@Aedes,
Aedes;102996 wrote:
But the question is about how to regard someone who is a philosopher of morals who fails to condemn the most outwardly destructive and self-destructive regime in the history of the world.
[...]
So Heidegger, it seems, couldn't let go of it. He couldn't separate his philosophy from it, or at least separate his self. If he can't do that, being intellectually equipped to do so, then why should we grant him that favor?
To me, if only because I haven't read
Mein Kampf, Hitler is a funny-looking ugly man with a Charlie Chaplin moustache and an Ian Paisley style of oratory who killed an awful lot of people in a foreign country many decades ago. He remains both external to me, and unattractive to me (to put it mildly). Thus I too easily keep at a distance Hitler and all that he represents. How then can I learn to fight against whatever he represents? Perhaps by reading Heidegger. Then, Heidegger's closeness to Nazism becomes a good thing for me, not a bad thing - if only I can resist him.
I have only dipped into Heidegger, but enough to know that he is seductive, and therefore immediately dangerous to me, in a way that Hitler is not. There are already warning signs in the kind of philosophy that is done under Heidegger's influence. That is not a way I want to go.
So how do I resist?
With more philosophy. (Your mention, elsewhere in the thread, of Plato's
Republic is apt. We have Popper to warn us against Plato, and others to defend Plato against Popper, and so on. It is as it should be. And as with Plato, so with Heidegger.)
With a sense of intellectual and moral intuitions which I do not want to sacrifice to his powerful genius. I cannot even imagine being interested in Heidegger without them. (I mentioned elsewhere his strange advice to put off reading Nietzsche until after studying Aristotle for a decade or so! Perhaps part of the reason for that is the converse of the other kind of use of philosophy I mentioned in the previous paragraph: as a prophylactic, rather than an antidote after the fact. I don't have any prior study of Aristotle, but I do have some resources - not properly philosophical, but not weak, for all that - with which to arm myself against Heidegger's possibly toxic influence.)
And by knowing the facts of his life and character. So Faye's book, too, must be read. (I will wait until it comes out in paperback. It is already out in hardback.)
But, just as we need not accept Heidegger's judgements (which, because they touch on moral matters, may be evil, to the extent that his character was evil, making him an evil philosopher - even if he is not a 'bad' one! - and even if he is, as he appears to be, a great one), so we need not accept Faye's (which, on the face of it, are absurd).
I am tempted both to quote some Heidegger, just to show how absurd it is to think of classifying his writings
en masse as "hate speech". (Is that not itself a hateful idea?)
It is hardly necessary to quote anything to show how absurd it is to suggest that he was "not a philosopher". (At best, that might be an exercise in humour.)
I am also tempted to quote extensively from a short, balanced and clear appraisal by Habermas, which I have just been reading, but this article is already too long (and probably more than a bit odd), so I will just give the reference:
Juergen Habermas, "Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective"
This was originally printed as the Foreword to Victor Farias,
Heidegger et le Nazisme (1988), but it is also reprinted as Chapter 10, pages 186-208 of:
Hubert L. Dreyfus and Harrison Hall (eds.),
Heidegger: A Critical Reader (Blackwell 1992)
The Habermas chapter is pretty readable (even for a total beginner like me); I haven't yet read any of the rest of the book, so can't comment on its usefulness.
[I must apologise for this article probably being long and odd and difficult to read. A strange synchronicity is going on with me at the moment. I learned only yesterday of the death in 2007 of a man who had influenced me with strange profundity, just through some conversations on the Internet. I was somewhat in awe of him intellectually. I had more illuminating conversations with him than with anyone else I have ever known. He is mourned by many others who knew him. Yet he described himself as a fascist! And at the same time as I learned of his death, I read of a rumour that he had been a Holocaust denier! On top of this, another man who influenced me profoundly, in a different way, and longer ago, was heavily under the influence of Heidegger. At the same time as that, I shared a house with a number of people including an astonishing schizophrenic German Jewish woman, whose sister had a PhD in philosophy, yet looked up to her as the really intelligent one in the family; and she held regular communion with, she said, invisible spirits of fascists. And there was more, strange and shocking, but which I need not detail. I am shaking as I type this; I do not know what it all means; I cannot sleep tonight. But you can see that the topic of Heidegger and Nazism has an enormous resonance for me right now, and I can't really contain it within normal bounds.]
---------- Post added 02-12-2010 at 06:11 AM ----------
Quote:how absurd it is to think of classifying his writings en masse as "hate speech"
Ah, no, wait - I tell a lie. Here he is in Part I, Lecture I of
What is Called Thinking?
Quote:The teacher is ahead of his apprentices in this alone, that he has still far more to learn than they - he has to learn to let them learn. [...] If the relation between the teacher and the taught is genuine, therefore, there is never a place in it for the authority of the know-it-all or the authoritative sway of the official. For you, ze war iss over, Britisher pig-dog! Heil Hitler! Achtung! Spitfeuer! Gott in Himmel! Aiee!
How come I never noticed that bit before? I must have been blind.
