Response to G. Fried on the Black Notebooks

This is not on migration but it is on Heidegger, and I did say I would post my personal publications on this blog. I was recently selected to reply to G. Fried's article on the publication of Heidegger's Black Notebooks and so I'd like to share my response (to be published online in the LA Review of Books. Link coming soon).
You can find Fried's article here:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/king-dead-heideggers-black-notebooks

Learning From Heidegger

Andrea Martinez

We do not always get the opportunity to radically question the importance of the work of a ground-breaking philosopher such as Heidegger. We normally understand and accept their relevance in terms of the insight they have provided regarding reality, human existence, ethics, knowledge, etc. The papers that are published in journals on foundational philosophers usually debate issues of interpretation, of aspects of their writings about which we are still in the dark.  Very rarely does anyone dare to question the absolute value of such thinkers. We are now once again presented with the question—as we have been for some time--of what to do regarding Heidegger and his legacy. The publication of the “Black Notebooks” has raised the question whether we should revise altogether the uttermost relevance that Heidegger has had for over half a century.

I consider this to be a great opportunity.

Fried’s essay has already shed light onto the de-contextualization of some of the quotes from the “Black Notebooks” that surfaced in different blogs and articles in order to “demonize” more than to clarify Heidegger’s attitude towards Judaism. However, in his conclusion, he points toward the assumptions implicit in our judgment of Heidegger. What lies behind our questioning of Heidegger’s value as a philosopher? Who do we want to be as we answer the question?  Are there totems, timeless truths, absolute values that can guide our questioning? And finally, what can we learn from Heidegger’s mistakes? Heidegger once spoke of the need for a crisis in the sciences in order to bring about “a radical revision” of their concepts (Being and Time, 1962). We could apply the same logic to his philosophy because it allows us to question not only his reasons for supporting the National Socialists, but also to ask why we are so altered by this question.  What does the question say about ourselves as readers, thinkers, and consumers of philosophy?

Instead of blacklisting Heidegger from the philosophy syllabus, let’s try to understand why he allowed himself to be so “easily” seduced by Nazi ideology. The question of Heidegger’s value and of his legacy should be asked alongside the teaching of his texts, yet it should be a question asked amongst others, such as his conception of the motherland, and his approach to technology and machination. However, it should not be addressed, as some seem to recommend (see Emmanuel Faye´s The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, 2005), as the defining character of his philosophy. Heidegger’s work continues to be relevant to our contemporary society insofar as it continues to ask the uncomfortable question of who we are, and how we shape the world (and vice versa) through our being.

Fried suggests that we take Heidegger’s National Socialism as a negative response to the question of being, and points at the possibility of learning from Heidegger’s mistake. For Fried, Heidegger was too optimistic regarding an “utterly other” inception of our time and along the way he made generalizing judgments about Jews. This formed a part of the “uprooting” from history and home that he considered quintessential to understanding ourselves. Yet, our times have revealed that these categorizations continue to blur their own boundaries.

In a number of his texts, Heidegger, despite his condemning words towards Judaism, works to offer a way of thinking the relationship between different perspectives in terms of understanding each other through common existential issues, and not through difference alone. Heidegger helps us to think about everything from the question of how to be authentic in our modern world to the way we inhabit and relate to our homes and our history. It is this Heidegger who can illuminate paths of mutual understanding, reaching beyond his own mistakes and revealing that the value of his legacy is not merely a problematic historical one. Polarization regarding his work will remain, but those poles will continue to be valuable so long as there is someone asking these questions in the lecture hall. Neglecting such poles seems to indicate that there is a definite answer to our question, and thus fails to question the question itself, by continuing to understand our judgments as timeless truths and diluting the possibility of asking if this really is who we want to be.

Ireland has more than one colour

You rained all day every day, I remember it so clearly.

I had no money and I had one boy pretending to be a man next to me. 

Your grey skies poured through my clothes, 

and it was cold and damp and I hated stout. 

What a depressing place! I said, describing Cork.

That was my first. 

Then, there was May, and a castle, and this boy who claimed he loved me, 

and I spiraled out and scattered pieces of Mexican love all over your fields. 

I made your stone walls shake with my discovery of ecstatic joy. 

I missed my flight back to my girl, back to some sort of sanity, and I stumbled through Mallow looking for the returning path to Barcelona.

August came and with it my return. 

We, that entity that never really existed, collapsed in his backyard on Glasheen road, 

as I laid there topless, staring at blue skies, 

I asked them for answers that didn´t arrive.

I found my way back, 

and at last I stayed. 

I dug my way out of that boy's sorrows and I blended with your walls, 

I hid in your corners, 

I swam in your single-malt and your lager, 

and I chanted to some Dublin skies next to fiddles and bodhráns.

My body memorized your streets, and my voice attempted to imitate your accents, 

I found beauty in every Irish man I met, 

and I gave one of them my words,
another one my pounding heart.

Washington street, Lough Road, Friar's Walk, 

Bandon Road. Bandon Road. Bandon Road.

I rejoiced in your fields and tried to understand the rain more as a companion than as an obstacle. 

I was yours, entirely. And even in my darkest hours, I could loose myself in you and in your pubs, and not feel lonely. I could loose myself, I could let go, only to be wakened by the immensity of your ever-changing skies. 

I found love in you. and comfort. 

and relief. 

and joy. 

never again could I speak of former homes as unique. You became my home of choice. 

You became my daily willed presence in your soils. 

Until now. 

I long for you maybe because that's what I do best. 

I close my eyes and see your fields and I say "bring me back again". 

Nostalgia rules my pathways 

and I am one ever-longing non-presence still standing straight. 

In my last visit, you were summer. You were blossoming in every wall. 

Purple, green, pink, red, yellow. 

Sunlight. 

I tried to memorize the details this time around. The way the sun rays hit the stone, the way your clouds melt into each other opening the violet/red evening skies, the way the rain smells minutes before it hits the ground. Everything, I wanted to swallow everything and let it fill me up again so that when the void comes back, I can find you somewhere inside of me. 

I cried that Sunday, in intervals. 

Not for lost love, but for the roots I felt being pulled out again from your soil. 

I promised you to return and I carried your leaves and your sand and your raindrops under my skin, and here they are, pouring through my early morning thoughts. 

You recognize me as your foreign child. 

And I feel your calling as a way out of my lethargic state. 

Until my path brings me back to you, and I can find something else to long for...

FREEDOM

      I, by no means attempt to even begin to analyze the concept of freedom. It is loaded and difficult, and many philosophers with brilliant minds have already engaged in such endeavor. In relation to migration this topic has been addressed in a simpler fashion, in terms of the actual possibilities for migrants. The freedom to migrate is determined by a lot of factors (economic, social, historical, etc.), some of them, presupposing a lack of certain freedoms in their home countries. For example, in the case of many queer migrants, they flee their home countries towards more liberal societies where they can express their sexual orientation openly (Fortier, 2003). Also, many migrants feel that they can "express" their identities more freely when the ties from their homeland are no longer present (Bradiotti, 1994). For example, if most of their family ties are left behind, they feel like they can re-build and create new identities. This is a very common understanding of freedom. I am now free from (x) in order to be free to (y). I'd like to say a couple things on the matter. The first is Heidegger's concept of anticipatory resoluteness, or what has been proposed as his understanding of freedom, which for me, poses a much more complex analysis on this topic in comparison to those mentioned above (from the social sciences literature). Secondly, just a personal reflection of what some aspects of my freedom have meant when I have migrated.

      Heidegger calls anticipatory resoluteness the way in which we relate to our future possibilities. Resoluteness [Entschlossenheit] involves a decisiveness, but it also means an opening up, or a remaining open in a disclosing fashion. Heidegger speaks of openly facing a particular and concrete situation that is already limited by certain possibilities. This situation reveals to us what is possible in the present moment. 'The resolution is precisely the disclosive projection and determination of what is tactically possible at the time' (Heidegger, Being and Time, 1962).  Resoluteness is a 'focused engagement' with the actual, with the world and with others.  The anticipating aspect of resoluteness [Vorlaufen] speaks for our temporal nature, thus, our capacity to project towards the future. Being anticipatory resolute is 'projecting wholeheartedly into the dying of possibilities that necessarily attend and define one's being or anyone at all' (Carman, 2003). It involves both engaging in actuality and projecting forward, but also realizing that any choice shuts other choices down. So, yes, my freedom is limited by aspects I have no control of (i.e. my nationality, my gender, etc), but I am also condemned to freedom in that any choice I possibly make, closes other opportunities down.
      In relation to freedom, resoluteness has been interpreted as Heidegger's conception of human freedom. It is understood as the revelation of our own finitude and then 'owning up' to it through resoluteness (Nichols, 2000). For Nichols, the resolute aspect of Dasein, of any and each of us, is our primordial freedom, our capacity to assume our "throwness" into this world as finite. We are thrown into a finite world and we necessarily possess a finite nature.  As the kind of being that I am,  comprehension of the finality of my life, and thus, the urgency/pointlessness/and possible assertiveness of any of my choices (especially the latter) is win intrinsic possibility. Nichols (2000)  disagrees with the account of negative freedom because it presupposes a simpler freedom: to do what one wants by being free of something, whatever, else. Not only do we have not open choices, but separating freedom into negative and positive accounts simplifies its meaning. The "x" and "y" in the equation of positive and negative freedom are empty spaces ready to be filled by numberless factors.  Such understanding can lead to delusions regarding the actualization of political and social ends. It strips the "agent" from its context and its ontological structure, giving such agent all the power (as social sciences like to do), presupposing possibilities that are not necessarily such.
      Heidegger's account of freedom considers not only the different social contexts we are possibly part of, but also the inherent inescapability of our freedom, and the imminent presence of our own death, which in all ways determines our choices. Evidently, most of the times, in our personal lives we have a very simple, if not idealized and misconstructed, understanding of our own freedom. When I first migrated, I felt free from so many things, and with time, and as I adapted to new societies, I felt free to do many others.  I understood my freedom very simply. Yet, as the years have gone by, I have realized that that freedom I've "gained" through migration has also meant questioning much of the decisions I have made in order to maintain it, or increase it. The following is a text I wrote some time ago. It attempts to  show the differences amongst a simple understanding of freedom or lack of, the freedom to tie oneself to places and people, and the freedom to untie oneself. By no means, however, I am stating here that the way I now experience and understand my own freedom has changed, or evolved. 

FREEDOM

I used to miss my single life  every time I found myself with someone.

I used to think i was giving up some kind of freedom,

Shutting possibilities down and

Exchanging them for comfort.

I always felt a bit asphixiated.

Until you.

Then, I did not feel the Winter,

I lacked money, but I did not notice,

The rain and the hale poured through March and April,

The wet and slippery streets reflected the grey of the Irish sky,

And it did not matter.

It was us, in a home housing mice, and spiders and bugs.

The kitchen wall, falling apart. The half working sink. The stains on the floors. All of it housing the way we smelled together. Loving dwellers.

Now I turn looking for your back, your hand, your voice,

I see my single life and it bores me,

It no longer excites me, this freedom.

It cuts deep through the ocean that separates us.

I miss you, I miss our life,

And everything else feels like bloody Winter.

REFERENCES

Braidotti, R. (1994) Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.

Carman, T. (2003) Heidegger´s Analytic. Interpretation, Discourse and Aunthenticity in Being and Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  

Fortier, A.  (2003) ‘Making Home: Queer migrations and motions of attachment’. In: Ahmed, S., Castañeda, C., Fortier, A. & Sheller, M. (2003). Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of home and migration. Oxford & NY: Berg, pp. 115 -35.

Heidegger, M.  (1962), Being and Time. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (transl). London: SCM Press.

Nichols, C. M. (2000) ‘Primordial freedom: The Authentic Truth of Dasein in Heidegger´s ‘Being and Time’’, In Thinking Fundamentals, IWM Junior Visiting Fellows Conferences. Vol. 9: Vienna 2000.