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.

Cuttlefish: the male cross-dresser and moral decadence

The male cuttlefish who reach the female disguised as a female suggest a view of knowledge and evolution which Paul Valéry might have enjoyed.

The female gives preference to his sperm pack (she has her choice of a few she has accepted.)

First, view his female camouflage as a mental representation of his which she perceives.

Second, consider that this camouflage first arose as an aspect of signalling among cuttlefish.

Third, consider that the hominid scientist views his display as a mechanism and her opting for his sperm pack as a response in which, once again, no perception and communication occurred at all.

Fourth: transpose to any long-standing debates about sense-data and physical objects or the existence of other minds and entertain the notion of theists that this skeptical trend has contributed to a moral relativism which reduces our prospects as a species.

Ethics and Selective Warfare: notes

The opening of the pre-emptive war with Iraq through the use of cruise missiles is a kind of warfare which I term "selective warfare".  The Polish response to Nazi and Soviet invasions was not selective in the sense which I intend - it my be termed "responsive warfare" in response to all-out attack, invasion, as opposed to sniping, border incursions, diplomatic insults and the like.  Slaughter by Nazi and Soviet forces and the doctrines animating both (Poles as "sub-humans" and Poles as "can never be trusted", respectively) bore out the need to defend the Polish people and their newly restored nation at almost all costs.

Iraq.  The direct victims of the Septenber 11 attacks on US soil number some 3000+ if one includes consideration of the health harm done to various rescuers and others during the attack and in the aftermath.  Some estimates of civilian casualties in the Iraq war place the number near 100,000 by early 2010.  If it is shown that the porous Iraq border with Syria and Saudi Arabia would allow the US to "bring the war on terror" to Iraq in a way in which sheer physical barriers had prevented a wide influx to Afghanistan (15 of the 19 attackers were from Saudi Arabia and none from a country neighboring Afghanistan), then it might be argued that a war against the Kufar had been brought onto Arab soil without justification.

If the majority of the attackers had been Iranian and their leader Persian, the war would have been fought on Iranian soil - and perhaps with UN-backing.  If the majority of the attackers had been Pakistani, then it would be reasonable to think that US forces would be today trying to establish democracy in the tribal lands of Pakistan.  But the majority were Saudi.