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5 responses to “Fundamental weirdness in nearly everything written on Heidegger’s anti-Semitism”

1. 

   Matt

   March 17, 2014

   That Slate article was amazingly bad. Not just for the suggestion that, among other things, if Heidegger was a big-time anti-semite his whole career, this means that Foucault is somehow tainted, but for just making not a bit of sense, nor showing the tiniest bit of understanding of philosophy. I sort of hope these “black notebooks” don’t turn out to be as silly as those hyping them make them seem.

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2. 

   Curtis

   March 17, 2014

   Do you think Foucault’s predilections had absolutely no impact on his thoughts on sex or power? While it may be difficult to tie one’s non-philosophical beliefs to their philosophical ones, it is equally implausible that there is no link whatsoever.

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3. 

   Jon Cogburn

   March 17, 2014

   I think what’s at issue is the nature of the link, and that we have to differentiate between the contexts of discovery and justification. Schroedinger probably wouldn’t have discovered the wave equation if he hadn’t been deeply steeped in certain Upanishads at the time. But the Upanishads are irrelevant for justifying the wave equation as a true statement about reality.
   So let’s say that Heidegger wouldn’t have written Being and Time were he not a Nazi. This would be an interesting fact in its own right, but I can’t see how it could possibly be relevant to understanding, assessing, and applying the insights in Being and Time.
   As far as Foucault, I think it’s grossly misleading to describe someone’s sexual identity as a set of “predilections,” but insofar as I understand your question I think the texts have a life of their own separate from the author. Foucault could have been John the Baptist and it wouldn’t add or detract from the plausibility of anything he wrote.
   Authors do have closer access to their texts than most of us, and thus their interpretive views should carry a little bit of authority when there is a meaningful disagreement among skilled interpreters who are following the principle of charity. But even in such cases the non-authorial reading might end up being truer to the world. And even so, nothing like this is going on in the Heidegger case.
   Also, we need to assess the author’s character to know how trustworthy they are. The irony with respect to Heidegger is that the bigger a jerk* he proves to be, the better evidence we have for not trusting his appraisal of his own texts. People commenting on Heidegger, pro and con, seem to get this exactly backwards.
   [*I’m not sure there was anything at all remarkable about Heidegger’s level of jerkiness. It just seems like run of the mill human depravity to me, and I’m thankful that at least thus far I’ve never been tested the way ordinary Germans were during that time period.]

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4. 

   James Osborn

   March 17, 2014

   You’ve hit the fundamental weirdness of this discussion exactly on the head:
   but as far as I can see the Black Notebooks could only even possibly be a “smoking gun” if you a priori assume that Heidegger gets the last word on interpreting his own works. Many of his detractors and French defenders seem to me to be making just this assumption. But it’s a frankly bizarre thing for anyone to believe, especially so for anyone who is sympathetic to Heidegger’s history of philosophy, which almost systematically posits that philosophers don’t really understand the meaning of their own works. Why would Heidegger himself be an exception?
   It doesn’t surprise me that journalists in Slate, Prospect, Chronicle, and others make this mistake, but it should be shocking to us all that philosophers would make the mistake of reducing the philosophical text or group of texts to the objective search for the “historical philosopher” whose activities will show up the “real meaning” behind the texts. I give an extended example of this problem in an exposition of the lectures on technology vis-a-vis this debate on the notebooks:
   http://notphilosophy.com/framing-heidegger-technology-and-the-notebooks/
   There are other factors at work here, like the obsession with the “French” defense of Heidegger, the universal rule (at least in the media) that there can be no subtlety when talking about someone even remotely connected to Nazism, and so on. But the core philosophical critique of the discussion is what Jon Cogburn points out here and which I go into at length above: the desire to condemn a whole “philosophy” as either fascist or not fascist, good or bad, etc. is an imposition on the texts of only certain possibilities of interpretation, along with a blocking off of other possibilities. The most egregious examples of this are the quotes taken out of context and repeated among news articles with no concern for context or philosophical import, employed only because they add emphasis to headline-grabbing claims (e.g., Heidegger’s “production of corpses”). Of course, that may not be the job of a journalist, to give context to quotes from philosophical texts. Then whose job is it?
   As Jon also suggests, some of Heidegger’s texts themselves offer a critique of this type of reduction of a philosophy and a person to its worst moment. We can find this critique, for example, in the phenomenon of Gestell from the 1949/1953 lectures on technology. It is in those same lectures where, as I argue above, we can find even a critique of the Holocaust. But we have to first grant that 1933 doesn’t absolutely define all of Heidegger’s thoughts both before and after, and that there’s no reason to believe his texts have their proper and ultimate expression in Heidegger’s anti-Semitism. And that seems like something philosophers would certainly want to grant, given the historical nature of doing philosophy, and given the implications for our own research and our lives if we don’t grant it.

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5. 

   Ed Kazarian

   March 17, 2014

   It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about this seriously, but even when I was doing my coursework in grad school there were lots of plausible readings already out there pointing out a variety of resonances between various aspects of Heidegger’s B & T period thought and aspects of Nazi Ideology. None of this, of course, means that it’s impossible to read and make use of Heidegger without being drawn into the same resonances, but there’s certainly stuff to think about there — as there is stuff to think about in re: the relation between Kant’s universalism with re: human reason in his theoretical philosophy and the racism of the Anthropology, etc. In both cases, there is a substantial amount for the philosopher and those who would make positive use of some of his work to account for (i.e., how does that positive account stand in relation to more problematic elements either in the philosophy or the philosopher’s life).
   It’s also worth remembering that part of the reason the Farias book made such an enormous splash in France, in particular, was that Beufret and those who followed him in elevating Heidegger within the French Academy of the 50s, 60s and 70s were absolutely committed to — and evangelical about — the view that Heidegger had an extremely minimal involvement with the Nazis and that there was no significant resonance between his philosophy and Nazi ideology. Farias, as I understand it, showed that the former was flatly incorrect and opened the floodgates for more serious interrogations of the latter. In other words, it blew up a more or less active process of minimizing the Nazi connection. This makes the contrast between two of Deleuze’s remarks about this—the fairly dismissive remark in Dialogues (1977) that acknowledges in passing that everyone knew H was ‘a bit of a Nazi,’ but says the ‘fundamental question’ regarding his work is elsewhere; and his flip remark, recounted by Jean-Pierre Faye in Liberation after Deleuze’s death, characterizing Heidegger as “the Nazi Druid”—rather interesting, especially if one also notes that Deleuze apparently credited Faye with being the first to see what was going on in Heidegger. There was a lot of institutionalized not getting it there, and a lot of people had built up careers that depended to some extent on that, thus there is still a very active tendency in France to try to say that there is no philosophically significant there there (the view Deleuze seems to be endorsing even in the late 1970s).
   If I understand what’s going on with the Black Notebooks (and I haven’t read the newest round of pieces, just the ones that showed up a few months ago), it’s mostly that there’s much more substantively and explicitly anti-semetic stuff, or at least stuff that lends itself to a substantively anti-semetic reading, and which seems to be clearly connected to Heidegger’s ‘history of metaphysics as the history of the forgetting of being’ narrative. And the latter, of course, is already one of the most contested aspects of H’s thought since it’s tied up with both much of what folks take to be at least crypto-Nazi elements in his work and with elements of the critique of technology, etc., which lots of folks think is some of the most potentially fruitful material in his oeuvre, even for a left politics. And that, I think, at very least means that there is a new round of questions about the genealogy (in the Nietzschean sense) of the Heidegerrian conceptual apparatus (i.e., what forces are at work in it, and what sorts of work are those forces doing, even beneath the surface).
   At very least, I don’t think you get out of this by appealing to the separation of the author and the work.

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