Heidegger's 'Letter on Humanism'

If there's one essay by Heidegger to which I still regularly return, it's his Letter on Humanism. First published in 1947, Heidegger provides a robust and brilliant defence not only of his own thinking, but of all those authors with whom he shares philosophical affinities.

In a crucial section that could almost act as a foreword to this blog, he writes:

“Because we are speaking against ‘humanism’ people fear a defense of the inhuman and a glorification of barbaric brutality. For what is more ‘logical’ than that somebody who negates humanism nothing remains but the affirmation of inhumanity?
      Because we are speaking against ‘logic’ people believe we are demanding that the rigor of thinking be renounced and in its place the arbitrariness of drives and feelings be installed and thus that ‘irrationalism’ be proclaimed as true. For what is more ‘logical’ than that whoever speaks against the logical is defending the alogical?
      Because we are speaking against ‘values’ people are horrified at a philosophy that ostensibly dares to despise humanity’s best qualities. For what is more ‘logical’ than that a thinking that denies values must necessarily pronounce everything valueless?
     Because we say that the Being of man consists in ‘being-in-the-world’ people find that man is downgraded to a merely terrestrial being, whereupon philosophy sinks into positivism. For what is more ‘logical’ than that whoever asserts the worldliness of human beings holds only this life valid, denies the beyond, and renounces all ‘Transcendence’?
      Because we refer to the word of Nietzsche on the ‘death of God’ people regard such a gesture as atheism. For what is more ‘logical’ than that whoever has experienced the death of God is godless?
      Because in all the respects mentioned we everywhere speak against all that humanity deems high and holy our philosophy teaches an irresponsible and destructive ‘nihilism’. For what is more ‘logical’ than that whoever roundly denies what is truly in being puts himself on the side of nonbeing and thus professes the pure nothing as the meaning of reality?
      What is going on here? People talk about ‘humanism’, ‘logic’, ‘values’, ‘world’, and ‘God’. They hear something about opposition to these. They recognize and accept these things as positive ... they immediately assume that what speaks against something is automatically its negation and that this is ‘negative’ in the sense of destructive. ...
      But does the ‘against’ which a thinking advances against ordinary opinion necessarily point toward negation and the negative? This happens ... only when one posits in advance what is meant by the ‘positive’ and on the basis makes an absolute and absolutely negative decision about the range of possible opposition to it. ...
...
      To think against ‘logic’ does not mean to break a lance for the illogical but simply to trace in thought the logos and its essence, which appeared in the dawn of thinking ...
      To think against ‘values’ is not to maintain that everything interpreted as ‘a value’ ... is valueless. Rather, it is important to finally realize that precisely through the characterization of something as ‘a value’ what is so valued is robbed of its worth. That is to say, by the assessment of something as a value what is valued is admitted only as an object for man’s estimation. ... Every valuing, even where it values positively, is a subjectivizing.”

In other words, valuing does not let things be in their own right; it allows them only to be valid when useful to man. This is what Nietzsche thinks of as nihilism and what Lawrence describes as blasphemous living. It is this they challenge via their work and in this challenge one can locate a new ethic (of letting be); something that their critics claim it is impossible to find within an irrationalist ontology and/or an anti-humanist politics of evil.

Thus, despite what these critics say, there clearly can be a post-moral ethics - just as there was a pre-moral ethics in the ancient world. As Nietzsche says on a number of occasions, beyond good and evil does not mean there are no conceptions of what constitutes good (noble) and bad (base) conduct.

Indeed, there could even conceivably be post-moral or neo-pagan religions, should we desire to formulate such on the basis of a newly affirmative will to power. But Zarathustra insists that any such religion would have to be one that stays true to the earth and to the flesh. This is not to posit a spurious form of blut und boden idealism in the manner of the Nazis, rather, it is to acknowledge that “Mortals dwell in the way they safeguard the Fourfold in its essential unfolding”.

In other words, mankind secures its destiny by tending the earth, receiving the sky, awaiting the gods, and by initiating an unfolding into being. This may not be humanism in the classical sense, but, as George Steiner says: “There are meaner metaphors to live by.”


Notes

Heidegger's 'Letter on Humanism' can be found in his Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, (Routledge, 1994).

The line on the dwelling of mortals comes from Heidegger's essay 'Building Dwelling Thinking', which can also be found in his Basic Writings. 

The line from George Steiner is taken from Heidegger, (Fontana Press, 1989), p. 150. 

O Wonderful Machine: Nihilism and the Question Concerning Technology (Part II)

"What is dangerous", writes Heidegger, "is not technology. ... The essence of technology, as a destining of revealing, is the danger." Developing this crucial point, he writes:

"The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already afflicted man in his essence. The rule of enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth."

In other words, the essence of technology - something that exists long  before the modern machine age - is a way of revealing so monolithically powerful and expansionist that it threatens to overwhelm man and prevent him from discovering any other possible becoming. Heidegger calls this revealing Ge-stell, a term commonly translated into English as ‘enframing’. He argues that this revealing that rules with technology doesn’t allow anything to come forth in its own right. Rather, it acts as a ‘challenging’ or ‘provocation’ [Herausfordern] “which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such”.

Thus, for example, a tract of land “is challenged in the hauling out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district”. But, more than this, it also reduces man to the status of ‘human resource’ or ‘standing reserve’ [Bestand] in service to technological purposes.

Interestingly, Lawrence also illustrates his thinking on the question concerning technology with reference to the coal mining industry. In Women in Love, for example, Gerald Crich acknowledges his destiny as someone caught up in an ideal-material struggle “with the earth and the coal it enclosed ... to turn upon the inanimate matter of the underground, and reduce it to his will”.

Prior to this, in The Rainbow, we encountered Tom Brangwen, another coal boss of the view that men belong entirely to their jobs and that outside of the great social-industrial machine of work man had become “a meaningless lump – a standing machine”.

Ursula, fundamentally hostile to her uncle's thinking and keen to imagine a different human future, nevertheless understands the horrible fascination of lives subjected to technology and the power of money; aware that there is a perverse satisfaction  to be gained from such subjection. Even, it is suggested, via machinic servitude man achieves his consummation and immortality, Lawrence arguing not that technology makes us less human, but, on the contrary super-human. Thus it is that Gerald Crich is transformed into a modern Prometheus and fulfils the great promise of science; namely, that man too can attain infinite power (or, perhaps more accurately, infinite knowledge, which, for modern man, is one and the same thing).

The question becomes: what will man do with this unlimited power-knowledge? Will he use it to transform himself and his world, or destroy himself and the natural environment? On the level of utility and abstraction we have made ourselves into lords of production, but we have also arrived at the very edge of an abyss: “Present-day man is of the lowest rank", writes Blanchot, "but his power is that of a being who is already beyond man: how would this contradiction not harbour the greatest danger?”

It is for this reason that Nietzsche predicts that modern nihilism will result in great wars and violent upheaval on an unprecedented scale. However, oblivious or indifferent as men like Gerald Crich are to such dangers, they press on in their quest to see life entirely dominated by mind and a will that is negative in direction and composed of predominantly reactive forces seeking the ego’s triumph over all that lies external to it. By bringing everything into the realm of knowledge and reducing the world to information, Gerald is able to master and manipulate existence, determining its truth via reference to his own learning. Thus, in this manner, as George Steiner correctly notes, the self becomes “the hub of reality and relates to the world outside itself in an exploratory, necessarily exploitative way”. 

But no matter how much Gerald knows, still he feels strangely empty; “as if the very middle of him were a vacuum”. And as this feeling becomes increasingly acute, his voraciousness grows: “And to stop up this hollowness, he drags all things into himself”. Such rampant egoism and greed is condemned repeatedly in the writings of both Nietzsche and Lawrence and yet it remains almost definitional of modern man who, it seems, will not rest content until he has “killed the mysteries and devoured the secrets”.

Clearly, if a change is to be made to a new mode of living then modern man must find someway to overcome his conceit and what Keith Ansell-Pearson describes as his “paranoid and phobic anthropocentrism”. To do so will not be easy and will involve a self-overcoming and a confrontation with our deep-rooted idealism. And yet, to return to Heidegger’s text concerning the question of technology, we have already seen how hope lies precisely where and when we might least expect it; the hope of a radically different revealing to the one that presently holds sway.

Heidegger names this with the Greek term poiēsis and indicates by this a revealing that brings forth without provocation, having, as it does, an entirely different relation to matter. It is a revealing that may enable us to confront the essential unfolding of technology and survive our prolonged flirtation with nihilism.

However, to reiterate, it is the supreme danger of the above unfolding and flirtation which harbours the possible rise of the saving power. Thus instead of simply gaping at the technological as that in which we see our own diabolical genius reflected, we must attempt to glimpse that which is ambiguous and other contained in the essence of technology.

Of course, to simply catch sight of this does not mean we are thereby ‘saved’ - but we are “thereupon summoned to hope in the growing light of the saving power” and we are reminded that there was once a time and a place (i.e. ancient Greece) when poiēsis was also understood as belonging to technē and the fine arts, undifferentiated from any other technical ability, “soared to the supreme height of the revealing granted them”.

For Heidegger, as for Nietzsche, it was the arts that uniquely allowed the Greeks to enter into a direct relationship with the world of being and not merely a world of knowledge and representation; the arts which allowed them to dwell poetically on the earth and not merely live prosaically.

Can they do so again, now, for us? Heidegger is uncertain.

But, despite his pessimism, he seems to remain hopeful that one day the arts may once again be granted this highest possibility. Providing, that is, that there are still profound thinkers who remain astounded by and before this other possibility and who, via their questioning, may be able to incite a new becoming.

And so there remains a vital task for philosophy. For whilst the latter cannot itself provide the new, it can prepare the conditions under which the new might emerge. And whilst philosophy is neither able to predict or guarantee the future, still it allows for the possibility “that the world civilization that is just now beginning might one day overcome its technological-scientific-industrial character as the sole criterion of man’s world sojourn”.

Bibliography

Keith Ansell-Pearson, Viroid Life, (Routledge, 1997). 

Maurice Blanchot, 'The Limits of Experience: Nihilism', essay in The New Nietzsche, ed. David B. Allison, (The MIT Press, 1992).

Martin Heidegger, 'The Question Concerning Technology', essay in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Routledge, 1994).

Martin Heidegger, 'The End of Philosophy and the Task for Thinking', essay in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, (Routledge, 1994). 

D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989).

D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987).

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Crown', essay in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988).

George Steiner, Heidegger, (Fontana Press, 1989).

Note: Part one of this post can be read by clicking here.

O Wonderful Machine: Nihilism and the Question Concerning Technology (Part I)

Charlie Chaplin: Modern Times (1936)

According to Blanchot, Nietzsche is quick to grasp that all the modern world’s seriousness is confined to science and the "prodigious power of technology". Lawrence refers to this (poetically) as the triumph of the machine.

Whilst Nietzsche doesn't entirely deplore this fact, happy, for example, to support the experimental practices of science, he is by no means able to affirm the above development without reservation; not least of all because he identifies modern science as the descendant and heir of Christian moral culture. In other words, it's a machine-embodied unfolding of the ascetic ideal; an expression of mankind's pathological will to truth.

Thus, for Nietzsche, science and technology is fundamentally nihilistic in character, full of thinly veiled metaphysical prejudices and productive of reactive knowledge-forms which may yet prove fatal not only to the Christian moral culture from out of which it has grown, but to the possibility of culture per se as it puts on ice all the illusions which are necessary for the sustaining of culture and, indeed, life itself.

In addition to this fundamental antipathy between vital illusion and the pure knowledge drive, Nietzsche claims that science is incapable of serving as the foundation of culture because, unlike art, it knows nothing of “taste, love, pleasure, displeasure, exaltation, or exhaustion” and so cannot evaluate, cannot command, and cannot create. At best, when coupled to the huge resources of capitalism, science is capable of building a tremendous industrial-technological civilization, such as our own, but, for Nietzsche, this is not a genuine cultural formation because, whilst it is certainly capable of organizing the chaos of existence and constructing a monolithic system or network, it lacks style.

Style, insists Nietzsche, always involves the constraint of a single taste. But it is not merely the imposition of universal laws or categorical imperatives; nor does it seek to make all things and all forces familiar, similar, and predictable. The ideal abstractions of science may very effectively allow for the manipulation of the world and the subordination of life to a tyrannical knowledge form - logic - but this is not the same as mastery and the artist of culture is more than a mere systematizer.

Failing to make the distinction, the technocratic man of reason confuses bullying with a display of strength and mistakes force for power. This is perfectly illustrated in  Lawrence's novel Women in Love by the figure of Gerald Crich; a character driven to impose his will and authority over himself and his workers, just as he does over his red Arab mare. Gerald’s world, the world of industrial civilization, has been described earlier by Lawrence in The Rainbow:

“The streets were like visions of pure ugliness ... that began nowhere and ended nowhere. Everything was amorphous, yet everything repeated itself endlessly ...
   The place had the strange desolation of a ruin. ... The rigidity of the blank streets, the homogeneous amorphous sterility of the whole suggested death rather than life. ...
   The place was a moment of chaos perpetuated, persisting, chaos fixed and rigid.” 

If such a mechanical world essentially lacks style, so too does it entirely lack meaning. At best, it retains a strictly functional residue of the latter that allows it to continue to operate. How to give value back to such a world - and a little loveliness - is a concern shared by Nietzsche and Lawrence. They both fear, however, that so long as the nihilistic-scientific perspective retains its authority, there can be no revaluation. For such a perspective has not only made the barbarism of the modern world unavoidable, but it ensures the destruction of all other perspectives and modes of being.

And yet, perhaps there is hope to be found where we might have least expected to encounter it. This is one of the great lessons of encouragement given to us by Heidegger in his essay entitled ‘The Question Concerning Technology’. At the heart of this work are the following lines from Hölderlin: Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch.

Commenting on these lines, George Steiner writes:

“To realize that false technicity has edged the human race to the brink of ecological devastation and political suicide, is to realize also that salvation is possible ... It is in the very extremity of the modern crisis, in the very time of nihilistic mechanism, that hope lies ready.”

It is important that we avoid misunderstanding here; hope does not lie in the fruits of science and technology themselves and it is not, therefore, a question of accelerating the production and proliferation of ever-more sophisticated machines in the erroneous assumption that only a micro-chip can save us. If, on the one hand, technophobes who rebel naively against technology and curse it as the work of the devil should rightly be challenged, then, on the other hand, technophiles and neo-futurists who argue for an ever-greater technological manipulation of life deserve also to be met with critical resistance.

Heidegger would surely have agreed with Lawrence that “the more we intervene machinery between us and the naked forces, the more we numb and atrophy our own senses”. Thus, if we are to find our way into a new revealing, then we will have to find a way to creatively manifest these forces. And if we are to deepen our questioning of nihilism and technology, then we will need to resist the temptation of easy solutions and the blackmail of being either for or against science.

It is only via such a questioning - one that manages to touch on the essence of technology - that we can find hope. For it is only by daring to think the latter, which is to say, move closer to the very danger that threatens us, that “the ways into the saving power begin to shine” more brightly.


Bibliography

Maurice Blanchot, 'The Limits of Experience: Nihilism', essay in The New Nietzsche, ed. David B. Allison, (The MIT Press, 1992).
Martin Heidegger, 'The Question Concerning Technology', essay in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Routledge, 1994).
D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
D. H. Lawrence, 'Dana's Two Years before the Mast', essay in Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Nietzsche, 'The Struggle between Science and Wisdom', essay in Philosophy and Truth, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale, (Humanities Press International, 1993). 
George Steiner, Heidegger, (Fontana Press, 1989).


Note: Part two of this post can be read by clicking here. 

Identity is the Crisis Can't You See

Cover of the English translation by David Schreiber 

(Arktos, London, 2013) 

Markus Willinger's Die identitäre Generation is not so much a book as a pamphlet, to paraphrase Larry David discussing Jason Alexander's equally flimsy (but doubtless more profound and challenging) text, Acting Without Acting. 

Either way - book or pamphlet - it's probably one of the most badly written works ever published; certainly the worst I've had the misfortune to read in a long, long time. If this is the best that a graduate student of history and politics from the University of Stuttgart and darling of the alternative Right can muster, then (a) the German education system is in trouble and (b) the identitarian movement is even more ideologically vacuous than one might have imagined.  

Willinger disingenuously claims his work is not a manifesto, but this is precisely what it is; a succinct and clear declaration of his views on what's wrong in Europe today, who's to blame - the soixante-huitards - and what future changes should be made. What the work doesn't do - despite what it says on the back-cover blurb - is move seamlessly between radical politics and existential philosophy. Nor does it set out its arguments (such as they are) in a poetic fashion.

Rather, it remains stuck in a reactionary rut and relies upon the ugly, prosaic and völkisch-organic language of fascism, or what Victor Klemperer characterized as the lingua tertii imperii. A standardized and stereotypical language which lacks all nuance and loveliness, all subtlety or sophistication; a language that forever speaks with one tone: loud, monotonous, and threatening - like the barking of an Alsatian dog.         

It's certainly not the German used by Goethe, Heine, or Rilke. It makes a noise, yes, and it continues to pass the word along along, but it creates no sense of communion as George Steiner would say. Willinger gives us dead metaphors and ready-made slogans in place of ideas; his writing lacks vitality, style, and, above all, humour. It does, however, successfully mix common vulgarity and prejudice with high flights of romantic twaddle and fatal amounts of saccharine pathos.

The pamphlet-manifesto is divided into forty-one chapters and a brief Preface in which Willinger writes of a (prepare to yawn) crisis of the European spirit, which he blames on the post-War generation and their corrupt theories that have "determined the social discourse ... and dominated all the dialogues"[80] for the last fifty years or so.

Speaking on behalf of his own generation, born shortly before the Millennium, Willinger demands a return to fixed identities, real values, and traditional family life; a return which will, apparently, mean an end to boredom and loneliness - as well as to the twin evils of multiculturalism and feminism. For the "perpetual, deep resentment" [25] that Willinger openly admits to feeling and which shapes his thinking, expresses itself not only in the form of  racism, but also misogyny and homophobia.

And thus, it's not only the artists and intellectuals associated with May 1968 (the month and year of my own birth) who are to blame for making poor Markus feel so bad about himself and his life, it's also the immigrants (particularly the Muslims), the abortionists, the queers, the perverts and the scowling feminists ... Oh, and it's also the Americans and the big corporations who have "inflicted countless and terrible wounds on our planet" [74] with their irresponsible greed (like every good Nazi, Willing is a romantic anti-capitalist at heart who adores Nature and values every tree and every mountain as sacred).

Not that he wants to "damn and demonize" [46] anybody of course. He just wants the above to learn how to be a little bit more like him; that is to say, someone ready to die for the one great thing that provides a final refuge ...LOVE! In this world of pain and sorrow, writes Willinger, the highest goal and greatest happiness is to find true love.

But of course, as much as Willinger may talk of love and want to receive such, like all men of ressentiment he doesn't know how to give love. And so he quickly recoils back into hate and the language of violence, fantasizing about life not in the bedroom, but the barracks: "If there is any masculinity, honour, and camaraderie today, the credit is due, above all, to the hard training that men received in the army." [85]

Not surprisingly, therefore, Willinger wants a return to compulsory military service, so that all young men might be taught how to obey orders, how to fight, and how to make the ultimate sacrifice.

Perhaps they'll also be taught how to recognise real beauty: for although Willinger concedes that "there is no accounting for taste and every attempt at defining a definitive aesthetic standard is inherently impossible" [93], he knows good art when he sees it - "the sort that stands in unity with the natural world, the sort that radiates pride and glory, that represents something real and in which we can find meaning" [94].

Not modern art, obviously, which is formless and fragmented. And stomach turning.   

Finally, bringing his manifesto to a close, Willinger calls for brave, passionate action. And weapons. He promises that a final verdict will shortly be passed upon people like me who are responsible for the downfall of mankind and the ruin of the world; nihilists who knowingly destroy everything holy and fight against everything natural; queers for whom the concept of identity is a crisis in and of itself.

To be honest, one rather hopes it'll be a death sentence, if only so one never has to read any more of his appalling books ...  

Why I Love the Poetry of Paul Celan

In his essay 'The Hollow Miracle' (1959), George Steiner argues that the Nazis killed the German language. Or, at any rate, they murdered the poetry of the language. Post-war German, says Steiner, still makes a sound and it still allows for communication, but it creates no sense of communion.

This is a terrible indictment - and, clearly, it's meant to be. But is it strictly fair, or even accurate? For without wishing to dispute that something immensely damaging was done to German during the Nazi period, it might be argued that a process that had been underway for some time was simply taken to its fatal conclusion.

In fact, Steiner concedes that the death of the German language has a long and complicated history. Thus, even during the Second Reich, for example, there were worrying signs that German was in a bad shape, including an over-reliance on fixed metaphors, stock similes, and ready-made slogans. And as words and sentences started growing clumsy and bloated, it became ever more difficult to express new thoughts or feelings in a concise and cheerful manner (even Nietzsche struggles at times).  

It was the Prussians, therefore, not the Nazis, who replaced the genius of the language with cliché, vulgarity, and a fatal taste for sickly romantic pathos beneath which to conceal their own ressentiment; and it was the Prussians who showed a peculiar liking for the loud voice barking threats and commands, rather than that which spoke softly and with good humour.

Thus it was that the voices of Heine, Rilke, Kafka, and others were all drowned out by the those who knew how to turn the German tongue into a weapon of mass destruction and rob human speech of its integrity and tenderness. Steiner writes:

"Let us keep one fact clearly in mind: the German language was not innocent of the horrors of Nazism. It is not merely that a Hitler, a Goebbels, and a Himmler happened to speak German. Nazism found in the language precisely what it needed to give voice to its savagery. Hitler heard inside his native tongue the latent hysteria, the confusion, the quality of hypnotic trance."

- 'The Hollow Miracle', essay in Language and Silence, (Penguin Books, 1969), p.140.

Of course, all languages contain toxic reservoirs of hatred, but only in German did they bubble so closely to the surface of legitimate and everyday speech. Thus it was that German supplied evil with a tongue. And if under Bismarck it became the language of the modern state, under Hitler it became the language with which to administer Hell. 

Steiner concludes his essay on a pessimistic note, arguing that when a language has been used to conceive, organize, and justify genocide, then it has been fatally compromised; that something of the malevolence and malignancy sinks into the language and prevents it from ever being able to renew itself. Is there then no hope for German? Was Adorno right to assert there could be no poetry after Auschwitz? 

For me, Paul Celan provides this hope and proves Adorno wrong. Celan knew exactly what was needed of poetry after the Holocaust: first, it had to articulate the silence without breaking it; secondly, it had to find a way to 'bear witness from the inside of death'. Those critics who accused him of aestheticizing genocide were profoundly stupid and shamefully mistaken. Celan is the greatest post-War poet writing in German and those who love the language have him to thank for reinvesting it with Geist and freeing it from its congealment in blood and soil.