Eulogy for the Sciences: What Darling Babes They Will Have Been! (An Appropriating Expropriation)

The conflict as to the interpretation of Being cannot be allayed, because it has not yet been enkindled.  And in the end this is not the kind of conflict one can [just] ‘bluster into’; it is of the kind which cannot get enkindled unless preparations are made for it. 

                                                                        — Martin Heidegger 

Those lines are from the penultimate paragraph of Being and Time. Let’s help prepare for the coming fire by adding more to the pile that awaits enkindling.

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Theology is sometimes said to be the Queen of the Sciences. Well, if theology is a science at all, there’s no special reason she should not claim such sovereignty, and she may well be the legitimate contender for the empty throne, should it need to be filled.  But even if she Queens it over all the other sciences, that would still leave theology to be just one science among all the sciences.  In contrast, philosophy is no science at all, and therefore no Queen of them all. Yet, though she is no royalty among scientific plebs, philosophy is Mother to them all, since the sciences themselves — science as such and as a whole — springs from philosophy as from the womb.  

Like all mothers — and all fathers, too — philosophy sometimes messes up in her attempts to do the best she can by her children, which means the best she can for them.  After all, every real mother loves her child, and seeks, in her heart of hearts, only what’s best for the child. And philosophy is, or at least can be, a very real, loving mother indeed!  But even the best mothers, with the very best intentions toward their children, can end up missing the mark of their own intentions and hurting their children rather than helping them. That can even take the form of failing to see and appreciate just who her children really are. Mom can sometimes give her children bad advice, sometimes even force them to conform to that advice, convinced as she is that in her heart mother knows best. And she is right:  mothers in their hearts do know best.  

The problem, however, is that Mom sometimes doesn’t know her own heart.  Then her love goes bad. It gets corrupted. It can even end up doing such damage to the children she loves in her heart that she may as well have hated them all along instead.  But even when that does happen, it can still even sometimes also happen that the mother all inadvertently — that is, despite her own betrayal of herself in losing track of her heart — ends up loving her children well after all, by giving them the golden, never to be repeated opportunity really to mother their own real mother in return for all the mothering she has lavished upon them without ever counting the cost over many years.

Another thing altogether is how fathers can be “real mothers,” too, but in a different, degenerate sense of that expression. Fathers become such obscene mothers precisely when they forget themselves and their own hearts, which are very different from the hearts of mothers, as different as are the act involved in fathering a child and the act involved in bearing one in a mother’s womb. As old Socrates knew, only sterile fathers should risk trying to act like mothers, just as even after their own child-bearing days are gone real mothers in the non-pejorative sense become midwives, each after her own fashion.  For a father to be a real father, however, and not to degenerate into a “real mother” of a father, he must always keep clearly in mind the difference between fathers and mothers, and not confuse the two.

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Without having to pass any final judgment on the matter, we might well profit from asking how good at mothering the sciences old Descartes proved himself to be. Descartes’ fatherly heart was certainly into that task, as willing fathers often readily are.  Of that no one has any right to doubt (pace Descartes). But Descartes may not have known his own fatherly heart, for all that. Did Descartes succeed in mothering the sciences well when he said what he did, aiming to fulfill his own heart’s best intentions?  Or did he betray himself and his own-most best intentions?

If we ourselves seek to act at the bidding of Mother philosophy’s own heart, we need to keep on asking ourselves that question as we go on to listen, now, to what Descartes said, to and for the sciences as such and as a whole, and speaking on behalf of philosophy: He said that the sciences were there for the sake of “establishing man’s [his fatherly word for it] dominion and control over nature,” and recommended to the sciences that, to fulfill that purpose, which he took to be their own, they adopt his “method,” the way of relating to the world, and maintaining the stance toward the world, in which, as he articulated it, in a perhaps all too typically fatherly premature ejaculation, one would “accept as true only what cannot conceivably be doubted.”  

Well, we must ask if that arrow hit its mark — or, to continue to mix metaphors, if that sperm found its way to the egg it was blindly seeking. 

Gaea and Uranus (Earth and Sky), parents of the gods

NOTE: The material in both this post and the preceding one was actually written in 2012, as a two-part piece for the Heidegger seminar I was teaching at the time.

What the Demonstrations Demonstrate

What the current demonstrations themselves demonstrate is not malevolence on the part of the demonstrators. Whatever ill will is at work is to be found, not in the demonstrators, but in those who wish to silence them: the police and the coercive power they serve. 

The resort to force is always the answer of those who have no answer when their authority is called into question. The demonstrations demonstrate that.

In fact, that same thing has been demonstrated time and time again by other, earlier demonstrations. To give just three examples, it was demonstrated in the 1967 in Detroit, in 1969 at Kent State University, and in 2011 on Wall Street.

Another thing the demonstrations demonstrate is the inequality rampant in our society. Indeed, it is precisely in order to call that pervasive inequality to our collective attention that the demonstrators are demonstrating. Since the fault-lines of inequality in American society always above all follow racial divisions, their greatest weight falls most heavily upon people of color — just such people as George Floyd himself. That is exactly what the protests are consciously protesting against, and that protest is precisely what calls those who presume to have the authority in our society into question, thereby eliciting the very response to violence already addressed.

Yet a third thing that the demonstrations demonstrate is the solidarity of objective interest that unites all of the oppressed with one another, and with all those who stand with them in protest against inequality. The demonstrations demonstrate that there is just such a unity of objective interest, regardless of all the differences that may exist between the apparent, perceived interests of the diverse segments of the oppressed. 

In fact, it is in the interest of the oppressors to create and to foster just such diversity of perceived interest among the oppressed, thereby setting one segment of the community of all the oppressed against other segments of that same community—for example, setting white unemployed or underemployed people against people of color. That is the same old and effective strategy of divide and conquer that has always served coercive power.

The demonstrations demonstrate that.

Tribute to an Old Nazi (An Expropriating Appropriation)

Our humanity is not a matter of who we are, but of how we are whoever we are.  Thus, respecting humanity, whether in the person of ourselves or in the persons of others, is not a matter of establishing a clear identity for ourselves, either collectively or individually.  Nor is it a matter of preserving such an identity, once established.  That is, being human is not becoming aware of who we are, then protecting that against whomever and whatever we, for whatever reason, perceive as somehow threatening it.  That is especially so, if the supposed threat consists, as it often does, in no more than our supposed enemies simply having--in our eyes, even if not in their own—a supposedly different identity than the one we identify with.  

Being fully human is, first, a matter, not of establishing our identity, but of stabilizing our hold on ourselves, what-ever and who-ever we are.  And it is then an ongoing matter of demonstrating self-constancy or self-consistency in maintaining our grip on ourselves, thereby keeping faith in ourselves, staying steadily faithful to ourselves.  We must, in effect, keep trust or faith in ourselves, ever vigilant against betraying ourselves by literally letting ourselves go, forgetting ourselves like some already toilet-trained and out-of- diapers child going potty in its pants (forgive me if I’m forgetting myself and all my training in the proprieties by putting it that poopy way). If we don’t in that way keep the faith, we inevitably will and do betray humanity itself.  

In such betrayal we betray humanity both in the person of ourselves and in the persons of all others, whether those others share any identity with us or not.  If we do not maintain our self-stability we will do again what we have so horribly and so often done before, inevitably forgetting our very humanity and “going ape” again, like the pet monkey going ape in the bar his master has taken him to, running all around in a frenzy, defecating all over everything, in William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.  To use another, less amusing but every bit as accurate, perhaps more properly sobering way of putting it (to borrow from a source I’ll let go unnamed, at the risk of being accused of plagiarism for my omission), like all the “good German” Nazis saying “This way to the gas, ladies and gentlemen!” Such self-styled good Germans murdered millions upon millions of people for no better reason than that those oh-so-good-Germans took those they murdered to be Jews, regardless of whether those murdered  took themselves that way or not. To give a paradigmatic example, Jean Améry, born Hans Meier, never took himself for a Jew until the Nazis forced him to, by making him one without his consent and even against his own wishes and sense of himself, in their Nuremberg Laws of 1935.

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In short, to give a perhaps surprising condensation, the meaning of Being is to let beings be.  What Being itself means, whither it is tending, is just to let all beings be, that’s all!  Being means, wants, tends, and intends just this:  to let all beings be — all beings:  rich or poor, near or far, big or little, pagan or Christian, Arab or Jew, Greek-Jew or Jew-Greek, conscious or unconscious, natural or nurtured, fish or fowl, animal or vegetable or mineral, man or woman, certified citizen or “illegal alien,” rock or scissors or paper, trees or stones, dolphins or homo sapiens-sapiens, snails or frogs or puppy-dogs’ tails, sugar or spice or everything nice:  all beings!  

Just let them all be!  Nothing more. No big deal at all. And that’s what our humanity’s for, what being human means: staying faithful to ourselves and in that very process letting go of all our cherished images of ourselves so Being can have us, all of us, and use us to take place in and as us, at last fulfilling its own tendency, its own meaning, in us and through us and as us, by letting everything that in any sense “is,” just be, just as and what and how it is.  

Thus, becoming human is perhaps as simple yet hard and rare as learning how to hear all the way through the lyrics of a certain old Beatles’ song, all the way through the song’s “simple words of wisdom” to what those words are telling us, what they are pointing and directing us to.  And that is simply this, as the lyrics of the same song tell us, if we hear them clear through: “Let it be!”  (Or, as the God of Abraham and Jacob and Isaac, the God of Saul-become-Paul and that devil Peter, the God of Mohammed the Prophet and Mohammed-Ali, says at the very start of Genesis, at least had he said it in Latin: “Fiat!”)  

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And that, in my judgment, is a fitting tribute to that old Nazi.  It gives him just what he deserves.  May all old Nazis be damned!  May they all rot in hell! 

Indeed, I’m quite certain that all old Nazis, including the one who lurked in Heidegger, already are, and always have been, damned to hell by their own hands. To which I can only add “Amen!” — which is to say, “So be it!” 

NOTE: The material in this post was actually written in 2012, for the Heidegger seminar I was teaching at the time.