Author Archives: Majken Hirche

Classical Liberalism vs. Conservatism in Denmark

The debate is swirling again between classical liberals and conservatives. But the two camps actually need each other. Without conservatism, liberalism is a travesty. And without liberalism, a conservative society is repressive.

By Ryan Smith

I myself am a classical liberal, but I admit it: Looking at the last twenty years of major policy issues in Denmark, namely EU membership as well as the package of problems relating to the non-Western immigration, it’s mainly conservatives who have been right, while we liberals have been far too optimistic.

For example, we were many classical liberals who believed that even though the non-Western immigrants immediately created problems for the existing order, these immigration evils would soon blow over. All we needed was for the immigrants to make their entrance on the labor market. More hands in the labor market meant a bigger economic pie, and on the whole “people are ultimately steered by economic (rather than cultural) interests”, said the liberal logic. For the same reasons we were many who gladly welcomed any further strengthening of the EU-node: Every step towards a closer union was of course also a step towards greater free trade – or so we thought.

Many years later, we can see that the non-Western immigrants cannot simply be integrated and that they still show up in all the wrong statistics. And the EU, which many liberals once saw as a hope in the fight against regulation and monopolies, has now ended up as its very own brand of postmodernist regulatory hell. In both areas, it was the conservatives who were first to say no, and in both areas it was the conservatives who were right.

Although I am a classical liberal, I recognize that conservative thinkers and conservative politics historically have had a great deal of the credit for the ‘liberal’ success like the Netherlands, the UK, and the USA, as these have unfolded in the best periods of these countries. Liberalism without conservative moderation all too easily becomes a parody of itself, a kind of right-wing utopianism, where people want to abolish national borders, police, military and taxation. A mirage that – somewhat like communism – looks good on paper, but is guaranteed to lead to death and destruction if implemented.

I therefore recognize that liberalism needs conservatism. Yet I am still a classical liberal. For a purely conservative society is not a society that I personally would like to live in. If liberalism without conservatism becomes a right-wing utopianism, then a conservative society that does not have a liberal gadfly to keep it on its toes tends to stagnate and become repressive: To become a strict ‘father state’ which discriminates ruthlessly against religious, sexual, and political deviants.

A purely conservative society resembles those found in antiquity, where even a democratic state like classical Athens ended up condemning a deviant like Socrates to death for presenting the city’s young people with ideas other than those of the establishment. Contrary to what many of my contemporaries seem to believe, democracy is not in itself a guarantee against the unnecessary discrimination of misfits, which the disgraceful treatment of homosexuals in contemporary America proves to the fullest.

In addition to continuously challenging the existing order, the liberal opposition can also play a crucial role for the Conservatives, as classical liberals like to remind anyone who will listen that the state is too large (always too large) and that state power should be constitutionally limited. Briefly stated, the liberal reminds the powers that be that the preferred civil values of the state should not be enforced by the police power, which ultimately is what conservatives argue for when they want to ban certain symbols or items of clothing from the public sphere.

I’m not saying that all conservatives need to be reminded of this lesson, simply because they are conservatives. Within the conservative ranks there is an excellent tradition in which conservatives fight, first and foremost, for the right of free people to choose, of their own free will, to honor and live by their traditional values. But against this tradition, there is also a more state-friendly conservative tradition, which has an unfortunate tendency to want its preferred values enforced by law.

The conservative intelligentsia in Denmark is troubled by the fact that this country does not (any longer) have a strong conservative tradition that is of the people in the same way that it once had. After half a century of socialist majority governments, we know that the people have been accustomed to think of civil society as something that the state is in command of and that the individual does not need to take responsibility for his own life. This development makes it inherently difficult for today’s conservatives to win support for their views by appealing directly to the public. Hence they compensate by succumbing to the intellectually lazy solution: To get the state to enforce the value policies they happen to like best.

No matter how many laws you manage to force through, you do not foster a genuine conservatism that way. You cannot create a public sentiment of conservatism from above, by means of the state. A true conservative society is the opposite of a society in which all decisions regarding civil life emanate from parliament. This also means that the more conservative commentators help to politicize civil society, the more they also counteract their own long-term goals, as they leave more and more up to a future socialist majority.

So dear conservatives: Get to work. Get out of the armchairs and drop the idea of introducing the ‘right’ values per government decree. The real conservative work is to raise a conservative culture among the population in this country after 50 years of social democracy. And you have to start from the bottom.

A Critique of the Big Five’s Openness to Experience

What is striking about the way Openness in the Big Five personality system is defined is how biased the descriptions are in favor of high Openness. This amounts to an ongoing point of contention, with the definition of Openness having undergone perpetual readjustments and corrections since the 1970’ies.

To understand how this bias crept into the system is no hard feat: Something like 90% of all social science researchers (the kind of people who produce these studies) are well-educated, middle-class liberals – exactly the kind of people who tend to be high in Openness themselves. In other words, only a few of the researchers operating in this field are low on Openness themselves. People who are low on Openness simply have no voice. They are typically only studied as object from afar.

In fact, researchers have had to correct the definition of Openness in the past because they had unwittingly snuck their own middle-class values into the system: For example, being high on Openness once included “a propensity to participate in community organizations” – exactly the kind of thing that white, middle-class citizens with an interest in social science are likely to do themselves. Yet as more and more data flushed in, it  gradually became obvious that this assumption had little basis in reality – the “good citizens” of the community, who participate in community organizations, may just as well be low in Openness. In fact, they may even be more likely to be low in Openness.

To this day, there is still ongoing research that sets out to correct our biased perception of Openness. Most prominently, one could name the researcher Jonathan Haidt from New York University and his research into the value of low-Openness traits for human civilization.

So our perception of Openness is biased to this day, and while the false assumptions will gradually be corrected it will be many years still and there is no quick fix around the corner. So what might be a way in which Openness is still biased? Well, if we refer to Jungian typology, we see that according to the Big Five, one defining trait is that people who are high in Openness appreciate art and aesthetics. In Jung’s typology, that would supposedly meant that N types are more likely to appreciate art than S types, but if we examine Jung’s typology that doesn’t seem to hold up: Certainly there are N types who appreciate art, but does it really make sense to say that ENTPs are more likely to appreciate art than ISFP? Probably not. Two obvious possibilities thus present themselves: Maybe Openness and a preference for Intuition are overlapping but not synonymous when understood as traits. In that case it could easily be true that people who are high in Openness tend to appreciate art while there is no such special correction for Jung’s Intuitive types. On the other hand, it could it turn to mean that an appreciation of art is another of those white middle-class values that the researchers have unsuspectingly inserted into the system as representative of their own preferences. Time will tell.

Finally, a bon mot: Being low on Openness is defined as being resistant to change. And of course, if we look at Openness in an American context we can certainly say that the circumstances surrounding the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the people who were high in Openness tended to vote for him and were certainly eager for sweeping and dramatic changes to an extent that the people who voted for the Republican candidate were not. But even so, there are probably also areas where the people who voted for the Democrats were resistant to change: For cuts in benefits like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, for example.  The lesion here is that defining someone as “resistant to change” isn’t very likely to be an accurate description of how somebody sees himself. As the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said: “Everyone wants development but nobody wants change.” That is to say: Simply saying that people who are low in Openness are “resistant to change” isn’t going to cut it. That is only how it looks from the high Openness side of the table. In the Big Five system will purport to be an objective way of describing differences of personality, it befalls its proponents to reach across the table and to find a way of speaking about and operationalizing the difference in a way that does justice to both parties way of understand themselves. And the same goes for Sensation types for that matter. Anything else is simply one party bantering the other while pretending to be scientific.

Velfærdsstatens fortid og fremtid

Tirsdag d. 24. april kunne økonom og forskningschef i den borgerligt-liberale tænketank CEPOS Henrik Christoffersen præsentere sin nye bog, Den mindst ringe, for et interesseret publikum. Bogen er med Christoffersens egne ord en opsamling på adskillige års forskning i velfærdsstaten.

Ifølge Christoffersens analyse kan velfærdsstatens historie inddeles i tre hovedfaser: (1) Dens indstiftelse i 1950’erne. (2) Dens opstigen og dominans fra ca. 1960 til 1995. (3) Dens nuværende status som slagmark for modsatrettede interesser.

Velfærdsstatens begyndelse

For at blive klogere på velfærdsstatens spæde begyndelse har Christoffersen været på jagt i arkiverne for at finde ud af, hvad den oprindelige motivation for indstiftelsen af velfærdsstaten var. Ifølge Christoffersen var velfærdsstaten oprindeligt tænkt som en pragmatisk samfundskontrakt mellem frie mennesker. Argumenter om økonomisk rationalitet og langsigtet rationalitet var i højsædet. 1950’ernes velfærdsstat var ikke et moralsk projekt, men essentielt tænkt som en forsikringsordning, som staten blot var tovholder på.

Her giver Christoffersens analyse ham anledning til en sammenligning med Schweiz: I 1950’erne lignede Danmark og Schweiz hinanden på en lang række områder. Siden da besluttede de sig begge for at satse på velfærd. En afgørende forskel var dog, at mens Danmark lod staten stå for ydelserne, så påbød man i Schweiz borgerne at erhverve sig sundhedsforsikringer på et privat marked. Denne forskel skulle vise sig at blive afgørende for schweizernes succes med at holde kvaliteten af disse ydelser oppe, og omkostningerne nede.

Velfærdsstatens storhedstid

Den tidlige velfærdsstat var fortrinsvis skruet sammen af økonomiske eksperter og betonede langsigtet økonomisk rationalitet. Sætter vi vækst i højsædet, vil kagen blive ved med at vokse, og der vil over tid blive mere til alle. Men økonomerne havde ikke forudset, at ikke alle har en præference for at handle langsigtet.

Velfærdsstaten kunne nemlig ikke kun bruges til at sikre udsatte borgere et eksistensminimum. Den kunne også anvendes som løftestang for kortsigtede egeninteresser. I stedet for et bredt samvirke, hvor alle samfundsgrupper samarbejder om at få kagen til at vokse mest muligt, kan en mere snæver koalition også koncentrere sig om at omfordele mest muligt af den eksisterende kage til sig selv.

I velfærdsstatens anden fase går velfærdsstaten fra at være et pragmatisk og universalistisk projekt, hvor selv A.P. Møller skulle have folkepension, til at blive et moralsk projekt, hvor de velstillede var forpligtet til at dele ud af deres indkomst. Velfærdsstatens grundfortælling skifter fra den jordnære forestilling om en gensidig forsikringsordning til at blive et moralsk og idealistisk projekt, hvor de rige ensidig forpligtelser overfor de fattige. Pligter og rettigheder adskilles, sådan at den, der er mindrebemidlet, altid har krav på ydelser, uanset hvordan han i øvrigt opfører sig.

Christoffersen fremlægger her citater fra periodens velfærdstænkning: Velfærdsstatens særlige konstruktion, hvor rettigheder og pligter er adskilt, kræver af sine borgere, at de er solidarisk sindede. Fra oprindeligt at være en overbygning til det samfund, der i forvejen eksisterede, bliver velfærdsstaten nu en toneangivende institution med autoritet til at kræve bestemte sindelag af sine borgere.

At være uenig med velfærdsstatens politik anses nu ej længere som et spørgsmål om økonomi eller politik. Det er en moralsk brøde.

Velfærdsstatens fremtid

Afslutningsvis gør Christoffersen status over velfærdsstatens fremtidsudsigter. De senere års udvikling har truet velfærdsstatens eksistensgrundlag, både indefra og udefra. Udefra udfordres velfærdsstaten af den økonomiske globalisering. Udlandet kan i stigende grad producere de ting, vi vil have, billigere og bedre, end vi selv kan. Danmark er ikke længere så konkurrencedygtigt, som det var engang.

Samtidig er velfærdsstaten løbet ind i finansieringsproblemer. Flere og flere vil nyde, og færre og færre vil yde. Dog uden, at befolkningen synes indstillet på at indskrænke antallet af danskere, som har krav på ydelser og overførsler fra velfærdsstaten.

Resultatet bliver den gradvise forringelse af velfærdsstatens ydelser. Almindelige danskere efterspørger i stigende grad privatskoler og private sundhedsforsikringer. Vi ved godt, at velfærdsstaten er blevet economy class, og at denikke leverer ydelser af samme kvalitet, som borgerne i andre Vesteuropæiske lande nyder godt af. Men samtidig synes tiden ikke rede til et opgør.

Velfærdsstaten udhules i det stille, snarere end den beskæres i det åbne.

Warhammer Sucks Because of You ;-)

Now that I have your attention, okay, no, Warhammer doesn’t suck because of you. 😉

I just thought I’d share some observations that maybe people would have some intelligent insights on, because I’m kind of struggling with how awful they seem at first glance.

For example, I got involved in the Coreheim team early on (a fan-generated version of Mordheim). The extreme pushback that we got from players was astounding. We have even gotten hatemail attacking us personally, and people reporting us to GW, and long rants telling us to get lost.

In the same vein, we launched a project yesterday that we had been working on for some time (WyrdWars). We haven’t gotten hatemail yet, but ostensibly people (including Warseers) have made a point of reporting us to GW.

Here’s what I can’t understand: We are some Warhammer FB fans who are using our time and our own money to make a game for whomever wants to play it. We have not made it commercial in any way (which is GW’s no. 1 criteria for what they will allow). We have not asked people to do anything, or bullied them. On the contrary, we have provided a free set of rules (and inspirational art) that people can use if they want to and ignore if they want to. Yet somehow we are the subject of hate, bashing, and self-styled enforcers that suddenly feel it is their duty to report us to GW (even though GW knows about Coreheim and think it’s fine).

What is really astounding to me is that if you read the Warseer boards, people do nothing but complain about GW and how bad they are. Yet when someone then tries to do something about the situation by making a set of fan rules, people suddenly love GW and hate the other party. I want to emphasize that I am not just talking about myself here. I have seen lots of fan-generated projects getting bashed and reported here on Warseer for no good reason at all. It’s like people love to hang back and whine, but then turn around and get vindictive and spiteful if somebody actually tries to do something about the situation.

Here’s how I see it: If you’re a Warhammer player and someone makes a rules mod, you’re just better off all around. The sum-total of what you can use your miniatures for has expanded. Even if you don’t like the specific rules mod, competent fandexes will be in your interest over the long run, as GW (by their own admission in WD) traverse through the various rules posted online and snatch the good ideas for future versions of Warhammer (I am not an expert on WHFB, but apparently, GW snatched a rule or two from Coreheim over the years). All in all, then, you may shrug your shoulders at fandexes, but you have no reason to hate them or suddenly turn around and become GW’s own STASI informant after you’ve been whining about how bad GW are in thread after thread.

Another observation on the matter is this: People keep whining about how bad GW’s rules are, but when someone makes something alternative, they suddenly seem to think that the GW rules can’t be improved at all and that they’re the output of a process of math geniuses with lab coats and pocket calculators, and that the GW rules have no ambiguities or imbalances.

With fandexes, I can understand that some people don’t want to play them, but all to often, people bash and hate on fandexes, their sole criticism being that they’re not made by GW. Okay, I can understand that you don’t want to play those rules, but why on earth are you bashing the module then, when by your own admission, you would never give the rules a chance? If you want to bash the contents, you should at least be criticizing the actual contents rather than the circumstances surrounding the contents.

All in all, then, while I recognize that there are fair-minded and constructive people out there, it’s pretty disturbing to be a fandex writer. Ungrateful is one thing, but the people who whine about GW and then suddenly turn around to side with them when someone tries to do something about the very complaints that they are having are a pretty disturbing sight. It would be easy to think that they are the reason that Warhammer sucks.

TL;DR: 

* People whine about GW, but then suddenly become GW’s BFF when someone makes a rules module.

* People take it upon themselves to be GW’s willing STASI informant, reporting this or that fandex to GW, which seems pretty authoritarian and misplaced. (Note: Commercial infringements, I can understand. Non-commercial, not so much.)

* The vast majority of fandexes are made by people who use their own time and money to bring you a module which you can use for free if you want to. How is that a threat, or in any way a cost, to you?

* Maybe people should be a little less gleeful and restrain themselves from taking obvious pleasure in bashing fandex writers for not being official when they are not contributing anything themselves. Note that nobody is saying that you should like this or that particular fandex. Just try to pull your own weight by not bashing people who are actually trying to contribute.

***

Perhaps Jurassic 5 have said it best:

yo, either you a part of the problem
or part of the solution
what’s your contribution to life
so many people complain, always talk about change yo
but what’s your contribution to life

Human or Objective? – An Answer to ‘The Moral Landscape Challenge’

Dear Dr. Harris

Thank you for your continued contribution to the public debate concerning science and religion, as well as your willingness to take on the tough questions that concern us all.

You have recently issued a public challenge for readers to refute the central thesis of your book, ‘The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values‘. Please allow us to point to some reservations regarding the thesis of your ambitious book.

(1) The book’s subtitle says that science can determine human values. With that, we agree. Insofar as similarities can be found in human populations across the globe, these findings do indeed constitute a case for science determining human values.

However, throughout the book the term human values is then bolstered with some pretense to be objective values. The book argues the existence of a morality that is objective and scientifically true based on a series of hard-wired tendencies in the human brain. Excuse us, but all that means is that this morality has been evolutionarily beneficial to the human species. In no way does it assert that these values are objective.

As William James has said in ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience‘, the human brain in its normal state is not necessarily objective. The human brain has evolved capabilities that ensure our survival, but which do not necessarily render reality as accurately as possible or process moral questions as objectively as possible. Your own experiences with psychedelics and meditation will no doubt have hinted this same thing to you: The sum total of possible perceptions and judgments that are objectively there for us to perceive is infinitely vast compared to the humbling subset of perceptions and judgments that we actually do perceive.

In his ‘Descent of Man‘, Charles Darwin himself considered the notion of morality to be a byproduct of evolution; just one more effect of natural selection working upon the raw material of the species. So again: Insofar as the science presented in your book is correct, you are right that science can determine human values. But human values are not necessarily objective values in the sense that they would be valid independently of our species as collective subject.

(2) It is enormously high-minded of you to air the possibility that you might be convinced and recant your view by an argument submitted in this challenge. The probability of that happening through any argument, however, is much lower than first meets the eye. As peer-reviewed studies by Jonathan Haidt, Ravi Iyer, Spassena Koleva and others have shown in recent years, there are considerable variations in the moral instincts of people.

According to these studies, a difference in moral instincts is one of the roots that sprout to create different political affiliations on the emergent level.  Liberals chiefly care about fairness and not harming the weak. Conservatives primarily care about loyalty, authority, and sanctity, and Libertarians mainly care about freedom. In your book, you aim to separate “genes from memes”, but according to the findings of these scientists, these variations in moral instinct are partially genetic.

Such variations in instinct, even within the same species, are in accordance with the ‘Baldwin effect’ as known from developmental biology. Daniel Dennett has referred to this effect as being “no longer controversial” in science and it presumes a developmental framework of epigenesist, phenotypic plasticity. If such mechanisms are indeed at work in shaping our instincts, including our moral instincts, then the premise of separating genes from memes cannot be meaningfully upheld.

(3) In your book, you propose to contest the findings of Haidt and others by conjecturing that “conservatives have the same morality as liberals do, they just have different ideas about how harm accrues in this universe.” But by this argument, any morality could potentially be said to be the same morality as any other morality, albeit with “different ideas about how harm accrues in this universe.” Where a liberal might see cuts in social security as doing harm to society’s poorest, a libertarian might see their continued existence as doing harm to his negative liberties. The differences in empirical data are there, yet your book reasons that these differences are merely different manifestations of the same ultimate morality.

As you do not establish a definitive demarcation line between one and the other, this manner of reasoning must leave you, or some other subject, as the umpire of when these occurrences in the empirical data do indeed constitute a meaningful difference (Haidt), a non-meaningful difference (Harris) or an instance of “moral confusion” (which is how you characterize morality of political Islam in your book). Thus, by the manner of reasoning employed in the book, empirical data acquired through science cannot stand on its own as objective data, but is in need of some subjective interpretation. If two bright, young, well-educated and scientifically minded gentlemen such as Dr. Haidt and yourself cannot even agree on whether what we are seeing in the empirical data is one or several moralities, this constitutes ample illustration that whatever objective data we have to work with cannot be interpreted objectively on its own account, but must be subjected to subjective interpretation in order to make sense to us.

***

So this constitutes our argument against the thesis of your bold and adventurous book: We agree that science can and should be used to establish an inquiry into human values. We also agree that science can determine what those human values are. But human values are not necessarily objective, and if they are, there is no way to assert that their objectivity without involving memes and subjectivity.

Great Scientific Big Five Test

Big Five tests on the internet are a dime a dozen. But most of them are really just rubbish. The Big Five system itself, though, is actually pretty good. It is commonly considered the most scientific framework for the study of personality in existence, if not the only scientifically acceptable personality test in existence.

Great Scientific Big Five Test

I have personally tried many online Big Five tests that all purport to be accurate, free, scientific, tested, etc. But most of them quite simply aren’t. They’re made by amateurs with little understanding of personality testing. That’s why I was glad to find this test, which actually was quite accurate and based on actual, scientific, peer-reviewed studies made by real scientists. It was pretty interesting to see my results, both in the form of the feature that matches your personality with a famous movie star, but also the scientific data about how you use your phone, how your home has been decorated, and what you are really like. Those were interesting insights, which I will be saving on my hard drive for my own future reference. Yeah.

Generally, the Big Five system of personality has been tested by scientists for almost 50 years and the framework is considered to be extremely well-validated. Through continued criticism and optimization, a more and more precise scientific framework has been arrived at, which is just now beginning to be related to genes and biology.

In December 2013, a Harvard University twin-study revealed that as much as 40% of your adult political opinions is related to your genetics, and not something that is a result of a process of thinking or something similar. That’s right, you were, to a large extent, born to think what you do on most political issues – you were predisposed, as the scientists say.

While there is a sizable crowd on the internet that adheres more to the MBTI Test than the Big Five framework, the popularity of the MBTI test should perhaps be seen as a manifestation of its positive outlook. In the MBTI, there are no negative types (although some types are commonly thought to be more desirable than others). With regards to the Big Five system of personality, though, lots of people want to be high in Openness, high in Conscientiousness, and low in Neuroticism. Which could be said to be like an NJ type in the MBTI system.

However, most people are not necessarily like that. It is only by actually taking the Big Five personality test and carefully reviewing and reflecting on your scores that you can really find out what you are like. It is chiefly by being critical, i.e. only accepting the best, most accurate tests that you will be delivered the most reliable results, which you can then use in your process of self-discovery.

Since you are dealing with something as important as your own personality, it is wise that you take the time to find out where you can get the best online tests. Personally, the test that I linked to in bold is the most accurate and reliable that I have yet found.

Var Heidegger nazist og/eller en svindler?

Heideggers “sorte notesbøger” fra 1930’erne er nu på vej til at blive publiceret for offentligheder for første gang. Der er allerede udbrudt et slagsmål om foretagenet: Var Heidegger nazist eller ej? Og hvis han var, hvilken forskel gør det så for hans filosofi?

Der er to klemmer, der sniger sig ind på Heidegger i disse år, og faktisk har gjort det de sidste 20-30 år.

Nazist og plagiator

Den ene er, at han (selvfølgelig) var racist og nazist/fascist. Det hævdes ofte fra Heideggers støtter, at selv hvis Heidegger var nazist, så ivlle det ikke gøre nogen forskel for hans filosofi. Men man kan spørge sig selv, hvorfor han og hans epigoner så havde så travlt med at benægte det og tale udenom i alle disse år, hvis det alligevel ikke gør nogen forskel? En anden konsekvens af hans filosofi er, at folkemord og etnisk udrensning kan legitimeres, hvis det sker i overensstemmelse med folkets vilje, på folkets eget territorium og i overensstemmelse med folkets historiske kontinuitet.

Den anden er, at han har stjålet centrale ideer af sin metafysik fra østasiatiske tænkere uden at kreditere disse. Han er med andre ord en intellektuel svindler. Når en studerende stjæler andres arbejde uden at kreditere det, bliver han smidt ud af universitetet. Men når løgnen bliver stor nok, og ingen opdager tyveriet de første 30 år, så bliver svindelnummeret til akademisk sandhed og Heidegger sikret en plads i filosofihistorien. Det, der holder ham ved ilden i forhold til akademisk prominens, er således simpel kulturalisme (det kan jo ikke være asiaterne, som har tænkt og udviklet de her ideer før os; der skulle en Heidegger til for at finde på dem) og det, at mange akademikere har meget investeret i hans tænkning og nødig vil se hans navn krydset over i filosofihistorien.

Relationen mellem menneske og tanke

Fra Heideggers forsvarere lyder det ofte, at man må skille mennesket fra filosofien. Dvs. Heidegger var muligvis et skidt menneske, men hvis han var, så betyder det intet for hans tænkning.

Til det kan man sige: Heideggers person og tænkning kan muligvis skilles ad, men hans metode og tænkning kan ikke. En tanke er åbenbart ikke ‘rigtig’ for Heidegger før den er tænkt af en ikke-jødisk, hvid vesteuropæer, som helst er tysker. Gule menneskers tanker er en slags andenrangsfostre, der svæver rundt i det frie rum indtil en hvid europæer beslutter sig for at sige god for dem. Først da vil disse tanker blive placeret på et konkret sted i filosofihistorien og den hvide person, som egentlig blot er kurator, anerkendt som ophavsmand til disse tanker. De beundrere, som ikke mener, at Heidegger burde have nævnt sine asiatiske kilde på lige fod med de europæiske, viderefører blot hans racisme.

Heideggers forsvarere laver en hård opdeling mellem personen og tankerne. Men der er et mellemstadie mellem personen og tankerne – metoden; den systematiske underkendelse af ikke-europæiske kilder. Alene derfor kan man lige i Heideggers tilfælde ikke kan skille tankerne og manden 100% ad.

Heideggers racisme og kulturalisme kan ikke skilles fra hans metode, hvor gule mennesker, hvis tanker han er bekendt med og inspireret af, selektivt kan forbigås i stilhed idet man selv hævder, at have fundet på ideerne deri.

Et tankeeksperiment

En kineser læser Nietzsche og skriver så nogle værker på kinesisk hvor han genbruger de mest centrale fraser: Gud er død, viljen til magt, overmennesket, etc. etc. Han får talrige chancer for at forklare hvad hans inspiration er. Gang på gang siger han, at det er tanker, som har meldt sig i hans hoved fordi han har læst klassiske kinesiske tænkere. Han formår at opretholde løgnen i 30 år, men derefter bliver det afsløret, at han har sine centrale koncepter fra Nietzsche. Hvad ville vi tænke om denne person: Geni eller svindler?

Hvad end svaret er, så er det det samme, vi skal tænke om Heidegger.

Henlige uheld og “glemt” inspiration

Nogle vil påstå, at det er et henligt uheld eller en “ubevist inspiration Det er en mærkelig bevidsthed, som godt kan finde ud af omhyggeligt at kreditere sine europæiske kilder, men systematisk undlader de asiatiske. Ubevidst er det i hvert fald ikke.

Dernæst er der dem, som sætter den stråmand op, at der ikke findes ensomme tænkere, der sidder i deres tårne og gør nye indsigter uden reference til andre tænkere. Men ikke at bruge andre kilder er jo ikke det samme som systematisk at udelade visse af sine kilder. Og ironisk nok er billedet af den ensomme tænker, der sidder i sit tårn netop ét som Heidegger selv ville stå på mål for. Udskift blot tårn med skovhytte.

Heidegger contra Freud

Heidegger har opnået den prominens, han har, ved at lyve. Lyve om kilder, lyve om handlinger, lyve om andre filosoffer, lyve om eget politiske ståsted.

Da det blev afsløret, at Freud havde løjet i sine case studies, skadede det hans faglige anseelse betragteligt. Men i filosofi, hvor der ikke er umiddelbare konsekvenser ved at forfølge et falsum, er det nemmere at vende blikket væk fra uredelighed i beskyttelse af egne interesser.

I dag kan man ikke tage en seriøs diskussion om Freud uden at nævne hans uhæderlighed. Det kan man stadig godt med Heidegger. Men sådan kan det ikke fortsætte.

Freud fortalte folk, at hans nye kur var vildt effektiv, når han vidste at der i bedste fald var tale om blandede resultater, og derfor fik mange til at tro på den. Det var svindel på samme måde som med Heidegger.

Argumentet om historisk signifikans

Nogle vil medgive, at Heidegger svindlede sig til prominens. Men deres argument er så nu, at siden Heidegger slap afsted med sit svindelnummer, så har han nu opnået en historisk signifikans som berettiger hans tænkning til den plads, den sædvanligvis tilskrives.

Denne pointe er grundlæggende, at hvis man kan slippe afsted med et falsum, så udgør det sin egen berettigelse, når først løgnen er blevet stor nok. Gad vide, om disse mennesker så også mener, at det samme gælder for normal historieskrivning? Er det også ligegyldigt at få verificeret om det var Polen, der angreb en tysk grænsestation, eller om angrebet var en tysk fabrikation?

Berettigelsen er post hoc: “Mange tænkere har forholdt sig til Heidegger, derfor havde han talent.”  Men disse andre tænkere har jo netop ikke haft mulighed for at vide hvor flere af Heideggers centrale ideer i kom fra – de troede, at de kom fra ham, for han gemte jo netop sine asiatiske kilder af vejen. Så er præmissen for hans ‘talent’ som filosof jo forfejlet. Der er i lige så høj grad tale om talent som svindler.

Argumentet om Heideggers samtid

Et sidste arugment i Heideggers forsvar lyder: “Måske svindlede han, men i så fald må man se hans svindel i forhold til samtiden. Den gang var filosofien betydeligt mere etnocentrisk, og Heidegger var næppe blevet taget alvorligt, hvis han havde kastet sig ud i en analyse af asiatisk filosofi.”

Dette argument er bare ikke historisk korrekt: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Leibnitz, Kant, m.fl. kunne alle finde ud af at henvise til asiatiske tænkere, når de behandlede disse i deres tænkning. Schopenhauer er et særligt godt eksempel: Han er født ca. 100 år før Heidegger, men kunne finde ud af, at behandle sine inspirationskilder ligeligt, uafhængigt af race og kultur. Han var en global tænker. Heideggers forskelsbehandling gør ham bare til en provinsiel, nationalistisk kulturalist.

Der er efterhånden en del undersøgelser, som viser, at Heidegger var en svindler. Én meget tekstnær en er juristen Reinhard May’s bog, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources. Her skriver han:

“The investigation concludes that Heidegger’s work was significantly influenced by East Asian sources. It can be shown, moreover, that in particular instances Heidegger even appropriated wholesale and almost verbatim major ideas from the German translations of Daoist and Zen Buddhist classics. This clandestine textual appropriation of non-Western spirituality, the extent of which has gone undiscovered for so long, seems quite unparalleled, with far-reaching implications for our future interpretation of Heidegger’s work.” – Routledge 1996, side xv

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I 2010 var der stadig folk, der i ramme alvor benægtede, at Heidegger var nazist og antisemit. I løbet af de tidlige 10’ere skiftede de så over og sagde, at selv hvis det var rigtigt, så ville det ikke have haft nogen indflydelse på hans filosofi. Nu er det afsløret, at Heideggers modernismekritik bundede i antisemitisme, fordi modernismen i hans paranoide og racistiske sind tillod jøderne kulturel domins på tværs af nationalstater.

Styk for styk falder Heideggerianernes beskyttelsesrum og krybegange af hellig renhed indenfor hvilke Heideggers antisemitisme i hvert fald ikke kan siges at have påvirket hans filosofi. Jeg ser personligt frem til Heideggerianernes næste undvigelsesmanøvre: “Det endegyldige bevis på den Heideggerianske tankes renhed er, at den slet ikke behøver have noget med Heidegger at gøre!”

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Det er i debatten blevet sagt, at Heidegger var ikke så slem, fordi Platon også var totalitær. Så hvis man sagde: “Hitler er ikke så slem. Melos blev også etnisk udrenset under den Peloponnesiske Krig,” så ville de samme folk købe den. Godt at vide.