Fail Slow, Fail Hard

“Once you start looking for them, Heideggerians are everywhere. But identifying what they had in common with each other wasn’t easy. It was hard to tell who even counted as a Heideggerian, anyway, especially in the United States — a nation for which Heidegger himself had little positive to say throughout his life (among other things, we had too much technology and too little history, he thought). Catholics read him, but so too did Protestants and Jews. Existentialists claimed him as one of their own, despite his protests, but deconstructionists did the same, and by then he was no longer around to protest. Pragmatists sometimes made their peace with him, and occasionally poets and novelists played around with his wordplay-filled writings. I found that those last ones generally had the most fun, partly because they didn’t take it all so terribly seriously. Critical Theory, Hermeneutics, and Phenomenology — theoretical paradigms predicated on seriousness — each genuflected in Heidegger’s direction at one point or another, sometimes skeptically, sometimes not. There was hardly a corner of the American academy that hadn’t been infiltrated by some kind of at least latent Heideggerianism —except, of course, actual philosophy departments, where Heidegger often remained simply too foreign and too suspicious. One had better luck finding him in anthropology, literature, or theology.”

“As if to signal the danger inherent in these culminating volumes of Heidegger’s collected works, the three epigraphs Trawny chooses to introduce his essay — from Hölderlin, Heidegger, and Paul Celan, respectively — dwell on things “monstrous,” “tragic,” and, in Celan’s case, a combination of the two. In a direct reference to the Holocaust, the third epigraph speaks of “the monstrousness of the gassings.” The original German title of Trawny’s book, Irrnisfuge, or “Errancy Fugue,” deliberately echoes Celan’s famous poem “Todesfuge,” or “Death Fugue,” from which the epigraph is drawn. That poem describes “death” as a “master from Germany.” In another celebrated poem titled “Todtnauberg,” a reference to the location of Heidegger’s celebrated Black Forest hut, Celan immortalized a famous postwar meeting with the philosopher, during which the poet’s hope for a word of contrition and/or explanation — a word literally “to the heart” — from his host never came. For a philosopher who made mortality, our “being-towards-death,” a cornerstone of all philosophizing, such silence surely spoke volumes to Celan, who lost both his parents in the Holocaust. “Todtnauberg” was published only after Celan’s suicide, in Paris, in 1970.”

“Trawny’s essay can be read as a retelling of the story of Icarus, with Sein in place of the sun, and Heidegger taking over for the winged highflyer. But where some might see hubris at work, others see only a willingness to push the envelope, and it is clear from the very beginning that Trawny would rather have his philosophers be daredevils than hall monitors — Nietzsche rather than Kant, Kierkegaard instead of Descartes. In trading “drama” and “poetry” and “tragedy” for mere “argument,” contemporary philosophy has, Trawny thinks, totally lost its way. Or as he puts it: “The drama of thinking has vanished in the world of the argument.” Freedom to Fail is a lament — not for Heidegger’s mistakes, but for a philosophical epoch that, as he sees it, avoids mistakes at all costs.”

“According to Trawny, Heidegger’s commitment to thinking leads him into a realm beyond argumentation. It also led him into a realm beyond good and evil. Rhetorically, but also dramatically, Trawny asks if Nietzsche, who first surveyed this territory, was “Heidegger’s master” and then spends the next 80 pages answering his own question. Many of these pages make for captivating reading, but a shorter route could have been taken simply by quoting Heidegger’s late confession, as reported by his student Hans-Georg Gadamer, that “Nietzsche hat mich kaputt gemacht” — or, to translate it a little loosely, “Nietzsche broke me.””

“On one level, Trawny’s essay is a meditation on the necessity of brokenness and failure for philosophical thinking. It takes as its lodestar Heidegger’s infamous — and undeniably self-serving — postwar declaration that, “He who thinks greatly must err greatly.” Without failure, success is meaningless. Without endings, no new beginnings. Without daring and danger, no true safety nor security. One could go on to list any number of productive oppositions: darkness and light, concealing and revealing, calculating and poetizing, erring and thinking. Heidegger’s understanding of truth as aletheia, or unconcealment, was predicated upon this chiaroscuro-like interplay of opposing forces — things were revealed one minute, only to slip into darkness and oblivion the next. Who was to say when something stood in the light of truth and not, in fact, in the shadow of error? “Is there an absolute criterion for the assessment of a philosophy?” Trawny asks, once again more rhetorically than not.”

“the act that Heidegger was always performing, which was that of the academic outsider, the philosophical rebel who showed up to conferences and lectures still wearing his ski clothes. Many of Heidegger’s most famous students, from Hannah Arendt to Herbert Marcuse, were taken in by this image, but they also eventually came to see its limitations. Even the first Americans to hear about him or to see him teach, such as Sidney Hook and Marjorie Grene, knew that Heidegger was putting on a show. He may have railed against academic philosophy, but he still participated in it. Unlike Nietzsche, his “master,” Heidegger never abandoned his academic post and, when he got the chance, he even tried to reorganize the venerable University of Freiburg along Nazi party lines. What kind of academic outsider goes into university administration willingly, and then tries to militarize it? The one who errs greatly, of course.”

“Heidegger’s self-conception sets him, and those Heideggerians who follow too closely in his footsteps, apart. Whereas for Williams the lessons of Greek tragedy emphasized the contingency and frailty of even our best intentions (hence his famous idea of “moral luck”), for Heidegger they pointed towards the inescapability of fate and destiny. True philosophy wasn’t a matter of luck or chance at all: it was predestined, scripted even, by the historical unfolding of being itself. Heidegger was just the first and only thinker to recognize as much. He knew that history was tragedy and he thought he knew what roles he and the German people were supposed to play in it. He may have been miscast.”

“The history of being was, for Heidegger, the history of the forgetting, the oblivion of being. Tragedy was the only genre that suited it.”

“Once one begins to think in world-historical and onto-tragic proportions things often get dicey — never more so than when you start to think of yourself in such terms. Hegel had enough hubris to think that he stood at the end of history; Heidegger likewise considered himself the first true philosopher since Heraclitus, precisely because he alone had seen the tragic unfolding of the history of being leading up to him. Heidegger also thought he was alone in recognizing how, like Greek tragedy, the onto-tragedy of being contained within it the possibility of a new beginning. (In the black notebooks he also recognized that the names Heraclitus, Hegel, and Hölderlin each began with the letter “H.” So too did Heidegger and Hitler, of course. Was it fate?)”