Heidegger's beatific ethics, or beyond reason: pro and contra

No doubt truth, meaning, world, and Being are not disclosed by reason. Reasons operate with givens; logics are rules of derivation. Heidegger can very well establish that poetry is prior to mathematics, but not that nothing is understood with the help of the latter. Reasons are demanded to justify the presumptive truth of statements and, by extension, actions, because actions, unlike behaviors and mere practices, are contingent and appeal to a space of reasons. There is a practice of giving and asking for reasons; that practice is 'reason' as such. It would be a strange world beyond labor and need that would have no space for anyone to contest an action as unjust or a statement as untrue. Or a performative utterance as unjust. Heideggerians often are like some Hasidim, convinced that all that is needed is a change in manner of thinking to live fully in a world beyond need, lack, and meaningful disagreement. This is idealist and not materialist, and that is why philosophy and its idealized poetic thinking can be posited as absolute. Heidegger can certainly show, as he does in The Principle of Reasons, that Being itself has no Why, it just is, like beauty (the rose that blooms and doesn't need to ask permission to do so). But the thing that most distinguishes human beings and makes it possible for us to be recognizably the beings of "the there," or Dasein, is language, and in language not only does what is said reveal what it is said about in a particular way, it also says it as true or false, warranting agreement, on the basis of some reasoning, or disagreement, assent and dissent. It is also easy to show that an 'anarchist' world without coercive authority and necessary labor (these surely go together) will be one beyond management and where less is contested for the same reason that few will be the failures of compliance with social norms that we call sin, however that is also thought of as the moral or ethical blindness of anyone who 'goes on' as Wittgenstein and Beckett put it, with any doing or saying, and so in a 'hubris'. or sinful pride. So much of this is obvious. Heidegger's world of the poetic thinking of Being and event and all that is idealist in the same way that Plato's extra-cave enlightened world was; both are possible as a total way of life only for an aristocracy with 'absolute' leisure to think and perhaps make (art, for example, and so 'worlds', or, if one prefers, interpretations of 'the' world), or a world where everyone is more like an aristocrat than a slave. So, I say: Heidegger with Marx, not Plato, not the Church, and not obscurantism. It should be added that defenders of the Heideggerian orthodoxy are doing something not so interesting. Thought is creative in its inventive and experimental character, which is also that of science. That Heidegger seemed to want to get beyond logic, mathematics, and science altogether is further evidence that this profound thinker with his head in the clouds at best gives us either an ethics for the Sunday of life, or for that messianic and utopian post-scarcity world we can well dream of as it is not an impossibility, in a world to come on this very planet, among our descendants, as was always the promise. Then everyone will set under his tree, study the law and the texts and artworks, remember the evils that they and we will have finally become free of, but, and this is a sticking point: even reading the laws no longer in much effect (few murders and great crimes, etc.), will require some pleasure in logic and not only in seeing appearances in their beauty or sublimity no matter how fleeting and well we, now freed like Buddha of worldly longings, perhaps, enjoy them when we do. Sure, beauty and love are greater than business, work, law, medicine and life, but we still live in that kind of worldly world, for better and worse. Philosophy in the late modern world became often also social theory. But what is a social theory that is only an ethics and aesthetics for les dimanches de la vie, an end of history, the Sundays of life, redeemed no doubt from the Mondays and Tuesdays. Heidegggerianism cannot refuse logic any more than law, but can only think beyond them. Who should quarrel with that? Even the greatest scholars of the law may not be thinking of it or deriving any new principles while engaged in acts of great love or passion.

Those who do not believe in Reason at all should be asked, does anything ever happen to you, or does anyone do or say anything, that you can judge to be wrong? Would you be necessarily mistaken (if everything that happens is a priori good) in so judging, or in so asking. It is one thing to suppose that Being as such has no negation, since that could only be non-Being and non-Being is not the negation or denial of Being, which would presuppose it, but its absence, nothingness. And as King Lear said, nothing can come of nothing. It is another matter to say that statements, and actions, which correspond to statements in being particular and determine, and constituting claims, which means that they can be judged right or wrong. Duns Scotus once quipped comically that those who deny that there is freedom of the will should be tortured until they admit that they might not have been. What is might not be, what happens might not have happened (the proof is we can imagine this), what is done might not be done, what is desired might not be wanted, and what is said not only might not be said, perhaps withdrawing in favor of the happiness of silence that can commit no fault as long as it remains in total obscurity in its withdrawal, but also what is said about something that is such or that it is like such or that happens or diid not, or that it is or is not, such statements enjoy the same contingency, which is perhaps the origin of all such, as it reveals the possibility of negation, of the not this. If we say “The cat is on the mat,” we are not just making a statement, and not just revealing certain possibilities, in the instance that what we are positing as “there” is a cat, and a mat, and a prepositional relationship between them (“on,” however we interpret this preposition, which might just mean on top of, for it does not know it is perhaps). This is a different statement from “2+2=4,” which has no external referent, except in so far as the terms used for the entities and functions in this statement are part of a lexicon of use and imply a meaning, such as that of numbers, counting, and two-ness, as well as the operations addition and mathematical equality. The statement about the cat and the mat and the relation between them (and the singularity of both indicated by “the”) is about something in “the world” understood as a territory that the statement refers to but is exterior to. Proof of this is that the statement cannot be found true or false by simply examining it; one must also ‘look at’ the world, or at least whatever place a, and indeed, “the,” cat and mat might be said to be, a space that has the properties of permitting relationships like “on".” That the cat is on the mat is a proposition; it is a statement and also a claim. Implicit to it is the claim that it is true. No one who states does not mean that it is true, unless some other statement is made or implied relativizing the statement. For example, “The boss says, ‘The cat is on the mat’. “ It will be a strange world without not only labor and necessity but statements that have their own necessity, and conditions of meaning and so possibility, when there is no truth and falsity. That is a grander and more puzzling thing than what surely is not, which is a world where fewer things would be contested and so doubted. In this world, for example, there might be fewer lawsuits, strikes, protests, or parliamentary disagreements placing much of consequence for fateful subjects, resting on cat and mat relationships and whatever might be thought to be at stake between them. However, attempts to think clearly about the architecture of paradise tend to fail along with the great difficulty we have in imagining it as different from our worldly and mortal world. If no one should be forbidden to ponder such questions, few among us should be presumed to rest our case with answers to them. It is easy to negate in imagination what is in favor, obviously, of something theoretically possible that is not. The limits of ability to think in such terms may in the meantime appear to us as the limits of thinking at all. Imagine that a paradise and an inferno both refuse argument. Primo Levi was told by a guard at Auschwitz, “There is no why here,” and Heidegger this is true of Being itself. Beauty, he argues, referencing a poem by the mystic Angelius Silesius about a rose, needs no derivation and of course comes without one, just as people are born independently of any logic, or the architecture of any machine that could produce some commodities. Now if heaven and hell both exclude the practice of giving and asking for reasons as unnecessary, perhaps because these are final states like the supposed end of history, what do we do wit that world that we must live in, and where, contrary to the more utopian among religious and psychological thinkers (like American champions of ‘cognitive therapy’), bad things (that we would want to avoid or even stop or even fight against) and even horribly catastrophic things do happen? Auschwtiz differs from the famous rose in being constructed and maintained, indeed managed, by wilful acts of persons. “Why this?” can be given a sufficiently precise answer, beginning with the recognition that “It need not be thus” and “It can be different than this.” You don’t ask why rocks and mountains exist, but if you are chained to a rock on a mountain like Prometheus as a punishment, you could ask why and even know why and how it might not be. Maybe history has an outside but not an end. Maybe that outside is beauty and poetry; maybe it is divine love and grace. Maybe one should have some faith in it or in the forces that make it possible; maybe. But social institutions like persons can at most be in the image of God; not being God, and not being entitled to the august mantle of Being itself which needs no reason, they can be other than they are, which is why there is history, still, for they are contingent. What are they relative to? Perhaps to what we can think and imagine about them.

The argument between Heidegger and ‘rationalism’ is unsolvable if certain distinctions are not made. So too perhaps is the path of philosophy if it would dwell with the gods alone. The rest of us do not.