Good, Paul. Heidegger has always been a very contradictory figure.
Here you have a consummate teacher who perhaps is the only one in the
world who could explain to anyone who might be interested just
exactly why we say to each other "Please" and "Thank You." How
Civilization leads to just such a generous disposition in customs,
especially as such graciousness emerges in poetry, is one but only
one of H's great contributions. It is with no little cranium
knuckling betwielderment that I wonder how such a mind could have
affirmed the most gratutiously cruel, lunging, systematically insane,
egomaniacally mystically incorrect social idealism as the Nazi.
Now, from a strictly American Conservative standpoint, National
Socialism was indeed a form of Socialism. From this standpoint,
Fascism, Nazism, Marxism all of them pose equal dangers to what
America should be trying to do: Republican Democratic Capitalism.
[I leave the order of those terms for further consideration.]
Also, quickly, we, the American Conservatives, believe that our
election system is quite good, the best of the lot, if mass media
[ah, see Heidegger!] stays out of it as a partisan agency, which it
has become in America, seeking to instill in those who bother to
watch a belief in a faux socialism that is not the animating ideology
of the American citizen.
Richard Dillon
===========
Just a note: Former President Clinton's dog, Buddy, ran out of his
house today in Chappaqua, N.Y., and was hit by a car. As I recall,
Clinton kind of liked that dog, who led him off the helicopter at
Martha's Vineyard when he, daughter, wife put up a big front after
the Lewinsky scandal hit. Clinton crashed a wedding in Manhattan in
last year when, purportedly, he was out walking this dog, whereupon
he told the amazed witnesses of his expelled adminstration's hard
work on the Terrorist problem.
>Hi, I think that there are some core misconceptions,
>which I have talked about in previous mails. H was a
>politician without a programme, that is why many
>people failed to take him seriously, before 1933 at
>least (and why a short, dark haired man could
>elaborate anything as ludicrous as the Ubermensch)
>Therefore, anything that might help H win votes was
>good, hence his claim to be a 'Socialist', Josef
>Goebbell's described H as 'that petit bourgeois'
>during an attempt in 1926 to have H expelled from the
>party by Otto Strasser, who, together with his brother
>Gregor, constituted the serious anti-Capitalist wing
>of the Party. In my opinion Heidegger was both an
>opportunist and a survivor, hence his weak support for
>H, which was withdrawn after 1933 or so, and why he
>ended up digging dykes on the Rhine (ie before he was
>shot and thrown into one) in 1945, 'that most
>expendable of university Professors'. But there are
>also many of Heidegger's papers still somewhere in
>Germany in storage, and which someone, possibly a
>family member, is quite desperate that the world
>should not see. Heidegger did report Jewish
>colleagues to the Gestapo, and other malign activities
>and has to be seen as sharing the responsibility and
>consequences of what happened.
>But then if H had won we would all be speaking German,
>and certainly not talking about the malign influences
>of Heidegger, but his greatness as a German thinker.
>ciao,
>Paul Murphy
>
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