A Heidegger glossary:
Inauthentic being: racial impurity
Being-there: true German (Levinas joked that the problem with Heidegger's 'Being-there' was that it usually entailed being in someone else's country)
Das Mann: The Jews/the urban masses (in a sideswipe at Georg Lukacs, H' says that it is unthinkable that Das Mann could be a subject, still less a collective subject).
Destruction of ontology: book burning
The stand in History: The third Reich
Being-towards-death: the SS
In message <002301bef6fb$b4c84300$d912fdd0 at chrisgroup>, christian a. gregory <pearl862 at earthlink.net> writes
>Farias book didn't say
>anything that anyone didn't know, but was received as it it made
>groundbreaking factual revelations.
This is a curious point, often made by Heidegger apologists. Oh yes, we all knew that he was a Nazi, that's so old hat. The effect is to say, all you ignoramuses ... didn't you know, everyone knew that. But of course everyone did not know that, because the Heidegger apologists minimised and played down H's actions (saying that he had lapsed his membership, or that he was a secret critic or that he left in 1943 - all untrue). The reason that Farias' book was _treated_ as if its revelations were groundbreaking was because for all but the in crowd who secretly guarded the knowledge, the extent of Heidegger's complicity, the letters to the Gestapo denouncing Nobel laureates, the anti-Jewish agitation - all these things had been so played down by H's apologists that Farias' book was indeed a revelation.
After all, if these things were so well known, why was it only _after_ Farias' book that Derrida, Lyotard, Lacoue-Labarthe felt the need to reflect upon the relationship between Heidegger's fascism and his philosophy? It was because Farias made it an issue in a way that they shied away from.
Only two conclusions are available: either the replies to Farias were unworthy, shallow pugilism, whose only point was to shout him down, or, these authors, including Derrida were in Farias' debt. It was Farias who brought the issue to the public attention, while Heidegger's supporters, seemingly sleepwalking, thought it was not an issue - at least not until around 1980, when, after Farias wrote, it was the most pressing issue, the urgent issue the one that had to be addressed.
>But at the same time, Farias really
>wants to put Heidegger the philosopher, not Heidegger the citizen, on trial.
This is a comically unHeideggerian approach. What would Heidegger make of the separation between citizen and philosopher, that Christian follows all the other Heidegger apologists in hiding behind? Is this an authentic approach, in the way that Heidegger would see authenticity? I don't think so. I would say that Heidegger would denounce such an approach. He would disdain the 'publicness' and 'idle chatter' of 'citizenship'. He would surely decline to accept the bad conscience of bifurcating himself into citizen and philosopher.
>(After all, if Heidegger weren't Heidegger, who would care . . .?) And on
>that score, the book is a joke. Farias can't even get the plain grammatical
>sense of _Being and Time_ right. He translates participles as past tense,
>doesn't understand the basics about German word order, etc. My sophomores
>can do better with that text.
Terrible sin, to get the tense wrong. How much greater it stands than mistaking the holocaust for a renewal of the German spirit. Only someone who is on the defensive could make such a partisan judgement against Farias' book, which is very good indeed. You hope to smother with ridicule the book that made it clear that Heidegger's philosophy and his politics were not isolated or discrete compartments in his life, but, as he understood himself, wholly integrated.
Heidegger's philosophy is an intellectual working up of the same base prejudices of German reaction that were the well-springs of Fascism. Heidegger rightly recognised the correlation between the two.
>
>None of that's to exonerate Heidegger,
Yes, it is. You are aiming to exonerate Heidegger 'the philosopher', hoping that his philosophy can somehow be insulated against his actions and his goals. But that is absurd: the philosopher was the Nazi, the philosophy is Fascism.
>or Derrida.I think Derrida is mostly
>wrong in judging Heidegger's attachment to the Nazis, but I think he's right
>to insist that we should continue to read him.
I am not clear where you disagree with D.. Would it be unfair to say that you think D. is too harsh on H.?
>Bourdieu's take on Heidegger
...
>: Heidegger is always
>trying to talk about the political, but he doesn't want to do political or
>social science. He wants to retrieve the privilege of philosophical language
>without dirtying it with the empirical research or everyday perception.
>Bourdieu's conclusion is that, although Heidegger is complicit with the
>Nazis, he isn't simply an ideologue for them, since his conception of human
>being is never tied to race--it's tied to language.
Apologetics. More sophisticated than 'it wasn't me', but apologetics none the less. 'If Heidegger had only taken the time to do some sociology then he would have been ok.' (As it happens, a great deal of German sociology was complicit in the reaction, so there's no saving grace there.)
Boudieu's solution, at least as you describe it, seems pretty weak to me. It is naive to accept the excuse that Heidegger was never taken in by Rosenberg's race theories - Heidegger's own excuse. It's naive because it is an unduly formal understanding of fascism. Fascism = naturalistic theory of race. Heidegger did not share in that, so Heidegger's not a Nazi. A case of the sillygism, I would say.
First, racial ideology was only one aspect of reactionary thinking in Germany at that time. It didn't chime with Heidegger because it clashed with another aspect, the rejection of scientific reasoning. Second, anyone who does not hear the resounding echo of fascism in Heidegger's preoccupation with language is not listening. The quest for the Ur- language, was fundamental to German reaction at the turn of the century. Heidegger's interests here closely correlate with the crank theories of the German origins in the black forest and the original Aryan people. It's so cheesy, it's embarrassing to look at today, even more embarrassing to think anyone takes this Nordic Valhalla crap as a serious contribution to philosophy.
>
>Or maybe it's a recognition that stupidity and intelligence are, let's
>guess, historically determined?
Oh what, as in stupid is just an ideological construct. No. Stupid is stupid. Of course if you want to persuade people to read Heidegger and Derrida, I can see that you would want to make a case for stupidity, or at least pretend there was no difference between stupidity and intelligence. Shame that Heidegger did not think so when he welcomed the gassing of the mentally disabled. -- Jim heartfield