Daimon Life

Heidegger and Life-Philosophy

David Farrell Krell

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 1992
• Print ISBN: 9780253207395
• eBook ISBN: 9780253114808
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

"Daimon Life is life-enchancing. To read it is to become richer in wor(l)d." –John Llewelyn

Disclosure of Martin Heidegger's complicity with the National Socialist regime in 1933-34 has provoked virulent debate about the relationship between his politics and his philosophy. Did Heidegger's philosophy exhibit a kind of organicism readily transformed into ideological "blood and soil"? Or, rather, did his support of the Nazis betray a fundamental lack of loyalty to living things? David Farrell Krell traces Heidegger's political authoritarianism to his failure to develop a constructive "life-philosophy"—his phobic reactions to other forms of being. Krell details Heidegger's opposition to Lebensphilosophie as expressed in Being and Time, in an important but little-known lecture course on theoretical biology given in 1929–30 called "The Basic Concepts of Metaphysics, " and in a recently published key text, Contributions to Philosophy, written in 1936–38. Although Heidegger's attempt to think through the problems of life, sexual reproduction, behavior, environment, and the ecosystem ultimately failed, Krell contends that his methods of thinking nonetheless pose important tasks for our own thought. Drawing on and away from Heidegger, Krell expands on the topics of life, death, sexuality, and spirit as these are treated by Freud, Nietzsche, Derrida, and Irigaray. Daimon Life addresses issues central to contemporary philosophies of politics, gender, ecology, and theoretical biology.

PART ONE

Advanced Za-ology

The gods heard the lament of the people of Uruk: no new bride could satisfy in that first and last night the lusts of King Gilgamesh, and no young warrior could satisfy the King’s lust for battle. The goddess therefore molded from sky and earth a second self for Gilgamesh, and called him Enkidu. Enkidu was a hirsute, wild man, and Gilgamesh would wrestle with him, would be drawn to him as towards a woman.

When a trapper happened upon the savage Enkidu at a watering hole, he was struck dumb, benumbed with terror. The trapper found in the Temple of Love at Uruk a child of pleasure. She would civilize Enkidu. Together they returned to the watering hole and on the third day of their ambush Enkidu arrived.

She was not ashamed to take him, she made herself naked and welcomed his eagerness, she incited the savage to love and taught him the woman’s art. . . . Enkidu grew weak, for wisdom was in him, and the thoughts of a man were in his heart. So he returned and sat down at the woman’s feet, and listened intently to what she said. . . . “O Enkidu, you who love life, I will show you Gilgamesh.”

Gilgamesh and Enkidu wrestled now in the bride’s doorway. They snorted like bulls locked together. Then one of them threw the other and they became brothers. One night Gilgamesh dreamt, and Enkidu interpreted the dream: “The meaning of the dream is this. The father of the gods has given you kingship, such is your destiny, everlasting life is not your destiny. Because of this do not be sad at heart, do not be grieved or oppressed.”

Gilgamesh and Enkidu struck out for the Land of the Living. At its border, a terrible giant guarded the cedar wood. Enkidu grew afraid, but Gilgamesh chided him: “Where is the man who can clamber to heaven? Only the gods live forever with Shamash the Sun, but as for us men, our days are numbered, our occupations are a breath of wind. How is this, already you are afraid!”

Yet if Enkidu’s limbs were benumbed with terror it was only because he knew that the Land of the Living would not receive his brother Gilgamesh. Enkidu taught his brother the lesson by dying. While Gilgamesh boasted—“All living creatures born of the flesh shall sit at last in the boat of the West, and when that boat sinks they are gone; but we two shall go forward and fix our eyes on this monster”—Enkidu fell sick with contagion and withered.

At the very doorpost of death, Enkidu cursed the trapper who had snared him and rebuked the child of pleasure who had given him the wisdom of cities. Shamash the Sun replied by scolding Enkidu, who then revoked his curses. Gilgamesh refused to love Ishtar, the Queen of Heaven, but Enkidu in the end did not refuse: “Let no man scorn you, striking his thigh in derision. Kings, princes, and nobles shall love you, the old beard will wag his head but the young man will undo his belt. For you gold and carnelian and lapis lazuli lie heaped in the strongroom. On your account the wife, the mother of seven, shall be forsaken. The priests shall make a way for you into the presence of the gods.”

Before he died, Enkidu told Gilgamesh his dream. Gilgamesh said, “The dream was marvelous but the terror was great; we must treasure the dream whatever the terror; for the dream has shown that misery comes at last to the healthy man, that the end of life is sorrow.” And Gilgamesh raised a keen:

Hear me, great ones of Uruk,
I weep for Enkidu, my friend,
Bitterly moaning like a woman in mourning
I weep for my brother.
O Enkidu, the wild ass and the gazelle

That were father and mother,
All four-footed creatures who fed with you
Weep for you,
All the wild things of the plain and the pasture;
The paths that you loved in the forest of cedars
Night and day murmur.
Let the great ones of strong-walled Uruk
Weep for you,
Let the finger of blessing
Be stretched out in mourning. . . .
O my young brother Enkidu, my dearest friend,
What is this sleep which holds you now?
You are lost in the dark and cannot hear me.

ONE

“I Call It Death-in-Life . . .”

Reading Being and Time

“Life” is not an existential structure of Dasein. Yet Dasein dies. Indeed, it is even born to that end: birth is one of the two ends of an end-like or finite existence—Dasein natal, Dasein fatal. In this regard Heidegger entertains the testimony of a medieval Bohemian peasant, one who has recently become a widower, and who therefore has a complaint against Death. However, Heidegger follows the lead of his anonymous medieval predecessor by allowing Death to have the last word. Der Ackermann aus Böhmen begins:

Grimmiger tilger aller leute, schedelicher echter aller werlte, freissamer morder aller menschen, ir Tot, euch sei verfluchet!

Malevolent subverter of all the people, thoroughly malignant to all the world, murderous devourer of all mankind, thou Death, my curse upon you!

Death, offended by the farmer’s vituperation, replies:

Weistu des nicht, so wisse es nu: als balde ein mensche geboren wird, als balde hat es den leikauf getrunken, das es sterben sol. Anefanges geswisterde ist das ende. . . . [A]ls schiere ein mensche lebendig wird, als schiere ist es alt genug zu sterben.

If you knew it not before, know it now: as soon as a human being is born it has drunk from the proffered chalice, and so it is to die. The end is akin to the beginning. . . . The instant a human being comes to be alive it is old enough to die.¹

In an early lecture course at Freiburg, Heidegger cites Luther’s commentary on Genesis to similar effect: Statim enim ab utero matris mori incipimus. “For as soon as we abandon our mother’s womb we begin to die” (61, 182).

We, who? How many of “us” are there? How many mother’s sons and mother’s daughters? How many peasant men and women? How many living creatures? If the classical and perdurant definition of human being is ζ

ον λόγον ἔχον, “the living being that is essentially determined by its capacity to speak,” Heidegger nevertheless resists “life” as an earmark of Dasein. The birth and death of Dasein will have to be interpreted in a way that does not depend on the unclarified, unexamined categories of traditional ontologies, especially the category of the “living.” For, as Dominique Janicaud writes, “The definition of man as living [comme vivant] is ontic.”² Almost always, “life” will appear in “scare-quotes” in Being and Time. Almost always, “life” will have to be shooed away—for example, in the following moments of the analysis, which we will want to examine quite closely:

(1) Section 10, where the fundamental ontology of Dasein is demarcated or delimited over against anthropology, psychology, and, a fortiori, biology;

(2) Section 12, where human being as embodied being is affirmed, albeit in a way that leaves the human body, the body of Dasein, largely undetermined;

(3) Sections 35–38, on the “falling” of Dasein, which is the very animatedness (Bewegtheit) of existence;

(4) Sections 40–42, where anxiety and manifold care define what it is to be human, even though they spill over into other receptacles of life;

(5) Subsections 43b–c, where the principal ontological problem of “reality” is the being of nature and of the sort of thing we call life;

(6) Sections 47–49, where the death of Dasein is set in relief against the perishing of animals and the mere demise of a forlorn, inappropriate Dasein;

(7) Subsection 68b, where the ecstatic temporalizing of having-been, mood, and anxiety is made to bedazzle an already bedazzled and benumbed life;

(8) Sections 78–81, in which the path of the life-giving sun rises once again (as it did in section 22), in order to pose the timely question of life to Dasein and eventually to beings as a whole.

(Sections 72–74, where Dasein finally turns to the “end” of its birth, as to its destiny, heritage, and history in the world-historical fate of a “generation” and a “nation,” I shall hold in reserve for chapter 5, on the politics of daimon life.)

In each of these locations in Heidegger’s Being and Time “life” proves to be both essential to existential analysis and utterly elusive for it, quite beyond its grasp. Life falls into the gap that yawns between beings that are of the measure of Dasein and beings that are altogether unlike Dasein. Life neither precedes nor succeeds existential analysis but remains outside it, being both necessary to it and inaccessible for it. In short, life supplements Dasein, and like all supplements it is the death of Dasein. Fundamental ontology discovers a kind of being-there that is born and that dies, an existence it “fixes” terminologically as Dasein; what it is unable to determine is whether such a being is ever properly alive, or what such “life” might mean.

THE FACTS OF LIFE

Needlessness, heedlessness. Lack of need, lack of heed. Why heed the question of being? Who needs it? Why heed it, and how? A perverse, remorseless reflexivity and recoil characterize oblivion, as though oblivion were the very air we breathed. If the question of being makes no sense it is because we have never even had to remember to forget it. Oblivion replicates itself and achieves a lethal perfection by which we have always already forgotten being. Oblivion seems to seal the fate of Dasein as unneeding, unheeding. Like Nietzsche’s herd of cows at pasture and child at play, like Kafka’s ape roaming the rainforest before the circus troupe captures him, oblivious Dasein is indifferent to the question of being. A remarkable complacency (Bedürfnislosigkeit) surrounds the question with an impenetrable fog; a remarkable lack of need (Unbedürftigkeit) characterizes the “they” in their quotidian concerns (SZ, 177, 189). The tradition of philosophy exhibits such complacency in its neglect of the question of being (21, 46); it is as though philosophers too were Cartesian extended substances (92), more like mindless, indifferent stones and animals than vital thinkers.³

However much Dasein declines to heed and neglects to need the question of being, it moves within and is animated by something like an “understanding of being.” Not a theoretical observation of entities or a scientific comprehension of their being, to be sure, but an understanding (in) which Dasein lives. Being is not only the most universal and undefinable concept, but also the most evident one: “That we in each case already live in an understanding of being and that the meaning of being is at the same time veiled in obscurity demonstrates the fundamental necessity of fetching back again [wiederholen] the question concerning ‘being’ ” (4).

What does it mean to “live” (in) an understanding of being? Can we ever understand such “living,” if the living itself encompasses (parenthetically) understanding? Can living leap over its own shadow?

Whether or not we can ever understand it, such living within an understanding of being, Heidegger assures us, is a fact (5: ein Faktum). Thus the formal structure of the question concerning being yields a particular facticity and a certain movement or motion. We move (wir bewegen uns) in a vague and average understanding of being, not insofar as we theorize and construct ontologies, but simply by being alive. Such animation or, better, animatedness (the passive form of Bewegtheit, “movedness,” is not to be overlooked) is Heidegger’s principal preoccupation both before and after Being and Time, from the period of his hermeneutics of facticity (roughly 1919 to 1923) to that of his theoretical biology (1929–1930) and well beyond. Moreover, our factical animatedness within an understanding of being, which is an understanding (in) which we live, directs us to something very much like being. Nietzsche, in a note that will become important for both Heidegger and Derrida, writes as follows: “ ‘Being’—we have no other notion of it than as ‘living.’—For how can something dead ‘be’?”⁴

If the earliest form of Being and Time is a hermeneutics of facticity, the fact of facticity (to repeat, the facticity by which we understand something like being, which is something like being alive) is a fact of life. Heidegger’s project sprouts (in part, but in good part) from the soil of Dilthey’s philosophy of factical-historical life.⁵ We know that already from the references to Dilthey in sections 10, 43, and 72–77 of Being and Time. However, the early Freiburg and Marburg lecture courses demonstrate the point even more forcefully.

For example, during his lecture course on the hermeneutics of facticity in the summer semester of 1923, Heidegger says, “Facticity designates the character of the being of ‘our’ ‘own’ Dasein” (63, 7). Why the quotation marks or “scare-quotes” around “our”? Because Dasein lingers or tarries there in each case as this particular Dasein: Jeweiligkeit is under way to what Being and Time will call Jemeinigkeit, Dasein whiling away its hour of existence as in each case “my own.” Why the scare-quotes around “my” or “our” “own”? Because what may seem to be the property of Dasein is swept away in the larger questions of life, being, and (not quite yet, but lingering on the horizon, as the horizon) time. For the moment it is being alive that captivates Heidegger: “Sein—transitiv: das faktische Leben sein!” Being is to be understood transitively: it means that we are factical life—not as a soporific solipsism but as active vigilance (Wachsein). “If we take ‘life’ as a way of ‘being,’ then ‘factical life’ means our own Dasein [now without scare-quotes] as ‘there’ in every sort of ontologically explicit manifestation of the character of its being” (63, 7).

Yet the larger questions posed to “our” “own” factical Dasein will not disperse, not even in Being and Time. If fundamental ontology appears to be constructed on the axis of the proper and the improper, the appropriate and the inappropriate (Eigentlichkeit/Uneigentlichkeit), the quotation marks around “own” have in fact already replaced more drastic question marks, or, rather, as we shall see, a single, drastic, ironic exclamation point (!). The scare-quotes and exclamation point cause the axis to tremble and perhaps even to shatter. Any reading of Being and Time in terms of “authenticity” would be put to riot by this catastrophe, inasmuch as the only authentic Dasein would be a dead Dasein. And yet such trembling, such shattering of the axis of propriety, would be a sign of life.

Hermeneutics is not the chilly science of facticity, not a methodology that allows us coolly to approach life matter-of-factly; rather, hermeneutics is factical life surprised in the act, vigilantly caught in the act of interpreting itself. Hermeneutics of facticity is not like the botanics of plants (63, 15; cf. SZ, 46), whereby vegetable life is the object of botanical science; rather, to say facticity is to say interpretation—as though Dasein were goldenrod or dill catching itself going to seed. In a sense, the genitive in “hermeneutics of facticity” is subjective as well as objective: factical life does the interpreting as well as the living. Yet what does factical life include? What does it exclude? These questions Heidegger does not raise, perhaps because of a certain solidarity of life, solidarity with life, or perhaps because of insufficient vigilance. Nevertheless, we gain some insight into the sort of life Heidegger means when we hear him say, toward the end of his lecture course, “Life addresses itself in a worldly way when...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Key to Principal Works Cited
• An Introduction to Za-ology
• Part One Advanced Za-ology
• Part Two Toward a Politics of Life
• Part Three Vital Signs
• Notes
• Index