Time and Trauma by Polt Richard F. H.;

Author:Polt, Richard F. H.; [Polt, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)
Published: 2019-01-24T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Three

Recovering Politics

As Heidegger remarks, not only is there is no “Sophocles in himself,” but Sophocles would find our attempts to formulate the essential Sophocles insufferably dull (GA 39: 145/127). His point is not that we can assign any meaning we like to a text, but that our inherited meanings keep appealing to us to draw new possibilities from them. Likewise, there is no Heidegger in himself; there is the letter of what he said, but the sense, truth, and falsehood of the words operate within a range of darker and brighter possibilities that his texts make available. The question is which of these possibilities remain worth pursuing, and which are dead ends.

Heidegger’s sympathies for Nazism are certainly a dead end from a moral point of view, and so is his increasingly ambiguous attitude toward Nazi ideology as “counter-essence.” When it comes to tyranny and genocide, ambiguity is no virtue. But a phenomenological critique may get us farther than a moral one: we can learn by thinking through his visions of political founding, language, power, and the political, deciding where these visions have some validity and where they fall short. For Heidegger’s most dedicated enemies, even considering that there may be some truth in his political thought of the thirties amounts to crypto-fascism, but this attitude is unfair. No matter how misguided a political decision may be, it is not normally undertaken in sheer blindness; those who support tyrants do so in reaction to some tension or problem that is not mere illusion, even if they misinterpret this problem or propose a false solution to it. As Heidegger rightly argues, even a false appearance is an appearance, a case of something showing itself—as something that it is not (SZ 28–29). If we cannot accept a point of view, the question is what phenomena were glimpsed, but misinterpreted, in that view.

As for the anti-Jewish passages in the Black Notebooks, it would be a mistake to minimize them—to emphasize their ambiguities, their relative mildness for the times, and finally to be left with a handful of assertions that we can dismiss as part of a personal journal that has nothing to do with Heidegger’s “real philosophy.” This would be an error because his comments on Jews (and Americans, Englishmen, and Christians) are part of a whole. It is not a mathematically deductive system, but more like an ecosystem: it may well survive if one element is removed, but only in a changed form. In Heidegger’s thinking, suspicion of rootless, calculating, nomadic, cosmopolitan, “Jewish” ways of life goes hand in hand with his emphasis on thrownness, rootedness, and historicity. His hostility to rationalism, universalism, and all things global—such as “world Jewry”—fits with his attempt to think of Dasein and being as radically finite. As Robert Bernasconi puts it, “ideas hunt in packs.”1

But it would also be a mistake to maximize the anti-Jewish passages by representing them as the capstone or cornerstone of a Heideggerian edifice, or assuming that it is impossible

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