File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2003/heidegger.0311, message 35


From: GEVANS613-AT-aol.com
Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2003 16:54:20 EST
Subject: Biologism Two



Biologism Two.


Malcolm:
However, given the context of our current reading, how proximal might this 
emphasis on the 'biological' essence of will to power as art - an essence never 
fully explicated by either Nietzsche or Heidegger - be to that of a fascist 
aesthetic of the body, especially given that Heidegger is obviously 
reinterpreting the Nazi emphasis on 'blood' and its animality of human being? 

Jud:
Most people laugh at 'Nazi art'  - those kitsch, butch, chunky, chiselled 
modernist concrete robots and thick-thighed wide-hipped baby machines bearing 
scythes.  There is a surprising similarity in all totalitarian art, and if one 
removed the titles and giveaways signalling symbols and from Nazi statuary and 
paintings and stuck a few Cyrillic subject cards around the place you could 
easily fool someone into believing it was 'socialist realism. Look at the crap 
that the North Koreans call art and remove the beautiful and functional Han'gul 
alphabet [probably the most efficient and aesthetically pleasing writing 
system in the world] and if one ignores the epicanthic folds in the eyes of the 
subjects one could be at a Nuremberg Rally all over again. Are we to suppose that 
the 'aesthetic Heidegger admired such hideous bullshit? How come such an 
aesthete was not repelled from Nazism merely on the basis of viewing the clumsy 
ordure that passed for art in the parks and streets, which were soiled with such 
offensive rubbish?

Malcolm:

For the Nazi's their folk were human material, literally breeding stock, and 
a material human resource in the service of the state. I was introduced to one 
of Hans Frank's grandsons by my former supervisor while researching my 
thesis. His grandmother had been part of the Aryan eugenics program, living in a 
sort of Nazi pagan nunnery were they were visited by selected members of the Nazi 
hierarchy to be inseminated, just as you would run a cattle breeding program. 
This guy had a lot of issues to work through and my supervisor asked me to 
talk to him honestly about Heidegger's Nazism. I basically told him I thought it 
was an open-ended problem, although a philosophical one rather than a mundane 
political problem. He decided not to continue with his Heidegger research as 
it was all to close to the bone so to speak. Which is fair enough.

Jud:
Totalitarian, right wing forms of government love this game of treating women 
as objects in some sexual zoo.  The Japanese perverts were up to the same 
game urging women to shag for their country

Malcolm:
I do think Heidegger is dealing with the Nazi ideology of 'biologism' here, 
and he is necessarily close to his subject, but it's in the context of a 
philosophical reinterpretation and retrieval of Nietzsche from the ideological 
misuse of his philosophy for the Nazi biological world view.

Jud:
Heidegger as an apologist for Nietzsche's notions of the Ubermenschen and 
racial superiority?
It makes no sense to me as a theory for he had already made it quite plain 
the Hitler's racial theories were the right ones by ostentatiously joining the 
Nazi Party and characterising Hitler and thereby Hitlerism as the one true 
reality.  In other words his public statements contradict and imagined NEED to 
de-biologise Nietzsche. HE believed in it, Hitler believed in it Heidegger 
believed in Hitler and to fillet Nietzsche of racialist notions was to do a 
disservice to his own announced beliefs as an extrapolation of the frenzied support he 
rendered to Herr Adolf Holocaust himself.

Malcolm:
For me this does not imply that Heidegger was party to the crude anti-Semitic 
racism of 'blood and earth', of German biological superiority, but on the 
contrary is attempting to rescue the will to power from its perversion in Nazi 
biologism. 

Jud:
Blood and earth? Then what about: 'That is the power to preserve, in the 
deepest way, the strengths [of the Volk] which are rooted in soil and blood.'  A 
discourse on May 1933. About the spirituality of the German people. Ibidem, p. 
4.?

And

'Needless to say, non-Aryans shall not appear on the signature page.'
Written in the bottom of a letter - on December 13, 1933 - to a group of 
German academics, requesting financial support for a book of pro-Hitler speeches 
by professors that was to be circulated to intellectuals around the 
world.bidem, p. 5.

 And


'With reference to Dr. Baumgarten: 'After failing with me, he frequented, 
very actively, the Jew Frankel, who used to teach at Gottingen and just recently 
was fired from here [under Nazi racial laws]....



According to Heidegger 
(N3, p. 46) "When Nietzsche thinks beings as a whole - and prior to that 
Being - as 'life', and when he defines man in particular as 'beast of prey', he is 
not thinking biologically. Rather, he grounds this apparently merely 
biological world view metaphysically". Nietzsche's apparent biologism gives rise to a 
"biological illusion" which explains for Heidegger (p. 46) "why

Jud:
I'm surprised at your naivety here Malcolm  - the reason why so many writers 
consciously or unconsciously expound and copy Nietzsche's treatises, 
invariably fall prey to a variety of biologism". Is because the majority of them are 
drawn to Nietzsche because of his reputation as the originator of the 'Overman' 
idea and the 'God is Dead Battalion'.  Social inadequates are always drawn 
towards polemicists who answer their existential need and who can transmogrify 
their spotty faces and weakling bodies. Nietzsche the syphilitic homosexual and 
Heidegger the undersized runt and asthmatic [or professional malingerer and 
post-office-soldier take your pick] into supermen, and provide a focus for the 
frustration of the failure to seize upon a Jew or a Black as a whipping boy or 
sacrificial goat to be driven over the edge into the abyss of their own 
insufficiency. 


Malcolm:
What then, of this proximity of Heidegger's Nietzsche with Nazi biologism? Is 
it possible that there is a fascist progression from Nietzsche's metaphysical 
biologism to the Nazi's ideological misinterpretation and its virulently 
racist biologism, and on through to the threshold yet erasure of an openness to 
the historical truth of being? 

Jud:
The fascists claim both Heidegger and Nietzsche as one of their own.  Visit 
just about any Neo-Nazi site or White Supremacist website and you will see for 
yourself.  N and H appear on their websites like the 'obligatory Black' 
appears on American soaps. BTW I sometimes look at those sights when I am conducting 
my Anti-Heidegger research. In case any comedians say that this parallels 
people who visit porn sites for 'research purposes' they are right and they are 
wrong for Nazi sites ARE porn sites. There is not one shred of doubt in my mind 
that Nietzsche's writings did influence the rise of Nazism - Hitler confirms 
this. 'Erasure of an openness to the historical truth of being?'  It all 
depends on which 'beings' experience the clanging crash as the sliding doors of 
'Being' meet in the middle and hide the world of 'disclosure from anxious eyes? 
The columns of defeated Nazi heads down staring at the mud in which the dead 
bodies of their comrades imitate the grinning corpses of the mountains of camp 
victims are perhaps excluded from an openness to the historical truth of being 
- for defeat does tend to blot out the reality of the world.  For the 
shining-eyed Soviet soldiers climbing onto the top of the arch in the Brandenburger 
Tor in Pariser Platz in Berlin however life must have never seemed so wonderful, 
and there was a joy in being - in being alive. Shakespeare says something 
similar in the St Crispen's day speech.



Malcolm:
This would be a fascist fallacy that is nonetheless founded in the sensuous 
truth of the immediate physiological realm, the ecstatic realm of the here and 
now. How close did Heidegger initially think (hope) Hitler was to the truth of 
the will to power?

Jud:
If we judge him by his track record of optimism - very close I suspect.  In 
fact I reckon he believe that Hitler was THE EMBODIMENT OF THE WILL TO POWER - 
THE WILL TO POWER INCARNATE!

Malcolm:
Already in 1934, Levinas (1990, 'Reflections on the philosophy of Hitlerism', 
Critical Inquiry, 17 (Autumn), p. 70) was warning about the "Germanic ideal 
of man", an ideal whose self-same truth is "anchored in his flesh and blood", 
where "truth is no longer for him the contemplation of a foreign spectacle; 
instead it consists in a drama in which man is himself the actor". The crisis of 
Nazism is thus a question of a subjective relation to truth concerning "the 
very humanity of man", and for Levinas this crisis is grounded in "Nietzsche's 
will to power, which modern Germany is rediscovering and glorifying" (p. 71). 
Like I keep saying, Heidegger is a dangerous thinker because of his proximity 
to Nazi ideology, but for all that it's a critical proximity and one that 
constantly undermines the ideology while travelling along with it, at least in this 
early optimistic phase.

Jud:
You still haven't produced any believable evidence of Heidegger's 'critical 
proximity and one that constantly undermines the ideology while travelling 
along with it?'  A brave effort but insubstantial.  Do you think that ANYBODY is 
dumb enough to believe a word he says after the defeat of the Fatherland?   The 
growing Anti-H community are lying in wait for succulent apologists morsels 
like this.  It needs stiffening with reported speech [though I doubt that any 
exists from NON- SYMPATHISERS like Jaspers or someone else who is respected for 
his straightforwardness - not some crave idolater like Petzet who had 
everything he wrote cleared by Heidegger in advance and was more of Heidegger's 
scrivener than a biographer. from others who heard him make anti-Nazi remarks 
BEFORE the allied victory became obvious. It is no longer possible to accept his 
own evidence as to his anti-Nazi feelings for the man is regarded nowadays as a 
ravenous and unrepentant liar.

Malcolm:
According to Heidegger (N3, p. 121), "Nietzsche's 'biologism', which although 
it does not constitute Nietzsche's fundamental position still belongs to it 
as a necessary ambiguity". That is, the question of Nietzsche's biologism, 
although necessarily ambiguous for Heidegger, is somehow relegated to a secondary 
position in relation to Nietzsche's more fundamental metaphysical thinking. 

Jud:
We classify things in accordance with our own hierarchy of priorities - it 
suited Heidegger to magnify the other [less harmful] aspects of Nietzsche and to 
minimise the racialist content.

Malcolm:
Yet if the 'vitality of life' expresses itself as a volk (nationalist) 
relation to self-righteousness or self-justification (to what will become the 
essence of will to power as such), in which Heidegger stresses the historical 
destiny of the German-speaking peoples as the guiding destiny of the West, then is 
this not merely a metaphysical racism that, although dismissive of crude 
biologism, remains its bedfellow? As Derrida (1989, Of spirit: Heidegger and the 
question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, University of Chicago 
Press, Chicago, p. 74) asks: "A metaphysics of race - is this more grave or less 
grave than a naturalism or a biologism of race?" It's still an open question 
as far as I'm concerned, and I think you really should give this some thought 
Jud as it would be a rich mine to excavate for a critically informed version of 
your otherwise bankrupt Nazi vilification of Heidegger.

Jud:
As I said a brave effort for an apologist.  You may not acknowledge your role 
as an apologist, but that is the inevitable tenor of you piece.  There is NO 
SUCH THING as 'a metaphysical racism' I have never heard such a preposterous 
excuse in my life. I can hear it all now:

'I'm only a meta-physical white-supremacist.'
'I'm only a meta-physical lover of pornography.'
'I'm only a meta-physical supporter of the death penalty.'
'I'm only a metaphysical believe in male dominance.'

Malcolm:
>From this essentially ambiguous notion of 'life', Heidegger's Nietzsche 
posits the necessity of a completion of nihilism in the sense of the devaluing of 
all values. 

Jud:
Pan-moral iconoclasm. - and what replaces it?  Chaos!


Malcolm
This completion is necessary because, although the older traditional values 
have been devalued through the project of modernity, this bourgeois modernity 
or 'incomplete nihilism' "still posits the [former values] always in the old 
position of authority that is, as it were, gratuitously maintained as the ideal 
realm of the suprasensory" (Overcoming Metaphysics, p. 69). 

Jud:
And a good job too, for if there was a sudden and cataclysmic implosion of 
ALL bourgeois morality it would end up like some parts of the states which are 
'no-go areas and people would be sacking warehouses and shagging in the streets 
and frightening the horses.
Not all bourgeois values are valueless, as Anatoly Vasilievich Lunacharsky 
screamed as he raced around Moscow in a car, protecting the art of the Romanov 
dynasty from destruction by the madding crowd of reds. Look at the way that the 
Iraqi's looted their own heritage of priceless Mesopotamian treasures in the 
aftermath of the Bush/Blair Blitz. It was the bourgeois-minded collectors who 
put together these treasures


Malcolm:

Completed nihilism distinguishes itself by doing "away with the place of 
value itself, with the suprasensory [uebersinnlich] as a realm, and accordingly 
must posit and revalue values differently" (p. 69). The notion of the 'death of 
god' reflects this devaluation of all the 'supersensuous' or 'transcendental' 
guarantees for our traditional value systems, while the meaningless concepts 
of god, or the transcendental, or the fundamentality of 'human rights' and 
democratic principles are still held onto as such a guarantee. So a new ground for 
truth must be conceived which has no recourse to themes of transcendental 
meaning or any authority 'beyond' its own positing. A belief in the supersensuous 
as an ideal realm, which structures the merely sensuous or apparent, a belief 
in 'Platonism', must be done away with. For the Platonic supersensuous is 
imaginary and projects attention away from an absorption in the moment, in the 
constant becoming of the sensuous or the 'rapture' of the 'supreme plenitude of 
life'. Thus it is that "Nietzsche, inverting Platonism, transposes Becoming to 
the 'vital' sphere, as the chaos that 'bodies forth'" (N3, p. 172).

Jud:
We each admire Nietzsche in our own way, his anti-Platonism warms the cockles 
of my heart, whilst the Ubermenschen ravings make my blood run cold.

Malcolm:
Completed nihilism is attained by constantly willing a return to the 
sensuous, to the 'vitality' of being 'alive', where "animality is the body bodying 
forth, that is, replete with its own overwhelming urges.... 

Jud:
Which is precisely what the syphilitic slowly dying body and brain of 
Nietzsche could not do. 

Malcolm:
Because animality lives only by bodying, it is as will to power" (p. 218). 
Here, the will to power is always becoming, in the sense of a continual circling 
back to self-presence and out of an immersion in ideation. 

Jud:
I agree with that interpretation.

Malcolm:
The sensuous is embodied, and it must be constantly willed in an ongoing 
'bodying forth', which in the constant return to willing, goes forward toward 
itself, towards the sensuous as the a-rational foundation for truth.

Jud:
I would say irrational but I am still with you here.

Malcolm:
 In this way will to power consummates itself in an ecstatic tumescence. 

Jud:
I suspect that Hitler and Heidegger may have orgasmed during their frenzied 
speeches.
I wonder what Elfrida thought when see noticed the stains?  'Oh no - not 
ANOTHER female student?'

Malcolm:
This activity of willing a constant return to the sensuous realm of one's own 
body, a wilful return to 'life', is that which constitutes the subjectivity 
of will to power. Such a willed subjectivity does not ground its identity in 
bourgeois dreams because it is its own ground as a constant willing. 

Jud:
And the constant willing is wishful thinking. And most of the Willing to 
power goes on behind the closed doors of the eye-lids and the will to powerer, who 
is often the only one who realises the will to powering that is taking place 
out of sight in the cupboard of the will to powerer's brain.

Malcolm:
This is the metaphysical essence of and Heidegger's hope for modern humanity, 
lost in the meaninglessness of its old traditional values but coming back to 
itself, back to 'life' as the origin of truth and the foundation for a 
revaluation of all values.

What do you think of this philosophical notion of 'biologism' Jud?

Jud:
Not much - For me race hate is race hate - though I enjoyed the read.  If 
Heidegger would have been a civil servant or a Post Office executive or a sexton 
like his dad, instead of a philosopher he would have gone far in the Nazi 
party and would have been 'up there' with Goebbels, Heydrich, and co.  He would 
have made a fine enthusiastic  delegate In January 1942 at the Wannesee 
Conference? 


regards, 

Jud.

<A HREF="http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/ ">http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/</A> 
Jud Evans - ANALYTICAL INDICANT THEORY.
<A HREF="http://uncouplingthecopula.freewebspace.com">http://uncouplingthecopula.freewebspace.com</A>


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