Questionable Treatment
A Rant on Heidegger and Byung-Chul Han
Several people I respect have suggested to me that I read some of the many books authored by Byung-Chul Han (best known for The Burnout Society), so I bought a few that intrigued me and started with Vita Contemplativa since it appeared relevant to the writing of my book on Aristotle.
Well, I’m sorry, but I find myself compelled to go on a bit of a rant. Although much of the book’s substance interested me, something quite specific about Han’s approach really got under my skin. Chapter 3 (”From Acting to Being”) is an adoring paean to unrepentant Nazi Martin Heidegger, quoting liberally from a wide variety of his books, essays, and journals. Chapter 5 (”The Pathos of Action”) is a no-holds-barred takedown of persecuted Jewess Hannah Arendt, focusing almost exclusively on her book The Human Condition and studiously ignoring her book The Life of the Mind (having read them both, I’d assert that the latter is rather germane to an analysis of the contemplative life). The fact that Arendt was a student of Heidegger’s and had an affair with him before the Nazis took power only adds a twist to the story, as does the fact that several times Arendt barely avoided being shipped off to the concentration camps before eventually escaping from Vichy France to America. (And Han has the gall to say that the French Revolution was vastly superior to the American Revolution; surely “liberté, égalité, fraternité” rang much more hollow in Arendt’s ears than “the pursuit of happiness” as she was literally being pursued by the secret police!) Then, at the end of Chapter 3, Han lovingly quotes from Heidegger’s reflections on a self-effacing Frenchwoman named Marcelle Mathieu whose hospitality Heidegger enjoyed at her home in Provence. The good little woman - so different from the brainy Arendt - listened silently, meekly, subserviently as Heidegger and various friends of hers engaged in spirited conversation. Han and Heidegger praise Mathieu for engaging in “an ethics of timidity” (!), even to the point of celebrating the fact that when some years later she was to visit Heidegger in Freiburg she came to his door and couldn’t bring herself to ring the bell, presumably for fear of imposing on the great man himself (who you can be sure wasn’t engaging in an ethics of timidity when he threw his mentor Edmund Husserl under the bus and took over the rectorship of the University of Freiburg under the Nazis). Yet Han writes all this without even a hint of irony or self-consciousness!
Although I have been forcibly exposing myself to Heidegger (right now I’m reading his lectures on Book VI of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics), emotionally and intellectually it’s difficult for me to get around the fact that he was such an unethical philosopher. The thick layer of misogyny on top of the authoritarian cake only makes it that much more unappetizing.
Rant over, I return to the much more positive and pleasant task of translating Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics…
I had about ten minutes of Heidegger in my college philosophy classes. Memorized enough to get an A on a final. My brain wiped what I knew afterwards, forever.
"Jewess" is a curious antiquated label I sometimes encounter in fiction written in the 1930s and before. Sort of the same era from when it was common to call us "Hebrews", which I often see in older government records, such as census reports, when I am conducting genealogical research for my family from Romania, Poland, and Belarus.
Most of my relatives who chose to stay in the Old Country before the 1920s rather than emigrate to Canada and US were predictably murdered en masse. The village in Romania is gone. All the Jews in the village in Belarus were marched into a field - 1000 plus men, women, children and babes in arms - and given shovels to dig their mass grave, then machine-gunned. These "little Holocausts" saved the time, resources, and soldiers to ship them to the camps.
Consequently, I admit to be unreasonable when someone tries to paint any of the Nazi government's hierarchy with virtue. (I do know there were officials who secretly did their best to mitigate what was happening, not just to Jews but to intellectuals, clergy, gays, the disabled, "Gypsies", and any other groups or ethnicities singled out.) None the less, your rant is much much milder than mine might be.
I don't expect perfect from the people I admire. Hannah Arendt is one of them. Read her best-known books in the day.
Thank you. Feel free to rant on.