Date: Fri, 7 Nov 2003 15:06:38 +0800
Subject: Re: Nietzsche/Nazism - Biologism One
From: Malcolm Riddoch <m.riddoch-AT-ecu.edu.au>


Hi Jud,

you've surprised me, finally we have something of a dialogue, who would 
have thought it possible? I'd like to thank you in advance for actually 
taking the time to read and respond thoughtfully in your own way. 
Obviously we will still mostly completely disagree but I don't see the 
problem with 'robust' debates, I try to be honest in my dealings here 
but give no guarantees that my opinions won't piss you off  :)

> I will remind you however that Heidegger's Nazism
> is for me incidental to my main criticism which is of his crude peasant
> ontology and his acceptance of 'Being' as a given.

Yes, understood, although I think actually reading Heidegger's texts 
will also benefit your rather myopic 'critique' here as well. Just my 
opinion mind you, but generally a shallow reading of a philosophy will 
lead to a shallow understanding of it, which is rather boring when you 
persist on spamming this list ad infinitum. I look forward to a more 
informed 'devils advocacy' from you in regards to Heidegger's ontology 
as that debating technique is a valuable resource for those of us 
opposed to it.

> Whilst I really appreciate the time and trouble you are taking over 
> this, and
> whether most of what you write is perhaps part of earlier stuff you 
> have
> written, maybe for lectures, with the occasional reference to 'Jud' 
> inserted into
> the text at appropriate points, [it has that 'feel' about it] I wish 
> you to
> know that I am interested and that I enjoy what you write and the way 
> you write
> it.

Cheers, and you're right. I find this list an interesting drafting 
board for my writing, and I am reworking some text I wrote about 9 
years ago now. I revert to monologues when a dialogue doesn't happen, 
but am always open to outside influences whether pro or contra so long 
as there's something I can engage with.

>  However ... Anything that Heidegger writes from the time
> of his resignation/dismissal from the rectorship is in my opinion not 
> worth the
> paper it is written on.

Also totally understood, although that's a rather limiting 
presupposition with which to start a reading of someone's work. For me 
there's just a bunch of philosophical text to be interpreted in one way 
or another. The question of the author's truth and falsehood is always 
there, and in the interests of critical reading I too think it's 
important not to abrogate one's own responsibility to think things 
through by just taking any philosopher at their word. But your stance 
is just the opposite sort of dogma to that of a 'rote Heideggerean'. 
Then again, if that's your thing who am I to argue?

> To equate one's own self with the historical constitution of a global 
> truth
> is to think in the manner of a person suffering from monomania surely?

Dunno really, although I can see the sense in it. We're all good 
moderns, all brought up learning the 3 R's, all initiated into the 
dominant ideology of our nation, and all placed at the service of the 
state and take up our part in the technological ordering of our 
everyday lives. Heidegger's just suggesting that this sort of world 
ordering has a historical provenance, and that its order is based on 
the way the human understanding has been historically constituted. Not 
in itself a particularly controversial notion, but he takes it to a 
phenomenological extreme in suggesting that the historical order is 
nothing rationally set up by us humans, and the origin of human 
understanding is itself not something rationally constructed by us 
either. Our rational understanding is a consequence or reflection of 
the way we already understand the world, an originary understanding 
that is not itself fully understood as yet.

> Openess to truth - what nonsense is this if the a priori belief is 
> that that
> one's own self knowledge is in strict correspondence to some global 
> veracity?

 From heidegger's perspective the 'strict correspondence to some global 
veracity' is precisely the problem of modernity and its nihilism 
because through it modern humanity believes it knows what is true, 
rationality and objectivity are the consequences and foundation of this 
belief, along with our scientific technological world order. It is a 
phenomenological proposition that this belief is not a fundamental 
truth but is derived from the origin of human understanding which is 
itself not fully understood. You yourself claim to fully understand 
what the term 'being' means, yet if you would care to take part in the 
phenomenological thought experiment you would have to open this belief, 
a form of faith, up to question. You would have to take an openness 
towards what we mean by the term 'truth'. Some claim that this 
'openness' and 'questionability' are the starting point for any sort of 
philosophy, but I don't expect you to agree, for you everything is 
already nicely sorted.

> He is obviously open only to his own perceptions of truth as espied 
> through
> the eyeglass of his own ultra-right preconceptions.

The same is true of everyone, and we are all free to question everyone 
else's opinions, as you do all the time, and as Heidegger himself said 
was the responsibility of all thought. For me, there was Heidegger the 
man, and then there is what he wrote. The text is something I can tear 
apart and interpret for myself, the man is lost to history and all we 
have left is biographical hearsay and historiographical 'facts'. All we 
can both do is read and interpret, but our motivations and backgrounds 
are different and we will read something different into the texts. You 
choose to read them through the lens of your 'ultra-right 
preconceptions', and you are free to do so. I'd be pleased if you 
recognised my freedom to read different truths into what is essentially 
a bunch of words on a page, even if you don't understand what I write 
here, or why.

> How can one approach art or anything else if the belief is that one 
> already
> equates one's own self with the historical constitution of a global 
> truth, or
> one's own self-understanding has already been historically constituted 
> in terms
> of a rationality and its objectivity?  In this way 'openness' to 
> anything has
> been strangled at birth.

Your misunderstanding is perfect here, and you have beautifully 
restated Heidegger's explicit problem concerning the question of being. 
How can we be open to truth if modernity has already closed off any 
possible access to even positing the question about the origin of 
truth? Rationality and its objectivity are perfectly correct and 
functional determinants of what is allowed to be 'true', our 
technological world is testament to that fact. Yet as you say here, 
this historically constituted relation to modern truth has 'strangled 
at birth' any openness to what the origin of our modern notion of truth 
might be. Everything is so self evidently rationally objective to us 
moderns that we no longer see how or why we should question anything so 
apparently fundamental as what we understand as 'rationality', 
'objectivity' or 'materiality'. This questioning and its openness is 
the most basic starting point of phenomenology. These are just 
methodological differences between our different reading styles though, 
we haven't even started discussing 'biologism'.

> His claims regarding his internalisation of a supposed 'condemnation of
> Nazism' are to be taken with a large shovel of salt.  I refer you to 
> my remarks
> about the impossibility of believing a single word he said in the 
> post-rectoral
> period and particularly in his post war cover-up period.

Yes, for me Heidegger's Nazism means that his philosophy is 
fundamentally questionable, but as already stated that questionability 
was also the starting point for Heidegger and he made it an explicit 
methodological concern for anyone who cares to read his philosophy and 
reinterpret it for themselves. But for you this questionability is 
already closed off as an 'impossibility of believing'. These are just 
texts Jud, you read and you interpret them for yourself. But obviously 
we are fundamentally diverging here before we even get to the matters 
at hand, I expect no real agreement with you but that's fine with me, 
what we have here is a very basic difference in our respective 
understandings of what textuality and interpretation mean.

> He makes it plain that the
> individual, wherever he stands, counts for nothing. His own fate and 
> the fate of
> the people in their State is everything.

Bingo... hard hitting criticism that targets what I think is one of 
Heidegger's greatest weaknesses regarding his view of actual 
individuals, actual people, where we apparently all have the same 
individuality under the modern rule of power. This problem just opens 
us up to the whole critique of Nietzsche, its nationalistic sentiments, 
the problematic notion of the Volk, and I think it provides a good 
starting point for a critical reappraisal of Heidegger's political 
thinking. Glad to see you're on board with this one Jud. My god, I 
think we actually agree on something here!

> And what about his being thoroughly obnoxious to all and sundry.  Do 
> you in
> all honesty think that the common-room conversation during the 
> rectorship would
> have accused him merely of 'optimism?'  Do you honestly think that 
> Walter
> Gross, Jaensch and   Kriek, and the other top Nazis would have sacked 
> the little
> jerk for 'optimism?'

He apparently didn't tow the ideological line and was accused of having 
a 'personal doctrine' somewhat critical of the party line. After 1934 
the Nazi hierarchy was obviously (to everyone but Heidegger it seems) 
not even vaguely interested in either proceeding with the German 
revolution or especially in any sort of revolutionary philosophy. They 
obviously didn't care about philosophy in general apart from its 
practical use in propping up the ideology and the political goals of 
the leadership. Have you read any of Rosenberg's ideological trash? 
There's the actual approved Nazi philosophy. The problem with 
Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche, for us and the Nazi's, is that 
it represents a genuine philosophical critique of Nazism from within 
the movement. That also makes it somewhat unique and intensely 
interesting as an insiders view of the German revolution and its place 
in world history. Obviously your view is that his philosophy is simply 
ideology and nothing else, I just beg to fundamentally differ on that 
one, and I doubt we'll come to any sort of agreement.

> If 'Being' is supposed to be the 'Being of beings'
> please explain how the population of the earth was suddenly 
> de-Beingized'
> Because some Nazi thugs were stooped in their tracks and the camps 
> liberated?

The 'truth of being' means an openness to a more fundamental relation 
to truth than that of modernity and its supposedly fundamental rational 
objectivity. Heidegger seems to have genuinely thought that the 
beginnings of the German revolution was a historical window of 
opportunity for a revolution in human understanding. The Nazi's for him 
'came close' to an explicitly willful relation to truth on the 
threshold of this new way of understanding our relation to modernity 
and its technological order. But instead they went the way of an 
extreme intensification of that modern order and its subjectivity, in 
the meaninglessness of the will to will order for the sake of order, 
machination, global war, national suicide and the exterminations. They 
accomplished an obliteration of that historical possibility for a 
revolution in human understanding that Heidegger called the advent of 
the 'truth of being'. Perhaps due to his Weimar experience, and the 
undemocratic tendencies of his German philosophical tradition 
culminating in Nietzsche, which many German nationalists of his 
generation shared, he didn't think the democracies under the banner of 
'Americanism' would ever be capable of coming to terms with the willful 
nature of modern truth and the power structures that keep catapulting 
us into repeating ad infinitum a renewal and intensification of our 
modern technological ordering.

Being an unreconstructed social democrat of course I see it 
differently. The collapse of the global totalitarian threat of Nazism 
and Stalinism in the second half of the 20th century is something of 
immense historical importance to me. The triumph of democracy and its 
perceived 'good', the advent of the international notion of 'human 
rights' with the founding of the UN, and the move towards the economic 
development of the third world nations and the gradual yet spasmodic 
lifting of living standards world wide is something truly unique in our 
history. But this doesn't mean that actual democracy is somehow 
released from machination, and for me both Churchill and Roosevelt were 
as thoroughly ruthless and amoral as Hitler and Stalin, all of them 
worked within the constraints of geopolitical power. Nor do I think 
democratic power is something completely different from totalitarianism 
since the democratic aspirations of us 'insane uneducated mobs' are 
constantly struggling with the self-interests of power. You can equally 
see post WW2 history as the triumph of world capitalism in the 
accelerated exploitation of the worlds resources for a wealthy elite, 
and as the ascendency of a ruthless US super power whose militarism has 
caused untold suffering, chaos and murder throughout the world. Todays 
democracies seem to be founded on the cynical control of their domestic 
constituencies through mass media propaganda that spouts the old 
democratic truisms of 'freedom' and 'equality' for all, not to mention 
'god' and 'christian' values, while the leadership dismantles social 
programs at home and runs amok on the world stage in a globalised 'war 
on terror' which also plays well in the domestic polls come election 
time.

There is a lot about Nazism that remains remarkably intact in our 
modern 'democracies'. But still, us democrats can remain deeply 
dissatisfied and argue about values while looking to the future instead 
of being terminated in death camps. There is still hope within 
machination, and this is partly why I find Heidegger's Nietzsche so 
fascinating, no matter that Heidegger despaired of anything other than 
a god to save us.

> To introduce the question of 'Destiny' into philosophical or 
> ontological
> discourse is to shame philosophy and drag it down to the level of the 
> astrology
> page of a teenage magazine.

That depends on how you interpret the term 'destiny' in this context of 
course. If you insist on interpreting it in 'childish' terms all you 
will see are 'childish' truths. I see it in terms of a call and hope 
for the future which is always historically open to us, and this in the 
context of the historical rule of power.

> Honestly Malcolm, man-to-man I never cease to be utterly amazed at the 
> sheer
> banality of some of these German 'philosophers'.  Surely in the bowels 
> of
> Christ Nietzsche and Heidegger and co don't think that their 
> readership already
> don't know that the will to anything at all is posited on the 
> actuality of being
> alive.

I think the banality is in your interpretation of these philosophers, 
other interpretations are more interesting. On the other hand 
philosophy in general can be seen as utterly banal because it questions 
truths that are for us self-evidently apparent. But then I think what 
is most strange about human understanding is its utter familiarity, the 
simplest truths are so mundane we are not generally aware of how we 
come by them. 'Being alive' means here not your biology, not a human 
organic machine, not sensory apparatuses and rational computation of 
sense data, not psychology, not empirical science, but one's own lived 
experience. It's a simple inversion of the modern approach to 'life' 
which we tend to understand in objective terms first in order to 
explain the actual experience of living. No doubt this is far too banal 
for you to consider important, that reality is something we first live, 
and on the basis of which we can rationalise 'life'. But it's a 
starting point for a phenomenological analysis that we have only barely 
touched upon. Justice and truth are yet to come.

> I despair!  How on earth is any human to experience one's own lived
> experience other than as a 'physiological' experience of one's own 
> embodied existence?'

Exactly, but how do you use that as the fundamental philosophical basis 
for the rational objectification of 'life' in terms of scientific and 
technological reason? How do you derive our modern objectivity from the 
banality of 'life'? You're almost there Jud, you're starting to ask the 
questions that Heidegger posited half a century ago. There is hope for 
you yet.

Cheers,

Malcolm



     --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---