In a message dated 12/10/2004 07:24:40 GMT Standard Time,
michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
Jud, after (wow) finding out that ordinary germans wittingly or unwittingly
went along with the holocaust asks this:
> But who gave Heidegger HIS orders? Did he NEED them? Did he give HIMSELF
> [will to will]
Jud:
You really make me smile [genuinely] Michael. Did you think for one moment
that I was unaware
of the complicity of the majority of the German people in the persecution of
the Jews?
The first thing I noticed when I visited Germany for the first time after
the war [actually in 1958]
as a member of a Liverpool Labour Party delegation to Kassel, I was amazed
at the organised way that the Germans
structured their society, and the horrified looks upon the faces of ordinary
Germans if any little detail of their robot-like
hive-life was *abused.* I was amazed at the celebration and ubiquity of
uniforms — everybody who was involved in any way with an organisation
of any kind wore a uniform. Newspaper vendors appeared to be dressed like
fieldmarshals, and pedestrian-crossing keepers
acted like little Hitlers - striding to the centre of the road and
perfunctorily holding their lollipops aloft like it was Roman Tribune's insignia.
Counter clerks barked orders at each other, and ticket clerks passed tickets
to travellers with a quick, sharp arm extension
which reminded one of those Gestapo police screaming "Papers! Papers! Their
society [like the Japanese one] reminded me of an anthill
or perhaps a beehive. The place was spotless of course — but it completely
lacked a *soul* [to borrow a religious term.] ;-)
Michael:
Jud, if you were to truly ASK this question of what calls for Heidegger's
thinking (the "giving of orders"), the es gibt, and the relation of this to
"necessity" and "will", and not just look for a ready-made answer or
ridicule or the tired flattened version of questioning as a questionnaire,
not just jump the gun, but perhaps allow a real space of the question-mark
to enter your orbit, a pause in the relentless pursuit of know-it-all
certainty, the taint of certainty, register the question-mark as a fermata,
an erotic tension in the allowing of stillness before plunging in with what
you already have in excess.... you just might think in the sense of awaiting
an answer to your call.
Jud:
The same old Heideggerian shibboleth I'm afraid
(1) If you were to truly ask...
(2) If you were to read Heidegger with...
Those words could have been said to Heidegger by Father Krebs when Heidegger
jacked in the Catholic church.
Heideggerianism [like Catholicism] is a FAITH - it is not something RATIONAL
which the intellect accepts
as an acceptable representation of the world and how we should address the
environment in which we find ourselves.
Those that lack the *faith* are seen as being in some way *blind* or
*stupid* or *lazy* for not reading more of the *word.*
It never occurs to heideggerians to question the creed, to look inwardly,
and ask themselves:
"Hold on a moment — just what am I asking this guy to swallow? If he tried
to tell me that there was a little purple lizard who lives in the bole of an
oak which is in direct contact with Buckingham Palace and controls the royal
family by means of thought transference — would I believe him?
The above illustration is no silliness, for such is the incredibleness and
implausibility of Heidegger's childish doctrines of *Being* and the
see-through Daseinic trick, that in my book if you believe Heidegger you are very
likely to believe me concerning my craniate arboreal controller.
Once an intelligent person has read and absorbed Heidegger's Grundbegriffe
and recognised its childishness there is no turning back —
no enrolment in the philosophical kindergarten is possible. The brain
rejects that which is patently puerile, and the only way to overcome
disbelief is to begin to FORCE ONESELF to believe — irrationally —
inauthentically — dishonestly. I have to much self-respect to lower myself into what
I see as the ruminative gutter, and intellectually speaking I perceive
Heideggerianism as the philosophical equivalent of skid-row.
Michael:
You are in close proximity to genuine questioning
(particularly if you isolate the question from your concern with "Heidegger
the Nazi" and with laying blame, from the question concerning the "giving",
the "needing" and the "willing" [please do not just respond with your 'X
does not exist' mantra, a copout] with which you begin above.
Jud:
Jud;
As I have said many times before, Heidegger's fanatical Nazism is a
side-issue, the main evil is his philosophy.
The fact that his politics were evil too [as well as his doctrines] is
instructive in the way it points to his whole *Being*
being evil and inextricable mixed. As Rockmore says:
' ... Heidegger's original approach to Being was as being is manifest in the
"here and now" -- Dasein, being (sein) here (da). This introduces a
positivistic, Hegelian ("the real is rational") aspect to any possible moral guidance
from this system. The here and now in 1933 meant Adolf Hitler. The truth and
greatness of National Socialism was an authentic "uncovering" of Being. When
this didn't seem to work out, Being "withdrew" itself, according to
Heidegger. '
Jud:
We can see here that Heidegger's *Being* is no more than a lifestyle tool,
to be traded in for another version, depending upon the circumstances of the
zeitgeist.
First it is the Catholic church which was: *The authentic "uncovering" of
Being, then *Being* withdrew into its transcendental shell again, then out it
pops once more as Lutheranism was passed the baton of *Being.* Then *Being*
bows out once more, but only to emerge again like some Nazi eagle from a
cuckoo-clock as Nazism became the final custodian of *Being* and remained the
true steward of his soul until his dying breath.
MIchael:
Trans-late your (thinking) self from "orders" to "calls" and "who" to "what"
and
bracket out (for now, not for ever) the concern with Nazism, and, if you
pause a while, you might be asking as to the very be-coming of philosophy
its self. Otherwise, it's just ridicule business as usual: shame.
Jud:
In an exchange with Ted Keller on Relativism and Marxism, by Kelley Ross:
'Hitler was no philosopher and gave no intellectual respectability to
Fascism. That it got from philosophers like Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. Heid
egger, indeed, is the perfect relativistic philosopher of Fascism, as he
recognised and honestly acted upon himself. The self-deception or bad faith of the
deconstructionists and "post-modernists" who constitute the vanguard of
contemporary relativism is that they do not or cannot translate their obvious
intellectual dependence on Heidegger into an acknowledgement of the totalitarian
nature of their own project. If truth, indeed, is just a matter of POWER, as
Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault can all agree, then actual power is
actually self-justifying, and no mere intellectual objections to it, whether
in the name of truth or justice, have any meaning. The mere powerless
individual, who to Socrates or Kant may actually be alone in seeing the Truth,
becomes a mere meaningless "abstraction" to all sub-Hegelian theories.'
Regards,
Jud
Personal Website:
_http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/index.htm_
(http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/index.htm)
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