On Witold Gombrowicz's Heidegger

"...whatever you want, / you will, like a literate insect, fabricate or radiate."

-- Amy King, from "Everyone Has a Decision To Make"

Gombrowicz's A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes is like a teacher you want to talk to for hours. Someone not just knowledgeable or entertaining, but who brings a unique spin on how anything works. Someone you want to follow to find meaning. I have mentioned the book before, but I do not remember recommending it. I will remedy that now. I do have quibbles with his descriptions of certain philosophers, and his slim volume doesn't always do justice to struggling with another work of philosophy yourself. But it is a work of philosophy on its own, one that manages to be fun and useful. I can imagine people reading it out loud together and asking "Well how is that idea supposed to work?" Gombrowicz's writing is optimal for that experience, as short, thoughtful, aphoristic bursts demonstrate his grappling with everything he has put down. Philosophy is not an abstraction for him. As he says toward the opening of the book:

There is no point in asking whether one should do philosophy or not. We do philosophy because we must. It is inevitable. Our consciousness asks us questions and we must try to resolve them. Philosophy is a necessary thing. (1)

My eyes lit up seeing philosophy described as a "must," "inevitable," and "necessary." How many times have I been told reading a book is useless? That thinking about ideas is hopeless? All the same, I want to argue with Gombrowicz's invocation of the royal "we." Who is this "we" who do philosophy? Clearly not everyone. I recently dealt with an attitude fatally opposed to any kind of reflection, let alone that needed to pursue wisdom. One person adamantly denied anything was ever wrong as they were helped out of a bad situation. It was beyond ungrateful; it made me wonder what we owe ourselves in a world aiming to deny acknowledgement.

When you want to deny you could possibly be helped, you're not just denying the possibility of wisdom. You're exerting power upon the floor you're standing on, and it is destined to collapse. There does not seem to be a trace of a consciousness which "asks us questions" we "must try to resolve." There is insecurity and a lust for power. Can philosophy operate with the worst of intentions?

I'm drawn to Gombrowicz's statement that "Philosophy is a necessary thing." Nowadays, I see it at work in the bleakest of situations. Many of the most hateful, hurtful people hold a comprehensive theory of the world. They feel they need it; the more they're called out on their wrongdoing, the more they lean on terrible but consistent assumptions. They're enmeshed in the necessity of philosophy, and so are we. Somehow, we've got to get them to ask a real question, or all is lost.

Gombrowicz describes Heidegger as "creative," but with disorganized, "difficult[,] and tortured" thinking. (2)

His is one of those comments you pass over when first studying a thinker. You want to dive into their ideas, start using them, let them enhance how you see things. But now that I've spent a lot of time with Heidegger, I have to sit with this. A lot of Heidegger's creativity, in my experience, comes from his forcing his ideas and bending the text out of shape. I really do like his notion, in the later lectures on Antigone, that the polis can be thought a pole, a swirl where beings gather around and their various statuses can be seen. It is completely faithless to the actual language of the play, let alone our typical idea about the Greek polis, a city whose people stand united by their laws and traditions. But for me, it serves as a powerful reminder that when we posit a political order, when we say "this is how it is," we are actually working with a chaotic notion of history that somehow holds hidden aspects of order. There is no simple, settled organization: the more someone insists on that, the more they indulge violence to get their way. There are the simplifications we use to begin thinking and communicating, and then the flood of complexities which threaten to overwhelm those simplifications.

The funny thing is that Heidegger's overreading of polis has a certain faithfulness to the drama itself. Antigone is not just a stand-in for nature or the gods, and Creon is not only the fact of law. Thebes as a fragile polis, one with far more problems than a succession crisis, exposes a radical swirl which lets you see their true statuses. Creon does believe his brutishness is legitimate enough. He does not want to think, merely assert. He believes this is his right, and is helped by the combination of a power vacuum and scraps of legitimacy. Antigone is far more complicated, not just bounded by death (her brother's unburied body, her own sealing in a cave) but by the history of her family. If you're tempted to think all this talk has nothing to do with modern politics, it is worth dwelling on Antigone as practicing something like an extreme but necessary democratic virtue, one that grounds justice. Not everything done in the name of family is just, but there is something irreducible about the idea of family which modern politics cannot extirpate. This is not to say trad wife influencers or reactionaries have a point. In some ways, what is at stake is more visible when strangers stand up for the rights of those they do not particularly like. Polyneices, we note, was ready to kill Antigone and everyone else in Thebes to get the throne.

I am in a curious position, then, with Gombrowicz's summary of Heidegger. I agree with his words – Heidegger's thought is creative, "difficult[,] and tortured" – and perhaps none of Gombrowicz's own reasoning.

I want to conclude with a passage that I feel summarizes for Gombrowicz the power of Heidegger. How is it that we become who we ought to be? What grounds authentic living?

Heidegger says that man's essence is his existence, that man is not a definite thing. There are no models of man–as for example in Catholic philosophy–but man is an existence in the process of making itself. Subtle but profound difference. One cannot say that someone is man; one can only say that he becomes man, that he achieves himself as human existence. (3)

"Man is an existence in the process of making itself" sounds exactly correct, especially when contrasted with the notions that we emerge pretty much who we are or conform to select models of true humanity. I do believe people have to put in the work in order to be their best selves, and the toughest part of the work is realizing this even has to be done.

All the same, this leads to another proposition which I must wrestle with. Gombrowicz on where Heidegger's thinking goes: "...you see there are very few people who have human lives." (4) I don't want the elitism entailed, but it is true that we do not take authenticity seriously and there are consequences for this. I don't doubt that our constant vulnerability to fads and advertising is a product of a profound lack of self-respect. An entire population, scammed by miracle cures, desiring to bend science to its will, needs to learn to admit it is wrong. "Concerns" should not lead to tyranny; evidence and knowledge shouldn't be shouted over. There are good questions one can ask about one's own identity which lead to both achievement and acceptance.

References

(1) Gombrowicz, Witold. A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes. Translated by Benjamin Ivry. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. 10.

(2) ibid., 73-74.

(3) ibid., 78.

(4) ibid., 79.