Heidegger and the Left

[@spellman007]

Crazy how things have turned out for midwestern MAGA

[@benmateus6883]

This is fantastic! I am glad to see Midwest Marx and Dr. Rockhill come together for more collaboration.

[@ai-ml-ml]

I for one am extremely disappointed they continue to collaborate with Midwestern Marx as they're clearly settler chauvinist opportunists who platform fascists like Haz and Hinkel. We cannot build socialism out of the reactionary American nationalism as they seek to, and frankly it weakens Rockhills analysis of fascism. kzbin.info/www/bejne/jJ_RkJWNedKcsNk 13:33 "the real struggle against fascism needs to be a struggle against colonialism" - Gabriel Rockhill

[@B_Estes_Undegöetz]

Why is Heidegger so widely regarded as “important”, even today with the certain knowledge he was a Nazi? Well, my theory is that Heidegger holds out the vague hope of elaborating a philosophy not inconsistent with the radical individualism the right craves, the liberal centrist capitalists need, and the left (especially the “cultural left” heavily influenced by the liberal centrists) feels obliged to address and “include”. I’ve tried numerous times. I’ve listened to audio books of Heidegger and by specialists about Heidegger and after a while one gets cross-eyed wondering why it all seems so dense and elaborate. What’s it all getting at? I used to demand my students tell me in three sentences or less what was the main point and purpose of anything they’d just read (or written). If they couldn’t do it then they didn’t really understand what they’d read, or hadn’t written anything themselves that had actually made a point. With Heidegger I don’t think I could do this myself even after trying to understand him. And worse … it was never clear what social goals one could hope to achieve by choosing to believe what metaphysics or epistemology he’d written. Which didn’t disturb me as much 30 to 40 years ago as it does now. Anyone who can be adopted by everyone is actually a friend or ally to no one. And in an oppressive society such a man becomes an enabler of the oppressive establishment … and permits the philosopher who proposes it cynically to stick his finger into the political breeze and choose his politics accordingly. There was a lot of this kind of cynical withdrawal from ethics and political philosophy in the early 20th century. I associate the entire “analytical philosophy” movement as cynical table setting for the establishment rich and their growing fascist tendencies … while still being able to claim “liberal values” or even some bizarre connection to realists and materialists if that’s the way world went post WWI and the Russian Revolution. Wittgenstein himself was raised surrounded by wealth (even if he renounced it for himself personally… he never renounced the idea of wealth and an aristocracy of wealth) and its easy to see the consistency between his philosophy of “we make the world up by what we say the world is and the language games we decide to play in it.” and the psychology of the entitled aristocratic newly globalist elite who’d come to rule the world. I was taught to read such proclamations as “relativist” … but a more likely reading I’ve come to understand is a post-Nietzschean one that means to remake the world along the lines of whatever the globalist rich ruling class and their intellectual philosopher-priesthood think it SHOULD look like after the next great conflagration and destruction of all those excess commoners and working people. My two cents. I’ve not seen the early 20th century analytical tradition the same since the developments of the last twenty years in which a new pseudo intellectual enabling group has come along to give legitimacy to whatever grotesque plans the super rich pseudo-intellectual new-world-builders say it should be.

[@in.der.welt.sein.]

Could you express that in three short sentences?

[@LittleMushroomGuy]

Heidegger is important because he IS the father of postmodernism, he deconstructed 2000+ years of western philosophy. Even in his early days, Heidegger was the one who brought Nietzsche back from literature to philosophy. During his peak he was the face of Phenomenology and Existentialism. After his peak he was still highly regarded, influential and quoted by philosophers like Derrida and Foucault. After his death he continued to be highly influential, Enactivism, Embodied Cognition, the modern Phenomenology of Psychopathology, Post-Phenomenology, Pragmatism.... They all continue in the footsteps of Heidegger. What Aristotle and Plato were for the Medieval Philosophers, Heidegger and Wittgenstein are today. "But he was a Nazi", ok you are commenting on a video from a channel that discussed Marxism, how do you not have any problems with the millions that died under communists systems? Or that Marx was antisemitic and a racist?

[@davisoneill]

Daniel Tutt really nails it. Why wouldn't the bourgeois philosophers love Heidegger - he allows them to talk about reification and alienation without mentioning class struggle.

[@thekratomchannel]

First time finding this podcast. Thanks for the wakeup call guys. Not heard people doing some good philosophy for too long.

[@joer4]

I am currently in a deep dive into Heidegger. As with many people, I find his analysis to be of great interest. While I don't agree with everything said in this discussion, I really appreciate the time that the speakers have taken to truly engage with Heidegger and present a critique. It has given me some food for thought. I particularly hope that Danial Tutt will publish some of his thoughts, as he clearly has some insight into Heidegger's thought that could afford further analysis.

[@lorenzobetancourt5559]

The issue is that one thing is his political ideals and the other is his Philosophy and some issues that must be rescued or proven that they have no value and buried forever, but no one seeks the answer to this and in the end the Nazi ghost is still alive.

[@syourke3]

Heidegger is the most influential philosopher that no one ever actually reads.

[@galek75]

Only idiots avoid reading him

[@syourke3]

Only idiots call other people idiots just because they don’t read Heidegger.

[@galek75]

@@syourke3 Just because? If you find where I said that then you deserve a reader of the year award.

[@syourke3]

Thais what you say! That anyone who doesn’t read H is an idiot! 😂

[@alexissycamore8707]

Surely that’s Hegal😂

[@rossdouthard6216]

Very informative presentations.

[@DMGrass-gb9kg]

Thanks! Great work!

[@AbtinX]

Thank you gor doing this. These philosophers are a waste of time.

[@MrCartmannn]

Thank you so much for this!

[@jancoil4886]

I will the first to admit that Heidegger is not to my taste but his popularity and impact are undeniable. How does one account for this? His admirers and students can be found throughout the left and right. Christian, Jewish, Atheist and everything in between. This was long before the Black Notebooks and it has never been a secret that he was a Nazi. He was for a while banned from teaching after 1945. If he was just a charlatan and careerist how were so many intelligent people fooled by his humbug for so long?

[@stephen1340c]

Not dissimilarly, people on the academic Left and Right alike place Carl Schmitt on a pedestal for not dissimilar reasons while conveniently, for themselves, overlooking the very real and severe political, moral, and ethical baggage of Schmitt. The precise, same baggage that Heidegger has.

[@B_Estes_Undegöetz]

He holds out the vague hope of elaborating a philosophy not inconsistent with the radical individualism the right craves, the liberal centrists need, and the left (especially the “cultural left” heavily influenced by the liberal centrists) feels obliged to address.

[@BlackSmokinStile]

because they are not so intelligent as it seems

[@heidenburg5445]

I have to say this to deepen your understanding. That gaming chair sucks because you cant spread your legs to let your balls air out.

[@Fred73251]

Bergson forever

[@joeyrufo]

1:14:22 yes! One of the problems with Heidegger is his habit of ontologizing phenomena! Marx's own ontology was always domain-specific! He would never have talked about justice like it had a meaning or an existence outside of human(like) society! 🙄🙄🙄

[@joeyrufo]

1:49:00 there's a really great book called _Marx's Social Ontology_ by Carol C. Gould! Human "reality" itself only exists at the human level! It doesn't make sense to talk about "human reality" in any other context!

[@danieldrazenovich935]

Heidegger, the philosopher writes that the Jewish people, with their "talent for calculation", were so vehemently opposed to the Nazi's racial theories because "they themselves have lived according to the race principle for longest".

[@hazelwray4184]

Zionism?

[@danyalghaznavi6818]

Here he was right- Ask Dr Dershowitz... Dershowitz, yes not a n Iranian Muslim Cleric. 😂

[@IIBizzy]

Would have been better without Midwestern Marx.

[@ezepeda5441]

Maybe do some due dilligence before working with MWM

[@harveyyoung3423]

Part A1: The first guy Colin (?) is disclosing part of the Heideggerian background to Derrida's "deconstruction of the myth of presence". This can be interpreted as "idealist" if we think that realism is direct causal realism. This can be understood also in terms of one particular kind of Derrida's "deconstruction" of Western metaphysics. The term "deconstruction" here is from Heidegger's claim to the "destruction" of Western Metaphysics. In Derrida these moves point to a general critique, via a Critique of his intellectual contemporary context (post World War Two France) of structural linguistics, of linguistic naming and reference. Derrida will go on to Critique the myth of presence in terms of speech acts traditionally interpreted as prior or privileged to writing or text, in terms of meaning. Derrida then can deconstruct the subject as a metaphysical entity via the deconstruction of speech to writing and presence, which are is seen perhaps as "its" conditions of possibility. All that might make us view Heidegger's philosophy as a kind of idealism but perhaps better that there "is" only the world according to Dasein "in" it practically/historically. Heidegger later wanted to move away from this risk and i would say his move is to bring in discussions of "Ereignis" most explicitly in Heidegger's' "Contributions to Philosophy". Indeed here we encounter the "Event" underdetermined by a priori structures of reason and so not graspable within rationalisms. This leads towards a rethinking of "Agency" and "who" maybe even "responsibility". A direction at odds with Derrida's use of Heidegger as it is not idealist and not in the first instance anonymous. The New post Derridean Left like Badiou and Zizek turned to Hegel's Speculative Realism and interpreted the "Event" in terms of affordances for projects via rethinking modal (metaphysical) notions like necessity and possibility. Moves within art and culture via Critique becomes more important, but there is also gestures towards Kant's aesthetics in the interpretation of the "event". But in practice for the left the aesthetic quickly becomes tactical means ends driven eg Lenin.

[@harveyyoung3423]

Part A2: Now that’s the early Heidegger going forward to the post structuralism left and new speculative left. Now the left in general ironically have a reverence for their own historical traditions of revolution and socialist reformers. Indeed Heidegger find himself in the 1920’s already in an intellectual atmosphere that is from the late 19th century left, materialist and mechanist. For some Marxists this meant that scientific materialism and mechanism were the necessary unconditional economic reality which meant that socialist change or revolution had to have a serious theoretical scientific base, and that the “Proletariat” were too caught up in Capitalist mechanist determinisms to be able to becomes a common self conscious class. Experts in economic science alone can see the reality behind liberal appearances of the super structural ideology. There was a group of Marxists called Legal Marxists at the end of the 19th century, legal because: a) unlike the more extreme revolutionaries of violence they had not broken the law and were not then in prison or in exile, and 2) they saw in liberalism and its legal construction affordances for a gradual shift in Russia from agrarian based economy to embrace liberal Capitalism which would then transform into Marxist communism gradually though the law. The revolutionaries though saw no need for Russia to hand such power and wealth to a rising Beusware Class in the hope they will transform into communists later. The Revolutionaries won this debate of course in Russia in early 20th century. But as that debate is and event we can imagine things could have been otherwise counterfactual alternatives forwards from the factual Event. It is surly no stretch to claim the Critical Legal Studies and Critical Legal Theory and Praxis movement in academia the legal and other professions, owe much to Derrida’s and Foucault’s work on the law and justice, along with Deleuze version of a transcendental imminent empirical material base. And it’s no stretch to claim that they would see themselves as re-playing what might have been early on prior to the Russian revolution. They were after a Marxism that was not saddled to the Soviet Union radical break, and more continuous with their contemporary Capitalism e.g. Foucault on Gary Becker, Derrida on Justice. The question is though for a thinking acting been who has experience and the apparent capacity to judge and decide based in perception, a radical break revolution means no continuity no time so experience will never see anything like a whole world as science has the apparent privilege of. So warrant and consent are alone for the professionals and experts. Also though a very gradual change by increment and differential subliminal changes might also be said to be sub experiential sub consenting. Individual Experience and knowledge is then dethroned and de-legitimated, un- justified with respect to experts. That is standard Marxism on individual claims to knowledge. Now in part this rose as a response to Neo-Kantianism, which rose as a response to the earlier idealism/mechanism debates which between Hegel and Marx with socialists.

[@harveyyoung3423]

Part A3: This gives rise to epistemology and individualist empiricism in Britain Germany and the US from the early 20 the century a return to people having an “in”, a voice an action in the face of anonymous experts and professionals. Indeed Heidegger spends some time arguing against the neo-Kantians in his precursor lecture course to “Being and Time”, “A History of the Concept of Time”. Heidegger seems to think the neo-Kantians are trapped in an idealism, as did the socialists, but Heidegger gestures towards ontology and later the ontic/ontological difference against to rescue his philosophy from an accusation of idealism. Here the idealism manifests as opposed to mechanism and disenchantment of capitalism and Marxism, but Heidegger’s move is also a Critique of capitalism and Marxism, but one not captured in terms of knowledge metaphysics eg as an idealist mechanist debate. I mean part of the old idealist tradition was to oppose morals and ethics to mechanisms of Capitalism and Marxism, a view some Marxsit saw as essential to add to the dry Scientific economic descriptions and aims. What happed in the late 20th century to epistemology in the hands of the left and the Marxists was the focus on media and media Critique before their mass entry into these industries. This media focus is also old, for Marxists, many of which were journalists, and then the Lucas Gramsci Adorno route to Critique institution’s media and culture. In many ways the turn to media now for many years goes back though Lucas aesthetics and B Crose aesthetics to the neo-Kantian epistemology. Indeed the link is embodied in some who had boots in both camps. An example of this debate might be a neo-Kantian epistemology looking at this “Heidegger and the Left” program would focus on just the content the claims and asses them, while a Critical Marxist would ask is this program just to get people to pay for their courses, lets look at the economic model on display behind the frame and the screen. They might ask: “what is the ideology at play un recognised in what they are saying. We might be abkle to decide this on whether they delete this comment from the comments section or “let it be”. This is a different scepticism to epistemological that just tries to compares their presentation to a reality as disjunctive. Rather I believe Critical epistemology requires no reality or truth behind the presentation as such as a Criteria but rather the difference here is conjunctive is the sense they only compare representations with each other not reality and just let the economics and legal notions of Justice to speak the rest.

[@harveyyoung3423]

Part A4: Heidegger then is really in neither of these camps on epistemology and Critique. Heidegger on “difference” that Derrida also took up and appropriated might attest to where the disagreement is. For in the 19th century many Communist movements were back to nature movements and only later did the term commune, communist, community become seen as essentially a socialist term. The Marxist initially saw them as Romantics of the German Idealist sort of Kant’s Third Critique. The aesthetic shift for the Marxists was to turn to media and cultural representations of identities through Derrida’s difference and privilege. It’s a tool of analysis and Critique of institutions and traditions and also a mode and zone of possible action for change given the appropriate understanding of “event” and tactical action. Heidegger it seems wants aesthetics and language to return us to a primordial relationship to nature that both Capitalist and socialist engineering and mechanisms are destroying. Here Heidegger wants to contrast his relationship to nature with seeing nature as standing reserve for human use. Its slightly Kantian in that it seeks to escape from mere means ends calculations. Being here stands not so much opposed to seeming or appearance eg epistemicaly or scientifically, but as a kind of moral or ethical distinction about how e engage with the world as mere use value or something beyond or before or even independent of our aims and uses. Its more of a ethical sort of distinction between Kant’s phenomenal appearance and practical reason or numina. Heidegger is more situated as Kant’s Aesthetic Judgement (3rd Critique) that is a bridge between between knowledge (1st Critique) and action (second Critique). This contrast with the role of epistemology in neo Kantian view and in media Critique. The parallels between the left now and 100 or so years ago also had the debate between the environmentalist agrarian communes and scientific Marxism, that we see playing out right now in our contemporary “Event”. Should the environmentalists throw their lot in with the socialists? Should the socialists concentrate on people projects first before the long term environmental projects?

[@harveyyoung3423]

Part B1: I've listened to part of Daniel Tutt's presentation and i imagine we are going to be taken back to the left's reintroduction of Hegel's conflict thesis on epistemology and the lefts return to Hegel's problem of the "other" as Critiqued by the left (Jean Hypolite Kojevi etc) and then taken up, to articulate women as other and non Western cultures as other to the Western tradition. Part of this Critique involves non appropriation but positive rights as capabilities in law. its ends up i think risking conflating the N##i's with all European Colonialisms as if they were one homogeneous coordinated organisation, when in fact they were in conflict. This was I think Carl Schmitt's view different type differences of the same kind of thing. Now we also have the return of Political Theology with Zizek and so on.

[@harveyyoung3423]

Part b2: so by 34:00 mins it is clear Marcuse was not trying a synthesis of Heidegger and Marx on historical materialism but rather whether Heidegger could be usfully "appropriated" by Marxists for revolution or change. Hence if the apparent lack of understanding in Marxism of how to solve contradictions these manifold and changing dimensions of self consciousness towards class consciousness without conflict, is already in the 1848 manuscripts, then Heidegger is wholly redundant. its the idea taken up by Derrida from Adorno and Marx against Feuerbach's reification and alienation. That is: from Derrida on Justice and the law and Rights we get; "the tools of the master can be used to bring down the masters house". Capitalism Rights and laws far from being merely the superstructure ideology of appearance can also afford as mediations tools at hand, for subversion. This is reminiscent of the late 19th century Legal Marxists positions. Incidentally i have jsut written a lot on this as a comment to Zizek's discussion recently. I am of the thought that Lucas is also responding to Benedetto Croce. This because of similarities between Croce and Zizek's use of Lacan. But I've only just started on this.

[@geolazakis]

As long as Heidegger is seen as this bourgeoisie curiosity, or evil esoteric puzzle, not only won't a critique rise from 'the left', but his writing will forever stay inaccessible to them. 1:44:08 'he sees it as a will to utility, but that's not what driving production, what's driving production is the creation of exchange value, not use value.' Utility captures Marxist exchange value, use value and profit. And no, it's not will to utility, it's will to power, which is imbued in secular political theologies.

[@in.der.welt.sein.]

Gegenstandpunkt has written a Marxist critique of Heidegger. Unfortunately it's not translated into English.

[@mollyklein6355]

.1.Heidegger has never been of interest to Marxists with the negligible exception of celebrity academic philosophers, all political dilettantes, kibbitzers of revolutions, whose youth was stewed in the ideology of Nazism and its French precursors. Mao, Stalin, ignored this rubbish. Historians treat it as a morbid symptom 2. Maximally radical change, the production of supermen hugging trees unframed who don’t go to the pub, read or write novels, or laugh at jokes, is not and never was a Marxist aim. Maximal radicalism is petty bourgeois fantasy. (Marx himself is often explicit on this). 3. Heidegger's being thrown into the world and enframed is a euphemistic [Bourdieu] expression of a crank gnosticism and politically worse fixations. Tutt on the one hand treats Heidegger's gnomic pronouncements as if they're just pretentious ways of saying 'people are dispossessed by proprietor classes' or 'I hate the city.' But on the other hand he pretends awe and says ah this is what marxism is missing! Superstition and Magic! Marxists can just reply: no and no. You defeat Heidegger by evaluating his claims. Doesn't take a whole day. You're all avoiding this because you really find them either unintelligible or trite. Why don't you bring 20th-21st c. cosmology to bear on his actual claims? Because you implicitly classify them as sorcery, fit for study in the Hogwarts of academic philosophy and Dengist podcastia, where we pretend we all agree babies come from homunculi, and not beyond. 4. You're avoiding this: Being _isn’t_ thrown into the world and enframed. If this were ‘enframed’ there'd be nothing objectionable about it, nothing preferable about a prior illiterate and unmediated state of original uh , er, Imaginary Greekishness. Nothing to envy in the frameless.

[@mollyklein6355]

Cosmology or for that matter mediology? Everybody reads Heidegger as if they have no more than a medieval monk's education.

[@AbtinX]

Heidegger and his ilk, are a waste of ink and paper

[@withnail-and-i]

One of the worst comment sections that I've ever read

[@alexanderfuchs8742]

heidegger is a rural, prvincial philosopher, not really bourgeois, cosmopolitan ...

[@syourke3]

I think he was absolutely revolted by the ugliness of industrialism and the greed and rootlessness of finance capitalism. Perhaps that’s why he was sympathetic to the Nazis with their “blood and soil” rhetoric. The Nazis were very popular among the German peasantry.

[@austintierney4828]

The bourgeois revolution and theory of the subject allow for a figure like Heidegger to “reject” it via irrationalism and mystification (marxists and hegelians would instead sublate it), so as much as he would like to think he stand above it he nonetheless abides bourgeois social relations…I think…

[@austintierney4828]

@@syourke3nazism arises as a right wing answer to the crisis of capitalism. Like FDR/newdealism that “saves capitalism” from the so-called left; fascism saves it from the right.

[@alexanderfuchs8742]

@@austintierney4828 the point is that he stands below it

[@alexanderfuchs8742]

@@syourke3 yea for sure. the fastest track from heidegger to marx and back again is via werner sombart & ferdinand tönnies ... techocritique also via ernst jüngers "total mobilization" & "der arbeiter" ... heidegger kind of believed that the n@zis would enable return to a more agrarian, rural and calm life in which thinking and poeticizing is still possible and isnt drowned out like in anonymous cities ... and he didnt understand that they wanted war, which means total mobilization, which is the opposite of what he wanted ...

[@ahmuqasim7540]

Too abstract and hurried talks.

[@TerryTappArt]

What's the link to Ness's new book and talk?