-3. Heidegger was a charlatan who, like others who feign some ability to garner fame and fortune, made a convoluted and incomprehensibly subjective spectacle in order that his philosophy live forever and all would think him so genius that no one could truly grasp his revolutionary depth and insight. Except, of course, for the fact that he states at least thrice that he thinks intelligible philosophers and philosophies are doomed. He tells us it is nonsense.
-2.9 He shows us, as Uri Geller did not, how he bent the spoon to make us think he was special. It is a joke and so was he and so are the scholars who subject their students to such a foul mind. Don't get me wrong, I love the works of Nietzsche, and he was a foul person with dark and disturbing beliefs, but he was honest and used words in ways that had an important quality: meaning. If his philosophy was great, I would say so, despite his vile personal nature. But, it is possible to be a crap philosopher and a crap person, a large segment of humanity can be said to be both. It takes one to know one and I consider myself an authority on nonsense as I have dabbled in it myself.
-2. I find myself becoming more and more amused by the current throng of philosophers in the early 21st who claim to be both intelligent and who find much to be appreciated in Heidegger's writings. Gems should be found amongst tall stacks of writings, somewhere, between the simple nonsense and the deliberate obscurantist nonsense. Like chunks of corn in feces, something can always be found that is sweet and worth taking out of the rest. In my opinion, bluntly, I think he was a vile man and his philosophy is nothing short of hack shit that should be used to wipe the arse and not to enlighten anyone about nearly anything.
-2.1. Yes, he had some things to say about anxiety and technology, hoorah. The man wasted more ink between interesting tidbits than any thinker I have had the misfortune of studying. It becomes more and more distasteful and a waste of time to read his circumlocutious babble that, if not understood, makes the reader just such a dolt. Heidegger asks of his readers more than any philosopher I have read in terms of where we must trust him or give him benefits of doubt that it is really going anywhere at all.
-2.11. "Wait, Martin, those are the same footprints we left yesterday when we were in this same spot, aren't they?"- "Yes," he says, looking at the dried mud bootprints below, "but if we continue round and round forever, maybe we will get somewhere different". "But I'm tired and my feet are bleeding," says the follower. "Good, by the time we make progress you will be hobbling on stumps, near dead, and greatful to still have just enough uninfected blood to see the glimmer of there-it-is-now-to-be-human-here-spirit-sein" says the wide-eyed Heidegger, winking and striding ahead. "What the fuck did you just say? Seriously Martin, that's not a fucking word. Did you take your medication this morning? It's freezing and I think I have a tick in my neck, for Christ's sake let's go back to the Reichstaag, I hear it's really warm there tonight" replies the follower.
-2.2. To be confused is not how one should feel when approaching Heidegger. Nor perplexed. Nor impressed. Just simply laugh and scratch one's head as to why he is so appreciated as a great philosophical mind by anyone at all. Then close the book and read Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Russell, Plato, Hume, Kant, Aristotle... and so many others so much more worth being with. Heidegger was a genocidal toady pussy with no integrity, skill, or aptitude for anything other than making a gruesome mess appear a beautiful specimen by covering a tird with sugar and new words that give academics years of lecture fodder but never reaches that high place where it has a definition or meaning that is steadily referential to anything. My fecal references are intentionally myriad, and of that I am aware.
-2.3. Call me shallow or prejudiced. Call me simple and slow. Call me a stupid American who plays the "Nazi's suck" card all too strongly. Call me anything... but please, wake up to what I hope future history will surely see: Heidegger was a bloated Nazi apologist whose philosophy is and was a collossal joke played on humanity like scientology was a joke by Hubbard to see how many idiots would sign up and perpetuate his science-fiction turned absolute truth. Most Nazi's were just trying to be good in their culture as most people try to be. Being a good German meant thinking the world needed more highways, less Jews, and more blood sausage via imperial aggression.
-2.4. Being a good American today in 2011 means "supporting the troops" no matter what imperial aggression they are sent to engage in as they too are trying to be culturally heroic and good against the made up enemies our psy-ops invent. Being a 9-11 truther is tantamount, in America, to being a traitor for simply noting that steel doesn't melt when exposed to very relatively low-temperature burning jet fuel and buildings don't just suddenly collapse, all at once, in an instant, without being professionally demolished as World Trade Center 7 was. The American soldiers, like the Nazi's, don't know any better and they've been lied to and brainwashed so why blame any average soldier or citizen? I didn't know what was going on here for some time and was of the mindset we had been attacked and retribution was just.
-2.5. But Heidegger was supposed to be a superior mind not a peon, yet he beat the war drums and shouted to all that Adolf was the be-all and end-all of German identity, and he did so louder than almost anyone. This was, of course, because he was a kiss-ass opportunist with no true spine who cared only for his blossoming career and reputation in the Reich. His philosophy is a homage to attempting to appear deep, learned, and genius. But where is the actual depth, learning, and genius to be found? In the hoax? In the question of being and about rethinking being and questioning the questioning? It's like a card trick and it stinks of Ayn Rand's metaphysical "genius": existence exists. Wow. Great thought. Please die now so Leonard Pekoff can go on and on about you.
-2.6. This was why he was dropped eventually, because he was a sycophant with nothing real to contribute other than his nose in the Furher's anus, which, I think he often remarked "Smelled so lovely, like roses mine ubermench". This was difficult to hear given the proximity of Hitler's testicles to his tongue but most scholars agree, that's what he was trying to say at least. His philosophy? Another attempt at self-aggrandizing by being different in that he makes any other philosopher accused of obscurantism look crystal clear and he fucking says so in many places that I can not fathom why so many otherwise seemingly intelligent minds take him seriously at all- other than to fill up time in a class or have something controversial to write a paper about?
-1. I am rethinking all of what follows as I fear my dislike of Heidegger the man has infected my opinions of his ontological project to some degree. To what degree, I am still working out. If personal shortcomings disqualified philosophers, there would surely be only a few left to study.
0. Heidegger was severely lacking as a person and few argue against this. The questions must be (i) what is the quality of his philosophy and (ii) to what extent, if any, can we separate Heidegger's thought from Nazism?
But, to separate him from his philosophy and, also, to say that it too was severely lacking, seems sacriligious to many of the philosophical powers that be. There is an article here, that denounces Heidegger severely, and I think the comments are more interesting than the article itself.
1. Though I have found nuggets of insight in Heidegger and what I consider to be a bold, yet failed, attempt to explain being and human being in new and interesting terms, I am overwhelmingly critical of his work.
I loathe opinions in stone, however, and I am always reinterpreting. Perhaps, this never ending process was precisely one such nugget to be found in Heidegger's thinking. I am not even qualified enough to be called a novice of his work, nor of any particular philosopher, so my comments that follow are not even the comments of a novice.
1[.01]. But, I am not a novice of rigorous and right thinking and I have both done them and their opposites. I think Heidegger is mired in their opposites and I recognize it rather outright. I will spend the rest of my life contemplating my thoughts about this and everything else, so, if I find reason and only reason, to change my mind, then I will.
1[1]. I report only on how I think and feel about Heidegger and his writing, though I am not well versed in German. I am relying on the translations of others, as we often do, when attempting to understand the writings of those who write in other languages. One could ask, why then, do I think I am qualified to comment so extensively about Heidegger after admitting that I am so ignorant of his work and language?
Interpretation is a process, and, if I am ever to come to a better opinion of Heidegger, I am attempting to express my starting point and my initiation into this process of investigation. I write about what strikes me this way or that and nothing that follows, in that Heidegger must be taken more aesthetically than analytically, because, as I mention, how can we analyze what is not analysis but the expulsion of analysis?
1[2]. I applaud those, like Richard Polt and Hubert L. Dreyfus and the myriad Heidegger scholars for their attempt to understand what I so obviously, do not. My problem is with whether or not it is understandable, in itself, without the interpretation of others. This is my greatest concern.
Though, I must say that in the interpretation of others, I still found a lot of doubt, confusion, and attempts to explain for Heidegger what he did not explain himself. I must mention that, at many points in interpretations of Heidegger, there are pauses for statements of the form, "and, if we accept that or this Heidegger is putting forth..." which shows the degree to which we must make the same assumptions and aesthetic choices Heidegger does in order to continue with him on his project.
1[3]. What follows seems to end badly and without room for change. But, there is always room for change and perhaps I am just in a bad mood. Though, my suspicion is that I am right, for why else would I put forth a single idea about a single thing at all, ever? Perhaps to think one is right about anything is a mild form of insanity in itself, and I accept this.
2. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was a leading philosopher in and of the Nazi movement yet he was later under Gestapo watch himself. He never apologized for anything and, this too, is a detriment to his lack of ethical character. I think he largely used the rise of the Nazi party to rise up in German academics himself.
I would have much more sympathy for Nazis and Heidegger's lack of apologetics if they had been a militaristic empire only and not also genocidal against Jews. To say that there was nothing he could do about anything at the time is to deny the history of Sophie Scholl (and the philosophy professor Kurt Huber) and the White Rose movement among many other defectors and resistances.
2[1]. Yes, doing something about it probably meant death but millions of people from all over the world "did something about it" and paid with their lives precisely because people like Heidegger went along. I can, like many others, forgive lots of soldiers and peons in imperial grabs or movements, but not those who devote their lives to philosophy and who are supposed to be great minds. I would rather die than knowingly go along with mass murdering regimes anywhere. And, if I had made some mistake through false faith in my country, I would recant because I have a conscience.
3. Despite these personal flaws (or even personal psychopathies), I think portions of his philosophy may (and only may) be an interesting non-analytic but attempting to appear analytic, exposition on what eastern philosophers have been circling for millenia. Though, I will say that circiling "it" is all any human can do.
4. I think we can separate people from their art or philosophy or mathematics but we should never apologize for or overlook the history of the individuals. Maybe something Mao or Stalin said was great and profound, but this does not excuse them as mass butchers. And, for some of us, the person informs the work to a degree that we can not separate it and I would never suggest that anyone detach an artist's aesthetics from their ethics or lack thereof.
4[1]. We can take a mathematical proof at face value but, beyond simple math and logic and scientific conjectures, why should we listen to someone like Heidegger about "care"? "Care" is something that refers to what Heidegger was the antithesis of. Heidegger wants to be such a good and farmer-like member of his society yet he does not make any effort to think his society extends to humans in general.
4[2]. Humans are not cold, logical robots and it is hard for us (and me) to separate people from their thoughts in these cases.
4[3]. And none of this has to do with what is so ignorantly called "existentialist" or "continental" philosophy. Terms like these only seek to harden the perceived rift, though I do not think there is an actual rift except in the minds of those who use such terms. What philosophy has nothing to say about existence and is, therefore, not existential in some way?
So what if the philosophy took place here or there? We're going to group all of them, like they are simple potatoes, into a single sack related to, of all things, geography? I love Nietzsche, so do not throw me into the anti-continental philosophy group, either.
5. There is something important about Being as such and not the being of beings. But, I don't know if sentences like "The world around us is worlding" do any better at dislodging us from the world of individuated things than "The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao". If his work is ultimately meaningless, then the Gesamtausgabe is one of the greatest 100 volume wastes of time in the history of philosophy.
6. I am in the process of taking the time to understand his work, and the introduction to his philosophy by Richard Polt (Heidegger: an introduction) is excellent. Why do I praise Polt and not Heidegger?
Because I can understand Polt. And, Heidegger's analytic attempt to discuss that which is unapproachable through analytic philosophy is, perhaps, his greatest mistake or his greatest achievement. I praise anyone who makes sense of Heidegger and perhaps someone as dull and amateur of a philosopher as myself should stick to secondary sources. But, I will take on Being and Time at least once more to be sure.
6[1]. When I am, in the future, called an idiot for not liking or thinking Heidegger understandable, please note that I have already said as much. Most certainly, only idiots could possibly detest both the man and his non-thinking. Sarcasm often gets lost in text, so I feel I must mention it for there are people who think Steven Colbert is a conservative and I, unlike Heidegger, do not desire to be confusing.
7. I can not say this for sure because he is long dead, but one of Heidegger's greatest influences, Nietzsche, I think, would have had volumes to say, and not nice volumes, about Heidegger. People often incorrectly suppose Nietzsche would have been a happy Nazi. Nothing, I think, could be further from the truth.
8. I will say that he was one of the first western philosophers to wrestle with Being as a whole. But, to say he discovered this concept is like saying Columbus was the first human to discover the new world. It is western-centric thinking that overlooks the vast works of the brilliant eastern Confucian, Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist philosophies that have existed long before Heidegger came to them. My main reason for not having as much to say about these eastern philosophies is more derived from my own ignorance of them than my appreciation for them.
9. We can separate our value of a person and our value of their thoughts. But we need not necessarily do so. And, a person could be any combination of a type of thinker and type of person. A good thinker may be a bad person and a bad person may be a bad thinker.
10. My most recent suspicion is that Heidegger is wrong about some of his methodologies as in his distinction between humans and inanimate objects or even animals. For example, contrasting humans and a piece of quartz as fundamentally different require the very same empirical observations and science that Heidegger is trying to undermine as a proper understanding. On page 44 of Polt's introction to Heidegger he states:
10[1]. "But the quartz itself has no relationship to its own being...". How do we come to know or assume such a thing unless he's attempting to square the circle and tell us that we know, in some non-empirical sense, anything about a piece of quartz? Also, that we have a relationship to being, is a theory of mind or psychology that derives from investigations of the empirical world.
10[2]. He wants us, basically, to use reason to see why we should abandon reason because reason takes us away from our true, unreasonable selves. What we, as humans, truly are, is whatever we say we are.
11. Also, the podium on which human existence is placed in Heidegger's thought is certainly a result of his empirical psychological investigations. He assumes so very very much but asks us to trust him that it's not circular but only spiraling, that it's not logic but apparent.
11[1]. "Trust me" says Heidegger, "I'm not misleading you but I can't give you a single clear reason why not because my system abandons logic and words you already know"? Heidegger says, "I am going to show you a square circle, don't blink, but don't pay close attention either."
11[2]. If I give up all reason and logic then I can accept anything at all.
12. We need not be realists about computational theories of mind in order to play and think and use them like all science. We need not let technology corrupt our human being.
But, we also need not do any of it for the pseudo-reasons Heidegger presents. There are plenty of rational, clear, precise, and logical reasons to not destroy ourselves by taking science as descriptive of absolute reality.
12[1]. Even if we are scientific realists, there is still no reason to think that negatively altering ourselves or the world in which we live in is a good idea.
Technology and the quality of our lives must be balanced and technologies that could destroy us must be abandoned in the capacities that they can do so- ie, nuclear weapons, carbon energy processing, genetic meddling that is driven by corporate greed rather than slow, responsible science, etc.
13. I have found some interest in Heidegger's concept of angst or anxiety. His exploration of moods and their resultant thought patterns is both familiar and clear to me.
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"Heidegger", 2010, graphic drawing
by Anthony Peter Iannini |
14. I find nothing interesting or useful in terms such as "autheniticity" or "resoluteness". One can apply them arbitrarily. I have the same criticism, and even moreso, directed at the works of Sartre
15. The fundamental problem is thus: Existentialist deconstructionist types want us to listen to them but they can never tell us why. They want us to act or be in the world in a certain way but their descriptions give us no compass to how we should act because they do not want to preach. Therefore, they can have no real ethics because they refuse to assume anything about humans except all the things they assume in telling us about our aesthetic approach to philosophy.
15[1]. I find no reason to abandon reason in the pursuit of understanding how to act in the world. I have not the faintest clue why so much time and energy is devoted to these figures. But, I never have claimed to be so intelligent as to understand nonsense. Rather, I have actually thought and written nonsense in my life and nowhere have I found more familiarity with this period than in Heidegger's writings.
16. Heidegger is a horrible underling to the brilliant figures of Eastern philosophy that I have only begun to investigate. Heidegger was an unapologetic, bloated, Nazi fool who used obscurantism to impress those who find what is impossible to decipher "deep".
16[1]. There are infinite ways to uproot us from our paradigmatic thinking about being in the world and I find Heidegger's method severely lacking. His greatest contributions to philosophy are his failed attempts that, perhaps, if used properly, can mean something important in the proper hands. Yes, one can gain meaning from the experience of reading philosophy in which the meaning is derived from the experience and not so much the words themselves.
16[2]. But, Heidegger's writings constitute a vast array of veritable doorstops in which a million words or a hundred words do not make more clear what is and always will be unclear. If it can't be pointed to, how do you know you are spiraling around it and not spiraling off to the side, in the dark, around nothing at all? If you can never use reason to clarify it, how do you even know that you are talking about anything at all?
16[3]. Ultimately, how can reason defy what is unreasonable? How can we have an unreasonable analysis? If not analytic, if not using words precisely so that people understand us, how should we proceed?
16[4]. Heidegger, in my opinion, could have been clear about what he was doing. But, to make itself clear, is suicide for a philosophical system, according to Heidegger. He may well be right. What is not clear attracts attention, like a car wreck. Perhaps for all time, people will stop and wonder, "What happened there?".
17. Heidegger is the apex of egotism and fraud. But, as can be seen from history, such traits, in extremes, often carry personalities through all time. Like his hero Hitler, these methods of cult formation have worked quite well for Heidegger in history.
18. I think, in the end, had he been a saintly individual I would have said, "Saint or not, I can't begin to take his philosophy seriously. But, philosophy is infinitesimally less important than how we live and treat others. How good he was such a humanitarian".
19. One who rejects most of Heidegger's philosophy need never also be a logical positivist or a scientific realist or a physicalist. These other extremes, that we can be certain of our logical and linguistic constructs or in the data we collect or in that our words correspond to reality, in some grounded way, are also baseless.
20. Anyone who wants to accuse me of basing philosophical appreciation on my disdain for Nazis can do so. I am a huge fan of modern German cinema, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and understanding propaganda's role from assholes like Goebbels.
I am not fan of Zionist racist Jews as I am no fan of racists and racist apologists anywhere. No one can deny that under the war machine and sick murderous campaigns, there were some great minds in all areas. Germany, up through the last war, was astonishingly advanced technologically.
21. After completely separating the man from politics, I am still less than a fan and more of a skeptical detractor. Maybe someone has made some sense from Heidegger's nonsense and this is wonderful. Then, it should be this or that interpreting philosopher that deserves a medal of intellectual honor, not this laughable "farmer" from the black forest.
22. Even after all this, I will not put Being and Time down or stop researching. There is something to be learned from obscurantism, and Plato, Aristotle and most existentialists have been accused of it. Perhaps there is something important in that which is impenetrable- like reality itself.
