[lit-ideas] Re: Heidegger: which books shall we burn?
- From: "Veronica Caley" <molleo1@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:02:28 -0500
Heidegger: which books shall we burn?The answer to the question in the subject
line is none of them.
Heinrich Heine said that one starts with burning books and ends by burning
people.
And Milton, in "Aeropagitica", he who destroys a book kills reason etc.
Veronica
----- Original Message -----
From: Lawrence Helm
To: lawrenchelm1. post@blogger. com
Sent: Wednesday, November 11, 2009 12:12 PM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Heidegger: which books shall we burn?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/books/09philosophy.html?_r=3
Referring once again to Cohen's NY Times article on Faye's book, we find,
"As a result Mr. Faye declares, Heidegger's works and the many fields built
on them need to be re-examined lest they spread sinister ideas as dangerous to
modern thought as 'the Nazi movement was to the physical existence of the
exterminated peoples.'"
Further down Cohen writes, "First published in France in 2005, the book,
"Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy," calls on philosophy
professors to treat Heidegger's writings like hate speech. Libraries, too,
should stop classifying Heidegger's collected works (which have been sanitized
and abridged by his family) as philosophy and instead include them under the
history of Nazism. These measures would function as a warning label, like a
skull-and-crossbones on a bottle of poison, to prevent the careless spread of
his most odious ideas, which Mr. Faye lists as the exaltation of the state over
the individual, the impossibility of morality, anti-humanism and racial purity."
I have ordered Faye's book, but I haven't received it yet; still; one can't
help thinking . . .
If one is going to burn Heidegger's books (in a manner of speaking), one
ought to be selective about it, it seems to me. Which books are to be burned.
We know from the full title of Faye's book that his "smoking gun" discovery
about Heidegger are some previously unpublished speeches he gave in 1934 and
1935.
If we look at a record of the books Heidegger published, in
http://www.iep.utm.edu/heidegge/
For example, we find that his most important work, Being and Time, was
published in 1927. Some have argued that Heidegger was a Fascist even back in
1927 and that this book is shot through with Fascism, but that statement isn't
borne out by a sober investigation. The single section used as evidence of
Fascism in Being and Time isn't supportive of any of the objectionable actions
the Nazis carried out during the war. So the most one could claim, it seems to
me, is that this passage isn't inconsistent with some of the features of
National Socialism. But it isn't inconsistent with the Sovereign Democracy of
modern day Russia either. So is that sufficient evidence to burn Being and
Time. I think not.
In 1929 he wrote Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics and in 1936,
Elucidations of Holderlin's Poetry. I haven't encountered anything (thus far)
asserting that these were "shot through" with National Socialism. But Faye
apparently wants to put his Death's Head warning on these books as well. I
will be interested in his argument for that.
We know that after 1935 Heidegger's enthusiasm for National Socialism in
Germany waned. And his enemies don't seem interested in pursuing anything he
did later. Why is that? We find from his biography that he spent the time
beginning in 1936 up through the end of the war (as much as he could) working
on the Nietzsche lectures, eventually published in four volumes. In other
words, he was doing scholarly work rather than supporting the activities of the
Nazis. Has anyone found anything in Heidegger's Nietzsche that supports the
idea that he was an enthusiastic Nazi during that period? Not that I have
read. In fact Heidegger argues that he opposed what National Socialism had
become in his Nietzsche.
There is evidence that Heidegger never wanted Germany to lose World War II,
but that is not usually held against the losers in any war. Writers wanting to
demonize Heidegger look elsewhere for his after-war sins. His existential
philosophy, for example, permits the blurring of the distinction between the
Nazis committing atrocities and their victims; thus allowing post-war Germans
to feel better about themselves.
Since I am not out to convince anyone else - just myself - I don't find any
of these anti-Heidegger arguments persuasive. I have opposed Existentialism in
several arguments, but it never occurred to me to want to destroy
Existentialist literature.
As near as I can tell at this point in my investigation, the enemies of
Heidegger are assembling not just the sins of the later Nazis, such as the
burning of the Jews and the killing of political prisoners in concentration
camps, but adherence to the more benign aspects of National Socialism. I can
call them "benign" because I have been looking at the same thing in Russian
"Sovereign Democracy." Heidegger's enemies must attack those benign aspects or
they have no serious grounds for attacking Heidegger, for his head was into his
Nietzsche studies during the war and not into the heinousness that Nazism
became.
Here is Julian Young on the difference between National and Marxist Socialism:
"Socialism of this national variety came to the fore once again in the
twenties, in the writings of men such as Moeller van den Bruck and Oswald
Spengler. It supplied, of course, the Nazi Party with its name. It differs in
three important respects from Marxist socialism. Though it could claim to be
concerned to terminate the exploitation of labour by capital (Nazi propaganda
posers during the twenties calling for an end to the power of blood-sucking
financiers and industrialists were often indistinguishable from those of its
communist rival), it had no interest in a redistribution of wealth. National
socialism, that is, was hierarchical rather than egalitarian: inequalities of
wealth, and hence differences of class, were accepted on the ground that what
mattered was the individual's duty to the state rather than the possession of
the means to pleasure: true national socialism, wrote van den Bruck, is not
materialistic but idealistic. Second, it rejected the Marxist dogma of the
inevitability of class warfare: conflict between capital and labour was held
to be by no means inevitable. They can be, and in a national socialist state
are, brought into harmony with each other. Third, it rejected Marxist
internationalism, a rejection grounded in the presupposition that a fundamental
antagonism exists between nations so that the idea of an internationally
coordinated transformation of economic relationships can be nothing but a
dream. Whereas Marxist socialism postulates inevitable conflict as occurring
between classes, national socialism locates it as occurring between peoples."
So what are the "sinister ideas" that Faye fears Heidegger's books will
spread? None of his detractors go so far as to suggest that he supported the
crimes for which some Nazis were judged at Nuremberg. His crime must consist
of his peculiar adherence to his idea of National Socialism.
From what I've read thus far Heidegger's National Socialism bears a closer
resemblance to the ideas of Al Gore than Adolf Hitler; which causes me to
wonder where Emmanuel Faye is coming from. That is, what are his
presuppositions about politics?
Lawrence Helm
www.lawrencehelm.com
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