ON MARTIN HEIDEGGER: POLITICS AND LIFE SEEN THROUGH THE APOLLONIAN- DIONYSIAN DUALITY Glyndwr Stephen Davies A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of Staffordshire University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2013 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank Professor Douglas Burnham for making it possible for me to pursue this study, and Dr. David Webb who, through his knowledge and advice, has made the project realisable. And I must thank my wife Margaret for her patience and support through these years of study. ii CONTENTS TITLE PAGE i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii CONTENTS iii ABSTRACT v ABBREVIATIONS vii HEIDEGGER’S INDICATIONS xi INTRODUCTION 1 The Political Case/ Towards a Hermeneutics/A Musical Intuition and Attunement/Formal Indication/The Apollonian-Dionysian Duality /Fugue/ Synopsis. CHAPTER 1: POLITICS AND MUSIC 23 The Heidegger Case/ Heidegger’s Rectoral Address , 1933/ From Politics to Facticity/ The Demonic/ Towards Music/ From Circles to Fugues/ Music, philosophy and Heidegger/ From dread to tragedy. CHAPTER 2: TOWARDS HEIDEGGER’S NIETZSCHE-HUSSERL DUALITY 66 Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy/ John Sallis’ Crossings/ The Husserlian Apollonian/ Intuition and the Phenomenological Reduction/ The Breakthrough of Affectivity/ The Crossroads of Phenomenology/ The Nietzschean Dionysian/Nietzsche and Phenomenology/ The Presence of iii Nietzsche in Heidegger Literature/ Remaining True to the Earth: Intimations of a Demonic Life CHAPTER 3: HEIDEGGER’S LETTERS 140 Introduction- A Contextualisation: the body, sexuality and repression/ Letters to his wife, Elfride/ Letters to Hannah Arendt/ Strife & Transformation. CHAPTER 4: FUGUE, SUPPRESSION AND INTENSIFICATION IN HEIDEGGER’S THINKING OF THE 1920S 212 Introduction/ Tradition and Counter-Tradition/ Fugue and Oscillation/ Inauthenticity-Authenticity/ Suppression and Intensification: Being-toward- death/ Authenticity and Heidegger’s ‘great separation’/ A return to Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle. CONCLUSION 271 NOTES 276 BIBLIOGRAPHY 301 iv ABSTRACT This study bears upon the ‘Heidegger case,’ that is, the relation of Heidegger’s philosophizing to his political involvements as Rector of the University of Freiburg 1933-4, and his subsequent silences on the subject of the Holocaust. I use the phrase ‘bears upon’ for Heidegger’s political involvement will serve as the ‘horizon’ for the study, my concern being the genesis of Heidegger’s position. Grounded in a musical ‘intuition’ and attunement, I take up the Nietzschean cipher for understanding proposed by Heidegger himself for the self-understanding of the German people: the Apollonian-Dionysian duality, which I apply to the ‘being’ of Heidegger’s own philosophizing. Through this approach I hope to make an original contribution to Heidegger scholarship by showing that Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is overdetermined, evolving out of both the phenomenological demand for a rigorous method in establishing fundamental structures of existence and - at the same time – out of an Apollonian attempt to ‘tame’ Dionysian existence, including Heidegger’s own. Inextricably interlinked will be the argument that Heidegger’s Auseinandersetzung , his ‘confrontation,’ with Nietzsche precedes the overt engagement of his ‘Nietzsche’ lectures of the 1930s, and, further, that this more pervasive concern with Nietzsche figures in the Apollonian-Dionysian strife within Heidegger’s thinking and within his ‘being.’ Heidegger’s silences in the face of the Dionysian - as well as the Auseinandersetzung with Nietzsche - will be seen to precede his ‘silence’ in the face of the actuality and history of the Third Reich. What I am proposing one might characterize as Heidegger’s Auseinandersetzung - through Nietzsche - with v Heidegger, in a disclosure of the ontic roots of Heidegger’s ontology, an exercise in his own hermeneutics of facticity. I will pursue the trace of the Apollonian-Dionysian duality: in the Western philosophical tradition which Heidegger confronts, using Husserl and Nietzsche as exemplars; in Heidegger interpretation; in the relation between his texts and his letters; and in the suppressions and intensifications within Being and Time. And I will propose that the fugue and the mutually generative duality of suppression and intensification within Heidegger’s academic thinking were conditions of the possibility of Heidegger’s ‘way’ towards political involvement. vi ABBREVIATIONS HEIDEGGER BPP The Basic Problems of Phenomenology . Translated by Albert Hofstadter. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988. BT1 Being and Time . Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1990. BT2 Being and Time . Translated by Joan Stambaugh and Dennis J. Schmidt. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010. B&T Being and Truth. ‘The Fundamental Question of Philosophy,’ SS:1933. & ‘On The Essence of Truth’ WS:1933. Translated by Gregory Fried, & Richard Polt. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 2010. BW Basic Writings . Edited by David Farrell Krell. London: Routledge, 1993. CP Contributions to Philosophy . Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. ERS Nietzsche: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same. Translated by David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper Collins, 1991. FCM The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics . Translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995. HA Letters 1925-1975: Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger . Translated by Andrew Shields. New York & London: Harcourt, Inc., 2004. HEP ‘Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry’ in Existence and Being . Edited by Werner Brock. Washington: Regnery Gateway Company, 1949. HCT History of the Concept of Time . Translated by Theodore Kisiel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. IM Introduction to Metaphysics . Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2000. J Per Mortem Ad Vitam: Thoughts on Johannes Jorgensen’s Lies of Life and Truth of Life.’ In S below. KPM Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Translated by Richard Taft. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 1997. L Logic: The Question of Truth. Translated by Thomas Sheehan. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010. LW Letters To His Wife: 1915-1970 . Edited by Gertrud Heidegger. Cambridge: Polity, 2010. MFL The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic . Translated by Michael Heim. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992. N Nietzsche: Nihilism . Translated by David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper Collins, 1991. NW ‘Nietzsche’s Word “God Is Dead” ’ in OBT below. O Ontology . Translated by John van Buren. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999. OBT Off The Beaten Track . Translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. OTB On Time And Being. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper Row, vii 1972. OWA1‘Origin of the Work of Art.’ Translated by Albert Hofstadter, 1971. In BW. OWA2‘Origin of the Work of Art.’ Translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes . In OBT. OWL On the Way to Language . Translated by Peter D. Hertz. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1982. P Pathmarks . Edited by William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pa Parmenides . Translated by Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998. PDT ‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth.’ in Pathmarks. Translated by Thomas Sheehan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. PI ‘The Principle of Identity’ in Identity and Difference . Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Chicago: Harper Collins/The University of Chicago Press, 2002. PIA Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle . Translated by Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001. PIE : Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression. London: The Athlone Press, (Continuum), 2010. PLT Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: HarperCollins, Perennial Classics, 2001. Translated by Tracy Colony. PRL The Phenomenology of Religious Life . Translated by Matthias Fritsch and Anna Gosetti-Ferencei. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004. RA ‘The Self-Assertion of the German University,’ (‘The Rectoral Address’) in Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, edited by Gunther Neske & Emil Kettering: New York: Paragon House, 1990. S Supplements. Edited by John van Buren. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. TDP ‘The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldview’ in Towards the Definition of Philosophy . Translated by Ted Sadler. London: The Athlone Press, (Continuum), 2002. WCT What Is Called Thinking? Translated by J. Glenn Gray. New York: Perennial (Harper Collins), 2004. WIM ‘What is Metaphysics?’ in Basic Writings . Translated by David Farrell Krell. London: Routledge, 1993. WPA Nietzsche: The Will To Power As Art. Translated by David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper Collins, 1991. WPK Nietzsche: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics. Translated by David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper Collins, 1991. ZS Zollikon Seminars: Protocols-Conversations-Letters. Edited by Medard Boss. Translated by Franz Mayr & Richard Askay. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois, 2001. viii HUSSERL CM Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Translated by Dorion Cairns. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 1969. EB ‘Phenomenology,’