Babette Babich pointed out that the trade-off is one we make all the time: many great artists and thinkers have said, done, or written things that are wrong. “I’m a Nietzschean, and Nietzscheans are used to this, because Nietzsche says terrible things about the Jews, he also says terrible things about women,” she said. Philosophy professors, she went on, had to defend the thinkers that mattered, even if they had said or done terrible things, because it was so easy for a thinker to disappear from the intellectual landscape. “To this day, Nietschze is only rarely taught at the Ph.D. level,” she said. “Heidegger’s not taught very often as it is.” In short: Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Trawny was unmoved by the idea of discretion; instead, he wanted to double down and talk it all out in public. “There’s a point where we have to say, ‘No, no, this is a point we cannot contextualize anymore,’ ” he said. “There is a responsibility to say, ‘It’s impossible—Heidegger, you cannot say that!… Even if you are the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, this is over the limit.’ ” At the same time, he saw a way out for Heidegger in one of the philosopher’s own concepts, “errancy”—the idea that human beings are not calculators, but conjecturers, and that being wrong is, therefore, an irreducible part of being a person. (In “The Essence of Truth,” Heidegger wrote that “the errancy through which human beings stray is not something that, as it were, extends alongside them like a ditch into which they occasionally stumble; rather, errancy belongs to the inner constitution of the [existence] into which historical human beings are admitted.”) Trawny continued, “He knew, at the end of his life, what was written in these notebooks. He was aware of the problems. But he couldn’t take the pen and wipe it out. He tries to show us how deeply a philosopher can fail. I don’t know whether this interpretation is strong, but I hope so—that this could be possible.” (As to the question of “contamination,” Trawny said that he regretted, somewhat, the choice of that metaphor. It may have been “too strong.”) On the whole, I find myself agreeing with Trawny. It’s impossible to disavow Heidegger’s thinking: it is too useful, and too influential, to be marginalized. (A few weeks ago, when I pulled “The Essence of Truth” down from my bookshelves, I found it as compelling as I had a decade ago.) But it’s also impossible to set aside Heidegger’s sins—and they cannot help but reduce the ardency with which his readers relate to him. Philosophers like to play it cool, but the truth is that intellectual life depends on passion. You don’t spend years working your way through “Being and Time” because you’re idly interested. You do it because you think that, by reading it, you might learn something precious and indispensable. The black notebooks, however seriously you take them, are a betrayal of that ardency. They make it harder to care about—and, therefore, to really know—Heidegger’s ideas. Even if his philosophy isn’t contaminated by Nazism, our relationship with him is.
Posted on: Wed, 07 Jan 2015 06:58:29 +0000
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