A Bit of Heidegger and a Tad of White Western Philosophy
[copyright]
Ken L. Walker
INTRODUCTION
Recently, Emmanuel Faye (French) wrote a book which seeks to re-engage an old debate, that of Heidegger’s philosophical thinking/lecturing and writing, that it should be re-shelved as “Nazi Studies” rather than Philosophy. The book, released in 2005, is now out in English -- debate, re-stirred. Faye is clearly appalled with Heidegger’s hate-filled actions and inactions, calling him “an appropriated idiot.” Many critical reviewers agree with Faye, ridiculing Heidegger as a philosophical “hack” and asserting that the German existential-founder was “overrated in his prime.”[i] The impasse here is that, certainly, Heidegger commiserated swastika-hate, but he is simply a link on the chain of ontology’s consistent history to invent and re-work normative hierarchies -- the foundations of modern day racism and ethnocentrism.
What I hope to construct here is that the breadth of Western philosophy pursues very hierarchically ethnocentrist and racist conventionsfrom Aristotle (placating natural slavery) to Immanuel Kant’s detestable statements about the inherent ignorance of black folks (as well as his Herrenvolk and Untermenschen personhood) to Thomas Jefferson’s hypocritical presentations of equality (while simultaneously raping his slaves), all the way up to Martin Heidegger’s endorsement and carrying-out of National Socialist/Nazi ideas; however, that critics might have these so-called “great thinkers” removed from the scope of ontological, existential and epistemological discourse is irrational and a would-be failure in regards to scoping out philosophical historicity properly. Instead, there should only be a perpetual admonishing, a consistent, interruptive notation that “whiteness” as well as “invisibility” are not only socioeconomic and political handiwork, but philosophical rehearsals that began somewhere (past, history) and have continued on elsewhere (present, the possible future) through those momentous foundations.
HISTORICAL SUFFICING
Charles W. Mills is one of the few Black philosophers working in the United States
(i) tacit or overt racial markers originally limited who counted as full “man” or “person,” so that moral egalitarianism restricted to whites and (ii) “absolutist” rule was sanctioned for nonwhite populations, e.g., in aboriginal expropriation, slavery, colonialism, etc. and (iii) the oppressive social institutions imposed on nonwhites were not created by them but forced on them by the white population; and (iv) finally, (most crucially), the inclusion of nonwhites in contemporary updated versions of the contract will only be nominal unless this differential history is somehow registered in the apparatus and corrected for, so as to achieve genuine egalitarianism.[ii]
The key term Mills inserts in the overview of his RC theory is genuine, a well-lit orb which is only viewable by a certain section of individuals -- in the case of historico-philosophical racism, where “egalitarianism” continues to be looked at, from over a two-faced, duplicitous shoulder.
Race, according to basic anthropological study, and as an actual (beyond semantics) concept can be broken down two-fold: (1) phenotypical (physical appearance) and (2) genealogical (familial history). These are basic anthropological statements that make use of their own scientific neutrality. An anthropologist intellectually examines the phenotypical and genealogical differences between various human beings and cultures. Terms like “black” and “white” only appear to be neutral when exercised anthropologically. When political, social, economic or cultural, etc.. they appear to be objective but open to construal analysis. Where the concept becomes haunting and historically criminal is the creation of spatial and normative psychological, geographic, and ideological hierarchies thru specific historical events (the trans-Atlantic slave trade, various wars, cultural practices via the media, religion, etc).
Much of this norm-making and hierarchical creation spawns out of Europe’s Enlightenment. When Thomas Hobbes discusses “nature” and “man,” (far from Aristotle) two things are important to examine: (1) what does Hobbes mean by “nature” and as opposed to what; more importantly, (2) “man,” with a post-modern hindsight, is seen as land-working, land-owning, non-slave man (not women, not slaves, not ‘savages” etc.). The definition of both “nature” and “man” (the brute) is then contorted slightly because it is not a neutral term for Hobbes. Likewise, in The Second Treatise, John Locke explicates that the State should be created out of a desire to equalize power and make it reciprocal. Locke’s work had perhaps the largest direct philosophical influence on American idealists like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Locke, (comparable to Jefferson and Adams) invested in the Royal Africa slave-trading company and would also, after the Second Treatise was popularized, help write the Carolina slave constitution.[iii] However, his theoretical assertions of equality continue to permeate democratically-driven entities but are also saturated out of a disgusting history of mass-murder, beatings, lynchings, and cultural imperialism.
Immanuel Kant created many hierarchically-driven conceptions: what genius is, what it means to be a subjective entity via Herrenvolk. His idealisms spawned quite an important notionthe individual, the human being -- while intensifying Rene Descartes’ subjectivism. One thinks and is and thus possesses pure reason out of that existence-made thought. Yet, in 1775, Kant wrote an essay entitled, “The Different Races of Mankind” in which he pointed out that race is a permanent and immutable factor of social life.[iv] This would not be a colossal breach of humanity-making were it not for the fact that Kant is quite possibly the father of modern morality. Somehow, racist impressions like Kant’s and Locke’s (beyond even their actions) went largely ignored and are immersed in the massive amount of sociocultural aphasia that “white” is so capable of.
If it can be agreed upon that slavery (an en masse series of criminal actions) carries the bulk of the foundation of Western racism, and that we live now under its legacy, and that slavery is considered a global act of modernity, then that is fine, but it is not enough of an agreement. If any obvious faction of genocide can be collected under a heading of human-transgression, as criminal act, as immoral act, as a series of murder, then anyone who refuses to cease what should be seen as morally erroneous is then, also, a criminal. Silence (non-communication) on an issue is, nevertheless, communication. Silence is also a privilege, a notation of invisibility, a proof that one possesses the prowess to say nothing, to remain quiet (See: Miranda Rights). This can be re-applied to any intelligent being withholding from the necessary praxis of dialogue because one is allowed to. There are examples which do not follow along this privileged parallel of silence regarding Europe and America’s racist felonies (Ralph Waldo Emerson funding and housing abolitionists, Jean-Paul Sartre asking his fellow French nationals to take up arms with the Algerians as they fought for national independence, or Michel Foucault discussing race a creation of discipline, a sovereign entity).
Martin Heidegger, like Paul DeMan and many others entered into an equivalent type of silence, while also conciliating one of human history’s quickest murder apparatuses -- the Nazi regime. Also of note, M.H. thought/wrote/taught in the period previously discussed, the current era, the legacy (not the reality) of slavery, and thus has even less right to condone any sort of genocide. The distinction between many intelligent Nazi/German mid-twentieth century intellectuals and Martin Heidegger is that Heidegger is arguably philosophy’s most important thinker of the 1900s, as was the eighteenth century for Immanuel Kant. M.H. must be singled out (from DeMan, Hitler, etc.) because he philosophized poetry, art, etc., as well as, most importantly re-examining the topic Aristotle never finished completing -- existence (being) itself. His importance to modern/contemporary/postmodern Western philosophy is asterisked by membership and vocal support for one of the worst political factions the modern world has ever seen.
M.H. joined the Nazi party in 1933 after becoming rector of Freiburg University,[v] where he was in charge of firing every Jewish professor.
Aristotle, Heidegger’s delineated debate participant, is exceptional in regards to modern models of race. Though he pacified any anti-slavery ideals, race was a non-concept in Greece. Binary systems of race were unheard of. Though, Aristotle may have been ethnocentric when purporting ideas of slavery, of subservience, of picking out natural slaves[vi] from a group of human beings. Yet and still, Aristotleian theory develops concepts of personhood, master over slave. That same disgustingly evil notion rivals the modern practices like The Final Solution or the TransAtlantic Slave Trade. Still, even Aristotle while acknowledging and accepting a hierarchy like master and slave could never have predicted a binary system of hate (like racism, etc.). Most working philosophers would disagree with this, saying that there is anti-racist tradition, which there definitely is (from Plato to Emerson to Sartre) but at the point of “whiteness” (the height of the racial hierarchy) being invisible one finds that non-action is action as well.
Thinkers like Aristotle, Locke, Jefferson, Kant, did not create racism or raced space, on their own, but they did patent and re-distribute the range of philosophical thought. That, in and of itself is a vast wilderness to explore, a wilderness in whose innovativeness, there lacked a certain wherewithal to judge humanity without hierarchy, without same being better than other.
WHITENESS IMPLICATIONS
There is no more powerful position than that of being ‘just’ human. The claim to power, philosophically and otherwise, is the claim to speak for the commonality of humanity. Raced people cannot do thatthey can only speak for their race. But, non-raced people can, for they do not represent the interests of a race. The point of seeing the philosophical racing of whites is to dislodge them/us from the position of power, with all the inequities, oppression, privileges and sufferings in its train, dislodging them/us by undercutting the authority with which they/we speak and act in and on the world.[vii]
If, the race-making of humanity has any reduction capability, it may be found in the creation of White Privilege Studies, a brand new academic field (coming to fruition in the late 1990s). The notion that a corrective amendment has to be placed on socio-philosophical fields is powerful enough to re-engage the entire scope of philosophy.
A coin rests on a table, let’s say, and it has been the tail-side showing for somewhere around five hundred years. Many important folks knew the coin could be turned over, that the heads-side could be shown for awhile, but not many had the courage to actually do so. Tim Wise, through the words of James Baldwin, says that being white means never having to think about it.[viii] Race is an issue for the raced. DuBois discussed this form of victimization like a double veil. The raced person must consider, in the DuBoisian sense, his or her own blackness as well as his or her humanity. This paradigm is reconstructed via the false egalitarianism that hypocritical systems of humanity once created. This consideration would not be far off from systems of hate like Brazil, Nazi-run Germany, et cetera. We/they have inherited an ideological history and historicity that does not ever fully alleviate us/them because of the long stationary position the philosophical system has been in. Of course, since it is a philosophical system, it is also a socioeconomic and political system as well. It is never one without the other, at least prior to hyper-modernity, postmodernity, et cetera, prior to the twentieth century, just to be safe.
There is a system of hierarchy that fits in here paradoxically, that of class. A white person could certainly claim poverty (economically-related hierarchical oppression), yet when a “black” person claims poverty, it is coilingly tied to being raced and made poor. This simple claim to poverty is weighed down with multiple anchors; a quiet consideration is never made. When one sees Kant’s statement that a man was “quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid,”[ix] and compares that with Locke’s actions, as well as, Heidegger’s activity and, then, later silence on the Nazi issue, one may be able to make the connections of philosophy’s responsibility to cease the racing of hierarchies.
David Hume and Voltaire can be recognized in this string of concession-incidence as well. Voltaire exclaimed the differences of races as two dog breeds. Hume claimed a natural difference, one which is irrefutable. Again, this would not matter, as the modern and postmodern world possesses a manifold essence; however, whiteness is a race creation (just as in an Aryan-Jew format) that develops a pecking order of power, unlike any other the world had known previous to the first colonially-related events. The connection that can made within this long trajectory is not only a lack of concern for the true definition of the human being, of there being a closed door on the same/other hierarchical recognition, but a disregard of the privilege that possibly allows someone to remain in an office of silence.
I am not an atomic individual; in fact, I (a white person) am a creation and a victim and a signer of these hierarchies and must thus, not be silent about them as an issue, yet this I also has the privilege to not speak at all. Now, if that same I is reversed as “other” (black, Jew), those considerations are reversed within their semiotics and semantics. Creation and victim become opposites, while signer becomes not allowed to hold a pen.
Charles Mills emphasizes that there must be:
a distinguishing “between whiteness as phenotype/geneaology and Whiteness as political commitment to white supremacy, thus making conceptual room for ’white renegades’ and ’race traitors.’ . . . [The] aim is not. . . to eliminate race (not as innocent human variety but as onotological superiority and inferiority, as differential entitlement and privilege) altogether.[x]
Some might say that even philosophically-speaking, race can possibly be eliminated by ignoring the political circumstances that are involved with racial/ethnic hierarchies. Ignoring (color blindness, etc.) has also long been a problem of Western philosophy and can be said to be wrapped up in the notion of the invisibility that makes resting atop an sociopolitical apex so easy. Moreover, attention to the invisibility (whiteness, etc.) of privilege that the inheritors and signers of these power-systems must not only be noticed and discussed, but completely re-arranged, in order to alter the makeup of the philosophical body that suffers from these hate-filled diseases.
THE TURN
That the philosophical body contains (and transmits) hate-filled diseases does not completely eliminate the other planes and fields of ideation that the previously implicated philosophers registered into the world. Kant’s ideas, along with Hume, Voltaire, Locke, Jefferson, etc. ushered in Modernity and notions of individual freedom.
The same goes for Martin Heidegger, reintroducing Aristotle’s most notated question: What is being? Answering this question, or as Heidegger’s terms it -- his “life’s work” -- serves as an example of how to properly pose the asterisk of racist silence but continue to inspect the philosophical benefit a reader or thinker may experience from the absorption of the breadth of a possibly-racist philosopher’s ideas.
Damon Linker writes that Heidegger “possessed the most powerful philosophical mind of the twentieth century. If he had written nothing besides Being and Time (1927), he would deserve to be recognized as Europe’s greatest philosopher since the death of G.W.F. Hegel in 1831.”[xi] Later, Linker declares (out of this re-surfacing pro-Nazi backslash ) that “moral disgust does not relieve a reader -- let alone a critic -- of the burden of intellectual engagement.”[xii]
If one were to look at philosophy, sans-Heidegger, he or she may find a very bulky blank spot, let alone would not get to examine Heidegger’s philosophical disagreements with Kant’s critical idealism, favoring critical realism to the more conjunctive spirit-of-idea notion Kant belabored. Even the pragmatist Cornel West acknowledges this potential blank-space, enlightening us that “Despite his abominable association with the Nazis, [MH’s] project is useful in that it discloses the suppression of temporality and historicity in the more dominant metaphysical systems of the West from Plato (and Aristotle) to Rudolf Carnap.”[xiii]
The centrifugal concern for Heidgger, the question of being, since its Greek derivation, took time as its nuisance. Plato, in discussing forms, can be seen to discuss time as atemporal, or even eternal; but, he does in the sense of presence, so time, in the usual Platonic sense, is seen as presence. In reviving the question of being, the question of time must also be revived. Heidegger resuscitates the being who even makes conscious the question, the being (Dasein) that is conscious enough to ask the question. “We have forgotten what Being is, and we have even forgotten this forgetting.”[xiv] This goes on to influence Jean-Paul Sartre, among countless others, in their work to boil the various notions of ontological meaning in both existence and essence.
This is the most striking inquiry there is, thus the ontological and essential notions it possesses within its questioning process which then make the question (of being) relevant to all faculties (sciences, etc.) that “matter” to human beings (in general, as opposed to Dasein). Existence, prior to Heidegger’s re-framing of the picture, was transitive (according to Arsitotlian scholars) and Heidegger re-made that (in slightly similar fashion to Soren Kierkegaard) thin, clear sheet into something darkened, perceptively-altering, yet somehow still clear -- thrownness. Thrownness is a sort of pressurized primary experience (for individual beings) that ensues out of the fugitive nature of Time. Time is sort of like a curtain with nothing behind it, as Safranski tells it, “The meaning of Being is Time; but Time is not a cornucopia of gifts, it gives us no content and no orientation. The meaning is Time but Time ‘gives’ no meaning.”[xv] For Aristotle, time was significant and held central features; however, for Heidegger, that version of time is more like “the world” or social place of human interaction, the place of holidays and calendars and conversation. Hence the notion that human beings do not live in time but human beings, indeed, live time.
The elephant in the room sits between the door frames. Heidegger was not only supportive of the Nazi regime, but entered a long period of silence after the end of World War II. His support is clear example of overt ethnocentrism and racism; his silence is clear interaction and engagement of his hierarchical privilege, a more covert action from which any critic or reader is absolutely unable to decipher any apology, etc. This is the troublesome character of silence.
Nazi silence as well as Nazi deterministic genocide, to California professor and social-psychologist, Zevedei Barbu, is a facet of German ideological society from the time of the arrival of Hitler‘s reich:
During the period of the rise of Nazism the German nation lived in unique conditions of stress and security . . . [and to put this in further perspective] It should be mentioned in the first place that industrial society has a great capacity for creating sociopath groups. . . The main pathological symptoms shown by German society during and immediately preceding Nazism is that of a sociopath group. . . Feelings of insecurity lead to a morbid urge for self-assertion of the group.[xvi]
Perhaps the most interesting mechanism of irony here, is that MH may disagree with these notions because, in fact, Dasein is capable of altering its being as it is the complex thought-thinking circumstance of its own essential control. However, Barbu identifies industrialization (technological progress, mass labor) as the culprit for creating “sociopath groups,” a group that would have included Heidegger, who would certainly, in an unaligned way, agree with this notion in the sense that modern technology digresses and regresses Dasein’s own progress.
The paradoxical nature of this very thing -- that Heidegger wants Dasein to further enter its own existence while being regressed by the onslaught of modern technology which is overturning the simple dwelling and oneness of things as peasants long ago experienced -- is palpably tied into the previously mentioned notions of tacitly racist behavior and hierarchical privilege, in that MH supports the idea of an essential human figure (Dasein) while laying claim (through teaching, lecturing, speaking, and writing at the behest of Adolf Hitler and his murderous supporters) that one group of people can determine the fate of another group of people. One could then critique Heidegger’s philosophical ideas with Heidegger’s realistic actions. If a man, a generic human individual (das Man) abides by a culturally-created facet (like hate speech, let alone a concentration camp, or a slave plantation) and wantonly carries out the duties of the everyday they, then is that generic human individual (whether attempting Dasein or not) simply part of the das Man problem? To repose, the they, according to MH, makes Dasein inauthentic and fallen; so, if one is not rising above the everyday (in this case, Nazi genocide camps) by not keeping silent, by not acting like what MH terms as “nobodies,” then that person becomes a “nobody.” Perhaps this is why Jean-Paul Sartre wrote what he wrote in the introduction to Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, as he perhaps found radicalized social action to be a way toward alleviating one’s own nothingness as well as to exit from the inauthentic they. This may also be why MH opted out for so long and grew silent following World War II.
Emmanuel Faye, among other thinkers and critics that want to enshrine Heidegger with the cape of hatred, seem to suffer from socio-historical memory loss. This is represented well by the word the when referring to the Nazi Genocide on Jewish and African peoples -- socially-deemed the Holocaust -- as though it were the only one, the singular genocidal act to occur out of and within modernity, if not ever.
This represents an astonishing white amnesia about the actual historical record. Likewise, the despairing question of how there can be poetry after Auschwitz evokes the puzzled non-white reply of how there could have been poetry before Auschwitz, and after the killing fields in America, Africa, Asia. The standpoint of Native American, black Africa, colonial Asia, has always been aware that European civilization rests on extra-European barbarism, so that the Jewish Holocaust is by no means . . . an unfathomable anomaly in the development of the West, but unique only in that it represents [a violence of Europeans] against [other] Europeans.[xvii]
If, once and for all, full humanity realizes the long spherically-historic errors of their/our ways and subjugates hatred and non-understanding of/for/from other human beings by providing the proper asterisks to the proper philosophers, then the scope of this dialectical process toward further social evolution can continue. If not, dialogue ceases and enormous blank spaces of ideology are opened up to complete disregard. Nothing about any philosopher should be ignored. All should be taken into account. Otherwise, the danger of the hidden re-surfacing may occur, as did when Hitler came to power. Ignoring anything enters persons into forgetfulness, into amnesia, while simultaneously, the current and past branch of racial and ethnocentric hierarchies keep all sides of dialogue out of tactsilence is exercising privilege, just like when Heidegger gave a lecture regarding racism and hate being a necessity. This is the perpetual admonishing that can be completed through responsible acceptance, pragmatic praxis as well as and most importantly, non-silence.
[ii] Mills, Charles W. “Contract of Breach: Repairing Racial Contractarianism.” Department of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago presentation, 2006.
[v] Patricia Cohen, “An Ethical Question: Does a Nazi Deserve a Place Among Philosophers?” New York Times
[viii] Tim Wise, “Membership Has Its Privileges: Thoughts on Acknowledging and Challenging Whiteness.” White Privilege, ed. Paula Rothenberg
[xvi] Zevedei Barbu, “The Uniqueness of the German Psyche” in The Nazi Revolution: Germany’s Guilt or Germany’s Fate?. Ed. John L. Snell, Heath and Co. pp 85-89.
