Heidegger

In a message dated 18/07/2006 02:02:07 GMT Standard Time, tgeorgescu at home.nl
writes:

> Just because Heidegger was a Nazi does’nt mean we can’t all be free
> to examine his work, indeed, because he was a Nazi we should all at
> least take a look.

General Patton said that Germans joined the Nazi party as Americans join
Republican or Democrat parties. In totalitarian systems, there are two kinds
of people who join the official party. One kind is the idealists, and their
reasons are sometimes obscure. One man told me he joined the Communist Party
because he heard Ceausescu speaking against Russian presence in Romania.
Another kind is the mercenaries, i.e. those who seek to fulfill their
material interests through allegiance to the party which has the power. They
build networks of powerful friends, exactly as businessmen build business
friendships in golf clubs.

Now, the problem with being member of the official party, it is that it is
easier to become a member than to quit the party. Quitting the party gives
its officials the message that you are at least a dissident, if not some
conspirator against the state order.

The obligations of the ordinary party members in totalitarian systems is pay
the membership fee and eventually attend party meetings, wherein they have
to vote for the same stuff everybody else is voting for. Again, failing to
vote for the proper issues brings the message that one is dangerous.

So, I assume that Heidegger joined the Nazi party due to his idealism; he
remained a member because the alternative (quitting the party) was
undesirable. He was already under the suspicion of the officials, so being
seen as a dissident was the last thing he wanted. In totalitarian regimes,
dissent is a criminal offence, and a dissenter is treated like a dangerous
criminal.

Besides, as Leo Strauss suggests in Persecution and the Art of Writing, that
it is fashionable in totalitarian regimes, Heidegger used his position in
order to further a polemic with the official philosophy, thing for which he
has been put under Gestapo surveillance.

So, besides offering a formal (make-believe) support to the Nazi party,
Heidegger was certainly not under the influence of the Nazi ideology. He
rejected its very basis, namely its biologism, that is racism. Unlike some
well-known and respectable Enlightenment philosophers, Heidegger did not
produce anti-Semitic writings. For a card carrier of the Nazi party, this is
indeed an astounding performance. For, in totalitarian regimes, moral
compromise is the rule, and refusing moral compromise is punishable as
crime. Heidegger made no compromises with racist ideology, as far as his
writings are concerned. He knew that Nazism will pass away, and that he will
be judged by posterity for what he wrote. If Nazism learned him something,
it was precisely how one should not write.

He is a philosopher, just as Aristotle, who was born, wrote and died. The
rest is ad hominem, i.e. arguing that the person who posits the arguments is
flawed, instead being able to demonstrate that his arguments are flawed. Of
course, that’s the most rudimentary approach to philosophy, and it has the
same standing as the Nazi students burning the books of their enemies and
the same standing as the communists expelling the sons and daughters of
relatively rich people from universities. In Goebbels’ understanding, Jewish
books were a poison and burning them was the logical thing to do. In
Marxists’ understanding, the intellectual and artistic products of the
bourgeois class were a poison and stamping it out was the logical thing to
do. Both these attitudes are equally anti-intellectual and anti-philosophic.

Only the most rudimentary minds would attribute Spinoza’s pantheism to his
racial background and Plato’s Republic to his class position. Such minds
have nothing to seek in philosophy, for they are a priori unable to
understand the philosophic effort, that is taking thoughts for what they are
in themselves, for their alethic value, and not according to some accidental
attributes of those who produced them. Philosophy is thinking, while racial
and class stigmatizations are prejudice. Prejudice is the refusal of
thinking.

As Allan Bloom writes in his Closing of the American Mind, all this moral
intransigence (namely that democracy invented morality, says the last man
and blinks) is an easy way of attributing oneself a spurious strength and
spurious greatness, through reducing whatever goes against shared prejudice
to the least common denominator between genius and vulgar.

The greatness of genius is precisely that of producing valuable work,
despite all the material and political adversities one meets in his life.
Genius is living as a representative of the spirit in a world possessed by
vice and usury. Having a moral conscience and producing lofty philosophy are
indeed linked, but not in the superficial and spurious way the vulgar claims
they are. Moral conscience does not mean satisfying the intellectual vanity
of the vulgar. Philosophy is noble, not as class allegiance, but as the
deepest sharpness of mind which enables one to go against the mass, which is
untruth, as Kierkegaard suggested, and going this way not because of
imbecile stubbornness, but because one seeks the truth.

In fact, Heidegger would be very happy that those unable to understand the
theory of existence keeping lurking in the muddy waters of ad hominems,
instead of pretending to do philosophy, for which they are unfit. They may
have a noble spirit, but their soul is vulgar, so their spirit cannot
properly express itself.

Greetings,

Tudor

Posted on Tuesday, July 18th, 2006 at 2:25 am
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