Mark Blitz on Martin Heidegger

[OnerousEthic]

Mark Blitz puts MH in perspective!
My hilight reel (11:30 - 22:30)
11:44 You are yourself from the beginning to the end
12:30 Value is part of this misunderstanding of what human beings actually are
12:50 Being authentic
13:30 Seeing the public via authenticity
14:00 Illuminating the public via authenticity
14:30 Authenticity as the true understanding of humanity
15:45 Hostility to technological world view
19:00 Full dehumanization
20:30 Recovery of art
21:00 Connection to Environmentalism
33:45 Nazi association

[dennismcclure]

Thanks for this discourse. I have heard many an articulation about Heidegger's involvement with the Nazi's, and Professor Blitz is the best so far. The hook that snags Nazism is "Das Man" or "They-Self" or "The One", where we (daseins) find our understanding of 'self' or 'me' in he public world, rather than some 'inner experience' or 'mental representation' or 'belief'. What was missing (due probably to time limitations) in Professor Blitz's articulation is that there was a certain 'temporality' or better 'historicality' to the events taking place in Europe and Germany in the 1920's. There is also an inherent, acceptable anti-Semitism that pervaded the 'They-Self" through Europe for centuries, and obviously Heidegger grew up in that "They-Self". The opportunity for anyone that studies Being and Time and Heidegger's thinking is the possibility to experience immersion into the "They-Self" and experience one's identity in this pre-conceptual, pre-linguistic public realm. In doing so, it frees one from being this incriminating, judgmental a-hole that seems to pervade public discourse, and most notably in political discourse. Currently, such notable figures and Donald Trump and Rush Limbaugh express this "non-They-Self" understanding of human beings, and go about their days invalidating and chastising those that are not on their page of "inner experiential' involvement. or understanding. So, it was with Heidegger, since the 'they-self' is not the kind of clearing that shows everything. Yes, it seems we are all on the same page, but the page is as Heidegger distinguishes a "lucus non lucendo" -- a clearing with little light. Or, what is implicit is difficult to make explicit, so signing on with Hitler was a leap into some very dark territory. At the time, Heidegger seems to accept the challenge of the Rectorship to see if his 'thinking' and 'standing' could at least offer a way forward to transforming the German University system, and move it from its attachment to detached, conceptual, theoretical science. It is interesting that with all this baggage, his work continues, even though it is called Continental Philosophy in Europe and not Heideggerian thinking. In the end, I guess, no one likes to be affiliated in any way with a history of genocide.

[cyfacrider]

There are some deeply important points to be taken away from this, particularly as the human species is now being forced to cope with climate change. Worlds and the earth are entering into an unprecedented interrelated meaning.

[charlesmartel]

23:18 "The use of reason is...dependent (first on) things having a certain meaning.... Rational understanding of a rational calculation is always in terms of something or other. And what we are first of all is the ones who first illuminate or bring out those first terms of meaning." This is the core of it.

[slmjkdbtl]

I don't think it interferes with scientific reductionism at all, scientific reductionism is very pragmatic and has a clear purpose - to predict, and it does well on that. Heidegger's view towards objects is not about prediction, but about the common philosophical quest to internally rationalize our surroundings. These are 2 different tool of thought, each for different purpose, and I think there's no one absolute "correct" way for all situations.

[rhwinner]

He's very technical in his verbiage. If you want a quick intro to MH's thought, this is not the video you want!

[stephenc]

Heidegger's idea of leading a meaningful life: advocating systematic discrimination and genocide against racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious minorities.

I guess that's one way to be in the world.

[jakecarlo]

Love that this is being hosted by a great American exponent of authoritarianism. Not likely to win any worthwhile new American inquisitors into the question of Being.

[johnstewart]

Authenticity is not regarding ourselves as a bag of chemicals but also not as just a soul. We're both. My thought is that if mind and body did not meet there would be no love, hate etc. Animals exhibit some mother love and some bond as couples. But humanity is special ... probably among others elsewhere.

[ekkehard-tejawilke]

Why political? because it shapes your concrete actions. We are in the Covid-19 crisis right now; and how authentic are we?

[beingsshepherd]

This is surreal.
Of all the hosts ... we have the ever-grinning hawk who helped mastermind 9/11.
I can't see past that to listen to anything McKenna has to say.

[georgemccroskey]

Someone please tell this Mark Blitz fellow that the accent in the name "Heidegger" is on the first syllable.

[countvlad]

Kristol is like Krystal Ball of NBC falling asleep. He doesn't know what to ask, and the interviewee is going off into the Netherlands with the Santa, the Elves, and Heidegger driving them in the Santa Sleigh. It's not very enlightening nor is the presence forthcoming. We're grasping at straws for anything while Bill is getting his beauty nap. Blitz is probably aware of it but can't do anything. There will be coal in Bill's boots for this and the best of the worse is he can use it to do blackface at his leisure with his chums. He should, however, just be getting the boot.

[jefffudesco]

I read Heidegger's essays as an undergrad in 89 and then read what he published as "Being and Time" maybe 10 years ago. It creeped me out somehow as a 19 year old and creeped me out again as a 45yr old. Like some kinda philosophy ghost story like James' "Turn of the Screw". Obviously this is the specter of the Death Camps wafting around the text. It is hard to read heidegger's stuff on "authenticity" without imagining the Furher. It is hard to read him today without imagining and scaring oneself over the people supporting Trump. I think Marcuse commented that the Nazi's fascist "pure land" politics is IN THE TEXT"S FORMULATIONS, not a bastardization of an abstruse philosophy. The way commentators since the 1980s have pronounced Heidegger's word "Being of Things" is a tell. Everyone must bar his teeth and clench his fingers when using Heidegger's phrases. The text is an exercise in how abstract and poetic language can be pushed in the service of one german's romantic nostalgia for the Fatherland, the anti jewish anti immigrant HOMELAND. Can we preserve Heidegger's bullshit "authenticity" now that communication is instantaneous and wealth and technology is spread so unevenly? The authentic kids from central america want to live in heidegger's technologically developed neighborhood. I think Heidegger's clenched teeth abstractions, the language he stretched out, trend toward a viscious Trumpian Bolsanaro Brexit politics that can only end badly. The answer is to spread a greener technological wealth more widely. If every kid in Nicuragua and Panama wants to come to the suburbs around the U of Nebraska or to NYC then the task for Nicuragua and Panama is to become more like the college town suburbs of U of Nebraska or NYC. The task for every human, contra Heidegger's nonsense, is to learn as much as she can. And that learning includes sport and languages and technology and cooking and hx and how to drive and how to make love and how to parent and make a fire. Heidegger is kinda ultra plus plus Marx in THIS regard: he diminishes the prestige of the German University Professor's "theoretic or text based" desk bound, lecture hall learning and elevates the practical activity of working people. Farming or pumping welding gases into cylinders or hunting becomes an activity like a professor reading a thrice translated text from 400BCE. BUT THEN he goes into critical mode from his cabin in the woods and his famous strolls around his property, that he probably inherited from his daddy, to talk a rather theoretic shit against people unlike himself. A lot of the early 20th c philosophy is concerned with immigration and tech like we are today. Perhaps Ortega Gassett's, and everyone elses modern "Mass man" was Heidegger's immigrant/iphone problem. In essense, the push/pull factors of wealth and climate change "ruining" the borders we police for our children (future).

[artlessons]

The speaker right off , began sounding like Heidegger personal agent .Setting Heidegger up as the modern God .Heidegger was a student of Husserl ( phenomenology) who was influenced by Descartes as was Sartre .
Kierkegaard was the father of Existentialist not Heidegger. He is in fact trying to be a model of Heidegger rather in fact being anything himself . His upside l feel was his awareness of Aristotle genius .
Heidegger being in time was being a natzi .

[JohnMoseley]

19:12 Kristol sounds just about ready to go Marxist. ;)

[josephgreen]

Interviewer annoys me. He's got no idea

[arunjetli]

Heidegger does not look at presocratics at all he assumes that Aristotle’s criticism was valid it was not Aristotle fudged his way and the west has suffered ever since Husserl was closer to getting back to Parmenides where he needed to be

[justinruins]

to me, it seems that nazi germany is always judged by the facts, however, when historians look back to understand why, it’s almost as though the facts are pushed aside in favor of abstractions

[geoffreynhill]

Pferdscheissigkeit? (Would he have got the job if so many dons hadn't been scarpering abroad or disappearing into labour camps?)