my vote for stupid book of the year

Emmanuel Faye’s Heidegger book.

But naturally, Faye has framed it in his Introduction in such a way that anyone objecting to his odd non sequiturs and philosophical shallowness must be an “apologist” for a Nazi.

Can’t decide yet whether it’s worth the trouble to review the book. I could go either way on that question.

Perhaps the weirdest claim: the ontological difference is nothing more than code for der Führer and das Volk. He doesn’t see the ontological difference as having any genuine intellectual content or genealogy at all. It’s simply a politically motivated concept from the start.

Other mildly dishonest techniques include the following… Quoting Gadamer as saying that people who find Heidegger’s politics peripheral to his philosophy are doing an injustice to Heidegger. But then also lavishing praise on Victor Farías, without mentioning that the very same Gadamer reviewed Farías’s book in a brief and blistering piece entitled: “On Superficiality and Ignorance.”

Is there a name for this technique? I’m referring to the practice of simply quoting from every author the things that you agree with, while tacitly giving the false impression that they agree with you on everything else as well.

It’s good to find something of value in every book, though. And if Faye’s book has some value, it’s as a reminder that we probably still haven’t seen the ugliest of the Heidegger political documents yet. Those may in fact still be suppressed. (And the downside of that is that it means we’re going to have to go through yet another few waves of “Heidegger’s politics” books. But I’m frankly not sure that we’ve made too much headway as compared with the Farías wave 20 years ago.)

But on the whole I would agree with what Bob Vallier told me about his experience of reading the book… You can only read about 10 to 15 pages at a time, because by then you’ve mentally formulated several dozen objections to the things he’s just said, and your head is about to explode from them.

How do you come to terms with a book this annoyingly bad? I do it by remembering two things:

1. It surely can’t catch on for long.

2. Frankly, in some ways, Heidegger deserves it. People doing serious philosophy in the present that incorporates Heidegger have a right to be angered by this superficial effort on Faye’s part. But it’s hard to have much sympathy for Heidegger as “a poor misunderstood figure.” He brought much of this on himself. So, let’s not spare any pity on him as a person when reading this book. Let’s just hope Faye’s impact is limited, because philosophy will not be helped if several key Heideggerian breakthroughs are misread as nothing but codes for Nazi propaganda. What would happen if someone said that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is just code for the irrational decisionism of the Third Reich overlords for whom Heisenberg labored to build an atomic bomb, and should be removed from physics?

As for Heidegger, it remains unclear to me how either the question of the meaning of being or the tool-analysis are contaminated with Nazi ideology. It’s such a strange interpretation.