I’ve just finished watching a documentary on Nietszche, followed by one on Heidegger. My estimation of Nietszche has diminshed the older I get. When I was a teenager, I found his works exhilarating. He is a rapid, compact, aphoristic writer who never fails to strike a pose. Strangely, for one who claimed to be in the vanguard of a new era, he is very much a Romantic. He glorifies ‘Great Men’, and is always preoccupied with his own emotional responses. He rejected Morality as a universal: it is alright for the masses, but for the exceptional and great it is a hindrance that should be dispensed with in favour of pursuing the working out of an ‘inner law’ unique to each exceptional great man (Nietszche despised women: he conceived of them as weak and frivolous, if not downright cunning and devious). There is no attempt in Nietszche to seek foundational justification for morality: with the ‘Death of God’ the absolute basis of morality is gone. What we are left with is a relativity that may even extend beyond morality, and go so far as to uproot and destabilize truth itself, though that is a matter of interpretation. In it’s place we have the utility value of truth and morality: how life enhancing is an idea or point of view? I am unsure about Nietszche’s position on the ‘truths’ propounded by science. Not many scientists, I think, would be happy to characterise their results as true relative to their utility in increasing our sense of power and mastery over life. I suspect that most scientists hold absolutist, foundational presuppositions on the nature of truth within their respective fields of inquiry. Like I said: the older I get, the less sympathy I have for Nietszche…and more for the horse. On 3rd January 1889, Nietszche collapsed in a street in Turin after causing a disturbance by his attempts to shield a mistreated cart horse from the whippings being inflicted on it by it’s owner. After years of decrying pity as part of ‘slave morality’, his last public act as a sane human being was to display pity for a poor dumb animal. He swiftly descended into insanity, followed by dementia. He died eleven years later, in 1900. The documentary went on to detail some of the misinterpretations and distortions of his philosophy foisted by the Nazis. Will Self makes some comments: his early ones are banal, but those towards the end of the program show a deep grasp of Nietszche’s work. I should really make time to read some of Will Self’s books. Even his name is cool.

The documentary on Heidegger focussed on his activities as a Nazi, which have only come clearly into the light over the past two decades. I was aware that Heidegger had joined the Nazi party and had sympathies in that direction, but I was not prepared to hear just how culpable he was. I came to Heidegger via Paul Celan. Celan was a German-Jewish poet whose family was exterminated in the Holocaust. While he and his family were forced into a walled ghetto in Czernowitz, Celan translated the Sonnets of William Shakespeare, and continued to write poetry. He wrote in German, his native language, but also the language of the Nazis, the murderers responsible for destroying the East European Jewish culture which had nurtured him. This placed tremendous pressures of ambivalence on Celan’s relationship with the German language. And his attraction to Heidegger is partly explained by this: Heidegger was fascinated by language and attributed great ontological power to it. It is Heidegger that said that man only speaks insofar as he concurs with language, and that great writers such as Holderlin transcended their own meager resources by a profound engagement with language and it’s powers of calling into being. Celan knew of Heidegger’s culpability with respect to Nazism, and after the war visitted Heidegger in his hut ‘Todtnauberg’, situated in the Black Forest. Celan went there seeking some kind of acknowledgement from Heidegger, that he should apologise, or say “the word in the heart”. He never got it. In fact, it never came: Heidegger died without having said a public (or private?) word in repentance. I’ll include Celan’s poem on that visit, in Michael Hamburger’s translation:

Todtnauberg

Arnica, eyebright, the draft from the well with the starred die above it,

in the hut,

the line -whose name did the book register before mine?- the line inscribed in that book about a hope, today, of a thinking man’s coming word in the heart,

woodland sward, unlevelled, orchid and orchid, single,

coarse stuff, later, clear in passing,

he who drives us, the man, who listens in,

the half- trodden wretched tracks through the high moors,

dampness, much.

The documentary also included information on Hannah Arendt, who was once a pupil of Heidegger’s, and with whom he had an affair. Arendt was Jewish, and is most widely known for her reportage on the trial of Eichmann, in Jerusalem. Originally written as pieces for The New Yorker, it was compiled and issued in book form in 1963. Heidegger’s influence on Arendt is apparent in her diagnosis of a form of aphasia in Eichmann who, she says, was able only to think in ‘officialese’, government underwritten jargon that insulated him from the reality and evil consequences of his acts. He was unable to properly relate to language. Now, if we pause here and think about this, what are we to make of Heidegger? This point is interesting, because there are those (mostly within the Anglo American philosophical tradition of epistemic and language philosophy) who maintain that Heidegger’s use of language is obscurantist and conceptually vacant. Heidegger’s reputation is diminishing the more we learn about his Nazi activities, but it is an ironic justice that his greatest pupil, a Jew, should have written an epitaph that may one day become applicable not only to Eichmann, but Heidegger himself. It certainly indicates the complexity of any final assessment of his position within the tradition of western philosophy.