All posts by Tim Gorichanaz

On Reading Heidegger

One of my favorite philosophers is Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). His work has influenced not only my scholarship, but also my worldview. The notion that human being is inextricable from the world, the concept of the “they-self” who we are when we follow the stream of society, the vision that our death gives meaning to our life, the idea that modern technology coerces us into seeing the world in terms of resources to be exploited, the understanding that thinking is a form of thanking… His insights really are numberless.

Heidegger is in a very strange position nowadays. On one hand, he is hailed as one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, but on the other there is a palpable cone of silence around his name. There’s a mostly-unspoken notion that perhaps one shouldn’t engage with his ideas—or, God forbid, cite him. (Though I have to think he’s not too worried about his h-index.) The elephant in the room, to put it sensationally, is that Heidegger was a Nazi.

I saw a post on Twitter earlier this year that read, “Given that Heidegger was a Nazi, who should I cite for the concept of breakdown?” First and foremost, such a question strikes me as a form of academic dishonesty, though I do understand the impulse comes from a good-hearted place—not wanting to support a hateful regime. It reminds me of when I read Robert Sokolowski’s Phenomenology of the Human Person, which comes to the same substantive conclusions as Heidegger in Being and Time and yet only mentions Heidegger glancingly and tangentially. In my opinion, we should give credit where it’s due, whether we like where it’s due or not.

Anyway, I read and cite Heidegger quite a lot in my own work, and I thought it would be worthwhile to reflect on my doing so. Particularly now, as there is a way of thinking that is becoming more prevalent: a tendency to take people as one thing only—you’re either with us or against us—not recognizing that, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it, “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” This is the impulse that leads people to topple statues commemorating historical figures who, notwithstanding any of their virtues, committed the sin of holding slaves. Amartya Sen argued that such a “solitarist” approach to identity is fallacious and harmful—and yet it is apparently so enticing to us that we slip into it again and again.

Saying “Heidegger was a Nazi” gives quite a particular impression, and the first question we should ask is whether that impression is true. This has been widely discussed, and I don’t want to rehash all that discussion here, but some broad strokes are warranted. In the end, my own conclusion is that Heidegger was more a coward than anything.

Heidegger was a professor at the University of Freiberg and joined the Nazi party in 1933, becoming rector of the university (i.e., president). In this role, he was responsible for removing Jewish faculty from the university, for enforcing quotas on Jewish students, implementing race-science lectures, etc. Adam Knowles, my colleague at Drexel, has written that Heidegger carried out these duties with efficiency. A year later Heidegger resigned from the rectorship and stopped participating in Nazi activities, though he never formally left the party. Beside all this is the fact we have to contend with that, as a philosopher, Heidegger worked with and inspired a slew of Jewish philosophers with whom he had friendly relationships, such as Hannah Arendt and Hans Jonas—and not to mention his advisor Edmund Husserl.

Then there’s the issue of Heidegger’s infamous notebooks. Throughout his life, Heidegger kept philosophical notebooks in which he recorded ideas and observations. The publication of these notebooks caused a renewed (and sensationalized) interest in the questions of Heidegger’s Nazism, as they contain certain anti-Semitic snippets. But these comments should not be mistaken for reflective philosophical views; for a philosopher, a notebook is a tool for thinking, for playing with ideas, for exploring. We should be careful in attempting to infer one’s beliefs from their writings in philosophical notebooks.

But even if we do suppose that Heidegger was a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi, should that matter? A thorny question if there ever was one. Nazi scientists made a number of scientific discoveries, sometimes through unethical research on human beings. Whether and how such findings should be used is difficult to say. The antimalarial drug chloroquine, for instance, was originally developed using human subjects in concentration camps. Should we do away with it? How do we account for advances made since after World War II? The problem with science is that it cumulates.

Knowledge gained through coercive and unsafe research is one thing, but what about desk research funded by the Nazi regime? For instance, Fanta was developed in Nazi Germany. Should we stop drinking it? When it comes to philosophy, perhaps, the relevant question is whether the philosophy is somehow sympathetic with Nazism. On that question, with regard to Heidegger, a regiment of philosophers can be marshaled both for and against. It is anything but clear. And so how to rule in such a case? To me, it begins to look much more like a typical ad hominem fallacy. In my view, philosophical arguments should be assessed on their own merits, not on the basis of who said them. Heidegger himself seems to have held the same view; when tasked with recounting the life of Aristotle, he gave one sentence: “He was born at a certain time, he worked, and he died”—because that’s all that matters, when the subject is Aristotle’s philosophy. But I do wonder if, as time goes on, we are finding ad hominem arguments more and more persuasive. It seems to me that, societally, we’re having quite a difficult time separating people from ideas.

Another consideration: Should we expect our philosophers to be morally good? (To be sure, I think we should expect everyone to be morally good, but I guess the question is whether we should expect more of philosophers than of others.) In ancient times, when philosophy was more clearly understood as guidance for how to live a good life, perhaps the answer was yes. But in modern philosophy, there seems to be a disconnect. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) was a famous misogynist and once pushed a woman down a flight of stairs, and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was a tyrannical and abusive schoolteacher. John Searle (b. 1932) allegedly sexually harassed, assaulted, and retaliated against a student while a professor—and not to mention earlier, as a landlord, played a major role in large rent increases for students at his university. A 2019 study found that philosophy professors by and large do not behave any more morally than other academics. (There’s an exception, evidently, when it comes to vegetarianism.)

Is it fair, then, to malign Heidegger and give all these other philosophers a pass? We might recall the Christian maxim here: “Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone” (John 8:7).

Myth for the Digital Age

My thinking and teaching is centered on the relationship of humans to information technologies—from paper documents to smartphone apps and AI systems. And of course, a deeper theme here is the age-old question of the relationship between humankind and nature.

One way to understand what we humans are doing when we make technology is that we’re constantly encapsulating ourselves from nature, continually adding layers of separation between ourselves and the world around. (This is the view of Luciano Floridi, for example.) It may have started with clothing and shelter, but now we separate ourselves from the world with social media, online shopping, digital entertainment and on and on. And so what does that mean for us? What does it mean for humanity—past, present and future?

One way to explore such questions is through myth. The old stories help us ask the big questions: What do we want? Is it good for us? What will it cost? What are we willing to pay? Is it worth it?

So to help us ask these questions, I want to share a story that I learned from the storyteller Martin Shaw.

It’s late in the lonely afternoon, and a hunter trudges through the forest. Belly stuck to spine, an unsuccessful day. When he comes near to his hut, he sees something that terrifies him: smoke coming out of the chimney. Someone’s inside. Carefully he crept closer, and he discovered that whoever it was, they were gone now. But someone certainly had been there. Inside he found a warm fire and a hot meal. His clothes had been mended and cleaned. He felt something then that he couldn’t quite name. No one had ever cared for him in this way before.

Day after day, the same thing. At the end of the week, the hunter decided to come home early to see who it was who cared for him. He peered through the door, and there he saw a woman with his back to him, cooking at the stove. And he looked at her with his hunter’s eye, and he knew, like all hunters know, that she was not just a woman. She was part woman, part fox, and part spirit. And she knew, like all women know, that she was being watched. She turned around and said to him with authority: “I will be the woman of this hut!”

The hunter knew a good thing when he saw it, and he nodded and said, “Yes.”

“There’s just one thing,” she said. “Being part fox, I have my pelt, and I need to hang it on the inside of the door. Is that going to be all right with you?”

Again he nodded and said, “Yes.”

They had a wonderful night. He told stories and she told jokes and they both sang songs. The hunter’s life changed then—no longer was it so cold and solitary.

But over time, the pelt began to give off a strong, wild smell. You might think it was a small price. But the smell grew more and more pungent as time went on, and the hunter started to complain. “Do you have to keep the damn thing in the house?!” he said. As the months passed, the hunter could smell the wild scent on his pillow, in his clothes, on his own skin—even in his mind. His complaints grew more severe until one day he burst. “I told you before!” he started. “Get—rid—of—the—pelt!”

The woman simply nodded. And in the morning, the woman was gone, and the pelt was gone, and the scent was gone. And the man stood in the doorframe and looked out into the lonely wood, and he felt something that he’d never felt before. And they say that he still stands there, lonely in his whole body, for the scent of the fox woman.

This is what Shaw has to say about the tale:

I would suggest that we are that hunter, societally and most likely personally. The smell of the pelt is the price of real relationship to wild nature; its sharp, regal, undomesticated scent. While that scent is in our hut there can be no Hadrian’s wall between us and the living world.

Somewhere back down the line, the West woke up to the fox woman gone. And when she left she took many stories with her. And, when the day is dimming, and our great successes have been bragged to exhaustion, the West sits, lonely in its whole body for her. Stories that are more than just a dagger between our teeth. More than just a bellow of conquest. As I say, we have lost a lot of housemaking skills for how to welcome such stories. We turned our face away from the pelt. Underneath our wealth, the West is a lonely hunter.

Martin Shaw, “Turning Our Head from the Pelt

Here Shaw sees the fox woman as wild nature. But the power of myth is in its thickness. We can also see the fox woman as our digital technologies—they do have a certain spirit to them. We have invited them into our lives without considering the costs… and once we are infused with their scent, they cannot be gotten rid of so easily, lest we stand, lonely with our whole body.

Myth, I think, for better or worse, can help us see our questions, and see them differently, but it will be up to us to forge the answers. So—where to from here?

Reading the Home

This year we’ve been confined to home much more than usual. This has prompted a lot of thinking, mostly about what I can’t do. I like my apartment, but it can be small and lonesome at times, particularly eight months into a pandemic. But lately I’ve been exploring what being at home enables, rather than what it precludes.

What if our home was not just the place we live (or worse, just the place we’re stuck) but a space of inspiration? In Care of the Soul, psychotherapist Thomas Moore writes of the possibility for considering the home as a sort of modest museum—and museums are, in the end, all about inspiration. We can furnish our home with well-loved items and decorate it with objects of personal meaning. Furniture and art, sure, but also special rocks, leaves and branches.

I have a lot of art in my small apartment, but one interesting piece that this train of thought reminds me of is my Museum Bhavan—which is at once a book, a museum and a work of art. Created by Dayanita Singh, the bhavan contains nine museums, small accordion booklets of photographs with titles like “Museum of Furniture” and “Museum of Vitrines.” These museums can be set out on a table for display or paged through in handy exploration. Museum Bhavan enchantingly blurs the boundary between book, art and space.

Museum Bhavan, by Dayanita Singh

From reading Moore, I learned about the medieval concept of liber mundi, or “book of the world.” It refers first to our belief that the world is comprehensible and can be learned about in the same way that texts are comprehensible and can be learned about. Scientists, for instance, read the world as liber mundi in this way. More deeply, the term also refers to a sort of what we might call spiritual literacy, a capacity to encounter the mysterious and sacred in our environs.

This concept traces back to the Gospel of John, which begins, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… and the Word became flesh” (John 1:1–14), suggesting that the world is at once material (flesh), rational (Word), and divine (God). In our modern eagerness to dispense with tales of a bearded man in the clouds, we seem to have also done away with our capacity to experience the world as a deep mystery—a question to be lived, and not just answered. Maybe the spiritual literacy of liber mundi is just what we need here.

What I am suggesting is there is not a clean line of separation between reading a book and reading the world; after all, books are part of the world. Like Borges I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books. But maybe that is the case for us all.

Museum Bhavan, detail