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. 

Waiting for the Migrants (After Cavafy)

Portrait of C. P. Cavafy: the Onassis Cultural Centre

www.sgt.gr

More than a million migrants and refugees crossed into Europe by sea in 2015, sparking a crisis as countries struggled to cope with the influx. And, according to new figures published this week, the situation is only getting more desperate as the number of people seeking safety, shelter, and opportunity continues to rise ...

I don't know what can be done or what should be done about this. But, as a poet, I feel myself entitled to comment on events and express all kinds of thoughts and feelings which others might repudiate (though whether anyone should pay the slightest attention to the musings of a poet in a time of social and political upheaval is of course debatable).

And so here's a few lines of verse in relation to the above chaos of peoples; lines which rely upon (and play with) Cavafy's famous poem, Περιμένοντας τους Bαρβάρους.

I am grateful to Dr Maria Thanassa for providing me with a new translation of the original Greek text.


What are we waiting for gathered on the beach
and looking nervously out to sea?

Haven't you heard? The migrants are arriving today …

Why is nothing being done to stop them?
Why are the politicians arguing about quotas and not acting?

Because it’s already too late: what laws are they to pass now?
Besides, when the migrants arrive, they’ll legislate anew.

Why did Frau Merkel throw open the gates to Europe?
Who gave her the right to lecture others on their Christian duty?

I don’t know. But the migrants are arriving today  
and we must receive them with smiles and open purses.
We must bestow universal rights upon them.

Why have so many news crews arrived on the scene,
with solemn reporters pushing cameras into the faces
of crying women and children?

Because the migrants are arriving today
and journalists have a moral obligation to bring us their story ... 

Why are so many celebrities holding signs that read:  
Refugees Welcome?

Because the migrants are arriving today
and bleeding hearts have never looked better
than when stitched onto designer sleeves ...

Why all of a sudden is there such restlessness and such confusion?
Why are the streets and the squares emptying so fast, people heading
home in horror?

Because darkness has fallen.   

What shall become of us in a land occupied by immigrants?
We were told they'd provide a solution ...

Steve Taylor's Softness Contra Nietzschean Hardness

According to best-selling author and academic Steve Taylor - a man who prides himself on having a Ph.D in transpersonal psychology and the fact that for the last four years he's been included in a list of the world's most spiritually influential living people - we should allow ourselves to be soft in order to:

(i) avoid conflict with others or creating unnecessary friction -

(ii) make ourselves invulnerable "so that disappointments and insults don't bruise" and life is as painless as possible -

(iii) become a good liberal able to "pass through the world" without damaging anything.   

Amusingly, this is a man who - I'm told - once made a pilgrimage to Nietzsche's birthplace!

But Nietzsche didn't tell his readers to calm down and he sneered at philosophies about which the best that can be said is that they don't hurt anyone. Indeed, for Nietzsche, it is modern man's excessive sensitivity and decadence that lies at the heart of so many of the problems facing us today. Zarathustra famously speaks of the diamond who asks of the charcoal:

"Why so soft, so submissive and yielding? Why is there so much negation and abnegation in your heart? Why is there so little fate in your look?"

He insists that creators are of necessity hard; that they impose and impress themselves upon others and upon life with cruelty and innocence. And he laughs at the weaklings who think themselves good merely because their claws are blunt ... 


Notes 

Readers interested in Dr Taylor and his work should visit: stevenmtaylor.com 
His poem, Be Soft (for Russel Williams), Dec. 2015, can be found directly by clicking here. 

Readers interested in Nietzsche's thought can consult the digital critical edition of his complete works and letters based on the G. Colli and M. Montinari text, ed. by Paolo D’Iorio: click here. 

The above painting of Nietzsche, by Angela Vera Concha (2010), can be found here along with other interesting stuff.

Big Mac Amongst the Bramble

Nothing says Essex more than this image of a Big Mac box discarded amongst the bramble: the perfect juxtaposition of brash and noisy consumer culture and a largely lifeless countryside rendered silent beneath the onslaught of the former.

The futile attempt to keep Britain tidy has largely been lost in an age of litter. Indeed, paper bags, plastic bottles, tin cans, cigarette butts and other manufactured objects are now such an ever-present part of the natural environment that many people seem not to notice, or passively accept the fact.   

And whilst the fast food industry isn't entirely to blame for this, it's certainly a major producer of rubbish. Several recent studies have shown that packaging from their products is a significant percentage of national litter, with McDonald's the chief culprit. For despite priding themselves on their corporate efforts to ensure responsible disposal of trash, waste from McDonald's continues to make up almost a third of the junk food litter in the UK.

Beneath the Golden Arches and the promise of hamburger heaven lies a landfill site ... 

Reflections on the Death of a Rat

SA 2016

When exiled in Essex looking after an elderly parent in need of extensive and intensive care due to a serious neuro-cognitive impairment, it can quickly become isolating: friends fall away and family members stay away. And it's virtually impossible of course to communicate with the natives, or get to know the next door neighbours. 

And so, like Dr Doolittle, one turns to the animals for companionship; whistling to the little birds, observing the slugs and snails in all their soft beauty, and attempting to befriend a very timid but rather fierce looking local cat who likes to sit under a big bush at the top of my back garden, disappearing through a hole in the fence whenever he's approached. 

I've been leaving him a small tin of Gourmet Gold chicken and liver chunks in gravy at night for several weeks now, which, judging by the emptiness of the tin each morning, he seems to enjoy. Indeed, in what I like to interpret as a gesture of gratitude the cat today left a freshly killed (and semi-eaten) rat on the lawn for me to find.       

Now I know that many people find such feline behaviour gross, or might raise a moral objection to cruelty (it's amazing how many self-professed animal lovers are in denial about the murderous and carnivorous nature of reality). But I must admit to feeling rather touched by this attempt to reciprocate kindness and share food.     

I understand that domestic cats have an effect on wildlife numbers, killing many millions of birds, rodents, and other small creatures each year. However - and this might surprise many readers - there is no scientific evidence that predation by moggies is having any serious impact on other species here in the UK.

What the research does show, however, is that rapid loss of natural habitat due to human activity is the major factor in why biodiversity is shrinking; over 60% of British species have significantly declined in recent decades and 10% face extinction. And it's we - not our pets - who are to blame ...

Thoughts on D. H. Lawrence (Stephen Alexander in Conversation with David Brock)

                                   

Back in the far-off summer of 2014, I was interviewed by then Editor of the D. H. Lawrence Newsletter, David Brock, who wanted to know my thoughts on a number of questions that were then troubling him in relation to his hero poet.

As most torpedophiles are not members of the D. H. Lawrence Society and will not therefore have read the published interview, I thought it might be helpful to reproduce extracts of it here, thereby making my own rather ambivalent relationship to Lawrence a little clearer ... 


DB: In her guide to the life and work of D. H. Lawrence entitled The Country of My Heart (1972), Bridget Pugh argues that Lawrence looked deeper into the human soul than any of his contemporaries, concerned as he was with the hidden and unconscious sources of the self. Do you feel that any writers today look as deeply?

SA: Probably not. But then this metaphysical notion of subjective depth is no longer one that greatly troubles us in an essentially non-essential age of irony, inauthenticity, and insincerity. We are far more Wildean in this regard than we are Lawrentian and have become - in Nietzschean terms - superficial out of profundity. Personally, I think this is a good thing and much prefer Lawrence when he sticks to the surface, writing about the importance of fashion for example, than when he indulges in folk psychology and starts speculating about fundamental human desire, feeling, and belief.

DB: Bridget Pugh also writes that Lawrence "saw the invasion of the landscape by the ugliness of industrialism as a reflection of the destruction of natural man removed from his instinctive communion with the rest of the universe ..." Other than by reading and re-reading Lawrence, how do you feel we can regain that vital communion? What hope is there for humanity?

SA: Well, hope isn't something I cling to or seek to offer others; not only does it encourage optimism, but it's one of the three theological virtues upon which Christianity is founded and, like Lawrence, I am, in a sense, with the Anti-Christ, rather than with Jesus and all the saints and angels of heaven. As for humanity, that's something to be overcome, is it not? A form that is restrictive and no longer tenable. Sorry to be so Nietzschean about this once again.

As for the quotation from Bridget Pugh, I'm afraid that doesn't interest me in the least. That's not to say it's wrong: Lawrence clearly subscribed to certain romantic and neo-pagan narratives regarding nature, industrialism, and the vital character of the cosmos. But it's very difficult for us to share his beliefs without sacrificing intellectual integrity. We can have an immensely exciting understanding of the universe we inhabit - thanks to modern science - but we cannot enter again into any kind of religious communion with the earth and stars in good faith. Or, as Lawrence concedes when face to face with the religious rituals of Native America: Sorry, I can no longer cluster at the drum. This might seem like typical English reserve in the face of genuine otherness, but it is rather one of the most honest admissions that Lawrence makes anywhere in his writings. He knows there’s no going back to an earlier way of being.

DB: As Lawrentians, Stephen, how do we justify our joy and our continual celebration of his creative genius? Would Lawrence prefer to have loyal readers, or active followers who put his ideas into practice?

SA: Nietzsche once said that there was only ever one Christian and that he died on the Cross; that for others to call themselves Christians was a fatal misunderstanding. I think we can - and should - feel something similar whenever the term Lawrentians is used. Thus I would answer your question this way: we don’t need to justify our pleasure in reading his books and celebrating his life; there’s no need for apology or explanation here. Those who seek to make others feel guilty about their pleasures are the kind of censor-morons sitting in judgement on life that Lawrence despised and so courageously fought against.

Lawrence would prefer unashamed readers, rather than loyal ones. Like Zarathustra, he would quickly lose patience with followers and tell them that ultimately their task is simply this: Lose me and find yourselves. That’s the key. Unashamed readers must be prepared to challenge Lawrence and recontextualise his ideas; which isn’t the same as simply putting them into practice as if Lawrence supplied a convenient set of dos and don’ts. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze - who happens to be one of Lawrence’s great readers - says the task is to pick up the arrow that he fired into the world and then shoot it anew into the future, in a new direction and at a new target. As a reader - particularly as a reader of a writer like Lawrence - you remain loyal by an act of infidelity.

DB: Do you think that Lawrence Society members should oppose factory farming and care about animal rights?

SA: In principle I’m tempted to say yes. Obviously the question of the animal and its suffering is an important one, although I’m not sure it’s one that is best addressed in terms of ‘rights’. I’d like to think we might develop an altogether different relationship with non-human forms of life - and it’s here that Lawrence might perhaps prove useful.

To be clear on this: I don’t think we should plead the case for animal liberation, or argue that they have specific interests that give rise to certain moral claims; rather, I’m interested in the becoming-animal of man and undermining the singular status of the human. We need to find a post-metaphysical way of thinking man and animal both; one that does away with anthropocentrism and deconstructs the violent hierarchy that places us in opposition to the animal and accords us superiority.

Having said this, whilst you have every right to imagine Lawrence as an ardent animal activist, I’m not sure you’re entitled to imply that those members of the Lawrence Society who don’t concern themselves with the exploitation of animals and who don’t think meat is murder, are somehow morally deficient or missing the point of his work. It should always be remembered that Lawrence was primarily a writer and his concern was language and thus, even when seemingly celebrating the otherness of the animal, be it a bat, snake, or fish, it might be argued that Lawrence is really still just playing textual games on the page. Amit Chaudhuri makes a very powerful argument that even in the famous poems of Birds, Beasts and Flowers Lawrence doesn’t accurately describe such things at all, or directly touch on them as things in themselves. Rather, he recreates and imitates them for his own amusement and that of his readers, assembling an exhibition of stuffed creatures; “his collection of textual mannequins, his pantomime of nature”.

DB: You once reminded me that Lawrence thought there was nothing romantic about madness - that it was a tragic waste of sane consciousness. Do you consider that we have an insane and romantic view of the importance of human life and are we wasting our consciousness in this respect?

SA: We certainly have a conceited and somewhat sentimental view of our own importance and one of the things I love most about Lawrence is that, for the most part, he avoids (and combats) anthropocentric vulgarity. Unfortunately, he doesn’t go far enough in his attempt to thoroughly dehumanize nature and remains trapped within what Quentin Meillassoux terms correlationism - i.e., Lawrence continues to make a link between thinking and being and so can never quite accept the possibility of a mind-independent reality.

This is a great shame and a great failing in his work; one which keeps him within a theo-humanist tradition. Ultimately, he’s not really interested in the stars, animals, trees, or other objects, but only in their relation to man, who, in turn, cannot be considered outside of his relation to the world. That’s the contradiction or paradox at the heart of his writing. For whilst he repeatedly insists that he wants to know the great outside - that inhuman space of the savage exterior - like all critical thinkers after Kant Lawrence too is fundamentally more interested in consciousness and language and these concerns keep him tied to a form of correlationism. 

DB: Despite all Lawrence's best efforts, one has a strong sense that most people are still only half alive. Should this concern us, do you think?

SA: No, I don’t think so. As is perhaps clear from some of the earlier answers, I’m not a vitalist and don’t fetishize or privilege being alive over being dead. As Nietzsche pointed out, being alive is only a rare and unusual way of being dead. Death is ultimately a welcome return to material actuality and an escape from complexity and, as Heidegger argued, all being is a being-towards-death. I think Lawrence recognised this as is clear in his late poetry.

Perhaps the undead fascinate more, philosophically-speaking, than the half-alive. The zombie, for example, embodies the Derridean notion of undecidability which so threatens the traditional foundations of Western metaphysics and so-called common sense. Like the vampire, or, more recently, the cyborg, the zombie cannot be classified as either alive or dead. Rather it belongs to the indeterminable realm of the neither/nor whilst also being, paradoxically, both at once.

Zombies not only indicate the limits of our thinking on life and death, but help to subvert all of those other binary oppositions upon which we establish conceptual coherence and build a stable world - but also a world of violent inequality. It might be stretching things a bit, but might we not read the story of The Man Who Died as a piece of zombie fiction?

In Defence of the Slug

I knew the slugs in the garden ate the vegetation and had a particular liking for Maria's flowers (much to her chagrin and my amusement). But until last week I didn't know they feasted also on the dead baby birds that occasionally litter the lawn after a summer downpour.

In other words, whilst I was vaguely aware these naked snails whom many gardeners delight in killing with salt and pellets played a crucial role in the ecosystem by disposing of decaying plant matter, I had no idea they were carrion feeders. Nor did I discover until very recently that some species of slug are predatory and necro-cannibalistic; devouring not only earthworms, but even their dead brethren.               

Nevertheless, I remain sympathetic towards these slimy-bodied hermaphrodites as I am to other animals deemed to be horticultural pests by human beings. Slugs, it seems to me, are more sinned against than sinning, mercilessly preyed upon as they are by a multitude of better-loved garden creatures including frogs, newts, blackbirds, and hedgehogs.      

So leave 'em alone Little Greek: we can always grow new daisies ...

On Non-Referential Aesthetics and the Politics of Silence

Lawrence writes that, as a novelist, it's his primary task to conduct a molecular exploration of the feelings and not comment on molar politics and the great social issues of the day. Besides, other people understand these things much better than him. 

In other words, like Richard Somers, the apolitical protagonist of his novel Kangaroo, Lawrence wants to fight out something with mankind in order to make an opening into the future, but he doesn't want to become hopelessly entangled in history and great events.

Thus Lawrence comes to an understanding that - as a man of letters - his alienation from public life is something he has no choice but to actively sustain; particularly if he wishes to secure a degree of intellectual freedom and transmit in his thinking something that does not and will not allow itself to be codified within conventional political discourse.

Of course, Lawrence is not the only author to display ironic indifference (or insouciance as he calls it) to the world at large. Jane Austen is another novelist whom I admire precisely because she chose to write about the micropolitics of daily life and affairs of the heart whilst staying wonderfully silent on the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, or the massive upheaval caused by industrialization. 

Push comes to shove, I'd rather re-read Pride and Prejudice than War and Peace. And hopefully this explains why I've not written a post on the EU referendum being held in the UK today ...       

Quizás, Quizás, Quizás

Nietzsche: Philosopher of the Perilous Perhaps

I have just read a rather ridiculous article on Yahoo to do with words that make the speaker sound stupid. For the most part it was a predictable list with few surprises; we can all agree, for example, that only a moron uses the word awesome.

However, I was intrigued to see the list included the word maybe on the grounds that it showed the speaker to be unsure of his own views or unable to make up her own mind (i.e. to lack intellectual confidence and decision making ability).

For maybe is perhaps one of my favourite words; just as perhaps functions as the most privileged of all qualifiers in my philosophical lexicon. For the term perhaps doesn't express my uncertainty, so much as create unease in the listener via a suggestion of ambiguity when there was an everyday expectation of clarity and coherence.

It thus subverts and, more radically, deconstructs an entire system of metaphysics based upon a fundamental belief in the opposition of values and an eternal game of either/or (Either you love me or you don't, goddammit!)

For those who believe in the truth - and who believe, what's more, that they know the truth when they hear it - everyone is expected to speak truthfully (i.e. with sincerity, conviction, and logical coherence). Only liars, cheats, swindlers, women, poets, and Continental philosophers refuse to call a spade a spade and like to beat about the bush.

Philosophers such as Nietzsche, for example, who eagerly anticipated the arrival of a new style of thinker; one who has a very different taste and inclination to the adherents of the Truth as a categorical imperative. He calls such thinkers to come philosophers of the dangerous Perhaps.       


See: Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990). Part I, Section 2. 

On the Politics of Beach Body Readiness

D. H. Lawrence wrote a series of poems sneering at modern sunbathers in all their beach body readiness. Yes they looked fit and healthy (healthy, healthy, healthy). And yes, they even looked good enough to eat. But somehow their flesh lacked meaning and vitality; their great inert thighs leading nowhere.  

So, far from feeling bad about his own emaciated and disease-ravaged physique when confronted with those bodies deemed biologically admirable, Lawrence defiantly affirmed his own contrasting quickness.  

I thought of this last year when there was a great hoo-ha over a poster for Protein World's weight-loss collection featuring a perfectly formed bikini-clad model (Renee Somerfield). The Advertising Standards Authority received almost 400 complaints from those who found the campaign objectifying and socially irresponsible. There was also a protest in Hyde Park and an online petition that attracted more than 70,000 signatures.   

Eventually, the fuss died down and everyone either forgot about the case, or found something else to get het up over. But now this issue of body shaming is back in the headlines thanks to the new London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, who has said he will ban all ads on the Tube and bus network that might offend commuters or make them feel pressured to conform to an ideal body type.

Speaking as a father of two teenage daughters, Khan warned that images such as the above demeaned women and caused confidence issues among young people. It is high time, he said, that such advertising came to an end.         

Obviously, this is an astonishing and, to my mind, rather worrying development. For it means that the Mayor is making policy on the basis of a Helen Lovejoy approach to decision making; one that effectively turns all Londoners into Sadiq's little girls in need of daddy's protection and wise authority.    

Ultimately, I'm no more beach body ready than Lawrence. But nor am I ready for Khan's progressive paternalism which offers a soft form of sharia and censorship in the name of feminism and thinking of the children.