Some Essays on Heidegger's Black Notebooks
October 2, 2014 10:28 AM Subscribe
Heidegger in Black. The King is Dead: Heidegger's Black Notebooks. Heidegger's Black Notebooks: Extreme Silencing. Release of Heidegger’s ‘Black Notebooks’ Reignites Debate Over Nazi Ideology. Is Heidegger Contaminated by Nazism?
Another view: "moral disgust does not relieve a reader--let alone a critic--of the burden of intellectual engagement" Why Read Heidegger
posted by Vibrissae at 11:29 AM on October 2, 2014
posted by Vibrissae at 11:29 AM on October 2, 2014
The chronicle alludes to the explanation I have always heard for this genius gone kook:
the philosopher is scathing in his criticism of modernity’s wayward drift, the soullessness and ahistoricity of the cosmopolitan, and the rule of technology and science.
He was a country boy and he was shunned by all the brightest and most sophisticated people he admired and longed to emulate. The only time he was happy as an adult was in his cabin in the woods alone.
posted by bukvich at 11:55 AM on October 2, 2014 [1 favorite]
the philosopher is scathing in his criticism of modernity’s wayward drift, the soullessness and ahistoricity of the cosmopolitan, and the rule of technology and science.
He was a country boy and he was shunned by all the brightest and most sophisticated people he admired and longed to emulate. The only time he was happy as an adult was in his cabin in the woods alone.
posted by bukvich at 11:55 AM on October 2, 2014 [1 favorite]
... moral disgust does not relieve a reader--let alone a critic--of the burden of intellectual engagement ...
Maybe. The last article in the OP suggests a critical argument one might give without ever needing to look at a single page of Heidegger's work:
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 12:06 PM on October 2, 2014 [3 favorites]
Maybe. The last article in the OP suggests a critical argument one might give without ever needing to look at a single page of Heidegger's work:
Philosophy has a math-like quality: it’s not just a vocabulary, but a system. A failure in one part of the system can suggest a failure everywhere.But setting that aside, I definitely think moral disgust relieves professional philosophers of the obligation to read Heidegger in the first place. (That is to say: If you read and engage with Heidegger, then you should definitely do so carefully, but are we obligated to read him in the first place? I think not.) In philosophy, there is just too much material for anyone to properly engage with it all. You have to pick and choose. And there are lots and lots of really good thinkers. When I was 20 or 21, I read a very small bit of Heidegger for a course on existentialism, and it seemed to me then that what he had written was absolutely worthless. (I wasn't much impressed by the other existentialists either, but at least Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir, and Buber had something going for them.) Heidegger just came off as a pompous and insipid windbag. His devotion to Nazism seals it for me: this guy is not worth my time and energy.
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 12:06 PM on October 2, 2014 [3 favorites]
he was shunned by all the brightest and most sophisticated people he admired and longed to emulate
I had not, until today, considered a Heidegger-Nixon connection. I am in your debt, bukvich.
posted by thelonius at 12:16 PM on October 2, 2014 [6 favorites]
I had not, until today, considered a Heidegger-Nixon connection. I am in your debt, bukvich.
posted by thelonius at 12:16 PM on October 2, 2014 [6 favorites]
the philosopher is scathing in his criticism of modernity’s wayward drift, the soullessness and ahistoricity of the cosmopolitan, and the rule of technology and science.
I don't see how this is a criticism of Heidegger.
Nor this --
He was a country boy and he was shunned by all the brightest and most sophisticated people he admired and longed to emulate. The only time he was happy as an adult was in his cabin in the woods alone.
Yes, perhaps some intellectual engagement is in order rather than looking for simplistic and simple minded "explanations".
posted by Blitz at 12:31 PM on October 2, 2014 [1 favorite]
I don't see how this is a criticism of Heidegger.
Nor this --
He was a country boy and he was shunned by all the brightest and most sophisticated people he admired and longed to emulate. The only time he was happy as an adult was in his cabin in the woods alone.
Yes, perhaps some intellectual engagement is in order rather than looking for simplistic and simple minded "explanations".
posted by Blitz at 12:31 PM on October 2, 2014 [1 favorite]
His devotion to Nazism seals it for me: this guy is not worth my time and energy.
One problem is that much of European post-war philosophy (Foucault, Derrida, Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, many others) is to some extent based on his work
posted by goethean at 12:42 PM on October 2, 2014 [2 favorites]
One problem is that much of European post-war philosophy (Foucault, Derrida, Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, many others) is to some extent based on his work
posted by goethean at 12:42 PM on October 2, 2014 [2 favorites]
I definitely think moral disgust relieves professional philosophers of the obligation to read Heidegger in the first place.
I don't see how moral disgust enters into it. If he were influential in your areas of interest, then you'd be obliged to read him whether he were a Nazi windbag or a lucid saint. Since he's not influential in your areas of interest, presumably there's no particular obligation to read him anyway.
posted by twirlip at 12:57 PM on October 2, 2014 [1 favorite]
I don't see how moral disgust enters into it. If he were influential in your areas of interest, then you'd be obliged to read him whether he were a Nazi windbag or a lucid saint. Since he's not influential in your areas of interest, presumably there's no particular obligation to read him anyway.
posted by twirlip at 12:57 PM on October 2, 2014 [1 favorite]
I've been reading Being and Time a bit the last few weeks and its actually kinda amazing. His thoughts on Being are significant independent of anything he did in his personal life.
Suppose Einstein had a similar past - would that mean that General Relativity should be discarded because of that? Because that is essentially what you are saying if you say "you shouldn't read Heidegger".
posted by mary8nne at 1:12 PM on October 2, 2014 [2 favorites]
Suppose Einstein had a similar past - would that mean that General Relativity should be discarded because of that? Because that is essentially what you are saying if you say "you shouldn't read Heidegger".
posted by mary8nne at 1:12 PM on October 2, 2014 [2 favorites]
Certainly I agree that we should not abandon/shelve/excommunicate Heidegger, but on the other hand, his involvement with Nazism and anti-Semitism ran quite a bit deeper than a hypothetical about Einstein dabbling in something similar, outside of his real work, in his personal life.
posted by Sticherbeast at 1:27 PM on October 2, 2014
posted by Sticherbeast at 1:27 PM on October 2, 2014
His thoughts on Being are significant independent of anything he did in his personal life.
that may be so, but the issue with Heidegger is about what he did in public life
posted by thelonius at 1:28 PM on October 2, 2014
that may be so, but the issue with Heidegger is about what he did in public life
posted by thelonius at 1:28 PM on October 2, 2014
One problem is that much of European post-war philosophy (Foucault, Derrida, Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, many others) is to some extent based on his work
They might have eventually gotten to their work without Heidegger; to some extent, parts of his work are based on quotes from Tao Te Ching.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 1:38 PM on October 2, 2014
They might have eventually gotten to their work without Heidegger; to some extent, parts of his work are based on quotes from Tao Te Ching.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 1:38 PM on October 2, 2014
From a blog post discussing Hans Sluga's Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany:
posted by No Robots at 2:50 PM on October 2, 2014 [10 favorites]
Sluga shows that most of the prominent German philosophers who stayed in Germany after Hitler's ascent to power publicly supported Hitler and Nazi ideology. 30 German philosophers joined the Nazi Party in 1933. By 1940, almost half of Germany's academic philosophers were Nazis. But since we have forgotten that history, we give too much significance to Heidegger's Nazism as if it were an isolated case. Sluga's history shows that in fact the many German philosophers who became Nazis manifested a wide range of often conflicting philosophical positions. The common assumption that the major philosophical position supporting Nazism was some kind of moral relativism (such as Nietzschean subjective value relativism) is not correct. Many, if not most, of the Nazi philosophers--for example, Nicolai Hartmann, Bruno Bauch, Hans Heyse, Hermann Schwarz and many others in the German Philosophical Society--were Kantian idealists who assumed a metaphysical order of objective eternal values, and who argued that it was the destiny of the German nation to be rooted in that eternal order of value.The Geman-Jewish thinker Constantin Brunner was among to first to raise the alarm about the trends in German thought that he predicted in the 1920s would lead to the wholesale massacre of Jews. For his attack on Kantians specifically, see his Spinoza gegen Kant, of which I have made available an unpublished English translation here.
posted by No Robots at 2:50 PM on October 2, 2014 [10 favorites]
Suppose Einstein had a similar past - would that mean that General Relativity should be discarded because of that? Because that is essentially what you are saying if you say "you shouldn't read Heidegger".
No, that's not what I'm saying at all. I didn't say that one shouldn't read Heidegger, which would be to say that everyone has a duty to refrain from reading him. I said that one would be justified in not reading Heidegger, which is to say that one has a permission to ignore him.
Again, what I am saying in the first instance is that when someone's professional reasoning leads him or her to embrace Nazism, that is at the very least a good reason to hold that person's professional reasoning to a higher-than-normal standard. If the person exhibits really bad reasoning in an area suitably close to their professional work, then it is not unlikely that they exhibit bad reasoning in their professional work as well. And in the second instance, insofar as we have to pick and choose which people to read, and insofar as we have lots of excellent choices that aren't Nazis, we should read the people who are not Nazis and avoid reading the people who are.
To illustrate with your hypothetical, if Einstein had been a Nazi and claimed that his Nazism followed from his physical ideas, I think that we would have had excellent reason to treat his physical ideas with greater critical care, and since there were other mathematicians, physicists, and even philosophers working out very similar ideas at about the same time (e.g. Poincare, Fitzgerald, Whitehead, and others), I think one would have been justified in ignoring Einstein's work and paying attention to these other writers, instead.
But really, the analogy with Einstein is not very good. For one thing, Heidegger has nothing like the importance in philosophy that Einstein does in physics. Nowhere close. For another, Einstein's ideas have been experimentally confirmed over and over again; whereas, Heidegger's ideas, as far as I can tell, aren't even testable. My cursory familiarity with Heidegger makes me think that his work is shot through with bad and/or weak reasoning. For me, the Nazism connection is confirmatory evidence that the part of his work I have not read is not worth reading. So, I find other things to read, even though I am interested in time (which I am) and being (which I am but to a lesser degree). If anyone would like to provide me with examples of good, powerful, interesting reasoning in Heidegger, I am open to revising my opinion. But I'm not about to slog through Being and Time just to test my hypothesis that I haven't been missing much.
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 2:55 PM on October 2, 2014 [5 favorites]
No, that's not what I'm saying at all. I didn't say that one shouldn't read Heidegger, which would be to say that everyone has a duty to refrain from reading him. I said that one would be justified in not reading Heidegger, which is to say that one has a permission to ignore him.
Again, what I am saying in the first instance is that when someone's professional reasoning leads him or her to embrace Nazism, that is at the very least a good reason to hold that person's professional reasoning to a higher-than-normal standard. If the person exhibits really bad reasoning in an area suitably close to their professional work, then it is not unlikely that they exhibit bad reasoning in their professional work as well. And in the second instance, insofar as we have to pick and choose which people to read, and insofar as we have lots of excellent choices that aren't Nazis, we should read the people who are not Nazis and avoid reading the people who are.
To illustrate with your hypothetical, if Einstein had been a Nazi and claimed that his Nazism followed from his physical ideas, I think that we would have had excellent reason to treat his physical ideas with greater critical care, and since there were other mathematicians, physicists, and even philosophers working out very similar ideas at about the same time (e.g. Poincare, Fitzgerald, Whitehead, and others), I think one would have been justified in ignoring Einstein's work and paying attention to these other writers, instead.
But really, the analogy with Einstein is not very good. For one thing, Heidegger has nothing like the importance in philosophy that Einstein does in physics. Nowhere close. For another, Einstein's ideas have been experimentally confirmed over and over again; whereas, Heidegger's ideas, as far as I can tell, aren't even testable. My cursory familiarity with Heidegger makes me think that his work is shot through with bad and/or weak reasoning. For me, the Nazism connection is confirmatory evidence that the part of his work I have not read is not worth reading. So, I find other things to read, even though I am interested in time (which I am) and being (which I am but to a lesser degree). If anyone would like to provide me with examples of good, powerful, interesting reasoning in Heidegger, I am open to revising my opinion. But I'm not about to slog through Being and Time just to test my hypothesis that I haven't been missing much.
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 2:55 PM on October 2, 2014 [5 favorites]
A little bit of philosophy from Bruno Bauch suggests that it's not much defense of Heidegger to say that he was keeping company with thinkers like that.
posted by thelonius at 3:03 PM on October 2, 2014
posted by thelonius at 3:03 PM on October 2, 2014
If anyone would like to provide me with examples of good, powerful, interesting reasoning in Heidegger, I am open to revising my opinion.
There is a Hubert Dreyfus Heidegger class on the internet archive (Philosophy 185 at UCBerkeley): I have not listened to it but I plan to do so. His Internet archive Philosophy 7 Existentialism in Literature and Film I found top notch. I would link to it but the internet archive site is temporarily down.
posted by bukvich at 3:17 PM on October 2, 2014 [3 favorites]
There is a Hubert Dreyfus Heidegger class on the internet archive (Philosophy 185 at UCBerkeley): I have not listened to it but I plan to do so. His Internet archive Philosophy 7 Existentialism in Literature and Film I found top notch. I would link to it but the internet archive site is temporarily down.
posted by bukvich at 3:17 PM on October 2, 2014 [3 favorites]
But really, the analogy with Einstein is not very good. For one thing, Heidegger has nothing like the importance in philosophy that Einstein does in physics. Nowhere close. For another, Einstein's ideas have been experimentally confirmed over and over again; whereas, Heidegger's ideas, as far as I can tell, aren't even testable.
Also, Einstein was Jewish and had to flee the Nazis to stay alive. And in order to perpetuate their lies about the Jewish people, the Nazis launched an extensive propaganda campaign targeted at Einstein. So maybe this attempted analogy is not a very good one?
posted by hydropsyche at 4:47 PM on October 2, 2014 [2 favorites]
Also, Einstein was Jewish and had to flee the Nazis to stay alive. And in order to perpetuate their lies about the Jewish people, the Nazis launched an extensive propaganda campaign targeted at Einstein. So maybe this attempted analogy is not a very good one?
posted by hydropsyche at 4:47 PM on October 2, 2014 [2 favorites]
"Again, what I am saying in the first instance is that when someone's professional reasoning leads him or her to embrace Nazism, that is at the very least a good reason to hold that person's professional reasoning to a higher-than-normal standard. If the person exhibits really bad reasoning in an area suitably close to their professional work, then it is not unlikely that they exhibit bad reasoning in their professional work as well. And in the second instance, insofar as we have to pick and choose which people to read, and insofar as we have lots of excellent choices that aren't Nazis, we should read the people who are not Nazis and avoid reading the people who are."
This is an embarrassingly bad argument.
1) Nazi ideology largely came out of a post-Romantic reactionary idealism and that strain of ideology can both be examined outside of the obvious anti-Semitism. In fact, the continued use of Nazism as an ad hominem to dismiss consideration of anything connected with Nazis through an emotional appeal against the grotesque horror of the Holocaust just as often precludes us from dealing honestly with why these ideologies were attractive and what strains we still see within politics.
2) Nazism isn't relevant at all to the majority of Heidegger's major works. Heidegger does not profit in any way from people reading his works, nor does Nazism. Heidegger is indisputably a pillar of Continental philosophy and many of the alternatives (Sartre, etc.) assume a familiarity with Heidegger's work. Therefore, reading most of Heidegger's most important works does no harm and offers significant advantage over other options — you're advancing an irrational aesthetic principle as if it were a reasoned argument.
Frankly, your dismissals of him just sound like the stereotypical glibness of analytic partisans, who can be counted on to trumpet any new reason not to read Continental philosophers.
posted by klangklangston at 5:01 PM on October 2, 2014 [6 favorites]
This is an embarrassingly bad argument.
1) Nazi ideology largely came out of a post-Romantic reactionary idealism and that strain of ideology can both be examined outside of the obvious anti-Semitism. In fact, the continued use of Nazism as an ad hominem to dismiss consideration of anything connected with Nazis through an emotional appeal against the grotesque horror of the Holocaust just as often precludes us from dealing honestly with why these ideologies were attractive and what strains we still see within politics.
2) Nazism isn't relevant at all to the majority of Heidegger's major works. Heidegger does not profit in any way from people reading his works, nor does Nazism. Heidegger is indisputably a pillar of Continental philosophy and many of the alternatives (Sartre, etc.) assume a familiarity with Heidegger's work. Therefore, reading most of Heidegger's most important works does no harm and offers significant advantage over other options — you're advancing an irrational aesthetic principle as if it were a reasoned argument.
Frankly, your dismissals of him just sound like the stereotypical glibness of analytic partisans, who can be counted on to trumpet any new reason not to read Continental philosophers.
posted by klangklangston at 5:01 PM on October 2, 2014 [6 favorites]
Back to the regular topic: The blow here is new news of anti-Semitism, something that Heidegger apologists largely allowed him a pass on. He's was undoubtably venal and grasping in his professional life, but by distancing him from anti-Semitism (especially through Arendt), many of his major themes (the dehumanizing aspect of technology, especially in treating humans as resources) were available specifically to critique the Nazis. It was easy to put Nazism off as a perversion, rather than a legitimate outgrowth, of his philosophies.
But the thing is, once you get past the childish view of Nazis as HISTORY'S GREATEST MONSTERS, a lot of their self-mythologizing (especially through heroic realism) is directly in line with Heidegger's Romantic leanings. Someone upthread mentioned Einstein — a better analogy is Wagner, for whom the same mythologized cod pagan past drove many of his major artistic successes. And even then, an honest appraisal shows a lot of the appeal of the technological skepticism of Heidegger. It's the same impulse that drives impersonal corporations and governments to reduce people to numbers, even the same impulse that drives people to complain about social media supplanting face-to-face communication. It is ironic that the Nazi's mechanized death industry flourished at the same time the anti-modernist populism of heroic realism should have been elevating reverence for all people, and it would be interesting to read these new journals in that light — my sense is that what they demonstrate most clearly is that prejudice and bigotry lead to corrupt rationalizations for why Jews are exempt from being revered, something that ties in directly with Heidegger's outsized Volk nationalism and romanticism. That doesn't necessarily mean that his messages about how abstraction can lead to the inability to see others as full beings are invalid, it means that he lacked the intelligence, compassion or ethics to carry them through and more concretely grounds Heidegger in the world he lived in. He's maybe a better proxy for the German people in the '20s, '30s and '40s now that we know about the taint of anti-Semitism than he was when it was only suspected or inferred.
posted by klangklangston at 5:25 PM on October 2, 2014 [9 favorites]
But the thing is, once you get past the childish view of Nazis as HISTORY'S GREATEST MONSTERS, a lot of their self-mythologizing (especially through heroic realism) is directly in line with Heidegger's Romantic leanings. Someone upthread mentioned Einstein — a better analogy is Wagner, for whom the same mythologized cod pagan past drove many of his major artistic successes. And even then, an honest appraisal shows a lot of the appeal of the technological skepticism of Heidegger. It's the same impulse that drives impersonal corporations and governments to reduce people to numbers, even the same impulse that drives people to complain about social media supplanting face-to-face communication. It is ironic that the Nazi's mechanized death industry flourished at the same time the anti-modernist populism of heroic realism should have been elevating reverence for all people, and it would be interesting to read these new journals in that light — my sense is that what they demonstrate most clearly is that prejudice and bigotry lead to corrupt rationalizations for why Jews are exempt from being revered, something that ties in directly with Heidegger's outsized Volk nationalism and romanticism. That doesn't necessarily mean that his messages about how abstraction can lead to the inability to see others as full beings are invalid, it means that he lacked the intelligence, compassion or ethics to carry them through and more concretely grounds Heidegger in the world he lived in. He's maybe a better proxy for the German people in the '20s, '30s and '40s now that we know about the taint of anti-Semitism than he was when it was only suspected or inferred.
posted by klangklangston at 5:25 PM on October 2, 2014 [9 favorites]
Konrad Lorenz leaps to my mind as a comparison. He was real live Nazi. He was also a three-dimensional human being who did groundbreaking work in his field. It is what it is.
However, Heidegger was more of an asshole and more of an anti-Semite, and his involvement with Nazism was more related to his work. That said, Being and Time is not literally just a bunch of sketches of Hitler riding horses and hearts with "HITLER + HEIDEGGER" written in them.
So, I don't know.
posted by Sticherbeast at 6:11 PM on October 2, 2014 [1 favorite]
However, Heidegger was more of an asshole and more of an anti-Semite, and his involvement with Nazism was more related to his work. That said, Being and Time is not literally just a bunch of sketches of Hitler riding horses and hearts with "HITLER + HEIDEGGER" written in them.
So, I don't know.
posted by Sticherbeast at 6:11 PM on October 2, 2014 [1 favorite]
The weight a lot of people have put on these notebooks is, they are suppose to be the documents that answer the question about the extent of his intellectual engagement with Nazism. However deep that may be though (assuming he wasn't secretly in the SS or something), I think the idea of some broad moral interdiction against teaching Heidegger is misguided. As a few people have said above, you can't read basically the whole late 20th century of French or German philosophy without understanding Heidegger. The egg cannot be extracted from the cake, and students will need to study him.
The topic of the troubling relationship between his philosophy and Nazism is just going to have to be taught too. The Heideggerians in France tried to completely discredit Frias' book, where this all first came to light, iirc, and there has been, among some people, an ongoing unwillingness to face up to all this, an eagerness to write it off as a compromise or flirtation. According to what people are saying about these new texts, that should be finished now.
posted by thelonius at 6:28 PM on October 2, 2014 [2 favorites]
The topic of the troubling relationship between his philosophy and Nazism is just going to have to be taught too. The Heideggerians in France tried to completely discredit Frias' book, where this all first came to light, iirc, and there has been, among some people, an ongoing unwillingness to face up to all this, an eagerness to write it off as a compromise or flirtation. According to what people are saying about these new texts, that should be finished now.
posted by thelonius at 6:28 PM on October 2, 2014 [2 favorites]
It isn't so much the crime, but the coverup. I mean, we knew he was a moral coward because of the way he treated his associates and compromised his academic position so that he could suck up to Nazis, but we thought he was an essentially-good (or at least neutral) person whose weakness and venality led him to betray his principles. Now we learn that he was a bad person whose weakness and venality, etc. As for his philosophical works, they don't exist in a vacuum; they have to be at least somewhat tainted by the question of what Heidegger really thought.
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:58 PM on October 2, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:58 PM on October 2, 2014 [1 favorite]
"As for his philosophical works, they don't exist in a vacuum; they have to be at least somewhat tainted by the question of what Heidegger really thought."
How so? What impact do you think the confirmation of his anti-Semitism has on his philosophy?
posted by klangklangston at 7:44 PM on October 2, 2014
How so? What impact do you think the confirmation of his anti-Semitism has on his philosophy?
posted by klangklangston at 7:44 PM on October 2, 2014
we knew he was a moral coward because of the way he treated his associates
Husserl...
And I think Thelonius hits the sweet spot: teach the ideas and the context.
posted by CincyBlues at 7:49 PM on October 2, 2014 [1 favorite]
Husserl...
And I think Thelonius hits the sweet spot: teach the ideas and the context.
posted by CincyBlues at 7:49 PM on October 2, 2014 [1 favorite]
From the blurb for Historical destiny and national socialism in Heidegger's "Being and Time," by Johannes Fritsche:
posted by No Robots at 7:52 PM on October 2, 2014 [3 favorites]
There has been much debate over the relationship of Heidegger's philosophy—in particular his book Being and Time—to his practical involvement with National Socialism. Yet the question has never been addressed through a comparison of Being and Time with other texts on history and politics written at the time. Johannes Fritsche does this, providing a detailed interpretation of the relevant passages in Being and Time--especially sections 72-77 on fate, community, and society. He analyzes for comparison two other authors who explicitly regarded themselves as rightists—Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf) and Max Scheler (Formalism in Ethics and other writings)—and two authors on the left—Georg Lukacs (History and Class Consciousness) and Paul Tillich (The Socialist Decision).From a Brunnerian perspective, Heidegger is a perfect exemplar of Volkisch thinking, presenting crude group egoism disguised as high culture.
Fritsche concludes that Being and Time is a brilliant summary of right-wing politics in general, which proposes the destruction of liberal society in order to regenerate an idealized community. In addition, Heidegger rejects positions on the right, such as Scheler's, that enabled their authors to distance themselves from the most extreme political rightists, and thus he paves the way for National Socialism. Being and Time, Fritsche demonstrates, must be seen as a clear case for the National Socialists and their project of revitalization of the Volksgemeinschaft, the community of the people.
posted by No Robots at 7:52 PM on October 2, 2014 [3 favorites]
One problem is that much of European post-war philosophy (Foucault, Derrida, Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, many others) is to some extent based on his work.
OK, so just discard them all, and start over from scratch. It'll give Philosophy professors something to do.
Look, when experimental evidence in physics showed that the lumiferous ether theory was wrong, all the work done by physicists based on that theory had to be discarded. In biology, when theories such as Eugenics or Scientific Racism were found to be horribly tainted, they were discarded. Can't we exect similar rigor from philosophy?
posted by happyroach at 11:19 PM on October 2, 2014
OK, so just discard them all, and start over from scratch. It'll give Philosophy professors something to do.
Look, when experimental evidence in physics showed that the lumiferous ether theory was wrong, all the work done by physicists based on that theory had to be discarded. In biology, when theories such as Eugenics or Scientific Racism were found to be horribly tainted, they were discarded. Can't we exect similar rigor from philosophy?
posted by happyroach at 11:19 PM on October 2, 2014
What impact do you think the confirmation of his anti-Semitism has on his philosophy?
It honestly isn't so much the fact that he was an anti-Semite. It's more the fact that he had all these opinions that he kept hidden. It makes me wonder about his intellectual integrity, not just his moral integrity: to what extent was his philosophy shaped by a need to be "in" with the developments of National Socialism?
posted by Joe in Australia at 12:43 AM on October 3, 2014
It honestly isn't so much the fact that he was an anti-Semite. It's more the fact that he had all these opinions that he kept hidden. It makes me wonder about his intellectual integrity, not just his moral integrity: to what extent was his philosophy shaped by a need to be "in" with the developments of National Socialism?
posted by Joe in Australia at 12:43 AM on October 3, 2014
Look, when experimental evidence in physics showed that the lumiferous ether theory was wrong, all the work done by physicists based on that theory had to be discarded. In biology, when theories such as Eugenics or Scientific Racism were found to be horribly tainted, they were discarded. Can't we exect similar rigor from philosophy?
But just because someone is bad doesn't mean their work is invalid. This isn't like depending on lumiferous ether, it's like saying Werner Von Braun was a Nazi so we should completely abandon rocket science.
posted by Elementary Penguin at 2:22 AM on October 3, 2014
But just because someone is bad doesn't mean their work is invalid. This isn't like depending on lumiferous ether, it's like saying Werner Von Braun was a Nazi so we should completely abandon rocket science.
posted by Elementary Penguin at 2:22 AM on October 3, 2014
It honestly isn't so much the fact that he was an anti-Semite. It's more the fact that he had all these opinions that he kept hidden. It makes me wonder about his intellectual integrity, not just his moral integrity: to what extent was his philosophy shaped by a need to be "in" with the developments of National Socialism?
Joe, I'm honestly a little surprised that you seem to be casting Heidegger's anti-Semitism (and other Nazi sympathies) as coming from a merely cynical place! To me, it looks as if he really did believe in what he was writing - it's just that, as the Nazis fell, he was smart enough to keep tight-lipped about much of it. (He also did break off philosophically from the Nazis, but not for reasons that we would find especially admirable.)
...
My thing with Heidegger and Nazism is that there are two extreme positions, both of which we should reject. The first position is to either deny that Heidegger was a Nazi and an anti-Semite, or to say that, yes, maybe he was, but let's pretend that this never shows up in his work. The second position is to say that, since he really had been a Nazi and an anti-Semite, then the whole thing just stinks of it, and his work should be entirely discredited/shelved/etc.
It does not take away from the evil of Nazism to recognize that Heidegger's otherwise worthwhile work was oftentimes simpatico with it. Granted, that commonality was almost always more in the vein of what klangklangston and others are talking about, but it's important to recognize nonetheless. It's just another thing that we have to deal with.
In general, I think it stilts these kinds of conversations to Otherize people with evil beliefs, whether it's related to the Nazis or whomever. Ironically, I would otherwise cite Hannah Arendt here...
...
Two more people this mishigas reminds me of: Julius Evola and Nick Land.
The Nick Land thing to me is especially striking, because it's another case where somebody who had once seemed like a brilliant, if obscure thinker turned out to also have opinions which were not only wrong, but fucking stupid. Take the abstruse with a grain of salt...
posted by Sticherbeast at 3:08 AM on October 3, 2014
Joe, I'm honestly a little surprised that you seem to be casting Heidegger's anti-Semitism (and other Nazi sympathies) as coming from a merely cynical place! To me, it looks as if he really did believe in what he was writing - it's just that, as the Nazis fell, he was smart enough to keep tight-lipped about much of it. (He also did break off philosophically from the Nazis, but not for reasons that we would find especially admirable.)
...
My thing with Heidegger and Nazism is that there are two extreme positions, both of which we should reject. The first position is to either deny that Heidegger was a Nazi and an anti-Semite, or to say that, yes, maybe he was, but let's pretend that this never shows up in his work. The second position is to say that, since he really had been a Nazi and an anti-Semite, then the whole thing just stinks of it, and his work should be entirely discredited/shelved/etc.
It does not take away from the evil of Nazism to recognize that Heidegger's otherwise worthwhile work was oftentimes simpatico with it. Granted, that commonality was almost always more in the vein of what klangklangston and others are talking about, but it's important to recognize nonetheless. It's just another thing that we have to deal with.
In general, I think it stilts these kinds of conversations to Otherize people with evil beliefs, whether it's related to the Nazis or whomever. Ironically, I would otherwise cite Hannah Arendt here...
...
Two more people this mishigas reminds me of: Julius Evola and Nick Land.
The Nick Land thing to me is especially striking, because it's another case where somebody who had once seemed like a brilliant, if obscure thinker turned out to also have opinions which were not only wrong, but fucking stupid. Take the abstruse with a grain of salt...
posted by Sticherbeast at 3:08 AM on October 3, 2014
I'm grasping to find the real problem here.... lemme try
A horrible person has good work that is praiseworthy and eagerly transmitted to others.
We fear that praise for the work gets garbled in transmission, and sublimates into praise for the person.
Praise for the person may lend credit to horrible ideas the person also carries in his/her portfolio.
The horrible ideas then also spread in a parasitic manner, gaining status as not-so-horrible ideas borrowing social status from the credibility of the good work.
Examples: Heidegger, Mircea Eliade, Henry Ford, Curt Schilling, etc.
It is a valid fear, and what we really need is a vehicle for easily transmittable asterisks in these cases.
posted by drowsy at 5:25 AM on October 3, 2014
A horrible person has good work that is praiseworthy and eagerly transmitted to others.
We fear that praise for the work gets garbled in transmission, and sublimates into praise for the person.
Praise for the person may lend credit to horrible ideas the person also carries in his/her portfolio.
The horrible ideas then also spread in a parasitic manner, gaining status as not-so-horrible ideas borrowing social status from the credibility of the good work.
Examples: Heidegger, Mircea Eliade, Henry Ford, Curt Schilling, etc.
It is a valid fear, and what we really need is a vehicle for easily transmittable asterisks in these cases.
posted by drowsy at 5:25 AM on October 3, 2014
"(He also did break off philosophically from the Nazis, but not for reasons that we would find especially admirable.)"
He was philosophically opposed to digging ditches.
"It does not take away from the evil of Nazism to recognize that Heidegger's otherwise worthwhile work was oftentimes simpatico with it."
A decent example here might be Ezra Pound, whose work is also tainted by fascism, but who is also a major figure in modernist poetry.
"Look, when experimental evidence in physics showed that the lumiferous ether theory was wrong, all the work done by physicists based on that theory had to be discarded. In biology, when theories such as Eugenics or Scientific Racism were found to be horribly tainted, they were discarded. Can't we exect similar rigor from philosophy?"
You know that medical research from the Holocaust, anatomical research in particular, is still used, right?
posted by klangklangston at 9:02 AM on October 3, 2014
He was philosophically opposed to digging ditches.
"It does not take away from the evil of Nazism to recognize that Heidegger's otherwise worthwhile work was oftentimes simpatico with it."
A decent example here might be Ezra Pound, whose work is also tainted by fascism, but who is also a major figure in modernist poetry.
"Look, when experimental evidence in physics showed that the lumiferous ether theory was wrong, all the work done by physicists based on that theory had to be discarded. In biology, when theories such as Eugenics or Scientific Racism were found to be horribly tainted, they were discarded. Can't we exect similar rigor from philosophy?"
You know that medical research from the Holocaust, anatomical research in particular, is still used, right?
posted by klangklangston at 9:02 AM on October 3, 2014
OK, so just discard them all, and start over from scratch. It'll give Philosophy professors something to do.
You can't do this, because philosophers (unlike scientists) don't pretend that the history of their field of study is irrelevant.
posted by goethean at 11:53 AM on October 3, 2014
You can't do this, because philosophers (unlike scientists) don't pretend that the history of their field of study is irrelevant.
posted by goethean at 11:53 AM on October 3, 2014
Heidigger, Heidigger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the table.
posted by Mental Wimp at 2:32 PM on October 3, 2014
Who could think you under the table.
posted by Mental Wimp at 2:32 PM on October 3, 2014
Ezra Pound is an interesting analogy because huge chunks of his later stuff is completely ruined by his awful and stupid political beliefs. I mean, Pound was an incredible craftsman of poetry, but in his later years he was larding everything he wrote with hateful idiocy. The question with Heidegger is whether his reprehensible political beliefs similarly became part of his work.
I don't know enough about Heidegger to say for sure, but his central insight for me was always that Plato's idealism was a deeply weird idea that should be a questioned. That was a radical thought and opened up many new avenues for philosophy. But as far as I can tell, Derrida had a much better answer to that problem than Heidegger. Derrida dismantled hierarchies, but Heidegger wanted to create new hierarchies. Like the Nazis (and all other revolutionaries).
I'm not at all claiming that there's a one-to-one relationship between nazism and Heidegger's thought, but I can understand why it appealed to him. Both wanted to make a better Germany and, this is where they agreed, a better Germany meant a better world. But ultimately what Heidegger wanted and what the Nazi leaders wanted were radically different things. I think what I find most disturbing is the feeling that Heidegger would have felt that his revolution was worth any price.
posted by Kattullus at 3:23 PM on October 3, 2014 [1 favorite]
I don't know enough about Heidegger to say for sure, but his central insight for me was always that Plato's idealism was a deeply weird idea that should be a questioned. That was a radical thought and opened up many new avenues for philosophy. But as far as I can tell, Derrida had a much better answer to that problem than Heidegger. Derrida dismantled hierarchies, but Heidegger wanted to create new hierarchies. Like the Nazis (and all other revolutionaries).
I'm not at all claiming that there's a one-to-one relationship between nazism and Heidegger's thought, but I can understand why it appealed to him. Both wanted to make a better Germany and, this is where they agreed, a better Germany meant a better world. But ultimately what Heidegger wanted and what the Nazi leaders wanted were radically different things. I think what I find most disturbing is the feeling that Heidegger would have felt that his revolution was worth any price.
posted by Kattullus at 3:23 PM on October 3, 2014 [1 favorite]
"But as far as I can tell, Derrida had a much better answer to that problem than Heidegger. Derrida dismantled hierarchies, but Heidegger wanted to create new hierarchies. Like the Nazis (and all other revolutionaries)."
"Deconstruction" and "sous rature" are both Heidegger phrases and Derrida was influential in rehabilitating Heidegger's reputation as an important philosopher after the Nazi charges. Derrida argued that you couldn't do without Heidegger and that Sartre had wrongly reduced Heideggerian concepts in Being and Nothingness. Derrida even rejected the 1987 Nazi claims about Heidegger.
posted by klangklangston at 4:51 PM on October 3, 2014 [1 favorite]
"Deconstruction" and "sous rature" are both Heidegger phrases and Derrida was influential in rehabilitating Heidegger's reputation as an important philosopher after the Nazi charges. Derrida argued that you couldn't do without Heidegger and that Sartre had wrongly reduced Heideggerian concepts in Being and Nothingness. Derrida even rejected the 1987 Nazi claims about Heidegger.
posted by klangklangston at 4:51 PM on October 3, 2014 [1 favorite]
You know that medical research from the Holocaust, anatomical research in particular, is still used, right?
Mengele was a bad scientist and a bad doctor. He was a bad scientist because his assumptions were insane and unquestioned and he was looking for evidence to support them rather than let the results lead to the conclusion; He was a bad doctor because he tortured people to death.
But who would get the funding for those experiments these days?
posted by Grangousier at 5:53 PM on October 3, 2014
Mengele was a bad scientist and a bad doctor. He was a bad scientist because his assumptions were insane and unquestioned and he was looking for evidence to support them rather than let the results lead to the conclusion; He was a bad doctor because he tortured people to death.
But who would get the funding for those experiments these days?
posted by Grangousier at 5:53 PM on October 3, 2014
You know that medical research from the Holocaust, anatomical research in particular, is still used, right?
As a matter of fact, I was told in my training for institutional review board service that that research is not being used and that use of it would be unethical according to current thinking. Do you have some specific studies that you are referring to?
posted by Mental Wimp at 2:22 PM on October 4, 2014
As a matter of fact, I was told in my training for institutional review board service that that research is not being used and that use of it would be unethical according to current thinking. Do you have some specific studies that you are referring to?
posted by Mental Wimp at 2:22 PM on October 4, 2014
Illustrations from the Pernkopf atlas are still used in some anatomy textbooks, and some professors of surgery and anatomy still recommend it. Everyone involved knows that it's based on the bodies of Holocaust victims.
posted by klangklangston at 4:44 PM on October 4, 2014
posted by klangklangston at 4:44 PM on October 4, 2014
The corpses used in the atlas were not Holocaust victims per se; they were people executed within the German judicial system. It was an evil regime and they gave no consent to the use of their bodies, but (a) they weren't killed in order to prepare the atlas; and (b) the laws under which they were killed (in contrast to the decrees establishing the death camps) were not necessarily crimes against humanity.
posted by Joe in Australia at 9:29 PM on October 4, 2014
posted by Joe in Australia at 9:29 PM on October 4, 2014
You can't do this, because philosophers (unlike scientists) don't pretend that the history of their field of study is irrelevant.
Well, philosophers are eclectic enough that you can find some for whom this isn't true. Wittgenstein was uninterested in reading the history of philosophy, for example. And even philosophers who (like Heidegger) had studied the subject deeply, often begin by announcing that it's time to pitch out everything that has come before and rethink everything from the beginning. Which is what they are supposed to do, I guess, or what they were supposed to do.
posted by thelonius at 2:36 AM on October 5, 2014
Well, philosophers are eclectic enough that you can find some for whom this isn't true. Wittgenstein was uninterested in reading the history of philosophy, for example. And even philosophers who (like Heidegger) had studied the subject deeply, often begin by announcing that it's time to pitch out everything that has come before and rethink everything from the beginning. Which is what they are supposed to do, I guess, or what they were supposed to do.
posted by thelonius at 2:36 AM on October 5, 2014
Everyone involved knows that it's based on the bodies of Holocaust victims.
Not judging you, kk, but I'm somewhat skeptical of claims like this, even by well educated people. I'd be quite wealthy if I had a dollar for every thing every doctor knew that turned out to be false when actually tested in a rigorous trial.
posted by Mental Wimp at 5:08 PM on October 5, 2014
Not judging you, kk, but I'm somewhat skeptical of claims like this, even by well educated people. I'd be quite wealthy if I had a dollar for every thing every doctor knew that turned out to be false when actually tested in a rigorous trial.
posted by Mental Wimp at 5:08 PM on October 5, 2014
There was a FPP on the Pernkopf Atlas last year.
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:04 PM on October 5, 2014
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:04 PM on October 5, 2014
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