A Small Man

Perhaps we've had enough of Heidegger for the moment, but since it's linked at A&L Daily. I'll link as well to this piece by Tim Black at Spiked, reviewing Emmanuel Faye's Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy. It's by no means a defence of Heidegger, but he does take the man's philosophy seriously enough to make some points against what he sees as Faye's misguided attempt to cast him out of the academy:

Heidegger’s vast influence does hint at why the controversy over his Nazism erupts into public life again and again. Never have so many owed so much to the work of such ‘a small man’, to use George Steiner’s damning epithet. More pointedly, Heidegger is just too central to a culture for which the one remaining claim to moral authority is anti-fascism. His moral failure as a man niggles.

So what does he have to say then, this "small man" who's so central to our culture? Well, it's the Seinsfrage, the ‘question of being’:

As he puts it in Being and Time, man has forgotten the question of being, has forgotten to ask ‘what is it to be?’. [...]

Our being in the world is also being in the world with others. That is, it’s a social existence, a being within society. This is the public world, a world of duties, of responsibilities, of values. And it’s here, according to Heidegger that individual human beings encounter ‘das Man’, ‘the they’, ‘the one’ - in short, the social agency manifest in the social world. This social agent, attributable to no one in particular, but encompassing everyone in general, mediates every aspect of an individual’s existence. ‘It prescribes that way of interpreting the world and Being-in-the-world that lies closest’ even to the extent that it ‘prescribes one’s state-of-mind, and determines how one “sees”’.

And here’s the thing. Heidegger’s virtuoso portrait of human being wasn’t just compelling, it was damning. It wasn’t just an unprecedented way of grasping the nature of being, indeed, of human being. It was a critique, too. And this is the nub of Heidegger’s appeal, his remarkable historical resonance. Subsumed by the received wisdom and social praxes of the public world, this mode of being in society, according to Heidegger, is ‘fallen’ – the theological residue is no accident. In other words, through social existence, our being-in-the-world-with-others, human being succumbs to the hopelessly rationalised, destructively instrumental mode of being that Heidegger holds responsible for the forgetting of the Seinsfrage, or as he would put it in 1946, the ‘homelessness of modern man’....

Heidegger’s solution to this in Being and Time is the authentic individual, the being who is true to himself, who, through Angst, comes to recognise both his own finitude, his ‘being-towards-death’, and alongside it the meaningless of the modern, social world with its routines of production and consumption, and liberates himself from it, ‘from possibilities which “count for nothing”, [letting] him become free for those which are authentic’.

But - and this is the point I was trying to make here - the question of being, "What is it to be?", is a meaningless one. Existence, as Kant pointed out, is not a predicate. It may sound suitably profound, but it's saying - or asking - nothing. You might want to translate it as, "How should one live an authentic life?", or "How should one escape the social conformism of one's time?" (to which one might answer, well, not becoming a Nazi would be a good start) but both of these questions - and the many other similar possible translations - don't somehow carry the gnomic resonance of "What is it to be?". Authenticity, you say? Is this like Holden Caulfield hating the phonies? No no no, I mean something deeper than that. OK, well, you mean living your own life?...doing your own thing?..like a drop-out? ..like a hippie? No no, you misunderstand; it's a much more profound malaise that I'm pointing out here. It's the malaise of modern civilisation. We....well, it's the only way one can say it...we've forgotten how to be. You do see the point I'm making, don't you? It's not just inauthenticity, or conformism, or alienation, or consumerism, or capitalism, or communism. It's all those and more. It's the central problem of modern man. We've forgotten how to be. Um, yeah, well, sure, yes, I um...yes, that's very profound. Yes indeed. I wish I was a philosopher, to come up with thoughts like that.

So any criticism you want to make of the modern world - and most of us could probably come up with one or two - well, old Martin H got there first. He's got it all covered. He laid the philosophical foundations for any critique you care to make. That's why he's such a central figure.

As Tim Black concludes, "too many disenchanted intellects have found succour" in Heidegger's philosophy:

His thought resonates not because he was a Nazi, but because his criticism of modernity echoes many of today’s anti-modern trends....

Heidegger’s Nazism is the least troubling part of his cultural legacy. Rather it’s his profound, philosophical anti-humanism that needs, not burning, but a vigorous, unceasing challenging.

Well yes, maybe, but I don't think we need to take him quite as seriously as he clearly took himself.

Comments

[Bob-B]

This really highlights the extent to which some philosophy is a matter of playing games with words. Wittgenstein's remark that ‘philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday’ is very relevant.

I'm not sure that it helps to say that existence is not a predicate. It is clearly meaningful to say 'X exists' or 'X does not exist', though, of course, saying 'X does not exist' is very different from saying e.g. 'X does not drink'. But, as you say, 'What is it to be?', is a meaningless question. Unlike 'exist', 'be' requires a complement. You can't just 'be', you have to be something, e.g. 'an Englishman', 'clever', 'in bed', 'reading' or 'wanted by the police'. 'He is' followed by expressions like these is meaningful, but 'he is' on its means nothing unless it is a funny way of saying 'he exists'.

[John Meredith]

"I'm not sure that it helps to say that existence is not a predicate. It is clearly meaningful to say 'X exists' or 'X does not exist'"

Yes, but existing is not a quality of X, is it? I think that was Kant's objection. Unicorns are white and have single horns but they don't exist. Whiteness and uni-hornedness are qualities, predicates, of unicorns, but non-existence (to invert the point) isn't. A unicorn that did exist wouldn't be any less a unicorn than one that didn't. If I have got this all wrong, please (any of you) put me right, I really would like to know.

[Mick H]

No, you haven't got it wrong at all. That's why I included that comment about existence not being a predicate.

As Bob-B notes, there are occasions when you might be saying something substantive when you say something exists: unicorns, for instance. But that's clearly not the case with Heidegger's usage. When he says we've forgotten how to be, he's not worrying about the imminent extinction of the human species: he's trying to say something about the malaise of modern man, but he's not saying anything which has any meaning. So you can sort of attach your own meaning to it - alienation, lack of authenticity, whatever - and it becomes a general all-purpose rallying cry for the disenchanted intellectual.