I think Martin is completely right in the proposition that (taking
account of the continuing fascination the academy has with
Heidegger) his works should be read to understand why and how
Fascism and Heidegger's philosophy supported each other and what
should be done about it.
As Goethe said "The greatest discoveries are made not by individuals
but by their age," or more particularly every age is bequeated a
certain problematic by their predecessors, but the different
philosophers confront that problematic in different ways. To say
that those on either side of the battle lines in the struggle of a
particular times have something in common, seems to be in danger of
missing the point.
Also, in my opinion, Husserl and Heidegger may have been responding
to Hegel, but between them they erected the gretest barrier to
understanding Hegel until Kojeve arrived on the scene. But that's
just me. A grumpy old hegelian.
Andy
Martin Packer wrote:
A few days ago Steve made passing reference to an article that
apparently Tony had drawn his attention to, titled "Heil
Heidegger." I Googled and found that it is a recent article in the
Chronicle of Higher Education.
<http://www.chroniclecareers.com/article/Heil-Heidegger-/48806/>
The focus of the article is Heidegger's links with and support of
the Nazis, and its principal recommendations are that we should
stop paying attention to Heidegger, stop translating and publishing
his writing, and "mock him to the hilt."
I feel I should comment on this, since I have occasionally drawn on
Heidegger's work in these discussions. I certainly have no
intention of apologizing for Heidegger, who seems to have been a
very nasty person, who was responsible for some deplorable actions.
I do want to question, however, the proposal that because of these
facts we all would be better off ignoring his writing.
I was introduced to Heidegger by a Jewish professor of philosophy
who shared his last name (coincidentally as far as I know) with one
of the best-known victims of antisemitism. At that time less was
known about Heidegger's Narzism, but by no means nothing, and I
recall discussion in the classroom of the issue. I came to feel
that the last thing one should try to do is separate the man's work
from his life. Perhaps if he had been working on some obscure area
of symbolic logic, say, that would have been possible, but
Heidegger had written a philosophy of human existence, and this
would seem to *demand* that there be consistency between what he
wrote and how he lived. Indeed, perhaps it would be important to
study the man's writings to try to understand where he went wrong;
at what point in his analysis of human being did Heidegger open the
door to the possibility of fascism? I think in fact that it is in
Division II of Being and Time, where Heidegger is describing what
he called 'authentic Dasein,' which amounts to a way that a person
relates to time, specifically to the certainty of their own death,
that the mistake is made and the door is opened to evil.
Carlin Romano, the author of the article, doesn't seem to know
Heidegger's work very well. Dasein ("being there," i.e. being-in-
the-world) is not a "cultural world," nor do "Daseins intersect,"
as he puts it. (But I suppose that he is mocking Heidegger.) And
that brings me to my other reason for recommending that we continue
to read Heidegger, his politics and (lack of) ethics
notwithstanding. It is that his analysis throws light on issues
that have been raised in this group, and were important to LSV and
others. I am sure it seems odd to link a Nazi philosopher to a
socialist psychologist, but I am hardly the first to see
connections. Lucien Goldmann wrote "Lukacs and Heidegger," a book
in which he acknowledged the incongruity but argued that there are
"fundamental bonds" between the two men's work, that at the
beginning of the 20th century "on the basis of a new problematic
first represented by Lukacs, and then later on by Heidegger, the
contemporary situation was slowly created. I would add that this
perspective will also enable us to display a whole range of
elements common to both philosophers, which are not very visible at
first sight, but which nevertheless constitute the common basis on
which undeniable antagonisms are elaborated" (p. 1).
What is this common basis? It is that of overcoming the separation
between subject and object in traditional thought, overcoming
subject/object dualism, by recognizing the role of history in
individual and collective human life, and rethinking the relation
between theory and practice. As Michael wrote, Heidegger reexamined
the traditional philosophical distinction between an object (a
being) and what it *is* (its Being), and rejected both idealism and
essentialism to argue that what an object is (and not just what it
'means') is defined by the human social practices in which it is
involved, and in which people encounter it. These practices, of
course, change over historical time, so the conditions for an
object to 'be' are practical, social, and historical. And since
people define themselves in terms of the objects they work with,
the basis of human being is practical, social, and historical too.
I continue to believe that this new kind of ontological analysis,
visible according to Goldmann in the work of both Lukacs and
Heidegger, influenced in both cases by Hegel, is centrally
important. If we can learn from studying Heidegger how to
acknowledge these cultural conditions without falling into a
valorization of the folk, without dissolving individuals in the
collective (a failing of the Left just as much as the Right), then
we will have gained, not lost, by reading his texts.
Martin
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Classics in Activity Theory: Hegel, Leontyev, Meshcheryakov,
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