Heidegger

[LeoCasey at aol.com]

Every year at the Socialist Scholars Conference, there is some small outfit 
with usual modest name [Workers Something Or Other] which sponsors a panel of 
why, in their opinion, Heidegger's thought is essential to the working class 
movement. It is fitting that it seems to be pretty much the same panel every 
year, no matter what is happening. They seems to have attracted at times a 
leftish political philosopher with Frankfurt type sentiments from Notre Dame, 
Fred Dallmayr.  

    
I would agree with Justin that Heidegger needs serious attention, not so much 
because his ideas are directly assimilable into a left project, but because 
he is one of the leading philosophers of the 20th century, and arguably the 
best of the continental types. But he is like Carl Schmitt: there are some 
intrinsic links between his ideas and his political affiliations with the 
Nazis, and they must be approached with a critical edge. It is not accidental 
that _Telos'_ slide into nasty racial conservatism, one might even say 
proto-fascist ideology, accompanied their embrace of Schmitt.  

But contrary to Justin, I can't think of any good reason to learn German. For 
a native English speaker, it has to be the most wretchedly difficult language 
to learn [English fulfilling that role for others, due in no small part to 
its German antecedents], with is compound to the fifth degree terms and its 
convoluted sentence structure. I have to admit that I was never a great one 
for skills which require hearing aptitude [I am pretty tone deaf], and so I 
have never loved language acquisition to begin with. But learning German was 
the worst part of my Ph.D. degree, and I forget it all as soon as I passed 
the test. Whatever fictions academia would like to believe, I knew that I was 
not going to produce better English translations of Hegel and Marx than 
professional translators, and I stuck with some few exceptions to the 
published translation.

Leo Casey
United Federation of Teachers
260 Park Avenue South
New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)

Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never has, and it never will.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who 
want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and 
lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
-- Frederick Douglass --

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