Monday’s New York Times has an interesting article about the forthcoming English edition of Emmanuel Faye’s book Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935. In brief, Faye argues that Heidegger’s pro-Nazi views were not incidental, but were at the core of his life’s work. Accordingly, suggests Faye, libraries should remove Heidegger books from the “Philosophy” section, and place them in the “History of Nazism” section. From what I know of Heidegger (he’s discussed in my forthcoming book Aiming for Liberty) his intellectual influence on the 20th century was highly pernicious. Heidegger, like Hitler, wrote books addressing the question of what it means to be a “German,” and came to similar conclusions. Both writers were verbose; Heidegger was superior in the fabrication of elaborate philosophical constructs, while inferior to his hero is writing comphrensibly. Given Heidegger’s own dedication to Hitlerism, it seems that Heidegger himself might have considered it appropriate for his books to be shelved next to Mein Kampf.
bob says:
I don’t know what’s sillier: that someone would suggest that Heidegger’s books shouldn’t be shelved in the Philosophy shelves or that anyone would suggest that librarians shuffle their collections around to appease such ignorance.
November 12, 2009, 3:29 pmPersonFromPorlock says:
Instead of shelving Heidegger in ‘Nazi history’, why not shelf Hitler in ‘philosophy’? Mein Kampf is arguably as much a philosophical work as Plato’s Republic is: that it’s reprehensible is neither here nor there.
November 12, 2009, 3:46 pmMatthew says:
Wasn’t Heideggar’s involvement with the Nazis fairly brief and followed by a strong renunciation? You could do the same for Neitzche; the Nazis played off philosophy in a more obvious and recognized way. You could go back to Plato (if you wanted to) to find philosophers arguing for authoritarian governments.
November 12, 2009, 3:48 pmArkady says:
Well then I’m afraid you don’t know much. I hold no brief for Heidegger’s work beyond Being and Time. But that is his most influential work. I don’t see any nazism in it (it was written in 1927), a lot of Nietzsche, yes, nazis no. But if that’s the criterion for explusion, send most of Ayn Rand out with him. That his intellectual influence was pernicious had little to do with his politics and much more to do, I think, with his mode of analysis and writing. And a lot of that, in the English-speaking world, can be traced to the horrible, tendentious Macquarrie-Robinson translation of Sein und Zeit. If someone was reasonable as Gilbert Ryle can speak well of Being and Time, I wouldn’t write Heidegger off.
November 12, 2009, 3:49 pmT. Sifert says:
“I’m afraid you don’t know much.”
That’s about all that can be said for this post.
November 12, 2009, 3:56 pmDotar Sojat says:
What will that do to Heideggerian Hermeneutics?
November 12, 2009, 3:56 pmrichard says:
Wasn’t Heideggar’s involvement with the Nazis fairly brief and followed by a strong renunciation?
No. All the recent scholarship shows that he involvement was lengthy and thorough, that his support for Hitler and National Socialism was fervent and the renunciation was was a bunch of falsehoods designed to preserve his reputation after the war.
November 12, 2009, 3:57 pmThat said, however, the idea that his books shouldn’t be included in the philosophy section is just plain stupid.
xx says:
What does his Nazi connection have to do with whether he’s classified as a philosopher? Wouldn’t you classify Leni Riefenstahl as a filmmaker? And her work was outright Nazi propoganda.
November 12, 2009, 3:59 pmRicky Nelson says:
Think what you want about Heidegger and Nazism. But to suggest that Heidegger’s philosophy is closer to Nazism than philosophical thought is asinine. His study of being is the foundation for all modern structuralist philosophy, what it means to be a subject, and perhaps most importantly, it attacks the question on the limits (or lack thereof) of ontology
The argument presented here is like saying the Constitution should be put in the “History of Slavery” section in the library because the Constitution promoted slavery. Slavery of course is a tiny part of the Constitution that is unrepresentative of the Constitution as a whole. Even if parts of Heidegger’s work promote Nazism, to suggest that his works’ main theme have “non-Nazi” content is simply not true.
November 12, 2009, 4:13 pmStrict says:
“Heidegger was superior in the fabrication of elaborate philosophical constructs, while inferior to his hero is writing comphrensibly.”
Heidegger was “inferior to his hero is writing comphrensibly?”
Devastating critique of his philosophy and works, DK.
In fact, you even proved that his writings were not even philosophy!
November 12, 2009, 4:15 pmShadesOfCarnap says:
The Nothing itself nothings
November 12, 2009, 4:17 pmNowMDJD says:
I supppose, then, we shouldn’t read Carl Schmitt. Or watch plays by Bertolt Brecht, who lent his support to East Germany. Or watch Sergei Eisenstein’s movies.
November 12, 2009, 4:18 pmpete says:
I am not sure quite what you mean by this, but Nietzsche was an outspoken critic of anti-semitism and probably would have been horrified by the Nazis use of his work.
For those of you unfamiliar with Heidegger here is a sampling of a few of his works: Poetry, Language, Thought; The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics; What Is Called Thinking?; Being and Time. I was never a big fan of his work, but it is clearly philosophy and should be cataloged as such.
For what its worth I am a librarian and was a philosophy major as an undergrad, although I do not remember much of the Heidegger I read back then other than that one of my Jewish professors thought he was brilliant and a Nazi. OCLC catalogs almost all of Heidegger’s work as philosophy in the 100s of the dewey system. Some works like Poetry, Language and Thought are cataloged in the related disciplines like literature.
November 12, 2009, 4:18 pmCornellian says:
Why stop with philosophy? Why not remove books from the math section and put them in the Nazi section if the author had Nazi sympathies?
November 12, 2009, 4:19 pmMike says:
Super stupid post. Just because you haven’t read Heidegger doesn’t mean everyone else is equally ignorant.
November 12, 2009, 4:22 pmArkady says:
Did I fix that for you?
November 12, 2009, 4:23 pmMichael F. Martin says:
In response to an earlier comment: No, Heidegger never renounced (or apologized) for his affiliation with National Socialism.
Arendt wrote an essay called Heidegger the Fox, which just aboit sums up what I think of the guy. It’s Arendt we have to “thank” (I think) for the fact he’s still so widely read and revered in academic circles. The guy had ethos, not ethics.
November 12, 2009, 4:24 pmThales says:
Leiter has a pretty definitive exposition of this point:
November 12, 2009, 4:26 pmhttp://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/10/carlin-romano-does-it-again.html
k says:
I am not a libertarian or a conservative but I did enjoy reading VC from time to time. I regret, though, that the blog is veering off into a fantasy-land where I can no longer follow. I do realize that this blog is not meant to be of uniform quality but it has made a great reputation over time and it is difficult for readers to readjust their expectations now that things are getting stranger. I do hope that this is only a temporary phase.
November 12, 2009, 4:30 pmuh_clem says:
k,
You will find a widely varying level of quality at the VC, highly correlated with the authorship of the post.
Why Eugene puts up with the know-nothingness of Kopel, Bernstein, Lindgren et. al. is anybody’s guess, but it’s his blog and he can allow front page access to whomever he wants. Maybe he keeps them around to make his posts look even more well-reasoned by comparison?
Anyway, I wouldn’t give up yet. There’s usually a good post or two a day here, and it’s good to have one’s assumptions and prejudices challenged every once in a while.
November 12, 2009, 4:52 pmjstar says:
Just got back from the lunch break visit to my local library. I totally couldn’t find the Grave of Discarded Lies. The catalog only returned suggestions for Golfing books about dealing with bad lies. Should I have looked in the Reference Section?
November 12, 2009, 4:59 pmRandy says:
I guess we’ll now have to move Wagner’s Ring Cycle to the “Nazi Music” section of the music store.
November 12, 2009, 5:09 pmRPT says:
Mr. Kopel:
Where do put Prescott Bush?
November 12, 2009, 5:13 pmyankee says:
Why stop with math? Heisenberg’s papers on matrix mechanics and the Uncertainty Principle should go in the History of Nazism section too.
November 12, 2009, 5:13 pmAnderson says:
Wasn’t Heideggar’s involvement with the Nazis fairly brief and followed by a strong renunciation?
He remained a party member to the end of the war, and never really renounced Nazism; rather like some of the leftist profs that we heard about last week, he thought National Socialism was a potentially good idea, poorly executed. It doesn’t help that his sole, AFAIK, reference to the death camps was to compare them to mechanized agriculture as equally pernicious.
Whether Being and Time is a Nazi-sympathetic work is addressed most thoroughly, to my knowledge, by Johannes Fritsche in a book that concentrates especially on two sentences in B&T. I heard him lecture on the thesis of his book at the New School some years back. He was rather vehement.
The silliness of Prof. Kopel’s post is adequately expounded above. I had some comments on the NYT article here. For those too sensible to click through:
Leaving aside the question of whether all, or even most, of Heidegger’s works have said qualities (and I don’t believe they do), the notion that fascism and racism are somehow exclusive of “philosophy” leaves me wondering just how Mr. Faye defines “philosophy.” Can there be no evil philosophy? What about a mistaken philosophy — also impossible?
November 12, 2009, 5:17 pmAnderson says:
I guess we’ll now have to move Wagner’s Ring Cycle to the “Nazi Music” section of the music store.
Right next to the “Horst Wessel” remix.
November 12, 2009, 5:18 pmJakeCollins says:
Know who else liked to get rid of books and ideas they found degenerate?
November 12, 2009, 5:32 pm[Insert Godwin’s law here}
tlb says:
Clearly, the best way to fight Fascism is by suppressing unpopular ideas, and the best way to fight Nazism is by burning books. I see nothing ironic here.
November 12, 2009, 5:43 pmAppalled says:
I am not a libertarian or a conservative but I did enjoy reading VC comments from time to time. I regret, though, that the comments are veering off into a territory where I can no longer follow. I do realize that comments are not meant to be of uniform quality but they have made a great reputation over time and it is difficult for readers to readjust their expectations now that things are getting stranger. I do hope that this is only a temporary phase.
November 12, 2009, 5:49 pmegd says:
And here I thought Heidegger was nothing more than a boozy beggar who could think you under the table.
November 12, 2009, 5:52 pmAnderson says:
Appalled, if you could be less Delphic as to the comments (comments, right? not posts?) and their flaws, perhaps your explanation would be persuasive and assist us in mending our ways.
… Egd, it’s *reading* Heidegger that puts one under the table.
November 12, 2009, 5:54 pmCJColucci says:
From what I know of Heidegger (he’s discussed in my forthcoming book Aiming for Liberty) his intellectual influence on the 20th century was highly pernicious.
Really? You “discuss” him in your book? Based on “what [you] know of him”? Please, share. From what I know, he had a pernicious influence on the English language even though he wrote in German. Whether his philosophical ideas have anything to them I have never been able to figure out for myself, (see previous sentence for partial explanation)but I know that a number of serious people take him seriously. Oh, yes, and he was an odious Nazi, or at least a fellow traveller — but we knew that.
November 12, 2009, 5:54 pmAnderson says:
Well, we are going to find out what Heidegger thought about personal firearms, anyway. Should be good!
November 12, 2009, 6:03 pmloki13 says:
I think there’s an interesting observation buried in the inane OP.
At what point is something so inextricably linked to an idesology that is fundamentally repugnant that the thing is no longer of value, or, if of value, should be discarded regardless?
Do give you two examples (one scientific, one artistic):
1. Nazi and Japanese scientists did horrific human experiments. Most of these were completely valueless and, well, just evil. But not all were valueless (just evil). Some greatly advanced our knowledge in the way that the human body reacts to, inter alia, extreme cold, pressure, and biological and chemical agents. Should we ignore these findings because, well, the way the data was found was (for lack of a better phrase) absolutely evil?
2. Leni Reifenstahl was an amazing filmmaker. There are many ways in which we could look at the way in which she shaped the cinematic experience; to name one, the entire way in which sports are shot was indelibly influenced by her decisions in shooting the Berlin Olympics. She was also a Nazi propogandist. Should she be taught in cinema history / appreciation courses?
These are not easy questions, because the art/science is tied into the ideology. What is easy is this- just because someone might be a bad person does not mean that their work is bad. Heidegger was a Nazi. Period. But he also was a major philosopher (good or bad, depending on your taste, but major).
Now I’m going to go listen to Thriller. ;)
November 12, 2009, 6:09 pmUncleWin says:
“From what I know of Heidegger (he’s discussed in my forthcoming book Aiming for Liberty) his intellectual influence on the 20th century was highly pernicious.”
To read a statement like this at the VC is just depressing.
November 12, 2009, 6:10 pmPatrick Moran says:
What does this imply (if anything) about the motivational and self-development programs provided by Landmark Education LLC? It is generally assumed that Landmark’s “technology” comes from Heidegger. I remember reading somewhere a comment that Landmark Education’s philosophy is the purest example of Heidegger’s thought in popular culture.
Does this mean that participants in Landmark Education’s programs are being influenced by Nazi thought without knowing it?
November 12, 2009, 6:32 pmSara says:
I am perfectly fine with putting Heiddegger in the library section on disgarded, whatever, but then I am not a supposed academic who discusses “what I know of him” in my books. You cannot be a serious scholar.
November 12, 2009, 6:33 pmMark N. says:
For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s entirely true that the leftist profs who like Heidegger’s philosophy all paper over his personal history. For example, Emmanuel Levinas, who was one of the people responsible for introducing Heidegger into French philosophy, later wrote some fairly strong denunciations of his association with the Nazis.
November 12, 2009, 6:52 pmdeClerk says:
As a lawyer and gun owner, I would like to kindly request that Mr. Kopel take up knitting instead of writing because his posts makes us look really, really stupid.
November 12, 2009, 6:52 pmreadery says:
It may have been bad philosophy, but it was philosophy.
November 12, 2009, 7:03 pmreadery says:
Bertrand Russell pointed out in his history of Western Philosophy that Schopenhauer was personally a really nasty man. He recounts an incident when Shopenhauer pushed an elderly woman down a flight of stairs. The woman sued and was awarded payments for the rest of her life. When the woman died, Shopenhauer wrote “obit anus, abit onus” in his diary –”The old woman dies, the burden departs” — cute, but no remorse whatsoever. Russell noted that Shopenhauer’s philosophy was, well, really nasty philosophy, kind of like his personal life.
Nonetheless Shopenhauer’s philosophy is still philosophy.
November 12, 2009, 7:09 pmYale2010 says:
If the goal is to keep unsuspecting people from reading Nazism, putting it on “The Nazi Shelf” is a sure way to make every iconoclastic middle and high school student read it. I bought Mein Kampf at age 13 because it was a forbidden book… it was only in picking it up off my shelf almost ten years later as a college student that I realized how terribly written it is. If it hadn’t been banned in Europe and were instead billed as “ONE OF THE 20TH CENTURY’S MOST BORING BOOKS” my 13-year-old self would have passed it by.
November 12, 2009, 7:20 pmrichard says:
2. Leni Reifenstahl was an amazing filmmaker. There are many ways in which we could look at the way in which she shaped the cinematic experience; to name one, the entire way in which sports are shot was indelibly influenced by her decisions in shooting the Berlin Olympics. She was also a Nazi propogandist. Should she be taught in cinema history / appreciation courses?
And the answer is, of course. Just like DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation is appallingly racist but is also great filmmaking. Both Riefenstahl and Griffith have to be taught in any decent history of cinema course or you’re teaching history that is a lie. The fact that you don’t like an artist or that he or she was a (choose your favorite epithet here – Nazi, Communist, child molester, etc) doesn’t mean that the art is any better or worse. And even if the objectionable content is inextricably mixed in with the artistic achievement – like in Triumph of the Will or Birth of a Nation or Lolita – you leave it to the students to sort it out. What you don’t do is pretend these works didn’t exist or weren’t influential. And you don’t take Heidegger’s books out of the philosophy section even if you think his influence was pernicious.
November 12, 2009, 8:02 pmReally? says:
Is this post serious? Should we eradicate the literature section of the library based on the personal beliefs of the authors?
November 12, 2009, 8:11 pmphilostudent says:
This article makes me embarrassed to read VC.
November 12, 2009, 8:28 pmMarquette says:
This is worse than a slippery slope.
Maybe we should have a self-hating Jews section–where Popper and Wittegenstein
be prominently displayed. Query–how many of the great Jewish thinkers escaping to the
West–would have left if the Holocaust had no nexus with Jews, qua, Jews–
and was contained to Poles and Romano gypsies?
Philosophy is part of the marketplace of ideas.
Does the OP want to put Wagner
not in the Classical muisc section but in Jewish hater composers.
And how about Jewish History–should a books by Ben Gurion and Begin
be moved to the 20th Century Terrorists Section?
November 12, 2009, 8:36 pmloki13 says:
Richard,
I happen to agree with you about Reifenstahl. Of course, once you watch Olympia (and understand it), it’s hard to watch any sportscast the same way again. :)
But you ducked #1. That’s a harder question, isn’t it? And why is it a harder question? Is it because of the level of remove (science that was directly based on inhuman cruelty, as opposed to art by people that participated in cruelty, or, arguably, enabled it… cf. Triumph of the Will)?
As I wrote, the OP is ridicuolus, in the sense that the poster clearly doesn’t really understand anything about Heidegger (not that there’s anything wrong with that… I struggled with Wittgenstein, and I thought Heidegger was just babbling about babbling… but maybe it was better in German :) ), and doesn’t really grapple with the underlying problem of his post, namely:
1. While Naziism used some Heidegger, Heidegger’s philosophy was not of Naziism, just as the Nazis used Wagner, but Wagner’s music is not of the Nazis (cue up Curb Your Enthusiasm).
2. That someone is a bad person does not make their art or work bad when their art is not tied up into the essence of what makes them bad. See Michael Jackson, see also Roman Polanski.
November 12, 2009, 8:37 pmAk Mike says:
loki13, I think your number 1 is in doubt. Certainly if the book referenced in the original post is at all accurate, Heidegger’s philosophy was indeed “of the Nazis.” For what little it’s worth, that has long been my impression of his “get back to the soil” attitude about being; that it was consistent with and supportive of the Nazi “think with your blood” approach.
Obviously his philosophy shouldn’t be suppressed, but neither should it be concealed that it meshes closely with the Nazi perspective.
November 12, 2009, 9:09 pmDuffy Pratt says:
You guys are being too hard on the poster. I just opened up my copy of An Introduction to Metaphysics at random, and came up with the following:
Doesn’t it just make your blood boil? Of course he should be put on the Nazi history shelf. Then those of us who studied philosophy would never have to wonder whether this stuff made any sense in any language at all. Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that Heidegger’s philosophy was just the “No soap, radio” joke done on a very large scale.
November 12, 2009, 9:16 pmMarquette says:
Does Nothing negate itself?
Could have come straight from Adolph’s pursed lips;
but maybe Goebbels and his Luger were a deterrent.
November 12, 2009, 9:31 pmhappycynic says:
Yet more evidence of the double-standard regarding fascism and communism. Marx is not banished from the philosophy section and neither should Heidegger. I haven’t read his Nazi writings but I have read his metaphysical works and they definitely belong in the philosophy section. He is an important step in the progression of Post-Modern thought.
November 12, 2009, 9:40 pmNorthern Dave says:
Actually, I agree with the Blog that Heidegger’s works are pernicious (and frankly worthless, like Viscount Haldane’s ramblings). Plato doesn’t overly impress me either and Sarte and Nietzsche were fools.
(Incidentally, recall that Heidegger’s first act as Rector of Freiburg was to eliminate all democratic structures making him a card carrying member of the I-hate-everything-the-Volokh-Conspiracy-stands-for Club.)
Moving him to the 25 cent discard table would be the most appropriate thing for a library to do.
November 12, 2009, 9:45 pmreadery says:
According to Wikipedia Patti D’Arbanville was underage when she began dating Cat Stephens, and the article says she stayed with him whenever she visited London during her career as a teenage model.
Should his songs be removed because he was a “child molester” when he wrote them? Or because he later converted to Islam?
November 12, 2009, 10:19 pmAnderson says:
Plato doesn’t overly impress me either and Sarte and Nietzsche were fools
Northern Dave can dispense with the philosophy section, period. Except perhaps for his hero, David Hume.
When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
November 12, 2009, 10:23 pmCornellian says:
I guess we’ll now have to move Wagner’s Ring Cycle to the “Nazi Music” section of the music store.
Did you hear that guy at the music store? It was the way he said “we have a special on VAHG-ner.” Clearly he’s an Anti-Semite.
November 12, 2009, 11:01 pmCornellian says:
Plato doesn’t overly impress me either and Sarte and Nietzsche were fools
Considering the entire field of philosophy was virtually a blank slate before Plato showed up* I think you ought to be more impressed. Try inventing an entire field of study. It’s not that easy. And Nietzsche was a genius – hard to read, but still a genius.
(*Yeah, yeah, don’t tell me about the pre-Socratics. Been there, read that).
November 12, 2009, 11:04 pmloki13 says:
Ummm…… no. The book referenced in the original post isn’t correct. This would be similar to saying that Michael Pollan’s locavore movement “meshes closely with the Nazi perspective” because it’s so darned close to blood and soil.
Being and Time is his classic work. 1927. Please feel free to provide me with a quote from that that shows any Nazi sympathy or taint. For bonus points, please pick any paragraph at random and explain what it means. :)
Your trouble began with, “If the book referenced in the original post is at all accurate…”
Here’s some big surprises for you:
1. Academic wants to create controversy with book by mischaracterizing things; book is roundly rejected in serious community in question (feel free to check links above), accepted by gullible population.
2. European (French, no less) wants to characterize something as “hate speech”.
3. People premise comments by “accepting [the lie] as true” without checking to see if the lie is, in fact, true.
November 12, 2009, 11:23 pmloki13 says:
And by the way, I never thought I’d be defending Heidegger. In my book:
1. Bad Philosopher.
2. Worse writer.
3. Worser (heh) person. And that’s saying something, because…. damn, he’s a bad writer. Then again, he was a pretty vocal Nazi supporter.
But that’s my opinion (as to the first- he’s an objectively bad writer and person :) ). He’s still an important philosopher.
November 12, 2009, 11:26 pmReally? says:
New logical fallacy: ad hominem bloginem.
November 12, 2009, 11:28 pmhappycynic says:
Plato is only problematic if you ignore his statement that his ideal city is simply a metaphor for the well-ordered individual. If you take him at his word all the objectionable stuff goes away.
November 13, 2009, 12:01 amShadesOfCarnap says:
Heidegger was certainly not the only academic to indulge in naive romanticism. It’s one thing to sit in an ivory tower and wax eloquent about the idyllic pastoral life of peasants in the Black Forest; it’s quite another to actually have to live that way.
I really don’t think this equates to Nazi rants about ‘blut und boden’ (which are more about a cult of nationalism/romanticism).
If you want to take issue with pastoral ideology leading to nasty real world results, start with collective farming in Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Stalinist USSR, and Maoist China.
November 13, 2009, 12:19 amRicardo says:
Sounds good to me :-)
Except I would replace the “commit to flames” part with, “only read it if you want insight into intellectual history and the evolution of different schools of thought.” Marx, for instance, falls in this category.
November 13, 2009, 12:26 amShadesOfCarnap says:
The problem, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, is when great thinkers get watered down. The finer points tend to get lost in translation. Cliff Notes version of The Republic: totalitarianism is for your own good. Cliff Notes version of Kant’s categorical imperative: follow the law blindly.
November 13, 2009, 12:28 amSolon says:
OP–
Since translation is the height of pomposity–Hegel–
I can only assume that your exegesis of Hegel was based
on your reading in German–no?
Also to claim Nietzsche was not anti-semitic–begs incredulity.
One can argue his virulence was in part due to his sister’s translations
but lets not make saints of common sinners
November 13, 2009, 1:15 amAnderson says:
The problem, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, is when great thinkers get watered down.
Heidegger has an entire chapter in B&T on “the They” and their superficial understanding. And he hadn’t ever seen a blog.
Also to claim Nietzsche was not anti-semitic–begs incredulity.
One can argue his virulence was in part due to his sister’s translations
What do you know of Nietzsche? His sister never translated any of his works, that I’ve ever heard of. *She* married an anti-semite who moved her to South America with a little Aryan colony, and N. was furious at her for marrying such a dork.
N. is not an admirer of the Jews (tho he praises the Tanakh in contrast to the New Testament), but calling him an “anti-semite” betrays confusion about the meaning of the term, or about N. He was an anti-Christian, not an anti-semite.
November 13, 2009, 7:18 amInstapundit » Blog Archive » SHELVING HEIDEGGER’S WORKS next to Mein Kampf…. says:
[...] SHELVING HEIDEGGER’S WORKS next to Mein Kampf. [...]
November 13, 2009, 8:51 amiowahawk says:
Principle lesson of the 20th Century: when coffee house philosophers get power, the body count starts piling up.
(Notable exception: Vaclav Havel)
November 13, 2009, 9:10 amcyclescott says:
That’s not a bad idea considering Plato described a proto-authoritarian regime in The Republic: Rigid class structure, the state replacing the family, the ruling class controlling all aspects of life for the lower classes, etc.
November 13, 2009, 9:30 amHucbald says:
The cool thing about naziism is – yes, nazis have at least one positive – is that anyone who falls for that ideology, however briefly and despite any following retractions, can be written of as a buffoon en toto and forever. No more thought need be wasted on said moron(s), and no more attention need be paid to what they think: They are morons and their thoughts are garbage.
The only better litmus test are the Jews: Any Jew hater is simply garbage as a human being. Not just sh!t to the bone, but even their bones are made of super-impacted sh!t – rammed-earth sh!t – and the marrow produces sh!t corpuscles.
Communism serves a similar purpose, but to a lesser degree, as does socialism, to an even lesser degree. Anti-Semitism, naziism, communism, and socialism are like sliding-scale assho!e-detecting litmus tests.
I wouldn’t waste any time on Heidegger. I crap more brains and piss more talent.
November 13, 2009, 9:37 amenowning says:
In the shelving system of the library of political correctness, would the Founding Fathers be closer to Mein Kampf than Heidegger? Heidegger owned no slaves, nor exterminated any indian nations. Perhaps it would be simpler to move Mein Kampf to the Manifest Destiny shelf.
November 13, 2009, 9:48 amacassa says:
I am stunned by the lack of reading comprehension among the commenters here. Nowhere in this brief post does the poster mention that he believes the book should be moved to the Philosophy section. This post is about an article he read which promotes this idea. The only thing written in the post that even vaguely suggests support for the idea is his thought that “Heidegger himself might have considered it appropriate for his books to be shelved next to Mein Kampf.” – that’s it.
And for the especially ignorant commenters here, there was not even the slimmest suggestion by the poster that books should be banned, burned or suppressed. The discussion was about moving the book from the Philosophy shelf to the Nazi shelf, not moving it the dustbin. Intellectual dishonesty at its finest.
November 13, 2009, 9:50 amAndrew Lale says:
I would love to know as a percentage 1) how many of the commenters had heard of Heidegger before this post, 2) how many know his first name, and 3) how many could defend their bold bald assertions by reference to books written by him.
November 13, 2009, 9:51 amAnderson says:
There is is, folks, Hucbald’s Razor — or machete?
… I have a similar philosophy on why flag-burning should be legal. It’s helpful to see Americans burning their own country’s flag, because it saves me the trouble of wondering whether I should listen to ‘em.
I am trying to think of a repentant Nazi who’s worth attending to (Heidegger was non-repentant, and de Man wasn’t a Nazi). No one comes immediately to mind.
November 13, 2009, 9:51 amAnthony says:
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
November 13, 2009, 9:51 amWho could drink you under the table.
rhhardin says:
This was a controversy in the late 80s.
Levinas had the nicest remark on Heidegger: (quote)
But on the issue of Heidegger’s participation in “Hitlerian thinking,” I do not believe that any kind of historical research, archival data, or eyewitness accounts – even when they do not rest on pure misunderstandings – can equal the certainty that comes to us in the famous Testament in Der Spiegel, from his silence concerning the Final Solution, the Holocaust, the Shoah. Indeed it is in the “final solution,” in the pure extermination of the death camps that – beyond all the major injustices that stamp the thirteen years of the Hitlerian regime – National Socialism revealed the diabolical criminality, the absolute evil, of what cannot be called “thought.” All the rest could, if necessary, still be attributed to the inevitable immorality of politics – haven’t all states been responsible for wars? Consequently, all forms of compromise and servility, self-serving contacts and suspect friendship, unworthy statements and acts, and the pure opportunism of the citizens of totalitarian states could still, if necessary, be ascribed to a lamentable self-interest – cowardice or caution – and as human weaknesses appeal to some indulgence on our part. Doesn’t Heidegger speak of “human failing,” for which, according to the same Testament, he apologized to Mrs. Husserl for hot having “once more” paid his respects at the time of his teacher Husserl’s illness and death? But doesn’t this silence, in time of peace, on the gas chambers and death camps lie beyond the realm of feeble excuses and reveal a soul completely cut off from any sensitivity, in which can be perceived a kind of consent to the horror?
He was silent, but not completely. There is a statement in a fine book on Heidegger by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe that Professor Miguel Abensour has pointed out to me. Martin Heidegger made it during one of the unpublished lectures from the cycle of four talks given in Bremen on technology in 1949, but it is quoted in the book by Wolfgang Schirmacher, Technik und Gelassenheit: “Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry. As for its essence, it is the same thing as the manufacture of corpses in the gas chambers and the death camps, the same thing as the blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.” This stylistic turn of phrase, this analogy, this progression, are beyond commentary.
It is impossible to be stinting in our admiration for the intellectual vigor of Sein und Zeit, particularly in light of the immense output this extraordinary book of 1927 inspired. Its supreme steadfastness will mark it forever. Can we be assured, however, that there was never any echo of Evil in it? The diabolical is not limited to the wickedness popular wisdom ascribes to it and whose malice, based on guile, is familiar and predictable in an adult culture. The diabolical is endowed with intelligence and enters where it will. To reject it, it is first necessary to refute it. Intellectual effort is needed to recognize it. Who can boast of having done so? Say what you will, the diabolical gives food for thought.
Emmanuel Levinas, “As If Consenting to Horror,” _Critical Inquiry_ 15:2, 1989, p.487
November 13, 2009, 9:55 amBoulderfield says:
Good grief. This was preventable, David. You know the rules better than most: Don’t draw a gun unless you are certain you want to use it. Keep your finger off the trigger until you are sure you want to squeeze it. Don’t point the muzzle at your own foot.
On the other hand, such accidents are bound to happen once you get closer to intellectuals (as Paul Johnson pointed out). In too many cases, how do you separate their work from their crappy lives? And can it be done at all?
November 13, 2009, 10:03 amcomatus says:
No post is wasted if it allows Arkady to get in a quick and dirty slap at Ayn Rand. “To a gas!” –Chambers. Bigtime ethical criticism, from the author of Bambi.
Plato’s salvation is not the ‘well-ordered individual’ syllogism, but a brief early passage called ‘The City of Pigs.’ An ideal simple life is outlined, but the symposium demands more urban sophistication, and the complexities of class rule are shown to be the unavoidable outcome of this flaw. Socratic, see?
While you have the bonfire kindled, they tell me Spinoza had a very bad day once, too.
Cornellian, as Thales might be translated, “You’re all wet.”
November 13, 2009, 10:05 amAnderson says:
Acassa, moving Heidegger out of the philosophy section = denying that Heidegger’s work was philosophy.
Equating it to Mein Kampf = denoting it as intellectually worthless.
The former is tendentious to the point of ignorance, and the latter, while the conclusion might be correct, is a silly argument.
… Andrew’s comment reminds me of this gem from a Crooked Timber thread on the same subject:
Fritz also claimed to correct Martin’s prose, but obviously, not enough.
November 13, 2009, 10:07 amJohn says:
Wow. The Heideggarians are out in force. I did an entire graduate level seminar on Being and Time back in college. It is utterly incomprehensible. Most of the people who claim to understand it don’t. They throw around these terms like “comporting oneself” and the like without being to in anyway explain what the terms mean. The technical language of Heidegger becomes an end in itself with people using words they don’t understand to define other words they don’t understand. You just speak the sounds and use the words and pretend that what he is saying makes any sense. It is like quantum physics explained in ordinary language only without the math and experimentation to back it up. In short, it is pretentious nonsense.
Heidegger is right about the rather mundane point that big events sweep up individuals and that there is a real duality between our free will and the mysterious drive of history. The ancients called it fate. Tolstoy explored it and explained it better than Heiddeger ever would.
Although Heidegger is a bad philosopher, he is a philosopher. He was a nasty, awful person who openly worked for the Nazis and went out of his way to ruin the careers of Jewish colleges that of course when he wasn’t busy sleeping with 18 year old Jewish students. But he was still a philosopher. And he was also the last really big philosopher who tried to construct a big philosophical system. After Heidegger philosophers wrote small explanations of small problems.
While I can’t stand Heidegger and his followers even less, I think it is overreach to say he wasn’t a philosopher. To say that is to put him on the level of Georbles or Mao, which is just not true.
November 13, 2009, 10:09 amAnderson says:
Great Levinas quote, Hardin — thanks!
November 13, 2009, 10:09 amacassa says:
Anderson,
Thank you for proving my point about reading comprehension. Nowhere did I express support for the ideas promoted in the article linked to by the poster. Neither did the poster.
Catch on yet? If not, give it a few minutes to let your brain catch up to your mouth.
November 13, 2009, 10:17 amAnderson says:
I did an entire graduate level seminar on Being and Time back in college. It is utterly incomprehensible.
How exactly would one prove it’s *utter* incomprehensibility? Everyone who’s written a book interpreting it is a fraud?
I picked it back up after seeing the Faye article, and while, like Hegel’s Phenomenology, I find the book difficult to follow sentence-by-sentence, the overall thrust is usually discernible.
(For instance, Heidegger takes several pages to explain that someone else’s death, however moving, does not allow us to experience what our *own* death is like, because, hey, it’s somebody else.)
You just speak the sounds and use the words and pretend that what he is saying makes any sense.
Cf. Wittgenstein on “language games,” remembering that for W., *all* language is a language game.
I think much of the difficulty of Heidegger comes from his being one of the last (?) generation of philosophers for whom the loss of religious faith was a *problem*. In the absence of Christianity, Heidegger claimed to be seeking to restore a pre-Christian understanding of something sacred (“claimed” b/c he was probably inventing, not restoring, a myth). Dozens of poets, philosophers, etc. of the same time period had the same notion. Unhappily, Heidegger’s quest for such a myth led him to sympathize with the great German mythologist of the 20th century, Hitler (tho Heidegger always felt Nazism was insufficiently Heideggerean).
Heidegger’s way of proceeding was via a fascination with language and its dual ability to conceal/uncover “being.” Since he wrote in German, much of this has to do with German words, etymologies, and puns which, whether or not meaningful to the German speaker, are damn hard to follow in translation.
“Only a god can save us now,” he told Der Spiegel. I wonder whether at some level, this meant “only a god can save *me*.” It would be nice to think so anyway.
November 13, 2009, 10:21 amJohn says:
“That’s not a bad idea considering Plato described a proto-authoritarian regime in The Republic: Rigid class structure, the state replacing the family, the ruling class controlling all aspects of life for the lower classes, etc.”
I am not entirely convinced that Plato wasn’t being ironic. He constructed a government in this world entirely dedicated to truth and it turned out to be a totalitarian nightmare. I think it is entirely possible that Plato meant it to be that way as a warning against trying to achieve perfection in this world. You can read the Republic as a warning against Utopian schemes.
November 13, 2009, 10:21 amJim Ryan says:
Heidegger’s is crummy philosophy. He pursued an idea. It didn’t amount to anything.
Heidegger’s is hard-to-understand philosophy. If you don’t understand it, don’t say it’s Nazistic. If you haven’t spent a couple of years on it, you don’t understand it.
No one has proven a logical link between Heidegger’s philosophy and Nazism. Faye’s next in line to try. Don’t hold breath.
Yes, Heidegger’s pomo followers were indeed pernicious. He would have thought of them in that way, too. He wanted truth; his pomo descendants sneer at truth.
November 13, 2009, 10:25 amAnderson says:
Nowhere did I express support for the ideas promoted in the article linked to by the poster. Neither did the poster.
And nowhere, Acassa, did I say that you (or Kopel) did. I’m glad reading comprehension is a source of concern for you.
Kopel said that (1) Heidegger was pernicious, (2) Heidegger’s work resembled Mein Kampf, and (3) Heidegger might have liked to see his works shelves under “Nazism” not “philosophy.”
If you want to cling to the notion that those remarks were not sympathetic to Faye’s views as expressed in the article, then I’ am not sure what else to say to you on that point. But evidently quite a few readers disagree with you.
November 13, 2009, 10:25 amJohn says:
“Everyone who’s written a book interpreting it is a fraud?”
Yes. Many of them are absolute frauds. To the extent that they are “interpreting it” they are inventing their own system and ideas and using Heidegger as an excuse. If something is opaque enough, it allows everyone to project their ideas and values on it like a blank screen. That is what is going on when most people “interpret” Heidegger.
“Cf. Wittgenstein on “language games,” remembering that for W., *all* language is a language game.”
Yes it is a game, but it is game that relates to something. Yes we play with the words and the words themselves are interchangeable but the words are being applied to something we understand. I don’t think anyone, including Heidegger, understands what the Heideggarian terms actually relate to or mean. They just float at least in English. Perhaps in German as you point out they have more meaning. At some point, however, they cease to be difficult and cross the threshold into meaninglessness. I will grant you not all of it does, but a good portion of it seems to.
I agree with you about Heidegger being the last philosopher being upset about the loss of the sacred. Again, I do consider him a philosopher and in some ways better than the ones who followed him. He was at least smart enough to understand that the loss of God and the sacred is a big problem, which is better than the typical nitwit we have now running around practicing nihlism without the abyss.
“Dozens of poets, philosophers, etc. of the same time period had the same notion. Unhappily, Heidegger’s quest for such a myth led him to sympathize with the great German mythologist of the 20th Century; Hitler (though Heidegger always felt Nazism was insufficiently Heideggerean).”
From Heidegger’s prospective why is that a problem? If you find the sacred and the myth to embrace and find meaning, what difference does it make if a few million people die in the process? Indeed, you could argue that the victims of the Holocaust found their meaning and place by being victims. They were a vital part of one of the greatest and most compelling dramas in history and will be remembered forever. Sounds sick I know. But, that is where his kind of thinking takes you.
November 13, 2009, 10:34 amAnderson says:
He wanted truth; his pomo descendants sneer at truth.
Cf. Nietzsche:
… Reducing Heidegger to “he wanted truth” and “pomos” (Derrida?) to “they sneer at truth” is not showing much grasp of the problematic set by Nietzsche: “the problem of the value of truth.”
November 13, 2009, 10:35 ammonkeyfan says:
I beg to differ. I just recently finished reading Mencken’s translation of Nietzsche’s Anti-Christ screed and most of the things he hated about formal Christianity he attributed to what he surmised to be the Jewish monotheistic tradition of rebelling against reason and the laws of nature by pacifying the heroic instincts of man through their priestly elites’ invention of self-serving moral law based on a falsified mythology – i.e. God.
Nevertheless he admired the Jews because they were to his thinking the most tenacious and crafty race that has ever existed.
In essence he [Nietzsche] admired the Jews as Goebbles admired and sought to improve upon the propagandsitic achievements of the Bolsheviks, or in the way that Hitler had admired and emulated the supposed methodological will to power codified within the manufactured Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.
As for Heidegger? Methinks his philo-sophical fanboys doth protest too much…As though the openly National Socialist man they defend had no influence in the foundational theorems of National Socialism. It hits too close to post-modernism’s home plate.
November 13, 2009, 10:37 amAnderson says:
“Everyone who’s written a book interpreting it is a fraud?”
Yes. Many of them are absolute frauds.
John, you said the book is *utterly* incomprehensible. “Many” will not cut it, unless you’re distinguishing “frauds” from “absolute frauds.”
I don’t think anyone, including Heidegger, understands what the Heideggarian terms actually relate to or mean.
Well, shit, what does “God” mean? Hasn’t stopped people from writing about it, and we don’t normally complain that they’re frauds. What is “freedom”? What is truth? Etc.
As for where Heidegger’s thinking takes one, that is the kind of claim that needs to be demonstrated; Fritje’s book I cited is one of the rare efforts I know of that really tries to do this with a close (one might say, microscopic) reading of Heidegger.
But it’s certainly possible that Heidegger was a poor student of his own philosophy. I for one don’t grasp how he could write so scathingly about “the They” and then embrace Nazism.
He was at least smart enough to understand that the loss of God and the sacred is a big problem, which is better than the typical nitwit we have now running around practicing nihlism without the abyss.
Good point, and it’s not a problem I’ve resolved in my own life; but I do have some hope that Nietzsche pointed us towards post-abyssal philosophy, as it were. Perhaps the philosopher can dance on the edge of the abyss because he knows there is no abyss?
November 13, 2009, 10:42 amFred Beloit says:
“I supppose, then, we shouldn’t read Carl Schmitt. Or watch plays by Bertolt Brecht, who lent his support to East Germany. Or watch Sergei Eisenstein’s movies.” by NOWMDJD
No, afraid not, old chap. This statement suggests the author of this piece says no one should read jolly old Heidie. Not true. This article is about classification, right or wrong.
November 13, 2009, 10:55 amAnderson says:
As though the openly National Socialist man they defend had no influence in the foundational theorems of National Socialism.
Well, he just didn’t. I’ve never seen Heidegger’s most devoted enemies demonstrate that he had the slightest influence on Nazism. Kaufmann said of Hitler that his reading of Nietzsche never got beyond the titles of the books; a fortiori, Heidegger. (Which Nazi do you actually imagine reading B&T?)
As for the Jews, N. detested what he called “slave morality,” which he saw as characteristic of Judaism; the Genealogy is a better place to see what N. thought of the Jews than the Antichrist. As he says in BG&E, “the Jews brought about that tour de force of a reversal of values that enabled life on earth to acquire a new and dangerous fascination for one or two thousand years.” I daresay most VC readers do not personally share the theology or philosophy of the ancient Jews.
Or look at section 251 in its entirety (too long to quote here).
November 13, 2009, 10:57 amCalling that “anti-semitic” is simply a mistake. Goebbels wanted the Jews *exterminated*; Nietzsche hoped they would be *assimilated* (as he thought the Jews wished to be, and as most German Jews did apparently wish) for their contribution to improving Europe as a whole.
John says:
“Perhaps the philosopher can dance on the edge of the abyss because he knows there is no abyss?”
I think somewhere in the deepest recesses of our minds, we know God is there. Some of us are really good at denying it. But, I am a theist and don’t fit in very well these days.
And yes, you are right thta I am not being fair when I say the terms don’t mean anything. He did mean something. But about every two years or so I will pick up Being and Time and try to wade through it. I am always left with the feeling that it means less than it seems to and that some of the impenetrability is not insight but a reflection of Heidegger himself being really confused. He once said that you could either get things clear or you could get things right, which I think is pretty profound and true. But what he didn’t mention is that you can also get them neither clear nor right. And if things are not clear, it is awfully hard to tell if they are right.
November 13, 2009, 10:59 amAnderson says:
I am always left with the feeling that it means less than it seems to
Well, that’s 90% of philosophy.
some of the impenetrability is not insight but a reflection of Heidegger himself being really confused
Agree there as well. But I’ll give him credit for thinking that philosophy had thought itself into a box and for arguing that, to get out of the box, it was necessary to think differently and thus to use language differently.
If he did this poorly at times, or even if his whole approach was screwy, again, that just confims his qualifications for the philosophy shelf. Philosophers are better at identifying problems than at answering them.
But, I am a theist and don’t fit in very well these days.
I’m kind of an aspiring theist myself, most days.
November 13, 2009, 11:06 amtdiinva says:
Nowhere do I see it noted that Heidegger was the Minister of education in the Nazi regime. He was an anti-Semite of the first order and was fully onboard with the Holocaust.
Heidegger was “rehabilitated” by the Belgian Nazi Paul de Man posing as a “Progressive.” while at Yale. Should give one pause to think about why Progressives have adopted anti-Semitism as a key element in their program.
November 13, 2009, 11:08 amJFP says:
John, I take it you’re a Straussian on Plato, or that you were trained or influenced by them. Everyone else takes Plato’s Republic seriously.
Think about this:
1. Plato tried to turn the tyrant in Sicily into a philosopher-king.
November 13, 2009, 11:08 am2. He sent out some of his students as political advisers.
3. In despair that his political system would ever be implemented, he wrote the “Laws,” which he called the second-best system.
4. His own student Aristotle took the Republic seriously and not as something ironic.
Ak Mike says:
loki13 – um. . . . yes. My impressions of Heidegger I confess I did not pick up from reading his stuff, which does not call out to me. However, I did read some material from a strong supporter of his, Prof. Hubert Dreyfus of Berkeley, and listened to a course he taught on existentialism in literature and movies. For sure not a deep investigation. But from that shallow investigation, I came away with the impression that his orientation was similar to, and supportive of, Nazi ideology which celebrated things you do with your muscles as opposed to things you do with your brain. I think the quote above by rhhardin nails that point.
I’m not saying that in 1927 he wrote in explicit support of the Nazis. I’m saying that his ideas were congenial to their philosophy – and his later history is evidence of that. Whether the Faye book is true or not I don’t know, and it appears despite your emphatic language that you don’t know either (since it does not appear you’ve read the book).
November 13, 2009, 11:11 amJFP says:
I was trained in the analytic tradition, and my philosophy professors never mentioned Heidegger. Nor have I bothered to read him. Nor has anyone said anything so far that has convinced me that I should. I don’t like those who can’t write clearly (including Wittgenstein). The poster above who said that several pages of Heidegger boiled down to a single sentence (concerning another’s death and our own) is exactly why I don’t see why I should bother. And it’s easy enough to say that one can be clear or one can be right, but that’s just an assertion. The basic summaries of Being and Time that I’ve seen describe it as talking about Being as such, but it’s also clear that he was just talking about human beings. How anthropocentric!
Why should I bother? My guess is that in fifty years, Sayyid Qutb will be deemed more important than Heidegger anyway.
November 13, 2009, 11:17 amJohn says:
JFP,
I am not a Streusian. But, I do think that we are less able to understand the full layers of meaning of ancient texts than we think. There are layers of meaning to ancient Greek that are probably lost to time. You can imagine someone trying to interpret something written in 20th Century English 2,000 years from now. Most of our points of reference and idiomatic phrases would be lost to time. All they could do is interpret it literally.
I guess I just think too much of Plato’s other writing not to believe that the Republic means something other than its literal meaning. Only a complete idiot with no understanding of how the world actually functions or human nature could think the Republic is a good idea. Surely the father of all philosophy couldn’t have been such an idiot.
November 13, 2009, 11:37 amTwirlip says:
That may be. But being pernicious is not the same thing as being non-philosophical. Otherwise you could argue that Plato’s The Republic be removed from the philosophy section, along with the works of many of the French philosophes.
November 13, 2009, 11:39 amTwirlip says:
Yes, but the question here is whether he was a philosopher, not whether he was an anti-Semite.
November 13, 2009, 11:41 amCincinnatus says:
Let it stay in philosophy. It’s a reminder to people that they should wonder what good ever came of philosophy.
November 13, 2009, 11:44 amTwirlip says:
To claim Nietzsche was anti-semitic demonstrates that the claimant has never bothered to read Nietzsche. He was perhaps the most philo-semitic philosopher of all time. None of which has the first thing to do with the quality of his philosophy.
It’s unfortunate that Mr Koppel wrote a post implying that that quality of a philosophy is somehow tied to the philosophers opinion of Jews.
Contra what some Jews seem to believe, the world does not revolve around them.
November 13, 2009, 11:49 amAnderson says:
Nowhere do I see it noted that Heidegger was the Minister of education in the Nazi regime.
Because he wasn’t? That would be a good reason for you not to see that. He was rector of the university of Freiburg for about a year.
He was an anti-Semite of the first order
Then we’re going to need zero and negative magnitudes for Hitler, Goebbels, and Streicher.
and was fully onboard with the Holocaust.
Whatever this means, it apparently isn’t true.
Heidegger was “rehabilitated” by the Belgian Nazi Paul de Man posing as a “Progressive.” while at Yale.
Sigh. De Man was not a Nazi, and to suggest that he personally “rehabilitated” Heidegger is just ignorant.
Should give one pause to think about why Progressives have adopted anti-Semitism as a key element in their program.
You’re not getting any more accurate as we go.
November 13, 2009, 11:54 amJFP says:
John: “I do think that we are less able to understand the full layers of meaning of ancient texts than we think. There are layers of meaning to ancient Greek that are probably lost to time.”
Anyone who looks at an annotated text will see that many of the obscure references are explained. Not all, of course, but as time goes on, more and more of them are.
“Only a complete idiot with no understanding of how the world actually functions or human nature could think the Republic is a good idea.”
Some philosophers think that the point is to change how the world functions and to change human nature. Anyway, what you’re saying is what Aristotle’s criticism of Plato boils down to. And as I said above, if Aristotle takes this seriously, why shouldn’t we?
November 13, 2009, 11:56 amTwirlip says:
Then read a proper translation by a genuine scholar before you form any opinion of what N thought. And read a few more of his books while you’re at it.
November 13, 2009, 11:58 amJohn says:
“Some philosophers think that the point is to change how the world functions and to change human nature.”
Those tend to be the dangerous ones. And even if Plato was being serious and was that delluded, the text does to at least some degree belong to the reader. Even if he didn’t mean it to be ironic, doesn’t mean that it can’t be read that way.
November 13, 2009, 12:01 pmdasein says:
great heidiggery dog. what an overrated gasbag. dasein is a being until death and when dasein dies he only dies alone. either trivially true or completely false. if pointing out his naziism prevents others from wasting time reading him i’m all for it. just a flatulent german redneck folks. move along. nothing worth seeing there.
November 13, 2009, 12:02 pmBrett says:
Anderson: Thanks for the Crooked Timber reference. I wish that blog had been around when I was in graduate school. Oh well.
November 13, 2009, 12:08 pmAnderson says:
Also, re: de Man:
After the war ended in 1945 all Belgians who were suspected in any way of collaborating with the Germans were brought before the tribunal called the Auditeur Generale. Paul de Man went before the tribunal and all charges against him for his work at Le Soir were dismissed, although many others who had worked at Le Soir were convicted and sent to jail.
–Lindsay Waters, intro to de Man’s Critical Writings 1953-1978.
De Man, at the absurdly young age of 21, with the help of his genuinely collaborationist uncle Henrik, got a job writing a literary column at Le Soir, whose editors “followed the Nazi line.” He wrote one notorious column on “The Jews in Contemporary Literature,” which reads now like someone trying to be too clever in defending said literature while pleasing/tweaking the Nazi occupiers, and some rather silly nationalist stuff for Le Soir as well as a Flemish paper. He left Le Soir at the venerable age of almost 23, and kept very quiet about the experience in later life, for reasons which the David Kopels and Emmanuel Fayes of the world make understandable, if not admirable.
I think the Belgian verdict on his “collaboration” should stand absent some cogent argument to the contrary.
November 13, 2009, 12:10 pmAnderson says:
107, I’m not sure you’re the real dasein.
November 13, 2009, 12:11 pmdasein says:
anderson, i am too the real dasein because dasein is the only being for whom its being is an issue and my being is an issue for me. plus i have lots of vorhandsein and zuhandsein but prefer zuhandsein. language is just hammer used for certain purposes and we only reflect on its nature when it breaks down. qed or some such thing but that sounds too present-at-hand.
November 13, 2009, 12:18 pmMark Field says:
Or someone who’d been to Sparta and thought they just needed a little tweaking around the edges.
November 13, 2009, 12:21 pmMark V Wilson says:
Heidigger’s Nazism was horrible, but he was an important philosopher whose contributions to philosophy were, at a minimum, useful. See Hubert Dreyfus’ online course at Berkeley – Heidegger Course.
November 13, 2009, 12:33 pmdasein says:
mark v. wilson, most garbage cans contain something edible. excuse me if i decide to check out the grocery stores offerings instead. and by garbage can i’m just referring to his philosophical work. i need to find a clearing folks. a clearing.
November 13, 2009, 12:38 pmmonkeyfan says:
Sheer apologia.
That Heidegger was read and admired by the good National Socialist cradling his Mauser on the Eastern front and subsequently sanitized, legitimized, and re-purposed by progressives of every stripe since, bespeaks a common philosophical underpinning of moralistic relativism.
In essence, Heidegger was to National Socialism as Lukacs was to Stalinism in that they both advocated the sublimation of reason to the totalitarian impulses of their day within their not dissimilar contexts. That the National Socialist elite didn’t make Heidegger their philosopher king hardly belays the fact that his major criticism of, or difference with, the Nazis was that they held what he thought to be an imperfect metaphysics of Being, which is to say they didn’t make him philosopher king of the National Socialist movement.
It’s interesting to note that he [Heidegger] had little objection to the civil mayhem, racism, and murderous natures of the Nazis which had early openly manifested themselves around him for he held to no moral or ethical framework that might have served to restrain his philology of Being beyond his search -shared with Nietzsche- for the true essence of the Germanic volk. Also of note is that he wasn’t particularly fond of the “‘Jewification’ of the German spirit”. This from a letter he wrote in 1929; before the National Socialist rise to power.
His moral incontinence regarding the Jews was slightly different yet essentially contiguous with (excuse me) the zeitgeist of the German intellectual spirit shared by Nietzsche and Wagner, but that is no excuse. His pinings for a purified Germaness was/is functionally equivalent to the overt racism espoused and practiced by the Nazis who had successfully tapped into said zeitgeist. Heidegger was after all a card-carrying National Socialist who is admired and defended by [fellow] men of the left to this very day. Men who decry Zionism’s ‘global’ influence and form philosophical and meat-space alliances with Islamist supremacists. Men who march together to the beat of essentially racist drums and don keffiyas for peace as easily and as comfortably as they wear silkscreened visages of Che upon their shirts. Apologia lives.
November 13, 2009, 12:43 pmAnderson says:
That Heidegger was read and admired by the good National Socialist cradling his Mauser on the Eastern front and subsequently sanitized, legitimized, and re-purposed by progressives of every stripe since, bespeaks a common philosophical underpinning of moralistic relativism.
Example, please?
his search –shared with Nietzsche– for the true essence of the Germanic volk
Oh, it just gets better. Cite us, please, to N’s “search for the true essence of the Germanic volk.” And I hope you’re smiling when you write “true essence” and “Nietzsche” in the same sentence.
Monkeyfan exemplifies the problem besetting those who would like to be better-advised on whether Heidegger’s philosophy is Nazi-like: the most vociferous attackers sound so damn clueless.
November 13, 2009, 12:48 pmken says:
I agree, put them with Nazi propaganda books………but what about Sartre, et. al, who were apologists for the murderer Stalin. Shouldn’t they also be put in another section rather than philosophy.
November 13, 2009, 12:55 pmTwirlip says:
Argh! Nietzsche and Wagner were at opposite ends of spectrum regarding both Jews and the “German intellectual spirit”.
Would it kill you people to find out what you’re talking about before talking about it?
November 13, 2009, 1:13 pmdasein says:
as david stove said of hegel, heidegger loses something in the original.
November 13, 2009, 1:14 pmAnderson says:
as david stove said of hegel, heidegger loses something in the original.
I shudder to imagine.
November 13, 2009, 1:15 pmGordon says:
Monkeyfan you have got it right!
November 13, 2009, 1:16 pmI moved to France about 15 years ago and was mystified, once my french had improved enough, by the huge amount of time devoted to Martin Heidegger’s philosophy.The fact that I could make no sense of what was being said I put down to my poor french.
I did glean some information though; he was the Nazi’s favourite philosopher; he expelled the Jews from his university; He was the founder through “abbau” of the “deconstructionism” of that charlatan gang lead by Derrida, Lacan etc.
Eventualy during a three hour colloquium I heard George Steiner explain, in what was, by other speakers, devoid of sense,that Heidegger’s writings were merely a play on words, to which the German language easily lends itself. He also said that Heiddeger’s “philosophy” being meaningless was ideally suited to the nazis, since “there is no “ism” in naziism save the will to destruction”.
Twirlip says:
Assuming for the sake of argument that everything you say is 100% correct, what does any of it have to do with the question of whether or not Heidegger was a “real” philosopher?
November 13, 2009, 1:18 pmPersonFromPorlock says:
John, theism is a straightforward consequence of materialism: our bodies are typical material processes; will works efficiently in us (we experience this more directly than we can experience any evidence to the contrary); and therefore efficient will is an integral aspect of matter – which is to say, of everything.
This line of thinking raises the possibility of God, if not the certainty, and is great fun to use on the louder varities of atheist. But stand well clear when applying it: they splutter.
November 13, 2009, 1:30 pmGaryM says:
“Heidegger was superior in the fabrication of elaborate philosophical constructs, while inferior to his hero is writing comphrensibly.”
I’m afraid I don’t find that sentence comprehensible. Or even comprhensible.
November 13, 2009, 1:34 pmdasein says:
GaryM, see that’s what happens when you even think about heidegger. imagine what happens after you spend a bunch of time reading him? people think you’re off your meds. it takes years to flush the nonsense out.
November 13, 2009, 1:47 pmGuesty says:
I think Heidegger is generally comprehensible, if long-winded. Hell I think Being and Nothingness is comprehensible if you can take the time to parse out the different ways “transcendence” “trascendent” and “transcending” are used.
The being at hand/ presence at hand stuff is pretty interesting. I just think Heidegger and his follower’s have believe it was far more important than it was. It alway seemed to me that, like Anderson suggests, Being and Time dealt more with language and mental constructs than anything else.
I think parts of the Genealogy are uncomfortable to read, knowing about the Nazi’s adoption of some of N’s thought, but I did not think he was anti-Semitic in a conventional sense.
November 13, 2009, 1:57 pmThales says:
Just a bit on the alleged anti-Semitism of F. Nietzsche:
1) It’s well known at this point that his sister married a prominent anti-Semite and edited some of his later works (without authorization) when he was institutionalized. She later took up with some strange cults and later, the Nazis. There’s a book about her pernicious influence in his life on on his reputation after death called, I believe, Forgotten Fatherland.
2) He *was* an admirer of the Jews as a people, and is almost embarrassingly effusive in his written praise. At several points he referred to himself as an “anti-anti-Semite” and called anti-Semitism the “German disease.” One of the reasons he broke with Wagner was over the composer’s anti-Semitism.
3) He disliked Juda*ism* as a religion, but his reasons are that in his view it is proto-Christianity. A point on which both Jews and every anti-Semite in the history of the universe would disagree with him. (He also, as pointed out above, thought the Old Testament a much greater work of literature than the New).
Nietzsche held some pretty outrageous views on many subjects, but it’s pretty indefensible on the historical record to ascribe anti-Semitism to him.
November 13, 2009, 2:01 pmdasein says:
guesty, he’s comprehensible if you’re willing to plow through acres of verbal feces. the problem is the meager payoff. sort of like, oh so it’s the new testament minus jesus, or something like that. plus he could have told us all that on page one. he’s just the archetype of a continental charlatan who goes on and on with needlessly opaque vocabulary to disguise how little he has to say. the obfuscation serves a barrier to disproof since so few are willing, and understandably so, to hold their nose for that long.
November 13, 2009, 2:08 pmArkady says:
Oh for Christ’s sake, grow the fuck up and reread what I wrote. I said there is no nazism in Being and Time, but a lot of Nietzsche. And if having a lot of Nietzsche in your writing is a criterion for expulsion from the graced, then Ayn Rand should be expelled, too. It was meant as a reductio, and was a defense of Rand, you dolt.
November 13, 2009, 2:13 pmThales says:
Also, among Nietzsche scholars, Heidegger’s interpretation and biography is generally viewed as completely bonkers, and has also contributed to Nietzsche’s bad reputataion.
November 13, 2009, 2:19 pmMarquette says:
Loki:
What say you of Von Braun–even feted in a ride in JFK’s convertible–
luckily not the Dallas one. Was the use of Nazi Rocket Scientists–unethical and indefensible?
Would it matter if our use of it was outcome determinative in the Cold War?
Plato does not impress you?
Christ Whitehead thought all Philosophy was a mere footnote to PLATO–
I guess more of an opinion–one of your apprehension of the Greats.
Mais pourquois?
November 13, 2009, 2:24 pmGuesty says:
dasein:
A lot of it is bullshit, but a lot of times claiming something is incomprehensible* is code for “I didn’t read it.”
*Saying something is meaningless, a la Wittgenstein, is a different, much stronger claim, but generall requires actually engaging the material.
November 13, 2009, 2:25 pmXenophon says:
Mark Lilla’s book The Reckless Mind provides an excellent precis of Heidegger, his thought and his relations with two contemporaries, Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers. To borrow from Lilla:
…in April 1933 Martin Heidegger left his Black Forest cabin to become the rector of Freiburg University, joining the Nazi party in May, and held the position until the following April…It is now clear that Heidegger had voiced support for the Nazis at least since the end of 1931; that he campaigned actively for the rectorship; that, once appointed, he threw all his energies into “revolutionizing” the university and gave propaganda lectures across Germany, ending them with the standard “Heil Hitler!”
His personal behavior was no less despicable. He cut off relations with all his Jewish colleagues, including his mentor Edmund Husserl.(In the early Forties he even removed the dedication to Husserl in Being and Time and later just as silently restored it.) Heidegger also used his considerable powers to denounce on political grounds, in secret letters to Nazi officials, a colleague, the future Nobel chemist Hermann Staudinger, and a former student, Eduard Baumgarten. And even after resigning his post, Heidegger signed petitions in support of Hitler and lobbied the regime to allow him to establish a philosophical academy in Berlin. In 1936, two years after his resignation, Karl Lowith saw him in Rome, where he wore a Nazi lapel pin and explained to his former student how Being and Time had inspired his political engagement.
….When the French occupied Freiburg in 1945 they threatened to take his library and called him before a denazification commission, which eventually decided to ban him from teaching and even, temporarily, withdrew his pension. In a vain effort to save himself Heidegger proposed that the commission seek a deposition from his friend Karl Jaspers, who, he hoped, would still vouch for him.
Jaspers, it turned out, had spent much of the war brooding about the Heidegger case and was now prepared to offer a sober and morally astute judgment on it…Jaspers…tried to explain that Heidegger’s intellectualized Nazism had little to do with the real thing; he was an unpolitical man, Jaspers wrote, more like a child who got his finger stuck in the wheel of history. Yet althought Heidegger was “perhaps unique among contemporary German philosophers” in his seriousness, and therefore should be allowed to write and publish, teaching was another matter. “Heidegger’s manner of thinking,” Jaspers concluded, “which to me seems in its essence unfree, dictatorial, and incapable of communication, would today be in its pedagogical effects disastrous,” especially since “his manner of speaking and his actions have a certain affinity with National Socialist characteristics.” The commission followed Jasper’s advice and imposed a teaching ban that lasted until 1950…
….[based on Heidegger's correspondence with Jaspers after this, Jaspers was finnally driven] to the conclusion that Heidegger was irremdeemable – as a man and as a thinker.
Heidegger was no longer for him a model of what a philospher could be, but rather a demonic antiphilosopher consumed by dangerous fantasies….
Need anything more be said? If your tendencies lean towards non-analytical continental thought Heidegger was certainly the most profound philospher of the twentieth century. But at what cost? The whole point with Heidegger is that thinking broke down. If we had to await the “irruption” of Hitler as the last “god” who could save us, who would wish to be saved? Is this not perhaps why Strauss returned to the Greeks to begin re-thinking the whole process and begin a new sailing into philosphy?
November 13, 2009, 2:30 pmAnderson says:
Lilla is AFAIK correct except that I’ve heard the publisher told Heidegger they would have to cut the dedication to Husserl.
Not that Heidegger absolutely refused to reprint the book after that, of course.
Note 5 to page 38 continued to express gratitude to Husserl for his teachings and “personal guidance.”
But, yeah, Heidegger was a shit. And for all I know, Socrates molested little boys.
November 13, 2009, 2:39 pmArkady says:
The whole point with Heidegger is that thinking broke down
Indeed. I’m not going to get into it, but by the end of Zein und Zeit, his analytical toolbox was exhausted–he’d put himself in the fly bottle and could find no way out. And thus came all the later linguistic flimflammery.
November 13, 2009, 2:44 pmAmos Wright says:
Shouldn’t the New York Times be shelved under Communist propaganda, genocide and mass murder, then? After all, its complicity in the Ukrainian famine is well documented. It even won the Gray Lady a Pulitzer.
Hardly a socialist thug-tyrant rears his head that somebody on the editorial staff doesn’t try to see the brighter side of the murder of political dissidents, government-created poverty and misery and hate America speechifying. Didn’t Friedman just opine about how lovely China’s government is, because it “gets things done;” and was I the only one who thought it shameful that the same paper that whines about Guantanamo (the gulag of our times!) fawns a bit much over China, with its lao gai prisons?
Or is that just the good kind of insane totalitarian boosterism?
November 13, 2009, 3:00 pmAnderson says:
Maybe Sarah Palin will add “library classification reform” to her platform!
November 13, 2009, 3:28 pmmonkeyfan says:
Amos Wright I think you nailed it.
The foundation of much of what passes for modern philosophy is the rationalization and justification of various systems that promise to ‘get things done’. These philosophic constructs seem to share a couple key features; They usually entail getting rid of God…’Cause he’s a big ‘ol buzz kill who just gets in the way of the best new-thinking men declaring themselves gods, and they also tend to advocate the destruction or de-construction of whatever human [moral] order that has served to prevent our ‘superiors’ from achieving their will to power.
Besides, for some reason, God tends to frown on buggery and wanton omelet making.
November 13, 2009, 3:45 pmloki13 says:
Dunno. These are hard questions. Much like the use of scientific data gained by horrible human experimentation. I believe (and don’t have the time to wikipedia) that Von Braun was fully aware of the slave labor used to manufacture the V-2s. But we “needed” him. So…
What if Goebbels had survived the war, and we needed his propaganda techniques in the third world (think VOA) to fight the Soviets? Would it have been acceptable to employ him? I think not. But Von Braun was. Is it because Goebbels was more more reprehensible, and his work less useful, than Von Braun? If it’s line-drawing, where do you draw the line?
November 13, 2009, 3:47 pmAnderson says:
Is it because Goebbels was more more reprehensible, and his work less useful, than Von Braun? If it’s line-drawing, where do you draw the line?
Goebbels is a fairly easy case. Speer would be harder.
November 13, 2009, 3:52 pmGottIstTot says:
Worry about the ones who kill because they believe in something, not the ones who kill because they believe in nothing. Lone sociopaths don’t go far without the assistance of useful idiots.
November 13, 2009, 4:05 pmTwirlip says:
Every anti-Semite in history? Even the Muslim and atheist ones?
November 13, 2009, 4:17 pmTwirlip says:
If he has been a brilliant propagandist, sure. In reality he was mediocre at best.
November 13, 2009, 4:22 pmmonkeyfan says:
GottIstTot: I hear what you’re saying except that the would-be Übermenschen of nothingness don’t cop to the fact that they actually do believe as deeply as “believers”. They believe with all of their hearts and minds in the superior power of nothing. Their faith in nothing is nearly unmatched…Monumental.
One of the defining traits of the 20th Century is the industrial scale annihilation and unprecedented body count racked up by the social scientists who played their part in the death of [non-existent] God and the usurpation of his [non-existent] earthly estate. They spent alot of blood and treasure pushing ‘nothing’.
Funny how by the latter part of the Godless century the various armies of nothing were finally stopped by capitalist Christian and Jewish soldiers. There must be something to the God thing after all.
November 13, 2009, 5:01 pmThales says:
Twirlip: I’m not sure if your comment is meant to be a slur, but to take you seriously: I don’t know that history records an awful lot of prominent atheists that are also anti-Semites or disbelieve in God/reiligion but pick on Jews in particular as a people (and as a demographic matter, many famous atheist thinkers are ethnically Jewish, e.g. Ayn Rand). As for Muslim anti-Semites (I hope you don’t mean to suggest that all Muslims are anti-Semitic), I am not aware that there is a view in their “thinking” (qua anti-Semitism) that posits a necessary connection or logical progression from Judaism to Christianity, though the Koran of course (correctly) recognizes the monotheistic Abrahamic faith as the historical progenitor of both Christianity and Islam. The latter is indeed one reason why during many long stretches of Europe’s history (Dark Ages, most of the medieval period, the Inquisition, Cromwell) it was generally safer to be Jewish in an Arab state than to be in, e.g., Spain or England.
What I mean is that anti-Semitism in the historical sense is almost always associated with members of one political/social/religious group persecuting Jews as a people, and often claiming divine sanction for their behavior–I would include German Nazism in this, though of course the Nazi ideology of religion mixed elements of Christianity, Nordic mythology, occult mysticism and plain old insanity.
In any case, Nietzsche’s dislike of religion per se and Christianity in particular had nothing to do with all this.
November 13, 2009, 5:14 pmThales says:
er, pre-Cromwell in England
November 13, 2009, 5:14 pmloki13 says:
Anderson-
Your comment re: Speer is intereting. There is some evidence that while he was close to Hitler (VERY close) he was, in fact, nominally a decent person who had little knowledge of the holocaust and disobeyed Hitler’s orders in the last year+.
As for the comment re: Goebbels being a bad propoagandist, therefore it is an easy decision; well, that’s debatable (see his work in the 20s on and he was considered as good as, although different, a speaker than Hitler), is the argument that if he had been better at spreading lies and, inter alia, enabling the Holocaust, he would have been more valuable and therefore should have been spared?
I am truly confused- his greater culpability would have been reason to exonerate him? That’s realpolitik for ya.
As an aside to Anderson; where is the line drawn?
November 13, 2009, 5:19 pmJackOfClubs says:
Agreed. Bad philosophy is still philosophy.
November 13, 2009, 5:44 pmAnderson says:
There is some evidence that while he was close to Hitler (VERY close) he was, in fact, nominally a decent person who had little knowledge of the holocaust
That was Speer’s version, but it’s pretty well exploded by now. See Gitta Sereny, and also Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction.
… Any line is arbitrary, but I’d distinguish those who committed crimes vs. humanity and those who didn’t; Speer would thus be on the wrong side of the line, having been convicted of war crimes & crimes vs. humanity at Nuremberg.
Speer was in some respects a more corrupted version of de Man: young people without much ideological Nazism but corrupted by power’s temptations, in a small way re: de Man, much more so re: Speer.
November 13, 2009, 5:59 pmAnderson says:
Bad philosophy is still philosophy.
If it weren’t for real bad philosophy, we wouldn’t have no philosophy at all.
November 13, 2009, 6:00 pmTwirlip says:
The communist regime in the USSR? The Nazi regime in Germany?
I’m pretty much saying that, yes.
Then you’re historially illiterate. Nazism was not as anti-Christian as it was anti-Jewish, but it was anti-Christian all the same. Hitler spoke of Christianity in language very similar to that of the modern left.
Please entertain me by listing those elements of Christianity which you see in Nazism. You could say with rather more accuracy that it it incorporated elements of Jewish thought.
November 13, 2009, 6:43 pmDavid Ross says:
“Every anti-Semite in history? Even the Muslim and atheist ones?”
You’re right to question this; he’s overstating his case.
Muslims view the Prophets before Muhammad as preaching Islam, to people who had been Muslims before they strayed. Therefore they see the Children of Israel as brother Muslims with the Children of Ishmael – until the time of Jesus. When Jesus preached to the Jews, those Jews who rejected their “last Prophet”, thereby left Islam; those who followed Jesus (and rejected Paul) remained Muslims.
Therefore Muslims do not view Judaism as practiced today as proto-Christianity. They view ISLAM as proto-Christianity and Judaism as a heresy.
November 13, 2009, 7:48 pmSenatorX says:
but I do have some hope that Nietzsche pointed us towards post-abyssal philosophy, as it were. Perhaps the philosopher can dance on the edge of the abyss because he knows there is no abyss?
Or the abyss as a blank slate for individuals to “paint” apon. One reason Nietzsche spends so much time focused on art.
November 13, 2009, 8:40 pmFat Man says:
In my old age, I have reached the sad conclusion that most of European intellectual production, including so called philosophy, from the French revolution until now has been a toboggan ride to hell. The primary purpose of most European intellectuals has been to strew rose petals in the paths of tyrants. Distinctions such as communist, fascist, left, and right are all pretty meaningless. They have all denigrated human dignity, rationality, the fatherhood of God, and the brotherhood of Man. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Brecht, Wagner, Schmitt, Arendt, the lot of them deserve the obscurity of forgetfulness.
I am not a fan of censorship, nor of book burning, but I do not think that we should spend public funds (even in the form of tax exemptions) on the study of this twaddle. I would support the elimination of “philosophy” from college curricula, and of its flotsam and jetsam like literary theory and post-modernism. I think that would be a popular move with other tuition paying parents.
For all of you people trying to defend various intellectual miscreants like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and DeMan, give up. We are on to you and to them. They were anti-Semites. Don’t try to justify them or yourselves. They will always be what they were, and you make yourselves look delusional.
November 13, 2009, 10:23 pmAnderson says:
Shorter Fat Man: “By not studying philosophy, you can sound ignorant and prejudiced just like me!”
I couldn’t have made a better case for the subject if I’d tried.
November 13, 2009, 10:58 pmmartin says:
exactly why I (an appellate lawyer who graduated from an a “top tier” law school) consistently maintain that legal scholarship is comparatively (vs., for example, the humanities) incredibly shallow and narrow. the poster clearly knows almost nothing of heidegger’s philosophy or its implications/nuances as they may be understood apart from the man’s political commitments, nor does he know enough to even understand the relationship, if any, between the philosophy and the man’s commitments. this is not scholarship. it is not even bad journalism, and it shouldn’t be dignified by publication. and i would add that i am not only a lawyer, but someone who graduated from a “top flight” philosophy honors program with distinction, and seriously considered becoming a philosophy professor. in short, kopel and his publisher, and the administrators of this often excellent blog, should be humiliated.
November 13, 2009, 11:30 pmSalamantis says:
Although French existentialists (Sartre, Camus, Merleau-Ponty) owe a great debt to the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger was the most seminal of his German students (the aforementioned French existentialists were also very aware of Heidegger’s work. Edmund Husserl, their common philosophical mentor, was, btw, Jewish. And Husserl himself owed a great debt to his teacher, Franz Brentano, who wrote Philosophy from An Empirical Standpoint (practically all philosophers are, like psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, economists, political scientists, theologians, physicists, chemists, novelists and poets, shoulder-standers).
Husserl wished to render philosophy into a rigorous science, and therefore labored to develop a systematic method for observing the world (the perceived noema) purely and without the presuppositions that can sediment themselves into our personal experiential histories and cause us to mistakenly assume what we do not apprehend, but found that this endeavor required an underpinning understanding of both the nature of the observer and the nature of observation itself (the subject and the noesis of perception). However, he tended to succumb to the transcendental temptation to ignore the carnal embodiment of the subject and the subject’s embedding in the natural world and tended to abstract and idealize the subject to the point of distortion.
Heidegger saw this difficulty, and decided, in Being and Time, to begin not with the world, but with the dasein (the being-IN-the-world), and Being and Time is meant to render the subject’s existential situations and circumstances explicit. Only from such an epistemological foundation, Heidegger believed, could subsequent valid attention to be paid to the perceptual unfoldment of this enfolding world to the embedding subject’s beholding. Husserl reluctantly agreed that Heidegger was onto something in his last great (and post WW II) work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.
The actual place to begin, however, is not with either the subject or the object, but with the dynamically recursive feedback loop of perception and action, and then work one’s way from this shared center to both the subject and object poles, by figuring out what must be true of both self and world for the interactions between them to be as they are and not other ways.
Those who are interested in the Cliff’s Notes version of Being and Time can read philosopher Simon Critchley’s eight-part synopsis in the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/jun/05/heidegger-philosophy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/jun/15/heidegger-being-time-philosophy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/jun/22/heidegger-religion-philosophy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/jun/29/religion-philosophy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/jul/06/heidegger-philosophy-being
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/jul/13/heidegger-being-time
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/jul/20/heidegger-being-time-critchley
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/jul/27/heidegger-being-time-philosophy
November 13, 2009, 11:37 pmAdam Sullivan says:
I first read this and thought it was a joke. Heidegger won’t be leaving the philosophy section anytime soon. And yes – he was a Nazi. He wanted to be the Reich’s Philosopher a la Albert Speer. He was rejected as such. He then went along with the torch parades in the way that many academics did back then and then went on to try to excuse his behavior after the war. He also wasn’t into the Nazism for the racial theories – he had an affair with Hannah Arendt (a Jew) who spoke in his defense at denazification hearings. He is no moral model for courage and conviction – not in the least. He was an ambitious academic who tried to catch the express to the top. Averting his eyes from the Holocaust (like so many of his countrymen) is a shameful legacy. All of that said, his scholarship is intact. Being and Time is a landmark work.
November 14, 2009, 12:01 amRandy says:
Monkeyfan: “esides, for some reason, God tends to frown on buggery and wanton omelet making.”
God also frowns upon dozens of things. Most of which are so arbitrary that even deeply religious people ignore them. So if religious people don’t see much value in the God thing, then I don’t see much value for me either.
“Funny how by the latter part of the Godless century the various armies of nothing were finally stopped by capitalist Christian and Jewish soldiers. There must be something to the God thing after all.”
Well, I guess they finally got it. But it took about 1900 years before Christian leaders finally realized that waging war isn’t the way to settle differences. Better late than never, eh?
November 14, 2009, 12:03 amAdam Sullivan says:
I forgot to add – I suppose that since Heidegger’s contributions are “pernicious” in their influence on 20th century thought then Existentialism should be a Philosophical subcategory of Nazism. L’Etranger can be placed on the bookshelf between Mein Kampf and Being and Time.
November 14, 2009, 12:17 amBlackMinorcaPullets says:
yes – put Heidigger and Nietzsche in the Nazi section… and then burn them all.
Keep the fire lit – there are probably more.
November 14, 2009, 1:53 amMarquette says:
Anderson:
Nietzsche’s sister did hijack-edit,invent, misstate her frere’s
works to be voice her anti-semitism, but to deny his racism and anti-Semitic writings are also confused.
When the colony inevitably failed, Elisabeth returned to Old Germany and set about transforming her brother, now irretrievably insane, into a symbol of her own twisted philosophy. She edited his works, wrote her own prejudiced versions of his life, and gathered his rejected jottings and published them as if they were real books, most notably Will to Power, which would be adopted as a sort of totalitarian textbook. When Nietzsche died, the man who had declared “God is dead” was buried in Röcken churchyard by his pious sister with full Lutheran rites.
Elisabeth avidly offered up her brother’s writings in support of militarism and Nazi world domination. Mussolini, she declared, was “the genius who rediscovered the values of the Nietzsche spirit… Nietzsche would have regarded him as the splendid disciple”. Nietzsche, I am certain, would have regarded Mussolini as a dangerous buffoon.
Hitler’s will to power sent Elisabeth into paroxysms of delight. Nietzsche’s warnings against nationalism and the dangers of anti-Semitism were conveniently ignored. “The link between National Socialism and Nietzsche is the heroism in both their souls,” she declared. The Nazis eagerly embraced Nietzsche, or rather his sister’s mangled version: Hitler, who probably never read a word of his writings, was photographed gazing contemplatively at a bust of the great man.
The kidnapping of Nietzsche’s thinking was complete when a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra, a poetic work of anti-dogmatism, was laid in the Tannenberg Memorial (commemorating a victory over Russia in the First World War), alongside a copy of Mein Kampf.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/ben_macintyre/article3634609.ece
November 14, 2009, 2:11 amSalamantis says:
Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time belongs with Immanuel Kant’s Critique Of Pure Reason, GWF Hegel’s Phenomenology Of Mind, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology Of Perception in the list of the central, fundamental and seminal works of Western philosophy. BTW: the Right Hegelians, precursors of Fascism, referenced Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (not to mention Plato’s Republic and Hobbes’ Leviathan), and the Left Hegelians, precursors of Communism, referenced Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, as reinterpreted by Feuerbach and elaborated upon by Karl Marx.
For those who claim that Heidegger has an irretrievably tainting influence, it should be remembered that both Sartre (who wrote Being And Nothingness) and Merleau-Ponty fought in the French Resistance, and the works of both were informed by Heidegger’s Being And Time. Later, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty had a major falling out partially due to Sartre’s subsequent embrace of Communism, and Merleau-Ponty’s equally vehement rejection of it.
To attempt to denigrate a work of academic scholarship by invoking sins the author committed during his life is to commit a 2500 year old Greek logical fallacy known as ad hominem. It is a cardinal principle of reason and rationality that conceptions should stand or fall on their own merits, regardless of the moral rectitudes or deficiencies of their sources.
November 14, 2009, 7:24 amPersonFromPorlock says:
A little OT, but Speer’s ‘success’ as Armaments Minister wasn’t all that successful: he kept production up but at the cost of avoiding new technology, so that the weapons produced were progressively more obsolescent as the war proceeded. For instance, by 1944 Germany had several jet aircraft in limited production but the bulk of its aircraft production effort was still in prewar designs.
November 14, 2009, 8:07 amAnderson says:
Porlock is correct; Tooze’s book I mentioned is good on that as well.
November 14, 2009, 8:52 amAnderson says:
Thanks for the links, Salamantis!
This thread’s been a classic example of why blog comments are valuable — I’ve benefited from many of the commenters, and possibly some who came here with a Kopel-level knowledge of the subject are a bit better informed.
(And all credit to Prof. Kopel for enabling comments despite his getting slagged on, which suggests genuine character on his part — and in contrast to some blog posters.)
November 14, 2009, 8:55 amSenatorX says:
The only people who can say Nietzsche was an anti-semite are the ingnorant who have never actually read him. He loathes anti-semites and goes out of his way to say so many times. His big break with his sister and Wagner were because of their association with anti-semites. One of that very last things he wrote a year befor he dies is a letter to his friend Overbeck saying something about having all the anti-semites shot.
Those who claim he was an anti-semite are simply proclaiming their ignorance, nothing more.
November 14, 2009, 9:41 amNorthern Dave says:
martin, isn’t this blog a chance to reflect on the differences between the practical outworking of a philosopher’s ideology and his theoretical production? I’m thinking of Marcus Aurelius here. His writings are full of “tolerance”. His life had none. Is then his “philosophy” to be valued or discarded as worthless? Is he to be classified according to what he wrote or how he personally expressed what he believed in action? (To arbitrarily label him a hypocrite and complain his personal working out of his own philosophy is an ad hominem lacks in its ability to convince…)
Salamantis produced the most succinct presentation of Heideggers’ work, but it’s valuation (and perhaps classification – though from my earlier rambling you would have noted all the people I didn’t value the opinion of – along with Heidigger – would be found in the Philosophy section….) depends on whether one considers the content of his work to weigh in on Weltanschauung in some valuable way or not at all.
If there is a God and He is the one in the Christian scriptures, Heidegger and company are not worth bothering with as dasein is by definition incapable of realizing Truth (or Reality for that matter….).
It seems to me that John had the best of it. Modernism and Post-Modernism fail completely through both their Materialism (as God is Spirit) and their Humanism (as man is *not* the measure of all things). Unfortunately it seems to me that we are moving towards the failed paganisms of the past as our solutions to the failings of things our great-grandparents told us must fail and why….
November 14, 2009, 7:39 pmAnderson says:
martin, isn’t this blog a chance to reflect on the differences between the practical outworking of a philosopher’s ideology and his theoretical production?
One can also consult Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals, passim.
… Philosophy, from its inception, has pretty much depended upon the axiom that the truth about the world can be ascertained independently of religious revelation, regardless of whether that revelation has its own merits. So I think it’s misplaced to criticize philosophy for not being theology.
In a way, it all comes full circle with Nietzsche — even if theism is false, why is that an objection to believing it? His response, I daresay, amounts to an aesthetic objection to Christianity.
November 14, 2009, 7:52 pmNorthern Dave says:
Kant et al are indeed the fathers of much current Western philosophy but they are a departure from the more solid thinking in the West that went before (see Francis A. Schaeffer’s “Escape From Reason” for example).
While ad hominem’s are inadequate counters to arguments, in Heidegger’s case as in Marcus Aurelius’ I would argue that they lived out their philosophies and therefore, like Nietzsche, their lives are open arguments for or against their philosophical writings. I don’t see any conflict with Existentialism – which when boiled down is “I like doing evil and it isn’t a bad thing” whether you find it in Sartre, Heidigger or Dovsteyevsky – and and how Heidegger lived personally, just as I don’t see any conflict in Aurelius’ paganism and his failure to achieve tolerance except in his writings. In point of fact, I would argue that only by an analysis of the practical outworkings of the philosophy can one put a value on the hypothesis of the written work.
As a practical example, Thor Heyerdahl proposed sailing a reed boat across the pacific. He then did it. Hypothesis proved. Aurelius proposed Stoicism provides functional tolerance. He was brutal. Hypothesis not proved. Heidegger proposed Existentialism works if you just tweak it a bit. Anti-democratic, back-stabbing, self-serving wretch. Hypothesis not proved.
These are not the followers of some teacher or philosopher living at odds with their master’s declared teachings (ie hypocrites). These are the living exemplars of their own values.
November 14, 2009, 7:58 pmNorthern Dave says:
November 14, 2009, 8:18 pmNorthern Dave says:
Well and succinctly put, Anderson, but I am convinced it’s actually wrong. If philosophy is indeed unable to find Truth without Revelation it becomes empirically lost. It a priori rejects core Realities and becomes unscientific (being unable to be tested). It becomes so much arguing without a hope of finding Truth.
I find Nietzsche one of the most codified rejections of The God That Is and deification of Man that I have ever seen.
Neitzsche, however, is dead. Contrary to popular opinion, godhood isn’t demonstrated by the ability to take life but by being able to preserve one’s own. Alas, poor Friedrich….a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent *fancy*….
Poor Neitzsche was lost, but a least not a hypocrite! He lived what he preached….So did Heidegger.
November 14, 2009, 8:34 pmSenatorX says:
“How we, too are still pious. – In science convictions have no rights of citizenship, as one says with good reason. Only when they decide to descend to the modesty of hypothesis, of a provisional experimental point of view, of a regulative fiction, they may be granted admission and even a certain value in the realm of knowledge–though always with the restriction that they remain under police supervision, under the police of mistrust. –But does this not mean, if you consider it more precisely, that a conviction may obtain admission to science only when it ceases to be a conviction? Would it not be the first step in the discipline of the scientific spirit that one would not permit oneself anymore convictions?
November 15, 2009, 12:36 amSenatorX says:
“Probably this is so; only we stil have to ask : To make it possible for this discipline to begin, must there not be some prior conviction–even one that is so commanding and unconditional that it sacrifices all other convictions to itself? We see that science also rest on a faith; there simply is no science “without presuppositions.” The question whether truth is needed must not only have been affirmed in advance, but affirmed to such a degree that the principle, the faith, the conviction finds expression: “Nothing is needed more than truth, and in relation to it everything else has only second-rate value.”
November 15, 2009, 12:58 amThis unconditional will to truth–what is it? Is it the will not to allow oneself to be deceived? Or is it the will not to deceive? For the will to truth could be interpreted in the second way, too–if only in the special case “I do not want to deceive myself” is subsumed under the generalization “I do not want to deceive.” But why not deceive? But why not allow oneself to be deceived?
Note that the reasons for the former principle belong to an altogether different realm from those for the second. One does not want to allow oneself to be deceived because because one assumes that it is harmful, dangerous, calamitous to be deceived. In this sense, science would be a long-range prudence, a caution, a utility; but one could object in all fairness: How is that? Is wanting not to allow oneself to be deceived really less harmful, less dangerous, less calamitous? What do you know in advance of the character of existence to be able to decide whether the greater advantage is on the side of the unconditionally mistrustful or of the unconditionally trusting? But if both should required, much trust as well as much mistrust, from where would science then be permitted to take its unconditional faith or conviction on which it rests, that truth is more important than any other thing, including every other conviction? Precisely this conviction could never have come into being if both the truth and untruth constantly proved to be useful, which is the case. Thus-the faith in science, which after all exists undeniably, cannot owe its origin to such a caculus of utility; it must have originated in spite of the fact that the disutility and dangerousness of “the will to truth”, of “truth at any price” is proved to it constantly. “At any price”: how well we understand these words once we have offered and slaughtered one fath after another on this alter!”
SenatorX says:
“Consequently, “will to truth” does not mean “I will not allow myself to be deceived” but–there is no alternative–”I will not deceive, not even myself”; and with that we stand on moral ground. For you only have to ask yourself carefully, “Why do you not want to deceive?” especially if it should seem–and it does seem!–as if life aimed at semblance, meaning error, deception, simulation, delusion, self-delusion, and when the great sweep of life has actually shown iteslf to be on the side of the most unscrupulous polytropoi. Charitably interpreted, such a resolve might perhaps be a quixotism, a minor slightly mad enthusiasm; but it might also be something more serious, namely, a principle that hostile to life and destructive. –”Will to truth”–that might be concealed will to death.
November 15, 2009, 1:14 amThus the question “Why science?” leads back to the moral problem: Why have morality at all when life, nature, and history are “not moral”? No doubt, those who are truthful in that audacious and ultimate sense that is presuuposed by the faith in science thus affirm another world than the world of life, nature, and history; and insofar as they affirm the “other world”–look, must they not by the same token negate its counterpart, this world, our world?–But you will have gathered what I am driving at, namely, that it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests–that even we seekers after knowledge, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine. –But what if this should become more and more incredible, if nothing should prove to be divine any more unless it were error, blindness, the lie–if God himself should prove to be our most enduring lie?–
Nietzsche-The Gay Science – Book Five – 344
Northern Dave says:
Sigh…just another version of “Did God really say?…”. Western science (and all its successes like heart transplants and microwave ovens) is indeed based on faith in the Creator having made a Universe with truths and order that can be discovered. With the rejection of Truth that Neitzsche and Co. have made, though, that is of course changing and we are reverting to a paganistic worship of shrubberies and pond scum….soon we’ll be making sacrifices to appease the gods of Chaos in our shrubberies and terrified the bunny may be a changeling out to get us………………….Heidegger is just another link in the chain from Sight to Blindness.
PS – Nietzsche is still dead and his lifestyle – which was an extension of his philosophy, he wasn’t a hypocrite – shortened and miseried his life. The lifestyle was a failure, the lifestyle was an outpouring of the philosophy, the philosophy is fully discredited except amongst those who are self-deluded. One can choose to keep hitting one’s head upon a rock, but the results are always the same……..
November 15, 2009, 8:22 amSenatorX says:
Have you ever read Popper Northern Dave? Like Nietzsche not all philosophers (and scientists) believe we are falsifying our way to the Truth. I don’t understand two things you are saying though. One is what exactly about this has been discredited? Where in science have we hit on the absolute truth and stopped? Or are you forever moving the goalposts and saying the truth is out there but WE will never quite find it? In any case I fail to see where the discredit is.
Second why do you keep talking about Nietzsche’s lifestyle? I am having trouble imagining what you could be referring to. Are you confusing him with another philosopher?
November 15, 2009, 11:31 amAnderson says:
Yeah, I was wondering that too, Senator — is that an allusion to his death from (presumably) syphillis? Not a very persuasive allusion, if so.
November 15, 2009, 4:03 pmNorthern Dave says:
While syphilis was the original diagnosis by the doctors from Jenna and Basel, it is uncertain whether it was from his wild student days or caught when he was a medical attendant in the Franco-Prussian War.
His lifestyle was one of giving oneself over to the dualistic embracing of evil as well as good – a follower of Dionysus to the end. This led to total breakdown of body and soul – he died mad.
It’s been a looonng time since I looked at Karl Popper, SenX! If I recall correctly I would agree with his limitation of “Scientific” to the questions that can be falsified. I think I’d put him with Wittgenstein in terms of his quest for a clearer hold on truth/Truth by consideration of context (lately unpopular in some circles) but I might be in a minority there……
To hopefully clarify and leave any final comments to you and the patient Anderson:
As I see it, Philosophy has made a fundamental tennant – to whit that it can be used as a tool to find Truth (as opposed to facts or truth) or Ultimate answers to the legitimate questions of Who Am I?, Where Did I Come From?, Where Am I Going? – non-falsifiable. This makes it meta-physics but not Science.
The Christian Model is exquisitely definite in that the Truth is out there but it cannot be apprehended without Revelation from the Divine. As an example the fulfilled prophecies of the restoration of the political unit of Israel would be an empirical evidence of a Transcendant and Immanent God, but not something philosophy could have discovered.
Nietzche I would claim as discredited because his death proved (to my satisfaction) that:
A. As death is universal there *are* absolutes (dispensing with Modernism and Post-Moderism in one swoop)
B. His death proved that the human will-to-anything is severely limited and his Dionysian dreams are just so many spider webs glittering to capture the unwary. To prove god-hood one would have to dispense with one’s own death.
PS – the reference to Popper somehow reminded me of the Revelation of the Divine in Genesis 11:6 :
“The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they imagine to do will be impossible for them.”
(This not being a threat to God Who, being infinite must needs retain quite a bit outside of our collective imagination :-) ).
PPS – As a next philosophical movement I predict a god-emperor movement a la Warhammer 40000 as the solution to all our problems….after all if the Will-to-Power hasn’t provided the Elysian Fields perhaps we just haven’t focussed it enough yet……I’m pretty sure Popper would be opposed, Nietzshe in favour and Heidegger would nominate himself for the position :-)
November 15, 2009, 10:27 pmRandy says:
Dave: “Contrary to popular opinion, godhood isn’t demonstrated by the ability to take life but by being able to preserve one’s own.”
I had no idea this was popular opinion.
Dave: ” Western science (and all its successes like heart transplants and microwave ovens) is indeed based on faith in the Creator having made a Universe with truths and order that can be discovered. ”
Absolute baloney. The intellectual world of the 17th and 18th century specifically rejected any notion of the Creator in discovering the ways of science. That doesn’t mean that they were all atheists; rather, they were trying to discover a world that operated upon laws independent of any Creator.
Darwin’s whole theory is based upon truths and orders that have been discovered that have no role for the Creator. AGain, it doens’t mean there was no Creator, just that the Creator isn’t needed.
November 16, 2009, 12:44 amAnderson says:
Nietzsche never denied the existence of death. It’s the *meaning* of death that is up for interpretation.
N. was also not under any illusions about limits on human willing. The will to power is not to be confused with “lust for power.” It’s more like a will to interpretation — to interpret, and to impose one’s interpretation.
November 16, 2009, 10:24 amFat Man says:
Further proof, as if any were needed, that they need to have their funding taken away.
Anderson: Bite me.
November 17, 2009, 10:59 pmBoulderfield says:
David (Kopel for clarity),
Do you see what I see?
Hopefully your brief on McDonald v. Chicago will get just as much acclaim as Heidegger.
Godspeed.
P.S. Im Übrigen bin ich der Meinung, daß das Sein stets das Sein eines Seienden ist.
November 18, 2009, 12:20 amTony Partrdige says:
The intellectual historical discourse is overflowing with hypocritical extremes. The mans politics is truly where the “rubber hits the road” in this context. Given the mans politics you had better examine his so called philosophy (be it “structuralist” or whatever) with a truly jaundiced eye. Perhaps justice dictates that his works should be in both sections of any library?
December 2, 2009, 1:29 pm