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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

The poverty of philosophy « Previous | |Next »
April 10, 2004

Trevor,
I met the crude kind of reasoning of philosophy and politics mentioned in relation to the Victor Farias text when I was a student of philosophy at Flinders University in South Australia. I was reading continental philosophy (Hegel) at the time and I had to contend with a crude Marxist interpretation of continental philosophical history.

This interpretation held that continental philosophy after Marx was damned. It was not science. It was romanticism. It was irrationalism. It lead to fascism.

They--the academics ---had never read the continental texts of Nietzsche & Heidegger. They said there was no need to. Bertrand Russell was enough. He said it all. I even sat through seminars in which it was held as truth that continental philosophers did not argue, so they were not philosophers. Hence there was no need to engage with them.

In the same breath they were defending the liberal university as a place of scholarship, research and truth against the attacks of the neo-liberals who wanted to revolutionize the university so that it was an instrument to help generate the wealth of the conservative nation.

Adorno, to his credit, posed the issue as a question: "is Heidegger's philosophy "fascist in its most intimate components"? That way of addressing the issue leaves room to make a judgement using the tools of philosophy.

Some answer the question as yes. When I was a postgraduate I read The Destruction of Reason by the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukacs. The book made the above interpretation explicit, since Lukacs set out to show that Nazi ideology and practice was derived from the philosophy of Jacobi, Hamann, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Max Scheler, Jaspers, and Heidegger.

The argument? All the above philosophers attacked reason, all promoted irrationality, and hence they all prepared the way for Hitler. I thought that the Lukacs interpretation indicated the poverty of marxist philosophy residing in Stalin's Moscow.

The marxist ideologues at Flinders were not concerned to engage philosophically with Heidegger's philosophy. They saw no reason at all
to read and reread Heidegger within a rethinking and recontextualizing of of the pre-war european intellectual endeavors and politics. They simply related to a conservative/nationalist Heidegger as politicians.

Their central task was to prove that the philosophy of the rightwing Martin Heidegger bears a logical and necessary connection to his support of National Socialism in Germany in the 1930s and 40s; and that his philosophy constitutes an historical cause of that experience. They would then intimidate any student who thought it important to read Nietzsche or Heidegger.

What has happened since then--the late 1980s--- is that people--primarily American liberals --- have read Heidegger's speeches on the university when he was a rector. These speaches show that Heidegger was a Nazi. Thomas Sheehan, in his review of Victor Faria's book, sums up what is known:


"In outline, the story of Heidegger and the Nazis concerns (1) a provincial, ultraconservative German nationalist and, at least from 1932 on, a Nazi sympathizer (2) who, three months after Hitler took power, became rector of Freiburg University, joined the NSDAP, and tried unsuccessfully to become the philosophical Führer of the Nazi movement, (3) who quit the rectorate in 1934 and quietly dissassociated himself from some aspects of the Nazi party while
remaining an enthusiastic supporter of its ideals, (4) who was dismissed from teaching in 1945, only to be reintegrated into the university in 1951, and who even after his death in 1976 continues to have an im- mense following in Europe and America."

The political case, that Heidegger's ideas were a cause of National Socialism, is now developed along the lines that Heidegger amplified pernicious intellectual fashions. And, as authoritarian, undemocratic rector and department chair at an important university, Heidegger implemented party policies to "revolutionize" the liberal research university. So Heidegger was both a philosopher and an active party member who implemented at least some of the party's policies. So his philosophy is contaminated with fascist politics.

If the prosecution does give a philosophical interpretation of Heidegger's philosophy, then it is along the lines that Heidegger's conception of being in-the-world makes impossible any principled ethics (ie., moral rights and obligations) promotes a nihilism and give rise to the politics of Nazi Germany. It is only universal liberal rights, no the particular ethical category of care or concern, that is able to oppose historical decline, nihilism and Nazism.

This kind of criticism primarily relates to the second part of Heidegger's Being and Time; the one concerned with historicity, authenticity, anxiety, resoluteness, dread, the destiny of the community and the Volk. It is these categories that lead to, or point towards, the possibility and even desirability of political activism.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 2:24 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (2)
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Comments

Comments

Dear Sirs:


I have read all his works in their German originals and have never found even a slightest line of his works favouring Nazism and its world-view. Recently I have read an article, in French language, in "Le Monde Diplomatique" just about the same lines of interpretation. Heidegger was morally "blamable" for Nazism as much as Richard Wagner and Nietszche also "were", namely, they are not to blame... at all.
There has been a, say, intellectual conspiracy aimed at presenting the famous German thinker as someone who introduced Nazism in the modern philosofical thought. Nonsense! That is how you said: Bertrand Russel suffices for himself to deny it.

Cordially

H. Castro
Rio de Janeiro - Brazil