Being me, mostly, I got to thinking “what if Heidegger had had a tool like Kum Nye, that he used consistently?” It is, I think, a good question. He thought a lot ABOUT Being–Dasein and the rest. But when he bought his coffee in the morning, who was more emotionally present: him, or the person serving him? Chances are overwhelming, are they not, that it was the person serving him, who perhaps because Heidegger thought “deep” thoughts considered him his superior? In my own worldview–can I say Weltanschauung?–Heidegger of the two was vastly the inferior, since he had made an apparent virtue of actual existential retrogression. It does not matter how deeply you THINK about being: if you are not there, then no one is. You are operating an unclever machine, which spits out informationally flat 0’s and 1’s.
Or take Sartre: “L’etre et le rien”. He sat at a cafe, high on speed, and drank coffee and wine all day long, smoked furiously, and wrote 10-20 pages of something most of his adult life. Was he there? No: he was cruel, he was angry, and in my own moral cosmology this means inherently that no, he was not there. He did not think he COULD be there, and one could perhaps look at his entire life’s work as an extended rationalization of a failure necessitated by being stupid. Or, put more precisely, by being unwilling to allow his emotions to percolate, process, and “rationalize”, both due to inherent lack of deep awareness, and due to lacking a METHOD.
I am superficial and ignorant enough to take the two as types, the first of Fascism, the second of Communism. In Heidegger’s case, he had “feelings” for Nazism. After his initial infatuation he lost his enthusiasm, but he in my understanding never resigned his membership, and never fully rejected the Nazi project. How would he have conceived the Nazi project? The formation of Home in conditions of existential confusion. (again: I am not well versed on this topic, and am perhaps projecting as much as analyzing, but I still think this basic project is useful).
Hitler, in my view, was a much better man than Stalin. Objectively, Stalin killed more people–particularly once one factors in the Comintern and its role in mass death the world over, not least through leading agent Ho Chi Minh, and the mass deaths he facilitated throughout Indochina. But more importantly, Hitler was capable of at least loving ideals. I don’t think anyone capable of such atrocities would be capable of loving actual people, but Hitler clearly operated from a wellspring of deep emotion, which is what made him such a powerful orator, and charismatic leader. He truly loved his vision of the German people, and he truly wanted what was best for them, as he conceived it. He wanted for them wealth and power, and security and stability.
Stalin had none of that. He was a calculating machine, which loved no ideal, wanted no concrete outcome, had no attachment except to power for himself. He recognized no truth outside of power, no reality outside of power. He had no love for the Russians or any other nation. He rejected his homeland of Georgia in rejecting his name. He had no place, he wanted no place, he dreamed of no place for those he “led” through abuse.
I repeated a claim a few weeks ago that Camus was murdered. I wonder if Stalinist Sartre knew of this, if in fact that is what happened? He would not have cared, would he, since his whole life was rejected in the course of his arguments as to why and how he and no one else could exist, despite his furious and sadistic exhortations that that was the “essence” of life, to the extent it had one.
I am a Liberal. Period. To my mind, adding “classical” is to accept the lie that modern “liberals” are anything but people who do not exist, and so must grab power in the name of others to protect themselves through power from the lie at the core of their beings.
I reject, of course, Fascism. I simply reject even more strenuously the creed that Obama and others seemingly still carry, which has no love, no life in it: nothing but lies and death, moral and physical.