The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King

15 Indications of Ethics

15 Indications of Ethics HEIDEGGER CALLED HIS "authentic beginning" of philosophy "the most radical phenomenology that begins 'from below' " in the midst of kinesis and not from some mythological high-ground above facticallife (G61 195). There is a double sense of "radical" at work here. It suggests the depth-dimension of the primal source (radix) of Ereignis and kinesis that produces being as an effect, as well as the profoundly ethical significance of a stress on the alterity and ownness into which this depth-dimension becomes anarchically differentiated. Here Heidegger contrasted openness toward the cultural, social, personal, and philosophical Other with being closed off (Abreigelung, Verschlossenheit) to the Other. In other words, he contrasted "humility before the mystery and gracecharacter of all life" with the fallenness, hyperbolic presumption (Vermessen), and pride of metaphysics, which exhibits the attitude of "a logical tyrant" (G58 263). The original model for Heidegger's notion of ontological humility and openness was actually the religious contrast between humility and pride before the mysterium tremendum of God, between theologia crucis and theologia gloriae. Chronologically, Heidegger's models were, first, Eckhartian lettingbe of the mystery of the flux of the Divine Life and Schleiermachean mutual respect within free sociality (1917-20); then, the wakefulness toward incalculable Parousia, toward kairological alterity, and toward the unique situation of the individual, which are found in Paul, Luther, and Kierkegaard (1920-21); and, eventually, also the resolute openness toward being as "that which can be other" in Aristotle's kairological ethics and its critique of the Platonic Idea of the Good and philosophical kingship (1921-22). I examine the following themes in the young Heidegger's thought, which indicate the ethical significance of his new beginnings for the question about being: (1) unmasking the illusions of homogeneity and calculative control in the technology and worldview-ideology of metaphysics; (2) formal indication as the type of postmetaphysical discourse that cultivates opennness to and constant beginning within the mystery of the anarchic differentiation of Ereignis; (3) the influence of Eckhart's attitude of letting-be and Schleiermacher's notion of free sociality on Heidegger around 1917 through 1920; (4) Heidegger's sketches in WS 1921-22 for a kairological ethics based on Kierkegaard, Jas- 320 New Beginnings pers, and Aristotle; (5) cultural and universal reform; and (6) Dasein and Geschlecht. Unmasking Technology and Worldview-Ideology Heidegger's "completely new concept of philosophy" and "genuine beginning " mean precisely a humility and openness toward the topic of the primal flowing source that is ultimately groundless, absence-permeated, incalculable, differentiated into ownness, and therefore an-archic and nonmasterable. His notion of the "end of philosophy," on the other hand, means precisely the end of the traditional "kingly vocation" from the Greeks to modernity that lies in searching for a metaphysical arche, principle/kingdom, which would be fully present, calculable, identical and universal, and thus available to and masterable by the manus mentis of the knowing subject. For example, his KNS 1919 course noted that, for Plato, "dialectic is the only way [methodos] that advances in this manner ... up to ten archen, the principle/kingdom itself, in order to find certainty," the "fixed secure element of logos." This "upward path of the soul to the noeton topon, the intelligible place," is "the making explicit of the valid ideas that provide an ultimate grounding" (Republic 517b, 533C). But in erecting its principles, metaphysics performs a violent act of dehistoricizing , deworlding, and deliving through its "theoretical fixation and cold-clocking" of the "stream of lived experience," its "objectifying and stilling " of the an-archic flux of Ereignis. "We make a grab [Griff], as it were, into the flowing stream of lived experiences and seize out one or more, i.e., we 'still the stream' " and "destroy" it. The ocular-aesthetic quietism of metaphysics wants objectification, totalization, homogeneity, mastery, and securitas in the sense of the carefreeness that is no longer anxious for its daily bread. It wants to be "secure absolute science" (G56/57 11,20,115,100,86; DK 107; G61 56). In fact, Heidegger already understood modern culture and philosophy as "technology" that seeks to master the unruly abousiological and heterological character of life by turning it into a presence that can be calculated according to rules. Recall that his qualifying dissertation had already characterized the modern in contrast to the medieval worldview as "the will to power" of both the" 'natural-scientific worldview' " and the general "consciousness of methods " in philosophy that seeks the "constant control of...