BEING AND TIME AMONG THE NAZIS
NEW HEIDEGGER BIOGRAPHY PAINTS A STARK PICTURE
ROBERT FULFORD |
National Post
Published: Tuesday, March 30, 2010
http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=eb735e29-c7be-4840-9ad1-bb22c5d60549#ixzz0ktt5gOTX
This excellent article concerning the Nazi hack Heidegger by
Robert Fulford which appeared in
the highly regarded Canadian National Post is in the finest traditions of investigative
journalism. The author is a Toronto
author, journalist, broadcaster, and editor.
He writes a weekly column for The National Post and is a frequent contributor to Toronto
Life Canadian Art, and CBC radio and television.
His books include Best Seat in the House: Memoirs of a Lucky
Man (1988), Accidental City: The Transformation of Toronto
(1995), and Toronto Discovered (1998). You can read some of Robert Fulford's newspaper columns,lectures, and articles (including writings about the world after Sept. 11) The Triumph of Narrative: Storytelling in
the Age of Mass Culture or listen to his public Massey Lecture in Real Audio. And read what the critics
have to say about Toronto Discovered and Accidental City: The Transformation of Toronto (now out in paperback).
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How serious a Nazi was Martin Heidegger,
how long did he maintain his Nazi convictions
and how should the answers to those questions
affect his status as one of the towering
thinkers of the 20th century? His political
history has produced waves of controversy
among his fellow philosophers in the last
65 years. It's resurfaced through an angry,
dense and difficult book, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy
(Yale University Press), by Emmanuel Faye,
a professor at the University of Rouen. It
was first published in France and now appears
in an English translation.
Admirers of Heidegger (1889-1976) passionately
defend their hero. They admit that in 1933
he greeted the rise of Hitler with enthusiasm,
proclaimed Nazi beliefs while serving for
a year as rector at the University of Freiburg
and described Hitler as the embodiment of
the German soul.
But, his supporters claim, that was merely
a phase that ended when he resigned his position
as rector. Alasdair MacIntyre of Notre Dame
University, a major voice in moral philosophy,
typically called Heidegger's time as a Nazi
"a short period." His blunder,
the pro-Heidegger people say, should not
obscure his greatness.
That opinion seemed to make sense for decades,
with the assistance of Heidegger's own carefully
obscure accounts of his politics, delivered
in a disdainful this-nonsense-is-beneath-me
style. Major figures across the West, most
famously Jean-Paul Sartre, built their reputations
on versions of Heidegger's thinking.
But in the last two decades a series of books
have revealed that he was a much more deeply
involved Nazi than many believed, that he
kept the faith until the end of the Second
World War and that he never got around to
disowning his mistakes -- if, in fact, he
considered them mistakes.
Emmanuel Faye goes much further. He says
Heidegger was not a philosopher who for a
time became a Nazi; he was a philosopher
of Nazism. His adherence to it was not an
error but a natural outgrowth of his own
thinking. Like Hitler, Heidegger was an enemy
of the belief in reason and humanity that
sustains philosophy. Heidegger and Hitler
were a perfect fit.
Faye grounds his views in Heidegger's published
lectures and the contents of seminars he
gave. Working his way through Heidegger,
thought by thought, he keeps coming upon
the same ideas that animated Hitler. He notices
"a progressive dissolving of the human
being ... into a community of people rooted
in the land and united by blood" --
a "community of biological stock and
race." Those with the patience to read
Faye will probably find his arguments persuasive,
though Heideggerians in France have disputed
them.
Faye doesn't want Heidegger's books burnt;
he just wants them transferred from the philosophy
sections in libraries to the archives of
Nazism. While supporting his analysis with
on-the-ground documents, he includes an evaluation
made in 1938 by a Nazi bureaucrat assigned
to check up on Heidegger, four years after
he resigned as rector. It was framed as a
questionnaire. Did he subscribe to the party
newspaper? "Yes." Did his children
belong to a Nazi youth organization? "Yes."
Did he approve of the Nazi state? "Yes."
Had he ever made negative remarks about it?
"No." Does he buy from Jews? "No."
The functionary marked him down as "a
positive force" in the University of
Freiburg.
Faye addresses his deconstruction of Heidegger
in a relatively solemn tone. But the Chronicle
of Higher Education in the U.S. decided that
the subject deserved a more raucous approach.
Last fall, it published Heil Heidegger!,
an article by Carlin Romano, a University
of Pennsylvania philosophy teacher. Romano
described Heidegger as a "pretentious
old Black Forest babbler," overrated
in his own time, hideously overrated ever
since.
Heideggerians in American universities weren't
going to take that. Romano's article drew
167 replies, condemning it as scandalous,
ill-informed, anti-intellectual, oafish,
simplistic and presumptuous. One reader said,
"This piece is reminiscent of watching
a great Shire horse being pestered by a gnat."
Another, "It is absolutely unbelievable!
Someone who does not even have a PhD is criticizing
Heidegger's contributions to philosophy!"
One pro-Heidegger reader, apparently intent
on setting a record for damning with faint
praise, said: "Heidegger was an opportunist,
a political suck-up, and a slimy little man.
But as a philosopher, he had much to say
-- mixed together with no little dreck--which
is challenging."
Curiously, people have stopped discussing
Heidegger's embarrassing style. No matter
who translates him, his prose emerges in
English as a literary catastrophe, a gridlock
of invented jargon. It means less than it
says but insists always on its own profound
seriousness. There may never have been another
philosopher so willing to browbeat readers
with his own gravity. He leaves no doubt
that something vital is at stake whenever
he applies pen to paper -- the future of
civilization, perhaps, or the fate of Germany,
which were in his mind much the same thing.
Heidegger wrote with an ugly scowl on his
face. It's no surprise that he seldom mentioned
Socrates, who demonstrated a light heart
even when confronting complex questions.
Heidegger became a great favourite of the
most appalling paranoids among professional
social theorists, like Michel Foucault and
Louis Althusser, who passed on their ideologies
to an army of acolytes. The Canadian philosopher
George Grant was among the great admirers
of Heidegger; Grant's essentially dark view
of Western civilization shows the baleful
influence of the Master.
Heidegger's effect on the teaching of the
humanities has done much to deaden the appreciation
of literature and art in the universities.
In intellectually ambitious art magazines,
he's inescapable. Typically, Michael Fried,
an eminent American art critic, spent a couple
of dozen pages of his recent book, Why Photography
Matters As Art As Never Before (Yale University
Press), trying vainly to show that the spectacular
backlit photos by Jeff Wall of Vancouver
illustrate Heideggerian thought. In extremely
subtle ways, of course.
When Carlin Romano began his article by asking
"How many scholarly stakes in the heart
will we need before Martin Heidegger reaches
his final resting place as a prolific, provincial
Nazi hack?" the question was purely
rhetorical. Romano knows that Heidegger's
admirers are tenured in universities around
the globe, spreading the poison by turning
out replicas of themselves among young scholars.
The world will not be rid of Heidegger for
generations to come.
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