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Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
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The Fascist Foundations of Heideggerian Thought: A Marxist Critique with Colin Bodayle
What if I told you one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century wasn't just a Nazi sympathizer, but that fascism was fundamental to his entire philosophical project? In this profound conversation with Colin Bodayle, doctoral student in philosophy at Villanova University, we peel back the sanitized layers of Martin Heidegger's legacy to reveal the uncomfortable truth behind his continued influence.
The mystification around Heidegger's Nazism represents one of academia's most persistent blind spots. While other Nazi intellectuals like Carl Schmitt are acknowledged for what they were, Heidegger enjoys special treatment. Colin reveals how Heidegger's manuscripts were likely edited to remove explicitly fascist content, creating a historical deception that continues to this day.
Most importantly, we explore how Heidegger's core philosophical concepts—authenticity, Dasein, and his critique of technology—directly support his fascist worldview. His concept of authenticity isn't about individual self-creation but about embracing one's heritage and historical destiny as part of a "folk." His subjective idealism dissolves the possibility of objective truth in favor of interpretation, creating a philosophical framework perfectly aligned with fascist thought.
The conversation takes fascinating detours through German idealism, Nietzsche's reactionary politics, and the strange appropriation of Heideggerian concepts by both the contemporary left and far-right figures like Alexander Dugin. We also discuss how continental philosophy's language games often obscure the political implications embedded in philosophical concepts.
Rather than suggesting we abandon these thinkers entirely, this conversation invites critical engagement. As Colin notes, "Heidegger can teach you things about being human—he wasn't wrong about everything." But we must approach his work with our eyes wide open to its political foundations.
If you've ever grappled with continental philosophy, critical theory, or the political dimensions of abstract thought, this episode offers a masterclass in intellectual clarity and honest critique.
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Hello, I'm here with Colin Bodale, doctoral student at Villanova University and the Department of Philosophy student of Gabriel Rockhill, I guess, and some other people. I mean you've studied with more than just Gabriel, but your primary research interests are Marx, hegel and Heidegger probably more Hegel and Heidegger than even Marx, and you tend to read in a kind of dialectical paradigm. I know you're a big fan of Dominico Lucerto, who I have had my disagreements with, but we agree that the left and Heidegger needs to be read more critically. And one of the weirdest things I read your essay on Heidegger that you originally published out of monthly review and I'm on your own sub stack on the channel. And, colin, a lot of people compared us to conservatives who dish marks but don't read him. And the funny thing is your critique is one of the few critiques of heidegger that engages with the text. It's not just based off of the. You know, the black notebooks are the fact he was a nazi. Uh, it's not just that you actually try to work through and show that it isn't an accident are just epiphenomenal to Heidegger's project with fascism. So why is it?
C. Derick Varn :You know, I always think about the big three intellectual German Nazis. Um, the ones that have been maintained. Werner sombart, who's mostly been erased because for some reason people don't want to deal with that one, but was super important in the middle 20th century, um, uh. Carl smith, who gets resurrected all the time, uh, can't seem to be kept down. And heidegger and heidegger is the one that there's the most dissembling about. The other two, I mean even people who use and like smith, come out and say yes, he was a nazi jurist, um, except for some people who pretend he was a revolutionary conservative, which he may have been at one time, and maybe that's getting around the walls in Russia, where you can't actually cite an endorsed fascist, but nonetheless. But in general people admit what what Smith was. Why do you think so many otherwise well-meaning left liberal people turn their head in a case so unambiguous like Heidegger?
Colin Bodayle :Yeah, it's a good question, Right, because you could also point to Frege.
Colin Bodayle :That's a funny one but people don't even know about that. I just found out about that recently. So why is it with Heidegger? I guess it's like it would be interesting to look at the history of it like from a historical materials perspective and actually see who was behind the reception. And I don't know a ton about that, but there are weird things, like Jean Befray was the guy who Heidegger wrote the letter on humanism to, and a lot of people don't know that he was right wing and anti-Semite and an anti-Holocaust denier. But as for as for why, I think like I don't know. I mean, maybe just a lot of people read Heidegger when they were younger. A lot of people got into it.
Colin Bodayle :Um, I also think that there's he fits into this narrative of kind of this, um very idealist historicist tendency in continental philosophy. Um, this, this way to see everything, all all truth, as just a kind of function of history or subjectivity or institutions or something like that. Um, but yeah, it's uh, I think like for me personally, like being like. You know, I had heard that heidegger was a nazi before I read being in time I think you know I was 18, right and then I read being in time and I was like, wow, this is like I've never read anything quite like this before, and part of it, too, was that it was really really difficult, right, like the language was incredibly difficult.
Colin Bodayle :Heidegger redefines all of these words, and so I feel like there's something about wanting to dive into a text that's very mysterious, like he promises you this, this answer to dive into a text that's very mysterious, like he promises you this, this answer to the question of being that goes all the way back to the pre-socratics, and you get caught up in this project of trying to figure out what it means, and because you invest so much intellectual labor into understanding the text, you kind of want all that to pay off. And so then, when someone threatens that by, like, calling out the political dimension of heidegger's thought, you feel like you've wasted all the. You feel like, if you have to give up what you've invested time into, you've wasted all that time, right?
C. Derick Varn :right. I remember in the 90s when I was uh coming up and I was in high school and I read, uh, like I read a short fragment of heidegger. I was trying to understand nietzsche, who I got obsessed with as a 16 year old, as a stereotypical 16 year old um, and I got to nietzsche through the kinds of french literature you often encounter in high school and then you come back to when you're like 40 um, which is camus and sartre and the and the french existentialist and the debate between the marxist end of that and the absurdist end of that, and I I got to nietzsche. I read birth of tragedy and I got to heidegger on nietzsche and I remember thinking, oh fuck, I really have to learn German, which is my also response. When I first read Hegel, which I think I was like 19 when I started reading Phenomenology of Spirit, we're like, oh shit, I'm going to need to learn German. And I did. Actually I sat down. The only reason I studied German was I was totally obsessed with these german existentialists and trying to figure them out.
C. Derick Varn :And I remember discovering that heidegger had a relationship to the nazi party and I remember it being weird when reading things like you know that uber liberal magazine that I don't even know if it still exists.
C. Derick Varn :The salon still exists anymore, but anyway, uh, in the 90s, reading Salon, and they're talking about how strange it was that Sartre was a communist because of the assumptions of existentialism, but they didn't call out how strange it was that Heidegger was a fascist. And so I was like, well, if individualism is all, if existentialism is all about your existence, before essence and individual, how do you get to to blood and soil nationalism? That doesn't? That seems even less obvious to me than communism and I never really got an answer. But I was really surprised and I do mean this, like in the 90s and aughts how little people talked about Heidegger's politics at all. And it wasn't like Nietzsche, where there is plausible deniability. Right Like you can even not accepting Kaufman. It took me a long time to come over to the to the Nietzsche is his reactionary, as it feels like he might be.
C. Derick Varn :Um reading yeah um, that's not true with Heidegger. It's pretty obvious, yeah, but it's not obvious what Heidegger means.
Colin Bodayle :So, yeah, although although if you're like, if you're in the I don't know what's the word, I don't know if I'm using this correctly the habitus of heidegger scholarship. Is that the right, right term for it? Right? Yeah, I would say so like yeah, like there are excuses within heidegger scholarship for this. There are like ways of justifying, I mean, because think of how many heidegger scholars are jewish too right, and tons still, yeah, tons right.
C. Derick Varn :Um our rent started that by sleeping with him.
Colin Bodayle :But yeah, go ahead all right, all these people there's usually like a few different like strategies. So if you look at someone like hubert dreyfus which I think it's a lot of people first when they first get into heidegger, they first get into hubert dreyfus because he has his courses on youtube and it's the kind of analytic, easy version of heidegger and then you find out heidegger um, but yeah, like for him he's just like I'm gonna just cut off all the division too is worthless.
Colin Bodayle :But the analytic philosophy and what I can like basically rewrite in heidegger is all in like the beginning. And then you know there's like all of the being in time purists, uh too, who you know. You can just say that's where the existentialism is. And then he became a nazi for reasons that made no sense or whatever. Right, you can kind of pretend that there's no link there. But then there are people who argue that Heidegger was either single focused on education and that what he wanted to do was implement educational reforms to go back to kind of a more 19th century arrangement of education being around philosophy at the center, as opposed to this kind of technical, everything specialized version of things. And then there's the claim and Heidegger tries to sell this, but it's pretty demonstrably false that Heidegger was only a Nazi for one one year. That's what he, his official story is. And then after that he engaged in a secret resistance against nazism and had to self-censor and all this stuff that's.
C. Derick Varn :That's like his claim and um so he was secretly ernst younger the whole time.
Colin Bodayle :That's what, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, actually speaking of I guess we will say the name of the devil, alexander Dugan. If you read Alexander Dugan's book on Heidegger, that's his claim too is that Heidegger was secretly working for a conservative revolution against Hitlerism, or something like this. But it's very demonstrably false In the book Introduction to Metly false. Um, there's a in the book, you know, uh, introduction to metaphysics.
Colin Bodayle :There's this passage in here where heidegger says something like the inner truth and greatness of our movement of national socialism all right, you may be familiar with this is like it's really shocking, because this, this was in there and this was one of the first books published by heidegger in english and so a lot of people. It was right there in front of everyone. But heidegger claims that he wrote in the manuscript in terms of the confrontation with technology. And then, um, he says but I was too afraid to say that because the, the gestapo was watching my classes, because they knew I was resisting the party right and um, then, uh, if you go and look at the, look for the actually official manuscript from, like, the heidegger archives, guess what one page is missing from that manuscript, conveniently, that exact page where heidegger allegedly had this thing.
Colin Bodayle :He never read and I think it was actually habermas first and I haven't figured out where, but it was apparently the young habermas who actually figured out that heidegger completely faked this fake resistance and there are other places where people have like where heidegger said really nazi things, like pro Hitler, pro Mussolini, things, like I think there's a Schelling lecture where he says it and either, and in the process, heidegger or his family or whoever have edited these things out of the Gesamtaskapp of the official like Heidegger manuscripts. If you're really deep into heidegger scholarship and into the criticals, it's a kind of secret among that's kind of open among these kind of high level heidegger scholars that we're not working with original manuscripts, like they've all been edited to take out this stuff.
Colin Bodayle :So it is interesting, I don't that's part of the reason, too, why I was like you know, I could list all of his crimes or whatever, but there are people who have done that way better than I could do, for sure. And yeah, the manuscripts we have are not even true manuscripts. He's edited out fascist stuff. It's funny really like convinced me that there was no, that it was that nazism or some kind of far right um philosophy, because it, you know, it is a a flavor of a far right philosophy that you find in heidegger. It's not like identical. They're not all identical, like he didn't think the same thing as every single you know yeah, he's not the same as giovanni gentile, for example.
Colin Bodayle :Right yeah, yeah, exactly.
Colin Bodayle :But I read the holderland seminars from 34 with christopher fenske at duquesne and um he wanted to read them, you know, because usually there's like the way I was, I was used to like seeing people read heidegger was either you know, like one like oh, is he really a nazi like you know? Or you know, is that just you know something people attribute to this, or can we like deconstruct it away from that? Or it's like he's a Nazi, kill him, let's find out all the dirt on him and Fenske's reading was he's a conservative revolution philosopher.
Colin Bodayle :Let's read him for his revolutionary philosophy of conservative revolution. And then when we did that reading in the class which I did really closely like in the German and stuff I was like, yeah, this guy's a fucking Nazi, it's just very deep into his political theory. Yeah.
C. Derick Varn :Well, I mean, this is something that I've seen as plausible deniability for a lot of German reactionary thinkers is to tie them to the conservative revolution because they have an ostensible critique of fascism. And sure, I mean, you know, there are people like Oswald Spengler and you know Edgar Young, who basically thought fascism was too liberal, yeah, and there's people like Thomas Mann who are more, and even Ernst Junger, who are more ambivalent figures Not people who I would endorse, by the way, but are at least legitimately interesting, and we're genuinely opposed to the Nazis most of the time. But it seems like a very convenient thing that I've seen done with both Heidegger and with Smith to say, oh, they were really conservative revolutionaries, they were just pretending to be, fascist and I'm like okay.
Colin Bodayle :Schmidt and Heidegger have a whole correspondence. Also Heidegger have a whole correspondence. Also heidegger has a correspondence with ernst jünger, I think. I think a lot of people know about the jünger correspondence because it's the um, it's the essay where heidegger crosses out being right, that darryl really is like you know, takes that from, or whatever. But um, these people were also like talking about german, so german socialism, right, that's what they all call it, which is the same thing. Right, like um, what's the guy's name?
C. Derick Varn :strasser called it, right, um yeah, strasser, spengler, I mean the prussian socialism and german socialism movement, which which, uh, I mean you see in the, the german historical school, which is something I've actually studied a lot, and you know, that's where stuff like MMT comes from, yeah, but also that's where Max Weber and Werner Sombart come from, and they're more of the, they're the thing that makes third periodism look true, because they were basically soft social Democrats, not Weber, so much he.
C. Derick Varn :He doesn't live long enough for us to see him do this but some Bart moves from Marxist to German historical school, marxian to Nazi, in that order, um and there's a. There's a lot of hand wringing about that, um and there's a. There's a lot of hand wringing about that um, because there's a want to distance the German socialism people, uh, particularly in the German historical school, from Nazi and national socialism, even though they use a lot of the same language, language, uh, and they usually rely on spengler and the fact strasser was purged and, yeah, I mean, hitler was almost first a shaktian, and I mean that by the, the, uh, the finance minister, and then not uh, and then almost a proto-neoliberal later on. But, um, uh, there was a lot of people in the german socialist movement. And you know in the national socialist movement a lot of the right of the SPD who were pretty Nazi sympathetic, so to me that doesn't even seem like an excuse. Yeah.
Colin Bodayle :And also like I wonder if it's like less interesting to just be like split hairs about it, like it's like, oh well, technically not a nazi, because it's nazi aligned movement, or like, and makes more sense to look at these as like kind of a spectrum of far-right ideologies that will materially all act together if there is a right fascist revolution. Right, um, or not revolution, but you know what I mean. A fascist movement, what kind good old counter-revolution? Yeah, the conservative revolution.
C. Derick Varn :The conservative revolutionaries would have fought the Marxists just as hard.
Colin Bodayle :Exactly right Because yeah, conservative revolution is not a revolution, it's a counter-revolution as well. But I don't know have you looked at Lasorda's book on Heidegger perchance?
C. Derick Varn :Not deeply so. What is losorto's argument?
Colin Bodayle :yeah, I think you would enjoy it. I don't think I finished, I think I still have like 30 pages left or something, but I've read most of it. Um, so he situates you know how like losorto likes to work from, I'm sure, from like western marxism, where he likes to look at a lot of different figures and kind of situate them in different time periods and be like this person said this around here, this person said this around this thing or around specific issues. And so what he does is he locates being in time and heidegger's uh analysis of finitude within what he calls the war ideology, the kriegs ideology, which is like this idea of like, hey, y'all remember when war, war one was happening and we were all like dying on the front lines and like everything like was like really like intense, y'all that shit was lit. Let's go back and go to war, right, like like junger's novels are all like kind of romanticizing war. And then there's this, there's this idea that the whole german public was mobilized around, you know, even like people who weren't fighting were like in the hospitals working or whatever, and so, um, he takes being towards death and shows how it's a kind of trope that can be found around this time period and germans are already death obsessed like.
Colin Bodayle :Go back to the 19th century right um, and if you look at the, I think it's in the holderland seminars he heidegger talks about the closeness of like.
Colin Bodayle :Go back to the 19th century Right Um, and if you look at the I think it's in the Holderlin seminars he talks about the closeness of the soldiers to the front.
Colin Bodayle :There's a line in being in time about like struggle and uh, communication, like referring, I think, to the battlefield as these things that bring the community together around a common like history and around the what he calls the combined shop, or the community together around a common like history, and around the what he calls the gemeinschaft or the community um. So there are these like already in being in time, this kind of ideology that's building up that can be found in figures on the right who were adjacent to fascism and people on the right who were opposed or, you know, not, not going along with the nazis for personal reasons, like carl jaspers um, which is somebody that used to get talked about a lot. Nobody talks about jaspers anymore. I'm not sure why. I don't know a ton about him, but uh, one thing will sort of brings up is that he had a lot of the similar death ideology and a lot of like affinities with certain German socialism.
C. Derick Varn :His wife was Jewish, though, so he couldn't really Right, yeah, I mean Jaspers is interesting in that at least from what I read by Roland, who is more liberal than than Lacerdo but does good history on this, and Lacerdo, but does good history on this he didn't try to do that apolitical Heidegger thing that Arendt did. He did not go there, even though his thought to me, Jasper's thought is really really indebted to Heidegger in some ways. A lot of his actual age notions and his epoch seem related. But maybe it's because it's indebted to heidegger in some ways, like a lot of his actual age notions and his epoch seem related. But maybe it's because it's indebted to prior stuff.
Colin Bodayle :I've I've read jaspers in english a long time ago, so I don't think I ever actually read jaspers unless it was like something in, like you know, when I was like 18, in some book on existentialism or something right. But you know, it's interesting about a rent too, because if you look at a rent's politics, I mean they're really heideggerian politics and they're not. They're not left-wing politics either. I don't like, they're not at all. I don't know why so many people like they're not liberal either, like they're conservative they're, they're fashy, I don't know like it's. It's alarming when you really look at some of um like a rent's ideas about. I mean, it has that kind of niche, an idea of like this uh, aristocratic kind of greek person over on top of society supported by the people beneath them. Right, that's kind of her defense of slavery, um, is that the slave classes, as bad as that was, let, like aristotle and plato, do their thing, right right, so I don't know it's like, it's weird it's.
Colin Bodayle :She's like another figure who is placed on is is kind of treated as a left-wing figure, just like most people reading heidegger.
C. Derick Varn :Either liberals are on, you know left or center, at least right um daradoc's you right like yeah, well, daradoc, daradoc's interesting um, not to bring up old controversies, but like I remember, the paul demand controversy that's what I was about to say, yeah, like the fact that so many of these deconstructionists were, like I don't know, affiliated with the nazi party always was like what?
C. Derick Varn :like because, because you wouldn't get that from derrida. But I also remember, I mean when I read derrida in university which I was an undergrad in english at the time and I was also in um analytic philosophy studying nicha and german. But I remember reading derrida and going this is a really complicated ass way to get to a paragraph of heidegger, basically like I just read of grammatology and it's like I just read a 400 page book to like go through the experience of a point Heidegger made in a paragraph and it really made me mad. And what is interesting to me is that, while there's been some attempt to like being barely discussed at all within, I don't know, seven years, it was pretty fast, yeah what do you?
Colin Bodayle :I think that that's like like part of it too, like I think, um, I mean, he's like so heidegger, adjacent, right, right, and like we've seen an intensification of politics since. Like we've seen an intensification of politics since like when was it? Like I feel, I feel like there was I'm just like a little bit going blank on like my timeline here, but when I was in graduate school before I was in graduate school, people were reading Heidegger and they were also Marxist and they were just like hey, can we like do both of these things? And then at a certain point with um, the kind of intensification of culture, war issues, I guess from the left, like it became just like no, you can't read nazis anymore, right, like kind of thing. Uh, and then I feel like derrida got kind of pushed away with that like right. So who's gonna want?
Colin Bodayle :to do deconstruction when it's based on heidegger's conception of metaphysics and all these kinds of things well, you saw the shift to like deluse and guitarry as opposed to, uh, derrida.
C. Derick Varn :I mean, that's what I noticed was like, yeah, deluse and guitarry became hip and we just don't talk about deconstruction, hardly at all anymore. Uh, we might mention the structuralism conference at John Hopkins as like some major, important thing and then like never talk about what the politics of it actually were. And if we do talk about Derrida, we're going to talk about some of the late books, like specters of marks are, which are very liberal readings of marks. I mean, it's going back in and I actually recently went back and read that because it comes up in a Fisher piece and I was surprised how like, oh, this feels like whatever the talking points were in 1997. Now, you and I are not the same ages. I'm a little bit older than you, I think, probably younger than your teachers and older than you. But, um, it was very interesting. Because the other thing is, uh, I think people forget in the late nineties that like stuff like, uh, heart and Negri were bestsellers.
Colin Bodayle :Right.
C. Derick Varn :Like Empire was on the New York Times bestseller list, which is crazy to think about now. Yeah, because that also feels like it's just completely fallen away and we don't mention it anymore. And we don't mention it anymore. Um, and you know, one of the things I'd be interested in is I mean, how much does the role of the kind of questionable role the french existentialists play into this, before we get into the actual like philosophy in it, because you already covered that somewhat, but but, um, like, why, like sartre being somewhat respected even by normies, uh, you know, on the left end and and the depoliticized world, um, uh, how much do you think that plays into this? Because, and then also heidegger's relationship to lakhan, maybe, because I've been trying to figure that out for a long time.
Colin Bodayle :Yeah, yeah, I'm not sure it's weird, because Sartre was the most famous intellectual until he died in, I believe, 1980 on the dot right and he was kind of a figure like Noam Chomsky might have been in the 90s or 2000s right, where every time something political happened you see what Sartre's positions were on it.
Colin Bodayle :And Sartre had, with the exception of Palestine, pretty decent political positions and was a committed communist. Beauvoir as well, like her writings on politics, are woefully understudied because she's placed in a kind of feminist box. But I feel like a lot of people, when they first get into existentialism because it does speak to something that people who are teenagers really think about and resonate with, they start with the Sartre and then they're told to go read Heidegger Right, and so Sartre has always presented as the kind of like oh, this is like the crappy existentialism, you need to read the real existentialism kind of stuff, and so maybe that moves students away from what could be a more radical wrestling with existentialism. Now I think it is true that, like Sartre is indebted to Heidegger. It is like a weird Heidegger and a weird Hegel, because it's like really kind of nascent in terms of being studied in France in that time the translations aren't good like. What you have for Hegel is like Kozhev's lectures. I don't even think like a lot of people will read.
Colin Bodayle :It's mostly Kozhev yeah, right, um, and uh, yeah, until you, until you have Hippolyte really like work this all out. Um, weirdly, I think, hippolyte, I read somewhere. Have Hippolyte really like work this all out. Weirdly, I think, hippolyte, I read somewhere that Hippolyte didn't attend Khrushchev's lectures because he didn't want to be spoiled have his like reading spoiled by them, which is interesting. But, um, but yeah, like, I think there are elements of Sartre that are definitely, I mean, he's a phenomenologist in a lot of ways right and so he's going to begin from that standpoint of subjectivity.
Colin Bodayle :He's a pretty good phenomenologist as far as like that discipline goes. Like his essays on like the transcendence of the ego are quite interesting. But I think, like he, he's someone who did so much work from the standpoint of subjectivity and beginning with the transcendental ego and experience and all of this kind of stuff, and then realized he needed to be a materialist for political reasons and, you know, kept going with that. I'd never read the critique of dialectical reason. I know a few people have. I'd like to at some point. But he has a book like like search for method. That's an attempt to kind of figure this out. He To kind of figure this out. He goes to like A kind of Kantian Regulative ideal, as like a kind of guiding principle of totality For linking things together and stuff like that.
C. Derick Varn :I feel like he kind of accidentally Bumps his way through parts of the entire German idealist tradition.
Colin Bodayle :Just like.
C. Derick Varn :Trying to wrap around how you start from this radical subjectivity and tie it back into materialism which, to be fair, I actually do think is a problem for marxists. Like it's not easy. Um, um, I I mean, like I used to think, I used to try to figure out, like, what marx thought ideas were, and then I remember reading the ep thompson, altus air debates and being like, oh, I see where both these guys are coming from. Actually, like this is not an easy question, um, so, to get it back to heidegger though, um, what about heidegger's philosophy? Because of that focus on authenticity, how do you get this idea of a collective folk from this idea of radical authenticity to yourself? Because that is the bridge that I think is clearly there. I've read a lot of Heidegger, the bridge that I think is clearly there. I've read a lot of Heidegger, you know it seems to be there, and I've even read Dugan talk about this too, and yet it's hard for me to see how you get there.
Colin Bodayle :For most people and I think that's what I think most people miss it because it's not obvious yeah, yeah, okay, I think I can maybe dive into this uh and explain how I think it gets there.
Colin Bodayle :So, authenticity in someone like sartre the way I read it and I haven't done a very close reading of being a nothingness so I might have some things wrong about this, but going off, like his kind of more popular stuff, I take it that he understands authenticity to be kind of this humanist idea like you create your life as a kind of work of art or a project in that sense, right, but I also bind everyone to this project in a certain way and I give a model of how I think human beings should be with the way I act.
Colin Bodayle :I don't think that's anything like Heidegger's authenticity. Heideggerian authenticity is rooted in this Nietzschean idea of use and disuse. It comes from the use and disuse of history essay of like looking to the past and finding a hero to emulate or a model to emulate, right. And so this could be, you know, kind of innocent right like you could be, like, oh, I want to want to right, like you read, like I'm trying to think of someone who's not just like I was going to say Wittgenstein, but he's kind of a weirdo.
Colin Bodayle :You probably shouldn't imitate him. But like you know some like philosopher that you read about and you read how they live their life or you read about, you know Marx or Lenin or someone like that, and you see that as a model and you try to model yourself on their greatness or something like that. That could be like a kind of one way of seeing it. But, um, for heidegger there's this sense of like finding possibilities for the folk in history, right, so like it's this idea of looking back at historical figures and seeing them as kind of having an authority or being a kind of model for the future. And but in each repetition or it's like the Wiederholung is the German word like there's a kind of like newness to the repetition of the old. And so I think that this heideggerian temporality plays itself out in the kind of like modus operandi of most continental philosophy these days, which is like reading and rereading and then like, if you like, here's you know my views on xyz text and they're like what's new about your reading? And it's like well, my reading is correct. Like you know, it's like no, it has to be a new reading, a new reading and rereading, like you have to go back to wherever nicha, the pre-socratics, and present it in some radically new way. I think that also, that that is like the political kind of impulse, at least, of being in time. And you find it, I think, in later works too, where the, the history of the people is, somehow has this, uh, this becomes this kind of model for how one, the, the folk, is unified in struggle or something along these lines. If that makes sense, and I think you find it in like some of the left-wing heideggerianisms that we're so familiar with, right, we need to, we, we need to go like. There's like um I won't mention any names, but I think most people know who I'm talking about like, like right, like the they talk about in the. There's like the Dmitriyev essay that talks about how fascism always goes and looks for these like heroes for the past to bring and like use as these, these kind of models, to capture the imagination of the people and bind them to the, to the, to the folk right, like Joan of Arc, george Washington, whoever right, to the folk right Like Joan of Arc, george Washington, whoever right, there's a sense in which even some of the kind of left Heideggerian movements we're seeing pop up that are kind of, you know, bringing some right wing or conservative elements and also kind of make this move of like we need to have I don't know, alexander Hamilton communism or George Washington communism or you know, I don't know, maybe you could do it with Joan of Arc too, or something like that.
Colin Bodayle :And there's this sense in which Heidegger's politics involves bringing up the ghosts of the past and I think, like I've heard too, that like this is why the Nazis didn't like Heidegger. It's because, like, his idea of conservative revolution was like we need to read the pre-socratics and they're like who can even relate to that right? But there's a sense in which, like um, someone like holderland for heidegger, in writing these poems about these german rivers, creates this sense of like love of the heimat right, the love of the homeland in people. And there's something where, if you really look at what authenticity is for Heidegger, he talks about it.
Colin Bodayle :I think it's in the call of conscience section that it's making up for not choosing. It's not like you're, like I'm going to be different or I'm going to be unique, or I'm going to be, you know, go the Sartre route, and it's not like you're like I'm going to be different or I'm going to be unique or I'm going to be. You know, go the Sartre route and it's like I'm going to be a model of what I think a human being should be. It's that you're making up for not choosing where you've been thrown and you're taking it on as your own project, right?
C. Derick Varn :Yeah, well, one of the things that's always been interesting to me about Heidegger is that there's obviously this Nietzschean terrain. Although his Nietzsche is actually particular, it's not Nietzsche Nietzsche, even if we both agree Nietzsche's, I think. I think it should be uncritically stated that Nietzsche is a reactionary and you have to depoliticize them to deal with that. Um, you know, and while you might argue that there's useful things in Nietzsche for the left, I am agnostic but, uh, having thought about it for a long time, I'm more and more leaning to mostly no, um, uh, there is this interesting other relation to the other counter-enlightenment German philosophers which is something to think about, because I think we have to deal with this.
C. Derick Varn :I don't want to go all Isaiah Berlin Anglo-liberal school here, but there is something to, uh, the the late romantics and their relation to heidegger's thought, which I do think we have to to deal with, and it shows up in his love of holderland is basically what I'm trying to say. Um, uh, what do you make about that? Like, do you think that's an important strain there? That maybe is the the missing element of understanding how you get from it.
Colin Bodayle :You know this existentialist thinker who also has a, like voluntary blood and soil, existential commitment, like yeah, I don't know Like I think his reading of Holyland is so weird and he's trying to like I mean like the really kind of like obviously weird thing about Heidegger is him making up words Right, like he constantly feels like you need a new language to do philosophy and so like.
Colin Bodayle :If you read him, like doing the Holyland seminars, he's like trying to like take holerlin and turn it into like, make it weirder and weirder and weirder so he can develop new concepts out of what holer than saying kind of like he does with the pre-socratics, this, this like whole, like deconstructive reading or whatever, and like part of it is like him developing the starting points for what will later be the fourfold, das Gewert, which I don't know. There's a, there's a good book by Andrew Mitchell explaining the fourfold. That's quite accessible and clear and all this stuff. But every time I've read about the fourfold I'm like this is his last concept, like this is his solution, like what we need to solve the riddle of being. Is this like gods, mortals, earth, sky, shit, like really like what even? Is this like? I feel like at that point, that's like the people who have invested so much into understanding it that they feel like they have to hold on to this concept of the fourfold.
Colin Bodayle :But this, all of this weirdness and all of these um, these kind of archaic or esoteric, all of these um, these kind of archaic or esoteric terms really come from him mining into holderland and I'm not sure. Besides, holderland's attachment to germany, I'm not really sure. Um, like, I guess, I guess that's part of the like uh appeal for heidegger, but like, the way he's reading him is so like idiosyncratic, like you know, like, where the danger grows, there are the saving power also. I mean, well, holder then wrote that it had nothing to do with technology. Right, it's just kind of like Heidegger is pulling on a yeah, and maybe it's just like he's pulling on the German past, for the same reason that someone might pull on George Washington or Joan of Arc for right-wing purposes, right?
C. Derick Varn :yeah, what they was going to ask you then is you know, there is the German idealist who we all should be a little afraid of, and that is Fichte. Yeah, yeah and I know that Heidegger likes Fichte. So what do you want to talk about that relationship? A little bit about you know.
Colin Bodayle :I actually don't know anything about Heidegger's relationship to ficta, unfortunately. Uh, I think like he talks about ficta, I think, a few times here and there, usually with the I equals, I stuff, but I'm not really familiar with like much of his work on ficta, unfortunately. But yeah, there is a weird split in the german like liberal movement, like building up to the like revolution of 1848, where, which I'd like to study in more detail I'm not a historian, you may have, you probably studied it more than I have but as I understand that there's a split between the like liberal kind of more french revolutionary side of um german revolutionaries, and then there's the people who are the German nationalists side of that and they have things that they share in common with each other and are, you know, both pushing towards the same goal of, you know, defeating the monarchy and, you know, creating a, a United Germany. But I happen to have noticed that one of the things that really distinguishes the liberals from nationalists in this like movement of 1848 is that the liberals want to incorporate jewish people into society and the nationals tend towards anti-semitism.
Colin Bodayle :And I believe that, if I remember right, f Fichte was more on the nationalist camp and was anti-Semitic, whereas someone like Hegel, who I read as being a liberal through and through, was against anti-Semitism or was against, I mean, you know, maybe he said some things that were not tasteful here and there or whatever, but he wanted Jews to have full political rights, right. Jews to have full political rights, right. So I wouldn't be surprised if there is a thread there, one that a historian as opposed to someone who's good at reading texts closely but somebody who's good at looking at, like long historical trends, like that might have something really interesting to say about.
C. Derick Varn :Yeah, one of the things that I got from the, from the scholar Friedrich Besser, was that neo-Kantianism kind of splits that way too, and but you also see it with Fichte and the Nationalists and it doesn't always hit the way you think.
C. Derick Varn :Like, bruno Bauer is not someone I would have associated with the Nationalists side, but he definitely is on it, so it's at least in that um, his quasi-antisemitic writings that marx is responding to that leads to on the jewish question, etc. Etc. Um, and that that tension does seem to be in all of German idealism and people kind of cut in different sides. And I find that interesting because I tend to think of German idealism and some of the later counter-enlightenment thinkers or the late German romantics like Klaga and the bio-thinkers and those people as not having any relationship or being totally opposed to one another. Or I think, like Nietzsche, who I've misstated and I said he was a contemporary, he wasn't really a contemporary of Hegel. I mean, he was. Hegel was much older than him, but like, like, and there's an explicit anti-Hegelianism in Nietzsche, but also weirdly, he doesn't reference Hegel directly.
Colin Bodayle :A super lot so he probably didn't read Hegel. Let's be honest, like right right.
C. Derick Varn :I mean like, but if he probably didn't read Hegel. Let's be honest, right, right. I mean like, but if you were in the German, if you were in the Prussian University at that time period, you have to deal with Hegelianism. There's no way not to. So I find that interesting too, but I don't have a clear answer either, because it does seem to me is a there's a lot more intersections here.
C. Derick Varn :I mean, uh, one of the things I was fascinated with with ficta was I started reading the work of eric von re um, who is a historian of, believe it or not, stalin, but he, he started going on the um, the kind of right-wing socialism in one country kick in the right of the sp day, not not the kotsky faction, but the faction to the right of even them um, who were like arguing for german imperialism as a means for socialism and stuff like that. Uh, who are part of ebert's core and so many of them, uh, loved ficta and a lot of them became nazis like boom, boom, boom um, and it's. It's really interesting to see that now we can. I do think you know, as uh, so I read a lot of history. I want people to understand.
C. Derick Varn :Some people think I'm a historian? I'm not. I'm actually trained mostly in poetry and anthropology and I write on intellectual history sometimes, um, but I'm not a trained historian. But it does seem like there's the people who do the history of this and the reception history, and then there's the philosophers, and they don't talk very much. Lasorda is actually one of the few exceptions.
Colin Bodayle :Yeah, which is why I like Lasorda. It is hard to do because this is something I've noticed as someone who's trying to do both, but I'm more, my skill set's more in the philosophy side of it or um, and so like one thing is like a very. You might like this, given your um, your profession, uh, different styles of reading, right, historians, really, yeah, 100, 150 pages, a 100, 150 pages a day. Philosophers read 20 pages a day. If it's Hegel, five pages a day. You know what I mean.
C. Derick Varn :If it's Hegel five pages a day If you're lucky.
Colin Bodayle :If you're lucky.
C. Derick Varn :Particularly if you're reading it in German. It's more like one page a day and I need two different translations and an index. Someone needs to make sure I got my Swabian dialect down.
Colin Bodayle :It's that bad. What made me actually be able to read German fluently without a dictionary is I once decided no more translations while I was in grad school. Then I took that high-tier class with Christopher Fenske at Duquesne and he assigned 80 pages of the Holderlin seminars a week, and so I literally was like 12 hours a day all weekend trying to read this thing, and then after that I was set. But it's hard enough because it's Heidegger. So half the shit he says is playing on etymology.
Colin Bodayle :Right yeah, you've encountered before. It's just like if you read in english, you're like wait, what did these things have anything to do with each other? And then you like, look in german, oh uh, like you should get sick chicken, like, oh okay, he's playing on something, which is weird too. I feel like I, I, I feel like it. People like, what did what does this sound like to german speakers? That is what I really want to know, because, like, I learned german originally to study heidegger and then later you know hegel and stuff like that. But like, think about like something like the word dasein right, we know this word probably first through heidegger, if anything yeah, I didn't encounter it much otherwise, yeah but the word dasein has a meaning in german.
Colin Bodayle :That is not what heidegger's meaning is, aside from, you know, associations with heidegger, now um. So if you look at the pre-critical khan, the pre-critical khan has that essay called the only possible proof of the existence of god, word existence, there is dasein. Dasein, literally just, is um, how you would render the latin existentia.
Colin Bodayle :But there's like a little note in being in time that nobody really noticed except me, and like I, I found like maybe one other scholar even pays attention to this where heidegger says um, normally the word existentially is translated as dasein.
Colin Bodayle :I'm going to be translating this, as for handenheit, as presence at hand.
Colin Bodayle :So presence at hand is heidegger using existence in the like thatness sense, throughout being in time, whereas dasein is his term for the type of being that we are, not the type, not not the being that we have, but not the design that we have, but the Seinde that we are, the being, the entity that we are. And then the being of this entity is existence with a Z, the German word that is a more transliteration of existential. And reading this, if you were to read this in german, you'd be like what, what the fuck is going on here? And so when you read it in english, you kind of just accept that dasein it means human being, right, and this is probably the only association you have with it until you get later ones, later, maybe from reading hegel in german or something like this right, where Dasein is the second category of the logic that has more qualities, and all that right which threw me for a loop when I hit it after reading Heidegger for a long time, because I went through the phenomenology in English than in German.
C. Derick Varn :And then I'm like I want to read the logic, yeah. And then I was like, wait, I don't, I have too much 20th century baggage to understand what is being spoken about here, because clearly hegel can't mean the same thing as heidegger. That is absolutely clear.
Colin Bodayle :yeah so it is fun to pretend that he does, though, because it does make a cool reading of being in time. But yes, he does not, um it. Yeah, well, because it's fun. It can be fun to pretend he does just because of the infinite being the resolution of it, because you can read being in time through the lens of the logic, as denying the the move to infinity.
Colin Bodayle :That all aside, what's interesting, though, is when I read lukash on in the destruction of reason on heidegger, like he really like, pinned down what Heidegger is really doing. Because Heidegger claims to have this solution or I mean, maybe he doesn't even like, he kind of says this, but like everyone says this about Heidegger, the Heidegger. We need Heidegger because he solved the subject object distinction somehow. What what Heidegger really does is he replaces the subject with human existence, like the thatness of human beings. So instead of saying, like all of history and all of objectivity and everything scientific, all truth is relative and contained within the transcendental ego, he says it's all relative to the thatness of human beings and that's a pretty big difference actually yeah can we talk about, like, the implications of that?
Colin Bodayle :that's actually yeah yeah, so well, to get to, to get something out of the way that I mentioned in the article and kind of repeat myself here, there is this, what I call subjective idealism that emerges from this, where if objects and objectivity are relative to whether or not to human design and human existence, then if human beings do not exist, there are no truths, there are no objectivities, there's no Newton's laws, there's nothing, and so you end up in that problem that Mearsou talks about in After Finitude. Have you read that book After Finitude?
C. Derick Varn :Oh, God, um, have you read that book after finitude?
Colin Bodayle :oh, oh god, I I do believe I read it, uh, in 2010 or 2011 somewhere I think when it first came out, but I haven't touched it since then it's it's really short, but his like argument is that he basically says that like idealists and heideggerians are like young earth creationists, basically right, um, because there's no, not before human beings, there's nothing, um, and when you look at height and when you look at heidegger and how his theory of time works and what his theory of you know, um, for heidegger, what he calls the present at hand which in this footnote that no one seems to have noticed he says is like his translation of the normal sense of existence only emerges out of this, like shift from the practical into the theoretical, where we then like objectify and like individuate in our object, like against the background of the world, right, and all of this occurs within like the horizon of Dasein's ecstatic temporality, like Dasein time, basically, and objective time, like clock time, for Heidegger is stripping the existential time of its significance and dulling it down and universalizing it.
Colin Bodayle :That's something that Heidegger gets from Nietzsche too, that I don't think people always notice. That, like heidegger sees, you get really like into some weird trippy, far-right shit, but like this, with this argument, heidegger sees as like, like science, by treating objects as following, like universal laws and as empirically verifiable and objective, is like liberalism, because it treats everything as equal and everything having the same rank, so it's like has some kind of synergy with liberalism and maybe that's part of the, the kind of like left um infection with heidegger in a way too.
Colin Bodayle :Like like that um, there you could see left perspectives to make this argument as well. That like flattening out of objectivity is somehow like rooted in a liberal ideology, um, and treating everything in the same way. I mean, even lukash says something like this at one point, I think in, uh, the one of his essays, I think the orthodox marxism one essay or something like that like he says something about yeah, yeah, yeah, that comes up in uh, early in the history and class consciousness book it does.
Colin Bodayle :Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And so there's like, and he associates this with Christianity too. In some ways, maybe it's even like an inverted Hegelianism too, right Cause, cause Hegel sees Christianity as bringing the idea of, of freedom forward and equality. I think this is pretty Eurocentric of him. But you know, whatever, the whole idea of ranking religions is kind of suspect to me. But Heidegger, like Nietzsche, right, like Nietzsche, doesn't. When Nietzsche says stuff, something like Jesus the Jew, right Like Calvin, says that, oh, nietzsche is like sticking it to the anti-semites um, who are christians. It's like no, no, no. Nietzsche and heidegger too, are so anti-semitic that they're anti-christian because they're like, that's too semitic, right which is the plain reading of actually the genealogy of morals.
C. Derick Varn :Like I don't like it, it's there.
Colin Bodayle :Like it's it's nuts to me that people like still try to claim, like professors who teach classes on Nietzsche still try to claim that Nietzsche is a left wing figure. Have you read the books? And maybe this is because, like you know, I grew up in the South and so I was taught Nietzsche by like conservatives.
C. Derick Varn :Right, and so it's like me too. Actually, I was taught nietzsche and hegel by nietzsche and hegelian conservatives, so yeah, right.
Colin Bodayle :And then it was like, yeah, it's like nietzsche hates liberalism and you're just like, yeah, obviously he does. Like it's like, yeah, nietzsche, like doesn't care about anyone except like powerful people and you know the rest of the people should just like fall in line to the powerful and and also you're studying philosophy, right, so you're special, like you should be like Nietzsche and not care about don't get involved in the world of politics or, you know, fighting for anything, because, right, like, you're trying to ascend or whatever. Like that's the reading of Nietzsche that I feel like I was exposed to, and if you read the text, that's kind of what he says. And and if you read the text, that's kind of what he says. And then I don't, yeah, like that's not to condemn everything in nietzsche. I don't think we should form a politics out of nature, but I mean there's some like life advice in nietzsche that I like in some passages, right, like yeah, I don't mind like his stuff about, you know, not trusting people with too much urge to punish and stuff like.
C. Derick Varn :But like, the other thing is, when Nietzsche is systemic, it is when he is most suspect, and that's the thing that I think that I look at the most. He's not systemic all the time but, like, when I see systemic things I'm like OK, so the Jews are in position of slave morality.
Colin Bodayle :Sure, he has a problem with anti-Semsemites, but it's not because he loves jews, right yeah, yeah and then you get into like I mean it starts using like the aryan and versus semitic language, which I know like there are people who just use that because those are language categories or whatever. But oh, like there's the the passage in dawn, or I think it is like 2062, where he talks about like, like he literally describes just like sending three fourths of the of the reserve army of labor to the colonies to let them like go, like off and like live their like violent desires and then he says we should bring the chinese in because they're industrious ants to do all the labor for us. And it's like I'm pretty sure that like it may say there describes like the exact same ideological claims, like almost word for word in discourse on colonialism as what nicha says there.
C. Derick Varn :But um, it's, it's special, um, yeah, I mean the the stuff about the blonde beast is a bit like. Yeah, like I just I remember when far rightist would quote nicha and I'm being like, well, you know what they actually. Unless you're bracketing out the will to power with the elizabeth foster nicha thing, um, and just pretending that she wrote all of it, I'll buy that she edited it sketchily. I haven't actually dealt with the archives of Nietzsche to say one way or the other, but to be like oh no, she wrote that. No, it reads like Nietzsche. The right-wingers aren't wrong, they read like Nietzsche. And I don't need a special like dispensation from Walter Kaufman to somehow get around that, because what Kaufman's whole argument is based on? Bracketing all that out, you just can't.
Colin Bodayle :you have to pretend it's not Nietzsche at all like yeah, and Kaufman too, like I mean, if I did something I noticed recently, if the Viking portable Nietzsche was one of the first Nietzsche texts available in English, right, yep, first one.
C. Derick Varn :I read actually in high school. Yeah, it was a Copic translation of Genealogy and Morals that I got in high school too, as a 16-year-old. The one published, I think it was in the 80s, yeah, yeah.
Colin Bodayle :So at some point I would recommend going through the viking portable nicha and looking for ellipses. And then going to the original text and seeing what kaufman took out. It's funny and like I don't know. There's one I want to look up because it's like nicha's like. And then the jews, ellipses, ellipses. It's like okay, wait what? Yeah, you took out a passage here. Why is that like um, but uh, yeah, so, but so why is heidegger still like such a big uh deal for so many philosophers, I mean even like zizek, right, who I mean? Hey, you know, you can make plenty, plenty of criticisms of zizek and a lot of, you know, a lot of older people don't even consider him to be doing anything significant.
Colin Bodayle :But you'll see people say that we have to accept the critique of ontotheology from Heidegger right, that's like a big one and the critique of metaphysics. But I don't even really know. Are people? What are people really attached to here? Because, as I understand Heidegger's critique of metaphysics, it's that metaphysics is an attempt to determine being in general, usually through some like paradigm, being grounded in an account of being in the whole, being of the whole through some kind of god type figure, although this could be the subject too, right, there's some grounding ground, the concept for hegel or something like that. And I feel like if you represent metaphysics this way, you're going to end up in idealism, because we're starting from the standpoint of what metaphysics is is an attempt to interpret the world through the lens of one particular entity. But there could be other entities that we choose, right, like you could say it's all atoms, or you could say it's all object oriented ontology or whatever, I don't know.
Colin Bodayle :Like you know what I mean or you could say it's all water or you know, and um, there's a sense in which this, I think, erases the distinction between materialism and idealism in favor of idealism and idealism in favor of idealism, even if the subject is like disappeared, like is out of the picture, because the subject is considered metaphysical.
Colin Bodayle :We start from this position that we have to give an interpretation of the meaning of being. But you can read the pre-Socratics as materialists, on the other hand, as opposed to ontologists, you can read dailies as saying what is everything? Everything's made of matter. What is the composition of matter? Well, it's like water, it can change forms, right. Or it's like air, it can change forms. Or heraclitus, it's like fire, it can change forms.
Colin Bodayle :Um, there's a passage in Heraclitus that I love, that I did not notice until teaching him last semester, which is the one about just as all things are exchanged for gold and gold for all things, so, um, fire is exchanged for all things and all things for fire, which is very interesting because it kind of shows like a kind of economic category and work in this like early pre-Socratic ontology, or we could call it a form of materialism. Or second chapter it's either the first or the second chapter goes through this kind of materialist reading of the pre-Socratics and he sees them all as kind of doing a new type of materialism that's thinkable because of the emerging merchant economy of ancient Greece, which is a really fascinating reading.
C. Derick Varn :Richard Seifert has a similar argument, actually, and he talks about that also in terms of selves, like the concept of selves that we see emerge both in the indian context, because he's actually doing comparisons between, uh, india and ancient greece, and the ancient greek context seems to be tied to the development of land property as a concept. That's pretty, and territorialization as a concept uh, it's not perfect. I don't know that I completely buy it, but like it is interesting and and I I do think that's a good answer to some of the heideggerian stuff like, uh, you know, I and it. I think it also becomes clearer when you read outside of just the quote european and let's be honest, the ancient anatolians and greeks are not really europeans the way we think of them. That's a german myth too, um, but thank you germanthology for that bullshit. Um, but this you're this european reading. If you compare them to, like, dharmic or cynic thinkers, you see similar developments with similar developments in and concepts of property. At least that's what you see for its uh argument.
Colin Bodayle :Yeah, that's really interesting. I have to look at that sometime. Um, and yeah, like I mean, I mean you have a history of buddhist, buddhist philosophy, so many similar problems. I mean early buddhism is doing stuff that is very phenomenological. Um, it's, it's development of dialectic right it's like.
C. Derick Varn :It's like reading what would have happened if the anti-platonics won the baited grace like, yeah, like I mean there's also platonic. There's also platonic like thinkers, even in, weirdly, the Buddhist redevelopment later, but like um, but yeah, when you start getting into it it's very fascinating. And um, it's actually something that I wish Marxist philosophy if I have a critique of Marxism, not just Western Marxism and I hope maybe the Chinese Marxists do more with this and we eventually get it in English, because I can't read Mandarin. It's hard.
Colin Bodayle :Oh my God, Mandarin is hard.
C. Derick Varn :Yeah, I lived in Asia for like four years and went to China a bunch and I could start to mimic tones kind of. But when I started getting into idiomatic writing I was like, oh man, I don't understand this. It breaks my pathetic phonetic Western brain. But nonetheless, it does actually matter for understanding certain translations of Buddhist philosophy, which is why I cared. It does actually matter for understanding certain translations of Buddhist philosophy, which is why I cared. Yeah, yeah. But you start seeing these parallels and developments and you just realize, oh my god, we don't study this stuff enough to see that there may be corresponding traditions, which also means that even people that I like, like lukash, are still fairly eurocentric.
Colin Bodayle :occasionally you'll get like african marxists looking at africana philosophy and doing cross-cultural comparisons and stuff, but there's not a lot of it and there's not a lot of it available and unfortunately a lot of it is available is written by hadggerians, so like yeah well yeah, and then you had the right, the kyoto school, and all that too right and oh, yes, yes, yes, you do the the kyoto school, the nicha heidegger, buddhist synthesis stuff like um uh, yeah that that stuff is wild, um yeah well, now that I've got my red note account, I've been talking with students about philosophy in china, although I've, you know, I've been like really busy lately, like because I just I just did like um the the on sunday, I did like the rev left episode on spinoza and then trying to figure out all this, you know other drama we won't go into and but now, like every time I look at my phone, I have a hundred red note notifications, because I don't know if it's like the population or just because people really like philosophy or what like um, and so I'm like, how do I respond to all of these things?
Colin Bodayle :but yeah, like some, some of the reactions are that chinese marxists are kind of more critical towards buddhism because of tensions with, like tibet and things like this right of course, yeah, so that even makes like I actually get.
C. Derick Varn :I actually understand those tensions from both sides, to be quite honest. But let's, let's, um, and there's a lot of reactionary buddhist thinkers. Actually I don't want to downplay that at all.
Colin Bodayle :Like yeah, you were like the Suzuki guy that a lot of people, like you know, like our parents, age, like studied and all this stuff. He's like really popular. Yeah yeah, you heard about what he did like during war too. Like, yes, he would like train like soldiers and be like, oh like, well, you know, it's all nothing. The knife isn't real. The body you're stabbing isn't real. The book on that is.
C. Derick Varn :Zen at War. If you want to get into Theravadan Buddhism, there's some stuff by the Buddhologist Donald Lopez on Theravadan, nationalism and anti-communism and anti-internationalism and and and all that. Um. So I don't want to idealize it at all, I really don't.
Colin Bodayle :But you know, heidegger tried to translate the dao de jing into german I could see that, I can see that, I can see him trying to somehow redefine both Dao and Dharma as something equivalent to Dasein. It's like Deveg, Vagan and Tevegmans, I don't know.
C. Derick Varn :That's like reading Ezra Pound's translations of confucius which is also wild which I have done.
Colin Bodayle :It's just crazy, yeah I'd never I haven't touched like, uh, confucianism or like ancient kind of ancient chinese philosophy, aside from having read the dao de jing and, I think, maybe one other daoist philosopher in undergrad. But I'm, you know, now trying to throw this into my ancient syllabus because, like my new thing is like, whenever I don't haven't read something, I just teach it, so then I have to know it before the day right yeah, but um, back to that.
Colin Bodayle :I do a podcast on it. That's what I do. I've got to like want to learn something.
C. Derick Varn :I'm like I need to fucking need to find an expert.
Colin Bodayle :So I have to read about this a lot of the heidegger, like idioms though came from him trying to translate aristotle, because like he's, I mean because he imagines himself as being aristotle, and so, like, if you read like aristotle, like the word for essence, totian and I like the the what it is to be, like aristotle just made that shit up, right, and so heidegger thinks like he needs to make shit up, uh, as well, um, although it's not clear to me, like if you take off your hideover glasses and actually like look at being in time, it kind of I'm I'm not sure how much you like he really needs to like coin these terms, like I mean, yeah, just like imagine how cheesy this would be if you read someone do this in english, right, um, and they sound new.
C. Derick Varn :you read someone do this in English, they sound new age when they do this in English, when you take normal words and redefine them like that, it often reads to us like new age grifter shit. I actually do think Heidegger is more sophisticated than that.
Colin Bodayle :Yes, of course.
C. Derick Varn :I've already been attacked like oh, you guys just hate Heidegger because of his politics, and I'm like I think his politics and his thought are directly related.
Colin Bodayle :Yeah, Um, have you ever? Oh, there's something crazy. Uh, I almost like forgot about this until recently. So one of Heidegger's early readings of Leibniz is like. I remember reading it I was like I forget what it is.
Colin Bodayle :Uh, it might be like metaphysical foundations of logic, right like one of those like from the being in time era prior to the 30s, or at least like on the dot 30s.
Colin Bodayle :Um, and he goes through this whole thing with like leibniz and the psr and all this stuff, and you expect him to just like do the heidegger thing, right when it's like, oh, we're going to read this, we're going to like play around with some words in the original language and make weird German words, and then at one point we're going to realize that this is all the history of metaphysics and it all leads to Nietzsche and Marx and who are just inversions of Hegel, of all the law, or or you know, this is just you know the president at hand and really like there's a more fundamental like ready to hand, etc.
Colin Bodayle :But this is not what he does at the end of this Leibniz seminar. At the end of the Leibniz seminar, he's like so what we can see is that, like, the perceptions of the monad are like pulled by the appetitions into the future, like from the past into the present. And dazan's a fucking monad because it has its world in itself, it's being in the world and this is like wow, that is like actually such a great expression of why heidegger's philosophy has this inherent subjective idealism to it. For those of you who have not studied leibniz, because he's weird, um, he's one of those philosophers, who sounds crazy.
Colin Bodayle :And then when you dig into him he's even crazier because, like, if you read like his correspondence, arno or whoever like he's corresponding with, will be like leibniz, that's fucking ape shit dog. Like what the hell like? That is a very strange position and Leibniz is like no, no, no, you don't understand, I account for this with some other really crazy position. Right, like he, he invents, he makes things weirder and weirder to keep his, his positions afloat.
Colin Bodayle :But for Leibn, everything that exists are minds that are kind of like organisms, but they're numerically one and they have no spatial extension or anything like that. They're units with no parts that have everything on the inside and each contains a world within itself and there are clouds of these things everywhere that form objects, but they have no relationship with each other. They just all represent the world as a little mind on the inside. And then, because of the pre-established harmony where god has made everything the best of all possible worlds, god is like programmed, as it were, all the little minds to sync up with each other. So there are like ideal chains linking everything in the clouds of monads that make up all of us, but really they are just playing according the the entire world from their own perspective, according to their own little program linked up with all the other monads.
Colin Bodayle :And then, finally, the other interesting claim that Leibniz makes is that every monad perceives the entire world from its perspective. And, just to give a kind of frame of reference, our minds are monads and they're linked up to the monads that make up our bodies, which are made of more monads that are linked to more monads, to more monads, to more monads, because Leibniz claims that all organisms are organisms all the way down to infinity, but he claims that we perceive events everywhere in the world right now. So right now, we're perceiving China at a very low degree of intensity.
C. Derick Varn :China at a very low degree of intensity. This is the as above so below, but written into literal idealist metaphysics of cognition.
Colin Bodayle :Yeah, okay, and that instead of matter.
C. Derick Varn :He has little minds Everywhere, so he's an idealist animus kind of I guess he's just loudness.
Colin Bodayle :I think honestly Everything is made of things that are ones.
C. Derick Varn :Yeah, I mean loudness is one of these guys of things that are ones. Yeah, I mean, leibniz is one of these guys that I know from his debates would like Voltaire, and I know by comparing him to Spinoza, who I find more rational. But I actually haven't read a lot of Leibniz, so it's just always wild when I read Leibniz, leibniz is really.
Colin Bodayle :it's just always wild. When I read Leibniz, leibniz is really strange because he always seems to be in a hurry, so all he does he doesn't have one big systematic work. He's just like here is my system, it's five pages, gotta go Bye. Later he's like here is my system, it's five pages, gotta go Bye. And they're all kind of different from each other but they all like harmonize with each other, kind of like the monads. And then he has his correspondence and then, but, like, the monads are slightly different. So we're like, oh, is this the, the deboses monad? But um, yeah, you can read. I'll give you a list of of stuff. But like, you can read leibniz in a day very easily. It's weird, but it's very easy and very short and fun.
Colin Bodayle :But this is a weird thing for Heidegger to read Leibniz, the weirdest metaphysician in early modern philosophy, and be like yep Dasein's a monad. But it makes sense when you realize that Leibniz thinks that the monad carries the entire world within itself, and that's kind of, and and it's um, yeah, there's these appetitions which are like the. Yeah, the only two features of the monads are the perceptions and the appetitions. The appetitions are he uses. He changes his words a ton too. They're intellikis, they're like self-movement, like it's like a principle of self-m self movement that just pushes perceptions for the entire world, at different degrees of perception based on the location of the monad, forward in like like ecstatic temporality does for the whole world around. Dasein, it's really, really strange. I'm gonna have to go like look back at that, maybe whenever I write parts two and three, which, who knows when, that will happen.
C. Derick Varn :Yeah, you gotta. You gotta finish a bunch of stuff like your dissertation first.
Colin Bodayle :That actually is going well. I have 250 pages of Hegel already.
C. Derick Varn :Good job.
Colin Bodayle :Yeah, the technology stuff might be something we should maybe touch on real quick.
C. Derick Varn :Yeah, let's talk about tech, because that's one of the things where leftists tend to be somewhat more sympathetic to heidegger. So what's, yeah, there?
Colin Bodayle :yeah, okay, so let me give an overview of heidegger's view of technology first. So heidegger sees technology as a interpretation of the, of the meaning of being. Um, he gives some strange claims of tracing this back to techne. I'm not sure if I could give that argument off the top of my head, but essentially he sees it as an expression of what Nietzsche calls the will to power, specifically the will to keep on willing. And so here's the idea If technology you could think of as like use values, right, um, if I it's weird too, because it resonates with the height it sounds. His description of technology actually sounds like the ontology and being in time, right, but like I have a stapler and I it like is, can exercise my will by like stapling things right.
Colin Bodayle :What technology does in the 20th century is it makes everything presence in the form of what Heidegger calls the standing reserve, which is this idea of like, the like it's on. He gives the example of a plane on the runway ready to take off in case someone needs to go somewhere. So, like technology is like providing us with stuff that we will, things that secure the possibility of future, willing and it if we wish to. And even science. He thinks it's like we measure all of the particles in the atmosphere or whatever, to kind of unlock them for the possibility of changing them and making them useful, human, willing and um. Heidier calls this the in framing, das gestell um, and there's a sense in which, uh, like I remember I talked to my german professor about this and she said, oh yeah, like frames, because that's like a double meaning to it that you wouldn't necessarily notice, that like it's a, a worldview where everything appears just something that's at hand, that you can exercise your will upon. And even like nature, like a park is like a version of the gestalt, because you're like, we have nature standing by, ready for people to go experience it, which is it's interesting. It's interesting as a way to describe things the water of the river, instead of being the water described by Holderlin, becomes something that we can harness using the, the, the, you know, the dam power or whatever, and so everything becomes unlocked in terms of its like ability to be an object for our will to power. And heidegger thinks that this is this, alongside with science and technology, and science and technology. He thinks that science and technology have taken over the role that he thought belonged to philosophers, and maybe in this sense he is kind of infected with what uh lukash talks about as a kind of spontaneous ideology of the petty bourgeois intellectual, which is that he thought that he was the one who gets to decide what being is, and now it's the, the scientists and technology people, or whatever. But the danger of technology is that Heidegger thinks we will never be able to see anything any other way than as a fully revealed, fully disclosed scientific picture of everything. And if you think about, like, what a scientific theory reveals, it reveals what you can do and what you can change about the thing that you understand and as Marxists, that's our criterion of truth is praxis already right. So there's a sense in which, when he says that marx and nietzsche are the like, the inverted hegelianisms that reveal everything in terms of the will. He's not wrong like marxist theory of scientific validity, as what can prove itself through praxis does involve exercising our will.
Colin Bodayle :Um, he seems to think that the german peasant here we go again with german peasants experienced nature differently because they go along with nature and don't challenge upon it. I forget what the german term being translated here is um, so they just plant the seeds and it grows along with the soil, whereas modern agriculture tries to like you know, it's the robbery of nature tries to strip the soil or maximize the, the yield of the soil and challenges the soil to to give its most, um, powerful, uh, fruit-bearing capacities, I guess. And so I think a lot of leftists are easily swayed by this heideggerian account, because it sounds like swayed by this heideggerian account, because it sounds like science bad, technology bad, causing us to see all of the earth and all the environment is just a resource for human use, um, which is going to create environmental catastrophes and things like this, because you know how dare we play God and fuck with nature kind of thing.
C. Derick Varn :Now, I mean this leads to people who like both Heidegger and somehow also like and I have critiques of them too, but also like a Horkheimer and a door nose dialectic of enlightenment, and they'll cite them both as if they're not diametrically opposed to each other. But go ahead.
Colin Bodayle :Yeah, and so I'm not super familiar with the Frankfurt school, cause I kind of skipped, like Western Marxism, and then until I read the sort of and I'm kind of like going back like cause I would just, you know, I just read like the classic texts, right, I just read the classic texts, right, I unfortunately came wrong-sided.
C. Derick Varn :I started with the Frankfurt School and read the classic texts and came back to the Frankfurt School and was like I don't know.
C. Derick Varn :But every time I read Adorno I'm like, bro, you're Heidegger, I thought you hated Heidegger, and because the dialectic of Enlightenment it sounds like this he of position it does um yeah, and so he does hate heidegger though I mean but, but, but, but it's interesting because you also I mean, uh, we, we forgot to mention one of the the the key transitionary figures, marcuse, who is the Heideggerian Marxist. Yeah, because you can't, because you're right, like you can't read one dimensional man without some of this Heidegger's critique of technology, like definitely being in there yeah, and so like.
Colin Bodayle :What's weird, though, about the environmental side of it is that, in a weird way, even trying to stop climate change is somehow connected to the world of power and gestalt I think right yes, yeah, like, because you're still like I think I don't even makes a comment. That's almost like this, because you're still trying to save nature. You're just like, just because we caused it, or whatever, but your purpose is about rounding up all the carbon and figuring out ways that there's not so much of it.
Colin Bodayle :Okay, so here's the thing I mean Heidegger would lead you to super fatalism almost.
Colin Bodayle :I mean, I think he just wants, like, go dress up as a peasant and go to his garden man like I don't know, but yeah, yeah, there could be a kind of fatalism or nihilism to it. Um, okay, so here's the critique. Mm-hmm. The environmental crisis is not a result of technology or things being connected to our own will or our will to power Us utilizing them like, them being objects for our utility. The environmental crisis is a result of building our entire economies around exchange value Right and maximizing the production of things for the purpose of exchange value. Because even like right, because like. Because if we actually like, were focused like, yeah, I would take it back to this use value, exchange value distinction, because if we actually were trying to like, rationally calculate things to our own advantage, we would do what the libertarians say that capital would do.
C. Derick Varn :But we can see clearly capital has no incentive to ever do um, which is rationally allocate resources, because it's stupid to waste them. Uh, but you know, marx makes it very clear that once you get into abstract value accumulation and that becomes your driving teleological framework, um, you'll burn through almost anything to maintain it and like, including capital itself, apparently like yeah, yeah, I haven't seen the market uh, allocate the 15.1 million empty homes to the half a million homeless people in the us yet.
Colin Bodayle :So I don't know right. Um, that's, that's always the number I pull out for my students. It's like I was like how many homes do you think are unoccupied in the us? How many homeless people do you think there are? How many more homes do you think there are? The homeless people?
Colin Bodayle :right, but yeah, that's absurd but then we go back to, yeah, like the whole ontology and metaphysics and idealism aspect of things. Um, hold on a second. Uh, the uh. What heidegger is claiming is like what ontology is? Is that it or technology as a? As metaphysics, it's determining what can count as a being. Right, that's what ultimately ontology is. For Heidegger, what is the meaning of being? What counts as a being? What does it mean for something to be? According to Heidegger in the in the 20th century, it means to be an object that's manipulatable, that's scientifically describable and manipulatable by technology, which, honestly, is not far from what I would say. The actual definition of being is, anyway, like I mean, because I'm kind of a scientific realist. But that aside, for Heidegger, like, being is kind of still phenomenal and I'll make another point about that in a second Like, it is still a mode of appearance for things For Marx, though, marx says the opposite, that the mode of appearance of things is actually not its use value, it's its exchange value.
Colin Bodayle :It's commodity right, the form of appearance of wealth in the capitalist age of production. To paraphrase it loosely, the first sentence of capital is um, a world of commodities. That's the way that things appear, um, and if you have a materialist account, like, like, like, what the materialist account would reveal is the use values, the actual wealth, the actual what's, what's actually materially being produced and can be utilized rationally. But this appears in this form of exchange, whereas Heidegger thinks that that is actually the appearance, the rationally utilizable, real, material, scientifically describable things, because science, for him, is ultimately just a way of revealing being according to certain presuppositions and basic concepts.
C. Derick Varn :Which makes sense in a way for him. I'm not saying in general, but if you assume that being is rooted in Dasein, like the being of the human, the thingness of, and that's the perception of that thingness, everything is just subjected to that. Anyway, engagement with the world is phenomenologically relative to this or that, but we are approaching some kind of objective truth. You know, struggling though we may be, you know embracing the Hegelian slash, marxist critique of positivism, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But in Heidegger you are, in some ways it almost feels like mere subjectivity.
Colin Bodayle :Yeah, it's like objectivity is like a choice for Heidegger. You're choosing to objectify things and you're stripping them from their worldliness according to certain procedures and principles. Now there are things in Heidegger's tool being or not, tool being or not to pull me, that's a Harmon book tool analysis that are cool for Marxist analysis. There's also one place in capital where Mark says, like when you look at the, when you when like the, the the worker receives, like the, the raw materials and there's a flaw in them that they notice the other worker that produced it in the flaw, which is, which is kind of like the breakdown thing in Heidegger. So there's like a weird Heideggerian moment in Marx too, when it comes to because Heidegger for Heidegger. He says you don't notice the hammer when you're swinging it, you only notice when it breaks and that was what turns it into an object. There's a line where Marx says something very similar about the raw materials being broken. But that aside, what objectivity is for Heidegger is it's like staring at something with a certain like theoretical lens and isolating it from this context of practical activity and engagement that is ultimately rooted in Dasein's own existence and world, which is part of it's like a structure of Dasein. But what I wanted to say to you on this topic of of, you know this whole, you know um correlationism that's the term Marcy uses for this like idealist position that there's no outside.
Colin Bodayle :One thing that's really revealing is Husserl's margin notes in his copy of being in Time. They're in the Husserliana and I've read them and one of them I remember distinctly is, as Husserl's going and he's starting to be more and more like what the fuck is this Heidegger? He writes in one of the margins all of this in a phenomenological reduction For Husserl, in Husserl's phenomenology, the epoche, the phenomenological reduction, the idea of, like we're only going to look at what appears to us, we're going to bracket the natural attitude which assumes that what I see is a real thing out there. He said we're going to put that aside using a deliberate skeptical procedure. This is a method for huser and that method actually kind of changes how we, we look at what's in our perceptual apparatus. But huser will switch back and forth between natural attitude and then phenomenological attitude to draw points of contrast.
Colin Bodayle :Because huser is all about trying to find these like essences within consciousness and these, these necessary claims that he can make about the structure of consciousness. There is, there's no like, there's no epoch like. Maybe there is like in a weird sense in the anxiety chapter, like there is no epoch in heidegger in the sense that he said I'm going to bracket being or bracket reality or whatever, yet heidegger kind of is in a phenomenologically reduced sense the entire time. It just almost seems like that's all he thinks there is. And this kind of extreme idealism too is very compatible with fascism, I think really like where everything is like, if everything is just. I would really like to like have a clear I'm a cartesian at heart. I would really like to have a clear and distinct idea of like why there's some need for fascist ideology to be like the most subjective forms of idealism and everything to just be mind and subjectivity and opinions and things like this. You see this in Dugan too. Dugan has a chapter on Husserl in the fourth political theory book. Do you remember that?
C. Derick Varn :Oh yeah.
Colin Bodayle :There's no husro in that chapter. Like what the hell is that chapter?
C. Derick Varn :it's like no, no, I mean like no, but it's a weird chapter.
C. Derick Varn :I mean dugan's, one of these people who like starts one of the things I pointed out in my reading of like his first chapter, but I mean in the husro chapter, but like where he's basically arguing that cultures are basically to use a metaphysical concept from wu, land, agrigors that we should give rights but not people.
C. Derick Varn :So we should give, like the concept of german identity or the concept of russian identity, rights, but people don't get that Because the ideas are more real than the. I mean, you know, and at first I thought, when he was talking about liberalism, does this liberalism? Does that? I was like, okay, he's making that representative problem where we use the abstract in a hypostatized way to represent the things underneath it. We all do that, I get it. But then, as I read the, I read the book, I'm like, no, I think he actually believes this literally, like you know, um, that liberalism is like a thought process that we get into. And then, like, we do these things and it's liberalism controlling us, and i'm'm like, yeah, okay, yeah, maybe that's the connection, cause you get that in Jordan Peterson too.
Colin Bodayle :Yes, you do. Yeah, there's a Reddit post that went like really viral. I would still get messages from Peterson supporters. I used to be really active in ask philosophy under a pseudonym, and people would always send my critique of Peterson Cause we're all like don't read peterson, he's not a real philosopher. And then people like tell us what's wrong with him. And I was like show me something he's written. And like his book hadn't come out, so like it's just like youtube. I'm like I'm not fucking listening to youtube. Y'all like give me a text and someone showed me a speech anyways, so I did a close analysis of it and that's his. His thing is Peterson's.
Colin Bodayle :Post-modernism is something that grips you and gets into your consciousness and makes you work Right and similar similarly with Dugan and liberalism, except he wants to take part of liberalism, namely the equality and freedom. But have it be for not individuals and just be for cultures, right, right, yeah, yeah. Have it be for not individuals and just be for cultures, right, um, right, yeah, yeah. The weird contradiction for him is that he's like did you see his debate with, or a discussion with, tucker carlson?
Colin Bodayle :yes, I did actually, yeah yeah, like, yeah, you remember, like, so like dubin was like we are, we are russians, like we are traditional, like we do not, you know, buy your lgbtq wokeness, like that's for you, we're okay with you having that, we just don't want it for us because it's not our tradition. And tucker carlson's like um, I don't think it's america's tradition, neither I'm an american traditionalist. And then it's like I just like, realized, like, oh, it's just like every like, every appeal to tradition is just. I mean, of course, you're gonna, whatever you hate, you're just gonna say that that's you know it's traditional to not like that thing, right right, right.
C. Derick Varn :I mean I hate to go all like reactionary hobsbawm, but most traditions are invented specifically for that purpose.
Colin Bodayle :Like yeah yeah, um, but yeah. His reading of a of huserl which has nothing to do with huserl in any sense whatsoever is like this time consciousness where literally all that exists is like the infinitesimal. Now, yeah, like that's nuts and then it's just which means all that exists is perception too.
Colin Bodayle :It's what it would imply, but yeah yeah, he tries to move from that to um.
Colin Bodayle :It's funny cause I he shall not be named from twitter argues that the reason you need Dugan and not just heidegger is because he says that, like dugan can take dasein and make him like, make it cultural dasein. Right, that move. Like dugan in the fourth political theory, like like there's some kind of crazy leap there, like where he actually can't get from the like all that exists is the now of consciousness. To like which seems radically individualistic, to like folk or people or culture, ethnos or whatever he calls it right. Like there's right. There's like this slippage there which is weird because I think heidegger totally. If you read heidegger more carefully, maybe you could make that move. I didn't read all of his book on heidegger, though, so maybe he gives a more detailed account there, but um I have read four dugan books and he contradicts himself a lot, so it's hard to actually know um like I, never contradicts himself on the fascism stuff besides calling it something different each time no, he does not.
C. Derick Varn :He uh, he, uh it. Well, it's also funny, because he basically relies on the most vulgar liberal understanding of fascism as racial nationalism yeah, as carl popper's racial nationalism, to distance everything he says for fascism. And then I point out that like, but like Mussolini's fascism is definitely copacetic with what you're talking about. Yeah, but yeah, it's, it's wild. I mean, you know, maybe we should thank the Dugan is for reminding us that Heidegger has a high as a right wing reading, though that's actually really easy to do, because they make that obvious.
C. Derick Varn :Yeah, we're not just dealing with decolonial theorists anymore and Derrida fans.
Colin Bodayle :Yeah, with the decolonial theorists where, yeah, I made some critiques of them, I mean like I'm like really open to like the idea that there are like like like what is the guy? Keanu Keanu? Yeah, like I remember reading him in undergrad and I was just like, even if he was critical, when he's critical of Marxism I was like this seems like something, you know, worth taking seriously or whatever. But then it gets really strange. Like we're now like it's kind of like, it's kind of like Heidegger, but for decolonial theory, where I mean I haven't seen the receipts for Descartes connection to Cortez. Maybe there are receipts somewhere in a book that I've never seen. But just because I think, therefore I am sounds like I conquer, therefore I am, you know.
C. Derick Varn :Yeah, that's incredibly weak.
Colin Bodayle :It came from Europe, so it must be colonial, except for Heidegger and Levinas. We'll keep those. The Nazi and the Zionist, we'll just keep them. They're fine, but everyone else right.
C. Derick Varn :Yeah, the the nazi and the zionist, we'll just keep them. They're fine. But everyone else right like, yeah, don't get me on my whole, there's a strain of afro pessimism that is heideggerian.
Colin Bodayle :That really rhymes with zionism. Yeah, um, but anyway, I haven't delved into that yet um, not all of it. I wouldn't condemn all of it, but uh yeah some of it, because I've had some people I respect tell me that some of it is like really worth like considering, and so yeah, I, I.
C. Derick Varn :I think people should struggle with fred wilkinson, even if they don't agree with him. Um, uh, I don't, I wouldn't. I mean, look, I, despite what people think, we aren't telling you not to read heidegger. We're telling you not to be mystified by heidegger. Um, yeah, or heidegger scholars who want to take these concepts and just pretend there's no relation to heidegger's politics, and I think we can't do that right I don't think ideas are.
C. Derick Varn :You can just like, like, like I'm not a Deleuzian. I don't think you can just carte blanche like oh, I like this from here and this from here, and just throw it together and it makes sense.
Colin Bodayle :Yeah, like where he likes Socrates' critique of dialectic, or he likes Nietzsche's critique of Socrates' dialectic when he uses it against Hegel, but not when he uses it against Hegel because he claims that Socrates was racially inferior. Right, yeah, that hagel because he claims that socrates was racially inferior, right, yeah, have you seen that? Like yes, um, I, yeah, so it's. It's weird too because, like people always just like shift what heidegger is like the trendy heidegger too, right, so like I think the contributions for a while was like really cool and that's written in his like in the 30s. So right, some sketchy stuff in there, for sure, um, but it's also just like very weird. There's all this last god stuff and he's trying to develop the arachnids, um, and I don't know like I I remember just like whenever heideggerians debate, they just throw heidegger's terms at each other until someone gets lost, and then whoever gets lost loses. I feel like.
Colin Bodayle :Sometimes it ends up like that not all heideggerians, but I just remember like a lot of that growing up um of who could like show that they've mastered the concepts enough, lot of that growing up um of who could like show that they've mastered the concepts enough. And I'm like really skeptical and like worried about how in a lot of continental philosophy we're kind of thrust into like language games without really knowing the stakes of the language games.
Colin Bodayle :So let me give an example, the other my entire first semester of uh, one of my, one of my programs, two different classes were just like but can hegel deal with alterity? But can heidegger deal with alterity? But what senses of alterity is there in heidegger? Ah, but is there any alterity? And even like, the marxist students are trying to like jump on board and it's like okay, so now we got to figure out about like alterity, what is alterity and like how? So now we've got to figure out about like alterity, what is alterity and like how does it fit into this? And I'm sitting there like what? Can somebody just please explain to me why a system needs to account for alterity? Is this politics? Is there something like going on here? Like is the other? Like I don't know, the immigrant or something? I genuinely don't know what we're talking about when we say the other?
Colin Bodayle :It turned out by the end of the semester that there were two different discussions going on where one of the professors was a theologian and the other was God and the other was a Derridian. So the other was more conceptual, I think, and not theological. But you get into these, it's similar to the whole, like totalities, equal totalitarianism thing, right, like well, I don't want to have a totalizing philosophy because all my professors have said that's a bad thing, right, and so I don't want to be accused of it. And I feel like a lot of kind of ideological indoctrination happens through these kinds of conceptual associations, when we don't actually really work out what we mean by them. Metaphysics, that's another one, right. No one wants to be considered metaphysics, or doing metaphysics, or metaphysical, and I think the term metaphysics means very different things for different philosophers absolutely right.
Colin Bodayle :So for aristotle means first philosophy. I didn't realize this. But the reason it doesn't mean that in like hegel or kant, is because kant has a critique of this claim that metaphysics is first philosophy, has a critique of this claim that metaphysics is first philosophy because he says like this is ambiguous, because when does the first part end and the second part begin? Because he says something along the lines of like okay, you say all extended things are, um, like subject to, or all, all bodies are extended. He's like okay, that's metaphysics. What about all liquid bodies are extended? Are we still doing metaphysics, you know? And like he, he's worried about that specification yet even among the german idealists.
Colin Bodayle :There's this like shift in what metaphysics means between different german idealists. Um, for some of the early ones it just means like something that can determine the thing in itself. But if you look at hegel, it doesn't mean that because hegel thinks that metaphysics was, metaphysics was right in thinking that it could know the thing in itself.
Colin Bodayle :From hegel I actually I, actually I. You know this is controversial, but I think I have the textual evidence for it. I think Hegel and Engels have a very similar definition of metaphysics, where metaphysics is opposed to dialectical thinking. Metaphysics is the abstract understanding you get to Heidegger. What is metaphysics? It's ontotheology, it's this attempt to give this account of being in general and being as a whole, you go to derrida.
Colin Bodayle :And metaphysics is somehow both the hegelian and the heideggerian definition right. I'm not sure if there's anywhere where derrida says this is what metaphysics is. Metaphysics is presence, right? That's another one of heidegger's argument where that um, there's actually some historical backing to this claim. So he says that um, existence I mean this in a non-heideggerian sense has been associated with existence in the present moment, existence in the now, and has not had the future or tense or past tense given to it Like right, we say that dinosaurs don't exist because they don't exist now. We say that they won't exist in the future or whatever Like, or you know, the future does not exist because it's not here yet, things like this. Or if we say that the future exists, we imagine it as a present that is not yet right Somewhere. If we say that the future exists, we imagine it as a present that is not yet right somewhere. Or the past is like in a container somewhere because it was present back then.
Colin Bodayle :There is some like etymological work, like there's an essay called the greek verb to be. That's a really kind of famous essay by charles khan written, and I think it was in the 60s on this topic, where he talks about this present tense preference in ancient greek, uh philosophy. But that's like another aspect, this whole like metaphysics of presence thing that gets derrida takes up where for derrida it's the um, um thinking of meta, thinking, of being in terms of like stable presence, hides this play of signifiers, this play of difference that ultimately like defers meaning, which is, um, I think, very similar to his like, it's kind of his he, his take, his attempt to take, take like some stuff from ecstatic temporality and like structuralism and and make it more of a structuralist move with presence.
Colin Bodayle :But this is another thing like what's wrong with presence right, like you know right, yeah yeah, I mean that's a basic question.
C. Derick Varn :I mean one of the things I find very frustrating and this can come out of phenomenological thinkers of all types, and you can also do the other thing the analytic philosophers do and over define stuff. But there is a lot of equivocation in this, like deconstruction between concepts and hegel and concept and heidegger yeah particularly that are just like thrown around as if they're talking about the same thing and like in der.
C. Derick Varn :I remember being utterly confused by this when I first read this being like what? Like huh and I think you're right Like what do people mean by metaphysics? For years, colin, I couldn't figure out why ontology wasn't metaphysics, knowing what I know about the Eshterian definition of metaphysics, so you know know, is it?
Colin Bodayle :or is it not? That's the question. I I think like right, yeah, like, I mean, like I, traditionally it is metaphysics, traditionally is metaphysics generalis, which includes ontology and then um special metaphysics, which is cosmology, psychology, and um.
Colin Bodayle :I'm missing one theology I think, um, right, the world, the soul, god. And then I think another aspect of general metaphysics and this, this might help some things click, uh, because it helped me put some things together. Modal claims are metaphysical, like possibility, contingency, things like this, right, right, yeah. And then that actually makes sense of like, oh. So that's why analytic metaphysics is metaphysics in the 1960s. Right, right, right, yes, that makes sense, right, because they say like, oh, like this is true across all possible worlds, it's modally necessary. So that's a metaphysical side to it. And, um, but for heidegger it's so caught.
Colin Bodayle :One of the reasons I quit heidegger is I just like started realizing that all I know how to do is think about being right, and people like start talking about like difference and contradiction and and like the part in the whole and all this stuff. And I'm like wait, there are other concepts besides being. Why have I just been on like page one of Hegel's logic? I could have been doing all of these other fun things. Um, and it was really that limitation of Heidegger, uh, that that pushed me away from him. I mean, he does talk about like difference, but I don't know.
Colin Bodayle :That essay is really weird. He doesn't say it as much as he should in a lot of, a lot of essays. So I mean, some of his like really, really careful though is, uh has some, like you know, he has some good work, I think. Uh, on the history, philosophy when, when he was younger especially, he made all of his students know greek before they could take his class. Yeah, I mean, back then I guess people knew that stuff. I wish I, you know, I I've, you know, done the basic ancient greek like on my own once, but yeah, like I definitely couldn't be in a heidegger class on it that's true.
C. Derick Varn :I will admit that aristotle started making a lot more sense with me when I started like getting the technical terms like in greek a little better um, yeah uh and then, and that made a lot of 19th and early 20th century German philosophy make more sense.
C. Derick Varn :But you know, yeah, I mean my brain was scrambled when I studied this stuff because on one hand I was coming from the very deconstructionist era of critical literary theory when I was an English major, and then I was studying philosophy and anthropology together and it was analytic or it was anthropological, it wasn't continental and so, and I got obsessed with nietzsche and uh, with and and hegel, but, like I said, through conservative, actually very conservative southern professors. So it was, um, it took me a while, and heideidegger, I think, was both obviously right-wing to me but also heavily mystified. But I don't think it's all bad. It's funny that people react to us critiquing them or saying like, oh, you can't really base the left-wing philosophy off of Nietzsche and Heidegger with saying, oh, you should never read them, right, I don't think we should be basing our philosophy off of Hobbes, but I love reading Hobbes.
Colin Bodayle :Oh my gosh, I just taught Hobbes. It was great.
C. Derick Varn :Right, it's wild. And there's some wild stuff in Hobbes.
Colin Bodayle :I was just going through Hobbes for fun earlier today. Honestly, I was thinking about through Hobbes' fun earlier today honestly, like I was thinking about Well, because I just did the Spinoza thing.
C. Derick Varn :Right.
Colin Bodayle :And then I was like I should really go look back up Hobbes' analysis of Knottis. It's wild, right, because, like, what the Knottis is is like motion particles have entered the body and remain in the body, by which I mean imagination. Because, like, because, like there are no such things like what is an idea for hobbes? Decaying motion in the senses, right, yeah, like, and what the canadis is is those little bitty beginnings of motion still in the body from what is entered into the imagination.
Colin Bodayle :Because memory is just imagination, with the thought of the past.
C. Derick Varn :Right, right, right right, which is actually somewhat insightful and a little bit accurate, but like how he gets there. I mean, one of the things I go off on is, like you kind of have to understand that hobbes is not. A lot of people read him as atheist he might be kind of, but he's closer to spinoza, that he seems to believe that god is a literal, material being like the ancient stoics like, and that everything, including ideas maybe, are literal material, things like so yeah, it's and like, and it either has to do with matter or motion and some relation between the two, which is fascinating for that time period in particular, because it's so close to a modern outlook and also so not a modern outlook.
Colin Bodayle :Yeah, yeah, all these people, I guess probably reading Lucretius and secret at this time.
C. Derick Varn :Yes, exactly. I mean like it's clearly, like there's Lucretius all up in this and you're absolutely correct. So just because we say that you can't base a left-wing philosophy off of it doesn't mean we don't think you should read it or learn from it. In fact, I think it's actually important to understand where some of this thought comes from and how you deal with it, and also to admit some of it is, in its own way, genius, even if I think it's utterly corrupted.
Colin Bodayle :Yeah, Like a lot of people are kind of like you know, cause, cause Gabriel is doing his Gabriel thing right now of criticizing the canon, and he's been, but at the same time he's been very clear.
Colin Bodayle :It's like no, you should definitely be reading all these people and it's funny, the lasorda book has me actually wanting to go read marcusa and the frankfurt school and block and all this stuff like really carefully now. But, um, like, from his vantage point like he, like you know, studied with derrida and studied with badu and read all these people in the original language and his, like, his kind of position is that, like you shouldn't think that you need to do all of those things to be a good leftist. That's actually distracting you from things that are probably more important on the agenda. But if you're a, if you're a marxist working in professional philosophy, good time to pick up this stuff and start criticizing. You know, now there are probably also other important things to be doing, like more so than just criticizing philosophy. I think a lot more important things to do, um, but you know, yeah, I mean not like you shouldn't do it at the same time.
Colin Bodayle :Like you know, there's nothing wrong with it, no one's forbidding you to do it there is like a yeah, we, we can only focus on so many things at once, um, but I think like, really, what people are saying is that you don't need to you don't need in your marxism.
Colin Bodayle :You don't need heidegger in your marxism. You can go read these people and I think even like if you wanted to understand the history of fascism, you probably should understand how these philosophers fit into it also. Heidegger can teach you things about just being a philosophers fit into it also.
Colin Bodayle :Heidi can teach you things about just being a human being, because you know he wasn't wrong about everything right yeah, like I remember writing my honors thesis while reading, being in time and understanding, being towards death, because my 22 year old mind was like I've got to finish this honors thesis, cause, cause, I'm going to die one day.
C. Derick Varn :Right, it's a very basic motivational strategy, but it's a pretty good one.
Colin Bodayle :Yeah. Like and yeah, the the analysis of angst is really interesting. You know there's a lot of weird stuff going on with that. It's also interesting to take Heidegger and Hegel and see if you can figure out where they're coming into tension with all this like negativity and nothing and the nothing not stuff. One thing there is a analysis of boredom. Have you ever read that? Yes, fund, fundamental concept metaphysics I always be right.
Colin Bodayle :I always think about that because I remember reading the boredom part and finding it way less interesting than the stuff on animals, uh, and it looks cool and all of that um, and I remember reading it and thinking of, um, what is called thinking, where heidegger is always like, but we are not yet thinking, and then I'll like talkgger is always like but we are not yet thinking, and then I'll talk about whatever he's like, but we are not yet thinking. And I kept just being like we're talking about boredom but we are not yet bored enough. Let's bore us some more with this boredom, right?
C. Derick Varn :Yes, I feel that way with Derrida a lot too. Well, colin, where can people find your work?
Colin Bodayle :Well, I'm mostly on twitter. I just started tiktok, though, where I'm going to be doing, uh, some philosophy stuff, also posting stuff from red note on there, um. But yeah, uh, I also, you know, have an article that just came out on hegel's critique of kant's moral postulates, which is an idea, uh forthcoming and idealistic studies, but it's available in online first, or, if you would like a copy, hit me up. I'm happy to send you a copy, so yeah, All right. Thank you so much.
C. Derick Varn :Thank you so much for having me, it was fun, I really enjoyed it. All right, and you'll be back. I want you back on and talk about Hegel, because that's actually your primary field of research right now.
Colin Bodayle :Yeah, hagel, because that's actually your, your, your primary field of research right now. So, yeah, I'd love to, I'd love to, all right. So, all right, see you back on then, take care, yep bye-bye, bye.
