The Davos "Arbeitsgemeinschaft" and some helpful quotes on Being and Time

I just finished reading the amazing Davos disputation (called, euphemistically as it can only appear now, an "Arbeitsgemeinschaft" or "workgroup" while the event was being held--I should just mention now that anyone interested in it should consult Peter Eli Gordon's fascinating account of the conflict in Modern Intellectual History, 1, 2 [2004], pp. 219–248) between Heidegger and Cassirer that took place in the little Alpine city in early March 1929 (pictured, as it probably looked in March). Heidegger in his rebellious ski-clothes (I've tried to evoke how strange Heidegger looked at the time by including this picture from 1921 of him, on the right, with Gadamer chopping wood) walked in, pissed off at what he thought were Cassirer's misreadings of Being and Time, which still was extremely new on the philosophical scene (has anyone yet digested Badiou's sequel to Being and Event, Logiques des mondes? This philosophical atmosphere probably has the same relationship to 1929's and its familiarity, especially with Kantians like Cassirer, with Being and Time--in fact I think we can appreciate how penetrating Cassirer's reading is, especially with regard to truth, given this atmosphere), and proceeded to bulldoze him with a series of amazingly penetrating responses. By "bulldozed," I mean mostly that in general Heidegger just rudely talked over him: I don't think Heidegger made himself look any better by doing this, except to the hoarde of his spiritual followers in the audience. Nor is it clear that he presented a better case about Kant than Cassirer, in the end. But something (and you can see from the vehemence that this something is very much tied into his Nazism) impelled him to be impolite and indirect to one of the most amazing minds of the early twentieth century. If we can rationalize it, I think he was angry that people were not able to see and appreciate what he had been developing through his teaching and writing at Freiburg for more than a decade--the ideas that made up and were condensed into Being and Time. But obviously there is more to it than that, and this "more" precisely what becomes and what always was ugly, barbaric, romantic, naively Wagnerian and in the end unbelievably stupid in Heidegger. Regardless, any scholar of Heidegger gets some very direct statements out of this "bulldozing," this disturbing performance there in front of Cassirer, regarding what Being and Time was frankly trying to get at, not to mention some more direct statements on Heidegger's interpretation of Kant. From Cassirer, we also get an elucidation of the importance he accords to the symbol and its relationship to freedom, which Heidegger to a certain extent sees (inanely) as unimportant in pushing Cassirer into a definition of what freedom is and how it relates to time. In the end, what I'm saying is that Heidegger brings it to this debate. That said, the quotes we see below should really help anyone reading Being and Time:

On Time:
Every page in this book was written solely with a view to the fact that since antiquity the problem of being was interpreted on the basis of time in a wholly incomprehensible sense and that time always announced the subject (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Fifth Edition, Appendix IV, 198). Notice "every page:" this means Division I, too (Heidegger somewhere says this of Division I explicitly in the discussion, but I can't find it).

What, then, does the eternal actually mean here? From where, then, do we know of this eternity? Is this eternity not just permanence in the sense of the aei [the "always," the "forever," the "everlasting"] of time? Is this eternality not just that which is possible on the grounds of an inner transcendence [my emphasis, mj] of time? ...that [is,] time is not just what makes transcendence possible, but that time itself has in itself a horizonal character; that in a futural process of having been as a comportment [my interpretation of what the transcribers of the debate probably misconstrued, mj] I always have at the same time a horizon with respect to the present, futurity, and having-been [or what the transcribers misconstrue as "pastness", mj] in general; that a transcendental, ontological determination of time is found here, within which something like the permanence of the substance [the phenomenon of the aei] is constituted for the first time (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Fifth Edition, Appendix IV, 198).

On "Anxiety:"
This whole problematic in Being and Time, which treats Dasein in man, is no philosophical anthropology... the task is: to bring out the temporality of Dasein with reference to the possibility of the understanding of Being... The analysis of death has the function of bringing out the radical futurity of Dasein, but not of producing an altogether final and metaphysical thesis concering the essence of death (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Fifth Edition, Appendix IV, 199). This quote (and the next) seems absolutely indispensible for anyone who is reading Heidegger on anxiety and death, or indeed any one of the "ontical possibilities of Dasein" that Heidegger looks at throughout the work, because it shows a bit clearer than in Being and Time what the role of this ontical possibility is playing in the work. It also shows you that Dasein in general is not a being or entity which man always is, but rather is "in man." In other words, it is a kind or way of manifestation of being, like Vorhanden or Zuhanden. If one thinks the relationship of man to Dasein in this way, you reading Being and Time becomes a lot easier (even though, as Derrida constantly reminds us, this relationship is confused and constantly re-thought in Heidegger, and, in fact, never sufficiently resolved). In the end, what I'm getting at is that you can see the genius of the simplicity in the way Hubert Dreyfus presents his account of what Dasein is (that it is just one of these kinds of being that man can, in a sense, enter into and step out of--even though man never can properly or "own-mostly" be something other than Dasein), and that it gets its justification in the most forthright passages of Heidegger like these.

On the grounds of which metaphysical sense of Dasein itself is it possible that the human being in general can have been placed before something like the Nothing? In answer to this question, the analysis of anxiety was provided so that the possibility of theNothing is thought of only as an idea which has also been grounded in this determination of the disposition of anxiety. It is only possible for me to understand Being if I understand the Nothing or anxiety. Being is incomprehensible if the Nothing is incomprehensible (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Fifth Edition, Appendix IV, 199).

Etc.
I would misunderstand myself if I said that I gave a philosophy free of points of view. And here a problem is expressed: that of the relationship between philosophy and world-view. Philosophy does not have the task of giving world-view, although, again, world-view is the presupposition of philosophizing. And the world-view which the philosopher gives is not a direct one in the sense of a doctrine or in the sense of an influencing. Rather, the world-view which the philosopher gives rests in the fact that in the philosophizing, it succeeds in making the inner possibility of this finite creature comport itself with respect to beings as a whole (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Fifth Edition, Appendix IV, 200). Here Heidegger resignifies the role of "world-view" in his work in opposition to Cassirer (or really any humanist philosopher--Cassirer really has just become a straw-man for Heidegger at this point): world-view is a "setting free of the Dasein in man," not an opening out of philosophy into "cultural philsophy," which Heidegger, rashly, characterizes Cassirer's work as.

Hegel and the sway of truth

Why do we have so many objections to Hegel's philosophy as too "idealistic," that is (ignoring any historical determinations of this word but rather getting at the experience of Hegel's philosophy it tries to signify), as making the world conform to a movement of thought rather than to its own movements? This is the underlying phenomenon that the critiques of Hegel by Feuerbach, Marx, Engels, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kojeve, Sartre, Benjamin, Bataille, Blanchot, Lukacs, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, and others react to and from which they claim their justification. In other words, in Feuerbach, Marx, Engels, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kojeve, Sartre, Benjamin, Bataille, Blanchot, Lukacs, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida... in all these philosophers reacting to Hegel, they all levy a critique on Hegel's being too idealistic, or, to use a word of Bataille's used to characterize this experience (that Derrida takes over), too restricted--in the sense of restricting the movements of the world to its own movements, to its own "economy." Now, I would include Heidegger too, except he in a sense understands why this is so, and so can't be said to be merely "reacting" to the idealism of Hegel--even though he himself is probably the most critical of this catalogue of critics, the person that Hegel disgusted most. For it is through his determination of the essence of truth that he shows us there have been other essences or swayings of truth (Wesen for Heidegger means more like a movement of ecstatical perdurance or swaying than "nature," which it is often horribly rendered as), and particularly the sway of truth of which Hegel's "idealism" or "restrictedness" is merely the effect.
Heidegger allows us to see that for metaphysics, and I quote,"truth is the agreement of thought with the object." The history of metaphysics determines the true in this way, and thus cannot be broken with or altered without altering how truth is supposed to be the truth of agreement.
Now, the problem with this characterization of metaphysical truth is that it is not only Heidegger's. The quote just cited is not Heidegger, but Hegel in his Science of Logic (44). Hegel writes that it is "inept" to think that

truth is the agreement of thought with the object, and [that] in order to bring about this agreement--for it does not exist on its own account--thinking is supposed to adapt and accomodate itself to the object.
-Science of Logic, "Introduction," 44.

In other words, Hegel both characterizes metaphysical truth with regard to its essence and seeks to break with it, just like Heidegger. Truth shall not be the truth of agreement for Hegel. It shall be more. But before we define what it is, we must ask: is it this "more" that will make his philosophy look "restricted," or "idealistic?" Or could it merely be the fact that he is rebelling against a tradition of truth as agreement, as adequation between the thought and the object?
While this last thought is obviously--if anyone who utters it knows their Hegel and particularly the definition of truth that Hegel gives us--unfounded, wild, and stupid: for Hegel, truth is in fact even more the truth of adequation or agreement than the metaphysical tradition he here criticizes as "inept." But I'd like to suggest that maybe this last thought isn't as unfounded or wild or stupid as we'd like to think it is.
In other words, Hegel really does attempt to break with the metaphysical tradition that we now, only with the help of Nietzsche, Wittegenstein and Heidegger, have come to recognize and to an extent overcome. And this attempt in its critical gestures comes dangerously close to carrying it out. The boldness of the criticism, and the attempt to overcome it by a systematic shift in the way philosophy is done, in fact seem to make it almost impenetrable to the charge of idealism--that is, if they didn't fail. But it is this dangerous closeness, I'd like to say, that makes Hegel in his failure, appear all the more restricted--in a way he comes so close to doing what we attempt to do today that it is inevitable that a failure would seem idealistic. But who genuinely can criticize someone as idealistic who rightly is able to diagnose and to an extent displace the condition of metaphysical truth since even before Plato? Wouldn't someone who is able to do this precisely be the most realistic, most generally (i.e. not restricted) in touch with the actual as opposed to someone who sacraficed reality to his own ideas? That is what I mean.
Truth is not agreement for Hegel. As Heidegger makes clear, anyone who diverges from the tradition that affirms the opposite of this statement is destined to remain either in deep obscurity or will be cast off by the tide of reaction in favor of truth as what agrees. And yet Hegel says, "One must discard the prejudice that truth must be something tangible" (50), that is, able to be ascertained as what in an object agrees with a thought about that object.
What is truth then for Hegel? It is speculative truth: in other words, it is not only the agreement of the thought and the thing, but the identity of the thought and the thing in each other. True truth also includes certainty, the reassertion of the thought or the object as itself in its opposite, or (put differently) in its difference from itself.
Now, isn't this just more agreement? Yes. But also no. Indeed, Hegel takes his insight into the problem with truth in metaphysics and buries it in more metaphysical thinking rather than breaking with that tradition. But if one thinks speculative truth respectfully, it has the opportunity of being thought as not relying on agreement perhaps as much as a philosophy where truth is solely agreement between thing and thought. I'll leave it for others to do this.
But the fact remains, even if Hegel does even more rigorously entrench himself in a metaphysics where truth is agreement, truth is not merely agreement for Hegel. And this is perhaps the least restricted potential of the science he lays out. How can we think the possibilities of this particular unrestricted moment in Hegel, precisely when it is also the most restricted?
Truth for Hegel isn't, when thought rightly, the mere agreement of a thought and a thing. In this sense, then, truth isn't idealistic. Truth is a movement of mutual identity in otherness, truth combined with certainty, that does not require an object in the sense of an object for adequation. So it does not restrict the world to its terms. Rather, what is true belongs to truth itself in its own unfolding: truth's terms explode and generalize into a world. Insofar as one attributes a goal for this truth to come out and face the world, i.e. to agree with it, it will necessarily be misinterpreting Hegel because it will only be able to see idealistic agreement as the truth. But while truth keeps to itself, this truth will not be idealistic.
It will, of course, also be doubly a truth of agreement. But it is possible to use this aspect of non-agreement, of non-idealism as a clue to interpretation of Hegel that does not constantly submit itself to a metaphysical definition of truth for ridicule. In that vein, Heidegger and, to an great extent, Hippolyte's interpretations of Hegel do this. Kojeve, however, seeks to make Hegel work with metaphysical truth: this is why he must erase much of Hegel in the Phenomenology through his anthropological/Marxist interpretation.
Emphasizing and teasing out the self-movement of truth allows for a different version of truth than metaphysical truth to start to cultivate itself, even though it is merely this version of truth reasserted. In a sense, it is what happens when one tries to think truth as the development of what Hegel calls Geist not, in its English translation, as "Mind," i.e. as the truth of a personal, anthropological, Transcendental-consciousness/subject (for whom objects appear and must agree), but as "Spirit," as a less easily definable movement of discourse within itself. For those who know these two translations of Geist, all I'm trying to do is suggest what constitutes the difference between them, and how thinking the latter is ultimately more productive, more true to Hegel (in his conception of truth at least), and ultimately less idealistic than the former way.

Blanchot and memory

Here is a good quote from Blanchot that outlines how what Heidegger in Being and Time calls "historizing," and in other places calls "the destiny/destining of Being" in its movement of "enowning"--how this "epochality" (as Derrida calls it in order to indicate how all these concepts form a nexus, cf. Of Spirit, 12) ties in with memory, life, and death. That is, how it ties in with Hegel, for whom these topics (Errinerung, Lebenserfahrung/Erfahrung, der Tode/das Nichts, respectively), are absolutely crucial. If you are thinking these things and their imbrication, let me just suggest you look at this quote (I'll elaborate what I think this imbrication is as indicated by this paragraph later--I don't have time now unfortunately!):

A novelist writes in the most transparent kind of prose, he describes men we could have met ourselves and actions we could have performed; he says hs aim is to express the reality of a human world the way Flaubert did. In the end, though, his work really has only one subject. What is it? The horror of existence deprived of the world, the process through which whatever ceases to be continues to be, whatever is forgotten is alwas answerable to memory, whatever dies encounters only the impossibility of dying, whatever seeks to attain the beyond is always still here.
-"Literature and the Right to Death," from The Work of Fire, 333-4.