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.

Anderson: Bite me.

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.

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.

Anderson: Yeah, I was wondering that too, Senator — is that an allusion to his death from (presumably) syphillis? Not a very persuasive allusion, if so.

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 :-)

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?

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……..

Anderson: 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.

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.

Anderson: 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.
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Well put, Anderson, but in my opinion too limiting (I recognize that most university philosophy departments currently hold your view). If philosophy declares itself independently able to ascertain Truth it makes a potentially fatal error, for if it is indeed unable to ascertain Truth independently of Revelation it becomes empirically lost. The assumption that it can do so becomes an untestable axiom and one loses the scientific ability to evaluate it. It becomes so much arguing about the nature of what is when the most fundamental realities are denied a priori.

Neitzsche is the purest example I can think of of a codified rebellion against the God That Is. The ultimate expression of Man as the Measure of all things. Neitzsche, however, is dead. Contrary to popular opinion the measure of godhood isn't the ability to kill but the ability to save oneself from death. Alas poor Friedrich!…a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent *fancy*….

Salamantis: 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.

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.

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.

martin: 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.

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….

Those who claim he was an anti-semite are simply proclaiming their ignorance, nothing more.

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.)

Anderson: 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.

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.

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.

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

Keep the fire lit – there are probably more.

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?

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

I couldn’t have made a better case for the subject if I’d tried.

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.

Or the abyss as a blank slate for individuals to “paint” apon. One reason Nietzsche spends so much time focused on art.

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.

“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.

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

The communist regime in the USSR? The Nazi regime in Germany?

As for Muslim anti-Semites (I hope you don’t mean to suggest that all Muslims are anti-Semitic)

I’m pretty much saying that, yes.

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

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.

of course the Nazi ideology of religion mixed elements of Christianity, Nordic mythology, occult mysticism and plain old insanity.

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.

If it weren’t for real bad philosophy, we wouldn’t have no philosophy at all.