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Philosophy 1: Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as sloshed as Schlegel

Good article.

What Han misses in his analysis, other than what I already stated in the article I just linked, is that, like Slavoj Zizek often argues, ideology does not take itself seriously. Zizek gives many examples of codes of conduct that you are explicitly told to follow but actually indirectly expected to transgress “between the lines”: you are a young 12–13-year-old boy and your father comes to warn you about sexual contact with girls, “don’t have sex, don’t do drugs, stay in school”; but between the lines you can feel him alluding messages like “What, are you a loser? Are you even a real man? At your age I had twenty women already!”. He’s explicitly telling you “Don’t do it” while implicitly telling you “Do it, but make sure I don’t find out”.

It was the same thing in the Soviet Union. Zizek often tells how if you publicly disavowed communism, you were sent to the gulag. But if you were to actually fanatically believe in communism and genuinely think that it is a good system and try to make it work, you were also suspected to be a madman and too dangerous and also sent to the gulag. Ideology, at that time, expected you to publicly pretend to believe in communism while privately disavowing it. Genuinely believing in the system was seen as just as dangerous as publicly not believing it. You were forced to believe in public and disavow in private.

It is the exact same today with transparency. Transparent communication is autistic. It implies interpreting every social situation literally, communicating directly, not being able (or refusing) to read body language, contextual cues, etc. If you were to actually genuinely believe in the popular messages of transparency today, you would not succeed in society, you would simply be diagnosed with autism. Just like with communism in the Soviet Union, autistic speech itself has become a mask to wear in public – to succeed in society, you have to pretend to believe in transparency and “play dumb” or present yourself as socially unaware, while actually needing higher social skills than ever before.

This seems paradoxical since autism implies a dysfunction of the persona as a whole, it implies not having a proper persona, being transparent, not wearing a mask. The autistic subject is the authentic subject par excellence insofar as they have trouble adapting the “filter” of their words to the context they are in (no “protective filter” from inside to outside) or in their hyper-sensitivity to outward sensory stimuli (no “protective filter” from outside to inside). Yet, this is precisely our predicament today: authenticity has become a mask.
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I started reading Hegel. I thought this was especially applicable to today:

"“We stand at the gates of an important epoch, a time of ferment, when spirit moves forward in a leap, transcends its previous shape and takes on a new one..... A new phase of the spirit is preparing itself. Philosophy especially has to welcome its appearance and acknowledge it, while others, who oppose it impotently, cling the past.”
 
I couldn't get very far with Heidegger either, though I kind of understand his concept of Dasein and how the mundane creates meaning.
 
MissThundercat said:
I couldn't get very far with Heidegger either, though I kind of understand his concept of Dasein and how the mundane creates meaning.
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I recommend this as a start. It's quite beautiful and Dreyfus is a wonderful communicator of Heidegger's ideas.

Seriously, I would recommend everyone take the 90 minutes to just sit and watch it. It isn't revolutionary -- we have all independently "discovered" these truths -- but rarely have I seen them put so well.
 
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Kepler said:
I recommend this as a start. It's quite beautiful and Dreyfus is a wonderful communicator of Heidegger's ideas.

Seriously, I would recommend everyone take the 90 minutes to just sit and watch it. It isn't revolutionary -- we have all independently "discovered" these truths -- but rarely have I seen them put so well.
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I also understand he was a member of the Nazi party, but I think I read something on how he tried to break from the party and was told to sit in a war trench?
 
MissThundercat said:
I also understand he was a member of the Nazi party, but I think I read something on how he tried to break from the party and was told to sit in a war trench?
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Very unfortunately, he does not get a pass. Heidegger was a real Nazi, in good standing. As rector of the University of Freiburg, he actively worked to identify and fire Jewish professors and students. He considered Hitler a home grown and healthy incarnation of the German spirit, and he welcomed the boldest strokes of Nazi philosophy. He did not believe in their mindless racism and genocidal manifest destiny, but in a way it's almost worse. The brownshirts and the ideologues were stupid, and drunk on their delusions. Heidegger was a genius, and he was stone cold sober as he went to work every day and forwarded the Nazi project in his own small way. He was like the Dachau guard who does his job and tries to get a promotion. It is terrible and without any redemption. And then, after the war, he deflected and denied and obfuscated. The man who believed to his roots, and preached, authenticity, lived a pungent, blood-besotted personal lie.

Heidegger's Naziism is one of the profound discrepancies that we must deal with in philosophy, along with Plato's prescription in The Republic of a rightwing totalitarian hell as his ideal state, and Leibniz' rationalization of suffering and tragedy as necessarily for the best, following logically his positing of a tri-omni Christian deity. These were brilliant, subtle, sensitive thinkers, who were able to throw off the gross tonnage of ages of superstition and convention in forming their ideas, and who wound up justifying truly horrific political and social positions.

We contain multitudes, and all biography that does not include jaw-dropping, troubling contradiction is hagiography. Heidegger is a cautionary tale of such magnitude it should be emblazoned on the gate of every university: no matter the depth of your insight, without gentle humanity your soul is damned.
 
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Kepler said:
Very unfortunately, he does not get a pass. Heidegger was a real Nazi, in good standing. As rector of the University of Freiburg, he actively worked to identify and fire Jewish professors and students. He considered Hitler a home grown and healthy incarnation of the German spirit, and he welcomed the boldest strokes of Nazi philosophy. He did not believe in their mindless racism and genocidal manifest destiny, but in a way it's almost worse. The brownshirts and the ideologues were stupid, and drunk on their delusions. Heidegger was a genius, and he was stone cold sober as he went to work every day and forwarded the Nazi project in his own small way. He was like the Dachau guard who does his job and tries to get a promotion. It is terrible and without any redemption. And then, after the war, he deflected and denied and obfuscated. The man who believed to his roots, and preached, authenticity, lived a pungent, blood-besotted personal lie.

Heidegger's Naziism is one of the profound discrepancies that we must deal with in philosophy, along with Plato's prescription in The Republic of a rightwing totalitarian hell as his ideal state, and Leibniz' rationalization of suffering and tragedy as necessarily for the best, following logically his positing of a tri-omni Christian deity. These were brilliant, subtle, sensitive thinkers, who were able to throw off the gross tonnage of ages of superstition and convention in forming their ideas, and who wound up justifying truly horrific political and social positions.

We contain multitudes, and all biography that does not include jaw-dropping, troubling contradiction is hagiography. Heidegger is a cautionary tale of such magnitude it should be emblazoned on the gate of every university: no matter the depth of your insight, without gentle humanity your soul is damned.
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So... silence is violence, and he kept silent as his buddies were committing unspeakable acts.
 
MissThundercat said:
So... silence is violence, and he kept silent as his buddies were committing unspeakable acts.
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That, but he was more than silent, he was actively complicit. And after decades of fellow philosophers bending themselves into pretzels to exonerate him, his private notebooks turned up and demonstrated that he was an anti-Semite so... yeah.
 
Kepler said:
That, but he was more than silent, he was actively complicit. And after decades of fellow philosophers bending themselves into pretzels to exonerate him, his private notebooks turned up and demonstrated that he was an anti-Semite so... yeah.
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When I took Existentialism at NMU, we did not cover this at all... but we touched on Kafka's history of mental illness. I wonder why.
 
MissThundercat said:
When I took Existentialism at NMU, we did not cover this at all... but we touched on Kafka's history of mental illness. I wonder why.
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I'm genuinely surprised it didn't come up. The two SURVEYLord assertions about philosophy are Nietzsche was a Nihilist! (No) and Heidegger was a Nazi! (er... well... yes).
 
Kepler said:
I'm genuinely surprised it didn't come up. The two SURVEYLord assertions about philosophy are Nietzsche was a Nihilist! (No) and Heidegger was a Nazi! (er... well... yes).
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It may have. When I took that class, it was 20 years ago, and there are days I can barely remember what I had for breakfast, let alone a philosophy lecture from my undergrad.
 
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