Jeff Collins

This is a solid short and reasonably readable review of the debate over Heidegger and his Nazism. He was undoubtedly a Nazi, at least between 1933 and roughly 1935 (but then so were a lot of people). The author is fair and measured in a difficult debate.

At the end of the day though, one gets the sense of a victorious Western liberal culture, staffed by philosophers determined to justify and extend liberalism, desperately trying to deny history and subvert reality in order to come out with show more clean hands.

They want the brilliant, transformative and revolutionary insights of Heidegger (who, in effect, made much of philosophy from Plato to Schopenhauer irrelevant) but they don't want to deal not so much with Heidegger's Nazism as with the complexity of national socialism.

The contemporary liberal philosophers' problem is not really with Heidegger who simply failed to behave like a good little boy whose inconvenient genius then becomes irritating, but with the fact that national socialism has never been investigated properly out of fear of contamination.

We get the liberal essentialism of Habermas (which at least is honest in its power play), the 'mauvaise foi' of Levinas attempting to create Jewish good out of Nazi evil and Derrida's obfuscations, a case of trying to stop the baby going down the plughole of his thought.

It is all absurd because there really are only two strategies here. You can contest the philosophy on its merits (and disregard the politics) or you can properly understand national socialist thinking in all its complexity (and realise that the philosophy was marginal).

If I would context Heidegger on the philosophy (I am a strong admirer of the work of the 1920s which I would go so far as to be a remaking of humanity and the basis for a positive transhumanism), it would be on his Nazism as a foolish essentialist lapse.

Sometimes brilliant philosophers are not quite as bright as they are cracked up to be. Heidegger was no exception when he was dazzled by the sheen of German nationalism and 'got religion' for a few years. I think we can forgive him for this because none of us have hindsight.

The 'shock and horror' of Heidegger's support for national socialism is a-historical naivete and there is little more a-historically naive than the denizens of modern continental philosophy departments. If you did not live then, you cannot judge then.

In short, the philosophy stands but stands as the insights of the 1920s. Anything after that is just a gloss on those insights as fallible as the insights of others who understood what he was getting at - including the brilliant Marxist existentialist Sartre who really did understand it and used it.

Which leaves us with the real problem - the 'evil' of national socialism - which, frankly, represents a process of demonisation of history designed to be a moral tale from which we are all supposed to learn but, because the tale is a half-truth, teaches us little.

I won't say it teaches us nothing because the moral tale, undoubtedly based on true horrors, does teach us about moral things like the lack of a God when you need it, human cruelty when gangsters and not due process rules , the madness of ideology based on bad science and so forth.

What we have not come to terms with is that 'national socialism' was not a reified thing that was somehow intrinsically evil but that it is just a word slapped on a massively complex stew of human aspirations, interests and emotions with a history before it had an outcome.

The idea that someone was evil just because they were a Nazi or a Communist at point A (or perhaps in the future a Liberal Globalist at Point A) and that all debate should be closed down and their statue destroyed is the simplification of history into a mere morality tale for present purpose.

Heidegger and other Germans lived as flotsam in a historical trajectory where his philosophy (partially betrayed, I believe, in his submission to the collective dream) was irrelevant in his prtesent if remaining the only hope of defying all collective historical trajectories in the future.

Oddly, he did not think as much as he thought he thought and perhaps was not able to call on Sartre's existentialist choice approach because it had not been invented yet. He just went with a flow that was not essentially evil but resulted in truly evil outcomes - as communism did.

Judging Heidegger on 1933-1935 is convenient for the liberal victors but misleading if we want to get to the truth of matters. Demanding apology for the past (the obsession of the modern liberal) is as futile as tearing down a statue - it does not change the past by one atom.

As much as fascists and perhaps more than communists, modern liberals are desperate for much of the past not to have happened, to fit into a 'presentist' morality play and then go la-la-la and stick their fingers in their ears rather than face human complexity in both individual and society.

They are like children shutting their eyes in the scary bits of the movie or when the stars kiss - yuk! And Heidegger's Nazi period is the scary bit in the movie which then has to be rehearsed and reheated and redrafted until the modern liberal philosopher can have 'closure'.

Far better to see his philosophy as a process, history as a process, condemn what needs to be condemned in its precise context and know the truth of things to stop harms in the future. A liberalism that covers up reality for ideology is not going to do that.

So, this is a neat little book, not a masterpiece but useful, that will give food for thought and enable you to make your mind up according to your predisposition. The author writes within the modern liberal framework but, pleasingly, avoids customary outrage in favour of description.

Above all, he is fair on critiquing the problems with the critics of Heidegger. Derrida comes out of this as perhaps most problematic since there is not a deconstructive exercise he uses to buttress liberalism that could not be directed at liberalism itself.

Like Lacan and so many post-moderns, he leaves us standing on quicksand so that you realise that the philosophical destruction of past ideologies has also destroyed value. Values have not been transvalued as Nietzsche suggested but allowed to dissipate as mist.

The book was written in 2000 at the high point of post-modernism before it turned into the mess that we see on our social media and television screens every day. It expresses a struggle to appropriate philosophical challenges to 'decency' that failed in the end.

You cannot have 'decency' without values. You cannot have values if your questioning is constant and lacks a point where it must stop and a choice be made in accordance with reality and the self. Question reality and the self too far and both disappear and take value with them.

Liberalism really cannot survive as anything more than a process designed to manage interests without core values. When the process starts to collapse (as it is doing now), other people will emerge capable of imposing their values because they are sure of them.

Habermas, who I consider a philosophical charlatan, at least understands this point about values and choices, placing a certain reality before pure thought. Heidegger's pure thought (which I endorse) does not stop the obligation to choose values that may not be connected to the thought.

Marcus Aurelius' Meditations have inspired values in many and come from a process of thought but the aspirational words could not match the political realities of the Roman Empire. Linking thought, reality and values is a project that has barely started in the West.

I would not choose Habermas' values but I understand that they are a real choice and that a society built on his values is a coherent ideology. One day perhaps, someone will have to defend Habermas as I defend Heidegger when someone decides to tear down his statue as a 'Liberal'.

We might say that Heidegger made a mistake in his choice (but that would play the a-historical game). It would be better to say that he made a choice and it became a mistake because history turned out the way that it did. We are all subject to the fortunes of political war. show less

Derrida may be brilliant, however, his writing is incomprehensible. This book helped me understand what the hell he was talking about. Now I get to throw Deconstruction around like a ridiculously good hand of poker.

I have a copy of Jacques Derrida's Writing and Difference sitting on my bookshelf waiting for me to get to it. I also had this introductory text laying around. I am glad I went for the easy option first, as this text saved me from learning the hard way. I am not ready for Derrida - I have to start with Hegel and work my way through to Heidegger first.

I am not averse to reading introductory texts, but this one is a little different, in that it is more like a comic book. Or, indeed, it is very show more similar to the style Alain de Botton has adopted for The School of Life (but this book predates the YouTube series).

But the book is not too basic. Even after reading this introductory text, I am little the wiser.

I see Derrida's idea of "deconstruction" as an attempt to critique logo-centrism, where Western philosophy tends to privilege one thing over another in a binary either/or paradigm. For example, speech tends to be privileged over writing; philosophy over literature, men over women (traditionally), and so on.

Deconstruction is helpfully explained using the example of a zombie. Zombies are neither dead nor alive - their status is "undecidable" (see also the pharmakon (p. 73):

To embrace the curious logic of this writing, we have to be willing to sign up to it, to subscribe to it the task it takes on: the creation of destabilizing movements in metaphysical thinking.

Had I set out to read Writing and Difference, I would have been lost in Derrida's writing, which this text suggests can be "puzzling, infuriating, and exasperating", p. 73). It would be better to tackle his three major works on "structuralism and phenomenology" in order: Speech and Phenomena, Writing and Difference, then Of Grammatology.

However, the reading list at the end of the text sets out a reading plan to ease into Derrida's work gradually, beginning with Peggy Kamuf's Derrida Reader: Between the Lines. Sound advice.

It would seem that I must also go right back to Plato for a closer reading of his work so I can engage with Derrida's Plato's Pharmacy.

What all this means is that I am completely out of my depth! Whereas with Albert Camus and even Nietzsche I was able to struggle through, with Derrida I will have to tackle post-modernism (Derrida didn't necessarily think of his work as "post-modern"). I suppose it is time.

This text was a good place to start. I also found the School of Life's video (see the video "Jacques Derrida") useful. I must admit to being pleased to find an area of my knowledge that is so completely lacking as to require considerable thought - especially in approaching Derrida. At the same time, the task is quite daunting and it may have to wait until some time later next year if I am to do it any justice. show less

I had to read this twice. And it's the comic book! But the second time I started to get it.

"Between life and death--it's an uncertain space. The zombie might be EITHER alive OR dead. But it cuts across these categories, it's BOTH alive AND dead. Equally it is NEITHER alive NOR dead, since it cannot take on the "full" senses of these terms. True life must preclude true death. The zombie short-circuits the usual logic of distinction. Having both states, it belongs to a different order of show more things: in terms of life and death, it cannot be decided.

Undecidables are threatening. They poison the comforting sense that we inhabit a world governed by decidable categories. . . .

What if the comfort of order is not to be restored? What if we insist on undecidability? The ceaseless play of EITHER/OR . . .NEITHER/NOR . . .BOTH?" show less