Arendt and Heidegger, the postwar 'friendship"

[Joseph Tracy]

Apart from the fact that many philosophers seem to think Heidegger's writing suffers from a lack of lucidity and is overly esoteric and that  one can argue that Hannah Arendt is the more admirable human being in terms of courage and action. And given the fact that HA actually knew and studied with Heidegger and never repudiated the value of his philosophical work, we still end up, whether or not his "Volk "was a cultural concept , with a philosophy that did allow him to become a Nazi and so align himself with a very racialized concept of Volk. 

Many writers and philosophers offer profound insights along with enthusiasms of thought that are less valuable. My sense of Heidegger( far less informed than many here- mine is  mostly Wikipedia and offshoots) is that he allows for and endorses such an internal sorting process and personalized pursuit of authentic being, thinking, living. 

 If we take the best possible spin on H's response to Nazism, and presume he went along, but  as little as possible to protect Freiburg from complete politicization;  then one question would be, was this and is this a successful tactic?  My own feeling is that this kind of moral and intellectual acquiescence and entanglement is all too common,  and rarely produces good results. Instead every good idea is balanced by a horrible idea and in most cases compromise means we live with the resultant genetically modified monstrosities.. Politically and academically and journalistically the US  has  become the center not of serious intellectual considerations, fact checked  debate  and real research but propaganda wars. This war of lies is not just a peripheral distraction. It takes center stage.   Over 70% believed Saddam was responsible for 9-11. About the same percentage of German  churches supported the Nazi scapegoating of Jews. What good is journalism or academia if they cannot be bold enough and united enough and courageous enough to stand up to such lies before they are translated into mass murder? 

BE revolves around following the money into an internet  which is being taken over secretively but with many indications of veiled government involvement. Correlating to the real world we can see in Gabriel Ice and associates a time when google, verizon, NSA, CIA, and criminals  were all claiming bandwidth and starting to swap power. The NSA, long a secretive and little mentioned entity, already had a larger budget than the CIA and books were finally coming out.

When Cheney proposed Total Information Awareness, everyone on the list and most citizens were appalled and completely opposed.  Part of Obama's campaign promise was to end the spying on citizens. Once in power he let the telecoms off the hook, along with those who introduced torture as US policy and practice. It all came from a very bizarre philosophy of law that is summarized in " looking forward not back". How one can be the chief enforcer of law and only be willing to consider crimes in the future puts us  well into the most surreal of Orwellian linguistics and is only possible in a society that provides no intellectual limits on even the most absurd propaganda. 

The important  Heidegger -like  assent of recent US history has been an assent to ignore the constitutional outline of powers and to give the presidency virtually unlimited executive power.  Intellectually and emotionally that  assent was built around  2 ideas that could be seen as core elements of fascism: to assert our right to military supremacy over any country we consider a threat to our security, and to defend M Friedman style corporate economic  hegemony which strips most workers throughout the world of the right to organize or bargain collectively. .  Another common theme of passive assent  was the idea that we cannot possibly expect personal privacy in the age of electronic communication. Together these things  allowed the NSA under Obama to fund, plan and build, very quietly, and with no meaningful public debate, TIA on steroids. 

Until maybe 20 years ago this was the stuff of dystopian sci-fi. Now it is part of the infrastructure of our world.   We find ourselves in A Philip K Dick novel made real  through  one of the many areas of bi-partisan agreement.  Could a courageous investigation by a reform president have exposed what needs to change?   Not without the personal risk which is generally relegated to soldiers.   What would the heroic defense of democratic liberty  and constitutional law really look like? Here we enter a Gore Vidal story in which Chelsea Manning is more impressive  than Barak Obama.  

Too longwinded as usual.






On Dec 6, 2013, at 9:52 AM, Raymond Easton wrote:

> To understand what Heidegger means by 'Volk', Alice, surely one should read *Heidegger*, not HA.  Kai's analysis (taken with a grain of salt, yes!)  seems correct.  Yours seems to me superficial, the sort of thing that results from reading second rate thinkers writing about Heidegger rather than Heidegger's works themselves.
> 
> A different question bothers me when I reflect on the relationship between Heidegger's work and his Nazism:  not 'is this philosophy somehow "Nazi"?', but rather 'of what use can this mode of thinking be if it allows one to become a Nazi?'.
> 
> An aside:  I often used to joke -- stealing this from someone (Kierkegaard?) and modifying it -- that I learned German to read Hegel, but was rewarded by discovering Holderlin.
> 
> Ray
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