Date: Sun Jul 30 13:05:49 1995
Subject: re: martyrdom, repudiation


Iain T. wrote:
 
"The martyr may be the  witness par excellence, literally 
giving his or her life as the guarantee of that to which 
they bear witness, but the existential witness--humanity as 
bearing witness to what it takes itself to be, and doing so 
in language, and thus creating history--is also caught up in 
the logic up martyrdom."
 
--- There is a connection, but no guarantee. When the 
situation of the martyr is precisely ritualized and 
institutionalized, it is possible to "do what one does", all 
the way to the gallows, to the guillotine, the firing squad, 
without ever having a "properly" (if you will) activated 
existentiell understanding which would be a necessary 
precondition for authenticity. Furthermore, as I have been 
suggesting, this authenticity, if it is there, is not yet a 
guarantee of *moral* authenticity, but, and I think this is 
at the crux of Heidegger's entire modus operandi for Being 
and time, it is a founding and necessary condition of 
possibility of *moral* authenticity. But, moral authenticity 
itself must at the same time be in the independent-
substantive relation to the question of violence, and on, in 
certain ways, a path of nonviolence. It would be very 
helpful then to contrast a somehow "obviously" authentic 
(existentially and morally) martyr with one who is not. You 
pick for the former case. In the latter case, I would think 
of, for example, a missionary working to "convert" people in 
a "primitive" land. It is quite easy to imagine the death or 
trauma (for martyrdom is not restricted to death, I suspect) 
to such a missionary who is never the less still in the 
"they", doing what one does, concerning not only simple 
activities, but broad decisions concerning peoples lives and 
his or her own. 
 
This is a certain "by product" that goes with the 
development of recorded history, system, systems of paths, 
the presentation of the images and stories of the martyrs' 
agonies. For Nietzsche, a "flight from life". I don't agree 
with a total iconoclastic approach to the problem of 
disauthentication made possible when the story is told. But 
the idea that any so-called martyr "really is" authentic 
seems quite naive.
 
This can perhaps be easily problematized under the heading 
"*true* martyr?" This is no small point or simple corrective 
aspect, again, owing to the very systematization of 
martyrdom bound up in so many institutional practices.
 
Iain also quoted Heidegger:
 
"Plain the existence of man. But what must man bear witness to? That he 
belongs to the earth.  This relation of 
belonging to consists in the fact that man is heir and learner in all things.  
...The bearing witness of human 
existence and hence its essential consumation [!!] occurs through freedom of 
decision.  This freedom lays hold 
of the necessary and places itself in the bonds of a supreme obligation. This 
bearing witness of belonging to all 
that is becomes actual as history.  In order that history may be possible, 
language has been given to man." 
(E&B, pp. 274-275)"
 
--- The context here might be very important. Is Heidegger 
developing the "essential definition" of bearing witness en 
route to something concerning the status of Being and Man? 
I'm not suggesting that the bearing witness of the martyr 
can not be in some way found out to really mean that the 
Martyr always says, in essence, "I belong to the earth", 
though it takes a lot to be able to see that. But I am also 
not suggesting that it is acceptable to take the "words of 
the martyrs" as merely this simple, if profound, phrase. Is 
the en route to Being at this point in a kind of direct, and 
perhaps transformative, if only in the sense of rupture or 
contamination, contact and crisis point with the en route of 
the moral, the en route to the problem of violence?

---
There is no path to peace. Peace is the path.

Tom Blancato
tblancato-AT-envirolink.org
Eyes on Violence (nonviolence and human rights monitoring in Haiti)
Thoughtaction Collective (reparative justice project)




     --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

     ------------------