Friday, April 1, 2016

Martin Heidegger: Post-Mortem, Post-Philosophy


Martin Heidegger is Lady Philosophy’s problem child—there is no doubt about it.

Imagine Boethius, who was a Roman senator, a consul, and all-around good-guy Stoic philosopher at large, but who had then been, from the height of his successes, thrown into prison for conspiracy against the Ostrogoth King, Theodoric, and then executed in 524 AD. This good man, who seemingly had forgotten all the life-lessons that are taught by Stoicism and by Plato, had in prison a consoling series of conversations with Lady Philosophy; and she was able to guide Boethius back again onto the path of right thinking and therefore of right living and dying. Boethius has therefore been for centuries the quintessential example of the life lived philosophically.
Now imagine Heidegger in a bitch session with Lady Philosophy. First it would be H saying: ‘Get away from me, because I don’t believe that Reasoned Thinking (a.k.a., rationalism) can help us live,’ and then him explaining in the inexplicable jargon of mumbo-jumbo: ‘In my Nazi vision of life a man only has meaning as a cog in the wheels of the German state; but I am special because I am the Führer’s philosopher, so please leave me alone—you have nothing to teach me.’ Unlike Boethius, Heidegger was never plagued by ethical thinking, and he was uninterested in being a teacher of the philosophical life.
Phrontisterion readily understands philosophy that is conceived of as a vehicle to help us to negotiate with awareness and personal dignity the all-too-often surprising vicissitudes of life, which is why Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy has continued to remain at the top of philosophy’s all-time best-seller list. And very rightly so. However, what should be the take-home Kerygma of a conception of philosophy that is not truly interested in life at all, but only in the enslavement of the many?

The following is Phrontisterion’s translation of a book review by Yann Diener, which appeared in the French weekly journal, Charlie Hebdo (No. 1228 / 3 February 2016); Diener reviews several books about Martin Heidegger that have recently been or are about to be published in French.

“Books [by Yann Diener]: Heidegger: his Life, his Work, his Führer.

Star philosopher and notorious Nazi, Martin Heidegger would have preferred that his bibliographical notice be limited to the narrative of his promenades in the Black Forest with his students. That did not happen: the historian Guillaume Payen has published [Perrin: January 2016] a solid biography that tells the story of the Master’s passage from Catholicism to Nazism.

Very well documented, Payen’s book will not end up as fodder for peoples’ magazines; rather, it shall permit one to read or reread Heidegger in his context. Payen, as historian, is contributing to the contextualizing work that the philosopher Emmanuel Faye as well as the linguist Francois Rastier have so desperately wished for (Charlie Hebdo, 16 & 23 December 2015). This biography is important because it is the first that shows the logic of young Heidegger’s journey, going from Catholicism to Nazism: first he wants to become a priest, but then he is seized by the desire to toss everything out the window, and he will begin to focus first on philosophy and then on national-socialism. Heidegger’s adepts have wanted to portray him as an inadvertent or opportunistic Nazi; but now we discover that he had a veritable passion for Hitler. When, in June 1933, his colleague Karl Jaspers asks him how a man as uninformed as Hitler can govern Germany, Heidegger gives him this stupefying response: “His educational upbringing does not matter; just look at his marvelous hands.” The ‘back-to-Being’ philosopher is counting on the Führer to provide for Germany, and so also for the whole world, the conditions for a philosophical revolution. (In his Reichstag speech of January 1939, Hitler even portrays himself as a prophet). Catholic until the age of 25, Heidegger will remain Nazi until his death. Nevertheless, his apologists continue to maintain that their hero was nothing more than an unfortunate assimilation into the Nazis worldview. This is an example of a thesis contradicted by the biography. The only choice the adepts shall have will be either to go into full-blown denial or to shift from their position of negation to a position of affirmation in order to claim/explain their unconditional love of their prophet.

Hypnotic language.
Translator of Kafka, of Freud or of Peter Handke, George-Arthur Goldschmidt has already shown an interest in the particularity of Heidegger-speak: his violence is contained in his hypnotizing prosody, which quickly fascinates his students. He uses the omnipresent ‘We,’ which helps to constitute [psychologically] a combat group. The texts that George-Arthur Goldschmidt has dedicated to this terrifying ‘newspeak’ are reedited in a book scheduled for publication at the end of January 2016. [NT: It is as of yet unpublished]. There is no doubt that the publication of this book shall permit us to get a clearer picture of how Heidegger’s words have slipped into the vocabulary of philosophy and how, unfortunately, they have also wormed their way into the vocabulary of psychoanalysis. Anne-Lise Stern, Auschwitz survivor and psychoanalyst, used to spit on the ground when she had to pronounce the name of Heidegger, whose concepts have helped psychoanalysis to slide toward a sort of adaptive psychotherapy, whose focus is to normalize and to format the subject.
            When Heidegger used to begin his lecture on Aristotle, he would summarize the biography of the Greek philosopher by saying: “He was born, he lived, he died.” For Heidegger, we can say: he was born a Catholic, he lived as a Nazi, he is a dead Nazi.

1.     Guillaume Payen, Martin Heidegger. Catholicisme, révolution, nazisme (Perrin), January 2016.
2.     George-Arthur Goldschmidt. Heidegger contre la langue allemande, to be published at CNRS publishers.”

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