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Heidegger’s Phenomenological Concept of Violence
Abstract
This article accounts for Heidegger’s phenomenological concept of violence from the period of Being and Time. Violence is relevant for Heidegger in two different contexts: (i) methodological, where we speak of hermeneutic violence, and (ii) thematic, where we should speak of existential violence. The former is grounded in the latter. In the first part of the article, I analyze hermeneutic violence, showing that this concept is ambiguous, and one has to distinguish between two different meanings of it. In the second part of the article, I show that at the core of the original sense lies the existential violence of bursting out of senselessness. In the final part, I contextualize Heidegger’s concept in light of the contemporary phenomenological developments of the phenomenon of violence, showing that existential violence is constitutive and has the peculiar character of being at the same time sense-destroying and sense-making.
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This article examines the concept of existence underlying Carl Schmitt’s political philosophy—a concept is that Heidegger largely shares. Can such a conception do justice to our political life? Or is it, in fact, inimical to it? The crucial issue here is that of political identity and the role that violence plays in its formation. The article concludes by examining Jan Patočka’s account of existence as motion and applying it to our political commitments.
The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger's 'Being and Time' contains seventeen chapters by leading scholars of Heidegger. It is a useful reference work for beginning students, but also explores the central themes of Being and Time with a depth that will be of interest to scholars. The Companion begins with a section-by-section overview of Being and Time and a chapter reviewing the genesis of this seminal work. The final chapter situates Being and Time in the context of Heidegger's later work. The remaining chapters examine the core issues of Being and Time, including the question of being, the phenomenology of space, the nature of human being (our relation to others, the importance of moods, the nature of human understanding, language), Heidegger's views on idealism and realism and his position on skepticism and truth, Heidegger's account of authenticity (with a focus on his views on freedom, being toward death, and resoluteness) and the nature of temporality and human historicality.
This essay provides an analysis of the role of affectivity in Martin Heidegger’s writings from the mid- to late 1920s. We begin by situating his account of mood within the context of his project of fundamental ontology in Being and Time. We then discuss the role of Befindlichkeit (often translated as “attunement” or “disposition”) and Stimmung (“mood”) in his account of human existence; explicate the relationship between the former and the latter; and consider the ways in which the former discloses the world. To give a more vivid and comprehensive picture of Heidegger’s account of mood, we also focus on the experience of anxiety (Angst) by articulating both its function within fundamental ontology and, relatedly, its revelatory nature. We conclude by considering the place of emotions in Heidegger’s thinking from this period. In a companion essay, “Affectivity in Heidegger II: Temporality, Boredom, and Beyond,” we complement our present analysis by revisiting the issue of affectivity in terms of Heidegger’s discussion of temporality in Division II of Being and Time. We also expand our present discussion by considering the fundamental mood of boredom and certain moods that Heidegger considers within his later thinking.
Is violence senseless or is it at the origin of sense? Does its destruction of meaning disclose ourselves as the origin of meaning? Or is it the case that it leaves in its wake only a barren field? Does it result in renewal or only in a sense of dead loss? To answer these questions, I shall look at James Dodd’s, Hegel’s, and Carl Schmitt’s accounts of the creative power of violence—particularly with regard to its ability to give individuals and groups their sense of self-identity. I shall also follow up on Peg Birmingham’s suggestion that Socrates’ defense at his trial points to an alternate source of our self-identity—one that is ultimately less barren.
The book is the first detailed and full exegesis of the role of death in Heidegger’s philosophy and provides a decisive answer to the question of being. It is well-known that Heidegger asked the “question of being”. It is equally commonplace to assume that Heidegger failed to provide a proper answer to the question. In this provocative new study Niederhauser argues that Heidegger gives a distinct response to the question of being and that the phenomenon of death is key to finding and understanding it.
The book offers challenging interpretations of crucial moments of Heidegger’s philosophy such as aletheia, the history of being, time, technology, the fourfold, mortality, the meaning of existence, the event, and language. Niederhauser makes the case that any reading of Heidegger that ignores death cannot fully understand those concepts.
The book argues that death is central to Heidegger’s “thinking path” from the early 1920s until his late post-war philosophy. The book thus attempts to show that there is a unity of the early and late Heidegger often ignored by other commentators. Niederhauser argues that death is the fulcrum of Heidegger’s ontology and the turning point of the history of being. Death resurfaces at the most crucial moments of the “thinking path” – from beginning to end.
The book is of interest to those invested in current debates on the ethics of dying and the transhumanist project of digital human immortality. The text also shows that for Heidegger philosophy means first and foremost to learn how to die.
This volume speaks to continental and analytical philosophers and students alike as it draws on a number of diverse Heidegger interpretations and appreciates intercultural differences in reading Heidegger.
Based on the argument that violence has a parasitic quality rather than an essence of its own, this article seeks to bring to light the conversion processes through which violence crystallises out of, as well as into, various phenomena. Violence is first examined in terms of the relation between perpetrator and victim with, however, an emphasis on the fact that violence cannot be reduced to the intention or the act of the perpetrator. On the contrary, violence is shown to have the character of pathos and to open up a dimension of which the act itself is only a part. Further, the author argues that in being directed towards the other, violence harbours a performative contradiction: by turning the addressee into a thing to be destroyed, the addressing act cancels itself. The paper also sets out to identify the breeding grounds of violence, which, due to its capacity for conversion, can be detected in various phenomena that are not necessarily linked to violence. This means that violence can resort to various mechanisms and can emerge in multiple fields of activity: in bureaucracy, economics, medicine, politics, war, and most importantly, in everyday life, hidden under inconspicuous but sometimes pervasive forms. Finally, the metamorphoses of violence are shown to ultimately rest on the temporal character of violence, which implies that violence has a time of preparation (such as in the field of politics) and an aftermath (for example, in posttraumatic disorders).
The paper aims to rectify the reception of Heidegger’s so-called “hermeneutic violence,” by addressing the under-investigated issue of its actual target and rationale. Since the publication of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, some of Heidegger’s contemporary readers, such as Cassirer, as well as more recent commentators, accused Heidegger of doing violence to Kant’s and other philosophers’ texts. I show how the rationale of Heidegger’s self-acknowledged violence becomes tenable in light of his personal notes on his Kant book, and of several hermeneutic tenets from Being and Time. The violence at stake turns out to be a genuine method, involving the appropriation (Zueignen) and the elaboration (Ausarbeiten) of an interpreted text. Its target, I argue, is not the text itself, as it was often assumed, but its reception by a community or tradition. Thus, that violence may well instill interpretive conflict, yet its purpose is to salvage a text from a conventional and ossified reception, namely, from what Heidegger regards as the authoritarianism of idle talk (Gerede) in a philosophical milieu.
Jean Améry’s memoir of his imprisonment and torture by the Nazis links the loss of “trust in the world” to the violence he experienced. The loss of trust makes him feel homeless. He can no longer find a place in the intersubjective world, the world for everyone. What is this “trust in the world” (Weltvertrauen)? How does violence destroy it? In this article, I use Améry’s remarks as guide for understanding the relation of violence, trust, and homelessness. Trust, I argue, is crucial to the constitution of the intersubjective world. Violence, by undermining trust in Others, destroys the sense that this world is “for everyone.” In excluding the victim from its “for everyone,” it enforces a homelessness that transforms the victim’s very being-in-the-world.
Heidegger’s explorations of affect or “attunement” are an essential part of his challenge to predominant Western traditions. The alert and inquisitive essays in this collection show that Heidegger’s thoughts not only offer opportunities for deeper psychological insight, but also raise crucial questions about being, knowledge, ethics, and politics.
- Richard Polt, Professor of Philosophy, Xavier University, USA
This book offers the first comprehensive assessment of Heidegger’s account of affective phenomena. Affective phenomena play a significant role in Heidegger’s philosophy — his analyses of mood significantly influenced diverse fields of research such as existentialism, hermeneutics, phenomenology, theology and cultural studies. Despite this, no single collection of essays has been exclusively dedicated to this theme.
Comprising twelve innovative essays by leading Heidegger scholars, this volume skilfully explores the role that not only Angst plays in Heidegger’s work, but also love and boredom. Exploring the nature of affective phenomena in Heidegger, as well as the role they play in wider philosophical debates, the volume is a valuable addition to Heideggerian scholarship and beyond, enriching current debates across disciplines on the nature of human agency.
Despite the importance that Heidegger assigns to affectivity structurally in Being and Time, accounts of the relevant sorts of affectivity are frequently and, in some cases, perhaps even egregiously missing from existential analyses that form the centerpiece of the work. The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate as much. After recounting the considerable insights of Heidegger’s general account of disposedness and affectivity and the fundamental status he assigns to them, the focus of the chapter turns to the secondary status often accorded them in the first half of Being and Time and the seemingly crucial absence of an adequate account of the affective dimension of authentic existence, in the second half of the work. After making the argument that, according to Heidegger’s own criterion, the adequate rootedness of the existential analysis demands a more robust account of the affective character of existing authentically, the chapter concludes with an open question about the mood of undertaking the existential analysis itself.
Phenomenology is a method that aims to ground its findings in evidence, so as to counter metaphysics. This chapter argues that an important aspect of Being and Time is to radicalize the basic concept of evidence that is operative in Husserlian phenomenology, conceived in terms of apodictic certainty, which commits Husserl to mentalist evidentialism. Heidegger overcomes mentalist evidentialism and relaunches phenomenology on the basis of a different “epistemic” measure, which turns phenomenology into a hermeneutics of facticity. The chapter analyzes the fundamental mood of angst in terms of evidence, so as to better illustrate the methodological role it plays in Being and Time. Angst serves as the hermeneutic equivalent to what analytic epistemologists call “justifier of knowledge”, that is, it takes on the function of evidence that phenomenologically grounds the interpretation of the basic structures of Dasein, as these are disclosed in authentic existence.
While we endorse Heidegger’s effort to reclaim Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as a work concerned with the possibility of metaphysics, we hold, first, that his reading is less original than is often assumed and, second, that it unduly marginalizes the critical impetus of Kant’s philosophy. This article seeks to shed new light on Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics and related texts by relating Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant to, on the one hand, the epistemological approach represented by Cohen’s Kant’s Theory of Experience and, on the other, the metaphysical readings put forward by Heimsoeth, Wundt and others in the 1920s. On this basis, we argue that Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant remains indebted to the methodological distinction between ground and grounded that informed Cohen’s reading and was transferred to the problem of metaphysics by Wundt. Even if Heidegger resists a ‘foundationalist’ mode of this distinction, we argue that his focus on the notions of ground and grounding does not allow him to account for Kant’s critique of the metaphysical tradition.
Heidegger's Shadow is an important contribution to the understanding of Heidegger's ambivalent relation to transcendental philosophy. Its contention is that Heidegger recognizes the importance of transcendental philosophy as the necessary point of entry to his thought, but he nonetheless comes to regard it as something that he must strive to overcome even though he knows such an attempt can never succeed. Engelland thoroughly engages with major texts such as Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Being and Time, and Contributions and traces the progression of Heidegger's readings of Kant and Husserl to show that Heidegger cannot abandon his own earlier breakthrough work in transcendental philosophy. This book will be of interest to those working on phenomenology, continental philosophy, and transcendental philosophy.
Martin Heidegger's 1925--26 lectures on truth and time provided much of the basis for his momentous work, Being and Time. Not published until 1976 as volume 21 of the Complete Works, three months before Heidegger's death, this work is central to Heidegger's overall project of reinterpreting Western thought in terms of time and truth. The text shows the degree to which Aristotle underlies Heidegger's hermeneutical theory of meaning. It also contains Heidegger's first published critique of Husserl and takes major steps toward establishing the temporal bases of logic and truth. Thomas Sheehan's elegant and insightful translation offers English-speaking readers access to this fundamental text for the first time. © 2010 English edition by Indiana University Press. All rights reserved.
Heidegger's primary concern in Being and Time is the question of the meaning of being—a distinctly ontological concern. Yet, with discussions of death, guilt, conscience, anxiety, uncanniness, authenticity, and inauthenticity, Heidegger seems to end up in existential territory. The ontological import of these existential excursions is difficult to discern—indeed, it has not been identified in leading interpretations. In this paper, I aim to highlight the ontological import of Heidegger's analysis of anxiety—it manifests the inadequacy of Dasein's fallen and inauthentic self-understanding, which is motivated by the inadequacy of Dasein's fallen and inauthentic, average understanding of being. In making this case, I will clarify the sense in which anxiety involves an experience of world-collapse and show how it functions to reveal the possibilities of authenticity and inauthenticity.
Der Davoser Disput zwischen Ernst Cassirer und Martin Heidegger ging in die Philosophiegeschichte als ein historischer clash zweier grundverschiedener Ansichten ein.2 Die verschiedenen Zeugen und der schriftliche Niederschlag der Debatte haben zu dieser Reputation beigetragen. Es hat den Anschein, dass Cassirer und Heidegger während ihres gemeinsamen öffentlichen Auftritts in Davos im Frühjahr 1929 nicht nur hartnäckig am eigenen Standpunkt und der eigenen Kantinterpretation festhalten, sondern sie finden nicht einmal eine gemeinsame Sprache, um ihre Meinungsverschiedenheit auszutragen.
This is the first time that a seminal collection of fourteen essays by Martin Heidegger (originally published in German under the title Wegmarken) has appeared in English in its complete form. The volume includes new or first-time translations of seven essays, and thoroughly revised, updated versions of the other seven. They will prove an essential resource for all students of Heidegger, whether they work in philosophy, literary theory, religious studies or intellectual history.
Martin Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy reflects his famous philosophical "turning." In this work, Heidegger returns to the question of being from its inception in Being and Time to a new questioning of being as event. Heidegger opens up the essential dimensions of his thinking on the historicality of being that underlies all of his later writings. Contributions was composed as a series of private ponderings that were not originally intended for publication. They are nonlinear and radically at odds with the traditional understanding of thinking. This translation presents Heidegger in plain and straightforward terms, allowing surer access to this new turn in Heidegger's conception of being.
When, a few years ago, I studied the Critique of Pure Reason again and read it against the background of Husserl's phenomenology, it was as if the scales fell from my eyes, and Kant became for me an essential confirmation of the correctness of the way I was seeking. (GA 25: 431/PIK 292) With these words Heidegger closes his 1927/28 lecture course on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. They reveal a lot about Heidegger's work on Kant. Heidegger experienced in Kant the same philosophical originality and insight that makes Being and Time such an enduringly important book. Indeed, Heidegger implies here that he sees substantial overlap between his own work and Kant's. When Heidegger publishes his interpretation of Kant, commentators condemn this overlap. They claim that Heidegger's interpretation distorts Kant and buries his transcendental philosophy under a mound of Heideggerian views. The aging Heidegger himself feels compelled to issue a retraction in a late preface to his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, claiming – with uncharacteristic modesty, and falsely, as it turns out – that he had forced too much of his own thought onto Kant, subjecting the Critique to a reading whose basic terms are foreign to it. This presumption endures, but it is mistaken. Heidegger's Kant-interpretation is important, and it is so deeply intertwined with the existential phenomenology of Being and Time that it is impossible to understand one without the other.
Steven Crowell has been for many years a leading voice in debates on twentieth-century European philosophy. This volume presents thirteen recent essays that together provide a systematic account of the relation between meaningful experience (intentionality) and responsiveness to norms. They argue for a new understanding of the philosophical importance of phenomenology, taking the work of Husserl and Heidegger as exemplary, and introducing a conception of phenomenology broad enough to encompass the practices of both philosophers. Crowell discusses Husserl's analyses of first-person authority, the semantics of conscious experience, the structure of perceptual content, and the embodied subject, and shows how Heidegger's interpretation of the self addresses problems in Husserl's approach to the normative structure of meaning. His volume will be valuable for upper-level students and scholars interested in phenomenological approaches to philosophical questions in both the European and the analytic traditions.
Key to References Cited in the Text Introduction I. On the traditional conception of logic II. Introduction to the idea of philosophy III. The Definition of philosophy according to Aristotle IV. The Basic question of philosophy and the question of man V. Basic problems of a philosophical logic VI. The traditional classifications of logic and the task of returning to the foundations of this logic Preliminary Note Firt Major Part Dismantling LeibnizOs Doctrine of Judgement Down to Basic Metaphysical Problems 1. Characterization of the general structure of judgment 2. Judgement and the idea of truth. The basic forms of truth In memoriam Max Scheler 3. The idea of truth and the principles of knowledge Summary 4. The idea of knowledge as such 5. The essential determination of the being of genuine beings a) The monad as drive b) Intermediate reflections to find the guiding clue for the interpretation of being c) The structure 6. The basic notion of being as such (not carried out) 7. The theory of judgment and the notion of being. Logic and ontology Second Major Part The Metaphysics of the Principle of Reason as the Foundational Problem of Logic First Section: Exposition of teh Dimensions of the Problem 8. The principle of ground as a rule of thought 9. The essence of truth and its essential relation to OgroundO a) The essence of propositional truth b) Intentionality and transcendence 10. The problem of transcendence and the problem of Being and Time Appendix: Describing the Idea and Function of a Fundamental Ontology Second Section: The problem of Ground 11. The transcendence of Dasein a) On the concept of transcendence b) The phenomenon of world c) Freedom and world 12. Transcendence and temporality (nihil originarium) 13. Transcendence temporalizing itself in temporality and the essence of ground 14. The essence of ground and the idea of logic supplement: distance and nearness editorOs epilogue translatorOs afterword index
In his final seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 2 (2002–2003), Jacques Derrida spends the entire year reading just two texts, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Martin Heidegger’s Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. This essay looks in detail at Derrida’s treatment of this latter and, in particular, at Derrida’s emphasis on the Heideggerian notion of Walten (as sovereign power or originary violence) in this work. The essay begins by considering several of Derrida’s prior engagements with Heidegger, especially in Of Spirit and the “Geschlecht” essays, and their analyses of such themes as Geist or spirit, sexual and species difference, violence, and ontotheology. The essay then develops the relationship between what Derrida considered to be the hyper-sovereignty of Walten and Derrida’s own notions of autoimmunity and différance, before concluding with the question of why Derrida would think it necessary to devote so much of his final seminar to this Heideggerian notion.
In Heidegger's Religious Origins, Benjamin D. Crowe explores the meaning and relevance of Heidegger's early theological development, especially his intellectual ties with Martin Luther. Devoting particular attention to Heidegger's philosophy of religion in the turbulent aftermath of World War I, Crowe shows Heidegger tightening his focus and searching his philosophical practice for ideas on how one cultivates an "authentic" life beyond the "destruction" of Europe. This penetrating work reveals Heidegger wrestling and coming to grips with his religious upbringing, his theological education, and his religious convictions. While developing Heidegger's notion of destruction up to the publication of Being and Time, Crowe advances a new way to think about the relationship between destruction and authenticity that confirms the continuing importance of Heidegger's early theological training.
This book pursues the problem of whether violence can be understood to be constitutive of its own sense or meaning, as opposed to being merely instrumental. Dodd draws on the resources of phenomenological philosophy, and takes the form of a series of dialogues between figures both inside and outside of this tradition. The central figures considered include Carl von Clausewitz, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernst Jünger, and Martin Heidegger, and the study concludes with an analysis of the philosophy of Jan Patocka.
Thus Plotinus (what is his status in the history of metaphysics and in the "Platonic" era, if one follows Heidegger's reading?), who speaks of presence, that is, also of morphē , as the trace of nonpresence, as the amorphous (to gar ikhnos tou amorphous morphē ). A trace which is neither absence nor presence, nor, in whatever modality, a secondary modality.
In his reading of Heidegger in his 2003 seminar, published as The Beast and the Sovereign , Derrida is particularly troubled by one particular aspect of Heidegger: Heidegger's "superabundant use" of the language of Walten . "As you see," Derrida writes of Heidegger's use of Walten , "late in my life of reading Heidegger, I have just discovered a word that seems to oblige me to put everything in a new perspective. And that is what happens and ought to be meditated on endlessly." Derrida discovered the forceful, even violent language of Walten in texts by Heidegger that span the period from 1929 to 1957, including its rather prominent usage in the primary text under analysis in The Beast and the Sovereign , volume II: Heidegger's 1929-30 seminar published as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics . In the seminar, Heidegger introduces the language of Walten as a translation of the Greek phusis , which according to Heidegger bears within it an ambiguity of two meanings: "φύσις, that which prevails, means not only that which itself prevails , but that which prevails in its prevailing or the prevailing of whatever prevails [das Waltende in seinem Walten oder das Walten des Waltenden ]." While phusis cannot be reduced to any single one of these options, what will be of interest here is the forcefulness of the prevailing of what prevails—a centering, a gathering, a pulling together, in a continual agon that always pulls against a pulling apart.
And what is to be made of this ambiguous forcefulness given that, for Heidegger, "philosophy is meditation upon the prevailing of beings [Walten des Seienden ], upon φύσις, in order to speak out φύσις in the λόγος"? What is this phusis ? What is this logos ? And what is the force that binds them? What, moreover, is to be made of Derrida's endless rethinking of Heidegger through the pervasive language of Walten ? In what follows, I will argue that potential answers to these questions are in part already latent in Derrida's earlier work and are best approached through an analysis of Reiner Schürmann's concept of henological difference—an originary process of difference within the One that is, in Plato's phrase from Republic 509B, "beyond being [epekeina tēs ousias ]." The task of this essay will therefore not be to say what Heidegger's Walten "is" but, instead, to draw a perhaps contentious historical comparison with Plotinus in order to develop more fully the role played by the forceful concept of Walten in Heidegger's thought.
Schürmann develops the notion of henological difference as an explicit response to Derrida's repeated provocative hints about Plotinus's exclusion from the Heideggerian history of metaphysics. In developing the concept of henological difference through a recovery of Plotinus's agonistic thinking of the One, Schürmann argues for a "differential theory of the singular," positing otherness as an "originary process in the One." The One in Plotinus is prior to all difference, for difference exists only "in second nature [en deutera phusei ]." But despite being prior to all difference, a "dissension belabors the One from within" since the One is a holding together of "essentially opposed forces." The One holds together as a forceful centering and as a centering is simultaneously both a force that puts beings in a constellation and less than a being . It is less than a being, but it is not nothing. It is precisely the contested ontological status of the One that drives Schürmann to decisively break with the common ontotheologization of Plotinus by contesting the all-too-pervasive assumption that, as the purported father of the Christian tradition of negative theology, Plotinus likewise represents an ontotheological concept of the One...
This book is a systematic reconstruction of Heidegger's account of time and temporality in Being and Time. The author locates Heidegger in a tradition of 'temporal idealism' with its sources in Plotinus, Leibniz, and Kant. For Heidegger, time can only be explained in terms of 'originary temporality', a concept integral to his ontology. Blattner sets out not only the foundations of Heidegger's ontology, but also his phenomenology of the experience of time. Focusing on a neglected but central aspect of Being and Time, this book will be of considerable interest to all students of Heidegger both inside and outside philosophy.