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.

Philosophical Anthropology and Dasein: the Octopus as immersion in being

Edith Stein never had a child (nor did Hannah Arendt.)  I like to think that if a Professor Stein had a daughter then she might have made some significant corrective to Heidegger and his followers.

I would like to think that the self first emerges in its relation with the nurturing presence.  There is no need to opt for the machinations of Melanie Klein.  I prefer the insight offered by Richard Hughes.

But if a philosphical anthropology is to escape a solipsistic epistemology and yet escape an ontology emptied of values there will still remain the problem of the octopus.

No philosophical anthropology can ignore biology anymore than it can ignore psychology or ethnology.

I am not concerned with octopus in relation to problem-solving as such - although the sight of the pacific giant in a small, empty tank at San Diego's SeaWorld (2003/4?) revealed in an instant how little they know about both "world" and life in the sea.

No the problem is that unlike even the crow, the octopus begins as an unmothered, untutored larva.

If in time the octopus evolves to have mirror self recognition such as that of crows, dolphins, apes, pigs and elephants, it will be truly unique in the known course of evolution (who will hold a mirror up to T. Rex?)

The eye of the octopus has the very glands that doom the female as she broods her eggs.

The eye of the octopus, the window into a universe undesigned.

But what world beheld by the eye of the cephalopod?  If the elephant is there-in-my-world as its own recognized self, what are we to make of the octopus?

Consider the self-less cat, the domestic feline*.  Pace Roger Scruton, I suggest that Felis silvestris catus lives in a world governed not by percepts but utterly impelled by imagination.  If to be is to be distinguished, then in the world of the cat, to move is to be imagined edible.

And in the world of the octopus?

An author deplores that we possess cats as pets.  Wrong.  These little cats of the Levant  domesticated us.

Some have asked us to learn to hear what it is that we fail to see.  The cat doesn't ask.

And the logos in relation to the octopus?

* my apologies to those 30 years ago who endured my tendentious exploration of "cats don't really see".