Heidegger, Metaphysics & Wheelbarrows
Richard Oxenberg gives a poetic introduction to Heidegger’s Being and Time.
Just out of curiosity, is anyone here familiar with anything that Heidegger said or wrote that would connect the dots between this “philosophical assessment” and his own views on the Nazis and fascism? How did he connect them in his mind?
Now, in regard to the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein, if I had enough information about the life he lived, the experiences he had, the relationships he sustained, etc., I’ll bet I could explain a lot about it.
But when Dasein is ever up in the intellectual clouds what on earth does it mean for it to embody a “lost” state…or to be “inauthentic”.
Anyone familiar with Heidegger care to go there?
Seriously, how can a point of view – worldwide or other – be disembodied? What for all practical purposes can that even mean? No, for me to call a point of view authentic or inauthentic we need two or more bodies expressing a point of view about some aspect of the lives that we live. A rock is a thing. A hammer is a thing. As are most other living creatures. Their “point of view” either does not exist or is almost entirely autonomic. Propelled by nature in the form of drives and instinct. Imagine discussing a lion taking down a zebra in terms or authentic or inauthentic behavior. As for “clock time”, tell that to someone who is counting the seconds to one or another really, really important event in their lives.
I just finished reading Being and Time a couple weeks ago. I’m not an expert on philosopher Martin Heidegger but I question this fellow Oxenberg’s interpretations. Of course if I were to discuss the book with you, you would get my interpretation which is questionable as well. From my reading of your use of the word Dasein, it’s at least somewhat consistent with Martin Heidegger’s. Beyond that it wouldn’t surprise me if you were to dismiss every concept in Heidegger’s book as a contraption.
Well he coined a lot of terms, or at least used a lot of words in technical senses that they hadn’t previously held. But he did it in the service of the understanding of being. Whether you think that’s a worthwhile project or not depends on your own Dasein, or situation, or being- in-the-world, a fact that he helped to clarify. Now he subsequently changed his methodology in later writings, departing from his method of coining neologisms. And he gave up the project of elucidating fundamental ontology because he came to see that ontology is always relative to its historical epoch. In any case if one dismisses his concepts as contraptions one will never see what he’s getting at.
What I’m interested in however is not interpretations that revolve around Heidegger’s intellectually constructed Dasein, but in bringing those interpretations into a discussion regarding Heidegger’s view on the Nazis…given the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein here: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=176529
In other words, given the tools that philosophers/ethicists have at their disposal, is there in fact an argument that can be made that would allow all rational and virtuous human beings to come to an agreement regarding how one ought to react to the Nazis?
Or is moral nihilism actually the more reasonable frame of mind here?
One can speculate about possible connections between his philosophy and his involvement with the Nazis as has been done by numerous commentators. I expect such speculation to be inconclusive.
One can psychologize about facts of his biography that may have led to his Nazism. I’ve read biographies of him that do that.
One may also look at the reactions of his friends who knew him well like Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers and glean what one can from that. Those I take to be some of the most significant insights into the man. Yet the question remains.
I think I see where your question does fit in your usual method of inquiry involving the use of a concrete context with which to examine ethical issues. In this case I think the question begins with conjecture and will unfortunately conclude with it as well.
Not that it’s a bad question. The relationship of the philosopher’s life to his philosophy is important one if philosophy implies a wise way of life. Thus did Socrates become a model for the Cynics and Stoics who followed him.
When the logical positivists and analytical philosophers reduced philosophy to a matter of language clarification by and for academics the idea of philosophy as a way of life got sidelined.
This I will say about Martin Heidegger, given the profundity of his analysis of the phenomenology of human existence, his blindness to the evil of Nazism is astonishing. But there must be more to the story than that. And I suppose that’s where you want to go.
Still, the distinction remains between his understanding of Dasein that is, philosophically, applicable to all human beings, be they Nazis or Jews, and the manner in which my own understanding of the “self” here is profoundly rooted in specific historical, cultural and experiential contexts. The part where “I” and “we” and “them” are far more dependent on the existential lives that we live than on something that is examined using Capital Letter Words and intellectual jargon.
So, after reading Being and Time, someone will attempt to connect the dots between his Dasein and my dasein in regard to Heidegger and the Nazis or they won’t.
Instead, in my view, you keep it all up in the clouds.
We’ll need an actual context of course.
My point, however, revolves more around how philosophers/ethicists, using the tools at their disposal, are or are not able to argue that, in a No God world, the Nazis were, in fact, necessarily or objectively evil. That morality is objective and only if you share our own particular dogmas – become “one of us” – can you call yourself a virtuous human being.
The moral nihilist argues that, on the contrary, in the absence of God, all things are permitted. Including genocide. They are merely rationalized given any number of conflicting moral and political agendas. That, given an essentially meaningless existence, the sociopath’s choices are on par with the most dedicated idealist.
I merely then shift the focus from what someone believes to how they came to believe it given the arguments I make in my signature threads.
All the while acknowledging in turn that those arguments themselves are no less subjective accounts rooted existentially in dasein.
If there weren’t a lot of truth to nihilism it wouldn’t be the threat that Dostoevsky and Nietzsche foresaw that it would be in the God-is-dead world.
Here’s a factoid you might find interesting: I read that Karl Jaspers when asked in 1945 for an opinion on Heidegger’s anti-semitism came to the conclusion that in the 1920s Heidegger had not been anti-Semitic. “With respect to this question he did not always exercise discretion. This doesn’t rule out the possibility that, as I must assume, in other cases anti-Semitism went against his conscience and his taste.”
Talk about a charitable evaluation. Good on Jaspers for not throwing his friend under the bus. But look at his language. That Heidegger wasn’t anti-Semitic was a “possibility” and an “assumption”.
Oh here’s another tidbit: in a lecture in the mid 1930s he defended Spinoza declaring that if his philosophy was Jewish then all philosophy from Leibniz to Hegel was Jewish too.
In “The Self assertion of the German University” Heidegger wrote that Nietzsche’s finding that God is dead has at last and correctly understood and a whole nation deliberately accepts the abandonment of man today in the midst of being. It overcomes the degenerate phase of the last men of nietzschees zarathustra who no longer have any chaos within themselves and are there for unable to give birth to a star who in fact content themselves with having invented comfortable happiness and having left the regions where it was hard to live who are satisfied with their Little pleasures for the day and one’s little pleasures for the night and who have a regard for health. For Heidegger the Nazi revolution was the attempt to give “birth to a star” in a godless world. (“Martin Heidegger”, Rudiger Safranski)
As rector of the University Martin Heidegger was an enthusiastic Nazi and authoritarian until he became disillusioned because the party hacks didn’t listen to him. As a candidate for posts in Berlin and Munich, a psychologist described Heidegger as a dangerous schizophrenic who’s writings were just psychopathological documents, and opined that Heidegger’s thinking was essentially Jewish and character and therefore admired by his Jewish followers. Oh and you might like this: Ernst Krieck the pretender to the role of official philosopher of the movement publicly characterized Heidegger’s position as “metaphysical nihilism”.
We’ll still need a context though. And as though the moral objectivism rooted in any number religious denominations [and their secular equivalents] down through the ages haven’t posed ghastly threats all their own.
So, to the extent that nihilism can yank those fanatics away from their, at times, brutal dogmas, all the better for us. Though, sure, no doubt about it, moral nihilism can be just as ghastly.
My point though is this: that if someone had been able to follow him around throughout the course of his life, they would have spotted the experiences, relationships and access to information and knowledge that did predispose him to think what he did and then did not over the years. The existential factors rooted in “becoming something and then becoming something else and time”. The part I explore in my signature threads.
Well, the heroes here might be those who are willing to accept [and bear the burden of accepting] that, in an essentially meaningless and purposeless No God world, there are no philosophical arguments that are able to establish objective morality.
The at times brutal conclusion that in the absence of God all things are permitted. Why? Because one way or another all things can be rationalized.
And in part because, given human history to date, what already hasn’t been?
It seems to me that objective morality for you would be like God giving the ten commandments on stone tablets to his faithful servant Moses, a story you can no longer believe in.
But you can evaluate yourself as a hero because you don’t give up. You’re like Sisyphus. You persist following your dream here on ILP even though you believe it’s probably futile. No?
Martin Heidegger makes a nice case in point. In Being and Time, he writes 488 pages of original philosophy using obstruse language. That much material is bound to invite multiple interpretations. I have read that he thought Sartre misunderstood existential ontology. Did anyone get it right in Heidegger’s mind? I know he and his teacher Husserl disagreed on it.
I mean you can read Heidegger’s books for their ethical implications, but I don’t see him claiming an objective morality like you want. Human life doesn’t come with an instruction manual. Like Heidegger said we’re thrown into the world. With help from our culture whatever that is we achieve an understanding of how to act. Our ideals are images of the ultimate good or goods. Objective morality,if there is such a thing, lies behind the image.
If you want to see what Moses saw you’ve got to go up the mountain yourself. You’re not going to believe what Moses or anybody else tells you about it that you don’t experience firsthand. And even then you might doubt it when the shine wears off.
Obviously: If an omniscient and omnipotent God does exist then He [an assumption] presides over Judgment Day. There is no question of what is or is not a sin. There is no question of who committed one. There is no question of punishment…and of what the punishment will be.
Right?
Is there anything even remotely close to that in any Humanist narrative?
Yes. What’s the alternative? In the gap between what I think I know here and now about all of this and all that there is to be known about it going back to a definitive understanding of existence itself – God or No God – I can only come here a few hours and day and explore it with others so inclined to. The rest of the day is taken up with fulfilling distractions from it.
Existential ontology? Given what context? How about a discussion between them in which they explore, say, political economy from the perspective of Fascism and from the perspective of Communism/Maoism. What constitutes the least misunderstood existential ontology there?
What I want is a discussion with someone here who thinks that he or she understands what he meant by Dasein in Being and Time and what I think “I” mean by dasein [here and now] in my signature threads. Given a particular context such as Nazis or abortion.
Still, doubt for me here resides mostly in the is/ought world…and not in the either/or world. In the either/or world, doubt enters the discussion [for me] only when we conjure up such “metaphysical” quandaries as determinism and solipsism and sim worlds and dream worlds and matrixes. Where reality itself is in question.
