Date: Sun, 24 Jan 1999 22:57:29 +0100
Subject: Re: Heidegger in Germany


Michael,

You write:
> 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. 

Not only to his own detriment but to the detriment of German thinking as
a whole. 

> As Rafael has shown recently, there was however, 
> _privately_ shame on Heidegger's part.

Shame one feels when one is condemned by society for one's actions. What
I miss, is a self-critical attempt on his side to put his thinking back
on the right track. That is what one may expect of a thinker. If Petzet
is to be believed Heidegger's only concern after the war was for his own
well-being. 

> 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.

Heidegger, Grassi and others who supported National Socialism have
barred the way to what is most valuable in German tradition. Everything
they touched has become suspect.   
> Levinas was not a pupil of Heidegger, perhaps of 
> Husserl.

This is new to me. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy but also De Boer
and Peperzak who have known Levinas personally maintain that he was a
student of Heidegger in 1928/1929.

> 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.

You are clearly not referring to Levinas' _En decouvrant l' existence_.

> 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 oblivion to being, but 
> an active repression of the question of being.

If the beating heart of Heidegger's thinking turns out to be fascistoid
one needs vigilance of not allowing it to beat any longer.

> 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.

I believe that one should take Heidegger's entanglement with National
Socialism seriously. His thinking went wrong somewhere and somehow.
Someone should show where and how. It is a pity that "fundamentalist"
Heidegger criticism and "fundamentalist" Heidegger apologetics have one
thing in common: the refusal to take this where and how seriously. They
wage a battle of the Somme, fighting in trenches for every centimeter of
ground - as if Heidegger's thinking were a closed system.      

> 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. 

I do not think that writing about Heidegger is easy, in Germany or
elsewhere on the continent. The demonstration asked is not just a ritual
one. Fascistoid ideology should be met head on. And that is a tall
order. For two reasons. German culture is an integral part of
continental culture. The two cannot be separated. Fascism has usurped
this culture - and it is still unclear (read Sluga's excellent account)
if there are enough defences in continental culture against fascism. 
This may be different for trans-atlantics or those at the other side of
the Canal who always lived and will remain living in splendid isolation.

> 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. 

Adorno's negative dialectics and aesthetics certainly cannot be called a
sociology. Habermas is indeed one of the most influential social
philosophers of our times. It does not help Heidegger to belittle his
thinking. It is Heidegger's thinking that has become tainted in the
worst possible way, not Habermas's.

> 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. 

This is still one of the reasons why Heidegger is in the picture. Why
Levinas - and others - kept and keep him alive. He is a true
philosopher. One who knows the ins and outs of continental philosophy.
But where and how did his thinking come under the spell of the beautiful
hands of the Fuehrer? 

> 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).

And fundamentalist Heideggerians refuse to answer these two questions:
where and how did it go wrong? They defend Heidegger's thoughts and
actions as Heidegger defended himself: the idiots are sitting at the
other side of the table. They keep repeating his thoughts and have
stopped thinking - the worst possible recommendation for his
philosophy.   

Henk



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