Berkeley has a long Heideggerian pedigree. It's no secret that one of our intellectual luminaries, Hubert Dreyfus, was considered the leading Heidegger scholar in this country for decades. He is one of the pioneers in artificial intelligence and his work on Heidegger, Hussurl, Marlu-Ponty, Homer and Dante, is unmatched. It was aided by his unpretentious pedagogical style, which was clearly that of someone who deeply cared about sharing his understanding of the material with his students. He even has a Matt Groening character drawn in his image. His voice is missed in the current AI gold rush.
I enjoy repeating the story of Dreyfus to today’s fanatics about how he was ostracized by the MIT faculty for his phenomenological criticism of AI, which probably contributed to their being de-funded by DARPA, and his subsequent resignation from his professorship preceding Berkeley's 1968 offer. That was nearly sixty years ago. I always liked Dreyfus' lecture recordings and writing before coming here and was disappointed that the "Reports of [his] demise [were] not exaggerated" before my time.
When I began in philosophy one of my goals was to have read 'Being and Time' and this, in addition to learning Ancient Greek, became one of my goals at Berkeley. I was disappointed that not only was Dreyfus' pedagogical style not shared among the faculty but none even seemed very familiar with his work. It would be safe to bet that roughly zero of the admitted students in the philosophy department, or the entire school for that matter, even know his name today.
The summer sessions at Berkeley are the best but, despite the weather and the thinner crowds, they are no walk in the park (unless you mean the violent drug market encampments we have in Berkeley). The visiting professor who teaches Heidegger didn't stop us from including 'Dreidegger' for reference. There was even some humor suggested at the requirement of reading the entirety of 'Division I' of 'Being and Time' in four weeks but one gets used to this level of reading assignment being de regur at Berkeley.
A Heidegger class will show you the 1933 Rectoratsrede and you will be warned of Heidegger's allegiance to the National Socialist Workers Party. My point in this article is not about an ad hominem. It's about deflection and, really, on a deeper level, about apologetics. I see a culpability on the academic Left. Something lays behind the proposition, 'As long as I am pointing out the bad guy, then you will still think I am on the good side.' I posit that, while the above antecedent may be based in truth, its consequent may not necessarily follow. That is, it's the accusers themselves who killed and robbed the proverbial pawnbroker woman and her sister Lizaveta. I see an injunction for the academic Left to offer an apology that stems from a deep a priori guilt brought on by a truth from which they deflect.
One image I've seen since coming to this place is one whose meaning I could take great pleasure in trying to untangle ad infinitum: the university chapel on College Ave. and Haste. Outside this church hangs two flags. One of the United Nations and, alongside it, the 'Progress Pride' flag. What is the relationship between these three institutions? What are their histories? What is the relationship between their histories? Why are they together here now? What is their relationship to me?
Heidegger, like many of the brilliant philologians who stood in opposition to centuries of Platonic and Christian metaphysics had a special relationship with the main man, Josh the Jew. With many of these Germans, in their early work you'll see much more clumsy and telling stabs—the sort of awkward seeds of a larger enterprise—than their more famous writing. For example, 'The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate' or Nietzsche's Pre-Platonic lectures. For Heidegger it's 'The Concept of Time'. Their projects—if I'm being purely descriptive and positive and not making a value judgement here—are largely in opposition to the ubiquity of the underlying ideas of what we sometimes call the Greek Enlightenment and, well, Christianity. Later projects might use these scholars works, taking their metaphysics as the basis for a political, jurisprudencial, or other ethical system. One might derive an ontology or epistemology and apply it in opposition to, say, an essentialist conception of or natural basis for gender.
There is not room here to make an argument explicitly expounding Heidegger’s influence on or, at least, his many valences and correlations with Queer Theory. I will also spare any tawdry English Heideggarian deployments like 'care' or 'authentic' as one finds in feminist jargon. Arguably, the French schools whose 'Theories' permeate Queer Theory scholarship and are largely responsible for its ubiquity never had any interest in understanding philosophy to the degree necessary to make any meaningful comparison anyway. Ask a professor in the 'studies' wings of Dwinelle or Barrows about metaphysics—you'll get a lot of stilted Derridian mimicry.
One might rejoin, 'What about the Heideggerians on the Right like Bannon or Dugan?' Well, Bannon and Dugan don't have a monopoly on the academy that might necessitate an apology. Neither Bannon nor Dugan has managed to hang a flag in nearly every storefront, library, classroom and church. The Heideggerian alarmism from the academic Left is Nazi apologetics minus the nationalism. It's identity-groups-as-nations in the W.E.B. Du Bois via Herder sense. I have a horrible vision of a future: There is an antisemitic Queers for Palestine department chair at a prestigious public school. She/They are handed down orders from a committee of DEI-hire tyrants at the US Department of Education. Equity Task Force Stasi skulk in the shadows of the department wings.
One might also say that questions regarding Heidegger's Nazi allegiances are merely the honest pursuit of objective historical truth. While I believe this is the case for Wolin and probably others, I am sorry to have to tell you the bad news: pursuing objective historical truth has not been the de facto academic historical method for at least a century. History has been up for grabs, just like science and just like everything else.
I say leave Heidegger to his philology and his metaphysics. Maybe these Leftist professors could aspire to learn Latin and Greek rather than churning out pablum in their 'Far-right Studies' propaganda mills. I was disappointment that these heavy hitters, namely Searle and Dreyfus, were gone from Moses Hall before I arrived. What's worse is that when I check Dreyfus' twitter today, he seems to have made a mistake common to many smart people due to their openness, which is to assume the people around them are anywhere near as smart as they are. Whatever woman he left in charge appears to be so dizzy and petty that she's littered his account with trite cranky Leftist nonsense. It's really very sad. I had aspired to an education without a 'Sieg Heil' but was coerced into declaring my pronouns.
