> >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.
So, I'm supposed to be Heideggerian? Why? Because I think people should read Heidegger before they reject him out of hand? Hello? It's like saying if I urge my friends to read one of Martha Stewart's recipes I'm committing myself to her personal ontology. Sheesh.
Besides, I didn't make this distinction, Farias did.
>
> >(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.
First, Heidegger didn't mistake the holocaust for anything. He was silent about it. That's part of the problem.
Second, since when does calling me defensive mean anything?
Third, my point: there are other ways to describe the relation b/w Heidegger's philosophy and his politics. If I reject Farias treating one as the transparent reflection of the other, that doesn't mean I think they are "isolated." Also, to say they are discrete is not the same thing as to say they are unrelated.
>
> >
> >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.?
Okay, well, we read the philosophical corpus differently. I don't think you can or should say about Heidegger that his philosophy was fascism and have done with it. It doesn't tell you anything about Heidegger or fascism.
Derrida is wrong about Heidegger b/c he can't account for Heidegger's mistake as anything but a philosophical one. It was an historical and ethical mistake, and a political one.
>
> 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.)
Uh, no, actually. Bourdieu's argument means that, however you're disposed to
read Heidegger's philosophy, even as a political strategy, it's also, at the
same time, a cultural one. Whatever kinds of politics one can read in the
corpus, there's also a struggle for cultural prestige within the university
there. Bourdieu doesn't place any faith in sociology to extricate one from
that--since sociology is part of that field.
>
> 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.
I never said that Heidegger wasn't a Nazi. I said you couldn't call Heidegger an ideologue for the Nazis. He was a Nazi, he carried a party card, etc. So he was a Nazi. Nothing will change that. But you seem to want to believe that since he was in the party, there's nothing more to say, since once he becames a party member, he automatically lost the ability to say anything that conflicted with party ideology. It's actually a cartoon image of Nazism (and totalitarianism in general), much like the one Hannah Arendt paints.
>
> 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.
>
Hmm. Not listening means not agreeing with your reading, sounds like to me. Or am I hearing you wrong?
> >
> >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.
Okay, well stupid is stupid, in the sense the effects of the difference b/w stupidity and intelligence are real enough. But that doesn't mean it's not historical.
And Heidegger was silent about the gas chambers. He didn't welcome anything, but he didn't stop anything either. He was silent about them. That's the point. That's one of the things that makes him such an ogre.
Christian