Jan 7, 2022
Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and demise of the Soviet Union, prominent Western thinkers began to suggest that liberal democracy had triumphed decisively on the world stage. Having banished fascism in World War II, liberalism had now buried communism, and the result would be an end of major ideological conflicts, as liberal norms and institutions spread to every corner of the globe. With the Brexit vote in Great Britain, the resurgence of right-wing populist parties across the European continent, and the surprising ascent of Donald Trump to the American presidency, such hopes have begun to seem hopelessly naïve. The far right is back, and serious rethinking is in order.
In Dangerous Minds, Ronald Beiner traces the deepest philosophical roots of such right-wing ideologues as Richard Spencer, Aleksandr Dugin, and Steve Bannon to the writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger—and specifically to the aspects of their thought that express revulsion for the liberal-democratic view of life. Beiner contends that Nietzsche's hatred and critique of bourgeois, egalitarian societies has engendered new disciples on the populist right who threaten to overturn the modern liberal consensus. Heidegger, no less than Nietzsche, thoroughly rejected the moral and political values that arose during the Enlightenment and came to power in the wake of the French Revolution. Understanding Heideggerian dissatisfaction with modernity, and how it functions as a philosophical magnet for those most profoundly alienated from the reigning liberal-democratic order, Beiner argues, will give us insight into the recent and unexpected return of the far right.
Beiner does not deny that Nietzsche and Heidegger are important thinkers; nor does he seek to expel them from the history of philosophy. But he does advocate that we rigorously engage with their influential thought in light of current events—and he suggests that we place their severe critique of modern liberal ideals at the center of this engagement.
Transcript
August Baker:
Welcome to the New Books Network. This is August Baker, and today
I'm talking with Professor Ronald Beiner about his book, Dangerous
Minds, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right,
University of Pennsylvania Press. Welcome, Professor Beiner.
Ronald Beiner:
I'm happy to participate. Thanks so much for your interest in the
book. That's great.
August Baker:
Yes. I actually listened to it on audio. It comes in audio. I
listened to it but sort of read it first. Let me just, first of
all, give the listeners an overview, at least through some of the
reviews of the book, and I'll just read three quick paragraphs
here.
August Baker:
One is from John McCormick, University of Chicago. "Ronald Beiner's
Dangerous Minds is a staggeringly impressive and deeply needed book
that traces the philosophical foundations of contemporary
reactionary politics in the philosophical works of Nietzsche and
Heiddeger. Beiner avoids both shrillness while confronting
present-day opponents of liberal democracy; and shallowness while
excavating the work of their intellectual heroes. Indeed, he treats
authors such as Julius Evola and Aleksandr Dugin with deathly
seriousness, and he soberly and with exquisite philosophical care
delves into the fundamental core of Nietzsche's and Heidegger's
writings. Dangerous Minds is elegantly structured and beautifully
written. It will be widely read and debated in this frightening age
of fascist resurgence."
August Baker:
Second one is Steven Smith, Yale University. "A great book. If it
proves anything, it's that ideas have consequences, often profound
and dangerous ones. One perhaps unintended benefit of the emergence
of the new right is that it forces readers of Nietzsche and
Heidegger to see them for what they are: apostles of a resurgent
fascism. For those accustomed to reading these thinkers as prophets
of individual liberation and moral self realization, Ronald Beiner
has a clear message: think again."
August Baker:
Finally, from Contemporary Political Theory: "In this erudite,
insightful and short monograph, Ronald Beiner takes aim at often
French-inspired intellectuals who believe that Nietzsche and
Heidegger can and should be deployed to advance a progressive or
radically democratic politics. Beiner believes that the two
philosophers often serve as better resources for fascists.
Dangerous Minds mounts its critique in the light of the recent rise
of far right movements, which often rely on Nietzsche and Heidegger
for philosophical ballast."
August Baker:
Professor Beiner, do you have any corrections or clarifications on
those?
Ronald Beiner:
No. I kind of appreciate the generous reactions to the book, and I
think they all kind of stated what the basic enterprise is.
So...
August Baker:
Good.
Ronald Beiner:
... I'm comfortable with those blurbs. So...
August Baker:
Right. Right. I understand that. I want to read, start off, a
paragraph from your book. You say, "Hopefully, no reader of my book
will draw from it the unfortunate conclusion that we should just
walk away from Nietzsche Heidegger, that is, stop reading them. On
the contrary, I think we need to read them in ways that make us
more conscious of, more reflective about, and more self-critical of
the limits of the liberal view of life, and hence what defines that
view of life." Would you expand on that? I thought that was an
interesting approach.
Ronald Beiner:
Yeah. Happy to do that. Someone actually said quite recently on a
podcast where my book came up, said, "I don't want people reading
Nietzsche. I'm trying to dissuade people from Nietzsche." Well,
that's just complete nonsense. I never said that. I never have said
it. I never would say it. It's kind of basically a slander. I
myself been reading Nietzsche and Heidegger my whole adult life. I
mean, since I became a political theorist in my early 20s. I've
taught them. The book came from a grad seminar I taught on
Nietzsche. So if I'm teaching him, I want people to read him and
read Heidegger and learn from them and draw from them insights that
will be helpful in dealing with contemporary cultural and political
crises, which that's the context for the book. That gives us extra
reason to read them, try and understand what their essential
message is and learn from them.
Ronald Beiner:
Unfortunately, the people seem not to have gotten the core message
or think that, well, there is no core message. He's just being
playful or he's just tossing out ideas, or he's kind of
contributing to a wonderful hyperpluralism or something like that.
Well, I think that's just mistaken. I think people who think that
need to reread Nietzsche or reread both of them and understand
better what the core vision is. Once we understand that, perhaps
it'll make it easier for us to cope with and respond to the kind of
cultural and political crises we currently face. That's why I wrote
the book. If you're writing a book on them, if I just wanted to
shoo them away and or not engage with them and not encourage other
people to engage with them.
Ronald Beiner:
The core insight one needs to get here is with respect to
Nietzsche, to start with Nietzsche, and Heidegger in this respect
is a kind of disciple of Nietzsche, political disciple of
Nietzsche. I think he understood himself in those terms, that there
is a definite political project in Nietzsche. I mean, it's just
shocking the number of commentators who refer to Nietzsche as he's
apolitical; he's antipolitical. There's no politics in Nietzsche;
there's no political philosophy in Nietzsche. All that's just so
totally wrong that it's hard to fathom how people could read this
thinker and think such a thing. It may be that the majority of
readers are somehow getting that crazy upside-down idea of
Nietzsche from there not being a politics or political project in
Nietzsche. That political project is what's powering, what's
animating the whole thing. These thousands and thousands of pages
he's writing, there's politics on every page of Nietzsche.
Ronald Beiner:
The core of his thought is that there is a political imperative to
undo the cultural political dispensation in which we currently
live, which is a kind of liberal egalitarian dispensation inherited
from the French Revolution, liberal thinkers in 19th century, such
as Hegel and Tocqueville assumed that that dispensation was
irreversible, that the world we're launched into by the French
Revolution cannot be undone and should not be undone and it raises
us to a notably higher level.
Ronald Beiner:
Nietzsche thinks the opposite. That it's degrading. That it's
dehumanizing, that it's impossible to have culture within the
political, moral, political horizons shaped by the French
Revolution. Nietzsche thinks that politics should be at the service
of culture, but if you have the wrong kind of politics, you can't
have culture. What is taken to be culture in a liberal egalitarian
world is a non-culture, a pseudo-culture. Heidegger says the same
thing, a moribund pseudo-civilization, he calls it.
Ronald Beiner:
The political project is to undo those horizons, undo that
dispensation so we can once again live in a culture, live in a
world where culture is possible. For Nietzsche, culture is what
everything is about. But culture has political conditions. If you
live in a world where everyone thinks they're the equal of everyone
else... I mean, for him, the only real culture's top-down cultures.
So if you live in a world where top-down cultures are unacceptable,
then you live in a culture-less world. I think Nietzsche and
Heidegger shared that view, and hence their political
preoccupations were the same, that that world has to be swept away
or it has to be razed, or we'd have to start over, wipe the slate
clean and recreate a world where you can have real cultures.
Ronald Beiner:
So, the idea that this is unpolitical in any sense, that's just in
insanity. If that's what most people are getting out Nietzsche,
they really have to take another look at those texts and reread
them because they're missing the forest for the trees. I'm trying
to set that straight, not because I don't want them to read
Nietzsche, but I want them to come closer to a genuine
understanding of what his enterprise is such that they can then
draw insights from that about our world that can help us respond to
the crises of our liberal world.
August Baker:
Yes. I think you touched on this a little. It's not really the
topic of your book, but you touched on it a little, that what is it
about us with our intellectual heroes, that once we align with
someone, we want to read everything they wrote in a positive light?
It's difficult to see them complexly, it seems. I find that in
myself. I'm kind of like rooting for this particular philosopher or
this particular thinker, and it's difficult to see where they...
It's like you spend a lot of time with them, and then it's
difficult to see where they're just totally wrong and you end up
wanting to defend them in some way.
Ronald Beiner:
I can totally understand that. I'd say I spent decades reading
Nietzsche and Heidegger, probably read more Nietzsche and Heidegger
than reading anyone else. I felt that in myself, that you don't
want to think poorly of Nietzsche. He draws you into his net. You
get seduced by him. He's a retortion of genius and he knows buttons
to press and how to draw people's attention and how to keep their
attention and how to make people feel drawn to him. Totally
understandable. My way of thinking about the book was time to
square accounts with Nietzsche, precisely because I was so drawn to
and seduced by him myself. So, I totally understand that.
Ronald Beiner:
The times in which we're living are severely serious. Stakes are
very high to understand what anti-liberal thinkers are really
saying. There's much more extreme example than Nietzsche and
Heidegger. Look at Carl Schmidt. Look at Carl Schmidt's reception
in contemporary intellectual circles. He said [inaudible 00:11:18]
the left. Well, how did that happen? He's much more evil than
either of those two. He was a totally, totally committed Nazi. Not
that Heidegger wasn't, but Carl Schmidt's much worse. Yet, he has
the same loving defenders and people apologizing for him, people
kind doing all kinds of somersaults to make him out to be a good
guy and a healthy contributor to contemporary culture and theory.
It's just insanity.
Ronald Beiner:
There's not much discussion of Schmidt in the book, but it's really
a kind of trinity of people who being misguidedly appropriated by
people, theorists and intellectuals you should know better. All
three of these guys belong very much to the far, not just the
right, but the far right. They themselves understood themselves
that way. They all regarded liberalism and egalitarianism as a
curse. They shared the project of putting an end to it and undoing
the hegemony of liberalism and of the idea of the freedom and
equality of all human beings. They tested that idea. They saw it as
a destruction of genuine culture. We have to fight back. In order
to fight back, have to understand clearly what their project
is.
August Baker:
Start with Nietzsche. What does the far right find in Nietzsche?
Well, he writes, you quote him in Ecce Homo, that his text Beyond
Good and Evil is in all essentials a critique of modernity,
encompassing the modern sciences, modern arts, and even modern
politics. The purpose is to conjure up a contrary type that is as
little modern as possible, a noble yes-saying type. White
nationalists and fascists appear to be noble yes-saying types?
Ronald Beiner:
Well...
August Baker:
To the [inaudible 00:13:32]
Ronald Beiner:
I don't see them that way. So if a fascist is reading Nietzsche,
they're going to see themselves inscribed in Nietzsche's pages.
When Nietzsche gave... Often, his descriptions are kind of cryptic
or incomplete or just gestures towards something without filling in
the details. But insofar as he does fill in the details, it does
fit what became fascism. You can't call Nietzsche a fascist because
fascism didn't exist in the 19th century. But when it did come to
exist, there's no question that fascists saw Nietzsche as
articulating their project, their endeavor.
Ronald Beiner:
George Lickteim wrote that not a single fascist from Mussolini to
Oswald, mostly, escaped Nietzsche's pervasive influence. Well,
that's just a historical fact. The influence of Nietzsche on
fascism, that's not something a hypothetical. That's just
empirical. The breeding ground for what became fascism in the 30s
was the what has been called the conservative revolution in the
1920s. Those people were Nietzschean and through in through in
their self understanding. That fed into Nazism. Now, once they saw
Hitler and saw the Nazis in power, they didn't necessarily like
what they saw. They maybe saw it as too plebeian. It wasn't
aristocratic enough. But of course, you're going to have these
grand ideas of some wonderful aristocracy. Nietzsche himself
did.
Ronald Beiner:
So, if Nietzsche was still around in the 30s, he might have looked
down at his notes at the fascists, and says, "Well, this is more
democracy. It's not aristocracy." But of course, setting some
agenda for some aristocratic revolution that's going to overturn
liberalism and overturn egalitarianism, well, of course it's not
going to quite match what your grand vision was. That would be true
of Nietzsche, too.
Ronald Beiner:
But there are the kind of rhetoric he does, the great question is
where do we look to for the barbarians of the 20th century? He
wanted barbarians. He praises barbarians. He praises vikings or
civilizations that had no qualms about shedding blood. That's kind
of almost a test of... That was part of the tragic vision, that we
can fight wars and be up to our knees in blood and not worry about
it, feel that it's part of what it is to have a civilization.
August Baker:
In terms of the rhetoric that is appealing to the far right, you
have this quote from an early Nietzsche text on the uses and
disadvantages of history for life. In talking about, you might say,
the modern liberalist... I think this is what the people on the
right say... The modern liberal can no longer extricate himself
from the delicate net of judiciousness and truth for a simple act
of will and desire. Is that what you think?
Ronald Beiner:
[inaudible 00:17:03] There's no question that Nietzsche wants to
reorient the core of human life from reason to will. That whole
idea that, the will to power, that if you live in a civilization
that's dominated by intellect and reflection and science and reason
[inaudible 00:17:23]
August Baker:
Dr. Fauci and...
Ronald Beiner:
[inaudible 00:17:25] civilization, and hence the kind of
pseudo-civilization. The test is whether can you have a kind of
civilization that, I don't know, builds pyramids? Well, to have
pyramids, you need slaves. To have slaves, you can't believe in
equality. You have to believe that there's a kind of top-down
dictation of cultural norms. There have to be people who are mirror
instruments of that. If you can't believe, liberalism undermines a
belief in the kind of top-down vision of things that make it
possible for there to be cultures, any cultures.
Ronald Beiner:
Where does liberalism come from? Well, it ultimately comes from
Christianity, mediated through the Reformation, then the
Enlightenment, then the French Revolution. But ultimately, it's
traceable back to Christianity and the belief that we're all equal
children of God. Well, for Nietzsche, those are culture-destroying
premises and they have to be destroyed. So he declares war on
Christianity. What's the reason for that? Well, that too is
political, that if you start with the premises of Christianity,
what you end up with are liberalism as egalitarian liberalism as a
general dispensation. That means no culture. People have to be
ruthless and impose their will and strive for the heroic and strive
for grand visions of things. That's what the fascists were trying
to do. Look at their architecture. Nietzsche says, well, look, at
least they're trying to be a real civilization. They aspire to be
around for a thousand years. Well, no liberal civilization is going
to aspire to that. They hated Christianity for precisely
Nietzsche's reasons.
Ronald Beiner:
There's a very powerful book, my book on Nietzsche and Heidegger's
very short, 1,000 page book by Domenico Losurdo called Nietzsche,
the Aristocratic Rebel in which he kind of spells out how
Nietzsche's political through and through. If you're not persuade
by my little book, well, I'd encourage people to read the 1,000
pages of Losurdo. Bery incisive account of what the fascist owe to
Nietzche. It's all spelled out, I think, in an utterly compelling
way, in a way that's, I think, irrefutable. It's not an accident
that fascists historically have looked to Nietzsche as an
inspiration, including, including Mussolini, including Hitler
himself, went to the Nietzsche archives and warmly embraced
Nietzsche's sister and had himself photographed with a bust of his
hero. And contemporary fascists all love Nietzsche. There's nothing
accidental about that. They have a good case for him belonging to
them rather than belonging to us. It's all fully intelligible, why
fascist, whether fascists of the 20s and 30s or fascists in the
21st century would find inspiration from Nietzsche. And it all
makes sense.
Ronald Beiner:
I mean, Nietzsche's fundamental purpose as an intellectual, as a
philosopher, is to de-legitimize equality. In order to do that, he
has to delegitimize Christianity. That's the twin project.
Everything flows from that. If you can't see that as being at the
core of Nietzsche's project, I don't think you can understand
anything in Nietzsche. You have to appreciate what the core is
because there is a core. It's not just playful pluralism. There is
a hard core there. There's a political project in Nietzsche
[inaudible 00:21:14] and then there's a political project in
Marx.
Ronald Beiner:
For Marx, the political projects just carry forward to the next
stage the egalitarianism of liberalism. In Nietzsche, it's the
opposite. The civilizational commitment to equality has to be
completely annulled, has completely annihilated in order that there
be real cultures. I think fascists see themselves as carrying that
baton and putting into practice and trying to put Nietzsche's
theory into action. Whether Nietzsche would have been impressed,
entirely happy with the results, well, that's a different question.
But then would Marx be happy with Stalinism?
August Baker:
I...
Ronald Beiner:
It's not the point. The point is there is a vision there, and
fascists saw themselves as trying to realize what Nietzsche had
articulated normatively.
August Baker:
Would you say that both for Marx and Nietzsche, they were long on
criticism and short on how the new world is going to be?
Ronald Beiner:
Yeah. 100%. You could say that's a kind of parallel between them,
that they're both writing blank checks, very dangerous blank
checks. And no. Nietzsche said that the 20th century would be
ideological war the likes of which would had never been seen in
human history. That was more or less true. That was pretty
prophetic. The ideas, well, you have the Marxist on one side and
you'd have the fascists on the other, and you'd have the liberals
in the middle who would be irrelevant, and that he was on one side
of that ideological war.
Ronald Beiner:
The problem is for Nietzsche as much as for Marx. They're both
utopians, but they don't fill in the content of this utopia. All
the emphasis is on destroying the existing order. For Marx, we wipe
out capitalism, but then what succeeds capitalism? Well, we find
out later. [inaudible 00:23:22] Leninism and Stalinism. In the case
of Nietzsche [inaudible 00:23:28] that they're very powerful
cultural critique. Sure. Let's destroy liberalism. Then what? Well,
then we get Mussolini and Hitler. Nietzsche didn't spell out, well,
if you follow this path, you're going to wind up with Hitler.
There's society. Well, we'll get to the further shore. Well, we'll
figure it out when the arrow hits the further shore. Well, by time
you get to the further shore, sorry, it's too late.
Ronald Beiner:
So, yeah. It's that part of what makes him attractive as theorists
is there's a kind of tremendous kind of ambition and reaching for
the stars and climbing Mount Everest culturally and intellectually.
That's part of what defines our theory tradition. But the theory
tradition's dangerous precisely because you get in the theory can
and by virtue of your ambition, but then that can turn out to be
politically ambitious if all you've done is write a bunch of blank
checks.
Ronald Beiner:
I think both Nietzsche and Marx did that.
August Baker:
Yeah. One of the [inaudible 00:24:35].
Ronald Beiner:
We paid the place for it in the 20th century [inaudible 00:24:37]
there's no guarantee right this moment that the 21st century won't
be a replay of the 20th century. God help us if it is. But there's
plenty to suggest that the 21st century could turn out to be as
horrifying as the 20th century was. Again, that's part of
[inaudible 00:24:57]
August Baker:
Be realistic.
Ronald Beiner:
... of what I wrote, why I wrote the book. It's here we go again.
It's like Weimar over again where you get intellectuals... I guess
like most liberals, the assumption was, well, fascism now will
never happen again. It's in the rubbish bin of history. It'll stay
in the rubbish bin of history and wouldn't go to the extent of
Fukiyama, that liberal democracy who will reign forever. That was,
I think, obvious nonsense from the start.
Ronald Beiner:
But certainly, the idea of there being fascist intellectuals,
trying to pull fascism out of that rubbish bin of history, that was
sort of beyond my imagination. Then I don't [inaudible 00:25:38]
starting in 2015 more or less, and then it got worse after Trump
was elected. You start think, well, fascist intellectual do exist.
And it's back. It's back not just in with respect to mob behavior,
but it's back with respect to intellectual activity. That was a
very scary realization for me. I wrote this book, I guess, as
feeling a kind of citizens' imperative to say something or do
something with the equipment I had, to say, well, we better wake up
and smell the coffee.
August Baker:
Yep. Yeah. One of the points you made that I thought really
interesting was you said Nietzsche puts a lot of energy into
exposing liberal and leftist resentment, but he turned a blind eye
toward or was silent about the resentment of the right, including
his own. I was like, "Yes."
Ronald Beiner:
It's pretty hard not to see all the resentment in the pages of
Nietzsche. For him, that's the standard of the things that he
rejects, supposedly, are defined by resentment and all the business
about yay-saying and that's the opposite of resentment. Well, his
texts are, not always, at least not every page, but there's plenty
of resentment packed into Nietzsche's texts. It delegitimizes him
according to the standard he himself is applying. He's not as
yay-saying as he makes himself out to be. There's this rhetoric of
yay-saying, but he doesn't live up to that rhetoric. I think that
that's true of the political legacy he's left up till the present.
Right wing populism is powered more than anything by resentment
against supposed liberal elites who are running the world and so
on. Well, a lot of that you can actually trace back to Nietzche. He
was completely ignored in his own time. Hardly anyone knew him.
Hardly anyone knew who he was.
August Baker:
What a miserable life.
Ronald Beiner:
Yeah. Not a fun life. It's a lonely life. I think he bitterly
resented the fact that he wasn't being treated as the intellectual
giant that he took himself to be. He was right. He was right that
people would start reading him in the 20th century, in fact, regard
him as one of the leading thinkers of his time. But...
August Baker:
He only barely saw that, I think, before he went mad. Just briefly
did he realize that he was becoming successful, as I understand
it.
Ronald Beiner:
Well, he went mad in 1889. I don't think there was much there.
Yeah. Hardly any knows [inaudible 00:28:36]
August Baker:
Hardly, right.
Ronald Beiner:
... was starting. It really picked up in the 1890s, and then as one
got into the 20th century, he took off and became perhaps the most
influential thinker of the 20th century or one of the most
influential thinkers.
August Baker:
You talked about culture and one of the things that you say was
that Nietzsche would say that modern liberals are to reflective
about their membership in cultures and about the equal validity of
alternative cultures. We do talk a lot about culture, but not in
the way... I was trying to think how, with all the talk of
multiculturalism, how that fits in with his critique of
cultures.
Ronald Beiner:
Well, again, I think that you can draw a direct line from that to
the contemporary far right. I think in this sense, they're
precisely Nietzscheans in the strict sense, that part of what we
associate with modernity and part of why Nietzsche condemns
modernity is one's trying to assent to a kind of universalism where
one can appreciate different cultures and what different
communities within the human world have to contribute to a larger
conversation and a larger human experience and a kind of
impartiality.
Ronald Beiner:
Again, I think here where you could see Heidegger as an
intellectual heir to Nietzsche, that real cultures are so deeply
rooted that they don't see outside of themselves, don't see outside
of their own [inaudible 00:30:19] want to.
August Baker:
Interesting.
Ronald Beiner:
And you could say the central rhetoric in Heidegger is that modern
man is homeless. You get this idea in his important Letter on
Humanism, that homelessness is the core modern experience. Again,
it's like for Nietzsche, is what condemns modernity. For Nietzsche,
what condemns modernity is there are no horizons, that the
universalism that has been introduced into Western experience by
Christianity has dissolved horizons. The horizon for much of
Christianity was the idea of God itself, and God's dead, and we're
left with nothing and we're just left with some kind of residues of
Christian civilization. But those are fast eroding. And so we're
left just drifting. Our kind of supposed openness to a variety of
cultures shows we have no culture; we have no horizons of our own.
We live in this horizonless world.
Ronald Beiner:
Well, Heidegger similarly, we kind of live in this homeless world
where everyone's trying to be universal and they're not rooted in
any particular identity or cultural experience of their own. The
kind of far right attack on multiculturalism, I think, just draws
straight out of that. One of these alt-right thinkers, Greg
Johnson, said that the originator of the European new right was
Heidegger. I think that's a plausible claim. But I think you can
trace similar preoccupations back to Nietzsche, and I try and do
that in the book.
August Baker:
As we go to Heidegger, I think immediately of Rorty in the New York
Times said similar to you in the sense that we're not trying to say
don't read Heidegger, but Rorty said Heidegger's books will be read
for centuries to come. But the smell of smoke from the crematories,
the grave in the air, referring back to Paul Celan's Death Fugue,
the grave in the air will linger on their pages.
Ronald Beiner:
I think that's true. I discuss in the book how some of the most
incriminating texts in Heidegger were taken out by Heidegger in the
'60s, and then when they put together the collected works in the
'80s, they were put back in. I think that that tells you a lot
about Heidegger, that he was never prepared to admit that he had
made any mistakes. He was silent about the Holocaust, or insofar as
people forced commentary out of him, it was kind even more
incriminating than silence.
Ronald Beiner:
I think it relates to what I was saying earlier, that the core
project is to destroy the liberal egalitarian world founded on the
idea of a universal dignity of human beings. The commitment to
fascism is actually not some... I don't know... some ornament or
some add-on, but what connects quite centrally to what his
fundamental project was. In a sense, if fascism didn't work out in
the 20th century, well, his thought will still be around centuries
later and some later version will have to try and do what Hitler
and Nazis failed to do in the '30s. I mean...
August Baker:
Rorty also says he lied over and over again about his Nazism, and
that he did its best to ignore the murder of the European Jews. But
for those who care about philosophy, things are not so simple. He
says, as far as whether to read him, and this is again getting back
to your point, he managed to write books that are as powerful and
as original as Spinoza's or Hegel's. You can't understand really
Gadamer or Levinas, Arendt, Foucault, Derrida, Habermas without
reading Heidegger. That's what Rdy was saying.
Ronald Beiner:
I pretty much agree with all that. Yeah. We should read him. He
earned his place in the canon of Western philosophy. I think it's
almost certainly correct that people will read him long from now
just as they read Aristotle store or read Hegel. I don't want to
expel him from the canon and I wouldn't want to pull his books off
the library, as one prominent critic of Heidegger suggested. So, I
think that's right. There's a reason why people read him, and
there's a reason why he's just been essential to 20th century, as
he's been, and why he had the tremendous influence he's had on a
whole generation of philosophers, many of whom I kind of cherish.
Same for Nietzsche. I mean, they are a indispensable part of the
history of modern philosophy. That's not a reason to try and
whitewash them or [inaudible 00:35:32].
August Baker:
Exactly.
Ronald Beiner:
... apologize for them or kind of pretend that the project was
something different than what it really was.
August Baker:
Right.
Ronald Beiner:
[inaudible 00:35:41].
August Baker:
No, absolutely.
Ronald Beiner:
Look at that clear-sightedly and face up to it and understand why
these thinkers have such attraction for people who are not good
liberals, but who are ferociously anti-liberal. Those people are on
the rise and have a big and growing following. If they understand
themselves in Nietzsche and Heidegger in terms we have to
understand that and maybe if necessary, reread Nietzsche and
Heidegger until we're clear about it, and trying to contribute in
my modest way to that.
August Baker:
That's certainly the way I understood it. Fascinating. We don't
have time. But for the listener, there's an interesting anecdote
you have about your own personal interactions with Gadamer and
Habermas, which is quite interesting. Time, unfortunately. But I
was just wondering, what are you working on now? Freud? Is
that...
Ronald Beiner:
Well, I'm writing a book called Moses and Political Philosophy,
looking at the whole diversity of appropriations of the Moses story
within the Western theory canon, and I'm co-writing it with my
friend Harrison Floss. Freud figures in that because of course he
wrote [inaudible 00:37:06] that's why he gets included in the book.
But it's kind of a broader story of how Moses intersects with
Western theory.
August Baker:
Well, we look forward to that. Professor Beiner, thank you so much
for talking with me. Was really interesting and I really enjoyed
the book, and appreciate what you've done with that.
Ronald Beiner:
Great. Well, thanks so much for your interest in it. It's been a
pleasure chatting with you.
August Baker:
Same here. Okay. Bye.