Heidegger

my yearly appearance:

since i’m a practicing sophist (trial lawyer), i recognize a good courtroom smear; an ad hominem
argument, second class. heidegger’s personal weakness, political stupidity, simple ambition, self-
imposed blindness to brutality,
or any other set of flaws makes him automatically wrong about everything?

is he also wrong about the proposition that 2 plus 2 equals 4? or about his slavish adherence to
the law of gravity? or his appreciation of music (even Wagner?), or any other belief?

if he were a reprehensible, child molesting, new york yankee fan, could he not also be right about
believing the giant redwoods are worth saving?

i don’t see any internal logic in what i can understand of his writing that implies nazi politics, race
hatred or authoritarianism. correct me if i’m missing something.

there were some strange people in the history of thought who noticed some remarkable truths. do
we weed out Plato whose Phylakes wre rather brown-shirtish?

i read the chronicle piece and winced. it was just like reading a bad brief from the prosecution.

bob

—–Original Message—–
From: That Pete
To: Discussions pertaining to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger
Sent: Thu, Oct 22, 2009 6:34 pm
Subject: Re: Chronicle of Higher Ed. hit piece on Heidegger

The disturbing thing is how they try to elevate Nazism to the status of a
philosophy:

Romano: “Faye counters that his philosophy grew out of his Nazism, forcing us to
see it as a kind of philosophical propaganda for Nazism in a different key”

So, with this article, the situation shifts from the traditional one of Nazism
being anti-philosophy, or unphilosophical, to the new condition: the most cited
philosopher of the XXth century is a philosopher of Nazism. So whereas before
this article, contemporary philosophers had to deal with Heidegger’s way of
thinking, they will now have to grapple with Nazi philosophy?

—– Original Message —-
From: Anthony Crifasi
To: Discussions pertaining to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger

Sent: Thu, October 22, 2009 4:15:11 PM
Subject: Chronicle of Higher Ed. hit piece on Heidegger

I’ve seen some pretty strange things in the Chronicle of Higher
Education, but this is one of the most offensively ignorant pieces
I’ve read on anything, anywhere. Apparently, the author is actually
philosophy professor. I can understand not having Heideggerian
philosophy in one’s area of specialization, but then at least don’t
attempt to write about him.

================================
 http://chronicle.com/article/Heil-Heideg…

October 18, 2009
Heil Heidegger!

By Carlin Romano

How many scholarly stakes in the heart will we need before Martin
Heidegger (1889-1976), still regarded by some as Germany’s greatest
20th-century philosopher, reaches his final resting place as a
prolific, provincial Nazi hack? Overrated in his prime, bizarrely
venerated by acolytes even now, the pretentious old Black Forest
babbler makes one wonder whether there’s a university-press equivalent
of wolfsbane, guaranteed to keep philosophical frauds at a distance.

To be sure, every philosophy reference book credits Heidegger with one
or another headscratcher achievement. One lauds him for his “revival
of ontology.” (Would we not think about things that exist without this
ponderous, existentialist Teuton?) Another cites his helpful boost to
phenomenology by directing our focus to that well-known entity,
Dasein, or “Human Being.” (For a reified phenomenon, “Human Being,”
like the Yeti, has managed to elude all on-camera confirmation.) A
third praises his opposition to nihilism, an odd compliment for a
conservative, nationalist thinker whose antihumanistic apotheosis of
ruler over ruled helped grease the path of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.

Next month Yale University Press will issue an English-language
translation of Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy,
by Emmanuel Faye, an associate professor at the University of Paris at
Nanterre. It’s the latest, most comprehensive archival assault on the
ostensibly magisterial thinker who informed Freiburg students in his
infamous 1933 rectoral address of Nazism’s “inner truth and
greatness,” declaring that “the Führer, and he alone, is the present
and future of German reality, and its law.”

Faye, whose book stirred France’s red and blue Heidegger départements
into direct battle a few years back, follows in the investigative
footsteps of Chilean-Jewish philosopher Victor Farias (Heidegger et le
Nazisme, 1987), historian Hugo Ott (Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu
Zeiner Biographie, 1988) and others. Aim? To expose the oafish
metaphysician’s vulgar, often vicious 1930s attempt to become Hitler’s
chief academic tribune, and his post-World War II contortions to
escape proper judgment for his sins. “We now know,” reports Faye,
“that [Heidegger’s] attempt at self-justification of 1945 is nothing
but a string of falsehoods.”

The Heidegger exposés, like Annie Leibovitz’s tasteless photos of
partner Susan Sontag in the latter’s final battle against cancer,
force even refined, sophisticated observers of intellectuals to gape.
See “Professor Being and Time” wear his swastika like a frat pin while
meeting German-Jewish philosopher Karl Löwith! Recoil at the hearty
“Heil Hitlers” with which Martin closed his missives! Wince as he
covertly maneuvers another Jewish colleague or student out of a job
with a nasty, duplicitous “recommendation” letter!

Unfortunately, Faye’s scrupulously documented study, like Jytte
Klausen’s controversial The Cartoons That Shook the World, about
depictions of Muhammad, lacks the satirical illustrations that might
have given it knockdown force. In the case of Heidegger, it may be
that only ridicule—not further proof of his sordid 1930s acts—can save
us.

To his credit, Faye takes the usually avoided logical step of
articulating that goal. He essentially calls on publishers to stop
churning out Heidegger volumes as they would sensibly desist from hate
speech. Similarly, he hopes librarians will not stock Heidegger’s
continuing Gesamtausgabe (collected edition), shepherded by the
Heidegger family, a project that Faye rightly attacks as sanitized and
incomplete.

Even on this side of the Atlantic, one can share Faye’s distaste for
the flow of reverent Heidegger volumes. In 2006, MIT Press brought us
Adam Sharr’s Heidegger’s Hut, about the philosopher’s Black Forest
hideaway in Todtnauberg. It began with Simon Sadler asking in a
foreword, “Is the hut described in this text the smallest residence
ever to merit a monograph? Might it be the most prosaic, too?” A
couple of quick yeses would have stopped the project right there. We
wouldn’t have had to read that while Heidegger’s “politics were an
abomination,” the reader must “concede that any belief in something at
Todtnauberg conducive to political crime would be essentialist.” Oh,
really? Sounds bad. You wouldn’t want “essentialism” to make you think
Heidegger’s mullings at home base for 50 years had any connection to
his rancid politics.

MIT, in fact, gifted us that year with a doubleheader, also offering
up Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World. That came from Jeff
Malpas, professor of philosophy at the University of Tasmania, which
is about as far away from the camps as you can get. While conceding
Heidegger’s true-believer behavior, Malpas wrote of “the addresses
from the early 1930s in which Heidegger seems to align himself with
elements of Nazi ideology,” as if there were any doubt. Malpas
repeated a falsehood put into play by Heidegger himself after the war,
that the philosopher had resigned his rectorship “after having
apparently found it increasingly difficult to accommodate himself to
the demands of the new regime.” For Malpas, “Heidegger’s own politics
cannot be taken, in itself, to undermine his philosophy in any direct
way.”

In that respect, Malpas revived an old standard view that Faye seeks
to eliminate once and for all. For Faye, new material about
Heidegger’s 1930s teaching and administrative work turns a crucial
point upside-down. While other thinkers, including Löwith and Maurice
Blanchot, suggested that Heidegger’s Nazism stemmed directly from his
philosophy, Faye counters that his philosophy grew out of his Nazism,
forcing us to see it as a kind of philosophical propaganda for Nazism
in a different key.

Faye’s leitmotif throughout is that Heidegger, from his earliest
writings, drew on reactionary ideas in early-20th-century Germany to
absolutely exalt the state and the Volk over the individual, making
Nazism and its Blut und Boden (”Blood and Soil”) rhetoric a perfect
fit. Heidegger’s Nazism, he writes, “is much worse than has so far
been known.” (Exactly how bad remains unclear because the Heidegger
family still restricts access to his private papers.)

Faye pulls no punches: Heidegger “devoted himself to putting
philosophy at the service of legitimizing and diffusing the very bases
of Nazism,” and some of his 1930s texts surpass those of official
philosophers of Nazism in “the virulence of their Hitlerism.” Lacking
any respect for Heidegger as thinker, Faye writes that the philosopher
Hannah Arendt so deeply admired “has done nothing but blend the
characteristic opacity of his teaching with the darkness of the
phenomenon. Far from furthering the progress of thought, Heidegger has
helped to conceal the deeply destructive nature of the Hitlerian
undertaking by exalting its ‘grandeur.’”

Faye agrees that it was possible, even in the wake of Farias’s and
Ott’s work, “with a lot of self-delusion, to separate the man from the
work.” He asserts it’s no longer possible, since scholars can now
access “nearly all the courses” that Heidegger taught in the 1930s.
According to Faye, “we witness, in the courses and seminars that are
ostensibly presented as ‘philosophical,’ a progressive dissolving of
the human being, whose individual worth is expressly denied, into a
community of people rooted in the land and united by blood.” The
unpublished seminar of 1933-34 identifies the people with a “community
of biological stock and race. … Thus, through Heidegger’s teaching,
the racial conceptions of Nazism enter philosophy.”

The “reality of Nazism,” asserts Faye, inspired Heidegger’s works “in
their entirety and nourished them at the root level.” He provides
evidence of Heidegger’s “intensity” of commitment to Hitler, his
constant use of “the words most operative among the National
Socialists,” such as “combat” (Kampf), “sacrifice” (Opfer) and
völkisch (which Faye states has a strong anti-Semitic connotation). He
also cites Heidegger’s use of epithets against professors such as the
philologist Eduard Fraenkel (”the Jew Fraenkel”) and his fervid
dislike for “the growing Jewification” that threatens “German
spiritual life,” mirroring Hitler’s discourse in Mein Kampf about
“Jewified universities.”

For Faye, Heidegger’s 1930s Nazi activism came from the heart. Pains
takingly providing sources, Faye exhibits Heidegger’s devotion to
“spreading the eros of the people for their Führer,” and the “communal
destiny of a people united by blood.” We learn of Heidegger’s desire
to be closer to Hitler in Munich, and his eagerness to lead the
Gleichschaltung, or “bringing into line,” of the German universities
with Nazi ideology. According to several witnesses, Heidegger would
show up at class in a brown shirt and salute students with a “Heil
Hitler!”

Tellingly, Faye also mines the internal papers of the Munich
philosophy faculty, showing that the department’s professors
considered Heidegger’s work “claptrap,” and saw him as so politicized
that they believed “no philosophy could be offered the students” if he
were appointed. They considered appointing Heidegger only because of
his well-known status as a professor favored by the Nazis.
Synthesizing details with the precision of a Simon Wiesenthal
researcher, Faye further undermines Heidegger’s later lies that he was
not involved with book burning or anti-Semitic legislation, withdrew
from active support of the party after he resigned his rectorship, and
became rector only to protect the independence of the universities.

“We must acknowledge,” Faye says in one fierce conclusion, “that an
author who has espoused the foundations of Nazism cannot be considered
a philosopher.” Finally, he reiterates his opposition to the Heidegger
Industry: “If his writings continue to proliferate without our being
able to stop this intrusion of Nazism into human education, how can we
not expect them to lead to yet another translation into facts and
acts, from which this time humanity might not be able to recover?”

Is it superficial to yoke wildly different cultural worlds (Daseins,
if you will) together? Might much the same reasoning heard among a few
Manhattan TV executives recently about David Letterman—like Heidegger,
a would-be touchstone for the authenticity of his Volk—apply as well
to the Meister from Messkirch? Well, Heidegger did think that Daseins
intersect.

“Only the jokes can do him in,” opined one savvy network veteran in
the group. All agreed that Letterman would survive or fall at the
hands of fellow talk-show hosts and comics torn between instincts to
eviscerate and guild solidarity. No sober column by, say, The New York
Times’s Nicholas Kristof, analogizing Ball State University’s most
famous alum to a Cambodian brothel owner, would pack the requisite
resonance with key audiences.

It would seem that Heidegger, likewise, will continue to flourish
until even “Continental” philosophers mock him to the hilt. His
influence will end only when they, and the broader world of
intellectuals, recognize that scholarly evidence fingers the scowling
proprietor of Heidegger’s hut as a buffoon produced by German
philosophy’s mystical tradition. He should be the butt of jokes, not
the subject of dissertations.

In the meantime, we can expect Heidegger’s Faux Tyrolean Wardrobe and
the Specter of Carl Schmitt to roll off a university press before too
long, sans cartoons or illustrative plates.

Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle Review, teaches
philosophy and media theory at the University of Pennsylvania.

Posted on Sunday, October 25th, 2009 at 6:00 am
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