Heidegger |
Of late I have been thinking much about the philosophical foundations of these United States, and of the difficulties 'We The People' have, to steer a straight course that follows the North Star of State Secularism. The recent condemnation in Russia of the punk-rock group, Pussy Riot, in which State Religion legally overwhelmed Individual Freedom, serves as a timely object lesson for me, and reminder, that the course of liberty needs two anchoring ideas that seem to be lacking in the Russian state, but that the America philosophes did not neglect in their thinking some 200 years ago -namely, the philosophical commitment (1) to keep free from State control individual speech and the press, and (2) to keep separated AT ALL COSTS the church, Religion, from the State. Founding Father philosophes, one; Perestroika technocrats (?), nil.
The American philosophes,
in addition to separating Religion from the State (following an idea from Jefferson), borrowed an idea from the 16th
century French humanist philosopher Montaigne, which also involved keeping separated
the various powers of government – the legislative from the executive and the judicial.
By framing the Constitution in this way, these philosophes reasoned that it might just be possible to fragment the
institutionalization of power so thoroughly that it becomes nigh unto
impossible for any group or individual to consolidate power into one place in
order to create a social tyranny. This last/previous link harks
back to an article posted August 15 on the Phrontisterion
website,
which refers to Putin’s new dictatorship, the one that is, arguably, being presently
constructed on the foundations of Perestroika. All I can say is that, from this
philosopher’s modest point of view, the “philosophers” of the Russian Perestroika
should have perhaps re-ferred and de-ferred to Mr. Thomas Jefferson of Virginia
in the course of their human events.
All of which has brought
me around again to the question of philosophical underpinnings for nations and
states. When we think about politics we should think about ethics – so says Aristotle anyway. And in the study of ethics there is one question that is
rather more important than all the other questions, which is THIS question:
will men (of both the girl and boy persuasion) generally, (i.e.,
usually, normally, routinely, customarily, mostly, largely, regularly,
habitually, recurrently, commonly, repeatedly, and/or ordinarily) fail to live
up to high moral standards? A Heidegger biographer, Hugo Ott, answers in the
affirmative, calling this attribute Menschliches
Versagen (human failing). Let it be said, though, that Ott is specifically thinking
about, presupposing, and nominally referring to the great German philosopher, Martin
Heidegger, when he asks, if I may presume to render in my own phrasing, whether
the human animal (including the great MH) isn’t just designed by nature to be an
ongoing social screw up. (Human failing, after all, is not really applicable to
the isolated hermit out living on some remote mountain top; but bespeaks human
thoughts and action in the social realm). Carlin Romano, himself a philosopher
who clearly has little to no use for the great MH, nonetheless observes that MH
is considered by some to be the greatest German philosopher of the 20th
century; similarly, MH is regularly listed by philosophers of all ilk to be among the top
20 philosophers, all nationalities combined, of the 20th century.
So how did I get from
the American Founding Fathers to this
philosopher whom Romano has unpleasantly, but not necessarily inappropriately,
called the “pretentious old Black Forest babbler”? In an Aiken Musing in which
I was thinking Big Thoughts about Socrates and Heidegger, particularly with
regard to how they viewed the relationship between the individual and the
state, I made the following remarks. Take them for what they’re worth.
Socrates’ philosophical paternalism,
especially in the Crito, seems to
compare with Heidegger’s notion of man’s new/true Ontologie, viz., his
existence in terms of the State, his für-den-Staat-sein
(“existing ‘for the State’”, in Being and
Time). Emmanuel Faye, [the French
philosopher who has written the currently definitive work on Heidegger’s
commitment to the Nazi philosophy], does in fact say, in writing and in person
(both on p. 694 of the French edition, Poche 2007, and in a public lecture held
at Notre Dame University, which I was fortunate enough to attend), that Heidegger cannot be
considered a philosopher because Philosophy, as an intellectual discipline, has
the vocation of serving the evolution of man, and is incompatible with any
'philosophy' that seeks the destruction of man. Now, no matter what we might
think personally about Heidegger's State-based ontology as a potential political structure in the abstract,
from the non-abstract point of view articulated and argued by the American philosophes in the Constitution, any
philosophy that argues for the dissolution of Man into the machinery of the
State is at odds with the American philosophy of Individualism and the fragmentation
of State power.
An additional assumption of Emmanuel Faye's is entirely
French in nature, which is that he is, predictably, the faithful child of the
Cartesian cogito; so he
is naturally hostile toward Heidegger's fundamental (and fundamentally Hitler-era German, i.e., Blut [blood]-based) Ontology, which dissolves
(conquers/annihilates) the subjectively knowing individual (cogito), and
dismisses it as a philosophical (ontological?) untruth—a conviction which in
turn must, of necessity, invalidate the philosophical underpinnings of a
liberal democracy. According to Faye, Heidegger seeks to replace by means of
his philosophy the impoverished cogito
(i.e., Thinking Individual) with a
new ontological value for man: a für-den-Staat
(for the State), collectivized existence -- at which point Heidegger's thought
weds wonderfully well with Nazi political thought, and, frankly, with any other
type of political theory that seeks to dissolve the Individual into the grinding
cogs of State existence. This is how Faye already reads Heidegger 's 1927 Being and Time; and I find Faye's reading not only
plausible but extremely persuasive. I am also very sympathetic to Faye's
loyalty to a truly existential and individualized cogito, which continues to speak out from the heart of the American
and French revolutions, and which, I think, must ultimately constitute the
redoubt against which the permutation of power into tyranny must finally fail
(which is Jefferson's argument for education in this liberal democracy). The cogito also has the virtue of
justifying, both politically and philosophically, the devolvement of a centralized
Führer power principle in the State (Heidegger)
onto the shoulders of simple citizens (Jefferson).
So, obviously, this philosophical
notion of man as man-in/under-the-State, where the State is the significant
entity and the individual is subservient to and sacrificed FOR the State, is a
notion that lies at the heart of both Heideggerian Ontology and Nazi thinking.
Furthermore, if truth be told, this philosophical inversion is also at the
heart of almost any type of patriotic
sentiment that seeks to dissolve the Individual and fuse him/her/it into a State-defined whole.
But this idea of man-in/under-the-State is precisely what
the American philosophes found
unacceptable, thus provoking their philosophical fury and frenzy in separating
everything that could possibly lead to a consolidation or centralization of
social power in America. Power to the Individual!!!!
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