Glover on Heidegger

Further to my earlier post...

After consulting Jonathan Glover's Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century about Heidegger, I remember more clearly now why I reached for it. He puts together a powerful indictment. 

While it's generally agreed that Heidegger was indeed an enthusiastic Nazi and a thoroughly despicable individual, there's still the argument that, yes, OK, he wasn't a nice man, but that fact shouldn't be allowed to detract from the importance of his philosophy. You can see it in the responses to Carlin Romano's article.

But, as Glover points out, the obscurity of Heidegger's philosophical terminology helps to conceal how second-rate his thinking is. One of analytical philosophy's old chestnuts is the question, Is existence a predicate? - ie by saying something exists, are we attributing to it a quality in the same way as when we say something is green, or sticky, or heavy. It's a question that Bertrand Russell, among others, grappled with, but the generally accepted position is that no, existence is not an extra quality. metaphysical or otherwise. 

In logic the existential quantifier (introduced on the basis of the work of Gottlob Frege, half a century before Heidegger) captures the special function of a statement that something exists. The objection to treating "Being" as a "real predicate" had been made a century before Frege by Kant.

Yet Heidegger made the "question of Being" central to his philosophy, notably in his huge "Being and Time". Thus:

Over there, across the street, stands the high school building. A being. We can look over the building from all sides, we can go in and explore it from cellar to attic, and note everything we encounter in that building: corridors, staircases, schoolrooms, and their equipment. Everywhere we find beings and we find them in a very definite arrangement. Where is the Being of this high school? For after all it is. The building is. If anything belongs to this being, it is its Being; yet we do not find the Being inside it.

This is a complete muddle. As Glover writes:

In this passage Heidegger appears to suggest that its Being is something additional the building possesses as well as its staircases rooms, etc. And he thinks this feature is very important: the difference between Being and beings is "the one basic differentiation whose intensity and fundamental cleavage sustains history".

You see how Important This Quickly Becomes, with fundamental cleavages in history, and capitalised Being, and straining for Significance - all from a schoolboy piece of philosophising.

There's more in that vein - Heidegger's notion of authenticity, for instance, which for him reached its highest expression in Nazism. But this is Glover's conclusion:

The moral case against Heidegger the man is obvious. The central moral case against Heidegger the philosopher is easier to get wrong. It is not about a link between his theories and Nazism. It is about undermining philosophy's role in developing a climate of critical thought. His books are an embodiment of the idea that philosophy is an impenetrable fog, in which ideas not clearly understood have to be taken on trust. Karl Jaspers was right in seeing this "incommunicative" mode of thought as linked to being dictatorial.

Deference is encouraged by having to take it on trust that the obscure means something important. And since things not understood cannot be argued about, the critical faculties atrophy. Philosophy could not have served the Nazis better than by encouraging deference and by this softening of the mind.

Comments

[Robert Hanks]

I'm not qualified to comment on Heidegger, but one point in mitigation: in German, all nouns are capitalised; so "capitalised Being" must be a translator's quirk rather than Heidegger himself straining for significance.

[Mick H]

Yes, I'll admit that did occur to me later. Alas, I'm not dedicated enough to check back to the original German.