[lit-ideas] Heidegger and the Thief
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lawrenchelm1. post@blogger. com" <lawrencehelm1.post@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:34:38 -0800
One of the reasons that Heidegger denigrated Liberal Democracy was that its
freedom was too readily turned to license. Everyone was free to make up
his own rules, or to operate without any rules at all. There was no
constancy, no interest in tradition. Everything was up for grabs and such a
system could not possibly survive.
I took a break from reading Heidegger at about noon on Monday (11-16-09) to
take the dogs for a run down at the river. It was a little warm, but I
thought we'd do okay, and we did. The dogs had their tongues hanging out by
the time we headed back toward the Jeep, and they were moving from the shade
of one tree to the shade of another.
And then I saw the purse. I've raged before about the people who dump
things down there. The river is a beautiful place and it outrages me to run
across garbage and junk that irresponsible people dump down there. But this
was a purse all by itself. I picked it up and looked inside and from what I
found it seemed obvious that some thief had dumped it down there. I looked
up toward the road. It wasn't so very far. The thief could have parked up
on Soboba Road and then scrambled part way down and tossed the purse.
Drat, I thought to myself. I didn't want to take on another person's
problems, but maybe there wasn't anything valuable in it. Maybe I could
just leave it where I found it. But in looking through it I found some bank
stubs, a Cosco card, some membership cards and a laminated card showing that
the owner of the purse to be an attorney licensed to practice law in
California. Drat, I thought again. She will probably want that card back.
So when I got home I emailed her (using the email address I found in her
purse) and she told me her car had been broken into on 11-13-09. She
stopped by after she got off work and picked up her purse. She said one of
her credit cards had been used at the Soboba Casino; and that for her purse
to have been dropped alongside Soboba Road seemed consistent with what she
knew. She said she intended to give the purse to the police and invite
them to fingerprint everything. She said the police (assuming they go along
with her suggestion) would want to fingerprint the two of us so they can
eliminate our prints from any others they find and hopefully narrow the
remaining prints down to the thief.
My paranoid imagination went to work with that but I readily agreed. Based
upon my sense of responsibility, I had no choice. To choose otherwise would
be going against "dasein," against "being," or in Freudian terms it would
mean going against my superego. And yet I am living in a Liberal Democracy
82 years after Heidegger wrote Being and Time. Was I feeling especially
responsible because I had been reading Heidegger about responsibility?
That's possible, but I don't think so. I would have preferred being able to
conclude that what I had found would be worthless to the owner. If I could
have convinced myself of that then I would have left the purse where I found
it with a clean conscience, but I could not, and (based upon what I found)
would not have been able to even if I had not been reading Heidegger.
My conscience was based upon a "tradition" Heidegger said Liberal
Democracies were forgetting.
Not everyone has such a tradition, to be sure. Our particular Liberal
Democracy is guilty of most of the criticisms Heidegger has leveled against
it, but we are not all guilty, and I would venture to guess that during
World War II as many Americans relied upon our Liberal-Democratic tradition
as Germans relied upon their ethnic one.
But I can imagine the thief, if the police find him, claiming his innocence
by relying on his nihilistic lack of belief in any such tradition. And
he'll do it with a straight face and an utter lack of guilt, but that's what
Heidegger thought we would all be doing, and we aren't.
Furthermore, while we who live in Liberal Democracies see our own evil (how
can we avoid seeing it), we have overwhelming evidence that the utopias
Heidegger and Marx envisioned were far more evil than anything a Liberal
Democracy has produced.
[And I would feel a lot better about the police taking my fingerprints if
only I hadn't been reading Kafka recently. :-(]
Lawrence Helm
www.lawrencehelm.com
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