Once more unto the Heideggerian breach

You can't go wrong when doing a mash-up of famous Shakespearean phrases (for $1,000, Alex) and amateur philosophical scrivening, can you? At least not in my book.

So, we're taking off from a post a little over a month ago about the latest on Heidegger and Nazism, and a comment by Brett Welch, which led me to update my calling him a "lover of Heidegger" to a "student of Heidegger." I then made an addition.

As for whether one can separate Heidegger's other ideas from his purely philosophical ones, we'll probably disagree. I speak personally, having not read T.S. Eliot in more than a decade as my realization of the breadth of his antisemitism and its intertwining with so much of his poetry led to increasing disgust. As for the power of Heidegger's ideas in a world of increasing fractures and silos today? Brett knows Heidegger's overall philosophy better than I do. If it works for him, it works for him.

I will also note that, beyond this issue, most modern "Continental" philosophy, outside of existentialism, simply doesn't do much for me. Within the world of theology, Paul Tillich and his "ground of being," which has obvious parallels to Heidegger, never came close to enthusing me. I forgot that, a full decade ago, I wrote some highly snarky thoughts — yet highly serious ones — on "the Ground of Being." And, I stand by them. That said, as Tillich clearly did not follow Heidegger's path in politics, one can use such ideas as expressed by people other than Heidegger.

And, from there, we start into new material, based on some journaling I did after more pondering, that, along with Texas heat and other things, kept me up until 3 a.m. one night last week.

By Brett's own words, he IS a lover of Heidegger’s ideas, even though one could get most of them, without Heidegger’s other baggage, from other German existentialists. Like Tillich of one wants Ground of Being with a dose of theology. Or, the later French structuralists, who may have been influenced by him to a degree on “anti-positivism,” but again, without his fascism. 

Per Wiki, which had a pretty good article on him, with a couple of important footnotes to new writings, which I will also use directly, within philosophy, his treatment of Husserl (one of the philosophers I used to transition out of conservative Lutheranism) is disgusting. In addition, he’s simply a liar about his relationship to Nazism — even if that formally pro-Nazi relationship was of short duration — and why he self-allegedly had to do what he did, and of course, ethics is philosophy.

As for whether his philosophy can be separated from his politics? The Frankfurt School said no, at the time, in their mutual Germany. In addition, Heidegger’s anti-Semitism appears to well predate his formal allegiance to Nazism, making him a non-humanist philosopher. 

And, re Brett? Part of his anti-Semitism was to blame Jews for the acceleration of technology and thus saying the Holocaust was essentially self-inflicted. If you really think you can separate his philosophy from his Nazism — and from his pre-Nazi anti-Semitism, well documented in his Black Notebooks, you’re not a better man than I am, Gunga Din, but per an old bon mot, you have a spirit with which I am not familiar.

Per my journaling, I write this at some risk of knowing, per connectedness issues, a whole "web" of ties to the late Leo Lincourt has frayed since his passing. But, per that thought of his, to have Heidegger's ideas as a guiding light on freeing oneself from technology?

And, to the degree he was not narrowly Nazi, per his pre-Nazi anti-Semitism, he was “völkish,” and that many Nazis held such ideas, thus his own stance should NOT be seen as anti-Nazi. And, that's the start of a serious of thoughts based on an in-depth review of a 2020 book, "Confronting Heidegger: A Critical Dialogue on Politics and Philosophy,"  referenced in a Wiki footnote.

Writing all this, as edited from a Word document diary entry, only intensifies a poignancy of Leo Lincourt as a “glue” now missing from my social media world. Karla McLaren is out of it entirely, as is Leo’s journalist friend from Fort Worth and the Indian-American from Houston. Ditto the Minneapolis bicyclist. Jim Lippard disappeared into libertarianism before Leo’s passing.

And now, Brett and a spirit unfamiliar to me. Sadly, after reading Wiki and that review of the 2020 book on him, another sundering may be at hand.

Otherwise? The IEP entry on Heidegger treads very lightly, close to a whitewash. Stanford

openly talks about “apologists,” on the other hand. From there, echoing the Fried book referenced above, it mentions themes that could certainly be considered völkish in the larger context of the first half of 20th century Germany with originally pre-Nazi roots, even if not using that word. One also sees echoes of Hegel in his idea of a German spiritual mission. Actually, it goes on to talk about the “Volk” in Heidegger’s thought. 

Hitler himself may have laughed at the völkish ideas of the likes of Rosenberg, and somewhat of Baldur von Schirach and Himmler. He may have partly purged that from the Nazi Party with the Night of the Long Knives. But Nazism climbed to power in part because the völkish background was already there, and in fact, there before World War I.

Now comes the "turning," but not the one Heideggerians reference. Stanford thinks, which Fried et al don’t seem to mention, that Heidegger distanced himself from the Nazis, and perhaps got in trouble with them, in fact, because he thought they too were technology-focused and not truly völkish. Schopenhauer-ish, with a völkish will and idea? It adds that he appeared to claim the Volk was historical-linguistic, not biological. And yet, he undercut himself here, with his claim, again, well known, that Africa doesn't have a history. Well, there is no single language that represents "Africa," so that knocks both props out from his Volk claim vis-a-vis Africa and means that we're presumably back in race territory. 

Stanford unfortunately doesn’t have the Fried book in its bibliography. Its entry is dated 2011 and doesn’t indicate its had major revisions, so it’s dated. In any case, the “völkish” comes through in his anti-technology attitude, per its subsection on his thought on technology, which strikes me as not Luddite so much as cartoonishly simplistic, setting aside the anti-Semitic angle already noted above. Or, in another, quasi-Hegelian sense, it’s almost as if he posits it in opposition to Being, but absolutely does not want a synthesis.

Or, in another way, he strikes me as a more naïf version of Rousseau, living 150 years later. Let us not forget that, naïf or no, with things like the General Will, Rousseau was not a philosophical innocent. Indeed, his concerns about “authenticity” appear to parallel Heidegger’s concerns about “technology,” with the idea that Heidegger is worried that, in essence, “Man is born free, but is everywhere in technological chains.” And also indeed, I wrote a whole piece about Rousseau starting with him as authoritarian, contra both Leo and Leo Damrosch in his otherwise very good bio of Rousseau. (From there, I moved on to a pathetic [in the proper affective sense] pity for many of Rousseau's struggles and troubles, while also noting that he had a high tendency to shoot himself in the foot, and wasn't very good at self-perception or self-honesty.)

And with that, as not a huge fan of Rousseau either, and definitely not of the "state of nature" idea, which is way overused in a Wökeish (I see what I did) sense in large chunks of American academia in its thought about American Indians, I have squared the circle here.

And, as an almost footnote-level idea?

Beyond all the above, I don’t like him because he’s a “system-builder.” That’s part of why British philosophy way back in Empiricism vs Rationalism days has generally appealed to me more.