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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