Destiny Symposium Response

Gregory Fried

Writing as the coronavirus nears its peak in the United States, I cannot escape the impression that thinking about destiny is itself a destiny.

Julia Ireland is right that our being bound together in a “co-implication, or ‘co-respondence,’ as the event of difference between gods and human beings, and between humans beings bound to an Earth in common (in 1934 ‘destiny’ as Fatherland; in 2020 ‘destiny’ as climate change, thanks to the West), is what Heidegger means by destiny as ‘nuptial.’” The universal spread of this particular illness underlines a global ill-ness in our human being: that the particular trajectories of historical communities, their Schickung, cannot be isolated and are wedded (Ge-) in a common thread, a shared destiny as Ge-schick on a planetary scale.

Elliot Wolfson is right that Heidegger’s reflections on language, and on historical community as the habitation of a distinct language, “must be interpreted in a particularistic as opposed to a universalistic register.” Heidegger’s seynsgeschichtlich valorization of the German language-people as the locus of a polemos to save Being from oblivion is paradoxical: an envisioned rescue of the radically particular from the root-eradicating universal as the mission of the Germans on a universal, planetary scale. Heidegger’s actual response to this destiny was catastrophic; what is at issue remains potentially so for us.

Laurence Hemming is right to read Heidegger’s strange saying that “human being was never even until now Da-sein” (GA 82: 56) as meaning “not that our destiny is yet to be fulfilled, but that our present destiny is ever and always ‘to be “not yet”’: never absolute, ever in question.” At stake is not what we are as a global humanity but who we are, and whether we can imagine our way to living together with this shared fate as a question that confronts us, or whether, in our hubris, we succumb to an identitarianism that closes itself off. We must find a measure on Earth by which we might inhabit both our situated belonging to particular community and our belonging to a global destiny that at once threatens to erase rooted locality and promises to enlarge it beyond what its boundaries previously could contain.

Peg Birmingham is right that “The struggle to free the power of destiny then is a struggle involving a plurality of standpoints” and to see her struggle as opening this plurality from her own embedded standpoint, as a U.S. citizen, confronting the trajectory of this nation as a polemical encounter between the specificity of its racial, particularist injustices and the universalism of its aspirations. Being-human is fateful because, as temporal-historical, we are a tra-jectory: a project cast forward by a past that transcends that past into a future as a Geschichte. This trajectory has its distinctive momentum that defines the scope and ambit of its possibilities, but not as a pre-ordained destination, even if it must begin from the utterly specific. The destination is always to-come and therefore in question as question. In transcending, the trajectory must confront its past as its own, as empowering, shameful, or, most likely, both. The challenge in taking the question seriously is to own the trajectory rather than to be dragged along by it, to transcend without uprooting.