Patricia Cohen’s article in the NY Times, “An Ethical Question: Does a Nazi Deserve a Place Among Philosophers?” is another in a collection of recent hatchet jobs in the press (here and here) condemning the work of Martin Heidegger for his connections to the Nazis.
The occasion for these journalists writing about something they know nothing about is a book by Emmanual Faye, soon to be released in the U.S., claiming that Heidegger’s thought ought to be stricken from the canon because it was allegedly inspired by Nazism.
The articles consist of some “he said, she said” opinions about the matter with no discussion of the nature of Heidegger’s work. And Faye’s book has been widely discredited as itself a hatchet job. (see comments here)
I have no idea what inspired Heidegger. It is well known that he was a provincial German nationalist, probably an anti-semite, and an all-purpose jerk. But I can’t for the life of me figure out what this is supposed to tell us about his philosophy.
Heidegger’s main points, at least in his major work Being in Time, were that (1) our experience is always situated in a context of which we already have a non-cognitive (or non-representational) grasp prior to conscious deliberation, (2) that non-cognitive grasp is a product of the way things matter to us (care), (3) and ultimately how things matter to us must be understood in terms of our temporality (roughly our sense of past, present, and future). This view draws a sharp contrast with philosophical views that assume meanings are abstract, fixed entities without a history grasped primarily through theoretical reason. Heidegger’s ideas have found their way into the mainstream of philosophical thought and in fact have deeply influenced contemporary cognitive science.
I suppose one could interpret these ideas as meaning there is some sort of national destiny written into the “blood and soil” of a nation being disseminated through its history, and that the surge of “feeling” and “will” emanating from that destiny make reason irrelevant. Maybe Nazism flows from such an point of view. But it is a real stretch to find this in Being and Time–Heidegger’s works neither entail nor lend themselves to such a reading.
The genetic fallacy and the intentional fallacy are not necessarily incompatible with standards of good philosophical reasoning, but they must be handled with care—and neither Faye’s book nor the articles in question take the requisite care.
Heidegger’s limitations as a thinker (and perhaps a person) are revealed, not by what he said, but by what he didn’t say. Moral relationships with other persons do not occupy a sufficiently central role in Heidegger’s thought. This is the source of much criticism of Heidegger, especially from thinkers such as Levinas, and to my mind the criticism is deserved. But that hardly makes his work an example of “Nazism” and is no argument for refusing to read Heidegger but, instead, for taking what insight one can and building a more adequate account.
Tags: Emmanual Faye, Heidegger and the Nazis, Martin Heidegger
