50

Heidegger, History and the Holocaust

through social assistance (Sozialfuersorge), looks after them and cares for their
future on their behalf. One could list the commonplaces of academic aristocratism which recur throughout this oft-commented passage, replete with topoi on
the agora as an antithesis of the schole, leisure versus school. There is a hatred of
statistics (harping on the theme of the average) seen as a symbol of all the operations of levelling down which threaten the person (here called Dasein) and its
most precious attributes, its originality and its privacy. There is a contempt for
all forces which level down, doubtless with a particular disgust for egalitarian
ideologies which endanger everything gained by a struggle, meaning culture (the
specific capital of the mandarin, who is the son of his works), ideologies which
encourage the masses to take things easily and make them easy. There is also a
revolt against social mechanisms such as those of opinion, the hereditary enemy
of the philosopher, which recurs here through the play on ffentlichkeit and
ffentlich, public opinion and public, and against anything symbolizing social
assistance, that is democracy, political parties, paid holidays (as a breach in the
monopoly of the schole and meditation in the forest), culture for the masses,
television, and Plato in paperback. Heidegger was to say this so much better, in
his inimitable pastoral style, when, in his Introduction to Metaphysics, written in
1935, he set out to show how the triumph of the scientific-technological spirit in
Western civilization is accomplished and perfected in the flight of the gods, the
destruction of the earth, the transformation of men into a mass, the hatred and
suspicion of everything free and creative 16

On the one hand, this simply parrots Adornos heavy-handed derision of Heidegger,
and indeed we find versions of the same criticism in Habermas, Steiner and Wolin
too. And yet, Bourdieu thinks this kind of superficial reductionism is proof positive
of the cogency of his story concerning the sociology of knowledge. One wonders,
however, if Bourdieus claim isnt staggeringly arrogant in its scope, since there seems
to be little reason to suppose that his claims can be restricted to Heidegger, and, if
they are not, then Bourdieus position amounts to a rejection of the possibility of
doing philosophy at all which is not a claim that warrants serious consideration.
One might well ask why Bourdieus own analyses are impervious to the historicizing
and contextualizing he insists upon in terms of dismissing Heideggers thought as
simply the by-product of a series of cultural, political and historical features beyond
his control? Bourdieu consolidates his own hermeneutic prejudices with a lofty
summary and dismissal of Heidegger and his thought in the final lines of his text as
follows:
It is perhaps because he never realized what he was saying that Heidegger was
able to say what he did say without really having to say it. And it is perhaps for the
same reason that he refused to the very end to discuss his Nazi involvement: to do
it properly would have been to admit (to himself as well as others) that his essentialist thought had never consciously formulated its essence, that is, the social
unconscious which spoke through its forms, and the crudely anthropological
basis of its extreme blindness, which could only be sustained by the illusion of the
omnipotence of thought.17