From: andrew@rentec.com (Andrew Mullhaupt)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
Subject: Re: Heidegger, Hitler, Racism and logic.
Date: 20 Aug 92 04:36:22 GMT
Organization: Renaissance Technologies Corp., Setauket, NY.

In article <Bt4stL.Lxx@unx.sas.com> sasghm@theseus.unx.sas.com (Gary Merrill) writes:
>|> Logic, by itself, can be a most dangerous tool. I hope that this
>
>I hope this isn't going in a direction where an appropriate response
>will be, "When logic is outlawed, only outlaws will use logic".
>
>It may be fruitful to draw a distinction between logic and rhetoric
>here.

Care to elucidate?

>|> logic: Many Nazis have displayed an unswerving dedication to logic in
>|> their implementations of 'final solutions' [Extremely final in many
>|> cases] and 'medical research'.  I _understand_ the

For those with a strong enough stomach, one should read R. J. Lifton's
book _The Nazi Doctors_. He interviews some of the miscreants so you
get a close view (Lifton is a psychiatrist) but Lifton makes it quite 
clear what the actual scientific value of the Nazis was: nothing.

>I would be interested to hear from the Heidegger-volken why it is
>that Heidegger seems so attractive to those with a religious
>perspective.

How about hearing from religious people who shudder and puke at the idea
of a Nazi philosopher. There isn't going to be a shortage of these.

For a less visceral reaction, we can turn to Hans Kung's panorama of
theological philosophy _Does God Exist?_.

	  "I am a Christian theologian," wrote the young Heidegger in 1920
	to the philosopher Karl Lowith, a confession that the later
	Heidegger would not have made. In a lecture at the time, 
	"introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion" (1920-21)
	Heidegger had made use of the First Letter to the Thessalonians
	in order to examine closely the primitive Christian understanding
	of time (kairos), a study that was to have a considerable influence
	on _Sein und Zeit_. Human existence always depends on decision. And
	throughout his life, Heidegger made a clear distinctino between
	what Christianity had become (_Christentum_) as a metaphysical
	system and the original Christian spirit (_Christlichkeit_), based
	on faith (and the gospel): not philosophy but only theology can
	vouch for the latter and must do it emphatically.

	  Heidegger's inaugural lecture in Freiburg, on July 24, 1929 "What
	is Metaphysics?" had ended with a reference to the _ground-question
	of metaphysics_, which is wrested from Nothing itself: "Why is there
	any Being at all - why not far rather Nothing?" Here (in a postscript
	written in 1943) Hedegger can even speak of the "marvel of all
	marvels": "Man alone of all beings, when addressed by the voice of
	Being, experiences the marvel of all marvels: that what-is _is_."
	The basic question-- aiming at "Being's favor"-- is a reformulation
	of the Leibnitzian basic question, which, however, with Leibnitz (we
	might say) aimed at God's favor: _Pourquoi il y a plutot quelque
	chose que rien?_ But can these two basic questions-- the question of
	being and the existence of God-- be absolutely separated? And what
	of the old proposition _Ex nihilo nihil fit_ ("nothing can come from
	nothing")? This too, Heidegger reformulated: "_Ex nihilo omne es qua
	ens fit_ (every being, so far as it is a being, is made out of
	nothing)."

	  Heidegger is supposed to have said once: "My philosophy is a
	waiting for God." And even in 1953 he declared: "Without ...
	theological origins, I would never have entered on a life of
	thought. But the origin always remains the future." He hoped that
	one day the night of God's darkness would be overcome and _a new
	God_ would appear _in the light of being_. If man then were to come
	into "nearness to Being," a decision might be made "as to whether
	and how God and the gods withhold their presence and the night
	remains, whether and how the day of the holy dawns, whether and how
	in the upsurgence of the holy an epiphany of God and the gods can
	begin anew." To talk about this, of course, is not the business of
	philosophizing in the traditional sense: "The thinking that is to
	come is no longer philosophy....Thinking is on the descent to
	poverty of its provisional essence. Thinking gathers language into
	simple saying."

	...

	  Of course the question is not now being or not-being, nor waiting
	for being or not-being. But, _waiting for God_, or waiting, vain,
	futile _waiting for Godot_-- that is the question that Heidegger's
	philosophy in the last resort places before us, and theology should
	make every effort to examine it. Theology should not simply be silent
	before God but should talk about him afresh, without the framework
	of a dualistic metaphysics. At the same time, we must always be
	aware of the _limits of Heidegger's philosophy_-- if only by recalling
	what we learned about transcending and transcendence from Bloch and
	Horkheimer. It is in this light that we can understand why Heidegger's
	waiting remained so oddly neutral and anemic. He was unable to make 
	clear that this waiting was not merely thinking and meditating but
	could be man's concrete experience of life in all history and society,
	for many even an inhuman suffering that tears all waiting away from
	its restrained neutrality. Here-- in the opinion of many people--
	lie the limits of Heidegger's philosophy:
	    in a dangerous way--and the political consequences have become
	  only too obvious-- Heidegger ignores the _real history_ of the
	  world and of man in favor of a universal history of being and
	  of man's historicity;
	    in a similarly dangerous way-- and this affects his understanding
	  of relatedness to the future-- Heidegger ignores _real society_ in
	  favor of a universal being-together on the part of men and a
	  universal relatedness to being.

	These limits, however, may be left to philosophical discussion. And it
	is precisely the question of the God who is more hidden than being, the
	question of the "more divine God," that permits us to raise the question
	of his existence in a new form. Does God exist? Indeed, is the term
	"God" a meaningful term at all? This is the problem as stated in
	analytical philosophy, which has largely replaced Heidegger's philosophy
	even in Germany.

So I think we can get a notion of Heidegger's appeal to some religious people-
there is an expectancy, a vacancy in his ideas of being that he is hoping will
be filled by God. But we can see from Kung's stress on the limits of Heidegger's
philosophy, that the final reading is not sympathetic. I think Kung cannot
really allow Heidegger to have _been there_ and not been pushed off the fence
(one way or another) by the concrete suffering. Has Kung put his finger on the
blind spot of Heidegger that allowed him to be a Nazi? Perhaps. At least we
have to think twice before believing in Heidegger's God-shaped hole as the
explanation for being.

Later,
Andrew Mullhaupt