Sunday, April 6, 2025
after the onto-theo-logical constitution of the Holocaust
The early 20th century mandarins of German academia unwittingly rational-
ized Catholic capitalism: the “onto-“ of pretentious German power.
Holy Roman Catholicism unwittingly rationalized antisemitism: the “-theo-.“
of scapegoating.
Catholic capitalism enabled Hitlerism which thereby afforded engineering of the Holocaust: the “-logical” scaling of psychotic murder.
The native culpability of Germans—portended in the dynamic of “refusal” which Heidegger framed in Contributions to Philosophy (c1938) and his framing of German ideology in his notebooks—was so horrifying to Germans after the war that decades would pass before their innocent children would grow up to demand that their parents’ generation face accountability, which appeared academically as the Historikerstreit.
So, of course inquiry into Heidegger’s pre-war search for an authentic cultural basis for German nationality (after the Crash annulled the stability of the Weimar Republic) would arise, especially for Jewish scholars.
But the question belonged to the Germans altogether, not to Heidegger (and belonged to the history of Christianity), who were already called to account in 1951 by Heidegger—decades before Germany enowned its guilt: “What is most thought-provoking....” Finding “heartfulness” can be not only heartbreaking, but more difficult than facing post-“Great War” German guilt (“being toward death”), when Germans were clueless about “authentic potential for being” a grounded community, most “belonging together in the Same” (“The Principle of Identity”) authentic language.
Cluelessness applies to some current Heidegger scholarship, which withdraws into transcendentalist scholasticism, if not revenge against being German troped by scapegoating fabulated “Heidegger”s.
Needless to say, the dangers of technocracy are now greater than ever, dramat-
ically shown in the ability of oligarchic autocracy to damage the promise of democracies and to institute ethno-nationalist license.
Heidegger called for “planetary thinking” (1962), which has been coincidently evidenced by Gaic politics (from the environmental protests of the 1970s through the Paris Accords), and by collaborative global leadership modeled by the Allies-engineered United Nations (but hobbled by nuclear-armed autocracies). Collaborative global political leadership begins with authentic community thinking globally for the sake of future generations (paying forward as “good ancestors”).
The future of humanity is at stake. That’s become a trite point. But also trite to historians is that “the jungle grows back.” Decency in government can be suffocated by capitalist predation. There are no gods to save us (which was Heidegger’s sarcasm, not advocation of restored theocentrism).
Academia must ensure that (1) the humanities stay on the leading edge of academic thinking about public policy; (2) higher education keeps the humanities centrally important for professional education; and (3) capitalist A.I. remains controlled by genuinely human interests.
