Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes last night gushed over the late boxer as a "transcendent" specimen of humanity. Her over-the-top performance put me in mind of what I call the 'Pincers Passage' in Heidegger's 1935 lecture, Introduction to Metaphysics (tr. Ralph Manheim, Doubleday 1961, p. 31, emphasis added.
This Europe, in its ruinous blindness forever on the point of cutting its own throat, lies today in a great pincers, squeezed between Russia on the one side and America on the other.From a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are the same; the same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted organization of the average man. At a time when the farthermost corner of the globe has been conquered by technology and opened to economic exploitation; when any incident whatever, regardless of where or when it occurs, can be communicated to the rest of the world at any desired speed; when the assassination of a king in France and a symphony concert in Tokyo can be 'experienced' simultaneously, and time as history has vanished from the lives of all peoples; when a boxer is regarded as a nation's great man; when mass meetings attended by millions are looked on as a triumph -- then, yes then, through all this turmoil a question still haunts us like a specter: What for? -- Whither? -- And what then?
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