In German the word ‘Notruf’ means ‘emergency call’, a call from someone in distress. The German word ‘Notwendigkeit’ means simply ‘necessity’, which suggests one possible signification of ‘Notruf’ as the call from someone in need. But there are also other possibilities.
Readers of Heidegger, most of whom are clueless, like to make fun of his terminology, even if they are unable to understand his concepts. ‘Notwendigkeit’ is an example, when Heidegger puns that Notwendigkeit is to be read etymologically as Not-Wendigkeit, that is, as ‘a turning around from a state of need or distress’. There is a resonance here with Plato’s famous ‘turning-around of the entire soul’ to see the ideas in the allegory of the cave in Politeia, but Heidegger is thinking in a completely different age at the end of a long trajectory of metaphysical thinking and its corresponding cast of world, namely, the hermeneutic cast of subject/object metaphysics with an interior consciousness vis-à-vis an external, objective world.
All of modern science and hegemonic academic philosophy remains held tight in the grip of this modern cast of mind without its being noticed at all. The ontological difference that once served as entrance to the realm of philosophy proper has been closed down. No one sees the necessity for a cry for help, which amounts to a felt need to recast today’s hegemonic cast of mind. They remain complacent and just don’t ‘get it’. Heidegger himself has a word for this: Notlosigkeit, literally ‘needlessness’, but signifying ‘lack of distress’, ‘lack of urgency’. Lack of distress is a good thing, isn’t it? If there is a lack of urgency, there is no urge. All the more reason to remain unperturbed. No recasting of mind is necessary or even possible; it’s literally inconceivable, they say.
There are ostensibly ’sympathetic’ readers of Heidegger who latch on to this or that thought in his huge oeuvre, but continue writing of the ‘human subject’ and ‘consciousness’. They do this presumably because they themselves haven’t seen the need that needs turning, but also because they adapt to the mood of the times and their audience, which is just as clueless and lacking any urgent need to disturb its own complacency.
Heidegger’s phenomenological deconstruction of the subject/object split and the resultant dissolution of subjective consciousness as the site of human openness for the world has yet to be taken ‘on board’ by today’s thinking, whose needlessness is seismically unshakable. Nevertheless Heidegger felt the need to turn around an emergency, pursuing a project of going back to the very roots of Western thinking, with its stranglehold on today’s global mind, to revise and recast them. He is the first to insistently ask the question: What does being itself mean?, a question that upsets the whole of metaphysical thinking which, since Aristotle, was focused on the investigation of the being qua being, i.e. ontology. In modern philosophy, not even this investigation is understood, and the term ‘ontology’ has degenerated to the status of a mere fashionable catchword “signifying nothing”.
The unshakable complacency of modern thinking, its perseverance in making ‘progress’ along entrenched ruts, its cluelessness about understanding what ontology in its best days meant, point to its imperviousness to an emergency-turning Not-Wendigkeit, to an imperative for the historical cast of mind to subject itself to a recasting from the ground up.
Heidegger’s unforgivable question: What does being itself mean? led to his provisional answer: Being means time. But what kind of time? Not clock time, not time interpreted as a flow of successive instants of time along a time-line, but what he calls “ursprüngliche Zeit” (originary time). This originary time still needs to be conceptually unfolded in a recasting of world. In our age of maddening complacency with regard to the need to rethink, however, this answer, first presented in Heidegger’s ground-breaking Sein und Zeit, is met with a shrug of the shoulders. Instead there is, for instance, boundless charlatanry from clever authors who catch the public’s whimsical attention, enjoying their allotted time in the spotlight and the proceeds from their bestsellers. They are the ones whom Plato termed sophists — rhetorically skilled, slippery characters. They’re a dime a dozen and there’s always many who fall for them.
There’s nothing that can be done about it, but the uncanny complacency vis-à-vis the historical need to take on the hard task of thinking through elementary phenomena (being, time, movement, life,…) once again from scratch, instead of continuing to blab on more or less eruditely about this and that, especially about this philosopher’s name and that philosopher’s name, is unsettling for those few still capable of being unsettled and called to the task. Talking about rather than thinking through sums up the profession of scholarship. The latter is strenuous and slow, since you have to think in concepts, the modern equivalent of what Plato called ‘ideas’. The elementary phenomena do not allow themselves to come to light easily in appropriate concepts. It can take millennia for crucial phenomena to do so, as shown by the case of the phenomenon of time, for which an appropriate concept is still a philosophical neonate whose Not-Wendigkeit has yet to be appreciated.
Historical time is not propitious for thinking to become unsettled and face the music: How could the world shape up differently in alternative genuine ‘ideas’ for our shared mind?
Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.
From the artefactphil blog at Blogger in particular: Laws of movement & Energy.
