OF SARTRE AND HEIDEGGER: An Exchange

My cybercomrade Charles Todd, who's getting his PhD. in philosophy and runs the intelligent blog Freiheit und Wissen, posted a comment on his blog in response to my earlier blogpost last week on Sartre at 100: Still Relevant. I thought our subsequent exchange, which appears on Freiheit und Wissen, was interesting enough to share with DIRELAND readers:

Freiheit und Wissen: Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Sartre. I thought I would commemorate the occasion by pointing to an essay I read a few years back, published in the London Review of Books by Edward Said. The article is titled, “My Encounter with Sartre.”

Despite the fact that this essay was published in 2000 (three years before Said died and 20 years after Sartre died), I thought it was worth looking up to reread. If you know anything about either Sartre or Said you may imagine that an encounter between the two of them would be rather interesting. Add to that the fact that Simone de Beauvoir and a handful of other intellectuals were present, and the fact that the entire meeting took place in the Paris home of Michel Foucault, and you have a pretty interesting read.

Some may find it odd that I choose to remember Sartre on this day with such an essay, but I think sometimes it is all too easy for philosophers to forget that despite the brilliance of the person’s mind and work, they may sometimes hold nefarious political views - which at least in the case of Sartre was a blindness for the plight of the Palestinians. Doug Ireland has a far more in depth look at Sartre and his legacy - also prepublished at Znet

Charles, I'm glad you exhumed our dear late friend Ed Said's article. It's important to remember, however, that at the time of this unfortunate episode, Sartre was in seriously failing health, totally blind, and being manipulated by his then-secretary, Benny Levy (who ended up as a mad Talmudist after Sartre's death). As I noted in my DIRELAND post, Sartre, of course, made mistakes -- especially in his later years. And in the final years, when he was under Levy's sway, those mistakes grew in number. The state of his health -- Sartre for decades had taken amphetamines to write (in some of his books, like Saint Genet, it showed) and the ravages of the drug on body and brain were very evident in his later years -- and the fact that he was under Levy's spell does not excuse his moral equivocation on the Palestinian question which Ed Said (right) chronicled, but it does place it in context. And I don't think it can invalidate the enormous philosophical and moral contributions Sartre made in his earlier years when he was in full possession of his mental powers, as he wasn't toward the end of his life. Regards, Doug

Doug, Thanks for the comment! I absolutely agree that it should not invalidate Sartre's legacy. He made a tremendous contribution - one which I did not mean to dismiss at all. And yes, at that stage in his life Sartre was certainly the shell of his former self. Heidegger is another philosopher whose work I find myself defending despite some unfortunate decisions he made in his political life - decisions that, once again, should not detract from an invaluable corpus of writing. cntodd 06.22.05

DIRELAND: Brother Charles, I'm afraid I can't follow you on Heidegger (below right), who seems to me a much different case from Sartre. Far from being a short and temporary parenthesis in Heidegger's  life, his embrace of Nazism and the worst sort of racialist drivel extended over a long period, and grew rather than diminished as the horrific criminal nature of Hitler and the national socialist enterprise became unmistakably clear. I don't know if you read frog (you certainly have the advantage of me in knowing German), but I earnestly recommend to you a book that came out in Paris earlier this year, Emmanuel Faye's "Heidegger, L'introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie" (Editions Albin Michel). Faye has unearthed hitherto unpublished works by Heidegger (including seminar lectures) and material that had not hitherto been translated from the German. From this book it emerges that Heidegger's seminar of 1933-34 was entirely Nazified, for he identifies the German people with their racial community and postulates the formation of a new racial nobility for the Third Reich, while exalting the eros of the masses for Hitler. His Nazism subsequently became more and more radical. In June of 1940 he characterizes the motorization of the Wehrmact as a "metaphysical act." and in 1941 argues that racial selection is "metaphysically necessary." After the defeat of Nazism, his positions on national-socialism and on the Holocaust's camps nourished the revisionist and negationist discourse of the Holocaust deniers. His self-willed immersion in this sewer, over such a sustained period, and with such growing exaltation of the anti-humanism that is the negation of all philosophy worthy of the name, makes it impossible for me to take anything he said seriously in any moment. The sheer enormity of the Holocaust as the unhealable and defining moral wound  of the 20th century, so brilliantly captured in the work of Primo Levi (left, whom I infinitely prefer to that pompous and indigestible political whore Eli Wiesel), completely negates for me any redeeming features which some profess to find in Heidegger's work. Do take a look at the Faye book, I think it might affect your reflection on Heidegger's worth to us today. Regards, Doug