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- Philosophical Problems With Heidegger (Of The Non-Nazi Variety)
- BIBLIOGRAPHY
Why This Matters So MuchAs you can see, the evidence against Heidegger is pretty convincing. But why does his involvement with the Nazi Party matter? Even if he was a hardcore Nazi, the advocates for Heidegger will claim, we must separate his philosophical work from his personal actions -- as in the Jefferson example, or in the case of John Locke, another slaveowner. To throw out his philosophy based on his personal behavior throws the baby out with the bathwater, the argument goes. Well, even if his philosophy is BRILLIANT, there's a lot to be said for refusing to endorse the work of a racist. In responding to Heidegger, you can point out that there are a lot of philosophers that make the same (or similar) claims -- to argue "The Heidegger Critique" as such endorses the man himself. Just as you wouldn't choose to read Hitler cards on vegetarianism (because it would endorse a horrid human being, even if the ideas are good), you can make a persuasive case that debaters should choose to forego reading Heidegger in rounds. It props up the name and reputation of someone who was abhorrent, and held abhorrent beliefs. The notion of authenticity, especially of authentic people, rang very true to the Nazis. It played right into their ideas of authentic people (Aryans) versus non-authentic people (everyone else). If you extrapolate that idea even a little bit, you see it's not very many steps from "we should be authentic people" to "those who are not authentic people have no worth." Take his critique of technology for example. Heidegger claims that reliance on technological solutions separates the people (volk) from the land. Your opponent will no doubt respond that you can't prove Heidegger's views led to the Holocaust. But you don't need to. You can claim that 1. That type of thinking reflects racism and the genocidal mentality, even if it didn't lead to the Holocaust, and 2. Even if Heidegger's views don't lead everyone to racism -- they give us no philosophical to COUNTERACT racism. This last point is very important. Even those people who are unconcerned with Heidegger's Nazism admit that his philosophy is devoid of social context. That is, it addresses humans in the abstract rather than dealing with real social situations. As such, it can never address real social issues in real social situations. How can you address racism if you never consider race as a factor? How can you address classism if your philosophy does not consider situations where wealth is unevenly distributed? Scholars differ on how seriously they take this argument. Heidegger's defenders generally admit that it's true, but use it to argue that their boy was an innocent - if he didn't know how the Nazis were going to take his philosophy, how can he be responsible for it? If he never applied his work to the real world, how could he address the potential implications? The milder critics think this is a mere shortcoming of his work, an indicator that Heideggerean thought might not apply in all situations. But the strongest critics of Heidegger see it for what it is: a fatal liability. Philosophical Problems With Heidegger (Of The Non-Nazi Variety)Heidegger is criticized by both Marxists and social anarchists from slightly different perspectives, although they have at least two criticisms in common. The first criticism is that Heidegger privileges the archaic in his thinking. Rather than embrace Enlightenment rationality, Heidegger (and other deep ecologists) seek to return to a sort of pre-rational era. Critics like Theodore Adorno and Murray Bookchin say that this is far from the task of a philosopher - rather than being postmodern, this seems to be pre-modern, or even pre-philosophy itself. This lends itself well to the second criticism, a critique of Heidegger's notion of individual freedom. In pressing for humans to return to "authenticity of being," his work seems to push people into a fatalist stance. Instead of deciding for oneself how one's life must be lived, humans ought to answer the call of fate, living life according to that ordainment. The word for "being" Heidegger uses is "Dasein," and he says people must just accept fate to achieve it. Check out this part of Heidegger's Being and Time: "Dasein [Heidegger's term for human being] can be reached by the blows of fate only because in the depths of its Being Dasein is fate in the sense we have described. Existing fatefully in the resoluteness which hands itself down, Dasein has been disclosed as Being-in-the-world both for the 'fortunate' circumstances which 'comes its way' and for the cruelty of accidents. Fate does not arise from the clashing together of events and circumstances. Even one who is irresolute gets driven about by these-more so than one who has chosen; and yet he can 'have' no fate." Socialist critics like Johannes Fritsche and anarchist critics like Bookchin have noted that this seems to be the OPPOSITE of individual freedom. If one is not free to determine one's own destiny, than what meaning does freedom have? And who determined what one's "fate" is, anyway? God? Heidegger? Hitler? Ernest Rohm? Conclusion Debate is a wonderful activity in that it teaches us to be skeptical. This should be true even of people tagged with "great philosopher" labels. Just because someone has the respect of academia and writes long, seemingly deep philosophical essays does not mean that the person wasn't totally full of it. It also doesn't mean that the work that person produced isn't dangerous. There's no more obvious example of that than the work of Martin Heidegger, philosopher and Nazi. Don't be fooled: when we say "Never forget the Holocaust," we should mean it. That includes remembering all those who contributed, even those who are tagged with the label "philosopher" instead of "war criminal." BIBLIOGRAPHYTheodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, tr. K. Tarnowski & F. Will (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Yoko Arisaka, Philosophy Department, University of San Francisco, Spatiality, Temporality, and the Problem of Foundation in Being and Time, PHILOSOPHY TODAY 40:1, Spring 1996, p. 36-46. Murray Bookchin, Director of the Institute for Social Ecology, GREEN PERSPECTIVES No. 15, April 1989. Hubert L. Dreyfus, BEING-IN-THE-WORLD: A COMMENTARY ON HEIDEGGER'S "BEING AND TIME," Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1991. Victor Farias, HEIDEGGER AND NAZISM, Temple University Press, 1989. Andrew Feenberg and Alastair Hannay, editors, TECHNOLOGY AND THE POLITICS OF KNOWLEDGE, Indiana University Press, 1995. Johannes Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger's Being and Time, University of California Press, 1999. Martin Heidegger, BEING AND TIME, Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York, Harper & Row, 1962. E.F. Kaelin, HEIDEGGER'S BEING & TIME, Tallahassee, Florida State University Press, 1988. George Lukacs, THE DESTRUCTION OF REASON, Humanities Press, 1981. George L. Mosse, THE CRISIS OF GERMAN IDEOLOGY: INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF THE THIRD REICH, New York, Grosset and Dunlop, 1964. Thomas Sheehan, "Heidegger and the Nazis," NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, June 16, 1988. Hans Sluga, HEIDEGGER'S CRISIS: PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICS IN NAZI GERMANY. Cambridge: Harvard Univeristy Press. 1993. Gerry Stahl, Research Professor at the University of Colorado's Institute of Cognitive Science, MARXIAN HERMENEUTICS AND HEIDEGGERIAN SOCIAL THEORY: INTERPRETING AND TRANSFORMING OUR WORLD, 1975, http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~gerry/publications/dissertations/philosophy/ch0.html, accessed May 10, 2001. Frank Tipler, professor of physics at Tulane University, THE PHYSICS OF IMMORTALITY, Tulane University Press, 1994. 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