This Just In: Heidegger Was a Nazi!
Who knew? Both Carlin Romano & Ron Rosenbaum have contributed heavy-breathing paeans to a very shabby new book by Emmanuel Faye with the understated title Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy. Faye has nothing new to say, but that isn’t really what Romano & Rosenbaum are interested in. They’re simply pleased to have an excuse to contribute more bad writing to the anti-Heidegger cause. Here’s Romano:
To be sure, every philosophy reference book credits Heidegger with one or another headscratcher achievement. One lauds him for his “revival of ontology.” (Would we not think about things that exist without this ponderous, existentialist Teuton?) Another cites his helpful boost to phenomenology by directing our focus to that well-known entity, Dasein, or “Human Being.” (For a reified phenomenon, “Human Being,” like the Yeti, has managed to elude all on-camera confirmation.) A third praises his opposition to nihilism, an odd compliment for a conservative, nationalist thinker whose antihumanistic apotheosis of ruler over ruled helped grease the path of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.
Who cares that reducing ontology to “think[ing] about things that exist” constitutes the sort of question-begging Heidegger’s distinction between the ontological & the ontic is meant to avoid?
Rosenbaum’s prose, meanwhile, is punctuated by his usual careful formulations of critical acuity: “Duh!” “Come on, people!” “Oooh, so daring!” Some college newspaper should snatch this guy up fast.
Heidegger was a nasty character, & no one is about to defend his Nazism or deny that it raises troubling questions for his philosophy. But what are Romano’s & Rosenbaum’s juvenile rantings meant to accomplish? Are we supposed to be impressed by their bold anti-Nazi stance? No, we’re supposed to applaud them for having the courage to point out that the pretentious emperor of the Black Forest has no ontic covering. Hey, the guy wrote about abstruse stuff! He often sounded pretty silly: “Language itself is—language, and nothing else besides.” So why bother with the hard work of actually trying to figure out if there’s any there there? Luckily for us, dude was a Nazi to boot.
On the other hand, there’s “Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger” by James K. Lyon. Highly recommend it if you’re interested in a nuanced treatment of H’s Nazism and its complicated relation to his philosophy, which is further complicated by the influence he had on Celan’s thought and poetry.
I’ll do something new and make my latest DE post in a comments box. Here you go:
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It’s Sure Dang Strange
It’s sure dang strange that two out of the three or four 20th century philosophers who’ve offered the most sustained discussion of poetry and its ways are
1) a Nazi,
and
2) a Maoist.
I think it means that poetry is inherently totalitarian. Which I’ve been saying for years.
>I think it means that poetry is inherently totalitarian.
Certain attitudes and behaviors of the U.S. post-avant certainly are!
Hobbyhorses are Nazis!
So said the Social Democrats during the Weimar…
So … Romano fails to appreciate “Heidegger’s distinction between the ontological & the ontic,” and Rosenbaum’s style is flippant. Can there be a lamer attempt to dismiss, by proxy, Emmanuel Faye’s book? While I agree with Damon Linker that Romano’s article is “an intellectual disgrace,” it seems to me that we owe both Faye the same due diligence that we owe Heidegger. We should engage with them—instead of dickering over third and fourth hand accounts.
This was about Romano & Rosenbaum. Faye’s book isn’t worth my time. Others can take it up if they wish.