Author: Bill Vallicella

Heidegger: Nazi Philosopher or Nazi Philosophy?

My old friend Horace Jeffery Hodges over at Gypsy Scholar  comments on a New York Times book review by Adam Kirsch entitled The Jewish Question: Martin Heidegger.  One of the books reviewed is  Emmanuel Faye's The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935 (translated by Michael B. Smith).  Hodges writes,

I'd be interested to know what my philosopher friend Bill Vallicella thinks about this matter, for I can mostly just direct attention to a matter outside my expertise. Heidegger's personal culpability is beyond question, but the question concerning the culpability of his philosophy remains, and I think it an important one, intellectually, for Heidegger the philosopher is considered a major thinker of the 20th century, and his ideas have influenced the intellectual left, continental philosophy, literary criticism, theology, and many other fields.

I thank  Jeff for the link and for his interest in my opinion.  As it turns out, I had already commented on an earlier NYT article on Faye's book and so I will now repost with some additions and deletions my commentary on that earlier article.  In so doing I will engage Hodges' question concerning whether culpability is as it were transmissible from a thinker to his thought.

I should begin by saying that I haven't yet read Emmanuel Faye's Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy.  But if the earlier NYT article is to be trusted — a big 'if' —  Faye's book

. . . calls on philosophy professors to treat Heidegger’s writings like hate speech. Libraries, too, should stop classifying Heidegger’s collected works (which have been sanitized and abridged by his family) as philosophy and instead include them under the history of Nazism. These measures would function as a warning label, like a skull-and-crossbones on a bottle of poison, to prevent the careless spread of his most odious ideas, which Mr. Faye lists as the exaltation of the state over the individual, the impossibility of morality, anti-humanism and racial purity.

If this is what Faye is saying, then his book is rubbish and ought to be ignored.  Hate speech?  That's a term leftists use for speech they don't like.  No one in his right mind could see Heidegger's magnum opus, Sein und Zeit  (Being and Time),  published in 1927, as anything close to hate speech.  The claim that it is is beneath refutation.  Nor can his lectures and publications after 1933, when Hitler came to power, be dismissed in this way.

Heidegger undoubtedly inspires violent passions: he was a National Socialist, and what's worse, he never admitted he was wrong about his political alignment.   But according to Michael Dummett, the great logician Gottlob Frege was an anti-Semite.  (Dummett says this in either the preface or the introduction to Frege: The Philosophy of Language. ) Now will you ignore Frege's seminal teachings because of his alleged anti-Semitism?  That would be senseless.  And let's not forget that the later Jean-Paul Sartre was not just a Commie, but a  Stalinist.  Should Critique of Dialectical Reason be dismissed as hate speech?  Should we deny Sartre the title 'philosopher' and re-classify him as a Commie ideologue?  Of course not.  And please no double standard.  Why is being a Nazi worse than being a Stalinist?  Why is murdering people because of their ethnic affiliation worse than murdering people  because of their class affiliation?

You have two highly influential philosophers.  One aligns himself politically with the mass murderer Hitler, the other with the mass murderer Stalin.  That is extremely interesting, and no doubt troubling, but in the end it is truth that we philosophers are after, and in pursuit  of it we should leave no stone unturned:  we should examine all ideas in order to arrive as closely as we can to the truth.  All ideas, no matter what they are, whether they come from a Black Forest ski hut or a Parisian coffee house, or the syphilitic brain of a lonely German philologist.  Haul them one and all before the tribunal of Reason and question them in the full light of day.  To understand the content of the ideas it may be necessary to examine the men and women behind them.  But once a philosopher's propositions have been clearly set forth, the question of their truth or falsity is logically independent of their psychological, or sociological, or other, origin.  To think otherwise is to commit the Genetic Fallacy.

Sartre claimed that man has no nature, that "existence precedes essence." He got the idea from Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, p. 42:  Das 'Wesen' des Daseins liegt in seiner Existenz.  It  is an interesting and influential idea.  What exactly does it mean?  What does it entail?  What does it exclude?  What considerations can be adduced in support of it?  Questions like these are what a real philosopher pursues.  He doesn't waste all his time poking into the all-too-human philosopher's dirty laundry in the manner of Faye and Romano.  Are people in this Age of Celebrity incapable of focusing on ideas?

And then there is Nietzsche.  If the Gesamtausgabe of Heidegger ought to be marked with a skull-and-crossbones, then a fortiori for the Gesammelte Schriften of Nietzsche.  There are dangerous ideas in Nietzsche.  See my post Nietzsche and National Socialism.  Indeed, Nietzsche's ideas are far more dangerous than Heidegger's.  Should we burn Nietzsche's books and brand The Antichrist as hate speech? Stupid!

The Nazis burned books and the Roman Catholic Church had an index librorum prohibitorum.  Now I don't deny that certain impressionable people need to be protected from certain odious influences. But Heidegger writings are no more 'hate speech' (whatever that is) than Nietzsche's writings are, and they don't belong on any latter-day leftist's index librorum prohibitorum.    Are they both philosophers?  Of course.  Are they on a par with Plato and Kant?  Not by a long shot!  Are their ideas worth discussing?  I should think so: they go wrong in interesting ways.  Just like Wittgenstein and many others. 

According to Carlin Romano in "Heil Heidegger!"

Faye's leitmotif throughout is that Heidegger, from his earliest writings, drew on reactionary ideas in early-20th-century Germany to absolutely exalt the state and the Volk over the individual, making Nazism and its Blut und Boden ("Blood and Soil") rhetoric a perfect fit. Heidegger's Nazism, he writes, "is much worse than has so far been known." (Exactly how bad remains unclear because the Heidegger family still restricts access to his private papers.)

From his earliest writings? Absurdly false.  Heidegger's dissertation was on psychologism in logic, and his Habilitationschrift was on Duns Scotus.  No exaltation of the State or Blut und Boden rhetoric in those works.  Trust me, I've read them.  Have Faye and Romano?

One more quotation from Romano:  "The "reality of Nazism," asserts Faye, inspired Heidegger's works "in their entirety and nourished them at the root level."   That is an absurd claim.  The ideas in Being and Time were worked out in the 1920s, long before Hitler came to power in '33, and are a highly original blend of themes from Kierkegaard's existentialism, Dilthey's Lebensphilosophie, Husserl's Phenomenology, Kantian and ne0-Kantian transcendental philosophy, and Aristotelian-scholastic ontological concerns about the manifold senses of 'being.'  There is no Nazism there.  The rumblings of Nazi ideology came later in such works as Introduction to Metaphysics (1935).  But even in these works from the '30s on, what is really going on is a working out of Heidegger's philosophical problematic concerning Being.  The notion that Heidegger's work is primarily an expression of Nazism is delusional and not worth discussing.

So why did I discuss it?

 

God: Necessary or Noncontingent?

Anselm_01 Many theists in the tradition of Anselm and Aquinas define God as a necessary being.  But if God is a necessary being, then he cannot not exist: he exists in all broadly-logically possible worlds.  The actual world is of course one of these worlds.  So it would seem to follow from the very definition of God favored by Anselmians that God exists.  But surely the existence of God cannot be fallout from a mere definition!

I have hammered the Objectivists (Randians) for their terminological mischief as when they rig up 'existence' in such a way that the nonexistence of the supernatural is achieved by terminological fiat.  So doesn't fairness demand that I hammer the Anselmians equally?  (This is one way of attaching sense to Nietzsche's notion of philosophizing with a hammer, although it is not what he had in mind.)

The trouble with defining God as a necessary being is that 'necessary being' conflates modal status and existence.  For any item we ought to distinguish its modal status (whether necessary, impossible, or contingent) from its existence or nonexistence.

The concept of God as "that than which no greater can be conceived" is the concept of a being that exists in every possible world if it exists in any world.  But from this one cannot validly infer that God exists.  For it might be (it is epistemically possible that) God exists in no world, in which  case he would be impossible.  God is either necessary or impossible: that was Anselm's great insight.  He cannot be a contingent being.

If we want one word to express this disjunctive property of being either necessary or impossible, that word is 'noncontingent.'  So we should not say that God is a necessary being.  We should say that he is a noncontingent being.

Companion post:  Necessary, Contingent, Impossible: A Note on Nicolai Hartmann

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Torch Songs

"A torch song is a sentimental love song, typically one in which the singer laments an unrequited or lost love, where one party is either oblivious to the existence of the other, or where one party has moved on." (Wikipedia) Sarah Vaughn, Broken Hearted Melody.  Timi Yuro, Hurt.  Billie Holliday, The Very Thought of You.  Roy Orbison, In Dreams.  Peggy Lee, Oh You Crazy Moon.  Ketty Lester, Love Letters.  Etta James, At Last.  Lenny Welch, Since I Fell For You.

Conservatives Versus Libertarians on Immigration

Victor Reppert thinks that a conservative case can be made against immigration restriction but cites a libertarian article in support of his contention.  But as I see it, it is important to distinguish carefully between conservative and libertarian positions on this and other issues, despite several important points of agreement.  Pace Reppert, no conservative who understands his position can support open borders or tolerate the elision of the distinction between legal and illegal immigration.  There are no conservative arguments for open borders.  But let's turn now to the article in question.  Here are some excerpts:

. . . the false dichotomy between civil and economic liberties. Both incorrectly bifurcated forms of freedom are rooted in the same set of property rights, first and foremost in one’s own person and, by extension, in the tangible property one acquires justly through homesteading, gifts and honest market transactions. If Big Brother tries to comprehensively regulate immigration, he can smash economic freedom of association. And if the state has the power to oversee our economic lives, our personal freedom will always suffer in the process.

This is the type of excessive rhetoric that libertarians are known for.  Immigration laws obviously limit economic freedom of association, but to write that they "smash" it is to suggest that the limitation is some pure power move on the part of "Big Brother" without reason or justification.  But there are a number of solid reasons for border control none of which is  so much as mentioned in the article.  I sketch some of them in Immigration Legal and Illegal.  And what exactly is wrong with the distinction between civil and economic liberties?  The word 'civil' derives from the Latin civis, civis, citizen and civitas, civitatis, state, citizenship.  So I hope I will be forgiven for asking how a person could have civil liberties apart from his membership in some state or other, and how a person who has civil liberties in a state of which he is a citizen can have any civil liberties in a state of which he is not a citizen.  As an American citizen I have the civil right to the presumption of innocence.  But I don't have that right when I head south of the border.  I can see how economic liberties are grounded in the universal right to life, a right that does not derive from membership in any polis, civitas, Staat, state.  But civil rights and liberties are state-specific.  The right to vote is a civil right, but Mexicans don't have the right to vote in American elections any more than Americans have the right to vote in Mexican elections.  There is no universal right to vote wherever one happens to be.

This also is a good time to question the entire idea of the national government trying to “seal the borders,” pick winners and losers among immigrants, decide who gets all the welfare benefits of being a legal immigrant and who is not even allowed into our golden door. Invariably, when the federal government imposes its way on immigration, we get some immigrants who come in with legal sanction and quickly become dependents of the U.S. government—whereas illegals are probably not net beneficiaries of the welfare state, legal immigrants might very well be.

I'm sorry, but this is hopelessly wrongheaded.  Since the USA is a welfare state and under ObamaCare about to become even more of one, it is obviously suicidal  for purely fiscal reasons alone to open the borders.  Who would not want to come to this great prosperous nation of ours?  Do I really need to spell this out?  Only if the libertarians got  their way and succeeded in shrinking the government down to 'night watchman' functions (the Lockean triad: protection of life, liberty, and property), would this fiscal objection to open borders be removed.   But obviously this shrink-down is not going to happen.  Given that the USA is a welfare state and will remain one  — the only real question being how much of one — it is all the more necessary to control entry into the country.

Since conservatives often say our rights come not from the government but from God and the nature of man, it is not for the government to decide whether someone should have the right to live here or not—it is up to individuals and communities, which obviously are able to sustain a fair number of illegals.

This is very shoddy reasoning.  Conservatives maintain that there are certain natural unalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the right to pursue happiness (which is not the right to be or be made happy).  These natural rights are not granted by governments but secured by legitimate governments.  They are rights that one has irrespective of one's being a citizen of a state. But it does not follow that every right that one has one one has irrespective of citizenship.  My right to vote is not a right to vote anywhere.  When I lived in Germany, Austria, and Turkey, I did not have the right to vote in those countries, nor should I have had that right.  Just as I don't have the right to vote anywhere, I don't have the right to live anywhere or travel anywhere.  When I lived in Turkey I could not stand on my natural right to live in Turkey: there is no such right.  I had to apply for a visa and be granted permission to live there for a stated period of time after I had paid a fee for the privilege.  Now you might not want to call living in Turkey a 'privilege,' but it is surely not a natural right that everyone has just in virtue of being a human being.

The author says that communities have a right to decide who shall live in them.  But a community is a political entity, a state writ small, and what goes for states writ small goes for states writ large.

. . . constitutionalists in particular should question the very notion that the feds have legal authority to crack down on the border, since immigration is not an Article I, Section 8 authority of Congress. Conservatives especially should follow Reagan’s example and embrace immigration amnesty.

This is just false.  "Congress shall have the power to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization . . . ." (Article I, Section 8)  As for Reagan's example, is this guy suggesting that conservatives should follow Reagan's example even in matters on which he acted foolishly or not like a conservative?  Come on!  Amnesty for those illegals already here and established may well be unavoidable.  But this is separate form the question whether the border should be sealed to keep out additional illegal aliens.

You Want Anti-Government? I’ll Give You Anti-Government

Contrary to the willful  misrepresentations of contemporary liberals, conservatives are not anti-government.  To oppose big government is not to oppose government.  This passage from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851),  conveys a genuine anti-government point of view:

To be governed is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so…. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

A Modal Aporetic Tetrad

Here is a four-limbed aporetic polyad:

1. The merely possible is not actual.

2. To be actual is to exist.

3. To exist is to be.

4. The merely possible is not nothing.

Each limb is plausible, but they cannot all be true.  The first three limbs, taken together, entail the negation of the fourth.  Indeed, any three, taken together, entail the negation of the remaining limb, as you may verify for yourself. 

Now which limb ought we reject in order to avoid logical inconsistency?  (1) is non-negotiable because purely definitional.  Everything actual is possible, but not everything possible is actual.  'Merely possible,' by definition, refers to that which is possible but not actual.  This leaves us three options.

(2)-Rejection.  One might reject the equivalence of the actual and the existent analogously as one might reject the equivalence of the temporally present and the existent.  Just as one might maintain that past events exist just as robustly as present events despite their pastness, one might maintain that merely possible items exist just as robustly as actual items.  David Lewis' extreme ('mad dog') modal realism is an example of (2)-rejection.  On his modally egalitarian scheme there is a plurality of possible worlds all on an ontological par.  Each is a maximal mereological sum of concreta.  Each of these worlds is actual at itself, but no one of these worlds is actual simpliciter.  For each world w, w is actual-at-w, but no world is actual, period.  Thus there is no such property as absolute actuality.  It is not the case that one of the worlds is privileged over all the others in point of being actual simpliciter.  What is true of a world is true of its occupants:  I enjoy no ontological privilege over that counterpart of me who is bald now and living in Boston.  Actuality is world-relative and 'actual' is accordingly an indexical term like 'now.' When I utter a token of 'now' I refer to the time of my utterance; likewise, on Lewis' theory, when I utter a token of 'actual,' I refer to the world I am in.

Having rejected (2), a Lewis-type philosopher could gloss the other limbs of the tetrad as follows.  To say that the merely possible is not actual is to say that merely possible objects (e.g. bald Bill the Bostonian) are denizens of worlds other than this one.  To say that to exist is to be is to say that there is no distinction between the existence of an object and its being in some world or other.  To say that the merely possible is not nothing is to say that objects which are not denizens of this world are denizens of some other world or worlds.

I am tempted to say that this solution, via rejection of (2), is worse than the problem.  For one has to swallow an infinity of equally real possible worlds.  Further, my possibly being bald is not some counterpart of mine's being bald in another possible world.  (This critique of course needs to be spelled out in detail.)

(3)-Rejection.  A second theoretical option is to reject the equivalence of being and existence, of that which is and that which exists.  Accordingly, there are things that are but do not exist.  They have Being but not Existence.  Everything is, but only some things exist.  The early Russell, in the Principles of Mathematics from 1903, toyed with this view although he rejected it later in his career.  If existents are a proper subset of beings, then one could locate merely possible items in among the beings that do not exist.  The merely possible would then have Being but  not Existence or Actuality.

This solution leads to an ontological population explosion much as the Lewis theory does. 

(4)-Rejection.  A third option is to deny (4) by affirming that the merely possible is nothing in reality, that it has no ontological status.   One might construe the merely possible as merely epistemic, as being merely parasitic on our ignorance, or as having no status outside our thought.   A view along these lines can be found in Spinoza. 

Intuitively, though, it seems mistaken to say that there are no genuine, mind-independent possibilities.  My writing desk, for example, is one inch from the wall, but it could have been two inches from the wall.  It is not just that I can imagine or conceive it being two inches from the wall; it really could be two inches from the wall even though this possible state of affairs was never actual and never will be actual. (Moreover, what I CAN imagine or conceive refers to real but unactual possibilities of imagination and conception; or will you say that these possibilities are themselves derivative from acts of imagining or conceiving?  If you do, then a vicious infinite regress is in the offing.))

Now suppose I had provided more rigorous and more convicing rejections of each of the three theoretical options.  Suppose that a strong case can be made that all four propositions must be accepted.  Then we would have four propositions each of which has a very strong claim on our acceptance, but which are collectively inconsistent.  (Assume that the inconsistency is demonstrable.) What might one conclude from that?  (A) One possibility is that we ought to abandon the Law of Non-Contradiction.  (B) A second is that one of the solutions must be right even though we have good reason to think that every solution is mistaken.  (C) A third is that the aporetic tetrad is an insoluble problem, a genuine intellectual knot that cannot be untied.

Note that (A), (B), and (C) form a meta-aporia.  Each of them has a claim on our acceptance, but they cannot all be true.

Suppose there are genuine but absolutely insoluble philosophical problems.  What would that show, if anything?

The Pointlessness of Worry

The dreaded event will either occur or it will not. If it occurs, then the worrier suffers twice, once from the event, and once from the worry. If it does not occur, then the person suffers from neither.    Therefore, worry is irrational.  Make provision for the future, be aware of the possibilities of mishap, take reasonable precautions — but don't worry.

Maverick Philosopher 6th Blogiversary

Some say that blogging is dead.  Read or unread, whether by sages or fools, I shall blog on.  A post beats a twit tweet any day, and no day without a post.  Nulla dies sine linea.   It is too early to say of blogging what Etienne Gilson said of philosophy, namely, that it always buries its undertakers, but I am hopeful.  After all, a weblog is just an online journal, and journal scribbling has flourished most interestingly for centuries.  To put it romantically, blogging is a vehicle for the relentless quotidian sifting, seeking, and questing for sense and truth and reality without which some of us would find life meaningless.

This, the fourth version of Maverick Philosopher, was begun on 31 October 2008.  Since that time it has racked up  459446 Lifetime Pageviews, 835.36 Pageviews/Day, 1463 Total Posts, and 2685 Total Comments.

I thank you for your patronage.

Is Hegel Guilty of ‘Epochism’?

Hegel In these politically correct times we hear much of racism, sexism, ageism, speciesism, and even heterosexism. Why not then epochism, the arbitrary denigration of entire historical epochs? Some years back, a television commentator referred to the Islamist beheading of Nicholas Berg as “medieval.” As I remarked to my wife, “That fellow is slamming an entire historical epoch.”

The names of the other epochs are free of pejorative connotation even though horrors occurred in these epochs the equal of any in the medieval period. Why then are the Middle Ages singled out for special treatment? This is no mean chunk of time. It stretches from, say, the birth of Augustine in 354 A.D. , or perhaps from the closing of the Platonic Academy in 529 A. D., to the birth of Descartes in 1596, albeit with plenty of bleed-through on either end: Greek notions reach deep into the Middle Ages, while medieval notions live on in Descartes and beyond.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) counts as an epochist. When he comes to the medieval period in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, he puts on his “seven-league boots” the better to pass over this thousand year period without sullying his fine trousers. (Vol. III, 1) Summing up the “General Standpoint of the Scholastics,” he has this to say: “…this Scholasticism on the whole is a barbarous philosophy of the finite understanding, without real content, which awakens no true interest in us, and to which we cannot return.” “Barren,” and “rubbishy” are other terms with which he describes it. (Vol. III, 94-95)

The politically correct may wish to consider whether the descendants of Hegel should pay reparations to the descendants of Thomas Aquinas, et al.

Top Ten Dumbest Things Said About Arizona’s New Immigration Law

Here.  The mendacity and journalistic malfeasance of liberal quill-drivers has reached an all-time high.

Their wild exaggerations and hysterical allegations will do more to help the new law achieve its objective than its actual enforcement.   Illegals are leaving and we can expect fewer to turn up here.  Why migrate to the land of nAZis when you can head for California?

The Characteristic Attitude of the Pyrrhonist

Benson Mates, The Skeptic Way, Oxford UP, 1996, p. 5: ". . . the characteristic attitude of the Pyrrhonists is one of aporia, of being at a a loss, puzzled, stumped, stymied."  Aporia is not doubt.  Doubt implies understanding, but aporia is a lack of understanding.  The modern skeptic may doubt, but not the ancient skeptic.

Connected with this is a distinction between epoché as the withholding of assent and suspension of judgment. One can withhold assent from an assertion without granting that it makes sense; but if one suspends judgment then one has a clear propositional sense before one's mind which one neither affirms nor denies.  See Mates, p. 32.  A good distinction!  Add it to the list.

So, strictly speaking, aporia is not doubt and epoché is not suspension of judgment.  Close but not the same.