Yeats' An Irish Airman Foresees his death, which is (I agree with Carrol) beautiful and creepy, resonates with this attitude, although it is not a fascist poem. It foresees a loneley death, not a sort of mass produced one. Also, Yeats, despite his personal accommodations with fascism, never lost his moral sense. See, e.g., Nineteen Ninteen.
This aestheticisation hasn't anything to do with the Socratic slogan that Carrol so hates, and I think quite misunderstands. Socrates was an advocate of encouraging people to reflect on received assumptions, to some to realize by critical analysis that they didn't know what they thought they did about justice and virtue and the like. He certainly was not a fan of having the state round up and exterminate the unreflective. The idea never crossed his mind. And he thought the lives of unreflective people--craftmen, artisans, people who he thought actually knew stuff, but who never bothered with the nature of justice, were very much worth living. He got in trouble in part for irritating the idle rich who didn't have ant craft skills (techne) and thought they have knowledge (sophia), but didn't. ANywaym fascists aren't in favor of any sort of examined life. Think with the blood, is more their speed.
Heidegger is onto something altogether different from either of these things. Btw, he thought the philosophy took a big wrong turn with Socrates and Plato, and had been on the wrong path ever since. ALthough he's a fan of the examined life, what he means by it is something quite different and more mysterious than what Socrates did, which (in Socrates' case) was mainly to know what you're talking about and know when you don't know what you are talking about.
For Heidegger, the good life is authentic, which involves a sort of openness towards Being, which itself opens itself to beings when you take the proper attitude towards it, that is hard to talk about at all; and has a lot to dow uth living in the presence of one's own mortality without getting all crazy about it. I think that this draws a lot from German romanticism, and I don't see it as a contemptible ideal at all. Arguably Feuerbach and the young Marx resonate to these chords, too, with ratrher less of the death and finitude stuff, natch.
Anyway, that's not what got H going the wrong way, it's his utter naivite in thinking that the Nazis had anything to do with these romantic ideals apart from cynically manipulating them. In any case, the Heideggerian ideals are quite different from either the SS's aestheticism or any sort of Socratic skepticism, and is in fact foreign to and hostile to both these ideals.
--jks
>
>
>
>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
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