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.
