Jaspers and the animals

In his 1935 lectures printed as "Reason and Existenz", Jaspers contrasts the animal with the human.

Even at the time of the lectures, the concept of the organism in its environment was evolving (and offering hope to anti-Darwinians such as Heidegger, strangely enough.)

Today almost nothing that Jaspers says about animals in those lectures remains defensible.  While not as vulgar as Catholic Peter Geach in his treatment of "brutes" in Mental Acts, Jaspers fails to acknowledge any of the aspects of great apes, dolphins or elephants which now place them on a continuum with what had been seen as distinctively human: a minimal level of self-awareness, a minimal level of social learning, a minimal level of culture - and, in the case of the elephant, almost certainly grief.

What interests me is to see whether Jaspers' overall views of the person and a life with others could be revived and revised in a variant suitable for Alcoholics Anonymous.

By middle-age most of us have friends afflicted with alcohol addiction and among them likely one who has rejected AA for its requirement to acknowledge a higher power.  Jaspers thought is far more subtle than typical Christian-inspired theism and is free of the taint of Medard Boss and the Heideggerian "Daseinanalyse" movement.

Heidegger's Vom Wesen des Grundes

In 1949 Heidegger had the opportunity to a add a preface to the 3rd edition of his Vom Wesen des Grundes.  He took the occasion to close an additional preface as follows:

Wie wäre es, wenn die Besinnlichen begännen, auf diese seit zwei Jahrzehnten wartenede selbe Sache endlich denkend einzugehen?

When you hear that Heidegger was unapologetic, it can help to remember that twenty years earlier he had celebrated a Fest for Husserl in the company of Edith Stein with whom he had worked on the Husserl texts for inner time consciousness.  Stein had since perished in the Holocaust.
Let us turn to the ending of the book:

dem Dasein als Selbst das Erwachen der Antwort des Mitseins, im Mitsein mit dem es die Ichheit darangeben kann, um sich als eigenliches Selbst zu gewinnen.

It is difficult to read such a closing passage knowing that the Master had a chance to add a thoughtful rewording with less of Self and individual.  Consider this: his one case of collaboration also dates back to 1928 (the year he says gave us his Kant book and this book on "grounds" or "reasons") and in his editor's introduction to that book he suggests that Edith Stein had worked on it as a steno who had added the chapter and paragraph divisions to a "transcription".

Nothing in the closing of the Grounds book evokes You or We.  This is the author who ridiculed Schelling as being a mere "thinker" and not a "philosopher" - this is Heidegger who took the concept of "horizon" and "Eigenwelt" and reached his greatest depths of profundity in evoking the "world" and "transcendence".

So in some matters he was a thoughtless fool and ingrate.  But he also seems to suggest that this book has been denied its readers those past twenty years - and that it is what they have been waiting for (Heidegger is at the time not banned from publishing but banned from teaching.)  What grounds might we have for distrusting the insight of the Master?

One reassuring possibility for his concerned, thoughtful reader is that the mere Schrift of an Edith Stein on empathy and others could not be expected to have interested Heidegger - or yet another possibility is that he also repeatedly neglected to actually read the work of his former lover and later confidante, Hannah Arendt.

But there is a philosopher with whom he will not now be able to communicate, an author who converted to the Catholicism of his youth, with whom he worked closely, the trusted secretary of his own former Master - Edith Stein.

To turn Heidegger on himself: we need not ask for the "reason" that he makes no mention, exposes no regret, but we can be open to someone evoking the "ground" for this neglect.

Poet and astronomer (amateur) in response to Heidegger

Any amateur poet (unpublished in any book by third parties, itself a book devoted principally to poetry) who is also an amateur astronomer (whether by sundial, lunar records, binoculars, azimuth-mounted telescope or other telescope either solar or astral, reflector or refractor, planetary or nebular or spectrographic) may wish to reply to Herr Heidegger.
It has long been claimed that a geocentric viewpoint is of more value in navigation on the seas than a heliocentric viewpoint.  Heidegger was concerned more with hiking than with celestial navigation, but some matters can be addressed to his followers.
The heideggerian speech among those with a reverence for Being can be compared to communication among those making astronomical observations: this need involve no technology.  Somewhat north of the Mediterranean, the stars which are visible throughout the night travel about in the heavens as would indicate the thumb of the right-hand outstretched when facing north (what techno-trolls call "counter-clockwise") while some considerable distance south of that Sea, the stars visible all night have no central star about which they swing, but swing they do, as indicated by thumb of the outstretched left-hand when facing south.
Heidegger was very fond of notes left by ancients, so we can imagine how disconcerting [throwing them for a loop] that those to the north should read that only a few thousand years earlier, the stars of the northern summer sky swung about a major star such as that of the Lyre.
The structuralists should have been able to demonstrate that to the south lay left-handed languages and to the north lay right-handed languages.  The heideggerian could explain that the technology of the pack camel and the barge had led to commerce which had allowed these languages to be polluted and the origins lost.
Worse yet, the moon far south of the Mediterranean in the reverse of the moon far to the north: both see a "man in the moon" but for one the grey Mare are an eye, for the others a mouth.  This heresy is easily disposed of by condemning the idolatry of the lunar images and the technology of charcoal on parchment.
But surely we are not doomed to be unable to communicate the peculiar balancing of the crescent moon such that it face one way in the heat of summer in the north while it sets facing quite the other way far to the south and yet never sets in the east when south nor rises in the west when the observer is south.
Heidegger on the search for "grounds" rightly reminds us that all understanding and explanation occurs against a background and in a situation in which the wonder of the world makes itself available to itself and in which the friend is willing to listen or the wise one willing to speak, the better slaves permitted to pose questions at the end and the women content to quietly serve beer or mead or peppermint tea.

[Husserl began as a student of astronomy, whatever his reservations later about the epistemology of Galileo]