“The Question Of Ethics” in “The Question of Ethics”
The division between ethos and ecstasis constitutes a major problem for Heidegger’s rectorial address of 1933. In the address he attempts to apply his interpretation of human existence and the loss of the question of being to the formation of the German university in the context of the new and, for many at that time, exhilarating political changes taking place under German National Socialist rule. Because it is an ethical writing, the address has a singular importance of Heidegger’s relation to the question of ethics. We shall work on it by paragraphs, indicating at the beginning of our own paragraphs which paragraph in Heidegger’s text we are reading. We will also examine both the relation of this work to those that we considered in Chapter 4 and the role, or absence, of the question of ethics in it.
The title of the address, “Die Selbstbehauptung der Deutschen Universität,” can be translated “The Self-Assertion,” “The Self-Maintenance,” “The Self-Affirmation,” or, in this context, “The Self-Governance of the German University.” According to his 1945 reflections on the address, Heidegger had in mind the importance of the word Haupt ‘head’ in the word Behauptung.1 He contrasts, for example, what he means by Selbstbehauptung with self-decapitation.2 How the university is ‘headed’ is a preoccupation of the address. The role of the Rector is noted at the beginning in the context of essence, and not primarily from a practical, institutional point of view. The Wesen or ‘essence’ of the German university heads it, provides the continuing reference for its direction and struggle. The Rector is to follow the university’s Wesen in molding the institution. The word Selbstbehauptung thus raises the question of how the university is to head itself with regard to both internal institutional structures and outside political pressures. It indicates that the political, social, and cultural functions of the university are to be delimited by the essence of the German university. But the essence is also to guide the Rector in his leadership of the university. In addition to an ecstasis that breaks into and radically conditions a people’s history, we find a function of heading the German university given to essence. It is to imprint, form, lead, and delimit the institution. It is to provide direction for a determined institutional identity. Heidegger has before him the task of both speaking in the “Aufbruch” of essence and of speaking out of his rectorial chair. How will the essence of the German university head Heidegger’s language? Will it lead him to put in question his own relation to it? Will it have the effect of casting doubt on his determined program for the university? Or will it confirm his rectorial authority and provide in addition an authority for his language that confirms the right of his intentions for the German people?
(1) The Rector is to be led in his intellectual leadership of the university by the unremitting task of spirited [geistige] mentation, a task that is defined and constrained by the imprint [Gepräge] of the history of the German people.3 The dispensation, destiny, and fortune [Schicksal] of the German people is to be found in the constraint of this imprint. Likewise, the fortune and flourishing of teachers and students alike come to pass by rootage in the essence of the German university, and this essence finds specific authority, clarity, and power when the Rector and other authorities lead by following the obligations imposed on them by the history of the German people. The entree to the issue of the university’s self-maintenance and self-affirmation is the authority of the Rector’s office and the definition of that authority by reference to the history of the German people. Essence at this early point in the address appears to refer to the history of a people. It is an ontic or regional essence, one that appears to have played too small a role heretofore in the development of the German university. Heidegger’s initial appeal does not lead us to expect an invocation of being, ontological difference, ecstasis, or truth. We look rather to the conformity of an institution to a history. This history has only the relative transcendence of a history vis-à-vis a present aspect of it. But we are initially unsure of the significance of this transcendence. It suggests ethnic self-conformity and can be given authority, clarity, and power. It can be established. Will it also address the question of being and truth?
Heidegger begins his address, as he so often begins his treatises, with an appeal to strictness, exactness, and unbending criteria for discipline. The personal convictions and values of the university’s administrators are secondary to the essence of the university. The Rector, for example, is to attend to this essence, follow it, and bring it to expression in the form and content of his administration. His office is to describe the essence in the sense that the office gives the contours and direction of the institution by reference to the contour and direction of the essence. The question before us is whether this beginning will lead to a process of destructuring that will put in question the ontic and almost technological emphasis on criteria, their fulfillment, and strictness of approach.
(2) The first question raised by Heidegger is whether the teaching staff and the student body are truly and mutually rooted in the essence of the German university. By using Hohen Schule, which can be read in this context as either a school of higher learning or a school that is high in the sense of elevated or lofty, Heidegger suggests that the essence of the German university elevates its participants and sets them apart from the rest of society. The university has a mandate in its essence which may or may not be known, but which in any case must set the agenda for the university, must imprint, by inspiring the staff and students. Even if they do not understand the university’s essence, they must make it the focus of their will. We may assume at this point that something is to be overcome and something is to move with force toward an essencecentered university. It can imprint—not just form or suggest directions for, but powerfully stamp—the university only if faculty and staff will “this essence fundamentally” [von Grund aus]. Heidegger asks, who can doubt this mediational relation of will to essence? Intensity of will is essential for the operative establishment of the German university’s essence. It must mold our existence, our dasein, in a determined way. But first we must see that the university’s self-government is grounded commonly and primarily not in a legislated independence from other authorities but in its essence, and the task of university people is to adhere to this essence through the Rector’s leadership even if they cannot say what that essence is. We note Heidegger’s reach to his hearers—this man alone at the podium—in the name of commonality. He indicates a sense of commonality, that will be hard to find, one that apparently is shared in German civilization, but that can be retrieved only by strenuous exertion of will. On the one hand, the faculty and students must mold their passion to essence. On the other hand, essence must be approachable by powerful, willful exertion.
Heidegger’s emphasis at this point has a double edge. It eliminates a liberal democratic interpretation of the university’s independence, on the one hand, and, on the other, claims authority for the university by appeal to its essence, not to a state authority. The autonomy [Selb-stverwaltung] of the university is not to be founded in its constituted identity or in the state government, but in an essence, yet to be described, that is found in the history of the German people. Its mission is said to be higher and other than that prescribed for it by any office or governmental body. In principle, all acts regarding the university are to be taken as subject to appeal to the university’s essence, not to a party, ideology, or state government.
(3) The university’s autonomy means that the body of teachers and students can set their own duties and procedures and can determine how to bring to realization the task that they find before them. But the Selbst ‘self’ of Selbstverwaltung ‘autonomy’ is a question. Heidegger himself is unclear about the identity of the university’s constituents as a body, and he doubts that there is an adequate understanding of this identity in the university as a whole or on the part of its individuals. He can hardly know what their autonomy means without continuous and unsparing attention to the question of who they are as the constituted body of the university. Their ability [Können] to know themselves and to be properly autonomous depends on their attentiveness [Besinnung]. They must retrieve themselves from the uncritical habitual assumptions that govern them if they are to find the meaning of autonomy; that is, the essence is to occasion, in a way still to be specified, the autonomous individuality of university citizens.
This early move of destructuring the sense of identity that pervades the university community, a move that puts in question the meaning of autonomy, is an opening move on Heidegger’s part to initiate a struggle by which the being of the German faculty and student body can come into the open and by which the unknown essence of the German university can become manifest. It is a move toward interpreting the Haupt, which is the essence of the German university, and it makes questionable the function of the Rector as much as it makes questionable the identity of the German university. Rather than an assertion of rights and privileges, Selbstbesinnung—self-attentiveness, self-reflection, and self-recollection—names the activity that opens the academy to itself. This attentiveness is prefaced by uncertainty and unclarity, the acceptance of which makes possible initial steps toward the openness that Heidegger says is necessary for a proper exposure of truth. In this case he is addressing the ontic truth of the university’s being. The elevation of the university can come to sight by means of this Selbstbesinnung. The affiliation of Selbstbesinnung and elevation of the educational enterprise will continue to play a major role in the address. I find an incongruence between the spiritedness of the imagery of elevation and the inward, deepening overtones of the Besinnung. The inflaming, rising, and consuming dimension of Western spirit and spirituality about which Derrida has written eloquently, the rising movement that leaves behind the ashes of its consumption, is not fully in accord with that meditative attentiveness that lets something come out in its disclosiveness and in the full flavor of its difference and distinctness.4 But Heidegger clearly does not find such an incongruence in this address and links closely spirited mentation and attentiveness to self and history. Between these two kinds of movements a new university is to rise, rooted in the history of the German people which has been disastrously misappropriated.
(4) Knowledge of the contemporary situation of the university thus does not constitute an adequate basis for the required self-attentiveness. Nor can the academics count on acquaintance with the received histories. Something more is needed to care for and give refuge to the essence in question. They must first delimit this essence, find the region of its future coming [die Zukunft umgrenzen]. In this effort they will it. They do not make it an object of desire or pinpoint it as something just outside of their present reach. They exert themselves and constitute themselves in self-delimitation [Selbstbegrenzung] as they find the region of the essence’s coming: this is their activity of willing, and this is their effort to find their ‘head’ to which the Rector and the university community are subservient. Their single-minded search and self-delimitation constitute their self-assertion, their governing themselves in the light of the essence they know they do not know. The destructuring move on Heidegger’s part is thus advanced a step. He is showing that the German university must maintain itself in the question of its essence and thereby hold in question the received knowledge of what the German university is.
(5) The first four paragraphs thus establish that the assertion of the German university is found in maintaining the question of the essence of the German university. The proper autonomy of its faculty and students occurs in retrieving the essence that is lost to view. The university takes charge of itself—heads itself—and finds its future in this activity. It finds its ‘head’ by the discipline of holding itself in question, by knowing that its essence is not manifest in its current self-understanding or institutional identity. We are not led to believe that the essence is something to be known at the end of a search. The essence, rather, appears to take place as the university community holds itself in question in Selbstbesinnung, in attentiveness to itself, recollection of itself, and self-reflection. The attentiveness that Heidegger emphasizes appears to occasion displacement of the university’s identity vis-à-vis an essence different from the identity in which the university holds itself. “Autonomy comes to stand only on the ground of self-attentiveness,” and this attentiveness can turn the university to its essence when the university heads itself. Heidegger is invoking both a mentation that he finds rare in the university and a culture’s history that can return the academy to its originary mission. At this point we can say that the essence does not constitute the university’s identity. Its identity is constituted by searching for and returning to its essence. The question is whether and how the university will assert and find itself.
(6) The will to the essence of the German university is closely affiliated with the will to disciplined knowledge [Wissenschaft]. In Selbstbesinnung the mission of the German people and the self-affirmation of the university come together under the heading of the essence of the university. The disciplined knowledge of the university’s faculties educates and cultivates “the leaders and guardians of the fortune of the German people.” Hence, the future leaders and guardians are followers of the knowledge and culture that the university maintains, advances, and teaches. The German people knows itself in its state, Heidegger says, so the education of the leaders of the state in Germany’s universities brings together the people’s self-understanding, disciplined knowledge, the future and destiny of the German people, and the will to the essence of the German university. The university community must combine its disciplines with the university’s essence and stand firm with German destiny “in its most extreme need.”
Whatever this need might be, it will be addressed by the elusive essence of the university and the disciplines, at least three of which—history, sociology, and political science—have indirectly been called into question in the preceding paragraphs. The disciplines must be formed and presumably transformed by this essence. Already the essence of the German university, for which we have as yet no name or definitive interpretation, is heading up the organization of Heidegger’s address. We can imagine at this point in the lecture that both university disciplines and the fortune of the German people are, on Heidegger’s terms, being addressed—headed—by the form and movement of his remarks. The turn to essence is being made. Heidegger is also laying the groundwork whereby the German university provides a unifying force for all national culture and for the evaluation of good and ill fortune in the state. The German university is to be the leader of German culture when it is organized in self-attentiveness by its historical essence. The turn to essence is to unify national culture.
(7, 8) The newly developed and up-to-date disciplines, or their critique, will not help with Heidegger’s question about the essence of the university and the disciplines. They function with virtually no careful contact with their history nor with critical evaluations of the assumptions that pervade them. They lack the range of reference and the persistence of self-criticism to put us in touch with the question of essence, even when we engage these disciplines critically. No Selbstbesinnung there. Given the drift of the disciplines toward mere superficiality—a motley cacophony of academic talk without substance—his hearers must decide whether to allow this disciplinary drift and the rapid demise of discipline in any serious sense of the word. Heidegger leaves hanging the question of how to attempt to restore traditional disciplinary knowledge to serious knowledge and thought and turns to the question of what the necessary conditions are for the disciplines to exist and be “for us and through us,” that is, what the disciplines would become if they were developed in Selbstbesinnung with attention to the essence of the German university. The us seems to refer to those who are now engaged in the de-struction and questioning that clears the way for the appearance of the essence of the German university, to those who in the process of this address constitute the assertion of the German university.
(9) The necessary move, if Heidegger’s colleagues are genuinely to find themselves in their state, is to return to the beginning of their heritage, to the time of departure that brings them to the situation of their intellectual and mental existence [Dasein]. In Greek philosophy the West experienced its awakening in its interrupting departure from the national and cultural characteristics that had held intellection in provincial bondage. This is a move on Heidegger’s part that will play a significant role in the remainder of his address and in our understanding of it. Greek philosophy rises above the Greek Volkstum, that is, above the Greek national, ontic, and ethnic character. The move beyond its ethnic character is important in the context of Heidegger’s claims: he is arguing that the German university should not be restrained or defined by its present cultural situation. His move here is analogous to that in Being and Time in which he shows that proper selfhood must be formed by reference to its interrupting being, not to itself. The German university must rise up to its essence, beyond the hold of current opinion and knowledge. This move to the Aufbruch of essence is an ontic ecstasis that occurs solely within the historical dispensation of the Greek-German heritage. On the other hand, Heidegger is arguing that the German university, by virtue of this ontic ecstasis, should mold and form the German state. That claim, as we shall see, is an ethical one, and our question is whether it falls into question in this address. At this point Heidegger directs his hearers to the Greek heritage of the German people and indicates that the Greek philosophical move beyond the Volkstum is a decisive and continuing aspect of their German heritage. This is a movement in the Greek language, one that we can expect to indwell the German language, and one that the mission of the German university is to bring to prominence in its institution and its knowledge. Greek philosophy breaks free of the bonds of its popular situation by questioning and conceiving the totality of beings according to its being. This is the revolutionary inauguration of thought that is not under the sway of things in their unquestioned significance and thoughtless impact on the lives of the people. Heidegger’s questioning the essence of the German university is in the direct lineage of this ecstasis, while the present state of German disciplinary knowledge is in the lineage of popular domination by unquestioned, inchoate beliefs and preconceptions. So he must persuade his hearers that what they believe in their commonality actually is separate from their common essence and that the essence that is foreign to them gives them a commonality that now is strange to them. He is very much alone at the podium. But disciplinary knowledge is also structured by the heritage of philosophy: Heidegger, in fact, says that all disciplinary knowledge is philosophy and is bound to its commencement, from which disciplinary knowledge draws the vigor of its essence as long as it grows and develops in the opening that marks its philosophical beginning. The power [Macht] of this beginning, which we already know is brought to bear in essential Selbstbesinnung and which is to imprint the entire German culture, can be reinstated in the culture and intelligence of the German people, but only at the cost of breaking inherited bonds and transforming what occurs in the process of coming to know the world. The clear implication is that a transformation of language [Sprache] must take place as a condition of this inheritance and that such a transformation will have revolutionary consequences for the university disciplines.
(10-13) The Greek experience of breaking the hold of everyday knowledge and belief gives knowledge an essence and bearing that originated in the West. A continuing and leading departure from the everyday is a characteristic that German scholars and thinkers can regain for their dasein. Regain in this context means a transformation of people’s existence by reappropriating an originary aspect that indwells their language and tradition but is lost to the knowledges that characterize German culture. Heidegger’s emphasis on the intrinsic relation of dasein and knowledge is pronounced as he turns to the Greek heritage in German language and thought. To “win back” the Greek essence of disciplined knowledge is to redress the German way of being.
Aeschylus’s Prometheus says that “‘knowing, however, is far weaker than necessity.’ This is to say: All knowing about things remains previously delivered over to the overpowering destiny and fails before it.” Heidegger translates techne as knowledge [Wissen] and anticipates the claims that knowing, disciplinary knowledge, and philosophy are all characterized by departure from essence and that they are not themselves essential or wesentlich. The weakness of knowing, we shall find, is its ‘distance’ from the revealing and concealing of being, a distance that is in part measured by its defiance. The further implication of translating techne by Wissen is that as knowledge finds its mission and telos in essence, its productions disclose essence, although they do not constitute a thought of essence. The essence of the German university then delimits knowledge, and knowledge gives expression to this delimitation. Within this delimitation disciplinary knowledge recognizes its subservience to a surging event that makes knowledge as we know it possible. Such knowledge allows a confrontation of its present state—dominated, we may surmise, by technology and subjectivity as well as by a complacent forgetfulness of everything essential—with essence that is traced in but overlooked for most of its history. Knowledge is thus derived from a destiny-giving dispensation, from a Wesen, that is not to be circumscribed by knowledge, but which may come in the German university to its own disclosure by the attention of disciplinary knowledge to its questionableness and origin. Knowing can be a techne that knows how to bring itself to its essence and how to imprint both the process of willing the essence and the meaning of the process on German life. But as techne it will not be the thought of being. In this sense, Heidegger intends his address to constitute a process of knowing in the sense of techne. Only if it disrupts itself before the disclosure of Wesen—only if it puts itself in question—will this address escape the bonds of the technological age that circumscribes it and its values and makes possible a way of thinking that is not knowledge.
In order to fail properly, knowledge must develop “its most extreme resistance,” for only then does “the full power [Macht] of hiddenness rise up.” The discipline of knowledge taken by itself exists in spite of destiny. People attempt to counteract the implacable flow of events; that is, they interrupt the flow by the intervention of knowing and appear to challenge the unmitigable process of destiny by the power of their knowing. As knowledge becomes more disciplined and thorough, the concealing of things, their imperceptibility and withdrawal from the grasp of knowledge, is all the more unavoidable. Knowing genuinely fails before the “unfathomable unalterability of beings.” In the language of Being and Time we could say that this failure is proper to knowledge. In this failure beings are opened up in their unfathomable unalterability. They are disclosed to knowing in their dimension of unknowability and hiddenness. The defiance of knowing fails in its own intractability and finds, by owning its failure, its truth—the openness of beings in their concealment. In contrast to everyday knowledge and certainty, this knowledge finds its essence as its defiant will against destiny collapses before the unrelenting concealment of the beings that it knows, and in this process the originary Greek experience again emerges.
We readily see that knowing, by virtue of its effort to overcome the world’s, and particularly human, destiny, is predisposed to rely on itself, to separate itself from the force of inevitability, and to forget its own destiny, that is, to forget its inescapable impotence. In that case, knowledge would play a blind role in the concealment of beings, oblivious to its own fate of concealing and revealing. Knowing then would not be able to speak of its destiny in its destiny, but would conceal the concealment of beings in its language and thought. It would be a mere technology instead of a techne, that in its resistance to destiny and the everyday comes up against its limits and finds that disclosedness that both defines its destiny and offers it its fortune.5 Far from understanding theoria as distant and pure observation and reflection that enacts itself for its own sake, the Greeks experienced in theoretical activity a passionate closeness to beings in their travail. They struggled to conceive and to carry out a way of thinking that, in its troubled closeness with beings, is always like a question and is the highest measure of energeia. Theoria is the highest and most genuine praxis. For the purposes of Heidegger’s address, the primary point is that thinking and disciplined knowledge are not just cultural values for the Greeks, but are “the innermost invoking center of the entire national-political dasein.” They constitute a power that encompasses dasein and keeps it well focused, because the Greeks know and think with regard to the failure of knowledge before destiny. Heidegger is giving emphasis to an involvement with beings that continuously (that is, originarily) experiences the rift of beings vis-à-vis the stubborn certainty whereby people establish the semblance of their own destinies in their communal and social lives. He is further showing that the center of German culture is not only, at its best, a highly disciplined knowing, but one that knows itself to be without power before its disclosing and concealing destiny. Whether this “impotence” shapes the cultural power of knowledge in Heidegger’s address is a question we shall hold in mind.
To be well focused, dasein is thus in its passion to be held close to beings in their perplexing, troubled, and fateful concealment. People attach, as it were, to their destiny when the limits of their knowing are appropriated in the impact of the concealment of beings. Their “defiance” of destiny, when properly centered, allows the disclosure of immeasurable destiny that will not be captured in the language of disciplined knowledge. In this context a people’s self-determination is put in question by the indeterminate reach of beings in their concealment. A considerable rift occurs in the cultural fabric, a break from the certainties of organized, institutionalized, ritualized ways of living, and when this rift is appropriated in trained and careful knowledge, such knowledge ‘centers’ and focuses human being. A ‘decentering center’ heads up genuine knowledge and reveals the indeterminate, nonteleological destiny of a people. “Disciplined knowledge,” Heidegger says by way of summary, “is the questioning resistance [to destiny] in the midst of the ever self-concealing totality of beings. This negotiating perseverance knows as it preserves and negotiates its impotence before destiny.” This impotence focuses and disciplines the power of knowing as the power of knowing forms and leads people in the entirety of their culture. One could expect at this point a severe critique of German political culture, and why such a critique is not forthcoming focuses our own questions about Heidegger’s address. Does he replace the impotence of his disciplined knowledge with a power of cultural formation that, true to his ethnic tradition, is unquestioningly exuberant in its sense of essence and destiny?
(14-16) Heidegger uses a virtually marching cadence as he speaks of the beginning of the essence of disciplined knowledge and its “irruption” in the future. His language throughout this rectorial address appeals to power and often has a strident, elevated, and spirited quality in spite of its theme that the essence of academic knowledge and of the academy’s leadership is beyond the power and skill of academics and politicians alike. As he makes the transition to discuss the situation of the disciplines, he notes the roles of Christian theological interpretation and mathematical-technical thought in distancing the beginning of the essence of disciplinary knowledge. He underscores the nonnarrative character of this beginning—its coming to the Germans from the future—and names the beginning “the greatest,” which cannot be overcome by the perversions that have let it lapse into obscurity as they have given it expression. Only if the German academics join themselves in a fitting way—release themselves—to this beginning, with its fateful decree for knowledge, will knowledge become the innermost necessity of their dasein. Their situation, their being, and its structure of necessity will join appropriately to disciplinary inquiry and its Greek-pronounced destiny in a future that reinherits a lost fortune. So if they are to be fitting to the originary enunciation of their beginning, the disciplines must both be appropriate to their essence and become fundamental for the intellectual and political occurrence of German existence [Dasein]. The greatness that Heidegger celebrates gives hope for overturning technological predominance and democratic slackness of discipline. A new beginning for German culture is under way.
Heidegger’s play in the last two paragraphs on fügen—fit together, join, unite, dispose, decree, accommodate to, be fitted, suited or proper—and Verfögung—decree, disposition, enactment, arrangement—indicates that the German intellectuals are to arrange their way of being in a way fitting to the beginning of the essence of their disciplines, which has bestowed on those disciplines, as though by decree, a disposition ordered by it.
The italicized words mark this play. The further implication in the context of the rectorial address is that the German university is to carry out the ‘decree’ of the beginning of the essence of disciplined knowledge in the organization of its disciplines, knowledges, and education. But such organization is founded in the rupture of the ordinary orders of life by the question of the being of beings. Hence, Heidegger says that the fitting connections to the beginning are to be found in disciplined self-attentiveness, fundamental questions, developed uncertainties, severe self-critique, the maintenance of the question of being, and that way of thought that eventuates in these endeavors—all of which disrupts what we ordinarily consider traditional knowledge and proper institutionalization.
(17) If it is true that ours is a heritage in which we are without ballast and are bereft in the midst of things, if that is our situation of extreme need, if it is true that in our usual search for knowledge the very essence of knowledge is lost, a claim that is analogous to Nietzsche’s discovery in his search for God that God is dead, and if it is true that our very own and most proper [eigenstes] dasein confronts a great metamorphosis, then what is the situation of disciplinary knowledge? The modern situation is quite other than it would be if dasein’s most proper being were welcomed in our disciplines.6
(18) Since we are in no position to know what is, having lost the language and manner of thought necessary to this knowledge, having lost even the passion proper to the endeavor, we are relegated to cultivating questions. “Questioning becomes the highest form of knowing.” The purpose of the questioning is heralded in the Greek persistence in holding out without reserve and with wonder before the way things are. But we find ourselves now, given the change of fortune in our heritage, vulnerably exposed to the hidden and uncertain, that is, to the questionable. Questioning is the highest configuration of knowing. It “unfolds its most proper strength in unlocking what is essential in all things.” It leads to utter simplicity regarding what is inevitable and, in the context of this address, regarding what is specifically inevitable in the heritage of Germany. The interruption of ordinary life in Greek culture now interrupts German culture, and properly so, given the heritage-forming impact of this interruption. It calls for questioning in the absence of language and thought appropriate to both the being of things and the ecstasis that the being of things occasions for thought. It calls for a simplicity of focus that is not imaginable within the current state of committed scholarship. The lost transformation of the question of being recoils on itself and becomes transformation of certain knowledge into a discipline of questioning. Ironically, this discipline is to lead the German university in its self-assertion.
(19) Heidegger emphasizes the power of questioning to interrupt the common certainties, which are divided in the academy into distinct, segregated bodies of knowledge, and to initiate a unifying force among these disciplines. This combination of interruption and unification controls a major strand of thought in the remainder of the address. His language becomes more strident and willful as he condemns the encapsulation of disciplinary knowledge and as he insists on a way to bring unity to them by the discipline of questioning. On the one hand, he shows that the distribution of knowledges is uncentered and lacks a unifying essence. On the other, the interruptive essence of knowledge will radically disturb the divisions of knowledges and bring them to a focused and centralizing power.
When we hold in mind that the essence of the disciplines is indeterminate and thoroughly questionable, that it breaks certainty and unsettles working assumptions from the ground up, that it is not yet thinkable or knowable, and that it is defined by an essential impotence of disciplined knowledge, the confidence of Heidegger’s own assertions appear all the more questionable. What accounts for this counterflow, this clash of assertion and unassertability? He wants to transform the German university and German culture. He wants to imprint the essence of the German university by a far-reaching metamorphosis of learning and teaching. His address constitutes a pressing insistence on heading the German university by a leadership that adheres to the call of the obscured essence. He has insisted on the German university’s freedom from the defining authority of the state, the society, or the institution’s infrastructure. His appeal to the autonomy of the university in its complex heritage outside of the present cultural and political regime is unmistakable. He reflects the stubbornness of his own appeal in the resistance that he notes as a characteristic of Western knowing, a resistance that allows the unknowableness of beings to stand out in relief. He knows the direction that the German university is to take, and he draws this cord of knowledge tightly around the degraded and, we may assume, nihilistic state of German learning and culture. He clearly gives his Freiburg audience and German academia their marching orders with a heightened and spirited sense of vocation. Instead of a starved and depleted dispersion of information-and profession-dominated fields, he invokes the “fertility and blessing of all world-shaking powers” that will nourish human existence in the plenitude of their history. These powers include nature, history, language, thought, fate, disease, madness, and technology. With persistent and questioning attention to the essence of knowing, Heidegger says, with certainty of knowledge, their knowledge will lead people back to a wholeness and unity that is presently beyond dream. The discipline of questioning will galvanize the German people in a unified endeavor of mind and draw them together with their lost inheritance into a new and productive community. He foresees a praxis—and he attempts such a praxis in his rectorial address—that will eventuate in a renewed encounter with beings in their unfathomable questionableness. He is applying his thoughtful obsession with being to the shaping of a new world. His ethnic hope and its agenda have led him into ethical thought.
(20) The tension between questioning and certainty indwells the essence of disciplinary knowledge when this essence is taken in the sense of “resisting in a questioning and vulnerable way in the midst of the uncertainty of beings as a whole.” Questioning, vulnerable [ungedeckt], and uncertainty could be taken to caution against an all-out assault on the question of essence, and Heidegger will give priority to resistance, struggle, and revolution because of the vulnerability of essence. But when the German people will the essence of disciplinary knowledge, theirs is an essential will, a Wesenswille, that “creates for our people a world of the innermost and most extreme danger, that is, its world of true mentation and remembrance” [seine wahrhaft geistige Welt].
Is the most extreme danger reflected in Heidegger’s call? Is the vulnerability and uncertainty of the resisting firmness [Standhalten] of knowledge heeded in Heidegger’s words? Is the danger recognized in the cadence of his address? One could well expect Heidegger to step back from a headlong will to essence, whereas his assertion here is in a volition and for a volition that is based in certainty concerning uncertainty. There is no recoil in a questioning uncertainty before its perception and situational meaning. The march to essence is not in question. A direction for committed action controls Heidegger’s ethical agenda.
Further, no specter of uncertainty appears to haunt Heidegger’s appeal to “Geist,” which he defines as “originary, attuned, knowing, resolved openness [Entschlossenheit] regarding the essence [Wesen] of being.” And the “Geist” of these paragraphs? Heidegger is firm; his Standhalten is not in question. “Geist” is neither cleverness nor worldly reason nor argumentation, he says. It does not properly lead to the artificial divisions in the disciplines or to self-enclosed methodologies. It leads to danger in the life of the mind that grips and shakes one to the core. He uses the word specifically to reinstate the priority of Entschlossenheit and the question of being in relation to the university disciplines. But the strident shaping power of openness to being and the power of the will to follow it overrides the vulnerability of open resolve and leads one to a sense of aggressive spiritedness that one otherwise might assume Heidegger would wish to avoid by his typical avoidance of a positive use of a Geist. His appeal invokes a sureness of dedication that recalls the spirit of ethical discourse. This spirit, in fact, is a haunting element in his address that he ignores. As he transforms the word to his own purposes, an incautious, ethically centered optimism nevertheless overrides the question of ethics, and the creations of the Wesenswille appear to track a course that is without question true, no matter how ill-advised the specific efforts along the way might be.
If we read Heidegger to be using the new hopefulness and exuberance characteristic of many Germans at the time of his address, using them as an entree to a far more cautious and meditative endeavor, if his cadences and invocations constitute a strategy, we could say that Heidegger is leading his hearers to a way of knowing and thinking that will recoil on the incautious loftiness of spirit and transform it into a different kind of reticent thoughtfulness. He does speak of a knowing that finds its disposition in open resolve, and we expect that kind of knowing to be one of reserve and uncertainty. But even as a strategy, in the context of the self-assertion of the German university, his thought is overwhelmed by the ideas and ideals of unity, which are firmly associated with the Führer principle and by the German ethos of which he is a part. The complexity of the rectorial address is found in its affirmation of an unknowable essence of beings, which eventuates in a certain stubbornness of mind (one of the connotations of his use of Standhalten) before the unfathomable uncertainty of beings as a whole, in combination with an unquestioning affirmation of this stubbornness of mind as he applies his thought to the shaping of German culture and the German university. In this application, in the ethical move, the priority of the question fails in Heidegger’s assertion of it. We can expect that the processes of thought and inquiry idealized by Heidegger are to result in a discipline of questioning. But the affiliation of his thought with the exuberant sense of new life and hope that accompanied National Socialism for many people, this ethnic and ontic exuberance, his attaching his thought to the philosophy of will and volition, his uncritical allegiance to the practical power of the idea of unity, and his failure to link dispersion and the priority of the question: these aspects of Heidegger’s ethnic identification of German destiny and Greek experience in the application of his thought introduces a play of power and unity in his quest for cultural leadership that mandates the loss of the question in his assertion of its priority. The ecstatic dimension of thinking appears to be lost in a practical German ideal in 1933.
“The world of the mind of a people . . . is the power of the deepest preservation [Bewahrung]7 of the people’s earthly strength and the strength of their blood; it is the power of the most inward excitation and most far-reaching trauma [Erschütterung] of their dasein. The world of the mind alone guarantees greatness for the people.” This world will allow the people to decide between the will to greatness and the luxury of decline and to make this decisiveness the beat to which the people march into their “future history.” In the context of this address, the meaning is reasonably clear that the preservation [Bewahrung] of the strength of earth and blood, the traumatic power that excites and shakes their dasein, and the greatness they must choose over decline are to come by attentiveness to the intrusion of the question of being, whereby they will rise above their own Volkstum.8 But a subtle shift of emphasis has occurred in the last few paragraphs. There is an insistence on the insistent quality of the German people, a failure to see clearly that the language of will, earth, blood, and power, and the very cadence of the address are of the Volkstum, the national, ontic, and ethnic character of the culture. Now those qualities are affirmed, and the expected ontic ecstasis of the essence of the German university becomes for all practical purposes an insistent affirmation of the excitation and elevation of a national culture that feels that it is recovering itself. Mediocrity and laziness of mind may well be interrupted by Heidegger’s proposal, but the everyday interpretations of strength and German identity and the everyday hope for German greatness and destiny become a definitive part of his agenda. Heidegger has moved from a proposal that holds in question values that tend toward universalization and self-elevation to one that takes responsibility without question for a people’s privileged calling in Western culture. Instead of an interruption of these values and ideals, there is now a passionate affirmation of them. Heidegger appears to believe that he can move through this affirmation to a “deeper” affirmation that will destructure both the German culture and his present allegiance to it. But that conviction occasions his not maintaining the question in the midst of his strategy; that is, it occasions the kind of oversight that we would expect of everyday life on the basis of his account of it in Being and Time without the reversal that moves in the everyday and outside of the monopolizing power of the everyday.
(21) This loss of the question clarifies the increasing emphasis that Heidegger gives to the positive function of the resistance of knowledge and the consequent deemphasis on the ecstatic uncertainty of the world. That uncertainty now is interpreted by him in terms of the world’s ontic danger. His issue is leadership in the face of this danger and uncertainty, and his account of leadership is one of the points in which his interrupting question of being is especially obscured. The danger is not found so much in temporality and its being forgotten in our concept of time or in the ecstasis of thought—although these are not inconsistent with what Heidegger says—as it is found in the uncritical disciplines of information, interpretation, methodology, and the professions. The Freiburg faculty, he says, “must recoil forward, that is, spring back [Vorrücken] to the outposts of danger in the constant uncertainty of the world.” His argument is that if scholars resist single-mindedly “in the midst of the essential and oppressive nearness of all things” and if a common question and communally attuned saying arises, then out of this resistance to the insistent world and out of the growing communal saying will come strength for leadership. When one is “empowered by the deepest and destined vocation [Bestimmung] and broadest obligation,” one is not a solo performer or an isolated individual, but plays a role in a heritage that is community-forming and that arises from what binds individuals together as a people. Such obligation forms the basis for selecting the best and for awakening a following of those characterized by a new mind. That we are involved within an ethos and are not now under the ‘leadership’ of the destructuring question of being is clear from the ending of the paragraph. We do not need to awaken a new following, Heidegger says. The German student body “is on the march. And whom it seeks are those leaders through whom it wills to so elevate its own destined vocation that it becomes a grounded, knowing truth, and through whom it wills to place word and work into clarity of interpretation and effect” [second emphasis added].
(22) Out of the Entschlossenheit—open resolve?—of the German student body “which stands firm [ standhalten] with German destiny in its most extreme distress, comes a will to the essence of the university.” This is the student body that has been organized under the new structure designed to integrate them into the National Socialist movement. Heidegger stops considerably short of saying that the student body, as it is constituted, wills the essence of the university; rather, theirs is a true will “insofar as9 the student body places itself under the law of its essence through the new student code and thereby for the first time circumscribes this essence.” He is using one of the continuing concepts of this address, that by a disciplined and firm circumscription of purpose and by a passionate pursuit of that purpose for essential definition over against the easy mediocrity of everyday life, the stage is set for the emergence of a clarity of vision regarding what is genuine and what is bogus. The division of culture into what is essential and what is everyday is a first, crucial step in the direction of proper questioning and spirited mentation. When radical danger is perceived in a culture and a movement seeks to define it over against something essential, the following debate can progress to increasingly proper thought. I doubt that it occurred to Heidegger that a formula can justify most kinds of dogmatism and closed systems of beliefs, and it surely did not occur to him that this formula was not in question in the way he used it in his address. The double edge of his claim was not clear: “The highest freedom is to give the law to oneself.” On the one hand, this claim sets the university free of the definitive authority of the state and in a certain sense divides it from political authority. On the other, it allows for a strictly ethos-dominated redetermination and a traditionally ethical posture that seeks totalization, unification, and authority over all fundamental differences, one that tends to the inflation of relative rights and goods into axioms that seek to govern by suppressing all serious differences and to the inflation of radical differences into opponents of cosmic proportions. True freedom is contrasted to “the much-heralded academic freedom” that will be banished from the German university. Academic freedom is not genuine. It merely allows individual arbitrariness and lack of restraint. The student body, as well as the faculty, must be placed in those restraints and services that will draw the boundaries tightly and form a community of common endeavor for the sake of what is genuine and proper for the culture. With the proper concept of freedom in tightly controlled limits, the students will be brought back to their truth. Heidegger is unmoved by the possibility that openness to the disclosing/concealing clearing of truth can be facilitated by a maximum allowance of differences and the severe discipline of allowing practical axioms to fall apart in the face of what is not integrable by the ethos’s highest standards.
(23-26) The three “equally primordial” services or “binding powers” for students are labor service, armed service, and knowledge service. These provide the techne that will return the culture to its essence. The first binds them to the community, the second to “the honor and mission [Geschick] of the nation in the midst of other people,” and the third, which is most germane to Heidegger’s purposes, to the intellectual and mental [geistige] mandate of the German people. Students in the service of knowledge are not merely trained for professions or given a survey acquaintance with essences and values. “The German people have an effect on its [not their] destiny by inserting its history in the openness of the predominance of all world-shaping powers of human existence [menschlichen Daseins] and prevailing at every turn in its mental world.” That is, the preponderance of technology and subjectivity carry within them the disclosiveness of being and the call back to the originary irruption of the question of being. Only by questioning this state of knowledge will the people find their way back to what is genuine and essential in their heritage. Their forgetfulness of being must come to light in the midst of the forgetfulness. There is no place to stand outside of it. The question of essence in the context of technologies of power will allow the limits of modern culture to be known. Presumably technology will recoil on itself and develop into a self-overcoming movement within the power of the question of essence. If this account, typical of Heidegger, were applied to his own address, then appeals to power and national pride, the use of time’s rhythms and cadence, the general ethnocentricity of the address, and the National Socialist sympathies would recoil on themselves and lose, in this address, their vocational authority. But Heidegger’s specific claim is that German people must expose their dasein to the most extreme questionableness, and in this process they become a genuinely spirited people, thoroughly housed within their destiny. Their destiny is beyond question.
The “leaders and guardians” must be uncompromisingly clear in their “elevated, widest-ranging, and richest knowledge.” Students serve this knowledge. Since they are to learn to serve the destiny of the German people, they must be led by those who know the dasein of the people, the dasein that is in severe danger; that is, they must be led by a knowledge that is itself in severe danger and that appropriates its danger in its knowing. This danger appears to be the force that puts knowledge in question. The predominant power of beings makes being questionable, Heidegger says, and forces the people to work and fight for the cause of being; the questionableness forces the people into a state of struggle and search which the professions must serve. The Übermacht, the prevailing power, of beings makes being questionable and makes the people work, fight, and belong to a state. Heidegger’s attention is riveted by this Übermacht. The posture of genuine knowledge is one of Standhalten, a resisting firmness. Now it appears to be shaped not by the welcoming openness of being and the concealing mystery of being, but by the everyday Western hostility to being. The questionableness of dasein here is shaped by its threatened role on the world stage, not by its ecstatic temporality. The truth and essence of the German university is conceived to be under siege, and the initial steps toward defending them are formed in regimental discipline.
What predominates in this part of Heidegger’s rectorial address? Where is the move beyond the national self-interpretation of Germany as privileged in the destiny of being? What has overcome the originary question of being and turned it into a question of national destiny? Where is the thinking that proceeds in our questionableness, that finds itself intrinsically in question and not put in question by threatening external forces? How is it that compulsory military service and work service are equally primordial [gleichursprünglich] with genuine knowledge in the “German essence”? And why does the German essence uniquely have its privilege in the dispensation of the question of being? Why has Heidegger’s question of thought become national and ethical without question?
(27-29) Heidegger is certainly aware of the possibility of misguidance in the academic order that he outlines. All of this will work properly only if the members of the university so dispose themselves that their mental-historical existence is appropriate to the distant predisposition of its beginning. He returns to the language of paragraph 16 and its play on fügen and Verfügung in order to say that just as the faculty is to arrange itself in a manner fitting to the essence of the German university, so the students, too, must be under this decree and must constitute themselves in accordance with it. The cadence changes. There is now caution and qualification in Heidegger’s words. He refers back to his discussion of disciplinary knowledge and its academic orders. He specifies that only that knowledge is intended which defines the essence of the German university, which, he recognizes, is the school that is elevated by its originary mission. It is the knowledge that will teach the German people the power and privilege in their destiny and lead and cultivate them by virtue of their appropriating this essence. This knowledge obligates them to considerably more than objectivity about reality. It makes obligatory the simple and essential questioning that is the basis for any so-called objectivity.
(30-33) We thus have a double movement: The concept of proper disciplinary knowledge must shape the German university by taking hold of faculty and students alike. This concept [Begriff] must seize [ergriffen] and hold those who make up the university. At the same time this concept must intervene in and transform the defining forms of the faculty and the academic organization. The transforming hold of this concept of disciplinary knowledge, analogous to the resisting firmness by which faculty and students come to and maintain disciplinary knowledge, on the one hand, falls just short of rigidity and, on the other, by virtue of its strict discipline provides a context in which the essence of the university can be approached. The faculty carries out its mission only when it shapes the oppressing powers of dasein into “the one geistige world of the people.” And the organizing body must also tear down the departmental barriers and overcome the stifling aspects of professional training. When the faculties and the academic organization begin to raise the simple and essential questions, “both students and teachers are encompassed by the same final necessities and pressing concerns which are indispensable for the dasein of the people and state.”
(34-36) This will be a slow process. Not only has it not yet been practically initiated in the university, but we can expect it to take a very long time. The character proper to this mission must be broadly cultivated among all related people. Heidegger mentions rigor, responsibility, and superior patience. The required reorganization and reconceptualization will not occur as minor adjustments. Heidegger is clear that he is proposing a long process that will have revolutionary consequences. “One imprinting force”—that is what he wants the academic community to be in its work, legislation, and administration. The university is to be like a stamp, the kind used by a notary public or, in Germany at that time, by a university official, to give a legitimating imprint to a document. It is to give the imprint of the simple unity of the essence on all who come under the forces of its influence. Strength of will must be nurtured and the form of the imprint slowly forged, while the dispersion of the academic community, its laissez-faire attitudes, its foolish misrepresentation of freedom, its allowance of widely divergent methodologies and disciplinary traditions, and its blindness to the unity of its essence are purged by the emerging piety of simple and single-minded questioning. On the one hand, the present state of things does not fare well in this address. On the other, a bureaucrat’s decisive and sometimes presumptive certainty seeps into the imagery and provides a unity and a sterile purity for the context of questioning that leaves very little room for doubt about how questioning is to go on. Heidegger is so certain about the unity and mission of the essence of the German university.
(37-38) Heidegger picks up the cadence again. In the midst of emphasizing the simple importance of the essence of the German university for shaping service and knowledge, he begins to highlight words more frequently. He is clearly worried about superficiality and ill-directed enthusiasm among the students, and his anxiety is evident as he summarizes what he has said about the student body in direct, hard-hitting sentences. I surmise that he intentionally reflected the cadence and passion of current student and political rhetoric in an attempt to pick the students up where they were, to fire their imagination for the intellectual and moral discipline that he sees as necessary for genuine education and professional life, and to attract them to a model closer to Plato’s guardians than the one he finds in the current, relatively light-headed student leadership. His remarks can also be read as a warning to the faculty in reference to the students. The will to essence must be awakened and strengthened, he says. This will must force itself to rise to the highest clarity and culture of knowledge, and it must integrate its engaged knowledge of the people and state into the essence of disciplinary knowledge. These are unaccomplished tasks, Heidegger says, and reflect perceived and extremely important deficiencies in both faculty and student leadership and exertion. But the mood and beat of the appeal also constitutes an intimate association with a quality of certainty, zeal, nationalism, and ethnic glorification that transformed the nonobjective, nonsubjective, nonvolitional difference of the question of being into a defined teleological march, a march that is circumscribed and stamped by language and feeling that are necessarily oblivious to the boundless danger of the question of being for all quasi-religious ethics and national enthusiasm. “All capacities of will and thought, all strength of heart, and all skills of the body must be unfolded through battle, heightened in battle, and preserved as battle.” Karl von Clausewitz, the undisputed authority on the defense and expansion of the German nation, is right, Heidegger says. Deliverance will not come by accident. Presumably deliverance will come by maximum preparedness for war. Given the claims of the address, it is to be a war on the entrenched dispersion of the essence of the German university. Given the rhetoric, separation of the battle over dispersion within the university and a less intellectual mobilization is difficult to sustain.10
(39-41) “The battle community,” in relation to rigor, responsibility, and superior patience, must also be characterized by exceptional simplicity, toughness, and frugality in the way it organizes its existence. It must understand that those who follow must have their own strength, and it must be prepared for and appreciate the inevitable tensions between those who lead and those who follow. Heidegger foresees a lean organization that encourages austere self-discipline and provides an environment in which spirited and talented people can exert themselves and grow. Spiritedness must be cultivated, not suppressed. As all parties take part in the struggle toward simple and essential questioning and toward clarity of purpose, they will strive, fall short, think again, and pursue again their quest. Thoughtful self-attention must be nurtured by struggle. Self-assertion and careful thoughtfulness go together, for Heidegger is not concerned with change for change’s sake, but the change that goes to the originary essence of the university. Without attentive thoughtfulness, there can be no access to the university’s fundamental element. Then Heidegger adds another assertion: “No one will prevent us from doing this.”
(42-43) This is the same ‘no one’ who does not notice whether people will properly when the mental and spiritual life of the West fails and falls apart, “when the moribund semblance of culture comes in and drags all that remains strong into confusion and lets it suffocate in madness.” Whether the crisis culminates in such desolation depends on whether they—those very people in the lecture hall and the others in the German academic community—will themselves as a people with an historical mission. If they do not so will themselves, if they keep to the course that they now follow, their misfortune is assured. They are in crisis together; they are each a part of the crisis. Responsibility weighs heavily on everyone.
(44-46) Heidegger’s closing sentences affirm that “we” do will the fulfillment of the German people’s historical mission, that “we” do will ourselves in a young and recent popular strength, which already outstrips us and sets a decisive direction, and that the splendor and greatness of this awakening depend on the profound and far-reaching presence of mind out of which comes Plato’s wisdom in The Republic, “All greatness stands in the storm.” In the original address, Heidegger concluded with “Heil Hitler,” which provided a point of political reference for the context of standing firm, willing themselves, and finding a decisive direction. Plato’s reference, on the other hand, provides the context for finding, in the Greek dispensation to the German people, what the essence of the willing and the mission is.
Ecstasis in Being and Time is found in thought as thought turns in the mortal, ecstatic temporality of its being: thought is ecstatic, for example, in the processes of self-overcoming that we followed; in the question of being thought is ecstatic as it moves beyond the habits of everyday life and belief; it is ecstatic in the Vorlaufen of possibility as well as in the proper appropriation of the Vorlaufen of possibility. In dasein’s open resolve in its being, the proper moment of presence is not found by reference to firm standing or integrated confidence, but in a process of removal from the firmness of an ordering life-world. This remotion [Entrückung] is integral to resolve, is consonant with the ecstases of temporality, and defines the question of ethics as that question develops in Being and Time. Dasein is thereby able to concern itself with beings out of care in its being for its being. This ecstasis is found in the ontological difference of being and beings that is constitutive of dasein and that frees one, wrenches one free, from the predominance of ethnic values, hope, and visions. In the question of ethics all that a culture prizes is put in question. The ontic ecstasis that we have found in the Rector’s address—the ecstasis of the movement of the German mission in the midst of German decadence—solidifies its hearers in a regional enthusiasm that is punctuated by the final salute. It hides the remotion of time in the forward march of a new state of affairs and solidifies a Germanic politics that is far removed from a ‘proper’ appropriation of the ecstasis of temporality. The address affirms a government internal to a particular ethos. It is a governance that is instituted by education and that totalizes German ideals in spite of Heidegger’s intention to give priority to an essence that cannot be identified with German identity. Without a recoiling self-overcoming movement to put the given discourse in question, the address is destined to be ruled by the morbidity of regional values that are out of touch with the movement of their own temporality. This morbidity expresses itself as an enthusiasm that falls considerably short of ecstatic thought as Heidegger had previously defined it and undergone it.
The problem of succumbing to everyday values and of losing the question is one that Heidegger addresses throughout his writing. It is built into his way of thought. Up until he wrote the Rector’s address, Heidegger regularly began a given body of thought in a recognized affirmation of the field that circumscribed his thinking. He would then begin to turn that field of assumptions, concepts, etc. into a different topos for thinking, as he did in Being and Time, which begins with a regional account of the everyday that is not adequately informed by the question of being, or in The Basic Problems in Phenomenology in which he begins with a strict phenomenological method that his inquiry into the concept of time overturns. In these cases the movements of remotion and self-overcoming take place as a torsion that is created when a question that is primordial for the language and to which the language is ill-tuned begins to emerge in the process of the inquiry. Heidegger’s discipline is one that allows such questions to emerge and that follows the consequences of the emergence in and for the language and conceptuality in which he thinks. He undergoes this movement in the process of the account that he gives.
In his rectorial address Heidegger is convinced that if he begins with the largely technological knowledge of the German academy, with the cadence and rhetoric of the new politics, and with a predisposition in German culture to get to the ground of things by strict discipline, and if he holds these ethnic qualities in the context of the essence of German knowledge and the German university, he is convinced that a self-overcoming remotion will take place over a period of time that will overcome the banal decadence that dominates both the academy and the German culture generally. But the position that he takes in the address, while speaking about the question of essence and less directly about the question of being, does not invoke the priority of question in the movement of the address. A proper appropriateness of ecstasis, on his own terms, does not occur in it. Rather he articulates the priority of “Wir wollen uns selbst” (We will ourselves). And consequently the question of ethics does not take place in the thought and language of the address. Instead of standing out in the free openness of the question of being and the disclosure of being, he takes his stand in a stubborn German resistance to contrary ethea and in a glorification of one type of national self-interpretation.
In Heidegger’s ethnic insistence we found unchallenged the authority of the principles of unity and leadership. His preoccupation with unity in his writings up to 1933, which is expressed in such elements as his inclination to one authoritative methodology, the predominance of one question, and the unity of dasein, was regularly offset by the recoiling and self-overcoming effects of the questions of time, being, and truth. The ecstasis of his thought occurred in the passing away of this authority even as Heidegger wrote within it. But in his address his preoccupation with unity becomes a virtual obsession with the unity of the German university and culture and finds one of its ethical expressions in the principle of the Führer. The wise philosopher as the king’s advisor and as the leader of a culture is not only a Platonic and Enlightenment ideal, but one that implicitly maintains the notions of superior, as opposed to inferior, culture and a privileged, quasi-royal access to the principles of the superior culture. Cultural dispersion and nonsynchronized pursuit of many inconsistent ideals and values feel like anarchy inside this ideal. Granted the value of unity and the attraction of new power in a weakened country, a virile German paranoia, and a reemergence of the Fuhrer principle—without the value of unity in being in question—in addition to Heidegger’s own extremely conservative convictions about state and academic politics in this state of mind, he is vulnerable to the situation that he judges to be decadent and to the metaphysics that he wants to destructure.
The self-attentiveness that focuses Heidegger’s constructive alternative and the way of thought that he wants to exemplify in his rectorial address do not achieve the ek-stasis that is necessary if his thought is to avoid the numbing control of the metaphysical stasis that he had put in question so effectively. Had the value of unity fallen into question in a process of recoiling thought, had the question of ethics emerged in the process of his thought, the Fuhrer principle could not have exercised the power that it did. It would have been overturned in the remotion of its own time and Heidegger would have been left uncertain of the values that most attracted him and of his role as Rector. Presumably the uncertainty would not have neutralized him. Perhaps he would have chosen to fellow-travel with the National Socialist party. But he would have been out of step with his own values as well as with those of the party. The questionableness of his position, its “destiny” and the denial of its “destiny,” his goals, his hopes would have found articulation in the torsion of his address: the question of his position, not its certainty, would have set its direction and thought. And in that question I believe that radical tragedy and failure gain voice, not silence. The questionableness of axiomatic values is attuned to loss, outcasting, ambiguity, and suffering. The unquestioned direction of a leader, the satisfaction of being properly led, and the desire for a saving hero are wrenched from their moorings in the question of ethics; and had this question exercised much power, Heidegger would probably have felt far more bereft of hope and far more swayed by mortal temporality and the question of meaning than he in fact felt in his Rector’s address. On the basis of what he had already undergone in his thought, the address could have shaken his attraction to National Socialism and its metaphysical-ethical underpinnings. The severity of discipline that Heidegger discusses in relation to the call of conscience, a discipline that leads to a twisting free of the surveillance and authority of cultural identity at the same time that one undergoes that surveillance and authority, is replaced in the Rector’s address by a severity of disciplined citizenship in a state projected to be under the constant surveillance of a leader who is unchecked by higher or equal offices, and a state that is under the surveillance and authority of a cultural leader who is answerable primarily to an essence that no one properly understands. In the head’s surveillance and authority, the questionableness of essence loses its power, and an ethic replaces the question of ethics. In this replacement Heidegger seems tragic to me: he appears to defy the destiny of the essence that he expects to lead him and to occasion an ethnic destiny in his thought that overturns the transformation of learning for which he hoped.
The question of ethics is constituted by a disruption of the control of axioms and values that structure and govern the lives of those who live in a given discourse. A discourse marked by the question of ethics, in its interruption of ethical thought and action, is opened to questions and possibilities to which the discourse has been closed and with which the ‘normalcy’ of the discourse interplays to create a different situation and horizon of thought. This discourse is also attuned to the travail of excluded differences and the pain of transformation. When ways of speaking and thinking appropriate their own disruptions, the inevitabilities that indwell their heritage, and the limits to their life-giving values, and do not resist these elements, but learn to give place to them as well as to self-overcoming, then they will be far more attuned to the atrocities and devastation in which they are implicated. The issue presently is not one of judgment, not one of finding out who is right and who is wrong, but one of learning to be attentive to the destruction that a given way of life makes inevitable, usually without noticing. The combination of nurturance and resistance that marks an ethos, the power of identity within a community to give people a firm place and familiarity, and the drive of an ethos toward continuous repetition of its standards and habits mean that an interruption by fundamental questions and differences that put in jeopardy the ethos’s self-understanding will be extremely hard to follow.
I have not found it possible to judge Heidegger’s politics without making axiomatic for all practical purposes my own politics. I have not been able to avoid a sense of satisfaction, even though it is a painful one, when I recognize what I judge to be his naive stupidity. I believe that I know better than to fellow-travel with fascist movements, and I believe that my democratic values, which preserve among other things academic freedom, are obviously better than his. I know that I do not understand atrocity or the unspeakableness of massive destruction. I am sure that in cataclysmic upheaval, suffering is not measurable or repeatable in thought and language. I feel a measure of confidence and ethnic identity in these recognitions. But when I make my ethical judgments, I also undergo an erasure of the question of ethics, the question that, had it occurred in his address, could have had momentous import for Heidegger’s politics. I feel myself relatively free of the necessity of such questioning when I face German National Socialism and Heidegger’s relation to it. I am very certain in my rejection of it, and I think that all people should be equally certain in rejecting it. I feel no danger in the values that structure my confidence.
But when I undergo the impact of the question of ethics I find that, in Levinas’s phrase, the cry of the other—as other—seems to be audible in the passing interruption of my values. Not the value of the other or the dignity of the other or the autonomy of the other or the right of the other. But the cry of the other. In the strike of the question’s interruption, the measure is taken of universalization, moral clarity, obvious decency, and right-mindedness: the measure of their muffling their own destructiveness, of their genealogies of power and suppression, and of their availability for atrocity. One cannot repeat, in the sense of cannot speak, or re-cognize, either the destruction or the cry, and with it its ethical truths, which cannot be doubted by those included in its mainstream.
Without the interruption of the question of ethics, I suspect that Heidegger was also closed to atrocities that were part of his ethos, as they are part of mine. Without that interruption I am free for the satisfaction of my judgment and am as closed as I believe he was in the address to the nómos of destruction that also helped to make his ethos nurturing.
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