5 Phenomenologists
Some of the most fruitful intellectual debates took place
in Germany between World Wars. The complex of ideas that went under the name
'phenomenology' were generated in an atmosphere of heightened social conflict
and anxiety about the future. It was Edmund Husserl who first developed a
phenomenological approach. That mean that he would look at the phenomena of
consciousness, and bracket them from any question of whether they are true or
not. Reflecting on the formal science of Geometry he came to the conclusion
that the objectivity of ideas arose from their assent amongst a community of
subjects. This was an intellectual development that closely paralleled
Wittgenstein's shift from truth tables to language games - but in Germany, and
later in France, the idea got a more sympathetic reception.
Already the distinction between a realm of nature and one
of culture, with their respective sciences of Naturwissenschaften and
Geisteswissenschaften, had been made in Germany by Dilthey and his fellow
neo-Kantians. This was a development that helped the growth of sociology in
Germany, as did the influence of Max
Weber. Weber's sociology - in part a challenge to a
burgeoning Marxism - paid special attention to cultural factors. Amongst
Weber's students the precocious Hungarian Gyorgy Lukacs embodied the challenge of
Marxism. At the end of the first world war, when Germans were faced with the
choice between a pax Americana or the New World in the East, Weber and Lukacs
parted company as Weber joined the Weimar government in Germany and Lukacs took
part in the brief Soviet revolution in his native Hungary as minister of
culture.
After the war, sociologists like Max Scheler, Alfred Schutz and
Karl Mannheim were increasingly influenced by the phenomenological approach. Scheler
and Mannheim developed Husserl's phenomenology into a 'Sociology of
Knowledge' in which competing points of view were taken as the outcome of
competing sectional interests - it wasn't hard to divine an attempt to
understand the growing dissensus in Wiemar. Schutz linked Husserl's
phenomenology to Weberian sociology, understanding that if knowledge was
generated between subjects then 'intersubjectivity' and the way that it created
a 'lifeworld' of meaning should be the subject of investigation.
However, these investigations were in danger of being
overshadowed by a more violent clash of opinion as Germany slid into anarchy.
The possibilities of constitutional government and the yearning for dramatic
political solutions, the growing alienation from society, and Germany's future
were all issues that were at large at the time. In philosophy they found a
particularly pointed formulation in the unspoken hostility between Edmund Husserl's
brilliant student Martin
Heidegger and Gyorgy Lukacs, and the counterposition of
their two political and philosophical tracts: Being and Time and
History and Class Consciousness.
Lukacs had
already broken from constitutionalism, in favour of a bolshevism that even
earned him a reprimand from Lenin. The principle of the masses overrode
constitutional democracy. Also he had reworked Marx's critique of capitalist
society, with elements of the Geisteswissenschaften of Dilthey and Heinrich
Rickert, to analyse the alienation in Western society in his essay 'Reification
and the consciousness of the proletariat'. The choice facing Germany was the
one outlined by Rosa Luxemburg: 'Socialism or barbarism'.
Heidegger was meditating on the same problems as Lukacs, but drawing
on some very different resources. He analysed alienation as a metaphysical
problem. The instrumental rationality of traditional ontology had separated
being from its rootedness, making it inauthentic, 'thrown' and abstract.
Heidegger's programme was a 'destruction of ontology' - that is a dismantling
of the instrumental reasoning that had separated us from our primordial being.
In Heidegger's estimation Germany was caught between the pincers of bolshevism
in the East and Yankee capitalism in the West, which, despite their differences
were 'metaphysically' the same, operating according to the same indifference.
Heidegger's attitude to the masses was quite different from Lukacs. Far from
providing the resolution of alienation they were exemplified it as 'das Man',
the They. Mass media and mass democracy were poisoned by the They, by their
'publicness' and their 'idle chatter'. Heidegger had his answer to Lukacs's
bolshevism. According to Heidegger, the impending disaster facing Germany was a
wake-up call to 'take a stand in history'. This kind of thinking was common on
the right, as for example the reactionary criticism of parliamentarism made by
Carl Schmitt, that would later be characterised as 'decisionism'.
Of course, this is to reduce these two great thinkers to
their political outlooks, when their own influence arose less from the
political content of what they said, as the more profound theoretical
development of their thinking. So, for example, Lukacs's influence
was felt in the sociology of Mannheim, a comparatively conservative
political thinker, who had been part of Lukacs' circle. In the case of
Heidegger the contrasts between ostensible political affiliations and influence
were yet greater. Amongst his students were Emmanuel Levinas and Herbert Marcuse at
Freiburg and Hannah Arendt
at Marburg. Even Jean-Paul Sartre attended Heidegger's
lectures. Levinas and Arendt (who had an affair with
Heidegger) were both Jews, and all four were ardent critics of the Nazi party
that Heidegger had joined. As we shall see, the continuing influence of
Heidegger's ideas after the defeat of Hitler and Heidegger's disgrace, comes
largely through the influence of his unsullied students.
One important instance of the way that philosophical
ideas cut across political affiliations was the work of the Institute of Social
research founded by businessman Felix Weil under the directorship of Carl
Grunberg in 1923. What went on to be called the 'Frankfurt School' was
ostensibly on the far political left, corresponding with the Marx-Engels
Institute in Moscow. But the key figures in the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer,
who became director in 1930, Theodor
Adorno and later Herbert Marcuse all favoured an unorthodox
reading of Marx. They were particularly interested in Lukacs and Karl
Korsch's rejection of a mainstream, positivist-inspired Marxism. Following
Lukacs they drew upon Weberian
sociology, phenomenology and even Heidggerian
ontology to 'enrich' Marxism. But departing from Lukacs, the School gradually
dispensed with the role of the working class in revolutionary theory, bringing
its newly minted 'critical theory' yet closer to Heidegger's romantic rejection
of the modern world. In time it would become clear that the affiliations of the
Frankfurt School gave it a leftist veneer, but that the content of its work was
much closer to the currents of German philosophy and sociology in the
twenties.
Impact of War
The Second World War was a turning point in the
intellectual history of the twentieth century. For those whose political
beliefs or racial origins made it impossible to stay in Germany and Austria it
means upheaval: Carnap went to Chicago, Popper to New
Zealand, before joining Hayek in London, Goedel to Chicago,
Adorno
went first to Oxford - as did Mannheim - and then to Princeton, Lukacs went to
Moscow to an uneasy relationship with the authorities, Freud and Melanie Klein went to
London, Arendt and Karen Horney
to New York, Levi-Strauss to Sao Paulo, Althusser was
imprisoned, as was Sartre, briefly, who continued his
underground activities on release. Most ambitiously the Frankfurt Institute
reconvened itself on America's West Coast. There was a knock-on impact upon
intellectuals in Britain and America who suddenly found themselves next to the
best brains of Europe. For the New School for Social Research in New York this
was clearly an unmitigated success, as the college became an organising centre
for the most advanced ideas in philosophy, social anthropology and sociology,
with Levi-Strauss, Alfred
Schutz, and Hannah Arendt joining the faculty. Perry
Anderson suggests that the effect in British Universities was less useful,
dwarfing the achievements of the analytical philosophers, and inculcating a
sense of inferiority towards positivists like Hayek and Popper.
For those Germans who stayed, however, the upheaval came
not in 1933 with the accession of the Nazis to power, or 1939 with the outbreak
of war, but in 1943 when the reversal of the German campaign in the East made
it obvious that the Axis powers would lose. German intellectuals who had
supported the Nazis faced the same ignominious trial as other collaborators
with the regime. The party ideologue Rosenberg was executed, the architect and
armaments minister Albert Speer was imprisoned for twenty years. Behind the
front-line of war crimes trials were the local denazification hearings
organised by the occupying allied powers, before which academics like Carl
Schmitt and Martin Heidegger
were judged.
Schmitt spent a year in the internment camps and was
interrogated, but still managed to evade responsibility for defending the
legality of the Nazi regime, and was allowed to retire. But unlike Schmitt,
Martin Heidegger still considered himself a player in the intellectual world and fought
tooth and nail to avoid responsibility for his political affiliations. The
terms of Heidegger's defence before the commission on 23 July 1945 can be
surmised from his article written at the time 'Facts and Thoughts'. There he
attempts to differentiate himself from the Nazis by redefining Fascism in terms
of his own analysis of the mass societies of America and the Soviet Union: 'the
rule and the shape of the worker … is the universal rule of the will to
power within history, now understood to embrace the planet. Today everything
stands in this historical reality, no matter whether it is called communism, or
fascism, or world democracy.' (Rockmore, p94)
Just as Heidegger assimilated Fascism to democracy
as the 'will to power' of 'the worker', so too did he relativise the difference
between industry and the gas chambers in a lecture given in 1949: 'Agriculture
is now a mechanised food industry; in essence it is no different from the
production of corpses in the gas chambers and death camps, the embargoes and
food reductions to starving countries, the making of Hydrogen bombs.' (The
Question Concerning Technology, cited in Lyotard, Heidegger and the 'jews',
p85) By these inversions Heidegger maintained the consistency of his hostility
to mass society and to 'instrumental reason', by turning Fascism from the
proposed resolution of these dangers into an exemplar of them.
In their own mouths Heidegger and Schmitt's evasions were
unconvincing. Nobody wanted to hear their excuses. But the Heideggerian
philosophy did survive the Second World War in the writings of Heidegger's
left-wing, and therefore uncompromised students.
German exiles in America
Hannah Arendt, Herbert
Marcuse, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer developed the twin theses of 'Totalitarianism' and the inhumanity of
instrumental rationality in America in their books On Totalitarianism
(1951) and Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). In the Dialectic of
Enlightenment, technical rationality is held to lead inexorably from the
domination of man of nature to the domination of man over man. It is an idea
that is taken from Being and Time, reworked in a left-wing style.
Anticipating, perhaps informing Heidegger's own apologia, Adorno and
Horkheimer see instrumental reason leading inexorably to the gas chambers - an
argument that has become a central component of modern environmentalism. Their
critique of the mass culture industry (The culture industry: enlightenment as
mass deception') is also inspired in part by Heidegger's concepts of the
'publicness' and 'idle chatter' of 'the They', except now the power of mass
propaganda is identified with Fascism rather than democracy.
(The
strangest story of all was the love affair between the Nazi Martin Heidegger
and his Jewish student Heidegger and
Arendt in love)
Arendt's
On Totalitarianism also deploys key Heideggerian concepts, albeit to an
ostensibly different political goal. Explaining the power of totalitarian
movements Arendt makes special play of their mass character, a category which
closely parallels Heidegger's Das Man, being characterised by
'indifference' and 'sheer numbers' (p 311). Arendt's contribution to Cold War
ideology is the identification of Soviet Communism and Fascism under the
heading of Totalitarianism - again an evasion that mirrors Heidegger's own.
6 Existentialists