Justin Schwartz wrote:
>
> inauthenticity and shallowness of the sotys of
> livesa available in capitalism.
This touches on my reasons for creating static over the galumphing on this list re SUVs & grammar, because this rather than a lack of class analysis seems to me to be probably the source of Heidegger's fascism. Fascism proper does not representant any particular world view -- it is a totally opportunistic practice, and I don't have the slightest idea (nor particularly care) what leads the Hitlers, Goerings, Mussolinis, etc to fascism. It is of importance, however, what leads bourgeois (and some proletarian) intellectuals to fascism. For such there are several routes. Pound, I think, was not entirely wrong about his _own_ route in an apologetic line he wrote re Hitler:
Adolph, furious from perception,
but there are those whose blindness comes from inside. (quoted from memory).
Something like that may also describe Wyndham Lewis and a number who moved to fascism through one or another form of populism.
But for another group of intellectuals, including I suspect Heidegger, it was their adherence to that contemptible claim of Socrates, so often quoted admiringly by humanists, "The unexamined life is not worth living." Something like that must lie behind the most beautiful praise of killing for fun ever written:
An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I love I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
Beautiful but vile.
Alienation is an objective quality of life under capitalism, not a spiritual disease of those who suffer it. Those 'alienated' billions are just trying to get along as best they can, and emphasis on authenticity or the "examined life" or "this life, this death" is the seedbed of a certain kind of intellectual adherence to fascism.
Carrol