American Freedom v. Martin Heidegger & The State

Heidegger

It’s a charming idea, to think of America the Beautiful as America the Philosophically Beautiful.

Of late I have been thinking much about the philosophical foundations of these United States, and of the difficulties 'We The People' have, to steer a straight course that follows the North Star of State Secularism. The recent condemnation in Russia of the punk-rock group, Pussy Riot, in which State Religion legally overwhelmed Individual Freedom, serves as a timely object lesson for me, and reminder, that the course of liberty needs two anchoring ideas that seem to be lacking in the Russian state, but that the America philosophes did not neglect in their thinking some 200 years ago -namely, the philosophical commitment (1) to keep free from State control individual speech and the press, and (2) to keep separated AT ALL COSTS the church, Religion, from the State. Founding Father philosophes, one; Perestroika technocrats (?), nil.

            The American philosophes, in addition to separating Religion from the State (following an idea from Jefferson), borrowed an idea from the 16^th century French humanist philosopher Montaigne, which also involved keeping separated the various powers of government – the legislative from the executive and the judicial. By framing the Constitution in this way, these philosophes reasoned that it might just be possible to fragment the institutionalization of power so thoroughly that it becomes nigh unto impossible for any group or individual to consolidate power into one place in order to create a social tyranny. This last/previous link harks back to an article posted August 15 on the Phrontisterion website, which refers to Putin’s new dictatorship, the one that is, arguably, being presently constructed on the foundations of Perestroika. All I can say is that, from this philosopher’s modest point of view, the “philosophers” of the Russian Perestroika should have perhaps re-ferred and de-ferred to Mr. Thomas Jefferson of Virginia in the course of their human events.

All of which has brought me around again to the question of philosophical underpinnings for nations and states. When we think about politics we should think about ethics – so says Aristotle anyway. And in the study of ethics there is one question that is rather more important than all the other questions, which is THIS question: will men (of both the girl and boy persuasion) generally, (i.e., usually, normally, routinely, customarily, mostly, largely, regularly, habitually, recurrently, commonly, repeatedly, and/or ordinarily) fail to live up to high moral standards? A Heidegger biographer, Hugo Ott, answers in the affirmative, calling this attribute Menschliches Versagen (human failing). Let it be said, though, that Ott is specifically thinking about, presupposing, and nominally referring to the great German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, when he asks, if I may presume to render in my own phrasing, whether the human animal (including the great MH) isn’t just designed by nature to be an ongoing social screw up. (Human failing, after all, is not really applicable to the isolated hermit out living on some remote mountain top; but bespeaks human thoughts and action in the social realm). Carlin Romano, himself a philosopher who clearly has little to no use for the great MH, nonetheless observes that MH is considered by some to be the greatest German philosopher of the 20^th century; similarly, MH is regularly listed by philosophers of all ilk to be among the top 20 philosophers, all nationalities combined, of the 20^th century.

So how did I get from the American Founding Fathers to this philosopher whom Romano has unpleasantly, but not necessarily inappropriately, called the “pretentious old Black Forest babbler”? In an Aiken Musing in which I was thinking Big Thoughts about Socrates and Heidegger, particularly with regard to how they viewed the relationship between the individual and the state, I made the following remarks. Take them for what they’re worth.

            Socrates’ philosophical paternalism, especially in the Crito, seems to compare with Heidegger’s notion of man’s new/true Ontologie, viz., his existence in terms of the State, his für-den-Staat-sein (“existing ‘for the State’”, in Being and Time). Emmanuel Faye, [the French philosopher who has written the currently definitive work on Heidegger’s commitment to the Nazi philosophy], does in fact say, in writing and in person (both on p. 694 of the French edition, Poche 2007, and in a public lecture held at Notre Dame University, which I was fortunate enough to attend), that Heidegger cannot be considered a philosopher because Philosophy, as an intellectual discipline, has the vocation of serving the evolution of man, and is incompatible with any 'philosophy' that seeks the destruction of man. Now, no matter what we might think personally about Heidegger's State-based ontology as a potential political structure in the abstract, from the non-abstract point of view articulated and argued by the American philosophes in the Constitution, any philosophy that argues for the dissolution of Man into the machinery of the State is at odds with the American philosophy of Individualism and the fragmentation of State power.

            An additional assumption of Emmanuel Faye's is entirely French in nature, which is that he is, predictably, the faithful child of the Cartesian cogito; so he is naturally hostile toward Heidegger's fundamental (and fundamentally Hitler-era German, i.e., Blut [blood]-based) Ontology, which dissolves (conquers/annihilates) the subjectively knowing individual (cogito), and dismisses it as a philosophical (ontological?) untruth—a conviction which in turn must, of necessity, invalidate the philosophical underpinnings of a liberal democracy. According to Faye, Heidegger seeks to replace by means of his philosophy the impoverished cogito (i.e., Thinking Individual) with a new ontological value for man: a für-den-Staat (for the State), collectivized existence -- at which point Heidegger's thought weds wonderfully well with Nazi political thought, and, frankly, with any other type of political theory that seeks to dissolve the Individual into the grinding cogs of State existence. This is how Faye already reads Heidegger 's 1927 Being and Time; and I find Faye's reading not only plausible but extremely persuasive. I am also very sympathetic to Faye's loyalty to a truly existential and individualized cogito, which continues to speak out from the heart of the American and French revolutions, and which, I think, must ultimately constitute the redoubt against which the permutation of power into tyranny must finally fail (which is Jefferson's argument for education in this liberal democracy). The cogito also has the virtue of justifying, both politically and philosophically, the devolvement of a centralized Führer power principle in the State (Heidegger) onto the shoulders of simple citizens (Jefferson).

So, obviously, this philosophical notion of man as man-in/under-the-State, where the State is the significant entity and the individual is subservient to and sacrificed FOR the State, is a notion that lies at the heart of both Heideggerian Ontology and Nazi thinking. Furthermore, if truth be told, this philosophical inversion is also at the heart of almost any type of patriotic sentiment that seeks to dissolve the Individual and fuse him/her/it into a State-defined whole.

            But this idea of man-in/under-the-State is precisely what the American philosophes found unacceptable, thus provoking their philosophical fury and frenzy in separating everything that could possibly lead to a consolidation or centralization of social power in America. Power to the Individual!!!!