From: Everdell-AT-aol.com
Date: Thu, 15 Jun 2000 18:09:19 EDT
Subject: Political Modernisms (was Nazi Modernism and Yeats)



In a message dated 6/12/00, Howard Hastings writes:

<<(Sorry for going on so long about that. I know you know this stuff.)>>

Well, I did know this, and I think it is just as important to the present 
debate as you do:

<<Although Nazi's tended to root racial values and abilities in biology, they 
nevertheless emphasized Spirit above all, the "essence" behind all material 
phenomena.>>

However, this is new to me and I'm grateful:

<<E.g., Heidegger's Being and Time was called Jewish philosophy because of 
its emphasis on existential themes like Death and Care (Sorge), and because 
of its "destruktion" of Western Metaphysics.>>

I figured that Nazis could have no opinion on Heidegger's works simply 
because none of them had enough respect for reading to learn what was in 
them.  Clearly one or two of them failed to reach for their revolvers on 
hearing the word "culture."  Do you have a reference for Nazi criticism of 
Heidegger?

Let me add an answer to another of the many questions that Howard asked on 
5/31/00:

<<So you present your students with a contrast between 19th century 
"liberals" and "romantic reactionaries."  I am wondering which of the two 
demonstrates that the current Right's ideas are not new.  Or are both 
employed in this fashion.>>

The current Right in the anomalous USA is a remarkable combination of both.  
I take "liberalism" to mean (as it meant at its invention, and still means in 
every country but my own) by and large: free speech and press, freedom of 
religion, free markets, a right to property so nearly absolute as to make 
taxation problematical, and political power to the propertied (as contrasted 
with both the titled and the propertyless).  Romantic reactionaries, called 
"conservatives" in the first half of the 19th century (until, say, Disraeli), 
seem to be epitomizable as partisans of monarchs, "just price," 
institutionalized inequality, God, and the old religion, whatever it was.  
The American attempt, on a spectrum from Buckley to Gingrich, to relabel 
19thC liberalism as conservatism (while trying to uncloset religion) is even 
more excruciating than American liberalism's slow, pragmatic incorporation of 
democracy and socialism, naming the one, never naming the other, and 
insisting that property is still sacrosanct because the majority are 
propertied.  

I suppose, though, that I should call both positions "Modernist" following my 
own favorite use of the word Modernism to mean thinking that begins with 
irreducible parts (atoms, quanta, neurons, color planes, epiphanies, frames, 
shots, bits, pixels etc.) and then puts them together with the continuity 
either left out or left to the interlocutor.  US political opinion is the 
most marvelous example of montage that I know outside of movies, all the more 
marvelous for being seen, like that in the movies, as seamless and continuous 
by most of the audience.

Hoping the discontinuity in this post is more provocative than excruciating, 
I remain

-Bill Everdell, Brooklyn