Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy's Others

Chapter 32: Fear of Primitives, Primitive Fears

32 Fear of Primitives, Primitive Fears Anthropology in the Philosophies of Heidegger and Levinas These are the words of Percy Mumbulla, from Ulladulla, an Australian aborigine in a long line of guardians of tribal memory about the arrival of Captain Cook at Snapper Island, as set down by Roland Robinson, a collector of oral traditions: Tungeii, that was her native name: She was a terrible tall woman who lived at Uladulla She had six husbands and buried the lot. . . . She was tellin’ my father They were sittin’ on the point That was all wild scrub The big ship came and anchored out at Snapper Island He put down a boat an’ rowed up the river into Bateman’s Bay. . . . When he landed he gave the Kurris clothes an’ those big sea biscuits. Terrible hard biscuits they was. When they were pullin’ away to go back to the ship, these wild Kurris were runnin’ out of the scrub. 488 They stripped right off again They were throwin’ the clothes an’ biscuits back at Captain Cook as his men were pullin’ away in the boat1 I shall not try to assess the complex hermeneutical issues that the cross-cultural transmission process generates but want only to note the claim that, coming from the sea, a place of danger in Koori thought, Cook and his men disrupted the Koori order of cosmic and social law, which derives from the land. In an inversion of this disruption , one that philosophy has largely failed to disclose to itself, late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Western thought is fissured by the ‘‘primitive’’ as derived from the new science of anthropology , construed early on in Kantian terms as the science of man. I shall focus upon Ernst Cassirer’s account of myth and mana, the magical sacred of the Australian aborigines as depicted by Western ethnographers, and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s description of the ‘‘savage mind’’ as these accounts bear upon the philosophies of Heidegger and Levinas. The political and cultural critique of the primitive as a mytheme in the larger narrative of modernism has received considerable attention, so I shall not rehearse what has been argued cogently elsewhere.2 At its nadir, the primitive has been inscribed in the history of physical anthropology as racial morphology.3 For Heidegger, the received view of Dasein’s lineage leads to its respectable origin in his favored figures of pre-Socratic philosophy: Anaximander, Empedocles, and Heraclitus, an origin that is not for him a mere beginning (Beginn) but an inception (Anfang), a sending forth of the thinking of Being.4 For Heidegger’s Hellenes, to ponder the truth of Being is to think the meaning of truth as an uncovering that is a concealing-revealing. The patrimony of Dasein is to think in accordance with method (meta hod), not in the modern sense, which for him ‘‘holds all the coercive power of knowledge,’’5 but etymologically : to think both within and beyond the way of the logos. Thus, to think is to do so errantly yet without departing from the philosophical etiquette of Greek thought. Why, then, touch upon the Dasein of ‘‘wayward’’ primitives unconstrained by the logos? ‘‘Primitive Dasein speaks to us more directly in terms of a primordial absorption in phenomena,’’ says Heidegger (BT, 76). Is it possible that Western Dasein is the bastard child for whom ‘‘the absorption in phenomena’’ supplements the existentialia uncovered through phenomenological analysis? Bastard, enfant naturel, child of nature, wild child, illegitimate and improper, the progeny of anthropologists’ dreams. Fear of Primitives, Primitive Fears 489 What lack in Heidegger’s Daseinsanalyse could be supplemented (giving the term its Derridean resonances) by cultural anthropology ’s representations of ‘‘primitive man’’? The destruction of metaphysics , already far along in Being and Time, precludes the positing of transcendental conditions of experience in the Kantian sense, yet at the same time prohibits the description of a purely factical Dasein from passing as a phenomenologically clarified analysis of human existence , one that would be sufficiently general to possess its own Notwendigkeit , its necessity, without hypostatizing the subject. Primitive Dasein, the wild child, unconstrained by the Western mittance of Being, would come to fill this role. How, for example, can a Dasein always already ahead of itself be phenomenologically exhibited, how be brought out of time ‘‘in’’ time? By ‘‘going primitive.’’ By scraping away the veneer of civilization, Dasein is both hidden and disclosed...