You're Never Alone with a Strand

Why I hate Heidegger

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:

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,  comporting themselves towards death by puffing away on cigarettes.

The fractured Europe of post-World War II was perfectly captured in Carol Reed's masterpiece 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 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,*) here 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 *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.’

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 etc., and more recently the 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 theSearch and Replace function in my word programme, I discovered that if your 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 sort out and undergone the experience of language, harvesting the proper nouns as useful stout oaken timber for the construction of my ideas, and gathering the pretty blooms of adjectives and adverbs to prettify and adorn the joy of the reality I experience. To me the return to the nursery of Heidegger-speak vandalises these English groves and tramples the flowers of expression into the mud of meaninglessness.

      Compare the plain-speaking Socrates as ventriloquist-doll [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 North Germanic lingo, or that the presentation gets mangled in the translation, because it doesn't or more precisely needn't.

     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 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.

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 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 my Patsy - my Token Trannie.