YOU'RE NEVER ALONE WITH A STRAND
WHY I HATE HEIDEGGER
JUD EVANS
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THE ZOMBIFICATION OF PHILOSOPHY
I made my hate and disgust of Heidegger very
plain from the beginning. Very early on I
decided that my intention was to defame him
- to traduce his false image and his ersatz
pseudo-philosophy - to help expose him to
the world as a fraud and a thoroughly distasteful
character. I have asked myself in the past:
'Is not this hate of Heidegger all very worrying?
What is wrong with me? What is it in him
that threatens me?
I have asked myself this question a lot over
the years and never tried to dodge it.
It is not because I do not understand the
*sensibility* he evokes, nor the wrongness
of it. And yes, though it will no doubt surprise
you, I DO occasionally accept - as an actor
accepts a role - at least for the moment,
the imagined *rightness* of the sensibility
he evokes, and, being empathetic, am sometimes
touched by it.
It is fun to buy a candy-floss and jump a
ride now and again on the metaphysical merry-go-round,
and spin for a while through the swaying
forest of candied curlicues, sugar-twists
and fluttering Hakenkreuze on the back of
some black, white and red Heideggerian steed
or caparisoned Hölderlinic bobbing-horse.
But grown-ups tire quickly of fantasy fairgrounds
and philosophical infantilism, and craving
more intellectual amusement, long for the
ride to come to a rest.
If only Socrates had taken his own advice
and had trodden the middle path instead of
getting involved with the extremes of right-wing
politics as Genosse Heidegger himself did
two and a half thousand years later - we
unsympathetic and unreceptive ones may have
viewed them differently?
Originally I was drawn to existentialism
because of Sartre. It was the 'in thing'
in Liverpool in the fifties to wear a white
raincoat and hang about in cafes. I was a
Trotskyist, and the combination of romantic
Sartrean angst and the Trotskyist certainty
of the red revolution to come, and the inevitable
worker's paradise that would follow was a
heady mix.
Sartre being a Stalinist didn't bother me
overmuch at the time. Later existentialism
became what it is today - no more that an
urban life-style statement. It was highjacked
by the cigarette advertising industry, and
the media was overflowing with images of
guys like Harry Lime [The Third Man - aka Orson Wells] standing on dark
urban street corners [in white raincoats]
or walking alone across glistening cobblestoned
streets after-rain, coughing themselves
towards death on carcinogenic cigarettes.
The fractured Europe of post-World War II
was perfectly captured in Carol Reed's masterpiece The Third Man thriller with shady characters dipping and
flitting in and out of the shadows of post-war
Vienna, still shell- shocked from battle.
It all seemed so attractive to the disaffected
working-class youth of the time like me,
for suddenly the slums were made romantic
and acceptable - sucking on a cigarette to
a background noise of 'The Lonely Man Theme,' played on a wailing saxophone with harmonica
accompaniment. '
You're never alone with a Strand (1959). The Lonely Man jingle was written by Cliff Adams. The actor
was Terence Brooks who looked like Frank
Sinatra, standing on a street in London,
wearing a trench coat, with a hat on the
back of his head, stopping to light a cigarette
under a gas lamp. Then the haunting theme
music played on a quavering mouth-organ came
drifting in.
As soon as the commercial went on the air,
enquiries started coming in, people ringing
up and asking if there was a record of the
music available. So Cliff Adams quickly went
to a studio and recorded:
"The Lonely Man Theme." Significantly
[or *siggy-nificantly,*) there was no vocal
and nothing mentioned about cigarettes.
Very soon though - Existentialism became
a laughing stock, and the: "You're never
alone with a Strand.' cigarette launch became
an all-time classical advertising disaster
and a complete flop, and the product was
withdrawn from the market, *Why?* I hear
you ask. Because the public rejected a brand
that had associations with personal loneliness
and failure, and existentialism was forgotten
by a post war society longing for gaiety
and light oranges and ice-cream
Introspection and a preoccupation with a
Heideggerian-style: *comportment towards
death* were disregarded, or put on the backburner,
other than in the continental masturbatoriums
of academia of course.
Iris Murdoch's flirtation with existentialism
did not last. She wrote of existentialism
that:
'The atmosphere is invigorating and tends
to produce self-satisfaction in the reader,
who feels himself to be a member of the elite,
addressed by another one,' and there is on
the part of the existentialist. a 'gloom
is superficial and conceals elation'.and.
a 'contempt for the ordinary human condition,
together with a conviction of personal salvation.'
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See my review of Murdoch's, The Idea of Perfection HERE
Later, [I mean about 5 or 6-years ago] I
was looking around at various philosophies
and I joined a Heidegger Discussion List
on the Internet. Prior to that [like most
people] I didn't know that Heidegger had
been a Nazi, it had all been hushed up and
played down anyway.
As I read more about him: the Farias Exposure and more recently the Emanual Faye Revelations,]
I began to realise that Heideggerianism wasn't
a philosophy at all, but just a blonde-nationalist
fantasy for spotty-faced adolescents and
failed academics clumsily and tenuously linked
to a non-existent 'Greek inception'.
What passed for a 'philosophy' had developed
into a consumer-business, a replacement psychiatrist's
couch catering for the angst and ennui of
a customer-based mixture of disillusioned
flower-people, failed poets, marooned right-wingers
scared away by the skinheads who had hijacked
their nationalism, and embittered left-wing
reprobates stranded halfway up the academic
ladder with nowhere to go anymore, and with
nothing to do but write yet another 'Heidegger
Book' [if they could only think of 'another
angle?] as a form of escape. For others it
was plainly a moneymaking racket for the
publishers of interminable investigations
into the risible and non-existent ' problem
of being.'
It became obvious that what was behind it
was just another form of religion - where
Heidegger had unplugged God - and plugged-in
'Being' as a more cognitively 'acceptable'
replacement-part for those experiencing difficulties
reaching intellectual tumescence, and that
the whole apparatus of religion had been
left intact by him, with the biblical abstractions
replaced by tongue-twisting German and Greek
semantic argument-fodder.
At a very early stage with the help of the
Search and Replace function in my word programme, I discovered
that if you replace all the 'Being' [the
gerund] words with 'God' in Heidegger's 'Being
and Time,' it just reads like a religious
tract and makes perfect sense both grammatically
and theologically.
As a hater of organised religion and right-wing
mysticism and all it stands for - this sauerkraut-compote
of Religion and Nazism nearly made me projectile-vomit
all over the screen. This disgust, together
with the revelations concerning Heidegger's
involvement and support for the most evil
regime which has ever disgraced the pages
of human history caused the contempt which
I feel for Heidegger the man and Heideggerianism
as a pseudo philosophy.
After a while the willingness to undergo
certain experiences changes or ceases altogether.
The willingness becomes a reluctance and
then becomes an outright unwillingness, or
is even identified as a weakness of will
that one succumbed to in the first place.
I have always willingly and joyfully etymologised
and sorted out meanings and enjoyed
the exhilarating experience of
language, harvesting the proper nouns as
useful stout oaken timber for the construction
of my Theseus-like ship of
ideas. Gathering the pretty blooms of adjectives
and adverbs to embellish and adorn the joy
of the communicative reality I experience.
To me the grotesque nursery-world of Heidegger-speak vandalises these groves of intellectual
fruit and tramples the flowers of expression
into the mud of meaninglessness.
Compare the plain-speaking Socrates as ventriloquist-doll
[operated with Plato's arm up his elenctic.
bum ) via his Platonist proxy] with the generally
acknowledged communicational disgrace of
Heidy-speak. I speak some German [and much
better Swedish] so don't tell me that it
is impossible not to to speak plainly in
German, or any other North Germanic
lingo, or that the presentation gets necessarily
mangled in the translation, because it doesn't -
or more precisely needn't do.
One can reluctantly, grudgingly, and condescendingly
descend to ground level and accompany someone
to a punk-music session to please them, or
to feign one is young-hearted, but to enter
the metaphysical music-hall of Heidy-speak,
which feeds upon anger and social alienation
and abandonment, with its deliberately offensive
cacophony of hoarsly screamed anti-science,
anti-analytic lyrics and crude daseinic discordance,
but one can only overcome this disinclination
to do so, if one is convinced as I am that
it contains the seeds of western wipeout,
and as such that it is of extreme sociological
and anthropological importance that it be
understood that it might be combatted and
rubbished.
It is important [to me] for you to know that
my contempt for Heidegger the man and Heidegger
the 'philosopher' does NOT include those
poor souls who have been taken in by this
fraud, most of them I respect for their intelligence
and scholarship and their general concern
about humanity.
So to sum up, I see Heideggerianism as a
dangerous evil in our midst, as an insidious
new form of pseudo-religion, a transcendentalist
toad-stood - a fungus, which though in itself
will never attain a mass-following, [it's
too complicated for most people to understand]
it nevertheless provides by its support for
abstractionism and general transcendentalism
an underlying academic imprimatur and establishment
endorsement for obscurantism.
In other words for me, Heidegger being such
an obvious idiot, and his transparently childlike
notions offering no real opposition, presents
a 'soft target' for my anti-obscurantist
stance.
Heidegger is the comedic Jerry Lewis of Philosophy -
the Grotesque Grimaldi of Ontological Gratuitousness.
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