The Destructive Impact of Cultural Heideggerianism
The Destructive Impact of Cultural Heideggerianism
The Destructive Impact of Cultural Heideggerianism
When Heidegger published Being and Time, philosophy was in crisis. The
neo-Kantian project that dominated late-nineteenth-century German
philosophy was in shambles. Ludwig v. Wittgenstein and the positivists of
the Vienna Circle portrayed metaphysics as literal nonsense. Heidegger
promised a path out of the cul-de-sac of the old metaphysics. His student
and mistress Hannah Arendt wrote that Heidegger sought “to make Man
the ‘Master of Being,’” and to “put man in exactly the same place that God
had occupied in traditional ontology.” His evolving understanding of
Being turned the concept into a secular substitute for God.
Meanwhile, as Aristotle told us, “Being is said in many ways.” I can say
that “the cat is black” or that “the cat exists,” and in each case the “is”
seems to mean something rather different. These applications of the
concept of “Being” are different but nonetheless analogous, as Aquinas
observed, but the analogy of Being is only a place-marker for a solution.
The analytic philosophers dismissed this problem by dismissing these
metaphysical questions as literally meaningless. Their logic-oriented
approach soon proved to have its own limitations. Kurt Gödel proved in
1931 that mathematical systems cannot prove their own premises. In
short, these paradoxes have persisted in philosophy from Parmenides
through Gödel, and philosophical investigation has only succeeded in
sharpening them.
The signature idea of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) was that man’s
Being-There, or Dasein, arose from mortality, in what he called Being-
unto-Death. Because “Being” cannot be defined directly, Heidegger
defines it by what is not Being, or rather our own ceasing to be. From the
standpoint of religious philosophy that was hardly new (Franz Rosenzweig
began his 1921 masterwork The Star of Redemption with the assertion
that “from death—from the fear of death—comes all of our knowledge of
the All”). Heidegger’s innovation was to secularize mortality, with a new
terminology that replaced sin and redemption with “care” (Sorge) and
“resoluteness” (Entschlossenheit).
Heidegger when he claims, toward the close of the Freiburg Lectures, that
“we remain settled upon this earth in relationality”. This “relationality”
clearly says something other than “being in relation with.” To be “in
relation with” implies polarities, an otherness, the distinct otherness of
that with which we are “in relation.” To be “settled in relationality”
implies by contrast a state of betweenness, the discomfort of operating
continuously from within a field of relation.
This sounds obscure, but Hanly’s intent (like Heidegger’s) is
straightforward: He is searching for a path in between the antinomies
that inevitably appear in any philosophical framework that draws a bright
line between truth and falsity, or between Being and Non-Being.
Ingeniously, Hanly interprets Heidegger’s later fragments with the aid of
Novalis, who died at 29, leaving behind two unfinished novels, some
philosophical “fragments,” a few poems, and a deep impression on later
Romantic standard-bearers such as Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck.
Novalis adopted the notion of an ecstatic state from the Neoplatonic
philosopher Plotinus. His teacher Fichte had posited an “intellectual
intuition” independent of experience; Novalis identified Fichte’s
somewhat nebulous concept with Plotinus’ “inner light,” a state of
enlightenment (in his willful misreading of Plotinus) evoked by sensual
stimulus rather than reason.
Hanly picks up the story in medias res, with the Heidegger of the mid-
1930s, after his so-called “turn” away from his Being in Time project. A
perhaps stronger case for Heidegger’s dependence on Novalis can be made
in my view ab ovo. Ten years earlier, Heidegger had revived Novalis’
concept of “ecstasy” (Ekstase) that figures so pivotally in Being and Time.
If that is so, we may add Novalis to the long list of the philosophers’
predecessors whom Heidegger appropriated with little or no
acknowledgment, ranging from St. Augustine to Kierkegaard.
Hanly adds: “It is, too, in a sense very close to Heidegger’s that Novalis
understands Gefühl [Feeling] as the domain of the in-between, the
between-space that binds the movements of real and ideal, intertwining
and conjoining them—a mode of thought that entirely presages
Heidegger’s foregrounding of Stimmung.”
But Fichte did go far enough for his student Novalis, who declared, “Fichte
doesn’t understand the hypostasis, and for this reason he lacks the other
half of the creative mind. Without Ekstase—gripping, all-displacing
consciousness—you can’t get anywhere with all of philosophy.”
Kant had left Reason in a precarious balance, too weak to penetrate into
the true nature of things or to overcome the antinomies of metaphysics,
but powerful enough to sustain the autonomy of the individual. That left
philosophy with two main alternatives. One was to elevate reason, as did
Hegel, in a dialectic that took the antinomies as markers for the
generation of new hypotheses. The other was to eschew reason along with
the Romantics. The fact that Heidegger reenacted the Romantic rebellion
against reason tells us something about the limited choices available to
philosophy. As Arendt observed, it is an easy lope from Romantic
irrationalism to Heidegger’s ascent to rector at the University of Freiburg.
Just what sort of Nazi Heidegger was will be debated for some time. Victor
Farías argues persuasively that the decline of his political standing after
1934 was due to Heidegger’s affinity to the Ernst Röhm wing of the
NSDAP, which Hitler crushed in the Night of the Long Knives.
Novalis was the first of the Romantics to embrace the irrational, with
baleful consequences. National Socialism had its roots in Romantic
irrationality, according to Hannah Arendt. She wrote in a 1944 critique of
Heidegger, “The ruthless individualism of Romanticism never meant
anything more serious than that ‘everybody is free to create for himself
his own ideology.’ What was new in Mussolini’s experiment was the
‘attempt to carry it out with all possible energy.’…Romanticism provided
the most excellent pretext in its unlimited idolization of the ‘personality’
of the individual, whose very arbitrariness became the very proof of
genius.” In fact, the Nazis embraced Mueller’s 1807 tract The Idea of the
State, with its emphasis on authenticity (Eigenheit) that anticipates
Heidegger’s concept of the authentic (eigentlich) through “integration of
the individual into the organism of the whole.”
REVIEWED
by Peter Hanly
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