Dangerous Heidegger

There’s no learning the landscape of contemporary continental philosophy, no knowing the paths of phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, and deconstruction, no interpreting the stories told by the postmodern pilgrims who tread such ways, without understanding the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. If serious philosophical study of Heidegger were to cease, not a few philosophers would say, “Good riddance,” and shed not a tear as the ways were shut to those dark, dry caverns where bandits, marauders, and tricksters dwell. Having gained some of my education in a climate largely hostile to any hints of subjective thought, I am quite familiar with the distain Defenders of Truth feel for names such as Derrida.

Knowing how invidiously postmodern philosophers are despised, I find plausible Freddie’s theory concerning the desire to relegate the works of Heidegger to the pile marked “Dangerous” on account of his Nazism. Freddie is certainly right that the philosophies Heidegger influenced undermine the very groundwork of Nazism and other such ideologies.

Here’s Freddie:

Let’s get real: this has everything to do with what philosophies Heidegger has contributed to. It has everything to do with the assault on “postmodernism,” that capacious and vilified term that encompasses just about every straw man to be stacked up as a straw man against lefties and their various relativisms. If Heidegger’s philosophy had contributed to some new entrenchment of objective values, some neo-classicists return to “good sense and order,” I submit, his terrible personal failings would be relegated to the same margins that we relegate, say, the despicable support for slavery of many of the philosophers responsible for Western civilization. Existentialism, post-structuralism, constructivism, subjectivism– whatever you call them and to whatever degree they are actually consonant systems, they have been despised for decades, and the recipients of a massive and sustained assault that accuse them of all manner of sins. They are corrosive! They are subversive! They are incapable of defending us from fascism and totalitarianism and Marxism and Islamism and various other frightening things! Ah, but now we see the real story– they’re all secretly corroded by Nazism, I can hear the argument now. There we have it, the magic bullet to kill the beast.

Never mind that the actual content of all of these -isms is as far from the certainty and Manicheanism of Nazi ideology as is possible. Never mind that all of the greatest villains in the history of the world, every one, thought that they were in possession of just the kind of righteous certitude that this postmodern tradition tells us we can never really have. Never mind that the great advantage of the philosophy of people like Richard Rorty is precisely because it engenders caution, care and delicacy in the pursuit of actualizing ones values.