Ethics: Sexism & Feminism

Introducing Prejudice (Sexism & Racism)

A friend of mine had a horrible experience when I was preparing this lecture on sexism and the next on racism for the first time.  He was playing video games online, and one of the players asked if anybody was black in the most offensive way possible.  My friend, who is black, said he did not know how to respond and simply said nothing in return.  He said he was still not sure if he should have said something or not, and that this was the first OVERT racism he had experienced in the new millennium.  He made a further observation that I have found quite valuable in describing racism and sexism in America today: While OVERT prejudice is often and in most places rare today, COVERT prejudice is constant and continuous.  While slurs, mob violence and other open acts of racism are rare, we still live in a culture that is racially divided with institutions plagued by institutional racism.  While women wear pants and are not openly called “doll” or “baby” so much anymore, the glass ceiling remains alive and well.

Just a little while ago, overt prejudice was the law of the land.  Women were told openly, by teachers and scientists, that they were intellectually and socially inferior to men.  I have an older co-worker who told me that when he was in elementary school in San Diego in the early 1950s, his class put on a production of Little Black Sambo, a British children’s story about a boy in India.  He got the main part of Sambo which he performed in blackface, applied by his teacher.  Because the British called Indians and Africans “blacks”, but this term is not applied to Indians in America, the children in the chorus were dressed up in overalls and mammy dresses and the teacher had them sing ‘Camp Town Races’ and other traditional black songs from the days of slavery even though Sambo is Indian and not ‘black’ or from the South.

It is a sign of progress that overt racism and sexism has become covert.  This change has happened almost entirely in the last 50 years, since the 60s and the triumphs made by the civil rights and feminist movements.  Unfortunately this change has convinced many, both right and left wing, that racism and sexism no longer exist in America.  The media, which downplays America’s social problems (as we looked at with propaganda), ignores racism and sexism for the most part.  Worst of all, the few times it pays attention to these problems is when they serve the interests of the dominant majority or powers that be.  As my friend noted, if you point at covert racism as a marginalized person, YOU are called racist.  We hear about white people losing opportunities to affirmative action policies, but not about racism against minority groups that cost them the same sorts of opportunities.  Just after 9/11, feminists made brief appearances on news programs to tell us of the evils that traditional Islamic culture inflicts upon women, and then feminism disappeared again from our televisions.



I enjoy looking at the animal kingdom to see the root behaviors of our human problems.  While the apes are our most direct ancestors, the octopus is studied by researchers as one of our most important and ancient ancestors because it has a brain very much like our brain stem, the most basic and early part of our brains.  Thus, studying octopi allows us to study the most basic behaviors of animals and ourselves.  In one study, researchers took an octopus and shocked it whenever they showed it a teddy bear.  Quite understandably, the octopus soon became very scared of the bear, but the experiment did not stop there.  They took a second octopus, put it in a separate tank next to the other traumatized octopus so the two could not communicate other than by sight.  They then showed the teddy bear to the first octopus, and let the second octopus watch the first be frightened.  They then took away the first octopus and showed the second the teddy bear.  Surprisingly, the second octopus was even more frightened of the teddy bear than the first.  The researchers concluded that octopi can watch each other, as all animals with brains can, and learn about what they should like or fear from the behaviors of others.  They also concluded, important for considering prejudice, that the second octopus was more scared than the first because it knew it should be scared of the teddy bear but did not know why it should be scared.

Consider that covert and institutional prejudice are learned reactions and fears, and they need never be consciously or overtly expressed or explained by those who teach or learn these reactions.  In this sense, covert prejudice can be more severe and harder to unlearn because it is never consciously or overtly expressed and so there is no opportunity for direct criticism.

A good (or rather horrible) example of covert racism is covered in a famous article The Myth of Model Minority.  The article was written in the 90s by Rosalind Chou, then an Asian-American college student who was upset by many articles in Time and Newsweek that warned of rising Asian-American voices as a new “special-interest” group.  These articles seemed to speak with the voice of the “average” American, in the name of “the common interest”, a voice that feared Asian voices becoming like African and Latino voices of dissent.  Apparently, the “common interest” is threatened by minority groups who have “special interests” that can pull in the opposite direction, and warns that while Asians have been quiet and supportive of the common interest in the past there are signs that they are becoming dissenting opinions like the voices of Africans and Latinos.  Chou notes that Time, Newsweek and the mainstream media often speak with such a voice, a voice which does not identify itself as particular or white at all but is speaking in opposition to all other interests.  Why are Asian and African and Latino American interests not “our” common interests?  This is one of the dominant ways that covert racism remains a constant and very real experience for many Americans.

Today, we cover sexism and the reactions of feminists to the oppression of women.  Just like for Asian Americans, feminists are not “us” in the media but a special interest group that opposes the common interest.


Myths and Realities of Gender Differences

The myth is that women are docile, non-violent, unconfident, incompetent, and emotional.  Grossman already has told us that there is no difference between men and women in combat physically or psychologically.  Women are capable of violence and even rape, though our society does not recognize this yet (Melody’s lesbian serial rapist story, female gang members story, female serial murderers as poisoning, girls style of picking on people vs. boys).  Women are not unconfident or emotional compared to men.  Consider that it has been said women have a emotional-sexual cycle that lasts 28 days, men’s lasts 6 minutes.

What, then, are the differences between men and women?
Most obviously, there are physiological differences that relate to sex and procreation.  In addition, there are two dynamics of psychology in which women differ from men.

First, men tend to seek power through NOT being social, isolating themselves and their opinions, whereas women tend to seek power through BEING social, interacting with others.  The two best examples are 1) classic women ‘let’s talk’ vs. men ‘I don’t want to talk about it’ that becomes strained in many heterosexual relationships (choosing a restaurant, where women wants to discuss and man wants her to just pick), and 2) male boss ‘don’t bring it to me until it’s done and done right’ vs. female boss ‘let’s go over the details so we are on the same page’ difference of support offered.

Second, in sexuality, men like to watch women and women like to be watched, as one author has said, to watch themselves being watched.  Women want to be desired, whereas men want to get what they desire.  BOTH OF THESE differences are relative and to a degree, a leaning apart as I like to say.  Thus, men like being watched and desired, and women don’t want to talk about everything.

Other than these RELATIVE oppositions, there is no good evidence to suggest that men and women are very much different at all.  The work of Piaget suggests that men and women undergo the same mental development in the same set of stages at roughly the same ages.


History of Sexism and Feminism

In apes and the most ancient nomadic and tribal societies, there is evidence that women often had status and leadership positions.  Women were shamans, leaders, and there were often central female mother gods.  As people began to collect into city states, we can see patriarchy increase.

Why did this happen?  The best explanation so far, one that does not rely on any inability of women, is the increased size of the community.  When people lived in small communities, women could raise children at the center of the village, as the political center.  As city states increased in size, it made it increasingly difficult to raise one’s children at the public center.  Thus, women retreated into the home, and men, who had to be the go-for before now were the ones who could venture out of the home and into the centers of political activity.  Today, devices allow women to raise children while fully participating in public life, but women are still confined in a way to the home in balancing life between home and career.

When we look at the cultures of the world and their historical development, we can see that all cultures have taken part in a similar oppression of women, but at the same time women have had increasing power in society and new movements have to appeal to women to take off.  Consider that Buddhism, Christianity and Islam (the three largest cultures yet) all had to offer women better status and rights than they had previously (Naga princess story of Buddhism, stories of Jesus involving women and men cheating equally bad, Islamic law and divorce and consensual sex), but all three oppressed women (nuns can only teach kids).

Modern society has continued the trend, such that today women have equal legal status in many nations but covert sexism and a lack of women owning property persists.  A united Nations 2004 report claims that women work 20% more a day on job and home together than men do (10 ½ hours to men 8 ¾ hours).  Women are 51% of the population (technically the MAJORITY of the population), do 66% of the work, get 10% of the income, and worldwide own 1% of the property.  Thus, sexism (overt AND covert) is quite alive, in spite of counter claims.
(Performance art piece with empty area of museum with card that says women who clean are the artists who have performed in this space).

Feminism is the movement in reaction to sexism and prejudice against women.  The basic idea is that women should have the same status as men in society, or “women are people too” (Kate Weber from high school assembly asks crowd ‘Who thinks women are equal to men?’ most everyone raised hands, ‘Then you are all feminists!’, impressed me much).  It is a shame that people, men but ALSO women, are afraid of calling themselves feminists, largely from the backlash of the 80s between the second wave and third wave of feminism which said that “militant feminists” “hate men”.

There are three waves, each building on the last and addressing new issues from the last wave.

The first wave was the women’s suffrage movement of the 1920s in America and Britain.
The most famous figure is Susan B. Anthony.  She argued that the abortion issue should be set aside to concentrate on women’s right to vote as an adult citizen and women’s right to refuse sex to their husbands (note Mohammed in the Ahadith says this in 600 CE, with problems today).
The first wave, not of course known as that till the second wave, ended in 1919 with 19th amendment to the constitution.

The second wave was the civil rights movement, the late 60s and early 70s which is also called the women’s liberation movement or ‘women’s lib’.  Defined by Carol Hanisch’s phrase “The personal is political”, took off in early 60s and culminated in the civil rights act of 1966 (backed by both NOW and NAACP, the biggest US anti-sexism and racism groups together).  While the first wave said ‘this is America so we deserve to vote’, the second wave was part of anti-establishment left movement that said that America was a corrupt institution that needed to be changed.

Simone De Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex in France in 1953, arguing that women had been marginalized as ‘The OTHER’ by men using Hegel’s idea of the master-slave dialectic (my German Hegel professor ‘a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle’ speaking of feminists using Hegel).
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The Feminine Mystique (1963) by Betty Friedan was another big book of the time (much more published in America than Marxist De Beauvoir’s), arguing that women were not feeling fulfilled as homemakers and mothers, and they needed an identity for themselves as individuals beyond the identity of the family (valium in the 50s, TV’s Madmen).

The major criticism of the movement, which only fully rose in the third wave:
Gloria Jean Watkins, known as ‘bell hooks’, early critic of 2nd wave as white middle class women empowerment that ignores all else in the name of ‘feminism’, thus hooks’ ‘womanism’.

The third wave was after the 80s backlash against the 60s progressive movements that began in the early 90s and continues today.  The third wave tried to not only pay attention to black women, Latina women, third world women, but also to break down the idea of women as essentially different from men but equal.

The two big issues, which are still being fought out today, are 1) Is gender a subjective construct (in the mind) or social reality (in the world)? And 2) Did feminism accomplish what it set out to achieve, or did it in part hurt its own efforts in telling women that sex makes them oppressed?  I was talking with a co-worker the other day, and she said her son and his friends in high school think that feminists are hippie women who don’t shave their arm pits, hate men and think that the oppression of women is a thing of the past.  Notice that this deals with these two issues: the kids misunderstand feminists as both anti-sex and not recognizing the battle is over.

First Issue: Structuralism of 50s & 60s vs. Post-Structuralism after 60s.  De Beauvoir says that ‘one is not born a woman, one becomes a woman’.  Judith Butler (I saw speak on Wed) says that gender identity is performative.  Both of these figures thus back the poststructuralist conception, that identity is created and performed.

Second Issue: If a woman puts on makeup and wears a short skirt, is she being oppressed or is she actively expressing her individual sexuality?  Second wave came under fire from the third wave because feminists often told women that if they tried to be sexy they were being deceived and made into property (vs. my friend from Berkeley at the Lusty Lady, working for prostitute’s rights here and in the third world).  This drew a fight between anti-pornography and prostitution feminists and younger pro-sex feminism.  Pro-sex feminists ask, even if we are talking of abusive male style porn (vs. porn FOR lesbians), do you want to make porn illegal?  Should we try to deny men watching women and lust, or should we empower the individual woman to live as freely and equally as men in a complex and messy world?

This is still a big issue, as many feminist authors have argued that TV and movies today SEEM to be pro-feminist (Sex and the City, Ali McBeal, Brigit Jones’ Diary) but in fact they are stories where a working white woman (and her friends) try to find the perfect man to find happiness.

Grrrl punk movement of the 90s, lead group Bikini Kill as third wave branch.

Intro Philosophy: Heidegger, Sartre & Foucault

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.

Social & Political Philosophy: Fascism

Fascism is a word that many say but fewer understand and explain.  The word Fascist comes from fasces, a tied bundle of rods or sticks.  One stick can be easily broken, but many bound together cannot.  The ancient Romans used a bunch of rods and an ax tied together as a symbol of Rome, and rulers would often have such a bundle carried in front of them and symbolically present in halls and during speeches.  The Italian fascists identified with and glorified Roman power and empire, and they named themselves after the bundle and put it on their flag.  These were the first “fascists”, followed soon by German Nazis under Hitler and Spanish fascists under Franco.

The definition and philosophy of fascism is highly debated.  Industrialization is typically identified as a necessary condition for fascism, and as we have seen political philosophy in Europe is profoundly concerned with industry, technology, and capitalism rising along with these two.  Right wing authoritarianism and nationalism, with patriotic support of war and empire and conservative taste in culture, tends to be the weak consensus among theorists, but does that make all conservatives or nationalists fascists?  The tempting answer from the left is a simple yes, but there were a great variety of philosophies and policies that supported fascism before WWII and still today, and fascists want to transform society even if they often celebrate traditional culture, masculinity, discipline and patriotism.  There were left wing and right wing factions among Italian fascists, and fascists were influenced by ideas from both wings.

Consider that Mussolini supported Jewish rights before adopting Hitler’s antisemitism.  Consider that the Nazis said many anti-capitalist pronouncements that sound identical to those made by communism, calling themselves national socialists before accepting corporate backing soon after they started to become successful and dropped all anti-capitalist rhetoric and policies long before Hitler gained power (Nazis believed that Jews controlled the world economy and were ruining Europe during the great depression, so they were angry at capitalism as a Jewish device before they allied themselves with corporate interests in Germany, Britain and America).  Consider that there were Christian Nazis and anti-Christian Nazis.  Consider that there were Neo-Kantians as well as existentialists like Heidegger who joined the Nazi cause on both sides of the dogmatism/skepticism spectrum in philosophy.

We could try the opposite approach, and say what fascism ISN’T by looking at its triadic hate relationship with communism (or international socialism) and anarchism.  Fascists do not like anarchist ideas like getting rid of war, the police state, national borders, or free love.  They do not like communism because even if communists believe in imposing an authoritarian structure in the name of revolution they argue, in theory, for a dismantling of authoritarianism by process.  Anarchists, as we have seen, argue that communism is authoritarianism in the name of anarcho-syndicalism, so an anarchist might say that there is no difference between the two.  Fascists would argue that anarchism, communism and libertarian capitalism are all the same, as they lack the strength and discipline of authoritarianism.  Like communism, fascists argue that the time of crisis requires authority and order, but unlike communists they do not argue for a more bottom-up democratic future.  One could say that Stalin’s “socialism in one country” approaches fascism, but even still evolution is expected.


Italy Under Mussolini

Mussolini was the first fascist dictator, as the Italians coined the term fascism from the Roman symbol.  His glorification of violence inspired Hitler, who imitated Mussolini and then surpassed him with the superior power and technology of Germany.  World leaders praised both Mussolini and Hitler for standing up and viciously smashing communists, but then when Italy and Germany expanded their empires, Italy first in Africa and then Germany in Eastern Europe, the British, French and Americans amongst others declared war for cutting in on their action (since they themselves wished to maintain control and exploitation of Africa as well as everywhere else).  The Pope said that Mussolini was sent by divine providence.  Churchill said Mussolini was the Roman genius whose triumphant struggle against communism had rendered a service to the entire world.  Italy hoped for an empire in Africa and thus a seat at the table with other powerful European nations, but they banded together to eventually defeat both Italian and German ambitions.

With the Great Depression of the 1920s, despair was everywhere and one had to ask how to rebuild and thrive.  Communism offered a way forward, and their numbers exploded.  In reaction against communism’s anti-religious, anti-elite, anti-authoritarian internationalism, many on the right but some on the left joined the fascist cause.  After Russia, and then again after WWII with China, many national leaders were deeply afraid of communism and were willing to give full support to right wing brutality.  After WWII, when communism again threatened to take Italy by storm, the OSS (precursor of the CIA) worked with Italian fascists and the Italian mafia to crush the movement, just as America supported right wing dictatorships (some of whom called themselves fascist by name) in Central America to prevent communism there.  The upper and middle class feared that their property would be seized, so many celebrated Mussolini and Hitler’s rise to power.  Both Mussolini and Hitler had socialist views in their early years, but through intense nationalism at a time of crisis abandoned socialism for capitalism as the strength of their nations was bound up with corporations, industry and technology, particularly military technology.

In Italy in the 1920s, fascists fought against peasant, worker and Catholic unions that rallied under the red flag and set up co-ops.  Mussolini’s fascist black shirts, that later inspired Hitler’s brown shirts, set out to destroy the communist threat through open violence often with the full support of the police, the military, the king, and the pope.  The fascists, in military style black uniforms, were thus a paramilitary group that had the full support of the authorities without official office.

In both Italy and Germany, first fascists started getting elected to office, then they began gaining seats but remained in the minority, and finally Mussolini and Hitler, who were made the heads of parliament, declared wartime emergency powers and dissolved parliament such that their minority became the totality.  The population of both countries accepted the emergency dictatorial decrees in the name of protecting family, faith and nation.

Mussolini was careful to give the king and Pope whatever they wanted.  The Catholic Church was given the Vatican as an independent country and it remains so today.  The communists and socialists wanted the Church removed from Italian politics, but Mussolini strengthened the Church’s presence.  In return, the Church invested heavily in government bonds and continued to do so in wartime.

Those who spoke out in Italy against Mussolini’s dictatorship, either in conversation or in print, were beaten by black shirts, often to death.  Schools were ordered to teach fascist conservative values.  Little boys were given black shirts and toy wooden rifles.  The salute, the raised palm open towards the saluted, became common in greeting (the Nazi salute, with open palm and arm straight and at a sharp angle, is more notorious).  The military adopted the Roman salute of raising swords vertically in the air as the leader passed, but for a modern army this meant military issued knives raised instead.

When Libya, in North Africa, revolted against Italian control, Italy under Mussolini viciously pacified it.  It is important to consider that fascist brutal and glorified warfare, including the first fascist concentration camps, started in Africa and were influenced not only by economic but also racist tyranny.  Italy used torture, camps, chemical weapons, targeting civilians and refugees with bombs, and destroyed mosques.  At first, Mussolini ridiculed Hitler’s racial theories while remaining quite racist himself, as he did not believe that Germany was a racially pure nation.  Then, when Hitler seized Jewish property and bank accounts and used them to finance the party and warfare, Mussolini followed, arguing that the Italians had to learn to become hard and brutal like the Germans to become masters.  Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, bombing civilians and using chemical weapons.  The wars were popular in Italy, but the British and French began to feel that their hold on much of Africa was threatened.  As Franco rose in Spain, Mussolini and Hitler welcomed and supported his fascist regime as they believed Spain would be a powerful ally should war break out.  Mussolini seized Albania, Hitler seized Poland, and Britain, France, America and others declared war.

As the Italians and Germans began losing to the allied powers, both Mussolini and Hitler blamed their troops and nation for being weak and not strong enough to overcome the challenge of crisis.  Fascism does stand for unity, but it seems that in times of failure they blame each other as much as they blame foreign nations and religions for their problems in times of success.  If the rods start breaking, it seems the axe gets angry at the arrangement.  In the same way, with repeated failures in the war including a failed invasion of Greece, the Italian king imprisoned Mussolini and changed sides in the war.  Hitler invaded Italy, dividing the country, and Mussolini was given puppet control of Northern Italy before Germany eventually lost the war.


Germany Under Hitler

Since everybody likes calling each other Hitler in America today, including the religious and the anti-religious (“Nazi’s were essentially religious” vs. “Nazi’s essentially anti-religious”) and the progressives and conservatives (“Bush is Hitler” vs. “Obama is Hitler”), let us be clear:

Nazi Germany was art and artists, health and doctors, truth and philosophy, science and scientists, religion and religious, technology and engineers, poetry and poets, environment and volunteers, exercise and instructors, order and peacemakers, business and investors, pest control and exterminators, the group and helping your neighbor, life and the living, and, at the same time, death and the killers.

Doctors opened the gas caps to euthanize the mentally ill to give it scientific legitimacy.  Athens, Sparta and Rome, the origin of the supposed West, were Hitler’s Mecca, the source and model of legitimate culture.  Hitler wrote that the European and German forefathers were the Greeks, and if the Nazis could create a synthesis of these three cultures that the Nazi German state would never perish.  Like the ancient Greeks and Romans, Nazis glorified the human body, nature, and warfare through art and literature.  Other cultures were diseases, the Jews microbes that had to be eradicated or made servile.  The gas Zyclon B was first developed to kill insects and rodents before being used in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and elsewhere.  Antisemitism, racism and murder were called hygiene, medical and scientific.  The gas chambers were considered a humane alternative to firing squads, more effective and efficient.

In Germany during the Great Depression communists, many of the leaders Jewish, gained many members and for a brief period took over the city of Munich.  The right wing, including the military, corporate leaders of industry, and traditional authority leaders, organized the Freicorps as a paramilitary group for fighting communists, many to join the Nazis as they rose to power.  Hitler and the Nazi party began mobilizing, marching, demonstrating, and street fighting against communists in this period.  As in Italy, in the hard times communism and fascism were the radical options and sources of hope and renewal.

Adolf Hitler, a failed painter and architect, found that he had a talent for giving impassioned speeches, and he rose quickly to leadership of the group and attracted many new members.  After he and other Nazis were given extremely light sentences after beating a communist, they attempted the Beer Hall Putsch (or coup) in 1923.  Marching into a traditional beer hall where many right sided drinkers were socializing, Hitler announced that the revolution had come and they were taking the city.  Hitler hoped that the police would join them or at least look the other way as the police did often for fascists in Italy and Germany, but in the ensuing fight 4 cops and 16 Nazis were killed.  Hitler was given, by the same judge who sentenced him to one month in prison before, the lightest sentence possible, 9 months in prison, during which time he wrote Mein Kampf, or My Struggle, a political autobiography and polemic.

Disturbingly, Hitler writes that as a boy he saw nothing in antisemitism and that there was a Jewish boy in his class (who may or may not have been the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein) who was strange but not frightening, and that it was only in the Depression and reading anti-semetic works that Hitler began to see that the Jews controlled both capitalism and communism to control Germany and the world.  In this work, he argues that Jews should be removed from German society, stripped of citizenship and public positions (including professorships), and expelled from the country for the Treaty of Versailles and the communist takeover of Munich.  Hitler argued for Darwinism, survival of the fittest and the law of nature.  He believed that leaders, including those within the Nazi party, should take over by force and charisma, not by being appointed or elected.

While the Nazis were a fringe party in 1929 with 3% of the vote, the worsening depression brought them members and power.  Banks were crashing, and the middle and upper class were beginning to suffer like the poor who could be sufficiently ignored.  The Nazi message stayed the same, but the audience began to grow, such that in 1930 they had 25% of the vote.  The communists were also picking up voters and members as the people polarized.  Hitler began making plane trips to various cities to make speeches that were enthusiastically embraced by many.  In 1932, the Nazis had 37% of the vote, the largest party but still a minority (the “majority minority” as some have said of white Americans living in diverse areas such as the Bay).  Businessmen wrote to Hindenburg, the chancellor of Germany, arguing Hitler should be made chancellor to stop communism.  By this time, the Nazis had received full corporate backing and had ceased to speak out against capitalism and support socialist policies that benefited workers such as union rights.  The army was worried it would not be able to hold the borders if both clashed in a time of crisis.  In 1933, Hindenburg resigned and Hitler went from vice-chancellor to chancellor.  The communists waited, thinking Hitler would fail miserably and they would have a chance to take control.

After setting the Reichstag Fire and blaming the communists, Hitler declared a state of emergency and rounded up communists and other opposition leaders.  A boycott of Jewish businesses and book burnings were organized.  Storm troopers, the brown shirts who followed the Freicorps and the Italian black shirts of Mussolini, engaged in random beatings and killings.  Concentration camps were established, but since the average German believed such things were inevitable under communists it was all seen as unfortunate but inevitable evil.  At first, the concentration camps were temporary prisons where dissidents and communists would be sent for a year or two.  It was only as Germany began to lose WWII in 1941 that the slave labor camps became extermination camps for the Jews, communists, gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and counter-culturals imprisoned.

Hitler was terrible as a political leader, preferring to not interfere with the work and projects of his highly disorganized underlings.  Hitler would have visions, often architectural monuments to Nazi power.  If an officer had enough power, they would approach Hitler with an idea for a project and Hitler would either approve and the officer would gain favor and try to stay close to Hitler and the top brass or Hitler would ignore the suggestion.  The decision to make the concentration camps death camps came in just this fashion.  This is strangely similar to bottom-up yet top-down arrangements of capitalism communism, anarcho-syndicalism, and other systems and thinkers we have studied.

Under Hitler’s regime, many Germans did much better than they had during the depression, as did many French, Polish and others under Nazi occupation.  Through military industrialization, slave labor and seizure of Jewish businesses, jobs were created, consumerism supported and property maintained.  This created many job opportunities, as it did for Heidegger in universities cleansed of numerous Jewish professors including Heidegger’s old master Husserl.  There were new opportunities for doctors, lawyers, scientists, and even actors.  If one was the wrong sort of person, one faced imprisonment and death, but because this was kept out of sight it was easy for those with money in their pockets to ignore.  Synagogues were destroyed to make parking lots, marriage to Jews and foreigners outlawed, citizenship revoked and Jim Crow style laws imposed.  Having Jewish or communist friends was enough to be sent to the camps.

Hitler was a great admirer of Britain and American power.  He wrote in Mein Kampf, that Germany had lost WWI because they did not have the propaganda of Britain and America that demonized Germany such that the harsh Treaty of Versailles was imposed.  Next time, he wrote, would be different.  It was the British who invented the modern concentration camp fighting the Dutch.  Hitler admired how Britain, a small island, maintained a world-wide empire, and believed that this was proof positive that the Aryan race, though a fraction of the world population, could truly become the master race.  He wrote, “What India was for England, Russia will be for us”.  Hitler hoped for an alliance with Britain and America that would dominate the globe, and many anti-communist authorities and corporations in the UK and US supported this.

Hitler, as he did in all areas, allowed economic experts and business leaders to do whatever they wanted as long as they were successful and supported his own visionary projects.  Hitler liked radical ideas, and German and foreign economists were astonished at how well Nazi control was for business and industry.  Authoritarianism and totalitarianism are vast freedom for the powerful and successful, all the while slavery and death for the oppressed.  Looking at British success, Hitler believed that Germany needed colonies and expansion to create an empire.  As the Nazis had victory after victory in war, and the UK and US said nothing, Hitler told his generals to “Germanize” the new regions and no questions would be asked.  In Poland, one general used a campaign of horror to break the spirits of Polish slave labor, while another general simply declared 80% of the population to be German.  When rival factions complained about each other’s methods, Hitler often did nothing.

This would be remarkably existentialist, if it happily supported transparent self-questioning rather than brutally suppressing all questioning and dissent.  Heidegger is strikingly like Trotsky.  Both believed that they supported a regime that would lead to a new era of continuous revolution and questioning, but both came to see that even as power is renewed by new ideas and perspectives it learns to silence opposition and stifle transparency like the overthrown regime it replaces.  In front of the Denazification Committee in 1945, Heidegger said that he truly believed Hitler would evolve beyond his views and policies, but by 1938 his dream had become a nightmare.  Heidegger, like many in Germany, Britain and America, believed that communism was the death of Western civilization and individual thought, and it took him seven years to realize that fascism, like communism, fails to evolve toward freedom.


Heidegger, his Use of Nietzsche and Support of the Nazis

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.  Though he eventually came to doubt the party, spoke critically of its development and was for this 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 into and 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, 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 he 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 is over after Beethoven.

Heidegger originally studied to be a Catholic theologian, but in studying Neoplatonism 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.

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.  We are thrown into the world, called “thrownness”, as a being-there, or there-being, in German, “dasein”.  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.  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.

This tendency to box and categorize the world is imperfect, and cracks can become ruptures.  This is remarkably similar to ideas in communism and anarchism (especially 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.  While I am in favor of this view, we must note that 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 famously argues that every revealing is a concealing, that history both gives us our meanings as it removes others from our sight.  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.  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 another who 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 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.  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.  As for Nietzsche, all truths are idols to be smashed, such that new truths can freely grow in their place.