Fw: Arendt and Heidegger, the postwar 'friendship"

[Fiona Shnapple]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/feb/15/who-was-milton-friedman/?page=1

On Friday, December 6, 2013, Fiona Shnapple wrote:

> Not an expert in Heidegger either, but You don't need to be a German
> Philosophy professor to get this right.   You nailed it here JT. I might
> quibble with your characterization of the corporate state, it's not
> Friedman style, but, the rest of what you say here is golden.
>
> On Friday, December 6, 2013, Joseph Tracy wrote:
>
> 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 o
>
>
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