[This excerpt is from Chapter 2 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault]
After Kant: reality or reason, but not both
Kant’s legacy to the next generation is a principled separation of subject and object, of reason and reality. His philosophy is thus a forerunner of postmodernism’s strong anti-realist and anti-reason stances.
After Kant, the story of philosophy is the story of German philosophy. Kant died early in the nineteenth century, just as Germany was beginning to replace France as the world’s leading intellectual nation, and it was German philosophy that set the program for the nineteenth century.
Understanding German philosophy is crucial to understanding the origins of postmodernism. Continental postmodernists such as Foucault and Derrida will cite Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Hegel as their major formative influences—all of them German thinkers. American postmodernists such as Rorty emerged primarily from the collapse of the Logical Positivist tradition, but will also cite Heidegger and pragmatism as major formative influences. When we look to the roots of Logical Positivism we find cultural Germans such as Wittgenstein and the members of the Vienna Circle. And when we look at pragmatism, we find it to be an Americanized version of Kantianism and Hegelianism. Postmodernism is thus the supplanting of the Enlightenment with its roots in seventeenth century English philosophy by the Counter-Enlightenment with its roots in late eighteenth-century German philosophy.
Kant is central to that story. By the time of his death Kant’s philosophy had conquered the German intellectual world,[22] and so the story of German philosophy became the story of extensions and reactions to Kant
Three broad strains of post-Kantian philosophy emerged. What shall we do, members of each strain asked, about the gulf between subject and object that Kant has said cannot be crossed by reason?
1. Kant’s closest followers decided to accept the gulf and live with it. Neo-Kantianism evolved during the nineteenth century, and by the twentieth century two main forms had emerged. One form was Structuralism, of which Ferdinand de Saussure was a prominent exponent, representing the broadly rationalist wing of Kantianism. The other was Phenomenology, of which Edmund Husserl was a prominent representative, representing the broadly empiricist wing of Kantianism. Structuralism was a linguistic version of Kantianism, holding that language is a self-contained, non-referential system, and that the philosophical task was to seek out language’s necessary and universal structural features, those features taken to underlie and be prior to the empirical, contingent features of language. Phenomenology’s focus was upon careful examination of the contingent flow of the experiential given, avoiding any existential inferences or assumptions about what one experiences, and seeking simply to describe experience as neutrally and as clearly as possible. In effect, the Structuralists were seeking subjective noumenal categories, and the Phenomenologists were content with describing the phenomena without asking what connection to an external reality those experiences might have.
Structuralism and Phenomenology came to prominence in the twentieth century, however, and so my focus next will be on the two strains of German philosophy that dominated the nineteenth century. For those two strains, Kant’s philosophy set a problem to be solved—though one to be solved within the constraints of Kant’s most fundamental premises.
2. The speculative metaphysical strain, best represented by Hegel, was dissatisfied with the principled separation of subject and object. This strain granted Kant’s claim that the separation cannot be bridged epistemologically by reason, and so proposed to bridge it metaphysically by identifying the subject with the object.
3. The irrationalist strain, best represented by Kierkegaard, was also dissatisfied by the principled separation of subject and object. It granted Kant’s claim that the separation cannot be bridged epistemologically by reason, and so proposed to bridge it epistemologically by irrational means.
Kantian philosophy thus set the stage for the reign of speculative metaphysics and epistemological irrationalism in the nineteenth century.
References
[22] See, e.g., Wood, in Kant 1996, vi; also Meinecke 1977, 25.
Bibliography
[The chapter from which this section of Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism (Scholargy Publishing, 2004) is excerpted can be downloaded as a PDF at the Explaining Postmodernism page. The full book is also available at Amazon.com.]
Posted 1 month, 3 weeks ago at 3:44 pm. Add a comment
[This is Section 20 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]
20. The question of Nazism’s philosophical roots
We do not do ourselves any favors by not understanding Nazism thoroughly or by being satisfied with superficial explanations. It took a world war to stop National Socialism in the twentieth century. War is brute force. Brute force rarely changes anyone’s minds about anything, and it alone does not destroy the underlying causes that motivate conflict. To use a crude analogy: If two neighbors are having an ongoing argument about a series of issues, and one neighbor hits the other and knocks him unconscious—that ends the argument but it does not solve their problems. The source of their argument is still there and it will re-surface.
The same holds for the underlying causes of National Socialism and its differences with the liberal democracies. The liberal democracies were able to knock out the Nazis in World War II, though it was a close call—but the underlying arguments are still with us.
The differences between National Socialism and liberal democracies are profound and involve entirely different philosophies of life. National Socialism was the product of a well-thought-out philosophy of life, the main elements of which were originated, crafted, and argued by philosophers and other intellectuals across many generations.
The Nazi intellectuals were not lightweights, and we run the risk of underestimating our enemy if we dismiss their ideology as attractive only to a few cranky weirdos.[43] If your enemy has a machine gun but you believe he only has a pea shooter, then you are setting yourself up for failure. And if we remind ourselves of the list of very heavyweight intellectuals who supported Nazism—Nobel Prize winners, outstanding philosophers and brilliant legal thinkers—then it is clear that these were no pea-shooters and that we need heavyweight intellectual ammunition to defend ourselves.
In the case of other major historical revolutions, we are more familiar with seeing the significance of philosophy. When we think for example of the causes of the Communist Revolutions in Russia and China, we naturally think back to the philosopher Karl Marx. When we think of the causes of the French Revolution, we think back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. When we think of the causes of the American Revolution, we naturally think back to the philosopher John Locke. The same holds the causes of National Socialism—although since the Nazi regime went so horribly wrong, there is perhaps some reluctance to name names. Yet naming names is sometimes crucial if we are going to get to the historical heart of the matter. What philosophers can we cite in the case of the Nazis? Several names are candidates: Georg Hegel, Johann Fichte, even elements from Karl Marx.
But in connection with the Nazis, perhaps the biggest and the most controversial name regularly mentioned is that of Friedrich Nietzsche. The Nazis often cited Nietzsche as one of their philosophical precursors, and even though Nietzsche died thirty-three years before the Nazis came to power, references to Nietzsche crop up regularly in Nazi writings and activities. In philosopher Heidegger’s lectures, for example, “Nietzsche was presented as the Nazi philosopher.”[44]
In his study, Adolf Hitler had a bust of Friedrich Nietzsche. In 1935, Hitler attended and participated in the funeral of Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth. In 1938, the Nazis built a monument to Nietzsche. In 1943, Hitler gave a set of Nietzsche’s writings as a gift to fellow dictator Benito Mussolini.[45]
Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, was also a great admirer of Friedrich Nietzsche. In his semi-autobiographical novel, Goebbels has the title character Michael die in a mining accident—afterward three books are found among his belongings: the Bible, Goethe’s Faust, and Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.
So who was Friedrich Nietzsche?
References
[43] Recall Albert Speer on “the event that led me to [Hitler]”—a speech Hitler gave to the College of Engineering in Berlin: Speer expected it to be “a bombastic harangue” but it turned out to be a “reasoned lecture” (quoted in Orlow 1969, p. 199).
[44] Rohkrämer 2005, p. 181.
[45] During WWI, the German government printed 150,000 copies of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and gave them to soldiers along with a copy of the Bible.
[Bibliography]
[This post can also be downloaded as a PDF at the Nietzsche and the Nazis page.]
Posted 2 months, 1 week ago at 3:34 pm. Add a comment
[This is Section 14 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]
14. Education
Political tools such as physical force and authoritarian laws are necessary tools for a dictatorship, but long-term control of a people also requires control of their minds. The Nazis recognized this and made re-shaping Germany’s educational system a priority. They already had a good head-start.
When the National Socialists came to power in 1933, about 2.5 million Germans were members of the Nazi Party. Seven percent of the Party’s members were from the upper class, seven percent were peasants, thirty-five percent were industrial workers, and fifty-one percent were from the professional and middle class. Surprisingly, in the latter group, the professional and middle class, the largest occupational group represented was elementary school teachers. Hitler and the Nazis thus already had a core group of committed followers in a position to help them shape the minds of the next generation.
The general purpose of education
The Nazis had a particular kind of youth in mind. As early as 1925, Hitler had written in Mein Kampf: “the folkish state must not adjust its entire educational work primarily to the inoculation of mere knowledge, but to the breeding of absolutely healthy bodies. The training of mental abilities is only secondary.”[28]
Come 1933 and power, Hitler repeatedly made it even clearer what kind of healthy bodies he wanted the educational system to produce:
“My program for educating youth is hard. Weakness must be hammered away. In my castles of the Teutonic Order a youth will grow up before which the world will tremble. I want a brutal, domineering, fearless, cruel youth. Youth must be all that. It must bear pain. There must be nothing weak and gentle about it. The free, splendid beast of prey must once again flash from its eyes … That is how I will eradicate thousands of years of human domestication … That is how I will create the New Order.”
Intellectual training was less emphasized than physical training, but it was not omitted. Students were trained in Nazi ideology, studied German history from a National Socialist perspective, learned political activism, and trained themselves to develop a selfless, obedient, duty-oriented moral character. The curriculum was revised, textbooks re-written, and teachers trained as servants of the cause. Early in the Nazi reign, teachers were declared to be civil servants and required to join the National Socialist Teachers League, swearing an oath of absolute fidelity to Adolf Hitler.
The Hitler Youth
In addition to transforming the formal school system, the Nazis put great emphasis on the Hitler Youth organization. The Nazi Party’s youth organization had been formed in 1922, early in the party’s history, and acquired its Hitler Youth name in 1926. The purpose of the Hitler Youth was to train a cadre of devoted young followers outside the formal school system. Once the Nazis came to power, the formal German school system and the Hitler Youth became complementary training and indoctrination programs.
Boys could enter the program when they were age six, though official training began at age ten. All members of the Hitler Youth swore this oath: “In the presence of this blood-banner, which represents our Führer, I swear to devote all my energies and my strength to the savior of our country, Adolf Hitler. I am ready and willing to give up my life for him, so help me God.”[29]
Full membership and systematic training began at age fourteen and included the ability to take a physical beating without whining. Brutal fighting sessions among the boys were common and encouraged. As Hitler had put it in Mein Kampf, “But above all, the young, healthy body must also learn to suffer blows.”[30] If a boy was unable to withstand the pain or pressure, he was embarrassed in front of his peers. Those who succeeded, though, received accolades, a sense of belonging to a great cause, and useful symbols of their status, such as a special dagger.
Parallel programs existed for girls. The League of Young Girls was established for girls ten to fourteen years of age. The fourteen-to-eighteen-year-old girls’ group of the Hitler Youth was the Bund Deutscher Mädel, or League of German Girls. From seventeen to twenty-one years of age, young Aryan women were members of Faith and Beauty. Instruction focused on home, family, and the duty to bear children. The girls’ training was similar to the boys’, including wearing military-style uniforms, engaging in soldier-like activities, and learning Nazi ideology and activism.
Although the youth were encouraged to question their parents and their non-Nazi teachers, within the Hitler Youth absolute obedience was demanded. Despite this, membership in the Hitler Youth was appealing to many young Germans. Summer camps and parades were regular activities for the Hitler Youth. There was also the feeling of camaraderie and the sense of developing a sense of self-discipline, loyalty, and honor. Membership came to be considered to be a badge of honor—and, as the Nazi Party came closer to achieving power, membership even became a status symbol.
In 1932, the year before the Nazis came to power, the Hitler Youth had 107,956 members—or five percent of the German youth population. Within a year, membership had swollen to well over two million members.
In 1936, membership in the Hitler Youth became mandatory. All other youth groups had ceased to exist, been absorbed into the Hitler Youth, or abolished. And by 1939, the year that World War II was to begin, membership in the Hitler Youth reached almost eight million members.
The universities
The Nazis had also achieved great success with older students, those of university age.
Well before Hitler came to power, Nazi student groups existed at universities all over Germany. Before 1933, it was common for students to come to classes wearing brown shirts and swastika armbands, and in many cases it was the most intelligent and idealistic university students who were the most activist and outspoken supporters of National Socialism.
The students also had many allies among their professors.
When the National Socialists took power, they prohibited all Jews from holding academic positions—this resulted in the firing of hundreds of tenured Jewish professors, including several Nobel Laureates. To their credit, many other professors resigned in protest or emigrated. But such professors were in the small minority.[31]
A large majority of university professors remained on the job, either silently accepting the new regime or even actively supporting it. In 1933, for example, 960 professors, including prominent figures such as philosopher Martin Heidegger, made a public proclamation of their support for Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist regime.[32]
References
[28] Hitler 1925, p. 408.
[29] Quoted in Shirer 1962, p. 253.
[30] Hitler 1925, p. 410.
[31] “But in numbers the émigrés were not to be compared with the leading figures in every field of intellectual endeavour who hailed the advent of National Socialism and pledged support to its Führer with every evidence of enthusiasm” (Craig 1978, p. 639).
[32] Shirer 1962, p. 251. Rohkrämer notes the following: “Association with National Socialism was also widespread among philosophers. While twenty philosophy professors were forced out of their positions, about thirty joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and almost half became party members by 1940” (Rohkrämer 2005, p. 171). On Heidegger in particular, given his high profile in the landscape of 20th-century philosophy, “‘Martin Heidegger? A Nazi, of course a Nazi!’ On a purely factual level, this exclamation by Jürgen Habermas is fully correct. Contrary to what Heidegger and Heideggerians have long maintained, historical research has demonstrated beyond doubt Heidegger’s early enthusiasm for National Socialism. Heidegger sympathized with the Nazis before 1933, he actively maneuvered to become rector, he publicly joined the Nazi Party on May Day, and the ceremony around his Rectoral Address included Nazi flags and the singing of the ‘Horst Wessel Song.’ While Jews and political opponents were removed from the university (like his teacher Edmund Husserl) or even forced to flee the country (like his intimate friend Hannah Arendt), Heidegger showed his enthusiastic support for the destruction of the Weimar Republic and for the new regime. He praised the Führer principle for the university sector, while striving to attain such a position for himself. In speeches and newspaper articles he identified himself with Hitler’s rule, going so far as to state in autumn 1933 that ‘the Führer himself and alone is and will be Germany’s only reality and its law.’ He not only approved in principle of the Nazi cleansing, but also tried to use the new regime to destroy the academic careers of colleagues, for example by initiating a Gestapo investigation” (Rohkrämer 2005, p. 172-173).
[Bibliography]
[This post can also be downloaded as a PDF at the Nietzsche and the Nazis page.]
Posted 2 months, 3 weeks ago at 2:46 pm. 1 comment
[This excerpt is from Chapter 5 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault]
Marcuse and the Frankfurt School: Marx plus Freud, or oppression plus repression
Marcuse had long labored in the trenches of academic philosophy and social theory before coming to fame in America in the 1960s. He studied philosophy at Freiburg under Husserl and Heidegger, later becoming an assistant to both. His first major publication was an attempt to synthesize Heideggerian phenomenology with Marxism.[25]
His powerful allegiance to Marxism combined with his Heideggerian distrust of Marxism’s rationalistic elements led Marcuse to join forces with the nascent Frankfurt School of social thought. The Frankfurt School was a loose association of mostly German intellectuals centered at the Institute for Social Research, led from 1930 on by Max Horkheimer.
Horkheimer had also been trained in philosophy, having completed his doctoral dissertation on the philosophy of Kant in 1923. From that work Horkheimer moved directly to concerns with social psychology and practical politics. In the late 1920s, while Marcuse was working on his theoretical integration of Marx and Heidegger, Horkheimer was reaching some pessimistic conclusions about the possibility of practical political change.
Setting before himself the question of why the German proletariat were not revolting, Horkheimer offered a breakdown of the politically relevant units, arguing that each was incapable of achieving anything significant.[26] Naturally enough, Horkheimer began his analysis with the working classes, dividing them into the employed and the unemployed. The employed, he noted, are not too badly off and seem content enough. It is the unemployed who are in the worst shape. Their situation is also getting worse, for as the mechanization of production increases, unemployment also increases. But the unemployed are also the least educated class and the least organized, and that has made it impossible to raise their class consciousness. A clear sign of this is that they waver between voting for the Communists, who are blindly following Moscow, and the National Socialists who are, well, a bunch of Nazis. The only other socialist party is the Social Democrats, but they are much too pragmatic and reformist to be effective.
So, Horkheimer concluded, the situation is hopeless for socialism. The employed are too comfortable, the unemployed are too scatterbrained, the social democrats are too wishy-washy, the communists are too obediently following authority, and the National Socialists are un-discussable.
As way out of the morass, the Frankfurt School’s members began to explore the idea of adding a more sophisticated social psychology to Marxism’s economic and historical logic. Traditional Marxism emphasized the inexorable laws of economic development and de-emphasized the contribution of human actors. Given that those Marxist laws seemed rather more exorable in their non-development, the Frankfurt School suggested that history is as much made by human actors, and especially by how those human actors understand themselves psychologically and their existential situation. Incorporating a better social psychology into Marxism would hopefully explain why the revolution had not happened and suggest what would be necessary to make it happen.
For sophisticated social psychology the Frankfurt School turned to Sigmund Freud. Applying his own psychoanalytic theories to social philosophy, Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) argued that civilization is an unstable, surface phenomenon based upon the repression of instinctual energies. Bio-psychologically, human agents are a bundle of aggressive and conflicted instincts, those instincts constantly pressing for immediate satisfaction. Their constant immediate satisfaction, though, would make social living impossible, so the forces of civilization have evolved by incrementally suppressing instincts and forcing their expression into polite, orderly, and rational forms. Civilization is thus an artificial construct overlaying a seething mass of irrational energies in the id. The battle between the id and civilization is ongoing and occasionally brutal. To the extent that the id wins, society tends toward conflict and chaos; and to the extent that society wins, the id is forced into repression. Repression, however, merely forces the id’s energies underground psychologically, where those energies are unconsciously displaced and often forced into irrational channels. That displaced energy, Freud explained, must discharge itself eventually, and often it does so by bursting out neurotically—in the form of hysterias, obsessions, and phobias.[27]
The task of the psychoanalyst, then, is to trace the neurosis back through its irrational, unconscious channels to its origin. Patients, however, often interfere with this process: they resist the exposure of unconscious and irrational elements in their psyches and they cling to the conscious forms of civilized and rational behavior that they have learned. So the psychoanalyst must find a way to bypass those surface, blocking behaviors, and to strip away the conscious veneer of civility to probe the seething id below. Here, Freud suggested, the use of non-rational psychological mechanisms becomes essential—dreams, hypnosis, free-association, slips of the tongue. Such manifestations of irrationality are often clues to the underlying reality, for they slip past the patient’s conscious defense mechanisms. The well-trained psychoanalyst, accordingly, is the one who is able to spot the truth in the irrational.
To the Frankfurt School, Freud offered a psychology admirably suited to diagnosing the pathologies of capitalism. Capitalism, we know from Marx, is definitely based on exploitative competition. But modern capitalist society is taking a technocratic form, directing its conflictual energies toward creating machines and corporate bureaucracies. Those machines and bureaucracies do provide for the average member of the bourgeoisie an artificial world of order, control, and creature comforts—but at a very high cost: capitalism’s people are increasingly distant from nature, decreasingly spontaneous and creative, increasingly unaware that they are being controlled by the machines and the bureaucracies, both physically and psychologically, and increasingly unaware that the apparently comfortable world they live in is a mask for an underlying realm of brutal conflict and competition.[28]
The Frankfurt School portrait of capitalism, Marcuse explained, is what we find realized most extremely in the most advanced capitalist nation, the United States.
Consider Joe Sixpack. Joe works as a low-level technician for a television-manufacturing company, part of a huge telecommunications conglomerate. Whether he has a job tomorrow depends on Wall Street speculators and the decisions of a corporate head-quarters in another state. But Joe does not realize that: he simply goes to work each morning with a slight sense of distaste, pulls the levers and pushes the buttons as he is told to do by the machine and the boss, mass-producing televisions until it is time to go home. On the way home he picks up a six-pack of beer—another mass-market product of capitalist commodification—and after supper with the family he plops down in front of the television, feeling the narcotic effect of the beer kicking in while the sitcoms and commercials tell him that life is great and who could ask for anything more. Tomorrow is another day.
Joe Sixpack is a product. He is a constructed part of an oppressive and dysfunctional competitive system—but one that is overlain with the veneer of peace and comfort.[29] He is unaware of the gap between the appearance of comfort and the reality of oppression, unaware that he is a cog in an artificial technological system—unaware because the fruits of capitalism that he produces and thinks he enjoys consuming are sapping his vital instincts and making him physically and psychologically inert.
Thus Marcuse had an explanation for the new generation of revolutionaries-in-training for why capitalism in the 1950s and early 1960s seemed to be peaceful, tolerant, and progressive—when, as every good socialist knew, it could not really be—and for why the workers were so disappointingly un-revolutionary. Capitalism does not merely oppress the masses existentially, it also represses them psychologically.
It gets worse, for to the extent that Joe can even think about his situation, he hears his world described in terms of “freedom,” “democracy,” “progress”—words that have only a faint glimmer of meaning to him, and that have been crafted and fed to him by capitalism’s apologists to keep him from thinking too deeply about his real existence. Joe is a “one-dimensional man” trapped in a “totalitarian universe of technological rationality,”[30] oblivious to the second and real dimension of human existence wherein true freedom, democracy, and progress lie.[31]
Capitalism’s having achieved this cynical state of development, in which its oppression is masked by pious hypocrisies about liberty and progress, is made even more cynical by its being able to neutralize and even co-opt all dissent and criticism. Having created a monolithic technocracy—the machines and the bureaucracies and the mass man and the self-serving ideology—capitalism can pretend to be open to criticism by allowing some radical intellectuals to dissent. In the name of “tolerance,” “open-mindedness,” and “free speech,” a few lonely voices will be permitted to raise objections and challenges to the capitalist behemoth.[32] But everyone knows full well that nothing come of the criticisms. Worse still, the appearance of having been open and tolerant will serve only to reinforce capitalism’s control. Capitalist tolerance, then, is not real tolerance: it is “Repressive Tolerance.”[33]
So was Horkheimer’s early pessimism right? Was the lesson thirty years later still the same—that the prospect for socialism is totally hopeless? If capitalism’s control extends even to co-opting the dissent of its strongest critics, what weapons are left to the revolutionary?
If there is a chance for socialism, then more extreme tactics will be necessary.
Freudian psychology again gives us the key. As with the repression of the id’s energies by the forces of civilization, capitalism’s suppression of the original human energies cannot be totally successful. Freud had explained that the id’s repressed energies will occasionally burst out in irrational, neurotic forms, threatening the stability and security of civilization. The Frankfurt School taught us that capitalism’s orderly technocracy has repressed much of humanity, driving much of its energy underground—but that repressed energy is still there, and potentially it can burst out.
Thus, Marcuse concluded, capitalism’s repression of human nature may be socialism’s salvation. Capitalism’s rational technocracy suppresses human nature to the point that it bursts out in irrationalisms—in violence, criminality, racism, and all of society’s other pathologies. But by encouraging those irrationalisms the new revolutionaries can destroy the system. So the first task of the revolutionary is to seek out those individuals and energies on the margins of society: the outcast, the disorderly, and the forbidden—anyone and anything that capitalism’s power structure has not yet succeeded in commodifying and dominating totally. All such marginalized and outcast elements will be “irrational,” “immoral,” and even “criminal,” especially by capitalist definition, but that is precisely what the revolutionary needs. Any such outcast element could “break through the false consciousness [and] provide the Archimedean point for a larger emancipation.”[34]
Marcuse looked especially to the marginalized and outcast Left intellectual leadership—especially those trained in critical theory.[35] Given the pervasiveness of capitalism’s domination, the revolutionary vanguard can come only from those outcast intellectuals—especially among the younger students[36]—those who are able to “link liberation with the dissolution of ordinary and orderly perception”[37] and who thereby can see through the appearance of peace to the reality of oppression, who have retained enough of their humanity not to have been turned into Joe Sixpack—and above all who have the will and the energy to do anything it takes, even to the point of being “militantly intolerant and disobedient,”[38] to shock the capitalist power structure into revealing its true nature, thus toppling and smashing the system to pieces, leaving the way open for a renewal of humanity through socialism.
Marcuse’s reign as the pre-eminent philosopher of the New Left signaled a strong turn towards irrationality and violence among younger Leftists. “Marx, Marcuse, and Mao” became the new trinity and the slogan to rally under. As was proclaimed on a banner of students involved in closing the University of Rome: Marx is the prophet, Marcuse is his interpreter, and Mao is the sword.
Many in the new generation listened attentively and sharpened their swords.
References
[25] Marcuse 1928.
[26] Horkheimer 1927, 316-18.
[27] Freud 1930, esp. Ch. 3.
[28] Horkheimer and Adorno 1944, xiv-xv.
[29] Marcuse 1969, 13-15.
[30] Marcuse 1964, 123.
[31] Marcuse is thus halfway between Rousseau and Foucault. Rousseau (1749): “Princes always view with pleasure the spread among their subjects of a taste for the arts. … The sciences, letters and arts … cover with garlands of flowers the iron chains that bind them, stifle in them the feeling of that original liberty for which they seem to have been born, make them love their slavery, and turn them into what is called civilized people.” Foucault: “What is fascinating about prisons is that, for once, power doesn’t hide or mask itself; it reveals itself as tyranny pursued into the tiniest details; it is cynical and at the same time pure and entirely ‘justified,’ because its practice can be totally formulated within the framework of morality. Its brutal tyranny consequently appears as the serene domination of Good over Evil, or order over disorder” (1977b, 210). Also: “If I had known the Frankfurt School at the right time, I would have been spared a lot of work” (Foucault 1989, 353).
[32] Marcuse 1965, 94-96.
[33] The title of Marcuse’s influential 1965 essay.
[34] Marcuse 1965, 111.
[35] Marcuse 1969, 89.
[36] Marcuse 1969, ix-x, 59.
[37] Marcuse 1969, 37
[38] Marcuse 1965, 123.
Bibliography [pdf] [html]
[The chapter from which this section of Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism (Scholargy Publishing, 2004) is excerpted can be downloaded as a PDF at the Explaining Postmodernism page. The full book is also available at Amazon.com.]
Posted 3 months, 1 week ago at 2:09 pm. 1 comment
Tim Black, a senior writer at spiked, has a good review discussion of “Why they’re really scared of Heidegger.” The “they’re” refers to many contemporary academics, and Black’s review is of Emmanuel Faye’s wave-making Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935 (Yale, 2009).
Some key quotations from Black’s essay with some commentary from me:
“The philosopher still makes some academics feel itchily uncomfortable, not because they truly believe his Nazism will leap from the pages of his works, but because his deeply anti-humanist arguments sound a little too familiar.”
Indeed. In the academic world, especially in the Humanities, we are surrounded by anti-humanists postmodernists, left environmentalists, extreme animal activists, and various other sub-species. (I sometimes wonder whether—for the sake of truth in advertising—we should rename the “Humanities” divisions in our colleges the “Anti-Humanities.” Not that I am bitter or anything.)
Yet there is a bit of a puzzle for some commentators given that, on the usual (ridiculous) Left-Right political spectrum, Heidegger and the Nazis are often place on the “Right” while most of Heidegger’s contemporary fellow-travelers are on the “Left.” Tim Black notes: “Heidegger’s influence is such that any attempt to see the fascist thread loses itself in the weave and weft of an immense, largely leftish legacy.”
So we have to go up a level of abstraction to see the connections. Just as “left” Communism and “right” Nazism are two particular applications of a broader collectivist and authoritarian political vision, Heidegger’s particular philosophy and contemporary postmodernists’ particular philosophy share essentially the same anti-reason and anti-human vision.
Black puts it this way: “The discomfort Heidegger’s Nazism repeatedly causes is revealing. … Heidegger prompts discomfort precisely because he was a Nazi propagating a non-Nazi philosophy. He is just not alien enough. His is a philosophical vision that sits too comfortably with many mainstream attitudes, whether it’s an environmentalist assault upon human hubris or a snobbish disdain for consumerism.”
And of Heidegger’s more abstract philosophical commitments, i.e., his stance against reason and modernity, Black says: “what remained consistent throughout, from the Letter on Humanism to the Question Concerning Technology, was that veiled, abstracted, but nonetheless, resonant critique of modernity, and the human-centred rationality he discerned at its fallen heart … . His thought resonates not because he was a Nazi, but because his criticism of modernity echoes many of today’s anti-modern trends.”
Exactly right. Heidegger’s Nazism is a particular application of his broader anti-humanism, and his philosophical influence has to be understood from that level of abstraction and generality. Heideggerian anti-humanism can be applied particularly in a number of ways, so that is why we find his continued resonance with today’s postmodernists, left environmentalists, neo-Luddites, and man-hating animal activists, and the rest.
My own discussion of Heidegger appears in Chapter Three (pp. 58-67) of my Explaining Postmodernism. Four sections of that chapter are devoted to Heidegger:
* “Heidegger’s synthesis of the Continental tradition”
* “Setting aside reason and logic”
* “Emotions as revelatory”
* “Heidegger and postmodernism”
That chapter is also available at the Explaining Postmodernism page.
Posted 3 months, 1 week ago at 1:59 pm. 1 comment
[This excerpt is from Chapter 3 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault]
Heidegger’s synthesis of the Continental tradition
Martin Heidegger took Hegelian philosophy and gave it a personal, phenomenological twist.
Heidegger is notorious for the obscurity of his prose and for his actions and inactions on behalf of the National Socialists during the 1930s, and he is unquestionably the leading twentieth-century philosopher for the postmodernists. Derrida and Foucault identify themselves as followers of Heidegger.[1] Rorty cites Heidegger as one of the three major influences on his thinking, the other two being Dewey and Wittgenstein.[2]
Heidegger absorbed and modified the tradition of German philosophy. Like Kant, Heidegger believed reason to be a superficial phenomenon, and he adopted the Kantian view of words and concepts as obstacles to our coming to know reality, or Being. However, like Hegel, Heidegger believed that we can get closer to Being than Kant allowed, though not by adopting Hegel’s abstracted third-person pretense of Reason. Setting aside both reason and Reason, Heidegger agreed with Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer that by exploring his feelings—especially his dark and anguished feelings of dread and guilt—he could approach Being. And like all good German philosophers, Heidegger agreed that when we get to the core of Being we will find conflict and contradiction at the heart of things.
So what is new? Heidegger’s distinctiveness was his use of phenomenology to get us there.
Phenomenology becomes philosophically important once we accept the Kantian conclusion that we cannot start as realists and scientists do by assuming that we are aware of an external, independent reality that is made up of objects that we are trying to understand. But, from the phenomenological standpoint, we must also realize that Kant took only a timid half-step. While Kant was willing to give up the noumenal object, he held onto the belief in an underlying, noumenal self with a specific nature available to us for our investigation. But a noumenal self underlying the flow of phenomena is just as problematic a notion as the notion of noumenal objects underlying the flow. Recognizing this, Heidegger therefore wanted to start, following Nietzsche’s occasional but undeveloped suggestions, without making the assumption of the existence of either an object or a subject.
So we start phenomenologically—that is, by simply and clearly describing the phenomena of experience and change.
On Heidegger’s account, what one finds when starting so is a sense of projection into a field of experience and change. Do not think objects, Heidegger counseled, think fields. Do not think subject, think experience. We start small and local, with Da-sein’s being projected into reality.
“Da-sein” is Heidegger’s substitute concept for “self,” “subject,” or “human being,” all of which he thought carried undesirable baggage from earlier philosophy. Heidegger explained his choice of “Da-sein” by defining it as follows: “Da-sein means being projected into Nothing.”[3] Ignoring the “Nothing” for now, it is the being projected that is Da-sein—not that, if anything, which is projected or does the projecting. The emphasis is on activity, thus avoiding assumptions that there are two things, a subject and an object, that enter into a relationship. There is simply action, the action of being out there, being thrust into.
The being projected reveals and clothes successively over time various semi-stable fields or “beings”—what we would call “objects” if we had not already shed our naïve realism.
Yet the long process of describing the phenomena of beings, Heidegger found, led him inexorably to a question—the question that has haunted all of philosophy: What is the Being of the various beings? The beings differ and change, come and go, yet for all their changeability and difference they still manifest a oneness, a commonality: They all are. What is that Being underlying or behind or common to all beings? What makes the beings Be? Or, raising the stakes to the Heideggerian Question of all questions: Why is there even Being at all? Why is there not rather Nothing?[4]
This is no ordinary question. With a question like this, Heidegger pointed out, reason quickly finds itself in trouble—the same kind of trouble that Kant had pointed out with his antinomies: reason always reaches contradictions whenever it attempts to explore deep metaphysical issues. A question such as “Why is there Being and not rather Nothing?” is therefore repugnant to reason. For Heidegger, this meant that if we are to explore the question, then reason—the “most stiff-necked adversary of thought”[5]—was an obstacle that had to be discarded.
Setting aside reason and logic
The Question is repugnant to reason, as Heidegger wrote in An Introduction to Metaphysics, because we reach logical absurdity whichever way we go in attempting to answer it.[6] If we say, on the one hand, that there is no answer to the question of why there is Being—if Being just is for no reason—then that makes Being absurd: something that cannot be explained is an absurdity to reason. But if, on the other hand, we say that Being is for a reason, then what could that reason be? We would have to say that that reason, whatever it is, is outside of Being. But outside of Being is nothing—which means that we would have to try to explain Being from nothingness, which is also absurd. So either way we go in trying to answer the Question, we are deeply into absurdity.
Logic wants at this point to forbid the Question. Logic wants to say that the absurdity shows that the question is ill-formed and so should be set aside: Logic wants instead to make the existence of reality its axiom, and to proceed from there with discovering the identities of the various existents.[7]
On the other hand, switching back to a Heideggerian perspective, the questions spawned by the Question strike very deep feelings in Da-sein. What about the Nothingness that Being would have come from? Could Being not have been? Could Being return once again to the Nothing? Such questions are compellingly awesome, and yet at the same time they fill Da-sein with a sense of disease and anxiety. So here Da-sein has a conflict: Logic and reason say that the question is contradictory and so should be set aside, but Da-sein’s feelings urge Da-sein to explore the question in a non-verbal, emotional way. So which does Da-sein choose: contradiction and feeling—or logic and reason?
Fortunately, as we have learned from Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, this contradiction and conflict is yet another sign that logic and reason are impotent. As we all know by now, we should expect to find conflict and contradiction at the heart of things—contradiction is the sign that we are on to something important.[8] So mere logic, Heidegger concluded—an “invention of schoolteachers, not of philosophers”[9]—cannot and should not get in the way of probing the ultimate mystery that is Being. We must reject entirely the assumption “that in this enquiry ‘logic’ is the highest court of appeal, that reason is the means and thinking the way to an original comprehension of Nothing and its possible revelation.” Again:
“If this [contradiction] breaks the sovereignty of reason in the field of enquiry into Nothing and Being, then the fate of the rule of ‘logic’ is also decided. The very idea of ‘logic’ disintegrates in the vortex of a more original questioning.”[10]
And again, in case we have missed the point: “Authentic speaking about nothing always remains extraordinary. It cannot be vulgarized. It dissolves if it is placed in the cheap acid of merely logical intelligence.”[11] Deep feeling about Nothing trumps logic any day.
Emotions as revelatory
Having subjected reason and logic to Destruktion and then set them aside as merely one superficial way of thinking—one that the Greeks had established fatefully for all subsequent Western thought[12]—we need another route to Being and Nothing. We can try to explore language without the presuppositions of reason and logic, but even the elements of language, words, have evolved over time and become so twisted and crusted over with layers of meaning that they almost entirely hide Being from us. Their original force and contact with reality has been lost. We can therefore try to strip away from our language the encrusted layers to reveal the ur-words that had original and genuine connective force to Being, but that will require special efforts.
For Heidegger, the special effort that is required is emotional, an exploratory letting oneself go into the revelatory emotions of boredom, fear, guilt, and dread.
Boredom is a good mood to start with. When we are bored—really, really, really bored—we are no longer engaged with the ordinary, trivial, day-to-day things that occupy most of our time. When we are bored, “drifting hither and thither in the abysses of existence like a mute fog,”[13] all beings become a matter of indifference, undifferentiated from one another. Everything merges or dissolves into an un-distinguished unity.
Progress has thus been made: “This boredom reveals what-is in totality.”[14] Real boredom takes one away from one’s normal focus on particular beings and one’s cares for them and diffuses one’s awareness into a sense of Being-as-a-whole’s being revealed to one.
But this revelation also brings with it anxiety and dread. For part of the process of the dissolution of particular beings into a state of undifferentiation is the dissolution of one’s own sense of being a unique, individual being. One has the feeling of beings being dissolved into an undifferentiated Being—but at the same time one has the feeling of one’s self-identity as also slipping into a state of being nothing-in-particular—that is, of becoming nothing. This is distressing.
In dread we are ‘in suspense’ (wir schweben). Or, to put it more precisely, dread holds us in suspense because it makes what-is-in-totality slip away from us. Hence we too, as existents in the midst of what-is, slip away from ourselves along with it. For this reason it is not ‘you’ or ‘I’ that has the uncanny feeling, but ‘one.’[15]
This sense of dread that comes with a sense of the dissolution of all beings along with oneself was for Heidegger a metaphysically potent state, for in effect one gets a foretaste of one’s own death, a sense of one’s being annihilated, a sense of going into nothingness—and thus a sense of getting to the metaphysical center of Being.
One must absolutely not, therefore, give into one’s overpowering sense of distress and run away from dread and back to the safety of one’s petty, day-to-day life. One must embrace one’s dread and surrender to it, for “the dread felt by the courageous”[16] is the emotional state that prepares one for the ultimate revelation. That ultimate revelation is of the truth of Judeo-Christian and Hegelian metaphysics.
In dread we come to feel that Being and Nothing are identical. This is what all philosophy based on the Greek model had missed, and what all philosophies not based on the Greek model had been struggling toward.
“Nothing,” wrote Heidegger, “not merely provides the conceptual opposite of what-is but is also an original part of essence.”[17] Heidegger credited Hegel with having reclaimed this lost insight for the Western tradition: “‘Pure Being and pure Nothing are thus one and the same.’ This proposition of Hegel’s (‘The Science of Logic,’ I, WW III, p. 74) is correct.” Hegel of course got it from trying to resuscitate the Judeo-Christian account of creation, in which God created the world out of nothing. As Heidegger put it in re-affirming that Judeo-Christian claim, “every being, so far as it is a being, is made out of nothing.”[18]
So after abandoning reason and logic, after experiencing real boredom and terrifying dread, we unveil the final mystery of mysteries: Nothing. In the end, all is nothing and nothing is all. With Heidegger, we reach metaphysical nihilism.
Heidegger and postmodernism
Heidegger’s philosophy is the integration of the two main lines of German philosophy, the speculative metaphysical and the irrationalist epistemological. After Kant, the Continental tradition quickly and gleefully abandoned reason, putting wild speculation, clashing wills, and troubled emotion at the forefront. In Heidegger’s synthesis of the Continental tradition, we can see clearly many of the ingredients of postmodernism. Heidegger offered to his followers the following conclusions, all of which are accepted by the mainstream of postmodernism with slight modifications:
1. Conflict and contradiction are the deepest truths of reality;
2. Reason is subjective and impotent to reach truths about reality;
3. Reason’s elements—words and concepts—are obstacles that must be un-crusted, subjected to Destruktion, or otherwise unmasked;
4. Logical contradiction is neither a sign of failure nor of anything particularly significant at all;
5. Feelings, especially morbid feelings of anxiety and dread, are a deeper guide than reason;
6. The entire Western tradition of philosophy—whether Platonic, Aristotelian, Lockean, or Cartesian—based as it is on the law of non-contradiction and the subject/object distinction, is the enemy to be overcome.
This is not yet to introduce Heidegger’s strong social and political collectivism, which is also part of his inheritance from the main lines of German philosophy. Nor is it to make explicit, as Heidegger did, his strong anti-science and anti-technology views.[19] Nor is it yet to discuss his anti-humanism,[20] with his regular calls for us to be obedient to Being, to feel guilty before Being, to pay homage to Being, and even to “sacrifice man for the truth of Being”[21]—which, if we are still allowed to be logical, means sacrificing ourselves to Nothing. (Those elements in Heidegger’s philosophy will arise in Chapter Four, in the context of discussing the political background to postmodernism.)
What the postmodernists will do in the next generation is abandon the remnants of metaphysics in Heidegger’s philosophy, along with his occasional streaks of mysticism. Heidegger was still doing metaphysics, and he spoke of there being a truth out there about the world that we must seek or let find us. The postmodernists, by contrast, are anti-realists, holding that it is meaningless to speak of truths out there or of a language that could capture them. As anti-realists, accordingly, they will reject the formulation of (1) above as a metaphysical assertion, and instead reformulate its assertion of the reign of conflict and contradiction as descriptive merely of the flow of empirical phenomena; and while they will accept (3) above, they will accept it while abandoning Heidegger’s faint hope that ultimate ur-concepts connecting us to reality may be revealed at the end of the unmasking.
The postmodernists will effect a compromise between Heidegger and Nietzsche. Common to Heidegger and Nietzsche epistemologically is a contemptuous rejection of reason. Metaphysically, though, the postmodernists will drop the remnants of Heidegger’s metaphysical quest for Being, and put Nietzschean power struggles at the core of our being. And especially in the cases of Foucault and Derrida, most major postmodernists will abandon Nietzsche’s sense of the exalted potential of man and embrace Heidegger’s anti-humanism.
References
[1] Foucault 1989, 326.
[2] Rorty 1979, 368.
[3] Heidegger 1929/1975, 251.
[4] Heidegger 1953, 1.
[5] Heidegger 1949, 112.
[6] Heidegger 1953, 23, 25.
[7] E.g., Rand 1957, 1015-ff.
[8] See, for example, Heidegger 1929/1975, 245-246.
[9] Heidegger 1953, 121.
[10] Heidegger 1929/1975, 245, 253.
[11] Heidegger 1953, 26.
[12] Heidegger 1929/1975, 261.
[13] Heidegger 1929/1975, 247.
[14] Heidegger 1929/1975, 247.
[15] Heidegger 1929/1975, 249.
[16] Heidegger 1929/1975, 253.
[17] Heidegger 1929/1975, 251.
[18] Heidegger 1929/1975, 254-255.
[19] Heidegger 1949.
[20] Heidegger 1947.
[21] Heidegger 1929/1975, 263.
Bibliography [pdf] [html]
[The chapter from which this section of Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism (Scholargy Publishing, 2004) is excerpted can be downloaded as a PDF at the Explaining Postmodernism page. The full book is also available at Amazon.com.]
Posted 3 months, 1 week ago at 1:53 am. 2 comments
[This is Section 4 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]
4. Five weak explanations for National Socialism
a) A common explanation is that the Germans lost World War I. They were bitter over the loss and the harsh punitive measures the victors imposed in the Versailles Treaty. There is a grain of truth here, but this is a very weak explanation. One reason why it is weak is that many countries lose bitter wars, but they do not respond by electing Adolf Hitlers to power. Another reason is that Germany’s losing the war does not explain Italy. In the 1920s Italy turned to Benito Mussolini and his fascist version of National Socialism. But Italy was on the winning side of World War I. So if one of the winners of World War I became fascist, and one of the losers also became fascist, then whether one lost or won the war is not the significant factor here.
b) Another explanation holds that Germany’s economic troubles of the 1920s were the cause of National Socialism. Here again there is a grain of truth, but again this is a weak explanation. Many countries suffer economic malaise, but they do not turn to National Socialism for the solution. There is also the phenomenon of Nazi and neo-Nazi movements throughout the twentieth century in relatively prosperous countries. Very few countries suffering economic difficulties go Nazi, and there are plenty of Nazi-sympathizers in prosperous nations.
c) Another weak explanation suggests that there is something innately wrong with Germans, that history shows that they are inherently militaristic, bloodthirsty, and genocidal—and the Nazis merely tapped into and exaggerated innate German tendencies. This kind of explanation is an insult of course to the many Germans who were appalled by National Socialism, who opposed it and fought it vigorously. And it does not explain how National Socialism has appealed to people of many races and ethnicities. In 2005, Mein Kampf was a bestseller in the country of Turkey.[2] Do we want to suggest that the Turks are inherently bloodthirsty and genocidal? I do not think so.
d) Another weak explanation holds that Nazism is explained by the personal neuroses and psychoses of the Nazi leadership. The argument here is that Hitler was bitterly disappointed by being rejected for art school—or that he was a repressed homosexual—or that his right-hand man, Josef Goebbels was compensating for his below-average height and having a club foot. Again, this is a poor explanation. How many art-school rejects become Nazis? How many repressed homosexuals or handicapped men become Nazis? This explanation also ignores the large number of powerful Nazis who were neither homosexual nor short nor particularly interested in art.
e) Any of the above explanations can works together with a suggestion that the Nazis were a product of modern communications technologies—that as masters of rhetoric and propaganda the Nazis succeeded in fooling millions of Germans about their agenda and manipulated their way into power.
I have some sympathy for this way of thinking, for it is the kind of explanation that comes naturally to those of us raised in liberal democracies. When I first started learning about the Nazis, I thought they must have been insane. It is hard to imagine that such horror could be anything but the products of deranged minds manipulating the masses. But here I want to suggest two reasons why I think it is not a good idea to dismiss the Nazis merely as manipulators.
The first is that the Nazis achieved power though democratic and constitutional methods. When the party was formed in 1920, it was a small, fringe party. But it spoke to the beliefs and aspirations of millions of Germans. And in the 1920s, the Germans were, arguably, the most educated nation in the world with the highest levels of literacy, numbers of years of schooling, newspaper readership, political awareness, and so on. It was in an educated nation that the Nazis achieved increasing success in elections through the 1920s, spreading their message far and wide, until they made their major breakthroughs in the early 1930s. Millions of voters in a democracy may be wrong, but it is unlikely that they were all deluded. A better explanation is that they knew what they were voting for and thought it the best course of action. And that is what I will be arguing.
But millions of people do not decide spontaneously to vote for this party or that. A mass political movement requires that much cultural groundwork be done over the course of many years. And this is where intellectuals do their work. A culture’s intellectuals develop and articulate a culture’s ideals, its goals, its aspirations. In books, speeches, sermons, and radio broadcasts, intellectuals are a culture’s opinion-shapers. It is intellectuals who write the opinion pieces in the mass newspapers, who are the professors at the universities, the universities where teachers and preachers are trained, where politicians and lawyers and scientists and physicians get their education.
This leads us to the other reason why it is a weak explanation to say the Nazis were simply deranged and lucked or manipulated their way into political power. Consider the following list of intellectuals who supported the Nazis long before they came to power. These intellectuals represent a “Who’s Who” list of powerful minds and cultural leaders:
Philipp Lenard won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1905.
Gerhart Hauptmann won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1912. Hauptmann once met Hitler and described their brief handshake as “the greatest moment of my life.”
Johannes Stark won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1919.
That is three Nobel Prize winners.
Then there is Dr. Oswald Spengler, author of the historical bestseller The Decline of the West (1918). Spengler’s books sold in the millions, and he was perhaps the most famous intellectual in Germany in the 1920s.
Then there is Moeller van den Bruck, another famous public intellectual of the 1920s. His book The Third Reich (1923) provided a theoretical rationale for National Socialism and was, like Spengler’s books, a consistent best-seller throughout the 1920s.
Then there is Dr. Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), probably the sharpest legal and political mind of his generation. Schmitt’s books are still widely read and discussed by political theoreticians of all stripes and are recognized as twentieth century classics.
And to round out this initial list, there is philosopher Martin Heidegger. Already in the 1920s Heidegger was being hailed as the brightest philosopher of his generation, which is especially significant in a philosophical nation such as Germany. That assessment has held over the course of the twentieth century. Ask professional philosophers of today to name the five most significant philosophers of the twentieth century and, whether they love him or loathe him, most will include Heidegger on the list.
These seven men are among the most intelligent and powerful minds in Germany in the decade before the Nazis came to power. They are leading figures in German intellectual culture, spanning the arts, science, history, law, politics, and philosophy.[3] All of them, to one degree or another, supported National Socialism. Was Hitler smart enough to fool all of these highly intelligent men? Or is it more likely that they knew what they believed and supported National Socialism because they thought it was true?[4]
References
[2] “Mein Kampf a Bestseller in Turkey,” April 20, 2005. Windsofchange.net. Viewed August 24, 2009.
[3] Weinreich 1999 (pp. 13-16) gives a wide-ranging list of professors and intellectuals who supported Hitler prior to 1933. See also Rohkrämer 2005 for a clear discussion of the role of Heidegger and the many other philosophers who gave enthusiastic support to the Nazis. Earl Shorris (2007) describes Germany of the time as “a society richer in the knowledge of the humanities than perhaps any other in modern times. Among those people who rose to the top of the Nazi government were students of humanities, former scholars. Joseph Goebbels had studied history and literature at the University of Heidelberg. Reinhard (Hangman) Heydrich was the child of a pianist and an opera singer who founded a conservatory. Ernst Kaltenbrunner studied law at the University of Prague. More than a third of the members of the Vienna Philharmonic belonged to the Nazi Party. Albert Speer, who ran the business side of the Nazi war machine, was an architect.” Gottlob Frege (1848-1925), the great logician and philosopher of mathematics, can be added to this list. Frege was an anti-Semite and later in life named Adolf Hitler as one of his heroes; see Reuben Hersh, What Is Mathematics, Really? (Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 241.
[4] Albert Speer described “the event that led me to [Hitler],” which was a speech Hitler gave to the College of Engineering in Berlin. Speer expected the talk to be “a bombastic harangue” but it turned out to be a “reasoned lecture” (quoted in Orlow 1969, p. 199).
[Bibliography]
[This post can also be downloaded as a PDF at the Nietzsche and the Nazis page.]
Posted 3 months, 2 weeks ago at 12:05 pm. 1 comment
At the Explaining Postmodernism page, Chapter Three of my book is now available online. This chapter covers Martin Heidegger’s integration of the two main lines of Continental philosophy, the origins and eventual collapse of Logical Positivism, and the resulting mid-20th-century epistemological void that enabled postmodernism.
Here are the chapter’s sections and page numbers:
Chapter Three: The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason [pdf]
Heidegger’s synthesis of the Continental tradition 58
Setting aside reason and logic 61
Emotions as revelatory 62
Heidegger and postmodernism 65
Positivism and Analytic philosophy: from Europe to America 67
From Positivism to Analysis 70
Recasting philosophy’s function 72
Perception, concepts, and logic 74
From the collapse of Logical Positivism to Kuhn and Rorty 78
Summary: A vacuum for postmodernism to fill 79
First thesis: Postmodernism as the end result of Kantian
epistemology 80
Posted 5 months, 2 weeks ago at 12:13 pm. Add a comment
