Destiny Symposium Response

Peg Birmingham

There is no question that in the 1930s Heidegger’s notion of destiny emphasized the destiny of the Volk, understood as a homogeneous unity tied to the German language and soil. I agree entirely with Wolfson’s point that the trinity of land, language, and people moved Heidegger to National Socialism, a move that brought him disastrously close to Schmitt’s concept of the political. However, I disagree with Wolfson’s further claim that while Heidegger “grew wary of the party,” he never abandoned his belief in “the supremacy and distinctive role of the German people to be actualized in their land and through their language.” This claim ignores completely Heidegger’s later thought on destiny in “The Anaximander Fragment,” thought now in the thinking of errancy. Errancy does not privilege land, language, or soil, but instead understands destiny as radical abandonment. Thought through errancy, destiny is no longer handed down to a privileged Volk rooted in land and language, but instead encompasses a shared world and earth, a shared being-in-common without foundation. Rooted in the errant finitude of abandonment, Heidegger does not abandon destiny’s “readiness for anxiety” that, in Being and Time, singularizes each of us in a plurality with others. Instead he broadens the plurality, now encompassing a plurality of worldly standpoints and belonging to a common earth. In his reading of the Anaximander fragment, Heidegger understands belonging as the “jointure of appearance.” This last rejects an understanding of belonging constituted through identity and exclusion, claiming instead a fundamental relatedness or jointure of beings in their diversity and plurality of appearing worlds and on the earth. Heidegger’s thinking of historicity through “jointure” (Fug) calls then for thinking beyond the nation-state trinity of territory, language and people. Gregory Fried reminds us of the urgency of the task, with the global climate crisis predicted to add another 150 million climate refugees to the present 65.5 million forcibly displaced stateless who are unwelcome and have nowhere to go as nation-state borders become increasingly militarized.

Laurence Hemming’s claim that the phenomenon of time in Heidegger is futural seems to be at odds with his claims that the presencing of time “opens us to risk, to urgency, to need: to need to decide. Ours, the destiny of the futural history of being.” If the need is to respond, that is, to decide, and I think it is, then the emphasis cannot be on a future history of being, but rather, on the historicality of our present moment: the Augenblick, understood as the temporal gap between the past and the future, a gap characterized by a de-cision, that is, a scission or interruption of the smooth process of the past moving into the future, or the future smoothly moving into the past. The time of the Augenblick, the time of the present, is then the time of interruption, that is, the time of judgment.

I am concerned that judgment is entirely lacking in Julia Ireland’s beautiful reading of Heidegger’s notion of destiny through his engagement with Hölderlin. Ireland stresses destiny as poetic dwelling or standing in the open. She stresses the “whiling” of this dwelling in the open, a waiting for the gods. This concept of destiny that stresses the future seems emptied of historicity. And I think it is at once too optimistic and too pessimistic. Her optimism is a concept of destiny in which absent gods will return. Her pessimism is a concept of destiny that seemingly allows no place for judgment, let alone action.

Returning once again to the Anaximander fragment, Heidegger takes issue with Nietzsche’s translation of the fragment that ties destiny to an eschatology, offering instead a translation that emphasizes destiny as the temporal play of necessity and transience at the heart of Being’s historicity. Most importantly, Heidegger claims this play is ordered by Dike’s law in which “things render justice and pay penalty to one another for their injustice, according to the ordinance of time.” Ordered by the law of justice, our taking over of our destiny calls for a response, a “counter-blow” (Erwiderung) that Heidegger in Being and Time insists is Dasein’s response to destiny (GA 2: 510/SZ 386). The counterblow occurs in the gap between the past and the future. Again, this is the gap of judgment. As Gregory Fried puts it, and I agree entirely, at issue in this gap is the question of “who we think we are and how we will inhabit this earth responsibly.”