[lbo-talk] Heidegger

Tahir Wood twood at uwc.ac.za
Wed Jul 9 01:01:12 PDT 2008



>>> <lbo-talk-request at lbo-talk.org> 07/08/08 6:28 PM >>>
Intellectual adherents (or 'fellow-travellers') of Naziism represent larege variation in formal philosophical commitments, though presumably the philsoophy each held was in some way "welcoming" of that political tendency while certainly not requiring allegiance to the Third Reich or to National Socialis . Carrol

Yes, well Heidegger pledged allegiance in no uncertain terms. But I think the wrong interpretation is being placed on this. It is possible I suppose to claim that politics is an expression of someone's philosophy, but that is a very linear way of looking at it, as would be the case of someone seeing it oppositely: their philosophy being merely an expression of their politics. My view is neither of these things. Let me use Heidegger as an example, focussing on the question of his anti-semitism.

Heiddegger, it is true, never bought into biological racism or biological anti-semitism. (I have no doubt that this is also true of many nazis, for whom biological anti-semitism was just a convenient 'scientific' prop for their ideology -- I don't think they really gave a fig as to whether it was 'true' or not). Heidegger had the resentment of the country bumpkin towards sophisticated, urban, cosmopolitan types, the supreme archetype of which for him was the figure of the jew. I have no doubt that there was an element of deep erotic significance in his sexual relationship with the left-liberal jew Hannah Arendt. Generally he hated liberals and leftists with a deep passion.

Passion, is what I'm drawing attention to here. A similar love-hate dynamic appears to have been at work in his relationship to the father figure of Edmund Husserl, a converted jew (no doubt merely a 'cultivated jew' in Heidegger's view). Husserl, when he first read some of Heidegger's major work, immediately began to realise that there was a revolt going on.

I am saying that Heidegger's philosophy and his politics were both equally an expression of his personal resentments and his German folkish nationalism, a potent mixture that he shared with many other humiliated Germans under the Weimar republic, and which was more than enough to lead, not only to an enthusiastic endorsement of Hitler, but also to literally fantastic delusions, in which he would become the spiritual leader of the whole movement.

Tahir

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