90DOSS@xxxxxxx writes:
"...First of all, Marx is a reductive materialist who reduces all metaphysical systems to
accretions upon and justifications of particular socioeconomic structures."
Hadn't Weber, Schwietzer, Darwin, J. G. Fraser,...Freud, Einstein, ...et. al.
pretty well put this point beyond dispute; put the empirical stamp on this,
after all, Nietzschean, death-of-god/metaphysics/myth system, thesis.
The materialism of the Positivists certainly repelled Heidegger, but
marxian dialectical materialism had the distinct virtue of a dynamic complexity
that has seemed to many amazingly congruent with H's "being and time"
ontology.
and:
"Second, Marxism is, to a large extent at least, a Utopian humanism,
which turns the welfare of human beings into the summum bonum of
revolutionary activity."
I don't agree with the predication of utopianism, but were'nt both
thinkers driven by a vision of an hieratic community; beyond the
professor's pipe dream of periclean Athens, or devote's
Jerusalem, were'nt both passionately engaged to struggle to authenticate
the political dimension of human Being against the meaninglessness and
abjectification of bourgeois existence?
Christopher Rickey writes:
"...Heidegger expressed the conviction the the communist party was
committed to levelling social distinctions and making society homogenous;
that might have signalled eliminating (or radically changing) the
universities in Heidegger's mind... At any rate, in his
Nazi period he was under the spell of Nietzsche, ..."
Heidegger's essay at Superman, the Frieberg rectorship, seems to me
rather more ironic (like, say the presidentcy of Ohio State?)
...than the self-glorification, larger than life (Jeremiah the prophet,
Robespierre, Napoleon,...or even Rbt Hutchins) stature
we customarily associate with Nietzschean hero/praxis.
Heidegger was not a gymnasium type, had'nt the caste consciousness of
the Brahmins, the high priesthood of the 38 (?) chairs of German
philosophy - he rejected the real pontificacy, the Berlin chair--
baldly denounced the bourgeois professional striving
of the conventional German university student...was sedulously Volk.
So how could he find "levelling" exceptionable?
and:
"...While Heidegger was a type of labour philosopher, he disliked Marx's
reduction, if it can be so called, of labour to the base of being. This
would be a philosophical repudiation of Marx."
There are a multitude of Heideggerian formulations of becoming,
like the "fulfilling of one's ownmost" that seem to conceive the pursuit of Being to
consist in a global notion of life's-labour or vocation undertaken with
resolution and passion -- not labour qua bourgeois cog. Wouldn't this work as
an ontological validation of labor at the core of Dasein? What is Heidegger
except his labor: his corpus, his rectorship, his students?
and:
"The practical rejection of communism was its internationalism.
Besides being a nationalist, Heidegger joined a chorus of other
nationalists who thought that communisms emphasis on class
war would destroy nations and the cross-class bonds fostered
by nationhood..."
Wilhelminian Germany (Ludendorf & Hindenberg) was no longer
of any seriousness, and Nazism, of course, loudly professed a class
war against Weimer and the bourgeoisie, so I don't take your point re
a putative Heideggerian classism.
There is no disputing his "nationalism". But even so it would
be only a very provincial "nationalism" that would find marxian
"intenationalism" exceptionable (like a German lover of Holderlin being
incapable of recognizing spiritual affinities in larger European culture,
Wordsworth, or Witman, or even larger world culture, Lao Tze, etc.).
Simply on the face of it, it's hard to ascribe this degree of parochialism
to H and his Volk nationalism.
and:
"When one combines these characterizations of communism, one arrives
exactly at Heidegger's words in 1935 and afterwards: that communism as
exemplified by the Soviet Union was the most advanced form of the
technological frenzy of modern nihilism."
But didn't he say pretty much the same about the U.S., so how's this
a marxian/communist determination?
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