“My false god” is not dead; if he is, then so is Kant. Anyway, like myself, you cannot be sure about the future either, of course. And politics is only experimental history. I’m practicing political philosophy here. May the greatest philosopher win!
[size=95]“History is needed to make some sense out of the customary faith in something so obviously false as common sense.
If nothing exists but one’s perceptions and thoughts, why do most men so passionately cling to selves, and pursue goods, which they believe exist independently of their cognition? That question can be answered in liberal terms only by a historical account, a record of the origin and development of the sensations and thoughts responsible for faith in common sense. If nothing exists but perceptions and thoughts, the common sense belief denying this liberal conviction must itself arise from perceptions and thoughts. History explains how illiberalism or superstition arises in an essentially liberal reality. It is the story of all moral-political life which, as such, is sparked by nothing but superstition. It is the account of blind aimless wills and their foolish conflicts which superstition forces men to take seriously. Far from being guided by evident insight, as the nihilist rejection of common sense is, history is merely a record of the blind resolves enslaving men to certain prejudiced perceptions and thoughts such as faith in one’s family, tribe, city, state, race, sex, church, or humanity. Superstition manufactures an ‘objective’ reality for the objects of these faiths. Those pseudo-liberals who take history seriously will even die to actualize or preserve one or another of these historical developments of superstition.
Heidegger opted for one such historical development, nazi Germany, and particularly for the nazi German university. Unlike most thinkers of this [the twentieth] century, he was clear that neither his country, nor her universities existed or have any right to exist apart from the resolve to have them. Consequently he despised any allegiance which assumed that its object exists independently of the will that it be. Self-assertion, the willing of its self, is the only existence moral or communal things can have. Heidegger, therefore, rejected Hitler’s claim that Aryan superiority over Jews exists by nature apart from will or self-assertion. He traced Hitler’s error to ‘fishing in the murky water of values and universals,’ that is, to what Spinoza called superstition. For Hitler wanted his biologists to prove his racial theories scientifically.
Heidegger despised Hitler for his ‘Platonic’ enslavement to the common sense need for independently existing moral standards. The lesson of 1933 was responsible for Heidegger’s liberal contempt for politics. It taught him that Hitler’s enslavement to superstition was no exception, but the necessary hallmark of political or moral life. Liberals interpret such illiberal necessities as the culmination of the senseless, historical developments of thoughts and feelings unable to perceive themselves merely as thoughts and feelings. Only the basic liberal insight into the falsity of the whole illiberal orientation responsible for this inability requires no historical studies to make it intelligible. Anyone liberated from superstition realizes the illiberal fraud behind all pseudo-liberal efforts to obfuscate liberalism’s emptiness. Since nothing is more terrifying to superstition than honest liberalism, nothing is more popular academically than pseudo-liberal obfuscation of that terror. Universities and colleges are pseudo-liberalism’s most effective contemporary propaganda institutes.” (Neumann, “Illiberalism or Liberalism?”)[/size]