Heidegger's entanglement

"Had Heidegger ever come up with a saying to sum up his philosophy it would have been: ‘I dwell, therefore I am.’ For him, identity is bound up with being in the world, which in turn means having a place in it. We don’t live in the abstract space favoured by philosophers, but in a particular place, with specific features and history. We arrive already entangled with the world, not detached from it. Our identity is not secured just in our heads but through our bodies too, how we feel and how we are moved, literally and emotionally.

"Instead of presenting it as a puzzle to be solved, Heidegger’s world is one we should immerse ourselves in and care for: it is part of the larger ‘being’ where we all belong. As Malpas puts it, Heidegger argues that we should release ourselves to the world, to find our part in its larger ebb and flow, rather than seek to detach ourselves from it in order to dominate it." ~ Charles Leadbeater summarizes a lot of what I like about Heidegger in as clean a language as one could care for.

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A quick word about Heidegger's Nazism: I want to say that Heidegger was like Ezra Pound, whom I feel gets a pass for being a good poet, but a political and social idiot. Pound was selfless enough to encourage many world-class poets. But, Heidegger wasn't selfless. He was man of poor character, a bigot, a coward. He did not practice what he preached. Reading Heidegger is like coming back to what was a family home, now made rubble by a spring twister. Tragedy everywhere, but some keepsakes remain.

An Unalienable Shelf

Supreme Court Justice William Brennen, Jr., speaking at Georgetown University on October 12, 1985, put into words something that has been gnawing at me for months now. I had only one class in law, and that was business law. Yet I think it true that values exist beyond the violent grasp of politics. Brennen agrees, pointing to the Bill of Rights.

"The view that all matters of substantive policy should be resolved through the majoritarian process has appeal under some circumstances, but I think it ultimately will not do. Unabashed enshrinement of majority will would permit the imposition of a social caste system or wholesale confiscation of property so long as a majority of the authorized legislative body, fairly elected, approved. Our Constitution could not abide such a situation. It is the very purpose of a Constitution-and particularly of the Bill of Rights-to declare certain values transcendent, beyond the reach of temporary political majorities. The majoritarian process cannot be expected to rectify claims of minority right that arise as a response to the outcomes of that very majoritarian process."

The Bill of Rights, of course, is a document born of politics. But the founders rightly tossed the ball up out of reach and into the hand of God, "that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights" and it lists a few of these that were consequent upon its historic purpose.

I think American politics has forgotten this high unalienable shelf. And I know that American evangelicals have largely forgotten it. But a theological politic must have it and cannot exist without it. Isn't that shelf "Jesus is Lord (and you are not)"? Yes. Consider, then, the unalienable shelf of values untouchable by the greedy chaos of human politic: to it we aspire and from it we are judged (Psalm 2).