Enter Heidegger

No work of Wolfson’s would be complete without taking inventory of the specters of Heidegger. Upon circumspection, one senses Heidegger either lurking in the crawl spaces and closets of the discussion or in full display as the center piece of his work at hand. In the overture to his present work, one finds no exception as Wolfson summons his prized philosophic genie:

In Heideggerian terms, the historiographical project, the writing of history, is bolstered by a chronological conjecture with respect to speaking/thinking of time; but to speak or to think of time is to be caught in an extenuating circularity: my telling of time cannot be disentangled from my time of telling. (7)

True to his word, the genie consistently delivers. This remarkable insight into the temporal character of thought of the thinker/historian atones for the terrible track record of philosophy/historiography with its tendency to license its practitioners to record the universal history.

Perched with a monocle, they act as the purveyors of a seamless synoptic narrative. They work to hide in the folds the evidence of their intrusions. Aloof from the spectacle, they steal across the interval that separates their object from themselves (which is in no way the same interval that separates themselves from their object). What they have taken, they took anonymously. But Heidegger will force their confession.  One must admit to being more proximate to our work than comfort would allow.

From the alcoves of the event one gazes; or perhaps one makes one’s bed in the middle of it all. Can we go further and concede that we are fully inhabited by the object of our study? Can we possess without being possessed? If the answer is yes, then by what alibi do I prove my detachment from the history that I seek? If the answer is no, then what strange algebra endows my craft?

Philosophy is often “caught in an extenuating circularity.” Our quest for foundations frequently requires us to hop through a host of hermeneutical circles suggesting that the only foundation left to be found is that of internal consistency. All participants must submit to the same rules. If I require that my object be time bound then I must apply the same restriction to myself. My thinking, due to its immediacy and self-evidence, acquires a sense of false order that only idealization can provide. Slipping out of the temporal stream, my thoughts maintain their dryness by dancing between the rain drops as if time itself were at their command.

Heidegger points out that one cannot order one’s own exemption. We have to get wet. Everyone speaks from somewhere—from somewhere wet. Moisture even acts as the superconducting element of thought. It ensures the flow of ink before it dries. For Heidegger, I am party to this world and my being-in-the-world is captured in the ultimate horizon of time, but not just any time: my time. My time is as irreplaceable as I am. It forces me to see with two eyes/I’s. One eye/I marks the outline of a moving history of my historical object that is ever receding on a chronological scale, applying its gaze as a gravitational pull in attempt to arrest this motion. The other eye/I is turned up into my head, to look inwardly at my progress navigating my own dynamically shifting past, present and future of which my thinking is not immune.

Thus each historian lives in a particular time that serves as the launch pad and luggage of his or her particular account of what may just be a highly personal journey into the past. This journey often pursues a course that circumnavigates the intercedent generations that comprise the linear distance into the past. One can consider how Gadamer’s Truth and Method exemplifies a work of Heideggerian inspiration that develops an “elevation in the historicity of understanding” and an “analysis of historically effected consciousness.” (8) The dynamics of our discussion are aptly captured in Gadamer’s meditation on the hermeneutical circles wherein:

The circle, then, is not formal in nature. It is neither subjective, nor objective, but describes understanding as the interplay of the movement of tradition and the movement of the interpreter. The anticipation of meaning that governs our understanding of a text is not an act of subjectivity, but proceeds from the commonality that binds us to tradition. But this commonality is constantly being formed in our relation to tradition. Tradition is not simply a permanent precondition; rather, we produce it ourselves inasmuch as we understand, participate in the evolution of tradition, and hence further determine it ourselves. Thus the circle of understanding is not a “methodological” circle, but describes an element of the ontological structure of understanding. (9)

Cited in one of Wolfson’s lucrative endnotes, Sandra Rosenthal’s Time, Continuity and Indeterminacy: A Pragmatic Engagement with Contemporary Perspectives weighs in maintaining:

What is involved here is neither a mere continuity nor a mere duration, but rather a situation in which the past both conditions and adjusts to what is taking place in the present, and in which what is taking place adjusts to the oncoming future. In this way, each new present brings about a new past oriented towards a new future. In this way also, while past and future emanate from a present, each temporal dimension is in a sense spread through every other. (10)

The tendency to associate the past with a timeless death is overcome. Rosenthal zeros in on the sense of a living past which undergoes a continual renewal with the shifts and changes of a new present. Time is heavy with its events. Its weight corrupts the elegant geometry that formalists would like to confer upon it. Its character is one of constant readjustment and incessant interruption. One might be tempted to say that History resets itself to the tune of the tenses of time joined and out of joint—the marriage of histories past, present and future.

Would this not lead to a maze of transmigrations whose anachronism would suffocate the bare facts or the fact of facts? We must keep an ear out for the tenor of this proposed revisionism. As Rosenthal continues:

Lived temporality thus incorporates a temporally extended present within which experience opens onto past and future and to which past and future adjust. Such an understanding renders impossible not only a fully determinate future but also a fully determinate present or a fully determinate past, but it provides for a thickness and directional movement to time that is directly experienced in the temporal flow of the passing present. (11)

However will we save History as she is drowning? How can we hedge her in and protect some semblance of an unadulterated History from one that cohabitates with whomever calls upon her. Do we not fear being duped by history, by a history with which one can “prove anything?” The modesty of Rosenthal’s critique, that is, its measured response, must be highlighted.

For example, the “openness” of lived temporality evoked here does not imply the total abandonment of positions nor does “adjustment” refer to complete transformation bearing no resemblance to the original. Moreover, the qualification of the past and present as not being “fully determinate” does not seek to undermine the defensibility of historical accounts particularly in moral and legal contexts.

The break with the language and goal of totality does not coincide with anarchy—as though anything short of the whole would have no commercial value. We are not weakened by this lack of fullness. The choice is not all or nothing. We continue to stand resolute against the deniers of history and the morally reprehensible revisionists of historical events.  If anything, we are stronger with our sense of incompleteness for we can account for some degree of inconsistencies, relativities may cancel and in the end we will reflect again and again upon our progress toward a greater and greater sense of the events that we present.

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