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Re: [xmca] Intransitivity and Intransigence
David,
There are two treatments of language in Being & Time. One is that
speech is a tool, an aspect of the network of equipment each of us
finds ourself in. The other is that language is constitutive, a ground
against which entities can show up. Neither is fully adequate, and
they don't fit together very well. But in neither case does it seem to
me that Heidegger was suggesting that language is immediate.
Look, Heidegger was grappling with a problem that none of us has yet
solved. Once we accept that humans are products of culture, on what
basis do we judge what is ethical conduct? Is it simply what is
acceptable within the norms of our particular society? Or is there
some kind of external vantage point from which we can judge and
critique these norms? The Frankfurt School, despite its admirable
intentions, has not been able so far to solve this problem; Habermas'
attempt to articulate a communicative ethics, in which language
itself, or the communicative situation, contains resources that will
enable us to decide together what is fair and just, has not in my view
been successful.
For many Marxists the criterion was provided by the belief in an end
point to history. The socialist state would treat everyone fairly, and
almost any actions were justified in order to achieve it, including
revolution, terror and oppression. Heidegger's writing on authenticity
is shaped, in my view, by his Catholic education rather than by his
totalitarian sympathies. The criterion for ethical action, for him,
was provided by the past, by the traditional way of life of the
ancient Greeks before the fall of humankind into technological
thinking. Becoming authentic was a matter of adopting the right kind
of attitude to this old tradition, handing it down to the next
generation. One can immediately see how Hitler's rhetoric might have
resonated with such a view, and this shows shows some of its
difficulties. But the problem remains, and surely it is one we have to
solve.
Martin
On Oct 21, 2009, at 8:58 PM, David Kellogg wrote:
I think a lot of what Adorno is attacking in Heidegger is his
attempt to restore immediacy to language through a 'jargon of
authenticity'; this is what he recognizes as a link between
Heidegger the philosopher and Heidegger the Nazi, and I think he is
right.
"The term 'commission' sets itself up with unquestioned authority in
the vulgar jargon of authenticity. The fallibility of the term is
hushed up by the absolute use of the word. By leaving out of
consideration the organizations and people which give commissions,
the term establishes itself as a linguistic eyrie of totalitarian
orders. It does this without rational examination of the right of
those who usurp for themselves the charisma of the leader. Shy
theology allies itself with secular brazeness. There exist cross-
connections between the jargon of authenticity and old school like
phrases, like that which was once observed by Tucholsky: 'That's the
way it's done here.' The same holds true for the trick of military
command, which dresses an imperative in the guise of a predicative
sentence. By eleminating all linguistic traces of the will of the
superior, that whichi s intended is given greater emphasis. Thus the
impression is created that it is
necessary to obey, since what is demanded already occurs factually.
'The participants on this trip, in memory of our heroes, assemble in
Luneberg.' Heidegger, too, cracks the whip when he italicizes the
auxiliary verb in the sentence, 'Death _is_'."
Adorno, T.W. (1964/1973) The Jargon of Authenticity. London:
Routledge Classics. p. 71.
Everything Adorno says about Heidegger's love of the intransitive
could be said with equal justice about the Rumsfeldian nonaccusative
"Stuff happens" (which was taken, in turn, from a slightly more
scatological expression current in the military). But the ideas
Adorno is attacking cannot really be attached to one grammatical
mood or another; as he points out, the use of the declarative
instead of the imperative actually enhances the absolute and
categorical quality of the expression rather than undermining it by
attaching arguments to the verb. This is because in the imperative
there is a very clear subject and object directly recoverable from
context. In contrast, real culture, including political culture, is
always mediated:
"That which legitimately could be called culture attempted, as an
expression of suffering and contradition, to maintain a grasp on the
idea of the good life. Culture cannot represent either that which
merely exists or the conventional and no longer binding categories
of order which the culture industry drapes over the idea of the good
life as if existing reality were the good life, as if those
categories were its true measure."
Adorno, T.W. (1981/1991) The Culture Industry. London: Routledge
Classics, p. 104.
As a Nazi, Heidegger was not a weak man at all--he was sufficiently
strong to actively and enthusiastically finger a number of his
colleagues to the Gestapo (including one who later won a Nobel prize
for chemistry). He was also sufficiently petty minded to have his
own mentor, Edmund Husserl, barred from using the library at the
University of Freiburg in his retirement on the grounds that Husserl
was of "Jewish ancestry". It seems to me that it was Arendt who was
too weak to disentangle the man's thoughts, his politics, and his
personal charm; in retrospect her celebrated phrase "the banality of
evil" has a deceptively disarming ring.
Of course LSV too used a lot of work from intellectuals who later
became fascists. So much so that Vygotsky got started on the
necessary de-Nazification of his own work in "Fascism and
Psychoneurology", which Andy has kindly made available for free
download at:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/reader/p327.pdf
But this essay is not simply a belated attempt to cover his ass, or
even a heartfelt expression of his genuine rage and sense of
betrayal (though there is a lot of that). It is a serious attempt to
put some critical distance between himself and psychologists who had
an undoubted influence on Vygotsky's early work: Ach and Jaensch to
name only two.
"Wolves and Other Vygotskyan Constructs", and before it, Chapter
Five of Thinking and Speech relies on an experiment which was
largely taken from Ach and Rimat. Ach was one of the first
psychologists to embrace Nazism, and really did believe in a
"determining tendency" in activities. This entirely externally
determined, object-orientation later became the notion of a
"national will" which drew people to Hitler, and this is what Carl
Jung picked up on in his infamous statement that it was entirely
natural for the German people to follow their Fuhrer.
In contrast, LSV insists on the subjectivity of the subject from the
get go, and he volition of the child right to the end. LSV's first
stage of preconceptual thinking, that of syncretism (random heaps,
spatial heaps, and two-step heaps that are rather like dealing a
shuffled deck of cards to create similarly shuffled decks for each
of the players), is almost undiluted subjectivity; no "determining
tendency" is present other than the action of the subject. Paula's
work work with three year old subjects shows this beautifully.
But even the later categories, such as the complexes, depend not
simply on the "aim" or the "goal" of the task, but on the objective,
concrete, factual links which are noticed by the child and
systematized accordingly. The words which organize the child's
activity are clearly mediate, contingent, and not some kind of
omnipresent super-genetic influence. Conceptual thinking, of course,
is even more mediated by the words of others and by the thoughts of
the subject; it's the recognition of the "I" in the word "it".
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
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