(gm) Martin Heidegger remains the subject of much confusion and polarisation. Some love him, while others consider him a Nazi philosopher. Yet critics and defenders of Heidegger agree on one thing: you cannot ignore him as a philosopher of the twentieth century. His magnum opus, Being and Time, is obligatory reading for anyone with an interest in philosophy. So why does a thinker like Heidegger still polarise so many people today?
Alfred Denker: Alongside Wittgenstein, Heidegger was the twentieth century’s most influential philosopher. Even if you consider his philosophy unimportant, you will not be able to understand the history of twentieth century philosophy without his thinking. His philosophy was influential in many very different areas. These included – aside from philosophy itself – the fields of theology, psychiatry, literary science and ecology; his thinking even affected scientists like Heisenberg and von Weizsäcker. His influence was especially strong in France, from Sartre and Levinas to Ricoeur and Foucault. Given Heidegger’s rectorate at the University of Freiburg, people have always asked whether and to what extent he was involved in National Socialism, and what the implications of that are for the philosophy Heidegger inspired. On top of that he was to some extent an existentialist avant la lettre, and extremely interesting as a person. One need only recall his affair with Hannah Arendt. He is somebody people either love or hate, which is why he polarises so many people to this day.
GM: You have devoted a lot of study to the philosopher Martin Heidegger. You recently wrote a book called “Unterwegs in Sein und Zeit” (Travelling in Being and Time), which is a kind of introduction to Heidegger’s thinking and Heidegger as a person. What is your position on the accusation that Heidegger was involved in National Socialism? The French philosopher Emmanuel Faye even calls him an intellectual pioneer of Nazism.
Alfred Denker: First of all, anyone seriously interested in Heidegger has to take these accusations seriously. Secondly I should state that I abhor National Socialism and I would not be so intimately involved with Heidegger if he had actually been a Nazi. It is important to look very carefully at where Heidegger was actually involved in National Socialism and where he distanced himself critically from it. In doing so we can also learn why National Socialism was so popular with so many people. It is very difficult to imagine oneself back into the world of 1933. The claim that Heidegger was some kind of mastermind of National Socialism is easy to refute. Even if Hitler had read Heidegger, he would only have been able to read material which was politically completely uninteresting. It is impossible to trace a line from Heidegger’s dissertation, habilitation treatise, and Being and Time, to Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
GM: In his later works Heidegger reflected on the nature of technology. What kind of relationship does Heidegger’s later work have with – and what kind of contribution can it make towards – our understanding of an ever-shrinking modern world, poised between the frenzy of globalisation and the quasi-revelation of the Internet?
Alfred Denker: The contribution which Heidegger’s thinking has always been able to make is to question. He questions what we take for granted. A good example is his assertion that science itself cannot think. By that he means that the existential questions of human life cannot be solved by science. My choice of career, whether I marry or not and so on, are not scientific problems. It is a wonderful thing that we can have access to limitless information in a split second these days, but Heidegger would say that information is not the same as recognition. Another thing we can learn from Heidegger is that globalisation is a process which is not being controlled by people, and which is disempowering us. This means that there are no easy solutions, which is a shame for politicians, who are expected to solve every problem within the space of four years.
GM: Do you think it is possible for someone who studies Heidegger’s work to be politically partisan? After all, he did not see the solution to the fundamental issues of our time as located inside old political ideologies. In the legendary Spiegel interview published in 1976 he said, “Only a god can save us.”
Alfred Denker: What I understand him to have meant by that is that as a philosopher you have to keep asking and you have to keep questioning what people take for granted. An ideology is a theory which people no longer question, which is why it is dangerous. Unfortunately there are no simple solutions, nor is there a recipe for heaven on earth. Death and illness are part of human existence. We cannot live forever either. I think that the statement “Only a god can save us” is an unfortunate one, because it cannot be proven. On top of that, we have seen the danger of religious ideologies in our time. It is only a small step from “Only a god can save us” to “Only this god can save us”. I would prefer to say (and I believe this was what Heidegger was thinking): “There is no person that can save us”. Only we limited people living together can attempt to solve these problems. It is not much, but at least it is something.
GM: In this time of financial crisis in which we currently live, can we apply Heidegger’s analysis of technology to the abyss of modern Finanztechnik, or financial technology? When one observes the extent of global Finanztechnik, it is impossible to resist the idea that “it is not we who have technology in our hands, rather it has us in its hands,” to use Heidegger’s own words.
Alfred Denker: It is important to pick up on Heidegger’s thinking in order to continue to evolve in directions in which Heidegger himself did not go. Finanztechnik could indeed be interpreted as a new manifestation of the “Gestell”, as Heidegger called the enmeshing framework of technology. Perhaps we could then say that money has become an end in itself, and so lost its true character. Heidegger would have said that the crisis of Finanztechnik cannot be solved by financial technique. Attempts to rescue Greece from bankruptcy using such techniques are only proof of this. What this means is that a change of system is necessary, and this could only be achieved by political means.
Source: www.globaliamagazine.com
