There was recent revival in the controversy over Heidegger's connection with Nazism. I did quite a bit of research on this a few years ago, so I thought it might be useful to someone to summarize what I found out, and the conclusions I reached.
Some people think that Heidegger was simply a liar and a hypocrite, who cooperated with the Nazis to further his career and/or save his skin. Other people claim that he wasn't a hypocrite, and that this makes his behavior even worse. He joined the party before Hitler came to power, and because he never formally apologized for joining, many people think he remained a Nazi for the rest of his life.
The first group gets to say that Heidegger, like Charlie Parker or Richard Wagner, was a schmuck who happened to be a great creative thinker, and there is therefore no reason to think that his ideas are contaminated by his Nazism. The second group concludes that Heidegger was a sincere Nazi, and therefore no one should read his work anymore.
As usual, the reality is more complicated. Heidegger was a schmuck, but he was not a coward. His relationship with the Nazis actually showed a considerable amount of moral courage. He was also in a sense a sincere Nazi, but that does not mean that no one should read his books. It does, however, reflect badly on his character, but not in the usual ways he is criticized. Here is a summary of what I consider to be the essential facts. I have not gone back to check my research so I may have a few details wrong. Nevertheless, I think this summary captures essentially what happened.
Heidegger was a great admirer of both Hitler and the Nazis before they came to power. This was why they made him Chancellor of Freiburg University, and why the the most famous speech he gave as Chancellor was so optimistic. That speech is pretty clearly in Heidegger's style, and was in my opinion written entirely by him. That speech contains few statements that would freak people out if it had been written at any other time in history, but it looks pretty scary when you realize he is talking about the Nazis. Over the next year, Heidegger signed (and in my opinion did not write) a variety of other pronouncements which sound like general issue boiler plate Nazi propaganda, calling for the burning of books, the expulsion of Jews etc. These speeches have been collected in a book called something like "German Existentialism". Although they are obviously important historical documents, I don't think they tell us anything about what Heidegger was thinking at the time.
After about a year of this, Heidegger resigned as Chancellor. The reason he gave was that the Nazis were not living up to their own ideals. Over the next few years, Heidegger frequently criticized the Nazis, so much so that his books were eventually banned and he lost many of the privileges that he once had. Heidegger was never jailed or physically punished for his criticisms. He was the only intellectual of any stature the Nazis had, and they didn't want to completely disassociate themselves from him. He was, however, forced to work on a labor crew when he was over fifty, lifting rocks and doing other kinds of hard menial labor. Some of his critics have pointed out that essentially all German boys and men were pressed into these labor crews as the war was winding down. However, it's obvious that an important figure like Heidegger would have been exempted from this kind of treatment if he had simply kept his mouth shut, so he really did pay a price for not being silent.
All this looks pretty good for him until you consider a few other factors. His criticisms of Nazism were limited almost exclusively to their misinterpretations of Nietzsche. No mention of the imprisonment, torture, and murder of Jews. He did not even speak up against the firing of his Jewish teacher Edmund Husserl, and editions of Being and Time published in Nazi Germany removed the original dedication to Husserl. Also, what about this claim that the Nazis were not living up to their ideals? For the Nazis, this seems like it would be a good thing, considering how vile their ideals were. To understand what Heidegger meant by this, however, you have to consider another statement attributed to him: That Hitler himself didn't really understand Nazism.
Here is where we can see that Heidegger's big character flaw was not cowardice, but hubris. Heidegger had a very special gift for reinterpreting the great classic texts of western philosophy, particularly the pre-Socratics. He believed that he was uncovering the true meaning of these texts that had been lost for centuries. The rest of us who admire this work usually see these re-interpretations as brilliant original creations,and don't worry about how accurate they might be. Heidegger apparently had an interpretation of Nazism which was as original and idiosyncratic as his interpretations of Parmenides and Heraclitus, which apparently made Nazism look pretty good. He thought that his interpretation was the only one that mattered. Perhaps he was aware of Nazism's innumerable evils and believed that eventually he could purge those out and come up with a more essential Nazi ideology that was humane and decent. This is not as preposterous as it would be for you or me to believe. Heidegger really was one of the greatest thinkers of all time, and he had a profound effect on the minds of thousands of people. This particular delusion is also not a problem when you're reinterpreting the ideas of someone who has been dead for thousands of years. But Marty, when Hitler is alive and his troops are marching across Europe, you don't get to decide what Nazism is. It's his ball, so you have to play by his rules.
Surprisingly, Heidegger never seemed to have grasped this obvious point. Apparently he believed to his dying day that he was the only person who really understood what Nazism was, (or at least could have been) and that is why he never apologized for being a Nazi. He felt that he had stood up for his beliefs, and therefore he had nothing to apologize for. However, to understand why he felt this way, you have to give a meaning to Nazism shared by no one but him, and also believe that this idiosyncratic interpretation is the only one that mattered.
Richard Mcdonough's Martin Heidegger's Being and Time has a chapter on the relations between Heidegger's ideas and Nazism which is the best work I have seen on this topic. It shows pretty clearly that Heidegger's idea of Nazism was so different from anyone else's that it was only Heidegger's scholarly hubris that enabled him to ignore the numerous evils and stupidities in Nazism, and focus only on the parts he liked.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
The Twilight Movies
My sister-in-law (a scholar of medieval romance) and my nieces are crazy about the Twilight books and movies, and my wife suggested we see both of them. So I did, and was quite impressed at how they managed to imbed the classic Gothic myths into the lives of modern young girls. Here is the rather prosaic story that underlies them. I do not mean to disparage them by uncovering this story, because I am genuinely impressed at how the author has given this story such epic resonance. That is part of what artists are supposed to do: "See infinity in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour". Here's the grain of sand that the author of these stories is working with. You'll have to see the movies, or read the first two books, to see what she has done with it so far.
1) The sensible thing to do is to date boys in your own social class. However, the kids in your social class are boring, partly because they're a lot like you, and partly because you seem to want something more than they want. Consequently, you are going to be attracted primarily to upper class boys with pale skin and high cheekbones, and secondarily to lower class boys with dark skin and big biceps.
2) The first movie dealt with the problems of being attracted to the upper class boys. Most of them will see you as food, to be chewed up and spit out for their temporary pleasure. The best you can hope for is a boy who will want to treat you this way, but loves you so much that he stops himself from doing so by shear force of will. His brother, however, will not have the will power that he has, so don't ever let him see parts of your body that are ordinarily covered. Your upper class boyfriend will protect you from his brother, but this will result in bad family tensions. Eventually you will want your upper class boyfriend to do the terrible thing that would destroy you, but he won't, no matter how much you beg him to, because he loves you too much. He believes that if he does this terrible thing, you will be damned for all eternity. You're willing to risk that, he's not.
3) If your upper class boyfriend leaves you (as he does in the second movie) you can turn to the lower class boy with brown skin and big biceps. He will not force himself on you, but he will do things like fix your motor cyle. Unfortunately, his friends travel in gangs that are bad tempered, dangerous and violent. Eventually he will join one of those gangs himself, because this kind of violence is in his genes. He realizes this, however, and so refuses to get emotionally involved with you, even though he loves you. He knows that other members of his gang have committed domestic violence against the women they love, and he is afraid he will do the same thing to you.
The good news is that the upper class boy eventually agrees to do the terrible thing that you both want him to do, but only if you agree to marry him. The bad news is that if you do this, the lower class boy will get very angry, and there's no telling what he'll do when he gets angry.
The one character I found myself identifying with was the girl's father. He loves his daughter deeply, but the only way he has ever learned to relate to women is romantically, and he knows that this is highly inappropriate in her case. Consequently, he keeps his distance from her, and expresses his feelings only in stiff formal utterances and the giving of carefully chosen gifts. This shows my age of course, as does the fact that the last time I saw Romeo and Juliet (performed by my own students) I couldn't identify with Romeo any more. Instead, I identified with Friar Lawrence, the childless scholar who finds himself surrounded by teenagers hopped up on hormones and existential angst, doing everything he can to stop them from killing themselves. I hope I have more success than he did. Perhaps watching movies like Twilight will help.
1) The sensible thing to do is to date boys in your own social class. However, the kids in your social class are boring, partly because they're a lot like you, and partly because you seem to want something more than they want. Consequently, you are going to be attracted primarily to upper class boys with pale skin and high cheekbones, and secondarily to lower class boys with dark skin and big biceps.
2) The first movie dealt with the problems of being attracted to the upper class boys. Most of them will see you as food, to be chewed up and spit out for their temporary pleasure. The best you can hope for is a boy who will want to treat you this way, but loves you so much that he stops himself from doing so by shear force of will. His brother, however, will not have the will power that he has, so don't ever let him see parts of your body that are ordinarily covered. Your upper class boyfriend will protect you from his brother, but this will result in bad family tensions. Eventually you will want your upper class boyfriend to do the terrible thing that would destroy you, but he won't, no matter how much you beg him to, because he loves you too much. He believes that if he does this terrible thing, you will be damned for all eternity. You're willing to risk that, he's not.
3) If your upper class boyfriend leaves you (as he does in the second movie) you can turn to the lower class boy with brown skin and big biceps. He will not force himself on you, but he will do things like fix your motor cyle. Unfortunately, his friends travel in gangs that are bad tempered, dangerous and violent. Eventually he will join one of those gangs himself, because this kind of violence is in his genes. He realizes this, however, and so refuses to get emotionally involved with you, even though he loves you. He knows that other members of his gang have committed domestic violence against the women they love, and he is afraid he will do the same thing to you.
The good news is that the upper class boy eventually agrees to do the terrible thing that you both want him to do, but only if you agree to marry him. The bad news is that if you do this, the lower class boy will get very angry, and there's no telling what he'll do when he gets angry.
The one character I found myself identifying with was the girl's father. He loves his daughter deeply, but the only way he has ever learned to relate to women is romantically, and he knows that this is highly inappropriate in her case. Consequently, he keeps his distance from her, and expresses his feelings only in stiff formal utterances and the giving of carefully chosen gifts. This shows my age of course, as does the fact that the last time I saw Romeo and Juliet (performed by my own students) I couldn't identify with Romeo any more. Instead, I identified with Friar Lawrence, the childless scholar who finds himself surrounded by teenagers hopped up on hormones and existential angst, doing everything he can to stop them from killing themselves. I hope I have more success than he did. Perhaps watching movies like Twilight will help.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)