Aye! I imagine we agree.

And we all can make arguments for why any of these figures here shouldn't be as influential. — Manuel

I am curious about you putting it that way. Isn't the cat already out of the bag?

Different thinkers made what they will of the text. Grouping them or not grouping them on that basis has played a part in many observations. But what was said is just what was said, available to those interested to read it.

As Heidegger made his own Nietzsche, others have made their own Heidegger. That element can be investigated without burning any books.

Dumb question but is Heidegger an important figure in philosophy?

And this is coming from someone who thinks less of his work than I used to. But, I cannot deny it has value, just like people here get massive amounts of value from Wittgenstein or Nietzsche or Husserl, Ayer, etc. And we all can make arguments for why any of these figures here shouldn't be as influential. — Manuel

:up:

My feeling as well.

Which I can understand to an extent. Even though the same must be true of, say, Hegel, I currently cannot assign much value to him, but he must have something, given he influenced many.



I don't quite follow. Yes, of course, people use Heidegger in ways they find useful.

Guessing a bit, the point in many of these threads, so far as I can see, is that Heidegger is not only, say, unintelligible or hard to understand, but also that because he was a Nazi, he is not worth reading.

If it's not something like that, then why so much insistence on him being a Nazi? If the point is an ethical one, yeah, he was not a good person.

But if it goes on to suggest that Being and Time, and other lectures are just disguised Nazism, then that too is "appropriating him" for particular ends.

This is, incidentally, not denying that some of his work show Nazi sympathy, like Introduction to Metaphysics and others.

Each work should be valued for its merits and flaws.

it is, however, like the Nazi bible — 180 Proof

Says who? I’ve read it several times, and I see no relation to the “nazi Bible,” even if Heidegger liked Hitler’s writings.

Guessing a bit, the point in many of these threads, so far as I can see, is that Heidegger is not only, say, unintelligible or hard to understand, but also that because he was a Nazi, he is not worth reading.

If it's not something like that, then why so much insistence on him being a Nazi? — Manuel

I think it’s exactly that. Especially among people who already thought he was a charlatan or too obscure. Now they can dismiss it all easily. One of my heroes, Chomsky, does exactly this —incidentally.

Understandable, but not very persuasive. Being and Time is still amazing, in my view. I’m open to being shown that it isn’t— but no one has done that yet.

:ok:

Yeah, as you know, Chomsky is by far my biggest influence, and even if he actually read Being and Time (he didn't, he read Intro to Metaphysics), I don't think that type of thinking would be persuasive to him.

Doesn't matter. We complement what we may find wanting, or may want to develop independently of those we most respect.

I look at it as a unity of authorship. If an author says x,y, and z are connected, then they are asking me, the reader, to connect them. The 'disguising' part (in so far as Heidegger tried to minimize that part of his life) is not something that is being done to him. It is not an ethical judgement to look at those different parts separately when he did place them together.

Making it all about choosing between apology or denial is not an earnest attempt to understand what is being said. If the crappy part is connected to the worthwhile part, then that is something to be wrestled with.

I entirely agree.

What bothers me, is that these threads don't even try to engage in any positive or interesting parts Heidegger may have said. In fact, just by looking at the title of these topics, you already know who dislikes him already.

I don't have any problems acknowledging his Nazism nor noting his antisemitic stances. He was not an ethical person, by and large- maybe a bit of leeway with technology, but also ugly remarks in that aspect too.

I don't think BT has those problems, nor his lectures about Kant. And even his most obscure and famous book after BT, his Contributions to Philosophy, show signs of Nazism that I can see. Other works surely do, as does his personal correspondence and observed behavior.

I don't look at it that way. It is not about finding "naziism" in everything he wrote or not.

I agree with many things he points to in the Lecture I linked to. But I object to other statements because I think they are incorrect, not because of his character.

Dumb question but is Heidegger an important figure in philosophy? — Tom Storm

As my previous behavior might have suggested, I am more interested in ancient texts than recent ones. I cannot explain why exactly but that is the case. The heart wants what the heart wants.

So, Heidegger was an important part of the discussion and kinds of study that developed in academy and elsewhere regarding such texts that is happening as we speak. It is a matter of much dispute,

There is a whole world of responses regarding political philosophy that he influenced that I will leave to my political sisters and brothers to opine upon.

why so much insistence on him being a Nazi? — Manuel

He was a Nazi. No need to insist on it. Why is it important? I think his address,The Self-Assertion of the German University, linked to earlier, makes it abundantly clear. His understanding of being and time, of history unfolding, cannot be separated from what he claimed had come to be in that here and now, of what the call of conscience, what authenticity resolutely demanded of this people and only this people who were to follow the Fuhrer (literally the leader) and play a central role in world history and the truth of Being.

I too was drawn to Heidegger. Like many, I sensed that he had something mysterious and important to disclose. That thinking plays an essential role in to bringing being to presence. In time I came to think that pursuit of the question of "Being" is like chasing the wind. An oracular prophet without a revelation.

This is not to deny his influence or the value of reading him. He is certainly seductive, but it is for this reason that we must be most critical. The idea of harkening to being, of an openness to what is to be, is not, as he would have it, being responsive to being, but an abdication of responsibility. We all know what came to be in the 20th century.

:fire: :100:

His understanding of being and time, of history unfolding, cannot be separated from what he claimed had come to be in that here and now, — Fooloso4

Yes it can. Simply asserting it doesn’t make it true.

Absolutely read him like a Nazi. Does that mean a phenomenological "sense of community", as Heidegger's described it, is a Nazi concept? Remains to be seen. — fdrake


It’s not a sense of community. The “they” can be thought as something like Freud’s superego— the sense of what “they” think and “they” believe. The masses, the mainstream, the general culture, this vague sense of “what one does.” — Mikie

Yes, it has obviously this connotation but it means also the "subject" of the language or the everyday understanding as such. Orienting towards language mean orienting towards "average meanings" that every one understands. Within "they" is discussed about "tables" etc and every one already understands what table is. Functional communication means that every one is "they". There has to be always common ground for the understanding and communication. However, the more this "commonness" itself is pursued the more the discussion about the matter itself becomes "mere" conversation or conventional behavior. Normally, in our every day understanding the intentions remain more or less empty i.e. we are orienting towards vague indications.

It is not simply a matter of his character, or attitude, as if it just personal. It is not just a matter of how poorly Heidegger treated his Jewish students.

Heidegger's understanding of history is guided by notions of providence, fate, and destiny:

But if fateful Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, exists essentially in Being-with Others, its historizing is a co-historizing and is determinative for it as destiny [Geschick].This is how we designate the historizing of the community, of a people. Destiny is not something that puts itself together out of individual fates, any more than Being-with-one-another can be conceived as the occurring together of several Subjects. Our fates have already been guided in advance, in our Being with one another in the same
world and in our resoluteness for definite possibilities.

(II 5, 436 Macquarrie & Robinson, 384)

[Added: I see that @waarala already cited this passage].

But if fate constitutes the primordial historicality of Dasein, then history has its essential importance neither in what is past nor in the "today" and its 'connection' with what is past, but in that authentic historizing of existence which arises from Dasein's future.

(II,5, 438, 386)

As summarized in the SEP:

This phenomenon, a final reinterpretation of the notion of resoluteness, is what Heidegger calls primordial historizing or fate. And crucially, historizing is not merely a structure that is partly constitutive of individual authentic Dasein. Heidegger also points out the shared primordial historizing of a community, what he calls its destiny.

When the contemporary reader of Being and Time encounters the concepts of heritage, fate and destiny, and places them not only in the context of the political climate of mid-to-late 1920s Germany, but also alongside Heidegger's later membership of the Nazi party, it is hard not to hear dark undertones of cultural chauvinism and racial prejudice. This worry becomes acute when one considers the way in which these concepts figure in passages such as the following, from the inaugural rectoral address that Heidegger gave at Freiburg University in 1933.

Heidegger SEP

Orienting towards language mean orienting towards "average meanings" that every one understands. Within "they" is discussed about "tables" etc and every one already understands what table is. Functional communication means that every one is "they". There has to be always common ground for the understanding and communication. However, the more this "commonness" itself is pursued the more the discussion about the matter itself becomes "mere" conversation or conventional behavior. Normally, in our every day understanding the intentions remain more or less empty i.e. we are orienting towards vague indications. — waarala

Good points. In What is Thinking, Heidegger says that at first we tend to orient ourselves to what words seem to be, mere expressions of pre-existing thoughts. This misapprehension leads to the commonness of everyday communication.

“Words are not terms, and thus are not like buckets and kegs from which we scoop a content that is there. Words are wellsprings that are found and dug up in the telling, well-springs that must be found and dug up again and again, that easily cave in, but that at times also well up when least expected. If we do not go to the spring again and again, the buckets and kegs stay empty, or their content stays stale. To pay heed to what the words say is different in essence from what it first seems to be, a mere preoccupation with terms. Besides, to pay heed to what the words say is particularly difficult for us moderns, because we find it hard to detach ourselves from the "at first"" of what is common; and if we succeed for once, we relapse all too easily.”

What a word first seems to be “satisfies the demands of common speech in usual communication. Such communication does not want to lose time tarrying over the sense of individual words. Instead, words are constantly thrown around on the cheap, and in the process are worn out. There is a curious advantage in that. With a worn-out language everybody can talk about everything.”

It is not simply a matter of his character, or attitude, as if it just personal. It is not just a matter of how poorly Heidegger treated his Jewish students.

Heidegger's understanding of history is guided by notions of providence, fate, and destiny: — Fooloso4

Yes it is. The title of the book Being and Time expresses this. First , Being is linked with Dasein , the being there of the human being. To be a dasein is to already be in the midst of being with others in a world.Destiny is always going to be the destiny of a people rather than an individual.

“Dasein in itself is essentially Being-with” “Being-with existentially determines Da-sein even when an other is not factically present and perceived. The being-alone of Da-sein, too, is being-with in the world. The other can be lacking only in and for a being-with. Being-alone is a deficient mode of being-with, its possibility is a proof for the latter.” When one feels alone in a crowd, “Their Mitda-sein is encountered in the mode of indifference and being alien. Lacking and "being away" are modes of Mitda-sein...[Being-with-others]”. (Being and Time, p.113.” “…an "innerworldly" being has being-in-the-world in
such a way that it can understand itself as bound up in its "destiny" with the being of those beings which it encounters within its own world.”

Second, Time for Heidegger always comes from the future.

“Dasein "occurs out of its future"."Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general." Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. We call the unified phenomenon of the future that makes present in the process of having been temporality.” “ The existence of the Moment temporalizes itself as fatefully whole…” (BT)

So destiny and fate for Heidegger are presupposed by his understand of Dasein and Temporality. The Nazi dog whistles you’re looking for in Heidegger’s texts, if they are to be found, are in places where he particularizes the German volk as the worthy inheritors of the Greek heritage of philosophical thought, not in Being and Time , which can just as easily point to the the destiny and fate of a communist or liberal democratic volk as to a fascist one.

Nazis are people too.

And Nazism had considerable popularity in Europe and the US, along with their own variants of Fascism. The roots are deep in the Colonial attitudes of racial superiority that still run as an undercurrent through all our cultures. Therefore, send not to ask at whom the finger wags, it wags at thee. It would be pleasant to distance ourselves from all that horror, but such indulgence is dangerous.

By all means look for the nazi in Heidegger, but look closer to home also. Do you also worship power?

Yes, that's the sense I now get of Heidegger, of being an oracle teasing of things to come, without giving a full revelation. But the journey is still quite interesting.

Sure - connect those parts of his works to Nazism if you like, or if you find it interesting. Not many of those whom he influenced became Nazis though - so the extra context - which he managed to hide for many years, does clarify his involvement with Nazism. Again, in BT and his lectures on Kant, I don't see much relevance.

To be clear, as mentioned by others here, it is well and good to point out his Nazism - it is important to be aware of this.

But let's not then pretend that Hume, Kant and Hegel were not racists, or that followers of Descartes treated animals like garbage, that Althusser murdered his wife, that Schopenhauer made a woman invalid for the rest of her life, that Camus supported France's massacre in Algeria, that the Ancient Greeks were pedophiles and slave owners, and on and on.

Alternatively, people who already dislike Heidegger, can continue calling him a crap human being and an obscurantist gibberish producer. Ok.

To be a dasein is to already be in the midst of being with others in a world. — Joshs

Right, and so, we need to take our noses out of the book and consider what it means to be in the world with others on the level of our everyday experience of being with others, how we and others treat each other.

Time for Heidegger always comes from the future. — Joshs

Right again. And again, we must consider what this means apart from the text. What responsibility do we have for what happens? What is the gift of Heidegger's "es gibt" (it gives)? As with the notion of God's will, we have no way of determining whether to stand with or against what will happen. It seems clear that the future will bring increased threats that imperil our existence. Do we welcome global warming as what the future brings? What does it mean to "hearken to Being"? Isn't the question of the good of essential importance with regard to what will happen? Isn't it our responsibility to say yes or no? Why is Heidegger silent on this?

Not many of those whom he influenced became Nazis though — Manuel

That may be but some notable Jewish students he influenced,including Hans Jonas, Leo Strauss, and Jacob Klein, turned against him, at least initially, because he was a Nazi. But this is not to say their thinking moved passed Heidegger because Heidegger was a Nazi.

But let's not then pretend that Hume, Kant and Hegel were not racists — Manuel

Quite the opposite. These things should be brought into the conversation, but that is not to say they should be "cancelled".

And Nazism had considerable popularity in Europe and the US — unenlightened

Before the civil rights movement in the US I suspect that the prevalence of Nazism diminished mostly because Hitler and Germany became the enemy in WW ll.

Do you also worship power? — unenlightened

Power? It has its attraction, but for many it is more a matter of counteracting power. And, of course, power comes in many forms.

More to the point of the topic, we all have our prejudices, and no doubt the future will see us differently than we see ourselves. Remove the beam from you own eye and all that, but don't blind yourself in the process.

They did - and it makes sense too, given the recent experience of the war at the time. I believe Arendt eventually forgave him - I don't think she was aware of the extent of his involvement with Nazism though. We know much more of it now.

Quite the opposite. These things should be brought into the conversation, but that is not to say they should be "cancelled". — Fooloso4

I don't care much for the topic. I read these figures because I'm interested in what they say about epistemology or metaphysics.

I don't focus on ethics in philosophy. Not that ethics isn't important, it obviously is, but I prefer to speak about current events instead of frequently abstract discussions of right and wrong.

It's useful to know how much progress we've made in ethical matters, but to focus on what Descartes, Locke or Schopenhauer believed in that we now take to be reprehensible is kind of "so what?" We have burning issues now, what's the point in judging people with standards they did not have, but we take for granted?

It's not at all clear to me that most of us wouldn't have been racists or sexists or imperialists back then, to think otherwise is potentially misleading.

Of course, Heidegger, Camus and others are recent figures, so it makes some sense to discuss this.

And absolutely, I agree with no cancellation.

we need to take our noses out of the book and consider what it means to be in the world with others on the level of our everyday experience of being with others, how we and others treat each other. What does it mean to "hearken to Being"? Isn't the question of the good of essential importance with regard to what will happen? Isn't it our responsibility to say yes or no? Why is Heidegger silent on this? — Fooloso4

Heidegger isn’t silent on the question of the good. On the contrary, he is giving us a way to think differently about the justification and grounding of ethical decision-making. But in order to understand this we need to take our noses out of Enlightenment -era books on ethics and ask ourselves how we might think pragmatically, contextually about the good rather than trying to essentialize and universalize it beyond the contingency of the actual relations and situations we find ourselves in.

Heidegger’s refusal to adopt a standpoint of epistemic or po­litical sovereignty does not disable our capacities to reason, to crit­icize or justify statements or actions in ways that are not arbitrary or “ungrounded”.

As Foucault writes, “political criticism is not arbitrary if it can be historically situated as an intelligible response to specific institutions and practices: The theoretical and practical experience that we have of our [historical] limits and of the possibility of moving beyond them is always limited and determined; thus we are always in the position of beginning again. But that does not mean that no work can be done except in disorder and contingency.
Rather, it means that such work must always be reflective about its historical limits and experimental in spirit.”

Joseph Rouse says that Robert Brandom joins Foucault and Heidegger in “rejecting a standpoint of sovereignty outside of ongoing contested practices of reasoning from which to assess their outcome:

Brandom writes:

“Sorting out who should be counted as correct, whose claims and applications of concepts should be treated as authoritative, is a messy retail business of assessing the comparative authority of competing evidential and inferential claims. ... That issue is adjudicated differently from different points of view, and although these are not all of equal worth, there is no bird’s-eye view above the fray of competing claims from which those that deserve to prevail
can be identified, nor from which even necessary and sufficient conditions for such deserts can be formulated. The status of any such principles as pro­bative is always itself at issue in the same way as the status of any particular
factual claim.”

I believe Arendt eventually forgave him - I don't think she was aware of the extent of his involvement with Nazism though. — Manuel

Their relationship raises many questions. What she might have known and whether she looked the other way is not something I will attempt to decide.

... what's the point in judging people with standards they did not have ... — Manuel

I don't see it as matter of judging but of understanding what is said in terms of the situatedness of thinking, in the sense of not being able to fully escape the perspectives of one's time, and of context, of what a term like 'man' and what conditions are put on it.

Heidegger isn’t silent on the question of the good. — Joshs

What does he say?

Heidegger isn’t silent on the question of the good.
— Joshs

What does he say? — Fooloso4

In BT there is a distinction made between authentic and inauthentic modes of thinking. When we are in the inauthentic mode , we always have in front of us differentiations between what is more or less fitting or appropriate , what is more or less intelligible, more or less workable, more or less true, more or less familiar. But these distinctions take place in reference to a frame of intelligibility that is ultimately oppressive and conformist, leading to the justification of violence in pursuit of the ethical status quo. Only on those occasions when we think authentically are we able to replace the frame as a whole with a new ground. The ethical good , then, is aligned with keeping this process of creative reframing in motion and not getting stuck in the various forms of universalization (sovereignty, representation, the ‘good will’), that typify most ethical discourses.