect on Cassirer, and he devoted the rest of his philosophical life to addressing the problem of symbolic forms---basically the arts, literatures, languages, and broadly conceived mythological systems, hence his `Philosophy of Symbolic Forms'. Its ultimate foundation was to explore the general frame of primordial ontologies in human thought, language, and society---all brought into view through a neo-Kantian philosophy.
Heidegger by contrast thought he could plummet these depths through pure thought, through classical philosophy, that is by reading ancient Greek and other texts and meditating---with the preferred insight of the present. And why not, if you believe you can reach into the primordial depths of words, through their surfaces, into their roots in thought---who knows? Maybe it was possible. But look at where he found himself, neck deep in the mythological system of the national socialist state.
Jerry Monaco thinks he lived in the Hobbet world, which I think is a somewhat tacky analogy. The Black Forest was a much better view, and not entirely wrong headed. Among all the possible ways to see the origins of human societies (from a romantic sensibility), is to regard the landscape with its plants and animals as the primal stuff of human thought, with all the multifarious relations and orders they present. My great admiration for Native American cultures, the little I know about them, comes from sharing the same landscape, hiking in the mountains, fishing in the ocean, climbing on the rocks and outcroppings that once attracted the attention of a symbolic imagination---so their tales of the origin of `man' were not entirely unfamiliar to me---seen through a different lens, but looking at the same landscape.
As for the ultimate mystery of the origin of human thought or at least reflection, there is also Mann's Prelude to Joseph and his Brothers which is a long lyrical essay on more or less this same problem---where the central metaphor is the Well. Thinking back on it, maybe Mann was influence by Heidegger or maybe just the dissolution of Weimar was enough...
(I was going to ditch this post after writing it for lunch hour, but Chris Doss comes back today...]:
``If anyone is interested in discussing Heidegger's place in Weimar Germany, whether the content of the Daseinsanalytik is thrown out of joint by Heidegger's overreliance on religious texts as anthropological source materials or being an identification of Dasein and the individual Martin Heidegger, the influence of Heidegger on the Origins of Totalitarianism, and so forth, that would be great....''
So my point is that Weimar was a profound identity crisis, among other things, and that resulted in a fabrication of national identity through national socialist propaganda---where Heidegger saw at the very least a resonance with his own explorations of origins...
So the implication for the present is that I think the US also in a national identity crisis and has attempted to define itself through the enemies it has picked, something along the lines of Carl Schmitt's other, so I see a general parallel with Weimar in these terms.
The current immigration `reform' nonsense is also a reflect of a similar mass phenomenon....
CG