discursive living • gary e. davis • berkeley: What’s “obvious”?

October 31, 2021

Given “for your consideration...,”…

I have much respect for your literary writing. That’s obvious for me: that you’re a highly accomplished writer. But I’m disappointed with your approach to Heidegger, all the way down: from On Being and Becoming to your Holderlin book.

Yesterday, I got fascinated with the idea of doing a closely-read treatment of ‘Heidegger’ in On Being and Becoming as character in that story of Existentialism, showing how the reader must go back to The Life of Imagination to understand the basis for your caricature—which would lead the inquiring mind back to your Hölderlin book for an extended venture in deconstruction.

But I’m (too) easily fascinated. This is brief: You refer in On Being and Becoming to Heidegger’s “moral and political failure,” but you provide no citation there (though you include an expansive, book-general bibliography at the end of the book; why you assert his failure is anybody’s guess). Thus, your intro course-level book doesn’t allow a student to follow up on specific points (let alone assess for herself the credibility of your assertions). A reader can get a sense of why you see failure, by recalling or finding other non-footnoted passages in your book, but that just fleshes out (minimally) your literary character in your story.

A simple numeration of the items in your bibliography, with inclusion of parenthetical bib. number at relevant points in your text (especially for controversial points) would have allowed a reader (or teacher using your book) to follow up, relative to a specific point. (That’s a common practice in academic publishing, you know.) But you and your editor betrayed the book’s future audience, while you write as a just-so authority who is not accountable to the reader.

In email to me, you refer to Heidegger’s political failure as “obvious,” but in response there to my earlier, extended disagreement in specific terms, you don’t even cite your own work which gave you the sense of the obvious (let alone citing specific points/pages in your work, which you seldom if ever do in citing your work and others’ work in The Life of Imagination, like “read the whole book, and you’ll find out why I footnoted it.”)

When I said in March that you were “harming” student interest in Heidegger, I had a lot of evidence to share. But you were incuriously defensive; and indicated no time to bother with my concerns further. “We” can’t let evidentiary case-making get in the way of you finding your “voice” (as you put it to me, last March).

Your sense of Heidegger, surviving the Nazi period, is generally invalid, to put it politely. Actually, you provide an extended demonstration (in your Hölderlin book) of literary expression through distorted reading of Heidegger and others’ views of Heidegger which are irrelevant to shaping your sense of “poetic subject”: merging extracted quotes from different works and/or different authors for the sake of your own admirable literary project, which needs your fictional Heidegger to warrant qualifying your excursions as “philosophical”. Your book would have been better titled Employing Hölderlin, Heidegger, and Others for My Poetics.

When Heidegger mentions “national socialism” in his Ister lectures (re: p. 179 of your Hölderlin book), he is asserting a difference between (1) its singular (unprecedented) sense of politics—technocratic ideologues pretending to absorb Greek ideas into political ideology as legitimizing precedent)—and (2) Greek polis. Indicating that the politics is unprecedented is not endorsing Hitlerism.

When he refers to the “violence” of (in short) the dark night of the abyss (i.e., the struggle of emancipation from the singularity), that’s the violence of unhomeliness in the German politics. Germans are having violence done to them by what’s happening in Germany, which calls for a comparable struggle of heartful dwelling to escape. That’s congruent with the literary movement of innter emigration, where overt resistance gets one arrested.

Your misunderstanding of Heidegger at that point is associated with Heidegger’s comment in his IM lectures about a “truth and greatness” (from 1935, not 1953, you mis-locate). But his quip is a ruse, which he indicated in a 1946 letter to Marcuse (if I recall the year correctly).

Your p. 179 quip is one example of many misreadings throughout your “poetic” extractions of passages from their contexts (p.8 is a good example), a kind of philological sleight of hand for the sake of your subject-centered, crypto-Cartesian conception of Dasein, which I really regret finding to be the case.

By the way, Heidegger uses the Hellingrath edition because that’s the edition so influentially available, which is precisely the edition to use for deconstructive appropriation of Hôlderlin’s Romantic sense of nationality which is Germany’s “Hölderlin.” It’s not about fidelity to Hölderlin (your interest); it’s about the Hölderlin that is popular.

There is no interest shown by Heidegger in advocating a new conception of nationalism. Issues of nationality belong to every society. Clarifying the difference between (a) Hölderlin’s sense, inspired by the Greeks; and (b) Germany’s current sense isn’t expressing a nationalist aspiration.

I’ve mentioned one relevant passage above that I picked out (re: listing of “national socialism” in your book’s index), but every politically relevant passage I’ve examined in your books has the same disappointing result: dismay at your sense of reading.

But your book isn’t really about Heidegger; it’s about warranting your conception of the poetic subject, relative to Hölderlin (and others) in a philosophy program, so you need a reading of Heidegger to make your Comp. Lit. project “philosophical.”