José Pablo Feinmann on Nietzsche and the death of God, Philosophy Here and Now (Temporada 1-12) (Spanish-language video)

This is Chapter 12 of the first season of Argentine philosopher José Pablo Feinmann's public TV series Filosofía aquí y ahora, "T1 CAP 12: Nietzsche: 'Dios ha muerto'” Encuentro n/d Filosofía y Praxis YouTube 02/05/2013:

In this installment, Feinmann further discusses the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), particularly his famous concept of the death of God.

Feinmann explains that he takes the concept of the will to power being the "central concept" of Nietzsche's philosophy. As he explains it, Nietzsche's notion of life is that life seeks to conserve itself by expanding its own life force. Because if it merely conserves its life energy, it will die.

He expresses his agreement with Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) on this point about the centrality of the will to power in Nietzsche's thought. He goes on to say that he views Nietzsche as a proto-National Socialist philosopher, and Heidegger as a straight-up Nazi philosopher.

But the genius of both philosophers makes this question very difficult, as he says. Because they are both extremely important in the recent history of philosophy, however they may have contributed to Nazi ideology.

I wouldn't express it the way Feinmann does. I don't think it's meaningful to describe Nietzsche as a proto-Nazi philosopher. The explicit anti-Semitic boosters of the so-called "Aryan race" were around in Nietzsche's time. And he was a bitter critic of them. His friendship with the composer Richard Wagner broke up primarily over Wagner's outspoken anti-Semitism.

There is plenty in Nietzsche's work that could be easily taken out of context and used as support of aspects of Nazi propaganda: his analyses of both Judaism and Christianity; his oblique references to the "blond beast"; his praise for notions of strength and war; his polemics against democracy and socialism. There's no question that in politics, Nietzsche ideas were reactionary. But there is little to argue that Nietzsche's actual philosophy contributed in a meaningful way to what passed for Nazi philosophy. Which, in any case, mostly amounted to ideas promoting the "Aryan race" by promoting hatred against Jews.

Heidegger's allegiance to National Socialism and membership in the Nazi Party until the end of the war is well-documented. Jürgen Habermas, Karl Löwith and Herbert Marcuse all believed that there were aspects of Heidegger's philosophy that contributed to his support for the Nazis. Feinmann himself has written a philosophical novel about Heidegger that deals in a substantive way with these issues, La sombra de Heidegger (2005).

Feinmann also explains the "death of God" idea. Very oversimplified, it has to do with Nietzsche's idea that Christianity and other contemporary religions have been historically superceded. But Nietzsche did have a sort of religious idea that a superior spiritual value could be found in ancient Greek thought. Nietzsche's famous Zarathustra persona appears to have been modeled in significant part on the 6th-century BCE pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus.

This affection for the pre-Socratics is one point of commonality between Nietzsche and Heidegger.

Feinmann also brings Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007), Michel Foucault (1926–1984), Hegel (1770–1831) and Karl Marx (1818–1883) into the discussion in this episode.

Georg Picht on the history of the concept of Nature (1 of 2)

German philosopher Georg Picht (1913-1982) in his book, Der Begriff der Natur und seine Geschichte (1989) based on lectures he gave in the early 1970s deals with the development of the concept of nature in Western philosophy in the modern era, especially since the second half of the 18th century. It includes an introduction by his friend Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (1912-2007). (The Weizsäckers are a prominent German family. His younger brother Richard served as President [head of state] of Germany 1984-94 and earned widespread respect as a real statesman during the process of German unification.)

Georg Picht (1913-1982)

Picht's book addresses the scientific concept of Nature and the role of humanity in relation to it. René Descartes' famous cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) established a radical dichotomy between the thinking and perceiving human Subject and the Objects outside itself that shaped future philosophical and scientific understandings of human cognition, the methodology of science and the role of humanity in relation to the rest of natural reality.

Picht uses a theme throughout his book that sounds very sympathetic from an environmentalist point of view, "Die Naturwissenschaft zerstört die Natur": "Natural science is destroying nature." (All translations here are mine.) He expands it later to saying that such a natural science cannot be true. His formulation suggests he will lead us toward a more true and less destructive view of natural science.

Imagine my surprise when he later explains that, of course, natural science is destroying nature. Destruction is part of nature! And his solution to the problem he has posed that "natural science is destroying nature" turns out to be to reframe the question as humanity destroying the natural environment it requires to survive and thrive.

He essentially sets up the provocative suggestion that "natural science is destroying nature" as a straw-man that he shoots down with what amounts to a rhetorical trick. Because of course, preserving the life of humanity in the natural environment is how most environmental activists and scientists would define the ecological problems to begin with. As Picht puts it in a good observation and humanity and destruction of their own sustaining environment, "But precisely thereby humanity destroys itself, and this conduct is counter to nature, if we can assume that the drives to self-preservation and to the preservation of the species is constitutive for life in nature." (p. 257)

But despite that disappointing rhetorical trick, his account has helpful discussions of the concept of nature among the ancient Greeks and in Kant, in particular, who Picht argues established the basic methodological approach that still dominates present-day science. Unfortunately, he tries to tie it all together with some unconvincing Heideggerian existential woo-woo.

Tom Hayden, who is better known as an antiwar activist, gives the following formulation of the problem in The Lost Gospel of the Earth: A Call for Renewing Nature, Spirit and Politics (1996; quote is from the revised 2007 edition):

But we divide grace from nature and spirit from matter at our peril. When we worship God above, the earth withers from neglect below. We develop a society where everything from human habits to politics and economics exploits the environment with callous indifference. Unless the nature of the State is harmonized with the state of Nature, our greed and ignorance will eventually take us beyond the capacity of the very ecosystems that support human existence.

This book is an effort to heal the divide between the human spirit and the natural world. It attempts to retrieve and apply an older vision in which the earth is alive, and the sacred is present there too. But in what sense is the earth alive? Some will object to the notion that the earth is a living organism - a super-organism - a host to myriad interconnected life forms. I do not claim that the earth is conscious of itself; it does not think and scheme, envy and lust, love and hate as we do. But the earth as a whole is the birthplace, the subject and object, and burial ground for the elements of consciousness.

I cannot share the reductionist view that it is merely dead physical matter or a lifeless chemical ball. I believe that since the earth contains the elements of life, the earth is a living interconnected form as well. Ironically, this view is considered sentimental and subjective, yet science itself cannot agree on a definition of "life." (pp. 2-3; emphasis in original)

Hayden defines the problem there is a kind of New Agey/spiritual way that has similarities to the Gaia Hypothesis articulate by the somewhat erratic James Lovelock in Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979). The notion is that the Earth itself is a living organism, an idea that has won some popularity even among some positivist-minded scientists in the form of a metaphor that emphasizes the interconnectedness of environmental phenomena. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used a similar idea in his Professor Challenger short story "When the World Screamed" (1929); also available at Wikipedia.

Hayden's view of the problem as a triad of spiritual, human and non-human natural issues actually has a kinship to the approach Picht takes. Picht was a professor of the philosophy of religion at the University of Heidelberg. In his large segment of this book devoted to Kant, he touches on elements of Kant's approach that affect both theological and scientific understandings.

Picht writes, "The concept of science that today determines the entire methodology of the natural sciences, was strictly depicted and founded for the first time in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason." (p. 256) He calls Kant as "the founder of natural scientific perception," at least in the view of the neo-Kantians (p. 212) Picht argues that the experimental method at the core of present-day science that stems from Kant, the method of establishing an hypothesis and testing it by empirical trials, is a method of eliminating what is not true rather than affirmatively establishing what is true.

Various branches of science today grapple with that issue in different ways. Chemistry can test hypotheses extensively with controlled experiments and double-blind trials. Sciences like paleology or psychology find it harder to test hypothesis in strictly controlled experiments. The same is true for social science. Paul Krugman has often commented recently on how the euro crisis has provided about the closest economics can come to a laboratory-type test of the effects of austerity policies in a depression with interest rates at the zero lower bound. They can compensate for that by using mathematics. And as Picht himself says, even more than Kant's philosophy it was "the immanent logic of a mathematical natural science" that made the developed understanding of today's natural sciences possible. But he credits Kant with establishing what is now considered a mundane assumption, "that general knowledge first becomes science through systematic unification." (p. 64)

Picht draws a connection between Kant's problem of how the Subject conceives itself as Subject and the difficulty humans have seeing ourselves as part of Nature. Kant recognized that his theory of cognition required the Subject to view itself as an Object in order to understand itself, while some aspects of the Subject's perception are limited by its own structure.

But in addition to the aspects of Kant's philosophy that Picht considers to have contributed to the problem on which he is focusing of humanity as part of Nature, Kant in the Third Critique sought to establish the unity of humanity and external nature on the basis of his aesthetic theory. This allows Picht to take Kant's transcendental Ideas as a basis to criticize the destructive wrong direction of present-day science. "The development that has run through the technical civilization of the previous century appears as something like a great cross-check of the truth of Kant's system design." (p. 219)

Picht describes Kant's argument for the unity of Nature including humanity as being based on a metaphysical concept including the three transcendental Ideas of God, the World and Humanity. The three Ideas together constitute the whole of Nature in Kant's system. The World represents non-human nature, the nature that the transcendental ego of Humanity (and individual humans) perceives.

Picht argues that without the God Idea, the Idea of the World, the horizons of our knowledge and ability to know, stands as a separate and non-unified one to that of Humanity. But the Idea of God is effectively excluded from the practical materialism on which modern science is based, thus making impossible the kind of unified concept of Nature that Kant articulated.

He also notes an important and, it seems to me unappreciated, aspect of Kant's philosophy. He argues, against neo-Kantians who hold Kant's theory of empirical experience to be the centerpiece of his philosophy, "The core of the philosophy of Kant is not his theory of objective experience but rather his philosophy of freedom." That aspect of Kant's philosophy is not fully compatible with a philosophical determinism that is generally implicitly assumed by present-day science.

Picht also includes some good discussions of the ideas of the pre-Socratic philosophers Talk about the Heraclitus Ephesus (c. 540 BCE-c. 480 BCE) and Parmenides of Elea (c. 515 BCE-c. 450 BCE) parts, as well as Plato and Aristotle. Unfortunately, here's where the Heideggerian woo-woo comes in.

Martin Heidegger defined his concept of truth with the Greek word ἀλήθεια (alatheia), or un-forgetting. He believed in early times, people had directly experienced das Sein (Being) which he and like-minded present-day thinkers were seeking to recover, or rediscover. He took pre-Socratic references to ἀλήθεια as meaning that those thinkers had directly experience the metaphysical reality of das Sein, or at least were aware that recent generations had experienced it. And that recovering that experience was a matter of remembering, of un-forgetting what had once been known.

Placing the authentic knowledge of truth and the experience of das Sein, central to Heidegger's philosophy, into a distant Golden Age gives one the opportunity to let the imagination soar off from quite a shaky foundation. The works of Heraclitus, for instance, are preserved only in fragmentary form. And there is considerable scholarly doubt about which fragments actually stem directly from Heraclitus himself. Parmenides' work survives in fragments of a long philosophical poem, On Nature. Knowing about the philosophical work of the ancient Greeks has value because they were a key source of the development of later Western and scientific thought. Picht refers to both Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker as saying that Plato's Timaeus and Aristotle's Physics are "the best introduction to the problems of the basic crisis of the physics of the 20th century." (p. 414)

So its intriguing but not particularly conclusive when Picht argues that the notion of destruction of Nature is the projection onto the non-human world of the inner destruction of "the unity of time" after the work of Parmenides and Heraclitus. (p. 380) It's kind of nice to know that we can blame Plato and Aristotle for getting us all on the wrong track by not doing a better job of understanding and solving the differences between the approach to Nature of the two sixth and fifth century BCE thinkers Parmenides and Heraclitus. But it serves to trivialize the problem of the dangerous consequences of humanity's current understanding and practice of its own role in the nature of which we are very much a part. It's doubtful in the extreme that those two pre-Socratic philosophers were on the verge of finding the secret key to the problem we face today with humanity seriously encroaching on the ability of the Earth to support its human inhabitants.

I want to stress that Picht is not arguing an anti-science position. He is not defending some esoteric mind-over-matter theory or some fundamentalist religious attack on science, which is how much of the popular criticism of science is framed these days. Despite his bouts of Heideggerian speculation, Picht is not defending an anti-rationalist position on science. He is making a contribution to a critique of the historical development of science in terms of how humanity relates to our natural environment that comes from within the philosophy of science itself. His discussions are relevant to theology and the philosophy of religion - he was a professor of religious philosophy - but that is not the primary focus of this book.

Tags: begriff der natur und seine geschichte, georg picht, heidegger, kant

Theodor Adorno's "Jargon of Authenticity" and Adorno's criticism of existentialism

I just read Theodor Adorno's Jargon der Eigentlichket. Zur deutschen Ideologie [Jargon of Authenticity: On German Ideology] (1969; written in 1962-64) for the first time. It's largely an argument that the "authenticity" which is a key element of existentialism is largely a vague notion that promotes superficiality. He directs his argument largely against Martin Heidegger, though Husserl's phenomenology and Karl Jaspers' version of existentialism, a variety more humane than that of Heidegger, also come under Adorno's criticism. He even gets in a dig at the end-of-ideology notion made famous in the US by Daniel Bell, a delusional technocratic daydream that Barack Obama has revived in his hopeless quest for postpartisan harmony.

(I'm working from the edition in Adorno's Gesammelte Schriften, Bd 6 (Suhrkamp; 1996; 5th edition); all translations are mine. Adorno isn't easy to translate, so though I wouldn't be using them if I didn't think they were reasonably good, I wouldn't want to blame anyone else for these.)

Adorno took Heidegger's attraction to the Nazi cause into account in his evaluation of his philosophy. Heidegger's focus on the importance of death in his existentialism Adorno finds particularly objectionable. "'Das Opfer wird uns frei machen', schrieb, in polemischer Variation einer sozialdemokratischen Parole, 1938 ein NS-Funktionär. Heidegger ist damit einig." In that passage, he quotes a sentence that plays on the meaning of "das Opfer" as both "victim" and sacrifice": "'Das Opfer will make us free,' an NS {Nazi} functionary wrote in 1938 in a polemical variation on a Social Democratic slogan. Heidegger is in full agreement with that." He argues that Heidegger makes death "into the core of the self." (p. 504) Adorno characterizes the central role of death in Heidegger's existentialism in the following passage. Reference is made here to "ontic" as material, empirical existence as distinct from ontological, which has to do with the nature of Being:

Der Tod wird zum Stellvertreter Gottes, für den der Heidegger von Sein und Zeit noch sich zu modern war. Auch nur die Möglichkeit der Abschaffung des Todes zu denken, wäre ihm blasphemisch; das Sein zum Tode als Existential ist von der Möglichkeit seiner bloß - bloß! - ontischen Abschaffung ausdrücklich getrennt. Weil er, als existentialer Horizont des Daseins, absolut sei, wird er zum Absoluten als dem Venerabile. Regrediert wird auf den Todeskultus; deshalb hat der Jargon seit den Anfangen mit der Aufrüstung gut sich vertragen. Heute wie damals gilt der Bescheid, den Horkheimer einer Ergriffenen erteilte, die sagte, Heidegger habe doch wenigstens die Menschen endlich wieder vor den Tod gestellt: Ludendorff habe das viel besser besorgt.

[Death becomes the representative of God, who was still too modern for the Heidegger of Being and Time. Even just the possibility of thinking of the abolition of death would be blasphemous for him; the Being for death as existential is expressly separated from the possibility of its mere - mere! - ontic abolition. Because it {death} as existential horizon of Dasein is absolute, it becomes the Absolute as the Venerable One. This is a regession to the death cult; therefore jargon since the beginning goes well with increasing armaments. Today as then, the information holds good that an enthusiast shared with {Max} Horkheimer, which said that Heidegger had nevertheless at least stood humanity against before death: Ludendorff took care of it much better.

The reference there is to Gen. Erich Ludendorff (1865-1937), who by the end of the First World War had become the de facto military dictator of Germany.

Though Adorno makes a good point about how the existentialists' view of death may provide substantial points of contact with ideologies and movements, the perspective and mood of existentialist philosophy emphasize the precariousness of the human condition generally and the individual condition more particularly. Karl Löwith in "Heidegger: Problem and Background of Existentialism" (Social Research 15/3; Sept 1948) talked about how existentialism "is shaping, with ultimate logic, the basic mood of modern man's worldly existence." It poses the question of why is there something rather than nothing. "Even those who have never read a line of Heidegger, Jaspers, or Sartre are so familiar with such typical categories of existential philosophy as 'contingency' and 'finiteness' of our existence, 'anxiety' and 'care' and all that which Jaspers calls 'extreme situation,' that they can hardly imagine a normalcy apart from mediocrity," he wrote.

And he describes the mood of existentialism this way, illustrating it with a quote from Kierkegaard:

The fundamental question, therefore, is not what is but that I am. "My life has been brought to an impasse, I loathe existence, it is without savor, lacking salt and sense. ... One sticks one's finger into the soil to tell by the smell in what land one is: I stick my finger into existence - it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the thing, and now leaves me there? Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs ... ? How did I obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality? Why should I have an interest in it? Is it not a voluntary concern? And if I am to be compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I should like to make a remark to him." [emphasis and ellipses in original; Kierkegaard quote is from Repetition (Princeton 1941)]

Löwith's reference to those who toss around such concepts without having ever "read a line of Heidegger, Jaspers, or Sartre" could be read as referring to the jargonization of the philosophy. Though Adorno regards Heidegger and Jaspers as having generated a lot of superficial jargon first-hand. His quote from Kierkegaard also illustrates that some of the existential jargon even preceded Heidegger.

Adorno also savages Heidegger's pretensions of drawing his wisdom from the soil and the people who work it for a living.

Adorno is not writing "history of philosophy" here, a field which philosophers tend to regard as inferior to the real business of philosophy. Readers familiar with Adorno's work will not be surprised that he engages with Heidegger's philosophical ideas as such here. Adorno's writing may sometimes border on the obtuse. But a reductionist he certainly is not. He deals here with Heideggerian concepts of Sein (Being) and Seiendes (Becoming) and why Heidegger's attempt to collapse the two together is problematic for his notion of Dasein, which for Hegel was a mode of existence but which for Heidegger stood for a self-aware existence in the moment, a being-there (Da-sein) in the sense of intensely conscious experience.

Part of the promise in the jargon of existentialism is to humanize the specialization of knowledge that is so much a part of our daily lives in the present-day world. Adorno invokes a memorable image in commenting on the problem with this promise, which he sees as pretentiously pedantic:

Das Quid pro quo des Personalen und Apersonaelen im Jargon; die scheinhafte Vermenschlichung von Saclichem; die reale Versachlichung von Menschlichem ist das leuchtende Abziehbild der Verwaltungssituation, in der abstraktes Recht und objektive Verfahrensordnung jeweils in Entscheidungen von Angesicht zu Angesicht sich vermummen. Unvergeßlich aus der Frühzeit des Hitlerschen Reiches der Anblick jener SA-Leute, in denen Verwaltung und Terror sichtbar sich zusammenfanden, oben die Aktenmappe, unten die Stulpenstiefel. Etwas von diesem Bild bewahrt der Jargon der Eigentlichkeit auf in Worten wie Auftrag, wo der Unterschied zwischen einem von gerechten oder ungerechten Instanzen Verfügten und einem absolute Gebotenen, zwischen Autorität und Sentiment berechnet verschwimmt.

[The quid pro quo of the personal and impersonal in jargon; the apparent humanization of the specialized; the real specializing of the human is the radiant transfer of the administrative situation in which abstract right and objective rules of conduct disguises themselves. Unforgettable from the early time of the Hitlerian regime is the glimpse of an SA person {a Brownshirt}, in whom administration and terror found themselves visibly united: above, the file folder; below, the top boots. The jargon of authenticity preserves something of this image in words like Auftrag {order/instructions/assignment}, where the difference between having the disposal of {being able to distinguish beteen} a right or wrong instance and an absolute order, what is counted as {a distinction} authority and sentiment, is blurred.]

Adorno, like others of the Frankfurt School and like a large part of 20th century philosophy and theology, was heavily influenced by existentialism. But it was a highly critical engagement, and was heavily conditioned by Heidegger's enthusiastic embrace of National Socialism. Adorno in this essay seems to regard Kierkegaard, the reactionary 19th-century Danish philosopher who nevertheless produced important insights that a wide variety of social critics found useful, as more substantial than the 20th-century existentialists.

But he also traces the individualism valued abstractly in nominal disregard of its social content that he finds so problematic in Heidegger and Jaspers to Kierkegaard's perspective:

Nicht umsonst ist bei Kirkegaard, dem Urvater aller Existentialphilosophie, richtiges Leben definiert durch Entscheidung schlechthin. Mit ihr halten es alle seine Nachzügler, auch die dialektischen Theologen und die französischen Existentialisten. Subjecktivität, Dasein selber wird aufgesucht in der absoluten Verfügung des Einzelnen über sich, ohne Rücksicht auf die Bestimmungen der Objektivität, in die er eingespannt ist, in Deutschland limitiert durch die ganz abstrakte und darum je nach Machverhältnissen zu konkreitisierende "Bindung an den Befehl", wie in dem Wortfetisch "soldatisch".

[Not for nothing is true life defined by Kirkegaard, the founding father of all existential philosophy, through decision absolutely. All his stragglers, even the dialectical theologians and the French existentialists, hold to it. Subjectivity, Dasein itself is sought out in the absolute disposal of the single person over himself, without regard for the rules of objectivity in which he is clamped, in Germany limited by the very abstract, and therefore depending on the power relationships to concretize, "commitment to the order," as in the word "soldierly."]

In terms of philosophical heft, Heidegger comes off better than Jaspers in Adorno's essay. He tends to regard Jaspers as even more superficial in his existential concepts than Heidegger. Adorno also isn't pleased with Martin Buber's adaptation of Kierkegaard's existentialism:

Die hinter dem Jargon waltende These von der Ich-Du-Beziehung als dem Ort der Wahrheit schwärzt deren Objecktivität als dinghaft an und wärmt insgeheim den Irrationalismus auf. Als solche Beziehung wird Kommunikation zu jenem Überpsychologischen, das sie einzig durchs Moment der Objecktivität des Kommunizieren wäre; am Ende Dummheit zum Stifter der Metaphysik.

[The thesis {Buber's}, which works behind jargon, of the Ich-Du {I and Thou} relationship, as the place of truth denigrates its objectivity as thing-like and secretly warms up irrationality. As such a relationship, communication become something super-psychological, which it would be only through the moment of the communicating; in the end, gabbiness as the founder of metaphysics.]

Adorno addresses Heidegger's pose of being nonideological, and the end-of-ideology notion more generally, in the following passage, part of which is challenging to translate into English, because he refers in a very compact way, and almost as an aside, to Heidegger's philosophy regarding ideology as of so little value that it resembles the curve in a calculus function that comes infinitely close to the line of the axis without actually touching it, i.e., that Heidegger regards ideology as being as near worthless as it can possibly be. And yet , Adorno argues, Heidegger winds up with an anti-ideology ideology:

Nennte man unideologisch ein Denken, das die Ideologie dem Grenzwert des Nichts annähert, dann wird Heidegger unideologisch. Aber seine Operation wird durch den Anspruch, sie erschließe den Sinn von Dasein, abermals zur Ideologie, ähnlich wie die heute gängige Rede vom Ideologieverlust, welche auf die Ideologie schlägt und die Wahrheit meint.

[If one calls a {system of} thought nonideological that positions ideology as being borderline worthless, then Heidegger is nonideological. But his operation becomes ideology again and again through the claim that it finds the sense of Dasein, similar to today's popular talk of the loss of ideology, which strikes out against ideology, but really targets the truth.]

True in 1964, true today. End-of-ideology aspirations or schemes of thought, especially when it comes to political theories, always wind up being heavily ideological.

Tags: adorno, existentialism, frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, heidegger

José Pablo Feinmann's "La sombra de Heidegger"

Argentine philosopher and political theorist José Pablo Feinmann wrote a philosophical novel about the influential and controversial German philosopher Martin Heidegger. La sombra de Heidegger (The Shadow of Heidegger) (2005). The main narrator writes at one point of Sartre's novel Nausea, "it's hard to know where one discipline ends and the other begins. What was philosophy, what was literature." (my translation)

As the cover image with its young men marching in uniforms and carrying swastika flags suggests, the novel focuses heavily on the aspects of Heidegger's thought and personal career that connected him in sympathy with the National Socialist movement, including his own membership in the Nazi Party (NSDAP) until 1945.

The story is in the form of accounts written by a fictional student and disciple of Heidegger's, Dieter Müller, and a much shorter one by his son, Martin, who Dieter named after the philosopher. Dieter's account is an extended suicide note. The son's describes his visit to Martin Heidegger in Freiburg, Germany in 1968.

Dieter's note introduces us to critical issues about Heidegger's direct involvement with the NSDAP and the issues in his philosophy that may have been especially compatible with, or particular open to adaptation to, the Nazi worldview and political program. As the title implies, Heidegger hangs over the story more than participates in it, though he does appear in places as an active character. The philosophers Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre also appear as characters in the narrative, Arendt as Heidegger's girlfriend (which she was in reality) and Sartre as also a shadowy kind of presence. The German philosopher Karl Löwith shows up in connection with his account of his 1936 meeting with Heidegger in Rome, an important document in understanding Heidegger's support of the NSDAP.

Dieter and young Martin introduce us to Heidegger's apparent relationship to the SA (Sturmabteilung), aka, Brownshirts, and his competition with Alfred Rosenberg and Alfred Bäumler to articulate an official philosophy for the Nazi movement. Heidegger largely abandoned this effort after the suppression of the SA in 1934, though he continued to insist on the greatness of the Nazi movement from the viewpoint of his philosophy.

A number of key philosophical issues in and around Heidegger's philosophy are touched upon: his concept of truth as aletheia (ἀλήθεια), which he understood as the un-forgetting of the experience of Being; the privileged position he assigned to the pre-Socratic philosophers; his notion of the history of metaphysics as a long-term decay from the pre-Socratics; his concept of the inauthenticity of the present human Dasein (mode of existence); Heidegger's relation to Hegel's philosophy; his notion of historicity; the role of intense experience of living in Heidegger's outlook; the concept of death in his thought; the (in Dieter's view) surprising adaptation of Heidegger's though in French philosophy not only in Sartre's existentialism but also by thinkers by Jacques Derrida and others in the deconstructionist school of literary criticism.

Dieter has Heidegger at one point explaining his support for Nazism as based on his sense that Germany had a particular mission to save Western culture from the threat of Bolshevism, i.e., Soviet Communism. A mission that was connected with Heidegger's sense of Germany as the nation of the most superior culture. The Germans were a "metaphysical people", as Dieter puts it interpreting Heidegger's view on this point. Dieter also notes that Heidegger distanced himself from the biological racism of Rosenberg and the official Nazi doctrine, though this didn't mean that he was free of anti-Semitism.

The novel doesn't have a lot of sex or romance. Most of what is there comes in the form of Dieter and his SA friends gossiping and fantasizing about what the Master and young Hannah Arendt might be doing during their romantic encounters. Probably the cheesiest part of the story comes early on, when Dieter and his SA friend Rainer Minder encounter the fictional characters Sally Bowles and Maximilien von Heune from the musical Cabaret.

The most interesting action sequences come after Dieter emigrates to Argentina in 1944 with his son, and there after the war encounters old Nazis who want to recruit him to a neo-Nazi Fourth Reich conspiracy. This provides some cloak-and-dagger time moments, though not a lot of them. Dieter, like his mentor Heidegger, had been and NSDAP member and believer in the cause, though the particular Party factions they would have preferred had not won out. Once Dieter allows himself years later to realize the magnitude and seriousness of what the Nazis had done, he commits suicide.

The timing of Dieter's arrival in Argentina allows him to convey us his own Heideggerian interpretation of the Peronist movement and the Revolución Liberatadora, the military coup that overthrew it in 1955. He connects the Peronist notion of the tercera posición that Juan Perón advocated, a "third poisition" that, in Dieter's description, "debe rechazar tanto el comunismo como el capitalismo" ("should reject Communism just as much as capitalism"), with Heiddeger's justification of Nazism as a middle road between Russia's "Bolshevism" and the "mercantilism" of American capitalism.

In the conclusion of the novel, Martin Müller confronts his namesake in 1968 in his study in Freiburg, a confrontation heavily burdened by his relationship to his father's, his father's inability to resolve his contradictory feelings and attitudes towards Heidegger and his philosophy, and Dieter's own suicide.

Not only is it a challenge in this book to know "what was philosophy, what was literature". It's also a challenge, as usual with fiction, to distinguish what the author may be trying to say by what he has the narrators say. The narrators do have their own story, and Dieter's viewpoint is that of a disciple of Heidegger's until the end.

But our author has given us a clue suggesting that when Dieter Müller accepts Heidegger's view of the Germans as a "metaphysical people" with a special role assigned to them by history - or as the agent of Being in history? - the character Dieter departs from the outlook of the author who created him. In his book La sangre derramada: Ensayo sobre la violencia política (1998/2006), he includes a chapter, "Digresión: Heidegger y el nazismo, ¿contingencia personal o necesariedad interna de su filosofar?", in which he identifies that concept as the central problem in Heidegger's philosophy and political outlook. He quotes from Heidegger's description of the historical mission of the Germany people in Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), and concludes (my translation):

Détras de estas líneas late el genocidio. Cuando un pueblo se adjudica un misión histórica, cuando esa misión consiste en rescatar a los otros pueblos de su decadencia espiritual y remitirlos a un centro originario y puro que él, ese pueblo, representa, aquí, exactamente aquí, se abre el horizont conceptual del genocidio.

[Behind these lines lies genocide. When a people assigns itself an historical mission, when this mission consists in rescuing other peoples from their spiritual decadence and sending them to an original and pure center {of existence} that they, this people, represent: here, precisely here, is where the conceptual horizon of genocide opens.] (italics in original)

Tags: heidegger, josé pablo feinmann, peronism