BEING JEWISH / READING HEIDEGGER:
AN ONTOLOGICAL INQUIRY
INTRODUCTION
I am
a Jew who reads Heidegger. Nothing remarkable in that! There are
many of us. Of course this relationship does require a bit of maintenance
work around the edges in order to preserve an appropriate emotional distance
from the man-as-he-lived, while at the same time permitting the most intense
intellectual and spiritual intimacy with the man-as-he-thought-and -wrote. But
even though, as the title suggests, this book is very much concerned with the
relationship between Being Jewish and Reading Heidegger, it is not at all
concerned with any sort of reconciliation--relationship repair, as it
were. It doesn't even treat the possible philosophical implications of
Heidegger's "silence" about Jews and Judaism before, during, and after National
Socialism. Rather, I mean to explore the relationship between Being Jewish
and Reading Heidegger solely at the naive level of a concrete
phenomenology. The concrete phenomenology I have in mind might best be
clarified by relating it to the syntactical structure of the simple declarative
sentence: In what follows, "Being Jewish" is the subject; "Reading
Heidegger" is the predicate. That is to say, the "subject" which herein
reads Heidegger is "Being Jewish."
The awkwardness of the
foregoing suggests that "Being Jewish" does not quite fit as the subject
of a simple declarative sentence. Perhaps that is because such a sentence
requires that the subject be a stable nominative— that it "sit still" long
enough for us to conceive of it an agent, performing, or being performed upon by
the verb. Being Jewish simply will not sit still! It is always
already on its way towards becoming what it is. Its movement begins way
before any sentence's attempt to catch up with it, and continues long
after the period which brings that attempt to arbitrary closure. In its refusal
to be limited by the syntax of the sentence, we might say that Being
Jewish is simply acting as Dasein— a "being-in-the-world which always,
already has been on the way to becoming what it is. In the textual moment
you have happened upon here, the being-in-the-world of "Being Jewish" is
"Reading Heidegger." But, bearing the pretense of a work of philosophy,
this textual moment means to raise Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger beyond a mere
circumstantial meeting between subject and predicate, to the level of a
comprehensive concept. In the Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,
Heidegger makes explicit the objective I have in mind:
In each case they(philosophical concepts)comprehend the whole within themselves, they are comprehensive concepts (in-begriffe). Yet they are also comprehensive in a second sense which is equally essential and which ties in with the first: they also in each case comprehend within themselves the comprehending human being and his or her Dasein—not as an addition, but in such a way that these concepts are not comprehensive without there being a comprehending in this second sense and vice-versa. No concept of the whole without the comprehending of philosophical existence. Metaphysical thinking is comprehensive thinking in this double sense. It deals with the whole and it grips existence through and through(9).
The comprehensiveness of
the concept is thus achieved by the subject being joined to the object of
investigation so tightly and fully as to render a whole and complete
phenomenological representation of a possibility of philosophical
existence. In order to accomplish this, the subject and the predicate at
work in philosophical conceptualizing must be "thought" as inseparable from one
another. As Heidegger declares a few pages earlier, "Philosophy is
philosophizing(4)." If the business of philosophy is to conceptualize, the
philosopher must be "en-concepted" (ergriffen ) in/by the concept being
conceptualized. Being thus en-concepted is being in movement toward an
almost con-substantial intimacy with die Sache selbst, the object of
phenomenological research.
Heidegger's insistence on the implicative depth required of the subject in the
conceptual work of philosophy goes all the way back to the early twenties and
his ongoing project of reading Aristotle. In a central passage of the so
called "Aristotle Introduction" of 1922, Heidegger defines the object of
philosophical research as "Factical human Dasein as such," then goes on to say:
"The concrete specification of the philosophical problematic is to be derived
from this, its object(360)."A few pages later, Heidegger gives us a more exact
characterization of the philosophical problematic so derived, which he reads out
of Aristotle's Physics : "The central theme (of philosophy) is the being
in the how of its being moved.(373)." In the present case, the being "being
moved" is "Being Jewish" and the "how" concerns its being moved as a
philosophical subject. The "predicate" by which the subject is moved
("en-predicated," we might say) is "Reading Heidegger." The question
before us, then, is "How is 'Being Jewish,' as philosophical subject,
moved by 'Reading Heidegger'"?
Of course, any serious reading of a great philosophical text is
necessarily performed by an interpreting subject moved by a text.
But how much of the reading subject's character— one's own particular experience
of being moved— need be displayed as part of a meaningful performance of
the reading? In philosophy, I would say "none." That is, none
explicitly. The subjectivity of the reader is indeed present, but
only "in front of" the subject herself. The ways in which the reader is
moved by the text in her particularity as a subject must be seamlessly woven
into the fabric of her interpretation as it unfolds in relation to the text and
the shared "Sache " within. Otherwise the work becomes an "
Intellectual Memoir"—something along the lines of Hans Georg Gadamer's
Philosophical Apprenticeships— interesting, in its own way, to be sure, but not
philosophy.
So why do I insist on featuring my
subjectivity, in all its blatant particularity, in the book's title? And then
take it up first thing? Mainly, because I mean to indicate very definitely that
this book is, in fact, an exploration of the relationship between Being
Jewish and Reading Heidegger. But after we have done with the explanatory
preliminaries in the introduction, there will be no further reference to your
author as subject, Jewish or otherwise.That is because the relationship between
Being Jewish and Reading Heidegger being investigated here is "too close" to
permit subjectivity, as such, to insert itself. The closeness pursued in what
follows might be characterized as a "hermeneutical" closeness— an intimacy
between a being and a reading, in which the reading is so thoroughly grounded in
the being as a being, that the being shows itself as what it is in only in and
through the reading. If this showing is sufficiently comprehensive, the
purview of the subject-predicate relationship ( its teorein, we might say) may
extend beyond the merely factical to the ontological.
FACTICITY AS THE GROUND OF ONTOLOGY
Let me further detail the underlying perspective of the project by
describing how it is grounded in a rather conventional principle of Jewish
hermeneutics, but then brings that principle to the point of a rather radical
heresy. To suggest that Being Jewish might be phenomenologically
characterized as a way of reading rather closely follows the contours of
Jewish tradition in its view of its own unfolding: Being Jewish
comes about in each generation— indeed in each individual Jew in each
generation— through a devoted commitment to a certain way of reading the
Torah. That is, the way in which each individual Jew becomes what he
already is—most fully realizes his own-most potential of Being Jewish— is
through a lifelong commitment to the care-ful reading of the Torah.
Now the heretical character of the present work does not quite reach the level
of claiming that Being Jewish may be satisfied through a careful reading of
Heidegger in place of the Torah. I also readily grant that there are
other ways of being-in-the-world that may find themselves strongly implicated in
carefully reading Heidegger. But I will elaborate a Being Jewish that
finds itself so deeply attuned to Heidegger's textual voice that
Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger as a factical Subject/Predicate is transformed
into a comprehensive ontological concept.
The character of the work as a phenomenological ontology may be further
clarified by a brief excursus into an earlier version of the title. This earlier
title (rejected in hopes of finding a more convivial initial connection with
potential publishers and eventual readers) took the form of an item on one of
those analogies tests we all hated so much: "Being Jewish: Reading
Heidegger, Facticity : Ontology." ( In case you've forgotten, the
foregoing should be read "Being Jewish is to Reading Heidegger, as Facticity is
to Ontology." ) By formatting the book's project in this way, I mean to
suggest a mirroring dance between the two sets of terms, such that the
relationship I will elaborate between Being Jewish and Reading Heidegger mirrors
the relationship between facticity and ontology. I should add, hopefully
without causing the reader to collapse in a vertiginous swirl, that the
mirroring dance to be performed between the two sets of terms is itself a
mimetic reflection of the thematic development we find in certain of Heidegger's
lecture courses in the early twenties, in which he grounds the formation of his
ontology in a reading of key passages in Aristotle.
To round out this beginning overview of the project, I will abuse the privilege
of explicit subjectivity I have allowed myself a bit further in order to tailor
the terms in the fuller version of the title just elaborated to my purposes,
while at the same time leaving them enough freedom to linger under their own
sway in the essays to follow. First, "facticity."
Early on, in a well known letter to his student, Karl Loewith, Heidegger
poignantly announces the factic ground of his thinking: "Factically I am a
Christian theologian." The significance of this announcement is deepened
by Heidegger's insistence, around this same time, that facticity—the lived
experience of being a self— is the only valid basis for ontology. Ontology
which is not grounded in the pre-theoretical "originating
domain"(Ursprungsgebiet) (117) of lived experience condemns itself to
lifeless abstraction ( Ent-leben )(46). But, of course, facticity, in its
persistent concreteness, necessarily correlates with the
being-in-the-world of a particular self. The factic particularity
Heidegger predicates of himself as the very essence of his being as a
philosophical subject thus embodies the basic problematic of his ontology: How
to square the very particularistic, even idiosyncratic "Factically I am a
Christian theologian" with the ontological claims of his project.
The presumption of a productive similarity between our two facticities—My "Being
Jewish," and Heidegger's "Being a Christian Theologian"—constitutes the moving
force behind this book. Inevitably, of course, growing out of such an
exploration of similarities will be the discovery of significant
differences—differences which will likewise bear on our understanding of the
problematical relationship between the seemingly bounded particularity of
"facticities," and the all encompassing comprehensiveness of ontological
concepts. But here, in the autobiographical prologue, it is the
similarities which most provoke us: What did Heidegger mean to say to
Loewith? (And what do I mean to say to you?) Heidegger himself clarifies (
for the both of us) :
I work concretely and factically out of my " I am," out of my intellectual and wholly factic origin, milieu, life-contexts, and whatever is available to me from these as a vital experience in which I live. . . to this facticity of mine belongs what I would in brief call the fact that I am a " Christian Theologian (78)."
Heidegger has no choice but to "read" his ontology off his factical
"I am." "I am no philosopher," Heidegger goes on to say in another
part of the letter, "and have no illusions of even doing anything at all
comparable( Dahlstrom, 794)." The announcement has the tone of a definitive—one
might almost say self-righteous— affirmation of who he is, as a basis for
philosophizing. This affirmation of who he is also excludes, in no
uncertain terms, who he is not. He will not think ontology as Hegel did;
he will not speak from those lofty heights. (At least not yet!) Rather, he
will speak from his own factical ground. This factical ground is what is given
to him to philosophize—his philosophical "gift." Affirming it, as he does,
constitutes perhaps the first "new beginning" of his thinking. He will
begin from where he already is — "always already has been"— but now
with a full recognition of its value. One is reminded here of
Nietzsche's admonitions to " become what one is," "to love one's
fate," to say, "not this I know, but thus I will it. "
Heidegger himself eloquently restates this fundamental principle of Nietzschean
hermeneutics in Was Heisst Denken:
We receive many gifts of many kinds. But the highest and really most lasting gift given to us is always our essential nature, with which we are gifted in such a way that we are what we are only through it. That is why we owe thanks for this endowment, first and unceasingly( WHD 94/142)."
THE PHILOSOPHICAL VALUE OF " BEING JEWISH"
So the "Being Jewish" in my title means to suggest an affirmation which plays
a role in the ontological inquiries to follow similar to Heidegger's "Being a
Christian Theologian." But why not just put it in a letter? The only real
interest it would seem to have here would be to foreshadow a kind of
philosophical ethnography: a report and analysis of one person's
experience as a Jew reading Heidegger. But of course, that's not the
point here, any more than Heidegger's being a Christian theologian was the
"point" of his thinking. Thinking ontology as he did not make him a better
Christian theologian, nor did he use his ontological thinking to do or speak
Christian theology. Rather it was— always was and would remain— the
factical ground of his ontology. In his letter to Loewith, he merely owned
this facticity, perhaps to "indicate" it to himself as the essential
factical ground of his thinking . I make my own parallel indication explicit in
the work itself in order to say that Being Jewish not only serves here as
the factical ground of the ontological inquiry which follows, but that that
factical ground will itself be phenomenologically explored in and through the
unfolding of the ontology.
By identifying myself with Heidegger's affirmation as an explicit focus of the
book, I mean to call attention to what one might call the "factic
essentiality" of my Being Jewish. That is to say, Being Jewish is and always has
been of the utmost significance to the hermeneutical unfolding of my factical "I
am." I name its significance "hermeneutical" to indicate the primary modality in
which Being Jewish shows itself: Namely, as a way of reading. I also mean
to emphasize that in the present context, my affirmation of Being Jewish is in
no way a confession of faith. But, on the other hand, as I think was
also the case with Heidegger's factically essential Christianity, the factic
essentiality of my Being Jewish has a history—is historical— and as such, has
played a number of roles in my life, perhaps the most significant, prior
to the philosophical, being an opening to the path of religious
experience. It is this religious experience, undergone primarily in an earlier
time, but lingering longingly in the present, which marks Being Jewish as
a being-in-the-world amenable to philosophical investigation.
Indeed, I would argue that any serious ontological undertaking requires a
particularly intense factical experience in which, and through which(er-leben)
the ontology will be thought. But one must take care that the
thinking does not emerge directly out of that facticity. If that were to
occur, the ontology would always remain in the service of the facticity from
which it was derived. And so it must go through a kind of "temporal filter,"
which involves more than just the passage of time. I would say (at least
on the basis of the two cases we have at hand) that as the factical ground of
thinking, religious experience must be "abandoned," at least
momentarily, as the essential ground of one's faith. Or perhaps we
might more accurately say that one's thinking must have been "abandoned by" the
experience—cut off from it, —as a call to faith. But whichever way one
conceives of the occurrence; for purposes of thinking, one's factic
essentiality must no longer be in thrall to religion(B&T 206). Dasein must
have had the experience of having been "let go" — we might say "set
free"—by religion as its primary preoccupation (Bekuemmerung).
It should be emphasized that this "letting go" is not at all complete, though I
cannot specify the degree of its "incompleteness." However, I can say
that the "letting go" is sufficiently incomplete as to leave one with the
lingering sense of still being fundamentally connected to the originary
experience, such that one is preoccupied with a longing to somehow return to
it. In the Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger likens this
condition to a "homesickness." But, as the ground of philosophy, the longing to
be home directs one not to a particular place, but toward "being as a whole"
: The philosophical subject longs to be at home everywhere at once, and at
all times within the whole.(5)" This "within the whole," is named by
Heidegger "World." The longing to be at home everywhere might be
characterized as the unrequited ontological promise which philosophy carries
with it from the originary factic experience of religion.
Though decidedly unrequited, the promise of "being at home everywhere at the
same time" shows itself differently in philosophy than it did as a religious
experience. Originally, the promise seemed contained within the factic
particularity of religious experience as a call to faith. However, before one
has had the chance to fully "compose oneself" to respond to the call, its
"content,"—what it seems to be calling one to—becomes other than a call to
faith, at least to a particular religious faith. Nevertheless the
personal"force with which it knowingly addresses each individual Dasein is just
as compelling, even though the home Dasein is called to is not identifiable as
anyplace local. But whether the promise of homecoming is conceived of as
local, universal, or somehow both, "One can't go home
again." Probably because there is no such place. Indeed there
probably never was. Being-at-home-everywhere-at-once must be
philosophically "created," but at the same time still must also be
grounded in the originary factic experience of "home," localized within a
particular religion. Heidegger explains this phenomenon as part and parcel of
Dasein's "being historical":
Dasein. . . is in itself historical in so far as it is its possibility. In being futural dasein is its past. It comes back to it in the 'how. 'The manner of its coming back is among other things, conscience. Only the "how" can be repeated. The past-experienced as authentic historicity is anything but what is past. It is something to which one can return again and again(19).
This repeatable "how" of authentic historicity I identify with
Heidegger's reference, in the 1922 "Aristotle Introduction," to the central
thematic of philosophy as "The being in the how of its being moved." The
possibility of return to the "how" provides a certain—though
uncertain—indication of the authenticity of the historical moment, now
philosophically affirmed as one's essential "I am." Even though this
indication of authenticity is merely provisional, put in place to mark the
factic ground from which the work of ontology might proceed, it is sufficient to
maintain the original factic experience as philosophically available in its
"how,"—as still somehow "there" as Heimat, the place to which one belongs. But
now, in philosophy, the call to Heimat is made more difficult to hear and
interpret because of its refusal to be localized—its insistence on being THERE
for philosophical Dasein only everywhere at once.
Heidegger describes the transformation of the call in philosophy this way:
"Dasein is at once the caller and the one called(277)." Philosophy
forces upon the thinker the realization that the originary experience of the
call as coming from some "foreign power invading Dasein," was merely a necessary
prelude to the earthshaking discovery that Dasein stands alone.
Heretofore, the soul-invading power of the call seemed like it could only have
come from God. Indeed, one might have even heard the call as, in some way,
spoken in God's voice. But that celestial voice, heard, paradoxically, as
compellingly local, but at the same time resoundingly universal, was always
Dasein-with-itself—the binding together of the particular with the
universal. When one returns to the "how" of the originary call, Heidegger
suggests, "The manner of its coming back, is, among other things conscience."
One might also say that what Dasein is calling itself "to" through the call of
conscience is ( and always has been) "care." Yet the way to understand
care— to think it ontologically— still must be grounded in the facticity of its
originarily being what it was. Thinking the call as the call to care links
its present showing as conscience to its originary factical showing as the call
of faith and thus makes a factically grounded ontology possible.
BEING JEWISH AS CARE
In the case of Being Jewish, the locus classicus of the originary factic call of
care is in Joshua 1:9 : "The book of the law ( The Torah) shall not depart
out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night."
The conscientious care of the Jew is summoned by, and directed to the words of
the Torah. Being Jewish in the how of its being moved is thus profoundly
hermeneutical— a dwelling with the words of a sacred text. The true
Heimat of the Jew is not so much the Land of Israel, as the text of the
Torah—a text which has the power to transform a wilderness of desert and
sagebrush into a "promised land, flowing with milk and honey." Even without the
land, the promissory power of the word remains, arguably even strengthened by
exile from the localized physical space. Being Jewish turns out to be an ongoing
responsibility to interpret and re-interpret the word in order to continue to
heed its call. In another Biblical text, central to rabbinic Judaism, this
ongoing responsibility to interpret is itself interpreted as "teaching" the word
" diligently to thy children." The constancy of one's relationship to the
word is how Judaism is transmitted from generation to generation. The
"how" of this originary experience of connection to the word, always available
to repetition through teaching, is perhaps most poignantly indicated in
the rabbinic adage that every Jew is responsible to feel as though he himself
stood at Sinai, and heard the words of the Law. This originary experience
of having been there and "heard" the Word is what drives the teaching of
it. The transmission of the word as lived experience is part and parcel of
the response one is called to make.
This induced experience of somehow "having been there" accompanies one's
ongoing sense of Being Jewish. And so one's capacity to hear the words
with the originary force of their utterance remains palpably real, such
that even if one is no longer observant, one nonetheless can find oneself
occasionally "taken" with the words of the Torah in somewhat the same way.
This time, however, the implications one draws from the experience are not the
same.
Still finding that the words of the Torah can sometimes draw one into a powerful
and personal relationship with them, but now without any of the familiar,
conventional ground for such experiences of connection, frees one to experience
that relationship to other words in other texts until finally one finds oneself
in philosophy— committed to an ongoing inquiry (Versuch) into the
relationship with words—a relationship which not only gives the text the power
to speak, but to speak what seems like the truth.. Though the relationship, as
it is factically available for philosophical study, is never entirely
separate from its original content or context as Torah, it is never again
reducible to it. Once its philosophical value is foregrounded, the orginary
relationship to the words of the Torah becomes a "formal indication" of a
possibility of philosophical existence. The hermeneutical work of
phenomenology begins with the discovery of such possibilities which remain
available in one's facticity, but now only as indications of ontology. The
particularity of Being Jewish thus becomes a resource to draw on— a pattern of
historical connections indicating an ontological possibility. This
indication can be relied upon because it is grounded in the particular factic
forms through which history continually unfolds. These forms comprise the
set of hermeneutical connections indicated by the word "Tradition." The
words in certain texts seem capable of binding successive generations of
interpreters together in a "community of understanders." The authority
which informs this interpretive tradition, as it unfolds, provides the community
with an ongoing warrant to believe that the "truth"— or at least a version of it
appropriate to the community's being-in- the- world— lies somehow within its
hermeneutical ken. Not at one time and in one place. But in all times and
in all places. This is the wonder which gives rise to what Gadamer calls, " The
Universal Scope of Hermeneutical Reflection": How may we account for the
fact that the movement of tradition in history—that is, particular facticites in
the how of their being moved—appears everywhere to be basically the same?
It is this most basic
question, giving hermeneutical reflection its universal ( ontological) scope,
which links Being Jewish to Reading Heidegger. Though historically grounded in
religious autobiography, Being Jewish is factically gifted with a relationship
to the word which throws philosophical Dasein into a lifelong project of
questioning the relationship. Of course, this relationship to the word is not at
all confined to factically Being Jewish any more than Heidegger's factically
being a Christian theologian limited the range of the ontological thinking that
it grounded. Heidegger found his factic essentiality "suitable" as the
ground for his ontology. The importance of the announcement in the letter to
Loewith is Heidegger's recognition of this suitability as always already having
been .
What makes "Being a
Christian Theologian" a suitable factical ground for Heidegger's ontology?
Heidegger of course never explicitly says. But the remarkable "attunement"
that the version of Being Jewish elaborated in the present work finds in Reading
Heidegger suggests an affinity between Being Jewish and "Being Heidegger" as
ways of reading. Another "discarded" version of my title might have read:
" Being Jewish and Being Heidegger: Facticity Reading the Way to
Ontology." But such a title might over-estimate the similarity of our
particular facticities at the cost of significant differences. So I will
leave the historical particularity of what it means to be Heidegger aside, along
with the historical particularity of my Being Jewish, and turn to the
relationship to ontology these particular facticities share. That relationship,
which I also find reflected in my own reading of Heidegger's texts, will be
shown to be embedded in the repeated (and repeatable) hermeneutical
configuration which informs the movement of tradition through time. The
experience of Reading Heidegger I am trying to account for here has been for me
a series of returns to the authentic "how" of Being Jewish. Though it will
not be explicitly argued here, I think there is good reason to believe that
Heidegger found in his own reading of central texts in the philosophical
tradition a similarly repeated "authentic" return to his factically being a
Christian theologian. What I do hope to communicate in what follows is the
enlightening pleasure in Reading Heidegger's texts as a re-enactment of the
primordial always- already- having- been of the relationship between Dasein and
the Word.
Drop me a note at
allen.scult@drake.edu