Heidegger, Schelling, & the Reality of Evil
Part 15
Collin Cleary
5,809 words
Part 15 of 15 (Read all parts here)
Phenomenology as Gelassenheit
In our previous installment, we discussed at length Heidegger’s conception of Gelassenheit: “letting beings be” or letting things be “in their restful repose.” A question may have occurred to the reader: how exactly is Gelassenheit reached? What exactly does one do in order to achieve it?
Reading Heidegger, one is actually drawn to the conclusion that Gelassenheit, in practice, will look very much like phenomenology (though Heidegger, to my knowledge, never explicitly said this). Phenomenology is an attempt to describe the fundamental features of experience. Phenomenology does not deal with the concrete content of experience (dogs, rhododendrons, rocks, stars, etc. – which are studied by the other sciences) but instead describes the ways in which objects (of any sort, including “mental objects”) are given to us.
Phenomenology is purely descriptive, and it does not make metaphysical commitments. For example, phenomenology will tell us, correctly, that we experience sensory objects as given to us directly. When I am looking at the laptop, I seem to be seeing the laptop directly. What about “representationalist” theories that I am actually looking at a mental image of the laptop rather than the laptop itself? Phenomenology will have nothing to do with such talk because these are theories about what causes experience “behind the scenes,” and phenomenology deals only with a description of experience itself. (See my essay “Heidegger’s History of Metaphysics, Part Four: The Cartesian Destruction of Being.”)
In order to engage in phenomenology’s descriptive enterprise, it can easily be seen that a certain special sort of openness is required. One must, at all times, be true to the phenomena, true to what we experience, and not lapse into laying out theories about what is “really” happening. One must also take great care that one’s descriptions are not subtly influenced by such theories. For example, one cannot truthfully say “I’m seeing a mental image of a laptop,” since that is not what we actually experience. What we experience is seeing the laptop. Edmund Husserl, the founder of the phenomenological movement and the teacher of Heidegger, gave phenomenology’s rallying cry as “back to the ‘things themselves.’” This means nothing more than being true to the phenomena – rather than imposing some pre-given meaning or agenda upon them.
But what is this other than “letting beings be”? In Heidegger’s hands, it seems that phenomenology is no longer construed as a “method” – and least of all a technē – to be “used” by the philosopher in his office hours in order to write “studies.” Instead, it has become a way of life. This appears to be at least partly what Heidegger means by an “other beginning” for philosophy – a new, post-metaphysical beginning that he effects. One in which we open to the things themselves, and relieve ourselves of the baggage of two millennia of theories about “what really is.”
A moment ago, I stated that, in phenomenological terms, I am directly aware of my laptop. But my readers may well resist this. We are such knee jerk Cartesians that our immediate reaction to such a claim is to say “well, it may seem as if you are directly aware of the laptop, however . . . .” The tendency, in other words, is to think that phenomenology describes mere appearances; that which only seems to be true. Phenomenology literally means “science of phenomena,” where “phenomena” does indeed mean the same thing as “appearances.” But if we do not understand the true meaning of “phenomena” this can be extraordinarily misleading. I have used this term several times already, but let us explore what Heidegger would call its “originary” meaning.
In Being and Time, Heidegger writes that “φαινόμενον [phenomenon] means: what shows itself, the self-showing; the manifest.”[1] We Cartesians, however, automatically take “phenomena,” especially when rendered as “appearances,” to mean a kind of “internal picture” of an external thing – an internal picture existing in our mind box. But what Heidegger is saying is that a phenomenon is a being showing itself to us in its being. Phenomena are not images that intervene between ourselves and things in the world; phenomena are the things in the world displaying themselves to us.
Yes, there are such things as illusions, delusions, and hallucinations. But these are aberrant phenomena; the exception and not the rule. And all illusions, delusions, and hallucinations indirectly point to the world. I cannot hallucinate a pink elephant unless I’ve already seen actual pink objects and elephants. To appeal to these aberrant phenomena in order to call all phenomena, all appearances into question is no more reasonable than using examples of intersex humans to declare that there is no objective masculinity and femininity, and that “gender” is a “social construct.”
In the absence of any pressing reason to think that an experience is misleading, we must always assume that the phenomena disclose beings to us as they are. As we will see in a moment, this realization has important implications for Heidegger’s claims about being and evil – and for our thesis that evil is something real.
Revenge of the Blobs
Before we consider those implications, we must first discuss how, specifically, Heidegger’s Schelling-inspired theory of evil can help us to make sense of the world in which we live. So far, we have made only very general claims about seeing beings merely as resources for man’s needs, and about a drive toward uniformity. How exactly does the malice of will express itself in the world today? The example that is usually given is mankind’s plunder of the earth, leading to environmental devastation. This example is quite correct, and Heidegger makes prominent mention of it.[2] But there is much more. In modern technological civilization it is not just other beings that are regarded as raw material for manipulation, but human beings themselves.
My readers do not need me to rehearse examples of the coldness and inhumanity that pervade everything today. There is no “fellow feeling” any longer, and even the expression itself now seems quaint. Only part of this is the result of “diversity.” The vector of the modern world, for Heidegger, is uniformity, and, as he makes clear in the dialogue between prisoners of war (discussed in the last two installments), even our “moral ideals” serve this end. Thus, the advocacy of diversity, which serves as a substitute religion for the elite, is itself a means by which real diversity – racial and intellectual – is eradicated and human beings are homogenized.
The insistence on “equality” – or, more often today, “equity” – is really an insistence on uniformity, replaceability, and interchangeability. What does it matter who lives in France? Anybody can be French. Anti-racism becomes a moral veneer for the enforcement of uniformity. We must “celebrate our differences,” while working to make everyone the same. To this end, even biological differences, even those apparent to the unaided senses, are denied. Race and “gender” are “social constructs.” Anyone can be a man and anyone can be a woman, and no one can define either – which effectively means that there are no men and women but only generic “humans.” But when humans are understood entirely in terms of competition for resources, even the difference between Dasein and the animal gets erased.

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Who are the denizens of this modern world – its perfect citizens, those who truly “fit”? Those who are least distinctive and most malleable and conforming; who conform to every cultural trend and reliably seek what others seek; who have no opinions of their own save the opinions manufactured for them. Obedience ranks high on their list of virtues, though they have been sold, and have accepted, the idea that they are counter-cultural rebels with independent minds. The extreme of this type are the shapeless, blue or green-haired “woke” blobs of indeterminate “gender.”
What is the dominant sentiment one sees in these “individuals,” aside from fear? It is malice. Hence the blob as “spiteful mutant.” To what is their malice directed? At all that resists uniformity. All that stands out as definite or individual, and that sees the world in terms of the definite and individual. This means that their hate is directed at individual men who refuse to obey, who think independently, and who know who and what they are. But, more generally, the hate of the blobs is directed at nature itself, whose definiteness and hierarchy are the ultimate reproach to them. They must deny nature altogether, even as they fret about “saving the earth.”
However, the passively conforming blobs are at the lower end of the food chain. At the high end is a technocratic elite that effectively regards human beings as commodities for exploitation and social experimentation. Because passive, uniform blobs are the easiest to control and exploit, the elite has made sure that everything is geared towards producing more of them – especially technology, but even dietary recommendations. Some of the elite justify their part in the production of the wasteland by painting a thin moral veneer over what they do, or by simultaneously engaging in “philanthropy.” But typically, and at the highest echelons of power, we find sociopaths knowingly engaged in the obliteration of all that makes us genuinely human, in exchange for wealth and power. And someone like George Soros seems even worse than this: a man seemingly bent on destroying civilization purely out of malice.
The blobs lend themselves very obviously to a Nietzschean analysis: they are motivated by ressentiment against their betters. This is, I think, indisputably true. Of course, Nietzsche would not label them “evil” since he wants us to go “beyond good and evil.” The reason for this is that Nietzsche theorizes that the opposition “good and evil” is part of the “transvaluation of values” effected by the slave types. “Slave morality” is constructed when the slaves react against the masters and declare the traits of the masters “evil,” and their own traits “good.” Needless to say, neither Heidegger nor Schelling conceive evil in these terms, though Heidegger is certainly well aware of the phenomenon of ressentiment.
The Nietzschean analysis is not wrong, but the Schellingian-Heideggerean understanding of evil complements it – and, in fact, goes much deeper. It also gives us a valuable tool for understanding the behavior of the aforementioned elites, which is not always clearly attributable to ressentiment. From this standpoint, the blobs and the elites are united by a desire to negate what is and thus simultaneously to “absolutize” themselves; to make themselves into the “reversed god.” This is Schelling’s conception of evil, and I have argued in earlier installments that it is essentially identical to Heidegger’s analysis of the “malice” of “will,” which he describes as evil (hence my “Schellingian-Heideggerean” conjunction).[3]
This language of “absolutizing” and of the “reversed god” may be off-putting to some. In much simpler terms, it refers to the fact that the evil person is essentially someone who places themselves at the center of all. For Schelling, God or the Absolute is the whole. Through the spirit of what Schelling calls “love,” which draws together things that are different or opposed, all that exists is united in one holistic or organic system. (And, by the way, recognizing that this is a plausible view of nature does not entail that we must follow Schelling in calling it “God.”)
The evil person is a part of the whole who sets himself in opposition to the whole, like a diseased organ in an otherwise healthy body. The evil person effectively regards all that exists, including other human beings, as a means to his own ends; as tools for the satisfaction of his desires. (He thus violates Kant’s categorical imperative – in its second formulation – which commands us to always treat others as ends in themselves, never as means only.) This is the person about whom we say “he thinks the world revolves around him.” And he effectively does regard himself as the center of all, around which everything turns. This is what Schelling means when he says that the evil man makes himself into the “reversed god.”
In regarding all else as intrinsically valueless except when used as a tool for his own satisfaction, the evil man effectively deifies himself. It is easy to see how our sociopathic elites exhibit this spirit. In fact, entire peoples may exhibit it (as the Talmud states, “On the house of the goy one looks as on the fold of cattle”). And in the modern world, there are countless individuals, some of them perfectly decent people, who are engaged in cooperative efforts to advance the interests of terrifyingly powerful “legal persons” that exhibit all the characteristics of the “reversed god” (I am referring, of course, to corporations[4]).
A variation on the “reversed god” is exhibited by those whose attitude toward the rest of existence is not so much exploitative as nihilating. This is the sort of person who basically seems to have a grudge against reality. This describes the blobs. I have already alluded to their malice against nature and against order and hierarchy. The blobs feel that nature has cut them a raw deal – and from the looks of many of them, they are correct. They resent all that surpasses them, and rage against all that constitutes a reproach to their lives, or that fails to affirm their proclivities or their self-image. Indisputably, they are grist for Nietzsche’s mill, but here too the metaphysics of the “reversed god” is to be found. If one’s attitude toward the rest of the world is a nihilating revenge, this too is a desire to raise oneself above all else and to make oneself the center.
In case it is not clear, the difference between the Nietzschean and the Schellingian-Heideggerean approaches is that the former is a purely psychological analysis, while the latter adds an ontological dimension. That this dimension is “ontological” is not to be understood loosely. We should not, for example, understand it to be claiming that evil men act “as if” they are the “reversed god,” for this would turn an ontological claim into yet another psychological one. No, both Heidegger and Schelling are convinced that there is a duality in human nature itself, corresponding to a duality in being.
We can open to what is, affirming it in both its presence and its absence, its mystery. In Schelling’s theological terms, we can affirm God – though Heidegger would not endorse such language. Or we can close to what is and distort, deny, or negate it. Moreover, sometimes being itself seems to lead us in one of these directions, or the other. Being/the clearing can “open” to us “benevolently” so that we encounter beings “as they are.” But the openness of being is made possible by its self-concealing or self-withdrawing, its “hiding” of itself, as I have discussed in previous installments. This self-concealing “tempts” us to become the “reversed god”; to regard ourselves as that which confers being upon things, by treating them solely as ours to manipulate.
The Reality of Evil?
In the last installment, I quoted Heidegger in Introduction to Metaphysics discussing the advent of modern technological civilization. He states, in words that call to mind René Guénon’s Reign of Quantity, “The prevailing dimension became that of extension and number.” Heidegger goes on to say that “In America and Russia . . . this all intensified until it turned into the measureless so-on and so-forth of the ever-identical and the indifferent, until finally this quantitative temper became a quality of its own.” He speaks of the onslaught “of that which aggressively destroys all rank and all that is world-spiritual, and portrays these as a lie” and, significantly, he describes this onslaught as “demonic” (dämonisch). When this lecture course was published in 1953, Heidegger explained this as meaning “the destructively evil.”[5] At least part of the reason he added this explanation was to forestall a literal reading of “demonic.”
Heidegger is right. It does genuinely feel that we are everywhere today in the presence of the demonic. At the beginning of this series, I mentioned that this observation now comes up, again and again, in my conversations with likeminded friends. It feels that we are being pushed to a conclusion that, in my youth, I never thought I would maintain: that evil is a “reality.” This claim is easily misunderstood. Of course, the evil that men do is fully real. But most modern people believe that evil is exclusively a quality of men or of certain choices men make, and not “some thing” existing in its own right. By “the reality of evil” I mean, however, precisely the idea that evil is “some thing” existing independently of us, that moves men in their actions.
It is going out on a metaphysical limb to speak of a “force” (or “forces”) of evil, but it does indeed feel that that is what we are confronting in the world today. I argued in the last section that the blobs and the sociopathic elites both qualify as evil (as defined by Schelling and Heidegger). Yet the account I gave of the system in which these people are implicated – das Gestell or the world of exploitation[6]– makes it clear that there is an evil to this system as a whole.
Further, it is also clear that this system is not the personal creation of any of these individuals. It is, in Heidegger’s terms, one of the “dispensations” or “sendings” of being (or Ereignis, see part eleven). In other words, it is a historical situation that men have not deliberately brought about, but into which they are “thrown.” It does really feel like something is “acting through” the blobs and the sociopathic elites – indeed, through all of us – something which we did not create and over which we ultimately have no control.
One of the purposes of these essays on Heidegger and Schelling has been to continue my series on “Heidegger’s History of Metaphysics.” This series is an intellectual archaeological dig: we are sifting through the intellectual strata that we must confront, according to Heidegger, in order to account for our modern predicament. And one of the reasons I have spent so much time on Schelling is that he offers us a profound meditation on the nature of evil. Further, Schelling attempts to account for the reality of evil in purely philosophical terms, without appealing to faith. As my readers are aware, the usual demand of those that would have us believe in the reality of evil is that belief is to be had through religious faith alone.
I have tried to argue that Schelling’s theory of evil was a major influence on Heidegger. Heidegger effectively adopts Schelling’s account of evil, but places its existence on philosophically surer footing. Whereas Schelling’s claims are metaphysical and often seem ad hoc, Heidegger’s account is phenomenological. In other words, Heidegger shows us that, if we are honest with ourselves – if we are, in other words true to the phenomena – we clearly do experience life as if we are in the grip of forces over which we have absolutely no control, regardless of whatever modern myths we may pay lip service to about how man is the author of his destiny. And, more specifically, it really does seem as if there is a force of evil loose in the world.
But is there? My readers may still not be convinced. We have seen Heidegger argue, as he puts it, that evil “may very well remain a basic trait of being itself.” If, as Heidegger holds, das Gestell is a dispensation of being, not a conscious choice on our part, and if it is a perversion, a situation in which human willfulness occludes what things truly are, then, as I stated in the last installment, we must grapple with the fact that sometimes being lies to us. But skeptics will say that even if this is a correct account of how things seem to us – even to all of us – we cannot leap to the conclusion that this is how things truly are; that there is an extra-human source of meaning and an extra-human “force of evil.”
However, such a response replicates a basic error we addressed in the first section of this installment. We have been so imprinted by Cartesianism, with its dichotomy of a thing-like self existing in a self-enclosed sphere and standing opposed to a world “out there,” that we take phenomena to be “mere appearances.” But, as we have discussed, phenomena or appearances are things disclosing themselves to us in their being. As I put it earlier, in the absence of any pressing reason to think that an experience is misleading, we must always assume that the phenomena disclose beings to us as they are. This means that if we experience the world as moved by an extra-human source of meaning, including an extra-human source of evil, there is every reason to think that this is how things really are.
Grasping this point requires a great deal of unlearning. Heidegger argues that the subject-object distinction as we normally construe it is, in fact, a modern “construct” (with ancient roots). And he argues, further, that the very basis of das Gestell, of the idea that beings are nothing more than raw material for human use, lies in the construction of the idea of a thing-like “subject” that exists “in here,” in a kind of interior cabinet of consciousness, standing opposed (in every sense of the term) to objects “out there.” Here we see the true radicality of Heidegger’s thought, for he is challenging us to call into question our deepest modern self-conception.
Consider Heidegger’s words in Basic Problems of Phenomenology:
The cognitive faculty is not the terminal member of the relation between an external thing and the internal subject; rather, its essence is the relating itself, and indeed in such a way that the intentional Dasein which thus relates itself as an existent is always already immediately dwelling among things. For the Dasein there is no outside, for which reason it is also absurd to talk about an inside.[7]
As a phenomenologist, Heidegger is asking us to consider whether the idea that we are a “thing inside” confronting a “thing outside” truly describes our actual experience of our situatedness in the world. For Heidegger this is merely a theory we have absorbed. The truth is that I experience myself “out there” in the world with other things (though, as the quote indicates, this language is inadequate, for the inside-outside distinction is itself problematic). Except when I am engaged with my private thoughts, I am always engaged directly with the world. If I am true to my experience, I recognize this. And even those private thoughts relate directly or indirectly to the world, are formulated in language learned from others “out there in the world,” and would be impossible without prior engagement with that world.
When I assert that our experience of the world as containing an extra-human source of evil gives us every reason to think that this is really how things are, I am therefore not saying something like “there is every reason to think that this experience ‘matches up’ (or ‘corresponds’) to the world ‘out there.’” For this is, yet again, to buy into the Cartesian conception of a subject cut off from an external world, a subject whose impressions just might not “correspond” to reality. Under normal conditions (which prevail 99% of the time) there is no dichotomy between “what we experience” and “the world (out there).” What we experience is the world – in fact, experience just is the world disclosing itself to us in its being. And if the world discloses itself to us as containing a “force of evil” (or whatever we’d like to call it) then we are justified in saying that it does contain such a thing.
Can we go further than this? Can we attach a name and specific characteristics to this force of evil? Is it Satan? Is it Set? Is it Ahriman? My readers interested in Asatru may have been excited by the parallel I drew in part four between Schelling’s force of evil, which is essentially a force of chaos or inertia, and the role played by the “thursic forces” in Norse mythology. In that mythological “system,” evil is all that resists or acts against form, order, and health. The climactic battle of Ragnarok is a battle between the gods, who represent the light principle, and the giants, and spawn of the giants, who represent the dark force of chaos.
Christianity, of course, represents another direction. Heidegger was raised as a Catholic, but ceased to practice the religion, or any religion, in his maturity. I remarked earlier that “The more one explores Heidegger’s ideas, the more they reveal a religious and mystical dimension to his thought.” It is true that, at least superficially, the “fit” with Christianity is much closer than with Asatru – for reasons that should be obvious, and for other reasons we have not had the time to go into here (such as the fact that Heidegger clearly perceives “metaphysical man” as “fallen”). And Heidegger’s appropriation of Eckhart strengthens this impression – but perhaps only if we ignore the extent to which Eckhart presents us with a decidedly unorthodox Christianity.
However, phenomenology cannot underwrite such attempts to get more specific about just exactly what (or who) real evil is. These are attempts at personifying evil, and here we enter the realm of mythology (which, as most of my readers know, is not synonymous with “lies”). From a Heideggerean standpoint, the attempt to personify evil as Satan (or some such figure) is problematic because it makes evil into a subjectivity, a conscious subject. Effectively, this appears to be an attempt to make evil less alien, less terrifying by likening it to ourselves. As the reader may recall from part eight, Schelling argues that introducing a Satan figure to explain evil would simply push the problem further back: if men are tempted to evil by an evil, “fallen” creature, how then did that creature fall? How did it become evil in the first place?
Understanding evil as Mephistopheles is a kind of comfort. Mephistopheles (especially in Goethe’s version) is far more genial than Cthulhu. And Cthulhu, with its octopus head and batwings, is actually more genial, more familiar than chaos or the evil void. It may just be that evil is something entirely unlike a subject. It may be something, in fact, entirely beyond our capacity to know or to give form to at all. And it may just be that affirming this is part of the way to resist evil. Wouldn’t confidently personifying evil and saying that it is Satan, or some such, actually be an example of will – of claiming that we know and understand more than we really do? Resisting evil, in other words, may begin with affirming that it is real, but that it is also an impenetrable mystery – at least for us humans.
One of the interesting aspects of today’s cultural scene is the plethora of conservative “influencers” who are flocking to Christianity. More and more, it seems, convert – or return – with each passing day. A frequent topic of discussion in our circles is whether such and such influencer seems to be tending towards Christianity and about to announce his conversion. “It’s going to happen any day now,” friends will say to me (Joe Rogan is the current topic of speculation). It is fascinating that what seems to have drawn them to religion is their confrontation with the political Left. The extraordinary indecency of the Left today does indeed often seem to be demonic. It is enough to drive one into the arms of the angels.
Of course, most so-called “conservatives,” especially those holding political office, are serving the same system and see nothing problematic at all about the commodification of beings and about an ideal of “freedom” that amounts to freedom to exploit and consume. Nevertheless, it is a fact that those locating themselves on the political Left present us with the most extreme examples of modern perversity – and the most extreme examples of malice. In the face of this overwhelming perversity, for many people – those aforementioned influencers, and others – Christianity has essentially morphed into “the decency party.”
For most of them, the details of Christian teaching, and the differences between denominations, seem to be largely unimportant. They see Christianity as something clean, decent, and untouched (so they imagine) by modern perversity; a refuge, in other words, from evil. It is a reaction with which we can sympathize – even if we cannot ultimately follow them. What is indisputably true, however, is that the religious and mythological traditions that personify evil may offer us invaluable insights into its nature. And it is to those that I plan to turn, if and when I decide to write about evil again.
Accepting the reality of evil is obviously a bitter pill, and I do want to leave my readers with some hopeful words. I have some friends who are extraordinarily pessimistic. They do not need to be convinced of the reality of evil, and are readily persuaded by the sort of arguments I have presented here. What these folks actually may need to come to grips with is the reality of good. Let’s recall some of what Schelling has taught us: opposites are “one” in the sense that each has its being in the other; each is what it is only in opposition to the other. This is true of all opposites, including good and evil. Each is only because the other is.
Evil, Schelling teaches us, is a necessary condition for the good – or for the good to reveal itself. To repeat some of the ways in which Schelling expresses this idea in the Freiheitsschrift, at one point he states that sin is necessary because “only in the opposition of sin is revealed the most inner bond of the dependence of things and the being of God.”[8] And, later: “The arousal of self-will occurs only so that love in man may find a material or opposition in which it may realize itself.”[9] Evil is indeed a reality, but it is in opposition to evil that good expresses itself in the world.
I will end this long journey by repeating some of Heidegger’s comments on these ideas:
[Freedom] as a real faculty, that is, a decided liking of the good, is in itself the positing of evil at the same time. What would something good be which had not posited evil and taken it upon itself in order to overcome and restrain it? What would something evil be which did not develop in itself the whole trenchancy of an adversary of the good? Human freedom is not the decidedness for good or evil, but the decidedness for good and evil, or the decidedness for evil and good.[10]
Notes
[1] Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (rev. ed.) (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 27.
[2] The following passage, from Heidegger’s “Bremen Lectures,” has become quite famous, and is worth quoting at length: “A tract of land is imposed upon, namely for the coal and ore that subsists in it. The subsisting stone . . . is challenged forth and subsequently expedited along. The earth’s soil is drawn into such a placing and is attacked by it. It is ordered, forced into conscription. . . . Through such requisitioning [Bestellen] the land becomes a coal reserve, the soil an ore depository. This requisitioning is already of a different sort from that whereby the peasant had previously tended his field. Peasant activity does not challenge the farmland; rather it leaves the crops to the discretion of the growing forces; it protects them in their thriving. In the meantime, however, even the tending of the fields [die Feldbestellung] has gone over to the same requisitioning [Be-Stellen] that imposes upon the air for nitrogen, the soil for coal and ore, the ore for uranium, the uranium for atomic energy, and the latter for orderable destruction. Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry, in essence the same as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of countries, the same as the production of hydrogen bombs. But now what is it positioned toward, the coal that is positioned in the coal reserve, for example? It is not poised upon the table like the jug. The coal, for its part, is imposed upon, i.e., challenged forth, for heat, just as the ground was for coal; this heat is already imposed upon to set in place steam, the pressure of which drives the turbines, which keep a factory industrious, which is itself imposed upon to set in place machines that produce tools through which once again machines are set to work and maintained.” See Martin Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012), 26-27.
[3] Heidegger does not refer, as Schelling does, to a “reversed god,” nor does he use an equivalent expression. However, I would argue that this conception is fully in keeping with what he does say.
[4] For more information, see Joel Balkan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (New York: Free Press, 2004). This book analyzes the corporation in terms of the psychiatric profession’s criteria for sociopathy and concludes that the corporation is effectively a sociopath. “Corporation” literally means “embodiment.” The corporation is referred to as a “legal person” because corporations are treated before the law as if they were individuals.
[5] Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 48-49. For a systematic comparison of Heidegger and René Guénon see my essay “Heidegger Against the Traditionalists.”
[6] Sheehan interprets Gestell as the “world of exploitation.” See Thomas Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 258.
[7] Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, rev. ed., trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 66. See also Being And Time: “Of course, one is sometimes assured that the subject’s inside and its inner sphere is certainly not to be thought as a kind of ‘box’ or ‘cabinet.’ But what the positive meaning is of the ‘inside’ of immanence in which knowing is initially enclosed, and how the character of being of this ‘being inside’ of knowing is founded in the kind of being of the subject, about this there is silence. However this inner sphere might be interpreted, if one asks how knowing gets ‘out’ of it and achieves a ‘transcendence,’ it becomes evident that the knowing which presents such enigmas remains problematic unless one has first clarified how it is and what it is.” Stambaugh, 60-61.
[8] F.W.J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 55.
[9] Schelling, 64.
[10] Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1985), 156. Italics added.
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9 comments
Mr.Cleary, this series are very good!! Thanks for them.
Would you continue it with discussions on Hegel and Nietzsche?
Thank you! Yes, the next figures I will cover will be Hegel, and then Nietzsche.
Within a few years, after I’ve retired and can really delve into these subjects, I’m going to go back and read all your wonderfully in-depth examinations of various thinkers and works here at CC, ideally with [many of] the texts under review in hand for parallel consultation. I’m interested in identifying and studying the really fundamental ideational problems which have created the intellectual climate through which the accelerating process of white extinction gets treated as a non-event. I feel this would be a most rewarding way to spend my retirement.
I hope you continue building this excellent body of work. Thank you.
Thank you for your kind words. I hope you can start soon!
More to come . . .
Great conclusion to the essay series! I really liked that 2nd footnote. What exactly is the language used by Heidegger when it is written “challenged forth”, “imposed upon”, etc.? Perhaps gelassenheit is less “challenging” than we thought, lol.
Thank you! And thanks also for making the entire journey with me. Hegel is next. As to the German you ask about:
Challenge forth = herausfordern
Impose upon (for) = stellen (auf)
It was a pleasure to have ridden along!
Regarding the land, it seems like Heidegger favored the old peasant ways because they did nothing to fundamentally change the land as it was. It’s the difference between skimming a little bit off the top versus a total pillaging, I think. And that total pillaging is what happens when that land’s resources is completely repurposes towards something else, with no shot of its specific material being returned to what it was doing prior.
See this essay I published a number of years ago:
https://counter-currents.com/2012/10/the-fourfold/
Selecting the following as a choice excerpt for the purposes of gelassenheit:
“This mortal existence – living between the sheltering earth and the mercurial sky, in awareness of divine presence – is dwelling. Heidegger tells us that
Mortals dwell in that they save the earth – taking the word in the old sense still known to Lessing. Saving does not only snatch something from a danger. To save really means to set something free into its own presencing. To save the earth is more than to exploit it or even to wear it out. Saving the earth does not master the earth and does not subjugate it, which is merely one step from spoliation. [PLT, 150]
Mortals “save” the earth, and they “receive the sky. They leave to the sun and the moon their journey, to the stars their courses, to the seasons their blessing and inclemency; they do not turn night into day nor day into a harassed unrest” (PLT, 150). Here we see the anti-modern subtext in Heidegger: mortals (i.e., authentic, pre-modern men) practice what Heidegger calls Gelassenheit (letting-beings-be). They accept the earth and sky with a certain humility, not forcing them, and what appears within them, into pre-given categories, or attempting to break down the natural limits that sky and earth impose upon our lives (e.g., they do seek to “turn night into day”).
Now the last thing left to demystify is what it means to “wait for the divinities” in my never-ceasing quest to figure out what Heidegger wants us to do besides “nothing at all.”
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