Martin Heidegger – Post Mortem

 

~by David Aiken~

 

 

Martin Heidegger is Lady Philosophy’s problem child—there is no doubt about it.

Imagine Boethius, who was a 5^th – 6^th century Roman senator, a consul, and all-around good-guy Stoic philosopher at large, but who had then been, from the height of his philosophical and material successes, thrown into prison for conspiracy against the Ostrogoth King Theodoric, and then executed in 524 AD. This good man, who seemingly had forgotten all the philosophical life-lessons that are taught by Stoicism and by Plato, had in prison a consoling series of conversations with Lady Philosophy; and she was able to guide Boethius back again onto the path of right thinking and therefore of right living, and of right dying. Boethius has therefore been for centuries the quintessential example of the life lived philosophically.

Now imagine Heidegger—in a bitch session with Lady Philosophy. First it would be H saying: ‘Get away from me, because I don’t believe that Reasoned Thinking (a.k.a., rationalism) can help us live,’ and then him explaining in the inexplicable jargon of mumbo-jumbo: ‘In my Nazi vision of life a man only has meaning as a cog in the wheels of the German state; but I am special because I am the Führer’s philosopher, so please leave me alone—you have nothing to teach me.’ Unlike Boethius, Heidegger was a lumpen-philosopher: he was never plagued by ethical thinking, and he was uninterested in being a teacher of the philosophical life.

Phrontisterion readily understands philosophy that is conceived of as a vehicle to help us, with awareness and personal dignity, to negotiate the all-too-often surprising vicissitudes of life, which is why Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy has continued to remain at the top of Western philosophy’s all-time best-sellers list. And very rightly so. However, what should be the take-home Kerygma of a Heideggerian lumpen-conception of philosophy, which is not truly interested in life at all, but only in the enslavement of the lesser, of the many?

 

The following is Phrontisterion’s translation of a book review by Yann Diener, which appeared in the French weekly journal, Charlie Hebdo (No. 1228 / 3 February 2016); Diener reviews several books about Martin Heidegger and his philosophy, which have recently been published in French.

 

Books [by Yann Diener]: Heidegger: his Life, his Work, his Führer”

 

Star philosopher and notorious Nazi, Martin Heidegger would have preferred that his bibliographical notice be limited to the narrative of his promenades in the Black Forest with his students. That did not happen: the historian Guillaume Payen has published [Perrin: January 2016] a solid biography that tells the story of the Master’s passage from Catholicism to Nazism.

 

Very well documented, Payen’s book will not end up as fodder for peoples’ magazines; rather, it shall permit one to read or reread Heidegger in his context. Payen, as historian, is contributing to the contextualizing work that the philosopher Emmanuel Faye as well as the linguist Francois Rastier have so desperately wished for (Charlie Hebdo, 16 & 23 December 2015). This biography is important because it is the first that shows the logic of young Heidegger’s journey, going from Catholicism to Nazism: first he wants to become a priest, but then he is seized by the desire to toss everything out the window, and he will begin to focus first on philosophy and then on national-socialism. Heidegger’s adepts have wanted to portray him as an inadvertent or opportunistic Nazi; but now we discover that he had a veritable passion for Hitler. When, in June 1933, his colleague Karl Jaspers asks him how a man as uninformed as Hitler can govern Germany, Heidegger gives him this stupefying response: “His educational upbringing does not matter; just look at his marvelous hands.” The ‘back-to-Being’ philosopher is counting on the Führer to provide for Germany, and so also for the whole world, the conditions for a philosophical revolution. (In his Reichstag speech of January 1939, Hitler even portrays himself as a prophet). Catholic until the age of 25, Heidegger will remain Nazi until his death. Nevertheless, his apologists continue to maintain that their hero was nothing more than an unfortunate assimilation into the Nazis worldview. This is an example of a thesis contradicted by the biography. The only choice the adepts shall have will be either to go into full-blown denial or to shift from their position of negation to a position of affirmation in order to claim/explain their unconditional love of their prophet.

 

Hypnotic language.

Translator of Kafka, of Freud or of Peter Handke, George-Arthur Goldschmidt has already shown an interest in the particularity of Heidegger-speak: his violence is contained in his hypnotizing prosody, which quickly fascinates his students. He uses the omnipresent ‘We,’ which helps to constitute [psychologically] a combat group. The texts that George-Arthur Goldschmidt has dedicated to this terrifying ‘newspeak’ are reedited in a book scheduled for publication at the end of January 2016. [NT: It is as of yet unpublished]. There is no doubt that the publication of this book shall permit us to get a clearer picture of how Heidegger’s words have slipped into the vocabulary of philosophy and how, unfortunately, they have also wormed their way into the vocabulary of psychoanalysis. Anne-Lise Stern, Auschwitz survivor and psychoanalyst, used to spit on the ground when she had to pronounce the name of Heidegger, whose concepts have helped psychoanalysis to slide toward a sort of adaptive psychotherapy, whose focus is to normalize and to format the subject.

            When Heidegger used to begin his lecture on Aristotle, he would summarize the biography of the Greek philosopher by saying: “He was born, he lived, he died.” For Heidegger, we can say: he was born a Catholic, he lived as a Nazi, he is a dead Nazi.

 

1.     Guillaume Payen, Martin Heidegger. Catholicisme, révolution, nazisme (Perrin), January 2016.

2.     George-Arthur Goldschmidt. Heidegger contre la langue allemande, to be published at CNRS publishers. [NdT- published in 2016 at CNRS Editions]

 

Further reading:

·      François Rastier, Naufrage d’un prophète. Heidegger aujourd’hui, PUF, 2015.

·      Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger, l’introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie : Autour des séminaires inédits de 1933-1935, Le Livre de Poche, réed. 2007.

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.nl/2016/02/heidegger-treacherous-millesime.html

·      http://www.worldcat.org/title/crisis-of-german-ideology-intellectual-origins-of-the-third-reich/oclc/253069

·      http://next.liberation.fr/culture/2014/03/06/il-n-y-a-pas-d-affaire-heidegger_985029

·      http://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/lessai-et-la-revue-du-jour-14-15/laffaire-heidegger-revue-critique

·      https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/09/30/commentary-heideggers-black-notebooks

·      http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/martin-heideggers-black-notebooks-reveal-the-depth-of-anti-semitism.html

·      https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/what-heidegger-was-hiding

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2012/08/martin-heidegger-state.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2014/11/novembers-essaynietzsche-eichmann-and.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2014/08/august-septembers-essayvoices-on.html

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/p/blog-page_24.html

 

Reprised and reworked from an original Phrontisterion essay published in April 2016.

Dead Gods Wandering Around Lost in the World of Men.

~by David Aiken~

§ I can think of few topics more appropriate to the spring season in the West than Dead and Dying Gods. The season is especially festive for Christians, of course, coming off six weeks of famine-defined Lent, which culminates in Easter festivities and a surfeit of chocolate bunnies, colored eggs, and the Holy Week, which prepares the way for Whitsun (Pentecost) and the descent of the Dove. Apparently in the UK the Christian Whitsun has borrowed some aspects of the Pagan festival of Beltane, the Walpurgis Nacht of Faustian fame, which falls at the half-way point between All Hallows Eve (October 31st) and the beginning of summer. Summer is traditionally ushered in by the June solstice on the 21^st.

Grunewald

For those in the Jewish faith tradition, this season marks the beginning of the Feast of Passover, which commemorates the life of a people over whom the Shadow of Death has passed. 

           

In this springtide season, then, during which men’s fancy seems to turn away from the dying and the dead, and to lightly turn to thoughts of God, the question for our reflection concerns the possibility of verifying authentic religious experience in a period of existential intellectual crisis. The short and honest answer to this question is that, although everyone seems to have an opinion, no one actually knows anything for sure. However, what the Reasoning Man does absolutely know about the possibility of authentic religious knowledge in every period, including those marked by existential silence, is that the onus remains on the Magical Man to demonstrate to all and sundry that Gods are somehow relevant to human existence, which is to say that they can in fact be experienced.

            Insufficient to this task is any pretend-answer that seeks to pawn off on the philosophically shortsighted some religious ritual of faith, which is nothing but a metaphor for interpreting an inexperience or a lack of some quantifiable experience. It is necessary for the Magical Man—the religiously minded—to bring to the round-table of thoughtful citizens neither metaphor nor psychology (i.e., some vague notion of “belief” as a precondition of psycho-experience), but rather some real, verifiable human evidence for an experience of the Gods.

            Let us also be quite clear by saying that although a Socratic philosopher’s naturally skeptical nature is fairly indisposed to the more philosophical concept that gives support to the idea of “Deity,” such a Socratic fellow is not necessarily opposed to the possible historical existence of Gods. So, the odd ‘Socrates’ wandering around in the world can be sure that any Divine Critters, who may potentially also be fellow-wanders in this wilderness, will forgive them if they presume to be so intellectually bold as to pose questions concerning Their relevance and/or existence, and concerning how men might acquire knowledge about such things… But, then, is it not reasonable to suppose that Such Enormities as Gods must be big enough to get over a little philosophizing from a pissant ‘Socrates’?

Yet, let us suppose that the case is truly as Plato has said, quoting Heraclitus (B 83), that “The wisest of men, in contrast to God, appears as an ape in wisdom and beauty and all things.” How is it, then, that Gods really cannot tolerate the pint-sized and irritating musings of thinking ape-like humans, although this is certainly the case if we believe the story of the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11). If it is indeed true that Gods work on a short ego-leash, then the author of this essay and its readers had better watch out for the bolt of lightning coming our way if we dare to continue reading—for friendly fire is just as deadly as if the bolt were meant for another! The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was intended for just such as this author, whence the name of our Phrontisterion URL: nonimprimatur.

 [The following is condensed from peer-reviewed, internationally published research entitled, “On the Death of God. A Post-mortem Reflection on a 'Life’,” which is archived at Phrontisterion, or here. This research is scheduled for full publication in summer 2019 in the Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte ZRGG 71,3 (Brill).]

§ Other prophets of the Death of God… and other Dead and Dying Gods.

Similar to generic dying God stories typical to agrarian cultures, announcements of the death of a God in the western world may also perhaps be seen to follow cycles. A first important announcement occurred in the mid-first century, at sea off the western coast of Greece, with the proclamation that the Great God Pan was dead. Some believe that this moment marked the beginning of the end of the pagan era. The announcement was heard a second time, in the late 19^th century, when Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, returning into the world of men from a self-imposed exile, encounters a holy man in the wood worshipping, says the Heiliger, “the God who is my God”-- a statement that leaves Zarathustra wondering at the fact that this holy man had not heard in his woods that God is dead. Nietzsche mitigates the matter-of-fact flatness of Zarathustra’s wonder by also composing an exalted, quasi-mystical dirge in the now-famous madman story from the Gay Science.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the greatest of all murderers? … Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

Many have been the assertions that “God is dead,” and sundry the variations on the theme: from the “flight of the Gods,” the “Entflohene Götter”, of Hölderlin, to the contemporary God is Dead movement in America. It seems, however, that there is always hidden within the very language of the assertion a second proposition: namely, that the Gods, and especially the God that surfaced in the theological traditions of the Christians, once existed. More philosophically oriented than the German romantics and their “Gods,” the high priests of the American Death of God movement offered up the death of the Christian God not by talking about “Him,” but rather, by talking about how humans seem to have transcended the need, interest, or even the possibility, of Him. So what has been at issue in this Death of God tradition, it would seem, is really not (the) Deity, but rather the human (lack of) interest story.

In the light of the various traditions of God/s in the West, then, and of Their dyings, let us examine a different alternative—let us assume that we moderns do in fact live post mortem Dei christiani. Let us also assume that there are plausible intellectual justifications for why the modern world has moved beyond the Christian faith.

In the Great Conversation, the "death of God" thinkers have laid the theoretical foundations of an idea. For when Plato posited the reality of the Forms to explain how things came into being and (were) moved, it was not long before Aristotle came along to point out that, at the end of the day, the Forms are only a theoretical model with logical issues (e.g., their immovable, yet causative natures, present contradiction), and that a very adequate, persuasive, and almost entirely empirical description of reality could be posited without them. Similarly, I would like to suggest that the modern God-is-Dead propositions and treatments also contain an untenable logical assumption – that the Christian God ever existed.

         The wider evidence of Western history, and not simply the evidence from the history of the Western philosophical tradition, suggests that it is in fact the Christian God, and very specifically The-God-of-the-Bible, who has gone missing. And there is no need of a romantic and exalted post mortem, for the failure of The-God-of-the-Bible, equal to that of His Alter Ego The God of the Christians, is that as a philosophical Fiction derived from debate and consensus, He/They never had any historical reality.

Is the Christian God, the Protagonist of the Bible, really dead? The question is certainly of academic interest to the scholar of religions, and also a challenge for the believer in the fides Christiana.

            Evidence clearly shows that The God of the Christians is not The-God-of-the-Bible; rather “It” is a Concept of philosophy—an extraterritorial Deity of Logic born out of the speculations of the earliest Platonized Christian philosophers. It could in fact be argued that Western philosophy already reached its zenith in the first half of the Common Era with the philosophical conception and articulation of this God, whose genealogy can be traced in its evolution from a Hellenistic Abstraktum, to a Supreme philosophico-religious Idea(l). This “God,” conceived very literally out of season, corresponds to the highest ideals of western neo-platonic thought, and bears no comparison, either in actions or character, to the historico-geographical deities of the Hebrew Bible. There is considerable evidence to substantiate this argument.

§ The-God-of-the-Bible.

Buttressed by archaeology, biblical scholarship has paved a wide road for the articulation of this argument; and much of recent scholarship received its impetus from Albrecht Alt’s groundbreaking 1929 essay on the God of the Fathers, which was so fruitfully furthered by the works of Albright, Gordon, D.N. Freedman, and the Harvard scholar Frank Cross, of Dead Sea Scrolls fame. The Albright “school,” in seeking to identify more fully the various Deities of the Bible in the light of Their ancient Near Eastern origins, has led some to wonder whether the Western Religious narrative has not in fact completely “lost” the Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible in its attempt to articulate a philosophical God. Such is R. Friedman’s recent thesis: that the Hebrew Bible is literally a record of the disappearance of God—that it is the story of a God who has gone into retirement, who, like the Canaanite El a thousand years before him, is become deus quiescens.

            This is a troubling state of affairs for the study of western religions. Indeed, it is potentially a worst-case scenario. For in addition to having perhaps identified the wrong deity as God, western religious scholars now must consider the possibility that the Hebrew Bible may be the narrative record of a God-become-absent from the world of men (deus absconditus).  Indeed, it has always been difficult for the missionary to make a persuasive case for a God who is not present to defend himself publicly—the Baalite priests of I Kings 18 learned from Elijah, much to their detriment, that les [dieux] absents ont toujours tort.

The German Assyriologist Friedrich Delitzsch profiled this argument already in a 1920 volume entitled, The Great Deception, in which he argued that, just like the other olden gods: “the Hebrew national god (Nationalgott) belongs also to the ‘anemic’ ones (elîlîm)—as the Old Testament relishes designating the gods of other peoples—and it is impossible that he should be identified … with the most-powerful GOD.” Delitzsch concludes with this: “Israel is not the people of ‘GOD’, but the people of Jaho, as Moab is the people of Kemosh and Assur the people of the god Asur.” In a similar iteration in the Interpreter’s Bible one reads: “The religion of the fathers was not the same as the worship of the thundering Yahweh of Sinai. The God pictured in Genesis is not like the God who reveals himself to Moses in the book of Exodus.”

(Reprised from an original Phrontisterion essay first posted in April 2013)