Never mind that president Trump may not be quite as intellectual Martin Heidegger, or that Heidegger may have lacked Donald Trump’s charming, charismatic personality. There’s an important and surprising similarity in their politics: Trump is like Heidegger in his wish to make his own nation great (again). Just as Trump claims that he wants to “make America great again,” so did Heidegger (along with other, less unorthodox Nazis) want to make Germany great again. A further, stranger similarity is that Trump and Heidegger both seem to have a mythic, fictional past in view when they seek this return for their nation. Which time of greatness are we supposed to return to? When, exactly was it? Which past, exactly, is to be recovered, and what about that time makes it desirable for return? That’s the question raised by the #MAGA slogan, and the answer recalls that of Heidegger to the question of German greatness.
In Trump’s case, we must ask: which period of American history is being referred to? When, exactly, was America “great” in his vision and in that of his followers? It’s never really specified. Maybe it’s the 1950s, with an Ozzie and Harriett image of a very white America, traditional and middle-class, deeply conservative and conformist. The problem is that such an image is fictional, mythical; there is no such past to return to. And it’s exclusive; no ethnic diversity, no room for any sexualities except the heterosexual monogamist, no atheists or nonconformists, can find a satisfactory place in that utopia.
Furthermore, current economic conditions won’t allow a man to get out of college with a B.A., walk into a good office job, and support a family with the mother staying at home taking care of the kids and cleaning. If that’s the vision of when America was great, it has no chance of being realized. Too much has changed. Perhaps that’s why this vision of American “greatness” has to stay vague; it’s politically offensive to the vast majority of Americans who are excluded by it, and it’s not available under current economic conditions.
On the Trumpian theory, if it can be called that, the gays, the Mexicans, the Blacks, the Jews, the atheists, the leftists, the feminists and so on are to blame, in one way or another, for stopping America from attaining this vision of greatness. If they are all excluded by that vision, if they have no desire to return to the 1950s (and, why would they?), then their presence, their demands for full citizenship, for full inclusion in American society and politics, constitute a challenge to President Trump’s project. The case is similar with Heidegger’s idea of the Jew as an outsider, interfering with the recovery of a better, mythical past. And in the cases of both Trump and Heidegger, this account of the loss inflicted on a nation by outsiders who block the recovery of past greatness translates into an extremely hard-right politics. So it is that Andrew Jackson is Trump’s favorite president, known mostly for racist genocide against the American Indians.
To clarify what nostalgia has to do with Fascism and Nazism, it’s useful to locate Antisemitism in Heidegger’s thought. The Jews, like the Latin-speaking tradition of medieval philosophy, like Kant (and even Socrates and Aristotle, for that matter) had all played a role in what Heidegger calls “the forgetting of Being.” Heidegger’s history of philosophy is structured by the progressive alienation of Western civilization from Being itself, so that the modern period is the most alienated of all. Instead of any openness to Being, humanity is now engaged in rational calculation, and sees Nature itself merely as a “standing reserve” of resources to exploit. Within that framework, the Jews are drearily stereotyped as the modern, urban, calculating, profiteering types who have been instrumental in the rise of modernity and the forgetting of Being. Thus, Heidegger’s view of history, and philosophy, are structured by a nostalgic yearning for the past, and the modernizing Jews are presently to blame for alienating human thought from this past.
But, as in Trump’s case, one has to ask: was there ever such a past? Nostalgia always has an element of illusion, but the yearning for a fictional or mythic past, a past that was never present, crosses the line from illusion to myth. “What is happening now is the end of the history of the great inception of Occidental humanity, in which inception humanity was called to the guardianship of be-ing, only to transform this calling right away into the pretension to re-present beings in their machinational unessence…” GA 95: 96-97 (Überlegungen VIII, 4).
The questions of what Heidegger really means by “Being,” and in what sense humanity was “called to its guardianship,” are philosophical matters. The ideological point is the way Heidegger’s nostalgia assigns the Jews their critical role in the “forgetting of Being.” “The question of the role of world Jewry is not a racial question, but the metaphysical question about the kind of humanity that, without any restraints, can take over the uprooting of all beings from being as its world-historical 'task'.” GA 96: 243 (Überlegungen XIV) (1941). It’s in this sense that Heidegger remarked, in his 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), that Hitler had missed the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism.” In Heidegger’s mind, the problem with Hitler was that he missed the importance of the recovery of “Being” to the Nazi project. Hitler aimed to “protect” German society and culture from the Jews by extermination, as living beings; his thought remained too “ontic,” too oriented around (killing) actual human beings, and insufficiently ontological, that is, insufficiently concerned with Being itself.
But Heidegger saw that it was the very way of thinking of the Jews, their alienated calculation, their lack of a mystical connection to Nature and fatherland, which had to be destroyed, or more exactly, deconstructed. Just as Martin Luther wanted to “deconstruct” Catholicism in order to recover the original, obscured meaning of Christ’s teachings,[1] so Heidegger wished to deconstruct modernist thought itself in order to recover humanity’s proper relation to Being. And the Jews were held to be the most typical modernists, financially adept, rootless, cosmopolitan, and so on.
We see that Heidegger was a unique Nazi in some ways, and a typical Nazi in other ways. But we also see that Nazism is part of the core of his philosophy, a version of nationalist romanticism, pessimistic, nostalgic, alarmist, and not an error or a confusion. And we see, again, that the Jew was to play a villain in his history of modernity, just as the Mexicans and other non-whites have a role as villains in Trump’s vision. This is obviously ethnic scapegoating.
This is an occasion to learn from history, to take warning and to resist a politically dangerous gesture. Nostalgia is a key aspect of why the alt-right has embraced Heidegger, after all. “It’s funny to imagine the intellectually adolescent fascists of the alt-right debating some of philosophy’s most arduous texts, but their interest is based in a real affinity.” It may be funny, as is the American right’s analogous misappropriation of Nietzsche, but it represents something not funny: the return of ethnic extremism to political life. We have seen this before. To refuse the misuse of philosophy by extremists is only one of many points of resistance, but an essential one.
It’s funny to imagine
the intellectually adolescent fascists of the alt-right debating some of
philosophy’s most arduous texts, but their interest is based in a real
affinity.Read more: https://forward.com/culture/367981/the-alt-right-loves-this-dead-nazi-would-he-have-loved-them-back/
It ’s funny to imagine
the intellectually adolescent fascists of the alt-right debating some of
philosophy’s most arduous texts, but their interest is based in a real
affinity.Read more: https://forward.com/culture/367981/the-alt-right-loves-this-dead-nazi-would-he-have-loved-them-back/
It’s funny to imagine
the intellectually adolescent fascists of the alt-right debating some of
philosophy’s most arduous texts, but their interest is based in a real
affinity.Read more: https://forward.com/culture/367981/the-alt-right-loves-this-dead-nazi-would-he-have-loved-them-back/gia is part
It’s funny to imagine
the intellectually adolescent fascists of the alt-right debating some of
philosophy’s most arduous texts, but their interest is based in a real
affinity.Read more: https://forward.com/culture/367981/the-alt-right-loves-this-dead-nazi-would-he-have-loved-them-back/y why
It’s funny to imagine
the intellectually adolescent fascists of the alt-right debating some of
philosophy’s most arduous texts, but their interest is based in a real
affinity.Read more: https://forward.com/culture/367981/the-alt-right-loves-this-dead-nazi-would-he-have-loved-them-back/
It’s funny to imagine
the intellectually adolescent fascists of the alt-right debating some of
philosophy’s most arduous texts, but their interest is based in a real
affinity.Read more: https://forward.com/culture/367981/the-alt-right-loves-this-dead-nazi-would-he-have-loved-them-back/
It’s funny to imagine
the intellectually adolescent fascists of the alt-right debating some of
philosophy’s most arduous texts, but their interest is based in a real
affinity.Read more: https://forward.com/culture/367981/the-alt-right-loves-this-dead-nazi-would-he-have-loved-them-back
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DeleteSo what are you really saying nothing.We are Americans of many colors and ages put that in your dictionary. Trump is King.Biden is poo poo sick and is not needed now.Goodbye.
ReplyDeleteIt's hard to parse the non-English language comment here. But let's be clear: if you think "king" is an appropriate american category, you are the problem. I quite literally expect that trepaniering you would result in a fistful of feces
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