[§ 2, p. 8-15] September, 2020.
Do you hear me, Lord of Revelations? Call off your men. I was just touched by some deluded smiling freaks who tried, in all honesty, to baptize me on the road in front of a boarded up old-folks home up here in the wooded north of the city. Do I really look so bad, Lord? Have I truly strayed so far? Or was it just more post-hippies? Adults so strung out on COVID-price-gouged molly they can’t tell what was once a soviet sunset from the Berghain techno light show? Either way, evangelicals or hippies turned alt-yuppies, my options don’t look good–both flavors of apocalypse are in terrible taste.
The US election is looming and the first Big March in Berlin since August happened this weekend–anti-corona, fascists, the poorer start-up washouts who want their rent capped. Despite my hopes, it was nothing but an underwhelming trickle of the angry and the dumb and, as always. it was often hard to tell the difference. You’ll hear more about that from me soon.
Between you and me, I’m terrified. Maybe it’s no wonder that I’m turning to questions of faith in these off-brand end times. I did ask the Jesus-freaks if they were Baptists. They laughed and said they didn’t know. Then they mentioned they weren’t sure if Baptists even believed in the healing power of Christ. They laughed some more. In these times, laughter really might be the answer. Or art? Isn’t that what Instagram and exasperated middle school guidance counselors teach us? Maybe I could sink myself into some sort of creative daze, write that script for the scathing political drama about the White House that everybody definitely wants to see . . .
Ah. Shit.
I shouldn’t have been surprised.
If there was ever a mug that you instinctively knew would be the harbinger of buzzkill, it was our man Heidegger’s. Seriously, google the guy. You can unmistakably hear the soft frying of Schnitzel in his aura. Apparently it was Marty’s brother who got the entire genetic dosage of the familial sense of humor; this according to anyone who spent more than a minute with both of them.
Okay, where did we leave off last time? I got all carried away about how this Weltanschauung thing was gonna show we’re all sadists at heart or something. The proverbial hearty potatoes of every good modern critical theory hard-on: something about subjectivity, the subject, imagination, queering multiplicities, etc. Apparently today we’re going to learn what philosophy is by asking how it relates to weltanschauungen.
“Philosophy can and perhaps must show, among many other things, that something like a world-view belongs to the essential nature of the Dasein. Philosophy can and must define what in general constitutes the structure of a world-view. But it can never develop and posit some specific world-view qua just this or that particular one. Philosophy is not essentially the formation of a world-view; but perhaps just on this account it has an elementary and fundamental relation to all world-view formation, even to that which is not theoretical but factically historical.”
Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. by Albert Hofstadter, Revised Ed (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 10; ” Philosophie kann und muß vielleicht unter vielem anderen zeigen, daß zum Wesen des Daseins so etwas wie Weltanschauung gehört. Philosophie kann und muß umgrenzen, was die Struktur einer Weltanschauung überhaupt ausmacht. Sie kann aber nie eine bestimmte Weltanschauungals diese und jene ausbilden und setzen. Philosophie ist ihrem Wesen nach nicht eltanschauungsbildung, hat aber vielleicht gerade deshalb einen elementaren und prinzipiellen Bezug zu aller, auch der nicht theoretischen, sondern faktisch geschichtlichen Weltanschauungsbildung.” Martin Heidegger and Friedrich-Wilhelm von. Herrmann, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1997), p. 13.
We look at the text and, well, first things first, an admission; I was barking up the wrong tree last week. I got a bit too excited about this Weltanschauung question, I missed that it was mostly a ruse to bring us to philosophy’s favorite narcissistic exercise: defining itself. Defining itself real hard. In one of his lectures on metaphysics, Adorno once joked to the effect that one could most easily be sure one was doing metaphysics simply by discussing whether or not one was doing metaphysics. Funny guy.
And what is philosophy? Here we quickly distinguish ourselves from priests and artists:
“A philosophical world-view is one that expressly and explicitly or at any rate preponderantly has to be worked out and brought about by philosophy, that is to say, by theoretical speculation, to the exclusion of artistic and religious interpretations of the world and the Dasein.”
Heidegger, p. 6; “Eine philosophische Weltanschauung ist eine solche, die eigens und ausdrücklich oder jedenfalls vorwiegend durch die Philosophie ausgebildet und vermittelt werden soll, d. h. durch theoretische Spekulation mit Ausschaltung der künstlerischen und religiösen Deutung der Welt und des Daseins.” Heidegger and Herrmann, p. 8.
Uh oh. None of that artsy shit here. Forgive me, I can’t help but hear a nasal Shapiro: facts don’t care about your feelings, you sentimental lib. “Madam, I swear I use no art at all.” Strap in, though, because we’re only getting started. You see, unlike science, philosophy might ask us to forgo everything we thought was important, useful, visible, hell, actually everything entirely. In its stead, in his steely Teutonic tone—maybe think Clint Eastwood vith a German akcent—he gives us a sort of metaphysical 18th amendment and warns us that the philosophical weltanschauung bars not only booze but any real-existing object, any “this or that” (Seiendes als dieses und jenes) so to speak. Spooky. After going out of his way to rub our faces in the worldly, in everything you’ve ever known and cared about—psych!—Marty yanks it, chucks it, and washes his hands of it.
I’ll admit, at this point, I’m feeling whatever it is he’s been putting in the water; I’m confused. What are we talking about then? What are we even doing? Where am I? Who are you?
Apparently anticipating the naïve clamor of the rabble, the city kids and their quick thrills and sexual promiscuity, Heidegger teases us and makes us guess. Tell us, what are we talking about?
“What then is philosophy supposed to concern itself with if not with beings, with that which is, as well as with the whole of what is? What is not, is surely the nothing. Should philosophy, then, as absolute science, have the nothing as its theme? What can there be apart from nature, history, God, space, number?”
Heidegger, p. 10; ” Womit soll die Philosophie sich denn beschäftigen, wenn nicht mit Seiendem, mit dem, was ist, sowie mit dem Seienden im Ganzen? Was nicht ist, ist doch das Nichts. Soll etwa die Philosophie als absolute Wissenschaft das Nichts zum Thema haben? Was kann es geben außer Natur, Geschichte, Gott, Raum, Zahl?” Heidegger and Herrmann, p. 13.
Give us something to work with! Daddy, please! I’m starting to get why Lacan called Kant erotic . . .
Finally, we get to the big reveal. I’ll drop the entire thing in its entirety for you. In the words of a friend who was very much fed up with me: how about you stick this in your theoretical pipe and smoke it:
We say of each of these, even though in a different sense, that it is. We call it a being. In relating to it, whether theoretically or practically, we are comporting ourselves toward a being. Beyond all these beings there is nothing. Perhaps there is no other being beyond what has been enumerated, but perhaps, as in the German idiom for ‘there is,’ es gibt [literally, it gives}, still something else is given. Even more. In the end something is given which must be given if we are to be able to make beings accessible to us as beings and comport ourselves toward them, something which, to be sure, is not but which must be given if we are to experience and understand any beings at all. We are able to grasp beings as such, as beings, only if we understand something like being.
Heidegger, p. 10; ” Von all dem Genannten sagen wir, wenn auch in einem verschiedenen Sinne, es ist. Wir nennen es Seiendes. Darauf bezogen, sei es theoretisch oder praktisch, verhalten wir uns zu Seiendem. Außer diesem Seienden ist nichts. Vielleicht ist kein anderes Seiendes außer dem aufgezählten, aber vielleicht gibt es doch noch etwas, was zwar nicht ist, was es aber gleichwohl in einem noch zu bestimmenden Sinne gibt. Mehr noch. Am Ende gibt es etwas, was es geben muß, damit wir uns Seiendes als Seiendes zugänglich machen und uns zu ihm verhalten können, etwas, das zwar nicht ist, das es aber geben muß, damit wir überhaupt so etwas wie Seiendes erfahren und verstehen. Seiendes vermögen wir als solches, als Seiendes, nur zu fassen, wenn wir dergleichen wie Sein verstehen.” Heidegger and Herrmann, pp. 13–14.
Here we have it then. This is the plan. The goal of philosophy. The reason we are gathered here today. And so we reach the end of part 2 of our introduction and hit the first sentence of the next: “Das Sein ist das echte und einzige Thema der Philosophie.” [“[B]eing is the proper and sole theme of philosophy.”] That’s got some meat on it.
Let’s perhaps pause here and look in the mirror. Rather, let’s look around. With every vestige of institutional stability being blasted into precarity with the neoliberal dynamite quietly packaged and shipped out by the Chicago boys, I think we’re approaching a certain metaphysical certainty that no animal alive today with “human” on the name tag can in good faith claim that they’re an apolitical operator. With the internet-facilitated hyperfocus on the political aspects of every minute aspect of life, it really seems that the cliché lines of philosophising don’t seem as quite as serious; universal questions of mortality, meaninglessness, and temporality, unconcerned with historical effects of race, gender, class, etc. smacks of privileged indulgence at best. If asked to think of a philosopher, the popular imagination maybe spits out French men in dark coats with cigarettes contemplating the pain of life, perhaps drinking heavily, driving recklessly and looking at those younger girls over there. Come to think of it, it’s no wonder Marty was turned off by Sartre. He had a stick up his ass even by small town Prussian standards and would have never stood for this shit.
Hell, even the small survivalist and mountaineering forums I like to spend my discrete evenings on are being rocked by the pesky little realities of power politics and historical structures behind them. And if the recluse isn’t safe . . .
Who the hell has the actual space, time, dare I ask, the money to do this? To step away from every thing. You raised your hand? “Perhaps that’s exactly why he’s—” Yeah, good lord. I can feel the condescending professorial smirk from here.
Sorry. Maybe this is too much snark. I gotta breathe. It was only the first debate. Maybe things aren’t so bad. Chris Wallace did his best. Maybe I could even go find my newfound evangelical friends and talk things over. None of that changes the fact that, as cultural critic turned messiah of the young Left Mark Fisher noted, nowadays remarking on the futility of our situation is already de facto passé. There is no space today for talk like this. Maybe what this philosophy needs is some space to stretch it—I think in German they call it Lebensraum.
Jokes aside, reality today doesn’t go for the price anymore. These days it doesn’t seem to have the capacity for serious philosophical, conceptual structures at all. While early 20th-century conflicts were riddled with conceptual treatises, dogmatic schools, and ideologically fleshed-out weltanschauungen, today’s conflict doesn’t seem to need much of that at all. Instead, the rapid-fire think-piece hot take format has exceeded both in volume and velocity the need for, and possibly even the ability for, carefully constructed foundational arguments to support particular social positions and their perspectives. The GOP gets it: they didn’t even bother writing down a platform for 2020. Perhaps if we look outside of the world of letters, we may very well find certain schools of thought constituted not by philosophical structures but by embodied realities. It is the age of the body and the imagination after all.
Either way you cut it, these next few months are going to be rough. I have a certain perverse hope that these lectures will give me something to clutch as we start to really hit the rapids. This, despite the fact that any proper philosopher worth the weight of their paper degrees should know well enough to take serious issue with my approach. That is, if they don’t throw it immediately in the trash. A classroom introduction to the lectures states that the “the advantage of using the lecture course instead of Heidegger’s magnum opus is that it prevents pragmatist and existentialist readings of Heidegger” and that it instead “focuses on what Heidegger is really after.” Well, there’s a saying among fencing aficionados. The biggest threat to the world’s best fencer isn’t the second best. It’s an amateur, wildly swinging their épée in all directions. Well, for all intents and purposes, consider me extremely stupid and very well armed.
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Editors note: Further instalments of Heidegger at the End of the World should be up every Friday.
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