Richard Hughes and Martin Heidegger: A High Wind in Jamaica

In the year 1929 that "Vom Wesen des Grundes" appeared also appeared Richard Hughes' A High Wind in Jamaica.
Chapter 6 is the legendary account of Emily's self-discovery at about age 10: she is this Emily in this body and not another.  She climbs the rat-lines to the masthead and below the children play on that other "mortal coil" which Hughes' did not know not to have  "a huge coil of rope" (there is no "rope" on a ship - perhaps it was a 'hawser' to be used for towing a captive vessel.)

Hughes imaginative account may have been known to Lawrence Vogel in his discussion of a self which emerges in an "ethos".

Vogel's critical comments and observations on Heidegger and ethics gave rise to this variant: the village in the clearing, as a setting for a variant of Veza Canetti's Der Oger.

The old ladies are holding down a young girl who has offended a taboo: her life thereafter will be more circumscribed.  When the deed is done, her old Auntie reports back to the old men, the village elders, seated about in her husband's hut.

Henri Troyat repeats a tale that a Russian landowner had hanged in his courtyard a German tutor whom he suspected of having an affair with his wife.  This is the law of the home, the ethos.  Villages in hillsides the world over attest to its role in either inhibiting or incubating culture - or both.

It is reported that only 1.5 million children perished in the Holocaust of which Heidegger would not speak.  In a letter from Arendt, we hear how the remaining tens of thousands of Jews in Germany were no longer enough to matter to the direction which Europe would take (even the prospect of the annihilation of Israel seems to leave her unconcerned.)

In my image of the origin of the ethos I see the old ladies of the Macaque troupe gathered around the slain elder male or I see the distraught mother elephant standing over her fallen calf.  We cannot look to ourselves to see our the origin of the possibility of seeing the other as we have come to see ourselves or as we ought to come to see, if not ourself, then the others.

Betancourt, a prisoner, found inner strength that was not autochthonous even if we cannot name it and have no grounds to name it "inner".  Its beginnings were not inner, they were without and are lost in our pre-history and in our pre-species, if you will.

We indulge Richard Hughes with his attribution of amusing ontological considerations to young Emily in his fanciful tale.  But down below the children are calling to her and her own thoughts go to the problem of Margaret.

Dilthey, Weber, Marcel or Jaspers would be at home with Hughes tale - but I think not Heidegger, for it could not be cast as more than fantasy and surely not as great, memorable Dichtung.  It is of course a flawed tale which we might be tempted to correct, or even to cease reprinting: his particulars in his portrayal of the abduction of children may now offend the facts of both piracy and child abductions as we know them - and of history, class and race in Jamaica.

Of course, there is no need to make Heidegger a "bogey-man" of the east Java seas - in the "dum-mie" of Hughes' Caribbean tale we may even hear the "dym", "duk" and "dusha" of a Russian tale, a Viking tale - a scholar might advise us.  But where are the children in the Heidegger opera?  Were there a Heideggerian variant of the Hughes' tale, would the practice of navigation at sea be illumined (flat geocentric, practical but also theoretical in so many respects) by the practical Heideggerian, schooled in anti-theory, anti-science, anti-mathesis (see Walcott, Omeros) - the hiker carries no sextant.

Regardless, it may be worth remembering the other thoughtful work about the self and others being written in and around 1928 and also published in that brief, decisive period of 'Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics', 'Being and Time' and 'The Essence of Reasons'.  For anyone having been up in the air, it may be a matter of coming to ground.