Provocation: “All You Need to Know”: On Intellectual Life and Moral Responsibility

In Fall 2011, while wrestling with Being and Time, I made a comment to Jim and others that I was determined to understand Martin Heidegger. In response, Jim replied: All you need to know about Heidegger is this line from a 1933 speech to his students: study must again become a risk, not a refuge for cowardly. Whoever does not survive battle, lies where he falls. The new courage must accustom itself to steadfastness, for battle for institutions where our leaders are educated will continue for a long time. It will be fought out of strengths of new Reich that Chancellor Hitler will bring to reality. A hard race with no thought of self must fight this battle, a race that lives from constant testing and that remains directed toward goal to which it committed itself. It is a battle to determine who shall be teachers and leaders at university (Aune, personal communication, December 3, 2011). At times, at least, it seemed that Aune had decided not to consider Heidegger's (arguably) because of his involvement with Nazism. Given that two of us shared same religious background, I understood source of his discomfort. At same time, I was uncomfortable rejecting Heidegger solely on that basis. Not fully satisfied with Jim's response, I enrolled in a graduate course on Heidegger. The course, which professor Dennis Schmidt had named Intellectual Life and Moral Responsibility, focused on Heidegger question, or, as Schmidt put it, whether it was possible to be a person of while being blind to world and to one's own (Schmidt, personal communication, 2013). Aune may have considered this question closed, but this essay seeks to reopen it. In an effort to expand how rhetoricians have studied (or not studied) Heidegger, I call for deep reflections upon complexity of ethos in both our readings of controversial figures and our own intellectual practices. In field of rhetorical studies, several individuals have engaged in studies of Heidegger. Ramsey Eric Ramsey, for instance, written about relationships between Mitdasein (Being-with-the-other) and rhetorical listening (Ramsey, 1993) and Heidegger's Principle of Reason address (Ramsey, 1997). Michael Hyde, Susan Zickmund, Allen Scult, and others have also written about Heidegger's relationship with rhetoric. However, as late as 2005, Gross argued in Heidegger and Rhetoric that story of Heidegger and rhetoric has not been adequately told (Gross & Kemmann, 2005, p. 1). The subsequent chapters in that volume include into Heidegger's views of pathos, kairos, audiences, and a variety of other subjects. However, volume focuses heavily on Being and Time and on a lecture course that Heidegger gave in 1924 on Aristotle's Rhetoric. This focus on Heidegger's early work brackets ethical questions about his involvement with Nazism and his subsequent work after leaving Rector position at University of Freiburg. Gross posits that the art of listening in SS 1924 [the unfortunate common name for Heidegger's summer session on Aristotle] obviously a more practical orientation than does later Heideggerian (Gross & Kemmann, 2005, p. 1). However, I argue that it is primarily through Heidegger's later dabbling in poetics during war that we can find evidence of great insights part of Professor Schmidt's question. First, ideas that Heidegger presented during and after war--particularly those on growing influence of technology and decline of social ties-seem to have been, in retrospect, far ahead of their time, recognizing postmodern themes that would not be picked up for decades. His lecture course on Holderlin's Der Ister and Sophocles's Antigone in 1942 takes up Greek to demon or German unheimlich, which might be translated as being outside of oneself' or homeless at height of World War II. …