Ernst Jünger, Skulls and Reefs Krzysztof Michalski, Martin Heidegger and the Question of Truth ...

236 Pages·2017·3.01 MB·English

VOLUME VI / 2017 / ISSN 2392-0963
Ernst Jünger, Skulls and Reefs
Krzysztof Michalski, Martin Heidegger and the Question of
Truth
Richard Capobianco, Heidegger’s Being as Ἀλήθεια: Older
Than the Human Being
Piotr Nowak, Nothingness and Absence
Christian Sommer, Fall of Dasein: Heidegger Reading
Luther 1924-1927
Christoph Jamme, Martin Heidegger’s Reinvention of
Phenomenology
Thomas Sheehan, Heidegger and the Right Heideggerians:
Phenomenology vs. Crypto-Metaphysics
Andrzej Serafin, Heidegger’s Patricide
Dennis J. Schmidt, Heidegger and the Call for an Original
Ethics
Babette Babich, Between Heidegger and Adorno:
Airplanes, Radios, and Sloterdijk’s Atmoterrorism
Krzysztof Ziarek, Event and Nothingness
Jean-Luc Nancy, Here Color Seems to Think by Itself
PHILOSOPHICAL JOURNAL
VOLUME VI / 2017 / ISSN 2392-0963
Piotr Nowak, Editorial Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
PRESENTATIONS
Ernst Jünger, Skulls and Reefs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
ESSAYS
Krzysztof Michalski, Martin Hei degger and the Question of Truth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Richard Capobianco, Hei degger’s Being as ’Aλήθεια: Older Than the Human Being . . . . . . 29
Krzysztof Ziarek, Event and Nothingness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Piotr Nowak, Nothingness and Absence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Christian Sommer, Fall of Dasein: Hei degger Reading Luther 1924-1927 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
Christoph Jamme, Martin Hei degger’s Reinvention of Phenomenology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Thomas Sheehan, Hei degger and the Right Hei deggerians: Phenomenology
vs. Crypto-Metaphysics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
Andrzej Serafin, Hei degger’s Patricide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
Jason King, Hei degger’s Seam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
Dennis J. Schmidt, Hei degger and the Call for an Original Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
Dmitri Nikulin, The Burdens and Blessings of Boredom: Hei degger and Kracauer . . . . . . . 120
Babette Babich, Between Hei degger and Adorno: Airplanes, Radios, and Sloterdijk’s
Atmoterrorism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
Robert Bernasconi, Desire Become Abstract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
Peter Kalkavage, Schopenhauer’s Will and Wagner’s Eros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
Richard Kearney, Narrative Imagination and Catharsis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
Bruce Rosenstock, The Origins of Jewish Tragic Drama: An Episode in Gershom
Scholem’s Relationship with Oskar Goldberg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
Jean-Luc Nancy, Here Color Seems to Think by Itself . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
REDISCOVERED BOOKS
Piotr Nowak, The Man from Under Ground . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
ABOUT THE AUTHORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230
VOLUME III / 2014 / ISSN 2392-0963 VOLUME IV / 2015 / ISSN 2392-0963
Leo Strauss, Introduction to Political Philosophy: A Course Gustav Shpet, Consciousness and Its Owner
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Marta Gibińska, Time, the Old and the Young, or Chaos
Controlled
Piotr Nowak, The Child of War
free at www.kronos.org.pl
Editor in Chief: Wawrzyniec Rymkiewicz
Deputy Editor in Chief: Piotr Nowak
Editorial Assistance: Ivan Dimitrijević, Krzysztof Rosiński, Andrzej Serafin
Reviewers: Prof. Jeff Love, Dr hab. Paulina Sosnowska
Published by Fundacja Augusta hr. Cieszkowskiego
ul. Mianowskiego 15/65, 02-044 Warszawa, Poland
ISSN 2392-0963 (print)
ISSN 1899-9484 (online)
All material remains © copyright of the respective authors. Please address all queries to the editor at the following address.
[email protected]
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
A teacher who expects continuous approval and docile subservience from
his students is not a good teacher. Also, a student who wants to remain
a disciple, still digesting his master’s ideas, does not reciprocate the efforts
the latter put into him. Thus, the risk of apostasy is embedded in teaching –
the more eminent the thinker, the more likely is the desertion of his closest
disciples whose careers might follow a variety of paths. They do not have
to swim as one school; they can be divided by individual businesses, values or
aesthetic preferences. Their reasons for breaking with the master are usually
different: some reject his attitude as not radical enough and prefer to seek their own solutions,
while others, contrarily, consider it an exaggerated or unnecessary radicalism. However, what
binds them together, what determines the fact that they can be seen as one, is their idiosyncrasy
about the master. If they talk about him, they most often remember him badly, constantly denying
whatever they owe him. They try to think themselves up from scratch, to recreate themselves
from the ashes of the old world, the scraps of recollected and distorted conversations or images.
They hold a “witches’ Sabbath”, inviting their own students and drumming into their heads the
simplified version of the master’s teachings. They are unable to think of the old times without
regret. Although resentment constitutes a powerful weapon in their fight against the demons of
the past, the dynamics of generational conflict makes them overlook a very important thing: that
they cannot discard what they have learned and that, whether they want it or not, it somehow
belongs to them, even if they try to disown it. They attribute the clumsiness of their own thinking
to the teachings of their master, blaming him for all the evil of the world as well as for their personal
disappointments and creative failures. At the same time, they happen to be extremely petty and
scrupulous. With their calumnies and untimely doubts about the eminence of the master’s work,
they contribute to his ideas, his concepts. But their own work (and this feature seems common
to all of them) lacks the fusillade of thoughts that they found in the writings of their teacher; it
lacks that thrilling atmosphere of complications in which the first intuitions and understatements
begin to hatch. Their books suffer from hopeless secondariness. They always cross the finish line
second, just behind the tortoise that they cannot overtake.
The apostates use the rhetoric of independence. Underlying their will to shun good advice or
to free themselves from the burden of authority is the desire to overthrow that authority or at least
to “undermine” it. They tend to ignore the warnings coming from everywhere, forgetting that, in
fact, they are cutting the branch they are sitting on. Because authority is “more than advice and
less than command, an advice which one cannot safely ignore” (Hannah Arendt).
2017 3
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
The articles collected in this volume of Kronos and devoted to the work of Martin Hei degger
differ in the attitude the authors take towards Hei degger’s thought. Some point to the ambivalent
dimension of his work, whilst others can be regarded as an apology or a “repetition”. There is
plenty to choose from. Taken as a whole, they are a gesture of προσκύνησις and a great tribute
paid to the most outstanding philosopher of the twentieth century.
Piotr Nowak
Deputy Editor-in-Chief
Piotr Nowak
The Ancients
and Shakespeare on Time
Some Remarks on the War of Generations.
In The Ancients and Shakespeare on Time Piotr
Nowak depicts a world where tradition –
devoid of gravity, “Sans teeth, sans eyes,
sans taste, sans everything” – attempts
to curb the young and new, while youth
resists with all its power, vitality and
characteristic insolence. The wars of
generations, which Nowak explores in
the works of Plato, Aristophanes and
Shakespeare, pertain to  the essence
and meaning of time. They make up the
dramatic tensions in the transgenerational
dialogue between the old and the young.
Amsterdam/New York, NY 2014. XIV, 104 pp. (Value Inquiry Book Series 271)
ISBN: 978-90-420-3820-2 Paper €27,-/US$38,-
ISBN: 978-94-012-1067-6 E-Book €24,-/US$34,-
Online info: http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?BookId=VIBS+271
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
PRESENTATIONS
Ernst Jünger
SKULLS AND REEFS
1
“What sort of foolishness are you up to, monsieur Ludovico?” Such was the question
Cardinal Ippolito d’Este asked his protégé, Ariosto, upon reading his Orlando Furioso.
Along with Byron’s poetry, Ariosto’s Furioso was one of my favorite works
as a youth. I became acquainted with it at fourteen or fifteen years of age through the
impressive folio edition illustrated by Dore. Hermann Kurz did the translation. I was less
satisfied with the pocket-size Reclam edition I carried along later, translated by Gries.
I read it in the spring of 1917 on the Hindenburg Line and brought the two slim volumes
back home with me too. I seem to remember reading more in war years than at other
times – and I was not alone in this.
Reading Ariosto is dangerous – Cervantes knew this too. Above all, a literary
education creates standards that reality cannot meet; the playing field is too large.
The skeptical question posed by Ippolito d’Este is not only a cardinal’s question; it
is also a question of cardinal importance. I have often reflected on it, even while working
on this text. Endless questions arise about why I have indulged myself in this or that
matter – and about what one can expect to hear in response to such questions. And who
bears the responsibility for them.
2
We hardly need to fear that, as they used to say, the Epicurean swine will break into the
gardens of poppy and hemp. The Epicurean is not inclined to excess – it would interfere
with enjoyment. He takes his time enjoying things and thus represents the opposite of
the addict, who suffers over the passage of time. He has nothing in common with the
2017 5
ERNST JüNGER
chain-smoker – he is more like the gourmet who concludes a good meal with an imported
cigar. He masters his enjoyment and keeps it under control, less for the sake of discipline
as for the expansion of enjoyment itself.
Old Chinese men enjoyed a bowl of opium now and then in a similar fashion, and
they may still exist today. Imagine that after a meal of many courses we were not content
with merely a stroll on the terrace or a walk in the park, but were to pass beyond the hedges
of time and space and therefore enlarge the field of the possible. This is more than food
and drink, more even than wine and good cigars; it leads much further.
From this perspective, after a certain age (say, from retirement on) we should
no longer be restricted by boundaries: those approaching the boundless should set their
boundaries much further afield. Not everyone can build like Faust in his old age, but we
are all free to devise plans in that unmeasured space
This applies, above all, to that final stretch in which the ultima linea rerum, the
finish line, approaches and becomes distinct. There are old vintners who live for months
and even years on nothing but bread and wine. Konrad Weiss has paid homage to their
lives.
To alleviate the pain of the dying person whose time is quickly coming to an end
is understandable, though insufficient. To his lonely deathbed we should bring one last
time the fullness of the world.
In the hour of death, narcotics are unsuitable. We should offer gifts that expand and
sharpen consciousness. If we harbor even the slightest suspicion that there may be some
form of continued existence – and there are reasons to believe this might be the case – we
should remain alert. For we must assume that the passage has distinct qualities.
Leaving this aside, many people place special value on their individual death as
well, and do not wish to be cheated of it. For the captain it is a point of honor to be the
last man to abandon ship.
And finally, we should consider that painkillers may not only eliminate the pain of
death, but also its euphoria. Perhaps the dying chords of consciousness include important
messages: receptions, transmissions. Death masks retain their reflection.
Brightly colored is the plumage of Aesclepius’ rooster.
3
A taste for spiritual adventure appeals to the highest and most sophisticated consciousness
and is to be conceived independent of enjoyment. All enjoyment is essentially spiritual. It
is there that the inexhaustible source rests, giving rise to desire that no satisfaction fulfills.
“And in enjoyment I crave desire.”1
Every advertisement knows this connection. When we receive our gardening
catalogs in the winter, their images awaken a livelier satisfaction than do the summer
flowers that bloom in their beds. In nature, as well, more artifice and cleverness is spent
on the display than on its consummation. Witness the pattern on the wings of a butterfly
or the plumage of a bird of paradise.
1 J. W. v. Goethe, Faust: Eine Tragödie, line 3250.
6 2017
SKULLS AND REEFS
Hunger of the spirit is insatiable – of the body, narrowly limited. If a Roman glutton
like Vitellius devoured three large meals each day and rid himself of excess food by
vomiting, we can assume discord between eyes and gullet, even if of a rather primitive
variety. This discord has its scale; the eye cries to the spirit for help when the visible world
fails to satisfy.
St. Anthony was more capable of enjoyment than Vitellius and others like him –
this was not on account of his stronger physique or greater wealth, but rather a superior
spirituality. In Flaubert’s Temptation, his imagination fills tables with dishes that are fresher
and more vibrant than the ones produced by gardeners and cooks, nay, even by painters. In
his hut in the desert, Anthony caught a glimpse of the abundance overflowing from the source
– it is there that such abundance instantaneously crystallizes into appearance. That is why
the ascetic is richer than Caesar, master of the visible world though addicted to enjoyment.
4
I tried to depict the spiritual adventurer as a type like the figure of Antonio Peri: “Antonio
was scarcely to be distinguished at first sight from the other artisans that one often saw
busily at work throughout Heliopolis. Beneath this outward appearance was hidden
something else – he was a dream-catcher. He caught dreams the way others hunt butterflies
with nets. On Sundays and holidays he did not go to the islands, nor did he frequent the
taverns on the waterfront at Pagos. He locked himself away in his studio and departed
to the land of dreams. It is there that, according to him, every country and undiscovered
island was woven into the tapestry. Drugs served as keys to enter the chambers and
grottoes of that world.
“He also drank wine, but never for the sake of enjoyment. He thirsted after
a cocktail, equal parts adventure and knowledge. He did not travel to settle in unknown
regions, but as a geographer of those lands. Wine was merely one key among many others,
one of the doors to the labyrinth.
“Perhaps it was only his methodology that allowed him to bypass catastrophes
and deliria. He had many run-ins with such obstacles. He was convinced that every drug
contained a formula that granted access to certain riddles of the world. What is more,
he thought it possible to decipher the hierarchy of these formulas. Like the philosopher’s
stone, the highest must reveal the secrets of the universe.
“He was looking for the master key. But isn’t the supreme mystery necessarily
lethal?”
That it meant something else, this ceaseless quest for adventure, for remote and
strange places, would not be revealed until the final attempt. Antonio fell into a radioactive
net, was mortally injured with serious burns. In his torment he refused morphine. It was not
enjoyment nor was it adventure that led him to make his departures. Curiosity, certainly,
but a curiosity that was sublimated to the point where he finally stood before the right
portal. Here a key is unnecessary: it opens of its own accord.
5
Every enjoyment lives through the spirit. And every adventure lives through the proximity
to death around which it revolves.
2017 7
ERNST JüNGER
I recall a painting I saw when I had scarcely learned to read, entitled The
Adventurer: a sailor, a lone conquistador, steps ashore on an unknown island. Before him
looms a frightful mountain, his ship in the background. He is alone.
That was roughly how it was. The Adventurer was at the time one of those famous
canvasses constantly surrounded by a pack of admirers at exhibitions. It is a prime example
of the art of narrative painting, which culminated in Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead (1882).
The taste for this type of work has been lost; today this painting is gathering dust
somewhere, if it has even survived. Its character was symbolic: the ship from which the
man had disembarked, the beach upon which he steps, the tonal quality incorporating fear
and expectation. Böcklin was more profound, and in Munch the same theme is already
treated from a different perspective. An entirely different solution is on offer today. Now
we possess a few great works in which the nearness to death is not directly portrayed, but
rather saturates the work entirely.
I have retained only a few specific details concerning this Adventurer: the beach
was strewn with the bones and skulls of those who shared in the same failed venture.
I noted this and saw what the painter was getting at: that alighting here was indeed
seductive, but dangerous. These are the bones of your predecessors, of your forefathers,
and in the end they are your own. Time’s beach is littered with them. If its waves bear us
toward them, if we step ashore, we stride across them. Adventure is life concentrated; our
breath quickens, death crowds closer.
6
The skull and crossbones was for a long time a legitimate symbol, not only on crypts
and in cemeteries but in art as well. It was a favorite motif of the Baroque, along with
the hourglass and the sickle. Today it would seem primitive to use it in this sense; its
significance is rather like that of a traffic sign. Already the painter’s use of it in The
Adventurer shows him succumbing to the temptation of a literary allusion.
We wonder: how is it that an object such as the skull and crossbones was once used
as a theme of high art, that it still makes sense to us today as such; yet this same object,
when offered up to us by our contemporaries, no longer satisfies us and instead perhaps
even strikes us as comical.
Here it is worth noting that every object can both gain and lose the force of a symbol.
Its role is that of a scope through which the eye views its target. If the aim is true, the
radiance of the target will be transferred to the sight. And this radiance persists as in
images of old, “it glows for a long time after.” Not only has the beauty of the meaning been
transferred, but a shimmer of the imperishable as well. Aphrodite was not merely what the
Beloved stood for – she was represented by her in the embrace, and in it made nameless.
Today, we are still deeply moved by the death’s head depicted by the old masters.
Through it, through its eye sockets death was seen – communicated by atoms.
The skull and crossbones of The Adventurer is, in contrast, a mere prop. There
a symbol, here an ornament; there myth, here allegory. Approach there, distance here.
It is worth noting as well that the contemporary artist, even in terms of pure
painting, does not achieve the mastery of the old masters, although he may be at the height
of his craft. The satisfaction and the acknowledgement that the spectator gives to artistic
8 2017
SKULLS AND REEFS
achievement, and on which the artist’s fame depends, quickly disappears. Although he
didn’t know it, the poor fellow was a counterfeiter. The fake was accepted in good faith, but
sooner or later the truth will out: there’s nothing behind it. The bank note has no backing
– here the pretense of paper, there the reserve of gold; here appearance, there reality.
Often enough, fakes succeed through deception, and only a few experts immediately
see through them. “Seeing through” them in such cases means: recognizing that nothing
stands behind them.
7
Attempting to achieve an effect with a skull became absurd around the advent of the
x-ray. Here we should perhaps explain in more detail what we mean: we are commenting
not on the physics of vision but on the fundamental nature of optics – to see a type of
humanity that in its genesis is new and quasi-instinctive, The x-rays arise as an empirical
consequence of a fluctuation in form.
Asserting itself in physics and its array of instruments, this fundamental alteration
entails not only a rarified air in which it is difficult to breathe, but also a depth where matter
becomes denser and more illuminating. Physics stands to gain from both.
More importantly, the relation to death also changes, and this change calls for
expression in art and not merely faith and thought. This too explains why the skull and
crossbones, like so many other symbols, is no longer “credible.”
It is a question of perspective, not substance. “In itself,” the power of the skull
remains unbroken, yet we no longer see anything through the sight it affords. What’s
more, bear in mind that we are undergoing a general fading away of symbols. Only a few
powers will withstand this – perhaps only Faust’s Mothers.
Art must take this into account and it is in fact doing so – above all negatively
(ex negativo), but with tentative feelers. The devaluation of the classic symbols is
a characteristic of every change in style. In a Great Transition, however, it is not merely
individual symbols that are at stake. It concerns the entire world of symbols. Here we are
reminded of what has been said of “whitening” in my work, Time’s Wall. It is not ultimately
to be understood as a nihilistic act, but rather as a counter-offensive. White is not colorless;
it is the refuge of the polychrome world.
8
Casting an eye back at our example, let us imagine one of the majestic limestone cliffs
that looms over the French Riviera or the verdant grasslands of the Danube valley. Or we
could think of the cliffs composed of cretaceous rock on the coast of Rügen or the coral
reefs in the Pacific Ocean.
In such places, death no longer glares at us as an isolated skull, but as monstrous
piles of sedimentation. All of this was the skeletal form of life: snails and clams, the shells
of diatoms, corals that had been deposited for millenia before arriving at a higher degree of
petrification. Primordial waters spun out forms that bore the stamp of terrestrial pressure
more clearly, and that were annihilated when that pressure became a little too great. Then,
breaking apart again with the surging and receding waters until the molecules, whose lives
are being incessantly robbed, are resurrected in circles, spirals, and symmetries.
2017 9