``...of course different individuals will respond in radically different ways. That is a given... Carrol
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Here is a review that covers the theme in a context that I am interested in. (It should become glaringly evident, why examining these philosophers is important to understanding the US, Israel, and the Islamic world...)
The review is on Richard Wolin's Heidegger's Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Loewith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse---and Mark Lilla's, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics, by Sela Benhabib (one smart cookie)
(from: http://www.bostonreview.net/br27.6/benhabib.html)
>From a quick scan, I would call these guys superficial idiots... (I
shouldn't be so quick to condemn, since I haven't written shit. For
Chris Doss. See, you should have finished your thesis. Hell, screw the
degree, finish it anyway and then get it published.)
``The principal challenge to philosophy in contemporary culture, however, comes not from natural science but from what Paul Ricoeur has called "the hermeneutics of suspicion"-the idea that every grand theory and noble sentiment hides a base motive. Nietzsche started it all when he said that universalistic morality traces to the efforts of the weak to band together and thwart the powerful while casting their struggle for power in the high-minded language of ought and obligation. Since then the suspicious style of interpretation has evolved in several different directions.
One direction is historical and social and is expressed, for example, in the familiar observation that the philosophical tradition is overwhelmingly the creation of dead-white-male heads of household, including some slaveholders and misogynists. In the 1970s, feminist theorists-including Carole Pateman, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Genevieve Lloyd, and Susan Okin-made this case with respect to the place of gender in liberal-tradition classics. Recently such post-colonial theorists as Paul Gilroy, Uday Mehta, Tzvetan Todorov, and Anthony Pagden have uncovered the complicity of Western philosophy with Western imperialism. Some theorists have argued that the project of modern philosophy, from Hobbes to Locke, from Descartes to Hegel, is implicated-not only accidentally, but essentially-in the global consolidation of Western imperial hegemony. Even the great Western liberals-John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant-have come under heavy fire for their Eurocentric prejudices against the capacity of non-Western peoples to govern themselves, produce culture, and contribute to rational discourse.
Such social and historical contextualization, often a source of illumination, must be distinguished from a second kind of hermeneutics of suspicion, which is biographic in focus and psychoanalytic in theory. Here the personal lives of philosophers and other intellectuals-their political, religious, and erotic choices-are explored in search of some underlying personality pattern, some compulsive reenactment of early hurts or traumas expressed in each thinker's work.
A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education notes that "since 1982, more than thirty biographies of philosophers have appeared. Of those, twenty have been published in the past decade, a dozen just since 1999." Among those whose lives have been subject to close scrutiny are Bertrand Russell and John Dewey, leading the group with three biographical works each; Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault, and Hannah Arendt follow with two titles to their names. In a culture in which philosophy has become "breathtakingly irrelevant,"1 the study of philosophers' lives continues to hold some fascination.
This turn to biography presents unusual challenges. Philosophical theories make claims to truth that transcend historical and social context. From inside the discipline, the details of personal lives seem quite irrelevant to understanding or evaluating a thinker's views. Every student of philosophy learns to master the distinction between "genesis" and "validity," between the personal or historical circumstances that may have led thinkers to develop certain views and the correctness of these views. Studying philosophy in this country and Germany throughout the 1970s, for example, I do not recall a single seminar in which the biographical or historical details of thinkers' lives emerged as a theme.
The fixation on biography, particularly when it is mixed with interpretive suspicion, suggests a retreat from philosophy's aspiration to truth; we wallow in the particular and revel in salacious detail, whether it be Wittgenstein's homosexuality, A. J. Ayer's promiscuity, Foucault's "sadomasochistic" experimentations in the gay subculture, Dewey's sexual shyness, or Hannah Arendt's affair with Martin Heidegger. The ease with which moral judgments are passed on the lives and passions of others and the titillation derived from cutting intellectual giants down to size are indicative of our own culture. Citizens in a republic of voyeurs, we are intent on microscopic moralism, incapable of appreciating more gracefully the contradictions, tensions, and ragged edges of all lives and unwilling to take ideas seriously, as something more than bandages for personal wounds.
If we find something objectionable in a philosophical theory, we can, of course, always attribute it to a personal deficiency. Mill, the great defender of personal liberty and representative government, did not consider Indian people capable of self-rule or the people of the Balkans capable of entering the mainstream of human history. Kant teaches us that there is a universal faculty of human reason that lies at the foundation of moral agency. But his writings on history and anthropology reveal a belief that the distribution of rationality among the human race is not uniform: some human beings, because of cultural and even racial characteristics, are incapable of higher levels of abstraction. Faced with such contradictions, we can call Kant and Mill racists and treat their systems as gussied-up projects of group dominance or expressions of some form or other of heterophobia. But there is an alternative interpretive strategy. We can treat the troubling elements of their views as occasions to probe deeper and ask: What was their understanding of the relationship between reason and culture? Is education the key to the acquisition of human reason? What is culture? And when we do that, we link our efforts at historical interpretation and contextualization with our own efforts to join the debate and engage hard questions about morality, politics, and history, rather than using historical interpretation as a way to satisfy a suspicion, evade these questions, and pretend that we already know their answers...
Lilla opens his collection of essays, most of which have previously appeared in The New York Review of Books, with a discussion of "Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers." For him, the privileged context for understanding what he names the "reckless mind" is a specific interplay of philosophy and politics. Lilla puts the point sharply: "As continental Europe gave birth to two great tyrannical systems in the twentieth century, communism and fascism, it also gave birth to a new social type, for which we need a new name: the philotyrannical intellectual"-the intellectual whose unmastered passions occlude the tyrannical potential of noble-sounding ideas. Lilla uses this phrase unsparingly to characterize Walter Benjamin, Alexandre Kojeve, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida.
Despite the differences in their political orientations-Wolin is a repentant New Leftist who has discovered the virtues of liberalism, while Lilla is a moderate and thoughtful follower of the conservative political theorist Leo Strauss-both authors are relentless in their use of contextual simplification. For Wolin, biography is destiny (or rather "Heidegger is destiny"); for Lilla, intellectuals' political choices exhibit that they are tempted by tyranny, whether of the right or the left. Rather than deploying historical, biographical, and political detail to enhance our understanding of their subjects, to solve some conceptual puzzles, or to carry forward an argument on substance, both authors reduce the legacies of their subjects to rubble...
...Drawing on this general historical-cultural context, as Wolin does, is essential to any understanding of the early Heidegger's work and influence. Arendt, Löwith, Jonas, and Marcuse emerged out of this milieu, which also produced Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, Georg Lukacs, and members of the Frankfurt School, as well as Karl Mannheim, Gustav Mahler, Karl Kraus, and many other Central European Jews who made some of the most remarkable cultural contributions of the twentieth century. Intellectual historians have long commented on the puzzle that the Holocaust followed upon this great effervescence and creativity, frequently referred to as the Golden Age of European Jewry.
Wolin reprises this story of the failure of German-Jewish assimilation; it has been told previously by such historians as George Mosse, Arno Meyer, and Saul Friedlander. The most influential of these accounts is Gershom Scholem's autobiographical From Berlin to Jerusalem (1980; published in English in 1988). Scholem originated the observation that the much-touted German-Jewish intellectuals' symbiosis was in fact a series of "continuous bloodlettings"-a process of "negative symbiosis" (Dan Diner)-and that German intellectual traditions had already begun to decry the very ideals of Enlightenment humanism and emancipation that so many Jewish thinkers were attempting to make their own.
Yet the devil is in the details, and very little in Wolin's account illuminates the specific familial and cultural milieu of each of the four thinkers. More fundamentally, Wolin's own concepts of "non-Jewish Jews" and "the delusions of Jewish assimilation" suggest a disturbingly fixed understanding of "authentic" Jewish life. When Isaac Deutscher introduced the phrase "non-Jewish Jew" to characterize Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Rosa Luxembourg, Trotsky, and Freud, he drew attention to the fact that these intellectuals had gone beyond the limits of traditional Judaism into alien cultural territory. For Deutscher their genius was nurtured through their experiences at the edge of their communities: "They were a priori extraordinary insofar that as Jews they lived at the borders of distinct civilizations, religions and national cultures and were born and grew up at the boundaries of different epochs."2 Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, as well as Hannah Arendt, were aware of this Jewish tradition and wrote and thought about it. Hans Jonas's work in The Gnostic Religion (1958) and his reflections on post-Holocaust theology ("The Concept of God after Auschwitz") draw from the ethical and political roots of traditional Judaism, whether rabbinical or messianic, while reflecting on matters of universal concern to all.
For Deutscher "non-Jewish Jew" is a term of praise, whereas for Wolin it means having false consciousness. Like Gershom Scholem, Wolin affirms the futility of assimilationist Jewish intellectual aspirations. If one believes that authentic Jewish existence is possible only in a Jewish collectivity, whether a nation-state or not; if one believes that life in the diaspora is a form of Galut (exile); if one also believes that the Jews will not be free of anti-Semitism until they become a "nation like all others," with their own state, army, and territory, then it makes sense to insist as Wolin does that German-Jewish assimilation is illusory, and that assimilation is the road to annihilation.
Yet there is a deep inconsistency in Wolin's account: he often writes as if he were a convinced Jewish nationalist, for whom Jewish participation in bourgeois liberal democracies, with their individualistic understanding of rights, is itself a form of inauthenticity. But he takes to task all four of Heidegger's "children" for sharing the master's prejudices against political modernity, democracy, liberalism, and individuals' rights.
Wolin cannot have it both ways-either he accepts a liberal democratic understanding of rights and respects the separation of one's public identity as a citizen from one's private identity as a Jew, or he considers such a solution inadequate and pleads for a more collective resolution of questions to Jewish existence. The relationship of these collective strategies of Jewish existence to liberal democratic understandings of individual rights, the rule of law, and the separation of public right from the moral good is, as the current situation in Israel well demonstrates, contentious. But if one questions cultural or political Zionism-and surely such questioning is legitmate-then it is possible to regard Jewish assimilation and all its attendant paradoxes as a leaven, a creative force, in political modernity itself-not simply as a self-denying evasion. The dilemmas of Jewish assimilation, with its individual strategies of converting, passing, denying, or displacing are themselves part of the cultural-political toolbox which liberal democracies offer to ethnic, religious, and cultural minorities under conditions of modernity. Surely the kind of moral universalism to which all four thinkers aspired is no less an aspect of the Jewish experience in modernity than the assertion of Jewish particularism. Wolin does not address these dilemmas. In accusing Arendt, Löwith, Jonas, and Marcuse of failing to live up to their Jewish identities, he fails to illuminate their work and instead invites questions about his own vantage point. What are his standards for deciding whether a Jewish life is sufficiently "authentic"?