Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1999 16:09:23 +0100
Subject: Re:  Heidegger in Germany


Cologne, 23 January 1999

h.vantuijl-AT-kub.nl schrieb:
> Michael Eldred wrote:
>
> > So-called Critical Theory has propagated a sociologization 
> > of Heidegger's thinking which serves as fertile soil for 
> > people like Lotz.
>
> Rightly so. By becoming a member of the NSDAP Heidegger also became a
> sociological and psychological problem: How is it possible that one of
> Germany's greatest thinkers does think wrong when it matters? 
> Heidegger delivered a severe blow to the belief in the quality of German
> thinking. His refusal to admit that he made a mistake only made things
> worse. 

I agree that his behaviour as a citizen was not up to scratch. He was far too 
cagey about his entanglement with NS and did not make a clean breast of it, I 
think, to his own detriment. As Rafael has shown recently, there was however, 
_privately_ shame on Heidegger's part.

> Thanks to people like Adorno, Habermas and others like them
> German thinking still has a raison d'etre.

I regard these figures as theorists of accommodation, esp. Habermas, who has 
been at the forefront of the submergence of any genuine philosophy in post-WWII 
Germany. Critical Theory has been barring the way to German youth to take up 
what is most valuable in their own, German tradition.

> However, there is more. It is amazing how well Heidegger is treated
> after the war, in particular by his students abroad - and in particular
> in France. Levinas, for example, a pupil of Heidegger and a Frenchman,
> does his utmost to make his teacher's thinking respectable again.

And does not understand much of Heidegger. Levinas was not a pupil of Heidegger, 
perhaps of Husserl.

> Strasser - and many others - thinks well of this attempt. The title of
> his excellent introduction to Levinas' philosophy is: Jenseits von Sein
> und Zeit (On the other side of Being and Time).

Levinas' main work doesn't even bother with a translation/interpretation of the 
famous Platonic phrase _epekeina taes ousias_ which gives it its title. Instead 
the obsessive, dogmatic assertion that ethics comes first. Levinas also does not 
engage with the Seinsfrage but polemicizes against it in a kind of mantra 
rhythm.

> Only by seeing Heidegger as the thinker he is - through the eyes of his
> predecessors, his critics, his students or in other ways - one may
> restore what is worthwhile in his thinking without directly falling in
> the trap of fascistoid thinking as Heidegger himself did, and did
> without remorse.

One needs the vigilance of not allowing the beating heart of Heidegger's 
thinking to be buried. Today one could say that there is not a forgetting of 
being or an obliviion to being, but an active repression of the question of 
being.

Just as _alaetheia_ as the open space for the uncovering of beings in their 
being went under completely in Western philosophy with the shift to an 
understanding of truth purely in terms of _homoiosis_, then _rectitudo_, 
_adaequatio_, etc., H.'s entanglement with NS is used as an excuse to obstruct 
any serious consideration of H.'s philosophical question.

It's easy for writers like Lotz to go over the top and simply refuse to treat 
the "truth of being" as a question at all. The ground, the atmosphere has been 
well prepared. It is a kind of secular apostatic demand placed on (German) 
youth. One must first ritually demonstrate that one is not tainted in the 
slightest by "fascistoid" (your word) ideology. Instead, the question of the 
"truth of being" is written off as a grotesque mannerism born of H.'s 
over-estimation of himself, his 'strategy' to seduce young minds and aggrandize 
himself. Most of the anti-Heidegger literature reads this way. This is pure 
sophistry, and one would do well to re-read Plato to discover what sophistry is 
and reflect on how it is alive and well in sociological theorists such as Adorno 
and Habermas. Philosophy always takes place on the threshold to sophistry, so 
there is a constant struggle to save genuine philosophical questioning from 
sophisticated rhetoric. Bringing in political and psychological aspects can be 
interesting and informative, but only under the proviso that one keeps in mind 
that such aspects cannot substitute for philosophical thinking. But precisely 
this submergence of philosophical thinking is what usually happens, almost 
always with a sleight of hand, amidst the din of academic waffle (at least one 
hundred footnotes).

Michael
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