men behaving badly

On Heidegger's involvement in Hitler's Third Reich, and other related matters. Ooooohhhh... All the more reason not to go into academia...

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from Steiner, George. Heidegger. London: Fontana Press, 1992. xxv - xxvi. (Italics mine.)

"What strikes me as perfectly evident is the extent of Heidegger's rhetorical and administrative participation in the Nazification of the German university-world in 1933-34. Like so many other intellectuals, Heidegger was manifestedly caught up in the brutal, festive inebriation which swept across Germany after some fifteen years of national humiliation and despair. Naked power can mesmerize the academic-mandarin temper (Sigmund Freud was, for a spell, entranced by Mussolini, and those thinkers and writers who worshipped at Stalin's shrine were legion). Unquestionably, Martin Heidegger saw himself as a chosen praeceptor Germaniae, as a leader-in-thought who would mould a national resurrection. The Platonic image, not only in reference to Plato's doctrines of philosophic governance but also with regard to Plato's role as advisor to Sicilian despotism, lay to hand. The chapter of the unwisdom of philosophers in regard to matters political is a long one. Voltaire's Jew-hatred was rabid. The racism of Frege was of the blackest hue. Sartre not only sought to evade or find apologia for the world of the Gulag; he deliberately falsified what he knew of the insensate savagery of the Cultural Revolution in Maoist China. It is an ill-kept secret that cloistered intellectuals and men who spend their lives immured in words, in texts, can experience with especial intensity the seductions of violent political proposals, most particularly where such violence does not touch their own person. There can be in the sensibility and outlook of the charismatic teacher, of the philosophical absolutist, more than a touch of surrogate sadism..."


i find the link Steiner makes between 'the sensibility and outlook of the charismatic teacher' and 'surrogate sadism' highly intriguing. And, i must admit, it is a link that i'm inclined to agree exists. One of these days i'll have to write a long post about the teaching profession and the exercise / abuse of power.
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