Romano-Faye treatment of Heidegger

Romano and Faye say Heidegger’s politics and philosophy are inextricably bound up, and since they don’t elaborate, perhaps we shall never learn what that binding consists of, but moving slightly beyond – to a parallel situation I want to relate to Heidegger’s, i.e., the Monica Lewinski episode in the Clinton administration -- If the outside pressures, the people who “voted for impeachment,” etc played no role in Clinton’s ability to run the country, then yes, Clinton’s ability to run the country would not have been compromised, but Clinton was not permitted that freedom, people wanted to hold him accountable under their idea of how a president ought to behave. That sort of thing is true in all Liberal Democracies. We see over the years that many leaders have been forced to resign over an improper (in the eyes of the critics) dalliance with the opposite (or the same) sex.

Someone might argue that it ought not to be that way, but it is. Some of the people who voted for or against a leader who is found to be engaged in something they consider immoral wish to see that leader removed from office. Whether or not he is removed depends more on the forces brought to bear than inflexible principles – in fact I don’t believe there are such principles.

Now if we apply that same sort of thinking to Heidegger, we find that we are more ready to forgive a Communist who has repented of his Communism than a Fascist who has repented of his Fascism. As far as I can tell, the main consideration that bears upon our rating Communism above Fascism is that Communism (as Marx conceived it) embodied an ideal that embraced all humanity; whereas Fascism exalted some particular ethnicity above others. The fact that Communism didn’t work shoved it in the direction of National Socialism which did, or may work, at least the modern day Russians seem to be giving it a try.

In moving back to Heidegger, Hugo Ott portrays Heidegger as being idealistic (an oxymoronic feeling as it turned out, but Heidegger didn’t know that at the time) about German Fascism. Heidegger’s “crimes” are discussed by Ott. He mistreated some colleagues and belonged to the Nazi party, but the colleagues would not have been acceptable to the Nazis anyway and if Heidegger didn’t mistreat them someone else would. Heidegger could rationalize that sort of behavior for a while. Then either Heidegger backed away from the Nazi party or the Nazi party backed away from Heidegger. Ott thought the latter. So we can build a case that portrays Heidegger as no worse than many Germans who went along with the Nazi party just far enough to get along.

But if we look back at the Clinton experience and apply it to Heidegger, we see that Heidegger’s critics are insisting on “removing him from office.” His critics are relentless and want to destroy his reputation – no resting in peace for this dead Nazi. We might object to the treatment Carlin Romano and Emmanuel Faye have subjected Heidegger to, but their articles carry weight. They may be rants, mere assertions, and lacking in logical content, but these critics are voting to impeach Heidegger, and their votes carry some weight.

I hope it won’t be too much weight. I hate articles like the ones these. But not everyone hates them. They certainly don’t hate each other. Notice what Rosenbaum had to say about Romano’s article. He described it “. . . a delightfully acerbic review essay by Carlin Romano . . . which discusses new revelations about Heidegger’s shameless adoption of Nazism.” Some of us think Romano and Rosenbaum’s articles shameless.

Heidegger, Fascism and Communism

A bit more on Carlin Romano’s article “Heil Heidegger”:

In regard to whether we should place totalitarian Fascism in close proximity to totalitarian Communism, I have been following events in Russia somewhat closely, and especially their toying with a new Nationalism. They are not a dictatorship, but Putin is within spitting distance of being a dictator. He is restrained by world opinion and the need to trade and get along with other nations. But listen to them talk and they hate Poland as much as they ever did and think the Germans responsible for Katyn and the near-abroad nations are opting out of the Russian Federation because of the “aggression” of the EU and the US.

At the root of our wanting to rate Communism higher than Fascism is understanding that Marx believed in an ideal. He modified Hegel a bit and saw history tending inexorably toward a Utopia, and Lenin was his prophet. Fascism on the other hand was ethnic nationalism, sort of what Russia is tending toward today. There is no universalism in that sort of Fascism. The best ethnicity wins and every other becomes second class – if not slaves.

However, in our willingness to exalt Communism above Fascism, we should add somewhere the observation that this Communist Experiment failed. It didn’t work. As wonderful and heartwarming as was the Marxist ideal, it didn’t work. Yes, it was more successful than Fascism, but now what is it, and what is following in its wake? Putin calls his brand of Nationalism, “Sovereign Democracy,” which seems to be whatever he wants it to be.

But like so many in Europe after WWII, the Russians today hanker after a large centralized government that will take care of them. If Putin turns out to be something like Stalin, then all the better. The Russians don’t trust Liberal Democracy any more than the Chinese do. They are willing to make a few adjustments in order to benefit from the World Economy, but they feel comfortable with Socialism and not Liberal Democracy.

I know it is common to say “left” and “right” when we refer to Fascism and Communism, and put them at opposite poles, but I don’t see it. National Socialism and Soviet Socialism need to be closer together and at the opposite end of any spectrum from Liberal Democracy. They are both forms of socialism. At their Socialist end you have big totalitarian government making decisions for the people. Granted one form is based on ethnicity and the other on faith in a Utopia, but they both believe in managing the people. Liberal Democracy on the other hand (and at the other end) has no such over-arching beliefs or plans. Things are haphazard and chaotic, but not oppressive – at least not oppressive by government. People have the freedom to do most of what they want – as long as it doesn’t hurt others.

Rosenbaum & Wasserstein attack Arendt via Walter Frank

http://www.slate.com/id/2234010/pagenum/all

The above article was written by Ron Rosenbaum for Slate. It is entitled, “The Evil of Banality, Troubling new revelations about Arendt and Heidegger.”

Rosenbaum’s chief source is an article by Bernard Wasserstein from the Times Literary Supplement, which is not available on line – something Rosenbaum notes. While I don’t have access to that article, I do have Arendt’s The Origin of Totalitarianism so it is possible for me to check some of the things Rosenbaum says Wasserstein says:

“And then "in a new preface [to The Origins of Totalitarianism] written in 1967, Arendt commends the work of the leading Nazi historian Walter Frank … whose 'contributions,' " Wasserstein quotes Arendt, " 'can still be consulted with profit.' "

“Wasserstein wonders about her motives here [Rosenbaum writes]: ‘Was she bending over backwards not to be totally dismissive of ideological opponents who despised her on categorical (i.e. racial) grounds?’ he asks.

"’But there must have been more to it than that,’ he answers, ‘because modern Jewish history was the only subject where she repeatedly relied on Nazi historians as external authorities, that is, other than as evidence of what the Nazis themselves thought or did. Moreover she internalized much of what the Nazi historians had to say about Jews, from the 'parasitism' of Jewish high finance to the 'internationalism' of [Walther] Rathenau [the Weimar German minister assassinated by anti-Semites.]’

“’Of course, there have always been Jewish critiques of Jews. But Arendt's ‘aversion clearly ran much deeper’ than has been supposed, Wasserstein asserts. He concludes his piece by wondering, ‘Why?’

Let’s read what Arendt actually wrote. In her preface on page xiv she does indeed say what Wasserstein says she says, but he takes her out of context and implies something she never meant. Here is the context:

In her preface she wrote, “Even the dubious products of Jewish apologetics, which never convinced anybody but the convinced, were towering examples of erudition and scholarship compared with what the enemies of the Jews had to offer in matters of historical research.” She footnotes this sentence and in the footnote writes, “the only exception is the anti-Semitic historian Walter Frank, the head of the Nazi Reichsinstitut fur Geschichte des Neuen Deutschlands and the editor of nine volumes of Forschungen zur Judenfrage, 1937-1944. Especially Frank’s own contributions can still be consulted with profit.”

Why can the contributions of this “anti-Semitic historian be “consulted with profit”? In the first of four references, Arendt writes (on page 21) “Frank, in spite of his official position under the Nazis, remained somewhat careful about his sources and methods. In this article he quotes from the obituaries on Rathenau in the Israelitisches Familienblatt (Hambug, July 6, 1922), Die Zeit, (June, 1922) and Berliner Tageblatt (May 31, 1922).”

Does this sound as though Arendt has allowed herself to be corrupted by Nazi ideology? Not to me.

The next reference to Walter Frank is on page 100. In her text she writes “Contemporary journalists and later historians have made valiant efforts to explain the conflict between military and civil powers during the Dreyfus Affair in terms of an antagonism between ‘businessmen and soldiers.’ Then in a footnote to this passage she writes., “It is under this caption that Maximilian Harden (a German Jew) described the Dreyfus case in Die Zukunft (1898). Walter Frank, the anti-Semitic historian, employs the same slogan in the heading of his chapter on Dreyfus while Bernanos (op. Cit., p. 413) remarks in the same vein that ‘rightly or wrongly, democracy sees in the military its most dangerous rival.’”

On page 339, Arendt writes “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” Then in a footnote she discusses several examples. This is the part of her footnote pertaining to Walter Frank: “The last to fall into disgrace was the historian Walter Frank, who had been a convinced anti-Semite and a member of the Nazi party before it came to power, and who, in 1933 . . . In the Early forties, Frank had to cede his position and influence to the notorious Alfred Rosenberg, whose Der Mythos des 20, Jahrhunderts certainly shows no aspiration whatsoever to ‘scholarship.’ Frank clearly was mistrusted for no other reason than that he was not a charlatan.”

Thus far Arendt has indicated confidence in Frank for his accurate quotations and references. Too bad Rosenbaum and Wasserstein didn’t share Frank’s talent.

In the last of the Frank references in Arendt’s book, on page 402, we read, “A classical instance of this planned shapelessness occurred in the organization of scientific anti-Semitism. In 1933, an institute for study of the Jewish question . . . was founded in Munich which, since the Jewish question presumably had determined the whole of German history, quickly enlarged into a research institute for modern German history. Headed by the well-known historian Walter Frank, it transformed the traditional universities into seats of ostensible learning or facades.”

This last reference is a mere statement of fact about Frank’s career. Frank was appointed to a certain post, and from the previous reference we learned that his Nazi superiors sometime later decided he wasn’t the right man for the job and replaced him Rosenberg.

My conclusion from what I read is that Rosenbaum and Wasserstein slandered Arendt in the way they describe Arendt as commending the “work of the leading Nazi historian Walter Frank.”

Revisiting the Banality of Evil

Some time ago I read Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil and described my impression: http://www.lawrencehelm.com/2008/08/banality-of-evil.html and http://www.lawrencehelm.com/2008/08/more-on-what-arendt-meant.html .

Someone just sent me an article by Ron Rosenbaum that takes a different view: http://www.slate.com/id/2234010/pagenum/all . Rosenbaum’s article is entitled, “The Evil of Banality, Troubling new revelations about Arendt and Heidegger.

I don’t think Rosenbaum understood Arendt’s book. I don’t know who he is, and no doubt he has the intelligence to understand Arendt, but he didn’t read the book with sympathy, that is he didn’t “suspend disbelief” while reading it.

I doubt that Rosenbaum read Amos Elon’s introduction to the 2006 Penguin edition of Arendt’s Eichman in Jerusalem. In it Elon writes (to quote from my first post on this subject) that “ Arendt was bitterly criticized for this book. For one thing she exposed the Judenrate, the Jews in Germany who facilitated the collection of Jews and their transportation to such sites as Auschwitz. She was also critical of Ben-Gurion for creating a “show trial.” But the key point for which she was criticized was implied in her subtitle, namely that this evil epitomized by Eichmann was banal rather than demonic. Her opinion didn’t fit the preconceptions and conclusions held and formed by many prominent Jews (especially in America) and Israelis of her day.”

I thought Arendt’s description far worse than the description Rosenbaum would prefer: Fascism as demonic. For if it is Demonic then it its “out there” and while it may indeed overwhelm us, it is not us. But Arendt argues that it is us, or that it could be. We are all capable of this sort of evil, of going along with a horrendous brutal ideology.

Well, perhaps not all. Some would prefer to die instead of going along, but the numbers would be very small. Interestingly, the numbers were probably small in Stalin’s Russia as well. I’m reminded of an operation to remove a cancer from the leg of my dog, Trooper. They had to cut enough healthy flesh around the cancer to make sure the cancer wouldn’t return. The cancer, in other words, might have infected the healthy flesh in ways the vet couldn’t see, so she cut into healthy flesh. Stalin did that too. He didn’t just cut away known enemies. He killed, or sent off to Gulags millions who might in anyway have been “infected” by any sort of resistance against what Stalin wanted. Those who remained in Russia, were submissive to Stalin. We see the effects in Russia today. The typical modern Russian reveres Stalin. Why should he not, anyone who might have taught him differently was killed or sent to a Gulag.

In regard to the term which so offended Rosenbaum, The reaction to her book (to quote from the second of my posts referenced above) did cause her to want to explore the concept more fully. Eichmann to her was obviously banal, but not so to her interlocutors who preferred seeing him as the epitome of demonic evil. . . in her introduction to Thinking, she wrote,

“The immediate impulse [for writing this book] came from my attending the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. In my report of it I spoke of ‘the banality of evil.’ Behind that phrase, I held no thesis in doctrine, although I was dimly aware of the fact that it went counter to our [I take her to mean “Western” rather than Jewish by ‘our’] tradition of thought – literary, theological, or philosophic – about the phenomenon of evil. Evil, we have learned, is something demonic; its incarnation is Satan, a ‘lightning fall from heaven’ (Luke 10:18), or Lucifer, the fallen angel (‘The devil is an angel too’ – Unamuno) whose sin is pride (‘proud as Lucifer’), namely, that superbia of which only the best are capable: they don’t want to serve God but to be like Him. Evil men, we are told, act out of envy; this may be resentment at not having turned out well through no fault of their own (Richard III) or the envy of Cain, who slew Abel because ‘the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard.’ Or they may be prompted by weakness (Macbeth). Or, on the contrary, by the powerful hatred wickedness feels for sheer goodness (Iago’s ‘I hate the Moor: my cause is hearted’; Claggart’s hatred for Billy Budd’s ‘barbarian’ innocence, a hatred considered by Melville a ‘depravity according to nature’), or by covetousness, ‘the root of all evil’ (Radix omnium malorum cupiditas). However, what I was confronted with was utterly different and still undeniably factual. I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives, and the only notable characteristic one could detect in his past behavior as well as in his behavior during the trial and throughout the pre-trial police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidly but thoughtlessness.”

The writing style of Ron Rosenbaum strikes me as being very like that of Carlin Romano; so one can understand why Rosenbaum admired him. Neither has advanced or, indeed, seems capable of advancing a coherent argument to support their hostile rants.

Heidegger and Fascism

http://chronicle.com/article/Heil-Heidegger-/48806

This article, entitled “Heil Heidegger!” and written by Carlin Romano, appeared in the October 18, 2009 issue of The Chronicle of Higher education. It is largely a review of Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy by Emmanuel Faye.

I marvel that anyone can assert that Heidegger's philosophy supports Fascism, or that it grew out of Fascism, or that his philosophy grew out of his belief in Fascism. I don’t utterly rule it out, but my impression is that Heidegger thought Fascism as it progressed in Germany was intellectually childish and that he could shape it into something worthwhile, but he was quickly disabused of that idea. The Nazi leaders would use Heidegger, if he would permit himself to be used, but they would not listen to him. I would like to learn Faye's arguments for believing there was a deeper relationship, but if Romano's response is any indication, Faye didn't develop such an argument, Faye was more interested in character assassination.

If someone were to argue that Thomas Carlyle's philosophy gave rise to Fascism, I could immediately see the relationship. That is, I could relate Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero Worship to Fascism. There was no relationship as far as I know, but I could accept that Carlyle’s work is consistent with Fascism.

But in what way is any of Heidegger’s work consistent with Fascism? Yes, he himself was for a time consistent with Fascism, but what he did is not necessarily identical with what he wrote. Or if it is, then someone needs to prove it. I would like to see someone relate Heidegger’s reflective and existential philosophy to the triumphalism of Fascism. I can’t see it.

I have been interested in Gadamer who studied under Heidegger and who had great respect for his teaching. I, frankly, have never thought a study of Heidegger worth the candle, but I enjoy studying Gadamer and Gadamer enjoyed Heidegger – and I credit that above Romano’s (and presumably Faye’s) hatchet job.

Also, if we cast Heidegger into outer darkness because of a temporary attraction to Fascism; what must we do to all the philosophers who were attracted to the equivalent evil, Communism? And if someone wants to argue that Communism was less of an evil than Fascism, I would be interested in that argument as well.

Mann, Flaubert, Kafka -- life vs. art

In Thomas Mann’s “Homage” to Franz Kafka (written in 1940 and appearing on pages xxxi through xxxix) of the 1995 Schocken edition of Franz Kafka’s The Castle, Mann (on page xxxiii - xxxv) writes,

“. . . Brod relates that Kafka had always been deeply impressed by an anecdote from Gustave Flaubert’s later years. The famous aesthete, who in an ascetic paroxysm sacrificed all life to his nihilistic idol, ‘Litterature,’ once paid a visit with his niece, Mme Commanville, to a family of her acquaintance, a sturdy and happy wedded pair surrounded by a flock of charming children. On the way home the author of the Tentations de Saint Antoine was very thoughtful. Walking with Mme Commanville along the Seine, he kept coming back to the natural, healthy, jolly, upright life he had just had a glimpse of. ‘Ils sont danse le vrai!’ he kept repeating. This phrase, this complete abandonment of his whole position, from the life for the sdake of art – this phrase had been Kafka’s favorite quotation.

“D’etre dans le vrai – to live in the true and the light – meant to Kafka to be near to God, to live in God, to live aright and after God’s will – and he felt very remote from this security in God and the will of God. That ‘literary work was my one desire, my single calling’ – that he knew very soon, and that might pass, as being itself probably the will of God. ‘But,’ he writes in 1914, a man of thirty-one, ‘the wish to portray my own inner life has shoved everything else into the background; everything else is stunted, and continues to be stunted.’ ‘Often,’ he adds at another time, ‘I am seized by a melancholy though quite tranquil amazement at my own lack of feeling . . . that simply by consequence of my fixation upon letters I am everywhere else uninterested and in consequence heartless.’ This Calm and melancholy perception is actually, a source of much disquiet, and the disquiet is religious in its nature. This being dehumanized, being ‘stunted’ by the passion for art, is certainly remote from God; it is the opposite of ‘living in the true and the right.’”

[I’ve left out Mann’s discussion of what Flaubert meant by “art”]

“’For a few days,’ Kafka says, ‘I have been writing. May it go on! My life has some justification. Once more I am able to converse with myself, and not gaze into utter vacancy. Only in this way can I hope to find improvement.’ He might almost have said ‘salvation’ instead of improvement. It would have made still clearer the religious nature of the tranquility he felt when he worked. Art is the functioning of faculties bestowed by God, as work faithfully done – that is an interpretation not only in an intellectual but in a moral sense: as it heightens the actual into the true, it lends meaning and justification to life, not only subjectively but also humanly; thus the work becomes humanly conservative, as a means of living ‘in the right’ – or at least of coming closer to it – and art thus becomes adaptable to life.”

COMMENT:

Referring again to Tony Hill (of the BBC’s TV series “Wire in the Blood”), in one episode (perhaps “Hole in the Heart”) he is on the verge of committing suicide because he views his recent (and perhaps all of his) psychological efforts as failures. He is like Flaubert in this. He has devoted his life to his psychological art. He doesn’t believe in God and his psychological art is all that gives vindication to his life; so if his work can be invalidate then his life is invalidated as well. Tony Hill is talked out of suicide not by a challenge to his philosophy, but by showing that he was right after all, and that those who had attacked his views were wrong.

We have great numbers of examples of actors and actresses who have devoted their lives to their acting art and then killed themselves when they became disillusioned. Perhaps the disillusionment hinged on acting ability, but it may very well have had more to do with the poor quality of films emanating from Hollywood. Fans, for whom poor quality is fit fare, may adore an actor, but if he gains enough sophistication to understand that what he is participating in is very poor art, and perhaps not art at all, then the adulation of fans is worthless to him – if he needs vindication from his art.

Why did Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton commit suicide? If we assume that Crane did indeed jump from the ship of his own volition, then it may well have been due to his magnum opus, The Bridge being, in his own estimation, a failure. Yes, Hemingway was old and sick, but he had also lost his ability to write. John Berryman was fascinated by his father’s suicide, but there is indication that he never valued his work very much. It was enough if it got him close to willing young ladies. Sylvia Plath had been betrayed by Ted Hughes, but her best work was poured out as anger and hopelessness right before she killed herself. Her earlier work was what she based her worth on (perhaps) and it wasn’t enough. Anne Sexton learned to write poetry in a mental institution. How valuable can that be as a measure of worth?

In short, if your art is the necessary validation to your ongoing existence, then it better be damned good.

Method in Kafka and Tony Hill

I picked up The Castle this morning and read the introduction by Irving Howe to see if perchance it would inspire me to reread this depressing novel, something I swore (after reading it the first time years ago) never to do. The nature of Kafka’s writing is such that there has never been agreement or even consensus about what he means. Howe offers his opinion. Also in the volume I have, is the opinion of Thomas Mann.

And can there be agreement about the meaning of words like “method” when applied to individuals like Gadamer, Wittgenstein, and Cesar Milan?

I’d like to add Tony Hill to this list. He is the psychologist-police advisor in the BBC series “Wire in the Blood.” I have watched the episodes one after the other (on Netflix) and am up to Season 5. What he does would defy an orderly person’s prejudice about the meaning of “method,” but he has one none the less. And it is a pragmatic “method” comparable (at least initially) to Cesar Milan’s. He is mostly quiet when he begins, looking at the murder scene, looking at the body, listening to the witnesses, listening to other people’s opinions, and if he speaks, he is like Cesar, asking for clarification.

After that, Tony Hill engages in antics that baffle and alarm his coworkers. He talks to himself, talks as though he were the killer he is trying to find, repeating key words, acting out the crime in his mind, while he revisits witnesses, acquaintances of the victim, the daily life of the victim over and over until something fits – or doesn’t fit. He is not constrained by an external system like the ones Gadamer rails (if that word can be applied to Gadamer’s mild approach) against, but he has preconceptions and these form an internal system, a Tony-Hill-Modus-Operandi.

To insist that Tony Hill has a “method” might seem counter-intuitive, and I only do it to make the point that he doesn’t expose himself to undifferentiated chaos. He has an approach that over time (the time of his investigation) he makes order out of the pieces of the chaos that he selects. His coworkers see only the chaos, but he pulls out this piece and that one and as he does so, he slowly produces order. At the end of each episode order is achieved.

Order is never achieved in The Castle, and yet when one steps back from this novel, and his others and his short stories as well, one see that he wrote out of something, out of some system of preconceived ideas or dreams. If you have a vivid dream-life, for example, as Kafka did, and resolved to develop these dreams in short stories, the end result would seem and perhaps be chaotic, and yet couldn’t we in the psychological sense view what Kafka does as his “method”?