Tony,
By "sacred to profane" I meant RC doxology/theology to Nazi ideology/
onto-theology, and that the continuity lay in precisely the preserving
the impulsion to "the holy", the transcendant, etc.
Anyway, it was Pope's lines occurring to me:
Why risk the world's great empire for a punk?
Caeser, himself, might answer, he was drunk.
But, sage historians, it's your task to prove
One action conduct, one heroic love.
As Doss observes: "...a high proportion of Nazi bigwigs
had RC upbringings."...presumably not philosophers.
So isn't it more likely that H didn't "think" his way to Nazism;
but was emotionaly impelled to it? Given his youthful formation,
wasn't he a cinch for fascism?
Doss refers to the "authoritarian streak" in both institutions.
I don't think the significance of the Pastor/sheep structure,
or "hierarchy" can be exaggerated. The training in institutional
loyalty and discipline, the pastor/sheep discipline, regardless
the adequacey of the pastor, i.e. its centrality for his personal
gestalt or ego. The required personal abjection (not just an expedient
observing of forms, but a positively disposing of one's heart) to grossly
undeserving superiors, cannot be come by thru intellectual conviction.
On the "weltanschuaang" level, the extreme reactionary character of
Catholicism, its literal anathema against "modernism", and correlative
idealization of medievalism, seem perfectly congruent with Nazi
preachment: the same hysterical revulsion toward modernity, same idealized
salvation myth/history of here the German nation and race, the
same rejection of the materialist/realist outlook in favor of a
need always to be pursuing the numinous, the transcendant, meaning
in personal life and socio/historical context, salvation history,
Judeo-Xian or Nazi. And so on...I'm sure this has been done.
The point in all this, however, is that H's Nazism probably
oughtn't be construed in the nature of a free moral option,
but that he was born to it, like Original Sin, or like slavery
to Washington, Jefferson, etc. He would be remarkable had he
won thru to a position of opposition (like Bonnheoffer, sp??),
but he is not a villain for the simple fact of his adherence;
he is resoundingly average (in its way a momentous thing for H, no?).
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
By "sacred to profane" I meant RC doxology/theology to Nazi ideology/
onto-theology, and that the continuity lay in precisely the preserving
the impulsion to "the holy", the transcendant, etc.
Anyway, it was Pope's lines occurring to me:
Why risk the world's great empire for a punk?
Caeser, himself, might answer, he was drunk.
But, sage historians, it's your task to prove
One action conduct, one heroic love.
As Doss observes: "...a high proportion of Nazi bigwigs
had RC upbringings."...presumably not philosophers.
So isn't it more likely that H didn't "think" his way to Nazism;
but was emotionaly impelled to it? Given his youthful formation,
wasn't he a cinch for fascism?
Doss refers to the "authoritarian streak" in both institutions.
I don't think the significance of the Pastor/sheep structure,
or "hierarchy" can be exaggerated. The training in institutional
loyalty and discipline, the pastor/sheep discipline, regardless
the adequacey of the pastor, i.e. its centrality for his personal
gestalt or ego. The required personal abjection (not just an expedient
observing of forms, but a positively disposing of one's heart) to grossly
undeserving superiors, cannot be come by thru intellectual conviction.
On the "weltanschuaang" level, the extreme reactionary character of
Catholicism, its literal anathema against "modernism", and correlative
idealization of medievalism, seem perfectly congruent with Nazi
preachment: the same hysterical revulsion toward modernity, same idealized
salvation myth/history of here the German nation and race, the
same rejection of the materialist/realist outlook in favor of a
need always to be pursuing the numinous, the transcendant, meaning
in personal life and socio/historical context, salvation history,
Judeo-Xian or Nazi. And so on...I'm sure this has been done.
The point in all this, however, is that H's Nazism probably
oughtn't be construed in the nature of a free moral option,
but that he was born to it, like Original Sin, or like slavery
to Washington, Jefferson, etc. He would be remarkable had he
won thru to a position of opposition (like Bonnheoffer, sp??),
but he is not a villain for the simple fact of his adherence;
he is resoundingly average (in its way a momentous thing for H, no?).
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---