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The Heidegger Question
November 9, 2009 7:58 PM Subscribe

In [a recent] essay titled Heil Heidegger! Carlin Romano, a critic for The Chronicle Review, called Heidegger a “Black Forest babbler” and fraud who was “overrated in his prime” and “bizarrely venerated by acolytes even now.” As the NYT noted yesterday, the publication in English of a recent French book on the by now familiar controversy about Heidegger's Nazism is re-igniting an old debate about the influential philosopher's politics.
posted by HP LaserJet P10006 (143 comments total) 10 users marked this as a favorite

He was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table.
posted by mark242 at 8:07 PM on November 9, 2009 [5 favorites]

I once had a suspicion Heidegger read a lot of Tao Te Ching and translated its philosophical ideas into German, calling it his own. Unoriginality is often a worse sin for historical figures, in the long run, than criminal conspiracy with fascist governments. I suspect he'll be contemned either way.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 8:10 PM on November 9, 2009 [1 favorite]

Hmm, I have only touched on Heidegger through hermeneutics and thus as a sidenote to people like Husserl and the Frankfurt School (if not his opposite, at least very different), so I don't feel qualified to comment on the merits of his (typically Germanica, shithouse-ily written) philosophies.

Nonetheless, the idea that someone is incapable of having both good and bad ideas, or indeed even incapable of provoking interesting dialogues despite being kinda shit(in deed or thought) strikes me as a bit... well a bit pointless really. I'm not so interested in what Heidegger had to say and its rightness, as to how useful a lens it is through which to interpret my world, or interact with other discourses (doing, not being as the big H himself might say). But of course, I would say that, being the hopeless, phenomenological ,hermeneutics-loving, relativist commie I am.
posted by smoke at 8:19 PM on November 9, 2009 [3 favorites]

The "debate" over Heidegger is nothing new. People like to fancy themselves contrarians for denouncing him as a Nazi (which he was obviously) but also ZOMG A BAD PHILOSOPHER!!!

Not sure why people keep falling for it. He hasn't been taken seriously in philosophy departments for a very long time, with some notable exceptions of contra-contrarians trying to ignite their careers by saying similarly outrageous things about his genius.
posted by bardic at 8:21 PM on November 9, 2009 [1 favorite]

supposed genius, that is
posted by bardic at 8:21 PM on November 9, 2009

Yes, Bardic. Philosopher and Heidegger scholar Iain T. in the first comment of the article puts it better than both of us:

"This is terrible! Romano seems totally ignorant about Heidegger's massive influence in continental philosophy, and about how critical much of that philosophy already is of Heidegger!"
posted by smoke at 8:36 PM on November 9, 2009

Not sure why people keep falling for it. He hasn't been taken seriously in philosophy departments for a very long time

Well that's just fucking ignorant. And not at all true.

Jesus Christ. This is a stupid post, for so many reasons. Please read Heidegger and then we can have an interesting conversation about his, yes, interesting ideas. All of these links are a bunch of wannabe intellectuals who are embarrassing themselves.
posted by Lutoslawski at 8:37 PM on November 9, 2009 [6 favorites]

He hasn't been taken seriously in philosophy departments for a very long time

That's not true at all. His work remains extremely influential, widely read, and widely commented upon; his influence has even entered into analytic philosophy to some small degree. The secondary literature on all aspects of his corpus grows every year, and there are still a lot of graduate students all over the world who are writing dissertations on him. Even if one considers him overrated (as I do), his status as a major philosopher is undeniable.

If Heidegger had never written anything besides Sein und Zeit (published in 1927, or six years before his association with Nazism), his place in the modern philosophical pantheon would have been assured.

It's worth remembering that the bulk of his work is not in any way overtly political. While I find his politics reprehensible, the very fact that Arendt, Jaspers, Celan and other Jewish intellectuals found, and others continue to find, much to admire in his work means that the question of the relation between his philosophy and his politics is not easy to pigeonhole.

Fwiw, my own view falls somewhere between dismissing all of his work outright (which to me would be dogmatic and uncalled for), and bending over backwards to apologize for his politics (the very topic can itself be philosophically fruitful).
posted by HP LaserJet P10006 at 8:38 PM on November 9, 2009 [3 favorites]

a bunch of wannabe intellectuals

No they're not: Wolin, for one, is very evenhanded on this topic, and he studied with Gadamer besides.
posted by HP LaserJet P10006 at 8:39 PM on November 9, 2009

Nonetheless, the idea that someone is incapable of having both good and bad ideas, or indeed even incapable of provoking interesting dialogues despite being kinda shit(in deed or thought) strikes me as a bit... well a bit pointless really.

This. This a thousand times. I call it the Phil Spector Phenomenon, because invariably in every conversation about Spector's murder, someone always chimes in with "AND he's talentless, AND he fucked up Let It Be!" Like murdering a young woman isn't enough reason to hate the guy, we need to pick over his musical career too.
posted by middleclasstool at 8:46 PM on November 9, 2009

No they're not: Wolin, for one, is very evenhanded on this topic, and he studied with Gadamer besides.

Oh fucking hurf durf. I studied with a bunch of famous philosophers too. Gadamer is awesome; it doesn't follow that all of his students are. Did you miss logic 101? Sure, so-and-so studied with the father of hermeneutics. Whatever. Alexander the Great studied with Aristotle.

What I'm trying to say is that the links on this post really do nothing but contribute to the undermining of what is actually a deep, interesting philosophical system. Sure his politics were strange at times, but that shouldn't give pseudo-intellectuals license to render a genius's philosophy inert by way of misunderstanding, misconstruing and downright ignorance.

None of this gives Heidegger his due. That's all.
posted by Lutoslawski at 8:50 PM on November 9, 2009 [1 favorite]

Once, my undergrad theatre group put on Kate Fodor's Hannah and Martin, about Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, as our school's Reunions show. The show was followed by the traditional singing of the school song, which features a synchronized arm-extended salute.

...man, that was awkward.
posted by ilana at 8:54 PM on November 9, 2009 [5 favorites]

middleclasstool it doesn't need a new name it's called ad hominem
posted by bhnyc at 8:56 PM on November 9, 2009

Carlin Romano, the author of the first link simultaneously seems to generally know his philosophy and at the same time seems to be stuck in criticism world. Reading his wiki makes me appreciate how much he must have crammed in his head, all so he can be snotty in as many ways as possible. Trying to reduce Heidegger down to a few paragraphs and say how you feel about it is as valid as "That Shakespeare chap sure knew how to write eh?" And frankly Romano's writing style makes me instinctively want to dismiss him as a blowhard and give hima major dope slap.
posted by edgeways at 8:56 PM on November 9, 2009

The Evil of Banality: Troubling new revelations about Arendt and Heidegger

That's actually not the article I was looking for ... one also published about a week ago but much more personal, i.e. "I studied Heidegger and here's why all this Hitler nonsense is generally bunk". Not sure where, but I suppose it'll pop up in this thread soon enough.
posted by intermod at 8:57 PM on November 9, 2009

Lutoslawski--have you read Wolin's work on this subject? I suspect not, because anyone who reads it will aprreciate that Wolin is not simply dismissing Heidegger: far from it (furthermore, Wolin has written some really insightful stuff on intellectuals and politics in general). The Romano piece is completely over the top, so I'm with you on that. But there's been a lot philosophically provocative work on Heidegger's politics. I have no idea if the Faye book falls into that category, but the whole defensive "OMG we can't talk about this subject at all: I'm not listening" approach is silly. This is not necessarily an either/or question. It's a complicated subject.
posted by HP LaserJet P10006 at 8:57 PM on November 9, 2009 [2 favorites]

I too have leafed through a small volume of Heidegger's pithy sayings in a bookstore.
posted by turgid dahlia at 9:00 PM on November 9, 2009 [2 favorites]

middleclasstool it doesn't need a new name it's called ad hominem

I'm familiar with ad hom, yeah, but the reaction to Heidegger doesn't really seem to me to do better than aspire to ad hominem, which at least makes an attempt at looking like an argument. With Heidegger, it looks more like just moral self-satisfaction.
posted by middleclasstool at 9:05 PM on November 9, 2009

Not to be glib, but anyone who thinks that Heidegger's politics might in any way invalidate Heidegger's philosophy has frankly not read enough...Heidegger.
posted by jefficator at 9:15 PM on November 9, 2009 [4 favorites]

"The Heidegger exposés, like Annie Leibovitz's tasteless photos of partner Susan Sontag in the latter's final battle against cancer..."

There's not room enough in the biggest bucket I can find for all of the cocks Carlin Romano earned with this shitty, smirking little unnecessary backhand. What an assflower.
posted by mountain_william at 9:29 PM on November 9, 2009 [3 favorites]

"Sure his politics were strange at times"

Understatement.

I studied with Richard Rorty myself, so I guess I'm biased. But it's not at all uncommon for much more, shall we say "open-minded" philosophers to dismiss Heidegger out of hand for being incomprehensible at best, and an outright quack at worst.

And this is before you get to the Nazi stuff.
posted by bardic at 9:41 PM on November 9, 2009

Brian Leiter's take on Romano's article.
posted by jayder at 9:47 PM on November 9, 2009

Here's a book related to some of my comments above.

Fwiw, an even more problematic case than Heidegger is that of Carl Schmitt, since he wrote about politics directly and his involvement in Nazism was far more involved. Like Heidegger (and for that matter Hegel), Schmitt's work has found a sympathetic audience with both left-leaning and right-leaning intellectuals.
posted by HP LaserJet P10006 at 9:55 PM on November 9, 2009

If the nothing noths, does the something soth?
posted by Wash Jones at 10:00 PM on November 9, 2009 [2 favorites]

I just wanted to record my gratitude that Heidegger is being discussed in the Blue before I launch into any drunken tirades on either side of the (so-called) "Heidegger Question." Depending on my mood ("stimmung," to be fair), I find his approach and conclusions (?) profound or maddening or glib or significant. Or some combination thereof. At minimum, he gets me thinking, which I suppose is the point. Anyways, before I go any further, if I do: thanks for the post and the links and the opportunity for discussion. And I mean that sincerely. Authentically, even.
posted by joe lisboa at 10:10 PM on November 9, 2009

Aah, the lovely Richard Wolin: justly famous for publishing an unauthorised translation of one of Derrida's works, and then having Thomas Sheehan clucking like the Black Knight about its existence and fidelity in the NYRB.

"I knows me some French. Heck, I've even got a *dictionary*, and that's some pretty noice French my buddy RW's got goin' there. Sure, there's a few words per page that might be a bit off-kilter, but that JD guy's not going to mind a sorta slovenly translation that he doesn't actually know about. Is he now? Anyway, here's an example to show you just how good my French is... "

"What's that? Speak up, I can't hear you, my fingers are in my ears. And you're all wrong (+) (Except, umm, about the bit to do with my poor translation, unfortunately)."

Now there's an episode worthy of failblog, and Wolin's contributions to the episode shine a rather sad light on his meager understanding of deconstruction ("you claim that the author is dead, and now you're talking about my translation being unauthorised: huzzah!"). See Derrida's "Points" for the long version. Ah, but this is about Heidegger, isn't it... Isn't it?

(+) Of course Sheehan gets the final, nastiest word on the subject, in true NYRB vs Derrida tradition.
posted by pjm at 10:23 PM on November 9, 2009

in 50 years time people will still talk about Heidegger, even if it is to continue the "debate", and no one will remember Romano
posted by edgeways at 10:37 PM on November 9, 2009

pjm--Thanks for the derail; I remember that kerfuffle; the issue of translation aside, Derrida came off as an absolute ass in that incident, and one can only surmise it stemmed from his own inability to grapple with the question of his master's politics: the very subject was verboten. But I don't blame Heidegger for the cult he created; a lot has changed since the early 1990s: for one, Heidegger scholars are not nearly so sensitive, and many of them are able now to actually talk openly and frankly about Heidegger's Nazism without retreating (as Deridda did) into out-and-out denial.
posted by HP LaserJet P10006 at 10:38 PM on November 9, 2009

I tend to associate philosophy departments with a conservative (not in the political sense, but in the traditional sense) attitude compared with the more volatile literature departments. But thinking back to my undergraduate days, I clearly remember that my exposure to academic philosophy was very much informed by the personal leanings of those philosophy profs. I mean, there was some noticeably nutball crap that passed for literary theory, but at the same time even the most "out there" English professors seemed interested in at least explaining something like New Criticism to you before they tried to tell you it was complete bullshit and that you really needed to catch up with feminist theory, cultural studies, deconstruction, or some other contemporary theoretical trend.

But in my experience it was the philosophy professors at my reputable institution who felt completely comfortable telling you simply not to bother with a given individual philosopher, line of inquiry, or entire school of thought. Not all of them, certainly, but to me it seemed like many of them had found their little niche/pedantic foxhole and simply wanted to keep digging deeper. This is typical academic behavior of course, but IMO the English department tried to not only stay abreast of breaking trends (for better or for worse) but also convince you that to understand the new movements you had to acquaint yourselves with the older ones.

So maybe I should have spent more time with Heidegger before concluding he was a joke as a philosopher (and a piece of shit as a human being, obviously). But I think the author of the piece at least understands (albeit maybe in a far too flippant manner) that many philosophers today continue to attribute some vague significance to the man that doesn't really hold up under scrutiny. There's a mood and a tone to his work that still resonates, but those sorts of literary conventions are probably best left to poets and novelists.

And while I didn't study with Rorty until graduate school, his summation of Heidegger says it best IMO: a "myth of being, not an account of it" (quoting losely, most of my books are currently on the other side of the world).
posted by bardic at 11:50 PM on November 9, 2009 [1 favorite]

Tom Sheehan is the gentleman responsible for having taught me Marxism, Hegelianism, and (in a way) philosophy per se. I will not tolerate snide side-swipes at his intellectual acumen from anonymous e-snipers, if that in fact is what's going on here.
posted by joe lisboa at 11:59 PM on November 9, 2009

I will not tolerate snide side-swipes at his intellectual acumen from anonymous e-snipers, if that in fact is what's going on here.

Oh, well then.
posted by maledictory at 12:14 AM on November 10, 2009

Oh, well then.

Well argued, grasshopper.
posted by joe lisboa at 12:15 AM on November 10, 2009

Please read Heidegger and then we can have an interesting conversation about his, yes, interesting ideas.

Have you read Heidegger in German? And if so, how do you rate the translation of his ideas into English; or French for that matter. Are those the same ideas -- even while much of what he says is a kind of wordplay only possible in German? Do you think something got lost in the translation? Do you think something was added?

Which Heidegger have you read?
posted by ijsbrand at 12:36 AM on November 10, 2009 [3 favorites]

Heidegger was a deep thinker; really, in some ways a frustrated poet. I don't always agree with him, and didn't appreciate his politics. He was a complex guy. A fraud? I don't think so. He was touching on something that ironically circles around to Eastern ways of thought. What he was trying to get at, in words, was essentially an experiential phenomenon, like prayer or meditation. Heidegger lived that phenomenon in a highly idiosynchratic way. I made myself plow through some of his writing in English; it was like reading an obscure, subjective prayer. Keiji Nishitani studied with Heidegger; rough going, but there's something inside both their oeuvres that's moving. It takes a lot of work to put oneself in their frame of mind/intention. I don't think I could do it again, but I did learn something - something ineffable.
posted by Vibrissae at 3:08 AM on November 10, 2009 [2 favorites]

If you amend bardic's statement to say that Heidegger isn't taken seriously in analytic philosophy departments, then he's definitely right. Analytic departments have the occasional Dreyfus or Haugeland plumping for Heidegger, but by and large, Heidegger's treated as the butt of jokes about bad philosophy.

It seem to me that if your job is to sit around thinking about stuff and disagreeing or commenting on the thoughts of other people in a similar profession, it doesn't make all that much sense to get all outraged about the fact that you disagree with one of them.

I like this point. But of course, there's disagreeing and then there's disagreeing.
posted by painquale at 4:25 AM on November 10, 2009 [1 favorite]

It seem to me that if your job is to sit around thinking about stuff and disagreeing or commenting on the thoughts of other people in a similar profession, it doesn't make all that much sense to get all outraged about the fact that you disagree with one of them.

Surely this is just the natural human impulse towards the heroic? How many pudgy middle managers have "business" books with the word "warrior" or "war" in the title? Many, because no-one thinks of themselves as a boring regional-manager-for-gidget-sales type. This kind of "violent" disagreement is the academic equivalent. We all want to be the heroes of our own stories, and an epic philosophical feud is the kind of stuff that gets the blood flowing.
posted by atrazine at 4:56 AM on November 10, 2009 [1 favorite]

I recently heard a very funny story that may not even be true, but I'll tell it, anyway.

Allegedly the book Heidegger's Hut, an architectural critique of the cabin where Heidegger retreated to work, is based on the wrong cabin. The photographs and the criticism are apparently the wrong hut, or at least so say some Heidegger scholars I met last weekend.

The reason this might not be true is because there's a tradition in Heidegger scholarship of misrecognizing the subjects of art and literature. Famously, Heidegger himself wrote a long portion of a famous essay ("Origins of the Work of Art") on a van Gogh painting of a pair of shoes, thinking that the shoe's belonged to a peasant woman, when in fact they were the artist's own. So it could just be a kind of scholarly urban myth, with the audience already primed to believe these kinds of basic failures are common-place. There are enough people alive who visited him in the cabin to say for sure, but they're not talking.
posted by anotherpanacea at 5:06 AM on November 10, 2009 [1 favorite]

All of these links are a bunch of wannabe intellectuals who are embarrassing themselves

I'd bet Yale University Press basically only prints books by wannabe intellectuals. They're a well-know repository of posers.
posted by Ironmouth at 6:00 AM on November 10, 2009

While I find his politics reprehensible, the very fact that Arendt, Jaspers, Celan and other Jewish intellectuals found, and others continue to find, much to admire in his work means that the question of the relation between his philosophy and his politics is not easy to pigeonhole.

Perhaps Hannah Arendt was a less than neutral observer, no?

The last time I discussed Heidegger was with a 21-year old in a bar while acting as wingman for my friend, who was quite smitten with her companion. The good wingman as I was, as an old man, I found it hard to relate. Learning she was still in college, I fell back on that old staple, "what's your major?" Philosophy, she said. I asked her what philosophers she was into and she answered "Heiddegger." As a former German history graduate student I couldn't help my self and pointed out that the man was an unrepentant National Socialist. She immediately rose with the old trope: "But he loved Hannah Arendt, and she's Jewish, so he couldn't be a Nazi."

*Sigh*
posted by Ironmouth at 6:11 AM on November 10, 2009 [2 favorites]

From Brian Leiter's take:

Heidegger was a very bad man, with disgusting moral and political judgment, who spent the rest of his career whitewashing his romance with Nazism: but everyone knows this.

Just pulling that out.
posted by mediareport at 6:21 AM on November 10, 2009

It's not Heidegger that's the problem; it's the Heideggerians.
posted by LMGM at 6:35 AM on November 10, 2009 [3 favorites]

joe lisboa: [Anonymous e-sniper? What would you like to know about me?]

Meester Sheehan may be the cleanest, waxiest, and most polished man on the planet, but it's far from evident in the dust-up I mentioned. Bray loudly enough and publicly enough and someone will always end up calling you an ass. He's been there: he gets the hairshirt for this one.

HP LaserJet P100S: have you looked at anything other than the NYRB's letters page? There were an awful lot of behind the scenes shenanigans that accompanied the published exchanges. Hence my nod to "Points"... but if you already believe that Derrida "out and out denied" Heidegger's Nazism (Where? When? Really, I'm fascinated!) I suspect that door may remain forever shut.

OK, away from sniping for a moment: if anyone is interested in a beautifully written, concise, level-headed series of essays about Heidegger's relation to Nazism I highly recommend Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's "Heidegger, Art and Politics". If you're after a careful rendering of the facts of the case without rancour, or the over-reaching conclusions that make Farias and Faye (J.P, the elder, but also it seems Emmanuel, the younger) almost unreadable, Hugo Ott's "Martin Heidegger: A Political Life" should be on your reading list.
posted by pjm at 6:38 AM on November 10, 2009 [2 favorites]

The only time I read Heidegger was for the course "Philosophy 211: Introduction to Existentialism." The prof had an amusing lisp, and mispronounced Camus' essay as "The Myth of Thythyphuth."

Reading Heidegger ("Discourse on Thinking") at 18 was the first time I had to dissect a reading assignment word by word, and he was the easy part of the course.

Later in the course, just a day or two before Reading Break, I was in the library reserve material reading room, struggling through a tattered photograph copy "Beyond Good and Evil" when the Abyss spoke to me. The Abyss told me to quit the course, and go drink a beer at the SUB Pub.

It was a lesson that served me well during the entire seven years of undergrad.
posted by KokuRyu at 6:42 AM on November 10, 2009 [5 favorites]

intermod: "The Evil of Banality: Troubling new revelations about Arendt and Heidegger"

Since Salon is closer to my intellectual level than Sein und Zeit, I clicked this link for some relief...

To my mind, the use of the phrase banality of evil is an almost infallible sign of shallow thinkers attempting to seem intellectually sophisticated. Come on, people: It's a bankrupt phrase, a subprime phrase, a Dr. Phil-level phrase masquerading as a profound contrarianism. Oooh, so daring!

That a person who writes on this level presumes to "debunk" Arendt, let alone Heidegger, is pretty funny.
posted by Joe Beese at 6:51 AM on November 10, 2009 [2 favorites]

Todtnauberg

Arnica, eyebright, the
draft from the well with the
star-die on top,

in the
hütte,

written in the book
—whose name did it record
before mine—?
in this book
the line about
a hope, today,
for a thinker's
word
to come
in the heart,

forest sward, unleveled,
orchis and orchis, singly,

crudeness, later, while driving,
clearly,

he who drives us, the man,
he who also hears it,

the half-
trod log-
trails on the highmoor,

humidity,
much.
posted by OmieWise at 6:55 AM on November 10, 2009

You know who else wouldn't tolerate anonymous e-snipers?
posted by r_nebblesworthII at 6:57 AM on November 10, 2009

All of these links are a bunch of wannabe intellectuals who are embarrassing themselves

I'd also hasten to point out that Emmanuel Faye, the author of the book, is a professor of philosophy at Rouen with a CV as long as your arm, and has achieved the miraculous feat (in this day and age) of getting two of his academic philosophy books translated into English. To call him an wannabe intellectual is seriously rich. He's the very definition of the word.
posted by Ironmouth at 7:07 AM on November 10, 2009

-shakes head, sighs, and walks away from this-
posted by strixus at 7:09 AM on November 10, 2009

Heidegger?
posted by No-sword at 7:11 AM on November 10, 2009

As each of us is a unique and special snowflake, our actions and ideas form around us as a seamless whole. Every part of a person's personal, political, and artistic work is so tightly bound as to be inseparable. Gödel's incompleteness theorem is incorrect because he was often tardy in emptying his cat's litterbox. And Thomas Kinkaid is the greatest painter of all time because he tips generously at Starbucks.

Let me make the case a bit clearer. Hitler wrote a book called Mein Kampf. Ever heard of it? It speaks very clearly of his political philosophy. It mentions putting Jews under gas.

Heidegger either read this book and signed on to Nazism, or committed the unpardonable sin of not reading it before signing on to Nazism. Heidegger signed on part and parcel to Nazi philosophy and took a government administration post at a German university run by the government.

Emmanuel Faye, a French philosopher, did research on Heidegger, drawing on the notes of graduate students who attended his seminars, which indicates that far from being a temporary dalliance, Heidegger actively taught racist and anti-semitic thought to his students.

Reading the original German, Faye, who has written dozens of articles upon this subject, comes to the conclusion that Heidegger had always been working to intellectually buttress National Socialist ideals, even in Sein und Zeit. In other words, that in the book's nearly impeneterable prose, is really Heidegger's own racist views which involve subsuming one's self to society and authority. Put another way, Faye uses Heidegger's own words about his own work to his own graduate students to come to this conclusion.

We are not talking about litter boxes or Starbucks here. We are talking about teaching and supporting an openly racist regeime which killed six million jews simply because of their race--using both large death camps designed to gas by the millions, and Einsatzgruppen, roving bands of SS police in occupied areas who forced several million jews to dig their own graves and then machine-gunned the victims into the pits.

I think it is laughable that one could not question the intellectual judgment of Martin Heidegger given those facts. The idea that this man had something figured out we all don't get, given the fact that what he apparently, in his own words, figured out was a continental philosophic underpinning for the Nazi regieme is frankly hilarious.
posted by Ironmouth at 7:32 AM on November 10, 2009 [5 favorites]

Frankly the argument is downright irresponsible. If ideas exist and others are in conversation with those ideas, then refusing to confront the ideas themselves because of aversion to their source will only maim our reflection. This point is so obviously true that I can only assume the argument has been resurrected for headlines more than for serious consideration. (Note: the nytimes.com website links to the story with "Should we still read a Nazi philosopher?" Who say "Yes" to that? It's a prime example of begging the question, and numerous people should know better than this).

But that being said, the answer can be found in Catholicism. Way back during Augustine's day, numerous bishops and priests recanted their faith when faced with execution. And so the question arose: are the sacraments performed by those bishops and priests still valid? If they "took back" their faith, did they also "take back" the works they performed?

Augustine answered that the works had merit independent of the merits of the worker. The sacraments performed remained valid despite the emerging invalidity of the performer. This was know as the Donatist controversy.

When I studied Heidegger in college, his political affiliations were so inconsequential (for my orthodox Jewish professor) that any attempt to bring up the matter was shot down immediately by the professor with the words, "You're being a Donatist."

It is a sad commentary on the sorry state of philosophical engagement that someone can be published who apparently fails to understand even the high-points of Western intellectualism.
posted by jefficator at 7:37 AM on November 10, 2009 [2 favorites]

Painquayle hit it on the head. Analytic philosophy departments don't take Heidegger seriously. If you're studying under Rorty, Heidegger is going to get dismissed as a matter of course. Heidegger is, and will continue to be, extremely influential in Continental philosophy. There's really no denying it; his work is engaged by all the heavy hitters: Derrida, Habermas, Deleuze, etc. The analytic trend runs stronger through English-speaking universities than does its counterpart.

As a result, any debate about the Heidegger Question in an English-speaking forum is going to skew, at least to some extent, in that direction. But let's be clear: if you dismiss Heidegger as a philosopher , you're calling into question an entire line of thought in the European tradition.

Heidegger may have been a piece of shit, as Bardic notes. But that doesn't discredit his philisophical work. Being and Time is a seminal writing and isn't going away.

On the other hand, I've always found his later works like "Building, Dwelling, Thinking", and his writing on Van Gogh's shoes, to be weirdly parallel with Aryan ideology. I mean, he basically declares humanity's authentic mode of being to be that of a German peasant. And that makes modes-of being outside of this description...inauthentic? Yikes.
posted by HabeasCorpus at 7:39 AM on November 10, 2009 [4 favorites]

Ok, ok, I have to say one more thing. There really needs to be a place for those of us who want to be Continental, hate Analytic, but loath "Derrida, Habermas, Deleuze, etc." One of the many reasons I left philosophy without much hesitation was this push that "ZOMG YOU ARENT ANALYTIC, you MUST focus on these things we all think are interesting!"

Excuse me, I'm going to go back to bashing people to death with my Kant texts and pretending that Nietzsche's sister never got a hold of his work after his death.
posted by strixus at 7:47 AM on November 10, 2009 [1 favorite]

Ok, ok, I have to say one more thing. There really needs to be a place for those of us who want to be Continental, hate Analytic, but loath "Derrida, Habermas, Deleuze, etc."

It'd be nice. I'm not a philosopher, but I've hung around enough of them (at U of Chicago mostly) to know that there's a fair number of people that can't be slotted into either of these.
posted by AdamCSnider at 7:55 AM on November 10, 2009

The Intellectual History group at Harvard likes to joke that the Philosophy Department is just a shitty Math program with an identity crisis.
posted by jefficator at 8:00 AM on November 10, 2009 [4 favorites]

Ok, fair enough.

To qualify my response, I wasn't trying to slot people into two binary categories (yuk-yuk) so much as try to identify some general academic trends. I am fully aware and comfortable with the fact that you can loath Derrida, Habermas and Deleuze and still not be an analytic. I certainly have my reservations about all three. There are lots of different philosophers doing lots of different projects, that don't (and shouldn't) be lumped into categories.

That being said, I think it's fair to say that DDH (Derrida, Deleuze and Habermas) are fairly influential, and that all three take Heidegger seriously. In fact, there are a lot more philosophers who give serious weight to Heidegger; those three might just be the most obvious.
posted by HabeasCorpus at 8:02 AM on November 10, 2009

When I studied Heidegger in college, his political affiliations were so inconsequential (for my orthodox Jewish professor) that any attempt to bring up the matter was shot down immediately by the professor with the words, "You're being a Donatist."

Hm. While it makes sense that a professor might not want to derail a class with a discussion of topics not directly relevant to the syllabus at hand, the suggestion that Heidegger's politics really have no bearing at all on his thinking is absurd. I will accept that it's possible to be utterly opposed to Heidegger's politics and still find something of value in his philosophy, but truly believing that his politics have nothing to do with the value of the rest of his thinking seems, well, very un-philosophical.
posted by octobersurprise at 8:19 AM on November 10, 2009

Frankly the argument is downright irresponsible. If ideas exist and others are in conversation with those ideas, then refusing to confront the ideas themselves because of aversion to their source will only maim our reflection.

I think Faye's point is to address the ideas based on the philosopher's own intepretation of those ideas around the time he wrote them. Faye looked at stuff nobody has looked at yet, notes from graduate seminars that Heidegger himself gave on his own work. It appears that the man told these students that the meaning of his work was defending racism and authoritarianism and supporting a regieme which showed every sign of being the genocidal force it later became. After the war, Heidegger presented a different interpretation of his work that a lot of scholars accepted. Faye posits not that Heidegger's works should be dismissed because he personally suppored Adolf Hitler and worked in a governmental office at the time, but because the intellectual content of those works is, by the philosopher's contemperaneous teaching of it, an intellectual underpinning of National Socialism. Thus he is attacking your intellectual interpretation of the work--unless, of course, you agree with Dr. Heidegger, and feel that anti-semitism and authoritarianism actually are OK.
posted by Ironmouth at 8:25 AM on November 10, 2009

octobersurprise: "... truly believing that his politics have nothing to do with the value of the rest of his thinking seems, well, very un-philosophical."

Ah, another opportunity to quote C.S. Lewis!

... when Freud is talking about how to cure neurotics he is speaking as a specialist on his own subject, but when he goes on to talk general philosophy he is speaking as an amateur. It is therefore quite sensible to attend to him with respect in the one case and not in the other - and that is what I do. I am all the readier to do it because I have found that when he is talking off his own subject and on a subject I do know something about (namely, language) he is very ignorant. - Mere Christianity, "Morality and Psychoanalysis"
posted by Joe Beese at 8:35 AM on November 10, 2009 [1 favorite]

Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.

Heidegger lost me when he said that.
posted by goethean at 8:37 AM on November 10, 2009

Stop, you fool - you had me at "production of corpses"!
posted by r_nebblesworthII at 8:53 AM on November 10, 2009

the publication in English of a recent French book on the by now familiar controversy about Heidegger's Nazism is re-igniting an old debate about the influential philosopher's politics.

I think that the post is wrong. I think that at least for Emmanuel Faye, the debate isn't about Heidegger's Nazism, its about Heidegger's work and how it supports Nazism and how, based on Heidegger's own teaching of the work, it is a justification for National Socialism's rejection of humanism and rationality.

The intellectual underpinnings of National Socialism are a very difficult topic, but it is clear that following it does require a rejection of rationalism and humanism.
posted by Ironmouth at 8:55 AM on November 10, 2009

To give you an idea of what Faye's book is about, here's a blurb from the Yale University Press site:

Emmanuel Faye draws on previously unavailable materials to paint a damning picture of Nazism’s influence on the philosopher’s thought and politics.

In this provocative book, Faye uses excerpts from unpublished seminars to show that Heidegger’s philosophical writings are fatally compromised by an adherence to National Socialist ideas. In other documents, Faye finds expressions of racism and exterminatory anti-Semitism.

Faye disputes the view of Heidegger as a naïve, temporarily disoriented academician and instead shows him to have been a self-appointed “spiritual guide” for Nazism whose intentionality was clear. Contrary to what some have written, Heidegger’s Nazism became even more radical after 1935, as Faye demonstrates. He revisits Heidegger’s masterwork, Being and Time, and concludes that in it Heidegger does not present a philosophy of individual existence but rather a doctrine of radical self-sacrifice, where individualization is allowed only for the purpose of heroism in warfare.
posted by Ironmouth at 8:58 AM on November 10, 2009

I don't know much about Heidegger, but it strikes me as amusing that the intelectual forefather of the Deconstructionists is being defended by appeals to the concept that "ideas" exist independently of cultural considerations.

Brilliant observation.
posted by Ironmouth at 9:01 AM on November 10, 2009 [1 favorite]

I'm not a philosopher, but I've hung around enough of them (at U of Chicago mostly) to know that there's a fair number of people that can't be slotted into either of these.

Chicago is one of the analytic departments where you'd be most likely to think that. It's vaguely continental. More so than a lot of other departments, anyway. Pitt and Chicago are the two departments I think of when I picture analytic departments tinged with Freud and later Wittgenstein.

I don't know much about Heidegger, but it strikes me as amusing that the intelectual forefather of the Deconstructionists is being defended by appeals to the concept that "ideas" exist independently of cultural considerations.

This is why people are revisionist about his life. Given all the focus on authenticity and whatnot, Heidegger's politics really matter, and by his own standards are sure to infect his philosophy.

Frege was a raving anti-semite, but that has nothing to do with his formal logic, so no one really cares about it.
posted by painquale at 9:27 AM on November 10, 2009

loath "Derrida, Habermas, Deleuze, etc."

Wait, what? What's there to loath about Habermas? Why does he even belong in this list? He may be a German whose last name ends in 'H' but there's absolutely no comparison between him and any sort of project in deconstruction or fundamental ontology, let alone problematic political affiliations. (The same absence of troublesome political affiliations can be noted of Derrida, whose biggest "crime" is probably sticking up for his friendship with Paul de Mann.)

Of his many, many contributions to political philosophy, none of which are particularly hard to folow (or 'not even wrong' as Leiter likes to dismiss Derrida), I'd just mention Habermas's participation in the Historian's Dispute as evidence that not all Germans are closet Volks-waggers.
posted by anotherpanacea at 9:31 AM on November 10, 2009

All of these links are a bunch of wannabe intellectuals who are embarrassing themselves

I'd bet Yale University Press basically only prints books by wannabe intellectuals. They're a well-know repository of posers.

To be fair, I was a bit rash last night, but I have a difficult time taking anyone seriously who simply dismisses Heidegger because of his politics or the difficulty of the writing. Basically, and this will make me sound like even more of an asshole, I assume that anyone who brushes Heidegger of as simply a quack just doesn't get it. I mean, just because he veers dramatically from the course of the cannon is no reason to freak out and call him an unintelligible nincumpoop.

I also believe that these sorts of articles reduce their authors to little more than fanatic sports fans. Heidegger rules! No, Heidegger sucks! This is not philosophy. This is not interesting.

In college I was chatting with the chair of the philosophy department and he told me he had never cracked Heidegger. I was aghast; I literally lost most of the respect I had for him. I mean, disagreeing with Heidegger on this or that issue is one thing; throwing him in the trash without ever even reading him simply because of his reputation and his writing...in my book that makes you a pseudo-intellectual, jumping on the "we don't actually read philosophy we just try and look smart" train.

I find a great deal of Heidegger beautiful, frankly, and extremely interesting to think and talk about. His politics? Eh. You know, Aristotle thought women were pretty worthless and we still have a great deal of reverence for his work. Frege hated jews too, and yet Sense and Reference is a philosophy of language 101.

It is way more interesting to consider why he was a Nazi than the fact of his Nazism.
posted by Lutoslawski at 10:03 AM on November 10, 2009 [1 favorite]

I've always found his later works...to be weirdly parallel with Aryan ideology

Weirdly parallel with Aryan ideology? Really? Isn't it obvious that what Heidegger was *trying* to do with his later work was support Nazi ideology? Using the phrase "weirdly parallel" is a bit of an understatement.
posted by mediareport at 10:04 AM on November 10, 2009 [1 favorite]

*off
posted by Lutoslawski at 10:04 AM on November 10, 2009

It is way more interesting to consider why he was a Nazi than the fact of his Nazism.

Well, let's hear your take.
posted by mediareport at 10:09 AM on November 10, 2009

And actually, I think exploring the specifics of the relationship between his Nazism and his thought - and surely there's no one here who thinks that's not a fruitful question? - is more interesting than either of the questions Lutoslawski proposes.
posted by mediareport at 10:11 AM on November 10, 2009

And actually, I think exploring the specifics of the relationship between his Nazism and his thought - and surely there's no one here who thinks that's not a fruitful question? - is more interesting than either of the questions Lutoslawski proposes.

Yes, that's a better question. When I say "why he is a Nazi" I mean it in the more teleological sense. So there is no 'my take,' anymore than there is an actual answer to the question. I think Heidegger would say that while you cannot divorce his philosophy from his politics, you must, that the relationship is at the same time frivolous and necessarily contingent.

Heidegger has his own facticity goin on. I mean, for one he's a German at the fin de siecle. He's coming off the heels of Hegel and he's all caught up in Germany's whole destined for the greatestness thing. I think it speaks volumes about why he had such deep insights into ontology, aesthetics, metaphysics - but such fucked up politics. He's a lot like Wagner - genius grasp of beauty and the human condition, though unintelligible to some and vile for his politics and ego (that's a curious duo, now that I bring it up. Music departments revere Wagner - and yet he was a Nazi who wrote the infamous chord that is theoretically unintelligible.)
posted by Lutoslawski at 10:28 AM on November 10, 2009

I think exploring the specifics of the relationship between his Nazism and his thought

Dude oversaw the removal of all Jewish professors in the university where he was rector. He acted in a morally abhorrent and racist manner towards fellow human beings. Indeed, his actions would be judged criminal in Germany today. And rightly so.

Let's also get it straight. Faye wrote a book, not an article. That book is based on information previously unavailable. It specifically explores the relationship between his Nazism and his thought, and finds, based on Heidegger's own explanations of his thought to his graduate students, that Heidegger has been misrepresented by Heidegger himself, presumably for the purposes of rehabilitation after he was banned from working in German universities because he was a Nazi, and misinterpreted by those who professed to follow him. I think you see these reactions because Faye is saying that people like Lutoslawski have got Heidegger wrong from the start, because Heidegger's own teaching and private correspondence give a completely different meaning to his work than has been previously accepted.

Furthermore, it seems that Heidegger's thought would require us to judge him by his culture and intellectual milleu and make us question the assumptions behind his work based on that milleu. His politics would then be totally a part of the analysis of his own work, and to act as if it had no bearing on what he said would make no sense and be wrong under his own school of thought.

Now I am no expert, far from it. In a previous life I got a graduate degree in German history and my experince with the man is limited to some limited reading of his work in the German language. However, to dismiss Faye, whose works include the following, seems to be the wrong way to go about looking at the problem:

Heidegger. Die Einführung des Nationalsozialismus in die Philosophie. Im Umkreis der unveröffentlichten Seminare zwischen 1933 und 1935, avec une postface inédite à l'édition allemande, Matthes & Seitz, Berlin, 2009.

Heidegger. La introduccion del Nazismo en la filosofia. En torno a los seminarios ineditos de 1933-1935, Madrid, Akal, 2009.

"I fondamenti nazisti dell'opera di Heidegger", Rivista di filosofia, n°3/2006, p.439-456.
"Der Nationalsozialismus in der Philosophie: Sein, Geschichtlichkeit, Technik und Vernichtung in Heideggers Werk", Philosophie im Nationalsozialismus, Hans Jörg Sandkühler (éd.), Hambourg, Felix Meiner Verlag, 2009, p.133-155.

The guy has multiple publications on this subject, including a book, written in four different languages, including German. I'd say his work deserves the same respect that seems to be given to Heidegger himself. Knee-jerk dismissals of Faye's work, which appears to be groundbreaking in that it is based on previously ignored statements and notes from Heidegger's own seminars on his work, seems to be not the best move here and certainly does not give credit to any counter arguments.

Certainly, the man is not a pseudo-intellectual. His father Jean-Pierre Faye was also a professor of philosophy.
posted by Ironmouth at 10:39 AM on November 10, 2009 [1 favorite]

Isn't it obvious that what Heidegger was *trying* to do with his later work was support Nazi ideology?

To be fair, Heidegger wasn't so interested in supporting the Nazis as he was in becoming their intellectual inspiration. He wanted *them* to support him: in all of his writing about philosophy and politics during that period, and especially in the Rector's Address, he's describing a world where politicians enact policies designed by thinkers, and the not-so-subtle subtext is that the greatest thinker, the one who could show all the politicians what to do, was him.

That's the basis for most philosophic defenses of Heidegger: that he was a clueless bumpkin with a little power who wanted much, much more. His early work is an important extension of Edmund Husserl, and his later work has been pretty influential in the arts, among certain sorts of hardcore environmentalists, and with intellectual historians.

The rest of it? Well, all due respect to Ironmouth, but a lot of the scholarship on the intellectual connections between Heidegger and the Nazis is deeply misguided. There are many, many similarities, but the question is a causal one. They were all writing and lecturing at a certain moment in German history. They had a lot of the same cultural touchstones, and a lot of the same fashionable ideas. It doesn't have to be the case that Heidegger took his ideas from Hitler or vice versa. It doesn't have to be that simple. They were all referencing the same canonical cultural icons, just like when opposing politicians adopt the same rhetoric. (Just wait for the 2010 Republicans to start hitting on "Change.")

A lot of these ideas were in the air: the Nazis were fantastic at taking a little bit of everything to make up their ideology. The genius of their propaganda was the way it seamlessly melded faux-paganism with a German version of Manifest Destiny with a return to Nature with support for the military-industrial complex with xenophobia with three different and incompatible conspiracy theories. Heidegger saw a piece of that propaganda formation in media res and apparently thought he could hop on the bandwagon and quickly end up driving. He wasn't even wrong about that: Carl Schmidt isn't much of a legal scholar, and look where he ended up! Eichmann was a schmuck who couldn't even make quota as a traveling salesman, and look how far he rose in the ranks! Like the latter half of the Bush administration, anybody with more loyalty than brains could rise very far very fast in the Nazi hierarchy. Heidegger's cluelessness eventually ran out of steam. He was an opportunistic Nazi, seeking both personal glory and a larger audience for his ideas.

Was Heidegger an asshole who thought Duns Scotus could prepare him for world-historical leadership? Yes. Did he have any clue that the Nazis were contemplating genocide? Not even a little bit. Does that make him a bad philosopher? I don't think so, though some of it (I'm looking at you, "On the Essence of Truth") is very bad independent of his political affiliations. Why not read his work and decide for yourself?
posted by anotherpanacea at 10:49 AM on November 10, 2009 [6 favorites]

Music departments revere Wagner - and yet he was a Nazi who wrote the infamous chord that is theoretically unintelligible.

Richard Wagner died in 1883. The German Workers Party (DAP) was formed in 1919. It changed its name to the NSDAP in 1920. Wagner was not a Nazi. Intellectually National Socialism cannot even be understood without the context of the First World War. To say Wagner was a Nazi is just plain incorrect.

I mean, for one he's a German at the fin de siecle.

Heidegger was 11 years old in 1900. He did not really intellectually dwell in the fin-de-siecle period. His thesis was completed at the beginning of the First World War and his habilitation was completed in 1916, during the war. I cannot agree with your assessment that he is a fin-de-siecle figure. Instead, he belongs to the first generation after the fin-de-siecle.

He's coming off the heels of Hegel and he's all caught up in Germany's whole destined for the greatestness thing.

The chauvinist nationalism of the first half of the twentieth century is something that I cannot take seriously. I find it very hard to take seriously someone who bought into it.
posted by Ironmouth at 10:52 AM on November 10, 2009

Just chiming in here: music departments tend not to revere Wagner, and his reprehensible politics are discussed in much the same way as Heidegger's.
posted by avianism at 11:04 AM on November 10, 2009

My choice of words was poor, mediareport. You are correct: "weirdly parallel" doesn't put it strongly enough, since it doesn't really bring up the issue of Heidegger's intentions.

And I do think that the specific relationship between his Nazism and his thought is a very important question, perhaps the most important question, surrounding Heidegger.

My major point was that the beginning of the thread, and in "Heil Heidegger", it seemed that people wanted to dismiss the philosopher on the basis of his politcal allegiance, rather than examining his texts. We should read then texts, and then dismiss them if we find them too steeped in Aryan ideology.

But I think it's now been clarified, by Ironmouth, that this is essentially what has been done in Faye's book, and what Ironmouth himself (and other Mefites) have done.

To be fair, I don't think Romano's essay fairly explored this requisite distinction between the man and his writing.
posted by HabeasCorpus at 11:05 AM on November 10, 2009

The rest of it? Well, all due respect to Ironmouth, but a lot of the scholarship on the intellectual connections between Heidegger and the Nazis is deeply misguided.

I think that Faye is saying its not, based on the sources which others have not looked at, i.e. the seminar notes and private sources which have been ignored up to this point. Perhaps the prior work is flawed, but Faye is apparently saying something new. Since my reading French is pretty atrocious, I think I will have to wait until this book comes out. This is the more revolutionary premise of his book which I think is new to this question.

I am going to get this book.

They were all referencing the same canonical cultural icons, just like when opposing politicians adopt the same rhetoric. (Just wait for the 2010 Republicans to start hitting on "Change.")

A lot of these ideas were in the air: the Nazis were fantastic at taking a little bit of everything to make up their ideology. The genius of their propaganda was the way it seamlessly melded faux-paganism with a German version of Manifest Destiny with a return to Nature with support for the military-industrial complex with xenophobia with three different and incompatible conspiracy theories.

Indeed, it could be said that National Socialism was a political movement in search of a justifying ideology. Its internal positions are incredibly inconsistent--for example the famous speech to farmers "We don't want higher bread prices! We don't want lower bread prices! We want National Socialist bread prices!" Instead it was the first modern political movement to really capitalize on the emotional aspect of mass politics and reach power. For an excellent explanation of all of this, I recommend Joachim C. Fest's masterwork, Hitler which includes several "interpolations" (messy translation) which give an excellent sampling of the confusing emotional and intellectual forces which National Socialism tried to harness. The fact that the Strasser brothers were in the same party as Adolf Hitler and the nearly openly gay Ernst Rohm gives you some idea of the intellectual mismash of what National Socialism was.

As for the question of did he predict genocide? I think it is really hard to believe that he did not think some very hard times were in store for the Jews in Germany. Unfortunately it was more than obvious to those who were willing to see--although I do not agree with Goldhagen's outrageously overstated thesis in Hitler's Willing Executioners (the man is a political scientist, not a historian), by 1934 the writing was on the wall. I think that Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews has done an excellent job of laying the idea that "we knew nothing" to rest.

Having said all that, I don't think I can really argue philosophy effectively with a pro like Josh!
posted by Ironmouth at 11:14 AM on November 10, 2009 [1 favorite]

From the article: Drawing on new evidence, the author, Emmanuel Faye, argues fascist and racist ideas are so woven into the fabric of Heidegger’s theories that they no longer deserve to be called philosophy.

I'm sorry, but that is just fucking silly. Philosophers who write books arguing what should and should not be considered "philosophy" are really, really off the mark. I find these sorts of proclamations laughable.

I think you see these reactions because Faye is saying that people like Lutoslawski have got Heidegger wrong from the start, because Heidegger's own teaching and private correspondence give a completely different meaning to his work than has been previously accepted.

Eh. I don't doubt that this "new evidence" is interesting and, as it is Heidegger after all, completely relevant, but I really doubt it will 'give a completely different meaning" to his work, if such an assertion even makes sense.

and to act as if it had no bearing on what he said would make no sense and be wrong under his own school of thought.

I don't think anyone is claiming it doesn't have any bearing - of course it does. It's all this "right or wrong" and "philosophy or not" bullshit that's troublesome, and, regardless of the new evidence, so very tiresome.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is this: I think the very premise of this project is fundamentally skewed and, ultimately, uninteresting.

The guy has multiple publications on this subject, including a book, written in four different languages, including German. I'd say his work deserves the same respect that seems to be given to Heidegger himself.

You know, I don't give a fuck about Faye's CV or what his father did for a living. Everybody shits in the morning. I don't respect people just because they've written books. Christ.
posted by Lutoslawski at 11:14 AM on November 10, 2009

I don't really "deg" Heidegger. Ha ha! I made a tedious, nearly meaningless pun. Seriously, though, I don't think I've read a word he's written.
posted by Skot at 11:25 AM on November 10, 2009

Music departments revere Wagner - and yet he was a Nazi who wrote the infamous chord that is theoretically unintelligible.

Richard Wagner died in 1883. The German Workers Party (DAP) was formed in 1919. It changed its name to the NSDAP in 1920. Wagner was not a Nazi. Intellectually National Socialism cannot even be understood without the context of the First World War. To say Wagner was a Nazi is just plain incorrect.

Forgive me, Wagner was just someone who hated Jews, their music, and their existence in Germany. Technically no, he wasn't a Nazi.

Just chiming in here: music departments tend not to revere Wagner

I don't know what music school you went to, but this has not been my experience. Most musicians, especially conductors, I've met want to stroke Wagner's balls.

The chauvinist nationalism of the first half of the twentieth century is something that I cannot take seriously. I find it very hard to take seriously someone who bought into it.

I get disagreeing with it, I get having a hard time stomaching it, but I don't think the "chauvinist nationalism" during the first have of the last century is something you can just "not take seriously."
posted by Lutoslawski at 11:27 AM on November 10, 2009

Forgive me, Wagner was just someone who hated Jews, their music, and their existence in Germany. Technically no, he wasn't a Nazi.

This kind of shorthand completely ignores the complex nature of the questions we are looking into today. National Socialism cannot be reduced to mere hating of Jews.
posted by Ironmouth at 11:51 AM on November 10, 2009

Forgive me, Wagner was just someone who hated Jews, their music, and their existence in Germany. Technically no, he wasn't a Nazi.

This kind of shorthand completely ignores the complex nature of the questions we are looking into today. National Socialism cannot be reduced to mere hating of Jews.

You're right.

I meant the Wagner reference only as a sort of interesting parallel example of how we view historical figures w/r/t their work vs. their personal beliefs.
posted by Lutoslawski at 12:05 PM on November 10, 2009

It may be worth mentioning that Romano's is not the first caricature of Heidegger: the famous Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard lampooned him as well (more here).

Also, the question of Celan's 1967 meeting with Heidegger (see the poem OmieWise quotes upthread) highlights a few issues that are not really being addressed here:

chiefly, the question of to what degree Heidegger failed to ever apologize for, attempt to explain, or even explicitly consider his involvement in Nazism. It is after all possible, although unknowable, that Heidegger remained not entirely unsympathetic with Nazism up until his death in 1976. Thus, one wonders what to make of his apparent silence on the subject (I linked to a book on this subject in one of my comments above). It is one thing to say Heidegger was a half-hearted Nazi during the war, but another entirely to speculate about the degree to which he may have failed to ever self-reflect on his participation in it.

The 1929 debate with Cassirer at Davos raises another set of questions that may offer some insight: Skidelsky's recent book on Cassirer convincingly argues how this debate foreshadowed the larger problem of anti-rationalism then haunting Europe. Why "neo-Kantianism" was used by MH in a pejorative sense against Cassirer, the Jewish humanist polymath, is one of those details that reflects one reading of Heidegger: that there perhaps lurks in his work a genuine strain of anti-rational, anti-Enlightenment folk-mysticism that fits all to easily into the neo-Romantic volk mythos of the Nazis.

Finally, Faye's assertion that Heidegger may have been disguising his politics in his metaphysics is at least worth considering: after all, in 1952 Leo Strauss, the Jewish father of neoconservatism who knew Heidegger, made a similar argument not about MH specifically, but about the question of philosophy and politics more generally. Given the question of hermeneutic concealment of truth in Heidegger's work, the question has some merit.
posted by HP LaserJet P10006 at 12:21 PM on November 10, 2009 [4 favorites]

I think that Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews has done an excellent job of laying the idea that "we knew nothing" to rest.

Well, there were certainly indications, but there's also a lot of retrospect driving that work. Backdating judgments and all that. A very astute observer with a really finely honed political sense could still have been fooled, especially in the early thirties. But this was the very beginning of modern nation-state politics, and the messy solidarities of peasant and industrialist and conservative intellectual that have come to typify rightist political movements had yet to be properly sorted. I think many Germans laughed off the stronger claims of the National Socialists in the same way we ignore Glenn Beck or Ron Paul: assuming that their audience is small and powerless and that the moderating forces of a constitutional democracy will prevent them from ever enacting their agenda. You could say the same of class-based populism: I don't assume that every call for taxing the rich will inevitably lead to guillotines, so why should interwar Germans think any different?

Perhaps that's a failure of imagination or good judgment on their part. But I tend to side with those, like Arendt, who argue that totalitarianism was unprecedented and by its very novelty, completely unforeseeable. I don't think that's a defense of any of the participants, but it does help to explain how different the world looks to us now after Stalin and Hitler. All the parts of the Shoah and WWII had been seen before: antisemitism and pogroms, massive administration of everyday life during wartime, state population classification based on race for 'health' reasons, national ideological myths designed to usurp the role of religion in people's lives, and even the attempted destruction of a people, in the Armenian genocide. But all those components had never been assembled in the way that the Nazis assembled them.

So in 1933 and into 1934, I think it made sense to think of the Nazis as Heidegger apparently did: as the wet-behind-the-ears newbies on the political stage, looking for someone with intellectual heft to guide them. Perhaps the best example is Newt Gingrich and the current conservative wing of the Republican Party. At that moment, you hear a speech on the radio quoting Nietzsche and the pedant in you thinks: "That's great that you're interested in one Germany's great philosophers! He's under-appreciated, and it's good to see young people getting excited by ideas. But you've got it all wrong: here, let me show you. He didn't hate Jews: in fact, he couldn't stomach antisemitism, all overcome with resentment. Judaism may have saddled men with a conscience, but it was Christianity that really took guilt and sin to this self-flagellating degree. The Greeks: now there's an ethos for you... look at what the Athenian Stranger says here in The Sophist...."

I can sort of get my head around how you might talk yourself into it. Not the firings, not taking power, but the pedantic temptation. I feel this sometimes with the Republican Party: Lincoln freed the slaves, and now they're reduced to fawning over talk radio shock jocks and pretending like they have any clue how to run a major economy. Don't you just want to pretend you oppose abortion long enough to get them to listen to reason, sometimes?
posted by anotherpanacea at 12:26 PM on November 10, 2009 [1 favorite]

especially conductors

Well there's your problem right there! (rimshot)

Wagner made some really important contributions to music, especially conducting (he wrote a book on it which is often a required text); maybe as important as Heidegger's to philosophy, although this is a pretty apples to oranges comparison.

Very few people in music want to write Wagner off completely because of his politics—his innovations were too evidently influential to ignore—but a great many come close. For many it's not just the results of his politics, or the way he was used politically, but the strange, rotten and gaudy romantic impulse that sits at the core of his whole approach to art. I think this romanticism is seen as a proximate cause of a lot of his politics. Most music faculty I've worked with are sharply, deeply critical of his work, and I've never met a single educator, no matter how sympathetic, who isn't careful to at least give students a heads-up that he was anti-semitic and otherwise politically problematic.

But yeah, there are more interesting parallels between Heidegger and Wagner, and a big one is this romanticism, this kind of earthy, mythical, back-to-the-land "authenticity" which seems to prefigure in some way their nationalism and racism.
posted by avianism at 12:27 PM on November 10, 2009

The extent of Heidegger's comments:

The rectorate was an attempt to see something in the movement that had come to power, beyond all its failings and crudeness, that was much more far-reaching and that could perhaps one day bring a concentration on the Germans' Western historical essence. It will in no way be denied that at the time I believed in such possibilities and for that reason renounced the actual vocation of thinking in favor of being effective in an official capacity. In no way will what was caused by my own inadequacy in office be played down. But these points of view do not capture what is essential and what moved me to accept the rectorate.

posted by anotherpanacea at 12:29 PM on November 10, 2009 [2 favorites]

If you want a little light video on the subject, the Human, all too Human series of four documentaries had one episode about Heidegger. Features shots inside the mythical Hütte.
posted by fcummins at 12:35 PM on November 10, 2009

Finally, Faye's assertion that Heidegger may have been disguising his politics in his metaphysics is at least worth considering

Well, I think Heidegger would say that of course politics and philosophy are bound; he would add, however, that this is not where things stop. Certainly you must understand a text from within the context of that text's (or whatever) hermeneutic circle - but one tries to do this only to then be able to understand the text and its author free from, for lack of a better word, its facticity.

What I don't agree with is that Heidegger all along had some secret agenda he was consciously weaving into his metaphysics (and to a lesser extent ethics and aesthetics). The hermeneutic concealment of truth, as I read Heidegger, is an attempt to explain how one's facticity - including political landscapes - obscures, and perhaps even makes impossible, the understanding of certain truths, or potential-truths, and understanding an idea from within the context of its origins is a necessary but ultimately futile stepping stone. I think of it like trying to understand the concept of a circle by walking around it.

What this means is that Faye actually has it backwards. He's looking for politics 'concealed' in the metaphysics - but Heidegger, I think, would say he should be looking for the metaphysics obscured by the politics (and contexts in general - including language) of its author. In fact, the whole "philosophy" vs. "history" argument Faye tries to put forth is exactly the sort of confused dualism that Heidegger would argue is nonsense. It seems to me that Faye perhaps knows his history but is wholly confused about philosophy.

Now, the question of why Heidegger never really addressed his Nazism even after the whole thing was over (and if he didn't know about the genocide before he certainly knew after) is an interesting one.
posted by Lutoslawski at 12:54 PM on November 10, 2009

Now, the question of why Heidegger never really addressed his Nazism even after the whole thing was over (and if he didn't know about the genocide before he certainly knew after) is an interesting one.

Yes, it is. And, although I'd argue that it does not necessarily condemn his thought to irrelevance, Heidegger's failure in that regard does condemn him as a heartless beast. What was said so reluctantly will in no way obscure my unwillingness to extend my understanding or forgiveness for his cruelty.
posted by OmieWise at 1:30 PM on November 10, 2009

Also, Lutoslawski, I'd point out that the cogency of your defense is partly called into question when you make very basic errors of fact, and when you dismiss relevant publishing history as akin to an argument from popularity. If your argument holds, then it can do so without those props.

yeah, wrongfully calling Wagner a Nazi in a off-handed reductionist remark really rendered my argument about Heidegger's philosophy questionable, you're right {/}.

And yes, I will reserve the right to dismiss someone's CV when used in an attempt to prove the correctness of an argument. It's fallacious. you can't be serious
posted by Lutoslawski at 2:02 PM on November 10, 2009

It seems obvious that Lutoslawski's emotions in this thread are making it hard for him to think clearly about what other people are posting. It's certainly obvious those emotions are making it hard for him to take the time to think clearly about what *he's* been posting.
posted by mediareport at 2:03 PM on November 10, 2009

Oops. My apologies. That was supposed to be one of those "type it out but don't post it" moments. You know, to relieve stress. Everyone here does it. Right? I'm sorry to Lutoslawski that it showed up.
posted by mediareport at 2:06 PM on November 10, 2009

But I tend to side with those, like Arendt, who argue that totalitarianism was unprecedented and by its very novelty, completely unforeseeable.

First, Arent's classification of "totalitarianism" is considered completely outmoded in historical thought--there never was such a thing. The analysis must be more complex. The NS-state, rather than this gigantic force pressing down on all, was a mishmash of conflicting and converging apparats which contstantly fought with one another regarding their spheres of influence and powers. Hitler was actually a terrible leader and administrator in practice. However, the power of NS propaganda was that it gave an entirely false picture of the internal power of the Nazi regieme. Indeed, even the easily optimized sections of the German economy, such as the military-industrial complex, remained unorganized into 1942, when economic pressures led Hitler to put Speer in charge of production.

Indeed, this understanding of the NS society and state demonstrates that rather than a hidden agenda held by Hitler and his cohorts and only later unveiled, the German bureaucracy and party apparatus openly acted on their own, in ways that were obvious to those around, making any argument that Heidegger was unware of what was going on problematic at best.

Thus, I side more with the fuctionalists in the debate of functionalism v. intentionalism. The beginnings of the Holocaust came from the bureaucracy and as such were visible to anyone who cared to look in highly-regulated (although not well-organized Germany). Within weeks of taking power, the NS-state had passed the Enabling Act and the Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service. These two laws both removed the power of political institutions to counter National Socialism and began the slow process of discrimination against the Jews. I find it impossible to believe that a trained observer such as Heidegger, who during 1933 and 1934 was actually working in a university and directing operations designed to implement the vague directions from the top regarding Jewish Germans working in academia, could be unaware that the situation for Germany's Jews had turned dire and was not likely to get better.

This is not to say that he saw completely the road to the gas chambers and the Einsatzgruppen. However, to argue that it was completely unforseeable seems to run counter to all of the evidence we have regarding 1930's Germany. Therefore, his support of the NS State, and the emerging evidence that he saw his philosophy as providing the anti-rationalist intellectual basis for National Socialism, seems to make it hard to dismiss a political critique of it based on his intellectual understanding of his own work.

Take, for example, the Nuremburg laws of 1935. This was a move to segregate Jews from other Germans and made it clear to anyone who cared to see, that Jews were going to be made less and less welcome in Germany. This wasn't like the Jim Crow laws, which put a minority into a place it held in a practical sense the entire time. Instead it was the beginnings of a segregation of an entire race from a country that they had lived in for centuries. Remember also, the Nuremburg laws were a response by the Party to the major wave of assualts, boycotts and destruction of property by the Alte Kaempfer and old SA men who were upset with the fact that the regieme had not moved quickly enough against the Jews. The Nuremburg laws were part of a wave that was relatively obvious to anyone who lived in Germany.
posted by Ironmouth at 2:08 PM on November 10, 2009

it seems obvious that mediareport hasn't really understood a lot of the discourse here.
posted by Lutoslawski at 2:13 PM on November 10, 2009

oops. sorry mediareport. accident, you know.
posted by Lutoslawski at 2:13 PM on November 10, 2009

And yes, I will reserve the right to dismiss someone's CV when used in an attempt to prove the correctness of an argument. It's fallacious. you can't be serious

It wasn't put there to prove the correctness of my argument. It was put there to discredit your ad hominem attacks which described the persons bringing forth this new scholarship as "wannabe intellectuals." I merely was hastening to point out that a person who has published this much on this particular topic, and is a professor of philosophy at the University of Rouen, is hardly a "wannabe intellectual." The gentleman most certainly is an intellectual and has dedicated a large part of his work to examining the problem of Heidegger and his relationship to National Socialism.

My argument is simple--Heidegger got away with a big one when he completely refused to ever speak on the subject of the relationship of his philosophical thought and scholarship to National Socialism. If, as Faye proposes, Heidegger's thought contains within it a germ of the same anti-rationalist and anti-humanist thinking that drove the Nazis, and that Heidegger himself felt that was the case, then perhaps one needs to reevaluate Heidegger's position within the canon--based not on his political association with the Nazis, but the fundamental basis of his thought. Because I for one am opposed to not only what the Nazis did, but what they thought. I do not believe in "Blood and Soil." I do not think that an anti-rationalist, anti-humanist set of values enlightens us, but instead threatens us. And I think the Nazis are the perfect example of why this is true.
posted by Ironmouth at 2:18 PM on November 10, 2009 [2 favorites]

I think that Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews has done an excellent job of laying the idea that "we knew nothing" to rest.

Well, there were certainly indications, but there's also a lot of retrospect driving that work

Actually, no. The Destruction of the European Jews was researched in the 3 years following the war, and was only the third scholary treatment to come out on the subject in 1961. It was the first extensive treatment of the subject by any scholar, anywhere. Of all of the historical monographs on the subject, it is the one least tainted by retrospect. It is a tremendous work of scholarship (so difficult to read, both in amount of detail, in length and subject matter). Most of the work since then has been a reaction to Hilberg's work, and much more "retrospective" if you will. The conclusion that the bureaucracy drove the process comes from the documents.
posted by Ironmouth at 2:28 PM on November 10, 2009

What this means is that Faye actually has it backwards. He's looking for politics 'concealed' in the metaphysics - but Heidegger, I think, would say he should be looking for the metaphysics obscured by the politics (and contexts in general - including language) of its author. In fact, the whole "philosophy" vs. "history" argument Faye tries to put forth is exactly the sort of confused dualism that Heidegger would argue is nonsense. It seems to me that Faye perhaps knows his history but is wholly confused about philosophy.

Again, I cannot say if Faye has it right or not, not having read the book in the original French. The English translation has not yet come out. Where I think he would say you are erring is that you have not read the source materials he has read, where he claims that Heidegger explicitly pushes his philosophy as a racist supporting theory for National Socialism.

However, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that you have also not read Dr. Faye's manuscript in the original French as well. My entire point in this thread has been to suggest that the knee-jerk dismissal of his position upthread seems totally without merit, given that he has used manuscripts and explainations provided by Heidegger that you have not read, nor have had access to.

As for not understanding philosophy, again, Dr. Faye is a professor of philosophy at the University of Rouen and has also written some very well-received books on Descartes and others. He clearly has a lot to say on this subject and has the professional training to analyze his subject. Whether that analysis is correct or not depends on his argument and evidence, which we do not have in English translation for a few more weeks. I'm saying dismissing his position without reading the book makes no sense to me, especially based on the fact that he is using new sources that Heidegger concealed for a long time. Famously, Heidegger only granted one interview on this particular subject and refused to let it be published during his lifetime and edited it before publication. Hardly the position of a man who is anxious to clear up the subject.
posted by Ironmouth at 2:37 PM on November 10, 2009

anti-rationalist, anti-humanist set of values

The problem of course is that one can find traces of "state-worship" and proto-fascistic ideas going back to Plato's Republic, to say nothing of the work of de Maistre, Machiavelli, Julius Evola, etc. It's a complicated genealogy.

The question of culpability aside, it is less than clear if Heidegger's thought is explicitly anti-rationalist (Wolin certainly thinks it is implicitly so). Certainly the tradition of German thought is not immune from this charge, to varying degrees, but these are questions perhaps requiring more detail than a forum such as this will allow.
posted by HP LaserJet P10006 at 2:45 PM on November 10, 2009

ironmouth-

Ok, let me clear up the 'wannabe intellectual thing.' That was a poor choice of words on my part. What I mean is - I have a very difficult time taking someone who writes off Heidegger as a quack (Romano) or someone who wants libraries to re-categorize Heidegger, etc (Faye) seriously, and I assume they have only a cursory knowledge and understanding of philosophy, especially Heidegger. I made this pretty clear in a comment above. No, I'm not an expert; but I think the projects of these two men reveal a general ignorance w/r/t Heidegger's philosophy from the get go, and that some of the *interesting* scholars of Heidegger would look at Romano and Faye and laugh their asses off.

Faye's agenda seems to be little more than "I've read the secret papers and everything Heidegger said is fascist and no one should like him anymore!" I find very little interesting about debating a philosopher's place within the cannon (or the library). It's absurdly reductionist, and people do it for attention. In my opinion and experience, academics who engage in this type of historical ranking and the like have little original or substantial thought themselves.

Look, ironmouth - you are clearly incredibly versed in German history, and I've really appreciated all of your input in this thread. I don't think we disagree completely here. The big problem, as I see it, is that Romano, Faye and many folks in this thread are confused about the relationship - the philosophical relationship - between history and philosophy (wonderfully coincidental as this is the very problem Heidegger concerned himself with). So much has been said here about MH's history and the historical context of his work - but so little has actually been said about his philosophy. Granted, we don't have the book yet (and I can't read French), but no one has really done anything here in the way of explaining how, say, his metaphysics is, at its core, based upon and propagating Nazi ideology.

That said, and Heidegger would argue, that you could make a good case for claiming that every philosopher's political views are deeply embedded in their entire systems. Consider Plato, MH's arch enemy, as an obvious example. This is the very question of interpretation we are trying to solve. This fact is at the same time interesting and yet meaningless. We are trying, as philosophers, to transcend this trap. Faye, as I pointed out earlier, actually seems very stuck in the very sort of hermeneutic circle Heidegger discusses.
posted by Lutoslawski at 3:00 PM on November 10, 2009 [2 favorites]

The big problem, as I see it, is that Romano, Faye and many folks in this thread are confused about the relationship - the philosophical relationship - between history and philosophy (wonderfully coincidental as this is the very problem Heidegger concerned himself with).

I can understand your dismissal of Romano's essay above. However, you have not read Faye, and I cannot understand how you can dismiss his argument without reading it or seeing the evidence he's presented.
posted by Ironmouth at 3:08 PM on November 10, 2009

but no one has really done anything here in the way of explaining how, say, his metaphysics is, at its core, based upon and propagating Nazi ideology.

I think that Faye leaves that up to Heidegger himself who according to Faye, made these very arguments to his students and others.
posted by Ironmouth at 3:14 PM on November 10, 2009

However, you have not read Faye, and I cannot understand how you can dismiss his argument without reading it or seeing the evidence he's presented

Fair, and I look forward to its publication. I could be proven incredibly wrong, but - I am willing to bet that any book that tries to make the flat out claim that Heidegger's work is not "philosophy" is *probably* a little off the mark. Being and Time aside, I have a hard time imagining the sort of "secret documents" that would be necessary to dismiss, say, the essays in Poetry, Language, Thought as merely Nazi propaganda and hate speech.

And as I've said a few times upthread, someone who finds it interesting to categorize things into philosophy/not-philosophy makes me dubious about the depth of such a person's thought with regard to the topic, and Heidegger, perhaps, is an apotheosis of sorts in this regard.
posted by Lutoslawski at 3:18 PM on November 10, 2009

Lutoslawski--I don't think anyone on this thread is advocating censoring Heidegger's work (even if Romano and Faye may--it's not clear--be). Rather, the first step in the "hermeneutics of suspicion" is doing away with idols.

The genesis of Heidegger's thought is complicated--his indebtedness to Lask, Husserl, Dilthey, and the German idealists (especially Schelling and Hegel) is well known--but that Heidegger himself engendered something of an academic cult cannot be denied. Yet he also served to inspire many independently great thinkers (Ricoeur, Gadamer, Sartre, Merleau Ponty, etc.). What I'm arguing here is that the question of the relationship between his thought and his involvement in Nazism is not necessarily a question that seeks first and foremost to dismiss him: in the right hands, it can help us understand him. A little less defensiveness about this question could go a long way.
posted by HP LaserJet P10006 at 3:18 PM on November 10, 2009 [1 favorite]

What I'm arguing here is that the question of the relationship between his thought and his involvement in Nazism is not necessarily a question that seeks first and foremost to dismiss him: in the right hands, it can help us understand him. A little less defensiveness about this question could go a long way.

Well put, and well taken. (however, it really does seem to me that (certainly) Romano and (to a lesser extent) Faye do in fact wish to dismiss him on these grounds).
posted by Lutoslawski at 3:21 PM on November 10, 2009

Of all of the historical monographs on the subject, it is the one least tainted by retrospect.

I didn't mean that it was tainted by the layers of scholarly treatment that came before, but that it was trying to tell the history of the very recent past and that Hillberg, like any journalist, (and like Arendt) was blinded by what actually happened in a way that made it difficult to see what could have happened. The goal was to explain a very recent phenomenon, and it's easiest to ignore the contingencies of a moment when you've only just realized how it all turned out.

Arent's classification of "totalitarianism" is considered completely outmoded in historical thought--there never was such a thing. The analysis must be more complex.

Maybe it's true that Arendt is considered outmoded, but her claim is not that German or the USSR managed to actually accomplish total domination, but rather that its governments were rooted in the ambition to that kind of totality and that many citizens outside of the government would experience the totalizing ideology and internal terrorism of the state as that kind of totalizing domination. The recent work I've seen on this is Claude Lefort's Complications, but perhaps your have something else in mind. Arendt's book is called Origins of Totalitarianism, and as a result she spends as much time discussing the nineteenth century than the twentieth. Certainly when she wrote the Eichmann articles or her meditations on the Hungarian revolution, she was well aware of how complex the bureaucratic borsht had become under Hitler and in the Soviet bloc.
posted by anotherpanacea at 3:35 PM on November 10, 2009

And yes, I will reserve the right to dismiss someone's CV when used in an attempt to prove the correctness of an argument. It's fallacious. you can't be serious

I'm completely serious. You come across here as someone who can't read well enough to actually respond to the arguments being presented. You also come across as overvaluing your insights while dismissing the insights of people who can, at least, actually get tenured and published. Neither of those things presents someone from being an idiot or a crank, but, then, neither does an account on MetaFilter.

I think if you read my comment regarding your comments here, you'll see that it was relatively gentle, especially considering your evident disregard for most who disagree with you.
posted by OmieWise at 3:48 PM on November 10, 2009 [1 favorite]

You come across here as someone who can't read well enough to actually respond to the arguments being presented.

Funny, i was thinking the same thing about you. And I don't think you've read some of my comments carefully (yes, some of what I've said in this thread has been thoughtless, but not all of it).

You also come across as overvaluing your insights while dismissing the insights of people who can, at least, actually get tenured and published. Neither of those things presents [sic] someone from being an idiot or a crank, but, then, neither does an account on MetaFilter.

Eh. Again, tenured-smenured. Any prestige or credibility 'tenured' or 'published' might warrant sort of dissolved when I read things like "Heidegger is a quack" and "his work isn't philosophy." Those are silly things to say, and I know a great deal of published, tenured professors who would be quick to dismiss these...er...um..."insights" or whatever as well.
posted by Lutoslawski at 4:12 PM on November 10, 2009

Did you just make an "I know you are but what am I?" argument?

Forgive my earlier impertinence, sir, I didn't realize the full quality of your thought. Carry on!
posted by OmieWise at 4:25 PM on November 10, 2009 [2 favorites]

L'histoire de Martin H is a cautionary tale in the vein of Faust or Mephisto.

A humble arcadian philosopher is tempted by fate to accept worldly power, but he soon regrets his deal with the devil.

A turn in fortune and the vicissitudes of war demand his humility and contrition, which, in his intellectual arrogance, he denies.

A film by Terence Malick.
posted by ovvl at 4:26 PM on November 10, 2009

you know, I thought I'd wrap up here with a little anecdote. David Sidorsky, who's been teaching 20th century philosophy since half-way through the century, hilariously, once told me the story about how in the 70's philosophers at Columbia University, which used to give away a 'greatest living philosopher' award, elected Heidegger for the award. Well, as you might expect, half the faculty promised to walk out if he was given the award, the other half threatened to walk out if he wasn't. Passions run high with Heidegger on both sides, as we know; I probably should not have gotten involved in a thread whose whole raison d'etre was to point out more articles calling HM a bigger quack and a bigger nazi than previously thought.

I apologize for having opposing views on the subject; next time I'll know to either shut-up or just buy into whatever someone with tenure status tells me too like a good little MeFite.
posted by Lutoslawski at 4:37 PM on November 10, 2009

I've read Richard Wolin's books trashing large numbers of continental thinkers. He's got some points, but he didn't seem to know when to stop, so some comparatively minor collaborative writings by Blanchot get put alongside Heidegger and De Man's collaborations without much sense of difference. Anyway, Wolin definitely has an agenda, and if even he thinks the Faye book is unconvincing, I'm inclined to be skeptical going in.

I did read Hugo Ott's biography of Heidegger and his political activities, and while Heidegger comes out looking like a craven, cowardly, bigoted, confused, ultranationalist opportunist, he does not ultimately seem like a Nazi ideologue or apparatchik. The reality of Nazism seemed to disappoint him even though the fantasy clearly had some appeal.

Ott doesn't deal much with the philosophy. The George Steiner book that Leiter mentions is interesting but inconclusive on trying to draw links between Heidegger's philosophy and his politics. It is and will remain in dispute. As HP says, Carl Schmitt was far, far more openly Nazi-aligned in his (political) philosophy, and as long as he meets with the approval of the academy, I can't see attacks on Heidegger's philosophy getting much traction.
posted by waggish at 4:47 PM on November 10, 2009

Someone reading over my shoulder says this:

Heidegger understood technology better than anyone except maybe Marshall McLuhan. It's not just a tool, its a mode of being. It's not just a mode of being, its a framing device that conditions our mode of being.

In his pre-war happy peasant days he was a lot more keen on the human-tech relationship. The hammer presents itself, ready-to-hand, and becomes a hammer only through its relationship with us. And we become ourselves through our relationship with the hammer.

After the war, once he'd witnessed techno-science operating as a genocide machine, he got a lot more pessimistic about the whole thing. The airplane is a resource in the service of technology, a nothing machine just sitting in storage on a runway until it is put to use. Same with a river. Understoood through a technological framework, a river is just a resource, waiting to be dammed and diverted. Same with a person: just a resource waiting to be put to some use.

This framing device of technology is in and of itself meaningful and it can reveal to us our mode of being, but it's damn hard to see it, because as we construct it we are at the same time in it and of it. Like McLuhan said, "One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in."
posted by ovvl at 4:48 PM on November 10, 2009 [5 favorites]

Returning to say great comment ovvl.

The hammer presents itself, ready-to-hand, and becomes a hammer only through its relationship with us. And we become ourselves through our relationship with the hammer.

Don't forget the part where it breaks! That's my favorite part!

Like McLuhan said, "One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in."

A little dfw: Two young fish encounter “an older fish swimming the other way,” and the older fish asks, “How’s the water?” The young fish ask one another: “What the hell is water?”
posted by Lutoslawski at 4:54 PM on November 10, 2009

I apologize for having opposing views on the subject; next time I'll know to either shut-up or just buy into whatever someone with tenure status tells me to like a good little MeFite.

Nooooo!!! No more philosophy fight to the death?!

I know this discussion was very heated, and feelings may have been hurt, but I just want to note that from the standpoint of someone not so involved, it was a fruitful, fascinating and enlightening conversation.

Thank you Lutoslawski, and Ironmouth. While you might not agree, you both certainly gave us a lot of food for thought.
posted by HabeasCorpus at 5:52 PM on November 10, 2009 [1 favorite]

If you amend bardic's statement to say that Heidegger isn't taken seriously in analytic philosophy departments, then he's definitely right.

He was on the Ph.D. comps reading list when I was at Notre Dame.
posted by Jahaza at 6:27 PM on November 10, 2009

I was hoping to learn something about Heidegger's philosophy in this thread. We've got 125 comments about whether his philosophy is worthwhile, but hardly any containing philosophy.

Don't tell, guys. Show.
posted by painquale at 6:43 PM on November 10, 2009

I was hoping to learn something about Heidegger's philosophy in this thread. We've got 125 comments about whether his philosophy is worthwhile, but hardly any containing philosophy.

in typical philosopher fashion. and i'm as guilty as any.
posted by Lutoslawski at 7:03 PM on November 10, 2009

mct: I call it the Phil Spector Phenomenon, because invariably in every conversation about Spector's murder, someone always chimes in with "AND he's talentless, AND he fucked up Let It Be!"

He's not at all talentless, but I was bitching about "Let It Be" long before he shot that woman. I kinda wanted them to tack a few extra years onto his sentence because of it.
posted by the_bone at 7:50 PM on November 10, 2009

Late to the party I was at earlier but -- analyzing the historical context of MH's professional duties in th 1930's is a far cry from either a) dismissing his significance or b) wanting to burn his books. It's obvious to me that any sort of pearl-clutching over the need to build a wall between the philosophy and the philosopher (Lutoslawski's whinging, for example) is terribly ironic given some of the central points of MH himself, not to mention the philosophers who followed in his wake.

I think anyone who wants to understand 20th century history should read Mein Kampf as well and realize what a flawed, idiotic work it is.

What it sounds like Faye is trying to do (as noted, in a book nobody has read but that some have already tried to dismiss) is point out that MH's philosophy isn't just embedded in the parallel rise of National Socialism, but was actually a vehicle for its formulation and promotion. So we move from the earlier apologia of "He was a doddering philosopher who simply signed on to Nazism to continue his important philosophical work" to the recent "Gee, he actually did a few bad things but during the 1950's and 1960s he realized he was wrong," to potentially something like "The dude was hand-in-glove with Nazism and to understand his philosophy you have to understand Nazism, because he actually gave lectures where he said this."

And believe me, you can read plenty of MH and still consider him to be the ultimate racist quack. But he is "significant" and sure, I'd expect any philosophy prof. to have read him. Some of the philosophy professors I worked with (granted, I only minored in the subject) had certainly read much of his work before realizing what a racist quack he was, and how wrong-headed his supporters are. Some even kept reading after realizing what a racist quack he was in order to find the "real" MH, the one who is so significant, the one who is so misunderstood. Funny how their opinion of him only grew worse getting to the truly bizarre later work.
posted by bardic at 11:36 PM on November 10, 2009

Hard to believe that H's philosophy was a pure vehicle for Nazism, because it's so damn hard to understand. (The Nazis got fed up with him fairly quickly.) And hell, Being and Time was dedicated to Husserl, a Jew. Heidegger notoriously removed that dedication once the university purges started. He never apologized and he only obfuscated the issue in later years. But he wasn't a pure brownshirt; even Richard Evans, who is pretty hard on collaborators in general, paints him as a mendacious fellow traveler rather than as a founding ideologue.

If there's a silver bullet as to the connection between his philosophy and his "political activities," it's probably in this inaugural speech to the rectorship from 1933: "academic freedom would no longer be the basis of life in the German university; for this freedom was not genuine, because it is only negative. It means a lack of concern, arbitrariness of views and inclinations, a lack of anchorage in doing things or not doing them." That *does* bear some resemblance to H's proper philosophy, and it deserves to hang over his work like Celine's pamphlets do over his novel. I doubt it will be enough to indict the philosophy tout court, however.

(I say this as someone who was pilloried by theory folk for calling Schmitt a Nazi on my blog.)

If anyone's interested in a decent demystifying introduction, I recommend William Blattner's book on Being and Time. (He was a student of Hubert Dreyfus, who wrote the similarly demystifying Being-in-the-World.)
posted by waggish at 4:38 AM on November 11, 2009 [2 favorites]

Don't tell, guys. Show.

This comes off as a little aggressive, but if you're really interested in short, readable defenses of Heidegger's relevance, Simon Critchley's blog at the Guardian has eight entries that will get you up to speed. It's my own view that Heidegger's relevance is heavily dependent on his popularizing and disseminating Husserlian phenomenology, and that his attempt to give an account of a fundamental ontology or "the difference between Being and beings" is a departure from what's valuable in phenomenology.

I think it's fair to say that Heidegger lays to metaphysical groundwork for existentialism and for anti-humanism by prioritizing existence over essence, but again this is not unique nor even particularly fruitful or even clear enough to help solve problems in mathematics or set theory. His central claim is something like: "to exist is to exist in a time and place and to always to have one's thinking claimed or circumscribed by the history and organization of that time and place." The rest of his work is an attempt to work out the implications of that claim, for the most part badly. Before him, the best proponents of this view (Kierkegaard, maybe Nietzsche) were not particularly rigorous philosophers, so even the slight additional rigor he offers is useful.

He's often credited with dissolving the mind-body problem by demonstrating how it is predicated on a syntactical mistake of thinking of ourselves as somehow not always-already in the world. In analytic philosophy fifty years after Being and Time, there were still folks who thought that they could distinguish human from machine thinking on the basis of the lack of referentiality or semantics. (Putnam is one example of this, but then in a different sense, so is Dreyfus, who ought to know better.)

His work also seems to demonstrate the exhaustion of a certain kind of political communitarianism, but more from its failure than its success. Again, this criticism has had to be worked out a second time in analytic philosophy by folks like Taylor, Sandel, and Pettit, though in Taylor's case, at least, Heidegger was clearly an influence.

One of the reasons Heidegger continues to be exciting to artists, architects, and literary folk is the way he connects the art work to the constitution of our shared world. His "Orgins of the Work of Art" is credited with demonstrating the way that art works, the arrangement of public spaces, and language and structure of fiction and poetry help (and hinder) us in framing and making meaning out of our experience of the world, without necessarily getting in the way of our encounter with the "things themselves." The sense data folks (AJ Ayer, for one) still had not learned this lesson in the 50s, but that's as much out of ignorance of Heidegger as of Thomas Reid.

He's also credited with developing a some sort of unique theory of truth, but I can't say much about that without getting disgusted. Of all the things for analytic philosophers like Rorty to have picked up, this seems like the worst possible one. Gadamer is allegedly wholly dependent on this, but for some reason he doesn't disgust me in the same way so that's what I point to when asked to talk about Heidegger's epistemology.

All that said, I'm generally opposed to "Great Man" theories of the history of ideas. My preference is for folks like Derek Parfit who acknowledge that philosophy is a discipline that builds on the work of one's predecessors and that showing clearly why a bad idea is wrong can be tedious but also more useful than the flashy sexy work of doing it all new just to prove you can.
posted by anotherpanacea at 6:31 AM on November 11, 2009 [4 favorites]

"Truth" is kind of boring. And also impossible. To acknowledge it, sure. That's what we do as gibbering thought-and-language-and-noise speakers. To say it in an appreciable way beyond our primate instincts is also cool, because that's art. That allows the farmers to have some connect with the magistrates, and we can have our parties and festivals and maintain something called culture.

The glances at the failed concepet of "Truth" are interesting, or can be if you have good friends and communities. Aesthetics are fun. I'll admit, Heidegger is kind of fun. But let's not forget he was also an unconscionable asshole who rooted for the Holocaust.

Heidegger as failed poet can work, Nazis aside and within. As an institutionally relevant builder of something called "Philosophy," no. We shouldn't allow him that sinecure.

But please read him all you want.
posted by bardic at 10:28 AM on November 11, 2009

This comes off as a little aggressive

Yeah, sorry, my being too pithy led to my being too punchy. I didn't mean that as a command; I meant it as a suggestion. It seemed to me that the best way to convince Heidegger-deniers that he's worthy of study is to hit them (including me) with some of his best arguments. Appeals to authority weren't doing much good because no one could agree on who counts as an authority or what the authorities actually believe.

Thanks for your comment; that was very good. At the very least, it drove me to consider his comments on the mind-body problem and reread the Critchley column on it. It would be kind of astounding to me if the mind-body problem had been solved or diffused.

(Gut reaction: it sounds like Heidegger is overemphasizing the role that an epistemic notion -- doubt -- plays in worries about the mind-body problem. The mind-body problem doesn't need anything epistemic to get off the ground... you can just say that facts about mind and consciousness are not entailed by current physics. I can happily admit that Dasein is being-in-the-world and that I can't really believe that I'm a free-floating spirit or that other people I meet are robots. But I don't see how that helps.

I guess my main problem is that while the ready-at-hand might very well be conceptually prior to the present-at-hand (that seems kind of uncontentious) it is a far stretch to claim metaphysical priority. Critchley conflates these two all over the place in the final paragraph of that column. These sentences seem true: "if my parents had not met when they did, then I might not have existed." "The Cambrian Explosion would not have happened 400 million years ago if the earth were hotter." "Before people existed there were dinosaurs." Etc. To believe any science at all, you need to believe counterfactuals that involve your nonexistence. I don't see how you can get these sorts of modal facts to work out right if you take the ready-at-hand as metaphysically prior... and if you can get them to work out right, that's all you'll need to get skeptical worries and the mind-body problem off the ground. It's because we think that statements like this are true that we end up with some form of "dualistic distinction between mind and reality;" we do not, as Critchley thinks, "presuppose" it.

So, I guess I'm making a pretty basic charge of confusing epistemology and metaphysics. I do actually think that those two things are not separate and that the mind-body problem is predicated on a mistake... but the "syntactic error" seems entirely too fast to me.)
posted by painquale at 1:28 AM on November 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

To believe any science at all, you need to believe counterfactuals that involve your nonexistence. I don't see how you can get these sorts of modal facts to work out right if you take the ready-at-hand as metaphysically prior... and if you can get them to work out right, that's all you'll need to get skeptical worries and the mind-body problem off the ground. It's because we think that statements like this are true that we end up with some form of "dualistic distinction between mind and reality;" we do not, as Critchley thinks, "presuppose" it.

For Heidegger, counterfactuals are the whole problem. If the ready-to-hand is phenomenologically prior, then the possibility of the present-to-hand and ultimately the possibility of absence is what needs to be explained, rather than presumed. He claims that we can only access counterfactuals through actual experiences of not-ready-to-handness (the broken or missing tool) and that this culminates in the ultimate counterfactual: the possibility of my own impossibility, i.e. my being-towards-death. At least in this, he's trying to figure out how we get from a phenomenological experience of a world that is unquestioned to the possibility of asking the question of being and not-being, or worldliness and mortality.

So skepticism is not the product of mental distinction, but of a worldly phenomenon and of the kind of being that Da-sein is: a being that calls its own being into question because the world it "for it" but the world is also fragile. I know that's jargonistic, but Heidegger is claiming that unless we work out the sources of this kind of counterfactual rigorously, we'll be mislead by the way we speak about it. The phrasing of the question can draw us into identifying metaphysical perplexities where none exist. At base, he's charging dualists with a category mistake: they think they need an account of mind only because they're already speaking in a way that creates the difference that needs explaining. What they truly need, Heidegger claims, is an account that doesn't have minds and bodies in it to begin with, because it doesn't prioritize perception and knowledge, but rather sees those as metaphysically posterior (though in truth, ontologically coeventuated, because metaphysics for Heidegger always makes this mistake and needs to be unsaid or concealed in order to reveal the fundamental and non-enframed questioning of Being) to action and involvement. That's basically where he loses me: it's a hermeneutic circle you can only understand once you've drunk the Kool-Aid. It's Scientology for philosophers.

But that's how a Heideggerian would respond. If what we're trying to make room for are the ineffable, intrinsic, private, and directly accessible elements of an experience, my guess is that Heidegger would sound a lot like Dennett in "Quining Qualia." The only experience that is truly private is so private even I can't have it: my own death, which is only the cessation of experience. If what we're trying to make room for is P-Consciousness, or an irreducible (but not private, intrinsic, etc.) "what it's likeness" then I think Heidegger would say that this what-it's-likeness is the question that draws us inexorably into metaphysics, and the forgetting of the question of Being, despite its pitfalls and errancy. I'm not sure if that claim is translatable back into more traditional philosophical vocabulary or into an argumentative form, and I'm not sure if it's true, but it doesn't seem to entail, or be entailed by, any particular politics. If Heidegger claimed otherwise, as he apparently did in lectures and private conversation, then he misunderstood the insights of his own work.

I didn't mean that as a command; I meant it as a suggestion.

"Show don't tell" is what I write in the margins of mediocre student papers.
posted by anotherpanacea at 5:55 AM on November 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

OK, if I try to translate some of those terms into my own native dialect, this all mostly sounds pretty reasonable. But some parts don't ring true. I'm going to try explaining myself occasionally using Heideggerean jargon; sorry if it sounds weird and wrong and amateurish (the best way to learn a language is to jump right in and sound like an idiot at first, and that goes for technical languages too, I've always thought). It seems to me that your first paragraph, and the first bit of your second paragraph, present a position that is at odds with the Heideggerian charge against the dualists that you present in your second paragraph.

I read you as saying that Heidegger thought that skepticism and the possibility of absence are in the nature of Dasein and that is a mysterious problem worthy of philosophical investigation... however, the mind/body problem is not and is predicated on something like a category mistake. Now, trying to explain the possibility of absence sounds like a fine project... the existence of counterfactuals and the existence of counterfactual knowledge are both definitely worthy of inquiry. But if you allow for the possibility of absence in any form, you get all your skeptical and dualist worries, I think.

I tend to think of skepticism in the way that Quine does. Common sense reasoning leads us to science, which is itself just sophisticated common sense reasoning. Then, the skeptical problem arises through science. I am only led to believe that the table in front of me might not exist by considering the way the eye works, the way light works, how information is transmitted through physical media, etc. Skepticism is just regular old thought leading to a reductio ad absurdum: trusting common sense leads us to the conclusion that we can't trust common sense.

I suppose I'm disagreeing with Heidegger in the first sentence there. I think the present-at-hand is just a reflective and sophisticated version of the ready-at-hand. It sounds like Heidegger would draw a thick line between the two, and how we traverse that thick line needs explaining. But anyway, that's not important. If Heidegger thinks that skepticism arises from the sort of being that Dasein is and the fact that the world is fragile, then it's unclear to me why the mind-body problem doesn't similarly arise. Just as skepticism comes from science, so does the mind/body problem. Once we start coming up with a theory of physics that is causally closed and supposed to be complete, we recognize that there are features of experience that the physics cannot explain, and we have what appears to be a contradiction.

It won't do to just assert that because minds and bodies are metaphysically posterior in some sense, then there something wrong with our doctrine of minds and bodies and we must reject it. (And I have to say that I still don't see why phenomenological or conceptual priority is the same as metaphysical priority. Our concepts of the world are one thing and the world is another.) We got to mind/body dualism through normal scientific, counterfactual reasoning... which is the sort of thing that gets us to skepticism, and so part of the kind of being that Dasein is (I'm guessing Heidegger would reject this for some reason). It won't do, when faced with a reductio, to just assert P and deny not-P. You need to explain what went wrong in the reasoning that got you to not-P. (Moore tried to run this sort of argument against skepticism in his "Here's a hand" argument, but it's not terribly convincing because it doesn't explain what went wrong in the reasoning that got the skeptic to "I might have no hands.")

I assume that there's some subtle argument that shows why the possibility of absence falls out of the kind of being that Dasein is but dualism does not, but I don't see it. It probably has something to do with the sorts of counterfactual statements that are legitimate and all that stuff about broken or missing tools? I'm a little worried that an account that denies the counterfactuals that lead to dualism will also deny the sorts of counterfactuals that physics relies on. I hope we're not driven to say that there are no laws about leptons because we don't have the right sort of not-ready-to-handness.

Anyway...

The Dennett analogy sounds right to me. The philosophers I know who partially align themselves with Heidegger (i.e. Rorty and Haugeland) hold views on the mind that are pretty much entirely consistent with Dennett. And yeah, I don't particularly see how politics enters into these positions.

"Show don't tell" is what I write in the margins of mediocre student papers.

Apologies for being rude. It can be difficult to avoid snarking on Metafilter. I usually regret it, and do now. Thanks for the very nice responses.
posted by painquale at 1:14 AM on November 13, 2009

Just a brief reply now, as you seem to be responding about the same time each day so I can come back later and fill in the gaps....

I'm a little worried that an account that denies the counterfactuals that lead to dualism will also deny the sorts of counterfactuals that physics relies on.

So the kind of dualism that emerges when we consider the counterfactual "I could be a brain in a vat," (or in the Matrix) is very different than the sort that troubled Descartes or that Heidegger is addressing. But I'm also not really sure why it's a dualism, rather than a skepticism... or I doubt we're committed to substance dualism by that skeptical concern, and I doubt you think so, either. If the problem is property dualism, then I don't think Heidegger helps at all. He doesn't resolve what it is about the human brain that makes phenomenal consciousness possible.

Heidegger seems to be a property dualist in the following way: some kinds of beings have a phenomenological world of their own and some don't. Some kinds of beings are Dasein: they constitute a world and there that is 'ownmost,' such that they say that the phenomena that are revealed to them are 'their own,' i.e. their own experiences. Some kinds of beings aren't Dasein: no experiences there. There's nothing it's 'like' for the rock to fall or sit in the sun. (In contrast, I find panpsychism sort of attractive: the rock just doesn't reflect on its experience like you or I do.) In all the Heidegger I've ever read, which doesn't include some of the "esoteric" writings like the "Beitrage," (the unpublished "Contributions to Philosophy," which focuses on "eventuation" and is very exciting to devotees) he never gives an account of how it is that some things develop worldliness and some things don't.
posted by anotherpanacea at 4:29 AM on November 13, 2009

(And I have to say that I still don't see why phenomenological or conceptual priority is the same as metaphysical priority. Our concepts of the world are one thing and the world is another.)

Just to continue: this is the distinction that bothers Heidegger. Our concepts of the world are worldly: they're derived from the world, from some set of experiences. (He's at odds with Kant here, obviously. There's a set of Heidegger lectures on the first Critique that try to show that they're not at odds, which I haven't read, but I know a lot of folks that claim that there's a way of using the third Critique to reconcile them.)

It may well be the case that a concept derived from the ready-to-handness of the tool may not serve us well when thinking about hadrons or substances, and that's basically Heidegger's critique: at some point, perhaps it was Aristotle, perhaps it was Augustine, we began applying a set of concepts derived from instrumentality to describe Being. "Form" and "material," like "telos" and "arche" or "property" and "substance," are concepts derived from the artisan's vocabulary, concepts for instrumental planning. They're already over-stretched when applied to the physician's task (that's one of the tensions he points out in Plato and Aristotle) and they're even more inappropriate when trying to "say the world" or do justice to the difference between Beings and being or whatever.

Again, we're back at a down-the-rabbit-hole moment: you either accept this and amend your concepts, or you don't. The right way to relate to hadrons is to 'let them be' or say them 'poetically' rather than try to "enframe" them with a scientific worldview. This is more clearly a political project, and it's more clearly an enraging and stupid thing to say. But it does help to explain why the whole set of counterfactual brain-in-a-vat questions would have been a category mistake for Heidegger: if you want to say you can't know that you're not a brain in a vat, you still aren't really expressing a dualist concern, but only worrying about whether the world that presents itself to you as ready-to-hand is as dependable as it seems to be. It's precisely not to worry about whether there 'is' a world at all: the world is there, presenting itself to you as a things to be concerned about. It may be different, in its foundations, than you previously thought... but that's as much a problem for us if we aren't brains in vats and think, falsely, that the electrons are the smallest particles, or erroneously believe that a specific version of string theory is correct. Realism doesn't solve fallibility.

None of these concerns would ever prove that the world is something unworldly. I've always thought that Montero captured this very well in an analytic mode in her article "The Body Problem": physicalism may spare us from some of the metaphysical perplexities of the intersubstantiality, but it comes with a whole host of other metaphysical perplexities every bit as, well, perplexing.
posted by anotherpanacea at 5:59 AM on November 13, 2009

you seem to be responding about the same time each day so I can come back later and fill in the gaps

True! Metafilter is my can't-get-to-sleep addiction.

So the kind of dualism that emerges when we consider the counterfactual "I could be a brain in a vat," (or in the Matrix) is very different than the sort that troubled Descartes or that Heidegger is addressing.

Yeah, I meant to be talking about Cartesian (substance) dualism, not brain-in-a-vat skepticism. Physical theories seem to leave questions about consciousness and the mind open, and that's why dualist worries emerge. Insofar as physical theories express laws, they express counterfactuals, which is why I was claiming that dualism is a natural outgrowth of counterfactual reasoning. Heidegger tells us that claims like "my body could exist without my mind" are illicit counterfactuals. But the common sense reasoning that leads to these counterfactuals is the same common sense reasoning that leads to more sophisticated counterfactuals in physical laws. Physics tells us about physical bodies and psychology tells us about minds, but we don't have bridge principles between physics and psychology, so it seems like whatever form of counterfactual reasoning led Descartes to claims like "my body could exist without my mind" is still there in the sciences.

he never gives an account of how it is that some things develop worldliness and some things don't.

Oh, that's interesting... it looks like an analogue of the mind/body problem that occurs in his own theory. I'm not sure how he can criticize Descartes on the mind/body problem while leaving himself open to the Dasein/non-Dasein problem. Is Heidegger only criticizing substance dualism? I don't see that he has an argument that concludes that substance dualism isn't a problem which would not also entail that property dualism or skepticism is not a problem. What would the argument be? Critchley made it sound like the argument was that the dualist is not entitled to doubt, but I argued that you don't need doubt, you just need counterfactuals. You presented Heidegger's argument as being a little different: dualists" think they need an account of mind only because they're already speaking in a way that creates the difference that needs explaining". But I suspect that the "way" that the dualists are speaking -- the way that creates the difference -- is just the same way of speaking that gets you skepticism, physics, and the possibility of absence.

(I've gotta admit that I'm a little worried I'm misunderstanding something: I took phrases like "the possibility of absence," "the possibility of my own impossibility," "the question of being and not-being, or worldliness and mortality," and so on, to be expressions of something like skepticism. They are at least counterfactuals about our own nonexistence. But in this last comment you say that brain-in-a-vat skepticism would also be considered a category mistake. So, what's so special about the possibility of our own impossibility... why is that not also a simple category mistake? It also arises from the present-at-hand... right...? Maybe I'm misunderstanding and Heidegger really does think that this is a category mistake too...?)

this is the distinction that bothers Heidegger. Our concepts of the world are worldly: they're derived from the world, from some set of experiences.

Oh yeah, I wasn't trying to go noumenal there... I definitely agree that our concepts are in the world, of the world, and caused by the world. Instead of saying "our concepts of the world are one thing and the world is another," I should have said, "a concept is one thing and what it's about is another." Conceptual priority is not metaphysical priority because, although your concept of A might be prior to your concept of B, and although you could have a concept of A being metaphysically prior to B, B could still be metaphysically prior to A. The ready-at-hand could be conceptually prior but metaphysically posterior to the present-at-hand.

"Form" and "material," like "telos" and "arche" or "property" and "substance," are concepts derived from the artisan's vocabulary, concepts for instrumental planning. They're already over-stretched when applied to the physician's task (that's one of the tensions he points out in Plato and Aristotle) and they're even more inappropriate when trying to "say the world" or do justice to the difference between Beings and being or whatever.

I like this quite a bit. I'd be completely happy if metaphysics did away with talk of properties and substances and the like. It's caveman science.

The Montero article looks neat; I'll toss it into a to-read pile. (You also might like to know that I pulled Being and Time down off my shelf and tried muddling through some of it. Wow my advisers would be irritated if they knew I was spending some of my time reading this.)
posted by painquale at 10:36 PM on November 13, 2009

I'm not sure how he can criticize Descartes on the mind/body problem while leaving himself open to the Dasein/non-Dasein problem.

This would be a great paper title. Drop me a line if you ever want a coauthor for it.

I took phrases like "the possibility of absence," "the possibility of my own impossibility," "the question of being and not-being, or worldliness and mortality," and so on, to be expressions of something like skepticism.

I think they explain how it could be that we would experience doubt, but not why it would be valid when extended to metaphysical things like minds without bodies. I can worry about absence because occasionally my things aren't where I left them. I can worry about the possibility of the destruction of the world ("the possibility of my own impossibility," or the not-any-longer-being-worldly) through analogy: I see that other people die, and am confronted with my own mortality. Like Cavell after him, though, Heidegger believes that true skepticism/solipsism is sublimation of the anxiety over my own death, not philosophical but an escape from philosophy.

Physics tells us about physical bodies and psychology tells us about minds, but we don't have bridge principles between physics and psychology, so it seems like whatever form of counterfactual reasoning led Descartes to claims like "my body could exist without my mind" is still there in the sciences.

To have this conversation further, we've got to talk about supervenience and phenomenological zombies. Certainly we can worry that a brain state might not always entail a mental state, so in that sense a kind of dualism emerges, but (a.) it's not a substance dualism, since the missing mental state would be a missing property of the brain, like color or radioactivity, and (b.) not being able to give a conceptual account of the way in which mental properties emerge from physical properties does not commit us to a dualist metaphysics, only to a conceptual division between the human and natural sciences in search of unification.

To (a) I think you can reasonably respond that what worries you most is not bodies without minds, but minds without bodies. I'm really not sure how to respond adequately to skeptical doubts that invoke ghosts and souls, and I do feel a little like I'm making an argument from assertion by saying that we must accept naturalism if we're ever to make any progress. I can kind of wave at Hume and the problem of non-natural causation, but if you simply claim to have divine revelation that minds can exist without bodies, I get stymied. Hopefully, you won't stymie me that way, but perhaps you will elaborate a bit.

Heidegger's solution to (b) is to force the natural sciences to view themselves within the constraints of the human sciences, which is clearly absurd, but I think it's just as absurd to force the human sciences to be explicable in terms of the natural sciences. A good, short essay for understanding Heidegger's take on this is: "The Age of the World Picture," which I rather like as it echoes some of my own concerns about what's lost when we attempt to reduce any of the humanities to a research agenda that can be divvied up amongst working groups and lab and directed more by funding availability than by the intrinsic draw of the question.

The other way to get at the problem is through reference/intentionality/representation: what are mental states 'about' and how do they get that way. Heidegger is a Husserlian in the sense that he claims that our mental states always-already reference the world and the things that make it up, which, again, starts to sound like an argument from assertion. But how else can we surmount the problem of reference by which any thing is about any other thing? It's a finger-pointing-at-the-moon issue: if minds didn't already have syntax, I don't know how they could gain it, but since they do it's difficult to explain it. Perhaps he's an old Mysterian? I have a friend who has been trying to use John McDowell's "second nature" to explain the connection, but I'm frankly not sure if that helps or if it doesn't just give the problem a pretty name.
posted by anotherpanacea at 9:26 AM on November 14, 2009

This would be a great paper title. Drop me a line if you ever want a coauthor for it.

Heh, thanks for the offer! Feel free to use the title; I can't really see my name on a paper discussing a guy I hardly know the first thing about.

Anyway, I know that I've been lumping all sorts of dualist positions together into one box, so yeah, I really should tease them apart and see if I can clear up what I was doing. Let me try to recap (this'll clear things up for myself as well). I was defending substance dualism. But not because I believe it! Not in the least! I defended it because it's what Descartes believed, and the Cartesian skeptic was Heidegger's target. I wasn't trying to protect the Cartesian at all costs, just saying that I couldn't see how the Heideggerean hurt him.

In retrospect, I think I was a little unfair to claim that Heidegger didn't touch Descartes at all. I claimed that Descartes' argument didn't essentially depend on any epistemic notions such as doubt or knowledge. But Descartes clearly did rely on them! I was presenting a more sophisticated form of Descartes' argument that didn't rely on epistemic notions; but in doing that I was presenting something that wasn't Descartes' (it was more like Kripke's argument). Also, on my updating, I stressed that physics gives us laws about bodily mechanics but says nothing about the mind. This presents the possibility of zombies but says nothing about unembodied souls, whereas Descartes stressed the soul business and only mentioned zombies in a pretty perfunctory way.

So, I ended up defending this weird hybrid view that updated some parts of Descartes but left in the substance dualism. It's obviously not one I subscribe to. I wanted to show that all Heidegger had an counterargument against was the epistemic formulation of the argument for dualism (actually I'm still not sure his argument here works, but it's interesting). You could even give an argument for substance dualism if you jettison the epistemic portion. The substance/property dualism issue is orthogonal to the issue over whether Heidegger's argument works (except for the fact that most modern formulations of the dualist argument will be for property dualism, because people aren't crazy anymore).

Maybe we should just ignore Descartes and consider whether Heidegger has shown that even modern formulations of the mind/body problem are founded on something like a category mistake. But it seemed like you think that Heidegger didn't have an argument against property dualism, and his conclusion about forcing the natural sciences to obey the human sciences is over the top. I guess my tentative and totally guessy claim is that he doesn't have an argument against property dualism, or the possibility of absence, or the Dasein/non-Dasein issue, because those aren't argued for with epistemic premises, but substance dualism usually is. Actually, if Heidegger even has problems explaining original intentionality as well as where as Dasein comes from, it sounds like the mind/body problem hits him square in the face, so Critchley's claim that he diffused the problem sounds a little misleading.

Like Cavell after him, though, Heidegger believes that true skepticism/solipsism is sublimation of the anxiety over my own death, not philosophical but an escape from philosophy.

I find these claims really interesting and kind of exciting, but I have no idea how to evaluate them! Is this a psychological claim about how the skeptic thinks? Is it a historical/etiological claim about how skepticism came to become a topic in philosophy? Is it a conceptual claim about what "true" skepticism is? Is 'sublimation' here a technical term? (Is it Freudian?)
posted by painquale at 1:36 AM on November 16, 2009

(it was more like Kripke's argument)

Hrm... it's been a while since I've read any Kripke, but I thought the issue there was that minds without bodies (or vice versa) are not real possibilities? I thought his version of the modal argument actually proposed that mental facts name something identical to neural facts.... Thus, it's not really possible to articulate the counterfactual, any more than 'twater is H20' is possibly true. I spend most of my time in value theory, though, so the textual question about Saul Kripke is only of peripheral interest to me in the way that textual problems about Heidegger are of only peripheral interest to you. As I recall, it doesn't help us with Putnam's 'Twin Earth' stuff, so it's not particularly useful to solve the modal argument this way. It ends up being reducible to its own argument by assertion.

I find these claims really interesting and kind of exciting, but I have no idea how to evaluate them!

For Cavell, at least, these arguments are solidly ad hominem. (The same is largely true for other anti-solipsists.) On the one hand, he acknowledges the difficulty the solipsist finds himself in, and on the other he merely claims that this is a difficulty that could easily be resolved with a little trust. Then he creates an elaborate analogy between King Lear and the solipsist, which is quite beautiful but hardly an argument. The same is largely true of the later Wittgenstein, though: philosophy as therapy tends to indicate that problems are pathologies.

Maybe we should just ignore Descartes and consider whether Heidegger has shown that even modern formulations of the mind/body problem are founded on something like a category mistake.

One reason that philosophers object to Heidegger's inclusion within the canon is that he doesn't make arguments, he only articulates things differently. I think the idea is that he's performing the argument by showing how a problem doesn't arise when described correctly. That's why, for instance, he has no problem describing original intentionality: that mind-world relationship is the ontological structure of action, and enacting is (in your sense metaphysically) prior to perception and skepticism.

my tentative and totally guessy claim is that he doesn't have an argument against property dualism

I'm not sure why he needs an argument against property dualism. Should we all be property dualists? Or maybe even property pluralists, since objects seem to have many properties, many of which are relational and even referential? For instance, my brain is grey and white, weighs about three pounds, and is currently thinking.

or the possibility of absence

My brain will stop thinking when the cells die. I know this by analogy, to some extent, but mostly by report from experts.

or the Dasein/non-Dasein issue

This is a distinct version of the mind-body problem, which is what makes it a good idea for a paper.

Feel free to use the title

If this makes it past a blog post, I'll credit you.
posted by anotherpanacea at 6:02 AM on November 16, 2009

Hrm... it's been a while since I've read any Kripke, but I thought the issue there was that minds without bodies (or vice versa) are not real possibilities? I thought his version of the modal argument actually proposed that mental facts name something identical to neural facts....

It's true that physicalists in the wake of Kripke have typically claimed that mind-brain identity is an a posteriori necessity, like water being H20, but that wasn't Kripke's own view. Kripke thought that the claim that mind=brain was of a very different sort than the claims that water=H20 or heat=molecular motion. We can explain why heat=molecular motion gives the appearance of contingency by appealing to the fact that things other than molecular motion could have given rise to the way we typically recognize heat (a feeling of warmth), and molecular motion could have existed without causing that feeling of warmth. Similarly, we recognize water by seeing a clear, potable, odorless liquid... yet other things could have played that role, and water needn't have had that appearance. A conscious sensation like pain, however, is different because the appearance of pain is all there is to pain. We can't explain the apparent contingency of pain being a brain state in the same way we can explain the apparent contingency of other a posteriori necessities, because the sensation of heat isn't identical to heat, but the sensation of pain is identical to pain. So pain and brain states aren't even a posteriori identical. So says Kripke, anyway. He's a quasi-Cartesian dualist (I'm not sure if he ever said anything about whether he's a property dualist or substance dualist).

Should we all be property dualists? Or maybe even property pluralists, since objects seem to have many properties, many of which are relational and even referential? For instance, my brain is grey and white, weighs about three pounds, and is currently thinking.

There's an interesting issue here about what it means to be a property dualist. If all it takes to be a property dualist is to think that there are at least two properties, then we're definitely all property pluralists. But usually property dualists want to say that mental properties are not physical properties and aren't reducible to physical properties (whereas being three pounds very well might be). And now you get into really weird issues about property individuation and what it means for one property to "reduce" to another. I don't really understand the issue myself, I confess. I don't think that a property like being a pencil is semantically or conceptually reducible to the properties in fundamental physics, and neither is a property like being a mind, but I do want to say that both hold "in virtue" of the physics, or something like that (this is not just a supervenience claim), so maybe there is a sense in which they are metaphysically reducible and I'm not a property dualist after all. This in virtue of relation is starting to receive some attention right now.

Anyway, the literature has tended to shy away from claims about property reduction and moved instead to discussions of supervenience, so I guess we could ask what Heidegger has to say about mental things necessarily being physical and certain sorts of physical things necessarily being mental.

One reason that philosophers object to Heidegger's inclusion within the canon is that he doesn't make arguments, he only articulates things differently. I think the idea is that he's performing the argument by showing how a problem doesn't arise when described correctly.

Yeah, that sounds like a fine form of abductive argument. But he apparently did describe what he thought went wrong with Cartesian dualism, and isolating that lets us see if his own view is immune to the problem. It doesn't seem to me that it is.

If this makes it past a blog post, I'll credit you.

Awesome! Definitely let me know if this goes anywhere.
posted by painquale at 2:00 PM on November 16, 2009

so I guess we could ask what Heidegger has to say about mental things necessarily being physical and certain sorts of physical things necessarily being mental.

Mostly just that we ought not to speak in this way or else we risk the degeneracy of Cartesianism.

A conscious sensation like pain, however, is different because the appearance of pain is all there is to pain. We can't explain the apparent contingency of pain being a brain state in the same way we can explain the apparent contingency of other a posteriori necessities, because the sensation of heat isn't identical to heat, but the sensation of pain is identical to pain.

I've written about pain and qualia, and found the same issue, but I'm not sure why it's the case that pain can't be a "what it's likeness" overlaid on information about the type and source of the injury. The "what it's likeness" is very troublesome, but the function of pain is to supply aversive and attention-grabbing information.

I find the attempts to reduce pain to qualia are pretty unpalatable. For instance, Elaine Scarry has argued it should be considered as an intentional state without an object, a propositionless attitude, since it does not correspond to the stucture of normal propositional attitudes like “I believe that S is P,” but rather indicates an ungrammatical “I hurt” or even simply “Ow!” or a non-linguistic /pain/. A third-person perspective might allow for us to analyze such an event, like a nearly fatal beating, as a series of statements where a particular kick creates an intention: “Jose believes that he feels pain in his right shoulder,” and the next kick, and the next, and the baseball bat wielded by a second assailant, all follow this form.

Here, the proposition, “pain in his lower back” and its cousins serve an important descriptive purpose, but lose their last vestiges of relation to the phenomenon of a total sensorium of pain. On the Scarry view, to say that pain is a color that also has the function of aversiveness and attention-getting is to miss the tension between aversion and attention. The attention of a person in large amounts of pain is completely “gotten,” consumed fully and totally, in a way that delocalizes it, while the aversion with which she is completely occupied work on her. According to Scarry, “I have an excruciating pain in my lower abdomen” is a luxury unavailable to those who experience the most extreme forms of pain.

One way of saying that the humanistic, first person description does not capture the the naturalist version, or vice versa, is to say that we ought to be dualists. Another way is to say that pain and torture is capable of destroying the physical basis of subjectivity, as we apparently did to some of the people interned at Guantanamo Bay. But I don't see why either of them precludes speaking of pain as a brain state. Indeed, we'd have to be able to say that if we were to make sense of the operation of narcotics and other pain-management techniques, wouldn't we? We just get confused by the intensity and moral opprobrium we attach to pain.

From your username, I assume that you think about this a lot, but I'm at the very limits of my competence here. There's a paper I've started several times but never completed on this and the naturalist's temptation to 'put nature on the rack.' Each time I drop it, because I just don't know how to solve the issue. Beyond competetency, you might say that these questions really take me to the limits of my powers.
posted by anotherpanacea at 9:54 AM on November 18, 2009

(Hey, I just wanted to apologize for dropping the ball on this conversation, ap. I got distracted with some proposals I had to write and kept meaning to returning to this thread when I had a little time to think about it, but that time never came. In any case, I wanted to thank you for what I thought was a fun discussion.)
posted by painquale at 7:19 PM on November 30, 2009

No problem painquale: it's a busy time for me too. See you in the next thread.
posted by anotherpanacea at 8:20 AM on December 1, 2009

holy shit. anotherpanacea and painquale. Excellent discussion. Haven't been back to this thread in a bit, and this is really great.
posted by Lutoslawski at 10:10 AM on December 1, 2009

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