Re: [xmca] "Creature Consciousness," "Heil Heidegger!," etc.

[Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>]

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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