Mick Hartley

Patrick West of Spiked has been reading Heidegger, and thinks he could be the answer to the problem of collective herd mentality and cancel culture – "The notoriously difficult philosopher was a vociferous enemy of groupthink".

Ever since I started to read him a couple of years ago, it has increasingly struck me that the best antidote to today’s woes are the thoughts of German philosopher Martin Heidegger. He could even be seen as a counterbalance to Michel Foucault, the French philosopher who inspired much woke thinking.

Utilising Heidegger would be no mean feat. His magnum opus, Being and Time (1927), is notoriously difficult to read in translation. Worse still, he was a member of the Nazi Party from May 1933 until the end of the war, and his posthumously published ‘black notebooks’ have exposed his deep-seated anti-Semitism. He was a ‘small man’ as the critic George Steiner once put it. But he was also a great thinker. And ironically, despite what we now know about the rise of the Nazis, Heidegger was actually very sound on the pernicious power of the crowd.

Intrinsic to Heidegger’s philosophy was a belief in authenticity, which, in his own idiosyncratic German, he called Eigentlichkeit. We are ‘thrown’ into the world at a time not of our choosing and our time here is finite. This is the primary source of our angst, says Heideigger. In this finite life, we are necessarily faced with having to make individual choices, which, by implication, are moral choices. It is a terrible but inevitable predicament to be authentic, to be oneself, to decide one’s destiny.

For Heidegger, the opposite of Eigentlichkeit is being beholden to das Man. In English this is translated variously as ‘They’, ‘People’ or ‘The Public’. This is the tempting, easy, inauthentic option. To conform to what ‘They’ expect means not having to make up your own mind or take responsibility for your actions. It means you are not oneself but part of the ‘they-self’.

Heidegger said that it is life’s arduous challenge to be, or regain, our authenticity and autonomy. Once that state is attained, our lives can be joyous and liberated, not burdened with the imperative of having to conform or bury oneself in a passive public persona.

This is the task that faces us today: to struggle to be oneself. To not be ‘They’.

It's certainly a bold idea, citing a Nazi and a supporter of Hitler in the 1930s for his opposition to groupthink and collective herd mentality.

The joy of Heidegger is that he mixes obscurity of terminology with schoolboy philosophy. The reader, then, struggles through the Eigentlichkeits and the Daseins and eventually may come to appreciate that what the great thinker is getting at is this idea that life is a struggle in which we have to make individual choices and take responsibility for our actions. This spectactularly banal conclusion is then somehow gilded with an aura of profundity, simply because it's been such a struggle to get there. I mean, it's hard going, so he must be a deep thinker – right?

As philosopher Jonathan Glover put it:

The moral case against Heidegger the man is obvious. The central moral case against Heidegger the philosopher is easier to get wrong. It is not about a link between his theories and Nazism. It is about undermining philosophy's role in developing a climate of critical thought. His books are an embodiment of the idea that philosophy is an impenetrable fog, in which ideas not clearly understood have to be taken on trust. Karl Jaspers was right in seeing this "incommunicative" mode of thought as linked to being dictatorial.

Deference is encouraged by having to take it on trust that the obscure means something important. And since things not understood cannot be argued about, the critical faculties atrophy. Philosophy could not have served the Nazis better than by encouraging deference and by this softening of the mind.

As relevant now as ever.