File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2003/heidegger.0311, message 381


Date: Sun, 23 Nov 2003 19:43:14 +0800
Subject: Re: Nietzsche/Nazism - truth
From: Malcolm Riddoch <m.riddoch-AT-ecu.edu.au>



Hi Jud,

> Patently the biggest divide between the thinking of sundry 
> Heideggerians... [and] science, is the former's preoccupation with 
> abstractions rather than actuality.

I think that's more a problem of different terminologies, I find your 
pseudo-nominalist terms rather abstract and while you have a sort of 
natural language bent it generally confuses me. But that's just cos I 
don't know what the hell you're talking about half the time. I don't 
expect you're going to see anything other than an implausible 
abstraction in my writing either, we use words differently even though 
we're both obviously talking about 'actuality'.

> What is the bloody point?... individuals of the neo-conservative 
> clique who have snatched
> the reins of government from the American people, and with the 
> compliance of
> the most disreputable and incompetent leader that the United States 
> have ever
> had are acting out their own agenda, which has stoked the fires of 
> resentment
> in the Arab world and unleashed the increasing systematic use of 
> violence as a
> means to intimidate or coerce Western societies or their governments 
> towards
> a change in policy.  Anybody who refuses to acknowledge that the 
> festering
> sore underneath all this instability and bloody death is the 
> Israel-Palestine
> problem is burying their head in the sand, or worse being a hypocrite.

Exactly, you have a touch of that good old British will to power 
yourself don't you Jud? Apparently my grandad thought the British WW1 
tommies in the trenches were every bit as tough and fair minded as the 
Australian colonials. The Australians and New Zealanders didn't like 
the English officer corps they fought under though and after a few 
disasters tended to shoot them as they blew the whistle for the insane 
death march. Now that's individuated realpolitik. I'm guessing you'd 
pop the aristocracy as well if it came down to it.

> Again from my way of looking at things, to use such words like 
> 'justice,
> truth, freedom in a political sense is just as obnoxious and dangerous 
> as it is to
> employ childish philosophical gobble-de-gook like, ' the truth of the 
> will to
> power,' in philosophical discourse, for to do so is not to 
> philosophise, not
> to strive to attain or to demonstrate wisdom, but to degrade, demean, 
> cheapen
> and disgrace philosophy and drag it down to gutter level.

Shit ay? So like I said, we have a different way of talking about 
things, a different dialect if you like, and I don't think you know 
what I'm talking about mate. I don't find your writing degrading, 
demeaning, cheap and disgraceful, just confused although I do like your 
abrasive sense of humour.

> I feel uneasy with your use of terms like: 'the US' and the  'Bush 
> doctrine,'
> for on the one hand I understand that the majority of individual 
> Americans
> that make up what we loosely refer to as 'America' or the 'Us' did not 
> actually
> vote for the miserable bumbler who holds the office of President ... 
> and what
> is happening now is completely out of the hands of those that voted
> for him as well of those that didn't vote for him.

Yes, I usually say 'the Bush or US administration' to make that point. 
And from the perspective of power it's all about the leadership, the 
masses are just a strategic concern in terms of founding some degree of 
unity and sense of purpose in a national identity while appealing to 
their needs in order to gain popular political support. Once the 
support's there and power has been conferred then public opinion is 
something to be managed through to the next election cycle. But amongst 
these masses there's a huge amount of freedom of speech in the US at 
the moment over what's happening, at least on the internet anyway, in 
spite of the patriot act, and US society does generally seem to 
tolerate a lot of dissent as it's written into their constitution.

>   The same situation applies here
> in Britain, where the majority of people disagree with the Iraq 
> adventure,
> but are completely incapable of doing anything about it other than 
> march about
> in the rain waving banners and burning Bush in effigy.

Strangely a lot more ambivalent here in Australia, and Howard still has 
popular support enough for this coming election in spite of the fact 
the electorate understands he's an inveterate liar like Bush and Blair.

> In this sense the will to power of the German Volk a la Heidegger is 
> little
> different from a religious fanaticism.  The question is can fanatics 
> like
> Heidegger be taken seriously as philosophers?  Is a God-cantered 
> fanaticism any
> different from a Fuhrer-cantered fanaticism?

Is a supersensuous fanaticism any different from its ideological 
inversion? Not as far as I'm concerned

> Is fanaticism 'wise,' and if not can a quest after wisdom [philosophia
> 'wisdom' from Greek (as philo-, 'love' sophos 'wise')] employing 
> fanaticism as the
> core motivating element be thought of as 'philosophy' at all, but 
> simply as a
> vehicle whereby the fanaticism can be manifested in an acceptable and
> persuasive format?

Or was the fanaticism a trojan horse for the philosophy? Interesting. 
Heidegger certainly seemed to think, at the beginning anyway, that he 
could influence the movement 'towards the good', and from the inside. 
I'm not at all sure what his concept of the 'good' was though.

> In other words I am not arguing that the wish to
> dominate is not a human trait and a fact of life, but that to elevate 
> this
> basically animal instinct into a virtue is to criminalize philosophy 
> and to condemn
> any political policy based upon this philosophical position as being no
> different from the territorial gang warfare of Chicago in the twenties.

Yep, or Nazi thuggery for that matter. I'm not sure it's being elevated 
to a virtue here so much as accepting and making clear what is the 
reality. But that acceptance, Heidegger's going along with the 
fanatics, becoming one of them, is dreadful, no two ways about it. Even 
his friends thought so at the time and told him as much. That's the 
central problem here and nicely restated Jud. Again I'm in agreement 
with you.

> State violence or the threat of it was not only obvious to the Nazis 
> at that
> time, but to all other countries too. Hitler represented those Germans 
> who
> still resented the ignominy and economic effects of their country's 
> defeat in WW
> One in which their rulers were also the aggressors.
> By 1939 the beneficial economic outcomes of the National Socialist 
> programme
> had mostly been achieved and Germany was strong again.  Had Hitler not
> initiated his policy of expansion no doubt the German economy would 
> have continued to
> progress from strength to strength.
> It was the crazed determination to create a greater Germany, which 
> drove the
> Hitlerian aggression against other states, the wish to dominate and 
> enslave
> the Slavs and take their lands.

Yes, he wanted to be like the British and the US, an undisputed super 
power with a massive industrial base and all that Caucasus oil. Once 
the Soviets collapsed with a whimper the Wehrmacht was supposed to do a 
right turn and swarm down through to Baghdad, capturing the British 
middle eastern oil fields, then across to meet up with the forces in 
North Africa. Gigantic plans hatched by madmen, funny how the US 
military has finally gotten around to it 50 years after the fact. I 
think the economic recovery was based on these war plans, on 
Lebensraum, and Germany would have been bankrupted if they left it any 
longer. The good thing is Hitler had no real idea about atomic warfare, 
if they'd waited 5 years, kept their Jewish scientists and plunged a 
huge lump of GDP into the nuclear problem then Moscow at least would be 
an irradiated wasteland today, or maybe none of us would be around to 
argue about anything except how to grow mutated maize in a nuclear 
winter and just stay alive, like mediaeval serfs.

> The key glossed-over abstraction in the above is the coinage-value of 
> the
> word 'good' in the first sentence.
> We must ask ourselves the question not whether propaganda is good or 
> bad, but
> what did Goebbels mean by the word 'good' and what was his propaganda 
> 'good
> for?' Also whether Goebells' version of 'good' was in accord with our 
> own
> version of the meaning of 'good?'

Well I think it's clear he means 'good' in the sense that good 
propaganda, no matter if it's true or false, brings about the required 
outcome, no matter if the moralists consider that outcome good or evil. 
In this case that outcome was the unification of support for Nazi 
policy, getting publicity and making recruits for the revolution to 
come. These recruits came from all walks of life as well, from the beer 
hall thugs to the disaffected middle classes, wealthy industrialists, 
the military and police, through to the Prussian aristocracy. All 
flocking to the banner of a united German national identity based on 
the 'good' ie usefully effective propaganda of anti-Semitism, blood and 
earth, Volk. So much for those bourgeois christian moral values, they 
were only good for appealing to the deluded christian masses, and that 
morality stood in the way of the Nazi pagan vision. Apparently a lot of 
Germans rationalised their implied support of this anti-Semitism by 
shrugging it off as just such a propaganda tool, a cynical appeal to 
the coarser less educated masses, and that once power was consolidated 
by the leadership the Jewish problem would just fade away. 
Unfortunately they didn't see Hitler's forward looking world vision and 
take the notion of a 1000 year Reich seriously enough until it was far 
too late.

> There is no such 'thing' as 'good' or 'evil' as I pointed out to 
> Anthony
> years ago.  There are only the actions of human beings, which are 
> characterised as
> conforming to another individual's or group of individuals' conception 
> of
> 'good' or 'bad.'  Such words are utterly worthless unless linked to 
> the behaviour
> of actual human nominata.

Well that's a very Nietzschean way to see morality, very 'biologistic' 
I must say. I'd say that whether there is good or evil is a matter for 
moral debate between us individuals, and if I assert that human 
suffering caused by violence is 'evil' then 'evil' does exist, and this 
existence takes the 'embodied' form of little children with their limbs 
blown off by cluster bombs for the sake of bringing 'democracy' to the 
middle east and securing middle eastern oil. You can agree with me or 
not, it doesn't matter, and your 'nominalist' devaluation remains a 
dangerous moral relativism. Beware the will to power Jud, it devalues 
everything and catches us up in this historical devaluation leaving us 
nothing but 'nominata', the bare facts of a reality that has already 
been decided for us.

> As I see it there is nothing metaphysical or philosophical about the 
> 'will to
> power' - it is simply a manifestation of the human proclivity to have
> dominance or the power to defeat others - either by dominating then 
> physically, or
> persuasively with the use of abstractions.

That proposition is itself what I'd call a philosophical generalisation 
about human 'nature' and the persuasive use of truth as propaganda by 
those with the will to dominate others. Again, very Nietzschean of you 
Jud, and of course I generally agree.

> In other words what N was identifying about the so-called 'will to 
> power' was
> historical old hat dressed up in 'philosophy speak' and ALL of 
> philosophy is
> the same - simply the commonalities of general knowledge tricked out in
> pedantic lumbering language engorged with abstractions.

You're a good practitioner of this philosophical gobbledegook yourself, 
AIT is an excellent example of this. As you know, philosophy is about 
the simple truths and clarifying what is already so self-evidently 
obvious that it defies talking about it in simple terms. I imagine your 
nominalist acrobatics mean something plain and simple to you since 
that's the way you write, to me it sounds like 'simply the 
commonalities of general knowledge tricked out in pedantic lumbering 
language engorged with abstractions'. So we both deal in simple truths 
and try to restate them in our own ways... agreed.

> That is why when some philosophers take a break from philosophising 
> within
> the walls of their educational cantonments and visit a local 
> blue-collar pub,
> they are surprised to find that ordinary folk know just as much 
> 'philosophy' as
> they do, albeit with a different way of articulating their knowledge.

I totally agree, I like a beer down at the local myself, it's just 100m 
down the road and does a decent old fashioned Aussie counter meal just 
like mum used to cook before she went vegetarian. And the beer halls 
are where Nazism first organised itself and drew its brownshirt 
supporters. This simple beer hall truth, the nakedness of force and the 
individuality of truth in the service of gaining political and social 
power was organised around a direct appeal not to the gods, not to 
international ideals and democracy, not to common decency but to blood 
kinship and bread for the folk - the 'sensuous' ideals of national 
socialism. Unfortunately this particular world view gained a degree of 
cynical self-consciousness in its leadership that propelled it way 
beyond the beer halls into national leadership of a developed 
industrial war machine. No wonder Churchill was spooked.

> Malcolm:
> But this critique of will to power is firstly a critique of modern 
> values and
> their truths.
>
> Jud:
> But there are no 'modern values' and their 'truths.'

I'd say that being true to oneself is a valuable value to hold. I also 
value the democratic freedom of the world I've grown up in, even if it 
is largely compromised. And your de-valuation?

>  There are only modern
> human valuers evaluating the actions of other humans, who are 
> presumably
> evaluating them at the same time. There are no 'truths' because the 
> notion of 'truth'
> is something that one person conceives as conforming to their veridical
> script of what 'truth' is, though that might  [and often does] 
> conflict absolutely
> with the truthfulness as read off from the cacography of somebody else 
> whose
> conception of 'truth' differs from theirs.

Another wonderful summary of Nietzsche's own willfully individuating 
concept of truth, at least according to Heidegger. Your Heideggerean 
insights continue to surprise me Jud, even as you use them in your 
pretend critique of Heidegger. I'm not suggesting you're being German 
though of course, just that you seem to be tapping into a deep 
historical vein of British will to power, something that Hitler himself 
much admired and that Churchill brutally personified even as he dragged 
the British empire down with the Nazis. One person's truth stands out 
from all the others though don't you think? That of the leader's truth, 
the powerful truth that speaks for nations and appeals to the instincts 
of the led. That truth which as propaganda, for good or bad, has a say 
in the historical destiny of a people.

Cheers,

Malcolm

*************************
  "It's not in the history of civilization for peace ever to reign. 
Never has in the history of man. ... I doubt that we'll ever have a 
time when the world will actually be at peace."
General Tommy Franks, Nov 21, 2003.
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/11/20/185048.shtml



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