[lbo-talk] Grappling with Heidegger (and other responses)

[andie nachgeborenen]

You can wrath and contempt for Heidegger or Schmitt as
a Nazi without thinking that this personal, political,
and moral failing makes their thought worthless. The
assertion that X was a a Nazi, therefore his ideas are
crap, is an ad hominem.  Granted, being a Nazi raises
question about one's judgment that requires attention
to the philosophy or political thought to determine
whether the author's affiliations, poor judgment, or
wickedness irreparably damage the ideas. 

I note here that that this is not a mater of the ideas
being wrong; being wrong is no disgrace in a thinker
as long as he is fruitfully wrong.  But there are
so-called thinkers whose allegiance to vile ideologies
makes their thought into mere propaganda, worth only
the historian's attention. Rosenberg, among the Nazis,
copies to mind; lots of Stalinists too (e.g.,
Zhdanov), and many bourgeois economic and political
writers. 

But the effect of bad allegiances on thought requires
independent evaluation of the thought, if not the
person. And I venture to say that most philosophers
have had bad political allegiances, starting with
Plato. Few have been as bad as Heidegger's, but in my
view the connection between Nazism and Heidegger's
thought is at an abstract enough level -- basically
anti-modernism, Germanocentism, and nature-worship  --
as to exculpate the thought if not the man of the
worst of Nazism.  

The thought is not overtly or by implication
antisemitic; the philosophy is no justification of war
or mass murder -- technological processes of the the
precise sort that are the object of Heidegger's
critique of modernity, which shares a lot with the
middle Frankfurt School insofar as I understand, e.g.,
The Eclipse of Reason.  

One may object to Heidegger's anti-modernism, his
anti-Enlightenment attitudes, his contempt for
democracy, etc. But he can't be blown off as a
philosopher merely because he was (apparently to the
end) a loyal Nazi. 

--- Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:


> Ravi wrote:
> 
> >...As the anger on-list towards Heidegger has
> demonstrated, there is 
> >always room for mud-slinging against anyone you
> hold up as an 
> >important thinker....
> 
> Not so.  The truth is that "there is always wrath
> and contempt
> against any Nazi held up as an Important Thinker."
> 
> Shane Mage
> 
> "Thunderbolt steers all things...It consents and
> does not
> consent to be called 
> Zeus."                                              
>           
> 
> Herakleitos of Ephesos
> 
> 
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> 

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