Philosophical "complexity"

I'm not making this up, the subtitle of the article really is"Is the philosopher’s complexity enough to excuse his overt anti-Semitism?". Because it's oh so much nicer when the person who hates you is complex?

Heidegger strikes me as a pretty simple proposition. His writing is dark and needlessly elaborate but  that is the mark of the simple-minded thug doing philosophy. The complexity lies in his defenders who endlessly tie themselves in knots trying to dress this nasty piece of work such that no one will notice what a crass little whore he was.

Notice, for example, this move from the article under the subtitle noted above:

But with Heidegger, sweetness and light were never part of the package, and that was the key to his power. Being and Time was the first book of philosophy I had read that seemed to understand the human condition in the same way that literature did—less through abstract intellectual concepts than through the lived experience of mood. For Heidegger, existence—in German, Dasein—is grasped first and foremost not by the rational mind, but by the emotions that determine the very shape and texture of the world in which we live. The affects he dwells on are primarily “negative” ones—fear, alienation, anxiety, rather than love or joy—but he argues that these dark and disorienting moods are precisely what disclose the world to us most primally.

Do babies feel fear, alienation and anxiety? We might concede fear, although even that would be a stretch in a newborn. Anxiety and alienation, on the other hand, are not possible for the simple reason that you need a whole lot of language skills and some abstract intellectual concepts that develop along with language skills before you can experience alienation and anxiety. All by yourself in your "throwness" you experience no such thing. Only a language-using, social being can understand such emotions. Heideggerians are stealing several bases when they make this move.

And this initial trick, made so quickly that we barely notice it, has serious long-term consequences.

Being and Time is not an overtly ethical book—it has nothing to say in the traditional vocabulary of Western philosophical moralism, no use for ideas like Plato’s “the Good” or Kant’s categorical imperative. That is largely because Heidegger is not very interested in the central problem of ethics (and of politics), which is how to live with other people. For him, the key experiences and challenges of existence are individual: Alone we suffer, alone we die, and alone we must make meaning out of our fate. The highest value, then, is not goodness but authenticity; above all, authenticity in the face of death. To accept one’s actual condition of mortality and thrownness, not to flee from these difficult facts into consoling illusions and abstractions, is for Heidegger the ultimate moral achievement. As he writes, “Authentic Being-towards-death can not evade its ownmost non-relational possibility, or cover up this possibility by fleeing from it, or give a new explanation for it to accord with the common sense of ‘the they.’ ”

Well, yes, once you've cheated by smuggling in concepts like alienation and anxiety without acknowledging that these can only be learned and understood by social beings, then you can pretend that we face all this alone. And what part of not fleeing "from these difficult facts into consoling illusions and abstractions" was Heidegger's decision to become a Nazi. (There is, by the way, no evidence that he ever regretted or repented that choice.)

To the very limited extent that it does matter, it is not in the face of death but among the living that authenticity matters.

Bonus Mad Men tie in

"'She won''t get married because she has never been in love'. I think I wrote that; it was used to sell nylons." 

"For a lot of people love isn't just a slogan." 

"Oh, you mean love, you mean big lightning bolt to the heart where you can't eat and you can't work  and you just run off and get married and make babies. The reason you haven't felt it is because it doesn't exist. What you call 'love' was invented by guys like me to sell nylons." 

"Is that right?" 

 "I'm pretty sure about it. You're born alone and you die alone and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts. But I never forget."

That's Don Draper and Rachel Mencken from the first season. We read this dialogue and we know this guy because we've met his type before. Draper isn't telling us something about "being" when he speaks of being born alone and dying alone. It's just a clever excuse for not caring. We see that right away. Why don't we see it in Heidegger? Because of all the complexity!