Drafts by Johannes Fritsche
Virtually all commentators agree that, in Physics I, ch. 1, Aristotle lays out the program to sho... more Virtually all commentators agree that, in Physics I, ch. 1, Aristotle lays out the program to show, in Physics I, the number and character of the principles of any natural being. By contrast, in this paper it is argued that, in the first place, he argues for the need to prove the existence of principles of natural beings. This proof of the existence, number, and character of the principles of a natural being is completed only at the end of Physics IV. In addition, it is shown that, in their interpretations of the notions of ordo and methodus (which virtually all commentators have seen in the second half of Physics I, ch. 1), Thomas Aquinas and Zabarella prepare the ground for the method of early modern natural philosophers, which is very different from Aristotle's method of explicating the basic assumptions shared by the natural philosophers and of testing different types of analysis of the empirical phenomena. This paper was given under a different title in 1995 at the 20th International Conference on Patristic, Mediaeval, and Renaissance Studies in Villanova/NJ (USA). It is a very brief summary of Johannes Fritsche, Methode und Beweisziel im ersten Buch der “Physikvorlesung” des Aristoteles, Frankfurt am Main: Hain Verlag, 1986, pp. 11-57 and 171-212 (text and pagination as in Johannes Fritsche, Form und Formmangel im ersten Buch der “Physikvorlesung” des Aristoteles, Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin Dissertationsdruck, 1982). For the implications of the thesis on Physics I, ch. 1 for the method in Books I-IV of the Physics, see ibid., pp. 58ff., Johannes Fritsche, “Aristotle on Χώρα in Plato’s Timaeus (Physics IV:2, 209 b 1-17)”, Archiv für Begriffsge¬schichte 48, 2006, pp. 27-44, and Johannes Fritsche, “Aristotle on Space, Form, and Matter (Physics IV:2, 209 b 17-32)”, Archiv für Begriffsge-schichte 48, 2006, pp. 45-63. For an interpretation of Physics II, ch. 1 that makes good on the theses in Methode und Beweisziel, pp. 58ff., see Johannes Fritsche, “Meaning and function of Aristotle’s two definitions of nature (Physics Β, 192b8-193a9), Physics Β, and his biology,” Revue de philosophie ancienne 36(2), 2018, pp. 215-287. See also Johannes Fritsche, On Heidegger’s Being and Time and National Socialism: Johannes Fritsche and Thomas Sheehan, Texto ! Textes et cultures, vol. XXIV, n°3, 2019, pp. 1-81, here 77-81 (“Appendix 5: Heidegger and other mortal scholars on Aristotle and ‘the Greeks’”) (www.revue-texto.net/). For Aristotle’s usage of the method of his biological research to prove, in Politics I, that the European and Asian barbarians are by nature slaves, see Johannes Fritsche, “Aristotle’s Biological Justification of Slavery in Politics I,” Rhizomata 7(1) (2019), pp. 63–96.
Abstract: In a paper published in 2016 in Philosophy Today, Thomas Sheehan attacked my book on He... more Abstract: In a paper published in 2016 in Philosophy Today, Thomas Sheehan attacked my book on Heidegger from 1999 (Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger’s Being and Time [Fritsche 1999; shortened and expanded German edition: Fritsche 2014]). Peg Birmingham and Ian Alexander Moore, the editors of Philosophy Today, refused to publish a rejoinder of mine to Sheehan’s paper. My responses are now in Johannes Fritsche, On Heidegger’s Being and Time and National Socialism: Johannes Fritsche and Thomas Sheehan, in: Texto ! Textes et cultures, vol. XXIV, n°3, 2019 (www.revue-texto.net/) (Fritsche 2019a: 16-59), with an introduction referring to five publications by five different authors from 2019 (2019a: 1-15) and drafts of some sections and of an appendix of a book on issues related to Heidegger that I had begun at some point (2019a: 60-80). The current document contains the draft of a further appendix of that book, a paper with instances of combat in the thinking of Heidegger and several Heideggerians, and a meditation on mortality.
Abstract: In a paper published in 2016 in Philosophy Today, Thomas Sheehan attacked my book on He... more Abstract: In a paper published in 2016 in Philosophy Today, Thomas Sheehan attacked my book on Heidegger from 1999 (Johannes Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger’s Being and Time [= HDN]; Berkeley: University of California Press; shortened and expanded German edition, Geschichtlichkeit und Nationalsozialismus in Heideggers Sein und Zeit, Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag, 2014). Peg Birmingham and Ian Alexander Moore, the editors of Philosophy Today, refused to publish a rejoinder of mine to Sheehan’s paper on me. For a collection of my responses to Sheehan and further pertinent material, see my On Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ and National Socialism: Johannes Fritsche and Thomas Sheehan (= HBT), in: Texto ! Textes et cultures, vol. XXIV, n°3, 2019 (www.revue-texto.net/).
Sheehan, other American scholars and I agree in that §74 of Sein und Zeit is the culmination of the entire book. As I show in detail in HDN and HBT, in this section destiny raises its voice, calls upon Dasein to cancel society and re-realize the past (the past community, the Volksgemeinschaft promoted by Hitler’s National Socialists), and authentic Dasein submits to the call. By contrast, as to my knowledge with the only exception of Tom Rockmore all American interpreters claim – as it were in the spirit of the American ideal of the self-made man – that an authentic Dasein produces by itself its individual fate, and that several such Dasein produce by themselves their common destiny. Some, amongst them Sheehan, maintain that authentic Dasein can freely choose out of the pool of possibilities offered by the past the one that fits its unique personality (Sheehan turns §74 more thoroughly upside down than any other American interpreter [see HBT 25, 31-38, 49, 51-55, 70-77]). Others, among them Birmingham, maintain that Dasein produce their fates and destiny by rejecting the call of destiny. (In 2019, the Heideggerian William Blattner acknowledges the ignorance of the ‘Germanic’ notion of destiny and fate amongst the American scholars [see HBT 13].) American interpreters normally misread Being and Time in these and related matters because they are ignorant of the fact that the structure and dramaturgy of the whole book Sein und Zeit mirrors the concept of history shared by extreme and moderate rightists at Heidegger’s time (see HDN, HBT), and because the English translations contain several unclear or simply false translations that suggest the self-made-man interpretation (see HDN, HBT). The English translators pervert the last and, admittedly, linguistically rather subtle passage of the narrative in §74: Heidegger makes authentic Dasein obey the call; in the English translation, however, it rejects the past’s offers. Birmingham finds an even stronger rejection than the one of the translators: “Macquarrie and Robinson’s translation of Erwidert as ‘reciprocative rejoinder’ conveys too great a sense of a return understood as identity: I reply to you in the same way that you did to me. In more militaristic terms, I return the strike in the same way that I received it. But clearly the passage above suggests something different,” namely a “disrupt[ion of any sort of] identity and continuity” between the past and the present (for the full quote, see HDN 12; on Stambaugh’s translation see HDN 335).
The idea of the self-made man seems to be deeply ingrained in many American minds; so much so that, despite my extensive treatment of the issue, even a reviewer of my book for Constellations in 2001 – a reviewer who is not a Heideggerian, who works on Heidegger’s fellow Rightists, and who regarded my book as the “best analysis of Being and Time to come along in a long time” – attributes to me Birmingham’s interpretation of erwidern in §74, a mistake after which the rest of the review could not make much sense for anyone not aware of it. I comment on this review in the text below from 2001, which Constellations did not publish. For Heideggerians, metaphysics might also, or primarily, be the epoch of the dominance of the call, the last calls being Heidegger’s calls of destiny in §74 of Sein und Zeit and in his history of Being (which Sheehan exploits in a way that is just simply most ruthless fraud, blindest wishful thinking and reading, and/or utmost incompetence, see HBT 18-23, 66-71). The first is the address of the divine craftsman in Plato’s Timaeus, in which he transforms the chaotic disorder of necessity and chōra into the most beautiful three-dimensional animated being. It is by “wise persuasion” that nous makes necessity “direct most of the things that come to be toward what is best” (Timaeus 48a2-5). Persuasion female as it is in Greek, ἡ πειθώ, is not male combat, ὁ πόλεμος. No one has ever denied this until 1999, the year in which John Sallis applied the deconstructivist procedures of isolating quotes from their contexts and ignoring philological evidence onto the Timaeus as generously as Sheehan, Birmingham, and other American scholars do so regarding Being and Time: necessity/chōra fights against nous, and it does so successfully, just like the brave soldier in the American interpretation of §74 of Being and Time. For, there is “a standing together of nous and anankē, not only in the sense of their meeting, their being joined together in a kind of union, but also in a sense involving hostility, as when two soldiers stand together face to face in battle, in close combat with one another” (John Sallis, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999], 93). The “otherness” (ibid., 95) of necessity/chōra, “its character as errant and its prospect as being like a soldier face to face in battle with nous, can hardly not provoke suspicion that nothing here will be simple or linear” (ibid., p. 95). In fact, Timaeus 47 e 3ff. “disrupts” (ibid., p. 96) the theoretical framework used up to that point (see here below, p. 4f.). When, in 2002, John Sallis and Charles Scott (unsuccessfully) tried to make Pennsylvania State University throw me out of the position that I had at that time at PSU, they committed at least one unethical deed and one criminal act for which they should have been brought to court.
Abstract: In a paper published in 2016 in Philosophy Today, Thomas Sheehan attacked my book on He... more Abstract: In a paper published in 2016 in Philosophy Today, Thomas Sheehan attacked my book on Heidegger from 1999 (Johannes Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger’s Being and Time; Berkeley: University of California Press; shortened and expanded German edition, Geschichtlichkeit und Nationalsozialismus in Heideggers Sein und Zeit, Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag, 2014). Peg Birmingham and Ian Alexander Moore, the editors of Philosophy Today, refused to publish a rejoinder of mine to Sheehan’s paper on me. In two papers that I had uploaded on my account with academia.edu in 2016 and 2017, I show that, misinterpreting – or, in more or less many cases, fraudulently misrepresenting – crucial notions, such as the ones in §65 of Sein und Zeit, and relying on an interpretation of §74 in Sein und Zeit that is as banal as it is philologically and hermeneutically arbitrary, naïve, and false, Sheehan’s critique of my book lacks any merit. I also point out some of the numerous insults or vulgarities in his paper. These two papers of mine and a short comment on Emmanuel Faye uploaded in 2018 are now part of Johannes Fritsche, On Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ and National Socialism: Johannes Fritsche and Thomas Sheehan, in: Texto ! Textes et cultures, vol. XXIV, n°3, 2019 (www.revue-texto.net/).
In addition to these three papers, On Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ and National Socialism: Johannes Fritsche and Thomas Sheehan contains a summarizing introduction also referring to five articles from 2019 by five different authors each of whom (along with other things) implicitly or explicitly confirms, or further explicates, an aspect of my interpretation, amongst them one Heideggerian, William Blattner. Many American interpreters, amongst them Sheehan, and I agree upon that §74, the center of the chapter on historicity, is the culmination of the entire book Sein und Zeit. In my view, in this section destiny raises its voice, calls upon Dasein to cancel society and re-realize the past community, the Volksgemeinschaft, and authentic Dasein submits to the call. By contrast, as it were in the spirit of the American ideal of the self-made man, virtually all American interpreters (including Birmingham and Sheehan) claim that authentic Dasein produce their individual fates and their common destiny by themselves. Blattner acknowledges my interpretation and the respective ignorance of the American interpreters.
Furthermore, in my view the design of the two Divisions of Sein und Zeit and the content of several of their sections reproduce the notion of history as decline and recovery shared by moderate and extreme Rightists at Heidegger’s time. By contrast, other than in Heidegger’s comments on the history of philosophy in §§ 6 and 44 American interpreters do not see in Sein und Zeit any theory of history, or reference to history, prior to §74. According to Dreyfus, for instance, in the sections on being-in-the-world and being-with-others Heidegger formulates Dreyfus’ theory of skillful coping and captures the constitutive need of conformity at the bottom of all human behavior, no matter where and when, by the concept of Abständigkeit (distantiality) in §27. As I have shown in 2003, Dreyfus’ interpretation of Abständigkeit is just simply for philological reasons wrong, and Heidegger means by Abständigkeit (or, by its modern, its fallen mode) competition in modern capitalism. Blattner acknowledges the first part of my interpretation, and works hard to develop an interpretation of the They that avoids, or waters down, the second one. See Johannes Fritsche, “Die Unhintergehbarkeit der Kantischen Urteilstafel. Ein Beitrag zur Dreyfus-McDowell-Debatte mit Rücksicht auf Adorno, Benjamin und Heidegger“ (Aufklärung & Kritik 26[3] [2019], 47-68) for a critique of the basic presuppositions in Dreyfus‘ theory of skillful coping; a critique that equally applies to the corresponding basic presuppositions in Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Samuel Todes, and in which I show that, according to their theories, the individual behaves more subjectivistically than, in their view, the modern subject does.
On Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ and National Socialism: Johannes Fritsche and Thomas Sheehan also contains the preliminary list of content, and drafts of some parts, of a book on which I am working, and in which I add some new points in support of my interpretation of Sein und Zeit and discuss the whole issue in the broader context of Heidegger’s philosophical development, his interpretations of the Greeks, his reception in Europe and the USA after 1945, and the hermeneutics of Heideggerians.
More than twenty years ago, at a conference on Reiner Schürmann’s posthumously published Des hégémonies brisées (Mauvezin: Trans-Europ-Repress, 1996; Engl. transl. Broken Hegemonies, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), in October 1997 at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York City, I had given a talk on the part on Plotinus in that “beast,” as he would call this book of his. In 2002, I had written an introduction to an edition of two lecture courses of Schürmann on Being and Time and on Heidegger’s Kant interpretations that Morgan Meis had planned (the former meanwhile published in Simon Critchley and Reiner Schürmann: On Heidegger’s Being and Time, London: Routledge, 2008). These two papers (which I had separately uploaded in 2018) make up the current document. The two “top-Heideggerians” in the USA that I mention at the end of the abstract of the first paper are Charles Scott and John Sallis.
In his Meditations, Descartes uses the axiom that an efficient cause gives something to that upon... more In his Meditations, Descartes uses the axiom that an efficient cause gives something to that upon which it acts, and can only give what it already has. A history of the axiom referring to Aristotle, Plotinus, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Meister Eckhart, and other Scholastics up to Francisco Suárez shows that Descartes uses the axiom of efficient causation established by Aristotle and acknowledged by Aristotelians and Platonists as well, and that he is wholly right in his defense of the axiom against Gassendi. Thus, as I show, many recent assessments of the dispute between Descartes and Gassendi are incorrect, because they are based on a misunderstanding of the axiom and its history. In addition, Descartes uses this axiom in the Meditations as a meta-framework in Michael Friedman's sense to lead his Scholastic audience from the traditional physics into his new physics. Finally, I show the career of the axiom in Kant from the pre-critical Kant to the Critique of Pure Reason.
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Drafts by Johannes Fritsche
Sheehan, other American scholars and I agree in that §74 of Sein und Zeit is the culmination of the entire book. As I show in detail in HDN and HBT, in this section destiny raises its voice, calls upon Dasein to cancel society and re-realize the past (the past community, the Volksgemeinschaft promoted by Hitler’s National Socialists), and authentic Dasein submits to the call. By contrast, as to my knowledge with the only exception of Tom Rockmore all American interpreters claim – as it were in the spirit of the American ideal of the self-made man – that an authentic Dasein produces by itself its individual fate, and that several such Dasein produce by themselves their common destiny. Some, amongst them Sheehan, maintain that authentic Dasein can freely choose out of the pool of possibilities offered by the past the one that fits its unique personality (Sheehan turns §74 more thoroughly upside down than any other American interpreter [see HBT 25, 31-38, 49, 51-55, 70-77]). Others, among them Birmingham, maintain that Dasein produce their fates and destiny by rejecting the call of destiny. (In 2019, the Heideggerian William Blattner acknowledges the ignorance of the ‘Germanic’ notion of destiny and fate amongst the American scholars [see HBT 13].) American interpreters normally misread Being and Time in these and related matters because they are ignorant of the fact that the structure and dramaturgy of the whole book Sein und Zeit mirrors the concept of history shared by extreme and moderate rightists at Heidegger’s time (see HDN, HBT), and because the English translations contain several unclear or simply false translations that suggest the self-made-man interpretation (see HDN, HBT). The English translators pervert the last and, admittedly, linguistically rather subtle passage of the narrative in §74: Heidegger makes authentic Dasein obey the call; in the English translation, however, it rejects the past’s offers. Birmingham finds an even stronger rejection than the one of the translators: “Macquarrie and Robinson’s translation of Erwidert as ‘reciprocative rejoinder’ conveys too great a sense of a return understood as identity: I reply to you in the same way that you did to me. In more militaristic terms, I return the strike in the same way that I received it. But clearly the passage above suggests something different,” namely a “disrupt[ion of any sort of] identity and continuity” between the past and the present (for the full quote, see HDN 12; on Stambaugh’s translation see HDN 335).
The idea of the self-made man seems to be deeply ingrained in many American minds; so much so that, despite my extensive treatment of the issue, even a reviewer of my book for Constellations in 2001 – a reviewer who is not a Heideggerian, who works on Heidegger’s fellow Rightists, and who regarded my book as the “best analysis of Being and Time to come along in a long time” – attributes to me Birmingham’s interpretation of erwidern in §74, a mistake after which the rest of the review could not make much sense for anyone not aware of it. I comment on this review in the text below from 2001, which Constellations did not publish. For Heideggerians, metaphysics might also, or primarily, be the epoch of the dominance of the call, the last calls being Heidegger’s calls of destiny in §74 of Sein und Zeit and in his history of Being (which Sheehan exploits in a way that is just simply most ruthless fraud, blindest wishful thinking and reading, and/or utmost incompetence, see HBT 18-23, 66-71). The first is the address of the divine craftsman in Plato’s Timaeus, in which he transforms the chaotic disorder of necessity and chōra into the most beautiful three-dimensional animated being. It is by “wise persuasion” that nous makes necessity “direct most of the things that come to be toward what is best” (Timaeus 48a2-5). Persuasion female as it is in Greek, ἡ πειθώ, is not male combat, ὁ πόλεμος. No one has ever denied this until 1999, the year in which John Sallis applied the deconstructivist procedures of isolating quotes from their contexts and ignoring philological evidence onto the Timaeus as generously as Sheehan, Birmingham, and other American scholars do so regarding Being and Time: necessity/chōra fights against nous, and it does so successfully, just like the brave soldier in the American interpretation of §74 of Being and Time. For, there is “a standing together of nous and anankē, not only in the sense of their meeting, their being joined together in a kind of union, but also in a sense involving hostility, as when two soldiers stand together face to face in battle, in close combat with one another” (John Sallis, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999], 93). The “otherness” (ibid., 95) of necessity/chōra, “its character as errant and its prospect as being like a soldier face to face in battle with nous, can hardly not provoke suspicion that nothing here will be simple or linear” (ibid., p. 95). In fact, Timaeus 47 e 3ff. “disrupts” (ibid., p. 96) the theoretical framework used up to that point (see here below, p. 4f.). When, in 2002, John Sallis and Charles Scott (unsuccessfully) tried to make Pennsylvania State University throw me out of the position that I had at that time at PSU, they committed at least one unethical deed and one criminal act for which they should have been brought to court.
In addition to these three papers, On Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ and National Socialism: Johannes Fritsche and Thomas Sheehan contains a summarizing introduction also referring to five articles from 2019 by five different authors each of whom (along with other things) implicitly or explicitly confirms, or further explicates, an aspect of my interpretation, amongst them one Heideggerian, William Blattner. Many American interpreters, amongst them Sheehan, and I agree upon that §74, the center of the chapter on historicity, is the culmination of the entire book Sein und Zeit. In my view, in this section destiny raises its voice, calls upon Dasein to cancel society and re-realize the past community, the Volksgemeinschaft, and authentic Dasein submits to the call. By contrast, as it were in the spirit of the American ideal of the self-made man, virtually all American interpreters (including Birmingham and Sheehan) claim that authentic Dasein produce their individual fates and their common destiny by themselves. Blattner acknowledges my interpretation and the respective ignorance of the American interpreters.
Furthermore, in my view the design of the two Divisions of Sein und Zeit and the content of several of their sections reproduce the notion of history as decline and recovery shared by moderate and extreme Rightists at Heidegger’s time. By contrast, other than in Heidegger’s comments on the history of philosophy in §§ 6 and 44 American interpreters do not see in Sein und Zeit any theory of history, or reference to history, prior to §74. According to Dreyfus, for instance, in the sections on being-in-the-world and being-with-others Heidegger formulates Dreyfus’ theory of skillful coping and captures the constitutive need of conformity at the bottom of all human behavior, no matter where and when, by the concept of Abständigkeit (distantiality) in §27. As I have shown in 2003, Dreyfus’ interpretation of Abständigkeit is just simply for philological reasons wrong, and Heidegger means by Abständigkeit (or, by its modern, its fallen mode) competition in modern capitalism. Blattner acknowledges the first part of my interpretation, and works hard to develop an interpretation of the They that avoids, or waters down, the second one. See Johannes Fritsche, “Die Unhintergehbarkeit der Kantischen Urteilstafel. Ein Beitrag zur Dreyfus-McDowell-Debatte mit Rücksicht auf Adorno, Benjamin und Heidegger“ (Aufklärung & Kritik 26[3] [2019], 47-68) for a critique of the basic presuppositions in Dreyfus‘ theory of skillful coping; a critique that equally applies to the corresponding basic presuppositions in Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Samuel Todes, and in which I show that, according to their theories, the individual behaves more subjectivistically than, in their view, the modern subject does.
On Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ and National Socialism: Johannes Fritsche and Thomas Sheehan also contains the preliminary list of content, and drafts of some parts, of a book on which I am working, and in which I add some new points in support of my interpretation of Sein und Zeit and discuss the whole issue in the broader context of Heidegger’s philosophical development, his interpretations of the Greeks, his reception in Europe and the USA after 1945, and the hermeneutics of Heideggerians.
More than twenty years ago, at a conference on Reiner Schürmann’s posthumously published Des hégémonies brisées (Mauvezin: Trans-Europ-Repress, 1996; Engl. transl. Broken Hegemonies, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), in October 1997 at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York City, I had given a talk on the part on Plotinus in that “beast,” as he would call this book of his. In 2002, I had written an introduction to an edition of two lecture courses of Schürmann on Being and Time and on Heidegger’s Kant interpretations that Morgan Meis had planned (the former meanwhile published in Simon Critchley and Reiner Schürmann: On Heidegger’s Being and Time, London: Routledge, 2008). These two papers (which I had separately uploaded in 2018) make up the current document. The two “top-Heideggerians” in the USA that I mention at the end of the abstract of the first paper are Charles Scott and John Sallis.
Sheehan, other American scholars and I agree in that §74 of Sein und Zeit is the culmination of the entire book. As I show in detail in HDN and HBT, in this section destiny raises its voice, calls upon Dasein to cancel society and re-realize the past (the past community, the Volksgemeinschaft promoted by Hitler’s National Socialists), and authentic Dasein submits to the call. By contrast, as to my knowledge with the only exception of Tom Rockmore all American interpreters claim – as it were in the spirit of the American ideal of the self-made man – that an authentic Dasein produces by itself its individual fate, and that several such Dasein produce by themselves their common destiny. Some, amongst them Sheehan, maintain that authentic Dasein can freely choose out of the pool of possibilities offered by the past the one that fits its unique personality (Sheehan turns §74 more thoroughly upside down than any other American interpreter [see HBT 25, 31-38, 49, 51-55, 70-77]). Others, among them Birmingham, maintain that Dasein produce their fates and destiny by rejecting the call of destiny. (In 2019, the Heideggerian William Blattner acknowledges the ignorance of the ‘Germanic’ notion of destiny and fate amongst the American scholars [see HBT 13].) American interpreters normally misread Being and Time in these and related matters because they are ignorant of the fact that the structure and dramaturgy of the whole book Sein und Zeit mirrors the concept of history shared by extreme and moderate rightists at Heidegger’s time (see HDN, HBT), and because the English translations contain several unclear or simply false translations that suggest the self-made-man interpretation (see HDN, HBT). The English translators pervert the last and, admittedly, linguistically rather subtle passage of the narrative in §74: Heidegger makes authentic Dasein obey the call; in the English translation, however, it rejects the past’s offers. Birmingham finds an even stronger rejection than the one of the translators: “Macquarrie and Robinson’s translation of Erwidert as ‘reciprocative rejoinder’ conveys too great a sense of a return understood as identity: I reply to you in the same way that you did to me. In more militaristic terms, I return the strike in the same way that I received it. But clearly the passage above suggests something different,” namely a “disrupt[ion of any sort of] identity and continuity” between the past and the present (for the full quote, see HDN 12; on Stambaugh’s translation see HDN 335).
The idea of the self-made man seems to be deeply ingrained in many American minds; so much so that, despite my extensive treatment of the issue, even a reviewer of my book for Constellations in 2001 – a reviewer who is not a Heideggerian, who works on Heidegger’s fellow Rightists, and who regarded my book as the “best analysis of Being and Time to come along in a long time” – attributes to me Birmingham’s interpretation of erwidern in §74, a mistake after which the rest of the review could not make much sense for anyone not aware of it. I comment on this review in the text below from 2001, which Constellations did not publish. For Heideggerians, metaphysics might also, or primarily, be the epoch of the dominance of the call, the last calls being Heidegger’s calls of destiny in §74 of Sein und Zeit and in his history of Being (which Sheehan exploits in a way that is just simply most ruthless fraud, blindest wishful thinking and reading, and/or utmost incompetence, see HBT 18-23, 66-71). The first is the address of the divine craftsman in Plato’s Timaeus, in which he transforms the chaotic disorder of necessity and chōra into the most beautiful three-dimensional animated being. It is by “wise persuasion” that nous makes necessity “direct most of the things that come to be toward what is best” (Timaeus 48a2-5). Persuasion female as it is in Greek, ἡ πειθώ, is not male combat, ὁ πόλεμος. No one has ever denied this until 1999, the year in which John Sallis applied the deconstructivist procedures of isolating quotes from their contexts and ignoring philological evidence onto the Timaeus as generously as Sheehan, Birmingham, and other American scholars do so regarding Being and Time: necessity/chōra fights against nous, and it does so successfully, just like the brave soldier in the American interpretation of §74 of Being and Time. For, there is “a standing together of nous and anankē, not only in the sense of their meeting, their being joined together in a kind of union, but also in a sense involving hostility, as when two soldiers stand together face to face in battle, in close combat with one another” (John Sallis, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999], 93). The “otherness” (ibid., 95) of necessity/chōra, “its character as errant and its prospect as being like a soldier face to face in battle with nous, can hardly not provoke suspicion that nothing here will be simple or linear” (ibid., p. 95). In fact, Timaeus 47 e 3ff. “disrupts” (ibid., p. 96) the theoretical framework used up to that point (see here below, p. 4f.). When, in 2002, John Sallis and Charles Scott (unsuccessfully) tried to make Pennsylvania State University throw me out of the position that I had at that time at PSU, they committed at least one unethical deed and one criminal act for which they should have been brought to court.
In addition to these three papers, On Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ and National Socialism: Johannes Fritsche and Thomas Sheehan contains a summarizing introduction also referring to five articles from 2019 by five different authors each of whom (along with other things) implicitly or explicitly confirms, or further explicates, an aspect of my interpretation, amongst them one Heideggerian, William Blattner. Many American interpreters, amongst them Sheehan, and I agree upon that §74, the center of the chapter on historicity, is the culmination of the entire book Sein und Zeit. In my view, in this section destiny raises its voice, calls upon Dasein to cancel society and re-realize the past community, the Volksgemeinschaft, and authentic Dasein submits to the call. By contrast, as it were in the spirit of the American ideal of the self-made man, virtually all American interpreters (including Birmingham and Sheehan) claim that authentic Dasein produce their individual fates and their common destiny by themselves. Blattner acknowledges my interpretation and the respective ignorance of the American interpreters.
Furthermore, in my view the design of the two Divisions of Sein und Zeit and the content of several of their sections reproduce the notion of history as decline and recovery shared by moderate and extreme Rightists at Heidegger’s time. By contrast, other than in Heidegger’s comments on the history of philosophy in §§ 6 and 44 American interpreters do not see in Sein und Zeit any theory of history, or reference to history, prior to §74. According to Dreyfus, for instance, in the sections on being-in-the-world and being-with-others Heidegger formulates Dreyfus’ theory of skillful coping and captures the constitutive need of conformity at the bottom of all human behavior, no matter where and when, by the concept of Abständigkeit (distantiality) in §27. As I have shown in 2003, Dreyfus’ interpretation of Abständigkeit is just simply for philological reasons wrong, and Heidegger means by Abständigkeit (or, by its modern, its fallen mode) competition in modern capitalism. Blattner acknowledges the first part of my interpretation, and works hard to develop an interpretation of the They that avoids, or waters down, the second one. See Johannes Fritsche, “Die Unhintergehbarkeit der Kantischen Urteilstafel. Ein Beitrag zur Dreyfus-McDowell-Debatte mit Rücksicht auf Adorno, Benjamin und Heidegger“ (Aufklärung & Kritik 26[3] [2019], 47-68) for a critique of the basic presuppositions in Dreyfus‘ theory of skillful coping; a critique that equally applies to the corresponding basic presuppositions in Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Samuel Todes, and in which I show that, according to their theories, the individual behaves more subjectivistically than, in their view, the modern subject does.
On Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ and National Socialism: Johannes Fritsche and Thomas Sheehan also contains the preliminary list of content, and drafts of some parts, of a book on which I am working, and in which I add some new points in support of my interpretation of Sein und Zeit and discuss the whole issue in the broader context of Heidegger’s philosophical development, his interpretations of the Greeks, his reception in Europe and the USA after 1945, and the hermeneutics of Heideggerians.
More than twenty years ago, at a conference on Reiner Schürmann’s posthumously published Des hégémonies brisées (Mauvezin: Trans-Europ-Repress, 1996; Engl. transl. Broken Hegemonies, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), in October 1997 at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York City, I had given a talk on the part on Plotinus in that “beast,” as he would call this book of his. In 2002, I had written an introduction to an edition of two lecture courses of Schürmann on Being and Time and on Heidegger’s Kant interpretations that Morgan Meis had planned (the former meanwhile published in Simon Critchley and Reiner Schürmann: On Heidegger’s Being and Time, London: Routledge, 2008). These two papers (which I had separately uploaded in 2018) make up the current document. The two “top-Heideggerians” in the USA that I mention at the end of the abstract of the first paper are Charles Scott and John Sallis.