Thomas Yaeger's Blog: Heidegger

Showing posts with label Heidegger. Show all posts

Monday, 10 February 2020

Heidegger and Barbarism (Writing to @SemprePhi)

This passage is from Heidegger’s lecture series on Parmenides, section 4. I was taught that the use of the term barbaroi by the Greeks originally designated those who were not speakers of Greek, and that the term did not necessarily have negative connotations. It referred to how other languages sounded to Greek ears. I don’t mean to suggest that the Greeks did not have an exceptionalist sense of themselves (they clearly did), but barbaroi was not initially conceived of as some kind of quasi-structuralist contrast with the characteristics of other cultural groups. Persians, Medes, Babylonians and Egyptians were barbaroi because they were not Greek, and often did not speak Greek (Those Egyptian priests who spoke with Solon during his visit to Egypt clearly spoke Greek).

Later of course the term barbaroi did come to have negative connotations particularly as a term used by the Romans), but not generally in Greece in the period between Parmenides and Plato (6^th and 5^th centuries BCE.)

So what is going on with the passage by Heidegger? He says that for the Greeks, the opposite to ‘barbarism’ is ‘’dwelling within mythos and logos’. This is hard to understand, since mythos and logos indicate quite different ways of thinking. Mythos concerns things which are unascertainable, and usually belong to the world of the gods and of the ancestors, all of which are necessarily wrapped up in a great deal of conjecture. Logos (i.e., ‘reason’) is more associated with things which can be ascertained by rational inquiry, such as investigations into historical, political and societal events.

Did the Greeks blur together their interest in mythos and logos as part of their definition of themselves in the sixth and fifth centuries? Or did they distinguish them as opposites? Or is this just a construct manufactured by Heidegger’s imagination? Where does Heidegger get this from?

The obvious place to look is in the pages of Herodotus. He talks about things which are mythical and difficult to establish as true or false, and also of things which can be ascertained, to an acceptable degree, by careful inquiry into the available information. Though Herodotus sometimes went adrift when he was describing cultures with which he had very little familiarity (Egypt and Babylon in particular). Herodotus spoke of the gods, and their supposed genealogies, but he did not use the term mythos in connection with matters of the gods. Concerning the gods, it is just so much more difficult to establish what is true, and what is merely a matter of conjecture. Plato likewise, left questions about the gods and their genealogies to those who had a better claim to know the truth than he did (those who claimed to be their descendants). The Greeks always imagined themselves as rational creatures, but knew the difference between speculation, and truths which could be established to a reasonable degree.

What Heidegger has to say about the idea of culture is partly correct, but also largely nonsense. Culture was not a concept in the Greek lexicon, for the simple reason that it was so much part of the warp and weft of life that it was hard to separate out as a concept. It was about observance, about ritual, literature and poetry. They had no word for their religion. Why should they?

But Heidegger characterises culture as the product of the ‘willful power of man’, and compares it to technology, suggesting that the Greeks would have regarded both culture and technology as barbarism, because they were ‘unmythical’. This is ludicrous. The best and most successful technology the Greeks created was the fleet that won the battle of Salamis against the Persians. The Greeks did not have a problem with that, and didn’t regard their victory as an instance of barbarism. This is technology, not culture.

‘Heidegger’s lecture series on Parmenides was delivered at the University of Freiburg in 1942-3. He does not provide a translation of Parmenides poem, or provide a thorough and informed commentary on it. Instead, his subject is the starting point for extensive riffing on ideas about Greece and culture in his head which are without evidential support.

The period in which Heidegger gave these lectures is important if we are to understand what is going on. Heidegger was a supporter of the Nazi party in Germany, and declared that the nature of reality was determined by that party. That makes it possible to say such things as: ‘what you are seeing and hearing is not what is happening’, and other remarks which effectively represent the abdication of reason. When reason and the evidential base have been left behind, it is possible to say all sorts of things, including remarks about the importance of reason which have no reason.

So the assertion that the Greeks understood the opposite to barbarism to be living within both mythos and logos, which is a contradictory pairing, as well as an opposition of concepts based on no evidence at all, needs to be explained. You quoted a scholar who has said that ‘Heidegger's readings of the ancients are heavily determined by the modern polemics in which he is involved… He also lacks a sense for the breadth and diversity of "Greek" thought’. That is correct on both counts, I think. Heidegger cannot be lifted out of the context in which he thought and wrote, but he can be understood, or rather what he thought can be explained, within that context.

The poet Robert Graves rued the fact that Greek mythology was a mess, and that it was often hard to make sense of it. The reason for this is that what survives exists without any documentation of how the various versions of myths (and associated genealogies, which often exist in conflicting versions), came to be constructed. The reason for the mess is fairly simple however – the stories and the genealogies were the work of poets and praise singers, who wrote to support the self-perceptions of their tribal patrons and war lords. Everything was in flux, and imagined genealogies could change as a consequence of defeat in war.

Myth serves many purposes, but often could be repurposed for political and dynastic interests. Sometimes a myth serves as a charter for political change. It doesn’t often serve truth, at least not when it forms part of politics. The writer Alfred Rosenberg, one of the architects of the development of Nazi ideology, wrote The Myth of the 20^th Century which contains much of the spurious and evidence-free thought which became the basis of the party and its intentions. His Wikipedia entry tells you what you need to know:

The author of a seminal work of Nazi ideology, The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), Rosenberg is considered one of the main authors of key National Socialist ideological creeds, including its racial theory, persecution of the Jews, Lebensraum, abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles, and opposition to what was considered "degenerate" modern art. He is known [also] for his rejection of and hatred for Christianity.

All of this fantasy was forged from WW1 (even before) up to the outbreak of WW2. The party acted on the fantasy as if it was real, and behaved as if what they were doing was entirely rational. In which case both mythos and logos co-existed at the same time in Nazi Germany.

Essentially Heidegger is, by reading back from his own present, attempting to understand ancient Greece in terms of contemporary thought in Nazi Germany. Germany had long thought of itself as the natural successor to Greek civilisation. The fusion of mythos and logos he saw around him was what gave Germany its power, as he imagined an earlier fusion of these gave rise to the power and influence of Greek civilization.

Thomas Yeager, February 10, 2020.

Thursday, 6 February 2020

Heidegger and Being: (Writing to @SemprePhi)

Hi. I read some of Heidegger’s Being and Time when I was around twenty, not realising that it was only the first third of a much larger projected volume. His essentially existential approach to gaining a theoretical grasp of ‘Being’ left me cold. This is because even then I didn’t think there was an existential approach possible, since, by definition ‘Being’ by itself is beyond actual existence.

Or at least by my definition, which was fuelled (at the time) by the sort of thing Plato said about it, and some of the statements by the presocratics. We might imagine that it exists, as all things must do, somewhere in space and in time. This Plato said was an illegitimate way of thinking about ‘the one true thing’. By its nature it cannot have its reality and nature in space and time.

Heidegger is aware of this of course, but nevertheless deflects from the consideration of Being as Being (the presocratics Aristotle described as the first philosophers to consider the question of Being qua Being). He looks leftwards again and again at existential and phenomenological approaches to questions of Being.

In the end, he argues, in a manner similar to Sartre later on when talking about meaning (in Existentialism & Humanism, which is the slightly inaccurate title his book is given in Britain), that existential experience, however imprecise and however poor it is as a process, is the way in which to gain an understanding of what is difficult to apprehend.

In short, for me, Heidegger is not actually talking about Being at all, but the Being of living beings, and occasionally looking upwards at more abstracted and transcendent conceptions of what Being itself might be, though it is an unattainable concept.

Heidegger was a pupil of Edmund Husserl, who has been a major influence on me, also, though it a different way. Many of my essays on subjects start off from one place, and end up in another. Occasionally I follow the line of an established author or authors, and as the essay goes on, I start to deconstruct the elements which hold their argument together. After that, I may entirely reverse the premises of their argument, and go off in another direction. I was doing this before I had my close encounter with Husserl, but learning to see all information as elements which might be capable of being read and constructed in entirely different ways, and breaking down conventional narratives into their components, was a key part of my intellectual development.

I also had the advantage of having read widely in philosophy and ancient literature before I began formal study of the ancient world. So there was much more going on in my head than a direct interaction with texts as themselves. There were always other possible contexts, and other ways of understanding what their actual concerns might have been (this widened to an interest in iconography and ritual texts – no one treats the latter seriously (in their own terms), outside of a purely anthropological interest. Wittgenstein thought this was a foolish approach by the anthropologists).

One of the first things which set me on my current path was noticing (as I’ve mentioned elsewhere), that some equivalent technical terms in ancient Egypt were used in the same way as Aristotle did. But the Egyptian evidence was nearly a thousand years older (the concept of ‘completion’ for example). So it occurred to me that both the established history of philosophy (i.e., invented by the Greeks in the 5^th century BCE), and that the idea that philosophy was the successor to religious thought (considered scarcely rational), might be components in a false narrative. So I started to move the building blocks of the conventional narratives around, to see if they made more sense when looked at from a different point of view.

I’ve mentioned Aristotle referring to the presocratics as the first philosophers to consider Being as Being, meaning in all the abstracted glory of the concept (Aristotle made an important distinction between the actual and the potential infinite, and the latter is still the basis of most mathematical work on the infinite. Why? It is hard to do mathematics and geometry with the actual infinite. The modern assumption is that nobody before the Greeks ever conceived of a direct engagement with the infinite (or with Being).

Yet the prosocratic concern with Being qua Being is in the wrong place. If it was in the right place, it would follow on from the kind of discussion we get from Plato and Aristotle, when contemplating various intellectual puzzles (the aporia). Yet there it is at the beginning of the Greek philosophical tradition. It is in fragments only, many of which were used by Aristotle in his Metaphysics. Could it be that these fragments were the product of a sophisticated discussion of philosophical questions in the Eleatic school and elsewhere, much earlier, and that such discussion has just dropped out of the record? Or perhaps was never committed to writing at all?

I know the answer to that question now, which is that the Greeks did indeed get their philosophical ideas from elsewhere, which is not to say that they did not do philosophy themselves before this (I’m in the process of writing up the evidence and case for the Greek close encounter with Ancient Assyria in the seventh century BCE.)

I’ve been reading an extensive paper on Heidegger, and his uncompleted project of Being and Time. The latter half of the proposed book was actually looking to a deconstruction (or even destruction) of the history (and modern understanding) of philosophy. That was a big surprise, since it is essentially what my overarching project is about. For me, it is largely a necessary task because the Enlightenment placing of the first sophisticated discussion of philosophical questions in Greece between the seventh to the fourth centuries BCE entirely obscures the relevance of philosophy to the history and development of religion, both in the ancient Near East, and in ancient Greece. That false narrative needs to be fixed.

I’ve beaten over a thousand words in about an hour, so I will break off here. If you are interested the essay (actually seminar notes) on Heidegger’s Being and Time is at: https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/campuspress.yale.edu/dist/8/1250/files/2016/01/Heidegger-Being-and-Time-1qtvjcq.pdf . By Karsten Harries, from 2014.

I’ll write about Parmenides and Heidegger’s discussion of Plato’s Sophist later.

Hope you have had a great start to the year!

Best, Thomas