SPENGLER ON THE GHOST OF HEIDEGGER AND THE SEX LIVES OF THE NEW YORK INTELLECTUALS:
Every writer speaks from an agenda which has no more claim to verity than any other, and which agenda prevails is strictly a matter of power. This is a trivial thought, but de Man invoked the influence of Martin Heidegger, the most prominent 20th century Existentialist. That was appropriate in a number of ways; after de Man’s death it was discovered that he had written nearly 200 articles for the Belgian puppet government’s press during the German occupation of World War II, including some anti-Semitic ones. He had also been convicted of embezzlement in absentia by a Belgian court. Heidegger joined the Nazi Party with enthusiasm and, although he did not find Hitler quite up to his expectations, he never repudiated this vile action.
De Man was revealed to be a rotter, but the damage was done. Deconstructionism encouraged every group to devise its own narrative and assert its own will. If the Western Canon simply expressed the will to power of dead white men, then minorities of various kinds could invent their own narratives and assert their own putative truth.
Earlier this week, Steve Green Insta-linked to an article at PJM with the ostensibly humorous title “Transgender Man Identifies as Alien, Plans to Remove Genitals, Adopt Kids.”
But as political scientist Dale Kuehne, quoted by Rod Dreher in a fascinating piece titled “[Camille] Paglia: Transgender & Civilization’s Decline” correctly notes, “if the ultimate source of reference is the self, and if no other self than the individual is a reference point, how can you know who or what you are?… We don’t live at a tipping point; we already live beyond the tipping point. Whether adults realize it or not, the most important conversation today is not about gender, but about identity, as released from the confines of gender.”
This is the endpoint of Nietzsche’s nihilism and Foucault’s postmodernism. As David P. Goldman (aka “Spengler”) notes in the passage quoted at the start of this post, Heidegger’s brand of postmodernism had a very different endpoint – thankfully, we’re not quite there yet, even if we are living in Weimar America.