more Bultmann-Heidegger

Now finished with the correspondence part of the volume. There remain 60 or so pages of appendices, and I’ll read those when I get back.

It’s a different sort of friendship from Heidegger’s others. A few thoughts…

*As stated earlier, Heidegger ends up the dominant partner in every human relationship he’s ever in. It doesn’t feel right. I don’t just mean that he was such a towering figure that no one in the vicinity could equal him. Einstein’s letters don’t read like this, and neither do Kant’s, and they were at least as far above their peers in achievement terms as Heidegger was.

No, I recognize this personality type, and it’s found well beyond the range of great thinkers. It’s a sort of energy-miser type, basically lacking in warmth. “You come to me, I don’t come to you. You respond to the things that I say, but I respond to things that you say only when it suits me to do so. At times you do pretty good work, but I will be the judge of that.” I can imagine the corrosive effect Heidegger had on the morale of those near him.

*The Heidegger/Bultmann distancing is much different from the Heidegger/Jaspers distancing. There is a rupture in both cases, but it is far more violent in the Jaspers friendship.

This can be partly explained by the far graver situation of Jaspers under the Nazis (with his Jewish wife) than the situation of Bultmann during the same period (I know he spoke out against them somewhat, but I don’t recall stories of Bultmann being in serious danger as Jaspers was).

But even prior to that, Jaspers seemed significantly more wounded by Heidegger than Bultmann ever was.

There is no doubt, after reading these letters, that the very close relations of Bultmann and Heidegger in the 1920’s were destroyed by Heidegger’s Nazi Rectorate. The frequency and intensity of the letters never recovers from 1933.

Nonetheless, they send friendly, even sentimental messages back and forth during old age. Bultmann had an especially tough time during that period; his wife was hospitalized for lengthy periods with severe depression, and he engages in repeated laments about his old age that are moving even if a bit self-pitying. They send each other lots of nice photos, apparently (most of them not reproduced in the book, though a few of them are).

Of course, there was also an asymmetry in the intellectual friendship. Bultmann is a very significant figure, but while he was deeply influenced by Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, there is no equivalent reciprocal influence.

Bultmann certainly comes off as the more likable figure of the two, but I’m afraid that’s almost always the case when Heidegger is one of the two people involved. There’s been plenty of consideration of the Nazi question. What has been less discussed is the unfortunate fact that Heidegger had one of the more unpleasant personalities in the history of philosophy.

Who was worse? Schopenhauer was prickly. Giordano Bruno was extremely rude.

According to some sources, Francis Bacon may have been the worst human being of the lot, happily torturing for the Queen, turning on his benefactor as a hostile witness in a capital trial, and supposedly keeping a pre-teen boy “companion.”

But all incidents aside, I always feel strangely drained of energy after spending much time with Heidegger’s correspondence, even though I think it is underrated in terms of quality. He’s a good letter-writer, just a domineering personality of a markedly selfish sort.

ever been a tighter band?

Has there ever been a tighter band than Booker T. & The MG’s? They’re a groove machine. Even the organ and guitar solos sound like background rhythm. Not sure how they came up with so many 3-minute masterpieces.

top left: the late Al Jackson (drums)

bottom left: Booker T. Jones (organ)

center: Steve Cropper (guitar)

right: Donald “Duck” Dunn (bass)

didn’t know

Didn’t know that the Cilantro Café on 26th of July Street was a 24-hour operation. That certainly opens up different possible schedules for when I return. Apparently it’s always been open around-the-clock; not sure how I didn’t learn that until tonight.

the degeneration of my sports knowledge continues

I used to earn actual money writing sports articles. From age 7 or 8 until my early 30’s, I devoured sports information on a daily basis.

But once, about 5 years ago, I looked at the rosters for the Baseball All-Star Game, and noticed that I hadn’t even heard of a full half of the players. And remember, these are the best players in baseball, not obscure reserve players.

Today, looking just at the starting line-ups for the All-Star Game, I won’t even tell you the number, but it’s less than half– less than half of the starters for the Baseball All-Star Game are players I’ve even heard of. And Albert Pujols and Derek Jeter are the only two I’ve actually seen play on television (no, I ‘ve never seen Ichiro Suzuki play on TV somehow; vacations in the USA are few– I haven’t even seen LeBron James play basketball, except on YouTube).

What happened? I moved to Egypt.

Could you continue to follow American sports diligently in Egypt? Sure. There’s the web. And almost everyone in Egypt has a satellite dish of some sort.

However:

1. Watching live American sports in Egypt would mean a 3 AM TV lifestyle that I cannot and do not wish to maintain.

2. The web isn’t enough. No matter how many links I click, I miss things. In olden times, I bought both Chicago newspapers every day and went through the sports sections thoroughly. I watched all the big sports events live. During the period when I split the Oakley Avenue flat with Paul Schafer, another great sports fan, we also had Chicago sports talk radio on all day long.

I was so into it in those days… Not only did I make a living writing articles, but I’d call the radio station to give trivia question answers. Once, the ex-pro football players doing the broadcast on the Score even shouted aloud with joy at my memory of a mildly obscure 1970’s football player who fit the question perfectly (it was the wrong answer, but they liked it even better than the right answer, and it erased the skepticism I heard in their voices when they announced that “Graham from Bucktown” had called in to take a shot at the question– doesn’t sound like a likely sports fan, I’ll admit).

I used to remember the entire NCAA Basketball Final Four all the way back to 1979 when I first watched, and easily remembered all the World Series winners and losers running back to the late 1960’s.

And now, I am approaching a state of appalling ignorance.

Granted, I’ve gone into overdrive work mode in recent years on philosophy projects. Most likely sports would have faded a bit for me even if I had been living and working in the USA. But being in Egypt, in a terrible time zone for watching major American sporting events, I’ve more or less just given up on that area.

Sports is a good example of an area of knowledge that is developed through multiple media. Information comes from newspapers, the web, television, and radio, but the most important medium for that knowledge is primarily hanging out with friends and talking about it. With that gone, the primary knowledge base is eroded.

Philosophy, unlike sports, has only a few channels of information access. What would it be like if there were philosophy talk radio, and if you could talk metaphysics with pretty much anyone in a bar, as you can do with sports now?

[ADDENDUM: That last point about “what if you could talk metaphysics with anyone in a bar?” reminds me of my favorite aspect of Jack Kerouac’s fiction– the fact that whenever the narrator meets a hobo on the train or in a car, the hobo turns out to be well-versed in Zen or other Eastern philosophies, and Kerouac treats this as a commonplace needing no further explanation. In the same way, it would be possible to have a fictional universe where the Chicago bars are filled with serious metaphysical debates.]

Heidegger on Karl Löwith

Heidegger to Bultmann
October 12, 1954

Löwith is an uncommonly well-read and versatile man, but he cannot think, and always says “No!” on principle…

on the spelling of Žižek

Incidentally, no, I still haven’t figured out the Slavic diacritical marks on this new French laptop I’m using. I simply cut-and-pasted Žižek from the Immanence blog.

a very pretty blog

IMMANENCE weighs in on Levi’s response to the 10 Questions for Specualtive Realism post and my own brief reply.

You can read it for yourself. I just wanted to say, Immanence has one of the physically most beautiful blogs I have ever seen.

I just wanted to make a quick reply to Immanence on one point:

“With his Hegelian-Kantian ontological underpinnings and his commitment to a nebulous Lacanian Real, can Žižek count as a “realist,” or is he being included to grease the movement’s wheels? (I guess we may get a better sense of that when the book comes out. By the way, I like that Lacanian Real; I’m just not sure how well it stacks up against traditional notions of “realism.”)”

Žižek is certainly no realist. But the subtitle of The Speculative Turn is Continental Materialism and Realism. Žižek calls himself a materialist, as does his gifted interpreter Adrian Johnston. (I don’t actually see why either Žižek or Meillassoux are materialists, but why not grant them the right to use the word?)

It’s not a speculative realist anthology, by the way. Over half of the people in the volume would refuse that label. The net was cast more widely.

However, it must be admitted that successful words and phrases tend to take on lives of their own, and we can see this now happening with “speculative realism” just as it did with “structuralism” long ago.

The stages seemed to run like this…

1. The term was invented by Ray Brassier as a last-minute compromise for the 2007 Goldsmiths workshop. (The flavor of our four-way discussions was something like: “All right, we have a meeting and a venue, but now what the hell are we going to call it? We’re all so different.”) Until the last minute it looked like I was going to cave in and go along with Meillassoux’s “speculative materialism”, even though I am not and never have been and never will be a materialist, but no better ideas were on the horizon. But “speculative realism” was a nice phrase, since both words are fairly accurate descriptions for all of us. If memory serves, Meillassoux was uneasy about the “realism” part later on, and Brassier about the “speculative” part, but I still like it, and Grant may still like it too.

2. From that last-minute and somewhat successful descriptive role, “speculative realism” then became mostly a rigid designator for the particular four people who spoke at the April 2007 Goldsmiths workshop.

3. It has now mutated, quite recently, into a sort of useful catch-all for all current trends in the school formerly known as continental philosophy that don’t fit into existing labels, but which have a generally realist flavor and are also just weird enough to be unassimilable to traditional boring schoolmaster realisms. (“There is a real world outside our mind. Deal with it.”) As I said in my DeLanda article, realism has usually been the boring enforcer in philosophy, the reality principle working against imaginative flights of fancy, bearing the same relation to speculative philosophy that health inspectors have to chefs: a sort of “critical” policing role. The strands loosely united under the name “speculative realism” are all bigger gambles than that.

What it has never been is a unified school, and it will only become less of one as more people jump on board and bring completely different orientations into the vicinity.

Already, I think the “post-speculative realist” phase has begun… Those four people appeared on stage together exactly once, in 2007. The exact same assemblage is highly unlikely to reappear together at any time, and to some extent the directions of the four research programs are so different that they will only get further apart as time goes on.

For example, of the other three original members, my own position was probably closest to Grant’s. But by now I have a lot more in common with Levi Bryant than with Grant. That’s no great surprise, given that Levi and are two of the only people in the vicinity of roughly the same generation who are doing metaphysics highly attuned to Latour. The “object-oriented philosophy” constellation (there are some admitted problems with the name, but I’ve been half-wedded to it since September 1999 when I first coined it) will probably take root in the book series I’ll be co-editing with Latour at Open Humanities Press, while Brassier’s more scientistic orientation will probably continue to be expressed ever more intensely in Collapse, with different venues and institutions supporting the other orientations.

the need for variety

Just set up a new playlist of my 26 most-played MP3’s of between 2 and 3 minutes. It’s amazing what that does for the energy level– frequent change, but not too frequent. Feels like listening to a radio station, I guess.

The list is somewhat dominated by Booker T. & The MG’s and the Sgt. Pepper’s album. There are a few techno cuts on there as well. Also one by Hendrix, one Bobby Bland, one Stevie Wonder, one Nancy Sinatra, one Beach Boys, plus 90’s nostalgia with Digable Planets, 80’s nostalgia with “Tainted Love” and the Police, and 70’s nostalgia with the one Partridge Family song. Otherwise, pretty much Booker T. and the Beatles.

I deliberately excluded everything from Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, however. Too incompatible with the others.

Bultmannn/Heidegger exchange on the Nazis

At long last I came to the portion of Heidegger’s correspondence with the theologian RUDOLF BULTMANN that deals with the rise of the Nazis. Here are some samples…

——
Bultmann to Heidegger
December 14, 1932

It is said that you are now also politically active and have become a member of the National Socialist Party. It would naturally interest me to hear whether that is correct…

For my part I have never understood why the National Socialist Movement became a “party.” The authentic movement was and perhaps still is something great, with its instinct for the ultimate, for the feeling of solidarity, and for discipline. But must these forces be brought into party and electoral struggles?…

After the impression I received of superb National Socialist students, I had placed great hopes in the movement. But the impressions I now receive are depressing.
——

Heidegger to Bultmann
December 16, 1932

I am not a member of this Party and never will be, just as little as I have ever been a member of any other.

[“Never say never.” Heidegger joined the Nazi Party 4 months and 17 days later.]

——

Bultmann to Heidegger
June 18, 1933

In the meantime I have read as much of your Rectoral Address as the Freibuger Tagespost printed of it…

“We will ourselves!” you say, if the newspaper reports correctly. How blind this willing appears to me!

The correspondence drags on for many years afterward, but with a long wartime break, and no real resumption of the former intimacy between the two friends.

The only sign of tension in the friendship before this was when Bultmann, appalled by Prussian government interference in the appointment of Theology professors, reported that his wife had suggested that he go to Freiburg and habilitate in Philosophy with Heidegger– a career change from Theology to Philosophy, essentially. Heidegger gave this plan a chilly and evasive reception, and rather than letting it slide, Bultmann responded defensively that it wasn’t as stupid an idea as Heidegger seemed to think.

That issue ended there in the correspondence, though there may have been a phone call to help smooth things over for all I know.

Whenever I read Heidegger’s correspondence, brilliant though it is, what makes me queasy is the extent to which he always has the upper hand in all of his dealings with other humans. Heidegger is always in the driver’s seat. His correspondents are always trying hard to please him, never the reverse, and he rarely pays full compensation for the good treatment he’s receiving. People come to him. (And this is not true just of younger admirers, but of his peers as well, such as Bultmann and Jaspers.)

It would surely have been worthwhile to attend his lectures, but I think close contact with the man would have been best avoided. Among his more talented closer students (Arendt and Gadamer) signs of real psychological damage are visible. Among those who kept their distance and merely listened to the lectures (Levinas and Zubiri) such damage is absent, and they innovate Heidegger’s thoughts in a clean and healthy manner rather than being all tied up in the psychology of it like Arendt and Gadamer. (Whenever Arendt speaks of Heidegger it sounds like arrested emotional development, and no wonder, while Gadamer seems deeply and incurably insecure whenever he refers to Heidegger.)