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

[Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>]

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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--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden http://www.erythrospress.com/
Classics in Activity Theory: Hegel, Leontyev, Meshcheryakov, 
Ilyenkov $20 ea

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