Krell, "Lifedeath"

[Dave Monroe]

>From David Farrell Krell, Daimon Life: Heidegger and Life-Philosophy
(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992), Chapter Seven, "Lifedeath: Heidegger,
Nietzsche, Freud" (pp. 217-51).  Again, thanks to a certain someone out
there for mentioning Krell to me ...

Earlier we noted how disconcerting it was for life-philosophers such as
Georg Simmel who became convinced that death could no longer be regarded
as standing apart from life as its opposite.  Studies by biologists on
the life-duration of individual members of the various genuses and
species suggested that the causes of dissolution and death were immanent
in life; if not the telos [Krell here uses Greek letters] of life's
unfolding, death was certainly not  merely contingent truncation of a
vital development that was in principle endless.  Neurophysiological
research on nerve tissue and germn plasm and psychoanalytic speculations
on the types of drives and pulsions at work in living creatures expanded
on these medical and biological studies, wqhich, as we have seen, had
already (especially through Eugen Korschelt) had already had their
impact on Heidegger's existential ontology.  If Dasein was reborn at
each instant of its ecstatic existence, and if it was dying in each such
instant as well, then the immanence and imminence of its death had to
alter whatever sense its factical "life" might possess.  (217)

Nevertheless, Heidegger's fundamental ontology leaves the question of
immanent and imminent death untouched insofar as it suppresses or at
least subordinates "ontology of life."  If existential ontology always
need the question of being (die Frage nach dem Sein) to have been
"clarified eforehand" [citations available upon request ...], it also
always needs "life" to have been clarified in precisely thev same way.
As though being and life were inseparably joined--perhaps one and the
same.  For Nietzsche, as we heard, they were: "'Being'--we have no other
way of representing this than as 'living.'--How can anything dead 'be'?"
[...].  Heidegger, however, who explicitly acknowledges the circularity
of ontology of Dasein and the question of being, holds the circles of
the living at a distance, no matter how persistently and incorrigibly
Dasein dies. (217)

For both Nietzsche and Freud, as we know, death is immanent in life.
Life "itself" and death "itself" can be written only as lifedeath.
(217)

nietzsche's thought of lifedeath--of becoming and of life bodying forth
from chaos and ash--arises from a thinking that according to Heidegger
is not biological, but eminently metaphysical. (218)

... Heidegger acknowledges that for Nietzsche's "perspectivism" the very
distinction between organic and inorganic too has its own perspective,
and all becoming          Let us be on guard! [n.b.--Krell occasionally
inserts italicized text in the midst of sentences set off from the
"normal" text by several character widths of blank space]         must
be acknowledged as perspectival.  Heidegger explains as follows: "The
mechanistic representation of 'inanimate' nature is only a hypothesis
for purposes of calculation; it overlooks the fact that here too
relations of forces and concatenations of perspectives hold sway."  Thus
for Nietzsche there is no inorganic world; wahtver is in any way "real"
is alive, that is, "perspectival." (218-9)

Not surprisingly, Heidegger realtes Nietzsche's new interpretation of
comprehensive sensuousness to Leibnitzian mopnadology, except of course
that now truth and semblance fall on the same side of an impossible
distinction, so that the very difference between truth and error
collapses along with the distinction bewtween the living and the
nonliving.  If a residual distinction between the inanimate and the
animate realms persists, it is only in order to stress the equation of
truth with error: "Truth is the kind of error without which a certain
kind of living being could not live.  The value for life ultimately
decides" [...].  (219)

... and so forth.  Again, "the opinions expressed do not necessarily
...," but seemed of interest anyway.  Let me know ...