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  • "ARENDT REMAINED FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE LOYAL TO THE WHOLE PHILOSOPHIC TRADITION THAT HAD HELPED LEAD TO HITLERISM."

    By UD November 9, 2009 11:44 am

    Male hysteria, currently on view here and here, is a strange thing. It's easy to find, among men, examples of writers like those I've just linked you to -- Ron Rosenbaum and Carlin Romano. It's harder to find them among women, though in her heyday Naomi Wolf was like this.

    Scathing Online Schoolmarm always tells you to moderate your emotions in your writing, because if you don't, the writing turns out to be about your narcissistic self-display rather than about your ostensible subject. Beyond making you look unpalatable as a human being, narcissistic self-display makes your reader wonder whether you're being self-promoting, attention-seeking, needy, rather than engaging a subject that transcends your particular experience.

    Rosenbaum and Romano want Heidegger's philosophical works labeled hate speech and suppressed; they write in praise of a forthcoming book by a French philosopher which argues for the criminalization of Heidegger's writings on the grounds that his fascist philosophy actively recruits new generations of fascists in Europe, America, and around the world.

    One-upmanship being at the core of narcissistic writing, Rosenbaum sees Romano and raises him one. My post's title is Rosenbaum's approving quotation of a writer who sees Hannah Arendt, once Heidegger's lover, as one of the loyalists.

    John C. Halasz, a commenter at the blog Crooked Timber, seems to UD to sum up the long controversy over Heidegger's politics and views well:

    Whether Heidegger’s thought is “fascist through and through”, as Adorno claimed, is not a question that can be readily and easily decided. Certainly Heidegger was always an arch-conservative thinker veering toward the rechts-radikal, and there is a deep strain of a reactionary, irrationalistic, elitist cult of sacrifice built into his thought. And the recurrent trope of the dispensation of being amounting to a fated commandment,- (“a voice which no face commands”),- has an utterly authoritarian ring to it... [W]hatever one thinks of the man and his work, he did raise in a new way fundamental questions, which are centrally important to the modern consideration of the philosophical tradition, regardless of whether one rejects his exact formulation of the problematic or his answers.

    Though he reviled it, Adorno engaged Heidegger's thinking with care throughout his intellectual life; he did not call for its criminalization.

    An encounter with Heidegger - and with writers influenced by him - is an important component of a serious liberal arts education.

    Among other things, this sort of education prepares you for the emergence of hysterics who want you to stop thinking.

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Comments on "ARENDT REMAINED FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE LOYAL TO THE WHOLE PHILOSOPHIC TRADITION THAT HAD HELPED LEAD TO HITLERISM."

  • Posted by john c. halasz on November 17, 2009 at 5:30am EST

  • My sister, whose of your ilk, mentioned yesterday that she'd happened across a mention of my handle here, amongst the "higher fatuity". And so it seems. I agree that the Romano and Rosenbaum articles are just god-awful. I don't care for or follow Leiter, though, on account of his arrogantly contemptuous academicism. And so much name dropping. (Ya!) But I agree with your diagnosis of hysteria, even if I might not be so inclined to put it in a feminist perspective. It reminds me of the best comment I read on the French "headscarves" controversy, as a political hysteria that is a displacement and distraction from an underlying political logjam or ignored, unresolved conflict. Then a couple of years later those riots in "les banlieux" broke out, helping to secure "Sandblaster" Sarkozy's rise to fame and fortune. This one is a much smaller teapot, since few know or care much about Heidegger. But something of the same tell-tale signs might be involved, in the face of a threatened dis-integration of an "unquestionable" neo-liberal doxa.

    The dragging of Arendt into the matter is a bit rich, as she was quite enamoured with American constitutional "democracy", which she over-idealized, if understandably, in my view. But if she was useful for Cold War ideology, she paid too little obeisance to Zionism and was too critical of U.S. miltarism. Ergo, she too must be brought into the circle of denunciation and "purification". Her conception of "radical evil", which term goes back to Kant, as she obviously knew, was that it was rooted in the capacity to treat all of human existence, including one's own, as sheerly superfluous. Inspite of all the querulous demands of her critics, it doesn't seem much of a stretch to reconcile such a conception of "radical evil" with the "banality of evil" she observed in one of the chief bureaucratic functionaries "responsible" for implementing such evil. She even catches Eichmann quoting Kant's "categorical imperative" from a pop primer, in defense of doing his "duty". She diagnosed such "banality of evil" as rooted in an utter inability to think for oneself, as, indeed, a vast amount of sheer conformism is necessary to implement such "radical evil". Something of the wrath of her critics depends on her conception having no other context of application that the uniqueness of the Holocaust and the utter terror of totalitarian "politics",- (quotes, because her conception of "totalitarianism" was that it amounted to the apotheosis of the anti-political, in her distinctive sense of "politics").

    At any rate, another reiteration of l'affaire Heidegger broke out at CT last week, occasioned by the same Faye book. Someone threw back at me a snippet from the same '05 comment that you cited here, which puzzled me, since I wasn't saying anything different, just in a more differentiated way, suiting a different contextual purpose. But now I see that snippet perhaps came from here, and I wasn't being thoroughly "fisked".

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