Addendum: The Unbearable Strangeness Of Being

Dwelling With Martin

My first exposure to Heidegger was through William Barrett's Irrational Man, a book I read when I was about 15 years old.

In my teens, I was a voracious reader of Existential philosophy. I suspect it was ordinary teen-age angst that drew me to such literature, plus the ennui born of growing up in an affluent white suburb of what Kierkegaard would have called a "market town" in the mid-1970's.

Martin both gripped and repelled me at the same time--though, until recently, the repulsion has typically outweighed the attraction.

I cannot count how many times over the last four decades I have picked up Heidegger only to put him down again for what I was sure would be the last time. But it was never the last time--nor will it be, so long as I have the strength to cast my eye upon a page.

Unlike Wittgenstein (a thinker with whom I fell in love almost immediately upon reading him and who remains one of my guiding intellectual lights), Heidegger refused to disown the philosophical heritage of Western Europe. Instead, he attempted to reinterpret it and, in effect, to re-write it--a Quixotic project that resulted in the production of volumes of tortured prose and twisted politics.

If that weren't bad enough, self-styled Heideggerians have always impressed me as High Priests of The Obscure; as a consequence, I have never harbored any desire to learn their secret handshake.

In 1989, however, Richard Rorty published Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity--a book that took Heidegger seriously and without sycophancy. He valued Heidegger's intellectual project and incorporated aspects of it into his own. This impressed me immensely, but did not convince me to lower my guard. Then, in 1991, George Steiner published a monograph on Heidegger. Steiner is not a professional philosopher and yet he, too, values Heidegger's work, finding it useful in his reading of literature. He is also a first rate intellectual, gentleman, and superb prose stylist for whom I have boundless admiration.

Rorty and Steiner supported my interest in Heidegger and encouraged me to continue to read him despite my misgivings. These would continue, however, through the 1990's into the 2000's. Even as late as 2007, when I was writing a PhD dissertation on hermeneutics, I was tough on Heidegger, and remained suspicious of him. It has only been in the last five years or so that I have finally made my peace with Martin, accepting him for the deeply flawed and yet remarkably visionary thinker that he was.

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Genius Is No Guarantee Against Bigotry

As for the now infamous "black notebooks," we should be no more surprised that Martin Heidegger tried to couch his anti-Semitism in his new language of "being" than that Thomas Jefferson couched his racism in the language of Enlightenment era "science" of race.

Genius is absolutely no guarantee against bigotry. If it were, we should adopt Plato's political schema in The Republic forthwith and never look back.

Heidegger was a man and, as a man, must be permitted his personal opinions and politics. His readers, likewise, are entitled to find his opinions and politics unforgivably reprehensible. We are under no obligation to adopt them ourselves and anyone who would suggest otherwise is a mere sycophant and a fool.

End of story.

Translation

"Every translation is an interpretation, and, despite the lack of coincidence between languages, translation can bring to light contexts that lie fallow in both languages. Herein lies the import of genuine translation. Beyond merely transporting us into another language with the help of our own, it is 'an awakening, clarifying, unfolding of one's own language through the help of the encounter with the foreign language.' Moreover, every interpretation, even within the same language, is a translation. Indeed, the translation within the same language is in fact harder, given our tendency to think we understand our own language without further ado."

--Daniel O. Dahlstrom, The Heidegger Dictionary, 223.

Heraklitus By His Stove

In his "Letter on Humanism," Martin Heidegger cited (from Aristotle) the story of Heraklitus encountered by tourists while warming his hands by his stove. "In this altogether everyday place," Heidegger comments, "he betrays the whole poverty of his life." The tourists, expecting to see a Thinker, are taken aback. Heraklitus, however, invites them in to his abode (Dar ul-Fikr), "for here, too, the gods are present."

Where To Begin With Mevlana?

Coleman Barks's The Essential Rumi (new expanded edition, 2004) is a great place to start. Having studied for many years with the late Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, Barks displays uncommon insight into Mevlana. He also works with the Persianist John Moyne to try to do justice to the original. What one does not get from Barks, however, is any sense of Mevlana's own ordering of his poetic corpus. Reynold Nicholson's multi-volume translation and commentary of the Mesnavi preserves the order of that great poem and also makes it obvious that Rumi threads his lines with Qur'an and ahadith (less obvious in Barks's renderings). But Nicholson suffered from the anxieties about Islam that afflicted so many Orientalists (he could not permit himself to fall in love with the Mesnavi--known traditionally as "the Qur'an in Persian"--and it shows in his renderings and comments). Why so many academics feel that they are obligated to reinscribe sectarian and cultural boundaries--to be "gatekeepers for the West" (or wherever)--is truly mystifying to me. There can be no academic freedom (what my mentor in Qur'anic studies Nasr Abu Zayd called the "scholar's license") where academics themselves fail or refuse to exercise it.



Only those who, like Norman O. Brown, break the bonds of ethnocentrism arrive at the Heideggerian "clearing"; those who do so abide there, as he did, with "the unravished bride of quietness." (Love's Body).

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Letter To Posterity

Among the many subjects which interested me, I dwelt especially upon antiquity, for our own age has always repelled me, so that, had it not been for the love of those dear to me, I should have preferred to have been born in any other period than our own. In order to forget my own time I have constantly striven to place myself in spirit in other ages, and consequently I delighted in history.

--Petrarch

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