merican Thinker had an
article
this week by Christopher Chantrill, who asks
“I wonder what is going to happen in the next war with women and
transgenders in combat.” The idea, which practically merits crucifixion
these days, is that men and women have innate psychological differences,
and denying it causes psychiatric problems. He writes:
[Women] are just programmed by Nature to complain to men if they are not being protected, and it is right that they should do so.
For a superlative example of a woman complaining, take Virginia Woolf's famous complaint against men. Written during WWII, she blames war on men and vows not to support either side. England is not her country, she says, and she is as indifferent to the impending invasion by the Nazis as to the destruction of its culture and the enslavement and death of its people because, she said, women were not allowed to own property:
If he adds that he is fighting to protect her body, she will reflect upon the degree of physical protection she now enjoys when the words “Air Raid Precaution” are written on blank walls. And if he says that he is fighting to protect England from foreign rule, she will reflect that for her there are no “foreigners” . . . As a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.
We may not think highly of such unpatriotic sentiments, but Woolf, who was believed to suffer from bipolar disorder, got off easy because her ideological descendants found her useful. When resentment starts, it spreads from neuron to neuron, engram to engram, tainting everything associated in any way with the object of the victims' hate until they become more and more detached from reality.
Look what happened to Didier Raoult, the brilliant French virologist who proposed in a throwaway paper that the combination of hydroxychloroquine [HCQ] and azithromycin would protect against Covid. Because of the association of HCQ with the man so many political activists hate, the New York Times wrote a hit piece on him titled “He was a science star. Then he promoted a questionable cure for Covid-19.”
Now, of course you might say the Times is just political and therefore lacks credibility. Raoult's paper has been widely misinterpreted: no one seems to have noticed that he calculated his statistics wrong, which means that no one but us science geeks actually read it, but it scarcely matters. Humans enjoy nothing better than shooting down somebody's reputation for saying the wrong thing. Once you become an Official Bad Guy, few people will dare to dispute any claims made about you, lest they be accused of the same faults.
Heidegger
Which brings us to the philosopher Martin Heidegger. Critics have pored over Heidegger's black notebooks, so called because their cover was black in color, searching for clues that would convince them that he too was evil. Heidegger joined the Nazi party in its early days, making him an Official Bad Guy. Whether he joined out of youthful enthusiasm or an ill-advised career move we can only speculate, as he refused to discuss it.
So naturally, speculate they do. A common theme is that despite his well known affair with his Jewish student Hanna Arendt, Heidegger was a rabid anti-semite.
Jürgen Habermas once said that Heidegger “detaches his actions and statements altogether from himself as an empirical person and attributes them to a fate for which one cannot be held responsible.” This, he said, was the reason for Heidegger's famous silence on the matter. Heidegger himself in 1938 called national socialist philosophies “absurd,” implying that they were not worthy of discussion. He later said in a letter: “One had to throw them a crumb here and there in order to keep freedom of teaching and speaking.”
I've read a few anti-Heidegger books, including one from George Steiner. They all lambaste him for those notebooks. Yet curiously, no one seems to be able to come up with more than one or two sentences to make their case. Now a new anti-Heidegger book is out, with a glowing review in last month's Commentary magazine. The reviewer quotes him as saying: “[I]n the era of the Christian West . . . world Jewry was the principle of destruction.”
He rages about Heidegger for two and a half pages, but only gives as evidence that one single quote. Its meaning is ambiguous. What is the context? Was Heidegger saying this was his opinion or the opinion of the Christian West? We can't tell from this excerpt. If there is more to what the reviewer calls a “protracted denunciation of Jews,” it's not evident in what he and the other critics have shown us. Those of us who have better things to do than to read stuff that got published not because it was any good but because the author was famous are just supposed to take their word.
My opinion of Heidegger's philosophy is that it missed greatness by a wide margin, but that's not the issue. Just as Nietzsche was posthumously maligned [unfairly, as it was his own sister who fabricated the supposed connection with Nazism after his death], lending credence to the false claim that he died of syphilis, it raises the following question: why would anyone create a new philosophy, build a new monument or invention, or discover a cure for some disease knowing that future generations will take any throwaway sentence you wrote or said and use it to demolish your reputation—long after you are dead and therefore unable to defend yourself?
It's hard to escape the conclusion that all these cases, from Woolf's ‘indifference’ to the death of her countrymen to the critics of Dr Raoult and the attacks on Nietzsche, are agenda-driven. In a way they're like hot dogs: the conclusion is hidden inside a tasty bun of rhetoric, made palatable with the mustard of an appeal to our pre-established beliefs. Just as with a hot dog, it's best not to ask where the wiener comes from, or where it's been.
Geniuses like Heidegger might not care. Nietzsche would probably regard it as proof of the human herd mentality. But a less famous person with an insight that could save thousands of lives might just think: Why bother? Let 'em rot. Why would any future Chopin, Nietzsche, or Heidegger bother to contribute to civilization knowing that their reputations will be based not on their achievements but on their mistakes? That is the price we pay for spitting on their graves.
This is no hypothetical exercise; it is now the norm in academic science, and perhaps also analytic philosophy. The trend is to work on small, abstruse problems just interesting enough to get published but not enough to make any difference in people's lives. If we discover something important, we fill the paper with math or unparseable writing to discourage people from reading it. And we never, ever study anything controversial. Who wants to end up like Raoult?
aug 30 2023, 5:46 am
