Saturday, October 1, 2016

Martin Heidegger: Everyone's Favorite Nazi

How did it happen that one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century was a Nazi? And how did it happen that seriously leftist  philosophers continue to pretend that it did not matter? Why, in the case of Martin Heidegger, did so many of his fellow philosophers willingly ignore his service to National Socialism and his lifelong failure to recant his views?

If it was not a will-to-power, perhaps it was a will-to-ignore… to ignore the fact that, in extolling Heidegger’s thought, they were teaching people how to think like Nazis.

It becomes that more complicated when we reflect that Heidegger’s work is borderline unreadable. Even before he joined the Nazi Party, Heidegger was writing some of the most impenetrable prose anyone had ever seen. For a language that gave us Kant and Hegel, that’s a considerable achievement in its own right.

So, very, very few people really understand what Heidegger was talking about. They do understand what Nazism was, but they cannot make the connection.

Considering how much time and effort it takes to figure out what Heidegger was about, they are not about to admit that they were duped by a Nazi. Academic thinkers like to think that they are impervious to demagoguery. When it comes to Heidegger they should think again. Surely, they do not agree with any of the tenets of Hitler’s thought, but they have become what medical science would call “carriers.” They transmit the disease without suffering its symptoms themselves.

Now, Adam Kirsch, in an exceptionally clear exposition of the Heidegger problem explains the internal contradictions that have beset those who continue to defend the great Nazi:

… no matter how much we find out about Heidegger’s Nazism, it still seems like a contradiction in terms. After all, we think we know what Nazis are like and what philosophers are like, and the two identities simply don’t match. Thinkers are supposed to be idealistic, moral defenders of the highest values of civilization; fascists are brutal, barbaric, appealing to humanity’s lowest instincts. Nazis burn books; philosophers write them. But Heidegger did both. In 1927, he published one of the most influential books in the history of philosophy, Being and Time; six years later, as rector of Freiburg University, he presided over a public bonfire of “un-German” books, proclaiming, “Flame, announce to us, light up for us, show us the path from which there is no turning back.” Like the famous optical illusion in which the same figure is both a duck and a rabbit, then, we keep twisting and turning our image of Heidegger, trying to see in him both the Nazi and the philosopher at the same time.

Could it be that those who have devoted their lives to disseminating the Heidegger’s thought have misunderstood it?

When I asked a young college graduate about this contradiction one day many years ago, he offered up what he had been taught in a college philosophy course. He suggested that, perhaps, Heidegger did not understand his own philosophy. To which I replied: And you do?

But, why should anyone care?

For one, as I explained in my book The Last Psychoanalyst, Heidegger’s thinking seems to have been perfectly consonant with Freudian theory.

For another, Heidegger was the progenitor of what is now called the practice of deconstruction. College students often thrill to this new method. They love deconstructing texts to expose the way Western, that is Judeo-Christian civilization contaminates our minds and destroys our authentic individuality.

And yet, precious few of those who practice deconstruction understand that it is just a fancy philosophical terms for “pogrom.” Deconstruction does to texts what the SS and the Gestapo did to the cities, towns and villages that were conquered by the Wehrmacht. If you do not understand that these are fundamentally the same thing, you do not understand deconstruction.

And, how smart do you have to be to understand that the assault on Judeo-Christian culture would naturally lead to the destruction (or deconstruction) of Jewish culture, Jewish customs, Jewish learning and Jewish people?

To repeat a point that I made in my book, Heidegger’s thought was designed to create a form of human being that was perfectly amoral, and thus, that was exempt from responsibility for personal behavior or even political actions.

Kirsch explains it in terms that place Heidegger firmly within Nietzsche’s orbit:

That is largely because Heidegger is not very interested in the central problem of ethics (and of politics), which is how to live with other people. For him, the key experiences and challenges of existence are individual: Alone we suffer, alone we die, and alone we must make meaning out of our fate. The highest value, then, is not goodness but authenticity; above all, authenticity in the face of death. To accept one’s actual condition of mortality and thrownness, not to flee from these difficult facts into consoling illusions and abstractions, is for Heidegger the ultimate moral achievement.

Could it be that philosophers who drunk too deeply of this philosophy found that their moral judgment was numbed to the point that they could not hold Heidegger accountable for his grotesque moral failings?

Kirsch continues:

What Heidegger does here is to pluck a kind of meaning from the midst of nihilism. It is precisely because life is meaningless, because it has no value or purpose imposed on it from above or outside, that the individual human being must endow it with meaning by deciding on an authentic existence. But authenticity and decision are fundamentally anti-ethical concepts, because they deny the existence of any established values, such as justice, equality, or sympathy. Why be a “good” person rather than a “bad” person, if terms like good and bad are mere conventions? If life has the meaning we decide to give it, what’s to stop us from finding that meaning in arbitrary violence, domination, or irrationality? What if we choose to find meaning in serving a Volk or a Führer?

Don’t these ideas have a ring of familiarity? We are not born as we are, but we can make ourselves over, recreate ourselves in order to have an authentically anti-social existence. Wasn’t Heidegger merely doubling down on anomie?

If we follow this program we will overcome all established values and will transvalue, as Nietzsche put it, values like good and bad, which to Heideggereans are, as Kirsch says, mere conventions, or better, social constructs.

And what could be a better sign of our ability to transcend custom and convention than to take actions that any civilized human would consider to be evil and then declaring them to be good. It is any wonder that Heidegger thrilled to the pogroms carried out by the SA and that he was not especially moved by the Holocaust.

In the hermetic world of Heidegger’s thought, our lives are meaningful because we give them meaning. They do not gain meaning by our values, our actions, or our membership in groups. Trying to get along with other people is a waste of time. Trying to be a good person is to fall prey to an illusion.

In Kirsch’s words:

This hope is expressed again and again in the “Black Notebooks” for 1933, the year Hitler took power and Heidegger became rector of his university. “A marvelously awakening communal will is penetrating the great darkness of the world,” Heidegger writes. Nazism, with its rhetoric of destiny and rebirth, was going to define new coordinates for human life, simply by the authenticity and confidence of its self-assertion. These coordinates might be upside-down, from the perspective of conventional morality; Nazism might call murder, conquest, racism and dictatorship good, where the old Judeo-Christian morality thought them bad. But because values are determined by conviction, not vice versa, the Nazis could succeed in bringing into being a new world in which evil actually was good. “The mission—if precisely this were the mission: the full imposing and first proposing of the new essence of truth?” Heidegger asks, thrilled at the prospect that truth itself can be transformed.

Of course, Heidegger’s minions have been fighting to remove the taint of anti-Semitism from their guru’s reputation. And yet, Kirsch explains, the recent publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks shows that they are fighting in a losing cause:

In his published work, Heidegger traces it all the way back to Plato and Aristotle, suggesting that it was the fate of Western civilization to turn against itself in this way. But in the “Black Notebooks,” he finds a much simpler and more familiar scapegoat: the Jews. “World Jewry,” Weltjudentum, with its overtones of hostile conspiracy, was a common Nazi phrase that the philosopher had no qualms about embracing, using it several times in the privacy of the notebooks. Thus in 1941 Heidegger writes: “World Jewry, spurred on by the emigrant that Germany let out, remains elusive everywhere. Despite its increased display of power, it never has to take part in the practice of war, whereas we are reduced to sacrificing the best blood of the best of our own people.” This is a breathtaking example of how Nazi anti-Semitism precisely inverted reality: At just the moment when the Holocaust was killing millions of helpless Jews, Heidegger suggests that it was “elusive” World Jewry that was killing Germans.

Following Heidegger, Jacques Derrida also traced the beginning of Western civilization to the time of Socrates and Plato. Derrida, who seems have believed that the civilization was founded on the repression of the activity of writing—Socrates did not write—did not see that putting his theories into practice would produce a multitude of anonymous internet trolls.

And Derrida did not seem to know that Alfred Rosenberg, a great Nazi ideologue and member of the Nazi Party high command—high enough to be tried at Nuremberg and summarily executed for his crimes—had once said that Plato and Socrates had ruined it all because they had suffered the influence of Judaic thought. Jewish ideas—ideas like free will—had contaminated the Being that had been extolled by pre-Socratic philosophers.

It is true that very few people really have anything like an understanding of Heidegger’s project. Conservative thinkers tend not to be familiar with it at all. And yet, great ideas trickle down through the academy and the media. Before you know it, students are acting like Brown Shirts, asserting their authentic being and working to destroy anyone who does not accept their own self-creation.

Even on a more mundane level, a current debate over the value of small talk seems to reflect Heidegger’s critique of what he called idle chatter. When a behavioral economist like Dan Ariely declares that small talk is a waste of time because it does not produce authentic connections and because it does not engage meaningful topics of conversation, he is communicating, without knowing it, a basic tenet of Heidegger’s philosophy.

12 comments:

JPL17 said...

I've never read such a clear exposition of Heidegger, Stuart, well done. Although I read both "Beyond Good and Evil" and "Being and Time" back in college (in a political philosophy course), I didn't really understand the latter and missed how strong the connection is between Nietzsche and Heidegger. Many thanks, then, for sharing your thoughts, and for linking to Adam Kirsch's fascinating review of the "Black Notebooks".

Ares Olympus said...

Stuart: When a behavioral economist like Dan Ariely declares that small talk is a waste of time because it does not produce authentic connections and because it does not engage meaningful topics of conversation, he is communicating, without knowing it, a basic tenet of Heidegger’s philosophy.

I see Ariely's new article you linked:
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/banning-small-talk
... research has confirmed what most people know but don't practise: surface level small talk does not build relationships and it is not great for our happiness levels.

I don't think we're in any danger of eliminating small talk, although it does seem like an interesting experiment to try within a closed system, like a party where everyone knows the ground rules.

I think Scott Peck's work is more interesting, talking about community and he saw the lowest level as "pseudocommunity" where differences were suppressed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._Scott_Peck#Community_building
---
1. Pseudocommunity: In the first stage, well-intentioned people try to demonstrate their ability to be friendly and sociable, but they do not really delve beneath the surface of each other's ideas or emotions. They use obvious generalities and mutually established stereotypes in speech. Instead of conflict resolution, pseudocommunity involves conflict avoidance, which maintains the appearance or facade of true community. It also serves only to maintain positive emotions, instead of creating a safe space for honesty and love through bad emotions as well.
---

So if you look at "small talk" as suppressing everything interesting, like even the 1% differences between a 99% agreement group, you're probably someone who is a trouble maker who likes to stir things up and see what happens.

Although the opposite is also true - a group may find itself in a false consensus, because it believes there's 99% agreement, while in fact the agreed reality was just created by an assertive 10%, and the other 90% just went along with it to keep the peace. And this is what makes "mobs" so dangerous, when the emotions of a minority become invigorated by the majority. And incidentally this won't look like "small talk" either, but very serious talk.

But if a critical mass for whatever reason challenge the false consensus, the conflict-avoidance phase, if differences in opinions are "allowed" to be expressed, then a group suddenly finds its center has been lost, and people divide up in divergent camps of opinions. Peck saw two new stages of community - chaos where the differences are exposed, and emptiness, where there seems no hope to bring people back together.
---
2. Chaos: The first step towards real positivity is, paradoxically, a period of negativity. Once the mutually sustained facade of bonhomie is shed, negative emotions flood through: Members start to vent their mutual frustrations, annoyances, and differences.

3. Emptiness: In order to transcend the stage of "Chaos", members are forced to shed that which prevents real communication. Biases and prejudices, need for power and control, self-superiority, and other similar motives which are only mechanisms of self-validation and/or ego-protection, must yield to empathy, openness to vulnerability, attention, and trust. Hence this stage does not mean people should be "empty" of thoughts, desires, ideas or opinions. Rather, it refers to emptiness of all mental and emotional distortions which reduce one's ability to really share, listen to, and build on those thoughts, ideas, etc.
---

Anyway, we know "small talk" won't get us through those stages, but on the other side, small talk can also help with perspective, and remind us what we agree upon. And small talk can slow down conflicts, and create a sense of order while we mull through our individual and collective ignorance.

AesopFan said...

I had read another article about Adam Kirsch's book, but Stuart's take is definitely value-added. I came to the conclusion in graduate school ages ago that no one should be allowed to read or study philosophers until they were at least 40 and had lived in the real world long enough to appreciate how un-moored most philosophy was from reality.

Ares: thanks for the link to Peck's work. I read his early books, also ages ago, and thought he was pretty well grounded in reality, but I haven't been keeping up.

AesopFan said...

From Ariely's article, with my comments in parentheses:

To better understand this problem of social co-ordination and what we can do about it, we arranged a dinner party. Usually dinner parties involve two social co-ordination problems. The first is arrival times: if everyone arrives at different times, the party always seems to be in flux - "getting going" or "dying down". ( That's a reception or open-house, not a dinner party. )
The second is one of conversation topics: no single person will take the social risk of talking about complex personal issues with mere acquaintances. ( No sane person these days takes the social risk of discussing complex issues with their friends and family, who have been known to cut off relations over differences in politics and social ideology at the drop of a "So, who are you voting for this year?")The alternative is surface chat that makes no lasting impression on anyone. ( I don't want to have every conversation make a lasting impression, just as I don't want every tv show or movie or book make a lasting impression; sometimes you just want to relax.)


To help combat the problem of co-ordination, we added one simple variable to this dinner party - rules. 1) Show up between 7:30-8pm. If you can't make 8pm, don't come. ( Arriving at a specified time for dinner used to be called etiquette, and was taken for granted by all civilized people.)2) Absolutely no small talk. Only meaningful conversation is allowed. ( I derive a lot of useful meaning from knowing about someone's family, job, hobbies, and other "shallow" information; without that, you can't put their "meaningful" utterances into any kind of context. )

These rules eliminated some individual freedoms in favour of better outcomes for everyone. Ninety per cent of invitees RSVPed within the day, many asking for clarification on the rules: "What exactly is small talk? Sports? Travel? My job?" ( I may not be able to define small talk, but I know it when I see it.)

Not only were they curious about the rules, they liked having them - and nobody wanted to break them. ( The authoritarian / conformer arises from the depths once again.)
* * *
Looking at Ariely's list of topics which he passed out on cards (I have an actual printed card game that does that for you), and just taking a wild guess, I bet all the vocal guests entertained the same positions on most issues (see above on sanity).

If he ever invites me to a party, I will respectfully decline.

enowning said...

"How did it happen that one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century was a Nazi? And how did it happen that seriously quantum physicists continue to pretend that it did not matter? Why, in the case of Werner Heisenberg, did so many of his fellow physicists willingly ignore his service to National Socialism and his lifelong failure to recant his views?

If it was not an uncertainty, perhaps it was an ignorance… to ignore the fact that, in extolling Heisenberg’s thought, they were teaching people how to think like Nazis.

It becomes that more complicated when we reflect that Heisenberg’s work is borderline unreadable. Even before he joined the Nazi Party, Heisenberg was writing some of the most impenetrable tensor equations anyone had ever seen. For a mathematics that gave us Leibniz and Gauss, that’s a considerable achievement in its own right.

So, very, very few people really understand what Heisenberg was talking about."

Perhaps we should listen to those who understand the physics, and worry less about the political correctness of the physicists?


Trigger Warning said...

"I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."
--- Richard Feynman

Despite its uncanny mathematical precision, QM is just weird. This is embarassing...

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/01/17/the-most-embarrassing-graph-in-modern-physics/

Personally, I'm a "Copenhagenist", but I'm not a quantum mechanic. :-) My field, acoustics, is only slightly less weird.

AesopFan said...

This offering on another unreadable philosopher with unsavory connections dovetails nicely, and Stuart probably already knows about him (a disciple of Lacan).

http://www.city-journal.org/html/clown-prince-revolution-14632.html

Clown Prince of the Revolution
On Slavoj Žižek, a new kind of leftist thinker
Roger Scruton
September 29, 2016

(My favorite passage, paragraphing added)

"If he had stayed in Slovenia, and if Slovenia had stayed Communist, Žižek would not have been the nuisance he has since become. Indeed, the release of Žižek into the world of Western scholarship could almost suffice to make one regret the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe.
By seizing on Lacan’s psychoanalytic vision as the transcendental ground for his new socialist philosophy, Žižek raises the level of excitement beyond anything achieved by the dreary socialists who are the normal product of the Western academy.
And his slick, all-inclusive style offers constant hints of persuasive argument. He can sometimes be read with ease for pages at a time, with a full sense that he is sharing matters that could form an understanding between himself and his reader.
At the same time, he passes quickly over outrageous statements that seem, at first, to be slips of the pen but that the reader discovers, in time, to be the true content of his message."

AesopFan said...

enowning said...
"How did it happen that one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century was a Nazi? And how did it happen that seriously quantum physicists continue to pretend that it did not matter? Why, in the case of Werner Heisenberg, did so many of his fellow physicists willingly ignore his service to National Socialism and his lifelong failure to recant his views?.."

Perhaps we should listen to those who understand the physics, and worry less about the political correctness of the physicists?
* * *
Political correctness among physicists is far less dangerous than among philosophers.
If the physicist's ideology affects his work, eventually, his work won't, ah, work.
A philosopher's ideology IS his work.

Check out the book "Heisenberg's War" for somewhat of an apologia (it presents a favorable view of H. that some others have refuted, but makes for interesting reading about the zeitgeist of the era).

Anonymous said...

One can be wrong politically but still offer interesting insights. Or one can be politically decent but have nothing to say.

Same with art. Brecht was a diehard Stalinist, but he was a great dramatist.

Eisenstein was a great filmmaker but also Soviet propagandist.

Stuart Schneiderman said...

One thing Heidegger did not teach people was... how to think. Heidegger's project was to destroy or deconstruct Western civilization, beginning with the Anglo-Saxon and Jewish sides. He wasn't pondering questions of modal logic. And he was not running scientific experiments. He militated for the Third Reich and refused to recant his Nazi views-- suggesting that he believed that the Nazi project was consonant with his theories, only it was not well carried out. Pogroms are not art forms. If you think that Eisenstein was a great filmmaker, do you think the same of Leni Riefenstahl? Propaganda is not, by definition, great art. A propagandist can certainly be very talented, but if he is promoting the Gulag or the Chinese Cultural Revolution, he is not making art. Heidegger notwithstanding, the Holocaust was not comparable to industrialized agriculture. I find it obscene to compare feeding people with killing people. Either he was making a sick joke or he was trying to hide his real opinion. And, since the Heidegger project, as I and Kirsch noted, was about transvaluing Western values, thus about ethics, about the rules people live by... it had nothing whatever to do with science. As David Hume famously said, science is about what is and ethics is about what should. And yes, I do understand that great idealists like Heidegger believed that the scientific and industrial revolutions were horrors that repressed the true inner strength and outer beauty of the Aryan race. And that he wanted those of us who survived the practical application of his ideas to get in touch with blood and soil, but only if it is the right kind of blood, and to go back to the kinds of street theatre, aka, pogroms that the SA, to Heidegger's glee visited on Germany.

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

"And yes, I do understand that great idealists like Heidegger believed that the scientific and industrial revolutions were horrors that repressed the true inner strength and outer beauty of the Aryan race."

That's what Ted Kaczynski believed, too... minus the Aryan bit.

It's all right there in the first sentence of the Unabomber Manifesto:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm

Another destroyer.