Dai principî all'anarchia. Essere e agire in Heidegger

Open Indiana

by Reiner Schürmann

..". elegant and provocative... Exhibit[s] a subtle mastery of Heidegger's works." --Review of Metaphysics..". splendidly precise study of Heidegger... to be recommended not only to Heidegger scholars but also to those interested in the question of what philosophical thinking has as its task in the modern technological world." --Religious Studies Review..". indispensable to understanding the later Heidegger." --Choice

Genres: Philosophy

Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Reiner Schürmann, O.P. was a German philosopher. From 1976 to his death, he was Professor in the department of philosophy of the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York City. He wrote all his major published work in French.

Reviews

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review:

April 2007:

Radical Phenomenology and Philosophy

We have all heard it said that Heidegger had no great followers, only great apostates. The list of those influenced by him, and impressed by the quality of his thought, but nevertheless refusing to simply follow him includes Arendt, Derrida, Gadamer, Kojeve, Lowith, Marcuse, Merleau-Ponty, Rorty, Sartre and Leo Strauss. Schürmann is a rarity; a genuine follower of Heidegger who is also a thinker in his own right. Now, I do not maintain that Heidegger himself would agree with everything that Schürmann says of him and his 'radical phenomenology' but I do think that this is easily among the most serious and thoughtful accounts of what we might call the later Heidegger's final position. People only familiar with Heidegger's early work (such as 'Being and Time') tend to read him as a practical, existential or political philosopher actively interested in the 'human things'. Schürmann considers this a profound mistake.

Allow me to begin with a long quote:

"The 'intrinsically manifold state of affairs which is that of being and time' prohibits referring the epochs and their closure, let alone the 'event', to some figure of root, of the One, of man. It is because of this anti-humanism that Heidegger's concept of epoché has nothing to do with Husserl's. The phenomenology of the reversals in History follows the trail of the regimes to which unconcealment gave 'sudden birth,' but which have folded up their order to withdraw again into concealment. The genealogist seeks to understand this phenomenon of an encompassing, although precarious arrangement as it comes about and recedes. The birth of such an arrangement is 'epochal,' since in it presencing as such 'withholds' (epechein) itself. Thus what establishes us in our precarious dwellings is not some thing, it is nothing - a mere coming to pass. In the deconstruction of the texture or text of Western history, phenomenology remains transcendental in that it looks for the context which is the world; it is however dissociated from all a priori reference to the subject as text-maker. The principle of an epoch is a factual a priori, finite and of non-human facticity. It exhibits the paradox of an 'ontological fact.' What bequeaths the historical epochs and their principles, the 'event', is itself nothing, neither a human nor a divine subject, nor an available or analyzable object." (Schürmann, On Being and Acting, p.57.)

I follow Schürmann in this understanding of Heideggerean Being; the 'gift' of Being does not come from a subject nor is it a 'History of Reason'. It is fundamentally just whatever Happened to Happen. That is, it is pure contingency. Again: not only is there not a Subject but this pure contingency is absolutely not a history of Reason. It would seem that whatever 'reason' is in the world is itself only a temporary affair, waiting to be overthrown by the next epoché, or gift, of Being. But since what is unreasonably given is always (eventually) unreasonably taken away one ends up wondering precisely why Heidegger so often speaks of 'gift' here... In any case, by the curious phrase 'ontological fact' Schürmann is conceding that Heidegger's 'gifts of Being' are little more than Necessary Irrationalities. So you see that the 'Truth of Unconcealment' equals exactly the 'truth' of circumstances. While Concealment always remains precisely Nothing. Note that Man is in no sense, for either Heidegger or Schürmann, a 'maker' of the text of the World; no, Man is merely the reader of (or powerless Witness to) the succession of Epochs that make up the text of world history. Thus it is not, in my opinion, that Heidegger's philosophy in any way 'predestines' him to be a Nazi, rather, his philosophy provides no resources to oppose it. Or, more clearly, to oppose anything. The Epochs are given and withdrawn without any reference to human values or needs. But we must never forget that whatever happens to happen is always, I mean eventually, at least for historical Man, a catastrophe. Thus Heidegger's oft referring to these happenings as 'gifts' is but another example of will-to-power. One can say anything about these 'ontological facts' that one chooses, absolutely anything at all. Heidegger, at times, elects to say 'gifts'...

But it really has become impossible to discuss Heidegger without discussing the relation between the Nazi period and the later position. If you will allow me a few more words on this contentious topic there is a little vignette in Chamfort which I would like to share that might be apposite here:

"The Curé of Bray had moved three or four times from the Catholic to the Protestant faith, and his friends expressed surprise at his indifference. 'Indifferent?' said the Curé. 'Inconstant? Not at all. On the contrary, I don't change at all. I want to be the Curé of Bray.' (Chamfort, Products of the Perfected Civilization, p. 226)"

All the various ontological 'regimes' of History are 'gifts of Being'. In the end there is absolutely nothing we can do about this. One can only accept what is. When Heidegger thought that the Epoch he lived in was one of 'fascistic' authenticity he embraced it. Later, realizing his mistake, he supposed that the next 'unconcealment' to be revealed would be an ontological 'quietism' that many today read in an ecological 'new age' manner. But in reality Heidegger never changed his mind, he only wanted to see the World in its giveness, not as human needs and values would have it, but as it was. And he wanted to accept whatever his phenomenological method revealed to him. Thus there is from this perspective, for Heidegger, no truly fundamental difference between his early and late position; he always wanted to see the World phenomenologically - that is, exactly as it was.

There is an apatheia at work here that at first glance reminds one of the ancients but is truly modern. Ancient apathy was aimed primarily at the emotions; but what one could (be perhaps forgiven to) call Heideggerean apathy is aimed at theory or belief. But what of the practical or 'political', that is, nature and technology? "... political thinking consists in weighing the advantages and drawbacks of one theory or another. Nothing of the kind occurs in Heidegger. The pertinent question is therefore not of knowing whether technology may be counteracted, mastered, surpassed, sublimated; whether nature, given over to the rule of reason for two millennia and summoned to surrender its energies to the reign of comfort for two centuries, may be 'restored', whether man can be 'reconciled' with it. About matters such as these the deconstruction has nothing to say." What askesis (training) will be necessary for us today to achieve such distance from older conceptions of theory and practice! The 'radical phenomenology' (or 'deconstruction', in Heidegger's sense, not Derrida's) of the later Heidegger, and also Schürmann, is this very training...

Radical Phenomenology, as here conceived, is the science of circumstances. Fundamentally, it neither predicts nor learns; it sees whatever happens to be. More clearly, its learning and predictions are based on what it sees, and not the other way around. This also means that every one of its results (i.e., 'discoveries') will be 'falsified' in time. Knowing circumstances doesn't tell you what to do, not ever. All evaluation is beyond the ability of any phenomenology. (On this also see Heidegger on Nietzsche, especially the fourth volume: Nihilism, for his denunciation of values.) Thus even the decision whether or not to write a book on phenomenology is made for extra-phenomenological reasons... Now, if we are past the regimes of Principles, as Schürmann here argues, - well, what exactly are we to understand that to mean? Those regimes, where action was based on 'metaphysical' principles, are the regimes that were initiated by philosophical interventions. After the regimes of Principles pass we will live in an 'anarchic' (i.e., no metaphysical Principles) world. This can be understood to mean that there will be no philosophical artifacts (that is, no post-Platonic monotheism, Christianity or Islam, and no modernity -Liberalism, socalism, etc., at all) once the latest 'unconcealment' (i.e., the anarchic unconcealment our author here defends) is fully apparent. Properly speaking, this is where the 'conservatism' of the later Heidegger is most obvious. It is tempting to say that what the later Heidegger is, in effect, prophesying (or making) is a world in which pre-philosophical 'traditional' societies rise again. Note that a 'pre-philosophical' world will likely be one that is, among other things, bereft of modern technology. One wonders if John Zerzan, perhaps even unbeknownst to him, is another one of the later Heidegger's acolytes?

Note that by 'Anarchy' Schürmann does not mean the political movement known as anarchy, rather he says anarchy because there is no longer an arche (ultimate underlying principle or substance). When the regimes of Metaphysics (the Principles) fall what will be left is a world without said principles; it is only on this sense that the world will be 'anarchic'. Now, Schurmann does not mean that everyone will do their 'own thing'. Far from it! Doing ones own thing is also a product of the history of Metaphysics... As Schürmann says "...'in principal' all men do the same thing." This is so whether they are all worshipping the One True God or 'hanging out' doing their own thing. But, I would argue, when we look at how men lived in pre-philosophical civilizations there too we find that 'all men do the same thing.'

Now, what is the relation of philosophy to this radical phenomenology? But let's start with another question: Why did phenomenology, the ability to see circumstances, have to arise? It turns out that this question rests on another question: Why is seeing the world, as it actually is, so difficult? One suspects that it is because the various artifacts of philosophical interventions (e.g., Christians, Moslems, liberals, socialists) have imposed their various 'myths' and these myths have become the habitual way we see the world. So philosophy, according to Heidegger, must first deconstruct what it has ultimately made in order to see what the world (i.e., 'unconcealment') actually offers. Radical Phenomenology allows us once again to see the unmade. After this deconstruction philosophy becomes phenomenology, the mirror of circumstances. No? I ask your indulgence of another long quote where our author calls for:

"...the removal of the principial obstacles as just so many conditions for compliance with the event of appropriation. 'Any conception and enunciation of the thing, which tend to place themselves between the thing and us, must first be removed.' Which are the conceptions and enunciations that most massively tend to place themselves between us and things emerging into their world? They are the conceptions and enunciations about essentially hubristic ('unjust' in Anaximander's words) representations - the epochal principles." (pg. 281)

The 'epochal principles' that Schürmann refers to are the succession of metaphysical world-views that dominate our understanding even today. According to our author, in Heidegger philosophy has turned on itself; destroying its own history is the first step towards seeing the world it inhabits...

Radical Phenomenology is not an attempt to make the world conform to some arche; it is an attempt to see the world exactly as it is, that is, as it merely happens to be. But like the esotericism and dialectics that preceded it, Heideggerean phenomenology, from the viewpoint of philosophy, is only another philosophical method (i.e., tool). Unlike them, phenomenology only intends to see (or know), not make. Phenomenology cannot be converted into a metaphysics or an ethics. All attempts to do so are either mistakes, idiosyncrasies or lies. Thus the phenomenology here described is at war with the other philosophical tools of the philosophical tradition. In order for radical phenomenology to see the world it must wipe away the shadows (myths) that other philosophical methods have made. In order to survive philosophy must incorporate Heidegger's 'radical phenomenology' as another tool while denying that it is in any sense an 'uber-tool'. In other words, if philosophy, as we have known it, is to have a future it must see to it that no tool is privileged and that each is only used in the proper measure...

To put all this in another way, to Radical Phenomenology the rational constructs produced by philosophy have become idiosyncrasies; they are ciphers of a bygone time and place - that is, of an 'unconcealment' that has been withdrawn. Philosophy answers that the non-rational, non-foundational, nature of all unconcealments (Being is, after all, Time!) will one day make the radical phenomenology (and its 'anarchic' moment) that Schürmann here defends also passé. And that would be why Philosophy, and all its methods, must continue.

Even though Schürmann is also, broadly speaking, a 'postmodern', he sees clearly the abyss that post-Heideggerean philosophy represents. Compared to Derrida, Rorty, etc., there is a dreadful seriousness in these pages that is the outward mark of all deep thinking. Our author is to be congratulated on his clear eyed vision of what can and cannot be done; fundamentally, there isn't anything that Man can do - except radical acceptance of whatever happens to be insofar as it is and for as long as it happens to be. This is a profound book. I have barely considered the complex argument within it in order to concentrate on what might be called some 'extra-phenomenological' points. This is an extremely demanding book. Know your Heidegger, especially the later Heidegger, and be prepared to work.

[Larry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I give it the maximal amount of stars, because this is the only way the hot topic of Heideggerian politics should be approached at first, but I still regret that RS didn’t really write a phenomenological book itself, and often slides between a political interpretation/clarification of late Heidegger (best parts of the book, roughly corresponding to its beginning and end), and a (sometimes too) comprehensive exposition of his thought in a systematic fashion (with the advantage, however, that RS expounds distinctions I myself hadn’t picked up on or learned to master, such as Anfänglich/Ursprünglich).

-- I would like, not to review it again, but to write down something the book triggered in me, where I think the reading ought to take us in thought:

Artificial lives

Introduction: No Way to Live

Derrida’s Specters of Marx begins with the impossibility, for one, of learning how to live. Actually, it is difficult to state this without emphasis, because what Derrida stresses, is not the impossibility, for one, of learning how to live, but the impossibility of learning it, though of course, it is easy to see how one could fall into the other, and stymie us for life. Yet, if every thing done can be done badly, if every course of action is intrinsically saddled with the possibility of misfire, it seems that life escapes this law of possible failure. But then, so does everything else: how badly does something need to be done in order not to have been done, is an absurd question. And precisely because of that, because something is always done, can’t be undone, even if it has been badly done, because, in short, badly is not a way for something not to have been done, we seem to lack the definitive criterion to ascertain how badly (or, after all, how well) we are doing, even at life. How to do well at life has long been the subject matter of ethics. But no longer, at least not here. For I want to approach this idea of sucking (at things, life e.g.) in the broadest possible sense, for I see life, and how well we live it, in a continuum with every single thing we do in it, and of which we can always (and actually do, sometimes) wonder whether we are doing it wrong, and, additionnally, how such a thing could be known, preferably by us, because that would be nice. More specifically, I want to approach the life lived by one (me, there’s no point in hiding it) who is pervaded by a feeling of not actually living it, based on the conception that something done badly is not properly done, and a life lived badly is not properly lived. While it is hardly a problem to think of what it is, for a novel, to be a bad one, it does not seem so obvious to me what a life not properly lived, the ersatz of a life, or what Hume, though in a moral sense, aptly called an ‘artificial life’, should be like.
Here we come to a first tension: on the one hand, and unlike ethics, I want to approach life like any other course of action or enterprise pursued in it, partly because I think to apply notions of doing great, or badly, at it, come from such endeavors, and it would be ambiguous to change their range of application to a broader sphere, wishfully thinking it won’t disturb the system—indeed, not even raising the question. On the other hand, I claim we lack a notion of a bad life, because such a thing has always been understood, except by novelists, from without. It is the moral philosopher who defines lives as good or bad, but each time she does that, she ignores the crushing indeterminacy within, unless, like Derrida, she defines the good life precisely as one that is constantly anxious about itself. This line of thinking tells us there is nothing beyond life as we live it; no other, more fulfilling, more stable life, if the life we live is precisely anxious about things like the possible existence of some more stable, more fulfilling way of living. The anxiety, raised to ‘the mood of ethicity par excellence’ (A. Ronell), meets itself in its quest for the supposed otherness it recoils from. The answer is(:) no answer. It wouldn’t even be nice if there was one. There have been a few made-up ones (God, the State, religion). It wasn’t nice. The paradox, of course, is that such a line of thinking is still, despite the deconstruction of it all, an ethics! Not an ethics in the pre-Kantian, antiquated sense of: This is how it (life) is done, but an ethics in the more formal sense of a radical difference between life and other things done, resting on a hypostatized notion of ‘good’ that strictly applies to life, and not to what we do with, or in it. The paradox is even more difficult to solve for me, because I really like what Derrida is saying. But I can’t buy it. So I have to think of something else.

One: I am done

To do so, I’m going to have to move the starting blocks to a very different place. Ever since Husserl, it is no exaggeration to say that transcendental phenomenology has fallen out of fashion somewhat. Except for a handful of brilliant students of his (mostly Eugen Fink), the great phenomenologists who followed him emphatically rejected Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity: Heidegger was the first one, followed by Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and of course Derrida. The problem with abandoning the transcendental is: How do we know the experiences we are describing actually are experiences anyone (the reader, for instance) can perform? To put it bluntly, what if Heidegger’s anxiety is only accessible to people rather prone to melancholy, Levinassian substitution to schizophrenics, and Merleau-Ponty’s ‘chair du monde’ only perceptible by more or less psychotic subjects? Well, the first thing we could say is it’s precisely the idea experience has to be performed that a lot of post-Husserlian phenomenologists would disagree with (and, more or less rigorously building on Heidegger’s notion of Ereignis, they would emphasize that experience is, if anything, more like an event, something that happens to me). What follows is a deconstruction of the idea that experience has a subject, and so the whole question of having access to it, drops as irrelevant. Such a deconstruction of experience rests on the idea that Husserl insufficiently clarified what an experience is, and his lack of scrutiny made it appear like it was a separate part of the world, in which the world itself was paradoxically mirrored (the kind of thinking Rorty became famous for criticizing as ‘representationalism’). As a consequence, the very suspicion that, after all, the experiences phenomenologists like Heidegger refer to don’t have the kind of universality they should (?) be having, becomes meaningless: not only would it be very problematic for the critic to tell us what exactly he is quantifying over when he brings the concept of ‘universality’ in, but, what is more, Heidegger never claimed anxiety was an experience that could be ‘performed’ the way an object can be picked up, or a task be achieved. That, however, doesn’t mean that it is the privilege of the happy few (though Heidegger later did start writing like he was only addressing ‘the happy few’, but that’s a different problem). Anxiety, Heidegger writes, is always lying in wait in everything we do. It is an implicit factor in all experiences, which are no private shows in the mind’s theatre, but an occasion for us to attune to the self-showing of beings. This ‘us’ doesn’t point to an identity, but to a way, for some beings, to relate to their own being (understanding it), and thereby be in a certain way (in time, in the world, or just there). The question is not: Who am I?, but: What is my being? What does it mean for me to be, especially when I (don’t really know, but acually experience, am anxious about the fact that I) will be dead? Here we come to the difficult connection between being and life for Heidegger, for being seems only to speak, or show itself purely in death. Death, Heidegger writes in his Beiträge zur Philosophie, is the greatest, highest evidence of being. We have to die, in other words, in order to be. Or rather: we have to be dying in order to be. In this sense, because we are mortals, we are always dying. To be dying is a mere pleonasm.
In this regard, it becomes difficult to understand how one (I) could be doing anything, since, quite simply, there is no I, but a being. Only being, actually, sort of ‘does’ things, and not small things: it makes beings (things) be. In close connection to it, there is the ‘doing’ of the beings we mortals are, who prepare the coming of being to being, the event of being, by attuning to presence (the presence of the present being the being of beings; we don’t turn inward to look for what we are, but to understand our being, in the verbal sense—much like we would say: our doing). This, for Heidegger, is the only ‘thing’ left for ‘us’ to do, since (even though that will sound like a poor logical justification) there is nothing else for us to do. So it’s not like Heidegger chose to embrace a form of expecting quietism, it’s only that his phenomenological reduction is so radical he doesn’t, actually, have a choice. It’s so powerful nothing else can resist it. Anyway, this is only one of the many ways in which to tear the argument of performability of experience apart. The lesson, for our question, is clear: there is no doing well, or sucking at, life, because life is not our doing. A rigorous understanding of action, and of things done, requires that we drop the idea of a ‘good’, or ‘bad’ life. There are good tools. But no good lives. It seems sometimes that Heidegger did think ‘authentic’ lives or ways of living were ‘better’ than inauthentic ones. But that is not so. They are simply different, in that they relate differently, almost as a matter of fact, to being.
Against Heidegger, we could say two things. First, maybe there is a realm outside of being, maybe not ideally conceived of, the way Husserl did, as an inner, monadological sphere (the reference to Leibniz is explicit in Husserl, but later writings on intersubjectivity tend to nuance a caricature often made by Heideggerians of Husserl as a subjectivist metaphysician), but as a ‘wild’ region (to borrow from the title of one of Tengelyi’s books) in which what ‘is’ not yet (a being) morphs into one, or, in the jargon of transcendental phenomenology, constitutes itself. That region, Heidegger would retort, is precisely that of being, in that it is where beings come to be. It is the phenomenological realm par excellence, not in the sense of a realm separated from the ontic, but as a way of looking in (Einblick) the present, for its presence. Every thing (Ding) is temporalized in this odd sense that it is phenomenologically reduced to the ‘event’ of its own coming together, self-gathering in-the-world (another pleonasm). But the transcendental phenomenologist continues to feel that it is not, actually, the same thing, for Heidegger’s much derided ‘ontological monism’ seems to overdetermine what this realm looks like: Is it not at least a bit surprising, to say the least, to find out that before being, what we find is… being? Of course it is contradictory, Heidegger could say, to ask if something else than being could not ‘be’ there, but this is just because language is built this way; we need to perform, Fink says, a phenomenological reduction of language too. And nothing, in the phenomena, tells us that being is there all the way up. Therefore, a kind of exclusive, unwarranted teleology of being begins to appear in Heidegger’s understanding of phenomenology. The second thing we could say is Heidegger criticizes the notions of acting and doing things on the basis that they’re understood in relation to a subject who is doing them. But the being of action as precisely not a being, in the sense that a table is a being, does seem to escape him (unlike, say, the being of space and time, which even lead him to identify being, at some point in the evolution of his thought, with the play of space and time as that which makes what is, be). We would have to go back to Kant, Fichte, and ultimately Nietzsche, to find such an anti-ontological, because practical understanding of action, which also serves, way before phenomenology, the purpose of a kind of deconstruction of the subject, moving from: Nothing is done, because being is acting (busy with making things be), to: Everything is done (Nietzsche would say: willed), because there is no being (nothing is), and every so-called being can be ‘reduced’ to a doing (‘of’ a transcendental subject, in the tradition, but maybe we can outthink that ‘of’, using Heidegger, but not necessarily piggybacked by him—that’s, in a way, the hard part). But, on second thought, isn’t that the underlying lesson of Heidegger’s deconstruction of ontology? Being, deconstructed as Seyn, gains the fleeting, changing, seinsgeschichtliche nature of acting without principles, as Schürmann first pointed out, because it founds beings without exhausting itself in them, thus finitizing them (because being itself is finite: the absence of ground (or dare I write: (the absence) (of ground)) in which every 'thing' is grounded). But again, back to the first thing, why, any Nietzschean will ask me, express it in terms of being? Why call it being if, as Heidegger himself emphatically writes, it is not? Well, Heidegger himself didn’t like the word ‘being’ so much. He crossed it in his Zur Seinsfrage essay to Jünger, so we can’t really blame him for that. More to the point, the question these two points raise is this one: What standpoint, though it better not be (thought of as) a simple tertium quid, do we need to reach, if we want to understand the way being and acting influence each other, and make life possible or impossible?

[Kevin Q · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a serious fucking challenge. Schurman essentially applies Heidegger to an anarchist political outlook. Which makes sense, because post-structuralism is basically a fancy justification for just that.

Unfortunately anarchy before equality would just mean a corporate de facto sovereignty. Where your choice would be to get conscripted to ATT to kill conscripts of Sprint OR get to the neighboring block and be conscripted to Sprint to kill the conscripts of ATT.

[Leonardo]

Me refiero al hermoso libro de Reiner Schürman, Le principie d ’anarchie [El principio de anarquía]. Éste es un intento por escindir y separar origen y orden, para alcanzar un puro origen como un venir-apresencia, como el autor lo indica, separado de cualquier mandato histórico.

Teología y Lenguaje Pág.52