Damon Linker is offended by one academic's highly public call to cast Martin Heidegger out of the canon because for a time he was fond of the Nazis ("a prolific, provincial Nazi hack"). Excerpt:
I'm a liberal democrat and a humanist who considers totalitarianism in general, and Nazism in particular, to be moral and political abominations. I believe in the truth of science, and I like many things about technological modernity. I accept logic as a valid means of determining many forms of truth. And I happily accept the vision of Being that has prevailed in the Western world since the time of the ancient Greeks. In other words, I'm not inclined to follow Heidegger in its efforts to prepare the way for a more "primordial" encounter with Being by subverting these and other aspects of our world. But what a breathtakingly exciting experience it is to be forced to think about and make a case for, rather than lazily accept as self-evident, our most fundamental assumptions about the world and ourselves!
Yes, exactly! That needed saying. Some version of it often does these days.
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Heidegger exiled himself with his utterly impenetrable prose. It’s easier to read the whole of Atlas Shrugged than comprehend one page of Zeit und Sein. I was encouraged by Bertrand Russell’s assessment of his ontology: He held it to be worthless.
On the other hand, Heidegger didn’t stay a Nazi long. He quit after less than a year and suffered personally for quitting.
Is life really long enough to read and study this guy, rather than, say, learning Italian or classical Greek so as to be able to read the Divine Comedy or Homer in the original language?
@ Jim:
"His jargon laced vocabulary masks the fact that there really isn’t anything there. After having a breakthrough with his jargon I found his insights almost painfully trivial."
I agree, although I suspect it's because we've all lived partially in Heidegger's world since birth: in other words, it seems trivial only because Nietszsche-derivatives like Heidegger have been a part of our daily existence (more on that in a moment). Imagine, for instance, how insightful Heidegger would seem to some 13th Century Christians, who, along with everyone they knew, derived their "identity" solely from their relation to the Christian God and the Church. The question of "being" was well-settled and not publicly discussed by non-clergymen. When were growing up, Heidegger (and more importantly, Nietzsche) had already won the day...
As an example, the logic of race-based-"affirmative action", unmoored from religion or personal merit, would have no intellectual underpinning without Heidegger, insofar as beneficiaries only have to prove membership in a secular "race" to get a (partial) benefit. In other words, membership in a non-religious "race" defines benefits regardless of personal station (all blacks, for instance, are considered as one people (Volk?) regardless of whether they have slave ancestry or are newly arrived from Ethiopia last month). That wouldn't exist without Heidegger. Of course, we take secular-race-based things for granted because we've always known them.
"I think he should be retired because he has nothing to offer."
Fine in principle, but that standard is a slippery slope, too. You could eliminate basically everyone but Aristotle, Nietzsche, and the Epistles of St. Paul from the Western Canon if every writer needed smashing original insights instead of a derivative interpretation of those three. If you think Heidegger is a poor derivative take on Nietzsche, well, I honestly haven't seen a "good" one. (And I haven't been looking.) I might argue that Nietzsche is an "ending" of thought, rather than a beginning of thought.
"Contrast with Whitehead who also coined a lot of terms."
Sincere apologies, Jim. Here's where our conversation ends: I've never even heard of Whitehead. (I'm proud to say I didn't major in philosophy or go to graduate school.)
"Is life really long enough to read and study this guy, rather than, say, learning Italian or classical Greek so as to be able to read the Divine Comedy or Homer in the original language?"
Yes, I agree 100%.
And the irony of it all is that I really do think Heidegger would agree (he would have preferred us to learn Greek instead of Italian, but yeah).
Gerard
LOL - agree that Heidegger is a boon to alcohol sales everywhere. My Heidegger experience included a professor who had just come to the US from China - was supposedly very learned but spoke very little English and so read - slowly - very slowly - his notes to the class. It was excruciating. I have had an aversion to German philosophers since then.
Undergrad - psych and biology. The PhD is in history.
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