Martin Heidegger (1889 - 1976)
For a period of seven years, from 1931 to 1938, Martin Heidegger, one of the most celebrated German philosophers today, was a member and supporter of the fascist Nazi party as it rose to power and took authoritarian control of Germany and Austria. Though he eventually came to doubt the party, spoke critically of its development and was put under surveillance by the Gestapo (the Nazi secret police), he enthusiastically embraced their rise and seizure of power, spoke at propaganda rallies in several cities, and openly spoke of the Nazis as a rebirth of Western civilization, a return to the revolutionary times of ancient Greece.
Because I myself am influenced by Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, as well as Marcuse and Foucault who have both been influenced by these three, and because Heidegger took the worst of Hegel (eurocentrism, the birth of self-conscious individualism in ancient Greece and the destiny and realization of ancient Greek thought in Germany) and the best of Nietzsche (existentialism, the idea of absolute truth as denial of death, perspective, interpretation and transformation), for me Heidegger’s support of the Nazis is the question we would often prefer to ask our opponent rather than ourselves: how is it that our systems aim for the greatest human fulfillment yet support the worst practices of humankind, including genocide, slavery, and censorship?
Heidegger wrote in his major work Sein und Zeit, ‘Being and Time’ (1927), that authentic being is questioning, that categorical and absolute truth are ignorance of one’s own human nature, and every revealing is a concealing. How is it that he believed the Nazis, a fascist regime enthusiastic about racism, censorship, and brutality were a magnificent chance for questioning, renewal and transformation? Just as Heidegger argues that being is authentic as questioning or inauthentic as a denial of questioning, this is a question that philosophers should ask rather than avoid, particularly as all varieties of philosophy, including the religious and anti-religious, the analytical and existential, joined the Nazi cause.
Let us examine Heidegger’s thought, with a particular focus on his use of Nietzsche. For Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger the beginning of self-conscious questioning that is philosophy began in glorious ancient Greece with Heraclitus, Plato and Aristotle. This set the European West apart from other cultures as philosophical. For Hegel and Heidegger, Germany was the natural culmination and destiny of Greek thought and philosophy, while for Nietzsche the Germans were fooling themselves through science, religion, nationalism and antisemitism into thinking they were the great race, and he moved to Switzerland, renounced his German citizenship and declared himself to be a citizen of no country. I myself would have preferred Nietzsche to be as critical of ancient Greek superiority as he was of German nationalism and antisemitism. In the opening paragraphs of Being and Time, Heidegger looks to the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece in the hopes that he can reclaim this glorious past and rebirth of thought. Heidegger believed, like Hitler and Nietzsche (though Nietzsche was far more critical and cynical) that one should look to the Greeks to be German, as the Greeks were the rebellion that gave birth to authentic thinking and learning. Heidegger, as countless other professors and academics, confuses his own self easily with the identity of the ancient Greeks and the Western mind.
The Great Depression, the 1920s and 30s, was the time when Heidegger did his critical writing and gained fame and position, a time when many feared the fall of the West and the death of Christian European civilization. Heidegger, like Rousseau and Nietzsche, was an anti-modernist anti-technology romantic who spoke of Greece as a more glorious and meaningful time. These thinkers in turn influenced Marcuse, Adorno and the Frankfurt School. Later Adorno, Jewish like Marcuse, both having fled the Nazis for Switzerland and then New York, wrote a 1964 pamphlet, The Jargon of Authenticity, criticizing Heidegger for supporting the Nazis while calling for self-questioning, which is ironic given Adorno hated jazz and argued that music was over after Beethoven.
Heidegger originally studied to be a Catholic theologian, but after studying Neo-Platonism he switched his study to philosophy and wrote his thesis on Duns Scotus. Husserl, the phenomenologist, took him under his wing as his star pupil, and as phenomenology (the school of studying the mind by focusing on how we experience the phenomena or things around us) rose to fame and gathered followers Heidegger began to gather fame and followers of his own. Husserl wanted a science of the mind, a radical criticism of all philosophy and psychology up through Kant and Hegel. Husserl is famous for the idea of intentionality, that consciousness is always directed toward something or away from something by intention. Nietzsche similarly believes that thought is always instinct and drive. Wanting, fearing, loving, and assessing objects is never neutral, nor is our own philosophical grasping of our grasping cold or objective.
Husserl studied the various and often subtle ways we are intentional in our world under the banner of phenomenology, a term invented by Hegel but intended as an open speculative psychology by Husserl. The world and subject co-develop together in an evolving symbiotic relationship. Husserl kept writing and expanding his work, but rather than develop a new alphabet for thought as he had originally intended his work snowballed out of control and continued to amass until his death. Heidegger picked up Husserl’s work, but merged this with Nietzsche and took it in an anti-scientific existential direction. Heidegger forms his own insights based on the work of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Husserl. Husserl’s scientific Freudian ego becomes Hegel’s ‘dasein’, or being-there. Heidegger emphasizes the open-ended multiplicity of being and interpretation romantically like Nietzsche.
What is existentialism? Sartre, who we will study next, coined the term to describe the skeptical school of thought, the deep questioning of human understanding and knowledge, that was initiated by Kierkegaard, a student of Hegel’s, and Nietzsche. Sartre read Heidegger, and applied the label ‘existentialism’ to their own work as well, both quite influenced by Nietzsche. Thus, in some ways Sartre was the first official ‘existentialist’, thought this is often said of Nietzsche with others contending that the first was in fact Kierkegaard. Soren Kierkegaard (1813 - 1855) was an enthusiastically Christian Dutch thinker who found Hegel’s claim to absolute knowledge and system of thought out of touch with the experience of the individual. Kierkegaard was the Dionysus to Hegel’s Apollo, arguing that the individual was thrown into the world without a chance at reason reaching an absolute understanding, much like Schopenhauer saw things. For Kierkegaard, any human undertaking or belief is a leap of faith, a risk that one individually takes. Nietzsche, as we saw last week, was of a similar mind, arguing that we must have the courage to be individuals in a world that defies reason. Heidegger and Sartre both read Nietzsche and agreed that modern times show us that the human experience, in spite of the rising tide of science and technology, is a dramatic and risky quest for meaning and purpose. One can pair essentialism, that there are given essential meanings and purposes for human life and our world, with existentialism, that we must create meaning and purpose for human life and the world. As Nietzsche warns last week, to be skeptical this way, which Sartre calls ‘existentialism’, one risks nihilism, staring into the void and finding nothing, but only this sort of courage can bring greater meaning and truth to one’s life.
Heidegger argues in Being and Time that philosophy means being a beginning, the way one weighs anchor while setting sail out into the vast ocean. Remember Nietzsche has Zarathustra say to the crowd in the marketplace, “What is great in man is that he is a bridge, and not a goal”. We are thrown into the world, which Heidegger calls “thrownness”, as a being-there, or there-being, in German, “dasein”, a term Heidegger borrows from Hegel. Heidegger is famous, some would say infamous, for inventing his own vocabulary and Heideggerians follow this jargon to an equally infamous extent. Welcome to Heidegger-speak 101. What Heidegger is doing is trying to merge Hegel with Nietzsche, to identify Hegel’s becoming with Nietzsche’s rejection of both dogmatic morals and nihilism. For Heidegger, the goal is not the system of absolute knowledge as it was for Hegel, but attaining an authentic transparency of one’s own self and giving life one’s own purposes, as sought by Nietzsche.
Heidegger asks, how do we experience reality before and as we arrange it? What is the ground of being that supports our views and values? The world is “worlding” around us and as us, and thus we are “being-in-the-world”. We approach the world, each other, and objects either as closed and identified or as mysterious, uncanny and miraculous. Industrialization and technology have disenchanted the world, and so we must question the world and re-enchant it. Mystery and truth appear only in the cracks of our industrialized reality when things break or go missing. My good friend who got me interested in philosophy, who was at the time a Heideggerian, used the example of dropping the soap as you take your morning shower. Objects and persons disappear until they are out of place or misused, and then we become conscious of them. Consider a poster on a wall that we stop seeing after time, which then becomes new again and leaps out if we call attention to it again. Consider Nazis, and times of crisis, which Heidegger unfortunately saw as an opportunity to re-enchant the technological world.
This tendency to box and categorize the world is imperfect, and cracks can become ruptures. This is remarkably similar to ideas in anarchism and among artists such as the Dada who believe we can reanimate and enchant the world to break beyond its boxes. Nietzsche, an existentialist like Heidegger, similarly romanticized ruptures and struggle with the categorical and the dead in thought. We build meaning as individuals, as groups and as cultures in the face of the infinite. While Nietzsche would implore us to strike out on our own here as an individual, and only individuality could give our meaning and perspective authenticity, Heidegger parts ways with Nietzsche and declares that our being-there is always a ‘they’ as much as it is an ‘I’. As with Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, the individual comes into the world already populated by a “they”, and one is a part of this “them” as much as one is thrown against it. Remember that Hegel speaks of the evolution of stages in history, which is driven by individuals but is always a social expression of the mind and its formation. While I am in favor of this view, balancing the Hegelian group with the Nietzschean individual, Heidegger’s identification with Germany and the Nazis is in stark contrast to Nietzsche’s renunciation of German citizenship and denunciation of German nationalism.
Heidegger argues that every revealing is a concealing, that history both gives us our meanings as it removes others from our sight. This is similar to Nietzsche arguing that every philosophy is a self confession of its author. Consider the statement, “Science is true”, what this reveals as well as what it conceals. We have made great leaps and bounds through technology, but does this always help humanity? To stand for something, one takes a risk. To believe in something, one focuses on what one wants to be true. For both Nietzsche and Heidegger, it is good to stand for things, to create and live, but to do this well is to understand that we must take responsibility for this ourselves and not place its truth on another being such as religion or science. When we say that a system is true, we are individuals taking a gamble. To lose sight of this is to lose one’s freedom and a great deal of one’s power, even though it can be frightening, indeed the most frightening thing, to admit.
For Heidegger, Being and beings withdraw from our grasp as we grasp them. Time continuously gives us the present as it takes the present from us. Meaning is always historical, always has “historicity”. Remember that one of Hegel’s great contributions to philosophy was to understand all thought as historical process. For Heidegger, being is always bound up with time, and thus the title, “Being and Time”. Time is the horizon of being. In this way, time gives us our meanings as it stretches beyond, taking from us any clear view of how long our meanings can be as they are for us. As time and being are seen and unseen, so there can be no absolute judgment, interpretation or meaning. Nietzsche argues for a multiplicity of interpretation and meaning that cannot be reduced to a single objective truth. Care and life are always as much for oneself as much as for something else that never fully arrives, just as we never reach the horizon as we walk.
For Freud, all thought is denial of sex. For Heidegger, all thought is denial of death. Understanding oneself as a simple and singular being, the conception of closed scientific facts and categorical, eternal, absolute truths, is the way we cope with the fear of death. We are in a basic state of anxiety towards our world that extends over the horizon just as we are afraid of particular people and objects. The things in front of our faces distract us from our more basic and fundamental fear of the world. Nietzsche gives Heidegger this picture, arguing that we can inauthentically ignore the void by turning to absolute immutable truths, or we can give up and find no meaning in life, but rather we should authentically give and create our own meaning as life itself, though again Nietzsche sees this as an individual activity that is corrupted by participation in social movements.
Heidegger agrees that we must make our way from absolute being to nihilism and beyond to understand ourselves as essentially becoming and transformation. We imagine we and our truths simply exist as a denial of death and meaninglessness which have just as central a role to play in our questioning, discovery, and living. Out of the basic state of anxiety spring love, fear, rejoicing, suspicion, and a variety of ways we interact with our world. True freedom is realizing this and gaining self-conscious transparency. We must resist reducing ourselves, our truths and even objects as “ready-to-hand” if we wish to truly live. We kill the world and ourselves continuously in the attempt to avoid death, but if we accept death and meaninglessness, we are free to live and give our lives meaning. If we realize we are running off into the woods to avoid being lost, we can learn to dwell comfortably at home.
For Hegel, to recognize being is non-being together as one is to understand becoming. For Nietzsche, all truths are idols to be smashed, such that new truths can freely grow in their place. For Heidegger, to recognize we, our world, and everything and everyone in it both has meaning and is meaningless, is enclosed but remains open and alive, is to live authentically rather than kill to avoid death. To get what one truly wants, one has to accept its opposite.
Jean Paul Sartre (1905 - 1980)
Sartre (pronounced, ‘Sart’, though the British pronounce it ‘Sar-truh’), who coined the term ‘existentialism’, is often known better as an author of novels and plays than as a philosopher in Britain and America, where Nietzsche and Heidegger are not always taught but are much more than Sartre. This is in part political. With Stalin’s brutal dictatorship in Russia, many European intellectuals had to choose whether to continue to be Marxists or to abandon Communism all together (often remaining socialists, but identifying as ‘post-Marxists’ who no longer have faith in the entirely planned economy of Communism). Albert Camus (1913 - 1960), a friend of Sartre, author of The Stranger and The Rebel, chose to abandon Marxism, while Sartre decided to continue to identify with Marxism and Communism, continuing to believe that violent revolution was unfortunately in the interests of the common people. Camus was often called an existentialist, but he rejected the label and called himself an absurdist, like the Dada and Surrealist artists we will look at near the end of the course.
Sartre saw his own philosophy as an extension of the work of Heidegger. In response to Heidegger’s Being and Time, Sartre wrote his Being and Nothingness. In it, he argues like Heidegger that the basic condition of humanity is anxiety, fear in the face of the unknown, and that most of the time we avoid this deeper fear by becoming involved with the world, trying to keep what we like and avoid what we hate. In the process, we become ignorant of ourselves, of the world, and of our relationships with our fellow human beings.
Nietzsche wondered aloud in many of his writings why philosophers, who claim to seek the meaning of life, spend so little time contemplating friendship, laughter, and romance, things which give us great meaning but which are hard to define or understand. He argues that it is just because these things are so meaningful and so alive that makes them hard to pin down, hard to understand consistently. Nietzsche approaches the problem by giving up on consistency and writing his philosophy as a dynamic and contradictory flow. This fits much with the absurdism of Camus and modern artists. Sartre, as a Heideggerian, argues that there is a consistent way that we inauthentically try to avoid the dynamic life of our relationships with others, both those who are intimate (family, friends, partners) and those we pass on the street or encounter in a shop.
Sartre uses his famous example of a waiter in a cafe to illustrate. Sartre did much of his writing in the cafes of Paris, and he describes the scene as if he is witnessing it firsthand. The waiter in a cafe plays his role, overemphasising the rigidity and seriousness of the gestures, the bows, the distribution and collecting of menus, the seriousness with which orders are taken, to define himself as a waiter, as filling his role, his work. We and he come to inauthentically see him as a waiter, and not as a human being. The waiter becomes a robot, and his individuality disappears, both for our and his comfort. We find it easier to interact with a role than with the actor as a person, and the actor finds it easier to lose himself in the role than to try to retain individuality while serving in his position. For Sartre, it becomes easy for us to lose sight of the situation as a whole, that this is not a waiter in essence but a human being playing the role of a waiter. While it would be tiresome to say, “Excuse me, authentic human individual playing the temporary role of a waiter, can I have another espresso?”, our substitution of the word ‘waiter’ for the individual does violence to our awareness of the situation.
Sartre wrote Antisemitism and Jew in 1944, as Paris was liberated from the Nazis. Like Nietzsche, Sartre argues that racism, that the Nazis had for Jews as well as that which the French had for North Africans (Arabs and native Africans), is a similar violent inauthentic effort to box up the other rather than deal with the complexity of dealing with our fellow human beings face to face. In one of his plays, Sartre’s main character famously says, “Hell is other people”. We are constantly faced with others who do and do not know themselves as we do and do not know ourselves. Like the horizon of time for Heidegger, the ‘other’ threatens to give us new meanings while simultaneously take all meaning away. To face this authentically is to have a good and positive faith in life and the generation of meaning. To have what Sartre calls “bad faith” is to trust that meanings are closed and dead, that the waiter is nothing more to oneself than a waiter, that the Jew or African is nothing more to oneself or one’s nation than another who is simply other with no relation.
Sartre, like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, believed that art can liberate us from the common human condition, however, most art for Sartre is inauthentic. Much literature reinforces our prejudices and ideas, giving us a shallow and false substitute for meaning in an increasingly mechanized and commodified world. Sartre sought to write and entertain in ways that opened up audiences to examine themselves, their world, and each other with new possibilities of meaning and activity. This is as true of the individual, who could come to identify with the waiter as a friend, as it is of society, which could come to identify with the marginalized and oppressed. Rather than try to hold up the barriers between self and other, we must, as Hegel argues, seek resolution of contradictions not merely to gain the powers of reason, but to truly be alive.
Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984)
Foucault is now a very celebrated and well studied thinker not only in philosophy but also in history, sociology and political science. He also taught briefly at Berkeley. His books are critical historical studies of social institutions and practices such as prisons, psychiatric hospitals, science and sexuality. Foucault called himself a Nietzschean and his critical philosophy centers on the idea of the human tendency to privilege what is labeled as good while marginalizing and dominating what is labeled as evil. Foucault went on vacation to the French Riviera and brought Nietzsche, who he had not yet read, with him, and then stayed in his hotel room the entire time reading Nietzsche, overcome with his criticism of all institutions. Foucault, already a psychiatrist, became fascinated with the complexity of good and evil Nietzsche unearthed, not merely as morality but as ‘sane’ and ‘insane’ in the history of psychiatry, of ‘normal’ and ‘perverse’ in the history of sexuality, of ‘law-abiding’ and ‘criminal’ in the history of prisons.
As a Nietzschean, Foucault is deeply critical of any claim to absolute or objective knowledge, distrusts binary dichotomies such as good/bad, true/false, opinion/knowledge or sane/insane, and understands truth as a struggle between competing forces, institutions and interpretations. Institutions must support binary divisions to maintain power and pronounce themselves objective holders of genuine knowledge and truth. This bends our view of reality such that the dominant system (religion, science, politics, etc) is simply identified with truth and the messy historical process and evolution of systems of thought is obscured. On one side, giving an institution the right to distinguish the sane from the insane is quite sane and sober. On the other, when one looks at the complex history of uses and abuses of these categories, one can find much that is outright insanity. Are the institutions sane or insane? How can we know so simply, when these are the complexes that determine their own sanity, their own ability to be good or embody justice and truth?
For Foucault knowledge is always involved with serving power, just as for Nietzsche truth is always involved with serving desire. We have all heard ‘Knowledge is Power!’ as a good thing, but for Foucault knowledge is not only enabling power, it is repressive domination. Truth is not outside power, but is a thing of this world. Just as for Nietzsche, institutions and their systems of thought (Foucault famously held a chair in ‘History of Systems of Thought’) grow and thrive on opposition and problems.
Foucault studies the complicated historical situations when one form of power, knowledge and dominance shifts to become another form as circumstances change. A dominant theme of his work is that with industrialization people have to learn to police and dominate themselves and the authorities have to convince them that it is their own idea and independence. Marcuse describes something similar in One-Dimensional Man. The famous metaphor Foucault uses is the Panopticon, a prison designed by the philosopher Bentham, teacher and friend of the utilitarian John Stuart Mill. The Panopticon is a prison designed so that everyone can see that they are possibly being watched, but they can see little other than this. Never knowing when they are being watched, never seeing their observers, they learn to behave as if they are always being watched, and thus even without any guards they learn to police themselves and be constantly in self-conscious anxiety.
Thus, science such as psychiatry serves powerful interests while baptizing itself as disinterested objective truth, and the average person believes that they are smart and free for believing what they are told in a magazine rather than understanding the complicated and brutal process of various forms of truth that compete with each other. Foucault believes that we should push for what we want and strive for greater understanding while knowing that we are naturally greedy, abusive, marginalizing, and ignorant.
Power is not just a negative thing, but everything, so the form of the bad is the form of the good. One can see the influence of Nietzsche and a philosopher who is “beyond good and evil”. Thus, communists who declare themselves to be liberators are also oppressors, and people who feel oppressed by society are also helping to oppress themselves through their own individual fear and desires. Human nature is neither good nor evil, but the two together. While not openly calling himself an anarchist, Foucault distrusted all forms of authority and became disenchanted with communism and other forms of left wing thought.
Just as we had rationalists and empiricists, and now positivists and existentialists, Foucault was at first understood as a structuralist, but later as a post-structuralist or post-modernist. He is concerned with showing the structures of power as they grow from what he calls the capillary level, the tips of the branches, the experiences of individuals, up through the dominant institutions, cultures and identities. While this is quite structuralist, very much a description of history and sociology that presents itself as the record and truth, Foucault seeks in a Nietzschean fashion to constantly subvert our perspectives and the institutions, to show that what we try to marginalize consequentially becomes quite dominant. The insanity, brutality and evil that we seek to overcome, that we try to lock away in the asylums and prisons, that we try to barricade against through walls and warfare, becomes the new manifestation of contradiction and chaos, the new complex that continuously strives to overcome itself while simultaneously remaining blind to its own actions.
In a debate with Noam Chomsky, Foucault argues that the very idea that we will achieve a good and just society as opposed to this now or another outside is the domination, oppression and ignorance that characterizes human history. While we should always strive for the best, we should always remain aware that we are always capable of the worst, and that it is the very striving to separate ourselves from the worst that often brings the worst itself about. To truly be aware of our lives and our possibilities, to live responsibly and with greater awareness, means recognizing that there is always risk, that nothing is ever absolutely safe. All we can do is strive as best we can, and this constant becoming. While Foucault focuses on the history of institutions, we can easily see the resemblance of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and Foucault in striving for acceptance of change and the need to continuously question and perfect the individual and society.
