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Dialectical defaming | August 24, 2014 | |||||||
gary e. davis |
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[Safranski, Martin Heidegger: between good and evil, gets his “facts” wrong at times; and is parasitic on Ott, who got his “facts” wrong at times, and parasitic on Farias—none of whom understood how a philosophical practice can be the ethical basis for pragmatic improvisation in dangerous times. Safranski—no Heidegger scholar—spends more time with his own view of Heidegger than doing biography. His book is a roman à clef.]I can provide realistic, ethical, good-faith reading of every detail that others find suspicious. Yet, a book would be required to show exactly how others misread a small number of particulars, relative to how Heidegger had an astute sense of prudence, such that an ethical instrumentalism with language had nothing to do with self expressiveness in those surreal times. Did you know that the phrase “inner truth and greatness of the national socialist movement” comes from Rudolf Bultmann, in a letter to Heidegger, 1932, such that use of the phrase by Heidegger three years later is likely thinking of the Christian resistance movement? Moreover, by 1935, 'greatness' was largely associated by Heidegger with "the gigantic," and "inner truth" pertained to what was to be emancipatorily unconcealed, not something essentially admirable. But Nazi monitors would imagine otherwise. Extensive effort to find bad faith in Heidegger against conscientious and credible efforts to read in good faith is very odd, to say the least. Amazingly, some persons who espouse bad-faith views get dismissive toward efforts to show exactly how it was that Heidegger was working in good faith, based on fidelity to his published work and plausible close reading of marginalia. I guess they get defensive of bad faith reading because their careers have been shaped by bad reading of Heidegger. One correspondent—a professor of philosophy specializing in Heidegger scholarship—got insulted by having his misreading protrayed as ad hominem incrimination of Heidegger (a narcissistic wound? He enjoys the royal “We” in writing confidently). He thought I was being ad hominem toward him (rather than criticizing his views of Heidegger—his crypto-Cartesian projection?), after long and detailed attention to how he was misreading. This is a classic phenomenon in the psychotherapeutic alliance: displaced "Object": mirroring back to the client is displaced by shooting the messenger. But he was so continuously misreading that one might wonder why, and I did wonder. (The professor did a translation of a Heidegger notebook passage where he inserted "[Husserl]," including the brackets, because he thought that Heidegger was attacking Husserl in a passage where Heidegger was asserting the opposite: that Husserl misread Heidegger to be attacking Husserl when Heidegger was focused on Husserl's thinking. When I showed the correspondent exactly how it was that he was projecting, he admitted to it—apparently because we were corresponding on a public discussion list. Earlier, in private correspondence, the same process of closely-read deconstruction brought disdain from him. This is typical of egoism.) I responded to the correspondent's sense of insult, in part: “If you believe that your extended efforts to show that Heidegger, the person, is antisemitic for reasons not related to his work (secretly holding views he doesn't speak) is not prima facie ad hominem in the extreme, then I believe that you had better think again. My conjecturing that your earlier-expressed personal view is now relevant at the point where you find Heidegger buying in to being crude is not ad hominem.” It was about his view—perspective—toward a vital issue. “Of course, being-historical thinking is integral to Heidegger's thinking during the Considerations period,” I continued. “Being-historical thinking is Jewish in lineage.” This was the last straw: associating Heidegger with Judaic thinking (as Allen Scult has done for many years). Heidegger belonged with what is Jewish, in the sense of rigorous Catholic theological background (where the Judaic foundations of Christianity are integral to hermeneutical thinking); in terms of his primary mentor, Husserl; in terms of “the passion of my life,” Hannah Arendt; in terms of The Question of “Being”; again, in terms of his guiding notion of the 1930s, “being-historical thinking”; and in terms of his life-long and late-life “heading toward a star” of holiness in poetic thinking. So, moving on, I’ll say a little more about my sense of his political times, late 1930s. Then, I'll leave the topic for some distant future. overcoming The Dialectic Beginning immanently: Anxiety (central to Being and Time) is a more-complex phenomenon than alienation. Trying to understand anxiety as alienation conceals the “nature” of anxiety, i.e., conceals the real phenomenality of anxiety. Anxiety about X is not basically alienation from X. Alienated thinking is basically oppositional. The classically 19th century sense of dialectic (Fichte, Marx) was oppositional— Negational, negate-ive. The elusive anxiety of modernity that is mirrored in questions of being and “Being” is reductionistically suppressed (concealed) in alienated analysis (alienating analysis) and oppositional models of struggle. But oppositional models of struggle had become pervasive to the early 20th century. Oppositional politics had become widely theorized as The Dialectic, and The Dialectic between East (USSR) and West (Anglo-American empire) was inflaming Germany in the 1930s. Alienation, theorized Dialectically, buys into a dynamic that tends to create the oppositionality that is then used to corroborate itself. Alienation tends to unwittingly find itself being mirrored in oppositions posited, “read” as construal of “reality.” In other words, Fichtean/Marxist Dialectic tends to be self-positing. During Heidegger’s Considerations period (1938-41), The Dialectic had been a raging dynamic for decades. Heidegger was extremely critical of this at the academic level of superficial thinking in historiography, which mirrored vastly reductionist machination of life in urban modernization. But short passages about this in his notebooks, his Considerations, were supplementary to other work of that period, especially Mindfulness. Anything in his notebooks should be read relative to other, extensively-attending work. To Heidegger at the time, the Dialectic of metaphysicalist power was working itself to "completion" in the conflict between Anglo-American empire and the USSR, and Jewry was victimized in the process. A generally-German alienation of unprosperous Germans from prosperous Germans would not, as such, be concerned about who’s Catholic, who’s Lutheran, who’s Judaic. But exclusionist dynamics in German wealth (i.e., a politics of urban German wealth excluding rural Germans from distributive justice) easily causes ethnic displacement. The “class warfare” was not essentially an ethnic conflict, but the Dialectic was a mobile "logic." Clearly, economic dynamics (capitalism and non-capitalist, as economics isn’t intrinsically capitalistic) were mixed up with dynamics of capitalist power and exclusiveness of economic prosperity—the so-called “class conflict”—that was also integral to Lukàcs’ History and Class Consciousness (1922), which some theorists believed Heidegger had near-to-mind in developing his thinking (which was political—in an Aristotelian sense—even in the mid-'20s). Inasmuch as ethnic difference was made salient by the times, re-appropriating German alienation through critical phenomenology involves understanding the nature of anxiety (Weimar period) and, later, targeting the real features of modernization (homogenization, machination, power politics, etc.) that are inflaming Dialectical dynamics like a World-Historical Individual in conflict with Itself. Focusing “blindly” on the nature of Dialectical inflammation (Heidegger's practice in his notebooks) is an appropriate frame for overcoming the generalized Dialectic philosophically. The appropriate counter-frame to ethnic conflict is to "blindly" target the features of capitalism (machination, spectacular arrogance) that are inflaming the Dialectic—targeting the Dialectic that unconsciously finds itself mirrored by scapegoating world Jewry, the latter being obviously irrelevant to the base problem of features of modernization that work Dialectically, because metaphysicalized power is in epochal (inter-continental) conflict with itself. Ontotheological power is epochally Catholic. But the history of power is also economic. The spirit of this is not racial. German capitalist fantasies of an Aryan race are pathological, but enforce a machinational spirit that acts like an agent of history, because nihilistic features of modernization have lodged themselves into self-concealing history. Thinking of the polis (Aristotelian) as primarily cultural, as Heidegger proffered, not “political” (i.e., not economistic, scientistic, etc.)—which is a pre-Aristotelian anticipation of post-modernist prospecting—is an appropriate containment of the machinational “thinking” that is inflaming the Dialectic. Such was Heidegger’s “third concept of the political,” circa 1935, that Kisiel has detailed. No war was anticipated until 1939. Heidegger's private considerations (1933-1938) wanted workable ways of grounding university leadership (but spent a lot of space expressing disgust with German politics and university politics). One issue for prominent Germans who happened to have Jewish lineage was that they had been assimilated into German history for so long that they considered themselves prima facie to be Germans. Many Germans presumed that Hitlerism would self-destruct; Jewish persecution wouldn't last. (Nazi extremism was not generally popular, the best scholarship shows.) A fascinating recent account of prominent German life during the 1930s notes that one Jewish professor of German classics (cited as typical of the times) rejected advice to leave Germany after Kristallnacht because he and other prominent Germans who had Jewish background “considered it beneath his[/their] dignity to flee from his own country....[He] ‘had always felt himself to be a German. He didn’t even feel that culturally he was a Jew’...” (NYRB, Aug. 14, 2014). An implicit message, 1938, in insisting that Jews leave Germany could be: “Wake up!” Anti-Jewishness was inflamed by multiple dynamics, including the esteemed prominence of German Jews. A scholar of the period, Götz Aly, argued recently, in Why the Germans? Why the Jews? that “... 'Nazism was propelled by the least pleasurable of the seven deadly sins: envy.’ For Aly, it was precisely the persistent achievement gap between gentiles and Jews that explains what poisoned Christian-Jewish relations. In an increasingly competitive economic and social climate, with everyone struggling for upward mobility and advantage, Jews seemed to have an unfair edge.” Capitalism and the Jews, by a Jewish expert on the topic, argues: Nowhere was the intellectual exploration of the origins, nature, and moral significance of capitalism pursued with greater intensity than in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century. At its highest levels, it took the form of a three-way debate between Georg Simmel, Max Weber, and Werner Sombart. The role of Jews and finance were central to the debate, either explicitly or implicitly....[Capitalists, according to Simmel] also become more calculating and more used to weighing factors in making decisions....—than persons not living under capitalism, such as agrarian regions coming under capitalist domination (in a Depression that is sucking resources into the cities). Machination of modernity—the gigantic, the historylessness of academia and economics, the calculativeness, etc.—is preventing Jewry (which is so wrapped up in it all, due to their success) from gaining the opportunity to create a homeland. Also, world Jewry is integral to the history of the West, such that anti-Judaism accompanies the entire history, up to contemporary (to Heidegger) debates about the nature of "thinking" within academic historiography. An appropriate counter-frame to this is retrieving the origin of the West that predated its Latinate destining and doing so for the sake of a "new inception" of (new covenant about!) who We are. World Jewry had an especially important self-interest—and opportunity (one might have thought, up to 1938, given the power of world Jewry)—in dissolving the inflammatory Dialectic progressively. But Hitlerism didn't self-destruct before war. So, what could the philosopher do that’s constructive? Targeting the basic mentality of machinational modernization which was "blindly" inflaming the Dialectic was appropriate. Yet, thinking historically was not in the cards for Heidegger—i.e., being historically effective through university leadership was not feasible. The university didn't gain progressive (new covenant-al) leadership. Philosophy’s place in the university didn't become leading. New inception belonged to the future. The philosopher makes his contributions to mindfulness, but he's outstripped by the onset of war. The philosopher has his considerations, but they remain private.
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Be fair. © 2017, g. e. davis. |