"Martin Heidegger, taking after volkisch naturalism, believed that we could never and should never aspire to such transcendent allegiances or loyalties such as to multiculturalism, international human rights, liberalism, etc. Instead, he was fooled by Hitler’s rhetoric that if the German Worker’s rights were to be prioritized, their volkisch labor rights had to exclude sympathy for multiculturalism or for human rights. Since the predominant voice in the U.S. foreign policy establishment were infected by suspicions of Stalin and the Soviet Union and thus a caricature of Marxism, Hitler’s and the Nazi’s extrication of human rights from labor rights was made easy."
"Heidegger dutifully attempted to accommodate a philosophy to this concept that Being is necessarily ignored and left unrecognized by a transcendent metaphysics. Transcultural value and a transcendent or objective view of history had to be subsumed to a volkisch provincialism infused with the Hero-worship of Thomas Carlyle which Hitler himself co-opted into Nazi ideology. Now the liberal humanist understanding of history forming the individual had to be inverted: now, it was the individual who formed history."
"Ernst Cassirer, seeing this new rise of volkisch naturalism as an unintended fallacy by the shortsighted political calculations of a misguided growing anti-Marxism of Western foreign policy, launched his valiant effort to mend the quickly-expanding battles between a philosophy of transcendence and a provincial naturalism quickly growing suspicious of the possibility of transcendence. He saw the dangers of and disagreed vehemently with Heidegger’s growing zealousness in falsely constructing a stronger and stronger wall between the volkisch individual and Kantian universal history."
"Unfortunately for Cassirer, he seemed to be a man out of his time- quite literally- in advocating for the timeless value of a humanism informed by transhistorical ideals against a more radical and degraded humanism that insisted on tearing whatever is human from its historical ideals. Now, there was a Being christened in a radical humanism that cherished it over the Becoming of a humanitarianism- and this is when the misformed humanism of Heidegger cut itself from the womb of humanitarianism. Also unfortunate was the West’s misguided attempts to contrast itself with it’s Eastern antagonists- an attempt insidious enough to increasingly crystalize a division between Continental philosophy and Analytic philosophy, as recounted by John McCumber in his
Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era."
"So yeah- Cassirer was quite literally a man out of his time, trying to unsuccessfully beat back
both the onslaught of a provincialist nationalism quickly metastasizing in Europe and an equally misguided suspicion of any form of historicism metastasizing in the halls Western academia which loyally christened it “liberal internationalism” for the policymakers in Washington and London who had no actual fucking idea what “liberal internationalism” was. But hey, it erected a silly fucking contrast between the Allies and the Axis, and later the “enlightened” West and whoever it deemed “stuck in the past” that had to be civilized out of it (notice the stupid fucking rhetoric from neoconservative policy-makers toward the Middle East “stuck in the superstitions of its religious traditions”)."
"Those Who Knew Not What they were doing in Washington mistakenly fell into the false paradigm Heidegger caused most of Europe to embrace. It was no longer Time that gave birth to Being- it was now
Being that gave birth to Its Times. Heidegger poisoned the well of Continental philosophy and the so-called Wise Men of Washington and London stupidly obliged- and hastily crafted policies that it thought was in direct contrast to this. However, this misguided effort needed an academic stamp on it- a rationalization. Thus, as John McCumber recounts, the rise of the dubious and ill-conceived partnership between an Analytic philosophy the Loyal Academics of the Ivory Towers and those in Washington giddy for a “purifying” purpose."
"Unbeknownst to them, Heidegger pushed them to the other extreme to what he was advocating. If he said that a Being can never objectively imagine or conceptualize beyond Its own Time into a transhistorical Timelessness, Western foreign policy now would be molded into the exact opposite- endorsed by the Loyal Analytics. The objectivity of a liberal internationalism can be ripped from its phenomenological roots, an objectivity which strove to strip Time from Being’s grasp in order to create the very same sanitized Timelessness Heidegger himself warned his European acolytes was infesting European humanism. The West played right into Heidegger’s
ressentiment and became the enemies of a philosophy it consistently did not understand- and in their misunderstanding, mistakenly bolstered its allure in whomever had the dubious honor of being called the West’s enemies. Cassirer wasn’t only fighting Heidegger in Davos that day in 1929- he was fighting the sterile tendencies of a malformed Analytic liberal humanism the West blindly embraced as European provincialism’s antithesis."
"It wasn’t only Heidegger who knocked Cassirer out of the 20th century but the blindly obliging Western power-brokers in Washington and London as well. Just when they needed him most. Heidegger, with the West’s help, won out on an unexpected secondary front: it was a sanitized Time that rejected Cassirer’s Being. The malformed Western conception of Freedom was ripped from its historicist roots in Time in the West’s misappropriation of it under a stupid fucking political philosophy of the sterile Timelessness of an idolized Freedom."
"The Western appropriation of a sanitized cosmopolitan crystallization of Human Rights quickly ripped itself from its provincial European womb- a womb that once bathed it in the proud nourishment of Being’s triumphant Labor. The universalism of a Marxian emphasis on the dignity of labor was thereafter whitewashed into a suspicious provincialism that now threatened the universal project of Timeless Liberty. (
Note: this also explains the stupid fucking popularity of Ayn Rand’s “Objectivism” among Reagan’s Gekkoian “Greed is Good” acolytes)."
"And this, my friends, is why there is a silly, stupid fucking divide between domestic policy- and its attendant Labor Rights emphasizing Economic and Social Justice- and foreign policy, with its attendant focus on a recklessly malformed Freedom being spread around the globe under the stupid fucking banner of democracy-promotion."
"Oh, and Heidegger?! Not even a full three years after Cassirer’s death did Heidegger realize and clothe his misunderstanding of Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms as an ‘original,’ ‘authentic’ and ‘nuanced’ shift in his own philosophy. He never came out and said, “oh, that dead guy Cassirer I debated in 1929? Yeah, it turns out he was right and I debated him for no fucking reason,” instead covering up his mistakes as
an original shift in his thinking. And just maybe he also realized the futility of thee political influence he foolishly thought he had when Hitler revealed his earlier celebration of the German Worker as the rhetoric of empty political expedience when he abolished the trade unions. How fucking brave and prescient of him."
"Fuck Heidegger."
"Happy fucking Labor Day."
"Think about
both the physical
and metaphysical implications of that statement and then revisit the previous statement."
[Daniel Buk, is a featured writer for this blog, and a great political philosopher in his own right. Be looking for more of his writings in the near future.]
