[lbo-talk] Heidegger

Chris Doss lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com
Tue Jul 8 09:16:12 PDT 2008


"Schwarzwald redneck" is a great term! And very apt.

I was thinking, and it strikes me that Marxists, or people sympathetic to Marx, are not in a particularly good position to take the "everything Heidegger wrote is infected by dangerous Nazi cooties" approach. One, while Hitler was not a Heideggerian, Stalin was in fact a Marxist. I would imagine that the number of large-scale murders embarked upon by Heideggerians is zero. Two, while finding the real or imagined scary Nazi-cootie bits in Heidegger takes careful textual exegesis, and Heidegger did not even believe in the main core of Nazi ideology (the race thing), the links between Marx and Stalin are obvious. Three, while Hitler probably had only the vaguest idea who Heidegger was, and while Heidegger had almost certainly no influence whatsoever on Hitler's worldview or actions, everything Stalin did was in Marx's name, both in word and probably in his mind.

Now, I know the common tactic here is to say that the Stalin people were "vulgar" Marxists or "betrayed" Marxism, but golly gee that is pretty much exactly what Heidegger said about the Nazis and is in fact the standard defense of people when their worldview gets involved in some nastiness.

Personally I have no problem with this, because, unlike Rover, I do not have a theology in which good cannot coexist with evil. However, for the zealot and the ideologue, it is anathema.

--- On Tue, 7/8/08, Angelus Novus <fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com> wrote:


> From: Angelus Novus <fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Heidegger
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Tuesday, July 8, 2008, 11:35 AM
> Chris Doss:
>
> > As if Heidegger's Nazism is more explicable by
> > reference to his philosophy as opposed to, oh, his
> > being a southern German in the 1930s.)
>
> I love Richard Rorty's hilariously mean term for him:
>
> Schwarzwald redneck.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk



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