Heideggers Heritage: Philosophy, Anti-Modernism and Cultural Pessimism
49
However, if that is the ultimate measure of Heideggers philosophical achievement,
then the question of Heideggers political allegiances is more or less irrelevant. In Bourdieus well-known book, he looks to situate Heideggers philosophy such that his ontological politics in the 1930s are perfectly consistent with and emerge rather predictably from the views he had been developing in the melting pot of cultural pessimism and a conservative revolutionary mindset which he would have been stewing in since his teens: Heidegger is close to the spokesmen of the conservative revolution, many of whose words and theses he consecrates philosophically, but he distances himself from it by inserting them in the network of phonetic and semantic resonance which characterizes the Hlderlin-style Begriffsdichtung of the academic prophet. All of which situates him at the antipodes of the classical academic style, with its several varieties of frigid rigour, whether elegant and transparent in Cassirer, or tortured and obscure in Husserl.14
Bourdieu explicitly describes Heidegger then as a conservative revolutionary in
philosophy, something which is overly reductive and simplistic on our reading. Heidegger simply does not reduce to or overlap with Jnger or Spengler, for example, as readily as Bourdieu would have us believe, regardless of how many times he reminds us of the high esteem in which Heidegger held Der Arbeiter. It simply is not sufficient to try and reduce philosophical texts to biography, sociology or psychology and Bourdieu is inclined to shift between these registers as though he is fully entitled to do as much stating rather than demonstrating that There is no philosophical option neither one that promotes intuition, for instance, nor, at the other extreme, one that favours judgement or concepts, nor yet one that gives precedence to the Transcendental Aesthetic over the Transcendental Analytic, or poetry over discursive language which does not entail its concomitant academic and political options, and which does not owe to these secondary, more or less unconsciously assumed options, some of its deepest determinations.15
Bourdieu is completely subservient to his sociology of knowledge in this regard; it is
also worth remarking that Bourdieu uses the very term (again pejoratively) to characterize Heideggers criticism of twentieth century publicness and technology that we find in Habermass summary dismissal (i.e. Mandarin): The opposition between Eigentlichkeit, authenticity, and Uneigentlichkeit, inauthenticity, those primordial modes of Being-there, as Heidegger says, around which the whole work is organized (even from the viewpoint of the most strictly internal readings), is a particular and particularly subtle retranslation of the common opposition between the elite and the masses. They, (Das Man, literally one) are tyrannical (the real dictatorship of the they), inquisitorial (they keep watch over everything), and reduce everything to the lowest level, the universal they evade their responsibilities, opt out of their liberty: they live on procured assistance, fecklessly depending on society or the Welfare State which, especially
Stoicism The Art of Happiness: How the Stoic Philosophy Works, Living a Good Life, Finding Calm and Managing Your Emotions in a Turbulent World. New Version