Saturday, August 25, 2007

Hegel and Heidegger and memory

The esteemed French scholar Jean Beaufret remarked in a seminar of Heidegger's that Heidegger fundamentally appears to be a recapitulation of Hegel, and yet essentially different from him somehow (On Time and Being, 48). In its superficiality this view is flawed, as Beaufret acknowledges. But there are essential similarities in how each philosopher conceives the task of thinking. While Beaufret specifies these tasks in terms of a thinking of time and ereignis, I'll specify them in a more basic sense in how they see the work of proper thinking as a work of memory.
Consider this quote from Heidegger:

[When reflection on the nature of truth proceeds resolutely towards the mystery of truth's self-concealing,] then resolute openness towards the mystery is under way into errancy as such... The glimpse into the mystery out of errancy is a question... The thinking of Being, from which such questioning primordially originates, has since Plato been understood as "philosophy." ...Philosophical thinking is especialy that stern and resolute openness that does not disrupt the concealing [of truth] but entreats its unbroken essence into the open region of understanding and thus into its own truth.
-"On the Essence of Truth," 134-6.

Heidegger is saying that thinking is the thinking of what is essential is basically a penetration into what remains mysterious in the manner of self-concealing: thinking is penetrating into the most essential self-forgetfulness of truth. As such, it remains on a path of errancy, i.e. of not being in the truth or in the process or procedure of constituting truth, by letting the truth of the forgetfulness of truth come to the fore as itself, in its "unbroken essence." This errancy thus is remembering.

Now, compare this to Hegel:

Progress in philosophy is rather a retrogression and a grounding or establishing by means of which we first obtain the result that what we began with is not something merely arbitrairly assumed but is infact the truth, and also the primary truth... the advance is a retreat into the ground.
-Science of Logic, 70-1.

This movement of retrogression is the same as errancy: it is a remembering of a beginning, a restoration of meaning to what at first is traumatic or arbitrary. In its return to this origin, in its "retreat," philosophy is a recollection.
This stated, the difference between the two philosophers can be stated as follows: Heidegger entreats thinking to remain "open" to the forgetfulness which is sought by the process of remembering, while Hegel seeks to grasp and ground, fix, set up (cf. Gegen-stand, object, which is literally setting-up-against) this forgetfulness. Thus, especially with reference to how Nietzsche uses the word "forgetting," we might say that while Hegel pursues remembrance all the way to the end, in which it will bring everything into the present as an object for thinking, Heidegger strives to forge a type of thinking that might, as remembrance, remain a forgetting, or let things remain in the non-present (i.e. in the past or in the future) while they are still thought. The essential element that determines what these modes of thought look like are, for Hegel, negation, and, for Heidegger, ereignis.
These are just quick reflections, but hopefully they are helpful in bringing together two interesting quotes.

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