Delivered-To: fixup-owner-lbo-talk-digest at lists.panix.com@fixme Date: Wed, 09 Dec 1998 20:57:24 -0700 From: Charles Miller <bautiste at uswest.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lbo-talk-digest <owner-lbo-talk-digest at lists.panix.com> Subject: It's a Battlefield Out There
James,
Granting some of what you say here, I think it fair to say that Heidegger can still teach even socialists something about the scientistic world-view. He repudiated the extremes of totalitarianism in the 50s. His reputed anti-Semitism has been shown to be a form of xenophobia. (He was lovers with Hannah Arendt.) If you look at Derrida's (a Marxist) critique of Heidegger's concept of spirit, you'll see that even his infamous speech is more in line with a Hegelian notion of _Volk_ than Nazi. He resigned from the Nazi Party several months after that speech.
Terry Winograd, early proponent of AI, teaches Heidegger in his CS course at Stanford. There are three essays on Heidegger's notion of technology in the very Marxist-leaning collection of essays in _Technology & the Politics of Knowledge_, edd. Andrew Feenberg and Alastair Hannay.
Finally, there is this comment from Hubert L. Dreyfus, a pre-eminent Heideggerian scholar, and distinguished critic of AI and cognitivism: "To many, however, the idea of a god which will give us a unified but open community--one set of concerns which everyone shares if only as a focus of disagreement--sounds either unrealistic or dangerous. Heidegger would probably agree that its open democratic version looks increasingly unobtainable and that we have certainly seen that its closed totalitarian form can be disastrous. ..." (Hubert L. Dreyfus, "Heidegger on Technology_, ibid., p. 106)
Jim heartfield <jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk>
Heidegger was a paid up member of the NSDAP from the 1930s right to the end of the war. As rector of Freiburg University he wanted to subordinate the study of the sciences to the principles of national socialism. In that he was supporting the argument of the far-right wing of the NSDAP (which was strongest in the Universities) which polemicised
against free enquiry as 'a myth'. With the suppression of the Strasserites Heidegger's wing of the Nazi party was restrained. Business
pressurised the NSDAP to stop trying to politicise scientific research in the Universities, for fear that their madcap prejudices would get in the way of making money.
Yes, he has a lot to teach us about the way that scientific enquiry can be crushed under the iron heel of fascist ideology, but not much to teach us about science itself. - -- Jim heartfield