Blammo!

[adribean]

I am going through some anger...things. So here's another thing that pissed me off!

Last week I read a piece in Slate by Ron Rosenbaum about how Hannah Arendt is a NAZI!!! because of her relationship with Heidegger. Ugh. The piece was a real hatchet job. Basically, because of her relationship to Heidegger, everything she *ever* said is laced with

Comments

[flamingjune07]

I think it both is and is not more complicated than that -- is, insofar as it's kind of ironic in a way that this debate is surrounding Heidegger in particular, whose own work is ultimately exactly what one would have to refer to in order to explain exactly how it is that someone's cultural context and political ideology might become in some way embedded in their philosophy -- but is not, because it's pretty unlikely that most of the people who go off about Heidegger & Nazism even realize that (and if they do, it's probably a pretty superficial interpretation, arrived at just for their own political/rhetorical purposes

[adribean]

I think I agree with you, on a few grounds. It is more complicated than that. 1) The historical and personal context of any thinker are relevant to interpretation and should inform it, but should not have the final judgment on the validity of a work or body of work. I think a good example would be "He probably said X thing because of Y personal trait/history" rather than "Because of Y personal trait/history, X is invalid"

2) It's fairly obvious when you read through the various articles that none of them have any substantive analysis of the works themselves. It becomes clear pretty quickly that they're just vitriol.

And yes, if there was some "political purity" litmus test, there would certainly be a lot less philosophy around.

Also, thank you for taking the time to read all that text there and also respond.

[flamingjune07]

In all fairness, I had actually already read (okay, skimmed) most of this stuff before I came across your LJ entry, but I suppose I did read all of the text of your LJ entry :)

The historical and personal context of any thinker are relevant to interpretation and should inform it, but should not have the final judgment on the validity of a work or body of work. I think a good example would be "He probably said X thing because of Y personal trait/history" rather than "Because of Y personal trait/history, X is invalid"Well, sort of. I mean, yes, on the level on which you are speaking. I meant to also include, though, the general notion (characteristic but not limited to phenomenology/hermeneutics/etc) that (and this is way oversimplified) one should try to understand a work sort of as a humanly conceived work -- which isn't a matter of, say, taking down a list of possibly relevant historical facts and then occasionally checking them and thinking "Hmm, might X have been influenced by Y?" It's much more about sort of getting into the

[adribean]

Yeah, I meant just the LJ post itself. I assumed you had probably seen most of those articles someplace or another.

and Yes, I agree with you, on all counts. Naturally, I am not an academic sort, nor trained philosopher and as such have really no familiarity with the intricacies of phenomenology/hermeneutics, etc. So my understanding and explanation of it is probably pretty coarse.

I wasn't really aware of the fact that that approach to interpretation can be traced back to Heidegger. It makes the whole thing sort of worse, since the two Heidegger articles both express the thought "No one even knows what Heidegger was saying!!! LOL WUT?!".

In other news, this is all making the pendulum swing back to STUDY PHILOSOPHY. Arrrrggghhh.