Heidegger in France: Nazism and philosophy

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Heidegger in France: Nazism and philosophy

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Heidegger in France: Nazism and philosophy

by Jonathan Derbyshire / December 13, 2013 / Leave a comment

One of the distinctive features of French intellectual life in the post-war period has been the influence of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). Heidegger’s standing among French philosophers, especially those working in the phenomenological tradition (who are more numerous in France than anywhere else in Europe, let alone the Anglophone world), contrasts dramatically with his reputation in the country of his birth, where his legacy is tainted irredeemably by his political compromises with National Socialism in the 1930s. The precise nature and extent of those compromises remain a matter of controversy—not least in France, where the murky subject of Heidegger’s political affiliations convulses the intellectual class roughly once a decade. Last week, Nicolas Weill, a journalist at Le Monde, wrote on his blog that the latest volume of Heidegger’s complete works (the Gesamtausgabe), which will be published in Germany in March next year, promises a definitive answer to the question whether “Heidegger was an intellectual led astray by a temporary will to power or whether his political itinerary reflects a more profound tendency”. Eric Aeschimann, writing in Le Nouvel Observateur, reports that Heidegger’s Schwarzen Hefte (“Black Notebooks”) will trouble even the most faithful of his acolytes in France. It appears that the German editor of the notebooks, Peter Trawny, has written an essay entitled “Heidegger: ‘The Black Notebooks’ and Historial Antisemitism” (“historial” being one of those neologisms of which Heidegger, and Heideggerians, were and are fond) in which he argues that these manuscripts, written between 1931 and 1946, contain ideas that are “clearly antisemitic, even if it is not a question of antisemitism of the kind promoted by Nazi ideology.” One of Heidegger’s French translators, Hadrien France-Lanord, has read Trawny’s essay and has pronounced himself dismayed by many of the extracts from the notebooks that it contains. We are, Aeschimann writes, on the verge of another “Heidegger affair”. The last time the question of Heidegger’s politics became a matter of public debate in France was in June 2005, when a number of eminent philosophers and historians wrote an open letter to Le Monde expressing their support for Emmanuel Faye, whose book about Heidegger, Heidegger – L’introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie, had attracted a considerable amount of favourable press coverage. The signatories (including Jacques Bouveresse, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Serge Klarsfeld) denounced the attempt by those they described as “radical Heideggerians” to discredit Faye’s book “by all means”, including attacks on its author broadcast on a dedicated website set up by the writer Stéphane Zagdanski. “We do not accept these dishonourable procedures,” they wrote, “and believe that critical research into the relationship between Heidegger’s work and Nazism must carry on.” François Fédier, Heidegger’s principal French translator and an ally of Zagdanski, referred derisively to Faye carrying on the “family business”. In 1966, Fédier wrote an article defending Heidegger against charges made in several German books which generated a number of responses, including one by Faye’s father Jean-Pierre. Twenty years later, an even more intense querelle was set off by the publication of Heidegger et le nazisme, written by a former student of Heidegger’s, the Chilean Victor Farias. The facts that Farias assembled were already well-known, thanks largely to the immense archival labours of the German scholars Hugo Ott and Guido Schneeberger, while his treatment of Heidegger’s philosophy was highly tendentious. Yet the impact his book had in France was enormous, with major figures such as Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard being drawn into the fray. To see why disputes of this kind have been a more or less permanent feature of the French intellectual landscape since the war, one needs first to understand how a distinctively gallicised version of Heidegger’s thought came to enjoy a position of pre-eminence in France, especially, and perhaps paradoxically, on the left. *** In November 1945, as he awaited the verdict of Freiburg University’s denazification commission, Heidegger wrote to a former colleague describing the unusual situation in which he found himself. Stripped of his chair and shunned by his compatriots, Heidegger was buoyed by news from Paris of his burgeoning reputation there. Elements in the French military, which was overseeing the épuration in Freiburg, had assured him that in France his work “guides and inspires people’s thinking, and in particular the attitudes of the young”. And the philosopher Edgar Morin, then a lieutenant in the French army, had conveyed to Heidegger a letter from the editor of a leading Parisian journal inviting him to write on a subject of his choosing. But Heidegger was reluctant to “promote” his thought in France as long as his position in Germany remained uncertain. Soon, however, he would have no choice. The commission had already produced a report on Heidegger’s activities during the early 1930s, paying close attention to his behaviour while rector of the university in 1933-4 and noting that he “consciously placed the full weight of his academic reputation and the distinctive art of his oratory in the service of the National Socialist revolution”. Heidegger joined the NSDAP in May 1933 not long after assuming the rectorship and quickly set about establishing the Führerprinzip at the university, ensuring that the institution would no longer be autonomous but instead directly answerable, through the person of the Führer-rector, to the Nazi minister of education. This chimed with his assertion, in his inaugural address as rector, that traditional notions of academic freedom were empty and merely “negative” and that real freedom lay in a German student body that was now “on the march”. But Heidegger’s rectorship was shortlived, and he resigned after falling out with the minister in Berlin. The report concluded that the “label ‘Nazi’ ceased to be applicable to him after 1934” and that consequently there was “no danger that he would ever again promote the ideas of Nazism”. It recommended that Heidegger be given emeritus status and be allowed to do a limited amount of teaching. One member of the commission, however, continued to insist that more serious action be taken and so the process dragged on. It only reached a denouement when one of Heidegger’s oldest acquaintances, the philosopher Karl Jaspers, was asked to provide the commission with a reference. In December 1945, Jaspers delivered the following devastating verdict on his former friend: “Heidegger’s mode of thinking, which seems to me to be fundamentally unfree, dictatorial and uncommunicative, would have a very damaging effect on students at the present time. And the mode of thinking itself seems to me more important than the actual content of political judgements, whose aggressiveness can easily be channelled in other directions. Until such time as a genuine rebirth takes place within him, and is seen to be at work within him, I think it would be quite wrong to turn such a teacher loose on the young people of today, who are psychologically extremely vulnerable.” Thanks in part to the teaching ban that followed, the “mode of thinking” Jaspers refers to would not take root after the war in Germany, where the reception of Heidegger’s work was always as much political as it was narrowly philosophical and where that work’s affinities with the “conservative revolutionary” thought of writers such as Carl Schmitt and Ernst Jünger were, for better or worse, taken for granted. According to this “historicised” interpretation, the famous “turn” in Heidegger’s thought, in which he abandoned the quasi-Kantian categories of his masterpiece Being and Time (1927) for what he termed a “history of Being”, can only be understood in the light of his abandonment of the rectorship and his disillusionment with the course taken by the National Socialist revolution after 1934. Heidegger came to believe that the present is characterised by a forgetfulness of “Being” and that this forgetfulness shows itself in the global domination of modern science and technology. Where, in 1933, Nazism, and the Führer in particular, had promised an “awakening” of the German people and salvation from the “nihilism” of the modern age, now Heidegger regarded it as the latest embodiment of that dispensation. But, as his former student Karl Löwith pointed out in 1946, this did not mean that Heidegger had stopped believing in the necesity of national revolution after 1934—far from it. And Löwith maintained that what a “naïve apology” for Heidegger published the same year in French in Les Temps Modernes really showed was that he was a “distinguished representative of the German Revolution”. In France, by contrast, Heidegger’s “History of Being” was taken up in a decidedly ahistorical fashion, and the author of the Temps Modernes piece, Jean Beaufret, played an important role in its dissemination. He was the addressee of the “Letter on Humanism”, the founding text of French Heideggerianism. Beaufret had written to Heidgger after Jean-Paul Sartre delivered a lecture entitled “Existentialism Is a Humanism”, which was subsequently published to considerable acclaim. In the lecture, Sartre had claimed to derive from Heidegger’s Being and Time an existentialism according to which man’s existence precedes his essence; in other words, man is free to decide his own essence. Responding to Beaufret, Heidegger denied all connection between his thought and Sartre’s. Sartre takes for granted, he argued, precisely what ought to be questioned, namely: the meaning of “the human”. In assuming that man’s essence lies in action or decision, Sartre misses the more fundamental question about the meaning of Being. Sartrean existentialism, it turns out, is but another mode of forgetfulness. The history of the West, for Heidegger, is the history of the growing power of human subjectivity, in which man enjoys technological dominion over nature rather than the more humble role of “shepherd of Being”. Heidegger appeared on the post-war French scene, therefore, as a critic of technology and of modernity more generally. And in his book, Emmanuel Faye notes the influence that Heidegger’s anti-humanism had on major currents of post-war French thought, from Althusser and Foucault to the work of Jacques Derrida. It’s that influence, moreover, that explains why successive “Heidegger affairs” in Paris have been so charged. In the 1970s, a leftist anti-humanism derived from Heidegger’s history of Being filled the gap left by the decline of Marxism, on the one hand, and the more or less complete absence in France of any tradition of normative political theory on the other. It was not the least of Faye’s achievements, in a work whose philosophical sophistication outstrips that of Farias by several orders of magnitude, to show to a French audience what German philosophers such as Jürgen Habermas have been arguing for many years: that, in fact, Heidegger’s undifferentiated and undialectical hostility to modernity was intimately bound up with his commitment to “national revolution” in Germany (a commitment that outlasted his brief formal adhesion to the Nazi Party). For example, Faye shows that the critique of “biologism” that Heidegger developed in lecture courses given after he resigned the rectorship was not, as Heidegger himself and certain of his French epigones claimed, evidence of his growing opposition to the “National-Socialist worldview”. Heidegger certainly rejected the biologistic racial theories propounded by Nazi ideologues such as Alfred Bäumler and Ernst Krieck. But this critique is compatible, Faye argues, with Heidegger’s retention of a “metaphysical” conception of race. What Heidegger objects to is the grounding of biologistic theories in the “Darwinian conception of life”, which he regarded as of a piece with a “liberal conception of man and human society” towards which he remained unequivocally and unremittingly hostile. Back in 2005, I spoke to Richard Wolin, an American intellectual historian who signed the open letter in support of Faye. He told me: “Faye does a very effective job of showing how fully committed Heidegger was to Nazism [and] demonstrates that Heidegger’s commitment was also intellectual and philosophical.” However, Wolin insisted that we ought not to conclude from this that Heidegger’s philosophy as a whole should be placed on the index (something Faye comes close to saying). Perhaps a more appropriate conclusion to draw from Faye’s remarkable book is the one argued for by his colleague, the philosopher Jean-Michel Salanskis. In Salanskis’s view, what Faye taught us is that the French left should now recognise that there is nothing in Heidegger that has anything whatsoever to do with the “promise of freedom and equality”.

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Trent
December 14, 2013 at 05:06
Heidegger is a philosopher with flashes of incomparable brilliance. However, he is an unremitting coward. While Heidegger was selling his soul for comfort, a much more thorough, accessible, and brilliant Philosopher was working the resistance. Jaques Ellul, a model of the philosopher putting his money where his mouth is.
ortega
December 14, 2013 at 10:24
The question is not about Heidegger being a nazi. Sure he was. The question is: what does it tell us that the XXth century greatest philosopher was a nazi? Dismissing him as a philosopher because of his political views is a way to elude the question.
Gene Schulman
December 14, 2013 at 11:15
The debate on Heidegger's influence in France certainly predates the one in June 2005. I remember the scandal over the publication of Victor Farias' book "Heidegger and Nazisme". This caused a spate of articles and even a televised debate on the French program "Oceanique" on 14 December, 1987. (The program actually ran for several days, with other luminaries piping in with their opinions.) The panel included such luminaries as Michel Cazenave, Andre Glucksman, George Steiner, et al. Steiner had published his own book on Heidegger in 1979, in English, in which he did not defend Heidegger's Nazism, but rather explained his philosophy. On the above mentioned TV program, he did the same versus all those who were more concerned about Heidegger's Nazism.
g. hayes
December 14, 2013 at 12:29
That mountain of 6 million bodies in his back yard (where Hannibal Arendt would beckon him to come lie with her in the Edelweiss), is Heidegger's signature work. If he was ever a philosopher, it is for him to prove.
Lucien Aychenwald
December 14, 2013 at 13:28
As someone who has met (and extensively read) both François Fédier and Hadrien France-Lanord, I would attest to their impeccable integrity as men and very exacting interpretative powers in translating Heidegger into French. The recently published Dictionnaire Martin Heidegger in France, which they co-edited (and to which Peter Trawny contributed) is a magisterially comprehensive treatment of Heidegger's thought. There is much new material in it that reveals the heretofore untranslated criticism by Heidegger of the Nazi régime. This article is a mere sketch of the ongoing debate, and does not mention the rebuttal of Faye's book (Heidegger à plus fort raison) by Fédier among others, which exposes Faye's poor comprehension of German and takes apart his mistranslations in great detail. It should be pointed out that Fédier has never denied the gravity of Heidegger's error in 1933, which I have heard him to refer to as a "délire" (an act of madness). It should also be pointed out that Fédier must in no way be associated with Derrida, Foucault, and other French "post-structuralist" or "deconstructionist" thinkers. Fédier's work consists almost wholly in meticulously examining and commenting on philosophical texts (Plato, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and others), always using the original and then translating it step-by-step with extensive explanations of his choices. Also, Heidegger was not an "anti-humanist" -- he specifically states that humanism, as conceived by Sartre, is not human enough. As for Jaspers, he revised his opinion in 1949. And no account of Heidegger would be complete without the point of view of his Jewish lover and great friend, Hannah Arendt. My sense is that Heidegger's work -- particularly his reading of the Western metaphysical tradition, and its forgetting of Being -- probably constitutes the most important intellectual event of the 20th century. His understanding of the Greeks was without parallel, and his commentaries on art, language, and Being are exhilarating and make much of contemporary analytic philosophy look dry, useless, and fundamentally naive. But this is not to say that there isn't something problematic in some of his work, particularly his treatment of the "historial" and the destinies of peoples. His view of "Americanism" as fundamentally ("in its essence") equivalent to Bolshevism is, to put it mildly, debatable. His persistance in interpreting history through a very particular lens may well have blinded him, in my opinion, to a more down-to-earth regard for basic human needs and -- to put it simplistically -- how people really are. It would have been far less difficult for those of us who consider his work indispensable had he forcefully, openly, and repeatedly denounced the horrors of Nazism, instead of going back to his usual mode of essence-interpretation and likening the Shoah to industrial agriculture -- or saying very little at all. The Hesperic Age of Holderlin, the new beginning, dwelling, the fourfold (gods-humans-sky-earth)... all of these are rich sources of inquiry, but there are also times when what's most important is whether the man next door has the courage and sensibility to shelter a refugee from danger. I'm somehow reminded of Thales falling into the well as he gazes at the stars. Martin Heidegger, one feels, needed to get out of his hut more.
Vance McLaughlin
December 14, 2013 at 14:35
The discussion on Heidegger and his ban from teaching seems to support the idea that those who advanced views that in some way supported a totalitarian regime that killed millions in camps should be punished. Therefore, the academics in the United States who supported communism in Russia, should have been purged after World War II. Interesting outlook.
Lucien Aychenwald
December 14, 2013 at 16:08
Actually, to revise a point that I did not express very well (Heidegger's misunderstanding of people): what is uncanny about Heidegger's work in general, and particularly his reading of Western metaphysics, is how he works his way upstream to dismantle the concepts we have inherited and to show that they do not rest on anything substantial. It is this, among other things, that makes his critique of science ("Science doesn't think") so trenchant, because truth, knowledge, and Being are not what we think they are. Curiously, there is a great liberation in his illumination of this, not to mention the seeds of a real humanism, because we are of an entirely different order than the "rational animals" or indeed the gene-manipulated information processors that so many cognitive scientists take us for. In this sense, as Fédier has pointed out, Heidegger's thinking is profoundly anti-totalitarian. But it seems to me that Heidegger's interpretation of history is made from this same upstream position, and that he is so concerned with the sweep of the destiny of Being that there is a strange absence of real events and real people in his writing. Heidegger is not concerned with solutions to the nihilistic evening-time he considers us to have entered, but with preparing the way for another kind of thinking, one that is not based on Will. Our task is consider what kind of thinking this may be, without losing sight of the undeniable political and social gains humans have made in recent centuries.
Santiago
December 14, 2013 at 20:34
Great essay. Great example of "high" journalism.
Kyle
December 14, 2013 at 21:27
Evil is banal.. I don't see what more can be said than that. Our life's decisions are heuristc and our moral axioms are ultimately no firmer grounded than those holding up mathematics. But hey, at least it's easier to navel gaze about the decisions of the dead than take our own lives seriously.
Tom Blancato
December 14, 2013 at 22:05
What can not be fleshed out through even the most painstaking, meticulous researches is what remains off the table in the *Sturm Und Drang* of Heidegger's world, century and ultimately the whole history of philosophy/metaphysics Heidegger helps us to begin to think: nonviolence. It is unquestionably the violence of Nazism that makes Heidegger's association with it problematic. But what remains unthought in Heidegger is something that plagues us to this day: the free opening of a category of substantive thought, research, discovery, exploration and implementation in thoughtaction, precisely what the "on the ground" students of Nazi Germany did not bring with them, and what thinkers to this day fail to recognize as being both of preeminent importance and fundamental ontological and/or philosophical purchase: nonviolence. As Egypt limps for failing to recognize her greatest power, nonviolence, the need is as great as ever for the thoughtful to begin to approach what was, for Gandhi, a co-fundament with truth. It is striking that the Foucauldians, who find the hybridity of power-knowledge so important, have not taken up the category of *satyagraha*, itself a hybrid in thoughtaction of a most remarkable elegance, one which preceded Foucault by many years. Just as the question of Being undertaken by the free mind with the deconstructive ability to "go upstream", as one commenter here so effectively put it, releasing it to its more original development, the question of nonviolence (as opposed to the question of violence) likewise promises to unfold in its own ways. That question requires a turning. It has barely begun. Lucien Aychenwald is right about the neighbor, the question of refuge, etc. But he still oddly offers this in that ubiquitous parenthetical form, as a kind of humble aside, in the form of a vague "perhaps", a musing, a dream, that characterizes the subservient, secondary role accorded nonviolence in the world dominated by prevailing metaphysics and we may add post-metaphysics. To realize the consequences of his observation more fully is to send a shock wave through thought. It is to begin an envolution.
Andrew
December 14, 2013 at 22:40
good article thanx, the best explanation of "being" I have come across :o), short and understandable :o)
Sean Matthews
December 14, 2013 at 22:45
it has seems to me that there are two points here: first, there is the way Heidegger's enthusiasm for Nazism in the early thirties was a mistake based on a misunderstanding, just like the Vienna positivist embrace of Wittgenstein was a mistake based on a misunderstanding. Simply to state it like this seems to be enough. Second, Heidegger was a fundamentally a moralist, and he thought that Nazism offered, or at least suggested, authentic moral insight into being. That is the moral equivalent of a reducto ad absurdum. Guys, lets face it, the man was reactionary cesspit scum with prose that was beyond parody and the moral depth of a puddle of stagnant water. The postwar enthusiasm of jewish intellectuals for his 'thinking' is bizarre.
Gregory Peterson
December 15, 2013 at 00:25
Heidegger on his association with the Nazis: from 1950 "What I report here can excuse nothing. Rather, it can explain how, when over the course of years what is virulently evil became manifest, my shame grew-the shame of directly or indirectly having been involved in it."
Mark Titus
December 15, 2013 at 04:59
It amazes me that Heidegger and those who follow him should still be puzzling over Aristotle's "being qua being." The metaphysics of Democritus (after an eclipse of 2,000 years) has clearly triumphed over the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle. Philosophers should study it--i.e. learn a little physics, chemistry, and biology--and then help us understand its implications. Many traditional philosophers, especially Spinoza I think, could help in this regard.
Crispin Sartwell
December 15, 2013 at 10:20
i think framing it in terms of 'compromises' with nazism is rather odd and sort of question-begging if we start out with the question of what his relation to nazism actually was. it articulates the relation by its distance, when whether there is any distance is a question.
Greg Desilet
December 15, 2013 at 17:55
The major innovation of Heidegger's philosophy turns on the necessary association of being and time. One cannot be adequately theorized without the other. But the effects of time were not thereby equally valued by Heidegger. Time undermines being whereas everything good about human culture and civilization depends, for Heidegger, on the upholding of tradition and resistance to the ravages of time. Modernity advances the forgetfulness of being and especially accelerates it with technological innovations. In response to these developments, philosopher kings are needed to lead societies in the proper preservation of tradition through their authoritative knowledge and understanding of tradition. This is the role Heidegger imagined for himself in 1934. Heidegger's philosophical system, therefore, is not inconsistent with versions of elitism and authoritarianism potentially consistent with totalitarianism. Heidegger's falling out with Nazism may not have been so much his falling out with its practical agenda as the falling out of Nazi leadership with Heidegger's positioning of himself as its philosopher king. He was not allowed to play the role he desired for himself. He was always more disappointed in this rejection of his leadership than with his decision to join the Nazi party. And it would only be fitting, from his point of view, that the historical development of Nazism would not go well without his guiding hand. This explains his ultimate rejection of Nazi leadership during the war as well as his continued advocacy of a version of National Socialism, in opposition to democracy and socialism, after the war.
Al_de_Baran
December 15, 2013 at 18:34
Hooray! Now Humanism has another arrow in its quiver: Anyone who critiques Humanism can now safely be tarred with the epithet "Nazi".
Mike Cope
December 16, 2013 at 06:13
Essentialism much? Are we also to chuck out all of Esra Pound because he thought bad thoughts?
Greg Desilet
December 16, 2013 at 06:23
In response to bzfgt: I think you misunderstand me. When I say of being and time that in Heidegger’s view “one cannot be theorized without the other,” I had hoped to suggest that Heidegger would be among the last to think being “ahistorically,” that is, apart from time. Nevertheless, I believe Heidegger places the emphasis on being in his valuation of tradition—reflected in a particular way by the effort necessary to overcome the worst consequences of the forgetfulness of being, a forgetfulness made possible only through the passage of time. You are right to say Heidegger “did not attempt to fossilize tradition—quite the contrary.” He, perhaps better than anyone, understood the impossibility of doing that. However, this did not prevent him from desiring to use the necessity of “difference” in the service of the same, in such ways as to maximally re-think the same in relation to the truth of being. But as Derrida has persuasively argued, this task is hopeless and consequently the desire thoroughly misplaced. As for Heidegger not advocating a form of National Socialism after the war, consult the Der Spiegel interview not to mention Habermas and Rockmore. There is certainly a difference of opinion with you on that point.
B. Switzer
December 16, 2013 at 14:34
I would simply add to the above comments that Stanley Rosen's incomparable analysis of Heidegger's thought, found in many of Rosen's works, should be considered in any discussion of the significance and profundity of Heidegger.
Gene Schulman
December 16, 2013 at 14:53
Why even bother with Heidegger anymore? The world has moved on - in Being and in Time.
Theryn Lyes
December 16, 2013 at 17:53
Heidegger? Heidegger was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table
Greg Desilet
December 16, 2013 at 21:00
Bzfgt: Yes, I agree it is hard to get the full sense of what someone is saying in these comment sections due to the need to be brief. (On that point, I’m not sure I read you when you say “I am not exactly what you mean by ‘difference’ in the service of the same”). Moving on, I do grant that Derrida may not necessarily be the best interpreter of Heidegger in all things. Heidegger is difficult to read and so is Derrida. There is much room for interpretation and a lot of work to do in any interpretation of them at all. I will also grant that Derrida in defense of Heidegger and de Man is not Derrida at his best, though I also do not think Derrida’s comments on these men undermine his integrity and that of deconstruction nearly as much as some critics have claimed and would like to believe. However, Derrida is at his best in relation to Heidegger in his critique of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology and Heidegger’s claims to have gone beyond traditional metaphysics. Derrida shows such claims to be questionable at best. Having said all this, I would respond to Gene Schulman (“Why even bother with Heidegger anymore? The world has moved on—in Being and Time.”) by adding that Heidegger is sufficiently important as a philosopher of fundamental ontology to insure that it would be impossible to move on philosophically without going deeply through him. The same must be said for Derrida. These two, Heidegger and Derrida (with Nietzsche as third), represent the mobile cutting edge of philosophy far more so than anyone from the analytic tradition, including Wittgenstein. This does not mean there are not many things to be wary of when reading Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. There are many things to be wary of when reading Plato as well. This does not mean there is no need to read Plato. Nor does it mean one can possibly fully appreciate the Western tradition of philosophy without reading Plato. The entire trajectory from Plato to Derrida is necessary as context in order to understand the Western tradition and where it may head next. Heidegger is no less a part of this than Plato and for that reason he should be read and appreciated regardless of how one feels about the nature and extent of his Nazi affiliations. The primary reason for exploring Heidegger’s Nazi affiliations is not to tear the man apart or discredit his entire philosophy but rather to understand the implications, as Heidegger himself may have seen them, of his philosophy in relation to the breadth and depth of culture and politics. This much must be understood in order to adequately grasp where any particular philosophical position leaves us, as a culture, in relation to politics. Because, ultimately, and I think both Heidegger and Derrida would agree, fundamental ontologies (as versions of metaphysics) have profound implications for political systems. Toward the end of his life Heidegger, I admit, no longer took a strong stand on advocating a particular political system. But he did still take a strong stand in criticizing and rejecting American democracy and Soviet socialism. Nor did Heidegger continue to think of the philosopher as capable of assuming anything like the role of a philosopher king (as he may have thought in 1934). His remark in Der Spiegel “Only a God can save us” is famous for having made clear his thinking on that matter.
John Primitivo Orosco
December 17, 2013 at 03:47
Heidegger was a clever Nazi philosopher, what a terrorizing thing to unleash on the world " Evolution is an ascent towards consciousness." Heidegger was in regression moving away from the world of reason ,he was trapped in his own world. Arendt captured Heidegger when she wrote" he build a trap as his burrow.He set himself inside it, passed it off as normal burrow."
John Primitivo Orosco
December 17, 2013 at 04:13
If anything am going easy on him.
Cedric
December 17, 2013 at 07:58
This is a funny chat. Philosophy stills a very marginal academic discipline. So, would you please relax. How many people in the world read Plato or Heidegger? It doesn't matter at all. There's no stake, it's just poetry.
Greg Desilet
December 17, 2013 at 12:14
Re: Mark Titus—I don’t quite understand why you say Heidegger is “hostile to thinking of the natural sciences as philosophy.” Few philosophers have done as thorough a job as Heidegger in weaving together the natural sciences and philosophy as he. See, for example, Heidegger’s “Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics” in Basic Writings. Indeed, Heidegger reveals the sense in which modern science is metaphysics writ large. As for analytic philosophy being hostile to thinking the natural sciences as philosophy, there are those who would claim that analytic philosophy, growing out of positivism, is a giant monument to the methodology of science—empiricism applied across the board such that nothing is left out. Wittgenstein’s entire corpus, early and late, may be seen as a continually refined attempt to theorize language within the confines of empirical methodology. Had either Heidegger or Derrida addressed Wittgenstein’s work it is likely they would have questioned whether language can be adequately theorized in the manner Wittgenstein attempts.
Greg Desilet
December 17, 2013 at 12:17
Re: Quixote—your remarks regarding the criminal satire case seem a bit off topic and designed rather to introduce and then disparage what you call “the advent of postmodernism.” You then associate postmodernism with the notion that “everything is merely a matter of arbitrary definition” and suggest further that postmodernism finds “ethical principles are radically subject to the relativity of knowledge” such that “words can simply be toyed with and reinterpreted or reinvented at will.” This view of postmodernism and especially deconstruction as somehow advancing a platform of radical relativity is a tiresome and misinformed canard. Would you complain of Einstein that he introduced radical relativity into physics? Einstein merely showed that the effects of motion and gravity are highly context dependent, not that there are no laws that govern them. Postmodern thinking merely brings postmodern physics to the door of language to update our thinking about language and how it works. And Heidegger opened the path for beginning to think language in this way.
Martin
December 17, 2013 at 13:51
Rejecting someone's work because of Nazi taint, or accepting it because of political purity, is a way of avoiding, not engendering, thought. It does no service to philosophy or to the cause of anti-fascism. Heidegger is worth reading for his own thought and for his influence. We should all look within ourselves for the compromises and prejudices in our actions and thought.
DSteiner
December 17, 2013 at 20:27
Interesting discussion. Quixote's remarks in a way are off topic, in a way not--in the sense he's addressing a certain cynicism that arguably has accompanied the triumphal march of the Franco-German "prophets of extremity" through the Western academy since WW II. But anyway it seems to me the really interesting question isn't being addressed here, which is, isn't it possible to have been both a vicious Nazi and antisemite AND a great philosopher? After all, L.F. Celine was a strong Nazi sympathizer, an odious Jew-hater, and a great novelist who ironized his own sick manias in his best novels. Degas was likewise an antisemite (just loved seeing Dreyfus condemned to Devil's Island) and a great painter. Heidegger was clearly a Nazi and antisemite, maintaining consistent sentiments in that respect before, during, and after the war. Efforts to gloss over the reality are ridiculous at this point. Both in the interwar period and during the war, and then through use of rhetorical chiasm after the war as well, he applied a not uncommon "nudge nudge" (or "wink wink") technique, with comrades in the know appreciating precisely what his rich range of vague, Germano-Greco neologisms meant, in the particular context of ongoing events. The beauty of that technique was that if the times changed, he could then say "but that's not what I MEANT," and then be embraced by generations of students hungry for meaning after the Nazis made a REAL mockery of "liberal positivist" values. So then the American Heideggerians, in their beautiful, ahistorical neo-Heideggerian way, could pick up on all that "wink wink" conceptual arsenal, remove it from its particular historical context, and use it in sometimes very exciting ways, to talk about art and life and so forth. And why not? Is that inherently invalid on historical grounds? We here have it seems a classic conflict between historical and ahistorical interpretive/conceptual templates (or something like that). So then, we come back to the question, is it possible to be both a Nazi and a great philosopher, like Celine and Ernst Juenger were (arguably) great imaginative writers. Are we simply stuck with the standard critique of Heidegger (and I guess of phenomenology in general) voced by Bourdieu and others, that the philosophy lacks any real ethical content and terms such as "being onto death" can mean whatever you want them to? Is that necessarily a weakness? In a closely related context, that of another Nazi thinker, Carl Schmitt (one of Heidegger's real spiritual brothers), Raphael Gross has pointed out (in the framewwork of his excellent book on Schmitt and the Jews) that it's one thing for, say, a famous cook to also be a Nazi, it's something else for an extremely influential jurist to "also" be one. That point seems a pretty strong one in relation to Schmitt, and the question of what we salvage from HIS corpus of ideas, and his own code-terms for comrades in the know. But does the same thing hold true of Heidegger?
DSteiner
December 17, 2013 at 20:35
My apologies for the processing errors in the second paragraph above.
Mark Titus
December 18, 2013 at 00:13
I am no fan of Martin Heidegger, but I wonder why the editors of Prospect chose a photograph of him that makes him look like an unscrupulous salesman, child seducer, and buffoon in combination. I don't see that photograph of him anywhere on Google images. Maybe they thought this is the sort of fellow who could be drawn into support of Naziism.
Greg Desilet
December 18, 2013 at 04:31
Quixote: Sokal’s hoax was more an embarrassment for Sokal than for postmodern theorists, including Derrida. Sokal, who claims to be a physicist, could not see the close parallels between 20th century theory in physics and postmodern language theory—best represented by Derrida’s work on language. To the extent Sokal disparages postmodern language theory he also disparages the best and most current theory in his own field—all without even realizing what he is doing. What could be more foolhardy? Since space does not permit a demonstration here, please see the essay downloadable on my web site here: http://www.gregorydesilet.com/pdfs/PhysicsandLanguage.pdf. To be disabused of other wrong-headed notions about Derrida, read this: http://www.gregorydesilet.com/code/Gregory_Desilet_on_Demonizing_Deconstruction_Skeptic_Letter.html. As for Searle, Derrida trounces him quite handily at the time (1977) but also in Limited Inc. (the book). As for Derrida’s leaping form “a healthy skepticism into a form of radical nihilism”—this is so wrong as to be breathtaking in its error. I’ll let others who see the error in this respond to it.
Greg Desilet
December 19, 2013 at 01:41
DSteiner: Yes, for the sake of argument, let’s suppose Heidegger was a Nazi. If so, I think we would be right to say he was not a Nazi like many others. There were those who were first and foremost Nazi ideologues and who happened also to be philosophers (or write some philosophical-like tracts). But Heidegger was first and foremost a philosopher, highly trained in the classics of Western culture, and who happened also to have joined the Nazi Party. Perhaps he was in some sense—even in his own mind—a National Socialist before, during, and after the war (as Habermas and others have suggested). If this were true, would it discredit his philosophy? I do not think it discredits his work but I do think it requires a close reading into the possible points of contact aspects of his philosophy might have with the salient themes of National Socialism (which would also need to be sorted out). All this work—not in the spirit of “purification police” but rather in the spirit of doing what philosophy does best—attempting to understand what we are doing as cultures and communities, where we may be headed and why, and which ideas may head us in that direction and which may not. In other words, Heidegger’s philosophy and his political engagements force us to confront, in a focused way, very significant questions about particular views as well as forcing us to revisit the cultural role of philosophy and philosophers.
Greg Desilet
December 19, 2013 at 02:10
Quixote: I see why you are so interested in the “criminal satire case” you have been mentioning so persistently. You are a gifted satirist yourself! As I take it all in, I can only express how exasperating it is to confront someone who is so sure of being right about Derrida while providing so little evidence of grasping even the basic substance of his views. I would include Heidegger too, but it isn’t really fair to Derrida to lump him with Heidegger. Derrida takes certain cues from Heidegger but he is an ocean apart. Nevertheless, I can also add that you have shown little evidence of understanding Heidegger. If you are going to make these two and other postmoderns your scapegoats for whatever you don’t like about contemporary culture, you should at least bother to know what they say. But no need to take my word on your misunderstandings. Try writing up something about your views on these thinkers and send it somewhere to be published. If you can get it published anywhere, which I doubt, then I will respond to what you have written in whatever public forum you have found, and we can let the audience of that forum decide the merits of your case. What do you say, Quixote?
Greg Desilet
December 19, 2013 at 06:01
Tom Blancato: You give a very articulate and thoughtful defense of the notion or thoughtaction of nonviolence. Placing it within metaphysical terrain, however, results in seeing it as yet another expression of traditional metaphysics. By metaphysics here I mean a fundamental orientation toward how oppositional relations are structured. In the oppositional relation of violence/nonviolence you argue from the same orientation John Searle did in his debate with Derrida. Searle essentially argued that in any given oppositional relation (say A/B) there are pure or clear cases of A and pure or clear cases of B and, in between, there are cases that are a mixture of A and B (Searle used the categories of “sentence meaning” or literal meaning and metaphorical meaning or ironical meaning). For example, above you say there are some cases that are violent and some that are not. Then you suggest that seeing every case as violent is a way of waving off thought on the matter. But this is not the case. Derrida describes a different structuring of oppositional relation whereby in, say, the opposition of literal/metaphoric there is no pure instance of either (either in particular cases or in concept). The literal always contains within it some measure of the metaphoric and vice versa. Violence always contains within it some measure of nonviolence and vice versa. There are no instances of pure violence or pure nonviolence. The idea concerns the inseparability of opposites, the irreducible entanglement much like the situation in physics with particle/wave. In language we can never tell definitively if someone speaks ironically or literally. To decide, we construct a context (which may be constructed in a variety of ways) and then one or the other type of meaning emerges (as in physics with the particle/wave). Derrida believes this way of structuring oppositional relation serves us better in relation to our experience of the “real world.” In this respect he is being very scientific and empirical and offers a law of oppositional relation. One visualization of this way of thinking oppositional structure resides in the yin/yang symbol—one black dot in the center of the white swirl and one white dot in the center of the black swirl. As physicists have learned, this metaphysics provides a better conceptual approach to understanding the complexity of oppositions/conflicts in the “real world.” This is the sense in which I think it may be useful to abandon the notion of pure categories, a vestige of the traditional metaphysics that has helped Western culture be among the most violent cultures. Most eastern cultures do not escape this metaphysics either.
Greg Desilet
December 19, 2013 at 21:07
Quixote: By Jove, I think he’s almost got it! You most certainly CANNOT tell definitively right now whether I’m being serious or ironical. By what evidence could you? The words on the screen won’t decide for you because the words alone are not sufficient to enable you to do so. But this also most certainly does not mean you have no alternative but to throw up your hands and say, “Why read anything?” That would be nonsensical. What you do, what we all do every day, is make a judgment. We make that judgment based on a variety of contextual cues, past experience, and a host of generally useful assumptions, including extending a measure of trust toward whomever we are speaking to. But all these practices are only relatively useful protocols. They guarantee nothing. We can be fooled at any time because language (and for that matter behavior as well) does not protect us from being fooled or from misunderstanding. To impose a definitive literal meaning on anything is indeed a classic act of violence. We have no calculus for imposing certified, final meaning on anything. Why? Because the passage of time changes context and new events, new contexts always contain the possibility for changing what we think we know. This orientation toward “facts” in the world is precisely the hallmark of science. There is no fact or law in science that is not susceptible to revision, even radical revision. The same holds true for any sentence, any story, any book. To fail to understand this about language, to insist that language may at rock bottom level provide us with certainties, is to set ourselves up for subscribing to the authority of sacred texts. This point of view belongs, for example, to Constitutional and Biblical literalists—and, historically, we know a great deal about where that orientation to texts leads us with respect to the potential for deadly violence not to mention oppression. Similarly, we do not have to acquiesce when someone does violence to us and says, “Oh, I was just being ironical.” We are often constrained by circumstances to form judgments. All I am suggesting is that there is no need to form FINAL judgments. We can all act and speak in life and make decisions, yet still leave the door open for new information that might change our decision. This is also one of the lessons learned in death row cases where, years later, the introduction of DNA evidence has resulted in the reversal of cases that were thought to be rock solid. Why not bring that attitude to the interpretation of any text? The benefits far outweigh any harm that could be done.
Greg Desilet
December 20, 2013 at 03:38
Quixote: Sometimes we do not realize who our friends are. I think Derrida may be your friend—and not only in the sense shrewdly suggested by Blake when he said: “Opposition is true friendship.” It may surprise you to know that I value those elements of the “Western tradition” you have named. So, too, does Derrida. The program he proposes, deconstruction, does not undermine them but instead attempts to uphold them. As, for example, when he says,”What is called ‘objectivity,’ scientific for instance (in which I firmly believe, in a given situation), imposes itself only within a context which is extremely vast, old, powerfully established, stabilized or rooted in a network of conventions. . . . We can call ‘context’ the entire ‘real-history-of-the-world,’ if you like, in which this value of objectivity and, even more broadly, that of truth (etc.) have taken on meaning and imposed themselves. That does not in the slightest discredit them. In the name of what, of which other ‘truth,’ moreover, would it?” (From Limited Inc.). How, then, does deconstruction help? This way: “One of the definitions of what is called deconstruction would be the effort to take this limitless context into account, to pay the sharpest and broadest attention possible to context, and thus to an incessant movement of recontextualization.” But what if paying the sharpest and broadest attention possible to context complicates the search for truth and requires more difficult and rigorous standards of truth as well as justice? Well, then, says Derrida, bring it on. Did Einstein complain because motion was not objective in the way it was originally thought to be? Derrida was never opposed to the most rigorous standards in the interpretation of texts. Indeed, he made textual interpretation more difficult by exposing the limits of language, by showing that language cannot be made to make decisions for us. Does this open language to misuse, deliberate spinning, and manipulative interpretation? Yes. But there is no remedy for this other than what Derrida calls “vigilance” and the incessant work of upholding and defending standards. Which is why Derrida is also a fan of the best elements of the Enlightenment and the work of “reason.” Derrida again: “Everything that prepared the way for a philosophy of Enlightenment, or that has become its heir (not rationalism as such, which is not necessarily associated with it, but a progressive, teleological, humanistic and critical rationalism) does indeed struggle against the ‘return of the worst’, which education and an awareness of the past are supposed to be able to prevent” (from “The Deconstruction of Actuality”). So, Derrida is a fan of objectivity, truth, justice, science, tradition, Enlightenment critical rationality, and high standards of textual interpretation. What’s not to like? Perhaps you have other so-called postmodernists in mind when you complain about the effects on standards in education. I may agree with you on some of these cases. But Derrida and his work should not be held accountable for the sins in academia you have listed. Where Heidegger fits in concerning these issues is very complicated. But Derrida is certainly no Heideggerian.
Greg Desilet
December 20, 2013 at 15:05
Tom Blancato: Well, okay, this is quite a bit to slog through. If it is not confused thinking it is confusing rhetoric. For example: . . . “insofar as we may see violence as the seizure and creation of fate (however impossible that may be). We may merely make a distinction between the compulsion of fate versus the creation of conditions of possibility of that which must arise on its own.” In other areas it would seem the problems are less metaphysical and more the selection of appropriate terminology (to the extent philosophical communication is a priority). For example, you say: “Yet there is no question there are instances of nonviolence and instances of violence. If two people argue and start throwing punches, it clearly has gone violent, while if they withdraw from that, that violence is quelled, quelled well (enconstructed) or has reached cessation. That doesn't mean that their other interactions don't have a rich, mixed and various violence aspect.” Here you shift from any sort of metaphysical considerations concerning the fundamental ontology of human being and human relations to practical considerations relating to conflict management. I don’t think the word “nonviolence” serves well in this context. It seems to me you would be on clearer ground if you spoke from the frame of reference of practical management of conflict and ways to avoid escalation. These kinds of considerations fall into the broader categories of sociology and political science rather than the level of metaphysics in which Derrida and Heidegger are working. These strands cannot be crossed without creating a lot of confusion in terminology and communication.
Greg Desilet
December 20, 2013 at 16:04
DSteiner: Okay, I think we may be in agreement here. I apologize for the use of the “weasel” word “suppose.” I use such words in the context of these kinds of comment forums in order not to arouse over-reactions to sensitive topics. Just for the record, I am in print expressing not only the full meaning of this “Historie” and my complaints about Heidegger’s Nazism but also my complaints about Heidegger’s entire philosophy from the metaphysical ground up (titled: “Burke, Heidegger, Derrida and the Specter of Nazism at the Origin of Rhetoric” in Cult of the Kill). I’m not a Heidegger fan and I do not regard him as a great philosopher; but he is an important philosopher. He is like a boulder on the historical road of philosophy and you can’t go around him, or at least it would be unwise to do so. You have to deal with him, as you suggest, in order to continue effectively into the future of philosophy and perhaps avoid going over another cliff.
Greg Desilet
December 20, 2013 at 16:28
Quixote: Yes, I spoke with Derrida one time in the early ‘90s in his office at Irvine where he complained about the “abusive distortion” of his work on the majority of campuses in the United States—as I was showing him where someone had written an entire book based on an extraordinary misunderstanding of Derrida’s view of hierarchy. I think we might be in agreement on the merits, or lack thereof, of certain postmodern influences relating to the work of folks like Baudrillard, Foucault (take a look at his politics!), Lacan, and numerous less well known figures lumped into the postmodern arena. Derrida never appreciated being labeled a postmodern philosopher—and for good reason (although I think if the term is carefully defined it can be useful). In my opinion, Derrida is not a Heideggerian. He passes through Heidegger and takes what he finds to be useful and leaves behind one of the best critiques of Heidegger. He does not defend Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism but he has been wrongly accused of doing so. Instead, he merely wants to defend Heidegger in the sense that he feels Heidegger must be read and adequately understood in the historical unfolding of philosophy. To dismiss him because of his association with Nazism is a mistake in his case, whereas in the case of other prominent Nazi philosophers who have not as powerfully engaged the philosophical tradition as Heidegger, it would be acceptable to pass them by.
Greg Desilet
December 21, 2013 at 17:40
Quixote: Yes, the most clear and distinct statement by Derrida concerning misunderstandings relating to his work occurs in the book Limited Inc, especially in the Afterword where Derrida deals not only with Searle’s misunderstandings but also discusses similar misunderstandings from many other quarters. Also, Habermas represents another order of misreadings of Derrida and the exchanges between the two over the years—whereby Habermas comes to see the nature of his misunderstandings and the two eventually become friends—is detailed in The Derrida-Habermas Reader compiled by Lasse Thomassen. Another place where Derrida directly addresses the extraordinary misunderstandings of his work from the realms of academe can be found in book of collected interviews called Points . . . and titled “Honoris Causa: ‘This is also extremely funny.” This book also contains an interview with Derrida about the business with Wolin and Derrida’s reflections on that. This book also contains the interview called “Choreographies” where Derrida discusses some of the ways in which feminists have misunderstood and misapplied deconstruction. And in the same book another interview titled “A ‘Madness’ Must Watch over Our Thinking” discusses other orders of misunderstanding. A worthwhile commentary on Faye’s conflicts with and deliberate distortions of Derrida can be found here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/07/19/jean-pierre-faye-s-one-last-attack-on-jacques-derrida.html. This is only a partial list but it is good for starters. As for the comment you cite about Rapaport’s view of affinities in thinking and style between Derrida and Heidegger, I would only add that there are great affinities in thinking and style among most of the so-called Continental thinkers. I will be the first to grant that Derrida is extremely difficult to read. But so also are Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Sartre, and many others. Few among these thinkers make any great effort to present their thinking in a style of writing that makes it accessible. I don’t believe there is any great need, relating to the nature of the philosophical points he is making, for Derrida to be as obscure and as convoluted as he often is. A demonstration of the way in which it is possible to speak in terms of Derrida’s basic ideas yet in a style of great clarity can be found in the work of Martin Hagglund (Radical Atheism). So in some ways I can agree that Derrida has facilitated his own misunderstanding. Having said that, though, I also believe that some of those who have misunderstood him badly, such as Searle and Quine, have more than enough skill and intelligence to read him more faithfully. What happened in their cases, I believe, is that they read reports of what Derrida was supposed to be saying and pre-judged him on that basis without making much effort to read him in his own texts.
DSteiner
December 21, 2013 at 19:08
While this discussion of Derrida, a possible massive institutional misunderstanding of his oeuvre, etc. is certainly intermittently very interesting, it also appears somewhat "off topic" from the topic of the main article. To return to that for a moment if I may, from what I gather, however entrenched and rigorously dogmatic the two sides in the latest French Heidegger spate may be, the basic problem amounts to a refusal on the part of the Heidegger estate, supported by key admirers of H in France and elsewhere (some certainly very close to "the big D," others less so) to allow publication of a critical-historical edition of H's works (for one thing, H's efforts to cover up his Nazi writings after the war would quickly become clear); and this is combined with placing every possible obstacle in the way of independent scholars being able to work philologically with the texts in the archives. Again, the effort at work here is to iconocize the massive Heidegger corpus, as published in the Gesamtausgabe, as a contribution to world-historical "Geschichte" and bury the crass, from their viewpoint irrelevant "Historie" to which the corpus is historically tied. It seems to me the conflict at work here is grounded in the question of, well, conceptual-ideological genealogy and the role it should properly play in our understanding and use of philosophical texts; and in this respect (to go back "off topic"), however very well taken the point about a systematic (and, yes, institutionally damaging) strong misreading of Derrida may be, his name is bound to become powerfully caught up in the conflict .
Terrence O'Keeffe
December 22, 2013 at 02:02
It’s time for someone who has absolutely no interest in the internal debates among professional philosophers (and their acolytes) about Heidegger (or Derrida, or Foucault, etc.) to step in and point out the obvious, which is, to paraphrase A. Lincoln, “The world will little care nor long remember” the alleged substance of these debates, which, speaking personally, seem to be entirely insubstantial (is that an irony? – I certainly hope so, because it’s difficult to speak or write of such debates without a very heavy dose of irony). Everyone involved needs a radical “reality therapy” course of treatment (the kind of reality that happens when one is slapped in the face). First, one should think about Heidegger’s Nazism, or temporary Nazism, or rejected Nazism (rejected perhaps because it was insufficiently Nazi). As Nazis came and went, he was hardly a blip on the radar screen, merely one of those many academicians, jurists, scientists, and other professional men and women whom the regime recruited for reasons of both prestige and practical efficacy (we’ll control the schools, the courts, the technical institutions, etc., everyone will do our bidding to ensure the “final victory” and so on; pretty grubby and pathetic stuff, but intellectuals really don’t have a nose for such things, they’re actually quite awkward everywhere except in their own domain, so they’re easily gulled). And, in fact, there was really only one Nazi (and a part-time and skeptical “Nazi” at that) who counted, and that was Hitler. Germany was in some senses a “Nazified” society for twelve years, but in all senses, up until its defeat it was a “Fuehrer-State”. This much is obvious. Nazi “intellectual eminences” were always a joke from the point of view of policy and the decisions of Hitler, the decisions that counted the most (Stalin held a parallel position with respect to Marxism, or, as the phrase went, “really existing socialism”). Crass power politics dominated both of these societies that used the endeavors of intellectuals (“ideologies”) as props, and feeble props they proved to be. Though the cardinal social ideas of the West and the USSR enjoyed their moment of victory, the war was won and lost not as a “battle of ideas” but by sheer brute force. Of all the comments cited in Derbyshire’s article, perhaps the most telling is: “In December 1945, Jaspers delivered the following devastating verdict on his former friend: ‘Heidegger’s mode of thinking, which seems to me to be fundamentally unfree, dictatorial and uncommunicative, . . .’ " While it’s difficult to know what “unfree” means here, “dictatorial” certainly means that Heidegger asserted “truths” as self-evident, he never demonstrated them nor showed his means of arriving at them; they were understood as “intuitive”. And “uncommunicative” is just a fancy way of saying that whatever vague ideas Heidegger held at the core of his thinking about man, life, the universe (you name it), he expressed these ideas in opaque and muddy prose. L. Aychenwald’s comments exemplify this – we don’t get the Heidgerrian definition of Being (I assume this is the infamous “Dasein”), or even a paltry example or two, but we are assured he (as an heir of the pre-Socratics) was onto something Big – you just have to “get it” (in other words you have to be the kind of person whose intellectual curiosity, the real driver of science, is satisfied by misty verbal formulas that are believed to be “elevating” or “necessary for man” or that satisfy some emotional need born out of unhappiness with the world). As I said, a bit of a joke and a bad one at that. Ah, but this must be a mere misunderstanding, a phrase that in the above discussions is the armor of idiocy and the proud banner of vanity. Any sensible person with enough basic education, a lifetime of experience, and the free time to think about such matters can give a sound critique of the failings of modern societies – neither philosophy nor ideology is necessary for that task, though the fundamental categories of moral philosophy (e.g., good, evil, right, wrong, values, goals, means, etc.) will be resorted to in a variety of ways. As to many modern philosophers’ problems with science and technology (often envy disguised as criticism), they should be required to demonstrate knowledge of some particular science (rather than purporting to understand its assumed epistemology) before tackling the subject. Being, Time, Essence, and Nothingness, inter alia, have to be clearly described or defined before you can take erudite meditations or polemics about them seriously. So, get serious for a change.
Greg Desilet
December 22, 2013 at 04:09
Terrence O'Keeffe: I don't understand how you found this web site. Did you stumble onto it while doing a search for Duck Dynasty?
Greg Desilet
December 23, 2013 at 06:40
Terrence: You come onto a comment forum after a lengthy set of exchanges and proceed to insult everyone participating by suggesting its “alleged substance” is “entirely insubstantial” and then add that everyone involved “needs a ‘radical reality’ course of treatment”—the “kind of reality that happens when one is slapped in the face”—and then you complain of my ad hominem? If you expect to be treated civilly why don’t you begin with civility? But enough about manners, let’s get to the “substance.” You say of Heidegger that “as Nazis came and went, he was hardly a blip on the radar screen.” For the sake of argument, I’ll grant this is so, but it is beside the point of these comments. The point is that, as far as philosophers go, Heidegger is much more than a blip on the radar screen. He has had a considerable influence on a number of key developments in 20th century social, political, and philosophical movements (existentialism, phenomenology, post-structuralism, hermeneutics, language theory, and critical theory, to name a few) and the published commentary on him is enormous. Whether you like him or not or whether you understand him or not, his influence has been such that he requires considerable attention for anyone wanting to understand and take the measure of 20th century developments. This is the reply to Gene Schulman when he asks, “Why bother any more with Heidegger and the rest, when the world has moved on?” How does Gene Schulman know the “world has moved on”? Does he presume to understand Heidegger well enough to know the world has moved on? And does he presume to understand “the world” well enough to know it has indeed moved on? If Gene Schulman has resolved this satisfactorily he apparently has not persuaded a large number of those who have studied Heidegger and who still have questions about all this. It is more likely the case Gene Schulman has moved on—and left a number of very large and important questions unanswered. Among these questions would be: Is Heidegger’s philosophy of Being—the metaphysical ground of his thinking about Dasein—fundamentally consistent with metaphysical assumptions of Nazism (among which would be the possibility of pure and impure expressions of being)? This chain of comments has largely been about the power of ideas and not about the power of political action. For folks like O’Keeffe and Schulman to suppose that the power of ideas takes a back seat to the power of boots on the ground is to forget that boots on the ground get set in motion by the power of ideas. No human being lives in this world without being a natural born philosopher. Everyone has a philosophy of life, whether they can consciously see it or not, which influences every step they take. It’s just a question of the extent to which one is able and willing to take some responsibility for it. Life is only fully lived and engaged by taking on that responsibility and exercising that freedom. In this sense one cannot NOT philosophize and that makes philosophy important. And because of his past influence and his potential for future influence the quality of Heidegger’s philosophy becomes crucial to understand. Which is one reason these forums on Heidegger generate the level of response they do. So if you want to get serious, Terrence, try taking philosophy and influential philosophers seriously. Not everyone may read Heidegger but the point is that people can be Heideggerians without ever knowing it. Perhaps many Nazis who never read Heidegger were Heideggerians in their metaphysical outlook. If such is the case, it might be important for communities to know whether that is a good thing.
Greg Desilet
December 23, 2013 at 15:20
Gene Schulman: With your years you have certainly earned the right to your views, and I can respect that. But I have to respectfully disagree. I think you miss my point about Heidegger. Although I don’t think it is true no one reads Heidegger anymore (he is still taught at universities all over the world), it wouldn’t matter if that were true. There are perhaps three or four significantly different metaphysical stances to adopt and Heidegger’s is one of them. His expression of that particular stance is the most cogent and powerful to date. A person can operate from that metaphysical stance without having ever read Heidegger. If Heidegger himself saw certain affinities between his philosophy and planks of National Socialism, that should be of interest to philosophers today—in a world where Heidegger’s metaphysics is definitely alive and deployed by many people, whether they realize it or not.
Greg Desilet
December 23, 2013 at 19:05
I don’t know if anyone is still reading, but if not I’ll speak into the bottomless well. Speaking of reading, I can sympathize with Derrida when he complained that he was not read, as in not really read, as in misread. How does one go, as Terrence does, from what I say here: “Among these questions would be: Is Heidegger’s philosophy of Being—the metaphysical ground of his thinking about Dasein—fundamentally consistent with metaphysical assumptions of Nazism (among which would be the possibility of pure and impure expressions of being)?” To this: “One implication is that Heidegger actually “answered” this allegedly large and important question. Of course he didn’t, or if he did, he did it in hermetically sealed prose that requires metaphysical code-breaking; the flight from or avoidance of clarity of expression is the flight from understanding. Every one of us will go to the grave with these “large and important” questions unanswered.” Why bother reading at all if you are going to read this sloppily? This is not a question Heidegger could possibly answer because it is only a question addressed to those who are now living and consequently in a position to judge his thinking. Furthermore, it is obviously not a deep question about the nature of being or of existence (whereby it might make some sense to suppose one would go to the grave leaving it unanswered) but a smaller question about possible alignments between two metaphysical positions. It is a question that can and ought to be explored and answers offered (with the understanding that no “answer” is final). I’ve answered the question in my own writing and I would like to see others’ answers. As for notions of purity and purification, these have obvious significance in Nazi ideology that need not be spelled out here. They also play a significant role in the motives for violence in the world. The possibility they also play a significant role in Heidegger’s philosophy of being and Dasein’s comportment toward the “truth of being” is a possibility definitely worth exploring—and not because Heidegger is widely read by everyone but because the metaphysical stance to which he has arguably contributed—and in a broadly influential way—is still alive and operating in the world today. Concerning the probing of these philosophical questions, Terrence then adds: “More generally Mr. Desilet’s belief that we can live fully only by taking responsibility for our own philosophy of life raises more smiles (I’m not sure what it’s supposed to mean — it seems like one of those facile verbal formulas that is a descendant of “the unexamined life is not worth living” remark attributed to Socrates). I’ll leave the judgment on that silly piece of “pop wisdom” up to those who have actually lived fully.” I’ve put forward the proposition that everyone is a philosopher by default—meaning one cannot not philosophize or live without subscribing to deep metaphysical “decisions,” which can be unconscious. Granting as much, it is not hard to understand that people who choose to philosophize on a more conscious level are also choosing to engage life more fully, choosing to take more responsibility for whatever philosophical “decisions” or views influence their actions. This is not “pop wisdom” but the basis for any progressive human community whatever. As for leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao not really “reading” the philosophers and intellectuals of their time, why would Terrence make such a point and then, in the same set of comments, turn around and do the same thing himself? I’m not claiming with certainty to have knowledge worth listening to, but I do deserve, as everyone does, to actually be read rather than skimmed over with a set of pre-conceived assumptions and then assumed to be saying something irrelevant to what I’ve said. Regardless of my complaints, the exchanges have been interesting and I will sign off as well and wish you all the best. I think I’ll now have an e-cigarette and a power shake vitamin cocktail (just kidding).
Quixote
December 23, 2013 at 19:32
As I attempted to indicate a moment ago, with my comment appearing in the wrong spot: Were ye ever anointed knights, I'd have at ye all with my lance!
Quixote
December 23, 2013 at 19:42
This entire discussion, which hopefully will now come to a conclusion, would certainly make for a good satire of American academics. Let's at least try to stay out of jail so we can keep arguing with one another. Above all, let's avoid raising the hackles of American academics who "resort to the oldest and crudest of weapons, the police," to silence their impertinent online critics. The final irony would be if thugs with badges were to impose a Heideggerian order on the university at the request of the editors of Social Text. Any late stragglers who are unaware of the sordid events I'm alluding to may wish to examine the material appearing at: http://raphaelgolbtrial.wordpress.com/
Sue
January 1, 2014 at 06:07
Since the topic of metaphysics was introduced into this discussion please find an essay which describes some profound metaphysics. It is also gives profound critique of all of our forms of knowledge. See section 3 on hunter-gatherer behavior: http://www.dabase.org/Reality_Itself_Is_Not_In_The_Middle.htm
StephenKMackSD
January 1, 2014 at 20:33
I read Emmanuel Faye's Heidegger book in 2009 and found it impressive, and the attacks on his integrity as scholar, and his person, utterly consistent with the Heidegger apologists inability to be honest about the political/philosophical connection, in Heidegger's body of work and his political sentiments/attachments. Then, this last year I read Heidegger's Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks by Charles Bambach, published by Cornell University Press. Another very impressive intellectual/political/philosophical examination of the Heidegger question, worth the time and attention of any one interested in the questions raised in this essay. StephenKMackSD
DSteiner
January 4, 2014 at 21:35
For anyone still peeping in on this discussion, the latest issue of the important German weekly Die Zeit devotes considerable space to the appearance of the "Black Notebooks," with articles by Thomas Assheuer (journalist for that paper) and Peter Trawny (director of the Martin Heidegger Institute at the University of Wuppertal), together with an interview with Emmanuel Faye. On one level Trawny offers an argument similar to the one I've proposed as a possibiity in this forum: that apologia should be dispensed with and Heidegger should be approached both as a man with strong Nazi sympathies and a great philosopher. But in fact, Trawny himself engages in consistent, if somewhat subtle, apologia. For instance, he emphasizes that the Black Notebooks give no indication H was aware of what T refers to as "the violence against the Jews," by which he presumably means the mass murder. But what T does not indicate is that violence against Germany's Jews was transparently part of the Nazi program from the start, and those who supported Hitler were well aware of what he stood for. The violence of course had its most dramatic practical expression in the pre-mass murder period in the nationwide pogrom known as the "night of broken glass" that all Germans were aware of. There is apparently no indication n the Black Notebooks that H disapproved of the pogrom--the idea he didn't know about it is naturally an absurdity, and if he was, say, shocked by the barbarity of it all--i.e. not HIS vision of National Socialism--he apparently kept THAT a secret. Perhaps he simply shrugged his shoulders, as did very many other Germans. It seems, again, that even Heideggerians with publicly stated good will have great difficulty facing up to the crass reality of the man.
foolswritingonphilosophy
January 10, 2014 at 23:18
Those who cast aspersions on Wittgenstein by calling him names display the idiocy and the full breath of ignorance. Most of the comments here are sub-optimal and lack both philosophical and logical merit.
Samuel Ogbonna
January 16, 2014 at 16:26
Why devote this time and energy to Heidegger? As the logical positivists noted, his work is all nonsense anyway.
Greg Desilet
January 17, 2014 at 16:11
And by what evidence do you feel entitled to suppose the logical positivists are speaking anything other than nonsense? Richard Rorty systematically demonstrates in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature why it would be a mistake to do any such supposing. Between the analytic and the Continental traditions, I prefer Heidegger's nonsense. At least he directs his attention to questions of lived experience.
Gene Schulman
January 20, 2014 at 13:15
As a coda to this very long and inconclusive discussion of Heidegger and Nazism, you might find this relevant. Especially the comments about George Steiner, who was my introduction to Heidegger many years ago: http://www.denisdutton.com/heidegger.htm
Gene Schulman
January 21, 2014 at 22:49
It wasn't so much that Dutton's book was narrow, as it was his evolutionary psychology approach to a subject that is culturally driven. Yes, Steiner was (is) impressive. Unfortunately, he wears it on his forehead for all to see. Don't let the impressive sounding name of the Academy fool you. It's really just a think tank made up of retired academics and businessmen/consultants in Geneva. We now spend our time writing papers and articles on world affairs, that sometimes get into the press or alternative media sites. I am not an academic, but a former financial consultant. I never practiced architecture which was interrupted after graduation by four years served in the air force in Germany, then into the construction business when I returned to LA. A lot of other stuff between then and now. But I read all the time, and even once owned a book store here in Geneva.
Sam Ogbonna
January 23, 2014 at 16:08
Really, what does a philosopher sitting in his study with a pen and some paper really know about "being" and "time". Maybe we shouldn't be taking these guys too seriously. We will have to rely on the plodding means of science to figure out these questions.
Gene Schulman
January 24, 2014 at 10:43
It is the philosopher sitting in his study with pen and some paper who asks the questions that your scientists can answer with their technological knowledge. Except for questions of ethics and morality. Your scientism has value, but leave the important questions like human values to the philosophers. Science is no less speculative than philosophy. All theories are subject to revision.
Dr. Margit Appleton
January 28, 2014 at 16:28
Why is the Heideggerr discussion in the UK so desperately plodding? Will it ever transgress beyond "Yeah, Nazi wozzn't e?" And how strange to say Peter Trawny used "one of those neologisms Heideggerians are so fond of : Historial". When in actual fact he used the expression "Seinsgeschichtlicher Antisemitismus". Should not a minimum of linguistic knowledge be the basis of a discussion that is more than in danger of being tangentially misdirected? And what relevance can those disgruntled comments have - other than: "Just what I've been saying for years". This is new territory, the Heidegger case is far from shut...But in this country, through prejudicial conviction, linguistic lazyness, and a superciliously closed mindset, it hasn't even been opened.
Jacob Arnon
March 11, 2014 at 02:06
Heidegger was hardly "the greatest philosopher of the 20th C." Heideggerz legacy consists in his helping to destroy philosophy as such. The man was a racist, a bully, and a self promoter. Any man who compares the systematic murder of human beings to the slaughter of cows isn't a philosopher, he isn't even a thinker.
Jackson Davis
March 12, 2014 at 23:07
Re: Sam Ogbonna "An example of the profundities that obsessed Heidegger is his asking why anything exists at all, and why what exists looks the way it does. How does one go about answering that kind of question?" Metaphysically !
Sergiu
March 21, 2014 at 11:43
Heidegger notebooks reveal antisemitism at core of Being
Sam Ogbonna
March 23, 2014 at 20:00
There's no limit to the nonsense these philosophers could write once they got started. I can't recall the one, I think it was Hegel, who wrote a proof for why there could be no more than seven planets.

Jonathan Derbyshire

The world of ideas

Heidegger in France: Nazism and philosophy

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